Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England 9780226500218

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Persecution, Plague, and Fire

Persecution, Plague, and Fire

Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England

Ellen MacKay

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK HAS BEEN AIDED BY A GRANT FROM THE BEVINGTON FUND. Ellen MacKay is assistant professor of English at Indiana University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2011 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2011. Printed in the United States of America The Afterword was first published as “The Theatre as a Self-Consuming Art” in Theatre Survey, Volume 49, Issue 01, May 2008, pp. 91–107. Copyright © 2008 American Society for Theatre Research. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. 20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11   1  2  3  4  5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50019-5 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-50019-5 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data MacKay, Ellen.   Persecution, plague, and fire : fugitive histories of the stage in early modern England / Ellen MacKay.     p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50019-5 (cloth : alk. paper)   ISBN-10: 0-226-50019-5 (cloth : alk. paper)  1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism.  2. Theater—Moral and ethical aspects—England.  3. Theater—England—History—16th century.  I. Title.   PR646.M33 2011   792.0942'09031—dc22 2010031161 a The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

To my family

Contents

List of Figures  ix Acknowledgments  xi Introduction: The Theater as a Loaded Gun  1 The Hurt That Comes of Fooling  1 Aeschylus’s Ballistic Stage  7

P a r t I : T he R ui ns of R ome 1. The Theater as Persecution  23 Tragedy’s Guilty Creatures  23 England’s Conscience-Catching Theater  31 Rome’s Fatal Charades  37 2. Tyrannical Drama  47 The Dream of Theatrical Justice  47 Hamlet’s Show Trial  53 The King’s Immunity  59 The Widow’s Foregone Confession  61 Gertrude’s Uncaught Conscience  66 Orestes Redux  69 The End of Rome  71

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Contents

P a r t I I : The F all of the Un i fi ed Chur ch 3. The Theater as Infection  81 The Toxic Middle Age  81 “The Theater and the Plague”  85 “The Sure Disease of Uncertaine Causes”  89 The Life of Performance  94 Not Quite Nothing  102 4. Stigmatical Drama  105 Some Symptoms of the Medieval Stage  105 “It is not words that shakes me thus”  113 The Plague in Art  122 “Look there, look there!”  130

PART I I I: THE A PO CAL YP SE TO C OME 5. The Theater as Conflagration  139 The Eschatology of the Tudor Stage  139 The Theater’s Propensity for Burning  142 Raising the “Cry of Sodom”  147 Wielding the Crime of Sodom  150 Sodomy’s False Origins  157 6. Sodomitical Drama  165 The Sought Apocalypse  165 Remembering Lot’s Wife  168 The Stage’s Hymeneal Contract  174 The Impossible History of Theater Fires  179 The Mare Mortuum’s Infinite Stage  186 Afterword: On the Uncertainty of What Comes After  195 Bibliography  201 Index  229

Figures

1. A Roman Amphitheater (1616)  8 2. The Cart of Thespis (1616)  9 3. Figures Dancing around a Fire (1616)  10 4. The Coliseum in Ruins (1551)  45 5. Jael Slaying Sysara (c. 1560)  64 6. The Manner of Dissecting (1666)  101 7. St. Catherine Receiving the Stigmata (1519)  110 8. “Out, Damned Spot!” (1744)  114 9. The Men of Sodom Compassed the House Round (1635)  158

Acknowledgments

One of the great pleasures the publication of this book affords is the opportunity to recognize those who have provided the inspiration, criticism, and support that I needed to write it. My thanks begin with Jean Howard, who has mentored me with such an abundance of wisdom, brilliance, enthusiasm, and alacrity that I could have been forgiven for believing that I was her only graduate student. The astonishing cohort of fellow mentees who tell the same story is only one of the reasons she remains the model of all that I think is finest about academia. Many people contributed to this project in its earliest stages. D. A. Miller enthralled me to the art of scrutinizing spectatorship. Andreas Huyssen, David Levin, and Julie Peters were charismatic proselytes of theater and performance theory; much of what I have come to think about the stage originated in their classes. Julie Crawford, Fran Dolan, and David Kastan kept me rooted in the culture and history of early modern England by showing me, via their own marvelous insights, the period’s myriad attractions. Martin Meisel made the theater a field of wide-ranging Realizations, while Martin Puchner made antitheatricalism a prerequisite of modernity—a notion that lies deep in this book’s DNA. Two reading groups at Columbia provided me with receptive but rigorous environments in which to try out my arguments; deep and abiding are my thanks to fellow early modernists Rhonda Arab, Patricia Cahill, Michelle Dowd, Alan Farmer, Tom Festa, Jessica Forbes, Becky Helfer, Zachary Lesser, Fiona McNeill, Mona Nicaora, Doug Pfeiffer, Ben Robinson, Elliot Trice, Henry Turner, Paul West, Chloe Wheatley, and Adam Zucker, and to fellow theater specialists Julie Bleha, Heidi Coleman, Ehren Fordyce, Lisa

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Acknowledgments

Hollibaugh, Tom Dale Keever, Lisa Silberman-Brenner, Matthew Wilson Smith, and Tamsen Wolff. In Bloomington, I have been blessed to join a department whose intellectual liveliness is rivaled only by its collegiality. I must single out Penelope Anderson, Ed Comentale, Shannon Gayk, and Ivan Krielkamp, whose camaraderie has leavened many a long walk to the photocopier, but I am grateful to every one of my colleagues; it was not until arriving at Indiana University that I really understood the value of a scholarly community, and I am lucky to have the privilege of working in the midst of such a vibrant and generous one. My greatest debt is to the faculty who have read and championed this project, revealing to me better approaches and finer insights by their accounts of the promise they saw in it. The heroic support of chairs Steve Watt and Jonathan Elmer, and the unflagging encouragement of Linda Charnes, Mary Favret, Jennifer Fleissner, Susan Gubar, Patty Ingham, Joan Linton, Deidre Lynch, and Shane Vogel made it possible for me to set aside my qualms and write the theoretically and historically peripatetic book I wanted to write. I can’t thank them enough. Nor are there world enough and time to detail my gratitude to my students, undergraduate and graduate, who have followed me down the rabbit hole of some of my more arcane theatrical preoccupations and come out with remarkable ideas to share. I wish to thank the students in my “Toxic Theatre” seminars at Cornell and at IU for the spirited engagement they brought to some of the texts discussed in this book, as well as the students who took “Preserving Performance” and helped me bring the long history of my fascination with theater history to such a satisfying state of irresolution. I must mention by name Melissa Jones, Scott Maisano, Tracey Metivier, Maura Smyth, and Will Stockton, whose research has been so inspiring to witness. This book was supported by an IU summer faculty fellowship, a grant in aid of research, and a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. While at Cornell, I was able to turn my attention to a second project and give this one much needed time to percolate. But inevitably, the fellows’ seminar on “Performance and Interpretation,” into which Amy Villarejo so generously adopted me, proved vital to this book’s revision. I remain profoundly grateful for the intellectual riches shared in that forum over deli sandwiches and iced tea; to Katherine Biers, Jason Frank, Andy Galloway, Philip Lorenz, Lida Maxwell, Hirokazu Miyakazi, Nick Salvato, Jason Sokol, Sara Warner, and of course Amy, my debts are especially high. Rayna Kalas provided me great fellowship in Ithaca; her hospitality and incisive conversation helped me make the most of my precious time there. The professionalism, expeditiousness, and acuity that the University of



Acknowledgments

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Chicago Press brought to this project made the final stages of its preparation a pleasure. I thank Alan Thomas, who took a quick and strong interest in it, Randy Petilos, who has vigilantly shepherded it through to the end, and Therese Boyd, who copyedited the manuscript with all the discretion and perspicacity a writer could hope for. My readers at the Press provided invaluable suggestions for the book’s improvement; I am delighted that Jody Enders shed her anonymity so that I can thank her directly for her scrupulous comments and for the passion and ingenuity she consistently brings to the theater’s lost evidence. Closer to home, I thank Breon Mitchell and the staff of Indiana University’s Lilly Library for so graciously accommodating my odd and emergent rare book requests, and for waiving all fees for the reproductions printed herein. Parts of chapters 5 and 6 appeared in “The Theatre as a Self-Consuming Art,” Theatre Survey 49:1 (2008): 91–107; I am grateful to the editors and to Cambridge University Press for granting me permission to use this material. Some of the help I have received from friends and colleagues led to breakthroughs. A passing conversation with Mark Wing-Davey gave me the gift of fire. Jonathan Sheehan solved the riddle of the book’s structure. Judith Goldman pushed me to turn small texts into big ideas. And encouragement at key moments came from Frances Dolan, Paul West, Rebecca Wilkin, Michael Witmore, and Julian Yates. Other help has been constant and life-sustaining. Mara De Gennaro has been a tireless friend, a brilliant companion, and a joyous celebrant of every small victory along the way. Tamsen Wolff has been both mentor and fellow traveler, unwavering in her faith in me and this project. And Constance Furey has made Renaissance Studies a friendly and vital intellectual community for me, and Bloomington a welcoming home. Finally, I dedicate this book to my family: my parents, Ian and Carol, who first introduced me to the pleasures and risks of the theater and then cheerfully bore with the years of preoccupation that ensued; my brother Stuart, sister-inlaw Fran, nephew Cameron, and niece Julia, who provided happy respite from the travails of writing my first book; my son Graeme, whose rivalrous relation to my laptop (“bye bye Mommy’s ’puter”) taught me to separate work from play; my new son Alistair, who arrived just in time to nap on my shoulder as I write this; and finally, to my husband, Randy White, who has made my life better with every minute he has spent in it. Inasmuch as this book is about disaster, it might seem maladroit to say that everything I know about theatrical performance I owe to him, but I know he will take it in the very best sense when I affirm that this is true.

And yet the very essence of the theater is absolute transitoriness. [. . .] Theater history deals with costumes that were burnt, with playhouses that have perished, with actors who made their final exits 2,500 years ago, with chandeliers that can be lit no more, and with audiences that have vanished. a. m. nagler, A Source Book in Theatrical History All play-haunters receive much hurt from Stage-playes. william prynne, Histrio-mastix The public comes to the theater to be struck. alain badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics

Introduction

The Theater as a Loaded Gun The Hurt That Comes of Fooling

For theater historians, early modern England is an awkward subject: a golden age fettered to a shadowy past. In vexing accord with Peggy Phelan’s famous axiom that performance “becomes itself through disappearance,” there is little indication of the way the English theater became itself during the period that has been subsequently hailed as its “greatest flourish.” The result is an illustrious drama that happened off the record, absent the narrative that would place dramatic texts in clear relation to their theatrical contexts. So palpable is this absence that it is hard not to take it as evidence withheld; even the remains that furnish E. K. Chambers’s annals of The Elizabethan Stage . Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146; Richard Flecknoe, Love’s kingdom a pastoral trage-comedy . . . with a short treatise of the English stage (London, 1664), sig. G5r.

And yet the very essence of the theater is absolute transitoriness. [. . .] Theater history deals with costumes that were burnt, with playhouses that have perished, with actors who made their final exits 2,500 years ago, with chandeliers that can be lit no more, and with audiences that have vanished. a. m. nagler, A Source Book in Theatrical History All play-haunters receive much hurt from Stage-playes. william prynne, Histrio-mastix The public comes to the theater to be struck. alain badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics

Introduction

The Theater as a Loaded Gun The Hurt That Comes of Fooling

For theater historians, early modern England is an awkward subject: a golden age fettered to a shadowy past. In vexing accord with Peggy Phelan’s famous axiom that performance “becomes itself through disappearance,” there is little indication of the way the English theater became itself during the period that has been subsequently hailed as its “greatest flourish.” The result is an illustrious drama that happened off the record, absent the narrative that would place dramatic texts in clear relation to their theatrical contexts. So palpable is this absence that it is hard not to take it as evidence withheld; even the remains that furnish E. K. Chambers’s annals of The Elizabethan Stage . Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146; Richard Flecknoe, Love’s kingdom a pastoral trage-comedy . . . with a short treatise of the English stage (London, 1664), sig. G5r.



Introduction

bequeath to us an archive that seems hostile to its purpose, compromised as it is by this sort of “accydentall news”: Yow shall understande of some accydentall news heare in this towne, thoughe my self no wyttnesse thereof, yet I may be bold to verifye it for an assured troth. My L. Admyrall his men, having a devyse in their play to tye one of their fellowes to a poste and so to shoote him to deathe, having borrowed their callyvers one of the players handes swerved, his peece being charged with bullett, missed the fellowe he aymed at and killed a chyld, and a woman great with chyld forthwith, and hurt an other man in the head very soore. How they will answere it I do not study unlesse their profession were better, but in chrystyanity I am very sorry for the chaunce. But God his judgmentes are not to be searched nor enquired of at mannes handes. And yet I fynde by this an old proverbe veryfyed ther never comes more hurte than commes of fooling.

This anecdote, traded in a letter between a son—the courtier Philip Gawdy—and his father, is typical of Chambers’s archive for the way it piques our interest but gives history the slip. It is frustrating, first of all, that the report is not first-hand: the author admits he was “no wytnesse” to the accident, leaving us to take his gentleman’s word for its “assured troth.” More suspicious still is the way the tale thrills with homiletic bathos; with its pietà of fatalities and its sententious warning against idle play, the letter seems to have been written to moralize the “news,” not purvey it. At base, though, what discredits Gawdy is his lack of facts: since the production, the actors, and their victims go unnamed, he leaves tantalized scholars to conjecture, but never to ascertain, that he is describing the first production of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Part II. For these sins, Gawdy’s is the kind of “suggestive anecdote” maligned as both the hallmark and the defect of New Historicism: compelling as narrative but unreliable as history, and therefore precisely the kind of “seductive opening” that a critic employs at her peril. Yet it is with Gawdy’s anecdote that I begin this book, by attributing to it, and to the perils that it takes for granted, a historiographic impulse that early modern England is generally thought to have lacked. For although the English . E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 2:135. . As John Jump writes in the introduction to his edition of Tamburlaine the Great Parts I and II, it is always possible that “Gawdy was referring to a performance of some other play, now lost”; “Introduction” to Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great Parts I and II (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), xi. . Michael Neill, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 285; Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 61.



Introduction



professional stage emerged in a culture all too prone to consent to its disappearance, leaving us only those vestiges of production that managed to survive their inconsequence, the ease with which Gawdy yokes the (alleged) shooting of playgoers to a platitude demonstrates that there was, at the ready, a catastrophic philosophy of the theatrical event: “ther never comes more hurte than commes of fooling.” The historical significance of his tale is thus a function of its poor historiography, for by failing to provide a clear record of a performance, Gawdy supplies intriguing testimony of how the theater was thought to happen in early modern England: by careening off the course of its expected event and headlong into disaster. From Gawdy, then, I derive a rejoinder to the disciplinary dictate that has long dogged historians of the early modern English stage. Though there may have been no such thing as theater history before Richard Flecknoe’s very “short treatise of the English Stage” of 1664, it is certainly not the case that there was no such think as theater history in the age of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and their cohort. This consciousness has seemed wanting only because pre-Restoration expressions of how performance happens have nothing to do with the teleological structure in which the theater’s official history has mainly trafficked. Flecknoe’s inaugural treatise is a case in point: Playes (which so flourisht amonst the Greeks and afterwards among the Romans) were almost wholly abolished when their Empire was first converted to Chris­ tianity, and their Theaters, together with their Temples, for the most part, demolished as Reliques of Paganisme . . . from which time to the last Age, they Acted nothing here, but Playes of the holy Scripture, or Saints lives; and that without any certain Theaters of set Companies, till about the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s Reign.

From this succession of abolition and demolition, Flecknoe traces the rise of “our Modern Stage”: “if we hold on but as we begin,” he assures us, England’s theaters, which have “stood at a stand this many years . . . shall soon out-strip . . . those of other Countreys.” Gawdy’s anecdote is a perfect counter to this happy outlook: bathetic and very nearly factless, it could hardly be less conducive to the grand recit Flecknoe is preparing the ground for. Yet its oppugnance to consequence is precisely what makes the early modern English theater archive much more than the nugatory resource it seems to be. For while Flecknoe casts aside the stops and losses of earlier traditions to chart the timeline of the . Flecknoe, Love’s kingdom, sig. G4v. . Ibid., sigs. G8r, G4v.



Introduction

theater’s certain progress, Gawdy chalks up the destruction to which a theater has consigned its public to a long-standing propensity for stoppage and loss. We could say that his sensibility is a function of his anecdotalism; since “the anecdote is the literary form” that punctures “the teleological . . . narration of beginning, middle and end,” perhaps it isn’t Gawdy’s testimony that conveys the theater’s dissolutive ontology so much as the manner of its telling. But I want to suggest instead that the anecdotal form that Gawdy’s news takes, and that remains the chief repository of early modern England’s theatrical ‘facts,’ bears witness to the “absolute transitoriness” that results from performance’s encounters with history. Admittedly, the likelier way of accounting for Gawdy’s anecdote is as the fulfillment of early modern England’s “antitheatrical prejudice.” The kind of thinking that makes its story proverbial is signally characteristic of the tracts, acts, and sermons that attack the playhouse. The preface to John Rainolds’s Th’ Overthrow of Stage-Playes, for instance, flourishes this mentality with gusto: The danger and hurt that commeth by [Plaies] hath been plainly laied open by sundrie frutfull treatises of this our age. Farther it seemeth that the Lord himself by sundry his visible judgementes from Heauen, hath pronounced a sensible vae against them even in the face of the world. Witnesse Paris Garden and other places where divers haue bene grievously hurt, wounded, and maimed; and some by lamentable death and destruction utterly cutt of [f ] and consumed.10

So “sensible” is this “vae” that Rainolds’s publisher professes himself astonished at the precarious situation that we have let the theater get us into: “These and such like warnings and examples going before should (a man would thinke) have bene a fearfull precedent to the succeeding age that came after.”11 We need only “Witnesse Paris Garden”—or rather, the place where it once stood—to behold the lost past on which the future so restlessly rests.12 While there is no mistaking the agenda being flogged here (and later, I will discuss it in some . Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote,” 61. . A. M. Nagler, “Introduction,” in A Source Book in Theatrical History, ed. Nagler (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), ix. . By now common parlance, this phrase is the title of Jonas Barish’s magisterial work The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), which I discuss further in chaps. 1 and 6. 10. John Rainolds, Th’ Overthrow of Stage-Playes (London, 1599), sig. A2r. 11. Richard Schilders, “The Printer to the Reader,” in ibid., sig. A2r. 12. The fall of the Paris Garden (on January 13, 1583) is a disaster I discuss at length in part 3. Much to the Lord Mayor’s consternation (“to our shame and grief ”), the venue was rebuilt later that same year (Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 1:291).



Introduction



detail), central to this book’s argument is that Th’ Overthrow is basically right: the ubiquity of the theater’s disastrousness is no prejudice, but a visible fact and, more unsettlingly, an implacable future. Eschatological expectancy cannot help but hang over the age of a stage whose best-remembered proceeding is the burning down of the Globe, and whose death is anything but natural; as William Prynne writes, lamenting the institution he is more famous for scourging, this “wicked and Tyrannicall Army, they did lately in a most inhumane, cruell, rough and barbarous manner take away the poor Players from their Houses.”13 In light of the Privy Council’s 1642 resolution that “Publicke stage-Playes shall cease,” we are constrained to always remember that the En­ glish stage was indeed “utterly cutt of [f ],” just as Th’ Overthrow predicted.14 This book reads the rough end allotted to early modern England’s “golden age” as the looked-for culmination of an era too tightly bound to the stage’s dissolutive practice. Disasters like the one at the Admiral’s Men signaled the theater’s dangerous relation to the “real” world. This is a lesson brought home by the architectural odds and ends that early modern London is built on. Consider, for example, Guildhall’s amphitheatrical foundations, excavated in 1988.15 As if to prove Saint Salvian’s credo that the “Romane empire [was] brought into desolation, into barrennes, and accursed” because of its fondness for “plaies,” the theatrical ruins of an age done in for its theatrical habits lie like a faultline under the center of the city, a sedimentary record of the hurt that comes of fooling.16 The same can be said about the remains of Catholicism, stripped and defaced because the Church “turned” its “Temples into Theaters.”17 Hence the deep sense of déjà vu (“I fynde by this an old proverbe veryfyed”) that Gawdy’s fatalism evokes, as if to affirm what Marx has not yet written: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”18 The difference, though, is that fooling’s long tradition

13. William Prynne, Mr William Prynne his defense of stage-playes, or a retraction of a former book of his called Histrio-mastix (London, 1649), sig. A2v. 14. G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1941–68), 2:690, quoted in Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage: 1574 to 1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 79. 15. In 1988 archeologists discovered the remains of a Roman amphitheater below Guildhall Yard “in the heart of the City,” as the journalist Norman Hammond wrote in “Design of London’s Amphitheatre Revealed,” Times Online (London), September 17, 2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/ court_and_social/article2480558.ece (accessed March 11, 2009). 16. Anthony Munday, A second and third blast of retrait (London, 1580), sigs. Ciir, Bviiiv. 17. William Prynne, Histrio-mastix (London, 1633), sig. Q3v. 18. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 595.



Introduction

actually brains its heirs. The city itself bears witness to a theater that keeps befalling us or, as Gawdy specifies, keeps hitting us “very soore . . . in the head.” What I call fugitive histories represent early modern England’s handling of this propensity; I take as my subject those evocations of the theatrical past that “flash[] up at a moment of danger,” to borrow Benjamin’s phrase, and by putting the public at risk, put to question the steady course of our collective continuance.19 Their elusive relation to history’s dominant narrative is easily described: if Renaissance humanism invests us in a view of time that presses ever onward from antiquity to the Middle Ages to the incipient modernity of Shakespeare’s moment, then the theater pushes back against that forward march, leaving in the wake of its disappearing occurrence evidentiary gaps, ruined landscapes, and unreliable anecdotes. But more particularly, my title takes its cue from the Hegelian precept that “only a state cognizant of laws” is given to see “the necessity of [composing] an enduring record.” Hegel’s point is that “no objective history” can arise under other conditions; my emendation is that a state cognizant of performance’s violation of its most basic laws produces history that in no way looks reliable or objective.20 My aim is to prove that early modern England’s transient and patchy theatrical record conveys an acute understanding of performance’s perishing operation. To Peter Holland’s important claim that “early modern drama and theater refused to acknowledge their origins, refused to construct a sense of their own history, denied their continuity from an antecedent past,” I add that this prohibition of genealogy and continuity precisely recapitulates the theater’s ever-disappearing event.21 As I read them, then, the stage’s fugitive histories are not the symptom of a culture unfit to meet “the conditions indispensable to a history”; instead they reflect a broad cultural recognition of performance’s fundamental conflict with the practice of historicization.22 The many ways in which early modern England’s theater archive has seemed lacking—its anecdotalism, its accidentalism, its feckless and troué miscellany—evince performance’s peculiar exemption from the upward and onward structure that Flecknoe inaugurates. This book is therefore an attempt to document the resistance of the early modern stage to the documentation of its progress; I argue that anecdotes, tracts, and 19. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255. 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: George Bell and Sons, 1902), 64, 65 21. Peter Holland, “A History of Histories: From Flecknoe to Nicoll,” in Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, ed. W. B. Worthen with Peter Holland (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 11. 22. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 114.



Introduction



plays evince the broken stages and superseded ages that theater history’s first “short treatise” conspicuously does not account for. In pursuit of this mission, I chart a surprisingly orthodox course across the stage’s longue durée: from “Persecution,” which treats Rome’s amphitheatrical atrocities, to “Plague,” which treats the polluted regard of the medieval church for spectacle, to “Fire,” which treats the theater of the early modern “now” as a futureless moment, awaiting its apocalypse. In each case, my subject is the forestalled teleology— what might be called a road to modernity not yet takable—that comes across in the way that playwrights, playgoers and their critics regard present and past traditions of theatrical performance to be fundamentally, and even age-endingly, unsustainable. Aeschylus’s Ballistic Stage

It might be helpful at this point to illustrate each part’s relation to the book’s whole. Rendered in pictorial shorthand, the structure of my project proceeds from “Theatrum” (fig. 1) to “Plaustrum” (fig. 2) to “Visorium” (fig. 3). The scenes are from William Hole’s frontispiece to Ben Jonson’s folio, where they adorn the neoclassical façade that ensconces “The Workes” with representations of the Roman amphitheater, the cart of Thespis, and a choric dance. But I offer them here as pictures that betray more than the deep provenance Jonson wishes to claim for himself, since the cart with its sacrificial goat (the tragedian’s prize) looks so much like a medieval pageant wagon, and the “chorus that dances,” as Stephen Orgel points out, is noticeably “Jacobean.” Jonson thus brings out a second reason that the history of the theater is such a dodgy subject in early modern England: the bad habits of one age are well-nigh indistinguishable from the bad habits of the next. If, as Orgel says, Jonson’s title page is “the most reaching conception of theater the English Renaissance produced” for presenting “nothing so transient as a scene from a play,” but rather the “history” of the drama, its inadvertent revelation is the difficulty of confining theatrical scapegoating and fireplay to the antique regions in which they belong.23 The looming Coliseum, the spectator-scapegoat, and the dooming bonfire are key figures of the three parts that ensue: each represents a form of catastro­ phe into which early modern England organizes the theater’s habit of disappearing itself. That each of these figures is, in its way, historically emblematic is the reason this book proceeds the way it does, for my structuring claim is that before Flecknoe’s treatise, English theater history amounts to a long lesson 23. Stephen Orgel, “Shakespeare Imagines a Theater,” Poetics Today 5, no. 3 (1984): 561, 552–53.



Introduction

Figure 1.  A Roman Amphitheater, from the title page of Ben Jonson’s Workes (1616). Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

in sic transit Gloria mundi. The dramatic forms associated with Roman Antiquity, the High Middle Ages and the doomed present each offer separate but related illustrations of the fact that every epoch of the stage—tyrannical, stigmatical, and Sodomitical—will bring about the fall of its age. In what remains of this introduction, I want to offer an origin for this principle by returning to Gawdy’s gunshot, which I read as a fundamental gestus of the early modern English stage: an “explosive and elusive synthesis of alienation [and] historicization,” in Elin Diamond’s singularly apposite gloss.24 The roots of performance’s fugitive relation to history, and vice versa, begin with the ballistic stage. Beyond Gawdy’s anecdotal usage, the gunshot recurs in early modern debates about the theater as if to prove what Gawdy proverbializes: that errant bullets are not so “accydentall” as we might suppose. By way of a contorted conceit, Stephen Gosson makes this case in his Schoole of Abuse: “but these [plays] by the privy entries of the eare, slip downe into the hart, and with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason and vertue should rule the roste.”25 In Gosson’s account, performance leaves the spectator surreptitiously assassinated: condemned at a shot for the sin of attendance. A colleague known only 24. Elin Diamond, “Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism,” in Women in American Theatre, ed. Helen Kritch Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 351. 25. Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, 2nd ed. (London, 1587), sig. C3r.



Introduction



Figure 2.  The Cart of Thespis, from Ben Jonson’s Workes (1616). Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

as I.H. makes much the same point in This World’s Folly Or a Warning-Peece discharged upon the Wickednesse Thereof, a sermon that promotes its preaching in the form of the warning shot that portends the stage’s deadly bullet. Yet playwrights, too, play up the theater’s ballistic impact. Thomas Heywood puts the idea to vindicating use in the Apology for Actors (1611) when he recalls “an accident happened to a company” of Cornish actors some twelve years since: certaine Spaniards were landed the same night unsuspected, and undiscouered, with intent to take in the towne, spoyle and burne it, when suddenly, even upon their entrance, the players (ignorant as the townes-men of any such attempt) presenting a battle on the stage with their drum and trumpets strooke up a lowd alarme: which the enemy hearing, and fearing they were discovered, amazedly retired, made some few idle shot in a bravado, and so in a hurly-burly fled disorderly to their boats. At the report of this tumult, the townes-men were immediatly armed, and pursued them to the sea, praysing God for their happy deliverance from so great a danger.26 26. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1611), sig. G2r.

10

Introduction

Figure 3.  Figures dancing around a fire in a classical amphitheater, from Ben Jonson’s Workes (1616). Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

For Heywood, the theater’s “gunshotte of affection” beats back the Spanish foe with no less efficacy than a volley of actual bullets: in a neat inversion of the antitheatrical censure, he renders the stage an “instrument” of national defense, a warning-piece that quashes a stealth attack. The result is a surprising consensus: for the theater’s defenders no less than for its antagonists, and even for a seemingly disinterested reporter like Gawdy, the performances that pass through the playhouse impact their beholders like gunfire. As an idiom of performance, the theatrical gunshot thus cuts across the antipathy of its sources to supply us with evidence of the conceptual economy in which early modern English theater is hashed out. Like persecution, plague, and fire, it represents another form of fatal impact from which men like Gawdy and Gosson work backward to work out an epistemology of performance. But I place the gunshot at the start of my study, in prologic relation to those modes of theatrical wounding that correspond to “The Ruins of Rome,” “the Fall of the Unified Church,” and “The Apocalypse to Come,” because it harks back to a bit of theater lore that concerns the Western theater’s founding moment. In Pantagruel, Rabelais offers a jaunty version of it:



Introduction

11

It had been foretold him by the Sooth-sayers, that [Aeschylus] would dye on a certain Day, by the ruin of something that should fall on him; that fatal day being come in its Turn, he remov’d himself out of Town, far from all Houses, Trees, or any other things that can fall, and indanger by their ruin; and stay’d in a large field, trusting himself to the open Sky, there very secure as he thought, unless indeed the Sky should happen to fall, which he held to be impossible. [. . .] Notwithstanding all this, poor Aeschylus was kill’d by the fall of the shell of a Tortoise, which falling from betwixt the Claws of an Eagle high in the Air, just on his head, dash’d out his brains.27

Though it is not until the Restoration that the impulse arises to character­ ize Aeschylus as “the Father of Tragedy,” well in advance of a theater thus ped­ igreed is a theater well acquainted its tendency to hurt.28 Read in light of Gawdy’s proverb, the playwright’s projectile death is a familiar sort of accident, much in the vein of the “soundrie slaughters and mayheminges of the Quenes Subjectes” caused by “engynes, weapons, and powder used in playes,” as a 1574 Act of the Common Council asserts.29 Indeed, in early modern England’s seemingly unhistoricizing theatrical moment, in which anecdotes substitute for the Western stage’s longue durée, it marks the start of performance’s habit of disappearing the grounds of its disappearing act, for as Timothy Kendall’s 1577 epigram on “Three Grecians, writers of Tragedies” demonstrates, this habit emerges in the cradle of Western drama, during Athens’s classical past: Three Grecian Poets tragicall

did leave their lives and dye Most straungely, as the stories of the Grecians testifie. The first ycleped Sophocles, (as writers sundrie saie) Was chokt with kurnell of a grape, That in his throate did staie. Euripides the seconde (that From women did refrained)

27. Francois Rabelais, Pantagruel’s voyage to the oracle of the bottle being the fourth an2d fifth books of the works of Francis Rabelais, trans. M. Motteux (London, 1694), sigs. E9v, E10r. 28. Nahum Tate, A Duke and No Duke . . . to which is now added, a preface concerning farce: with an account of the personae and larvae, &c. of the ancient theatre (London, 1693), sig. bv. 29. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:274.

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Introduction

By cursed hap with cruell curres, Was all to torne and slaine. Now Aeschilus the thirde and laste, An Egle from an hye Let fall a shell uppon his pate Which kilde hym by and by.30

Kendall’s three examples corroborate Gawdy’s warning that those who traffic in tragedy had better look out. The difficulty, however, is that looking out is a fruitless means of ducking the fate that Aeschylus suffered. As Montaigne extrapolates from the same unfortunate instance, “Shell thee with Steel or Brass, advis’d by dread/Death from the Cask will pull thy cautious Head,” as if to remind us that the story of the ignoble passing of drama’s paterfamilias is the chronicle of a death not just foretold, but implacable.31 Shield ourselves as we may, the theater demands its “hurt” “head.” I do not make the claim that when Gawdy, Gosson, Heywood, and I.H. render the theater a bombshell they mean to call up the turtle that is said to have dropped onto the “pate” of Aeschylus. Nor can I state that they are not calling it up, since their testimony is incompatible with standard delineations of historical influence. Because performance’s self-destructiveness comes across in the paucity and poverty of theatrical evidence, it is not the sort of tendency whose cultural traction can be readily graphed or mapped.32 But this is not to say that its venerable origins remain unrecognized. Consider another anecdote in a similar vein: Amynias the brother of Aeschylus the tragedian, who when the people would have stoned his brother for some impiety upon the stage, held up his elbow and arme whithout a hand, lost in the fight at Salamis; by which spectacle the Iudges calling to minde the merits of Amynias, dismissed the Poet.33

30. Timothy Kendall, Flowers of epigrammes, out of sundrie the moste singular authours selected (London, 1577), sigs. Lviv–Lviir. Peter Hay, in his 1987 miscellany of Theatrical Anecdotes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), says almost exactly the same thing: “The Father of Tragedy happened to be going for a walk, and [an] eagle mistook his bald head for a rock. Euripides is reported to have been torn apart by mad dogs in his Macedonian exile, soon after he wrote the Bacchant Women, in which a group of women tear apart their king” (170). 31. Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michael, seigneur de Montaigne in three books, trans. Charles Cotton (London, 1700), sig. H3r. 32. I take these terms from Franco Moretti’s modes of distant reading; see Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). 33. Francis Rous, Three Books of the Attick antiquities (Oxford, 1637), sig. Qr. The source of this story is Aelianus’s Varia Historia (lib 5, cap 19), a work full of moralized lore about the ancient philosophers and poets.



Introduction

13

Poised to suffer death by stoning for an unpopular play, Aeschylus is rescued by the wounds of his war-veteran brother—a story cited in the first decades of the seventeenth century to illustrate (among other things) fraternal love, the Greek justice system, and the oratorical effectiveness of a well-wielded stump.34 When read in light of the first Aeschylean anecdote, however, it purveys the fateful sense that a hurled rock (or its close analogue) always awaits the poet: for Aeschylus, there can be no escaping his art’s missilery payback. I conclude that though theatrical archives are like “a bombsite,” as Margaret Kidnie has written, in which trace remains point back to performance’s irrecuperable “detonation,” those remains nevertheless yield up the recognition that it was Aeschylus who put the bang in the theatrical event.35 Still, Aeschylus’s well-known and inexorable fate would claim no more than anecdotal relevance here, were it not for the questions raised by the theater’s dangerous projectility. Intentionally or not, what brings this classical past fleet­ ingly into view is Gawdy’s central dilemma: how does the theater break from its constitutive and flagrant insincerity and wreak real havoc?36 Or to take up the dramatic circumstance that his news may or may not be describing, how is an audience to ascertain that a gun fired at the walls of “Babylon” to “kill” the enchained “Governor” might take down “a chyld, and a woman great with child” in Bankside? Kendall’s poem suggests that hurt has always been the price of fooling; when Euripides is ripped to pieces like Pentheus in The Bacchae, we are given a pretty clear picture of playwrights reaping what they dramatically sow.37 Yet by classical definition, the tragedies that Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus write cannot not partake of this sort of boundarycrossing. Since the most basic of Aristotelian rules tells us that a play is the imitation of an action, then what happens on stage is a kind of act that doesn’t 34. Edward Reynolds, An Explanation of the Hundred and Tenth Psalme (London, 1632), sig. B5v; Rous, Three Books of the Attick antiquities, sig. Qr; J.B, Chirologia, or the naturall language of the hand (London, 1644), sig. B7r. 35. Margaret Jane Kidnie, “Where Is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 108. Kidnie credits this simile to one of her students. 36. This question lies at the heart of Jody Enders’s important studies, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Murder by Accident: Medieval Theater, Modern Media, Critical Intentions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) that treat fatal performance as a vital domain for thinking through premodern epistemologies and historiographies of the stage. Enders’s work weaves through my own set of inquiries, and in the chapters that follow, I point out some significant overlaps. 37. This fate becomes a signature trope of theatrical lore. In later compilations of theatrical accidents, we read that “Molière is supposed to have died while performing the title role in The Imaginary Invalid’ and John August Stone, “threw himself, in a fit of insanity, into the Schuylkill river” (Peter Hay, Theatrical Anecdotes [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 171).

14

Introduction

really take place, or that doesn’t take place in any way that counts.38 Philip Sidney presumes upon the obviousness of this lesson when he writes in tragedy’s defense, “What child is there, that coming to a play and seeing ‘Thebes’ written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?”39 His aim is to debunk the view that tragedy is a liar’s art by arguing that any verisimilitude is the result of spectatorial goodwill and not theatrical deceit. But if performance is a lie that fools no one, not even a “child,” the accident that befalls the Admiral’s Men demonstrates that incredulity is a poor safeguard against theatrical assault. In what amounts to a fatal blow against Sidney’s exculpatory reasoning, the man, woman, and “child” who watch without flinching as a fictional character pretends to open fire on his fictional adversary are casualties of their unsuspended disbelief. The result is a rebuttal of Aristotle’s circumscribed account of the theatrical event. The theater’s rich trove of “Accydentall news” shows instead that when it comes to the innocuity of signifying “Thebes,” Sidney clings to an obsolete poetics, blind to those conditions under which “imitation and action come at us,” as Bert States writes, quoting John Webster, “like two chained bullets.”40 The precept circulates as a commonplace in the more heuristic register from which Gawdy draws: in the playhouse, the distinction between fact and fiction, or what is all too much the same thing, between “hurte” and “fooling,” is a false one. We need not take Gawdy’s word for it. This precept is advertised by a number of playwrights who promise as their chief goal the same confusion of action and imitation that the disaster at the Admiral’s Men exemplifies. From the chorus of the 1608 satire Ram Alley: Or Merrie Tricks, we are told that the purpose of playing is to show Things never done, with that true life, That thoughts and wits should stand at strife, Whether the things now shown be true,

38. Though England at the time of Tamburlaine shows nothing like France’s later avidity for the Poetics, mimesis is nevertheless the most frequent defense offered to those who critique the stage on the grounds of its pernicious effects. For a discussion of the fate of the Poetics in Renaissance England, see Stephen Orgel, “The Play of Conscience,” in Performativity and Performance, ed. Eve Sedgwick and Andrew Parker (New York: Routledge, 1995), 133–51. I discuss to this essay in more detail in chap. 4. 39. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or the Defense of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. and expanded by R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 103. 40. Bert States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 5.



Introduction

15

Or whether we ourselves now do The things we but present. (8–13)41

Though a city comedy like Ram Alley might seem to make light of this mandate, less “merrie” plays turn it into a lethal game of chance. In A Warning for Fair Women, for instance, Tragedy lays out the demands of her art in the same terms: I must have passions that must move the soule Make the hearte heavie and throb within the bosome, Extorting teares out of the strictest eyes To racke a thought and straine it to his forme Until I rap the senses from their course, That is my office. (44–49)42

Here, too, it is performance’s prerogative to “straine” and “racke” “thought” and “sense” to their breaking points, but in the midst of tragedy’s homicidal antics the indecision that puts the nature of things in question can also hold it at gunpoint. Denied the essential knowledge of which things are but presented and which are truly done, playgoers cannot tell whether they have been called to act as witnesses or victims of tragedy. That Prologues call this “strife” the “office” of playgoing, and not its accident, suggests that the audiences of early modern English theater were willingly beguiled by tragedy’s invisible bullets.43 To be sure, much rests on anecdote, and on anecdote’s mythopoetic deployment, in such a formulation. But less tenuously, it rests on what plays have to say about themselves, since it is insistently the case that the troubling contingency Joel Fineman has called the anecdote’s defining trait, and that and that Michael Neill has found responsible for New Historicism’s “dazzling” but questionable critical practice, is the mode in which early modern tragedy stages its own reception.44 According to a convention made famous by Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, avenging characters like to carry out their plots unchecked by masking slaughter as stagecraft, rendering the hard fact of 41. David (Lording) Barry, Ram-Alley: or merrie-trickes (London, 1611), sig. A2r, quoted in B. L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 42. A Warning for Fair Women, edited by Charles Dale Cannon (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). 43. I am alluding to the chapter of the same title in Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 21–65. 44. Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote,” 49–76; Neill, Putting History to the Question, 286, 287.

16

Introduction

homicide apparent only belatedly, when actors fail to get up to register their applause. As Hieronimo makes clear, speaking amid the carnage wrought by his “Tragedy of Soliman and Perseda,” the susceptibility of the stage to epistemologically troubling contingency is central to the success of his tragedy’s design: Haply you think, but bootless are your thoughts, That this is fabulously counterfeit, And that we do as all tragedians do: To die today, for fashioning our scene, The death of Ajax, or some Roman peer, And in a minute starting up again, Revive to please to-morrow’s audience. No, princes. (4.4.76–83)45

This peripeteia is among the most famous in the Tudor-Stuart canon: after his banal account of how the theater works—we “die today,” only to “start[] up again” and die “to-morrow”—Hieronimo confutes it with three corpses killed in jest. But what makes the passage so exemplary is that, read in light of Aeschylus’s head injury, Hieronimo has merely done “as all tragedians do.” As Jody Enders has shown, and as Kyd may well have known, Lucian’s “Saltatio” details an occasion in which an actor playing Ajax was so carried away by his character’s madness that “with a vigorous blow he cracked the crown of Odysseus.”46 Had it not been for the lucky fact of an interposing hat, Lucian tells us, the stroke would have been fatal. Crucially, then, the same thing that makes Hieronimo’s “Tragedy of Soliman and Perseda” so unexampled is what yokes it to classical tradition; beneath the seeming contrast of “our scene” with “the death of Ajax” there lies the theater’s habit of “drop[ping] th[e] deed of murder down” upon our un-shielded heads (2.5.[49]*).47 Similarly evocative is the more modest line Hieronimo speaks at his show’s start: “Hang up the title/Our scene is Rhodes” (17–18). As Sidney tells us, no one, seeing Rhodes written in great letters on an old scene, would believe that it is Rhodes, and it is precisely this belief in the hokiness of theatrical deceit 45. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J. R. Mulryne (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 46. Lucian of Samosata, “Saltatio,” ed. A. M. Harmon, in Works, vol. 5 (Loeb Classical Library, 1936; rpt., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 83, quoted in Enders, Death by Drama, 43. This tale is the overture to Enders’s third chapter, “Of Madness and Method Acting,” 43–50. 47. The line comes from the second of the four 1602 additions to the play, from the discovery scene in the second act.



Introduction

17

that Hieronimo exploits. The pleasure of tragedy, as Kyd renders it, is thus the pleasure of its stealth attack upon its status as mere imitation; like “the open Sky” that Aeschylus mistakenly “trust[s] himself to,”48 the catastrophe of The Spanish Tragedy strikes out against its misconceived harmlessness with a vengeance. What is fascinating about the enduring vogue for Kyd’s type of tragic ending is how insistently its conventions go on to overturn Aristotle’s philosophy. The fatal plays that clinch such famous tragedies as Shakespeare’s Titus Andro­ ni­cus (1592), Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614), Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633), Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626), and Middleton’s Women Beware Women (1623), offer proof in abundance that there “never comes more hurte than commes of fooling.”49 Middleton is worth singling out for the sheer sweep of his theatrical desolation: the nuptial masque of his play’s fifth act is the occasion for six murders, including the assassination of the reigning Duke, in whose honor the play is performed, as well as the suicide of Bianca, his debauched bride. In brutal contrast to the Aristotelian view that tragedy is “serious lernyng” that shores up the body politic, Middleton, like Kyd before him, has the stage bring down the state.50 We could call the finale of Women Beware Women a vindication of Gosson; what finer demonstration could we seek that any frequenter of the playhouse “reportes [there] to be assaulted”?51 But more interesting is how utterly the cast fails to notice its own offing; though each character ventures upon the principle that “great mischiefs/Mask in expected pleasures” (5.2.173–74), di­ saster befalls the company like the turtle that brains Aeschylus: clear out of the blue. So much is this unforeseen projectility the mode of Middleton’s catastrophe, in fact, that each death takes the form a thing violently hurled. Isabella has “flaming gold” “throw[n]” upon her, and “falls down upon’t” (S.D. 117, 120); Guardiano “falls through the trap door” (129) and “drop[s] away” (130); soon after, in a flurry of broken feathers, Livia “[is] down too” (135). Finally, the show comes to an awkward halt when Hippolito is struck down by the arrows launched by some high-placed Cupids. In the face of all this downfalling, Bianca is vexed by her brother-in-law’s aplomb—“When falls he 48. Rabelais, Pantagruel’s voyage, sig. E10r. 49. This tally is doubtless incomplete. The proceedings of the conference The Show Within: Dramatic and Other Inset Spectacles in English Renaissance Drama (1550–1642) includes an appendix listing 280 plays with some manner of inset performance (including dumbshows, ceremonious processions, and so on), 461a–466c. 50. Thomas Elyot, The Boke named the Governor (London, 1537), sig. Er. 51. Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, sig. C2v.

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Introduction

to the earth?” (177), which leads to an evocative anagnoresis—“My deadly hand is fallen upon my lord” (187), and swan song—“Pride, greatness, honours, beauty, youth, ambition,/You must all down together” (219–20). Once she drinks the dregs of the poison in her bridegroom’s cup, Bianca is the last of Middleton’s characters to be dropped like a stone by a theater that cannot keep from dropping like a stone upon us, as if from “the open Sky.” Rabelais uses this phrase to teach us that Aeschylus’s fate is rationality’s failure: when the poet “remov[es] himself out of Town, far from all Houses, Trees, or any other things that can fall” and “trust[s] himself to the open Sky,” he makes the understandable calculation that he is “very secure,” “unless indeed the Sky should happen to fall, which he held to be impossible.”52 That Aeschylus dies anyway is a reminder that drama confounds our most rooted philosophies; the more we insist upon a clean division between imitation and action, the more accidents crack open the lack of difference between these two seemingly contradistinct spheres. It is on this score that Women Beware Women’s masque-within-a-play seems so convincingly Aeschylean: since everyone is felled by a rampant inability to perceive the difference between false acts and real harm, Middleton’s stage is not just a mechanism for falling, it is a mechanism for “impossible” falling, or falling despite our evident “secur[ity],” which is to say, for upending the truths we hold to be self-evident. The play’s most resonant cry, “My great lords, we are all confounded,” nicely captures the simultaneity of confusion and catastrophe in which I find the early modern English theater’s hurt always trades. My turn from Kyd to Middleton is thus to argue that although a founding theater historian like A. M. Nagler trains us to sift out “dilettantism and anec­ dotalism” from the archive, anecdotes like Gawdy’s remember the stage as a site that always troubles our desire to know what really happened.53 Hence, those witnesses to the London stage who render performance a loaded gun bequeath us two rather contradictory accounts of it: while actuality spills out from the theatrical event with nothing like fair warning, it nevertheless crosses the bounds of Sidney’s Theban door or Marlowe’s Babylonian wall with sufficient consistency to prove that what happens in an “excellent,” “famous,” or “tragicall history” does not stay within that history.54 Performance, by its prerequisitive nature, is always “remember[ing],” “restor[ing],” and “reinscrib[ing]” its past, 52. Rabelais, Pantagruel’s voyage, sig. E10r. 53. Nagler, “Introduction,” xxi, xx. 54. These terms are taken from the quarto titles of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1600), Troilus and Cressida (1609), and Hamlet (1604).



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19

which is why it accosts English audiences with large and small-scale disappearances, from Rome’s fall to Aeschylus’s felling.55 Its revivalist mode turns the theater’s “absolute transitoriness” into an ongoing threat, so that every time Tamburlaine loads his gun, spectators submit themselves to a performance whose fulfillment of its dissolutive ontology may cast them into that state of discontinuity that keeps the theater’s history from being written. The epistemological freefall that results is not confined to fleeting allusions to Aeschylus’s turtle. Among its more celebrated iterations is Prospero’s (premature) farewell, in which life imitates its theatrical imitation by following it headlong into the abyss: Our revels now are ended. These our actors As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; And—like the baseless fabric of this vision— The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. (4.1.148–56)56

The chapters that follow take racked pageants as the site of a counter-Poetics. Against the Aristotelian precept from which Flecknoe spins his history—“The Stage [being] a harmless and innocent Recreation”—early modern England’s records of ended revels theorize a stage that stops history in its tracks.57 Because this book offers a revaluation of a stage that hurts, readers who share my high regard for theater and performance may worry that I grant to the stage’s most benighted antagonists total approbation of their first principle. As I see it, though, harmlessness is the more pernicious theatrical philosophy. If exonerating tragedy means dismissing it as make-believe, as Sidney briefly suggests, then the theater’s defense is more damaging to our understanding of performance than the prosecution. By chronicling the disappearances that come of fooling, early modern England espouses the belief that what happens on 55. Elin Diamond, Writing Performances (New York: Routledge, 1995), 5. Marvin Carlson cites the larger passage from which these terms are drawn in the introduction to The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 2–3. 56. Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 1999). 57. Flecknoe, Love’s kingdom, sig. G7v.

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Introduction

stage counts; if sometimes for the worse, then surely also for the better, the theater intervenes in history, exposing what Linda Charnes has called the “inherent limitations of the cognitive framework that continues to organize our ideological relationship to time.”58 This book aims to show that tales of spectacles and spectators “utterly cutt of [f ],” are crucial testimony of the theater’s epoch-shaking, age-defying influence.

58. Linda Charnes, “Anticipating Nostalgia: Finding Temporal Logic in a Textual Anomaly,” Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation 4, no. 3 (2009): 73.

A Play’s a briefe Epitome of time, Where man may see his vertue or his crime Layd open, either to their vices shame, Or to their virtues memorable fame. A Play’s a true transparent Christall mirror To shew good minds their mirth, the bad their terror. john taylor, “to my approved good friend M. Thomas Heywood” The games & shewes sett foorth at Rome stained the maners of all the world. john rainolds, Th’ Overthrow of Stage-Playes

1 The Theater as Persecution Tragedy’s Guilty Creatures

Even before Jonas Barish yoked the terms together, it has been the custom in criticism to regard antitheatricalism as a prejudice. The view of the stage as a fundamentally benign institution, falsely accused and wrongly condemned, is stuck fast in the thinking of a discipline that takes the Poetics as a foundational text. And yet, as to the question of how we know the theater is good, criticism can offer little grounds for an answer. Hard evidence of the theater’s salubrity is hard evidence to gather so long as we know that a play is only pretense, its relation to the real world figurative and fleeting. If, as Maria von Trapp tells us (paraphrasing Lucretius), “nothing comes of nothing; nothing ever could,” it follows that the theater, the place where nothing

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is consigned to happen, must be defined by its incapacity to do something good. To grant tragedy a way out of this dilemma, Aristotle champions the virtue of the theater’s inconsequence; his ingenuity is to see in a play’s eventlessness safe conduit for emotions that might, if left unchecked, lead to acts unfriendly to the state. The theater as he imagines it therefore demonstrates its worth not by what it does but by what it keeps from happening, rendering its influence an unchartable succession of crises vicariously purged and averted. One of the more remarkable features of this philosophy is its persistence; even Brecht, who is the keenest critic of catharsis, marvels at its continuing ability to keep history on the straight and narrow path of an unyielding status quo. Calling it an “illusion that excites [the spectator] for two hours and then leaves him more tired than ever, filled only with vague memories and vaguer hopes,” Brecht regards Aristotelian drama as the guarantor of time’s unruffled passage, an apparatus deployed by the state to strongarm the past and present into quiet and seamless alignment. Against the long tradition of a theater that promises nothing as its best effect, the theater of early modern England subscribes its audience to a very different bargain. My introduction has shown that its accidental archive preserves performances whose disappearance leaves a mark. This first chapter takes up the English playhouse’s signature injury; its gift for “turn[ing]” the “guttes” of the spectator “outward” and “blaz[ing] with colours to the peoples eye” his, or more likely “her secret conveighaunce.” Odd as it sounds, this is a talent the theater is proud of; the quotation comes from Stephen Gosson’s paraphrase of a lost scene in Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (1581), in which the allegorical character of Conscience recommends playgoing as a preventative to sin’s concealment. To Gosson’s great vexation, this gut-spilling ends up furnishing the emerging stage with its most vindicating rationale. In what follows, my aim is to account for the tenacity of this idea, by bringing out what . “Something Good,” music and lyrics by Richard Rogers, The Sound of Music, Robert Wise (dir.), 1965. This Lucretian phrase is also prominently featured in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (ed. David Bevington [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997], 1.2.105), and Shakespeare’s King Lear (ed. R. A. Foakes, The Arden Shakespeare [London: Thomson Learning, 2001], 1.1.90). . This is Walter Benjamin’s famous quotation of “an epistolary poem which Brecht addressed to the workers’ theatre in New York” on the occasion of a production of The Mother (20–21) in “What Is the Epic Theater” (second version) in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 2003), 21. . Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), sig. D2r. . It is ironic that Gosson’s deploration turns out to be the only record we have of what “Conscience” said. Irene Mann concludes that for reasons unknown, the scene treating the morality of the theater was excluded from the play’s printed version (“A Lost Version of the Three Ladies of London,” PMLA 59, no. 2 [1944]: 586–89).



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tends to get forgotten in conscience’s protheatrical use: the catastrophic alignment with Rome’s debauched past. Since the closest thing to a theatrical manifesto in early modern England is Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors (c. 1608), it seems appropriate to begin where it starts: the dream sequence in which Heywood renders antitheatricalism a nightmare from which he cannot awaken. At “about that time of night when darkness had already overspread the world,” the playwright reports being summoned like a knight-errant to the defense of the tragic muse Melpomene, who appeared to him with “her heyre rudely disheveled, her chaplet withered, her whole complexion quite faded and altered; and . . . her habit . . . with the envenomed juice of some prophane spilt inke in every place stained: nay more, her busken of a wonted Jewels and ornaments, utterly despoiled.” It is no wonder that scholarly posterity regards antitheatricalism as a prejudice when the Apology paints the stage as the virgin-victim to the “seditious Sect­ ists” of the age. But as to the question of how he knows the theater is good, and thus well suited to the “despoiled” “busken” of a victim’s part, Heywood turns with pride to its unsafety record. In the Apology, proof of the stage’s service to the state is the hurt—or to be more exact, the capital punishment—that comes of fooling. It is a canny move on Heywood’s part to have Melpomene first make this service known. No sooner has she appeared to him than she reminds the playwright of the virtues of her art: “Have not I whipt Vice with a scourge of steele,/Unmaskt sterne Murther; sham’d lascivious lust,/Pluct off the visar from grimme treasons face,/And made the Sunne point at their ugly sinnes?” By its own contention, the theater—or at least its most serious and metonymic genre—advertises itself as a force of reckoning: at once infallible inquisitor and forensic genius. Inasmuch as both are purgatorial in design, the manner of this business is not unlike the work of catharsis, but whereas Aristotle’s tragedy clears the air of any sins in the making, Heywood’s exposes the sinners in its midst: by the mysterious workings of the theater’s vigilante justice, occulted and unsolved crimes are brought to a righteous close. Thus to Melpomene, as to Hieronimo, the value of the theater is the carnage of just deserts that it doles out. Implicit, though perhaps not very, in this idea of the stage is the pleasure taken in bringing chickens home to roost. While our stock account of the

. Though An Apology was published in 1611, scholars have argued from internal evidence that Heywood completed it around 1608. See Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:250. . An Apology for Actors (London, 1611), B2v, Br. . Ibid., B2r. . Hence the subtitle Heywood provides for the third treatise of his Apology for Actors.

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spectatorial experience is all about suspension and sublimation, with audiences suffering the emotional travail of their witnessing in the full and reassuring certainty of its inconsequence, the spirit of Tragedy from which Heywood takes dictation delivers the satisfaction of endings borne out in the here and now. The result is a very different understanding of the theater’s relation to history: in contrast to Brecht’s opiate of the masses, the theater enacts a justice denied by the state, supplying the catastrophes demanded by crimes that have gone unpunished. At its most self-righteous, then, Tragedy defines itself to an early modern English audience as an instrument of eventuation, a means of crashing the curtain down on lamentable histories that have somehow escaped the de casibus routine. The wunderkammer of “strange accidents” and “like wonder[s]” that make up the Apology for Actors advertise this apotheothetical feature. Heywood finds, for instance, that the “whole world” would not have been conquered had not Alexander witnessed “the destruction of Troy acted”; he finds too that it could not have been brought low a second time if Julius Caesar had not watched “the like representation of Alexander in the Temple of Hercules.” In sum, the whole cataclysmic business of history—the rise and ruin that take us from one age to the next—depends upon dramatic performance, such that “to see a Hector all besmeared in blood, tramping upon the bulkes of Kinges,” remains the certain course to “any noble and notable attempt.” Clearly, the pattern of theatrical influence The Apology lays out is not at all in keeping with the idyll of Aristotelian tragedy. For its elite audience of kings and emperors, drama wields a groundclearing force: it prods great men into great acts of desolation. Still, this sort of influence is not quite the fulfillment of Melpomene’s promise, and Heywood seems to know it. With actors’ “Antiquity” and “Ancient Dignity” well established, “it followes,” he writes, “that we prove these exercises to have beene the discoverers of many notorious murders, long concealed from the eyes of the world.” Thus distinguished as the climactic evidence of his defense’s closing argument, the two incidents that he marshals to this end are worth a close look. The first of these concerns a “Norfolk” woman (from the town of “Lin”) who is suddenly troubled to distraction by a performance of Friar Francis, a play that survives only in the Apology’s remembrance. This “old history,” hoary even in Heywood’s time, rehearses a familiar moral: a young wife, “insatiately doting on a young gentleman,” murders her husband and then suffers the visitations of his angry ghost. Heywood reports that “as this was acted,” the “townswoman, (till then of great estimation and report) finding her conscience . . . extremely troubled,” suddenly cried out “oh my husband, my husband! I see . Ibid., G2r; B3r–B4r; G1v.



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the ghost of my husband fiercely threatening and menacing me.” Roused by her “shrill and unexpected outcry,” “the people about her, moov’d to a strange amazement, inquired the reason of her clamor, when presently un-urged, she told them that seven years earlier, she, to be possest of such a Gentleman . . . had poisoned her husband, whose fearefull image personated itself in the shape of that ghost.”10 The event resolves in the way that the play might have, had it been permitted to continue: apprehended and examined by the city justices, the woman is condemned for murder and sent to the scaffold. A second case of an oddly similar type is said to have taken place in Amsterdam, a stop for a troupe of English players touring abroad. This time the play in question dramatizes the conspiracy of a group of laborers to murder one of their company, a penitent named Renaldo whose industriousness has made the rest of the men redundant. To put an end to his overzeal, the laborers wait for Renaldo to fall asleep, then drive a nail into his temple. During the climactic act of this conspiracy, Heywood reports that once again “a sudden outcry” erupted from a remote gallery. Pressing in upon the site, the audience perceived “a woman of great gravity, strangely amazed, who with a distracted and troubled brain oft sighed out the words ‘oh my husband, my husband!’ ” Too overwrought to watch the rest, the woman was conducted home, where she languished despite the care of her solicitous neighbors. Among her visitors was the local churchwarden, who bore this strange news from his sexton: in “ripping up” a grave in the parish cemetery, a skull was exhumed “with a great nayle pierst quite through the braine-pan.” Hearing of this discovery, and “out of the trouble of her afflicted conscience,” the widow admitted to the murder of her husband twelve years earlier, by “driving that nayle into that skull.” The authorities are then left to hasten the tale to a just conclusion: “this being publicly confest,” Heywood writes, “she was arraigned, condemned, adjudged, and burned.”11 Several of their features recommend these stories for the special place they occupy in the Apology, as Heywood is eager to point out. Until now his argument has depended upon the wisdom of the ancients, and he has wielded it dutifully enough (“The word Tragedy . . . is derived from the Greeke word [for] goat,” begins one lesson). But at the last, Heywood decides to abandon “all farre-fetched instances” and prove his case by “domestike” and “homeborne truth[s],” “which within these few yeares happened.” What persuades is therefore neither “Antiquity” nor “Ancient Dignity” (if the two can be held distinct), but gossip, preserved in the form of the “domestike” and “homeborne” anecdote. At once outré, unspecific, yet (Heywood purports) all too 10. Ibid., G1v–G2r. 11. Ibid., sig. G2r–G2v.

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“tru[e],” the wonders that he cites to supplant the more authoritative proofs of “ancient” history are much like Gawdy’s news, for what makes the playhouse the place to search out final reckonings is the gut-turning hurt that comes of fooling.12 It is impossible to know whether these widows catch hold of the public’s imagination to the extent that Heywood claims they do (“these therefore out of other infinites, I have collected, both for their familiarnesse and latenesse of memory”).13 Unquestionably, though, their story lingers in the minds of his fellow dramatists. Three separate tragedies rehearse some version of his lore, each one during an inset or offset meditation on the judicial virtues of theatrical performance. In A Warning for Fair Women (1596), three male bystanders are inspired by the “strange” “reveal[]” of a local murder to trade stories on the subject of homicides supernaturally discovered (2019).14 The climactic example in this suite sounds remarkably familiar: A woman that had made away her husband, And sitting to behold the tragedy At Linne a towne in Norffolke, Acted by Players travelling that way, Wherein a woman that had murtherd hers Was ever haunted with her husband’s ghost: The passion written by a feeling pen, 12. Ibid., sigs. D1v, G1v, G2r. 13. Ibid., sig. G3v. 14. A Warning for Fair Women: A Critical Edition, ed. Charles Dale Cannon (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). All subsequent references to this text refer to this edition. The similarity between the tales of criminal discovery that A Warning and An Apology narrate is extraordinary, not just in terms of the Norfolk tale, which is set in the same named town (Linne or Lin), but also in terms of the Amsterdam one, which shares some key features with the Mayor’s anecdote: I have heard it told, that digging up a grave, Wherein a man had twenty yeeres bin buryed, By finding a nail knockt in the scalpe, By due enquirie who was buried there, The murther yet at length did come to light. (2022–26) This overlap suggests several possibilities. The first is that both works share an author in Heywood, and that the Apology amplifies his earlier, dramatized versions of widow-gossip. This hypothesis would make A Warning for Fair Women the earliest of Heywood’s plays and would push back his entry on the London theater scene by four years; he is first mentioned in Henslowe’s records in 1596, as the recipient of payment for a play called Hawode’s Bocke. The second is that Heywood’s likely familiarity with A Warning for Fair Women—a play produced “diverse times” by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (according to the quarto)—led him to borrow from it while composing his defense of the stage. The third possibility is that these stories are indeed common knowledge, at least within the lore-loving world of the professional theater, and share these several details because they derive from the same, well-remembered tale.



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And acted by a good Tragedian, She was so mooved with the sight thereof, As she cryed out, the Play was made by her, And openly confesst her husband’s murder. (2037–48)

Philip Massinger offers a saucier version of the same tale when he has Paris, the hero of The Roman Actor (1626), hauled before the Senate to defend his profession. Charged with assailing “persons of rank and quality” with barbed satire (1.3.39), Paris reasons that the poignancy of a play is hardly the fault of its performer, as when his company presents a loose adult’ress, That does maintain the riotous expense Of him that feeds her greedy lust, yet suffers The lawful pledges of a former bed To starve the while for hunger; if a matron Howsoever great in fortune, birth or titles Guilty of such a foul, unnatural sin, Cries out, “ ’Tis writ by me,” we cannot help it. (1.3.115–22)15

That last exclamation—“ ’Tis writ by me!”—is especially telling. Unlike Master James, the townsman who means to thrill his audience with the strangeness of the widow’s outcry in A Warning for Fair Women, Paris banks on this confession’s legibility: like Heywood does with “Oh my husband, my husband!,” Massinger imagines “ ’Tis writ by me!” to stand in for the elocution of a crime that needs no actual confessing. The difference between A Warning and The Roman Actor, then, is the distance between accidental news and “an old prov­ erb verified.” By the time Massinger backdates the phrase to Domitian’s Empire, a good thirty years after his anonymous colleague dramatizes it, the playwright’s interest is not in the surprise of the confession but in the familiarity of its occurrence, rendering the confession of the Norfolk widow at once inexorable and axiomatic. The reason, as one might well conjecture, is Hamlet (1601). At a turning point in this tragedy, the Prince seeks a way to assess the guilt of his uncle, and hits upon a solution that turns Master James’ anecdote into Massinger’s polygraph test:

15. Philip Massinger, The Roman Actor, ed. Martin White (Manchester UK: Manchester University Press, 2007). All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

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I have heard That guilty creatures, sitting at a play Have, by the very cunning of the scene, Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaim’d their malefactions. For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. (2.2.584–90)

Hamlet’s recourse to the proverbial—murder will out—makes his scheme close enough to A Warning’s gossip to pass for a paraphrase of it. At the same time, Hamlet’s extrapolation—a play’s the thing that outs murder—formalizes the confessional effect that Paris says his company “cannot help.” From here it is but a short step to an unsurprising conclusion: The Mousetrap is the cornerstone of guilty creature lore. Its self-exonerating display of how performance works still grips our imagination with an idea of the theater that is outré, badly evidenced, and yet convincingly ‘true.’ Chapter 2 will test the strength of Hamlet’s theory in some detail; for now, I mean only to emphasize the way that Hamlet, in his recollection of “proclaim’d” “malefactions,” makes the case for the theater’s “true use” and “quality.” In a play that is engrossed by the question what has the theater done for us? and that offers such beguiling answers as furnished our happiest memories and supplied our fondest acquaintance, it is here, at the moment of The Mousetrap’s conception, that the stage promises as its greatest good history’s redress. In Hamlet the performance of a play not only draws out the true circumstances of the past succession, but summons down an appropriately cataclysmic end. Crucially, then, Hamlet does not just vindicate acting, but holds up the theater as a cure for a troubled age. Since it is the Prince’s unsought mission to “right” a time that is “out of joint” (1.5.197, 196)—a time that, as Claudius says, has given “justice” the “shove” (3.3.58)—the virtue of Hamlet’s tragedy, and (to proceed in the common extrapolation) of tragedy in general, is justice’s long-awaited reappearance, returning the “native hue of resolution” to a world “sicklied o’er” (3.1.84, 85). By their strange mixture of the accidental and the apotheothetical, “guilty creatures, sitting at a play” are thus responsible for tragedy’s potent combination of prodigious efficacity and epochal confusion; they imbue the theater with both the “promise” of “eman­cipat[ion]” and the looming sense that an “end of history” is at hand.16 16. Hamlet in The Arden Shakespeare, Second Series, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Routledge, 1994). All subsequent quotations are from this edition. Using Hamlet as his point of departure, Jacques Derrida finds “emancipatory promise” in the justice promised by Marx via his allusions to Hamlet in Specters of Marx: The



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England’s Conscience-Catching Theater

The task of this chapter is to piece together a genealogy for this idea. How did the widow playgoer gain such traction in the small miscellany of writings that constitute the remains of the early modern English stage? And why does her story outweigh the “Antiquity” and “Ancient Dignity” of that stage’s classical precedent? It is clearly a thorn in his side that one answer is Stephen Gosson. I have already described how, in The Schoole of Abuse, Gosson denounces playhouses as places of special “assault,” where plays “with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde.” His insight—and it is a very fine one, highly prized in the marketplace of theatrical ideas—is that plays captivate the senses in order to surreptitiously “wound[] the conscience.”17 For Gosson, this assault is no metaphor but a capital offense; how is it, he wonders, that “We accompt him a murderer, whome we see delight in sheading of bloode, and make him a jester, that woundeth our conscience”?18 And yet the crime he condemns is not exactly the homicide suggested by the conceit of an invisible bullet. Instead, in a lengthy rebuke of a claim made by Thomas Lodge, he assails the theater for the cruelty of its false accusations: “[Lodge] gives to a play, [. . .] that it is a very Glasse of behaviour. The corruption of manners is there revealed and accused. Which is easily confuted, by the circumstaunce of the place, of the person, of the manner, and of the end of accusation.”19 At the heart of this dispute is an important consensus: both Gosson and Lodge agree that the theater “shocks the conscience,” to use a phrase coined by the California Supreme Court. But whereas defenders of the stage adopt this shock as the divine means of exposing a corrupt soul, to Gosson what is shocking is the illegitimacy of such a practice. In keeping with its current usage, which describes evidence-gathering that violates due process, Gosson attacks the conscience-catching stage as an abuse of the spectator’s civil rights.20 His careful reasoning reads like the opinion of a high court: State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 59. The End of History is the title of Francis Fukuyama’s book on 1989’s post-communist moment, with which Derrida rigorously argues (e.g., 14–15, 56–64). 17. Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, 2nd ed. (London, 1587), C2v. The first edition of this pamphlet is 1579. 18. Gosson, The Ephemerides of Phialo and a Short Apology for The Schoole of Abuse, 2nd. ed. (London, 1586), Mr. 19. Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), C8r. 20. Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165 (1953). The case involved the forcible removal of evidence (mor­ phine capsules) from the accused’s digestive tract, and the Court argued, much as Gosson does, that “a conviction which rests upon evidence . . . obtained . . . by physical abuse is as invalid as a conviction which rests upon a verbal confession extracted from him by such abuse.” The means in such a case must nullify the ends, for they “shock the conscience.” It is worth noting as a fortuitous coincidence that the mechanism of unlawful discovery is the same turning of the guts outward that Gosson objects to in The Three Ladies of London.

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At Stage Plaies it is ridiculous, for the parties accused to replye, no indefferency of judgement can be had, because the worste sorte of people have the hearing of it, which in respecte of there ignorance, of there fickleness, and of there furie, are not to bee admitted in place of judgement. A Judge must be grave, sober, discreete, wise, well exercised in cases of governement. Which qualities are never founde in the baser sort.21

And therefore, Gosson continues, the theater’s conscience-catching must be dismissed as no more than empty slander: If the common people which resorte to Theaters being but an assemblie of Tailers, Tinkers, Cordwayners, Saylers, olde Men, yong Men, Women, Boyes, Girles, and such like, be the judges of faultes there painted out, the rebuking of maners in that place is neyther lawfull nor convenient, but to be held for a kind of labeling, and defaming.22

What I wish to bring out from this attempted confutation is how readily Gosson admits to the judicial miracle effected by theatrical performance, reviling instead, and for a total of nine pages, the inappropriateness of its “cir­ cumstaunce.”23 Offensive to him is the ignobility of judge and jury; given their lowness of mind (“ravished with every giewegawe” ),24 any guilty creature fingered at the playhouse suffers an inquisition that is manifestly illegal, and that should be dismissed, as Dennis Kezar writes, as a “mistrial.”25 While something might be said for Gosson’s defense of judicial impartiality (even coming as it does at the “common people’s” expense), he seems to be missing the point, for while he quibbles over the question of admissibility, he concedes to the stage the forensic power that Melpomene holds up as proof of the theater’s miracle-working. His last word on the subject is a case in point: “Perswade your­selves that as stages and Theaters are not allowed by the lawes of God, or man, to medle with disorders; so it is not the marke that

21. Playes Confuted, sig. C8v. 22. Ibid., Dr. 23. Gosson’s inspiration here is Augustine, who denounces the idea of the show as trial in City of God: “For it is by the decisions of magistrates, and by well-informed justice, that our lives ought to be judged, and not by the flighty fancies of poets; neither ought we to be exposed to hear calumnies, save where we have the liberty of replying, defending ourselves before an adequate tribunal.” From The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1948), 48. 24. Gosson, Playes Confuted, sig. Dr. 25. Kezar, Guilty Creatures: Renaissance Poetry and the Ethics of Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 88.



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those authors shoote at when they fill these rooms.”26 If, as Gosson says, plays neither should nor mean to catch consciences, the fact that they cannot help doing so only heightens the sense that theirs is a God-given gift. His lengthy denunciation of performance’s “gunshotte of affection” thus advances, rather than debunks, the stage’s providential justice. To give Gosson his due, it should be said that Providence is bound to vex Gosson’s confutation.27 At a cultural moment in which the wafting into view of  “a sprigge of fearne” is enough to evince murder’s tongueless proclamation (AWFFW, 2032), and in which cruentation (the bleeding of a corpse in the killer’s presence) is still admissible in the courts as inculpating evidence,28 the fact that an accident or “disorder” in the playhouse is so readily taken for a criminal discovery is not especially surprising. The problem that troubles Gosson is that the theater’s special power is his own coinage. Having once argued that plays wound the conscience, so attractive is the notion to early modern En­ gland’s dream of justice, and so persuasive is its account of the experience of theatrical spectatorship, that no matter how “unlawful” this wounding may be, or how hypocritical the whole business (“so have they no grace in rebuking others, that nourish a canker in themselves”), it cannot be denied.29 Which is to say that a further reason for the tenacious presence of the guilty widow in the small archive of the early modern English stage is the allure of consciencewounding to a post-Reformation English audience. The idea has yet to lose its luster. Even now, in an age unversed in its theology, “the play’s the thing” remains so much a common sense that it takes some effort to recover its strangeness. To an early modern audience, habituated to the Protestant discourse of casuistry, the catchable conscience is not only familiar, it is doctrinal. If one of the master tropes of the Reformation is its imper­ fect effort to refine sensuous Catholicism into logocentric Anglicanism, the conscience, in equal parts a metaphorized abstraction and a real, somatized presence, is a paradox at the center of early modern England’s religious, judicial, and theatrical thinking—a very “daemon” “at the “enigmatic ground of Being itself,” as Ned Lukacher writes.30 26. Gosson, Plays Confuted, sig. D2v. 27. For a much richer account of provendentialism and its competing hermeneutics in this period, see Michael Witmore’s Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press), 2001. 28. Malcolm Gaskill discusses the persistence of cruentation in “The Displacement of Providence: Policing and Prosecution in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century England,” Continuity and Change 11, no. 3 (1996): 354. 29. Gosson, Playes Confuted, D2v. 30. Ned Lukacher, Daemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the Question of Conscience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 2.

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Conscience emerges as a slippery term of the Reformed faith at the moment of confession’s dissolution, when Protestantism transforms the sacrament from a Lenten obligation into a quotidian practice of private devotional life.31 What was once a “rushed and abbreviated” inquiry becomes, in one of the Reformation’s more challenging renovations of the faith, not just a daily practice inward self-scrutiny, but also a form of supernatural disclosure.32 The idea behind this change is that by eliminating the middle man, casuistry—as the sifting of the conscience is called—creates a more perfect union between God’s oversight and the subject’s soul, for a priest might extenuate a particular case, or even drift off in the heat of a sin’s recounting, but not so the conscience, whose vigilance is on a par with Sauron’s unblinking eye. Writes Samuel Clarke in his casuistical tome The Marrow of Divinity, “other powers of the soul taking Conscience to be but a spie, do what they can, first to hide themselves from it, next to deceive it, afterwards to oppose it, and lastly, to depose it,” but resistance is futile.33 Conscience is immovable, “a thing placed of God in the middest betweene him and man, as an arbitratour to give sentence,” says William Perkins, the most prolix of casuistical authorities.34 Incorporate within the individual but always in God’s service, conscience “determines or gives sentence of things done, by saying to us this was done, this was not done, this may be done, this may not be done, this was well done, this was ill done.”35 From this careful accounting, it exacts the wages of the subject’s thoughts and

31. The sacrament of auricular Confession is repealed in Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer in 1549; subsequent reformation of the mass bars the administering of priestly absolution even from deathbed confessions. On the necessity of this reform, the Church of England remains outspoken long after the break with Rome. See, for example, this passage, taken from William M’Gavin’s essays “On the Principal Points of Controversy between the Church of Rome and the Reformed”: “Rome’s “mystery of iniquity” appears in nothing more palpable, than in the practice of what she calls auricular confession. By means of this she has access to the heart of every sinner in her communion, maintains an absolute authority over his conscience, and directs his conduct as she pleases: and this prerogative does not belong to the “church” alone, considered in her collective capacity, nor to this pope alone as head of the church; it belongs in common to every pedant of a priest, who considers himself divinely appointed to receive the confessions of sinners, and authorized to absolve them from all their iniquities.” William M’Gavin, The Protestant; Second American Edition from the Ninth Glasgow Edition, 4 vols. (Hartford, Conn.: Hutchison and Dwier, 1833), 1:602. 32. Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth Century England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 80. Camille Wells Slights offers detailed studies of the multiple metaphors of conscience. See “Notaries, Sponges and Looking-Glasses: Conscience in Early Modern England,” English Literary Renaissance 28, no. 2 (1998): 231–46, and The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert and Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). 33. Samuel Clarke’s Medull Theologiae: or the Marrow of Divinity (London, 1659), sig. Iii3r. 34. The Workes of that famous and worthy minister of Christ Mr. William Perkins (London, 1612–13), sig. Xx4r. This is one of the figures of conscience that Slights discusses in “Notaries, Sponges and LookingGlasses,” 232. 35. William Perkins, The Workes, sig. Xx4r.



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acts in accordance with their merits: “Conscience is a power and faculty of the soule taking knowledge and keeping witnese of all a man’s thoughts words and actions and accordingly everything absolving, condoning, comforting, and tormenting to the same.”36 Yet once summoned to tasks so various, conscience quickly exceeds its role as God’s not-so-secret agent. Not just the arbitrator who gives sentence, conscience is also the rack that follows, the penalty that fits the crime of its own strict accompt. More paradoxically, conscience is not just the expiator of past sins, it is also the memory that preserves them, the “keep[er]” and “witnese” that waits to testify at the soul’s judgment. It is not difficult for English Protestants to see that some of these figures are incompatible with others; the hot press of the rack and the cold storage of the vault exemplify a conceptual crisis that George Herbert’s poem, “Confession,” has some trouble resolving: O what a cunning guest Is this same grief ! Within my heart I made Closets; and in them many a chest; And like a master in my trade; In those chests, boxes; in each box a till: Yet grief knows all, and enters when he will. (ll. 1–6)37

Though the point here is that closets, chests, boxes, and tills are a futile engineering, hopeless to defend against the “work and winde” of God (9), it is also true that unlocking them constitutes the act of confession, the necessary precondition of grace. Even as Herbert makes this disclosure both irrelevant (because nothing eludes God’s detection) and implacable (because extracted under divine pressure), he cannot quite avoid the fact that it remains a choice: ultimately, it lies with the individual either to unlock conscience’s closet or to keep it shut and suffer the soul’s damnation. What exasperates about casuistry, therefore, is how effectless a corrective this devotion administers to those in need of its rebuke. However true it may be that one should “spend one hower [per week, if not per day] in examination of the selfe, in opening the booke of [one’s] conscience,” a moral code that works on the honor system is unlikely to do much to keep sinners in check.38 As Claudius says, when “the fault is past,”

36. Jeremiah Dyke, Good Conscience: or A Treatise shewing the nature, meanes, marks, benefit, and necessity thereof (London, 1624), sig. B3r. 37. George Herbert, George Herbert: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (New York, Penguin, 1992), 117. 38. Immanuel Bourne, The Anatomie of Conscience (London, 1623), sig. E3v.

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and the criminal happily “possessed/Of [its] effects,” what incentive does he have to face, like Dorian Grey, the horror of his sins’ reflection (3.3.51, 53–54)? Casuistry is thus a shining instance of Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment: its theology takes God’s oversight off the table, leaving sinners to police themselves, but it does so in the name of bringing that oversight back with a vengeance.39 The fallacy is nicely rendered in one of Perkins’s tautologies: Every murderer is cursed, saith the minde Thou art a murderer, saith the conscience assisted by the memorie: Ergo, Thou art cursed, saith the conscience, and so giveth her sentence.40

As long as the “Discourse of Conscience” remains this sort of allegorical scenario, it is bound to appear ever more conspicuously a strain of wishful thinking, an empty fable of just deserts. Without any real purchase on the affairs of men, the “Marrow of [early modern] Divinity” thus steals from the age the promise of sin’s redress. But though casuistry will be repudiated as a call to equivocation rather than repentance, plays remain the memorial, exhibitive, and disclosive apparatus that the Reformation dreams of. To a public trained to believe that “one day conscience will appear, and shew plainly” all it knows by “set[ting] before” the sinner “all the things that [he or she] ha[s] done” in its “eye and glasse,” “ ’Tis writ by me!” is the unmistakable sound of a guilty soul recognizing itself in “A play’s . . . true transparent Christall mirror.”41 In the age of casuistry, in other words, plays are made to seem the realization of a vision of justice that is richly imagined but never in evidence, since wafting ferns and oozing corpses must be judged poor substitutes for the full disclosure of guilt that both Perkins and Melpomene, in their remarkably identical exempla, promise to deliver: “Have not I . . . Unmaskt sterne Murther”?; “Thou art a murderer, saith the conscience.” Having raised this affinity, it lies with Gosson to discredit the stage for putting Protestant belief into practice. Guilt, he counters, is only ascertainable in a court of law, where the accused has the right to mount a full defense under the eyes of a sober and impartial judge. By schooling his readers in this lesson, Gosson lays bare the cynicism of casuistry’s promise: in this world, conscience’s testimony (“ ’Tis writ by me!”) does not count, it is of no more consequence than the “fearn” it is written on, and the temptation to read it otherwise, as the 39. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). 40. Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience (London, 1596), sig. F3r. 41. William Fenner, The Souls Looking-glasse (Cambridge, 1640), sig. C5r; Bourne, The Anatomie of Conscience, sig. B4v; John Taylor, “To my approved good friend,” in Heywood, An Apology for Actors, a3v.



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visitation of an irrefutable truth, is a mistake of gross and vulgar ignorance, a crossing of the “headie” “ravish[ment]” of the “rudest sort” with God’s perfect judgment. The insinuation is not very tacit: only a base-born fool would look for justice in the signs and wonders of the playhouse, while those who hold themselves to a higher standard must abide the bitter truth that there is no categorical certainty to a subject’s guilt or innocence, there is only the testing ground of trial, which is to say (though of course Gosson does not) the inevitability of error. His insistence on the illegality of conscience-catching is thus a thankless struggle against the high tide of an expectation that is sanctioned to take anything, and particularly anything that happens in the “true transparent Christall mirror” of the theater, as a sign of its fulfillment. Yet it is precisely because Gosson puts himself so much at odds with the saws of the hearthside and the doctrines of the Reformed church that it seems especially important to hear him out. Given the dry technicism of his argument, this may seem like a thankless task. But if Gosson feels the need to remind his readers how the justice system works, of the impartiality on which it rests, and of the many aspects of its decorum (with regard to place, person, manner, and end)—in brief, if Gosson feels compelled to rehearse a civics lesson that is to all appearances both irrelevant and obvious, it must be for the reason that to his readership it is neither. His plea that audiences reserve their judgment—“Persuade yourselves, that the theatres or stages are not allowed by the Lawes of God or man to meddle with disorders”—is written out of the conviction that playgoers are too prone to endorse the idea of this illegal meddling.42 In his struggle to uncouple the stage from the spirit of casuistry, Gosson thus offers up to us an important insight: English drama is justified by a purge that conceals its vindictiveness in the dream of a crime divinely discovered. Though Hamlet has made this claim a tough sell, Gosson nevertheless offers a convincing answer to the question that The Schoole of Abuse raises: in her relish for turning guts outward, whose law does Melpomene really serve? Rome’s Fatal Charades

That law, Gosson tells us, is Rome’s. By way of refuting the theater’s Protestant conscientiousness, he locates in “antiquitie” the origins of the theater’s rush to judgment. The stage, he says, provided the means for Roman poets to “revenge” themselves against “any man [who] had displeased them”; since

42. Gosson, Playes Confuted, D2v.

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Cicero’s time, it has been a platform upon which the lesser men “ruffle, and taunt, scoffe and snappe, thunder, and lighten, and spue up theire cunning.”43 Kezar discovers in this “concern with defamation” a reaching critique of the violence done by drama. The slander Gosson repudiates is nothing less than the “coercion” intrinsic to mimesis, the “wholesale violation of history” that happens when “a playwright silences a subject, appropriates that subject as spectacle, and displays it before dubious and numberless judges.”44 I want to add to this depredation the simpler problem of violation in theater history—the tendency for taunting, scoffing, snapping, and defacing that the conscience-catching stage revives. In marshaling the classical past to describe qualms about the present, Gosson brings up what Heywood lets drop when he turns to “domestike, truth[s]”: that the “snappe” of those Antique poets lives on in us. Under the cover of conscience, Antique habits remain darkly present on the English stage. It isn’t far into the Apology that Heywood discloses something similar, for Gosson’s vision of a theater underwritten by antiquity’s revenges anticipates Heywood’s account of history forged from the pointed replay of the same old bloody show. If not Hector awash in royal gore, then Priam and Troilus “plunged in a purple ocean,” Pompey conquered by Caesar, Hercules “slaughtering Diomed”—any of these will suffice to light a fire under the “Princes of our times,” since, as Heywood argues, it is in the image of these scenes that every age has reached its height. Clearly, old plots die hard in a climate in which rulers and plays are caught in this closed circuit of imitation; in Heywood’s retooling of the theatrum mundi conceit, all that “pashing” and “squeezing,” “knocking” and “murdering” that prick on princely ambition represent wounds that keep on wounding, with each new conquest but another re-enactment of Jupiter’s first violence. For the purposes of the Apology, then, history itself is underwritten by antiquity’s revenges, thanks to the “passion, action, motion” of the stage, and to their needling impact. And it is here that Heywood insinuates something of the grim classicism that Gosson raises, for what sustains history’s never-ending cycle is performance’s recriminating force: just as Caesar “was never in any peace of thoughts” until “hee had purchas’d to himselfe the name of Alexander,” so too did Alexander seek to “be called Achilles,” “Achilles Theseus,” “Theseus . . . Hercules,” and “Hercules . . . Jupiter.” By virtue of this chain of emulation, which Heywood is also happy to work out in reverse (with “Edward the third” and “Henry the fift”), the value of the theater is again chalked up to a troubled conscience, except that now the royal 43. Ibid., Dv. 44. Kezar, Guilty Creatures, 86, 88, 89.



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spectator is wracked by the sight of any violence he has left unperformed; in this genealogy of theatrical self-fashioning it is as if the great men of antiquity watched the exploits of their predecessors in the hope that they might be justified in crying out, “ ’Tis writ by me!”45 Surprisingly, then, Heywood corroborates Gosson’s point; consciencecatching is an antique idea and not—or at least not only—the miracle the apol­ ogist and his cohort of playwrights (Wilson, Shakespeare, Massinger, and the anonymous author of A Warning for Fair Women) would prefer it to seem. What emerges here is the doubleness of Heywood’s project, not to say its duplicity, inasmuch as An Apology must tell two stories at once: on the one hand, Heywood would have us know the illustrious past from which the theater derives, and reciprocally, the illustrious theater from which the past derives. On the other, he would render the stage a visitation of “truth” that happens clear out of the blue, with no regard for convention, decorum, or precedent. To keep these strains unmingled is Heywood’s unenviable task, and thus to uphold the Christian imminence of those “home-borne” and “domestike” judgments. And yet, in equal measure to Heywood’s overperformance of changing the subject (“To omit all farre-fetcht instances”), and to his overarticularion of the difference between Actors’ “Ancient Dignity” and the “true use of their quality,” his defense is everywhere crowded with the “snappe” and bite of antique practices that won’t give up the ghost. Like the apparition that begins his Apology, crying vengeance (“revenge my blot”), and tossing her head “terq quaterq” in righteous indignation, there is a Roman spirit to tragedy that haunts Heywood’s defense of the English stage.46 There is one anecdote in An Apology that offers an especially hair-raising corroboration of this claim. To prove that actors are men of “substance, of government, of sober lives and temperate carriages” Heywood enlists “Julius Caesar himselfe,” who took on the lead role in Hercules Furens to “generall applause,” but to fatal effect:47 It is recorded of him that with generall applause in his owne Theater [Caesar] played Hercules Furens, and amongst many other arguments of his compleatnesse, excellence and extraordinary care in his action, it is thus reported of him: Being in the depth of a passion, one of his servants (as his part then fell out) presenting Lychas, who before had from Deianeira brought him the poysoned shirt, dipt in the bloud of the Centaure Nessus, hid in a remote corner (appoynted him to 45. Heywood, An Apology for Actors, B3v, B4r, B3v. 46. Ibid., sig. B2v. 47. Ibid., sigs. E3r, E3v.

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creep into of purpose) although he was, as our Tragedians use, but seemingly to kill him by some false imagined wound, yet was Caesar so extremely carryed away with the violence of his practiced fury, and by the perfect shape of the madnesse of Hercules, to which he had fashioned all his active spirits, that he slew him dead at his foot, & and after swoong him terq quaterq [three or four times] (as the Poet sayes) about his head.48

If Heywood’s aim is to swell the ranks of his profession with some of history’s most eminent men, this is hardly what grabs the reader. Like Lucian’s report of ‘Ajax’ gone berserk, Caesar’s turn as Hercules describes the antics of a man dangerously possessed by the animosa Tragedia; as Heywood writes, “so extremely” was Caesar “carried away” that he not only cut down the unfortunate player of Lychas, but then, in an extemporized bit of stage business, “swoong him terq quaterq . . . about his head.” The jauntiness of Heywood’s narration, so marked in that Latin colloquialism, makes the death of Caesar’s scene partner seem the pinnacle of the emperor’s thespian achievement—here is a method actor who, in service to his role, forgets his own strength and shows that it is not wanting. But the effort is not successful; the reader is left to wonder, and also to wince, at the tyrant’s overkill. Something of this unease seems to impinge upon the story’s telling, for Heywood then proceeds to a hasty reconceptualization. In order to draw some instruction from Caesar’s performance—on the theme of acting’s ancient dignity, no less—he sets the anecdote aside to explain its historical context: It was a manner of the Emperours, in those dayes, in their publicke Tragedies to choose out the fittest amongst such, as for capital offences were condemned to dye, and imploy them in such parts as were to be kil’d in the Tragedy, who of themselves would make suit rather to dye with resolution, and by the hands of such princely Actors, then otherwise to suffer a shamefull & most detestable end. And these were tragedies naturally performed. And such Caius Caligula, Claudius Nero, Vitellius, Domitianus, Comodus and other Emperours of Rome, upone their festivals and holy daies of greatest consecration, used so to act. Therefore M. Kyd in the Spanish Tragedy, upon occasion presenting itselfe, thus writes: Why Nero thought it no disparagement And Kings and Emperours have tane delight, To make experience of their wit in playes.49

48. Ibid., sig. E3v. 49. bid., sigs. E3v–E4r.



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Heywood’s shocking extenuation of Caesar’s circumstance is what Gosson calls “fly[ing] to a blinde texte” “when reason is scant”: the explanation, igno­ miniously derived, is worse than the offense.50 Beyond the atrocity of the judi­ cial practice that Heywood tries to euphemize (“these were tragedies naturally performed”), that last line delivers an especially savage bite: to everyone who knows Kyd’s play–and who among Heywood’s readers doesn’t?—Nero’s example beckons two princes and a princess to their deaths. It is deployed by Hieronimo for the most fell of purposes. It is therefore difficult to know how to take An Apology’s point, but supposing that Heywood does not intend the irony of his own evidence—supposing that he is asking us to forget what Kyd shows—then the instruction he offers on the Roman ways of “publicke Tragedies” must be meant to explain that what we mistook for an injudicious homicide is really Roman jurisprudence—a reprieve from “a shameful & most detestable end,” and not, as it seemed, an example of one. The trouble, of course, is that the rehabilitation of a Roman accident into Roman law comes at the price of a terrible confession. The theater, we are told, is at its classical core a scaffold, its “consecrated” practice a death sentence-cum-entertainment maintained by the likes of Caligula, Domitian, Commodus, and Nero. Little wonder that it lies in the nature of the form to send widows to the gallows, since “tragedies naturally performed” are therefore, as K. M. Coleman writes, “fatal charades.”51 Like the “terq quaterq” that suggests just how much Melpomene and Caesar have in common, the vindictive compulsions of antiquity spill forth from the Apology, confronting us with a law of performance that Heywood, in his quest to legitimize his profession, cannot help but trace. While it is hard to understand how Heywood sees them boosting the dignity of his profession, it is not surprising that the bloody habits of the Roman theater come so readily to mind. Blistering accounts of the death spectacles at the Coliseum live on in early modern posterity in the epigrams of Martial, which are mainstays of England’s public school curriculum. “[I]t is more than probable,” writes Thomas May in the preface to his 1629 collection, “that divers gentlemen have exercised or pleased themselves in translating some of the[m].” Among those May says he was specially “intreated” to render are the complete contents of Martial’s “booke of Spectacles,” including this one (number seven in the series), which he introduces with a quick gloss of Roman theatrical practice:52 50. Gosson, Playes Confuted, D4r. 51. K. M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Reenactments,” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 44–73. 52. Thomas May, Selected Epigrams of Martial (London, 1629), “To the reader,” A6v, A7v, A8r.

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Men condemned to dy, did personate in their deaths some ancient fable upon the stage, as this Prometheus: As to the Sythean rock Prometheus bound Fed stil a bird with his breast’s deathless wound. Laureolus on no false gibbet here, So yields his brest to a Calidonean beare. His torne bloud-dropping members liv’d one wound, And in his whole body was no body found. Sure he, that suffer’d thus, with impious sword Murder’d his father, or had slaine his Lord; Or rob’d the temples of their sacred gold, Or fired Rome. What ere, that crime of old His crime surpast; for what they did invent Of t’others harme, was his true punishment.53

Because May’s translation is a little shaky, let me parse this epigram before I go on to read it. It concerns a convict whose undisclosed crime has earned him a spectacular death in the role of Laureolus, a notorious brigand whose exploits, apprehension, and crucifixion were the subject of a popular mime.54 Happily, Martial tells us, certain improvements were made to enhance the show: Laureolus’s lingering (and un-theatrical) death on the cross was altered so that, in the manner of the bird that plucked out Prometheus’s liver, a bear has eaten the play’s protagonist.55 A characteristic cynicism creeps into the verse when Martial reassures us that this deviation from the script—in which ‘Laureolus’ is reduced to such a sea of gore that “no body” could be “found”—was surely called for by the heinous nature of the actor-criminal’s crime, though its particulars are of no concern to the narrator (Arson? Parricide? Domestic treason? Sacrilegious larceny? “What ere,” he shrugs). Without bothering about

53. Ibid., B3r. May misunderstands Martial’s analogy by presuming that the performance is of Prometheus, and not Laureolus. Coleman translates the epigram as follows: “Just as Prometheus, chained on a Scythian crag, fed the tireless bird on his prolific breast, so Laureolus, hanging on no false cross, gave up his defenseless entrails to a Scottish bear. His mangled limbs still lived, though the parts were dripping with blood, and in his whole body there actually was no body. Finally punishment . . . whether in his guilt he had stabbed his master in the throat with a sword, or in his madness robbed a temple of its golden treasure, or stealthily set you alight with blazing torches, Rome. This wicked man had outdone crimes recounted in tales of old; in his case, what had been legend became punishment.” “Fatal Charades,” 65. 54. Coleman, “Fatal Charades,” 64. As Coleman notes, this mime is also discussed in Allardyce Nicoll’s Masks Mimes and Miracles: Studies in the Popular Theatre (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963), 110–11. 55. Writes Coleman, “the slow agony of crucifixion was relatively lacking in spectacular appeal” (“Fatal Charades,” 65).



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the facts, Martial affirms that in the ensuing scaffold-drama (“no false gibbet here”!), there was a perfect conjoining of imperial and poetic justice; as May renders it, here was “true punishment” indeed. Martial’s epigrams are just the sort of thing to keep boys glued to their horn­ books. But beyond the philological uses to which the Liber Spectaculorum is put, its more generalized impact is to disseminate an understanding of the Roman theater that is breathtakingly dire—an irreligious piety and a miscarriage of justice in the fell swoop of (in this case) a Caledonian bear. Prurient and pithy, the anecdotal record of the Roman theater-cum-scaffold infiltrates English urbane legend56 as exactly the kind of ancient gossip to which the wellschooled are bound to recur. We might speculate then, that no matter how hard it they are to reconcile to any apologetic purpose, fatal charades are sure to find their way into Heywood’s collection. Among the array of incidents in which plays demonstrate their god-like power of recrimination, Caesar Furens is an irrepressible anecdote. The more interesting implication, though, comes from putting this idea the other way around. Perhaps the reason that judicial travesties suggestive of the Liber Spectaculorum rear up in the midst of An Apology is that Rome’s antique revenges set the pattern for Heywood’s undertaking. The evidence Heywood employs to substantiate his defense is, after all, the same matter as we find in Martial’s epigrams: memorable theatrical anecdotes chosen to add luster to the state and the stage. The possibility that one compendium of dramatic table-talk might well have given shape to the other is supported by the kind of anecdote the Apology makes its special feature, for the story that Heywood wants most to tell, and on which he tends especially to dilate (“but I draw my subject to greater length than I purposed”) is a tale of real punishment let loose from the domain of theatrical play.57 His particular interest, in fact, is in performances that “blaze[] with colours to the peoples eye” the “guttes” of a citizen-criminal. Heywood is quick to hand over any justice that pleases to God, so that clamoring widows expose the fallacy of the theater’s falsity in the name of an Almighty Truth. But by dint of his own argument, we are nevertheless led to see that this is a variation on a pre-Christian, and even an antiChristian theme—as John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments abundantly illustrates, among the ‘actors’ condemned in the arena are the faith’s first martyrs.58 So 56. This paranomasia is meant to evoke Jody Enders’s wry title, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 57. Heywood, An Apology for Actors, G2v. 58. See the “Table Illustrating the X. first Persecutions of the Primitive Church under the Heathen Tyrannes of Rome,” a foldout series of illustrations appended to the end of the 1583 edition of Actes and Monuments, for a gruesome tour of Roman martyrological spectacle.

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though it may be impossible for an early modern poet to forget that the theater that prosecutes “guilty creatures” is, in a word, the arena, it is still the case that Heywood remembers this inconvenient truth with surprising gusto. Repeatedly he shows us that the stage at its best has been a site of condemnation, and in his defense of the earliest of these instances he proves that the cause is not Providence, or even accident, but classical design: the ancient dignity of the stage has always come from furnishing spectacular scenes of state-sponsored retribution. The effect is much in the vein of Martial’s boast, “no false gibbet here”: what turns out to be felicitous about the theater is the violence that exceeds its mimetic frame—the real gibbet that the stage is built on. Of course, there is no way to prove that Heywood intends to prompt us to this kind of remembrance, just as it cannot be said that Gosson, who does wish to do so, can make the notion stick. Less arguable, though, is that both men’s theatrical philosophies are shaped by the peremptory and fatal judgments of the antique stage, those legendary entertainments that derive their pleasures from the cruelty (the snap and bite, as it were) of their punishments. One consequence is that Heywood and Gosson undermine early modern England’s rep­ utation for lacking a theater history. But the nature of the past that they retail to posterity is defined by its poor service to good historiographic practice. As they recall it, the Roman theater is a mythopoetic realm, as extravagant and infamous as the Coliseum, and as impervious to reconstruction. So while there is no denying that fatal charades are storied stuff, recorded by Martial, reviled by Tertullian, and regretted in Augustine’s famous anecdote about Alipius at the games (“For, directly he saw that blood, he therewith imbibed a sort of savageness”),59 their story does not preserve a stable history so much as it marks the end of any stable past. As it happens, this sort of catastrophism is precisely what the Coliseum stands for (fig. 4): Quandiu stabit coliseus, stabit et Roma; Quando cadit coliseus, cadet et Roma Quando cadet Roma, cadet et mundus.

While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall When Rome falls the world shall fall.60

59. Augustine, Confessions, trans. and annotated by J. G. Pilkington (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1876), 6.8.125. 60. Bedea Opera Omnia (Cologne, 1612), 482, cited in Howard Vernon Canter, “The Venerable Bede and the Colosseum,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 61 (1930): 150.



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Figure 4.  The Coliseum in ruins (engraving n.2.A), from Hieronymous Cock’s Speculum Romanae et Magnificentiae (1551). Courtesy the University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center.

Writing in the eighth century, the Venerable Bede links Rome’s most famous theatrical edifice to the world’s end. By the time Heywood composes his Apology, the crumbling amphitheater, the landmark at the center of the city to which all roads lead, is a perpetual reminder that Rome’s most infamous consumption is not just Rome’s consummation, but ours too. How unsettling, then, that it remains “a pattern, precedent, and lively warrant” of the English stage.61

The most famous iteration of these lines is Byron’s translation of them, found in Childe Harold, canto IV, stanza CXLV. 61. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus in the Arden Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Thomson Learning, 1995), 5.3.43. Here, the precedent that authorizes a fatal act is the tale of Virginius, which Titus emulates by murdering his daughter.

“Resistances,” “survivals,” or delays discreetly perturb the pretty order of a line of “progress” or a system of interpretation. michel de certeau, The Writing of History

2 Tyrannical Drama The Dream of Theatrical Justice

Uncontroversially hailed by Helen Vendler as the “best poem of the millennium,” Hamlet is the staple proof of the good the theater has wrought. Its gift to posterity is of such an order that if the play does not quite put to bed the antitheatrical prejudice, its interest in “see[ing] . . . players well bestowed” has made it a mainstay of the counterargument (2.2.518–19). But though much can be said about the value of Hamlet to defenders of the stage, its artistic triumph has made it easy for us to forget at what price its vindicatory use comes. This chapter begins by remembering that for Hamlet the salubrity of

. Helen Vendler, “Best Poem; Hamlet Alone,” New York Times, April 18, 1999, sec. 6, col. 1. . Martin Puchner’s book, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama, is a testament to the long life of this habit of thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

“Resistances,” “survivals,” or delays discreetly perturb the pretty order of a line of “progress” or a system of interpretation. michel de certeau, The Writing of History

2 Tyrannical Drama The Dream of Theatrical Justice

Uncontroversially hailed by Helen Vendler as the “best poem of the millennium,” Hamlet is the staple proof of the good the theater has wrought. Its gift to posterity is of such an order that if the play does not quite put to bed the antitheatrical prejudice, its interest in “see[ing] . . . players well bestowed” has made it a mainstay of the counterargument (2.2.518–19). But though much can be said about the value of Hamlet to defenders of the stage, its artistic triumph has made it easy for us to forget at what price its vindicatory use comes. This chapter begins by remembering that for Hamlet the salubrity of

. Helen Vendler, “Best Poem; Hamlet Alone,” New York Times, April 18, 1999, sec. 6, col. 1. . Martin Puchner’s book, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama, is a testament to the long life of this habit of thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

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performance is a lesson exacted from his own spectatorial torment. At the center of the play that has become a key text of enlightened modernity lies the “snappe” and bite of an antique past. Let me pick up this argument where it diegetically arises, in Hamlet’s second soliloquy. Having just watched the First Player’s command performance of “Aeneas’ talk to Dido, and thereabout of it especially when he [Aeneas] speaks of Priam’s slaughter” (2.2.442–44), Hamlet is shown to us wracked with guilt: Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I. Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann’d, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her, That he should weep for her? What would he do Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears, And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty and appall the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears. (2.2.544–60)

Only by suffering this recrimination does he arrive at the scheme of consciencecatching that furnishes his tragedy’s centerpiece, and that sets the terms for criticism to come of what the early modern English stage is good for: in fine, “Unmask[ing] sterne Murther; sham[ing] lascivious lust,” and “Pluck[ing] off the visar from grimme Treasons face,” as Heywood writes. And yet the an­ guish of the Trojan episode proves strangely forgettable. When he breaks off his litany of self-reproach, disgusted by the impotence of his own rage, the discontinuity of thought that brings the Mousetrap to mind (“About my brains. Hum—,” followed by a Pinter-esque pause of three metrical feet [2.2.584]) . Heywood, An Apology for Actors, sig. B2r. . Here I am following Harold Jenkins’s version of the text; see Hamlet, 2nd ser., ed. Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1994). Subsequent quotations are from this edition.



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renders Hamlet’s theatrical plan all but contingent upon the suppression of his recent theater history. What comes next—“I have heard/That guilty creatures sitting at a play” (584–85)—is a story whose origins are likewise elided, for in this play discretion, omission, and disavowal turn out to be central to the project of putting the theater to good use. Unlike Heywood, who struggles to justify tragedy by resurrecting histories both local and ancient, the theatrical apologetics of Hamlet work by blocking out any past or prologue, including, as we will see, so eminent an antecedent as Plutarch’s Moralia. Here, the price of achieving poetic justice is keeping “antiquity forgot” (4.5.104). Still, the play is never free of what Benjamin calls the Renaissance’s unflagging “will to classicism.” As Stephen Orgel has written in his treatment of the place of the Poetics on the early modern English stage, Hamlet is proof positive to a long history of readers of the ubiquity of catharsis. The reason is clear: here is a play that not only shows the purpose of playing to be the release of stifled emotions, but that deploys the theater’s cue for passion to safeguard the state. So neatly does Hamlet seem to capitalize upon a cherished poetics, in fact, that it seems fair to wonder whether its prestige derives from its illustration of the theater’s most redemptive asset. Catharsis, after all, has acquired a crucial function in the dream of justice raised by postmodernity’s guilty past. It provides the sense of collective purpose behind the trials and tribunals that have eventuated from crimes against humanity—including those of Goering, Hess, Speer, et al. at Nuremberg (1945–49), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961), Byron de la Beckwith in Hinds County, Mississippi (1994), Edgar Ray Killen in Philadelphia, Mississippi (2005), as well as the more sustained proceedings of Truth and Reconciliation commissions in Argentina (1983), Chile (1991), El Salvador (1992), and South Africa (2000) to name only a few—all of which are conceived for the purposes of a needy public as expiation for and emancipation from a ruinous age. In The Trial of the Germans Eugene Davidson characterizes the Nuremberg verdict as a “catharsis of the pent-up emotions of millions of people.” The National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington represents “Eichmann” with the apposition “Trial as National Catharsis.” Jason Sokol, in his chronicle of “White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights,” finds among this constituency a tendency to view the convictions of de la Beckwith and Killen as “resolution, catharsis and even justice,” a series of overlapping terms that add up to “closure,” in the words of at least one Mississippian. And the journalist Roger Cohen lauds the South African commission . Walter Benjamin, The Origins of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, introduction by George Steiner (New York: Verso, 1998), 59. . “The Play of Conscience,” 133–51.

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for “provid[ing] a catharsis” that enabled blacks and whites to circumvent the expected catastrophe of civil war and “get[] past the past.” As Sokol writes, “the metaphor of the stage wield[s] a commanding power” as we seek means of recovering from devastating forms of iniquity. Catharsis in particular, as a catch-all term for a curative kind of witnessing, has become our shorthand designation for the penetration of conscience, the extrusion of guilt, and the promise of a clean slate that comprise Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a term coined in the post–World War II fallout to describe the struggle to set right a time that has been put out of joint. In light of these contemporary usages, Hamlet offers a catharsis tailor-made for the long twentieth century; the way the Prince pictures it—as a species of show-trial that will purge whatever is “rotten” from the state (1.4.90)—The Mousetrap retrofits the Poetics to exorcise modernity’s ghosts.10 Consequently, defenders of the theater find much consolation in Hamlet’s philosophy: to a stage always under suspicion, the Vergangenheitsbewältigung of Hamlet’s theater redeems the performance of a play into a thing of conscience or, to be more exact, into the platform across which conscience does its best work. Consider, for instance, the Hamlet-esque mission Desmond Tutu provides as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s mandate: “We are charged to unearth the truth of our dark past, to lay to rest the ghosts of our past, so that they will not return to haunt us.”11 Yet for all its persistence, this reading of the play strains against the findings of Hamlet’s theatrical experiment, for the Hecuba soliloquy, as the overture to that eureka couplet from which the justice of the play descends—“the play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (2.2.600–601)—is less an affirmation of catharsis than its indictment. So feelingly does Hamlet denounce the Player’s expense of passion as a shameful waste (“and all for noth. Eugene Davidson, The Trial of the Germans (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 36; National Holocaust Museum, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007152 (accessed August 5, 2007); Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 330, 332; Roger Cohen, “A South African Model for Reconciling in Iraq?” International Herald Tribune, March 11, 2006, 2. . Sokol, There Goes My Everything, 339. . The word Vergangenheitsbewältigung translates as “the struggle to come to terms with the past.” Excellent studies have been published of the theatrical and performative dimensions of Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimony; see, for example, Catherine Cole’s Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). However, my interest here is to bring out a less specialized understanding of the role of catharsis. 10. Davidson describes the Nuremberg trials as an attempt to “exorcise evil” (Trial of the Germans, 36); Sokol describes the “ghosts of slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, and civil rights” as the prompt to the “atonement cases” that would put them to rest (There Goes My Everything, 337, 330). 11. Cohen, “South African Model,” 2.



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ing!”) that he seems to have crossed that emission with his own emotion, sufficient in Polonius’s regard to stop the show: “Look whe’er he has not changed his colour and has tears in his eyes./Prithee, no more” (515–16). Read from this perspective, which is to say, from a point of view that takes account of how Hamlet acts before ‘Aeneas’s’ performance as well as what he says about it,12 the prompt to Hamlet’s self-reproach (“And I/A dull and muddy-mettled rascal” [561–62]) isn’t that an actor can feign grief better than a Prince can suffer it, but rather that this Prince weeps for ‘Hecuba,’ a mere dramatic “conceit,” and yet “not for a king” and father “Upon whose property and most dear life/A damn’d defeat was made” (551, 564, 565–66). As Rousseau writes, crediting the principle to the ancients (he finds it in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers), “the heart is more readily touched by feigned ills than real ones,” and the judgment the philosopher reaches on this subject is very much in keeping with the melancholy Dane’s: In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves; whereas unfortunate people in person would require attention from us, relief, consolation and work, which would involve us in their pains and would require at least the sacrifice of our indolence, from all of which we are quite content to be exempt.13

If Shakespeare never scripts the full confession of this dilemma, Hamlet’s soliloquy is heavily marked by the effort to suppress it, especially during the revenge fantasy that weeping for Hecuba inspires. Having misspent his passion, Hamlet corrects the bad husbandry of his emotions by putting them to good use: in the performance he dreams up, his outrage over Claudius’s crimes contorts the apprehending public in attitudes of horror, as if in the hope that 12. When Polonius cuts short the Player’s monologue he does not disclose the subject whose pallor and weeping provoke the interruption, leaving many editors to presume that he is describing the performer and not its audience (Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor’s third Arden edition reads the passage this way). But given Polonius’s mission of princely surveillance (“I will find/Where truth is hid” [2.2.157–58]) it is more plausible that Hamlet’s sudden emotionalism, and not the Player’s, motivates the interruption, given Polonius’s disdain for the troupe. 13. Jean Jacques Rousseau, “Letter to M. Dalembert on the Theatre,” in Politics and The Arts, trans. and introduction by Allan Bloom (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960), 25. The letter dates from 1758. Augustine is an unnamed influence on Rousseau’s antitheatricalism. In the Confessions (a work whose title Rousseau poaches), he disclaims against “stage-playes” by reasoning in a similar vein: “But what kind of mercy is it that arises from fictitious and scenic passions? The hearer is not expected to relieve, but merely invited to grieve; and the more he grieves, the more he applauds the actor of these fictions. And if the misfortunes of the characters (whether of olden times or merely imaginary) be so represented as not to touch the feelings of the spectator, he goes away disgusted and censorious; but if his feelings be touched, he sits it out attentively, and sheds tears of joy.” Augustine, Confessions, 3.2.38.

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the affect of disgust—the “ugly feeling” Sianne Ngai has singled out as the most “politically efficacious”—might produce the effect of revolt.14 By purging purgation from his vision of the stage and, more radically, by replacing its harmless diffusion of feeling with dangerous increase, Hamlet offers something on the order of Rousseau’s critique; as Brecht will do, he rejects the idea of feeling something for “nothing,” imagining instead a purposeful anguish that will further his pursuit of truth (“I’ll have grounds/More relative than this” [2.2.599–600]) and reconciliation (“the time is out of joint; O cursed spite/That ever I was born to set it right!” [1.5.196–97]). It is therefore surprising how little The Mousetrap has to do with this mission. After his poignant meditation on the gross inutility of theatrical affect, Hamlet commissions a second performance of a similar stripe, with the only difference that the waste and shame that he suffers are displaced onto another audience. The parallel is surprisingly explicit, since both the slaughter of Priam and The Murder of Gonzago—two performances by the same acting company of “something like the murder of [Hamlet’s] father” (2.2.591)—play out pretty much identically: under his antagonist’s regime of surveillance (“we shall sift him” [2.2.58]; “we will both our judgments join/In censure of his seeming” [3.2.86–87]), first Hamlet and then his uncle are overcome by paroxysms of emotion that twice lead Polonius to stop the show. This recurrence can’t help but color the “thing” of the play—that unnamable quality that turns a retooled scene from a touring company’s B-list repertoire into a means of redressing an unjust past. By having his protagonist seize upon an effect of performance he has only just reviled, and that has only just exposed him to impertinent judgment, Shakespeare renders The Mousetrap a perfect figure of its name: a scheme of entrapment, and thus (to recur to Kezar’s term) a mistrial. To subject Hamlet’s plan to this kind of reckoning means reading against the grain of a judicial poetics that is deeply intertwined with the play’s received purpose. It means, for instance, mistrusting the “emancipatory promise” that Derrida locates in the twinned specters of King Hamlet and Karl Marx. Given the synecdochic quality the play has acquired, it also means undermining the redemptive purpose assigned to playing more generally since, as Derrida writes, Hamlet’s impossible quest “to be the man of right” by setting right the time has become the very “essence of the tragic.” Yet however much the play attributes to drama a just poetics, and however much it trains us to long for poetic justice, it also raises to mind Gosson’s warning that “the rebuking of manners in [the theater] is neyther lawfull nor convenient, but to be held for a kind of labeling, and defaming.” Indeed, the play demonstrates that when this 14. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 354.



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sort of “rebuke” is prosecuted to its furthest extent, there is an uncomfortable equivalence between the purgation that defines catharsis and the sort of purge a despot commands. Particularly in the ancient precedents it evokes but tries to keep forgotten, Hamlet shows that hope “for a justice that one day . . . would be removed from the fatality of vengeance”—the hope that Jill Dolan holds up as the theater’s distinctive contribution to the social good—is utterly bound up with antiquity’s spectacle revenges.15 Hamlet’s Show Trial

What, then, are these sinister and ancient origins of Hamlet’s hope for justice? As several critics noted, the Hecuba scene stages an incident that Plutarch tells twice, first in the Life of Pelopidas and again in the Moralia.16 As an influence that apparently must be repressed, the source is something of a disappointment, however. Given how stealthily Shakespeare’s finely wrought allusion passes, we might expect it to point to the death drive of the early theater archive, with its trove of accidental and injurious news. Instead, the unsafety of Plutarch’s incident seems, at a first pass, to lie entirely in the theater’s favor. In fact, the anecdote is frequently enlisted as proof of the stage’s intrinsic goodness; it appears in the preface to the first English translation of the Poetics (1705, rendered from André Dacier’s French version of 1692) as a rebuke to the antitheatrical argument: those who condemn it [the stage], condemn, not only the most noble Diversion, but the most capable to raise the Courage, and form the genius, and the only one, which can refine the Passions, and touch the most vicious and obdurate Souls. I could give many examples; but shall content myself with relating the Story of Alexander of Pherae: this barbarous man, having ordered Hecuba of Euripides to be Acted before him, found himself so affected, that he went out before the end of the first Act, saying, That he was asham’d to be seen to weep, at the Misfortunes of Hecuba and Polyxena, when he daily imbrued his Hands in the Blood of his Citizens; he as afraid that his heart should be truly mollify’d, that the spirit of

15. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 21, 59; Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 16. See D. M. Gaunt, “Hamlet and Hecuba,” Notes and Queries 16, no. 4 (1969): 136–37; Gaunt credits S. Reingold (1882) and G. E. Mandarin (1896) with the discovery and elaboration of this allusion. See also James E. Freeman, “Hamlet, Hecuba and Plutarch,” in Shakespeare Studies 7 (1974): 197–201. On the basis of the similarity between a simile in the Moralia in which Alexander is “softened” like worked “iron” and Shakespeare’s use of “muddy-mettled,” Gaunt argues that the Moralia is the source text, found by the playwright “in some florilegium,” since there was no available translation at the time.

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Tyranny would now leave the possession of his Breast, and that he should come a private person out of that Theatre into which he enter’d a Master. The actor who so sensibly touch’d him, difficultly escap’d with his Life, but was secur’d by some remains of the pity, which was the cause of his Crime.17

Sidney, who also makes much of Plutarch’s “notable testimony” in his Apology for Poetry, likewise extrapolates the virtues of tragedy from its lesson: The right use of comedy, will, I think, by nobody be blamed. And much less the high and excellent tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue; that maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humors; that with stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded; that maketh us know “The tyrant who rules harshly fears those who fear him/Terror returns to its agent. But how much it can move. Plutarch yieldeth a notable testimony of the abominable tyrant Alexander Pheraes, from whose eyes a tragedy well made and represented drew abundance of tears, who without all pity had murdered infinite numbers, and some of his own blood.”18

For Sidney, Alexander’s tears demonstrate that tragedy is fatal to tyranny in the same manner that a Caledonian bear is fatal to “Laureolus”: both wound deeply and by this violence figure forth the “ulcers” of an unseemly guilt. At a glance, it would appear that Shakespeare takes up Plutarch to promulgate Sidney’s gloss. By inciting a tyrant’s confession and by triggering a murderer’s flight from the theater, the story of Alexander “sensibly touch’d” prefigures The Mousetrap perfectly, shaping it into the kind of salubrious catharsis—what might be describes as a tyrant’s unwitting practice of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—that will come to characterize the pursuit of social justice on a grand scale. It is difficult to imagine a more definitive fulfillment of the play’s “emancipatory promise” to lay to rest the unquiet spirit of an unjust past than Hamlet’s jubilant response to his uncle’s exit: “I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound” (3.2.280–81). To audiences familiar with Plutarch, just 17. André Dacier, Preface to Aristotle’s Art of Poetry, Translated out of the Original Greek according to M. Theodore Goulfton’s Edition. Together with Mr. Dacier’s Notes Translated from the French (London, 1705), sig. A9v. 18. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (or The Defense of Poesy), ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, 3rd ed. rev. and expanded by R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 98. The couplet is from Seneca’s Oedipus.



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as telling is the way the antique source inculpates the villain Claudius as the obvious stand-in for its spectator-tyrant. As James Freeman writes, “in Hamlet’s eyes his uncle is an Alexander,” a “lecherous villain” who has steeled himself against the guilt of his crimes.19 The Mousetrap is thus a pleasing mixture of the classical and the casuistical: once Claudius sees paraded across the stage “all the things that [he] ha[s] done” and shrinks appropriately from his sins’ reflection, he demonstrates, like the wicked king of Plutarch’s lore, that the stage is the place that only villains need fear. A problem arises, though, from the “villain” and “rogue and peasant slave” that ‘Hecuba’ makes of Hamlet (2.2.544). In light of the suffering that precedes his resolution (“the play’s the thing [. . .]”), Hamlet looks to hit upon the idea for The Mousetrap because he has only just been caught in the tight squeeze of Alexander’s implicated position. Certainly ashamed of tears shed for Hecuba, perhaps even “asham’d to be seen to weep, at [her] Misfortunes,” Hamlet looks to cause by his own “changed colour” the interruption of her performance; all of which is to say that circumstantially speaking he presents a clearer figure of the Pheraean despot than his uncle does. To read this as some sort of coded critique seems misguided; the Prince that Shakespeare scripts does little to deserve the analogy. But if Hamlet’s (vicarious) interruption of a spectacle so similar to Alexander’s does not mean what its precedent says it means, then how can Claudius’s retreat from The Murder of Gonzago be taken as a sure sign of a murderer’s confession? At issue is this: while it seems clear enough that “Shakespeare was using Plutarch’s anecdote as his workingmaterial,” it is hard to discern the use the playwright could derive from a formula that can only prove “the distress caused in high personages by a theatrical performance,” as one early translator writes.20 Howsoever venerable its classical origins, there is no science to a conscience-catching scheme that produces the same verdict irrespective of the malfeasance of the royal audience it accuses. And since Shakespeare’s reworking of Plutarch has the theater “unkennel” a “guilt” that cannot be assigned with any forensic assurance to either spectator (3.2.81, 80), that guilt is left to fall instead on “the thing” that fails to differentiate between a tyrant and his victim. As Gosson might say, it is the medium, and not the man who would be “Master” of it, that is at fault here. Rousseau reaches a similar conclusion when he puts Plutarch to work for his own argument: 19. Freeman, “Hamlet, Hecuba and Plutarch,” 199. 20. The phrase is quoted in Gaunt, “Hamlet and Hecuba,” from an unnamed translation of the Moralia, 136.

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I hear it said that tragedy leads to pity though fear. So it does, but what is this pity? A fleeting and vain emotion which lasts no longer than the illusion which produced it; . . . a sterile pity which feeds on a few tears and which has never produced the slightest act of humanity. . . . Thus the tyrant of Phera hid himself at the theatre for fear of being seen groaning with Andromache and Priam, while he heard without emotion the cries of many unfortunate victims slain daily by his orders.21

In rejecting Sidney’s sort of reading, Rousseau could not be more blunt: he regards tragedy as a miscarriage of justice, a misalignment of crime and conscience that acts as a preventative to “the slightest act of humanity,” let alone to the making right, or even to the making less rotten, of the time and the state. Especially pertinent is the “steril[ity]” of the purgation that performance seems to administer: what disturbs Rousseau is how much tragedy’s impact promises, and how much it fails to deliver. For Shakespeare, whose use of the episode is more elaborate, it is possible to be more specific: not merely is tragedy a medium of injustice, but that injustice derives from the dream of truth and reconciliation that tragedy inevitably unleashes. Hamlet proves as much when, worked over by the “working material” of his Plutarchan circumstance, he fantasizes about the theater as the cure to an unjust history, only to turn the stage into a judicial travesty, or show trial. The dodginess of Hamlet’s scheme comes out most clearly during The Mousetrap’s planning stage, when the Prince sets a surprisingly low standard for his uncle’s guilt: “I’ll observe his looks;/I’ll tent him to the quick. If a do blench/I know my course” (2.2.593–94). Claudius’s subsequent, eloquently timed flight does much to quiet our discomfort over the flimsiness of this imagined evidence: as Horatio corroborates, the King rises and flees “upon the talk of the poisoning” (3.2.283), apparently “marvellous distempered” (293). But if given the consideration that the play does not exactly invite, the rules of evidence that govern Hamlet’s production raise the question of whether the King’s acts and words are even salient to this determination. If Claudius had but blanched or “blench[ed]” (2.2.593), or if he had merely sneezed or shifted in his seat, would Hamlet’s verdict have been any different? After the Ghost’s bombshell of an accusation, what timing of the King’s (inevitable) exit would not have registered to him as a confirmation of a crime? And in the unblinking glare of his scrutiny (“mine eyes will rivet to his face” [3.2.85]), what possi­ble demeanor, gesture, or phrase could pass as innocent? While 21. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960), 24.



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the corrob­oration offered later in the play renders these questions moot, the fact remains that Hamlet sets up an implicative model that relies on enlisted evidence to manufacture the proof of a foregone conclusion. The play renders the stage, in other words, a site of forced and false confessions. The upshot of the play’s judicial philosophy thus places Hamlet and Gosson in surprising accord: for both, the ‘wounds’ inflicted by tragedy do not amount to the proof of a guilty conscience, but supply the false pretext for an unjust conviction. That audiences seldom notice as much only proves our persistent unwillingness to detach the feelings and fancies of spectatorship from some sort of justification. As Rousseau knows, there is something insupportable in the idea of idle playgoers cosseted in a state of “sterile pity.” To sustain the illusion of the theater as the “thing” that Hamlet says it is—a consciencecatcher par excellence—is therefore the easier path, particularly since the clues to Hamlet’s injustice are subordinated within the play of an allusion to antiquity that defenders of the theater, including (and especially) the play’s protagonist, never admit. Yet, understated as it is, Shakespeare’s use of Plutarch tells a remarkable tale about the way the theater works—or more precisely, about the way the theater is rationalized into some sort of working order—in early modern England. From weeping for Hecuba comes the unsettling revelation that fiction is palpable in a way that real atrocities are not, for as we see both then (in the case of Alexander) and ‘now’ (in Hamlet’s experience) the spectator who sits still before “foul deeds” is somehow made to heave with anguish before false acts (1.3.257). Remembered in an anecdote that nags at philosophers and poets alike, this paradox (“the heart is more readily touched by feigned ills than real ones”) is nothing less than the provocation to theater theory; it is the cri de coeur for a philosophy of theatrical representation that would redress the intolerable misalignment of false cause to real effect. Sidney takes up the call when he reads the tyrant’s expense of passion as the mark of the stage’s reforming power; in An Apology for Poetry, Plutarch’s episode is theater history’s shining example of the stage’s essential goodness. But should the lesson seem counter to classical fact, he is quick to lay the fault with Alexander and not with tragedy: “if it wrought no further good in him, it was that he, in despite of himself, withdrew himself from hearkening to that which might mollify his hardened heart.”22 What makes this speculation salient to Hamlet’s idea of the theater is how neatly it exhibits the sort of faulty reasoning that Shakespeare, in his unattributed turn to Plutarch, uneasily brings to light. For Sidney’s recourse to the conditional here—his shamelessly unevidenced claim that if only Alexander 22. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, 98.

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had actually watched the whole of Hecuba, he would have returned a nicer king—brings home the degree to which the reformed spectator remains an unfulfilled ideal even in its instantiating case. Driven like Hamlet to attach a purpose to theatrical affect, and thus to make something out of the felt report of “nothing” (“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her,/That he should weep for her?”), Sidney discards the facts of his anecdote to claim that the “wounds” opened by “the high and excellent Tragedy” not only expose to public view the sins of the royal spectator (as he says, it is under tragic duress that “tyrants manifest their tyrannical humors”), they also bring those sins home to roost: “Terror returns to its agent.” He thus precedes Hamlet in showing that it is only by some wild extrapolation—or a marked discontinuity of thought—that we get from Alexander’s tears to the early modern commonplace that turns the theater into a judicial crucible, with tragedy, as the genre that “unkennel[s]” “occulted guilt,” “the thing” that puts “guilty creatures” in the hot seat. The innovation of Hamlet, then, is that it shows the gaps in the apologist’s way of thinking. In contrast to Sidney, who needs Plutarch to demonstrate the use and moral profit of the theater, Shakespeare returns to Plutarch to demonstrate the illusion of usefulness and moral profit that arises from the theater’s strangely palpable report. As Rousseau will do, Shakespeare reveals this dream to be a dangerous kind of wishful thinking, but he also shows how susceptible we are to it, offering as it does a reprieve from the disconcerting fact that the theater makes its feigned presence—its “nothing”—so profoundly felt. In short, Hamlet shows us that being “sensibly touched” by “feigned ills” prompts a rose-tinted vision of what the theater might do that conceals the judicial perplex that the theater, in fact, causes: in Plutarch’s precedent, an admission of guilt that has nothing to do with an awakened conscience; in Hamlet’s experience, a stirring of conscience that has nothing to do with the presence of guilt; and in the climax of The Mousetrap, a guilty verdict that has nothing to do with a fair trial. There is one final way in which Hamlet is tacitly indebted to Plutarch. I have argued that The Mousetrap is born of an urgent desire to turn tragic implication—that feckless form of guilt that Hamlet decries as “all for nothing”— into some sort of true and purposive judgment. This is, in some measure, a lesson that Plutarch draws from Alexander’s example, for as D. M. Gaunt writes: “In the Moralia . . . Alexander punishes the actor on the ground that he has “softened his [i.e., Alexander’s] spirit.”23 As retold in the preface to the Poetics, the result is nearly fatal: the player only “difficultly escap’d with his Life.” The upshot of weeping for Hecuba, then, is not just the persistence of tyranny, but 23. Gaunt, “Hamlet and Hecuba,” 136.



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the occasioning of tyranny’s worst excesses. Judging by its impact upon a notorious despot as well as a philosopher-prince, the result of tragedy’s “stirring of [the] affects” is a pressing need to give someone else something to cry about. Its “Ancient Dignity” thus elaborated, conscience-catching in Hamlet amounts to more than a mistrial; it is wholesale persecution concealed in the guise of catharsis. Countervailing against Dolan’s dream of justice, the vision Hamlet summons by harkening back to Plutarch is the nightmare of the arena, and not just because like a Roman emperor Hamlet uses the theater to prosecute judgment on behalf of the state, though this is striking enough. Even more unsettling is the way that Martial’s epigrams, which recall a time when the stage was literally a place for breasts to be opened, spell out the consequence of Hamlet’s play within the play. As in ancient Rome, so too in Hamlet, the price of shoring up the Prince’s spectatorial equanimity—of ridding him of the shame of his own tears, and thus of maintaining the fiction of his god’seye view—is the persecution of a chosen scapegoat. The King’s Immunity

Of course, it would be easier to notice this persecutorial poetics were Claudius not so ill-suited to the role of victim. As a tyrant who fits the mold of the bad king Alexander, he is a poor substitute for “Laureolus,” the low-born brigand gruesomely executed by a Roman tyrant. More obviously, the wounding of Claudius’s conscience, a type of injury both Gosson and Sidney would have us regard as tantamount to bloodshed, is a markedly bloodless affair; his anguish is thus the palest shadow of that featured in Coliseum entertainments. True, the King is moved—or at least he does move—when presented with the poisoning plot, but like Hamlet under Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s surveillance, he manages to “keep[] aloof ” from the “confession of his true state” (3.1.8, 9–10). And true, the fact of his crime is eventually brought to light by his botched appeal for mercy (“O, what form of prayer/can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murder?’ ” [3.3.51–52]). But the prayer scene, as the definitive corroboration of the Ghost’s accusation, is also the finest evidence of Claudius’s resistance to his nephew’s entrapment.24 In a cynical deployment of one of Herbert’s many metaphors, Claudius unfolds the record of his sin only after sealing himself in the closet of his private chamber; he opens the figurative door to his conscience only after shutting a literal one.

24. For a thorough account of the theology of the prayer scene, see Ramie Targoff, “The Performance of Prayer: Sincerity and Theatricality in Early Modern England,” Representations 60 (1997): 49–69.

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There is a galling theological propriety of this maneuver. When Claudius’s abortive confession prevents his nephew from taking his revenge, the spoiler to Hamlet’s conscience-catching mission becomes casuistry’s prerogative to “secret praier.”25 But a more intransigent obstacle is the spectatorial privilege of kingship: if tragedy is special for its ability to “make[] kings fear to be tyrants,” tyrant-kings are equally special for their ability to stop tragedy in its tracks, and for habitually presiding over the sort of scaffold spectacle in which their judicial authority and their (concomitant) immunity from judgment are ratified by the wounding of someone else. Accordingly, Claudius counters The Mousetrap by devising a public tournament that is a dead ringer for one of Martial’s fatal charades: the fencing match that concludes the tragedy is a deadly form of show “trial” meant to exculpate him and damn his nephew (5.2.165). Hamlet’s tragedy of The Mousetrap therefore fulfills Sidney’s definition of the genre as one that “maketh tyrants manifest their tyrannical humors,” but it also demonstrates that this tyranny arises from the ferocity with which kings defend themselves against the excitations of the tragic, since the persecution they orchestrate is the means they use to shore up their own royal composure. The Prince sets the pattern for this injustice: having registered his own culpability in the wake of Aeneas’s monologue, and having narrated the experience in terms that seem carefully chosen to prove its consequence to be a loss of rank (e.g.: “rogue,” “peasant,” “rascal,” “villain,” “slave,” “drab,” “scullion,” or “stallion” [2.2.544, 562, 567, 544, 582, 583]), he restores his dignity by devising a performance that will turn his uncle into the flinching figure of a “guilty creature.” In the wake of The Mousetrap, which procures its own unwonted perturbation (“The King” is “marvellous distempered” [3.2.291, 293]), Claudius similarly seizes upon the implicative force of play to render his nephew, rather than himself, the victim of a bad conscience: in the fifth act’s ersatz trial by combat, Hamlet’s death is plotted to seem synonymous with Hamlet’s guilt. So it happens that both men, with their clear affinities to Alexander’s precedent, show themselves alike in their fear of “com[ing] a private person out of that Theatre into which [they] enter’d a Master,” as Dacier puts it. The attempt each makes to allay that risk is the degradation of his rival in a performance that doubles as an indictment. The highness of its target means that in each case, this task cannot go smoothly. When the Prince stages The Mousetrap for his uncle—who has lost his brother, assumed the throne, and married the Queen all within the previous month or so—Claudius’s distraught interruption of a play that dramatizes and 25. William Perkins, A warning against the idolatrie of the last times (London, 1601), sig. Q3v.



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criminalizes exactly that turn of events fails to rouse any reaction from the court. And when Claudius plots the fencing match that will prosecute his nephew for the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia, not only does Hamlet’s demise fail to look like justice, it registers as its opposite: “carnal, bloody and unnatural acts” (5.2.386). That neither prince achieves the kind of “palpable hit” he longs for demonstrates how hard it is to turn a “Master” into a “private person” when the object of this transformation is endowed (or has endowed himself ) with a power that is absolute (5.2.282). Unsubject to the “labeling and defaming” that Gosson says is the “headie” pursuit of “the common people” against their own kind, both Prince and King are conditioned to lie so far beyond the grasp of Hamlet’s confessional scenario of “guilty creatures, sitting at a play” that it is only from his rival’s lofty view that either can be said to look guilty. To the rest of the assembled multitude, prudence dictates that men like Claudius and Hamlet, who are by birth or usurpation accorded what Gosson calls an “indefferency of judgement,” are men best regarded with an unjudgmental gaze. As it plays out in Hamlet, then, one problem with tragedy’s power of bringing tyranny to light is that the resulting guilt cannot be prosecuted; “the distress caused in high personages by a theatrical performance” is a matter that remains between those high personages and God. The result is a high degree of irresolution, as critics and audiences of Hamlet are legion in pointing out. But as an exercise in theater theory, the judicial impasse brought about by the play’s royal spectators offers a crucial illustration of the persecutorial mechanics that sustain the conscience-catching stage. The lesson amounts to this: if early modern playgoers wish to remain their own masters in the playhouse and avoid the molestations of unwarranted and inexplicable affect, they would do well to turn the guts of a lowerranking spectator outward, for the look of indifferancy is best achieved when a guiltier-looking creature is thrust into the public eye. Little wonder, then, that it is the bruited gossip of Heywood’s exclaiming widow and not the classical exemplum of Plutarch’s blenching king that Hamlet takes as the basis of his conscience-catching project. The Widow’s Foregone Confession

I have been arguing that the more we scrutinize The Mousetrap, the more Hamlet betrays the scandal behind its “emancipatory promise.” But the strongest evidence of conscience-catching’s injustice lies in the popular lore and local prejudice that inspire it, and render it the sort of “domestike” and “homeborne truth” that Hamlet can reasonably claim to “have heard.” We might consider, for a start, the strangely identical outcries of those unfortunate

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widows that crown the Apology. Though confessions are seldom extemporized affairs in early modern England—in the ecclesiastical courts, the church would often script “the exact words of repentance” to be performed by a sinner before her congregation, and the criminal’s confession (at least, as it has come down to us) is clearly shaped by popular print genre of the scaffold speech—Heywood’s verbatim expostulations of “oh my husband, my husband!” are nevertheless at odds with the conditions of their spontaneous emission.26 It is impossible not to notice that both women ‘accidentally’ spill their guilt in a line that is suspiciously overrehearsed. What is more, the phrase itself is wildly inconclusive. Detached from The Apology’s damning prologue—that the theater has proved “the discoverer[] of many notorious murders”—the phrase “oh my husband, my husband” could signify just about anything, from grief (“Oh [how I miss] my husband, my husband”) to surprise (“Oh [how much that actor looks like] my husband, my husband”) to glee (“Oh [how glad I am to no longer be saddled with] my husband, my husband”).27 As in Claudius’s case, it is only the prior assumption of guilt that transforms the phrase into the confession of a crime. Of course, as in Claudius’s case, this controvertibility can never exonerate the unnamed women whose cases are recounted in The Apology and elsewhere. Heywood’s gloss—“Oh [how bad I feel for having offed] my husband, my husband”—is as legitimate as any other, since the circumstances of their crimes, real or imagined, have disappeared into an irrecuperable past. But

26. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 40. For an illuminating discussion of the limited language available to early modern women, see Gowing’s essay on slander prosecutions, “Language, Power and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London,” in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 26–47. On the rhetorical and formal conventions of the scaffold speech, see J. A. Sharpe, “ ‘Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology, and Public Execution in Seventeenth Century England,” Past and Present 107 (1985): 144–67. It is a cynical feature of the age that wives who reference a dead husband with anything like affection are immediately hauled up on charges of murder. Given the proverbial falsity ascribed to widows and the popular representations of fatal discord within marriage (see J. A. Sharpe’s “Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England,” Historical Journal 24, no. 1 [1981]: 29–48), a more plausible playhouse expostulation before the spectacle of a deceased husband might be the one playwright Elizabeth Cary assigns her tragic protagonist in The Tragedy of Mariam: “Oft have I wished his carcass dead to see” (1.1.18). Then again, Mariam, too, is eventually falsely convicted of husband-murder. 27. See, for example, this exchange from Heywood’s own The Wise Woman of Hoxton, in which nearly the same phrase signifies a wife’s abandonment: Luce: My husband! Oh, my husband! Luce’s father: What of him? Luce: Shall I the shower of all my grief at once Pour out before you? Chartley, my once husband, Hath left me to my shame. (4.1.102) Thomas Heywood, The Wise Woman of Hoxton, ed. Sonia Massai (London: Routledge, 2002).



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that Heywood assumes the readiness of his readers to convict these playgoers on the basis of so little evidence, and in despite of their upstanding characters, demonstrates how much the expostulating widow is a cipher of guilt—a forensic cliché. This is a cliché with real-world consequences, moreover. In an essay on seventeenth-century witchcraft trials, Louise Jackson discusses the case of a Suffolk widow who was railroaded by the justice system on the same slight evidence: Her husband being a bad husband she wished he might depart from her meaninge as she said that he shold die and presently after he died mad . . . she cried out oh! my deare husband, but being asked whether she bewitched him or noe [she] said she wished ill wishes to him and what so ever she wished came to pas.28

Not only do we have it on court record that the lack of a husband, impropitiously exclaimed, is enough of a stigma to eliminate the need for any proof of guilt, the overhastiness of a widow’s conviction is a fact that the accused draw upon, as Raleigh demonstrates when he denounces the injustice of his own treason trial: It is no rare thing for a man to be falsely accused. A Judge condemned a woman in Sarum for killing her husband, on the testimony of one witness; afterwards his man confessed the Murder, when she was executed.29

If we press a little on Heywood’s favorite evidence, then, Taylor’s theory that a play is “a true transparent Christall mirror/To shew good minds their mirth, the bad their terror” turns out to euphemize a concept of theatrical justice that works according to a much narrower logic of cultural surmise. Amid the topsy-turvydom of early modern England’s family values, in which a widow’s upstanding character only encourages the suspicion that like Jael, wife of Heba, she has driven a nail through a man’s skull (fig. 5),30 it is all but inevitable that when Heywood’s women cry out in distraction and amazement, abrupting the theatrical performance and drawing all eyes to them, their 28. Quoted in Louise Jackson, “Witchcraft, Wives and Mothers: Witchcraft Persecution and Women’s Confessions in Seventeenth-Century England,” Women’s History Review 4, no. 1 (1995): 69. 29. Quoted in Karen Cunningham, “A Spanish Heart in an English Body: The Raleigh Treason Trial and the Poetics of Proof, ” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22, no. 3 (1992): 334. 30. The monstrosity of this domestic treason is nicely evidenced by the fact that it is the method of revolt that Caliban proposes to Stephano: “I’ll yield him thee asleep,/Where thou mayst knock a nail in his head” (Shakespeare, The Tempest 3.2.58–59).

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Figure 5.  Jael slaying Sysara, from The Deceyte of Women (1560?). Photograph © The British Library Board (C.20.c.31.(1.)).

strange behavior commands but one interpretation, for a widow hiding something can really only be hiding one thing, and that is the murder of “[her] husband, [her] husband,” the figure whose death happens to coincide with her reprieve from established systems of social and legal control. As D. A. Miller writes in his deft gloss of this hermeneutic, “it is thus a misleading common sense that finds the necessity of secrecy in the ‘special’ nature of the contents concealed, when all that revelation usually reveals is a widely diffused cultural prescription, a cliché.”31 Beyond the scaffold, where guilty widows are confessed, dispatched, and (by Raleigh) invoked, the most visible platform for this cliché’s dissemination

31. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 194–95.



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is the playhouse. In the last decade of the sixteenth century, a tragic subgenre crops up that mines the scaffold speeches of fallen women; two plays of this type, A Warning for Fair Women and Arden of Faversham (1592), dramatize actual husband-murderers recently “arraigned, condemned, adjudged, and burned.”32 As this provenance might suggest, domestic tragedy is not a dramatic form that has met with much acclaim. Traditionally, critics have disparaged it as crude and formulaic, stunted by unprepossessing antiheroines who tend to commit their crimes for no very clear reason and then spend the remainder of their stage time professing a highly didactic repentance. An illustrative example is this passage from A Warning, in which the guilty widow, Anne Sanders, finally owns up to her crime: Here I confess I am a grievous sinner, And have provok’t the heavy wrath of God, Not onely by consenting to the death Of my late husband, but by wicked lust, And wilful sinne, denying of the fault: But now I do repent and hate my selfe Thinking the punishment preparde for me, Not halfe severe enough for my deserts. (2406–13)

But if domestic tragedy enacts the extrusion of “occulted guilt” at the expense of character, rendering the sinner a cipher and her reform a homiletic cliché, this failure might also be called the genre’s greatest triumph. With its recriminatory energies reserved for real widows who have already been apprehended, domestic tragedy is perfectly suited to safeguard its audience from the question that devastates Hamlet: “What’s Hecuba to him?” A play like A Warning even puts the terms of its spectatorial contract up front, to stave off any confusion: Tragedy: I must haue passions that must moue the soule, Make the heart heauie, and throb within the bosome, Extorting teares out of the strictest eyes, To racke a thought and straine it to his forme, 32. Julie A. Carlson tallies the list of plays that fit under this rubric as follows: the anonymous Arden of Faversham (1591–92), A Warning for Fair Women (1599), and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1605); Robert Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies (1601); Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607) and The English Traveller (1625); and William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton (1621). Of these seven, five concern women who sin, confess, and die. Only A Yorkshire Tragedy and Two Lamentable Tragedies feature men’s crimes (“Like Me: An Invitation to Domestic/Tragedy,” South Atlantic Quarterly 98, no. 3 [1999]: 334–35 n. 9.

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Untill I rap the sences from their course, This is my office. Comedy: How some damnd tyrant to obtaine a crowne, Stabs, hangs, impoysons, smothers, cutteth throats, And then a Chorus too comes howling in, And tels vs of the worrying of a cat, Then of a filthie whining ghost, Lapt in some fowle sheete, or a leather pelch, Comes skreaming like a pigge halfe stickt, And cries Vindicta, reuenge, reuenge: With that a little Rosen flasheth forth, Like smoke out of a Tabacco pipe, or a boyes squib: Then comes in two or three like to drouers, With taylers bodkins, stabbing one another, Is not this trim? is not here goodly things? That you should be so much accounted of, I would not else. (Prologue, 44–64)

I have reproduced this exchange at some length because Comedy’s ribbing of her rival genre offers us an unusually specific account of the kind of tragedy A Warning for Fair Women is not, namely, Ur-Hamlet.33 There can be, I think, no stronger way of describing domestic tragedy as a solution for the problem that weeping for Hecuba raises. Instead of rousing sterile pity, A Warning reattaches the “sense”-“rap[ping]” force of performance to a true crime, and ends with a purgation that is hailed as true justice (as Tragedy says, she has, “sluic’d forth sine/And ript the venom’d ulcer of foule lust” [2718–19]). What domestic tragedy thereby adds to the range of dramatic forms that emerge around the time of Hamlet isn’t necessarily good tragedy (though this is certainly arguable), but feel-good tragedy—tragedy that releases us from the worrying feeling of its hold over us. Gertrude’s Uncaught Conscience

Hamlet, I propose, is well versed in this exculpatory regime. If, once again, we take account of how he acts before the play he scripts, and not just what he says about it, the Prince has not just “heard” of A Warning for Fair Women’s 33. For this attribution, see Frederick G. Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 2 vols. (London, 1891), 2: 321.



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“mooved” murderess, he makes her the object of The Mousetrap’s “snappe” and bite. And again, this is a debt that passes tacitly; certainly, Hamlet never acknowledges the shift of his “censure” away from the King and onto the widow in his midst. But the play makes much of his retrained sights, as if to suggest that Shakespeare’s most theatrically literate protagonist is not immune to domestic tragedy’s allure. In fact, the play goes further; when Hamlet drops his fusspot production values (“Speak the speech, I pray you . . . trippingly on the tongue” [3.2.1–2]), and resorts to agitating “the counterfeit presentment of two brothers” (3.4.54) in order to spur his mother to the outcry that she has already failed to deliver on his cue (“Madam, how like you this play?” [3.2.224]), Shakespeare outs the scandal of Actors’ “true use” and “quality.” The proof is in the rapacity of the scene that ensues: not only does the play’s conscience-catching devolve into an unseemly raid on Gertrude’s closet, it instigates the play’s most wrongful death. But most chillingly, the episode is haunted by the “soul” of Rome’s most infamous tyrant. What Heywood insinuates, Hamlet thus pronounces: that the theater’s gift for proving a widow guilty proceeds from a savage, antique bent: ’Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on. Soft! now to my mother. O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom: Let me be cruel, not unnatural; I will speak daggers to her, but use none; My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites,— How in my words somever she be shent, [shamed] To give them seals never, my soul, consent. (3.2.379–90)

We may be tempted to forget the closet scene’s affinity to Nero when Hamlet’s recrimination meets with some success, stirring Gertrude to speak a penance not unlike Anne Sanders’s “I do repent and hate my selfe”: O Hamlet speak no more. Thou turns’t my eyes into my very soul, And there I see such black and grained spots As will not leave their tinct. (3.4.88–91)

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But what keeps the spirit of Roman tyranny hanging in the air is the lack of any clear confession. Every time that Hamlet presses Gertrude further, she cuts him off (“No more” [102]) until the Ghost’s intrusion arrests the inquisition, and the Ghost’s command, “O step between her and her fighting soul” (113), forces him to abandon it altogether. The result is a character so enigmatic as to merit Eliot’s epithet “the Mona Lisa of literature”:34 unshriven and unshent, Gertrude is absorptive of every suspicion and corroborative of none. Even the Ghost’s lament of his wife’s infidelity seems borne of conjecture, merely: killed by his brother in a state of ignorance, he can hardly have witnessed Gertrude’s purported “decline” (1.5.50).35 Yet he cannot drop the subject, or at least, when he does, it is in such a way as to insure that his son won’t: Taint not thy mind nor let thy soul contrive Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven, And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge To prick and sting her. (1.4.85–88)

Henceforward, the “leav[ing]” of Gertrude is undermined by the provocation of her untroubled conscience. Suspected of a crime that looms large in the popular imaginary (i.e., husband-murder) and of the role that, circumstantially speaking, fits her like a glove (again, husband-murderer) she maintains an almost indecent sangfroid before The Mousetrap, despite the flagrancy with which the play holds a mirror up to her own condition (dead husband, hasty remarriage). Even under the pressure of her son’s frenzied inquisition— Peace, sit you down And let me wring your heart, for so I shall If it be made of penetrable stuff, If damned custom have not braz’d it so, That it be proof and bulwark against sense. (3.4.34–38)

she does not to give herself up; all that Hamlet’s “words like daggers” (95) discover are the “black and grained spots” of guilt, but never the grounds for their appearance. Moreover, in a play replete with soliloquies, Gertrude is given but

34. T. S. Eliot makes this comparison in “Hamlet” (1919), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), 47. 35. Laurie Osborne provides a thoughtful account of the contradictions in the Ghost’s narrative in “Narration and Staging in Hamlet and Its Afternovels” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 114–33.



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one opportunity to speak her mind, and in that short passage she offers up the most generic of sentiments: To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss. So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt. (4.5.17–20)

So banal is this quatrain that in the second quarto the lines are enclosed within quotation marks that designate them as sententiae, as if to indicate that tendered in the place of Gertrude’s hotly anticipated disclosure is a “widely diffused cultural prescription,” or “cliché.” The effect is to hold a mirror up to the audience’s disappointment: rather than spilt guilt, Shakespeare exposes the commonplaceness, by which I mean the shabby ad hominem gambit, of the widow’s confession. Hamlet is thus a scathing rejoinder to the theater’s most vindicating philosophy. Not only does the play insinuate that the lore of the guilty creature is the recipe for a mistrial, but by exposing the ghost of Nero in its conscience-catching machine, Hamlet links the appetite for confession to the most depraved impulses of the classical past (“Now could I drink hot blood”). As in the Plutarchan episode, so too in Gertrude’s closet, Hamlet’s efforts to forget antiquity manage instead to show how the early modern stage, in its drive to make something of performance, keeps Rome’s sins remembered. Orestes Redux

There is one last point worth making about the implications of Hamlet’s dramatic inheritance. I have been arguing that the shakedown of the tragedy’s widow is the occasion for Shakespeare to confute the theater’s reputation for justice. Another way the play attempts this confutation is by breaking with the domestic-tragic paradigm at its root, for as critics have long pointed out, Hamlet is a retread of Orestes’s story, right up until the point that he bids Gertrude “good night” (3.4.219).36 Not only does Shakespeare borrow from the Oresteia the central figure of a usurped prince of a murdered father, and the difficulty of his revenge upon the mother and stepfather who are to blame, he takes from Aeschylus the founding precept that a play can repair of a time out

36. On the Oresteian influence of the play and its scholarly reception, see Margreta de Grazia’s “Hamlet” Without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11–12, 20.

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of joint:37 by the end of the Oresteia, and by means of its climactic show trial, the ghosts of an archaic and bloody past are laid to rest, and the audience is ushered into a new age, one “removed,” just as Jill Dolan would have it, “from the fatality of vengeance.” Aeschylus’s classical antecedent, in other words, is Hamlet’s fantasy of justice perfectly realized. It cannot but seem perverse, then, that when he stands on the brink of Oresteian fulfillment—dagger in hand, mother “spot[ted]” in guilt, and all circumstances aligned to reproduce the classical climax—Hamlet balks. In Gertrude’s bedroom, Shakespeare lets slip from his hero’s grasp the Vergangenheitsbewältigung that a dead widow signifies, raising the prospect of his classical source only to foreclose the judicial culmination for which it is so famous. The ends for which Aeschylus’s trilogy offers the means—the birth of a just society founded on the order of law—are thus the apotheosis that Hamlet conspicuously thwarts. Instead we are left to recognize that there is no deus ex machina to emerge from The Mousetrap and read out its trial’s righteous verdict; notwithstanding the catchiness of the notion, plays are not the things to hasten England into an age of clear consciences. As a doppelgänger for the Aeschylean hero who becomes, all of a sudden, his antithesis, Hamlet brings to a standstill the widow-killing mechanics of the theater’s emancipatory promise. It follows that instead of an Aeschylean trial by jury, the play ends with a scene straight out of Martial: under the pretext of a play-“trial” of Hamlet’s swordsmanship (5.2.165), “true punishment” is doled out. That the scheme goes wrong, leaving Laertes dead and the King “justly served” by a “poison temper’d by himself ” (5.2.332, 333), supplies no redemption to theatrical performance per se, since the whole of Denmark as we know it is carried off by its catastrophe. Instead, the rather more daunting insinuation is that while the death by spectacle may be a feature of the Roman amphitheater, where it glorifies the judicial power of “the cruellest Emperours, as Caligula, Nero, Domitian and others,” it is a thing beyond the conscience-catching, time-redeeming purposes to which it is put.38 Hamlet’s final contribution to early modern theatrical philosophy is therefore his tragedy’s demonstration that whatever the theater is enlisted to show (“guilty creatures, sitting at a play,” or “Laureolus on no false gibbet”) is put at risk by the medium itself, which inevitably careens of the course of its scripted event and headlong into disaster. Performance, in 37. Aegisthus, like Claudius, is a relative to the prince he usurps, though this time he is a cousin: the son of Orestes’ great-uncle, Thyestes. 38. Philippe de Mornay, A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian religion, trans. Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding (London, 1587), sig. Do7v.



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other words, doesn’t favor the just; its inculpating force, in the use of which Hamlet falters and Claudius proceeds with self-destructive abandon, turns out to take down in equal measure both of the men who would make something of it, as if to prove the theater’s catastrophic response to its instrumentalization. This is a lesson already well exampled to Shakespeare’s audience. There is, after all, no great age that signals to posterity through its ruins as Rome does, offering the citizens of early modern England who pass along its broken vias a reminder of the hurt that comes to a culture that puts fooling at the center of its civilizing process (“the whole body of this people made the effusion of humane blood, and the slaughtering of men, their common sport and pastime,” writes one early modern historian).39 It takes a marked effort, therefore, to fend off the sense of doom that arises from the early modern English theater’s will to classicism. Perhaps the reason that Hamlet remains the index of what is good about the stage is that at a crucial moment that effort is duly made: “Let not the soul of Nero enter this bosom.” But the reason the play remains so rich a testament to the early modern English understanding of performance is that it demonstrates the impossibility of exorcizing Rome. The End of Rome

Concomittantly, perhaps the reason Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1629) has received nothing like the interest reserved for Hamlet is its frank embrace of the theater’s desolating, Neronian soul. To the extent that Shakespeare’s tragedy has remained the exemplar of Sidney’s and Heywood’s hopeful brand of poetic justice, The Roman Actor comes across as the period’s antiHamlet; as Orgel writes, “If one wanted a text to demonstrate the genuine relevance of the wildest antitheatrical polemics to actual theatrical practice in Renaissance England, The Roman Actor would do nicely.” For Orgel, the lesson of the play is the stage’s indefatigably bad influence; what I find even more arresting than The Roman Actor’s endorsement of “Gosson, Stubbes and Prynne,” though, is the unapologetic way the play roots out the pro theatrical argument at its source, exposing the Ancient Dignity of acting as anything but.40 Massinger goes about this business methodically, by having Paris, the play’s actor-hero, hauled before a stage-hating Senate to answer Gosson’s claim that actors “spue up theire cunning to deface” innocent men. He counters the 39. George Hakewill, An apologie of the povver and prouidence of God in the gouernment of the world (London, 1627), sig. Zv. 40. Orgel, “The Play of Conscience,” 148.

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accusation by recurring to Heywood’s favorite story: “if a matron” “Cries out, ’Tis writ by me’ ” then certes, the blame lies with her: “We cannot help it” (1.3.119–22). The philosophy of conscience-catching is thus distilled to a simple rule: the sting of performance is always the fault of the spectator who suffers it. No less than four times Paris asserts that the theater is innocent of the pangs of conscience that it provokes, which is why he says we should regard the stage as a more perfect form of “torture”: I once observed In a tragedy of ours in which a murder Was acted to the life a guilty hearer Forced by the terror of a wounded conscience To make discovery of that which torture Could not wring from him. (2.1.90–95)

In this, the play’s fifth pass at the theater’s most self-sanctifying lore, it is impossible to miss just how closely the stage’s deft touch for finding “where truth is hid” resembles a dictatorship’s strong-armed methods of truth-production.41 Massinger makes much of this affinity by having the tyrant Domitian try it out. After setting Paris free to reopen his theater, the Emperor sends two sena­tors to public execution, but with the following proviso to his attending spies: ’Tis great Caesar’s pleasure, That with fixed eyes you carefully observe The people’s looks. Charge upon any man That with sigh or murmur does express A seeming sorrow for these traitors’ deaths. (3.2.46–50)

Once again, it is difficult to view this scenario as anything other than a caustic rebuttal of the theater’s emancipatory promise.42 As if to expose the tyranny of the early modern stage’s conscience-catching ambitions, Domitian takes what he has heard from Paris about guilty matrons to contrive a loyalty test 41. Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) remains the seminal discussion of torture as truth production; see especially “The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power” (27–59). 42. As William West points out, this sort of testing was a famous component of Nero’s tyranny; in Elyot’s The Image of Governance, we are told that Nero put to torture spectators who responded inappropriately to his imperial shows (Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 4).



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for the citizens of his police state.43 As the Emperor says, scanning the anxious ranks of spectators, he will seize on anything, even a blanch (an evocation of Hamlet’s “blench”?) as the sign of treason: “Who looks pale, or thinks/That I am cruel?” (3.2.79–80). This travesty of The Mousetrap would be less disturbing were it not so hard to refute. The play raises a difficult question: why should not a grimaced sympathy for the state’s ‘enemies’ be taken as such? Certainly, the iniquity of this scheme is advertised by the iniquity of its inventor, but the reason for its judicial failure once again comes down to the relentless problem at the heart of Hamlet, the same one that Shakespeare’s philosopher-Prince cannot resolve, which is the discrepancy between feeling and fact. That “sad object[s] may beget compassion” (RA 3.2.22), even if those objects are as nothing to the beholder—indeed, even if they prove to be “nothing” at all—is Hamlet’s metaphysical stumbling block, one temporarily alleviated by the factitious philosophy that “If, ” as Paris says, performance leads “you[]” to “feel something in your bosom,” the reason can only be that it “puts you in remembrance of things past,/Or things intended” (1.3.136, 138–40). As a precept of performance, this neat realignment of truth and feeling is reassuring, and the triumphant history of Hamlet’s reception shows how deeply audiences are attached to it. But the impossibility of maintaining a look of indifferency before the Senators’ executions shows that even for the ‘guiltless’ (a role that is ironically assigned the Emperor’s Machiavellian henchmen) there is no escaping implication, for irrespective of what Paris would like us to believe, the theater operates in excess of any real-world analogies. Hence the Emperor’s lackey Parthenius, a man bereft of any but the most sterile pity, struggles to maintain his composure before the suffering of his political rivals: “I dare not show/A sign of sorrow; yet my sinews shrink,/The spectacle is so horrid” (3.2.81–83). Equally disconcerting is the violence with which The Roman Actor detaches the impact of performance from the claim that it “shew[s] good minds their mirth, [and] bad their terror.” Insistently, the plays within this play fail to ignite any spark of conscience from audiences in need of rebuke, beginning with The Bacchae (the play on the boards when The Roman Actor opens) that does nothing to check the zealotry of the Senate’s antitheatrical mob, and including “The Cure of Avarice” that so utterly fails to “work compunction” it exacerbates the stinginess of a notorious miser (2.1.108), and “The False Servant” that leaves Paris, just caught by the Emperor in the Empress’s embrace, fatally 43. See Tracy Davis’s article, “Theatricality and Civil Society,” for real-world examples of this type of audience “scrutiny” (in Theatricality, ed. Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 138).

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blind to the accusation in its title (4.2.207). But if the theater can never be mistaken for an art that pricks the conscience, it is equally recalcitrant to the tyranny of its most notorious fan. When Domitian arranges to play an actor’s part in order to take his cuckold’s revenge, the spectacle falls flat: O villain! Thankless villain!—I should talk now But I have forgot my part. But I can do— Thus, thus and thus. [Kills Paris] (4.2.281–83)

The farcical fumbling of the play’s climax proves how manifestly the theater refuses to do the Emperor’s dirty work. Instead, The Roman Actor suggests that while the stage is certainly not good, it is not intrinsically bad, either. Here, bad theater—theater that is the tool of a very bad man—is simply bad theater, in much the same way that Hamlet’s “good” theater—from its creaky dumb show to its final, frantic motion of painted kings—is bad theater, too.44 In Massinger’s tragedy, there lies beneath the petty purposes of its players and patrons a stage so unfriendly to instrumentalization that those who hinge something upon it are swiftly dead. It could be argued that this notion has classical roots; in a memorable passage on the theater of Curio, a building made up of two semicircular stages that hinged together (he says) to create a single arena, Pliny excoriates the “follie” of his age: “behold the uniuersall state and people of Rome,” “supported between heauen and earth” by only “two pins or hookes.”45 If The Roman Actor can be said to take a stand on the theatrical controversy of its age, it is to reiterate Pliny’s point that one ought not make a platform out of so giddy a platform. As Paris tells his company (once out of the Senate’s earshot), acting is less a vehicle of virtue or vice than a preparative to public execution; its only purpose is to show us how to disappear into death’s abyss: We, that have personated in the scene The ancient heroes and the falls of princes,

44. Critics have puzzled over the creaky dramaturgy of The Mousetrap. In an attempt to exculpate Hamlet from the sin of bad playwriting, Andrew Gurr reads the dumb show as a “mistake[n]” addition of the players, whose “premature[] revealing of the mousetrap” provokes the “savagery with which [Hamlet] greets them when they come out to start the play itself ” (The Shakespearean Stage, 4). 45. Pliny the Elder, The historie of the vvorld, Commonly called, the naturall historie of C. Plinius Secundus tr. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), sigs. Dddivv–Dddvr. Peter S. Donaldson offers a compelling account of Curio’s theater in relation to the “bloody games” of Julie Taymor’s film Titus. “Game Space/Tragic Space” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 476.



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With loud applause, being to act ourselves, Must do it with undaunted confidence. Whate’er our sentence be, think ’tis in sport; And though condemned, let’s hear it without sorrow, As if we were to live again tomorrow. (1.1.51–57)

This is dubious stuff to raise the spirits of his fellow men, but it nicely describes the telos Massinger attributes to Roman acting. At each of several opportunities—and the play supplies several of them, from the epistle that names Martial as one of its sources, to the death sentence that ends Philargus’s botched morality play, to Paris’s on-stage demise—Massinger reminds us that the Roman tradition of wielding stagecraft as statecraft always spells doom.46 This is never clearer than during the retooled Mousetrap, when the Emperor’s victims remain mild and smiling throughout the tortures they suffer. Domitian prods them (“for my sake roar a little” [3.2.84]), reproaches them (“By Pallas,/It is unkindly done to mock his fury/Whom the world styles Omipotent!” [3.2.86–88]), and at the last he even casts himself as the victim of the violence he has impotently inflicted (“I am tortured/In their want of feeling torments” [3.2.88–89]). Yet he can do nothing to convince the men to despair and die. Instead, they pattern themselves after the “pure untainted soul” of their Christ-like “master,” “for whom,” and in whose image they “suffer” while awaiting his summons to grace (3.2.63, 64, 62).47 The Senator Rusticus summarizes the effect on his tormentor: “our calm patience tread[s]/Upon the neck of tyranny” (3.2.95–96), which the Emperor, by now in a panic, corroborates: “By my shaking/I am the guilty man and not the judge” (3.2.117–18). 46. Thomas May, the translator of Martial I discussed in my last chapter, commends The Roman Actor by saying that it exceeds even “Martiall’s wit bestow’d/[In] lasting Epitaph” (10–11). A play called The Cure of Avarice is the first of the play’s inset, conscience-catching spectacles. It fails when Philargus, the miser for whom it was devised, proves entirely resistant to the mirror held up to his nature. Demands Domitian: Now, Philargus, Thou wretched thing, has thou seen thy sordid baseness And but observed what a contemptible creature A covetous miser is? Dost thou in thyself Feel true compunction, with a resolution To be a new man? (2.1.424–29) To which Philargus finally replies: I must not part with My gold; it is my life; I am past cure. (435–36) Domitian immediately has him hauled off and hanged. 47. This “master” is identified by Massinger as “Thrasea” (3.2.64), the senator and stoic philosopher Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus, who was summarily executed under Nero in AD 66. Famous for his discussions of the nature of the soul, Thrasea is well suited to the part of Roman Christ-figure.

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What is so intriguing about this scene is the culmination it supplies to Acting’s Ancient Dignity—that foundation of the English stage that yields without really ending into Heywood’s account of late, “domestike truth[s].” As if to rewrite Heywood’s Apology from last to first, Massinger opens his play by showing us how the poignancy of performance—the matron’s hapless “ ’Tis writ by me!”—led Rome to conflate theater and punishment. In the execution scene, he then indicates that this poignancy will lead to Rome’s undoing, for once “the sad object” of the state’s tormented victims “beget[s] compassion” (3.2.22), the end of the Empire is nigh: as surely as Rusticus’s holy ghost will come back to haunt its persecutor, tyrannical drama will bring on revolt and ruin. It cannot but be so, for the cataclysmic supersession of Antiquity’s fall and the medieval period’s rise is written in a theatrical idiom: in a turn of events that will, in turn, doom the unified Church to sectarian fragmentation, the scaffoldstage of the arena furnishes the platform for Christianity’s dissemination. The achievement of The Roman Actor, then, is its unstinting depiction of the catastrophic impulse that the early modern English stage is built on. With startling bluntness, Massinger conveys the lesson that if “an Argument for the great Degeneracy of the Romans,” was their “delight[] with the bloody Entertainments of the Amphitheatre, where the Gladiators mangled and killed one another for the Sport and Pastime of the cruel Spectators,”48 then maintaining the stage in the name of the “guilty creatures” killed by it cannot help but evoke same ruinous imperative. By reattaching the theater’s most self-sustaining lore to its Roman foundations, Massinger proves that Heywood’s “domestike” and “home-borne truth” is a classical import that rallies the public’s good opinion by making performance a Roman holiday—and thus an obliterating art. In a period that never fails to recognize itself as Rome nouvant, Massin­ ger’s point is one that antitheatricalists are keen to mine: “compare London to Rome and England to Italy, you shall finde the Theaters of the one, the abuses of the other to be rife among us.”49 A favorite tack is to hold up the ruin of the classical past as the pattern of a futureless present, as John Greene does when, refuting Heywood’s Apology point by point, he quotes from “Marcus Aurelius his letter” to Lambertus:50 Then saw I Rome, invincible to the valiant men, that day overcome with loiterers. Rome, which could never be won by the Carthaginians, is now won by 48. Richard Blackmore, A Paraphrase on the Book of Job (London, 1700), sig. av. 49. Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, sig. C5r. 50. I. G. ( John Greene), A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (London, 1615), sig. F4r (marginalia).



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Jesters, Players and Vagabonds: Rome, which triumphed over all the Realms is now vanquished.51

At a glance, this looks like a conventional lament of the theater’s bad influence. But read with an eye to performance’s ontology of disappearance, the letter spells out the spirit of the theater’s relation to history, insofar as the rise of the stage means the decay of the age. In perfect inverse proportion, the theater’s triumph corresponds to Rome’s disappearance, such that at the height of its depravity, the empire is nothing but its evanescent performances, which is as much as saying that it is nothing at all. A final anecdote featuring Laureolus makes this point all too well. Among Caligula’s many infamous entertainments, Suetonius tells us, was a “shew or Enterlude entituled LAUREOLUS,” in which the action was performed, following the custom of the day, first as a fatal charade, then as a farce. Apparently the shed blood of the first actor-victim was so pleasing to the Emperor that the comedians attempted to revive its gore: “many more of the Actours in a second degree [those performing the comic reprise] strived . . . to give some triall and experiment of the like cunning; the whole stage by that meanes flowed with bloud.” Descending into the “cloisture” of the blood-soaked theater to applaud the surviving company, Caligula was surprised and assassinated by his own guard: “with thirtie wounds [they] dispatched and made an end of him.”52 To those who tally up “the judgments which God hath inflicted upon the Players, and [their] beholders,” the fact that “Caius Caligula the Emperour was slaine at a play” is a sure sign of God’s animus for the theater and its patrons (“a just rewarde, and a fit Catastrophe,” writes Gosson).53 But the more unsettling implication is the fundamental incoherence—the foundationlessness, even—of an epoch that maintains justice by theatrical means, for at the height of Rome’s “degeneracy,” the distinction between performance and history—or tyrannical drama and tyrannicide, in this case—is catastrophically vexed. Massinger’s play shows us that invoking the guilty widow to justify the stage must revive this confusion, since the domestication of tragedy into a conscience-catching art is merely a new way of perpetrating Domitian’s 51. Ibid., sig. Gr. 52. Suetonius, The Historie of Tvvelve Caesars Emperours of Rome, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1606), sig. O3v. 53. Dudley Fenner, A Short and Profitable Treatise, of Lavvfull and Unlavvfull Recreations and of the Right Use and Abuse of Those that are Lavvefull (London, 1625), sig. D1v; Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, sig. C3v.

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antique revenges (“I have forgot my part. But I can do—/Thus, thus and thus”). Still, it isn’t The Roman Actor from which we draw our theatrical philosophy, but Hamlet, with its apparent embrace of Heywood’s guilty creature lore. And so, as Bede foresaw, the Coliseum continues to hold us in its grip: we entrust ourselves to its crumbling scaffold at every moment that we embrace the false consciousness of a theater that catches consciences.

The poyson creep[s] on secretly. stephen gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions Alas, we cannot but with shame and griefe acknowledge, that our moderne Play-Poets doe not onely record and publish to posterity in their lascivious Enterludes, . . . but likewise dive into oblivions deepest Lethe, resuscitating those obsolete putred wickednesses of former ages, which Hell had long since buried in her lowest Cels, lest present and future times should be so happy as not to imitate them, or finally to forget them. william prynne, Histrio-mastix

3 The Theater as Infection The Toxic Middle Age

The Roman Actor has brought us to the imminent fall of Rome and its persecutorial mode of performance. But before embarking on the fugitive history that arises in its wake, I need to revise an earlier statement. I have said that there was no age that signaled through its ruins as Rome did, haunting early modern posterity via the archeological remains of the hurt came of antique fooling. This is true inasmuch as the medieval age’s signaling through its ruins is much worse. Certainly, Rome’s past looms large, and memorializes a loss that is, as Bede’s apothegm tells us, sweeping, imminent and explicitly theatrical (“When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall./When Rome falls, the world shall fall”). But what John Foxe calls the “middle age” of the Christian Church is a still-living memory: its ruins are not patinated but fresh and raw, hacked out during

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the relatively recent violence of iconoclastic attacks. There is more at issue here than temporal proximity; another way of putting the matter is to say that whereas Rome is long dead, Roman Catholicism, in its English incarnation anyway, is freshly killed. The look of this recent past, which comes across in defaced pictures, repurposed monasteries, and vanished monuments, altarpieces, and relics, is therefore the look of the effort to leave it behind. Not very implicit in what John Weever lamentingly calls the “small continuance of magnificent strong buildings” during England’s iconoclastic period is the fear of a past will not stay in the past, for the disfiguration and dismantling of Protestantism’s Catholic inheritance is, at its most sanctioned, a suppression of that inheritance’s enduring appeal. A ballad account of the fate of the “gogle-eied Rood of Boxley,” one of the more infamous objects smashed in the first wave of Protestant altar-stripping, locates the problem of idolatry in its allurement of the eye: . . . we poore soules Begyled with idolles, With fayned miracles and lyes, By the devyll and his docters, The pope and his procters: That with such, have blerid our eyes.

Commensurately, the Rood’s infamous end—it is publicly taunted, disemboweled (to expose the mechanisms that made it move), and dispatched with such scrupulousness that “not one peece” is left whole—illustrates how much the future of Protestantism depends upon the quashing of past beguilements. The King’s “speciall motion” to consign “all the notable images, vnto the which were made any especiall pilgrimages, and offerings” to the fire makes the cease

. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of matters most speciall and memorable (London, 1583), vol 1, sig. Nvv. . John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (London, 1631), sig. B2v. . John Ponet, A short treatise of politicke pouuer (London, 1556), sig. Kvr. . William Gray, “The Fanstassie of Idolatrie,” published in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563), quoted in Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars in England, c. 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 409. . C. Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England (London: Camden Society, 1875–77), 1:76, quoted in Margaret Aston, “Iconoclasm in England: Official and Clandestine,” in Iconoclasm versus Art and Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson and Ann Eljenholm Nichols (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1988), 57. For a reassessment of this ‘puppet’s’ chicanery, see Leane Groenveld, “A Theatrical Miracle: The Boxley Rood of Grace as Puppet,” Early Theatre 10, no. 2 (2007): 11–50.



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of Catholicism spectacularly coincident with the effort to cut off its art’s eyeblearing spell. A past conditioned by this sort of vigorous repudiation is never very amenable to remembrance. If Foxe’s “middle age” can only be kept apart from “these our latter days” by fending off its still-dangerous influence—in homiletic parlance, by turning away from the “most deadly contagious filthines” or “Spirituall Poyson” of the idol’s entrancing look, and hence, in civic practice, legislated by royal edict, by the physical breaking of its marble or wooden stare—then the possibility of that past’s return is ever-present. Since Catholicism’s surpassing hangs on the degree to which its images can be kept from recollection, the middle age looms over England’s early modernity as the threat of its future outbreak. This is no idle fear, but a hard-learned lesson: the Protestant dramatist John Bale recalls how Queen Mary, “entoxicated” with the Pope’s “idolatrous poison,” “receyued into [the] common wealth” the “great” “blindnesse” that “K[ing] Henry the eyght banished. Henceforward, it is always the case that “Romyshe lore” remains confined to a time “long before” solely by the effort to keep it unseen. Which is to say that at this volatile moment, the ‘Dark Ages’ become disconcertingly performative: if once The Ruines of Rome assured us that “all things” were “The prey of Time,” now, it takes nothing more than a wayward look, or a wayward way of looking, to conjure the Catholic past back into being.10 One effect of early modernity’s precarious hold on its present is the remarkable synonymy that emerges between bad spectatorship and contamination. Because the price of freedom from “the pope and his procters” is the vigilant suppression of their gimcrackery, the “Spirituall poyson” of Catholicism and idolatry are rendered very nearly the same thing. One problem with this equivalence is how difficult it must then be to keep from ushering in perdition, for though there are countless homiletic demands to “clear[]” “the sight,”11 and though there are countless sites that are, by Protestant mandate, cleared, the . This motion is made by Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, in 1531. John Weever reproduces it in Ancient Funerall Monuments, sig. L2r. . Foxe, Actes and Monuments, vol. 1, sig. Nvv; Henry Ainsworth, An Arrow Against Idolatrie (London, 1624), sigs. A6v–A7r; William Crashaw, The Parable of Poyson in Five Sermons of Spirituall Poyson (London, 1618). . John Bale, The pageant of popes (London, 1574), sig. dv. . R.M., A Newe ballade [“O Dere Lady Elysabeth”], London, 1560. 10. Weever excerpts Spenser’s 1591 translation of Bellay’s sonnet sequence The Ruines of Rome at the start of his discourse on Ancient Funerall Monuments, sig. B2v. 11. Sampson Price, The Clearing of the Saint’s Sight (London, 1617).

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fact that clergy and councilmen remain thus exercised only proves that the eye is never secure from the idol’s appeal, regardless of how thoroughly the nation has voided itself of sacred representation. Then again, since the idol is merely the medium of a “life” (as Richard Schechner says) or “living presence” (as David Freedberg writes) that continues to drive the Reformed church to avert its gaze, it stands to reason that the stripping of the altars is never sufficient to purge the air of idolatry’s pollution.12 As W. J. T. Mitchell argues, paraphrasing Marx, “the . . . Christian iconoclast is the idolater,” insofar as his or her effort not to look only shores up the power of the unseen germen for which the Rood of Boxley (for instance) plays a momentary host.13 The dilemma that idolatry creates is thus a classic paradox: by schooling its citizenry in the virulence of a past that must (therefore) be forgotten, post-Reformation England keeps idolatry’s virus active, for if remembering Catholicism is the prerequisite to England’s apophatic Protestantism, remembering Catholicism—and thus thinking its bad ways of thinking—is also what causes Catholic history to repeat itself. The effort to pull down the prompts to a medieval mindset is a lesson in the infeasibility of a bliss built on ignorance. Impracticable as it is, Protestantism’s forgetfulness nevertheless hobbles the recovery of the early modern English understanding of what, dramatically speaking, has just preceded it. A past whose beholding is sure to poison the present—a past with a history of just this sort of toxic resurgence—is, to say the least, recalcitrant to scrutiny. The failure to account for medieval England’s theater history is thus a much more pathological disavowal than Hamlet’s “not like Nero,” for despite the ubiquity of the charge that “Popish priests and Jesuites” “have turned the Sacrament of Christs body and blood into a Masseplay,” Catholicism is guilty of more than an overinvestment in performance.14 To early modern England, Catholicism is performance: a beguiling sight that retains the power to corrupt Protestant disbelief. Speech act theory gives this power a name: Catholicism, as J. L. Austin might say, exerts an unstanched illocutionary force. But it is Artaud who accounts for this problem in the idiom of this study: it is his argument that the transmission of “feelings that do not benefit or even relate to [one’s] real condition,” feelings that scourge the victim by an unseen, unknown science, defines the dissemination of both “The Theater and The Plague.”15 12. Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985) 35; David Freedberg, The Power of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 245. 13. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 200. 14. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. P4v. 15. Artaud describes this mystery in his Preface: “for example, on an island without any contact with modern civilization, the mere passage of a ship carrying only healthy passengers may provoke the sudden



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“The Theater and the Plague”

The homology is not Artaud’s invention; “The Theater and the Plague” draws its inspiration from the world of John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (c. 1633), the essay’s “passional” dramatic example.16 At the heart of Artaud’s pestilential theory, therefore, is a dramatic milieu in which theaters are not only thought “verye dangerous for the spreadinge of Infection,” but taken as the sign and source of the disease’s evil.17 An Act by the Common Council in 1574 illustrates this thinking: “to play in plagetime is to encrease the plage by infection: to play out of plagetime is to draw the plage by offendinges of God upon occasion of such playes.”18 Though the attack is less vehement than those antitheatricalists launch (one tract describes stages “behung with chaines of Garlicke, as an Antidote against [the players’] owne infectious breaths”),19 its offhanded presence in what is mainly carefully argued civic policy demonstrates the ubiquity of theatrical dread even in the midst of early modern epidemiology. Historians of the plague have shown the reasons behind this stage-fearing rhetoric.20 It was widely observed that both plays and plagues occurred in the summer, both took hold in the poorer subdivisions of the city, and both gripped the lower sort with special virulence.21 The circumstances of the outbreak of diseases unknown on that island but a specialty of nations like our own: shingles, influenza, grippe, rheumatism, sinusitis, polyneuritis, etc.” (“Preface: The Theater and Culture,” in The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards [New York: Grove Press, 1958], 9) 16. Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague” in ibid., 30. 17. “Act of Common Council of London” (Dec. 6, 1574), quoted in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:274. In The Medieval Theater of Cruelty, Jody Enders offers an alternative genealogy for Artaud’s manifesto, locating the idea of cruelty in medieval legal and theatrical rhetoric. I find Enders’s book persuasive and elegant, and my suggestion that Artaud’s pestilential tropology speaks (also) to a later moment is not offered as a contradiction to her argument (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002). 18. “Answer of the Corporation of London enclosing the Act of Common Council of 6 Dec,” quoted in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:301, also quoted in F. P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare’s London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 51. The answer is to a petition on behalf of the Queen’s Men requesting increased latitude in plague time. The City Fathers are not alone in employing this kind of formulation; consider, for instance, how readily William Harrison slips into a similar conflation of cause and conduit in this entry in his Chronologie (circa 1576): “Plaies are banished for a time out of London, lest the resort unto them should ingender a plague, or rather disperse it, being alredy begonne,” quoted in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:269. 19. I.H., This World’s Folly: A Warning Peece discharged upon the Wickednesse thereof (London, 1615), sig. B2r. Michael Neill offers a deft reading of this pamphlet in Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 26–29. 20. See, in particular, Barbara Freedman’s “Elizabethan Protest, Plague, and Plays: Rereading the Documents of Control” for a discussion of the reasonableness of the Lord Mayor’s precautions (ELR 26, no. 1 [1996]: 34–35). 21. Poorer neighborhoods were more prone to higher transmission of the plague because of their crowding (ibid., 34), and their higher incidence of rat infestation. They were also less capable of sacrificing infected bedding and linens (see Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague. Containing the natures, signes, and

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plague’s outbreak make the city fathers’ false leap from correlation to theatrical causation understandable enough. Yet once this error is thus rationalized, the resulting precept can have little to say to us or to Artaud.22 By way of arriving at a richer understanding of the way early modern England understood the infectiousness of performance, this chapter asks what happens when we don’t consign to the antitheatrical wastebasket the culture’s conflation of plague and playhouse; what happens if, like Artaud, we read the city fathers’ tautological thinking less for what it gets scientifically wrong than for what it gets theatrically right? This is not to deny the vested interests that buttress the fathers’ maxims, which are well evidenced by the city’s several attempts to constrain the emerging professional theaters,23 but simply to point out that fearing the stage—and in particular, fearing its communicability—is not the same thing as (understandably) misunderstanding it. On the contrary, I will argue that the city fathers’ practice of epidemiology articulates an early and acute strain of performance studies. Let me start by admitting that Artaud’s presiding role in this argument is not a boon to its credibility. No theater theorist is as invested in the figure of the plague as Artaud, but as Stanton Garner has discussed, no theater theory is so routinely debunked as scientifically unsound.24 Such complaints, I would add, are essentially correct; the contempt Artaud expresses for the “tadpole[s]” brought to light by Pasteur’s microbiology puts him on the wrong side of medical history. But Artaud has no interest in the methods of sound science. As researched and learned as his essay plainly is, its manner of setting straight “the errors of historians or physicians” is more gestural than evidentiary;25 Artaud’s

acidents of the same, with the certaine and absolute cure of the Fevers, Botches and Carbuncles that raigne in these times (London, 1603), sig. L2v), and more likely to purchase objects pawned from infected houses, a practice that was outlawed but commonplace (see The Royal College of Physicians’ Directions for the Plague [London, 1636], sig. Hr). 22. For a different take on this problem, see Leeds Barroll: “Current Shakespearean criticism is too quick to dismiss the prescientific and practical steps adopted for plague suppression in the Elizabeth era merely as the futility of superstition and ignorance” (Politics, Plague and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991]), 72. 23. See Wilson, 51–52; also Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 7–9, 213. 24. Stanton B. Garner Jr., “Artaud, Germ Theory, and the Theatre of Contagion,” Theatre Journal 58 (2006): 1–14. For a gripping account of Artaud’s relevance to history at its most senseless, see Anthony Kubiak’s Altered States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 25. Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague,” 18. The essay references literature and history widely; clearly Artaud has pored over the medical and city records of eighteenth-century Marseilles, but he draws into his argument such far-flung matters as 1502 Provence, 660 BCE Japan, Herodotus, Augustine, and John Ford’s play.



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poetics are never about pinning down the theater’s “metaphorics of disease” but succumbing to them.26 Garner proves as much with a telling example of Artaud’s theory in action: In [Anaïs] Nin’s memorable account of Artaud’s “Theater and the Plague” lecture at the Sorbonne on 6 April 1933, the actor/playwright shifted from reading his text to replicating the symptoms of plague through and on his own body. As Nin wrote, “He made one feel the parched and burning throat, the pains, the fever, the fire in the guts. He was in agony. He was screaming. He was delirious. He was enacting his own death, his own crucifixion.” By the end of this performance, Artaud was lying motionless on the floor.27

Necessarily, there is some savor of charlatanism to this performance. However admiring Nin’s report, from the vantage of a present-day scholar, fortified by the knowledge that Artaud will pick himself up off the floor and live another fifteen years, his plague reenactment comes across as embarrassing: all shamanistic shamming and shrieking ecstasy. Like Franz Mesmer’s magnetism, his affliction convulses actor and audience with a force that isn’t actually there. Yet it is precisely the hollowness at its core that makes Artaud’s pestology so valuable to an understanding England’s theatrical thinking. In her superb discussion of the mesmerism craze, Jessica Riskin demonstrates how its hucksterism, once exposed, triggered “the crisis of sensibilist science,” which Riskin defines as the discovery that “the most vivid of sensations did not, in fact, reflect the action of any external, physical agent.”28 Likewise utterly performative, the plague in “The Theater and the Plague” is a similar “total crisis” except this time explicitly so, for the plague that Artaud conveys “without rats, without microbes, and without contact” makes a virus out of its lack of a virus. The disease Artaud finds impossibly coincident with “the most profound political upheavals,” “downfalls,” “disappearance[s],” “cataclysms and devastations” is not catastrophic because it is unmoored to the causal logics of history and

26. Garner, “Artaud, Germ Theory, and the Theatre of Contagion,” 2. Garner’s reference is to Tudor and Stuart descriptions of the disease, but the phrase necessarily evokes Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989) and its discontents (see D. A. Miller, “Sontag’s Urbanity,” October 49 [1989]: 91–101). 27. Garner, “Artaud, Germ Theory, and the Theatre of Contagion,” 11, quoting from Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 1, 1931–1934, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann (New York: Swallow Press, 1966), 192. 28. Jessica Riskin, “The Mesmerism Investigation and the Crisis of Sensibilist Science,” in Science in the Age of Sensibility: Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 188–225.

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science; it is catastrophic because it unmoors them, killing the organs “where human will, consciousness, and thought are imminent and apt to occur” by killing the epistemological systems that sustain rational thought. Lacking any “actual morbid entity” and traceless in its occurrence (Artaud claims that “the corpse of a plague victim shows no lesions when opened”), the plague’s antifoundationalism is both the cause and effect of its fatality.29 A mise-en-abîme of forensic pathology, Artaud’s essay is nevertheless capped by something like a coroner’s verdict, and this is it: The state of the victim who dies without material destruction, with all the stigmata of an absolute and almost abstract disease upon him, is identical with the state of an actor entirely penetrated by feelings that do not benefit or even relate to his real condition. Everything in the physical aspect of the actor, as in that of the victim of the plague, shows that life has reacted to the paroxysm, and yet nothing has happened.30

In short, victims of the plague suffer death by performativity. This remarkable diagnosis is central to the story I want to tell, but for one hitch: it does not go far enough. Odd as it is to accuse Artaud of understatement, his vision of the “tragic actor remain[ing] enclosed within the perfect circle” of his toxic characterization is an ungenerous gloss of his own performance,31 for according to Nin’s eyewitness account, it isn’t just the actor, but also the audience, that with the plague’s heavy nothing faints and shrinks.32 From Nin’s perch at the Sorbonne, Artaud’s rendition of “The Theater and the Plague” makes palpable and even sickening the synonymy of its titular subjects. I will go on to discuss how much Artaud’s rendering of the plague get this crisis right from the standpoint of its early modern English observers. Equally important to my argument, though, is Artaud’s treatment of history. In “The Theater and the Plague,” Artaud wields the epidemic as an archaic symbol of destruction; with the age of its infection safely past (the last major outbreak in western Europe was in 1720), the plague is confined to “history, sacred books, among them the Bible, [and] certain old medical treatises.” And yet it is also a foil to pastness, for the plague signifies absolute performance, “reveal[ing] 29. Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague,” 31, 23, 18, 21, 19, 20. “Tracelessness” is one of the defining features Phelan attributes to performance in Unmarked, 149. 30. Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague,” 24. 31. Ibid., 25 32. Wikipedia describes (without evidence) a similar transmission: “In one production that he [Artaud] did about the plague he used sounds so realistic that some members of the audience were sick in the middle of the performance” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonin_Artaud; accessed August 17, 2008).



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the lie, the slackness, baseness and hypocrisy” of the world’s positivist underpinnings, of which history and science are the promulgators-in-chief. The effect is to make reality and performance switch places: the plague is an illusion that acts upon us with much more actuality than what Artaud disparagingly calls “materialized nature.”33 All origins and authenticity inhere in it, while the world, secondary and depleted, is “its double.”34 As a philosophy of history, Artaud’s plague has the effect of arguing, before Bruno Latour, that “we have never been modern.”35 Even as Pasteur’s new science draws a line under the primitive past to launch us into a new epidemiological age, the plague is never dead to Artaud but always imminent; a stray thought, to say nothing of an impassioned lecture, is enough to resurrect the disease that is to him equal parts “fascination” and “liquidation.” But Artaud is more specific: the return of the plague means “tak[ing] images that are dormant” and “extend[ing] them”; it means “recover[ing] the notion of symbols and archetypes which act like silent blows.” In descriptions of “inflammatory images thrust into our abruptly wakened heads” he makes the plague a virulent iconology: its recrudescence is a reassertion of the hold that old images and symbols continue to have over us, notwithstanding the shift in our outlook.36 By mocking the clean break of modern science, Artaud draws a picture of the plague that is richly suggestive of the post-Catholic moment to which this chapter attends. His homoousios with a past that will not yield us up to our modernity, a past that stalks our dreams in “a battle of symbols” and breaks out on our bodies like an unholy “stigmata,” offers a trenchant articulation of the way the medieval age, and, in particular, the medieval stage, lingers beyond its disappearance.37 The explanatory value of “The Theater and the Plague” is therefore not just its account of the conjunction advertised in its title, but the profile it offers of an era mocked by the chimera of its reformation—by its failure, in other words, to get past its past. “The Sure Disease of Uncertaine Causes”

The remainder of this chapter aims to show two things: first, and briefly, that the plague in early modern England has a lot in common with the performative, epistemologically anarchic disease that Artaud describes, and, second, 33. Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague,” 17, 31, 27. 34. Artaud, The Theater and Its Double. 35. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 36. Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague,” 27. 37. Ibid.

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that its close relation to Catholicism’s toxic past confounds the pre- and postof post-Reformation England. I begin, therefore, by culling some examples of the plague’s conceptual volatility, first among them John Donne’s opening Meditation on the devastation “Sicknes” inflicts upon the order of things: this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surpriz’d with a sodaine change and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. [. . .] a Sicknes [. . .] summons us, seizes us, destroys us in an instant.38

Donne speaks generally of the disquiet of his premicroscopical age, when the sheer causelessness of an unseen, unidentifiable malady is indissociable from its virulence. But the rash of prognostic tracts that try to catalogue “The signes that doe declare a person to be infected  ” make the plague the culture’s case in point.39 In pamphlet after pamphlet, attempts to isolate and track the disease bring out the disconcerting fact that the only clear sign of the infection is the “token” or heralding sore that does not so much materialize its visitation as pronounce that hope is past. In this respect, the plague traffics in roughly the same dilemma that Hecuba raises for Hamlet: how is it that “nothing” can make a person feel so bad? Despite frequent recourse to the reverend authorities (“Plato,” “Plotinus,” “Iamblichus, Proclus, Mercurius, Trimsmegistus, Aristotle and Averrhois” fill out Thomas Lodge’s list),40 all manner of experts find their logics unstrung when they attempt to give shape and substance to a disease that remains fundamentally ungraspable. Their confusion is not lost on the wider culture; consider this caustic critique from the playwright and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker: Never let any man aske me what become of our Phisitions in the Massacre, they hid their Synodicall heads as well as the prowdest: and I cannot blame them, for their Phlebotomies, Losinges, and Electaries, with their Diacatholicons, Diacodions, Amulets and Antidotes, had not so much strength to hold life and soule together, as a pot of Pinders Ale and a Nutmeg: their Drugs turned to durt, their simples were simple things: Galen could do no more good that Sir Giles Goosecap: Hipocrates, Avicen, Paraselsus, Rasis, Fernelius, with all their succeeding rabble of Doctors and Water-casters, were at their wits end.41 38. John Donne, “I. Meditation,” in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. John Sparrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 1. 39. George Donne, “The signes that doe declare a person to be infected with the pestilence,” London, 1625, single page. 40. Lodge, Treatise of the Plague, Cr. 41. The Wonderfull Yeare (London, 1603), sig. D3r.



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With Galen indistinguishable from Sir Giles Goosecap, the learned world is left the wasted double of the antic stage. This is but the most visible sign of the plague’s total crisis; a subtler but no less salient trait is its tendency to disable the ability to scrutinize it. In Artaud’s unscientific account, the plague targets those organs “where human will, consciousness, and thought are imminent and apt to occur”;42 in English plague pamphlets, it comes across as a spectatorial affliction. In one treatise, its symptomology includes the patient’s impression that “all that he beholdeth . . . be green.”43 Another warns of blindness, another of the “divers and heavie lookes of the eyes,” another of the “crewel[]” and “staring[]” glare of the infected.44 But the strongest expressions of the plague’s perceptual trouble are the warnings not to picture it lest it take hold in the mind’s eye. Citing Paracelsus as his authority, Thomas Vicary tells his readers “of the imagination springeth the Pestilence,”45 a transmission that George Thomson charts in detail in The Pest Anatomized: “the power of the imagination, making somewhat of nothing, sowe[s] a pestilential Seed in the blood, which fermenting and swelling up, doth forthwith entertain the vital spirit that makes in it self a perfect Idea of that Disease.”46 Without a clearer vector of infection on which to hang its etiology, doctors are left to conclude that the plague spreads from the metaphysics of its contemplation to the physique of the unlucky thinker; as Paré writes, because at the first suspicion of this so dire and cruell a Disease, the imagination and mind (whose force in the diversly stirring up of the humors is great and almost incredible) is so troubled with the feare of imminent death, and despaire of health, that together with the perturbed humours, all strength and power of Nature falles and sinkes downe.47

Even Francis Bacon, who dismisses the “Vast and Bottomelesse Follies” of Paracelsian physicians, decrees that it is by “the Force of Imagination” that the plague passes from “Body to Body.” Especially among “Women; Sicke Persons; 42. Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague,” 21. 43. M.D., The Poore Man’s Jewell (London, 1576), sig. Ciiyv. 44. Anonymous, “The Red-Crosse” (London, 1625), single page; Donne, “The signes that doe declare a person to be infected with the pestilence”; Ambroise Paré, A Treatise of the Plague, Contayning the Causes, Signes, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Cure thereof  (London, 1630), sig. E3r. Paré also notes that prior to death, “the Eyes are burning red, and as it were, swolne or puffed up with Blood, or any other humor” (A Treatise of the Plague, sig. E2r). 45. Thomas Vicary, The English Man’s Treasure (London, 1642), sig. Nn2r. 46. George Thomson, Loimotomia, or The Pest Anatomized (London, 1666), sig. Dv. 47. Paré, Treatise of the Plague, sig. Fv.

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Superstitious, and Fearfull Persons; Children, and Young Creatures” who are more vulnerable to its melancholy “Impression,” the contagion “Worke[s] at Distance, and not at Touch.”48 The result is an uncanny similitude between the theater’s ex-nihilo conjurations (“let us” “On your imaginary forces work” [H5 Prologue 16, 18])49 and the buboes that spring from the imagination’s fancy. This is an affinity that antitheatricalists are quick to exploit; as Gosson writes in his Schoole of Abuse, the abuses of plaies cannot bee showen, because they passe the degrees of the instrument, reach of the Plummet, sight of the minde, and for trial are never brought to the touchstone. Therefore he that will avoyde the open shame of privy sinne, the common plague of private offences, the greate wracke of little Rocks, the sure disease of uncertaine causes; must set hand to the sterne, and eye to his steppes, to shunne the occasion as neere as he can.50

Figured by Gosson as a “sure disease of uncertain causes,” the theater is a “plague” not merely in the sense that it does us harm, but also in the sense that its injuriousness derives from its skill at baffling our powers of discernment: it “wracke[s]” our means of understanding what it does to us, disabling our “instrument[s]” and confounding our “sight.” The plague is thus the idiom in which Gosson can rail against the hurt that comes of performance’s ontological bewilderment; the originlessness of its lethality makes the disease a vivid analogue to a play’s equally substanceless and afflicting “occasion.” It lends some credence to this analogy that the theater’s opponents are not alone in developing it. Dekker also draws with gusto upon the theater’s likeness to the pestilence in his Newes from Graves-ende (1603), a plague pamphlet in which he summons the Muse Melpomene to “inspire us therefore how to tell/The horror of a Plague, the Hell.”51 The invocation both anticipates and counters Heywood’s; while in the Apology, Tragedy takes the form of Justice, in Dekker’s Newes she is a communicant, in something too close to Artaud’s sense. None but she possesses the skill to render the “horror” of the epidemic, and more disconcertingly, none but she can translate its ravages into a fittingly pernicious experience:

48. Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum: or A naturall historie in ten centuries (London, 1627), sigs. Hh4v, Iir, Iiv. 49. William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 1995). 50. Gosson, Schoole of Abuse, sigs. D1r–D1v. 51. Nevves from Graves-end (London, 1604), sig. C3r (italics in original).



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Carowse thou to our thirstie soule A full draught from the Thespian bowle, That we may poure it out agen, And drinke, in nombers Juice to men, Striking such horror through their eares Their haire may upright stand with feares, Till rich Heires meeting our strong verse May not shrinck back, before it pierce Their marble eye-balls, and there shead One drop (at least) for him that’s dead.52

To scholars of the theater, the value of passage will be its attempt to describe Tragedy’s injurious “cours[e] through/The natural gates and alleys of the body” (Ham 1.5.66–67). What I find so suggestive about it, however, is that it makes no sense. Promiscuously somatized to afflict the ears, hairs, and eyes of his audience, the Tragedy Dekker summons is catachrestic: toggling between Muse and Juice, quease and quaff, freeze and thaw, he paints a picture that lies beyond “the sight of the minde.” And hence Melpomene’s fitness for the job that he gives her. A Muse that does not keep haires and Heires distinct is, after all, well conditioned to convey a contagion that blasts the culture’s semiotic ecology, just as a tragedy whose “horror” comes to an unquiet rest in the eye of her beholder accords nicely with an illness that amounts to a crisis of perception. But perhaps the queasiest poesis in this poem about “Queazie Tymes”53 is Dekker’s metaleptical rendering of Tragedy as a “Juice” that poisons sight by “pierce[ing] [our]/marble eye-ball[s],” a characterization that evokes the confusion and contamination that converge at the scene of the plague. As Nin tells us in her description of Artaud’s ordeal at the Sorbonne, play-watching is no different from plague-watching in the disconcerting sense that both wound inexplicably, “without rats, without microbes, and without contact.” A range of early modern evidence thus bears out Artaud’s point that the experience of the plague had little to do with our later, Pasteurized view of disease as something always findable, witnessable, and evidentiary. To the anguish of its chroniclers, the epidemic is not a matter that can be discovered like a “tadpole” under a microscope. Instead, as Bacon tells us, “The Plague is many times taken without Manifest Sense,” a fact that forges a persistent equiva­ lence between the theater and the epidemic’s causeless impact.54 During the 52. Ibid., sig. C3r. 53. Ibid., sig. C2r. 54. Bacon, Sylva sylvarum, sig. Ii2v.

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post-Reformation period of the English theater’s rise, the plague is like the stage, and vice versa, because it is another “nothing” that assails its victims in the form of an unbearable failure to see what ails them. Given that an idol is similarly understood as both an “abomination of the eyes” and a “nothing that hath no being,” it might seem that the Artaudian insights of early modern England marry well with its anti-idolatrous moment.55 The special difficulty posed by the theater and the plague’s shared virulence, however, is that Protestant history demands a very different account of it. In two separate and important studies, Huston Diehl and Michael O’Connell have shown that opponents of the stage were relentless in “aligning” performance “with the rejected visual culture of late medieval religion.”56 This discourse supplied antitheatricalism with its strongest rationale for the theater’s discontinuance, for a stage that that is “pollute[d] and defiled” by “abhominable Idoll-sinnes” must naturally come under the demolitional mandate that John Jewel lays out in his Challenge Sermon of 1559: to “br[ing] back Religion, which was foully neglected and depraved by [the Catholics], to her Original and first State.”57 Yet the foulness antitheatricalists would extirpate stems from its lack of traceable origins. Idol, play, and plague may furnish antitheatricalists with their most trenchant metalepsis, but all sicken by their failure to show their onsets—hence, as Vicary warns, just thinking about the infection will “spring[]” it. The effort to assign performance’s communicability to Catholicism’s “middle age” is therefore a risky undertaking. There are confounding repercussions to the fact that history provides such poor containment for “the stigmata of an absolute and almost abstract disease.” The Life of Performance

No figure suffers this confounding more sumptuously than William Prynne. His mammoth treatise, evocatively called the Histrio-mastix or “Player’s Scourge” (1633), is a comprehensive attempt to “evidence[]” by “divers Arguments,” including those of “the whole Primitive Church,” that “popular Stage55. Peter Smart, A Short Treatise of Altars, Altar-furniture, Altar Cringing and Musick of all the Quire . . . (London, 1629), sig. A4r; Henry Hammond, Of Idolatry (London, 1646), sig. A2v. 56. Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 63. 57. William Rankins, A Mirrour of Monsters (London, 1587), sig. Giiiir (Diehl treats this quotation in Staging Reform, 70); I.H., This World’s Folly, sig. B2r; John Jewel, “A Sermon Preached at Paule’s Crosse,” [The Challenge Sermon] in The true copies of the letters betwene the reverend father in God John Bisshop of Sarum and D. Cole upon occasion of a sermon that the said Bishop preached before the Quenes Majestie, and hyr most honorable Counsayle (London, 1560), sig. I7r.



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playes” are “pernicious Corruptions” “unlawful, infamous, and misbeseeming Christians.” Yet Prynne endangers his cause when he cannot keep the blame for the theater’s “overspredding abomination” on the “Popish Clergie,” but reviles as well a “propensity” for plays that is beyond religion’s minding. While his sense of performance as a thing “engrain[ed]” and “inexpiable” stems from antitheatricalism’s standard pathologizing of the stage, Prynne’s zeal for stalking performance’s toxic grain troubles his attempts to give the theater a history— which is to say, a beginning, a middle, and a hoped-for end.58 It also troubles the grasp that Prynne has on his subject, for the experience of the Histriomastix’s prose suggests a losing struggle with a thing altogether too animated to be chronicled.59 The more Prynne tries to contain the theater’s corruption, like a “tadpole” under a microscope, the more he finds that he cannot draw a line under its Catholic past, as Jewel and his fellow reformers demand. The wobbliness of Prynne’s project is all the more noticeable because it begins on such solid ground: “yea, this was one great crime which the Pagans did object against the Christians in the Primitive Church; that they came not to their Enterludes.”60 Certainly, there were other ways that early Christians distanced themselves from Rome, but Elizabeth Castelli has demonstrated that this antithesis is as fundamental as Prynne says it is; in her study of Martyrdom and Memory, she describes how “Early Christian Culture Making” depended on a “theology of suffering and persecution” that was rooted in the agon of the Roman arena.61 The seventy-one church fathers whose antispectacularism is so lavishly cited in Prynne’s tome are therefore not abstract in their dismay at Rome’s ludic culture; their problem with the stage, in other words, is never merely that it represents another assault upon Deuteronomic modesty codes. The amphitheater is for them the site of a clear and real divide: on one side are the Christians, tortured and tormented, and on the other, the pagan tyrants, regaling themselves with the gruesome sight. The impiety that Prynne attributes to medieval religious drama is therefore hard to dispute. As he writes, by way of “clos[ing]” his case against the Popish past, “Such honor, such worship give the Papists to our blessed Saviour, to these their idolized Saints, as thus to turne, not onely their Priests into Players, their Temples, into Theaters; but even their very miracles, lives and sufferings

58. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, title page, sigs. Ddddd4v, Zzz4r. 59. Stanley Fish discusses the “experience” of Renaissance prose in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1994), 203. 60. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. B2v. 61. Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 78.

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into Playes.”62 Yet the anecdote he recounts to prove God’s abhorrence for this “blasphemie” and “prophannesse” brings out instead the conversionary force with which Christianity takes hold in it: It is recorded of one Porphyry, a Pagan Stage-player, that he grew to such an height of impiety, as he adventured to baptize himselfe in jest upon the Stage, of purpose to make the people laugh at Christian Baptisme, and so to bring both it and Christianity into contempt: and for this purpose he plunged himselfe into a vessel of water which he had placed on the Stage, calling aloud upon the Trinity: at which the Spectators fell into a great laughter. But loe the goodnesse of God to this prophane miscreant; it please God to shew such a demonstration of his power and grace upon him, that this sporting baptisme of his, became a serious laver of regeneration to him: in so much that of a graceless Player, he became a gracious Christian, and not long after, a constant Martyr. The like I find registered to one Ardalion, another Heathen Actor, who in derision of the holy Sacrement of Baptisme, baptized himself in jest upon the Stage, and by that meanes became a Christian; Gods mercy turning this his wickednesse to his eternall good: not any wayes to justifie Playes or Players, or to countenance this his audacious prophannesse; but even miraculously to publish to the world the power of his owne holy Ordinaces, which by the co-operation of his Spirit, are even able to regenerate those who most contemne them, when they are used but in scorne.63

By way of bringing out the trouble this hagiography raises for Prynne’s project, it is worth pointing out that when Allardyce Nicoll opens Masks, Mimes, and Miracles with the nearly identical story of Saint Philemon (another actorsaint converted in the midst of a Roman performance), he does so to mark the supersessory moment when the Christian stage wiped all prior theatrical traditions off the map; thus was it, he writes, that “Imperial Rome sank crumbling in devastation, a mass of vague and almost indistinguishable ruins.” To Niccol, whose aim is to assemble “a kind of perspective arrangement” of the postclassical stage, the theater’s Roman period gives way to the medieval when actors like Porphyrius or Philemon turn the arena’s scaffold-stage into the platform of Christianity’s dissemination.64 If, as Tertullian preaches, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” then the theater is the place where that seed is both grown and sown.65 Prynne, however, tells another story.

62. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Q3v. 63. Ibid., sigs Q3v–Q4r. 64. Allardyce Nicoll, Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Studies in the Popular Theatre (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963), 19, 7; Tertullian, Apologeticus, 50.13. 65. Tertullian, Apologeticus, 50.13.



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From Livy, “the gravest Roman Historian,” he borrows the claim that “Stageplayes . . . were brought into Rome at first with an intent to asswage the Plague.”66 By “appropriat[ing] to their worship” a practice devised to propitiate Rome’s “enraged Deuill-gods,” Christianity’s middle age “Contract[s] a Guilt, or Sinfulnesse” that “wholy vitiate[s], and defile[s] not onely the Individualls thus devoted, but likewise the whole Species.” And hence the peril in which we now find ourselves: “it is evident,” writes Prynne, that “stage playes, dancing, Masques and such like Pagan sports . . . had their originall from Pagan, their revival and continuance from Popish Rome, who long since transmitted them over into England.”67 By taking this tack, Prynne successfully demonstrates that the desolations of a primitive, bloody past, including “the cruelty of the Ampitheater” and “the barbarousnesse of the Arena,” maintain their grip on the London playhouse.68 Yet by rendering the plague in the stage Catholicism’s import, and not the product of Catholicism’s bad faith, Prynne turns its corruption into a “cre[e]p[]” that he “cannot certainly determine.”69 The problem is at its most explicit during a lengthy tirade against Christmas “dancing, Masques, Mummeries, Stage-playes.” On the one hand, Prynne lays the blame for this development with some early popes (he mentions Boniface and Gregory) who “changed divers of the Pagan Festivalls into Christian” in order to maintain the enthusiasm of their convertites. On the other, it lies with “men’s naturall pronesse unto evill” that these Christianized “Festivalls” “did soone transform” back into Pagan ones. And on a third hand, what reignites the “peoples strong propensity to carnall pleasures [and] to heathenish rights and ceremonies” is again the “intolerable luxurie and voluptuousnesse of the Popish Clergie.”70 Prynne seems to be caught here between a prescript anti-Catholicism and fidelity to his own research, which takes up the problem of fooling’s hurt from a vantage that is surprisingly anthropological: as if channeling Victor and Edith Turner’s On the Edge of the Bush, he recognizes performance as a “fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness,” the very nihilo from which “men’s naturall pronenesse” to evil arises.71 But by letting slip a vision of performance that accords it a force more 66. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sigs. Mmmr, Mmmv. This history is first asserted on page signatures Dr–Dv. 67. Ibid., sigs. Fv, Dv, Eeeee3v. 68. Ibid, sig. Yyy4v. 69. Prynne’s argument is indexical of what Michael O’Connell calls the “ex origine” move in antitheatrical iconoclasm (Idolatrous Eye, 19), which denounces the impulse to perform as, at base, a heathen one: “by seeing of playes,” Gosson writes, we “joyne with the Gentiles, in theire corruption,” (Playes Confuted, sig. D8v). What changes in the Histrio-mastix is the epidemiology of Prynne’s approach. 70. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sigs. Ddddd4r, Ddddd3r, Ddddd4v. 71. Victor Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience, ed. Edith Turner (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 295.

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primal and more potent than the (bad) faith that deploys it, Prynne all but concedes what Huizinga pronounces at the start of Homo Ludens: that “play is older than culture,” and stronger than it, too.72 So it happens that in the unlikely form of an attack on yuletide, Prynne runs headlong into a classic tenet of performance studies: after trying to prove the futility the efforts to purge the stage of its poison (plays remain “as polluted, yea, more defiled[] now, as ever”), he finds, more vertiginously, that the world cannot be cleansed of the stage, for even the practices of everyday life—and Prynne lists dozens, from holiday games to the smallest matters of personal adornment—cannot be divested of the taint of performance.73 If once “the chiefest badge and character of a Christian” was a chaste life uncontaminated by performance, the theater bug, by now an “overspredding abomination[],” becomes something always already caught. Given the crux in which he finds himself, it follows that the culmination of this anthropological view is Prynne’s attempt to disavow what it shows. After lamenting that “Christendome” is already “over-runne,” and “all life, all power of Christianitie quite eaten out with these Pagan Christmas pastimes and delights of sin,”74 the best hope Prynne can muster is the fruitless wish that the whole business “should putrifie in oblivion’s Lethe”: “O therefore let Stage-Players perish, yea, for ever perish.”75 It is this futile effort to forget, and in particular, its irksomely expostulative manner, that led Carlyle to call the Histrio-mastix is “a work still extant, but never more to be read by mortal.”76 The to and fro of a genealogy so vacillating has made Prynne the pioneer of a famously unreadable style.77 But its fitful interruptions are also the most revealing feature of the text, for when Prynne abandons all evidence to hale out stale sentiments as if for public address—“O blasphemie, O prophannesse beyond all expression”78—we see him 72. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (New York: Beacon Press, 1950), 1. 73. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sigs. Eeeer, F3r. Prompted by Salvian’s De Gubernatione Dei, Prynne explains that “There are severall passages in this Discourse, which prima facie may seeme heterogeneous to the present subject, as those concerning Dancing, Musicke, Apparell, Effeminacy, Lascivious Songs, Laughter, Adultery, obscene Pictures, Bonefires, New-yeares gifts, Grand Christmasses, Health-drinking, Long haire, Lordsdayes, Dicing, with sundry Pagan customes here refelled: but if you consider them as they are here applied, you shall finde them all materially pertinent to the theame in question they being either the concomitants of Stageplayes, or having such neare affinity with them, that the unlawfulnesse of the one are necessary mediums to evince the sinfulnesse of the other” (preface, “To the Christian Reader,” unpaginated and no page signatures). 74. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Eeeer. 75. Ibid., sigs. B2v, M3v, N3r 76. Thomas Carlyle, ed., Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches with Elucidations, 4 vols. of The Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 1:71. 77. “No one could read through the book,” writes Henry B. Wheatley in What Is an Index? A Few Notes on Indexes and Indexers (London, Longmans, Green, 1879), 14. 78. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Qr.



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hiding from the “overspredding” bug that he seeks. The equivocation that lies behind his worst rhetorical habits thus puts him in intriguing compliance with Gosson’s advice: he that will avoyde the open shame of privy sinne, the common plague of private offences, the greate wracke of little Rocks, the sure disease of uncertaine causes; must set hand to the sterne, and eye to his steppes, to shunne the occasion as neere as he can.

Admittedly, such an account attributes more sense to the Histrio-mastix’s histrionics than they have heretofore deserved. Ever since Ben Jonson made aposiopesis the mark of Puritan stupidity, it has been impossible not to hear Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Prynne’s most interjectory moments. But the sheer abundance of the Histrio-mastix’s painstakingly documented research makes Busy a poor index of what the antitheatricalist is up to.79 Since we can rest assured it is not for the lack of “all particulars” that Prynne swerves away from the substance of his argument, the sudden switch to vague unspeculation (“When these disorderly extravagant kinde of Christmasses crept first into the Church, I cannot certainly determine”) and distracting interjection (“O”!) in a work so vested, from its outset, in the deep scrutiny of the past (“you shall finde nought else but resolved, uniuersally receiued ancient . . . truthes”) owes to something else, something that I want to call the fear of the particulate. As he reminds, us, via Petrarch, this fear is well founded: “the tokens of that we have seene, saith Petrarch, stickes fast in us whether we will or no.” Concerned by the “seeds of vice which Stage-playes sow and nourish,” and by the mystery of their “cre[e]p[]” into the body of the Christian church, Prynne evinces a marked hygiene in the lifted gaze of his vocative mode.80 By this twitchiness, Prynne might seem merely to uphold iconoclasm’s out of sight, out of mind strategy of discontinuance. If the Catholic past will stay in the past only as long as Protestants can be prevented from looking at it, then 79. By his own tally, Prynne’s research includes: “the concurrent testimonies, the unanimous resolutions of sundry sacred texts of Scripture, of the whole primitive Church and Saints of God, both before and under the Law and Gospell; the Canons of 55 severall oecumenicall, nationall, provinciall Synods and Councels of divers ages and Countries: together with the canonicall, the imperiall Constitutions of the Apostles themselves, of Emperours, Popes and other Bishops, the workes of 71 Fathers and ancient Christian Writers of chiefest note, from our Saviours Nativity to the yeare 1200[,] the suffrages of above 150 Christian Authors of all sorts, from the yeare 1200 to this present; the sentence of 40 Heathen Philosophers, Orators, Historians, Poets; together with the Play-condemning Lawes and Edicts of sundry Christian, yea Pagan Nations, Republikes, Emperours, Princes, Magistrates in severall ages; with the Statutes, Magistrates, Vniversities, Writers and Preachers of our owne renowned Kingdome” (ibid., “The Epistle Dedicatory,” sig. **2r). 80. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, “The Epistle Dedicatory,” sigs. **2r, **v, and sigs. Ddddd4r, Ffffff4v, Lll2r.

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he does his duty to his faith by repeatedly blocking its view. But Prynne’s goal of writing a comprehensive history of the theater’s corruption puts him at odds with this amnestic practice, for it is by assiduously sifting the theatrical past that Prynne suffers his averted encounters with a theater that remains on the creep.81 The result is his repeated use of a germaphobic syntax, characterized by a looking backward that turns, relentlessly, into an awkward and hasty looking up: “O therefore let Stage-Players perish, yea, for ever perish.”82 The Histriomastix’s outlook is thus a twofold gesture: first, a hailing of theater history’s not-to-be-looked-at-ness (its tradition must be consigned, he says, to “oblivion’s Lethe”), and second, a containment of its toxic matter within the sterilized field of a perished thought. Consider, as a visual correlate, the frontispiece of George Thomson’s Loimotomia: or the pest Anatomized (fig. 6), wherein “The Manner of Dissecting the pestilentiall body” seems to demand our not looking at it, as if to ward off an infectious sight. So too in the Histrio-mastix, the frequent breaching of Prynne’s otherwise fastidious observantness assigns the “seed” of the stage—Prynne’s base unit of theatrical matter—the form of a communicable disease. Happily, this contamination is not merely insinuated by the gaps in the Histrio-mastix’s argument; as the most dogged of the antitheatricalists, Prynne boasts of chasing after the grain “engrained” by performance’s “inexpiable steine” at no small personal risk.83 His goal to encompass the full extent of the theater’s “hurtful[ness]” means bringing across the affliction that “by unsensible gradations” “Play-haunters” have grown too corrupt to sense, so that under his guidance, we are all made Gertrude-like: forced to see the “black and grained spots” that have, by the theater’s pernicious conveyance, taken root in us.84 But equally Hamlet-esque is the refuge this scene promises from a time that is out of joint, for if, as Foucault suggests, quoting Canguilhem, the crisis of historicism can be found at the crossroads of “the microscopic and the macroscopic,” this is never clearer than in the Histrio-mastix, wherein atomization provides the means to trammel up the problem of performance’s recalcitrance to history.85 To Prynne, the particularity of the seed—its quality of encapsulating what it describes—stabilizes a “queazie” subject: at once a propensity “generated within” and a Catholic error “entering into us from 81. Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 35. 82. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. N3r. 83. Ibid., sig. Zzz4r. 84. Ibid., sigs. Ffffff4r–Ffffff4v. 85. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 4.

Figure 6.  “The Manner of Dissecting the Pestilentiall Body.” Frontispiece to George Thomson’s Loimotomia: or the pest Anatomized (1666). Courtesy the Wellcome Library, London (L0040881).

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without,” to use the terms that Thomson uses when he fails to pin down the plague’s cause.86 Hence the seed that “Stage-playes” both plant and grow is a solution for the catachresis that it figures, for its compressed representation of a presence, or a something there, that is brought to light by trained and focused scrutiny, counters the problem that performance poses when it collapses the distinction between cause and continuance. We might recognize this as a familiar inexactitude: when Prynne writes that the theater occasions “both . . . the engendring and propagating these late, these present plagues which yet wee feele, and suffer” he is repeating a causal crux inherited from the city fathers: “to play in plagetime is to encrease the plage . . .: to play out of plage­ time is to draw the plage.” In the Histrio-mastix, though, we are less likely to mistake this tautology for weak understanding, for what Prynne says here is the same paradox he struggles with elsewhere: that performance is caught at cross-purposes between a scourge (the “noysome Worme[] that canker[s] and blast[s] the generous and noble Buds of this land”) and a pre-existing condition (“men’s naturall pronesse unto evill,” as he puts it).87 This sort of causal crisis is the plague’s essential problem, for the dis-ease of its disease, that sense of balefulness at its core, is the impossibility of knowing “whence it cometh, whereof it ariseth and wherefore it is sent.”88 Prynne’s many “see[!s],” “Flie[!s]” and “O[!s]” supply the rhetoric of this dilemma’s evasion: in his relentless effort to catch hold of the thing of performance without, as it were, really catching it, Prynne does his best to keep his distance from the contagion he tries to isolate. At the same time, his reduction of stage-plays into “seeds of vice” makes a virus out of the theater’s matterless art. The life that he attributes to mere show—at once primitive, seminal, fatal, and wiggly—is like the corpuscle caught in the viewfinder of our epidemiological modernity: a fantasy of containment for an idea “whose laws cannot be precisely defined” and whose “origin it would be idiotic to attempt to determine,” as Artaud writes.89 Not Quite Nothing

Fitting for a text that was ordered by the Star-Chamber to be cast “into the fire to be burnt,”90 Prynne’s Histrio-mastix shows the stage to be infectious in ways 86. Thomson, Loimotomia, sig. B4v. 87. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sigs. Iiir, Aaa2v, Ddddd4v. 88. Henry Holland, Spirituall Preservatives against the Pestilence (London, 1603), sig. D2r. 89. Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague,” 22. 90. William Prynne, A new discovery of the prelates tyranny in their late prosecutions of Mr. William Pryn (London, 1641), sig. B2r. Prynne famously lost both his ears during this same public punishment.



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that Protestant England would rather forget, at the risk of exposing how little has changed between the polluted age of English Catholicism and the present, purged moment. Again, Jewel is illustrative of the reformed mentalité: If ever it happen you to be present againe at the Masse, thinke but thus with your selves: What make I here? What profit have I of my doings? I heare nothing: I understand nothing: Christ bad me eat; I eat nothing: Christ had me drinke: I drink nothing. Is this the institution of Christ? Is this the Lords supper? Is this the right use of the holy mysteries?91

For all his zeal to frush out incarnational superstition, Prynne cannot uphold Jewel’s conviction that there is “nothing” at the core of Catholicism’s “Masseplay.” Instead he discovers the persistence of something in performance’s primordial murk that withal his italicized, uppercase, vocative strivings (“O the desperate madness, the unparalleld profanes of these audacious Popish Priests & Papists”), he cannot expunge. For though his mission is to prove that the early modern stage is, as O’Connell says, “dangerously” “aligned with the religiously atavistic,” he overleaps his ambition.92 Prynne dutifully assigns the “stigmaticall Impresse” of idolatry to a Romish affliction, so definitive of the late medieval period that it demands the break that divides early modernity from its “adulterated and corrupted” antecedent.93 But in his treatise, the origins of this disease lie in an invisible elsewhere, beyond “the degrees of the instrument, [the] reach of the Plummet,” the “trial” of “the touchstone” or the “sight of the minde.” Performance’s irreducible remainder thus inhabits us beyond our power to scourge, strip, or otherwise expel it. By the improbable juxtaposition of The Theater and Its Double, the Newes from graves-ende and the Histrio-mastix, I have tried to show the early modern struggle to show that something inheres in performance—something prior to the theater’s antique founding that lives free of any “sing, o muse” command. It hardly needs to be said that the summoning or (in Prynne’s case) the disapparition that these works perform (“O therefore let Stage-Players perish, yea, for ever perish”) is a kind of negative evidence: in the absence of any logical explanation for the affliction of performance, what Artaud, Dekker, and Prynne offer is the embarrassing spectacle of a one-sided dialogue with an interlocutor who isn’t really there. The substance of my argument therefore comes down to the stuff that that Prynne apostrophically avoids: “O wickedness, O profanenesse 91. Jewel, “Sermon at Paul’s Crosse” [or Challenge Sermon], sigs. H5r–H5v. 92. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sigs. P4v, Eeeee3v; O’Connell, Idolatrous Eye, 63. 93. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Xx3r; Jewel, “The Sermon at Paule’s Crosse,” sig. I7r.

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beyond all expression!”94 Before such histrionics, it has been the practice of theater history to take Jonson’s rationalist stance: “O me no o’s.”95 But then history, in its eager concatenation of cause and effect, offers no discursive space for the problem I am tracing. The reason the plague is a manifestation of the theater, and vice versa, is that both countervail against history, by loosening their victims from the grid of truth and consequences that undergirds historiography, theology, medicine—in few, the systems of knowledge and belief that lie within the horizon of early modern England’s “sight of the minde.” Given its epistemological disruptiveness, the theater bug is by definition the sort of reified thing that doesn’t show up in more disciplined, less enthusiastic records. But as the next chapter will demonstrate, it is vividly present in some key examples of England’s post-Catholic drama, as a too-real presence that mocks its Protestant dispelling.

94. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Cccccr. 95. Ben Jonson, His Case is alterd (London, 1609), sig. H3r.

Saint Augustine brands all Stage-playes with this stigmaticall Impresse[:] That they are the Spectacles of filthinesse. william prynne, Histrio-mastix “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” shylock, in The Merchant of Venice

4 Stigmatical Drama Some Symptoms of the Medieval Stage

In The Histrio-mastix, the untenable relation of performance’s pollution to the Catholic past produces a syntactical problem. In the drama, I now mean to show, the same untenable relation looks stigmatical: in several of the chief tragedies of early modern England, performance raises a causeless sore. The result is a theater that proves Shylock wrong, for what binds spectacle to spectator are wounds that happen without pricking: like the lesions that spontaneously appear on the hands, feet and side of Saint Francis of Assisi, performance raises a sore. This cryptogenesis is a trope and bane of early modern theatrical thinking: if we manage to follow the Möbius-like topology of the theater’s pestilential rhetoric, the plague not only figures the wages of the stage, it figures the impossibility of conceptualizing the ague caused by performance’s empty show. What it also brings to mind, however, is the Catholic theater’s salvific mode. In Prynne’s tale of Porphyrius and Nicoll’s of Philemon—and

Saint Augustine brands all Stage-playes with this stigmaticall Impresse[:] That they are the Spectacles of filthinesse. william prynne, Histrio-mastix “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” shylock, in The Merchant of Venice

4 Stigmatical Drama Some Symptoms of the Medieval Stage

In The Histrio-mastix, the untenable relation of performance’s pollution to the Catholic past produces a syntactical problem. In the drama, I now mean to show, the same untenable relation looks stigmatical: in several of the chief tragedies of early modern England, performance raises a causeless sore. The result is a theater that proves Shylock wrong, for what binds spectacle to spectator are wounds that happen without pricking: like the lesions that spontaneously appear on the hands, feet and side of Saint Francis of Assisi, performance raises a sore. This cryptogenesis is a trope and bane of early modern theatrical thinking: if we manage to follow the Möbius-like topology of the theater’s pestilential rhetoric, the plague not only figures the wages of the stage, it figures the impossibility of conceptualizing the ague caused by performance’s empty show. What it also brings to mind, however, is the Catholic theater’s salvific mode. In Prynne’s tale of Porphyrius and Nicoll’s of Philemon—and

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even in Massinger’s account of the Senators’ persecution—antiquity’s arena spectacle gives way to the Christian stage with the sudden onset of a faith that is theatrically catching—hence the “fever” Domitian almost contracts by looking at the martyrs he makes (3.2.124). We can recognize this grace-by-affliction as a central theme of Christian devotion; as Augustine preaches, “a splendid spectacle offered to the eyes of the mind is a spirit whole and unbroken while the body is torn to pieces.” But I will argue that, more fundamentally, it is a reminder of the persistence of the hurt that comes of fooling. The infectiousness of the medieval stage is yet another manifestation of performance’s ability to breach the remove of the spectator by undermining the ‘indefferancy’ of looking on with such violence as to put to question the fundamental opposition between seeing and doing. Hamlet channels a classical poetics to purge the disphoria of this confusion, unloading it (or at least trying to unload it) onto a suitable scapegoat. In the Catholic tradition, however, the transmissibility of onstage torment is a boon. The vicarious hurts suffered by the spectators of religious drama mark out the faith into which audiences are reborn. It might seem, then, that in comparison with the Roman form that precedes it, Catholic drama accords more pleasingly with an audience’s experience. Instead of saddling the spectator with the burden of a guilt that must be displaced and disavowed, religious performance turns the poignancy of what it shows into the promise of salvation. The difficulty, though, is that it can admit no such comparison. Because its impact must always seem to have been holily begotten, not made, a Christian theater cannot aim to improve upon Rome’s travesty of justice; according to Hardin Craig’s 1955 study of English Religious Drama, it is a form that must be accorded a virgin birth: the religious drama had no dramatic technique or dramatic purpose, and no artistic self-consciousness. Its life-blood was religion, and its success depended on its awakening and releasing a pent-up body of religious knowledge and religious feeling. Therefore to carry to the study of the medieval religious drama a body of criteria derived from Aristotle, Horace and their Renaissance followers, or of specialists in the technique of the modern drama or of drama in general is to bring the wrong equipment.

This chapter finds that it is the unhappy lot of some of early modern England’s dramatists to disprove this claim by recognizing, as Prynne does, that perfor. Augustine, Sermons. 51.2, quoted in Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 105. . Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 4–5.



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mance’s injuriousness precedes and confounds its religious use. The discovery unsettles one point on which early modern England and its antecedent age agree: that contagious performance is a religious issue. So basic is this dictum that it supplies both sides of the Reformation schism with a bedrock belief: to Protestantism no less than to Catholicism, the wounds that come of witnessing shape the faith, with the crucial difference that the middle age treasures their affliction, whereas more latterly, they are eschewed as the work of the Whore of Babylon. By taking a quick look at some medieval examples of faith catching and spreading in the theater, I mean to demonstrate that the hallmarks of the Catholic stage’s contagion exceed post-Reformation attempts to explain and contain them. The result is a stigmatical dramaturgy that not only “stains the time past,” as Antonio says in The Duchess of Malfi, but taints “the time to come” (1.1.209). It is egregious, of course, to treat the corpus of medieval drama like a plague pamphlet—a means to confirm the “pre-existing conditions” of “the great Shakespearean stage,” as E. K. Chambers once proposed. Since O. B. Hardison’s repudiation of the “the evolutionary account of the drama’s development,” we are now free to suppose that “as a young man Shakespeare had seen some of [the Corpus Christi] plays,” but never for the sake of relegating them to a merely precursive role. And yet the medieval theater’s unhistoricizable influence— its refusal to be enlisted in theater history’s usual teleological project—is precisely the rationale for my dubious approach. In light of Prynne’s discovery that the theater’s corruption lies in a domain more microscopic than historiologic, then the presence of medieval drama in the golden age that succeeds it can only be symptomatic. What follows, therefore, is a nosology of the affliction that slips past the quarantine of the Renaissance’s historical break. In the order of their appearance, here are the key traits of the medieval stage that countervail against the myth of the theater’s fresh start. 1. The Sudden and Firm Grip[pe] The surest sign of performance’s tendency to contraction is conveyed with special clarity in the hagiographies of Porphyrius et al., when faith acquires . E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage (Two Volumes Bound as One) (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1996), 1:vi. . V. A. Kolve, “Introduction” to Approaches to Teaching Medieval Drama, ed. Richard Emmerson (New York: MLA, 1990), xii–xvi, xii. O. B. Hardison first critiqued this evolutionary historicism in his opening chapter to Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 1–34. “General Introduction” in Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katharine E. Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 30.

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a sudden cling under conditions that are infamously slippery. Since the person, place, and business in the midst of which religion takes hold are locations where by definition truth has no traction, the abrupt and unwavering sincerity that breaks out in the arena is the surest indication that a miracle has happened. This flash bond of Truth to falsity takes an especially memorable form in the “hierosphthic” effect of the stuck hand—a type of divine smiting particular to those characters who try to mock Christian matter. One surviving example is the N-Town Assumption of the Virgin, in which a Prince of the Jewish Priests tries to knock Mary off her funeral bier and finds his hands instead affixed to her coffin (“Allas, my body is ful of peyne!/I am fastened sore to this bere!” [395–97]). So prodigiously stuck are they, in fact, that when the Priest yanks himself free, he leaves them behind as the signs of his blasphemy; only conversion to Christianity restores his limbs to their former wholeness. The same fate more famously befalls “Jew Jonathas” (S.D. 148) of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, whose curiosity about transubstantiation rises to such a heat that he gives a merchant “an hundder pownd” (315) to procure a Host to experiment upon. When he tries to put the “cake” into a cauldron of boiling oil (457), it sticks to his hand and will not “avoyd” (500). His accomplices drive four nails into the Host to secure it to a post, then pull their friend back by the arm, but to no avail: “here” says the stage direction, “the hond shall hang styll wyth the Sacrament” (517). Only after Jonathas’s hasty “countrycion” (775) is he rewarded with the miracle of reattachment: “Here shall Ser Jonathas put hand into the cawdron, and it shabe [w]hole again” (S.D. 777). There are, however, some noteworthy exceptions to this trope of faith acquired by miraculous adhesion. In the York Crucifixion, for instance, holy matter repels human touch. In this play, the four soldiers who attempt to affix Jesus’ hands and feet to the cross are dismayed to find that they cannot be stuck to it; in the tradition of the miracle of the Holy Rood, the wood shrinks from its task: “it fails a foot and more” (107). In the Cornish Death of Pilate, Jesus’ “undermost garment” exhibits a similar nonstick quality (238): when the wily . The term “Hierosphthic” is used by Ann Eljenholm Nichols in “The Hierosphthitic Topos: Or, The Fate of Fergus: Notes on the N-Town Assumption,” Comparative Drama 25, no. 1 (1991): 29–41. Nichols tracks the abundant manifestations of this trope in the religious folklore of Western Europe. . Ludus Conventriae or the Plaie Called Corpus Christi, ed. K. S. Block (London: Oxford University Press, 1922). . There is some confusion as to whether the Prince hangs from the bier by his stuck hands or whether his hands remain affixed and he wrenches free. See Nichols, 34. . The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, in Early English Drama: An Anthology, ed. John C. Coldewey (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 274–305. Future citations are from this edition. . J. S. Purvis, The York Cycle of Mystery Plays (A Complete Version), (London: SPCK, 1957), 284.



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Pilate is arrested and brought before his emperor for killing the “King of the Jews” (229), he girds himself in Christ’s dessous to “charm” from the perplexed Tiberius an easy reprieve: “When the foul fellow came forward,” “He made me give way” (237).10 Pilate is at last stripped naked so that his crime can cleave to him, but when he kills himself before his death sentence is carried out, his corpse will not stay in the ground: twice buried, it is twice “thrown up” “out of the earth” (SD, 244, 245), where it emits a noxious “tang” (247). 2. The “Stigmatical Impresse” The adhesiveness that the last two plays strive so hard to reverse is the first symptom of medieval drama’s pestilential etiology. What brings out the plague in this business, though, are the lesions it effects. In the age of post–Lateran IV Catholicism, when stigmata become the signal marks of holiness’s visitation, Christian devotion aspires to a bubonic symptomology. In the Englished hagiographies of Catherine of Siena, for instance, the wounds of Christ are rendered “communicable enunciations” of faith’s grip on the faithful (fig. 7).11 Given the grace they signify, these enunciations are fervidly sought. In her remarkable account of pre-Reformation devotion, Sarah Beckwith describes the desire of the laity to literally “catch” Christ’s wounds:12 “Here, sweet Jesu, I biseche [th]e, cache me into [th]is net of [th]y scourging” “that I be unpartabelly to [thee] fastened.”13 The medieval stage, where scenes of scourging and crucifixion are a mainstay, becomes a potent site for precisely this sort of fastening, as demonstrated by the disaffixative urgency with which the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge warns “Cristen men” not to look for it there. At the start of this Lollard attack upon the stage, “pley[s]” are said to move God to “tak[e]” “his grace” away from us; in a telling attempt to replace the poignant scene of

10. “The Death of Pilate (Cornish Trilogy),” in Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, ed. A. C. Cawley (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 227–53. Since this translation lacks line numbers, citations refer to page numbers only. 11. Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Bernard Wall and Margot Adamson (New York: Scribner, 1938), 297. 12. Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993), 57. 13. “Meditations on the Passion,” in English Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, ed. Hope Emily Allen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931; rpt. ed., Gloucester: Alan Surron, 1988), 34, quoted in Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 62; The Prickynge of Love, ed. Harold Kane, Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 91:10, 1983, 10, quoted in Beckwith, Christ’s Body, quoted in Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 58.

Figure 7.  St. Catherine receiving the stigmata, from The Orcherd of Syon (1519). Courtesy the Wellcome Library, London (L0021214).



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the pinned Christ with its cleared sight, the Tretise proposes that sober “drede” is the “nayl” that “holdith . . . togidere” “oure bileve [belief ] to Him.”14 Whether satirically or in earnest, the Croxton Play goes on to repudiate this repudiation; so “unpartabelly” is Jonathas “fastened” that no amount of antic pulling can draw him free.15 At the same time, his hand’s sudden amputation, and all the bleeding from the wrist that it must entail, suggests a figure “wounded with [Christ’s] woundes.”16 By affecting two hands instead of one, the effect is redoubled in the N-Town Assumption, though the result is just as ludicrous; the lost York play on the same apocryphal theme, whose hapless, temporarily handless lead gives it the title of Fergus, is disowned by its guild for “produc[ing] more noise and laughter than devotion.”17 By making a farce of its fastening force, The Croxton Play (and its hiero­ sphthic affiliates) brings out the difficulty of fitting the theater to its religious agenda. In The Death of Pilate, the comic implications of spontaneous, miraculous injury seem to have been allayed: not only do Christ’s wounds fail to afflict anyone, the sacred cloths that have absorbed their effluvia actually shield and cure mankind from persecution and disease. But the solution is only momentary; when the plague nevertheless ensues, we are confronted with the difficulty of suspending medieval theater’s infectious mode. Here, it is opposition to Christianity that is, in the pathological sense, betokened, for the last half of the mystery concerns the hazards of handling Pilate’s toxic waste. When his burial doesn’t take, and the Emperor fears that Pilate “will kill with stench/All [his] kingdom” (246), Saint Veronica suggests putting his corpse in an iron box and dropping it in the Tiber, a decision that results in an epidemic: everyone who “goes over Tiber water,” whether “Man, woman or beast,” instantly dies (249). Eventually, Pilate is fished out of the river and set adrift in a boat that is taken by Satan to Hell; his descension, the antithesis of Christ’s rising from the dead, is a fitting end for a figure whose presence afflicts the public with buboes instead of sacred wounds. Yet the suffering the play 14. A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, ed. Clifford Davidson, Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph 19 (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 1993), 94, ll. 41, 55, 37, 38, 39. 15. For critical discussion of the play’s satirical or straight take on these Lollard misgivings, see Andrew Sofer’s reading of the play in The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 31–60; Michael Jones, “Theatrical History in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” ELH 66, no. 2 (1999): 241; and Ann Eljenholm Nichols, “Lollard Language in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Notes and Queries 36:234:1 (1989): 23–25. 16. The Prickynge of Love, ed. Harold Kane, Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 91, no. 10 (1983): 14; quoted in Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 59. 17. From a 1432 document preserved in the A/Y Memorandum Book, quoted by Philip Butterworth in Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 143.

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attaches to this divinely wrought infection suggests the difficulty of keeping the contagiousness of religious drama tethered to its theology. 3. Resistance to Treatment The Death of Pilate brings out the fact that though a faith that is catching nicely miraculizes the bond of the devout to God, it remains a queazie formulation; once Pilate’s rotting corpse takes down a passing traveler whose only crime is to wash himself “white, and free/From dirt” (248), the cling of God’s wrath to the body of the sinner is a miracle that even the play’s Saint wants lifted. The same problem is given remarkably explicit treatment at the close of The Croxton Play, when the assembly of contrite Jews, unable to stanch the Host’s bleeding, summon the Bishop to the “swemfull [sorrowful] sight” of the tormented sacrament (805). In a shocking reversal of the ecclesiastical rite, his special office is to render the Host untransubstantiate: “Lord, I cry to the[e], miserere mei,/ From thys rufull syght thou wylt reverte” (816–17). The miracle worked by the bishop’s intercessory efforts is thus the disappearance of Christ’s real presence, and in particular, the “ranch[ing],” “rufull syght” of His wounds. It could be said that the plays I am describing are too far out of the mainstream to exemplify the medieval theater’s contagious poetics. With the exception of the York Crucifixion, which is unorthodox for its interpolation of the legend of the Holy Rood, each dramatizes matter “not contained in the sacred scripture,” as the Masons say of Fergus in their successful petition to abandon it.18 Yet because they treat apocrypha, these plays show us a medieval theater free to pursue the implications of its own poetics: unconstrained by the fixed narratives of the Gospels, they press to its limit the religious stage’s transmissibility. A marked uneasiness follows. In the restoration of severed hands, the “change” of “wondys blody” back “into brede” (S.D. 825, 804),19 and the final, shrieking exit of toxic Pilate, we see the eagerness with which characters struggle to shed the “tokyns” of holiness’s visitation, like Catherine when she pleads for her “woundes” cure: “lorde god I beseche the that these woundes appyre not in me.”20 The York Crucifixion even goes so far as to hold 18. The quotation is taken from a “Goldsmith’s petition entered in the York Memorandum Book in 1431–2” and is reproduced at length in Clifford Davidson, From Creation to Doom: The York Cycle of Mystery Plays (New York: AMS Press, 1984), 171. 19. On the Christ child in the sacrament and the desire to see his bloodied body revert to bread, see Leah (Marcus) Sinanoglou, “The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays,” Speculum 48, no. 3 (1973): 491–509. 20. Raymond of Capua, Here beynneth the lyf of saint katherin of senis the blessed virgin (London, 1500), sig. hiiiv.



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out the heretical promise that those “tokyns,” in their original instance, can be kept from appearing, as if the ideal crucifixion would be the one that, by the tree of life’s miraculous intervention, never happened. “It is not words that shakes me thus”

The rest of this chapter concerns some early modern tragedies—Othello (1603), The Duchess of Malfi (1612), and, much more briefly, The Winter’s Tale (1611) and King Lear (1606)—that inherit the medieval theater’s transmission anxiety, but without its theological rationale. Written in the wake of Protestant altar-stripping and Rood-smashing, these are plays that are caught in Lady Macbeth’s dilemma: they struggle to shed the lesions that, in a postReformation climate, cannot exist (fig. 8). With the exception of The Winter’s Tale, it is hard to overstate the cruelty of the theater that results. Whereas classical and Catholic philosophies of the theater are each premised on the wish that the felt force of performance can be allayed, either by purchasing indifferancy at the cost of a scapegoat or by transforming a show’s hurt into a holy affliction, the early modern drama that I call stigmatical concedes the vainness of this hope. Not only do plays of this genre show us characters that are terminally afflicted, but they rock the boat of Protestant supersessionism by recognizing the failure of antecedent stages to solve the guilt or taint of performance; in the theater, they show us, we have never been early modern. Their plots therefore share an important double movement: they belie the Roman principle of conscience-catching, only to show that the Romish tradition of salvific performance is just as untenable. What remains to be seen beneath this defrocking is thus a poisoned sight, for once stripped of judicial purpose and religious uplift, the theater is revealed to be just as the city fathers account it: “verye dangerous for the spreadinge of Infection.” I begin with Othello because the play is notorious for making the catching of a supposedly guilty creature’s conscience “insupportable” (5.2.97); as Johnson famously complains, Othello’s final act “is not to be endured.”21 It is also a play that ostentatiously attributes its anguish to an unjust poetics, for the handkerchief business that Iago stages as “ocular proof ” (3.3.363) of Desdemona’s faithlessness is a blatant retread of the trial of Anne Sanders, in which a handkerchief, allegedly “Imbrude in Sanders bloud” (2338), corroborates the foregone conclusion of Anne’s guilt.22 As Arden editor E. A. J. Honigmann 21. Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Walter Raleigh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 200. 22. William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, The Arden Shakespeare (Surrey: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997). All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

Figure 8.  “Out, damned spot!” F. Hayman’s engraving of Lady Macbeth sleepwalking (from Macbeth, V.1., 1744). Photograph © The British Library Board (067315).



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writes, “Shakespeare was clearly aware of . . . [A] Warning, and adapted some of the most inspired touches in Othello” from it.23 Particularly since A Warning for Fair Women was performed “by Shakespeare’s own company” in 1599, it seems fair to expect that the handkerchief, a pivotal property in both plays, flags the short shrift of domestic tragedy’s judicial process—its speedy, clichéd trajectory from enlisted evidence to capital punishment.24 The difference, of course, is that in A Warning for Fair Women, this is a justice that pleases; in Othello, it appals (4.1.206). I raise this repertorial history by way of suggesting that Thomas Rymer’s cavil—that the tragedy of Othello is too bound to its handkerchief—is Shakespeare’s point.25 All that brandishing of the “antique token” goes to show that it is under the ignominious influence of the subgenre for which the prop stands that Desdemona’s protestations of innocence can only register to her husband as proof of her guilt (5.2.214). When, tyrant-like, he demands a confession to authorize the death sentence he is implacable in carrying out, he makes a mockery of the theater’s conscience-catching forensic: Therefore confess thee freely of thy sin, For to deny each article with oath Cannot remove nor choke the strong conception That I do groan withal. (5.2.53–56)

But perhaps the most scathing rebuke of the antecedent play is Othello’s treatment of domestic tragedy’s most overdetermined outcry: Othello: Emilia: Othello: Emilia: Othello: Emilia: Othello:

Thy husband knew it all. My husband? Thy husband. That she was false? To wedlock? Ay, with Cassio. [. . .] My husband? Ay, ’twas he that told me on her first;

23. “Introduction,” in ibid., 74. 24. Ibid. 25. “So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief ? Why was not this call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief ?” (The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt Zimansky [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956], 160).

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Emilia: Othello:

[. . .] My husband? What needs This iterance, woman? I say thy husband. (5.2.136–46)

Here, the exclamation of the guilty widow (“My husband?” “My husband?” “My husband?”) is the very opposite of a widow’s confession: what Emilia discovers when compelled to speak an unvarnished truth is not the identity of her victim but that of her murderer. This reversal of convention renders Emilia a critic avant la lettre of the theatrical philosophy that her phrase, similarly stammered, goes on to authorize. A decade before the publication of An Apology for Actors, but close on the heels of A Warning’s dramatization of its lore, Othello travesties the key phrase of the theater’s persecutorial poetics. The play’s theatrical investments would appear, then, to be plain enough. Since the repudiation of arena justice is the source and theme of Catholic performance, a tragedy that turns its “criminal” into a martyr and exposes the tyranny of an “erring barbarian” is a tragedy that is characteristically medieval (1.3.356). The impression is only furthered by Desdemona’s saintliness, and by the eerie estrangement of Othello from his role of tyrant, such that he seems bound to a higher power: “in the due reverence of a sacred vow/I here engage my words” (3.3.464–65). The play’s atrocity, therefore, is not Desdemona’s killing, but God’s failure to sanctify it. Disaster strikes when the martyrological trope of persecution-as-triumph is starkly denied, turning the corpse whose “look” reproaches Othello from a wholesome sight into a Prynnian aposiopesis: “O Desdemon! Dead, Desdemon. Dead! O, O!” (5.2.279). Worse is the lack of damnation dealt to the play’s malefactors: the “thunder[bolt]” that ought to have struck down the play’s “precious villain” (5.2.233), and the “devils” (275) summoned to sail Othello, Pilate-like, into “steep-down gulfs of liquid fire,” fail to come when they are bid (278). The resulting tragedy feels so agonizingly purposeless that “motiveless malignity” is its most conventional attribute.26 No less than it repudiates Rome’s judicatory theater, then, Othello critiques that stage’s Romish successor by torturing its audience with an unholy death; Othello even announces as much when Desdemona does not produce the confession he commands: “O perjured woman, thou dost stone my heart/And makest me call what I intend to do/A murder, which I thought a sacrifice” (63–65). To an early modern audience, well versed in the language of anti26. The phrase is Coleridge’s description of Iago; see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Notes on the Tragedies,” in Coleridge’s Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2 vols. (London: Constable, 1930), 1:49.



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Catholicism, his flaw is easily diagnosed: held hostage to a mentalité that literally entrances him (“[He] falls in a trance” [SD 4.1.43]), Othello persecutes Desdemona with his sights too fixed on the idolized relic she will become: . . . I’ll not shed her blood Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow And smooth as monumental alabaster. [. . .] Be thus when thou art dead and I will kill thee And love thee after. (3–5; 18–19)

Amid all this effigizing rhetoric, we see, long before Othello “thr[o]w[s] [her] away,” that Desdemona is too much his “pearl” (345): white, lustrous, treasured; in Christian allegory, the means to the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 13:45–46); in early modern medical terms an affliction of the eye;27 in sum, a syllepsis of the Protestant key words that describe Catholicism’s bad outlook. On the verge of her martyrdom (“Put out the light, and then put out the light!” [7]), she fairly glows with her husband’s idolatry. Given the way Protestantism pathologizes this error, it is only fitting that Othello’s fall begins with the “pestilence” of Iago’s slander (“I’ll pour this pestilence in his ear” [2.3.351]). What is especially telling, though, is that Othello mistakes his sickness for an epiphany: installed before the contrived spectacle of the handkerchief ’s handoff, Othello is persuaded of Desdemona’s faithlessness when, like Porphyrius gripped by his pretend baptism, he is seized and “shake[n]” by Iago’s show: Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus. (4.1.37–41)

As Samuel Johnson is the first to point out, this self-diagnosis is a superstitious error—Othello misreads the “passion” that confounds him as the “instruction, and influence of a superior Being.”28 His subsequent insistence on Iago’s artlessness (“Honest Iago” [1.3.295]) shores up his conviction that it must be the message, and not the medium (mere “words”), that “shakes [him] thus.” That he sacrifices Desdemona for the sustenance of this belief tells us how unthinkable he regards the alternative: to Othello, “Nature” forbids an effect without

27. See OED “pearl” n1 b. 28. Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, 199.

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some matter to cause it; the suspension of this precept would be worse “chaos,” it seems, than the loss of a beloved wife (3.3.91–92). With the benefit of its distance from the action, the play’s audience can join Johnson in deploring the spiritual error into which Othello has fallen. To borrow some terms from I.H., an antitheatricalist who makes much of playgoers’ idolatry, Othello is “seduce[d],” into “heav[ing] up [his] hearte[] and affections” by Iago’s “Stage-gestures,” and makes himself “a voluntary sacrifice to that exulcerated Fiend.”29 What complicates the play’s catastrophe, however, is the uselessness of this diagnosis. Though it is clear enough that Othello has been “Begyled/With fayned miracles and lyes” to “sacrifice[] the idol of his heart” (as an 1800 acting edition aptly notes),30 when he checks his ensign’s feet for hooves, he more or less mocks Protestantism’s anti-idolatrous position: “I look down toward his feet, but that’s a fable” (283). Despite what Prynne tries to tell us, we cannot chalk up the heavy toll of Iago’s “pestilen[t]” performance to the work of some “enraged Devill-god[].” Instead, the cause of this disaster lingers, underived, as the play careens to its “bloody period” (355): “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know./From this time forth I never will speak word (300–301). Left to unsettle the audience is this mystery: how is it that an imaginary sin convulses Othello’s body with epileptic seizures? What causes the absence of truth—the groundless slander of Desdemona—to manifest such measurable, medical effects? Pace Coleridge, what makes Othello unendurable is not so much motiveless malignity as causeless efficacity: the same epistemological crisis that is the hallmark of the plague. At the heart of Othello is thus the problem at the heart of idolatry: that image reform cannot reach the root of the “poison” it means to stanch. The Henrician “motion” to purge all “notable images” may well have succeeded in proving that when its wood, paint, gilding, or “monumental alabaster” is hacked away, the idol is demonstrably “a nothing that hath no being,” but “the power of the imagination” to “mak[e] somewhat of nothing” remains in full force. We see its persistence in Middleton’s Game at Chess (1624), when the statues venerated by a debunked faith still “move and dance” (S.D. 45).31 And, 29. Here is the passage in full: “These [actors] are the Maisters of those Mint-houses, wherein are coyned all kinds of Atheisticall prophanations: they are they, who by their wantonizing Stage-gestures, can ingle and seduce men to heave up their heartes and affections, as a voluntary sacrifice to that exulcerated Fiend, Asmodeus [the demon-spirit of Lechery], and all other abhominable Idoll-sinnes, obstinately alienating and tearing their selves and soules from the spirit of Grace.” I.H., This World’s Folly, sig. B2r. 30. Othello; A tragedy, By Shakespeare, as Performed at the Theatres Royal. Regulated from the Prompt Books, by permission of the Managers, with an introduction, and notes, critical and illustrative. London, printed (by assignment) for J. Barker, Dramatic Repertory, Russel street, Covent garden (London, 1800), 69. 31. Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). Though Howard-Hill assumes that this spectacle would have been



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as Lodovico tells us, we wish we didn’t see it at the end of Othello, when the characters done in by Iago’s artificial “pestilence” all stay dead, regardless of the fact that their decease eventuated from nothing: “The object poisons sight,/ Let it be hid” (362–63). The anecdotal record of the play’s production suggests the futility of Lodovico’s gesture. Consider the testimony of Henry Jackson, who graciously recorded his reaction to the King’s Men’s production of Othello at Oxford in 1610: the celebrated Desdemona, slayn in our presence by her husband, although she pleaded her case very effectively throughout, yet moved us more after she was dead, when, lying in her bed, she entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance.32

Jackson’s idolatrous transfiguration of art (a boy actor playing dead) into life (a “celebrated” woman, unjustly killed) proves the contagiousness of the play’s “poison[ed] sight,” albeit by supplying a fairly mild start to the long history of Othello’s celebrated impact. Johnson’s “unendur[able]” is more famous in this vein, though other testimony describes sufferings more dramatic: in the notes to a 1793 French parody, for instance, the author remarks that when Othello was performed in Paris, “in the fifth act the public cried out for the curtain to be lowered, not out of derision for the play, but because it inspired so great a horror as to prove its merit.”33 Though the King’s Men’s and the French production are far between, I raise their (alleged) receptions to point out an important commonality: counter to the antitheatrical common sense, Othello doesn’t move its spectators by charming them into a Catholic state of false belief; rather, the success of the play’s production comes from its ability to move the spectator whilst disbelief is decidedly, Protestantly, unsuspended. In both instances, audiences that feel for Othello know themselves to be watching a play—hence, the cry goes up to drop the curtain and not, say, the fatal pillow, and hence, ‘Desdemona’s’ ‘corpse’ “entreat[s]” Jackson precisely while he notices that he is in the company of other spectators, so that the frame that advertises the play’s fiction is at its most evident. The effect is the reverse of the guilty creature’s outcry: though Heywood’s Apology explains the potency visibly staged, so that audiences could see the artifice in the statues’ movements, there is no support in the text for this reading. Instead, the spectacle’s anti-papist agenda seems to compete with the unabated magic of Catholic image-worship 32. Quoted in Julie Hankey, ed., Othello: William Shakespeare: Plays in Performance (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), 18. 33. C. A. B. Sewrin, Le Maurico de Venise: Parodie d’Othello (Paris, 1793), 38 (my translation).

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of theatrical feeling as a matter of coincidence, whereby a performance makes itself felt only to the extent that a prior crime has turned the play’s fiction into a forensic truth, Othello stirs its audience by the depiction of events that are patently fictitious, that derive from a bald lie, and that occur in the full view of their own staged inauthenticity (“encave yourself,” says Iago, as if to remind us of the Platonic shadow-play to which he will subject his master [4.1.82]). Given the way that it flaunts the causelessness of its catastrophe (“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul!/Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars,/It is the cause. [5.2.1–3]), Othello seems bent on proving that the impact of performance is a suffering that only increases with the knowledge that it is, at its core, “a nothing that hath no being.” What hurts, in other words, is how much nothing continues to afflict us, long after its nonexistence has been proved. The urge to draw a curtain across this revelation (“Baissez la toile! ”) is the play’s response to its own upshot, as if to hand us a remedy for the reaction that it is sorry to have occasioned. But the relief that Lodovico’s command promises is like Iago’s hooves: a fable. For Othello is a play that cultivates our detachment: in the vein of the Boxley Rood’s desacralization, we see Iago bare all the strings of his magic, and mock the “free and open nature” of those who can be led like “asses”—“tenderly,” “by the nose”—to buy into his deceit (1.3.400–401). No less disabusing is the handkerchief, “drama’s most egregious stage property,”34 with its taint of overuse. Shamelessly redolent of Anne Sanders’s tooready conviction, it plays fast and loose with several other histrionic traditions, from Veronica’s veil (which Huston Diehl and Richard Wilson discuss), to Hieronimo’s bloody napkin (a “sacrilegious perversion” of that same relic, in Andrew Sofer’s compelling account), to Nessus’s cloak—the charmed, bloody garment at the center of the play in which Caesar killed his servant and “swoong him, terq quaterq” “about his head” (as Robert Miola has shown).35 Bloated with this cumulus of dramatic consequence,36 the handkerchief signals its theatrical device as unabashedly as Iago “play[s] the villain” (2.3.331), which is to say that like the Boxley Rood at the time of its destruction, it appears to its audience in the form of a “fayned miracle and lie.” This disillusionary mode of address is what makes Lodovico’s demand 34. Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 174. 35. Diehl, Staging Reform, 133; Wilson, Secret Shakespeare, 174; Sofer, Stage Life of Props, 85; Robert S. Miola, “Othello Furens,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 49–64. 36. Jonathan Gil Harris documents the extradramatic resonances to this property in the sixth chapter (“Crumpled Handkerchiefs”) of Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 169–87.



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to hide the play’s dénouement so disquieting, for the bootless gesture must therefore aim to clear from our sight a scene that has already been defrocked. After “undermin[ing] its audience’s trust in the imaginative art that is the theater,” as Diehl writes, Othello concludes in the expectation that disbelief is inadequate to preserve that audience from the poisoning of its sight, for the substancelessness of idolatry’s cause turns out to have no bearing on the toxicity of idolatry’s effects.37 Lodovico’s command (“Let it be hid”) mocks us, therefore, with the chimera of our reformation: what seems to be the culmination of a Protestant program of disenchantment—the stripping of the play’s altarpiece, as it were—turns instead into the full and final efflorescence of medieval drama’s infection. This is odd, to say the least, in a play that stages Catholicism’s contaminating poetics—including the seizures caused by a “pestilent[t]” delusion—to school us in the catastrophic effects of rooting a false belief in “ocular proof ” (3.3.363). Yet Othello leaves its audience the victim of this cautionary tale, as if to prove how little has changed in the pendulum swing that takes us from medieval drama’s fall to the rise of early modern England’s secular stage. In keeping with the Croxton Play’s detransubstantiated Host, or York’s shrinking cross, or Pilate’s disappearance into the absolute, Lodovico’s attempt to blank the tragic loading of Othello’s discovery space only discovers how fruitlessly we continue to wish that affliction would “reverte” from performance’s “rufull syght.” There is, though, one significant difference here: whereas the religious drama I have mentioned struggles to cure itself of holiness’s pathogenic visitation, Othello demonstrates that the stigma that come of performance have no truck with the holy. This might suggest the tragedy’s complicity with “the iconoclastic project of the reformers,” as Diehl has argued, were it not for the drastic misalignment of the play with the accusations of the Reformed church, for the dim view Othello takes of the theater is also a long one.38 In this play, every age’s manner of claiming “It is not words that shakes me thus” is debunked, beginning with Rome’s (it must be forensic truth that shakes me thus), to Roman Catholicism’s (it must be the Holy Spirit that shakes me thus), to Sidney’s Protestant demystification of tragedy’s hold on its audience (all this is mere words, therefore I must not be shaking). What persists, however, is the thing that calls for these philosophies in the first place: the sudden, gripping, sickening, and ineradicable affliction that symptomizes the materiality of performance. It is from this stuff that Iago concocts his “poison”: 37. Diehl, Staging Reform, 181. 38. Ibid, 180.

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Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons Which at first are scarce found to distaste But with a little art upon the blood Burn like the mines of sulphur. (3.3.329–32)

Which is to say that in Othello, as in Artaud’s “The Theater and the Plague,” performance—the pageanting forth of a mere “conceit”—is in its empty “nature[]” toxic. The Plague in Art

Othello plays out like a disquisition on the theater’s cruelty; in its hero’s fall we are presented with “all the particular signes and symptoms” of a plague that proceeds from nothing (“without rats, without microbes, and without contact”) yet encompasses us all (“Baissez la toile”). A play with similar ambitions, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614), works a similar discovery, but in the more acute vein of the Newes from Graves-ende: its tragic spirit doesn’t just poison sight, it stabs us in the eyeball. At least, so Thomas Middleton tells us in his commendatory verse on this “masterpiece”: Thy epitaph only the title be— Write, “Duchess,” that will fetch a tear for thee, For whoe’er saw this duchess live, and die, That could get off under a bleeding eye? (15–18)39

Especially disconcerting is the insinuation here of worse things in store, as though a “bleeding eye” were “get[ting] off ” easy, and it is this turbulent pathogeny that Webster exploits. If Othello proves the inconsequence of revealing performance’s essential nothing, catching us in the gap that separates defrocking an idol from dispelling its felt presence, The Duchess of Malfi takes up the something that lingers beyond Protestantism’s altar stripping to show us its protozoan shape: primitive, seminal, fatal, and wiggly. The turn from Shakespeare to Webster is thus a return to the twitchiness of the Histrio-mastix, for The Duchess of Malfi confronts us with the “plague[] in art” at its most germatic (4.1.111). The first order of The Duchess’s business, though, is to clear the ground for its pestology. Like Othello, the play does so by dispelling the false hope of 39. Brown prefaces the text of the play with these verses; see The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), 4–5.



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theatrical justice: Webster, too, acknowledges by repudiation the consciencecatching subgenre of domestic tragedy to which his play might seem to belong. Like Shakespeare, he proceeds unabashedly; for two-thirds of the play Ferdinand’s attempt to rack from his widow sister the identity of her new husband (“I will force confession from her” [3.1.79]) is The Duchess of Malfi  ’s chief villainy. So overemphatically does the play persecute its “lusty widow,” promising that her “darkest actions—nay, [her] privat’st thoughts/will come to light” (1.1.340, 315–16), that when Ferdinand stops the show he has encaved himself to see, even he is disconcerted by the tyranny of his own machinations: “I came hither prepar’d/To work thy discovery; yet am now persuaded/It would beget such violent effects/As would damn us both” (3.2.92–95). The hesitation is but momentary; Ferdinand goes on to prosecute his fatal judgment to its bitter end. But once the widow at its center is dead, the play caps its pattern of domestic-tragic borrowing by reversing the purpose of the guilty creature’s signature phrase. When Ferdinand cries “My sister! O! My sister!” (5.5.71), he brings guilt to rest on the villain who sought to out it. Having thus burlesqued the inculpating poetics of domestic tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi is free to take up its more sustained concern, which is the pollution of performance. The heroine’s early death attests to this special interest: strangled at the end of act 4, the Duchess lives on in her brother’s mind’s eye to make him, as his doctor says, “pestilent[ly]” “sick” (5.2.5, 5.1.58). This affliction is, on the one hand, a “palsy” intrinsic to his “most perverse, and turbulent nature” (2.5.54, 1.1.169). Likened to “plum-tree[s]” over a “standing pool,” he and his cardinal brother tap motiveless malignity from their deep Catholic roots (1.1.49–50). On the other, it is the effect of a toxic relic: when Ferdinand dispatches his sister, killing her (through his assassin’s hired hands) in the posture of her monument, “upon [her] knees” (4.2.234), he is so struck by the sight that Lodovico-like, he cries, “Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle” (264). The nature of Ferdinand’s desire for the Duchess—like a preposterous Pygmalion, he wants to “cas[e]” her “up, like a holy relic” and turn her too-teeming body into art (3.2.138)—cannot help but make him seem like iconoclasm’s object lesson. His “fix’d love” for “[his] sister” (3.1.52) not only illustrates “the hindrances” a dazzled “eie” poses to “the service of God,”40 as Protestantism would have it, but his bizarre malady has him reaping the infection that he, by his “crooked” and Catholic nature, sows (1.1.50). Among the symptoms Ferdinand suffers are “cruel sore eyes” (5.2.64) and a rapacious penchant for

40. George Hakewill, The vanitie of the Eye, first beganne for the Comfort of a Gentlewoman bereaved of her sight, and since upon occasion enlarged and published for the Common good (Oxford, 1608), sig. A3r.

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staring (5.2.75), eye-troubles intriguingly consistent with the plague.41 And these are the least of it: so manifestly is the Duke sickened by “nothing” (5.2.32, 39) that he attempts to “throttle” his own shadow (5.2.38), a farcical attack, it would seem, upon the entire category of art and artifice. Even more outlandish is his midnight excursion “Behind Saint Mark’s church,” where the Duke is discovered “with the leg of a man/Upon his shoulder” (5.2.14–15). Explains the pedant-Doctor, those “posess’d” with “lycanthropia” (5.2.6, 8) “Steal forth to churchyards in the dead of night,/And dig dead bodies up” (11–12). Webster’s rendering of Ferdinand’s “very pestilent disease” (5.2.5) thus leaves him hostage to idolatry’s essential misprision: that real and fleshly presence can be extracted from dead and lifeless objects. Yet the pathological excesses that spread from Ferdinand’s dazzled sight are but the culmination of the weird science that pervades The Duchess of Malfi. With its shrine and chanting Churchmen, graves and gravemaker (with “coffin, cords and a bell” [S.D. 4.2.165]), Cardinalatial paraphernalia (“cross, hat, robes and ring” [S.D. 3.2.6]), poisoned bible and “dismal” (S.D. 4.2.60), lycanthrogenic hymn (“O let us howl, some heavy note,/Some deadly dogged howl” [4.2.61–62]), the play is a veritable wunderkammer of the Catholic theater’s lost objects. Exemplary is the “dead man’s hand” that Ferdinand gives his sister to kiss in the dark (S.D. 4.1.43). Severed from a body we never meet, and therefore hopelessly extraneous to the workings of the tragic plot, the limb is both a remainder and a reminder of the hierosphthic corpus: when the Duchess realizes what she is holding, it is as if the play of Fergus is retold from the vantage of the unlucky Madonna, caught in her blasphemer’s grip. And yet, given the punch delivered by its recycled use (the Duchess calls it “witchcraft” [4.1.54]), the dead man’s hand is, as Katherine Rowe suggests, much like The Monkey’s Paw: a grotesque souvenir from whence a primitive force still emanates.42 Similar in kind is the larger “piece” from which that hand was supposedly “taken”: the tableau of “the artificial figures of Antonio and his children, appearing as if they were dead” that Bosola reveals from “behind a traverse” (4.1.56, S.D. 4.1.55). This too is a gratuitous repurposing of medieval gimcrackery: those life-size, lifelike mannequins recall the stagecraft of the Massacre of the Innocents, wherein, as John Gatton has shown, the technique of producing a “mov-

41. Bosola’s “pestilent disease” evokes the “Pestylent ydolatrie” in  John Bale, A Comedy concernynge thre lawes (London, 1548), sig. Biiv. 42. Katherine Rowe’s study, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern, treats the dead hands in both Webster’s play and W. W. Jacobs’s story as manifestations of alienated intention (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 87–110, 133–35.



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ing . . . slaughter” out of human-scale “dolls” was perfected.43 And yet neither the decrepitude of these properties nor their dramaturgical extraneity (since the real “strangl[ing] of the children” comes in the very next scene [4.2.239]) relaxes their grip on an audience.44 Especially as it descends into the gloom of its heroine’s imprisonment, boded by “screech owls” and “glowworms” (4.2.65, 4.2.144), The Duchess of Malfi is everywhere encrusted with the detritus of a dead stage, as if to prove that beneath the veil of Protestant plainness, medieval drama’s “graphic, even gothic horrors”45 continue to grab at us, like the “thing” that appears in the Cardinal’s “fish-pond[],” “arm’d with a rake” (5.5.6, 5,6). Webster, it seems, is remarkably keen to show us how bound we still are to the contents of medieval drama’s prop closet. And yet his play insinuates no support for a counterreformationist agenda. Consider the troubling presence of the Virgin of Loretto, the shrine that presides over the scene of the Duchess’s “ambush” (3.5.56). From the vantage of the play’s Protestant audience, it is hard to imagine an object more conspicuously polluted by the taint of idolatry; a notorious destination of Catholic pilgrimage, “our Lady of Loretto” is the spur to a “most irreligious superstition” whereby “the dead visit the dead” as one Oxford chaplain preaches.46 It is therefore in conformity with its Protestant deploration that the Duchess makes the Virgin the object of her “seem[ing]” “princely progress” (3.2.311, italics mine). Under Bosola’s disloyal advisement, she “feigns a pilgrimage” there (3.2.307), using false devotion to cover to her escape from the noose of her brothers’ increasing malice. But for this “jesting with religion” (3.2.317), the Duchess is handed a punishment straight out of the Catholic playbook. Cleaved from her spouse, her children, her title, and her estate in a perverse ceremony orchestrated by her cardinal brother, she is stigmatized by the blessings that suddenly drop from her. Given how much her experience resembles that of Porphyrius, whose own jesting with religion earned him a martyr’s crown, it is perhaps to be expected that the Duchess feels the tell-tale “stick” of a holy “scourge” here:

43. John Gatton, “ ‘There must be blood’: Mutilation and Martyrdom on the Medieval Stage,” in Violence in Drama, ed. James Redmon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 82. 44. In his gloss of this scene, Brown makes questions of plot and probability plainly irrelevant to Webster’s dramaturgy: “Why should an avaricious Duke go to the cost and trouble of wax corpses for two children who were in a few minutes to be real ones?” he quotes the play’s prior editor, F. L. Lucas, asking. To achieve “a maximum of horror and cruelty” Brown replies. The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Brown, the quotation comes from a gloss in Act 4, scene 1, indexed by Brows as “55.2 children” on page 110. 45. Gatton, “There must be blood,” 79. 46. John King, Lectures Upon Jonas (Oxford, 1599), sig. I8v.

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O Heaven, thy heavy hand is in’t. I have seen my little boy oft scourge his top And compar’d myself to’t: naught made me e’er Go right but heaven’s scourge-stick. (3.5.78–81)

Like Othello in the throes of his seizures, the Duchess concludes that it is not just her brothers’ cruelty that shakes her thus. And yet there is no tenable theology to this conviction: the villainy that happens under the statue’s watch means that we cannot look to heaven to account for the Duchess’s “scourg[ing].” Instead, the play shows us that religion has no grip on art; from both sides of the Reformation’s divide, Christianity has bungled its relation to representation, either by denying a force that remains real and present, or by inventing miraculous accounts of its irreligious influence. It lies with Antonio, the Duchess’s unlucky husband, to prove as much. On his way to meet the Cardinal (5.1.62), he pauses in “the ruins of an ancient abbey” to meditate on what, for early modern English audiences, is a timely subject (5.3.2):

I do love these ancient ruins: We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history. And questionless, here in this open court, Which now lies naked to the injuries Of stormy weather, some men lie interr’d Lov’d the church so well, and gave so largely to’t They thought it should have canopied their bones Till doomsday; but all things have their end: Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men, Must have like death that we have. (5.3.9–19)

The “peculiarly English post-Reformation context” of this monologue approves the correctness of its speaker’s mentalité;47 in happy contrast to the sick and dazzled Ferdinand, Antonio regards the remains of Catholicism with cleared sight, such that “the church” as it was—monolithic, simoniacal, iconol­ atrous—is consigned to a surpassed past, and its ruined appurtenances are “dea[d]” as doornails. And yet the place redounds with real presence: in the

47. Neill, Issues of Death, 347.



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midst of its “open court” is the Duchess’s secret grave, from whence her voice, and then her “face,” “folded in sorrow,” flash out to warn the widower of his fate (5.3.45). It is excruciating, therefore, that by virtue of his reformed belief Antonio cannot heed his dead wife’s alarm. This exchange, between the EchoDuchess, her husband, and his friend, shows that the price of Protestant antiidolatry is a devastating ignorance: Echo: Delio: Antonio: Echo:

O, fly your fate Hark: the dead stones seem to have pity on you And give you good counsel. Echo, I will not talk with thee, For thou art a dead thing. Thou art a dead thing. (5.3.35–39)

Just as Ferdinand is condemned for idolizing his sister by a “very pestilent disease,” Antonio is here condemned for repudiating the presence that has, as Delio says, “caught” him (5.3.20). When he is stabbed in the dark, some sixty lines later, he is left looking like Massinger’s Domitian—ignominiously dead for refusing a contagious grace. But the Duchess, who is more flexible, fares no better. Though, like Porphyrius, she jests with religion in her sham pilgrimage and, like Porphyrius, she then feels herself seized and shaken by Heaven’s “heavy hand,” her eventual death is “a deed of darkness” (4.2.335), and not a “splendid spectacle” from which Christians can take inspiration. Hence Cariola, who is barred from witnessing her mistress’s noble ending, dies in an awful travesty of it: desperate with excuses, she “bites and scratches” until the Executioners finally “throttle” her (4.2.252, 251). The play, I am arguing, refuses to stake out a position on one side or the other of the Reformation’s great divide. And the reason, I think, is that The Duchess takes a page from “The Theater and the Plague.” In Webster’s tragedy, human life and its neat progression from “time past” to “time to come” play a distant second to art’s primer, realer and untimely presence. Even from the outset of its commendatory verses, where it is hailed as a “masterpiece,” “epitaph” and “monument” (2, 15, 8), the work is its author’s materia prima: not just the afterlife but the epitome of Webster himself. Admittedly, this priority of the secondary is not exactly new—to live on “beyond death,” as Delio eulogizes (5.5.121), means that life must cede to the forms of its memorialization—but in Webster’s play, this necessity is made an acute concern, as when the Duchess struggles to tear Antonio’s attention away from the image of herself on her first husband’s tombstone:

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What is’t distracts you? This is flesh, and blood sir; ’Tis not the figure cut in alabaster Kneels at my husband’s tomb. Awake, awake man! (1.1.453–55)

If it is odd that the Duchess has to correct the precedence her beloved accords her alabaster self over her quick one, it is odder that this correction doesn’t take. By the time she is done in by the artificial tableau of her family’s doing in, reality and representation have changed places. Asks the Duchess, in the throes of her “suffer[ing]” (4.2.29), “who do I look like now?” (4.2.30), to which Cariola replies: Like to your picture in the gallery, A deal of life in show, but none in practice; Or rather like some reverend monument Whose ruins are even pitied. (4.2.31–34)

If anything is clear about these otiose lines, it is that seeming like the lifelike­ ness of one’s likeness, or like a thing whose piteousness derives from the dispelling of its pathetic fallacy, is nothing like an answer to the Duchess’s simple question. Instead, Cariola’s conceit, wherein the original approximates its imitation, is central to Webster’s project of making the verisimilitudinous the preserve from which the commotions of real life take their measure, a move so counter to the usual priority of life over show that we are likely to read it as an ironic gesture of disenchantment. Particularly since we have already heard the play’s heroine “account the world a tedious theatre,” in which she “play[s] a part” “against [her] will” (4.1.84, 85), Cariola’s similes don’t elucidate by alikeness but accost us with the conceit of likeness per se. They take us, in other words, straight out of the stage picture, to dwell on the “as if ” of theatrical performance. A more intrusive instance of this estrangement comes at another solemn moment, when the Duchess is shown the ‘cadavers’ of her family. Of her own suffering, she says, it wastes me more Than were’t my picture, fashion’d out of wax, Stuck with a magical needle and then buried In some foul dunghill. (4.1.62–65).

By comparing the ‘murder’ to its like carried out, in the same wax medium, upon the image of herself, the Duchess seems unjustifiably cognizant of the



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artifice of Bosola’s “artificial figures.” The lines raise the disagreeable impression that Webster has dropped the play’s façade to let his characters wink at their own theatricality. It is worth noting, therefore, that the circumstance is not Webster’s invention but Elizabethan history, recorded by England’s Spanish Ambassador in 1578: A countryman . . . found, buried in a stable, three wax figures . . . the centre figure had the word Elizabeth written on the forehead and the side figures were dressed like her councilors . . . the left side of the images being transfixed with a large quantity of pig’s bristles as if it were some sort of witchcraft. When it reached the Queen’s ears she was disturbed.48

The effect is a corroboration of the play’s pestology: thanks to the Queen’s “disturb[ing]” experience, we have it on high authority that art can grip us like the grippe.49 But Webster presses the point even further by reversing it: in his play, realer matters are secondary to art’s felt force. Hence, the “cords” of the Duchess’s “life” crack in the face of the hacked waxworks (4.2.354), whereas the “cord” with which Bosola strangles her is as nothing to her (Bosola: “methinks . . . this cord should terrify you?”/Duchess: “Not a whit” [4.2.213, 215–16]). Killed by show far more than she is killed by the Executioners’ practice, the Duchess abandons her part in the same iconic state that she took it up—kneeling for her “tomb-maker” (4.2.148)—as if to prove that despite our best efforts to throttle our own shadows, life remains art’s double. Precisely where he would seem to defrock his own spectacle, then, Webster proves instead that representation has “a deal of life” of its own. This corroboration avant la lettre of performance studies is assigned to Ferdinand; when he emerges from his antechamber to utter, like Frankenstein to Bosola’s Igor, “Excellent: as I would wish; she’s plagu’d in art” (4.1.111), we hear the summa of his mad but meticulous attempt to distil to its most fatal form the “life of its own” that Richard Schechner will attribute to performance.50 From his haunting of her bedroom, to the spectacularization of her divorce and exile, to the dead hand trick, to the “wild consort/of madmen” he sends to perform 48. A letter from Bernardino de Mendoza to Gabriel Zayas, London, September 8, 1578, in Calendar of Letters and State Papers Relating to English Affairs, Preserved Principally in the Archives of Simancas, ed. Martin Hume, 4 vols. (London, 1892–99), 2:611, quoted in Louis Montrose, “Idols of the Queen: Policy, Gender and the Picturing of Elizabeth I,” Representations 68 (1999): 112. Dekker makes much of this incident in The Whore of Babylon, dramatizing it as the witchcraft performed by The Whore upon England’s Queen (2.2.168–80). 49. A compelling account of this phenomenon is offered in William Egginton’s How the World Became a Stage, especially chap. 2, “Real Presence, Sympathetic Magic, and the Power of Gesture,” 33–60. 50. Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology, 35.

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in her prison, to the final and fatal waxworks show, Ferdinand uses his sister to pathologize Gawdy’s proverb: “there never comes more hurte than commes of fooling.” There is some justice to the fact that the most afflicted of the play’s victims is Ferdinand himself (“I have cruel sore eyes”). But more evocative is the suffering of Bosola, who extracts this moral from his master’s fall: “I will not imitate things glorious/No more than base: I’ll be mine own example” (5.4.81–82). Witness to the desolation wrought upon the Duke by his own dark theatrical experiments, Bosola resolves to wrest free of imitation’s taint, which is to say that like the medieval stage, and like the early modern theater that succeeds it, he founds his innocence on his fresh start. The problem with this plan, however, is that it is plainly impracticable. When the play reaches its “sad disaster” in the short space of the very next scene (5.5.79), its falling out is all-too derivative: Malateste: Bosola:

Thou wretched thing of blood, How came Antonio by his death? In a mist: I know not how— Such a mistake I have often seen In a play. (5.5.92–96)

It is possible, in fact, for Bosola to be more precise, for the felling of Antonio is accompanied to snatches from King Lear, from “wanton boys” (5.4.65; King Lear 4.1.38) to “break heart!” (5.4.72; KL 5.3.311) to this irreverent riff on Gloucester’s most famous line: “We are merely the stars’ tennis balls, struck and banded/Which way please them” (5.4.54–55). With the caustic suggestion that the sport the gods kill us for is tennis (King Lear, 4.1.38–39), Webster raises Lear’s example to prove that performance plagues us in art. “Look there, look there!”

The final aim of this chapter is to show that just as Hamlet’s use of Plutarch helps us discover “the thing” in Roman performance, The Duchess’s use of Lear helps us recognize the thing in stigmatical theater—the same something there that Prynne both sees and flees. Bosola gives us a steadier glimpse of this toxic sight by taking us back to Shakespeare’s most tragic ending, and to the trouble audiences have had bringing its performance to some kind of resolution. When he takes up Antonio’s cause, soliloquizing his change from henchman to belated hero (“all my care shall be/to put thee into safety” [5.2.339–40]), Bosola is afflicted, all of a sudden, by a troubling sight: “still methinks the duchess/Haunts me: there, there!—/’Tis nothing but my melancholy” (5.2.345–47). Though



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with a better sense of his own desperation, Bosola is like Lear here, conjuring his redemption out of the air: “Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips,/Look there, look there!” (KL 5.3.310–11). Like Lear, in other words, he fashions an enduring presence out of the person that he has (by deputation or neglect) killed. In The Duchess, this is a recurring tendency: the Cardinal’s fish-pond, the ruined abbey, Ferdinand’s solitude (“What’s that follows me?” 5.2.31–32), and the sanctum of Bosola’s private thoughts are each disturbed by the martyred heroine’s recrudescence. Yet as in Lear, what happens therein is peculiarly undenotable, for the thing seen—the stirring of something—is also the thing not seen. Lear is an unreliable witness, after all: Cordelia’s breath is generally taken as his dying ecstasy. The Duchess’s posthumous reapparitions are similarly vexed: Delio calls the “face folded in sorrow” Antonio’s “fancy, merely” (46), and there is no stage direction to corroborate its presence, however persuasively it forebodes. There is, likewise, no outward sign to indicate the realness of what Bosola or the Cardinal sees, though in his editorial gloss, John Russell Brown points out that the King’s Men were well furnished with the devices and effects to stage spirits rising from the grave,51 apparently to persuade us that there is, or there must have been, some there “there.” I think that the reason for his assurance is that the alternative is intolerable: not merely do we suffer at the thought that these characters are making something of nothing (though this is grim enough); worse is our own recognition that, when they “bend [their] eye[s] on vacancy” (Ham 3.4.113), we do not know “what we actually see.”52 I draw this phrase from James Calderwood’s account of the dissatisfactions of Lear’s ending, which come to a head in Cordelia’s death. Calderwood finds the “boy actor’s breathing body” a poor “theatrical sign of a dead Cordelia,” for the closer we scrutinize ‘her’ ‘lifeless’ form, the likelier we are to see the actor emit the exhalation that Lear is hallucinating. This conflict between the claims of the script (“no life” [5.3.304]) and the evidence of the performance is anguishing; as Calderwood writes, “for much of this latter part of the scene the audience’s feelings are in painful suspension as it attempts to interpret the naked ‘it is’ of drama.”53 His point is that the relation between what is happening and what is supposed to happen is perceptible only in retrospect; before the play finally stops, the audience struggles to get the sense of its ending, unsure of the realness of its catastrophe (Kent: “Is this the promised end?/Edgar: “Or 51. Given the use of a similar Lady-in-the-Tomb device in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (1611), Brown speculates that “perhaps Webster saw this piece of machinery among the properties of the King’s Men and the whole scene was born.” “Introduction,” The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Brown, xxxv. 52. James L. Calderwood, “Creative Uncreation in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 16. 53. Ibid., 16, 17.

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image of that horror?” [5.3.261–62]). The summa of Lear’s tragedy is thus its subsumption of the audience in the theater’s quintessential dilemma: the undecidable nature of the performed ‘fact.’ That Lear yanks us back from our suspended disbelief to see performance’s seeming is less interesting, though, than what Calderwood distills from the resulting epistemological murk. In the copular affirmation of drama’s “naked ‘it is’ ” he speaks the language of ontogeny, as if presiding over the discovery of performance’s “life of its own”; by hailing an irreducible something at the heart of Lear’s misperception, Calderwood, like Prynne, circumscribes the theater’s “seed.” Or rather, he shows us Lear doing so, when the old King has us “look,” “look,” “look on” the living presence that performance stirs up. Since we are trained by the play’s inset witnesses to take Cordelia’s breath as a delusion, Shakespeare would seem to uphold the Protestant view here: the demand to “look,” “look” is a demand to recognize that there is nothing to be seen. Yet under the special scrutiny that Lear orchestrates, artifice gathers life to unto itself: the breath of the actor attaches to the play’s most devout fiction (she’s alive!) proof of life. So it is that something breaks out from the nothing Lear indicates, like a “tadpole” under a microscope. There is, though, another side to this scene. For in light of the familiarity of Lear’s ending—and certainly Webster presumes that it is well known—the breath of the actor playing Cordelia is not evidence that Lear is right, but evidence that production does the play wrong. What Lear has us look at, in other words, is the actor’s inevitable failure to live up to the demands of his part. Because of the special attentiveness the moment commands, there is something stronger than difficulty at work here; inasmuch as Lear requires a Cordelia who stops breathing, then at ground zero of its tragedy, when all remaining characters join the audience in putting ‘her’ performance under a microscope, the play discloses as the “pre-existing condition” of “the great Shakespearean stage” that like the plague, it wants us dead. If this seems an unlikely diagnosis, it is worth asking why in The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare takes such pains to undo it. After rejecting the pleasures of a wife-killing show trial in the strongest terms possible (“it shall scarce boot me/to say ‘not guilty’: mine integrity,/Being counted falsehood” [3.2.25–27]), that play bypasses Othello’s catastrophe by staging the transformation of art into life: Hermione’s statue is the dead thing from which she, all-too-human, emerges (“Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing/So aged as this seems” [5.3.28–29]).54 The effect is a vivid rerighting of the theater and its 54. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2002). All subsequent quotations are from this edition.



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double: our summoned and concerted look upon the breathing “statue”— “see, my lord/Would you not deem it breath’d?” (5.3.63–64)—confutes life’s unequalness to art by making the opposite case: “What fine chisel/Could ever yet cut breath?” (5.3.78–79). Indeed, the whole of the play is dedicated to the transformation of Leontes’s “infecting affect” into the “sweet” “affliction” of art’s ceding to life (5.3.76), as if to sweep us past the cycles of ephochal “renovation” and “destruction” that Julia Lupton has found so central to the play’s structure, and into a state of happily ever after.55 This same curative impulse seeps into the very grounds of Shakespeare’s canonizing; when Jonson writes in his Folio tribute, “My Shakespeare, rise,” “Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,” we hear a not-so-distant echo of Paulina’s “descend; be stone no more” (5.3.99), as though to affix the moving nature of his art back onto its creator. The appeal of this notion is clear when we contrast the praise for Shakespeare with the encomiasm of The Duchess, for whereas Jonson famously imagines a poet “alive still” whilst his “book doth live” (34), the commendatory verses for Webster’s “masterpiece” are more in the vein of Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado.” Writes Middleton to his friend, by “this work of fame” “Thy monument is rais’d in thy life-time” (5, 8); adds Ford, the world that “took life” from thy “clear pen” now “raise[s] [thy] monument” (37, 36, 38).56 In Duchess, it is as if art praises its creator by burying him alive. The difference is pretty stark: whereas Jonson distills from The Winter’s Tale an art that immortalizes, Middleton and Ford distill from Duchess an art that wants us dead. In this they extend a contrast that Webster deliberately orchestrates, for his play seems designed to “hoot[] at” the “cordial comfort” of The Winter’s Tale (5.3.116, 77). Take the scene of the Duchess wasted by the fake deadness of her husband—the scene in which she is, as Ferdinand says, “plagu’d in art.” Given the syntactic and thematic symmetries at work, the moment cannot help but seem a parodic repudiation of the scene of Leontes restored by the fake deadness of his wife, in which he is, as he says, “mock’d with art” (5.3.68). The effect is underlined by the care that Webster takes not to stir Leontes’s false delusion (“Still methinks/There is an air comes from her” [5.3.77–78]), for even under the special scrutiny afforded by its discoveryspace discovery (“Here is discovered, behind a traverse, the artificial figures of 55. “Infecting affect” is Julia Rheinhart Lupton’s term. For Lupton, superseded pasts are pagan, Jewish, and Catholic, and the play more largely is heavily typological (Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology and Renaissance Literature [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996], 192, 218. 56. William Rowley, the author of a third dedicatory poem “To his friend, Mr. John Webster, upon his Duchess of Malfi,” arrives at a similar point by taking a different tack: the “lively body’d” heroine of Webster’s play has, he says, superseded the woman whose “life” she represents (25, 30). In The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown, 5.

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Antonio and his children, appearing as if they were dead ” [SD 4.1.55]), the heap of wax corpses can house “no, no, no life” to mar the bleakness of its prospect (KL 5.3.304). Instead, an unbreathing art perfectly discharges its primal force when Ferdinand tells us that it hatches the plague. This is a bold claim given that the plague was more or less unrepresentable in the early modern English playhouse;57 there seems to have been no stomach for rendering in the theater’s undecidable register a hurt whose undecidability is so much the source of its ague. But for Webster, performance is not about catching consciences or catching faith, but about catchingness, tout court. The ultimate sign of this theatrical philosophy is the way that Webster turns the Duchess herself into an art that plagues us, for by the fifth act, her volatile apparition becomes a wasting agent in its own right. This reading derives in part from the editor F. L. Lucas’s claim that the play “lives too long when it outlives the heroine,” which suggests a Duchess in ghostly excess of its author’s invention.58 But more recent spectralizations of performance’s staying power from Peggy Phelan, Alice Rayner, Marvin Carlson, Herbert Blau, and Diana Taylor, among others, have made it increasingly hard to ignore how much the spirit of the Duchess flaunts her synonymy with the spirit of The Duchess: her afterlife figures the grip of her show after those revels should have ended. Henceforward, seeing the Duchess becomes a meditation on seeing The Duchess, which is to say that her every apparition is a begging of Middleton’s question: “For who’er saw this duchess live, and die/That could get off under a bleeding eye?” The answer is no one. As Middleton insinuates, bleeding eyes—or “cruel sore” ones—are the least of it, since each character that catches sight of the Duchess (qua The Duchess) is soon dead. There is, therefore, a toxic effect to those Lear-like moments of spectatorial hailing (“What’s that follows/me?” [5.2.31–32]; “Still methinks the Duchess/Haunts me” [5.2.345]; “Hark” [5.3.36]; “Methinks I see a thing” [5.5.6]) when a special attentiveness is summoned from the audience and directed at something that is not there, but not not there either. This is an “ague” beyond the cure that Brown’s editorial help can administer (5.3.47), for the question “what is there?” with its crossings out (“your shadow” [5.2.35]; “your fancy, merely” [5.3.46]; “tis nothing” [5.3.347]) that are in turn crossed out (“O fly your fate!” [5.3.35]) is not 57. Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, as the clear exception to the theatrical silence on this topic, employs the plague as the backdrop for a masterless household, but the play’s characters are curiously immune to the disease. It is also true that William Wager’s obscure morality play, Enough is as Good as a Feast (1560), includes an allegorical character who personifies the epidemic, but neither play represents the suffering of the infection. 58. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. F. L. Lucas (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 34.



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about the Duchess we do or do not see before us, but the acknowledgment of a what that arises from the theater’s phenomenological field—or, in keeping with Prynne’s jumpy syntax, a what was that? Consistently, The Duchess’s posthumous apparition is a fleeting motion across a line of sight, one that Webster magnifies under the pressure of our scrutiny and yet never quite discloses. Both caught and blanked in the characters’ uncertain looks (“there, there!/’Tis nothing”) is a tell-tale wiggle in the visual field, a distillation and dissemination of performance’s queazie undecidability. I have two points to make, then, about Bosola’s imitation of Lear. The first is that it exhibits performance’s “naked ‘it is’ ” as the seed of a toxic, epistemic doubt. Under other names, we have seen variations of this demonstration elsewhere. Jealousy in Othello is an “essence that’s not seen” (4.1.16) whose “uncleanly apprehension[]” (142) is “a monster/Begot upon itself, born on itself ” (161–62) sufficient to wreak an “alteration” so profound that “th’affrighted globe/Should yawn at” it (5.2.99–100). Affection in The Winter’s Tale seems to be made of the same cruxy stuff, before it is subjected to Shakespeare’s miracle cure: Affection! thy intention stabs the centre: Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicatest with dreams;—how can this be?— With what’s unreal thou coactive art, And fellow’st nothing: then ‘tis very credent Thou mayst co-join with something; and thou dost, And that beyond commission, and I find it, And that to the infection of my brains And hardening of my brows.59

But it is in The Duchess that this “stab[bing]” but “unreal” matter is coaxed into view. Or rather, it is in The Duchess that we are shown the protocols and the effects of its coaxing, which are as close as we are allowed to get to beholding something so “coactive” with “the power of the imagination” that its mere conception “will infect [our] brains” and “sowe a pestilential Seed in [our] blood.” The spasmodic attentiveness that Webster brings to bear on the spirit of the Duchess leaves unfulfilled our desire to discover theater’s power to afflict us like a “tadpole,” under a microscope. And yet, in that herk and jerk (“there, there!/Tis nothing”), we are left with the impression that there is, nevertheless, something to be seen. 59. Both Stephen Orgel and Julia Lupton offer insightful readings of this passage. See “The Poetics of Incomprehensibility,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 4 (1991): 431–37, and Afterlives of the Saints, 186–90.

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My second point is that this something confutes the Reformation’s claim to a fresh start. Consider Antonio’s response to the haunted abbey: “Come, I’ll be out of this ague;/For to live thus is not indeed to live:/It is a mockery, and abuse of life” (5.3.47–49). In Duchess, to be mocked by art is thus to be plagued by the supervenience of our ruined creations, for the life that flashes out from “dead thing[s]” makes its beholders wish themselves dead. This is a neat reverse of iconoclasm’s sight-clearing impulse: when The Duchess “bring[s]” things “to th’hammer” (5.4.80), it doesn’t blank slates but snuffs out whole human lineages. As Bosola says to the Cardinal: “I do glory/That thou, which stood’st like a huge pyramid/Begun upon a large and ample base,/ Shalt end in a little point, a kind of nothing” (5.5.76–79). It is in his valediction, though, that Bosola puts the matter best: “We are only like dead walls, or vaulted graves/That ruined, yields no echo” (5.5.97–98). Since the acoustic liveness that Webster assigns dead walls and vaulted graves is one of the play’s most spectacular features, the difference that he draws between people and art is that only art remains posthumous to its own deadening. One way to describe the afterlife of The Duchess is therefore to say that it makes a chimera out of our Reformation: heedless of the cordon sanitaire that divides the medieval stage and the early modern, representation maintains its scourging grip. Yet it is not the case that nothing changes from one period to the next, for in Webster’s handling of their unabatement, the stigmata of spectatorship—those signs of performance’s sudden and unrelenting hold on us—shake off their false Christology. Webster’s calling out of art’s unreformed tendency to call us out (“look there!”) is more, therefore, than a revival of a disowned past; it is an account of what has always been true, beyond and beneath Prynne’s ill-fated search for origins.60 When Webster confronts us with a Duchess transubstantiated from her unholy martyrdom into a what was that? he reveals the contraction that has always subtended the spectatorial contract. He thereby shows us why Flecknoe’s theater history, with its careful separation of the middle from the modern ages, is an impossible subject in early modern England.

60. This formulation is meant to echo Joseph Roach’s account of performance: “I believe,” writes Roach, “that . . . the doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins . . . is the most important of the many meanings that users intend when they say the word performance.” Cities of the Dead: CircumAtlantic Performances (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3.

If any therefore henceforth perish by frequenting Stage-playes, after this large discovery of their sin-engendering soul condemning qualities, . . . their blood shall light upon their owne heads, not on mine, who have taken all this paines to doe them good. william prynne, “Catastrophe,” Histrio-mastix For whose eares do not tingle, whose flesh doth not tremble, whose hart doth not melt, to heare of such a sudden, strange, and mercilesse fire as this was, which like a showre of raine fell vpon these cities and destroyed them? robert gray, An alarum to England

5 The Theater as Conflagration The Eschatology of the Tudor Stage

I began this project by saying that one reason early modern England has seemed to lack the knack for theater history is that its theatrical pasts do not fade. Roman performance and its persecutorial upshot is a spirit England cannot exorcise; Romish performance and its cryptic affliction is a disease it cannot cure. The dissolution that is the theatrical event’s disconcerting ontological condition is therefore brought out by its continuance: what lives on, despite repeated efforts to clear our slate, is a stage that keeps befalling us, in the dooming sense that over and again it precipitates age-ending falls. This poetics is richly advertised in early modern England. Not only is the theatrical discourse tricked out with concrete and abstract expressions of the theater’s pull toward calamity, but in the unsecured relation of the abstract to the concrete its authors fret the heart of the problem. Previous chapters have described the fall of Rome and the rupture of the unified

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Church as the price paid for attempts made to resolve the problem of performance’s felt but fictitious condition. In due course, guilty creatures and miraculous wounds bring disaster to the regimes that put them in play. The resulting view of performance is of an unremitting vanishing point: the ends of other histories demonstrate that the stage is the eschatological horizon into which whole epochs disappear. Part 3 is this recognition brought to its endgame; my aim is to show how eschatology structures the understanding of early modern England’s golden age of the stage. To ground this argument, I begin as I have before—by piecing together the traces of a mode of disappearance. This time, however, my story is not buried in a murky past, but set in an incandescent future. I begin in the bright light of the “rash world[’s]” “burn[ing]” (5.5.94)—in the fifth act of a work that John Foxe calls his comoedia apocalyptica. Scholars typically introduce Foxe’s drama by conceding that it is the lesser work of the martyrologist. Christus Triumphans (1556), the second and last of Foxe’s theatrical experiments, is usually thought to deserve its neglect; “the play has no poetic merit,” writes J. F. Mozley, an assessment that is corroborated by its own plot synopsis. Here is John Hazel Smith’s prose translation of the Prologue: I shall speak a brief argument of a comedy which is not brief at all. When Satan brings charges against the two children of Eve, Nomocrates receives from heaven a writ under which Psyche is put into Orcus and Soma is turned over to Thanatus. Soma leaves three children by his wife Ecclesia: Europus, Africus, and Asia. Seizing these also as criminals, Nomocrates holds them in the prison Sciolethrum, intending to turn them over to Thanatus, his lictor. Even Ecclesia herself begins to be threatened. But when all is lost and human powers are of no avail, Christ comes, the philanthropist, and helps the wretched children of Adam. He frees Psyche from Gehenna. He provides Soma with the hope of a better life. With the aid of Paul and Peter, he frees the three children of Ecclesia. He strips from Nomocrates the authority of his writ. He sentences Satan to chains for a thousand years. Freed at last, Satan incites wondrous tragedies through Pseudamnus, the Antichrist, enemy of the lamb and of Ecclesia. But the lamb triumphs, and she is dressed for her wedding. On all sides the theater resounds with applause.

. John Foxe, Christus Triumphans, tr. John Hazel Smith in Two Latin Comedies by John Foxe The Martyrologist ed. John Hazel Smith (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), 233. The generic designation comes after the play’s title on the printed work’s cover page: “Christus Triumphans, Comoedia Apocalyptica” (Basel, 1556). All future quotations from this play are Smith’s translation. . J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and His Book (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 53.



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Few readers have been able to bear with the twenty-nine scenes of Latin verse that dramatize this tangled history. What is more interesting, however, is that Foxe doesn’t seem to want his audience to survive it. It isn’t just that his characters model what Martin Harries calls “destructive spectatorship,” though they do so in abundance: by the fifth act, Nature “stands stupefied, silent in stupefaction” (5.5.127), Death, “of its own will, surrenders” (130–31) and “the famous stone Terminus,” the “god of landmarks and boundaries,” gives way (134– 35). More remarkably, this “formal abolition of temporal and spatial order” is intended to call down a fire the play cannot fully stage. After casting God the broad hint that “the time is perhaps not long” (5.5.157) before “the rash world rages and burns” (94–95), Foxe stops his play with the promise that the show isn’t over, apparently in the hope that the apocalypse will come on his cue. Christus Triumphans would seem to have little in common with the professional stage inaugurated by the erection of the Theater in Shoreditch in 1576. Written in Germany during Foxe’s Marian exile, it belongs to that small, strange corpus of drama that is both post-Catholic and presecular, and that Chambers characterizes as an “accident[al]” offshoot of the pre-Elizabethan stage. Thematically speaking, Chambers is right: save Dekker’s Whore of Babylon (1606), not much is written for the professional theater that looks like Christus Triumphans. But the “chaotic” millenarian plays of the first half of the sixteenth century remain illustrative in one respect: they give voice to a pervasive feeling that the theater is for burning. In Foxe’s culminating invocation—“Come, oh bridegroom. Come, the Spirit and the bride bid you come” (5.5.101–2)—the stage meets its promised end in the application of Christ’s apocalyptic, hymeneal torch. Marlowe’s canon realizes this expectancy with characteristic brio, from King Henry’s deathbed command to “Fire Paris” (24.102) to Barabas’s fall into a boiling cauldron, to Dido’s leap onto her own funeral pyre, to Faustus’s descent into hell’s inferno, to King Edward’s rape by a . Martin Harries, Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). . Smith, in Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 368–69. . This is Smith’s gloss; 4:369. . The two other plays of this type are John Bale’s King Johan (performed for Cranmer’s household in 1538), and Thomas Kirchmeyer’s Pammachius (translated by Bale and staged at Cambridge in 1545). Chambers calls this subgenre “something of an accident” (Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 1:245). . On this play’s affiliation to Foxe, see Julia Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 62–108. . Felix Emmanuel Schelling, English Drama (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1914), 30. . The lines are drawn from the Gospel of Matthew’s parable of the ten virgins, five of whom run out of oil as they await the bridegroom. The other five, well prepared for his coming, are able to illuminate his welcome. The eschatological theme is explicit in the moral Christ takes from this story: “Watch, therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the son of man cometh” (Matt. 25:13).

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cooking “spit” (SD 5.6.110), to Tamburlaine’s brimstony elegy: “Meet heaven and earth, and here let all things end,/For earth hath spent the pride of all her fruit/And heaven consum’d his choicest living fire” (5.3.229–231).10 But this eschatological drive is not confined to its dramatic representation. Foxe’s vision of the stage as the world afire is as much a theatrical fact as it is his devout, reformative wish. The Theater’s Propensity for Burning

Proof of this claim is not hard to come by. Thanks to the abundance of records that describe it, just about everyone knows the fate of the Globe.11 What is most telling about this testimony, however, is how closely it adheres to Foxe’s dramatic form. As Gordon McMullan writes in his introduction to the play that occasioned the disaster, the Globe fire comes down to us as a “comoedia apocalyptica”;12 like Gawdy’s news of the shooting at the Admiral’s Men, Sir Henry Wotton’s report of the early modern English theater’s most famous accident sounds oddly preordained: Now, to let matters of state slip, I will entertain you at present with what has happened this week at the bank’s side. The King’s players had a new play, called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII, which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to 10. The Massacre at Paris, in Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (London: Penguin, 2003); Dido, Queen of Carthage in Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris, ed. H. T. Oliver, The Revels Plays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968); Edward II, ed. Charles Forker, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Tamburlaine the Great Part II, in Tamburlaine the Great Parts I and II, ed. John D. Jump. 11. There are four letters, an epigram, two ballads (only one of which has survived) as well as an entry in Stowe’s Annales that describe the Globe’s ruin; a decade or two later Ben Jonson and William Prynne tell the story once again. The letters include one written by Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas Puckering, another (excerpted above) from Sir Henry Wotton to Sir Edmund Bacon, another by John Chamberlain to Sir Ralph Winwood, and a fourth from the merchant Henry Bluett. The epigram is by John Taylor, printed in Taylor’s Water-Works (London, 1614). Two ballads are recorded in the Stationers Register on June 30 (the day after the fire took place), one, now lost, named “the Sodayne Burninge of the Globe,” and the other, by William Parratt, called “a doleful ballad of the generall overthrowe of the famous theater on the Banksyde called the Globe,” which seems to have survived in manuscript form as “a Sonnet upon the pittifull burneing of the Globe playhouse.” The record in the Annales comes from the 1615 edition, augmented by Edmund Howes. Jonson addresses the fire in “An Execration on Vulcan” (excerpted below) printed in Underwoods, and Prynne discusses it in his Histrio-mastix (1633) (also discussed below). Chambers transcribes all but one of these sources—the Bluett letter—in The Elizabethan Stage, 2:419–23. Maija Jansson Cole first brought Bluett’s report to light in “A New Account of the Burning of the Globe,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32, no. 3 (1981): 352. 12. “Introduction,” William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, King Henry VIII (All Is True), ed. Gordon McMullan, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2000), 60.



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the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order with their Georges and garters, the Guards with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous. Now, King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain chambers being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few foresaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle of ale.13

We can read Wotton’s news as a capitulation to the apocalyptical pressures that fire always exerts upon its early modern English chroniclers. Until 1666, when the Great Fire made the moralizing of this sort of loss less feasible,14 the same sense of divine disapprobation that Wotton attaches to the “familiar[ization]” of “greatness” pervades print accounts of passing comets, lightning storms, church, house, and town fires, and just about any report of unexpected burning. How could it not, the vicar John Sedgwick asks, when the properties of fire make self-evident the condemnation that all conflagrations speak: First, fire is terrible to behold, men tremble at the sight of it. . . . Second, fire is intollerable to endure, nature therefore feares it, because exquisite is the paine of it. . . . Thirdly, fire is unresistable, once getting the masterie, none can stand against the heate. . . . Fourthly, fire is unsatiable. . . . Fiftly, fire is mercilesse, it is impartiall, sparing no persons, no places, not the least twigge, nor tallest Cedars, not the lowest or basest Cottage, nor the sumptuest building. . . . Sixtly, and lastly, fire is nimble, of a quicke dispatching nature.15

13. The letter, dated July 2 (three days after the event), was written to Wotton’s friend and nephew, Sir Edmond Bacon; The Life and Letters of Henry Wotton, ed. L. Pearsall Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1907), 2:32. 14. Though much “ink was spilled” instructing the London populace to discern God’s judgment in that fire, Frances Dolan argues that there was also a widespread investment in laying the blame with covert and “Incendiary” Catholics, including the King’s brother; “Ashes and ‘the Archive’: The London Fire of 1666, Partisanship, and Proof, ” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 2 (2001): 387. 15. John Sedgwick, God’s Fury Fiered or Crueltie Scourged (London, 1625), sigs. B4v–B6r. See also Thomas Brooks’s “discourse” on the 1666 fire for a similar list: London’s Lamentations (London, 1670), sigs. B4r–Cv.

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But if the divine judgment in fire is common sense, the propensity of theaters to suffer providential burning is a historiological commonplace that is at least as tenacious. One of its promulgators is Saint Salvian, who reasons while surveying the Roman empire’s cascading collapse that if “Theaters” are no longer “where in times past they were” the reason is that God has struck them from the earth; indeed, says he, whole “townes” are “overthrowen, and destroied” as a result of the abominable fervor that plays inspire:16 For, I demand, who seeth another slaine before his face, and is not afraide? Who beholdeth his neighbors house on fire, and wil not by any meanes provide for the safetie of his owne? Wee do no onlie see our neighbors to burne, but also are set on fire ourselves from the chiefest part of our bodies. And ô abomination! What a mischiefe is this? We burne, we burne, yet dread we not the fire wherewith we burne.17

Surely one reason that Anthony Munday reprints this argument as the prologue to his own Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (1580) is history’s corroboration of it.18 Since the empire does indeed fall “into desolation,” as Salvian predicts, we have incontrovertible proof that “the Common-weale” that “maintain[s]” “Theaters” is well “nigh unto” God’s incendiary “cursse.”19 More surreptitious, but no less effectual, is the point that this curse is phenomenologically intrinsic: since to attend the theater is to be “set on fire” “from the chiefest part of our bodies,” the sensation of playgoing makes somatically selfevident the condemnation that the fire at the Globe eventually conveys. In Wotton’s letter, we get a sense of the strength of this double-sided formulation. Though his tale ends in a fortuitous rescue—an occasion of averted burning—in which the fire that has alighted in a pair of breeches is quenched “with a bottle of ale,” the divine judgment of fire remains in telling relation to the problem, or the sin, of spectatorial negligence. Mistaking the smoldering roof for “an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show,” playgoers “burne, [and] burne, yet dread not the fire wherewith [they] burne.” Only 16. Munday, A second and third blast of retrait, sig. Bviiir. 17. Ibid., sig. Ciir. 18. A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and theaters is routinely assigned to Anthony Munday, though its authorship is never disclosed. It was published is a follow-up to Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse (1579), which is interpolated in the role of first “blast”; the “second” is book six of Salvian of Marseilles’s De Gubernatione Dei (written around 440), and the “third” is Munday’s own critique of the contemporary stage. 19. Munday, A second and third blast of retrait, title page.



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barely are they snatched out of the hellmouth that the Globe’s smoking perimeter encompasses, when the flames that blaze “from the chiefest part” of one spectator’s body are providentially doused. The antic scene would therefore seem of a piece with the many tracts in which God forestalls the “harme” of a “fyerce and terrible fyer,” were is not for the fact of the Globe’s total loss; behind Wotton’s story of salvaged breeches lingers the “all-consuming disaster” for which Foxe makes the theater a platform.20 Wotton is not the only figure to have trouble veering off the course of fire’s received narrative. In the wake of the conflagration that consumed his library and much of his life’s work, Ben Jonson writes the “Execration on Vulcan” (1623) to revile the “call . . . to earnest & speedie repentance” routinely drawn from the ashes of his sort of misfortune.21 Always attuned to the inanities of the “Newes” market, Jonson takes the tack of satirizing the conflicting recriminations that swirl around the fire at “the Globe, the Glory of the Banke” (130). But there is something more than satire in the verses that follow: The Brethren they straight nosed it out for Newes, ’Twas verily some relict of the Stewes; And this a Sparkle of that fire let loose, That was raked up in the Winchestrian Goose, Bred on the Banck in time of Popery, When Venus there maintained the Misterie. But others fell, with that conceit by the eares, And cry’d it was a threatning to the beares, And that accursed ground, the Parish-Garden: ‘Nay’ sighed a sister, ‘ ’twas the Nun, Kate Arden, Kindled the fire!’ But then did one returne, No Foole would his own harvest spoil or burne! If that were so, thou rather would’st advance The place that was thy Wive’s inheritance. 20. James Pilkington, The True Report of the burnyng of the Steple and Churche of Poules in London (London, 1561), sigs. Avv, Aivr. “Introduction” to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, King Henry VIII (All Is True), ed. Gordon McMullan, The Arden Shakespeare (London, Thomson Learning, 2000), 60. 21. Francis Shakelton, A blazyng Starre or burnyng Beacon, seene the 10 of October last. (London, 1580), title page; Jonson, “An Execration on Vulcan,” in Epigrams, The Forest, Underwoods by Ben Jonson, Reproduced from First Editions, ed. H. H. Hudson (New York: The Facsimile Text Society, Columbia University Press, 1936), 209–14. For an autobiographical account of this poem, see Lilian Schanfield’s “Ben Jonson’s ‘An Execration upon Vulcan’: No Joking Matter,” Ben Jonson Journal 7 (2000): 355, and Richard Levin, “A Link Between Two Jonson Poems,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 9, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 8–10.

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Oh no, cry’d all, Fortune, for being a whore, Scap’d not his Justice any jot the more: He burnt that idol of the Revels too. Nay, let White-Hall with revels have to doe, Though but in daunces, it shall know his power; There was a judgement shew’n too in an hour. (137–58)

Characteristically, Jonson’s poem is a bit of a briar patch: pointed references, most of them highly topical, are laid on thick.22 What interests me, though, is the blank sense of the unexplained that pervades the “Execration’s” mockery of fire’s moralizing explanations. While the poem takes up the burning of the Globe with the aim of ridiculing those who contort fire into divine justice, it presents under the heading of “judgement[s] shew’n” an accumulation of theatrical disasters (the Paris Garden, the Globe, the Fortune, and Whitehall) that manages to suggest how markedly theaters, in particular, have been singled out to suffer Vulcan’s ire. Jonson’s assumption is that exposing the contradictory conjectures of the multitude will be enough to confute them, but beneath the squabbling that he scripts, there lies the uncanny fact that where there have been fires, a lot of revels have been cataclysmically ended. Other reports might look less indebted to Salvian’s foreboding; John Taylor, whom we have encountered as Heywood’s encomiast, calls the Globe’s burning “an emblem, that great things are won/By those that dare through greatest dangers run.”23 Yet by making the fire a crucible (“As gold is better that’s in fier try’d/So is the bank-side Globe, that late was burn’d”), he too improvises on an eschatological theme: “O God which are most just,” “send refining fire,/and purifie me.”24 And so it goes. Although the majority of those who tell this story write as theater sympathizers, either by upending its Christian caution (as Wotton, Jonson, and the anonymous ballad do), or by 22. Jonson holds up for mockery the full panoply of the Globe fire’s misconstructions. First come the puritan “brethren” who say the flames were sparked by the burning lust in Southwark’s adjoining brothels (licensed in “Pop[ish]” times by the bishops of Winchester). “Others” take the fire as a sequel to the collapse of the Paris Garden some thirty years earlier and read it as a further malediction on bear-baiting. A puritan “sister” reasons that the bad character of the Globe’s custom caused the fire and accuses of arson “Kate Arden,” a common nickname for a “Nun,” or whore. But another speaker dismisses that claim outright: to do away with the playhouse would only deprive Kate and her kind of their clients. The counterclaim that Vulcan would naturally protect the sex trade in deference to Venus, his bride, is disproved by his burning of the Fortune Theatre in 1621—a place that according to the common proverb (“fortune is a whore”) ought to have earned his reprieve. The last voice to chime in concludes that Vulcan targets “revels,” and with some zeal, since fire has even dispatched the King’s banqueting house at Whitehall (in January of 1618); merely “daunc[ing],” it seems, is enough to rouse the fire god’s incendiary “judgment.” 23. “Epigram” from Taylors Water-Works (1614), quoted in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 2:422. 24. William Leighton, The Teares or Lamentations of a Sorrowfull Soule (London, 1613), sigs. Hv, H2v.



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emphasizing its resurrection (as Taylor and Jonson do), they are each caught in the closed circuit of fire’s eschatological associations.25 The Globe’s “pittiful burneing” remains incontrovertible proof of a theater slated for divine destruction.26 Raising the “Cry of Sodom”

This consensus confers upon fire the distinction of being the hurt whose link to the playhouse is most plainly and inexorably true. Not only have theaters burnt, but the fervid feelings roused by performance raise the prospect of the “terrible,” “intolerable,” “unresistable,” “unsatiable,” and “mercilesse” conflagra­ tions that keep “dispatching” playhouses from “where in times past they were.” In this milieu, the fact that eschatology underwrites accounts of the Globe’s burning looks like a cultural inevitability; the name of the place alone insures that when Londoners scan the charred “bank-side,” they “See the world’s Ruines,” as Jonson writes (135). My argument, however, is that while fire is the most self-evident expression of an antitheatricalism intrinsic to performance—for the Paris Garden, the Globe, the Fortune, and Whitehall are each consummate proof that theater happens by disappearing itself—it is also the discourse via which opponents of the stage condemn the problem of the theater’s palpable experience with unprecedented ingenuity. That sense of Armageddon that Wotton can’t keep unsaid turns out to be a story carefully crafted to go without saying by opponents of the stage. A good place to see this narrative taking shape is the Paris Garden, a venue that collapsed during a bear-baiting exhibition in 1583. Though the logic that admits this disaster as a caution to playgoers might seem rather loose, it nevertheless anchors Rainolds’s tract on God’s escalating effort to “Overthrow” “Stage-playes”: it seemeth that the Lord himself by sundry his visible judgements from heaven, hath pronounced a sensible vae against [plaies and enterludes] even in the face of the world. Witnesse Paris Garden and other places where divers have bene

25. Taylor’s sympathy for the stage is spelled out in his praise for Heywood’s Apology for Actors (discussed in part 1). Wotton’s loyalties are less certain, but we do know of his success as a student dramatist at Queen’s College, Oxford; see Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 3:516. Edmund Howes’s addition to Stowe’s Annales ends with a similar Easter tale to the one Taylor and Jonson offer: “And the next spring it was new builded in far fairer manner than before” (quoted in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2:419). 26. “A Sonnett upon the pittiful burneing of the Globe playhowse in London” is the title of the extant ballad on the Globe’s destruction.

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grievously hurt, wounded, and maimed, and some by lamentable death and destruction utterly cast out and consumed.27

The condemnation of “plaies” that somehow “pronounce[s]” itself from the scene of the Paris Garden’s ruins is one indication of the manufactured divinity with which antitheatricalists shape the theater’s ends. A similarly verdictive and unattributed outcry overtakes John Field’s A godly exhortation, by occasion of the late judgement of God shewed at Parris-garden at the moment of the venue’s collapse, when “there was a cry of fire fire, which set them [the spectators] in such a maze as was wonderfull, so that as destitute of their wits they stood styll, and could make no shifts for themselves, till the scaffold was made even with the ground.”28 Oddly extraneous in Field’s report is the double exclamation of the kind of catastrophe that the bear garden did not, in fact, suffer—namely, consummation by fire. The consequence of this detail is best seen when Th’ Overthrow and A godly exhortation are taken together, for combined they disseminate a telling bowdlerization of an urban accident, by confusing its type (as Field does) and its place (as Rainolds does), in order to deny it the possibility of being accidental. From their accounts, we begin to see how the job of filling in Salvian’s vague record of catastrophe—“neither be Theaters where in times past they were”—inspires some historiographic sleight of hand, since the inaugural demonstration of God’s judgment against England’s theaters involves neither an actual playhouse nor an actual fire. Still, it isn’t the past that concerns these writers as much as the future that awaits the stage. As Field demonstrates, once the element of fire is insinuated into the bear garden’s collapse, the theater’s apocalypse cannot be far behind:29 surely it is to be feared, besides the destruction of body and soule that many are brought unto by frequenting the Theater and Curtin, that one day these places will likewise bee cast downe by God himselfe, and draw with them an huge heape of such contemners and prophane persons to be killed and spoyled in their bodies.30 27. “The Printer [Richard Schilders] to the Reader,” Th’ Overthrow of Stage-Playes, sig. A2v. 28. John Field, A godly exhortation, by occasion of the late judgement of God shewed at Parris-garden (London, 1583), sigs. Ciiir–Ciiiiv. 29. In an unpublished paper (“Non plus,” presented at the “Getting a Feeling for Shakespeare’s Theater” conference at Northwestern University, May 2, 2009), William West has recently argued that early modern audiences did not recognize a clear distinction between theatrical and beast-baiting entertainments. My claim here, which I think is no contradiction, is that antitheatricalists helped elide this distinction for the purposes of their own arguments. 30. Field, A godly exhortation, sig. Cvv.



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Born of a false precedent, this prediction nevertheless acquires the ring of “prophe[cy]” when, some twenty-six years later, the Theater (now relocated to Southwark and renamed the Globe) burns to the ground. At least, so Prynne assures us when he reprints the passage in order to add to it the solemn aside, “Neither was he a false prophet.”31 Though scholarship would hardly call this succession of events a coincidence, Prynne seizes on Field’s “fear” to affirm the law in which theater fires always traffic: that when playhouses burn, and (as the Paris Garden proves) even when they don’t, they mete out a universal desolation that we always knew was coming. No one does more to exploit this law than Prynne. In his overstuffed chapter on God’s “Nationall judgement[s]” against the frequenting of “Spectacles,” he buries the early modern English stage’s best recollected evidence to make “the sudden feareful burning, even to the ground, both of the Globe and Fortune playhouses” more eschatologically redolent by falsely assuring us that “no man perceiv[ed] how these fires came.”32 What is truly brazen, though, is his misuse of the Old Testament to establish the theater’s propensity for burning. Turning back to the first and worst biblical instance of fire as judgment, Prynne tells us that Sodom itself was razed to ashes because of her citizens’ wicked patronage of “Cirques and Theaters.”33 The reason this origin story claims my attention is not just its speciousness, but its unnecessity. Since fire comes precoded as a “woefull and lamentable wast and spoile,” and since news of its desolation is routinely collected under admonitions like “read and tremble,” there is no particular need to bring Sodom into the mix; as Sedgwick’s sermon proves, Old Testament retributivism is intrinsic to fire’s phenomenology.34 Even Prynne seems to know that he may have pushed his case too far by the discretion with which he slips Sodom into the start of his argument: “To passe by Gods judgements upon Sodom for her Cirques and Theaters, as Prudentius poetically expresseth it.”35 Perhaps he

31. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Hhhr. 32. Ibid., sigs. Gggr, Ggg4v. The supernaturalism of these occasions is made explicit in the example with which the two fires are grouped: “the visible apparition if the Devill on the Stage at the Belsavage Play-house” (sig. Ggg4v). 33. Ibid., sig. Iiir. This interpretation comes, as Prynne says, from the fourth-century poet Prudentius, but in “The Origin of Sin,” Prudentius merely lists the theaters and the circus among a litany of men’s “concerns” that God demolishes in Sodom, including “courts and market-place,” “baths,” “hucksters’ stalls,” and especially “brothels.” Prudentius I, trans. H. G. Thomson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), 259. 34. The woefull and lamentable wast and spoile done by a suddained fire in S. Edmonds-bury in Suffolke (London, 1608). This instruction is on the title page of John Hilliard, Fire from Heaven. Burning the body of one John Hitchell of Holne-hurst (London, 1613), title page. 35. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Iiir.

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hopes to draw our attention away from the fact that like the Paris Garden in Th’ Overthrow, the fall of Sodom is another false origin: here again, an inaugural demonstration of divine judgment against the stage is proof of how avidly the theater’s opponents go about constructing God’s fiery “cursse.” But if Sodom’s precedent reveals too much of the antitheatrical agenda, it also raises the question of why Prynne nevertheless places it ahead of fortythree subsequent “examples” that are (by and large) more fit to prove that “Playes have brought on Pagans, on Christians heretofore, and for ought we know upon our selves” the “judgements of God.”36 In what follows, I offer two reasons for the Histrio-mastix’s misuse of Genesis. The first is tactical: Sodom, and what Mark Jordan calls the “fearful abstraction” of sodomy, prohibits too close a search for the theater’s corruption, rendering it a safe way to handle a subject that elsewhere produces Prynne’s faltering, germicular prose.37 The second reason is theoretical: in Sodom, Prynne and his cohort hit upon a rich paradigm for the epistemological problem at the heart of the theater, albeit one that says more than they would like about performance’s inflammation of the flesh. Wielding the Crime of Sodom

Understanding why Sodom is so irresistible to Prynne means turning back to the story of the city’s destruction. But it isn’t the nineteenth chapter of Genesis, but its popular retellings, that avail us here, for if Sodom becomes “a story as memorable as any that was ever yet left upon record since the creation of man” in early modern England, the reason is surely the haziness of its recollection.38 Characteristic is Simon Wastell’s rendering of the story in his abridged bible, the Microbiblion (1629):

36. Ibid., sigs. Ggg*4r, Iii4v–Kkkr. 37. Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1. 38. William Ince, Lot’s Little One, or Meditations on Genesis 19 Verse 20 (London, 1640), sig. Br. Early modern England makes far more liturgical and homiletic use of Sodom’s story than medieval England does. Rosalind Hays argues that the problem with the tale for medieval priests is its affiliation with unnatural sexuality, a sin less pressing, and less easily addressed, than other faults (“ ‘Lot’s Wife’ or ‘The Burning of Sodom’: The Tudor Corpus Christi Play at Sherborne, Dorset,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 33 [1994]: 99–126). Madeline Caviness, in her survey of medieval illuminations of Sodom’s fall, adds to this reason the difficulty priests have discerning what moral they can draw from the metamorphosis of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, and from the incest that Lot commits with his surviving daughters (Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001], 45–81).



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Lot doth two Angells entertaine The Sodomites struck blinde, Lots sonnes doe mocke, he Zoar craves Where he doth safetie finde. Make Haste (saith th’Angell) save thy life, Marke Sodoms fiery slaughters Lots wife a pillar of salt is made, He drunke, defiles his daughters.39

Reduced to a series of non sequiturs, Wastell’s summary follows popular custom in its failure to attach any particular crime to the city’s spectacular punishment. The tendency in early modern print is to imitate Christ’s example and read the city’s ruin as the prefiguration of the Last Judgment: as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed. (Luke 17:28–30)

But whereas Christ sees Sodom as the forerunner to an eventuality for which Christians like Foxe eagerly await, popular tradition holds up the city’s fate as a future that can be avoided by clichéd calls to moral reform. For instance, a 1570 ballad on “Sodome[’s]” “horrible and wofull Destruction” warns its audience that “the stones that lieth in wall” “will call” out England’s “sore offen[ces],” like the cry that pierced the heavens in Genesis. Yet the nature of those offences is left in the form of a rhetorical question (“O England thou like Sodome art,/In filthy sinne doth play thy part,/What sinnes are found in thee?”) in order to reproach the broadest possible audience. The song’s closing verse sums up its sentiment nicely: “every one amende.”40 It is this blankness—or rather this fill-in-the-blankness—behind an impending desolation that abets Prynne’s effort to yoke Sodom to his agenda. Like “oh my husband, my husband,” Sodom’s cry is conveniently absorptive of whatever malefaction preachers wish to read into it, including, as Prynne alleages, the “maint[enance]” of “Theaters.” But Sodom’s greatest boon to the 39. Simon Wastell, Microbiblion or The Bible’s Epitome in Verse Digested according to the Alphabet, that the Scriptures we reade may more happily be remembered, and things forgotten more easily recalled (London, 1629), sigs. B2v–B3r. 40. Anonymous, “Of the horrible and wofull Destruction of, Sodome” (London, 1570), 1 sheet.

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antitheatrical cause is its instantiation of an incendiary yet equally tacit sex crime. A second exegetical tradition, begun in Second Peter, stipulates that the city was doomed for its “lust of uncleanness” (2 Pet. 2:10), a subject that the apostle Paul says is so defiling, it must not even “be named” (Eph. 5:3). Accordingly, English preachers routinely obfuscate “the horrible and namelesse sinne of Sodome” as an act “sinne[ful] enough to defile the tongue that talkes of it” and a “villainie . . . more monstrous, then that I meane to defile my penne with how the Lord abhorres this horrible sinne.”41 It is not surprising that Prynne, whose contamination anxiety pervades the Histrio-mastix, is an especially vehement periphrast. Though he concedes that some may be “necessitated to display” this sort of “filthinesse,” the prospect is to him abhorrent: “What modest Christian heart can once recount, what tongue relate, what eye behold, what eare receive, what pen diseypher” such a crime, he asks, but the “sinne itself ”? What does surprise, therefore, is how often Prynne is called on by necessity. He cites Virgil’s anguish at Troy’s burning to profess his distaste for the job (“my mind shudders at the recollection and shrinks from it in grief ”), but the fact remains that the Histrio-mastix denominates the sin and its committers no less than 37 times.42 What is more, since Sodom is routinely “diseypher[ed]” in all “lustes contrary to the common course and kinde of nature” (including “self pollution,” “whoredome,” “Adultery,” “Incest,” the “wickedness” of “Males with Males” and “Females with Females,” and “Bes­tiality”), the cry of Sodom rises from just about any charge of theatrical licentiousness.43 Of course, the liberality with which Prynne cries Sodom is hardly unique. Scholars of early modern English performance have shown the propensity of antitheatricalists to raise this hue and cry.44 Much has been written about the “imflam[mation]” said to spark from the cross-dressed boy actor,45 and only 41. Robert Milles, Abraham’s Sute for Sodome (London, 1612), sig. E5r; John Harris, The Destruction of Sodom: A Sermon Preached at a publicke Fast, before the honourable Assembly of the Commons House of Parliament (London, 1628), sig. B2r; Thomas Beard, The Thunderbolt of God’s Wrath Against Hard-Hearted and Stiffe-Necked Sinners (London, 1618), sig. K4r. 42. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sigs. N2r–N2v; “Quamvis animus meminisse horret; luctuque refugit. Virgil. AEneid. lib. 2.” Note “f, ” sig. N2v; I count fifteen mentions of sodomy or the sin of Sodom, four of sodomitical uncleanness, and eighteen of Sodomites. 43. Augustin Marlorat, A Catholike and ecclesiasticall exposition vppon the epistle of S. Jude the apostle (London, 1584), sig. Bviiv. Samuel Danforth, The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into upon Occasion of The Arraignment and Condemnation of Benjamin Goad for his Prodigious Villainy (London, 1674), sigs. A4r–Br. 44. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 85. 45. Rainolds, Th’ Overthrow of Stage-Playes, sig. O2r. Books that take up this topic are too numerous to list here; two of the most significant are Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).



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somewhat less about the “burn[ing] . . . lust” said to consume women in the audience, along with their beholders.46 But while earlier treatments of this discourse have noted antitheatricalism’s “engorged obsessiveness” with respect to sexual subjects,47 I am interested in the apocalypticism this strain of denunciation transmits, for the reason that I think Prynne and his predecessors are so eager to transgress Pauline decorum and rail against the venereal stage is their desire to hail an impending catastrophe. If we recall, as antitheatricalists so frequently do, that fire is both the nature and the price of the “lust of uncleanness,” then it is never just a measure of their sexual fixations, but also an indication of how calculatingly the critics of the stage wish to raise an end-of-days panic, that they inveigh so feverishly against the filthiness of plays. This principle clearly motors John Northbrooke’s warning that “our fleshe is strawe, and will burne quickly” “in an open theatre,”48 since like Field, Northbrooke proceeds to a dire prediction: Our Saviour also saith, watch and pray least ye enter into temptation. . . . For as a snare shall it come on al them that dwel on the earth, like as if befell and happened in the time of Noe, when all the world was drowned, and in the time of Lot when Sodome was burned with from heaven, so verily the last day shal come sodainely, & at the twinkling of an eye, even when men loke least for it. These things must be faire examples and sufficient warnings for us.49

As England’s first antitheatrical tract, Northbrooke’s Treatise (1577) thus forges a direct link between playhouse lust and Global fire. Ensuing works turn its prognostication into a featured idiom of antitheatrical critique. When Gosson writes that spectators of were “set on fire” by an antique production, or when Prynne gives out of the same event that it “enflamed the fleshly lusts of all the Spectators in a strange excessive measure,” or when Rainolds speaks of “sparkles of lust” “kindl[ing] uncleane affections,” or when Munday says that “spectacles of strange lust” will “inflame” women even “unto furie,” each is threatening the “firelling” consequences of sins whose picture, says White,

46. Gosson, “To the Gentlewomen Citizens of London, Flourishing dayes with regarde of Credite,” appended to The Schoole of Abuse, sig. F2v. Jean Howard offers a sustained and deft reading of this vexed text in “Scripts and/versus Playhouses: Ideological Production and the Renaissance Public Stage,” Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 31–49. 47. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sigs. N2r–N2v. 48. John Northbrooke, A Treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vaine playes or enterluds with other idle pastimes . . . are reproved (London, 1577), sigs. Iiiir–Iiiiv. 49. Northbrooke, “To the Reader,” in ibid., sig. aiiv.

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ought not be “paint[ed],” but whose wages, says Salvian, are implacable: “We burne, we burne, yet dread we not the fire wherewith we burne.”50 We can gauge the success of this discourse by the trouble defenders of the stage have dispelling it; when Jonson ends his execration by reasserting the Sodomitical association between lechery and fire (“Pox on thee Vulcan, thy Pandora’s pox,/And all the evils that flew out of her box /Light on thee” [214–16]), he demonstrates its intractability even among those who fight hardest against it. But this line of attack poses some difficulties for antitheatricalists, too, for the more they sexologize their discontent to raise the prospect of fiery desolation, the hazier their accounts of the theater’s strange lust. A passage that Gosson quotes to exemplify the theater’s pyrogenic debauchery offers a case in point. From Xenophon, he relates this account of a performance of Bacchus and Ariadne: when Bacchus rose up, tenderly lifting Ariadne from her seate, no small store of curtesie passing betweene them, the beholders rose up, every man stoode on tippe toe, and seemed to hover over the playe, when they sware, the company sware, when they departed to bedde; the company presently was set on fire, they that were married posted home to theire wives; they that were single, vowed very solemly, to be wedded.51

The question Gosson inadvertently raises here is so what? If the horror wreaked by plays is that they cast bachelors onto the marriage market and hasten married men home to their wives, then his complaint seems already written in the form of the mockery that Barish will make of it. And yet, for all its manifest inanity—and when Rainolds goes on to defend this evidence from its apparent “honest[y]” and “lawful[ness],” he proves that it is not just scholarly posterity that sees a problem here—this sort of claim is typical of antitheatrical discourse: in one tract after another, writers find themselves incapable of calibrating theatrical causes to their sexual effects.52 Munday tips too far in the other direction when he writes that “it is a miracle, if there be found anie either 50. Prynne, Histio-mastix, sig. Aaa3v; Rainolds, Th’ Overthrow of Stage-Playes, sig. C2r; Munday, A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theaters, sig. Gviiiv. Thomas White, A Sermon Preached at Pawles Crosse (London, 1578), sig. Cviiir. 51. Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), sig. G5r. Prynne writes of this same production that it “enflamed the fleshly lusts of all the Spectators in a strange excessive measure (Histrio-Mastix, sig. Aaa4r). The quotation comes from Book 9 of Xenophon’s Symposium (sometimes called The Banquet), from which Gosson expunges the pedestrian last lines: “Socrates, and the others who stayed behind, proceeded, with Callias, to accompany Lycon and his son in their walk. Such was the termination of the banquet” (Xenophon’s Minor Works, trans. J. S. Watson [London: George Bell and Sons, 1878], 191). 52. Rainolds, Th’ Overthrow of Stage-Playes, sig. O3r.



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woman or maide, which with these spectacles of strange lust, is not oftentimes inflamed even unto furie.” Rainolds winds up stumped up by his own question when he asks, “What flame of lust [is] kindled thereby in mens heartes?” And Prynne’s solution is to dream up an answer too sweeping to be meaningful: “this putting on of woman’s array,” he writes, is “sinfull, yea abominable,” because it not onely excites many adulterous filthy lusts, both in the Actors and Spectators; and drawes them both to contemplative and actuall lewdnesse . . . which is evill; but it likewise instigates them to selfe-pollution, (a sinne for which Onan was destroyed) and to that unnaturall Sodomiticall sinne of uncleanesse.53

Prynne goes on to direct his indignation at those men who go “so farre as to . . . actually to abuse” “Player Boyes,” but the other lusts he lists, “selfe-polluti[ng]” and manifoldly lewd in thought or deed, point to a muddled modus operandi. Taken together, his pederasts and masturbators, Munday’s maids “inflamed into furie,” Rainolds’ men with their hearts afire, and Gosson’s husbands who take Bacchus and Ariadne as a marital aid demonstrate the persistent instability of the object of theatrical lust: sometimes the actor is pursued, sometimes a spouse or a prostitute serves as surrogate, sometimes the desirer satisfies himself, and sometimes the desire “inflamed” in the playhouse is left unconsummated. As Prynne admits: “severall flames of different lusts are kindled.”54 By suggesting that theatrical desire has no stable object, these solecisms are important to the eschatology I am pursuing. What interests me is that while antitheatricalists denounce lust to kindle the fear of fire, the range of ‘perversity’ that they indict brings up the problem that performance always raises: why should we burn at the sight of something that is but “a fiction” or “a dream of passion” (Ham 2.2.547)? The groundlessness of this desire is manifest in the factitiousness of its consummation, since the sundry efforts to tie the “various flame of [theatrical] pleasure” to debauched acts, from Munday’s unspecific but wholesale orgy to Prynne’s uncorroborated “example[]” of an “actual[]” boy-player “abuse[r]” (“This I have heard credibly reported of a Scholler of Bayliol Colledge, and I have no doubt but it may be verified”), render the “corruption of Playes” a decidedly unproven matter. Prynne’s case, which he proffers to clinch the “experimentall truth” that “men-Actors in womens attire” are “an inducement to Sodomy” is especially telling, for though his case dissolves under scrutiny into hearsay, had Prynne managed to catch his “Scholler” in flagrante, the tryst could only have reinforced the gap between the lust the 53. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Dd4v. 54. Ibid., sigs. Ee2r, Xxv.

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player roused and the feasibility of its enactment.55 Since discursively, sartorially, circumstantially, and existentially, the actor who inflames his beholder is never his own man, then yearnings for ‘him’ are always an impossible desire, excited by the misguided conflation of signifier and signified.56 The Roman Actor has already held forth on this error, when Paris tries to talk the Empress out of her lascivious urges: “O gracious Madam,/How glorious soever . . ./I do appear in the scene, my part being ended, . . ./I am no more nor less than what I was before I entered” (4.2.47–52). By sharing in Domitia’s insistence that performance’s “lust-inflaming solicitations” must yield to real lechery, Prynne and his cohort earn scholarship’s rebuke.57 But the more compelling point is Barish’s speculation that their sexual “obsessiveness” is ultimately a fear of “the destruction of all props and boundaries,”58 for at base, the problem with theatrical desire, and the reason that critics are so keen to literalize its culmination, is the unsecured relation it orchestrates between the palpably real and the manifestly illusory. By reviling at such length the “actuall uncleanness” triggered by the stage, critics acquit themselves of the much trickier task of explaining how the “expressing of vice by imitation, brings us by the shadow, to the substance of the same,” a point Gosson demonstrates when he briefly attempts to do it:59 “Vice is learned with beholding; sense is tickled, desire pricked, & those impressions of mind are secretly conveyed over to the gazers, which the plaiers do counterfeit on the Stage.”60 The result is remarkably close to Leontes’ “affection,” that substance borne of shadows that “stabs” the very center of our epistemological certainty by “co-join[ing]” “nothing” with the “something” of our “pricked” “sense.” Which is to say that like Shakespeare’s, Gosson’s account of the spectator’s stirred affections is a crux. He is quick to resort to antitheatrical cliché to resolve it: “As long as we know our selves to be flesh, beholding those examples in Theaters that are incident to the flesh, wee are taught by other mens examples how to fall.”61

55. Ibid., sigs. Zv, Ee2r (asterisked footnote), Aa2r, Ee4r. 56. Corroboration for this insight comes in an anecdote found in the 1602 diary of John Manningham, a London law student: “Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard III. Shakespeare overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained at his game ere Burbage came. The message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard III” (quoted in The Norton Shakespeare, 507). 57. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Ppr. 58. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 85. 59. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sigs. Tt4r, Aaar. 60. Gosson, Playes Confuted in five Actions, sig. G4v. The passage is reprinted, with the emendation of “sinne” for “sense,” in Prynne’s Histrio-mastix, sig. Zz4v. 61. Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions, sig. G4r.



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But this reminder can only recall to us how readily we forget the laws of the flesh when we are in the playhouse. Underlying the Sodomitical sins that anti­ theatricalists decry is Leontes’s impossible and debauched coition between a “counterfeit” occasion and its beholder’s real body. Because of the breach it causes in “the common course and kinde” of “nature,” this account of antitheatricalism’s most judgmental idiom marries well with Alan Bray’s powerful argument that sodomy in early modern En­ gland designates a disordering of ideological or social categories.62 For anti­ theatricalists, I am arguing, this disorder is the rift that the stage effects between palpable experience and factual truth, a rift they suppress by reviling under Sodom’s unspeakable and apocalyptic heading. But even when antitheatricalism conspires to say the least about what it fears most, it belies a startling exegesis of one of the Old Testament’s most vexed passages. When figures from Northbrooke to Prynne make such charged use of Sodom’s unnamable transgression (“sinne[ful] enough to defile the tongue that talkes of it”), they end up showing us that sodomy is, at its biblical root, a performance, and one orchestrated by God himself. Sodomy’s False Origins

With the aid of William Slatyer’s oddly bland depiction of it, I want to illustrate this claim by turning finally to the scene from which sodomy’s persecutors have claimed their justification: Genesis’s account of the insistent but failed effort of “the men of Sodom” (“both young and old” “from every quarter”) to “know” the two angels who come in human guise to feast at Lot’s house (19:4–5). If we take as true that there is a sex crime at the heart of this incident—and this is hardly a given, since the violation of hospitality is a sin as readily gleaned63—the precipitating cause of Sodom’s destruction is thus its citizens’ foiled assault upon two figures mistaken for men. No doubt my corrective is already apparent, but I will spell it out: strictly speaking, the sin of Sodom is not sex between men, but an unconsummated desire on the part of men for spirits in mortal drag. For antitheatricalists, its story should therefore seem ready-made for condemnatory use, since Sodom memorializes the lesson

62. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 2nd. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 72. 63. As Robert Alter points out, Genesis’s “narrator offers no comment on the homosexual aspect of the threatened act of violence,” whereas the “thematic design” of the book of Genesis construes the lapse in hospitality as so grave that it exemplifies a kind of “anti-civilization.” See “Sodom as Nexus: The Web of Design in Biblical Narrative,” in Reclaiming Sodom, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (New York: Routledge, 1994), 33, 30.

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Figure 9.  “The Men of Sodom compassed the house round.” Attributed to William Slatyer and Jan van Langeren from “Illustrations from the book of Genesis.” Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University (STC 22634.5 [B]).

that “God meeteth [the] strange lust” inflamed by actors in false array “with strange fire.”64 The fact that antitheatricalists do not preach this moral is an invitation to consider how Sodom, for all its ineffability, might still say too much about the problem the theater’s critics mean to condemn. This suspicion is borne out in the dissonance historians of homosexuality have so often noticed between what sodomy is and what it means. As Jeffrey Masten writes, summarizing Bray, it is common knowledge that “the line between sodomy and friendship [wa]s easily crossed” in early modern England,65 and that the prospect of sex between men could even be lightly encountered, as when Snuffe, the Puritan hypocrite in Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611), seeks the warm embrace of a lady in his patron’s household and finds instead the cold body of Borachio 64. Harris, The Destruction of Sodome, sig. D2r. 65. Jeffrey Masten, “Is the Fundament at Grave?” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 131.



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beneath the sheets: “Now puritie defend me from the Sin of Sodom—This is a creature of the masculine sex” (4.3.193–95).66 The joke is on Snuffe, whose importuning of “purity” at such a moment is clearly inept, and whose panic is made ridiculous by the fact that the man in question, howsoever “stiff ” (4.3.196), is dead. But what is especially instructive in this scene is how the threat of sodomy, a sexual act between men, covers up the threat of feeling something for nothing. It is an emblematic misprision, I suggest, that Snuffe fears for his fundament when his problem is the solicitation he takes from the void of Borachio’s grave. The scene illuminates the theatrical heart of sodomy’s phobic construction, for if Snuffe (and his brethren) can be so engrossed by the fear of an act that even Prynne will classify as a mere subset of adultery,67 the reason is that this act has been crossed with a problem much more fearful to see. That problem is Hamlet’s dilemma, since Sodom, like Snuffe, is laid low by an eruption of feeling that is unsecured to fact. Indeed, I submit that it is the “nonreferentiality”68 of sodomy’s original performance—with its “actors” that “were all spirits” and that soon “melted into air” (Tem 4.1.148, 149, 150)—that produces the “deontologizing effect” that Jonathan Goldberg has found to be sodomy’s hallmark,69 for it follows that subsequent iterations of a crime so fundamentally “insubstantial” would seem bound to “dissolve” and “Leave not a rack behind” (Tem 4.1.155, 154, 156). Hence, the resonant question that Lee Edelman raises about the “Spectacle of Gay Male Sex” is answered in the language of its posing: “what wound, after all, can the scene of sodomy inflict to make its staging, if only in the space of the imagination, so dangerous to effect, and what within that scene has such power to implicate—and by implicating, to sully—that such a scene, or even the possibility of such a scene, ought properly be disavowed?”70 In light of the biblical fact that Sodom’s crime was,

66. Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist’s Tragedy, ed. George Parfitt, The Plays of Cyril Tourneur: The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Atheist’s Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 67. See, for instance, Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Ee2v. 68. This is Judith Butler’s term for one of the two meanings of performative; the other is “dramatic.” In “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 273, famously cited by Eve Sedgwick in “Queer Performativity: Henry James and the Art of the Novel,” GLQ 1, no. 1 (1993): 2. 69. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 20. 70. Lee Edelman, “Seeing Things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex,” in Reclaiming Sodom, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (New York: Routledge, 1994), 266.

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like The Mousetrap, a scene of theatrical entrapment, the wound of sodomy’s staging points back to the injuriousness of staging itself. By fronting for an error that is so markedly spectatorial, it follows that gay male sex is haunted by the paranoid structure of a desire that, as D. A. Miller writes, “must not catch the eye.” But it is not the genealogy of Miller’s closet that I am retracing here so much as the performance trouble that sodomy’s occulting discourse never quite conceals, particularly when early modern antitheatricalists wield it.71 As Slatyer illustrates, the sex crime of Sodom is a circle of men “press[ing] sore upon” men to cordon off from sight the nothing that actually happened there, as if to show us our blocked recognition of the empty stage at its center. I have been arguing that post-Reformation deployments of Lot’s saga let us see how the episode flips the terms of Eve Sedgwick’s famous formulation (“ ‘Performativity’ is already quite a queer category”) to show us that queerness is from the first a performative category—hence its Austinian ability to contaminate the scene of thought.72 But to the antitheatricalists whose use of it seems so “obsessive[],” the value of Sodom’s discourse is that it closes down this revelation. As Prynne tells those who think that they “may looke on Stageplayes and yet not be polluted,” man’s nature . . . is altogether filthy, stinking and corrupted since [Adam’s fall], more apt to be inflamed with any lascivious amorous speeches, gestures, Playes and Enterludes, then Tinder, Gun-Powder, Flaxe or Charcole with the least sparke of fire.73

In other words, to scrutinize performance is to sift one’s own ashes. The dissemination of this warning is ingenious: by rendering love for the stage a mysterious and dissolutive venery (“we burne, we burne, yet dread we not the fire wherewith we burne”), and by wielding this feeling as proof no less substantial than the theater’s catastrophic history that “For your uncleannes are yee with destruction abolished,”74 critics render the playhouse a second Sodom: destined to burn. Yet entailed by the precept that theaters are like Sodom is the unwonted recognition that Sodom burned for a theatrical sin that was God’s Hamlet-like

71. D. A. Miller, “Anal Rope,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 131, 132. 72. Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity,” 2. 73. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Gggggg2r–Gggggg2v. 74. Salvian of Marseilles, in A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theaters, sig. B8v.



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contrivance. Since the cunning scene that calls down God’s desolation is devised by God himself—since He assigned his Angels the task of “hold[ing] as ’twere the mirror up to [the Sodomites’] nature” (Ham 3.2.22)—no wonder His “judgement[] upon Sodom for her Cirques and Theaters” is the precedent that Prynne cannot resist mentioning but can only “passe by.” Instead, it is to the future that antitheatrical invocations of Sodom look, to forecast the doom that awaits not just “the great globe itself,” but even Jonson’s library. The efficiency of this strain of predictive lamentation is best seen in Robert Milles’s sermon Abraham’s Sute for Sodom (1612), in which Milles rebukes the stage in general and Jonson (the “illiterate bricklayer”) in particular for the sinful state into which London has fallen: Yea, Playes are growne now adaies into such high request (Horresco regerens) as that some prophane persons affirme, they can learne as much both for example and edifying at a Play, as at a Sermon. O Tempora, O Mores, O times, O manners, tremble thou Earth, blush yee Heavens, and speake O head, if ever any Sodomite uttered such blasphemie within thy gates. Did the divell ever speake thus impiously in this conflict with the Archangell? To compare a lascivious stage to this sacred Pulpet and oracle trueth? To compare a silken counterfeit to a Prophet, to Gods-Angell, to his Minister, to the distributor of God’s heavenly mysteries? And to compare the idle and servile invention of an illiterate brick-layer, to the holy, pure, and powerfull word of God, which is the foode of our soules to eternall salvation? Lord, forgive them, they know not what they say.75

If Johnson cannot keep from recalling the surrender of the Paris Garden, the Globe, the Fortune, and Whitehall to the same foretold judgment, no doubt the reason is that his own loss is so perfect a fulfillment of Milles’ sort of “sute,” for the fact remains that although scholarship would hardly call it a coincidence that some eleven years after this sermon, Jonson’s books burn to cinders, antitheatricalism’s apocalyptic doomsaying is hard to dismiss. Even at a time in which no structure can be called permanent, the theaters bear out London’s susceptibility to fire with uncanny fervor.76 By the Annus Mirabilis of 1666, not only have the four performance venues listed by Jonson burnt down, but

75. Milles, Abraham’s Sute for Sodome, sigs. D6r–D7v. 76. Working through Church briefs from the second half of the seventeenth century, Keith Thomas conjectures a national average of nearly two sizeable fires per year; in previous decades, he adds, things look to have been considerably worse. See Religion and the Decline of Magic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 17.

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so have three of the four Inns (the Bel Savage, the Cross Keys and the Bell), the second Blackfriars, and Salisbury Court.77 It is the work of my next chapter to account for the stage’s eerie compliance with antitheatricalism’s fiery predictions. For now, let me simply point out that the success with which playwrights’ houses and playhouses are marked for Sodomitical burning reflects a theological failure. Consider one last anti­ theatrical warning, prominently featured in Northbrooke’s tract: “among many evilles & naughty affections which folow the nature of man corrupted by sinne, none bringeth greater inconvenience than the inordinate hope of long life.”78 Though Northbrooke assigns it to Cicero, the sentiment is in fact derived from the Gospel of Luke, where it succeeds from the promise of Sodom’s second coming: “Remember Lot’s wife. Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it” (17:29–33). And in fact, in Northbrooke’s treatise too, this warning against self-preservation follows directly from a paraphrase of Luke’s prophecy: “like as it befell and happened . . . in the time of Lot when Sodome was burned with fire from heaven, so verily the last day shal come sodainely, & at the twinkling of an eye.” What jars, therefore, in the antitheatrical use of Sodom is how directly Northbrooke and his successors contradict its message. Whereas Foxe leans into the apocalypse, summoning the consummation Christ prophecies, critics of the stage raise the threat of God’s climactic judgment to ward off its catastrophe. Beware, they say, quoting Luke as evidence, for plays will summon Christ’s return, and this fulfillment of God’s greatest promise must, by all means, be prevented.79 Though a more nuanced account of post-Reformation England’s millenarian strains would complicate this paraphrase, the fact remains that antitheatricalism’s religious stance is remarkably flesh-preserving. In Genesis, Abraham’s suit for Sodom means facing down mortality; as the patriarch says to Jehovah, “I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes” (18:27). But Milles’s version is much fancier footwork, by means of which God’s judgment is first summoned and then exorcized: “Lord, forgive them, they know not what they say.” From Milles and his ilk, one senses a dread of burning that is very nearly un-Christian. 77. For a chronicle of the fate of each playhouse, see English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, ed. Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 287–649. 78. Northbrooke, A Treatise, sig. Aiiv. 79. I am riffing shamelessly here on Christian Thorne’s wry account of the apocalyptic disaster film: “Catastrophes are destabilizing a merciless world in preparation for Christ’s return—and this must be stopped.” In “The Revolutionary Energy of the Outmoded,” October 104 (2003): 101.



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Inside the theater, though, things look very different. The last chapter will show that the culmination antitheatricalism would forestall is the conflagration the stage seeks. Playwrights, it turns out, are much more devout in seeking the ending that Foxe scripts, wherein Death, “of its own will, surrenders” (130–31) and “the famous stone Terminus,” the “god of landmarks and boundaries,” gives way (134–35). For inside the theater, undreaded burning is not about “the world’s Ruines,” but a globe without end.

Now ashes will read their own epitaphs. john foxe, Christus Triumphans

6 Sodomitical Drama The Sought Apocalypse

When antitheatricalists can keep command of it, fire is a discourse that makes a virtue of what cannot be seen (“neither be Theaters where in times past they were”) and what cannot be spoken (“the filthines of Theaters are such as may not honestlie be no not so much as blamed”) to prophecy a disaster that cannot be avoided: “surely it is to be feared . . . that one day these places will . . . bee cast downe by God himselfe.” The strength of this construction is evident in Jonson’s “nose[y]” “Brethren,” who catch the playwright in performance’s ontological imperative when they “rake[] up” “Sparkle[s]” of “lust” from the Globe’s ashes. Jonson’s struggle to dispel the sense of “judgment show’n” by London’s felled stages suggests that English dramatists would be wise to leave fire and its eschatological associations alone. But oddly, the plays that date from the fervent years of England’s antitheatrical foment make reckless use of pyrotechnics. Even a small sample proves how much the drama

Now ashes will read their own epitaphs. john foxe, Christus Triumphans

6 Sodomitical Drama The Sought Apocalypse

When antitheatricalists can keep command of it, fire is a discourse that makes a virtue of what cannot be seen (“neither be Theaters where in times past they were”) and what cannot be spoken (“the filthines of Theaters are such as may not honestlie be no not so much as blamed”) to prophecy a disaster that cannot be avoided: “surely it is to be feared . . . that one day these places will . . . bee cast downe by God himselfe.” The strength of this construction is evident in Jonson’s “nose[y]” “Brethren,” who catch the playwright in performance’s ontological imperative when they “rake[] up” “Sparkle[s]” of “lust” from the Globe’s ashes. Jonson’s struggle to dispel the sense of “judgment show’n” by London’s felled stages suggests that English dramatists would be wise to leave fire and its eschatological associations alone. But oddly, the plays that date from the fervent years of England’s antitheatrical foment make reckless use of pyrotechnics. Even a small sample proves how much the drama

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seems to want to bring on the doom that antitheatricalists prophecy, from the “hye copyn tank [high-crowned hat]” “full of squybs fyred ” John Heywood asks an actor to wear in the Play of Love (1534), to the “dragon shooting fire” conjured up in Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589), to the devil that enters with “fire flashing ” in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr (1622), to the “burning statues and firebals” that signify the fall of Troy in Thomas Heywood’s The Iron Age (1632). Lavished with these special effects, early modern English drama cannot help but bolster the pervasive sense that the theater is a disaster waiting to happen. A reasonable interpretation of such flagrant violations of our modern fire code is that they cue its invention: the accident at the Globe (along with some other similarly desolating occasions) is instrumental in shaping theatrical practice into a progressively safer, more refined art. I begin this chapter, however, by confuting the assumption that the early modern English theater advances this sort of progress. For although antitheatricalists routinely frame playgoing as a perdition that goes unrecognized by its victims (“In those thinges that we least mistrust, the greatest daunger dooth often lurke”), the disaster that comes of putting flammable stuff like wood and straw in reckless proximity to squibbing, shooting, flashing, or falling flames is hardly a theological insight. In a milieu in which conflagrations are frequent and typologically marked, the disasters that result from playing with fire cannot be dismissed as unforeseen contingencies. I will not go so far as to state that theaters sought the ash heap that antitheatricalists consigned them to, though there is no denying that playwrights who call for fire abet performance’s dissolutive ontology. Instead, this chapter proposes that staging fire is the means with which playgoing’s eschatological pact is put under scrutiny by the dramatists who are bound to it. At no small risk, dramatic pyrotechnics summon the prospect of the theater’s disappearances in order to think through the futurelessness of performance. A compelling example is Henry VIII, the play that set the scene for the Globe disaster. The scripted circumstances of its fateful shot are straight­ forward enough: “chambers” are “discharged” to mark the entry of the King and his “noble troop” into Cardinal Wolsey’s house, where the men, posing . John Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (London, 1594), sig. E4r; Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger, The Virgin Martyr (London, 1622), sigs. Lr, Mv; Thomas Heywood, The Iron Age (London, 1632), sig. G4r. . See William Gerhard, Theatre Fires and Panics: Causes and Prevention (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1896), for an account of safety protocols developed over the course of the 516 theatre fires he tallies. . Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, sig. C4r. . See Ellen MacKay, “The Theatre as a Self-Consuming Art,” Theatre Survey 49, no. 1 (May 2008): 91–107, for a more developed account of this notion.



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as French masquers “habited like shepherds,” “crave view of the[] ladies and entreat/An hour of revels with ’em” and Wolsey, ever the canny operator, seeks out the disguised King in their midst (S.D. 1.4.46, 53, SD 63, 70–71). Less apparent to present-day readers, though, is the charge of this plotwork. Rankins, for one, tells us that foolery of this sort inevitably leads to burning: “the custome is in Maskes, to carry Torches, for to inflame the harts, and inkindle theyr mindes to contende with vertue, and wholly be guided and lighted by vice.” But Prynne provides the history lesson on this theme. In his arsenal of “fearefull judgements” against plays and “those Republikes that tolerate or approve them,” he details the tragedy that befell the French king Charles VI during a masque subsequently known as the “Bal des Ardents” or the masque of the wild men. Costumed in rustic apparel made from flax and pitch, the king and five of his courtiers were “sport[ing]” with “the Ladies” in a country dance when “The Duke of Orleance[,] running . . . to discover who they were, put one of the Torches his servants held so neere the flax, that he set one of the Coates on fire, and so each of them set fire on the other, so that they were all in a bright flame.” The king was saved by his aunt, the Duchess of Berry, who had the presence of mind to roll him in her ample skirts, and one courtier ran to the buttery and threw himself in a dish tub. The remaining four burned alive before a crowd of horrified onlookers, martyrs to their antic dispositions. To those familiar with this appalling and well-remembered disaster, Henry VIII would seem to invite its repetition. A play that stages a king disguised as a ‘French’ masker who acts a rustic part, flirts with the ladies, and comes under his host’s scrutiny is a play that tempts fate, particularly when it calls for fire to rain down upon the combustive occasion. What Fletcher and Shakespeare add to the Valois scenario is the prurience that antitheatricalism denounces, since by his revels, King Henry “ingender[s] not onely a sparke or two, but an whole flame . . . of filthy lusts.”10 Since the masque is the occasion of the . Rankins, Mirrour of Monsters, sig. Giiir. . Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Hhh2r. . The episode comes from Froissart’s Chroniques, which survives in a number of richly illuminated manuscripts. For an analysis of the text and its images, see Lorraine Kochanske Stock, “Froissart’s Chroniques and Its Illustrators: Historicity and Ficticity in the Verbal and Visual Imagining of Charles VI’s Le Bal des Ardents,” Studies in Iconography 21 (2000): 123–80. . It is worth noting that Shakespeare views Froissart’s chronicle as sufficiently well known that he has a character quote from its “records” in Henry VI part 1 (1.2.29–31). . Holinshed describes the party at Wolsey’s house as one among several occasions when the King and his gentlemen “disguised” themselves, carried “torches,” wore “visards” and “costlie apparel[] with strange deuises,” did “reverence to the ladies” and performed “dansings”; Raphael Holinshed, The third volume of Chronicles, beginning at duke William the Norman (London, 1587), 812, 805, 921, 894, 825, 817 (no page signatures). 10. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. bbb2v.

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married king’s first coup de foudre encounter with “Anne Bullen” (“O Beauty/ Till now I never knew thee” [75–76]), when it lights a fire in the theater’s thatch, the resulting desolation looks like the fulfillment of a risk recklessly courted. Indeed, so faithfully does the fire at the Globe bear out Rankins’s moral and Prynne’s precedent, it seems devised to prove that regarding the Sodomitical sin and doom attached to performance, All Is True. I am not suggesting that Shakespeare and Fletcher based King Henry’s rustic dance on the “Bal des Ardents.” If anything, the scene sticks particularly closely to its historical source.11 My point instead is that a play that calls for fire necessarily quotes the theater’s susceptibility to burning. Every toted torch and every fired cannon are an invitation to take stock of a doom that might well happen and that (sometime, somewhere) probably already did. But equally salient to this chapter’s argument is the marital circumstance that gives rise to this recognition. In the vein of Foxe’s hymeneal eschatology (“Nothing remains except the bridegroom himself, who will bring the final catastrophe to our stage” [5.5.151–53]), the conjunction of Anne Bullen’s alluring appearance and the playhouse’s consummation suggests a correlation between theatrical and nuptial contracts. The two plays that I will go on to discuss, Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1612), and Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling (1622), bring out this link by drawing their plots from Lot’s inflammatory marriage—the bad match behind Sodom’s torched landscape. Both conclude, however, in a state of Foxean deferral: by way of suggesting a less desolating take on the theater’s inflammatory art, they mine Sodom’s typology only to leave us guessing whether the “formal abolition of temporal and spatial order” has come on their cue. Remembering Lot’s Wife

As I will go on to discuss, Sodomitical drama has three essential characteristics: a plot inspired by Lot’s Wife’s homiletic tradition, impressive pyrotechnics, and a marked de-ontologizing effect. A Christian Turned Turk exhibits all of these, though on the first count, it is not very explicit. Ostensibly, the play tells the true story of John Ward, a Kentish fisherman who traded in his nets to become an “arch pirate” in 1605 and never looked back.12 But Daborne is not very interested in the facts of Ward’s biography. Though the real Ward 11. The source is Holinshed; see n. 9 above. 12. Andrew Barker, A True and Certaine Report of the Beginning, Proceedings, Overthrowes, and now present Estate of Captaine Ward and Danseker, the two late famous Pirates: from their first setting forrth to this present time (London, 1609), sig. A3r.



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died of natural causes at the age of seventy (eleven years after Daborne’s play went to print), on stage the character dies a repentant suicide for a sin that is not vocational but matrimonial: A Christian Turned Turk is an extended lesson on the devastating consequences of pursuing lust-at-first-sight. I will go on to show that this is an error altogether bound up with Lot’s saga, but before working though the play’s rich homiletic allusions, let me start by pointing out some plainer indications of the play’s links to Sodom. When, for instance, the Chorus reports “What heretofore set others’ pens awork/Was Ward turned Pirate; ours is Ward turned Turk” (7–8), Daborne distinguishes his tragedy for its treatment of a sin so vile that he cannot name it: Our subject’s low, yet to your eyes presents Deeds high in blood, in blood of innocents: Transcends them low, and your invention calls To name the sin beyond this black deed falls. (3–6)

This undenomination is telling in its own right, but for those who know Andrew Barker’s True and Certaine Report of the Beginning, Proceedings, Overthrowes, and now present Estate of Captaine Ward and Danseker, Daborne is picking up where Barker’s popular narrative left off: “I will leave their Sodomie, and the rest of their crying sinnes (which I feare their Atheisme hath led them into) to the Judgement of the Just Revenger, and not give them to be talked of fur­ther by my pen.”13 For the rarer few who know the one surviving sermon Daborne will compose on Romans 11:13 (“how unsearchable are [God’s] Judgements, and his wayes past finding out!”), the playwright shows a lasting interest in “crying sinnes” that will “reach as farre as Heaven” and call down God’s revenge: Clamitat in celu~ vox sanguinis & Sodomorum Vox oppressorum, merces retenta laborum. [the cry of shed blood, of Sodom, of the oppressed and of those who labor unrewarded rings out in heaven]14

It may seem ungenerous to reason from the paucity of his surviving work that Daborne can do no more than wrestle with the same story over the course of two careers and two decades (London playwright from 1609 to 1618, and dean of Lismore Cathedral from 1618 until his death in 1628). But if the 13. Ibid., sigs. C2r–C2v. 14. Robert Daborne, A sermon preached in the cathedrall church of Waterford (London, 1618), sig. C5r.

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sermon cannot serve as proof of the play’s Sodomitical content, it nevertheless offers us some assurance that it is not merely paranoia that finds Sodom evoked everywhere. Or rather, it offers us some assurance of the Sodomitical provenance of this paranoia, for the play’s most potent remembrance of Lot’s saga, and particularly of the fate of Lot’s Wife, is its repeated warning that on peril of desolation, certain sights must not catch the eye. We are more likely to think about Lot’s Wife as Robert Alter describes her: “an etiological story about a gynemorphic rock formation” or an “old mythic motif ” of a “taboo against looking back.”15 But early modern England tends to read her the way Martin Harries does: as the emblematic figure of “destructive spectatorship.”16 Harries describes this concept in relation to the disastrous history of the mid-twentieth century, for which Sodom provides an apt allegory. In Daborne’s moment, though, the lesson emerges from the homiletic treatments of Lot’s Wife as a disastrous spouse. Because her looking back is read as a longing retrospection (“her Body was out of [Sodom], but her Affections were in it still”),17 Lot’s Wife is a monument to the corruption that takes hold in the liking expressed by mere looking. She is, therefore, the consummate proof of a warning that Gosson issues to “The Gentlewomen Citizens of London” about matches made in the playhouse: “if you but . . . joyne lookes with an amorous Gazer, you have already made your selves assaultable, and y[i]elded your Cities to be sacked.” Since, as Gosson says, “looking eyes, have lyking hartes, [and] liking harts may burne in lust,” then Lot’s Wife, whose lookingback eyes search out the fire from which God has rescued them, “season[s] others with feare by [her] example” of the hurt that comes of watching.18 Tourists of her saliniform remains say as much: as both sign and thing (“both carcasse and sepulchre, and how can that be?”), her pillar of salt imparts the “assault” that it imports: “What object’s this that doth assault my sense”?19 15. Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 95 n. 26. 16. Harries, Forgetting Lot’s Wife, 1. 17. Stephen Jay, Ta’ Kanna’Kon: The Tragedies of Sin Contemplated (London, 1687), sig. I5v. This interpretation is, at base, Augustine’s: “where she looked back, there was she fixed,” Of the citie of God [The City of God against the Pagans] (London, 1610), sig. Fff4r. 18. Gosson, “To the Gentlewomen Citizens of London,” appended to The Schoole of Abuse, sigs. F2r–F2v; Henry Burton, A divine tragedie lately acted, or A collection of sundry memorable examples of Gods judgements upon Sabbath-breakers, and other like libertines (London, 1636), sig. Cr. 19. William Basse, A helpe to discourse. Or, A miscelany of merriment Consisting of wittie, philosophical and astronomicall questions and answers (London, 1619), sig. K4r; Thomas Bancroft, “Of the Pillar of Salt, the Remainder of Lots Wife,” Two bookes of epigrammes, and epitaphs (London, 1639), sig. Hv. Robert Wilkinson describes the pillar of salt as an object as desolating as the vision that it punishes—at once a “horror to [the] heart” and “a wofull spectacle to [the] eye” (Lot’s Wife: A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse



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But what Laura Levine has called the “naïve epistemology”20 of early modern spectatorship—that tendency of women, in particular, to be what they see—is especially pronounced in her case. Caught in the sight of Sodom’s destruction, Lot’s Wife is figured as the eye-catchingness of Sodom; she becomes the reason that Lot was led to linger in so unwholesome a city in the first place. Early modern accounts of the “unspeakable, unnaturall, and horrible” match transacted between settler husband and Sodomitical wife preach that the soul of Lot was snared and very nearly condemned to God’s rain of fire by the “hooke of [her] voluptuousnesse.”21 From this biblical legend, A Christian Turned Turk borrows quite a lot, including and especially its fiery consummation. Even before Ward lands on Tunis’s shores, the play’s reformed pirate, Dansiker, vows to “redeem [his] honor” with the “worthy deed” of setting the whole town alight (5.13, 15). This promise adds special weight to the words of Agar and Voada, two Muslim sisters who acknowledge themselves “infidel[s]” (7.122) and natives of an “accursed soil” (13.117), and who pursue adultery with incendiary self-abandon—“may I cool my heat,/Let the world burn!” (6.69–70); “I must enjoy his love, though quenching of my lust did burn the world besides” (6.100–101). But it isn’t just the wives in Daborne’s play who invite us to remember Sodom’s story, and the marital lesson preachers draw from it; Benwash, Agar’s husband, and Ward, who becomes Voada’s unlucky mate, are latter-day Lots: they take up residence in a hostile clime and get “hook[ed]” by the “golden bait” of “an Eve,” “a temptress,” with catastrophic results (7.34, 6.341). Particularly when he “strikes” “the face of heaven itself ” (8.6) by turning Turk for Voada, Ward models Lot’s signal error: “Behold now: When man lookes through the false medium of his owne affection and passion, what monstrous errours and solecismes doth he count?”22 As this sort of warning indicates, Lot’s story is not merely a lesson on the dangers of injudicious marriage; Lot’s eye-catching wife represents spectatorial risks more broadly construed. It is this metatheatrical resonance that Daborne seems especially keen to tap. The more A Christian Turned Turk harps on men’s vulnerability to women’s inflammatory looks, the more it calls to mind Th’ [London, 1607], sig. Hv). A subsequent Puritan tradition uses the pillar of salt to describe a distressing cautionary lesson—see, for example, Cotton Mather’s compilation of criminal narratives, Pillars of Salt: An History of Some Criminals Executed in this Land for Capital Crimes (Boston, 1699). 20. Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing, 6. 21. Wilkinson, Lot’s Wife, sig, F4v; John Carpenter, Remember Lots Wife: two godly and fruitful sermons (London, 1588), sig. E3v. 22. Ince, Lot’s Little One, sig. E5r.

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Overthrow that will come of watching a “false medium.”23 Consider Agar, put forward by her (soon-to-be-gulled) husband as the benefactress of Tunis’s freer marital climate, in which women are “give[n] open entertainment” (6.61–62). With gusto, she shows what comes of this spectatorial privilege: Thou powerful god of love, strike through mine eyes Those awful darts of thine, whose burning heads Pierce through hearts of ice, melt frostiest breasts, Make all stoop to thy deity! (6.36–39)

The lines recall Gosson’s unsolicited advice to London’s Gentlewomen to “keep home” and avoid the slings and arrows of the London stage:24 A wanton eye is the darte of Cephalus, where it leveleth, thereit lighteth; & where it hitts, it woundeth deepe. If you give but a glance to your beholders, you have vayled the bonnet in token of obedience: for the boulte is falne ere the Ayre clap; the Bullet paste, ere the Peece crack; the colde taken, ere the body shiver; and the match made, ere you strike handes.25

The difference is that Daborne strips the veneer of “paternalistic” “concern” from Gosson’s warning by making men the victims of all this pointed, heated gazing.26 This is, in fact, the commoner worry. As Prynne writes,

23. The theatrical resonance of the biblical story must owe in some part to the fact that Lot’s Wife evolves much of her legendary history and popular profile in the same place that Noah’s Uxor acquires hers: in dramatic performance. There are a number of lost plays that date from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that dramatize Sodom’s story. Rosalind Hays has chronicled the introduction of a new play on Sodom’s destruction in Sherborne, Dorset, in 1572 (“Lot’s Wife,” 99). Henslowe records Abraham and Lot among the Earl of Sussex’s men’s properties in 1592-93 (Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2:95). The Annals of the English Drama note a play called The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah licensed in 1619 (ed. Alfred Harbage, and S. Schoenbaum, 3rd ed. rev. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim [London: Routledge, 1989], 30, qtd. in Hays, “Lot’s Wife,” 113). If we add to this a school play by Ralph Radcliffe and two plays that Robert Browne toured in Frankfurt in 1593 (Hays, “Lot’s Wife,” 100, 113) as well as the puppet show (“Sodom and Gomorrah” [5.1.10]) that Leatherhead lists among the motions he has given at Bartholomew Fair, we get some sense of the rich but lost performance tradition that underwrites her homiletic uses. 24. Gosson, “To the Gentlewomen Citizens of London,” appended to The Schoole of Abuse, sig. F4r. 25. Ibid., sig. F2v. 26. These are Jean Howard’s words, from her article “Scripts and/versus Playhouses,” 34. Her mistrust of Gosson’s solicitousness describes my own; as she writes, “The intensity of Gosson’s scrutiny of the woman playgoer indicates to me that her presence in the theater may have been felt to threaten more than her own purity” (35).



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He who is conversant in a multitude (especially at Stage-playes) is affected with daily wounds; for the countenance of women is a Dart annoynted with poison, which wounds the soule and sends in venome.27

And in Northbrooke’s founding tract, the “sore hurt” David received from “beholding Bersave [Bathsheeba]” explains why theaters, where “harlot[s]” are “open[ly]” beheld, and where “unlawful things” and “filthie speeches” are boldly represented, is “a place where ye soule of the wise is snared & condemned.”28 His elision is typical: in the antitheatrical discourse, the whorishness of spectacles and the whorishness of women spectators are pretty much the same injurious thing. So while Agar’s apostrophe evokes Gosson’s warning to women that the theater is dangerous to look at, it also reminds us that the theater is like a woman: dangerous to look at. This correction of Gosson is central to the play, if we are to judge by the insistence with which A Christian Turned Turk brings it to life. In particular, the long scene of Ward’s ensnarement, betrothal, and marriage seems a clear stand-in for the bad “match” that (as Gosson tells us) we spectators are in the process of recklessly courting. This lesson begins in a light vein: no sooner does Ward see his “golden,” or dark-skinned, “idol” than he greets her with the maladroit praise, “so true a fair/I ne’er beheld till now” (6.258–59).29 Thereafter, every time that Ward looks upon Voada, his perception turns false, and reciprocally, every time she leaves his presence, he returns to his proper senses. Promised power and wealth on condition of conversion, Ward is initially staunch in his refusal: “It is not divinity but nature moves me/Which doth in beasts force them to keep their kind” (7.45–46). When Voada is brought onstage, he is instantly of a different mind: “Where beauty pleads, there needs no sophistry./Thou hast o’ercome me, Voada” (7.165–66). Chided to reconsider, he is all Christian repentance: “I do recant it. I am now/Myself. Her looks enchanted me” (7.232–33). But with Voada’s return, “the weathercock is [again] turned” (7.238); pleads Ward, “Forgiveness, Voada! Turn back thy comet-eyes!” (7.245). For a moment, the appearance of his Christian captives pulls him back from the brink: “Leave but this path damnation guides you to” (7.265). But Voada finally pushes him over it: “Why stand you in this dilemma?” (7.272). Ward, doomed again, is now absolute, “On! Zounds, on I say!/The way that leads to love is no black way” (279–80). 27. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Yy3v. 28. Northbrooke, A treatise, sig. Iiiir. 29. Daborne belabors this racist joke; see also 8:91–94.

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The problem is clear, but Daborne nevertheless spells it out for us: “You cast your eyes too much upon the flame/Proves your destruction” (7.240–41). Even Voada rebukes her husband’s delusion. When Ward greets her with the wildly unsuitable endearment, “My constant, loyal Voada” (13.19), she meets his devotion with incredulity: “Do you know to whom you speak?” (13.22). Ward, however, remains past cure. Even at the play’s end, after abundant proof of her infidelity and contempt, he dies confounded by the fact that his wife does not see him as he sees her: Ward: Canst thou behold These eyes struck inward, as ashamed to view The fires which first betrayed them? [. . .] Canst without tears Behold my miseries? Voada: Ha, ha, ha! Ward: Prodigy of a woman, dost thou laugh? Voada: This is true music! Could I enjoy these tunes, Myself would be thy jailor. (16.268–79)

As he thrashes on Voada’s “Soule-intangling snare,” Ward demonstrates the dangers of playgoing as well as any antitheatrical tract could hope for.30 Still, Daborne’s tragedy is never merely the sermon that we might expect a future clergyman to be preaching. By depicting two bad marriages—two catastrophic marriages, in fact—and especially how, in Ward’s case, the “match [was] made” by means of Voada’s “wanton eye,” A Christian Turned Turk probes the stage’s status as a lust-inflaming object. Its recapitulation of Lot’s Wife’s story, from the hooking of Lot to the burning of Sodom, makes A Christian Turned Turk a reconsideration of the eye-to-flesh relation that underwrites theatrical spectatorship. The Stage’s Hymeneal Contract

That marriage could stand in for the theatrical contract is a remarkably tenacious idea. Because the wedding vow lies at the “definitional center”31 of J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, the yoking-work of “I do” has become the readiest example of how performance makes things happen. What I wish to bring 30. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. C4v. 31. Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity,” 3.



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across, however, is the centrality of marriage’s fantasy of jointure to the experience of the early modern English stage. It isn’t just Gosson, with his threat of “match[es] made, ere you strike handes,” who suggests as much. In each of my preceding chapters, the inculpating or infectious uptake of performance is figured by a guilty wife, or by an innocent wife who is mistaken for a guilty one. The reason, I suggest, is that Protestant marriage and the theater share an important commonality: both traffic in the prick and tickle of a sense that makes no sense. Frances Dolan has brought to light Protestantism’s paradoxical re­ imagining of the marital bond; she finds “the fusion of spouses into ‘one flesh’ and the man’s role as the head of the household” produced a fundamentally irreconcilable paradigm for husbands and wives to follow.32 One effect of this figural predicament is the vigilance that husbands are expected to maintain over the female ‘members’ they have subsumed. The problem, as the drama keeps proving, is that such scrutiny has no object; men’s supervision of the “marital body” and, in particular, of the locus of its imaginary bond, leaves husbands with the burden of feeling the honesty of their wives.33 At base, then, marriage dictates that men enthrall themselves to the Paracelsian notion that “Things [merely] Contiguous” are bound together by palpable yet “Immateriate Vertues”—a hypothesis that Bacon calls “doubtfull to Propound.”34 On the stage, this dictate is a tragic convention;35 play after play makes marriage into an impossible demand for husbands to ascertain an unverifiable condition (mutton or lamb, pitch or marble) from sensations that are misconstrued as the testimony of bound flesh. The resulting pressure to so feelingly see what cannot be known foments false impressions of both stripes, “chaste” and “Alp[ine],” as well as “hot” and “false” (ACTT, 8.93, 94; WT 1.2.108,131), not to mention brutal acts of ‘discovery’ along the lines of Othello’s “I’ll tear her all to pieces” (3.3.434). More sweepingly, though, it produces the recognition that “bloody passion[s] [may] shake []our very frame” (Oth 5.2.44), but not for love. Certainly, men have shook and wives have died for it, but their tremor cordis is proof of an adulteration that happens at the level of ontology,

32. Frances Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 23. 33. Ibid. 34. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, sigs. Iii2r–Iiir v. 35. See Katharine E. Maus, “Horns of Dilemma: Jealousy, Gender and Spectatorship in English Renaissance Drama,” ELH 54, no. 3 (1987): 561–83, for a sharp discussion of this pervasiveness. Maus offers a rich account of cuckoldry’s “complex analogy” to the voyeurism of theatrical witnessing (563). See also the last chapter of Mark Breitenberg’s Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), for a more generalized account of the male preoccupation with “female chastity” (175).

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whereby, as Daniel Heller-Roazen puts it, “Bodies feel Parts they do not possess.”36 As Leontes tells us, the sensation summoned by the scrutiny that marriage demands is a relation between the orders of what is and what is not: “with what’s unreal thou coative art,/And fellow’st nothing” (1.2.138, 141–42). To return, then, to the disastrous marriages of A Christian Turned Turk means returning to the “forked plague” that antitheatricalism uses Sodom to avoid describing: the impossible and debauched jointure of a counterfeit figure with its beholder’s flesh (Oth 3.3.280). Ward provides the cautionary lesson here: the more he misconstrues his wife, the more he schools us in the spectatorial propensity for sensing what is not true and for failing to sense what is false. He does so, however, as Leontes in reverse: he “ha[s] the disease” of a “revolted wi[fe]” but “feel[s] it not” (1.2.207). This is a point the play can’t stop making, by showing us, again and again, the shamelessness of Voada and her sister—or, rather, by attempting this demonstration with as much verisimilitude as the theater can offer. Yet the more A Christian Turned Turk tries to exhibit, beyond “imputation and strong circumstance” (Oth 3.3.409), the whorish spectacle begot by its whorish, gimlet-eyed wives, the more it moots Iago’s “fulsome” question, “Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on?/Behold her topped?” (3.3.398–99). As if to discredit both the misogyny and the sexology of antitheatrical critique, A Christian Turned Turk shows us adultery’s tendency to dissolve into nothing under the audience’s supervision. The play’s guignolesque subplot advertises this effect by subjecting it to legal scrutiny. When Benwash berates his man Rabshake for being such a lousy witness to his wife’s suspected affair, he bemoans the strict constructionism of his servant: My dull-eyed villain Rabshake saw none of this. He’s all for rem in re. He would have me a cuckold by law, foresooth, by statute law. (6.379–80)

In his solicitude, Rabshake leaves Benwash to wrestle with the legal fact that adultery cannot be prosecuted without the evidence of “rem in re,” or ‘the thing in the thing,’ that would taint him with the ignominy he is so desperate to avoid (“Should I suspect myself to have that disease, I would run mad” [6.88–89]). But the paradox is bigger than Benwash’s circumstance, for the demands of “statute law” strain against the theater’s representational limits. Even as we watch the lover Gallop ascend Agar’s chamber, followed closely by two thieves 36. Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 253.



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who hold up the lovers’ shed clothes and listen to the act at the bedroom door (“she fetcheth her wind short, I am sure” [10.60–61]), the sin itself remains beyond our ascertaining. In light of Benwash’s lesson on adultery’s legal standard of evidence, we look on in the knowledge that we are not beholding the thing itself. I do not suggest that the plot raises any questions as to the faithlessness of its female characters. Rather, it is performance that puts A Christian Turned Turk’s adultery in doubt, and so flagrantly as to cancel the play’s homiletic debts. Though conventionally, cuckoldry plots traffic in the anguish of seeing the scene of uxorial betrayal without actually seeing it, via handkerchiefs (Othello), sleeves (Troilus and Cressida), rings (The Merchant of Venice), paddled palms (The Winter’s Tale), up to the point of some fairly “wanton” but still misleading “courting” (The Roman Actor, S.D. 4.2.108), A Christian Turned Turk asks us to “glut []our relentless sight” on the scene it cannot proffer (7.147). The result of this promised exhibitionism is the frustration of our never actually seeing it, as when Voada says that she and the “Dutchman [Dansiker] . . . have bartered wares” (6.162) (they haven’t), or her page claims that her mistress has with “violence attempted” her (13.179) (when did that happen?). Even Ward’s relatively mild request for corroboration goes unfulfilled. When commanded to repeat one of the indecent “dialogues” he has overheard between Voada and her servant (13.85), Rabshake promises a full reenactment—“you shall stand for the lady, you for her dog, and I the page”—but then flees the scene, leaving the cuckold grossly gaping on the empty space the clown no longer occupies (13.86). The performance of “insatiate whore[dom]” (16.66) that is repeatedly vowed, promised, brokered, and pledged in A Christian Turned Turk is thus the means for the play to flaunt the breach of its spectatorial contract, leaving its audience to recognize that where much is supposed to be a-doing, nothing ever happens. This breach is widened at the play’s end, when Ward is unjustly arrested and sentenced for stabbing his wife. To the sexually redolent charge, “You have most unmanly thrust in a woman,” Ward replies, “Honest friends, Turks and officers—if ever I laid hands on her, may I never see light more” (15.99, 100–101). His protest is misconstrued by the mob as an absurd claim of conjugal innocence—“You never laid hands on her! Out, impudence!” (15.102–3)— and yet there is the odd ring of truth to it, since we have never seen the consummation of the marriage that taints him with the sin beyond Daborne’s naming. More insidiously, we have no clear sense of when it might have occurred, for the main plot, from the time of Voada’s entrance to the time of Ward’s death, is compressed into roughly thirty-six hours. Upon the reflection that Ward’s protestation invites, we are thus consigned to notice that amid his precipitous

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decline and fall, the rites of love have been given short shrift.37 Indeed, if Othello can serve as an index of what this sort of distorted time-scheme does to an audience, we are consigned to “obsessive speculation about concealed offstage action,” and perhaps even some embarrassing efforts to prove that the marriage “was never consummated at all.”38 The difference is that Ward’s humiliating confession—“[I] never laid hands on her”—frankly solicits our skepticism, as if Daborne wanted us to notice the instability of the sin he takes for his chief subject. But the play goes further. In his account of the “feverish self-betrayals” of audiences overwrought by the faulty timeline of Othello, Michael Neill describes the shame that comes of seeking knowledge where it does not lie. “Entrap[ped]” by the play’s “scopophile economy,” Neill finds that critics, like characters, are “prey to [Othello’s] voyeuristic excitements”: they draw “sequential ‘facts’” out of the void of the offstage action to allay what Leontes, in his similar circumstance, calls “the infection of [their] brains” (1.2.145).39 In A Christian Turned Turk, the situation is different: we seek evidence of an adultery that is supposed to have really happened. But the effect is the same, since the play repeatedly demonstrates that it is no venue for the verification of rem in re. Marital infidelity is therefore the means for Daborne, like Iago, to mock the spectator’s will to epistemological security (“what you know, you know” [Oth 5.2.300]); to revise Calderwood’s phrase, the play will not let us see what we were sure we already knew. Instead, its alleged adultery sparks a pair of fires that altogether confound the reality of the performed event. When A Christian Turned Turk calls for “Flames and brimstone” (10.78), and even

37. It will always seem inane to conjecture a timeline for a work so deliberately temporally inchoate, but this is how I tabulate the lack of time allotted to the wedding night: Ward meets Voada and is converted to Islam right before Dansiker sets fire to Tunis harbor; presumably, then, the night of the fire is his wedding night, but when he emerges the next morning to assess the damages to his ship, his wife greets him with such disdain that Ward thinks there must be another hoop to jump through before he can claim her: “Put not a further trial on me, thou best of women” (13.23). Rabshake suggests a cultural reason for this when he mocks Ward for a night spent at “Who’s that knocks at the backdoor?” with his new brothers in belief; the suggestion is that conversion to Islam is followed by some sort of collective experience of gay male (or “backdoor”) sex that has left the pirate unavailable for nuptial rites. See Patricia Parker, “Preposterous Conversions: Turning Turk, and Its Pauline Rerighting,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 2 no. 1 (2002): 1–34, for a thorough account of the perversity of turning Turk in Daborne’s play. From Rabshake, Ward then learns of his wife’s lust for the disguised servant Alizia, leading him to disrupt an encounter between them that same night (13.10). When that ambush goes wrong and Ward is immediately arrested, he dies by his own hand, unreconciled to his wife. 38. Neill, Putting History to the Question, 250, 245, 249. Neill is specifically addressing T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines’s essay, “Othello’s Unconsummated Marriage,” Essays in Criticism 33, no. 1 (1983): 1–18. 39. Ibid., 245, 250, 249.



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when it doesn’t, we are confronted by the impossibility of reconciling its performance to a world of things and facts. The Impossible History of Theater Fires

It is worth pointing out that the questions raised by fire in the theater are not Daborne’s invention. In his seminal study of the phenomenology of the stage, Bert States tallies fire among the elements that dissolve the categorical divide of truth from fiction. Because fire can never be disciplined to perform a part, States finds that when flames are theatrically represented, “something indisputably real leaks out of the illusion.”40 To this I add that what distinguishes fire from other disenchanting matter is that it leaks its realness undetected. As Wotton tells us, when the Globe burned down, the audience failed to notice the encroaching danger until it was nearly too late; the cannon fire that “did light on the thatch” was “thought at first but an idle smoke” because the audience’s eyes were riveted “to the show.” Unlike dogs or babies, whose strayings from the plot only matter if they are obvious, fire is never only performing in ways that are often dangerously hard to detect. The catastrophic results of this blind spot render fire in the playhouse a device that alternates between enthralling an audience and terrorizing it with the risky prospect of its enthrallment. The crowd at the Globe models the first of these misperceptions: Anthony Dawson calls the members of this group “prisoners of their own delight.”41 But it is no less common that pyrotechnics intended merely to entertain wind up “fright[ing]” spectators “with false fire” (Ham 3.2.244). Robert Laneham, a retainer in the household of the Earl of Leicester, describes his fight to maintain his composure before the “fireworkes” set off in honor of the queen’s arrival in Kenilworth in 1575: a blaz of burning darts, flying too and fro, leamz of starz coruscant, streamz and hail of fierie sparkes, lightninges of wildfier a water and lond, flight and shoot of thunderboltz, all with such continuauns, terror, and vehemencie, that the Heavins thundered, the waters soourged, the earth shooke; in such sort surly, az had we not bee assured the fulminant Deitee was all but in amitee, and could

40. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, 31. In this passage, States is primarily interested in the implications of running water on stage—fire is added as a parenthetical analogy. 41. Anthony B. Dawson, “The Distracted Globe,” in The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 89.

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not otherwize witnesse hiz wellcomming unto her Highness; it woold have made mee, for my part, az hardy az I am, very vengeably afeard.42

Laneham’s concern is not unwarranted; during a similar display three years earlier, disaster struck when, “by negligence or otherwise,” “fire-balles” were discharged into the town of Warwick “to the great perill, or else the great feare, of the inhabitants of th[e] Borough,” leaving four houses burnt.43 Yet even in this instance, in which the damages done by mere spectacle are clear and quantifiable, “feare” and “peril” are set in an opposition that continually troubles the apprehension of theatrical pyrotechnics. On the one hand, the archive yields up figures like Laneham who display embarrassing trepidation before a show that turns out to be harmless. On the other, it remembers the losses of those residents of Warwick who watched passively as their homes and goods were destroyed. With perverse consistency, fire seems to impel its spectators to take a position on the wrong side of the divide between skepticism and belief, leaving some audiences inured to spectacles of their own undoing, and others, justifiably skittish, too prone to raise the cry of fire without good cause. Both responses have proved disastrous, and in fact both have been proved so by the same play; Gordon McMullan notes that in addition to the première that burned the Globe playhouse to the ground, a production of King Henry VIII in 1727 was the occasion for a deadly panic caused by the suspicion of fire, incited when a “gentlewoman, fancying she saw Smoke issue from under the stage . . . declared her Opinion so loud” that she sparked a stampede that killed a pregnant woman and injured several other spectators.44 No wonder, then, that “falsely shouting fire in a theater” is the phrase that has come to signify the limitations placed on the First Amendment in the U.S. Bill of Rights. According to the 1919 opinion of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the word ‘fire’ cried in the playhouse exemplifies language that “ha[s] all the effect of force” and produces a “clear and present danger” to others.45 Though Holmes never explains his choice of locale, the special power the cry 42. Robert Laneham’s Letter: describing a Part of the Entertainments Unto Queen Elizabeth at the Castle of Kenilworth in 1575, ed. F. J. Furnivall (London: Chatto and Windus Duffiled and Co, 1907), 12–13, reproduced in John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 2 vols. (London: John Nichols and Son, 1823), 1:435. 43. Nichols, Progresses and Public Processions, 1:320. 44. The Daily Journal, quoted in The London Stage, 1660–1800: a Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces, ed. Charles Beechers Hogan, 11 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–68) 2:290 (2.940), quoted in McMullan, “Introduction,” 58. 45. Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919). It is worth remembering that Holmes’s opinion supported restricting antiwar literature (specifically, pamphlets questioning the state’s right to conscript citizens) during wartime. The cry of “fire” in the theater is therefore something of a strained homology.



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of “fire” possesses to panic people in a theater owes to the impossibility of telling the difference between a prank and a catastrophe in a milieu in which fire is never really, but never clearly not, performing. As the production history of King Henry VIII demonstrates, fire can ambush an audience too enthralled by spectacle to discern its danger, just as the fear of fire can ambush an audience too suggestible to dissimulation to perceive a blaze’s inauthenticity. The uncertainty of fires on the stage is finally so pronounced that the architectural engineer William Gerhard cannot establish the evidence for his study of Theatre Fires and Panics: Here we at once encounter much difficulty in gathering and presenting accurate and reliable figures and facts. There are numerous cases in which a fire breaking out in a theatre . . . is at once extinguished by the stagehands. . . . Many cases of this kind never become known to the public or the press. . . . In other instances, again, blind [false] fire-alarms are followed by a panic and often by loss of life. When a fire in a theatre breaks out during the night and destroys the building, the cause forever afterwards remains a mystery.46

To paraphrase his dilemma, sometimes theater fires happen and the audience doesn’t see them, sometimes they don’t happen and the audience sees them anyway, and sometimes—like the tree that falls in a forest—theaters spontaneously combust when nobody is looking. The disappearances wrought by fire or “fire!” in the playhouse—and it hardly matters whether in name or in fact—thus exceed any material losses to encompass too the ontological stability of the distinction between illusion and fact. For though we are told that what we see on stage is “no more yielding than a dream” (MND 5.1.420),47 one misfired canon is enough to prove that performance can nonetheless mark out the perimeter of its imminent absence in scorched earth. Daborne’s play is ingenious to the point of reckless in raising this prospect. Twice, A Christian Turned Turk calls for extravagant pyrotechnics, overt in their Sodomitical apocalypticism. The first of these is the conflagration the Dutch pirate Dansiker sets in Tunis harbor and in Benwash’s home, a disaster that smells of judgment even before Gallop runs to the balcony exclaiming, “Flames and brimstone, I am in hell!” (10.78), for the effect requires “a good

46. W. P. Gerhard, Theatre Fires and Panics: Causes and Prevention (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1896), 4. 47. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1994).

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quantitie of bruised brimstone,” unmistakable for its sulfuric “exhalation.”48 But Daborne is more explicit than this; when Benwash realizes his wife and her lover are trapped in the house, he calls for the “powers of heaven” to “throw . . . wildfire down upon the heads of these adulterers” (11.13–15). A few scenes later, Gallop goes so far as to parse the eschatological message of the blaze he narrowly escaped: I thought of the Day of Judgment—and that was more than ever I did in my life before! What with the fire above, and the ram-headed devil of your husband below, I imagined damnation could not be far off. (16.32–35)

Gallop survives to reflect upon this event because—as long as the stage technicians succeed at their jobs—Dansiker’s arson is quickly contained. But with no human agent behind it, “Heaven’s ang[er]” (15.33) rains down even more evocatively in the firestorm that takes place two scenes later. Since this action lacks stage directions, there is no way of knowing its pyrotechnical design; all we have to go on are Alizia’s observations: “No marvel though thou thund’rest heaven/And darts thy flashes down!” [15.45–46]). Presumably, the effect called for is a ‘rain of fire,’ detailed in John Bate’s fireworks manual, The Mysteries of Nature and Art (1634), and deployed and with some frequency in maritime and Turk plays.49 If so, figures hidden aloft would have fired cascades of flaming, gunpowder-filled “goose quils” onto the stage while Alizia, calling out for her bridegroom (whom Voada has just shot), calls down the apocalypse—“Oh! Why is not/This world a universal fire? (15.46–47).50 With stray ‘bolts’ all but certain to break free of the diegesis to light on the audience, Daborne’s pyrotechnics raise the strong possibility that “the time is perhaps not long” before “the rash world rages and burns.” In fact, even the first fire is accompanied by a series of shouts conditioned, as Holmes will argue, to cause pandemonium. From Rabshake, and then from an unidentified 48. John White, A Rich Cabinet with Variety of Inventions (London, 1653), sig. L6r; John Bate, The mysteryes of nature and art (London, 1634), sig. H4v. Brimstone or sulfur is a crucial ingredient in fire effects since it is one of the three principal components of gunpowder; see Philip Butterworth, Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1998), 230. 49. John Bate, The mysteryes of nature and art (London, 1634), sig. H4v; R. B. Graves shows that The Battle of Alcazar, Captain Thomas Stukeley, and The Courageous Turk all include fifth-act blazing star effects, an effect that strongly resembles a rain of fire (Lighting the Shakespearean Stage 1567–1642 [Carbondale: Southern Illinois State University Press, 1999], 211). 50. These are Bate’s instructions: “How to make raining fire: Take diverse goose quils, and cut off the hollow ends of them, and fill them with the composition before mentioned [of saltpeter, Brimstone and coal], stopping them afterwards with a little wet gunpowder, that the dry composition may not fall out”; The mysteryes of nature and art, sig. Lv.



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voice “within” (S.D. 86), the audience is seventeen times assailed by the cry of “fire!” (10.74, 76, S.D. 87). While it is true that Daborne has prepared us to expect this conflagration, the more his characters cry out in fear, the more likely an audience is to recognize that there is no way of ascertaining whether the special effect is behaving as scripted or whether the cries convey real alarm. The audience is left to choose accordingly: either to flee and risk the danger of a collective panic, or to persist in an enchantment that could turn out at least as badly; just “Witnesse Paris Garden” where “divers have bene grievously hurt, wounded, and maimed” by the “cry of fire fire, which set them in such a maze . . . that as destitute of their wits they stood styll, and could make no shifte for themselves, till the scaffold was made even with the ground.” But what makes the play so spectacularly unsettling is the doom that is augured even by the absence of flames and brimstone. When, at his tragedy’s end, Ward exclaims that “Rather than be baffled thus/[He] will betray this town, blow up the castle” (13.93–94) and when Dansiker similarly confesses that he had planned “a massacre/Of the whole town,” we are left to consider what pyrotechnics might remain in store (16.222–23). Retrospectively, we know that the script consigns these plots to wishful thinking; dramatically speaking, the tragedy of Daborne’s tragedy is that, in the end, Tunis still stands. But in performance, this anticlimactic ending is not so assured. Almost the last words that Ward speaks are rich with eschatological promise: O may the force of Christendom Be reunited and all at once require The lives of all that you have murdered, Beating a path out to Jerusalem Over the bleeding breasts of you and yours. (16.309–13)

And with this prayer, the play invites the suspicion—or is it the hope?—that A Christian Turned Turk will turn its catastrophe into a comoedia apocalyptica. The resemblance to Foxe’s Christus Triumphans is pronounced: once again, the script stops with the promise that the show isn’t really over, in anticipation that the apocalypse will come on Ward’s cue. But Daborne adds as fuel to this surmise the volatility of fire’s prior apparition: after Dansiker’s fire, which was abundantly foretold, heaven darts its flashes down in almost the very next scene with no warning whatsoever. Without a diegetic pattern to enable their prediction, Daborne’s pyrotechnics raise an unanswerable question: how do we know that the “universal fire” Ward prays for is not smoldering somewhere, poised for deployment by a stage hand the audience cannot see and anchored to plotwork as yet unrevealed? Certainly the Governor’s command to put

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Dansiker to torture (“apply your torches/Unto his breast” [16.218]) suggests a ticking-bomb scenario in no way dispelled by Dansiker’s claim that he has been “prevented” (16.227). Since his first arson involved the use of a primitive timer (called a “train of match” [5.41]), it is easy to assume that another such fire remains, by a similar mechanism, in the works. I realize that I am straying quite far into the domain of the hypothetical here, but I want to propose that it is plausible, and even likely, that Daborne’s audience awaits the flames and brimstone the play has already accustomed them to. At a minimum, Ward’s appeal for another rain of fire must draw some glances to the onstage sites from which fire has previously flashed and smoked, though when nothing emits from them, we might presume the possibility foreclosed. It is worth remembering, therefore, that the absence of fire does nothing to dispel this sort of expectancy; consider the riot at King Henry VIII caused by a person wrongly convinced that the play was set to reprise its disastrous history. No matter how clearly we see that nothing is happening at the play’s pyrotechnical outputs, this nothing to be seen is no assurance that nothing will happen. It is always possible, and the play trains us to expect, that a fire might be kindling inwardly, or a spark might be traveling up a train of match. The longer Daborne defers the flames and brimstone that Ward pleads for, the more pointedly he raises the question, how do we know we’re not burning? The ingenuity of A Christian Turned Turk’s Sodomitical poetics is that the play shows us we can’t. Just as Foxe does, Daborne incites the belief that a “final catastrophe” awaits us. But in leaving his play’s third firestorm unperformed, he also forces us to see that we cannot see that catastrophe coming. The result might seem to be the Sodomitical paranoia that antitheatricalism promulgates—“we burne, we burne, yet dread we not the fire wherewith we burne.” But whereas critics of the stage, from Northbrooke to Prynne, are all concerned with making visible a threat that they believe has gone unremarked, Daborne flaunts its invisibility. Like the seventeen cries of fire that hail a danger at once imaginary and real, every toted torch and every lit squib is an invitation to notice that we cannot tell whether burning brimstone hails down in jest, or whether desolation is now upon us. Instead, his theater is a site for ontology to be mooted. As if to echo the mandate of Ram Alley’s Prologue— “thoughts and wits should stand at strife,/Whether the things now shown be true,/Or whether we ourselves now do/The things we but present”—Daborne makes his ending into an unverifiable apocalypse. I have sought to show that A Christian Turned Turk is a play that Remembers Lot’s Wife exactly as Luke asks: by hearkening to the promise of a returning Christ who will flash out like “lightning” (17:24). But in Daborne’s



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hands, Sodom’s story is not the overture to Foxe’s “earnest[] advi[ce]” to be not “unprepared, lest the bridegroom, when he comes, reject you as you sleep” (5.5.155–56). Instead, the play brings out the paradox of vigilance preached in Lot’s Wife’s name, for inasmuch as “yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night” (Thess. 5:2), preparation can have no truck with either the “crude, consequentialist positivism” of rem-in-re evidence gathering, or the more “gothic critical imagination that reads for hidden meanings and lost histories” illustrated by the perfervid imaginings of Leontes or Othello, twin strains of interpretive practice that Anne-Lise François finds equally dissatisfactory.51 Since Christ’s return is by definition a bouleversement of our epistemologies (as Northbrooke says, it will come “even when men loke least for it”), Lot’s Wife is a reminder to always be prepared for what we cannot possibly see coming. This is not a point that sits well in England’s populist preachings, given how hard they look for smoke to discern “God’s fire”: the mounstrous and strange signes in the heaven [comets], and sights in earth [fires], doe foretell and foreshew some fearfull wrath at hand. Abraham saw Sodomes smoake ascending, when God’s fire was descending.52

But the search for signs of a desolation that cannot be perceived is never more explicit than in antitheatrical discourse, where man’s Overthrow is so robustly forecast. A Christian Turned Turk’s innovation, therefore, is its defiance of this augury. By rendering so utterly unknowable the effects of the fires that his play calls for, Daborne binds us in the marriage that Foxe welcomes: “End the delays, you who are called; come quickly bridegroom.” This alignment of theater’s hymeneal contract with the state of unknowing that Christian eschatology proselytizes renders the stage a site that cataclysmically overturns our laws of expectation and consequence. As Dayborne renders it, the Sodomitical story of Ward’s fall conveys the deontologizing effect of Christ’s return as the price, but also the gift, of enthralled spectatorship. The difference between Sodomitical drama and the tyrannical and stigmatical genres that precede it is therefore the difference between justifying or pathologizing the matter of performance and promulgating its Christian mystery: what I called in part 2 performance’s queazie undecidability becomes, in Daborne’s hands, a doubt divinely wrought. The route A Christian 51. Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 31. 52. Sedgwick, Gods Fury Fiered, sig. B8v.

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Turned Turk takes to reach this inconclusion is in many respects familiar: the play confronts us, once again, with performance’s tendency to hold us hostage to desolations whose realness we cannot know. Its innovation, however, is in showing us how bootlessly we ask if our time is up (Now? Now? Very now? [Oth 1.1.87–88]), for the play’s resolution is more or less Hamlet’s “Let be.” By subjecting us to a reckoning that so clearly exceeds our reckoning, Daborne’s typological dramaturgy is a rigorous application of the New Testament’s most daunting dictate: that we submit ourselves to this world’s ontology of disappearance. It is, after all, the Globe’s burning that teaches us “great things are won/By those that dare through greatest dangers run.” Of course, one could choose to read A Christian Turned Turk as another momento mori for a “hard and flinty-hearted age.”53 By way of countering this interpretation and concluding this chapter, I turn now to a play that likewise consummates its nuptial contract with flames and brimstone. But in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling (1622), the apocalypse offers us a reprieve from the judgment it occasions. By situating the whole audience in the place that A Christian Turned Turk never names, Middleton and Rowley bring out the radical open-endedness of Sodomitical drama. The Mare Mortuum’s Infinite Stage

Let me begin by admitting that at first sight, The Changeling is a poor candidate for the reading I am offering. From the vantage of its bridegroom, the noble (though dull) Alsemero, the play is a vindication of the husbandly art of wife-testing. Though Alsemero’s censure of his bride’s seeming hits an embarrassing snag in the form of the virginity test that Beatrice fakes her way through, the final confession that he extracts from her when at last his “doubts are strong upon [him]” must be called a success (5.3.23). Faced with Beatrice’s indignant denials, Alsemero takes Othello’s tack: I’ll all demolish, and seek out truth within you, If there be any left; let your sweet tongue Prevent your heart’s rifling; there I’ll ransack And tear out my suspicion. (5.3.36–39)

But in this play lack of evidence turns out to corroborate the truth of a husband’s jealousy. When Beatrice asks that her husband to “show [her] the 53. Robert Gray, An alarum to England sounding the most fearefull and terrible example of Gods vengeance (London, 1609), sig. B2r.



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ground whereon [he] lost [his] love,” Alsemero counters that this “Unanswerable” question is proof of the slipperiness of her character—indeed, he reasons, the very groundlessness of his accusation is the same “ground [she] cannot stand on,” the site of her “fall” (5.3.41, 43, 44). Whereas Othello horrifies us with this sort of chop logic, The Changeling seems to redeem it: immediately, Beatrice admits her sins, and Alsemero locks her in his “closet” as if she were an object that poisons his sight (5.3.77). An easy way of summing up The Changeling is therefore to call it the fulfillment of Othello’s stigmatical poetics, particularly since De Flores, whom Alsemero rightly suspects for his rival, receives by mysterious means the stigma of a crime he cannot rub off: “What’s this blood upon your band, De Flores?” (5.3.95). The revelation hastens the play to a stunning conclusion: confining De Flores in the same closet as Beatrice, Alsemero claps them together in a perverse travesty of the marriage rite: Get you in to her, sir. I’ll be your pander now; rehearse again Your scene of lust, that you may be perfect When you shall come to act it to the black audience Where howls and gnashings shall be music to you. Clip your adult’ress freely, ’tis the pilot Will guide you to the Mare Mortuum, Where you shall sink to fathoms bottomless. (113–20)

“Combined together as it were in one,”54 the adulterers of The Changeling are thus commanded to “rehearse” the rem in re of their transgression while we are left at “the door of truth” to overhear it (Oth 3.3.410). As it happens, though, the deed done under our auditory supervision is murder, not adultery; when the closet is opened, Beatrice emerges, fatally stabbed, to purge her infected blood: “Let the common sewer take it from distinction” (5.3.153). Setting up a cordon sanitaire around her exsanguination, she confirms all that Alsamero suspects—“Oh come not near me, sir, I shall defile you” (5.3.149)—for De Flores, having usurped Alsemero’s bed, has done this avenging office too: “ransack[ed]” Beatrice’s heart, and with a dagger, and “t[o]r[n] out [his] suspicion.” The Changeling is thus the play that fortifies with forensic proof Leontes’s causeless affliction; when Beatrice’s “opacous body” is cut open to reveal its full “corruption” (5.3.196, 9), Middleton and Rowley have us “look there, look 54. William Perkins, Oeconomie: or Household Government, in 3 vols. (London, 1631), vol. 3, sig. Qqqq5v, quoted in Dolan, Marriage and Violence, 26.

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there” upon the material corroboration of Alsemero’s substanceless feelings (“my doubts are strong upon me” [5.3.23]). Still, as my decision to discuss it here must suggest, there is another side to the play, one that puts a twist on this ending by Remembering Lot’s Wife, and the inconclusive eschatology Daborne draws from her example. Since the play is a fairly orthodox retelling of Lot’s saga—once again, a traveler (Alsemero), ominously stricken by a woman’s “snare[] of beauty,” is brought by a “hidden malady” he “understands not” to a marriage that is “a charnel” (1.1.38, 24, 25; 5.3.83)—there is ample evidence for this argument, particularly once the house goes up in flames, and Alsemero bemoans the dismal “fate” to which he bound himself “at [the] first sight” of his wife (5.3.12,13). But the signal cue for this typological reading is the Mare Mortuum to which Beatrice and De Flores are dispatched, for the term denotes the spot upon which Sodom once stood. As Henry Peacham explains, “The valley of Siddim,” once smitten by “fire and brimstone from heaven,” “was turned into a most horrid, stinking, and infectious Lake, called even at this day, Mare mortuum, or The Dead Sea.”55 The geographical reference is obligingly definite, but the metatheatrical resonance is even more telling, since the sunken city in which Beatrice and De Flores “rehearse” the “scene” of their lust is also a theater, complete with an “audience” of the condemned. Should playgoers miss the insinuation that the Mare Mortuum is their own Phoenix playhouse, that same “hell” is mapped onto the present when Beatrice’s father exclaims, “We are all there, it circumscribes here” (164).56 At the same moment it confirms its cuckold’s worst suspicions, The Changeling thus casts its audience into the “fathoms bottomless” of Sodom’s desolation. This conjunction foists upon us the terrible cost of the knowledge we seek, for by holding a mirror up to the audience’s nature, Alsemero turns the play’s cuckold drama into a discovery that is on us. Like the nineteenth-century safety advocate who found that “spectacular plays, introducing effects of fire,

55. Henry Peacham, The Valley of Varietie (London, 1638), sigs B5v–B6r. Accounts of Peacham’s type are plentiful across and derive from the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon (“Evidence of their wickedness still remains: a continually smoking wasteland, plants bearing fruit that does not ripen, and a pillar of salt standing as a monument of the unbelieving soul,” 10:8). Henry Timberlake’s travel narrative entitled Two Journeys to Jerusalem relates a similar history: “We come now to the Dead Sea . . . It was once a fruitfull valley, and compared, for delight, unto Paradise, and called Pentapolis, for her five Cities, but afterward destroyed with fire from heaven, and turned into this filthy Lake, and barren desolation which doth encompass it” ([London, 1692], sigs. E4v–E5r). For a compelling discussion of the presence of Sodom in Shakespeare’s corpus, see Scott Maisano, “Shakespeare’s Dead Sea Scroll: On the Apocryphal Appearance of Pericles,” in The Shakespeare Apocrypha, spec. issue of Shakespeare Yearbook 16 (2007), ed. Douglas Brooks. 56. Malone records that The Changeling was “licensed to be acted by the Lady Elizabeth’s servants at The Phoenix, May 7, 1622,” quoted by N. W. Bawcutt in the introduction to his edition of the play The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), xxiv.



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in various more or less realistic ways, to gratify a vitiated taste, have added enormously to the dangerous character of theaters,”57 The Changeling caps its incendiary drama with the revelation of our enthrallment to our own (eternal) burning. What changes from the later admonition, however, is Middleton and Rowley’s queazie meditation on the lack of difference disgust makes, for The Changeling is a play that invites our revulsion, even as it confounds our efforts to keep aloof from its “scene[s] of lust.” Its lesson to playgoers therefore exceeds even what Gosson preaches, for here, “looking eyes” that beget “[dis]lyking hartes” burn all the same. Another way of summing up The Changeling, then, is as a test of the condemnatory ethos that its audience of devils conveys, for the play is remarkably eager to make us look at our looking at it, and the sight is never as “enflam[ing] ” as antitheatricalists purport. De Flores is the chief operative on this front, an apt part for a character who is equally repugnant in action and appearance. He is a “standing toad-pool” (2.1.58) and an “ominous, ill-aced fellow” (2.1.50) in the words of Beatrice, who nevertheless puts him to work as her hired assassin. Her plan is to manipulate the besotted servant into clearing the path for her marriage to Alsemero, but this is, as Gosson tells us a spectatorial error; if no woman can “joyne lookes with an amorous Gazer” without “yeld[ing] [her] Cities to be sacked,” Beatrice’s perdition is fixed when she presumes she can consort with a “basilisk” (1.1.115) without putting her virtue (such as it is) at risk.58 To De Flores, this is only too evident: Methinks I feel her in my arms already, Her wanton fingers combing out this beard, And being pleased, praising this bald face. (2.2.147–49)

But in a bold contradiction of the antitheatrical sexology, Beatrice’s “uncleane affections” are not kindled.59 Quite the reverse, in fact. Even as she draws him in to her employ (“Come hither; nearer man” [2.2.77]), her gorge rises at De Flores’ “physnomy” (2.2.76). She fights hard to conceal her “loath[ing]” (“Cannot I keep that secret,/And serve my turn upon him?” 2.2.66, 1.2.68– 69]), but still lets slip an exclamation of disgust: “Faugh” (2.2.80). When De Flores returns, the job complete, to demand the payment he has so salaciously

57. “Theater Fires and Their Lesson,” The Manufacturer and Builder 11, no. 14 (1882): 242. 58. Gosson, “To the Gentlewomen Citizens of London,” appended to The Schoole of Abuse, sig. F2v. 59. Beatrice’s subsequent sexual willingness proves DeFlores right; she will indeed come to “love anon” what she initially loathes. This fulfillment of De Flores’s stalker logic is one of the play’s most nauseating inventions, but my interest is her initial unconsenting capitulation to DeFlores’s rape.

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imagined, Beatrice is therefore baffled (“I understand thee not” [3.4.68]), then horrified; she even marshals the Sodomitical violation of “course and kind” to fend him off: “Think but upon the distance that creation/Set ’twixt thy blood and mine and keep thee there” (3.4.130–31). But he will not be denied. In an assertion of repulsive overconfidence, De Flores summons Beatrice to her offstage rape with the consolation: “Thou’lt love anon/What thou so fear’st and faint’st to venture on” (3.4.170–71). Since it instigates the “scene of lust” that Alsemero invites the couple to “rehearse again” at the play’s conclusion, this scene clinches the play’s spectatorial contract.60 In the play’s last act, we find out that Beatrice’s nuptial travesty, with its “disturbing” allusions to “the epithalamium from Ben Jonson’s masque Hymenaei,” is the theatrical moment before which we, the audience, are retrospectively interpolated as a ring of devils, “howl[ing] and “gnashing[]” in delight.61 And yet The Changeling invites us to recognize that like Beatrice, whose no is deliberately misconstrued as a yes, we are indicted for an appetite that is not necessarily ours. The lines De Flores confides to us before calling in his favor show how helpless we are to withhold our approbation: Hunger and pleasure, they’ll commend sometimes Slovenly dishes, and feed heartily on ’em, Nay, which is stranger, refuse daintier for ’em. (2.2.150–52)

Forced into silent collusion with his philosophy, we are inculpated in the scene to come, for in the pause that blooms over Beatrice’s horrified recognition that she is trapped, we cannot choose but wonder: while her “silence” is being so grossly misread as “one of pleasure’s best receipts” (3.4.168), must not our own silence be taken the same way? Worse, given De Flores’s diagnosis of Beatrice’s particular perversity (she “heartily” “feed[s]” on that which most revolts her) would not even our recoil be seen as the commendation of an unwholesome appetite? The Changeling thus denies to its audience the opportunity of exclaiming its outrage, like the apocryphal “yokel” who stopped the show during Othello’s fifth act, for according to De Flores’s logic, agitation and impassivity register equally as proclamations of consent.62 Prisoners of our own disgust, we are therefore left to consider: if we are not transported by “those impressions 60. Judith Haber, “ ‘(I)t could not choose but follow’: Erotic Logic in The Changeling,” Representations 81 (Winter 2003). Haber details the scene’s grotesque recollection of “the epithalamium from Ben Jonson’s masque Hymenaei,” and in particular its rapacious emphasis on “defloration” (79). 61. Ibid., 79, 80. 62. Stanley Cavell discusses this nonevent in “The Avoidance of Love (Theater),” in The Cavell Reader, ed. Stephen Mulhall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 145.



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of mind” “the players do counterfeit on the stage,” then what—and why—are we feeling? The more the play winkingly subscribes us to the delectation of its lustful scenes, the more it forces us to ask, how can we prove we’re not burning? Middleton and Rowley’s dramaturgical ingenuity is not to answer this question, but instead to confront us with its unanswerability. Caught in a debauched bond with a lust-inflaming spectacle, not only are we playgoers accounted an audience of the damned, we are made to see the cause of our own “black[ening]” when De Flores hauls onstage the charred corpse of the play’s sacrificial virgin (5.3.116): Vermandero: Bless us! What’s that? De Flores: A thing you all knew once—Diaphanta’s burnt. (5.1.105–6)

By revealing, like so much burned meat, the “slovenly dish” that the audience “feed[s] heartily on,” the play makes its performance the gratification of a “vitiated taste.” Yet the bedevilment to which we are subject is also a provocation for the audience to seek out an alternative to antitheatricalism’s naïve epistemology. It isn’t just the nauseating sight of Diaphanta’s remains that suggests as much. Alsemero’s epilogue is the key to this alternative view: Your only smiles have power to cause re-live The dead again, or in their rooms to give Brother a new brother, father a child; If these appear, all griefs are reconcil’d. (5.3.224–27)

By substituting “smiles,” for the more routine appeal to applause (“give me your hands, if we be friends” [MND Epilogue 15]) the production is free to presume upon its universal acclaim. ‘Dead’ actors, after all, are poorly positioned to ascertain the individual expressions of a multitude; we can therefore rest assured that they are going to “re-live” themselves and take a bow, regardless of the looks spectators give them. One effect of Alsemero’s insincere petition is thus to entrap the audience, once again, in a pact we never assented to, whereby even our stern silence will be taken as the authorization for the play to replay its debauchery another day, and confront another audience with another be-whored and burnt virgin. But the other effect, no less entailed than the first one, is to raise the prospect of this unconsenting outlook by the attempt to muscle it out of view. The egregiousness with which the play skates over its manifest unpalatability suggests that spectators are not the gnashing devils that antitheatricalists take them for. Instead, The Changeling conveys a

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theatrical experience that does not map onto the antitheatrical sexology, but is rooted to the ontologically precarious site of Sodom itself. Actually, this experience is rooted to the site where Sodom once stood, for crucial to the infernality that Beatrice’s father says “circumscribes here” is the fact that it is postapocalyptic: if we remember Sodom for the destruction it augurs, then it follows that the aftermath of that apotheosis stands for the time after the world’s fall. This disadjustment of the play’s time-scheme puts a new spin on The Changeling’s metatheatricality, for even as the play invites us to scrutinize our spectatorship, it puts us in a state beyond reckoning: out of time, out of place, in an epistemological freefall. Hence, the solicitation of the spectator’s flesh that Middleton and Rowley foment—and no play is as good at making us shrink from its touch—is colored by the realization that performance matters in a manner that we simply cannot gauge; subsumed by “fathoms bottomless,” we are loosed from our laws of causality and consequence. There are a number of indications of this new and uncertain spatiotemporal regime. One is the opening line of the play’s post-coital second half, “This fellow hath undone me endlessly” (4.1.1) of which Judith Haber writes, “to be undone is literally to be . . . deprived of closure, made forever endless.”63 Another is the scene in which Beatrice listens at the door to her bed trick’s consummation while in the space of eleven lines the clock strikes one and then two, as if to demonstrate that time itself is unraveling. But the most evocative instance is the confusion that happens when The Changeling unleashes its cry of “fire, fire, fire!” (5.1.73). Here again, there is a startling conjunction of the marital and the eschatological; while Christus Triumphans ends by convening a chorus of virgins who take up their torches to await their bridegroom (“nothing remains except the bridegroom, who will bring the final catastrophe to our stage”), The Changeling sends in a virgin to Beatrice’s bridegroom whom De Flores promptly torches, engendering a catastrophe that “endanger[s] the whole house” (5.1.33). Engulfed by the smoke of The Changeling’s false but real fire, the audience is again caught up in the raptus of witnessing the theater’s ontogeny in action. As we did in A Christian Turned Turk, we stand on the groundless ground—“the ground you cannot stand on”—between performance’s nonevent (none of this is really happening) and its most totalizing mode of disappearance (all this will consume us and leave not a rack behind ). That this “unanswerable” state is the effect of Beatrice’s slip from “grace and goodness” (5.3.45) is the reason the play suggests a “replay of the Fall,” as Don Hedrick

63. Haber, “(I)t could not choose but follow,” 81.



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and Bryan Reynolds have argued.64 But the fruitless search to know where we stand—whether in peril or pleasure—repackages that slip as a perpetual “drift.”65 For while Diaphanta’s burnt body might seem to bring to a gruesome close the uncertainty that The Changeling’s pyrotechnics have unleashed, the play goes on to tell us that the theater is “bottomless”: with or without our smiles of approval, its fire will be rekindled, and to who knows what end? By consigning us to the Mare Mortuum, Middleton and Rowley invent a commedia apocalyptica in which the audience’s condition—pitch or marble, devil or saint—drops perpetually out of reach (5.3.46). Other playwrights have led us to similar abysses—we might think of Othello’s “steep-down gulfs of liquid fire,” or the echoless depths that Bosola describes: “In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,/Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!” (5.5.101–2). But I end here, with The Changeling, in a less gloomy spirit, for when Middleton and Rowley shift their play onto Sodom’s ground, they open up a welcome space between performance’s antagonism to history and the disasters that this antagonism provokes. Their Dead Sea stage suggests that whatever happens when a spectacle and its spectator change eyes matters for reasons that we cannot fathom, since the theatrical event unfolds outside of the consequentiality of history, and beyond the apotheothetical split of guilt from innocence or sheep from (scape)goats. The fire in The Changeling’s employ is therefore a defiant repudiation of the ashes and dust to which the fall has consigned us. Endlessly resurrected in a theater carved out of Sodom’s remains, The Changeling makes performance a thing beyond the ends—judicial, salvific, or apocalyptic—that we keep assigning to it.

64. Don Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds, “ ‘I might like you better if we slept together’: The Historical Drift of Place in The Changeling,” in Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 115. 65. I take this term from the title of Hedrick and Reynolds’s essay.

“ ’tis hereafter to know, but here to promise” king henry v, 5.2.210 “and remember, you are but Adam, flesh and blood” jonson, Overdo, Bartholomew Fair, 5.6.100–101

Afterword

On the Uncertainty of What Comes After

History’s verdict on the story I have been telling is well known; in fact, I have already told it: the “wicked and Tyrannicall Army,” in a “most inhumane, cruell, rough and barbarous manner” did “take away the poor Players from their Houses.” It has been my argument, moreover, that the early modern English stage saw its dissolution coming, alert as it was to the falls allotted to past theatrical ages. But having come to the end, the point I want to make about the early modern English theater’s historical consciousness is not so predictably endbound. Fire, the most consummate of the theater’s practices of self-effacement, occasioned its fair share of catastrophes, but it proves to be a matchless broker of the here and now—that forking sense of contingency that arises when we slip off the grid of the script’s blueprint and into the blue. It is difficult not to fixate upon what succeeds from this sort of slip. The burnt theaters of England’s pre-Restoration theater supply precisely the sort of end from which history’s

“ ’tis hereafter to know, but here to promise” king henry v, 5.2.210 “and remember, you are but Adam, flesh and blood” jonson, Overdo, Bartholomew Fair, 5.6.100–101

Afterword

On the Uncertainty of What Comes After

History’s verdict on the story I have been telling is well known; in fact, I have already told it: the “wicked and Tyrannicall Army,” in a “most inhumane, cruell, rough and barbarous manner” did “take away the poor Players from their Houses.” It has been my argument, moreover, that the early modern English stage saw its dissolution coming, alert as it was to the falls allotted to past theatrical ages. But having come to the end, the point I want to make about the early modern English theater’s historical consciousness is not so predictably endbound. Fire, the most consummate of the theater’s practices of self-effacement, occasioned its fair share of catastrophes, but it proves to be a matchless broker of the here and now—that forking sense of contingency that arises when we slip off the grid of the script’s blueprint and into the blue. It is difficult not to fixate upon what succeeds from this sort of slip. The burnt theaters of England’s pre-Restoration theater supply precisely the sort of end from which history’s

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retrospection can begin—consider, for instance, the purchase point of Wotton’s spoof-chronicle of the Globe: “this was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric.” I conclude this book, however, by veering off the trajectory that would seem to be fulfilled by the consummations of the Paris Garden, the Fortune, Whitehall, and the Globe, and, most emphatically, by the full stop to which the theater is brought by its Cromwellian opponents. For though the terminus of the English stage’s “golden age” is uncommonly absolute—no date serves the turn of dramatic periodization better than 1642—the theater has a way of going on, regardless of the historical fact of its discontinuance. Prynne’s report of the antitheatrical wickedness undertaken by the “Tyrannicall Army,” for instance, dates from 1649, seven years after the theater’s official closure. There is a difference, therefore, between the unresolving nature of the theater that comes down to us and the history we have made of it. The prominence of the Globe fire in the popular understanding of what happened to the Shakespearean stage conveys nothing so well as our eagerness to secure the theatrical past to a disciplined unfolding, one that invites Nagler’s “scientific approach to theatrical facts” by proceeding in the customary way from a brilliant rise to a clearly demarcated end. The distinction I am claiming for early modern England is the recognition that the theater refuses this kind of clear and consequential proceeding. Most acute, I have said, is the broad and deep perception that performance cannot be put in the service of an end. To a remarkable degree, the stage’s opponents and poets agree that what a play does not do is out guilt or impress faith: it serves the judgments of neither man nor God. Indeed, foisting this role upon the theater is a clear path to disaster: as the fall of Rome and the dissolution of the unified Church remind us, there is no surer means to dissolve the very grounds of truth than to make them the subject of performance. At the same time, though, performance reminds us that evanescence is not the same as insignificance. As Hamlet proves, the fiction of “Hecuba” is not “nothing.” Though it remains the most mortal of the arts, reviled for an ontological condition that we cannot help but recognize as the way of all flesh (“neither be Theaters where in times past they were”), performance repudiates the inevitability of its own self-effacement. Like Abraham, who prefaces his haggling with God by conceding he is “but dust and ashes,” the stage takes the precondition of its disappearance as the reason that it matters. The Changeling is the play that I find most concretely voices this defiance, even as it refutes in absolute terms earlier efforts to make something endful . As Phelan writes, performance “rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered” (Unmarked, 147).



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out of the theater’s empty show. At its conclusion, the truth-seeking, wifetesting dramaturgy descended from Roman and Roman Catholic traditions is rendered the fastest way to send us all to “hell.” But there is an alternative, Middleton and Rowley suggest, in the endless repetition of the repertoire. By “re-liv[ing]” Beatrice and De Flores, they tack on to their play’s catastrophe an endlessness that is infinite—for who can say which “tonight” will be the last in which these “thing[s]” choose to appear? As the show fades into memory, its loss is therefore countered by the assurance that we are seeing what will be seen again. And this promise pushes beyond the horizon of what we can know the claims we might wish to make for the theater’s effects, for the play’s infinite continuance cracks open a posterity that unfolds in the no-time and no-place denoted by the “Mare Mortuum.” In The Changeling, then, performance is scripted to happen beyond history: outside the systematic and consequential epistemologies that govern what counts. It might seem dissatisfactory that The Changeling’s ending comes down on the side of inconclusiveness, since that tends to seem like no side at all. While early modern England accounts performance an alternative to historical forms of meaning-making, the question of how and why it imports is left to an apotheosis that has always never happened. This closing off of closure might seem to force our submission to an unappealingly fatalistic regime: stupefied by a fathomless spectacle, we await our taking off. But I suggest, by way of a conclusion, that there is something to be said for an alternative to history that does not simply counter fact—for instance, what if Lincoln hadn’t gone to the Ford Theater?—but counters factuality. The claim brings me back to the figure with which I began this study, and to one last piece of accydentall news, also drawn from a letter written by a son, James S. Knox, to his father, regarding a production of Our American Cousin, staged at the Ford Theater on April 14 of 1865: Dear father: it is with sad feeling that I take up my pen to address you. Last Friday night at 10 o’clock I witnessed the saddest tragedy ever to be enacted in this

. See Spenser Golub’s Infinity (Stage) for meditation on this idea across film and modern performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). Marvin Carlson writes, in accord with Freddie Rokem, that Horatio’s line, “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” (1.1.24), is “profoundly evocative of the operations of the theatre itself ”; The Haunted Stage, 7; Freddie Rokem, Performing History (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000). . See Linda Charnes, “Reading for the Wormholes: Micro-periods from the Future,” for an incisive account of other time-bending early modern localities (Early Modern Culture [2007], http://emc.eserver. org/1–6/charnes.html, accessed July 17, 2008). A dramatic rendering of this idea is famously found in Tony Kushner’s millennial “fantasia,” Angels in America.

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country. Notwithstanding my promise to you not to visit the theater, I could not resist the temptation to see Gen. Grant and the President . . . Just after the third act, and before the scenes were shifted, a muffled pistol shot was heard, and a man sprang wildly from the national box, partially tearing down the flag, then shouting “sic semper tyrannis, the South is avenged!” and with brandished dagger rushed across the stage and disappeared. The whole theater was paralyzed. But two men sprang for the stage, a Mr. Stewart and myself. Both of us were familiar with the play and suspected the fearful tragedy. We rushed after the murderer, and Mr. Stewart, being familiar with the passages, reached the rear door in time to see him spring on his horse and ride off. I became lost among the scenery and was obliged to return.

There is much that looks familiar about the idea of the theater conveyed here. As it does in Gawdy’s anecdote, performance impacts its beholder in the form of a gunshot; as it does in Women Beware Women, the play travesties the stage’s reputation for nation-building by carrying off the commander-in-chief. And in the same way that Ram Alley places “strife” at the center of performance’s apprehension, paralysis afflicts the audience at the Ford Theater that looks on in confusion as John Wilkes Booth brings down the state. Apparently all but Knox and Stewart, in the former’s far-fetched and self-serving account, are blind to the actor’s assassinating bullet. One way historians have accounted for what Knox deems the “saddest tragedy ever to be enacted” is by suggesting that Booth acted in too much Shakespeare, and I confess that I see in this glib judgment a seductive confirmation of this book’s argument. For if the Lincoln assassination is so readily assimilated to the tragic imperative of Booth’s most famous role—as Brutus, of course—it must mean that catastrophic endings, of the kind that exceed the petty vengeance of the individual to overtake the actor, the audience, the state and even the age, are a recognized function of the early modern English theatre.

. Clipping from The Princeton Alumni Weekly, February 13, 1903, no pagination. Collected in the “Lincoln Scrapbook” at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. . See, for instance, Albert Furtwangler’s Assassin on Stage: Brutus, Hamlet and the Death of Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991) and, more recently, Michael Kaufman’s American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2004). For an account of the assassination’s importance to the theorization of Shakespeare, see Stephen Bretzius, Shakespeare in Theory: The Postmodern Academy and the Early Modern Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 64–65.



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But against this view of the stage as a sinister business, deserving of its cutting off, is the fact that Americans faced the “mystery which permitted [Lincoln’s] removal at such an hour, in such a way” by turning to Shakespeare—by directly “appl[ying]” him, in the words of one broadside, “to our National bereavement.” Lincoln’s death thus brings to light a disowned knowledge at the center of the archive of early modern England’s theatre: that the stage that ruins history for us also delivers us from it. The last of the three passages offered for curative “appli[cation]” conveys something of this argument: Let us briefly put on manly readiness, And question this most bloody piece of woe And know it further—Ill deeds are seldom slow, Nor single—Dread horrors still abound— Our country—it weeps, it bleeds; and each new day A gash is added to her wounds.

Though these lines are, in the main, Shakespeare’s (plus some of the Witches’ bits written by Garrick), the “quotation” is a shocking hodge-podge of snatches from Macbeth; the first thing a Shakespeare scholar is bound to remark is that this is the script of no performance that has ever happened. Yet while the passage so brazenly forgets the way that Macbeth’s history goes, it does so in the name of keeping the future undecided. The lines promise that the consequences entailed by the “woe” of an assassination—namely, the propagation of more “ill deeds”—can be headed off with the charge that we “put on manly readiness” and prepare ourselves for whatever we cannot see coming. I will not venture to say that this sort of admonition had any effect on the tumultuous moment that succeeded Lincoln’s death. What is worth noticing, however, is that a return to the drama of early modern England is regarded as the means of calling down a state of contingency that veers us off the “primrose way to th’everlasting bonfire” (2.3.19–20). By means of Shakespeare, we defy

. Thomas Mears Eddy, Abraham Lincoln: A Memorial Discourse (Chicago, 1865), 24; “Shakespeare Applied to Our National Bereavement” (Boston, 1865), single sheet. . I reference here the title of Stanley Cavell’s Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). . “Let’s briefly put on manly readiness” is Macbeth’s line (2.4.131); “And question this most bloody piece of work/To know it further” is Macduff ’s (2.4.126–27 italics mine, to indicate deviations from the Folio text); “Ill deeds are seldom slow;/Nor single” is a Witch’s line from Garrick’s adaptation, as is “Dread horrors still abound”; the next line is expurgated from Malcolm: “I think our country sinks beneath the yoke;/ It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash/Is added to her wounds” (4.3.39–41, italics mine).

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augury, and in particular the prophecy that is our most binding teleological contract: ashes to ashes and dust to dust. All this comes at a risk, of course: I have made much of the fact that accidents happen and theaters burn. But the boon of performance’s undecidability is the pleasure of leaving the future uncounted. Against the dustheap of history, the stage keeps us open to the swerve of circumstances as yet undreamed of. This is not a bargain we can submit to as comfortably as to the Aristotelian theory of the theater’s inconsequence; certainly, Puck’s Epilogue conveys an easier train of thought than Alsemero’s adieu: If we shadows have offended Think but this and all is mended: That you have but slumber’d here While these visions did appear And this weak and idle theme No more yielding than a dream. (5.1.415–20)

But in some of the more daunting manifestations of early modern English drama, we are invited to consider the power of exclamations like “fire, fire fire!” to overturn the usual equation of what’s real with what matters. In so doing, performance invites us to push back against our own first principle, for it shows us that even things consigned to dust and ashes need not disappear into Puck’s goodnight.

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Index

Note: Italicized page numbers indicate figures. accidents: as kind of “newes,” 2–3, 197; read providentially, 22. See also anecdotes; the­ atrical anecdotes actors. See players actor-saints, conversions of, 96. See also Porphyrius (saint) Admiral’s Men: arrests of, 5; confusion of performance and reality caused by, 14–15; Gawdy’s anecdote about, 2–4, 14, 142 adultery: audience’s vitiated taste for, 188–93; legal proof of, 176–77, 178. See also cuck­ oldry; marriage Aelianus, 12n33 Aeschylus: brother’s defense of, 12–13; death of, 10–12; mistaken trust (rationality) of, 17–18; Shakespeare’s borrowing from, 69– 71; tragedies of, 13–14 Alexander the Great, 26, 38 Alter, Robert, 157n63, 170 amphitheaters, depiction of, 7, 8. See also play­ houses; Roman Coliseum; Roman stage Amynias (Aeschylus’s brother), 12–13 anecdotes: “Antiquity” outweighed by, in Apology for Actors, 26, 31; central dilemma of Gawdy’s anecdote, 13–14; confusion of type of catastrophe in, 148–49; as counter to progressive view of history, 4, 6; as defect of New Historicism, 2, 15; difficulty of corroborating, 1–3; as form

of early modern England’s theater history, 4, 6, 11; as fugitive history, 6; Mousetrap underlain by assumptions based on, 61– 66, 64; as off-the-record narrative and “accydentall news,” 1–4, 39–44; plays that recapitulate, 17–18; of playwrights’ deaths, 11–13; as recipe for mistrial, 69; as repository of early modern England’s theatrical past, 12, 18–19; of responses to Hecuba scene, 53–59; of stage’s expo­ sure of murderers, 26–30; theater’s epis­ temology constructed by, 10; of theatrical interlude and Caligula’s death, 77. See also theatrical anecdotes Angels in America (Kushner), 197n3 antiquity: anecdotes as outweighing the rec­ ord of, 26, 31; continuing hold of, on early modern England, 76–78; Hamlet’s tendency to forget or elide, 48–49, 69; playwrights influenced by, 39–41, 43–45, 67, 76–78, 106; as source for understand­ ing plague, 90–91; violent spectacles of, giving way to Christian stage, 105–6. See also Greek classical past; Roman Empire antitheatricalism: apocalyptic impulse in, 147– 50; Augustine’s reasons for, 51n13; The Changeling’s contradiction of, 189–93; emergence of, 4–5; epistemology con­ structed in, 10–11; “ex origine” move in,

230

Index

antitheatricalism (cont.) 97n69; fire and playhouse lust linked in, 152–57; fire discourse in, 143–50, 165–66; first tract of, 153; Gawdy’s anecdote as, 4, 5–6; Hamlet as counterargument to, 47– 48; Hecuba incident as counter to, 53–54; on illegitimate conscience-catching, 31– 33, 36–37, 39, 52–53, 71–72; of Lollards, 109, 111; performance and Catholicism linked in, 94; as prejudice, 23–24, 25; reversals of, 10; on Rome-London connec­ tions of stage, 76–78; self-preservation in, 162–63; sermon as warning shot in, 9, 12, 118; Sodom and sodomy in discourse of, 150–52, 157–62; state of unknowing as defiance of, 185–86; theater/plague connection and, 85; women spectators and spectacles in, 153n46, 170, 172, 173–74, 189. See also eschatology; Fenner, Dudley; Greene, John (I. G.); Gosson, Stephen; I. H. (antitheatricalist); Munday, Anthony; Northbrooke, John; Prynne, William; Rainolds, John; Rankins, William; Salvian of Marseilles (saint); Stubbes, Philip; White, Thomas apocalypse. See catastrophic impulse of theater; eschatology apocrypha, 108, 111, 112–13, 188n55 Ardalion (saint), 96 Arden of Faversham (anon.), 65 Argentina, Truth and Reconciliation Commis­ sion, 49 Aristotle and The Poetics: Brecht’s opposition to, 24, 26, 52, 20024; catharsis in, 24–25; foundational status of, 23, 49; Hecuba scene told by Dacier in preface to, 53–54, 58–59; Heywood’s Apology for Actors com­ pared with, 25, 26; overturned philosophy of, 17, 19; retrofitted to modernity, 50; as source for understanding plague, 90; on theater’s inconsequence, 24, 200; tragedy defined by, 13–15, 106 Artaud, Antonin: on plague symptoms and origin, 91, 102; sources for, 86n25; on transmission of feelings and disease, 84; work: The Theater and Its Double, 89, 103; “The Theater and the Plague,” 85–89, 92, 93, 122, 127 Assumption of the Virgin (play), 108, 111 audience. See spectators and playgoers

Augustine (saint), 32n23, 44, 51n13, 106, 170n17 Austin, J. L., 84, 174 Bacchus and Ariadne (play), 154, 155. See also accidents; anecdotes Bacon, Francis, 91–92, 93, 175 Bale, John, 83, 124n41, 141n6 ballistic stage: ancient Greek provenance of, 10–13; Cornish town saved by, 9–10; demonstrated by Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, 15–17; early modern examples of, 8–9; implications of, in Middleton’s Women Beware Women, 17–18; Lincoln’s assassi­ nation and, 197–99; move from imitation to real havoc in, 13–15; as ongoing threat, 18–19; as prime catastrophe of theatrical past, 7–8; safety of Aristotelian theater vs., 15, 24–25. See also Gawdy, Philip, the “hurte that commes of fooling” Barish, Jonas, and The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 4n9, 23, 154, 156 Barker, Andrew, 169 Barroll, Leeds, 86n22 Barry, David (Lording), 15n41 Bate, John, 182 Beckwith, Byron de la, 49 Beckwith, Sarah, 109 Bede the Venerable (saint), 44–45, 78, 81 Bellay, Joachim du, 83n10 Benjamin, Walter, 6, 24n2, 49 biblical references: Genesis, 157n63, 172n23; apocrypha, 108, 111, 112–13, 188n55; Matthew, 141n9; Luke, 162, 184–85; Romans, 169; Ephesians, 152; Thessalo­ nians, 185; Second Peter, 152. See also Sodom (story) Bill of Rights (U.S.), 180–81 Blackmore, Richard, 76n48 Blau, Herbert, 134 Bluett, Henry, 142n11 Book of Common Prayer (Cranmer), 34n31 Booth, John Wilkes, 198 Bourne, Immanuel, 35n38 Bray, Alan, 157, 158 Brecht, Bertolt, 24, 26, 52 Breitenberg, Mark, 175n35 Bretzius, Stephen, 198n5 brimstone: in A Christian Turned Turk, 178, 181–84, 186; in Sodom, 151, 184–85, 188



Index

Brooks, Thomas, 143n15 Brown, John Russell, 122n39, 125n44, 131, 134 Burbage, Richard, 156n56 Butler, Judith, 159n65 Caesar, Julius, 26, 38, 39–41, 120 Calderwood, James L., 131–32, 178 California Supreme Court, 31 Caligula, Caius, 40, 41, 70, 77 Canguilhem, Georges, 100 Carlson, Julia A., 65n32 Carlson, Marvin, 19n55, 134, 197n2 Carlyle, Thomas, 98 cart of Thespis, depiction of, 7, 9 Cary, Elizabeth, 62n26 Castelli, Elizabeth, 95 casuistry, discourse of, 33–37, 60 catastrophic impulse of theater: disaster films in context of, 162n79; as discourse con­ structed by antitheatricalists, 148–49; Roman Actor’s depiction of, 76–78, 127; Roman Coliseum as representation of, 7, 44–45, 81. See also ballistic stage; escha­ tology; fire; plague; sodomitical drama; tyrannical drama catharsis: affirmation vs. indictment of, 50– 51; Alexander of Pherae and, 53–57; as hoped-for outcome of war crimes trials and Truth Commissions, 49–52; as the­ atrical virtue, 24; ubiquity of, the theater theory, 49–50. See also confession; con­ science and conscience-catching Catherine of Siena, 109, 110, 112 Catholicism: exemplified, 107–13; as freshly killed by English Reformation, 81–84; medieval theater’s contaminating poetics and, 94–96, 105–7; performance as synony­ mous to, 84, 94; Protestant conscience vs. sacrament of confession, 34–35; Prynne’s averted encounters with, 98–100; remains of, 5, 82–84, 103, 126–27; stigmata’s de­ votional value to, 109, 110, 111–12. See also confession; medieval stage Cavell, Stanley, 190n62, 199n7 Caviness, Madeline, 150n38 Chamberlain, John, 142n11 Chambers, E. K., 1–2, 4n12, 107, 141, 142n11 Charles VI, 167 Charnes, Linda, 20, 197n3

231

Chile, Truth and Reconciliation Commis­ sion, 49 Christian Church: antispectacularism of, 95; doomed to fragmentation, 76; martyrs in Rome, 43–44; middle age of, 81–84; rep‑ resentation bungled by, 126–30; theater as conversionary force in, 96. See also Catholicism; faith catching; Protestantism Cicero, 38, 162 civil rights trials, 49–50 Clarke, Samuel, 34 Cohen, Roger, 49–50 Cole, Catherine, 50n9 Cole, Maija Jansson, 142n11 Coleman, K. M., 41, 42nn53–55 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 116n26, 118 Coliseum. See Roman Coliseum; Roman stage Common Council of the City of London, 11, 85–86 confession: classical past and appetite for, 66– 69; Protestant vs. Catholic, 34–35; widows’ assumed guilt and, 61–62, 64, 65–66 conscience and conscience-catching: as an­ tique idea, 38–39; Catholic confession vs., 34–35; Claudius/king’s immunity to, 59– 61; falsity of hope for, 122–23; Gertrude’s uncaught, untroubled, 66–69; Hamlet and, 29–30, 47–61, 66–71; as memory, guilt, and penalty, 35–37; metaphors of, 34n32; plays as inadequate shepherds of, 70–71; as postmodern fantasy of justice, 49–52; Protestant role of, 34–35; Roman principle of, belied, 113; sting of, as spec­ tator’s fault, 71–73; theater as exposing, 24–30; theater as illegitimate means of catching, 31–33, 36–37, 39, 52–53, 71– 72; theater as wounding, 8–9, 31, 33, 59, 60; as theater’s most redemptive asset, 53– 55; tragic injustice of, 54, 55–59; as un­ endurable and appalling, 113, 115–22. See also catharsis; confession; crimes; show trials Corpus Christi plays: bubonic symptomology in, 107–13; Othello in context of, 121; resistance of stigmata to treatment in, 112–13; Shakespeare’s viewing of, 107; sudden grip of faith in, 108. See also faith catching Cranmer, Thomas, 34n31

232

Index

crimes: anecdotes of theater’s exposure of, 24–30; cruentation as evidence of, 33; onstage punishment of, 40–44; slander, 62n26; state-sponsored retribution for, 43–44; theater as illegitimate means of evidence-gathering for, 31–33, 36–37, 39; widows assumed guilty of, 61–66, 64. See also conscience and conscience-catching; show trials Cromwell, Thomas, 83n6 Croxton Play of the Sacrament, The, 108, 111, 112, 121 Crucifixion (York Cycle), 108, 112–13, 121 cruentation, 33 cuckoldry, 74, 175n35, 176–77, 188–89. See also adultery Daborne, Robert: A sermon preached in the cathedrall church of Waterford, 169 —Christian Turned Turk, A: The Changeling compared with, 192; fire and brimstone in, 178, 181–84, 186; perilous state of undecidability in, 135, 185–86; Remem­ bering Lot’s Wife in, 168–74, 184, 185, 188; theatrical and nuptial contracts linked in, 168, 176–77; timeline of, 178n37; unseen action in, 177–79 Dacier, André, 53–54, 60 Davidson, Eugene, 49, 50n10 Davis, Tracy, 73n43 Dawson, Anthony B., 179 Dead Sea (Mare Mortuum), 188–93, 197 Death of Pilate (Cornish Trilogy), 108–9, 111–12, 121 Deceyte of Women, The (text), 63, 64 de Grazia, Margreta, 69n36 Dekker, Thomas: critique of response to plague, 90–91; depiction of Elizabeth as victim of bewitchment, 129n48; on the­ ater as plague, 92–93; works: Newes from Graves-ende, 92–93, 122; The Virgin Mar­ tyr (with Massinger), 166; The Whore of Babylon, 129n48, 141; The Wonderfull Yeare, 90–91 Derrida, Jacques, 30–31n16, 52–53 Diamond, Elin, 8 Diehl, Huston, 94, 120, 121 disappearances. See Catholicism; eschatology; fire; medieval stage; plague; Roman Empire

disease: Donne on despair of, 90; ideas about transmission of, 84–85n15, 85–89; Pas­ teur’s science of, 86, 89, 93; Prynne’s averted encounters in syntax of, 98–100. See also plague Dolan, Frances, 143n14, 175, 187n54 Dolan, Jill, 53, 59, 70 domestic tragedy, 61–66, 64, 69–71, 122– 23 Domitian (historical personage and charac­ ter): entertainments for, 40, 41; “fever” almost contracted by, 106; glorified cruelty of, 70; truth-production methods of, 29, 72–73, 75–76; as vengeful actor, 74, 75n46, 77–78; view of performance as lust-inflaming, 156 Donaldson, Peter S., 74n45 Donne, George, 90n39, 91n44 Donne, John, 90 Dyke, Jeremiah, 35n36 Earl of Sussex’s Men, 172n23 Edelman, Lee, 159 Egginton, William, 129n49 Eliot, T. S., 68 Elizabeth I, 129, 179–80 El Salvador, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 49 Elyot, Thomas, 72n42 emotions: demanded by spectatorial contract, 65–66; injustice due to tragedy’s stirring of, 54, 58–59; potential reformation of spectator and, 54, 56, 57–58; in specta­ tors’ response to Othello, 118–20; spies of playgoers’, 72–73, 75–76; stirred for real vs. fictional characters, 49–52, 53–57; theater as safe conduit for, 24; threat of feeling something for nothing, 159–60; transmission of disease linked to, 84, 85– 89. See also catharsis; confession; con­ science and conscience-catching Enders, Jody, 13n36, 16, 43n56, 85n17 eschatology: in antitheatrical discourse, 147– 50; Christ’s return in, 184–85; “crying sinnes” and judgment in, 168–74; disaster films in context of, 162n79; fire and brim­ stone linked to, 151, 165–66, 178, 181– 84, 186, 188; in Foxe’s Christus Triumphans, 140–42; Globe fire in context of, 142–47,



Index

149–50; pyrotechnics as means of scru­ tinizing, 166–68; Sodom evoked in, 161– 62; solecisms of lust and fire in context of, 152–57; in theater history, 139–40; warning against self-preservation and, 162–63. See also fire; Sodom (story); sod­ omitical drama Euripides, 11–12, 13–14 executions, 62n26, 65–66, 74–75. See also crimes; show trials faith catching: as medieval belief, 107; resis­ tance to treatment, 112–13; by “stigmatical impresse,” 109, 110, 111–12; the “sudden and firm grip[pe]” of, 107–9. See also stigmatical drama Fenner, Dudley, 77n53 Fenner, William, 36n41 Fergus (lost York play), 111, 112 Field, John, 148–49, 153 Fineman, Joel, 15 fire: blazing star effects of, 182n49; condem­ natory ethos (Mare Mortuum) and, 188– 93, 197; difficulty of confining to stage, 7–8, 179–81; discourse of divine judg­ ment surrounding, 143–50; enthrallment and terror in face of, 179–86; in Foxe’s Christus Triumphans, 141; Globe’s burn­ ing as most famous, 5, 142–43, 196; how to make, 182n50; as hurt whose link to theater is true, 147; lust and sexuality linked to, 152–57; plays’ use of, 165–68; playwrights’ vs. antheatricalists’ hopes for, 163; safety code for, 166, 188–89; the­ aters’ susceptibility to, 142–47, 168; wor­ ship depicted in Jonson’s Workes, 7, 10; yearly occurrences of, 161n76 Fish, Stanley, 95n59 Flecknoe, Richard, 3–4, 6, 7–8, 19, 136 Fletcher, John, King Henry VIII (All Is True) (with Shakespeare): audience expectations of, 184; foolery and pyrotechnics of, 166– 68, 181; Globe’s burning in production of, 142–43, 180; as reprise of Le Bal des Ardents, 167 Ford, John, 17, 85, 133 Ford Theater, 197–99 Fortune Theatre, burning of, 146, 149, 161 Foucault, Michel, 100

233

Foxe, John: on apocalypticism of theater, 145; divine judgment awaited by, 151, 162, 168; exile of, 141 —Actes and Monuments: on actors and mar­ tyrs, 43; on middle age of Church, 81–82, 83 —Christus Triumphans: The Changeling com­ pared with, 192; A Christian Turned Turk compared with, 183, 184–85; critique of, 140–41; as foundational example of theater’s self-consuming impulse, 141–42 Francis of Assisi (saint), 105 François, Anne-Lise, 185 Freedberg, David, 84 Freedman, Barbara, 85n20 freedom of speech, limits of, 180–81 Freeman, James E., 53n16, 55 Friar Francis (play), 26 Froissart, Jean, 167nn7–8 fugitive histories: concept of, 6–7; of perfor­ mance, 8–9; as site of counter-Poetics, 19– 20. See also anecdotes; fire Furtwangler, Albert, 198n5 Galen, 90–91 Garner, Stanton B., Jr., 86, 87 Gaskill, Malcolm, 33n28 Gasper, Julia, 141n7 Gatton, John, 124–25 Gaunt, D. M., 53n16, 58 Gawdy, Philip, the “hurte that commes of fooling”: as “accydentall news” reporter, 2–4, 5–6, 10, 14, 142; central dilemma in, 13–14; epistemology constructed by, 10; Heywood compared with, 28; Kendall’s corroboration of, 12; pathologizing of proverb, 130; performance context of, 8–9; plays that prove, 17–18; playwright’s death in context of, 11–12 gaze (eye): “bleeding” and blinded in Duchess of Malfi, 122, 123–24, 134; danger of lust at first sight in Christian Turned Turk, 169–70; eye trauma as symptom of plague, 91, 93; idolatry as allurement and pollution of, 82–84; Lot’s Wife and, 170– 72, 173–74; men as victims of women’s, 172–74; pearl as symbol of affliction of, 117 Gerhard, William P., 166n2, 181

234

Index

Globe Theater: ashes of, 165–66; audience response to appearance of fire in, 179; burning of, 5, 142–47, 149–50, 161, 180, 186; centrality of fire of, 5, 142–43, 196; link between lust and fire of, 153–54 Goldberg, Jonathan, 159 Golub, Spenser, 197n2 gossip. See anecdotes Gosson, Stephen: on antique Roman stage’s pernicious influence, 44; on avoiding plague, 99; ballistic stage and, 12; episte­ mology constructed by, 10; Hamlet’s show trial and, 55, 61; on lust and fire, 153, 154, 155, 156–57 —Playes Confuted in Five Actions: on con­ science in Wilson’s play, 24; on corrup­tion of seeing plays, 97n69; on illegitimacy of conscience-catching, 31–33, 36–37, 39, 52–53, 71–72; on Roman stage, 37–38, 41 —Schoole of Abuse, The: follow-up text of, 144n18; on spectators’ wounding, 8–9, 31, 33, 57, 59; on theater as plague, 92; on women playgoers, 153n46, 170, 172, 173, 189 Gowing, Laura, 62n26 Graves, R. B., 182n49 Gray, William, 82n4 Grazia, Margareta de, 69n36 Greek classical past: Orestes’s story from, 69– 71; poets’ deaths in, 11–13. See also specific Greek playwrights Greenblatt, Stephen, 15n43 Greene, John (I. G.), 76–77, 166 Guildhall, foundations of, 5 guilt. See confession; conscience and conscience-catching; crimes; show trials gunshots: Gawdy’s anecdote of, 2–4, 5–6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 28, 130, 142, 198; of Lincoln’s assassination, 197–99; notso-accidental appearances of, 8–9; as per­ formance idiom, 10–11. See also ballistic stage Gurr, Andrew, 74n44 Haber, Judith, 190n60, 192 Hammond, Norman, 5n15 handkerchief (theatrical property), 113, 115, 117, 120, 177 Hardison, O. B., 107

Harries, Martin, 141, 170 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 120n36 Harrison, William, 85n18 Hay, Peter, 12n30 Hayman, F., 114 Hays, Rosalind, 150n38, 172n23 Hedrick, Don, 192–93 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 6 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 176 Henry VIII (king of England), 83 Henslowe, Philip, 28n14, 172n23 Herbert, George, 35, 59 Heywood, John, 166 Heywood, Thomas —Apology for Actors, An: on ballistic incident, 9–10; ballistic stage and, 12; on Caesar as possessed actor, 39–41; on classical import of stage, 43–45, 67, 76; on crimes exposed in theater, 25–28, 29, 48, 92; Hamlet as exemplifying poetic justice of, 71; on history forged from theatrical rep‑ ertoire, 38–39; as manifesto, 25; Othello in context of, 116; The Roman Actor as rewriting, 76–78; Taylor’s praise for, 146, 147n25; on theatrical feeling, 119–20; A Warning for Fair Women compared with, 28n14; widows’ guilt assumed in, 62–64; writing of, 25n5 —Iron Age, The, 166 —Wise Woman of Hoxton, The, 62n27 Hieronimo (of The Spanish Tragedy), 16–17, 25, 41, 120 Hilliard, John, 149n34 historiographic impulse, 2–3, 6–7. See also fugitive histories history: accidental/anecdotal structure of, 3–6, 11–13; Artaud’s treatment of, 88– 89; dramatic performance’s influence on, 26, 196–200; as forged from theatrical repertoire, 38–39; life of performance as recalcitrant to, 100; teleological impulse in, 6; theater as intervening in (rise of stage as fall of age), 19–20, 76–78. See also anecdotes; fugitive histories; theater history Hole, William, frontispiece by, 7, 8, 9, 10 Holinshed, Raphael, 167n9 Holland, Peter, 6 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 180–81, 182 Holocaust, 49–50



Index

Honigmann, E. A. J., 113, 115 Howard, Jean, 153n46, 172n26 Howard-Hill, T. H., 118–19n31 Howes, Edmund, 142n11, 147n25 Huizinga, Johan, 98 hymeneal contract, 174–79, 185 idolatry: error of, in Othello, 116–21; failures of opposition to, 126–27; paradox of, 83– 84, 94; remainders and reminders of, 124– 25; suppression of, 82–83 I. H. (antitheatricalist), 9, 12, 85n19, 118 imitation/action and fact/fiction: bound together, 108; catharsis and, 49–52, 53– 57; dangers of misunderstanding linkages, 19–20; difference dissolved by fire, 179– 86; false distinction of, 13–15, 17–18; as key problem in Hamlet, 73; as ongoing revival and threat, 18–19. See also anecdotes inset performance: crimes exposed in, 26–30; as redressing unjust past, 52; theatrical workings explained in, 16–17; theories of the stage expounded in, 16–18; types of, 17n49. See also Massinger, Philip: The Roman Actor; Shakespeare, William: Hamlet instrumentalization, theater’s resistance to, 71, 74 Jackson, Henry, 119 Jackson, Louise, 63 Jacobs, W. W., 124n42 Jenkins, Harold, 48n4 Jewel, John, 94, 95, 103 Johnson, Samuel, 113, 117, 118, 161 Jonson, Ben: burning of library of, 161; Folio tribute to Shakespeare, 133; on Globe’s burning, 142n11, 145–46, 147, 165; on lust and fire, 154; on Othello, 119; ratio­ nalist stance of, 99, 104; works: The Alchemist, 134n57; Bartholomew Fair, 99; “An Execration on Vulcan,” 142n11, 145– 46, 147, 154; His case is alterd, 104n95; Hymenaei, 190; Workes, frontispiece, 7, 8, 9, 10 Jordan, Mark, 150 Jump, John, 2n3 Kaufman, Michael, 198n5 Kendall, Timothy, 11–12, 13

235

Kenilworth, pyrotechnics at, 179–80 Kezar, Dennis, 32, 38, 52 Kidnie, Margaret Jane, 13 Killen, Edgar Ray, 49 kingship, theatrical immunity of, 59–61. See also state; tyrannical drama King’s Men: Globe’s burning in production of King Henry VIII, 142–43; production of Othello, 119–20; production of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, 131n51; scenographic set pieces available to, 131 Kirchmeyer, Thomas, 141n6 Knox, James S., 197–98 Kubiak, Anthony, 86n24 Kushner, Tony, 197n3 Kyd, Thomas, 15–17, 18, 40–41 Laertius, Diogenes, 51 Laneham, Robert, 179–80 Langeren, Jan van, 158 Latour, Bruno, 89 Levin, Richard, 145n21 Levine, Laura, 152n45, 171 Liber Spectaculorum (text), 43 Lincoln, Abraham, 198–99 Livy, 97 Lodge, Thomas, 31, 85–86n21, 90 London: Common Council of, 11, 85–86; fires in, 161–62; Great Fire in, 143; the­ atrical remains underlying, 5–6 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 28n14 Lorkin, Thomas, 142n11 Lucas, F. L., 125n44, 134 Lucian of Samosata, 16, 40 Lucretius, 23–24 Lukacher, Ned, 33 Lupton, Julia Rheinhart, 133, 135n59 lycanthropy, 124 Maisano, Scott, 188n55 Mann, Irene, 24n4 Manningham, John, 156n56 Marcus Aurelius, 76 Mare Mortuum (Dead Sea), 188–93, 197 Marlowe, Christopher: apocalyptic fire ex­ pected in plays, 141–42; works: Dido, Queen of Carthage, 140; Doctor Faustus, 140; Edward II, 141; The Jew of Malta, 24n1, 140; The Massacre at Paris, 140; Tamburlaine, Part II, 2, 19, 141

236

Index

marriage: husband’s jealousy and wife-testing in, 186–93; of Lot’s Wife, 168–74; the­ atrical contract in context of, 174–79, 190–91 Martial: epigrams of the Liber Spectaculorum, 41–44, 59, 60, 70; as one source for The Roman Actor, 75 martyrs: Augustine on, 106; early Christians as, 43–44, 95–96; Othello’s refusal to sanctify, 116–17; Porphyrius as, 125; The Virgin Martyr, 166. See also Foxe, John: Christus Triumphans Marx, Karl, 5, 30–31n16, 52, 84 Mary I (queen), 83 Massinger, Philip: conscience-catching and, 39 —Roman Actor, The: antiquity’s arena spec­ tacle and, 106; crime exposed by, 29; failure to spark the conscience, 73–74; fatal end of, 17; imminent fall of Rome and, 76–78, 81–82, 127; on lust and fire, 156; stage as neither good nor bad in, 74– 75; stagecraft as statecraft in, 75, 77–78; sting of performance as fault of spectator in, 71–73; unseen action in, 177 —Virgin Martyr, The (with Dekker), 166 Masten, Jeffrey, 158 Mather, Cotton, 171n19 Maus, Katharine E., 175n35 May, Thomas, 41–43, 75n46 McMullan, Gordon, 142, 180 medieval period, rise of, 76, 96–97. See also Christian Church; medieval stage medieval stage: antiquity’s spectacle as giving way to, 105–6; audience as bound to con­ tents of, 125–26; key traits of, 107–13; Othello in context of, 116; religious sub­ jects of, 95–97; stage techniques of muti­ lation on, 124–25; Virgin birth (origin) of, 106–7; wounds suffered by spectators of, 106–7. See also Corpus Christi plays; stigmatical drama Mendoza, Bernardino de, 129n48 Melpomene (tragic muse), 25–26, 32, 36, 37, 41, 92, 93 Mesmer, Franz, 87 mesmerism, 87 M’Gavin, William, 34n31 Middleton, Thomas: on The Duchess of Malfi, 122, 133, 134

—Changeling, The (with Rowley): condem­ natory ethos (Mare Mortuum) of, 188– 93, 197; mortality repudiated in, 196–97; new spatio-temporal regime of, 192–93; production of, 188n56; seeming vindica­ tion of wife-testing in, 186–88; theatrical and nuptial contracts linked in, 168 —Game at Chess, A, 118 —Women Beware Women, 17–18, 198 millenarian drama: theater for burning in, 141–42; warning against self-preservation and, 162–63. See also eschatology Miller, D. A., 64, 160 Milles, Robert, 152n41, 161, 162 Miola, Robert S., 120 Mitchell, W. J. T., 84 Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin,13n37 Monkey’s Paw, The ( Jacobs), 124 Montaigne, Michel de, 12 Moretti, Franco, 12n32 The Mousetrap: classical and casuistical mixed in, 55; critics’ reading of, 74n44; as entrapment and mistrial, 52–53; Gertrude as object of, 66–69; injustice of, 58; modernity’s ghosts exorcised in, 50; planning stage of, 56–57; playgoers’ reactions in, 72–73, 75–76; popular lore underlying, 61–66; prefiguring of, 54; public tournament as analogical to, 60–61; unsupported verdict of, 70; as vindication of performance, 30 Mozley, J. F., 140 Munday, Anthony, 144, 153, 154–55 Nagler, A. M., 18, 196 National Holocaust Memorial Museum, 49 Neill, Michael, 15, 85n19, 178 Nero, Claudius: entertainments for, 40, 41; glorified cruelty of, 70; Hamlet haunted by “soul” of, 67–69, 71; Hamlet’s at­ tempted rejection of, 84; philosopher executed by, 75n47; torture by, 72n42 New Historicism, 2, 15 Ngai, Sianne, 52 Nichols, Ann Eljenholm, 108n5, 108n7 Nicoll, Allardyce, 42n54, 96, 105–6 Nin, Anaïs, 87, 88, 93 Northbrooke, John, 153, 157, 162, 173, 184, 185 Nuremberg trials, 49–50



Index

O’Connell, Michael, 94, 97n69, 103 Orcherd of Syon, The (text), 110 Orestes, 69–71 Orgel, Stephen, 7, 14n38, 49, 71, 135n59, 152n45 Osborne, Laurie, 68n35 Our American Cousin (play), 197–99 Paracelsus, 91, 175 Paré, Ambroise, 91 Paris Garden: audience confusion in, 183; collapse of, 4, 147–49, 161; as precedent for Globe fire, 146, 149; rebuilding of, 4n12 Parker, Patricia, 178n37 Parratt, William, 142n11 Pasteur, Louis, 86, 89, 93 Peacham, Henry, 188 performance: Catholicism associated with, 84, 94; cause and continuance collapsed in, 102; epistemology of, constructed by antitheatricalism, 10–11; eschatology of, 139–42; essential nothingness of, 118– 21; as ever-disappearing act, 6–7, 11–12, 166; and ongoing threat, 19–20; as fugitive history, 8–9; “hurte that commes of fool­ ing” exemplified in, 70–71; as imitation of an action, 13–15; infectiousness of, 85–89, 106–7, 111–12; irreducible re­ mainders of, 103–4; mistaken for hoky deceit, 14, 16–17; as older than culture, 97–98; pollution (plague) of, 123–30; as preparative to execution, 74–75; purposes of, 14–15, 49–50; pyrotechnics in, 165– 68; as reinscription of past, 18–19; as Roman holiday, 76; self-effacement of, repudiated, 196–200; theatrical and nup­ tial contracts linked in, 168, 174–79; transitoriness of, 4; undecidability in, 135, 185–86, 192–93, 197. See also conscience and conscience-catching; emotions; players; theater performance studies: city fathers’ practice of epidemiology as, 86; representation’s life as described by, 129–30 performativity, 50n9, 83, 87, 159n68, 160 Perkins, William, 34, 36 Petrarch, 99 Phelan, Peggy, 1, 88n29, 134, 196n1 Philemon (saint), 96

237

Pilate (character), 108–9, 111–12, 121 plague: anatomization of, 100, 101, 102; bodily experience of, 93–94; conceptual volatility of, 90–92; Duchess as art that plagues the spectators, 133–35; as hall­ mark of the medieval, Catholic stage, 97– 98; as life in performance, 132–33; signs and symptoms of, 90–91, 109; theater as, 84, 85–89, 92–94, 104; transmission of, 85–86, 91–92; unknowable source of, 102, 118; as unrepresentable, 134. See also stigmatical drama; theatrical transmission Plato, 90, 120 players: Alexander of Pherae’s punishment of, 54, 58–59; arrests of, 5; death inflicted by, 1–4, 39–44; Lady-in-the-Tombdevice of, 131n51; sexuality of, 152–57; slaughter masked as stagecraft by, 15–16; two strangers in Sodom as, 157–58, 158, 159–60. See also Admiral’s Men; Earl of Sussex’s Men; King’s Men; Lord Cham­ berlain’s Men; Queen’s Men playgoers. See spectators and playgoers playhouses: burning of, 161–62; official closure of, 195–96; susceptibility to fire, 142–47, 168. See also Ford Theater; For­ tune Theatre; Globe; theater; Theater (Shoreditch) “the play’s the thing” (phrase): as affirmation vs. indictment of catharsis, 50–51; gene­ alogy of, 33; sustaining illusion of, 55–57 playwrights: ballistic impact highlighted by, 9–10; death of, 11–13; imitation/action confusion furthered by, 14–15; pyro‑ technics used by, 165–68. See also specific playwrights Pliny the Elder, 74 Plutarch: audiences familiar with, 54–55; Hamlet’s use of, 49, 130; Shakespeare’s reworking of, 53–59; works: Life of Pelopidas, 53, 54; Moralia, 49, 53, 54, 58–59 Pocock, J. G. A., 36 Poe, Edgar Allan, 133 Porphyrius (saint), 96, 105–6, 107–8, 117, 125, 127 Privy Council resolution (1642), 5 Protestantism: anti-idolatrous position of, mocked, 118–19; beliefs about faith catching in theater, 107; Catholic remains

238

Index

Protestantism (cont.) overshadowing, 5, 82–84, 103, 126–27; dependent upon forgetting medieval past, 83; image reform and, 116–21; marriage imagined in, 175–79; stage as enacting, 36–37; undermined by Prynne’s toorigorous research, 102–3. See also anti­ theatricalism; conscience and consciencecatching Prudentius, 149 Prynne, William: on Catholicism’s effect on sacraments, 84; public punishment of, 102n90; on theater’s reputation, 5 —Histrio-mastix: antiquity’s arena spectacle and, 105–6; avoidances and averted encounters with performance’s “seeds of vice” in, 98–100, 103–4, 122, 130, 135; banned and burned, 102–3; on Charles VI and dance of burning men, 167; on Globe fire as divine judgment, 142n11, 149–50; on lust and fire, 153, 154n51, 155–56, 157; on medieval religious drama, 95–97; Othello in context of, 118; particularity of seed of stage in, 100, 102; on performance’s injuriousness, 106–7; on plague as Catholicism’s import to stage, 97–98; on Sodom and sodomy, 150–52, 159, 160, 161; sources of, 99n79; on theater’s corruption, 94–95; as un­readable, 98; on women gazing at men, 172–73 —Mr William Prynne his defense of stageplayes, 5, 196 —new discovery of the prelates tyranny, A, 102n90 Puchner, Martin, 47n2 pyrotechnics. See fire; performance: pyrotechnics in Queen’s Men, 85n18 Rabelais, Francois, 10–11, 18 racked pageants, counter-Poetics of, 19–20 Radcliffe, Ralph, 172n23 Rainolds, John: attack on playhouse, 4–5; A Christian Turned Turk as recalling, 172; on God’s effort to overthrow plays, 147– 48; on lust and fire, 153, 154, 155 Raleigh, Walter, 63, 64 Ram Alley (Barry), 14–15, 184, 198 Rankins, William, 167, 168

Rayner, Alice, 134 Reformation: Catholicism’s past that must be forgotten after, 84, 90, 113; The Duchess of Malfi ’s refusing to take sides in, 127–30; master tropes of, 33–34, 36; seed of toxic doubt about, 136. See also Christian Church; conscience and consciencecatching; faith catching Reynolds, Bryan, 193 Roach, Joseph, 136n60 Rochin v. California, 31n20 Rokem, Freddie, 197n2 Roman Coliseum: death spectacles at, 41–44, 59, 70–71; depictions of, 8, 45; as emblem of theater’s catastrophism, 7, 44–45, 81; mythopoetic realm of, 44, 78, 81; place in early Christian culture and, 43–44, 95–97; theater as originating in, 96–98. See also Roman stage Roman Empire: capital punishment in, 40– 44; Curio’s theater in, 74–75; effects of theater on, 5; Hamlet haunted by tyrant of, 67–69; imminent fall of, 76–78, 81– 82; impossibility of exorcizing from later stages, 70–71; truth-production methods in, 72–73, 75–76. See also Caligula, Caius; Domitian; Nero, Claudius; Roman Coli‑ seum; Roman stage Roman stage: alternative to dramaturgy of, 196–97; debauched nature of, 25–30, 37– 45; depiction of, in Jonson’s frontispiece, 8; Othello’s repudiation of, 113, 115–17; stagecraft as statecraft in, 75–78; telos of, 73–75. See also Roman Coliseum Rood of Boxley, 82–84, 120 Rous, Francis, 12n33 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 51, 52, 55–56, 57, 58 Rowe, Katherine, 124 Rowley, William: on Duchess of  Malfi, 133n56 —Changeling, The (with Middleton): con­ demnatory ethos (Mare Mortuum) of, 188–93, 197; mortality repudiated in, 196–97; new spatio-temporal regime of, 192–93; production of, 188n56; seeming vindication of wife-testing in, 186–88; theatrical and nuptial contracts linked in, 168 Ruines of Rome, The (Bellay), 83 Rusticus, Arulenus, 75, 76 Rymer, Thomas, 115



Index

Salvian of Marseilles (saint), 5, 98n73, 144, 146, 148, 154 scaffold speeches, 62n26, 65–66 scapegoating, 7–8, 58–59 Scarry, Elaine, 72n41 Schanfield, Lilian, 145n21 Schechner, Richard, 84, 129 Schenck v. United States, 180n45 school curriculum, Martial’s epigrams in, 41–44 A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and theaters (attr. to Munday), 144n18 Second Maiden’s Tragedy, The (play), 131n51 Sedgwick, Eve, 159n65, 160 Sedgwick, John, 143, 149 sexuality and lust: fire linked to, 167–68; theater as inflaming, 173–74; theatrical licentiousness and Sodom linked, 152–57 Shakespeare, William: canonization of, 133 (see also Jonson, Ben); consciencecatching and, 39 —Hamlet: catharsis offered by, 49–51; A Christian Turned Turk compared with, 186; crime exposed in, 29–30; feeling vs. fact in, 73; “hurte that commes of fooling” exemplified in, 70–71; injustice of show trial in, 55–59; justice envisioned in, 51–53; king’s immunity in, 59–61; as Orestes’s story retold, 69–71; origins of show trial in, 53–55, 58–59; past elided in, 48–49; The Roman Actor compared with, 71, 78; seeing vs. doing in, 106; selfeffacement repudiated in, 196; threat of feeling something for nothing in, 159–60; A Warning for Fair Women as contrary to, 65–67. See also The Mousetrap —King Henry V, 92 —King Henry VI, Part 1, 167n8 —King Henry VIII (All Is True) (with Fletcher): audience expectations of, 184; foolery and pyrotechnics of, 166–68, 181; Globe’s burning in production of, 142–43, 180; as reprise of Le Bal des Ardents, 167 —King Lear: difficulty of production of, 131–32; Duchess’s use of, 130–31, 132, 135–36; Lucretius quoted in, 24n1; scrutiny of actor’s “corpse” in, 131–32 —Macbeth, 114, 199–200 —Merchant of Venice, The, 177

239

—Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 181, 191, 200 —Othello: The Changeling compared with, 186–87; production of, 119–21; seed of toxic doubt in, 135; signs of plague in, 122; as stigmatical drama, 115–22; as unendurable, 113; unseen/offstage action in, 177, 178 —Richard III, 156n56 —Tempest, The, 19, 63n30 —Titus Andronicus, 17, 45n61 —Troilus and Cressida, 177 —Winter’s Tale, The: art transformed into life in, 132–33; seed of toxic doubt in, 135; transmission anxiety in, 113; unseen action in, 177 Sharpe, J. A., 62n26 show trials: catharsis offered by, 49–51; hopes for social justice in, 53, 59; injustice of, 55–59; king’s immunity from, 59–61; of Orestes, 70–71; origins of Hamlet’s, 53– 55, 58–59; of real vs. fictional characters, 50–52, 53–57. See also tyrannical drama Sidney, Philip: Hamlet as exemplifying poetic justice for, 71; on hokiness of theatrical deceit, 16–17; tragedy defended by, 14, 19, 54, 56, 57, 121; on wounding of conscience, 59, 60; work: An Apology for Poetry, 54, 56, 57–58 Sinanoglou, Leah (Marcus), 112n19 Sir Giles Goosecap (play), 90–91 Slayter, William, 157, 158, 160 Slights, Camille Wells, 34n32 Smith, John Hazel, 140–41 Sodom (story): A Christian Turned Turk linked to, 168–69, 171–74; divine de­ struction of, 149–50; fire and brim­stone in, 151, 184–85, 188; Mare Mortuum as site of, 188, 192, 193, 197; medieval vs. early modern use of, 150n38; as paradigm for theater’s epistemological dilemma, 150–52; Remembering Lot’s Wife of, 168–74, 184, 185, 188; as theatrical en­ trapment, 157–58, 158, 159–62; the­ atrical licentiousness and sexuality linked, 152–57; typology mined from, 168 sodomitical drama: audience perplexed by, 183–85, 190–92; characteristics of, 168– 74; condemnatory ethos (Mare Mortuum) of, 188–93, 197; epistemological confusion

240

Index

sodomitical drama (cont.) of, 179–86; hymeneal contract and, 174– 79, 185; pyrotechnics in, 165–68. See also Daborne, Robert: A Christian Turned Turk; Middleton, Thomas: The Changeling (with Rowley) sodomy: deontologizing effect of, 159; false origins and phobic construction of, 157– 63; lust and fire in discourse around, 152– 57. See also Sodom (story); sodomitical drama Sofer, Andrew, 111n15, 120 Sokol, Jason, 49–50 Sontag, Susan, 87n26 Sophocles, 11, 13–14 Sound of Music, The, lyrics from, 23–24 South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 49–50 Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd), 15–17, 18, 40–41 spectacles: ancient Rome as epitomized by, 95–97; of antiquity, as giving way to medieval stage, 105–6; antitheatricalism on women and, 153n46, 170, 172, 173– 74, 189; as darkly present in early modern English theater, 76–78. See also anecdotes; Roman Coliseum; show trials spectator as scapegoat figure, 7, 9 spectators and playgoers: alleged shooting of, 2–3; as bound to contents of medieval stage, 125–26; condemned by atten­dance, 8–9; Gosson on wounding of, 8–9, 31, 33, 57, 59; kings and princes as insensible spectators, 59–61; Lot’s Wife as emblem­ atic figure of “destructive spectatorship,” 170–72; plague as affliction of, 91–92, 133–35; playwright’s desired destruction of, 141; Plutarch as familiar to, 54–55; as prone to guilt/indictment, 31–33, 36–37, 39; reformation of, 54, 56, 57–58; replay of plots before, 38–39; response to in­ tended pyrotechnics vs. theater fires, 179– 86; response to Othello, 118–21; salvific possibilities for, 106–7; scrutinized in Hamlet, 72–73, 75–76; sensation of being “set on fire” for, 144; sexuality of, 152–57; stage’s contract with, 65–66; sting of per­ formance (conscience) as fault of, 71–73; theater collapse as caution to, 147–50; theater’s exposure of crimes by, 24–30;

theatrical and nuptial contracts linked for, 174–79; as victims vs. witnesses, 15; as vitiated taste, 188–93. See also gaze (eye); women state: records of, 6; Roman stagecraft as state­ craft, 75–78; show trials to purge and safeguard, 49–50; stage as bringing down, 17; stage’s service to, 25–30. See also kingship States, Bert, 14, 179 stigmatical drama: adhesion of faith by, 107– 9; antiquity’s tyrannical spectacles giving way to, 105–6; art that plagues the spec‑ tators in, 133–35; as art that wants us dead, 131–32; conscience-catching as unendurable and appalling in, 113, 115–22; hurts suffered by spectators of, 106–7; “impresse” of stigmata in, 109, 110, 111–12; plague in art confronted in, 123–27; refusing to take sides in, 127– 30; repudiation of domestic tragedy in, 122–23; resistance to treatment in, 112– 13; sodomitical drama compared with, 185–86; toxic sight in, 130–36; tran­ substantiation in, 108, 112, 121, 136 Stock, Lorraine Kochanske, 167n7 Stone, John August, 13n37 Stowe, John, 142n11, 147n25 Stubbes, Philip, 71 Suetonius, 77 Targoff, Ramie, 59n24 Taylor, Diana, 134 Taylor, John, 23, 63, 142n11, 146–47 Taymor, Julie, 74n45 Tertullian, 44, 96 theater: central problem of illusion vs. reality in, 13–15; as conversionary force, 96; as countering fact and factuality, 197–200; fact/fiction as false distinction in, 13–15; as intervening in history, 19–20; as lustinflaming object, 173–74; official closure of, 5, 195–96; as plague, 84, 85–89, 92– 94, 104; as putting Protestant casuistry into practice, 36–37; redemption falsely promised by, 70–71; religion’s lack of influence on, 111–12, 126–27; representa­ tion of its own volatility, 16–17; resistance to documentation of, 6–7; Roman origins



Index

of, 96–98; as safe conduit for emotions dangerous to state, 24; seen as benign, 23– 24. See also conscience and consciencecatching; performance; playhouses; play­ wrights; spectators and playgoers; theater history Theater (Shoreditch), 141 theater history: archives as “bombsite” in, 13; distant reading of, 12; eschatological horizon in, 139–42; evidentiary gaps in, 1–2, 6–7; evolutionary historicism in, 107; failure to account for medieval past of, 84; fall of each principal age of, 7–8; foundational text of, 23, 49; key figures of, 5; Prynne’s version of, 96–97, 100; succession of abolition and demolition in, 3–4; supersessionism of, 7, 96, 195–96. See also anecdotes; fugitive histories; history theatrical anecdotes: Aeschylus’s death, 10–12; Field, Jonson, Prynne, and Rainolds on fall of Paris Garden, 146–49; fire­works run amock in Warwick, 180; Gawdy on wounded spectators, 2–4, 5–6, 10, 14, 142; Gosson and Suetonius on Caligula’s assassination at a play, 77; Heywood on Caesar’s fatal performance of Hercules Furens, 39–40, 120; Heywood on Cornish town saved from Spanish army, 9–10; Heywood on widow spectators brought to justice by tragic performance, 26–28, 29, 62–64; Johnson, H. Jackson, and Paris audience on impact of Othello, 119; Ken­ dall on deaths of “Grecian Poets tragicall,” 11; Knox on Lincoln’s assassination, 197– 98; Lucian of Samosata on Ajax’s braining of Odysseus, 16; Martial on The Death of Laureolus, 42–43; Nicoll and Prynne on conversions of actor-saints, 96; Nin on Artaud’s contagious performance of “The Theater and the Plague,” 88; on panic at Henry VIII in 1727, 180; Pliny on Curio’s theater, 74; Prynne on Globe and Fortune fires, 142n11, 149–50; Prynne on tragedy that befell Charles VI, 167; Rabelais on death of Aeschylus, 11, 12; as recipe for mistrial, 69; Sidney and Rousseau on Alexander of Pherae touched by performance of Hecuba, 53; Wotton on

241

Globe’s burning, 142–43, 144–45, 146, 179, 196; Xenophon on titillating per­ formance of Bacchus and Ariadne, 154. See also anecdotes; ballistic stage; fire; gunshots theatrical justice: falsity of hope for, 122–23; as goal of Tragedy, 47–53; reversal of, 55–58 theatrical transmission: beliefs underlying, 84–85n15; as cause of anxiety in Catholic drama, 107–13; as epiphany, 117–18; feelings and, 84, 85–89; Othello in context of, 121–22; transubstantiation and, 108, 112, 121, 136. See also stigmatical drama theatrum mundi conceit, 38 Thomas, Keith, 161n76 Thomson, George, 91, 100, 101, 102 Thorne, Christian, 162n79 Thrasea Paetus, Publius Clodius, 75n47 Timberlake, Henry, 188n55 Titus (film), 74n45 Tourneur, Cyril, 158–59 Tragedy: Aeschylus as father of, 11; antique Roman spirit in, 39–41; bodily course of, 93–94; crimes exposed and punished by, 24–30; defense of, 14, 19–20; domestic type of, 61–66, 64, 69–71, 122–23; guilty creatures of, 23–30; imitational limits of, 13–15; as infectious, 92–93; justice aspired to in, 47–53; justice miscarried in, 55–58; Lincoln’s assassination as, 197–99; plea­ sures of, 17; purpose of, 15; virtues of, 53–55. See also ballistic stage; sodomiti­ cal drama; stigmatical drama; tyrannical drama transubstantiation, 108, 112, 121, 136 Trapp, Maria von, 23–24 Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, A, 109, 111 truth: falsity flash-bound to, 108; fire as dis­ solving difference between fiction and, 179–86; methods of producing, 72–73, 75–76; true effects independent of truth of cause, 118–22. See also imitation/ action and fact/fiction Truth and Reconciliation commissions, 49–50. See also show trials Turner, Edith, 97 Turner, Victor, 97 Tutu, Desmond, 50

242

tyrannical drama: appetite for confession in, 66–69; assumed guilt of widows in, 61– 66, 64; catharsis offered by, 49–51; con­ tinuing hold of antiquity in, 76–78; emotions stirred by, 54–56; king’s immu­ nity from, 59–61; redemption absent in, 70–71; sodomitical drama compared with, 185–86; surveillance of spectators before, 72–73, 75–76; theatrical justice dreamed of in, 47–53; theatrical justice reversed in, 55–58; truth-production methods in, 72–73, 75–76. See also conscience and conscience-catching; The Mousetrap; show trials Ur-Hamlet, 66 Vendler, Helen, 47 Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“the struggle to come to terms with the past”), 50, 54, 70 Veronica (saint), 111, 112, 120 Vicary, Thomas, 91, 94 Virgil, 152 Virgin of Loretto, 125–26 Wager, William, 134n57 Ward, John, 168–69 Warning for Fair Women, A (anon.): Apology compared with, 28n14; consciencecatching and, 39; crime exposed in, 28–29; demands of Tragedy in, 15; Hamlet compared with, 30; as inspiration to Mousetrap, 66–67; Othello in context of, 113, 115, 116, 120; widow arraigned, condemned, and executed in, 65–66 Warwick, fire in, 180 Wastell, Simon, 150–51

Index

Webster, John: on imitation and action, 14 —Duchess of Malfi, The: afterlife envisioned in, 136; as art that plagues its spectators, 133–35; King Lear used in, 130–31, 132, 135–36; plague in art confronted in, 123–27; as proof of “hurte that commes of fooling,” 17; repudiation of domestic tragedy in, 122–23; seed of toxic doubt in, 135; as theologically ambiguous, 127– 30; transmission anxiety in, 113; as work that “stains” both past and future, 107 Weever, John, 82, 83n6, 83n10 West, William, 72n42, 148n29 Wheatley, Henry B., 98n77 White, Thomas, 153–54 Whitehall, banqueting house burned at, 146, 161 widows: assumed guilt of, 61–66, 64; as object of Mousetrap, 66–69; Othello’s twist on guilt of, 115–16; presumed falsity of, 62n26; theater as exposing crimes of, 26–28, 29 Wilkinson, Robert, 170–71n19 Wilson, Richard, 120 Wilson, Robert, 24, 39 Witmore, Michael, 33n27 women: dangers of eye-catching, 170–72; men as victims of gaze of, 172–74; as playgoers, 153n46, 170, 172, 173–74, 189; Protestant marriage imagined for, 175–79; rape, in The Changeling, 189–93. See also widows Wotton, Henry: apocalyptic impulse of, 147; on Globe’s burning, 142–43, 144–45, 146, 179, 196; as student dramatist, 147n25 Xenophon, 154