New Directions in Early Modern English Drama: Edges, Spaces, Intersections 9781501513749, 9781501518218

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New Directions in Early Modern English Drama

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Gender, Performance, and Material Culture Series Editors Cristina León Alfar (Hunter College, CUNY, USA) Helen Ostovich (McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada)

New Directions in Early Modern English Drama Edges, Spaces, Intersections Edited by Aidan Norrie and Mark Houlahan

ISBN 978-1-5015-1821-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1374-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1402-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934819 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Traveling players in the friendship album of Franz Hartmann. © British Library, Egerton MS 1222, fol. 25r. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

For David, Joseph, Lawrence, Mikey, and Robert, who helped bring me in from the edge —A.N.

Contents List of Figures

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Acknowledgments

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Lisa Hopkins Foreword: The Stage on the Shore

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Aidan Norrie and Mark Houlahan Chapter 1: Introduction: Edges, Spaces, and Intersections in Early Modern English Drama 1

Section I: Edges Paul Brown Chapter 2: A Life on the Edge: Richard Bradshaw

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Chloe Owen Chapter 3: “Thou Dream’st Awake”: Ghosts and Sleep in Chapman’s Antonio’s Revenge and Marston’s Bussy D’Ambois 37 Adam Hembree Chapter 4: Canting Queer Ken: Stage Magic and the Edge of Knowledge Mark Houlahan Chapter 5: James Shirley at the Edge of Town

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Section II: Spaces Aidan Norrie Chapter 6: “Our Queen Is Comming to the Town”: Child Actors and Counsel in the Elizabethan Progresses of 1574 and 1578 97 Sophie Emma Battell Chapter 7: “And Huh, Too / For All Your Big Words!”: Language and Multiculturalism in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado 117

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Jeffrey McCambridge Chapter 8: Inherited Insecurities and the Staging of Alterity: Islam in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine 135 Laurie Johnson Chapter 9: “The End of All”: How a Forgotten Map Helped Us Forget Newington Butts 151

Section III: Intersections Jennifer E. Nicholson Chapter 10: Hamlet’s French Philosophy

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John R. Severn Chapter 11: “Then Turn Tail to Tail and Peace Be with You”: John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, Menippean Satire, and Same-Sex Desire 199 Gabriella Edelstein Chapter 12: “Whose Plot Was This?”: Shakespearean Convergences in Fletcher’s The Wild-Goose Chase 219 Christopher Orchard Chapter 13: “They Always Speak Things as They Would Have Them”: Aspirational Royalist Politics in Henry Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora (1653) 237 Notes on Contributors

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Index of Persons, Places, and Subjects

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List of Figures Figure 9.1

Figure 9.2 Figure 9.3

Figure 9.4

Figure 9.5

Figure 9.6

London and Westminster in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth Anno Dom. 1563. Published by John Wallis, 1789. Reproduced with permission. © Trustees of the British Museum 153 Detail from the Wallis map, 1789, showing the baiting arena and playhouse 163 Detail from the woodcut (or Agas) map showing the riverfront at the Tower of London. Reproduced with the kind permission of the London Metropolitan Archives, City of London 165 Composite showing deer as represented on the woodcut map (left) and Wallis map (right). Woodcut detail reproduced with the kind permission of the London Metropolitan Archives, City of London 166 Composite showing the same section of hills and landscape on the woodcut map (left) and Wallis map (right). Woodcut detail reproduced with the kind permission of the London Metropolitan Archives, City of London 167 Map of London Showing the Playhouses, by C.W. Redwood for Joseph Quincy Adams, Shakespearean Playhouses, front insert 170

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-203

Acknowledgments We thank our contributors for their perseverance and patience, and for embracing the themes of the collection; Octavia Cade, for her expert and eagle-eyed copyediting; Lisa Hopkins, for agreeing to write the book’s foreword, and for her support throughout the project; Christine Henschel at De Gruyter, for doing a superb job of overseeing the book’s production; and Erika Gaffney, for being the best commissioning editor a pair of academics could ask for. Aidan would like to thank Mark, their co-editor, for his good humor and for being a much-needed link back to Aotearoa; the members (especially Jayne Sweet) of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick for their support and encouragement; and Marina Gerzic, Joseph Massey, Sophie Shorland, and Lyn Tribble for fruitful and heartening discussions about the collection in the various stages of its existence. Mark would like to thank Aidan, his co-editor, for their pertinacity; the Division of Arts, Law, Psychology, and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato for periods of research leave and research grants; and finally the Australasian community of Shakespearean and early modern scholars in ANZSA and ANZAMEMS for their support and enthusiasm: “constantly causing a stir to the mind,” as George Puttenham puts it.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-204

Lisa Hopkins

Foreword: The Stage on the Shore In 1599, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men crossed the river. In so doing, they established the premier theater of its day on the banks of the Thames, close to where the Rose already stood. We no longer understand what that must have meant, because the Thames was embanked in the nineteenth century and the Thames Barrier came into operation in 1982. But the river across which audiences were rowed to performances was very different from our own: sometimes there was enough ice for frost fairs to be held upon it, sometimes whales and dolphins swam up it, and it lapped directly at the feet of passers-by; with only one bridge and many boatmen, it was in its own right a populous thoroughfare. It was also a point of arrival and departure for journeys that could sometimes be to what were for the time very exotic destinations indeed; the river was itself, but it was also a gateway to the sea. When Pocahontas died at Gravesend and Marlowe at Deptford, they were both poised on that most fluid of all edges, the cusp between the river and the sea. In one of the period’s most watery-minded plays, Pericles, Dionyza says to Marina, O’er the sea-margent Walk with Leonine; the air is quick there And it pierces and sharpens the stomach.1

Pericles is a play of the sea, but it is also a play of the river bank in that its Chorus is John Gower, whose tomb could be reached by walking along the river from the Globe and cutting round the head of the creek in which a replica of the Golden Hind, the ship in which Drake circumnavigated the globe, still reminds us that the river flows ultimately to the sea. The sea meant many things to the early modern mind. Superficially, it was a valued source of ornament; this is suggested by the Hardwick Portrait of Elizabeth I, where the Queen’s dress depicts amongst other things sea monsters, a sea horse, a crab, and fish (the sea monsters may be drawn from Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia).2 Grottoes were becoming popular, and cameos (which are made from shells), pearls, and corals were all valued as jewelry. But as the Hardwick portrait also indicates, the sea was also the home of monsters; audiences at the

1 Shakespeare, Pericles, 4.1.25–27. All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition, and references will be given in the text. 2 Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d, 78–79. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-205

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Globe might have read in Ovid how a monster emerges from the sea seeking to eat Andromeda,3 and would certainly have heard readings from the Bible about monsters of the deep. For Shakespeare, though, it was also the home of the strange in another sense, for throughout his plays the sea is insistently associated with miracle. Like the association of the sea with monsters, this connection fundamentally posits it as a place of change. Shells, which were prominent items in Renaissance curiosity cabinets, could also be potent emblems of alteration and instability. So too could fossils, which even before the formulation of a theory of evolution attracted attention and generated speculation: Alessandro Scafi notes that “For Luther, the entire surface of the earth had been destroyed by the Flood and nothing remained of the ante-diluvian life, apart from a few fossils of living organisms destroyed by the Flood.”4 The Lincean Academy, in whose activities the Caroline playwright John Ford seems to register an interest in The Fancies, Chaste and Noble (1638),5 were certainly interested in fossils. The many drawings produced for the Academy focused particularly on local fossils and Central American plants, including a drawing of frogs in a piece of American amber.6 Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood note that ammonites, known as snakestones, “were thought to relieve muscular pain, as were many other fossil remains of shellfish from the primordial seas. . . . The logic behind this folk medicine is a form of sympathetic magic, the clenched pain of cramp and other ills being thought of as transferable to the stony amulet.”7 The Revenger’s Tragedy’s metaphor of Gloriana’s skull as a “shell of death” was thus particularly apt on the early modern stage.8 Sometimes, there is a contrast between the variable shore and the more orderly river bank. In Pericles, the first Lord warns Helicanus that “our griefs are risen to the top / And now at length they overflow their banks” (2.4.23–24), figuring river banks as signs of the orderly whose disruption is a dangerous sign; by contrast, the first Fisherman cheerfully acknowledges the edge of the sea as a site of inherent instability when he jokes that “Such whales have I heard on o’th’land, who never leave gaping till they swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells and all” (2.1.32–34). Pericles itself is on the edge of the Shakespearean canon, having been co-written by George Wilkins, and so too is Timon of Athens, in which Thomas Middleton had a hand. In Timon, Alcibiades employs a similar logic to

3 4 5 6 7 8

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 112. Scafi, Mapping Paradise, 271. See: Ford, The Fancies, Chaste and Noble. Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx, 18, 27, 36, and 60. Kingshill and Westwood, The Fabled Coast, 16. Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, 1.1.15.

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that of Pericles’s first Lord when he reassures the Senators that “not a man / Shall pass his quarter, or offend the stream / Of regular justice in your city’s bounds,” but Timon himself chooses to associate himself with the edge of the sea, which he chooses as his burial place: Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood, Who once a day with his embossèd froth The turbulent surge shall cover.9

Later, a soldier confirms that “Timon is dead, / Entombed upon the very hem o’th’sea” (5.4.65–66). Sir Richard Barckley, writing in 1631, supposed that when Tymon perceived that death approched, he tooke order for his buriall to bee at the low water marke, in the very brinke of the Sea, that the waves might not suffer any man to come neere him to see his bones or ashes,10

but it might also be possible to relate Timon’s choice to the idea that the low water mark was an appropriate place of execution (and sometimes of burial) for certain sorts of criminals: Holinshed mentions pirates being condemned to be hanged at low water mark,11 and Stow calls Wapping “the usuall place of Execution for the hanging of Pyrates and sea Rovers, at the lowe water marke, and there to remaine, till three Tydes had overflowed them.”12 The tide and the changes it brought provided potent images in other respects too. Pericles tells the infant Marina, “Even at the first thy loss is more than can / Thy portage quit” (3.1.35–36). In her gloss on these lines, Suzanne Gossett calls this a “major interpretative crux,” but while the precise meaning of the passage may be difficult to pin down, it is unquestionably evocative. The materiality which freights that heavy word “portage,” the only disyllable among eighteen monosyllables, brings a sudden sense of the clumsy physicality of what might otherwise have seemed the essentially spiritual entry of a new soul into the world. Also implicit in the idea of portage is the sense of a link between the human soul and the movement of water. This is perhaps most evocatively captured in the recurrent idea that birth and death were linked to the turning of the tide. Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood note that

9 Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 5.4.59–61 and 5.1.213–16. Further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition, and references will be given in the text. 10 Barckley, The Felicitie of Man, 374. 11 Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles, 811. 12 Stow, A Survay of London, 347.

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Sixteenth-century parish registers of Heslidon (now Hesleden) sometimes noted the state of tide at the time of death, so we learn that on 11 May 1595, at six in the morning, “being ful water,” Henrie Mitford of Hoolam died, and that on 17 May of the same year, at noon, “being lowe water,” Mrs Barbarie Metford died,13

which they compare with Mistress Quickly’s observation in Henry V that Falstaff “parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning o’th’tide.”14 Something of the same idea is perhaps visible in Pericles when Dionyza says of Marina “She died at night. I’ll say so. Who can cross it?” (4.3.16), and the idea of a connection between the human and the tidal can also be detected in The Tempest, where it seems to underlie Prospero’s remark that Their understanding Begins to swell, and the approaching tide Will shortly fill the reasonable shore That now lies foul and muddy.15

It is suggestive that Julius Caesar’s metaphor of “a tide in the affairs of men” should coincide with the company’s first season on the south bank.16 Henry Ireland, cited here in Laurie Johnson’s chapter, may have been a forger and a rogue, but he was spot on when he referred to the Globe as “by the Thames.” Elizabethans knew, though, that shores could move. The antiquarian Reginald Bainbrigg observed of Bowness-on-Solway that “The fundacions of the picts wall may be sene, upon the west skar at a lowe water, covered with sand, a mile or more within the sea,”17 while John Wilson in The English Martyrology declared that St. Felix “was ordayned Bishop of an old Citty called Dunmocke (otherwise Dunwich) which at this day is more then halfe consumed by the sea.”18 Kingshill and Westwood note that the sandbar Scroby Sands, opposite Great Yarmouth, emerged above the surface in 1578 and was claimed by the local inhabitants, who christened it “Yarmouth Island.” Sir Edward Clere, lord of the manor, was about to go to law over its ownership when a storm in 1582 washed it away completely,19 and Robert Callis in The Reading of That Famous and Learned Gentleman, Robert Callis . . . upon the Statute of 23 H.8, Cap. 5, of Sewers, as It Was Delivered by Him at Grays-Inn in August, 1622 discusses the thorny problem

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Kingshill and Westwood, The Fabled Coast, 163. Shakespeare, King Henry V, 2.3.12–13. Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1.79–82. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 4.3.216. Whitworth, Hadrian’s Wall, 46. Wilson, The English Martyrology, 64. Kingshill and Westwood, The Fabled Coast, 140.

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of whether “lands between the high-water mark and low-water mark the bounds thereof may be prescribed to belong to, or to be parcel of the Mannor.”20 The essays in this collection all probe the edges, spaces, and intersections that formed or were created in and around the early modern stage. Paul Brown recovers the life of Richard Bradshaw, a neglected man of the theater. Chloe Owen uses two plays for the Children of St. Paul’s to take us to the edge of consciousness in her discussion of sleep paralysis, probing the edge of the discipline as recent scientific work is applied to early modern texts. Adam Hembree explores both the edge between magic and nature, and the ways in which different meanings of words bleed into each other, and Mark Houlahan examines James Shirley’s use of the liminal location of Hyde Park, which Houlahan smartly terms “a boutiqued form of countryside.” In the second part, Aidan Norrie tracks Elizabeth I to two edges of her kingdom, the port of Bristol and the coast of East Anglia, the farthest she ever traveled from London; in the latter case the fact that the (unusually female) child performers were actually knitting and spinning on stage further probes the edge between work and play. For Sophie Emma Battell, Massinger’s The Renegado depicts spaces where languages and different cultures interacted in dangerously alluring ways, with a particular emphasis on the vulnerability of the mouth as a point of entry. Jeffrey McCambridge offers a rich analysis of the ways Marlowe’s plays navigate both geopolitical and temporal thresholds, and Laurie Johnson looks to the edge of sixteenth-century theaterland to remind us of the history of a neglected playingspace. Finally, Jennifer E. Nicholson puts Hamlet and Montaigne in dialogue to explore the intersections between French and English (and implicitly between life and death). Both John R. Severn and Gabriella Edelstein reverse the normal critical trajectory by seeing Shakespeare as being on the edge of Fletcher, and Edelstein also argues that Fletcher explores the edge of sanity by making the staging of madness his calling-card. In contrast, Christopher Orchard’s essay on Henry Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora (1653) proposes to move Killigrew from the edge of the canon to the center, and probes the edge of the discipline in its wholehearted commitment to historicism. As concepts, edges, spaces, and intersections are productive ideas because they simultaneously assert difference and insinuate likeness. Collectively, these essays help us to see that early modern plays are able to do very different things in very different places, but all challenge the imagination of their audiences and take them to the edge of what was known and thought.

20 Callis, The Reading of that Famous and Learned Gentleman, Robert Callis, 26.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Barckley, Richard. The Felicitie of Man, or, His Summum Bonum. London, 1631. STC 1383. Callis, Robert. The Reading of That Famous and Learned Gentleman, Robert Callis . . . upon the Statute of 23 H.8, Cap. 5, of Sewers, as It Was Delivered by Him at Grays-Inn in August, 1622. London, 1647. Wing C304. Ford, John. The Fancies, Chaste and Noble. Edited by Lisa Hopkins. In The Collected Works of John Ford, Vol. 5, edited by Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Holinshed, Raphael. The Third Volume of Chronicles. London, 1586. STC 13569. Middleton, Thomas. The Revenger’s Tragedy. In Five Revenge Tragedies, edited by Emma Smith, 325–415. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2012. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Mary M. Innes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955. Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. Edited by David Daniell. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Shakespeare, William. King Henry V. Edited by T.W. Craik. London: Routledge, 1995. Shakespeare, William. Pericles. Edited by Suzanne Gossett. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Thomson Learning, 1999. Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens. Edited by G.R. Hibbard. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Stow, John. A Survay of London. London, 1598. STC 23341. Wilson, John. The English Martyrology. St. Omer, 1608. STC 25771.

Secondary Sources Arnold, Janet. Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d. Leeds: W.S. Maney & Son, 1988. Freedberg, David. The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Kingshill, Sophia, and Jennifer Westwood. The Fabled Coast: Legends and Traditions from around the Shores of Britain and Ireland. London: Random House, 2012. Scafi, Alessandro. Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth. London: The British Library, 2006. Whitworth, Alan Michael. Hadrian’s Wall: Some Aspects of Its Post-Roman Influence on the Landscape. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000.

Aidan Norrie and Mark Houlahan

Chapter 1 Introduction: Edges, Spaces, and Intersections in Early Modern English Drama It is one of the most remarkable scenes in the whole of early modern drama: the aged courtier, blinded out of loyalty to his master, attempts suicide by falling off an imaginary cliff. Once he has fallen, and lives, he encounters his former master, the former king, who is reeling from the effects of what we might now describe as a nervous breakdown. In the height of his mania, the ex-king reels off speech after speech of searing critique of the deeply stratified world he ruled for so long.1 It is no surprise that Lear has to go to the edge of his world to articulate this experience. The edge forms a clear boundary at which one can observe all that has been unfolding across ancient Britain in the previous three acts of Shakespeare’s play. The terrain at the top and bottom of the cliff at Dover becomes a classic space for ‘edge’ thinking. This complex scene is a formidable challenge to stage: the key actors need to sustain peak intensity throughout, and two-thirds of the way through any performance of the play their bodies and spirits (as too the audiences’) may well begin to droop. The scene is complex too, to analyze, as a formidable array of studies show.2 Shakespeare takes us to this edge because the plot requires the British characters to advance towards Dover to meet the French army with Cordelia at its head. Conversely, the French army needs to arrive by sea, and the final battle in Act 5 must take place not far from Dover, anticipating Caesar’s invasion across the English Channel in 55 BCE and William of Normandy’s assault in 1066.3 But, as Lisa Hopkins has shown in her finely textured studies of edges in early modern theater, it is not just that the edge gestured to on stage is one that would resonate with the first audience of the play, and that at least some would

1 It is telling that despite the manifold shifts from the 1608 Quarto to the 1623 Folio text of the play, this scene is substantially the same across both versions. F1 de-emphasizes the invasion of the French army, but it does not scale back Lear’s furor at the society he has ruled. 2 See: Milne, “King Lear and the Dissociation of Sensibility,” 62; and Bate, “What Makes a Great King Lear?” See also Shakespeare Survey 55, which is themed around “King Lear and Its Afterlife.” 3 Shakespeare drew on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. Monmouth describes Lear ruling around 3000 BCE. See: Hopkins, From the Romans to the Normans, 3–4. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-001

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have passed over: it is that Shakespeare uses the location of the edge to expand into states of emotion and insight he had never quite broached in this way, and that expansion required a revolutionary form of dramaturgy.4 The edge advances the play on multiple fronts: in terms of character, rhetoric, thought, and innovative use of stage space, in flight from the ‘real’ in order to arrive at a densely imagined moment of truth. Despite centuries of commentary, critics, theater historians, textual scholars, and audiences still wrestle with this scene. If the scene proceeds through a dramaturgy that is unnerving and sophisticated, so too, we suggest, should it be matched with a welter of critical approaches. We seek in this book to expand the range of topics on offer in discussions of early modern English drama. We wanted both new and established voices to give a fresh sense of what it means, currently, to engage in this ever expanding, turbulent field. Our contributors have, we think, more than ably risen to this challenge, collectively evoking an early modern theater world of provocative richness, engaging completely new topics and refreshing traditional ones, encountering the ‘old’ world of early modern drama with the force of twenty-first-century digital technologies and paradigms, what Robert Hughes, in his great book on twentieth-century visual art, calls The Shock of the New. It is of course something of a paradox to have begun with one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays, because a core part of our provocation was not to dispense with Shakespeare altogether, but rather to add to the increasingly diverse conversations in and about early modern drama, so many of which fruitfully focus on collective, and not singular, achievements of early modern playwrights. Early modern English drama was multifaceted, adaptive, irregular, emotive, and provocative: it is these facets of the field that the contributors to New Directions in Early Modern English Drama have illuminated, some of them for the first time. We consider new edges of the field, enfolding biographical, phenomenological, sociolinguistic, and urban edges. We map out new spaces for theatrical encounters in the townscapes beyond London itself, and in the space below the ley lines of the conventional 1560 Agas map of the city of London and its environs;5 on London stages we can map new encounters with the exoticized space of the Mediterranean littoral and the orientalized, spectacular space of the Islamic Near East. Furthermore, to grasp the expanding dimensions of the field, we need to keep crossing intellectual and institutional boundaries (irrespective of budget codes and subject-based job descriptions) and be constantly alert to the power of intersectional discourses. By doing this

4 Hopkins, Shakespeare on the Edge. 5 See: “The Agas Map” for a spectacular digital use of the map itself.

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we encounter, in the discourses and stage business ingeniously contrived by the willing congress of multiple authors, fresh meaning in the interstitial spaces between languages on stage, and sexual identities far beyond simple binaries. And, finally, we reach across an intersection often seen as an absolute limit, the closing of the theaters in 1642, to see theatrical practice from before the Civil War not constrained but rather replenished in the intricacies of political positionality in the mid-1650s.

Canon’s Edge One of the immediate concerns addressed by the chapters in this collection is the idea of the “canon” of early modern English drama. This canon forms an edge that has only relatively recently been properly re-assessed, and as the chapters that follow demonstrate, there are multiple edges that can preclude a play, playwright, or playhouse from assuming canonicity. Indeed, these boundaries still see certain performances and productions relegated to the edge of the canon, not yet truly accepted or embraced. The “canon” is of course a nebulous concept, meaning different things to different people in different times and places. Even Shakespeare himself, long at the heart of the canon, has been subjected to intense scrutiny and re-evaluation, as the editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare, most recently, have demonstrated. As is probably clear, in New Directions in Early Modern English Drama we have employed a dual meaning for “edge.” On the one hand, we have assembled chapters that illuminate English drama generally seen as being on the edge of the canon, rather than in the center. Collectively, we show also how drama moves through new spaces (virtual and real), creating fertile intersections. Those terms have been used here to represent distinct yet overlapping categories. We have considered then, for instance, civic entertainments, children’s companies, Restoration drama, and the actors and playhouses themselves. Conversely, we have also considered how the more ‘famous’ canonical texts can be better understood by blurring their edges, and thought about the way edges between drama types, performers, locations, and writers intersected and overlapped. This means we have considered (or thought anew), for instance, the links between Fletcher and Shakespeare, and religion, magic, and alterity on the stage and the page, asking how we should (or do) think about these issues and themes. Likewise, we are interested in exploring how to fruitfully harness the new affordances vouchsafed by the newest wave of digitality and databases. This duality was recognized by Hopkins,

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when she observed that edges allow two-way traffic, thereby investing them with a kind of power that could always be crossed, contested, or ceded.6 A core driver of this collection, then, is a (perhaps unspoken) acknowledgment that the canon, and thus its edges, are, in the words of Hopkins, “arbitrary and subject to radical change through time.”7 The arbitrary nature of the canon is of course well known in the scholarship. Recently, Paul Salzman has emphasized how editing practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still impact us today. According to Salzman, the emergence of “Renaissance studies” as a field of academic study, and its wider impact, is visible in the “creation of Complete Text Editions in the nineteenth century, as well as in the editing of more ephemeral works and authors.” Nevertheless, as the contributors here demonstrate, “the history of this process has been skewed by the unrelenting focus on Shakespeare.”8 Indeed, work under way by Brett Greatley-Hirsch will add to Salzman’s depiction of the proliferation of Shakespeare editions with an in-depth statistical tracking of the complementary (inevitably much lesser) publication of non-Shakespearean drama.9 As the editors of Other Voices, Other Views argued twenty years ago, we too seek to encourage “the inclusion of other voices to augment the standard university syllabus for the early modern period, urging recognition of the period’s diversity and reforming the conditions under which we pass judgement on its culture.”10 The nature, status, appropriateness, and contents of the early modern literary canon have been debated, theorized, and problematized for decades, and we have no intention of revisiting these debates here.11 Instead, New Directions in Early Modern English Drama seeks to bring aspects of early modern English drama that remain understudied to a wider audience, with the intention of sparking further scholarly debates and discussions. As Salzman observes, understanding how the canon was formed, and challenging the edges between what is included and excluded, offers us an “expanded notion of what could be known about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Britain.”12 6 Hopkins, Renaissance Drama on the Edge, 171, 8. 7 Hopkins, Renaissance Drama on the Edge, 15. 8 Salzman, Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 4. 9 For a preliminary survey of Greatley-Hirsch’s data, to be fully amplified in his forthcoming monograph for Bloomsbury Arden, see: Hirsch “The Kingdom Has Been Digitized.” 10 Ostovich, Silcox, and Roebuck, “Introduction,” 7. 11 See, for example: Altieri, Canons and Consequences; Felperin, The Uses of the Canon; Clark, Professional Playwrights; Guillory, Cultural Capital; Bloom, The Western Canon; Kramnick, Making the English Canon; Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor; Grant and Ravelhofer, English Historical Drama, 1500–1660. 12 Salzman, Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 2.

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Academics, Edges, and the Canon As alluded to above, academics are partially responsible for the perpetuation of the (restricted) edges of the canon. Teaching university courses requires set texts – physical or digital – and such courses are bound by time (and budgetary) constraints. Thanks to the editing done in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, plays are edited and presented in set formats, which has led to the rise of anthologies. These have affordances in the teaching space, in making a certain range of playtexts readily available; the downside has been to render a wide range of compelling texts invisible outside the range of the research monograph. Numerous scholars have studied the effect of this, but Jeremy Lopez has recently articulated our shared role in the more rigid edges of the canon of early modern drama: With the developments of the anthology’s institutional function in the twentieth century, and the reconception of the general reader as a university undergraduate, a stable idea of aesthetic value has become encoded within the form of anthology itself, chiefly through the repeated reproduction of the same body of texts.13

We do not criticize the practicalities of such works: it is not possible to study the plethora of extant sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama in an academic term of (around) twelve weeks. Such anthologies, however, (generally) do not allow for the inclusion of dramatic performances from civic entertainments, or for discussion of collaboration and inspiration. Indeed, according to Lopez, “the anthology form itself implies an aesthetic canon that subsumes its historical canon and to which its historical canon will always be incommensurate.”14 This is because plays in anthologies are often printed as stand-alone editions – ensuring that “each single-text edition contains the idea of the canon within itself” – and that teaching remains focused on those plays published in a single, cheap volume.15 Take, for instance, the works of Caroline playwright, poet, and court entertainment-deviser James Shirley. At the time of writing, work is underway on The Complete Works of James Shirley, edited by Eugene Giddens, Teresa Grant, and Barbara Ravelhofer, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. The last time Shirley’s complete plays and poems were printed together was 1833, with his plays last being printed together in 1888. This is perhaps because

13 Lopez, Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama, 84. 14 Lopez, Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama, 6. 15 Lopez, Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama, 42.

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of the (famous) description by Charles Lamb, that Shirley “claims a place amongst the worthies of this [early modern] period, not so much for any transcendent talent in himself, as that he was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common.”16 Whether or not Lamb is responsible for Shirley’s relative obscurity to the general public is of course debatable; nevertheless, his works have rarely been printed, which means, as Mark Houlahan’s chapter shows, that they are seldom performed. Ventures like the Shirley project thus emphasize both the history of academic enforcement of the canon, and the role we must continue to play in “democratizing” the early modern canon.17 *** New Directions in Early Modern English Drama is broken into three sections that shift, or add to, critical conversations on understudied, overlooked, or relegated aspects of early modern English drama, and as such we have been intentionally and unashamedly broad with our interpretations of each section title. As mentioned above, edges can be analyzed in a multitude of ways – whether this be as an (arbitrary) border between two things, as a way to separate out things based on value-judgments or suppositions, or indeed as a way to understand how early modern people conceived of and demarcated various types of knowledge, language, or beliefs. Likewise, our contributors have interpreted “spaces” in an array of ways, whether this be the literal space of performance, the space afforded to people or places by early modern people and/or modern scholars, or the use of the theater as a space to debate and conceptualize topical anxieties or issues. Finally, the chapters in the “intersections” section interrogate the various ways that different parts of early modern culture informed and affected each other, with an emphasis on the way that understudied aspects of early modern drama can shed light on the more familiar. It should come as no surprise that some chapters engage with the title of their section explicitly, while others do so more implicitly. Nevertheless, what links all the chapters in this collection together is an interest in a more holistic view of those aspects of early modern drama that have often been described in relation to Shakespeare (there really is no reason for the phrase “Shakespeare’s contemporaries” to exist), as well as a desire to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the various parts of early modern English drama that for too long have not been afforded a level playing-field.

16 Lamb, The Works of Charles Lamb, 535. 17 See: Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, 119.

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Edges The collection begins at the edge of theater companies and their personnel: Paul Brown shows how far from the nexus of the Lord Chamberlain’s and King’s Men we ought to travel. Brown draws inventively on the Records of Early English Drama, exploring a particular, and in some ways ordinary, acting life. Richard Bradshaw’s travels from company to company, his own experiments in brokering performances, his long working life in performance, and his persistent working tours away from the capital give a new edge to what we think it means to be a stage actor in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Like David Kathman’s valuable recent tracings of specific actors, Brown shows how powerful it can be to combine patient trawling of physical archives with digital resources.18 To newly evoke early modern drama, though, it is compelling to use disciplines not yet invented when nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholars were forming the basis of theater histories and literary/textual analysis. Thus, as Chloe Owen shows, early modern playwrights were certainly invested in exploring the extreme edges of somatic behavior, with the representation of states of sleep an especial fascination, with actors “sleeping” either in broad daylight in the public theater, or in the same candlelight as the audience. The states of sleep have become sites of intense investigation by contemporary scholars, fascinated by the mysteries of the sleeping state, and our cultural obsession with sleeping well as a marker of health. Owen resourcefully applies these psychobiological studies to the pre-modern sleeping world, showing how different the patterns of sleep could be, and how far our own assumptions are culturally derived norms. With these perspectives, Owen brings us to a new materialist edge in our study of Marston and Chapman’s revenge dramas. Another crucial edge, Adam Hembree shows, is lexicographical, deploying the online resources of the Lexicons of Early Modern English database (in particular) to understand, across several decades of dramatic production, the generation of arcane knowledge. This knowledge is vested in what Hembree delineates as “queer ken,” off-center, magical, and highly gendered in its adepts, conscious of its own theatrical power to queer spectacles. Mages at the edge of what might be permitted meet and emerge through playcraft, and players themselves, Hembree suggests, are frequently driven to play at or make manifest the edge

18 See, for example: Kathman, “John Rice and the Boys of the Jacobean King’s Men,” 247–66; Kathman, “Players, Livery Companies, and Apprentices,” 413–28; and Kathman, “The Boys’ Plays and the Boy Players,” 160–67.

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of Christian orthodoxy in terms of licensed public display. “What means this show?” asks Faustus of the dancing, crown-bearing Devils conjured for him by Mephistopheles.19 The desire to immerse oneself in this kind of edge behavior is a temptation for all playgoers, and many playwrights, as Hembree’s synoptic survey shows, were provocatively happy to invoke. By the 1630s, Mark Houlahan shows, edges emerged in systems of constraint, tellingly enacted within the more rarefied domain of the private theater the Cockpit on Drury Lane in particular. In the series of ebullient social comedies staged there by James Shirley in the decade before the 1642 closure of London’s theaters, we receive precise instructions as to “talk of court news . . . / Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out” as Lear puts it to Cordelia.20 Not only do we learn who is to be accepted in the simulacra of the Caroline court and high London society Shirley contrives, of course, but also where. Shirley overlays zones of social inclusion and exclusion with the specific locales in London where those seeking access and advancement had best gather: in Hyde Park, Covent Garden, and the Strand. Collectively, his London plays frame a virtual map of the metropole, circumscribed by a clear edge beyond which marginalized characters and groupings, of Irish, Jewish, and other nonelite cadres, need not seek admittance.

Spaces From Shirley’s perspective, we can see how he delineates London with a precise edge that marks his zones of inclusion. Yet, as has so often been remarked, engagement with the theatrical and the performative is deeply embedded in early modern English culture. Not until it was published in the 1623 First Folio could you have read Jaques’s ringing, famous summation, “All the world’s a stage / and all the men and women, merely players,”21 but so much evidence showing space becoming theatricalized for impromptu (yet pointed) ceremonies suggests that one would scarcely need to be able to read As You Like It in print to enact the point. Thus beyond London, Aidan Norrie shows Elizabeth I and her subjects engaging in stage plays, courting for favor, influence, and support. In the 1570s the Queen traveled west, to Bristol, and east, to Norwich, port towns at the edge of England, spaces where mercantile, pan-Europe networks

19 Marlowe, The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus, 2.1.83. 20 Shakespeare, King Lear, 5.3.1.14–15. 21 Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.7.138–39.

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merge into English space. Here we find a group of child actors not portrayed as charming bystanders, mere youthful color, but rather in strategic roles and large speaking parts, pressing to make the case for the city space they are in. The charisma of their performance serves to enhance the town space the children will, effectively, inherit. The children’s ability to enliven those spaces, Norrie shows, is a crucial aspect of the extended forms of theatrical activity we need to track. Norrie’s scrupulous attention to literary sources as well as civic records reminds us how carefully and profitably we should think about how this kind of civic space is morphed into playspace. While the space you were in and could know, materially or phenomenologically became a stage show in Norwich and Bristol (just as exclusive Londoners would have known the ‘real’ spaces that Shirley generates on stage), an important aspect of early modern drama was to investigate and render visible spaces to which, in early modern England, very few could have access. David McInnis usefully characterizes a swathe of such stage scenarios as Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England.22 In this context, Sophie Battell shows, exoticizing the space of the Mediterranean as suffused with Islamic custom, resonant with language of the other playing through a stage space so often aurally defined by then “standard” English, was a common tactic. Massinger’s 1624 play The Renegado might be seen to revel in this kind of Islamic urban space, but in particular the dangerously eroticized zone of the Sultan’s seraglio is foregrounded. In that zone, multilingual words are appropriated and literally repatriated, so that English dominance of this multi-ethnic, highly lucrative space might be assured. If Massinger spatializes an Islam of the present, contemporary with the life of his audience, Marlowe’s famous Tamburlaine, written thirty years earlier, casts back to the past for his epic plays that sweep across so much of the territory beyond the Bosphorus. Daniel Vitkus and others have rightly indicated the ways that Marlowe’s plays contributed to anti-Muslim ideology in this period. In stretching his ten acts across so many thousand kilometers, Jeffrey McCambridge shows, Marlowe is joining in a process that links with ideologies present in Europe for centuries before. His chapter is a useful reminder of the provisional status of all our period markers: medieval, early modern, Renaissance. McCambridge shows in detail the way the Islamic ‘threat’ is visualized in icons in manuscripts, books, maps, and in Marlowe’s

22 See: McInnis, Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England. See also McInnis’s follow-up 2018 collection, co-edited with Claire Jowitt, Travel and Drama in Early Modern England.

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sweeping use of stage space. He movingly cites Deleuze, Guattari, and Girard and shows why it might be that, through Tamburlaine’s gleeful holocaust of Islamic spaces, towns, and of course its religious text, the Qu’ran, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays remain salaciously entertaining feats of theatrical shock and awe. Where McCambridge illuminates the stage depiction of spaces at the outer limits of the early modern imaginary, Laurie Johnson excavates a space that has always been close enough to visit, if you were passing through London, but which has literally left the maps we frequently consult. What happened in the theater space we know existed at Newington Butts in a crucial eleven days in 1594 is the subject of Johnson’s recent monograph, Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse.23 In his chapter here, Johnson examines the metadata by which a space, marginal till now yet central in many respects, can be opened out to public view. Crucial here is reading through and reading with the palimpsestic series of maps that enabled Newington Butts as a theater space to drop from our sight. With Johnson’s exacting overlay of cartographic and archival methods, we can begin to restore our view of that space, even in the thick of South London traffic.

Intersections If you need to overlay maps to read the performance space Johnson restores to life, so too do you need a series of intersectional discourses and practices to rethink the fields of early modern drama. Our contributors found their homes in English and theater departments, but, as we show in our final section, for early modern drama you also need to cross-pollinate from a range of disciplinary practices, ignoring subject silos and administrative categories. Jennifer Nicholson breaches a crucial, long-held barrier by asking, effectively, if Shakespeare is an English or a French writer. That Shakespeare draws on Montaigne is a commonplace fact. More subversive, however, is the startling realization of just how much early modern French Shakespeare’s texts access. Both vocabulary and the structure of ideas suggest a filiation, an interpenetration of ‘Frenchness’ that is both rigorous in terms of the Neo-Stoic philosophies that are drawn upon, and free-floating in terms of words sounding on stage that could be heard as at once both French and English, in more nebulous strains than the famously overt language lesson in Henry V 3.4. 23 See: Johnson, Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse.

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In The Tamer Tamed, by contrast, John Severn newly highlights the intersection of multiple discourses. In treating Fletcher’s play as playing out the links back to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and the anonymous Taming of a Shrew, Severn shows they conceal as much as they reveal. He sets that influence to one side, however, revealing a more complex dramaturgy that, in the tradition of Menippean satire, melds together a welter of discourses. In particular this strategy brings out, alongside the revision of heterosexual marriage practice wrought by Petruchio’s second wife, a playful series of homosocial and homosexual scenarios, some so daring that, most likely, they were cut, and glossed over in first editions of the play. Fletcher, of course, was one half of the famous homosocial writing duo with Francis Beaumont, subject of much recent discussion, which is still dominated by Jeffrey Masten’s eloquent blend of close reading and speculation.24 Masten is important because of the way he blends 1990s advances in queer theory with meticulous attention to texts and manuscripts underpinned by current debates in the bibliography of early modern play texts. Yet, as Gabriella Edelstein shows, intersecting Fletcher might be more than just a matter of reading his plays through relevant contemporary critical paradigms. Fletcher writes assuming a sophisticated play reading and watching audience, who will be alert to intersecting clues and citations. The tragicomic figure of the jailer’s daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen, for instance, powerfully reworks the tropes of the young, disturbed female Shakespeare initiates with Ophelia in Hamlet. Fletcher, Edelstein shows, continued his productive intersections with Shakespeare long after they had formally ceased collaborating. Eight years after Two Noble Kinsmen, in his Wild-Goose Chase, Fletcher shows a female heroine, Oriana, who grasps the power of scenes of female madness but can turn them to her own comic advantage, staging lunacy in order to conclude her desired match. Such textual intersections, Christopher Orchard shows, continue to the end and beyond the period usually covered as early modern English drama. Though London theaters close in 1642, the predilection for theater continues through to their re-opening mid way through 1660, with performances in private houses and in the neo-courtly context of Cromwell’s regime in the mid-1650s. Moreover, the publication and dissemination of printed playtexts continues, most notably in terms of playwrights showcased here, the first folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays from 1647, and the six tragedies and tragicomedies James Shirley published

24 See: Masten, Textual Intercourse.

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in 1653.25 Playwrights and playreaders thus continued to engage in dramatic scenarios. Orchard demonstrates a fascinating intersection across the arbitrary divide of 1642, with Henry Killigrew revising his own 1638 play, Pallanthus and Eudora, to better suit the subtle anguish of beleaguered Royalists. Would the times ever change back in their favor? Orchard shows Killigrew’s own revisions as a form of enhanced consolation to those in exile, though couched in the same form of a stage-fable set in Ancient Greece. Orchard shows too not the power of new historicism but rather the force of a nuanced, revised historicism, taking full advantage of both digital and print access to the torrent of newsbooks commenting weekly on British and European news. Insofar as it may never have been publicly performed, Killigrew’s vehement encouraging of the king in waiting, Charles II, seems designed either for private reading or the discreet, invitation-only realm of closet drama; Orchard acknowledges the absurdity of imagining the RSC or Shakespeare’s Globe staging Killigrew’s play. Yet the power of Orchard’s analysis shows ways we can usefully broaden the topics and plays we consider under the rubric of “early modern drama” or “plays to 1642.” *** As Lisa Hopkins notes in her foreword here, the chapters in New Directions in Early Modern English Drama show that early modern plays, players, and playwrights crossed multiple edges in a relatively short span of time. Such edgecrossings are visible in the subject of the plays (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, and Ford all traverse a vast array of locations and temporal settings across their oeuvre), the location of performances (playing companies often toured around England when theaters in London were closed due to plague, but some also performed in Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, France – to say nothing of the various performances staged for monarchs on progress or when they visited Oxford or Cambridge),26 and the way that the performance was recounted and re-staged (such as the two accounts of Elizabeth’s 1578 Norwich progress that must be read together to give a “full” account, Killigrew’s revised version of Pallantus and Eudora, or even Fletcher’s engagement with The Taming of the Shrew). The chapters that follow show how early modern English drama was fundamentally about crossing edges: audiences were constantly taken to the edges of their imaginations, playwrights often pushed the ‘edge of the envelope,’ and dramatic works blurred the edges between worlds, religions,

25 Both of which were clearly designed as a homage to the Shakespeare Folios of 1623 and 1632. 26 See: Katritzky, “English Troupes”; Keenan, “Spectator and Spectacle”; and Russell, Stuart Academic Drama.

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ideas, and languages. There is still much work that needs to be done in breaking down the edges of early modern English drama so that students and the public alike do not automatically default to Shakespeare, but we hope that New Directions in Early Modern English Drama offers both a variety of ways of tackling this problem, as well as giving an insight into the plethora of delights that keep successive generations of scholars enthralled in the early modern English dramatic landscape. At meetings of scholars and in online forums (conferences, symposia, and the like) there is terrific energy across so many disciplines centered in studies of the early modern world, as people share new techniques and insights, and relish enhanced digital close ups of manuscripts or reliquaries. At the same time, in Dickensian terms, this is a terrible time. So many promising PhDs and postdoctoral fellows will never be in safe tenure positions because so many programs in theater and literary studies have shrunk or are constantly under threat. The scholarship we curate here is, we hope you will find, richly compelling. We hope the PhDs and early career researchers can afford to stay on task long enough to generate yet more.

Works Cited Primary Sources “The Agas Map.” In The Map of Early Modern London, edited by Janelle Jenstad. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 2012. https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/map.htm. Marlowe, Christopher. The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus (B-Text). In Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, 185–246. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Edited by Francis X. Connor. In The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition, edited by Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan, 1689–1756. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Edited by John Jowett. In The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition, edited by Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan, 2347–434. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Secondary Sources Altieri, Charles. Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Bate, Jonathan. “What Makes a Great King Lear?” The Telegraph, December 8, 2010, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/8189890/What-makes-a-great-King-Lear.html.

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Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Clark, Ira. Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Felperin, Howard. The Uses of the Canon: Elizabethan Literature and Contemporary Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Grant, Teresa, and Barbara Ravelhofer, eds. English Historical Drama, 1500–1660: Forms Outside the Canon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Hirsch, Brett D. “The Kingdom Has Been Digitized: Electronic Editions of Renaissance Drama and the Long Shadows of Shakespeare and Print.” Literature Compass 8, no. 9 (2011): 568–91. Hopkins, Lisa. From the Romans to the Normans on the English Renaissance Stage. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017. Hopkins, Lisa. Renaissance Drama on the Edge. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Hopkins, Lisa. Shakespeare on the Edge: Border-Crossing in the Tragedies and the Henriad. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Johnson, Lawrence. Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts. London: Routledge, 2018. Jowitt, Claire, and David McInnis, eds. Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: The Journeying Play. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Kathman, David. “The Boys’ Plays and the Boy Players.” In Thomas Middleton in Context, edited by Suzanne Gossett, 160–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Kathman, David. “John Rice and the Boys of the Jacobean King’s Men.” Shakespeare Survey 68 (2015): 247–66. Kathman, David. “Players, Livery Companies, and Apprentices.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, edited by Richard Dutton, 413–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Katritzky, M.A. “English Troupes in Early Modern Germany: The Women.” In Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, edited by Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson, 35–46. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Keenan, Siobhan. “Spectator and Spectacle: Royal Entertainments at the Universities in the 1560s.” In The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, edited by Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight, 86–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kramnick, Jonathan Brody. Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Lamb, Charles. The Works of Charles Lamb. Edited by Thomas Noon Talfourd. London, 1867. Loomba, Ania. Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989. Lopez, Jeremy. Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Massai, Sonia. Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Masten, Jeffrey. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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McInnis, David. Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Milne, Drew. “What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted: King Lear and the Dissociation of Sensibility.” Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002): 53–66. Ostovich, Helen, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck. “Introduction: Other Voices, Other Views.” In Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies, edited by Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck, 7–16. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. Russell, David L., ed. Stuart Academic Drama: An Edition of Three University Plays. New York: Garland Press, 1987. Salzman, Paul. Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 1825–1915. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Paul Brown

Chapter 2 A Life on the Edge: Richard Bradshaw Richard Bradshaw is not a familiar name, even to historians of the early modern theater. But he had a long career in the period’s professional theaters, interacting with some of the best-known figures. This chapter is the first study of Bradshaw’s biography in detail and of his life in the profession. It was, as we shall see, a life lived on the edge: geographically, legally, and dramatically. Bradshaw’s life can tell us much about the nature of the early modern theater industry, too. In a world often thought to be dominated by major companies, major figures, and major theaters in a state of perpetual enmity, a close look at this peripheral player shows far more amiable relationships than are often thought to have existed. The lives of early modern actors have never been as popular with scholars as the lives of playwrights, acting companies, or even theater managers. And yet these were the men who spent the most time in the profession: playwrights frequently earned money from their pens away from the stage, just as theater managers and entrepreneurs had other interests. Drawing attention to a littleknown actor can tell us much about the period’s acting profession. In what follows, I pay attention to Richard Bradshaw’s social network: those people with whom he interacted while a member of the acting profession. Such a focus is useful not only for articulating who knew whom, but also for showing where someone fits in the theatrical industry. In the case of Bradshaw, we meet a man benefitting from contacts in the industry, trading on the good favor amiable relationships provide. This chapter tracks Bradshaw’s life chronologically, focusing on those around him as necessary. It lays out the scant facts of his life, as well as articulating what those facts tell us about his profession. The study of a comparatively minor figure is useful for recalibrating our approach to biography of the period’s theatrical personnel. In what follows, for instance, we see Richard Bradshaw not only on the edge of things in a traditional sense, but also connected to many members of the industry by edges, or vertices, in his social network. He was surprisingly well-connected, and these connections demonstrably benefitted him professionally. Such considerations are often neglected in a world of scholarly thought centered on major figures like William Shakespeare. Even when thinking about Shakespeare in this way – as a man connected to the period’s theater and its personnel – scholars begin a priori with Shakespeare at the center. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-002

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Take, for instance, Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells’s recent collection, The Shakespeare Circle.1 By taking as subjects those people close to Shakespeare (members of his family, friends, his actor colleagues, and collaborators) the collection called itself an “alternative biography,” one focused on the people around its main subject. It makes Shakespeare the assumed center of a network. Edmondson and Wells figured Shakespeare as the middle from which “many different kinds of circles . . . emanate,” and the biographies they present start “from the centre of Shakespeare’s life and help to shape its peripheries.”2 But Shakespeare was no more the center than anyone else. Just like Shakespeare and the others discussed by Edmondson and Wells, Bradshaw is at times central to moments in theater history and, on other occasions, more on the edge. On still other occasions he is absent altogether. Bradshaw belonged, as with all theater personnel, to shifting networks, ones where vertices strengthened or weakened or sprouted or retracted at different times and in different directions. This altogether messy network approach helps tell the story of Bradshaw’s life and the story of parts of the entertainment industry in which he worked.

Early Life The first theatrical record of Bradshaw is as a traveling player named on a warrant in 1595. The text of the warrant is preserved and is worth quoting in full for the frequent references to it in what follows: To all maiors sheriffs baliffs Constables & all other her majesties officers & lovinge subjects greetinge wheras by virtue of the last act of parlament houlden at Westminster it was enacted that no players should be permited to play or travell in the Cuntrey in the quality of playinge without the warrant & seale at Armes of a lord baron or some greater personage, know ye therfor that I Edward sutton baron of dudley have thought it good to licence & Authorize and by theis presens doe licence & authorise my servants francis Coffyn and Rich bradshaw to travell in the quality of playinge & to use musicke in all Cittys Townes & Corporations within her majestyes dominons givinge them free liberty to discharge any that shall travell in my name but theirselves & their Company which I also authorise / further I request you the rather for my sake to ayde them with your Countenances & presens & to lett them have your Towne halls or other places fitt for their exersize as to other noble mens men of the like quality hath byn granted hertofore & to lett them passe without lett molestation or Contradiction so longe as the behave themselues well & honestly & to be debard from none

1 Edmondson and Wells, The Shakespeare Circle. 2 Edmondson and Wells, The Shakespeare Circle, 329.

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exept it be in the tyme of divine service which I thinke nether fitt nor convenient in wittnesse wherof I have herunto put to my hand & seale the 16 of february in the 41th yeare of her majesties 1595.3

This record is where biographers of Bradshaw have typically begun, but there is a plausible record of his birth that moves our first sighting of him to 1570. The church of St. Gregory by St. Paul’s sat next to St. Paul’s Cathedral in the city of London. In the Baynard Castle ward, in the west of the city and bounded by the Thames to the south, the church’s registers hold a baptism record for one Richard Bradshawe. Though the church was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, the parish register notes the following: “Richard Bradshawe sonne of John Bradshawe baptized 26 December 1570.”4 Nothing concrete, beyond name, ties this Richard Bradshaw to our man of the theater, but there are good reasons to think they are the same person. These reasons are highlighted as they arise below. First, and this is slight evidence only, searches of Ancestry.com’s digitized records of parish registers held at the London Metropolitan Archives return no other plausible candidates with a similar name born around this time.5 Second, his birth in 1570 makes him the right age to be appearing in the records discussed in this chapter. Third, despite many appearances in the provinces, he had roots in the city that suggest he was a native of London. Marking Bradshaw as a born Londoner is significant. Our narratives of the theater industry, particularly regarding playwrights, imagine a migration from the provinces to London. This is well attested demographically, with London experiencing mass rural to urban migration through the early modern period.6 The influx, however, masks travel in the other direction. Bradshaw’s life began in London, but he made a choice to spend a significant amount of it outside the city. Though he returned to the city and his roots periodically and, indeed, might have benefitted from those roots, his life shows that a theater professional need not have spent most of his time performing on, or trying to perform on, the London stage to earn his living in the industry. As we shall see, such a realization furthers the work of the Records of Early English Drama (REED) series and of Siobhan Keenan in confirming that actors routinely chose to perform

3 Clopper, Chester: Records of Early English Drama, 177–78. 4 London Metropolitan Archives, P69/GRE/A/001/MS10231. 5 Searches conducted include those with variant spellings like “Bradshawe,” “Bradshewe,” and “Bradshay,” as well as “Bradshaw.” 6 Finlay, Population and Metropolis, 51–69.

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outside of London and did not need extensive London experience on their resume to perform with a prestigious troupe.7 A Richard Bradshaw born in December 1570 would have been twenty-four when named in Dudley’s 1595 patent alongside Francis Coffin. His prominence in the patent suggests seniority within the company. Gerald Eades Bentley, having only the patent to work with, thought that Bradshaw’s position would make him at least thirty in 1595 and that records relating to Bradshaw from the mid-1630s, to which we turn below, could not have pertained to the actor: “surely” Bradshaw “would not have been still dashing about the country at the age of sixty-eight.”8 These twin conjectures from Bentley are countered here. Finding a twenty-four-year-old Bradshaw in a senior position would not be unheard of: Richard Burbage was an actor-sharer in the Chamberlain’s men at twenty-seven and Henry Condell, according to Andrew Gurr, may have held the same position in the same company by the age of twenty-one.9 Alternatively, Bradshaw may not have been a senior man at all in 1595. A note on the patent made in November 1602 refers to “francis Coffen & others,” making no mention of Bradshaw. Simply being a member of the company’s rank and file, lumped in with the “& others” of the memorandum, poses no mismatch between the proposed record of Bradshaw’s birth and his membership of the traveling company. There are also reasons to discount Bentley’s assumption that the Richard Bradshaw of the 1590s was not the Richard Bradshaw of the 1630s. The birth record from St. Gregory by St. Paul’s would make him sixty-four in 1635 – at the date of his last known appearance in the theatrical record – not sixty-eight as Bentley thought. This is not a trivial distinction: we know of at least one other actor tracing a similar trajectory at a similar age. Martin Slater, born around 1560 by David Kathman’s reckoning,10 was involved with the Admiral’s Men for a time.11 Slater also led touring companies as late as October 1625, when he appeared at Coventry: he would have been sixty-five.12 Moreover, Bradshaw’s appearances in records in the 1630s suggest he was involved almost exclusively in company administration, rather than performance. As we shall see, his company was even capable of performing without him on occasion, suggesting that he could still be involved in the profession at an advanced age in a managerial role.

7 Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England, 3. 8 Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 2:388. 9 Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 13. 10 Kathman, Biographical Index of English Drama. 11 Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites, 286. 12 Eccles, “Elizabethan Actors IV,” 172.

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The London Theater Though first found in the provinces with Dudley’s company, Bradshaw spent time on the edge of the commercial London theater world. Bradshaw was a hired man with the Admiral’s company from around 1598 to 1601.13 The records of him with the company suggest he was well treated by the company but was never at the core of their dealings. The work of the REED volumes has decentered narratives of the early modern theater by showing that provincial playing was far from a last resort when playing in London was not an option. Bradshaw, though, seems to have spent a good deal of his theatrical life on the outside looking in at events in the capital. He is repeatedly to be found heading back to London to conduct theatrical business, despite spending much of his time in the provinces with traveling companies. That is not to say he was excluded by those in London, more that he was never fully integrated. And he certainly appears to have been treated favorably in dealings with them. He worked in the service of at least one of the Admiral’s actors. On May 19, 1598, he was named as the servant of Gabriel Spencer in the diary of theater impresario Philip Henslowe. Bradshaw was given ten shillings to give to Spencer to buy a plume of feathers.14 Such a relationship is intriguing. Spencer was a one-man advert for the enmity often thought to have permeated life in the theatrical profession: on December 3, 1596, he had killed a man called James Feake, and on September 22, 1598 he was killed by Ben Jonson in Hoxton fields.15 More pertinent to our interest, however, is his age. When, in 1598, Bradshaw was listed as his servant Spencer was just twenty-two. The son of a pewterer, Spencer had been born on April 8, 1576 at Christ Church, Newgate.16 Bradshaw was his senior by four-and-a-half years. Clearly, this was not a theatrical apprenticeship where a senior actor might bind a younger actor for a period of tutelage (either formally through a livery company of which the senior actor was free or informally through some arrangement with the acting company). Just why Bradshaw was serving the younger man is difficult to know, though it may have been that Bradshaw was assisting the company’s young star. Mark Eccles thought Spencer must have been an actor of “real promise” because Thomas Heywood remembered him when listing famous players in his Apology for Actors.17 Why mention someone so young (Spencer died at twenty-two) and after so long – Heywood’s 13 14 15 16 17

Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites, 276. Foakes and Rickert, Henslowe’s Diary, 83. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 2:341. Eccles, “Elizabethan Actors IV,” 172. Eccles, “Jonson and the Spies,” 392.

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Apology appeared fourteen years after Spencer’s death – if he was not a real talent? Just why Bradshaw was named as Spencer’s man is unclear. There might be something in his attachment to a company star, though it could simply be a service born of financial necessity. Other records of Bradshaw survive in the papers commonly associated with Henslowe’s diary. These tell us more about his theatrical life in London. On October 10, 1598, Bradshaw, along with Robert Archer and Byrcot Bird, entered into a bond to pay fifty shillings to William Bird.18 The money was due on March 2, 1599 and was to be paid at the house of one Mr. Reeve who lived in St. Saviour’s, Surrey – the parish that housed the Rose playhouse.19 Other locations are noted in the bond that tell us the whereabouts of Bradshaw and his fellows. For the first time since his birth, we have a firm location for Bradshaw: he is described as being of St. Saviour’s, and is identified as a yeoman in the bond’s preliminary lines.20 He was living, then, in the parish most associated with the Admiral’s Men. Many of the dramatists and actors named in Henslowe’s diary are found in St. Saviour’s, and it is safe to imagine Bradshaw interacting with them regularly. Notably, William Bird, the person to whom Bradshaw and the others owed money, lived north of the river. He identified himself as a man of Hoxton, an area north of the city and just north of Shoreditch, the suburb that housed the Theater and Curtain playhouses.21 Hoxton was a popular space for Londoners to visit to get away from the city at the time, as well as a space open enough for dueling, as Gabriel Spencer discovered to his cost. Spencer had been resident in that area, too: as well as dueling with Jonson in Hoxton, he lived nearby in Hog Lane, Shoreditch, and was buried there in St. Leonard’s, the parish church.22 In isolation, relationships with two people living near one another – though not especially near their company’s theater – tell us little. Given Bradshaw’s service to Spencer, however, and the fact we know of at least one instance when Bradshaw was ferrying money from Henslowe to him, it seems plausible that Bradshaw might have met and interacted with Bird on a trip north of the river too. We can see the same thing happening – Bradshaw acting as go-between for Henslowe and company members north of the river – in the records discussed below. Nothing is known of Byrcot Bird, one of Bradshaw’s other debtors, but there are theatrical records relating to Robert Archer. He, like Bradshaw, was a

18 Greg, Henslowe’s Papers, 48. 19 Foakes and Rickert, Henslowe’s Diary, 287. 20 Ioppolo, “MSS 1, Article 25, 02 Recto.” 21 Foakes and Rickert, Henslowe’s Diary, 287. 22 Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 2:341.

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traveling player and is found on the continent in the first two decades of the seventeenth century.23 Though Archer is not found among the records of the Admiral’s Men again, he is tangentially connected to them through one of his traveling peers. One Henry Griffin, with whom Archer acted in Frankfurt and elsewhere, is conjectured to have been the “Griffin” named in the surviving playhouse plot of the Admiral’s play Frederick and Basilea.24 What then to make of this transaction? It is interesting that Bradshaw and Archer, two traveling players, are found borrowing money from William Bird, one of the Admiral’s sharers.25 Such an act suggests some dependence on the successful London company from the traveling men. The same can be said of later records of Bradshaw, too. Not a week after entering into the bond with Bird, Bradshaw is found in a couple of Henslowe’s entries regarding payments to playwrights. In the first entry, dated October 16, 1598, Bradshaw’s role is difficult to decipher. Henslowe noted an expense of thirty shillings as partial payment for a play called Conan Prince of Cornwall to be paid to Michael Drayton and Thomas Dekker. Bradshaw’s name appears to be an interlined addition to the entry, occurring above a line drawn from the end of the written record to the note registering the amount of expenditure.26 The space above this line is customarily left blank in other records. A second entry, immediately following this one, makes Bradshaw’s role explicit: pd unto Bradshaw at the Requeste of mr drayton & mr dickers in pte of payment of ther Boocke called the connan prince of cornwell some of . . . X s.

Bradshaw thus acted as a middle-man between Henslowe and the playwrights, collecting money to pass to them. As with the record pertaining to Gabriel Spencer, Bradshaw had money to transport. Presumably, he was taking it to the writers who were not immediately in Henslowe’s vicinity, else there would be little reason to have Bradshaw collect the payment and act as go-between. Of Michael Drayton’s residences we know nothing, but Thomas Dekker, as best we can tell, was to be found in Whitechapel at this time.27 Sat to the east of the

23 Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors, 21–22; Hoppe, “English Actors at Ghent,” 312–13; Hoppe, “English Acting Companies,” 28–29. 24 Hoppe, “English Actors at Ghent,” 312–13. See “Frederick and Basilea” for the play’s entry in the Lost Plays Database. 25 Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites, 276. 26 Foakes and Rickert, Henslowe’s Diary, 100; Ioppolo, “MSS 7, 051 Recto.” 27 Eccles, “Brief Lives,” 42.

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city, Whitechapel housed Samuel Rowley, another of the Admiral’s dramatists, and was a short hop around the city’s periphery to Shoreditch and Hoxton.28 Though clearly operating on the edge of the Admiral’s Men in the late 1590s, there appears to be some pattern in Bradshaw’s work. The surviving records attest some administrative role in the company, handling payments on behalf of others and serving more senior members. He benefitted from those members too, owing money to at least one of them. Geographically, despite living close to the company’s theater, his work seems to have taken him repeatedly to the city’s suburbs north of the river. The due date for the bond with William Bird came and went without repayment in March 1599, but it did not seem to harm Bradshaw’s standing with the company. Indeed, Henslowe appears to have trusted Bradshaw’s ability to repay a debt, assuming the following records are representative: Sowld unto Richard Bradshawe player the 15 of desember 1600 j pownd & ij owences of coope lace to be payde at to his Retorne a gayne to london.29

Bradshaw signed his name to this advance of fourteen shillings and Edward Alleyn signed his name, as a witness. Four months later, Henslowe recorded the following: lent more unto Richard Bradshawe player the 29 of Aprell 1601 in mony to be payd at his next Retorne to london the some of . . . Vs.30

Not only do these records show Bradshaw’s continued interactions with the Admiral’s Men, they also hold rich biographical information. Firstly, Bradshaw was leaving London, probably to act in a company in the provinces. We can surmise as much for two reasons: copper lace was widely used on stage, and we have seen his patent from Lord Dudley outlining the company’s touring practices. Second, London was Bradshaw’s primary residence: both records speak of a return to London after a period spent elsewhere. Third, Henslowe was happy enough to repeatedly allow Bradshaw to pay him back after some unspecified period of absence. The mention of lending “more” to Bradshaw in the second entry suggests he had not yet settled his first account or had another one outstanding. This is telling. It at once serves as a corrective for anyone still attached to notions of Henslowe as a “driving taskmaster” deliberately keeping his writers in thrall, as well as showing a willingness by the theater manager to

28 Cerasano, “Rowley, Samuel, (d. 1624).” 29 Foakes and Rickert, Henslowe’s Diary, 165. 30 Foakes and Rickert, Henslowe’s Diary, 165.

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co-operate beyond company lines.31 This inter-company co-operation is not often considered in the early modern theater. Henslowe is shown here not only to be trading with someone outside his company, but someone, once Bradshaw had left the Admiral’s Men, with whom he would have been in direct competition. One skeptical of this interpretation might observe that Henslowe’s company was not competing for a share in the same market. Bradshaw was to be in the provinces, and Henslowe in London. Superficially this might be the case, but touring was not far from Henslowe’s mind. When, in August 1597, he resigned Richard Jones to the company on his return from the Pembroke’s Men, Henslowe was sure to put a clause in the contract that ensured Jones would play “in my howsse only knowne by the name of the Rosse & in no other howse a bowt london publicke & yf Restraynte be granted then to go for the tyme into the contrey.”32 Henslowe considered the prospect of touring real. And, had his company gone on tour, he would have been met with competition from other touring companies. Siobhan Keenan has emphasized the competitive nature of touring too: London companies not only contended “with each other, but with regionally based troupes for a share of the provincial theater market.”33 We might also consider the goods being exchanged when thinking about the significance of trading beyond company lines. Henslowe sold Bradshaw copper lace, a material commonly used for imitating gold on stages in the period.34 Henslowe regularly bought it: Neil Carson counted ten separate purchases in the period covered in Henslowe’s diary. Apparel was among a company’s most valuable assets, so we can assume Henslowe was not wont to part with it on a whim.35 Costuming one notable production for the Admiral’s Men cost £17 and Henry Evans, when starting a boy company, spent “£200 on apparel and other playing materials.”36 A purchase of copper lace by Bradshaw confirms his seniority with the touring company at this point – by having the power of the purse – and it suggests he was a player with an eye for spectacle. Touring meant a good deal of playing indoors (the 1595 patent names town halls as one such venue), and copper lace shimmering gold under candlelight would have created a particularly rich scene for an audience.37

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Baldwin, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company, 28. Foakes and Rickert, Henslowe’s Diary, 239–40. Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England, 9. Lublin, Costuming the Shakespearean Stage, 50. Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 176. Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 36–37; Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 52. Dustagheer, “Why the Theaters Changed,” 143–47.

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These records show us Bradshaw on the edge of his primary pursuit: he was close to, but not a core part of, an acting company. Though he may have taken the role of a hired man with the Admiral’s Men, performing walk-on parts in large-cast performances, he was not a central member of the company. Rather, he was peripheral to the Admiral’s Men’s work, performing administrative tasks to make ends meet while readying his next venture. The Admiral’s Men were kindly to him in doing so, too. As well as showing the amiable nature of the profession and its members, such records show a willingness of those more established to help those who were up and coming or fallen on hard times. If Bradshaw’s experience is typical, and there is evidence – like the tolerance shown to John Russell, discussed below – to suggest that it is, then it depicts an industry happy to support its peers, rather than established companies endeavoring to stymie new entrants.

The Provinces With copper lace adorning his company’s costumes, we next meet Bradshaw in Chester in 1602. From being on the edge of the Admiral’s Men, Bradshaw was apparently central to Dudley’s touring company. Unfortunately, he had moved from explicitly decreed legal playing to the edge of legal activity. The Admiral’s Men were part of an officially decreed duopoly created in 1598 by Privy Council edict. The Council declared that only the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Admiral’s Men could stage plays in the capital.38 The Privy Council’s success in establishing this duopoly, whether it had really begun as early as 1594 and whether it was formally adhered to, is beyond the scope of this piece. Suffice it to say the duopoly narrative, most readily associated with Andrew Gurr, has been the subject of much debate by theater historians.39 Bradshaw’s touring company had no such official backing. They presented their patent at Chester but were not permitted to play. Instead, their patent was endorsed with the following: Memorandum that francis Coffen & others within named who were licenced to play as the lord dudleys servants did repayre to this citty for that purpose 10 no 1602 & for as much as I am Credbly enformed the lord dudly had long since discharged the sayd Coffen & licensed certayn others with words of revocation of this warrant which was shewed unto

38 Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:325. 39 See: Gurr, “Three Reluctant Patrons,” 164; Gurr, “Henry Carey’s Peculiar Letter,” 52; Knutson, “What’s So Special about 1594?” 459–67; and Syme, “Three’s Company,” 269–80.

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me I have therfore taken the same from them givinge them admonitions nether to play in this citty nor els where opon payne of punishment accordinge to the lawes & statutes in that Case provided.

The memorandum was signed by Chester’s mayor, Hugh Glasier.40 By attempting to play with an outdated license, Bradshaw’s troupe were breaking the law. The 1572 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds and for the Relief of the Poor and Impotent proscribed playing by actors who did not belong to an aristocratic patron.41 Bradshaw’s troupe must have known this fact, otherwise they need not have bothered presenting their invalid patent. The rewards for performing must have been considered substantial too, or the meting out of punishment unlikely, since the Act’s penalties were harsh: whipping, branding, and, for repeat offenders, death and loss of land.42 It is worth noting briefly the law’s successes and failures, since we will return to the issue of company licenses below. Following the official decree, there was some reorganization of troupes under aristocratic patronage in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign.43 But the Act clearly did not eradicate all proscribed ills, as it was restated in 1598 and 1604.44 Indeed, versions of the same law had been around since 1531 (though not necessarily naming players as explicitly outside the law). Almost certainly Bradshaw’s company stopped elsewhere between London and Chester. They must have had some luck with their out-of-date patent, else they would have stopped using it and tried something else, and it had not been marked until Glasier penned the memorandum at Chester. A surviving letter sent to the Mayor of Norwich, Henry Sebeck, on June 4, 1617 shows that lawmakers did take the issue of patents seriously, however. The letter catalogues several major companies who had copied their patents and split into smaller troupes to play in the countryside. Those named were to be summoned to Whitehall to answer for their behaviors.45 Following the failure to perform in Chester, Bradshaw made his way back to London. He was presumably present on January 8, 1604 when William Bird transferred the bond discussed above to Edward Alleyn, allowing him to recoup the money from Bradshaw. Ten shillings were due to Alleyn, from Bird, on March 25, 1604, and Bird instructed Alleyn to reclaim the money against the

40 Clopper, Chester: Records of Early English Drama, 178. 41 Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:269–70. 42 Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:270. 43 Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 7, 67. 44 Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:260–344. 45 Galloway, Norwich, 1540–1642, 152.

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1598 bond for fifty shillings, for Alleyn to take his cut, and to give Bird the difference.46 As well as showcasing Bradshaw’s impressive ability to avoid paying a creditor – the original bond was due to be paid after five months, and the transfer to Alleyn comes after five years – it shows a leniency we would perhaps not expect on Bird’s behalf. This leniency is heightened when we learn that during the time that Bradshaw was in Bird’s debt, Bird’s financial situation was so straitened that when he found himself imprisoned his wife had to borrow money from Henslowe so that he might make bail.47 Bird was also capable of entering into legal proceedings to solve his problems when he had to: in 1602 he sought “sureties of the peace for fear of death against Thomas Boulton”; he might also have been the William Bird who “sought sureties of the peace against Rowland Garland in 1602/3,” and the William “Byrd who sought sureties in 1606 against Roger Corbett, Humphrey Jones, and Richard Wilford.”48 History presents a man in William Bird who was, at times, in dire need of money and a man who would use the law to achieve his aims. Both these facts should have encouraged Bradshaw to settle his account. One possible explanation for his non-payment is that Bird showed repeated leniency to a man in the same profession. Rather than sue Bradshaw, he merely transferred his debt. At this point, with Bradshaw no longer a member of the same acting company, we might read further inter-company co-operation as with Henslowe’s transactions with Bradshaw. It could also simply be the case that Bird was disposed to do Bradshaw a favor, despite his own circumstances. Another record, a letter by Bird to Alleyn, suggests he was of a kindly disposition. Alleyn had appointed one John Russell as a gatherer to collect the money of patrons as they entered the theater. Unfortunately, according to Bird, Russell could not help but steal from the takings. Despite being warned by the players, and swearing he would desist, he continued to raid the money. Rather than sack him, Bird asked Alleyn to allow him to stay with the company to perform walk-on roles as attendants and to be paid for mending the company’s costumes in his leisure time.49 Given the several unpaid or delayed debts accrued in these records by Bradshaw, we might form a picture of him as being poor at managing his finances. At Skipton Castle, north of Bradford and a stone’s throw from Bolton Abbey, Bradshaw and his company were paid not to perform in 1617:

46 47 48 49

Foakes and Rickert, Henslowe’s Diary, 287. Foakes and Rickert, Henslowe’s Diary, 83. Eccles, “Elizabethan Actors I,” 40. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 2:187.

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Payd the 28th July to Bradshaw & his companie my Lo: darbies Players in reward from my Lo: in spit[e] he wold not heare them play . . . xxs.50

This record is the first of Bradshaw for more than a decade and places him, as with the record from Chester above, at the head of a touring company in the north of England. Such a record is consistent with what we know about the man. Notably, he was heading a different company on this occasion: the Earl of Derby’s Men. Bradshaw had, by 1617, left the service of Dudley and taken up with Derby’s Men. John Tucker Murray, writing before the REED series, thought Bradshaw, and his patent-mate Francis Coffin, had left Dudley’s service by 1610 because a company under Dudley’s patronage appears in Lancashire records as being headed by a man named “Distle” or “Distley” without mention of Bradshaw.51 Given the memorandum on the 1595 patent that must have effectively ended Bradshaw’s use of it, this split may well have occurred earlier. Certainly, the Earl of Derby’s Men was a step up for Bradshaw.52 They were popular at the big houses in the area. Numerous records attest their performances there through the early seventeenth century.53 There was a family connection, too. Francis Clifford, fourth Earl of Cumberland (from whose family accounts these records are drawn), was the cousin of William Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby, and Bradshaw’s new patron. Bradshaw had joined a large company: Derby’s Men arrived at Londesborough in June 1611 with fourteen players; in March 1612 they arrived with thirteen men.54 The company was not far short of the size of the big London companies, and was far from the rag-tag outfit sometimes thought to be found wandering the provinces. They were no aberration either. John Wasson catalogued other companies to appear in the Clifford records and found they brought similar numbers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the period’s major companies, with royal patronage, traveled in large numbers: Queen Anne’s Men brought fifteen in 1619; the King’s Men brought fourteen in 1620; Prince Charles’s brought fourteen in 1618. But lesser-known companies, ones who never had any residence in London, brought sizeable troupes too: Lord Evers’s Men brought twelve in 1600; Lord Clinton’s also brought twelve the same year; and Lord Mounteagle’s brought eleven in 1612.55 A nod to the size of visiting companies here is worthwhile

50 Wasson, “Elizabethan and Jacobean Touring Companies,” 53. 51 Murray, English Dramatic Companies, 2:42. 52 Wasson, “Elizabethan and Jacobean Touring Companies,” 53. 53 Wasson, “Elizabethan and Jacobean Touring Companies,” 53–55. 54 Wasson, “Elizabethan and Jacobean Touring Companies,” 55. 55 Wasson, “Elizabethan and Jacobean Touring Companies,” 55.

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for highlighting the change of Bradshaw’s circumstances we see at the end of his career. Bradshaw’s is a familiar story, told repeatedly in the lives of actors in the period. Despite increased stability in the profession through Bradshaw’s lifespan – there were permanent playing spaces in London, and royal patronage of acting troupes – it was still a precarious existence. Success was to be cherished because it could soon turn to failure, as we shall see below. A prolonged career in the profession at any level was not guaranteed: we have seen one example already of a talented actor, Gabriel Spencer, having his career cut short. A prolonged career at the top of the profession was even harder to sustain. For all the star actors whose names we know well, like Richard Burbage, Edward Alleyn, and Will Kemp, there are dozens of Thomas Downtons, Robert Hamlens, and John Shaws whose names are barely known. We now turn to the end of Bradshaw’s career, which, like much of the rest of his time in the profession, traced such peaks and troughs.

Later Life It is eight years before Bradshaw is sighted again in the historical record. Though Wasson noted Bradshaw may, as a member of Derby’s Men, have made it as far east as Ipswich, and as far south as Barnstaple, he is not explicitly found again until 1625.56 Once again he was heading up a touring company in the north of England, this time at Dunkenhalgh in Lancashire. When or why he left Derby’s Men is unknown, but Bradshaw led his own troupe for the next decade. As with Derby’s Men at the Clifford family houses, Bradshaw’s company proved popular: extant records show at least seven visits to Dunkenhalgh over the next ten years.57 Entries in the household accounts of Thomas Walmesley are formulaic: [February 11, 1625] given Bradshewe the plaier & his Companie . . . xx s. [January 2, 1626] paid to Bradshay the 2d. of Ianuary . . . xx s. [August 26, 1626] paid Bradshay & his Company the 26th day of August . . . xx s. [April 4, 1627] given Bradshay the plaier the 4th aprill . . . x s. [October 22, 1629] paid Bradshay & his Company the same day . . . xx s. [December 9, 1630] given Bradshaw and his Company of Players . . . xiij s. iiij d. [between November 16 and 30, 1635] given Bradshaw and his Company . . . xx s.58

56 Wasson, “Elizabethan and Jacobean Touring Companies,” 53. 57 George, “The Walmesley of Dunkenhalgh Accounts,” 10. 58 George, Lancashire: Records of Early English Drama, 193–209.

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Prior commentators have noted that Bradshaw’s men clearly found a willing audience at Dunkenhalgh.59 What no one has yet outlined is the fact that Bradshaw’s company were especially favored there. The royal court marked particular days in the calendar for prolonged festivities. Days like Shrove Tuesday, New Year, and Twelfth Night were likely to involve especially long or rich festivities.60 Assuming country houses followed the court in their style of entertainments – and since the court would sometimes be in residence at such houses the assumption is a safe one – then Bradshaw’s company appears to have been a preferred troupe. In 1625, Bradshaw’s company was resident on Shrove Tuesday, in 1626 the company were at the house for New Year, and in 1627 the company was back again for Easter Sunday. Not only were they popular players, but they were also important players, and they were expected to deliver performances on dates associated with festivities. Rather than ending his career with this notable, if minor, success, Bradshaw returned to the edge of legal playing in-between sojourns in Dunkenhalgh. He appeared in an isolated reference in Reading in 1630 – “Richard Bradshawe hath licens and company,” noted the record – before leading a group playing under a dubious license at Banbury.61 Bradshaw headed a group of “six suspicious strolling actors” who were arrested at Banbury, Oxfordshire after authorities became suspicious about their license.62 Bradshaw had not been with them, but the six men arrested – Bartholomew Jones, Richard Whiting, Edward Damport, Drewe Turner, Robert Houghton, and Richard Collewell – confirmed he was their leader. Bradshaw had left the company at Kineton in Warwickshire to head to London to supposedly renew their license and recruit more players. The plan was to regroup in Thame, Oxfordshire.63 The company was without its license because Edward Whiting, one of those arrested, had lent it to William Cooke and Fluellen Morgan. Cooke and Morgan used it to perform a puppet show, before spending all their money and pawning the license for four shillings.64 According to the details of Robert Houghton’s examination, Bradshaw, hearing of this, purchased the puppet show.65

59 George, “The Walmesley of Dunkenhalgh Accounts,” 10–11. 60 Dutton, Shakespeare, Court Dramatist, 48–49; Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright, 17. 61 Murray, English Dramatic Companies, 2:386. 62 Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 2:388. 63 Murray, English Dramatic Companies, 2:107–10. 64 Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors, 55. 65 Murray, English Dramatic Companies, 2:109.

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Despite the farcical edge to these events, they confirm details about Bradshaw with which we have become familiar. He was, once more, to be found on the periphery of a company. Though he headed the enterprise that hit trouble at Banbury, they could plainly survive without him, playing or endeavoring to play in his absence. Geographically, too, this final record shows Bradshaw caught between two places. As with earlier records with the Admiral’s Men, Bradshaw was set to garner resources from London before returning to the provinces. How many more debts and favors might he have run up in the years since his dealings with Henslowe? Just as his company had done three decades earlier, Bradshaw’s men at Banbury attempted to play with an inadequate or non-existent license. Even in his mid-sixties, Bradshaw was capable of living on the edge, of trying to find a way to the next performance and the next commission. This final record from Banbury of Bradshaw rather gives us his life in microcosm: he was the head of a provincial troupe who could not help but get on the wrong side of the law while eyeing the next venture. He was resourceful. No sooner was his company forced to stop playing than he was onto the next scheme, buying a puppet show or incarnating another company. We leave him doing just this, having disappeared to London, where, drawing on his relationships from a lifetime in the profession, he sought to muster actors to bolster his troupe. At the outset, I said that Bradshaw’s life showed the importance of one’s social network in the profession, how the edges by which one is connected to others shape the lived experience. Linked to this was the nature of these relationships, and how the study of a minor actor’s life told a story of amiable co-operation. Bradshaw capitalized on this social network. We saw how, for instance, William Bird was lenient with him in business transactions when he would have been justified in a harsher line. And Philip Henslowe, far from being a taskmaster, sold apparel to a rival and let outstanding debts wait while Bradshaw disappeared to the provinces. Nevertheless, Bradshaw’s life was one of peripheral interactions. Perhaps this is most marked with his administrative dealings with the Admiral’s Men, his service to a man several years his junior, or his collection of payments for others in the company. His repeated changes of company affiliation signal a peripheral existence, too. Beginning with Dudley’s Men, then on the edge of the Admiral’s, then a disbanded Dudley’s; following a lacuna in the record, he reemerged with the Earl of Derby’s Men, before heading his own company without any apparent noble affiliation. His fortunes oscillated. Debts and dubious patents mark the troughs of his life, whereas a lead spot in a major nobleman’s company and repeated commissions in country households on prime playing dates mark the peaks.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Clopper, Lawrence M., ed. Chester: Records of Early English Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Foakes, R.A., and R.T. Rickert, eds. Henslowe’s Diary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Galloway, David, ed. Norwich, 1540–1642: Records of Early English Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. George, David, ed. Lancashire: Records of Early English Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Greg, W.W., ed. Henslowe’s Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe’s Diary. London: A.H. Bullen, 1907. Ioppolo, Grace, ed. “MSS 1, Article 25, 02 Recto: Bond from Richard Bradshawe, Byrcot Byrde and Robert Archer to William Bird, March 2, 1599.” In Henslowe-Alleyn Digitization Project. London: King’s College, 2005. https://henslowe-alleyn.org.uk/catalogue/mss-1/ article-025/02-recto/. Ioppolo, Grace, ed. “MSS 7, 051 Recto.” In Henslowe-Alleyn Digitization Project. London: King’s College, 2005. https://henslowe-alleyn.org.uk/catalogue/mss-7/051-recto/. London Metropolitan Archives, P69/GRE/A/001/MS10231. Richard Bradshawe, Dec 26, 1570.

Secondary Sources Baldwin, Thomas Whitfield. The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Bentley, Gerald Eades. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage: Dramatic Companies and Players. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941. Cerasano, S.P. “Rowley, Samuel, (d. 1624).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. https://doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/24226. Chambers, E.K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923. Dustagheer, Sarah. “Why the Theaters Changed.” In Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, 137–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Dutton, Richard. Shakespeare, Court Dramatist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Eccles, Mark. “Brief Lives: Tudor and Stuart Authors.” Studies in Philology 79, no. 4 (1982): 1–135. Eccles, Mark. “Elizabethan Actors I: A–D.” Notes and Queries 38, no. 1 (1991): 38–49. Eccles, Mark. “Elizabethan Actors IV: S to End.” Notes and Queries 40, no. 2 (1993): 165–76. Eccles, Mark. “Jonson and the Spies.” The Review of English Studies 13, no. 52 (1937): 385–97. Edmondson, Paul, and Stanley Wells, eds. The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Finlay, Roger. Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London, 1580–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

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“Frederick and Basilea.” In Lost Plays Database, edited by Roslyn L. Knutson, David McInnis, and Matthew Steggle. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2019. https://lost plays.folger.edu/Frederick_and_Basilea. George, David. “The Walmesley of Dunkenhalgh Accounts.” REED Newsletter 6, no. 2 (1985): 10. Gurr, Andrew. “Henry Carey’s Peculiar Letter.” Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2005): 51–75. Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearian Playing Companies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Gurr, Andrew. Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Company, 1594–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Gurr, Andrew. “Three Reluctant Patrons and Early Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1993): 159–74. Hoppe, Harry R. “English Acting Companies at the Court of Brussels in the Seventeenth Century.” The Review of English Studies 6, no. 21 (1955): 26–33. Hoppe, Harry R. “English Actors at Ghent in the Seventeenth Century.” The Review of English Studies 25, no. 100 (1949): 305–21. Kathman, David. Biographical Index of English Drama before 1660. Accessed November 4, 2019. http://shakespeareauthorship.com/bd/bio-b.htm. Keenan, Siobhan. Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Kernan, Alvin. Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Knutson, Roslyn L. The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991. Knutson, Roslyn L. “What’s So Special about 1594?” Shakespeare Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2010): 449–67. Lublin, Robert I. Costuming the Shakespearean Stage: Visual Codes of Representation in Early Modern Theatre and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Murray, John Tucker. English Dramatic Companies, 1558–1642: Provincial Companies and Appendices. 2 vols. London: Constable and Company, 1910. Nungezer, Edwin. A Dictionary of Actors and Other Persons Associated with the Public Representation of Plays in England before 1642. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929. Syme, Holger Schott. “Three’s Company: Alternative Histories of London’s Theaters in the 1590s.” Shakespeare Survey 65 (2012): 269–89. Wasson, John. “Elizabethan and Jacobean Touring Companies.” Theatre Notebook 42 (1988): 51–57.

Chloe Owen

Chapter 3 “Thou Dream’st Awake”: Ghosts and Sleep in Chapman’s Antonio’s Revenge and Marston’s Bussy D’Ambois For centuries, folktales have arisen out of the experiences of sleep paralysis and hypnagogic/hypnopompic hallucinations (hereafter referred to as hypnic hallucinations). Psychologists estimate that rates of prevalence range from 6 to 62 percent of the population experiencing sleep paralysis at least once in their lifetime, with average estimates being 25–35 percent.1 These varying statistics are partly due to difference of methods between studies, partly due to cultural understandings of the phenomenon, and partly due to attitudes towards sleep paralysis and hypnic hallucinations in society.2 It is not uncommon for firsttime sufferers to have no awareness of the phenomenon prior to its occurrence. As a result, it is possible that it goes unreported because, as James Allan Cheyne notes, “they [experients] suspected that they were suffering from serious psychiatric or neurological disorders, and even daemonic possession or alien abduction.”3 As these subjects are considered taboo in modern society, they are little discussed, which has pushed this fairly common experience to the edges of cultural discourse. Up to two-thirds of people may experience these occurrences at least once in their lifetimes, and yet the phenomenon is rarely discussed outside of psychological research. This chapter begins to explore how sleep paralysis experiences have impacted supernatural folklore and, subsequently, popular culture in the early modern period. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were debates in the early modern period surrounding the exact nature of the experience. While medical practitioners stated that sleep paralysis (known then as the nightmare, mare, hag, old hag, hag-riding, incubus, or Ephialtes) was a bodily disease, folklore surrounding

1 Cassaniti and Luhrmann, “The Cultural Kindling of Spiritual Experiences,” S340; Cheyne, “Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis,” 142; Davies, “The Nightmare Experience,” 182; O’Hanlon, Murphy, and Di Blasi, “Experiences of Sleep Paralysis,” 194. 2 Cheyne, Rueffer, and Newby-Clark, “Hypnogogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations,” 319–20; Gangdev, “Relevance of Sleep Paralysis,” 77; Fukuda, “One Explanatory Basis,” 804; Cheyne, Newby-Clark, and Rueffer, “Relations among Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Experiences,” 313; Cheyne, “Sleep Paralysis Episode Frequency,” 319. 3 Cheyne, “Sleep Paralysis and the Structure of Waking-Nightmare,” 164. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-003

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the phenomenon persisted. Surviving supernatural pamphlets often describe incidents that correlate to the sleep paralysis and/or hypnic hallucination experience, while interpreting them as a paranormal event. Many modern psychologists believe that sleep paralysis is the root of various supernatural folktales, including demons, ghosts, spirits, and incubi.4 When people wake in the night to hear, see, or feel an unexpected figure in the room with seemingly no earthly explanation, it is understandable that they interpret it as a supernatural entity. It was not uncommon for playwrights of the period to adapt this folklore for the stage. In plays such as William Shakespeare’s Richard III (1591–1593), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–1596), Cymbeline (1608–1611), The Winter’s Tale (1609–1611), and The Tempest (1611), the supernatural is either seen to visit sleeping characters, or is reported to have appeared during the night. In each of these incidents, the paranormal entity crosses the boundary between sleeping and waking worlds and thus seems to represent a hypnic hallucination. This chapter considers such instances in two lesser-known plays: John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1600–1601), and George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (1604–1605).5 These plays are thought to have been first performed by the Children of St. Paul’s in the theater at St. Paul’s, and by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in the Blackfriars, respectively. While the supernatural has long been a popular trope in drama, from around 1590 to the 1620s there is a rich concentration of plays that include elements of the supernatural, many of which are related to sleep. These include those mentioned above, as well as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1592), Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (1616), and William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton (1621). These plays inevitably influence one another as they operate within the same theatrical culture. There was also a growing interest in scientific explanations for paranormal phenomena, as illustrated by medical pamphlets that describe the incubus as a bodily disease.6 These plays therefore emerge from a culture in which 4 Cheyne, Rueffer, and Newby-Clark, “Hypnogogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations,” 320, 333; Hufford and Hinton, “Sleep Paralysis as Spiritual Experience,” 20; Conesa, “Relationship between Isolated Sleep Paralysis and Geomagnetic Influences,” 1264; Klemperer, “Ghosts, Visions, and Voices,” 1518. 5 This chapter considers male sleepers and their interactions with supernatural entities. For a discussion of female sleepers and the male gaze, see: Roberts, “Sleeping Beauties.” For more details on the history of sleeping onstage, see: Bevington, “Asleep Onstage.” 6 James I, Daemonologie, K3r; Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, H3v; Barrough, The Methode of Phisicke, 34; Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 500; Bartholomaeus, Batman Uppon Bartholome, 85; Pomarius, Enchiridion Medicum, N1v; Boorde, The Breviarie of Health, F4v–F5r; Bruel, Praxis Medicinae, 51; Culpeper, The English Physitian, 23; Diemerbroeck, The Anatomy of Human Bodies,

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the supernatural was greatly debated and the psychological or spiritual nature of the entities became a point of interest. Even so, while some critics, such as Owen Davies, Julian Goodare, and Margaret Dudley have explored the connection between supernatural folklore and sleep paralysis, there has so far been no extended analysis of its presence in early modern drama. This chapter considers how the supernatural characters of just two plays seem to retain traces of their origins in sleep paralysis. In the supernatural scenes of Antonio’s Revenge and Bussy D’Ambois, the title characters are visited by spirits in the night in a way that reflects sleep paralysis and/or hypnic hallucinations. Both of these plays engage with early modern supernatural folklore that, in turn, seems to stem from these nocturnal phenomena. While the playwrights may not be purposefully representing sleep paralysis for the stage, the folklore from which they draw seems to originate in the very real and very frightening experiences of sleep paralysis and hypnic hallucinations. They therefore operate on the edges of consciousness, sleeping and waking, and imagination and reality.

Sleep Paralysis and Hypnic Hallucinations Sleep paralysis is characterized by a person’s inability to move their muscles, despite being awake, when they are between sleeping and waking states. It can occur with or without hypnic hallucinations. Hypnagogic hallucinations are visual, auditory, and/or tactile hallucinations that occur as a person is falling asleep; hypnopompic hallucinations are similar experiences, but they occur as a person is waking up. As they are so alike, some psychologists believe that using both terms is unnecessary, and so I will use Shelley R. Adler’s term, “hypnic hallucinations,” to describe both experiences.7 Just as sleep paralysis can occur with or without these hallucinations, the hallucinations can occur with or without sleep paralysis. There are three common types of hallucination that are experienced with sleep paralysis: the vestibular-motor hallucination, the intruder hallucination, and the incubus hallucination. The vestibular-motor hallucination is the least common and covers a wide range of experiences from feelings of moving a limb, to flying, hurtling through spiral tunnels, rising out of bed and walking around the room, spinning sensations, floating, falling, out-of-body experiences, and autoscopy (the

184; Wirtzung, The General Practise of Physicke, 150; Hart, Klinike, or The Diet of the Diseased, 103, 131–32, 334. 7 Adler, Sleep Paralysis.

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sensation of seeing oneself from an external viewpoint).8 These are, as James Allan Cheyne notes, “somewhat positively correlated with blissful feelings.”9 The remaining two types of hallucination are more common, and are more frequently associated with intense fear. The intruder hallucination involves the sensation of someone or something in the room with the sleeper. They may have experiences of “thinking someone is present, seeing them, hearing and being touched by them.”10 The incubus hallucination is the most closely associated with fear. It involves “feelings of someone sitting on the chest, a sense of being smothered or strangled, pain and impending death.”11 During the incubus hallucination, it is common for the feelings of tightened chest muscles and shallow breathing to be interpreted as the result of a person or entity sitting on the chest of the sleeper. Early modern playwrights would, of course, have been unaware of current theories and categorizations of sleep paralysis hallucinations. Nevertheless, these experiences are represented in early modern works: sleep paralysis is a universal experience that spans across time and culture and the early moderns – despite having different understandings of the phenomenon – were trying to make sense of the same things that people experience today. Sleep paralysis has been studied by medical science for centuries and, in the early modern period, was attributed to various bodily factors, including an excess of phlegm on the chest, vapors in the brain, lying on the back, too much food and drink, and sleeping during the day.12 Improper sleep cycles were, in fact, associated with a range of bodily and mental ailments, including forgetfulness, sluggishness, improper digestion, and an imbalance of the bodily humors.13 It should be noted that early modern physicians were specifically referring to the incubus hallucination when describing the phenomenon as a bodily disease. The other two types of hallucination were relatively ignored. Despite the medical community’s attempts to rationally explain the experience, folklore has persisted, attributing the phenomena to witches, devils, demons, ghosts, vampires, and, in the modern world, alien abductions. It is important to remember that the hallucinations that occur during sleep paralysis feel as real to the experient as the physical world. The realistic qualities of

8 Cheyne, “Sleep Paralysis and the Structure of Waking-Nightmare,” 164; O’Hanlon, Murphy, and Di Blasi, “Experiences of Sleep Paralysis,” 917; Cheyne, “Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis,” 145. 9 Cheyne, “Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis,” 145. 10 O’Hanlon, Murphy, and Di Blasi, “Experiences of Sleep Paralysis,” 917. 11 O’Hanlon, Murphy, and Di Blasi, “Experiences of Sleep Paralysis,” 917. 12 See the pamphlets cited in note 6. 13 Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama, 33–34; Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, 2; Dannenfeldt, “Sleep: Theory and Practice,” 418–20.

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hypnic hallucinations mean that they have been interpreted as supernatural events for centuries. In a more superstitious community such as early modern England and Scotland, it is likely that individuals will turn to this folklore as an explanation for their hypnic hallucinations. Not only were these occurrences more likely to be interpreted as supernatural in early modern Britain, but it is also thought that they were more likely to occur in the first place. Sleep paralysis is more common in people who are anxious and/or have been doing hard physical work. For this reason, Davies suggests that it was more likely to occur during the early modern era when most work was manual labor and there were anxieties about witches: he “suggest[s] that fear of witchcraft and associated anxiety created a vicious circle of attacks.”14 Furthermore, the early modern sleeping pattern itself may give rise to more episodes of sleep paralysis. It is common to see references to the “first” and “second sleep” in early modern texts. As A. Roger Ekirch writes, people before the Industrial Revolution often woke in the night for an hour or so of quiet reflection.15 The nature of the interrupted sleep cycle meant that individuals were far more likely to experience hallucinations in the night, and to remember them. Ekirch goes on to note that, “so influential were these visions, so vast was the ‘prerogative of Sleep,’ that frontiers sometimes grew blurred between waking and invisible worlds. Such confusion, naturally, was a common reaction among those just waking.”16 This blurred distinction between “waking and invisible worlds” suggests the experience of hypnic hallucinations, which involve dream-like encounters within the waking world. As well as hypnic hallucinations, sleep paralysis was also more common. This occurs when a person is between REM sleep (the stage in which we dream) and waking. During REM sleep, the skeletal muscles are paralyzed to prevent the individual from acting out their dreams and potentially harming themselves. Under normal circumstances, the body and mind come out of the REM state simultaneously. However, during sleep paralysis, the brain wakes up while the body remains paralyzed in the REM state. When people wake in the middle of the night, they are more likely to wake during REM sleep, thus bringing on sleep paralysis. The increased frequency of sleep paralysis in the early modern period meant that it was more frequently discussed in society, therefore giving rise to more folktales. It is easy for us to lose touch with the supernatural’s basis in sleep paralysis as it is so

14 Davies, “The Nightmare Experience,” 189. 15 Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost,” 344. For more information on early modern sleeping patterns, see: Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England. 16 Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost,” 379–81.

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infrequently discussed in the modern West. This chapter aims to reconsider supernatural characters in early modern drama in the light of their sleep paralysis origins. The incubus hallucination is the one that is most often explored in early modern medical pamphlets under the name of the incubus, the nightmare, or Ephialtes.17 It was the only form of sleep paralysis that seems to have been recognized as a condition as physicians frequently make statements such as, “It [the nightmare] is a disease, where as one thinketh himself in the night to be oppressed with a great weight, and believeth that something commeth upon him, and the patient thinketh himself strangled in this disease.”18 David J. Hufford suggests that sleep paralysis hallucinations are likely to have caused beliefs in the paranormal,19 and is supported by Conesa, who writes of the intruder and incubus hallucinations: “At times this presence may seem threatening and evil giving rise to the folklore belief of the ‘night-mare,’ the ‘old hag,’ and the ‘incubi.’”20 As James Allan Cheyne, Steve D. Rueffer, and Ian R. Newby-Clark note, “traditional narratives of demons, shades, spirits, and lost souls offer labels, narrative coherence, and explanations” to hypnic hallucinations.21 Even as medical practitioners were developing biological explanations for what we now know as sleep paralysis, superstition was still inspired by this phenomenon. In Antonio’s Revenge and Bussy D’Ambois, Marston and Chapman connect their supernatural scenes to the intruder and vestibular-motor hallucinations. As these hallucinations are not recognized and discussed in early modern medicine, the plays’ ghosts appear, on the surface, to be nothing more than creatures from superstition. Marston and Chapman are placed on the edge of medical debates as they at once dismiss the medical explanation of the nightmare, and allude to the psychological and physiological phenomenon of sleep paralysis.

The Intruder in Antonio’s Revenge It is common to find supernatural entities in early modern pamphlets that resemble the intruder hallucination. For example, James Carmichael describes

17 See the pamphlets cited in note 6. 18 Barrough, The Methode of Phisicke, 34. I have modernized the spelling in my quotes from the early modern pamphlets. 19 Hufford and Hinton, “Sleep Paralysis as Spiritual Experience.” 20 Conesa, “Relationship between Isolated Sleep Paralysis and Geomagnetic Influences,” 1264. 21 Cheyne, Rueffer, and Newby-Clark, “Hypnogogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations,” 333.

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the famous trial of a group of witches who were reported to have sent a tempest in an attempt to kill James VI of Scotland while he was at sea. He writes of a Doctor Fian: The morrow after upon the conference had with him, he granted that the Devil had appeared unto him in the night before, apparelled all in black, with a white wand in his hand, and that the devil demanded of him if he would continue his faithful service, according to his first oath and promise made to that effect.22

In this case, Fian’s description of Satan appearing by his bed in the night gives the impression of an intruder hallucination, interpreted as the supernatural. The dark figure is often seen during sleep paralysis and is described as “a form, which may be shadow-like or indistinct, [that] move[s] towards him or her [experiencing sleep paralysis],”23 or “a shadowy humanoid figure.”24 It can be heard talking to the experient, much like the devil is in this account. Fian’s shadowy and threatening devil, that appears to a man just on the edge of waking, is therefore consistent with accounts of the intruder hallucination. Similar statements are used to accuse women of witchcraft, but instead of the devil, the accused is said to appear to the sleeper in the night. John Darrel, describing a case in which seven people of one family were said to be possessed, and defending himself against accusations of fraud, states, “She [Mary Cooper of Nottingham] constantly affirmed that usually in the nights she was troubled with strange sights and visions, and namely of Alice Freeman [the woman accused of witchcraft]: some thing also now and then speaking to her, and by some circumstances this might be made probable.”25 Similarly, George Gifford recounts another case of a woman accused of witchcraft in which one witness “in her grievous torment saw the woman stand by her all the night, whom she suspected to bewitch her.”26 Gifford describes the testimony of another witness: He took his oath directly that she was a witch: I did once anger said he, but I did repent me: for I looked somewhat would follow. And the next night, I saw the ugliest sight that ever I saw: I awaked suddenly out of my sleep, and there was methought a great face, as big as they use to set up in the sign of the Saracens-head, looked full in my face. I was scarce mine own man two days after.27

22 23 24 25 26 27

Carmichael, Newes from Scotland, D1r–D1v. Hinton, “‘The Ghost Pushes You Down,’” 6. Jalal and Ramachandran, “Sleep Paralysis and ‘the Bedroom Intruder,’” 756. Darrel, A Detection of That Sinnful, Shameful, Lying, D3v. Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes, K3v–K4r. Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes, L3r.

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Much like Fian’s account of his visit from the devil, the three witnesses of these trials describe an intruder hallucination. In two of these cases, the witnesses claim to see the woman accused of witchcraft, while Gifford’s pamphlet describes a face sent by the witch. Whichever way the witchcraft was said to manifest, it is evident that experiences that resemble the intruder hallucination were used as evidence of the supernatural. In Antonio’s Revenge, Marston takes a similar approach to representing ghosts. As such stories of diabolical agents like devils and witches were so prevalent in the early modern period, it is likely that the similar appearance of Marston’s ghosts would cast doubt in the audience’s minds as to the nature of the spirits and would suggest that they are malevolent forces. This play is the sequel to Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, at the end of which the title characters are engaged, despite the objections throughout the play of Piero, Mellida’s father. While Antonio and Mellida seemingly ends on a happy note, Piero’s final acceptance of the marriage and friendship with Antonio’s father, Andrugio, is not based on genuine goodwill, but a fear of ill-luck falling on his house should he continue his feud. In his sequel, Marston shows his audience that this comic ending may not be the happily-ever-after we are often led to believe. Antonio’s Revenge immediately plunges its audience into the world of tragedy as it begins in the moments after Piero has murdered Andrugio and Feliche. When Antonio enters with a group of gentlemen to wake Mellida, he states that he is troubled: Last night my sense was steep’d in horrid dreams: Three parts of night were swallow’d in the gulf Of ravenous time when to my slumb’ring powers Two meagre ghosts made apparition. The one’s breast seem’d fresh paunch’d with bleeding wounds Whose bubbling gore assum’d my father’s shape; Both cried, “Revenge!” At which my trembling joints (Iced over with a froz’d cold sweat) Leap’d forth the sheets. Three times I grasp’d at shades, And thrice, deluded by erroneous sense, I forc’d my thoughts make stand; when, lo, I op’d A large bay window, through which the night Struck terror to my soul. The verge of heaven Was ring’d with flames and all the upper vault Thick lac’d with flakes of fire; in midst whereof A blazing comet shot his threat’ning train Just on my face. Viewing these prodigies, I bow’d my naked knee and pierc’d the star With an outfacing eye, pronouncing thus:

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Deus imperat astris.28 At which my nose straight bled; Then doubl’d I my word, so slunk to bed.29

Antonio’s initial claim that “my sense was steep’d in horrid dreams” implies that the effect of the ghosts is all-encompassing. This may recall Clarence’s dream of Hell in Richard III, in which Shakespeare writes, “O I have passed a miserable night, / So full of fearful dreams, of ugly sights.”30 Just as Clarence’s night is “full of fearful dreams,” Antonio’s sense is “steep’d in horrid dreams.” Both playwrights give the impression that the dreams are not only vivid, but also inescapable as they surround the sleeper. However, while Clarence is taken on a dream journey that seems to spill over into his waking life but from which he ultimately awakes (“I trembling waked, and for a season after / Could not believe but that I was in hell”),31 Antonio never seems to awaken from his dream, and therefore exists on the edges of the corporeal world. Antonio at first insists that the ghosts appeared to him in a dream, but he goes on to state that “my trembling joints / (Iced over with a froz’d cold sweat) / Leap’d forth the sheets.” It seems, then, that he is awake as he reacts to the apparitions, but his mind and body are in separate states. He specifically claims that his “trembling joints” leapt from out of the sheets, implying that his conscious mind was not in control of the action. This distinction between body and mind is reminiscent of the state of sleep paralysis as the mind is awake while the body is asleep. Similarly, in hypnic hallucinations, there is a distinction between the sleeping and waking worlds, even as both occur simultaneously: the experient can see the real world, which stands in contrast to the imagined hallucination. In this episode, Antonio’s mind belongs to the invisible world of spirits, while his body reacts to the physical world around him. The disjointed nature of the real and imagined worlds is further cemented when he states, “Three times I grasp’d at shades, / And thrice, deluded by erroneous sense, / I forc’d my thoughts to make stand.” As Antonio reaches out towards the figures, he signifies his belief that these apparitions are real. When the figures elude Antonio’s grasp, however, Marston suggests that they do not belong to the waking world; Antonio and the figures do not physically inhabit the same space. A similar idea is seen in Hamlet (1600–1601) when Marcellus

28 Hunter’s translation: “God rules the stars.” 29 Marston, Antonio’s Revenge, 1.2.103–24. 30 Shakespeare, Richard the Third, 1.4.2–3. 31 Shakespeare, Richard the Third, 1.4.61–62.

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“strike[s] it [the ghost] with [his] partisan”32 and concludes, “We do it wrong, being so majestical, / To offer it the show of violence, / For it is as the air invulnerable, / And our vain blows malicious mockery.”33 Like the characters in Hamlet, Antonio is unable to touch the spirits that appear to him in the night. However, Old Hamlet’s ghost visits waking characters, while Andrugio and Feliche’s ghosts appear during sleep. The entities that visit Antonio are not only more strongly connected to the intruder hallucination of sleep paralysis, but they are products of Antonio’s sleeping mind, placing them on the edge of Antonio’s psyche. This episode at first appears to be unrelated to sleep paralysis, as Antonio is able to get up, attempt to touch the ghosts, and walk to the window. However, even this is consistent with some sleep paralysis hallucinations. As Cheyne writes, the vestibular-motor hallucination may include “motor movements (getting up, walking around, flipping light switches, etc.).”34 Antonio’s perceived ability to walk around the room, then, does not necessarily mean that he cannot be experiencing sleep paralysis. Although most studies on the vestibular-motor hallucination focus on the out-of-body experience with sensations of flying and autoscopy, it is important to remember that these are not universal experiences for people with vestibular-motor hallucinations. Even mundane sensations such as ordinary bodily movements should be studied in connection to the vestibularmotor hallucination if we are to understand the breadth of people’s experiences. When Marston writes, “The verge of heaven / Was ring’d with flames and all the upper vault / Thick lac’d with flakes of fire; in midst whereof / A blazing comet shot his threat’ning train / Just on my face,” he further cements the episode’s status as a hallucinatory experience. The apocalyptic scene is foreshadowing the tragedy that is to come, but it also seems like a dream. Thus, Marston places the supernatural on the edges between sleeping and waking, dream and reality. When his friends try to comfort him, Antonio’s response is: The frightful shades of night yet shake my brain; My gellied blood’s not thaw’d; the sulphur damps That flow in winged lightning ’bout my couch Yet stick within my sense, my soul is great In expectation of dire prodigies.35

32 33 34 35

Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.1.121. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.1.124–27. Cheyne, “Waterloo Unusual Sleep Experiences Questionnaire,” 3. Marston, Antonio’s Revenge, 1.2.136–40.

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This intense response to the visions relates to accounts of hypnic hallucinations, particularly those that occur with sleep paralysis. As Wallace B. Mendleson, J. Christian Gillin, and Richard Jedd Wyatt write, “The general clinical impression is that hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations carry more emotional impact, and have more of a storylike quality than the relatively bland images that often occur in normal persons.”36 As Antonio’s experience is carried with him into the waking world, Marston attributes it with this “emotional impact” that is so often associated with hypnic hallucinations.

The Vestibular-Motor Hallucination in Bussy D’Ambois Although they are not as easily recognizable as the incubus and intruder hallucinations, vestibular-motor hallucinations can also be found in supernatural pamphlets. There are two ways in which the vestibular-motor hallucination appears. In cases of possession, such as those cited above, it was common for victims to claim that they had been taken from their beds by the entity. For example, in the case of a yeoman’s wife said to be possessed by the Devil, a headless bear was reported to come to her “and took her out of the bed, and so rolled her to & fro in the Chamber, and under the bed.”37 The fact that other people see her being rolled about the room is intended to verify her claims of possession. However, this feeling of being rolled is one of the ways in which people experience the vestibular-motor hallucination. This case, then, seems to be of a sleep paralysis experience that has been interpreted as a supernatural encounter and has been exaggerated in order to sell as many copies of the pamphlet as possible. The second way in which vestibular-motor hallucinations manifest in early modern pamphlets is in witchcraft cases when the author describes either the witches’ flight or their transportation to the realm of the fairies. In his tract, Demonology, James VI of Scotland gives an account of witches’ flight: And some sayeth that their bodies lying still as in an ecstasy, their spirits will be ravished out of their bodies, & carried to several places. And for verifying thereof will give evident tokens, answered by witnesses that have seen their body lying senseless in the meantime, as by naming persons, whom with they met, and giving tokens what purpose was

36 Mendleson, Gillin, and Wyatt, Human Sleep and Its Disorders, 98. 37 A True and Most Dreadfull Discourse, A6r–A6v.

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amongst them, whom otherwise they could not have known, for this form of journeying, they affirm to use most, when they are transported from one Country to another.38

While James goes on to state that the Devil merely makes these women think that they fly,39 Julian Goodare suggests that witches’ flight stories may be connected to the vestibular-motor hallucination of sleep paralysis. He argues that “Overall, it seems likely that OBEs [out-of-body experiences], as they are currently (but imperfectly) understood by psychologists, lie behind at least a few of the reports by Scottish witches that they themselves flew.”40 While it is possible that these witchcraft accounts are purely fictional, I concur with Goodare’s conclusion that several aspects of their flight seem to stem from vestibular-motor hallucinations.41 As their bodies are said to remain in bed “lying still as in an ecstasy” and “lying senseless” while they feel themselves to be flying, it seems that stories of witches’ flight stem from sleep paralysis’s vestibular-motor hallucination. While critics such as Goodare and Davies have explored the connection between sleep paralysis and accounts of witchcraft, there has not yet been a study that considers how this may apply to early modern drama. In Bussy D’Ambois, the ghostly visitation is similarly related to sleep paralysis. As the ghost of the Friar causes Bussy to experience similar bodily sensations as these witchcraft accounts, the audience is left in doubt as to whether the ghost is benevolent or malignant. Chapman engages with the vestibular-motor hallucination in a similar way to Marston’s engagement with the intruder hallucination. He also seems to bring in elements of exploding head syndrome, which I explain below. Bussy is based on the real historical figure of the French court, Louis de Clermont, Seigneur de Bussy (1549–1579), who played a prominent role in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (depicted by Marlowe in The Massacre at Paris), in which Catholics infamously murdered Protestants. With this contemporary knowledge, the audience may not be so sympathetic towards Bussy and may be more interested in the sensational details of his life rather than true emotional engagement. By the point in the play at which we reach the ghostly visitation, Bussy has started an affair with Montsurry’s wife, Tamyra, and the Friar has helped them. Montsurry discovers this after the Friar commits suicide, and plans to murder Bussy. In the following scene, the Friar’s ghost appears to Bussy to warn him of the danger. 38 James I, Daemonologie, F4r–F4v. 39 James I, Daemonologie, G1r. 40 Goodare, “Flying Witches in Scotland,” 170–71. For more on witchcraft and folk beliefs, see: Wilby, “The Witch’s Familiar”; Wilby, Cunning-Folk and Familiar Spirits; and Wilby, “‘We Mey Shoot Them Dead.’” 41 See also: Davies, “The Nightmare Experience.” Davies looks specifically at the relationship between sleep paralysis, the incubus, and early modern witchcraft beliefs.

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Chapman first sets the scene when he includes the stage direction, “[Enter] D’Ambois with two Pages with tapers.”42 The inclusion of tapers gives a visual clue to the audience that it is set at night. This is further emphasized when Bussy tells the servants, “Sit up tonight, and watch.”43 We know then that, regardless of the physical conditions of the stage, the scene in the world of the play is dark. As it was performed in the indoor theater, the Blackfriars, it is possible that the space was darkened for effect, but this is not necessarily certain. The fact that the servants are also being told to “sit up” and “watch” suggests that it is close to the time when they should be going to bed. The idea of “watching” gives the impression of tiredness and adds a sleepy quality to the ghostly encounter. As Frances Klemperer states, “Prolonged vigils may cause the illusions and hypnagogic hallucinations of profound sleep deprivation.”44 By having Bussy sit up in the night, then, Chapman creates the conditions that make hypnic hallucinations more likely. When Bussy is left alone, he asks: What violent heat is this? Methinks the fire Of twenty lives doth on a sudden flash Through all my faculties; the air goes high In this close chamber, and the frighted earth Thunder. Trembles and shrinks beneath me; the whole house Nods with his shaken burden. Enter Umbra Friar.45

The tiredness that has just been suggested by the mention of “watching” implies the possibility of Bussy entering a micro-sleep – a sleep that lasts for a fraction of a second and is often unperceived by the individual – thereby resulting in this encounter. The entire scene, therefore, may take place on the edge of consciousness. Chapman’s description of fire recalls a specific type of hypnic hallucination. As Ian Oswald states: Hypnagogic visions sometimes are of geometric designs – various brilliant and coloured lines and bright points. As Leroy remarked, these are not like the eigenlight or “entoptic light” (the amorphous and coloured visual sensations present to the dark-adapted eye), but resemble the “phosphenes” which one may observe if, for instance, one exerts steady, firm pressure on the eyeball for half a minute or so.46

42 43 44 45 46

Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois, 5.3.1. Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois, 5.3.1. Klemperer, “Ghosts, Visions, and Voices,” 1518. Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois, 5.3.3–7. Oswald, Sleeping and Waking, 101.

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As Chapman writes that “fire” flashes through Bussy’s faculties, the audience are encouraged to conjure the visual image of fire, as well as to imagine its heat. This flash therefore becomes related to the hypnic hallucinations described by Oswald. These images are like streaks of lightning and the sparks that come off a fire. The “fire” that flashes through Bussy, then, not only describes the heat that he feels, but also conjures up an image that suggests he is experiencing a hypnic hallucination. This scene also resembles the experiences of exploding head syndrome. This is a type of auditory hypnic hallucination in which the individual experiences a loud noise in the head between sleep and waking. These hallucinations are described as “an explosive bang, a crack of lightning, or a loud snap” and a “very loud sound or explosion in the head.”47 What Bussy describes in this scene reflects the experiences associated with exploding head syndrome. The idea that “the frighted earth / Trembles and shrinks beneath me; the whole house / Nods with his shaken burden” suggests a loud noise, which is backed up by the stage direction that calls for “Thunder.” By combining this with the description of a “sudden flash” that courses through Bussy, Chapman suggests that this sound of thunder and shaking is sudden, unexpected, and brief, much like the experiences of exploding head syndrome. Similar effects are used in Macbeth (1606) and Julius Caesar (1598–1599), both of which call for “Thunder and lightning”48 to announce the entrance of the witches and to predict Caesar’s death. However, Shakespeare’s uses of thunder and lightning are experienced by characters who are definitely awake and who have no immediate chance of sleeping. Bussy, on the other hand, is placed in a position that puts him on the edge of a sleeping state. Whereas Shakespeare uses his stage effects purely as omens connected to the supernatural and to murder, Chapman’s use of thunder is reminiscent of exploding head syndrome. The appearance of the Friar’s ghost is therefore introduced by an experience that resembles a hypnic hallucination and places Bussy on the edge of consciousness. Bussy describes an experience that is rooted in the body in this scene. As well as sight and sound, Chapman adds a tactile dimension to this encounter that resembles the vestibular-motor hallucination. While the fire certainly encourages the audience to imagine the visual attributes of flames that relate to hypnic hallucinations, Bussy begins the speech with, “What violent heat is

47 Ashworth, “Intracranial Bumps in the Night,” 1117; Rao and Silber, “Sleep-Related Hallucinations and Exploding Head Syndrome,” 194. 48 Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.1.1; Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 2.2.1.

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this?”49 This is, therefore, a physical experience in which the character feels heat coursing through his veins. The vestibular-motor hallucination involves unexpected bodily sensations that cannot be otherwise explained. Immediately after introducing the idea of wakefulness and “watching,” which, as Klemperer states, creates the ideal conditions for sleep paralysis and hypnic hallucinations in a micro-sleep, Bussy has this unusual bodily experience. The fiery heat that the character feels does more than conjure the idea of a visual hypnic hallucination: it also suggests that he is sliding into a vestibular-motor hallucination associated with sleep paralysis. The idea of a vestibular-motor hallucination is further cemented by Bussy’s description of the thunder. Much like with the fire, this is not only an auditory experience, but a tactile one too. Chapman writes, “the frighted earth / Trembles and shrinks beneath me; the whole house / Nods with his shaken burden.” The verbs – “Trembles” and “Nods” – as well as the adjective “shaken” all suggest a sensation similar to an earthquake. As stated above, the vestibular-motor hallucination is commonly associated with feelings of flying, floating, spinning, and falling. It is particularly evoked in the statement that the earth “shrinks beneath” him. Chapman creates the image of the ground falling away from Bussy, thereby giving the impression that Bussy feels himself, in turn, to be falling towards the retreating ground. This idea is repeated again when he states that the house “Nods,” which gives the impression that it falls downwards. Of course, Bussy is speaking to either the audience or himself in this passage, so he is not depicted as being paralyzed. His speech, though, retains elements of visual hypnic hallucinations, exploding head syndrome, and the vestibular-motor hallucination of sleep paralysis. Although these experiences are not adapted for the stage pointby-point, Chapman translates the phenomena in a way that fits with this theatrical setting.

Ghosts and Sleep on the Early Modern Stage While these playwrights may not be consciously modeling their supernatural scenes on sleep paralysis and hypnic hallucinations, they nevertheless share many of the traits of these phenomena. As is illustrated by the wealth of supernatural pamphlets that circulated in the early modern period, there were stories within the culture that stemmed from the real experiences of sleep paralysis and hypnic hallucinations. Marston, Chapman, and many other playwrights of 49 Emphasis mine.

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the period seem to have been influenced by these tales as their supernatural entities mirror these night-time experiences. In Antonio’s Revenge, Marston writes a ghostly encounter that reflects the intruder hallucination as the presence of the ghosts draws on the shadowy figures that are commonly seen in sleep paralysis. Chapman, on the other hand, introduces his supernatural entities with experiences that relate to visual hypnic hallucinations of vague geometric patterns and a crack of thunder that recalls exploding head syndrome. Both experiences further relate to the vestibular-motor hallucination as the heat that courses through Bussy’s veins and the shaking of the ground create the impression of unusual bodily sensations. In Antonio’s Revenge and Bussy D’Ambois, Marston and Chapman engage with folktales of nocturnal supernatural encounters that circulated in early modern society and adapt these stories for the stage. Although sleep paralysis is seldom discussed in modern society, it is evident that, for centuries, it has influenced cultural attitudes towards the supernatural. These plays are just two examples in which people’s lived experiences are reflected in popular entertainment, bringing us to the edges of consciousness and sleep, fiction and reality.

Works Cited Primary Sources Barrough, Philip. The Methode of Phisicke, Conteyning the Causes, Signes, and Cures of Inward Diseases in Mans Body from the Head to the Foote. London, 1583. STC 1508. Bartholomaeus, Anglicus. Batman Uppon Bartholome. London, 1582. STC 1538. Boorde, Andrew. The Breviarie of Health Wherein Doth Folow, Remedies, for All Maner of Sicknesses & Diseases, the Which May Be in Man or Woman. London, 1587. STC 3377. Bruel, Gualtherus. Praxis Medicinae, or, The Physicians Practice Wherein Are Contained Inward Diseases from the Head to the Foote. London, 1632. STC 3929. Carmichael, James. Newes from Scotland, Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of Doctor Fian. London, 1592. STC 10841a. Chapman, George. Bussy D’Ambois. Edited by Robert J. Lordi. London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1964. Crooke, Helkiah. Mikrokosmographia. London, 1615. STC 6062. Culpeper, Nicholas. The English Physitian. London, 1600. Wing C7500. Darrel, John. A Detection of That Sinnful, Shameful, Lying, and Ridicuous Discours of Samuel Harsnet. London, 1600. STC 6062. Diemerbroeck, Ysbrand van. The Anatomy of Human Bodies Comprehending the Most Modern Discoveries and Curiosities in That Art. Translated by William Salmon. London, 1689. Wing D1415. Gifford, George. A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes. London, 1593. STC 11850.

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Hart, James. Klinike, or The Diet of the Diseased. London, 1633. STC 12888. James I. Daemonologie, in Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into Three Bookes. Edinburgh, 1597. STC 14364. Marston, John. Antonio’s Revenge. Edited by G.K. Hunter. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Pomarius, Petrus. Enchiridion Medicum: Containing an Epitome of the Whole Course of Physicke. London, 1609. STC 24577. Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. London, 1584. STC 21864. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 681–718. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 627–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 183–222. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 969–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. A True and Most Dreadfull Discourse of a Woman Possessed with the Devill. London, 1584. STC 5681. Wirtzung, Christopher. The General Practise of Physicke. Translated by Jacob Mosan. London, 1605. STC 25864.

Secondary Sources Adler, Shelley R. Sleep Paralysis: Night-Mares, Nocebos, and the Mind–Body Connection. Piscatawny, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Ashworth, Bryan. “Intracranial Bumps in the Night: ‘Exploding Head’ Syndrome Is Usually Benign.” BMJ: British Medical Journal 299, no. 6708 (1989): 1117. Bevington, David. “Asleep Onstage.” In From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama, edited by John A. Alford, 51–84. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995. Cassaniti, Julia L., and Tanya Marie Luhrmann. “The Cultural Kindling of Spiritual Experiences.” Current Anthropology 55, no. S10 (2014): S333–S343. Cheyne, James Allan. “Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis.” In The Parasomnias and Other Sleep-Related Movement Disorders, edited by Michael J. Thorpy and Giuseppe Plazzi, 142–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Cheyne, James Allan. “Sleep Paralysis and the Structure of Waking-Nightmare Hallucinations.” Dreaming 13, no. 3 (2003): 163–79. Cheyne, James Allan. “Sleep Paralysis Episode Frequency and Number, Types, and Structure of Associated Hallucinations.” Journal of Sleep Research 14, no. 3 (2005): 319–24.

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Cheyne, James Allan. “Waterloo Unusual Sleep Experiences Questionnaire – VIIIa Technical Report.” Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 2002. https://www.research gate.net/publication/242157738_Waterloo_Unusual_Sleep_Experiences_Questionnaire_VIIIa_Technical_Report. Cheyne, James Allan, Ian R. Newby-Clark, and Steve D. Rueffer. “Relations among Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Experiences Associated with Sleep Paralysis.” Journal of Sleep Research 8, no. 4 (1999): 313–18. Cheyne, James Allan, Steve D. Rueffer, and Ian R. Newby-Clark. “Hypnogogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations during Sleep Paralysis: Neurological and Cultural Construction of the Night-Mare.” Consciousness and Cognition 8, no. 3 (1999): 319–37. Conesa, J. “Relationship between Isolated Sleep Paralysis and Geomagnetic Influences.” Perceptual Motor Skills 80, no. 3 (1995): 1263–73. Dannenfeldt, Karl H. “Sleep: Theory and Practice in the Late Renaissance.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 41, no. 4 (1986): 415–41. Davies, Owen. “The Nightmare Experience: Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations.” Folk-Lore 114, no. 2 (2003): 181–204. Ekirch, A. Roger. “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles.” The American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (2001): 343–86. Fukuda, K. “One Explanatory Basis for the Discrepancy of Reported Prevalences of Sleep Paralysis among Healthy Respondents.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 77, no. 3 (1993): 803–7. Gangdev, Prakash. “Relevance of Sleep Paralysis and Hypnic Hallucinations to Psychiatry.” Australasian Psychiatry: Bulletin of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists 12, no. 1 (1994): 77–80. Goodare, Julian. “Flying Witches in Scotland.” In Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters, edited by Julian Goodare, 159–76. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Handley, Sasha. Sleep in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Hinton, Devon E. “‘The Ghost Pushes You Down’: Sleep Paralysis-Type Panic Attacks in a Khmer Refugee Population.” Transcultural Psychiatry 42, no. 1 (2005): 46–77. Hufford, D.J., and D.E. Hinton. “Sleep Paralysis as Spiritual Experience.” Transcultural Psychiatry 42, no. 1 (2005): 11–45. Jalal, B., and V.S. Ramachandran. “Sleep Paralysis and ‘the Bedroom Intruder’?: The Role of the Right Superior Parietal, Phantom Pain and Body Image Projection.” Medical Hypotheses 83, no. 6 (2014): 755–57. Klemperer, Frances. “Ghosts, Visions, and Voices: Sometimes Simply Perceptual Mistakes.” BMJ: British Medical Journal 305, no. 6868 (1992): 1518–19. Mendleson, Wallace B., J. Christian Gillin, and Richard Jed Wyatt. Human Sleep and Its Disorders. New York: Plenum Press, 1977. O’Hanlon, J., M. Murphy, and Z. Di Blasi. “Experiences of Sleep Paralysis in a Sample of Irish University Students.” Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland 180, no. 4 (2011): 917–19. Oswald, Ian. Sleeping and Waking: Physiology and Psychology. New York: Elsevier, 1962. Rao, Satish C., and Michael H. Silber. “Sleep-Related Hallucinations and Exploding Head Syndrome.” In The Parasomnias and Other Sleep-Related Movement Disorders, edited by Michael J. Thorpy and Giuseppe Plazzi, 194–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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Roberts, David. “Sleeping Beauties: Shakespeare, Sleep and the Stage.” Cambridge Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2006): 231–54. Sullivan, Garrett A., Jr. Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Wilby, Emma. Cunning-Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. Wilby, Emma. “‘We Mey Shoot Them Dead at Our Pleasur’: Isobel Gowdie, Elf Arrows and Dark Shamanism.” In Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters, edited by Julian Goodare, 140–58. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Wilby, Emma. “The Witch’s Familiar and the Fairy in Early-Modern England and Scotland.” Folk-Lore 111, no. 2 (2000): 283–306.

Adam Hembree

Chapter 4 Canting Queer Ken: Stage Magic and the Edge of Knowledge How am I glutted with conceit of this! Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please . . . I’ll have them read me strange philosophy And tell the secrets of all foreign kings —Marlowe, Doctor Faustus1

Like witches and mages, players are conduits of power, specifically power over human passions. Like mages, players invoke spirits (such as the Muses) to perform their rites. Like witches, they are said to “charm,” “enchant,” “fascinate,” and “bewitch” their targets, to hold them “rapt” with wonder. Like all magic workers, players risk legal and moral sanction for practicing their craft. The lightest form of such censure compares players to street “jugglers” and “charlatans”2 (also known as “empirics” and “quacksalvers”), whose work should be ignored as trivial toys. At worst, players are thought seditious, blasphemous, and dangerously unnatural, worthy of censorship, imprisonment, and even damnation. Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor dramatizes this anxiety in the actor Paris’s trial, a trial of all stage action. According to Aretinus: You are they That search into the secrets of time, And under feign’d names on the stage present Actions not to be touch’d at; and traduce Persons of rank, and quality, of both sexes, And with satirical, and bitter jests, Make even the senators ridiculous To the plebeians.3

The actors’ crimes are thus crimes of knowledge. They search into the past for secrets better obscured by time’s softening folds. They operate under counterfeit names (and what do they hide beneath them?). They “touch” what they 1 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus A-Text, 1.1.79–80, 87–88. 2 “A Mountebank, a cousening drug-seller, a prattling quack-salver, a tattler, babbler, foolish prater, or commender of trifles.” L[exicons of] E[arly] M[odern] E[nglish], s.v. “Charlatan,” https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/298/8425. 3 Massinger, The Roman Actor, 1.3.36–43. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-004

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should not, even as witches are said to “touch” their victims to bring calamity.4 They “traduce persons of rank,” parading them before us to their infamy (trans + ducere: to lead across). Early modern English natural philosophy and magic thrive on this same promise of hidden knowledge. Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft allies the verb “to discover” with “decipher” and “detect.”5 Players invite audiences to follow clues, interpret signs, and make sense. Players trade on the same promise of strange discoveries, but they must also perform the role of quarry to lure and ensnare those who wish to hunt. While early modern English natural philosophers, theologians, and magicians fetishize knowledge, luring it from secret enclosures, they also criminalize it, capturing it for mastery and power. They render natural bodies as knowledge enclosures, a kind of “queer ken,” or prison house.6 In plays that feature magic, players perform the moments when secret powers thwart the over-reaching subject who would wield them. This offers players a chance to enact the form of their own practice, which also presents human bodies as enclosures for knowledge. “The quintessential characteristic of English Renaissance theater,” Lisa Hopkins notes, “is a metatheatricality . . . The simultaneous invocation and problematization of the distinction between the intra- and the extra-diegetic is the end in itself.”7 In demarcating these intra- and extra-diegetic spaces, playmakers conjure their own queer kens, capturing narrative in action, but also binding audience attention. Stage action relies on an audience’s eagerness to capture the play’s conceit, and to repeat the magic worker’s overreach.

Evil Language This chapter does not posit a “queer epistemology” to be uncovered by historical research or even by a proper hermeneutic. Eve Sedgwick’s “reparative reading,”8 for example, would better suit that need precisely because of its improprieties,

4 Witches were said to bring diabolical action by literal touch of the hand, by subtler use of sympathetic magic, or, as Elizabeth Sawyer does by inviting their familiar spirits to do the touching: “Go, touch his life” (Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, The Witch of Edmonton, 2.1.171). See: Levack, The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft. See also: Hopkins and Ostovich, Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage, 63, for a discussion of the king’s touch as a magical cure for the King’s Evil. 5 Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1. 6 LEME, s.v. “Quire ken,” https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/296/99. 7 Hopkins, Shakespeare on the Edge, 1. 8 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 150.

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and its re-orientation of the “selfish” pleasures of reading.9 Instead, this essay indulges in what Jeffrey Masten calls “queer philology” insofar as it reads obliquely, “through and against the discipline of traditional philology.”10 I will treat words as precisely the sort of dangerous technologies that magicians and witches always discover them to be. If I conjure the spirit of an etymon, it is to recognize recorded patterns between concepts and between domains of concepts, not to determine a hidden, more authorized, sense. I understand queer philology as a rhetorical ground for permissive etymology, where false friends, like the devil, can speak true. The historical usages of “queer,” “ken,” “cant,” and their known associates support an ongoing tendency to conceive of knowledge as prisoner and prey. This tendency haunts early modern English epistemology and continues in current English usage. The term “queer ken” operates on multiple registers. Looking forward to the performative possibilities of the word “queer” and its successors, Judith Butler observes that “it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage.”11 “Queer,” in fact, derives from German quer, “athwart,” from Old High German twer, “oblique,” the same etymons as modern English “thwart” and linked to the Latin torquere, “to twist.”12 Partridge suggests two possibly independent uses of “quere”13 in sixteenth-century Scots, one related to “query” or “questionable,” and a cant or slang usage as “worthless, bad, base, rascally,”14 which was also evident in early modern English cant terms quer(e), queer(e) and quire. To “cut quire whids,” for example, meant “to lie”15 or “to give evil language.”16 “Queer” is thus a term readily available for rascally epistemological questions and cross-purposes during the early modern period. It also suits early modern drama’s metatheatrical tendencies: that is, a theater that bends back upon itself. “Ken” has two apparently separate uses that are both relevant to this enquiry. A “ken” is a house, for which the OED provides the delightful etymology, “Vagabonds’ slang.”17 The term is used to describe a multitude of establishments,

9 Latin, proprius, “self.” 10 Masten, Queer Philologies, 22. 11 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 173. 12 Partridge, Origins, 2646. 13 Partridge, Origins, 2646. 14 Dictionary of the Scots Language, s.v. “Quere, Queir, adj.” 15 LEME, s.v. “To Cut quire whids,” https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/296/25. 16 LEME, s.v. “To cutt quier whiddes,” https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/287/19. 17 O[xford] E[nglish] D[ictionary] Online, s.v. “Ken, n.2.”

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from “bowsing kens” (alehouses) to “stawling kens” (caches for stolen goods). While this cant usage may share a history with modern English “kennel,” the word “ken” also signified perception, especially one’s line of sight, as in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece: “’Tis double death to drown in ken of shore.”18 The related sense of “knowledge”19 was also common, as in Pistol’s usage from Merry Wives of Windsor: “I ken the wight. He is of substance good” (1.3.32). Ken as a kind of knowledge or perception shares the same etymons as modern English “know,” “canny,” “cunning,” and “can” (Latin cognoscere). I employ the several disparate usages of “queer ken” simultaneously. It is strange knowledge (the matter at play), base perspective, and the material vessel of knowledge, corrupted by the knowing. When a magic worker attains dangerous power using strange knowledge, for example, then that queer ken queers the ken. The cant with which one descants can also enchant. “Cant” has come in British English to signify the “singing, whining utterance of certain preachers and, from much earlier, of beggars,”20 as well as the “secret language” thieves exchange with each other to mask their criminal intents. Samuel Johnson noted that definition in 1755 and added that to cant was “To talk in the jargon of particular professions, or in any kind of formal affected language, or with a peculiar and studied tone of voice.”21 In Shakespeare’s time, “to cant” could also simply mean “to speak.”22 The related, but distinct usages are linked to two strands of linguistic history: (1) Latin cantare (to sing), etymon of “enchant,” “incantation,” and “charm”; (2) Gaelic cainnt (speech). Johnson links the two in his definition and hypothesizes a link with “quaint.” This makes etymological sense, given the term links, via Middle English cointe, with Latin cognoscere.23 Sixteenth-century lexicons commonly define “quaint” as both “fine and strange” and, of course, “A woman’s privy member called of Chaucer a quaint.”24 These overlapping lexical strains underwrite the knowledge at the heart of magic, natural philosophy, and stage action (as a species of poetry). If “queer” makes a strange bedfellow with “ken,” then it does so quite literally. Their relationship reflects a technical pattern: a manual for knowing, for questioning the 18 Shakespeare, “The Rape of Lucrece,” line 1114. All references from Shakespeare’s works come from the Norton Shakespeare. Act, scene, and line numbers (where applicable) will henceforth be given parenthetically in text. 19 OED Online, s.v. “Ken, n.1.” See: 4a “Power or exercise of vision; look, gaze,” and 4b. “Mental perception or recognition.” 20 Partridge, Origins, 406. 21 Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, s.v. “cant, v.” 22 LEME, s.v. “To Cant,” https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/287/20. 23 Partridge, Origins, 399. 24 LEME, s.v. “Interfœmineum,” https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/179/18653.

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strange and strangely questioning. Under hegemonic regimes of knowing, though, there is a taint to quaint knowledge. Yet, another usage exists for the term “cant” in English, again delightfully rendered by the OED: “(probably) Edge, border, brink.”25 “The greater cantle of the world is lost / With very ignorance,” Scarus laments after Antony and Cleopatra flee the battle at Actium, “We have kissed away / Kingdoms and provinces” (3.10.6–8). From the Latin cantus (edge) by way of Greek kanthos (corner of the eye),26 this is the eldest English usage of “cant,” from which “canton” also develops. This set of words – “know,” “ken,” “cant,” “cunning,” and “quaint” – are edge-makers, the markers of borders, the feigned names for secrets and the act of enclosure. To “enchant” and “incant,” to render “quaint” and “queer,” however, marks those borders in their transgression. To mark these crossings as “evil” is an ancient enterprise, traced to that word’s Old Germanic etymon, *uƀilo-z: “‘exceeding due measure’ or ‘overstepping proper limits.’”27 Canting queer ken is a player’s practice: enchanting strangers’ perceptions, charming their attentions, and crossing borders of time, place, and person.

Hunting by Hand Harry Levin identifies Doctor Faustus’s effort to “overreach the devil”28 as a recurring character trope in Marlowe’s work and indicative of a broader early modern negotiation with humanism.29 Faustus’s power is a matter of Faustus’s reach – he can insofar as he kens – and his power is coextensive with his grip on secrets. The hand and its uses suffuse English terminology for obtaining knowledge. Whether you “comprehend” or “apprehend” knowledge, you seek to grasp something. Prehendere, Latin for “to seize,” prefigures English “prehensile.” The related noun praeheda (later praeda) is translated “prey.”30 We can hope to “get the point” by taking in whatever information is indicated. “Get” enters Old English via Old Norse geten, meaning “obtain,” “reach,” “beget,” and “learn,” all of which persist in current usages; geten is cognate with Latin praeda.31 You may “intend” to “obtain” and even “retain” knowledge when you “maintain” your “attention” on your target. The Latin antecedents for these words, tenere, “to 25 OED Online, s.v. “Cant, n.1.” 26 Partridge, Origins, 406. Recall also that “ken” could signify a field of vision. 27 OED Online, s.v. “evil, adj. and n.1.” 28 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, B-Text, 5.2.15. 29 Levin, The Overreacher, 112. 30 Partridge, Origins, 2541. 31 Partridge, Origins, 1259.

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hold,” and tendere, “to stretch,” both contain the root ten-, traceable forward to the number of fingers on two typical hands.32 Powers, properties, and mechanisms are deemed “occult” in early modern England based on missing knowledge – the prey that eludes one’s grasp. Missing knowledge presents a mystery, implies a secret, and inspires a hunt. Francis Bacon describes his epistemology as a hunt, what William Eamon calls “one of the oldest epistemologies of them all,” the venatio.33 This is the “hunt” with which Paolo Rossi bound together early modern natural philosophy and magic, the indication of a hidden truth to be captured.34 Bacon observes that science moves either “from experiment to experiment” or “from experiments to axioms; which may again point out new experiments.”35 The former he calls the venatio Panis, after Pan, who stumbled upon Ceres while hunting for food. Bacon dubs this method inferior to his New Organum, which hunts purposefully by the light of well-substantiated axioms.36 The knowledge hierarchy Bacon describes in natural philosophy bears out as well in medical terminology of his time. Robert Cawdrey defines an “emperick” as “He that hath all his skill in physic by practice.”37 Philemon Holland glosses the same word as “those Physicians, who without any regard either of the cause in a disease, or the constitution and nature of the patient, went to worke with those medicines whereof they had experience in others, fall it out as it would.” He also explains that the “Empiricke bookes of Diodorus, contained receits approved and found effectuall by experience.”38 In response to Helen’s offer of such an empiric’s “receipt,” All’s Well that Ends Well’s King of France responds: [We] may not be so credulous of cure, When our most learned doctors leave us and The congregated college have concluded That laboring art can never ransom nature From her inaidible estate. I say we must not So stain our judgment or corrupt our hope To prostitute our past-cure malady To empirics, or to dissever so Our great self and our credit to esteem A senseless help when help past sense we deem. (2.1.113–22)

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Partridge, Origins, 3402–6. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 269. See: Rossi, Francis Bacon. Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficiency of Learning, 226. Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficiency of Learning, 226. LEME, s.v. “emperick,” https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/820/1117. Holland, “A Briefe Catalogue of the Words of Art,” sig. A4r.

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The King’s language distinguishes these two medical options ethically, economically, and academically. Resorting to an empiric’s receipt would “prostitute” his illness, “stain” his judgment, and “corrupt” his hope. His physicians struggle to “ransom” his health from nature, whose valued secrets are his best chance, and their judgment in the matter underwrites the king’s “credit.” His “learned doctors” in the “congregated college” trade in a different knowledge than empirics. Their “laboring art” tilts at nature until nature gives up its secrets or the art can stand the contest no more. The nobility of institutional knowledge outweighs the “senseless help” of those who, as it happens, trust their senses. Natural philosophy’s quest for perfect knowledge of bodies manifests itself in magical discourse as well. The gendered knowledge hierarchy between magic workers reflects perceived differences in knowledge and agency. Those who excoriate witchcraft often align its knowledge with the crude or “natural” empiricisms described above, a move intended to feminize empirics and denigrate knowledge and practice traditionally associated with women outside of academic networks. Cornelius Agrippa’s widely published Three Books of Occult Philosophy demotes such works as follows: Natural Magic therefore is that which contemplates the powers of all natural and celestial things, and searching curiously into their Sympathy, doth produce occult powers in nature into public view, so coupling inferior things as allurements to the gifts of superior things, by their mutual application, that from thence arise wonderful miracles, not so much by art as by nature, to which art becomes an assistant whilst it works these things.39

Agrippa distinguishes art magic and natural magic by agency and fullness of knowledge. Rather than skill, nature produces these “wonderful miracles” in “public view,” a mark of “lower” motives like fame. The natural magician is, at best, a vessel or blind prompter for that power. The domains of magic, Agrippa continues, include: Natural “Wherein are discovered the qualities of things, and in which are found the occult properties of every Being.” Mathematical “The Aspects, and Figures of the Stars, upon which depends the sublime virtue, and property of every thing.” Theological “Wherein are manifest those immaterial substances, which dispense, and minister all things.”40

39 Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 567. 40 Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 5.

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The most elevated magical practices, per Agrippa and self-proclaimed mages like him, require knowledge of this continuum of causes, from physical properties to celestial motions to immaterial substance. Natural magic alone thus does not reach the potential of art magic, because “there is no work that is done by mere Magic, nor any work that is merely Magical, that doth not comprehend these three Faculties.”41 “Mere” in this usage signifies “pure”42 or “unmixed, sole, right . . . plain . . . of it self,” though not, as Cotgrave goes on to define it, “without art.”43 The art in art magic is a comprehension of secret causes. That perfection of knowing permits power in doing. Empirics and witches traffic in the lowest form of knowledge and, thus, the lowest magical practice: idle shows and the blind luck of experience. Doctor Faustus and The Witch of Edmonton present their titular characters in step with these gendered strata of magical practice: Enter Elizabeth Sawyer gathering sticks Elizabeth Sawyer. And why on me? Why should the envious world Throw all their scandalous malice upon me? ’Cause I am poor, deformed and ignorant, And like a bow buckled and bent together By some more strong in mischiefs than myself, Must I for that be made a common sink For all the filth and rubbish of men’s tongues To fall and run into? Some call me witch, And, being ignorant of myself, they go About to teach me how to be one, urging That my bad tongue, by their bad usage made so, Forspeaks their cattle, doth bewitch their corn, Themselves, their servants and their babes at nurse. This they enforce upon me, and in part Make me to credit it.

Faustus. These metaphysics of magicians And necromantic books are heavenly! Lines, circles, seals, letters and characters: Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires. O, what a world of profit and delight, Of power, of honor, of omnipotence, Is promised to the studious artisan! All things that move between the quiet poles Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings Are but obeyed in their several provinces, Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds; But his dominion that exceeds in this Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man! A sound magician is a mighty god: Here tire, my brains, to get a deity!

41 Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 5. 42 LEME, s.v. “Mere,” https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/53/10177. See also https:// leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/75/13862. 43 LEME, s.v. “Mere,” https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/298/29841. 44 Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, The Witch of Edmonton, 2.1.1–15. 45 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 1.1.50–62.

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Sawyer identifies as both the object and product of social oppression. She acknowledges systemic forces and collective causes, since she is the “common sink” of the “envious world” and “men’s tongues,” expressed collectively and ambiguously as “some” and “they.” She abjures any agency beyond what the curses of her community give her, “urging” – both accusing and prompting – her evil inclinations. If she casts herself as the product of “bad usage,” then Faustus takes the contrary line, casting himself as the user. Magic offers him far more individual control than the humanist pursuits listed before this passage. Unlike the harried and abused Sawyer, Faustus luxuriously ponders each of his arts and freely chooses necromancy and art magic. “Lines, circles, seals, letters and characters” are his chosen tools, all devices of enclosure, demarcation, and capture. While Sawyer is “like a bow bent and buckled together,” Faustus expects his dominion to stretch “as far as doth the mind of man.” Sawyer’s lament reflects a disconnection between extreme personal stakes and distant, uncaring social systems. Witches’ social marginalization features prominently in seventeenth-century English witchcraft drama, and that distance is replicated in witch characters’ distance from their dramas’ action. The prologue to Heywood and Brome’s Late Lancashire Witches apologizes to its audience: “An Argument so thin, persons so low / Can neither yield much matter, nor great show.”46 Middleton’s Hecate is powerful in her own right, but as Marion O’Connor points out: “In no plot of The Witch do the activities of the witch and her coven of companions determine the outcome nor even affect the actions of the human figures.”47 Even comedic magical characters like the namesakes of Lyly’s Mother Bombie and Heywood’s Wise Woman of Hogsdon are repeatedly asked if they are witches, forcing them to affirm their more palatable – but still peripheral – status as wise or cunning women. Mary Floyd-Wilson explains that such craft was “constantly subject to a sorting process; it could be classified as illicit witchcraft, specious nonsense, or useful information, ripe for more official appropriation.”48 Elizabeth Sawyer works in illicit witchcraft, while Heywood’s Wise Woman trades more in “specious nonsense.” Mother Bombie, like Macbeth’s witches, effectively – if equivocally – foretells her play’s dramatic argument while prophesying to individual characters, as she does to Dromio and Risio: “You shall all thrive like cozeners, that is, to be cozened by cozeners: all shall end well, and you be found cozeners.”49 As R. Warrick Bond would remark in his 1902 edition of Lyly’s complete works, while Mother Bombie “gives the title to the piece” and 46 47 48 49

Heywood and Brome, The Late Lancashire Witches, Prologue 8–9. O’Connor, “The Witch,” 1126. Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender, 25. Lyly, Mother Bombie, F1v.

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“prophesies in popular doggerel form the actual issue in each case,” she nonetheless “affects the plot only as inducing Vicina’s confession at the close.”50 These witches and wise women are “the show” in terms of their fame and the spectacles they offer, but they stand both socially and dramatically along the edges of the plays that often bear their names.

Foolish Wise Stage mages, wizards, and other high-status magic workers tend to possess the Chorus’s power for conjuring worlds, but they often use the opposite rhetorical strategy. Far from the Chorus’s characteristic humility, the following mages boast quite readily of their power. Take Friar Bacon, for example: Bacon can by books Make storming Boreas thunder from his cave, And dim fair Luna to a dark eclipse. The great arch-ruler, potentate of hell, Trembles when Bacon bids him, or his fiends, Bow to the force of his pentageron. What art can work, the frolic friar knows.51

The Evil Angel encourages Faustus in much the same terms: “Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky, / Lord and commander of these elements!”52 By overcoming the “weak masters” of the island’s natural spirits, Prospero claims similar virtuosity in art: I have bedimmed The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault Set roaring war; to the dread-rattling thunder Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak With his own bolt.53

All three mages are well versed in the powers and promises of their own work, and willing to craft their own encomiums. If Choruses affect humility while conjuring worlds, these characters rather wield their power with bluster, motivated by the

50 Lyly, The Complete Works of John Lyly, 165–66. 51 Greene, The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, B2r. 52 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 1.1.76–79. 53 Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1.41–45.

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desire to possess and control and, contrary to Agrippa’s admonition, the desire to inspire awe. Jonathan Bate contends that Prospero invokes Ovid’s Medea – who describes her art in almost identical terms – not to render Prospero suspect, but to allow him to ultimately reject that dark magic.54 I argue that Prospero, like theater apologists Thomas Lodge and Thomas Heywood, wants to maintain both his art’s strong power and its ethical use. That moral argument – that art’s virtuous uses outweigh the vicious – still cashes in on the spectacle of the vicious, however, just as Prospero does before abjuring magic: “graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let’em forth / By my so potent art.”55 Prospero, Faustus, and Friar Bacon will all ultimately be overwhelmed by the consequences of their own powers. The Chorus, having promised with humility, might well smugly return as the Epilogue when that promise is well delivered. Mages, however, must often survey the unexpected damage that their power has wrought. Prospero, suddenly humbled, delivers his play’s epilogue. Far from the tale of control he told even as he abjured his “rough magic,” the epilogue cedes all power to the audience: Now, ’tis true I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands.56

While the Chorus always credits the audience with the requisite power of imagination, the fuel to flesh out drama’s conceit, Prospero must realize the audience’s power only in the sudden loss of his own magic. His is an odd pathos, a character coming to grips with a player’s passion, “which was to please.”57 It is also a player’s plea for release from the bonds of that character. Friar Bacon likewise learns to fear his own power. First, he is devastated to have missed the apparently hollow message offered to his servant Miles by the spirits of his mighty brazen head: “Time is . . . Time was . . . Time is past.” “‘Tis past indeed,” he responds to Miles’s report in despair, “A villain time is past!

54 55 56 57

Bate, From Myth to Drama, 252. Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1.48–50. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Epilogue 3–10. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Epilogue 13.

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My life, my fame, my glory all is past!”58 When his two scholars murder each other at the prospective glass, Bacon, like Prospero, forswears his art: Bacon, thy magic doth effect this massacre. ... End all thy magic and thine art at once. ... So fade the glass, and end with it the shows That necromancy did infuse the crystal with.59

Bacon’s departure from his art is slower than Prospero’s, however, and stranger. As he vows to seek God’s forgiveness and devote his life to prayer instead of magic, he makes a suddenly specific report of his necromantic practice: I tell thee, Bungay, it repents me sore That ever Bacon meddled in this art. ... Conjuring and abjuring devils and fiends, With stole and alb and strange pentageron; The wresting of the holy name of God, As Sother, Eloim, and Adonai, Alpha, Manoth, and Tetragrammaton; With praying to the five-fold powers of heaven, Are instances that Bacon must be damn’d For using devils to countervail his God.60

Greene’s work would have well preceded the Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players of 1606, which prohibited that players “jestingly, and profanely speak, or use the holy Name of God, or of Christ Jesus, or of the holy Ghost, or of the Trinity, which are not to be spoken but with fear and reverence.”61 Even so, uttering actual names of God used in conjuring texts on stage does not accomplish the semantic intent of Bacon’s speech. In effect, he uncovers actual mechanisms of occult power while abjuring the arts that use them. Bacon thus repeats the Chorus’s strategy named above. During the outward show of humility, he cashes in on precisely the secret power that the 1606 act would aim to occlude. What’s more, he goes on to foretell the mighty reign of Diana (Elizabeth) to King Henry, who proclaims that “This prophesy is mystical.”62 In forswearing magic, he takes up

58 Greene, The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, G3r. 59 Greene, The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, H2r. 60 Greene, The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, H2r. 61 Gazzard, “An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (1606),” 495. 62 Greene, The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, I2r.

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prophesy, the most famous art of Merlin himself.63 He also sidesteps the dramatic register, as Castelvetro (and later Sir Philip Sidney) would observe, “when a messenger or a prophet is introduced, one passes into the field of the epic, and into the narrative method.”64 To recall Hopkins’s observation, Bacon’s prophecy is a passage from dramatic to meta-dramatic. Not only does it pay service to the reigning queen in a way familiar to audiences, it also subtly reinforces the classical link that Sidney himself emphasized between poets and prophets in his Defence of Poetry.65

Kennel Cant Like Prospero and Friar Bacon, Marlowe’s Faustus practices art magic and necromancy and loves spectacular shows of power. Unlike Bacon, Faustus makes Judas’s error in assuming he is beyond forgiveness for his sins. While Prospero and Bacon interact with spirits in their work – which is dangerous enough – neither of them go as far as to have intimate contact with a devil. Despite their aforementioned differences, Faustus here resembles Elizabeth Sawyer from The Witch of Edmonton, who is quite intimate with her familiar spirit, Tom the Dog: I am dried up With cursing and with madness, and have yet No blood to moisten these sweet lips of thine. Stand on thy hind-legs up. Kiss me, my Tommy, And rub away some wrinkles on my brow By making my old ribs to shrug for joy Of thy fine tricks. What hast thou done? Let’s tickle. [They embrace]66

The language permits a less intimate reading. Tom may simply kiss as a dog kisses and make Sawyer laugh with his “fine tricks.” “Fine” is a recorded synonym for

63 Though Merlin eventually became known as a magician, the earliest accounts of him from Geoffrey of Monmouth record his extensive prophecies, which inspired numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tracts applying them to current events. Many contend that Monmouth conflated Myrddin Wyllt, a Welsh prophet, with Aurelius Ambrosius, to create Merlin Ambrosius the wizard. On this conflation and other theories, see: Berthelot, “Merlin, or, a Prophet Turning Magician,” 377–79. 64 Castelvetro, “A Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle,” 355. 65 Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, 7. 66 Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, The Witch of Edmonton, 4.1.172–78.

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“lively,” however, not to mention “frisky,” “coy,” and “quaint.”67 Lucy Munro notes the erotic possibilities of “tickle” in early modern staging, and numerous more recent productions of The Witch of Edmonton that take this interpretation.68 Suckling familiars with blood is a common trope of witchcraft lore. In continental witchcraft treatises, at least, there are also many tales of sexual intimacy between witches and devils.69 Though that is less commonly held in English trial records and anti-witchcraft tracts, there are several other examples in English drama. Joan Goe-too’t of Rowley’s Birth of Merlin, for example, unwittingly sleeps with a devil to conceive Merlin. Delphia, from Massinger and Fletcher’s The Prophetess, invites the clown, Geta, to kiss and embrace a lady devil named Lucifera that Delphia conjured at his request. Faustus’s sexual encounter with a devil in the guise of Helen of Troy ostensibly performs normative sexual desire inspired by his conversation with two young male scholars about fair women. Daniel Gates observes, however, that “Faustus himself forgets the illusory nature of his magic,” becoming “enraptured by the deceptive appearance of a spirit.” Like Prospero and Bacon, Faustus finds trouble when he slides from creating spectacles into attending them. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Richard Rambuss’s work,70 Gates identifies the religious nonconformist, or “closet” heretic, as queer, not necessarily in terms of sexuality, but in terms of “secrecy and with a particular relationship to language,” in Faustus’s case a “carnal relationship to language.”71 The text supports this aspect of Gates’s claim thoroughly, for example with Faustus calling necromantic books his greatest desire. He even comes close to disappointment when Mephistopheles only has one catch-all book of occult power, to which he must continuously refer Faustus with each new request for another volume: “Here they are in this book . . . Here they are too . . . Here they be.”72 For one who so fetishizes the material vessels of knowledge, and one who claims custody of so much knowledge already, however, Faustus seems most preoccupied with new sensory experience, a broader concept than language. Whenever he appears close to recanting or praying for mercy, his devilish retinue distracts him with masques and spectacles. Faustus willfully distracts himself the same way with Helen “whose sweet embracings may extinguish clean / These thoughts that do dissuade

67 LEME, s.v. “Frisque & gay,” https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/205/9178; and LEME, s.v. “Coint & ioly,” https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/205/3935. 68 Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, The Witch of Edmonton, 81–84. 69 Levack, The Witch-Hunt, 30. 70 See: Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance; and Rambuss, Closet Devotions. 71 Gates, “Unpardonable Sins,” 62, 71. 72 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 2.1.167, 171, 175.

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me from my vow.”73 In the process, he makes love to the illusion of a woman, succumbing to a devil in disguise and effectively performing what antitheatricalists caution most against: All that do so are abomination . . . who put on, not the apparel only, but the gait, the gestures, the voice, the passions of a woman? All which like the writhings, and winding of a snake, are flexible to catch, before they speed; and bind up cords when they have possession.74

Stephen Gosson demonizes the player’s action, which is effectively an “active submission” to dangerous passions, a crossing of gendered sense experiences. Words are only one technology in use on Faustus’s imagination. The other is an array of airy spirits condensed into human form, practicing upon his sensations. The material fact of a man embracing a boy dressed as a woman, of course, facilitates the entire spectacle. Doctor Faustus not only plays with the moral consequences of theatrical illusion. It constructs a world in which theatrical illusion is the simplest option, the de facto relationship with sense experience. Faustus’s relationship with his devils unquestionably performs homoerotic desire and intimacy. I argue, however, that the play also queers Faustus’s desire for divine mercy. Once he enters into a pact with Mephistopheles, his longing for salvation becomes a secret desire to be disavowed or avoided, such a compelling desire that his blood congeals at the signing of his soul’s deed of gift, “Homo fuge” appears writ on his arm, and a voice rings in his ears, “Abjure this magic, turn to God again.”75 He even normalizes his love for Satan and his devils by way of contrast, protesting too much in the process: The god thou serv’st is thine own appetite, Wherein is fix’d the love of Belzebub: To him I’ll build an altar and a church, And offer lukewarm blood of new-born babes!76

Such promises never grip Faustus with the same ardor as his fear of damnation. Suppressing his need for salvation, Faustus’s act never quite convinces his devils, who hound him repeatedly like the jealous spouses of domestic comedies. Mephistopheles is even wary of Faustus’s desire for a human wife: “Tut, Faustus, marriage is but a ceremonial toy. If thou lovest me, think no

73 74 75 76

Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 5.1.85–86. Gosson, Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions, C3v–C4r. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 2.1.8, 81. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 2.1.11–14.

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more of it.”77 Never mind that his arrangement with Faustus is a contract written in rather marital terms, and Mephistopheles will even require Faustus “with blood again” to “confirm / The former vow” with an “unfeigned heart” just before granting Faustus’s desire for Helen.78 Their bond, twice consummated with blood and there sexually consummated for good measure, is under constant threat of Faustus’s hidden desire for God. Faustus’s “carnal relationship” to illusion is literally so. When Cuddy Banks asks where Tom the Dog acquires the flesh to make his tempting illusions, Tom reveals that his former trick was the work of a corpse: The old cadaver of some self-strangled wretch We sometimes borrow and appear human. The carcass of some disease-slain strumpet We did varnish fresh and wear as her first beauty.

He goes on to say that, for the lecherous fellow seeking quick gratification from a particular maid, there is always ready a “fine hot flaming devil in her place.”79 When Mephistopheles offers a first devilish bride to Faustus, he immediately rejects her in like terms: “A plague on her for a hot whore!”80 Faustus, like the unsuspecting lecher or the compliant theater audience member, experiences the slippery distinction between an illusion’s matter (story) and its matter (physical composition). Both are the “stuff” of dreams. He haughtily dismisses Hell as a fable and lightly ransoms “body, soul, blood, or goods,” perhaps under the hopeful loophole that Mephistopheles renders him “a spirit in form and substance.”81 If Faustus’s story relies on similar lore to Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s later work, then he spends a night with a corpse reassembled and possessed by a demon, then varnished to look and feel like Helen of Troy. Like his congealing blood at the signing of his contract, this is a visceral reminder that devils will eventually tear him to pieces; the illusion is simply more effective. It is, like any good staged action, played “to the life.” “Terminat hora diem; terminat author opus,” goes the A-Text’s epigraph: “The hour ends the day; the author ends the work.” While Bacon and Prospero both get to end their plays – and step away from the magic – on their own terms, Faustus must die a spectacle, without even the illusion of authorship:

77 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 2.1.150–51. 78 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 5.1.72–73. 79 Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, The Witch of Edmonton, 5.1.151–54, 159. 80 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 2.1.148. 81 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 2.1.109–10, 97.

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My God, My God, look not so fierce on me! Enter [Lucifer, Mephistopheles, and other] Devils Adders and Serpents, let me breathe a while! Ugly hell, gape not!82

Though once distracted by his own spectacular power, Faustus becomes hypersensitive to others’ gazes: God, his devilish stage audience, and the “Ugly hell” that both gapes open before him, and gapes at him from just below the lip of the stage, attending the matter. “Why, this is hell,” Mephistopheles tells Faustus in their first meeting, as is any place for one “who saw the face of God.”83 Faustus, who wanted to “try [his] brain to get a deity,”84 mirrors Mephistopheles’s fall from Heaven in his own descent from mortal life into damnation. Unlike Prospero, Faustus cannot negotiate his release from the bounds of the play. He is instead ripped screaming from his stage, only too lately horrified by the part he played. A play’s ending is a prologue’s inverse by design. The spirits have done, and the bodies that hosted them stand free. What began in conjuration resolves in exorcism. The audience, once safely distant in their judgment, has been made complicit in the action; their kind attention made the mechanism of their own enchantment. They must perform the final exorcism not only to free the characters from their players’ bodies, but also to free themselves from that “wooden O” and confront the strange knowledge that remains with them outside of its binding circle. Like players, they have been both the hunter and the prize, their attentions captured, then ever turned back upon the act of attending. “Canting queer ken,” as a rhetorical provocation, evokes the multiple strands of the trap conceived as theater in early modern England. To stage action was to sing a siren’s song, to lure with strange conceits, and to bind the senses with subtle art, a practice that balances on the edges of knowing: conception, perception, reception, deception. Escaping that snare, like the desire for strange knowledge that left them captured, is the work of hands. Paris’s conclusion to his defense of acting in The Roman Actor provides the instructions for that ritual of release: “censure us, or free us with applause.”85

82 83 84 85

Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 5.2.112–14. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 1.3.77. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-Text, 1.1.65. Massinger, The Roman Actor, 1.3.142.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Translated by John French. London, 1651. Wing A789. Bacon, Francis. Of the Advancement and Proficiency of Learning or the Partitions of Sciences. Oxford, 1640. STC 1167. Dictionary of the Scots Language. Edinburgh: Scottish Language Dictionaries, 2004. http://www.dsl.ac.uk. Gosson, Stephen. Playes Confuted in Five Actions Proving That They Are Not to Be Suffred in a Christian Common Weale, by the Waye Both the Cavils of Thomas Lodge, and the Play of Playes, Written in Their Defence, and Other Objections of Players Frendes, Are Truely Set Downe and Directlye Aunsweared. London, 1582. STC 12095. Greene, Robert. The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, and Frier Bongay. London, 1594. STC 12267. Heywood, Thomas, and Richard Brome. The Late Lancashire Witches. London, 1634. STC 13373. Holland, Philemon. “A Briefe Catalogue of the Words of Art, with the Explanation Thereof.” In The Historie of the World. Commonly Called, The Natural Historie of C. Plinius Secundus. The Second Tome. London, 1601. STC 20029. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language; In Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers. To Which Are Prefixed, A History of the Language, And an English Grammar. London, 1755. https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/lexicon/entry/1345/5555. Lexicons of Early Modern English. Edited by Ian Lancashire. Toronto: University of Toronto Library and University of Toronto Press, 2019. https://leme.library.utoronto.ca/. Lyly, John. The Complete Works of John Lyly: Now for the First Time Collected and Edited from the Earliest Quartos. Edited by R. Warwick Bond. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1902. Lyly, John. Mother Bombie: As It Was Sundry Times Played by The Children of Paul’s. London, 1598. STC 17085. Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus, A-Text. In Tamburlaine, Parts I and II; Doctor Faustus, A- and B-Texts; The Jew of Malta; and Edward II, edited by David M. Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, 139–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus, B-Text. In Tamburlaine, Parts I and II; Doctor Faustus, A- and B-Texts; The Jew of Malta; and Edward II, edited by David M. Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, 85–246. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Massinger, Philip. The Roman Actor. In The Selected Plays of Philip Massinger, edited by Colin Gibson, 101–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Rowley, William, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford. The Witch of Edmonton. Edited by Lucy Munro. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. London, 1584. STC 21864. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Andrew Gurr. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Sidney, Philip. The Defence of Poesy. In Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Gavin Alexander, 1–54. London: Penguin, 2004.

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Secondary Sources Bate, Jonathan. From Myth to Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Berthelot, Anne. “Merlin, or, a Prophet Turning Magician.” In Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time: The Occult in Pre-Modern Sciences, Medicine, Literature, Religion, and Astrology, edited by Albrecht Classen, 377–95. Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2018. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex. ” London: Routledge, 2011. Castelvetro, Lodovico. “A Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle.” In Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, edited by Allan H. Gilbert, 305–57. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967. Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Gates, Daniel. “Unpardonable Sins: The Hazards of Performative Language in the Tragic Cases of Francesco Spiera and Doctor Faustus.” Comparative Drama 38, no. 1 (2004): 59–81. Gazzard, Hugh. “An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (1606).” The Review of English Studies 61, no. 251 (2009): 495–528. Hopkins, Lisa. Shakespeare on the Edge: Border-Crossing in the Tragedies and the Henriad. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Hopkins, Lisa, and Helen Ostovich, eds. Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Levack, Brian P., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 3rd ed. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006. Levin, Harry. The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe. Boston: Beacon Press, 1952. Masten, Jeffrey. Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. O’Connor, Marion. “The Witch.” In Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, 1124–28. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008. Oxford English Dictionary: Online Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. http://oed.com. Partridge, Eric. Origins: An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. London: Routledge, 2009. Rambuss, Richard. Closet Devotions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Rossi, Paolo. Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science. Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Mark Houlahan

Chapter 5 James Shirley at the Edge of Town Did you enjoy the party? Sure, sure: the prettiest sight in this fine pretty world is the privileged class enjoying its privileges.1 —The Philadelphia Story

Shirley’s Edge “Hyde Park is nice. Very nice. Very nice park you got here. Very beautiful”: so Bruce Springsteen compliments his adoring London fans in the middle of his epic 2009 Hyde Park concert.2 The prolonged set by Springsteen and his E Street Band is the epitome of contemporary summer recreational use of the large, open park on the western edge of what is now inner London. In a form of highly democratic consumerist capitalism, anyone with sufficient credit can buy a ticket and join hundreds of thousands to revel in the enduring pleasure of “the Boss” at his stadium rock best. Though Springsteen himself has recently appeared on Broadway in his autobiographical, Tony-award nominated show Springsteen on Broadway, it is unlikely that he is familiar with the repertory of 1630s London theaters, nor that the trope of celebrating Hyde Park’s splendors dates back 380 years. In this chapter, I examine James Shirley’s presentation of Hyde Park as a then new edge of entertainment and recreation for London elites in the 1630s; and link that sparkling 1633 comedy through to the representation of other resorts of elite leisure in London in the sustained series of urban comedies Shirley wrote from 1628 to the closing of London theaters in 1642. Shirley’s eminence amongst English playwrights of the 1630s and early 1640s has often been noted, yet his comedies still remain comparatively neglected, understudied and, most crucially, underperformed. Key studies by Martin Butler and Ira Clark provided useful pathways in the 1980s and 1990s, and, more recently, Sophie Tomlinson and Julie Sanders have shown how sympathetically and how vividly Shirley dealt with the representation of female

1 Stewart, dir., The Philadelphia Story. 2 Twenty-one minutes into the second DVD of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, directed by Chris Hilson. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-005

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characters and agency. The Royal Shakespeare Company version of Hyde Park, staged at the newly opened Swan Theater, Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1987, left an indelible impression on many who saw it, especially in the young Fiona Shaw’s trenchant performance as Mistress Carol, depicted as a suffragist from the time of Virginia Woolf.3 Yet, as so often happens after sterling revivals of nonShakespearean early modern plays, this has not led to any surge in Shirley productions in theater companies’ bills of fare. Shirley remains at the edge of what theatergoers are offered, and beyond the edge of what most of them will know (even dedicated London or Stratford audience members). It would be hubristic to think that a chapter in a book will change this situation, yet, as with so much of the material in this book, my hope is that the invitation to re-examine playworlds beyond Shakespeare will redirect scholastic and theatrical energies.4 Three decades ago, Ira Clark presented a rich summary of Shirley’s achievement. I think, however, that he overestimated what he calls “Shirley’s Reverence for Degree”; instead, I contend that Shirley shows ways to be aware of “degree” without being completely in thrall to it.5 The nuanced readings of Sanders and Tomlinson rightly expand our sense of the independent female subject, but by locking on to the geospatial and material concerns of Shirley’s characters we can see that beneath the gloss of their inspiring rhetoric, the female characters are as trapped in their class and ethnic assumptions as are the male characters with which they do battle. By focusing on the specific, material London zones in which Shirley places his comedies, I will demonstrate how a geospatial awareness adds to our current understanding of Shirley’s dramatic achievement. Further, though the world Shirley delineates is a precisely circumscribed world of privilege, in showing us that world so specifically, he pointedly mounts a critique of it, rather than simply wallowing in craven fashion in its affairs. He specifies zones of inclusion (for those with the means or breeding to partake of “town” and “park”); these are then also demarcated with a forceful, at times violent policing of those who are 3 See: Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, 100–101. In her review of the production, Lois Potter notes the updating of the setting, though she is not as impressed as Tomlinson by the results. See: Potter, “Caroline Courtships,” 464. 4 This will also be aided by new editorial projects, such as Eugene Giddens’s new edition of Hyde Park in the Revels Plays series, and the comprehensive re-editing of Shirley’s plays for the forthcoming Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley. In most cases, Shirley’s playtexts will receive their first extended commentary in this edition. Brett Greatley-Hirsch and I are editing Hyde Park for the Oxford project, and though there is a modest tradition of texts of the play from the nineteenth century onwards, we will be newly reflecting on the play’s pertinence, and taking full advantage of the digital resources available since the RSC revival in 1987. 5 Clark, Professional Playwrights, 112–17.

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not to be included. By geospatial I understand the means by which the representation of the geography and cartography of specific places on stage cultivates the illusion of that imagined space being present to the audience. The “Geospatial,” as K.C. Clarke explains, is an approach that began life as a strategy developed by US intelligence agencies.6 The concepts have been most forcefully applied to the stage spaces of early modern London by Henry S. Turner in his groundbreaking study, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts. Turner’s study extends only to 1630, but as the variety of stage spaces available remain the same through to 1642, so too Turner’s exposition of “Theater as A Spatial Art” and “The Topographic Stage” seem to me applicable, by extension, to the private theaters of the 1630s where Shirley’s city comedies were performed. Turner’s focus is on the philosophical and epistemological implications of his argument.7 Here, I will emphasize the politics of exclusion that Shirley’s stage spaces invite us to inspect.

Hyde Park: The Place and Its Play For five hundred years, the acreage of what has become Hyde Park had been tended by the monks of Westminster Abbey. When the monastery was dissolved in 1536, Henry VIII forcefully requisitioned the land, keeping the Manor of Hyde, which became an imparked, exclusive royal hunting domain for the next hundred years. In the reign of Charles I, when Henry Rich, the Earl of Holland, was one of the Park’s two keepers, it was opened as a space for a limited number of elite courtiers and those close to them to recreate in after the winter.8 Shirley’s printed Quarto of 1637 (the first published text of the play) is dedicated to Holland. Lord Bonvile, the wealthiest character in the play, and the aristocrat with the highest status within it, seems in part to speak as an avatar for Holland when he opens Act 3, the first of two acts exclusively set in the Park: Lady y’are welcome to the spring, the Parke Looks fresher to salute you, how the birds On every tree sing.9

6 Clarke, “Geospatial Intelligence,” 446–67. 7 Turner, The English Renaissance Stage, chapters 5 and 6 (155–216). 8 Trussler concisely summarizes the history of the site in his RSC program edition, xviii. See also the entry on Hyde Park in Weinreb and Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia, 400–401. 9 Shirley, Hide Park, sig. E2r. Taylor, “The Structure of Performance,” 3–50, shows definitively that act breaks were utilized from 1608 when the King’s Men began using the Blackfriars, and

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The title page of the Quarto notes that it was presented “at the private house in Drury Lane,” the Cockpit Theater, by “her Majesties Servants” (Queen Henrietta’s Men). It is three miles from Drury Lane to the entrance to Hyde Park (off what is now Park Lane); the opening of the Park to a select few and Shirley’s dedication of a comedy to its charms is a signal of a key shift in the growth of London, with the building of lavish, elite town houses in the 1620s and 1630s on the estates between Temple Bar (which marked the formal western perimeter of the City of London) and Westminster, the domain of the court since Henry VIII’s requisitioning of the lands around the Abbey. This of course is precisely the area of the development of Covent Garden/Drury Lane that extends up from the Strand. Both the development of the real estate, and the enhancement of activity within Hyde Park, are attributable to the increased portions of the year elite members of the court were spending in London in the early seventeenth century. Commercial and entertainment precincts were then required to service aristocratic consumer demand. Shirley’s design in his Hyde Park then is partly to flatter (and inform) the tastes and interests of this elite group of playgoers and leisure seekers. From the eastern edge of this new section of London life, within the Cockpit Theater in Drury Lane, he invites the audience to revel in the charms available three miles away at its western edge. To that extent, Shirley is complicit and at one with Lord Bonvile’s invitation, and through Acts 3 and 4 there are frequent invocations both of the poetical nightingale and the song of the cuckoo, as herald of the English spring.10 Shirley evokes Hyde Park not as a truly rural fastness, but as a boutique form of countryside, held within the edge of the city. It is a form of “country” where city-bound revelers might go to discover what to be truly civic means. The “central scenes are created expressly for the purpose of bringing this pleasure ground on to the stage,” Darryl Grantley astutely observes, and present “an enhanced self-consciousness about being urban.”11 Butler, Tomlinson, and Sanders have all emphasized the critique to manners and ideology of the Stuart court that this new form of city (the “town”) might be seen to offer. This critique, however, emerges within the lively presentation

appear in every single playtext after 1616. He further notes that playwrights made strategic use of the beginning of each inner act (2–5) to signal changes in direction and theme of the action. 10 Weinreb and Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia, 413. Note that May 1, the first day of the English spring, was the day to be seen in the Park. 11 Grantley, London in Early Modern English Drama, 151, 184. In particular, the chapter “Caroline Drama,” 141–86, is an excellent recent guide to the growth of the city in the 1620s and 1630s, and the attempts by Caroline playwrights to encompass this in comic form.

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of life in the Park, and the intricate entwining of pursing lovers in the complex strands of the plot.12 In Shirley’s Park, along with birdsong, you can drink milk drawn by a maid from a “red cow,” and you can drink syllabub and sack from Maurice’s, a lodge within the actual Park. You can hear singing, in the form of Venturer’s neopastoral lyric Come Muses all that dwell nigh the fountaine;13 and you can gamble, first on human footraces, and then on horses.14 To judge from the stage directions of the first text, the humans raced across the stage; the horse race is partly watched by turning upstage and its climax is narrated as if this took place offstage.15 We hear in Act 4 “Confused noyse of betting within, after that a shoute” as the race starts, and thirteen lines later, barracking shouts “Within, Venture! Venture!” followed on the next page by “a shoute within” as, presumably the offstage race concludes.16 In July 1668, Pepys saw two performances where horses were “brought upon on the stage.”17 The imagined wealth of the characters is partly shown by the considerable sums invested by the men in the horse race, “twenty pounds to fifteene . . . forty pounds to thirty . . . forty pounds to twenty.” Even more, it seems, is bet on the humans in Act 3, as Venture offers odds there of “A hundred pound to ten.”18 In the valuable catalogue for his 2012 British Museum exhibition on

12 Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 138–39; Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, 92–103; Sanders, Caroline Drama, 45–50. In The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, Sanders shows how deftly Shirley marks out park space on the indoor stage (see especially 165–68). 13 Shirley, Hide Parke, sigs. G2r–G2v. Little is known for certain of the original cast for the play, but internal evidence suggests the song would have been specifically composed for Venturer, as Lord Bonvile remarks just before the song: “come I heard you can sing rarely” (sigs. G2r–G2v). 14 Shirley’s The Bird in a Cage (1633) takes place in an Italian Kingdom, but its reference to “a horse-race or I’th’Park with puppets” (2.1.511) is most likely a reference to the pleasure of Hyde Park that the play’s initial audience would readily grasp, as Julie Sanders notes in her edition of the play (Chalmers, Sanders, and Tomlinson, Three Seventeenth-Century Plays, 213). 15 According to Brett Greatley-Hirsch, textual editor for our edition of Hyde Park, these are most likely authorial. 16 Shirley, Hide Parke, sigs. G4r–G4v. 17 Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Despite this coup de théâtre, the play was not to his taste: on July 11, he described Hyde Park as “but a very moderate play” (26); and on July 17, he wrote, “a sorry mean play, that vexed us to sit in so much of the heat of the weather to hear it” (263). It is likely, but not certain, that the second comment applies to Hyde Park, as the title of the play is obscured in Pepys’s shorthand. There were no more London productions through to the end of the eighteenth century: Shirley’s London comedies were only revived for the first decade of the Restoration. 18 Shirley, Hide Parke, sig. F1r.

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Shakespeare’s money, Barrie Cook underlines the force of these sums. He estimates Shakespeare’s income from the Globe at forty pounds per year (an “income on which a gentleman could live”); and ten pounds as the “annual salary of a labourer.”19 Ten times the average wage is nonchalantly offered, as the momentary leisured class pleasure for a cool, early spring day. The two noblewomen who watch the race, Mistress Carol and the Lady Julietta, match this fiscal extravagance in kind, betting Spanish scented silk stockings against “a paire of perfum’d gloves.”20 The detail reminds us that the characters are still in “town,” despite being in the Park, with spending dispositions similar to, if perhaps greater, on stage than the original town audiences on Drury Lane. To that extent, the play embodies what Paul Yachnin has usefully framed as the populuxe, the evocation on stage of cosseted, materially sumptuous lives of privilege. In public – and in the case of Hyde Park in the private theater, The Cockpit – “one could pay to play with the pleasures of the elite – with their language, clothing, music, masquing, even with their (virtual) bodies.”21 And yet, a key point to note about Shirley’s approach, is that even as he shows his fictive elite braving, as it were, at the edge of town, so too he brings in real “edge” in our terms to the ways he allows his characters to behave, or misbehave. Butler has persuasively argued that Shirley angles his play towards a moderated, consensualist form of royalist politics; and Tomlinson has shown in detail how Shirley makes space within a patriarchal design for female eloquence and autonomy.22 There remain disconcerting aspects of elite behavior, however, that further add to the restraint on purely reveling in pleasure the play at first glance offers. Given the space to misbehave, Shirley stages crude versions of class dominance, the more striking, to my mind, for the elegance of the blank verse that is the major register he strikes throughout the play, with the “languishing numbers” of his “poem” (the printed text of the play) which he “modestly” advances in his dedication to the Earl of Holland.23 Tomlinson has examined the links between Mistress Carol, the play’s leading female, of independent means and spirit, and the “caroling” that heralds spring and the reign of Charles I.24 The park scenes emphasize birdsong, but Shirley also brings to light the undersong of that charm. The third act climaxes

19 Cook, Angels & Ducats, 29. 20 Shirley, Hide Parke, sigs. G4r–G4v. 21 Dawson and Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing, 41. 22 Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 178–79; Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, 99–103. 23 Shirley, Hide Parke, sig. A2r. 24 Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, 92–93.

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with a fraught, sexually tense dialogue between Carol and Fairfield, her main suitor. Carol proclaims the sound of the nightingale as a good omen: Harke sir the Nightingale, there is better lucke Coming toward us.

The nightingale, from her perspective, offers love and harmony. Fairfield responds with a coded threat: “Twas Philomel they say, and thou were one, / I would new ravish thee.”25 Part of the sophistication of Shirley’s dramaturgy is that he expects his audience to listen allusively: listening back to the earlier repertory is a standard move among Shirley’s fellow Caroline playwrights. Fairfield and Carol debate in jarring dialogues like Beatrice and Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, and Carol fashions herself in part as if she was a London Cleopatra.26 Here, Fairfield remembers Tereus’s rape of his sister-in-law Philomel, and, most likely, Shakespeare’s revision of that tale in the depiction of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, a play that endured in the minds of early modern playgoers from its first performance in the early 1590s. The placement of the allusion is telling. As the act breaks, the stage clears and the musicians play,27 we are reminded that all is not well amongst the hectic parkside amusements. Thematically, the link suggests a merging of the competitive concerns of the horse race, a duel between male horses and mares, and the exchange between men and women. As Fowler, a “wild young gentleman,” notes in the first act of Shirley’s 1628 comedy, The Witty Fair One: There is no discourse so becoming your gallants now, as a horse race, or Hyde-park, – what ladies’ lips are softest, what fashion is most terse and courtly, what news abroad.28

There is a link too between Fairfield’s combative stance in Hyde Park and Lord Bonvile’s attempt to take Lady Julietta as a “lady of Pleasure” to be used as he will. The new attractions of Hyde Park are described by several writers in the 1630s, but not everyone thought this unreservedly a good thing. Notably Katherine Philips and Hester Pulter list Hyde Park amongst many comparable London attractions (Spring and Asparagus Gardens, for example); in their perspective, however, the Park is a space that invited “lust, scorn” and “vanity,” rather than “peace and

25 Shirley, Hide Parke, sigs. F3v, F4r. 26 Tomlinson expertly draws out the links to Much Ado and Anthony and Cleopatra in: Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, 92–94. 27 It is now well established that in the private theaters, there would be a break between the acts and the musicians would play. See: Taylor, “The Structure of Performance,” 3–50. 28 Shirley, James Shirley, 17.

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honor,” where honorable women especially might be exposed to “guilt and shame.”29 Pulter, in particular, is “highly critical of . . . pleasure-seeking activities popular among women” and “advocates instead that women spend their time in writing godly rhymes.”30 Through Mistress Carol, Shirley might be seen to endorse the populuxe pleasures of the Park, but in the Act 3 footrace, which is the match of the horse race in Act 4, the play provides a space to give us pause, emphasizing the class and ethnic exclusivity of the revelers in the Park; and he makes it clear also that Carol shares these values. The race is between an “Irishman” and an Englishman, both footmen servants. Bonvile instinctively conforms to his high position by backing the English runner: “I love to cherish / Our owne Countrymen.”31 The runners cross the stage, after them the Gentlemen – that is those who have a betting interest in the encounter. Twenty lines later they run back across the stage (after say about two minutes of onstage dialogue), still followed by the Gentlemen. The stage directions suggest a good deal of commotion, which would be heightened if they were running at normal sprinting pace. All shout when the runners enter “Make way there, a Teag, a Teag, a Teag.” The chant is repeated three times, emphasizing the potential rambunctiousness of this gambling crowd. Mistress Carol’s remark after the runners leave the stage hints at the scale of sound evoked: Can they tell what they doe in this Noise, [?] Pray Heaven it do not breake into the Tombes At Westminster, and wake the dead.32

This is an economical form of the geospatial. The audience is invited to think west of Drury Lane, part of the way to Hyde Park where the scene is unfolding. Mistress Carol suggests the kind of noise familiar to anyone who has barracked for a team, or their horse (or has heard a large crowd do so). Waking the dead, in the Westminster instance, perforce would require awaking the illustrious dead, as is highly appropriate, given the zone of exclusivity unfolding in the space Shirley shows Hyde Park to be.

29 See, respectively: Philips, “A Country Life,” 191, and Pulter, “Emblem 20,” 145, in Ross and Scott-Baumann, Women Poets of the English Civil War. My thanks to Sarah Ross for a conversation at the edge of the SAA meeting in Los Angeles, 2018, for pointing me towards these pointed critiques of Hyde Park. 30 Ross and Scott-Baumann, Women Poets of the English Civil War, 146n. 31 Shirley, Hide Parke, sigs. E3r, E4v. 32 Shirley, Hide Parke, sig. F1r. Most likely a modern edition will need a question mark at the end of this line.

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The OED notes the use of the term “Teague” from 1583 as a cant term for an Irish person. Bonavent and Trier make the negative links clear: Tr[ier] Ha well run Irish Bon[avent] He may be in a Bogge anon.33

Shirley’s detailing in his stage directions suggest the uproariousness of the good time being had. The ethnic distinction made here though emphasizes the edge of this English elite, between an “us” who are gambling and taking their pleasures, and a “them” who are the object of this pleasure, but are specifically excluded from the compact of alliances framed in Act 5. The collocation of Irishness and a “bog” into which one might sink and lose distinction is striking and discordant to register. For all the ardor of her politicized eloquence, Carol also shares this language of racial exclusivity. This is made clear in a brittle, brutal exchange with Fairfield towards the end of Act 3. Here, she is deriding Fairfield as part of her stratagem of clearing an emotional space where she can contract with, perhaps even love, him without his status and his person overwhelming her. The derision marks his body parts racially, in order to diminish him: You have A medly in your face of many Nations, Your nose is Romane, which your next debauchment, At Taverne with the helpe of pot or candlestick May turne to Indian flat, your lip is Austrian, And you do well to bit it; for your Chinne It does incline to the Bavarian poke . . . you have eyes Especially when you goggle thus, not much Unlike a Jewes, and yet some men might take ’em For Turkes, by the two halfe Moones that rise about ’em.34

The blazon is forceful, and highly offensive, provoking in turn Fairfield’s implied rape threat via Shakespeare and Ovid, and makes a striking close to Act 3.35 However admirable in her wit and boldness, we are reminded that Carol nevertheless shares the elitist, racialized assumptions of her class. If we applaud her final triumph, as so often in high social comedies we are, in the end, applauding

33 Shirley, Hide Parke, sig. F1r. 34 Shirley, Hide Parke, sig. F3v. 35 This is clear evidence for Taylor’s claim that stage action, after 1616, was always shaped towards and around the act break, however brief (“The Structure of Performance,” 3–50).

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a conformist, exclusive group, aggressively determined on maintaining its edge against the rest of England and the wider realm of others in worlds elsewhere. The striking eloquence of Lady Julietta and Mistress Carol unfolds within a closed circuit defined by “town” and “park,” a matching pair of spaces. Freedom of eloquence is available here, and freedom for a woman to choose the right spouse. But that freedom can be entertained only by a happy, wealthy few.

Town and Its Edge Hyde Park, however, is not a unique, stand-alone achievement. Its approach is consistent with the evocation and critique of the “real,” and of the privilege traceable in Shirley’s other London-evoking comedies. In these plays from the late 1620s through to 1642, Shirley overlays his careful geospatial distinctions with generic conventions. His comedies of wit, with their distinctive attempts at merging the poetry of Neo-Platonism and the higher forms of love (as encouraged so zealously by Henrietta Maria) with briskly satiric depictions of urban society, are anchored in a specifically denoted version of the London world the Cockpit audiences knew well. Shirley’s tragicomedies and tragedies, in contrast, are set in highly romanticized versions of Italy and Spain, versions of that Mediterranean story-world generations of English playwrights had concocted.36 If Hyde Park is the western edge of the elite’s London life,37 then the Strand, linking Temple Bar to Charing Cross, frames the new center for elite lifestyles; and it is here that Shirley often summons his comedic characters to promenade and intrigue, as Helen Ostovich notes in her introduction to The Ball:

36 It is notable that Moseley and Robinson’s 1653 edition of Six New Playes by Shirley presents these tragedies and tragicomedies to Interregnum readers, not the London plays, possibly because there was, at that point, so little left of the Caroline London world from before the Civil Wars. In chapter 13, Chris Orchard shows how, in 1653, Henry Killigrew re-worked his 1638 play, Pallantus and Eudora, the better to draw out for his readers the analogies between the imagined polities of ancient Greece and Britain during the Commonwealth period. 37 Beyond the Park would then be the country “proper,” which urbanized pleasure seekers feel compelled to flee, as Aretina has made her husband do in Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure: “I would not / Endure again the country conversation / To be the lady of six shires” (1.1.2–4). The concern at all costs to be in town and not in the country is played out all through English comedies to 1800, and is burlesqued by Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and Noel Coward in Hay Fever (1925).

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The Strand, Covent Garden, the New Exchange, and the Inns of Court, [are] all sites of self-display and privilege, burgeoning with new buildings, bought by new and old money, and actively upscale in commerce.38

In The Ball, the newly returned traveler Freshwater is staying at an inn on the Strand, at “the sign of Donna Margaretta de Pia,” as his pretentiously overly foreign idiom puts it. His servant breaks this down into the demotic for the audience: “The maggoty-pie in the Strand, sir.”39 The ladies of the play stage their Ball (the climax of the play) on the Strand, having hired a “house of the city merchants”40 for that purpose; and in The Lady of Pleasure (1632) it is to the Strand that Aretina insists her husband bring her, as the most urban and commodity-soaked place possible to escape the terrors of the countryside. To cross into Southwark, Aretina advises, “you may take water at Strand Bridge,” a “landing-place on the bank of the Thames . . . between Somerset House and Arundel House,” near the eastward edge of the Strand itself.41 For the original audiences for Shirley’s comedies, the plays then demarcate the neighborhood in which they were watching them, just slightly up the hill in Drury Lane.42 For the censor, some scenes in The Ball were felt to be a little too “actual,” representing too closely the actual reveling of some members of Charles I’s court, though it is still not known exactly which courtiers were thus felt to be slandered. Early in The Lady of Pleasure, Shirley floats a knowing reference to his earlier play for his in-crowd, coterie audience: Bornwell. Your meetings called the ball, to which appear, As to the court of pleasure, all your gallants And ladies thither bound . . . There was a play on’t.43

Through the voice of Bornwell, Shirley coyly (and pragmatically) refuses to disclose what the audience had been prevented from seeing in The Ball, but archly assumes, it seems fair to say, that his knowing audience will fill in their own scenes of what Lady X did with Lord Y, and whereabouts they might have done it. This precisely circumscribed territory is often acknowledged also by Shirley’s

38 Ostovich, Introduction to Shirley, The Ball, np. 39 Shirley, The Ball, 1.1.145–47. Ostovich notes on this line in her forthcoming edition of the play that this would most likely be “‘Magpie’, a common tavern name.” She notes further that the “tavern suggests a suitable name for the residence of an idle or impertinent chatterer.” 40 Shirley, The Ball, 5.1.2. 41 Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure, 4.2.163–64; and Huebert’s note for these lines. 42 The Quarto title pages frequently remind readers of the first performances in the Cockpit. 43 Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure, 1.1.114–19.

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servant characters, as when Freshwater’s man Gudgeon inquires of Lady Lucina’s man Solomon: “Is Paul’s alive still? . . . / The Exchange stands?” Solomon’s reply neatly encompasses the burgeoning importance of material wealth in this section of the city: “Longer than a church. / There is no fear while merchants have faith.”44 In the Cockpit performances, audiences would not have seen visual backdrops of these iconic central London landmarks, including the great spire of Old St. Paul’s and the newly wrought Italianate porticos of the Exchange; the paucity of spatial stage directions is consistent with early modern dramaturgy, where space is identified and demarcated by convention verbally; the deftly placed references to these spaces are fashioned for those who can quickly recall them to mind.45 Thus, as Anthony Johnson notes, emotional and physical aspects of London’s geography are elicited for the benefit of visitors and local inhabitants alike, thereby welding his audience in the first instance into something of a synoptic community.46

Beyond the ridge where St. Paul’s stood sentinel is an intermediary zone, before you reach the outer bounds of the countryside Aretina has fled at the beginning of The Lady of Pleasure. Here characters might partake, as they do in Hyde Park, in a countrified form of city pleasures or urban forms of rural pleasures, as when Aretina describes those who might hackney out to Mile-end, or convey Your city tumblers to be drunk with cream And prunes at Islington.47

The excursions evoked here would take you literally a mile beyond Aldgate, or somewhat further north to Islington village where the dairies that “supplied . . .

44 Shirley, The Ball, 3.3.18–22. 45 St. Paul’s was easily the tallest building visible from the Strand, as it is in Wenceslas Hollar’s famous 1647 “Long View” of London’s mid-seventeenth century skyline. The modern, populist equivalent of the repeated invocation of these spaces would be filmmakers’ relentless citation of the equivalent landmarks of twenty-first-century London: the Gherkin, the Shard, and the London Eye. In theaters built after the Restoration in 1660, the backdrop scenes would change between acts, so visual referents could well have underlined the verbal shorthand Shirley uses. We have to work harder to reimagine this, ably assisted by such digital sources as the invaluable Map of Early Modern London project (https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/). This is useful for locating the “town” though not the Park, as the Agas map, from which the project derives, does not extend as far west as Hyde Park. 46 Johnson, “Contingencies of Time and Place,” 373. 47 Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure, 1.2.41–43.

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cream and cakes,”48 the equivalent of the syllabub and sack on offer in Hyde Park, were already celebrated in the 1630s. Here, Aretina acknowledges, only to dismiss, the pleasures of this rural retreat two-and-a-half miles from the Strand.49 Huebert notes that “tumbling” suggests casual sex and prostitution, with her disdain carrying through to the notion of being “drunk with cream / [a] nd prunes.” Aretina might sample delicately but would not want to be seen gorging at such a location. A comical version of this ex-urban rambunctiousness is seen in The Wedding (1633), first in the prospective duel between Rawbone “a thin citizen” and Lodam “a fat gentleman” out beyond the city in Finsbury fields, and then in Captain Landby’s dismissive suggestion that they would be better served gorging themselves in Hogsdon, another celebrated pleasure village, where they might rather “shew fencing upon cream / And cake-bread, murder a quaking custard.”50 In Shirley’s city worlds, dressing out of hand is another form of outlandishness. In The Lady of Pleasure, a conspicuous example is Aretina’s nephew Frederick. He has come straight from Cambridge, amply fulfilling the stereotype beloved in early modern city comedies of the new graduate whose pride in his learning is undermined by his ignorance and maladroitness every time he opens his mouth to speak English or the other tongues of which his education has, in theory, made him master: Am I not now a proper gentleman? The virtue of rich clothes . . . I put on . . . That virtue with my clothes.51

Frederick’s confidence in the on-trend panache of his wardrobe is undermined by a detailed critique offered by John Littleworth, disguised as a servant, and Lady Celestina’s steward. From top to toe, Frederick either is attired in items a decade out of date or he is wearing them in the style no longer customary in the early 1630s. One detail of the Steward’s critique links

48 The phrase is from Sugden’s Topographical Dictionary of the Works of Shakespeare (1925), cited by Huebert in Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure, 1.2.44. 49 Google Maps’ estimate of the walk from Somerset House on the Strand to Islington Borough. 50 Knowland, Six Caroline Plays, cast list (from 1633 Quarto), 90, 135. Hogsdon’s pleasures are a central locale in Thomas Heywood’s earlier play The Wise Woman of Hoxton (c.1604), first published in 1638. Hoxton likewise is just over three miles from the Strand. 51 Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure, 4.2.110–14.

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sartorial style crimes with the idea of being beyond the city in terms of location and ethnicity: Your coat and cloak’s a-brushing In long-lane Lombard.52

Both the coat and the cloak are too long to be fashionable and, moreover, are linked to the pawnbrokers of Lombard Street beyond the city walls. By further implication the Steward notes the look as a little too “Jewish” to be acceptable in polite English society. Huebert notes the link to pawnbrokers as an undesirable occupation; and in his majestically freewheeling essay “Lumber,” Nicolson Baker delineates the overwhelming linguistic evidence for the underlying associations here.53 The strain of policing the edge of inner London emerges also when Celestina is discussing the tapestries with which, by convention, her Strand apartment is bedecked when she rents it. She spurns the current fit out, before which the action unfolds: I will have fresher and more rich, not wrought With faces that may scandalise a Christian, With Jewish stories stuffed with corn and camels; You had best wrap all my chambers in wild Irish And make a nursery of monsters here To fright the ladies come to visit me.54

Even in her longing for something finer, she underlines the assumptions held by those of her rank, just as Mistress Carol does when she promenades and discourses in Hyde Park. In appealing through his Cockpit plays to that rank, Shirley seems to me brutally direct in acknowledging how its edge is to be maintained, and what lies beyond the pale of acceptability. The edge of privilege is violently, coarsely policed. And yet, in play after play, Shirley covers this edge by appealing to more elevated virtues.55 When Lord Rainbow restrains himself from dueling his cousin Bostock in The Ball he puts it this way:

52 Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure, 4.2.29–30. Huebert’s notes on the entire sequence (143–45), detail the fashion specifics of each item Frederick incorrectly bears about his person. 53 Baker, The Size of Thoughts, 236–39. 54 Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure, 1.2.13–18. 55 Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, 92–93; Clark, Professional Playwrights, 123–30.

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We inherit nothing truly But what our actions make us worthy of. And are you not a precious gentleman? Thou art not worth my steel. [He sheathes his sword] Redeem this love Some generous way of undertaking.56

The “generous way of undertaking,” pursued sincerely, leads, in Shirley’s highest poetical register, to the noblest values espoused at court by Charles I and Henrietta Maria, where all might aspire, Celestina claims, to feed gloriously And live at court (the only sphere wherein True beauty moves, nature’s most wealthy garden).57

Such set-piece orations on neo-platonic values, read apart from the plays in which they are embedded, might be read as a renunciation of this world, an escape from materiality that anticipates Andrew Marvell’s rhetoric in his famous Interregnum poetry of retreat.58 Yet the distinctiveness of Shirley’s scenarios seems to be that, in the plays where this ethos is celebrated, we also find characters either retaining great wealth or gaining it as reward for their “generous way of undertaking.” Shirley shows us the virtues of contemplation and more just relations between the sexes, yet those ideals mingle with and seem inextricable from the fiercely defended values and material pleasures at the edge of town and at its center. His dramaturgy, in playing so often with the real of consumerist London, 1630’s style, seems to anticipate the later development of hard-edged classics of the Restoration stage, such as Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), and Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700). Paradoxically, by the time those plays premiered, the town had evidently lost its

56 Shirley, The Ball, 4.1.210–14. 57 Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure, 4.3.128–29. 58 Such as “The Garden,” collected in Marvell, The Complete Poems: Fair Quiet, have I found thee here And Innocence, thy sister dear! Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men. Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow. Society is all but rude, To this delicious solitude. (2.9–16).

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taste for Shirley, as Pepys’s disdain for Hyde Park indicates.59 Shirley’s melding of the edges of Park life and philosophy, of the material and the ideal, of refined poetry with prose, masking the sharp edge of his points in his smooth rhetoric, no longer held sway.

Works Cited Primary Sources Chalmers, Hero, Julie Sanders, and Sophie Tomlinson, eds. Three Seventeenth-century Plays on Women and Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Heywood, Thomas. The Wise Woman of Hoxton. Edited by Sonia Massai. London: Globe Education/Nick Hern Books, 2002. Knowland, A.S., ed. Six Caroline Plays. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Marvell, Andrew. The Complete Poems. Edited by Elizabeth Story Donno. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Vol. 9, 1668–1669. Edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews. London: Bell & Hyman, 1983. Ross, Sarah C.E., and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, eds. Women Poets of the English Civil War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Shirley, James. The Ball. Edited by Helen Ostovich. In The Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley, edited by Eugene Giddens, Teresa Grant, and Barbara Ravelhofer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2021. Shirley, James. Hide Park: A Comedie. London, 1637. STC 22446. Shirley, James. James Shirley. Edited by Edmund Gosse. London, 1888. Shirley, James. The Lady of Pleasure. Edited by Ronald Huebert. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Shirley, James. Six New Playes. London, 1653. Wing S3486.

Secondary Sources Baker, Nicolson. The Size of Thoughts. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996. Butler, Martin. Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Clark, Ira. Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Clarke, K.C. “Geospatial Intelligence.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, 446–67. Oxford: Elsevier 2009.

59 Van Lennep et al., Index to the London Stage, 783. There were no performances of Shirley’s comedies in London after 1671.

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Cook, Barrie. Angels & Ducats: Shakespeare’s Money & Medals. London: British Museum & Press, 2012. Dawson, Anthony B., and Paul Yachnin. The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Grantley, Darryl. London in Early Modern English Drama: Representing the Built Environment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Hilson, Chris, dir. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band: London Calling Live in Hyde Park. Sony, 2009. 2 DVD Set. Johnson, Anthony W. “Contingencies of Time and Place: A Comntention for Honurs and Riches, James Shirley and the School Community.” In Community-Making in Early Stuart Theatres: Stage and Audience, edited by Roger D. Sell, Anthony W. Johnson, and Helen Wilcox, 363–93. New York: Routledge, 2017. Potter, Lois. “Caroline Courtships.” Review of Hyde Park, by James Shirley, directed by Barry Kyle, Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon. Times Literary Supplement, May 1, 1987, 464. Sanders, Julie. Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome. Plymouth: Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 1999. Sanders, Julie. The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Stewart, Gordon Ogden, dir. The Philadelphia Story. 1940; Warner Bros. Pictures, 2008. DVD. Taylor, Gary. “The Structure of Performance: Act-Intervals in the London Theatres, 1576–1642.” In Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606–1623, by Gary Taylor and John Jowett, 3–50. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Tomlinson, Sophie. Women on Stage in Stuart Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Trussler, Simon, ed. Hyde Park by James Shirley: A Programme/Text with Commentary. RSC Swan Theatre Plays. London: Methuen, 1986. Turner, Henry S. The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Van Lennep, William, Emmett L. Avery, Arthur H. Scouten, George Winchester Stone, Jr., and Charles Beecher Hogan, eds. Index to the London Stage, 1660–1800. Carbondale: Illinois University Press, 1979. Weinreb, Ben, and Christopher Hibbert, eds. The London Encyclopaedia. London: Macmillan, 1983.

Aidan Norrie

Chapter 6 “Our Queen Is Comming to the Town”: Child Actors and Counsel in the Elizabethan Progresses of 1574 and 1578 On November 12, 1586, Elizabeth I responded to a petition from both Houses of Parliament that urged her to execute the condemned Mary, Queen of Scots, for her role in the Babington Plot. A version of the response was published soon after, and it contained a rather astute observation on the theater of power: We princes, I tell you, are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed. The eyes of many behold our actions; a spot is soon spied in our garments; a blemish quickly noted in our doings.1

While this observation was made in the context of the need for delicacy concerning Mary’s potential execution – Elizabeth knew that any course of action would be divisive – it does speak to the importance of political theater to royal authority in early modern England. One of the most obvious examples of political theater in early modern England are the royal progresses, and Elizabeth seems to have enjoyed them (or at least embarked on them) more than any of her predecessors, and indeed her successors. No other English monarch engaged with the religiopolitical purpose of the performances and entertainments that accompanied royal progresses like Elizabeth.2 Progresses allowed Elizabeth and her supporters to tie royal power to the Queen’s physical presence, which became increasingly important in the decade after the Northern Rebellion of 1569, given both the issuing of Regnans in Excelsis in 1570, and the Ridolfi Plot of 1571. The centrality of political theater in these progresses is visible in the various civic entertainments that were produced and performed for the visiting Queen. The role of civic entertainments as a space to provide counsel to visiting monarchs in early modern England is a fairly well studied phenomenon. What many of these studies fail to emphasize, however, is the important role child actors played in imparting this counsel, with successive generations of scholars pushing the role of child actors in civic entertainments to the edge. While analyzing the various pageant stagings, and the authors who

1 Marcus, Mueller, and Rose, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 194. 2 For example, see: Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry; Cole, The Portable Queen; and Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-006

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devised them, is of course important, it gives the distinct impression that the children who addressed the Queen were on the edge of the performance. In actual fact, they were usually the ones charged with communicating to the monarch the didactic message behind the (sometimes elaborate) show. Child actors as mouthpieces for a group of adults – or, to use Michael Witmore’s phrase, as “agents without interests” – were thus a prominent feature of civic entertainments throughout the reign of Elizabeth. This chapter analyzes two entertainments with an overt socio-political context that feature child actors – Elizabeth’s 1572 progress to Bristol, and her 1578 visit to Norwich3 – and argues that not only were these children responsible for communicating the entertainment’s intended counsel, but also that their existence as inherently innocent symbols of the future allowed them to present this counsel without causing offense.

Children and Counsel Child actors were central to the pageants produced for Elizabeth, right from the very beginning of her reign. As Jeanne McCarthy notes, “children rather than adults . . . traditionally took the prominent roles in delivering written speeches in civic events.”4 Particularly in the early decades of Elizabeth’s reign, children were frequently the primary performers in civic entertainments, and they functioned very differently to adult performers. As Peter Hyland has observed, the popularity and widespread use of child actors in Elizabethan entertainments means they “must have offered something . . . that was different from what the adults could offer.”5 Nevertheless, even in entertainments that are well studied, the role of child actors is usually remarked on without any further analysis: Elizabeth’s coronation procession of 1559 – which featured six pageants all starring child actors – is a prime example of this relegation.6

3 This chapter draws on my detailed study of the 1578 Norwich progress. See: Norrie, “Child Actors in the 1578 Norwich Civic Entertainment.” 4 McCarthy, The Children’s Troupes, 45. 5 Hyland, Disguise on the Early Modern Stage, 22. 6 For example, Ilona Bell only mentions child actors when she says, “child actors were selected to recite poems and speeches to the queen” (Elizabeth I, 33); Tim Moylan neglects to mention the role of child actors in the first two pageants, and only mentions in his discussion of the third pageant, “As with the first two displays, a child explains the allegory” (“Advising the Queen,” 239); and Michele Osherow talks of “the child who explains the pageant” when discussing the fifth pageant, but then simply states “the pageant concludes” without mentioning the child’s role (Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England, 83–84). Scholars, therefore, continue to take child actors’ presence as a given, but offer no analysis of their role.

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While the children who performed in civic entertainments demonstrated highly accomplished verse delivery – usually as a result of being drawn from the local grammar school – I argue that their key difference from adult actors, which was prized above all else, was their role as inherently innocent symbols of the future. As Michael Witmore has observed, child actors brought with them a completely different set of social expectations than adults, which meant that in civic pageants they “could lend an air of innocence to traffic in fictions, particularly when the whole process seemed exempt from adult interests and passions.”7 Likewise, “children’s symbolic appeal during this period, grew, in fact, out of a sense that they were agents without interests,” and this “exemption meant that children could appear charming and unaffectedly elegant in some circumstances, a quality that was played up in civic pageantry.”8 A child’s innocence also allowed him (virtually never her) to speak of the future. Using their innocence in this way meant, according to Edel Lamb, that children “often operated as a symbol of the future – their own future or the future of the city, court, or nation that they addressed at that moment.”9 By forcing audiences to consider the future – particularly one shaped by the counsel the entertainment attempted to offer Elizabeth – a child actor “functions as a symbol of inheriting national culture, interpreting it for the present, and thus indicating its promise for the future.”10 Finally, Carol Rutter argues that children were used in civic entertainments as a clever way of ensuring no one offended the Queen. She notes, “No doubt political tact played a part. A . . . ‘boy’ to her ‘greatness,’ could hardly be taken for anything more than ‘cipher’ to her ‘great accompt,’ no contest.”11 Tracing the appearance of child actors from Elizabeth’s coronation procession, Rutter argues “the city was alluding to, recasting this history, using children to elicit the hopes and fears of the nation, to figure real political arrangements allegorically, and to voice messages her adult subjects wanted heard in public.”12 Rutter and Lamb thus argue that child actors embodied the future, and were used to express the collective desires of the society for its future. With this chapter, then, I demonstrate how the performances of child actors in civic entertainments were central to the counsel that was intended for Elizabeth, and not on the edge as the scholarship has tended to place them. By analyzing their role as inherently innocent symbols of the future, I emphasize

7 Witmore, Pretty Creatures, 7. 8 Witmore, Pretty Creatures, 7. 9 Lamb, Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre, 91. 10 Lamb, Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre, 91. 11 Rutter, Shakespeare and Child’s Play, 3. 12 Rutter, Shakespeare and Child’s Play, 5.

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the centrality of the children who performed in Bristol and Norwich to early modern performative counsel. Elizabeth may have been “set on stages in the sight and view of all the world,” but more often than not, it was children who were given center stage when the Queen came to visit.

“Shipshape and Bristol fashion” – Elizabeth in Bristol, 1574 During the 1560s and 1570s, the City of Bristol suffered through a crushing trade depression. At first, the monopoly of the Merchant Adventurers was blamed for this downturn in trade, and in 1571, Bristol’s parliamentarians secured the passage of a bill that ended the monopoly. The de-monopolization, however, did not revive the city’s dwindling trade, and another reason was sought. Eventually, the merchants of the city concluded that their prosperity was harmed by England’s troubled diplomatic relationship with Spain – previously one of Bristol’s largest trading partners.13 The Queen’s progress to Bristol in 1574 thus provided an ideal opportunity for the city’s citizens to petition the Queen to end the hostile relationship with Spain, and to remind her of their firm belief that international peace and domestic economic security went hand in hand. The entertainment performed for Elizabeth while she visited Bristol was devised by Thomas Churchyard. An account of the Queen’s visit was later published by Churchyard, but unlike his subsequent work in Norwich, it was published at least seven months after the progress occurred in a collection of various works called The Firste Parte of Churchyardes Chippes. David Bergeron emphasizes the importance of this pamphlet when he observed that it is “the first time . . . we can be certain about the identity of the deviser of [an] entertainment” during Elizabeth’s reign.14 Churchyardes Chippes does not include information about Elizabeth’s arrival, or the welcome she received. Churchyard simply began his account by stating, “The Whole Order howe oure Soveraigne Ladye Queene Elizabeth, was receyved into the Citie of Bristow, and the speaches spoken before her presens, at her entry.”15 Under this heading, Churchyard launched into a description of 13 Cole, The Portable Queen, 110. 14 Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 26. 15 Churchyard, The Firste Parte of Churchyardes Chippes, sig. N4v. Further references to this pamphlet will be made in text.

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an entertainment performed before the Queen. While there is no day or time affixed to this pageant, it was likely to be the first performed for the Queen, as Churchyard indicates subsequent entertainments that were performed on the Sunday morning, the second day of the visit. This pageant included a child actor. Churchyard prefaced the boy’s oration by stating: “At the hi[gh]e Crosse in a disgised manner stoed Faem, very orderly set forth, and spoke as followeth, by an excelent boy” (N4v). He then recounted the boy’s oration: A welcom freend that all men loves, and noen a live doth haet. Saluets the Queen of raer renowne, whose goodly gifts devien: . . . And knowyng of thy commyng heer, my duetty had me goe: Before unto this present place, the nues therof to sho[w]e. No soenner was pronownst the name, but Baebs in street gan leap: The youth, the age, the ritch, the poer, cam runnyng all on heap. And clappyng hands, cried maynly out, O blessed be the [h]owre: Our queen is comming to the town, with princely trayn and powre. . . . Whear duetie haeth deviesd by art, a sho[w]e on land and seas To utter matter yet unknown, that shall explayned be: By sutch dom sights and sho[w]es of war, as thear your grace shall s[e]e. (N4v–N5r)

While certainly playful in nature, the boy’s speech had an important political undertone that demonstrates the centrality of child actors to Elizabethan political theater. The speech appears to equate the fact that “Our queen is comming to the town” with the end of the city’s economic troubles. This association meant the boy was exemplifying Rutter’s observation that child actors embodied city policy, while at the same time operating as a symbol of the city’s future. The city was suffering due to the trade downturn caused by the Queen’s foreign policy, and the citizens believed that once Elizabeth saw this for herself, she would do her best to resolve the problems. Fame’s role thus demonstrates the centrality of child actors in civic entertainments, and the way that child actors used their inherent innocence to ensure that the politics behind their message was buried by their ‘prettiness.’

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The Second Bristol Pageant After stating that Fame flung his garland into the air, Churchyard recounts: “At the next Gaet, and neer her highnes lodgyng stoed three other boyes” (N5v). The distance between the “Gaet” – St. John’s Gate – and the High Cross indicates that this is a separate pageant. Churchyard states that these three boys were “called Salutacion, Gratulacion, and Obedient goodwil” (N5v). For the first oration of the second pageant, he simply includes a heading, “Salutacion the first boy,” and records the oration as follows: All hayll, O plant of grace, . . . Most welcom to this Western coest, . . . [All] in Bristow now this day: Salutes the Queen from deepth of breast, with welcom every way. And wee poer silly boyes, that cam from skoell of laet: . . . Our dueties heer to sho[w]e, and further moer in deed: Thear is a cause whearfore we say, thy helpyng hand we need, Heer is O mightie Queen, in way of myrth and sport: A matter mov’d tween Peace and warre, and therfore buylt a Fort. Dissenshon breeds the brawll, and that is Pomp, and Pried: The fort on law and order stands, and still in peace would bied. The Warrs is wicked world, as by his fruet is seen: . . . It seems the Gods have sent, in this great quarell now: A noble Judge that shall with speed, decied the matter throw.16

Churchyard then moved on to recounting the oration delivered by “Gratulation the second boy” (N6r): . . . A sottell Snaek of laet, . . . Haeth sleely crept in brestes of men, and drawn out naked swords

16 Heaton, “Queen Elizabeth’s Entertainments at Bristol,” 206.

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And with his wrangling taells, haeth stoerd up strife ynoughe: And drawn the marchant from his traed, and plowman from the ploughe Disenshon is his naem, that all this mischeef breeds . . . With wicked warrs, and wilfull brawls, that should with peace abied. But yet O peerles Prince, a true and loyall flock: Agaynst the prowd presomtuous minds, are bent to stand the shock. And swears by sacred Gods, not oen within this soyll: But reddy aer with losse of lief, to give thy foes a foyll. For proef the feble youth, and baebs of tender aeg: Daer draw their swords, in this attempt, to corb disorders raeg. Sens Englands hoep is com, to payse these things in brest: We daer not stay her longer heer, whose travell craveth rest.17

Churchyard then recounts the speech that would have been delivered by the boy portraying “Obedient good will,” who was prevented from speaking because “time was so far spent” (N6v): Yet if the Prince wold stay, or if men might make choice Of oen no bigger than my self, to speak in Citties voice I would declaer in deed, what deep desier they have, To spend their goods, their lands and livs, her staet in peace to save But sens the time is short, and Prince to lodging goes I say god bles our Queen that givs, the whit and fayr red Roes.18

After recording what Obedient Goodwill was intended to recite, Churchyard states: “[when] these speeches wear ended three hondreth Soldiors well appoynted, wayted on her highnes to her lodgying” (N7r). As the Queen lodged with Sir John Young during her stay in Bristol, and his house is some distance from St. John’s Gate, it can be inferred that Gratulation’s speech marked the end of the pageant.

17 Heaton, “Queen Elizabeth’s Entertainments at Bristol,” 207. 18 Heaton, “Queen Elizabeth’s Entertainments at Bristol,” 208.

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As these four speeches demonstrate, the boys were certainly not on the edge of the entertainments. Instead, they were embedded in the drama of the entertainment, and did not merely function as explicators. Churchyard did still rely on their ‘prettiness’ – for example, calling Fame “an excellent boy,” and by the inclusion of Salutation’s line, “wee poer silly boyes” – and in doing so, called attention to the fact that the boys were young and innocent in order to get across the counsel implicit in the orations without causing offense. In much the same way that Fame’s speech had an economic undertone, both Salutation and Gratulation’s speeches were intended to reinforce the city’s opinion that peace and economic prosperity went hand in hand. Salutation opens his speech by referring to Elizabeth as the “plant of grace” – a plant that is intended to grow and spread peace. The boy then, rather overtly, describes his role as speaking on behalf of the entire city: “Our dueties heer to shoe / . . . Thear is a cause whearfore we say, / thy helpyng hand we need.” By reinforcing the boy’s embodiment of the city, Churchyard cleverly buried the city’s call for help in a performance designed to hide its political intention. Salutation then says, “Dissenshon breeds the brawll, and this is Pomp and Pried.” While the “Pomp and Pried” may refer to the Spanish Catholics who were hindering the trading partnership, it may also indicate that the city felt that Elizabeth’s pride was part of the reason the trade dispute continued. This slight on Elizabeth’s vanity would have had disastrous consequences had it been offered by an adult. Churchyard, however, cleverly combined the child’s innocence with his embodiment of the city to avoid causing offense, and instead diverted attention away from the political issue, and focused it instead on the boy as a symbol of the future – a future that was bleak unless trade with Spain resumed. Elizabeth’s guilt in regards to the trade issue is further emphasized when Salutation ends his speech by claiming, “A noble judge that shall with speed, / decied the matter throw,” which hints that the Queen could resolve the issue immediately, and stop the city’s declining trade. Salutation’s speech is therefore an example of Rutter’s observation regarding the role of child actors. In addition to being voiced by a child, and therefore unable to “be taken for anything more than a ‘cipher’ to her ‘great accompt,’” the boy “carried a burden of representation that evoked adult fantasy, adult memory – and served to focus cultural anxieties.”19 The child thus served as the mouthpiece for expressing the city’s concerns over the ongoing political dispute between England and Spain – a mouthpiece that both implored the Queen to act, and prevented causing offense.

19 Rutter, Shakespeare and Child’s Play, 3, 5.

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This meaning of the pageant is further explained when Gratulation, in his speech, says: “And with his wrangling taells, / haeth stoerd up strife ynoughe: / And drawn the marchant from his traed.” With this statement, the child comes as close as possible to stating that diplomatic “strife” was the cause of the “marchant” suffering. This statement reinforces Lamb’s observation that child actors interpreted the present in order to speak of the future. The boy also tells the Queen that the city is “a true and loyall flock” – lest the criticism spoken already had made Elizabeth question their loyalty – and should it be necessary, the city is “reddy aer with losse of lief, / to give they foes a foyll.” The resort to military action reinforces how serious the city’s economic problems were, and how desperate the people were to have the issues resolved. Despite not being performed, “Obedient Good Will” had arguably the most politicized speech of the child actors – which may explain why Churchyard included it in the published account of the entertainment. The child reminds his audience that he speaks “in [the] Citties voice.” The speech also served to remind Elizabeth that the people of Bristol simply wanted “To spend their goods, their lands & livs” in “peace” – peace that Elizabeth was expected to procure by dealing with the Spanish trade issue. Churchyard also, subtly, reinforces Elizabeth’s legitimacy to the throne, by describing her as “the whit & fayr red Roes” – the white and red rose that symbolized the Tudor dynasty. This pageant, therefore, cleverly placed children at its center in order to press the Queen into action regarding the effect England’s poor diplomatic relationship with Spain was having on trade. Churchyard’s entertainment used children to emphasize the personal aspect of the issue: by burying the politics under an emotive performance, the city hoped that the Queen would empathize with the people whose suffering was caused by circumstances they considered to be beyond their control.

Norwich and the East Anglian Progress of 1578 The Queen’s 1578 progress through East Anglia took place against a backdrop of economic issues and religious disharmony. The progress, despite occurring during the twentieth year of Elizabeth’s reign, would be both one of the Queen’s longest, and also take her the furthest away from London. Elizabeth traveled through various towns in Norfolk and Suffolk between July 31 and August 30, with much of the latter part of the tour spent in Norwich. Two commemorative accounts of the Queen’s visit were published soon after. Bernard Garter’s The Joyfull Receyving of the Queenes most excellent Majestie

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into Hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich was entered into the Stationers’ Register on August 30 – only eight days after the visit to the city had concluded. On September 20, less than four weeks after the Queen left the county, Thomas Churchyard’s pamphlet, A Discourse of the Queenes Majesties Entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk, was entered in the Stationers’ Register.20 By involving two different entertainment devisers (both of whom had to be paid), the city emphasized the importance of engaging in political theater during the Queen’s visit. During their meeting on July 25, 1578, the City Assembly resolved to allocate (by means of borrowing if necessary) four or five hundred pounds “for the Setting forth of the Shewes at the Quenes majesties comyng.”21 This was an incredible sum of money for the city to spend, and while no accounts of the expenses incurred by the city survive (or confirmation that they did indeed raise that amount), their firm intention demonstrates that the leaders of Norwich hoped to impress the Queen during her visit. On Saturday, August 16, Elizabeth met Norwich’s mayor, Robert Wood, and the other Assemblymen and Aldermen, on Hartford Bridge at one o’clock in the afternoon.22 The Mayor delivered a lengthy oration of welcome in Latin, after which the Queen “hartily” thanked him. There was to be another welcome, but “by reason of a showre of raine which came, hir Majestie hasted away, [and] the speech [was] not uttered” (B2v). During the shower of rain, the Queen was sheltered in St. Stephen’s Gate, which was adorned with the Queen’s arms. Under the coat of arms was a banner that proclaimed, “God and the Queen we serve” (B3v) – which clearly identified the theme Norwich had chosen for the entertainments. Once the rain cleared, the Queen progressed down St. Stephen’s Street to the first pageant at St. Stephen’s Church. A large stage had been constructed for the pageant, and attached to the top of the stage was a sign that read: “The causes of this common wealth are, God truely preached. Justice duely executed. The people obedient. Idlenesse expelled. Labour cherished. Universall concorde preserved” (B4r). Of all of the shows Garter’s pamphlet recounts being performed for the Queen, this is the only one to include child actors. Although children only participated in the first of Garter’s pageants, their participation in the Queen’s welcome to the city emphasizes their centrality to Elizabethan civic drama. This first pageant set the

20 Galloway, Records of Early English Drama: Norwich, 243. 21 Galloway, Records of Early English Drama: Norwich, 58–59. 22 Garter, The Joyfull Receyving, sig. A3r. Further references to this pamphlet will be made in text.

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tone for the rest of the visit, and would also have served as the city’s welcome to the Queen. So rather than relegating child actors to a small and unimportant role in the Queen’s entertainments, Garter chose to have a child deliver an oration in the most important of the pageants. The pageant employed seventeen child actors, though only one had a speaking role. What is unique about the children is that sixteen of them are girls – described by Garter as “small women children” (B4r). This explicit description of the children as “small women children” is not found in any other surviving account of an Elizabethan civic entertainment, nor is any other account so clear in gendering the child actors.23 Eight of the girls sat at one end of the stage, “spinning Worsted yarne,” and the other eight sat at the opposite end “knitting of Worsted yarne hose” (B4r). While nothing is known of these girls, they may also be representing the city’s future. The inclusion of the working looms, and the girls spinning Worsted yarn, references the Dutch textile workers who had been settled in Norwich in 1564. The city had petitioned the Queen, through the Duke of Norfolk, to allow these Dutch clothiers to settle in Norwich in a bid to stimulate the local economy. These girls likely represented the first generation of children born in England to the Dutch clothiers, and their involvement in the pageant speaks to both the desire of the city to allow the special economic arrangements that allowed the clothiers to be settled to continue, and of their hope that Norwich’s economic prosperity would continue into the future – stimulated by their successful textile industry. Also on the stage were six men, each portraying a cause of the Commonwealth identified by the pageant’s sign. Garter then states, “in the myddest of the sayde stage stood a prettie Boy richly appareled, which represented the Common welth of the Citie” (B4r). All of these actors – the one boy, the sixteen girls, and the six men – were in position on the stage, awaiting the arrival of the Queen. In describing this unusual scene, Shehzana Mamujee notes that before any oration is made, and despite the presence of men and girls upon the stage, it is the “prettie Boy” who takes precedence. His attractiveness and sumptuous clothing are depicted, as is his assumption of the symbolic identity, the “Common welth of the Citie.” This boy is clearly the focal part of the pageant.24

23 This fact is often overlooked in the scholarship, but sadly we know nothing about these girls – other than what Garter includes in the pamphlet. Although she does not mention these girl actors, Deanne Williams’s Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood and “Chastity, Speech, and the Girl Masquer” offer the most thorough assessment of girl actors in England before 1603. 24 Mamujee, “Performing Boys in Renaissance England,” 728.

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Mamujee’s observation reinforces Lamb’s argument that children served as symbols of the future – not only is the boy speaking on behalf of the city, but he is also the center of the pageant’s show. According to Garter, “everye thing thus in readinesse, stayed hir majesties comming, and when she did come, the childe which represented, Common welth, did speak to hir highnesse these wordes” (B4r): Most gracious prince, undoubted soveraigne Queen, Our only joy next God, and chiefe defence: In this small shewe, our whole estate is seene. The welth we have, we finde proceede from thence, The idle hand hath here no place to feede, The painefull wight hath still to serve his neede. Againe, our seate denyes our traffique heere, The Sea too neare decydes [divides] us from the rest, So weake we were within this dozen yeare, As care did quench the courage of the best: But good advise, hath taught these little handes To rende in twayne the force of pining bandes. 1. Pointing to the spinners 2. Pointing to the Loombes 3. Pointing to the workes

From Combed wool we drawe this slender threede, From thence the Loombes have dealing with the same, And thence againe in order do proceede, These several workes, which skilful art doth frame: And all to drive Dame neede into hir cave, Our heades and hands togither labourde have. We bought before the things that now we sel, These slender ympes, their workes do passe the waves, Gods peace and thine we holde and prosper well, Of every mouth the hand the charges saves. Thus through thy helpe and ayde of power devine, Doth NORWICH live, whose harts and goods are thine. (B4v)

Once the boy’s speech ended, Garter recounts that “this shewe pleased hir Majestie so greatlye, as she particularlye viewed the knitting and spinning of the children, [and] perused the Loombes” (B4v). This interaction by Elizabeth implies that the children were actually spinning and weaving on the stage – not just miming the action. When the Queen had observed everything on the stage, she left for the marketplace, “after great thankes by hir [was] given to the people” (B4v). The central role the child played in the pageant provides a fascinating insight into the ability of children to make political points innocently. It is the child who represents the Commonwealth – that is, the country – and it is the

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adults who depict the causes of a successful country. Because the concept of the Commonwealth transcended political, gender, and even religious boundaries, children were prime candidates to embody this unifying concept.25 The distinction between adult and child roles further demonstrates how a child’s inherent innocence allows them to portray and embody concepts that transcend categorical boundaries. This fact is visible in the first two lines of the boy’s speech, which reflects the sentence displayed under Elizabeth’s arms at St. Stephen’s gate – “God and the Queen we serve.” It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the child is the first person in Norwich to express that sentiment in words. Likewise, in telling the Queen that “our whole estate is seene,” he was reinforcing his role as the embodiment of Norwich: as the only speaker in the pageant, he was responsible for communicating Norwich’s hopes for the future. The economic message implicit in the boy’s speech cannot be overlooked, and speaks to the boy as an inherently innocent symbol of the future. The boy’s line, “We bought before the things that now we sel,” demonstrated to the Queen the success of the resettlement policy, and the economic prosperity the textile industry had brought to Norwich; rather than importing products, Norwich was exporting their goods – their “workes do passe the waves” now. By 1578, nearly one third of Norwich’s 16,000 residents were Protestant immigrants from the Low Countries; and in the years since 1554, Norwich had grown to become the second largest and second wealthiest city in the country.26 In highlighting the success of the textile policy, the city was hoping to sway the Queen to again take their side in another economic matter. This economic issue is raised by the boy’s reference to “The Sea.” As part of her progress through Norfolk, Elizabeth was involved in resolving a dispute over fishing rights between the towns of Great Yarmouth and Little Yarmouth – a dispute that had an effect on supply and sales at Norwich’s market. Great Yarmouth had enjoyed a monopoly of the right to sell fish in their market: a monopoly that had been overturned in 1570 by the intervention of the Earl of Richmond on behalf of his tenants in Little Yarmouth. While in Norwich, the Queen and her privy councilors heard arguments from both towns, and eventually issued a ruling, partially restoring Great Yarmouth’s monopoly over fish sales, but allowing fish caught by boats from Little Yarmouth to be sold in their own town.27 The speech echoes Thomas Churchyard’s 1574 pageant in Bristol, where implicit in the orations

25 Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation, 275. 26 Woodcock, Thomas Churchyard, 779. 27 Cole, The Portable Queen, 109.

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was a desire to show the link between peace and economic success. The clearest example in the boy’s speech during this pageant is his line, “Gods peace and thine we holde and prosper well.” Not only does this clearly tie the Queen to the link between peace and economic prosperity, but it also reinforces two factors regarding child actors’ use in civic pageants. First, it echoes what Ilona Bell observes regarding the context of civic pageants: while the format “was bound by tradition, the content of peace pageant represented the historical moment.”28 Second, it is also a clear example of Rutter’s observation that cities often used children to broadcast political issues through allegorical performances.29 The religious disputes that also served as part of the reason Elizabeth visited are alluded to in the staging of the pageant, when Garter describes one of the causes of a Commonwealth as “God truely preached.” During the mid1570s, the Diocese of Norwich was plagued by religious non-conformity. Elizabeth’s arrival enforced the decision of the Privy Council on how the Diocese would be managed in the future: “strict conformity to the terms of the ecclesiastical settlement, [with] Catholic and Puritan dissidence to be handled with equal severity.”30 This religious backdrop, while only alluded to in the boy’s speech when he told Elizabeth, “Gods peace and thine we holde and prosper well,” is conspicuous in its absence. The city was likely still suffering from its enforced conformity, but with the Privy Council’s decision already made, it was futile to try to change the Queen’s mind through dramatic allegory. Instead, the city focused on the economic issue that was still to be decided on, and attempted to position Elizabeth to rule in their favor. While child actors may have been few in number in the entertainments Garter devised for Elizabeth’s visit to Norwich, it cannot be doubted that they played an important role. The boy’s oration was the substance of the first pageant of the Queen’s visit: a pageant that set both the tone and the scene of the rest of the visit. Elizabeth was also unmistakably impressed with the boy’s performance, as she personally interacted with the actors. The pageant also highlights the continuity between the Queen’s civic entertainments. Garter’s reference to “concorde” would have brought to mind the theme of the first pageant of Elizabeth’s coronation procession.31 Likewise, the “causes of a flourishing

28 Bell, Elizabeth I, 33. 29 Rutter, Shakespeare and Child’s Play, 5. 30 Collinson, “Pulling the Strings,” 127. 31 Elizabeth’s role in promoting concord was referred to in the Latin verses hung on the stage as part of the first pageant of the coronation procession. When translated, the first six lines of the verse tell Elizabeth: “No power overcomes spirits in concord. / Those who inspire terror when united, are terrified when divided. / Discordant spirits loose, those in concord unite. /

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Common weale” formed part of the fourth pageant of the coronation procession, and two of the causes of a “flourishing” Commonwealth – “Obedient subjects” and “Feare of God” – were echoed in Garter’s causes.32 These pageants of the coronation procession had also included child actors, and the meaning of the devices had similarly moved Elizabeth. Despite the twenty years that had elapsed between these pageants and the visit to Norwich, the same themes served as an important part of a city’s welcome to their Queen, which also emphasizes the pivotal role child actors played in counseling the now-present sovereign through civic drama.

Churchyard’s Norwich Pageant After the pageant at St. Stephen’s Church, Elizabeth “marched” to the second of Garter’s pageants, which was staged outside the market. According to Garter, the stage of the pageant was “replenished with five personages appareled like women. The first was, the City of Norwich: the seconde Debora: the third Judeth: the fourth Esther: the fifthe Martia” (C1r). The pageant was intended to demonstrate the people of Norwich’s support for Elizabeth. It was after this second of Garter’s pageants that Churchyard’s first began – affirmed by the fact that Churchyard’s entertainment took place inside the market.33 In his account of the visit, Churchyard states that after the Mayor had delivered his oration of welcome, the Queen’s party entered the city through St. Stephen’s Gate. She was greeted there by a song of welcome, sung by the “best voyces in the Citie.”34

Small things increase with peace, but great things are destroyed in war. / Joined hands are stronger to carry the burden. / The concord of the citizens is like a bronze rampart for the kingdom.” [Mulcaster], The Quenes Majesties Passage, sig. B1v. My own translation. 32 The fourth pageant was staged at the Little Conduit, and featured two signs. One listed the “Causes of a ruinous commonweal” – namely, want of the fear of God, blindness of guides, disobedience to rulers, bribery in magistrates, rebellion in subjects, unmercifulness in rulers, civil disagreement, unthankfulness in subjects, and flattering of princes. The second sign listed those of a “A flourishing Commonweal,” namely: fear of God, obedient subjects, a wise prince, lovers of the commonwealth, learned rulers, virtue rewarded, obedience to officers, and vice chastened. Warkentin, The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage, 89. 33 Woodcock, Thomas Churchyard, 192. 34 Churchyard, A Discourse of the Queenes Majesties Entertainement, sig. B4v. Further references to this pamphlet will appear in text.

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After the entertainment at the Gate, Churchyard has the Queen process to her lodgings at Bishop Freke’s house. At the far end of the market, however, she stopped for a “skaffold set up and bravely trimmed” outside the house of Mr. Peck, “a worthy Alderman” (C1r). Churchyard’s description of this pageant provides one of the most detailed accounts of the costuming of a child actor in Elizabeth’s pageants: On this Skaffolde, was placed an excellent Boy, wel and gallantly decked, in a long white roabe of Taffata, a Crimson Skarfe wrought with gold, folded on the Turkishe fashion about his browes, and a gay Garlande of fine flouers on his head. (C1r)

The costume is clearly elaborate, but does not appear to resemble any identifiable figure: the boy was attired with a white taffeta robe, and he wore a crimson turban upon which rested a garland of flowers. As Jerry Brotton has argued, ongoing trading relations between England and the Ottoman Empire meant that by the mid-1570s, a stereotypical caricature of “Turks” was engrained in the popular consciousness of the upper classes – and it is unlikely to be a coincidence that the boy’s costuming resembles this caricature.35 Soon after this performance, in early 1579, an Anglo-Ottoman trading agreement between Elizabeth and Sultan Murad III was reached, and it is conceivable that the boy’s Turkish costuming was extolling the virtues of international trade, and the advantages that would have for Norwich’s exports.36 The boy’s speech told the Queen: . . . Great hope we have it pleasd our Princes eye, Great were the harmes that else our paynes should reape: Our grace or foyle, doth in your judgement lie, If you mislike, our griefes do grow on heap: If for small things, we do great favour find, Great is the joy, that Norwich feels this day: If well we waid the greatnesse of your mind, Few words would serve, we had but small to say. But knowing that your goodnesse take things well That well are meant, we boldly did proceede: And so goode Queene, both welcome and farewell, Thine owne we are, in heart, in word, and deede. (C1v)

At the conclusion of the speech, “The Boy thereupon flang up his Garlande, and the Queenes Highnesse sayd, This Device is fine” (C1v).

35 Brotton, This Orient Isle, 8. 36 Bertolet, “The Tsar and the Queen,” 118.

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The oration is a fascinating example of how the city engaged with the political theater Elizabeth’s visit inspired. The economic and religious disputes that formed part of the reason for the visit are alluded to by the boy when he tells the Queen, “Our Grace or foyle [that is, defeat], doth in your judgement lie,” and the city was positioning the Queen to rule in their favor, in order to secure their prosperity: “But knowing that your goodnesse take things well, / That well are mean, we boldly did proceede.” The boy’s line, “Great were the harmes that else our paynes should reape,” is also curious. While it may allude to the “paynes” suffered by Norwich for the inhabitants’ religious non-conformity, the word “reape” has economic connotations that remind the Queen of the “harmes” facing the city. These meanings, however, are rather vague, and do not come across clearly. It is possible then that the city was taking a conciliatory tone with the Queen: rather than directly counseling the Queen, the city sought to assure her of their continuing loyalty and obedience. Several of the boy’s lines refer to this assurance of loyalty, including: “Great hope we have it pleasd our Princes eye,” “If for small things, we do great favour find, / Great is the joy, that Norwich feels this day,” and “And so goode Queene, . . . / Thine owne we are, in heart, in word, and deede.” If this assurance of loyalty was the boy’s primary goal, his message would have been bolstered by his innocence. As Witmore has observed, boys in civic pageants were considered “charming and unaffectedly elegant,” and thus prime candidates to express their city’s loyalty to the now-present sovereign.37 In addressing the Queen in this way, the boy – who was the focal point of the pageant – embodied the city and used his role as a symbol of the future to remind Elizabeth of her continuing duty to the people of Norwich; his performance thus served as a plea for the city to no longer be on the edge of royal favor.

The Space for Counsel As the civic entertainments performed for Elizabeth in 1574 and 1578 analyzed here demonstrate, child actors played a central role in counseling the Queen. As part of the political theater both cities engaged in, children were used as inherently innocent symbols of the future to expound the entertainment’s didactic purpose. To date, the scholarship has overlooked the role of children and child actors in civic entertainments, and in doing so, has dismissed the important socio-political role they played during the sixteenth century. As we 37 Witmore, Pretty Creatures, 7.

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have seen, it was the boys chosen (likely) from the local grammar school who served as the mouthpiece of the city they were embodying, and in doing so, they became the focal point of the pageant. While Elizabeth may have believed she was “set on stages in the sight and view of all the world,” in Bristol in 1572 and Norwich in 1578, “the eyes of many” were firmly fixed on a handful of child actors. The effect of these entertainments on Elizabeth, and her policy, remains open to debate. In the case of the 1574 Bristol progress, Spain and England had agreed to restore diplomatic and commercial relations over a year previously, in March 1573 with the Convention of Nymegen. The terms of the agreement, however, were only formalized in late August 1574 – after the progress to Bristol – when Elizabeth and the Duke of Alva (representing Philip II of Spain) signed the Treaty of Bristol. The Treaty restored Anglo-Spanish trade, and agreed “all merchants should be compensated for their losses and that neither ruler should give refuge to the other’s rebels or protect privateers.”38 The Treaty of Bristol, significantly, addressed the concerns declared before the Queen by the child actors during her visit to the city. The city thus achieved its desired outcome; an outcome that was more than likely given an edge by the boys who embodied their city on that August day.

Works Cited Primary Sources Churchyard, Thomas. A Discourse of the Queenes Majesties Entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk. London, 1578. STC 5226. Churchyard, Thomas. The Firste Parte of Churchyardes Chippes, Contayning Twelve Severall Labours. London, 1575. STC 5232. Galloway, David, ed. Records of Early English Drama: Norwich, 1540–1642. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1984. Garter, Bernard. The Joyfull Receyving of the Queenes Most Excellent Majestie into Hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich. London, 1578. STC 11627. Heaton, Gabriel, ed. “Queen Elizabeth’s Entertainments at Bristol, 14–21 August 1574.” In John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, Vol. 2, 1572 to 1578, edited by Elizabeth Goldring, Faith Eales, Elizabeth Clarke, and Jayne Elisabeth Archer, 197–221. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

38 Doran, Elizabeth I and Foreign Policy, 33.

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Marcus, Leah S., Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds. Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. [Mulcaster, Richard]. The Quenes Majesties Passage through the Citie of London to Westminster the Daye before Her Coronacion. London, 1559. STC 7589.5. Warkentin, Germaine, ed. The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage and Related Documents. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004.

Secondary Sources Bell, Ilona. Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Bergeron, David M. English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971. Bertolet, Anna Riehl. “The Tsar and the Queen: ‘You Speak a Language that I Understand Not.’” In The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I, edited by Charles Beem, 101–24. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Brotton, Jerry. This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. London: Allen Lane, 2016. Cole, Mary Hill. The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Collinson, Patrick. “Pulling the Strings: Religion and Politics in the Progress of 1578.” In The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, edited by Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight, 122–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Doran, Susan. Elizabeth I and Foreign Policy, 1558–1603. London: Routledge, 2000. Hyland, Peter. Disguise on the Early Modern Stage. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Lamb, Edel. Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Mamujee, Shehzana. “‘To serve us in that behalf when our pleasure is to call from them’: Performing Boys in Renaissance England.” Renaissance Studies 28, no. 5 (November 2014): 714–30. McCarthy, Jeanne. The Children’s Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater, 1509–1608: Pedagogue, Playwrights, Playbooks, and Play-boys. London: Routledge, 2016. Moylan, Tim. “Advising the Queen: Good Governance in Elizabeth I’s Entries in London, Bristol, and Norwich.” In Elizabeth I and the “Sovereign Arts”: Essays in Literature, History, and Culture, edited by Donald Stump, Linda Shenk, and Carole Levin, 233–50. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011. Norrie, Aidan. “Child Actors in the 1578 Norwich Civic Entertainment.” Shakespeare Bulletin 37, no. 2 (2019): 167–85. Osherow, Michele. Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Rutter, Carol Chillington. Shakespeare and Child’s Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen. London: Routledge, 2007. Shagan, Ethan H. Popular Politics and the English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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Williams, Deanne. “Chastity, Speech, and the Girl Masquer.” In Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England, edited by Richard Preiss and Deanne Williams, 162–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Williams, Deanne. Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Wilson, Jean. Entertainments for Elizabeth I. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980. Witmore, Michael. Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Woodcock, Matthew. Thomas Churchyard: Pen, Sword, and Ego. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

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Chapter 7 “And Huh, Too / For All Your Big Words!”: Language and Multiculturalism in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado In Act 3 of Philip Massinger’s play The Renegado (1624), Gazet, servant to the Venetian gentleman Vitelli, is mocking the renegade pirate Grimaldi on his recent misfortunes in Tunis. Gazet says to him: Now you do not roar, sir; You speak not tempests, nor take ear-rent from A poor shopkeeper. Do you remember that, sir? I wear your marks here still.1

The lines are intended to remind Grimaldi of his formerly rough speech and behavior in the Tunis bazaar, when he interrupted the trading and wrung Gazet violently by the ears. Yet Gazet’s derisive comments assume a wider significance in the context of the play, for it was uncontrolled speech that cost Grimaldi and his band of pirates their fortune in the first place. In an earlier scene, Grimaldi “blasphemed the Ottoman power” (2.5.78) by challenging its military dominance in front of Asambeg, the Viceroy of Tunis, thus prompting the Boatswain to remark, “Would he had been born dumb!” (2.5.92). While Gazet seems to allude to one particular moment of verbal confrontation, then, his lines in fact point to a central theme of The Renegado, which is the potential for words both to seduce and to antagonize, particularly across religious or national borders or edge lines. This chapter explores the relationship between language and multicultural encounter in Massinger’s play. Written for the Cockpit playhouse, The Renegado is a play deeply interested in multiculturalism and cross-cultural contact. It is also a play, although spoken almost entirely in English, about the challenges of communication across national and linguistic edges. While previous criticism has tended to focus on the play’s Anglo-Islamic context and, in particular, its religious conversions, in what follows I concentrate on linguistic identity in The

1 Massinger, The Renegado, 3.2.26–29. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-007

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Renegado and its political and cultural significance.2 Throughout the play, the characters’ speech operates as a site of belonging or exclusion, both problematizing and simultaneously reinforcing broader questions about religious and national identities. Jacques Derrida has done much to demonstrate that, when it comes to languages, the edges or limits that separate the native from the foreign are more fluid than we might like to imagine. He argues that “there are, in one linguistic system, perhaps several languages or tongues.”3 For Derrida, the edges of a language are always blurred and indistinct. As opposed to clear demarcations or limits, we find only “hidden frontiers.”4 Language thus works as an edge that people pass across both knowingly and unknowingly. In this chapter I suggest some of the ways in which linguistic encounters – or edge crossings – complicate the representation of multiculturalism in The Renegado. The language of The Renegado is, on the one hand, yet another site of conflict or distrust that separates the play’s Muslim and Christian interlocutors from one another. On the other hand, the play presents a series of verbal negotiations that encapsulate the seductions of Islam. Cross-cultural encounters in The Renegado, however, ultimately work to secure the English language and its renegade citizens, briefly allured by Islam, away from disgrace and captivity.

The Soundscape of Tunis As The Renegado opens, we discover that the Venetian gentleman, Vitelli, and his servant, Gazet, have disguised themselves as shopkeepers and have come to Tunisia in order to rescue Vitelli’s sister, Paulina, who has been kidnapped by pirates and is now being held captive in the Ottoman seraglio by an infatuated Asambeg.5 While waiting for an opportune moment to rescue her, Vitelli and Gazet intend to start trading in the local marketplace. In the port city of

2 An exception is LaPerle’s article, “Foreign Ornaments and Plain English.” LaPerle offers an analysis of the tensions surrounding ornamental rhetoric in The Renegado, arguing that “The overly ornate is synonymous with the foreign” (86). For further reading on the theme of religious conversion in The Renegado see: Hwang Degenhardt, Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance; Burton, Traffic and Turning; Dimmock, New Turkes; and Fuchs, “Faithless Empires.” On race in the Renaissance, see: Loomba, “Early Modern or Early Colonial?”; Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference; and Raman, “Imaginary Islands.” 3 Derrida, The Ear of the Other, 100. 4 Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 37. 5 See: Yu-Wen Wei, “Polemical Tropes of Captivity.”

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Tunis, however, the bazaar signifies a dangerously multicultural space. Before they enter, Vitelli cautions Gazet with a piece of advice: You are a knave, sir! Leaving your roguery, think upon my business: It is no time to fool now. Remember where you are, too: though this mart time We are allowed free trading and with safety, Temper your tongue and meddle not with the Turks, Their manners nor religion. (1.1.42–48)

Vitelli’s warning to “Temper your tongue and meddle not with the Turks” (1.1.47) alerts us to one of the main concerns of The Renegado, which is the potential for corruption through linguistic contact with those of other faiths and nationalities. As Daniel Vitkus writes of the bazaar in The Renegado, “Within this sphere of commerce and exchange, the desire for profit leads to other lusts and the market becomes a site of temptation and potential contagion.”6 Michael Neill similarly finds that it is “a place of perilous fungibility.”7 This fungible atmosphere is considered to be potentially dangerous to the Christian travelers. As implied by Vitelli’s admonition that Gazet should choose his words with care, language was thought to be particularly vulnerable to contaminating influences. Nabil Matar has demonstrated, for example, that inept speech on the part of early modern Christian travelers might even result in an unintended conversion to Islam: Such close interaction with the Muslims led some Christians living in the Ottoman Empire to use the Arabic and/or Turkish language in their idioms and expressions . . . as a result, the Muslim habit of repeating the Witness (“There is no deity but God and Mohammed is his prophet”) could not but influence some Christians. Hearing the Witness so frequently from Muslim friends and associates, a Christian might repeat it inadvertently: but the witness is the only requirement for conversion in Islam; so, if the Christian stated the Witness while in the presence of Muslims, they would promptly consider him converted.8

In The Renegado, the bazaar is the site of innumerable different types of interaction. But it is the potential slippage across the limits or edges of the language that is especially disquieting for European visitors. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the play, Gazet is seemingly indifferent to the dangers of cross-cultural linguistic encounter and he implies to Vitelli that he will adopt the local way of speaking – or the lingua franca – while they are trading in the bazaar. Having hired a shop, Gazet explains to Vitelli

6 Vitkus, Turning Turk, 158. 7 Neill, “Introduction,” in Massinger, The Renegado, 28. 8 Matar, Islam in Britain, 30.

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his intention to pass off their worthless portraits and other merchandise as luxury imported items: And I have studied speeches for each piece, And, in a thrifty tone to sell ’em off, Will swear by Mahomet and Termagant That this is mistress to the great Duke of Florence That niece to old King Pippin, and a third An Austrian princess by her Roman lip – Howe’er my conscience tells me they are figures Of bawds and common courtesans of Venice. (1.1.6–13)

With his “studied speeches” and “thrifty tone,” Gazet implies that he will integrate himself into the local soundscape of Tunisia. The impression of linguistic acclimatization is emphasized further through Gazet’s Muslim references, and his promise that he will “swear by Mahomet and Termagant” that their cheap bric-a-brac is valuable. On closer inspection, however, Gazet’s word choices produce the contrary effect of establishing an edge or boundary line between himself and the bazaar’s native speakers. Neill points out that in popular belief Mahomet and Termagant were supposed Mahometan idols: just as Mahomet, Maumet or Mammet became the archetypal instance of a false idol (from which the term came to apply to any kind of puppet or doll), so Termagant appeared in medieval plays as a violent, overbearing spirit (from which the word became a hyperbolical term for a roistering bully and, ultimately, for unruly, shrewish women). Gazet’s use of the oath only indicates his ignorance of the Islamic world, about which Massinger’s documentary sources, with their detailed, if often libellous, accounts of the Prophet’s life, had made him relatively well-informed.9

Gazet’s blasphemous distortion of the proper Muslim names in fact only reveals his anti-Islamic sentiment and identifies him even more clearly as a Christian traveler abroad. Certainly, once trading in the bazaar opens and Gazet begins peddling their wares, his earlier determination to blend in with the local speakers is quickly forgotten. While attempting to attract passing customers to their stand, for instance, Gazet calls out: What do you lack? Your choice China dishes, our pure Venetian crystal of all sorts, of all neat and new fashions from the mirror of the madam to the private utensil of her chambermaid, and curious pictures of the rarest beauties of Europa – what do you lack gentlemen? (1.3.1–5)

9 In Massinger, The Renegado, 1.1.8n.

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“What do you lack?” is the “London vendor’s cry,” familiar from Jacobean city comedy, relocating the play away from the Islamic threat.10 Indeed, Gazet’s speech becomes increasingly anglicized as he goes on to say aside to Vitelli: Cold doings, sir. A mart do you call this? ’Slight!! A pudding-wife, or a witch with a thrum cap That sells ale underground to such as come To know their fortunes in a dead vacation, Have ten-to-one more stirring. (1.3.26–30)

Pudding-wives and witches are stock figures from the London inns or playhouses, and the reference to ale is also recognizably English in this context. Furthermore, when Gazet compares the slowness of the trade in the bazaar to a “dead vacation,” he is alluding to London for, as Neill notes, the phrase refers to “the period when the law courts were closed and London was emptied of lawyers and their clients – a notoriously slack time for commerce.”11 Gazet, then, remains stubbornly English in his linguistic mannerisms. The Renegado can also be seen here as responding to contemporary social debates about multiculturalism and, specifically, the issue of language learning. Early modern travel writing often stressed the importance of the traveler acquiring new languages – especially in port cities like Tunisia that were host to diverse language populations. William Biddulph, for instance, wrote of Arabia that “there are here spoken so many several languages as there are several nations here dwelling or sojourning; every nation (amongst themselves) speaking their own language.”12 Thomas Coryate similarly reflected on his grasp of foreign languages by noting that at this time I have many irons in the fire; for I learnt the Persian, Turkish & Arabian tongues, having already gotten the Italian, I thank God. I have been to the Mogul’s Court three months already, and am to tarry here (by God’s holy permission) five months longer, till I have gotten the aforesaid three tongues.13

And yet, while undeniably useful for the purposes of trade and travel in multicultural areas like the Mediterranean, fluency in another language remained somewhat contentious. Janette Dillon argues that “the facility of English speakers in other languages, though it can be a matter of pride in a competitive

10 In Massinger, The Renegado, 1.3.1n. Compare Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Part 2 (1605/6) and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614). 11 In Massinger, The Renegado, 1.3.29n. 12 Biddulph, “The Travels of Certaine Englishmen,” in Parker, Early Modern Tales of Orient, 96. 13 Coryate, quoted in the “Introduction” to Parker, Early Modern Tales of Orient, 5.

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context . . . tends to be suspect.”14 As a result, the obstinacy of English speakers who refuse to adapt linguistically when traveling can function as a source of national pride on stage, as well as humor. Discussing Henry V, Dillon gives the example of how “Pistol’s failure to understand French, like Barnaby Bunch’s failure in The Weakest Goeth to the Wall, is turned into a celebration of stubborn Englishness.”15 Something similar is happening on stage, I suggest, in The Renegado, where Gazet’s frequent allusions to the London cityscape, his archaically English vocabulary (“old King Pippin”), and his slanderous misrepresentation of the Muslim proper names, style him as an obstinate European speaker who refuses to assimilate when traveling abroad. Notwithstanding Vitelli’s cautionary advice about the dangers posed by the culturally diverse bazaar, and the early indications that he and Gazet will adopt the lingua franca in Tunisia, the two Venetian travelers in fact remain clearly differentiated from both their exotic setting and their Muslim counterparts. Instead, linguistic differentiation – and the edge that it creates between the European and Islamic speakers in The Renegado – becomes a powerful source of fantasy.

Voicing Prejudice: The Raging Turk Discussing English theater and multiculturalism in the English Renaissance, Vitkus draws attention to “the gap between the fantasy of dominance in exotic encounters, and the reality of frustration and insolvency.”16 As he goes on to note, “many of the images of Islam that were produced by European culture in the early modern period are imaginary resolutions of real anxieties about Islamic wealth and might.”17 Early modern plays like The Renegado acquire their imaginative force by dramatizing scenarios that dismantle the threat of an imposing Islamic power. On stage, a popular way to bring about a satisfying resolution that reaffirmed European dominance over Islam was to depict Muslim characters converting willingly to Christianity. The Renegado adheres to this pattern and ends with Donusa, niece to the Ottoman Sultan, turning apostate and converting to Christianity before escaping by sea to Venice. As Vitkus and other critics have

14 Dillon, Language and Stage, 183. As Dillon continues, “suspicion of facility in languages is linked to the fear that not all those who look and speak English are truly so. Traitors mask their true identity by fraudulent speaking” (183). 15 Dillon, Language and Stage, 179. 16 Vitkus, Turning Turk, 10. 17 Vitkus, “Early Modern Orientalism,” 210.

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demonstrated, early modern “Turk plays” like The Renegado thus enact fantasies of dominance in cross-cultural encounters.18 What has not yet received scholarly attention, however, is the extent to which the language itself becomes a form of wish fulfillment that emphasizes European superiority at the expense of the play’s Muslim interlocutors. In the next section, I demonstrate how the encounters between Donusa and the Venetian characters express racially charged fantasies of Anglophone superiority. When we first meet Donusa in Act I of The Renegado, she tells her suitor, Mustapha, the Pasha of Aleppo, that she has a longing to visit the local bazaar: Mustapha

A confluence of all nations Are met together. There’s variety too Of all that merchants traffic for.

Donusa

I know not – I feel a virgin’s longing to descend So far from mine own greatness as to be Though not a buyer, yet a looker on Their strange commodities. (1.3.111–17)

Donusa’s curiosity to see “the Christians’ custom / In the venting their commodities” (1.3.102–3) brings her to Gazet and Vitelli’s stand in the bazaar where – in spite of Mustapha’s protestations that their shop contains only “toys and trifles not worth your observing” (1.3.105) – she requests a closer look at the merchandise. Although their wares are only worthless trash, Vitelli launches into a grand sales pitch and, as is made clear from Donusa’s admiring asides, his discourse makes a strong impression on her: Donusa

Pray you show us, friends, The chiefest of your wares

Vitelli

Your ladyship’s servant; And if in worth or title you are more, My ignorance plead my pardon.

Donusa [aside]

He speaks well.

Vitelli [to Gazet] Take down the looking-glass. [to Donusa]

Here is a mirror Steeled so exactly, neither taking from Nor flattering the object it returns To the beholder, that Narcissus might –

18 See: Vitkus, Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England, 1–53.

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And never grow enamoured of himself – View his fair feature in’t. Donusa [aside] Poetical, too! Vitelli

Here China dishes to serve in a banquet, Though the voluptuous Persian sat a guest. Here crystal glasses such as Ganymede Did fill with nectar to the Thunderer When he drank to Alcides and received him In the fellowship of the gods. True to the owners, Corinthian plate studded with diamonds Concealed oft deadly poison; this pure metal So innocent is and faithful to the mistress Or master that possesses it that, rather Than hold one drop that’s venomous, of itself It flies in pieces and deludes the traitor.

Donusa [aside] How movingly could this fellow treat upon A worthy subject, that finds such discourse To grace a trifle! (1.3.106–30)

Donusa’s admiration of Vitelli’s erudite language is a potent moment of idealism on stage. What is most compelling about their exchange is Donusa’s immediate recognition that the visitor sounds different from the bazaar’s native speakers. By implying that the uniqueness and superior grace of Vitelli’s speech is something that can be heard, The Renegado taps into prevalent cultural myths and anxieties regarding the status of early modern English. Ian Smith has persuasively shown how, as a comparatively young language, early modern English was involved in a continual process of self-definition against other languages. Smith gives the example of how reports of the African’s “supposedly barbarous speech” were deliberately deployed in order to try to distance English from its own “persistent reputation as an inelegant, crude language.”19 As Smith puts it, early modern English relied on an “anxious mobilization of language to demonstrate a coming of age in vernacular achievement in order to dispatch its own barbarous linguistic past.”20 The derision of foreign languages as barbarous or else cobbled together from multiple dialects was, as Smith notes, a conscious attempt to reclaim early modern English from analogous accusations. Thus, Biddulph writes that “as the Turks’ religion is a mixed religion compounded of many religions, so is their language also a medley language or (as I may say) a linsey woolsy religion and language, compounded of many other languages,

19 Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance, 16. See also: Iyengar, Shades of Difference. 20 Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance, 8.

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wherein nothing is written.”21 William Lithgow also comments of the Turks that “They borrow from the Persian their words of state; from the Arabic their words of religion; from the Greeks their terms of war; and from the Italian their words and titles of navigation.”22 Such statements are indicative of the sensitivity towards the early modern English vernacular, composed as it was of innumerable loan words from foreign dialects. An important part of this ongoing process of self-definition meant emphasizing the purity and wholeness of early modern English when compared against other languages like the “linsey woolsy” Turkish. The Renegado stages this fantasy through the evident pleasure that Donusa takes from listening to Vitelli’s speeches. Her effusive praise for his way of speaking effectively draws an edge around the English language, imbuing it with a sense of uniqueness that it lacked in reality. The idea that the European traveler abroad will discourse in such a way as to attract the flattering attentions of the Muslim niece of the Ottoman Sultan is, of course, a powerful form of wish fulfillment. This becomes clearer later in the scene when Donusa unveils herself to Vitelli who is astonished at her beauty and excuses himself momentarily from her presence. Determining to “bring you to yourself” (1.3.145) Donusa then starts breaking the glassware in his shop: Mustapha

Ha! What’s the matter?

Gazet [aside] My master’s ware? We are undone! Oh, strange! A lady to turn roarer and break glasses? ’Tis time to shut up shop, then. (1.3.145–48)

Linda McJannet has argued that “The most common pejorative western stereotype for the Ottomans was ‘the raging Turk.’”23 Of the epithet “raging,” she notes that “This sense of the word conveys extreme, uncontrollable emotion – wrath, grief, frustration, or a combination of all three – often leading to violence, even self-destructive violence.”24 When Donusa “turn[s] roarer” and breaks the glasses in Vitelli’s shop, she embodies crude European stereotypes about the emotional, uncouth Turkish interlocutor. Although Donusa’s violent outburst is plainly only a pretext to invite Vitelli to the palace to “receive court payment” (1.3.168) or reimbursement for his broken glassware, Donusa’s momentary personification of

21 Biddulph, “The Travels of Certaine Englishmen,” in Parker, Early Modern Tales of Orient, 96. 22 Lithgow, “The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Adventures,” in Parker, Early Modern Tales of Orient, 159. 23 McJannet, The Sultan Speaks, 17. 24 McJannet, The Sultan Speaks, 18.

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the “raging Turk” stereotype extends the fantasy that the Christian speakers are not only morally superior, but also superior in the very sound of their language. The Renegado’s prejudices regarding the dominance of the English language are emphasized again in Act 3 of the play, when Donusa rudely rejects her former suitor, Mustapha. Left stunned by her discourteous greeting, Mustapha falls silent, which then leads Donusa to mock him for having lost his faculties of speech: Come you here to stare? If you have lost your tongue and use of speech, Resign your government. There’s a mute’s place void In my uncle’s court, I hear; and you may work me To write for your preferment. (3.1.35–39)

Her idea that Mustapha might apply for the vacant mute’s place at court is symbolically castrating, and anticipates the ending of The Renegado when Asambeg, the Viceroy of Tunis, is left silenced with rage. Upon learning that Donusa has escaped on a ship to Venice in the company of the Christians, Asambeg says: O my credulity! I am too full Of grief and rage to speak ... I will hide This head among the deserts or some cave Filled with my shame and me, where I alone May die without a partner in my moan. (5.8.32–39)

These uneasy silences in the play attest to the violence behind multicultural encounters. When pressed by Mustapha to explain the reason for her abrupt displeasure at his courtship, Donusa launches into the following tirade: How deserved? I have considered you from head to foot, And can find nothing in that wainscot face That can teach me to dote; nor am I taken With your grim aspect or tadpole-like complexion; Those scars you glory in, I fear to look on, And had much rather hear a merry tale That all your battles won with blood and sweat – Though you belch forth the stink too, in the service And swear by your mustachios all is true. (3.1.46–55)

In this racially motivated rebuff of Mustapha’s wooing, Donusa establishes a tripartite association between her suitor’s rude way of expressing himself, the

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barbarous subject matter of his war stories, and his black skin. Displacing onto one of the play’s North African speakers the residual anxiety that early modern English was a vulgar and unpolished language, Donusa’s speech ably captures what Smith has referred to as “the shifting interrelation between colour and language as racial markers over time.”25 By disparaging Mustapha’s tales of “battles won with blood and sweat” as well as his grotesquely somatic delivery – “Though you belch forth the stink too” – Donusa articulates her prejudice that the visitors from Venice are infinitely more refined in speech and mannerisms than the local inhabitants of Tunisia. Repeatedly, then, The Renegado presents its audience with a powerful fantasy of English linguistic and somatic superiority.

The Shibboleth In the final section of this chapter, I offer one more example of how The Renegado implies the superior ability of the Europeans to thrive in the multicultural setting of Tunis. After she breaks their glassware, Donusa passes on to Gazet the following instructions about how Vitelli may claim his financial reimbursement from her at the palace: Bid him bring his bill Tomorrow to the palace and inquire For one “Donusa”: that word gives him passage Through all the guard. (1.3.158–61)

From these lines we learn that Donusa’s name will function as a password, or shibboleth, thus permitting Vitelli safe passage through the heavily guarded Ottoman palace. As the action of The Renegado moves from the public space of the bazaar to the clandestine interior of the seraglio, it is the shibboleth that now encapsulates the play’s central fantasy that the European protagonists will ultimately triumph over the Muslim authorities. Discussing the biblical tradition of the word “shibboleth,” Derrida notes “it acquired the value of a password. It was used during or after war, at the crossing of a border under watch. The word mattered less for its meaning than for the way in which it was pronounced.”26 Derrida gives an example from the Hebrew Bible of how this pronunciation test became entangled in a discriminatory politics:

25 Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance, 10. 26 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” 399.

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The Ephraimites had been defeated by the army of Jephthah; in order to keep the soldiers from escaping across the river (shibboleth also means river, of course, but that is not necessarily the reason it was chosen), each person was required to say shibboleth. Now the Ephraimites were known for their inability to pronounce correctly the shi of shibboleth, which became for them, in consequence, an “unpronounceable name”; they said sibboleth, and, at that invisible border between shi and si, betrayed themselves to the sentinel at the risk of death.27

In this account, the difference in pronunciation is weaponized by the army of Jephthah and it becomes an effective means of rooting out the Ephraimites, who are considered the outsiders to this language system. When manipulated as a pronunciation test, the shibboleth puts edges or borderlines around the language that only those with the correct pronunciation can negotiate. In The Renegado, Vitelli’s infiltration of the Ottoman palace also depends on his ability to pronounce the shibboleth “Donusa” correctly. In successfully doing so, he is able to pass over the edges of an unfamiliar language, at the same time that he physically moves past each threshold or checkpoint inside the seraglio. The correct pronunciation of new words and languages was considered an important issue in the early modern period. John Gallagher has shown that early modern readers . . . and the authors of the pedagogical texts they used, were keenly aware of the importance of speech to language learning. They understood the necessity of pronouncing a new language correctly and learning to speak with a “correct” or prestigious accent.28

Gallagher also points out that early modern people judged each other based not simply on the language they spoke but also on the way that they spoke it. The sound of speech was the basis for the pigeonholing of speakers within hierarchies of gender, status, nationality and/or regionality, and age.29

Noticeable discrepancies in word pronunciation enabled the social stratification of different communities of language users in the early modern period. Moreover, the adroitness of English nationals at pronouncing new or foreign words accurately was considered by some writers to be a reason for patriotic pride. In The Survey of Cornwall, for instance, Richard Carew argues for the superior pronunciation skills of native English speakers. He notes that English nationals are so proficient at learning new languages that they are able to

27 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” 399–400. 28 Gallagher, “To Heare It by Mouth,” 63. 29 Gallagher, “To Heare It by Mouth,” 86. Gallagher also notes that “the ability to speak with a prestige accent conferred social capital on the speaker” (65). See also: Fox and Woolf, The Spoken Word.

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converse fluently and, what is more, without ever revealing to the listener a trace of their own nationality or accent: For easye learning of other Languages by ours, lett these serve as prooffes; there are many Italyan wordes which the Frenchmen cannot pronounce, as accio, for which hee sayes ashio; many of the French which the Italian cann hardly come awaye withall, as bayller, chagrin, postillon; many in ours which neither of them cann utter, as Hedge, Water. Soe that a straunger though never soe long conversant amongest us carryeth evermore a watch woorde uppon his tongue to descrye him by, but turne ann Inglishmann at any time of his age into what countrey soever, alloweing him dew respite, and you shall see him perfitt soe well that the Imitation of his utteraunce will in nothing differ from the patterne of that native Languadge: the wante of which towardnes cost the Ephramites their skynnes.30

Carew also mentions the biblical example of the Ephraimites being unable to pronounce the word “shibboleth” correctly, but here the intention is to make an unflattering point about the inferior capabilities of non-native speakers to negotiate the edges of the English language. As Carew writes, “Soe that a straunger though never soe long conversant amongest us carryeth evermore a watch woorde uppon his tongue to descrye him by.” The disquieting implication is that the imperfect pronunciation of the English language by foreign nationals immediately identifies the speaker as an outsider. In contrast, Carew presents the reader with an idealized scenario in which English subjects are able to pronounce foreign words so faultlessly as to even elude detection by native speakers. In Act 2 of The Renegado, then, Vitelli makes his way through the palace, repeating Donusa’s name at each new threshold or security checkpoint as he has been instructed: Aga

Stand! The word? Or, being a Christian, to press thus far Forfeits thy life.

Vitelli

‘Donusa.’

Aga

Pass in peace. Exeunt Aga and Janizaries.

Vitelli [aside] What a privilege her name bears! ’Tis wondrous strange! The Captain of the Janizaries! If the great officer, The guardian of the inner port, deny not – Kapiaga

Thy warrant? Speak, or thou art dead.

30 Carew, The Survey of Cornwall, 7–8.

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Vitelli

‘Donusa.’

Kapiaga

That protects thee: without fear, enter. So – [calling offstage] discharge the watch.

(2.2.10–18)

Donusa’s name works as a shibboleth, allowing Vitelli freedom of movement through even the most secret interiors of the Ottoman palace. The dramatization of trespassing on the part of the European character here deliberately appeals to the voyeurism of an early modern audience fascinated by the hidden spaces of the seraglio. Vitkus notes that English descriptions that fixate on the sultan’s seraglio are symptomatic of English anxieties about foreign imperial power. The sultan’s harem was the hub of the world’s greatest empire, an empire whose power, discipline and masculine order were said to be enforced by extreme cruelty; but at the same time, the sultan’s palace was allegedly the locus classicus for effeminate luxury, hidden sensuality, and sexual excess.31

For a European national like Vitelli to use the shibboleth to gain access to the seraglio – a place of erotic mystery – is to score a symbolic victory over an intimidating opponent. For Derrida, the shibboleth is intimately associated with geographical movement. He writes that it can only take on meaning in relation to a place. By place, I mean just as much the relation to a border, country, house, or threshold, as any site, any situation in general from which, pragmatically, alliances are formed, contracts, codes and conventions established.32

The connection to architectural spaces or edge lines is crucial because, as Derrida goes on to say of the shibboleth, “it speaks in effect of the threshold, of the crossing of the threshold (Schwelle), of that which permits one to pass or to cross, to transfer from one threshold to another.”33 In The Renegado, Vitelli’s correct pronunciation of the shibboleth “Donusa” permits him to negotiate a number of edge lines that consequently take him deeper inside the Ottoman palace. The play thus stages a series of edge crossings, both linguistic and topographical, that demonstrate the outsider’s dominance over the local inhabitants

31 Vitkus, Turning Turk, 115. Vitkus also draws attention to the sense of voyeurism which characterized English consumers of Ottoman culture: “The sultan’s seraglio was a particular obsession with Western describers of Turkish culture, and the early modern reports and translations that depict the Turks and their customs dwell voyeuristically in the forbidden space of the sultan’s harem” (116). See also: Hayden, “‘Turkish Dames’ and ‘English Mastiffs.’” 32 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” 407. 33 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” 409.

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of Tunisia. Eventually arriving at Donusa’s private apartments inside the palace, Vitelli asks his hostess whether she is The owner of that blessed name “Donusa,” Which, like a potent charm – although pronounced By my profane but much unworthier tongue – Hath brought me safe to this forbidden place Where Christian yet ne’er trod? (2.4.29–33)

The lines remind us of the guard’s earlier warning to Vitelli that a violent death would usually await any Christian who dared to trespass so far inside Ottoman territory. While Vitelli is permitted to enter the seraglio, the risk of execution recalls the biblical example of the shibboleth, and the violence and exclusionary politics of language systems.

The Renegado and the Edge of English It has long been recognized that The Renegado stages a fantasy of European dominance in cross-cultural encounters with the Islamic East. What I have shown in this chapter, however, is the hitherto underappreciated role that language plays in these fantasies of Christian superiority. In The Renegado, the edges of the language operate as a gateway and – at times – as a barrier to multiculturalism. In Act 3 of the play, for instance, when Donusa attempts to seduce him for a second time, Vitelli says: I will stop Mine ears against these charms, which, if Ulysses Could live again and hear this second siren – Though bound with cables to his mast, his ship too Fastened with all her anchors – this enchantment Would force him, in despite of all resistance, To leap into the sea and follow her, Although destruction with outstretched arms, Stood ready to receive him. (3.5.20–28)

The lines allude to the classical myth of Ulysses who only resisted the song of the sirens by having his crewmates bind him to the ship’s mast. In The Renegado, Vitelli’s ability to withstand Donusa’s erotic seduction offers an idealized portrayal of Christian resoluteness. His steadfastness – and the ability to place an edge line between himself and her tempting words – assumes greater significance near the end of the play when Donusa attempts to convert Vitelli to Islam. Watching the scene, Asambeg comments:

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Let us hear this temptress. The fellow looks as he would stop his ears Against her powerful spells. (4.3.56–58)

In a moment of heightened dramatic tension that blends together the erotic and religious seductions of Islam, Vitelli resists the pressure to convert and, instead, manages to persuade Donusa to convert to Christianity. The Renegado thus ends on another fantasy of Christian superiority as the alluring words of Islam here fall on deaf ears. In the context of the multiple conversions to Islam that in fact took place in the early modern Mediterranean,34 The Renegado presents us with a powerful form of wish fulfillment.

Works Cited Primary Sources Carew, Richard. The Survey of Cornwall, and An Epistle Concerning the Excellencies of the English Tongue. London, 1769. Massinger, Philip. The Renegado. Edited by Michael Neill. London: Methuen Drama, 2010. Parker, Kenneth, ed. Early Modern Tales of Orient: A Critical Anthology. London: Routledge, 1999. Vitkus, Daniel J., ed. Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Secondary Sources Akhimie, Patricia. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. New York: Routledge, 2018. Burton, Jonathan. Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida. Edited by Christie McDonald. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. The Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan.” In Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 370–72. London: Routledge, 1992. Dillon, Janette. Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

34 For more on this, see: Vitkus, Turning Turk.

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Dimmock, Matthew. New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Fox, Adam, and Daniel Woolf, eds. The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500–1850. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Fuchs, Barbara. “Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes and the English Nation.” English Literary Renaissance 67 (2000): 45–69. Gallagher, John. “‘To Heare It by Mouth’: Speech and Accent in Early Modern Language Learning.” Huntington Library Quarterly 82, no. 1 (2019): 63–86. Hayden, Judy A. “‘Turkish Dames’ and ‘English Mastiffs’: The ‘Turk’ and the Female Body in Massinger’s The Renegado.” The Seventeenth Century 28, no. 4 (2013): 349–61. Hwang Degenhardt, Jane. Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Iyengar, Sujata. Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Colour in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. LaPerle, Carol Mejia. “‘Unclothe me of sin’s gay trappings’: Foreign Ornaments and Plain English in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado.” Cahiers Élisabéthains 94, no. 1 (2017): 74–92. Loomba, Ania. “Early Modern or Early Colonial?” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2014): 143–48. Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. McJannet, Linda. The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Raman, Shankar. “Imaginary Islands: Staging the East.” Renaissance Drama 26 (1995): 131–61. Smith, Ian. Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Vitkus, Daniel. “Early Modern Orientalism: Representations of Islam in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe.” In Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other, edited by David Blanks and Michael Frassetto, 207–31. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Yu-Wen Wei, Teresa. “Polemical Tropes of Captivity in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado.” Cahiers Élisabéthains 75, no. 1 (2009): 33–42.

Jeffrey McCambridge

Chapter 8 Inherited Insecurities and the Staging of Alterity: Islam in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine It is not good that the monsters live among us.1 —Ambro ise Paré, Des Monstres et Prodiges Hell is empty and all the devils are here.2 —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

In the twelfth century, Peter of Montboissier – also known as Peter the Venerable – commissioned the translation of a series of Arabic-language Islamic texts into Latin. Collectively, this series is known today as the Toledan Collection after the Spanish city in which the translations were undertaken. The Toledan Collection is the first major Western attempt to study and refute Islam – known as the Lex Mahomet – ostensibly on its own terms.3 Chief among commissioned translations was the Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete [The Law of Mahumet the false prophet], the first Latin translation of the Holy Text of Islam, the Qur’an. While the texts of the Toledan Collection established and validated many tropes in Christian Europe’s understandings of Islam, what is particularly unique about the collection for this study is paratextual. Within the Toledan Collection is De generatione Mahumet et nutritura eius, a biography of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad that is accompanied by an image of a monster with the body of a fish and the face of a man. Unlike other medieval manuscript illustrations that frame the texts they comment upon from the margins, the fish-monster emerges from the bottom line and penetrates upward, embedding himself into the paragraph and forcing the words to shift around his sloping form in quiet 1 From the critical edition by Jean Céard. The original text appears as a footnote. Translations are my own. 2 Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.213–14. 3 I use the term Lex Mahomet, or Law of Mahomet, when referring to the version of Islam that existed within the medieval and early modern Western scholastic and popular imagination to differentiate it from the actual religion. I also use the word Saracen, borrowed again from medieval and early modern writers, in place of Muslim, for the same reason. It is important to note that I apply these terms to Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays because of their historical meaning but also acknowledge that the Marlowe canon uses neither Saracen nor Lex Mahomet to describe Muslims or Islam, and regardless of the reason for this absence, it separates him from his predecessors and contemporaries. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-008

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accommodation. The fish-monster’s body is inscribed in a vermillion hue that stands in contrast with the brown lettering that surrounds him, trapping him within the confines of his fictional biographical sketch. Vermillion letters also provide the ominous labeling for the monster: Mahumeth.4 The invasive fishmonster simulates both the historical Islamic Prophet Muhammad (regardless of the historical veracity of the textual content) as well as the Lex Mahomet, i.e., Islam, which forcibly occupies the page, not unlike the popular perception, contemporary with the production of the manuscript, that Islam had forcibly penetrated and occupied the Holy Land. The fish-monster image presents a version of the Prophet’s body that is misshapen, unnatural, and a hybrid to parallel the content of the biography his form displaces. The fish-monster is not a physical monster, but is instead a spiritual monster who hybridizes and conflates elements of Christianity, Judaism, and paganism, and in the process creates an image of Islam as false, carnal, self-serving, heretical Christian sect. The monstrous body of Mahumeth – an inversion of Christ’s heavenly body – signals Islam’s ideological corruptions to invalidate Islamic territorial expansion not only into the Holy Land but also into Spain, Italy, Hungary, and other edges and European border regions as well as the formerly Roman Middle East and North Africa. To vilify Muslims, or Saracens as they were called in Christian literature, authors monsterized religious and ethnic alterity within their texts, and as early modern physician Ambroise Paré warns in his medical writings that also serve as the epigraph, it is not good that the monsters live among us. The fish-monster remains important to the study of Islam in the West not only because it is the earliest attested image of the Prophet Muhammad from a Western, non-Islamic source, but because it also exemplifies patterns in Western and Christian representations of Islamic alterity as hybrid, or monstrous, where the ostensibly inherent corruptions of Islamic spiritual alterity are inscribed across the Muslim body and coded as ideological corruption. Unlike the cynocephalus Saracens of medieval romance, whose dog-heads impede speech and rational thought, the danger of Mahumeth the fish-monster rests in his human-like visage, which implies his capacity to imitate rational thought and human speech, not unlike the polyglot Donestre of the Old English “Wonders of the East,” who

4 De generatione Machumet et nutritura eius. Within the manuscript, he is primarily referred to as Mahumet, although his name is also spelled Mahumeth (fol. 140r) and Machometh (fol. 172v). Also included in the Toledan Collection are Peter the Venerable’s Writings Against the Saracens, letters in which he argues that the Saracens form a heretical sect that can be dismissed much in the way that Augustine found and discredited heresies. For a brief but detailed discussion of the fish-monster from De generatione, see Avinoam Shalem’s introduction to Constructing the Image of Muhammad in Europe.

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lure wanderers to them with news of home only to consume them. The fishmonster’s incongruent body and the messages he produces are warnings that testify to the truth of the Christian faith it parodies and its own error.5 The Saracens are a useful archetype in European literature because they can be a placeholder for any inconvenient projection or fantasy of abject alterity that exaggerates and mitigates real-world anxieties during the Crusader eras, which extend well into the early modern period. A Saracen may represent a Muslim but is not a Muslim; the Lex Mahomet is not Islam but is used to represent the religion redefined as Christian heresy. This representational instability complicates any historical reading of Islam in Western literature, and Arnold Hottlinger may well have been correct in his assertion that Islam has never truly existed for the Christian West.6 Because the terms used to represent Islamic alterity in the late Middle Ages and early modern periods never actually refer to Islam directly, they are incredibly flexible, allowing Saracens to be quasi-Christian or conflated with Jews as well as to fully embrace non-descript pagan traditions that are obviously criminal from a Christian perspective.7 Regardless of the Saracenic paradigm used, Saracens are always coded as incompatible with Christian norms. Textual representations of Islam and Muslims as culturally as well as ethnically foreign continued in medieval romance and theological works and paralleled artistic representations, but it was not until the rise in drama during the early modern period that Western, especially English, textual and artistic fantasies about Islamic alterity combined and took physical form and were allowed space to move – and die – on the stage. Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays uniquely employ and critique these medieval assumptions and inspire the series of Turkish plays that follow. In this chapter, I show how Marlowe’s plays settle religious, social, and political anxieties about Turkish ascendency by historically remembering, and then physically dismembering, paradigmatic

5 In his “Monster Culture,” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that cultures produce monsters that reflect collective fears, anxieties, and desires that are projected onto bodies that are coded as monstrous as a type of scapegoat that can then be killed. Unfortunately, since the monster is a projection of the culture that generated it, the monster always returns. His general theory of the West’s generation of monsters works well when applied to the medieval and early modern fear of and fascination with the East. 6 Hottlinger, Die Länder des Islam, 1–9. 7 The Croxton Play of the Sacrament conflates Jewish populations and Saracenic traits, such as swearing in the name of Mahomet. Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend gives a biography of Mahomet in which he is a pagan who is tutored in religion by a disgraced Christian monk seeking revenge against the Church.

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representations of Saracenic authorities on the Elizabethan stage. The Tamburlaine plays recognize the Saracenic East not as a monolithic whole but as a series of fragmented, though powerful, states that are as diverse as postReformation, Christian, European nations. To settle schism-induced anxieties that show Europe to be divided, weak, and warring from within, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine looks to the opposing side of the binary, where the titular Tamburlaine conquers and unites the disparate Saracenic nations before his aggressive rule implodes and leaves the simulacrum of an Islamic empire vulnerable and in decline. In order to accomplish this, I first trace late medieval representations of Saracens and the Lex Mahomet that emphatically characterize the abject alterity of the Saracens and their faith and that help establish some of the tropes Marlowe capitalizes upon in his Tamburlaine plays. This brief history of English literature dealing with Saracens leads into a discussion of how Tamburlaine functions within his own play as a quasi-Saracenic character who declares war on Saracenic authorities. Both sections continue the discussion begun with the fish-monster to show how Marlowe deploys the same monsterizing tropes as medieval and early modern Christian theologians and literary authors to repackage the historical Turco-Mongol Tīmūr-i Lang as the fictional Scythian Tamburlaine, the romantic, pastoral, Asiatic emperor and conqueror who can both thrill and delight English audiences through hyperbolic rhetoric, exoticism, and violent conquest of non-Christian bodies and territories. The Tamburlaine plays are a useful anchor for this discussion because they recognize complexities in Saracenic ethnicity and hegemonies but also eliminate them through violent conquest, mitigating the anxieties that the plays respond to. Tamburlaine’s grandiose, romantic rhetoric contributes to his general appeal despite his obvious danger as a Scythian warlord and follower of the Turkish Mahomet, but because his violence is focused on Islamic authorities, Tamburlaine is a useful, if reluctant, ally for a Europe whose territorial, economic, and ideological edges are threatened by Islamic expansion.

Saracens in the English Literary Tradition Due to the rapid expansion of Islam out of the Arabian Peninsula, beyond the edge of the classical world, the ideology driving Islamic expansion became a concern for Christian authorities who were still establishing their ascendency over Europe. With few exceptions, Saracens were presented in literature as hostile hordes that formed a diverse-yet-united collective. Quite often the Saracens of European fiction had political ascendency and numerical strength despite

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being inept leaders and warriors. Unlike their rival Franks, they lack tactical skill and patience, as well as the greatest weapon of all: faith in Jesus Christ.8 While some medieval romances boast a surprising number of manuscripts, they lack a definite author and date of composition, leaving a window of centuries during which any given piece was written. Questions of authorship notwithstanding, the relative popularity of the following works testifies to their ability to resonate with audiences in various locations, at different times, and over diverse issues centered on or around “the Saracenic problem” that finds some resolution in Part II of Tamburlaine. These Saracenic romances form a tradition within European literature that informs Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays and the discussion about them that follows because Tamburlaine employs the same or similar representational tropes but also marks distinct changes in storytelling about Islamic alterity between the late Middle Ages and early modern writings. Principal among these changes is making the Saracenic Tamburlaine a selfdestructive anti-hero who combats other Saracenic authorities (unconsciously) on behalf of the Christian West, a problematic insider status embodied in his epitaph: The Scourge of God, a title used to refer to him more than two dozen times between the two plays. In late medieval English literature and its continental counterparts, Saracens are used to tell stories that are inherently historical, but like the biography of Mahomet in William Langland’s Piers Plowman,9 the Saracenic narrative serves – at least – a dual purpose. The historical nature of the Saracen in literature means the Saracenic narrative is ostensibly based in fact and often can be corroborated by a number of chronicles, theological treatises, and other non-fiction writings. Their historical nature also relegates his strength to past moments (usually moments in which his strength wavered and his battles were lost) and subsumes the Saracen and his (fictional) history to a Christian Creation-to-Doomsday eschatological framework, where he plays the role of heretic, pagan, and instrument of divine retribution. Conversely, the Saracenic narrative also testifies to the centrality and authenticity of Christianity, strengthened by the ethos of history – and also often witnessed through the mouths of the Saracens themselves who accuse their god Mahomet of sleeping when they need him most – and serving as a scapegoat that reflects and answers for the perceived shortcomings of the

8 Arabic language literature from the Crusader era also relies on binaries, separating the Islamic al-Mūminūn, or Believers, from the European al-Firinjīah (pl. of al-Faranj), or Franks. 9 B-Text “Passus XV,” C-Text “Passus XVIII.” He is referred to alternatively as Mahon, Mahoun, Makamed, and Makamede within the poem. More work is needed to see if there are patterns to naming the literary counterpart to the Prophet in Langland’s poem generally, and within the three textual variants.

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Christian community. As such, Saracens and the Lex Mahomet have been of great cultural use as a milestone for Christian deviance without the burden of accurately portraying the complexities of Islam or of Muslims. From their earliest use in Western literature, Saracens existed only in relation to Christians, usually as an inversion, and as such their representational value was in their ability to critique Christianity by proxy and as seen through Christian eyes. Langland’s Saracens are paradoxically more pious and devout in their faith than Langland’s Christian audience despite the Saracen’s wicked, carnal faith;10 Dante’s Saracens include jurists, philosophers, and theologians who signal an engagement with the classical world the poet may have seen lacking in his own Christian scholastic community;11 Martin Luther writes that the Pope may as well be a Turk because their practices are similar,12 while the English John Foxe’s Turks are indistinguishable from the Pope.13

Dismantling Paradigmatic Islamic Authorities Saracenic authorities follow slightly different paradigms that are rarely featured together within the same text. Tamburlaine’s use of multiple forms of Saracenic government makes Marlowe’s plays unique, and shows the Saracenic territories to be divided, even in their unity. Scholars Daniel Vitkus,14 Nabil Matar,15 and Rhoads Murphey16 have studied the rise and expansion of the Ottoman Turkish Empire during Europe’s early modern period and shown that the perceived threat of Turkish expansion was a source of great anxiety for English and other

10 See: Langland, Piers Plowman, B-Text “Passus XV,” and C-Text “Passus XVIII.” 11 Alighieri, Inferno, 128, 132. 12 Luther, “On War against the Turk.” 13 Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 569. 14 Vitkus, Turning Turk, argues that the “titillating, blasphemous edge” of Marlowe’s drama is a reflection of the times, which were characterized by the paradoxes of religious discourse engendered by the Reformation – theologically existential problems projected onto the figure of the Turk (45). 15 Matar, Islam in Britain, demonstrates that Islam was not always seen as a hostile and alien force, and conversions and valuable intellectual exchanges (as well as adversarial hostilities and assumptions) were not uncommon. 16 In Ottoman Warfare, Murphey breaks down the relationships between the many parts of the Ottoman military, providing a type of poetics to Ottoman recruitment, spending, provisioning, and political framework for Ottoman militarism. He also examines the social and psychological aspects of the Ottoman military, including troop motivation, religious motives, and the views and receptions of the Ottoman military from Ottoman historians.

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European populations. Marlowe’s plays draw on this anxiety about Saracenic alterity and pit the Scythian Tamburlaine, who “thought [that Mahomet was] a God,”17 against the other Saracenic kingdoms that he conquers, building his strength, in his quest against the Turkish Bajazeth in Part I and Bajazeth’s son Callapine in Part II. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays tell a fictional history in which the Turks are interrupted in their seizure of Constantinople, limiting Turkish power by humiliating and eliminating Bajazeth’s dynasty. The Tamburlaine plays fit into a framework of early modern history-making in which the past is reassessed to reflect contemporary anxieties that can be acted and represented on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. The plays allow the anxiety-inducing Saracenic bodies to be historically remembered and physically dismembered before the audience while also signaling larger political shifts such as the sometimes violent schism of the Reformation and constant calls to arms against heresies within and pagans from outside the fold of true Christianity, a vexed distinction in Elizabethan England. Like Richard III or Old Hamlet, Tamburlaine is a warrior king who battles other warrior kings and builds authority in a complex negotiation of strength, cunning, popularity, and (sometimes) piety, and like Richard III and Old Hamlet, he is replaced by cunning politicians and Machiavellian manipulators who forge strength through other complex negotiations and indirect attacks. Tamburlaine explores a fantasy of the exotic, political, and violently unstable East, where power can be seized through strong arms and persuasive rhetoric that acknowledges both what is understood as natural in an English, reforming Christian context, as well as what is natural for the hot-blooded, passionate Saracens. In this way, the accepted fictional history of Tamburlaine’s rise from common-born highwayman to Persian emperor is not structurally dissimilar from the accepted fictional history of Mahomet’s own violent political ascension among the Arabs nearly a millennium prior, with the primary difference between the two being that Mahomet, sometimes, relies on a disgraced Christian bishop named Sergius who teaches him scriptures and helps him counterfeit his miracles and that Tamburlaine is strong enough to bend people to his will by power of arms. What makes Tamburlaine unique is that Saracenic authority is not strictly in the hands of either the Arabs or Ottomans, but instead the play recognizes that Saracenic authority is spread across North Africa, Central Asia, Persia, Arabia, and Turkey and that in each location, and with each ruler within that location, the nature and exercise of authority is different.

17 Marlowe, II Tamburlaine, 5.1.175.

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These complexities in Saracenic authority are reflected in Tamburlaine’s status as a tool that has been weaponized against other Saracenic authorities, which is condensed in his epitaph: The Scourge of God. This is a vexed title whose use to describe the Ottomans had put Martin Luther in contention with other theologians who took issue with the problems of framing a religious and political enemy as a divine punishment because resisting divine forces – which for Luther were the Ottomans – is the same as resisting God himself.18 While the term Scourge of God may have been a problem for Martin Luther, it reinforces medieval Christian traditions of understanding the Lex Mahomet not as Islam, a separate religion within the same Abrahamic framework and which holds many of the same prophets and values in common with Christianity, but instead as a heresy originating from within Christianity and which can therefore be argued against in Christian terms, like the fish-monster of the Toledan Collection. Marlowe’s titular character reassesses the functions of Saracens in English literature because he is on the edge of the Saracen identity and threatens both Saracen and Christian alike, as his title The Scourge of God implies. Tamburlaine begins the plays as a Scythian warlord, or shepherd, in I Tamburlaine 1.2, where he walks onto stage for the first time, leading the captive Zenocrate, daughter of the Egyptian Sultan, and her chaperone lords along with their captured treasure, but he ends the plays as the late emperor of the consolidated Saracenic territories. Exactly how Tamburlaine takes Zenocrate captive is absent from the play, but this scene is important because it inspires and enables Tamburlaine to begin his transition from warlord to emperor. It is revealed that the Turkish emperor [Bajazeth] wrote Zenocrate papers of safe passage through Scythia, meaning that Scythia – a common reference point in Shakespeare’s plays for wild, untamed, monstrous lands19– is contested, lawless territory on the edge of two known Saracen empires, Ottoman Turkey and Persia. In these lawless borderlands on the edges of empires, Tamburlaine has the power to countermand “these letters and commandes” because here, in lawless Scythia, Tamburlaine is the “greater man.”20 Zenocrate initially challenges Tamburlaine’s claims to greatness through her use of the informal thou and by addressing him as if he were a shepherd, but appears to fall in love with the Central Asian warlord while in his custody.21 As

18 See: Luther, “On War against the Turk,” where he addresses this question throughout. 19 Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, Part I, and King Lear all contain references to Scythia as the home of abject barbarity. 20 Marlowe, I Tamburlaine, 1.2.21–22. 21 Marlowe, I Tamburlaine, 1.2.7–8.

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a common-born shepherd and warlord, Tamburlaine is unable to command Zenocrate’s respect based on his status and even his proposal of marriage is delayed, happening sometime between Parts I and II.22 It is during this early scene that Tamburlaine removes his shepherd’s weeds and first dons battle armor, marking the first of many Timurid-transformations, here from pastoral shepherd (and brigand) to soldier.23 Suitably armored, the Scythian warlord is equipped to extend his authority; this and the series of elaborate crowning scenes testify that sometimes the clothes do make the man. After seeing Tamburlaine, brilliant in his new armor and surrounded by shining gold that both shows his spoils and redirects the sunlight into Theridamas’s eyes, Theridamas says: A Scythian Shepheard, so imbellished With Natures pride, and richest furniture? His looks do menace heaven and dare the Gods, His fierie eies are fixt upon the earth, As if he now devis’d some Stratageme.24

Theridamas sees nobility in Tamburlaine in Scythia that is confirmed when Tamburlaine refuses to seize the crown from the unarmed, militaristically inept Persian emperor, Mycetes, whom he teases but otherwise does not harm. Mycetes all too late realizes that the Scythian braggard who called him a coward for fleeing the field when kings themselves make war is indeed the mighty Tamburlaine.25 The scene ends with the sounding of war trumpets and Mycetes running offstage; the next scene opens with Tamburlaine presenting the freshly won Persian crown to Cosroe, fulfilling his coup. The acquisition of the Persian crown after then betraying and defeating Cosroe marks a shift in Tamburlaine’s authority by entering the dynastic tradition, not unlike Mahomet when he crowned himself prophet-king through guile and force of arms. With the Persian crown in hand, the nature of Tamburlaine’s conquests changed as well from the seizing of booty to the acquisition of strategic territories. The catalyst for this transition can be traced to his introduction to [kidnapping of] Zenocrate; his love for her inspires him to seek his destiny as Monarch of the East, a title that would

22 Tamburlaine: “But Lady, this faire face and heavenly hew, / Must grace his bed that conquers Asia: / And means to be a terrour to the world, / Measuring the limits of his Emperie / By East and West, as Phoebus doth his course” (Marlowe, I Tamburlaine, 1.2.36–40). 23 It seems likely that the armor was apprehended with the jewels and riches Zenocrate and the others had with them that were also confiscated by Tamburlaine and his men, although the text is not explicit about this. 24 Marlowe, I Tamburlaine, 1.2.155–59. 25 Marlowe, I Tamburlaine, 2.4.

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prove Tamburlaine to be worthier of her hand, love, and bed than the Arabian king to whom she is betrothed. Tamburlaine’s raw, giant, Scythian strength and disregard for established rules of conduct and station put him into stark contrast with the two representations of Persian authority: Mycetes and Cosroe, who are both incapable of managing their empires. The play opens in the Persian court at Persepolis with Mycetes addressing his brother, Cosroe, by telling him that he is vexed but lacks the “great and thundering speech” required to articulate his frustrations and asks his brother to voice them for him.26 Cosroe’s response uses the emperor’s confessed lingual limits as representative of the state of Persian power generally, lamenting that in a former age Persia was the seat of conquerors, home to astute politicians and the lords of Africa and Europe. But now, because of the “fickle braine” of the emperor, “Turkes and Tartars shake their swords at thee, / Meaning to mangle all thy Provinces.”27 The edges of Persia are receding because of Central Asian warlords like Tamburlaine, because how could an emperor secure borders when he cannot even articulate basic frustration? Mycetes’s inabilities to express himself show the consequences of decades of Persian decadence; not only has the emperor devoted little time to education or reflection, but he has also not been cultivating his military and instead has relied on an ancient reputation of Persian militaristic power. Because of Mycetes’s oversight his army is easily shattered by the combined forces of the rebel Cosroe and the Scythian Tamburlaine. Mycetes is continually reminded of the limitations of his power by his aptly named advisor (or, perhaps vizier), Meander, who informs him that he cannot punish Cosroe for so small an offense as openly insulting the emperor in court. In the end, the witless Mycetes flees battle and tries to bury his crown, conflating the symbol of his authority with his actual ability to command armies. Counter to his brother, Cosroe exercises wit and demonstrates skill as a tactician in allying himself with Tamburlaine and Theridamas, but he also misreads the precarious nature of his own power and authority in relying too heavily on Tamburlaine’s strength and, more importantly, his loyalty as a subordinate. After the battle against Mycetes, Tamburlaine crowns Cosroe – in an act of mutual validation – as emperor of Persia and Cosroe names Tamburlaine regent as well as lieutenant of his armies before announcing that, once his authority is pronounced in Persepolis, he and Tamburlaine will march to India and reclaim the mines lost to Christian forces. Unlike Tamburlaine, Cosroe

26 Marlowe, I Tamburlaine, 1.1.1–5. 27 Marlowe, I Tamburlaine, 1.1.16–17.

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plans to sit on the throne and oversee his empire’s bureaucracy rather than lead his armies and re-draw or defend the edges of his territories. Cosroe aspires to be a sedentary king and even after being crowned refers to his brother’s throne and not his own.28 Unlike Tamburlaine, who assumes authority on his own, Cosroe needs both help and validation, and shows himself to be of the same militaristically passive paradigm of Saracenic leadership as his brother, Mycetes. The comedy at the expense of Persian emperors and the destruction of their empire may have been cathartic for Renaissance Humanists, who saw Persia not as an Islamic state but as the historical rival of the Greeks and Romans, both of whom had been relegated to history. While the conquest of Persia provides Tamburlaine’s authority with legitimacy and imperial status, the Persians are not his primary foes but instead a step along the path to conquering Africa and Asia, territories under Saracen domination. His next battle and the primary action of the play are directed against Bajazeth and the [Ottoman] Turks, who are positioned as Tamburlaine’s main territorial rivals in both plays although they prove to be the penultimate opponent of the first play, with the Egyptian Sultan being Tamburlaine’s final conflict. Bajazeth first appears in Act 3 and is accompanied by North African kings and the staging notes say they are in great pomp, demonstrating the opulence of the Turkish East, and he is addressing the “Great Kings of Barbary.”29 Bajazeth’s introduction shows him in full Turkish splendor as leader of the disparate, tributary Saracen nations. Bajazeth refers to himself as the lord of Africa, Europe, and Asia as well as the conqueror of Greece, representing Saracenic hegemony on three continents as wealthy, militaristically powerful, and offensively belligerent. Bajazeth’s wealth, his faith in the Lex Mahomet, and his ability to articulate his own thoughts prove insufficient measures of actual power, however, and each fails him. The difference between the Turks and Persians in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is that the Turks are a warlike nation who are always on the offensive.30 Because of its multinational and multiethnic makeup, the Turkish army has the greatest potential to instill fear in Marlowe’s relatively homogeneous English audience. Turkish military might notwithstanding, it is the Turkish Bajazeth, a symbol of Turkish pride and strength and the paradigm of Saracenic authority most explicitly associated with the Lex Mahomet, who is also most abjectly humiliated

28 Marlowe, I Tamburlaine, 2.5.47. 29 Marlowe, I Tamburlaine, 3.1.1. 30 See: Montaigne, “On Schoolmasters’ Learning,” in The Complete Essays, which states that the Turks are superior in war because they do not value education and instead spend their time practicing for war.

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by the warlike Tamburlaine within the play. Prior to his infamously rude treatment, torture, and suicide in Tamburlaine’s makeshift court outside Damascus, both Bajazeth and his empress, Zabina, call on and swear by Mahomet and his Alcoran, which marks them as distinct from the Persians and Scythians, who appear more-or-less secular in the play. Bajazeth’s invocations culminate in a medieval Saracenic lament, “O Mahomet, Oh sleepie Mahomet.”31 Bajazeth’s lament testifies to the weakness of the Saracen pseudo-god/pseudo-prophet, Mahomet, straight from the mouths of the faithful (though fictional) Turks to Marlowe’s English audience’s ears – ears that can hear what Mahomet cannot. Zabina follows her husband’s lament with a Christianity-validating blasphemy saying, “O cursed Mahomet that makest us thus / The slaves to Scythians rude and barbarous.”32 And Zabina is right to lament, as their faith has not prevented their public shaming: both Bajazeth and Zabina assume that their royal status guarantees that they will be ransomed, as tradition and the rules of engagement dictate; however, proud Tamburlaine keeps them as trophies that provide witness to his own majesty. As such, when Tamburlaine uses Bajazeth as a footstool to climb his imperial throne it is not merely one Saracen humiliating another, but Tamburlaine, The Scourge of God, an instrument of Christian justice and punishment, humiliating the fictional Lex Mahomet as if he is stepping on the false faith itself to reassure the English audience that even though the Turks hold political and economic hegemony in one of the largest empires in recorded history, the Christian God will punish them from the inside without risking Christian lives. The suicides of Bajazeth and Zabina while in Tamburlaine’s custody attest to this assumption of the superiority of the Christian West as well; Saracenic piety, devout as it may be, is incapable of providing salvation. Much in the way that Tamburlaine’s conquering arms crowning Cosroe gave Cosroe’s rule legitimacy, Bajazeth’s captivity testifies to Tamburlaine’s legitimacy as ruler by force of arms, if not by dynastic or divine right – a common theme also found in the medieval European biographies of the pseudo-prophet Mahomet. Mahomet’s ears will always be sleepy if they are affixed to a lifeless idol and not a living God, who helps the faithful (Saracen) Orcanes of Natolia overcome the duplicitous, Christian king of Hungary in Part II. With the defeat of the Turks and the promise of a martial feast, the narrative shifts immediately to the Sultan of Egypt, Zenocrate’s father, who provides the final test of Tamburlaine’s might in the first play. The Egyptian Sultan, much like his Turkish counterpart, is a simulacrum of monarchal authority

31 Marlowe, I Tamburlaine, 3.3.269. 32 Marlowe, I Tamburlaine, 3.3.270–71.

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whose lofty rhetoric, braggadocio, and massive armies cannot compensate for political incompetence. In this sense, Tamburlaine’s crusade cleanses the Saracenic world of its weak, inept despots but also fails to replace them with a more stable authority. The Sultan is a magisterial leader in terms of his pomp and his eloquence, but his lack of wit betrays his strategic incompetence. Act 4 scene 3, for example, opens with the Sultan comparing himself and his host with Meleager, who successfully hunted the Calydonian boar only to kill his own allies, an event that lead directly to his prophecy-inspired death.33 The comparison demonstrates the Egyptian Sultan’s shortsightedness and dangerous allegiance as if he will also initiate his own downfall – as well as that of his companions – by pursuing Tamburlaine, his personal Calydonian boar. Like the Calydonian boar, the Sultan likens Tamburlaine to a beast who needs to be tamed because he is base-born and a murderer. The rhetoric of taming Saracens is not unique to Tamburlaine but is instead an echo of the Middle English and French romances in which Charlemagne and his peers, and other Christian kings, would set out to tame the heþen hounds.34 The Sultan remains distinct from his Turkish counterpart in a few significant ways that have a direct correlation with his ultimate fate. First, the Sultan is likely an Arab and is allied with the king of Arabia – who is betrothed to Zenocrate, Tamburlaine’s beloved – and is situated within a traditional Arabo-Islamic hegemonic paradigm. He represents the version of Saracenic history that is monoethnic and originates from the southern edge of the Roman Empire and, not unlike the fish-monster of the Toledan Collection, penetrates northward and dislodges the still-rising Christian powers of the Eastern Roman Empire. Second, the Egyptian Sultan is Zenocrate’s father and she begs Tamburlaine to spare her father and her people, which he does, but only after besting the Sultan in battle. Tamburlaine’s defeat of the Egyptian Sultan is his most important military victory because it finalizes his dominance over the various Saracenic governments and peoples. It symbolizes his unification of Saracenic authorities under his own, Persian leadership. It also symbolizes another type of conquest, although one that remains unfulfilled at the end of the first play: the conquest of Zenocrate. Part I ends with Tamburlaine telling Zenocrate that after he has recrowned her father that he has finally reached the level of conquest that makes him the worthy conqueror who can claim her hand and bed – a reference to their introduction in Act 1 – but the play does not end with a marriage. Instead, 33 “To chance the savage Calidonian Boare” (Marlowe, I Tamburlaine, 4.3.3). 34 The repeated use of the alliterative “heþen [heathen] hounds” in place of Saracens (or even Muslims), which is common in medieval romance poetry, may be a convenient homophone with Mahound, a corruption of Mahomet, which is a corruption of the name Muhammad.

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the marriage is delayed, presumably to happen after the events of the play. First, Tamburlaine says they must bury the noble dead: Arabia, Zenocrate’s initial betrothed, who died nobly and romantically in her arms; Bajazeth, whose defeat empowered and emboldened Tamburlaine’s war machine; and Zabina, whose noble birth and ignoble death shocked and disgusted Zenocrate. The delay of marriage signals the generative problems the new Saracenic authority will have in Part II, where Tamburlaine’s three sons are little more than weak simulacra to their warlord father, even less competent than the kings Tamburlaine conquers in Part I. Despite Tamburlaine’s physical size, prowess, tactical skill, and masculine war knowledge, he is unable to seed his empire, which is destined to crumble after his death, eliminating the newly unified Saracenic threat. While the play itself is a work of fiction, it is historical fiction that uses medieval events to comment on early modern politics and the fear of Turkish domination. Tamburlaine’s secular, militaristic despotism replaces Bajazeth’s faith-based militaristic despotism and the witless despotism of the Persians, and subordinates the opulent yet also witless Afro-Arab despotism of the play. In doing so, Tamburlaine gives the appearance of creating a stronger, united Saracenic front that can threaten European borders at the end of the first play, but finds himself trapped in Asia and sending only hollow threats toward Europe in Part II. Tamburlaine’s eventual defeat of the surprisingly noble Orcanes, king of Natolia – a tributary Turkish state – effectively eliminates the Turkish threat, eliminating the great Ottoman Empire and humiliating it by chaining its leadership to Tamburlaine’s chariot where, like a beast of burden, the noble Natolian king draws Tamburlaine’s chariot in tiny circles within the space of the Elizabethan stage. Domesticated, Turkish authority (assisted by the king of Jerusalem) carries Tamburlaine’s incompetent son off stage, leaving the future of Saracenic governments uncertain. No longer the political powerhouse that conquered much of the formerly Greek and Roman territories, that dominated North Africa and had taken – and now lost – European Spain and Sicily, Saracenic power is reduced, deconstructed to show that it need not be feared because it is imploding under its own incompetence and schism, despite their superior numbers and the perceptions of their wealth.

Works Cited Primary Sources Alighieri, Dante. Dante’s Inferno. Edited and translated by Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

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Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Edited by John T. Sebastian. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2012. De generatione Machumet et nurtritura eius. MS. Arsenal 1162. Paris. Toledan Collection. Bibliothéque de l’Arsenal. De Voragine, Jacobus. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. Translated by William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Foxe, John. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe. Edited by George Townsend. New York: AMS Press, 1965. Langland, William. The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts Together with Richard the Redeless. Edited by Walter W. Skeat. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Luther, Martin. “On War against the Turk, 1529.” In The Annotated Luther. Vol. 5, Christian Life in the World, edited by Hans J. Hillerbrand, translated by John D. Roth, 335–90. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017. Marlowe, Christopher. Tamburlaine, Part I. In The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 1, edited by Fredson Bowers, 77–148. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Marlowe, Christopher. Tamburlaine, Part II. In The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 1, edited by Fredson Bowers, 149–252. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated and edited by M.A. Screech. New York: Penguin, 2003. Paré, Ambroise. Des Monstres et Prodiges. Edited by Jean Céard. Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1971. Peter the Venerable. Writings against the Saracens. Translated by Irven M. Resnick. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2016. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Arden, 1999.

Secondary Sources Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Hottlinger, Arnold. Die Länder des Islam: Geschichte, Tradition und der Einbruch der Moderne. Zürich: Schöningh, 2013. Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Murphey, Rhoads. Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700. New York: Routledge, 2003. Shalem, Avinoam, ed. Constructing the Image of Muhammad in Europe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Laurie Johnson

Chapter 9 “The End of All”: How a Forgotten Map Helped Us Forget Newington Butts I see, as in a map, the end of all.1 —Elizabeth Woodville, in Shakespeare’s Richard III

“The grandest idea of all,” says Mein Herr in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, was to have “made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”2 The character concedes that the exercise was impractical, as the farmers complained that when spread out the map blocked the sunlight. Carroll’s absurd scenario captures a tension that is constantly at play within map-making: playing off the practical limitations of scale against the grand idea of including as much detail as possible in the representation of an area as to convey a desired version of the reality of that area. As Henry Turner has demonstrated, production of survey maps in early modern England went hand in glove with the rise of mercantilism in London, thus meeting the need for “a mode of representation for the different forms of wealth that were typical of an urban environment” – London, Turner notes, was where the abstraction of space effected by the surveying manuals became necessary; it was the place where the countryside could become an imagined space projected outward and idealized, abstracted into a thing that could be occupied, used up, or converted into a commodified form.3

This mercantile project would have been aided, I suggest, by the emergence of a cartographic-pictorial genre that we might call the view of the city, of which the most well-known example would be the maps of cities used to illustrate the Civitates Orbis Terrarum of George Braun and Frans Hogenberg (from 1572 to 1617). In addition to presenting the necessary abstraction of the interior of a city, these views also all involve a decision about where the frame of the image should be drawn, thereby arbitrarily establishing the edge of the city and its surrounds. The area beyond this edge is wholly abstracted to the point that it represents empty space, which enables the free play of imagination required to

1 Shakespeare, Richard III, 2.4.59. 2 Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 169. 3 Turner, The English Renaissance Stage, 188. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-009

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project onto it the apparent availability for occupation and commodification described by Turner. In the case of London, the edges of the view of the city were established by the artists who produced the “copperplate map” around 1560, from which many subsequent famous maps of the city were derived. It is my contention in this chapter that the edges of the map of London, set down as they were in the early modern period according to the mercantile principles explained by Turner, contributed to a misleading perception of the scope of the Elizabethan playing industry at a crucial juncture in the development of theater history as a field of study. This perception, in turn, allowed several generations of scholars to forget, or at least dismiss, the Playhouse at Newington Butts that had been situated beyond the edge of the map of London. A key early figure in theater history, Edmond Malone, made no mention of any map when discussing the locations of the Shakespearean playhouses in his “Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage,” published in the second volume of The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare in 1790. Yet six years later, when he became embroiled in a bitter dispute with George Chalmers over the authenticity of the letters and papers published by Samuel Ireland, and in order to expose one particular letter, Malone referred secondarily to several famous maps – he did this not because of what any of these maps included; rather, it was because of what was missing on all of them: Shakespeare’s Globe Theater.4 One map not cited by Malone was that of “London and Westminster in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Anno Dom. 1563” (Figure 9.1), published by John Wallis in 1789, and which I will show was far from obscure. This map could well have supported Malone’s main arguments in both his “Historical Account” and his dispute with Chalmers but for the rather embarrassing fact that it depicts “Shakspere’s Play-house” dominating the Bankside landscape a year before the playwright was even born. Since Wallis’s map was not used as an exemplar by Malone, then, it has largely been forgotten, but I argue here that this map does provide an insight into this crucial juncture in early theater history. I suggest Wallis’s map took the basic imprint set down in the earlier copperplate map and re-fashioned it for the popular taste at a time when antiquarian interest in the life and times of Shakespeare was on the rise. As the edges of these maps fused with the idea of the extent of Elizabethan London, it became natural to view the playhouse on the perimeter of the map as central to the cultural character of the city. In the antiquarian worldview, the map allowed them to see the end of all of the City of London, from which perspective the little playhouse located further to the south – out of sight, out of mind – was for all intents and purposes lost in a vacuum.

4 Malone, Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers, 84–87.

Figure 9.1: London and Westminster in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth Anno Dom. 1563. Published by John Wallis, 1789. Reproduced with permission. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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The Playhouse was converted into a playing space no later than 1575 by Jerome Savage, a leading member of the company of players that enjoyed the patronage of the Earl of Warwick.5 It was not an open-air amphitheater like the Theatre built by James Burbage in Shoreditch in 1576, but Newington Butts is important because it was the first site to be used as a long-term venue by one of the major early playing companies.6 Furthermore, nearly two decades later it housed the first series of performances by the company in which Shakespeare became a shareholder, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Yet for more than two centuries, scholars of the early playhouses either ignored its existence or dismissed it as irrelevant to the history of the Elizabethan stage or to Shakespeare’s career. Malone failed to mention Newington Butts in his “Historical Account” of 1790 despite it being listed in two early accounts to which Malone refers in his work: John Stow’s Annales (1631 edition revised by Edmond Howes) and James Wright’s Historia Histrionica (1699).7 Later, in the 1799 edition of his “Account,” after Malone found primary evidence of the existence of the Playhouse in Phillip Henslowe’s records of performances, he explicitly claimed that the venue was irrelevant in any case.8 This was an opinion echoed by many scholars in the next two centuries, aided I suggest in no small manner by the fact that none of the major maps of early modern London extended far enough south to include any visual signifier of a playhouse located at Newington Butts. Indeed, as I will show, even among scholars who have attempted to give more coverage to the Playhouse in their histories of the Elizabethan playing venues, there has been a tendency to replicate the copperplate map boundaries in their overview maps, leaving the more southerly venue on the outer.

Proving Nothing: Malone, Maps, and the Language of Absence I shall begin with the work of Malone, whose influence on the history of Shakespeare studies has been justly well-documented, and is not denied even by those who argue that the net result of his influence was negative.9 I have

5 For more detailed discussion of the history and location of this venue, see: Johnson, Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse, 59–81. 6 Johnson, Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse, 82–90. 7 Johnson, Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse, 26–27. 8 Johnson, Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse, 27–28. 9 See, for example: De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim.

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argued elsewhere that Malone was principally responsible for setting in place the Shakespeare-centric focus propping up many myths that persist to this day in theater history, despite his avowed intention of abandoning myths and resorting only to primary documentary evidence.10 As Margreta de Grazia argues, Malone’s unwavering insistence on authenticity meant that a new scholarly apparatus had to be created, the result of which is that the previous century or more of scholarship would be disregarded or distrusted and the playwright was “shoved . . . back into the remote world of documents and records.”11 One example of this is Malone’s refusal to accept the evidence of Howes, who stated in his additions to Stow’s Annales that there were as many as seventeen playhouses operating during the previous six decades.12 For Malone, the number was likely much lower, with only seven (three private houses, “four that were called publick theatres”) operating “in the time of Shakespeare.”13 Although Howes began working on his additions to Stow as early as 1603, Malone considers the account of the playhouses by “the continuator of Stow” in the final update of the Annales in 1631 to be untrustworthy. Accordingly, Malone makes no mention of the venues for which he lacked any other primary evidence, so he disregards Newington Butts altogether. He was in any case only interested in searching for evidence relating to two venues: “All the plays of Shakespeare appear to have been performed either at the Globe, or the theatre in Blackfriars. I shall therefore confine my inquiries principally to those two.”14 Regarding the Theatre, Malone lacked any evidence to enable him to say more than “I am unable to ascertain the situation,”15 although he adds in the accompanying note that it was “probably situated in some remote and privileged place,”16 since John Stockwood referred in a sermon of 1578 to “the gorgeous playing-place erected in the fields . . . as they please to have called, a Theatre.”17 Malone did not make any reference to the extant maps and panoramas of London in his “Historical Account,” but he changed his approach when confronted with the forgeries presented by Ireland as authentic letters pertaining to the life of Shakespeare. One letter refers to the Globe “by the Thames” and to

10 Johnson, Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse, 3–4, 27–28. 11 De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, 10. 12 Stow, Annales, or a Generall Chronicle of England, 104. 13 Malone, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, 41–42. 14 Malone, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, 48. 15 Malone, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, 41–42. 16 Malone, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, 42. 17 Stockwood, quoted in Malone, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, 42. Italics in original.

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the Earl of Leicester, who the author seems to assume is very much alive – Malone notes that since Leicester died in September 1588, the letter must refer to some time before that, but at that time the Globe had not yet been built.18 To help make his case, Malone refers first to “Aggas’s Map of London, which is supposed to have been executed in 1568,” noting that it does show two structures in Southwark but these are labeled for “Bolle-baytinge” and “Bearebaytinge” and no theater is depicted.19 This so-called “Agas Map” or Civitas Londinum has been shown by modern historians to have been incorrectly attributed, but there is widespread agreement that it was based directly on the copperplate map (of which only three panels survive) that is very likely to have been set down by around 1560.20 The next map Malone mentions is “Virtue’s [sic] Map of London in 1560,” meaning the map that George Vertue claimed in 1737 to be a perfect copy of the Agas map.21 Given Vertue’s claims, it is exceedingly odd that Malone calls on it in addition to observations based on “Aggas’s Map” – if his readers did not know the second was a copy of the first, it might seem evidence was being added to evidence; but to those familiar with Vertue’s map, Malone may well have appeared to be saying that no Globe was on Agas’s map, and neither was there one on an exact copy of the same map. The issue is compounded by his reference in the same sentence to there also being no theater shown on the map “by Braun and Hogenbergius, in 1573.” The map of London in the Civitates Orbis Terrarum is yet another of the early copies of the copperplate map, thereby bearing a remarkable similarity to the first two maps cited by Malone.22 If Malone was trying to create the impression of an abundance of evidence by citing three virtually identical maps, his reference to Vertue’s map, in particular, shows him to be rather overreaching to the extent that he breaks his own rule of evidence. Whether or not Vertue was correct in his claims about the source from which his image is derived, the fact remains that his map was prepared in 1737. Scholars have known for more than a century that Vertue’s map was simply an Agas copy to which he made some minor adjustments.23 Yet even without

18 Malone, Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers, 88. 19 Malone, Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers, 84. 20 Marks, The Map of Mid-Sixteenth Century London, 14–15. For a high-resolution version of the woodcut or “Agas” map online, see: Jenstad, “Agas.” 21 The Vertue map is best viewed at the British Museum online gallery, item number 1880, 1113. 1117–18: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1880-1113-1117-1118. 22 Marks, The Map of Mid-Sixteenth Century London, 11–12. 23 Mitton, Maps of Old London, 12.

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this knowledge, Malone’s clumsy insertion of the 1737 copy into his list of maps is inexcusable if only because the document in question openly identifies itself as a later copy and not a primary document. He finally gets to the map that does lend credible support to his claims, though, when noting that the survey by Norden in 1593 offers “the first delineation of a playhouse in Southwark,” but the building in question (called “The Playhouse” by Norden) was most likely Henslowe’s Rose.24 Perhaps mindful that Norden’s generic term “Playhouse” does nothing to settle the issue, Malone backs up this claim by citing legal documents fixing the construction of Henslowe’s playhouse to 1592 – this is actually the date of the expansion of the Rose, which was initially constructed in 1587 – and other documents that put the construction of the Globe to some time after December 1593. Malone settles erroneously on 1594 as the date of the Globe’s construction. Given that Malone had these legal documents up his sleeve the whole time, I am curious as to why he would trouble himself with all the talk of old maps, a form of text with which he was evidently not comfortable. To discredit Ireland he simply needed to cite the legal documents placing the Globe’s construction at 1594 or later. Not only did the use of these maps fail to adequately promote the argument against Ireland, but they also provided Chalmers with an abundance of material to refute when he published his response to Malone, An Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare-Papers, in 1797. Chalmers did not believe the Ireland papers to be genuine, but he objected to the manner in which Malone cast his ire against so many people for having been taken in by the deception. Thus he sought to pick apart Malone’s arguments to demonstrate that the forms of reasoning applied so liberally by the “public accuser” were equally deceitful. Regarding the maps used by Malone, Chalmers first points out that the absence of a building on a map is not proof of the non-existence of that building: “As these witnesses say nothing, they prove nothing.”25 Turning to Norden’s map, Chalmers then picks up on the building called “The Playhouse” to assert that it is not so evidently Henslowe’s Rose, and he points out Malone’s own contradiction in which he states that the Rose was further west than the site indicated on the map.26 Chalmers concludes that the more reasonable assumption is for this building to have been Shakespeare’s Globe, and it is just as likely to have been the theater to which Privy Council records of 1586 refer, so the evidence that Malone deploys to dismantle Ireland’s letter could easily be used to support the same document’s legitimacy.

24 Malone, Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers, 86. 25 Chalmers, An Apology for the Believers, 111. 26 Chalmers, An Apology for the Believers, 115.

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The Chalmers–Malone dispute set the tone for a great deal of what followed in Shakespeare scholarship for the next century. It is significant, then, that in the midst of a debate over how to interpret the maps of Elizabethan London, neither referred to Wallis’s map. Chalmers did cite the map later in his Apology, in a footnote, when challenging Malone on a point about the amount of space available for staging plays in the Blackfriars: “See . . . the re-engraved map of London, and Westminster, as they were in 1563.”27 This confirms that Chalmers was at least familiar with Wallis’s map, so why did he not refer to this map when discussing the location of the Globe? After all, Wallis puts “Shakspere’s Play-house” quite literally on the map. History, it turns out, is often cruel to scholars and twice as often to antiquarians: most of the key conclusions over which Malone and Chalmers squabbled were shown by subsequent generations of scholars to have been incorrect, but with Chalmers faring much the worse of the two on the balance sheet. Yet even the apologist for those eager to believe nearly everything about Shakespeare was not prepared to suggest that a map depicting Shakespeare’s playhouse on the Bankside, anno domini 1563, could be proof of anything. But for the anachronism on Wallis’s map, Malone could also have benefited from referring to a map showing the location of Shakespeare’s public playhouse south of the river, and the private Blackfriars precinct within the city walls, and no other identifiable playhouse structure. Wallis had copied from Vertue’s map the block in the lower left with this helpful explanation of some features of the built environment that could be used to date the map: LONDINUM ANTIQUA This PLAN shews the ancient extent of the famous Cities of LONDON and WESTMINSTER as it was near the beginning of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth these Plates for their great scarcity are re engraved to oblige the Curious and to hand to Posterity this Old Prospect whereby at one view may be seen how much was built of the populous CITY and parts adjacent at that time. Radulphus Aggus in his Oxoniæ Antiqua published A.D. 1578 says. Near ten years past the Author made a doubt Whether to print or lay this work aside Until he first had LONDON platted out. The following Buildings were not erected when this Plan was taken The Whitehall Banqueting House the 1st Building was of Timber

27 Chalmers, An Apology for the Believers, 280.

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The Royal Exchange (not built) before 1570. Moor Fields not divided nor planted. Lambs Conduit on Snow hill about 1580. Paget Palace called so till the death of Lord Paget. Anno. 1563.

Here, Wallis copies Vertue’s language of absence that would have sat well with Malone’s argument against Ireland, if only Wallis had stayed true to the earlier maps and not added “Shakspere’s” to anachronistically denominate the playhouse structure. As I have noted, Chalmers was definitely familiar with Wallis’s map, and I suggest that Malone is hardly likely to have been ignorant of its existence by the time he wrote his Inquiry. Wallis published his map in October 1789, during which time Malone was working on his “Historical Account” for his edition of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Wallis was no nobody: he had established the Map Warehouse in 1775 and by 1783 had a catalogue of sale items that filled a four-page insert in James Ralph’s Critical Review of the Public Buildings, Statues, and Ornaments in and around London and Westminster.28 Among the listed items were a number of traveling maps of the country around London and other major waypoints, more than two pages of international maps, and for those with serious interest in cartography and exploration, “A Chart of the World, upon Mercator’s Projection, Describing the Tracts of Captain Cook in 1768, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, and 75” and sheets described as “Geographical Exercises, Calculated to Facilitate the Study of Geography, and by an Expeditious Method to Imprint a Knowledge of the Science on the Minds of Youth.” It is possible that the exercises catalogued here included early versions of the board games and puzzles for which he would later become well-known. “Europe Divided into its Kingdoms,” from 1789,29 was one of his highly popular contributions to the burgeoning genre of jigsaw puzzle maps introduced in a simpler form by John Spilsbury in the 1760s, and which were the basis of a snobbish attack on the young Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814): “my cousin cannot put the map of Europe together.”30 As for Wallis’s depiction of London and Westminster c.1563, there is ample evidence of its popularity. The map was included as an insert by Robert Faulder when he published Thomas Pennant’s Of London in 1790, and again when the popularity of the title warranted a new edition in 1791. Wallis reissued

28 Ralph, Critical Review of the Public Buildings, insert xxviii–xxix. 29 Hannas, The English Jigsaw Puzzle, 84–85. 30 Austen, Mansfield Park, 18. See: Norcia, “Puzzling Empire,” 28. Norcia also notes that although Spilsbury appears to have been the first to make map puzzles of this kind (5), the industry in their sale became dominated in the 1780s and 1790s by Wallis (7).

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Pennant’s work himself, with four new plates, in an abridgment in 1790 and 1795. It is thus difficult to imagine that Malone was unaware of the map’s existence. Lest the reader think that the Wallis map is a mere obscurity, popular for a short time in the 1790s, it should be noted that there are three copies of the image catalogued in the Crace Collection of the British Library: the first by Samuel Neele is dated c.1800; one by George Neele is listed c.1820s; and one with fresh artwork on the border was printed by William Darton between 1810 and 1834. Until Nicholas Taperell and James Innes produced their map of London and Westminster in 1849, Wallis’s map was the most widely accessible and popularly reproduced copperplate derivative available. Why should it matter, then, that Malone elected not to engage with Wallis’s map in his “Historical Account,” his Inquiry, or anywhere else? To answer this question, I will revisit the relationship between the derivatives of the copperplate map, but will ultimately show that their peripheral features are every bit as meaningful as their representations of the built environment, even though scholars have in the past been more interested in the latter.

Framing London: Copperplate Derivatives and Cultural Difference The most comprehensive analysis of the copperplate map and its derivatives was undertaken more than fifty years ago, by Stephen Powys Marks, and the comparisons he provides – repeated by many scholars since – are offered in the service of dating the maps. For example, the presence or absence of the spire in the various representations of St. Paul’s is of particular interest, as it burned down in 1561 – the spire is a prominent feature on the copperplate map (the western City plate) but not on the woodcut map attributed to Agas, suggesting the former was set out prior to 1561 and the latter was cut later and updated to reflect the state of the building at that time. Vertue’s map clarifies the lines that Agas used to remove the spire, making the tower clearer and removing some clutter from the base of the building, so it merely compounds the error he makes in claiming that the map he “copied” can be dated to 1560. Wallis retains the crisper lines of Vertue’s map, without the spire, but this is not so much of an issue since he claimed the map represents London in 1563, after the spire was gone. Braun and Hogenberg retain the spire, suggesting theirs is based directly on the copperplate map or via a lost copy, but this ironically means their claim in Civitates to be representing the present view of the city in 1572 is also compromised. Marks is also very interested in the presence or absence of the

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Royal Exchange (built in 1570), or the cross in the yard at St. Botolph’s (removed in 1559), and so on. He is less interested in elements of the maps that are of no use in calculating chronology or derivation. He makes no mention of the appearance of “Shakspere’s Play-house” on the Wallis map, for example. Turning our attention to some of the peripheral elements of these maps, it is worth considering the reference blocks used by Vertue and repeated by Wallis. The blocks act as an index of key features on the maps, which for Marks is only of secondary concern, since his eyes are drawn more directly to the depictions of buildings and sites rather than their names in an index. Yet these reference blocks do tell us something about the greatest points of interest for the makers of these maps. One notable entry in these blocks seems every bit as anomalous as Wallis’s reference to Shakespeare: the item marked “e” in both is listed as “Tower Bridge” even though planning on the bridge in question was not started until 1879.31 Armed with this same anomaly in Samuel Neele’s copy of Wallis’s map, the writer of the commentary for the Crace Collection online notes: “This indicates that Londoners were thinking about bridging the river at this point one hundred years before the decisive plan to do so.”32 The “e” on all three maps – the Vertue map, Wallis’s map, and Neele’s copy – clearly refers to the small rise on the bank of the river to the immediate south of the Tower. Yet this is not, of course, the eventual planned location of the Tower Bridge, which crosses the river to the east of the Tower site. Instead, the “e” actually marks the stone bridge that fronted the entry to Traitors’ Gate, a feature recorded in Stow’s Survey of London: “on the same south side, toward the east, is a large water-gate, for receipt of boats and small vessels, partly under a stone bridge from the river of Thames.”33 I can find no use of the term “tower bridge” in reference to this site until well into the nineteenth century, when a proposal for building the Tower Bridge came up for discussion by the Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications (1855),34 so I conclude that Vertue is using an uncommon phrase to indicate knowledge of the older architecture of the site, which he possibly gleaned from Stow. Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger Kain point out that maps are never created free of the ideologies or socio-cultural perspectives of their makers: “The challenge of map history derives less from studying the reductible techniques of map creation than in understanding the human input and the motives,

31 32 33 34

Marks, The Map of Mid-Sixteenth Century London, 19. British Library, “London and Westminster in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth.” Stow, A Survey of London, 19. Report from the Select Committee, 77.

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rational and irrational, of those who created and used maps in the past.”35 We have already noted Turner’s argument about the intersection of surveying practices with the rise of mercantilism in the period, and I have argued elsewhere along these lines that Norden’s inclusion of the “Beare howse” and the “Play howse” at the bottom of his map had little to do with representational precision, and more to do with his own sectarian proclivities and a desire to depict the north of the river as the jewel of the kingdom and everything to the south as baser by comparison.36 Vertue’s motives for introducing the “Tower Bridge” are less clear. Given that the identities of the mapmakers responsible for the copperplate and woodcut maps are unknown, it is also difficult to declare any personal motivation based on knowledge of their other activities or beliefs, but it is suspected that the copperplate map is likely to have been set down by a visiting mapmaker from the Low Countries, given its use of symbols and nomenclature used by the Dutch.37 There is of course no way of knowing if the copperplate map had reference blocks like those used by Vertue, but the absence of a similar indexing tool from the woodcut map and Braun and Hogenberg’s map suggests that there were none on the copperplate. In each of the maps in question, though, the two structures on Bankside are denominated for bull baiting and bear baiting, which suggests that the copperplate map also had these labels attached to these two structures. The maker of the original map, being Dutch, was surely no stranger to animal blood sports, as both bull and bear baiting had been commonly practiced in the Low Countries for hundreds of years.38 What probably struck the mapmaker about the Bankside entertainments was the concentrated presence of two such venues in close proximity. It was not the case that the bear and bull baiting arenas were particularly impressive in size – Oscar Brownstein has exploded the old myth that these early arenas influenced subsequent amphitheater playhouses in both scale and design, noting that it was not until the Bear Garden was rebuilt after the collapse of scaffolding in 1583 that bear baiting was given a dedicated venue on that scale, and this was influenced by the Theatre in Shoreditch, rather than the reverse.39 Brownstein based his findings on, among other things, a close analysis of the baiting arenas as depicted in the

35 Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 6. 36 Johnson, Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse, 55–59. 37 Howgego, Printed Maps of London, 10–11. 38 Kalof, Looking at Animals in Human History, 90–92. 39 Brownstein, “Why Didn’t Burbage Lease the Beargarden?,” 81–96. For more recent archaeological evidence confirming Brownstein’s argument, see: Mackinder, Blackmore, Bowsher, and Phillpotts, The Hope Playhouse, 20–21.

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woodcut map – the size of the figures outside and the animals depicted within indicate a relatively small structure with only one level for audiences to stand and watch. It is only on the Vertue map of 1737 that extra detail is added to create the impression of a multi-tiered structure, with flags around the top, facing towards the populous city to the north, as if Vertue would have these arenas modeled directly on Roman amphitheaters. When Wallis decided to change the bear baiting arena to Shakespeare’s playhouse, he exacerbated the difference between the two structures by retaining the smaller arena-style image used in the woodcut map for the bull baiting arena, and for the playhouse he adds a sketch in an altogether new style, complete with shadow. The resulting building stands out so markedly in the Wallis map by virtue of being the only structure to cast a shadow, with the sun shining upon Shakespeare, it seems, from the east (Figure 9.2).40 Arise, fair sun, indeed.

Figure 9.2: Detail from the Wallis map, 1789, showing the baiting arena and playhouse.

If the decision to label the bull and bear baiting arenas was motivated initially by the Dutch mapmaker being impressed with the industrial approach to creating a baiting precinct on Bankside, Vertue’s reinterpretation of the images recasts industry as spectacle, and Wallis takes the next step by incorporating into

40 Special thanks to Matthew Nielsen for his assistance in preparing the details and composites for reproduction in this chapter.

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the map of London and Westminster a shadowy relic of the great English cultural icon: Shakespeare’s playhouse. Beyond any building or name of building on these maps, the same processes of removing the signs of industry and adding the hallmarks of the new romanticized English culture are present in other features. Casting our eyes once more to the riverfront at the Tower of London, G.E. Mitton observed in 1908 the significance of one alteration. Referring to the woodcut map, he points to the man and horses in the water (see bottom left corner of Figure 9.3), and adds: “the man is filling the water-casks on the animals’ back with a ladle. This gives a glimpse into the discomforts endured by our ancestors before water-pipes were laid on as a matter of course to all houses.”41 Commenting on later versions of the map, Mitton laments that they remove the man and his horses, “thus doing away with all its significance.”42 Vertue does indeed remove the man and his horses, but he retains some of the machinery on the riverside, the cannon for example serving as a strong visual reminder of the military history of the site. Wallis does away even with the cannon (see the Tower section at the lower right of Figure 9.1), thereby presenting a heavily sanitized representation of the Tower and erasing symbols of its history. Similarly, throughout the fields surrounding the city, on the woodcut map there are to be found intermittent signs of rural industry, including graziers tending to herds and tanners laying out hides to dry, and there are occasional depictions of archers at practice. Vertue’s map retains many of these figures, but there are some curious adjustments, usually to the animals in the fields – where the woodcut map depicts recognizable cattle, many of which are depicted grazing, Vertue’s animals appear almost uniformly to resemble alarmed foxes, and are set out in faint ink, suggesting that he had his limitations as an animal artist, even when copying another artist’s work. Curiously, also, Vertue removes all of the figures depicted on the roads in the upper western quarter of the map – perhaps this also speaks to the limitations of the artist for whom a figure in a blank field poses some challenges but a figure on a section marked already with roads represents an insurmountable obstacle. If Vertue started setting down the figures in the fields in the eastern sections first, he may have discovered the challenge of this feature and opted not to continue with setting down figures on roads on the western side of the map. Wallis then finishes in complete fashion the representational genocide that Vertue had started. There is in the fields on his map not a single living soul, human or animal, to be espied – that is, for one exception: in “St. Jemes Park,” Wallis takes the three

41 Mitton, Maps of Old London, 10. 42 Mitton, Maps of Old London, 10.

Figure 9.3: Detail from the woodcut (or Agas) map showing the riverfront at the Tower of London. Reproduced with the kind permission of the London Metropolitan Archives, City of London.

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deer in natural poses on the woodcut map, adds two more, and transforms them into synchronized, leaping performance animals (see Figure 9.4).

Figure 9.4: Composite showing deer as represented on the woodcut map (left) and Wallis map (right). Woodcut detail reproduced with the kind permission of the London Metropolitan Archives, City of London.

The final point I wish to make about the maps concerns the natural environment. The woodcut map fleshes out its fields with ridges, mounds, and foliage of irregular shapes and sizes. In Vertue’s map, ridges and mounds are often conspicuously flattened out and shown as grassy plains, and scattered forests resolve themselves into regular arrangements of well-groomed tree lines. Wallis compounds the erasure of many of the harsher features of the woodcut map (see Figure 9.5), the effect of which is to present the fields surrounding London as tamed but unpeopled. From the woodcut map to Wallis’s map, then, London undergoes a visual transformation, re-interpreting the city and surrounding fields for an audience more receptive to the English landscape movement and the work of Lancelot “Capability” Brown than they would be to more realistic depictions of the landscape c.1563. Regardless of the incorrect date atop the map, the visual cues provided to the readers of Pennant’s London create an indelible association between Shakespeare’s playhouse, a city romantically stripped of

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Figure 9.5: Composite showing the same section of hills and landscape on the woodcut map (left) and Wallis map (right). Woodcut detail reproduced with the kind permission of the London Metropolitan Archives, City of London.

signs of human struggle and industry, and the verdant, manicured fields surrounding the metropolis. This is the London that Pennant sentimentalizes in his account of his wanderings, back-projected onto the London of Shakespeare’s lifetime – it becomes a static monument to the playhouse, locked in time for the eye to pass over at its leisure. One thing that Wallis, Vertue, and the other makers of copperplate derivatives had in common, though, were three firm edges: the walls of the city, the river, and the border of the map. The third of these edges locks in place the relationship between the other two, and fixes each of the myriad smaller visual elements in the map in relation to its nearest edge. In all of the maps, then, although there are variations in the way the periphery of the city is depicted, the intramural space becomes defined in terms of the visual character of the space beyond it. In the last years of the eighteenth century and into the first half of the nineteenth century, as antiquarian interest in Shakespeare and his world reached fever pitch, Wallis’s map offered a version of London in Shakespeare’s time that suited the sensibilities of his audience, placing Shakespeare’s playhouse prominently in the foreground of a London that was not of an age (cluttered with the everyday lives of the inhabitants), but sculpted, pristine, timeless. The character

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of London in Shakespeare’s world thus seemed perfectly defined by the playhouse and arena to the south and by the idyllic pastures to the north. While the map certainly cannot be said to have precipitated the widespread popularity of Shakespeare or even to have shaped the particularly insular, pastoral flavor of this popularity, it nevertheless provided a visual correlative to this insularity and pastoralism.

Beyond the Edge: The Forgetting of Newington Butts In 1894, Thomas Fairman Ordish produced a broader study of the early modern playhouses than had hitherto been attempted, drawing on recent findings by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips regarding the Theatre and Curtain in Shoreditch, and not guided by the Shakespeare-centric restrictions Malone had placed on himself. Framing Early London Theatres (In the Fields), Ordish used the Braun and Hogenberg map as his cover insert.43 This is a curious choice, since the map in the Civitates does not depict any early London theaters, with the map’s makers naming the baiting arenas in accordance with their source, and not yet adding a reference block that might have allowed Ordish to use the map to illustrate the site of some of the intramural playing spaces, like the Blackfriars. Within his work, Ordish refers to the map only occasionally, with the most frequent references being those related to a discussion of the amphitheater-style structures depicted in this map for bear baiting and (also in Norden’s) for bull baiting.44 He does make one comment regarding the location of the Theatre: “Braun and Hogenberg’s map prefixed to this book is dated before 1576, but it shows the position of the property leased by Burbage.”45 No further guidance is offered on this except to direct readers to the work of Halliwell-Phillips, and it is debatable in any case whether the Civitates map is sufficiently detailed on its top margin to warrant such a claim – Braun and Hogenberg have flattened out the vanishing perspective used in the copperplate map and its other derivatives, and to do this they remove key buildings that might serve as suitable reference points. What is important to note here is that by using a copperplate derivative, Ordish marries a history of maps of

43 Ordish, Early London Theatres, insert facing page 1. 44 Ordish, Early London Theatres, 158–65. 45 Ordish, Early London Theatres, 39.

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early modern London to studies of the early London theaters, thereby giving validity to the association asserted in Wallis’s map between Shakespeare’s playhouse and the London area, inasmuch as this extended beyond the city walls to the mapped area. Reaching to the very upper limit of Braun and Hogenberg’s map to locate the Theatre, Ordish makes no similar effort with Newington Butts – beyond the boundary of the map that was by now associated indelibly with the story of the London playhouses, several pages are devoted to investigating the “inference” that plays were staged in Newington Butts, but the point is not, he adds, “to prove the existence of a playhouse” there.46 In 1917, Joseph Quincy Adams produced a more comprehensive survey, Shakespearean Playhouses, the title of which announces his clear intention to keep the career of Shakespeare central to studies of the London playhouses writ large. Like Malone’s inability to “ascertain the situation” of the Theatre, Adams declares that despite significant gains in the documentary record of the Newington Butts playhouse, any information on its “exact situation . . . is wholly lacking.”47 The same was true, as it happens, of several of the playhouses covered in the book, yet when Adams commissioned C.W. Redwood to prepare an original map of London “Showing the Playhouses” (Figure 9.6), guesses were made at the locations of all the playhouses that fit on the map. Adams did not, of course, ask that the map be extended sufficiently south to show the junction at Newington Butts. Redwood’s map is flattened out to create the impression of a cartographically precise representation, but its boundaries retain the same relative distance to key venues as the boundaries of the copperplate map and its derivatives. Adams thus perpetuates in a modern map the sense conveyed in the copperplate derivatives that the early playhouses surrounding London were a defining characteristic of the city in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and the important venue that sits beyond the edges of these old maps remains both invisible and unknowable. Only six years later, Edmund Kerchever Chambers released his monumental four-volume Elizabethan Stage, with volume two offering detailed histories of the playhouses. Chambers reproduces no single map, but does routinely draw the reader’s attention to any early maps of London that are useful in determining the locations of these venues. For the short section on Newington Butts, little more than half a page, only the name of the village is given as a broad indicator of location, and no mention is made of any map. Chambers does mention the map of John Rocque (1746) to explain potential sites for the

46 Ordish, Early London Theatres, 145. 47 Adams, Shakespearean Playhouses, 136.

Figure 9.6: Map of London Showing the Playhouses, by C.W. Redwood for Joseph Quincy Adams, Shakespearean Playhouses, front insert.

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Boar’s Head Inn and the Hope,48 so it is ironic that he makes no mention of this map in relation to the Playhouse, as this is the map that has more recently been used by William Ingram to illustrate the approximate location of Newington Butts.49 Ingram’s Business of Playing is the main work prior to my Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse to seek to pinpoint the Playhouse on an early map, and my work is clearly indebted to his pioneering exercise. Another work to seek to situate the Newington Butts venue on a map is Julian Bowsher’s Shakespeare’s London Theatreland, which provides a small inset image of the site of the venue under the eastern edge of the Elephant and Castle roundabout, although this is on a modern map of the south of the city in the section on the tourist walks and not in the discussion of the venue earlier in the book, and the inset is necessary because the main part of the map only covers as far to the south as would normally be covered by a copperplate derivative.50 Reinforcing this point, the map of London used by Bowsher to show the sites of “major” entertainment venues adheres to the copperplate map framing conventions, and so Newington Butts is not visible.51 Similar examples can be found in most major works of theater history and related resources in modern times. Consider, for example, Andrew Gurr’s use of the Civitates map with overlaid text boxes in Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London.52 In doing so, he had left Newington Butts off the map, and the book mentions the venue only cursorily, once, on the previous page. Similarly, the otherwise excellent online resource, the Map of Early Modern London, provides a graphic interface built on the woodcut map, so using the cursor to identify locations excludes Newington Butts from the main interface, and to date no alternative data set for the Playhouse has been made available on the text-based menu.53 The edges of the city of London established in the copperplate map thus continue to shape perceptions of the Elizabethan playhouses by being perpetuated in scholarship and in the resources used by these scholars. Wallis’s map plays a key role in this history of rigidifying the edges of the geography of Shakespearean London because it kept Shakespeare quite literally on the map at 48 Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 2:445, 470. 49 Ingram, The Business of Playing, 151, 161. Ingram’s images are highly simplified details from Rocque’s map, showing the Playhouse site relative to the Newington Butts juncture and the sewer that are visible on Rocque’s map. In Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse (69, 71–73) I take Ingram’s cue to more precisely transpose the site onto a reproduction of Rocque’s map and then to align that location with corresponding coordinates on modern maps. 50 Bowsher, Shakespeare’s London Theatreland, 224. 51 Bowsher, Shakespeare’s London Theatreland, 26. 52 Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 16. 53 Jenstad, “Agas.”

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the same time that his stocks were rising in both antiquarian and literary circles, and the map in question was derived from the copperplate original that initially set out these edges. The unfortunate accident of history and geography that saw the Playhouse built outside this map at the junction at Newington Butts ensured that it would remain in the cold throughout the emergence of modern theater history.

Works Cited Primary Sources British Library. “London and Westminster in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Anno Dom. 1563.” British Library Online Gallery. Accessed January 7, 2018. http://bl.uk/onlinegallery/onli neex/crace/l/007000000000001u00027000.html. Malone, Edmond. An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments. London, 1796. Malone, Edmond. The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare. London, 1790. Ralph, James. Critical Review of the Public Buildings, Statues, and Ornaments in and around London and Westminster. London, 1783. Report from the Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications. London, 1855. Shakespeare, William. Richard III. Edited by Barbara A. Mowatand Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square Press, 1996. Stow, John. Annales, or a Generall Chronicle of England. Revised by Edmond Howes. London, 1631. Stow, John. A Survey of London. Edited by William J. Thoms. London, 1842.

Secondary Sources Adams, Joseph Quincy. Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. Edited by Shobhana Bhattacharji and Barnita Bagchi. London: Longman, 2007. Bowsher, Julian. Shakespeare’s London Theatreland: Archaeology, History, and Drama. London: Museum of London Archaeology, 2012. Brownstein, Oscar. “Why Didn’t Burbage Lease the Beargarden? A Conjecture in Comparative Architecture.” In The First Public Playhouse: The Theatre in Shoreditch, 1576–1598, edited by Herbert Berry, 81–96. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979. Carroll, Lewis. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. London, 1893. Chalmers, George. An Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare-Papers, Which Were Exhibited in Norfolk Street. London, 1797. Chambers, Edmund Kerchever. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923.

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De Grazia, Margreta. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Delano-Smith, Catherine, and Roger J.P. Kain. English Maps: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Hannas, Linda. The English Jigsaw Puzzle, 1760–1890: With a Descriptive Check-list of Puzzles in the Museums of Great Britain and the Author’s Collection. London: Wayland, 1972. Howgego, James L. Printed Maps of London, circa 1553–1850. 2nd ed. Folkestone: Dawson, 1978. Ingram, William. The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Jenstad, Janelle, ed. “The Agas Map.” The Map of Early Modern London. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 2018. http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/map.htm. Johnson, Laurie. Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts. New York: Routledge, 2018. Kalof, Linda. Looking at Animals in Human History. London: Reaktion Books, 2007. Mackinder, Anthony, Lyn Blackmore, Julian Bowsher, and Christopher Phillpotts. The Hope Playhouse, Animal Baiting and Later Industrial Activity at Bear Gardens on Bankside: Excavations at Riverside House and New Globe Walk, Southwark, 1999–2000. London: Museum of London Archaeology, 2013. Marks, Stephen Powys. The Map of Mid-Sixteenth Century London: An Investigation into the Relationship between a Copper-Engraved Map and Its Derivatives. London: London Topographical Society, 1964. Mitton, G.E. Maps of Old London. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1908. Norcia, Megan A. “Puzzling Empire: Early Puzzles and Dissected Maps as Imperial Heuristics.” Children’s Literature 37 (2009): 1–32. Ordish, Thomas Fairman. Early London Theatres (In the Fields). New York, 1894. Turner, Henry. The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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Chapter 10 Hamlet’s French Philosophy Others form man: I account for and represent him in a particularly bad form, which, if I had to shape again, I would make better than he really is . . . The features of my painting do not err, even though they change and diversify. The world is merely in perennial motion. Everything wavers without ceasing . . . Constancy is nothing more than languid motion. I cannot maintain my purpose. It staggers and falters, with a natural drunkenness. I take it at this point, as it is, in the moment that I enjoy it. I do not paint being. I paint becoming. . . . It is necessary to adapt my story to the time at hand. Sometimes I may change, not only by chance, but intentionally . . . If my mind could get a foothold, I would not be essaying myself, but rather resolving myself; instead, it is always an ap—Michel de Montaigne, “Du repentir” prentice and on trial.1

French English To begin with a French essayist in a collection about early modern English drama may seem counterintuitive. However, while Montaigne and Shakespeare are not canonically peripheral, reading the essayist’s works alongside Hamlet

1 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” in Les essais de Montaigne, 804–5. Original: “Les autres forment l’homme; je le récite et en représente un particulier bien mal formé, et lequel, si j’avais à façonner de nouveau, je ferais vraiment bien autre qu’il n’est . . . les traits de ma peinture ne fourvoient point, quoiqu’ils se changent et diversifient. Le monde n’est qu’une branloire pérenne. Toutes choses y branlent sans cesse . . . La constance même n’est autre chose qu’un branle plus languissant. Je ne puis assurer mon objet. Il va trouble et chancelant, d’une ivresse naturelle. Je le prends en ce point, comme il est, en l’instant que je m’amuse à lui. Je ne peins pas l’être. Je peins le passage . . . Il faut accommoder mon histoire à l’heure. Je pourrais tantôt changer, non de fortune seulement, mais aussi d’intention . . . Si mon âme pouvait prendre pied, je ne m’essaierais pas, je me résoudrais: elle est toujours en apprentissage et en épreuve.” Original text will be given in lightly modernized French if and when word choices are significant to the argument. Unless cited otherwise, all pagination for Montaigne refers to the VilleySaulnier edition of the essays. Unless cited as Florio, all translations are my own. Note: I thank Huw Griffiths, Liam Semler, and listeners at the Early Modern Literature and Culture reading group and 2018 Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association conference. Your feedback on my work has been invaluable for this chapter. Thank you as well to the collection’s editors, Aidan Norrie and Mark Houlahan, for their advice and assistance throughout the process. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-010

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frames the playwright’s language at the borders of, rather than central to, English. This comparison reveals a complex translation process undertaken by Shakespeare as he writes across the porous border between English and French. As a result, I call the language in Hamlet not English but “French English.” This encompasses French terms that remained in use in early modern English after their migration over the Channel and words that share a combination of pronunciation, spelling, and meaning, even if they are false friends. A French English word is one that cannot be easily located on one side or the other of a French–English linguistic border. Early modern English was not yet a category with the same formal conventions as non-vernacular administrative languages like Latin; likewise with early modern French. However, both vernaculars were widely spoken and in print in early modern London.2 As Ardis Butterfield argues in her work on Chaucer’s vernaculars, “languages do not function autonomously in multilingual environments, but rather form a shifting set of relationships in which meanings are produced through a constant process of contrast, discrimination, overlap, and rivalry.”3 Her argument provides a framework for understanding French acquisition in early modern London, as multilingual sources and texts jostled for space among the city’s printed material. Considering Montaigne as a source for Hamlet is an unfinished task in literary criticism. Existing scholarship on Shakespeare’s French sources generally uses John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne as a point of reference.4 The main problem with referring only to Florio is that Hamlet was performed, and therefore written, before Florio translated the Essais.5 The relationship between the very language of Montaigne’s French and the Hamlet texts, however, seems 2 For one among many examples of work on the presence of French in early modern London, see: Newman, Cultural Capitals. 3 Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy, 14. 4 Scholarly connections between Shakespeare and Montaigne go back as far as 1779, beginning with Edward Capell, who argued for the relationship between Gonzalo’s Act II speech in The Tempest and Des Cannibales. More recently, critics such as Ronald Knowles and Hugh Grady have discussed relationships to Shakespeare’s texts, but also via Florio’s text, as with much of the comparative history between these authors. See: Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne; Knowles, “Hamlet and Counter-Humanism.” 5 Edward Capell is often attributed with the earliest comparison of Florio and Shakespeare, suggesting that Gonzalo’s speech in Act 2 of The Tempest re-works part of “Of the cannibals,” but his work suggests the relationship between Montaigne’s original French, while Edmond Malone is the first to encourage the relationship to Florio’s translation. Unlike Hamlet, The Tempest presents no chronological boundary to being associated with Florio’s work. A few years after Capell, Malone commented that the observation is obviously correct, but that Capell “knew so little of his author as to suppose that Shakespeare had the original French before him, though he has almost literally followed Florio’s translation.” See: Capell, Notes

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to suggest Shakespeare’s facility in that language. I borrow Kent Cartwright’s descriptions of source study as “diachronic” (traditional chronology) and “synchronic” (simultaneous chronology) to consider how Shakespeare’s knowledge of French allowed him access to Montaigne’s writing.6 This allows for new comparative work on the relationship between early modern English and French.7 I am less interested in how Shakespeare may have worked with a copy of Montaigne – in French or in English – in front of him, though this may have been the case, and forms parts of my analysis.8 The essays’ and plays’ relationships are found in shared words, phrases, and ideas. These connections can be traced both diachronically and synchronically, and their presence in each text’s multiple versions emphasizes their blurry linguistic and philosophical intersections. Following in the source-hunting tradition reveals shared phrases and ideas between Montaigne and Shakespeare. However, Shakespeare engages with the same ideas as Montaigne in more abstract ways, too. Florio’s translation then functions as another edge through which Shakespeare’s French English passes in later editions of his play.9 In the same way that the essays evoke “different Montaignes who are all Montaigne,” Shakespeare writes different Hamlets who are all Hamlet, and different Hamlets that are all Hamlet.10 In the vein of Zachary Lesser’s work on the First Quarto (Q1), I am reluctant to take traditional chronologies, placing Q1 in 1599 at earliest, at face value.11 I see the early staged Hamlet as Shakespeare’s; I date Q1 (printed 1603) prior to 1590, followed chronologically by the Second Quarto (Q2, printed 1604–1605), and the Folio (F, printed 1623) later still. Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane tentatively

and Various Readings to Shakespeare, 341; Malone in Johnson, Rowe and Steeven’s edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare, 63. 6 Cartwright, “Diachronic and Synchronic,” 184. 7 Two existing examples of this kind of comparison are Williams’s “The Bourn Identity” and Dennis McCarthy’s “A ‘Sea of Troubles.’” 8 Critical studies from Thomas Baldwin’s William Shakespere’s Smalle Latine and Lesse Greeke through to more contemporary accounts such as Robert Miola’s Shakespeare’s Reading do not and cannot pin down the exact text list from which Shakespeare wrote. However, among his many sources include the Essais and the Amleth myth translated by François de Belleforest, neither of which existed in English at the time that Hamlet was first being performed. While there has been a relatively small amount of research on Shakespeare’s French, Margrethe Jolly, Terri Bourus, and Travis D. Williams have argued for the ways that Hamlet specifically reflects his French knowledge. See: Jolly, The First Two Quartos of Hamlet; Bourus, Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet; and Williams, “The Bourn Identity.” 9 My thanks to Aidan Norrie for their comments on Florio’s work as an edge that directed my initial editing process for this chapter. 10 Lee, “The English Renaissance Essay,” 444. 11 See: Lesser, “Hamlet” After Q1; and Johnson, The Tain of Hamlet.

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date an early Hamlet from 1588 for which Shakespeare was responsible.12 This chronology supports Q2 and F being informed by Florio’s translation, whose work was based on the 1595 posthumous edition of Montaigne’s complete essays. The material in Q1 that corresponds with Montaigne’s work also seems closer to earlier editions of the essays, making use of similar lines of argument that change direction or focus in their 1595 (French) or 1603 (English) iterations. Comparing Montaigne’s French with Hamlet puts Anglophone comparisons of Shakespeare and Florio’s Montaigne at the edge rather than the center. This perspective reveals Shakespeare’s interest in the intersections and limitations of English.13 His language emphasizes both the closeness of and difference between English and French, in what I am calling French English. There is a synchronic relationship between Montaigne and Shakespeare, in that they are writing at the same time, but also an intricately diachronic relationship between these groups of texts. Hamlet emerges out of Montaigne’s philosophy. Synchronic relationships between Essais and plays consolidate the texts’ diachronic relationship through shared words and groups of ideas about grief, repentance, and regret. Overall, both Montaigne and Shakespeare consider the same series of ideas about selfhood to different ends. While selfhood emerges in both authors’ work and many Renaissance sententiae, the three texts of Hamlet engage with how Montaigne organizes his ideas about selfhood. Towards the end of the play, Hamlet’s concern with his own rashness is one example of the text’s relationship with Montaigne. In Q1, before being made to spar with Laertes, Hamlet tells Horatio that he regrets “forgetting himself” at Ofelia’s funeral. He assures Horatio that his response towards her brother was rash: Believe me, it grieves me much, Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot myself For by myself methinks I feel his grief Though there’s a difference in each other’s wrong. (Q1 17.1–4)14

12 Taylor and Loughnane, “The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works,” 542–48. Among others, Taylor and Loughnane refer to Bourus’s Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet in which she too discusses Q1 as an early text and its content in relation to its context and relationship with the Amleth myth. 13 See: Watson, “Shakespeare and the Norman Conquest.” Watson argues that the English language’s etymological history and “odd facility of offering the chance to say most things in two ways” allows Shakespeare “to see a new possibility” in English (622). 14 Hamlet (Q2) citations are from Philip Edwards’s Cambridge edition. First Quarto and Folio citations, marked “Q1” and “F” for in-text notes as needed, are from Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor’s Arden editions. When Q2 and F texts are nearly identical I revert to Edwards’s edition.

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The grief he refers to is Laertes’s response to the loss of both Corambis and Ofelia. However, it also implies grievances or problems, so the sympathy that Hamlet seems to harbor for Laertes is muddied by the bitterness of this additional meaning. In F, the tenor of his response is similar, but he describes his and Laertes’s shared experience as a cause rather than as grief: I am very sorry, good Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot myself, For by the image of my cause, I see The portraiture of his. I’ll count his favours. But sure the bravery of his grief did put me Into a towering passion. (F 5.2.75–80)

This grief is only the more traditional response to loss. Even though he understands that “the image of [his] cause” has similarities with Laertes’s cause, Hamlet does not attempt a comparison of his response to Old Hamlet’s death (and Claudius’s responsibility) with Laertes’s response to losing Polonius and Ophelia (at Hamlet’s hands). Both versions include an ambivalent phrase: “forgot myself.” Hamlet is describing losing his temper, but the phrase that he uses for this actually invokes a discussion that Montaigne has about how knowing his “self” can be both easy and utterly impossible. This discussion comes in his essay, “Du repentir” (On repenting), where Montaigne rewrites himself and his essays, having already claimed that he is the subject of his book.15 Likewise, Shakespeare responds to Montaignian ideas as he rewrites Hamlet (the character) and Hamlet (the text). Both “Du repentir” and another essay, “Que philosopher c’est apprendre à mourir” (That to philosophize is to learn how to die), correspond to the Hamlet texts. In “Du repentir,” Montaigne asserts that he does not portray “being,” but rather portrays “becoming,” because he “may change, not only by chance, but intentionally.”16 The language he uses in his discussion of these differences between being and becoming – “peindre,” evoking painting, portraiture, or representation – is the same as the language in the Folio where Hamlet compares portraiture to identity: “by the image of my cause, I see / The portraiture of his” (F 5.2.77–78). Montaigne argues that “the features of [his] painting do not err,

I differentiate “the King” in Q1 from “Claudius” in Q2/F, as well as maintaining alternate names for several other characters. However, I keep “Laertes,” rather than Q1’s “Leartes,” throughout. 15 Montaigne, “Au lecteur,” in Les essais de Montaigne, 3. Original: “je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre.” 16 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 805.

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even though they change and diversify.”17 In the same way that the earth is in “perennial motion,” he calls constancy “nothing more than languid motion.”18 Clarifying this allows him to defend the inconsistency of his thoughts across the essays. “Branler,” or what Florio will translate as “swaying,” resonates at multiple frequencies in Montaigne’s argument.19 Montaigne asserts that there is something central to every person’s “self” that guides their decisions. However, “branler” also echoes with uncertainty in the same way that the word “wavering” might be used to describe someone’s indecision. “Wavering” evokes hesitation, wavering between the certainty of instinct or control and the uncertainty of those easily “swayed” by decisions in one way or another. While Montaigne’s essays can function as individual chapters, they are consciously part of his broader project. A central statement in “Du repentir” is “je ne puis assurer mon objet,” which can be translated into English in several ways.20 When translating this essay myself, my instinct was to write this phrase as Donald M. Frame translates it: “I cannot keep my subject still.”21 Florio writes “I cannot settle my object,” and M.A. Screech writes “I cannot stabilise my subject.”22 In my own translation I settled on “purpose” as my translation of “objet,” largely because the multiple implications of “subject” and “object” pose more questions than they solve and do not, in my view, evoke the overall intention of Montaigne’s work, which is to identify that his rhetorical project does not and cannot remain static. “Objet” can mean “subject,” “object,” or “purpose,” but these differences destabilize Montaigne’s apparent conviction about his own unpredictability. In English, the word’s possibilities are interchangeable. Logic in the French text dictates that he is talking about his subject – his “self” – but “object” is an interesting parallel idea to consider when reading and translating Montaigne simultaneously. If the word becomes the English “object,” then Montaigne’s words mean that he cannot keep his subject, the object of his study, still. His “self” is therefore simultaneously knowable and unknowable. Across the collection of essays Montaigne is struggling with both sides of this, even though this particular phrase logically dictates that he is describing his uncertain “objet,” which in turn is his “subject” or “self.” This obsession with the idea of a self recurs in Montaigne’s and Shakespeare’s works at the level of word choice and in the ideas they express.

17 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 804. 18 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 804, 805. 19 Florio, “Of Repenting,” in Shakespeare’s Montaigne, 203. 20 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 805. 21 Montaigne, “On repenting,” in Montaigne’s Essays and Selected Writings, 313. 22 Florio, “Of Repenting,” 196; Montaigne, “On repenting,” in The Complete Essays, 907.

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The title of “Que philosopher” reads as a phrase that could come from Hamlet’s own mouth. Jonathan Bate noted the correlation between Hamlet’s words and that essay in a review of Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt’s edition of Florio’s translations: Imagine that Hamlet could have read Montaigne. He would have found a meditation on the pros and cons of suicide in an essay called “Of a custom of the Isle of Cea,” but he would most characteristically have turned to the essay in Montaigne’s first volume, strongly influenced by Cicero, called “That to philosophise is to learn how to die.”23

To philosophize is Hamlet’s way of learning to die, and this philosophical education develops across the three play texts. Close ties between repentance and regret in “Du repentir” also figure in more complex ways in what I propose are the later Hamlet texts. In those texts, Claudius’s characterization reveals less of a “French connection” between his English language and Montaigne’s work, but nevertheless both an engagement and re-engagement with the essayist’s thoughts on responsibility and guilt. Both Claudius and Hamlet develop in parallel with the Essais text as it is written and rewritten, rather than referring only to Florio’s translation of the essays’ later editions. Just as Hamlet is a text that is always in progress, with its multiple forms, so Montaigne’s conception of the self is also something that is always being revised. Each of these versions exemplifies Montaigne’s and Shakespeare’s processes of writing and re-writing. The relationships between Shakespeare’s and Montaigne’s ideas are thus synchronic and diachronic. The entry point for discussing both texts is French English, where these two languages intersect.

Fear and Grief Near the beginning of “Que philosopher,” Montaigne comments on the relationship between acting and personhood. Florio translates: “what person a man undertakes to act, he doth ever therewithal personate his own.”24 Montaigne’s

23 Bate, “Montaigne and Shakespeare.” In 2014, Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt edited Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, collecting several of Montaigne’s essays with an emphasis on correlations between Florio’s translation and various Shakespearean texts. See particularly ix–xxxiii and xxxiv–xlv of this work for their respective comments on Florio and Shakespeare’s potential connections and Florio’s translation processes. 24 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” in Les essais du Montaigne, 81; Florio, “That to Philosophise,” in Shakespeare’s Montaigne, 13.

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interest in the intersections between ideas of living a life and playing a part extends throughout the essay. In Florio’s translation once more, he continues: the distribution and variety of all the acts of my comedy is performed in one year. If you have observed the course of my four seasons, they contain the infancy, the youth, the virility, and the old age of the world. He hath played his part.25

Platt notes that “personate” in the previous quotation is being used in the sense of acting: to “play” or to “personate [a] role.”26 He also gives his reason for providing “comedy” in his edition, instead of the original word “commoditie”: “Florio has ‘commoditie’ but Montaigne has ‘comédie,’ and the theatrical metaphor is clear.”27 Montaigne’s interest in theatricality is broad and these examples are two out of many. However, Florio’s translations do not draw attention to the shared verb “jouer,” meaning “to play,” in both of Montaigne’s phrases. The relationship between “jouer” and “comédie” and the English “play” as both verb and noun respectively exemplifies the space where Shakespeare translates from French into French English.28 The tenor of Montaigne’s argumentation in “Que philosopher” echoes through Hamlet in the parallels between phrasing and word choice via the essayist’s French. Both writers also contemplate the fear of death in parallel. Montaigne begins the essay by referring to Cicero, solidifying the connections between philosophy and death that form the essay’s subject: Cicero says that to philosophise is nothing other than lending oneself to death. This is specifically because study and contemplation in no way remove our mind from us . . . All the wisdom and discourse in the world results at this point of teaching us not to fear dying.29

The connections also point to Hamlet’s eventual dependence on providence by learning to die. Although Montaigne establishes that philosophy teaches us not to fear death, he is equally concerned with the fact that, by nature, we do fear

25 Florio, “That to Philosophise,” 29; Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 93. Original: “la distribution et variété de tous les actes de ma comédie se fournit en un an. Si vous avez pris garde au branle de mes quatre saisons, elles embrassent l’enfance, l’adolescence, la virilité et la vieillesse du monde. Il a joué son jeu.” 26 Platt’s editorial commentary in Florio, Shakespeare’s Montaigne, 357. 27 Platt’s editorial commentary in Florio, Shakespeare’s Montaigne, 359. 28 The connection between these words and the fact that “play” is both grammatical forms is doubled in Hamlet’s antic disposition; the relationship that Montaigne identifies between impersonation, acting, and selfhood, emerges in the madness that still has “method in’t” (2.2. 200–201). 29 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 81.

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death: “nature nous y force.”30 Paradoxically, going against nature is what allows us to keep reason in the face of fearing death. His essay’s focus is largely on not fearing death because it is both a necessary object or purpose and the “origin of another life.”31 Montaigne also asserts that death only arrives at the right time: “no one dies before their hour. What you leave of time is no longer yours any more than that which passed before your birth and . . . where your life finishes, that is [the end].”32 While Montaigne focuses on death itself, these providence-based ideas inevitably imply mourning, although his examples separate an individual’s fear of death from fear of others’ death. He warns that avoiding thoughts about dying will result in being horrified and surprised by it: “when death arrives . . . what torment, cries, rage and despair overwhelms them! Have you ever seen anything so diminished, so changed, so confused?”33 Montaigne suggests that we must counter this loss of reason.34 In fact, since “at any moment death does not seem to us to hold us by the collar,” Montaigne’s overall advice about a response to death is this: “if this enemy [death] were avoidable, I would counsel you to borrow the weapons of cowardice. But this it cannot be . . . [so] learn to stand firm and to fight it.”35 Because neither fearing nor avoiding death is an option, he urges his reader to counter fear and cowardice with courage by “learning” – as in “nous apprenons,” “we learn” or “we are learning” – to stand firm. Given that death has many ways to surprise us, he proposes that his reader “have nothing so often on the mind as death.”36 Each of these ideas is invoked in Hamlet, particularly in the way the prince’s introduction on stage is countered by his resolve towards death by the text’s conclusion: “the readiness is all” (5.2.194–95).37 Hamlet’s philosophizing, in which he learns how to die, frames the play, bookending his development from grief to both action and death. The Q1 text responds to the “nul ne meurt” passage when the King assures Hamlet that

30 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 92. 31 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 84, 93. Original: “la mort . . . est objet nécessaire de notre visée” and “la mort est origine d’une autre vie.” 32 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 95. Original: “Nul ne meurt avant son heure. Ce que vous laissez de temps n’était non plus votre que celui qui s’est passé avant votre naissance, et . . . où que votre vie finisse, elle y est toute.” 33 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 86. 34 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 86. 35 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 85–86. 36 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 85, 86. 37 Q1 includes the Gentleman explaining to Hamlet that “on your side the King hath laid and desires you to be in readiness,” but no direct equivalent to “the readiness is all” (Q1 17.29–30).

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“none lives on earth but he is born to die” (Q1 2.47).38 The idea of birth as preparation only for death is not revisited in the play text until Hamlet tells Horatio “if danger be now, why then it is not to come, there’s a predestinate providence in the fall of a sparrow” (Q1 17.45–46). There is no equivalent phrase to the “none lives” line in either the Q2 or F text. However, both echo Montaigne’s description of avoiding thoughts of death: “the vulgar remedy is not to think about it, but from brutal stupidity can come such a gross blindness.”39 The English “vulgar” is used in Claudius’s much longer speech at the same point in the plot as the “none lives” line when he describes Hamlet’s mourning as “a fault . . . to reason,” because death is “as common / As any the most vulgar thing to sense” (1.2.101, 98–99). Montaigne’s focus on grief is different from Claudius and Hamlet’s concern in Act I, even though their resolutions are very similar. Claudius’s invocation of unreasonable grief as “a fault to heaven” implies Montaigne’s suggestion that “our religion has no greater assurance than the misery of human life” (1.2.101).40 However, Montaigne’s next few sentences conclude, as noted earlier, that “nature forces us” to fear death.41 This shared tension between reason and nature arises in the relationship between Hamlet and his uncle across all three texts, but is exemplified by the extent to which Shakespeare draws Hamlet out from the edges of Montaigne’s French and into English. Hamlet’s characterization becomes more complex as Shakespeare writes him more fully into English by complicating his engagement with Montaigne’s ideas. The King’s assurances to Hamlet in Q2 and F share the same content, but become a reprimand instead. In Q1 the King tells Hamlet to “cease laments,” while in Q2 and F he is told to “throw to earth” – that is, bury, like the dead – “this unprevailing woe” (Q1 2.44; 1.2.106, 107.). Claudius continues to admonish Hamlet’s expression of grief: to persever In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness, ’tis unmanly grief, It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,

38 The phrasing here perhaps mimics the grammatical structures of the French “nul ne meurt” and “non plus votre naissance,” but this moves so closely to the obsessive parallelism of early source-hunting that I am reluctant to comment further than this. The philosophical idea itself is close enough. 39 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 84. Original: “le remède du vulgaire c’est de n’y penser pas. Mais de quelle brutale stupidité lui peut venir un si grossier aveuglement?” 40 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 91. 41 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 92.

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A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, An understanding simple and unschooled. (1.2.92–97)

His language simultaneously berates and supports Hamlet’s “mourning duties” and philosophical pursuits (1.2.88). In both cases, the order to stop grieving is because it is improper. However, the fact that Hamlet’s return to Wittenberg “is most retrograde” to the King and Queen’s desires is at odds with the king’s identification of grief as unreasoned (1.2.114). In Q1, the King and Queen deny Hamlet’s return to Wittenberg because they “hold it most unmeet and unconvenient” (Q1 2.29). In the other two texts, Claudius calls Hamlet’s grief “unschooled” while simultaneously forbidding him to return “to school in Wittenberg” (1.2.113). Regardless of Claudius’s encouragements against grief tied with “unschooled” language, and of his location in Elsinore, Hamlet of course continues to think about death throughout the text.42 Hamlet spends the play thinking of death in order to learn how to die, and his thoughts therefore mirror those outlined by Montaigne. Hamlet’s grief and antic disposition waver into unreason – whether actual madness or otherwise – and form the basis of his character. The sense throughout this essay of the closeness of death aligns with his general language about providence, such as when Montaigne writes that “knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.”43 This phrase then captures both Hamlet’s initial constraint of vengeance and his eventual freedom from this as a result of his having learnt how to die: again, the readiness is all. Without this idea supporting this facet of his character’s philosophy, his shifting attitude towards death is, ironically, unreasonable.

Repentance and Regret Montaigne builds on his argument from “Que philosopher,” about the effects of reason, when he comes to write “Du repentir.” In this later essay, Montaigne states that “vice, like an ulcer in the flesh, leaves repentance in the soul,” while reason counters “sadness and sorrow,” and causes “grievous” repentance from within.44

42 While he returns to it differently by the end of the play, the Prince’s language frequently focuses in on ideas about death, even in comic scenes such as the conversation with Polonius about “kissing carrion” (2.2.180; Q1 7.207). 43 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 87. 44 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 806. Original: “Le vice laisse, comme un ulcère en la chair, une repentance en l’âme, qui toujours s’égratigne et s’ensanglante elle-même.”

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He establishes that a person’s inner and outer selves cannot correspond perfectly: “no one . . . knows if you are cowardly and cruel, or loyal and devoted.”45 Rather than seeing someone’s inner self, others “guess through uncertain conjectures” and so can see their “art,” or their outward self, rather than their true nature.46 Montaigne makes use of a theatrical metaphor to contrast outwards pretense with inward discipline.47 Florio takes his use of the phrase “au batelage” further in his own translation, where he writes, “everyone may play the juggler and represent an honest man upon the stage.”48 His translation captures some of the complexity of inward and outward conflict from the original French, when he writes that “the master be such inwardly by himself as he is outwardly, for fear of the laws and respect of men’s speeches.”49 Montaigne therefore connects inwardness with uncertainty. Montaigne also builds on the effects of outward dishonesty and inward uncertainty as he separates “impetuous” sins from premeditated and repeated ones.50 He writes that the latter must exist only if willed or intended by whoever possesses them, and that their claimed repentance is “a little hard for [him] to imagine.”51 He describes a man formerly a thief and now given to repaying his debts as an example: He regards larceny as a dishonourable action and hates it, but less than he hates poverty. He repents of it in itself, but because it was counterbalanced and compensated, he does not.52

Montaigne’s perspective is that one cannot “be pardoned and retain the offence” (3.3.56). In his eyes, repentance like this, or from premeditated or enjoyed sins is not true repentance: My actions are ruled and conformed by who I am and my condition. I cannot do better. And repentance does not touch things that are not in our control; that, instead, is regret.53

45 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 807. 46 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 807. 47 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 808. Original: “Chacun peut avoir part au batelage et représenter un honnête personnage en l’échafaud; mais au dedans et en sa poitrine, où tout nous est loisible, où tout est caché – d’y être réglé, c’est le point.” 48 Florio, “Of Repenting,” 200. 49 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 808; Florio, “Of Repenting,” 200. Original: “le maître soit tel au dedans, par lui-même, comme il est au dehors par la crainte de la loi et du dire des hommes.” 50 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 812. 51 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 812. 52 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 812. 53 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 813.

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The language that he uses to describe regret and repentance is the same as the language that Shakespeare uses to differentiate Hamlet’s uncertain view of his uncle from the audience’s knowledge of the king’s guilt. In the shift from Q1 to Q2 and F, Claudius’s role expands in both its length and emotional range. His first lines presiding over the court and his much later prayer are two focal points that show this expansion most clearly. Claudius regrets but does not repent, and reveals no outward signs of either to other characters. His characterization in Q2/F is, as with other characters, more complex than in Q1. Both his deceit and his experience of guilt are extended in the language of the longer texts. Here, the diachronic relationship shows that Shakespeare’s approach to both regret and repentance is magnified in these changes. In Q1, the king’s first lines on stage concern diplomatic matters: Lords, we here have writ to Fortenbrasse, Nephew to old Norway who, impudent And bedrid, scarcely hears of this his Nephew’s purpose. (Q1 2.1–4)

This speech establishes his political relationships – his outward self – but the scene does not grant any access to his inward self or directly acknowledge his marriage to the previous regent’s wife; inward and outward remain entirely separate. Later, the King tells Rossencraft and Gilderstone about Hamlet’s madness, followed by a discussion with Corambis about Ofelia and Hamlet interrupted briefly by Voltemar. Once more his speech is dominated by diplomacy: Right noble friends – that our dear cousin Hamlet Hath lost the very heart of all his sense It is most right, and we most sorry for him. Therefore we do desire, even as you tender Our care to him and our great love to you, That you will labour but to wring from him The cause and ground of his distemperance. (Q1 7.1–7)

The diplomatic tenor of this speech dominates once more, with appropriate deference to “cousin” Hamlet and his “noble friends,” but without any betrayal of the King’s true perspective on how Hamlet’s actions affect the court at large or raise the King’s suspicion. However, the tonal shift in the king’s movement from affectionate language (“dear,” “tender,” and “love”) to violent language (“labour” and “wring”) implies his more vicious, inward self, and blurs the distinction between them. While an actor could either emphasize or downplay the honesty or irony of their delivery, the lines themselves read as strangely opaque.

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Shakespeare’s language responds to Montaigne’s description of a leader’s inward state evoking this same kind of opacity: The admiring people publicly escort him to his door: he drops his role as he drops his robe, and the higher he has climbed, the lower he falls back down. Inside, in his home, everything is tumultuous and vile. If humility can be found at all, it takes keen and good judgement to perceive it among his low and private actions.54

In the same way, the King’s externally smooth transition to replace his brother effaces not only Old Hamlet but also the King’s own inward self and any chance for his repentance. In both Q2 and F, Shakespeare blurs both the lines between inwardness and outwardness and the extent to which these depend directly on Montaigne’s work. Claudius is more imposing and manipulative than the King of Q1. His lines afford an actor great flexibility in the extent to which the irony might be emphasized or kept subtle at this early stage of the narrative. While much of this scene maintains a polite veneer, Claudius’s first fourteen lines are no longer about international politics but about navigating Denmark’s political innards in spite of marrying his sister-in-law and supplanting Hamlet: Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death The memory be green, and that it us befitted To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom To be contracted in one brow of woe, Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature That we with wisest sorrow think on him, Together with remembrance of ourselves. Therefore our sometimes sister, now our queen, Th’imperial jointress of this warlike state, Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy, With one auspicious and one dropping eye, With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole, Taken to wife. (1.2.1–14)

A striking addition to the opening speech from its Q1 counterpart is the inclusion of the phrase “disjoint and out of frame” only a few lines later (1.2.20).55 Claudius rejects this assumption about Denmark by Fortinbras as a result of

54 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 809. 55 This of course invokes Hamlet’s description of Claudius’s actions after meeting the Ghost. For Hamlet, his acknowledgment that “time is out of joint” draws attention to both his role as avenger and Claudius’s hand in upsetting the balance of the Danish court (1.5.189).

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Old Hamlet’s death, but “it [follows] hard upon” the cumulative list of opposites describing the reasons he has married Gertrude (1.2.179). Claudius’s extended acknowledgment of how he has replaced his brother, while couched in politesse, is also undercut by the rhetorical effect of dismissing previous Norwegian and Danish conflict: He [Fortinbras] hath not failed to pester us with message Importing the surrender of those lands Lost by his father, with all bands of law, To our most valiant brother. So much for him. (1.2.22–25)

Here, “he” and “him” can be ambiguously attached to multiple subjects. This allows Claudius to dismiss Fortinbras and Old Hamlet simultaneously. While he still speaks in a courtly manner and has not revealed his hand in his brother’s murder, his multi-layered language is no longer as opaque as in Q1. It is important to note that Hamlet does not actively suspect his uncle of murder until told so by the Ghost; again, as Montaigne notes, “no one knows if you are cowardly or cruel.” However, more of Claudius’s language here implies the responsibility he will later admit. The secondary implications of Claudius’s words in Q2/F reveal more of what eventuates in unsuccessful prayer as his inward and regretful – rather than repentant – self. Shakespeare repurposes this inward fragmentation, from Montaigne’s discussion of fragmentation and inwardness, in Denmark’s disjointedness and Claudius’s dismissal of his brother, which in turn reveal the King’s splintered inward self in his Q2/F prayer. This opening speech engages not so much with the language that Montaigne uses, but rather with the same ideas as “Du repentir.” The content of Claudius’s speech becomes the “role” and “robe” that he drops when praying. The prayer sequence in these texts exemplifies Claudius’s attempts to articulate himself in prayer while also responding to Montaigne’s project of essaying, or trying, to articulate himself. In Q1, the King’s prayer, revealing his guilt, is quite short, and is his only regretful moment thus far. He acknowledges his crimes as “the murder of a brother and a king” and his “adulterous fault,” and calls them “unpardonable” (Q1 10.5–7). Although he considers “contrition,” he also calls himself “wretched” and seems to accept his inability to pray even before he identifies it as such (Q1 10.9, 12). However, while his speech is more personal than his previous scenes, his inwardness is still not fully revealed. The King’s supposedly inmost thoughts are more rhetorical than repentant. He is less concerned with his salvation in a similar way to Q1’s Hamlet. In the “To be or not to be” speech of Q1, the prince is more concerned with the philosophical contemplation of his questions about suicide and the afterlife than his status before God. This concern about God’s judgment is extrapolated further in the

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Q2/F texts. Claudius’s prayer in Q2/F is a much longer and more detailed engagement with regret as compared to repentance. Furthermore, the difference between Q1 and the other two texts again aligns with the emotional tenor of his language and the shifting philosophical focus on repentance and regret. While the prayers share some similar lines, the Q2/F versions of the prayer change their tone: Oh my offense is rank, it smells to heaven; . . . Pray can I not, Though inclination be as sharp as will. My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent. (3.3.36, 38–40)

Claudius’s view of his transgressions is more personalized. Recognizing that he lacks a repentant heart, he questions the legitimacy of his pursuit of forgiveness: what form of prayer Can serve my turn? “Forgive me my foul murder”? That cannot be, since I am still possessed Of those effects for which I did the murder . . . May one be pardoned and retain th’offense? (3.3.51–54, 56)

Claudius’s rhetoric from Q1 becomes more of an internal debate in light of his status before God. His language includes many more expressions that evoke fever and decay to describe his poor moral health, as well as “the corrupted currents” of the world at large (3.3.57). He engages directly with the same ideas as Montaigne about true repentance: Try what repentance can. What can it not? Yet what can it when one cannot repent? . . . Help, angels! – Make assay. (3.3.65–66, 69)

Shakespeare’s “assay” results in Claudius’s inward contemplation mirroring Montaigne’s own “essaying” (“essayer,” or “to try”) of his self. The Q2 text contains “assay” four times, while by comparison, each of Shakespeare’s other plays include it either once or twice at most. Furthermore, Hamlet’s intrusion on this moment – “trip him . . . that his soul may be as damned and black / As hell . . . This physic but prolongs thy sickly days” (3.3.93–96) – exemplifies the disjunction between Claudius’s inner and outer selfhood, as Hamlet chooses not to act upon the assumption that his uncle is “seasoned for his passage” (3.3.86). The dramatic irony created by the audience’s insight into both the struggle to pray, and the result that the words only “fly up,” while “sins” and “words” remain below, emphasizes the metatheatrical work here, too (Q1 10.32–33; 3.3.97–98).

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Claudius identifies the crux of his crisis of faith in the same vein as Montaigne, whose writing emphasizes both his critical distance between the essays’ revisions and a difficulty with capturing his “objet.” In the 1595 edition of “Du repentir,” Montaigne includes an extra sentence before his analysis of vice: “malice sucks up most of its own venom and so poisons itself.”56 That edition was published posthumously from his own heavily annotated copy of a 1588 edition. Montaigne’s emphasis on poison, alongside the image of a fever’s temperatures being stronger from within than from without, mirrors much of the diseased, feverish, and rotten terminology in the Q2 and F texts.57 Florio’s translation of the essay collection came from this 1595 edition. The relationship between these texts therefore suggests a chronology of the Hamlet texts in correlation with Shakespeare’s access to both French and English texts. All three plays contain this group of words and ideas; they indicate Shakespeare’s facility with French and are instances of a diachronic relationship. Q1 contains less, particularly in Hamlet’s visceral descriptions of his uncle and mother and their relationship.58 By contrast, Q2 and F include more extensive examples of “an unweeded garden” (1.2.135), “contagion” and related words, as well as the changes in Claudius’s prayer.59 The other mention of fever in the Q2/F texts is Claudius’s invocation to Hamlet’s executioners: “Do it England, / For like the hectic in my blood he rages, / And thou must cure me” (4.3.61–63). There is neither fever nor poison in the narrative source of the Amleth myth.60 The lateness of the additions in Montaigne’s and Shakespeare’s works, in conjunction with the appearance of Florio’s translation of the later edition of essays, implies the potential chronology of the Hamlet texts in correlation with Shakespeare’s access to both French and English texts. The images appear after reading Montaigne’s French, but develop even more once the essays are available in English. The metaphor is not definitively diachronic. However, it

56 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 806. 57 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 806. Original: “la raison efface les autres tristesses et douleurs, mais elle engendre celle de la repentance, qui est plus griève, d’autant qu’elle naît au dedans; comme le froid et le chaud des fièvres est plus poignant que celui qui vient du dehors.” 58 In Q1, examples include the Ghost’s words to Hamlet about his crimes being “purged and burnt away” and the story of his death “rankly abused” (Q1 5.6, 32), the recurring use of “foul” and its derivatives, and poison in the narrative via the Mousetrap, Laertes’s foil, and the wine prepared for Hamlet at the duel. 59 Other examples include Claudius’s words after Ophelia’s first “distracted” entry – “this is the poison of deep grief” (4.5.74) and Hamlet’s words to Gertrude after killing Polonius: “that flattering unction . . . will but skin and film the ulcerous place, / Whiles rank corruption, mining all within, / Infects unseen” (3.4.146, 148–50). 60 See: François de Belleforest, Le cinquiesme tome des histoires tragiques, 257–318.

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indicates that the playwright’s representations of inward and outward selfhood work with the same ideas as those presented in the essays. The philosophy in Hamlet addresses this same Montaignian inwardness. Recognizing this decenters Shakespeare’s English by merit of his work with Montaigne’s French.

Philosophers and Intersections So far I have focused on the relationship between the plays and Montaigne’s original French. However, Florio’s text also allows for further connections between them. His translation functions as a different kind of intersection. Hamlet’s “unreason,” according to Claudius, is of course a central part of his characterization, and we see this both in his public and private moments on the stage. It develops even more out of Florio’s “That to Philosophise” across the multiple play texts. In addition to his theatrical metaphor, “au batelage,” Montaigne returns to inward orderliness, saying that to be settled inwardly “is the point.” This reads in parallel to the Q1 “To be, or not to be” speech: “c’est le point” and “there’s the point” (Q1 7.115). The expression is not uncommon in English at this time, either, and Florio translates identically. The parallel is not adequate on its own, but the proximity of this phrase with the paragraph where it occurs, and the content of the speech, is more noteworthy. A central image of the “To be” speech in both Q2 and F is Hamlet’s discussion of “[taking] arms against a sea of troubles,” and here his language echoes Montaigne’s suggestion that we “learn to stand firm, and to fight” (3.1.59).61 There is no equivalent line in the Q1 soliloquy, while Florio’s translation picks up on both “nous apprenons” and “combattre” in the phrase “let us learn to stand and combat her with a resolute mind.”62 By the time Q2 was published in 1604, Florio’s translation had been in print for a year. Florio and his English hover around the edges of Shakespeare’s re-drafting process, re-reading and re-writing after re-visiting Montaigne’s French. The uncertainty in these pervasively unfinished and multiple texts makes Shakespeare’s language even more Montaignian. Hamlet’s “becoming,” rather than “being,” is of course evoked in the cyclical tragic narrative structure of the play in all three of its versions, as Horatio is tasked with retelling his story. However, the play maintains an uncertain status between English and French as

61 Montaigne, “Que philosopher,” 86. 62 Florio, “That to Philosophise,” 20.

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a result of its uncertain sources and their languages. In “Du repentir,” Montaigne draws specific attention to the title of his entire collection when conjugating “essayer,” meaning “to try,” writing “if my mind could get a foothold, I would not be essaying myself, but rather resolving myself: instead, it is always an apprentice and on trial.”63 His approach to each of these essays implies that each written project must inherently be about an attempt, rather than a solution, to any given philosophical problem. Even though Montaigne mock-boasts about his expertise about himself, being “the most learned man alive” on his chosen topic, the uncertainty at play in other parts of the essays evokes Montaigne’s selfdeprecating “what do I know?”64 The uncertainty remains central throughout his essays in a wry counterargument to his expertise about himself as an “object” rather than a “subject” for study. Hamlet shares aspects of this internal uncertainty. The proximity of multiple “Hamletian” ideas in the Essais (whether originally “Montaignian” or sourced elsewhere, such as through sententiae and the commonplace tradition) supports Shakespeare’s process of translation. The question of whether Florio functioned as an edge through which Shakespeare crossed is only a small part of his play texts’ relationship to the Essais. While I have paid close attention to specific examples in this chapter, I have granted little space to a particular category of critical work that argues against such connections being of overly high value. Skepticism is of course not solely attributable to Montaigne, but rather Sextus Empiricus, Cicero, and others who preceded them. Nevertheless, textual parallels appear in more than one guise, and look different when addressed in light of Shakespeare’s French. The ideas’ stylistic development and proximity in the play texts lend themselves to a wider question of Shakespeare’s translation of Hamlet’s French philosophy via Montaigne. French English is a means of accessing Shakespeare’s French sources. Both “Que philosopher” and “Du repentir” contain shared words, phrasing, and ideas that recur in Hamlet through its text and its dramatic plot. Claudius and Hamlet present opposite forms of the same kind of tension between repentance and regret, where their “inward man” does not represent their outward self. Claudius exemplifies both the disjunction between inner and outer selves and the relationship between repentance and regret, as his inward and outward selves diverge. However, Hamlet’s repentance, regret, and particularly his sense of guilt, counter Claudius’s own. From in his first lines on stage, where

63 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 805. 64 Montaigne, “Du repentir,” 805; Montaigne, “Apologie de Raimond Sebond,” in Les essais de Montaigne, 527.

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he insists that he “[knows] not seems” to having an even pulse but being “mad in craft” with an “antic disposition,” Hamlet’s inward and outward selves blur until their edges are indistinguishable (1.2.76, 3.4.189, 1.5.172).65 This comparative work centered on French English reveals the languages and philosophy that connects Shakespeare’s and Montaigne’s languages and texts.

Works Cited Primary Sources Florio, John. Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt. New York: New York Book Review, 2014. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated by M.A. Screech. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Montaigne, Michel de. Les essais de Montaigne d’après l’exemplaire de Bordeaux. Edited by Pierre Villey and Verdun-Louis Saulnier. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004. Montaigne, Michel de. Montaigne’s Essays and Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition. Translated by Donald M. Frame. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1963. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Edited by Philip Edwards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Shakespeare, William. “Hamlet”: The Texts of 1603 and 1623. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Shakespeare, William. The Plays of William Shakespeare. Edited by Samuel Johnson, Nicholas Rowe, and George Steevens. London, 1803.

Secondary Sources Baldwin, Thomas. William Shakespere’s Smalle Latine and Lesse Greeke. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944. Bate, Jonathan. “Montaigne and Shakespeare: Two Great Writers of One Mind.” New Statesman, July 2, 2014. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/07/montaigneand-shakespeare-two-great-writers-one-mind. Belleforest, François de. Le cinquiesme tome des histoires tragiques. Edited by Hervé-Thomas Campangne. Geneva: Droz, 2013. Bourus, Terri. Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy, and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

65 Q1 Hamlet’s equivalent lines hold the same meaning in different words: “outward semblance / Is [not] equal to the sorrow of [his] heart” but his actions are “not madness” (Q1 2. 36–37, 11.90). “Antic disposition” remains the same in all three texts (Q1 5.140; F 1.5.171).

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Butterfield, Ardis. The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Capell, Edward. Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare. Edited by John Collins. London, 1779. Cartwright, Kent. “Diachronic and Synchronic: Two Problems of Textual Relations in The Comedy of Errors.” In Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies, edited by Dennis Austin Britton and Melissa Walter, 184–205. New York: Routledge, 2018. Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Johnson, Laurie. The Tain of Hamlet. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Jolly, Margrethe. The First Two Quartos of Hamlet: A New View of the Origins and Relationship of the Texts. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Knowles, Ronald. “Hamlet and Counter-Humanism.” Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 4 (1999): 1046–69. Lee, John. “The English Renaissance Essay: Churchyard, Cornwallis, Florio’s Montaigne, and Bacon.” In A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Hattaway, 437–46. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Lesser, Zachary. “Hamlet” after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. McCarthy, Dennis. “A ‘Sea of Troubles’ and a ‘Pilgrimage Uncertain’ / Dial of Princes as the Source for Hamlet’s Soliloquy.” Notes and Queries 56, no. 1 (2009): 57–60. Miola, Robert. Shakespeare’s Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Newman, Karen. Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Taylor, Gary, and Rory Loughnane. “The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works.” In The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, edited by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan, 417–603. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Watson, George. “Shakespeare and the Norman Conquest: English in the Elizabethan Theatre.” Virginia Quarterly Review Online 66, no. 4 (1990): 613–28. Williams, Travis D. “The Bourn Identity: Hamlet and the French of Montaigne’s Essais.” Notes and Queries 58, no. 2 (2011): 254–58.

John R. Severn

Chapter 11 “Then Turn Tail to Tail and Peace Be with You”: John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, Menippean Satire, and Same-Sex Desire In John Fletcher’s 1611 comedy The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, Petruchio is tamed by his second wife, Maria, with the assistance of her cousin Bianca and other female supporters. In a subplot, Rowland breaks up with his girlfriend Livia – Maria’s sister – due to a misunderstanding. With Bianca’s assistance, Livia thwarts her father’s wish for her to marry the rich, elderly Moroso, and instead marries Rowland. Critical discourse on The Woman’s Prize has long wrestled with the play’s relationship to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, variously conceiving of that relationship in terms of adaptation, burlesque, continuation, counterpart, response, or sequel. What these conceptions share is the presupposition of a strong, fundamental link between the two plays, an assumption of some form of continuity between their characters, themes, and central storylines, despite the fact that Fletcher creates obvious disjunctions between The Shrew’s world and that of The Woman’s Prize. Without wishing to deny the roles that The Taming of the Shrew has played in the creation and reception of The Woman’s Prize, nor both plays’ central thematic concern with marriage, this chapter explores what might be revealed if we conceive of Shakespeare’s play as one of a range of intersecting dramatic and literary references that Fletcher invokes throughout The Woman’s Prize. Instead of approaching The Woman’s Prize as a sequel to Shakespeare’s Shrew, I propose that Fletcher uses the techniques of Menippean satire to create a more complex, richer texture than is usually recognized. In this chapter, I demonstrate how approaching The Woman’s Prize as Menippean satire reveals a shifting, unstable subplot of unsatisfied, temporary, and predatory same-sex desire, ironically disguised as a protective altruism, which modern critics have overlooked, and modern editors underplayed. The readiness to understand The Woman’s Prize as fundamentally linked to The Taming of the Shrew was already presented as problematic in 1935, when Baldwin Maxwell wrote that the “tendency to think of the two plays together has led not only to frequent failure to estimate fully Fletcher’s comic skill but https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-011

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as well to several false conclusions about The Woman’s Prize.”1 While Maxwell’s aim was to date Fletcher’s play, and the “false conclusions” he regrets relate primarily to that aim, his cautionary note holds good for other aspects of the play. If his arguments for dating The Woman’s Prize to 1611 have met with widespread acceptance, and if his article is regularly cited in discussions of the play, subsequent critics have nonetheless continued not only to “think of the plays together,” but often apparently to approach Fletcher’s play through the lens of Shakespeare’s. This is perhaps unsurprising, as centuries-long trends in titling Fletcher’s play have consolidated the tendency to link it primarily to The Shrew. While the undated seventeenth-century Lambarde Manuscript – containing possibly the play’s earliest surviving version – has no title page, the earliest printed editions in the first (1647) and second (1679) Beaumont and Fletcher Folios name the play The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed. However, from at least its 1633 revival, the play has frequently been referred to, published, or produced as The Tamer Tamed – or even The Taming of the Tamer – a trend increasing in line with the growing critical and theatrical attention paid to it since the turn of this century.2 A naming strategy that links a product to Shakespeare’s high cultural value is of course a useful marketing tool, whether for editions aimed at the non-specialist student market or for stagings of the play, which are almost always produced as part of a double-bill or in repertory with The Shrew. Munro notes only four

1 Maxwell, “The Woman’s Prize,” 353. 2 On October 18, 1633, Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, ordered the King’s Men “to forebeare the actinge of your play called The Tamer Tamd, or The Taminge of the Tamer” (Malone, An Historical Account, 265). The epilogue of John Lacy’s Sauny the Scot, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew first performed in 1667, suggests it was designed to be played alongside Fletcher’s play: “I’ve Tam’d the Shrew, but will not be asham’d / If next you see the very Tamer Tam’d” (Lacy, Sauny the Scot, 78). While the twentieth century generally saw a return to The Woman’s Prize, with George Ferguson’s 1966 critical edition under that name then the only freestanding edition, the twenty-first century has seen a turn to The Tamer Tamed. Among editions aimed at the student market, those by Munro and by Gaines and Maurer use The Tamer Tamed, while that by Daileader and Taylor swaps the Folio title and subtitle to give The Tamer Tamed or, The Woman’s Prize. The Woman’s Prize is retained in two anthologies: in Fischlin and Fortier’s Adaptations of Shakespeare and in Norton’s English Renaissance Drama. For specialists, Meg Powers Livingston’s Malone Society facsimile edition of the Lambarde Manuscript uses the unsubtitled The Woman’s Prize. Among acting editions, that prepared for the Royal Shakespeare Company uses The Tamer Tamed, while Patrick Young’s acting edition prepared for Theatre Erindale, Mississauga, renames the play The Taming of the Tamer, reinforcing links to Shakespeare’s play even more strongly. Productions of the play are almost invariably scheduled in the same season as The Taming of the Shrew with the title The Tamer Tamed, or, as in the 2009 Mississauga staging, The Taming of the Tamer.

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modern productions that were staged independently of Shakespeare’s play; I am not aware of any modern productions that have used The Woman’s Prize as a title.3 Ironically, as I discuss below, the use of naming strategies to set up a constantly shifting set of interpretive frames is one of the Menippean techniques that Fletcher uses in The Woman’s Prize. However, by using naming strategies that point so forcefully to a single interpretive framework, these editorial and theatrical practices both reflect the play’s modus operandi, and eclipse the play’s effects.

The Woman’s Prize as Menippean Satire Whether on page or stage, Menippean satire is a messy, unruly, playful, experimental, earthy, but often also erudite and intellectual, form of satire. While other forms of satire may take aim at particular individuals or stances, Menippean satire habitually offers its shifting viewpoints to readers or audiences as opportunities to test competing viewpoints on philosophical or social issues. Although Menippean satire may well come down on one side or another on these issues, it may also appear ambivalent or neutral: by foregrounding issues of interpretation and representation, it is more likely to invite readers or audiences to take responsibility for drawing their own conclusions than it is to take a straightforwardly polemical approach.4 As Menippean satire diverges from other forms of satire, theorists Milowicki and Wilson propose the term “Menippean discourse” as an alternative to “Menippean satire,” thus focusing more on modus operandi rather than on aims or results.5 Briefly, Menippean discourse is characterized by a discontinuous mixture and mélange of styles, forms, and languages, both highly intellectual and ribald, gross, and physical, drawing on multiple literary traditions, and incorporating allusions to other literary works that open up often competing and discordant interpretive frameworks. All these aspects are prominent in The Woman’s Prize. The play’s language and action are often gross, and ribald double and even triple entendres abound. As Ferguson notes, “Fletcher’s real forte lies in the double entendre and the twisting of an apparently innocent phrase into a suggestive reference.”6 Indeed, as

3 Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Munro, xxn35. 4 For extended discussions of Menippean satire, see: Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World; Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics; Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam; Kirk, Menippean Satire; and Sherbert, Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit. 5 Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse.” 6 Fletcher, The Woman’s Prize, ed. Ferguson, 15.

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might be expected in Menippean satire, Fletcher noticeably foregrounds the act of interpretation: multiple meanings regularly jostle for attention. However, the dangers of the unrestricted free play of interpretation are not passed over. The female characters themselves are aware of these dangers and prefer the perceived stability of the written word: in revolutionary terms, the aim of their uprising is to produce a new written constitution, and in personal terms to create a written contract for relations between spouses. Perhaps as a consequence, Fletcher’s women are far more in control of language, and thus of meaning, than the men: thus, it is only women who are able to manipulate language, to occasionally dazzling effect, with triple entendres. For example, Bianca packs three meanings into her comment to Moroso, “She is sick, sir, / But you may kiss her whole” (TLN2651–52), and further embeds yet another double meaning within one of the secondary meanings: as well as the obvious surface meaning “you may kiss her better,” Moroso can understand a bawdy reference (quibbling on “whole/hole”) to the opportunities for cunnilingus Bianca suggests await him.7 Embedded within this secondary meaning are at least two interpretations: a positive one, and, given the constant jibes throughout the play on Moroso’s assumed impotence, a taunt that penetrative intercourse is not an option. Finally, the audience, who alone know Bianca’s plan to dupe Moroso and prevent his marriage to Livia, can understand her to mean “but you can kiss her arse.” The male characters, on the other hand, appear far less able to control and manipulate language and meaning in their conversations: misunderstandings between them abound, confusions arising with unintended double entendres, when metaphors are taken literally, or when words are simply misheard or misunderstood. Here, for example, Sophocles refers to fortifications, while Rowland hears a reference to genitalia. Neither seems aware of the possibility of a double entendre, with confusion as a result: Rowland: Here’s stirring, but to what end? Whither go you? Sophocles: To view the works. Rowland: What works? Sophocles: The women’s trenches. Rowland: Trenches? Are such to see? Sophocles: I do not jest, sir. Rowland: I cannot understand you. (TLN736–42)

7 Line references prefixed with TLN are to the Through-Line Numbering of the facsimile manuscript (Fletcher, The Woman’s Prize, ed. Livingston) with silent modernization of spelling; references prefixed F are to the 1647 First Folio and refer to passages that do not appear in the manuscript.

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The result is that we are frequently invited to laugh with the women and at the men. Modern scholarly editions provide critical apparatuses that explicate bawdy or other multiple meanings. However, they are less likely to do so when such meanings suggest same-sex desire; indeed, in some cases, glossing effectively diverts attention from same-sex desire. For example, Daileader and Taylor, Gaines and Maurer, and Munro all acknowledge the sexual reference in Jaques’s line about the women, “they have got a stick of fiddles and firk it in wondrous ways” (TLN1169–70).8 However, while Williams confirms a sexual meaning for “root,” none of Fletcher’s editors glosses this in Bianca’s preceding “Where like a race of noble Amazons / We’ll root ourselves, and to our endless glory / live and despise base men” (TLN855–57).9 Indeed, Munro glosses “root” as “establish,” closing down rather than opening up the range of Fletcher’s sexual imagery.10 As Bianca is firmly in control of her sexual double entendres elsewhere, there is no reason to assume she does not intend a sexual meaning to be available here. While Munro proposes that Jaques’s suggestion of lesbianism is representative of “the men’s fear that the women might be sexually independent,” one might argue that it simply describes what he saw: Bianca’s rallying cry in enthusiastic action.11 Later in the Folio text, Bianca activates a potential double entendre in Petronius’s speech that also raises the possibility of sexual activity between women: Petronius: You have a hand, I hear, too – Bianca: I have two sir Petronius: – in my daughter’s business. Bianca: You will find there a fitter hand than mine to reach her frets And play down-diddle to her. (F4.1.101–4)

Whether Bianca acts as if she believes Petronius is imputing a sexual nature to her relationship with Livia, toys with Petronius by appearing to make that suggestion herself, or simply dazzles him with her playing on words (on “too”/“two,”

8 Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Daileader and Taylor, 97; Gaines and Maurer, eds., Three Shrew Plays, 178; Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Munro, 73. 9 Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language, 3:1168–69; Williams, Shakespeare’s Sexual Language, 262. 10 Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Munro, 55. 11 Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Munro, 73.

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as well as on “business” and playing), her responses are likely to disconcert Petronius. Here, comedy arises from a female character demonstrating her ability to manipulate a male character’s language. At the same time, that Bianca draws attention to multiple meanings and acts of interpretation invites audiences to be ready to engage in their own acts of interpretation. If Bianca’s word play creates an onstage world in which sex between women is a possibility, her word play also suggests that an awareness of this and the means by which it might be discussed lie primarily in acts of interpretation rather than in direct statements or denotative representation. I discuss further similar examples below in relation to desire between men.

Literary Allusions and Stylistic Shifts – Sources or Interpretive Frameworks? Alongside this widespread ribaldry, the play contains long passages of quasilegal and philosophical debate, as Maria engages Petruchio and her father in Socratic dialogues to argue for equal companionate marriage and freedom from patriarchal parental control, and extended shifts into poetic registers, particularly based on classical rhetorical models. These disconcerting shifts in register and style are again characteristic of Menippean discourse. The sense of a mélange of intersecting languages and literary textures is strengthened by the inclusion of lines or expressions in Latin (TLN476, 1193, 1255, 2739), French (TLN822, 2130), Italian (TLN2612), and Spanish (F4.1.55), together with snatches of song (TLN432–33, 1175; F4.1.68–71), and shifts to pseudo-catechizing rhetoric (TLN1189–260). Literary quotations, allusions, and parallels occur frequently, from a range of sources stretching from classical literature to popular ballads, including: Homer’s Odyssey (F4.4.173), Virgil’s Aeneid (TLN845–57), Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Seneca’s Hercules Furens (TLN571), the sixteenth-century shrew-themed farce interlude Tom Tyler and His Wife (TLN1235), Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen (TLN412–13), Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (TLN1313–14), Shakespeare’s King Lear (TLN1109–10), The Passionate Pilgrim (F2.1.32), Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, or The Silent Woman (TLN497), and the ballads of Babylon (TLN54) and Childe Rowland (F2.1.15). Sometimes these are fleeting, others, for example those connected to the Aeneid, prompt an extended shift in dramatic and poetic register.

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Recent commentators have pointed to some of these references as potential non-Shakespearean sources for The Woman’s Prize.12 However, to think of these allusions and parallels in terms of competing or complementary sources risks obscuring their literary and dramatic effect. I argue that these allusions and parallels might instead be thought of as strategically placed cues that combine with changes in tone, register, and style to set up a series of temporary interpretive frameworks, making The Woman’s Prize a slippery work that keeps audiences emotionally and intellectually unmoored. One of the interpretive frameworks that The Woman’s Prize sets up is undeniably The Taming of the Shrew, with the name “Petruchio” mentioned in the first scene (TLN53). Nonetheless, if late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century academic, editorial, and theatrical practices reify the primary role of The Taming of the Shrew in the reception of The Woman’s Prize, overall continuity between the plays is more apparent than real. While both plays have a central concern with gender roles within marriage, only three characters’ names – Petruchio, Bianca, and Tranio – are common to both plays, and the personalities of the characters bearing them differ significantly between the two plays. Although editorial practice identifies Shakespeare’s Katherina as the first wife of the widowed Petruchio in The Woman’s Prize, Petruchio’s first wife is in fact never named, nor is she ever referred to as Bianca’s sister.13 Instead, Fletcher uses circumlocutions such as “his other wife” (TLN28) or “his first wife” (TLN282). Unlike his Shakespearean counterpart, Petruchio is repeatedly described as having been even-tempered until his first marriage (TLN28–34, 47–54, 184–85): Petruchio’s bad behavior arose during, and as a result of, his first marriage to a woman who seems to have been tamed neither before nor after the marriage. As Maxwell argues, “it is hard for an admirer to admit that Fletcher could have proved so dull a student, for at best, The Woman’s Prize reveals a very distant and cloudy recollection of Shakespeare’s farce.”14 Indeed, Fletcher appears to go out of his way to avoid creating incontrovertible links to The Taming of the Shrew: the presence of a similar-but-different

12 See, for example: Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Daileader and Taylor, 11–14, who propose Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, or The Silent Woman and Aristophanes’s Lysistrata as sources; and Wootton, “The Tamer Tamed, or None Shall Have Prizes,” who proposes Carolus Paschalius’s False Complaints, Or the Censure of an Unthankfull Mind (1605). 13 For example, Daileader and Taylor gloss “his other wife” as “Katherine, depicted in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew” (Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Daileader and Taylor, 46); Lucy Munro glosses the line in similar terms: “i.e. Katherine, the heroine of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew” (Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Munro, 6), as do Gaines and Maurer: “i.e. Katherina” (Three Shrew Plays, 138). 14 Maxwell, “The Woman’s Prize,” 358.

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character called Petruchio instead invites us to draw parallels between the plays, rather than to identify continuities in character and action. Daileader and Taylor are unusual among modern editors in pursuing connections between the play and Jonson’s Epicœne, or The Silent Woman.15 The similarities in names, ages, and marital ambitions between Jonson’s Morose and Fletcher’s Moroso are reinforced by Sophocles’s line to Moroso, “I shall never believe a silent woman, when they break forth they are bonfires” (TLN497–98). A reference shortly beforehand (TLN477) to the siege of Ostend, and suggestions of similar costuming in references to a nightcap, are also produced as evidence of allusions to Epicœne in older work attempting to date the play.16 Further, I would argue that the homosocial opening scene of The Woman’s Prize contains parallels with the homosocial opening scene of Epicœne. In Epicœne’s first scene, fashionable men-about-town discuss Moroso’s search for a silent wife. The Woman’s Prize opens with Petruchio’s friends discussing their apprehensions about his treatment of his new wife. At this stage, Petruchio is still unnamed. Tranio (also as yet unnamed) describes him as requiring silence in a wife: “Her very sound, if she but say her prayers / Louder than men talk treason, makes him tinder” (TLN58–59). Tranio, showing off his knowledge of Petruchio’s bedtime habits, reports: For yet the bare remembrance of his first wife (I tell ye on my knowledge, and a truth too) will make him start in’s sleep, and very often cry out for cudgels, cowl-staves, anything, hiding his breeches out of fear her ghost should walk, and wear ’em yet; since his first marriage he is no more the still Petruchio than I am Babylon. (TLN47–54)

This is the first mention of the name “Petruchio,” and its context, in a negative formulation paired with a fictional ballad character, is ambiguous: is it used metaphorically, or is it the offstage character’s real name? The mention of Petruchio thus invites an interpretive shift from a scene with parallels to The Silent Woman to a scene with parallels to The Taming of the Shrew. Although Moroso is not named until the following scene (TLN129), if the earlier commentators are correct, and Moroso’s age and nightcap would have raised parallels with Jonson’s Morose, this first scene uses literary and visual allusions to provide competing and discordant interpretive frameworks – the offstage character Petruchio appears to share the characteristics of both Jonson’s Morose and Shakespeare’s Petruchio, while an onstage character also appears to be a reflection of Jonson’s Morose. The introduction of these competing and discordant

15 Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Daileader and Taylor, 11–13. 16 See: Maxwell, “The Woman’s Prize,” 383.

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interpretive frameworks signals Fletcher’s Menippean technique from the beginning of the play.

Delayed Naming and Desire: Sophocles, Tranio, and Petronius and Their Classical Namesakes Delaying the revelation of characters’ names in order to activate interpretive frameworks for audiences is unusual in Fletcher’s plays. Either characters’ names are mentioned in their first scene, or, exceptionally, as with Fletcher’s Wit Without Money’s Fountain, Bellamore, and Harebrain, audiences never hear their names – names instead presumably serving as guides to characterization for the performers. While audiences learn the names of many characters in The Woman’s Prize early on, as I discuss below, three characters – Sophocles, Tranio, and Petronius – are not named until long after their first appearance. Fletcher also usually makes his plays’ settings clear early on, either naming the place directly (for example, The Wild-Goose Chase, The Mad Lover, The Chances, Bonduca, The Faithful Shepherdess, The Loyal Subject, and The Tragedy of Valentinian) or, less usually, by repeated contextual references (for example, Monsieur Thomas, The Humorous Lieutenant, and The Island Princess); in all of these examples, the setting remains consistent. In The Woman’s Prize, Fletcher generally uses this second method of suggesting setting, but keeps his audiences unmoored as settings seem to shift between scenes. For audiences used to Fletcher’s techniques of contextualizing scene-setting, the extended references to Roman gods, classical references, and elevated diction of the women’s first scene suggests a disconcerting shift in time and place from Jonsonian city-comedy to classical tragedy; however, no sooner are we accustomed to this setting than we are taken apparently to rural Britain as the men’s frame of reference changes to Lancastrian ballads, The Faerie Queen, and English and Welsh saints. This unsettling approach to setting seems designed to invite audiences to receive other aspects of the play through allusion, including the strategic withholding and revealing of names.17

17 Audiences for productions such as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s that attempt to create continuity between The Shrew and The Woman’s Prize by changing the names of Fletcher’s characters to match those of characters in Shakespeare’s play thus lose the opportunities Fletcher’s naming strategies provided. As most modern audiences are unlikely to have the knowledge of classical literature required for these strategies to be effective, this is perhaps no great loss. The RSC amended Fletcher’s Jacques to Grumio, Moroso to Gremio, Sophocles to

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Sophocles, for example, does not display marked personality traits in the play’s first half: he is simply an unnamed friend of Petruchio, witty and circumspect. However, around the middle of the play, his character undergoes a change to one unable to control his lust, setting off a minor subplot (largely carried on offstage and reported) when he attempts, unsuccessfully, to bed Maria, his disloyalty putting his friendship with Petruchio at risk. This character change follows the revelation of his name. The name is first mentioned at TLN1514 by Jaques in a discussion with Pedro reporting offstage events as the women march through town. After Jaques and Pedro leave the stage, Petruchio and Sophocles enter, later joined by Maria. Petruchio and Maria repeatedly address Sophocles by his name, the repetitions both reinforcing his name and suggesting some significance in its late revelation. Presumably, we are expected to think of Socrates’s story in Book I of Plato’s Republic, of how the elderly Greek playwright Sophocles was relieved to have escaped lust, “that raging and savage master” (λυττῶντά τινα καὶ ἄνγριον δεσπότην) of his youth.18 A name here thus activates an interpretive frame that contextualizes a character’s otherwise unexpected actions. Like Sophocles, Tranio and Petronius are known to the audience from early on (Tranio from the opening scene, Petronius from the third); however, Tranio’s name is withheld until TLN959, while Petronius’s is not revealed until TLN2199. Critics have puzzled over the differences between Fletcher’s Tranio, apparently of similar rank to Petruchio, and Shakespeare’s Tranio, Lucentio’s servant. For Maxwell, the two Tranios have nothing in common.19 However, that is not strictly true: they both share traits with an earlier Tranio, in Plautus’s Mostellaria, the play from which Shakespeare also seems to have drawn the Shrew’s Grumio. In Mostellaria, Tranio appears as a wily, witty slave, apparently open to sex with men and women, a corruptor of his master’s son Philolaches, to whom he appears to be sexually attracted, but whom he is also willing to assist in Philolaches’s heterosexual affairs. Traces of this Tranio remain in The Taming of the Shrew, although Shakespeare’s Tranio harbors an apparently one-sided love, rather than lust after Lucentio, his master’s son, and takes Lucentio’s place to further the latter’s heterosexual affair:

Hortensio, while Fletcher’s Pedro, with no “equivalent” in Shakespeare, was de-Hispanicized to Peter. See: Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. RSC, xi. 18 Plato, Respublica, 1.329c. 19 Maxwell, “The Woman’s Prize,” 383.

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Tranio: I am content to be Lucentio Because so well I love Lucentio. Lucentio: Tranio, be so, because Lucentio loves, And let me be a slave to achieve that maid Whose sudden sight hath thralled my wounded eye. (1.1.215–19)20

Later, the Plautine flexible sexuality of Shakespeare’s Tranio emerges in his disguise: Tranio: Gentlemen, God save you. If I may be bold, tell me, I beseech you, which is the readiest way to the house of Signor Baptista Minola? Biondello: He that has the two fair daughters – is’t he you mean? Tranio: Even he, Biondello. Gremio: Hark you, sir, you mean not her to – Tranio: Perhaps him and her, sir: what have you to do? Petruccio: Not her that chides, sir, at any hand, I pray. Tranio: I love no chiders, sir: Biondello, let’s away. (1.2.217–26)

In Mostellaria, Tranio is introduced in a verbal duel with Grumio, a well-behaved slave, who calls Tranio “deliciae popli” (15; darling of the people), glossed by Lilja as “common prostitute,” and who uses the term “pergraecamini” (22; Greek it up), with suggestions of homosexuality, in his list of ways that Tranio has corrupted Philolaches while Theopropides, their master, is away.21 Tranio appears to take a physical interest in Philolaches: asked by Theopropides, his master, what kind of a person Philolaches was when Theopropides left, Tranio replies “cum pedibus, manibus, cum digitis, auribus, oculis, labris” (1118; one with feet, hands, with fingers, ears, eyes, lips). That Erich Segal translates this coyly for the Oxford translation as “Normal type – two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet, et cetera” and “deliciae popli” as “The people love your jokes,” suggests the anxieties still surrounding lines that gesture towards same-sex desire.22 A flustered Theopropides replies abruptly “Aliud te rogo” (1119; “That’s not what I asked”). Later, Simo, a neighbor with no desire for marital sex, appears and sings about how he has just escaped from his wife, who wants to go to bed with him. Tranio overhears, and approaches Simo, planning to trick him. Tranio flirts with Simo, who takes the bait and tries to seduce him, inviting himself into Tranio’s master’s

20 Line references to The Taming of the Shrew are to: Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Hodgdon. 21 Lilja, “Homosexuality,” 25. Line references to Mostellaria are to the text in: Plautus, The Merchant, ed. de Melo. 22 Plautus, Four Comedies, 183.

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house, now notorious for “goings on” in his absence. Tranio, however, stalls by appearing not to understand Simo’s intentions.23 For educated early modern audiences as familiar, if not more so, with Mostellaria as with The Shrew, the late naming of a character as Tranio is likely to have activated another Menippean frame of reference, one that indicated a corrupter of youth, someone associated with same-sex directed desires. Fletcher’s Tranio is not named until he meets young Rowland, who tells him that he has just broken up with Livia. An intriguing possibility reveals itself in Tranio’s ambiguous final lines of the scene. As Rowland leaves the stage, Tranio says “I’ll watch this young man. Desperate thoughts may seize him, and, if my purse or counsel can, I’ll ease him” (TLN1013–14). A straightforward reading suggests kindly benevolence. However, there are also bawdy quibbles available (unglossed in modern editions): Williams glosses “purse” as “scrotum,” while Henke notes that early modern “ease” also meant “relieve, with the innuendo of sexual gratification.”24 This is complex: does Tranio intend to gratify Rowland with Livia or with himself? The quibble on “purse” and a ghosting of Fletcher’s Tranio with Plautus’s might lean towards the latter interpretation. Tranio’s line lingers in the mind when he later manipulates the downcast Rowland to bet £100 against Tranio’s £20 that Rowland will never fall in love with Livia or any other woman again. As far as the Rowland–Livia subplot is discussed in modern criticism, the standard interpretation is that Tranio genuinely (or solely) wishes to help Rowland and Livia. Quite how this would be achieved by this rather complex bet is unclear. That Rowland, having already sworn off women, stands to lose a significant sum to Tranio if he recants is hardly an encouragement to return to loving women. On the other hand, Tranio’s earlier reference to his purse suggests a willingness to lose £20 with the pay-off of bedding Rowland. Nonetheless, it is significant that the predatory desire that one can at least glimpse in Tranio can also be understood as altruism. As Escolme points out, early modern conceptions of the passions conceived lust as particularly selfish: that Tranio seems to aim to satisfy a selfish passion through the disguise of altruism is comically ironic.25 If this scene is less clear than one might wish, it is because something is missing. Towards the end of the scene, the Folio text interrupts Rowland’s speech with an extended dash, usually used in the Folio to mark the removal of a short profanity or obscenity. However, the early manuscript copy of the play 23 For a fuller discussion of this scene, especially its comic aspects, see: Lilja, “Homosexuality,” 19. 24 Williams, Shakespeare’s Sexual Language, 250; Henke, Courtesans and Cuckolds, 78. 25 Escolme, Emotional Excess on the Shakespearian Stage, 100.

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also breaks off at that point in Rowland’s speech and leaves a blank space equivalent to seven lines (between TLN1002 and 1003), as if the content, or at least the exact extent, of a missing passage of some length were known. This lacuna has never been satisfactorily explained, although it is assumed that censorship issues lie behind it. Recognizing Tranio’s motivation of same-sex desire might provide further room for speculation as to the nature of the missing passage. The plot gets more complex still as Bianca enlists Tranio in having a set of papers drawn up. Ostensibly, these allow Livia’s father to release Rowland and Livia from their engagement promises. However, Bianca plans to swap them for similar documents arranging the marriage of Rowland and Livia. In keeping with the play’s theme of male carelessness over the written word, neither Livia’s father, Rowland, nor Tranio check the documentation, nor does Tranio enquire too deeply as to what Bianca is asking him to do. These arrangements take place during a curious scene that confirms that Bianca and Tranio are on intimate and friendly terms, Bianca being more lightheartedly disposed towards Tranio than she is towards other men, an example of the possibilities of friendship across gender. This comfortable intimacy is flagged earlier in the play, when, observing Rowland and Livia kissing, Tranio points out admiringly to Bianca that Rowland “Has made a stand” (TLN1819) – that is, he has an erection. In this later scene, this dialogue occurs: Bianca: Are the writings ready I told ye? Tranio: Yes, they are ready, but to what use I know not. Bianca: You’re an ass, you must have all things conster’d. Tranio: Yes, and pierced too, Or I find a little pleasure. Bianca: Now you are knavish. (TLN2180–87)

This playful passage has resulted in some puzzlement and ingenious commentary. Henke confirms that a bawdy quibble on ass and arse was available to early modern audiences.26 Maurer picks up on this meaning, but stops the quotation at “you must have all things construed,” omitting Tranio’s “Yes, and pierced too, or I have a little pleasure.”27 Munro and Daileader and Taylor gloss

26 Henke, Courtesans and Cuckolds, 8. 27 Maurer, “Constering Bianca,” 201–2.

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Tranio’s “pierced” as “penetrate sexually,” but ignore “ass.”28 Instead, they link pierced to “construed,” suggesting that Tranio picks up on the French word “con” / “cunt” in the first syllable of the word. While not denying the possibility of such a quibble, “pierced” is just as likely a referent for “ass,” which Tranio and Bianca have just identified with Tranio. Maurer is puzzled by Tranio and Bianca’s relationship, and, ignoring the possibility of non-sexual friendship between men and women, speculates, on the basis of no textual evidence, that “Tranio functions as if Byanca [sic] is his mistress in some sense or other.”29 An alternative speculation might be that Bianca and Tranio’s closeness stems from an awareness of each other’s openness to same-sex attraction. It is in this scene that we learn the name of Maria and Livia’s father: Petronius, present but unnamed from the opening of the play. The writings of the Roman Petronius, including the Satyricon – perhaps the most prominent example of Menippean satire – were well known in the early modern period, although the now famous “Trimalchio’s Feast” fragment was not re-discovered until later in the seventeenth century. Ben Jonson, for example, used the Satyricon as a source for his Volpone, while George Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears adapts the Satyricon’s tale of the Widow of Ephesus. The Satyricon charts the wanderings of Encolpius and his lover Giton, a younger man, who causes Encolpius frequent unhappiness as others, men and women, entice Giton away from him. If anyone is likely to recognize same-sex desire in others, it is a character called Petronius: Fletcher’s hitherto irascible Petronius, glad that Rowland and Livia have split up, undergoes a character transformation and appears to understand Rowland’s actions as motivated by the fact that he and Tranio are now lovers. Petronius advises Rowland that Livia “would make a kind farewell of ye, and give ye back a wandering vow or two you left in pawn, and two or three slight oaths she lent you too, she looks for” (TLN2695–98). Rowland replies: “She shall have ’em with all my heart, sir, and if you would like it better, a free release in writing” (TLN2699–701). Petronius responds: “That’s the matter. And you from her shall have another, Rowland, and then turn tail to tail, and peace be with you” (TLN2702–4). Again, editors have fought shy of acknowledging any samesex desire here. Daileader and Taylor correctly gloss “you from her shall have another” as referring to a reciprocal free release in writing, but strangely do not gloss “and then turn tail to tail, and peace be with you,” which Petronius clearly

28 Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Munro, 123; Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Daileader and Taylor, 140. The latter also give the alternative “penetrated intellectually.” 29 Maurer, “Constering Bianca,” 201.

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addresses to the two people standing before him, Rowland and Tranio, whom Petronius has greeted by name (TLN2663) – “tail” being a common bawdy quibble for penis, as they themselves have noted earlier.30 Munro, however, repunctuates and re-words the sentence, to read “And you from her. You shall have another, Rowland,” a sentence split that makes little sense, and glosses “another” as “another woman”; she does gloss “turn tail to tail” as “be sexually matched,” but here in relation to the putative other woman.31 Even without an interpretive framework based on the Satyricon, it is difficult to avoid understanding Petronius’s “and now turn tail to tail and peace be with you” as directed at those he is addressing. That the previously foul-tempered Petronius turns into an understanding friend after his name is revealed introduces an interpretive framework that makes this even more likely. If Petronius undergoes a shift in character after his name is revealed, Tranio’s interest in same-sex relationships might be suggested well before he is named, guiding audiences’ reception of the motivations for his bet. As discussed above, Fletcher provides cues for the audience to receive his first scene through the interpretive framework of Epicœne, or The Silent Woman. A notable feature of Epicœne is a blasé acceptance of same-sex desire among men as a marker of urban sophistication. An actor who approaches the opening scene of The Woman’s Prize through the interpretive framework of Epicœne might give Tranio’s otherwise banal response in this discussion of Petruchio an ironic ring: Moroso: I’ll assure ye I hold him a good man. Sophocles: Yes, sure, a wealthy – but whether a good woman’s man is doubtful. Tranio: Would ’twere no worse. (TLN23–27)

This response suggests perhaps that Petruchio might be a bad woman’s man, but a good man’s man. In this opening scene, Tranio himself might even be played as holding a candle for Petruchio. Sophocles fears Petruchio’s notorious temper will soon be unleashed. Tranio replies, “So do I too. And so far that, if God had made me a woman, and his wife that must be” – his unfinished sentence suggesting perhaps hesitation at having gone too far, perhaps a fall into comic reverie. Indeed, Daileader and Taylor note how unusual female identification is for a man in early modern drama (the practice of boys playing women notwithstanding).32 30 Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Daileader and Taylor, 160. See 66 for their gloss of “tail” as “penis.” 31 Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Munro, 145. 32 Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Daileader and Taylor, 14.

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Bianca’s plan works, Rowland and Livia are reconciled, and the play ends with their marriage, which both Tranio (like his Plautine counterpart) and Moroso appear happy to accept. Tranio’s same-sex desire is thus never fully clarified or brought to fruition, perhaps one reason for its absence from modern criticism. However, an awareness of Tranio’s potential for same-sex attraction appears to have been available to seventeenth-century audiences. Modern productions often pair The Woman’s Prize with Shakespeare’s Shrew, usually adapting Fletcher to iron out the disjunctions with Shakespeare. Restoration productions also paired the plays, but instead amended Shakespeare to provide a smoother match with Fletcher. To achieve a coherent double-bill, the differences between Tranios in the two plays is one aspect that needs to be addressed. In John Lacy’s Sauny the Scot, a 1667 adaptation of The Shrew designed to turn Shakespeare’s play into a coherent prequel to The Woman’s Prize, Lacy goes some way to achieving this by opening the play with the emotional break-up of Tranio and his male lover Winlove (Sauny’s equivalent of The Shrew’s Lucentio): Winlove: Thou, Tranio, hast been my Companion; still one Bed has held us, one Table fed us; and tho’ our Bloods give me Precedency (that I count Chance) My Love has made us Equal, and I have found a frank return in thee. Tranio: Such a Discourse commands a Serious Answer. Know then, your Kindness tells me, I must Love you: The Good you have Taught me Commands me to Honour you; I have Learnt, with you, to hate Ingratitude. But setting these aside, for thus I may seem to do it: for my own sake, be assur’d, I must Love you, though you hate me; I neither look at Vice nor Virtue in you, but as you are the Person I dote on.33

A Tranio whom we have seen in the process of breaking up with a male lover thus provides a framework through which to approach the Tranio of The Woman’s Prize. That my discussions of Tranio’s same-sex desire rely on allusive interpretive frameworks and multiple potential meanings is an indication of the general Menippean texture and meaning-making techniques of The Woman’s Prize. Usefully, such techniques that avoid denotative representation also allow affect and emotions to be staged in ways that recognize the temporary nature of emotional states as well as their ambiguous nature, both for observers and for those experiencing those emotions. This is particularly valuable when characters experience affects and emotions such as lust or sexual desires that they themselves might not be expected to be fully able to name, or prepared to acknowledge even to themselves.

33 Lacy, Sauny the Scot, 8–9.

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Putting The Shrew in Its Place An awareness of Fletcher’s Menippean strategies requires a reception that pays attention to changes in literary style and dramatic texture, that embraces discontinuities in place and character, that is alert to delayed naming strategies, and that approaches intersecting allusions and references as prompts to interpretation rather than as evidence of sources. Such an awareness reveals a play that is decidedly experimental in its own artistic and dramatic terms, especially within Fletcher’s output. The intense critical focus on The Taming of the Shrew in most modern approaches to Fletcher’s play means that, if we are to approach The Woman’s Prize on its own terms, we need to be open to a reception that sees The Shrew as one among many intersecting dramatic and literary references that activate opportunities for different interpretive angles on the play’s action. Given the play’s shifting interpretive frameworks, it is ironic that editorial, staging, and marketing efforts have positioned Shakespeare as the single interpretive framework for The Woman’s Prize. The overdetermined relationship between Shakespeare and Fletcher in twenty-first-century approaches to The Woman’s Prize effectively results in the silencing of voices beyond those related to heterosexuality and marriage. However, by accepting The Shrew as one among many intersecting references, we do more than create space for a reception in which same-sex desire – both male and female – might be heard: we also restore structural balance. Tranio’s desire for Rowland is not merely an interesting example of an early modern engagement with same-sex sexual desire as opposed to romantic love: recognizing that desire strengthens the significance of the subplot in itself, and also in relation to the main plot. Tranio’s use of a bet to discourage Rowland from returning to Livia mirrors the rich Moroso’s use of his wealth to obtain Livia from her father. A play in which each young lover has a pursuer determined to use financial means to achieve his sexual goal increases the dramatic tension and thus strengthens the subplot’s argument for marriage based on mutual emotional attraction, complementing the main plot’s argument for mutual rights and respect after marriage. At the same time, that Rowland is desired by a man goes beyond the presentation of the conflict of money and emotions in gendered terms. Further, by putting Shakespeare’s Shrew in its place in our reception process, so to speak, we create space for the other works to which Fletcher alludes to do their Menippean work: foregrounding issues of interpretation and representation. That this foregrounding invites audiences to take responsibility for interpretation arguably makes the play more effective than a polemic in changing mindsets. That both Tranio and Moroso are in the end happy to accept Rowland and Livia’s marriage suggests that, unlike the Vice figures of

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earlier drama, neither character is defined by affect or emotion. In contrast to Petruchio, who has to be trained and corrected from his anger and need to control women, neither Tranio nor Moroso need to be corrected: in itself, sexual desire, however directed, is not pathologized as a permanent character trait. The conclusion that Fletcher’s slippery Menippean satire appears to invite us to reach is that what is pathologized is violence, anger, and institutionalized inequality between genders.

Works Cited Primary Sources Bevington, David, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen, eds. English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology. New York: Norton, 2002. Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier, eds. Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. London: Routledge, 2000. Fletcher, John. The Tamer Tamed. Edition prepared by The Royal Shakespeare Company. London: Nick Hern Books, 2003. Fletcher, John. The Tamer Tamed. Edited by Lucy Munro. London: Methuen, 2010. Fletcher, John. The Tamer Tamed; or, The Woman’s Prize. Edited by Celia R. Daileader and Gary Taylor. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Fletcher, John. The Taming of the Tamer. Edited by Patrick Young. Toronto: Sheridan College, 2009. Fletcher, John. The Woman’s Prize. Edited by Meg Powers Livingston. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Fletcher, John. The Woman’s Prize, or, The Tamer Tamed: A Critical Edition. Edited by George B. Ferguson. The Hague: Mouton, 1966. Gaines, Barry, and Margaret Maurer, eds. Three Shrew Plays: Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” with the Anonymous “The Taming of a Shrew” and Fletcher’s “The Tamer Tamed.” Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010. Lacy, John. Sauny the Scot, or The Taming of the Shrew. In Shakespeare Made Fit: Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, edited by Sandra Clark, 3–78. London: Everyman, 1997. Plato. Respublica. Platonis Opera. Vol. 4. Edited by John Burnet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902. Plautus. Four Comedies. Translated by Erich Segal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Plautus. The Merchant; The Braggart Soldier; The Ghost; The Persian. Edited and translated by Wolfgang de Melo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Shakespeare, William. The Taming of the Shrew. Edited by Barbara Hodgdon. London: Methuen, 2010.

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Secondary Sources Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984. Blanchard, W. Scott. Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995. Escolme, Bridget. Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Henke, James T. Courtesans and Cuckolds: A Glossary of Renaissance Dramatic Bawdy (Exclusive of Shakespeare). New York: Garland, 1979. Kirk, Eugene P. Menippean Satire: An Annotated Collection of Texts and Criticism. New York: Garland, 1980. Lilja, Saara. “Homosexuality in Republican and Augustan Rome.” Commentationes humanarem litterarum 74 (1982): 1–164. Malone, Edmund. An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage, and of the Economy and Usages of Our Ancient Theatres. Basel, 1800. Maurer, Margaret. “Constering Bianca: The Taming of the Shrew and The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2001): 186–206. Maxwell, Baldwin. “The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed.” Modern Philology 32, no. 4 (1935): 353–63. Milowicki, Edward J., and R. Rawdon Wilson. “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare.” Poetics Today 23, no. 2 (2002): 291–326. Sherbert, Garry. Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideas of Self-Consciousness in Dunton, D’Urfey and Sterne. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Williams, Gordon. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. 3 vols. London: Athlone, 1994. Williams, Gordon. A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language. London: Athlone, 1997. Wootton, David. “The Tamer Tamed, or None Shall Have Prizes: ‘Equality’ in Shakespeare’s England.” In Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500–1700, edited by David Wootton and Graham Holderness, 206–25. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

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Chapter 12 “Whose Plot Was This?”: Shakespearean Convergences in Fletcher’s The Wild-Goose Chase The title page of the 1652 edition of The Wild-Goose Chase (first performed 1621) declares that the play is “the Noble, Last, and Onely Remaines of those Incomparable Drammatists, {| FRANCIS BEAUMONT, | AND | JOHN FLETCHER,} Gent.”1 The names are bracketed together, by then a familiar convention for readers of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays printed after 1620.2 Somewhat unconventionally, however, lower on the page, is another pair of bracketed names, albeit in a smaller font: “{JOHN LOWIN, | And | JOSEPH TAYLOR,} Servants to His late MAJESTIE.”3 Lowin and Taylor are given the stamp of authority through this similar formatting because the title page reinforces how these two erstwhile actors “Retriv’d for the publick delight” a play that was thought to be lost to the ages.4 The title page situates Lowin and Taylor within the general tradition of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, which used print to present plays as produced and shared by a pair of male friends.5 The commendatory verses to The Wild-Goose Chase also make much of Lowin and Taylor’s find, and in one epigram by William Eccleston, they are again conflated with Beaumont and Fletcher: In this late dearth of wit, when Jose and Jack Were hunger-bit for want of fowl and sack, His nobleness found out this happy means To mend their diet with these Wild-Goose scenes,

1 Fletcher, The Wild-Goose Chase, title page. The play was published somewhat lavishly in folio form by Moseley. 2 The 1620 quarto of Philaster is the first instance of the bracketing of Beaumont and Fletcher together in Phylaster or, Love Lyes a Bleeding. 3 Fletcher, The Wild-Goose Chase, title page. 4 Fletcher, The Wild-Goose Chase, title page. The play was thought lost up until this point, and was therefore not included in the 1647 folio. 5 Masten, Textual Intercourse, 28–62, discusses how discourses of friendship affected printed plays. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-012

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By which he hath revived in a day Two poets, and two actors with one play.6

The one who saves the “two actors,” Lowin and Taylor, from starvation is the singular “His nobleness,” Fletcher. A few lines later, however, Eccleston contradicts his first avowal of the play’s authorship, saying that the play revived “Two poets,” that is, Beaumont and Fletcher. Although the play is marketed as a Beaumont and Fletcher work, no other commendatory verse in this edition makes reference to Beaumont; it is quite clearly understood that The WildGoose Chase is the “rare issue” of only Fletcher’s “brain.”7 At this literary intersection, the play is both singular and plural; it sits at the divide between Beaumont and Fletcher’s respective canons, but it is also at an overlapping point between the two. Whilst it has previously been thought that Eccleston was mistakenly taken in by the title page’s ascription of the play to both Beaumont and Fletcher, it is perhaps more likely that he is consciously placing his epigram within the context of gentlemanly same-sex friendship that shaped the Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen from five years earlier, in 1647.8 The existence and retrieval of The Wild-Goose Chase, Eccleston’s epigram posits, is due to the ideal friendship between Beaumont and Fletcher, which is later replicated by Lowin and Taylor. The title page of The Wild-Goose Chase makes clear that Fletcher’s plays were understood in the context of an allmale community: friends, playwrights, critics, and audience.9 Eccleston seems to have perceived that the play was being sold in a fashion similar to the 1647 Comedies and Tragedies, thereby emphasizing Fletcher’s homosocial relationships. Indeed, The Wild-Goose Chase was not printed in quarto, but in the folio format, indicating its complementary role to the Comedies and Tragedies.10

6 E[ccleston], “An Epigram upon the Long Lost and Fortunately Recovered Wild-Goose Chase,” in Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance, 323. All subsequent quotations of The Wild-Goose Chase are taken from this edition. 7 Lowin and Taylor, “The Dedication,” in Three Seventeenth-Century Plays, 62. 8 Tomlinson follows Rota Herzberg Lister’s 1980 edition of The Wild-Goose Chase, where she ascribes the line to a mistake on Eccleston’s behalf: Three Seventeenth-Century Plays, 323n6. 9 Commendatory verses were used in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio to situate the playwrights’ friendship within a homosocial discourse, typical of the “textual intercourse” of the period. See: Masten, Textual Intercourse, 121–55. 10 Somewhat unconventionally, Humphrey Moseley published The Wild-Goose Chase in folio, rather than in quarto form. Such a printing was meant to appear more prestigious, but it also meant that the play could be bound to copies of the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio.

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Even when working solo, Fletcher cannot be separated from his concomitant “gentlemen.” And this cannot only be attributed to the publisher Humphrey Moseley’s canny creation of Fletcher’s gentlemanly persona in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio and in subsequent publications. It appears that there is something about The Wild-Goose Chase that lends itself to Fletcher’s sense of operating both within and without a playwriting community, foregrounding how his writing intersects other playwrights’ canons, particularly those of Beaumont, Massinger, and Shakespeare. His style of collaboration is both a division as well as a connection. This sense of doubleness is a quintessentially Fletcherian quality, an example of the “strange bifronted posture” that Gordon McMullan details as part of Fletcher’s “politics of unease.”11 That is, you never quite know where Fletcher stands – he is both singular and within a community. In The Wild-Goose Chase, this trait emerges through Fletcher’s use of literary referencing. Similar to the printers of The Wild-Goose Chase intertextualizing the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, Fletcher infused his plays with intertexts. This is particularly the case when he was working without a joint writer, so as to bring the voices of past collaborators into his plays. Fletcher’s continued collaborations with his group of “gentlemen” is part of what Jeffrey Masten has detailed as the individual – the indivisible – male friendships and literary collaborators in the period.12 The two-become-one relationships result in the different combinations of playwrights and actors: Shakespeare and Fletcher, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Lowin and Taylor, in The Wild-Goose Chase folio. Fletcher is often remembered as but a textual fringe to Shakespeare’s dalliance with collaboration. He is understood as being on the periphery of Shakespeare and his canon, even though he was a tie that bound together disparate social networks. This relationship can be inverted to reveal Fletcher’s uncontainable collaborative impetus: hovering on the periphery of Fletcher’s canon is the ghost of Shakespeare. Indeed, Fletcher’s desire to write with his collaborators was so strong that his work embodies a “collaboration with the dead.”13 By 1621, when The Wild-Goose Chase was written, Fletcher had accumulated several collaborative writing partners: Massinger, Field, Rowley, Middleton, Ford, and Webster. But his earlier co-adjuncts, Beaumont and Shakespeare, were by this point five years dead. Although The Wild-Goose Chase is not so heavily influenced by Beaumont, there are scenes in the play that revisit Fletcher’s collaboration, and possibly even professional friendship,

11 McMullan, The Politics of Unease, 257. 12 Masten, Textual Intercourse, 28. 13 McMullan, The Politics of Unease, 135.

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with Shakespeare. Indeed, the play features typically Shakespearean interests that Fletcher adopted for his own, such as disguise and women’s pursuit of men, similar to Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well. Besides his usual advertised relationship with Beaumont, Fletcher was also quite memorably bracketed together with Shakespeare in the 1634 edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen: “Written by the memorable Worthies of their time | {Mr. John Fletcher, and | Mr. William Shakespeare.} Gent.”14 The mythology surrounding Fletcher and Shakespeare’s relationship was in no small part due to this imprint, which has shaped subsequent readings of the operation of friendship and interrupted homosocial relations in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Masten argues that the text of The Two Noble Kinsmen “provides a possible critique of the collaborative practices that frames its own presentation,” and Huw Griffiths suggests that Fletcher intervenes upon Shakespeare’s representation of philia, giving the play traces of “rivalrous collaboration.”15 But, if The Two Noble Kinsmen is looked at beside The Wild-Goose Chase, a not so adversarial picture of the playwrights’ relationship emerges. This is not to endorse the fable of Fletcher and Shakespeare’s gentlemanly relations. Rather, Fletcher uses his allusions to Shakespeare for the sake of parody, calling into question Shakespearean characterization whilst simultaneously showing homage to his late collaborator. Fletcher is able to create new meanings for Shakespeare’s plays because of parody’s “theoretically endless” capacity to create novel narrative possibilities.16 Through his exaggeration of Shakespearean forms, Fletcher creates a “formal and liberating mise-en-abime.”17 He holds up a mirror through which he can reflect back onto his collaboration with Shakespeare; through parody, Fletcher is diachronically collaborating with, and emphasizing his links to, the dead.18 Fletcher’s friendship with Shakespeare had a prolonged effect on his plays, which created continued collaboration between the two playwrights. This relationship allowed Fletcher to intervene upon the intertextual communities within which a play like The Wild-Goose Chase is situated. This play is a particularly interesting site to consider the crossroads of Fletcher and Shakespeare’s collaborative relationship because the play features a character

14 Shakespeare and Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, title page. The only other playwrights Fletcher was bracketed with were Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton in Moseley’s 1652 edition of The Widow. The play, however, was only written by Middleton. 15 Masten, Textual Intercourse, 61; Griffiths, “Adapting Same-Sex Friendship,” 27. 16 Mack, The Genius of Parody, 25. 17 Mack, The Genius of Parody, 25. 18 The phrase “diachronic collaboration” has gained currency over recent years. For an extended discussion, see: Henderson, Collaborators with the Past.

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type that Fletcher shared with Shakespeare, and then returned to throughout his career: the madwoman. In particular, the protagonist Oriana’s mad scene in The Wild-Goose Chase is a parody not only of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, but also of the Jailer’s Daughter, a character written between the two playwrights. Indeed, Ophelia is an interesting starting point to consider homosocial relations as she is, in some ways, shared between Hamlet and Laertes. Furthermore, intertextuality acts as part of homosocial, collaborative exchange. Shakespeare and Fletcher’s sharing of the madwoman convention – indeed, sharing a woman in some sort of capacity – is typical of the Fletcher narrative. As Aubrey’s oft-quoted salacious anecdote goes, “They lived together on the Banke side, not far from the Play-house, both batchelors; lay together; had one Wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same cloathes and cloake, &c.; betweene them.”19 Fletcher, as a collaborative playwright, is envisaged as eternally sharing not only his plays, but also his self, with others.20 Whether it be a woman, or a play, or a printed edition of said play, Fletcher’s writing habits are explained by way of pairs. But Fletcher’s life was probably broader than a world of two, considering that he was part of a larger dramatic and textual community. Fletcher’s writing from inside, rather than the periphery, of this literary community tells us much about his concerns, as well as his readings of other playwrights. Furthermore, his writing takes part in narratives and conventions that he shared with other playwrights and his culture at large. Fletcher, neither singular nor paired, is in fact multiple. One of the cultural narratives that typifies Fletcher’s part in homosocial intertextual exchange is that of the “madwoman.” His parody of Ophelia and the Jailer’s Daughter through Oriana is his intervention into this convention, modulating audience response to what we usually conceive of as a tragic character. Fletcher’s use of the madwoman trope for what is, for all intents and purposes, an act of parody, reveals his place within a dramatic genealogy, which is apt considering that parody is “the custodian of the artistic legacy.”21 By looking

19 Aubrey, Aubrey’s Brief Lives, 21. 20 Fletcher did not become diet for worms alone either, as he shared his grave with Massinger: “In the same / Grave Fletcher was buried here / Lies the Stage-Poet Philip Massinger. / Plays they did write together, were great friends, / And now one Grave includes them at their ends. / So whom on earth nothing did part, beneath / Here (in their Fames) they lie, in spight of death.” Cokain, “An Epitaph on Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. Philip Massinger, who lie buried both in one Grave in St. Mary Overie”s Church in Southwark,” quoted in Masten, Textual Intercourse, 1. 21 Hutcheon, “Authorised Transgression,” 16.

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at how The Wild-Goose Chase is “shedding light backwards” – in the words of Lori Leigh – Fletcher’s diachronic collaboration unveils itself.22 Rather than merely paying homage, Fletcher uses playwrights’ memories to impose parody upon Shakespeare’s representations of female madness. Parody is a mode natural to Fletcher because of its ambivalence: whilst it seems to undermine other writers through humor, it actually bespeaks a genuine love of the source text. This is typical of Fletcherian “unease.”23 Fletcher’s parody has two effects: firstly, he breaks the male circle of intertextual referencing to re-orient towards women’s voices; and secondly, he closes his own circle of a decade-long “collaboration” with Shakespeare. This chapter discusses how Fletcher uses staged madness to construct his identity as a playwright and interrogate the male communities of writers, critics, and audiences that control women’s voices in early modern texts. I shall then move towards an analysis of Oriana’s mad scene, and how it intervenes upon the Jailer’s Daughter and Ophelia. By tracing the Daughter and Ophelia back to Oriana at the end of the essay, I show how Fletcher’s writing provides Oriana with an agency that her literary ancestors are denied. This way, Shakespeare is an intersection for Fletcher: one that allows him to interrogate his dead collaborator, while at the same time allowing him to re-collaborate with him, thus bringing Shakespeare’s voice into his play whilst also modulating it. By the time Fletcher wrote The Wild-Goose Chase, mad scenes were one of his specialties.24 Madness must have been particularly on Fletcher’s mind when he wrote The Wild-Goose Chase in 1621, because his other solo play of that year, The Pilgrim, also contains a set piece about feigned madness set in a Bedlamlike hospital.25 Not only using madness as spectacle, Fletcher’s use of the madwoman convention is also part of his tendency to create humor – and meaning – by alluding to other playwrights. Jeremy Lopez has argued that Fletcher’s intertexts can be used to consider his relationship with his collaborators, such as

22 Leigh, Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine, 1, uses later adaptations as a way to reflect on earlier plays. Griffiths uses a similar methodology, reading “for synchronic collaboration as well as diachronic forms of adaptation” in “Adapting Same-Sex Friendship,” 27. 23 McMullan, The Politics of Unease, 257. 24 Besides The Wild-Goose Chase and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Fletcher most notably included mad scenes in The Tamer Tamed (1611), The Mad Lover (1612), and The Pilgrim (1621). See: Potter, Introduction to The Two Noble Kinsmen, 50. 25 Two other notable examples of this phenomenon are Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. See: Neely, Distracted Subjects.

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when he parodies Othello in The Mad Lover (1616). He contends that through a “confluence of biographical and bibliographical history,” we can: [I]magine that the play had a particular meaning for Fletcher, that it provided a means of constructing or deconstructing his identity as a playwright at a moment when, with his most trusted collaborator and his theatre company’s longest-serving playwright dead, he was forced to come into his own on his own.26

Through writing The Mad Lover, Lopez argues, Fletcher had to adumbrate himself as a playwright without his usual band of merry collaborators. But even if creating himself without other playwrights, Fletcher still manages to collaborate through parody by using recognizable words and situations that bring Shakespeare’s ghost into the play. Fletcher is doing something similar in The Wild-Goose Chase, effectively calling Shakespeare’s voice back from the dead in order to continue their dialogue about the nature of women. The madwoman shows us something of Fletcher’s memory of Shakespeare, and his awareness of dramatic genealogies. The Wild-Goose Chase is a typically Fletcherian romp, in which the heroine Oriana conducts a series of tricks to compel the prodigal Mirabell, her erstwhile contracted, to fulfill his commitment of marriage to her. The play is innately aware of its own theatricality; it presents a series of mis-en-abyme tableaus, plays-within-plays where the characters put on costumes and play pretend.27 One of these metatheatrical performances is Oriana’s mad scene, where she enters “on a bed” (4.3.51SD), and proceeds to speak pretty nonsense similar to Ophelia. As Horatio described her in Hamlet, Ophelia is a “document in madness” from which Fletcher learned to write mad speech.28 Indeed, madness is a particularly useful site to track metatheatrical references as the spasmodic and seemingly disordered speech is made up of cultural references and popular traditions. As Masten notes, the Jailer’s Daughter embodies collaboration: she “may signify an escape from the very idea of constraining authorial attribution, for her discourse is a patch-work of songs and ballads.”29 Carol Thomas Neely likens the patch-work effect of madwomen’s speech quotation, which includes other conventional signifiers such as wearing one’s hair down, singing, childlike mannerisms, sexualized language, and broken syntax with what Maurine

26 27 28 29

Lopez, Constructing the Canon, 106–7. Chalmers, Sanders, and Tomlinson, Introduction to Three Seventeenth-Century Plays, 14. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 4.5.179. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Masten, Textual Intercourse, 58.

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and Hannah Charney call discourse “organised by lyrical free association.”30 Fletcher’s plays reveal their dramatic genealogies through allusions to previous plays that the audience would recognize. Fletcher can, in these moments, reflect upon his relationship with and to Shakespeare and the characters they created. Oriana, however, marks a major difference with Ophelia and the Jailer’s Daughter: she is not mad; instead, she uses feigned madness in order to make her own destiny and write her own script. Fletcher is clearly reliant upon a dramatic community for not only the creation, but also the ideas behind his plays, as evidenced by his collaborative and adaptive compulsion. Lucy Munro has argued that while Beaumont and Fletcher used humor as a means of transforming Renaissance audiences into a community, the playwrights were ultimately “sceptical about community,” whether it be the relationships between the playwrights or the company’s relationship to its audience.31 It may be, however, that Fletcher is less cynical about dramatic communities than intertextual ones. As Efrossini Spentzou has argued about Ovid’s Heroides, intertextuality allows for a circle of male writers to usurp and reproduce women’s voices: The learned reader knows the “end” of the story and can thus rejoice in the selfconscious irony and intertextual links that display the authorial and reader’s wit; but such displays operate at a level above that of the dramatis personae, the heroines.32

Dido, for example, is depleted of her identity and voice once she becomes integrated within a patriarchal literary tradition, becoming a character type rather than appearing as a fully formed character. Spentzou’s argument can also stand for women within early modern drama, as many female characters become referenced to the point of becoming mere types. Collaboration, too, has not gone without similar accusations; as Masten notes, “collaboration is enabled by, or sees itself producing, a female body as textual corpus.”33 Both intertextuality and collaboration make a trade of women, like books, which are reproduced as expressions of homosocial relations. But as Raphael Lyne has argued, there is a possibility to “reunite intertextuality and female expression,” as evidenced by Fletcherian characters like Aspatia from The Maid’s Tragedy, who “takes a kind of control over the literary texture of her play”

30 Neely, “‘Documents in Madness,’” 323; Charney and Charney, “The Language of Madwomen in Shakespeare,” 459. 31 Munro, “Plotting, Ambiguity and Community,” 274. 32 Spentzou, Readers and Writers, 2. 33 Masten, Textual Intercourse, 60.

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through literary allusion.34 Oriana, like Aspatia, uses intertextuality to her own ends, allowing her to not merely be a female voice exchanged between male critics, writers, and audiences.35 Whilst the Jailer’s Daughter, who is deeply intertextual, suffers for her relation to Ophelia, Oriana uses the audience’s knowledge of the madwoman convention in order to parody expectations of lovesick women. Fletcher’s break with his intertextual community is still reliant on his place within it; indeed, one cannot parody without referring to another text to sustain the allusion. But, if we imagine the collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher like a self-referential circle, Fletcher effectively breaks the circle of adaptation with Oriana, intersecting his play with Shakespeare’s work. Her lack of madness, and indeed, her use of the madwoman convention as worked upon by Fletcher and Shakespeare together, allows a female character to stand on her own outside of the intertextual community. Madness in Fletcher’s comedies is particularly inflected by genre, and is, by and large, an “educational experience” after which wits are restored and romantic resolutions are achieved – for the protagonists at least.36 In Act 4 of The Wild-Goose Chase, Oriana makes a third attempt to convince the profligate Mirabell to fulfill his obligation of marriage. Up until this point, she has asked him directly and has had her brother, de Gard, pretend to be a Savoyard lord who she will marry instead. Neither of these ploys are successful. Oriana’s next step is to feign madness that has been catalyzed by lovesickness, acting as though she is bereaved enough to be edging towards her death. Oriana hopes to provoke Mirabell’s pity, and from there his love, and up until she gives the game away, Mirabell is fooled. Oriana taps into the commonly understood conventions of staged madness, and like other characters of Fletcher’s plays, Mirabell is convinced by dramatic signs rather than reality. He is like Laverdine at the end of The Honest Man’s Fortune (1613), who is convinced that the pageboy Veramour is actually a girl in disguise. Laverdine is only proved wrong once Veramour reveals his breeches beneath the gown he dressed in as a joke. Clearly, both Laverdine and Mirabell are unable to differentiate between theatrical representation and reality. At one point, Mirabell declares that he should “set up bills to cure diseased virgins” (4.3.50), that is, advertise his services to

34 Lyne, “Intertextuality and the Female Voice,” 315. 35 Aspatia uses the signs of lovesickness for the sake of self-definition. She is not included in this essay as she is not, technically, a madwoman, nor does she pretend to be one. For a general discussion of the relationship between The Maid’s Tragedy and Hamlet, see: Davies, “Beaumont and Fletcher’s Hamlet.” 36 Charney and Charney, “The Language of Madwomen in Shakespeare,” 459.

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cure women of their “green-sickness,” or love melancholy.37 Clearly, he is not the only character in the Fletcher canon who has delusions of grandeur. Oriana’s madness plays into dramatic stereotypes, and for Mirabell, her state is perhaps an inevitability, seeing as it was commonly believed that women’s madness was catalyzed by unrequited love. By having Oriana appear mad, Fletcher exposes and parodies the seeming inevitability of loss, and perhaps even death, for characters who are struck by lovesickness, such as the Jailer’s Daughter. But Oriana’s revelation of sanity contradicts expectations of the potential destructiveness of women’s desire. Fletcher consciously places Oriana within a tradition of female characters who become sick from want of love, but then upends it. Before Oriana comes onstage, the sisters Lillia-Bianca and Rosalura set the scene for Mirabell, declaring that “She will die, she is grown senseless; / She will not know nor speak now” (4.3.33–35). Fletcher’s pun on “senseless” indicates that Oriana is both mad and unconscious, although the latter half of this report is swiftly contradicted once she appears. In an overly dramatic style, Oriana enters “on a bed” (4.3.51SD), a stage property which calls to mind Shakespearean tragedies such as Romeo and Juliet and Othello.38 Oriana works to immediately induce Mirabell’s pity: he has been to the theater, he knows that a bed is tantamount to a death sentence. Indeed, he says in an aside, “Oh, fair tears, how ye take me!” (4.3.75) – the cold-hearted libertine is suddenly emotionally overwhelmed. Mirabell’s reaction is somewhat like the audience member Henry Jackson’s response to Othello in 1610, who wrote that the King’s Men “drew tears not only by their speech but also by their action. Indeed, Desdemona, though always excellent, moved us especially in her death when, as she lay on her bed, her face itself implored the pity of the audience.”39 As Sasha Roberts writes, beds on the Renaissance stage have a “tragic loading,” but, in the context of Fletcherian comedy, the effect of the bed is immediately negated for the audience.40 While the audience responds with tears for Desdemona, Oriana’s use of the bed typifies the overindulgent and relentless nature of Fletcher’s comic characters. As soon as Oriana enters, the audience is in on the joke: the pleasure now lies in Mirabell’s fooling.

37 For a discussion of green-sickness, see: Potter, The Unruly Womb. 38 The bed would have either been pushed out onto the stage or exposed in the discovery space. See: Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 188. 39 Quoted in Honigman, Introduction to Othello, 101. 40 Roberts, “‘Let Me the Curtains Draw,’” 66.

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As the scene progresses, Oriana’s friends’ implied stage directions of her actions play into Mirabell’s expectations of staged madness. Her quest for the wild goose causes a coming together of her community. Indeed, throughout the rest of the play, it is only through the help of her friends that Oriana is successful. Lugier describes how Oriana “looks up and stares” (4.3.54), LilliaBianca tells us that Oriana “trembles,” and that “Her fits grow more strong” (4.3.81–82), whilst La Castre says that Oriana “smiles” at Mirabell, “Certain, she knows ye not, yet loves to see ye” (4.3.83). Surely on the level of realism, Mirabell would be able to know madness when he sees it, which makes the descriptions of Oriana’s actions appear overblown.41 Perhaps what is happening here is Fletcher’s knowing wink to the audience: all the characters have been taken in by Oriana’s act because of her use of the performance practices used to stage madness. But for the audience, all this stagecraft is a little too obvious. Fletcher’s use of “intertheatrical” references to previous madwomen and their tragic endings indicates the extent to which the signifiers of madness had become commonplace, and therefore, how easy it was to parody other examples of it.42 Unbeknownst to Mirabell, Oriana’s smiling, trembling, and staring does not prove that she is mad, but that she is a good student of the stage. But unlike other staged madwomen, Oriana is perfectly aware of how she is situated within a circle of intertexts, which, instead of causing her ruination, allows her to manifest her comic destiny. Oriana’s madness is constructed according to her character relatives: the Jailer’s Daughter and Ophelia. Indeed, there are parts of Oriana’s script that read very similarly to her two antecedents. The Jailer’s Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen is similar to Oriana in that she is granted political speech, but, unlike Oriana, she has no control over herself or her destiny. The Daughter’s madness is catalyzed by Palamon’s quick dismissal of her, despite having freed him from prison. At the end of the play, the Doctor orders the Wooer to pretend to be Palamon, marry the Daughter, and cure her sickness with sexual intercourse. This subplot was shared between Fletcher and Shakespeare. Studies of the authorship breakdown have found that Shakespeare wrote two of the Daughter’s scenes, whilst Fletcher wrote the remaining seven.43 Even if Fletcher

41 It is worth considering that as The Wild-Goose Chase appeared in print thirty-one years after its initial performance, these intratextual stage directions could have been inserted for readers’ understanding. 42 West, “Intertheatricality,” 154. West has conceived of early modern drama being made up of other performances. 43 It appears Shakespeare wrote 2.1 and 4.3, while Fletcher wrote 2.4, 2.6, 3.2, 3.4, 3.5, 4.1, 5.2. See: Bruster, “The Jailer’s Daughter,” 279.

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wrote the majority of the Daughter, the two must have actively collaborated upon her in order to ensure a consistency of character. As Douglas Bruster writes, “How she speaks depends less on who was writing, however, than on who the playwrights imagined her to be.”44 Perhaps, in a way, the collaboration upon the Ophelia-esque Jailer’s Daughter can be read as Shakespeare’s passing the baton to Fletcher, who was soon to become the steadfast writer of the King’s Men. Or perhaps the two playwrights were interested in the possibilities of writing a woman who was more openly sexual and more socially critical, without being constrained by tragic conventions. In a way, by creating a link between the two of them, Fletcher can indicate how his play is of a particular pedigree. Not so much in the sense that Fletcher was aiming to topple Shakespeare on the playwriting hierarchy, but reinforcing how their plays were in the same family tree. Ophelia, the Daughter, and Oriana all come from the same family of playwrights, linked by way of playhouse and company. Fletcher is very much part of this theatrical community, and by writing from within it, he can re-collaborate with his lost literary siblings. The Daughter’s madness is conveyed to the audience through allusions to Ophelia. Their textual relationship is made most obvious by the overlaps in their “mad” language. They are connected with natural imagery and singing, they both wear their hair down and pick flowers. Gertrude describes Ophelia in her watery grave as, “There with fantastic garlands did she come / Of crowflowers, nettles, daises, and long purples” (4.7.143–44), which is remarkably similar to how the Wooer describes finding the Daughter: The place Was knee-deep where she sat; her careless tresses A wreath of bulrush rounded; about her stuck Thousand fresh water-flowers of several colours.45

Unlike Ophelia, the Daughter is stolen out of proto-Millais-style imagery by the Wooer and taken back to her Kinsmen.46 But, this passage paints a picture so similar to Ophelia that it is almost as though the Daughter is inhabiting her role. Ophelia has become something of a palimpsest because her character is recreated with layers added to it. Just as we understand the Daughter through Ophelia, we understand Ophelia because of the Daughter. Oriana, too, employs this sort of language. She asks Rosalura if she ever dreams “of flowers and 44 Bruster, “The Jailer’s Daughter,” 279. 45 Shakespeare and Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, 4.1.82–86. All subsequent references are incorporated into the text. 46 Here I refer to Millais’s depiction of Ophelia’s drowning in the painting Ophelia.

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gardens” (4.3.58), and possibly even sings, if the ballad-like “Heigh-ho!” (4.3.64) is anything to go by. Oriana also offers to “tell ye your fortune,” just as the Daughter tells the Schoolmaster, “I can tell your fortune” (3.5.79). Along with the ballads and natural imagery, it seems that a necessary component of a madwoman’s character is intertheatrical allusions. Oriana’s creation of the façade of madness is built upon alluding to famous exemplars. The Jailer’s Daughter’s language differs from Ophelia’s however as hers is less abstruse in its sexuality and social criticism. The Daughter’s language has often been read in terms of empowerment, seeing as she is granted “freedom from restrictions usually attributed to women in the period,” as Leigh argues.47 And as Bruster has suggested, the Daughter is an anomaly as her madness “licenses speech freer than that of any other female character in Shakespeare’s plays.”48 Perhaps Bruster would not think the Daughter so free if he considered her in relation to other female characters in Fletcher’s plays, rather than those in the Shakespeare canon. Nevertheless, the Daughter’s sexual language and social critique builds upon Ophelia’s. Where Ophelia sings that she should know her true love “By his cockle hat and staff” (4.5.25), the Daughter pines “for a prick now, like a nightingale, / To put my breast against” (3.5.25–26). And Ophelia’s criticisms of the broken promises that young men make to women, “Alack, and fie for shame! / Young men will do’t, if they come to’t, / By Cock, they are to blame” (4.5. 58–60) turns into the more class-inflected criticism from the Daughter: Lords and courtiers that have got maids with child, they are in this place. They shall stand in fire up to the navel and in ice up to the heart, and there th’offending part burns and the deceiving part freezes. (4.3.41–44)

The two characters also differ in their use of song: Ophelia’s bawdy and social critique occurs in the context of ballads, whilst the Daughter does not have to be singing in order to voice her dangerous thoughts. Indeed, even before the true onset of the Daughter’s madness, she is also given license to speak of her sexuality, “What pushes are we wenches driven to / When fifteen once has found us!” (2.5.6–7). Perhaps what ultimately gives Oriana’s pretense away to the audience is her lack of sexualized language; her madness is studied, but her lack of bawdy talk reveals her sanity. The potential pathos of Oraina’s madness is swiftly undercut by her revelation to Mirabell that she is, in fact, sane. After Mirabell has confessed his guilt,

47 Leigh, Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine, 37. 48 Bruster, “The Jailer’s Daughter,” 288.

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“I have undone myself and a sweet lady / By being too indulgent to my foolery / Which truly I repent” (4.3.91–93), Oriana confesses that it was all a ploy, “I did this to provoke your nature” (4.3.125). And then, rather stridently, she asks, “Will ye be mine?” (4.3.129). Naturally, once he realizes he has been duped, Mirabell’s answer is a resounding no, mocking Oriana, “she was only mad for marriage” (4.3.134). Oriana’s ploy was an attempt to take courtship into her own hands, pursue her desire, and create agency. But Mirabell’s rebuff prompts the question: can Ophelia’s, the Daughter’s, and even Oriana’s actions be reduced to Mirabell’s banal sexism? This does not seem to be the case, because Mirabell has been set up for the audience as a philandering fop, whose opinions should be taken with a grain of salt. If anything, this line shows a concern for women who are trapped within a status quo that demands their union with men but punishes them for their desire, let alone pursuit of it. Mirabell’s jibe is perhaps a way to save face after having shed tears for a madwoman in front of his community. Indeed, the easiest way to punish a woman in a social forum is by calling her mad or libidinous. By having a scene that is so clearly concerned with antecedent characters who are both denied their desires and restricted by the men around them, Fletcher is creating a situation where staged women can write their own script. Oriana, by consciously using the signs of staged madness, turns herself into an intertext that re-scripts her predecessors. Oriana’s mad scene calls to mind the audience’s memory of dramatic precedents, placing Fletcher outside of the male circles of audience, critics, and intertexts. The Fletcher canon has been handed down by way of same-sex male friendship, but, in his comedies, Fletcher is concerned with women who use their community to create comic endings. To be sure, the joke within Oriana’s mad scene would be lost without the knowledge of the Shakespearean and Fletcherian antecedents. But the use of those familiar storylines and theatrical conventions does not mean that Fletcher’s characters are simply revisiting old ground. Indeed, in the final scene of The Wild-Goose Chase, Mirabell proposes to who he thinks is a wealthy woman from Italy. Surprise, surprise, it is in fact Oriana, “Then Oriana takes ye; nay, she has caught ye!” (5.6.76). Mirabell, shocked, concedes defeat: I thank ye. I am pleased ye have deceived me; And willingly I swallow it, and joy in’t; And yet perhaps I knew ye. Whose plot was this? (79–81)

Mirabell’s metatheatrical question, “Whose plot was this?” calls to mind the fate of the Jailer’s Daughter, who is similarly tricked into marriage through communal

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plotting. Like how Oriana’s story is resolved because of a theatricalized plot, the play’s plot is the result of shared memory, and a community of playwrights. Fletcher brings forth the ghost of writings past, and creates a ghost for writings yet to come. To add another intersection in Fletcher’s intertextual game, The WildGoose Chase also gestures towards a less expected source than Shakespeare: Cervantes. John Fletcher, it is certain, read Spanish.49 Literary criticism of early modern theater is particularly myopic, but by thinking about how Shakespeare converges with Fletcher, rather than Fletcher crossing Shakespeare canon, our image of the Renaissance becomes bifocal, or trifocal, instead of singular, because Shakespeare becomes one of Fletcher’s many sources. Time and time again, Fletcher returned to Don Quixote (1605) and the Novelas ejemplares (1613); indeed, thirteen of his plays are sourced from Cervantes. Whilst Barbara Fuchs argues that Fletcher’s use of Cervantes constitutes an act of piracy, it is more likely that Fletcher’s allusions constitute a cross-cultural collaboration, if not adoration.50 Fletcher may have had in mind Don Quixote, whose “brain’s been turned by those damned chivalry books he reads all the time,” when he wrote Oriana’s mad scene.51 Fiction, in Don Quixote, is equivalent to madness. During her mad scene, De Gard asks Oriana who he is, only for her to reply, “You are Amadis de Gaul, sir” (4.3.56). Indeed, Oriana shares her name with the heroine of Amadis de Gaul, one of the very books that sends Don Quixote mad. Has Oriana gone mad from love, from reading too many novels, or, is the pursuit of love a mad act in and of itself? Fletcher’s play provides competing narratives from the two axes of early modern literary thought, and like a Venn diagram, his presence caused Shakespeare and Cervantes to overlap in the middle. Like the radius of cross-cultural literary circles, Fletcher brought Shakespeare to Cervantes to diachronically collaborate. Fletcher’s use of overlapping intersections reveals his centrality, rather than his marginality, in early modern literary culture.

49 For a discussion of this issue, see: Wilson, “Did John Fletcher Read Spanish?,” 187–90. Definitive evidence of Fletcher being able to read Spanish, however, comes from The Island Princess. Detailed textual comparison uncovers clear borrowing from Argensola’s Conquista de las Islas Molucas, rather than the alternative French version. See: Darby and Sampson, “Cervantes on the Jacobean Stage,” 210. 50 Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy, 4. 51 Cervantes, Don Quixote, 50.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Aubrey, John. Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Edited by Oliver Lawson Dick. London: Penguin Random House, 2016. Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. Phylaster, or, Love Lyes a Bleeding. London, 1620. STC 1681. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. Translated and introduced by John Rutherford. London: Penguin, 2003. E[ccleston], W[illiam]. “An Epigram upon the Long Lost and Fortunately Recovered Wild-Goose Chase, and as Seasonably Bestowed on Mr John Lowen and Mr Joseph Taylor, for Their Best Advantage.” In Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance, edited by Hero Chalmers, Julie Sanders, and Sophie Tomlinson, 323. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Fletcher, John. The Wild-Goose Chase. London, 1652. Wing B1616. Fletcher, John. The Wild-Goose Chase. In Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance, edited by Hero Chalmers, Julie Sanders, and Sophie Tomlinson, 61–176. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Lowin, John, and Joseph Taylor. “The Dedication.” In Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance, edited by Hero Chalmers, Julie Sanders, and Sophie Tomlinson, 323. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Millais, John Everett. Ophelia. 1851–1852. Oil paint on canvas, 1105 × 1548 × 145 mm. Tate, London. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by G.R. Hibbard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Shakespeare, William. Othello. Edited by E.A.J. Honigman. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Shakespeare, William, and John Fletcher. The Two Noble Kinsmen. Edited by Lois Potter. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997.

Secondary Sources Bruster, Douglas. “The Jailer’s Daughter and the Politics of Madwomen’s Language.” Shakespeare Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1995): 277–300. Charney, Maurine, and Hanna Charney. “The Language of Madwomen in Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists.” Signs 3, no. 2 (1977): 451–60. Darby, Trudy, and Alexander Sampson. “Cervantes on the Jacobean Stage.” In The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain, edited by J.A.G. Ardlia, 206–22. Oxford: Legenda, 2009. Davies, Neville H. “Beaumont and Fletcher’s Hamlet.” In Shakespeare, Man of the Theater, edited by Kenneth Muir, Jay L. Halio, and D.J. Palmer, 173–81. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983. Fuchs, Barbara. The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

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Griffiths, Huw. “Adapting Same-Sex Friendship: Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Davenant’s The Rivals.” Shakespeare 11, no. 1 (2015): 20–29. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Henderson, Diana E. Collaborators with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Hutcheon, Linda. “Authorised Transgression: The Paradox of Parody.” In Le Singe à la porte: vers une théorie de la parodie, edited by P.B. Gobin, 13–26. New York: Peter Lang, 1984. Leigh, Lori. Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Lopez, Jeremy. Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Lyne, Raphael. “Intertextuality and the Female Voice after the Heroides.” Renaissance Studies 22, no. 3 (2008): 307–23. Mack, Robert L. The Genius of Parody: Imitation and Originality in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Masten, Jeffrey. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. McMullan, Gordon. The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Munro, Lucy. “Plotting, Ambiguity and Community in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.” In Community-Making in Early Stuart Theatres: Stage and Audience, edited by Roger D. Sell, Anthony W. Johnson, and Helen Wilcox, 255–74. New York: Routledge, 2016. Neely, Carol Thomas. Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Neely, Carol Thomas. “‘Documents in Madness’: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Early Modern Culture.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1991): 315–38. Potter, Ursula. The Unruly Womb in Early Modern Drama: Plotting Women’s Biology on the Stage. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019. Roberts, Sasha. “‘Let Me the Curtains Draw’: The Dramatic and Symbolic Properties of the Bed in Shakespearean Tragedy.” In Staged Properties, edited by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, 153–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Spentzou, Efrossini. Readers and Writers in Ovid’s “Heroides”: Transgressions of Genre and Gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. West, William N. “Intertheatricality.” In Early Modern Theatricality, edited by Henry S. Turner, 151–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Wilson, Edward M. “Did John Fletcher Read Spanish?” Philological Quarterly 27 (1948): 187–90.

Christopher Orchard

Chapter 13 “They Always Speak Things as They Would Have Them”: Aspirational Royalist Politics in Henry Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora (1653) As the last chapter and thus at the edge of this collection, my work will attempt to recuperate Henry Killigrew’s play from the obscure edge of the dramatic canon by suggesting how the radically political nature of his text deserves critical attention. What I am specifically interested in is how Killigrew’s 1653 version of his 1638 published text would have spoken differently to its readership in 1653 than it would have done in its performance in 1634. In his preface to his play Pallantus and Eudora (1653), Killigrew claimed that the justification for printing this copy was because it was a more perfect version of its pirated predecessor of 1638, The Conspiracy. This focus on composition, however, disguises and deflects attention from a more fundamental political change that occurs between the different editions that enables a Royalist reading of conspiracy, insurrection, assassination, and a restoration of the monarchy. Killigrew did not have to make – and in fact did not make – radical changes in order for the play to seem decidedly relevant for those seeking the restoration of the monarchy in the mid-1650s. In other words, he was allowing the text to yield to interpretations shaped by current political events. To support this reading, I follow an interdisciplinary approach that reads Killigrew’s play in relation to newsbook accounts of events in Europe from 1652 to 1653. This kind of reading is particularly germane to Killigrew’s newly edited play, since he was living in Europe at the time of its composition. Newsbooks revealed the extent to which Charles II’s political fortunes were predicated on a series of complex and constantly shifting series of diplomatic moves. Such hopes would ultimately flounder on the failure of pieces falling into place at exactly the right time. Furthermore, given their central role in the dissemination of information, newsbooks were responsible for how readers understood the mood of Royalist aspirations abroad. While some newsbooks reported Royalists in Paris or The Hague as occasionally punch-drunk with optimistic rumors of multiple fronts of military and diplomatic support, other newsbooks were quick to de-escalate the enthusiasm with political skepticism of the kind espoused by writers such https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-013

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as Marchamont Nedham.1 This interdisciplinary methodology will make it possible to contextualize the play’s political message, and determine where Killigrew’s interpretation of Royalist fortunes fits within the general mood of those Royalists in Charles’s political circle. What emerges from my reading of this play is a text that promises to fulfill positive Royalist fantasies about immediate monarchical restoration, but whose aspirational goals are subverted by the mixed political messages emerging from Royalist courts in Europe during this time. Since the regicide in January 1649, Royalist readers had been encouraged to read drama and newsbooks that supported their ideological tenets as edgy, political “in your face” narratives that sought pertinent correspondences between past settings and present crises. The pivotal texts that established these kinds of reading were Christopher Wase’s translation of Sophocles’s Electra (1649), and issues of newsbooks such as Mercurius Pragmaticus and John Crouch’s Man in the Moon published in the same year. Wase’s text established itself as a guide to terrorist activity, including how to kill a tyrant and with what weapon. A picture of the kind of axe that had beheaded Charles I was accompanied by instructions printed underneath on how to make one. The encouragement to engage in assassination, presumably of Cromwell and other grandees (at the end of the play Cromwell’s corresponding character Egist is killed by the thinly veiled Prince Charles as Orestes), could be found in dedicatory verses that preceded the play. One of these encouraged the reader to see Wase’s text as a textual Trojan horse, disseminating subversive material, in the guise of an innocuous translation.2 These verse writers also presented Wase as Charles’s agent, commissioned to translate a classical play into insurgent material and get it published in The Hague, that Royalist locus of hot-headed loyalty, that would cost Isaac Dorislaus, the Commonwealth’s ambassador, his life on May 9 in the same year and in the same location where Electra was published.3 Royalist newsbooks mirrored this aggressive message. Crouch had crowed at Dorislaus’s death, making up satirical verses to celebrate his 1 For a nuanced reading of the political content of newsbooks and their editors during this time period, see: Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper; and Raymond and Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern Europe. 2 “You make him to invade the State and seek / Not to translate but to transport the Greek.” Anon., “To My Learned Friend.” 3 “You had commission to lie / Agent in forreign tongues.” Anon., “To My Learned Friend.” Parliamentary newsbook writers seemed aware of the correlation between Wase’s text and Dorislaus’s murder. Robert Ibbitson started an issue of his newsbook Proceedings of the Councell of State with the following statement: “when Orestes turns murderer, his wanderings find disturbance. Those that killed Doctor Doreslowes may lye like Nutmegs in a Grater; But

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assassination.4 Such texts offered a rhetorically unaccommodating tone of revenge at a time when emotions were still raw after the death of Charles I. This political synergy of subversive Royalist drama melded to political agitation on the ground in Europe – that is, Wase’s text and Dorislaus’s assassination – and created edgily aggressive narratives designed to fire up the Royalist base. How the Dutch may have reacted to the publication of Wase’s text on their home soil, however, may have been foreseen by their actual reaction to Dorislaus’s assassination. Robert Ibbitson’s government newsbook, A Perfect Summary of Exact Passages of Parliament, noted that the Dutch identified a problem with Charles’s retinue: “His Court is to depart from Holland; They being displeased at Dr. Dorislowe’s murther.”5 Clearly, they were politically discomforted, for in the following issue, Ibbitson reported that the Dutch offered Charles £2,800 “to depart from them, of whom they are very weary.”6 In fact, the Dutch were keen to patch things up with the Commonwealth at the earliest opportunity. Papers from a Dutch representative were read out in Parliament, relating to them how much the Dutch “desire the strengthening of the amity between the Nations.”7 The lesson here was that realpolitik often subverted the Royalist narrative of aggressive retribution. In this instance, it was Dutch demurral intended to dampen Royalist zeal. My argument in this chapter is that this pattern – edgy fiction undercut by political event – became the template for the narrative of Royalist drama in the 1650s, of which Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora is a prime example. Killigrew claimed in his preface to the 1653 edition that there were stark differences in the two versions of the play: “my desire, is to have it shew as little Affinity and Resemblance as is possible to its Anti-type.” However, a comparative analysis suggests some degree of misdirection. It is true that there are some word changes, some structural rearrangements, substituted passages, and an added emphasis on action as the coup unfolds, particularly in the fourth act, and there are occasional important additions that seem to be created simply to provide a guided focus for the Royalist reader. For example, in Act 2, Clearchus

they are the individium vagum of a poore, pitifull, blacke Juncto.” Proceedings of the Councell of State (May 18–25, 1649, 125:1049). 4 In attempting to create a feeling of paranoia in the Commonwealth administration, Crouch promised that recent plots, to which he claimed he was exclusively privy, would make Parliamentary members keep guards around them in “fear of being Dorislow’d.” Man in the Moon (May 21–30, 1649, 7:64). 5 A Perfect Summary of Exact Passages of Parliament (May 14–21, 1649, 17:152). 6 A Perfect Summary of Exact Passages of Parliament (May 21–28, 1649, 19:159). 7 Proceedings of the Councell of State (May 18–25, 1649, 125:1049).

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comments, “The King of Crete is a usurper. / His son’s a Villain, by their masters blood / They have reach’d the diadem” (19).8 It reads as “Royalist Politics 101.” However, while I will note some of the more significant changes in the progression of my narrative, it remains true that the plot and the substance of the message of the play remain unchanged from the 1638 edition. In this sense, the idea of deliberately leaving themes unrevised was just as important as revision. By making this decision not to revise, Killigrew was inviting a reading of his play in 1653 that suggested the imminent likelihood of a coup to overthrow a tyrant, proposed a new titular figurehead who would strike at the heart of tyranny by killing the tyrant, and installed a new monarch under whom the Royalist cause could rally. It would not be hard for an ardent loyalist of monarchy to see Cromwell as the tyrant and Charles as the young king. However, as I shall suggest below, this reading that Killigrew may have wanted to create by leaving parts of his play unrevised is always tempered by the caveats of political reality that leave his play being read as more aspirational than a realistic program for actual change.

Overthrowing Political Tyranny The pointed political purpose of Killigrew’s 1653 text was suggested by the decision to leave unchanged the details of the conspiracy to overthrow the tyrant, including its prominent position at the beginning of the play. The discontented Aratus informs his followers that there is little the tyrant king can do to stop their plot from succeeding. He informs Eurylochus that He cannot crosse us now . . . We have not Tan’e so many yeares to build A work up And then to have it ruin’d With a push. (3)

It is clear that this plot has been planned for a long time and that the conspirators have worked hard to disseminate their ideological message far and wide. Aratus informs Eurylochus that new adherents are daily won over to their cause. They have provided such a successful groundwork that

8 All page references are to the Bodleian Library copy of Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora (1653).

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When we have called our Party forth, the Work Will seem done, the thin Numbers that are left Not deserving the Name of Enemies. The Tyrant then will see himself no more A King, but onely the Wretched Cause of Warre, His Power being ravisht from him. (4)

Later, the conspirators recall the guarantee of national support in the city and in the countryside “where Majesty / is more reverenc’d . . . where the name of King / Hears like the Name of God” (23). This would make for dispiriting reading for a republican administration in 1653, conjuring an image of its lack of support because of the domestic and subterfuge public relations exercises conducted by the Royalists. It is a conspiracy of which certain members of the tyrant’s family are all too aware. Timeus considers his father’s sense of security regarding the chances of being overthrown ill-founded and warns him about the dangers of coups even though the conspirators may not be acting in any overt fashion: Evils are silent now Not done away, they Couch, and lie in-wait, Sedition walks with Claws bow’d in, and a Close Mouth, Which onely she keeps for Opportunity Of Prey. Y’are not to suppose, that all Shut Eyes Do sleep; they are ne’er more watchful, than when thus They counterfeit neglect. (18)

Timeus’s admonition turns out to be accurate. Several of the most prominent loyalists are walking around the court, their identities undetected. They discretely choose locations for treasonous discussions, the participants well aware of the risks they take. For example, Hianthe tells Clearchus that they should retreat to “a place / That admits not so publique an Accesse. / Your Visit to me is not without all Danger” (21). Later in the play, when the conspiracy is activated now that Cleander has been crowned, Aratus warns of the necessity of breaking up their meeting, to avoid suspicion and to slip effortlessly back into their roles of apparent loyalists to the current king: “All we have to do, is to mingle our selves / In the Court again” (27). The eponymous hero, Pallantus, is among those who “mingle” in the tyrant’s court. Often he frustrates the tyrant and his son because he slips in and out of the court, tantalizingly just outside their reach. Several times in the play, both characters comment on how he has been disguised in their presence without their knowledge, hence avoiding arrest. He appears indestructible. Timeus’s attempt to have him murdered at the beginning of the play fails when Pallantus

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kills his would-be murderers. Pallantus is obviously important to Killigrew, because he is included in the revised title of the play. He is codified as a Royalist who will single-handedly assist their political fortunes. It is likely that Killigrew was thinking of a material person who the reader could see as Pallantus. The most plausible historical candidate for this position in 1653 was Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the cousin of Charles II, and whose mother, Elizabeth, was Charles I’s sister. There are numerous similarities. Pallantus indicates that he has suffered greatly in the recent conflict. He has lived a disguised life overseas where he has been hunted by the king’s forces who have killed his father among many others. Likewise, Rupert was exiled after the Civil War, and although the republic had no part in his father’s death, his father, as the short lived “Winter King” in Bohemia, had tasted the bitterness of usurpation and exile, living out his remaining years in the early 1630s in The Hague. There was also the wordplay connecting the name Pallantus with Rupert’s father’s political role as elector of Palatine. Like Rupert’s, Pallantus’s Royalist credentials are impeccable. Killigrew presents him as a vengeful aristocratic Royalist – “My education has been noble” (6) – aiming his wrath against “those who slew the King” (5). Just as Pallantus is on the periphery of domestic politics at the beginning of the play, so Rupert had made his reputation outside the country as a privateer and naval fighter engaged in global sea campaigns that were designed to secure much-needed funds for the Royalist cause. The Faithful Scout reports in November 1652 that he was heading to the Summer Islands around the coast of Scotland to seize ships “and this design is said to be upon the score of Charles Stuart.”9 Government newsbooks kept a wary eye on his whereabouts because of his importance to the exiled Royalists living in France and Holland, where Killigrew was then living. He was an important boost to Royalist morale. Nedham reported that his arrival in Nantes “makes them very jocund, as if he were able to deal with the whole Fleet of England.”10 And it was clear that in court conversation, Royalists fancied their chances of restoration more with him than Charles: “But Prince Rupert is the man now of whom the great discourse is; and they have more mind to put him upon action, than his Cosen.”11 Not only did Royalists in Charles’s court see his presence as preventing any chances of peace between Holland and England, but they also saw him as a headache to the republic. At various points in the newspaper accounts of Royalist conversation about Rupert, he was talked about as someone who could cause trouble anywhere, whether this was in Ireland or in the Scottish

9 Faithful Scout (November 12–19, 1652, 96:758). 10 Mercurius Politicus (March 24–31, 1653, 146:2333). 11 Weekly Intelligencer (April 5–12, 1653, 112:803).

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Highlands. Government newsbooks had to resort to sarcasm in order to contain his threat. Hence the Weekly Intelligencer derided both the ludicrous nature of Royalist endeavor and Prince Rupert’s egotism: Any desperate attempt over a Bog or a breakneck they think him fit for; and for this he is much bound to them, who know how to fit him with an Employment which none but such a one as himself would entertain. . . . So that they are not yet agreed about the manner, scene, or stage of Action for the performance of those wonders that must be wrought by Rupert.12

When news arrived of the hurricane that destroyed Rupert’s ships in the West Indies in February 1653, government newsbooks crowed: “this was sad news to the projectors against the Commonwealth of England, who hope to have made use of him in some attempts upon Ireland, or if that designed failed, to have made him Commander in chief of the Freebooters of Holland.”13 There is clearly a commonly shared projection of magnetism in the descriptions of Rupert and Pallantus. Just as Royalists were “jocund” with Rupert’s arrival in Nantes, so the conspirators are given a fresh boost of optimism when Pallantus arrives in Crete. Aratus first encounters Pallantus after the latter has successfully killed the two murderers who Timeus sent to murder him. Aratus is immediately impressed by this man’s “manly, and / . . . War-like skill” (7), and determines to befriend him. He then uses Hianthe, the royal king’s sister, to charm Pallantus into persuading him to join the cause: And yet, Madam, me thinks The present Opportunitie prompts us With a meanes, to add both Strength and Reputation To our Affaires. This Gallant Prince . . . is not, I find, a stranger to the interests of Crete, nor lightly resents The Tyranny it groanes under. The power You seem to have ore him, may improve This Compassion into a Zeal, to re-instate us In the Libertie we have lost. (20)

Just as Royalists in France were pinning their hopes on Rupert, so these loyalists in Crete believed that Pallantus would play a crucial part in the restoration of the monarchy. Pallantus/Rupert therefore would have fit in with other aspirants who had successfully engaged in active Royalist plots in post-regicide Europe. The assassinations of the Commonwealth ambassadors Dorislaus and

12 Weekly Intelligencer (April 5–12, 1653, 112:803). 13 Weekly Intelligencer (February 8–15, 1653, 105:738).

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Ascham in Holland in 1650 and in Spain in 1651 respectively indicated that Royalists did not blanch from going after high-value targets. The nature of material Royalist plots in the early 1650s, however, offers a cautionary check on Killigrew’s enthusiastic portrayal of Royalist saviors, and serves the purposes of my argument that Royalist drama was transformed from confrontational to aspirational fiction when read alongside contemporary events. A case in point is John Lilburne, whose trial took place in the same year of the revised publication. Lilburne had been arrested in England in 1653 after he had entered the country on his own cognizance and without a passport.14 His behavior in Europe in the previous years had attracted the government’s interest. Government newsbooks had treated Lilburne as a laughing stock. The Weekly Intelligencer published a report from The Hague detailing Lilburne’s behavior in Bruges. The report suggests that Lilburne “tears the ground in Brugges . . . and concerns himself exceedingly in pretended secresies of State, as if the Beacon of his brains had fired the combustion between the two Nations.”15 However, the most alarming narrative for republicans were stories coming from informants in the Dutch Republic that Lilburne was intent on assassinating Cromwell in 1653. A pamphlet defending the dissolution of the Parliament refers to accusations made against Lilburne at his trial in July 1653: “he enters into a wicked compliance with the Malignant party in Holland, offering his service for the assistance of Charles Stuart, promising to murther the General.”16 On this score, it would seem that Lilburne’s desire to assassinate Cromwell fit in with the death of the tyrant that occurs in Killigrew’s play. Pallantus acts as if his assassination of the tyrant is divinely blessed and that he was chosen for the deed. His hopes of greatness “first appeared to me / In a shape most heavenly, and told me / . . . That if I would strike one Noble Blow / I should remove the Numerous Wrongs and Evils / Of a Nation” (46). Furthermore, this providential favor extends to the national unity the Royalists believe would occur with the assassination of a tyrant. Cleander is positively giddy with excitement in the fourth act when he acclaims the tyrant-slayer Pallantus because his act has in short order “Dissolv’d an Armie, and Reduc’d a Kingdome” (40). The difference between Lilburne and Pallantus, though, is stark. Pallantus is the hero of the narrative. He rationalizes the assassination, sees it as just, and, more importantly, is judged by others to have done the right thing. He is

14 Anon., Severall Informations and Examinations, 14. 15 Mercurius Britannicus (July 19–26, 1652, 1:7). 16 Anon, Stop to the Mad Multitude, 27.

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valorized for his act and earns the commendation of the king. In contrast, those Lilburne sought to assist were bemused and disenchanted. When Lilburne told Sir Ralph Hopton his plans, he informed Lilburne that “it could not be so facile a thing.”17 When George Villiers, the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, repeatedly asked Lilburne to mediate his peace with Parliament so he could return from exile, Lilburne repeatedly refused and informed him of his intentions, to which Villiers, with Cromwell in mind, pragmatically replied: Sir, you may observe that in all your attempts the General out-witted you, and broke your business in the bud; besides, you may see that on all occasions the Souldiery hath been obedient unto his officer, so discreetly hath the Generall ordered his Army.18

The narrative of Lilburne’s tale therefore offers a cautionary tale of how demurral was the watchword for those individuals high up in Royalist political circles. Villiers was affirming here the larger point Geoffrey Smith makes about the problems with Royalist espionage in the early 1650s. Any optimism was seen to consist of “a desperate and feverish element” of the very kinds that Lilburne displays.19 Smith also notes, in what would be depressing reading for a Royalist, that “of the organization of conspiracy and the collection of intelligence at this time there is little evidence.”20 Perhaps astute readers would have regarded Clearchus’s enthusiasm in joining the conspiracy simply on the grounds that he is “glad to see the Enterprize / So hopeful” as extremely naïve (23). A few lines later, Clearchus proves just how untrained he is for the monarchical role that will shortly be thrust upon him. It was then one thing to see the ease with which the conspirators in fiction could claim widespread support; it was another to see that hope so easily dashed in material terms. So while Killigrew was providing a literary equivalence to the spies and agents that Smith describes, his characters were far more organized, efficient, and successful in their political goals than those engaged in actual espionage and plots around him. Real plotters were hare-brained zealots like Lilburne, and potential plots were often quickly crushed before they really could begin. Such discrepancies between fiction and real-time events exemplify the pattern of Royalist drama in the 1650s: bold claims of aggressive political engagement were quickly re-cast as idealistic projections with little change of fulfillment.

17 Anon, Severall Informations and Examinations, 4. 18 Anon, Severall Informations and Examinations, 6. 19 Smith, Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies, 156. 20 Smith, Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies, 170.

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Readiness Is All: Ad-libbing Leadership Killigrew’s plot of insurrection was complemented by another largely unrevised section that provocatively depicted the crowning of a king. Early in the play, Eurylochus asks Aratus why the revolt has not yet begun since everything is in place. Aratus replies, “onely a little Ceremony detaines us / To Crown our King, that past, our actions / With our thoughts shall then contend in swiftnesse” (4). When Cleander turns up, the coup acquires its legitimacy. In the first scene, Aratus justifies to Clearchus why they have gathered to crown Cleander. He argues that their motivation is neither for personal interest, innovation or ambition, but “our oath, the sacrament / We took, which still holds us, though our Lord be dead, / Until his successor release us from it” (22). This had to be read as nothing less than a Royalist commitment to Prince Charles until told otherwise, and a refusal to accept the tyrant currently on the throne. Aratus’s description of the tyrant aligned with narratives about Cromwell. His comment that the tyrant they currently lived under “was born less than We, and hides / The private Man, under the Publick Gown” (22) sound very like critiques of Cromwell’s rise to power of the kind conveyed by Andrew Marvell in “An Horatian Ode,” when he describes how Cromwell “from his private gardens . . . Could by industrious valor climb / To ruin the great work of time.”21 The fact that Aratus can say in a newly written passage that “A Sacrament is the Tie / No lesse of Loyaltie, than of Treason” (24) conceded how this act would be regarded by the republican administration. The crowning of Cleander would have served as both a remembrance of Charles’s ceremony at Scone in Scotland in 1650, and a hopeful anticipation of a duplicative event in the near future in England. But it would also have been an improvement since Scone was no triumph. As Smith notes, the coronation took place “in a sometimes humiliating ceremony, replete with tactless references in lengthy sermons to ‘the sins of former kings,’ to ‘tottering’ and ‘fading crowns.’”22 And in any case, Scone was a false dawn since it was followed by the military disaster of Worcester in September 1651 that would exile Charles until 1660. The button for restoration therefore had to be reset, and Killigrew offered his recreation of a coronation in a literary form as a viable model. However, what is interesting about the coronation in the play is the extent to which, while the coup has been long in the planning, the coronation reads as an

21 Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 275. 22 Smith, Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies, 150.

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extemporary, on the fly experience, in which the new king is given little choice or little time to think about accepting his new role. Aratus informs him: And sir, though it be a short Warning to so Great a Matter, you must Presently resolve to be a King. We Have no time now to instruct you in Your right, and how you lost it. (24)

This was not the time for a patient history lesson. And in a newly added passage, Killigrew emphasizes the urgency of this vital moment: Sir, the time presses now, and we cannot use The circumstances necessary to Perswade you; but whatever appears Strange At this time to you, a few dayes use will Render most familiar. (25)

It was almost as if Killigrew was insisting that his own monarch should be prepared for an immediate assumption of the throne, as if this is how a restoration was going to happen. In turn, man-handled as he is into his seat in order to be crowned, Cleander is alarmingly unprepared for his responsibilities, confessing in a newly added passage how he will learn as he goes along: “I shall make’t my Labour ev’ry day / To understand my Duty” (26). This exchange raises some disconcerting questions. Were real conspirators ready to crown Charles, king of the Scots as king of Great Britain? In turn, was Charles really ready to govern, having spent his years abroad begging for assistance as suppliant rather than ruler? Was Killigrew critiquing or alerting his patrons to the necessarily slapdash nature of the anointment in which questions would be answered at a later date? He seems to imply that a legitimate king could be crowned opportunistically while the finer details could be filled in later. Whatever the answers, the unfortunate echoes with the debacle of Scone undermined the political significance for the reader of experiencing the dramatization of a royal coronation.

The Simplicity of Political Fiction and the Complexities of European Diplomatic Networks The argument in this chapter has focused on the discrepancies between the militant, confident tone of the Royalist plot in Killigrew’s play and the ineffective strategies of Royalists in real-time events. The consequence of this requires a

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re-reading of the militant message of his play as aspirational rather than practical, improbable more than imminent. Nowhere is this requirement more evident than in examining the two Europes, the one of the play and the other of the continent in 1653. The comparison reveals a contrast between a fictional Royalist world characterized by simple, seamless coordination and cohesion between characters and a complicated, often duplicitous set of relations between Prince Charles and his diplomats and those from other countries. We have already seen how Pallantus and Clearchus are willing, generous outsiders who are fully invested in the cause of the loyalists. Killigrew’s play rests on an uncomplicated relationship between loyalists living in the court of Crete and those from the outside who travel to Crete to assist in their internal affairs and ensure the defeat of tyranny and the restoration of the monarchy. This is a text characterized by dynamic mobility as characters move in and out of Crete, where the play is set, mainly to instigate or support conspiracy. These are characters who have spent years abroad, and in specific capacities. For example, Clearchus is highly regarded as a disciplined navy officer, Haimantus telling him that “There wants nothing to make a War-like, Princely, / And wellcommanded Navy, but your presence Sir” (7). Characters who come into Crete do not necessarily regard it as their resting place. For example, Pallantus, whose face, marked by military encounters, both repulses and attracts others, fights overseas, returns to Crete to kill the tyrant, and then leaves to return to another unidentified engagement at the end of the play, his domestic task completed. What is important here is that Crete is his stopover, a means to ensure the restoration of the monarchy, but it is not his end goal. There is a larger European arena in which he is engaged. Consequently, an occasional domestic piece celebrating the marriage of aristocratic families in 1638 can now be read in 1653 in terms of a much wider European context. Killigrew’s revision marks a geographic re-orientation from domestic to international politics, marked by his exilic experiences. This part of the chapter, then, is in keeping with the “new histories” approach to literature in this period, propounded by Philip Major and others who are interested in seeing how those who chose or were forced to live in Europe adapted to a new environment. Such studies, Major argues, offer “insight into the multifarious ways in which governments and individuals of the host communities to which they flee respond on a political, religious and . . . cultural level to their new guests.”23 However, although there is this shift in the play to a larger European political arena, the uncomplicated relationships between loyalists in Crete and their

23 Major, Literatures of Exile, 6.

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overseas counterparts is naïve in the context of the nuanced and ambivalent interactions that transpired between Charles and his supporters and European powers during the period when Killigrew resided either in The Hague or in Paris.24 Diplomatic negotiations concerning material support in Europe for Charles’s cause repeatedly consisted of mixed signals. Royalists would have been confused as to whether they should be ready at a moment’s notice to launch a coup or to wait it out until a more propitious moment. It is what McElligott and Smith characterize as a feature of the politics of this period marked by “contingency, opportunism, short-term shifts of tactics, and simply muddling through in the face of unforeseen developments.”25 An analysis of newsbook accounts of these European relationships reveals that Royalists were faced with a series of complicated diplomatic maneuvers, practiced by both sides. This is best exemplified by the gaming analogy that Mercurius Britannicus used to describe Charles’s reaction to being courted by the Dutch. As he finds them a “temporizing, mercenary people . . . he is resolv’d to sit a Spectator, to see how the Cardes are shuffled.”26 It was hard to negotiate such a fluctuating landscape, as Ann Hughes and Julie Sanders suggest, given that politics determined hospitality: “changing political geographies, rendered places more or less hospitable. The Anglo-Dutch war of 1652–1654 made English Royalists more welcome while the peace bought dislocation.”27 There were a few brief months at the end of 1652 that would have aligned with Killigrew’s more optimistic reading of politics. The issues of Mercurius Britannicus in November and December reveal a clear pattern of a surge in Royalist good fortunes. This seemed to be indicated by intelligence reports from several sources that suggested a coordinated European/Royalist invasion would take place in the spring of 1653. Issue sixteen includes a report of considerable support for Charles in Paris. The fear of a Danish/Royalist alliance, together with the conclusion of hostilities within France prompted the writer to comment: “all these are symptoms of a sad spring, which me may justly fear 24 Killigrew’s experiences were decidedly European ones. Killigrew had left England for The Hague with the Duke of York, for whom he served as chaplain, in 1648. York was ordered by his brother Charles to join their mother’s exiled court in Paris in the fall of 1650. However, York eschewed France for Holland under the influence of Killigrew and remained for many months there with his sister. When he was ordered again to return to France, he was told to dismiss Killigrew from his service. Thus, Killigrew arrived back in Paris himself in the summer of 1651 with poor fortunes. Although York enhanced his military reputation by fighting with Marshall Turenne in the Fronde wars, he did not ask for Killigrew’s attendance again. 25 McElligott and Smith, Royalists and Royalism, 13–14. 26 Mercurius Britannicus (August 16–23, 1652, 5:9). 27 Hughes and Sanders, “Gender, Geography and Exile,” 143.

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to prevent, though not to encounter.”28 There was an uptick in fortunes across the board as reports from Paris indicated: “The English begin to be admitted dayly into places of high trust and command; and those shaded Cavaliers, whom the world thought worthy of nothing but exilement, begin to be looked upon according to their worth and known gallantry.”29 It was clear that Royalist fortunes had improved: “the Cavaliers comfort themselves up with the hopes of better fortune then has hitherto waited upon their designes.”30 The government must have regarded it as a very ominous sign that when Louis XIV visited Charles on November 18, 1652, a meeting during which the French king and other nobles assured Charles of “their upmost endeavors and assistance of their persons and purses to carry on his design the next Spring.”31 It was not made clear what form this design would take, but the government’s fears would have been realized by a league that was concluded between the Dutch and the French, which meant that attention could now be turned to the interests of Charles: The King of Scots and all his party are extreamly much pleas’d with the conjunction, and questionless it was his interest and meditation knit the knot: his lists fill apace, and the Court was never so joviall, since the black hand of Fate touch’d the Family, as it is now.32

More importantly for Killigrew, his former patron was also experiencing good fortune. It was reported that the Duke of York was held in great favor “and is cryed up for the most accomplished Gentleman both in Arms and Courtesie, that graces the French Court.”33 It was clear that he was at the center of possible political intrigue aimed against the Commonwealth: The Duke of York and the Lord Digby are the onely gallants of Paris . . . and when there is the least intermission . . . they list Valour and Resolution for an unknown, and yet unsuspected piece of service, which is not fit to be divulged or communicated.34

Perhaps it was these reports of his former patron’s good fortunes that might have prompted Killigrew to re-issue a few months later a play at the heart of which was a “piece of service” cloaked in secrecy, the assassination of a tyrant, that was designed to end the years of Royalist exile.

28 Mercurius Britannicus (November 2–9, 1652, 16:246). 29 Mercurius Britannicus (November 2–9, 1652, 16:245). 30 Mercurius Britannicus (November 2–9, 1652, 16:245). 31 Mercurius Britannicus (November 16–23, 1652, 18:260). 32 Mercurius Britannicus (November 23–30, 1652, 19:267). 33 Mercurius Britannicus (November 2–9, 1652, 16:245). 34 Mercurius Britannicus (November 9–16, 1652, 17:254).

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These moments of exhilaration, however, were few and far between. During the time Killigrew was revising and publishing his revised text, Charles found himself on constantly changing diplomatic grounds. The general impression was that he was being outplayed in his role as suppliant. The Faithful Scout, for example, reports on November 25, 1652 that Charles had written a letter to be present with German princes at their Diet “but that was denied him, and he was onely permitted to send an Ambassador.”35 Similar frustrations occurred with the Dutch. Charles was in Paris in June 1653, “in expectation of what he can get in order to his restauration.” He thought he could get the assistance of the Dutch, but “they are subttle and do not that we can hear yet, own his cause, he hath little hopes from hence.” There was no doubt that Charles was pursuing every alliance possible, and “leaving no stone unmoved, the turning whereof may appear to be any way advantagious to him”36– whether this was with the usual suspects, or more unexpected candidates, such as the Tuscans. On other occasions, the timing was wrong. On pressing the Holy Roman Emperor to make his case to the Dutch on stronger terms by providing him with assistance, Charles was informed that “the Emperor for his part, makes Answer, How he is sorry that he hath no Money at present, and that he cannot any other way befriend him, in regard his own Affairs are in a very uncertain condition.”37 And bad timing meant that all of Charles’s diplomatic efforts fell on deaf ears, despite his tireless efforts: He omits no opportunities of Courtship among them, by his Friends, Emissaries and Letters; and to move the rather, he offers, if they will lend him shipping, to joy and advance his Standard among them, & / adventure his own person at Sea against the English: This enters here at one Ear, & outs at another; because they have a hard work to find shipping enough for themselves.38

His cause was not helped in the Netherlands, where the empathetic United Provinces were hindered by the fact that Holland “holds stiff against the Interests of the Stuarts.”39 And political aspirations could turn on the wording of a treaty. The rumor of overtures of peace between Holland and England had this effect on Royalist morale: “This sending into England (of letters) hath put all the Cavalier party here into a monstrous agony, fearing lest it might induce a treaty and that a peace, to the quailing of their hopes.”40 The result of this

35 Faithful Scout (November 19–26, 1652, 97:166). 36 Weekly Intelligencer (March 29–April 5, 1653, 111:790). 37 Mercurius Politicus (March 24–31, 1653, 146:2331). 38 Mercurius Politicus (March 31–April 7, 1653, 147:2353–54). 39 Weekly Intelligencer (February 8–15, 1653, 105:738). 40 Mercurius Politicus (April 7–14, 1653, 148:2353–54).

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frustrating diplomatic effort was fatigue and despondency. A report from Paris on April 5, 1653 indicated that Charles was about to end his French sojourn and look to try his luck elsewhere: The Scottish King (as they call him) . . . hath had no good luck among this people since his coming hither, in point of affection, and now being weary of this country, he is like upon the same terms to leave them, and an ill report behind him.41

Charles’s decision seemed all too familiar to the mood of Royalists the previous year. The bleak outlook for Royalists continued in early 1652: the Fronde Civil Wars meant that the French king could not do anything further for Charles; Frederick III of Denmark was more worried by the expansive plans of his Swedish neighbor, Queen Christina; and Venice had expelled its Royalist resident, and was opening up a dialogue with republicans. This leads Smith to suggest a negative picture of Royalist fortunes, given: “The collapse of royalist fortunes in all three Stuart kingdoms and the reluctance of European governments to provide any significant aid.”42 In view of Charles’s desultory failure to acquire the military support of other countries, it seemed as if the government had nothing to fear about Royalist plots at all. One of the distinctive characteristics of the tyrant’s court in Killigrew’s play is its laconic air and a ruler’s preference for humor and relaxation. Although Timeus repeatedly alerts his father to the dangers of maintaining this temperament, the king dismisses his concerns, thinking himself safe: “we are hedg’d in beyond all fear” (18). He argues that those who threatened them are now dead, and believes that those still alive do not have the will to cause them harm. In displaying the tyrant’s casual response to his son’s fears, Killigrew might have had in mind the dismissive attitude of government newsbooks towards the chances of Royalist success. Readers of government newsbooks read correspondents’ reports indicating that there was nothing to worry about, assurances that were, as a report from Paris implied, part of a public relations campaign in which partisan versions were pitted against each other: The King of Scots solicits very hard for aid . . . but our home bred differences . . . perswades me to believe the contrary. Despite reports of men and money from several parts by Royalists party, we judg it only forgeries of their own, because our Letters form these parts confirm it not.43

41 Mercurius Politicus (March 31–April 7, 1653, 147:2353–54). 42 Smith, Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies, 159. 43 Mercurius Pragmaticus (July 6–13, 1653, 8:60).

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To further their position, government writers reacted to stories from Europe of an uptick in Royalist hopes by treating optimistic political statements as unsubstantiated gossip. For instance, the Weekly Intelligencer reacted to the idea that the French were going to give weapons to Highlanders in Scotland as follows: “But all this is looked on but as smoak in the air, and to make only an empty clowd, which every wind will blow about the world.”44 One of the most apposite statements that summed up the government newsbooks’ stance on Royalist hopes was Marchamont Nedham’s acute observation that spoke so well to the tenor of Killigrew’s text. Hearing that the United Provinces were being pressured by the people and ministers to support Charles, Nedham commented that this news was typical of Royalists who “always speak things as they would have them.”45 Here was an astute comment that succinctly encapsulated a Royalist mind-set of courtiers and fiction writers alike: an aspirational politics that would always flounder amidst the hardened cynicism embedded in diplomatic maneuvering.

Funereal Rites for Republicanism: Aspirational Dirges The newsbooks’ accounts of the fluctuations in Royalist fortunes suggested that there was no sense of a political trajectory that hinted at, let alone resulted in, a likelihood of monarchical restoration in 1653. Killigrew, though, persisted in pushing an overly optimistic agenda, determining that drama could at least offer the space in which a more definitive political outcome could be projected. At the end of his revised text, Killigrew added italicized notes that described a masque-like scene. While reminding the reader of the original inspiration for the play – to celebrate the marriage of Mary Villiers, the daughter of the first Duke of Buckingham and Charles, Lord Herbert, the eldest son of the fourth Duke of Pembroke – the newly added description of a funeral pyre bearing “the body of the dead tyrant” would have specifically suggested the imminent demise of Cromwell. More significantly, after the verses are sung, Timeus – who has by now reformed himself of republican desires after becoming besotted with the virtuous Pallantus – sets fire to the pyre, cremating his tyrannical father and suggesting the death of republicanism itself. The cremation takes

44 Weekly Intelligencer (April 19–26, 1653, 115:820). 45 Mercurius Politicus (March 24–31, 1653, 146:2333).

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place in the middle of the last stanza of verses, and is sung by the people in the revision rather than by the first and second flamen in the original text. The stanza is re-written to reflect the action of cremation. In the original text, the body is missing and there is no pyre. The different words suggest the extent to which Killigrew wanted to remind the readers of their responsibilities as they watched the demise of the tyrannical state. In the original text, the second flamen excuses the audience for any culpability they shared in the rise of tyranny by promising political amnesia: “None heare after of thy faults / . . . The rest shall sleep with thee.”46 However, when the people speak in the revised version, the cremation has to occur to eradicate any presence of tyranny because “Yet still you must allow a fault.”47 The agreement not to talk about the audience’s share in the blame for what occurred is replaced by a more intractable problem: a plain admission of responsibility. It is not enough to let time pass beyond this generation’s timespan, “the rest shall sleepe with thee.” Instead, the closure must be more abrupt, definitive, and handled in the present. And in both versions, Killigrew worries about any residual empathy to alternative forms of government to the monarchy: “Least our too partiall favour this way bent / Excuse the ill, and blame the innocent.”48 The only change is the substitution of the personal pronoun “our” for “your,” suggesting that an inclusive responsibility is redirected to the specific reader. Given this worry about a failure to completely excoriate tyranny, the falling of the curtain that “shuts both the Scene and the Actors from the Beholders Sight” takes on more significance, signifying the most aspirational Royalist desire of all: the definitive historical closure of the republican political experiment.49 Yet, the “fault” here is Killigrew’s, as he fails to acknowledge once more the discrepancy between the aspiration of drama and the reality of politics off-stage. In the year of the publication of Killigrew’s play, Cromwell moved definitively to establish his protectorate. By the end of the year, it is in place, and is secured until his death five years later. Far from a closure of republican government, the year indicated the formalized realization of its existence.

The Political Fantasies of Royalist Drama While the play remains on the canonical edge, both in its own time and ours, and remains a read rather than a staged experience, there is plenty of literary 46 47 48 49

Killigrew, The Conspiracy, sig. N3r. Killigrew, Pallantus and Eudora, 64. Killigrew, Pallantus and Eudora, 64. Killigrew, Pallantus and Eudora, 64.

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evidence to suggest how seventeenth-century readers understood print as a visceral substitute for attending the theater. For example, in the complete works of Beaumont and Fletcher (1647), numerous writers of dedicatory verses commented on how reading plays compensated for watching them. John Web saw how the readers could circumvent the prohibitions on acting: “The Presse shall give to ev’ry man his part / And we will all be actors . . . / And at each Exit as your Fancies rise / Our hands shall clap deserved Plaudities.”50 Therefore, to read a coronation scene, the assassination of a tyrant together with his funeral pyre, and the restoration of the monarch was to fully visualize it and imagine it as if staged. As James Loxley has commented about unstaged plays: “These scripts are prospective; they look forward to their actualisation, and in doing so mimic the element of articulate political longing in post-Regicide royalism.”51 The potency of this moment cannot be underestimated. It must have served as a vicarious experience for those Royalist readers frustrated by the failure of restoration. What is important about this text in 1653, however, are the difficulties facing the Royalist reader in determining how they could gauge the tone of this play, and the likely success of its promise of monarchical restoration given that mixed messages were emanating in newsbooks from amidst the constant diplomatic maneuvering between Charles Stuart, his ambassadors, and a variety of European powers. What emerges is a snapshot of international political intrigue characterized by double-dealing, demurral, and the rapid fluctuations between the deferral of and the promise of support for Royalist hopes of returning to England and overturning the republic. My approach then confirms what Major says is the feature of New British History: detailing the “complex inter-relations between English exiles and their hosts” in order to show just how much Europe played a central role in the English Revolution,52 and what Timothy Raylor describes as “an approach that is European rather than English in scope.”53 Consequently, my focus on the morally murky nature of European diplomacy means that Killigrew’s play has to be read more as aspirational optimism that promised a political clarity that was distinctly lacking in actual European courts. This is not to deny the valences of Killigrew’s text: to present to the Royalist reader a successful plot, the death of a tyrant, and the reality of restoration checks off every criteria of political fantasy. Why not take advantage of

50 Beaumont and Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies, sig. C2v. 51 Loxley, “Dramatis Personae,” 163–64. 52 Major, Literatures of Exile, 8. 53 Raylor, “Exiles, Expatriates and Travellers,” 43. See also: D’Addario, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth Century Literature.

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the arrival of a warrior prince like Pallantus, even though his success characterizes a conspiracy that is largely due to happenstance than careful planning? Why not operate on the fly to crown a prince who is unsure about his responsibilities? And perhaps Killigrew was a playwright who could invest in aspirational goals because of reports from Europe that briefly spoke of hopeful outcomes. In this context, his play was as good a political projection as any designs that were being conjured up in the courts in Paris and The Hague. However, the play also offers itself up to be read as an example of a jarring disjunction between the pressures exerted by the genre of drama itself in which events happen quickly, successfully, and reach a conclusion in a relatively uncomplicated manner, and the mundane frustrating reality of stalled negotiations and wasted time that were conveyed in newsbooks and other pamphlets of political import during the early 1650s. In his play, Killigrew promised Royalists starved for good news fulfillment of their aspirations. In reality though, as government newsbooks stated in relation to Charles’s hopes of support, “promises have nothing but air to defend themselves, and oftentimes do immediately vanish away in the same air they were begotten.”54 It was all very well for heroes like Pallantus to exemplify the “True and Noble spirit [who] ought not / To sink under Misfortune, but bear up / The stronger” (34), but as Royalists facing execution after failed plots would realize, aspirations are noble things until they are exposed as naïve fantasy in the harsh environment of realpolitik.

Works Cited Primary Sources Anon. Severall Informations and Examinations Taken Concerning Lieutenant Colonell John Lilburn, Concerning His Apostacy to the Party of Charles Stuart. London, 1653. Wing S5255. Anon. A Stop to the Mad Multitude, or A Seasonable Antidote against a Dangerous Cup of Poyson. London, 1653. Wing S5741. Anon. “To My Learned Friend on His Apt Choice and Seasonable Translation of Electra in Sophocles.” In Christopher Wase, trans. Electra of Sophocles. The Hague, 1649. Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. Comedies and Tragedies. London, 1647. Wing B1581. Faithful Scout. Impartially Communicating the Most Remarkable Passages of the Armies, in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Edited by Daniel Border. London, 1651–1655. Killigrew, Henry. The Conspiracy. London, 1638. STC 14958.

54 Weekly Intelligencer (July 19–26, 1653, 127:932).

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Killigrew, Henry. Pallantus and Eudora: A Tragœdie. London, 1653. Wing K444. Man in the Moon. Edited by John Crouch. London, 1649. Marvell, Andrew. The Poems of Andrew Marvell. Edited by Nigel Smith. London: Longman, 2003. Mercurius Britannicus. Edited by Robert Ibbitson. London, 1652. Mercurius Politicus. Edited by Marchamont Nedham. London, 1653. Mercurius Pragmaticus. Edited by Thomas Lock. London, 1653. A Perfect Summary of Exact Passages of Parliament. Edited by Robert Ibbitson. London, 1649. Proceedings of the Councell of State. Edited by Robert Ibbitson. London, 1649. Wase, Christopher, trans. Electra of Sophocles. The Hague, 1649. Wing S4690. Weekly Intelligencer of the Common-wealth. Faithfully Communicating All Affairs Both Martial and Civil. Edited by Richard Collings. London, 1653.

Secondary Sources D’Addario, Christopher. Exile and Journey in Seventeenth Century Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Hughes, Ann, and Julie Sanders. “Gender, Geography and Exile: Royalists and the Low Countries in the 1650s.” In Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum, edited by Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, 128–48. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Loxley, James. “Dramatis Personae: Royalism, Theatre, and the Political Ontology of the Person in Post-regicide Writing.” In Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum, edited by Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, 149–70. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Major, Philip. “Introduction.” In Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and Its Aftermath, edited by Philip Major, 1–13. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. McElligott, Jason, and David L. Smith. “Introduction: Rethinking Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum.” In Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum, edited by Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, 1–17. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Raylor, Timothy. “Exiles, Expatriates and Travellers: Towards a Cultural and Intellectual History of the English Abroad, 1640–1660.” In Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and Its Aftermath, edited by Philip Major, 15–43. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Raymond, Joad. The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Raymond, Joad, and Noah Moxham, eds. News Networks in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Smith, Geoffrey. Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies: Their Role in the British Civil Wars, 1640–1660. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Notes on Contributors Sophie Emma Battell is a lecturer in Renaissance literature at the University of Exeter and a research fellow at Durham University. She is currently working on a monograph on hospitality in Shakespeare’s plays. Paul Brown is the Modern Humanities Research Association’s Postdoctoral Research Associate to the New Oxford Shakespeare at De Montfort University. His research focuses on theater history and digital humanities. In particular, he works on the lives of early modern theater people, collaborative drama, and authorship attribution. He teaches modules on the technologies of text and doing textual studies using computers. Gabriella Edelstein is a lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and the 2019 S. Ernest Sprott fellow. Her research focuses on the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, and she is working on a monograph about the relationship between collaborative writing and censorship. Her work on Ben Jonson’s authorship has appeared in English Literary Renaissance. Adam Hembree is completing a PhD on early modern English stage acting at the University of Melbourne with the support of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. His project uses the history of natural passions to draw discursive parallels between stage play and occult practices, especially magic and alchemy. Additional interests include lexical history, translation, genre, and practice as research. Adam is a theater producer and performer. His company, Soothplayers, improvises plays in Elizabethan style in the Melbourne area and throughout Australia. Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English and Head of Graduate School at Sheffield Hallam University. Her publications include From the Romans to the Normans on the English Renaissance Stage (Medieval Institute Publications, 2017), Renaissance Drama on the Edge (Ashgate, 2014), Shakespeare on the Edge: Border-crossing in the Tragedies and the Henriad (Ashgate, 2005), and Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, co-edited with Aidan Norrie (Amsterdam University Press, 2019). She is co-editor of Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association, of the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides, and of Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama. Mark Houlahan is Associate Professor of English at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. He has edited Twelfth Night for the Internet/Broadview series (with David Carnegie) (2014), and Shakespeare and Emotions: Inheritances, Enactments, Legacies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), with R.S. White and Katrina O’Loughlin. He sits on the editorial board of the journals Shakespeare and The Journal of New Zealand Literature, and is immediate past president of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association. Currently he is editing Shirley’s Hyde Park (with Brett Greatley-Hirsch) for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley. Laurie Johnson is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Queensland, author of Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at Newington Butts (2018),

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The Tain of Hamlet (2013), and The Wolf Man’s Burden (2001), and editor of Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body–Mind (with John Sutton and Evelyn Tribble, 2014) and Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares (with Darryl Chalk, 2010). He is also author of over forty articles and chapters in cognate fields, the current president of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association, and a member of the editorial board of the journal Shakespeare (Taylor & Francis). Jeffrey McCambridge is a PhD candidate at Ohio University where he specializes in late medieval and early modern representations of Islam in English poetry and drama. He received his MA in English from Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. His scholarly interests include the history of Islamic ivories in the medieval West, medieval and early modern rhetorics of alterity, and historiography. Jennifer E. Nicholson recently completed her PhD, Shakespeare’s French: Reading “Hamlet” at the Edge of English, at the University of Sydney. Her research projects currently span Shakespeare studies (particularly Hamlet), Montaigne, Shakespeare in translation, early modern drama, Renaissance books, Renaissance publication history, and world literature. Jennifer was the recipient of the 2019 George Yule Essay Prize, awarded by the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, for further work on relationships between Hamlet and Montaigne’s Essais. She has also worked on Anglophone translations of Japanese film. Her broader research interests include untranslatability and comparative translation. Aidan Norrie is a historian of monarchy, and a Chancellor’s International Scholar in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. Aidan is the editor, with Marina Gerzic, of From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past (Routledge, 2019); with Lisa Hopkins, of Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2019); and, with Marina Gerzic, of Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations (Routledge, 2020). Aidan is currently working on a monograph, Elizabeth I and the Old Testament: Biblical Analogies and Providential Rule, which is forthcoming from Arc Humanities Press. Christopher Orchard is a professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in early modern literature and post-9/11 literature. His most recent essays have included: the contemporary literary afterlives of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson in the 1640s and 1650s, and the political poetry of Katherine Phillips. He is currently under contract with Routledge for a book entitled “To busie the mindes of the people”: Theater, Entertainments and Political Unrest in Republican Britain, 1649–1660. Chloe Owen is a PhD student at Loughborough University. She holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in English Literary Studies from the University of Exeter, as well as an MA in Shakespeare Studies from Kings College London and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Her current project looks at the ways in which ghosts, witches, fairies, and other supernatural events in early modern drama are related to both our modern understanding of sleep paralysis and hypnagogic/hypnopompic hallucinations, and early modern explanations for the phenomena.

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John R. Severn is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney, currently part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on the economic and cultural value of theater in Australia. His wider research focuses on the intersections among adaptation, early modern drama, opera and musical theater, dramatic texture, and community. He is the author of Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical (Routledge, 2019), and his journal articles in Australian Literary Studies, Cambridge Opera Journal, Music & Letters, Shakespeare Bulletin, Studies in Musical Theatre, and Theatre Journal explore the ways operatic and musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays have engaged with community inclusion from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.

Index of Persons, Places, and Subjects The Admiral’s Men 22–28, 34 Agas map 2, 88, 156, 165 Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius 63, 64 Alleyn, Edward 26, 29, 30, 32 Bacon, Francis 62, 70 Beaumont, Francis 11, 200, 219–222, 226, 255 Blackfriars (theater) 38, 49, 79, 155, 158, 168 Braun, George 151, 156, 160, 162, 168, 169 Bristol XVII, 8, 9, 98, 100, 102, 103, 105, 109, 114 Burbage, Richard 22, 32 Cervantes 233 Chalmers, George 152, 157–159 Chapman, George 7, 38, 42, 48–52, 212 Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland 31, 79, 82, 87, 91, 238, 239, 242 Charles II King of England, Scotland, and Ireland 12, 237–240, 242, 244, 246–249, 250, 251, 253, 255, 256 Chester 28, 29, 31 Chorus (drama) XIII, 66–68 Churchyard, Thomas 100–106, 109–111 Cockpit (theater) 8, 80, 82, 86–88, 90, 117 Death XV, XVII, 29, 40, 50, 72, 126, 128, 131, 137, 147, 148, 181, 183–187, 191, 227, 228, 238, 239, 242, 244, 253–255 Dekker, Thomas 25, 38, 72, 121 Derrida, Jacques 118, 127, 130 Devil 8, 40, 43, 44, 47, 48, 59, 61, 68–72, 135 Dorislaus, Isaac 238, 239, 243 Dream 41, 44–46, 72, 230 Drury Lane 8, 80, 82, 84, 87 Eccleston, William 219, 220 Edge XIII, XV, XVII, 1–5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 19, 20, 23, 26, 28, 33, 34, 37, 42, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 61, 66, 73, 77, 78, 80, 82, 85–87, 90–92, 98, 99, 104, 114, 117, 118, 120, 122, 125, 128, 130, 131, 136, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749-015

142, 144, 147, 151, 152, 167, 169, 171, 172, 179, 180, 186, 194–196, 237, 254 Elizabeth I, Queen of England XIII, XVII, 8, 12, 29, 97–101, 104, 105, 108–113, 152, 158 English language XVII, 10, 118, 125, 126, 129, 178, 183, 193 Etymology 59, 60, 180 Exploding head syndrome 48, 50–52 Fear 40, 41, 44, 45, 67, 68, 71, 88, 99, 111, 126, 130, 145, 148, 183–185, 186, 188, 203, 206, 213, 249–252 First folio 8, 11 Fletcher, John XVII, 3, 12, 70, 199–203, 205–208, 210, 213–216, 219–233, 255 – The Mad Lover 207, 224, 225 – The Pilgrim 224 – Tamer Tamed 11, 199, 200 – The Two Noble Kinsmen 11, 222, 229 – The Wild-Goose Chase 11, 207, 219–225, 227, 232, 233 Florio, John 178–180, 182–184, 188, 193–195 Ford, John XIV, 12, 38, 72, 221 – The Fancies, Chaste and Noble XIV France 12, 62, 242, 243, 249 French XVII, 10, 122, 147, 177–180, 182, 184, 186, 188, 193–195, 204, 212 French English 177–180, 183, 184, 195, 196 Friendship 44, 208, 211, 212, 220–222, 232 Garter, Bernard 105–111 Gender 7, 63, 64, 71, 106, 108, 128, 205, 211, 215, 216 Geospatial 78, 79, 84, 86 Greene, Robert 68 – The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 66–69 Grief XIV, 112, 125, 126, 180, 181, 183, 185–187, 190 The Hague 237, 238, 242, 244, 249, 256 Hallucination 37–44, 46–52

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Henrietta Maria, Queen-consort of England, Scotland, and Ireland 80, 86, 91 Henslowe, Phillip 23–27, 30, 34, 154, 157 Heywood, Thomas 23, 65, 67 Homosocial 11, 206, 220, 222, 223, 226 Hopkins, Lisa 1, 3, 4, 12, 58 Hughes, Ann 249 Hyde Park XVII, 8, 77, 79, 82–84, 86, 88, 90 Ibbitson, Robert 238, 239 Incubi 37–39, 40, 42, 47, 48 Ireland, Samuel (Samuel William Henry Ireland) XVI, 152, 155, 157, 159 Islam 9, 118, 119, 122, 131, 132, 135–138, 140, 142 James, Duke of York, future James II & VII 249, 250 James VI of Scotland, I of England 43, 47, 48 Johnson, Samuel 60 Jonson, Ben 12, 23, 24, 121, 204, 206, 207, 212, 222 Kathman, David 7, 22 Keenan, Siobhan 21, 27 Killigrew, Henry XVII, 12, 86, 237–240, 242, 244–255 The King’s Men 7, 31, 79, 228, 230 Lacy, John 200, 214 Lilburne, John 244, 245 London XVII, 2, 8, 10–12, 21–27, 29, 31–34, 77–80, 83, 86, 88, 90, 105, 121, 122, 151, 152, 154–156, 158–161, 164, 166–169, 171, 178 Lord Chamberlain’s Men XIII, 7, 28, 154 Lyly, John 65 Madness XVII, 11, 187, 189, 224–233 Magic XIV, XVII, 3, 7, 57, 58, 60, 62–72 Malone, Edmond 152, 154–157, 159, 160, 168, 169, 178 Marlowe, Christopher XIII, XVII, 9, 10, 12, 48, 61, 69, 137–142, 145, 146

– Doctor Faustus 38, 64, 71 – The Massacre at Paris 48 – Tamburlaine 9, 10, 137–139, 141, 142, 145, 147 Marston, John 7, 38, 42, 44–48, 51, 52 Mary, Queen of Scots 97 Massinger, Philip XVII, 9, 57, 70, 117, 120, 221, 223 – The Renegado XVII, 9, 117–119, 121–132 – The Roman Actor 57, 73 Merlin 69, 70 Middleton, Thomas XIV, 12, 38, 65, 221, 222, 224 – The Revenger’s Tragedy XIV – The Witch 38 Montaigne, Michel de XVII, 10, 145, 177–185, 187, 188, 191–195 Multilingual 9, 178 Munro, Lucy 70, 200, 203, 211, 213, 226 Nation 99, 121, 145, 244 Nedham, Marchamont 238, 253 Nightmare 37, 42 Norwich 8, 9, 12, 29, 98, 100, 105–114 Ophelia 11, 181, 223–227, 229–232 Out-of-body experience 39, 46, 48 Ovid XIV, 67, 85, 226 Parody 222–225, 227, 229 Pennant, Thomas 159, 160, 166, 167 Pepys, Samuel 81, 92 Petronius 212 Philip II of Spain 114 Philips, Katherine 83 Philosophy 10, 57, 58, 62, 63, 79, 92, 140, 179, 180, 183, 184, 187, 191, 194, 195, 196, 201, 204 Plato 86, 91, 208 Plautus 208, 210 Providence 184–187, 244 Pulter, Hester 83, 84 Quarto 1, 79, 80, 87, 179, 219, 220 Queer theory 11

Index of Persons, Places, and Subjects

Records of Early English Drama (REED) 7, 21, 23, 31 REM sleep 41 Rich, Henry, Earl of Holland 79, 82 Rose, The (theater) XIII, 24, 157 Rowley, William 38, 70, 72, 221 Rupert, Prince, of the Rhine 242, 243 Same-sex desire/attraction 199, 203, 209–215 Sanders, Julie 77, 78, 80, 249 Satan 43, 71 Shakespeare, William XIV, XVII, 1–4, 6, 10–13, 19, 20, 50, 60, 78, 82, 83, 85, 142, 152, 154, 155, 158, 161, 163, 167–169, 171, 177–184, 186, 189–196, 200, 205, 214, 215, 221–227, 229–231, 233 – All’s Well that Ends Well 62, 222 – As You Like It 8 – Hamlet XVII, 11, 45, 46, 177–181, 183–185, 193–195, 225 – Henry V XVI, 10, 122 – Julius Caesar XVI, 50 – King Lear 1, 26, 142, 204 – Macbeth 50, 65 – Merry Wives of Windsor 60 – Much Ado about Nothing 83 – Othello 225, 228 – Pericles XIII, XIV, XV, XVI – Rape of Lucrece 60 – Richard III 38, 45, 151 – Romeo and Juliet 228

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– The Taming of the Shrew 11, 12, 199, 200, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 214, 215 – The Tempest XVI, 38, 135, 178 – Timon of Athens XIV, XV – The Two Noble Kinsmen 11, 222, 229 Shibboleth 127–131 Shirley, James XVII, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 77–84, 86, 87, 89–92 – The Ball 86, 87, 90 – Hyde Park 11, 77, 78, 80, 83, 86, 89, 92 – The Lady of Pleasure 86–89 – The Witty Fair One 83 Sidney, Philip 69 Soundscape 118, 120 Spencer, Gabriel 23–25, 32 Stow, John XV, 154, 155, 161 Supernatural 37–39, 41–44, 46, 47, 50–52 Taylor, Gary 179, 203, 206, 211–213 Temple Bar 80, 86 Tower of London 164, 165 Translation 135, 178–180, 182–184, 188, 193, 194, 209, 238 Vitkus, Daniel 9, 119, 122, 130, 140 Wallis, John 152, 158–161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 169, 171 Wase, Christopher 238, 239 Weekly Intelligencer 243, 244, 253 Witchcraft 41, 43, 44, 47, 48, 63, 65, 70 The Witch of Edmonton 38, 64, 69, 70