Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton 9781139572910, 9781107027510

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R E t H i n k i ng H iS toR iC iSM FRoM SH A k E SPE A R E to M i lton

Reading literary texts in their historical contexts has been the dominant form of interpretation in literary criticism for the past thirty years. This collection of essays reflects on the origins of historicism, its present usefulness as a mode of literary analysis, its limitations, and its future. The volume provides a brief history of the practice from its renaissance origins, offering examples of historicist work that not only demonstrate the continuing vitality of this methodology, but also suggest new directions for research. Focusing on the major figures of Shakespeare and Milton, these essays provide important and concise representations of trends in the field. Designed for scholars and students of early modern English literature (1500–1700), the volume will also be of interest to students of literature more generally, and to historians. Ann Baynes Coiro is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Robert Herrick’s Hesperides and the Epigram Book Tradition and has published many journal articles and book chapters on seventeenth-century poetry, Milton, book history, court culture, and English theater. Thomas Fulton is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England, as well as journal articles and book chapters on the cultural intersection of politics and religion, problems in rhetoric and generic form, and the history of the book.

R E t H i n k i ng H iS toR iCiSM FRoM SH A k E SPE A R E to M i lton E di t e d B y A n n B Ay n E S C oi Ro Rutgers University

t HoM A S F U lton Rutgers University

ca mbr idge universit y pr ess Cambridge, new york, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, new york, N Y 10013-2473, USA www.cambridge.org information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107027510 © Cambridge University Press 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Rethinking historicism from Shakespeare to Milton / [edited by] Ann Baynes Coiro, Thomas Fulton. pages cm includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-02751-0 1. Historical criticism (literature) 2. new historicism. 3. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism – Theory, etc. i. Coiro, Ann Baynes, 1951– ii. Fulton, Thomas (Thomas Chandler) PN98.H57R 48 2012 801′.95–dc23 2012012616 ISBN 978-1-107-02751-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of UR Ls for external or third-party internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

for Annabel Patterson

Contents

List of Contributors Acknowledgments

page ix xiii

introduction: old, new, now

Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton

1

I: H i s t or ic i s m a n d I t s Di s c on t e n t s 1. Has Historicism gone too Far: or, Should We Return to Form?

23

2. Theory and Practice in Historical Method

40

3. limiting History

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Andrew Hadfield Michael McKeon

Marshall Grossman

I I: H i s t or ic i s m a n d T h e ol o g y 4. The Politics of Renaissance Historicism: Valla, Erasmus, Colet, and More

87

5. Historicizing Satisfaction in Shakespeare’s Othello

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Thomas Fulton

Heather Hirschfeld

I I I: Dr a m at ic H i s t or i e s 6. The new Presentism and its Discontents: listening to Eastward Ho and Shakespeare’s Tempest in Dialogue Paul Stevens

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Contents

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7. in great Men’s Houses: Playing, Patronage, and the Performance of tudor History Lawrence Manley

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I V: M i lt on a n d t h e Probl e m s of H i s t or y 8. Medea’s Dilemma: Politics and Passion in Milton’s Divorce tracts Sharon Achinstein

9. Milton, Foucault, and the new Historicism Martin Dzelzainis

181 209

V: G e n de r i ng H i s t or ic i s m 10. “you shall be our generalless”: Fashioning Warrior Women from Henrietta Maria to Hillary Clinton

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11. Wartimes: Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writing and its Afterlives

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Laura Lunger Knoppers

Erin Murphy

Afterword

Nigel Smith

Index

283 295

Contributors

S h a ron Ac h i ns t e i n, Professor of Renaissance literature at the University of oxford and a tutorial Fellow in English at St Edmund Hall. Author of Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (1994) and Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (2003) and coeditor of Milton and Toleration (2007). She is currently preparing an edition of Milton’s Divorce tracts for oxford University Press. A n n B a y n e s C oi ro, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University. Author of Robert Herrick’s Hesperides and the Epigram Book Tradition (1988) and many articles and book chapters on subjects in seventeenth-century literature, including Milton, dramatic poetry, court literature, and poetry and print culture in the English revolution and Restoration. M a r t i n Dz e l z a i n i s, Professor of Renaissance literature and Thought, University of leicester. Author of a range of articles, collections, and editions, including Marvell and Liberty (1999), coedited with Warren Chernaik, and an edition of Marvell’s two-part prose satire, The Rehearsal Transpros’ d (1672, 1673) in The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell (2003). He is one of the editors of the new oxford complete Milton, and he edited Milton’s Political Writings (1991). T hom a s F u lt on, Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. Author of articles on Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and other medieval and early modern writers, and of Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (2010). M a r s h a l l Gros s m a n, late Professor of English at the University of Maryland. Author of The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry (1998) and “Authors to Themselves”: Milton and the Revelation of History (1987); edited volumes include Aemilia ix

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Contributors Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon (1998) and Reading Renaissance Ethics (2007).

A n dr e w H a df i e l d, Professor of English at Sussex University. Author of Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (2004); Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (2004); Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005); and Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012). H e at h e r H i r s c h f e l d, Associate Professor of English at the University of tennessee. Author of Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (2004) and articles on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. L au r a L u ng e r K noppe r s, liberal Arts Research Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. Author of Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011); Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (2000); and Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (1994); edited volumes include, most recently, The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (2009). L aw r e nc e M a n l e y, William R. kenan Jr. Professor of English at yale University. Author of Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (1995) and Convention, 1500–1750 (1980) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London (2010) and London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology (1986). M ic h a e l Mc K e on, Board of governors Professor of literature at Rutgers University. Author of Politics and Poetry in Restoration England (1975), The Origins of the English Novel (1987, 2002), and The Secret History of Domesticity (2005). He also has edited Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (2000). E r i n M u r ph y, Associate Professor of English and Women’s, gender and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. She has published Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (2011) and several essays on seventeenth-century literature. She is also the coeditor, with James keith Vincent, of “Honoring Eve,” a special issue of Criticism on the work of Eve kosofsky Sedgwick. N ig e l S m i t h, William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern literature at Princeton University. Author of Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical

Contributors

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Religion 1640–1660 (1989); Literature and Revolution in England, 1640– 1660 (1994); Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare? (2008); and Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (2010), he has also edited the Ranter tracts, george Fox’s Journal, and Marvell’s poetry (longman AEP series), and he coedited with nicholas McDowell The Oxford Handbook of Milton (2009). Pau l S t e v e ns, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern literature and Culture at the University of toronto. Former President of the Milton Society of America and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, oxford, his publications include Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in Paradise lost (1985), Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism (coedited, 1998), and Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (coedited, 2008). He currently holds a 2012–2013 guggenheim Fellowship.

Acknowledgments

A collection of essays is an inherently collaborative process, and we have had the best of collaborators in our essay writers. our profound thanks to our contributors for each of their outstanding essays and for their willingness to open their essays to conversation with each other. Very sadly, Marshall grossman died in March 2011 after a brief illness. His vivid intellectual presence in this volume is testimony to the theoretical sophistication, ethical concern, and unabashed passion for literature he brought to early modern studies. We are all graced by his presence here. The ideas explored in this volume began their life at a symposium on historicism at yale University in 2006. We would like to thank the many participants whose ideas and conversation contributed substantially to this project, including: Paul Alpers, Alastair Bellany, kathy Eden, Stanley Fish, Blair Hoxby, Victoria kahn, David kastan, James kearney, Arthur kinney, Al labriola, David loewenstein, Steven Mentz, Molly Murray, lori newcomb, Annabel Patterson, Steven Pincus, David Quint, Ayesha Ramachandran, John Rogers, kevin Sharpe, John Staines, Richard Strier, Ramie targoff, and nicholas von Maltzahn. Support for the symposium was made possible by the Whitney Humanities Center, the English and History departments at yale, Renaissance Studies, the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke kempf Fund, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript library. We are also extremely grateful for the input of our colleagues and students at Rutgers University. The Medieval-Renaissance Colloquium took a lively and provocative interest in the questions the volume explores and helped sharpen its focus. We are fortunate to be part of a diverse and intellectually generous community at Rutgers that has consistently enriched our thinking; we owe particular thanks to Emily Bartels, Miriam Diller, Stacy klein, Ron levao, Jackie Miller, and Henry turner.

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Introduction

Old, New, Now Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton

History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we made today.

– Henry Ford

Historicism has been the dominant mode of literary analysis in early modern studies for more than thirty years, and it is now under attack from a number of quarters. Historicism is accused, for example, of denying literature’s relevance to the present moment, of becoming a methodology so dominant that it has smothered other theoretical approaches, and of forgetting that the formal analysis of deliberately wrought texts is fundamental to literary analysis. Once a seemingly “new” and revitalizing method of critical inquiry, its hegemony and the institutional pressures that sustain it have perhaps even caused it to “sicken,” in Milton’s words, “into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.”1 At a time when the humanities are under severe cultural and economic pressure, it therefore seems timely and useful to step back and consider what historically committed criticism has accomplished, what it has not done, and whether, why, and how it will be written in the future. The project of the literary critics contributing to this collection, all of whom do some variety of historicist work, is to examine our own practice and to take as salutary challenges some of the criticisms that have been mounted from within and without the field. There is no absolute agreement among us, but there is a shared sense in the essays comprising this volume that the study of literary texts within historical frameworks remains a challenging and important part of the discipline of literary criticism. Clearly, the term “historicism” is capacious, and many varieties of historicist work are now flourishing. Indeed, given the breadth of historicism’s reach, even the broad selection of essays collected here can only address part of its role in early modern literary studies. Among the most influential recent forms of historicism, for example, are the history of the 1

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book and the history of reading, related subdisciplines that are models of interdisciplinary cooperation and collaboration and that have effected a profound shift in textual studies.2 Book history and textual materialism have allowed us to trace the developing business of book and manuscript production throughout the early modern period, including the social networks among which different kinds of verbal media traveled, censorship mechanisms, and emerging ideas about intellectual property. When theory first shook the British and American academy, the venerable scholarly labor of editing might have seemed a mortal casualty. Instead, the historicist impulse has helped shape a number of major editing projects, including critical editions such as the Yale edition of Marvell’s prose, the writings of Elizabeth I, and the new Oxford complete works of Milton.3 The multiple-text editions of Shakespeare’s plays (notably Hamlet and King Lear) – some designed for the classroom – are also enabled by this movement. Twenty-five years ago, the call to consider race, class, and gender in Renaissance literature was dismissed by some as well-intentioned, perhaps, but hopelessly presentist. Now, however, scholarship is engaged in careful, increasingly nuanced accountings of the history of sexuality, the emergence of individual subjectivity, national and racial identity, educational practices, and economic change. Feminism, which had already emerged as a powerful force for change in the decade before New Historicism, has combined with historicism in ways crucial to our fuller understanding of the past. The expansion of knowledge about women writers – their texts edited, their place in their culture assessed and reassessed – is one of historicism’s most significant contributions. Writers such as Gabriel Harvey, Michael Drayton, James Shirley, or William Davenant, who once seemed doomed to a slow fade into scholarly oblivion, overshadowed by commanding figures like Shakespeare and Milton, have recently become the focus of lively interest under the ministration of editors and historically oriented scholars. Historicist work has broken down the monolithic notion of the “Scientific Revolution” into the many separate components of what we now call science – from mathematics to occult fields such as magic, astrology, and alchemy, to navigation and other forms of technology.4 Queer historicism offers one of the most effective challenges to previous understandings of the past.5 And studies of colonial practices and the beginnings of empire are among historicism’s signature endeavors.6 Historicist work has reconsidered the uses of genre and the formal properties of texts, it has deepened and complicated ideas of performance and subjectivity, and it has addressed the knotty complex of liberalism and

Old, New, Now

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fundamentalism at the roots of modernity.7 In all its forms, historicist criticism endeavors to put literature in the perspective of a richly documented understanding of the past. While we recognize the accomplishments of historicism, we hope that this collection also reflects honestly on its inherent challenges. The tradition of literary historicism itself provides an illuminating history of key debates and disciplinary disputes. It demonstrates, for one, that historicism has been a vital practice for a very long time. The term “historicism” or Historismus was coined in the nineteenth century to describe the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and others, but the concept is much older.8 The practice of reading texts in their historical context has strong roots in the early modern period, which experienced a major shift in historical consciousness and practice. Historical consciousness has been a defining feature of the Renaissance since Jacob Burckhardt, who wrote sweepingly that the “Italians were the first of all European nations who displayed any remarkable power and inclination accurately to describe man as shown in history.”9 Burckhardt surely overstates what has been understood as a “historical revolution” that swept northward with the Renaissance.10 Yet a defining shift occurs in this period, which need not be seen in such triumphalist terms, in which the rich chronological layering and collapsing of medieval representations came to appear as anachronistic to a culture newly obsessed with historical discrimination. Major textual reconstructions, such as the philological recovery of the Bible or the exposure of the Donation of Constantine, resulted from the historicist impulse among Renaissance humanists. Philologically oriented editorial projects, such as Erasmus’s retranslation of the New Testament in 1516, were accompanied by interpretively oriented historicist commentaries on the text. At the same time, the intense early modern interest in history – in such writers as Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Bodin – gave rise to an institutionalized academic discipline, albeit not without controversy. The first European professorship in history was endowed in 1622 at Oxford University by the Elizabethan antiquarian William Camden, who appointed Degory Wheare and then had to defend his interest in “civil history” and not just ecclesiastical history.11 Five years later, Sir Fulke Greville founded a chair in history at Cambridge and made the contentious choice of the Dutch republican Isaac Dorislaus, who was dismissed shortly thereafter for lecturing too enthusiastically on the republican implications of Tacitus.12 In contrast to academic history, literary historicism would remain largely the provenance of theologians and literary figures until the establishment of the first English departments in the nineteenth century.

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Historicism as a modern academic practice arrived essentially with the first English departments and remained as a mainstay in literary studies until the advent of New Criticism and other formalisms that developed after (and perhaps as a consequence of) the world wars.13 Indeed, the “new” in New Historicism, while denoting a radical revision of an implied “old” historicism, also acknowledged a return to the historical interests of the scholars who had been rejected by New Criticism. In some versions of its disparate practice, New Criticism had studied the literary text as an autonomous verbal artifact, whereas, in others, it studied the text as necessarily imbricated in the literary system of Western culture. One way or the other, though, for New Criticism the text itself was paramount. New Historicism, in contrast, opened its field of study to “cultural poetics,”14 unbinding analysis from the category of the literary. Nevertheless, there is important common ground. New Historicism challenged the same “old” historicism the New Critics had, and even as it repudiated the notion of a literary text separable from history, New Historicism did not abandon the textual commitments of New Criticism. To understand the historical reading practices now dominating our profession as a significant development from, rather than a rejection of, twentieth-century “practical criticism” – such as that of I.A. Richards – allows us a wider vantage on the place of history in literary studies.15 Recent historicisms differ most sharply from New Critical precepts in their embrace of cultural and political history, as well as in their enduring, if at times troubled, relationship with biography and authorial intention. This kind of historical work began to mark early modern literary studies even before the early 1980s when Stephen Greenblatt and others inaugurated the New Historicist movement.16 In 1977 and 1978, respectively, for example, Christopher Hill’s Milton and the English Revolution and Annabel Patterson’s Marvell and the Civic Crown placed major literary figures in their historical context, understanding Milton’s and Marvell’s literary works as consciously engaged with their contemporary world. Hill and Patterson thereby challenged the long-standing New Critical principle that the work of art, although shaped by its maker and the moment of its making, should stand alone as a verbal artifact. Crucially, too, Hill and Patterson crossed their own disciplinary lines: Hill, a historian, engaged closely with Milton’s prose and his poetry, and Patterson, a professor of literature, took an author whose poems had been used selectively by New Critics and widened both the range of questions to be asked about Marvell and the range of his works to be considered. Other scholars had also employed a form of historicism before 1980: Steven Zwicker, for

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example, who also crossed disciplinary lines in his collaborative work with historians, or John M. Wallace, a pioneering historicist critic whose influence crossed disciplinary boundaries. In the related field of the history of political thought, Quentin Skinner and other members of the so-called Cambridge School began to theorize Skinner’s contextualist approach to the history of ideas using paradigms borrowed from literary criticism.17 This contextualist method would in turn have a particularly profound impact on historicist approaches to seventeenth-century literature. The increasingly collective enterprise of historicism found perhaps its most galvanizing expression when Greenblatt and others seemed to inaugurate something thrillingly “new.” A similar trend emerged in the United Kingdom around the same time, identified by Raymond Williams’s term “cultural materialism.”18 Both forms of historicism were politically interested: Cultural Materialists employed the historically progressive models of Williams and Marx, whereas New Historicists were more influenced by Foucault’s model of power and subversion.19 Of course, there was never any such thing as “Old Historicism” – no one ever called him- or herself an Old Historicist, or set up a sign denoting such a school for others to join. The avatar of this practice, E.M.W. Tillyard, represents not a school or a methodology but an example of a reductively straightforward way of thinking about the relationship between history and literature. The Elizabethan World Picture was not a work of literary interpretation so much as a handbook supplying historical “background” – a word that became so problematic in the new movement.20 “We cannot separate literature and art from other kinds of social practice,” Raymond Williams wrote influentially, and thus “background” could not exist, both because all forms of cultural representation and belief were subject to the same forms of analysis, and because it falsely suggested a monolithic cultural unity.21 Part of the interest of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism was to understand the relations between different forms of cultural belief, especially the relationship between power and subversion, or – using Williams’s paradigm – between the residual, dominant, and emergent aspects of culture.22 Troping on the metaphor of world pictures, Alan Liu wrote memorably that “New Historicism” hung “those pictures anew – seemingly by accident, off any hook, at any angle.”23 New Historicism’s conception of early modernity as possessing a more fragmented and more skeptical worldview than Tillyard’s enabled its signature use of the anecdote as a way of reconstructing historical meaning. The “invisible bullet” of Harriot’s colonial report might be brought, following Greenblatt’s influential essay,

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to illuminate moments of contained subversion in Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V.24 Elizabeth’s evocative exclamation, “I am Richard II. Know ye not that?” similarly served to illustrate the extraordinary topicality of early modern drama during the Essex rising, as well as the queen’s willingness to condone this subversive form of cultural production.25 Text and context were seen as interchangeably open to literary analysis; in Louis Montrose’s chiastic formulation, New Historicism was concerned with “the historicity of texts and the textuality of history.”26 New Historicism and Cultural Materialism promulgated a rich array of procedures with a theoretical underpinning that looks somewhat dizzying in retrospect: the sociological models of Foucault, the economic language of Marx, the political theory of Gramsci, and the anthropology of Geertz. But while New Historicism was once distinguished by its methodological self-consciousness, in the past twenty years things have changed. Responding to corrective criticism and chastened in its ambitions, literary historicism has grown far more fact-oriented and precise. Historicist criticism has, at the same time, grown less speculative (or perhaps less sophisticated) in drawing connections between text and context, and literary historicists talk much less about methodology. The lack of conversation about method may in part stem from the diminishing number of methodologies practiced by early modernists today. To some extent, this may also reflect a justified weariness with the posturing, schools, “-isms,” and labels once bandied about. Yet an unexamined acceptance of historicism as our default method risks, at the least, naïveté and pedantry. If we maintain a blinkered pursuit of evidence, we run the danger of simply doing history, with the potential of doing it badly. Challenges and recalibrations are therefore vital for the ongoing life of this (or any) method, and historicism is fortunate to have acute critics. Significant objections or reorientations of historicism fall under three broad categories: presentist, formal, and disciplinary. Throughout this volume, contributors will engage with, test, and question the venerable – and recently reasserted – call to consider literature solely as it is meaningful to present readers. They also address concerns that historicism has displaced attention to important literary subjects such as genre, rhetoric, imagery, form, and the words themselves. The first wave of objections to historicism was disciplinary, directed by historians toward the New Historicist movement. Such criticism has had lasting effects since many literary critics hoped to collaborate with historians. Indeed, implicit and often explicit in the historicist movement was a demand that literary studies become more historically responsible.

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Yet for many historians, historicism was simply irresponsible history. In an especially perceptive essay, Gabrielle Spiegel wrote in 1990 that “the achievement of cultural history lies in its reintroduction of a historicist consideration of literature; its failure lies in its refusal to differentiate between text and context or to establish an intelligible relation between them that does not lead to their mutual implication in a textually conceived universe.”27 Inverting Montrose’s formulation, Spiegel went on to assert, “if we want to contextualize texts, we cannot achieve this by merely textualizing the context.”28 One problem never properly faced in New Historicist criticism is that the same level of speculation allowable in the interpretation of literary meaning cannot hold in the interpretation of events and facts. Still, as Marjorie Garber points out, interpretation of facts was not what New Historicism had originally set out to do. Instead, New Historicism stressed the idea that “history, or histories, could not be understood as determinative or lineal causes but rather as complex networks of cultural effects.” Paradoxically, she continues, “New Historicism began by reading history as a text, but it created, despite its best efforts, a desire for history as a ground.”29 Historicism has largely and somewhat unconsciously moved in the last century from an enterprise that used history to interpret the text to an enterprise that uses the text as a means to explain history. It is important to acknowledge the ways in which New Historicism wrought significant changes in the discipline of history itself. Historians too were drawing inspiration from Foucault and Geertz at the end of the 1970s, and a cultural and linguistic turn was a major feature of historiography in the 1980s and 1990s. Established political historians such as Kevin Sharpe would take a sharp, and permanent, methodological detour in the 1980s after being exposed to literary historicism. Many now-vibrant areas of research in the political historiography of the seventeenth century (news and libel, discourse under censorship, the politics of representation, the performance and contestation of authority) were initially opened up by historicist literary critics.30 Post-revisionist political historians followed suit: both Peter Lake and Thomas Cogswell, for example, have devoted significant attention to “literary” texts in their political and religious histories; Ann Hughes turned to the history of the book; Richard Cust has a memorable essay on the Earl of Strafford and his so-called change of sides, which moves the problem to a whole different terrain by casting it in terms of self-fashioning and the manipulation of alternative authoritative political narratives and roles; and Alastair Bellany has combined historical and literary analysis in his work on libels.31

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There are potential gaps in this disciplinary interaction, of course. On a basic level, literary criticism asks different questions from those of history, and operates with different methodological presumptions. Practitioners of these disciplines often discover this during interdisciplinary conferences: a lengthy argument among literary scholars about the significance of Abdiel in Milton’s epic, to cite one recent example, provoked in the attending historians a profound sense of bemusement that anyone could care so much about a fictional character, and that this interpretive problem could have any bearing on the narrative of history. Along similar lines, a social historian might wonder what the representations of a single extraordinary individual such as Shakespeare can really tell us about what people thought, or why we should choose such an individual to understand history. There is a basic problem in the oft-expressed desire to “satisfy the historians”: in many cases they simply may not be satisfiable, because the questions a literary critic asks might have a fundamentally different orientation. Knowledge of textual meaning is not the same as the collective historical knowledge of people and events. There are also ideological struggles within these two disciplines, and especially within history, where there is a methodological divide between functionalist explanations of social upheavals such as the English civil war and ideational and cultural explanations. Historians such as Lawrence Stone have denounced the practices of New Historicism in part because they believe in a more empiricist approach, one that studies “events and behavior.”32 Revisionist historiography has similarly affected seventeenth-century literary studies in its rejection of ideological origins for major social and political movements during the period. This is a debate – emanating from the field of history, but penetrating the walls of literature departments – that poses a serious challenge to literary historicists. For if there were no ideological foundations or even tensions behind social movements (to use a loaded term), what historical role would thoughts – or the written word – have at all? With some degree of ironic understatement, perhaps, the editors of a recent volume of first-rate historicist essays respond to this deterministic charge with the statement: “we think literature has something to offer.”33 The sentence stops there, but it might have been completed with the phrase to our understanding of history. In another generation, the study of literature might not have felt it needed to defend itself quite so much against the older discipline of history, a discipline whose terms have come to dictate much of what literary critics do now.

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It is instructive to remember – not only when considering the disciplinary debate but also the concerns and objections of formalist and presentist critics – that the critical world once assumed an opposite set of values. Don M. Wolfe’s pioneering study of Milton’s polemical prose in 1941 ends, for example, with a tentative reading of the “political implications” of Paradise Lost. With a note of apology that would seldom occur to a current Miltonist, Wolfe claims to write with “some hesitation,” as he worries that any reading of the poem as having political implications “would be construed as an unfavorable judgment of the poem as a whole.”34 Precisely such an unfavorable judgment can be found in Wolfe’s contemporary, C.S. Lewis, who condemns Spenser’s “political allegory” as poetic weakness. In The Allegory of Love (1936), Lewis admits that the poem’s political engagement gives it a “certain topical attraction,” but observes that “Time never forgives such concessions to ‘the glistering of this present.’” “What acted as a bait to unpoetic readers for some decades has become a stumblingblock to poetic readers ever since,” Lewis continues. “The contemporary allusions in The Faerie Queene are now of interest to the critic chiefly in so far as they explain how some bad passages came to be bad; but since this does not make them good . . . we shall not lose very much by ignoring the matter.”35 Texts that transcend history are thus the only texts worth reading. As Ann Astell wrote of this passage, “At the present moment, when ‘historicizing’ modes of criticism predominate in early modern and medieval studies, Lewis’s remarks sound quaintly outrageous.”36 Quaintly outrageous, maybe, but also strikingly self-assured: Lewis’s perspective is one in which literature as an art and literary criticism as a discipline need not question or assert their relevance. For Lewis, literature not only has value outside of history; it loses value when it becomes involved in history. Most literary critics today would dismiss this second judgment outright (although see the discussions of Stanley Fish in this volume), but the basic contention of literature’s transcendency still holds considerable force – if not always for the theoretical procedures of professional critics, at least for students and the general public. Rather than getting drawn into a knotty philosophical question of the actual role of literature or culture in shaping the course of history, we might more productively ask why it is at this juncture that we have taken a defensive position about the enterprise of literary criticism, and even about the value of literature itself. Perhaps the problem of self-doubt is endemic to the larger enterprise of the humanities; determinism derives, after all, from scientific positivism, and the fissure that has riven history may itself derive from an

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external challenge to its own epistemic status as a field. Fields that once identified themselves as belonging to the humanities have sought in one way or another to define themselves as “social sciences,” a change dictated perhaps more by the need to survive under the shifting academic funding structures than by the actual merit of the research.37 In one of the most damning statements against the historicist scholarship of this generation, cited with justifiable concern throughout this volume – Stanley Fish’s “Why Milton Matters: or, against Historicism” – Fish laments that “the best scholarship now being produced by the most intelligent, learned, acute students of Milton is designed, not self-consciously of course, to ensure that in time he won’t matter. No one will care.”38 This is all due, Fish argues, not just to historicism, but to politics: “The practitioners of cultural studies or cultural materialism generally situate themselves on the left and for them the rejection of formalist criticism is a political act that demonstrates their political virtue” (9). Contemporary historicists seek, Fish goes on, to “link the so-called literary work with revolutionary sentiments . . . or with the emancipation of the liberal subject from the hegemony of religion and political tyranny” (10). As a result, while these critics might be doing themselves a favor, they are not, according to Fish, doing anything good to the text, which is destined to fall from the hands of such irresponsible criticism into obscurity. Much of what Fish writes here is worth heeding, but the fault lies neither in historicism nor in politics per se. So why is there such a crisis – or, to put it another way, why is part of what Fish is saying disturbingly true? Why do a significant number of critics think that historicism is to be blamed for stealing the text from the classroom, or for not sufficiently defending the relevance of literature as literature? The answer partially lies in a contradictory conjunction of field interests. The cross-disciplinary dialogue between history and literary scholarship may, of course, be representative of an internal dialogue within literary scholarship. Literary critics who were also serious students of history could be as trenchant in their criticism of other critics as historians. But whether the criticism came from within or without, the problem remains the same: when the field of history responded negatively to the New Historicist movement, literary critics were forced into a dialogue that sometimes falsified their interpretive and textual aims. There is great potential in cross-disciplinary conversations between fields. But literary critics need to be careful before getting caught up in the problems and interests of historians, because the field of history has a different set of priorities. The struggle between disciplines becomes still more dangerous

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when some historians maintain that the written word is only marginally important to the study of history. While the yoking of literary criticism and history provoked useful criticism from historians, more recently historicism has come under spirited assault by literary critics themselves. New Presentism, a school that receives some criticism within this volume, asserts that it is a delusion to think that we do anything but project the present onto the past and that we should openly accept that all of our readings of the past are actually self-reflective readings of the present moment. An important third challenge has come from critics who charged that formal analysis, long the essential methodology of literary studies, has been neglected by historicism. Some of these critics have called for a “New Formalism” or a “Historical Formalism.”39 Although these calls of alarm may seem disproportionate given the wealth of recent formal analysis carefully attentive to history, such anxieties testify to the fundamental importance of textual analysis to our discipline.40 Scholars in this collection have responded to this challenge by making vivid textual analysis central to their historicist arguments. Historicism has thus come under attack, either for being too undisciplined to count as true history or for being too narrowly historical to satisfy the many interests of students of literature. To confront these concerns openly, we have assembled in this volume a range of voices that interrogate the problems of historicism in literary studies, explore its often-neglected history, and provide forward-looking examples of historicist work. We thus aim to accomplish three main goals: to examine the potential problems of historicism in literary criticism, to provide a brief sense of the history of the practice from its roots in the Renaissance (of which the field of early modern studies has been surprisingly unconscious), and to offer examples of historicist work that will not only demonstrate the continuing vitality of this methodology, but also suggest new directions for research. Overlapping and multifaceted in their engagements, these critical examples focus on four major areas within the field of early modern literary studies: theology and religion, Shakespeare and drama, Milton and the seventeenth century, and gender studies. We cannot, in the space of a single volume, hope to rethink all areas or include all of the important voices in the field, but we hope that this representative selection will provide a catalyst for further conversation. This volume begins therefore with a suite of essays that investigate broadly the weaknesses and strengths of the field. Andrew Hadfield opens the collection with an overview of current debates about the value of

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historicism in literary studies. Hadfield asks whether historicism is the logical culmination of theoretical and scholarly developments that have revivified literary studies, or whether it is the dead end of a tendency that has seen literary critics and historians become pale imitations of real historians. In the process, he historicizes presentism itself and demonstrates how elements of this self-referential interpretive strategy have long been part of literary practice. Exploring the practical problems of historicism that derive from his experiences training graduate students, Michael McKeon reflects on our methods for making historical interpretation responsible and persuasive. What interpretive ends do we achieve, he asks, when we place texts in context? What are the concrete functions of different methods of contextualization? What are the comparative claims of diachronic and synchronic contextualization? Does a specifically literary history require modes of interpretation distinct from those appropriate to other sorts of history? Coming at authorial control and the locus of historical truth from a very different perspective, Marshall Grossman enlists Milton’s own argument in Areopagitica to argue for the agency of the text itself. Without dismissing intentions and historical context, Grossman reminds us that texts themselves move through history. Finally, for Grossman, the ethics of the reader – our present ethics, in other words – is as important as the author’s intention or the historical pressures of its moment of creation. From these broad theoretical perspectives, the volume then moves to a series of focused historicist studies. The next section is devoted to the rising interest in theology, and simultaneously to the history of historicism. Recent work on English religion, such as James Simpson’s polemical Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (2007), has rethought the Reformation in terms of how it changed the ways people read and interpreted texts. Yet in spite of the rich array of politically focused historicist scholarship on the sixteenth century and scholarship on the history of biblical interpretation, there is relatively little beyond Simpson’s provocative work that brings these two fields of inquiry together, to focus on the political role of the Bible itself. Starting in the early stages of the northern Renaissance – and just prior to the period which dominates this volume – Thomas Fulton’s essay investigates the political dimensions of the hermeneutics employed by humanists working on the Bible in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, approaches that culminate in Erasmus and his monumental work in retranslating and annotating the New Testament. The figure at the center of a burgeoning interest in religion is Shakespeare, which is surprising, given that, unlike Milton, he left behind

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little tangible evidence of belief. Speculation about Shakespeare’s religious beliefs can devolve into cobwebs of supposition. Yet work that begins with Shakespeare’s texts rather than the playwright’s confessional biography can extend to the complexities and underlying attitudes of early modern religious practice.41 In her essay, Heather Hirschfeld probes Othello’s desire for more proof, more revenge, more love by tracing the changing nature of what qualifies as satisfaction in the juridico-theological shift from Catholic penitence to Protestantism’s dizzying chasm of guilt. In the next section of the collection, devoted to drama, Paul Stevens finds mystery and parody in theatrical stagings of grace in Eastward Ho and The Tempest. Theater’s appropriation of religion’s workings is both pleasing in the moment and destabilizing of belief. Prospero uses his art to effect moral change, but the redemptive change his stagecraft brings about is, as he and the audience of Shakespeare’s play know, the work of artifice. Lawrence Manley’s essay studies the relationship between the historical archive and the patronage structures that shaped the composition of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Manley employs a new method of reading dramatic texts in which dramatic production is understood holistically, and in which the conditions of playwriting and performance included patterns of artistic patronage and political affiliation that influenced the meaning – and even the content – of the Tudor archive.42 The variegated landscape of historicism is significantly determined by the nature of the subject or author under discussion. Perhaps no early modern author has a stronger hand in his own later interpretation than John Milton. Not surprisingly, then, biography and its critical counterpart, authorial intention, are dominant components of Milton criticism, which may in part explain why, as Martin Dzelzainis observes here, “New Historicism” per se never caught on in Milton studies.43 In the following essays, Milton is the subject of two very different meditations on how we find and value an author’s meanings. In a close reading inflected by her understanding of Milton’s generic cross-pollination of tragedy and polemic, Sharon Achinstein explores Milton’s acknowledgment of the role of passion in his divorce tracts. Achinstein explores the vexed conjunction of historical and literary modes of interpretation through the complex stratification of literary memory in history, and in particular through the dynamic reuse of Medea in the combative prose polemic of the English Civil War. Achinstein suggests that Milton constitutes an ethical subject whose fittest representation engages seriously with the formal constraints and theological necessities of tragic drama. In turn, Dzelzainis teases out the latitude between what Milton said and what Milton did. Threading

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a carefully constructed autobiography through his work, Milton presents himself as a martyr in the cause of truth, but Dzelzainis shows how much freedom from straightforward truth Milton allowed the circumspect political or intellectual figure, including himself. Dzelzainis also explores the history of the historicism of our time, tracing the inception of the New Historicist movement to the lectures of Foucault in California in the 1970s. As a first step in historicizing the New Historicism, he argues that Foucault must be reclaimed from an enterprise that was badly skewed from the start by their reductive reading of the discipline-and-punish model into early modern culture. By turning first to the printed works of women already marginally part of the canon (such as Mary Sidney) and then widening attention to other media and to women of many social classes, historicism helped us recognize what was always there but long invisible. Historicism has since gone beyond the stage of seeing women writers and readers as an essentialized interest group to understanding women in an increasingly integrated, historical way.44 Two essays in this volume, for example, consider women and the English civil war from feminist and historicist perspectives. Laura Knoppers calls attention to a woman we do not normally think of as a writer; she also alerts us to selective editing that has persisted for centuries. The parliamentary army’s seizure of the King and Queen’s private correspondence during the 1645 battle of Naseby and their gleeful publication of their incriminating prize, The Kings Cabinet Opened, was a propaganda windfall. But Parliament did not publish all the letters Henrietta Maria wrote to her husband. Significantly, letters detailing the queen’s body and its potentially sympathetic female ills were cut, presumably to strengthen stereotypical misogyny, and historical narratives have accepted this editorial lacuna without question, until now. Knoppers’s work on the Queen’s (missing) letters looks outside history’s usual proof texts and is able to understand the revolutionary propaganda machine in terms of its own editorial processes, from what remained, in a sense, on the cutting-room floor of the printing house. Erin Murphy directs our attention to a different kind of selective political reading. Both Mary Astell and Margaret Cavendish linked the civil war and the role of print, simultaneously castigating writers (like Milton) who used their pens against the king, on the one hand, and appropriating the role of warriors in the war of truth for women writers, on the other. Women writers continued to take positions on war; in her strategic, political use of Astell and Cavendish, Virginia Woolf further complicated (and deployed) the cultural role and reception history of the woman writer.

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What is the future of our study of the past? Henry Ford’s famous dictum that “history is more or less bunk”45 still represents a sentiment of the technological present, whose hectic forward movement can itself be an ideological repudiation of the past. The essays in this volume profess otherwise. History is made every day, and it abides. Amid all the apparently conflicting calls for the past, the present, the old made new and the newness of the old, is the enduring centrality of texts and a conversation with them that bridges generations and status. No t e s 1 Merritt Hughes, ed., John Milton’s Complete Poems and Selected Prose (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 739. 2 For the history of reading, see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s foundational article, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–78; William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the Early Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Thomas Fulton, Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010); and Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For valuable overviews of book history and theory, see Peter D. McDonald, “Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?” PMLA 121.1 (2006): 214–27; and David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 3 See, for example, Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds., Elizabeth I’s Collected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Laura Knoppers’s edition of Milton’s 1671 edition of Paradise Regain’ d and Samson Agonistes in Knoppers, ed., The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Other Oxford editions inflected by book history include Joseph Loewenstein’s forthcoming edition of Spenser, John Pitcher’s forthcoming edition of Samuel Daniel, and Alan Stewart’s volumes of Bacon. 4 See, for example, Howard Marchitello, Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England: Browne’s Skull and Other Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and

16

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6

7 8

9

10

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C oi ro a n d F u lt on Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See, for example, Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994); Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Mary Floyd-Wilson, Early English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Emily C. Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a discussion of “historismus” and the use of the term by Karl Popper and others, see Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess, and Rowland Wymer, eds., Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 2–3; Paul Hamilton, Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1–4. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 244, originally published in German in 1860; Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). On early modern historicism, see Anthony Grafton, What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought 1580–1640 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970); Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). See Daniel Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 133; and Kevin Sharpe, “The Foundation of the Chairs of History at Oxford and Cambridge: An Episode in Jacobean Politics,” History of Universities 2 (1982): 127–52, at 131. Sharpe, “The Foundation of the Chairs of History,” 139–44; see also David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 48; Ronald Mellor, “Tacitus, Academic Politics, and Regicide in the Reign of Charles I: The Tragedy of Dr. Isaac Dorislaus,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 11.2 (2004): 153–93; Thomas Fulton, “‘The True and Naturall Constitution of that Mixed Government’: Massinger’s The

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14 15 16

17

18 19

20 21

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Bondman and the Influence of Dutch Republicanism,” Studies in Philology 99.2 (2002): 152–77. Central texts of the New Critical movement include John Crowe Ransom, The New Critics (Norfolk: New Directions, 1941); Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947); William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 468–88; and the influential textbook, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students (New York: Henry Holt, 1938). A phrase first used in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980). See in particular Richards’s profoundly influential Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929). The New Historicism was announced in 1982 in Greenblatt’s forward to “The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance,” a special issue of Genre 15 (1982): 3–6, reprinted as The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1982). For a valuable discussion of this, see Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 67–79. Skinner cites, for example, the debate between the contextualist theorist F.W. Bateson and the textualist F.R. Leavis (from Bateson, “The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism 3 [1953], 1–27, and Leavis, “The Responsible Critic: or the Functions of Criticism at Any Time,” Scrutiny 19 [1953] reprinted in F.R. Leavis, ed. A Selection from Scrutiny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), II, 280–303) in “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 291n2; this essay was first published in 1969. See also the critics invoked in his essay “Motives, Intentions and the Interpretation of Texts,” in Tully, 68–78. John Pocock, similarly influential to literary historicism, is also a founding member of the Cambridge School. For discussion, see Rhodri Lewis, “Historians, Critics and Historicists,” English Historical Review 125 (2010): 370–82, at 371–72. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980). On the relationship between Marxism and New Historicism, see the reflective essay of Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 37–48. E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1944). Tillyard was also criticized in his own time; see Wells, Burgess, and Wymer, Neo-Historicism, 7–8. Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, 44; see Jonathan Dollimore, “Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism,” in Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays

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26 27

28 29 30 31

C oi ro a n d F u lt on in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 4–7. On “background,” see also Greenblatt, ed., The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 5–6. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–27. Alan Liu, “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism,” ELH 56 (1989): 721–71, at 722. Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” reprinted in Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare, 18–47. On the worldview of the New Historicism, see Jean E. Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” in Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins, eds., Renaissance Historicism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 1–33. From a conversation between Elizabeth and the antiquary William Lambarde, quoted in Peter Ure, ed., Richard II, Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1956), lix; see Greenblatt, Power of Forms, 3–4; Dollimore, “Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism,” 8. Louis Montrose, “Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History,” ELR 16 (1986): 5–12; at 8. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 65 (1990): 59–86, at 68. See also the debate started by Lawrence Stone, “History and Post-Modernism,” Past and Present 131 (1991): 217–18, where he calls New Historicism a “threat” to history (217); followed by Patrick Joyce, “History and Post-Modernism 1” and Catriona Kelly, “History and Post-Modernism 2,” Past and Present 133 (1991): 204–08, 208–13; and Stone, “History and Post-Modernism 3” and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History and Post-Modernism 4,” Past and Present 135 (1992): 189–93, 193–208. Spiegel, “History and Post-Modernism 4,” 71; for a more recent critique of historicist contextualism, see Christopher Lane, “The Poverty of Context: Historicism and Nonmimetic Fiction,” PMLA 118.3 (2003): 450–69. Marjorie Garber, “Historical Correctness: The Use and Abuse of History for Literature,” in A Manifesto for Literary Studies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 47. We are indebted to Alastair Bellany’s insights here. See, for example, Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Thomas Cogswell, Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Richard Cust, “Wentworth’s ‘Change of Sides’ in the 1620s,” in J.F. Merrit, ed., The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 63–80; and Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae, “Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources,”

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33 34 35 36 37

38 39

40

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in Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae, eds., Early Modern Literary Studies, Text Series I (2005). http://purl.oclc.org/emls/texts/libels/ “History and Post-Modernism,” 217. For an excellent discussion of these problems in historiography, see Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England, 3–27. See also Gordon S. Wood’s review of Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties (New York: Knopf, 1991) in “Novel History,” New York Review of Books 38.12 (June 27, 1991): 12–16; and Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. Don M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Nelson and Sons, 1941), ix. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936; reprint, 1971), 321. Ann W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1. For an astute discussion of the institutional rather than intellectual pressures that sustain historicism, see David Schalkwyk, “Between Historicism and Presentism: Love and Service in Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 17 (2005): 1–17. Stanley Fish, “Why Milton Matters; or, Against Historicism,” Milton Studies 44 (2005): 1–12; at 1–2. The new interest in formalism returns us, in some sense, to New Historicism’s origins, “the power of forms.” For one of many discussions of the New Formalism, see Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism,” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 558–69; see also Stephen Cohen’s introduction to Cohen, ed., Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). See Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); O. B. Hardison, Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Wayne Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Mind: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Patricia A. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Judith H. Anderson, Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Judith H. Anderson, Translating Investment: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); and Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Some examples of this recent trend include Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Debora Kuller

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43 44

45

C oi ro a n d F u lt on Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002): on this topic, see Thomas Fulton, “Speculative Shakespeares: The Trials of Biographical Historicism,” Modern Philology 103.3 (2006): 385–408. For discussions and examples of the repertory approach, see Scott McMillin, Lawrence Manley, Roslyn L.Knutson, and Mark Bayer, “Issues in Review: Reading Acting Companies,” Early Theatre 4.1 (2001): 111–47; and Helen Ostovich Holger, Schott Syme, Andrew Griffin, eds., Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). On New Historicism and the literature written during the civil war and Interregnum, see James Holstun, “Ranting at the New Historicism,” ELR 19 (1989): 189–225. Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Margaret Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004); Carolyn Sale, “Slanderous Aesthetics and the Woman Writer: The Case of Hole v. White,” in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, eds., From Script to Stage in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Interview in Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1916.

I

Historicism and Its Discontents

1

Has Historicism Gone Too Far

Or, Should We Return to Form? Andrew Hadfield

“History is now at an end: this history is therefore final.”

– W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman

Has historicism gone too far? It has certainly become the dominant mode of literary endeavour in English departments. University press catalogues are full of advertisements for books that describe the relationship between psychology and the novel in the nineteenth century, the representation of childbirth in seventeenth-century narrative poetry, or even republican thought in sixteenth-century drama. Anthologies of literature – Norton, Longman, Broadview, and others – reserve considerable space for historical materials alongside the vast collection of literature they include. It is clear that teachers are expected to get their students to read extracts from The Miracles of Thomas of Becket alongside “The Pardoner’s Tale” and The Book of Margery Kempe; Thomas Hariot’s Brief and True Report of the Newfoundland of Virginia when taking a seminar on The Tempest; and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in order to understand James Thomson’s The Seasons. Despite the resistance of students in literature courses, many of whom – initially, at least – would like to drive a large wedge between literature and history, there is a general consensus among academics who work in the broad field of English literature that research and teaching involve relating literature to a series of historical contexts. Historicism has subsumed literary studies. There is, of course, dissent. Literary theory no longer has the edgy, oppositional stance it once had and has been absorbed easily enough into the mainstream, with the exception of a few recalcitrant areas. Battles within departments probably center on the issue of historicism. Disgruntled colleagues are less likely to have strong opinions about the merits of semiotics or French feminism than they were two decades ago, and are more likely to complain that “everyone is really a historian these days,” having lost sight of literary quality. The case against historicism is easy to make, articulate, and understand. The principal argument is 23

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that historicism does not and cannot deliver what it is thought that it promises – a coherent and satisfying explanation of a text – and that it reduces literary works to their contexts. Furthermore, this case continues, historicism elides and often ignores value judgements, reading canonical masterpieces in the same way as any other routine cultural product, its practitioners often hunting out obscure texts that no one will ever really want to read, let alone teach, in the name of a research-driven agenda. Far from being an exciting new development in the wake of the intellectual spaces opened up by New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, current historicism simply takes us back behind New Criticism to the sort of work that was produced in the interwar period and which relied on biographical and intentionalist categories to provide explanation. In short, opponents claim that historicists are reactionaries and not the revolutionaries they imagine themselves to be. Most significantly, historicists are missing something vital – the aesthetic experience, the spiritual, the literary dimension of literature – failing to understand what our discipline actually does and what it knows in transforming the study of literature into history. Historicism has become a method that pervades literature departments; at best, it produces work that is “worthy” rather than innovative and exciting. It can be learned, repeated, and endlessly reproduced. In the end, there has not really been much advance in terms of the study of literature since the demise of New Criticism, a method that spectacularly ran out of steam in the 1970s with the advent of historicism and, more significantly, literary theory. Young researchers who fall into the hands of unscrupulous historicists are intellectually kidnapped, brainwashed, and forced to spend years of drudgery eking out a miserable living of aesthetic blindness, passing on their lack of insight to a new generation. The small questions eat up the big ones in the anxious quest for intellectual honours and preferment, and young academics realize that they should not rock the boat if they desire a foot on the lowest rung of the ladder, let alone professional success. Departments stare out into the void and replicate themselves when they employ new colleagues, institutional inertia militating against dramatic change. There is a growing sense of impatience with the status quo, even among many historicist-inclined scholars and teachers, just as many historians are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the assumptions made in their discipline. What is particularly fascinating is that both subjects seem to want to move in the same way, with many historians trying to become more literary in approach, just as their counterparts in literature departments think they ought to get back to the literariness of literature.1 For

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the latter group, this trend manifests itself most obviously in a longing for a serious and profound mode of literary study with a more substantial intellectual result than searching through the queen’s laundry lists to find out what clothes were worn in which masque; scouring some obscure documents in the Public Record Office to find an aristocrat who may once have met John Donne’s brother and so could have been a patron of the great poet; or reading through The Faerie Queene one more time to find yet another possible allusion to kern, gallowglasses, or a crannog in Coleraine that Spenser might once have seen when he possibly travelled north with Lord Grey who might have taken him with him. The logic of the past conditional can become very wearying. The need to find obscure allusions in texts in order to get published, the need to specialize too narrowly, and the absence of the bigger picture has led many to revolt against what they see as the prevailing professional ethos in the present. What is interesting – although probably unsurprising, even inevitable – is the alliance of the traditional and the avant-garde in literary studies, both reactionary and radical, against the prevailing tide of historicism. On the one hand, there are those who want to go back to a serious study of literature so that we can recapture the essence of the aesthetic experience that we have lost, either in the name of a longer, more capacious perspective, a world in which we read the Renaissance, for example, in terms of Montaigne, Petrarch, and Ficino; or, more simply, they desire a return to the study of the classics of great literature in which everyone reads Baudelaire, Tolstoy, and Goethe. On the other hand, there are those who feel a keen loss of cutting-edge controversy with the growing professionalization of theoretical and historicist issues, a development that has made Peter Barry’s admirably lucid Beginning Theory (revised edition, 2002) one of the best-selling books produced by an academic press in the last decade or so. Such critics are frustrated by the retreat of the more obviously politicized elements of the agendas of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. The aim of the latter movement in particular was to expose the ideological agenda of the center and bring into play the role of those voices at the margins. This program has obvious affinities with the aims of the History Workshop group in Britain and the Subaltern Studies collective in India.2 Most recent historicist study collects and analyses an excess of minutiae that prevents the proper consideration of serious political questions, which might include the relationship between early modern sexualities and the range of choices available to us now, the nature of power and oppression, and issues of terrorism and political violence.3

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Given this last particular issue, it is important to note just how eagerly a debate on the relationship between Milton and terrorism was developed within and beyond the academy, when it was argued that Samson’s destruction of the Philistines’ temple in Samson Agonistes could be read as a coded or tacit support for terrorist activities, and that Milton could perhaps be aligned with those whose religious convictions led them to destroy the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The debate resulted from an article in the TLS by the prominent public intellectual and Milton editor, John Carey, who argued that Samson was “in effect, a suicide bomber” and that the poem was “an incitement to terrorism.”4 Carey is not a scholar with an obvious interest in more recent developments in literary theory, and his comments in review of Stanley Fish’s book, How Milton Works, were obviously intended to imply that some literary theorists are naïvely producing arguments which support violent political movements. However, it is clear that his provocative article sponsored a debate that fed a deep hunger within the profession.5 It is good to feel and to be relevant if one spends years working in an area that seems so distant from the concerns of the real world, an anxiety that haunts all but the most disinterested scholars. Considered one way, this might seem a vain desire to be modish; read another way, and bearing in mind the pressures on those working in the arts and humanities to be more high profile, to engage in the public “understanding” of their subjects, such debates seem sensible and fruitful. Most history is, of necessity, a history rooted in present concerns. This does not mean that it is always inevitably teleological, nor that we should simply resist such pressures in the name of a purely disinterested pursuit of antiquarian truth, allowing the past to set our agenda as though we could simply get back to what once was. The study of literature in a historical context, for example, does not preclude the employment of terms such as “race,” “sexuality,” “ideology,” or even “liberalism,” just because they did not exist at the time when the texts in questions were written. It is quite legitimate to use conceptual tools to understand what has happened and it is a category mistake to imagine that we can only ever understand the past in its own terms, as is often argued. However, there is always the concomitant danger of anachronism, that our present agenda will distort a balanced and incisive understanding of past events and conditions. Students of literature read very few texts from the early modern period that deal with religion and religious subjects, yet the majority of books produced in that period were theological and doctrinal: “devotional reading was everyone’s reading.”6 Nevertheless, only a few years ago a

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collection of essays on literature and religion could claim without fear of contradiction, “literary scholars have been inclined to historicise literary texts in a context that often excludes religion.”7 It might be worthwhile to redraw our current literary map and make it more representative, even at the expense of limiting current concerns. Indeed, this process has already started with both the open acknowledgement that the great blind spot of New Historicism was religion, and an increased interest in religious belief and its significance in the wake of current concerns about fundamentalism, after a long period which equated progress and secularization. But what happens if we try to read literary texts without history? What are the alternatives to historicism currently available? Some would claim that deconstruction is an ahistorical mode of reading. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that its most committed adherents claim, persuasively, that deconstruction is a mode of reading that is inherently historicist and saturated with a historical knowledge that other modes of reading often elide or ignore, making them, in fact, less historical in their assertion of a historical reality beyond the text that they never reach.8 Psychoanalytic cultural and literary criticism has often involved an ahistorical approach to its subject, even when dealing with historical subjects.9 However, recent approaches testify to an increasingly sophisticated historicist nature.10 Indeed, most theoretical approaches to literary texts – feminist, postcolonial, culturalist, and so on – claim to be rooted in a history that others fail to see. As Fredric Jameson claimed many years ago in The Political Unconscious, “history is what hurts,” exhorting scholars in his opening phrase: “Always historicise!”11 Even labels of critical movements or styles that sound as though they are not historicist, such as “textual materialism” or “radical textualism,” are deeply rooted in historical analysis.12 There is one major critical movement that seems to oppose this apparently all-engulfing tide of historicism: “presentism.” According to one of its leading theorists, Hugh Grady, presentism is in one sense an extension of New Historicism as presentist studies “perform the same kind of contextualizing of cultural production, using some of the same theorists (Marx and Foucault, for example).” However, in another sense “they constitute an important challenge to historicist premises because they underline the salient point that all our knowledge of works from the past is conditioned by and dependent upon the culture, language, and ideologies of the present, and this means that historicism itself necessarily produces an implicit allegory of the present in its configuration of the past.”13 This is an admirably clear definition of the ways in which a critical movement perceives its goals and purpose, and understands how texts work.

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Nevertheless, it risks obliterating any sense of difference and assumes that the past is simply a foreign country where different things take place to which we can have no access and which cannot be translated into the present. The concerns of the present clearly influence our perception of the past, and establish an agenda. But does this mean that everything is an allegory of the present? For many this might seem another category mistake, an equal and opposite one to the assumption that the past can only ever be seen in its own terms. Many works of history have to be read with an acknowledgement of the particular circumstances in which they were conceived and written. Surely nobody reads the work of Sir Geoffrey Elton (formerly Gottfried Rudolph Otto Ehrenberg) now without some appreciation of his particular desire to defend the liberal and gradualist nature of the English constitution as a benign alternative to the brutal history of fascism in continental Europe. Elton, the offspring of two prominent German Jewish families, went into exile in England in the 1930s and highlights his gratitude to the English and their way of life in his last book, The English (1992).14 But does his history, which clearly has one eye on the present, really have nothing to tell us about sixteenth-century government?15 Of course, few would probably want to recuperate a work such as E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (1944), which deliberately contrasted what he saw as the calm certainties of the Elizabethan world to the frightening instability of world war, or the “patriotic guff and John Bullism of Arthur Bryant’s histories of Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.”16 However, it does not follow that all such histories can be reduced to allegories of what is happening now. Furthermore, when does the past stop and the present begin? Even the most superficial acquaintance with deconstruction should surely tell us that this is a seriously problematic distinction to make.17 One could just as easily talk about “pastness” as “presentism” and make as much sense. Looked at this way presentism can only lead to the extreme scepticism of solipsism, which is not, I think, what anyone has in mind or wants out of the enterprise. There is an argument made within the Western academy at times that empirical history is inevitably dull and reactionary and that truly liberationary figures should oppose its deceptive logic. This mode of thinking is usually labelled “post-modern history,” although it has little relationship to other forms of postmodernism in philosophy and the arts.18 The case made is often identical to that of presentism in literary studies: that only the self in the present is relevant and knowable.19 The most straightforward problem with this argument is that the equation

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between an anti-historicist and a progressive position, and a historicist one and a reactionary political stance, is misleading. The example of E.P. Thompson, whose mission was to “rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity,” and whose vociferous attacks on structural Marxism for neglecting the category of experience were made in terms of a commitment to “history from below,” should give us some pause for thought.20 Anyone who feels that history has nothing to tell us and nothing to unmask should head straight for Marc Ferro’s incisive and profoundly depressing book, The Use and Abuse of History: Or How the Past Is Taught to Children. Ferro shows us how every nation abuses its own citizens in the name of patriotism, forcing children to ingest a favorable version of the nation’s history in its curriculum. Other nations often have accurate and astute versions of the history of nations with whom they share no past but take outrageous liberties with their own story and those of their neighbours and rivals. The book shows just how easy it is to correct historical misunderstandings and expose the false and the untruthful, and how important it is to perform this task.21 There is another aspect of presentism which is not as pronounced, but perhaps just as problematic, namely the attempt to read the past in terms of its relevance to the present. On the one hand, as I have already pointed out, this can be a perfectly legitimate and desirable mode of enquiry, and the refusal to make history relevant courts the obvious danger of antiquarianism. However, such approaches do, of course, run the risk of teleological logic, the old bugbear of Whig historical narratives. Are we actually reading forwards or backwards? To return to the case of religion, once again: literary critics have often concentrated too much on the confessional allegiance of authors rather than exploring the historical problems of analysing religious belief from the evidence. Much current research suggests that looking simply at such divisions is not an adequate way of reconstructing the complex field of belief and that religion cannot be isolated from the communities in which it existed.22 The logical corollary of the need to analyze religion in studies of literature is that other factors need to be considered when studying religious belief: neither category can remain untouched in isolation.23 The problem is especially acute when dealing with the vexed question of Shakespeare’s faith.24 Trying to demonstrate that Shakespeare had a particular religious belief or allegiance is now a well-recognized sub-academic genre and can make the author well known or help to maintain their fame. Arguing that religious faith was

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complicated in late Tudor and early Stuart times and that religious adherence was inevitably compromised by other, less spiritual factors; or that people changed their beliefs; or that they did not always understand their motives, however keen they were on a religious course, are more legitimate but less obviously fruitful pursuits. Perhaps the most bizarre concatenation of all these forces occurred recently in the interesting collection, Spiritual Shakespeares, making it, in ways, a strangely paradigmatic example of many recent trends in scholarship. The book claims that it is seeking to revivify the project of cultural materialism by spiritualizing it, a neat combination of the traditional values of literature and the radical edge of 1980s literary theory (you can have your cake and eat it too): [A]s a structure of thought and possibility, spirituality may be a necessary supplement for radical materialism, which, after all, has its roots in Hegelian spiritual ‘dialectic’. . . . After new historicism and cultural materialism, history is now the far horizon and sole explanatory hypothesis in contemporary criticism to the extent that conceiving of and accounting for resistance to history has become a familiar problem. . . . Cultural materialists have managed to evade this hopeless position by emphasising that history is always fractured and divided. Alan Sinfield, for instance, finds a way of combining a commitment to historical determinism with the possibility of resistance to the dominant culture in the notion of ‘subcultures’. But while the efforts of radical critics to find counter-histories within the history that prevailed are instructive, they are not very inspirational. Spirituality holds out the hope of a more positive leap into a revolutionary alternative.25

The logic of this passage would appear to be circular. Of course spirituality holds out the hope of a revolutionary alternative: that is why it is spirituality. All debates are short-circuited and we are promised instant enlightenment instead of the diminishing and painstaking labour of historical investigation with its now rather low pay off (“history is what hurts”). The argument further suggests that reading a great literary text provides spiritual sustenance, a case that sounds very much like the claims made by F. R. Leavis and his circle in the interwar period, precisely what radical critics such as Alan Sinfield were reacting against.26 In one swift maneuver, traditional and radical values are united and much of the rest of the introduction to the book tries to show that all great modern thinkers, including Žižek and, most importantly, Derrida, have embraced spirituality as a means of the dead historical ends of the contemporary world. And, following Derrida’s analysis of Shakespearean ghosts and religion, the introduction moves to its inevitable conclusion: “Shakespearean

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spirituality promiscuously, irresistibly breeds with the spiritual possibilities of our own time. . . . Spiritual Shakespeares proffers a striking spiritual materialism, where spirituality is not so much an escape from material reality as an immanent chance for something better.”27 Shakespeare emerges as a spiritual writer who adheres to no particular faith, but whose works encourage us to think about the afterlife and the fact that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophy. As the preceding quotation demonstrates, reading Shakespeare’s works will make us more tolerant, enlightened, and better people, an argument that sounds nothing if not familiar.28 What is important to note, however, is that the book, like the debate on Milton and terrorism, obviously fills a need – an escape from the grind of historicism, as well as a recuperation of the materialist project that seemed to have petered out in the face of the same development within literary studies as it has become more dominated by historicism. There is also the promise of an aesthetic experience which, no matter how many times you read the calendar of state papers, will probably not take place. And, in doing so, Spiritual Shakespeares reminds students of English literature what they are studying and what defines their discipline, restoring the central principle of aesthetic value, so vital to the discipline of English when it first rose to prominence in the first half of the last century.29 So where do things stand now? On the one hand, there is a genuine concern that an excessive concentration on historical context may be obscuring the proper role of aesthetic principles in literary studies; on the other, there is, I think, a desire to escape the labour of proper interdisciplinary investigation and to move straight to immediate understanding of a work. Moreover, of course, if anything becomes a generally agreed norm, there will be a reaction against it – again, for a combination of good and bad reasons. I do not want to suggest that everyone needs to be a historicist critic, that historicism has to be overly circumscribed as a mode of reading, or that the relationship between literary texts and historical contexts – in itself a rather limiting formulation of the relationship between the two – does not need patient and careful consideration, exploration, and periodic rethinking. It is also axiomatic that various modes of theoretical reading can yield insights without recourse to historical information, and that these should be encouraged and should form a key component of any functioning group of scholars and teachers in the humanities. But, in an ideal world, things should not be so isolated and most of us would rather the two went together. After all, this is what many writers such as Michel Foucault, beloved by New Historicists and

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presentists alike, attempted.30 And, as regards a future project, it might be worth arguing that a carefully historicised reading of psychoanalysis and literature would be a major achievement, even if it concentrated simply on one short period. It would also be a substantial undertaking. It is a sign of the growing maturity of our young discipline, which is only slightly more than a hundred years old, that we no longer have to read the sort of airy generalizations that passed for critical wisdom a generation ago, what Tom Paulin has called the sort of “harmless Sitwellian waffle” that made him wonder “whether English studies will go the way of phrenology.”31 If we do not do historicism, what will we do? We can go the way of theory, although I suspect relatively few of us want to do this, at least in a sustained and committed way, even if we wish to use theoretical texts to help us to explore certain issues. Moreover, as legions of theorists frequently reiterate, they are not against history as such, and, in fact, if we read them correctly, we will understand that their writings are explicitly historicised.32 The alternative journey into presentism would seem to be moving in the same direction, towards a return to aesthetic values, the central feature of a discipline that many feel has been neglected as it has become more professionalized. These counter-historical developments, and the fact that they are surprisingly similar in their reading strategies, point to limitations with historicist criticism. As has frequently been pointed out, there has been an excessive emphasis on the political at the expense of the literary. Scholars and critics have undoubtedly been too keen to explain the political significance of a text and not keen enough to explain its value – or, rather, the problem of value, which is a more interesting way of approaching this issue. However, the fact that something is not done does not mean that it cannot be done. It simply has not been done. Historicist criticism is still at a very early stage of its history and needs to get beyond endlessly explaining the context of works and running the risk of transforming the discipline of English into a branch of History, of making literary criticism just one minor form of cultural history.33 It is hard to see this as an inevitable problem that will never go away. Paying more attention to the question of value as a concept and as a historical phenomenon will not simply enable scholars to analyse literature in more sophisticated and interesting historical contexts, but will help them to think about the problem of reading and valuing literary texts in a chronological framework. Indeed, histories of literary criticism and rhetoric already provide much information about the history of value.34 The problem is having the ability and finding the time to complete such a complex project.

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Perhaps the truth is that we need to be far more historicist in our teaching practices as well as our research, a path that will lead us back to a consideration of form. The forms of teaching and assessment that we practice in the arts curriculum in schools and universities in the West developed mainly in the nineteenth century. We teach students in large groups where they take notes (lectures) and small groups where they have discussions (seminars). We make them write essays of varying lengths and take examinations, usually unseen. But it was not always like this. In the medieval and early modern periods, students attended lectures as they do now, but they were often taught by individual tutors with whom they developed a particular relationship – an experience now available only at the most elite universities in the world. In the classroom they were taught to imitate forms of writing and argument, producing letters in the style of Cicero in particular, forensic oratory (again, often modelled on Cicero), arguing for and against particular cases, and praise of particular great men or exploits.35 The art of rhetoric taught students how to argue a case and persuade listeners that they were right, making a strong case supported by pertinent examples and using the right style and register for the occasion.36 In the Middle Ages, they were taught to become priests, learning how to argue themselves and then to educate their flock, if they were not among the few who continued their studies as scholars. After the Reformation, universities sought to produce graduates who could go out into the world and perform useful tasks as bureaucrats, functionaries, lawyers, secretaries, civil servants, and so on, showing that they could write well, argue, and think in strategic ways. Examinations were invariably oral, as students had to debate with their tutors in front of attendant assessors as well as their peer group.37 Perhaps in order to be truly historicist we have to think much more about form – not simply in what we write about, but how we teach what we do and how we develop our curriculum. There is significant pressure from students to be taught creative writing, a serious boom area, especially in the United Kingdom – somewhat less so in North America where there are far more classes dealing with composition and rhetoric. Perhaps we should try to teach some courses in ways in which the subjects of those courses were actually taught themselves, encouraging students to think like the writers they are studying. A course on Renaissance poetry, for example, might teach Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton in terms of rhetoric manuals they would have used and a selection of classical authors they would have read (Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, Lucan, Horace, and Xenophon). The course could be examined in a similarly

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historicised manner, with students producing writing samples based on what would have been produced in early modern English classrooms – letters, poems, formal arguments – and also being examined orally by having to debate with a tutor in front of the class. A course on Chaucer and the Middle Ages might make use of one of the many anthologies of medieval grammar and rhetoric now available, and again ask students to produce examples, imitations, and to argue a case relating to one of the poems in public.38 Imagining that such classroom practice can transport us back to the fourteenth or the sixteenth century would be a delusion, of course, but it will provide historical insight, perhaps more than just reading and writing an essay on a work; demystify what students might otherwise think is normal and inevitable; and force them to weigh up the different forms of education they experience at college. My suspicion is that debates about historicism concentrate on questions of content, not form, and on research with no relation to teaching. It is not necessary that every argument link the two, but it is worth remembering that many schools of literary criticism, New Criticism being an especially pertinent example, grew out of a desire to transform practical pedagogy. I. A. Richards in particular was keen that the lyric poem become the dominant form of literature in the classroom, enabling the teacher and student to study the literary artifact on its own with as little interference from complicating outside factors as was possible.39 Perhaps historicist literary criticism has missed a trick in never really thinking through its significance in the classroom, or the ways in which it might relate to teaching as well as research. But thinking about the curriculum in terms of its history could well lead to a much more exciting educational experience for many students and teachers and would help to revitalize the arts and humanities and remind governments of their significance at a time when they are under severe threat in times of economic hardship. If students were trained to argue and to think about how what they study was produced, they would be able to articulate more coherent and persuasive arguments about the value of education in the arts and humanities. They would also be able to see how such education had changed and what the value of different approaches, as well as the varying results, has been. It is one of the great clichés of literary history that an educational system will produce dominant writers who have emerged out of that system, who are then read with enthusiasm by others trained in the same way, a pleasingly circular process. It is perhaps not surprising that the influence of F. R. Leavis led to the rise of the reputation of D. H. Lawrence,

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who became the culmination of the story of the novel in English while Leavisite literary criticism dominated the universities.40 Nor is it a surprise that Philip Larkin, a great admirer of Lawrence, should become the one of the key English poets who produced neat lyrics which were read to express a desirable version of Englishness.41 In the wake of the advent of literary theory in universities in the 1980s, many critics were eager to explore and analyse the roots of their discipline and critical practice in order to expose the ideological forces that had shaped English studies.42 The problem was that they only went back into the nineteenth century, to the birth of English as a discipline. There was no serious historical curiosity beyond that point, or about the history of teaching before English existed, or even about form. Perhaps it is now time to move further backwards and to rethink the whole nature, history, and purpose of the discipline and, in doing so, to thoroughly historicise what we now teach and research, to think why we do what we do and to explore how educational value systems produce literary styles, movements, and works. Instead of being the obstacle to aesthetic experience, historicism could become its main spur. No t e s 1 Recent examples include Martin L. Davies, Historics: Why History Dominates Contemporary Society (London: Routledge, 2006); Ann Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Alan Munslow and Robert A. Rosenstone, eds., Experiments in Rethinking History (London: Routledge, 2004). 2 On centers and margins, see Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 290–9, passim; on the History Workshop movement, see Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, rev. ed., (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 89–94; on the Subaltern Studies group, see Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), ch. 24. 3 See the debate between Andrew Hadfield and Alan Sinfield: Hadfield, “Shakespeare and Republicanism: History and Cultural Materialism,” Textual Practice 17 (2003), 461–83; Sinfield, Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism (London: Routledge, 2006), ch. 1. 4 John Carey, “A Work in Praise of Terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes,” Times Literary Supplement, September 6, 2002, 15–16. See also Fish’s response, “Postmodern Warfare: the Ignorance of our Warrior Intellectuals,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2002, 33–40.

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5 For further comment see the essays in Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola, eds., Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006); Feisal G. Mohamed, “Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes,” PMLA 120 (2005), 327–40; Alan Rudrum, “Milton Scholarship and the Agon over Samson Agonistes,” Literature Compass 1 (2004) DOI: 10.1111/j.1741–4113.2004.00116.x. 6 Mary C. Erler, “Devotional Literature,” in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Vol. III, 1400–1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 495. 7 Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier, eds., Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2. 8 Jacques Derrida, “But, beyond. . . (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon),” in Henry Louis Gates, ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 354–69; Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young, eds., Poststructuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Nicholas Royle, “Writing History: from New Historicism to Deconstruction,” in After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 13–38. 9 Ernest Jones, “Hamlet Psychoanalysed,” in Laurence Lerner, ed., Shakespeare’s Tragedies: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 47–64 (rpt. of 1963); Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1958); Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959). 10 Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” in Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds., Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 211–24; Rachel Bowlby, Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Amber Jacobs, On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 11 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), 102, 109. 12 See Jerome J. McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Terence Allan Hoagwood, Politics, Philosophy, and the Production of Romantic Texts (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996). 13 Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2. See also Hugh Grady, ed., Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium (London: Routledge, 2000); Hugh Grady, ed., Presentist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2006). 14 See the Dictionary of National Biography entry by Patrick Collinson.

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15 For one assessment, see Simon Adams, “The Eltonian Legacy: Politics,” Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 95–113. 16 E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1944); Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 55. 17 See Derek Attridge, “Language as History/History as Language: Saussure and the Romance of Etymology,” in Attridge et al., eds., Poststructuralism and the Question of History, 183–211. 18 For comment, see M. C. Lemon, Philosophy of History: A Guide for Students (London: Routledge, 2003), pt. 3; Michael Roberts, “Postmodernism and the Linguistic Turn,” in Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield, eds., Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline (London: Routledge, 2004), 227–40; Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996), 151–63. 19 See Martin L. Davies’ eccentric Historics: Why History Dominates Contemporary Society (London: Routledge, 2006). 20 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 13; E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978). See also Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction?, 139–40, 167–8. 21 Marc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History: Or How the Past Is Taught to Children, trans. Norman Stone and Andrew Brown (London: Routledge, 1984). 22 See, for example, Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Lucy E. C. Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 23 For an exemplary analysis, see Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 24 Recent studies include Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare, 1592–1604 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and, the best recent study by far, Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: Thomson, 2008). An example of the ludicrous ways in which such debates are disseminated in more public ways is Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005). 25 Ewan Fernie, ed., Spiritual Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2005), 10. 26 For analysis, see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), ch. 1; Francis Mulhern, The Moment of “Scrutiny” (London: New Left Books, 1979). 27 Fernie, ed., Spiritual Shakespeares, 18, 20. See Alan Sinfield’s response to the book, “Turning on the Spiritual,” Textual Practice 20 (2006), 161–70.

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28 See the evidence collected in Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols. (London: Routledge, 1995). 29 Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 30 See the analysis in Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). 31 Tom Paulin, Ireland and the English Crisis (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1985), 154. 32 For a representative sample of recent work, see Martin McQuillan, ed., “Reading Cixous Writing,” The Oxford Literary Review 24 (2002), 185–201. Perhaps the most interesting recent work by deconstructionist thinkers has been on the significance of the institution: see, for example, Simon Morgan Wortham (ed.), Thinking Institutions, special issue of Textual Practice 21.2 (June 2007). A recent assessment of the ways forward for literary theory is Martin McQuillan, Graeme MacDonald, Robin Purves, and Stephen Thomson, eds., Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 33 See Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). 34 See, for example, Glyn P. Norton, ed., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. III: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 35 On the significance of Cicero in Renaissance England, see Howard Jones, Master Tully: Cicero in Tudor England (Nieuwkoop: Bibliotheca Humanistica & Reformatorica, 1981), vol. LVII. 36 Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric (London: Routledge, 2007). 37 This paragraph is based on Victor Morgan, with Christopher Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge: Vol. II, 1546–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); J. M. Fletcher, “The Faculty of Arts,” in James McConica, ed., The History of the University of Oxford: Vol. III, The Collegiate University (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 157–212; Lisa Jardine, “Humanism and the Sixteenth Century Cambridge Arts Course,” History of Education 4 (1975), 16–31; Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1975); Helen M. Jewell, Education in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998); David Cressy, Education in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Arnold, 1975). 38 See Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluter, eds., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language and Literary Theory, AD 300–1475 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 39 I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1924); I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement (London: Routledge, 1929). 40 See Eagleton, Literary Theory, 41, 44. 41 See Praseedra Gopinath, “‘One of Those Old-Type Natural Fouled-up Guys’: The Belated Englishman in Philip Larkin’s Poetry,” Textual Practice 23.3

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(June 2009), 373–96. On Larkin’s admiration of Lawrence, see Anthony Thwaite, ed., Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–85 (London: Faber, 1992), 49–56, 149–51, passim. 42 See Eagleton, Literary Theory, ch. 1; Brian Doyle, English and Englishness (London: Routledge, 1989); Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

2

Theory and Practice in Historical Method Michael McKeon

“The difference between the individual as a person and what is accidental to him is not a conceptual difference but a historical fact. . . . What appears accidental to [a] later age as opposed to [an] earlier . . . is a form of intercourse which corresponded to a definite stage of development of the productive forces. . . . The conditions under which individuals have intercourse with each other . . . are conditions appertaining to their individuality, in no way external to them; conditions [that correspond] to the reality of their conditioned nature, their one-sided existence, the one-sidedness of which only becomes evident . . . for the later individuals. Then this condition appears as an accidental fetter, and the consciousness that it is a fetter is imputed to the earlier age as well.” Marx and Engels, The German Ideology

Consumption is also immediately production. . . . [It] ideally posits the object of production as an internal image, as a need, as drive and as purpose. It creates the objects of production in a still subjective form. . . . [P]roduction creates, produces consumption. . . . Production not only supplies a material for the need, but it also supplies a need for the material. . . . The object of art – like every other product – creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.

Marx, Grundrisse

Several years ago the Mellon Foundation invited me to participate in a program aimed at developing seminars for graduate students who were writing their dissertations. The program had grown out of Mellon’s aim to support and strengthen the structures of higher education in the humanities; the specific focus of the seminar was to be my decision. After some thought it occurred to me that the needs and concerns of students in the English Graduate Program at my institution might best be addressed by a workshop seminar in methods of historical interpretation for students of literature. The primary reading for this workshop would be chapters 40

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from the participants’ dissertations supplemented by a selection of essays by a range of scholars on historical method. On the one hand, like most students in the field these days, ours were committed to the idea of historicizing literature. On the other hand, as students of literature rather than history, they had not received any training in historical method. What seemed to me significantly absent from their graduate education in this regard was not a knowledge of historiography, whether chronologically or thematically organized, but the ongoing practical expectation that their claims about the historical meaning of the texts they worked on had to be persuasive. Through their training, I supposed, history students had internalized this requirement as a component of their habitual interpretive practice. Students of literature, however, were most likely to encounter the question of the criteria by which we assent to the claims of historical interpretation not at the level of practice but at the theoretical level of epistemology, where in recent decades the news has not been good.1 To be sure, the critique of empirical epistemology in literary theory raises issues of central importance to historical practice. Yet its prominence in the milieu of literary studies over the last several decades often has seemed ungrounded in the sort of practical experience of interpretive historicization it aims to test. In the absence of that experience, it became too easy for literature students to embrace an abstract and absolute caveat against the legitimacy of historical interpretation as such, sidestepping a more searching effort to test against one another the relative adequacy of different modes of historicization. Moreover, the focus on historical epistemology in particular seemed blinkered. Profound theoretical skepticism about the grounds of objectivity, demonstration, and evidence in the representation of the past by the present coexisted with habits of close reading (the training literature students do receive and internalize) that seemed to me vulnerable – given that the present is to the past as the reader is to the text – but somehow immune, to the same skepticism. True, the idea that history itself is a text promised illumination on both sides of the disciplinary divide. Yet in practice the analogy tended to work unevenly, reducing all history to naïve history while ignoring, at least within the framework of disciplinary comparison, the implications of this sort of critique for literary criticism.2 As I reflected on these issues, I formulated an idea of how the dissertation seminar might be motivated and organized. A skeptical approach to empiricism seemed to me not only compatible with, but essential to, historical method. But as this suggests, so is empiricism itself, because it

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is the basis on which any critique of historical method must be founded. Whatever misgivings we may have about the way empiricist standards of objectivity suffuse modern thinking, empiricism is, I believe, the only game in town. But the cultural credibility of empiricism is much younger than the ancient practice of history. When and why did they converge? Indeed, I wondered if this second-order kind of question, which in effect seeks to historicize historicism, might play a fruitful role in the study of historical method. How would this work? Not by research into intellectual history, certainly, but perhaps by generating a sustained awareness of the modern division of knowledge by which the disciplines of history and literature came to be separated out from each other, and both of them from the discipline of science. This became not the explicit plan by which the seminar proceeded but a periodic recourse that helped clarify what was at stake in our ambition to ask what makes historical readings of literature persuasive. Lest my purpose be misunderstood, I should add that by “persuasive” I do not mean to suggest that this is an essay in the “rhetoric” of history writing whose ultimate aim is to undercut it by showing that it is rhetorical and therefore, in the light of that demonstration, unpersuasive. Nor do I mean that by historicizing historical method I will practice a hermeneutics of suspicion, for which to historicize is to demystify by demonstrating that a category is not “natural” but “linguistic” or “constructed.” To the modest extent that our seminar involved historical investigation rather than the study of historical method, we found ourselves interested in understanding how historical method, long before it became available for this modern sort of demystification, came into its own through an earlier stage of demystification that was fueled not by the critique of empiricism but by empiricism itself. In recalling some of the high points of the seminar, this essay takes the following route. First, I describe how our seminar came to conceive that an effective historical method can be practiced through a method of inquiry that not only can begin the process of defining one’s goals but also pursue and complicate those goals at every stage of study. Second, I use that method to open up, through a schematic series of operations, the territory of historical investigation. Before turning to my argument, however, I’d like to reflect briefly on the relationship between this essay and the two, by Andrew Hadfield and Marshall Grossman, with which it has been grouped in the opening section of this volume. It seems to me that the three of us are in broad agreement on a number of important issues that inevitably are raised by the effort to rethink historicism. With Hadfield I recognize both the return

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to the historical that has occurred in the last several decades and the apprehension that this return has gone too far, vitiating (although not on its own) the practice of aesthetic judgment that at one time had seemed central to the work of the literary critic. And with Grossman I recognize that during this same period, defining the nature of literary criticism as a distinctive mode of inquiry has lost the attractiveness that had been generated at mid-century by the polemical and remarkable example of Northrop Frye. It seems to me that if the conjunction of literary and historical studies appears to be at least partially responsible for the neglect of aesthetic judgment and disciplinary definition today, it is nonetheless by asking historical questions that fruitful attention can be brought back to bear on these literary matters. Literature and literary criticism are historical entities. And although it is clear that historical entities can be the subject of illuminating ahistorical study, the question for me is not whether historical study has gone too far but whether we have thought hard enough about how to do it. Grossman argues for the importance of an “ethics of reading,” by which I understand him to mean the way we can be engaged or moved, in our own time and place, by a literary text whose expression is that of a writer who occupies a time and place different from our own. I think this comes close to describing what we call aesthetic response: not necessarily the explicit judgment of aesthetic value, but the sense of an affective connection to texts from which we are circumstantially detached – and to some degree by virtue of that very detachment. My own experience as a reader persuades me that the evocation of this sort of affect is not limited to texts we customarily would deem literary; at the same time I recognize it as more likely to be evoked by those we do. But for me the most interesting question raised by this recognition is not how to define more precisely, on this basis, the difference between the literary and the historical, but how to understand how this difference came to be – a historical question to which Hadfield’s interest in aesthetic judgment leads him in the final paragraphs of his essay (and one whose answer I will be touching on in what follows). By this I mean not just that we have learned to take the difference between literature and history as normative, but that the difference itself is a historical result; and the further back we look into the premodern history of literature and history the harder it is to discern that difference. When, and by what historical logic, did literary criticism learn to eschew judgments of political and religious value as inimical to disinterested interpretation and to embrace judgments of aesthetic value as coextensive with its proper practice? By the same token, the more the

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difference between literature and history has endured as a modern norm, the more each has been written according to that norm, so that what began as a complex intuition of what might be so became a tacit injunction to make it so. In the beginning all discourse was “poetic,” marked by the insistence of a formal patterning that helped lodge it in consciousness and memory. As the mnemonic necessity of patterning was obviated by literate and typographical technologies of objectifying discourse, “literature” came to designate writing in which self-conscious patterning persisted as an end in itself – not, as the aestheticist extreme would have it, the end of exclusive self-reference but the end of doubled reference, to itself and to the world beyond itself. When we speak of literary “form” we mean the more or less ostensible patterning of its language, and in the process of learning to read literary texts we become increasingly conscious of the dense, virtual, and historically ramified network of formal signs – embedded in diction, syntax, style, figuration, voice, allusion – that allows us to feel at a distance what others have written. I think Hadfield and Grossman agree that form is at the definitive heart of what we mean by literature, and perhaps also that its affective force at any contingent moment cannot be separated from the history of how that moment came to be. Di s ta nc e a n d Prox i m i t y The most common experience in our workshop readings of dissertation chapters, familiar to anyone who has engaged in this sort of collective reading, was the encounter with perspectival difference. The question of perspective goes to the heart of the inescapable difference between being a reader of another’s writing and being a reader of one’s own – the difference between having the distance to see when and in what terms a claim requires support and being so close to a claim that it appears selfevident. In the great majority of our workshop cases, a consensus of disparate readers emerged to guide writers toward what we broadly agreed was the necessary sort of revision, which often enough took the form of providing better evidence. Along the way we tried to formulate some general principles of giving evidence that might cover the particular cases we had encountered. What are the standards of validity, probability, adequacy, and the like that we seek to satisfy when we give evidence? Do some kinds of evidence have greater intrinsic authority than others? What are the comparative claims of “quality” and “quantity” – of intentional statements, say, as opposed to the accumulation of data – in providing

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evidence for a historical interpretation? How much documentation is enough – or too much? Substantive answers to these questions are hard to come by, in large part because they must depend on and emerge from the nature of the project at hand. Later in the chapter I will return to the problem of evidence – and, more broadly, of perspective – in doing literary history. For the moment, however, the most useful principle may be no more than a rule of thumb based on the familiar workshop experience I have just mentioned: adducing satisfactory and plausible evidence requires the writer to be able self-consciously to internalize, within or alongside the relatively tacit standards of judgment one brings to one’s own work, the standards of others. This is a principle of detachment or distance: for evidence to be credible it must be credible according to standards of judgment that go beyond those of the writer. This rule of thumb is closely related to a central principle of empirical epistemology: to be credible, evidence must be separable from the phenomenon for which it provides evidence. John Locke, criticizing Puritan enthusiasts not on religious but on epistemological grounds, wrote that: [i]f they say they know it to be true, because it is a Revelation from GOD, the reason is good: but then it will be demanded, how they know it to be a Revelation from GOD. . . . Every Conceit that thoroughly warms our Fancies must pass for an Inspiration, if there be nothing but the Strength of our Perswasions, whereby to judge of our Perswasions: . . . Reason must . . . examine their Truth by something extrinsical to the Perswasions themselves.3

We readers are Locke’s enthusiasts: to be persuasive we need to give evidence extrinsic to the self-evidence of our self-persuasion. But the principle has implications for us as readers not only of ourselves but also of seventeenth-century enthusiasts. What Locke requires as grounds for assent to propositions is a detachment or distance of the object of knowledge from the subjective process and norms by which it knows itself. Whether we are historians who live in a later age, or, like Locke, contemporary with those enthusiasts, we cannot know them without having access to something beyond their own self-understanding. But what if our object of knowledge is not enthusiasts but poets like Milton and Dryden? Often enough the evidence on which we wish to base at least part of our interpretation of poetry is the judgment – the intentions and motives – of its authors. Indeed, this also is true of objects of knowledge like the enthusiasts themselves, because part of the knowledge we are after is knowledge of their subjective self-understanding. In such cases, it would seem, where the questions one asks about objects of historical knowledge call

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for answers that include the self-perceptions of those objects, subject and object must interpenetrate one another, and the principle of distance is joined by a principle of proximity. This means not that giving evidence in the pursuit of literary history – and any other historical inquiry that takes subjectivity as part of its object – therefore escapes the basic requirements of empirical method, but that we need a more nuanced understanding of empirical method.4 H i s t or ic i z i ng E m pi r ic i s m For such an understanding we could do worse than return to Locke, because in the case of self-knowledge he recognized that the separation of object from subject is not available as a matter of course. “The activity of reflection,” he wrote, is one in which “the Understanding turns inwards upon it self, reflects on its own Operations, and makes them the Object of its own Contemplation,” and he remarked that under normal circumstances, “the Understanding . . . takes no notice of it self: and it requires Art and Pains to set it at a distance, and make it its own Object.” If “sensation” is the means by which the subject gains knowledge of sensible objects that are external to it, “reflection” is a kind of “internal Sense” by which the subject gains self-knowledge.5 Fifty years after Locke’s Essay, David Hume pursued this empiricist logic further than Locke had done. For Locke, the case of reflective self-knowledge was a skeptical complication, perhaps even an exception to the rule, of empirical epistemology. Hume saw this exception to the rule as the rule itself, demonstrating that our sensible experience of the world cannot be separated from the experience of perceiving it.6 In the years following this brief but remarkable philosophical trajectory, Hume’s argument commonly has been bracketed off from the mainstream practice of empiricism, following the example of Hume himself in his own philosophical career. This has left the Humean rapprochement of subject and object to be rediscovered most often as a critique of empiricism rather than as an extension of it, most famously, perhaps, in the thesis of the hermeneutic circle.7 How is objective knowledge possible if its theoretically distinct categories can be felt, in interpretive practice, to interpenetrate or presuppose one another? Most often this thesis is formulated in terms other than those of subject-object relations. If the epistemological project begins inductively with particulars (or parts) in order to construct a knowledge of the general (or the whole) that is constituted by them, the nature of the whole is already predicated in, and determinant

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of, the conception of its parts as parts. A similar circularity obtains when we begin with a knowledge of the generality of the whole in order to construe the particular parts whose nature is already established by that condition of wholeness. Changing the terms from parts and whole to subject and object alters the argument to some degree but not in a way that challenges the basic circularity thesis: we can know an object only in the subjective terms available to us as subjects – or more simply, the unknown cannot be known except in terms of what we already know. So from one readily available perspective, the circularity of interpretation that is highlighted by the hermeneutic circle is by definition a logical contradiction that cannot be reconciled with the idea of empirical knowledge. Broadly speaking, this is the perspective of the natural sciences, which emerged toward the end of the Renaissance as an offshoot of the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. The opposition of the arts to the sciences was precipitated out by the opposition between the Ancients and the Moderns because the more closely contemporaries examined the grounds for claiming the superiority of either period over the other, the clearer it became that any claim to superiority turned on which kind of knowledge was under consideration.8 On the one hand, by the first years of the seventeenth century enough evidence had accumulated to show that in matters of what we call “science” and contemporaries called “natural” or “the new philosophy,” the ancients had gotten much of it wrong. On the other hand, the excellence of Homer and Aeschylus, Virgil and Horace persisted over time in a way that seemed impervious to the sort of standard by which Aristotle could be confidently criticized. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the traditional and undifferentiated category of scientia, which encompassed all knowledge, was divided into science on the one hand and the arts or humanities on the other. Science, proceeding incrementally by the accumulation and quantification of data acquired through empirical sense perception, avoided the hermeneutic circle through experimental testing that winnowed out, as “variables,” the subjective admixtures of particular acts of knowing, thereby permitting generalization about – that is, an abstractive understanding of – the objective properties of the natural world. As Bernard de Fontenelle put it in 1688: [I]f the moderns are to be able to improve continually on the ancients, the fields in which they are working must be of a kind which allows progress. Eloquence and poetry [la poésie] require only a certain number of rather narrow ideas as compared with other arts, and they depend for their effect primarily upon the liveliness of the imagination. Now mankind could easily amass in a few

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centuries a small number of ideas, and liveliness of imagination has no need of a long sequence of experiences nor of many rules before it reaches the furthest perfection of which it is capable. But science [la physique], medicine, mathematics, are composed of numberless ideas and depend upon precision of thought which improves with extreme slowness, and is always improving.9

By this view, the value of the arts and the humanities is qualitative and insusceptible to gradual increase, generalization, and understanding because their knowledge of the object is suffused with the imaginative particularities of the singular knowing subject. What about history and literature? Ever since its seventeenth-century formulation, scientific method has been the model by which all efforts to establish standards of credible and probable knowledge in both of these disciplines have proceeded. One might even say that the modern constitution of these disciplines has been a function of the way they have turned scientific empiricism to their own ends. The category “literature” cohered over the course of the eighteenth century in tandem with the explicit theorization of aesthetic judgment and response as an empirical mode whose relative detachment from the objective realm of the senses was achieved through the imagination, rather than through the understanding, of the knowing subject. The history of this theorization is a topic in itself to which I can only allude here,10 and it separated literature not only from science but also from the discipline of history. However, literature was seen to be not only a special way of knowing the world, but also an object of knowledge that was itself susceptible to being known through the fast-developing methods of literary criticism and literary history, which evidently shared the epistemological fortunes of historical method as such.11 Efforts at accommodating both history and literary history to the standards of science and its strict separation of subject from object have routinely punctuated the practice of historical method in the modern period.12 But the most persuasive developments in historical method have been those that take the hermeneutic circle not as a logical contradiction that precludes real knowledge but as a historical contradiction that provides the key to its methodical acquisition. Is this an “empirical” procedure? If we take “empiricism” to apply only to the objectivity of knowledge from which subjectivity has been evacuated, the answer is no. But we arrive at a different answer if we see the separation of subject from object – the major premise of empirical epistemology – as the starting point of a method that in departing from the scientific does not depart from its empiricist grounding. As I turn now to describing, historical method involves a strategic and self-conscious oscillation

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between particularity and generality, parts and whole, a toggling back and forth between these poles in a process that successively adjusts the nature of each in turn by reference to the other, until a point is reached where knowledge of the object is felt to satisfy the standards of credibility, probability, sufficiency, or the like. This method of historical inquiry is an empirical epistemology because the process I have just described – the dialectical movement between the division and the conflation of categories – depends for its very intelligibility on the division of knowledge through which empiricism itself is constituted as a mode of knowledge. H i s t or ic a l M e t hod: M at c h i ng Pa r t ic u l a r s a n d G e n e r a l s I have already alluded to the radical critique of historical method that dominated literary theory until rather recently. This critique may be known best for its blanket charge that the practice of history is committed to “binary” oppositions – for example, between the object and the subject. But this is to confuse opposition with dichotomy, provisional with absolute separation. It seems to me rather that the basic tool of historical method is the strategic dialectic between the division and the conflation of categories. It becomes available as a practice by applying it as widely as possible to the broad range of experience we take to be historical. In other words, the dialectic of opposition is a tool of discovery, a way of opening up possibilities for the interpretation of any and all historical phenomena. This will become more concrete if we momentarily adopt from E.D. Hirsch a different set of terms for our basic polar opposition, one that grows out of the study of genre and thereby capitalizes on the notion that history is a text.13 How do we recognize that a given text “belongs” to a certain genre? Whether we begin with the text or with its hypothesized genre, we gain confidence in assigning generic identity by successively “matching” the particular “traits” of the text to the general “type” of a given genre. The process begins on the basis of what may be a very loose expectation of how the match might be made, and as we continue the matching process we refine our understanding by reciprocal reconceptions of the nature of the generic type and reexaminations of the traits we take to characterize the text. The opposition between traits and type is methodologically useful because both categories are heuristic and therefore invite the revisionary process that in the end issues in a probable match. If such a match is not available, we may find ourselves speculating, as H.R. Jauss describes in his account of the aesthetics of reception,

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that the culturally given “horizon of expectations” that has guided our matching of traits to type has been exceeded and that the text at hand may contribute to the establishment of a new genre.14 The dialectical opposition between textual traits and generic type, although drawn from the precincts of genre theory, usefully illustrates the much broader province of hermeneutics. Traditionally a technique of reading a religious canon, hermeneutics construes the meaning of a “text” – commonly a word or a phrase – by methodically juxtaposing it with or within its enclosing linguistic context. This traditional, microlevel of matching text to context at the strictly linguistic level provides the model for the expanded, macro-level of hermeneutics, where the text is typically an entire book and its context is one particular part – political, social, intellectual – of the entire setting in which the book and its publication may be said to exist. There are an indefinite number of ways a context can be abstracted from its surrounds and conceived as the heuristic whole that best illuminates the text in question. No act of contextualization can be definitive; in fact, hermeneutic study commonly involves multiple reentries into the text and reconceptions of context. These experimental substitutions of one interpretive context for another build on what has been learned, from each successive contextualization, about the likely construal of the text in question, moving toward an increasingly persuasive construal. Historical interpretation has long found it fruitful to deploy a version of this process in which the text becomes not a word in a book or even a book but any other sort of historical entity – an event, institution, movement, culture – and the context becomes a yet more comprehensive historical entity. By successively matching and adjusting the lesser to the greater historical entity in the experimental process I have described, the historian arrives at a plausible understanding of what kind or “genre” of thing he or she is studying. As with the opposition of the particular and the general, the parts and the whole, and the traits and the type, historical text and context are heuristic categories that posit boundaries so as to fashion a two-part mechanism that construes meaning by crossing and recrossing those boundaries. Many of the cases in which our seminar members were collectively successful in improving on one another’s historical theses are well described as analyses of text and context. Is Hamlet a revenge tragedy? Is Paradise Lost a Renaissance poem? Is Milton a classical republican/civic humanist? Is Donne best seen as a Catholic or an Anglican poet? Is Swift’s masterpiece a satire of the pride not only of Gulliver but also of the Houyhnhnms? Was seventeenth-century latitudinarianism a precursor of

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the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility? Should the rise of the public sphere in England be backdated to the middle of the seventeenth century (or even earlier)? Were the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution revolutionary in comparable ways? As these examples make clear, to be hermeneutically useful, the relation of text to context need not conform to the single template of particular to general, of contained to container. In fact, the very diversity of these examples suggested to us that if we want the text-context opposition to provide practical guidance in discovering interpretive options, we need to think more analytically about how the relatively undifferentiated heterogeneity of these exemplary questions might be broken down into its component parts. Can we identify the several different kinds of oppositional sets that, taken together, schematically generate the range of possibilities for historical inquiry? Di a l e c t ic a l Opp o s i t ion I: H i s t or y a s F o c a l i z at ions of Pe r spe c t i v e As I suggested earlier, the separation of scientific empiricism from historical empiricism grew out of the notion that science requires a separation of the knowing subject from the object of knowledge. At its most extreme, this separation is expressed in the antithesis between the qualitative terms of self-knowledge and the quantitative terms of enumeration and measurement. Perhaps the recognition that historical method cannot proceed on a strictly quantifying basis was the necessary precondition for recognizing that an analogous version of this opposition exists within the realm of historical method itself. If historical knowledge cannot claim the objectivity of scientific knowledge, it can profit from distinguishing what we might call more or less objective ways of doing history. The terminology most commonly used by historians for making this distinction opposes “explanation” on the one hand to “interpretation” on the other.15 There has been much interesting debate over the exact nature of this opposition, but for present purposes it may be enough to characterize it as the difference between distanced and proximate, “external” and “internal” approaches to a historical phenomenon, meaning by “external” either something like statistical quantification or the laws, whether physical or metaphysical, that account for history as it were from without, without reference to human will and motive. On the one hand, we can “explain” the past in causal terms that are not available to its own self-understanding. On the other hand, we can “interpret” the past in terms that are compatible with, even derived from, its own motives and conceptual-affective

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framework. Both of these opposed methods have influentially been called “historicism.” When Karl Popper argued “the poverty of historicism,” he was criticizing the notion that doing history requires us to elaborate general laws – material and social but also psychological – as a foundation for explaining particular beliefs and behaviors “from the outside.”16 But “historicism” also, and more commonly, has been associated with the notion that doing history requires us to understand the meaning of the past within the context of, and in sympathy with, the intentional motives of its actors.17 If we deploy the opposition between explanation and interpretation broadly enough, it becomes methodologically useful in the first instance because it organizes the bewildering heterogeneity of my list of exemplary questions in literary history that have been asked by sorting at least some of them into the sorts of questions that might be asked. Now, there are obvious difficulties in the practical application of these categories. The coherence of the categories “external explanation” and “internal interpretation” is weakened as soon as we consider them in isolation rather than as antithetical and reciprocally constitutive parts of a greater methodological whole. Do we raise more questions than we answer when we lump together as “external” the kinds of determinacy advanced by economic materialism and psychoanalysis? The problem is even more evident in the case of “internal” interpretation. Even a small corner of the past – even a single consciousness – is populated by a multitude of motives, some of which even stand in relation to others as “external causes” to “internal motives.” Donne’s motives, for example, become susceptible to the sort of complication entailed in juxtaposing the different implications of “faith,” “belief,” “affirmation,” “profession,” “practice,” and “rule-bound behavior,” not to mention the different sorts and degrees of intentional claim made by disparate kinds of text – poetry, sermons, letters, public documents – or the subtly distinctive intentional valences of oral, written, printed (and for our era, cyber-technological) discourse. The question of Milton’s sociopolitical convictions (was he a classical republican/civic humanist?), of a different order than that of Donne’s religious beliefs, is perhaps more susceptible to being approached as an inquiry into the history of ideas. This sort of inquiry often identifies words, phrases, or other distinctive locutions that are at least partially representative or constitutive, especially in association with each other, of the idea under investigation. In the case of civic humanism, scholars have drawn our attention to the normative language of public virtue, landed property, and secularity, and to the negative status of fortune, luxury, corruption, and mercenary troops

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or standing armies. But these locutions and their norms play an active role as commonplaces in much of the discourse of Milton’s period, and to assess his attitude toward classical republicanism, we need to interpret the kind and degree of intention that is implicit in each usage. Schematically speaking, that is, we need to construe each textual word or phrase in its immediate contextual passage in order to judge whether it is used there as a discursive “commonplace” that betrays a specifically classical-republican “ideology” or instead used with a discernible edge that turns it to ideological ends other than those of classical republicanism.18 Interpreting Swift’s satiric norms (another putative classical republican/ civic humanist) in the fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels invites attention to a full spectrum of evidence from the internal to the external because it addresses a textual crux that goes to the heart of Swift’s personal, literary, ethical, sociopolitical, and existential identity. Why are the Houyhnhnms not, as their author is, Christian? How does their treatment compare with that of other figures in the first three parts of the book, who seem more clearly to be objects of either Swift’s praise or blame? Are characteristic strategies to be found in Swift’s satiric practice? Is Gulliver’s Travels an “imaginary voyage”? How was Swift educated and what had he read? Who were his friends and what were his politics in 1726? What were his views on sex, race, and social status? How compatible are his own writings on sublimation with those of psychoanalytic theory (and does their compatibility matter)? The nature of our heuristic context, and of the scholarly search for evidence it dictates, will be defined in very different ways depending on which of these (or other) questions we undertake to answer. And in the pursuit of answers, new contexts and reading programs, new exercises in matching traits to type, and new judgments about the resulting matches and their plausibility necessarily will follow. (What does it mean to be Christian in 1726? Do the differences between the Houyhnhnms and the king of Brobdingnag outweigh their comparability? Does Swift’s imaginary voyage better fit the model of More’s Utopia or of Vairasse d’Allais’ History of the Sevarites? Can we tell if Swift had actually read a book he possessed in his library? When was Gulliver’s Travels [not printed but] composed? What were “sex” and “race” in Swift’s age, and how can we reduce his ambivalence about aristocracy to a coherent “view”?) What I want to emphasize is that these complications, although they appear to raise serious problems with the method of interpretation I propose, should be seen instead as stages in its practical unfolding and application. The defects of the way the explanation-interpretation,

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external-internal opposition is formulated do not compromise the utility of its explicitness, and its consequent availability as a tool that can be adjusted to different kinds and layers of discourse. Rather, the explanatory crudity of the opposition (for example, its obliviousness of the fact that in Donne’s England the sociopolitical and the religious were lived as thoroughly interpenetrating categories of experience) is the precondition for its interpretive refinement. Deepening inquiry goes hand in hand with the recalibration of the methodological formulations themselves. For this reason, the most profitable opposition in heuristic terms may be the most general one – like the external versus the internal approach – and the invitation it gives us to enter more deeply into analysis in a methodical but open-ended fashion. Di a l e c t ic a l Opp o s i t ion I I: H i s t or y a s Mom e n t s of T e m p or a l i t y To some of my exemplary questions in literary history the dialectical opposition of external and internal would appear largely unhelpful – for example, whether the latitudinarianism of Restoration divines was a precursor of the sensibility movement a century later. Temporality is of course the existential medium most often associated with the domain of history: history, we like to think, happens in time. To understand the historical nature of sensibility, then, requires that we conceive the opposition “latitudinarianism-sensibility” along the temporal axis. Here contextualization is, broadly speaking, a matter not of mobility of viewpoint but of temporal potentiality. Temporal opposition does not in the first instance raise a question of determinacy on the schematic spectrum from cause to motive; it posits the field of temporality itself as flow or movement, a medium of becoming that schematically defines the difference between one precursory moment and the next. This understanding differs from that of the familiar theoretical charge against historical method that temporality – or its codified version, chronology – amounts to teleology. Behind this charge is the misconception that to posit a temporal relationship between a before and an after is to posit the latter as something like an evolutionary fulfillment of the former. This seems to me as mistaken as the belief that building a chimney establishes a normative hierarchy between its component bricks because some of them are higher than others. The policing of teleology as the quintessential tendency of temporal opposition also ignores the fact that for most of history it is not evolutionary but devolutionary thinking that has dominated the field.

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How do temporal oppositions become methodologically dialectical? When a temporal question like that entailed in the latitudinarianismsensibility opposition is answered in the affirmative, the implication is that the precursory status of the earlier formation is not only literally true but also expressive of a more particular kind of relationship to the later one, and earlier and later are experimentally reconceived as two moments in a single sequence of becoming. And if the evidence for a more particular relation between the two moments is compelling enough – that is, if it is a precursory relationship that goes well beyond the sheer necessity of the continuous temporal medium entailed in the very idea of becoming – we may wish to see the sequence more definitively as a “period.” To posit a period no more entails perspectival determinacy than does positing a sequence. However, it invites us to ask further questions, about the nature of the moments that frame the period, that lead us into the dialectic of perspectives: questions about the motives that may be entailed in the textual usages by which we define those moments as well as about the causes that may suggest a contextual but extra-intentional relationship between those moments. But the dialectic of temporality also has a distinct logic of its own. When we postulate periods, we generalize from evidence not just that the beginning and ending moments are connected to each other, but also that the moments between them are connected as well, and in ways that are related, whether more or less tangentially, to those that connect the two moments to each other. And as with the dialectical opposition between external and internal perspectives, although with different consequences, it is the revisionary movement back and forth between moments that thickens the texture of connection sufficiently to warrant identifying a sequence as a period. What is fundamental to this texture is neither the notion of a causal chain of moments nor the notion that each of them is intentionally motivated, but persuasive evidence of continuity. However periodization is an extreme outcome of temporalization. More often the temptation to postulate a period is instead the prelude to the discovery of shorter sequences, within the potentiality of a period, that are more compellingly integral than it is, no doubt in part because the territory they cover is less extensive and therefore more securely tied to the available evidence. I will return to the topic of periods in a moment, but first I want to ask what other sorts of temporal discovery, falling short of periodization, may be thrown into relief by shuttling between discrete temporal moments. Perhaps the most fruitful terminology for attaining this end by method is Raymond Williams’s triad of the residual, the dominant, and the

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emergent, which transforms the paradoxically intransitive stages of historical temporality – past, present, and future – into a dynamic language of process. Here the isolation of the central term establishes, through its very dominance, the negative conditions under which pre- and postdominance coalesce into view. Needless to say, the transitive quality of Williams’s categories militates against their stabilization – a point demonstrated by his effort to subtilize yet more the way dominance is infiltrated by emergence through the category of the “pre-emergent,” and then more subtly yet by those “structures of feeling” famously put forth by Williams to identify meanings and values so deeply interwoven with lived social experience as not yet to have been “precipitated out” into semantic availability.19 This is a good example of the way positing an opposition in one dimension (here, the temporal opposition of present and future) creates the opportunity for positing within one term of that opposition (the future) more precise versions of the opposition itself (dominant and emergent, emergent and pre-emergent, pre-emergent and structures of feeling) that recapitulate, and carry forward at a micro-level, the analytic work of the initial, macro opposition. Furthermore, the category “structures of feeling” exemplifies how the methodological refinement of opposition within one dimension can create an opportunity for opening up opposition within another dimension – here, the perspectival dimension of external and internal. “Structures of feeling” not only (like “emergent” and “pre-emergent”) recapitulates at the micro-level the initial terms of temporal opposition. It also does something similar within the perspectival dimension by conceiving an irreducibly singular moment of temporal futurity in perspectival terms, postulating a species of the internal (“feeling”) so delicately delineated that it bleeds into its external, unmotivated causes (social “structure”) without being reduced to or subsumed by them. So Williams’s influential term raises questions of perspectival determinacy. As I will suggest in a moment, however, these questions may be more instructively seen as the issue of a third and final type of dialectical opposition. Another temporal category that, like “emergence,” has gained favor for its capacity to transform apparent dichotomy into dialectical opposition is “pre-history.” When we speak of the pre-history of a phenomenon we attend to a temporal sequence as though through a magnifying glass, so that what had seemed to have no more than a sequential relationship to that phenomenon can be seen to be significantly related to it, although not in the fully constitutive way that would justify including it within the “history” of the phenomenon. The language of pre-history conveys a sense

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of permanent hypothesis, because the accumulation of evidence that confirms the probability of that term would likely result in the renaming of pre-history as history, turning the dialectic of separate parts into a whole made up of component parts. And in common with the other categories whose manipulation is central to this historical method, the transformation of pre-history into history is a heuristic enterprise that both establishes a new category of knowledge and solicits, on its own basis, the discovery of yet others, and perhaps even its own dissolution. Using the category “labor” as his example, Marx offers the most nuanced and suggestive account I know of how a pre-history might be disclosed. “Labor seems a quite simple category,” he writes. But in fact it is quite complicated, because “labor” is both immeasurably old and a product of the last century. According to Marx, Adam Smith’s topic, “the wealth of nations,” is a revolution in economic thought (although it has its own pre-history) because it is the result of generalizing, from the many kinds of labor he knew, to “the abstract universality of wealthcreating activity” or “labour as such.” Smith was able to make this leap, Marx argues, because by the end of the eighteenth century, no single kind of labor was still predominant, and increased labor mobility – that is, both physical and social mobility – ensured that a given mode of labor no longer seemed “organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form.” “The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid to all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society. . . . [Yet it] by no means begins only at the point where one can speak of it as such . . .”20 What Marx calls the “simple abstraction” is a whole that encloses a dialectical opposition: on the one hand, a protracted temporal sequence of heterogeneous activity; on the other, the comparatively brief moment of its conceptual generalization. Only by toggling back and forth between both parts of this whole, he suggests, can we do justice to the nature of historical temporality. To a great extent, however, the force of Marx’s argument comes from the nontemporal terms he uses here to describe the relationship between a historical phenomenon and its pre-history, namely the material and the conceptual. Now, the dialectical opposition between the material and the conceptual is recognizable as a version of the perspectival opposition between the external and the internal. The realm of material activity, by its nature objective, lies outside the realm of self-understanding and therefore is a source of historical explanation,

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whereas to conceptualize is a function of the subject and a precondition for, if not a guarantee of, interpretation. And although Marx finds material explanation essential to his work as a historian, he deploys it here not in a strictly oppositional mode, whereby conceptualization would be seen as the effect of a material cause, but as one part of a dialectical whole in which materiality and conceptualization have a fluid and reciprocal effect on one another. It is in this spirit that Williams formulated the category “structures of feeling.” Di a l e c t ic a l Opp o s i t ion I I I: H i s t or y a s L e v e l s of S t ruc t u r e Although he did not discover it and his historical materialism is not essential to it, the dimension of analysis represented by Marx’s division and conflation of the material and the mental is indispensable to historical understanding. Earlier I referred to the common notion that history can be equated with temporality. Marx repudiates this view by bringing into relation with the category of temporality the nontemporal category of structure. The result is an analytic grid composed of a “horizontal,” temporal dimension and a “vertical” dimension that is atemporal in the sense that it amounts to something like a slice or cross-section of temporality by which is disclosed the structure of any given moment. The relationship between temporality and structure is fundamentally oppositional in the way that time and space are oppositional. But like time and space, the temporal and the structural axes are at every moment coextensive; to do history is to do justice to this coextension.21 In Marx’s analysis, structure, like temporality, can be divided and subdivided according to the local requirements of inquiry. The most general division is the opposition of infrastructure to superstructure, social being to consciousness. But in order to achieve greater specificity, Marx often enough opens up this opposition into the three-part relationship between material production, social intercourse, and consciousness, where the middle structure, by mediating between the other two, makes explicit their dialectical relationship by its appropriability to each of them. Once again, these structural divisions are heuristic: they posit opposed wholes that are susceptible both to dialectical relation as parts of greater wholes and to subdivision into their component parts. In Marx’s general usage, there exists a causal – or better, a determinant – relationship between the material and the conceptual realms of historical structure. The determinacy of the material exerts an ontological force that is effective at all

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levels of structural and temporal existence. However, the particularizing requirements of historical method often enough lead Marx to focus on local phenomena for which the effective force of superstructure – political policy, social theory, literary movements, cultural tendencies – will be evident. The philosophers and historians of the Scottish Enlightenment may be the first to have put into concerted practice this model of historical interpretation that coordinates temporal sequence with inquiry into the structure of historical phenomena at any given stage in that sequence. Adam Ferguson wrote that if we would know the character of our distant past, of which little or no material evidence remains, we might conjecture it by observing similarities between cultures at comparable stages of development.22 The most celebrated outcome of this sort of “conjectural” history, as it came to be called, was the stadial theory of human civilization, whose appeal was tempered – or enhanced – by its susceptibility to teleological uses. And although the temporal and the structural axes of historical method are interdependent, their utility goes far beyond the dubious possibility of constructing a model that can predict the future development of a given culture. A familiar terminology for the temporal and the structural axes of history is the opposition of “diachrony” to “synchrony.” Saussure formulated this opposition to designate “the axis of successions” and “the axis of simultaneities” in linguistic study, an “opposition” that “is absolute and allows no compromise” because “[t] he diachronic perspective deals with phenomena that are unrelated to [structural] systems although they do condition them.”23 The temptation to extrapolate Saussure’s innovative opposition from the study of language to the formulation of analogous axes in the study of literature (syntagm and paradigm, metonymy and metaphor), and thence to the study of history, has been both productive and problematic. Saussure’s structuralist followers have tended to correlate the “diachrony-synchrony” opposition within language with a “history-structure” extrapolation, thereby contributing to the reduction of history to temporality – a theoretical confusion that is related to the reduction of temporality to teleology.24 In historical practice, diachronic and synchronic analyses are not “absolute” but dialectically intertwined. This can be seen in the way historical periods coalesce as probable categories of study when we oscillate back and forth between discrete moments in a temporal sequence until this multiplicity of traits is seen to possess the family resemblance of a general type. At this point, the diachronic study of history is operationally coextensive with its synchronic study because a period is nothing but a synchronic unit defined in

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its wholeness by its separation out from the temporal sequence of which it is also a part. Of course a period, however much its identification as a synchronic structure depends on its abstraction from diachrony, also possesses in itself a diachronic dimension, and it therefore cannot be said to be an “atemporal” structure. Nor can this apparent problem be solved by radically reducing the length of a posited period so as to make it devoid of temporality. On the one hand, the very definition of a period entails temporality; on the other hand, it is in the nature of time to be indefinitely divisible without sacrificing its temporal status. But in any case, the internal diachrony of synchronic structures is no more a methodological problem than is the external composition of diachrony by moments each of which has a synchronic dimension. The reciprocity of diachrony and synchrony ensures the concrete historicity of the phenomena to whose analysis they are methodologically applied, which is the same as saying that their reciprocity tests the historicity of those phenomena. Even period categories that attain the structural stability of habitual usage, like “the Renaissance,” are heuristic in the sense that their quasi-institutional claim to plausibility is an open invitation to experiments in reformulation, as the recent advocacy of the category “early modern” exemplifies. The protest against the reifying tendencies of periodization, like that against “binaries,” misconceives categorization to be a dogmatic strategy for closing down understanding rather than the first step in opening it up to questions that otherwise would never be asked. The synchronic challenge posed by the utter singularity of Paradise Lost may be less significant than the diachronic challenge posed by its belatedness as a Renaissance artifact. But of this we might ask: What is thereby challenged: the status of Paradise Lost as a Renaissance poem or the status of the Renaissance as a period category capable of coordinating its temporality structurally, that is, across national lines? The answer to this question, which generates new ones in turn, depends on whether the literary historian is most interested in bringing the instrument of dialectical opposition to bear on issues of generic or of period inclusiveness. In the preceding pages I have tried to describe a historical method that has a theoretical grounding but whose major value lies in its practical applicability to concrete problems in doing literary history. And history as such: for in the end, the opposition between “literary history” and “other sorts of history,” while useful in emphasizing the special demands of the former (for example, a sensitivity to the subtle intentional distinctions that are implicated in the use of different genres and media), is perhaps even more useful in forcing us to see this specialness as inherent in doing

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history as such. The method I have outlined is practical because it involves practices that are intelligible and determinate as concrete operations. The central practice is the deployment of analytic oppositions in a dialectical fashion, discovering and foreclosing new parts within former wholes and new wholes subtended by former parts. At the primary stage of analysis, there are three broad dimensions in which this method can be pursued: those of perspectival determinacy, moments of temporality, and levels of structure. Succeeding stages of analysis are dictated by choices made at the primary stage and are likely to involve the following two methodological shifts. First, within any one of these three dimensions, the relationship between oppositional terms at the primary level of analysis can be adapted to a more closely focused analysis of, and within, a single one of those terms. Second, all three of the dimensions can lead analysis into and out of any other dimension. By what evaluative criteria are methodological choices made? Near the beginning of this essay I reduced the thesis of the hermeneutic circle to its bare bones: the unknown cannot be known except in terms of what we already know. And yet in practice, gaining new knowledge is a rather common experience. The categorical aura of the hermeneutic circle is a function of the conciseness with which it is formulated. The more fully its circularity is described, the more it becomes recognizable as, not the dead end of repetition, but a methodological process of understanding whereby what we know is incrementally and differentially matched and rematched – increasingly with by-products that have been thrown up by the process itself – through a series of operations that leaves us in the end where we have not been before. How do we know when we have finished? Given that there is no end to the process of gaining historical knowledge that exists outside the process itself, we decide we have completed our task when (however forced this may be by the practical limits of time, opportunity, access to sources, and the like) we are satisfied with the results. Throughout this essay I have used words like “satisfactory,” “adequate,” “sufficient,” “persuasive,” “plausible,” “probable,” even “valid,” to signify, with respect to standards of epistemology and method, the positive evaluations both historians and their readers make of their work. These evaluations judge the degree to which there is a match, across the entire spectrum of the most particular to the most general levels of discourse, between explanatory and interpretive claims on the one hand and the evidence adduced to support them on the other. Entered into through the dialectic of oppositions, the three dimensions of perspective, temporality, and structure offer a method of discovery that is both economical

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in its operation and open-ended in its reach. The criteria by which we judge the match between claims and evidence are empirical in the same way that the hermeneutic matching of text to context is empirical. In the early modern period it became common to compare the reading of scripture with the reading of God’s other book, nature, and at least for a while both science and history took seriously the techniques of biblical exegesis as a model for their own enterprises. The discipline of history came into its own when it embraced the methodological requirement that knowledge of the past be grounded in “texts” whose objectivity, even in the most inclusive sense of that term, is also a function of subjective interpretation – that is, interpretation by a subject. This is the objectivity not of deconstructive “textuality” but of empirical hermeneutics. To recall the purpose with which I began this essay, students of literary history may gain their best access to historical method less through exposure to the training historians may customarily receive than by reflecting self-consciously on their own training in the close reading of written texts as the basis for extrapolating outward and upward to the realm of history as such. No t e s 1 The skeptical critique of empirical epistemology was central to those movements, poststructuralism and deconstruction, that dominated the heyday of “theory” in the latter decades of the last century, and it persists in less programmatic form today in much criticism that has been influenced by those movements. A case in point is the assemblage of practices that in the 1980s came loosely to be called “the new historicism.” It seems to me that the thread that connected these practices was the unfulfillable aim to return literary criticism to historical study, which seemed to have been abandoned when the theory movements were ascendant, without sacrificing the radical skepticism that was theory’s hallmark. 2 For an example and a fuller discussion of this tendency, see Michael McKeon, “A Defense of Dialectical Method in Literary History,” diacritics (Spring 1989), 91–2. 3 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), IV.xix.11, 14 (702, 704). 4 For a thoughtful discussion of distance and proximity in eighteenth-century histories and historiography, see Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), “Conclusion” and passim. 5 Locke, Essay, II.i.4, 8 (105, 107); I.i.1 (43). 6 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), 2nd ed. rev., ed. L.A. SelbyBigge and P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), I.iv.2, 6, 7 (187–218, 251–74).

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7 The most fundamental and influential commentators on this concept are the nineteenth-century German philosophers Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. 8 For a lucid account of this development, see Douglas Lane Patey, “Ancients and Moderns,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H.B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 34–46. My characterization of the opposition between the arts and the sciences, although schematic, accords well enough with our modern schematism. However, the terms of the eighteenthcentury debate were a great deal less tidy than this division would suggest: see David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), ch. 2. 9 Bernard Le Bovier Fontenelle, “A Digression on the Ancients and Moderns,” trans. John Hughes (with revisions, 1719), in The Continental Model, rev. ed., ed. Scott Elledge and Donald Schier (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 362. See Fontenelle, “Digression sur Les anciens et les modernes” (1688), in Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes. Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, ed. Robert Shackleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 166: “Cependant afin que les modernes puissent toujours enchérir sur les anciens, il faut que les choses soient d’une espèce à le permettre. L’éloquence et la poésie ne demandent qu’un certain nombre de vues assez borné, et elles dépendent principalement de la vivacité de l’imagination; or les hommes peuvent avoir amassé en peu de siècles un petit nombres de vues, et la vivacité de l’imagination n’a pas besoin d’une longue suite d’expériences, ni d’une grande quantité de règles pour avoir toute la perfection dont elle est capable. Mais la physique, la médecine, les mathématiques, sont composées d’un nombre infini de vues, et dépendent de la justesse du raisonnement, qui se perfectionne avec une extrême lenteur, et se perfectionne toujours . . .” The “Digression” first appeared in Fontenelle’s Poésies pastorales (1688). 10 For a fuller account, see Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 342–87. 11 Of course strictly “formalist” methods of literary criticism have no share in this fortune and fall outside the scope of my present inquiry. 12 For a powerful and notorious example, see Carl G. Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” in Theories of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (New York: Free Press, 1959), 344–56. 13 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), ch. 3. 14 Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 3–45. 15 Even on the level of terminology (which in this field tends to derive from German usage) this oversimplifies things, because “understanding” is a fairly common alternative to (but not a synonym for) “explanation,” and to a lesser

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Mc K e on degree even to “interpretation.” For a sense of the range of discussion during a particularly fruitful period of exchange, see Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Idea of a Social Science,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume (1967), 95–114, reprinted in Against the Self-Images of the Age : Essays on Philosophy and Ideology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 211–29; Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” Social Research 38.3 (Autumn 1971), 529–62, reprinted in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 73–101; and Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” Review of Metaphysics 25 (1971–72), 3–51, reprinted in ibid., 25–71. K. R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 1957). E.g., see Erich Auerbach, “Vico and Aesthetic Historism,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 183–98. For a discussion that aims to integrate into a single method these two senses of “historicism,” see Karl Mannheim, “Historicism,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge, 1952), 84–133. For a fuller argument, see Michael McKeon, “Civic Humanism and the Logic of Historical Interpretation,” in The Political Imagination in History: Essays Concerning J.G.A. Pocock, D.N. DeLuna, ed. (Baltimore: Archangul Foundation, 2006), 59–99. The opposition between “commonplace” and “ideology” is a version of the “external”-“internal” dialectic internalized, as it were, within the realm of the internal. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133–34. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), “Introduction,” 103–06. A classic example of this truth, alluded to above, is the way the temporal distinction between the ancients and the moderns disclosed the structural distinction between the arts and the sciences. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ii.1. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 80, 83, 85. Saussure himself disputed the correlation of “diachrony-synchrony” at the linguistic micro-level with “history-structure” at the macro-level: see ibid., pp. 79–81.

3

Limiting History Marshall Grossman

The party was all right except that I was tired. So was everybody, apparently, except McLuhan, Abrams, Joe Fisher, who talked very well, & of course Woodhouse. Woodhouse has been asked to do a Milton Paper at M.L.A. & his opposite number is Cleanth Brooks, who apparently belongs to a group called the “New Critics” who are supposed to ignore historical criticism & concentrate on texture, whatever texture is. Abrams is a historical critic, & is on Woodhouse’s side. – Northrop Frye, Diary, March 14, 1950

Back in 1957, Northrop Frye began his Anatomy of Criticism by lamenting the lack of an explicitly established discipline of literary criticism. Literary critics, he complained, too often confused the object of their study, literature, with it subject, criticism, or displaced its object altogether in favor of some other disciplinary preoccupation, which literature might instrumentally illustrate or explain: If criticism exists, it must be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field. The word “inductive” suggests some sort of scientific procedure. What if criticism is a science as well as an art? . . . The writing of history is an art, but no one doubts that scientific principles are involved in the historian’s treatment of evidence, and that the presence of this scientific element is what distinguishes history from legend. It may also be a scientific element in criticism which distinguishes it from literary parasitism on the one hand, and the superimposed critical attitude on the other.1

Three questions remain embedded in Frye’s formulation and implicit in our contemporary practice: What is the object of literary studies? What is the distinction between history and literary history? And, if Frye’s Marshall Grossman passed away shortly before this collection went into production. The editors have made minimal changes to the formatting to conform to the volume and added the epigraph from Frye’s Diary.

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analogy holds, how are the demands of art and science to be reconciled in the practice of literary history? The first of these questions points toward a definition of the literary, the second toward how we might recognize an event in literary history, the third toward how we might connect the literary historical events, so identified, one to another, by embedding them alternatively into artfully crafted narratives or speculative systems: diachronic stories of cause and effect or synchronic systems defining, and defined by, varieties of cognitive and conceptual interactions. The first of these procedures produces tales to be told, the second theories to be visualized.2 These are very old questions, and if there is to be any novelty in what I have to say, it will reside in the attempt to approach them functionally rather than ontologically: to ask, first, what it is that literature does and then how and in what circumstances it creates new ways to do whatever it is that it does. Like Frye, I would like to articulate a disciplinarity that distinguishes literary scholarship from its interdisciplinary associates in history, psychology, and social science; but, rather than positing a literary system as object, as Frye did, I want to explore the possibility of placing at the center of literary study an ethics of reading, distinct from, and contrary to, Frye’s dream of a literary science. It is interesting that Frye’s call for a proper discipline of literary criticism appeals to history as an analogous “science,” while immediately asserting that the writing of history is an “art.” Frye’s “anatomy” aspired to a scientific seeing of literature that would put criticism on a sound conceptual base by taking as its object a taxonomy whose categories were prior to and conceptually independent from the literary elements he placed in them. It was, at its taxonomic heart, an Aristotelian project. The “ethics of reading” I propose places a renewed emphasis on an artistic hearing of literature that attends to the exigent and nonsystematic experiences of writing and reading – exactly those elements that Frye’s system needed to elide.3 This interest in what happens when writers write and readers read requires interest in the historicity of texts and reading – the peculiar ways in which literary texts come from times and places remote from us, foster experiences in and of the present, and possibly influence the future. To understand the historical nature of literary texts in this sense differs from, and would tend to limit, the recent preoccupation with historicizing literary texts – a procedure that, I argue, renders art documentary and instrumental when it should be proactive. Since the waning of the New Criticism, Anglophone writers about literature have put a lot of effort into finding the scientific element of literary studies in one or another version of interdisciplinarity. Literature was

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to be illuminated by sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and the philosophers of ordinary language. Often these endeavors appropriated some version of another discipline, taking for granted that the appropriated discipline provided a coherent method and a body of knowledge that would supply “the scientific element.” These “approaches to literature,” as they are still called in MLA convention programs, bespoke a perceived lack of disciplinarity in literary studies, which appeared to have an object of study – works of imaginative mimesis – but was unable to specify just what writing was or was not literary and what it wanted to learn from or about these writings. Thus each of these “approaches to literature” displaced the properly (if not yet adequately defined) literary in favor of something else. Literary studies would gain coherence only by contributing to a disciplinary study to which literature was epiphenomenal. Literature became evidence: of the ideology, the means of production, the psychopathology, the linguistic constraints, or, tautologically, the culture from which it arose. This trend was partly a reaction against the self-consuming endeavor of the New Critics to set the literary work apart either as an autonomous thing-in-itself or, at best, a member of an autonomously developing literary “tradition” with its own, properly literary history. These efforts inevitably lapsed, in the first case, into the arid celebration of rhetorical cleverness and, in the second, into aimless speculation on influence and its attendant anxieties.4 Pressed to say why and for whom literary studies mattered, critics increasingly turned from the art-for-art’s sake hermeticism of rhetorical explication and the diachronic history of literature, in which literary works speak almost exclusively to other, prior literary works, to the synchronic historical contexts of specific literary works. If the point of literary studies was to understand how or why literature mattered, then it made sense for those of us interested in older literatures to study how and why they mattered at the time when they were produced, to ask what social or cultural or economic needs they met. Certainly history is the most sensible and has been the most enduring interdiscipline of literary studies. The New Historicism was a selfconscious attempt to restore the historical to literature and to rescue the literary from the irrelevance implicit in the new critics’ assertion of its autonomy. For the new historicists, literature was, along with everything else, the production of a specific time and place. But the vexing questions of object and method remained open. Was literature to be studied for the light it shed on the “culture” that produced it, or was the study of a “culture” instrumental to understanding its literature? The anecdotal

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method that exemplifies new historical writing is, of course, more than a stylistic quirk.5 Influenced by the not-all-that-post-structuralist, early Foucault, the new historicists tended to see culture as a virtual language, analogous to Saussure’s la langue.6 Like language, culture is not manifest but rather, a system of associations, of differences, only parts of which are in play in any given instance of meaningful discourse. While the system of a language or a culture is internalized as competence in the selection and arrangement of signs, neither speech nor literature is systematic. Each literary object is radically contingent with respect to the portion of the system put into play within it. As language must be always partially deduced from concrete specimens of speech, the New Historicist hermeneutic circle deduces culture from literature and then situates literature within the culture it makes partially manifest. The very dependence on “culture,” understood as supplying the rules, according to which meaning is produced and received at a given time, necessarily submits the history that may be proper to literature to the myth of a synchrony in which literature comes to be and to mean. This is why New Historicism and (early) Foucault were so bad at articulating transitions. The reading and writing of literature are never synchronous; literature continues to be readable long after the signifying system in which it first appeared has passed. The students to whom I am currently teaching the works of John Milton, in their normal practice of reading, do not spontaneously appreciate his English puns on Latin words, nor do they dependably recognize either his classical or his biblical allusions. They do not, without study and instruction, worry over the possible resemblance of Satan to Cromwell or feel in Satan and Beelzebub’s manipulation of the infernal parliament the urgent threat of Presbyterian parliamentarians’ collusion with monarchy. Helping them become aware of these things is part of the substance and pleasure of teaching them, but the case for them taking the trouble to learn these things must stand on the premise that, embedded though the poem may be in the time and place of its production, there remains also a poem to be read in our time and place. The poem, to be a poem according to this definition, must do something more than witness the context of its own creation. On the day we read a poem, it exists in a determined tension with the poem as it may have been read on the day it was written; its tensed presence distinguishes it, as a poem, from a document. This is not to say that this tension inheres only in self-consciously literary texts. It is also a function of how texts are read. A text may be used as a document one day and read as literature the .

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next. Areopagitica can be used in a court to document a precedent in the common law of the press. But it is also a literary work in which a series of powerfully conceived metaphors institute a community of intellectual endeavor in which the reader is invited to locate herself or himself. In other words, “literary studies” reads in a distinctive way. It is this ability of certain writings to be timely in both the writer’s and the readers’ worlds, to have a discernable efficacy in the time of their production and a continuing and perhaps different efficacy after it, that resists – or ought to resist – the historicist’s tendency to reduce literary works to documents. Because literature is art, literary criticism ought to share art’s commitment to the performance of the particular, as against science’s preference for the general principle. Therefore, despite the unpalatable baggage it may entail, I aspire to be an art critic. This does not mean a return to appreciative, evaluative, or belletristic critical writing. Because I understand art as a mode of action, my focus is on a specific interaction between text and reader. As Milton did in the Areopagitica, I want to assert the agency of the literary text as a subject in its own right. A text may say something instrumental to its immediate purpose. It certainly documents something of the context in which that purpose is realized. But art also aspires to do something that remains after history has moved on. I understand this proverbial je ne sais quoi neither as a supplement of form nor content but their irreducible remainder, the kernel of experience in excess of meaning. What is it about literary works that remains active and potent after the historical facts have been naturalized? What remains of our encounter with them that makes the work and even its most exhaustive paraphrase incommensurable? Might it be the case that what sustains our interest in literary works in the first place is that they are moving? If we were to answer every interesting formal and historical question about, say, Milton’s Paradise Lost or Shakespeare’s sonnets, the question of how it comes about that readers with no particular stake in Christianity, the Reformation, the toleration of sectarian religions, or the bad governance of the Stuart monarchs, in the one case, or the sexual and intellectual mores and hijinx of an Elizabethan playwright and his associates, in the other, feel something profound when they read these poems would remain. If I knew, not only that the dark lady and the young man and the rival poet of the sonnets existed, but who they were and what exactly they did for and to each other, would that knowledge contribute to what makes the sonnets important to me – or would it distract me from it?

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Following the commonplace, spatial metaphor that equates profound feeling with being moved, we might ask how – by what mechanics of conveyance are we moved by literature – and to where? Recurring to the play of diachrony and synchrony, one thing after another and all things with each other, we might say that when we feel ourselves moved while sitting in one place – reading a book – the new place to which we are conveyed is the same place made different. A new synchrony is another place. If this is so, something of an answer to the question about the mechanics of conveyance begins to take shape. The duration of a reading is an interval in which something destructive to the synchronous order of the reader’s world may occur. Something that had a place is conveyed to a different place. Something that had no place appears to disrupt the order of things in their place. Something necessary to that order, perhaps, disappears. Historians may use a text instrumentally, as a witness to tell them about the people who produced it. But they resist being moved because establishing and maintaining causal continuity is their business. They may change their minds about some historical issue or event, but they need to remain still themselves to establish the perspective from which history is seen to be continuous. They must stand apart from the archival world of their reading to make the displacements within it appear necessary – or at least explicable. As an art critic, I find this information interesting but insufficient to my task; I do not read merely to find things out. The text does not reach me as an instrument convenient to my inquiry, but as an agent. It may have come from the past, but it is always timely with me. Time and life are short. If it does not act presently, why am I reading it? The document witnesses, records, and pretends to transparency. An agent performs. It is opaque by its nature. One way of thinking about the opacity of literary agency is through the analogy of author and book to father and child, which was commonplace in the Renaissance. A book, Milton says in a famous passage of the Areopagitica, is to its author as a child to its father: For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigourously productive as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.7

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The seminal image refines and makes graphic a more general assimilation of the roles of author and father. In Paradise Lost, for example, Adam addresses God on their first encounter, just prior to asking for a mate so that man can redress his “unity defective” and “beget / Like of his like, His Image multipli’d”: O by what Name, for thou above all these, Above mankind, or aught than mankind higher Surpassest far my naming, how may I Adore thee, Author of this Universe. (8.423–5, 357–60, my emphasis).10

Adam perceives himself at once as authored and author in potentia, a point God, the Father, strategically anticipated in Book 3, when he preemptively disowns responsibility for the Fall by reminding the assembled angels that Adam and Eve were “Authors to themselves in all / Both what they judge and what they choose” (3.122–23). The point Milton helps me make here is that artists have long realized that artworks, having agency of their own, are not reducible to the intentions or the situations of their makers.8 Reversing the direction of the metaphor once again, Milton’s representations of literary and patrilineal genealogy anticipate Freud’s description of the narcissistic angst attending the seminal contribution to procreation: The individual does actually carry on a twofold existence: one to serve his own purposes and the other as a link in a chain, which he serves against his will, or at least involuntarily: The individual himself regards sexuality as one of his own ends; whereas from another point of view he is an appendage to his germplasm, at whose disposal, he puts his energies in return for a bonus of pleasure. He is the mortal vehicle of a possibly immortal substance – like the inheritor of an entailed property, who is only the temporary holder of an estate which survives him.9

Both God and the poet appeared as links in a similar chain early in Milton’s narrative, when: th’ Almighty Father from above, From the pure Empyrean where he sits High Thron’d above all highth, bent down his eye, His own works and their works at once to view. (3.56–59)

Milton’s use of the commonplace identification of biological and literary conception is elaborated and intensified by Freud’s recognition that the father’s life is at once – literally – prolonged and alienated in the child. The tension surrounding the loss of substance and control in reproduction has already been felt in the poetic assimilation of writing to procreation.11 So

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too, the temporal dislocation of a present encounter with a past that may or may not be one’s own, as occurs in The Winter’s Tale, when, Leontes searches Mamillius’s face for traces confirming his paternity: Looking on the lines Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech’d, In my green velvet coat; my dagger muzzl’d Lest it should bite its master, and so prove, As ornaments oft do, too dangerous; How like, methought, I then was to this kernel, This squash, this gentleman. Mine honest friend, Will you take eggs for money?12

To the extent that the boy is like the father, the renewed potential he represents, as yet unbreech’d, his dagger muzzl’d, certifies also the expenditure of the father’s former potency, now invested in “this kernel.” J.H.P. Pafford, in the Arden Edition, glosses Leontes’s question about taking eggs for money as “to accept payment with eggs instead of money,” possibly derived proverbially from the practice of paying children with eggs for running errands. But Shakespeare’s Leontes knows as well as Freud that to invest one’s bodily substance in an egg is to recognize and authorize one’s status as a link in the chain.13 The commonplace metaphoric ratio of father is to child as author is to book has always already transferred this elegiac reflection from the child to the book. A father must be prepared to see his child become progressively less an iteration of himself in the process of becoming an independent man or woman, defined by a world of radical contingency as much as by ancestry. For Milton the process by which a book retains and passes on the potency of its author is similarly adversarial. The book will breed books of its own, which may well oppose the ideas with which it began. Subject to differently interested and situated readings, the posterity of the author is preserved in the efficacy of the writing but not in the form of his or her first or conscious intention. In 1644, Milton’s allusion to the dragon’s teeth that sprang up armed men was pointed. Armed men had sprung up in England in response to printed polemics against the bishops and the king, and they would continue to do so for years to come. That Cadmus was credited by Herodotus and others with having brought the alphabet from Phoenicia to Greece firmly invests the printed word at the intersection of violence and civilization. Only five of Cadmus’s sown men survive their mutual combat, but this tested remainder builds Thebes.14 Similarly, Milton envisions

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civilization progressing from the mortal struggle of book against book, continued beyond the expectation, intention, and control of their authors. If the allusion to Cadmus in Areopagitica anticipates a Darwinian winnowing of written ideas in general, an allegory of a more specifically literary production may be found in Adam’s account of the creation of Eve in Paradise Lost. In Milton’s telling, Adam first conceives of Eve as an empty place; noting that the animals he names have mates but he does not, Adam brings her absence to the attention of God, who, after some argument, agrees that Adam should not be alone. At that point, however, Adam surrenders control of himself, falling into a sleep that closed his eyes but “op’n left the Cell / Of Fancy [to . . .] internal sight.” Asleep, Adam dreams the creation of Eve as the obstetric delivery of his own rib: Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape Still glorious before whom awake I stood; Who stooping op’n’d my left side, and took From thence a Rib, with cordial spirits warm, And Life-blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound, But suddenly the flesh fill’d up and heal’ed: The Rib he form’d and fashion’d with his hands; Under his forming hands a Creature grew, Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair, That what seem’d fair in all the World, seem’d now Mean, or in her summ’d up, in her contain’d (8.463–73).

The dissociated state in which Adam contributes his “bleeding rib” signals that Adam’s “likeness, [his] fit help, [his] other self,” his “wish, exactly to [his] heart’s desire” is, paradoxically, acquired in an act of self-alienation in which he experiences himself as a passive witness to his own creative donation. The importance of the ribectomy is illustrated when Adam confesses to Raphael the unsettling effects of “beauty’s powerful glance” and wonders whether “Nature . . . from [his] side subducting, took perhaps / More than enough” (8.533–37). Adam discovers that his image, Eve, resides in a world to which he will never have perfect access. As his image made flesh, Eve will also imagine Adam, and the two images, his and hers, will not coincide. Adam’s fall thus captures two limits: the inability of consciousness to fully contain itself and the radical contingencies to which we are subjected in the other. As Empson pointed out, if Adam had not questioned Raphael about the commotion of passion, and Eve had not overheard Raphael’s uncomprehending warning against uxoriousness, she might not have insisted on working separately the next day;

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Satan would, then, not have found her alone, and everything might or might not have been different.15 Here then is a picture of the relation of history to literature. Adam imagines a world in which he, himself, is contained and from which this other self is reflected back to him. But this object formed according to his desire reflects also the inscrutability of his own subjectivity. He confronts an image of himself – as desiring subject – that subjects him to the contingent experiences of another like himself. Wives, husbands, children, and books are ours only when they are not ours, as Adam articulates when he reluctantly accepts Eve’s determination to work separately from him: “Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more” (9.372). Just as a child is the collaboration of a mother and a father and the events that precede its birth and befall it in its life, a literary work is a collaboration between a writer, the formal rhetorical and linguistic medium in which he or she works, and the contingent events that precede its creation and accrete over time to its readings. It makes sense, therefore, to think of texts as having an unconscious. Like Adam’s bleeding rib, or the gamete only reluctantly surrendered by Freud’s narcissistic male, the unconscious is a name given to “that within which passes show,” the nonsignifying remainder that only becomes visible as abjected, other, opaque. Hamlet’s metaphor invokes an interior space in which feelings may move, but he also stipulates that these feelings cannot be intersubjectively certified, precisely because they can be imitated. The signifiers of grief – “the customary suits of solemn black . . . windy suspiration of forc’d breath . . . all forms, moods, shapes of grief” (1.2.76–86) – tell us nothing about its presence or absence. Once out in the world, they are simply signs, and, as such, their signification cannot be certified, stabilized, or secured. But a literary text may be activated by contact with another consciousness in which emotions are felt, affects are exchanged, cognitive structures altered. Neither the work nor the reader nor the writer emerges the same. In Paradise Lost, Adam addresses God, in whose image Adam was created, as “Author of this Universe.” Eve addresses Adam, in whose image she was created, as “My Author and Disposer” (8.360, 4.635). Having authored Eve as his image in the visible world, Adam finds her image, which is also his image, changed and no longer completely his. Similarly, Milton encounters himself as the “I” of his writings and adapts to the image he finds in them – not only as he reads his own work, but also as he reads others reading, who may see in it England’s national poet, but also, at varied times and in varied places, the divorcer, the notorious regicide, Cromwell’s Goebbels, or “the Lady of Christ’s College.”

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Literary criticism and literary history cannot bring to light the dark matter that persists through and enables these composite and mutable identities (1) because there will always be more; no matter how thoroughly a subjective consciousness is explicated, the kernel of meaning that enables it to affect the will and actions of a reader or a writer will simply move, recede, or disappear, as it becomes embedded in the discursive unconscious of the individual reader, the moment of his or her reading and the lived life in which it is situated; and (2) because as soon as an aspect of the textual unconscious is named, it loses its power, becoming merely “actions that a man might play” – one more mediated text, a performance of the self that marks but cannot illuminate the darkness behind the stage or the movements of the old, paternal mole beneath it. To approach this kernel of unrealized matter, this bleeding rib of literature, one turns from what a work says to what it does. The mythos of Paradise Lost begins when Milton asks his muse “what cause / Mov’d our Grand Parents . . . / . . . to fall off / From thir Creator, and transgress his Will . . .?” (1.28–31). The mimetic task this entails unfolds in the conjunction of motion and will. By asking the muse to supply an expressed subject for the verb mov’ d, Milton’s narrator indicates that the Fall was a caused action. The word will tells us that the visible action of the Fall followed from an intention that has a story of its own. The Fall is, visibly, a movement in space – Adam and Eve reach for and eat the forbidden fruit; but the cause is not in this visible action. It is prior to it and – pending the narrative to follow – obscured from view. This still-hidden cause is a motion of the will: an interior movement, or emotion, reaching out to an ambulatory action, a movement out from the will to the world. What does the slippage between motion as movement in space and motion as emotion signify and how can it be, in Hamlet’s terms, “denoted truly”? The expressed subject of the word will in Milton’s sentence is the creator rather than Adam and Eve, even though the movement of their will is an effect of the as yet unnamed intending cause of the Fall. The collision of the Will of the creator and that of the cause whose name we seek results in a struggle in our “Grand Parents” between an inhibiting will to obey God’s Will and the will to have the forbidden fruit, which is inextricably a will for the fruit as material object and a more reflexive will to transgress the inhibiting command, which confers on the fruit its special value. Recognizing this regressive etiology, Milton refines the question to “Who first seduc’ d them to that foul revolt?” (l. 33; emphasis added). Will, it seems, is distributive. The motion of the act – eating the fruit – may

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be walked back to the emotion of the will, which is in turn the result of prior motions and other wills. Insofar as stories are about linking causes and effects, the story of “man’s first disobedience” is the story of this prior struggle of contradictory impulses to control access to the voluntary muscles in the arms and mouths of Adam and Eve. The overt act of the Fall is trivial – picking and eating a fruit. But it represents or imitates the trace in space and time of the motions and emotions that precede it – it is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. To historicize literature entails a number of things: to accumulate the contextual knowledge that the first readers brought to it, to reconstruct the local and contingent intentions of the writer, to embed the work in the broader discourse of its time, to bring to bear philological study of its language, to find in the work an instance of, or intervention in, culture. To do literary history is to understand in particular the formal genealogy of a work with respect to works that came before and after it. At the intersection of history and literary history one asks how and why formal innovation takes place, locating the literary historical event at those points when, under specified historical conditions, what had been radical or strange in literature becomes normative, transparent, obvious. At this intersection one also encounters the historicity of the literary work: its peculiar timeliness, perpetually mediating past and future. The thought of the Fall in Paradise Lost as the proverbial tip of the iceberg suggests a (perhaps rather baroque) figure of literature. A reader sees the tip of the iceberg. The water collected in the iceberg has been carried from many places by odd and diverse winds and currents – some contingent, some prevailing. Over time these particular waters froze into a unique crystalline structure, perhaps part of an ice-shelf or glacier. The confluent waters locked in the ice were thenceforth joined in a common history, although occasionally pieces broke off. One such piece is our iceberg. When we encounter it, the iceberg has drifted for years and for miles. It presents us with more than one kind of information. There are things in the water from another place and another time, suspended in it since the moment the water crystallized: things within which pass show and which contain evidence of the material history of places and times when the ice froze and when this portion of it broke from the larger mass and began to drift. We can get at this information by melting the ice and analyzing the water. But if we do that, we lose the information locked in the crystal structure itself and in the shape of the iceberg as a whole. We lose precisely the history of the ice – the traces of its endurance over time. We can use a submersible craft to examine the vast area

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below the waterline, but when we do that we necessarily lose sight of the part above the waterline, the figure it bears against the horizon, the plane of the water intersecting it, the stun of its whiteness against varied backgrounds – blue, gray, black. Like the more analytic information to be unlocked by melting the ice, these phenomenal aspects of the iceberg are quantifiable and inherent. They are there. But they are also seducers of our different wills, white inkblots that engage the formal and contingent structures in which our own confluent identities have crystallized. They move and we are moved by them. If we value both the analytic and the phenomenal information in our iceberg – if we are willing to reflect on its reflection of our own willfulness – surely a crucial requirement of our critical procedure must be tact: the tact to let the work we encounter be many things and one thing in its time, our time and the time between. What I am proposing as the proper work of literary criticism makes an ethical turn toward understanding the mechanisms that facilitate the transfer of the seductions of the will at the limit of history, from writer to text to reader and to writer as reader. I turn one last time to Milton for an instance of what such ethical reading might entail. Near the beginning of Paradise Regained, Jesus goes over the history that has brought him to the wilderness. He says his Mother told him that he was “no Son of mortal man,” but rather of “th’Eternal King, who rules / All Heaven and Earth, Angels, and Sons of men”; that “A messenger from God” foretold his birth of a Virgin and foretold that he “shouldst be great and sit on David’s Throne” (1.234–40). He recalls the story of the magi led to him by a star and the prophecies of Simeon and Anna.16 And he brings this all to bear on his reading and rereading of the Hebrew Scriptures: This having heard, straight I again revolv’d The Law and Prophets, searching what was writ Concerning the Messiah, to our Scribes Known partly, and soon found of whom they spake I am (1.259–63).

At the end of the poem, Jesus speaks ambiguous words to Satan: “Tempt not the Lord thy God” (4.561). Whether these words refer to God the Father or Jesus himself cannot be grammatically distinguished. Like most everything Jesus says in Paradise Regained, the words are a quotation from the Hebrew Scripture: “Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God, as you tempted him in Massah.”17 The ambiguity of reference in the citation rather neatly performs and enacts the assimilation of text to self indicated in Jesus’ procedure of reading himself in the sacred text at the beginning

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of the poem. He becomes in the climactic moment both the speaker and the auditor of the commandment: the children of Israel and the God who has chosen them – “as it is written” and as he has read it. But this union may have already occurred in the Book 1 passage, if we recognize “For of whom they spake / I am” as a citation of Exodus 3:13–14: 13 And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? 14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

This passage, which comes, of course, from Moses’s encounter with the burning bush, is generally glossed as asserting the eternity of God, whose defining essence is eternally to be.18 But from a linguistic or syntactic point of view it couples the apparent uniqueness of God to the seduction of desire by the fungibility of signs, for it denominates God not with a proper noun but with a floating pronoun, what linguists call a shifter. As the answer to the question Moses has just put to God (or the bush), God’s self-naming also puts Moses in an awkward position. In verses 11–12, Moses had asked “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?”19 and gotten the answer “I will be with thee.” Moses, however, expects to be asked by the ever fractious children of Israel, “Who sent you? By whose authority do you come?” to which he is to answer “I am.” The play of being and name is intricate. Moses is to go to the Pharaoh and to the Israelites on the authority of “I” who will be with him, and who is called “I am.” How might this intricacy move in – or move us through – Milton’s text? Has God rendered the shifter “I” a proper noun – perhaps, the proper noun? Jesus’s citation of Exodus 3:13–14 near the beginning of Paradise Regained and his citation of Deuteronomy 6:16 at the end are mediated by the reference to Massah in the passage in Deuteronomy from which “tempt not the Lord thy God” is quoted. In Hebrew, Massah is already a common noun meaning “test, trial, proving,” and appears as such in, for example, Job 9:23.20 Deuteronomy 6:16 refers to the place and moment in which it becomes also a proper noun, the name given by Moses to another place of temptation in the desert: 1 And all the congregation of the children of Israel journeyed from the wilderness of Sin, after their journeys, according to the commandment of the LORD, and pitched in Rephidim: and there was no water for the people to drink. 2 Wherefore the people did chide with Moses, and said, Give us water that we

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may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why chide ye with me? wherefore do ye tempt the LORD? 3 And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst? 4 And Moses cried unto the LORD, saying, What shall I do unto this people? they be almost ready to stone me. 5 And the LORD said unto Moses, Go on before the people, and take with thee of the elders of Israel; and thy rod, wherewith thou smotest the river, take in thine hand, and go. 6 Behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb; and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel. 7 And he called the name of the place Massah, and Meribah, because of the chiding of the children of Israel, and because they tempted the LORD, saying, Is the LORD among us, or not? (Exodus 17.1–7)

Thus Exodus 3:13–14 and Exodus 17:1–7 join in involving Moses in the giving and receiving of names, the dialectical interplay of common and proper nouns. Jesus’ citation of “tempt not the Lord thy God” is thus the autonomic third in a thematic line of namings, following God’s naming of himself with the inherently ambiguous coupling “I am,” (which will be oddly placed in Moses’ mouth when he answers the question “Who sent you?” and iteratively superposed over the “I” of each reader of the Scriptural passage as it is read) and Moses’ conferring of the name Temptation on a place where the Israelites tempted their lord. Moreover, the temptation on the pinnacle elicits a reference to Moses’ admonition of the Israelites “this side Jordan in the wilderness” (Dt. 1:1), as they, but not he, prepare to enter the Promised Land. Moses warns them not to tempt the Lord by doubting him as they had at Massah.21 For Jesus to respond to Satan’s physical threat, either by acceding to Satan’s demand or submitting to a test of his divinity, would be analogous to the Israelites’ demand for water at Massah. The network of implicit typological allusions at work – to Pisgah and to God’s refusal to allow Moses to enter the Promised Land, to Jesus’s refusal to seek food or water in the wilderness, to the Israelites paused on “this side Jordan” and Jesus about to “enter” his “glorious work . . . and begin to save mankind” (Milton, PR 4.634–35) – need not be teased out here. My point is that they point to Jesus’ words on the pinnacle not as an admission of his messianic role but as its nominative discovery.22 I want, however, to attend to a different, and I think more intimate, network of references pertaining to naming. Massah is a place designated by a proper noun derived by metonymy from the common noun denoting

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the action of temptation that happened at that place; through citation the proper noun is then metaphorically extended to become again a sort of common noun, denoting places where temptation occurs. The pinnacle on which Satan places Jesus is Massah, as is the camp on the banks of the Jordan in Deuteronomy 6, where Moses offers his last admonishments to Israel and learns that, because of the people’s temptation of the Lord, he will, himself, be denied entry to the Promised Land, but Joshua – “whom the Gentiles Jesus call” (Milton, PL 12.310) – will lead Israel across the Jordan.23 The naming plot thickens further when we consider that Massah is situated geographically, and as a biblical place, between “the wilderness of Sin” from which Israel has journeyed and the banks of the Jordan. “Temptation” is thus a liminal space, a place; but, like the Pinnacle and Massah, a place to stand but not to stay. It is a place to which one is moved, from which one moves, through which one is moved. And, of course, it moves too – with the people – from the east bank of the Jordan into the Promised Land. The fact that to arrive at Temptation the Israelites journeyed through “the wilderness of Sin” has, I think, even stronger associative value precisely because it is utterly adventitious. The Hebrew Scripture refers to a geographic place – just a portion of the wilderness through which Israel must travel during its forty years in the desert. But no English-speaking Christian can read the phrase “the wilderness of Sin” without registering the typology it evokes – certainly not in the context of an allusion at the turning point of the anti-typal temptation of Jesus. So, “tempt not the Lord thy God” sets up a series of acts of nomination that perform as well as signify the identity of the messiah. One might say that Milton’s Jesus reads himself into a conversation with Moses when he refers to Exodus 3:13–14 by pronouncing the words “Of whom they spake / I am” at Paradise Regained 1.262–63. But Jesus experiences, when he quotes Deuteronomy 6:16 on the Pinnacle, the performative implications of the ambiguous layering of first-person pronouns in the Exodus text – the injunction that Moses’ “I” will speak with the power of “I am” because “I” who is “that I am” will be with him, when he, Moses, says, “I will lead you from bondage, through the wilderness of Sin to the sight of the Promised Land.” Speaking the words, “I, Jesus” and “I Am” become not metaphysically but linguistically indistinguishable. It is a reading from which Jesus will not recover. Jesus is a privileged reader, whose readings have been punctuated by omens and prophecies, but what about us? What do we read and how does our reading matter? One way to generalize as a parable of reading, Milton’s account of Jesus reading Moses’ account of the name of

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God, is suggested by some remarks made by Slavoj Žižek on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Asserting the importance of atheism as a European value, Žižek remarks, “When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God’s favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror.”24 The question of what one sees when one looks in the mirror lies at the heart of John Carey’s questioning of Samson Agonistes, the other poem in the 1671 volume with Paradise Regained; and of which Hadfield reports: “[I]t is clear that [Carey’s] provocative article sponsored a debate that fed a deep hunger within the profession.” Milton’s Samson performs the mirror function for Carey much as Hamlet hopes his Mousetrap will for Claudius, when he identifies “to hold the mirror up to Nature to show Virtue her feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” as the “purpose of playing” (3.2.21–24). As an editor of Milton, Carey is as versed in the particularities of 1671 as anyone. But the salient question he asks concerns how we are to read Milton’s poem after September 11, 2001. Whom will we see in the mirror, if we approve (or excuse on historical grounds) its protagonist’s religious violence? There is no straining for “relevance” or artificial “presentism” in asking this question.25 Answers and contexts change, but the poem asked the same question and relied on the same resources of language to enable an answer the day it was written. A truly historical account might want to reconstruct (speculatively) a different expectation about the image the mirror reflected in 1671 and 2001, but such a reconstruction ought to begin with a recognition that our feelings about religious violence may have (should have?) changed. Only then can literary historiography begin to significantly encompass and confront of “structures of feeling” as mediations in the sort of neo-Marxist dialectic McKeon derives from Raymond Williams in the aforementioned essay. In response to Hadfield’s invitation to think much more carefully about literary value and to articulate what we value in a text, I would propose that encountering the image in the mirror is the province of reading. The extent to which a particular work fosters such an encounter and the quality of the encounter it affords are an index to the value of particular works. Understanding the linguistic mechanics of how it is reflected is the province of an ethics of reading. Could it be, then, that the proper discipline of literary studies is learning to read backward, as in a mirror – something not entirely different from Jesus’ delayed realization that by placing himself in the textual space between two superposed personal pronouns, he has become what he thought he was – the place where the messianic action becomes at once

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a proper and a portable noun, a complex and resonant “I am”? Ethical reading would, then, be the reading that places the reader before himself or herself, much as Milton’s Adam reading Eve, reads: “Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, my self / Before me” (8.495–96). Understanding – in mechanical detail – how and when such transformative reading takes place – the linguistic, syntactic, and rhetorical mediations that support the flow of “I’s” passing silently into the reader’s voice – would then be the proper discipline of literary studies. No t e s 1 Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 6. 2 As has been frequently pointed out, our word theory comes from the Greek, theoria: viewing, beholding. The shuttling between the narrative unfolding of events and the visualized structure of events can be seen in Michael McKeon’s opening to a dialectical version of the hermeneutic circle. McKeon thus historicizes the moment of when “the category ‘literature’ cohered over the course of the eighteenth century in tandem with the explicit theorization of aesthetic judgment and response as an empirical mode whose relative detachment from the objective realm of the senses was achieved through the imagination rather than through the understanding, of the knowing subject” (Chapter 2 in this volume). 3 The ethics of reading follows Longinus in offering the experience of the sublime as a supplement to catharsis. On the interconnections of thought in Aristotle, (pseudo-)Longinus and Frye, see Marshall Grossman, “The Vicissitudes of the Subject in Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 24 (1982): 313–27. Where the “dialectical method” sketched by McKeon in this volume addresses the particulars Frye elides, the ethics of reading, as I describe it later in the chapter, would push McKeon’s dialectic to the Hegelian point of double negation, at which subject crosses over into object, thus disrupting the categorical distinction of external/ internal that sustains its movement. 4 For a sympathetic, intelligent, and concise history of the New Criticism and its successors, see Harry Berger Jr., “The Interpretive Shuttle: The Structure of Critical Practice after World War II,” in Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 19–98. 5 The most incisive inquiry into the function of the anecdotal method remains Joel Fineman’s “The History of the Anecdote,” in The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991), 59–87. See especially 83–87n34. 6 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966), 5–9. On the utility of Saussure’s distinction between

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9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18

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diachrony and synchrony as another version of the articulation of time and structure, see McKeon, Chapter 2 in this volume. Areopagitica in John Milton, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), vol II., 492. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized. On Milton’s depiction of the complicated relations of creator to created in general, with particular relation to the scenes of making in Paradise Lost, see Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 107–28; and Marshall Grossman, “The Genders of God and the Redemption of the Flesh in Paradise Lost,” in Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 95–114. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in The Standard of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud., ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vol. XIV, 78. Milton’s poetry is cited from John Milton, Complete Poetry and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). The similarity is intensified by Milton’s monistic insistence that creation is fashioned out of the substance of God. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London: Methuen & Co., 1963), 1.2.153–61. It even works for stepsons. Note Claudius’s concern about the egg within his wife’s egg: “There’s something in his soul / O’er which his melancholy sits on brood, / And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose / Will be some danger” from Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 3.1.167–70. This is one of many egg-hatching metaphors in the play. The story of Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth appears in Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.95–126. William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 147–56. On Jesus’ learning from his mother, see Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 118–46. My understanding of the personal engagement of seventeenth-century readers with Biblical “places,” and the method of reading from passage to passage in the following discussion has been greatly influenced by Haskin’s important study of the hermeneutics of place in the reading practice of Milton and his contemporaries. Deuteronomy 6:16 quoted from the King James Version; spelling and punctuation have been modernized. The Geneva Bible (1560) glosses the passage: “By douting of his power, refusing lauful meanes, & abusing his graces.” The Geneva Bible (1560) sends the reader to yet another place, glossing the passage: “The God who haue euer been, am & shal be: the God almightie, by whome all things haue their being, & the God of mercie mindeful of my promes. Reuel 1,4-.” Despite the intervening words, I cannot note the proximity of the question “Who am I” and the answer “I am” in the passage without being reminded of Lacan’s assertion that our messages return to us in inverted form.

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20 I am greatly indebted to Jason Rosenblatt for this specific information and for his generously offered advice on many other question regarding Hebrew language and Scripture. 21 See also Psalms 95:8–9 and Hebrews 3:8, where the event at Massah is referred to periphrastically as the “provocation in the wilderness.” 22 Cf. Teskey, Delirious Milton, 175: “The presence, here, of the Father in the Son is not a metaphysical identity. That presence is a moment of delirious identity when the Son is at once acknowledging the immanence of the Father in the Son.” 23 Deuteronomy 3:24–28, especially 3:26, “But the LORD was wroth with me for your sakes.” Moses is denied entry to the Promised Land because of the fractiousness of the Israelites. 24 “Defenders of the Faith,” Op. Ed., New York Times, March 12, 2006. 25 On the pretensions of “presentism,” see Hadfield, Chapter 1 in this volume.

II

Historicism and Theology

4

The Politics of Renaissance Historicism Valla, Erasmus, Colet, and More Thomas Fulton

I am Paul, because I imitate Paul.

– Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine (1440)

The forged Donation of Constantine, a document used for centuries to legitimate papal claims to secular authority, was exposed by Lorenzo Valla in a scathing polemic that is often seen to epitomize an emerging consciousness of historical difference in the Renaissance.1 But Valla’s act of historicism is also exemplary for what it attempts to accomplish politically. Like other early modern historicists, Valla used historicism to drive a wedge between those in power and the texts they used to legitimate their authority. He debunked Constantine’s supposed transfer of power to Pope Sylvester I by demonstrating that the language and context of the document betrayed its anachronistic eighth-century origins. In doing so, Valla sought to divest the power of the church from its secular interests: “I can scarcely wait to see, particularly if it is carried out on my initiative,” he concluded, “that the Pope is the vicar of Christ alone and not of Caesar as well.”2 The historicist criticism in Valla’s tract spread with various editions through northern Europe and England, destroying, as it went, a major illusion of power.3 The polemical energy behind Valla’s historicist bravura shows that ideological positions are inextricably related to methods of reading and interpreting texts. Valla’s historicism revolutionized textual studies in ways that had profound implications for biblical interpretation and, in turn, for the ways in which scripture might be used by those in power. The work of historically recovering the biblical text was undertaken in various ways by a diverse group of humanists that included Valla himself, I am grateful to audiences at the CUNY Graduate Center, the RSA, the Princeton University Renaissance Colloquium, and for the comments of the late Richard Marius, as well as Jessica Brantley, Richard Brantley, Miriam Diller, Kathy Eden, Judith Rice Henderson, Michael Masiello, Lawrence Manley, Kirsten Tranter, Lee Wandel, and the two anonymous readers for this volume.

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Jacques Lefèvre, John Colet, and Erasmus, whose massive project of annotating and retranslating the New Testament appeared a year before Luther posted his ninety-five theses in 1517. At the same time that humanists were involved in developing hermeneutic approaches to scripture and other texts, they were also in conversation about political rhetoric. Erasmus’ New Testament and Annotations were published in the same year as his Education of a Christian Prince, and as More’s Utopia. The year before this, in 1515, Erasmus edited the work of Seneca, a political philosopher often connected in the medieval and early modern period with St Paul. His Panegyric to Philip the Archduke of Austria, published in the midst of Erasmus’s biblical research in 1504, also drew heavily in its rhetorical formulations from what Erasmus gained in his close historicist analysis of Pauline scripture. This chapter explores connections between historicist interpretive methods and the development of early modern political rhetoric. But I hope to shed light, through a consideration of Renaissance historicism, on the problems and preoccupations of the field today. The criticism leveled at historicism lately has taken numerous forms, including the view promoted by Stanley Fish that historicists “generally situate themselves on the left,” and thus subordinate their reading of the text to another cause and close down its meaning.4 In addition to this formalist or aesthetic critique, historicism is also criticized by “New Presentists,” who argue that historicism can never really be anything but some form of presentism, despite what they see as the field’s deeply rooted self-delusion.5 Looking back at the great historicists of the distant past allows us to set into relief these present concerns and to recognize fundamentally that most of the problems attributed to historicism per se are not, in fact, the fault of the practice itself. Most of the criticisms of present-day historicism are, as I argue in conclusion, present-day problems. The problem of presentism, however, persists throughout history. Renaissance historicism was applied toward a vital problem in the early modern present: that of speaking truth to power, or parrhesia, eloquently described in this volume by Martin Dzelzainis (Chapter 9). Erasmus and his contemporaries were preoccupied with the problem of giving efficacious advice to princes – of speaking truth, or, as it often happened, of speaking truth behind a constructed rhetorical curtain. Thomas More theorized political advice-giving, first in Richard III, and – most famously – in the dialogue on counsel in the first part of Utopia. In both, More articulates a rhetorical strategy that he calls the obliquus ductus, or indirect approach, a method of giving counsel in a circuitous

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way that assures the safety of the counselor and the efficacy of the advice. More’s obliquus ductus is an explicit expression of what Annabel Patterson described in Elizabethan and Jacobean England as “a highly sophisticated system of oblique communication, of unwritten rules whereby writers could communicate with readers or audiences . . . without producing a direct confrontation.”6 But these rules were written, albeit rarely, in the early sixteenth century. Rendered in the English version of Richard III as to “touch a slope craftely,” the method of obliquus ductus enables its user to avoid sovereign wrath.7 The problem of staking one’s life on the truth is central to the discourse on counsel in Utopia, where More discusses the danger of addressing princes, but with more subtlety than in the unpublished history. “In the councils of kings,” he writes ironically, “where great matters are debated with great authority, there is no room for true advice.”8 More illustrates through analogy the conditions that distort true speech. He imagines a scene from Plautus performed over the din of the household slaves’ chatter. Suddenly an out-of-place philosopher intrudes: it is Seneca addressing Nero in Octavia. As More suggests, the combination of dramatic voices is absurd: it makes a “hodgepodge of comedy and tragedy” (99), and philosophers cannot function in the courts of kings. To compound the effect, More has chosen a passage – the dialogue between Seneca and Nero – that relentlessly illustrates the failure of counsel. Seneca vainly attempts to mitigate Nero’s implacable tyranny, while Nero stands firm in the position that a prince cannot be advised, a position strangely close to the early modern ideology of divine right: “Principem cogi nefas [to urge a prince is sacrilege].”9 This allusive passage in Utopia raises several questions concerning the ways in which humanists looked back to antiquity in forging their identity as advisors to princes. More’s rhetorical method emerged out of an exchange of ideas among humanists regarding ways of reading the imperial writers they used as literary models. As I argue, the method of obliquus ductus seems to come as much from a rhetorical analysis and emulation of Seneca’s contemporary Paul as it does from classical rhetoricians. Thanks largely to a popular epistolary correspondence between them, since dismissed as spurious, Paul had a close connection to Seneca in the medieval and early modern imagination, and a classicized version of Paul played a major role in forging the identity of a political writer. “I am Paul,” wrote Valla in the polemical pages that open his oration on the Donation, in an example of presentism-in-historicism, “because I imitate Paul.”10 Even in the process of berating the supposed Dark Ages for not sufficiently distinguishing the present from the past, Valla seems here – and in a manner

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shared by both Colet and Erasmus – to lapse into a sort of medieval celebration of anachronism, in which Paul can be brought into the present day by imitation. Valla saw himself as Paul because Paul was an orator and a parrhesiast: “No one who knows how to speak well can be a considered a true orator unless he also dares to speaks out. . . . [A] person who sins in public and who accepts no private counsel must be charged in public, to frighten all the rest. Did not Paul, whose words I have just used, reproach Peter to his face before the church . . . and leave this in writing for our instruction?”11 Julia Lupton’s Citizen-Saints has shown how Paul played a central role in the construction of the political self in Shakespearean England, but this history deserves to be traced from the early Tudor period, where the evangelist served a revealingly different purpose.12 Paul’s rhetorical method was not just a necessary component for the interpretation of scripture; it bore a saintly quality that pagan classical rhetoricians lacked. The rhetoric of Paul is explored in various places in the Erasmian corpus, but the Annotations on the New Testament are of particular significance, not only as they help define an important hermeneutic shift in the sixteenth century, but also because they provide a kind of stamp of validity on what might seem, in another context, an ironic or halfhearted assertion of meaning. C ol e t ’s a n d E r a s m us’s H i s t or ic i s m Recovering the biblical text in its historical form would have major consequences, not least in upsetting the stability of a text that had been sacrosanct for more than a thousand years. Erasmus feared that his rewording of Jerome’s Vulgate might scandalize readers, and he hid many controversial readings from the first edition, adding these in the increasingly extended notes of subsequent editions of his New Testament and Annotations.13 This magnificent publication included the Greek text facing the new Latin in one volume, with extensive glosses in the second volume, often bound with the first (see Figure 4.1). In the four editions that followed – the versions of 1519 and 1522, a three-columned text of 1527 (with the Greek, Erasmus’s Latin, and the Vulgate), and the final version of 1535 – Erasmus continued to revise and embellish the work in revealing ways. Unlike the Geneva Bible and its glosses, neither Erasmus’s translation of scripture itself nor his annotations was intended for the common reader, but they clearly influenced more than just elite readers and scholars.14 Yet however much they galvanized and defined opposition,

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Figure 4.1. The first page of Paul’s letter to the Romans, Novum Instrumentum Omne (Froben: Basel, 1516), with Erasmus’s new translation on the right. A reader has added verse numbers in red, which were introduced in the Geneva Bible. By permission of Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

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Erasmus’s readings were never fully accepted by either side of the massive schism that occurred after Luther’s posted theses.15 Protestants generally rejected Erasmus’s rather liberal interpretive approach, even though new vernacular translations – such as those of William Tyndale and Martin Luther – were based on his text.16 On the Catholic side of the schism, the Council of Trent repudiated Erasmian textual studies by determining that the Vulgate was an “authentic” replacement of the Greek original. Erasmus’s major reconstruction of the past had thus a troubled legacy, one that is still reflected in the neglect of modern criticism. The greatest shift in biblical interpretation prior to the Reformation resulted from the philological recovery of the historical meaning of texts. Scholars such as Valla, whose Adnotationes Erasmus studied closely, and Jacques Lefèvre, whose translation of Paul’s epistles in 1512 was among the first to supplant the Vulgate, share with and influence Erasmus’s philological methodology.17 Brian Cummings has shown how the classical studies that informed humanist approaches to the Bible brought scholars like Erasmus almost to the point of privileging the literary over the theological.18 In an astonishing assertion of the value of the literary, Erasmus praised Valla in his annotations as “a man more concerned with literature than with theology”19 in the enterprise of biblical scholarship.20 Erasmus meant this with some of his customary irony: theological truth is, of course, ultimately the goal of hermeneutics. But a literary treatment of the text – rhetorical, philological, and contextual – was for him the key to accurate recovery of meaning. The long-standing belief that Colet informed Erasmus’s philological methods has been discredited, but it remains clear that they share a historicist interpretive approach, particularly with regard to the most important Pauline text on secular power, Romans 13.21 Colet lectured on Paul at Oxford in the late 1490s, and Erasmus heard him lecture in 1499. Erasmus at this time began a long commentary on Romans, which, though never published, fostered ideas for his New Testament and subsequent paraphrases of Paul. Erasmus wrote to Johann Popenruyter in 1501 that he had been “carefully preparing an interpretation of [Paul] for some time.”22 In a letter to Colet in 1504, after saying that he was “astonished that none of your commentaries on Paul and the Gospels [have] yet been published,” Erasmus went on to say that “[t]hree years ago, indeed, I ventured to do something on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and at one rush, as it were, finished four volumes.”23 His ongoing work on this unpublished commentary accounts for the frequent references to Paul in his work leading up to the publication of the Annotations and the Novum Instrumentum in 1516.

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Colet’s lectures provide a reading of Paul’s language that takes into account the historical circumstances from which his text arose.24 Colet maintained that Paul’s support of absolutism was provisional and rhetorical, framed in dangerous conditions that must be brought to bear on the interpretation of the text. Paul states in Romans 13 that all power derives from God, and that magistrates hold the power of vengeance in a sword seemingly authorized by heaven. The words demand obedience without exception: “Let every soul submit himself unto the authority of the higher powers,” Tyndale’s translation reads, “[f]or there is no power but of God. The powers that be, are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, shall receive to themselves damnation.” To urge a prince, as Nero would say, is sacrilege. Paul goes on to define the “ruler” to whom one owes obedience as a “minister of God”: “For he is the minister of God, for thy wealth. . . . Wherefore ye must needs obey, not for fear of vengeance only: but also because of conscience. And even for this cause pay ye tribute.”25 In Tyndale’s bold proclamation of the new Protestant hermeneutic, “scripture hath but one sense which is the literal sense.”26 Tyndale and English Protestants after him interpreted this passage in Romans in an unflinchingly literal manner: magistrates are ministers of God, and disobedience and resistance is damnable.27 Indeed, as Henry VIII became Supreme Head of the Church, the transference of religious allegiance moved from pope to king, such that Bishop Latimer would use Romans 13 to assert the English king’s position as the vicar of Christ, turning Valla’s demand that “the Pope is the vicar of Christ alone and not of Caesar” quite on its head. In a sermon before the English court of Edward VI, Archbishop Latimer stated: “consider . . . the presence of the King’s Majesty, God’s high Vicar in earth.”28 Latimer then alludes to Paul’s doctrine that kings are “God’s ministers” (Romans 13:6), continuing: “Having a respect to his personage, ye ought to have reverence to it and consider that he is God’s high minister” (101). Just prior to the Reformation, historicizing humanists saw Romans 13 in a very different manner. Using Suetonius to help locate the precise moment of the epistle, Colet reconstructs the historical conditions surrounding Paul’s text, written during the reigns of Claudius and Nero. As Colet relates, Paul “perished in the first persecution of the Christians that continued under Nero.”29 “I mention this,” he continues, that St. Paul’s great thoughtfulness and prudence may be remarked. For being aware that Claudius Caesar had succeeded to the throne; a man of changeable disposition, and bad principles, and sudden purposes; a man too who, as

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Suetonius writes in his Life, banished the Jews from Rome, as they were in constant insurrection at the instigation of CHRESTUS (on account of which insurrection I suppose St. Paul to have written this Epistle, and that what Suetonius meant to convey was, that the Jews had been banished by Claudius on account of their disputes about Christ); St. Paul understanding, I say, that the Roman Emperor, as Suetonius also relates, was levying some new and unheard of taxes (95–6).

Considering that Claudius, like Nero, fiercely opposed the new Christian sect, Colet poses a simple question: how can Paul really have meant that magistrates are “ministers of God”? Paul’s position, Colet proposes, must have been constructed for the early survival of the church. In such a state, it was “St. Paul’s wish, while the Church is still as yet in its infancy, and especially in the case of those at Rome, under such wide control of heathens, that all things should be done discreetly” (91). That these magistrates were “heathen” made the precepts of Paul provisional, taking meaning from a situation that had long since elapsed: “St Paul implies [that] God allows and suffers such [pagan] magistrates, and the power of the unbelieving, for a time” (92; emphasis added). Colet imagines that Paul’s magistrates were given divine approval as a peace-making tactic, and one that might bring the magistrates “to grow gentle”: “[I]t follows readily that they must needs have been strongly induced to deal mercifully with the inoffensive Christians, and allow them to remain in the state without injury. This would follow, I mean, on their hearing that rulers were not to be objects of terror to the good, but to the bad; and that they were the ministers of God” (98). In Colet’s reading, Paul’s words should be read only as they functioned rhetorically, and as they were designed to function in that context – not in terms of their literal meaning. Phrases like “minister of God” are not meant to signify an actual quality in the magistrate, so much as they are designed to engender a desired one. By using this rhetorical ploy, Paul “covertly teaches [latenter docendi] what sort of men the rulers of states ought to be” (97; 202). Colet’s historicist reading suggests that the apostle used rhetorical strategies analogous to More’s obliquus ductus. The covert teaching, like the rhetorical obliquity of the obliquus ductus, is a self-protective method for correcting those in power. While Colet takes pains to create an accurate historical reading of Paul’s intentions, he lapses as well into a contemporary discourse of how to address kings. Instead of the historically descriptive terms otherwise pervasive in his discussion, Paul “relates the duties of the king and governor of the state (officium principis et gubernatoris reipublicae)” (202; my translation). Romans 13 thus turns from being

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instructions addressed to subjects on their duties (the primary literal sense of the passage) to instructions to the magistrate on the duties of office. Other than this presentist lapse, the bulk of Colet’s interpretation remains historically specific, suggesting that Colet sees nothing in Romans 13 applicable to his present time. When Paul says that “every one must needs be subject to the higher powers,” it is “the power of the heathen (paganorum), that is, in whose hands all power in secular matters then lay” (97; 202, emphasis added). The separation from Colet’s present is thus twofold: Paul’s treatment of sovereignty is a rhetorical gesture that means something different from what it says, and it is only meant in its historical context, in which the magistrate was pagan. Colet presses his historical reading yet further with the suggestion that Paul had consciously designed his letter with the possibility that it “should make its way into Roman hands” (97). According to Colet, Paul wrote with the possibility of epistolary interception in mind, which is why he “speaks in such a way of the Roman magistrates, as at once to instruct them, and win their favour for the Christians” (97). Paul’s rhetoric assumes even greater utility upon the possibility of Roman magistrates finding the letter: “[S]hould they have ever chanced to read his Epistle, it follows readily that they must needs have been strongly induced to deal mercifully with the inoffensive Christians” (98). Following Colet, Erasmus works subtly against the literal meaning of Romans 13 in the Annotations. He points out that “minister” does not mean anything other than “agent” (CWE 56, 350), and argues that “Paul was aware that some Christians, under the pretext of religion, were refusing the orders of their rulers, and that as a result the established order would be upset and all things thrown into disarray” (347). It was these historical circumstances that brought Paul to teach that “they should obey any one at all entrusted with public authority – making exception for the interests of faith and piety” (347). Erasmus reads further than the passage allows; Paul does not make exception here for the interests of faith and piety. Erasmus also softens the Vulgate in important ways, removing the threat of damnation (damnationem acquirunt) in 13:2 and replacing it with “judgment” (iudicium accipient). He also removes the “necessity” of obedience in 13:5 – usually translated as “must be subject” – replacing it with a weaker expression of ought; hence the Vulgate’s ideoque necessitate subditi estote “and so on this account be subject to necessity” becomes in Erasmus’s Latin “wherefore you ought to be subject” (quapropter oportet esse subditos) (350). Tyndale and subsequent English translations stayed closer to the Vulgate, with “receive damnation” in 13:2, and “must needs obey” in 13:5.

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In the annotations on this passage, Erasmus shares Colet’s view that the words of Paul were meant to apply only to a pagan magistrate, though again he asserts this with subtle irony: “True,” he wrote, “these very rulers are pagan (ethnici) and evil; but the order is still good” (347).30 Erasmus continues to stress the same difference between pagan and Christian in his note to Romans 13:7–8: “Pay to everyone what is owed: tribute to whom tribute is owed . . . owe no one anything”: “It can be understood in such a way that the previous words [that is, 13.7, pay tribute] refer to magistrates who were pagan (magistratus ethnicos), as they all were at that time; what follows – [owe] no one anything etc – refers to Christians: ‘pay them [the magistrates] what you owe, but a Christian owes a Christian nothing except mutual love.’”31 These ironic, albeit guarded, readings were probably concessions to his conservative critics, for whom Erasmus admitted making compromises in the interpretation of well-known passages.32 In the Education of a Christian Prince, however, published in the same year, Erasmus emphasizes the full implications of Colet’s distinction between pagan and Christian princes. Erasmus employs historicism with particular vigor in a reading of Romans 13, which supplies him with the distinction implied in the title between a Christian and a pagan prince.33 Pointing towards the well-known verse in Romans, Erasmus writes, “Do not let it escape you that what is said . . . about the need to endure masters, obey officials, do honour to the king . . . is to be taken as referring to pagan princes.” That is, “A pagan prince requires to be honoured; Paul says honour is to be shown him. He levies a tax; Paul wants the tax to be paid. . . . [F]or the Christian man is in no way diminished by these things. . . . But what does he go on to say about Christians? ‘you ought not,’ he says, ‘to have any debts among yourselves, except to love one another’” [Romans 13.8]. Erasmus suggests that the relationship of a Christian prince to his subjects must be understood in a radically new light – and not by the doctrines set down by Paul in Romans 13. “I hope,” he continues, that “such thoughts as these will not occur to anyone”: “Why then do you take away the prince’s own rights and attribute more to the pagan than to the Christian?” But I do not; I stand up for the rights of the Christian prince. It is the right of a pagan prince to oppress his people by fear, . . . to plunder their goods and finally make martyrs of them: that is a pagan prince’s right. You do not want the Christian prince to have the same, do you?34

The repetition of “rights” underscores the close historical relationship between biblical and legal hermeneutics: this is a right determined by scripture, and scripture must be read by a socially authorized hermeneut.35

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He concludes, suggesting that this claim is contingent on his authority, when he demands: “Or will his rightful power seem to be reduced if these things are denied him?” (236). The rights “denied him” – the “right” to absolute obedience – can only be denied by the assertions of a biblical authority who argues that Paul does not give princes that right. S a i n t ly S e n e c a a n d P ol i t ic a l Pau l Treating the Pauline text as another classical text had the effect of placing it conceptually close to other authors who operated fatally under Nero. The particular favorite, suggested by the passage in Utopia, was Seneca. The stoic philosopher and dramatist, as well as “consul, ac senator, & Neronis praeceptor,”36 as Erasmus described him in his edition of his works – with a frequent emphasis on “praeceptor,” or teacher, of Nero – shaped the way in which humanists framed their endeavors at court. “For Nero it was Seneca,” Erasmus wrote hopefully to Henry VIII in 1513, indicating the relationship he hoped to cultivate with the young king, “and if Nero had obeyed his advice he would have reigned longer, and might have earned a place among the good emperors as well.”37 But soon after, in the Education of a Christian Prince, he wrote, “Nero’s nature was so corrupt, that even that saintly teacher Seneca could not prevent his becoming a most pestilential ruler.”38 Just as Erasmus imagines Seneca as “saintly,” he recasts Paul in a role remarkably like that of Seneca. Seneca has some connection with Paul even in canonical scripture, as his brother, the proconsul of Achaea, is mentioned in Acts 18 as receiving Paul with clemency.39 For hundreds of years, the stoic philosopher and the Christian reformer were closely connected through a set of letters. Like the Donation of Constantine, the forged letters between the two contemporaries would not ultimately survive the scrutiny of humanist historicism. Yet the correspondence had such a hold on the early modern imagination as to carry considerable force even after its exposure; indeed, many of Erasmus’s contemporaries still adhered to its authenticity. Even though Erasmus did not, he was affected by the story. He claimed that Jerome wrongly used the correspondence “as a pretext for praising Seneca” while presuming that, as “a critic of keen discernment, Jerome well knew [the letters] were written by neither of them.” This is untrue: there is nothing to suggest that Jerome’s conviction was disingenuous. But for his own part, Erasmus possesses the same conflicted acceptance he sees in Jerome. For he embraces the sentiment that led Jerome to include Seneca “alone among Gentiles . . .

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recorded in The Catalogue of Illustrious Authors,” for Jerome “thought him the one writer who, while not a Christian, deserved to be read by Christians.” “Nothing,” Erasmus goes on, “sets a higher tone than his pronouncements. . . . Seneca alone calls the mind away to heavenly things.”40 Erasmus included the spurious correspondence in his edition of Seneca’s works, published a year before the Novum Instrumentum, “for fear,” he explained, “the reader might need something and not find it.”41 The degree to which Erasmus operated within a world that believed in a Paul-Seneca relationship is worth reconstructing. To prepare his edition of Seneca’s works, Erasmus consulted the commentaries of Barzizza, who presents Seneca as a follower of Paul at Rome. As Nero’s advisor, Seneca hides his Christian beliefs to avoid Nero’s wrath and win the emperor over to the Christian side.42 The correspondence appears uncontested in editions of Paul by Lefèvre, whose 1512 edition of the Epistles offered the only printed Latin translation to supersede the Vulgate prior to Erasmus’s complete edition, and Erasmus consulted it carefully.43 Lefèvre thought the correspondence to be authentic and set it beside Paul’s letter to the Hebrews. Other contemporaries, as Irena Backus has shown, “had no hesitations about using the Seneca Correspondence . . . to extend the Pauline corpus.”44 Lefèvre explains how Seneca’s pen or style (stilus) obscured and dissimulated (stilum aliquantulum adumbrasse & dissimulasse),45 with an effort to conceal his identity should the letters be found by Nero. Like Colet and Erasmus, Lefèvre read texts in terms of the political conditions under which they were formed. For Erasmus, as the ensuing pages show, the rhetorical stratagems he admired in these Neronian writers became those that he himself used when advising princes. I n Pr a i s e of Pr i nc e s Erasmus also employs Pauline forms of rhetoric in his Panegyric to Philip the Archduke of Austria, which was produced under tense historical circumstances. Members of the Estates of Brabant were concerned that Philip would join his father Maximilian in an invasion of Guelders, a province to the east of Holland.46 Erasmus’s oratory before the Estates and members of Philip’s council indirectly enforces, through fulsome praise, the lawfulness of Philip’s contract with his estates and the recklessness of military invasion. When defending the Panegyricus against charges of flattery, Erasmus based his rhetorical method on the example of Paul. “Those who believe panegyrics are nothing but flattery,” he wrote in a letter that would be published with the encomium, “seem to be unaware of the purpose and aim of the extremely far-sighted men who invented

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this kind of composition, which consists in presenting princes with a pattern of goodness” – and here the added italics emphasize the letter’s selfbetraying function as a key to the text’s meaning – “in such a way as to reform bad rulers, improve the good, educate the boorish, reprove the erring, arouse the indolent, and cause even the hopelessly vicious to feel some inward stirrings of shame.”47 (Erasmus surely gambled that Philip would not read the published version.) He goes on, identifying the most important of these “far-sighted men”: “Did not the apostle Paul himself often use this artifice (artificio) – a sort of pious adulation (pia adulatione) – of praising in order to amend?”48 “Again,” he goes on, weaving in a commonplace from Persius: how can one reproach a wicked ruler for his cruelty more safely, yet more severely, than by proclaiming his mildness; or for his greed and violence and lust, then by celebrating his generosity, self-control, and chastity, “that he may see fair virtue’s face, and pine with grief that he has left her.” (CWE 2:81, Ep. 180)

The sententia that Erasmus quotes at the end meaningfully omits some fiery words in the source, where Persius excoriates tyrants before introducing the quoted sentence: “Great father of the gods, may you punish savage tyrants, when terrible desire dipped in fiery poison has affected their minds, exactly like this: that they may see virtue and pine with grief that they have left her.”49 Persius’s sharp satire lurks under the comparatively placid veneer of the letter, which itself suggests constructing the veneer of praise, under which true speech can safely operate. The rhetorical artifice that Erasmus attributes to Paul in the letter attached to the Panegyricus derives from Erasmus’s interpretive work. It appears in the notes to Romans 1:11–12, where Erasmus annotates the words simul consolari, or comfort together, συμπαρακληθῆναι, from which “Paraclete,” the “comforter,” or “Holy Spirit” derives – hence Erasmus’s title Paraclesis, the “summons” to his readers of the Novum Instrumentum.50 Paul says in this passage, “I am longing to see you so that I may share with you some spiritual gift to strengthen you – or rather so that we may be mutually comforted by each other’s faith.”51 Erasmus notes that “Paul feared that he might offend the Romans, with their somewhat arrogant disposition. . . . Thus he explains this strengthening as their ‘mutual comfort,’ speaking, as usual, with the greatest modesty.” Erasmus then writes, in a gloss that did not appear until the edition of 1527, of how Paul “softened and tempered his speech”:52 Quum enim dixisset, confirmari, metuens ne Romani arrogantes dicerent, Quid? An vacillamus, ut tua lingua simus fulciendi: mitigavit hoc, & verbum confirmandi, vertit in consolandi, nec hoc contentus, non dixit παρακληθῆναι,

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sed συμπαρακληθῆναι: quasi non minus ipse egeret illorum consolatione. . . . Haec est pia vafricies, & sancta, ut ita dixerim, adulatio.53 For when he had said ‘to be strengthened,’ fearing that the arrogant Romans might reply, ‘What? do we waver so that we have to be propped up by your tongue?’ he softened this by changing the word ‘strengthening’ to ‘comforting.’ And not content with that he said, not παρακληθῆναι [comfort], but συμπαρακληθῆναι [to comfort together], as if he himself needed their comfort no less. . . . This is pious cunning and holy, if I may say, flattery.54

In the doubling of the phrases pia vafrities and sancta adulatio, Erasmus builds on his former pia adulatio, used to defend his own method of writing – it is pious, after all, because Paul uses it. In the letter appended to the Panegyricus in which he fashions his adulations after Paul, Erasmus elaborates on the power and danger of disingenuous praise: “It does not matter under whose name a pattern of the good prince is publicly set forth, provided it is done cleverly, so that it may appear to men of intelligence that you were not currying favour but uttering a warning.”55 A complex dynamic characterizes the praise and blame of epideictic oratory, which strives toward a mode of praise that hints at blame, in which the mechanisms of recognition are crucial to the effect. If the element of blame goes completely unrecognized by the prince, the praise may misfire dangerously, stoking the fires of self-aggrandizement. Early in his career, Erasmus was, like More’s Hythloday, concerned that the epideictic role had an ultimately corrupting influence. “I sang my songs to Midas,” he wrote in a letter of 1499, citing his favorite corrupt kingly exemplum next to Nero, “and, paying too assiduous court to men of his kind, in the end all that I achieved was failure to please them, or scholars either.”56 Fearing the dangers of false praise, Erasmus wrote to Colet that he was “reluctant to compose the Panegyricus” and did not “remember ever doing anything more unwillingly; for I saw that this kind of thing [or genre, genus] could not be handled without flattery.”57 Yet this reluctance is ambiguous and rhetorical, for he goes on, more elatedly, to speak of his new rhetorical strategy. “However,” he continues, “I employed a new stratagem [novo artificio]; I was completely frank while I flattered and also very flattering in my frankness.”58 The strange balance of misgiving and resolution suggests a thin line between the right kind of flattery – the holy flattery of Paul – and one that overbalances hidden criticism with too much adulation. The apologetic letter to Desmarez that would be printed with the Panegyricus attributed this artificium to Paul. But here, significantly, in Erasmus’s very next preserved letter, Erasmus proclaims

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to Colet that what he is doing is “new” (novum artificium); he has devised a new rhetorical technique. The conflict in the two letters about the origin of the artifice provokes the question whether Erasmus forgot that he had just attributed it to Paul what he claims as his own, or, more likely, that he is admitting in this more private setting that he is projecting on Paul his own rhetorical inventions. It is significant that a letter to Colet should have been the occasion for such self-revision, for the two shared a five-year connection as fellow explicators of Paul. Such an admission implies that their mutual enterprise of Biblical interpretation produces new forms of expression that are not in scripture itself. Erasmus had long since familiarized himself with the panegyric genre, and with the possibilities of a cunning form of criticism that functioned under the guise of flattery. In a remarkable letter of 1498 to the young Adolph, prince of Veere, he defends the writing of panegyrics and explains his theory of an indirect approach. This letter became public in 1503, when it was affixed to the front of the Oration on the Pursuit of Virtue: When I consider the matter carefully I do not, as a rule, conclude that the ancients’ habit of formally praising kings and emperors with panegyrics, even to their faces, was caused by a vicious tendency to obsequious toadying and flattery. Rather, my view is this: intelligent men who had an exceptional understanding of nature and of the human spirit gave up hope that any noble and lion-hearted king with fastidious ears would ever come to tolerate the moral authority of an adviser or the stern censure of a critic. So, acting out of a concern for the public interest (utilitatis), they changed their tack; they kept on towards the same goal, but took a more hidden route (occultiore via).59

This occultior via anticipates More’s obliquus ductus and underscores again the degree to which More’s famous concept emerged from a highly developed conversation among humanists. “This practice,” Erasmus continues, “was a concession made in times past to the violent temper of barbarian kings, not, I think, from some shameful motive, but from prudence.”60 Erasmus’s scriptural exegesis reveals Paul as the prime model from “times past.” A central example occurs in his interpretation of the famous address to the Athenians in Acts 17:23–5, where Paul says, “ye men of Athens, in all things I perceive that ye are very religious, for as I passed along, and observed objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: To An Unknown God.” Paul goes on to say, in the words from Erasmus’s Paraphrase on the Acts, “those who allege that I am introducing new and foreign gods are therefore mistaken. On the contrary I proclaim to you the very one whom you worship as unknown, as that inscription

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on the altar shows.”61 As in the note to Romans 1:11–12, Erasmus applauds Paul’s pia vafricies, which Jerome apparently also noticed: Ignoto Deo) Et hic Hieronymus indicat Paulum pia quadam usum vafricie, quod nonnihil mutavit in titulo, non pauca omisit, quo commodius detorqueret ad exordium praedicandi Christum.62 Unknown God: Jerome points out that Paul used a certain pious cunning, because he changed something in the inscription; he omitted not a few things in order to twist the sense (detorqueret) more serviceably towards a ground (exordium, rhetorical beginning) through which to preach Christ.63

The tone of this gloss may depend on the way in which detorquere is translated – “twist” might be translated more neutrally. But Erasmus’s point is that Paul has cunningly shifted the meaning of the original. Indeed, Erasmus and his contemporaries usually use detorquere and torquere negatively, when their opponents have “twisted” the meaning of scripture.64 Erasmus uses the word in his diatribe with Luther, where he describes how people “twist (detorquent) whatever they read in the Scriptures into an assertion of an opinion which they have embraced once for all.”65 In Acts 17, Paul has “twisted” the meaning of the inscription in order to insert Christ into the Athenians’ minds. More than just reinterpreting, Paul left something out, changing “gods” to “God.” Erasmus goes on to explain how Paul transformed the original text: Titulus enim sic habebat, auctore, quem modo citavi Hieronymo, Diis Asiae, & Europae, & Africae, Dis ignotis & Peregrinis. Ex diis ignotis deum fecit ignotum, & mentionem caeterorum omisit. For the inscription thus had, by the author, in the manner cited from Jerome, to the gods of Asia, and Europe, and Africa, and to the gods unknown and wandering. Out of the “gods unknown” he made a “God unknown,” and omitted the mention of the remaining ones.

This long gloss became even longer in the edition of 1519, in which Erasmus added the daring commentary that would remain through 1535: Quam equidem civilitatem imitamen arbitror iis, quibus studium est ethnicos, aut principes mala educatione depravatos, ad pietatem adducere, ne protinus conviciis rem agant & exacerbent, quibus mederi volunt, sed multa dissimulantes, paulatim illos adducant ad mentem meliorem. Et fortassis reprehendi non oporteat, si boni viri hoc animo in regum aulis agant, quo paulatim irrepant in principum affectus, modo ne sint auctores eorum quae palam sunt iniqua, licet ad quaedam conniveant inviti.66 In this manner indeed, I think there is truly an image of the state for those who seek to lead pagans – or princes, corrupted by bad upbringing – towards piety, lest they directly make reproaches, and exacerbate what they wish to remedy, but

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instead, while dissimulating many things, gradually lead them toward a better mind. And perhaps it ought not to be blamed, if good men act in this spirit in the courts of princes, and gradually steal into the mind of the prince, so long as they are not the doers of deeds that are openly wrong, although they may be permitted to overlook certain ones unwillingly.

Here a biblical gloss has been transformed into a commentary on the conditions of speaking in court. From Paul’s method of detorquendi, of shifting the meaning of the original text to apply to the immediate purpose of the reformer, Erasmus draws an example for the advisors of princes. The association between “lead the pagan” and “lead princes” suggests a satiric correlation between the Pauline role of converting pagans and Erasmus’s role in reforming princes. Another elaborate biblical gloss on Pauline political rhetoric can be found in Colossians 4:6: “Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time. Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer each one.” Here, the bracketed passages were added to the 1527 edition, with the marginal note “Quomodo monendi magnates,” added in 1522: Sale sit conditus) Ambrosius legit, semper in sale gratia sit conditus, quasi dictum sit. Sermo vester sit salsus, conditus gratia. Tametsi Graeca perinde valent ac si dicas, Sermo vester semper habeat gratiam, sale conditus, ut intelligamus iucunditatem ac modestiam in colloquiis [Christianorum cum] ethnicis, sed eam cum sapienta conjunctam. Hoc detorqueri potest ad nos, si quando cum magnatibus agendum est, ne intempestiva maledicentia & acerbitate provocemus eos reddamusque deteriores quam sunt, sed prudenti moderatione sermonis paulatim adducamus ad meliora[, si quid aberrant].67 Seasoned with salt: Ambrose read, “always with grace seasoned in salt” as if it stated, “Let your speech be salt, seasoned with grace.” And yet the Greek commends a reading in this manner – as if you were to say, “let your speech always have grace and be seasoned with salt”: so we might understand charm and modesty in the conversations [of the Christians] with the Pagans, but we may also understand that conjunction with wisdom. This can be turned (detorqueret) for our use, as when with magnates it needs to be done, lest by untimely maledictions and bitterness we provoke them, and render them even worse than they already are. We ought instead to lead them gradually toward the better with a moderated, prudent speech[, if they err in any way.]

As the bracketed passages show, Erasmus continued to emphasize the contrast between Christians and pagans in the later editions of the Annotations. The annotation makes use of “detorquere” to speak not so much of Paul’s transformation as of how we might further transform Paul’s own text – that is, how we might use Paul as an “exortium

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through which to assert” our own view. Lessons learned from the historical association between the Christians and the pagans might be applied in reforming those who are more powerful. Like the “conversations of the Christians with the pagans,” speech used to address magnates must be seasoned with salt. The word I have translated as “charm,” iucunditas, in “charm and modesty in the conversation between the Christians and the pagans” is a rhetorical device central to The Praise of Folly.68 I have only the space to touch briefly on this work in conclusion, for although it is not a straightforward work of epideictic rhetoric, Erasmus’s early turn from praise of princes to praise of Folly carries with it many of the tropes and inventions associated with his reconstructed Pauline rhetoric. This satiric inversion of the panegyric genre may have occurred out of frustration at the ineffectiveness of the Panegyricus, given that, soon after its performance, Maximilian and Philip invaded Guelders – the very conquest Erasmus had sought to oppose. After this mishap, Erasmus moved to England, where he translated Lucian’s satires of tyrants, conquerors, and ethically untenable pursuers of military glory.69 He then moved to Italy in 1506 to further his training in Greek for the New Testament project, returning to England three years later to compose The Praise of Folly (1511, 1514).70 Folly takes further some of the methods and problems reconstructed in the Pauline context. She expounds on how kings by nature shun wise men: “[T]hey are afraid that perhaps one of them might be so frank (liberior) as to say what is true rather than pleasant,”71 reusing the same language he had used to tell Colet about a new artifice that allowed him to be flattering when frank, and frank (libertate) when flattering.72 “Quite right,” Folly continues, “kings do hate the truth. But my fools, on the other hand, have a marvelous faculty of giving pleasure (iucunda) not only when they speak the truth but even when they utter open reproaches, so that the very same statement which would have cost a wiseman his life causes unbelievable pleasure if spoken by a fool” (56; 116). In the same way that grace and salt may be mixed to moderate the bitterness of truth, playfulness and wisdom may so be combined that a statement becomes safe and efficacious, which would, baldly expressed, provoke the wrath of a magnate. Folly also treats of the dangers of oratory in a speech initiated by the question of “what wisdom” caused Socrates “to be sentenced to drink hemlock.” She describes Plato’s vain attempts to “help his teacher in his hour of mortal danger” and then launches into an inquiry into the effects of “fear” on the orator’s “fight” to maintain the state. “Quintilian,” she goes on at length, “interprets this fear as the sign of a wise orator well

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aware of the dangers (periculum) of his task.”73 Folly probably had in mind the passage of Quintilian in which the rhetorician describes the technique of emphasis, which allows one to speak truth to power and avoid danger (periculum).74 Folly’s inquiry into the dangers of oratory continues until folly itself is proposed as the safe method for giving advice: “There are two main obstacles to gaining a knowledge of affairs: modesty, which throws the mind into confusion; and fear, which keeps people from undertaking noble exploits once the danger becomes apparent. But folly removes these hindrances in fine fashion” (42; ASD, 104). Here the context for Quintilian’s “fear” becomes still more apparent: it is a fear of speaking directly in such a way, as More relates in Richard III, and Erasmus in The Praise of Folly, that could “cost a wiseman his life” (56). One cannot “speke al the trouth,” More wrote in Richard III, “for fere of [the king’s] displeasure.”75 An untimely death caused by an act of truth (or, in More’s case, silence) was for these humanists a very real possibility, as it was for those imperial writers Seneca and Paul who, as Colet wrote, “perished under Nero.” In a bitter epigram written on the death of More, Erasmus cast his friend as perhaps both Seneca and Paul: “If you want the praises of Henry to be summed up in one verse, combine Midas and Nero into one man.”76 Colet, Erasmus, and More developed their elaborate methods of rhetorical subterfuge with a keen sense of the danger of speaking truth to power. It is no wonder that in his commentary on Romans 13, Colet turned abruptly from Paul’s death under Nero, as if foreknowing his untimely end, to explain his “great thoughtfulness and prudence”77 in shaping his rhetoric in a way that could “secretly teach” the powerful and keep his growing flock out of danger. Colet’s historicist reading of Paul set a vital example for Erasmus, who developed a set of tropes that explain Paul’s rhetoric, which could then be twisted (detorquere) for contemporary use. One advantage of looking back on historicists of the distant past is that it provides some perspective on the problems we face in the present, when it seems (at least to some) as if historicism has run its course. Constructive criticism of historicism is, of course, a very good thing. But if exploring the problems of Renaissance historicism can help reveal anything beyond their intrinsic interest, it does, I think, suggest that a false dichotomy has emerged in the way in which present-day historicism is characterized. If we look at the long history of historicism, neither historicism nor politics is guilty of diminishing the value of the text as an interpretive object. If anything, Erasmus’s political historicism has made a text like Romans 13 far more interesting, and certainly more rhetorical and more open to

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interpretation, than it would be in the hands of literalists like Tyndale. Historicism has not closed off interpretation, but instead revealed otherwise inaccessible rhetorical possibilities in texts. Nor has historicism caused readers like Erasmus, Valla, or Colet to privilege the historical or even the theological over the literary. The connection between historicist criticism and political rhetoric in Renaissance humanism demonstrates the close relationship between politics and interpretive methods. This relationship testifies to a close connection between method and belief, between the means by which meaning is assessed and meaning itself. While it would be anachronistic to say that these early modern historicists “generally situate themselves on the left,” they are similar to many twenty-first-century historicists in one simple respect: like modern historicists, these humanists employ historicist hermeneutics as a vehicle of political criticism. This, it seems, is a central and abiding feature of contextualist historicism. For although historicists themselves participate in a political construction of meaning, they recognize that without a continuous effort to apply the corrective of historical knowledge, the cultural construction of meaning would remain liable to the corruption of the powers that be. No t e s 1 See Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970), 55–9; Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 71–4; Carlo Ginsburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 54–70; Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (London: Collins and Brown, 1990), 29–30; see also Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England (London: British Library, 2003), 136–55. 2 Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, trans. By G. W. Bowersock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 79–80. I have modified the last few words to reflect the original: “non etiam Caesaris.” Christopher B. Coleman, The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine, Text and Translation into English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), 182. 3 See Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, vii–xiv. On the political dimensions of Valla’s oration, see Salvatore I. Camporeale, “Lorenzo Valla’s ‘Oratio’ on the Pseudo-Donation of Constantine: Dissent and Innovation in Early Renaissance Humanism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57.1 (1996): 9–26. 4 Stanley Fish, “Why Milton Matters; or, Against Historicism,” Milton Studies 44 (2005): 1–12, 9; for other bibliography, see the essays of Stevens (Chapter 6) and Dzelzainis (Chapter 9) in this volume.

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5 See, for example, Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, eds., Presentist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2007). 6 Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 53. 7 Richard S. Sylvester, ed., The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), vol. II, 59. 8 Edward Surtz, S.J., and J. H. Hexter, eds., The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), vol. IV, 98–9. I have slightly modified the translation. 9 Octavia, line 582. Seneca, Tragedies II, Loeb edition, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 568. My translation. See J. Crossett, “More and Seneca,” Philological Quarterly 40 (1961), 577–80. 10 Here I adopt the more literal translation of “Immo Paulus sum, qui Paulum imitor” in Coleman, Treatise of Lorenzo Valla, 24–5. See Camporeale, “Lorenzo Valla’s ‘Oratio’,” 11. 11 On the Donation of Constantine, 2. 12 Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005). 13 See Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 102n1. 14 Erika Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations on the New Testament (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1986), 17, 26–31. Erasmus’s work was popularized in such publications as The New Testament in Englishe after the Greek translation Annexed with the Translation of Erasmus in Latin (London, 1550); Douglas H. Parker, ed., William Roye’s An Exhortation to the Diligent Studye of Scripture (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000), esp. 51–4; Nicolas Lesse, The Censure and Judgement of the Famous Clark Erasmus of Roterodam; Whyther Dyvorcemente betwene Man and Wyfe Stondeth with the Lawe of God (London, [1550?]); An Exhortation to the Diligent Studye of Scripture Made by Erasmus of Roterodamus ([Antwerp], 1529). 15 Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations, 30, 33, 123–70; Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, 147–56. 16 See Gergely Juhász, “Antwerp Bible Translations in the King James Bible,” in Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 110–12; and James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 55. 17 Valla’s philological notes inform many of Erasmus’s glosses, although they are not crucial to the readings explored here. For some representative instances, see Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations, 85–8; also Jerry H. Bentley, “Biblical Philology and Christian Humanism: Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus as Scholars of the Gospels,” Sixteenth Century Journal 8.2 (1977): 8–28. Valla’s

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19 20

21

22 23

F u lt on annotations, like Lefèvre’s, are short philological notes rather than discursive commentaries. Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, 146; also Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations, 14–15. On the classical and rhetorical origins of Erasmus’s hermeneutics, see Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), esp. 64–78. Epistle 337. The Collected Works of Erasmus, 86 vols. projected (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1974 – ), vol. III, 137; hereafter cited as CWE. Erasmus published this work, written in 1442–57, as Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum in 1505. It is reprinted in facsimile in Valla, Opera Omnia, 2 vols. (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962), vol. I, 803–95. See Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 34–5; J. B. Trapp, Erasmus, Colet and More: The Early Tudor Humanists and their Books (London: British Library, 1991), 5–6. See John B. Gleason, John Colet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), esp. 93–132. Gleason rightly revises the traditional view that Erasmus was a “disciple” of Colet, but he may be going too far, as I attempt to indicate here, in arguing that there was little indebtedness. To reinforce this view, he suggests that Erasmus showed no interest in 1500 or 1501 in pursuing theology or in “planning an edition of the Greek New Testament” – that his interest in Greek was initially literary, and “not any awakening of religious interests” (113) – but evidence shows that he had turned at this point to his own commentary on Paul. For Colet’s influence on Erasmus, see also Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations, 10–12, and Catherine A. L. Jarrott, “Erasmus’ Annotations and Colet’s Commentaries on Paul: A Comparison of Some Theological Themes,” in Richard L. DeMolen, ed., Essays on the Works of Erasmus (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1978), 125–44. A more general account may be found in Albert Rabil, Jr., Erasmus and the New Testament: The Mind of a Christian Humanist (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1972), 37–52, 129–32. For a chronicle of Erasmus’s intervals in England, see R. J. Schoeck, “Erasmus in England, 1499–1517: Translatio Studii and the Studia Humanitatis,” in Classical and Modern Literature, vol. VII, no. 4 (1987): 269–83; esp. 276–79. For general influence, see Robert P. Adams, The Better Part of Valor, More, Erasmus, Colet, and Vives, on Humanism, War, and Peace 1496–1535 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), and Peter Iver Kaufman, Augustinian Piety and Catholic Reform: Augustine, Colet, and Erasmus (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1982). Epistle 164; CWE, vol. II, 53; P. S. Allen, ed., Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, 12 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906–58), vol. I, 375. Hereafter Allen. CWE, vol. II, 86; Allen, vol. I, 404. See John B. Payne, “Erasmus and Lefèvre d’Étaples as Interpreters of Paul,” 56; and Payne, “Erasmus: Interpreter of Romans,” in Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, ed. Carl Meyer (St. Louis, 1971), vol. II, 4ff.

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24 On Colet’s lectures, see Gleason, John Colet, esp. 67–184; and on the manuscript dates, see 67–92. The lectures on Romans are preserved in a manuscript that dates from approximately 1499–1505, thus representing a revised set of views, but given that Erasmus pesters Colet about not publishing them, we have some evidence that he had read as well as seen the lectures. See also Adams, The Better Part of Valor, 21, and Frederic Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers, John Colet, Erasmus, and Thomas More (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1913). According to Erasmus, Colet lectured on all of Paul’s letters at Oxford. See Allen, vol. IV, Epistle 1211; Epistle 181. See John B. Payne, “Erasmus and Lefèvre d’Étaples as Interpreters of Paul,” 55. 25 Tyndale, Tyndale’s New Testament (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 238. 26 William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man (London: Penguin, 2000), 156. For a valuable discussion of Tyndale’s literalism, see James Simpson, Burning to Read, 111–18; 169. 27 See The Obedience of a Christian Man, pp. 36–49; 54. For Protestant and Shakespearean readings of Romans 13, see Fulton, “Shakespeare’s Everyman: Measure for Measure and English Fundamentalism,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40.1 (2010), 119–47; at 124–29; and on Milton, see Fulton, Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 149–64. 28 Selected Sermons of Hugh Latimer, ed. Allan G. Chester (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968), 101. 29 John Colet, An Exposition of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ed. J. H. Lupton (Ridgewood: Gregg Press, 1965), 95. Subsequent citations are within the text. 30 Erasmus, Annotationes (1516), 448. 31 CWE, vol. LVI, 352–53; bracketed passages are in the modern edition; the original is Erasmus, Novum Instrumentum (1516), 448–49. 32 Erika Rummel observes how Erasmus was, as he relates, “well aware that certain biblical phrases were too familiar to be changed without creating an uproar.” See Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, Jean Leclerc, ed. (Leiden, 1705), LB., vol. VI, 223f. Hereafter cited as LB. “St Paul in Plain Latin: Erasmus’ Philological Annotations on 1 Corinthians,” Classical and Modern Literature 7.4 (1987): 310. Rummel points out that his New Testament work was “combated with undiminished fervor by conservative theologians” (309). 33 For an excellent discussion of Erasmus’ lesson in historicism, see Kathy Eden, “Equity and the Origins of Renaissance Historicism: The Case for Erasmus,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 5.1 (1993): 137–45; at 137. Eden notes that Erasmus “uses historicism as a tool of dissent” (138). 34 CWE, vol. XXVII, 235–36; the Latin may be found in Opera Omnia Des. Erasmi Roterodami Amsterdam, 1969-), vol. IV, part 1, 166. Hereafter cited as ASD.

110 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55

F u lt on See Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition, 2, 12–17. Senecae Opera, ed. Erasmus (Basel, 1515), 6. CWE, vol. II, 251. Epistle 272. CWE, vol. XXVII, 238. This is L. Junius Gallio, the proconsul of Achaea; see Lupton, CitizenSaints, 26. CWE, vol. III, 66. Epistle 325, CWE, vol III, 64. See Letizia A. Panizza, “Gasparino Barzizza’s Commentaries,” Traditio 33 (1977): 297–358. The editor of the correspondence overlooked Lefèvre’s edition. See Claude W. Barlow, ed. Epistolae Senecae ad Paulum et Pauli ad Senecam (Quae Vocantur) (Rome: American Academy in Rome, 1938). On Lefèvre and Erasmus, see Jonge, “The Relationship of Erasmus’ Translation of the New Testament to that of the Pauline Epistles by Lefèvre d’Étaples” in Erasmus in English (1987–8), vol. XV, 2–7; John B. Payne, “Erasmus and Lefèvre d’Étaples as Interpreters of Paul” in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (1974), vol. LXV, 54–83; Andrea Steenbeek, “The Conceptual Background of the Controversy between Erasmus and Lefèvre d’Étaples” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Hafniensis: Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1994), 935–45; Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations, 12–15. Irena Backus, “Renaissance Attitudes to New Testament Apocryphal Writings: Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and His Epigones,” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998), 1176–84; at 1184. Jacques Lefèvre, Epistolae Viri Pauli Apostoli: cum Commentariis Preclarissimi Viri Jacobi Fabri Stapulen (Paris, 1517), 226. Tracy, Politics of Erasmus, 13, and Holland under Habsburg Rule, 20–1. Emphasis added. CWE, vol. II, 81. Epistle 180. Allen, vol. I, 400. Persius, Satura 3.35–38, slightly modified from Juvenal and Persius, Loeb bilingual edition, trans. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 76–7. On Paraclesis, see Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, 105. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, eds., The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). CWE, vol. LVI, 36. Erasmus, Novum Testamentum Omne (Basel, 1535), 344. This translation is based on Robert D. Sider’s, CWE, vol. LVI, 37. For discussion of this passage, see Sider, “Erasmus on the Epistle to the Romans: A ‘Literary’ Reading,” Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontonensis, ed. Alexander Dalzell, Charles Fantazzi and Richard J. Schoeck (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), 129–35, esp. 131. CWE, vol. II, 82. Epistle 180.

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56 CWE, vol. I, 222. 57 CWE, vol. II, 87. Epistle 181. 58 Modified from CWE, vol. II, 87. The full Latin: “A Panegyrico sic abhorrebam ut non meminerim quicquam fecisse me magis reluctante animo. Videbam enim genus hoc citra adulationem tractari non posse. Ego tamen nouo sum usus artificio, ut et in adulando sim liberrimus et in libertate adulantissimus.” Allen, vol. I, 405. 59 CWE, vol. XXIX, 3. For the Latin see LB, vol. V, 65. On Erasmus and More, see Hexter’s excellent notes on Utopia in Complete Works of St. Thomas More, IV, 373–74. 60 CWE, vol. XXIX, 3. 61 Erasmus, Paraphrase on the Acts of the Apostles, ed. John J. Bateman, trans. Robert D. Sider, in CWE, vol. L, 108. 62 Erasmus, Novum Instrumentum Omne (1516), 393. 63 My translation. Unless otherwise marked, translations are my own. 64 Detorquere functions for Erasmus as a rhetorical trope: “Erasmus likes to use the verb detorquere to show how the genuine meaning of a biblical text is twisted into an alien meaning.” Manfred Hoffmann, Rhetoric and Theology: The Hermeneutic of Erasmus (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1994), 265n148. See, for example, CWE, vol. LVI, 351; Erasmus, Novum Testamentum (Basel, 1535), 417. See also Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations, 58. For More’s use, see Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. V, 288. 65 Gordon Rupp and Philip Watson, eds., Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 37; LB, vol. IX, 1215. 66 From the 1519, Novum Testamentum Omne, vol. II, 224. My translation. This is not in the 1516 edition (vol. II, 393), but it remains in the 1522 edition (vol. II, 259) and the 1535 edition (vol. II, 311). LB vol. VI, 501. 67 Erasmus, Novum Instrumentum Omne (Basel, 1516), 550; 1522, 510. 68 See Hoffmann, Rhetoric and Theology, 52, 53, 187–90; passim; Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation of Literary Study, ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson, trans. Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton, foreword by George A Kennedy (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 244 (no. 540); 467 (no. 1072). 69 Adams, The Better Part of Valor, 27. See C. R. Thompson, The Translations of Lucian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More (Ithaca: Vail-Ballou Press, 1940). 70 Lèon-E. Halkin, Erasmus: A Critical Biography, trans. John Tonkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 65. 71 Clarence H. Miller, trans., The Praise of Folly (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 56; original Latin in ASD, vol. IV, part 3, 116. 72 Allen, vol. I, 405. 73 Miller, Praise of Folly, 37. ASD, vol. IV, part 3, 98. 74 Erasmus’s familiarity with this passage may be assumed from his knowledge of Quintilian, as well as from distinct references to emphasis.

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See Hoffmann, Rhetoric and Theology, 36, 51, 185, 186; see also Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et Rhetorique chez Erasme, 2 vols. (Paris: Belles lettres, 1981), vol. II, 803–15. 75 Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. II, 59. 76 CWE, vol. LXXXV, 143–44. 77 Colet, Exposition of St. Paul’s Epistle, 95. On the traditions of explaining Paul’s death, see Lupton, Citizen-Saints, 30.

5

Historicizing Satisfaction in Shakespeare’s Othello Heather Hirschfeld

“And that great Cov’nant which we still transgress/Entirely satisfi’d”

– John Milton, “Upon the Circumcision” (21–22)

This chapter looks at a blind spot in recent historicist approaches to the intersection of religion and the theater in early modern England. Blind spots, to push the metaphor a bit further, enable vision even as they testify to the inherent conditionality of sight: they are what, or where, we do not see in order that we can see. So in locating a historicist blind spot, this essay nevertheless relies on historicist ways of seeing – or, more accurately, of reading. Historicist interpretive practices, as Andrew Hadfield points out in this collection (Chapter 1), have become the dominant mode of literary analysis in the early twenty-first century, relying on a variety of contextualizing techniques to open up the horizons of textual meaning.1 This essay is particularly indebted to the ways in which trends in late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century historiography – trends favoring the study, with various emphases, of “lived experience” in former times – have intersected with the most basic concerns of students of literary form and character to produce increasingly rich investigations into the textual artifacts of early modern emotion and feeling.2 But it also calls attention to the ways that recent historicizing work in this field can overlook certain terms for, and thus certain kinds of, experience. Such an oversight is not necessarily because of the customary problems associated with New Historicism. It is not, for instance, the result of historicism’s predominantly discursive focus, which leads it, as its critics have suggested, to “converge in a monologue of mastery.”3 Indeed, I depend here on imaginative engagement with the period’s discursive productions in order to pinpoint overlooked forms of experience. Nor is the oversight the result of historicism’s neglect of the role of religion in the daily life as well as in the politics of the period. Indeed, I draw 113

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here on a recent cottage industry of studies on literature and religion, the descendant of traditional approaches reinvigorated by scholars who no longer assume either an evolutionarily progressive model of the English Reformation or a simple didactic role for the early modern drama as the purveyor of religious orthodoxy. Finally, the omission cannot be linked to a historicist refusal to engage with its own situatedness, a misstep that Terence Hawkes associates with historicism’s pursuit of “‘the actual conditions of . . . production and reception.’”4 For in this case, acknowledging one’s own situatedness does not help spotlight the term and experience with which I am concerned: satisfaction. That is because satisfaction, from satisfacere, to “make enough,” has been neglected as an analytic category in contemporary scholarship. Its neglect, I suggest, is a result of its present-day intelligibility, a commonsense-ness (perpetuated in phrases such as “satisfaction guaranteed!” and in its association with consumer assessment) that masks its former polemical and affective dynamism. Satisfaction has been investigated tangentially, of course, as the static, passive “other” or “end” of more generative, creative desire, a passion that has received considerable attention in the scholarly reconstruction of the period’s emotional landscape. Historicist critics have approached the peculiar endlessness of Renaissance desire – aptly articulated in Sidney’s lament in Sonnet 71, “‘But ah,’ Desire still cries, ‘give me some food’”5 – in two basic ways. Some, by identifying culturally determined objects of desire, including but not limited to desire for political prestige, financial gain, or social advancement, have explored the material and discursive contexts that allowed a variety of ambitions to be portrayed through sexual allegory.6 Other scholars, looking at contemporary humoral and medical discourses, have discussed the ways in which powerful emotions or psychological states such as desire were understood as bodily as well as mental phenomena; Michael Schoenfeldt’s treatment of desire as an “inner prompting” in need of “regulation” is an especially cogent example.7 But despite Schoenfeldt’s interest in the disciplining or containing of desire, he pays little attention to the particularities of its fulfillment, its satisfaction. In this way he, like the others, repeats the very psychoanalytic prejudice he would ideally avoid: the fact that, as Laplanche and Pontalis admit, “The concept of the experience of satisfaction has no wide currency in psychoanlysis.”8 But, as Laplanche and Pontalis go on to note, satisfaction, despite its theoretical neglect, is integral to any notion of human longing or wishing, because “the image of the satisfying object . . . takes on a special value in the construction of the subject’s desire” (156). It is this special value of

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satisfaction – its role as a “primal experience” prior to the constitution of desire – that I try to recover here. I study it not, however, in psychoanalytic terms but as it took shape in Reformation doctrine and polemic, as a term to describe both divine and human penitential activity. Such an approach builds on recent historicist efforts to understand the ways in which religious belief and devotion both prescribed and inscribed emotional experience, the ways in which, for instance, something like “devout grief,” as Gary Kuchar suggests, “emerges out of a rich history of scriptural, literary, devotional, exegetical, iconographic, and doctrinal traditions.”9 But it pushes the boundaries of accounts such as Kuchar’s, which tend to focus, with good reason, on the signature doctrines or polemical positions of the Reformation – justification by faith, predestination, iconoclasm, anti-Puritanism, sacramentality – and their attendant emotional states: anxiety, melancholy, loss, despair, assurance.10 Here I focus on an underexplored category of affective life – satisfaction – which has distinct verbal ties to religious belief and practice. What is enough? What is satisfying? What do “enough” and “satisfying” feel like? The problem of defining and determining fulfillment, whether addressed by philosophic or psychological inquiries into the “good life” or the passions, is transhistorical and transdiciplinary. But it is part of the historicist project to identify the ways in which a specific moment – here, early modern England – takes up the problem in unique ways and with specific urgencies. A variety of contexts, including developments in early modern systems of measurement and theories of equity, could be seen as the occasions of these urgencies.11 But I suggest that we look instead at Reformation theology’s fundamental reorientation of the agency of repentance and forgiveness – that is, its reorientation of the possibility of satisfying for sin. My underlying premise is that Reformation doctrine and polemic in England produce a fundamental shift in the meaning of satisfaction as something that humans are able to do and thus able to feel. In the essay that follows, I discuss this concrete alteration in the theological status of satisfaction as a result of religious debate, and I discuss the way in which it can be absorbed by a playwright such as Shakespeare and dramatized in a play such as Othello. While expiatory theories and practices have a vast comparative religious history, far beyond what this chapter can address, it is feasible to recount here the emergence and elaboration within Christianity of a particularly juridical language and structure of expiation – expiation as the paying back, through penitential activity, of a debt to God and the godly

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community incurred by wrongdoing – and to describe its reworkings in the early modern period by agents of Protestant reform and Catholic renewal.12 This emergence can be traced to the church fathers, particularly Tertullian in the late second and early third centuries. Emphasizing the importance of performing penance through public and private acts of self-castigation and denial, Tertullian explains the logic of Christian exomologesis: “[W]e confess our sin to the Lord, not as though he were ignorant of it, but because satisfaction receives its proper determination through confession, confession gives birth to penitence, and by penitence God is appeased.”13 William P. Le Saint emphasizes Tertullian’s explicit use of the language and logic of compensation: Tertullian is the first Christian writer to speak of penance explicitly as satisfying God for sin. . . . Tertullian was certainly aware of the juridical meaning of the word satisfacere in cases of material indebtedness. . . . This juridical sense of the term satisfacere is easily transferred to express the idea of satisfaction for sin. Sin involves the contraction of a debt in the moral order. The performance of external works of penance, or better, the whole penitential process . . . is a means of paying the moral indebtedness which the sinner has contracted by offending God.14

The theological appropriation of the economic and juridical terminology of debt and payment are worth remarking, but what is central here is the way Tertullian uses such terms to reinforce the possibility that people can actually make up for their debt – can literally satisfacere, make enough, to set it right. Undergirding this possibility is the fundamental assumption – an assumption articulated most forcefully in St. Anselm’s hugely influential Cur Deus Homo (1097) – that penitential compensation depends absolutely on Christ’s reconciliation of man and God on the cross. The crucifixion is, indeed, the founding and exemplary act of satisfaction, the ultimate substitutive atonement made by a faultless God-man for sinning humankind. But if the crucifixion makes possible the redemption of fallen humans, it nevertheless does not eliminate the agency and responsibility of the sinner in repenting and compensating for his or her transgressions. According to Tertullian, for instance, the practice of penance is a blessing conferred on humans precisely in order that they “further the work of divine mercy” for themselves.15 Despite various developments in penitential theology, particularly as it was standardized in the High Middle Ages into the three stages of the sacrament of penance – contrition, confession, and satisfaction – the concept of human penitence as a mental, spiritual, and physical

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undertaking that augmented, even as it was enabled by, the crucifixion is a consistent feature of medieval and early modern Catholicism. Aquinas offers a standard: “[T]he first requisite on the part of the penitent is the will to atone, and this is done by contrition; the second is that he submit to the judgment of the priest standing in God’s place, and this is done in confession; and the third is that he atone according to the decision of God’s minister, and this is done in satisfaction: and so contrition, confession, and satisfaction are assigned as parts of Penance.”16 Chaucer’s Parson would echo him, some one hundred years later, for English readers: “The thridde partie of Penitence is Satisfacioun, and that stant moost generally in almesse, and bodily peyne.”17 Of course, these succinct formulations belie intense debate, in both the medieval and early modern periods, over the status and efficacy of these distinct parts, especially as the emphases of confession and reparation shifted from public to private and as the priest took up significant authority in the process. Thomas Tentler explains that the institutions of forgiveness in Christian antiquity and the early Middle Ages relied principally on ascetic public acts to ensure obedience and offer consolation. Of course they demanded contrition and belief in divine mercy. Nevertheless they were systems of shame and . . . expiation. Private auricular confession, on the other hand, gradually turned the institutional energies of ecclesiastical penance inward. In the penitentials it still focused on expiatory, albeit private, acts of satisfaction for sin. But by the thirteenth century it had become primarily a private act, protected by the seal of the confessional, emphasizing the inner preparation and disposition of the penitent seeking help from a sacrament dispensed by a priest. . . . From a penance of shame and expiation, the church . . . had turned to a penance of guilt and remorse.18

Tentler describes here a shift, which he links to the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, according to which private confession replaced public, physical acts of atonement in the compensation of sin and guilt. Confession, overseen by a priest, thus began to function as satisfaction. But this shift did not entail a change in the essential Catholic insistence on the agency of the individual penitent, whose activity complemented Christ’s own sacrifice. In other words, sinners were expected to satisfy for their sins, to “make enough” to justify themselves in the eyes of God, even if this enough came in the form of confession rather than corporal punishment. It is this understanding of penitential agency, and its demands on the human conscience, that became a target for early modern reformers.

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Reform doctrine, based on a fundamental revision of the causality of grace and the role of man in attaining salvation, opposed the notion of human participation in satisfying for sin even as it insisted on the centrality of human repentance in the godly life. As the theologian Timothy Gorringe suggests, early Reformers “bent the language of satisfaction . . . to a new purpose.”19 In many ways this bending rehearsed earlier scholastic disagreements about sacramental efficacy, but insofar as it also insisted that satisfaction was accomplishable only – and once and for all – by the “complete exchange made in Christ, whereby he once and for all takes our place” (135), it effected a fundamental break with Catholic doctrine designed to release the sinner from the demands of complete confession as well as dependence on the priest for absolution. The first of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses maintained that “the entire life of believers should be one of repentance,” with the second adding that such repentance “cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.”20 Later Continental Reformers could be even more vehement. Heinrich Bullinger, for instance, makes clear the doctrinal logic of the Reformers’ rejection of satisfying acts as a violation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. “The priests and Monkes,” he chides, “do teache that repentaunce of the sinne committed, and faith in Christ, are not sufficient for the purgeing of sinnes, without the satisfaction of our owne woorkes and merites, whiche they make to be, wearing of sackcloth, fastings, teares, prayers, almes deedes, offeringes, sundrie afflictions of the bodie, pilgrimages, and many other odde knackes like vnto these.”21 English reformers were equally vehement, about both the importance of repentance and about humans’ inability to make satisfaction. William Tyndale attacked the notion in Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), saying that “who soeuer goeth aboute to make satisfaction for his synnes to Godwarde . . . is an infidele faythlesse and damned in his dede.”22 For the early Puritan John Bradford, the idea of human satisfaction threatens the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice: it is a “monstruous abhomination, blasphemie, and euen open fyghtynge agaynst God. For yf Satisfaction can be done by man, then Christ died in vaine.”23 Following Bradford’s lead, the influential Elizabethan theologian William Perkins maintained that an individual person could not participate in redeeming his sin: “That the sinner by his workes and sufferings must make satisfaction to God for the temporall punishment of his sinnes [is] a flat blasphemie. The scriptures mention no other satisfaction but Christs, and if his be sufficient ours is needlesse: if ours needful, his imperfect.”24

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Such teaching was designed to relieve sinners from the demands of confessional scrupulosity – the demand to satisfy God with complete accounts of sin and suffering, which had been the cause of great fear as well as the grounds of suspicion of papal abuses.25 But one of the consequences of this teaching was to eliminate the human actor in the achievement of penitential compensation. (Catholic theologians were quick to call attention to this consequence as a theological as well as psychological flaw in Protestantism; the deliberately polemical Treatise on Auricular Confession [1622] proclaims that man is “bound to stand to the penalties for full satisfaction to God” or he will “conceiu[e] a deceitfull security of [his] own saluation, thorough the sufficiency of Christs satisfaction and redemption, as a cloake to couer [his] . . . dissolute li[fe].”)26 Humans, Reformed theology taught, could no longer make enough for God in matters of sin and redemption. My suggestion here is that the presentation of this impossibility in the period’s religious literature sweeps across other discursive realms and into other kinds of human relationships, deeply disrupting the individual’s ability to feel and do enough. We can observe this effect in a play such as Shakespeare’s Othello, in which the protagonist himself comes to lament: “Would I were satisfied!”27 Before Othello himself appears on stage, however, this loss is performed for the audience in the opening exchange between Iago and Brabantio. Iago, whose proliferating explanations for his hatred of Othello and Cassio testify to the absence in his world of any principle of enough, is the agent of satisfaction’s impossibility. His role as vice is to infect others with this principle of insufficiency. His inflammatory visit to Brabantio aims precisely at the “fertile climate” in which Brabantio dwells, a space of patriarchal fullness and plenty (1.1.70) One half of Iago’s strategy is to arouse and violate Brabantio’s proprietary claim in both daughter and goods. “Thieves, thieves!/Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags,” he calls to Brabantio, painting for him the scene of Desdemona’s “gross revolt” and thus the explicit and devastating loss of his daughter (1.1.79–80, 134). The other half of his strategy is to induce in Brabantio a complementary experience of loss, according to which making one kind of “enough” cancels out the possibility of having another kind. “Straight satisfy yourself,” Iago tells Brabantio, urging him to prove whether or not Desdemona is still in his home: “If she be in her chamber or your house,/ Let loose on me the justice of the state/For thus deluding you” (1.1.137–40, my italics). Iago uses the structure of evidentiary inquiry, the lure of

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satisfactory knowledge, to trap Brabantio, for whom proof of Desdemona’s absence translates into the hopelessness of paternal compensation: It is too true an evil; gone she is; And what’s to come of my despised time Is nought but bitterness. Now, Roderigo, Where didst thou see her? – O unhappy girl! – With the Moor, say’st thou? – Who would be a father! (1.1.160–64)

When Iago “poisons [Brabantio’s] delight,” then, he not only contaminates the father’s joy in his daughter, but also initiates Brabantio into a world – Iago’s world – where there is no possibility of remuneration, of a clear connection between making and having enough. Brabantio’s generic status as a blocking figure, as well as the Duke’s admiring response to the newlyweds in 1.3, makes the father an object of audience critique or at least laughter. Brabantio’s role is not to elicit sympathy, but rather to model a simplified and potentially comic version of Othello’s tragic trajectory, from a character able to claim that “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul,/Shall manifest me rightly” to one unconvinced that he can make or be enough for his wife. Othello’s opening claim bespeaks a conviction in transparent speech, in the perfect accord between what he is, does, and says (1.2.31–32). This almost Cratylitic theory of representation is the linguistic correlative of a broader sense of his sufficiency, his capacity to do enough. Ordered by Brabantio to prison, he responds: What if [I] do obey? How may the Duke be therewith satisfied, Whose messengers are here about my side Upon some present business of the state, To bring me to him? (1.2.87–91, my italics)

If Brabantio sends him to jail, Othello explains, the Duke will not be satisfied; if Othello appears before him, the Duke will be. Despite its interrogatory structure, Othello’s statement here is not so much a question as an answer, one that conveys his confidence in his ability to accomplish the Duke’s business, to do precisely what the Duke needs. He is enough – his very presence is enough – for the Duke. A similar understanding of his own sufficiency informs the sumptuous adventure narrative Othello delivers to the Venetian Senate as well as his promise to the Duke and Senators that Desdemona’s presence with him in Cyprus will not affect his service to the state: Vouch with me, heaven, I therefore beg it not To please the palate of my appetite,

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Nor to comply with heat (the young affects In [me] defunct) and proper satisfaction; But to be free and bounteous to her mind. And heaven defend your good souls, that you think I will your serious and great business scant [For] she is with me. (1.3.261–68)

This is a syntactically complicated passage, in which Othello raises the specter of his sexual life with Desdemona precisely in order to refuse it. Natasha Korda has argued recently that in refusing “proper satisfaction,” Othello refuses not only “‘permissible [sexual] gratification’” (the phrase is E.A.J. Honigmann’s) but also a proprietary claim to Desdemona: “Othello describes his satisfaction as unbound by notions of property or possession.”28 But refusal or “unbinding” is not the same as denial or loss. Othello can give up “proper satisfaction” only because he envisions, believes in, the possibility of fulfillment. He is thus able to imagine being “free and bounteous” to – making enough for – Desdemona. The couple’s reunion in Cyprus should be seen to share this sensibility. Having arrived ashore safely, Othello greets his “fair warrior”: It gives me wonder great as my content To see you here before me. O my soul’s joy! If after every tempest come such calms, May the winds blow till they have waken’d death! And let the laboring bark climb hills of seas Olympus-high, and duck again as low As hell’s from heaven! If it were now to die, ’Twere now to be most happy; for I fear My soul hath her content so absolute That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate (2.1.183–93).

Stephen Greenblatt sees Othello’s speech as the conflict between “gratified desire” and “the longing for a final release from desire” expressed in his wish for death.29 But this statement misrecognizes the positive substance of Othello’s “content so absolute”: death is here being imagined not as a release from desire but as a prolongation of satisfaction. Othello’s “Amen to that!” in response to Desdemona’s plea that “our loves and comforts should increase/Even as our days do grow” may record surprise and even alarm at her demand for more, but it continues express his sense that he can make enough for and have enough from her (2.1.195, 194–5).30 The ruination of this sense lies with Iago. He begins his work on Othello in 3.3, after Desdemona has spoken on Cassio’s behalf. “Did Michael Cassio, when [you] woo’d my lady,/Know of your love?” he inquires (94–5).

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Harry Berger has emphasized the way this query works to remind Othello of the erotic triangulation at the core of his marriage, but it is Iago’s next comment that should be seen to engage Othello’s worry.31 When Othello wants to know why Iago is so curious about Cassio, he explains it is “for a satisfaction of my thought,” and with this remark Iago exposes Othello to the same crisis into which he ushered Brabantio in the first scene (3.3.97, italics mine). For it is in trying to satisfy Iago’s thought that Othello discovers a monster: “By heaven, thou echo’st me,/As if there were some monster in thy thought/Too hideous to be shown” (3.3.106–08). That monster, the audience knows, is both Iago’s demonic plot to entrap Othello and the false image of Desdemona and Cassio that will enable it; but for Othello, that monster is the opening up of an experience of not being able to make or feel enough. Stanley Cavell and Katherine Maus have both described this experience as a kind of skeptical crisis, the problem of the existence of other minds, which fuels a desire to know or possess them. For Cavell, Othello is the model of a man who “seeks a possession that is not in opposition to another’s claim or desire but one that establishes an absolute or inalienable bonding to himself, to which no claim or desire could be opposed.”32 From a more historicist perspective, Maus has explained that Reformation religious conflict as well as new legal concerns with witchcraft and treason nurtured “habits of mind that encourage[d] conceiving of human inwardness as simultaneously privileged and elusive” so as to intensify the desire to investigate and verify the other’s inner self.33 Thus, according to Maus, Othello’s “capitulation to Iago’s slanders” represents a means of “preserving one version of his fantasy of perfect transparency: the fantasy that others are absolutely transparent to him” (171–2). Such reasoning concentrates again on the pressure of Othello’s desire, here a specifically epistemological need to know another person (be it Iago or Desdemona), which Iago simultaneously provokes and thwarts so as to keep it alive and accelerating. Certainly this desire compels much of the rest of the temptation scene, as Iago turns the dialogue into a perverse kind of prying (one Greenblatt has called “a brutally comic parody” of the confessional),34 so that Othello presses for access to Iago’s own thoughts: Thou dost mean something. I heard thee say even now, thou lik’st not that, When Cassio left my wife. What didst not like? And when I told thee he was of my counsel [In] my whole course of wooing, thou criedst, “Indeed!” And dist contract and purse thy brow together,

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As if thou then hadst shut up in thy brain Some horrible conceit. (3.3.108–15).

It is essential to recognize the way this desire develops from Iago’s challenge to satisfy his thought. The demand to supply information – to make enough – comes before the need to have or feel something. In other words, what will become Othello’s torment in not having enough – enough evidence, enough Desdemona – begins as a challenge to his ability to supply enough – to Iago, to Desdemona. Iago opens up a space in which the pressure to make satisfaction disturbs its connection to having satisfaction. This experience quickly translates into Othello’s jealousy, his conviction that Desdemona has been unfaithful, a conviction he traces to his own insufficiency borne of race and age: Haply, for I am black, And have not those soft parts of conversation That chamberershavem or for I am declin’d Into the vale of years (yet that’s not much) She’s gone. I am abus’d, and my relief Must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage! That we can call these delicate creatures ours, And not their appetites! (3.3.265–72)

In Othello’s mind, he cannot do enough for Desdemona, and her appetite runs away incontinent, her body available to others who can fill it more effectively than he: “I had rather be a toad,/Than keep a corner in a thing I love,/For others’ uses” (3.3.274–76). His farewell speech, a lament for the loss of military station, represents his recognition that he is not and cannot do enough even for himself: O now, for ever Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars That makes ambition virtue! O, farewell! Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, th’ ear-piercing fife, The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war! And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats Th’ immortal Jove’s dread clamors counterfeit, Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone! (3.3.347–57)

The tragic centrality of the temptation scene thus results not only from Othello’s escalating desire to discover Iago’s “monstrous thought,” but

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from his developing sense (learned in advance of him by Brabantio in 1.1) that being unable to satisfy means not being satisfied. This recognition becomes explicit when Othello again demands proof from Iago: Othello. By the world, I think my wife be honest, and think she is not; I think that thou art just, and think thou art not. I’ll have some proof. [Her] name, that was as fresh As Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d and black As mine own face. If there be cords, or knives, Poison, or fire, or suffocating streams, I’ll not endure it. Would I were satisfied! Iago. I see, [sir], you are eaten up with passion; I do repent me that I put it to you. You would be satisfied? Othello. Would? nay, and I will. Iago. And may; but how? How satisfied, my lord? Would you, the [supervisor], grossly gape on? Behold her topp’d? (3.3.383-96, my italics)

In the passage that follows, Iago lays out most clearly what he has accomplished in his conversion or seduction of Othello: he has convinced the Moor that even the most bestial sexual scenarios will be unsatisfying to him. It is impossible you should see this, Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys, As salt as wolves in pride, and fools as gross As ignorance made drunk. But yet, I say, If imputation and strong circumstances Which lead directly to the door of truth Will give you satisfaction, you might have’t. (3.3.402-08)

The miserable irony, of course, is that evidentiary satisfaction, the “ocular proof” Othello has demanded, only reinforces his own inefficacy, and thus can only leave him more unsatisfied. It means he has lost his wife. Othello can no longer make, have, or be enough. The remaining two acts of the play chart Othello’s efforts to restore this loss through the pursuit of vengeance, with its lure of setting things right, evening things out. He tells Iago: Like to the Pontic Sea, Whose icy current and compulsive course, Nev’r [feels] retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic and Hellespont,

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Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, Shall nev’r look back, nev’r ebb to humble love, Till that a capable and wide revenge Swallow them up. (3.3.453–60)

The fury of Othello’s imagination here underscores the terrible irony embedded in the structure of revenge, whose promise of restitution and equivalence can only be accomplished through amplified, excessive punishment and pain. Unlike his opening narrative, in which his richly narrated adventures served to “manifest me rightly,” Othello’s “bloody thoughts,” his plots for vengeance, overflow the bounds of human capacities: “Had all his hairs been lives,” he says of Cassio, “my great revenge/ Had stomach for them all” (5.2.74–75). His assaults on Desdemona – verbal and physical – throughout act four function in the same way, not only because they are so unwarranted but also because their lure is so illusory. Retribution seems to promise the restoration of his lost satisfaction, it is undermined by its very tendency to dip over into excess. As the legal theorist William Ian Miller notes, there is a “fine line . . . between talionic equivalence and balance, on the one hand, and reciprocity gone mad . . . on the other.”35 Othello, of course, does not see this irony, a fact underscored in the last scene when he imagines that his final treatment of Desdemona constitutes a “sacrifice,” the privileged form of compensating for wrongdoing. Like revenge, this sacrifice is designed to return Othello to a world in making enough possible.36 Surely this is the sensibility that informs Othello’s thought process when he enters the bed chamber: “Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee/And love thee after” – as though her death can actually restore both of them to the lives they once inhabited. So the most horrifying recognition of the final scene, more excruciating even than Othello’s eventual understanding of Desdemona’s innocence, is the recognition that whatever he does now in the pursuit of satisfaction cannot be enough. This horror registers most clearly in his final two monologues, which offer distinct but complementary versions of Othello’s insufficiency. Speaking in front of Gratiano, Othello contrasts a former self – who, in making “my way through more impediments/Than twenty times your stop,” was entirely commensurate with his calling – to the present Othello, whose sins defy all punishment. When he and Desdemona “shall meet at compt,/This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,/ And fiends will snatch at it. . . . Whip me, ye devils,/From the possession of this heavenly sight!/Blow me about in winds! roast me in sulphur!/ Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!” (5.2.263–64, 273–80). In his famous final speech, Othello recognizes his final insufficiency as his

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failure to evaluate accurately: “Like the base Judean,” he “threw a pearl away/Richer than all his tribe” (5.2.348, 49).37 Daniel Vitkus and Julia Lupton have each explained this ending as the final stage in a plot that has turned Othello, once assimilated into Venetian Christian culture, into a “version of the Islamic tyrant”38 or a semitic figure “identified with [the] jealous justice” of the Old Testament.39 As an ultimately irredeemable Turk or Jew, in other words, Othello supplies the model of the religious other against which the play’s Christian culture is defined. But according to the context I have sketched, Othello also inhabits a theological space determined by a Christian conflict over the human capacity to “make enough.” If he comes over the course of the play to fully embody early modern stereotypes of the irascible Muslim or the legalistic Hebrew, it is only because he is suffering from a dilemma raised by the theology of the Reformation, one poised on the premise that humans can never satisfy for sin. That he works through this dilemma in romantic relation to his wife and ensign, and not, as a medieval Everyman might, directly in terms of God and the devil, does not make his torment any less spiritual, any less determined by the language of penitential belief and polemic. “My life upon her faith,” as it were (1.3.294). That language, I have been suggesting, is an essential – though, of course, not the only – historical ground for understanding the way Othello could so quickly and drastically turn on Desdemona. Much contemporary criticism has asked us to see that turn as an effect of sexual desire and anxiety; as Gail Paster has summed up so effectively, Othello’s disgust with his wife and himself “represent[s] Othello’s tragic internalization of the alienated account of his and Desdemona’s sexual union.” She adds that “we have begun to recognize the significance of race, color, and geography as historical constructs deeply implicated in this tragic action.”40 By recognizing as well the significance of theology – not theology writ large but a historical moment in theological debate – we can see further that what we have been diagnosing as desire and anxiety depends on a prior loss of satisfaction. Othello’s horror at Desdemona’s sexual appetite, and his consequent need for epistemological certainty, is initiated only after he confronts the impossibility of satisfying Iago’s thought. His subsequent fixation on Desdemona’s uncontrollable urges are back-formations, retrospective ascriptions that take shape only after his introduction to the experience of not being able to make enough. If we embrace the historicist but also imaginative principle that “theological or ecclesiastical distinctions [can] be important and historically creative,”41 we can see that the slow, painful unfurling of what seems to be a “tragedy

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of desire” based on Othello’s “loss of self,” is deeply rooted in a “tragedy of satisfaction” that emerges when the possibility of making enough has been lost.42 No t e s 1 For a compelling distinction between “opening up” such horizons and merely “locating . . . texts in the past,” see Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603–1625 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17–18. 2 For pioneering work in the history of emotions in early modern England, see Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Some more recent contributions in literary history are discussed later in the chapter. 3 Richard Wilson, “Introduction,” New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, ed. Richard Dutton and Richard Wilson (London: Longman, 1992), 10. 4 Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002), 2. He quotes David Kastan as a polemical springboard to suggest that the present is “a factor actively to be sought out, grasped and perhaps, as a result, understood” (3). 5 Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, in Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Maurice Evans (London: Dent, 1977), lines 12–14. 6 A classic example is Arthur Marotti’s “‘Love is not love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,” ELH 49 (1982), 396–428. Although her theoretical priorities are very different, Valerie Traub also sees early modern, particularly Shakespearean, eroticism as traceable to something besides, or in addition to, a specific [hetero]sexual act. She thus “develop[s] a psychohistorical cultural and literary analysis [that] employ[s] psychoanalytic concepts for the purpose of deconstructive resistance to normalizing narratives.” Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), 11. 7 Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 17–18. See also Gail Kern Paster, who suggests that the passions were more unruly than in Schoenfeldt’s presentation: “It is not merely that self-control was understood as a good in and of itself . . . but that the internal forces of humors and passions working against it were perceived to be so strong. In high contrast to the rational-choice theory that underpins so many contemporary explanations of behavior, the early modern moralists strongly doubted the force of reason as an encompassing or even an adequate rationale for behavior.” Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 19. 8 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 156.

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9 Gary Kuchar, The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4. 10 Important recent studies include Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); James Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Kristin Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 11 See, for instance, Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Mark Fortier, The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). 12 For the use of the term “Catholic renewal” instead of Counter-Reformation, see R. Po-Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–9. 13 Tertullian, Treatises on Penance, ed. William P. Le Saint (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1959), 31. 14 See Le Saint’s footnote, Treatises on Penance, 156. 15 Ibid, 16. 16 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. and trans. Reginald Masterson, O. P., and T. C. O’Brien, O. P. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966), 60: 167. 17 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), X.1021–3. 18 Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 52. 19 Timothy Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 131. 20 Martin Luther, 95 Theses, in Martin Luther’s Basic Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989), 21. 21 Heinrich Bullinger, Of Repentance, in Fiftie Godlie and Learned Sermons (London, 1577) STC 4056, 583. 22 William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 85. 23 John Bradford, A Sermon of Repentaunce (London, 1553), STC 3496, B7r. 24 William Perkins, Of the Nature and Practice of Repentance, in Two Treatises (London, 1593), STC 19578, E3r.

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25 See, for instance, David Baggchi, “Luther and the Sacramentality of Penance,” in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, eds., Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation: Papers Read at the 2002 Summer Meeting and 2003 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical Historical Society (Suffolk: Boydell, 2004), 119–25, esp. 123. 26 John Heigham, Treatise of Auricular Confession (St. Omer, 1622), B5, C1. 27 William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 3.3.390. All subsequent citations from this edition. 28 Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 132. 29 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 243. 30 Greenblatt sees Desdemona’s demand, like her “greedy ear” of 1.3, as a “moment of erotic intensity . . . [that] awakens the deep current of sexual anxiety in Othello,” (250). 31 Harry Berger, “Acts of Silence, Acts of Speech: How to Do Things with Othello and Desdemona,” Renaissance Drama 33 (2004). 32 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3, 9. 33 Katharine Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 166. 34 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 246. 35 William Ian Miller, Eye for an Eye, 30. 36 For the classic statement of this role of sacrifice, see René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 37 For a reading of Othello’s inability, because of his race, to reach correct evaluations (“the susceptibility of both Africans and women to jealousy was thought to be the subjective correlative of their skewed object relations”), see Korda, 111–58. 38 Daniel Vitkus, “Turning Turk in Othello: Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997), 171. 39 Julia Lupton, “Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations,” Representations 57 (1997), 79. 40 Paster, Humoring, 75. 41 John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), viii. 42 Joel Fineman, “The Sound of O in Othello: The Real of the Tragedy of Desire,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Othello, ed. Anthony Barthelemy (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), 109.

III

Dramatic Histories

6

The New Presentism and Its Discontents

Listening to Eastward Ho and Shakepeare’s Tempest in Dialogue Paul Stevens The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

– L. P. Hartley

One of the paradoxes of recent literary history is that the advent of New Historicism and the renewal of cultural materialism in the 1980s did not extend the domain of “theory,” whether poststructuralist or post-Marxist, so much as usher in the rise of an aggressively empirical, albeit theoretically informed, array of very different kinds of historical criticism – what some critics have lumped together and characterized as a kind of “institutional historicism.” The truth is, says Hugh Grady writing in 2002, that historicism has triumphed: “Today in early modern literary studies, historicism, new or old, interwoven with feminism and psychoanalysis or not, has become virtually an unrivalled paradigm for professional writing.”1 Throughout the 1990s, so many now feel, a quiet revolution took place. The London tube train to the Public Record Office at Kew suddenly experienced an upsurge in excited literary commuters, book-history programs sprang up everywhere, digital humanities gave editorial studies a cutting edge, and the “archive” was rediscovered. As if to epitomize the shift, though in fact entirely coincidentally, the PRO became the National Archives. Books, articles, and dissertations were no longer to be rebuked for being under-theorized so much as for being under-historicized – that is, for succumbing to the temptations of “presentism.” What presentism meant for born-again historical scholars, and indeed for the historicist streak in all of us, was the unwitting or naïve re-creation of the past in the image of the present, a form of critical narcissism that, An early version of this essay was delivered in a special session organized by David Loewenstein at the MLA Annual Convention at Philadelphia in December 2006. I am grateful to all those who responded on that occasion. I am also grateful to our editors, Ann Coiro and Thomas Fulton, and to the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, for electing me to the Visiting Fellowship that enabled me to complete this article.

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in the case of postmodern critics, so it was argued, routinely transformed historical analyzes into allegories of their own immediate theoretical concerns. In this climate, any criticism not deeply sensitive to historical difference, no matter how theoretically inventive or illuminating, could be dismissed as an act of oblivion, erasure, or forgetting – an act effectively contributing to the destruction of our hard-won knowledge of what the past was. This was the burden of Stephen Greenblatt’s 1986 assault on the use of psychoanalysis in early modern criticism, and even more tellingly of Fredric Jameson’s 1991 assault on Greenblatt. For Greenblatt, psychoanalysis was not only the fulfillment but, more importantly, the “effacement of specifically Renaissance insights.”2 For Jameson, Greenblatt’s work itself was largely a matter of effacement, pastiche, or montage; it stood as evidence that New Historicism as a postmodern practice constituted a “new depthlessness” or radical “weakening of historicity.”3 This was as important as it was to Jameson because by historicity he understood the liberating power of the past to defamiliarize the present. Conversely, what the charge of presentism meant for those on the receiving end, for critics still deeply immersed in the practice of postmodern theory, especially as the charge was leveled by scholars without the prestige and sophisticated credentials of Greenblatt or Jameson, was a baleful retreat into positivism. It was as though Louis Montrose’s wonderfully elegant definition of New Historicism as a procedure simultaneously committed to “the historicity of texts and the textuality of history”4 was to be thrown aside, its delicate balance broken, as we were urged by Anne Barton, John Lee, and innumerable others to forget the second part of the chiasmus and focus only on the first, history and the historicity of texts.5 Theory, especially with its postmodern emphasis on indeterminacy, undecidability, and the free play of irrepressible textuality, was no longer at the center. A world of endless jouissance had given way to the workaday world of leaden-footed history. What I want to do in this chapter is, first, use the impasse between those whom historical scholars considered naïve presentists and those whom postmodern critics considered naïve positivists to try and come to a better understanding of what we might mean by historicism. Second, I want to develop that understanding by examining the relation between two apparently disparate texts like Eastward Ho and Shakespeare’s Tempest in order to emphasize the importance of form in the analysis of any historical content. And third, I want to suggest that when historicism is more imaginatively understood, the need to “limit history” might seem less compelling. Let me begin by saying something about the latest

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development in the contest between “presentists” and “positivists.” If by the end of the 1990s historical scholarship appeared to have triumphed, the countermove was not long in coming. I The year 2002 seems to have been a key one. In Milton studies, in December of that year at the MLA, Stanley Fish rose, Samson-like, determined to shake the pillars of establishment historicism, insisting that the proper study of criticism was not history or politics but literary texts. As he surveyed his massive audience, he lamented that historicism had undone so many. We should, of course, attend to the historical, he patiently explained; we should, of course, attend, “as many of us always have, to the political (and economic and social) concerns that find their way into [literary texts], and we should treat them seriously,” but only “as components in an aesthetic structure” – it’s the poetry, stupid, and the poetry is here and now in the present.6 At the same time, in Shakespeare studies, Terence Hawkes and Hugh Grady published books both highly critical of the same turn to institutional historicism and announcing a new form of critical practice they defiantly called presentism.7 According to Hawkes, “History is far too important to be left to scholars who believe themselves able to make contact with a past unshaped by their own concerns.” None of us “can step beyond time,” and after all, he continues, quoting Croce, “all history is contemporary history” (3). For Hawkes, the problem is very simple. In their rush to get to the archive, the institutional historicists have forgotten their basic theory – that is, they have forgotten the second part of Montrose’s chiasmus affirming the textuality of history. For Hawkes, not only is a past unmediated by the textual practices of the present unknowable; it is, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent. But rather than bemoan our inescapable situatedness in the present, we should celebrate it, play with it, turn it to our advantage. He talks somewhat confusingly of “dialogue” with the past, but given that the past has no voice other than what we choose or happen to give it, what he really means is the active exploitation of what appears to be the past in order to intensify our self-awareness – that is, our understanding of ourselves in the present. A Shakespeare criticism that takes this point on board, he says, silently rebuking Greenblatt, “will not yearn to speak with the dead” – it will aim “to talk to the living” (4).8 Grady makes a similar argument, albeit more carefully: “All our knowledge of works from the past,” he says, “is conditioned by and dependent upon

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the culture, language, and ideologies of the present, and this means that historicism itself necessarily produces allegory of the present in its configuration of the past” (2, my emphasis). For both Hawkes and Grady, this point is central, necessary, fundamental, or “irreducible” as old-fashioned anti-foundationalists used to say when in need of a foundation. It allows Hawkes to do what he has always wanted to do – that is, to play jazz, to produce a form of criticism that is essentially performative, brilliantly riffing on post-structuralist themes first heard, however faintly, in classic literary texts.9 For the more deliberate Grady, as the past mimics the present, it allows him to hold a mirror up to culture and see the changing lineaments of our present situatedness – for “the past,” so he argues, “takes on new contours and qualities for us as our own thinking shifts in the present” (2). And no group of theorists, he continues, has helped shift our thinking in the present more usefully than the Frankfurt school (16). It is for this reason that we can talk perfectly seriously about the influence of Adorno, Benjamin, and Horkheimer on Shakespeare. The past is, then, merely a representation whose real value lies in its ability to reflect and clarify our various present-day cultural transformations. In this sense, and only in this sense, Grady concludes, does the past intervene in the present (3). None of this, it seems to me, either in theory or practice, is especially persuasive. Far from being an alternative to institutional historicism, the new presentism, even with all its postmodern emphases, turns out to be little more than an ersatz form or unwitting function of that historicism.10 This is more than evident in Hawkes and Grady’s most recent counterblast, Presentist Shakespeares (2007), a collection quite extraordinary for the way in which the subversive asides of its contributors routinely deflate the larger claims of its editors.11 Michael Bristol, for instance, who can hardly contain his irritation at Hawkes for hyping presentism as “the new kid on the block” (47–8, 3–5), returns to Jameson’s point and insists on the importance of a knowable past’s role in defamiliarizing the present: “Learning about how other people thought and felt in other kinds of societies can help to bring out ‘the peculiar and transient idiosyncracy’ of our own contemporary ways of doing things” (47). Similarly, Kiernan Ryan pointedly dismisses as “unjust” (168) Hawkes’s 2002 insinuation that so much current historical criticism is naïve in its return to a nineteenthcentury desire to reproduce the past “as it really was” (2002: 4, 2007: 2). At the same time, however, he goes on to insist that real knowledge of the past is both possible and indispensable: “No critical approach to any Shakespeare play could make much headway, let alone carry conviction,

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unless it was grounded in solid historical knowledge of the language, forms and conventions of his drama. Without such knowledge criticism could never arrive at the point of basic comprehension where the task of interpretation begins” (169, my emphasis). This pattern of defection has clearly had its effect on Hawkes and Grady: whereas in 2002, for instance, presentist criticism, so we are told, will “not yearn to speak with the dead” (4), now it will “not only yearn to speak with the dead” (4, my emphasis). More illuminating in understanding historicism than this process of dilution, however, is the motivation of the presentists’ original claims. On reading the 2002 books of Hawkes and Grady, two specific problems immediately come to mind. First, for postmodern thinkers, Hawkes and Grady are curiously dogmatic about the absoluteness of the binary opposition between past and present. It is not clear to me, for instance, why the New Criticism should be assigned to the past while the Frankfurt school should be assigned to the present when the writing of both groups was most powerfully shaped by the language, culture, and ideologies of the early twentieth century. Second, what seems so striking about the presentism of these critics, as well as Fish, is the irony of their nostalgia. The more they insist on the all-controlling power of the present, the more one is struck by their longing for the past. In the case of Fish and Hawkes, it is a longing for what Hillis Miller once called “the triumph of theory,” that moment in the late 1970s and early 1980s when their familiarity with continental theory and their extraordinary rhetorical agility was rightly so widely admired.12 It is difficult not to think of Job: in those days, says the patriarch, I “sat as a chief, and I lived like a king among his troops. . . . But now they make sport of me, those who are younger than I” (29:25–30:1). In the case of Grady, it is not so much his triumph as the memory of his intellectual coming of age that haunts him. Freed from the narrow assumptions of the New Criticism or liberal humanism, he says, “Shakespeare’s plays [in the early 1980s] became interconnected with vital social questions and debate again, reasserting something of the cultural centrality that had not been theirs since the heydays of Eliot, Empson, Leavis, and Brooks” (9). The unpersuasiveness of Grady’s account as literary history is less important than the affective power of the moment in his memory. The nostalgia of these critics is as important as it is because it suggests something of the emotion with which they refuse to relinquish the critical worldview that first empowered them. The binary opposition between past and present is held as firmly as it is because it is a metonym for the distinction between text and world, a figure for the totalizing drive of what Richard Rorty called “twentieth-century textualism.”13

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Back in 1977, in his book Structuralism and Semiotics, Hawkes explained the central idea of that textualism this way.14 What we have learned from Derrida, he says, is that our traditional assumption that “some final, objective, unmediated ‘real world’ exists about which we can have concrete knowledge” is an illusion (145–46). It is an illusion because language, specifically the independence of the signifier from the signified, makes access to “Reality” with a capital R impossible (146). Although Hawkes’s book was only meant as a primer, it was surprisingly influential. A year later, Hayden White, in his book Tropics of Discourse, after acknowledging Hawkes among others, made a similar argument in his discussion of the discursive or tropological nature of understanding itself: “Understanding,” he says, “is a process of rendering the unfamiliar, or the ‘uncanny’ in Freud’s sense of the term, familiar; of removing it from the domain of things felt to be ‘exotic’ and unclassified into one or another domain of experience encoded adequately enough to be felt to be humanly useful, nonthreatening, or simply known by association” (5).15 The problem with this account of understanding is that it seems to render the unfamiliar or whatever is outside an already-known discourse passive and deny it any substantial role in the constitution of knowledge.16 Such an account of understanding as a closed system, remorselessly assimilating all it touches, familiarizing the unfamiliar, homogenizing the heterogeneous, is central to my argument because it stands as the antithesis of what historicism in its fullest sense means. At the heart of historicism is the conviction that not only does alterity make its presence felt, but it can be apprehended and articulated precisely through the swerves, tropes, or figures White considers so enslaving. And the new understanding or knowledge these tropes articulate can intervene to change our lives in the present. In other words, not only do the dead have voices, but with effort and imagination we can hear, however imperfectly, just how different their dialects are. The trope that most famously governs historicism is not a temporal figure but a spatial one. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” says L.P. Hartley at the beginning of his great novel, The Go-Between.17 Famous as the association of the figure with the novel is, it was not invented by Hartley but became current in Europe during the Renaissance. The liberating swerve from temporal to spatial in order to understand the past differently makes it clear that historicism is not history. It is not simply the story of past events, the record of what actually happened, or as Alan Bennett’s history boys argue, “just one fucking thing after another.”18 In its most general, primary sense, historicism

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means the perception that social and cultural phenomena are not simply historically shaped but layered – that is, each period in the history of a specific society or culture, whatever it may be, has its own synchronic structure or integrity, however volatile or transitory that structure may be. This means a period often has a set of values that are not directly applicable, or sometimes even comprehensible, to other periods or epochs in the history of that same society or culture. Without this historicist perception, the anti-historicism of the new presentists would be inconceivable. More than anything else, it is the emergence of this historicist way of thinking that distinguishes modernity. Quite literally so, for the very words “modern” and “ancient” in the sixteenth century, and somewhat later “modern” and “medieval” in the eighteenth century, arise out of the self-conscious need to comprehend the course of history in terms of radical cultural shifts or fissures, and only with the advent of this way of thinking can we talk of the “historicity” of a phenomenon, or can things properly be called “anachronistic,” or indeed can the past be called a foreign country. It is a measure of just how deep-rooted our historicist way of thinking is that it is hard to imagine anyone now contesting the idea that cultures are separated by time as well as space. In the same year that White published Tropics of Discourse, Edward Said published Orientalism – a book literally concerned with the foreignness of other countries.19 Deeply influenced by the same binary opposition between text and world as White – specifically, as Said acknowledges, by the same Foucauldian notion of “discourse” (3) – Said proposed that it was a measure of Western positivism’s imperial tendencies that its scientific analysis of the foreign, the other, the East, always reproduced it in the image of the West’s own fears or failings. Not only was the Orient foreign, but we, Westerners, were incapable of apprehending its alterity as something of value in its own right. Although he sees this cultural solipsism peaking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he also sees it as the West’s “always already” defining constant since the time of Homer. In 1978, all this seemed very clear: “what I am saying in this study of Orientalism,” he insists, is that all, not just some, but “all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact” of Western hegemony (11). As certain as he sounds, Said is clearly conflicted. His uneasiness with the totalizing element in his argument, the degree to which the West functions as a metonym for Derrida’s textuality or Foucault’s power, is evident throughout his book and one of the central stories of the postcolonial studies that Orientalism inaugurated is the accelerating desire to deconstruct the

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stark binary with which Said begins. From Homi Bhabha’s “ambivalence” to Greenblatt’s “go-between” and Mary Louise Pratt’s “transculturation,” enormous energy has been directed toward recovering the notion that resistance on the part of the colonized or foreign and new understanding on the part of Westerners was possible.20 The alterity of foreign voices could indeed be heard and they had an extraordinary impact. Most importantly for the present argument, the testimony of all these contemporary scholars is anticipated by Descartes. In his 1648 Discourse on Method, even while he fully recognizes what we have been calling the textuality of history, Descartes is clear not only that the past is a foreign country but that its alien dialects may be learned. The danger he sees, however, is not that we will recreate the past in the image of the present, but that the past will consume us and estrange us from the present: To live with men of an earlier age [he says] [to labor on the study of ancient languages, on the reading of ancient authors, and on their histories and narratives] is like travelling in foreign lands. It is useful to know something of the manners of other peoples in order to judge more impartially of our own, and not to despise and ridicule whatever differs from them, like men who have never been outside their native country. But those who travel too long end by being strangers in their own homes, and those who study too curiously the actions of antiquity are ignorant of what is done among ourselves to-day.21

This passage raises three critical points. First, it emphasizes the degree to which it is the Renaissance experience of Classical culture in all its radically disorienting alterity that creates Western historicism. During what we now call the late Middle Ages, the customary methods of assimilating the Classical past into the Christian present, of making the uncanny familiar, broke down – that is, they lost the seamlessness of their explanatory power. By recovering the languages and carefully studying the remains of antiquity, it became possible to see its achievements not as a type or imperfect pagan model of Christian revelation but as an alternative source of authority. Through the rigors of humanist education, it became possible, as Christopher Marlowe so dramatically perceived, to assign one’s soul to the old philosophers and “confound Hell in Elysium.”22 Second, the passage emphasizes not only the “labor” of this task but the difficulty of maintaining a firm grasp on both the difference and continuity between past and present without them consuming each other. It emphasizes the sheer difficulty, in James Joyce’s words, of entertaining “two thinks at a time.”23 This in turn suggests that the issue raised by the new presentists is not so much a theoretical problem as a logistical

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one. As R.G. Collingwood suggests, historicism, like any other form of philosophical thinking, “is reflective” – that is, it “never simply thinks about an object, [but] it always, while thinking about any object, thinks also about its own thought about that object.”24 Third and perhaps most importantly, the passage acts out its own meaning. Living with men of an earlier age like Descartes allows us to experience transculturation not only over space but over time. By listening to both Descartes and presentday textualists – just as Grady actually does when listening to Machiavelli and Montaigne – we become go-betweens. Contrary to Hawkes’s facile distinction, not only is it possible to break bread with the dead and simultaneously talk to the living; it is imperative to do so. For, as David Scott Kastan says, quoting Walter Benjamin, “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” and if it does, the prospect is one of a terrifying new ignorance.25 In Shakespeare studies, nowhere was the impact of “discourse” in the form of Said’s Orientalism more acutely felt than in discussions of The Tempest. Overnight what mainstream criticism had routinely celebrated as a meta-theatrical triumph, an existentialist testament to the power of art to create its own meaning, now became distanced as a problem play whose very aesthetic power could be seen as complicit in the process of colonial oppression.26 Most importantly, it was a work of art that denied alterity, that transformed the otherness of the foreign into the monstrous shape of Caliban. The present had shifted and with it, so a new presentist might argue, had the contours and qualities of this old play. Although a colonial reading of the play had always been available, including such anticipations of Said as Greenblatt’s “Learning to Curse,”27 no “sustained historical and theoretical analysis of the play’s involvement in the colonialist project,” said Paul Brown, had yet been undertaken.28 The analysis that Brown and then countless others provided emphasized the degree to which the play had not been written by Shakespeare but by language, culture, the dominant ideology, and, in Brown’s case, following Said, “discourse.” The seamlessness of Said’s original binary was, however, now troubled by Brown’s reading of Bhabha. By 1985, the play could no longer be construed as an “all-embracing triumph for colonialism” (68), because, as Bhabha had shown, the colonial stereotype to which Caliban conforms has within it a subversive grain – that is, the possibility of resistance, the need to contain which drives colonial discourse to reproduce itself endlessly: “it cannot rest,” says Brown, “it is always impelled to further action” (58). Implicit in this account is the same lack of agency, the same

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inability to apprehend alterity, evident in the new presentism. Just as early New Historicists could not step outside discourse, so the new presentists cannot step outside the irreducible foundation Hawkes calls “time” (3). There is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us. Twenty years on, Brown’s argument with its emphasis on discourse and its potted colonial histories seems procrustean and largely unpersuasive – not so much because our thinking in the present has shifted, but because our thinking in the 1980s was so single-minded. Over the course of the last two decades, as a result of spending so much time with men and women of earlier ages, our thinking, it might be argued, has become less focused, more disparate. That is, historical research, clearly reinvigorated by New Historicism and other forms of cultural materialism, has recovered so much unexpected and diverse information from the past that the ability of the present, in terms of postmodern or textualist theory, to assimilate it has become less and less effective. In the case of the discourse of early modern colonialism, the crisis came, more than a little ironically, with the turn to the east. The arguments of orientalism seemed to work quite well with Colonial Virginia or Tudor Ireland, but when applied to the Ottoman Empire or Moghul India, for instance, they fell flat. Incipient Western hegemony’s ability to efface alterity did little to explain Thomas Roe’s confused reaction to the Moghul court, Edward Terry’s admiration for the civility and religious toleration of Jahangir’s peaceable kingdom, the thousands of Europeans who later sought service with Indian princes and who as “white Moghuls” happily converted to indigenous religions.29 Similarly, when The Tempest is removed from the context of orientalism and Virginia Company propaganda and rethought in the context of old world dynastic politics, as Kastan has done, the cultural work it does begins to look very different.30 And this is even more the case when we look at The Tempest in the context of an old self-parodying city comedy like Eastward Ho. In developing this point, I want to follow Kastan in showing not only how unexpected are the insights historicist criticism is capable of producing, but, perhaps more immediately important here, how a methodology based on the assumption of radical cultural difference over time need not preclude formalist ways of thinking about literary texts. Indeed, quite the reverse, for unless attention is paid to the complexities of literary or rhetorical form – that is, to the pleasures of the text – then any kind of single-minded historicist criticism will not only render “art documentary,” as Marshall Grossman puts it, but flatten out critical distinctions and nullify the very historical alterity that is its primary objective.31 Reading

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Eastward Ho and The Tempest today, the most obvious link between the two plays is colonialism, but on examining that link more closely, especially with an eye to formal nuances and their affective power, the plays in dialogue offer a different perspective. Not only do they call attention to the mechanics of how they move both us and their contemporary audiences, but in so doing they open up a radical discontinuity between our culture and theirs. II Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s play, Eastward Ho, was first performed by a company of boy actors known as the Children of Her Majesty’s Revels in the summer of 1605 at the Blackfriars theater. The stock in trade or specific register of these children’s companies was, as Elizabeth Hanson puts it, deeply “ironic anti-mimetic” satire (92).32 In Eastward Ho, a burlesque of the prodigal son story, the Queen’s children do not disappoint. There, most importantly for the present argument, the mighty discourse of Western colonialism is not desperately contested, inadvertently subverted, or finally reasserted as “Renaissance authority” is in Greenblatt’s classic Foucauldian essay, “Invisible Bullets,” but openly and knowingly ridiculed.33 Colonial adventure does not appear as a discourse always-already impelled to further action but as a joke. No one is interpellated and only harebrained, greedy fools like Spendall, Scapethrift, and Sir Petronel would believe Captain Seagull’s pastiche of new world propaganda – a specific discourse, which in the case of Virginia was already felt to be more than a little tired and oversold.34 All the familiar topoi articulated in English dispatches from the new world, the reports produced by Sir Walter Raleigh and his associates over the previous two decades and collected in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1589; 1598–1600), are treated with complete disrespect; they are exuberantly rehearsed and satirized as various forms of fools’ gold. At the climax of the play, at the Blue Anchor Tavern in Billingsgate, Seagull begins his colonial catechism with an allusion to one of Raleigh’s most famous lines – as Raleigh had encouraged his readers with the thought that Guiana “is a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead,” so Seagull exhorts his fellow adventurers: “Come boys, Virginia longs till we share the rest of her maidenhead” (III.iii.15–16).35 The would-be colonists will share it, because John White’s lost colony of 1587 is imagined as having already populated the new land with Englishlooking indigenes. As Seagull responds to the questions of his followers,

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we learn that the natives are friendly, that gold is as plentiful as it is in Sir Thomas More’s new-world fantasy Utopia, that the climate is as paradisal as it is in Ralph Lane’s 1585 letter to Hakluyt, that the voyage out will only take six weeks, and that there, like Montaigne’s cannibals, the colonists will experience the true wonder of the new world, that is, a land without sovereignty: “And then you shall live freely there, without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, or intelligencers” (III.iii.42–4). Unfortunately, however, in a dig at the new king’s regime, they are also likely to find “a few industrious Scots” there who, as everyone knows, are now “dispersed over the face of the whole earth” (III.iii.44–6). Almost all the revellers at the Blue Anchor, even those like the scheming usurer Security and his pander, the profligate apprentice Quicksilver, both of whom aim to manipulate the colonial venture for their own separate ends, get caught up in its wake. Having had too much to drink, the voyagers, Quicksilver, and Sir Petronel’s paramour, Security’s disguised wife, Winifred, all take boat for Deptford to dine on board Sir Francis Drake’s ship, The Golden Hind. There, now pursued by the duped Security, they intend to “do sacrifice for a prosperous voyage” (III.iii.167–75). But before they get to Deptford, disaster strikes. The colonial venture stands at the center of the play; it connects and epitomizes all the gleeful, overreaching excesses of the comedy’s various fools and knaves. All their competing fantasies are, however, brought to nothing by the playwrights’ conjuring up a tempest in the Thames. “I know not what to do,” says the shipwrecked Quicksilver, “my wicked hopes / Are, with this tempest, torn up by the roots” (IV.i.143–44). All the gulls and gulling are tempest tossed, washed ashore, and made to confront the outward shows of their own villainies. Security, who would enable Sir Petronel to seduce Mr. Bramble’s wife without realizing that the knight’s paramour is in fact his own wife, is washed up at Cuckold’s Haven. His wife herself is cast ashore at Saint Katherine’s, a reformatory for fallen women. Quicksilver, the focus of the play’s prodigal son motif, lands at Wapping in the shadow of the gallows used for hanging pirates and sea-rovers: “Accursed, that I was saved or born,” he confesses, “How fatal is my sad arrival here” (IV.i.135–36). Finally, Sir Petronel and Captain Seagull are cast away not on an exotic island but on the Isle of Dogs – where, in a daring move on the part of the playwrights, Sir Petronel meets the mirror image of his own scheming in the figure of a gentleman who sounds a lot like England’s venal new Scots king: “I ken the man weel,” says the gentleman of Sir Petronel in a heavy Scots accent, “he’s one of my thirty-pound knights” (IV.i.197–8).36

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When the goldsmith Touchstone, Quicksilver’s former master and the play’s principal “manager figure,” hears of the tempest and its outcome, he cries: “A miracle! The justice of heaven!” (IV.ii.104).37 The miracle or wondrous act of God’s grace is, of course, nothing but the inspired work of the playwrights’ imagination, and if one were to transfer their powers of invention to a character within the play like Touchstone, making him magically or supernaturally responsible for the tempest, it is not difficult to see how one might reconceive the play’s manager figure as Prospero. Not only does the comedy’s plot anticipate Shakespeare’s great romance, however, but its deep engagement with other Shakespearean plays makes it a compelling and significantly ironic pre-text for The Tempest. The irony is as important as it is, so I want to suggest, because the theatrical reenactment of grace inadvertently emphasizes the artifice of the religious concept. As thrift and the story of grace are parodied in Eastward Ho and as the skepticism this engenders is exacerbated in The Tempest, it becomes increasingly clear that what is at stake for a seventeenth-century audience is not so much colonialism as the doctrine of grace. What makes Eastward Ho so difficult for any kind of uninflected historicist criticism is its tone, its register or literary form. The specific problem with the play is that its ostensible ideal, the satiric norm or antithesis of colonial venture, is also treated ironically. What the audience is insistently, perhaps too insistently, invited to admire in Eastward Ho is a discourse much more strange and rare to our twentieth-first-century ears than colonial venture. It is the countervailing discourse of restraint or small gain, a discourse that routinely seeks to associate thrift with grace: “Seven score pound art thou out in the cash,” says Touchstone to Quicksilver at the beginning of the play, “but look to it, I will not be gallanted out of my moneys. And as for my rising by other men’s fall, God shield me. Did I gain my wealth by ordinaries? no. By exchanging of gold? no. By keeping of gallants’ company? no. I hired me a little shop, bought low, took small gain, kept no debt book, garnished my shop, for want of plate, with good wholesome thrifty sentences” (I.i.49–57). Paradoxically, this thrift is rewarded with blessings completely out of proportion to what thrift actually earns. As in the biblical story of the prodigal son in Luke 15, so many of the rewards in the play are explicitly unmerited. Once Quicksilver repents, embraces thrift, and becomes the “prodigal child reclaimed” (V.v.223), for instance, grace flows freely and he is rewarded with the “huge mass” of Security’s ill-gotten gains (V.v.190). Given the Blackfriars’ self-reflexive, anti-mimetic style in 1605 and its knowing audience of “gallants, law students, wealthier citizens

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and nobility,” it is difficult to take this story of thrift and its rewards at face value.38 The play is intensely ironic and the sincerity of Quicksilver’s repentance throws all in doubt. It is not clear whether we should join Touchstone in applauding the prodigal’s return or smile at the send-up of the motif, a parody that not only implies the goldsmith’s final inability “to fix” his mercurial adversary, but calls the efficacy of grace itself into question. After all, Quicksilver not only bounces back from his first tempest-tossed conversion with a plan to blanch copper (IV.i.222–54), but he finally articulates the prodigal’s repentance only after he has learned and practiced the script in prison, happily reproducing popular ballads of contrition (V.ii.60–4, V.v.51–223).39 He is a stage penitent and his repentance, we are made to feel, may all be merely a matter of artifice. The ending could be played straight, as it probably was before the king at Whitehall in 1614, but at its 1605 performances it was almost certainly played as burlesque with the gracious endeavors of Touchstone and Golding being rendered ineffective. If Touchstone’s thrift and the discourse of small gain and its miraculous rewards are treated with some amusement, however, the reality of the need for grace is not in doubt. There are moments in the play, for instance, when the presence of Shakespeare changes the register and might suggest to even the most arch of audiences the gravity of what is to be lost if principle were denied and the ruthless policy of Quicksilver or the counterfeit thrift of his new master, Security, were taken seriously. The Shakespearean play that most forcefully announces itself in Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s comedy is somewhat paradoxically Hamlet.40 Hamlet himself appears as the footman of Touchstone’s socialclimbing elder daughter, Gertrude, Quicksilver’s chief female counterpart in profligacy. He does so not only as a very funny meta-theatrical punishment for his well-known diatribe against the boy actors of Blackfriars in Shakespeare’s play,41 but also because his story seems to function as a touchstone, more effective than the strictures of Touchstone himself, by which the very real lightness of the goldsmith’s adversaries might be measured. Hamlet the footman’s humiliating subjection to his vain and lascivious mistress, Gertrude, for instance, cannot but recall the Prince’s impassioned reproof of his unreflective and wanton mother, Gertrude. His subjection here cannot fail to elicit laughter that is to some extent uneasy especially when his appeal to “shame” is now only to the tardiness of his foolish mistress’s coach. It earns him the ironic rebuke of another servant: “’Sfoot, Hamlet, are you mad? Whither run you now? You should brush up my old mistress” (III.ii.5, 7–8). At the same time, the enormity of Gertrude’s casual, status-driven dismissal of her father is brought home

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in the sudden memory of Ophelia, for as Gertrude rejects Touchstone, she unwittingly turns to Shakespeare and sings a fragment from Ophelia’s tragic lament for her murdered father: “His head was white as milk, / All flaxen was his hair” (III.ii.85–6).42 Similarly, the venality of Winifred’s easily-persuaded infidelity, amusing as it is, is suddenly grounded this time in the memory of Ophelia’s suicide, for as Winifred struggles with the billows to reach the north shore of the Thames, there are moments when she appears like Ophelia drowning in the brook: “her clothes swim about her most handsomely. O, they bear her up bravely” (IV.i.67–9).43 This recurrent pattern of tragic counterpoint suggests that what is lost is the moral intensity of all those who, like the Prince, “hunger and thirst after righteousness.” While Shakespeare’s Hamlet, however misguided, might exemplify something of the moral passion or yearning for grace imagined in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5:6), in Eastward Ho it is only the profligates who claim to “hunger and thirst” and what they “hunger and thirst” after is merely unrestrained appetite. Security, for instance, having caricatured Touchstone on thrift (II.ii.112), proceeds to articulate his sharp practice in terms of Christian surplus: “Excellent Master Francis,” he says to Quicksilver as they plan to defraud Sir Petronel, “how I do long to do thee good! How I do hunger and thirst to have the honour to enrich thee – ay, even to die, that thou mightst inherit my living: even hunger and thirst” (II.ii.163–66, my emphasis). The recurrent use of this phrase from the Gospel suggests the degree to which Security’s demonic parody of Touchstone’s thrift is in fact a parody of grace at its most idealistic. The play seems to be paying deference to the ideal whose stock articulations in ballad and drama it mocks. The relation between thrift and grace at the heart of Touchstone’s citizen ethos is emphasized in the behavior of Touchstone’s second, younger apprentice, Golding, who plays out the role of the elder brother figure from the prodigal son story. His thrift, like that of Touchstone, is predictably made fun of, but his unwillingness to do malice is hard to ridicule, especially when it becomes the ground of the play’s climactic act of grace. For Golding, unlike the elder brother in the parable, shows no anger at the prodigal’s return but actually – that is, theatrically – engineers Quicksilver’s final forgiveness. It is Golding’s self-sacrifice, his selfless pretense of being arrested and sent to prison, that enables Touchstone to witness Quicksilver’s repentance and so to forgive him – the biblical roles of elder brother and father are reversed. The whole action may be a parody but it remains the parody of a beautifully constructed model of how artifice effects grace. At the beginning of the play Touchstone engineers

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the union of Golding and Mildred, somewhat more forcefully than Prospero engineers the fair encounter of two rare affections in Ferdinand and Miranda, but Golding understands it as an act of grace. Great as his thrift is, the reward is unmerited: “And though [your love] were a grace so far beyond my merit that I should blush with unworthiness to receive it,” he says to Mildred, “yet thus far both my love and my means shall assure you of requital” (II.i.81–4). The implication is that there is a form of equity or divine thrift in the way grace is made to answer grace, and the gifts that Golding receives provide the surplus or credit that enables him to offer grace in return and so to effect the forgiveness of his enemy, Quicksilver. Golding’s design is understood as a venture – “I have ventured on a device” (V.iii.118–9) – and it is this gracious venture or risktaking that is meant to stand in opposition to the fools’ gold of colonial venture; that is, the true gold that Touchstone is always urging people to assay. “Work upon that now,” he says as Golding and Mildred exchange grace. The burlesque style and consequent ambivalence of the play is such, however, that there is no evidence that it will work. It seems clear that what Shakespeare wants to exploit for The Tempest is the old comedy’s staging of grace, using, as David Lindley suggests, all the theatrical resources of the newly acquired Blackfriars theater. But as he transforms the burlesque into a romance, there is a degree to which he only exacerbates the doubts implicit in the old city comedy.44 III There is, of course, no single issue that dominates early modern English culture. If there were, however, it would not be the discourse of colonialism but, as Brian Cummings’s careful historical analyses have recently reemphasized, the problem of grace. This problem is not simply a matter of religion but, as even a secular burlesque like Eastward Ho suggests, a matter for the whole culture; it is an issue that permeates every aspect of English life. In his important book, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, Cummings lays out the problem this way: “grace was at once the transcendent, incomprehensible gift of God, and yet the inevitable locus of religion” (49).45 It was so because without grace, “there could be no God” – that is, “God was only in the world through grace, and could only be apprehended by grace” (49). All meaning, religious, civil, and domestic, to a degree that is totally alien to our twenty-first-century culture of economic, social, and personal growth, turned on the contingency of grace.46 Unlike growth, God’s grace was not only unknowable – it was

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completely unobtainable by any kind of human agency, effort, or ingenuity. It was essential but profoundly uncertain. The question that tortured so many became how grace is to be facilitated – that is, “how is it possible to bring forth the completely gratuitous?” (50). Within Christendom, especially Protestant Christendom, the question transcends boundaries of class, gender, and nation; it absorbs poor people like Anna Trapnel and John Bunyan as much as intellectuals like Luther, Calvin, or Milton. The answer is, of course, faith, but the ways of faith are difficult to understand and always fraught with doubt. Cummings offers an economic metaphor: “Rather than purchasing grace through works, or else mortgaging grace and surrendering works in repayment, the Christian offers them from an apparently supplementary credit” (50). The credit value of this supplement is in reality an illusion because it can never be repaid. If taken at face value, it backfires, producing the specter of a debt crisis that quite literally drives Milton’s Satan, for instance, to despair – he rebels against God precisely in order to quit “The debt immense of endless gratitude, / So burdensome still paying, still to owe” (Paradise Lost IV.52–3).47 If taken spiritually or figuratively, however, this supplementary credit allows one the freedom to believe and act in the world. In effect, it is the creative illusion that allows one being. In the case of Luther, so Cummings explains, it allows him the freedom to reinterpret God’s justice, transforming the grammar in which it articulates itself from an active into a passive construction, turning it from “the justice which judges man” into “that by which man is justified” (51–2) and so realizing the redemptive possibility of grace. If the primary locus of grace is language, it is not just language on the page but even more dramatically language as it is performed on the stage. In the case of the early modern English theater, as many playwrights clearly recognized, the drama was peculiarly suited to mimic, play out, or enact the creative illusion of this supplementary credit in a multitude of different variations. Seeing is believing, and the theater simulates seeing so powerfully that it can shock even the most cynical, so it claims, into belief: “Now I will believe / That there are unicorns,” says Sebastian on seeing the illusion of the harpy’s feast enacted in The Tempest (III.iii.21–2). Similarly, the “unmerited” gift of Mildred’s love so forcefully engineered by Touchstone enables Golding to believe and speak in such a gracious way that he in turn becomes the occasion of Touchstone’s faith – “the anchor of my hopes,” Touchstone says, alluding to Hebrews 6:19 (II.i.94–5). And after the tempest in the Thames, the artifice of Golding’s self-sacrifice becomes the occasion of Touchstone’s act of forgiveness. For the young Milton reading and watching Shakespeare

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at the Blackfriars theater, these acts of fancy are a matter of wonder and astonishment, for they give the most insubstantial concepts a local habitation and a name.48 But here, in a way that is critical for my argument, when The Tempest is read through Eastward Ho, those acts of invention are increasingly troubled by the self-conscious way the play recurrently draws attention to its own artifice. In 1608, when Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, took over the Blackfriars theater from the now-defunct boys company, it is clear that Shakespeare had not forgotten Eastward Ho’s tempest and artifice of forgiveness. As Eastward Ho had assimilated Hamlet so The Tempest would transume, along with many other texts, Eastward Ho. Like Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s play, one of the occasions of Shakespeare’s play was almost certainly topical colonial talk. The Virginia enterprise had been revived and the Virginia Company itself incorporated in 1606. Three years later in 1609, the year after the King’s Men took over the Blackfriars theater, news of the shipwreck of the Company’s Virginia-bound ship, the Sea-Adventure, in Bermuda and then a little later news of its providential recovery may have provided one of the immediate stimuli for writing.49 But the play is no more a function of the discourse of colonialism than Eastward Ho. If the wonder of the new world is not ridiculed as it is in the earlier play, it is treated with enormous skepticism. The natives, if Caliban is a native in the sense of belonging to a deep-rooted or distinctive indigenous culture, are anything but friendly. The island is without gold or any other treasure – it is “bare,” says Prospero (Epilogue 8). Although the air seems temperate, the island also appears to be a “desert,” says Adrian, “[u]ninhabitable and almost inaccessible” (II.i.34–42). It is only Prospero’s artifice and manipulation of Ferdinand’s imagination that makes the place seem like “paradise” (IV.i.124). Most importantly, Montaigne’s vision of a new world without sovereignty is assigned to the good-natured but fanciful Gonzalo; his reverie is routinely interrupted and its contradictions ruthlessly laid bare – even while the newly shipwrecked inhabitants struggle for the very sovereignty he would banish (II.i.140–80).50 None of the characters, save perhaps Caliban, want to remain on the island. Nor once enabled to leave do they sail on, like the crew of the Sea-Adventure, to the new world but happily return home to Italy. The new world is only deployed in the play to the degree that it can contribute to the problem of staging grace. Attention to form is critical. Both plays are intensely self-conscious or meta-theatrical. If Eastward Ho is an anti-mimetic burlesque, The Tempest is an equally anti-mimetic romance. Whereas one seeks to delight its

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audience with multiple ironies, both satirizing real iniquities and sending up the formal conventions of the old plays that contest those iniquities, the other seeks to delight its audience with astonishment and wonder. But while both stage the supplementary credit of grace, both are remarkable for the doubts they convey. In Shakespeare’s play, the key move is to reconceive the role of the manager figure – by turning Prospero into a magician and making him directly responsible for the tempest itself, the supernatural artifice of grace is effectively naturalized. What was only implicit in Eastward Ho is now explicit. The focus of Prospero’s device or venture is the most powerful of his enemies, Alonso, King of Naples. Through the illusion of the tempest and then the harpy’s feast, Alonso is made to confront the outward show of his villainy. As the sumptuous banquet vanishes, a monstrous harpy appears and Alonso is made to understand that his son’s drowning is in repayment for his unrestrained appetite, his part along with Antonio and Sebastian in deposing Prospero and exposing the old duke and his “innocent child” to the sea (III.iii.72). Alonso is condemned to lingering perdition not in an earthly paradise but in a place much more like the Isle of Dogs – “this most desolate isle” (III.iii.80). This artifice and the remorse it effects in Alonso prepare the way for Prospero’s climactic act of forgiveness. Remembering Gonzalo’s original act of grace, Prospero says, “I will pay thy graces / Home both in word and deed” (V.i.70–1), and goes on to repay Gonzalo by offering supplementary credit to his enemies. He urges Alonso to look to patience, “of whose soft grace / For the like loss [of Miranda], I have her sovereign aid” (V.i.142–3). After Alonso offers his life for the restoration not only of Ferdinand but, most importantly, of Ferdinand and Miranda, Prospero reveals them both alive and well – “A most high miracle,” says Sebastian (V.i.177). No miracle at all, a skeptic familiar with Eastward Ho and other old plays, especially those like Twelfth Night or The Winter’s Tale, might say, just artifice or the tricks of stagecraft represented as magic, and this is of critical importance because by staging grace, the drama inadvertently reinforces the problematic nature of the concept itself. The fragile nature of Prospero’s artifice suggests the degree to which even the efficacy of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount is based on the insubstantial evidence of things not seen (Heb. 11:1); it is merely an imagination and those who hunger and thirst after righteousness may not get their fill (Mt. 5:6). Two of the principal artifices or vanities of Prospero’s art in The Tempest reach back not only to what might be considered a colonial text like the Aeneid,51 but to city comedy – the tempest itself, as we have seen, to Eastward Ho and the harpy’s feast to one of Eastward Ho’s pre-texts,

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Dekker and Webster’s 1604 Westward Ho. In that play, the man of sin, the old Earl who would seduce the wife of the play’s manager figure, the merchant Justiniano, is like Alonso brought face to face with the enormity of his unrestrained appetite at a harpy’s feast. The Earl’s hunger and thirst after “delicious pleasure,” “Earths Supreamest good” (IV.ii.18) appears to be requited with a sumptuous banquet.52 At this feast, as a song begins and the sensuous music “sounds allarum to my blood” (IV.ii.51), a figure who appears to be Justiniano’s wife leads the Earl “to the table, places him in a chaire, and in dumbe signes, Courts him, til the song be done” (s.d. after IV.ii.52). The wife is suddenly revealed to be a “Harpy” (IV.ii.77) – that is, Justiniano in disguise. The object of the artifice is to make the Earl see his appetite for what it really is: “when Vice sees with broad eyes / Her vgly forme,” says Justiniano, “she does hirselfe despise” (IV.ii.160–1). Having brought the Earl to remorse by then showing him the murdered body of his wife, Justiniano brings her back to life: “Awake sweete Moll, th’ast played / The woman rarely, counterfetted well” (IV.ii.151–2). Rapidly transformed by the illusion of supplementary credit, the Earl pours forth his wealth: “The jewels which I gave you: weare: your fortunes, / Ile raise on golden Pillars” (IV.ii.170–1). None of this is very persuasive, and the taint of old theatrical tricks explains something of The Tempest’s ambivalence, a tired skepticism immortalized in Prospero’s response to Miranda’s expression of wonder, “O brave new world” – ah well, he says, “’tis new to thee” (V.i.183–4). At its most optimistic, the brave new world the play’s denouement offers is not the new world discovered in America but the old world transformed by grace. But the play is profoundly ambivalent, and at its most pessimistic, the theatrical reenactments of grace are felt to be illusory. Caliban’s repentance and determination to “be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace” (V.i.292–3) is no more convincing than the repentance of that “ill-yoked monster,” Quicksilver (II.i.95). Similarly, it is embarrassingly anticlimactic that the most confident assertion of felix culpa and the triumph of grace is assigned to the credulous Gonzalo, even to the extent of echoing Dekker and Webster’s old Earl in making the happy ending permanent with highly theatrical pillars of gold: “Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue / Should become kings of Naples? O rejoice / Beyond a common joy, and set it down / With gold on lasting pillars” (V.i.205–8). As the theater draws on the capital of religion, so many, especially among the godly, might feel, it devalues the credibility of its source, specifically the ability of that source to distinguish itself from the theatrical artifice of grace. This seems to be the case with the mature Milton who in Paradise Regained consigns the vanity of Prospero’s art, in the specific form of the Harpy’s feast, to Satan (II:402–3).

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IV Let me conclude by returning to the relation between presentism and historicism. What I am trying to suggest, then, is that by spending time with the writers of an earlier age, especially by listening to their responses to each other, it is possible to come to a sense of just how foreign a country the past is. In this case, in the intertextual relation between Eastward Ho and The Tempest and various other early modern texts, it is possible to hear the sounds of a different world, and see that one of the key images of the past that threatens to disappear irretrievably, because it is of little or no concern to the present, is the contingency or gratuitousness of grace and the inadvertent effects of its theatrical staging. This is, of course, not the only way to think about The Tempest, and it would be foolish to pretend that the play does not illuminate the origins and ways of modern Western colonialism. The “learning to curse” debate (I.ii.306–74) between Prospero and Miranda on the one hand and Caliban on the other, for instance, is remarkable for the way in which it anticipates and rehearses issues still at the center of contemporary neocolonialism – specifically the degree to which rival appeals to the authority of education on the part of the West and sovereignty on the part of the “developing” world, especially in places like Afghanistan, still stand in mutual incomprehension. The debate reveals a real continuity between past and present – not an analogy, but what Greenblatt would call a “homology.” What I have been trying to stress here, however, is the discontinuity that actually enables us to feel that such a continuity is remarkable. To be specific, I have been trying to stress how the content of form might enable us to see the difference between a culture of grace and one of growth. The dangers of staging grace are for us minimal, but for Milton and so many of his contemporaries they are formidable and go a long way toward explaining the great poet’s diffidence toward the theater. This sense of discontinuity depends on the possibility of “solid historical knowledge,” but to pursue such knowledge does not necessarily constitute an argument against the value of theory, let alone the literary – it is much more part of an argument for the dialogic relationship between historical research and theory, a relationship in which research will apprehend alterity every bit as much as theory will seek to comprehend it. In both these practices, attention to the rhetorical constitution or “literariness” of texts is crucial and it is, of course, what makes the contributions of our discipline so distinctive. In his fine essay “Limiting History” (Chapter 3 in this volume), the late Marshall Grossman sees this dialogism as a balance between “diachronic stories of cause and effect,” on the one hand,

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and “synchronic systems defining, and defined by, varieties of cognitive and conceptual interactions,” on the other – that is, “tales to be told” and “theories to be visualized.” It is, above all, a matter of entertaining “two thinks at a time.” This is not just a logistical problem, as I suggested earlier, but a moral one. It is at the heart of what I understand by an ethics of reading – the obligation to hold the past and present together, allowing them to speak in their own voices without consuming each other. This means understanding that when Miranda cries out, “O brave new world,” it might move a seventeenth-century audience in radically different ways compared to a contemporary one. This in turn does not mean that the contemporary response is wrong – just different. But recognition of that difference is vital, for out of its contemplation come wisdom and the ability to live more fully or self-reflectively in the world. This, it seems to me, is not a matter of limiting history but of enlarging our sense of it and our peculiar situatedness in it – that is, of listening to its many voices and ways of being without losing our own. No t e s 1 Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, & Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1. 2 Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” in Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. David Quint and Patricia Parker (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 210. 3 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 6, 188–94. 4 Louis Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 20. 5 See, for instance, the critiques of New Historicism produced by Anne Barton, “The Perils of Historicism,” The New York Review of Books, March 28, 1991; and John Lee, “The Man Mistook His Hat: Stephen Greenblatt,” Essays in Criticism 45 (1995): 285–300. For a response to Barton and Lee, see Paul Stevens, “Pretending to be Real: Stephen Greenblatt and the Legacy of Popular Existentialism,” New Literary History 33 (2002): 491–519. 6 Stanley Fish, “Theory’s Hope,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 374–8. 7 Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002) and Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, & Montaigne. References hereafter cited in the text. 8 The allusion is a reference to Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1. 9 For Hawkes on criticism as jazz, see That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986), esp. 124–6.

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10 On the pretensions of the new presentism, see the essays of Andrew Hadfield (Chapter 1) and Marshall Grossman (Chapter 3) in this volume. 11 Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, eds., Presentist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2007). 12 See J. Hillis Miller, “Presidential Address 1986: The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base,” PMLA 102.3 (1987): 281–91. 13 Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” The Monist 64 (1981): 155–74. 14 Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977). 15 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978; rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 16 In White’s pessimistic characterization, discourse is a prison house that condemns us to endless fictionality: “Tropic is the shadow from which all realistic discourse tries to flee. The flight, however, is futile; for tropics is the process by which all discourse constitutes the objects which it pretends only to describe realistically and to analyze objectively” (2). 17 L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), 9. On historicism, see R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), esp. 1–13, 46–85; Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), passim; and David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 18 Alan Bennett, The History Boys (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 85. 19 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Hereafter cited in the text. 20 See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994; rpt. London: Routledge, 2004); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992; rpt. London: Routledge, 2007). 21 Descartes is quoted in Collingwood, The Idea of History, 59. 22 Doctor Faustus, B-text, I.iii.57, quoted from Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (1995; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 23 Quoted in William Kolbrenner, Milton’s Warring Angels; A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 162. 24 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 1. 25 David Scott Kastan, “‘The Duke of Milan / And his Brave Son’: Old Histories and New in The Tempest,” Shakespeare after Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), 183. Hereafter cited in the text. 26 Kastan puts it this way: “No longer is The Tempest a play of social reconciliation and renewal, of benevolent artistry and providential design; it now appears as a telling document of the first phase of English imperialism, implicated in the will-to-power of the Jacobean court, even as ‘an instrument of empire’ itself” (184).

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27 See Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiapelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 561–80. 28 Paul Brown, “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine:’ The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 48. Hereafter cited in the text. 29 See, for instance, William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: Harper Collins, 2002); Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theater of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Paul Stevens and Rahul Sapra, “Akbar’s Dream: Moghul Toleration and English / British Orientalism,” Modern Philology 103.4 (2007): 379–411, esp. 381–8. 30 See Kastan, “‘The Duke of Milan / And his Brave Son.’” See also Lawrence Manley’s powerful essay in this volume, “In Great Men’s Houses,” for the way in which historicizing performance criticism can produce results that are anything but limiting or univocal. 31 See Marshall Grossman, “Limiting History,” in this volume, and Paul Stevens, “Intolerance and the Virtues of Sacred Vehemence,” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 243–67. 32 Elizabeth Hanson, “Against a Synecdochic Shakespeare,” Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 75–95. References cited in the text. 33 Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion,” Glyph 8 (1981), 40–61. 34 With the Treaty of London in 1604 and the end of the war with Spain, there appears to have been considerable interest on the part of some entrepreneurs in reviving the old Virginia enterprise of the 1580s. This appears to be the immediate occasion of the colonial element in the play. See, for instance, D. B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974), 452. 35 Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (London, 1596), 96. Eastward Ho is quoted from George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho, ed. R.W. Van Fossen (1979; rpt. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 36 Jonson and Chapman were imprisoned for a short period because of the anti-Scots passages in the play; these were almost certainly deleted from the 1614 performance at Whitehall, see Van Fossen, ed., Eastward Ho, 4–6, 218–25. 37 The term “manager figure” is David Lindley’s – see the introduction to his edition of William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 1–3.

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38 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 31. For other modern critics besides Gurr and Hanson, see, for instance, Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy (London: Methuen, 1968); Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), esp. 47–53; Van Fossen, Eastward Ho, 19–37; and Martin Butler, “Literature and Theatre to 1600,” The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 565–602. 39 See Leggatt, Citizen Comedy, 51. 40 See Richard Horwich, “Hamlet and Eastward Ho,” SEL 11.2 (1971): 223–33. 41 As a move in the “war of the theatres,” Shakespeare has Hamlet vilify the “little eyases” of the Blackfriars theater and identify the “tyrannical” craze for boy actors with the empty popularity of his murderous uncle, Claudius (Hamlet, II.ii.332–64). For the “war of the theatres,” which is usually taken to end with the collaboration of its rival protagonists, Jonson and Marston, in Eastward Ho, see, for instance, James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Butler, “Literature and Theater to 1600.” Hamlet is quoted from William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, New Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982). 42 Cf. Hamlet, IV.v.187–96 – “His beard was white as snow, / All flaxen was his poll.” 43 Cf. Hamlet, IV.vii.176–77 – “Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up.” 44 See Lindley, ed., The Tempest, 1–3. All quotations from The Tempest are from Lindley’s edition, hereafter cited in the text. 45 Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (2002; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). References cited in the text. 46 On our culture as a culture of growth, see, for instance, Liah Greenfeld’s stimulating article, “Is Modernity Possible without Nationalism?” The Fate of the Nation State, ed. Michel Seymour (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 38–50. 47 Milton’s poetry is quoted from The Complete Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longmans, 1968) and his prose from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82). References cited in the text, the prose as CPW. 48 See Milton’s epitaph “On Shakespeare,” and “Elegia Prima.” Herbert Berry, “The Miltons and the Blackfriars Playhouse,” Modern Philology 89.4 (1992): 510–14; and Gordon Campbell, “Shakespeare and the Youth of Milton,” Milton Quarterly 33.4 (1999): 95–105, have had a considerable impact on our understanding of how close Milton was to the world of the London theater. See also Paul Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in Paradise Lost (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); “Subversion

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S t e v e ns and Wonder in Milton’s Epitaph ‘On Shakespeare’,” ELR 19.3 (1989): 375–88; and Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See Kermode on the Bermuda pamphlets in William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1954), xxvi–xxx. See Lynne Magnusson, “Interruption in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37.1 (1986): 52–65. The tempest appears in Book I and the feast which is disrupted by harpies in Book III. See also Armida’s feast in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, X.65. Westward Ho is quoted from volume II of The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).

7

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Playing, Patronage, and the Performance of Tudor History Lawrence Manley Thy registers and thee I both defy, Not wond’ring at the present, nor the past, For thy records, and what we see doth lie, Made more or less by thy continual haste.

– SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS (1609), H2v

In a strange passage of Richard III, Shakespeare goes completely off the historical record, as the young Prince Edward, speculating with Buckingham and his uncle Richard on whether Julius Caesar built the Tower of London, asks whether the story is “upon record,” or “reported / Successively from age to age?” To Buckingham’s confirmation that historical evidence is “upon record,” the Prince responds that even were this fact “not register’d” (in some archive, perhaps), the truth “should live from age to age, / As ‘twere retail’d to all posterity” (as oral legend, or perhaps, anachronistically, in saleable commodities like Holinshed’s Chronicles of England or Shakespeare’s Richard III). But when Richard facetiously seconds the idea that “fame lives long . . . without characters,” the Prince, wise beyond his years and alert to his uncle’s bad joke, reverses himself, insisting on the primacy of the written record and, through the example of Caesar’s Commentaries, on that symbiotic combination of virtuous deeds with truthful writing that is found in firsthand eyewitness report: “With what [Caesar’s] valor did enrich his wit, / His wit set down to make his valure live.”1 In Caesar’s Commentaries, deeds and words, facta and verba, eyewitness participation and written record, together create the fons et origo, the definitive archive to which all later retellings may reliably return. Paradoxically, however, the dense wordplay in the Prince’s questions underlines the recursive process by which historical narratives are never just definitively recorded and then accurately repeated, but revised with each retelling. A glance at the Oxford English Dictionary for the verbs 159

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record, report, register, and retail suggests that this tennis match between orality and writing is being played without a net. Moreover, the reflexiveness inherent in the Prince’s questions about a monument “re-edified” by succeeding ages suggests that these are not so much questions about the Tower of London or about Roman times as they are questions about how history is made, indeed, about the making of Richard III itself, especially given the lack of reliable documentation about the eventual fate of this young interlocutor. Given the Prince’s exemplary insistence on the way that eloquence combines with power in the production of Caesar’s Commentaries, they are also questions about the role of historical literature in the making of the Tudor state. The Prince’s final comments, returning to where he began, with the figure of Caesar, contain the ominous suggestion that history is written by the winners.2 James Siemon and Paul Werstine have written well about the ways in which this passage glosses a variety of Elizabethan ideas about the historical record, both of them noting that this dialogue covers something like the range of discursive possibilities embraced by what Annabel Patterson has called the “multivocality” of Holinshed’s Chronicles: the volatile mixture of documents, anecdotes, eyewitness reports, fables, and orations that challenges us, as it did Shakespeare and his contemporaries, to integrate the disciplinary methods and perspectives of literature and history.3 If the “multivocality” of Elizabethan historiography locates this discursive category within the domain of literary hermeneutics, it should also remind us that the multiple voices of the sources comprised in the category correspond to historically concrete and specific interests and perspectives. Patterson’s historically nuanced sensitivity to the latter of these considerations is in fact a primary basis for her interpretation of Holinshed, in which she finds the intellectual “protocols” for a proto-liberal hermeneutics to set against the very different hermeneutical model of subversion and containment Stephen Greenblatt and other New Historicists have traced in Tudor writing, including historiography and the history play.4 Like Prince Edward’s dialogue with Gloucester on the making of history, however, Patterson’s account of “multivocality” should also remind us that just as there was no straight route from the various historical materials and sources to a univocal Tudor historiography, so there was no straightforward route from Tudor chronicles to their dramatization on the late Elizabethan stage. In the complexity of the problems it set and in the variety of interpretations it suggested, the “richness of the historical archive,” Patterson explains, was one of “the conditions of playwriting.”5 In elaborating on this latter point here, I hope to emphasize its less

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obvious converse: that the movement from archive to stage was not simply a one-way route, and that in the Elizabethan history play “the conditions of playwriting” actually contributed to the richness of the historical archive, making visible, through its own oral and performative dimensions, the processes by which historical narratives are constructed from the standpoint of particular sources, viewpoints, and interests. My aim, in other words, is not simply to suggest that much of the history known by Tudor Englishmen was history still in the making, or that this history in the making was performed and recited as well as written. It is also to show how the “conditions of performance” – which are at least as much a subject for historical investigation as for literary interpretation – involved patterns of patronage, aristocratic interests, and political affiliation that could influence not only interpretations of material from the historical archive, but understandings of the archive’s nature and changing uses. Historical study of the “conditions of performance” is a field coeval with study of Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama, a scholarly endeavor well established by the eighteenth century. “Theater history,” as it is sometimes called, has largely remained a branch of “literary history” in the older sense, and its necessary reliance on such archival materials as court, town, and guild records, contracts, and other legal documents has linked it at least as strongly with methods in other fields of Tudor historical research as with the interpretation of theatrical texts. With the development of New Historicism, some aspects of the historical “conditions of performance” extensively explored by theater historians – censorship and the regulation of playing, civic and religious opposition to the theaters, the social complexion of the audience, and the role of theater at court – have been adapted to the interpretation of plays, authors, and genres. Only more recently, however, has literary interpretation turned to a further “condition of performance” – the fact that plays were commissioned or purchased and then performed as parts of the characteristic repertory of individual playing companies operating under aristocratic patronage. Efforts to interpret plays “not primarily in terms of their authorship but in terms of the theatre companies for which they were written”6 have been supported by many recent developments: new research on acting companies and their repertories, disintegrationist trends in textual studies, which are complicating our sense of authorship and the significance of variant texts, and New Historical interests in theater as a social institution situated among others. These developments have inspired theater historians to “remove the barriers” between the archival dimensions of traditional theater history and the more literary fields of textual criticism

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and criticism.7 At the same time, they have brought into sharper focus an additional historical problem relevant to theater-historical interpretation: the influence of aristocratic patronage on the work of theater companies and their plays. Until recently, aristocratic patronage was regarded for the most part as a legal fiction, a mere technical convenience allowing players to perform under the restrictions of the 1572 Act for the punishement of Vacabondes, which had subjected to punishment all players “not belonging to any Baron of this Realme or towards any other honorable Personage of greater Degree.”8 By contrast with this older view, recent work by Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean on the patronage and repertory and the Queen’s Men, by Andrew Gurr on the role of Charles Howard and Henry Carey as the patrons of the Lord Admiral’s and Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and by Paul Whitfield White on Leicester’s Men has provided many indications that patrons may have taken interest in, and sometimes exercised influence over, the acting companies under their sponsorship.9 For Ferdinando Stanley, patron of Lord Strange’s Men (1589–1593), the company for whom some scholars have suggested Shakespeare first wrote Richard III,10 the case for interest in theatrical activity is perhaps especially strong. The Stanley earls of Derby had patronized companies of actors throughout much of the sixteenth century. The third and fourth earls, Ferdinando’s grandfather and father, maintained widely traveled acting companies from the 1540s onward, the fourth earl’s company having performed at court in 1581–1582 and 1582–1853. The Derby household book, which records activities at the family households in Lancashire between May 1587 and August 1590, mentions no less than twelve household performances during that period by leading touring companies, including Lord Dudley’s Men, the Queen’s Men, the Earl of Essex’s players, and Leicester’s Men. Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange and later fifth Earl of Derby, was present for each of three performances during these same years by an unnamed company that was almost certainly his own, formed out of members from the dissolved earl of Leicester’s Men by December 1588. The company appears to have migrated to London in the spring of 1589, at about the same time that their patron was summoned to the House of Lords as Lord Strange. By 1591–1592, “The servantes of our own verie good Lord Strange” had risen to the top of the London theatre world by garnering an unprecedented six performances at court (a feat not matched until their latter-day descendants, the King’s Men, performed eight times at court in 1603–1604).11 Following Ferdinando Stanley’s death in April 1594, his widow, the former Alice Spencer, attempted briefly to maintain

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patronage over the remnants of her husband’s company, while at about the same time patronage of a new company was undertaken by Ferdinando’s younger brother William, sixth earl of Derby – the “nidicock” who was later reported by George Fenners to have been “busyed only in penning commodyes for the commoun players.”12 Remarried to Sir Thomas Egerton, Ferdinando’s widow Lady Alice became patroness to masques by John Marston and John Milton. Ferdinando’s daughter Lady Frances began in her youth what eventually became, continued by her son, perhaps the largest collection of early modern English playbooks.13 With her husband, the first Earl of Bridgewater, Lady Frances became patroness to Milton’s Maske presented at Ludlow Castle. Lord Strange’s Men thus took their place in what looks like a century of intense and ongoing family interest in the patronage of plays and players. In what follows, I explore the possible role of patronage by this family and by others in historical dramatizations of Richard III, focusing especially on Shakespeare’s Richard III and that play’s treatment of history, by which I mean not only its representation of events but its capacity for reflecting on the nature of its sources and on the contemporary perspectives (including that of patronage) through which those sources were filtered in the theatrical remaking of history. I suggest that in addition to whatever it is saying in its central concern with the origins of the Tudor dynasty, the play is also working, in a manner that should concern us as historians, with the context of theatrical patronage, and, in a manner that should concern us as interpreters, with the nature of history on the stage. T h e L e g ac y of B o s wor t h It has long been a commonplace that historical interpretation of the fifteenth century on the sixteenth-century page and stage was shaped by the victors and by the “Tudor myth” embodied definitively in Edward Hall’s The vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre [and] Yorke (1548). Little attention has been paid, however, to the relevance of aristocratic patronage to dramatizations of this very same material, despite the fact that in several cases the theatrical patrons whose acting companies reconstructed the later fifteenth century in performance were among the great aristocratic families who emerged among the victors at Bosworth. That was preeminently true in the case of the Stanley lords of Lancashire. Henry Tudor’s triumph at Bosworth was, according to the sixteenthcentury chronicles, a work of providence; but it was also a conspicuously clever coup d’etat engineered by a handful of aristocratic families from

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Lancashire, Cheshire, and Wales. That paradox of victors’ history is conspicuous in the anonymous True Tragedie of Richard the third . . . As it was playd by the Queenes Maiesties Players, published by Thomas Creede in 1594. As we might expect from a group of players formed as a branch of government and patronized by the queen, the play, which probably predates Shakespeare’s by a few years, gives particular attention to the queen’s ancestral namesake, Elizabeth of York, whose marriage to Henry Tudor ended the Wars of the Roses. But the play gives remarkable attention as well to Lord Thomas Stanley, second husband of Richmond’s mother Margaret Beaufort and, according to the play, a leading supporter in the conspiracy against Richard III. Given that Thomas, Lord Stanley, was rewarded for his service at Bosworth with the Earldom of Derby, the play is also an account of the Stanleys’ rise to the Derby earldom and of their emergence in the Tudor period as a leading power in northwest England and Wales. The play assigns to Thomas Stanley an early conscientious resistance to Gloucester’s usurpation, depicting him as being wounded during Hasting’s arrest at the Tower and briefly imprisoned by Gloucester. In an episode also used by Shakespeare, Gloucester, suspecting Lord Stanley of conspiring on Richmond’s behalf, takes hostage Stanley’s son, George, Lord Strange, threatening to execute him should Stanley prove disloyal. This threat hanging over Lord Strange’s life lends suspense to all of Stanley’s proceedings, which culminate at Bosworth with Stanley’s refusal to commit his troops to Richard and his defiant message to the tyrant that he has “another sonne [i.e., Richmond] left to make Lord Standley.” The melodramatic question of George Stanley’s fate creates the principal suspense during the final scene, over which Lord Stanley presides, placing the crown on the head of Richmond, the man he continues to call “my sonne.” Richmond betroths himself to Elizabeth of York and all seems well enough but for Lord Stanley’s grief, which is cured when young Lord Strange is brought onstage, embraces his father, and dramatically upstages the coronation of Henry VII: Stan. And now were but my sonne George Standley here, How happie were our present meeting then, But he is dead, nor shall I euermore see my sweete Boy whom I do loue so deare, for well I knowe the vsurper In his rage hath made a slaughter of my aged ioy. Rich. Take comfort gentle father, for I hope my brother George will turne in safe to vs.

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Stand. A no my sonne, for he that ioyes in blood, will worke his furie on the innocent. Enters two Messengers with George Standley. Stan. But how now what noyse is this? Mess. Behold Lord Standley we bring thy sonne, thy sonne George Standley, whom with great danger we haue saued from furie of a tyrants doome. L. Stan. And liues George Standley? Then happie that I am to see him freed thus from a tyrants rage. Welcome, my sonne, my sweete George welcome home. George Stan. Thanks my good father, and George Standley ioyes to see you ioyned in this assembly. And like a lambe kept by a greedie Woolfe within the inclosed sentire of the earth, Expecting death without deliuerie, euen from this daunger is George Standley come, to be a guest to Richmond & the rest. (Sig. I)

In its happy conclusion, The True Tragedie of Richard the thirde is a romance twice over, celebrating both the union of Lancaster and York and the reunion of the Stanleys, father and son, at the defining moment of that family’s greatness. A little more than a hundred years later, when Thomas Stanley’s descendant, Henry, fourth Earl of Derby, had returned from his duties against the Armada assured of the Queen’s “good acceptance of my seruice and of her purpose to recompense the same,”14 the Queen’s players visited and performed at the Stanley estates in Lancashire. In fact, they performed at least five times before the Stanley household in 1588–1589, with some of their performances attended by the extended court, clients, and allies of the Stanleys from throughout Northwest England.15 I leave open the question of the nature of the Queen’s recompense to Henry Stanley, but I think there can be little doubt as to what the Queen’s Men were performing on their visits to New Park and Lathom in Lancashire. T h e S ta n l e y L e g e n d In view of the complex historical record, the Queen’s Men (though not by any means alone) were doing rather a great deal for the Stanleys. A representative modern view states that the Stanleys’ penchant for “political calculation” had earned the family a reputation as trimmers. The family attitude was demonstrated at Bosworth where, despite overtures of support before the battle, the

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enormous Stanley army remained uncommitted until the outcome of the direct confrontation between the retinues of Richard III and Henry Tudor was in the balance.16

In fact, the earliest accounts of the rebellion against Richard III – the contemporary continuation of the Crowland Chronicle, the version by Domenico Mancini, and the version in the Cotton Vitellius manuscript – attach little importance to the role of the Stanleys. In their narratives of Hastings’ arrest and execution, none mentions Thomas Stanley or his wound. In the Crowland Chronicle, the hostage Lord Strange cravenly reveals all the details of his father’s conspiracy against Richard. These early chronicles are likewise silent on the role of the Stanleys at Bosworth and on the battlefield coronation of Henry VII. It is only with the more extensive humanist histories of Thomas More and Polydore Vergil that the full Stanley legend begins to unfold. In More’s History of king Richard the thirde, on the occasion of Hasting’s arrest, Stanley receives that nearly mortal wound, and he almost alters the course of history by recounting to Hastings his premonitory dream about Gloucester’s sinister plans (the incident is used by Shakespeare).17 More’s history breaks off, of course, with Cardinal Morton’s entry into the Buckingham conspiracy, but Polydore Vergil’s continuation, similar to More’s on the earlier events, and providing the basis for the later accounts in Hall, Grafton, and Holinshed, follows through with a full account of the Stanley rebellion – the taking of George Stanley as hostage, the support of Richmond by the entire Stanley affinity (Lord Thomas Stanley, Sir William his brother, Gilbert Talbot, Sir John Savage and others), Stanley’s secret meeting with Richmond on the eve of Bosworth, his withholding his troops “in the myddle way betweixt the two battayles,” Sir William Stanley’s committing his army at the opportune moment, and, in its definitive form, Lord Thomas Stanley’s crowning of his stepson.18 The way the story is pieced together has suggested to modern historians that the major eyewitness reporters for both More and Vergil included not only Thomas Morton, so obviously influential in More’s portion of the history, but also the first Earl of Derby himself and Christopher Urswick. Urswick, a Stanley client and chaplain of Margaret Beaufort, appears frequently in the story as a messenger between the various conspirators against Richard III. An impoverished native of Lancashire, Urswick was sent to Cambridge at the expense of the Stanleys, and through them he became Margaret Beaufort’s chaplain. He accompanied Richmond on his exile to France, negotiated with Charles VIII for Richmond’s escape from Brittany to France, landed with Richmond at Milford Haven, and

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accompanied him to Bosworth. Urswick was amply rewarded for his services to Richmond with prominent church livings and important political posts (he negotiated the marriage with Katherine of Aragon, for example). The unusually fine detail in episodes of the Bosworth story involving Urswick lead many to suppose (and certainly led Shakespeare to suppose) that Urswick also supplied Polydore’s detailed account of the various messages exchanged between Richmond and the Stanleys during the days and hours leading up to Bosworth. To Urswick, by way of Polydore Vergil, we may attribute much of the prominence given to the Stanleys and their allies in the official victors’ history of Bosworth. The name of Urswick, mentioned frequently in the 1512–1513 manuscript of Polydore, disappeared from printed editions of the Anglica Historia after 1534. Urswick’s connections with Erasmus and More may have made it undesirable to mention him by 1534, he may have become too obscure to be worth mentioning after his death in 1522, or Urswick himself may have shunned attention. Robert Burton later cited Urswick as the archetype of “shamefaced” scholars who refuse honours, offices, and preferments, which sometimes fall into their mouths; They cannot speak, or put themselves forth as others can, timor hos, pudor impedit illos, timorousness and bashfulness hinder their proceedings, they are contented with their present state, unwilling to undertake any office, and therefore never likely to rise.19

The elusive Urswick was not the only intermediary of Stanley history. In a development that parallels Urswick’s role in creating the chronicle tradition, a number of early- and mid-sixteenth-century ballads and versified family sagas, evidently commissioned by the Stanleys, sought to write the family and their clientage network “into the record of opposition to Richard III.”20 The oral ballad-saga form of these works and their existence in multiple manuscript variants suggest that the Stanley legend circulated widely within the family’s domains. These works may have served to shore up regional alliances, to judge from their prominent catalogs of local families and supporters. The poem known as “Scottish Field,” for example, enumerates the host who gathered in Richmond’s name at Bosworth: Derby that deare earle that doughty hath beene euer, & the Lord Chamberlaine that was his cheefe brother, Sauage, his sisters sonne, a sege that was able, & Gylbert the gentle with a iollye meanye; All Lancashire, these ladds thé ledden att their will, & Cheshyre hath them chosen for their cheefe captaine; Much worship haue thé woone in warre.21

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In the matter of Bosworth, the tenor of these ballads and sagas is to make the Stanleys, sometimes more than Richmond, the principal nemesis of Richard III: That tyme the Standleyes without dowte were dred ouer England ferre and nee. Next Kynge Richard that was so stowte On any lorde in Englande free.22

These poems and sagas remind us of the fact that “literature” (and in this case probably oral performance) was, as Patterson explains, part of the Tudor historical archive, “an important source of historical knowledge.”23 In some circles, and certainly at the Stanley seats of New Park and Lathom, where works like these were probably commissioned and recited, the Queen’s Men’s staging of events at Bosworth, where the reunion of Stanley père et fils upstages the battlefield crowning of the first Tudor monarch, would not have been surprising or inappropriate. So furthermore, the circumstances of patronage surrounding works like The True Tragedie are part of an archive that enables us to witness how Tudor history was written and performed. But Tudor Englishmen, living in the culture of patronage, could perhaps see that as well. L or d S t r a ng e’s M e n a n d S ta n l e y H i s t or y The Elizabethan Stanleys needed their legend because they had much to explain. The nature of their contribution at Bosworth had perhaps been ambiguous, and moreover, the same Sir William Stanley who led troops at Bosworth was executed in 1495 for his treasonous support of Perkin Warbeck against Henry VII (the matter is treated in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck). During the mid-Tudor period, Edward, the third Earl of Derby, remained a staunch Catholic opponent of the Reformation, and he was at best a lukewarm supporter of Elizabeth during the Northern rebellion of 1569. Two of his sons were in turn imprisoned for conspiring to release Mary, Queen of Scots, from captivity. When this third earl lay dying in 1571 and his son Henry Stanley went to Lancashire to attend him, the Queen sent Henry Stanley a letter that may have resonated with the family’s own legends. Professing to know “how well and earnestly disposed you ar towards us and our Service,” and archly surmising that Henry’s “absence from” court “is not other than to attend upon” the dying Earl, the Queen requested that “yow . . . send up yowr eldest Sone, to be here some Tyme, that . . . he might here lern some Nurture, and be fashioned in good Manners.”24

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It would be going too far to say that Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, was taken hostage to guarantee his father’s loyalty in December 1571. But despite Ferdinando’s training in good manners, the family remained under suspicion, especially after January 1587, when Sir William Stanley, a cousin from the Hooten branch of the family, surrendered the English garrison at Deventer and went over to the Spanish. This traitor’s subsequent probing for pro-Catholic support among the Stanleys and other Lancashire families was a persistent cause of concern to Lord Burghley. In the autumn of 1593, Burghley’s concern came to a head. That is part of my final story. The Queen’s Men’s appearances at Lathom and New Park in 1588–1589 may have inspired the family to revive its own troupe in February 1589 under the patronage of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. And it may have been for this new company that Shakespeare wrote all of the English history plays in the first tetralogy.25 These early history plays are filled with the Stanleys’ ancestors and closest historical allies. “Valiant John Talbot . . . Lord Strange of Blackmere” (1 Henry VI, 4.7.61, 65), though not a direct Stanley ancestor, was descended from the same Lestranges, lords of the Shropshire marches, from whom the title Lord Strange of Knockyn came to the Stanleys through the marriage of George Stanley to Joan Lestrange, ninth Baronness Strange. The Talbot-Stanley alliance formed at Bosworth was confirmed by later Stanley-Talbot collaborations at the sieges of Thérouanne and Tournai (1513) and in opposition to the Protector Somerset (1551), and it was celebrated again in The Golden Mirror (1589), where the contemporary Talbot and Stanley earls of Shrewsbury and Derby were “set as spectacles or looking glasses, wherein all men may see a liuely pourtrayture of right Noble myndes in deede, for the right of their Countreys weale being most vigilant and studious.”26 Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick and kingmaker of 2 & 3 Henry VI, was Ferdinando Stanley’s great-great-great-great-grandfather: his daughter Eleanor was the first wife of Thomas Stanley and thus matriarch of the subsequent Derby earls. Lord Strange’s great-great-great-grandfather, John Clifford, the tragic Lancastrian firebrand of 2 & 3 Henry VI, sired the earls of Cumberland, from whose line came Ferdinando’s mother, Lady Margaret Clifford and, through her, a dangerous claim to the English throne. Sir John Stanley, the governor of the Isle of Man who takes Eleanor Cobham into exile in 2 Henry VI, stands in for the historical lord Thomas Stanley, father of the “Darbie” of Richard III, who actually performed this task.27 Sir William Stanley, later among the winners at Bosworth, makes a cameo appearance, together with Hastings,

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in Richard of Gloucester’s plot to rescue the captive Edward IV (3 Henry VI, 4.5). The series of Stanley tributes culminates, of course, in Richard III, with Ferdinando’s great-great-grandfather, Lord Thomas Stanley, founder of the Derby line, and his son, George, the first Stanley Lord Strange. R ic h a r d I I I, R e v i s e d ? We cannot say what Shakespeare’s Richard III was like in its earliest version, because the first quarto dates from 1597, long after the demise of Lord Strange’s Men during the winter of 1593/94. The play as we have it is complex and subtle on the role of the Stanleys. For one thing, Richard III’s final scene reduces to a mere report the Queen’s Men’s drama of young George Stanley’s survival, so that we move smoothly at play’s end from Lord Stanley’s crowning of Richmond to the last words of the real victor – in which the new king dares any traitor in his army (or in the audience) not to say “Amen” to his prayer for the prosperity of Tudor England. At the same time, in Shakespeare’s play the question of Lord Stanley’s intentions is left more ambiguous, reflecting, perhaps, the ambiguous and conflicting reports (i.e., the “multivocality”) of the various chronicles themselves. Where the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedie has Richmond give explicit thanks to Stanley “for your vnlooked for aide” at Bosworth, Shakespeare leaves it unclear whether Stanley acted positively on behalf of Richmond or merely refused to come to Richard’s assistance. In other ways, however, the play delicately keeps Stanley on the favorable side of the balance sheet, suppressing his role, as Richard’s steward, in putting down the Buckingham rebellion, putting him (rather than his brother William) at the head of the Stanley forces at Bosworth, and bringing him on a secret and potentially perilous visit to his stepson Richmond’s tent on the eve of the battle of Bosworth.28 Paradoxically, the very passage that does the most to emphasize the Stanley role at Bosworth also does the most to undermine it. This is the strange dialogue, forming act four, scene five, between Lord Stanley and Sir Christopher Urswick. In this efficient little scene, Shakespeare disposes of the many unnamed messengers who pass to and fro in the chronicles and in the Queen’s Men’s play, crystallizing into a single exchange all the crucial information – the arrangements for Richmond’s marriage to Elizabeth

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of York and the roster of allies gathering towards Market Bosworth. I quote from the 1597 quarto of The Tragedy of King Richard the third: Enter Darbie, Sir Christopher. Dar. Sir Christapher, tell Richmond this from me, That in the stie of the most bloudie bore, My Sonne George Stanlie is franckt vp in hold, If I reuolt, off goes young Georges head, The feare of that, withholdes my present aide, But tell me, where is princelie Richmond now? Christ. At Pembroke, or at Harford-west in Wales. Dar. What men of name resort to him. S. Christ. Sir Walter Herbert, a renowned souldier, Sir Gilbert Talbot, Sir William Stanlie, Oxford, redoubted Pembroke, Sir Iames Blunt, Rice vp Thomas, with a valiant crew, With many moe of noble fame and worth: And towardes London doe they bend their course, If by the way, they be not fought withall. Dar. Retourne vnto thy Lord, commend me to him, Tell him, the Queene hath hartelie consented, He shall espouse Elizabeth her daughter, These letters will resolue him of my minde. Farewell. Exeunt. (Sig. Lv)

The stage direction establishing this encounter is bizarre, because Urswick is not otherwise mentioned by name in Shakespeare’s play. His naming in the stage direction and the speech-heading (“Sir Christopher” and “S. Crist.,” respectively) is therefore not strictly speaking necessary for the purposes of the playhouse: “Messenger” would do. Yet Shakespeare seems to insist, by way of Lord Stanley’s salutation (“Sir Christapher, . . .”) that his playhouse should know him. Depicting Urswick in the role of a participant giving eyewitness report of Richmond’s allies, Shakespeare seems to “out” him as an author of Tudor history and of the Stanley legend. Moreover, by recording his name both in dialogue (for performance) and in the speech heading (for readers of the text), Shakespeare seems to be casting himself not simply as an alert reader of the chronicles’ multivocal construction, but as a historian who – having read history between the lines of patronage – is squaring the record in his own right. Shakespeare deftly forgoes any wooden declaration of Urswick’s surname, as if to imply, through Lord Stanley’s oral “Sir Christapher,” that we too ought to be, as it were, “familiar” with him, as certainly Lord Stanley was.29 And

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through this unglossed familiarity of Lord Stanley with “Sir Christapher,” Shakespeare requires his modern editors, in turn, to become historians – to supply in brackets, from between the lines of the chronicles, the missing surname of the suppressed author of the story. Thus, for example, the interpolations in The Riverside Shakespeare: Enter [Stanley, Earl of] Derby, and Sir Christopher [Urswick, a priest].

Perhaps oddest of all is the fact that the restored eyewitness reporter Urswick actually misreports. Though he repeats the usual roster of the Stanley allies, he begins by devoting a full line to a person not usually associated with victory at Bosworth, indeed, a figure whose loyalties remained unexplained in the chronicles: “Sir Walter Herbert, a renowned souldier.” The mention of the Herbert name, together with the mention of Jasper Tudor, the “redoubted” Earl of Pembroke, two lines later, leads those who care about such things to suppose that the passage reflects a change in theatrical patronage, Urswick’s mention of Sir Walter Herbert being added as a compliment to the patron of the new acting company, Lord Pembroke’s Men, into whose hands Shakespeare’s Richard III, along with the second and third parts of Henry VI, had probably passed, possibly as early as spring 1591, and not later than October 1592. Shakespeare’s “renowned souldier,” Sir Walter Herbert, was one of the upstart Raglan Herberts, sprung from William, a natural son of Sir William ap Thomas of Glamorgan, who took the name Herbert and, as a supporter of the Yorkist Edward IV, temporarily won the Earldom of Pembroke from the attainted Lancastrian Jasper Tudor in 1462. This first Herbert earl, William, had also captured Edmund Tudor’s son Henry (later Earl of Richmond) and, having purchased that young man’s wardship and marriage, made plans to marry him to one of his own daughters. Following the execution of this first Herbert earl, the earldom returned to Jasper Tudor, the “redoubted” supporter of Richmond at Bosworth who is mentioned in Urswick’s report. But the dispossessed Herbert heir, Sir Walter – “a renowned souldier,” according to Shakespeare’s Urswick – fights alongside his father’s former rival, the “redoubted Pembroke,” at Bosworth. Thus, just before Lord Stanley comes to pay his secret visit to Richmond’s tent at Bosworth, Richmond goes completely off the historical record by sending an inconsequential message to Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, to attend him at his tent by the second hour of morning (5.4.5–8). As John Jowett points out, the folio text of Richard III, which seems to have made use in places of a more expansive theatrical

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manuscript than the one behind the 1597 quarto, adds just before this passage a similarly gratuitous recognition of the Raglan Herberts when Richmond commands “My Lord of Oxford, you Sir William Brandon / And [you] Sir Walter Herbert stay with me” (TLN 3463–4). Working from a small hint, transposed in the first instance into Urswick’s speech from an anonymous messenger’s report that appears at an earlier point in the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedie,30 Shakespeare has created another aristocratic union to set next to the marriage of Lancaster and York, Tudor and Stanley: a battlefield alliance of the Lancastrian Tudor and Yorkist Herbert rivals for the Earldom of Pembroke. That alliance forecasts a key development of the mid-Tudor period, when the grandson of the first Raglan Herbert earl, having married a sister of Katherine Parr, became the first Pembroke earl of the Tudor creation. Such genealogical details may seem to us obscure, but they would not have been lost on Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke, who probably became patron of the newly formed Pembroke’s Men some time in 1591–1592,31 nor would they have been lost on William Herbert, the third Earl of Pembroke, dedicatee of the first folio of Shakespeare’s works. Not long after the Raglan Herberts joined the victors at Bosworth – that is to suggest, not long after Shakespeare’s Richard III migrated to Pembroke’s Men (or not long after Shakespeare hedged his bets when he was unsure which company might debut his new history play)32 – Lord Strange’s Men lost their Stanley patron. In September 1593, on the day of his father’s death, on the day that Lord Strange became fifth Earl of Derby, he was visited at the family home in Lancashire by Richard Hesketh, an emissary sent from Catholics abroad to sound him out on the claim to the English throne that descended to him through his mother. A second meeting followed before earl Ferdinando turned Hesketh over to the authorities in London, perhaps without enough due speed, and perhaps without enough candor concerning their two meetings. Throughout the later autumn and winter of 1593–1594, Ferdinando Stanley remained at home in Lancashire, under a cloud of suspicion, “crossed at court and crossed in his country,” as his wife put it, while many of his father’s honors and titles passed not to him but to more trusted court favorites.33 The following April he died a slow and painful death, possibly of poisoning. The earl’s acting troupe, on tour during that somber autumn of 1593, was making its way slowly northward toward Lancashire and York; their last recorded appearance was at Caludon Castle, near Leicester, on December 5, 1593.34 It appears the company was not planning to spend the Christmas season at court, where they

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had been the favored company the previous three years. By Christmas 1593, Pembroke’s Men too had been eclipsed, having collapsed financially while on tour, and so, in the absence of Lord Strange’s Men, the obsolescent Queen’s Men, who had not performed at court since 1591, had to be brought back from touring for that season’s single play at court. We do not know which of their old plays they performed, but I think we can guess which one it was not. Shakespeare’s Richard III probably returned to the boards in the years after June 1594, when the former leading partners in Lord Strange’s company rebanded under the patronage of Henry Carey, the Lord Chamberlain. The Richard III this company performed – or something very close to the variants of the Richard III first fixed in the quarto of 1597 (“As it hath beene lately Acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants”), reprinted 1598, 1602, 1605, and 1622, and published with further variants in the folio of 1623 – still bears the signs, in the handling of the Stanleys, Urswick, and the Pembroke allies at Bosworth, of a longer history of theatrical patronage and its passage through the hands of Strange’s and Pembroke’s Men. And in the dialogue of Prince Edward with Buckingham and the Duke of Gloucester, these Richard IIIs also “register” the hermeneutic implications of the play’s patronage history – in the form of a nuanced understanding of what the present contributes to the historical past. No t e s 1 3.1.69–88; unless otherwise indicated, I quote from The Tragedy of King Richard III, ed. John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 2 See David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 9–10. 3 Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 40; James R. Siemon, “Reconstructing the Past: History, Historicism, Histories,” in Michael Hattaway, ed., A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 662–73; Paul Werstine, “Is it upon record?”: The Reduction of the History Play to History,” in W. Speed Hill, ed., New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, II (Tempe: Renaissance English Text Society, 1998), 71–82. 4 The classic statement of the model is Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets,” Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 21–65. 5 Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, xiii. 6 Lucy Munro, “Early Modern Drama and the Repertory Approach,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 42 (2003): 1–33. 7 Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), xi.

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8 E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923), vol. IV, 270. 9 In addition to McMillin and McLean, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company 1594–1642 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 1; and “Henry Carey’s Peculiar Letter,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56.1 (2005): 51–75; Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall, eds., Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 2. 10 The strongest case is made by Jowett, Richard III, 3–8, and E.A.J. Honigman, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), ch. 6. Because the existence of Pembroke’s Men cannot be documented before December 1592, potential support for the idea that the play was first written with Lord Strange’s Men in mind can also found in early datings of the play (i.e., to 1590–1591) by Harold Brooks, E.A.J. Honigman, and Anthony Hammond; see Harold F. Brooks, “Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare,” Christopher Marlowe, ed. Brian Morris (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968), 65–94; E.A.J. Honigman, Shakespeare’s Impact on His Contemporaries (London: Macmillan, 1982), 88; and Anthony Hammond, ed., King Richard III (London: Methuen, 1981), 54–61. Gary Taylor, finding “unconvincing” the arguments of Brooks and Hammond for Richard III’s influence on Edward II, dates Shakespeare’s play to the latter half of 1592, by which point there is a greater probability that the play could have belonged to Pembroke’s Men; see Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), 115–16. In connection with his own poem on Richard III (circa August-September 1593), Giles Fletcher observed that “The Stage is set, for stately matter fitte,/ Three partes are past, which Prince-like acted were,/ To play the fourth requires a Kingly witte.” This suggests that if a play on Richard III was anticipated to follow the three parts of Henry VI, it had not yet been performed in London, perhaps on account of the closing of the theaters in 1592–1593; see Katherine DuncanJones, “‘Three Parts Are Past’: The Earliest Performances of Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy,” Notes and Queries 50 (2003): 20–1. If Henslowe’s letter (September 28, 1593) reporting that Pembroke’s Men were forced to abandon touring means that the company was actually defunct by August 1593 (see Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R.A. Foakes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 2nd ed., 280) then if the play was not written until 1593, they may never have been able to perform Richard III, or at east never able to perform it in London. This possibility is suggested in James R. Siemon, ed., King Richard III (London: The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, 2009), 44–51. Except for 1 Henry VI, the play usually associated with the “harey the vj” attributed to Strange’s Men in Philip Henslowe’s diary for 1592–1593, none of the other plays in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy appear among the plays assigned to the company by Henslowe; this fact, together with the title page attribution of The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke (1595), to “the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruants,” has been taken to indicate

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13 14 15

16

17 18 19

Manley that this play and its close companion, The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster (1594), belonged to Pembroke’s Men; the 1597 quarto of Richard III has in been linked to these Pembroke texts by Andrew S. Cairncross, “Pembroke’s Men and some Shakespearian Piracies,” Shakespeare Quarterly 11 (1960): 339–40; and “Richard III (Q1) and the Pembroke ‘Bad’ Quartos,” English Language Notes 14 (1977): 257– 64. However, for the view that 2 & 3 Henry VI predated 1 Henry VI and were probably written for Lord Strange’s Men before they gravitated to Pembroke’s Men, see, for example, Ronald Knowles, ed., King Henry VI Part 2 (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1999), 121; Roger Warren, ed., Henry VI, Part Two (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 64; Randall Martin, ed., Henry VI, Part Three (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 128; Lawrence Manley, “From Strange’s Men to Pembroke’s Men: 2 Henry VI and The First Part of the Contention,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54.3 (2003): 253–87. Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. J. R. Dasent, 32 vols. (London, 1890– 1907), vol. 22, 264. (February 19, 1592). PRO, SP 12/271/35, cited in Ian Wilson, Shakespeare: The Evidence (London: Headline, 1993), 17. The characterization of William Stanley as a “nidicock” appears in a letter concerning Ferdinando Stanley’s death written by his brother-in-law Sir George Carey, April 22, 1594; see Wilson, 474–75. On the Countess of Bridgewater’s library, see Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 240–57. The Farington Letters, ed. Susan Maria Farington (Manchester: Chetham Society, O.S. 39: 1856). The performances are recorded in the household book kept by William Farington of Worden, who held various offices in the household of the Earls of Derby; see The Derby Household Books, ed. F.R. Raines (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1853), 51, 82. Sean Cunningham, “Henry VII, Sir Thomas Butler and the Stanley Family: Regional Politics and the Assertion of Royal Influence in North-Western England, 1471–1521,” Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Tim Thornton (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2000), 220. See also Michael Hicks, “Richard, Duke of Gloucester and the North” and Michael Jones, “Richard and the Stanleys,” in Rosemary Horrox, ed., Richard III and the North (Hull: Studies in Regional and Local History, 6: 1986), 1–10, 11–26. Richard Sylvester, ed., Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), vol. II, 45–9. Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History, Comprising the Reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III, ed. Henry Ellis (London: Camden Society O.S. 29, 1844), 212–26. The Anatomy of Melancholy (1638), sig. Aa3-Aa3v; on Urswick and the chronicles, see Denys Hay, Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 79 ff.; Denys Hay, ed., The Anglica

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23 24 25

26 27

28 29

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Historia of Polydore Vergil, A.D. 1485–1537 (London: Camden Society, 1950), xix; Peter Iver Kaufman, “Polydore Vergil and the Strange Disappearance of Christopher Urswick,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 17.1 (1986): 69–85; J.B. Trapp, Erasmus, Colet, and More: The Early Tudor Humanists and their Books (London: British Library, 1991); and Trapp’s article on Urswick in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Alison Hanham, Richard III and His Early Historians 1483–1535 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 134. “Scotish ffeilde,” ed. J.P. Oakden (Manchester: Chetham Society n.s. 94: 1935), 10–18, 356–62. “Of the Princess Elizabeth,” Palatine Anthology: A Collection of Ancient Poems and Ballads, Relating to Lancashire and Cheshire, ed. James O. Halliwell (London, 1850), 60. In addition to this poem and “Scottish Field,” other Stanley sagas include “The Pleasant Song of the Lady Bessy” and “The Stanley Poem” in Palatine Anthology, 1–59, 208–71; and “Scotish feilde” and “Bosworth feilde,” in Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, ed. John W. Hales, 3 vols. (London, 1868), vol. I, 313–40 and vol. III, 233–59. On the provenance and purpose of the Stanley poems, see David A. Lawton, “Scottish Field: Alliterative Verse and Stanley Encomium in the Percy Folio, Leeds Studies in English n.s. 10 (1978), 42–57, and Andrew Taylor, “The Stanley Poem and the Harper Richard Sheale,” Leeds Studies in English 28 (1997): 99–121. Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, 47. December 6, 1571, in William Murdin, ed., A Collection of State Papers Relating to Affairs in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1759), 184–85. See, for example, Honigman, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years,” ch. 6; it is important to note that the connections between Shakespeare and Lord Strange’s Men are quite separable from Honigmann’s theory that Shakespeare’s “lost years” were spent in Lancashire. A Golden Mirrour (1589), ed. Thomas Corser (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1851), dedication and pp. 3–4. The substitution of “Sir John” for “Sir Thomas” may simply be an error repeated from Hall and Holinshed, or it may be an attempt to evoke John Stanley, who brought the rulership of Man into the family together, by way of marriage, with the de Lathom title to Lathom and Knowsley. See Jowett, The Tragedy of King Richard III, 4–5; and Honigmann, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years,” 64. An analogous case occurs in 3 Henry VI, where Sir William Stanley participates in the rescue of Edward IV from captivity. Stanley, who speaks no lines, is named as part of the rescue party in the opening stage direction of 4.5; yet Shakespeare insists that the stage, as well as the page, shall recognize Stanley by having the rescued King Edward address him: “Stanley, I will requite thy forwardness” (4.5.23). The hint is the passage in which an anonymous messenger “from the mother Queene / And the Ladie Stanley your mother” reports to Richmond on the supporters “coming in our aide”: “First, theirs the Lord Talbut, the Earle of Shreuebury / sonne and heire, with a braue band of his owne. / There is

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32

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Manley also the Lord Fitz Herbart, the Earl of Pembrookes / sonne and heire. / Of the Gentlemen of the Welch, there is sir Prise vp Thomas, / and sir Thomas vp Richard, & sir Owen Williams, braue gen- / tlemen my Lord” (lines 1721, 1723–1729). Shakespeare has removed the slighting “Fitz-“ from Walter Herbert’s name and substituted the rival earl, Jasper Tudor, for the mention of Sir Walter’s executed father. The earliest secure date for the existence of Pembroke’s Men is their performance at court on December 26, 1592. The exact origins of the company are obscure, but Andrew Gurr, following W.W. Greg (Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses, 23) and E. K. Chambers (The Elizabethan Theater, vol. ii, 120), suggests that the company originated as a splinter from Lord Strange’s Men formed some time between November 1590 and the spring of 1591, following a quarrel between the Alleyns and the Burbages while Strange’s Men where performing at The Theatre in Shoreditch; see The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 261. Jowett acknowledges the further possibility that “the manuscript [on which the Folio text is based] could have been updated with the two discreet ‘Pembroke’ passages if, for example, it was about to be gifted to the Earl himself, or indeed if the manuscript underwent minor revision with a view to a delayed first performance or a revival by Pembroke’s Men” (The Tragedy of King Richard III, 6). Calendar of the Manuscripts of . . . the Marquis of Salisbury . . . preserved at Hatfield House (Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1892), vol. 4, 427. Accounts of the Hesketh affair may be found in Christopher Devlin, “The Earl and the Alchemist,” Hamlet’s Divinity and Other Essays (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 74–114; Francis Edwards, Plots and Plotters in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002); Peter Edmund Stanley, The House of Derby: The History of an English Family from the 12th Century (Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1998), 163–64; Barry Coward, The Stanleys: Lords Stanley and Earls of Derby, 1385–1672 (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1983), 144–45; J.J. Bagley, The Earls of Derby (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1985), 65; and Leo Daugherty, The Assassination of Shakespeare’s Patron: Investigating the Death of the Fifth Earl of Derby (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011). See Peter H. Greenfield, “Entertainments of Henry, Lord Berkeley, 1593–4 and 1600–05,” Records of Early English Drama Newsletter 8.1 (1983): 15.

IV

Milton and the Problems of History

8

Medea’s Dilemma

Politics and Passion in Milton’s Divorce Tracts Sharon Achinstein “Thus history, with all its concrete force, remains forever a figure.”

– Erich Auerbach

It is an odd thing that the words of Euripides’ Medea adorn the title page of Tetrachordon, the second of John Milton’s tracts advocating divorce. The sorceress-infanticide is not the first figure one might choose to represent a case for divorce. It is true, divorce is a topic raised in Euripides’ play, and Milton’s readers may have remembered Medea’s complaint, made in women’s company, that “women are the most unfortunate [of creatures]. . . . The outcome of our life’s striving hangs on this, whether we take a bad or a good husband.” Medea continues, “For divorce is discreditable for woman and it is not possible to refuse wedlock.”1 Challenging the whole male culture of glory and heroism, she taunts, “I would rather fight three times in war, than go through childbirth once!” (239–40). In four works, published between 1643 and 1645, Milton pushed the political and religious leaders of England to write into their new constitutions a law for divorce. Milton’s tracts think in a number of different ways about the abrogation of a legal bond, as well as reinterpreting mainstream Christian teaching. Perhaps Milton sympathizes with Medea’s complaint about women’s lot, but that parallel does not go very far. A title page Euripidean quotation may have been Milton’s “house style,” signaling a particular kind of commitment to presence in the public sphere of democratic ideas.2 The title page sets in motion his pamphlet’s conflicting aesthetic and ethical senses by testing the structures of the humanist practice of citation and distribution of authority through sententia, aphorism, and argument. We have long known of the instrumental role of memory, of such memory devices as sententiae, in humanist theories of knowledge and pedagogy, heirs to medieval mnemonics.3 Yet the activity of citation was a mode of imitation where, as Terence Cave avers, “the activities of reading and writing become virtually identified. A text is read in view of its transcription as part of another text: conversely, 181

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the writer as imitator concedes that he cannot entirely escape the constraints of what he has read.”4 However, the ethical appeals of citation could run either to bolster or to subvert authority, and scholarship has generally been divided between those like Hobbes who saw that engagement with former authors was an insurrectionary practice and those who see the practices of imitatio as effectively quelling political engagement. As Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine argue, the habitual learning of imitatio, the method used by schoolboys in the Renaissance as their primary mode of instruction, offered a structured series of exercises with the aim of writing well, where philology could suppress the political or ethical waywardnesses of the texts they were reading. The celebrations of the republicans or the public eloquence of the Roman forum were ultimately in the service of cultivating a “properly docile attitude towards authority.”5 On the other hand, the philosophical appeal of skepticism by the later Renaissance, as Timothy Hampton has argued, rendered political activism inevitable: a skepticism “toward humanism, and indeed, toward the authority of history itself begins to emerge,” along with what Victoria Kahn has called a “resistance to theory,” meaning a preference for practical reason over philosophical speculation.6 Thus views about the meaning of citation open up questions about politics and action, whether examples and citation are taken as forms of evasion and consolidation; as means of articulating selves and subjectivities; as modes of Foucauldian disciplining of the subject under the threats of absolutism and Counter-Reformation pressure; or as means of resistance. This chapter takes a different view, by looking to the rhetoric of citation in one of Milton’s polemical title pages, neither to ask the hermeneutic questions of how writers interpreted their own lives and experience through salient acts of reading and interpretation demanded by the arts of imitatio and applicatio, nor to inquire how they work within a rhetoric of action, valuable though these approaches would be. Rather, it shall go one step back, toward an ontological exploration of the constitutive nature of such citation: of how Milton constitutes the “freedom” of the finite human being, through the aesthetic of citation that does not create a fixity of the self but rather insists on its fluidity, its horizontal identification within the material and political resources of contemporary language and communication – that is, how it engages reflexively with the premises of representation. Further, in so doing, Milton radically severs the vertical relations of spiritual to political authority. In some ways, this essay draws on the insights of the “turn to ethics” in literary study, as an engaged response to Habermas’s notion of communicative reason.7 Answering

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Jameson’s charge that ethical interpretation obscures the political unconscious, that it is “the ideological vehicle and the legitimation of concrete structures of power and authority,” David Parker has recently averred that “politics can have an ethical unconscious.”8 It is to that “ethical unconscious” that this essay shall turn. As I argue, in their severe rationalism, along with their decidedly nontranscendent testament of care, in his divorce writings Milton seeks in the public sphere an assurance and complicity while at the same time staking out a wholly secular ground as the basis of an irreducible emotional human being. This engages with the plot of historicism in two ways. Rather than to recontextualize Milton within a community of reading and writing practices, what Steven N. Zwicker has recently argued was the creation of a sphere of opinion that paradoxically constructed readers as either “armed for combat” (as in the civil war period) or as “increasingly passive consumers of texts” in the early eighteenth century, it explores the emancipatory value of adopting figural reference.9 Second, it challenges a conventional scholarly narrative of the cultural history of emotion, whether as a discourse of psychological inwardness or as in the development of the Foucauldian “repressive hypothesis” in which modern culture was at pains to prohibit, deny, and silence sex. In this second engagement with history, this essay disputes the historicism on which such a narrative account could rest by asking how Milton’s texts are burdened by the incongruent demands of political, ethical, and aesthetic perspectives yet seek to hold them in a productive tension. In so doing, Milton’s meanings must be understood as both historical and contemporary, a contemporary that is not anachronistic. But the project here is neither to find the contemporary “in” Milton – that is, the kind of insights for theorising democracy, women’s rights, or free speech as the extractable core from the husk of Milton’s seventeenth-century literary-polemical mode. As Stephen Fallon has put it, “Rhetorical practice mirrors theme in the divorce tracts.”10 This essentially mimetic model of literary history is supplemented here by an approach that is figural in principle. Rather than likeness or mimesis of form and content, or of content and context, here we are concerned with a likeness of form with form. As I shall argue, the intersection of ethics and form finds expression in Milton’s fundamental critical concern and methods of representation over the nature of public debate.11 The disruptive contingencies of individual desires are what sets Milton’s pamphleteering on public debate into motion, and in these he tests intimacy and its constitutive role in political identity. But the forms of representation for intimacy take shape aesthetically from forms

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within the repository of classical literature, and through the freedom to engage with these extra-historically, Milton reinvigorates in the practical modes of humanist citation, anatomized in the rhetorical application and celebrated through citational mastery. The realism that emerges – of an emotional character – is a specifically modern mode. Its two conflicting registers, horizontal and vertical, create the problematic and volatile ground of the public sphere. As Milton cited Euripides on the title page of his Areopagitica, This is true Liberty, when free-born men, Having to advise the public, may speak free, Which he who can, and will, deserv’s high praise; Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace; What can be juster in a State than this?12

Milton adopts the formula with which the herald opened the proceedings of the popular assembly at Athens. As a reawakening to justice, the title page unequivocably articulates a conception of the commonweal, a patriotic obligation that even the most ironic readings of Areopagitica have been unable to unsettle.13 Yet the early modern goals of tragedy, as filtered through the Senecan dominant model, that had emphasized purgation and tempering of the passions through vicarious experience and representation of suffering and evil, are only part of the multiple meanings of Milton’s habit of citing classical tragedy in his frontispieces. I turn instead to the equivocations of citation itself, which promise a descent from particulars into archetype while serving for Milton as media of expressive potency. This is a multivalent aesthetic: invested in the history of prior readings, of the narrative framings and modes of organisation that perform the rhetorical acts of persuasion; and also constitutive of the modes of public debate whose contours were being established in Milton’s time through their very contestation. This essay is concerned with the ways in which Milton flags up the questions of truth-telling and tragedy as he organizes his political work through conflicting aesthetic and ethical demands, particularly as he confronts the problems of imitatio, and especially “resembling unlikeness and unlike resemblance” (YP 2.595) that inheres in both the citation practices and in the intimate couplings of marriage: a dynamic that in both senses serves as the social, fundamental, and determining conditions of communication. What Ronald Levao has called this “chiasmus of pleasing variety,” Tetrachordon’s “resembling unlikeness and unlike resemblance” is itself the necessary, if dangerous, ground of both ethics and mimesis. In

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the few autobiographical moments in his divorce writings, we can observe the bereavement of unity and solidarity such a discovery produces, a heartbreak of, as can be seen in Paradise Lost, cosmic proportions.14 But in the divorce writings, the persistent threat of irremediable division and resulting alienation become the ground from which springs the robust political entity that is made whole only through such division. A preliminary step might be to explore how the ethics of Euripides’ tragedy provide for Milton a means of exploring the positive contribution the emotions make to ethical deliberation, both personal and public.15 Victoria Kahn has importantly argued that in his divorce tracts, “Milton made passion itself a source of obligation,” giving a new “prominence to the role of the passions in motivating the subject of the [marriage] contract.”16 But passion of what sort? In his divorce tracts, and most emphatically in the two editions of his first tract, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton is thinking through and revising a Stoical ethical position, perhaps the Stoicism of the Lady in Comus – her defiance that her captor “canst not touch the freedom of my mind” (line 662), and her championing of “a well-governed and wise appetite” (line 704).17 This shift has tremendous consequences for his developing ideas regarding knowledge, the body, will, and politics. Here, Milton begins to explore how emotion may be the source of knowledge, as he constitutes his ethical subject out of the formal constraints and theological necessities of tragic drama. His is a turn not simply to a literary mode whose moral outlook can engender pity, but a turn to a genre whose characters and experiences are structured around necessity, and where the balance between reason and passion will not hold. Through examining Milton’s use of the figure of Medea, I am less inclined to understand the solution to the impasse between reason and passion through the binary metaphors, derived from Stoicism, of “voluntarism” versus “slavery.” Rather, I see Milton seeking a means by which reasoning may not simply be trapped, but may be conducted, by the emotions, resulting in Milton’s invitation to tolerance, the suffrance of others’ pain, and communication to the public through a call for justice yet to come – what indeed the genre of tragedy invites. In his Second Defense, Milton later explained the relation of the divorce tracts to his larger political project, and this shows his interest in selfrespect, an ethical formation: “Then, I observed that there are, in all, three varieties of liberty without which civilized life is scarcely possible, namely ecclesiastical liberty, domestic or personal liberty, and civil liberty.”18 The Yale edition does not quite get this right, I think; the Latin text however, reads: “Cum itaque tres omnino animadverterem libertatis esse species, quae

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nisi adsint, vita ulla transigi commodè vix possit, Ecclesiasticam, domesticam seu privatam, atque civilem” (in bold: “without which a settling on a fit life is scarcely possible”).19 In our historicizing of Milton’s thought, we have tended to prioritize “liberty” over “the settling of a fit life.” But to emphasize the “settling on a fit life” here, which I think is the ultimate aim of his work on liberty, has something to do with connecting the political and the emotional aspects of one’s being. While recent critical approaches to the divorce tracts have taken it for granted that they emerge out of the author’s personal disappointments in marriage, the divorce tracts have also been examined in light of Milton’s developing theology, where aspects of his heretical opinions are set out.20 What disappears in the main lines of interpretation is, strangely enough, divorce.21 In avoiding divorce, however, a great deal of what is going on in these tracts is missed, namely an account of how the human heart is, at some point, incapable of having a change of heart, and further, how that stubbornness gives rise to action. Medea’s problem, and Milton’s problem as well, is a problem of immoderate passionate emotion: Medea’s is that she loves immoderately, Milton’s that he hates immoderately. Can such passions stop short of their excess? And if they cannot, what kind of social or political constraint should apply? The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce explores the shape of the life of passion and its consequent conception of the self, and, over against these, the limitations of Stoic self-sufficiency and Christian fortitude, usually seen as the cure for such a life. In acknowledging the insufficiency of the mind to dispel suffering in this case, Milton would seem to open up to reasoning by the emotions. Does he do this? No, he does not. The appeal to pity, to a common plight, to the wretchedness of the suffering husband or wife, is not a means of Milton’s conducting his argument. There are moments where these “facts” are alluded to, but only fleetingly is a portrait drawn; Milton preserves the dignity of the suffering husband or wife by refusing to shade in the detail. Instead, the suffering ones are allowed their quiet, and above all Milton insists on the respect for the primacy of moral purpose in each person, treating people not as victims or subordinates but as in the Stoical repudiation of compassion, “as dignified agents.”22 These aspects are why tragedy matters to Milton, in particular where the Greek playwright Euripides makes a felt presence in Milton’s lifelong engagement, in his many allusions and epithets across his writing career, as well as in Milton’s conception of tragedy and epic as dimensions of ethical experience. In his divorce tracts, Milton’s emphasis on human happiness offers the reasons of the heart as compelling, but quiet reasons they are left to be. The revision of a

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Stoical position and the reordering of emotional life are only of relevance in the context of the boundaries of the public sphere, and of a free speech that allows for the flourishing of not only republics but human emotion. Medea is a figure who offers the dangerous excess of a tragic position, while also being a truth-teller at the same time. T r ag e dy a n d E l o qu e nc e Medea embodies many cultural possibilities for identification or repudiation: daughter of a god, she is an exile figure; and while her story is enmeshed in modes of kinship – wife, mother, daughter – she nonetheless violently shakes off those modes. Her final horrific acts follow on a history of kin-breaking, her anti-patriarchal violences that litter her story and define her freedom: deceiving her father King Aeetes of Colcis, killing her brother, escaping with her lover-turned-husband, the upstart Jason; murdering a king, Pelias; and destroying her own children. Manifestly a kin-breaker, Medea does represent a divorcive and maternal murderousness that remain to be interpreted. What in her acts are murderous for kinship and gender roles, however, are suppressed in Milton’s title page for her intelligibility as a critic, a commentator on speech situations. It is either a breathtaking act of repression or an assertion of deviance that hides nothing. I think Milton’s mode here is to resist the tragic, to refute the argument of the passions that demands a tragic investment in narratives – indeed, to banish the binding mechanisms of compassion that the aesthetic mode of tragedy serves to put into place. The model of speech exemplified by Medea reveals the political risks of defying power and national unity: even the most reprehensible of souls deserves a hearing, and not all pleas for justice are self-serving. Does Milton, then, deploy the resources of tragedy in order to make his case? It would seem a likely possibility, given that compassion constructs a social relation between spectators and sufferers, an incitement to obligation through the recognition of a personal vulnerability, as Martha Nussbaum has suggested is the basis for an ethics. Indeed, as she puts it, “the arts in general make human vulnerability pleasing.”23 Yet Milton in his divorce writings seems to side against compassion as a rhetorical mode of appeal; thus the story of Medea, the figure whose words adorn the title page of Milton’s second tract advocating divorce Tetrachordon (1645), is a striking one. Not only is she an abandoned wife, one who is set aside by a husband who made a new, more suitable marriage, but she is a foreigner and a mother whose vengeance, barbarism, and sorcery know no

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bounds. She is, as she confesses, not wholly responsible for her violent deeds; her passion subdues her reason (1078–80; cf. YP 314).24 The title page of Tetrachordon presents not the divorcive or the love-lorn, but the clever Medea: Present some clever, new idea to fools – They’ll think it’s you who are useless and a fool. As for those who think they have a subtle intellect, If you are thought superior in the state, they take it hard. That has been my fate. Because I’m clever, Some are jealous, to others I’m objectionable.25

In Euripides’ play, Medea pleads for mercy as Creon has just commanded that she be sent into exile, Jason having married his daughter. The King ignores Medea’s verbal entreaty, calling her, pejoratively, “skilled in many arts” and “clever” (sophe), Creon being wary of rhetoric’s power, being a good wielder of rhetoric himself. Medea’s return is that her reputation for “cleverness” has been more harmful than good in the lines Milton cites: “Present some clever, new idea. . . .” We can see in both speakers the root term sophos, the name of the sophists, those rhetoricians capable of disregarding the good by their winning words. In calling attention to a passage that reminded Renaissance readers of the risks and dangers of cleverness disguised as wisdom, Milton invites controversy.26 The defender of divorce, speaking this maxim, however, sides with the “clever” one: the rhetorician, the dangerous Medea. In taking her words for his frontispiece, Milton courts the accusation that he, too, twists language to suit his ends. The frontispiece rebuts this imputation with a redescription – in identifying with Medea, Milton represents a true appropriation of wisdom through rhetoric as Medea’s words pierce the false descriptions of those – including the King – who seek her injury. To defend Medea, the rhetorician, was however, a radical position. The contemporary case against the eloquent Medea was made by Thomas Hobbes who repeatedly used the figure as an example of dangerous rhetoric. Hobbes’s special interest in Euripides’ play is long known. According to Aubrey, the young Hobbes translated Medea into Latin iambics just before he went up to Oxford, as a parting gift to his teacher, Robert Latimer (a manuscript now gone missing). His passion for the play never left him, as in his writings, Hobbes alludes to Medea more than to any other non-Homeric classical work.27 For Hobbes, Medea was to be identified with a highly toxic and even regicidal eloquence. As early as his Elements of Law (May 9, 1640), completed just after the dissolution of the

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Short Parliament, Hobbes considered whether rhetorical power or “want of discretion” contributed more “to the stirring of rebellion.” Alluding to Medea’s dangerous eloquence in his chapter entitled, “Of the Causes of Rebellion,” Hobbes recounts the story of Medea’s murderous counsel to the daughters of King Pelias of Thessaly, to chop him in pieces and set him in a boiling vat. The lesson from the tale is clear: “So when eloquence and want of judgment go together, want of judgment, like the daughters of Pelias, consenteth, through eloquence, which is as the witchcraft of Medea, to cut the commonwealth in pieces, upon pretence or hope of reformation, which when things are in combustion, they are not able to effect.”28 The verbal arts of Medea are summed up Hobbes’ antidemocratic worry that eloquence sways the unwary to king-killing rebellion. This fear of eloquence, and with it the exemplary case of Medea’s “witchcraft” of counsel, haunts all Hobbes’s major works. For instance, in De Cive (1642, trans. 1651), Hobbes lashes out against the alliance of “folly and eloquence” as contributing to those internal causes “tending to the dissolution of any Government” (ch. 12, par. 13). Here he gives a more precise reading of Medea that renders it as a topical allegory to the historical conditions of England’s civil war: “So the common people, through their folly, like the daughters of Pelias, desiring to renew the ancient government, being drawn away by the eloquence of ambitious men, as it were by the witchcraft of Medea.”29 Medea’s plot against the old King depended on fair words and sorcery. The danger to the English commonwealth of such arts could not be more threatening than this. If Hobbes presents the case against Medea’s verbal powers, Milton embraces them. His defense, as he had done three months earlier, appears on his Areopagitica title page. In his tract opposing press restrictions, Milton voices a challenge to the Parliament and the reading public of England and defends the place of eloquence in the service of the state. In his title page citation, he translates freely from Euripides: “This is true Liberty when free born men / Having to advise the public may speak free” (YP 2.485). To Milton, a just state was characterized by the liberty with which advice to the public could be made; his title page quotation went further than any argument in the tract towards defending the ideal of freedom of speech, and with it the risks of eloquence. In both the Areopagitica and Tetrachordon, the defense of eloquence had sprung from the words of the dramatist Euripides. In Tetrachordon, more controversially, those words came from the mouth of a woman. We know that Milton was deeply interested in women’s eloquence; his Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle represents such a performance, where the Lady

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meets words with words, offering a challenge “To him that dares / Arm his profane tongue with contemptuous words.” Her response, “sacred vehemence,” touches even the degraded monster: “I feel that I do fear / Her words set off by some superior power,” Comus asides.30 Classical Greek tragedy often put dissent in female mouths, dissent against the public ideologies of warfare, death, glory, and marriage, posing questions of democratic participation of mass and elite, as well as “representing the problems of discourse within the democratic polis,” as Helene Foley has pointed out.31 Bridging the private world of the household with the public world of the state, women’s experiences in classical tragedy show how these terms are mutually defined, unstable, and often contested.32 Milton would have known of the disruptive effects of choosing a woman’s voice: in Aristophanes’ Frogs, the poet Aeschylus complains that Euripides has made tragedy democratic by allowing his women and slaves to talk.33 It should be recalled that “Tragedy” in Milton’s period is only a literary genre, an interstitial space between the reader and book, as public theaters were closed in 1642, and it was not until the close of the first civil war in 1646 that groups of actors began to resume performance. In the private indoor theaters, thereafter, a new kind of theater was being developed, an affective royalist mode in which Davenant emerged as the primary aesthetic herald; a courtly romantic aesthetic, permitting opposition but in only highly stylized forms.34 It would be these theatrical modes that reigned victorious on the Restoration stage, and in which would be registered the formation of the affective political and sexual subject.35 Yet in 1643, all that was ahead, and the tragic theater Milton evokes is that of the library, or of memory. Milton’s reading of Medea, then, filtered through Euripides, Seneca, and Ovid, and in tension with the contemporary Puritan accounts of theater, allowed him to break down the very distinction that would separate domestic from political concerns. Indeed the figure of Medea is a means by which to explore the nexus between broken marriage, effective political speech, and the experience of the passions. Milton’s choice of a female voice in his epigraph not only reconstructs the dangerous freedom of this outsider; it allows a space for him to argue with, not against, emotions.36 As we know, Milton’s interests in ancient Greek drama were not simply literary. In his Reason of Church Government Milton praised the “Doctrinal and Exemplary” value of Euripides, the usefulness of his “Dramatick constitutions . . . to a nation” (RCG, YP 1.814). In Of Education, Milton lays importance on learning classics for the service of government, whether in parliament or pulpit, and offers especial praise for Euripides (YP 2.401).

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Milton’s advocacy of classical drama is not without its contradictions and anxieties, however. When Satan proffers tragedy as a temptation in Paradise Regain’ d, he offers as his lure tragedy as teaching “moral prudence” and praises the genre’s representational power: “High actions, and high passions best describing” (PR 4.263; 266). The Son does not disagree with these description; his check to Satan is that neither moral prudence nor description of the passions are the ultimate goal: to these qualities must be added “light from above” (PR 4.289). Yet Milton asserts rhetoric can serve godliness; in his preface to Samson Agonistes, he chooses an indisputable authority. “The Apostle Paul himself thought it not unworthy to insert a verse of Euripides into the Text of Holy Scripture,” (YP 8.134), Milton explains, alluding to Paul’s 1 Cor. 15:33, which in the Geneva text reads, “Be not deceived: evill speakings corrupt good manners,” a comment on the conduct of eloquence; and the quotation is believed to be from a lost play of Euripides via Menander.37 Milton’s recommendation of Euripides in Of Education of 1644 gives an idea of the dramatist’s themes he sees worth gleaning. Laying special emphasis on “Those tragedies also that treate of houshold matters, as Trachiniae [by Sophocles], Alcetis [by Euripides] and the like,” (YP 2.398), Milton picks dramas that show exemplary wives. Indeed, Milton was thinking about “household matters” in tragedy in the 1640s, filling seven pages of his notebook with jottings of outlines for tragedies he thought about writing (YP 8.554–60, 569–72). For Milton, the linkage of eloquence and justice in Euripides was good to think with. Not only did Euripides impart a taxonomy of irresolvable moral problems, but a consistent interest in the conditions for, and conduct of, public articulation of those problems. In the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the bereft Milton was recovering from a personal loss and the shattering of hopes about marriage, but he was also working out how Parliament might conceive of legislation to negate a vow, to overturn the obligation that is marriage, newly secularized in the postReformation context.38 He was stung by the vigor of his enemies and by the narrowness of vision of his contemporaries who claimed to overhaul liturgy and practice but who would limit the discussion and scope of matters to be considered within that remit. His tract thinks in a number of different ways about feelings as justifications for the abrogation of a legal bond, the residue of sacral unity not wholly lost. Milton comes up with the argument that unfit marriages were never really binding contracts to begin with. In the tract, he pits obligations to the Law against those to oneself, and his divorce writings are also concerned to preserve a realm of freedom for which speaking freely becomes the ultimate sign.

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Charming, deceitful, witty in language mastery, Medea is, in the Euripidean text that Milton cites, clever (sophos) – in Greek usually a positive attribution; but cleverness in a woman is of course suspect. Euripides’ heroine is hurt by the accusations of her cleverness – she admits, “This is not the first time my reputation has hurt me” – and endeavors to allay Creon’s fears by offering a maxim about public life that Milton cites on his title page (“Present some clever, new idea to fools – They’ ll think it’s you who are useless and a fool ”). These words had wormed their way through Aristotle and then Milton’s logic textbook,39 and they link his divorce writings ever more tightly to the concerns of free speech. When the Westminster Assembly and Parliament took up the question of marriage and divorce in the autumn of 1644, Milton’s works became notorious and were branded for censure; as a response, Milton came to defend not only his innovative ideas, but the right to publish them, in what Martin Dzelzainis sees as Milton’s “combative activity” of truth-telling.40 In his own day, the divorce writings represented the outer limits of freedom to speak, and Milton rose to their defense in the lasting words of Areopagitica (November 23, 1644), a tract also donning a Euripidean quotation. Arguments for freedom to publish, not just pre-publication licensing, are also expressed in the divorce tracts themselves (e.g., Bucer), as in this title page of Tetrachordon. In biographical terms, these defenses of civil liberty are a turning point in Milton’s development, when he “came out” against the Presbyterians and in favor of a wide religious toleration. Yet, it is in his divorce tracts that Milton’s attention to the affective and the nonpublic and perhaps unknowable sides of human life are preparing the way – not simply temporally but experientially – for the radical positions and public speaking mode he was soon to adopt. In commenting on the hostile reception of his ideas in the public sphere, Milton identifies with Medea’s words: he has brought clever, new wisdom; his detractors are fools. As for the title page allusion to Medea, Milton offered no clues as to his intentions in his annotated copy of Euripides (1602, Servetus, Geneva, now in the Bodleian library).41 But the annotations do show his sensitivity to the dangers of cleverness, as Milton retrieved the positive qualities of the word “sophist” when he wrote a note in the margin his own copy of Euripides in the case of the use of the term at Rhesus 949: “in bonam partem sumitur potius doctum et peritum virum” – that is, “the word sophist is to be interpreted in a good sense, really ‘a learned and skilled man.’”42 From the manuscript evidence of his marginalia in that book, we see that Milton read his Euripides very carefully, paying foremost attention to matters of Greek language, prosody, and grammar.

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On a thematic level, Euripides’ Medea, like Seneca’s, offered reflections on the dangers of speech in the public realm, and also presented a figure torn by passion. The classic Medean moment is 1078–80: “My wrath overbears my calculation, wrath that brings mortal men their greatest hurt” (Loeb, 383, a passage classicists have riddled with textual and critical debate). The quotation has a long afterlife. In fact, across the postclassical eras, Euripides’ Medea 1078–80 became the place to illustrate and evaluate the Stoic doctrine on the passions. In Metamorphoses, Ovid has: “Video meliora, proboque Deteriora sequor”: “I see the better course, but follow the worse” [Met. VII, 21].43 As for so many in the Renaissance, Medea’s conflict was the locus for examining the battle between reason and passion. Milton will come to rework this locus (1078–80) in Medea in Paradise Lost through the unredeemable creature, Satan: “To do what else though damn’d I should abhor” (PL IV.392). In echoing Medea’s self-knowledge, Satan makes that classical dilemma central to his tragedy of Paradise Lost as Milton returns to the profound dislocations in his approach to the subject of hatred and love emerging in his divorce tracts. If reason could be overthrown by the irrational, then the soul was divided.44 In Doctrine and Discipline, Milton summons a divided Medea in an allusion to the passage, reporting, “The Sorceress Medea did not approve her owne evill doings, yet lookt not to be excus’d for that” (YP 2.314). In this case, Milton refers to this self-aware but divided Medea in describing the hypocrisy of the case where magistrates permitted marital separation while turning a blind eye to it officially – and where Milton would assign moral responsibility. Here the State is acting as Medea, trapped by its clashing values. In exposing this “tragic flaw,” Milton holds, instead, that the State ought to be accountable for an unreasonable act. This accountability of passion to reason seems to be in line with the Stoical rendering of the passions and the unified soul. This cluster of associations to do with the figure is central to the issues Milton stirs up in his Divorce tracts: how a wrong action may not be “right” but humanly understandable, even humane. In these tracts, I think Milton is looking for a way of arguing, of deliberating with, not against, the passions. Susan James has argued that in the seventeenth century, philosophers on the passions were advocating a unified theory of mind, uniting each part of the soul, reason and the passions, coherently.45 Milton struggles to account for a kind of conflict in the heart that spiritual and intellectual discipline cannot help. In taking that position, Milton is wrestling not only with Moses and Christ, but also with Seneca, who would have humans control and dismiss their passions, particularly anger, and head toward a state of mind

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independent of the dangerous emotions. Senecan Stoicism was part of the intellectual sounding board for early modern European intellectual accounts of the passions.46 Milton did adopt a conventional Christian critique of pagan morality, as being insufficiently driven by grace, as in the Son’s criticisms of Stoicism in his catalog of rejection of heathen learning in Paradise Regain’ d (4.300–18; and cf. PL 2.562–569). Nonetheless, Milton’s life project resounds with Stoical ethos of independence that could fire a revolutionary political energy. Paradise Regain’ d, for all its rejection of the self-sufficiency of Stoicism (4.300), has been taken as a strong case for Stoical constancy and indifference.47 Elsewhere Milton suggests that there may be wisdom in the pagans (Christian Doctrine, YP 6. 396; even PR 4.350–51). In Paradise Lost, to explain the rise of tyranny Milton gives a classic account of failure to control passions (PL 12.86–90). Self-mastery and control of the passions or appetites are at the heart of the lessons of Raphael and Michael in Paradise Lost.48 Pa s s ion a n d J us t ic e One of Seneca’s remedies for the passion of anger is to “Fight with yourself. If you wish to conquer anger, it cannot conquer you. The start of the conquest is to conceal it, to allow it no way out. We should suppress its symptoms and keep it, so far as possible, hidden and secret.”49 When one is angry, Seneca advises, one should “allow oneself the minimum freedom of speech and inhibit the impulse” (86–87). “Let us rid ourselves of this evil, clearing the mind of it, root and branch” (114), he says. We should also be magnanimous, take our time, let our anger go: “We hold on to our anger and increase it, as though its violence were the proof of its justice” (III. 30 [p. 105]). In the divorce tracts, Milton is doing just that, making the violence of his passion the proof of its justice as he struggles to describe the felt effects of an unalterable unhappiness. In the first version of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), a bad marriage “grindes the very foundations of his inmost nature, when he shall be forc’t to love against a possibility, and to use dissimulation against his soul in the perpetuall and ceaseles duties of a husband” (YP 2.259; 1643: 12). In 1644, “grindes” is replaced by “crushing.” “Grind” had evoked the physical experience of sexual intercourse rendered brutely mechanical, like a miller’s wheel grinding its corn, a slow, ceaseless boring with repeated, miniscule diminution: Florio’s Worlde of Wordes (1598) had noted the sexual overtones of grinding in “carnall copulation.”50 In that sense, the term “grind” is visible in the text elsewhere in 1644, when Milton laments the harshness

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of the Gospel: “That to grind in the mill of an undelighted and servil copulation, must be the only forc’t work of a Christian mariage, oft times with such a yokefellow, from whom both love and peace, both nature and Religion mourns to be separated” (YP 2.258: added 1644). “Grinding” is also something you do when you sharpen something – for instance, grinding a tool or weapon to ready it for cutting. Indeed, the grinding seems in Milton’s tract to sharpen the hatred of the two parties for each other. That violent sense of enmity, how grinding can lead to sharpening, is felt throughout this pamphlet: how “that benevolent and intimate communion of body” can be held “with one that must be hated with a most operative hatred”; the force of the “must” there is Milton describing the marriage to an Infidel. In revising his bad-marriage-as-grinding (YP 2.259), Milton turns away from these sexual overtones and substitutes “crushing,” a word emphasizing the physical weight of the affliction, its ever-present force against the body. Yet the term “crushing” etymologically summons its root in Old French, croisir, to cross, and thus Milton in palimpsest reworks the terms of Christian duty, with cross-bearing becoming crushing. Even more radically in this passage, Milton challenges the Senecan advice to overcome passion by control or purgation. To remain in the unhappy marriage would be, as Milton presents it here, to engage in “dissimulation against his soul.” There are two types of dissimulation indicated: one is the husband, out of this “daily trouble and paine of losse” (YP 2.247), who becomes a hypocrite and seeks solace in prostitutes, “to piece up his lost contentment by visiting the Stews, or stepping to his neighbours bed, which is the common shift in this mis-fortune.” The second kind worries Milton more: the spouse goes about his marital duties without his heart joining, “suffering his usefull life to wast away and be lost under a secret affliction of an unconscionable size to human strength” (247). Again, the overturning of Christian language: to withstand such an affliction is to void conscience, “unconscionable” to human strength. Here Milton is talking of the limits to moral fortitude, of the finitude of patience, of reason’s inability to cast out, or even to temper, unpleasant and controlling emotions. He is not talking about managing a powerful emotion such as lust: that is pretty easy to do given a discipline of diet and exercise. As he notes, in the famous passage where he sets out to overturn Paul’s admission that “it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Cor. 7:9), in his ideal for marriage restraining sexual impulse not the main reason, “As for that other burning, which is but as it were the venom of a lusty and over-abounding concoction, strict life and labour with the abatement of a

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full diet may keep that low and obedient anough” (YP 2.251). The Stoical principle of self-control could apply to that emotional pull. Milton elsewhere was optimistic about the recommendation for patient fortitude; in Paradise Lost, Adam proposes patient fortitude: “arming to overcom / By suffering, and earne rest from labour won / If so I may attain” (PL 11.374– 376). But not in the case of marriage; here it is too much to bear the afflictions caused by an unhappiness of lacking “an intimate and speaking help, a ready and reviving associate” (YP 2.251). That dissimulation is described elsewhere when Milton presents the tension in marriage between a believer and the unbeliever: “For what kind of matrimony can that remain to be, what one dutie between such can be perform’d as it should be from the heart, when their thoughts and spirits flie asunder as farre as heaven from hell” (263). The power to dissimulate may be there, but it is soul-killing, a sure pathway to despair and alienation from God, as Milton worries that “the whole worship of a Christian mans life should languish and fade away beneath the waight of an immeasurable grief and discouragement” (259), leading “through murmering and despair to thoughts of Atheism” (260); “it lets perish the Christian man” (269). “What wearisomnes,” moans Milton (274): what if a bad marriage “subvert our patience and our faith too” (277)? In his account of human realities, Milton makes the basis of his ethics a recognition of the possibility of an unalterable passion, what he calls the “radical and innocent affections of nature, as is not within the diocese of Law to tamper with” (YP 2.345). This is a passage added to the second, expanded edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, based on a reading of Grotius on the distinction between Law and Charity. However, the original 1643 passage, which Milton emends with this account of charity, is starker in its insistence on the stubbornness of natural instinct. There, Milton writes, for the Magistrate “to interpose his jurisdictive power upon the inward and irremediable disposition of man, to command love and sympathy, to forbid dislike against the guiltles instinct of nature, is not within the province of any law to reach” (1643, 44–45; cf. YP 346). This, of course, may be an assertion of a liberal argument about how law ought to stay out of the personal, but I want to note what is being described here as an “irremediable disposition of man,” is in Milton’s text only representable by its resistance to remedy. The state should stay out of this determinedly resistant but ineluctably human quantum because the sources of this hatred are beyond human control, not blameworthy but “innocent” (1644) and “guiltles” (1643). To have the Medean subject surrender the will to overwhelming passion would be too

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simple a formulation. Instead we might say that those aspects that resist such sociable and juridical remedies comprise a sublime register: a core, and perhaps unrepresentable, human particularity. Milton must have been troubled by his means of conducting his argument here, and in particular this sublime or mysterious subject, and he revised this passage for the new 1644 edition. These changes, I think, are not so much solutions as his attempts to find a workable means of expressing the problem he wishes to address. In 1643, the text following the one just cited continues, “For if natures resistles sway in love or hate be once compell’d it grows careles of it self, vitious, useles to friend, unserviceable and spiritles to the Common-wealth” (1643, 45; YP 2.347). The argument at first is about compulsion, yes, and about the foundations of a commonwealth in the free and happy subject. It is also, Milton sees, to address the experience of human feeling, and what Milton confronts is feelings’ stubborn particularity and resistance to will’s power. For his revised edition, this passage in 1644 underwent significant elaboration. There, Milton turned to fable to work out his intentions, but indeed the fable he chose reminds us that while the move to classical intertext seems to solve the problem of how to express claims by turning an argument into an emblem or a story, nonetheless that classical intertext is also only an ever-more refined way of articulating the same unclarity, at the level now of narration; it also introduces new confusions. Milton added the parable of Ocnus, an industrious but unfortunate man whose extravagant wife spent everything that he earned, as related in Elegy IV by Propertius, and as depicted in Alciato’s emblems. In the emblem tradition, the link between bad wives and suffering husbands is clear. As his punishment for surrendering to his wife’s unreasonable demands, in the Underworld Ocnus braids a rope which a she-ass standing behind him continually devours. Alciato adds the moral: “Foemina iners animal, facili congesta marito,/ Lucra rapit mundum prodigit inque suum” – “Woman, an idle creature, grabs the accumulated savings from her complaisant husband and squanders it on her own adornment.”51 In the revised edition of Doctrine, Milton lays emphasis on the waste of industry by highlighting the nature of the rope binding the couple in marriage: That sluggish feind [sic] in hell Ocnus, whom the Poems tell of, brought his idle cordage to as good effect, which never serv’d to bind with, but to feed the Asse that stood at his elbow. And that the restrictive Law against divorce, attains as little to bind any thing truly in a disjoynted mariage, or to keep in bound, but serv only to feed the ignorance, and definitive impertinence of a doltish Canon, were no absurd allusion (YP 2, 345–46).52

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The bond of such an unfit marriage is not lasting, its very creation a punishment for a poor choice in marriage. While the divorce tracts take up the theme of loosening restrictive bonds, Milton elsewhere in his writings dallied with the emblem as a figure for a kind of rhetoric. The figure of a man twisting a rope had become proverbial for wasted industry, specifically in reference to empty words, earlier developed in his Prolusion III, where Milton blasts the “prating” of the scholastics that lacks both eloquence and virtue: “Then away with these ingenious praters, with all their forms and phrases, who ought to be condemned after death to twist the rope in Hades in company with the Ocnus of legend” (YP 1.246); and later developed in chapter nine of his First Defense, attacking his opponent Salmasius as that “grammarian” who “is used to twisting conclusions, as Ocnus does ropes in the underworld, which are of no use except to be eaten by asses.”53 In his divorce tract revision, then, Milton only mixes things up further: by elaborating on the insubstantiality, wasting of effort, and the emptiness of meaning and combining these with the conclusion to a bad marriage, he challenges the compulsive – and repulsive – acts of the state in keeping those tied to each other who do not belong together. What was an attempt to explain the meaning of that “inward and irremediable disposition of man” is turned into an analysis of the ill effects of commanding human obedience. The revision, then, highlights the political consequences and swerves away from the difficulty of exploring the emotional source of the problem: an irremediable disposition of man that must be defended against the state. Sounding awfully like some conception of fallen-ness, but somehow different, this condition renders one unable to be lifted or saved from without. Milton says as much, and the rhetoric in a long cited passage that follows gives a little drama of discord that arises from marriage of the unfit. At its heart is a tragic impossibility, a natural discord that is beyond the reach of will or even of regeneration, “considering . . . that many properties of nature, which the power of regeneration it self never alters” (YP 2, 279; 1643, 22): [I]f these reasons be duely ponder’d, and that the Gospel is more jealous of laying on excessive burdens then ever the Law was, lest the soul of a Christian which is inestimable, should be over-tempted and cast away, considering also that many properties of nature, which the power of regeneration it self never alters, may cause dislike of conversing even between the most sanctify’d, which continualy grating in harsh tune together may breed some jarre and discord, and that end in rancor and strife, a thing so opposite both to mariage and to Christianitie, it would perhaps be lesse scandal to divorce a natural disparity, then to link violently together an unchristian dissention, committing two ensnared souls

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inevitably to kindle one another, not with the fire of love, but with a hatred inconcileable (YP 279–80: italics my emphasis; this term “inconcileable” is first noted use in OED).

The parable of Ocnus as meriting punishment has disappeared, as human affection is posited as an area outside divine relation; it is up to humans to provide the most charitable institutions for its management. To remain in an unfit marriage, claims Milton, is to obey “commands therfor which compell us to self-cruelty above our strength” (YP 331; 1643, 37). Considering the ban on divorce a going-beyond of the law, Milton cites Ecclesiastes: “Bee not righteous overmuch . . . why shouldst thou destroy thy self?” (YP 354; 1643, 47).54 This seems to contradict the sentiment in Christian Doctrine, where Milton spends several chapters considering the regulation of appetites. In chapter ten of book two, he addresses virtues of fortitude and patience, which “are exhibited in our repulsion or endurance of evils.” There he contrasts patience with impatience and softness, as well as with what seems relevant to his divorce discussion, what he calls, “hypocritical” patience, “which brings unnecessary suffering upon itself”; examples are those self-mutilating prophets in Kings 18:28 who “cut themselves,” as well as “papistical flagellators” (YP 6.740).55 In his thinking on divorce, then, Milton is doing just what the Stoic Seneca had advised against:56 making respect of ineradicable passions into a principle of justice and denying Ocnus his due. To do this, he evokes, through tragedy, with its necessary formal and psychological resolutions, Medea’s plight. When Milton urges charity, it is in the recognition that humans’ natures are not infinitely malleable (355). By magistrates’ charity, Milton writes, “Man they shall restore to his just dignity, and prerogative in nature” (355; 1643, 48). But nor are humans’ natures fixed either. In Milton’s critique of Christianity for failing to provide a workable ethics, he raises a bold invitation to judge the efficacy of the Gospel to move a soul to virtue. In a passage he would omit in the expanded edition of The Doctrine and Discipline, he writes: Wee find also by experience that the Spirit of God in the Gospel hath been alwaies more effectual in the illumination of our minds to the gift of faith, then in the moving of our wills to any excellence of vertue, either above the Jews or the Heathen. Hence those indulgences in the Gospell; All cannot receive this saying; Every man hath his proper gift, with strict charges not to lay on yokes which our Fathers could not bear.57

1 Cor. 7:7 has Paul advising people to marry to brace against fornication; there he says “it is good for a man not to touch a woman” (7:1); but also “For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man

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hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that” (1 Cor. 7:7). Now, Milton’s many additions to 1643 add proofs and clarifications, wrestle with points in legal and Biblical theory, and his 1644 text may reflect his having read Selden’s Uxor Hebraica.58 Some of Milton’s revisions, as we saw in the grinding passage, may have been attempts to work out better semantic registers. This omitted passage, however, deserves comment. For 1644, Milton reworked the entire passage, making his debate with Pareus explicit. He not only rearranged points of argument, but removed the striking contention that the Gospel, for all its salvational excellencies, may not help one acquire virtue. Arthur Barker comments on this change in his Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, remarking that the 1643 wording is a red herring: “I do not think Milton ever again expressed this opinion; it contradicted his deepest convictions,” as Barker disbelieved that Milton could have been so dismissive of the Gospel’s relation to “virtue” (158).59 But Milton’s initial impulse, to contrast the work of faith with the work of the will may be part of the problem he was attempting to resolve, the problem that became one of resolving the knot of contradictory texts offered by Hebraic and Christian bibles. Milton may superimpose his fundamental worry that humans were incapable of change at the deepest level onto a theological and legal dispute about Old and New dispensations. In some way, this legitimizes the existential clash of values he is giving voice to, and his revisions in this case, which do leave in the Gospel lines about the believers’ incapacities (Matthew, Paul) are not made into a general principle: there is in Milton’s text a desire to unify the two Laws, but that resolution may stand in for the deeper irresolution about the educability, or indeed the tractability, of human nature. The unhappily married Christian in Milton’s depiction is not capable of such overcoming passion with reason. In Seneca, emotions may “happen” to you, but only in the first instance; “Emotion is not a matter of being moved by impressions received, but of surrendering oneself to them and following up the chance movement” (44). As Seneca outlines the self-mastery that will lead to greatness, he asserts, “Affections collapse quickly; reason remains constant” (35). Now, Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline offers a radical critique of this ethics. Against the idea of self-censorship, Milton criticizes dissimulation and worries about stopping powerful feelings as well (354, 278–9). Indeed, the main point in this text is that people fly to radical beliefs and sects because of the constraints of consensus, what he calls an “ill grounded strictnes” (279): the flight to “Anabaptism, Famelism, Antinomianism, and other fanatick dreams . . .

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proceed not partly, if not cheefly, from the restraint of some lawful liberty, which ought to be giv’n men” (YP 2.278; cf. YP 2.354). This is in relation to the Westminster Assembly’s Presbyterian assault on toleration, coming to a head in 1643 and 1644. Milton defends toleration on the worry that stopping all freedom will lead to real heresy. With divorce as a possibility, “many they shall reclaime from obscure and giddy sects, many regain from dissolute and brutish license” (355). The Senecan resistance or restraint will lead to ill effects, which Milton presents near the very end of his tract: Bee not righteous overmuch . . . why should thou destroy thy self? Let us not be thus over-curious to strain at atoms, and yet to stop every vent and cranny of permissive liberty: lest nature wanting those needful pores, and breathing places which God hath not debarr’d our weaknes, and either suddenly break out into some wide rupture of open vice, and frantick heresy, or els inwardly fester with repining and blasphemous thoughts, under an unreasonable and fruitles rigor of unwarranted law (YP 2.354).

Milton chooses a striking example there of the impossibility of patient fortitude: “Paulus Emilius, being demanded why he would put away his wife for no visible reason, This Shoo, saith hee, and held it out on his foot, is a neat shoo, a new shoo, and yet none of yee know where it wrings me?” (1643, 44–45; YP 348). The question mark in the 1643 edition is corrected to a colon (:) in 1644, as if Milton himself was not sure even how to represent the dramatic speech, toning it down over the course of these publications so that what was an emotional outburst becomes a simple declarative statement. One must acknowledge the inner life of the other; one simply cannot know the pain others feel. What is it to offer up such an amusing anecdote as the ground of an ethical or political position on an unpresentable, human nature? The conclusion is a shared sense of the human comedy of afflicting passions and a tolerance and forgiveness of such particularity. The moral outlook Milton engenders regarding unhappy marriage is radical, not simply because Milton wants to take divorce out of the law courts: “For ev’n the freedom and eminence of mans creation gives him to be a Law in this matter to himself ” (347). Milton steps back from the inflammatory antinomian tinge here by offering a practical ceremony: divorce should take place in the presence of a minister or elders (1643, 353), where the afflicted party confesses his faith. In 1644, the potentially dangerous, libertine “law unto himself” is further buttressed by an allusion to Aristotle’s Ethics (X.x) that sets up a distinction between public and private law. In practical terms, Milton suggests that there be a civil occasion at which the divorcing parties declare their irreconcilability. There, Milton offers

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language that speaks the heart of the matter, that the resolution of the marriage is beyond human effort, “that otherwise then thus he cannot doe”; this is beyond will, beyond faith, the source of the problem “not beeing of malice, but of nature, and so [he is] not capable of reconciling, [Further,] to constrain him furder were to unchristian him, to unman him” (YP 2.353). For one thing, and maybe it is the only thing, Milton wants unhappy marriages to be taken seriously. The Aristotelian account of compassion gives the cognitive elements triggering sympathy (Rhetoric, 1386). And the first ingredient for Aristotle’s theory of tragedy is that in order for pity to be created, the matter ought to be taken seriously. This is to suggest that other people’s experiences are not remote, but that they cannot easily be reconstructed. Empathy is psychologically important as a guide to ethics and political choice.60 As Milton recognizes the innovation of his approach, he asks that his readers have regard “at once both to serious pitty, and upright honesty; that tends to the redeeming and restoring of none but such as are the object of compassion” (241). From the early words of his tract, Milton offers that the unhappy spouse is a worthy object of concern. For an unhappily married spouse, “what a fit help such a[n unsympathetic] consort would be through the whole life of man, is lesse paine to conjecture then to have experience” (250). Milton’s first divorce tract offers an argument that does not represent an unhappy marriage so much as it offers an opportunity to reflect, with compassion – rather a different mimetic means than in tragedy. In turning to an ethos of self-cultivation, Milton remarks on the conditions necessary for that endeavor in the commonweal. Rather than a turn away from politics to ethics, then, Milton suggests the political sources of the conditions for self-maintenance. If iteration through citation is the means of marking such a moment of self-scrutiny as well as the political occasions for its emergence, then Milton’s text announces this new ethico-political project as bravely challenging of ethical development into an internalized space of conscience or the publicly mandated requirements of juridical order. The Law must preserve, rather than destroy, unlikeness and foster conditions, such as free speech, for its emergence. “Hate is,” Milton asserts, “of all things the mightiest divider, nay, is division it self ” (YP 2.345). Milton’s tract presents not his, but our story, as he asks that the most basic assessable action is itself interested, an action in the world of the heart, an action of pre-normative feeling. This insight is of cognitive and political importance, and if raging against the passions is ultimately an impossible task, there is a human significance

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nonetheless to that failure – a failure that law must acknowledge. Indeed, the divorce tracts offer a confused but salient expression of a strong argument against Stoicism or Aristotelian moderation, in the direction of a new ethics that can encompass a human being whose rationality and will exceed their mandated places.61 This insight provides a new and shocking core for Milton as he constructs his sublime political subject. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce explores the shape of the life of passion and its consequent conception of the self, and, over against these, the limitations of Stoic self-sufficiency and Christian fortitude, usually seen as the cure for such a life. Milton perceives – and surpasses – the necessities of tragedy in accepting the moral culpability of one divided by justice and passion, but also recognizes the limits of mimetic representation of that which is wholly one’s own. Milton, with his shoe, offers an account of particularity as a center of moral gravity, one that involves our embodied selves, our interests, things that are specifically ours. In short, there are things outside of control of God to affect, or us to represent and justify, and those things are our feelings. By political means, Milton gestures toward a meaning apart from politics, apart from God even, forging a new space for intimate life, a life of feelings, unrepresentable but present. Is his a move outside history to claim a justice that history itself cannot deliver? No t e s 1 Contrasted with Seneca’s later heroine, Euripides’ Medea is explored in Alessandro Schiesaro, The Passions in Play: Thyestes and the Dynamics of Senecan Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 209. 2 See John Hale, Milton as Multilingual, Otago Studies in English (Duneden, NZ: University of Otago, 2005), vol. VIII, 85–97; P. W. Timberlake, “Milton and Euripides,” Essays in Dramatic Literature: The Parrot Presentation Volume, ed. Hardin Craig (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935), 315–40; David Norbrook, “Euripides, Milton and Christian Doctrine,” Milton Quarterly 29.2 (1995): 37–41; William Riley Parker, Milton’s Debt to Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937). On Milton’s view of tragedy, see John Arthos, Milton and the Italian Cities (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1968). 3 See John M. Wallace, “‘Examples are Best Precepts’: Readers and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Poetry,” Critical Inquiry 1.2 (1974): 273–90; On medieval mnemonics, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Joan Marie Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of Commonplaces: An Historical Investigation of the General and Universal Ideas Used in All Argumentation and Persuasion, with Special Emphasis on the

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Educational and Literary Tradition of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Pageant, 1962). Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 35. See Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965). Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), xiv. Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 7; Victoria Kahn, “Humanism and the Resistance to Theory,” Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 373–96. On the “turn to ethics,” see Amanda Anderson, “Argument and Ethos,” Polemic, ed. Jane Gallop (London: Routledge, 2004); Marjorie Garber et al., eds., The Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2000); Marshall Grossman, ed., Reading Renaissance Ethics (London: Routledge, 2007). Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 103; David Parker, “Introduction: The Turn to Ethics in the 1990s,” Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, ed. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman and David Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7. See also Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Getting it Right: Language, Literature and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 6–58, ch. 1, “Ethics and Its Others.” Steven N. Zwicker, “The Constitution of Opinion and the Pacification of Reading,” 301, 295; in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 295–316. Stephen M. Fallon, “The Metaphysics of Milton’s Divorce Tracts,” Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 69. As such, it might form a political counterpart to the project articulated by Marshall Grossman in The Story of All Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998): “the determinative force of discourse not in a ‘poetics of culture,’ . . . but rather in the cognitive implications of a linguistically conditioned rhetorical usage” (15). John Milton, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. in 10 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2.485. All references to Milton’s prose, unless otherwise noted, will be to this edition and will be noted in text as YP. And see David Norbrook, “Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere,” The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere, ed. Richard Burt (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 3–33. See Annabel Patterson, Reading Between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 286; and Patterson, “No meer amatorious novel?”

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Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 85–102. See John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), which beautifully explores the ever-renewed figure of Medea in relation to revenge tragedy, and placing the Senecan reflections on anger at the heart of creativity. John Staines has powerfully explored how compassion and pity became politicized after the regicide in “Compassion in the Public Sphere of Milton and King Charles,” Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary-Floyd Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 89–110. Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 199, brilliantly links Milton’s hermeneutic thrust to his affective revolution, exploring the gender disparity that grounds Milton’s account. Among recent accounts of the history of the emotions, see, in addition to Susan James, Passion and Action in Seventeenth Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Gail Kern Paster, Katharine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli, eds., Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). All quotations taken from John Milton, ed. John Carey, Complete Shorter Poems (New York: Longman, 1997). YP 4.624. Milton, Angli Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (1654), 90, my translation. David Aers and Bob Hodge, “‘Rational Burning’: Milton on Sex and Marriage,” Literature, Language, and Society in England, 1580–1680, ed. David Aers et al. (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981), 122–51; Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Annabel Patterson, “Milton, Marriage and Divorce,” A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 279–93, 279. A careful description of the classical philosophical debate over compassion is Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 354–400, 357. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 317, 352. See Helene P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 246–57.

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25 Italics mine, indicating Tetrachordon’s lines, 298–304: Euripides: Medea, trans. John Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), lines 282–91. Cf. Medea in Euripides I, trans. David Kovacs. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), lines 309–11, henceforth referred to as Loeb. 26 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 175, shows Medea’s exchange with Creon as a classic locus for the dangers of eloquence. 27 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989), vol. I, 328–29; A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7. 28 Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 171–72, ch. 27, par. 15, “Of the Causes of Rebellion.” 29 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Bernard Gert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 255; and compare Leviathan (1651) ch. 30. On Hobbes’s use of Medea, see Richard Hillyer, “Hobbes’s Explicated Fables and the Legacy of the Ancients,” Philosophy and Literature 28.2 (2004): 269–83. 30 Milton, Maske, 780–81, 795, 800–01. 31 Foley, Female Acts, 15. Lynn Enterline has argued in relation to Renaissance reworkings of Ovid, that men speaking in and through the voices of women allowed them a sanctioned space “for examining passionate female emotion,” The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 21; see also John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy; and Laura McClure, Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 28. However, see Froma I. Zeitlin, “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama,” Nothing to do with Dionysius? Athenian Drama in its Social Context, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin and John J. Winkler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 63–97: she sees female characters’ struggles as largely designed “for exploring the male project of selfhood in the larger world” (69). 32 Foley, Female Acts, 9; and see 59. 33 Cited Foley, Female Acts, 13. 34 See Susan Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Janet Clare, Drama of the English Republic, 1649–1660 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 70–93; Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 35 See, for instance, Blair Hoxby, “Dryden’s Baroque Dramaturgy: The Case of Aureng-Zebe,” Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden, ed. Jayne Lewis and Maximillian Novak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 244–72.

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36 See Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan University Press, 1993). 37 On Paul, see P. H. Ling, “A Quotation from Euripides,” Classical Quarterly 19.1 (1925): 22–27. 38 On the consequences of Reformation marriage, see Diarmid McCullough, Reformation (London: Penguin and Allen Lane, 2003), 630–62; and Jason Rosenblatt, “Milton, Natural Law, and Toleration,” Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 126–43. 39 Aristotle, Rhetoric II, ch. 21; and Milton’s Art of Logic YP 8.387. 40 See Martin Dzelzainis (Chapter 9) in this volume. 41 Euripides, Euripides Trageodiae quae exstant cum Latina, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1602), Milton’s copy is Bodleian Library, Don.d.27–28, and will be referred to as such in this essay. 42 Bod. Don. d. 28, p. 282. See Columbia 18, 313. 43 Compare Arthur Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ed. Madeleine Forey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), VII.20–25. lines 17–21 in Loeb: “video meliora proboque, / deteriora sequor.” As in Ovid’s Heroides, the “sequor” follows the reason. Milton’s tragically contradictory Medea is mediated through Ovid, where the two different portraits agree on this essential feature. In Heroides 12, the barbarian wife, on the edge of madness, accuses her treacherous husband Jason and calls out to the gods: “Is there no more divine justice? Are there no more gods?” (“numen ubi est? ubi di?” [Loeb, line 119]), mad with anger, tearing her cloak and beating her breasts, shrieking, “[I] have not the power to escape the flames of my own passion” (“non valeo flammas effugere ipsa meas” [Loeb, line 166]). As the speech closes she warns, “Wherever this anger leads, I will follow” (“quo feret ira, sequar!” [Loeb, lines 209]). The story of Medea in Metamorphoses expresses this rage, book seven beginning with a long soliloquy of the raging woman, as she urges self-control. 44 James, Passion, 257. Significantly, George Buchanan’s Medea of 1544, his first attempt at translation of Greek drama, renders the lines as an explicit battle between passion and reason: “. . .malorum cedo magnitudini, / videoque quantum perpetrabitur nefas. / sed pessimorum facinorum genitor furor / ratione maior me retrorsum distrahit.” George Buchanan, Tragedies. ed. P. Sharratt and P. G. Walsh (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983), Medea, ll. 1125–29, p. 199. See also John M. Dillon, “Medea among the Philosophers,” Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art, ed. James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 211–18. 45 James, Passion, 257. 46 For the Renaissance political application of Seneca, see Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); J. H. M. Salmon, “Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 199–225; G. Oestrich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta

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Oestreich and H. G. Koenisgberger, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2.279–82. On violence and stoicism, see Andrew Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics and Literature in the Age of Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy, esp. ch. 5. Shifflett, for example, has made a powerful case for considering the Son adopting a Stoical critique of tyrants (Stoicism, Politics, 144–52). The emotional complexity of this passage is eloquently explored in Michael Schoenfeldt, “‘Commotion Strange’: Passion in Paradise Lost,” in Gail Kern Paster et al., eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions. Seneca, On Anger, ed. and trans. John M. Cooper and J. F. Procopé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), III.13 (p. 89). Florio, Worlde of Words (1598), 210/2. Macinio, the grinding or greest. Also taken for carnall copulation. See OED grind, v. 1.11. Alciato, “Ocnis Effigies de his Qui,” Emblematum liber (1539), Paris, 44, accessed February 23, 2011 at “Alciato at Glasgow,” (http://www.emblems. arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/dual.php?id1=A31a018&type1=1&id2=A56a017&ty pe2=1). On Milton’s many representations of the Ass, see Karen Edwards, “Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary,” Milton Quarterly 39.4 (2005): 200–05. This gendered story reminds us of the proposal of (false) redemption of Samson in Samson Agonistes, who rejects freedom if it leads to uselessness, a domestic scene, where his strength is “robustious to no use”: this impotent moment haunts him at every turn. Milton, A Defense of the People of England, Milton: Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 223. Cf. Milton, Bucer, YP 2.431: “a natureles constraint.” Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 200. Seneca, On Anger: “We hold on to our anger and increase it, as though its violence were the proof of its justice” (III.30 [p. 105]). YP 2.303: italic my emphasis. The final chapter of the revised edition of Doctrine refers to Selden’s De Iure (YP 2.350). On Milton’s echo of Selden, see Jason Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 89. Arthur Barker notes this change in his Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 1641–1660 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942), 365–66n.81; and in “Christian Liberty in Milton’s Divorce Pamphlets,” Modern Language Review 35 (1940): 153–61, disbelieving Milton could have been so dismissive of “virtue” (158). See Nussbaum, Upheavals, 330 and passim. On moderation, see Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

9

Milton, Foucault, and the New Historicism Martin Dzelzainis

My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity.

– Foucault, Fearless Speech

On February 25, 1874, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote to his fellow professor at the University of Basel, Friedrich Nietzsche, thanking him for a copy of the second of his Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen) to be published. This was the famous essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (“Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben”), and Nietzsche hoped it would repay an intellectual debt incurred some years earlier when Burckhardt had presented his then newly arrived colleague with a copy of the 1869 edition of his masterpiece, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien [1860]).1 What appears to have captured Nietzsche’s imagination was Burckhardt’s iconoclastic decision to focus his attention on the despotic states rather than the republics of Renaissance Italy, and his foregrounding, often in lurid detail, of acts of tyrannical violence by transgressive figures such as Cesare Borgia. He also seems to have adopted Burckhardt’s startlingly revisionist thesis about the relation between tyranny and culture to the effect that “[d]espotism . . . fostered in the highest degree the individuality not only of the tyrant or condottiere himself, but also of the men whom he protected or used as his tools – the secretary, minister, poet and companion.”2 Accordingly, in the first of the lectures that Nietzsche delivered in the summer of 1871 (“On the Discovery of Antiquity in Italy”), he reflected on the “innermost affinities” between despots and scholars.3 And not only was Burckhardt singled out for praise in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” but Nietzsche based his hope that German culture might be renewed by a few like-minded individuals on the fact that, as Burckhardt appeared to have demonstrated, “the culture of the Renaissance was raised on the shoulders of . . . a hundred men.”4 209

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These intellectual exchanges arguably constitute an epochal moment in the development of cultural history (Kulturgeschichte) as a scholarly discipline.5 While some aspects of Burckhardt’s interpretation of the Renaissance may be tendentious, it has kept its place as an indispensable scholarly point of reference, a “classic analysis” of the period.6 For its part, Nietzsche’s essay, having floated free of its origins as an intervention in a dispute between two Germanic schools of philology, has served to underwrite a succession of historical and antihistorical intellectual projects, from Foucauldian “genealogy” to the newly fashionable critical school known as “presentism” (on which see further Andrew Hadfield’s essay [Chapter 1] in this volume).7 Such divergent outcomes become less surprising when we consider the contrasting presuppositions on which the essay rests. On the one hand, that is, Nietzsche, regarding the age in which he lived as oversaturated in history and thereby rendered incapable of taking any initiatives, urges the importance of forgetting as a precondition of action. On the other hand, he also maintains that to live without any memory at all would mean that one was in effect no more than a beast of the field “fettered to the moment.” Consequently, each of the three modes of history posited by Nietzsche – the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical – can perform services and disservices for life. While monumental history inspires heroic action through reflecting on past greatness, it also tends to distort and deceive, and can even be co-opted by those who hope to obstruct change through promoting the idea that greatness is permanently confined to the past; or, to put it another way, those whose aim is for “the dead to bury the living.” As against this, a due and proper veneration of the past of the kind fostered by antiquarian history can affirm a sense of identity and provide an antidote to cosmopolitan restlessness – the corresponding danger being that an indiscriminate attachment to the past for its own sake “no longer conserves life, but mummifies it” instead. In this event, Nietzsche argues, critical history can help throw off the oppressive weight of tradition by arraigning and condemning the passions and errors of the past, although, as he warns, the resulting sense of liberation “does not alter the fact that we originate[d] in them” ourselves. These interlinked forms of history were, however, all threatened by the rise of positivist historiography, which required history not to serve life but to be a science. It was the triumph of this version of historical-mindedness that was responsible for the “malady of history” (historische Krankheit) that had paralyzed Germany.8 For the most part, Nietzsche’s essay is pitched at such a level of abstraction that it yields few prescriptions for practicing historians (Burckhardt

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modestly remarked in his letter that such things were above his head and it was all he could do “to guide [my students] towards their own grasp of the past, hoping at least not to make them dislike it”).9 However, in Renaissance studies at least, there is a clear line of intellectual descent that runs from Basel to Berkeley; that is to say, from Kulturgeschichte to new historicism. In most accounts, it is true, Burckhardt and Nietzsche are joined en route by a third figure, Michel Foucault, who in fact often functions as a kind of proxy for the latter.10 Unsurprisingly, all three are cited in the landmark work of new historicism, Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), and what links them all – and what underpins the new historicist project as a whole – is a fascination with the ways in which power manifests itself. The aim of this chapter, more specifically, is to examine how new historicism deals with the relationship between truth and power. To gain purchase on this issue, it deploys a historical approach that derives from Nietzsche’s idea of “untimeliness.” After all, given that Nietzsche was a product of the historicized culture of his time, it might well be asked – and Nietzsche did ask – how he was able to acquire sufficient distance from that culture to formulate his insights in the first place. His answer was that it was precisely “on account of my profession as a classicist: for I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely – that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time.”11 To a classical philologist like Nietzsche, the otherness of the mental world of the ancient Greeks was a given. However, seen – or rather imagined – from the vantage point of that otherness, the present could be rendered strange and become “other” in its turn. Nietzsche describes just such a thought experiment in his essay. One of the main ways in which the Greeks appeared strange, indeed deficient and “uncultured,” to moderns was their lack of a sense of history. But “imagine,” he says, “a Greek observing” us and our culture. To the Greek, for whom it was possible to be “very educated and yet at the same time altogether uneducated historically,” we would appear little more than “walking encyclopedias” that were otherwise impoverished. The fact that the Greeks were “essentially unhistorical” and yet possessed of “an inexpressibly richer and more vital culture” showed up by contrast the deficiencies of nineteenth-century Germans.12 Or to put it another way, an immersion in antiquity (being untimely in one sense) was thus reciprocally related to a contempt for modernity (being untimely in another). An aspiration to this kind of untimeliness has informed a number of distinguished historical studies, particularly by more philosophically

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minded practitioners. Bernard Williams, for example, quotes the same passage from Nietzsche’s essay in Shame and Necessity (1993) by way of introducing the claim that there is “a two-way street between past and present; if we can liberate the Greeks from patronizing misunderstandings of them, then that same process may help to free us of misunderstandings of ourselves.”13 And Quentin Skinner has mounted a defense of the methods of the so-called Cambridge School of intellectual historians on exactly the same grounds. In Liberty before Liberalism (1998), he remarks that, when considering “our normative concepts, it is easy to become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking about them bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be the ways of thinking about them.” What the history of philosophy can do, by showing us just how contingent the processes were by which these concepts acquired their status, is to allow “us to stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of enquiry what we should think of them.” His concluding injunction, taken from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, is that we should take the opportunity that history gives us to “ruminate.”14 What follows, therefore, are some “untimely” reflections on how truth and power are configured in new historicism, in the process bringing to light a number of misunderstandings. I Assessing “Milton’s Career and the Career of Theory” in 1994, Stanley Fish remarked that “the New Historicism has made very little headway in Milton studies, in contrast, say, to its impact on the study of Shakespeare.”15 This observation is as true today as it was then notwithstanding the upsurge of interest in Milton and colonialism, a topic that would appear to be ripe for new historicist treatment.16 Why should this be? Fish’s answer to this question was that the industrial enterprise that is Milton studies had been in business for so long that every possible methodological move had been preempted; the one thing the new historicism could not be was “new.” Another plausible answer might be found in the disconnect between Milton, usually seen as someone wholly bent on telling the truth to power (a view endorsed again by Sharon Achinstein in her essay in this volume), and the new historicists, usually seen as committed by their Foucauldianism to denying the very possibility of telling the truth to power. My contention is that neither of these perceptions is securely grounded and that the reason for Miltonists’ resistance to new historicism

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must be sought elsewhere. Furthermore, when we look at what Milton and Foucault actually had to say about speaking the truth, it becomes apparent that the usual view of them may have got things back to front. The best place to begin is with the supposed indebtedness of new historicism to the thought of Foucault. That there is such a debt has become an article of faith deeply entrenched in anthologies and handbooks.17 According to Frank Lentricchia, in an acerbic essay that helped establish this assumption, Foucault’s influence on Greenblatt’s Renaissance SelfFashioning is most apparent in its author’s “description of power” which, he claims, endorses Foucault’s theory of power, preserving not only the master’s repeated insistence on the concrete institutional character of power, its palpability, as it were, but also his glide into a conception of power that is elusively and literally undefinable – not finitely anchored but diffused from nowhere to everywhere, and saturating all social relations to the point that all conflicts and “jostlings” among social groups become a mere show of political dissension, a prearranged theater of struggle set upon the substratum of a monolithic agency which produces “opposition” as one of its delusive political effects.18

This is the familiar claim that what new historicists believe is that acts of rebellion in the Renaissance could not but help buttress the powers that be and that the forces of containment were always stronger than, and were only strengthened by, attempts at subversion. Admittedly, Lentricchia is somewhat embarrassed by the paucity of textual evidence, conceding that “Foucault inhabits Renaissance Self-Fashioning mainly in Greenblatt’s notes,” but nevertheless insists that “Foucault’s key obsessions and terms shape Greenblatt’s argument.”19 As against this, Catherine Belsey has recently argued that there is no significant debt to Foucault in Renaissance Self-Fashioning other than a stylistic one. When it comes to Greenblatt’s understanding of the workings of power, she agrees that he maintained what Lentricchia says he did; that is, that there is “no rebellion that is not complicit with the power that produced it, and no chance of a revolt that is not subject to co-option or worse.” What she denies is that this is an understanding that could properly have been derived from Foucault, whose view of power and resistance is much more subtle. Whereas for Foucault “power is always threatened, perpetually precarious,” for Greenblatt “power works.”20 In this respect, she argues, Greenblatt’s new historicism is heir not to the post-structuralism of Foucault but to the functionalism of the sociologist Talcott Parsons and, more clearly still, to the anthropological writings of Clifford Geertz, who studied under Parsons at Harvard.

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So on this view are the book’s intellectual antecedents ultimately American or French? Any uncertainty would seem to have been dispelled by Greenblatt himself in his essay “Towards a Poetics of Culture”: One of the peculiar characteristics of the “new historicism” in literary studies is precisely how unresolved and in some ways disingenuous it has been – I have been – about the relation to literary theory. On the one hand it seems to me that an openness to the theoretical ferment of the last few years is precisely what distinguishes the new historicism from the positivist historical scholarship of the early twentieth century. Certainly, the presence of Michel Foucault on the Berkeley campus for extended visits during the last five or six years of his life, and more generally the influence in America of European (and especially French) anthropological and social theorists, has helped to shape my own literary critical practice. On the other hand the historicist critics have on the whole been unwilling to enroll themselves in one or other of the dominant theoretical camps.21

Not only does he attest to Foucault’s role in shaping his own practice, but, given the number of times this paragraph has appeared in print without being modified, it must (for the moment) be allowed to stand as a conclusive statement. It is nevertheless the case that the only works by Foucault actually mentioned in Renaissance Self-Fashioning are La volonté de savoir (1976) and Discipline and Punish (1977). Neither of these subsequently featured in Practicing New Historicism (2000), coauthored by Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, in which the only Foucauldian texts discussed are The Order of Things (1973) and the little-known essay on “The Life of Infamous Men,” first published in French in 1977 and in English in 1979 – and even this essay is introduced by way of retrospectively illuminating new historicism without claiming that it had had any effect (or had even been read) when the project was getting under way.22 What this relatively limited engagement with Foucault’s writings leaves out of account, therefore, is the change of direction in his thought during the “last, restless experimental phase” of his career.23 One of the earliest indications of this came in the two Howison Lectures in Philosophy (on “Subjectivity and Truth” and “Christianity and Confession”) that he gave at Berkeley in October 1980 and again at Dartmouth a month later.24 In the first of them, Foucault announced that having hitherto “studied the field of government by taking as my point of departure techniques of domination,” his investigations would henceforth be “starting from the techniques of the self.” He was of course still concerned with “the interaction between these two types of techniques.” Nevertheless he now asserted that in “all societies” one could find

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techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on.25

Ironically, therefore, the Foucault apparently overlooked by the new historicists was precisely the one who was concerned with the techniques of self-fashioning – what he later called, during the course of a sequence of working sessions with Paul Rabinow and Herbert Dreyfus at Berkeley in April 1983, “self-forming activity” (pratique de soi).26 The difference between what Foucault and Greenblatt respectively meant by this, however, can be seen in their contrasting attitudes to Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. For Greenblatt, Burckhardt’s “crucial perception” was that the “transition from feudalism to despotism” meant that individuals were “forced by their relation to power to fashion themselves and their world: the self and the state as works of art.” Nevertheless Burckhardt’s view that this process meant that they “emerged at last as free individuals” was one that needed to be “sharply qualified.” This is because much of what Greenblatt meant by self-fashioning was the self as fashioned by others; indeed, as he remarked on the opening page of the book, “there may well have been less autonomy in self-fashioning in the sixteenth century than before.”27 For Foucault, by contrast, this was precisely when the self experienced “a reaffirmation of its autonomy.” Referring explicitly to Burckhardt’s discussion of the “aesthetics of existence,” he assured Rabinow and Dreyfus that the “idea that from one’s own life one can make a work of art . . . reappears at the moment of the Renaissance.”28 One aspect of these technologies of the self came to occupy an increasingly important part in Foucault’s thinking. In the first of his Howison lectures, he had already emphasized the “obligation of searching for the truth and telling the truth” and drawn attention to the existence “well before Christianity [of] already elaborated techniques for discovering and formulating the truth about oneself” in the form of the therapeutic practices of the Epicureans and the Stoics.29 For the most part, he explicated these techniques from the writings of expected figures like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, but he also became interested in a fragmentary text by Philodemus, a leading figure in the Epicurean schools at Naples and Herculaneum in the first century BCE. This text (only unearthed in 1752) was entitled Περι παρρησίασ (Peri parrhesias), known in Latin as De libertate dicendi and in English as On Frank Speaking or On Frank Criticism. What it examines is the various ways in which

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frankness or candor (parrhesia) can be deployed as a therapeutic technique in the correction and improvement of souls. Although the treatise is aimed in the first instance at psychagogues rather than their students, it is clear that frankness was ultimately required from all the participants.30 Foucault first discussed Philodemus and parrhesia in 1982 in a series of lectures at the Collège de France entitled “L’Herméneutique du sujet,” but he returned to the notion in greater detail in his subsequent series of lectures at the Collège in 1983 (“Le gouvernement de soi et des autres”) and in 1984 (“Le courage de la vérité”).31 My particular concern here, however, is with six lectures Foucault gave (in English) at Berkeley between October 10 and November 30, 1983, under the title “Discourse and Truth.” These were devoted to a comprehensive exposition of parrhesia in its literary and political as well as its therapeutic contexts. Accordingly, Foucault traced what he called the “genealogy of the critical attitude in Western philosophy” all the way back to the first appearance of the word parrhesia in the drama of Euripides, most notably Hippolytus and Ion where it refers to a central aspect of democratic Athens: the right of the citizen to speak freely in the assembly (ekklesia).32 However, Foucault is at pains to distinguish between an equal freedom to speak (termed isegoria), which does not necessarily imply saying whatever you want (or speaking at all), and speaking your mind freely (parrhesia), which does imply saying whatever you want. Indeed, as Foucault goes on to explain, the “one who uses parrhesia, the parrhesiastes, is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything, but opens his heart and mind completely to other people through his discourse.”33 So the parrhesiastes believes he is in possession of the truth, which he must tell as fully and clearly as possible, without rhetorical artifice. It is true that this is an unfamiliar way of thinking about freedom of speech. Most modern discussions are couched in an abstract language of human rights, which has floated free of any specific context, whereas parrhesia is always closely linked to a particular time and place, or, to use the Greek term, a kairos or occasion. So what is under discussion is the situation of the interlocutors in relation to each other and the exact moment chosen for speaking freely. Perhaps the most familiar such scenario is what Foucault calls the “parrhesiastic game” or the “parrhesiastic contract.” The parties to the contract are, respectively, “the one who has power but lacks the truth” and “the one who has the truth but lacks power” (for example, a king and a messenger or herald) in which the former undertakes not to punish the latter for telling the truth.34 (Such scenes were a staple of Renaissance as well as classical drama, a typical example being

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the exchange in Shakespeare’s Henry V in which the ambassadors ask the king for “leave / Freely to render what we have in charge,” to which Henry replies that they may safely “with frank and with uncurbèd plainness / Tell us the Dauphin’s mind.”35) But while not all instances of speaking the truth require courage of you, it is required if you speak parrhesiastically, because by definition what that means is to speak fearlessly. Or, to use the title of Foucault’s last series of lectures at the Collège de France, parrhesia just is “le courage de la vérité,” the courage of the truth. To grasp the analytical relationship between parrhesia and courage, consider the contrasting cases of the schoolteacher who corrects a pupil’s mistake and the philosopher who tells a tyrant he is in the wrong. Both of them are committed to telling the truth, but what differentiates them is the element of personal danger, and therefore courage, involved. A great deal more is at stake for the philosopher who speaks fearlessly than for the teacher who (merely) says what is true. Parrhesia, as Foucault insists, “is a form of criticism” spoken by one who is in a position of inferiority with respect to the interlocutor. The parrhesiastes is always less powerful than the one to whom he speaks. The parrhesia comes from “below,” as it were, and is directed towards “above.” This is why an ancient Greek would not say that a teacher or father who criticizes a child uses parrhesia. But when a philosopher criticizes a tyrant, when a citizen criticizes the majority, when a pupil criticizes his teacher, then such speakers may be using parrhesia.36

Parrhesia is, in short, telling the truth to power. Indeed, this is what makes Foucault’s project distinctive and important. He is not concerned with how we ensure that a given statement is true, a task central to that tradition in Western philosophy he calls the “analytics of truth.” Rather he is concerned with the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth – all preoccupations of what he calls the “critical” tradition.37 Although the attendances at Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia were relatively small (about twenty-five people, consisting mainly of students from the Departments of French and Classics), what he was saying nevertheless became known to a much wider audience interested in Continental philosophy.38 The process of dissemination began with the tape recordings made by Joseph Pearson (with Foucault’s permission), which he at first lent out, but then transcribed and edited, eventually sending out more than one hundred copies in response to requests from around the world. It was therefore “fairly common knowledge among Foucault scholars that the Berkeley lectures were circulating in samizdat form.”39 Moreover, many of these copies were themselves duplicated and passed on in a classic

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instance of what the late Harold Love termed “user publication.”40 Dutch and Italian translations appeared in print in 1989 and 1996 before, finally, Semiotext(e) published Pearson’s edition in 2001. What effect did these lectures have on the new historicism? After all, they had originally been delivered on the doorstep of several of its leading practitioners, including Professors Gallagher and Greenblatt. On closer inspection, the delicately phrased asseverations in “Towards a Poetics of Culture” turn out to be less than conclusive. Greenblatt begins by admitting he has been “disingenuous” – the present perfect tense consigning the peccadillo to an unspecified past while implicitly promising a more forthright declaration of intellectual allegiances. Yet all he will own up to is the shaping of his own practice by “the presence of Michel Foucault on the Berkeley campus” in his last years – his presence, that is, as distinct from anything he may have said in lectures or seminars. The form of words in the Introduction to Learning to Curse is not much more revealing. Defining new historicism as “less a set of beliefs than an intellectual trajectory,” he now adds that his “own version of this trajectory was particularly shaped by Raymond Williams and by Michel Foucault, who taught regularly at Berkeley in the late 1970s and early 1980s.” This disclosure is preceded by a vivid sketch of the “intellectual power and moral authority” of Williams, who was one of Greenblatt’s teachers at Cambridge while he was there on a two-year Fulbright scholarship between 1964 and 1966. But there is no matching personal reminiscence of Foucault or his teaching, though he could hardly be said to have “taught regularly at Berkeley” in these years anyway.41 In the end, it seems difficult to attribute whatever shaping influence Foucault may have exerted on Greenblatt to anything much more definite than the zeitgeist on the Berkeley campus. II How differently New Historicism might have turned out had due account been taken of Foucault’s insistence that it is not only possible but necessary to tell the truth to power is a subject for counterfactual history. One thing we can readily do, however, is examine Milton in just these Foucauldian terms. He first announced himself as a parrhesiast in 1641 when exploring the idea of truth in the marketplace at the start of the second book of The Reason of Church-governement. His opponents in this instance were the prelates, the “great Marchants of this world” whose intellectual trade consists in the “fals glitter of their deceitfull wares wherewith they abuse the people, like poor Indians with beads and glasses,” and who stir up

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hatred against those like Milton who “bear themselves uprightly in this their spiritual factory” and “cannot but testify of Truth . . . against what opposition, or danger soever.” For such individuals, Milton insists, “when God commands to take the trumpet and blow a dolorous or a jarring blast, it lies not in mans will what he shall say, or what he shall conceal.”42 The allusion is to Jeremiah 4:19 (“I cannot hold my peace, because thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet”), suggesting that this is a kind of pleromatic utterance, a speaking from fullness or out of plenitude. It is speech that cannot be contained or, as Stanley Fish puts it, “Milton is constrained by the very truth he serves to speak out even at those moments when the conditions for speaking seem least propitious.”43 While this is surely right, we should not overlook Milton’s careful insistence that concealment as well as proclamation of the truth can be nonelective. Telling the truth is usually seen by Milton as a combative activity that pits the solitary person against the group. The paradigm instance of this antagonism between the individual and the collective is in book five of Paradise Lost. Toward the end of the book (to quote from the Argument), Raphael tells Adam and Eve about Satan’s “first revolt in heaven, and . . . how he drew his legions after him to the parts of the north, and there incited them to rebel with him, persuading all but only Abdiel a seraph, who in argument dissuades and opposes him, then forsakes him.”44 In his account of the agon between Satan and Abdiel, Raphael emphasizes the loneliness of Abdiel’s stand, which is especially evident in the description of his exit from the “palace of great Lucifer”: So spake the seraph Abdiel faithful found, Among the faithless, faithful only he; Among innumerable false, unmoved, Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal; Nor number, nor example with him wrought To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind Though single. From amidst them forth he passed, Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained Superior, nor of violence feared aught; And with retorted scorn his back he turned On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed (5.760, 896–907).

The virtue displayed by Abdiel is the cardinal one of fortitude, which allows him, “though single,” to remain “unmoved” by the sheer numbers ranged against him and to withstand “public scorn” and humiliation. But

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it does not just so happen that Abdiel finds himself in a situation that requires fortitude if he is to speak the truth. For, as Foucault maintained, there is a necessary rather than contingent relationship between parrhesia and fortitude. Abdiel is one of several parrhesiasts in the poem. In the visions given to Adam by Michael in book eleven, he sees Enoch in a “council,” speaking “much of right and wrong, / Of justice, of religion, truth, and peace” to a hostile audience that threatens him with violence “for daring single to be just / And utter odious truth” (11.661, 666–7, 703–4). A little later, Adam is shown Noah, the “one just man alive,” who “testified” against wrong doing in “assemblies” and “preached / Conversion and repentance,” and did so “fearless of reproach and scorn, / Or violence” (11. 721–2, 723–4, 811–12, 818). Abdiel, Enoch, and Noah all speak the truth even though this places them in personal danger from audiences antagonized by the odious truths they utter. What clearly matters more to Milton than the legal right of the speaker to address an assembly is the moral rectitude that enables and impels the speaker to tell the assembly what it does not want to hear. Implicit in this repeated scenario is the problematic relationship between parrhesia and democracy that was highlighted by Isocrates and Demosthenes in their critiques of the Athenian ekklesia.45 But there is also a powerful element of self-identification. Throughout his career, Milton self-consciously insisted on his status as a parrhesiast. In the preface to the 1644 edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, he tells Parliament and the Westminster Assembly that “the duty and the right of an instructed Christian cals me through the chance of good or evill report, to be the sole advocate of a discount’nanc’t truth.” He prides himself on the fact that he has “with a fearlesse and communicative candor first publisht to the manifest good of Christendome, that which calling to witnesse every thing mortall and immortall, I beleeve unfainedly to be true” (YP 2.224, 226). And in the preface to The Judgement of Martin Bucer (1644), again addressed to Parliament, he looks back on the decision to publish his views on divorce in a yet more self-dramatizing way: “I resolv’d at length to put off into this wild and calumnious world. For God, it seems, intended to prove me, whether I durst alone take up a rightful cause against a world of disesteem, & found I durst.” Indeed, only the “special providence” of God has ensured “that a single innocence might not be opprest and overborn by a crew of mouths” (YP 2.434, 437). At this point, it is tempting to say Milton had an “Abdiel complex” that manifested itself repeatedly in his life and writings. Nevertheless, it would be unwise to take these self-fashionings at face value, and in the

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rest of this essay I suggest why his position was less clear-cut than he would have us think. One reason for being skeptical is the argument – often made at the time – that while the parrhesiast, unlike the rhetorician, appears committed to telling the truth and nothing but the truth, this anti-rhetorical stance is itself just another rhetorical ploy.46 But this problematization of truth-telling preoccupied many writers in the period (most notably Shakespeare in King Lear, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens), not just Milton. In Milton’s case, however, there is one episode in particular that raises such questions in an acute form. It occurred during his travels in Italy in the winter of 1638 to 1639, of which he later provided an account in Defensio Secunda (1654). Having spent October and November 1638 in Rome, Milton went on to Naples, but, just when he was on the point of leaving for Sicily and Greece, news arrived of Anglo-Scottish conflict, which left him feeling uneasy at the idea of traveling while his fellow citizens were warring over religion: As I was on the point of returning to Rome, I was warned by merchants that they had learned through letters of plots laid against me by the English Jesuits, should I return to Rome, because of the freedom with which I had spoken about religion. For I had determined within myself that in those parts I would not indeed begin a conversation about religion, but if questioned about my faith would dissemble nothing, whatever the consequences. And so, I nonetheless returned to Rome. What I was, if any man inquired, I concealed from no one. For almost two more months, in the very stronghold of the Pope, if anyone attacked the orthodox religion, I openly, as before, defended it. Thus, by the will of God I returned again in safety to Florence (YP 4.619; slightly adapted).47

This offers a self-portrait of Milton as the committed Protestant bearing witness to his faith in the stronghold of the Antichrist, showing nothing if not “le courage de la vérité.” Nevertheless in doing so Milton was wilfully disregarding advice about how to conduct himself in Rome given to him in April 1638 by the distinguished diplomat, Sir Henry Wotton: I hasten . . . to tell you a short story from the interest you have given me in your safety. At Siena I was tabled in the House of one Alberto Scipioni an old Roman Courtier in dangerous times, having bin Steward to the Duca di Pagliano, who with all his Family were strangled, save this onely man that escap’d by foresight of the Tempest: With him I had often much chat of those affairs; Into which he took pleasure to look back from his Native Harbour; and at my departure toward Rome (which had been the center of his experience) I had wonn confidence enough to beg his advice, how I might carry my self securely there, without offence of others, or of mine own conscience. Signor Arrigo mio (sayes he) I pensieri stretti, & il viso sciolto [My Signor Harry, your thoughts close, and your countenance loose] will go safely over the whole World (YP 1.342).

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It was evidently a well-worn anecdote because Wotton had earlier dispensed the same advice to another young traveler. The “moral Antidote” or “preservative contracted into so little room,” as he called it, was not merely prudential: Wotton was anxious to find a mode of behavior that did not offend only insofar as this was consistent with his conscience.48 Milton proudly published Wotton’s letter in his 1645 volume of Poems and referred to it again in Defensio Secunda at the start of his account of his European tour. As for keeping “i pensieri stretti,” however, this apparently he could not do even when threatened by Jesuits. Commentators have been troubled by aspects of the Roman episode that do not quite add up. What did defending true religion in the citadel of Roman Catholicism actually entail? At one point, it meant a tour of the Vatican library, personally arranged by the librarian, Lukas Holste, who was also secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, nephew to Pope Urban VIII. A few days later, it required Milton to attend a public performance at the Palazzo Barberini of a comic opera by Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi, the future Pope Clement IX. Among the notables in the audience was Cardinal Mazarin, but Barberini still singled out Milton at the door and welcomed him warmly. The next day, Milton returned to the Palazzo to pay his respects.49 All this sounds more like a charm offensive than a plot against Milton’s life. It should be remembered, however, that in Defensio Secunda, Milton was responding to an ad hominem attack by the royalist Peter Du Moulin in Regii sanguinis clamor ad coelum adversus parricidas Anglicanos (The Cry of the Royal Blood) (1652): “They say this man was expelled from his college at Cambridge because of some disgrace, that he fled shame and his country and migrated to Italy. When the rebellion broke out, he was recalled from Italy into England with the hope of a new state of affairs” (YP 4.1050). To counter this image of moral cowardice and political opportunism, Milton had to construct an account of his Italian sojourn in which he cut a principled, even heroic figure. One genre conveniently to hand for this purpose was the “escape from Rome” in which the English Protestant visitor is threatened spiritually and physically but staunchly resists before slipping the net.50 The narrative in Defensio Secunda conforms to this pattern, but Milton raises the stakes; although threatened by the Jesuits, he stays in Rome for two more months and defends his religion as freely as before. Milton here drew on a specifically New Testament version of parrhesia. In St. John’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, for example, parrhesiastic speech is plain and direct. Or, as Jesus puts it to the disciples,

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it is not parabolical or riddling: “These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs: but the time cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall shew you plainly of the Father” (John 16:25). His speech is also publicly accessible, not private or sectarian: “I spake openly to the world; I ever taught in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort; and in secret have I said nothing” (John 18:20). This plain speaking – in effect, preaching – before the judicial and political authorities is inherently dangerous; thus the protomartyr, Stephen, is stoned on account of a sermon that “cut to the heart” his accusers in the council (Acts 7:54). Even before this, we have seen “the boldness of Peter and John” before the same body, which is amazed by the eloquence of two such “ignorant and unlearned men” (Acts 4:13). The inference that their power of speech cannot be the result of rhetorical training but is rather the gift of God is borne out at once: “And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness” (Acts 4: 31). It follows that, as Schlier puts it, the “parrhesia of the apostle who preaches openly and eloquently to the hostile world is [also] a charisma” – a divine power.51 The fearless speech of the apostles and martyrs manifestly underpins the Miltonic scenario of the “one just man.” Yet when Milton’s opponents later claimed that he had said that “I was a candidate for martyrdom at Rome; [and] that plots on my life were laid by Jesuits” (YP 4, 774), he angrily denied the charge. Why? For an answer to this question we can turn to Milton’s manuscript Latin theological treatise, De Doctrina Christiana. Chapter six of book II, “DE ZELO” (“OF ZEAL”), offers an insight into Milton’s conduct in Rome (and, for that matter, Abdiel’s in the palace of Lucifer). Zeal, says Milton, is “an eager desire to sanctify the divine name, with a feeling of indignation against things which tend to the violation or contempt of religion.” What this entails is the “firm and, when necessary, open profession of the true religion” (YP 6.697, 701) in support of which he cites a battery of proof texts, including the injunction to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). So far, so good; Milton when in Rome could be seen as conforming to these imperatives. And yet the same chapter also warns against the “profession of one’s faith at the wrong time” (YP 6.702). One of the proof texts for this point about “intempestiva professio” (CM 17.164) is from the Sermon on the Mount: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you” (Matthew 7:6). This

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was a verse Milton had already taken to heart. Although he characterized his divorce tracts as parrhesiastic utterances, he was still severely shaken by their hostile reception. Sonnet 12, “On the Detraction which followed upon my Writing Certain Treatises,” registers the trauma: But this is got by casting pearls to hogs; That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood, And still revolt when truth would set them free (9–11).52

Milton is certainly aware of the promise that “the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32), but he has also learned a lesson about the futility and danger of casting pearls before swine. The sonnet is very much the work of an angry but chastened parrhesiast. However, the fullest discussion of forms of speech in De Doctrina comes in book II, Chapter thirteen. It is of course true that a good deal of the text is derived from systematic theologies, particularly Johannes Wolleb’s Compendium Theologiae Christianae (1625), which supplied Milton with the template for book II. However, even though there are verbatim borrowings, this does not mean he followed Wolleb slavishly. Chapter thirteen in both treatises is devoted to discussing the permissibility of various kinds of speech. In each case, a discussion of the topic of truth and falsehood (veritas and mendacium) in relation to our neighbors is followed by a list of various forms of verbal behavior, arranged in contrasting pairs. Thus Wolleb juxtaposes, for example, gravitas and garrulitas, taciturnitas and perfidia (that is to say, keeping and disclosing secrets), and comitas (affability) and morositas.53 It is as part of this list that we find parrhesia: Freedome of speech, is a vertue by which we speak the truth, and reprove offenders without fear of danger . . . To this is opposite preposterous fear. Parrhesia est virtus, per quam citra periculi metum veritatem loquimur, et peccantes corripimus . . . Opponitur ei praepostera Timiditas.54

Milton follows suit in his account of the virtue of speaking freely: FRANKNESS is what makes us speak the truth fearlessly . . . Opposed to this is timidity in speaking the truth (YP 6.770). LIBERTAS LOQUENDI est qua veritatem intrepide loquimur . . . Opponitur ei timiditas verum loquendi (CM 17.324–6).

Here Milton, as he sometimes does in the treatise, avoids a Greek term, parrhesia (and also, in this case, its usual Latin equivalent, licentia), and refers instead to “libertas loquendi.” Thus in the divorce tracts, for example, he had displayed libertas and avoided timiditas in speaking.

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The main difference between the chapters is in the latitude Milton gives to lying. He begins by rehearsing Wolleb’s standard definition of falsehood: “Falsehood is usually defined as the EXPRESSION OF AN UNTRUTH, EITHER BY WORDS OR ACTIONS, WITH DECEITFUL INTENT” (YP 6.760).55 Wolleb, however, adds three qualifying glosses; first, that metaphors and allegories do not count as lies since they are not intended to deceive; second, that it is possible to speak an untruth without lying, as when someone utters a falsehood believing it to be true; and third, that military stratagems cannot be considered lies, “so [long as] there be not perfidiousnesse and perjury joyned.”56 Milton instead finds fault with the definition itself – a difference of opinion that allows us to identify what follows as his distinctive contribution to the topic. His alternative definition is much more complex: FALSEHOOD must arise from EVIL INTENT and entails EITHER THE DELIBERATE MISREPRESENTATION OF THE TRUTH OR THE TELLING OF AN ACTUAL LIE TO SOMEONE, TO WHOM IT IS THE SPEAKER’S DUTY TO BE TRUTHFUL (YP 6.760).57

This shifts the emphasis from intention to deceive to intention in deceiving: falsehood requires not just intent but “evil intent.” What this means is that where the intention in deceiving is good (for example, a doctor withholding information from a patient), then there is no falsehood. Secondly, falsehood now takes negative and positive forms. In the first, truth is misrepresented or concealed. Such dissimulation does not necessarily require an act as such (for example, when keeping silent allows another to form or persist in a false belief). An outright lie, however, requires us positively to state an untruth – that is, to simulate rather than dissimulate. Finally, Milton stipulates that this only applies where we owe a duty of truthfulness to our interlocutors. Where no such duty obtains, the question of falsehood simply cannot arise. Although Milton departs significantly from Wolleb, it should not be supposed that he was saying something altogether new. It is likely his thinking at this point derived not from some alternative theological source but from the humanist tradition of political theorizing represented by Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius. Thus chapters three to five of book II of Gentili’s De Iure Belli Libri Tres (The Rights of War in Three Books) consider craft and strategy (“De dolo, & stratagematis”), deception by words (“De dolo verborum”), and falsehoods (“De mendaciis”). Likewise, the opening chapter of book III of Grotius’s De Iure Belli ac Pacis (The

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Rights of War and Peace), first published in 1625, consists of a comprehensive discussion of whether fraud is lawful in war.58 Like Milton, Grotius finds the common notion of falsehood inadequate for his purposes and moves on to consider lying in the strict sense of the term. He also distinguishes between simulation and dissimulation. And for him, too, the crucial issue is the duty of truthfulness that we owe to our interlocutors or, in his preferred terms, their right to expect us to be truthful. But whereas Milton says nothing about the source of a duty of truthfulness, Grotius grounds his right in the facts of language itself. Given that language was not a natural but a conventional phenomenon, it could be supposed to have originated in a contract similar to that which led to the establishment of private property. Simply to enter into discourse with someone, he argued, is to activate their right or “liberty of judging, which Men speaking together are, as ’twere by a certain tacit agreement, understood to owe unto them [to] whom they speak. For this and no other is that mutual obligation, which men intended to introduce, so soon as they instituted the use of words.”59 While I have just quoted from the 1654 English translation of De Iure Belli, in many ways the best vernacular account of the Grotian position was the generous paraphrase offered in 1660 by Jeremy Taylor in Ductor Dubitantium: For there is in mankind an universal contract implied in all their entercourses, and words being instituted to declare the mind, and for no other end, he that hears me speak hath a right in justice to be done him, that as far as I can what I speak be true; for else he by words does not know your mind, and then as good and better not speak at all. . . . Though God judges of our words by the heart, yet Man judges of the heart by the words; and therefore in justice we are bound to speak so as that our neighbour doe not loose his right which by our speaking we give him to the truth that is in our heart. And of a lie thus defin’d, which is injurious to our neighbour so long as his right to truth remains, it is that S. Austin affirms it to be simply unlawful.60

Starting from the premise of a linguistic contract, Grotius thinks lying is unlawful because it violates another’s right to the truth and hence constitutes an injury. This contractual approach also accounts for all the special cases conventionally adduced in discussions of lying (doctors, lunatics, and so on). As Taylor puts it in his gloss: It is lawful to tell a lie to children or to mad-men, because they having no powers of judging, have no right to truth: but then the lie must be charitable and useful . . . for though they have no right to truth, yet they have right to defence and immunity: and an injurious lie told to a child or mad-man is a sin, not because it deceives him, but because it deceives him to his prejudice.61

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Secondly, where the lie does not result in any injury to the one who is deceived but actually benefits them, then it can be presumed that they would have consented to set aside their right to the truth – that they are, in effect, willing to be deceived. Again, in Taylor’s words: in case the charitable lye be told to him to whom the good accrues . . . then there is a leave justly presumed, and he that receives the good is willing to receive it with the loss of an useless or hurtfull truth, and therefore there is no injustice done: as he that takes his neighbour’s goods, for which he hath reason to believe his neighbour willing, is no thief, nor the other a deceiver.62

Although these arguments were later subjected to stringent critiques by Samuel Pufendorf and Jean Barbeyrac, they were strikingly plausible and coherent. Not only Taylor was impressed; so too was Milton. We should remember that Milton made a point of being introduced to Grotius in Paris in 1638 at the start of his European tour, and it would be very surprising if he had not already read De Iure Belli. In some respects, Milton goes further than Grotius in the latitude that he allows to lying. Whereas Grotius could not fully endorse the Roman lawyers’ view that it made no difference whether one overcame one’s enemies by force or fraud, Milton is hard-line in insisting that we can have no duty of truthfulness toward an enemy: “stratagems,” he says, are allowable, even when they entail falsehood, because if it is not our duty to tell someone the truth, it does not matter if we lie to him whenever it is convenient. Moreover I do not see why this should not apply to peace any less than to war, especially when we may, by a salutary and commendable falsehood, save ourselves or our neighbor from harm or danger (YP 6.761–2).

Milton was thus willing to allow practices the legitimacy of which even in wartime was debatable to become a feature of ordinary life. Finally, although Milton, like Grotius, was committed to the principle of natural sociability, he was unusually severe in his restriction of the duty of truthfulness to our neighbors: If, then, we are commanded to speak the truth only to our neighbour, it is clear that we are not forbidden to tell lies, as often as need be, to those who have not earned the name of neighbor. If anyone disagrees, I should like to ask him which of the ten commandments forbids falsehood. No doubt he will reply, the ninth. Right then, let him repeat the words of that commandment, and he will no longer disagree with me. For what that commandment forbids is presented as an injury to one’s neighbor, so if a falsehood does not injure one’s neighbor it is certainly not forbidden by that commandment (YP 6.762).

Milton’s aim (not for the first time) was to demonstrate the limited and flawed nature of the Decalogue: on this view, the ninth commandment

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(“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”) was no bar against lying to all and sundry. What light does this throw on Milton’s experiences in Rome? Milton certainly makes it sound like a case of parrhesia; he could not but speak, and told the truth about his religious beliefs “in the most open manner” possible. But the passage in Defensio Secunda needs to be read again in the light of Milton’s stance on lying. The rule of conduct that he laid down for himself was highly elaborate. Firstly, he was never to initiate a conversation about religion because this would risk activating his interlocutor’s right to know his mind. If, however, he was asked about his religion, then his decision was to “dissemble nothing” (“nihil dissimulare”), adding that as a matter of fact he “concealed from no one” (“neminem celavi”) what he was. His speaking out on religion was thus not so much a matter of being unable to contain himself as of choosing not to conceal what he was entitled to conceal had he so wished. For, as we have seen, when speaking to someone who is not your neighbor, there is no duty of truthfulness and hence it does not matter if you lie. The same applies a fortiori to enemies like the Jesuits. So even if Milton did tell the truth about himself in the end, this was only after first deciding whether or not he was going to dissimulate or lie outright. His defense of the orthodox faith was emphatically not a spontaneous outburst of fearless speech, or an irresistible outpouring of charismatic utterance. In that sense, he was not a candidate for martyrdom. And it is worth dwelling on this point, if only because commentators on this episode have focused on whether or not Milton did what he said he did rather than analyzing the complex nature of the behavior he attributes to himself. The Roman episode serves to underline a broader point: in the early modern period, speaking “with a fearlesse and communicative candor” was always fraught with difficulty. But it also suggests that while Milton idealized parrhesiastic speech, he was more measured in what he himself said and did. When England became another Rome after the Restoration – a persecuting state in which it was dangerous to dissent from orthodoxy – he submitted all his major works – Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and The History of Britain – to the censor, and made no attempt at all to publish De Doctrina Christiana. He may have written warmly about fearless speech, but was himself much more circumspect in practice – more Signor Arrigo, perhaps, than Seraph Abdiel. Or, we might even say, more Stephen Greenblatt than Michel Foucault.

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No t e s 1 Nietzsche in fact owned two copies of the 1869 edition, both annotated; see Martin A. Ruehl, “‘An Uncanny Re-Awakening’: Nietzsche’s Renascence of the Renaissance out of the Spirit of Jacob Burckhardt,” Nietzsche on Time and History, ed. Manuel Dries (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 232–72 (at 242). 2 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London: Penguin, 2004), 99. 3 Ruehl, “‘An Uncanny Re-Awakening’,” 242–3. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 69, 73. 5 This is notwithstanding the fact that Nietzsche later dismissed his essay as juvenile while Burckhardt (somewhat disingenuously) sought to distance himself from the suggestion that his book had fueled Nietzsche’s fascination with men of violence (Gewaltmenschen). See Thomas H. Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s View of the Value of Historical Studies and Methods,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65.2 (2004): 301–22 (especially 309–11); and Ruehl, “‘An Uncanny Re-Awakening’,” 231–2. 6 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. I, 102. 7 See Anthony K. Jensen, “Geschichte or Historie? Nietzsche’s Second Untimely Meditation in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Philological Studies,” Nietzsche on Time and History, ed. Dries, 13–29; Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 76–100. 8 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 60, 72, 75, 76, 122. 9 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, xxi. 10 For an especially cogent account of the phenomenon, see David Norbrook, “Life and Death of Renaissance Man,” Raritan 8 (1989): 89–110. See also Foucault’s essay on “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 76–100. 11 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 60. 12 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 79, 103. 13 Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, with a new foreword by A. A. Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 11. 14 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 116–18. 15 Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing, Too (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 259. 16 It is telling that in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), Stephen Greenblatt is mentioned only once. 17 See, for example, the section on “Historicisms” in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), which reprints an extract from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975)

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Dz e l z a i n i s alongside extracts from Louis Montrose’s essay, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” and Greenblatt’s essay on “Shakespeare and the Exorcists” (549–66, 584–91, 592–620). Frank Lentricchia, “Foucault’s Legacy: A New Historicism?” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 235. Greenblatt himself disavowed “the supposed argument that any resistance is impossible” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 166. Lentricchia, “Foucault’s Legacy,” The New Historicism, ed. Veeser, 242n.8. For references to Foucault, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 80, 269n.16, 270n.26, 281n.51, 301n.34, 307n.70. Catherine Belsey, “Historicizing New Historicism,” Presentist Shakespeares, ed. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (London: Routledge, 2007), 33, 36. My thanks to Ewan Fernie for drawing this essay to my attention. Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in Veeser, ed., New Historicism, 1–14 (at 1). This essay was given as a lecture at the University of Western Australia, September 4, 1986, and then printed in the following: Southern Review (Australia) 20 (1987), 3–15; Murray Krieger, ed., The Aims of Representation: Subject / Text / History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 257–73 (a slightly revised version, although the relevant paragraph is unaffected); Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 146–59; and The Greenblatt Reader, ed. Michael Payne (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 18–29. See Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 66–74, 215n.23. There is also a reference (221n.2) to Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1978–86). Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lottinger, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 17. See Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,” Political Theory 21 (1993): 198–227. According to the editor, Mark Blasius, “Foucault delivered the [Dartmouth] lectures from texts handwritten in English” and “had given more or less the same papers as the Howison Lectures at Berkeley on October 20–21” (198). Foucault, “Hermeneutics of the Self,” 203–4. The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 353 (“On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress”). Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 1, 161–2. The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, 370. Foucault, “Hermeneutics of the Self,” 205, 223n.4. See Philodemus, On Frank Criticism, trans. David Konstan, Diskin Clay, Clarence E. Glad, Johan C. Thom, and James Ware, Society of Biblical Literature: Texts and Translations (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2007), 1–8. For Foucault on Philodemus and parrhesia in 1982, see Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 386–91.

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See now Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France (1982–1983), ed. Frédéric Gros under the direction of François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana (Paris: Gallimard, Sueuil, 2008); and Le courage de la vérité. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France (1983–1984), ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard, Sueuil, 2009). See also Frédéric Gros, “La parrhêsia chez Foucault (1982–1984),” Le courage de la vérité, ed. F. Gros (Paris: PUF, 2002), 155–66; Paul Allen Miller, “Truth-Telling in Foucault’s ‘Le gouvernement de soi et des autres’ and “Persius I: The Subject, Rhetoric, and Power,” Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy 1 (2006): 30–49 (available online at http://www.parrhesiajournal. org/parrhesia01/parrhesia01_miller.pdf); and Thomas Flynn, “Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the Collège de France (1984),” The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA and London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1988), 102–18. Foucault, Fearless Speech, 170–1. Foucault, Fearless Speech, 12. Foucault, Fearless Speech, 32. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 939–40, 1.2.237–8, 244–5. Foucault, Fearless Speech, 17–18. Foucault, Fearless Speech, 170–1. Professor Paul Rabinow of the Berkeley Anthropology Department also attended regularly. For information about the lectures and their dissemination, I am very grateful to Joseph Pearson of the Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Parkside. The lectures themselves can be audited at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/foucault/parrhesia.html. Joseph Pearson (private communication). A new (1999/2006) version of Pearson’s transcript is available at http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/. For a photocopy of Pearson’s original 121-page typescript, see Bibliothèque du Saulchoir, D213. See Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 35–47, 79–83, 284–8. For example, Professor David Owen (Southampton) gave a copy of the Pearson transcript to Professor James Tully (then at McGill), who gave a copy to Professor Quentin Skinner (Cambridge), who in turn passed it on to his then-graduate student, Dr. David Colclough (now at Queen Mary, London), who in due course produced a monograph on Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). My thanks to Paul Patton, David Owen, Jim Tully, and David Colclough for their help in reconstructing this episode in the circulation of ideas. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 1–3. The chronology of Foucault’s visits to California is as follows: April–May 1975 (Berkeley: at the invitation of the French Department); May 1976 (Berkeley and Stanford: conferences); October 1979 (Stanford: Tanner Lectures [in English]; conference at Sacramento); October 1980 (Berkeley: Howison Lectures in Philosophy

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48 49 50

Dz e l z a i n i s [in English]); October 1981 (Los Angeles, USC: symposium); April–May 1983 (Berkeley: Regents’ Lecture [in English]); October–November 1983 (Berkeley: six lectures [in English] on the “Discourse of Truth” under the auspices of the French Department; lecture [in French] on Kant’s “Was heisst Aufklärung?” in the Philosophy Department; conference at Santa Cruz). Foucault only came to a fixed arrangement about teaching at Berkeley in 1983: see James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: Harper Collins, 1993), 344; David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993), 462. Professor Greenblatt does not recall attending or not attending the Fall 1983 lectures, although he went to earlier seminars and lectures conducted in French, which, on the basis of the previously given chronology, would have been in 1975 or 1976 (private communication). Professor Gallagher likewise does not recall attending or not attending the Fall 1983 lectures (private communication). My thanks to Professors Greenblatt and Gallagher for responding to my questions. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven, CT and London, 1953–82), vol I., 802–3. This is the Yale edition, hereafter cited as YP. Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001), 128. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, rev. 2nd ed. (Harlow and New York: Longman, 2007), 281. Hereafter cited in the text by book and lines number(s). See Foucault, Fearless Speech, 77–85. See Kenneth J. E. Graham, The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). “Romam autem reversurum, monebant Mercatores se didicisse per literas parari mihi ab Jesuitis Anglis insidias, si Romam reverterem; eo quod de religione nimis libere loquutus essem. Sic enim mecum statueram, de religione quidem iis in locis sermones ultro non inferre; interrogatus de fide, quicquid essem passurus, nihil dissimulare. Romam itaque nihilo minus redii: quid essem, si quis interrogabat, neminem celavi; si quis adoriebatur, in ipsa urbe Pontificis, alteros prope duos menses, orthodoxam religionem, ut antea, liberrime tuebar: Deoque sic volente, incolumis Florentiam rursus perveni.” From The Works of John Milton, ed. F. A. Patterson et al., 18 vols. in 21 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–8), 8.124. Hereafter cited as CM. Sir Henry Wotton, Reliquiae Wottonianae (London, 1672), 356. See Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 99–100. See Diana Trevino Benet, “The Escape from Rome: Milton’s Second Defence and a Renaissance Genre,” in Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, ed. Mario Di Cesare (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), 29–49.

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51 Heinrich Schlier, “Παρρησια, παρρησιαζομαι,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel et al., 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdman, 1964–76), 5.882. 52 John Milton, The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, rev. 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 297. 53 Johannes Wolleb, Compendium Theologiae Christianae (Oxford, 1657), 323–4. Milton, however, pairs gravitas with levitas and taciturnitas with loquacitas (CM 17.320). 54 Johannes Wolleb, The Abridgment of Christian Divinitie (London, 1660), 421–2; Wolleb, Compendium, 325. 55 “Mendacium vulgo definitur, quo FALSUM ANIMO FALLENDI VERBIS FACTISVE SIGNIFICATUR” (CM, 17.298; cf. Wolleb, Compendium, 321); “A lye is, when a false thing is signified by words or deeds, with a purpose to deceive” (Wolleb, Abridgment, 416). 56 Wolleb, Abridgment, 417 (Wolleb, Compendium, 321). 57 “Quid si igitur mendacium hoc modo definiamus? MENDACIUM” (CM 17.300). 58 See Alberico Gentili, De Iure Belli Libri Tres, ed. C. Phillipson, trans. J C. Rolfe, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1933), 1.228–54; Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 3.1185–1230. 59 Hugo Grotius, The Illustrious Hugo Grotius Of the Law of Warre and Peace (London, 1654), 494; cf. Grotius, Rights, ed. Tuck, 3.1212–14 (III.I.XI). 60 Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium (London, 1660), 83–4 (third pagination). 61 Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, 84 (third pagination); cf. Grotius, Rights, ed. Tuck, 3.1215 (III.I.XII). 62 Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, 86–7 (third pagination); cf. Grotius, Rights, ed. Tuck, 3.1216–17 (III.I.XIV).

V

Gendering Historicism

10

“You shall be our generalless”

Fashioning Warrior Women from Henrietta Maria to Hillary Clinton Laura Lunger Knoppers Hillary would do much better being named Health Czarina, or (my preference) Attorney Generalissima.

– Eikyu Saha, Weblog, Daily Kos, June 2008

Henrietta Maria, Generalissima of all the Traitours in England, Scotland, and Ireland. – Mercurius Britanicus, September 8, 1645

The 2008 U.S. presidential primaries showed a hotly contested and closely followed race that seemed sure to prove historical, with either the first female or the first African-American candidate put forward by a major party. The media blitz stirred up by the war of words on the Democratic side alone was unprecedented, including reporting on major television networks, cable news, television talk shows, and print journalism, as well as an active Internet presence, from news Web sites to a veritable army of bloggers. The gender unease elicited by Hillary Clinton and her “sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits” is reflected in a sobriquet deployed in some of these blogs: “generalissima.” After a difficult Democratic debate early in the primary, one blogger wrote that “The Clinton Inc apparatus is clanking towards a vast left-wing conspiracy to cover up the Generalissima’s vicious boo-boo.”1 Still, in the thick of the primaries, one blogger thus queried a New York Times column written by Princeton economist and Clinton supporter, Paul Krugman: “So, Paul, if ‘[w]e should ask why anyone who didn’t raise questions about the war . . . or . . . acted as a cheerleader for this march of folly . . . should be taken seriously . . . [on] . . . matters of national security,’ why would we even think about supporting Generalissimo [sic] Hillary Clinton?”2 Even after Clinton had conceded the nomination to Barack Obama, another blogger, under the caption “Generalissima Clinton,” dissected Clinton’s underestimation of Obama in terms of battle: “She prepared as though she were attacking Grenada and found out she was engaging the likes of the Soviet Union. . . . If this 237

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were actually war instead of its somewhat lesser violent form, politics, the end result of her campaign would have us all speaking Russian.”3 As the intraparty contest gave way to fence-mending, and Obama pondered what role might best suit Clinton and please her many supporters, another blogger responded to speculation on a vice-presidential role by opining that “Hillary would do much better being named Health Czarina, or (my preference) Attorney Generalissima.”4 Indeed, one finds “generalissima” an epithet of choice not only in the heat of the American presidential primaries but in other instances in which women have gained positions of power. Commentators give the label not only to now-Secretary of State Clinton, but to Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1979–1990),5 Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (2007–2011),6 Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Secretary of State (2005–2009),7 Jane Campbell, Democratic mayor of Cleveland (2002–2006),8 and Martha Rainville, who ran for Vermont’s only seat in the House as a Republican in 2008.9 (Rainville, it is worth noting, is the only one of these women with military experience, as a former Vermont National Guard Adjutant General and retired Air Force Major General.) Bloggers who conjure up a threatening female martial figure, transgressive and violating implicit boundaries, would have little reason to think of the English civil wars and their aftermath. But the first recorded usage of the term “generalissima” comes from the 1640s and Henrietta Maria, controversial French Catholic queen of Charles I. The gendered history of the usage of the term “generalissima” – its origins with Henrietta Maria as well as Margaret Cavendish’s “generalless” in her closet drama, Bell in Campo – provides an apt point for rethinking historicism, its usefulness, limitations, past practices, and future directions.10 If early twenty-first-century bloggers would likely have no familiarity with the origins of “generalissima,” uncovering its early uses opens up new diachronic conversation. But tracing mid-seventeenth-century polemical and literary uses of generalissima (and the closely related generalless) also reconstitutes an important and polemical strand of history writing – and rewriting – in circumstances of war, exile, and restoration. Twenty-five years after Louis Montrose’s call to examine the “historicity of texts and the textuality of history,”11 have historicist approaches gone far enough? Or have they gone too far? No one would expect current-day bloggers to be writing objective history somehow purged of their own opinions. Most of the citings of Generalissima Clinton sought to sway political opinion in a highly contested American primary or its aftermath. Bringing a suspicious eye from

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the new media of blogging to seventeenth-century polemical print, we shall see how a printed text central to the English Revolution has been too readily taken as a window on civil war history, while a fantastical literary drama has been, despite important recent work, still too removed from polemical civil war history. Closer examination shows that The Kings Cabinet Opened, the notorious print publication of the king’s letters after the battle of Naseby in June 1645, deploys Henrietta Maria’s joking description of herself as a “generalissima” to construct the character of a warrior woman, larger than life and more threatening. In turn, Margaret Cavendish, former maid of honor to the queen and royalist exile, boldly engages polemical print in the aggrandized figure of Lady Victoria, the “generalless,” to rewrite civil war history for the queen, for her own husband, the Duke of Newcastle, and for herself. H e n r i e t ta M a r i a a n d

the k ings c abinet opened

The first recorded instance of the term “generalissima” occurs in The Character of an Oxford Incendiary, a highly polemic attack in 1643 on high churchmen and the royalist court that had settled in at Oxford University.12 An Oxford incendiary, the writer charges, “is the excrement of ill-govern’d Monarchy; the vast volume of Treason wrap’t up in an Epitome; one that feeds the Vulture Prerogative with the Carkasse of the Common-wealth, that it may disgorge into his own Coffers; and makes a Mule (to say no worse) of Majesty, to carry him through all his own private designes against the Publick” (2). After a scathing denunciation of various churchmen under Charles I, the writer then turns to “the Courtpageants,” bringing the queen with great drama onto the printed page: “Who comes next? What, Henrietta Maria! Sure our Incendiary is an Hermaphrodite, and admits of both Sexes: The Irish Rebels call Her their Generalissima; what Shee willed they acted: Shee set them on worke, and they pay themselves their wages out of the Protestants estates” (5). The attack links the queen with the Irish Catholics who revolted in November 1641, killing hundreds of Protestant settlers (reported as thousands or tens of thousands) and setting off panic and anti-Catholic hysteria in England. The event hardened opinion against the king, as the Catholic queen was thought by many to be complicit in the rebellion, and some of the Irish did indeed call themselves the Queen’s Army. The satirist, however, magnifies the queen into a cross-dressed and threatening figure of mythic proportions: “Because the Pope is turned out of dores, She makes the Fatall Sisters and Furies of her Privy-Councell, and proceeds so meritoriously

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manfull, that Kenelme Digby [a courtier who converted to Catholicism] consults now with His Holinesse, to have her set in the Rubrick, by the name of Saint Nemesis in Breeches” (5). The “generalissima” queen of all traitors will be written into the Catholic liturgy as a kind of parodic saint: “Saint Nemesis in Breeches.” As this polemical context suggests, although modern scholars have straightforwardly cited Henrietta Maria’s self-description as “her shee Majestie Generalissima,” the queen would almost certainly have not used the term seriously. Rather, she uses the term as a self-deprecatory joke in a private letter to her husband that is used as evidence against her when the letters are captured and published by Parliament after the battle of Naseby in June 1645. Historians and literary scholars agree that the publication of the king’s correspondence in The Kings Cabinet Opened crucially shifted public opinion against the king during the English civil wars.13 Valuable studies have examined how the letters evinced the king’s bad faith in negotiating with Parliament, his sympathies with and concessions to Catholics, and, above all, gender disorder with an uxorious king and domineering Catholic queen.14 Yet scholars have tended to echo the Parliament’s own rhetorical language of revelation and disclosure, without attending to the process by which the letters were translated, deciphered, sorted, selected, arranged, and, crucially, omitted. Even apart from its tendentious Preface and Annotations, The Kings Cabinet Opened reshaped the royal letters, framing the king as uxorious and untrustworthy and the queen as domineering, threatening, and martial. The “generalissima” reference comes as the culmination of a carefully constructed and hyperbolic character.15 The queen as “generalissima,” then, was part of the printed production of the royal letters, which were sorted, translated, and selected by a special joint parliamentary committee, read aloud to a crowd at Common Hall, London, put on public display, and expeditiously put into print.16 Of the thirty-nine letters published in The Kings Cabinet Opened, six are written by Henrietta Maria. The Kings Cabinet Opened places the queen’s letters at the center of the work, as if to heighten the effect of the hidden danger in the center of the king’s cabinet. The letters are not printed in chronological order: rather, they begin and end with the martial queen. Henrietta Maria, recently returned from Holland bringing men and munitions for the royalist cause, writes the first letter to Charles from York on March 30, 1643, informing him that “the Rebells have quitted Tadcaster upon our sending forces to Whetherby, but they are returned with twelve hundred men; we send more forces to drive them out. . . . Between this and

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tomorrow night we shall know the issue of this businesse; and I will send you an expresse” (28). The second printed letter by Henrietta Maria comes a full year later after the queen had been reunited with Charles, had spent time at Oxford, and, seriously ill and pregnant, once again fled Oxford, on the verge of leaving England for France and more than fifteen years exile. Henrietta Maria writes from Bath on April 21, 1644. Far from the martial figure with which the sequence began, this letter evinces a seriously ill queen and, as such, is one of the very few references in the printed letters to the queen’s failing health: “I finde my self so ill, as well in the ill rest that I have, as in the encrease of my Rhume. I hope that this dayes rest will doe mee good” (29). No other letters are printed from the spring of 1644 (a time of illness, childbirth, and further complications, as well as dangerous travel through England and to France). The Kings Cabinet Opened does print three of Henrietta Maria’s letters from early 1645, after the ailing queen had arrived back in Paris. All contain provocative political content. One letter seems likely to have been chosen for the passages in which the queen urges her husband “that you do not abandon those who have served you, for fear they do forsake you in your need ” (30). The letter also makes explicit whom she means, as the queen cautions her husband against “strictnesse against the Catholicks” (ibid). Finally, the last printed letter is that of June 27, 1643, in which Henrietta Maria informs her husband that she carries with her “3000. Foote, 30. Companyes of Horse and Dragoones, 6. peeces of Cannon, and 2. Morters” (33). Having named the commanders of the various units of foot or horse, she concludes, tongue-in-cheek, with own role as “her shee Majestie Generalissima, and extreamely diligent, with 150 wagans of Baggage to governe, in case of Battell” (ibid).17 The comment, in other words, is a self-deprecatory joke. Yet, carefully placed as part of a tendentiously framed and ordered arrangement of selected letters and papers, the reference seems to epitomize the threatening, hostile, and implacable warrior queen. While this letter is given a central place in The Kings Cabinet Opened, Parliament omits letters in which the queen details hardship or professes to be serving her husband, as well as letters on her dangerous illness in the spring of 1645. One such omitted letter also comes from the summer of 1643, when on July 9, the queen writes the king of the hardships they are enduring. In this letter, the queen, writing to her own “deare hearte,” recounts the royalist Army’s victory at Burton and writes of the soldiers’ being wearied and weighed down with plunder.18 She also mentions her

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own weariness and ill health, after much marching and poor diet: “We have bin ten dayes without eating any flesh except the last day we meete wth some could flesh; and from Newark hither I dare say I have not slept three houres in one night.”19 Despite her exhaustion, however, Henrietta Maria insists on her loyalty and desire to serve her husband: “but all this is pleasure to me in regard it is for you; and to let you see by all my actions that I have no delight but to serve you.”20 As such, the letter offers a very different image of the queen. Other letters captured by Parliament and still in the parliamentary archives, but not printed in The Kings Cabinet Opened, give details of the queen’s bad health after she returned to France in July 1644. Far from being a dominating generalissima, Henrietta Maria in the early spring of 1645 was so physically weakened as to be unable to write, depending on her close aide Henry Jermyn to communicate with the worried Charles. In the first letter, written (in cipher) on April 21, 1645, Jermyn informs Charles that the “Q[ueen] hath beene ill thease Days of an ague wch is the cause she writes not to your M[ajesty].”21 Jermyn goes on to reassure the king that he “need be in no pain for Q[ueen] for their is no appearance of much trouble to her or any danger.”22 On May 5, Jermyn writes another coded letter that was likewise captured by Parliament, but again not published. In this case, Jermyn expresses more optimism regarding the queen’s health: “I write this with much more comfort then I did the last to your Matie[.] [T]he Queene is now recovered of all her distempers only their remaines a little cough and looseness wch are nether of danger nor much trouble she is still very weake so that your M. will receave nothing from her this weeke[;] wee are in great hope that this sickness wch hath beene a very sharp one will have donn her good for her former indispositions.”23 Similarly, on May 12, Jermyn reports that the “Queens health mends dayly butt she is yet too weake to give your Maty an account of itt by her owne hand[;] some little cough remaines that keeping her from sleeping a nights makes her strength returne but slowly.”24 Jermyn adds that they have “receaved of late cheirfull newes from all parts concerning your Matys affaires” and that “nothing contributes so much as that to her health.”25 These omitted letters, then, present a very different image of the queen, as a loyal consort who supports her spouse despite considerable pain and physical suffering. With the details of her declining, at times desperate, health situation excluded from The Kings Cabinet Opened, Henrietta Maria emerges as an aggressive and dangerous martial figure and political

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conspirator. At the same time, the king’s repeated queries seem to evince his uxoriousness, his placing the private sphere above the public and his allowing himself to be swayed by a popish, foreign queen. In the print firestorm that followed the publication of the royal couple’s letters, the generalissima was one polemical touchstone. The Annotations to The Kings Cabinet Opened itself depicted the queen as an enemy to king and country: “The Queen appeares to have been as harsh, and imperious towards the King . . . as she is implacable to our Religion, Nation, and Government” (44). The parliamentary Three Speeches Spoken at a Common-Hall (1645) sums up the whole of the queen’s letters in telling terms: “The next are the Queens Letters to the King; in them you may see Her unwearied indeavours by Sea and Land to raise Forces against the Parliament to destroy it, you see she marcheth in the head of an Army, and calls her self the Generalissima.”26 Marchamont Nedham, who devoted several issues of his newsbook Mercurius Britanicus to raillery on the letters, includes pointed comments on the generalissima reference in the September 1–8, 1645 issue.27 For Nedham, the queen’s letters “speake mischiefe in as plaine words (though not in so large a manner) as the [king’s]” (857). To heighten the effect, he presents the queen as a dramatic character entering the stage: “and now enter Henrietta Maria, Generalissima of all the Traitours in England, Scotland, and Ireland, for they do but play her Game” (858). Nedham depicts a queen who wears the breeches, opposes Parliament, is in league with foreign and Catholic enemies, and dominates her husband through her pernicious counsel. Nedham quotes the generalissima passage at length (albeit leaving out the final clause that reveals it to be a self-deprecatory joke), followed by extensive commentary: Heighday, the Town is ours now, as they say in the Proverbe; for she stiles her self Generalissima, and next to her self, Harry [Henry Jermyn]: But were we not much beholding to our deare neighbours of Holland, that Ship’t away all this, for England under the name of the Queenes Baggage? I was the more willing to set down this part of the Letter, that you may see how conscientiously they provided for us in making our Queen such a Hogan Mogan Princesse, that she made no reckoning to swallow up us and our Religion, in that prodigious title of Mary by the help of Holland Generalissima, &c. (860).

Linked with popery and the apparent violation of public and political spaces, the epithet “generalissima” becomes part of civil war polemic, used to epitomize Henrietta Maria’s transgressions as a woman and a wife.

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bell in ca mpo

Failing to recognize the deliberate construction of the queen as a threatening woman warrior, a generalissima, scholars have also failed to recognize the boldness and full pertinence of one contemporary literary response: Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo.28 When Margaret Cavendish, exiled in Paris and then in Antwerp with her husband William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, wrote a closet drama that focuses on a Lady Victoria as “generalless” who reverses her husband’s military losses and is honored with a magnificent triumph, she is doing much more than generating creatures out of her own fancy. Rather, Cavendish – who, as is well known, joined the court of Queen Henrietta Maria at Oxford and traveled with her into exile, before meeting and marrying Newcastle – is writing and rewriting civil war history, in bolder and more engaged form than has been recognized.29 The sprawling, fantastic, and multi-plotted Bell in Campo helps us examine both the usefulness – and some of the limits – of tracing historical models and antetypes, returning us to selffashioning, playfulness, and the literary imagination. Bell in Campo seems designed to showcase and aggrandize the Lady Victoria and her army of “Heroickesses.” Early in the action, Lady Victoria expostulates with her husband, the Lord General, to be allowed to accompany him on campaign, as he seeks to defend the Kingdom of Reformation against the Kingdom of Faction. While the Lord General at first demurs, he eventually agrees and Lady Victoria comes along, with numerous other women who follow her example. As soon as battle threatens, however, the men relegate the women to a garrison town, much to their indignation. Left behind in camp ostensibly for her own safety, Lady Victoria marshals an army of thousands of women, offering to show them rigorous martial discipline: “let us practice I say, and make these fields as schools of martial arts and sciences, so shall we become learned in their disciplines of war, and if you please to make me your tutoress, and so your generalless, I shall take the power and command from your election and authority” (48–49). The women embrace Lady Victoria as their leader: “You shall be our generalless, our instructeress, ruler and commanderess, and we will everyone in particular, swear to obey all your commands, to submit and yield to your punishments, to strive and endeavour to merit your rewards” (49). Lady Victoria sets out a rigorous program of training, mandating that the women constantly wear armor, maintain a diet of bread and water while on watch, remain entrenched abroad rather than lying in the garrison town, and be constantly “employed in some masculine

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action” (54) such as throwing the bar, wrestling, running, vaulting, or riding, as well as undertaking thrice-weekly training in ranks, files, and figures. This fantastical training pays off when the women rescue the men from defeat in battle, rushing in with a charge “so hot and furious,” that they “did not only rout this army of Faction, killing and wounding many, and set their own countrymen at liberty, and recovered their losses, and gained many spoils, and took numbers of prisoners of their enemies with bag and baggage, but they pursued those that fled into their trenches, and beat them out of their works, and took possession thereof, where they found much riches” (85). Although at first embarrassed and ungracious, the men eventually acknowledge the female army’s valor, promising the women fame and addressing them extravagantly as “You goddesses on Earth, who have the power and dominion over men, ’tis you we worship and adore” (92). Their capitulation sets up Lady Victoria for a lavish and spectacular triumph, in which she is praised for having brought “peace[,] safety and conquest to this kingdom by your prudent conduct and valiant actions, which never any of your sex in this kingdom did before you” (116). How are we to read this dramatic account? While early scholars made much of Cavendish’s fantasized self-representations, more recent scholars have noted that Cavendish would have been familiar with a female heroic mode that ranged from earlier French and English literature, art, and history to such contemporary monarchs as Anne of Austria and Christina of Sweden.30 Finally, scholars cite Henrietta Maria’s self-description as “shee Majestie Generalissima” and her entry into Oxford in July 1643 as the female heroic mode in which Cavendish participates.31 The term “generalless,” used repeatedly in the play, is distinctive and unusual, signaling a link between Cavendish and the closely related term for Henrietta Maria, “generalissima.”32 Indeed, Cavendish’s own future husband, the Duke of Newcastle, accompanied the queen back to Oxford after her return from Holland and led royalist forces as General until his self-imposed exile after defeat at the Battle of Marston Moor. Yet how does the historical referent help us read the play? How does the play engage and respond, rather than simply allude to instances of heroic female warriors? Does the historical context help account for textual cruxes or seeming anomalies in form and content? What remains, to cite Marshall Grossman’s query elsewhere in this volume, after the historical facts have been extracted from the literary text? On the one hand, it is worth pondering whether previous scholars on Cavendish’s Bell in Campo have been historicist enough. That is, despite

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the recent inclination to cite Henrietta Maria, this has been with direct reference to the letter that the queen wrote to her husband and to dramatic, literary, and civil war exemplars of heroic women. Scholars have not, however, taken fully into account the significance of the fact that the generalissima reference was, as we have seen, a negative tool, part of the published text of The Kings Cabinet Opened and the ensuing print debate.33 Hence Cavendish is not so much participating in a tradition of the femme forte that includes her own heroic queen as responding to civil war news and polemic, defending the queen and the royalist cause. While modern scholars cite “generalissima” as a transparent, positive term, its origins in polemical print, as we have seen, show a very different picture. Henrietta Maria as “generalissima” was staged in print as a threat to rally public opinion; her martial endeavors brought not triumph but charges of treason. Indeed, Cavendish turns the parliamentary strategy in The Kings Cabinet Opened on its head. Bell in Campo attributes fantastical influence and actions to Lady Victoria and her Amazonian army, but to give credit, not blame, commendation, not charges of treason. Such a context helps account for the hyperbole of the Generalless’s actions and speeches and her concern with reputation. Recognizing the polemical context in which generalissima/generalless appears also illumines the function of what might seem extraneous aspects of Bell in Campo. Long and multiple subplots show that women who stay at home and do not serve as loyal wives in warfare cause much more trouble and disorder than the warrior women. The reactions of women who do not want to follow their husbands into war serve to heighten the virtues of Lady Victoria. For example, in response to her husband’s brusque directive, Madam Ruffell refuses to go “with a knapsack behind me as your trull” (41); she insists that she will “not disquiet my rest with inconveniences, nor divert my pleasures with troubles, nor be affrighted with the roaring cannons, nor endanger my life with every pot-gun, nor be frozen up with cold, nor stew’d to a jelly with heat” (41–42). When her husband, Captain Ruffell, threatens to replace her with a laundry maid, Madam Ruffell rejoins with the threat of riding with “my gentlemanusher in my coach.” While Lady Victoria might be viewed as transgressive for participating in war, Madam Ruffell shows that the true disorder occurs within the home, declaring that she will be “Generalissimo myself at home” in a battle for her sexual favors (42). Two long subplots detail further disorder when wives stay at home behind their husbands. Lady Passionate stays behind reluctantly, mourns

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extravagantly when her husband is killed in battle, but then foolishly remarries the youngest and most handsome of her suitors, who promptly appropriates her property, squanders her wealth, flaunts his mistresses, and mocks and abuses her. Madam Janquil, also forced to stay behind and also widowed in war, mourns her husband with lavish vows, builds a mausoleum in his memory, and locks herself away to pine to death. Finally, the triumph of Lady Victoria can be seen to reach back to a positive celebration of the martial endeavor for which Henrietta Maria was impeached by Parliament: the entry into Oxford in July 1643.34 The queen’s “most triumphant and magnificent entrie” into Oxford, trumpets sounding, soldiers standing on guard, and streets “thronged with spectators to behold her,”35 is echoed and amplified as Cavendish’s Lady Victoria enters “in a gilt chariot drawn with eight white horses, four on abreast, the horses covered with cloth of gold, and great plumes of feathers on their heads” (116). The triumph granted to the “Generalless” in Bell in Campo provides a potent and pointed counterimage to parliamentary attacks on the queen, while also deploying some of the queen’s own tongue-in-cheek humor that both seventeenth-century contemporaries and twentiethcentury scholars have missed. “S uc h fa s h ions a s I di d i n v e n t m y s e l f”: C av e n di s h a n d s e l f -fa s h ion i ng Yet as we reach the grand finale of the drama, the spectacular payoff for the spectacular deeds of the heroic Generalless, we also reach a textual moment that most scholars, including those who bring a historicist lens, have found deeply unsatisfying. Lady Victoria, given the opportunity to make what conditions she will, does not appear to change the public world of men, war, and politics in which she has so successfully intervened. Rather, the changes allotted to women seem surprisingly limited.36 The concessions include that women shall be mistresses of their houses, sit above their husbands at the table, keep the purse, order the servants, buy what they will, claim jewels and household furniture as their own, wear what fashion clothes they will, eat whatever they desire, go about freely to urban entertainments, and be of their husband’s counsel. Our fresh historicist lens of civil war polemic and the controversial reputation of Henrietta Maria here can – to some extent – help resolve the textual anomaly. At its most domestic, the drama is also its most political. The pernicious effect of Henrietta Maria’s counsel is repeated in civil war texts, including the parliamentary Annotations to The Kings Cabinet

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Opened: “It is plaine, here, first that the Kings Counsels are wholly managed by the Queen; though she be of the weaker sexe, borne an Alien, bred up in a contrary Religion, yet nothing great or small is transacted without her privity & consent” (43) and “The Queens Counsels are as powerfull as commands” (43). The Lady Victoria, in contrast, is a loyal wife whose counsel does not threaten but saves the Kingdom of Reformation. Yet many of the provisions in Bell in Campo seem to apply not to the queen, but playfully and wittily to Margaret herself. In recognizing the important historical analogues to the character of Lady Victoria, we may be in danger of overlooking the self-fashioning of Cavendish herself. In countering early biographers and critics who read Cavendish’s characters as grandiose alter egos, recent historicist scholarship has perhaps overcorrected, so that we now need to factor in not only political and historical analogues but imagination and wit, including playacting. That the Lord General in Bell in Campo is a transparent figure for William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, is recognized but seldom discussed in criticism focused on the femme forte. The Lady Victoria, who comes in gloriously to rescue her husband, the Lord General, by carrying out fabulous martial deeds, can serve not only as a possible figuration of the queen, but as an imaginative alter ego for Cavendish herself. The lavish costuming and accoutrements of Lady Victoria in triumph – her “coat all embroidered with silver and gold,” buskins and sandals, garland of laurel, curled and flowing hair, and crystal bolt (116) – evoke not only the extravagance of Caroline masques but Cavendish’s own flamboyant dress and her avowed interest from childhood on with “fashions” and self-fashioning. In The True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life, Cavendish describes the great delight that she took “in attiring, fine dressing, and fashions[,] especially such fashions as I did invent myself, not taking that pleasure in such fashions as was invented by others. Also I did dislike anyone should follow my fashions, for I always took delight in a singularity.”37 While historicist scholars have rightly moved away from the singularity of “mad Madge” to resituate Cavendish in her political and social milieu, her delight in “fashions” should not be forgotten. Indeed, while Bell in Campo may superimpose the queen and her former lady-in-waiting, holding them in balance, it is worth thinking about whether Lady Victoria / Margaret Cavendish does not so much rehabilitate as replace Henrietta Maria. The queen’s possible missteps – endangering her retinue by returning for her dog during a dramatic escape, and wishing herself elsewhere when under fire – are raised as reasons for Lady Victoria not to go into war, but then swept into the past by

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the heroic Generalless. In pressing too hard for historical context, we may be in danger of missing the imaginative, fantastic, and utopian aspects of the drama, and Cavendish’s literary use of make-believe and wit. That the author herself, as well as her heroine, seeks heroic fame and rescues her husband, albeit not through martial deeds but in print, can be seen more fully in Cavendish’s post-Restoration writing.38 In Cavendish’s 1667 Life . . . of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, written to defend her husband, much criticized for leaving the country after defeat at the battle of Marston Moor and disappointed in the treatment received by the restored king, the generalless disappears. Rather, Cavendish depicts a very different image of Henrietta Maria, who while returning to England with men and munitions nonetheless needs the “conduct” of the male army: “My Lord, after he had received this ammunition, put his army into a condition to march, and having intelligence that the Queen was at sea, with intention to land in some part of the East Riding of Yorkshire, he directed his march, in February 1642, into those parts, to be ready to attend Her Majesty’s landing, who was then daily expected from Holland” (18).39 Cavendish recounts the much-told story of the queen’s coming under fire soon after landing, praising her “undaunted and generous spirit” (18) in this adversity. But, unlike the Generalless in Bell in Campo, Henrietta Maria is very much in need of protection: “My Lord, finding her Majesty in this condition, drew his army near the place where she was, ready to attend and protect her Majesty’s person, who . . . took her journey towards York, whither the whole army conducted her Majesty, and brought her safe into the city” (19). After battles and various maneuvers with his army, Newcastle is called upon a second time to escort the queen, now to Oxford: “her Majesty being resolved to take her journey towards the southern parts of the kingdom, where the king was, [Newcastle] designed first to go from York to Pomfret, whither my Lord ordered the whole marching army to be in readiness to conduct her Majesty, which they did, he himself attending her Majesty in person. And after her Majesty had rested there some small time, she being desirous to proceed in her intended journey, no less then a formed army was able to secure her person” (23). Far from the extravagant prowess of Lady Victoria and her Amazonian forces, Henrietta Maria needs to be protected, and Newcastle obligingly supplies an army, “choosing rather to leave himself in a weak condition . . . than suffer her Majesty’s person to be exposed to danger” (23). Newcastle conducts the queen to Oxford for her own safety, and there is no mention of the queen’s triumphal entry into the city. No “generalless” or “generalissima” appears. Rather, Cavendish’s narration of

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the events constructs Newcastle as heroic general and Henrietta Maria as grateful recipient. Writing her plays in exile in the 1650s, Cavendish could imagine the queen’s cause and her own as one. In Bell in Campo, her own figure is juxtaposed with the queen’s, as she rewrites the fabulous narrative of the Lady Victoria, loyal wife and successful Generalless. Back in England and a world in which the restoration of the monarchy did not bring the expected remuneration of her husband’s losses or restoration of his influence at court, Cavendish no longer sees royalist identities as one. Her queen needs the very protection that Lady Victoria stridently disavowed. And, the role of the flamboyant, heroic, cross-dressing woman seeking fame and redeeming her Lord General husband moves decisively to Margaret herself. Hence, Cavendish’s stagings in print and in person: with flamboyant dressing and theatrical appearances – in Hyde Park, at court, and at the Royal Society. For Samuel Pepys, coming to court on April 11, 1667 with the hopes of catching a glimpse of the Duchess of Newcastle, “The whole story of this Lady is a romance, and all she doth is romantic” (8.163).40 Indeed, Pepys was not alone in his curiosity, as he writes that “There is as much expectation of her coming to Court, that so [many] people may come to see her, as if it were the Queen of Sweden” (8.163–64). On April 26, Pepys got his first direct glimpse of Cavendish: “met my Lady Newcastle going with her coaches and footmen all in velvet; herself (whom I never saw before) as I have heard her often described (for all the town-talk is nowadays of her extravagancies), with her velvet-cap, her hair about her ears, many black patches . . . naked necked, without anything about it, and a black juste-au-corps; she seemed to me a very comely woman – but I hope to see more of her on May-day” (8.186). On the first of May, Pepys goes accordingly to Hyde Park in hopes of seeing the Duchess, “which we could not, she being fallowed and crowded upon by coaches all the way she went, that nobody could come near her; only, I could see she was in a large black coach, adorned with silver instead of gold, and so with the curtains and every thing black and white, and herself in her cap” (8.196). Similarly, John Evelyn, meeting the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle at their house in Clerkenwell on April 18, 1667, was “much pleasd, with the extraordinary fancifull habit, garb, & discourse of the Dutchesse.”41 While the exiled Margaret Cavendish could imagine the queen’s cause and triumph and her own as one, in the disappointing and much more complicated realities of Restoration England, royalist identities fragmented, from each other and from the court. In a return that should have

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been a triumph but felt more like a defeat, Cavendish took to other forms of fantastic – and heroic – display. In her short masculine coat and cap, Cavendish recalled her own heroine, Lady Victoria, who in turn recalled the martial Henrietta Maria, Saint Nemesis in breeches, crossing boundaries in print and in person. The focus on the sartorial, as well as on print, in fashioning warrior women might seem far removed from present-day concerns. But in fact, a brief return to modern-day media and Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State under President Barack Obama, brings familiarity as well as difference. From the 2008 presidential primaries onward, media outlets showed a keen interest in Clinton’s fashion – or, more precisely, her invariable attire in a pantsuit. Web attention to Clinton’s pantsuits continues to proliferate, under titles ranging from “Wearing the Pants” and such questions as “How many pantsuits does Hillary Clinton have in her closet?”42 to “Top Ten Hillary Clinton pantsuits”43 to “Are Power Pantsuits the Solution?”44 In August 2008, Glamour Magazine devoted a two-page spread to the subject “Glamour Magazine Salutes Hillary Clinton’s Rainbow Coalition of Pantsuits.”45 And it is worth noting that Clinton herself called wryly on her “sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits” to join her into pressing on with their shared goals and values, in her speech to the Democratic convention in Denver, Colorado in July 2008. From Henrietta Maria to Margaret Cavendish to Hillary Clinton, we see how history is textually shaped and how fantastic-seeming literature engages closely with printed polemics. Historicizing the gendered uses of the term “generalissima” thus brings new insights into historical context and literary text, as well as illuminating the power of old and new media to fashion public perceptions of prominent women. But such historicizing also underscores the power of those women to fashion themselves and their twenty-first-century worlds in ways that in seventeenth-century England would have seemed sheer imaginative fantasy. No t e s 1 Ben Smith, “Kucinich wants to go mano a mano,” weblog entry, Politico.com, July 13, 2007. 2 “Paul Krugman’s Crusade,” weblog entry, Octopus Grigori blog, February 12, 2008. 3 Mike Picano, “Obama’s Real Experience: His Candidacy,” weblog entry, The Hill’s Pundits Blog, February 25, 2008. 4 Eikyu Saha, “My Math Beats up Clinton Math,” weblog entry, Daily Kos Blog, June 1, 2008.

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5 Sarah Benton, “The Tinpot Generalissima,” review of Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, in New Statesman & Society, November 5; 6:277 (1993): 39–40. 6 Jeff Emanuel, “Now we shall see whether Generalissima Pelosi can take a hint,” weblog entry, Redstate Blog, April 7, 2007. 7 Michael Hirsch, “The Long Goodbye,” Newsweek: The World from Washington, June 12, 2008: “Rice was once Bush’s black-booted generalissima, full of confidence about ‘the birth pangs of a new Middle East.’” www. newsweek.com/2008/06/11/the-long-goodbye.html. 8 “Opposing Wal-Mart makes you a socialist!” weblog entry, The Writing on the Wal, May 23, 2005: “Generalissima Jane Campbellino, partnering with key business leaders to minimize the power of labor unions? Sounds vaguely familiar, no?” 9 Peter Freyne, “Scooter Down, Scudder Up,” weblog entry, Seven Days: Vermont’s Independent Voice, November 2, 2005: “As most observers realize, that will not be good for Welch, though it would be a gift from the gods for our favorite general, Republican Martha Rainville. Generalissima Martha has her ‘exploratory’ committee up and running, and a campaign staffer on duty.” 10 My study thus complements Erin Murphy’s reconsideration in this volume of the relationship between women’s war writings of different moments, in particular how Virginia Woolf uses the writings of Mary Astell and Margaret Cavendish in relation to World Wars I and II. 11 Louis Montrose, “Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 5–12. 12 The Character of an Oxford Incendiary (London, 1643). 13 The Kings Cabinet Opened: Or, Certain Packets of Secret Letters & Papers, Written with the Kings Own Hand, and Taken in His Cabinet at Nasby-Field, June 14. 1645 (London, 1645). In the paragraphs that follow, I draw on my more extended account of the parliamentary “framing” of the royal couple in The Kings Cabinet Opened, in Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), ch. 2. 14 On privacy, secrecy, and revelation in the text, see Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 217–18; and Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writings: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 57–64. On gender transgressions, see Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 122–30; and Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 71–78. On the controversial text as evincing the queen’s unpopularity and a “patriarchal house in disorder” in court and kingdom, see Michelle White,

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

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Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 163–77. Some, albeit not all, of the letters available to the Parliamentary joint committee are extent in the House of Lords Records Office, Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/JO/10/1/183, Main Papers, Naseby Letters, April 3, 1641– June 8, 1645. Indeed, The Kings Cabinet Opened Itself notes that there were other papers “too numerous, and vast, and too much intermixed with other matter of no pertinence for publication at this time” (Sig A4). Nonetheless, scholars on The Kings Cabinet Opened have almost entirely ignored the omitted letters. The one exception is Michelle White’s brief summary in Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars, 165–66. For a valuable early study of the publication, including parliamentary maneuvering and negotiations between the two Houses, see R. E. Maddison, “‘The King’s Cabinet Opened’: A Case Study in Pamphlet History,” Notes and Queries 13.1 (1966): 2–9. The holograph French letter reads (in the queen’s idiosyncratic spelling and interspersed English): “et sa she majeste generalissime et extrememant diligente: avec 150 chariots de bagage pour gouverner en cas de bataille” (HL/PO/ JO/10/1/183/ Letter #5). As with the queen’s other letters, two translations were made, then one was chosen for print. The second translation – “and know she major Generalissimo is extreame dilligent, with 150: cariages for to order in case of battaile” – perhaps loses some of its punch by translating “majeste” as “major” rather than the more provocative “Majestie.” However, while mistaking “sa” for an imperative form of “savoir” (to know), this translation is probably more accurate than the printed version in taking “et” not as “and” but as the phonetic spelling of “est,” “[she] is.” Henrietta Maria almost certainly did not mean to list herself alongside the male commanders, but started a new sentence (with a new main verb) to make a self-conscious joke. I am grateful to Kathryn Grossman for her insights on the French in this letter. HL/PO/JO/10/1/183/ Letter #6, July 9, 1643, Queen to King from Walsall, parliamentary translation. Ibid. Ibid. HL/PO/JO/10/1/183/ Letter #22, April 21, 1645, Henry Jermyn to Charles I from Paris, in cipher. Conveniently for Parliament, Charles had fully deciphered the letter himself. Ibid. HL/PO/JO/10/1/183/ Letter #24, May 5, 1645, Jermyn to Charles I from Paris; this letter has also been fully deciphered on the original. HL/PO/JO/10/1/183/ Letter # 26, May 12, 1645, Jermyn to Charles I from Paris. Ibid. Three Speeches Spoken at a Common-Hall, Thursday the 3. of July 1645 (London, 1645), 17.

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27 Mercurius Britanicus 96 (September 1–8, 1645). On the emergence of newsbooks and public political debate in the civil war period, see Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and on Henrietta Maria in the newsbooks more broadly, see Michelle White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars, ch. 4. 28 All citations from Bell in Campo are taken from Margaret Cavendish, Bell in Campo & The Sociable Companions, ed. Alexandra G. Bennett (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002). 29 On Cavendish’s biography, see Kathleen Jones, A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673 (London: Bloomsbury, 1988); Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (New York: Basic Books, 2002); and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In seeing Cavendish as engaged with a particular print controversy, I build on Marta Straznicky’s reading of royalist Interregnum closet drama as a form of oppositional discourse (Privacy, Playreading and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550–1700 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], ch. 4, on Cavendish). 30 Amy Scott-Douglass argues that Cavendish drew on French women warriors and writers as inspiration for her heroic women (“Enlarging Margaret: Cavendish, Shakespeare, and French Women Warriors and Writers,” in Cavendish and Shakespeare: Interconnections, ed. Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006], 147–78). For Karen Raber, Cavendish’s embrace of prewar theater allows a unique reconceptualization of gender and the public arena of politics and war (Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001], 188–236). Hero Chalmers aligns Cavendish with the femme forte tradition of heroic women associated with French and English court circles (Royalist Women Writers 1650–1689 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004], 16–55). Sophie Tomlinson explores Cavendish’s investment in an ethic of female heroism associated with monarchist culture and, in particular, female acting (Women on Stage in Stuart Drama [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 163–84). 31 Raber cites Henrietta Maria as a heroic model, including the “generalissima” reference (Dramatic Difference, 209–10). Brenda J. Liddy cites the queen in her chapter on Cavendish in Women’s War Drama in England in the Seventeenth Century (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2008), 135–65. Tomlinson points to Henrietta Maria’s “active support of her husband during the Civil War” (Women on Stage, 173). Bennett cites the “generalissima” reference (Bell in Campo, 14), and reproduces the queen’s letter in her Appendix D (217). None of these scholars note that the comment is a joke misinterpreted by Parliament, nor do they consider the original French letter and the tendentious translation. 32 Cavendish, significantly, uses the feminine version of “general,” not the superlative.

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33 One exception is Elizabeth Anne Gross, who explores the drama as recuperating Henrietta Maria’s cultural legacy and expanding domestic roles for women, revising the standards for women’s conduct in wartime, in Domestic Agents: Women, War and Literature in Early Modern England, PhD thesis (The Pennsylvania State University, 2006), 179–217. 34 On Cavendish and the queen’s entry, see Jones, A Glorious Fame, 22; on the masque-like staging of the entry, see Tomlinson, Women on Stage, 173, and Gross, Domestic Agents, 205–07. On politically inflected heroic femininity in the entry and subsequent royalist verse, see Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 46–55. 35 Mercurius Aulicus, July 9–15, 1643, 372–73. 36 Chalmers writes that “Lady Victoria’s heroic actions and high aspirations ultimately win only limited (purely domestic) social concessions from the men” (Royalist Women Writers, 45), while Tomlinson similarly observes that “While the play leaves us in no doubt of the apotheosis of its female hero, the gains won for women through her endeavours are more questionable” (Women on Stage, 174). Raber comments that “To the exile, especially the aristocratic exile, there was no comfort or liberation in dissolving the structures on which power, place, and privilege depended,” going on to characterize Cavendish’s imagination of war as “radical” and of peace as “conservative” (Dramatic Difference, 217). Susan Wiseman likewise writes that “the list of demands returns the play from celebration of heroinism to analysis of women in their domestic relations, as they articulate demands for domestic autonomy which seem petty in comparison to the great triumphs of the Lady Victoria” (“Gender and Status in Dramatic Discourse: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,” in Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 109). Gross notes the political charge of “counsel” (Domestic Agents, 209–10). 37 Margaret Cavendish, The True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life, in The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, ed. C. H. Firth (London: Routledge, 1880), 175. 38 Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 17, asserts that Cavendish’s unusually forthright presentation of herself is the product of the cultural and historical condition of Interregnum royalism. 39 Margaret Cavendish, The Life of William Cavendish, ed. C. H. Firth. Subsequent references are to this edition. 40 Samuel Pepys, Diary, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979–83). All references are parenthetical. 41 John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), vol. III, 478. 42 “Wearing the Pants. What You May Not Know About Hillary Clinton. How many pantsuits does Hillary Clinton have in her Closet? And does she ever wear them in the same combination more than once?” Washingtonpost. com, December 8, 2007.

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43 “Top 10 Hillary Clinton Pantsuits,” weblog, Erik-IGN Blog, February 7, 2008. 44 Kate Betts, “Are Power Pantsuits the Solution?” weblog entry, The Daily Beast, April 14, 2010. 45 “Glamour Magazine Salutes Hillary Clinton’s Rainbow Coalition of Pantsuits,” Glamour Magazine, August 11, 2009.

11

Wartimes

Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writing and Its Afterlives Erin Murphy Allowing women to get shot to death or blown up or mutilated and disfigured in war is horrible. It’s unnecessary. It’s barbaric.

– Tucker Carlson, conservative pundit

Debate it all you want folks, but the military is going to do what the military needs to do. And they are needing to put women in combat. – Michael A. Baumann, Lieutenant Colonel (U.S. Army, retired)

Since the end of the Vietnam War, the number of women in the U.S. military has increased dramatically.1 Even though some may continue to lament the idea of female warriors and women still cannot be assigned to units whose purpose is direct combat, many female soldiers are deployed in combat zones where such distinctions become impossible to maintain.2 These material shifts in the role of women in the armed services have accelerated and begun to become more visible to those of us outside the military since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a result, in U.S. classrooms today, we teach a generation of students who operate under a changing and often unarticulated set of assumptions about gender and warfare.3 The paradoxical silence about women soldiers in the face of these recent changes in the U.S. armed forces supports Simon Barker’s claim that “the history of the relationship between gender and militarism has, in fact, always been an inherently unstable one.”4 In this context, considering the war writing of seventeenth-century women raises challenges and opportunities for scholars of gender. This essay proposes a dual historical analysis as a way to meet some of these challenges and to capitalize on some of these opportunities. Such a method of analysis continues scholarly efforts to enrich our sense of the particular culture of war in which seventeenth-century women wrote, and also extends our understanding of how their writing has been mobilized in other historical moments. 257

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To provide an example of this dual strategy, this chapter reconsiders the importance of the English Civil War to the writing of both Mary Astell and Margaret Cavendish. This reconsideration examines the work of Astell and Cavendish not only in relation to the seventeenth century, but also in relation to their afterlives in Virginia Woolf’s conception of the history of women’s writing, written in the wake of World War I and in anticipation of World War II, as well as Catherine Gallagher’s New Historicist analysis of Cavendish and Astell in “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England.”5 Reassessing Gallagher’s pathbreaking essay in the context of war illuminates the intersection of New Historicism and feminism. It also uncovers the peculiar way in which the legacy of the Vietnam War in both these critical movements indirectly helped obfuscate the importance of the English Civil War to seventeenth-century women writers, even as these movements helped solidify the position of these writers in the literary canon. By considering these authors’ texts in more than one moment, I begin to explore how our historicized accounts of seventeenth-century writers might enable a new set of conversations that would help recover one of feminist criticism’s greatest strengths – its ability to enable conversations across historical boundaries. Rather than a transhistorical feminism that would “diminish or dismiss that which is disparate or diverse,” this interhistorical approach would draw on the rich historical criticism of the past two decades to reconsider the relationship between women’s war writing of different moments without erasing the specificity of any particular moment.6 It will also help us confront the challenge of teaching and writing about women’s war writing in our moment. The brief debates between feminist scholars and New Historicists over the “return to history” in the 1980s gave way to a consensus that future criticism should “be more fully historical, and a fuller historicism depended on the insights of feminism,” a consensus that has informed scholarship on early modern gender and literature for much of the last two decades.7 Refusing the false opposition between feminism and New Historicism, Wai Chee Dimock offered a particularly subtle way forward, one that has echoes in Michael McKeon’s essay (Chapter 2) in this volume. Emphasizing the role of gender in diachronic historical inquiry, Dimock argued “that gender, as a principle of unevenness, will be important for any attempt to conceptualize history, not as a homologous or synchronized formation but as a field of endless mutations and permutations, a field where the temporal nonidentity between cause and effect and the structural nonidentity between system and subject

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quite literally open up a space for alternatives, however visionary and unsustained.”8 In recent years, however, scholars of early modern gender and sexuality have begun to lament that the drive to historicize has outpaced the influence of feminist insights upon historicism, leaving Dimock’s hope that gender could produce a diachronic historical analysis unrealized. One way to address this imbalance would be through the presentism that Andrew Hadfield interrogates elsewhere in this collection via the work of Hugh Grady. As Hadfield points out, however, Grady’s response seems to go too far in another direction: “It risks obliterating any sense of difference and assumes that the past is simply a foreign country where different things take place to which we can have no access and which cannot be translated into the present.”9 The recent work of Frances Dolan provides a more subtle alternative. In describing herself as practicing “presentist historicism,” Dolan reframes the juxtaposition of the native present versus the foreign past: “Critics of presentism frequently warn that we should not let ourselves feel too at home in the past; it’s another country, after all. Frankly, I don’t feel all that at home in the present either. As a consequence, I dwell on the connections between present and past so as to estrange the present rather than domesticate the past.”10 Through “a synchronic juxtaposition of then and now,” Dolan illuminates the fractured nature of the present and produces a more nuanced account of the relation between the past and the present.11 Dolan’s “presentist historicism” offers one way to avoid the unproductive battle between a focus on “then” and a focus on “now,” which characterizes too many discussions of presentism and historicism today. In my essay, I offer another way to resist the “then” versus “now” battle described by Hadfield, by providing an analysis of “then, then, and now.” By multiplying the sites of historical investigation, as well as investigating the way in which those sites represent their own relations to the past, I hope to defamiliarize the relation between “then” and “now” that will help us perform the kind of difficult work described by McKeon. I also hope to address a more concrete institutional consequence of the dominance of historicism in literary studies – the lack of dialogue among colleagues studying different time periods. The enormous gains of historicism have changed the landscape of our work in ways that are both invigorating and frustrating. As scholars of gender produce increasingly specific and complex accounts of their own moments of study, it has become increasingly difficult to talk to those working in other periods, but we now have more to share than ever before. To be clear, I am not advocating a return to a

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transhistorical approach to the categories of “women” or “gender.” Instead, I propose that the nuanced work of literary historians in all periods needs to be mined to create a new conversation across the centuries, calling on us to reconsider seventeenth-century women’s war writing and its many afterlives. I offer the following pages as part of this conversation. “On e l i f e on ly ”: Wo ol f on A s t e l l When Virginia Woolf answered the question “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” in her 1938 Three Guineas, she offered her famously subtle analysis of the politics of education. After trying to imagine how education could teach people to hate the use of force, she concludes that it actually has the opposite effect, as it implicitly leads the educated to support war in order to preserve their power and privilege. Still, she ends up ambivalently advocating women’s education because it provides women the independence from their fathers and husbands they need in order to exercise their “disinterested influence” in opposition to war.12 Woolf roots her advocacy in the assertion that all people yearn for learning, an assertion she tries to support by turning back to the seventeenth century: But so innate in human nature is the desire for education that you will find, if you consult biography, that the same desire, in spite of all the impediments that tradition, poverty, and ridicule could put in its way, existed too among women. To prove this let us examine one life only – the life of Mary Astell.13

Of course, Woolf is not really referring to Astell’s life, but to her famous call for a woman’s educational retirement in her 1694 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Woolf cites Florence Smith’s 1916 book-length study of Astell but does not mention any of Astell’s explicitly political writing, claiming “little is known about her.”14 Unlike so many feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s, however, Smith does discuss the entire body of Astell’s work, diligently including chapters on “Pamphlets on Marriage,” “Religious Tracts,” and “Political Pamphlets” as well as those on “Biography,” “Character and Influence,” and “Educational Writings.”15 Although Smith’s text contains an odd split between her explicit presentist agenda and an antiquarian spirit, she ultimately minimizes the significance of Astell’s writing about subjects other than education: “Her importance, however, to-day, when the religious and political controversies of the seventeenth century have lost their vitality, lies in her suggestion made in A Serious Proposal that a foundation should be established for the education of women.”16 Thus, Smith never takes the next step to consider how all

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those tracts about marriage, religion, and politics might be part of the unsolved “educational and social problems” not just of Astell’s moment, but also of her own.17 Woolf exacerbates Smith’s restricted view of education by ignoring Astell’s other writing completely. In this silent relay between Woolf and Smith, the seventeenth-century experience of war disappears. Woolf uses Astell’s failed call for a women’s educational retirement to establish two crucial elements of her argument about war. The first is the value of education. By plucking Astell out of the seventeenth century, Woolf naturalizes women’s desire for learning as part of their ahistorical humanity. She even goes as far as to claim a special strength and purity for a woman’s wish for education, because it cannot be read as utilitiarian: “And if we reflect that all the professions for which a university education fitted her brothers were closed to her, her belief in the value of education must appear still stronger, since she must have believed in education for itself.”18 If education provided women no material gain, and in fact jeopardized their chances of obtaining security through marriage, their desire for it emerges as “innate,” transcending time and place. Woolf, however, quickly undercuts the transcendence of education through the second point she presents via the “life of Mary Astell.” She notes that Princess Anne considered funding Astell’s project, but that Bishop Burnett dissuaded her because he claimed such a retirement would be too similar to a convent, which would thus encourage Catholicism. With great irony, Woolf reports the lesson of Burnett’s intervention, that education “is not good in all circumstances, and good for all people; it is only good for some people and for some purposes.”19 Thus, Woolf uses the example of Astell to demonstrate that education is always caught up in the politics of a particular time and place. Despite Woolf’s incisive discussion of the politics of education and its uneasy relationship to war, however, she does not reverse her gaze to consider the political stakes of Astell’s plan. Because Woolf weaves many examples into her argument, which includes more than one hundred footnotes, this omission would not be so strange, except for the importance of the English Civil War to Astell’s writing, and the fact that war is the central concern of Three Guineas. Even though Woolf does not attend to the connection between education and war in Astell’s work, A Serious Proposal’s call for women’s education must be understood in relation to the English civil wars. This essay begins to explore not only Woolf’s silence about the importance of the mid-century conflicts to seventeenth-century women writers, but also Astell’s own selective representation of the legacy of the civil wars.

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In doing so, I hope to show that the increasingly rich accounts of these female-authored texts produced by historicists, both old and New, in the last two decades should not be understood as evidence of the impossibility of scholarly inquiry that spans the centuries, but rather as a resource for reconsidering how conversations across the boundaries of periodization might proceed. English women’s writing of the seventeenth century provides a particularly rich site for such a consideration because so many of these texts explicitly reflect on the ways that print constructed the war and its relationship to other moments in time. The understanding of these female authors that reading and writing about war was part of ongoing political battles suggests that a consideration of how and why their war texts are read in different moments is not an anachronistic endeavor, but rather a response provoked by the texts themselves. A s t e l l a n d t h e “M e rc e n a r y S c r i bl e r s” Let us start by examining not the “life of Mary Astell,” but her work. For years, scholarship on Mary Astell worried about the seeming paradoxes of her thought, especially the supposed split between her support of the hierarchy of monarchy and her attacks on hierarchies of gender, most famously articulated in Some Reflections Upon Marriage: “[H]ow much soever Arbitrary Power may be dislik’d on a Throne, Not Milton himself wou’d cry up Liberty to poor Female Slaves, or plead for the Lawfulness of Resisting a Private Tyranny.”20 Since Gallagher’s pivotal intervention, “Embracing the Absolute,” critics have admonished the idea that Astell’s work is paradoxical as anachronistic, arguing instead that her “feminist and Tory commitments can be understood as complementary languages of critique.”21 What has not yet been addressed by this thoughtful historical criticism, however, is Astell’s own mobilization of anachronism. Astell’s “embrace of the absolute” needs to be reexamined in light of her engagement with the English Civil War. By representing her own moment as a repetition of the strife of the mid-century, Astell erased the historical difference between the past and the present in order to influence England’s political future. Astell’s deployment of the figure of “Milton” three decades after John Milton’s death provides a touchstone for an examination of her strategy of anachronism. Scholars have often credited Astell as a particularly perceptive critic of Milton’s supposed republican hypocrisy, but he plays a broader role in her oeuvre.22 In her 1704 An Impartial Enquiry into the

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Causes of Rebellion and Civil War, Astell names Milton as one of “those Mercenary Scriblers” who helped bring about the execution of King Charles I in 1649.23 By representing the turn of the century as haunted by the regicidal politics of Milton and his ilk, Astell’s voice emerged as much from the literature of controversy as it did from the presence of a woman on the throne. In addition to figuring as the ideal hypocritical misogynist, “Milton” provided Astell with an opponent who allowed her to evoke the horror of the civil wars. In her most extensive critique of Milton, Astell quotes Eikonklastes directly: And Milton (who was a better Poet than Divine or Politician) “To have brought the King to Condign punishment, hath not broke the Covenant, but it would have broke the Covenant to have sav’d him. –God hath testify’d by all Propitious and evident Signs, whereby in these latter times he is want to testify what pleases him, that such a solemn and for many Ages unexampled Act of due Punishment, was no mockery of Justice, but a more grateful and well-pleasing Sacrifice.”24

Mocking Milton’s logic, she equates his defense of Charles’ execution with the proposition that “if a Thief meets me on the High-way and goes off with my Purse, therefore he has a right to it, and God approves the action.”25 Taking on Milton’s argument through a particular quotation provides Astell a way to reinforce the monarchy by retroactively combating regicide through the realm of text. She ventriloquizes Milton’s argument in order to give voice to her own. The probable source of Astell’s quotation also suggests her sense of him as a representative figure. Although new editions of Eikonoklastes were issued in the 1690s, the page number Astell cites correlates to the 1649 edition. Astell’s selective citation, however, points to a third possible source – Roger L’Estrange’s The Dissenters Sayings.26 In her 1704 A Fair Way with the Dissenters, Astell explicitly refers her readers to L’Estrange’s text, which reproduced supposedly seditious passages from a range of previously published works, including Milton’s 1649 Eikonoklastes.27 Like L’Estrange, Astell participates in an effort to cannibalize Milton’s writing, depriving it of its power by recontextualizing it. Astell’s alliance with L’Estrange illuminates two crucial elements of the particular print culture she inhabited. The first is an insistence that the political crises of the mid-century continued to erupt, amounting to a kind of propaganda of anachronism. L’Estrange, who first became Surveyor of the Imprimery in 1662, helped develop the “Parallel betwixt Forty One and Eighty.”28 Bemoaning “how easie is it to renew the

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Measures of Forty One even under the best of Princes,” Astell joins the Tory effort to depict England as haunted by the specter of rebellion.29 Even though Astell was a generation removed from the Civil War, she constantly depicts a nation on the brink of another war. In A Fair Way with the Dissenters she suggests: There being no Difference, that I can find, between those Times and these, but that their Fathers had the Nation’s Purse in their Hand . . . I tremble to think! A bloody Civil War, the Destruction of all Laws and Rights, and of the whole Constitution Ecclesiastical and Civil; Anarchy and Confusion, Tyranny and Oppression alternately.30

Here, Astell derives her authority not from the Queen or even God, but from a version of history created by the literature of controversy. By refusing to separate her own moment from the 1640s, she positions herself within a “wartime” that she herself creates. By keeping the regicides alive in her texts, she produces a battlefield in which she has the authority to fight back. Thus, Astell derives more than a politicized historiography from L’Estrange. His publication of The Dissenters Sayings (1681) and Dissenters Sayings. The Second Part (1681) modeled an intriguing strategy for a woman writer. Once L’Estrange lost the power to censor his opponents as Surveyor, he tried to control the press by publishing these catalogs of supposedly seditious quotations from his opponents. Nicholas Van Maltzahn provides a sharp analysis of this technique: “[B]y building his collection of oppositional texts, L’Estrange can aggressively describe a parliamentary rhetoric open to loyalist censure, as if, out of office, he still had a licenser’s authority to legitimate discourse.”31 L’Estrange’s adaptation of the function of his state office of censor to his position as participant in the public sphere illuminates the political stakes of Astell’s writing. As a woman, Astell could not hold the position of licenser, but in this new world even those without public office could deploy political power akin to that formerly limited to the state. Astell’s explicitly political tracts employ strategies similar to L’Estrange, as she quotes her adversaries in order to contain them, effectively policing the realm of print. In 1681, L’Estrange wrote of the English: “’Tis the Press that has made ’um Mad, and the Press must set ’um Right again. The Distemper is Epidemical; and there’s no way in the world, but by Printing, to convey the Remedy to the Disease.”32 Censorship could prevent some of the ills of the press, but it still needed a parallel strategy of publication to ward off the worst of the infection. Astell shares L’Estrange’s diagnosis of the state of the English

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nation, offering educated ladies and righteous texts as antidotes to sedition. Collapsing the distance between the mid-century and the turn of the century, she uses the civil wars to authorize her writing. Although Astell had earlier insisted that “Women have no business with the Pulpit,” her pamphlet responds to the sermon that Bishop White Kennett preached on the anniversary of Charles I’s death in 1704.33 She attacks Kennett for encouraging faction and rebellion by not fully honoring the “Royal Martyr” and inadequately condemning the regicides.34 In her introduction, she explains that she did not hear the sermon directly, but “[h]aving heard it much commended and finding it in a second Edition, I was inclined to Read, and for the same reasons to make some Remarks upon it.”35 This description of her relationship to Kennett’s text reveals the complexity of the realm in which she participates. Although she originally hears of the text through a verbal review, her precise citation of the text’s second edition highlights its existence in the print world. The popularity and accessibility of printed sermons made them an important element in the “post-Restoration public sphere.”36 Astell accepts the gendered boundary that prohibits her from responding to Kennett from the pulpit, but she does answer him from the space of the page. For her, the print form of the sermon allows women access to political debate that the pulpit does not. Even though Astell grounds her inquiry into the causes of the civil wars in the iconography of the “Royal Martyr,” her sense of authority is not built on her identification with the monarch alone. Her tract charts a much more complex process, as the move from Kennett’s pulpit to the page, from hearsay to a second edition, from discussion to publication all suggest a writer constructing her authority in relation to print. The vehicle of the print sermon also brings together what Astell considers to be two of the regicides’ greatest weapons – publishing and preaching. She saw both the republication of rebellious, civil war texts and the echoes of seditious sermons as evidence of the parallels between moments of national crisis. If preachers like Kennett were going to fail to address the recurring threats to the monarchy from the pulpit, writers like Astell now had the opportunity to pick up the slack. Her investment in persuading her readers reveals her understanding that politics was no longer conducted only through those public offices from which women were currently excluded, but also through the printed page. Following L’Estrange’s propaganda of anachronism, Astell paradoxically revivifies the mid-century conflicts in order to seize a space for women writers to fend off the violence of the civil wars.

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When she first advocated women’s education in 1694, Astell was not yet the Tory propagandist she would eventually become. Still, in the similar vulnerability of women in A Serious Proposal (1694) and the English people in An Impartial Enquiry (1704), we can see that the two tracts share an understanding of the danger and potential of communication.37 In An Impartial Enquiry, Astell argues that England’s leaders “shou’d not suffer Men to infect the Peoples Minds with evil Principles and Representations, with Speeches that have double Meanings and equivocal Expressions, Innuendo’s and secret Hints and Insinuations.”38 She returns to her imagery of disease and healing when she notes that Kennett’s sermon provides only “a sufficient Antidote against the Poison of Rebellious Principles,” and offers a more potent solution to the spread of lies and rumors: “to give the Reader a due Antidote to those pernicious Popish Principles, and Rebellious Practices; I desire him to Read the Homily of our Church against Disobedience and wilful Rebellion.”39 Ten years earlier, she had used the same prophylactic imagery to describe the benefits of the educational retreat, arguing: “A devout Retirement will not only strengthen and confirm our Souls, that they be not infected by the worlds Corruptions, but likewise so purify and refine them, that they will become Antidotes to expel the Poyson in others, and spread a salutary Air on ev’ry Side.”40 In both tracts, the proper use of texts and learning serves as a guard against corruption. The more explicitly political resonance of “infection” and “antidote” in Astell’s later text demonstrates the implications of the spread of virtue she advocates in her earliest publication. Even though scholars have previously noted the parallel vulnerability of women and the English people to seduction in Some Reflections Upon Marriage and An Impartial Enquiry, this connection between her educational tracts and her Tory treatise has yet to be explored.41 Astell’s prescription reminds us of her alliance with L’Estrange, who prescribed printing as a crucial remedy for the infection caused by seditious texts. Astell does not explicitly invoke the issue of war in A Serious Proposal, but the political interests she articulates in her later tracts illuminate the dual goal of her educational plan for women. Astell explains that her proposed retirement “shall have a double aspect, being not only a Retreat from the World for those who desire that advantage, but likewise, an institution and previous discipline, to fit us to do good in it.”42 Although she offers her retreat as an escape from the dangers of the world, Astell

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insists that the retirement does not exist in isolation: “It shall not so cut you off from the world as to hinder you from bettering and improving it, but rather qualify you to do it the greatest Good.”43 By reexamining the second aspect of the retreat, we can see how it enables the kind of political project she imagines more explicitly in her later writing. In her analysis of the allure of royalism for women writers, Gallagher claims that one cause of Astell’s support for monarchy is that the figure of the sovereign provides her a crucial model of female subjectivity amid a dearth of alternatives. A Serious Proposal seems to support this analysis because it never offers the learned ladies any specific offices, such as lawyer, clergyman, or statesman. In part II of the proposal, Astell goes even further, specifically denying that she had any such roles in mind, and arguing, “Women have no business with the Pulpit, the Bar or St. Stephen’s Chapel.”44 Although Astell explicitly excludes women from these public offices, A Serious Proposal simultaneously responds to the fact that the world of print has made available a new kind of public.45 Astell’s interest in the relation of political writing to the civil wars helps us understand how a single woman could “do good” in the world without being a member of the clergy, the bar, or Parliament. She argues that personal interest corrupts the print realm, limiting its ability to provide legitimacy through reason, but she still chooses to participate in it.46 In part II, Astell spends several pages enumerating the advantages of proper spelling, grammar, and clarity of argument in persuasive writing, though she claims that women need not concern themselves with pronunciation because they will only be engaged in “Private Conversation.”47 Thus, she surrounds her prohibition against women’s public speech with her encouragement of their writing.48 By naming “the Ladies” as her readers, then calling for their education, Astell’s proposal also strives to create a new audience, one with the potential to stabilize the nation in the face of revolutionary writers.49 Despite its dangers, the realm of publication, unlike the troubled institution of marriage, remains appealing to her. A decade after her proposal first appeared in print, Astell had emerged as an active political writer and An Impartial Enquiry became “one of the famous set pieces of the Tory canon lamenting the death of the Royal Martyr.”50 Responding both to contemporary preaching and dead regicides, she gives a sense of how a single woman might do good in “the largest sphere.”51 This tract illuminates Astell’s engagement with the culture of print controversy. First, it reveals her sophisticated understanding of the ways in which print publication had the potential to enable, as well as hamper, political discussion. Second, it helps us understand the

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investments of A Serious Proposal, by demonstrating the importance of education as part of an ongoing battle. With Astell’s engagement with the politics of war and writing in mind, we can reconsider Woolf’s characterization of A Serious Proposal as expressing an innate human desire for education. Living in the wake of both the civil wars and the pamphlet wars, Astell had the distance to reflect on the relation between the expansion of publishing and the midcentury political strife. As I have begun to show, her discussion of the civil wars highlights, perhaps even exaggerates, the role “mercenary scriblers” played. In part II of A Serious Proposal, she makes her case for women’s special ability to argue using military terms: “Such as fence themselves against the Cannon they bring down, may lie open to an Ambuscade from you.”52 Figuring persuasion as a mode of warfare, and print as a place of battle, Astell imagines and enacts women’s participation in the political life of the nation. Much more than a retreat, her proposed educational community challenged the boundaries of the public by laying claim to an increasingly powerful print realm through which women could shape the nation. In one of the densest moments in Three Guineas, Woolf tries to account for women’s overwhelming support of war in 1914: “So profound was her unconscious loathing for the education of the private house with its cruelty, its poverty, its hypocrisy, its immorality, its inanity that she would undertake any task however menial, exercise any fascination however fatal that enabled her to escape.”53 For Woolf, women who have no other option than marriage remain beholden to the male political establishment. Even more threatening, their unconscious desire to inhabit a world beyond the family will lead them to support war as a way out of the household. Woolf’s solution is to provide educational institutions, where women’s opinions can be formed free of the pressures of marriage and the desire to escape the trap of domesticity. Even though she does not acknowledge the political implications of A Serious Proposal, instead describing its origins in a desire that is “innate in human nature,” Woolf implicitly shares Astell’s idea that education provides women a way to get out of the house. Most obviously, Astell’s educational retirement serves as an alternative to marriage. Perhaps even more radically, however, Astell imagines education’s role in creating a new sphere, one in which women can escape the “private house” and prevent rebellion by waging a new kind of war against “those mercenary scriblers.” For Astell, the battle over the future of England can be fought in print, a place where women can be good soldiers. Understanding her educational proposal as

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a response to the relationship between print culture and national violence deepens and enriches our history of women writers’ negotiations of the gendered spheres, helping us recognize Woolf’s unarticulated affinity for Astell’s work. S i l e n t H i s t or i e s Although Astell’s Enquiry acknowledges and critiques the role of print in the mid-century conflicts, she does not mention the role of female writers in this period, despite a huge jump in the number of books published by women in the 1640s.54 She does, however, echo the concerns of both royalists and republicans about a growing female audience.55 Justifying her own foray into political matters “wherein women are supposed to be unconcerned,” Astell notes the dangerous political activity of other women: My reason is . . . because a little practice of the world will convince us, that Ladies are as grand Politicians and every whit as Intriguing as any Patriot of the Good-old-cause. Perhaps because the gentleness of their temper makes them fitter to insinuate and gain proselytes, or that being less suspected they may be apter to get and to convey Intelligence and are therefore made the tools of crafty and designing demagogues. This made me think it not improper to take Notice in this Matter. That if Ladies will needs be Politicians, they may not build upon a rotten and Unchristian Foundation. . . . How busie looks and grand concern about that Bill and t’other Promotion, how whispers and cabals, eternal disputes and restless solicitations, with all the equipage of Modern Politicians, became the Ladies, I have not skill to determine. But if there be anything ridiculous in it, I had rather leave the observation to the Men as being both more proper for their Wit and more agreeable to their Inclination.56

Her claim “that Ladies are . . . as Intriguing as any Patriot of the Goodold-cause” introduces the possibility that those “whisperers and cabals” responsible for the regicide included women, while simultaneously positioning women in opposition to such seditious forces. Blaming her political opponents for making women into politicians, she uses this precedent to defend the propriety of making her own political intervention. Although her text laments the instability of “eternal debates,” her ambivalence does not keep her from proclaiming her own politics in print.57 Despite her general silence about women writers and the civil wars, Astell’s Serious Proposal does laud one seventeenth-century English woman writer, Katherine Philips: “Let . . . our own incomparable Orinda, excite the emulation of the English Ladies.”58 Earlier scholarship suggested

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that Philips’s universally celebrated “sweet poetry about friendship” made her “a safe heroine” for Astell, but more recent work supports the possibility that Astell recognized in “Orinda’s” poetry the political potential of women’s writing.59 Catherine Gray has demonstrated that Philips was a favorite not just because of the “sweetness” of her poetry but because of its political utility in forming royalist community during the Interregnum and the Restoration.60 The power of female friendship and writing to create and sustain political communities provides a productive model for Astell’s use of the proposal to call into being a community of women readers, even if she cannot establish the physical community of the educational retirement. Both women use the regicide to justify their political interventions, but Astell never mentions that Philips shared her project of protecting the memory of the “royal martyr.”61 By celebrating “Orinda” with no reference to the regicide or the civil wars, Astell helped create the false image of Philips as apolitical, which we now finally have come to reconsider. In addition to the legion of female petitioners, prophets, and Quaker women writers that Astell never directly acknowledges, we must add another significant silence. Even though Astell was born and raised in Newcastle, she never mentions one of the best-known women writers of her time, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. Cavendish died when Astell was only seven, but the Duchess’s reputation as a prolific writer survived her. Despite their shared politics, Astell never mentions the infamous Duchess. Although Gallagher famously pairs the two, Astell seemingly took no interest in this woman who also wrote in support of monarchy and against the regicides. Woolf, however, does choose to include the Duchess in her history of women writers, and her comments on Cavendish have themselves become infamous for the way that they dismiss this early modern author, depicting her as the eccentric aristocratic predecessor of the commercially successful Aphra Behn. What is rarely discussed, however, is that Woolf writes about Cavendish twice, first in the 1925 Common Reader and then again in the 1929 A Room of One’s Own.62 In the first account, which sometimes reads like a paraphrase of Cavendish’s autobiography, Woolf includes fleeting mentions of war, suggesting that the Civil War’s drain on Henrietta Maria’s court created the opportunity for Cavendish to become a lady-in-waiting; that, as such, Cavendish followed the court into exile in Paris; and, that while living in exile with her husband, she returned to England to plead for their lost estates.63 Despite the brief inclusion of these details, Woolf never comments on the Civil War in her analysis of

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Cavendish’s life or writing. Woolf only notes war as one in a capricious list of subjects about which Cavendish writes: On and on, from subject to subject she flies . . . talking aloud to herself of all those matters that filled her brain to her perpetual diversion – of wars, and boarding-schools, and cutting down trees, of grammar and morals, of monsters and the British, whether opium in small quantities is good for lunatics, why it is that musicians are mad.64

Woolf never considers seriously Cavendish’s engagement with the costs of war, turning the Duchess’s mournful account of the war into just another encyclopedic flight of fancy.65 In the texts Woolf uses as sources, however, the many costs to Cavendish become clear. In addition to the great losses to her husband’s estate, which she documents in detail in his biography, Cavendish’s autobiographical The True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life reports that “not only the family I am linked to is ruined, but the family from which I sprung, by these unhappy wars. Which ruin my mother lived to see, and then died.”66 Although Woolf joyously reports on the blissful family life of Cavendish’s childhood, she never mentions the tragedy that later befalls the Lucases. Cavendish refuses such a separation of the idyllic and the horrific, as the war erupts in the middle of her account of the happy siblings: “But this unnatural war came like a whirlwind, which felled down their houses, where some in the wars were crushed to death, as my youngest brother Sir Charles Lucas, and my brother Sir Thomas Lucas.”67 Woolf provides a romantic depiction of the “majestic grandeur” and beauty of Cavendish’s mother, but does not mention that the Duchess emphasizes her mother’s “majestic grandeur” to decry the “barbarous people as plundered her, and used her cruelly.”68 The note in the edition that Woolf cites gives additional details of the 1642 plunder of the Lucas estate, which supposedly began with a mob of two thousand people driving Cavendish’s mother out of her home, as she barely escapes death at the hands of a hostile swordsman.69 When Woolf returns to the Duchess in A Room of One’s Own (1929), she purges all mentions of the Civil War and makes Cavendish a foil for the professional female writer, embodied in Aphra Behn. Woolf shows some sympathy for Cavendish’s “wild, generous, untutored intelligence,” but her rhetoric has grown harsher than it was in The Common Reader: “What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! As if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.”70 Margaret

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Ezell’s seminal work has shown how Woolf’s progressive account of the rise of the professional woman writer trivialized and even erased many early modern women writers. In the shift from the Common Reader’s individual portrait of Cavendish to A Room of One’s Own’s reduction of her to a thumbnail sketch of a sad figure happily surpassed, however, another omission occurs. Woolf erases the English Civil War, the memory of which Cavendish fought so hard to preserve in her published accounts of the cost of the war to both herself and her husband.71 When Woolf writes of “the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers,” she misrepresents the environment in which women wrote in the seventeenth century.72 Even though Cavendish tries to maintain her aristocratic distance, the aftermath of war requires her to enter the fray.73 She tries to preserve her nobility by recasting her plea in her autobiography: “Indeed, I did not stand as a beggar at the Parliament door, for I never was at the Parliament House, nor stood I ever at the door, as I do know, or can remember, I am sure, not as a petitioner. Neither did I haunt the committees, for I never was at any, as a petitioner, but one in my life.”74 She attributes such rumors about her to the upheaval caused by the wars: [T]he customs of England being changed as well as the laws, where women become pleaders, attornies, petitioners, and the like. . . . For the truth is, our sex doth nothing but jostle for the pre-eminence of words (I mean not speaking much) as they do for the pre-eminence of place . . . I mean not noble, virtuous, discreet, and worthy persons, whom necessity did enforce to submit, comply, and follow their own suits, but such as had nothing to lose, but made it their trade to solicit.75

Cavendish echoes but ultimately departs from typical royalist propaganda about the gender upheaval that was part and parcel of the overthrow of the monarch because she understands that she occupies the same place as these female petitioners. Her awkward word order demonstrates the delicacy of the extraction she tries to perform, as she follows the tortured syntax of “nor stood I ever at the door, as I do know, or can remember, I am sure, not as a petitioner” with the grudging admission “but one in my life.” Despite her vicious depiction of ignoble women speaking in public, Cavendish’s text implicitly uses them as a justification for her to argue her own cause, much as we saw Astell do. Although some of Cavendish’s work clearly finds inspiration in the figure of the monarch, her effort to define herself in opposition to the opportunistic rabble of the civil wars and Interregnum provides another piece of evidence supporting a revision of Gallagher’s thesis. In addition to seeing Cavendish as deriving her

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sense of self from the Queen’s absoluteness, it is crucial to acknowledge the Duchess’s explicit acknowledgment of herself as a writer in a new terrain, one marked by the upheaval of war. In opposition to the Empress of her own mind in The Blazing World, or the “lonely riot” of Woolf’s Room of One’s Own, this “Cavendish” articulates herself as a fully social being caught up in the actual riots of the mid-seventeenth century. In Three Guineas, Woolf celebrated the marvelous resources of biography and autobiography. Yet, when she turns to the seventeenth century, she turns to just “one life – the life of Mary Astell.” She had read Cavendish’s accounts of war, as well as Lucy Hutchinson’s Civil War memoir of her husband, a text that was regularly reissued throughout the nineteenth century and was readily available to Woolf in its new Everyman edition in 1936.76 Why is Mary Astell’s life the “one life” Woolf turns to when discussing the prevention of war? Even more importantly, why does Woolf omit the importance of war to Astell’s life? Woolf’s emphasis on the emergence of professional female authors in the seventeenth century as a pivotal moment in the history of women’s writing does more than erase the rich archive of women’s manuscript publication; it also erases the role that the English Civil War and its aftermath played in the history of women’s writing. Most perversely, it obstructs the very complex relationship between self-interest, education, writing, and war that Three Guineas struggles so hard to illuminate and that Astell’s attack on the “mercenary scriblers” tried to manipulate. A complete answer to these questions would require a deeper investigation of Woolf’s work than I can offer here, but I do want to offer some preliminary thoughts.77 First, the erasure of war from her depictions of seventeenth-century women writers could merely be a consequence of Woolf’s trivialization of women who did not earn their livings by writing, but this explanation does not account for her celebration of Astell, who would not fit the model of Aphra Behn as a professional writer. Second, it could be the result of a lack of information. In her analysis of A Room of One’s Own, Ezell rightfully points out that the text is limited by the historiography of its time. Pointing to Woolf’s citation of George Trevelyan’s History of England, “this grand masterpiece of Edwardian historical narrative, a view of history as an account of the ‘significant’ forces in terms of bills passed, wars fought, and kings crowned,” Ezell suggests that women writers were not part of his understanding of these “significant” forces.78 But let us return to Woolf’s citation of Trevelyan once again, with our questions about war in mind. Woolf tells us that “Professor Trevelyan concludes, ‘neither Shakespeare’s women nor those

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of authentic seventeenth-century memoirs, like the Verneys and the Hutchinsons, seem wanting in personality and character’.”79 Perversely, Trevelyan lumps together imaginary and historical women, but Woolf makes an even stranger move. After listing several famous female characters from Shakespeare’s work and beyond, she concludes, “[b]ut this is women in fiction,” ignoring Trevelyan’s mention of the Verneys and the Hutchinsons completely.80 In her characterization of Trevelyan, Ezell inadvertently repeats Woolf’s erasure of women from the historiography of the English civil wars. Women obviously did not receive adequate attention in accounts of the civil wars, but they were not completely erased. The Memoirs of the Life of John Hutchinson was incredibly popular, leading Alice Meynell to claim in 1914 that “all Englishmen know the name of Lucy Hutchinson.”81 Even though this popularity often depended on Hutchinson’s text being read as proto-novelistic rather than historical, with a focus on the love story and a deliberate dismissal of its republican politics, the text also had another afterlife. The great historian of the English civil wars, C.H. Firth, edited both Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (1885) and Cavendish’s The Life Of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle (1886), and reviews of these editions treat them as works of importance to historians of the war.82 Although these texts were not “significant” to Woolf, we should not conclude that there was no place for women writers in a history of war. Thus, Woolf creates the “myth of Judith Shakespeare,” the victimized and silenced early modern woman writer, in the face of explicit evidence of a counterexample in the well-known Lucy Hutchinson.83 In A Room of One’s Own, this allows her to imagine a powerless, innocent female writer of the past as a foil for contemporary women writers, the same way she depicts Cavendish in contrast to Behn. These mobilizations of seventeenth-century women writers provide us a possible clue to Woolf’s use of Astell in Three Guineas. By depicting Astell as a pure lover of education who falls prey to the political machinations of her time rather than as a propagandist who engages them, Woolf separates her from the complex landscape of politics, war, and education with which Three Guineas wrestles. Woolf’s “Astell” stands free of the compromises of privilege, a bit like the ideal pacifist woman at the end of Three Guineas. Through her position in a time when women were supposedly separate from the “significant” forces of war, the figure of “Astell” serves as a temporal analogue to Woolf’s proposed female “society of outsiders” who prevent war by disengaging from all traditional modes of politics.84 Like Astell, Woolf remains silent about war’s enabling of women’s writing. By tracing these silences,

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I hope to have shown some of the ways that the issue of war challenges scholars of gender to create a new conversation across periods, calling on us to reconsider seventeenth-century women’s war writing then – then and now. A H i s t or y of I ns i de r s: Wom e n W r i t e r s a n d t h e “S ig n i f ic a n t ” P ol i t ic s of Wa r In her 1989 account of the “seed years” of New Historicism, Catherine Gallagher told a familiar story of American feminism: “In the early years of the women’s liberation movement, we were repeatedly told that we were siphoning off energy from significant political activities and wasting it in trivial, personal confrontations. Of course, we took such resistance, including the very rhetoric of triviality, as a token of the radical significance of our movement.”85 Despite contemporary debates about the conflict between New Historicism and feminism, Gallagher described the women’s liberation movement as a powerful starting point for her work as a New Historicist, pointing to three key elements: the historicizing of gender, the collapse of the division between categories of the self and society, and the elimination of the hierarchy of “significant political activities” over “trivial, personal confrontations.” In Gallagher’s list of “significant political activities” the Vietnam War looms large, appearing not only as “the war” but also through “the draft.”86 Gallagher’s pivotal 1988 “Embracing the Absolute” exemplifies the intersection of feminist and New Historicist goals by claiming the political significance of the historicized female subject without recourse to traditional models of political agency. Gallagher’s claim that a focus on war had rendered trivial the political concerns of women provides an interesting context for her choice in this essay. Rather than exploring Astell’s and Cavendish’s writing about the significance of the civil wars, she focuses on the figure of the “moi absolute.”87 Confronting the supposed paradox of seventeenth-century writers who criticized the hierarchy of men over women while endorsing the hierarchy of a monarch over his or her subjects, Gallagher argued that “Toryism and feminism converge because the ideology of absolute monarchy provides, in particular historical situations, a transition to an ideology of the absolute self.”88 According to this argument, both Cavendish and Astell “embraced” the figure of the monarch as a figure for female subjectivity because of a lack of other models of political being. Providing a warning “against the temptation to attach a twentieth-century feminist meaning to these emergent female subjects,”

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Gallagher’s piece became an influential argument advocating the need to offer more historically specific analyses of gender.89 Today, criticism of early modern women writers continues to be marked by this drive to historicize. By reconsidering the importance of war in understanding the work of Astell and Cavendish, the two key figures of Gallagher’s “Embracing the Absolute,” this essay joins the work of many recent critics who have shown that seventeenth-century women writers found other models of political being than the monarch, demonstrating how the intense historical work of feminist scholars has enriched our sense of the politics of gender in relation to “significant” matters, like war. Through her analysis of the rich archive of sectarian women’s writing, for instance, Katherine Gillespie has challenged Gallagher’s thesis by showing how these texts “imagined ‘public roles’ for women other than that of king or queen,” calling on scholars “to think about “female subjects” rather than the “female subject” in order to understand that absolutism was not the only fertile ground for feminism.90 Julie Crawford denies that even Cavendish embraced the absolute, arguing that the Duchess modeled her authority “on other models of power based on the offices of land and lineage and the key, if often underrecognized, roles these offices played in Tudor and Stuart politics and culture.”91 Despite their different perspectives, both Gillespie and Crawford show that understanding seventeenth-century women’s literature requires reconsidering women’s relationship to traditionally “significant” political forces. Understanding the centrality of war to these early modern writers also helps us respond to another challenging opportunity to feminist literary critics. We are now in a moment when feminist scholarship of seventeenth-century women writers has enlarged its view beyond the history of the gendered subject to reconsider how Astell, Cavendish, and their female contemporaries took part in the politics of war. This is the direct result of the contributions of scholars like Gallagher and the decades of painstaking historical work that has followed; still, it seems no surprise that it comes at a time when feminism struggles to redefine itself in the face of women’s increased political agency in the state and the military, a very different project than the attempt to reclaim the “trivial” that informed Gallagher’s earlier work. In addition to the other political developments that followed Vietnam, the transition from a conscript to an allvolunteer force has led to significant increases in the number of women serving in the U.S. military, with many serving in combat zones today.92 In other words, at the same time that American feminists like Gallagher struggled to gain recognition for political issues beyond the battlefield,

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American women were becoming a more integral part of the institutions of war. As continuing historical work shows, women were never simply outsiders to war, as even Woolf understood as she advocated her “society of outsiders” in Three Guineas. Today, we need to reconsider the status of women writers as insiders. Unlike Woolf, we now have the resources and perspective so that we do not turn “to just one life” when we examine the seventeenth century. But when we turn to Astell and Cavendish, Philips and Lady Anne Halkett, Anna Trapnel and Katherine Chidley, Eleanor Davies and Elizabeth Poole, the unnamed female petitioners, and a host of others, we need to consider what it means to once again be reading and writing about these war writers in another time of war, not so that we can see these writers as foremothers, but because our increasingly rich sense of the seventeenth century has the potential to unsettle our assumptions about gender and war, and to help us reimagine a history of women, war, and writing. No t e s 1 Erin Solaro, Women in the Line of Fire: What You Should Know About Women in the U.S. Military (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006), 12–17. 2 See Solaro and Anna Quindlan, “Not Semi-Soldiers,” Newsweek, November 12, 2007. Accessed February 12, 2008 at http://www.newsweek.com/id/67917. 3 Despite claims of a universally horrified response to women in war by those like Tucker Carlson, by 2009 the general public seems to be following the military: “Fifty-three percent of respondents in a recent New York Times/ CBS News poll said they favor permitting women to join ground-combat units” (Lizette Alvarez, “G.I. Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier”). 4 Simon Barker, “Allarme to England!: Gender and Militarism in Early Modern England” in Jessica Munns and Penny Richards, eds., Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe: 1500–1700 (Harlow: Pearson/ Longman, 2003), 141. 5 Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England,” Genders 1 (1988): 24–39. 6 Margaret Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 65. 7 Jennifer L. Fleissner, “Is Feminism a Historicism?” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 21.1 (2002): 46. Fleissner offers an insightful summary and analysis of these debates. 8 Wai Chee Dimock, “Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader,” American Literature 64 (December 1991): 622. 9 Andrew Hadfield, “Has Historicism Gone Too Far?” 10 Frances Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 17.

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11 Ibid, 18. 12 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (San Diego and New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1938), 36. 13 Ibid, 25. 14 Ibid, 25. 15 Here Ruth Perry’s seminal The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) stands as a crucial exception. 16 Florence Smith, Mary Astell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 20. 17 Ibid, 35. 18 Woolf, Three Guineas, 25. 19 Ibid, 26. 20 Mary Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage, in Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 46–7. 21 William Kolbrener, “Gendering the Modern: Mary Astell’s Feminist Historiography,” The Eighteenth Century 44.1 (2003): 1. 22 Even Springborg’s groundbreaking Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) relies on only one quotation from Milton to support Astell’s assertion (137), failing to grapple with his work’s actual complexity. Not only does Milton, unlike Locke, preserve the analogue between the marriage and the political contract; he admits the full extension of his logic, directly contradicting Astell’s depiction of him by imagining a woman’s right to divorce in Tetrachordon. 23 Astell, An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War, in Patricia Springborg, ed., Political Writings, 163. 24 Astell, Moderation truly stated: or, a review of a late pamphlet, entitul’ d, Moderation a vertue. With a prefatory discourse to Dr. D’Avenant, concerning his late essays on peace and war (London, 1704), 80. 25 Ibid, 80. 26 Even though Astell quotes a bit less than L’Estrange, her entire quotation can be found within his brief excerpt from Eikonoklastes, and she reproduces exactly the same ellipses and page citation that he does in his The Dissenters Sayings (London, 1685), 74–5. 27 Astell, A Fair Way with the Dissenters, in Patricia Springborg, ed., Political Writings, 98. 28 Sir Roger L’Estrange, A Reply to the Second Part of the Character of a Popish Successor (London, 1681), 3. 29 Astell, An Enquiry, 166. 30 Astell, A Fair Way with the Dissenters, 112. 31 Nicholas Von Maltzahn, “The Whig Milton, 1667–1700,” in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 25. 32 Quoted in Joad Raymond, “The Newspaper, Public Opinion, and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth Century” in Raymond, ed., News, Newspaper, and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 109.

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33 Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II, ed. Patricia Springborg (Ontario: Broadview Literary Texts, 2002), part II, 196. 34 Astell, An Enquiry, 195. 35 Ibid, 135. 36 Tony Claydon, “The Sermon, the ‘Public Sphere’ and the Political Culture of Late Seventeenth-Century England” in Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough, eds., The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 221. 37 On the similarity between sexual seduction and political persuasion in Some Reflections on Marriage, see Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England, 1680–1714 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 153–5; and Kolbrener, “Gendering the Modern,” 15–19. 38 Astell, An Enquiry, 139. 39 Ibid, 152, 171. 40 Astell, Serious Proposal, I.105. 41 Although both Weil and Kolbrener note the parallels between the seductions of the nation in An Impartial Enquiry and the ladies in Some Reflections Upon Marriage, neither one discusses the vulnerability Astell addresses in her educational tracts. Springborg points out that “Seduc’d into that Unnatural Rebellion” is a phrase from Kennett’s sermon, which suggests that the idea of seduction may not have as particularly gendered an association as these critics claim. 42 Astell, Serious Proposal, I.73. 43 Ibid, 76. 44 Astell, Serious Proposal, II.196. 45 Astell’s analysis of “mercenary scriblers” as a cause of the civil wars supports the existence of “a sphere of criticism of public authority” in the seventeenth century, but her critique of the scribblers’ self-interests and partisanship suggests the limits of using a Habermasian formulation to describe this moment. Questioning Habermas’s sharp distinction between the reason of criticism and the manipulation of pamphleteering, Raymond points out that “in Britain, it was surely instrumentality that created as well as curtailed debate” (124). The pamphlet culture that Astell decries simultaneously provides her a reason to enter these debates as a virtuous participant. 46 In her 1709 Bart’ lemy Fair, Astell criticizes the corruption of ideas by the market. See Perry, Celebrated Mary Astell, 222–31. Van C. Hartmann’s “Tory Feminism in Mary Astell’s Bart’lemy Fair,” Journal of Narrative Technique 28.3 (1998): 243–65, reveals Astell’s affinities with Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and other Tory writers in her later work, but does not discuss Astell’s earlier work. 47 Astell, Serious Proposal, II.196. 48 On Astell’s encouragement of other women writers, see Perry, Celebrated Mary Astell, 106–11. 49 Alessa Johns’ Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) notes the reproductive quality of the proposal,

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claiming that publication provided Astell “a chance to be emulated . . . creating a community of female readers and writers” (47). Astell, An Enquiry, 131. Astell, Serious Proposal, II.203. Ibid, II.203. Woolf, Three Guineas, 39. The number of books published by women between 1646 and 1650 rose to sixty-nine, a stark increase from the pre-1640 numbers of only ten books every five years (Patricia Crawford, “Women’s Published Writings 1600– 1700,” Women in English Society, ed. Mary Prior [London and New York: Methuen, 1985], 212–13). Despite her invaluable research on women’s publication in this period, Crawford’s brief comment on Astell minimizes the existence of a print sphere. Defending Astell for relegating women to the home, she asks: “yet in the 1690s, what other sphere apart from the household was there for women?” (230). Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 77. Mary Astell, The Christian Religion (London, 1730), 176–8. Ibid, 289. Astell, Serious Proposal, I.83. Perry, Celebrated Mary Astell, 116. Catharine Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 108, 143. Philips’ “Upon the Double Murder of King Charles” can be seen as a precursor to Astell’s lamentation of the sacrilege of White Kennett’s sermon, and her comments on women politicians in The Christian Religion. For instance, Ezell’s important analysis of Woolf’s reading of early modern women writers only discusses the depiction of Cavendish in A Room of One’s Own. Virginia Woolf, “The Common Reader” in The Common Reader First and Second Series (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1948), 106. Ibid, 107. This is particularly striking given that the edition of the Memoirs that Woolf cites was edited by C.H. Firth as part of his effort to recover the history of the English Civil War. Firth also contributed an entry on Cavendish for the Dictionary of National Biography when Woolf’s father was the editor. Margaret Cavendish, The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. To Which is Added The True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life (London, 1886), 289. I cite the C.H. Firth edition to follow Woolf. Ibid, 284. Woolf, Common Reader, 102; and Cavendish, True Birth, 290. Cavendish, True Birth, 290. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego and New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005), 61. This erasure is particularly striking because later, in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf does point to the role of war in enabling writers: “thanks, curiously

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enough, to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year . . . would be minute in the extreme” (107). Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 64. Ibid, 63. Cavendish, True Birth, 297. Ibid, 299. David Norbrook, “Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson: Identity, Ideology and Politics,” Inbetween 9.1–2 (2000): 179–203, takes Woolf’s passing fantasy about an exchange between Cavendish and Hutchinson as a starting point for his insightful discussion of the relation between the two seventeenth-century writers. A fuller discussion would have to consider how Woolf’s depiction of Astell relates to recent efforts by Woolf scholars to understand Three Guineas as part of a broad and varied feminist debate about war, rather than the work of a lone voice. See Phyllis Lassner, British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 24–57. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History, 49. Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 42. Ibid, 43. Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 28. See Samuel R. Gardiner, review of Memoirs of the Life of John Hutchinson, ed. C.H. Firth. The English Historical Review 1.1 (1886): 173–4, and Gardiner, review of The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, ed. C.H. Firth, The English Historical Review 2.5 (1887): 172–3. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History, 39. Woolf, Three Guineas, 106–9. Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 42. Ibid, 42. Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute,” 25. Ibid. Anita Pacheco, Early Women Writers: 1600–1720 (London and New York: Longman, 1998), 14. Katharine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 47, 48. Julie Crawford, “The Case of Lady Anne Clifford; or, Did Women Have a Mixed Monarchy?” PMLA 121.5 (2006): 1683. Crawford is hardly the first critic to challenge Gallagher’s analysis of Cavendish’s identification with the monarch. For other examples, see Battigelli and Rees. I cite Crawford here because she points to Cavendish’s embrace of a form of institutional power

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rather than her relation to an experience of disempowerment or an intellectual tradition. 92 Solaro, Women in the Line of Fire, 13 and James Dao, “Marines Moving Women Toward the Front Lines,” New York Times. April 24, 2012. Accessed April 25, 2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/us/marines-movingwomen-toward-the-front-lines.html. The New York Times special series, “Women in Arms” (http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/us/series/ women_at_arms/index.html) explores how the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have radically escalated this shift in women’s roles in the military.

Afterword Nigel Smith

Those who practice one form or other of the historical study of literature might have felt arrested sharply in their tracks, if not also scared about the possibility of their continued existence as they knew it, by the appearance of a volume of essays in 2005 called Spiritual Shakespeares.1 The volume promised to deal a deathblow to materialist approaches to the interpretation of Shakespeare; whatever good these works had delivered, they were tired and the field was in need of revitalization. In particular, the materialists had proved poor at addressing instances of spiritualism or enchantment in Shakespearean drama. What did they have to say, for instance, about fairies or about the magical moments that reinforce Shakespeare’s treatment of reconciliation or resolution? How could they address the supernatural beyond seeing it as a token in Shakespeare’s interrogation of superstition or the deployment of power in his various worlds? We encounter some hazy definitions in this treatment. What is spiritual; what is material? Moreover, many of the themes found wanting are in fact famously treated by historians (as opposed to historical literary critics); one thinks of the work of Keith Thomas, Lyndal Roper, and Margaret Aston, to name just a very few.2 But, not to be cowed, the introduction to Spiritual Shakespeares goes on to claim that far from the need to work in a historical paradigm, the book would avow a decidedly “presentist” perspective, regarding Shakespeare’s text as, if not a new Bible, then a new St. Augustine, teaching spiritual reinvigoration for our moment. History and materialism is by implication wrong or misguided, and worse, in its quest for answers in the nature of explaining historical causation, as dry as dust. Spiritual Shakespeares will instead make us new and whole again, and will save the study of Renaissance literature for a bright future. When Shakespeare has been spiritually done, with a proper eye on contemporary concerns, it will be time for Spenser, who is already the subject of a presentist project, with major government funding, entitled 283

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“The Faerie Queene Now,” which aims no less than to revivify religious language in the Church of England, and to bring together the different faiths in early-twenty-first century Britain, all under the umbrella of the Red Cross Knight. As the project members claim: “The Faerie Queene Now” responds by remaking religious poetry for today’s world. It speaks to where we have come from and where we are going by exploring Spenser’s foundational poem in various present-day religious, educational and cultural contexts. But it also aims to recreate and refunction Spenser’s epic as a positive contribution to contemporary life. In doing this it hopes to bring some of the energy of Spenser’s art and moment into official English religion, which it also hopes to open further to energetic and diverse elements not allowed for or even foreseen by the original national church. At the same time, it aims to bring official religion into creative dialogue with other groups in English society that are entirely beyond incorporation into any established church. In short, this project seeks via poetry and the imagination the greatest possible representation of religious and secular interests in relation to our shared inheritance and to those issues of religion and society which, one way or another, matter to us all.3

The description is hard on traditional scholarship (and nearly everything academic on Spenser is in some sense historical), described as dry “academic allegories.” How can this be fair or justified? After all, historical literary scholarship has been mapping the traces in literature of a grace-obsessed world for far longer than Paul Stevens suggests in his valuable reading of The Tempest in this volume, or than the originators of Spiritual Shakespeares or “The Faerie Queene Now” are prepared to admit.4 The question then, as we contemplate the vast Catalan-style puppets of Spenserian figures, among the first material products of the project, is to wonder quite how historicism could have failed so badly. It certainly makes one fear that the confidence of the editors of this volume in historicism might be misplaced, and that society evidently demands more from its literary critics than serious engagement with the methods and findings of historians, or simply the traditional virtues of historical literary scholarship. As is indicated earlier in the volume by Andrew Hadfield, the thrust of the “spiritualist” movement is to recuperate “materialism” in the name of a trans-faith, trans-church Shakespearean “spirit” that makes students once again appreciate the vital power of the greatest English literature. In so doing, and with obvious parallels to the teaching of F.R. Leavis in the mid-twentieth century, the claims of historicism are excised and ditched, and the glories of a decontextualized “literature” prevail. Hadfield’s

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critique is salutary, although the question of how the spiritualists define what they mean by “spirit” does need extensive further attention. We await the faithful’s (including the Synod of the Church of England’s) judgment on the new Spenserian liturgy, or how it might be seen to compare with the recreation of the preaching of one of Lancelot Andrewes’s sermons in the Chapel Royal in 2004. The energy for this interest seems largely to have begun in the enclosed world of Shakespeare studies, not in the broader field of Renaissance literary studies. What made the “New Historicism” of the 1980s stand out at the time was its balance of particularly attractive expression in several works and its enticing intellectual formulation of literature as a reflection of and a participant in the dissemination of power in a given society. This was especially so in the writings of Stephen Greenblatt.5 His work made not only older literary historicism but also other forms of historical inquiry look rather bland. The intellectual substance he mustered mattered, but no less impressive and brilliant was his argument and rhetoric. Forms of historical inquiry that paid more attention to the demands of difficult, fractured, and archival sources look pale by comparison with the pageby-page impact of Renaissance Self-Fashioning. In it, power always won out for Greenblatt; subversion was always contained. Kinds of historical and literary inquiry directed at uncovering long-forgotten subversive movements or the literary dimensions of rebellion had no place in his pages. To the extent that New Historicism in this respect offered a different perspective to traditions concerned with popular movements and the history of revolutions, it was as unhistorical as the “New Criticism” that preceded it. On the other hand, there is a similarity between New Historicist interest in “subversion contained” and the histories of social rituals like carnival, that time when the social order is inverted as temporary release from the harsh realities of the early modern social order, a domain occupied by both literary scholars and social historians.6 One of the most cogent critiques of New Historicism’s claim that subversion was usually or always “contained” came from someone devoted to the study of radical movements.7 In the large body of writing concerned with early modern literature and the law, it is salutary to find much analysis of archival material that belies this earlier model. One only wishes for a greater dialogue between the literary and drama scholars and the social historians proper, who are often using very similar sources.8 The other claim, often repeated in the preceding pages, that historicism ignored religion, is really only true for the earlier part of New Historicism’s career. No one can truly now claim that religion has been

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ignored – as the work of Heather Hirschfeld and others in this volume attest. Even during the earlier 1980s, historicist studies outside of New Historicism, but with a strong sense of the need for methodological innovation, took religion seriously. It was only the herd in 1986 that was not listening properly. A slightly older scholarly tradition, one invested in the study of patronage relations, never lost sight of the role that poetry and drama played in promulgating the views of the powerful in the past, views that were religious as much as political. As such, of course, literature played a most significant role in the historical process. As Lawrence Manley’s study of Lord Stanley’s patronage of an acting company shows, a particular view of the rise of the Tudor monarchy was excised from dramatic representations of Richard III, just at the point at which Stanley pulled out of the theatrical business, and shortly before his death, a death that was preceded by an approach from English Roman Catholics seeking his help in a projected nationwide insurrection. The historian Peter Lake has shown how intricately the city drama was part of the fabric of local political and religious debate, and how apparently social issues had vital religious and political meaning. His new and forthcoming work on history and tragedies takes the focus into national and international politics, exploring the stage as the fulcrum of a politics of “popularity” whereby monarch and people interacted.9 In Lake’s view, Jonson’s Sejanus represents a loyal Catholic view of the corrupt influence of the Cecils, and hence the true “classical republicans” in the late sixteenth century were Roman Catholics, quite contrary to the usual association of republicanism and (advanced) Protestantism in the following century.10 What all parties have become better at doing is understanding the intricate interconnection of politics and religion in the early modern world. In all of this no one doubts that a well-written or well-argued book or article is the best thing of all, although the issue is seldom discussed on the printed page. Like Greenblatt, much of Quentin Skinner’s appeal lies not only in his thought but also in the éclat of his expression.11 Equally forceful, but more chilling, and certainly contestable, is the work of Carl Schmitt on Hamlet, Hobbes and his concept of absolutism, alarmingly now thought worthy of consideration by the academic left.12 One simple solution then that should tie together formalists, presentists, and historicists is good writing: interesting, absorbing, and an admirable work of art in itself. A striking recent example is the work of John Kerrigan, a formalist and a historicist at once, a fine writer, and with very serious claims for historical innovation in his most recent work – the one scholarly author who has striven to produce a comprehensive historical literary geography

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for the entire British Isles.13 One could add the names of David Norbrook, Annabel Patterson, David Quint, and Colin Burrow. Is it a silent assumption of current scholars, even perhaps of those contributing to this volume, that historicist writing has to be unexceptionally expressed to be typical or rigorous? And given that fine writing is usually associated with the most publicly visible part of the academy – those who write regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and such like – do the essays in this volume assume a division between this world, where there is a premium placed on communication, and the acerbic and less expressively honed world of politicized dispute among humanists – the context from which U.S. New Historicism and UK Cultural Materialism originally emerged? The quarterly journal associated with New Historicism, Representations, is to be found in general bookshops, alongside a serial publication like Raritan Review, unlike Essays in Criticism, which nonetheless sees itself as including historical scholarship in a panoply of published criticism that performs a vital role in a civilized society. It is certainly a missionary sense of reaching out to the greater reading public that informs the criticism of (shall we call them?) New Formalists such as Gordon Teskey and Jeff Dolven.14 Like Oscar Wilde, they believe in criticism as a forceful tool of public revelation but one that implicitly involves serious aesthetic goals. There is a connection with the “presentists” here but don’t they risk the possibility of offending some with their proposed Spenserian liturgy (some of the Red Cross Knight’s adversaries are Saracens)? This is a very active field, and, with renewed interest in historical subjects in the mass media, especially film and television, historical literary scholarship has a lively role to play.15 No one speaking for “spiritualism” or “presentism” has any just claim to dismiss the contribution to public culture made in the name of “historicism” or, for that matter, “materialism.” The point of some of the best historicist writing about the politics of or in English literature was to take the world of political deliberation, as it has been projected inside English literature, and make it come alive as a series of dilemmas involving conflict, choice, interest and the exercise of persuasion on the page or in spoken debate. That is precisely the end of Annabel Patterson’s writing, and it is that which makes it most exciting, bridging the world’s historical scholarship and advocacy in our world. Patterson’s work on Marvell and Milton is particularly notable in this respect, making a bridgehead between the politics of the classroom and an older tradition of more apparently disinterested scholarship on midcentury poetry.16 Her more theoretical elaborations give ample testimony

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to her desire to uphold and extend a scholarly and ethical understanding of extreme democracy. For her, historical scholarship must make us able to entertain, to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes, “that which we hate.”17 More recent work on traditions of free speech, the rhetorical subdivision of parrhesia, as Martin Dzelzainis’s essay shows, serves a similar end.18 We might say that here the study of media in history, such as the history of the development of journalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is at its most engaged with contemporary concerns.19 In this collection, Sharon Achinstein’s brilliant demonstration of Milton’s attempt to show in the divorce tracts that some passions cannot be mastered by reason, and so divorce is a necessary remedy, is the material that goes where old historicism seldom went and New Historicism never ventured: a poet and humanist who then developed theories of radical social transformation in which poetry became an important shaping vehicle, and where there is a very direct connection with contemporary political concerns.20 By far the most engaged of recent approaches, and no less excellent in respect of eloquence, is Feisal Mohammed’s treatment of the uneasy and intricate interrelationship of faith, liberty, and rights. His historical foundation is often Milton, but he makes no bones about the contemporary crisis in the clash of faiths and the violence it has unleashed. His arguments are illuminating in a scholarly way, but he also uses his material to generate solutions for the future. This is nuanced work in the best of senses.21 It is also one component in a larger array of studies that show how midseventeenth-century literary debates concerned with liberty remain full of insights and value for a twenty-first-century perspective: a return to Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), a text that, in the opinion of many, refuses to be irrelevant.22 The point is well made that it costs something in effort (if not also, as Patterson reminds us, in affronted consciousness) to do worthwhile work; not merely to write painstakingly, but also to delve in the archive for undiscovered material. This is what historians and historicist literary scholars both do, although they are often looking at very different types of material, as Michael McKeon’s extensive argument in this volume shows. But it is the case that labor remains highly regarded, perhaps even the most highly regarded aspect of literary scholarship. Such recovery confirms the value of biography, as acclaimed studies that alter the understanding of an author are still highly celebrated, not least beyond the academy: witness the reputation of biographies by Hermione Lee (on Virginia Woolf), John Carey (on William Golding), Jonathan Bate (on John Clare), Zachary Leader (on Kingsley Amis), or, reaching further

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back, Irvin Ehrenpreis (on Jonathan Swift).23 Nor should we forget the notable success of “biographies” of a short historical period, or a particular moment, such as James Chandler’s treatment of 1819, James Shapiro’s history of 1599, or the techniques of chapters as “historical literary moments” pursued in the ongoing Harvard series on histories of national literatures.24 We should note that the “year biographers” are literary historians, and that a great many historians of various kinds contributed to the Harvard history of American literature, published in 2009. Finally there is the question of what quite is the value of literary criticism and what is the value of historical writing. Those values have much to do with how the disciplines are regarded not merely by other academics but also in the public eye. In a country where higher education funding is largely in the hands of politicians, this matters. Literary criticism has not always been given a clean bill of health despite its popularity with students. Forthright historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper have made their contempt very plain for what they regard as a too easy, frivolous discipline that should in any case be the concern of every educated person on a Sunday afternoon and no more. More challenging still have been the calls by politicians trying to create paradigm shifts in policy perception. George Walden, former MP and U.K. higher education minister, forcefully stated that the study of English literature was an unaffordable luxury, and stressed the benefits that more obviously utilitarian subjects would bring: Many of those going to university are unprepared or unsuited for higher education. They should have been doing training or apprenticeship courses in colleges of further education, the underrated Cinderellas of the system. Aerospace, plumbing, health studies, business studies or beauty and catering would be of greater use to everyone. They would be cheaper and better than a poorly taught course in English literature, featuring warm-hearted reflections on the role of nature in the poetry of Ted Hughes, or the life and work of Sylvia Plath, with a helping hand from the internet.25

Is it any surprise that some practitioners of literary criticism might feel the need to run into the arms of history in order to enhance their claim for doing something valuable? This is especially the case with a literature (Renaissance literature) that is so obviously part and parcel of political and religious life, the very business of historians. It is notable that several leading literary critics and historians have a common background, so that you cannot tell from which discipline they come, whereas others have trained in one discipline but have eventually been appointed in another.26 Something happened, I believe, to dent the confidence of the academy in the close reading of literary texts (and in many places it had only recently

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been established). The undermining of the New Criticism in the United States and Practical Criticism in the United Kingdom with the arrival of continental modes of textual interrogation and theoretical or philosophical reflection in the later 1960s and afterward raised a general skepticism with regard to “purely” textual interpretation. The recourse to history, on the building blocks of Marx or Foucault, or just through plain old empirical history, was bound to happen as a reaction. The attraction of the worth of the enterprise is considerable. The historian, writes the late Tony Judt, is mandated to transcend disciplinary boundaries in order to “write intelligently.” In a recent obituary of this compelling modern historian, who is generally held to have made the past speak to present concerns, Judt was quoted: “The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth.”27 It is in the juxtaposition of text and carefully discovered context that Judt’s “pleasant lies” (the contents of a panegyric for instance, or the apparent teaching of a play) are converted into “the truth about ourselves” as we are able to know ourselves collectively. This is surely a set of insights consonant with Christopher Hill’s vision of the transforming landscape of seventeenth-century England, as it is with Annabel Patterson’s endeavor to make us see the role of literature in making civil society. A similar effort to connect the past meaningfully with the present can be found in Erin Murphy’s and Laura Knoppers’s contributions to this volume. I would add with a sense of excitement and hope of disciplinary renewal, shared in Marshall Grossman’s essay, that the “New Formalism” or the “New Aestheticism” is at its most powerful precisely where it meets this sense of history. In this respect, the placing of Milton at the heart of a huge cultural contradiction – where God-fearing and godpresuming humanity meet – is in fact a statement of true historicist value, extremely potent in respect of what it tells us.28 But there is a final, gloomier point to make. The kind of disturbance of views that this volume addresses are made at a point in time when the resources of civilization seem challenged by forces of violent destructiveness and by environmental, climatic circumstances that threaten an exhaustion of humanity’s capacity to be civilized. I am not the first person to suggest a perspective parallel with the early sixteenth century, when a great deal of lives were lost in the name of a clash of faiths, and when Armageddon seemed just around the corner. There were a great many proffered solutions, not all of them to do with the teaching of history and reason – the context for Thomas Fulton’s essay in this volume. I know which side I’m on.

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No t e s 1 Ewan Fernie, ed., Spiritual Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 2 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971); Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 3 www.rhul.ac.uk/english/faeriequeene. The project description goes on: “One is ‘The Faerie Queene Liturgy Project’, which seeks to create new liturgical texts and solidarity-building rituals for contemporary society inspired by the quest for holiness in Book 1 of Spenser’s epic. . . . This project will be complemented by ‘The Faerie Queene Fable and Drama Project,’ in which writer Simon Palfrey and director Elisabeth Dutton will evolve new stories and a play through intense collaboration with heterogeneous educational communities: two ethnically diverse comprehensive secondary schools, both from socially deprived wards; and the radically different students of Oxford University.” What, I wonder, is involved in “solidarity-building”? Fernie and Palfrey are also general editors of an Oxford University Press series of short studies entitled “Shakespeare Now!” 4 See the list of cited works in Ewan Fernie, “Introduction,” in Fernie, Spiritual Shakespeares, 24n1. 5 Classically in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 6 See M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Emmaneul Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York: George Braziller, 1979). 7 James Holstun, “Ranting at the New Historicism,” ELR 19 (1989): 189–226; see also James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000). 8 Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Carolyn Sale, “The ‘Roman Hand’: Women, Writing and the Law in the Att.-Gen v. Chatterton and the Letters of the Lady Arbella Stuart,” ELH 70 (2003): 929–61. 9 Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Thomas Cogswell and Peter Lake, “Buckingham Does the Globe: Henry VIII and the Politics of Popularity in the 1620s,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60 (2009): 253–78. 10 Peter Lake, “From Leicester His Commonwealth to Sejanus His Fall: Ben Jonson and the Politics of Roman (Catholic) Virtue,” in Ethan H. Shagan, ed., Catholics and the “Protestant Nation”: Religious Politics and Identity in

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12

13 14

15 16

17 18

19

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Smith Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 128–61. See, most famously, Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), but see also Quentin Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ and the Language of Renaissance Humanism,” in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 123–57. Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hecuba? Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play, trans. David Pan and Jennifer R. Rust (New York: Telos Press, 2009); The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See, for example Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); on a broader topic, see also Stephen Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010). See Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). See, for example Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), revised as Marvell: The Writer in Public Life (Harlow and New York: Longman, 2000); Annabel Patterson, Reading Between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). Annabel Patterson, “More Speech on Free Speech,” Modern Language Quarterly 54 (1993): 57. David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Martin Dzelzainis, “‘Presbyterian Sibyl’: Truth Telling and Gender in Andrew Marvell’s Third Advice to a Painter,” in Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne, eds., Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 111–28; Oliver Arnold, The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641– 1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). But again see also Annabel Patterson, “No Meer Amatorious Novel?” in Annabel Patterson, ed., John Milton (Harlow and New York: Longman, 1992), 87–101.

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21 Feisal Mohamed, “The Burqa and the Body Electric,” The New York Times, July 29, 2010; Feisal Mohamed, Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 22 Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 30–1, 36, 41, 72–4, 83–5, 107–25; William Kolbrener, “The Liberal Areopagitica,” ELH 60 (1993): 57–78. 23 See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996); Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (London: Picador, 2003); Zachary Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006); John Carey, William Golding. The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies. A Life (London: Faber and Faber, 2009); Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift, The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1962–83). 24 James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber, 2005); David E. Wellbery et al., eds., A New History of German Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers, eds., A New Literary History of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). See also Paul Salzman, Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading 1621 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002). 25 George Walden, “Education: too many students – too few apprentices,” The Daily Telegraph, December 23, 2009. 26 Blair Worden and Martin Dzelzainis would be an example of the former, whereas Kevin Sharpe is an example of the latter. Where disciplinary territory in appointments is so tightly defined and guarded in the United States, the phenomenon is not so noticeable. There, cross-disciplinary influence has been felt in the classroom and in the makeup of dissertation committees. 27 Obituary by William Grimes, The New York Times, August 8, 2010. 28 Teskey, Delirious Milton, chapters 1–3; John Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Index

Achinstein, Sharon, 13, 212 Acts, Book of, 97, 101–2, 222–23 Adnotationes (Valla), 92 Adorno, Theodor, 136 Aeschylus, 47, 190 aesthetic experience, 24, 35, 43, 48 Alcetis (Euripides), 191 Alciato, Andrea, 197 Allegory of Love, The (Lewis), 9 anachronism, 26, 90, 139, 262, 263 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 65 Ancients and Moderns, quarrel of, 47–48 Annotations (Erasmus), 88, 90, 92, 95, 103–4 Anselm of Canterbury, Saint, 116 anti-foundationalism, 136 antiquarianism, 29 Aquinas, Thomas, 117 archives, 133, 135 Areopagitica (Milton): authorship compared with father-child relationship, 70–71, 72–73; as document and literature, 69; Euripides cited on title page of, 184, 189; on freedom to publish, 192 aristocratic patronage. See patronage Aristophanes, 190 Aristotle: on cleverness and fools, 192; on compassion, 202; in English studies education, 33; on moderation, 203; on public and private law, 201; scientific errors of, 47 art-for-art’s sake, 67 Astell, Ann, 9 Astell, Mary: Bart’ lemy Fair, 279n46; Cavendish not mentioned by, 270; in culture of print controversy, 267–68; English Civil War and work of, 14, 261, 262, 265, 267, 276; A Fair Way with the Dissenters, 263, 264; An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War, 262–63, 266, 267–68, 269, 279n41; and L’Estrange, 263–65; on Milton, 262–63; monarch as model of political being for, 267, 272, 275, 276; Some Reflections

Upon Marriage, 262, 266, 279n41; supposed split between feminist and political views, 262; Woolf on life of, 273, 274; and Woolf ’s proposed female “society of outsiders,” 274–75. See also Serious Proposal to the Ladies, A (Astell) Auerbach, Erich, 181 authorship, father-child relationship compared with, 70–74 Backus, Irena, 98 Barberini, Francesco, 222 Barbeyrac, Jean, 227 Barker, Arthur, 200 Barker, Simon, 257 Barry, Peter, 25 Bart’ lemy Fair (Astell), 279n46 Barton, Anne, 134 Barzizza, Gasparino, 98 Baumann, Michael A., 257 Beginning Theory (Barry), 25 Behn, Aphra, 270, 273, 274 Bellany, Alastair, 7 Bell in Campo (Cavendish), 244–47; Cavendish’s self-fashioning in, 248, 250; Duke of Newcastle as Lord General in, 248; extraneous aspects of, 246–47; Henrietta Maria and “generalless” in, 238, 244, 245, 247, 251; on Henrietta Maria’s missteps, 248–49; in rethinking historicism, 238; utopian aspects of, 249 Belsey, Catherine, 213 Benjamin, Walter, 136, 141 Bennett, Alan, 138 Berger, Harry, 122 Bhabha, Homi, 140, 141 Bible: contradictions between Hebraic and Christian, 200; exegetic techniques, 62; philological recovery of, 3, 87–88, 90–97; political role of, 12; Vulgate, 90, 92, 95. See also New Testament; Old Testament

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Index

Blackfriars theater, 143, 145–46, 148, 150, 157n41 Blazing World, The (Cavendish), 273 book history, 2, 7, 133 Bradford, John, 118 Bridgewater, Earl of, 163 Bristol, Michael, 136 Brooks, Cleanth, 137 Brown, Paul, 141–42 Bryant, Arthur, 28 Bullinger, Heinrich, 118 Bunyan, John, 149 Burckhardt, Jacob, 3, 209–11, 215 Burghley, Lord, 169 Burrow, Colin, 287 Burton, Robert, 167 Cambridge School of the History of Political Thought, 5, 212 Camden, William, 3 Campbell, Jane, 238 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 23, 117 Carey, Henry, 162, 174 Carey, John, 26, 81 Carlson, Tucker, 257 Cave, Terence, 181–82 Cavell, Stanley, 122 Cavendish, Margaret: Astell does not mention, 270; The Blazing World, 273; disappointments from Restoration, 250–51; familiarity with female heroic mode, 245; flamboyant dress of, 248, 250; Life… of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, 249–50, 249–50, 274; monarch as model of political being for, 272, 275, 276; Pepys on, 250; on personal cost of Civil War, 270–71; rewrites civil war history for the queen, 14, 239; self-fashioning of, 247–51; The True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life, 248, 271, 272; Woolf on, 270–72, 274. See also Bell in Campo Chapman, George, 143 Chidley, Katherine, 277 Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana) (Milton), 199, 223–25, 228 “Christianity and Confession” (Foucault), 214 Chronicles (Holinshed), 159, 160, 166 chronology, 54 Cicero, 33 citation, 181–82, 184 Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, The (Burckhardt), 209, 215 Clifford, John, 169 Clinton, Hillary, 237–39, 251 Cogswell, Thomas, 7

Colet, John: on deaths of Seneca and Paul, 105; Erasmus influenced by, 92, 96, 105, 108n21; and Erasmus on Paul’s rhetoric, 100, 101, 104; lectures on Paul, 92–95, 105; in recovering biblical text, 88 Collingwood, R.G., 141 Colossians, Book of, 103 combat, women in, 257 Commentaries (Caesar), 159, 160 Common Reader (Woolf), 270–71, 272 compassion, 187, 202 Compendium Theologiae Christianae (Wolleb), 224, 225 Comus (Maske presented at Ludlow Castle) (Milton), 163, 189–90 confession, 117, 119, 122 contextualism, 5, 7, 106 contextualization, 27, 50, 54, 76, 113 1 Corinthians, 191, 195, 199–200 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 221 Crawford, Julie, 276, 281n91 Crawford, Patricia, 280n54 creative writing, 33 Creede, Thomas, 164–65, 168, 170, 173 Criticism. See literary criticism Croce, Benedetto, 135 Crowland Chronicle, 166 crucifixion, the, 116 Cultural Materialism, 5–6; Fish on, 10; historical research reinvigorates, 142; political agenda of, 5, 25; and theory, 133; versus current historicism, 24 culture: cultural history, 210, 211; cultural studies, 10; New Historicism on literature and, 67–68; New Presentism on past and, 136 Cummings, Brian, 37n23, 92, 107n13, 107n15, 108n18, 110n50, 148–49 Cur Deus Homo (Anselm of Canterbury), 116 curriculum, 33–35 Cust, Richard, 7 Davenant, William, 2, 190 Davies, Eleanor, 277 Decalogue, 227–28 De Cive (Hobbes), 189 deconstruction, 27, 28, 62n1 Dekker, Thomas, 152 Demosthenes, 220 Derby, Edward Stanley, third Earl of, 168 Derby, Ferdinando Stanley, fifth Earl of, 162, 169, 173–74 Derby, Henry Stanley, fourth Earl of, 165, 168 Derby, Thomas Stanley, first Earl of, 164, 166, 169, 170, 171–72

Index Derby, William Stanley, sixth Earl of, 163 Derrida, Jacques, 30–31, 138, 139 Descartes, René, 140–41 detachment (distance), principle of, 45–46 determinism, 9–10 detorquere, 102–3, 105, 111n64 Deuteronomy, 78–79 diachrony, 59–60, 67–70, 153–54, 258–59 dialectic: of external and internal, 51–54, 55; of levels of structure, 58–62; of temporality, 54–58; of traits and types, 49–51 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 63n7 Dimock, Wai Chee, 258–59 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 214 “Discourse and Truth” (Foucault), 216 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 140–41 Dissenters Sayings, The (L’Estrange), 263, 264 Dissenters Sayings. The Second Part (L’Estrange), 264 distance (detachment), principle of, 45–46 divorce tracts (Milton), 181–208; and author’s personal disappointments, 186; on compassion as rhetorical mode, 187–88; The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 185, 186, 191, 193, 194–203, 220; intersection of ethics with form in, 183–84; irremediable division as persistent thread in, 185; The Judgment of Martin Bucer, 192, 220; on loosening restrictive bonds, 198; in Milton’s larger political project, 185–86; as parrhesiastic, 224; on passion and justice, 194–203; on passion as source of obligation, 185; Tetrachordon, 178n22, 181, 184–85, 187, 189, 192; on wrong actions as understandable, 193 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, The (Milton), 185, 186, 191, 193, 194–203, 220 documentation, 45 Dolan, Frances, 259 Donation of Constantine, 87, 97 Donne, John, 52, 54 Dorislaus, Isaac, 3 Drake, Sir Francis, 144 Drayton, Michael, 2 Dreyfus, Herbert, 215 Du Moulin, Peter, 222 Dzelzainis, Martin, 13–14, 88, 192 Eastward Ho (Chapman, Jonson, and Marston), 143–48; colonial reading of, 143–45, 150; ending of, 146; Hamlet announces itself in, 146–47, 150; irony in, 145, 146, 151; as pre-text for The Tempest, 145, 150, 153; self-consciousness of, 150–51; thrift and grace in, 145, 147–48, 149, 151 Eden, Kathy, 108n18, 109n33, 110n35

297

editing, 2, 3, 133 Education of a Christian Prince (Erasmus), 88, 96, 97 Egerton, Sir Thomas, 163 Eikonoklastes (Milton), 263 Elegies (Propertius), 197 Elements of Law (Hobbes), 188 Eliot, T.S., 137 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 168 Elizabethan World Picture, The (Tillyard), 5, 28 Elton, Sir Geoffrey (Gottfried Rudolph Otto Ehrenberg), 28 emblems, 197, 198 “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England” (Gallagher), 258, 262, 275–76 empiricism: historicizing, 46–49; skeptical approach to, 41–42 Empson, William, 73, 137 English Civil War: and Astell’s writing, 14, 261, 262, 265, 267, 276; Cavendish on personal cost of, 270–71; fashioning women warriors in, 237–56; women erased from histories of, 274; Woolf as silent about, 270–71, 272, 273, 274 Enterline, Lynn, 206n31 Epictetus, 215 Epicureans, 215 epideictic oratory, 100, 104 epistemology, empirical, 41, 45, 46, 48, 49 Erasmus: Annotations, 88, 90, 92, 95, 103–4; Colet’s influence on, 92, 96, 105, 108n21; Education of a Christian Prince, 88, 96, 97; on More, 105; New Testament translation of, 88, 90–91, 104; Novum Instrumentum Omne, 91, 92, 98, 99; Oration on the Pursuit of Virtue, 101; Panegyricus, 88, 98–101, 104; Paraphrase on the Acts, 101; on Paul’s pious cunning, 102–3; The Praise of Folly, 104; in recovering biblical text, 88, 90–91; on Seneca, 98; Seneca edited by, 88, 97–98; translation of Paul’s letter to the Romans, 91, 92, 95–97, 99–100, 105–6; Urswick’s connection with, 167; on Valla, 92 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 23, 46 ethics: of reading, 43, 66, 77–82, 82n3, 153; turn to, 182–83 Euripides: Alcetis, 191; Hippolytus, 216; Ion, 216; Milton cites on title page of Areopagitica, 184, 189; Milton’s annotated copy of, 192; Milton’s lifelong engagement with, 186, 190; parrhesia in works of, 216; Paul said to have quoted, 191; women and slaves talk in works of, 190. See also Medea (Euripides)

298

Index

Evelyn, John, 250 evidence, standards for, 44–46 Exodus, 78, 79, 80 expiation, 115–16 explanation, 51–54, 61 external/internal distinction, 51–54, 55 Ezell, Margaret, 271–72, 273, 274 Faerie Queene (Spenser), 9, 25 Fair Way with the Dissenters, A (Astell), 263, 264 Fallon, Stephen, 183 feminism: combined with historicism, 2, 133; and New Historicism, 258–60, 275; redefining itself in face of women’s increased agency, 276; as rooted in history, 27 Fenners, George, 163 Ferguson, Adam, 59 Ferro, Marc, 29 First Defense (Milton), 198 Firth, C.H., 274, 280n65 Fish, Stanley: historicism criticized by, 10, 88, 135, 212; How Milton Works, 26; and literature’s transcendency, 9; on Milton as truth-teller, 219; “Milton’s Career and the Career of Theory,” 212; nostalgia of, 137; “Why Milton Matters: or, against Historicism,” 10 Fletcher, Giles, 175n10 Florio, John, 194 Foley, Helen, 190 Fontenelle, Bernard de, 47–48 Ford, Henry, 1, 15 Ford, John, 168 form: in analysis of historical content, 134; literary, 44. See also formalism formalism: in criticism of historicism, 11, 88; New Formalism, 11. See also New Criticism fortitude, 196, 199, 201, 203, 219–20 Foucault, Michel: on articulating transitions, 68; Berkeley lectures of, 214–15, 217–18; on Burckhardt, 215; on genealogy, 210; Greenblatt influenced by, 213–14, 218; historians influenced by, 7; New Historicism influenced by, 5, 6, 14, 31, 68, 211, 212, 213; on parrhesia, 216–17, 220; on power, 213; presentists make use of, 27; repressive hypothesis of, 183; Said on West and, 139; on self-forming, 215; on theory and history, 31–32; on truth-telling, 209, 213, 215–17 Frankfurt school, 136, 137 freedom of speech, 192, 216 Freud, Sigmund: on father as author of the child, 71, 74; on the uncanny, 138. See also psychoanalysis

Frogs (Aristophanes), 190 Frye, Northrop: Anatomy of Criticism, 65; on object of literary criticism, 43, 65–66 Fulton, Thomas, 12 functionalism, 213 Gallagher, Catherine: Astell and Cavendish paired by, 270; on Astell’s support for monarchy, 267, 272, 275; “Embracing the Absolute,” 258, 262, 275–76; and Foucault’s Berkeley lectures, 218; Practicing New Historicism, 214 Garber, Marjorie, 7 Geertz, Clifford, 6, 7, 213 gender: Astell’s attacks on hierarchies of, 262; in diachronic historical inquiry, 258–59; historicizing, 275–76. See also women Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 212 “generalissima”: Hillary Clinton as, 237–39; Henrietta Maria as, 239–40, 241, 243, 246 genre, 49 Gentili, Alberico, 225 Gillespie, Katherine, 276 Gleason, John B., 108n21 Go-Between, The (Hartley), 138 Golden Mirror, The (1589), 169 Gorringe, Timothy, 118 grace: in Eastward Ho, 145, 147–48, 149, 151; importance in Reformation culture, 148–49, 153; in The Tempest, 151, 152 Grady, Hugh: in emergence of New Presentism, 135–36; as go-between, 141; on historicism producing allegory of the present, 136; on historicism’s triumph, 133; on opposition between past and present, 137; on presentism as extension of New Historicism, 27–28; Presentist Shakespeares, 136–37; seen as going too far, 28, 259 Grafton, Anthony, 182 Gramsci, Antonio, 6 Gray, Catherine, 270 Greenblatt, Stephen: on Burckhardt, 215; in emergence of New Historicism, 4, 5, 211; Foucault’s influence on, 213–14, 218; “go-between” of, 140; hermeneutical model of, 160; on homology of past and present, 153; “Invisible Bullets,” 143; “Learning to Curse,” 141, 218; New Presentist criticism of, 135; on Othello, 121, 122; on power, 213; Practicing New Historicism, 214; on psychoanalysis in criticism, 134; Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 211, 213–14; “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” 214, 218 Greville, Sir Fulke, 3 Grossman, Marshall, 12, 42, 43, 44, 142, 153–54, 204n11, 245

Index Grotius, Hugo, 196, 225–28 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 53 Gurr, Andrew, 162 Habermas, Jürgen, 182, 279n45 Hadfield, Andrew, 11–12, 42–43, 44, 81, 113, 210, 259 Hakluyt, Richard, 143, 144 Halkett, Lady Anne, 277 Hall, Edward, 163, 166 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 74, 75, 81, 83n13, 146–47, 150 Hampton, Timothy, 182 Hanson, Elizabeth, 143 Hariot, Thomas, 23 Hartley, L.P., 133, 138 Harvey, Gabriel, 2 Hawkes, Terence: in emergence of New Presentism, 135; on historicism producing allegory of the present, 136; on historicism’s refusal to engage with its situatedness, 114; on not yearning to speak with the dead, 137, 141; on opposition between past and present, 137; Presentist Shakespeares, 136–37; on stepping outside time, 142; Structuralism and Semiotics, 138; on textualism, 138 Henrietta Maria: counsel of, 247–48; entry into Oxford in July 1643, 245, 247; as “generalissima” in The Kings Cabinet Opened, 239–40, 241, 243, 246; and “generalless” in Cavendish’s Bell in Campo, 238, 244, 245, 247, 251; illness of, 242; letters to her husband, 14, 240–43; missteps depicted in Cavendish’s Bell in Campo, 248–49; as Saint Nemesis in Breeches, 240, 251 Henry V (Shakespeare), 217 1 Henry VI (Shakespeare), 169, 176n10 2 Henry VI (Shakespeare), 169, 172, 176n10 3 Henry VI (Shakespeare), 169, 170, 172, 176n10, 177n29 Henry VII (king of England), 163–65, 166, 168 Henslowe, Philip, 175n10 Herbert, Sir Walter, 172, 173 hermeneutics: biblical and legal, 96; hermeneutic circle, 46–47, 48, 61, 68; humanist, 88, 106; objectivity of, 62; Protestant, 93; proto-liberal, 160; trait/type opposition and, 50 Heroides (Ovid), 207n43 Hesketh, Richard, 173 Hill, Christopher, 4 Hippolytus (Euripides), 216 Hirsch, E.D., 49 Hirschfeld, Heather, 13

299

historicism: as academic practice, 3–4; alternatives to, 27–32; case against, 23–24; coining of term, 3; as collective enterprise, 5; curriculum and teaching and, 33–35; deep-rootedness of, 139; discursive focus of, 113; dominance in literary studies, 23, 133, 259; false dichotomy in characterization of, 105–6; Fish’s criticism of, 10, 88, 135, 212; forms of, 1–3; has it gone too far?, 23–39; historicizing, 42; institutional, 133, 135–36; left politics associated with, 88, 106; limitations of, 32; objections to, 6–11, 88; Popper on poverty of, 52; presentism-in, 89; presentist, 259; principal perception of, 138–39; as producing allegory of the present, 136; recent, 4–5; as reflective, 141; refusal to engage its own situatedness, 114; on text and history, 7; traditional and avant-garde allied against, 25. See also New Historicism; Renaissance historicism history: as all contemporary, 135; becomes academic discipline, 3; book, 2, 7, 133; as bunk, 1, 15; contextualization in, 50; cultural, 210, 211; Elizabethan historiography, 160; as focalization of perspective, 51–54, 61; as forever a figure, 181; form in analysis of historical content, 134; Greek lack of sense of, 211; grounding in texts, 62; as interdiscipline for literary studies, 67; as levels of structure, 58–62; lived experience in recent historiography, 113; matching particulars and generals in, 49–51; as moments of temporality, 54–58, 61; New Historicism affects discipline of, 7–11, 24–25; Nietzsche’s three modes of, 210; “the past is a foreign country,” 133, 138–39, 153; post-modern, 28; present concerns in, 26; as revised with each retelling, 159–60; scientific method and, 48–49, 51; seen as at an end, 23; techniques of biblical exegesis in, 62; as text, 49, 134, 135, 140; theater, 161–62; theory and practice in historical method, 40–64; writing history as art, 65, 66. See also literary history History of Britain (Milton), 228 History of King Richard III (More), 88, 89, 105, 166 history of the book, 2, 7, 133 History of the Sevarites (Vairasse d’Allais), 53 History Workshop group, 25 Hobbes, Thomas, 182, 188–89 Holinshed, Raphael, 159, 160, 166 Holste, Lukas, 222 Homer, 47, 139 Honigmann, E.A.J., 121 Horace, 33, 47

300

Index

Horkheimer, Max, 136 Howard, Charles, 162 How Milton Works (Fish), 26 Hughes, Ann, 7 humanists: citation by, 181–82, 184; hermeneutics of, 88, 106; look back to antiquity, 89; possibility of untimely death for, 105; in recovery of biblical text, 87–88, 90–97 humanities: digital, 133; natural science separates from, 47, 48; self-doubt in, 9–10 Hume, David, 46 Hutchinson, John, 273, 274 Hutchinson, Lucy, 273, 274 imitatio, 182, 184 Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War, An (Astell), 262–63, 266, 267–68, 269, 279n41 institutional historicism, 133, 135–36 interdisciplinarity, 4–5, 66–67 interpretation: distinct mode for literary history, 12; in historical method, 12, 51–54, 61; historicism does not close off, 106; ideological positions in, 87; politics and, 106. See also hermeneutics “Invisible Bullets” (Greenblatt), 143 Ion (Euripides), 216 Isocrates, 220 James, Susan, 193 Jameson, Frederic, 27, 134, 136, 183 Jardine, Lisa, 182 Jauss, H.R., 49–50 Jermyn, Henry, 242 Jerome, Saint, 90, 97–98, 102 John, Gospel of, 222–23 Johns, Alessa, 279n49 Jonson, Ben, 143 Jowett, John, 172–73, 178n32 Joyce, James, 140 Judgment of Martin Bucer, The (Milton), 192, 220 Julius Caesar, 159, 160 justice, Milton on passion and, 194–203 Kahn, Victoria, 182, 185 Kastan, David Scott, 141, 142, 155n26 Kennett, White, 265, 266 King Lear (Shakespeare), 221 Kings, Book of, 199 Kings Cabinet Opened, The, 239–43; Cavendish’s Bell in Campo turns it on its head, 246; on Henrietta Maria as “generalissima,” 239–40, 243, 246; on

Henrietta Maria’s counsel, 247–48; the king as depicted in, 240, 243; as propaganda windfall, 14, 240; the queen as depicted in, 242–43; queen’s letters omitted in, 241–42 King’s Men, 150, 162 Knoppers, Laura, 14 Korda, Natasha, 121 Krugman, Paul, 237 Kuchar, Gary, 115 Kulturgeschichte, 210, 211 Lacan, Jacques, 83n19 Lake, Peter, 7 Lane, Ralph, 144 language, culture seen as virtual, 68 Laplanche, J., 114–15 Larkin, Philip, 35 Latimer, Hugh, 93 latitudinarianism, 54, 55 Lawrence, D.H., 34–35 “Learning to Curse” (Greenblatt), 141, 218 Leavis, F.R., 30, 34–35, 137 Lee, John, 134 Lefèvre, Jacques, 92, 98 Leicester’s Men, 162 Lentricchia, Frank, 213 Le Saint, William P., 116 L’Estrange, Roger, 263–65 Levao, Ronald, 184 Lewis, C.S., 9 “Life of Infamous Men, The” (Foucault), 214 Life…of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle (Cavendish), 249–50, 274 Lindley, David, 148 literary criticism: and art’s commitment to performance of particular, 69; Fish on proper object of, 135; Frye on object of, 43, 65–66; historians and, 5–12; as historical entity, 43; learning to read backwards in, 81–82; practical pedagogy and, 34–35; psychoanalytic, 27; on religious belief, 29; scientific elements of, 65–67; turn to ethics in, 182–83; value and, 32. See also formalism; historicism; presentism literary form, 44 literary history: distinct mode of interpretation for, 12; as embedding work in broader discourse of its time, 76; empirical method in, 46; exemplary questions in, 50–51, 52, 54; mimetic model of, 183; in New Criticism, 67; practical historical method for, 60; reconciling demands of art and science in, 66; theater history as part of, 161; and theory, 133; versus history, 60, 65, 76

Index literature: as art, 69; cohering of category of, 48; curriculum and teaching practices for, 33–35; as historical entity, 43; historicizing, 76; literariness of, 24–25; as moving, 69–70; as readable long past its first appearance, 68–69; scientific method and, 48–49; seen as evidence, 67; transcendency of, 9. See also literary criticism; literary history Liu, Alan, 5 Locke, John, 23, 45, 46 Longinus, 82n3 Lord Admiral’s Men, 162 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 162, 174 Lord Dudley’s Men, 162 Lord Pembroke’s Men, 172, 173, 174, 175n10, 178n31 Lord Strange’s Men, 162–63, 168–70, 173–74, 175n10 Love, Harold, 218 Lucan, 33 Lucian, 104 Lupton, Julia, 90, 126 Luther, Martin, 92, 118, 149 MacLean, Sally-Beth, 162 Mancini, Domenico, 166 Manley, Lawrence, 13 Marcus Aurelius, 215 Marlowe, Christopher, 140 marriage: Astell’s educational retirement as alternative to, 268; Paul on, 195, 199–200. See also divorce tracts (Milton) Marston, John, 143, 163 Marvell and the Civic Crown (Patterson), 4, 287, 292n15 Marx, Karl: on the accidental as historical fact, 40; Cultural Materialism influenced by, 5, 6; on object of art, 40; on pre-history, 57–58; presentists make use of, 27; on structure, 58–59; Thompson’s critique of structural Marxism, 29 Maus, Katherine, 122 McKeon, Michael, 12, 81, 82n3, 258, 259 McMillin, Scott, 162 Medea (Euripides): cited on title page of Milton’s Tetrachordon, 181, 187, 189, 192; cleverness of Medea, 188, 192; cultural possibilities for identification of repudiation in, 187; dangerous excess in, 187; divided Medea, 193; on divorce, 181; eloquence of Medea, 188–90; Hobbes on, 188–89; immoderate love in, 186; Medea as torn by passion, 193; necessity of tragic drama, 185 Memoirs of the Life of John Hutchinson (Hutchinson), 273, 274

301

Mercurius Britanicus (Nedham), 237, 243 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 193, 207n43 Meynell, Alice, 274 Miller, J. Hillis, 137 Milton, John: assessing internal motives of, 52–53; Astell on, 262–63; Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana), 199, 223–25, 228; classical tragedy cited in frontispieces, 184; Comus (Maske presented at Ludlow Castle), 163, 189–90; diffidence toward theater, 153; Eikonoklastes, 263; Euripides’ presence in works of, 186, 190; First Defense, 198; grace as problem for, 149, 153; History of Britain, 228; in his own interpretation, 13–14; Lady Alice Egerton as patron of, 163; major editing projects, 2; New Historicism in Milton studies, 13, 212–13; Of Education, 190, 191; as parrhesiast, 218, 220–21, 228; as readable long past his first appearance, 68; Reason of Church Government, 190, 218; in Rome, 221–22, 228; Samson Agonistes, 26, 81, 191, 208n52, 228; on satisfaction, 113; Second Defense (Defensio Secunda), 185, 221, 222, 228; terrorism associated with, 26, 31; on truth-telling, 218–28; “Upon the Circumcision,” 113. See also Areopagitica; divorce tracts; Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained Milton and the English Revolution (Hill), 4 “Milton’s Career and the Career of Theory” (Fish), 212 modernity, historicism as distinguishing feature of, 139 Montaigne, Michel de, 144, 150 Montrose, Louis, 6, 7, 134, 135, 238 More, Sir Thomas: History of King Richard III, 88, 89, 105, 166; on obliquus ductus approach, 88–89, 94, 101; untimely death of, 105; Urswick’s connection with, 167; Utopia, 53, 88, 89, 97, 100, 144 Morton, Thomas, 166 Murphy, Erin, 14 Nedham, Marchamont, 243 Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of. See Cavendish, Margaret Newcastle, William Cavendish, Duke of, 244, 248, 249–50, 274 New Criticism: Frye on, 65; New Historicism emerges against, 4, 24, 67; New Presentism and, 137; and practical pedagogy, 34; runs out of steam in 1970s, 24 New Formalism, 11

302

Index

New Historicism: anecdote used in, 5–6; on articulating transitions, 68; on conditions of theatrical performance, 161; and Cultural Materialism, 5–6; cultural poetics in, 4; on culture and literature, 67–68; discipline of history affected by, 7–11, 24–25; and feminism, 2, 258–60, 275; Foucault as influence on, 5, 6, 14, 31, 68, 211, 212, 213–18; Greenblatt in emergence of, 4, 5, 211; hermeneutical model of, 160; historical research reinvigorates, 142; historicizing, 14; Kulturgeschichte and, 211; in Milton studies, 13, 212–13; Montrose’s definition of, 134; objections to, 6–11; political agenda of, 25, 32; presentism as extension of, 27; religion as blind spot of, 26–27, 113–14; seen as postmodern practice, 134; skeptical critique of empirical epistemology in, 62n1; on telling truth to power, 211, 212; on text and history, 7; textual history as interest of, 6; and theory, 133–34, 214; versus current historicism, 24; versus New Criticism, 4, 24, 67 New Presentism, 133–58; cannot step outside the foundation of time, 142; in criticism of historicism, 11, 88; emergence of, 135–36; main issue as logistical not theoretical, 140–41; motivation of original claims of, 137; nostalgia of, 137; seen as form of historicism, 136 New Testament: Acts, 97, 101–2, 222–23; Colossians, 103; 1 Corinthians, 191, 195, 199–200; Erasmus’ translation of, 88, 90–91, 104; parrhesia in, 222–23; Romans, 91, 92, 93–96, 99–100, 105–6 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Genealogy of Morals, 212; “On the Discovery of Antiquity in Italy,” 209; “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” 209, 210–12; on untimeliness, 211 Norbrook, David: “Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere,” 204n13; “Euripides, Milton and Christian Doctrine,” 203n2; good writing of, 287; “Life and Death of Renaissance Man,” 229n10; “Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson: Identity, Ideology and Politics,” 281n76; Writing the English Republic, 16n12 Novum Instrumentum Omne (Erasmus), 91, 92, 98, 99 Nussbaum, Martha, 187 Obedience of a Christian Man (Tyndale), 118 objectivity: empiricist standards of, 42; and hermeneutic circle, 46, 47; in historical

knowledge, 51; literature’s separation from, 48; skepticism regarding, 41; of texts, 62 Ocnus, 197, 198, 199 Octavia (Seneca), 89 Of Education (Milton), 190, 191 Old Testament: Decalogue, 227–28; Deuteronomy, 78–79; Exodus, 78, 79, 80; Kings, 199 “On the Discovery of Antiquity in Italy” (Nietzsche), 209 On the Donation of Constantine (Valla), 87, 89 “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (Nietzsche), 209, 210–12 Oration on the Pursuit of Virtue (Erasmus), 101 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 214 Orientalism (Said), 139–40, 141 Othello (Shakespeare), 119–27 Ovid, 190, 193, 207n43 Pafford, J.H.P., 72 Panegyricus (Erasmus), 88, 98–101, 104 Paradise Lost (Milton): authorship compared with father-child relationship, 71, 74; on control of the passions, 194; creation of Eve as allegory of literary production, 73–74; divorce tracts compared with, 185; on grace, 149; parrhesia in, 220; on patient fortitude, 196; on reason versus passion, 193; submitted to the censor, 228; synchronic versus diachronic challenges of, 60; truth-telling in, 219–20; unrealized matter in, 75–76; Wolfe on political implications of, 9 Paradise Regained (Milton): and ethics of reading, 77–82; on Harpy’s feast and Satan, 152; on Stoicism, 194; submitted to the censor, 228; on tragedy, 191 Paraphrase on the Acts (Erasmus), 101 Parker, David, 183 parrhesia: and democracy, 220; and fortitude, 220; Foucault on, 216–17, 220; Milton as parrhesiast, 218, 220–21, 228; Milton’s divorce tracts as parrhesiastic, 224; in New Testament, 222–23; in Paradise Lost, 220; Paul as parrhesiast, 90; Renaissance historicism and, 88 Parsons, Talcott, 213 passions: and justice, 194–203; Medea as torn by, 193; in Milton’s divorce tracts, 185; reason versus, 185, 186, 193; Seneca on, 184, 193–94, 195, 199, 200, 201; Stoic doctrine of, 192–94, 196, 203; stopping short of their excess, 186 Paster, Gail, 126–27, 127n7 patience, 196, 199, 201 patronage: in dramatization of Tudor history, 163–65; interpreting plays in terms of, 161,

Index 162; reading Richard III in terms of its patronage history, 170–74 Patterson, Annabel: Censorship and Interpretation, 107n6, 252n14; on literature as source of historical knowledge, 168; on literature in making civil society, 290; makes political deliberation come alive, 287–88; Marvell and the Civic Crown, 4, 287, 292n15; “Milton, Marriage and Divorce,” 205n21; “More Speech on Free Speech,” 292n17; on multivocality of Holinshed’s Chronicles, 160; in New Historicist movement, 4; “No Meer Amatorius Novel?,” 292n20; on oblique communication in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, 89; Reading Between the Lines, 204n14; Reading Holinshed’s Chronicle, 174n3, 174n5, 177n23 Paul, Saint: address to the Athenians, 101–2; Colet’s lectures on, 92–95, 105; in construction of political self in Shakespearean England, 90; correspondence with Seneca, 89, 97–98; Erasmus’ translation of Romans, 91, 92, 95–97, 99–100, 105–6; Euripides said to be quoted by, 191; Lefèvre’s translation of, 92, 98; on marriage, 195, 199– 200; More’s obliquus ductus approach and, 89; rhetoric of, 90, 98–106; untimely death of, 105; Valla’s “I am Paul, because I imitate Paul,” 87, 89–90 Paulin, Tom, 32 Pearson, Joseph, 217 Pelosi, Nancy, 238 Pembroke, Henry Herbert, second Earl of, 173 Pembroke, Jasper Tudor, Earl of, 172 Pembroke, William Herbert, first Earl of, 173 Pembroke, William Herbert, third Earl of, 173 penance, 116–17 Pepys, Samuel, 250 periodization, 55, 59–60 Perkins, William, 118 Perkin Warkin (Ford), 168 Persius, 99 perspective: external and internal perspectives, 51–54, 55, 61; perspectival difference, 44 Philips, Katherine (Orinda), 269–70, 277 Philodemus, 215–16 Plato, 104 Pontalis, J.-B., 114–15 Poole, Elizabeth, 277 Popenruyter, Johann, 92 Popper, Karl, 52 positivism, 134, 139 postcolonial studies, 27 postmodernism, 134, 136, 137 poststructuralism, 62n1, 133, 213

303

power: danger of speaking truth to, 105; New Historicism on truth and, 211, 212; Renaissance historicism on, 88; Valla uses historicism to drive wedge between texts and, 87. See also parrhesia Practicing New Historicism (Gallagher and Greenblatt), 214 Praise of Folly, The (Erasmus), 104 Pratt, Mary Louise, 140 pre-history, 56–58 presentism, 27–32; artificial, 81; in Colet, 95; historicist criticisms of, 133–34; in-historicism, 89; Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” and, 210; persists through history, 88; presentist historicism, 259. See also New Presentism Presentist Shakespeares (Grady and Hawkes), 136–37 Propertius, 196 psychoanalysis: a historical approach to criticism of, 27; in early modern criticism, 133, 134; as external explanation, 52; historicised reading of literature and, 32; Milton and, 53 Pufendorf, Samuel, 227 Queen’s Men, 162, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 174 queer historicism, 2 Quint, David, 287 Quintilian, 104–5 Rabinow, Paul, 215 radical textualism, 27 Rainville, Martha, 238 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 143 reading: ethics of, 43, 66, 77–82, 82n3, 153; ideological positions in, 87; learning to read backwards, 81–82; synchrony and, 70 Reason of Church Government (Milton), 190, 218 Reformation, satisfying for sin and, 117–18 religion: excluded by historicist studies, 26–27, 113–14; literary criticism and religious belief, 29 Renaissance: Burckhardt on, 3, 209, 210; experience of Classical culture in, 140; structural stability of category, 60. See also Renaissance historicism Renaissance historicism, 87–112; of Colet and Erasmus, 90–97; as defining shift, 3; relationship between politics and interpretive methods in, 106 Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Greenblatt), 211, 213–14

304

Index

rhetoric: of citation, 182; classical rhetoricians, 89, 90, 98; cleverness of the rhetorician, 188; emblem as figure for, 198; historicism reveals other possibilities of, 106; of history writing, 42; in medieval education, 33–34; in Milton’s divorce tracts, 183; parrhesia and, 221; of Paul, 90, 98–106; serving godliness, 191 Rice, Condoleezza, 238 Richard III (king of England): Creede’s True Tragedie of Richard the third, 164–65, 168, 170, 173; More’s History of King Richard III, 88, 89, 105, 166; Stanley family and conspiracy against, 164, 166–67, 168. See also Richard III (Shakespeare) Richard III (Shakespeare): folio versus quarto texts of, 172–73; history as treated in, 163; passes to Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 174; passes to Lord Pembroke’s Men, 172, 173, 175n10; read in terms of its patronage history, 170–74; on record versus report, 159–60; Stanley family members in, 170; as written for Lord Strange’s Men, 162, 170, 175n10 Richards, I.A., 4, 34 Rights of War and Peace, The (Grotius), 225–26, 227 Roe, Thomas, 142 Romans, Book of, 91, 92, 93–96, 99–100, 105–6 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf), 270, 271–72, 273, 274, 280n71 Rorty, Richard, 137 Rummel, Erika, 109n32 Ryan, Kiernan, 136–37 Said, Edward, 139–40, 141 Salmasius, 198 Samson Agonistes (Milton), 26, 81, 191, 208n52, 228 satisfaction: confession seen as, 117; the crucifixion as founding and exemplary act of, 116; as integral to human desire, 114–15; neglected as analytic category, 114; in Shakespeare’s Othello, 119–27; for sin, 115–19 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 59, 64n24, 68, 82n4 Schleiermacher, Friedrich D.E., 3, 63n7 Schlier, Heinrich, 223 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 114, 127n7 science: emergence of natural, 47–48, 51; literature and scientific method, 48–49; scientific elements of literary criticism, 65–67; techniques of biblical exegesis in, 62 Scottish Enlightenment, 59 “Scottish Field” (poem), 167–68 Seasons, The (Thomson), 23

Second Defense (Defensio Secunda) (Milton), 185, 221, 222, 228 Selden, John, 200 self-fashioning: of Margaret Cavendish, 247–51; Foucault on, 215 self-knowledge, 46, 51 Sellar, W.C., 23 Seneca: correspondence with Paul, 89, 97–98; death of, 105; Erasmus on, 98; Erasmus’s edition of, 88, 97–98; Foucault draws from, 215; Milton’s reading of tragedy filtered through, 190; Octavia, 89; on passions, 184, 193–94, 195, 199, 200, 201; tragic model of, 184 sensibility movement, 54, 55 Serious Proposal to the Ladies, A (Astell), 265–69; on Katherine Philips (Orinda), 269–70; on women in the pulpit, 265, 267; Woolf on, 260–61, 268 sermons, printed, 265 Shakespeare, William: Coriolanus, 221; early history plays perhaps written for Lord Strange’s Men, 169; eroticism in, 127n6; Hamlet, 74, 75, 81, 83n13, 146–47, 150; Henry V, 217; 1 Henry VI, 169, 176n10; 2 Henry VI, 169, 172, 176n10; 3 Henry VI, 169, 170, 172, 176n10, 177n29; King Lear, 221; major editing projects, 2; Othello, 119–27; problematizing of truth-telling in, 221; religious beliefs of, 12–13, 29–31; Timon of Athens, 221; Twelfth Night, 151; Winter’s Tale, 72, 151. See also Richard III; Tempest, The Sharpe, Kevin: “The Foundation of the Chairs of History at Oxford and Cambridge,” 16n11, 16n12; methodological detour of, 7, 293n26; Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, 204n9; Reading Revolutions, 15n2, 19n32 Shirley, James, 2 Sidney, Mary, 14 Sidney, Sir Philip, 114 Siemon, James, 160 Simpson, James, 12, 107n16, 109n26 Skinner, Quentin, 5, 212, 286 Smith, Adam, 57 Smith, Florence, 260–61 Socrates, 104 Some Reflections Upon Marriage (Astell), 262, 266, 279n41 Sonnet 71 (Sidney), 114 Sophocles, 191 speech, freedom of, 192, 216 Spenser, Edmund, 9, 25 Spiegel, Gabrielle, 7 Spiritual Shakespeares (Fernie), 30, 31

Index Springborg, Patricia, 278n22, 279n41 stadial theory of human civilization, 59 Stanley, Lady Alice Spencer, 162–63 Stanley, Lady Frances, 163 Stanley, Sir John, 169 Stanley, Sir William, 166, 168, 169–70 Stanley family: in conspiracy against Richard III, 164, 166–67, 168; legend of, 165–68; and Lord Strange’s Men, 168–70. See also members by name Stevens, Paul, 13 Stoicism, 185, 186–87, 193–94, 196, 203, 215 Stone, Lawrence, 8 Strange, George Stanley, Lord, 164, 166, 169, 170 Strange, John Talbot, Lord, 169 Structuralism and Semiotics (Hawkes), 138 structure, history as levels of, 58–62 structures of feeling, 56, 58, 81 Subaltern Studies, 25 “Subjectivity and Truth” (Foucault), 214–15 Suetonius, 93 Swift, Jonathan, 53 synchrony, 59–60, 67–70, 154, 259 Taylor, Jeremy, 226–27 teaching methods, 33–35 teleology, 29, 54, 59 Tempest, The (Shakespeare): ambivalence of, 152; colonial reading of, 23, 141–42, 143, 150, 153, 155n26; Eastward Ho as pre-text for, 145, 150, 153; grace in, 151, 152; “O brave new world,” 152, 154; reaches back to Westward Ho, 151–52; rethinking in context of old world dynastic politics, 142; seeing as believing in, 149; self-consciousness of, 150–51 temporality: anachronism, 26, 90, 139, 262, 263; diachrony, 59–60, 67–70, 153–54, 258–59; history as moments of, 54–58, 61; synchrony, 59–60, 67–70, 154, 259; versus structure, 58, 59 Tentler, Thomas, 117 Terry, Edward, 142 Tertullian, 116 Tetrachordon (Milton), 178n22, 181, 184–85, 187, 189, 192 texts: agency of, 69; as documents and literature, 68–69; in Fish’s view of literary criticism, 135; grounding history in, 62; as having unconscious, 74; historians’ approach to, 70; historicity of, 66, 134; history as text, 49, 134, 135, 140; ideological positions in reading and interpreting, 87; Valla uses historicism to drive wedge between power and, 87

305

textual materialism, 2, 27 Thatcher, Margaret, 238 theater: closed in 1642, 190; Milton’s diffidence toward, 153; religion appropriated by, 13; Restoration, 190; Tudor, 159–78. See also theater companies theater companies: interpreting plays in terms of, 161; King’s Men, 150, 162; Lord Admiral’s Men, 162; Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 162, 174; Lord Dudley’s Men, 162; Lord Pembroke’s Men, 172, 173, 174, 175n10, 178n31; Lord Strange’s Men, 162–63, 168–70, 173–74, 175n10; Queen’s Men, 162, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 174 theory: Barry’s Beginning Theory, 25; deconstruction, 27, 28, 62n1; New Historicism and, 133, 134, 214; postmodernism, 134, 136, 137; poststructuralism, 62n1, 133, 213; Renaissance resistance to, 182; triumph of, 137 Thompson, E.P., 29 Thomson, James, 23 Three Guineas (Woolf), 260, 261, 268, 273, 274, 277 Tillyard, E.M.W., 5, 28 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 221 “Towards a Poetics of Culture” (Greenblatt), 214, 218 Trachiniae (Sophocles), 191 tragedy: dangerous excess in, 187; dissent put in female mouths in, 190; Milton’s interest in Greek, 190–91; necessity in, 185, 203; Senecan model of, 184. See also Euripides Trapnel, Anna, 149, 277 Traub, Valerie, 127n6 Treatise on Auricular Confession (1622), 119 Trevelyan, George, 273–74 Tropics of Discourse (White), 138, 139 True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life, The (Cavendish), 248, 271, 272 True Tragedie of Richard the third (Creede), 164–65, 168, 170, 173 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 151 Tyndale, William, 92, 93, 95, 106, 118 Union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre [and] Yorke, The (Hall), 163, 166 “Upon the Circumcision” (Milton), 113 Urswick, Christopher, 166–67, 170–72, 173 Utopia (More), 53, 88, 89, 97, 100, 144 Uxor Hebraica (Selden), 200

306

Index

Vairasse d’Allais, Denis, 53 Valla, Lorenzo: Adnotationes, 92; Donation of Constantine exposed by, 87; Erasmus on, 92; “I am Paul, because I imitate Paul,” 87, 89–90; On the Donation of Constantine, 87, 89; in recovery of biblical text, 87–88 value, paying more attention to, 32, 81 Vergil, Polydore, 166, 167 Vietnam War, 258, 275, 276 Virgil, 33, 47 Vitkus, Daniel, 126 Volonté de savoir, La (Foucault), 214 von Maltzahn, Nicholas, 264 Vulgate, 90, 92, 95 Wallace, John M., 5 Warbeck, Perkin, 168 Warwick, Richard Neville, Earl of, 169 Webster, John, 152 Werstine, Paul, 160 Westward Ho (Dekker and Webster), 152 Wheare, Degory, 3 White, Hayden, 138, 139 White, John, 143 White, Paul Whitfield, 162 “Why Milton Matters: or, against Historicism” (Fish), 10 Williams, Bernard, 212 Williams, Raymond, 5, 55–56, 81, 218 Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 72, 151 Wolfe, Don M., 9 Wolleb, Johannes, 224, 225

women: in combat, 257, 276–77; fashioning women warriors, 237–56. See also feminism; women writers women writers: feminism and expansion of knowledge about, 2; historicism and recognition of, 14; increase in books published by women in 1640s, 269, 280n54; seventeenth-century, 257–82; war as enabling, 258, 274–75, 276–77 Woolf, Virginia: on Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 260–61, 268; on Astell’s life, 273, 274; on Cavendish, 270–72, 274; Common Reader, 270–71, 272; complicates cultural role of woman writer, 14; proposed female “society of outsiders,” 274–75, 277; A Room of One’s Own, 270, 271–72, 273, 274, 280n71; as silent about English Civil War, 270–71, 272, 273, 274; Three Guineas, 260, 261, 268, 273, 274, 277; on women’s education, 260, 261, 268; on women’s support of war, 268 Worlde of Wordes, A (Florio), 194 Wotton, Sir Henry, 221–22 Xenophon, 33 Yeatman, R.J., 23 Žižek, Slavoj, 30, 81 Zwicker, Steven N.: on construction of readers, 183; crosses disciplinary lines, 4–5; Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, 204n9