Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage [1 ed.] 9781443815628, 9781847184511

Citation preview

Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage

Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage

Edited by

Pauline Blanc

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage, Edited by Pauline Blanc This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Pauline Blanc and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-451-0, ISBN (13): 9781847184511

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Pauline BLANC PART I: SELFHOOD IN ITS EMERGENT STAGES The Selfhood of Stage Figures and Their Spectacular Efficacy in Early English Plays (c.1450-1528) André LASCOMBES .................................................................................. 8 Wit and Will and the Cohesion of the Human Self in the English Moral Drama Jean-Paul DEBAX..................................................................................... 21 Selfhood in the Tudor Dramatic Corpus Norah Yvonne PHOENIX ......................................................................... 33 PART II: SELFHOOD: A CULTURAL AND LITERARY CONSTRUCT John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe: An Exercise in Tautology: Selfhood as Cultural and Literary Construction Francis GUINLE ....................................................................................... 50 Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Marie-Hélène BESNAULT ....................................................................... 65 “Cultural Amphibians”: Impersonating the Alien in Stuart Masques Ladan NIAYESH....................................................................................... 86

vi

Table of Contents

PART III: SELFHOOD AND HAMLET When Anamorphosis Meets Aphanisis: New Perspectives on (and from) the Case of Hamlet Richard HILLMAN ................................................................................. 102 “They are actions that a man might play”: Hamlet and Characterisation: Theory, Performance, Criticism Peter J. SMITH........................................................................................ 114 PART IV: SELFHOOD AND SIGNATURE Signs, Signature, Selfhood in Early Modern Europe François LAROQUE ............................................................................... 130 Cyril Tourneur’s Defining and Defiling the Self Danièle BERTON-CHARRIÈRE............................................................ 147 PART V: SELFHOOD AND ROYAL AFFILIATION The Magisterial Hero?: Performing Royal Masculinity in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604-5) Greg WALKER ....................................................................................... 164 Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III Catherine LISAK..................................................................................... 182 Editor and Contributor Biographies......................................................... 211

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My deepest thanks go to all who participated in the colloquium, “Selfhood on the English Stage in the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries,” from which this collection springs; in particular to the director of the research team of the Department of Languages at the University of Lyon 3, Professor Hughes Didier, who sponsored the event which took place at the university on April 7-8, 2006, and who suggested that all the papers should be in English. I am grateful also to François Ové, the director of the University’s publications department, for permission to reproduce the majority of the essays of this volume, which appeared in the proceedings of the colloquium published in December 2007. Special thanks go to Don Beecher, Michael Hattaway, and Jacques Ramel for their support. Emeritus Senior Lecturer from the neighbouring University of Lyon 2, Jacques Ramel has been especially helpful with the typesetting of the volume, and without his assistance it would not have seen the light of day. For their patience, I thank Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Amanda Millar for all the work involved in giving this book its final shape. This volume is dedicated to my mother Doreen, and is in memory of my father, Arthur S. Ruberry.

INTRODUCTION PAULINE BLANC

The essays presented in this volume originate from the international two-day colloquium entitled “Selfhood on the English Stage in the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries” that I organized at the University of Jean MoulinLyon 3 in April 2006. The contributors are all specialists in the field of early modern English drama working in France and in England. The aim of the colloquium was to explore the matrix from which a plethora of stage selves of the early modern period emerged. Different approaches are used to account for the manner in which that fluid entity, the dramatis persona, was gradually elaborated into a fictional self, as a result of the multifarious shaping influences of early modern discursive and historical forces existing beyond the theatre itself. In the West, the notion of selfhood is generally regarded as being essentially imbricated in surrounding contexts—natural and social, material and human, theological, legal and political. The self lives in exchange, is not forever fixed and can look to models from literature as well as from life for ways to conceive itself. The mechanisms that accord selfhood to stage and to real-life selves are basically the same, as this collection of essays will reveal in its explorations of the elements that fashioned the stage figures which occupied the playing areas of early English drama, in which the dramatic conflict was to develop from a psychomachia between good and evil forces to a striving for selfhood and individuation, for the right to claim to be an “I.” The authors discuss a broad spectrum of stage selves, starting with abstract, little-known figures like Mundus and eventually incorporating more rounded, renowned stage beings like Hamlet. The first section consists of three essays which all reveal how certain representational factors, personal motives and personalizing traits entered into the composition of stage figures to augment or explain what was, in the early drama, a conventional posture and to bring into existence more compelling illusions of a self. The illusion of character is seen to grow

2

Introduction

away from abstractly registered Mankinds and Everymans, to incorporate Free Wills and more fully developed characters endowed with a capacity for emotion. André Lascombes, adopting a method based on the conceptual principle underlying Greimas’s models for actantial analysis of fictional constructs, begins by taking the reader onto the allegorical stage of the second half of the fifteenth century to focus on the semantic essence of the Tudor abstract figures, which he likens to “impressive totem poles” that do not represent individual beings, but rather a combination of energies capable of inducing human acts or passions. Jean-Paul Debax contributes his discussion of the way the human self was represented through the image of Mankind as conveyed by a selection of preReformation and contrasting Protestant-biased interludes. The relation between created man and his Creator is expressed in these plays in terms of the degree of independence of the creature, a Christian debate which, dating from Augustine or even earlier, fuelled the controversy concerning Determinism and Freewill and the efficacy of good works in the process of salvation. Debax comes to the conclusion that both Protestant and Catholic attempts at representing the workings of man’s soul failed to give a living or credible account of the self. Yvonne Phoenix, on the other hand, finds a considerable degree of psychological credibility in certain stage figures that appear in two late Tudor interludes, Apius and Virginia (1564) by R. B. and Cambises (1561) by Thomas Preston. Their capacity for emotion, reflection and reasoning, their capacity to evolve and not remain static makes them viable contenders for a place in the portrait gallery of memorable Tudor stage selves. In the second section of the volume, three essays illustrate how literary and cultural influences shaped the construction of even more compelling representations of selfhood. Francis Guinle discusses the way in which selfhood in John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe of 1584 is the result of a projected image found in history as well as in the different source texts about Alexander the Great. Marie-Hélène Besnault explores the numerous cultural and literary sources that helped shape Marlowe’s uniquely delineated Tamburlaine: classical mythology, early English chronicles, travel literature, the exploration of the body in Renaissance fine arts, Renaissance moral philosophy and the dramatist’s critical fascination with a newly developing acquisitive society. The focus then turns to the representation of selfhood in a selection of Stuart court masques. Ladan Niayesh analyses the way the embodiments of alterity and spectacles of foreign otherness in these masques point to the ideological basis of a genre which, contrary to the travel plays in the public theatres, did not roam the

Pauline Blanc

3

world but, with a self-serving purpose, brought the world back to Whitehall for a universal tribute to the British crown in a context of nascent imperialism. The barrier between the self and the foreign other becomes porous, as the supposedly alien masquers leave the stage to take partners from the audience, causing the masque to vacillate between a spectacle of incorporation and one of contamination. The third section of the collection is devoted to Hamlet. Richard Hillman studies the relation between the two technical terms and effects called “anamorphosis” and “aphanisis” and the representation of character in early modern drama. His argument focuses on the way anamorphosis and aphanisis enter into a mutually reinforcing dynamic with regard to self-representation and guide the audience in changing its imaginary point of view. Since the system is not hermetically self-contained, intertextual signals may creep into the critical equation and introduce meanings recognized by the audience but beyond the scope of the character’s consciousness. In other words, language and behaviour may cue an audience to view a character as having external rather than internal “origins.” Hillman suggests that what criticism has tended to read as moreor-less incipient “selfhood” may indeed smack of authorial bricolage. The essay develops this idea further as Hillman examines the possible shaping influence on Hamlet of two hitherto-unrecognized sources, both accessible to the original audiences: Histoire de l’estat de France, tant de la république que de la religion, sous le règne de François II (1576) by Louis Régnier de La Planche, and the fifth volume of Histoires tragiques (1572) by François de Belleforest. Peter J. Smith examines the vicissitudes of representing Hamlet, and reveals the differences as well as the similarities between early seventeenth-century notions of representation and contemporary ideas of characterisation. The argument, he contends, is not merely between a postRomantic idea(l) of human and autonomous selves and the New Historicist insistence on the relativity of subjectivity, but between actors on the one hand and literary critics on the other. If critical accounts are teleological (concerned with the manner in which the outcomes of the play are accomplished by or consistent with its characterisation), on the contrary, a performer’s approach is the reverse as s/he explores a way into the role, asking questions relating to their character’s intentions. Smith goes on to demonstrate how directors are able to construct Hamlet’s self/character against the grain of the expectations of a knowing audience and how the characterisation of the Prince of Denmark relies as much on the production as on the script.

4

Introduction

In the ensuing section, François Laroque investigates the links between various types of signatures in paintings by Van Eyck, Holbein, Michelangelo and Caravaggio on the one hand, and texts by Donne and Shakespeare on the other. Laroque seeks to uncover possible correspondences between signing as self-portrait and statement of selfhood, and to explain a number of ambiguous statements in poems or plays of the period in which poet and playwright simultaneously assert and erase their presence. Danièle Berton-Charrière focuses on the shaping influence of Cyril Tourneur’s life and personality on the self-centred and self-devoted villains of his The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611) and of The Revenger’s Tragedy, which was published anonymously in 1607, but later attributed first to Cyril Tourneur and then to Thomas Middleton. As a spy and double agent, Tourneur had to hide and adopt another self. It is not suggested that his works are autobiographical, but he does leave his imprint on Jacobean stage villains who, like him, constantly conceal their identities by changing their costumes, names, and intentions to fit into the tragic or satirical patterns that Tourneur actually defiles. Berton-Charrière suggests that the treatment of a perverted self necessitated the perversion of the dramatic frame itself. In the last section, two essays focus on the shaping influence of royalty on the dramatic representation of selfhood. Greg Walker discusses the subtle representations of early Tudor politics and identity offered in Rowley’s early Jacobean history play, When You See Me, You Know Me (first printed in 1605). In particular, he looks at the curious mixture of nostalgia and anxiety regarding memories of the reign of Henry VIII that are seemingly manifested in the play. Rowley represents the King as an embodiment of a highly personalised, masculine politics, juxtaposing him with various representations of “indirect” forms of political action which are posited as corrupt, “foreign” or effeminate. The particularly complex form of masculine personal and political identity represented by Henry is discussed in relation to both the complex legacy of the Henrician reformation received in later periods and contemporary anxieties concerning the early reign of James VI and I. Walker points out the various paradoxes implied in this representation of the Henrician legacy— in which tropes of male heroism and “effeminate” tyranny, romantic heroism and practical politics, laddish roistering and sober statesmanship all vie for attention—and addresses the question as to whether they can be reconciled with emerging senses of the dramatic representation of selfhood or whether the play is a harking back to earlier traditions of allegorised characterisation.

Pauline Blanc

5

In the last essay, Catherine Lisak focuses on the episodic appearances of the pastoral poetic mode in Shakespeare’s Richard III and discusses the way codified pastoral imagery endorses the cult of the royal self in order to challenge and dismantle the unified, singular, established court image of Elizabeth I and of her father before her. Lisak shows how the play taps into the lyrical imagination of the Elizabethan age, re-energizing several highly-charged voices of the times—Edmund Spenser’s, Philip Sidney’s, and John Lyly’s, as well as the Queen’s own—and calling up past voices of the classical age in order to stage Elizabeth I’s motley of selves in a disquieting manner which engages central questions concerning the representative value of the royal self as “Elisa, Queen of Shepherds.” This collection of essays illustrates the complexity and richness of the matrix which the early modern dramatists drew upon in their endeavours to bring alive a considerable range of compelling stage beings who, in many cases, have managed not only to occupy the space of the stage but also to impress a lasting vision of themselves upon their audiences. The editor of this volume sincerely hopes that its thought-provoking pages may contribute to elucidating reasons why certain early modern stage selves still fascinate the theatre-goer of the twenty-first century.

PART I

SELFHOOD IN ITS EMERGENT STAGES

THE SELFHOOD OF STAGE FIGURES AND THEIR SPECTACULAR EFFICACY IN EARLY ENGLISH PLAYS (C. 1450-1528) ANDRÉ LASCOMBES

Since the volume editor has avoided such anachronistic categories as “characterisation” and “characters,” I will choose, when discussing the intimate nature or “selfhood” of some anthropomorphic agents in the nonreligious English plays from the second half of the fifteenth to the very first decades of the sixteenth century, to classify them as stage types or figures, it being understood that most of them are abstract or allegorical in nature. Once this initial convention is made clear, two more decisions should be made explicit. One is my adoption of a method of analysis founded on the principle that the identity of a dramatic agent (its selfhood) is not primarily determined by its referential links to socio-cultural or historical models, but in more cogent and relevant fashion by its logical and syntactical function(s) within the fictional world to which it belongs. While recognising my methodological debt to the propounder of the theory behind such a view (Greimas’s models for actantial analysis of fictional constructs), I must also make it clear at once that I have never been able usefully to couch any spectacular artefacts of the western mimetic tradition upon the Procrustean bed of that fairly abstract theory, better suited in my opinion to the semantics of linguistic constructs than to those of the theatre. 1 I therefore claim the right to be irrelevant here and to limit my borrowing to the mere conceptual principle already indicated. My third caveat is one which has been, over the years, repeatedly sounded by practically all analysts of the Tudor and pre-modern English drama, from T. W. Craik (1958) and Richard Southern (1973), more recently in two articles, one by David Mills (1983) and one, more specific, by Sarah Carpenter (1983), and forcibly highlighted once again by Greg 1

For an outline of this method see Greimas 1977. For a detailed access to Greimas’s concepts and terminology, consult Courtès and Greimas 1979.

André Lascombes

9

Walker in his helpful selection of late medieval and early Tudor dramatic material (2000, 250): this is the notion (addressed essentially to today’s reader of theatrical texts) that (s)he should be aware that practically all categories of dramatic agents affect the almost Brechtian stance of “standing slightly outside [their roles], ‘showing’ or presenting [them] to the audience” (Carpenter 1983, 21). As my diagram below tries to suggest, the proximity to the play area of the encircling audience, which no material barrier isolates from the world of fiction, ensures a quality of audience-attention and participation which later conventions will be hard put to preserve. The outer world of actual reality in which the audience go on living and breathing, looking in, or even eating and drinking on some occasions, vies for recognition with the world of fiction. Hence the notinfrequent forays into the outer world of some dramatic agent puncturing the invisible partition, or even (in some bolder cases as in Henry Medwall’s famous Fulgens and Lucres), the intrusion of someone from the outer world, invading and possibly disrupting the fictional programme. In such conditions the aesthetic rule of role presentation comes natural to the generally highly-trained players/singers that operate in the fiction. The only problem remaining at this point is to determine which body of particular plays might make a sufficiently representative bunch, as singled out from a corpus essentially to be defined in negative terms, such as “Early Tudor non-biblical drama,” and which in fact includes a wide variety of forms. My decision has been to welcome a large selection of plays that resort to allegorical impersonation, written and performed between the two termini indicated as my corpus of reference, uneasily attempting to take into account a sufficient variety of cases while concentrating on the fairly homogeneous ensemble of household plays. Now, actively taking up the subject, I shall make a few brief remarks about the main characteristics of the corpus. In a relatively short period of time (1470-1528) it may be seen that the approximate score of plays here considered easily fall into sub-groups which have much in common and several distinguishing features. One of the traits each of them exhibits (to varying degrees of course) is a love of disputation and debate, both inherited from the medieval and humanist traditions. The argument may be moral, such as the odyssey of the salvation of the soul in the Christian perspective, as debated in the anonymous plays The Pride of Life, The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Everyman. It may also be of a moral/political nature, either reconstructing the doctrine of kingship and social authority (as in John Skelton’s Magnificence and in Fulgens and Lucres), or redefining the relationships between the estates in the new

10

The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)

context of mercantile power (as in Gentleness and Nobility 2 ). It may even be an issue of intellectual nature and more general scope, as in Rastell’s The Nature of the Four Elements, or again a renewed disquisition under the light of humanism about the old Petrarchan conflicts between rights of reason, rules of social order and the lawless powers of passion, as in Fulgens and Lucres again. In all cases, the general adaptability of the Interlude has long been recognised as its founding feature, one that also ensures an evolutionary capacity which, in David Bevington’s view (1975, 2), has made of that Tudor form the probable basis for so many later elaborations in Renaissance drama. It is no great wonder therefore that a dramatic structure, at once so traditional and so ready to adjust its varying semantic substance to new needs, should also favour the preservation of impersonation habits inherited from the traditional models of the biblical epos (the civic cycles) and from the fantastic romantic fabrications around heroic models of saints (saints’ plays and miracles). The plays here considered may well bend to their new ends the dramatic types and figures inherited from the traditional corpus. Nevertheless, such dramatic agents are in their essential structure recognisable heirs to the former models. For these two reasons, the evolutionary quality of the type of play discussed and the capacity for adaptation of its dramatic types, I shall use a very basic canonical programme of actantial/actorial analysis derived from Greimas’s lesson to sketch out the functional model of these dramatic types. Such a basic pattern offers a design of only five or six cardinal positions, thereby potentially applicable to all the key figures encountered in the plays considered. The following provisional descriptive tool may enable us to see better into the functional activity of these abstract or allegorical types: Key figure 1: DESTINATOR (implicitly or explicitly present) Key figure 2: THE HERO / LEADER Key figure 3: THE ADJUVANT(S) Key figure 4: THE ANTAGONIST(S) Key figure 5: WITNESS / COMMENTATOR / MEDIATOR / FIGURE OF FUN 3 Key figure 6: THE AUDIENCE

2

This play has been attributed to John Heywood, but also to John Rastell. This complex figure, endowed with flexible and multiple functions, which has been studied from different angles by various scholars (see Happé 1964 and 1981, and Debax 1987), is best left out of the present essay as functionally too different from the other major figures.

3

André Lascombes

11

I must simply point out that each of the polar positions charted in the suggested pattern is a mere occupational pre-orientation, inclining the titular figure to postures and acts which are to be expected from the said functional role. But such a pre-determination rarely prevents the figure from enacting for itself a functional existence more precisely adapted to the actual fictional context. It therefore follows that the said figure may develop an intensity, magnitude, or role of its own, far in excess of the potentialities of the original functional outline. This explains why the various allegorical characters in plays ranging from Everyman to Magnificence will be so notably different, depending on the dramatic issues and the tone of each play. With these various recommendations in mind we may now embark on our study.

In Search of the Selfhood of the Tudor Allegorical/Abstract Figure The first important question about those stage figures’ selfhood can now be addressed, even though the examination will be restricted to a few cases only in significant plays. It concerns of course each of these figures’ semantic essence, the locus which can be determined as the true source of its own self in a drama deeply dedicated to the argumentative and to the exemplary. While there is no question of what Humanum Genus, or Everyman really stands for in The Castle or in Mankind, nor about what is represented by Titivillus in the latter play, or even who Jupiter is in Heywood’s Play of the Wether, it is bafflingly difficult to get any deeper than this first fundamental notion: Humanum Genus is frail humanity seen in a Christian perspective; Titivillus is the archetypal image of absolute Evil; Jupiter, as the magnificent sun-like symbol of absolute power at the head of the state, obviously stands for King Henry VIII. But even if the detail of the text will yield scraps of additional information confirming that immediate identification, little informational light is finally added to the initial notion. It is useless to gloss at any length here the trite remark, a thousand times repeated, about the narrative or dramatic impersonations of the allegorical mode: those larger-than-life figures, practically reduced to one eminent semantic feature endlessly reverberated, seem impenetrable structures of a glassy essence that brings the critic to the brink of despair. The only discernible consequence of this is the incredible vehemence of meaning which that semantic elementariness inevitably entails. These two

12

The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)

tightly correlated features are the traditional ones that emerge in critical commentary about those king-size creatures. King-size indeed for the additional reason that, in such a simple programmatic pattern, with so few actantial positions to hold, each of these figures looms large, more threatening than benign, even when it embodies some sympathetic force held in readiness to assist the hero. But these two features do not help in any way to see better into the crux of the allegorical/abstract figures’ inner nature. To pore over the problem more closely, I should no doubt return to my initial remark about their basic function, and focus on the incredible banality of their semantic content. In terms of information quantity, these figures carry a meaning which is at once fictionally enormous and intellectually tenuous. Whether they suggest a debate about the Christian ideology, or the doctrine of authority and kingship, or some other topic of circumstantial value at the time of performance, the notional content which they dramatize is a tissue of commonplaces whose interest essentially seems to lie, rather than in their novelty, in their exemplarily perspicuous formulation. In other words, remembering that we are in the theatre, it would seem that those enormous figures rather serve a memorial, truly gnomic function, like buoys marking out an ideological sailing-path clear of reefs and shallows. Or, for a more theatrical metaphor, they are loudspeaking monuments issuing warnings and statements of policy for the benefit of the assembled audience-congregation, or, as Walker has convincingly argued, of their rulers. 4 Interpreted as resonant foci of meaning, redundantly mirroring an explicitly traditional lore to congregation-like audiences, these unreadable figures suddenly acquire a meaning much in excess of the dusty, paperthin existence to which a long critical tradition has confined them. Like impressive totem poles, each bearing some roughly hewn feature for his semantic signature, they serve the function of the immemorial maskfigures speaking or dancing in the ritual plays of some traditional cultures. But one last remark is in order here to help us see them for what they really are. In our culture, which has little use for such ritual masks, the original meaning of the word “mask” has been perverted and means no more for us today than the diminutive leather or cardboard covering worn over human faces within the area of play or delusion. In contradistinction, the totem poles of African or Amerindian tribes, or the ritual masks played 4

See Walker for a study of the links between early Tudor drama and the strategies of political advice (1988 and 1991).

André Lascombes

13

in ceremonial plays of the Balinese theatre cover no face at all; each of them is rather like the surface of a being devoid of individual lineaments. Far from reproducing the imagistic replica of a human face, each is modelled, deeply lined or distorted, into an other-than-human (ritual or allegorised) body featuring a set of cosmic, psychic or supernatural forces or dynamic qualities. Thereby they do not represent some individual being, but a combination of the energies capable of inducing human acts or passions (Evil, Envy, Luxury, Fright, Anger, Murder, Death, etc). The word “energy” should actually be taken here in the full sense of the Greek original, enargeia, which precisely refers to the violent impact on sight of a lit-up object. 5 Such energy, stored up as it were in the maskfigure as in a kind of well, is ready to be unleashed when activated by the staging. It is clear to all that such a notion and use of the theatrical figure gradually perished in Europe with the arrival of the bourgeois theatre, only to be reawakened at the very end of the nineteenth century when the epistemological forces at work in the Western world, including a new attraction for the values of primitivism and the need for a political theatre amid the growth of world-wide propaganda, brought it back to embody the awesome powers of political ambition and human perversity. But, during the in-between period, criticism, primarily adjusted to reading audiences, came to regard those potent wells of energy as imagistic and linguistic structures conceived to be read on the page only, and it therefore lamented the lifeless, dusty quality of the dramatic allegorical tradition. Today, when the various European attempts at theatrical renovation (even based on widely different premises) have favoured the revival of such stage figures, it is possible to conceive again that they may have displayed in the play-area of the Tudor age an exceptional theatrical virtue, actually far in excess of what the imagistic individual character can offer. 6 Logically, my 5

See the entry “enargeia” in Bailly’s dictionary (1894, 670), and in his “Table of Greek Roots” (2202), primarily relating its base element to “argos”, “bright, litup,” rather than to “ergon,” “activity.” I am obliged to Pauline Blanc for informing me of Peter Schwenger’s discussion of the term and of his quotation of Quintilian’s corroborating reading of it (Institutio Oratoria, 8.3.62) as referring to a “framing effect” capable of lighting up and throwing into relief a linguistic passage or element (1999, 102). 6 Among other signs, one may mention the world-wide prevailing masks of political propaganda, such as the Russian Bear and the American Eagle during the years of Cold War confrontation, and also note the fitful return to the nonpsychological character in plays by different dramatists, eminent or otherwise, written or defended by various theoricians, from Gordon Craig, Antonin Artaud or

14

The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)

essay should now try to show how the mask-like figures of the early Tudor stage, exploiting their enargeia to the full, vocally and visually impose the spectacle of what they represent. This exploitation is achieved through the three closely intertwined means at their disposal: a) their physical appearance and acting; b) their oracular activity throughout the play; c) the name by which they go. Since it is practically impossible to consider the first two separately, I shall, in the space allotted, quote a few instances of their interaction in one or two of the plays listed. That material might and should be expanded at leisure. As to the third energy-factor (the name), I shall briefly suggest how some of the great allegorical figures answer the awe-inspiring question which Juliet puts to her enemy-lover: what is in a name?

The visual and auditory resonance of the Mask-like figure or icon I shall provide here just a few instances from two representative plays, one belonging to the late Medieval tradition performed in the round (The Castle of Perseverance), the other to the effervescent new Tudor mode (Skelton’s Magnificence), to be played in a hall. In the former play, most readers/spectators today will feel assaulted by the strange anti-naturalistic mode in which all prime stage figures present themselves. In turgid truculent vocatives, launched at the audience as much and even more than at his co-agonists, each of the four main protagonists (Mundus/the World, Belyal/The Devil, Caro/The Flesh and Mankind/the puny hero) illustrates that address-technique. Monopolising the general attention from the height of the scaffold where he is enthroned (or from the central Castle for Mankind), each of them in turn cries out his own pre-eminence, as actor almost subsuming his own actant. Thus, like all medieval tyrants voicing in geographical litanies the extent of their empires (see The Castle, 15782), Mundus is the whole of the world’s space; similarly, Belyal is the irate violence of conquest and destruction (196-216); and Caro the complacent blossoming out of the flesh (235-74). As noted earlier, their semantic narrowness goes hand in hand with hyperbolic violence, expressing itself in the extravagant piling up of things and sounds Bertold Brecht down to Valère Novarina (e.g. his play L’espace furieux, and complementarily some of the essays collected in Devant la parole, particularly the first three [1999, 13-88], which summarize his meditations on theatrical speech, space and impersonation).

André Lascombes

15

representing the speaker (the accumulation of first person singular pronouns “I” in lines 164-78, but also the thronging of verbs expressing frantic activism, as in lines 196-208). Another feature adds to the semantic density of those soliloquised addresses, which in fact are furious fits of self-prosopography, literally glutted with what I must call “integrated stage directions.” These, used as mirroring replicas of the actor’s image, proclaim the various semiotic elements composing the spectacular speaking figure: its complexion, gait, clothing, gestures, and of course its voice. Much has been written about Pilate’s voice in the cycle plays; more should be said about the thunderous organ of the mask-like icons, especially (but not only) in the early masterpiece morality called The Castle of Perseverance. More interestingly, the orchestral quality of such dramatic language efficiently combining the diverse functions of addressmaking, action-depicting and specular reverberation of the actor’s or actant’s physical reality, deserves more space and attentive study, and so does its possible link with the nature of the play-area. Lastly, one more remark may prove useful for an evaluation of their spectacular virtue: some of the semes highlighted in the icon-like figures violently clash with each other. For instance, the pompous clothing of the three rulers, a constant sign of their supreme majesty, utterly jars with Belyal’s furious anxiety, or with the brutal disruptions of mood in Caro’s speech. Such contradictions seem to point to an intimate schizoid trend in these gigantic egos, an intimation of their latent monstrosity. But more importantly, in spectacular terms, such discrepancies feed to the spectator a referential uncertainty, a superposition of duplicitous images. And this eminently theatrical phenomenon (which I once dubbed “theatre diaphora” 7 ) ensures potent effects in reception. If we now turn to the later play, Magnificence, we will see how the importance of the vocal and the discursive elements is just as paramount, though the effects created are very different. I shall borrow here from the acute estimate of the play-as-linguistic-construct which Greg Walker gives in his introductory lines. Here, we may note, the dialogical structure prevails, with a constant turnover of brief, acute, sometimes murderous exchanges, and the play, Walker remarks, also exhibits an astonishing aptitude for constant word-play, use of proverbs and sententiae, by the “goodies” mostly, or references to popular wisdom by the “baddies,” a 7

For a tentative definition of the nature, mechanisms and effects of “theatre diaphora” and the techniques of “ostension,” see Lascombes 1979, 1989, 1992, and 1994 .

16

The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)

verbal dexterity further echoed by an artful variety of the verse forms. Walker specifically notes how the arrival of disorder with the promotion of Fansy at court coincides with “the collapse of the ordered four-stress rhyme royal stanza,” superseded by “a bravura array of forms” signifying chaos, until the return of order and virtue restores the former measure (2000, 350). As in the former play, however, the spectacular elements, clothing, gait, tone of voice are closely underlined, powerfully contributing to impose upon our imagination the visual/acoustic icon of such malevolent figures as Counterfeit Countenaunce, Crafty Conveyaunce, Clokyd Colusyon or Courtly Abusyon.

What is in the name of the mask-like icon?: the allegorical figure and onomasia 8 Nearly all the characters in The Castle of Perseverance (thirty-one out of a total of thirty-five) are given what the Anglo-Saxon critics call “labelnames,” which is preferable to the more pedantic but more official Greek term of “aptronyms” used in classical repertories, and which could be translated as “names that cannot fly away” (Cuddon 1982, 53). The term underlines the tightness of the link between name and bearer. Though critics at large seem to have neglected the importance of such a connection, audiences are, more than academics, alive to the stamp of spectacular enargeia with which the allegorical character is endowed. What follows is largely derived from the intuitive remarks of the few authors who have sensed the aesthetic value of the link, even if it remains a superficial exploration of the ways in which the onomastics of namegiving efficiently contributes to consolidate the actorial/actantial mask in most allegorical figures. To keep to essentials, I shall simply refer to the self-presentations already mentioned: the three pivotal Vice Figures in The Castle, Mundus, Belyal and Caro. Going back to their highly stylised, frantic ejaculations, we note how the first few lines of each address by the three princes are blurted out in heavily alliterated lines whose hammering effect is amplified by the systematic use of accented words which all begin with the same sound-letter, so that this initial letter further reverberates the initial sound-letter of the figure’s English name. Thus:

8

See Bailly 1894, and The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) s.v. “onomasia,” or “name-giving.”

André Lascombes

17

MUNDUS: Worthy wytys in all this werd wyde, By wylde-wode wonys and every weye-went, (157-58)

One will no doubt sense how the combination of devices reverberating the initial onomastic phoneme, acting like a stamp of vocal tyranny, affixes the phonological shadow of the princely being upon every single aspect of the geographical reality which the lines evoke, and which in fact features an aspect of the very body of princely Mundus. The same trick is repeated, with an additional effect, when Belyal enters (lines 196-99). Here, the combination applies to the four lines as follows, amplifying first the Infernal Prince’s name, Satanas; then, his innermost selfhood, Diabolus; and thirdly, the characteristic features of the evil spirit confined in Hell (“champe,” “chafe,” “chocke,” “boystows,” “bold,” “Belyal the blake” are all terms expressing the indomitable violence of the fallen angel). Belyal sits all this while on the scaffold of the devil, together with Pride, Envy, and Wrath: Now I sytte, Satanas, in my sad synne, As deuyl dowty, in draf as a drake. I champe and I cha[f]e, I chocke on my chynne, I am boystows and bold, as Belyal the blake. (196-99)

We can note in passing how the text, here again, is one continuous stagedirection depicting the attitudes, gestures, mood and even black face and apparel of the infernal figure, and how such deictic superfluity actually controls and reinforces the combined linguistic and visual enargeia of the speaking and acting figure. May I add that this is not confined to the arrival of the three grand Vices, but will be repeated upon the entrance of lesser characters, particularly the ancillary vices serving the three princes. On each occasion, the speech, monopolised by the main figure, functions as onomastic synecdoche of the all-powerful speaker. In so doing, the writer, by instinct or science, resorts to the fundamental rule of focussing and condensing, a basic potent trick which jointly ostends actor, action and idea across the play-area. This form of onomastic highlighting, intimately welded to the dramatic text, raises the label-name to the status and efficiency of a primordial seme feeding its energy onto the actorial mask. One instance of this occurs in the play (in lines 2968-94) when Humanum Genus, about to die, learns that he must deliver his possessions to Garcio, a boy. Garcio, as presumptive heir, mentions his name: “I-Wot-Nevere-

18

The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)

Whoo” (a nameless Nobody). Underlining the irony of disinheritance, this apparent disclaimer of identity also symbolically shows that the character’s name is the ultimate selfhood of the actor, its real anima. And this is not an accidental occurrence in one particular play, but a constant factor in the spectacular fabrication and operation of the abstract/allegorical icon throughout the period. In the morality and interlude tradition the power accorded to the practice of name-calling or insult is only equated by the convention of onomastic disguise which effects a change of identity more efficiently than any clothing. 9 To conclude, two remarks may help understand the influence of onomasia on the way the allegorical figure works in the theatre. In the naturalistic/imagistic tradition devoted to the mimesis of the realities of the here and now, the mimetic presence of anthropomorphic agents (the king, the lover, the killer) sufficiently legitimates and makes credible their theatrical representation. But such a presence clearly does not suffice when the focus of the dramatic agon is no longer the interplay of socio-cultural forces, but mostly centres upon the transcendent values founding the culture. Then, the clusters of meaning embodied by anthropomorphic characters, operating in a diegesis which is mythical by nature, must be housed otherwise and naturally go back for their roots to the sources of language, where onomasia reigns as the voice of creative power, as shown in the Biblical account of the Creation of the World. Another, more linguistic reason may be called upon. Jean Piaget, to describe the linguistic phenomenon of assimilation/accommodation, draws a pattern 10 which Groupe μ borrow from him in the account they give of the uses of the concrete and the abstract in lexical practice. 11 According to them, that pattern highlights the fact that allegorical names, whether derived from monosemic lexemes (such as Voluptas or Stultitia), or from substantives designating concrete realities (Mundus or Garcio in The Castle), are indifferently used to cover the two-way mental traffic from the concrete to the abstract and the reverse. In either case, the allegorical name always seems to be posted on the outskirts of the two modalities of thinking, and 9

Such widely-known plays as Mankind or Magnificence will easily provide illustrations of this. 10 On such questions, see the studies of Parain (1942, chapters 2-3) and of Piaget (1972, 63-75). 11 See Groupe ȝ 1982, 99-102. (In tribute to Aristotle and R. Jakobson, six scholars from the Centre d’Études Poétiques de l’Université de Liège have chosen to publish their collective work on rhetoric under the symbolic name of “Groupe ȝ.”)

André Lascombes

19

is therefore perfectly suited to the ambiguous figure called allegorical personification. Indeed, is the apparent paradox that the stage-figure on the pre-modern stage may be no more than a function (theatrically boosted by physical presence, verb and name) so very different a proposition from the way in which the supposedly realistic “character” (meant to embody a psychic and a social individual) is shown to work by critics of the drama?

Works Cited Primary Sources Anon. 1972. The Pride of Life. In Tudor Interludes, ed. Peter Happé, 39-62. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. ———. 1980. Everyman. Ed. Geoffrey Cooper and Christopher Wortham. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press. ———. 1997. Mankind. Ed. Peter Meredith. Alumnus Playtexts in Performance. Leeds: University of Leeds. ———. 1979. The Castle of Perseverance. In Four Morality Plays, ed. Peter Happé, 75-210. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. [Heywood, John?]. 1979. Gentleness and Nobility. In Three Rastell Plays, ed. Richard Axton, 97-124. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Heywood, John. 1991. The Play of the Wether. In The Plays of John Heywood, ed. Richard Axton and Peter Happé, 183-215. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Medwall, Henry. 1980. Fulgens and Lucrece. In The Plays of Henry Medwall, ed. Alan H. Nelson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Rastell, John. 1979. The Nature of the Four Elements. In Three Rastell Plays, ed. Richard Axton, 29-68. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Skelton, John. 1908. Magnificence. Ed. R. L. Ramsay. EETS, ES, 98. Oxford: University Press.

Secondary Sources Bailly, Anatole. 1894. Dictionnaire Grec-Français. Paris: Hachette. Bevington, David, ed. 1975. Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Carpenter, Sarah. 1983. “Morality-Play Characters”: Reports on Productions. Medieval English Theatre 5.1: 18-28. Courtès, J. and A. J. Greimas. 1979. Sémiotique, Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette.

20

The Selfhood of Stage Figures and their Spectacular Efficacy in Early English Plays (c. 1450-1528)

Craik, T. W. 1958. The Tudor Interlude: Stage, Costume and Acting. Leicester: University Press. Cuddon, J. A. 1982. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Debax, Jean-Paul. 1987. Le théâtre du Vice ou la comédie anglaise. Thèse d’État, Paris 4-Sorbonne. Greimas, A. J. 1977. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse. Groupe μ. 1982. Rhétorique Générale. Paris: Seuil. Happé, Peter. 1964. The “Vice” and the Folk Drama. Folklore 75: 161-93. ———. 1981. The “Vice” and the Popular Theatre, 1547-80. In Poetry and Drama, 1570-1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks, ed. Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond, London: Methuen. Lascombes, André. 1979. Culture et théâtre populaire en Angleterre à la fin du Moyen Âge. Thèse d’État, Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. ———. 1989. La fonction théâtrale des personnages du Mal. Evil on the English Stage: Medieval English Theatre 11: 11-25. ———. 1992. Formes théâtrales du trope de syllepse. In Rhétoriques du texte et du spectacle, ed. Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies, 66-80. Paris: Belles-Lettres. ———. 1994. Pour une rhétorique du spectaculaire: notes sur l’ostension. Spectacle in Early Theatre, England and France: Medieval English Theatre 16: 10-24. Mills, David. 1983. Characterisation in the English Mystery Cycles. Medieval English Theatre 5:1: 5-17. Novarina, Valère. 1999. Devant la parole. Paris: POL. Parain, Brice. 1942. Recherches sur la nature et les fonctions du langage. Idées. Paris: Gallimard. Piaget, Jean. 1972. Essai de logique opératoire. Paris: Dunod. Schwenger, Peter. 1999. Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Southern, Richard. 1973. The Staging of Plays before Shakespeare. London: Faber. Walker, Greg. 1988. John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1991. Plays of Persuasion: Dramatic Politics at the Court of Henry the Eighth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———, ed. 2000. Medieval Drama: An Anthology. London: Blackwell.

WIT AND WILL AND THE COHESION OF THE HUMAN SELF IN THE ENGLISH MORAL DRAMA JEAN-PAUL DEBAX

Fashioning implies action and change. And fashioning of the self, that is of a human being, and very often of one’s own self, is the most mysterious and perilous undertaking imaginable. It is probably because of a deep-rooted feeling of his own imperfection that man has invented in the story of the creation of his species, a fall (the so-called original sin), which is in fact not seen as consubstantial with his nature, but only an accident in his early history. Adam’s disobedience was a personal decision which totally upset the divine order of things. What is surprising is that this world-shaking upheaval was interpreted as the foundation of a fixed and permanent relationship between the different orders of the universe. But this disobedience was neither motiveless nor totally voluntary, since it was done, as it were, under pressure: a similar fall was imagined to serve as a model for Adam’s gesture, the fall of the brightest among the angels, Lucifer. The difference is that Lucifer was not egged on to his rebellion by any outside influence, but only by his own perverted will, the contemplation of himself instead of the permanent adoration eternally due to God only. Furthermore, this Luciferian rebellion accounts for the division of the universe between the two cities, heaven and earth (civitas Dei et civitas terrena), seen as high and low, since the metaphor used to describe them was that of the Fall. The usual explanation is that Lucifer did not turn to evil, since there was no evil available in the world created by God, but that the very fact that his will was no longer directed towards a higher good, the Creator, but to a lower good (his own self, a mere creature) turned his will into a wicked will. This explanation, mainly due to Saint Augustine and known through Boethius’s Consolationes, was to

22

Wit And Will and the Cohesion of the Human Self in the English Moral Drama

be accepted throughout the Middle Ages. 1 And so, Freewill and Divine Harmony, also known as Reason, are lodged together in the superior level of the medieval three-tiered conception of the Microcosm, and naturally opposed as antithetic tendencies. The change of Reason to Wit creates a phonetic similarity, and thus constitutes a sort of paronomasia, Wit and Will, which knits the two terms together. Thus, for the Christian tradition, man appears as a flawed being in a flawed world, and seems to be defined by a permanent conflict between these two opposed and incompatible principles. In this conflict where is the self? It is not surprising that this conception of Mankind should have inspired such a poem as the Psychomachia, famous throughout the Middle Ages and emblematic of the medieval man’s view of himself. The success of the Psychomachia raises two important points: the function of allegory, and the existence of a battle within the mind of man. First question: are the allegorical characters of the Psychomachia exterior influences, representing abstract principles orientating man’s choices in life, or are they the manifestations of inside feelings or tendencies? Are they the causes or the effects? This ambiguity will remain as long as the device of the allegory is used. The battle within man’s mind entails the passivity of the individual who, to put it in military terms, is rather seen as the battlefield than the control room. Two texts of a slightly earlier period than the dramatic corpus we are going to consider below will illustrate the commonly accepted value attributed to the individual will towards the end of the fifteenth century. The first is a short poem contained in scraps of vellum used to repair a missal printed circa 1507, a sort of allegorical romance, which refers to itself as a “long gest.” This poem was named by its editor The Conflict of Wit and Will. It is the story of the battle between the rational and the irrational “parts” within the soul, which reminds us of the homiletic allegory Sawles Warde, in which the Lord of the Castle called Wit, with the help of his four daughters (the four Cardinal Virtues), has to moderate the whims of his capricious wife, Will, and her servants, the Five Senses. In the end, Fear of Death brings her back to more holy thoughts. In The Conflict, the battle between “Wille the Wick” and “Witte the Wise Kynge” 1

“When the evil will abandons what is above itself, and turns to what is lower, it becomes evil—not because that is evil to which it turns but because the turning itself is wicked. Therefore it is not an inferior thing which has made the will evil, but it is itself which has become so by wickedly and inordinately desiring an inferior thing.” On the City of God, XII.6, quoted by R. W. Hanning 1973, 46n9.

Jean-Paul Debax

23

takes place in the Castle of Courage, and it seems that the Seven Deadly Sins also had a part to play in the battle. The very poor condition of the fragments does not allow us to follow the whole plot, but in all probability, it developed along the lines of many other homiletic narratives of the same type. A more complete story may be found in Lydgate’s The Assembly of Gods. In this poem, discord among the Olympian Gods surprisingly leads to a psychomachia, a battle between vices and virtues. Freewill is the Lord of the battlefield. At the beginning of the battle, he sides with Vice, but when Vice is overthrown, Freewill repents and becomes the bailiff of Microcosm under the authority of Reason. At the end of the battle two ladies come down from heaven (sent by Alpha and Omega, as God is called), obviously two embodiments of Providence: the one called Prescience acting as a sort of revenger, stands for the active or military side of Providence; the other, Predestination, blesses Virtue and his army and gives them a heavenly abode. Freewill is accused of being responsible for the trouble caused by the battle, but he puts the blame on Sensuality, who repents and promises to follow the advice of Sadness (serious and modest behaviour) but keeps his “hoole lyberte / Withyn Macrocosm”; and Reason will stand bail for Freewill, which means that Freewill still enjoys some of his freedom, while being in a sense Reason’s prisoner. In both cases then, the contradictions are not clearly resolved, so that the nature of Freewill is not exactly defined. The clearest picture of the Erasmian version of Natural Philosophy is probably to be found in the long didactic introduction to Medwall’s Nature (part I, 1-673). In her opening speech, Nature presents herself as a principle of cohesion between the elements (somewhat similar to Neoplatonic love) and as a “worldly goddess” (with the humorous restriction “as who seyth” [66], which means “so to speak”), a sort of relay between God and man. Before she leaves Man who starts on his journey, she appoints two guides to look after him: Reason and Sensuality. Man willingly admits that he must follow virtue, also called Understanding (136), but he immediately puts forward a restriction (“for all that” [138]) stating that he keeps the privilege of “fre eleccyon / To do what I wyll” (138-9). So, Man concludes, he is “halfe angelyke” (141), because, he explains, 2 he has “a wretched body” (145). So, Medwall’s Man is presented as having two flaws within himself; the opposition within his mind (or soul), Reason against Freewill, and in his person as a whole, the 2

This new theme is not present in Lydgate’s poem.

24

Wit And Will and the Cohesion of the Human Self in the English Moral Drama

opposition between soul and body. It is not quite clear in Medwall whether Sensuality (mentioned in lines 290-91 as “but a meane whyche causeth hym to fall / Into moch foly and maketh hym bestyall”), which is then held to be the cause of damnation (337-38), belongs to the mind or to the body. The soul/body opposition in which the body is held to be responsible for the sins of the person as a whole is also found in The Castle of Perseverance, and here again the body is accused of being guilty of Avarice and thus bringing the soul to a bitter end (3027). The grace of God alone can help to resist temptation (“power supernall” [340]). So the question may be asked: if man has to wait for God’s grace to be saved, where is his freewill? The pattern for the description of the hesitations about the working of Freewill can be found in Troilus’s meditations in Book IV of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Once he is abandoned by Criseyde, Troilus finds his fate still more unbearable when he realizes that such was his “destiny,” that all his previous life foreshadowed this sentimental disaster, and he expresses his despair by means of the often-quoted line “For al that comth, comth by necessitee” (958). But in fact, things are not so clear in Troilus’s mind and, aware of the different interpretations that “learned men had given,” he repeats the same sophistic argumentation about necessity: “things do not have to be / Because foreseen . . . / But if they are to be, they cannot hide / From Providence; things certain to befall / Must be foreseen for certain, one and all” (Stanza 144). 3 The main words under discussion are found in this passage: foresee, purvey, destiny, predestination and grace. Man seems to be caught up in a huge whirlwind, by which he is bashed about, and finally lost. And, as hinted above, man is, so to speak, smashed to smithereens, and submitted to a double discontinuity: firstly a sequential or diachronic discontinuity, and secondly a synchronic one, that is a simultaneous presence in two different worlds, harbouring in himself elements of contrary natures. This vacillation between two worlds is alluded to by Man in Medwall’s Nature when he declares: “I am halfe angelyke” (141). It would perhaps be more adequate to say that in the state of innocence Man is an angel, but a fallen angel. 3

Quoted in Nevill Coghill’s modern English translation of Troilus and Criseyde. This corresponds to lines 1004-08 of Robinson’s edition. The argument is none the clearer in the tenth “Article of Religion” of the Prayer Book: “we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.”

Jean-Paul Debax

25

When living in sin, man is really bestial “so that there ys no difference . . . / Betwyxt Man and an unreasonable best” (293-94). This view is quite in keeping with the medieval monastic ideal, in which purity was understood as chastity—an assimilation which seems to me to be strangely in contradiction with a religion that holds that redemption is achieved by means of an incarnation. The two discontinuities were illustrated by the traditional (I mean preReformation) moral drama. The point of synchronic discontinuity is particularly well depicted in the play Wisdom. The very structure of this play is a true masterpiece in the art of taking a living body to pieces. Anima appears early in the play accompanied by five virgins, the five senses, and the three “mights,” Mind, Will and Understanding: nine actors on stage to embody a simple abstract or moral concept, the soul! The three tempters, instruments of Lucifer, the World, the Flesh and the Devil, though not actually present on stage, are nevertheless mentioned by the character Wisdom (who “is Christ”) and are actors of the drama (294). Later in the play the sinful condition of the three mights is choreographically represented by six dancers each (twelve all told!), and the soul’s iniquity by seven devils who run out from under her horrible mantle (912). It is also of interest to note that Lucifer’s first victory over one of the mights, Mind, is won by tempting the body, “The flesch of man that ys so changeable” (360) and attacking monastic rule, that is to say the contemplative life, which implies idleness (“Ut quid hic statis tota die ociosi?” [394]) as well as chastity. He also refers to the episode of Mary and Martha, and argues, in contradiction with the evangelical lesson, that Martha had pleased Jesus better than her sister. 4 It is probable that by the end of the fifteenth century, monacal contemplation was no longer the highest religious model, possibly because of the increasing importance of the preaching of the Friars and of the growing social prestige of economy and commerce. Diachronic discontinuity is illustrated by those plots which tell the story of man’s life. We can select a few instances from Mankind, Mundus et Infans and Youth. In these plays it seems that the tempter works by magic, so sudden is the change. It is the case with Lucifer (Wisdom) and Man (Nature). In Mankind, Titivillus arouses in the eponymous character an urgent need to relieve himself, to the effect that he leaves his work and also his “beads” (that is his prayers). We may ask ourselves: was Mankind free to leave his holy thoughts and welcome the sinful suggestions of the 4

See Luke, 10, 38-42.

26

Wit And Will and the Cohesion of the Human Self in the English Moral Drama

three knaves, Naught, Newguise and Now-a-days? It was certainly not a calculated decision taken after long deliberation. Furthermore, is there, apart from his unchanged name (Mankind), any continuity in the character between what he was before the conversion and after? The character as such is but a transparent allegory. The reason may be because the play contains elsewhere the true motives of man’s choices represented by good or evil powers who pull the wires and manipulate him like a puppet. In other plays of this type, it is sometimes Lucifer himself or some hellish envoy, or heavenly messenger that does the work. Towards the end of the play, Mankind goes out on yet another spree in spite of Mercy’s objurgations, and when he returns, he has “seen the light”: he is convinced that he has behaved ill and falls into despair (806). Happily Mercy, a figure of God’s grace and a totally irrational help, brings Mankind back to obedience,—which the same Mercy interprets as the action of Freewill: “libere velle, libere nolle” (900). Let us turn now to the so-called “Youth plays,” which would be more aptly named traditional “linear plays.” In Mundus et Infans, the hero changes names six times in the course of his life. Mundus et Infans comes nearest to what may be called an education play. After all his metamorphoses, Manhood is admonished by Conscience, who acts as a safe-guard against Folly and Shame. Manhood’s Freewill seems to be of no help to him, for he is tempted and falls into sin, until Age and weakness lead him to Repentance. In Youth, Riot, who is Youth’s evil mentor, describes his own attitude as recklessness—“I care not what I do” (239)— which is akin to freewill. Charity points out the ambiguity of the term “free”—“Then thou wast bond, He made thee free” (710)—which does not really refer to freedom of conscience, but free from sinning, that is to say obedient to God’s articles. This ambiguity is emphasized by Youth’s punning on the word “bondage”: “that I know, I was never bond / Unto none in England” (714-15). 5 Most important and, at the same time, most unconventional, is Hyckescorner. It is the only pre-Reformation play in which a character called Freedom has a fairly important part. He can be considered as a mankind figure, as suggested by his entrance: “Make room for a gentleman” (645), although Hyckescorner, the title role, may also pretend 5

In a poem written circa 1430, “The Mirror of the Periods of Man’s Life”, Freewill says to the newborn child: “þese folks wolde þis life spill / To maka þee bonde; Y wole make þee free,” and Conscience answers: “Freewill will make þee mad” (Furnivall 1867, 63).

Jean-Paul Debax

27

to it. In fact, the play is a mixture of youthful pranks and morality situations. Freewill’s temptation is not staged and the play begins with an episode of his life in sin. So we are not told how he has used his spiritual freedom and was deceived by the Fiend. What is mainly treated in the play is Freewill’s experiences. Yet his name is not completely forgotten: when upbraided by Perseverance, Freewill boasts about his control of the situation, and pretends to be wary enough to escape hell, for he says “who would go to hell by his will voluntary?” (776). The most explicit reference to the freedom of the will occurs towards the end of the play, after Freewill’s conversion. The conclusion is provided by Perseverance, saying to Freewill “A new name thou need none have” (870), which means that the name of Freewill applies both to a conversion to sin or to good, and he goes on: “For all that will to heaven high / By his own free will he must forsake folly; / Then is he sure and save” (871-73), an echo of the roughly contemporary Magnificence, in which Freewill, there known as Liberty, declares: “For I am virtue if I be well used, / And I am a vice where I am abused” (2101-02). In both cases, we have a well-balanced answer, which sounds very much like the conclusion of an Erasmian debate (of the Gentleness and Nobility type). The popular view usually propagated by the drama is more negative. Will is associated with Ill Will and Self Will (as it is for instance in Wealth and Health). So, whether it is under the influence of diffuse reformed ideas, or due to an old and fundamental theological confusion and ambiguity, Freewill seems hardly compatible with the concept of Fortune (or Destiny) or God’s foreknowledge, and at this stage already carries with it most pronounced negative overtones. So far, it appears that the humanist faith in man’s potential for growth and in the virtue of education is not really represented in drama, and that the development of the personality and the process of decision-taking are rather accounted for in terms of Freewill or destiny. The great changes in the official religion that occurred in the 1530s and the early 1540s, with the reversal in the relative authority of freewill and election, are reflected (not surprisingly) in the popular drama of the day. A symbol of this change concerning freewill is to be found in William Wager’s The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art. Although there is in this play no explicit reference to the doctrine of predestination, the dogged perseverance of Moros in sin, ignorance and stupidity is clear enough to show that somehow this character was not free to choose another course. Two conclusions can be drawn from this example: Wager uses the old stage trick of having Moros carried away to hell on the devil’s

28

Wit And Will and the Cohesion of the Human Self in the English Moral Drama

back. 6 But in the old plays it was the Vice, and not the mankind figure that had to suffer such an uncomfortable posture. The use of this stage trick in the post-Reformation plays shows that, in this world, the possibility of damnation is always present and menacing, and looms threateningly at the end of man’s earthly career. It also proves that the humanist hope of improvement through education is a mere illusion. The influence in England of the Christian Terence movement in continental drama may seem to run counter to such a conclusion. Whereas the 1530 Prodigal Son, a straight and rather flat Catholic dramatization of the evangelical parable, ends with Hope driving Despair away (even the elder brother is converted!), the new Prodigal Son plays create two sets of brothers (sometimes also of sisters): one set is saved, the other damned. In Nice Wanton, for instance, a good brother is contrasted with an evil sister and a younger brother, who will end their lives, the girl as a prostitute, the boy as a murderer. Nice Wanton is a pseudo-education play, based on the moral: “Who spares the rod, spoils the child”; and indeed, spared it is! Here again the persistence of fixed destinies is a proof that the nature of the education received has no effect on personal choices. Similarly, in The Glass of Government, two fathers have two boys each. Two follow the path of virtue, the other two that of dissipation, and come to a violent end: one is hanged, the other whipped for fornication. Some other plays, devoid of any explicit reference to the Prodigal Son pattern, describe two parallel human destinies, usually known as a “bifurcated” mankind figure. In Enough Is As Good As A Feast, it is Covetousness, as suggested by the title, who is the main vice. He undertakes the conversion to evil of Worldly Man, the negative counterpart of a pure, angelic Heavenly Man. As soon as he is converted to good, Worldly Man is successfully and irretrievably tempted by Covetice, with the help of the other vices who have taken new names; among them Reason (for Inconsideration) and Ready Wit (for Precipitation). Worldly man will be carried to hell on the Devil’s back, a favourite stage business in Wager’s plays. In The Trial of Treasure, the evil figure, Lust, is symptomatically tempted to evil by Inclination (another name for Will) in spite of the attempts of Just (another name for Heavenly Man) at shackling Inclination. Lust is finally damned and turned to “dust and slime”(1005). 7 6

Already used in The Castle of Perseverance (3143) and Like Will to Like (1205). See also: “Behold here, how Lust is converted into dust,/ This is his image, his wealth and prosperity, / And Treasure in like case is turned to rust” (1095-97). 7

Jean-Paul Debax

29

A curious revival of the old pattern can be seen in some Catholic plays of the Marian period. In Wealth and Health, probably performed in Mary’s presence, Wealth and Health (names selected for their paronomastic phonetics) refer to the satisfactory state of the nation that is restored by Mary. Ill Will and Shrewd Wit, who embody the Protestant regime of Edward VI and, according to a well known pattern, act as vices in this play, are enrolled as servants by the good characters Wealth and Health. Liberty, a friend of Wealth and Health, probably a new name for the Catholic Freewill, engages in a hot disputation with Ill Will (the Protestant version of Freewill, in the same way as Shrewd Wit stands for the perverted faith of the Protestants). But Good Remedy (probably Cardinal Pole, in any case an agent favourable to Mary) sees through the two vices. So, under cover of a general debate, and while using a traditional pattern, Wealth and Health is not a moral play at all, but a topical and polemical one: a fierce attack against a rival party.

Conclusion There was indeed a medieval theory of the human self. As an illustration, one may consult the treatise Vices and Virtues (c. 1200). In that perspective, man’s intrinsic unity is realised when the two parts of the soul, the reason and the will, are in harmony; in Saint Bernard’s terms “Vertue is no other thing, but assent bitwixe resoun and wille.” But in other parts of the treatise, the soul is said to have followed a sinful way because she has obeyed her selfwill (“thynne ayene will”), inspired by the five senses which are out of control after the overthrow of Reason, and which is also called the “flesh’s will.” The distinction between freewill and selfwill was a fine one, and not always present in drama. In either case Will is on the side of the vices, and the spiritual war outlined by Saint Paul as an image of moral choices was admitted by Catholics and Protestants alike. Here I am not ready to follow E. M. W. Tillyard’s suggestion that “it is not by accident that of the heroes in Shakespeare’s four tragic masterpieces two, Othello and Lear, are defective in understanding and two, Hamlet and Macbeth, in will” (1979, 80). This explanation may be true as regards certain details and motivations, but not for the general pattern of the play. In like manner the Terentian motto “know yourself”, already employed by the end of the twelfth century by preachers and the authors of penitentials, does not appear as a theme in popular drama,

30

Wit And Will and the Cohesion of the Human Self in the English Moral Drama

except in a form totally foreign to the Wit and Will motif; this is the case of the so-called “Wit” plays. 8 These plays are not based on a moral analysis of the human mind, but concerned with the behaviour of the human being within the framework of a romantic plot. This romantic vein first manifests itself c.1540 with Wit and Science, and it is not “by accident” (as Tillyard would say) that it reappears in the 1570s in The Marriage of Wit and Science (1567), and in The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom (1579). 9 It follows upon the spread of romantic tales (numerous translations from the Spanish or the Italian), whose influence will be later felt on the public stage at the turn of the century. On the brink of closing this study, another reference may be of interest: it is Thomas Nabbes’s Microcosmus, performed in 1634. It is not a play, but a masque, subtitled “a Moral Masque,” combining a masque of the four elements, and a morality play about a mankind figure called Physander. All the actors of the moral tradition are present, if sometimes under slightly different names: Anima is found as Bellanima, Satan as Malus Genius and Virtue as Bonus Genius, and so on. One may note the distinction, already present in the Catholic plays, between Man (Physander) and the agents of evil. The happy ending is de rigueur. History is often a confirmation of one’s own impressions. The attempts made to describe the inside workings of man’s soul according to the methods of moral philosophy were never felt as being a living or credible account of the self, but remained a decorative paraphrase of mere spectacular value, as is illustrated by its late development into the most conventional of entertainments, the masque. In this respect, the moral interlude seems to be a dead-end. From Wisdom to Microcosmus, it knew no evolution or development. It was the romantic stories of the end of the century that offered a more convincing model for self-knowledge to contemporary spectators who had become more concerned with this world than with the next.

8

Examples of penitentials are Ayenbite of Inwyt, Speculum Christiani; also some Middle English sermons and Chaucer's The Parson’s Tale. The heading “Wit play” usually refers to Wit and Science (1539), The Marriage of Wit and Science (1567) and The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom (1579). 9 Other romantic plays: Clyomon and Clamydes (1570), Common Conditions (1576) and the bestseller, Mucedorus (1581).

Jean-Paul Debax

31

Works Cited Primary Sources Plays Anon. N.d. The Prodigal Son. In vol. 2 of The School of Shakespeare, ed. R. Simpson. London. ———. 1874-76. The Marriage of Wit and Science. In vol. 3 of A Select Collection of Old Plays, ed. R. Dodsley. London. ———. 1897. Hyckescorner. In Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, ed. John M. Manly. Boston. ———. 1897. Nice Wanton. In Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, ed. John M. Manly. Boston. ———. 1905-08. Trial of Treasure. In Early English Dramatists, ed. John S. Farmer. London. ———. 1905-08. Wealth and Health. In Early English Dramatists, ed. John S. Farmer. London. ———. 1908. Mucedorus. In The Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke. Oxford: University Press. ———. 1913. Clyomon and Clamydes. In The Works of John Peele, ed. E. Dyce, Malone Society Reprints. London. ———. 1915. Common Conditions. Facsimile. The Elizabethan Club. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1969. The Castle of Perseverance. In The Macro Plays, ed. Mark Eccles. EETS, OS, 262. Oxford: University Press. ———. 1969. Mankind. In The Macro Plays, ed. Mark Eccles. EETS, OS, 262. Oxford: University Press ———. 1969. Mundus et Infans. In English Morality Plays and Moral Interludes, ed. Edgar T. Schell. New York: Rinehart Editions. ———. 1969. Wisdom. In The Macro Plays, ed. Mark Eccles. EETS, OS, 262. Oxford: University Press. ———. Youth. 1969. In English Morality Plays and Interludes, ed. Edgar T. Schell. New York: Rinehart Editions. [Heywood, John ?]. 1979. Gentleness and Nobility. In Three Rastell Plays, ed. Richard Axton. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Medwall, Henry. 1980. Nature. In The Plays of Henry Medwall, ed. Alan H. Nelson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Merbury, Francis. 1976. The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom. In English Moral Interludes, ed. Glynne Wickham. London: J. M. Dent. Nabbes, Thomas. 1882-89. Microcosmus. In vol. 2 of Old English Plays, ed. A. H. Bullen. London.

32

Wit And Will and the Cohesion of the Human Self in the English Moral Drama

Redford, John. 1972. Wit and Science. In Tudor Interludes, ed. Peter Happé. Harmondsworth UK: Penguin. Skelton, John. 1908. Magnificence. Ed. Robert Lee Ramsay. EETS, ES, 98. Oxford: University Press. Wager, William. 1968. The Longer Thou Livest The More Fool Thou Art. In The Longer Thou Livest and Enough Is as Good as a Feast, ed. R. Mark Benbow. London: Edward Arnold. ———. 1969. Enough is as Good as a Feast. In English Morality Plays and Moral Interludes, ed. Edgar T. Schell. New York: Rinehart Editions Non Dramatic Texts Anon. 1866. Ayenbite of Inwyt. Ed. R. Morris. EETS, OS, 23. Oxford: University Press. ———. 1867. The Mirror of the Periods of Man’s Life. In Hymns to the Virgin and Christ, ed. F. J. Furnivall, 58-83. EETS, OS, 24. Oxford: University Press. ———.1888. Vices and Virtues. Ed. F. Holthausen. EETS, OS, 89. Oxford: University Press. ———. 1920. Sawles Warde. In Selections from Early Middle English 1130-1250, ed. J. Hall, 117-128. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1933. Speculum Christiani. Ed. G. Holmstedt. EETS, OS, 182. Oxford: University Press. ———. 1938. The Conflict of Wit and Will. Ed. Bruce Dickins. Leeds: School of English Language in the University of Leeds. Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1957. The Parson’s Tale. In The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson. Oxford: University Press. ———. 1971. Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. and trans. N. Coghill. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Lydgate, John. 1895. The Assembly of the Gods. Ed. O. L. Triggs. EETS, ES, 69. Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the EETS.

Secondary Sources Hanning, R. W. 1973. You Have Begun a Parlous Play. Comparative Drama VII: 22-50. Tillyard, E. M. W. 1979. The Elizabethan World Picture. Harmondsworth, UK. Penguin.

SELFHOOD IN THE TUDOR DRAMATIC CORPUS NORAH YVONNE PHOENIX

Concerning the Renaissance period where principles of collectivity and anonymity were rapidly giving way to greater individuality and selfidentity and also to the emergence of nationhood, the relevance of discussing issues related to the self is entirely obvious. Such a discussion applied to Renaissance drama opens up many pathways, many ways of throwing light on the plays of this period and discovering fresh points of interest in them. A number of approaches are possible. For example, the development of selfhood could be pinpointed through the political or religious orientation of Tudor plays or traced through their geographical dimension. To consider their psychological aspects would be another option. Indeed, since the early twentieth century, the self has been a key construct in several schools of psychology and some Renaissance scholars have gone so far as to apply the complexities of Jung’s theories of the self to Shakespeare plays. One example of this is Tucker Orbison’s enlightening article on the self in Hamlet (1975, 112-41). However, to discuss issues of the self in Tudor theatre, I have decided to focus on selfhood in its most simple expression, that is to say the state of having a distinct identity and individuality. Unsurprisingly, my discussion of this concept will focus principally on the issue of characterisation. On this question, as on many others, the chronological position of the Tudor corpus has always put it at a disadvantage with theatre scholars who tend to consider it as a mere transition between medieval and Elizabethan theatre, a kind of gap filler until future star characters were ready to take the playhouses by storm. The resulting lack of attention has done the corpus a disservice and, as I am now, most specialists are on the defensive. Selfhood is just one of the many angles of study which could yield precious insights into this corpus but which, regrettably, have tended to be waived aside or, at best, simply brushed over and, in any case, left largely unexplored.

34

Selfhood in the Tudor Dramatic Corpus

Concerning the question of characterisation, there appears to be a general tendency to consider the Tudor corpus as somewhat deficient as far as selfhood is concerned. For the characters of the Tudor corpus are often dismissed as rather bland collections of vices, virtues and social types. To begin with, many of these characters are without any topological identity, as they do not appear to belong to any one nation but evolve somewhere in the cosmos. Furthermore, they are said to function not as characters in their own right and with their own individuality but merely as representations, always faceless, often nameless but not quite self-less, as each one stands for vast numbers of similar selves. Plurality is the operative word here, plurality which, in this case, is often deemed to stunt character development, and therefore the self, as it tends to obliterate any possible markers of selfhood. Caught between, on the one hand, medieval selves ranting and raging on their pageant wagons, flaunting their individuality and their streamlined, almost three-dimensional selfhood, and, on the other hand, Elizabethan selves unveiling their complex minds and baring their tortured souls to mesmerised playhouse audiences, the Tudor brand of selfhood has somehow been overlooked, and most unjustly so, as I shall endeavour to demonstrate. The precise aim of this essay is to go some way towards answering the following question: regarding the selfhood of Tudor characters, can any of the following aspects be pinpointed to a sufficiently convincing degree in the corpus: firstly, the psychological credibility of characters, their capacity for emotion, reflection and reasoning; secondly, their capacity to evolve and not remain static, and thirdly, their ability to spark off emotion in the spectators? Hereafter when I use the term selfhood, that is broadly what I will mean. The main question I should like to address concerns whether the Tudor corpus was a viable contender in the production of memorable characters, characters endowed with selfhood. In other words does the quest for selfhood move straight from the Herods to the Hamlets and thus bypass the Tudor corpus, as the lack of critical attention would seem to imply or, to put it bluntly, between Herod and Hamlet are there really any selves worthy of notice? Running parallel with this discussion is another consideration to which I should like to draw attention. How high on the agenda of Tudor playwrights could the creation of selfhood have been? Was achievement in this area a question of talent or rather of priorities? One of the earliest Tudor plays, Johan Johan by John Heywood, already shows signs of a desire to develop characterisation. This play is a priceless

Norah Yvonne Phoenix

35

piece of evidence, as we can compare it word for word with La Farce du Pasté, the French text it was translated from. 1 Heywood pointedly endows the anonymous characters with names and a defined, colourful setting and, through such techniques as asides, he sharpens their features. But the works I would like to examine in this study belong to a small cluster of plays written towards the end of the period in the 1560s and are commonly referred to as late interludes (or hybrid moralities). I have chosen to use some examples from two of these plays: Apius and Virginia by R. B. and Cambises by Thomas Preston. There is no doubt that the sources which inspired these plays determined the conception of their main characters, those of the fable. In Apius the three main human characters are those from Chaucer’s “Phisicien’s Tale” and in Cambises they are the eponymous and infamous Persian king and some of his family and immediate retinue. In all of these characters, we can observe varying degrees of selfhood as defined above. Let us look first at R. B.’s play.

Apius and Virginia In Apius and Virginia, the three main characters, Apius, Virginius and Virginia are endowed with quite stunning degrees of selfhood, exceptional at this time. Their Roman identity is strongly marked and what is particularly noteworthy is that their characters are constructed not individually in separate entities but in relation to each other, either in harmony or in opposition. I will therefore discuss them in pairs, first Virginius and Apius, then Apius and Virginia, and finally Virginius and Virginia. When Apius appears alone on stage and soliloquises at the beginning of scene 3, the effect is to bring back into the mind of the audience, the earlier picture of Virginius in an identical posture (at the beginning of scene 1). Of course, everything depends on the choices made for staging, but the playwright seems to indicate that both characters are Roman tribunes of similar noble bearing, and the text makes it clear that they share the same register of language, the same erudition and the same culture. They even make similar references to Greek mythology. The juxtaposition of these two identical images, almost like the obverse and reverse of the same coin, not only brings theatrical harmony to the emerging dramatic conflict but helps the spectators engage their mental

1

For a translation of the Pasté, see Appendix II of Heywood 1991, 311-30.

36

Selfhood in the Tudor Dramatic Corpus

participation in the decoding and comparison of each of these examples of characterisation. These striking convergences showing that both these characters have, at the outset, the same potential, throw into sharper relief the divergences that emerge between them in the main body of their respective monologues, showing how each of them has developed. Whereas Virginius is characterised by his rapture in the joys of family life, Apius wishes he were unwedded. They both speak of Virginia, but whereas Virginius is filled with fatherly tenderness for her, Apius has lascivious designs on her. The fact that both Virginius and Apius pronounce the word “Fortune” at exactly the same spot in their monologues (the sixth and seventh syllables) brings out their differing positions on this subject with even more force, showing Virginius’s delight with his lot and Apius’s despondency about his. This comparative decoding of signs informs the spectator that the second stage image is a degradation or subversion of the first. It is the reverse side of the coin and shows what would happen to a man like Virginius if he became corrupt like Apius. Thus this visual and verbal doubling effect constructs the selfhood of both characters simultaneously whilst also serving the dramatic interest of the play and the moral message. Further appearances of each character alternate throughout the play, thus pursuing this dual system of building up their selfhood. Virginius, shown diligently looking after his estate and going to church, continues to be contrasted with Apius who, now fallen prey to the Vice, continues his ruminations and is shown teetering dangerously on the brink of damnation. In the second half of the play, they come face to face with each other on two occasions. The first time, in scene 6, Apius has the upper hand. He has summoned Virginius to his court and keeps him waiting nervously. There is an interesting glimpse into Virginius’s memory, as he anxiously sifts through the past in search of a reason for his present indignation. According to Ewbank, this is an efficient way of creating selfhood: “memory opens out the human perspective with nostalgic glimpses of the past . . . exploiting memory and exploiting the subjunctive of what might have been” (1989, 42). During his reflections some changes in his character become obvious. He is perturbed (6. 684-85 2 ), he feels old (6.688). He tries to reassure himself by reconstructing his glorious past in the service of the judge (6.674-75). When Apius sweeps in with his false story and his command to have Virginia brought to him, he fills the space with his corrupt authority, whilst the personal space of Virginius shrinks 2

References are to scene and line.

Norah Yvonne Phoenix

37

around him, making him cower, as he is reduced to pleading and supplicating in complete incomprehension. However, once the rumour about Apius’s true intentions reaches his ears by the beginning of scene 7, Virginius swells with anger and unleashes his fury, spouting forth images of mould, muck and clay (7.764). Like Hamlet some decades later, he sees the world almost as “an unweeded garden full of rank and gross things, a place not fit to live in. His ego is on the verge of dissolution” (Orbison 1975, 122). However even before the arrival on the scene of his daughter, the inner turbulence of Virginius shakes him into a new awareness. His earlier naïve, self-congratulatory attitude is now replaced by a sane, though violent, reaction to his despondency. His verbal expression finds a new authenticity. The “springs of his fury” set off a surprising flash of self exposure that lights up an inwardness barely conceivable earlier in the play (Rosenberg 1989, 24). He has moved forward from the slightly embarrassing to the genuinely moving, as he now concentrates on saving his daughter’s honour. Their second confrontation in scene 8 stages Virginius’s ironic compliance with the judge’s order when, in a dramatic reversal of the previous situation, he triumphantly brings Virginia’s head to Apius. Having helped his daughter keep her virtue, Virginius is no longer the cowering victim of Apius but is endowed with a new kind of moral grandeur. The final victory is illustrated by the image of Virginius leading the judge off to prison. Like that of her father, the character of Virginia is connected to the selfhood of Apius. But whereas, as we saw, Virginius functions here essentially as a key for reading Apius, a yardstick by which to judge his character, Virginia actually affects the judge’s selfhood and stimulates its development. The opposite is also true. Surprisingly, though, the two eponymous heroes of the play never actually meet, either in the stage space or in the offstage space, nor do they ever engage in any direct communication with each other. Yet the effect they have on each other is theatrical and dramatic dynamite. Not only does it constitute the driving force of the fable and the pulse of the action but, in other words, each of these characters helps to construct the selfhood of the other. They spark off in each other a series of moods and tensions which leads to tragedy for both of them. The image of Virginia shown directly to the audience is that of “a virgin pure, an imp of heavenly race” (1.153), in other words a pure innocent, childlike adolescent of exemplary good behaviour and obedience to her parents. The image perceived by Apius is, however, quite different.

38

Selfhood in the Tudor Dramatic Corpus

He sees only her sensual charms and this affects his whole personality. Completely subjugated by thoughts of Virginia, he spends his time steeped in sinful fantasies about her. His selfhood is constructed with a finesse unpractised in drama of this period and therefore totally original. He is essentially an inward-focused character and his lucid self-knowledge makes him aware of his weaknesses; he deplores them but is incapable of struggling against them. Through ruminations which come close to resembling self-analysis, Apius dwells on past images of his life as a respected judge taking part in wholesome activities like sport, and contrasts them with his present degradation. This accent on the psychology of a character is totally new in the extant Tudor corpus and the reflections of the villain of the piece are especially effective. This inner debate foreshadows Hamlet’s comment, “in my heart there was a kind of fighting” (Hamlet, 5.2.4-6), and possibly constitutes the forerunner of what has been described as a shift in the equation villain = contempt (Berry 1989, 24). This introspection allows the audience to see that the consciousness even of a wicked person has in it the potential for both good and evil. The destructive energy in Apius is above all self-destructive, as the “internal division in a character impels such anxiety that the very identity of the self is called into question” (Rosenberg 1989, 87). Unlike Apius, his victims obtain eternal salvation and their selves remain intact. The judge’s decision to pursue Virginia, to proceed with his plan to “deflower hir youth” (3.452) and thus to continue on his downward spiral therefore makes this play a double tragedy. The picture Apius paints of Virginia’s physical charms and sensuality clashes with that painted by her father. But this discrepancy is corrected by the fact that the audience actually see that the living breathing version of Virginia is the innocent, obedient girl vaunted by her father. Therefore, her reputation remains at all times untarnished in the eyes of the audience. However, there is every chance that the unusual and striking sensual quality of the judge’s description, uttered in lilting poetry, would have left its mark on the audience. And even if the chaste Virginia is utterly unaware of it, the features described are very probably among her attributes. That this slight note of ambivalence is intentional on the playwright’s part seems obvious when, in a tender moment of daughterly affection with her father, Virginia uses similar terms to those used by Apius in his fantasies about her. When she speaks these lines, “Then tender armes, complect the neck; doo dry thy fathers teares, / You nimble handes, for wo whereof my loving hart it weares” (8.816-17), the audience cannot fail to recall these earlier utterances:

Norah Yvonne Phoenix

39

APIUS: Ah Gods, would I unfolde her armes complecting of my necke? Or would I hurt her nimble hand or yeelde her such a checke? Would I ganisay hir tender skinne to bathe where I do washe? Or els refuse hir soft sweete lippes to touch my naked fleshe? (3.363-66)

Virginia’s character thereby appears less rigid, more complex, more human. However, the main effect Apius has on the development of Virginia’s selfhood is to make her grow in moral stature to become not merely a model of chastity but a tragic heroine. Her reaction to the judge’s threat brings out in Virginia a whole wealth of personal qualities. She matures into a brave, intelligent, sensitive determined young woman capable of expressing her ideas through discursive reasoning and eloquent rhetoric and able to convince her father about the course of action to take. Unlike Ophelia was to be, Virginia is not “divided from herself and her fair judgement” (Hamlet, 4.5.83). On the contrary, in face of adversity, she remains totally in control. Nor does her death signify the ego’s failure to maintain itself, as in Ophelia’s case, thereby provoking “the disintegration of her soul” (Orbison 1975, 129). Virginia loses her body but by so doing succeeds in preserving her self, rather than surrendering this self to Apius and keeping her corporal existence. A comparison of the two scenes in which father and daughter appear together shows an incredible progression in their degree of selfhood. Affected by the adversity imposed on them by Apius, the flat, rigid extremely naïve characters of scene 1 develop into the astoundingly credible human characters with a rich psychological dimension that we see in scene 7. From literally singing out the praises of happy family life for all to hear, outside their house, they become capable of introspection or deep reflection which, tellingly, takes place when they are alone indoors. This is expressed through complex rhetoric and sophisticated intellectual debate. Emotion is at its height in scene 7 and not simply because Virginia persuades her father to cut off her head and take it to the judge in order to save her honour. This emotional peak is attained through their expression of moral suffering and their exchange of affection and tenderness. Their selfhood blossoms through the quality of the poetry, an interesting mix of tetrameter and heptameter with a number of shared lines and shared rhymes between father and daughter—for example: VIRGINIA: Now father, worke thy will on me, that life I may enjoy Here tye a handcarcher about hir eyes and then strike of hir heade

40

Selfhood in the Tudor Dramatic Corpus VIRGINIUS: Now stretch thy hand, Virginius that loth would flesh destroy. (7.34-35)

Clearly, this scene showing the introspection of these characters and communicating to the audience every stage of their heightened emotions is an unequalled dramatic experience for the period. It can be said that all three major human characters in this play experience an internal struggle, but whereas Apius becomes possessed by the shadow part of himself, Virginius and Virginia answer a higher calling. In their complexity, their striking humanity, their capacity to evolve and their appeal to the emotions of the audience, these characters fulfil most convincingly the criteria set out in this study. Obviously, this major achievement in human selfhood, which in fact set a precedent, could and should be pointed out to those who disparage all too easily the characterisation techniques of Tudor playwrights. However, as hinted at earlier, creating characters with this type of selfhood was neither the primary vocation nor the central focus of the Tudor corpus. Even in this play, superbly crafted as they are, the human characters constitute only one part of the picture. As is so frequently the case in the Tudor drama, they evolve among a much wider cast of mixed characters which include social types, functional types and allegories, in fact a whole ensemble orchestrated by a Vice character, in this particular case, Haphazard. So although human selfhood is important, it constitutes just one facet of the plays. What seems to count above all is to preserve at all costs the artificiality of the theatrical act. This is shown in a number of ways in Apius and Virginia. For example, the rumour which comes to Virginius’s ears is actually recited by a functional character called Rumour, who runs onto the stage, says his piece and runs off again (6.736-63). In scene 3, when Apius is in the throes of letting himself be convinced by the Vice to carry out his evil plan, the playwright chooses an extremely theatrical way of showing the inner debate of the judge who is afraid of his own conscience and of how he could be brought to justice. In fact, this inner struggle can be described as a graphic staging of the judge’s mental pathways showing clearly his split self. To make this work effectively, the playwright links his innovative discursive method to a tried and tested technique: the recourse to allegory. In an amazing feat of staging, two allegorical characters, Conscience and Justice are shown actually “coming out” of Apius (they probably emerge from inside the judge’s ample robes). The stage direction is eloquent:

Norah Yvonne Phoenix

41

Here let him make as thogh he went out and let Conscience and Iustice come out of him, and let Conscience hold in his hande a lamp burning, and let Iustice have a sworde and hold it before Apius brest (3.428)

For the benefit of Haphzard (and the audience) Apius explains what has happened and provides a running commentary on this inner debate: But out, I am wounded; how am I devided? Two states of my life from me are now glided: For Conscience he pricketh me contempned, And Iustice wich saith Iudgement would have me condemned; Conscience saith crueltye sure will detest me, And Iustive saith death in thende will molest me; And both in one sodden me thinkes they do crie That fier eternall my soul shall destroy. (3.429-36)

By retorting that “these are just thoughts” (3.437), the Vice is able to convince Apius to disregard his scruples. Therefore, still besotted with lust for Virginia, he pursues his wicked plan. Such elaborate artificiality contrasts strikingly with the sophisticated level of discourse of the play, but it all seems part of the particular identity of Tudor theatre, its own individual stamp.

Cambises Thomas Preston’s play, Cambises, is comparable to Apius and Virginia in that it contains all the basic elements we have just discussed, albeit in substantially differing proportions. The accent on theatre as artefact is even stronger here and is organised in a rather different way. In this play the principal touches of human emotion are found among characters, who manifest brief but interesting flashes of selfhood usually sparked off by the king’s cruelty. Their sufferings at his instigation seem to make them grow in dignity and eloquence and to earn the audience’s respect as well as pity. Those put to death include the king’s brother Smirdis, his wife and the boy he murders for target practice. All show courage and inspire respect by remaining dignified. For example, the child with his last breath expresses solicitude for his parents: “O father, father, wipe your face / I see the tears run from your eye” (546-47). But perhaps the most memorable is the eloquent insight we are offered into his

42

Selfhood in the Tudor Dramatic Corpus

mother’s feelings. Language and stage image merge in bitter sweetness as she speaks her lament for her lost child while dolefully wrapping his torn body in her apron. In the longest speech attributed to any character in this play, this mother’s sorrow is every bit as intense and moving as that which Robert Greene’s Bellaria, Shakespeare’s source character for Hermione, is to feel: MOTHER: Oh heavy day and doleful time, these mourning tunes to make With blubbered eyes, into mine arms from earth I will thee take, And wrap thee in mine apron white! But oh my heavy heart . . . The death of this my son to see! O heavy mother now, That from thy sweet and sugared joy to sorrow so shouldst bow. (581-83; 585-86)

The feeling of loss and suffering is intensified by the visual element when she and her husband carry off this tragic burden like two lost souls. Such instances offer gratifying glimpses of selfhood, showing once more that Tudor playwrights did not lack the craftsmanship needed to endow characters with a psychological dimension. Curiously, though, Preston reserves such human touches to the minor characters. In fact, he seems to have set up a scale balancing out the psychological against the theatrical dimensions of his characters, so that as one decreases, the other augments. This can be noticed quite clearly by first observing the thoroughly theatrical main character, the king, and then comparing him with a character slightly lower down the scale, Sisamnes, who is depicted with a certain degree of human credibility. In this play the king is certainly a powerful theatrical character but his degree of selfhood, though existent, remains rather rudimentary. His personality does not remain totally static and in fact evolves, but in a rather elemental way and seemingly without any rhyme or reason. Optically, thanks to the paratactic structure of the proxemics, the audience is presented with a constellation of subordinates gravitating around the sovereign, and in the early episodes of the play, he is endowed with a number of characteristics befitting his position. A combination of stage iconography and dialogue establish him as a wise king who listens to his counsellors and a brave warrior, and, after his successful expedition to Egypt, he is shown as a man of justice sympathetic to the woes of his people. This character fills the playing area with majesty and underlines the continuity of the dynasty. Then, practically in the wink of an eye, he

Norah Yvonne Phoenix

43

becomes a paranoid tyrant with a sadistic streak and a veritable penchant for cruelty. Interesting though it is, this modification in his character does not actually evolve; there is no attempt to create the illusion of a natural development. The change is, in fact, announced by the allegorical character, Shame, who makes a fleeting appearance heralded by a few notes on his trumpet to impart this information to the audience, rather in the same way as Rumour in Apius and Virginia. From then on, King Cambises becomes the instigator of highly effective scenes in which a combination of horror and pathos could not have failed to hold the audience in its grip. Furthermore, such an audience response could only have been enhanced by the play’s stop-go tempo, which functions in the following way. As soon as a new desire for horror crosses the king’s mind, he immediately has it carried out. This acceleration (or “go” phase) between episodes is countered by the slow pace of the scenes of cruelty themselves (or “stop” phase) stretched out so that every gory detail can be registered (and, more importantly, seen) and every tear-jerking moment of pathos can be indulged in. The global effect of this accumulation is that of a cascade of shock effects for the audience, and the result regarding the king’s character is that he appears steeped deeper and deeper in bloodshed and meaningless evil. King Cambises is an amazing character and is the key to the success of this play but the initial spark of psychological realism or selfhood does not quite ignite. In fact, as the king’s character becomes progressively larger than life, his potential for selfhood shrinks and ends up quite petering out. Although the verbal element is not the be-all and end-all in the construction of a character, one of the reasons for the rather flimsy psychological dimension of the king’s selfhood has to be the language he is attributed. It consists basically of a somewhat relentless use of pounding fourteeners accompanied by almost comical phrasal inversions and has been aptly described by Nicholas Brooke as “jog trot” (Brooke 1996, 105). Turning our attention to the King’s right-hand man, Sisamnes, the judge who governs for him when he goes off to war, we could say that as far as developed selfhood is concerned, this character succeeds where King Cambises fails. He not only has his own soliloquy but his language in general is more supple, less wooden, than that of the king. He too changes quite rapidly from being a reputable man of state to becoming a greedy opportunist, but in his case the spectators are given a glimpse of the workings of his mind. They observe him first making a pledge of undying loyalty to the king which contains such principles as equality and sincerity:

44

Selfhood in the Tudor Dramatic Corpus

“With equity for to observe your graces minde and wil. / And nought from it to swerve indeed, but sincerely to stay” (104-05). Then just eight lines further on, he suddenly drops his solemn mask and begins gloating about the prospect of all the riches he intends to help himself to at the expense of the state. He can be imagined at this point, rubbing his hands with glee like any common stage villain. The sudden change is almost as surprising as that which occurs in Cambises, but, unlike the king, he is given the chance to explain himself. Strangely, his soliloquy (115-25), though full of unlawful and unethical intentions just happens to be the most poetic and the most fluid use of the fourteener in the whole play. Gone is the jog trot; instead, harmonious effects like the anaphora “Now may I” make this piece a kind of solemn litany even if these lines hint at the character’s future damnation. Furthermore, Sisamnes is a more subtle character than the king and later expresses some scruples about his own corruption. The audience can feel some pity for him particularly in his death scene. Immediately before his horrific execution, it is the visual element more than the dialogue which further develops the selfhood of Sisamnes. The text suggests the proxemics of an arrogant king (known already to the audience to be a hypocrite) striding across the playing area, barking out orders, accusations and threats to the solitary defenceless figure of the broken man that this great judge has now become. The pathos is further increased on the entrance of his broken-hearted son Otian, whom he greets with fatherly tenderness: “O childe thou makes my eyes to run, as rivers doo by streme” (455). The audience can even drum up some admiration for his dignity when he pardons his executioner (459). Such touches of sensitivity are totally absent from the characterisation of the king, whose flat mechanical dialogue is far removed from the lyrical quality of the judge’s language, and contrary to Sisamnes, he never shows any sign of inner debate. Although such instances offer gratifying glimpses and insights of selfhood in certain characters, there is no doubt that of all the “human” ones, Cambises is the one who best holds the stage. But, even if Cambises is an individual human figure with a personality which develops and fleetingly embraces a degree of selfhood, the potential of this is never fully realised and the character remains almost a purely theatrical animal. This provides further confirmation that in the Tudor corpus, although selfhood is an interesting notion, it would seem not to be of central importance: for in this play it is Cambises who fills the space, who is in fact the “co-star” of the play (with the Vice Ambidexter) and constitutes a brilliant role for an actor to play. King Cambises with his bombastic rant remains a

Norah Yvonne Phoenix

45

resoundingly convincing stage figure who managed, for whatever reason but certainly not for that of developed selfhood, to catch the attention of Shakespeare. In conclusion, I have tried to show that the Tudor corpus was capable of producing characters that were not simply flat representations but which were endowed with a psychological and emotional dimension: a mind and a soul. Furthermore, tragic figures like Virginia and Apius were created without prior models and may well have inspired some playhouse creations. However, whilst it seems obvious that developed human characters have their place in Tudor theatre, I wish to reiterate that I do not believe they constitute the essence of this drama. Some valuable clues as to its most vital preoccupations are again found early in the corpus, in John Heywood’s translation of La Farce du Pasté. The way Heywood deliberately multiplies the active roles of theatrical artefacts such as properties and how he amplifies stage action like fisticuffs and general clowning, provides us with a telling insight as to how Tudor theatre saw itself, how, from the beginning, it constructed its own identity. Such elements are still present in the late interludes and those examined here communicate in many ways a certain joy in their artificiality. One aspect of this transpires through some of the stage directions for the creation of highly theatrical visual effects, for example in the execution of Sisamnes: “flay him with a false skin” (Cambises, 460). Even the thoroughly credible selfhood discussed above is not created by literary dialogue alone; other, more theatrical means are also used, for example the juxtaposition of stage images, the organisation of the proxemics or the variation of the rhythm. Even more than is the case for other types of plays which lend themselves to dissection as literature, the soul of Tudor theatre, the essence of its authentic life, is only the lively action of the stage. Therefore, even characters which seem flat and deprived of selfhood on the page probably oozed with it on the stage (Brown 1989, 52). The pity is that we very rarely get the chance to verify this in live performance. As we saw in the plays I have examined, the human characters evolve in the midst of hosts of artificial ones. For example, in Cambises there are thirty-six characters played by a small troupe. As Jean-Paul Debax has pointed out, the huge amount of doubling required could only have intensified the effect of artificiality. The crucial matter is the harmonisation and pulling together of all these different kinds of characters, a task performed, as we saw, by the Vice. For again, Jean-Paul

46

Selfhood in the Tudor Dramatic Corpus

Debax has definitively shown that Tudor theatre is, more than anything, the theatre of the Vice (1994, 161-73). As well as the functional and mediating roles of the Vice, he is in his own right a highly seductive character with a self all of his own. It is not that of a believable human being, but a theatrical, hyperbolic self, brimming with personal magnetism and star quality. Therefore, although the Tudor corpus produced highly significant characters with human depth and psychological credibility, perhaps we can conclude by saying that, more than anything, this theatre vaunts its existence as an artefact and that, consequently, between the Herods and the Hamlets the most powerful and significant characters seem in fact to be none other than the Haphazards.

Works Cited Primary Sources Anon. 1972. Apius and Virginia. In Tudor Interludes, ed. Peter Happé, 271-318. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Heywood, John. 1991. Johan Johan. In The Plays of John Heywood, ed. Richard Axton and Peter Happé, 75-92. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Preston, Thomas. 1975. A Critical Edition of Thomas Preston’s Cambises. Ed. Robert Carl Johnson. Salzburg Studies in Renaissance Literature 23. Salzburg: University of Salzburg Press. Shakespeare, William. 1989. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen.

Secondary Sources Berry, Ralph. 1989. Hamlet and the Audience: The Dynamics of a Relationship. In Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance, ed. M. and R. Thompson, 24-28. London: Associated University Presses. Brooke, Nicholas. 1996. Emotional Language in Mankind and Cambises. In Tudor Theatre: Emotion in the Theatre, ed. André Lascombes. Actes de la Table Ronde V du Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance. THETA 3, 98-108. Bern: Peter Lang. Brown, John Russell. 1989. The Nature of Speech in Shakespeare Plays. In Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance, ed. M. and R. Thompson, 48-59. London: Associated University Presses.

Norah Yvonne Phoenix

47

Debax, Jean-Paul. 1994. Le personnage du théâtre du vice: ou démonstration en artificialité. In The Problematics of Text and Character, ed. André Lascombes, 161-73. Actes des Tables Rondes I-II-III du Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance. THETA 1. Bern: Peter Lang. Ewbank, Inga-Stina. 1989. From Narrative to Dramatic Language: The Winter’s Tale and Its Source. In Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance, ed. M. and R. Thompson, 29-47. London: Associated University Presses. Orbison, Tucker. 1975. This Distracted Globe: Self in Hamlet. In Perspectives on Hamlet, ed. W. G. Holzberger and P. B. Waldeck, 112141. London: Associated University Presses. Rosenberg, Marvin. 1989. Subtext in Shakespeare. In Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance, ed. M. and R. Thompson, 79-90. London: Associated University Presses.

PART II

SELFHOOD: A CULTURAL AND LITERARY CONSTRUCT

JOHN LYLY’S ALEXANDER AND CAMPASPE: AN EXERCISE IN TAUTOLOGY: SELFHOOD AS CULTURAL AND LITERARY CONSTRUCTION FRANCIS GUINLE

In a paper given at an international symposium on Popular Arab Literature in Damascus, Faustina Dufika-Aerts, a Dutch researcher, talked about SÐrat al-Iskandar or The Romance of Alexander. In her paper, 1 she lists the sources of that romance and the various texts and traditions (including the Coranic tradition, since Alexander the Great is supposed to be the figure behind ÅÙ al-Qarnayn, “the One with two horns,” mentioned in SÙrat al-Kahf), and comments: Whatever its genesis and its reputation in the Arab Islamic as well as Christian world, a figure was born integrating the various previous characteristics. I’m speaking of the arrival on the scene of al-Iskandar ÅÙ’l-Qarnayn, the folk protagonist of SÐrat al-Iskandar. I called it the “forgotten epic” because it is completely ignored by the mass of essays written about the sÐra š-šaÝbÐya in the last decades. 2 However, it deserves our attention like all the other epics. Yet, the reasons why this tale seems to have been forgotten by the story-tellers as well as their audiences in the past centuries remain obscure. 3 1

Faustina Dufika-Aerts, “SÐrat al-Iskandar, l’épopée oubliée,” (paper, international colloquium, Damascus, April 2006 [forthcoming publication]). 2 “Mass of essays” seems somewhat exaggerated, but it is true that these essays deal with most of the other epics apart from SÐrat al-Iskandar, which is very rarely quoted. SÐra š-šaÝbÐya: the usual translation for this genre is “oral Arab epic,” or “Arab popular romance.” 3 My translation of “Quoi qu’il en soit de cette genèse et de cette réputation dans le monde arabe islamique ainsi que chrétien, une figure est née qui a absorbé et intégré les caractéristiques diverses antérieures. Je parle de l’arrivée d’al-Iskander ÅÙ’l-Qarnayn, le protagoniste folklorique de la SÐrat al-Iskandar. Je l’ai dénommée “l’épopée oubliée” parce qu’elle est restée presque totalement

Francis Guinle

51

Now, considering the amount of literature around Alexander the Great, most of it deriving, one way or another, from The Alexander Romance by Pseudo-Callisthenes, 4 which was translated or adapted into twenty-five languages, including Syriac, Persian, Arabic and a number of European languages, it seems indeed surprising that this literature did not extend beyond the Middle Ages. Trying to think about notable Tudor plays which might have been inspired by Alexander the Great and which might have used him as their hero, I could only come up with John Lyly’s play of Alexander and Campaspe. Alexander does appear in other plays, not as a character, but as a figure, famous enough to be mentioned and played around with—for instance, in the churchyard scene in Hamlet—but to my knowledge, no other play seems to organize its plot around him as a central character. It may seem strange that such a figure has not aroused further literary attention either in the Arab or European world, especially since he is probably the only historical figure who was at one time popular in both cultural worlds. 5 The letters of Aristotle to Alexander the Great were collected into a kind of epistolary “mirror for magistrates” 6 and Faustina Dufika-Aerts notes: Indeed, this epistolary novel is at the basis of the famous Sirr al-AsrÁr known in medieval Europe under its Latin title, Secretum Secretorum. It contributed strongly to the genesis of the representation of Alexander as an archetype of the ethical king and at the same time the defensor and

inaperçue parmi la foule des traités sur la sÐra š-šaÝbÐya des décennies passées. Néanmoins elle mérite autant notre attention que les autres épopées. Pourtant, les raisons pour lesquelles ce récit semble être oublié aussi par les conteurs et leurs auditeurs pendant ces derniers siècles restent obscures.” 4 Callisthenes is said to have written a biography of Alexander. He was put to death by the king for having declared that he was only a man. Pseudo-Callisthenes, as he is called, produced The Alexander Romance in about 222 AD. 5 It is quite striking, for instance, to see that the kurdish ayyoubid sultan ÑalÁÎ alDÐn, known to us as Saladin, a popular figure in Europe, has no sÐra attached to him. Naturally, none of the European Medieval figures are known in the Arab world, and since all the sÐra-s were composed during the Islamic period, with a clear propagandist aim, the popularity of Alexander the Great can only be due to the Coranic mention, followed by further notice in the Sunna (the Tradition of the Prophet). 6 See Grignaschi 1965-66, 7-83 and 1967, 211-64.

52

Selfhood as Cultural and Literary Construction propagandist of the monotheist religion, a Êihadist before his time, and a sort of predecessor of the Commander of the faithful. 7

Confronted with this tantalizing account, it appears that an investigation of Lyly’s play might bring some interesting elements in the perception of the self in a figure which seemed to have been fashioned in the very same way in what we tend to consider as two different, even sometimes opposed, cultures. Indeed, among the various accounts of Alexander’s life, some are more disparagement than praise. But from the first century onward, most of these accounts contribute to the Alexander legend, and try to ignore the darker side of this historical figure. Most of these sources insist on the miraculous birth, or a birth announced by various signs. 8 What is striking, however, is that John Lyly, in spite of all the different sources available to him, chooses an anecdote which only appears in a few of them, and which is very briefly related in the sources which mention it. The most likely direct source is Pliny the Elder in his account of Alexander’s magnanimity when he gives up Campaspe, one of his mistresses, to the painter Apelles who had fallen in love with her. Here is the 1601 English translation of the passage: For having among his concubines one named Campaspe, whom hee fancied especially above the rest, in regard as well of that affection of his as her incomparable beautie, he gave commaundement to Apelles for to draw her picture all naked: but perceiving Apelles at the same time to be wounded with the like dart of love as well as himself, he bestowed her upon him most frankly: By which example hee shewed moreover, that how great a commaunder and highe minded a prince he was other wise, yet in this maistering and commaunding of his affections, his magnanimitie was more seene: and in this act of his he wan as much honour and glorie as by any victory over his enemies, for now hee had conquered himself, and not 7 My translation of: “En effet, ce roman epistolaire a jeté les bases de l’ouvrage célèbre Sirr al-AsrÁr, connu dans l’Europe médiévale sous son titre latin Secretum Secretorum. Il a contribué fermement à la genèse de la représentation d’Alexandre comme le roi éthique par excellence et, en même temps, le défenseur et propagandiste de la religion monothéiste, un Êihadiste avant la lettre, vraiment une sorte de prédecesseur du Prince des croyants.” However, it must be said that the representations of Alexander, in particular in Ancient Greece, were not all so flattering. In Greece Plutarch is probably the first writer to give a positive account of him. 8 It is the case of the Pseudo-Calisthenes, but also of Plutarch, and consequently the medieval writers such as Albéric de Pisanson (c.1120), and Alexandre de Bernay (1185).

Francis Guinle

53

onely made Apelles partner with him of his love, but also gave his affection cleane away from her unto him, nothing moved with the respect of her whom before he so dearly loved, that being the concubine of a king, she should now become the bedfellow of a painter. (Pliny the Elder 1601, 539)

I suggest that this brief account is used and developed by John Lyly to dramatize a major theme which concerns the congruence of a character with his cultural image. In the same way, John Lyly explores the anecdotes involving Diogenes, found in various sources, 9 to reflect on identity and conformity. Accordingly, the scenes which revolve around the philosophers’ servants serve the same purpose and do not provide a subplot as such. Everything in the play converges towards the same definition of selfhood as a strict conformity to a constructed image. Most of Lyly’s plays operate on the principle of identity and identification, 10 yet none so much as Alexander and Campaspe. 11 In each case, an image of the self is constructed to which the characters must eventually adhere. The conflict centres on the opposition between selfinterest and the interest of the community which has produced the image. This image can be social, political, historical or even legendary, cultural and literary. In each case the characters are defined and must conform to their definition. Thus, the very purpose of Act I, Scene 1 is to point to this definition, hence such formulations as “It becometh the son of Philip to be none other than Alexander is” (1.1.8-9), or: CLITUS: We will make no controversy of that which there ought to be no question; only this shall be the opinion of us both, that none was worthy to be the father of Alexander but Philip nor any meet to be the son of Philip but Alexander. (1.1.27-31)

Given the fact that in most of the sources the paternity of Philip is questioned, these statements about lineage can only point to a constructed 9

See for instance the numerous anecdotes reported by Diogenes Laertius in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lives_and_Opinions_of_Eminent_Philosophers (accessed October 20, 2007) 10 This is one of the themes I am researching at the moment in Lyly’s drama: how harmony is achieved by the concordance between identity and identification. 11 All the references to the text of the play (act, scene, line) are to G. K. Hunter’s edition of 1991.

54

Selfhood as Cultural and Literary Construction

image, first of Philip, then of Alexander. Regardless of the fact that Philip may or may not have been Alexander’s biological father, they point to a cultural filiation based on the recognized and necessary virtues of the ruler: “courage and courtesy” (1.1.2), implying “conquest without conflict” (1.1.6). Moreover, the “perfection” (1.1.10) and “excellency” (1.1.11) of the ruler is expressed in the double process of generation voiced by Clitus in the previous quotation, the genitor being “generated” by the son. In expressing the “opinion of us both,” Clitus states the opinion of all. This constructed image of the self is further developed in the dialogue between the captives, Timoclea and Campaspe, and the courtiers, Parmenio and Clitus. The ideal balance achieved by Alexander constitutes the essence of his nature: CLITUS: In fight terrible as becometh a captain; in conquest mild, as beseemeth a king. In all things, than which nothing can be greater, he is Alexander. CAMPASPE: Then if it be such a thing to be Alexander, I hope it shall be no miserable thing to be a virgin. (1.1.59-64)

In choosing to turn Campaspe into a Theban captive and a virgin, Lyly departs from all the sources where she is described as one of Alexander’s concubines. This choice serves several purposes. First of all, it changes the relationship between the three characters, Alexander, Campaspe and Apelles. Then it points to a different status reinforced by the association with Timoclea, the noble, virtuous enemy. 12 The constructed image of the self is not confined to Alexander and Campaspe. It affects all the characters of the play: Apelles, the famous painter, the philosophers and their servants. The text is crammed with definitions of identity. Thus, when Alexander remarks that the summoned philosophers have all obeyed his order, Hephestion defines them: 12

It has been rightly pointed out that the presence of Timoclea reflects on Campaspe’s character. G. K. Hunter reminds us of the story of Timoclea, the sister of a Theban general, as related by Plutarch: raped by a Thracian captain, she leads him to a well pretending that a treasure is hidden in it, and she then throws him into the well and kills him by piling stones upon him. G. K. Hunter states: “Campaspe’s humility and disposability take her close to the concubine status that Pliny describes; but the twinning with Timoclea in this scene (Timoclea never appears again) is sufficient to guarantee her a share of dignity” (Lyly 1991, 9).

Francis Guinle

55

ALEXANDER: I see, Hephestion, that these philosophers are here attending for us. HEPHESTION: They were not philosophers if they knew not their duties. (1.3.60-62)

Diogenes’s exception is justified simply by his being Diogenes. Melippus’s (the messenger) account of his meeting with Diogenes gives us an idea of the kind of tautology we may expect: Him when I willed to appear before Alexander, he answered, “if Alexander would fain see me, let him come to me; if learn of me, let him come to me; whatsoever it be, let him come to me.” “Why,” sayd I, “he is a king.” He answered, “Why, I am a philosopher.” “Why, but he is Alexander.” “Ay, but I am Diogenes.” (1.3.16-21)

In his study of Campaspe, Peter Saccio (1969, 37) points to “decorum” as central to euphuism: Decorum as a technique is a set of conventions governing the method of portrayal and consistency of characters: kings in plays should be kingly, or, as is the case with Richard II, we should know why they are not. Since this episode is discrete, 13 decorum is also the content of the scene. The decorousness of the arguments is the only reason for the presence of the episode. The scene exists to show Alexander as a king. It defines him. It exists to show Diogenes as a Cynic. It defines him. It exists to show both in relation to a third person, and they construct their relationship in accordance with the abstract position that they hold.

This can be generalized to all the characters in the play. But I would suggest that the notion of decorum should go beyond the world of the play, and should also be extended to the concordance between their social and cultural image and the balance that the play is striving to achieve. It is the characters’ response to this image of the self which defines the play’s action. Thus when the courtiers praise Alexander for his virtues, the audience is aware that this is what courtiers do, and that being true to their own selves, they cannot but praise their King. In the same way, when the servants deride their masters, they do exactly what the audience expect them to do. The scenes are therefore pitted one against the other in order to 13 He is speaking about Alexander’s meeting with Crysus, the Cynic beggar, and Diogenes (3. 4. 53-66).

56

Selfhood as Cultural and Literary Construction

provide distance and reappraise the definitions of identity. Excess of praise on the one hand, excess of criticism on the other, a balance must be struck. In their song, the servants express what they want, in the sense of what they desire and what they lack: wine, women, and food. In themselves these wishes may appear trivial compared to the high philosophical or artistic pursuits of their masters, 14 yet they also indicate faults and deficiency. The very fact that Diogenes acts differently from the other philosophers questions the relevance of Hephestion’s definition of philosophers. This difference seems to point to an absence of concordance between what Diogenes is and what he should be. Yet Diogenes himself implies that he is both Diogenes and a philosopher. What we get, in fact, is a complete congruence of Diogenes with his image as constructed by the various anecdotes found in the sources. In the play there is a strong feeling that selfhood, for Diogenes, is defined in terms of kind and conformity to kind. The tone may be light, as indeed it is in the reported anecdotes in Diogenes Laertius, for example, but the thought expressed is consistent: ALEXANDER: Why, be not women the best creatures in the world? DIOGENES: Next men and bees. ALEXANDER: What does thou dislike chiefly in a woman? DIOGENES: One thing. ALEXANDER: What? DIOGENES: That she is a woman. (5.3.68-74)

In this light, Diogenes’s objection to Trico’s performance is a reflection on art and the impossible concordance between the object and its representation: SYLVIUS: Now shall you hear the third, who sings like a nightingale. DIOGENES: I care not; for I have heard a nightingale sing herself. (5.2.31-32)

Imitation and counterfeit are inscribed in the text of the song which is supposed to imitate the various birds’ songs: nightingale, lark, robin, cuckoo. Although we do not have the music for the song, it seems likely that it afforded the opportunity for the singer to show his virtuosity. Yet, however adequate the singer may be, he is nothing but a counterfeit: 14

Granicchus is Plato’s servant, Psyllus serves Apelles, and Manes Diogenes.

Francis Guinle

57

SYLVIUS: Lo, Diogenes, I am sure thou canst not do so much. DIOGENES: But there is never a thrush but can. (5.3.8-9)

The point of the scene is also to show that try as he may, Trico will never be a courtier. Counterfeiting is, of course, Apelles’s art. Indeed, the words “shadow” and “counterfeit” in the text refer to Apelles’s pictures which all deal with Jupiter’s ploys to deceive women. In the dialogue between Campaspe and Apelles, she questions the very status of godhead and its conformity to Jupiter’s acts: CAMPASPE: What are these pictures ? APELLES: This is Leda, whom Jove deceived in likeness of a swan. CAMPASPE: A fair woman, but a foul deceit. APELLES: This is Alcmena unto whom Jupiter came in the shape of Amphitrion her husband and begat Hercules. CAMPASPE: A famous son, but an infamous act. APELLES: He might do so because he was a god. CAMPASPE: Nay, therefore it was evil done because he was a god. 15 (3.3.9-16)

The list continues and Campaspe’s comments touch on appropriate behaviour. Yet, at that point words are disconnected from desire and deeds. Just as Jupiter used his power to seduce mortal women, so Alexander wants to use his power to “conquer” Campaspe: ALEXANDER: Why, what is that which Alexander may not conquer as he list? HEPHESTION: Why, that which you say the gods cannot resist, love. ALEXANDER: I am a conqueror, she a captive. (3.2.120-22)

The displacement of the word “conqueror” from the battlefield to the field of love, in itself a cliché, conjures up the visions of rape associated with conquest, all the more so since from the start the presence of Timoclea and her association with Campaspe remind us of the darker side of conquest and conquerors. For a moment, in his exchange with Hephestion, Alexander’s positively constructed image cracks and shows 15 There might be here a reminder of Alexander’s link with Hercules, and the fact that he was said to have been begotten by a god.

58

Selfhood as Cultural and Literary Construction

the other Alexander, depicted in the earlier sources as a drunkard and an irrascible man who kills for a mere slight on his supposed divinity. The text bears the trace of this other Alexander in the mention of Callisthenes who was put to death by Alexander because of his free speech and because he did not acknowledge him as a god. Seneca’s judgement of Alexander on this account is particularly striking: He [Callisthenes] was endowed with a lofty intellect, and he dared to brave the wrath of a king. His death is an eternal blot on the memory of Alexander, which no valour and no success in war can ever remove. As often as it is said, Alexander slew many thousands of the Persians, the retort will be, And Callisthenes too. As often as it is said, He slew Darius, in whose hands there was then a mighty kingdom, the retort will be, Yes, and Callisthenes too. As often as it is said, He conquered all lands right up to the Ocean, the Ocean likewise he essayed with fleets strange to its waters, from a corner of Thrace he extended his empire to the bounds of the East; it will also be said, Yes, but he slew Callisthenes. Granted that he surpassed all former precedents of generals and kings, yet of all that he did, nothing will match his guilt in slaying Callisthenes (Clarke 1910, 254)

The very fact that the Callisthenes episode in reality took place a long time after the Theban war and the episode related in the play give the spectator an inkling of what Alexander is or might be. The image of the perfect ruler constructed at the beginning of the play reveals itself as only one possibility and is confronted by the image of the tyrant. The courtiers’ judgement of Alexander is not to be taken as mere flattery; after all they do not address Alexander with their compliments, but the audience. It partakes of an idealistic position expressing the need for correspondence between absolute power and virtue. Hephestion’s discourse (2.2) is a reminder of this position which he tries to force on to Alexander himself when he sees that the concordance is threatened. If Alexander refuses to conform to this image, if he does not think of himself as embodying this image, then all is lost and the whole system collapses. Identity itself is threatened by Alexander’s choice to follow his inclination and submit to love whereas what he should be is predetermined by all the discourses on Alexander within and without the play. This threat to a fixed identity is felt when Apelles, the embodiment of the Artist, spoils the perfect counterfeit he painted of Campaspe, in order to satisfy his desire to see her again:

Francis Guinle

59

APELLES: As soon as Alexander has viewed this portraiture I will by device give it a blemish that by that means she may come again to my shop. (3.5.66-67)

The song which follows is in the same vein, showing that the realm of the gods is also affected by this threat to identity: Cupid and my Campaspe played At cards for kisses, Cupid paid; He stakes his quiver, bow, and arrows, His mother’s doves, and team of sparrows Loses them too; then down he throws The coral of his lip, the rose Growing on’s cheek (but none knows how), With these the crystal of his brow, And then the dimple of his chin; All these did my Campaspe win. At last he set her both his eyes; She won, and Cupid blind did rise. O Love, has she done this to thee? What shall (alas) become of me? (3.5.71-84)

With this song, Apelles goes back to the source of disorder. Usually Cupid is blamed for the disorders engendered by Love, as in Gallathea, for instance, where he plays a major part in the disorder which follows the breach of the pact between Neptune and the villagers. Apelles operates a displacement which identifies Campaspe as the source, as a substitute for Love, grouping Cupid, Alexander and Apelles together as victims. Yet, losing all his attributes to Campaspe, he rises again as the Cupid we know. The myth is revisited in a conceit which eventually states that the experience of loss of identity is what allows a reconstruction of this identity along the lines of a consensus: to the question “What is Love?” the answer is “Love is blind.” The blazon would be a mere cliché if it were simply describing Campaspe; but the displacement also implies an exchange, and the attributes of the beloved are taken directly from Love. Depriving Love of all that defines him, Campaspe becomes more than the ideal beloved, she becomes Love itself. The interesting progression in the loss of identity induces a movement from the external attributes (quivers, bow, arrows) to attributes inscribed in his flesh, the loss of which alters his appearance (“the coral of his lip,” “the rose / Growing on’s cheek,” “the crystal of his brow,” “the dimple of his chin,” and eventually his eyes).

60

Selfhood as Cultural and Literary Construction

Through analogy and correspondence, however, the “blemish” inflicted by Apelles on Campaspe’s counterfeit is metaphorical of a redefinition of Campaspe’s identity. The time of the action is an in-between, a space in the conquests of Alexander between two wars. This space cannot properly be defined as “peace” since Alexander’s conquests never stop and his time is a constant time of war. However, it becomes a gap of time in which identities are blurred and selfhood ill-defined. The association between Timoclea and Campaspe stresses the difference as well as the likeness: the difference, for although Timoclea is a dignified captive, she is also “flawed,” since she has been raped, whereas Campaspe is still a virgin; the likeness, because as a captive Campaspe could very well be forced to become the victor’s concubine. In its turn, likeness is also expressed with such terms as “counterfeit” and “shadow.” The portrait of Campaspe is emblematic of an ambivalence which situates Campaspe between the dignified virgin captive and the prostitute who profits from the respite afforded by the interval between two military campaigns. This other female figure is present in the play in the character of Laïs. The alternative she offers to war is naturally tempting, even for the two soldiers she is consorting with: LAÏS: You may talk of war, speak big, conquer worlds with great words; but stay at home, where instead of alarums you shall have dances, for hot battles with fierce men, gentle skirmishes with fair women. These pewter coats can never sit so well as satin doublets. Believe me, you cannot conceive the pleasure of peace unless you despise the rudeness of war. (5.3.16-22)

However, several elements point to the fact that the situation here is a distortion of the cultural order, and a consequence of the inadequate attitude of Alexander. They clearly indicate a threat to the constructed identities of the characters. For a start, the female figure has been demoted to the rank of a prostitute, and represents the danger lying in wait for Campaspe. Then, Diogenes intervenes and states his identity which he sets in opposition to that of Laïs: MILECTUS: Diogenes, what sayst thou to such a morsel? [He points to Laïs] DIOGENES: I say I would spit it out of my mouth because it should not poison my stomach. PHRYGIUS: Thou speakest as thou art; it is no meat for dogs.

Francis Guinle

61

DIOGENES: I am a dog, and philosophy rates me from carrion. (5.3.26-30)

The mention of “dog” and “philosophy” in the same sentence reminds the spectator that indeed, “cynic” comes from the Greek which means “dog” or “doglike.” Finally, the soldiers themselves have a confused feeling that what they are doing is not quite in keeping with their trade: PHRYGIUS: Come, sweet Laïs, let us go to some place and possess peace. But first let us sing; there is more pleasure in tuning of a voice than in a volley of shot. MILECTUS: Now let us make haste lest Alexander find us here. (5.3.41-43)

The departure from the image to which Alexander should conform to “be himself” is due to the unsettling time of peace for such characters who are clearly defined as warriors and conquerors. The example set by Alexander is seen as an infectious disease which threatens to spread to the artist, but also to the common people. Why should Alexander blame the soldiers for their lack of zeal when he himself is not himself? Even Hephestion, who is the constant reminder of the constructed image of Alexander in the play, has fallen prey to the infectious disease: ALEXANDER: Methinketh, Hephestion, you are more melancholy than you were accustomed. (5.4.1-2)

Indeed, Hephestion expresses his discomfort in terms of a disjunction between his mind and body: HEPHESTION: Melancholy I am not, nor well content; for I know not how, there is such a rust crept into my bones with this long ease that I fear I shall not scour it out with infinite labours. (5.4.5-7)

These military terms, expressing the rusty arms which must be scoured in order to be used again, were the very same used by the two characters which opened the play with the proper (in the sense of propriety) definition of Alexander. In Act 4, Scene 4, Clitus and Parmenio express their concern without mincing their words. The whole passage conveys the idea of an alteration which has spread throughout the court like a disease weakening the minds and the bodies. Philip, whose status is guaranteed

62

Selfhood as Cultural and Literary Construction

because he is dead and who consequently is now the only figure which can serve as a standard, is invoked again: PARMENIO: O Philip, wert thou alive to see this alteration—thy men turned to women, thy soldiers to lovers, gloves worn in velvet caps instead of plumes in graven helmets—thou wouldst either die among them for sorrow or confound them for anger. (4.3.23-27)

It may be significant that Alexander gives us a glimpse of the denouement when he suggests that he will soon put things right: ALEXANDER: If all the travails of conquering the world will set either thy body or mine in tune, we will undertake them. (5.4.9-10)

The musical allusion points to the restoration of harmony. Tuning implies a concordance between the image of the sound and the sound itself, but it also denotes a choice since pitch is not fixed and depends on convention and consensus. Yet, it may seem strange that harmony should depend on war and not peace. What is at stake here is an order which implies that war and conquest is the only possible path for Alexander if he wants to be at one with himself, in tune with a constructed image of selfhood. Ending the play with a speech to Hephestion, Alexander expresses the greatest threat with a quip: ALEXANDER: It were a shame Alexander should desire to command the world if he could not command himself. But come, let us go. I will try whether I can better bear my hand with my heart than I could with mine eye. And good Hephestion, when all the world is won and every country is thine and mine, either find me out another to subdue or, of my word, I will fall in love. (5.5.168-74)

Alexander’s magnanimity in giving away Campaspe to Apelles works in two directions. On the one hand, it reminds the spectator that magnanimity implies power and, in this case, absolute power; and on the other hand, it shows Alexander as the epitome of the conqueror, since, on the verge of conquering the whole world, he has succeeded in conquering himself. On the whole, the play strangely departs from the notion of “decorum” which implies, not only that one should act according to what one’s self is,

Francis Guinle

63

but also that one should act in an appropriate way in any circumstance. Alexander’s rejection of affection in time of peace, which he “leadeth in fetters” (5.4.147-48), runs against the notion of decorum expressed in the complementarity of the warrior and the courtier, as expounded in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, where a famous anecdote shows the warrior who refuses to dance as a dunce: . . . a worthy Lady once remarked jokingly, in polite company, to a certain man (I do not want just now to mention him by name) whom she had honoured by asking him to dance and who not only refused but would not listen to music or take part in the many other entertainments offered, protesting all the while that such frivolities were not his business. And when at length the lady asked what his business was, he answered with a scowl: “Fighting . . .” “Well then,” the lady retorted, “I should think that since you aren’t at war at the moment and you are not engaged in fighting, it would be a good thing if you were to have yourself well greased and stowed away in a cupboard with all your fighting equipment, so that you avoid getting rustier than you are already.” (Castiglione 1976, 58)

In order to fit the image of the Conqueror, Alexander is denied the status of the courtier, as he is denied that of a lover, or a painter in the scene where Apelles, treading on dangerous ground, simply tells him that he paints “like a king” (3.4.127). Alexander’s famous line concerning Diogenes is quoted in the play: ALEXANDER: Hephestion, were I not Alexander I would wish to be Diogenes. (2.2.167-68)

But it is made quite clear that Alexander cannot be anyone but Alexander.

Works Cited Primary Sources Castiglione, Baldesar. 1967. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. George Bull. London: Penguin Classics. Clarke, John, and Seneca. 1910. Physical Science in the Time of Nero: Being a Translation of the Quaestiones Naturales of Seneca. London: Macmillan.

64

Selfhood as Cultural and Literary Construction

Lyly, John. 1991. Campaspe. Ed. G. K. Hunter. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pliny the Elder. 1601. Naturall Historie. Trans. Philemon Holland. London, printed by Adam Islip.

Secondary Sources Dufika-Aerts, Faustina. 2005. SÐrat al-Iskandar, l’épopée oubliée. Paper presented at the international colloquium of Damascus: Le Roman populaire, tradition et perspectives d’avenir. Grignaschi, M. 1965-66. Les RasÁ’Ðl d’ArisÔÁÔÁlÐsa ilÁ-l-Iskandar de SÁlim AbÙ-l-lÝAlÁ’ et l’activité culturelle à l’époque omeyyade. Bulletin d’études orientales 19: 7-83 ———. 1967. Le roman épistolaire classique conservé dans la version arabe de SÁlim AbÙ-l-lÝAlÁ. Le Muséon 80: 211-64. Saccio, Peter. 1969. The Court Comedies of John Lyly: A Study in Allegorical Dramaturgy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

SELFHOOD IN CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S TAMBURLAINE MARIE-HÉLÈNE BESNAULT

If one takes “selfhood” to mean personality, in the sense of being a person, an “individual”—the highest degree of reality in dramatic personification according to Patrice Pavis (1987, 281)—my attempt to deal with the selfhood of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is necessarily self-defeating. Tamburlaine or rather Timur Lenk, the Tartar warrior (1336-1405), is a historical character. But Christopher Marlowe, in his first two plays, 1 did not even try for verisimilitude, let alone lifelikeness, in characterization or presentation of speech and action. So his eponymous character appears to many, at worst as a subhuman creature, an exaggerated type, or even a caricature of the archetypal “villain,” when not as a killing machine, at best as a superhuman figure. I wish to qualify the critical judgments mentioned above, but I shall focus on other senses of the word “selfhood.” The easier task is, of course, to demonstrate that Marlowe’s hero embodies “selfhood” in the sense of “oneself as the centre of one’s life and action” (OED). It has long been recognized, on the other hand, that Christopher Marlowe was a conscious workman who gathered information from multiple sources and also, like other artists, allowed his own experience, sensitivity and morals to nourish his fictional works. I shall subsequently be concerned with the main elements, borrowed or experienced, which contribute to shape Tamburlaine’s “ipseity,” that is to say “the quality or rather qualities by which he is himself” (OED), while questioning the validity of all conjectures. Finally, I shall try to evaluate to what extent Marlowe unified his appropriations. It is my contention that Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is not more “composite” than any human being and that his compositeness can be contained within the definition of his dual temperament, which itself justifies his partaking of the “aspiring mind” of 1 All quotations from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine The Great, Parts 1 and 2, are taken from Irving Ribner’s edition of 1963. Text references are to act, scene and line.

66

Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

the “New Age,” the advent of which was marked, according to Louis Leroy (1594, 108v, 119v) precisely by Tamburlaine’s overthrowing of the “Depraved Age of Bajazeth.” The identity of a character dramatized from various legendary accounts of a historical figure turned into a myth is not entirely fixed, in spite of what we may call a broad definition of this character. In the case of Timur Lenk, there are differences among the sources, 2 while Marlowe’s own construct departs from them and is diversely interpreted by other characters. Opponents—and some moralists—try to reduce him to a subhuman creature, an animal, for instance. He is likened to a lion, a fox, and a wolf. But the lion is “princely” and admired (Part I, 1.2.52); the fox (Part 1, 1.1.31) is cunning and efficient (both have Machiavelli’s approval for a Prince). And the wolf, in spite of its description as “A compact of rapine, piracy and spoil,” is magnified by its being “A monster of five hundred thousand heads” sent by “angry Themis” (Part 1, 4.3.5-8). Nor is Tamburlaine’s career presented as what Michel Bitot 3 terms, concerning Shakespeare’s Richard III, “a metaphoric descent in the order of creation, a degeneration from tiger, to hound, boar, toad, spider, and finally to monstrous cockatrice and foul lump of matter.” Moreover, the bestiality of Tamburlaine’s adversaries’ practices matches his own, especially Bajazeth’s: “Let thousands die! Their slaughtered carcasses / Shall serve for walls and bulwarks to the rest” (Part 1, 3.3.138-39). “Devil,” “fiend,” “monster” and “thief” are recurrent epithets in the descriptions Tamburlaine’s enemies make of their “foe,” and in their curses. But the association of those terms with contemptuous social markers or laudatory comparisons, plus the fact that they proceed from the fear, the vindictiveness and the humiliation of the vanquished, invite us to put them into perspective. The Governor of Damascus’s “Vile monster, born of some infernal hag” (Part 2, 5.1.110), Callapine’s “monster that hath drunk a sea of blood” is also Ortygius’s “monstrous slave,” but never ceases to make people wonder: What god, or fiend, or spirit of the earth, Or monster turnèd to a manly shape, 2

Two main sources, Pedro Mexía’s Silva de Varia Leción and Petrus Perondinus’ Magni Tamerlanis Scytharum Imperatoris Vita, are believed to have supplied the bulk of Marlowe’s material, although the young playwright may have been confronted with numerous accounts of the fabled life and deeds of the Tartar warrior. See Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman 1994. 3 Besnault and Bitot 2002, 111.

Marie-Hélène Besnault

67

Or of what mold or mettle he be made, What star or state soever govern him, … Whether from earth, or hell, or heaven he grow. (Part 1, 2.6.15-18; 23)

Subhumanity vies with superhumanity in these reactions, and what is mostly stressed is the ambivalent nature of Tamburlaine. The relativity of all judgements and pre-suppositions is highlighted by the treatment the word “thief”—a word often associated with degraded humanity—receives in the play. While all the Turkish kings command their troops to make large-scale spoils of their enemies, the Mongol leader remains a “basebred thief” in their appreciation. The Turk, Meander, who, in the same discourse, had referred to Tamburlaine’s “lawless spoil,” and promised his soldiers “the spoil of him and all his train,” plans “to entrap these thieves” with “camels laden all with gold,” flung “in every corner of the field,” wrongfully thinking these “base-born Tartars” will prefer “gold to honor” (Part 1, 2.2.23-66). Likewise, Mycetes, the Persian King, marvels that “Tamburlaine the thief” did not steal away his crown when offered to his estimation on the battlefield (Part 1, 2.4.41-42). Indeed, the term thief becomes almost a title—often alliterative—in the curses of these opponents: “this thief of Scythia” (Part 2, 3.1.14), “that sturdy Scythian thief” (Part 1, 1.1.36), “This proud usurping king of Persia” (Part 2, 3.1.15), or “Tamburlaine, the great Tartarian thief” (Part 1, 3.3.171). Unpolluted by hypocrisy or meanness, Tamberlaine’s “thievery” is too superlative to make him an archetype. He claims and proves that all the gold in the world could not ransom the woman with whom he falls in love, or the man he hates most (Part 1, 3.3.232). It is well known, moreover, that after a military victory spoils are a general practice, collateral benefits, one would say today, as all our “embellished” towns and museums prove. Tamburlaine cannot be reduced either to an archetype of villainy, or to a caricature. He shares, of course, a few traits with the character who presents himself in the Coventry biblical pageant as “the myghttyst conquerowre that eyver walked on grownd; / For I am evyn he that made bothe hevin and hell” (The Shearmen and Tailors’ Play, 487-88). He has indeed often been said to “out-Herod Herod.” Unlike Tamburlaine, however, Herod, the archetypal villain, is never presented as having any moral ascendancy or any real eloquence. In fact most of his speeches deflate his arrogance:

68

Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Stint, brodels, your din—yea, everyone! I rede that ye harken to I be gone; For if I begin, I break every bone, And pull from the skin the carcass anon, Yea, pardie! (Herod the Great, 82-86)

The Wakefield Herod the Great, in this instance, far from expressing his self-confidence in “high astounding terms” like Tamburlaine the Great, sounds as fearful as weak Mycetes about losing his reputation as a strong ruler: “But I do as I mean, I were a full lewd sire / In wones” (Herod the Great, 103-04). He constantly refers to the devil, to his anger and his intended “vengeance,” while only Tamburlaine’s enemies do so. Herod rebukes his counsellors and abuses his soldiers for their lack of vigilance: “Fie, losels and liars! Lurdans ilkone! / Traitors and well worse! Knaves, but knights none!” (Herod the Great, 163-64). Marlowe’s character does vaunt his invincibility, but is never presented as a clownish and fearful braggart who abuses his fellow-warriors. His eloquence is obvious. Moreover, when he arouses laughter on the stage, it is always at the expense of his enemies. 4 Unlike Stephen Greenblatt, I think that it takes exceptionally poor performers and performances to make him sound grotesquely comic, or look “like an expensive mechanical device” which “once set in motion . . . cannot slow down or change course” (1980, 195). Tamberlaine, to conclude, is not a caricature of the archetypal villain, nor a machine. Can he be reckoned to be superhuman? As stated above, Timur Lenk had already become a legendary character, almost a myth, by the time Marlowe, in 1587-88, wrote his plays. The choice of adjectives, the positioning of words and the use of capitals on the title-page of the first edition in 1590 prove that the playwright intended to give his Tamburlaine a heroic stature, and to emphasize the “scourging of kingdoms” by “the conquering sword” of “Tamburlaine the Great. Who, from a Scythian Shephearde, by his rare and woonderful Conquests, became a most puissant and mightye Monarque. And (for his tyranny and terrour in Warre) was tearmed, THE SCOURGE OF GOD.” We see that the words “tyranny” and “terror,” two fixed traits of the legendary conqueror, are downplayed by the parenthesis and limited to war.

4 See in particular Part 1, 2.5.40; 90-101; Part 1, 3.3.214; Part 1, 4.4.51-59; 11526.

Marie-Hélène Besnault

69

In many sources and in Marlowe’s title, Tamburlaine is termed “the Scourge of God” by the threatened world. In the plays he appoints himself “the Scourge of God,” as indeed many had done before him—Old Testament prophets, Cyrus, Titus, Attila, Genghis Khan—emulated today by those who self-righteously posture as scourges of corrupt tyrants or savage terrorists. Defending himself against Orcanes’s accusations of cruel tyranny, he presents his acts as god-invested wrathful justice: But since I exercise a greater name, The scourge of God and terror of the world, I must apply myself to fit those terms, In war, in blood, in death, in cruelty. (Part 2, 4.2.78-81)

Tamburlaine asserts that his conquests are inspired by divine fury and make him godlike. Unlike Plato, as translated by Barnes, he does not distinguish between two kinds of fury. Indeed, he does not seem concerned by the “human furie” that “maketh a man lesse than a man, and the very same with wildde, unreasonable beastes.” He sounds convinced that he does possess the “divine rage and sacred instinct of a man” which “maketh him more than man, and leadeth him from his base terrestrial estate, to walke above the stars with angelles immortally” (Barnes 1815, 1-2). Tamburlaine, indeed, often likens himself to Jupiter or “Jove [who] sometimes maskèd in a shepherd’s weed” (Part 1, 1.2.198) and whose immortality he and his followers intend to emulate (199-200). When faced with Turkish curses, he stresses his intimacy with what he presents as the supreme god: . . . till by vision or by speech I hear Immortal Jove say “Cease, my Tamburlaine,” I will persist a terror to the world. (Part 2, 4.2.124-26)

He envisages his own death as a divine promotion: “If Jove, esteeming me too good for earth, / Raise me to match the fair Aldeboran . . .” (Part 2, 4.4.60ff.), before challenging the powers of gods, when he sees death approaching. Nor does Tamburlaine beg their favour before a battle, as many leaders, Homeric or not, have done and still do. He needs no priest, divine or soothsayer. He appears to be self-sufficient. Likewise, he presents himself as the elect of the stars, and vows that the Turk, Orcanes, shall smart for his insulting “the shepherd’s issue, at

70

Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

whose birth / Heaven did afford a gracious aspect” (Part 2, 3.5.79-80). The “gracious stars” (Part 1, 1.2.92) have pronounced once and for all at his birth that they favoured him. So have the Fates and Fortune, an opinion shared by Tamburlaine’s friends and enemies, as well as Marlowe’s sources, which describe Timur as having been “swept by Fate to domination of the entire East” and earned the names of “Lucky Sword” or “Sword of Fortune” (Thomas and Tydeman 1994, 99). Early in the play, Marlowe’s hero claims: “I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains, / And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about (Part 1, 1.2.173-74). 5 After Renaissance writers such as Louis Leroy, modern critics like Mario Praz, Roy W. Battenhouse and, above all, Eugene M. Waith, with relevant illustrations, have pointed to striking resemblances between Marlowe’s heroic character and Hercules as he appears in Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. Tamburlaine himself gives the lead by comparing himself to the hero who subdued Diomedes’s man-eating mares: The headstrong jades of Thrace Alcides tamed, That King Ægeus fed with human flesh And made so wanton that they knew their strengths, Were not subdued with valor more divine Than you by this unconquered arm of mine. (Part 2, 4.4.12-16)

To Theridamas, his fiery eyes had immediately evoked the twelfth labour of Hercules, namely his pulling “the triple-headed dog from hell” (Part 1, 1.2.160). Tamburlaine, like the demi-god, is indeed a paragon of masculinity endowed with superlative courage and strength, and constantly engaged in combat. From the start, as we have seen, he thinks of himself as conquering negative forces and scourging the corrupt and tyrannical mighty of the world with appropriate cruelty. Like Hercules, he has varying attitudes towards the gods, which range, according to circumstances and addressees, from gratitude for their unlimited favour, to challenge of their power and desire to storm the heavens. Like Hercules, he thinks of himself as semi-divine, and feels sure that his “incorporeal spirit” will become a star which “might move the turning spheres of heaven” (Part 2, 4.2.43). Like Hercules, he is eloquent and wrathful. But he is not the son of Jupiter; no Labour has been imposed upon him; when he kills his own son, it is not in a fit of madness; he receives no punishment for his actions, however unnatural they may seem. Finally, he 5

See also Part 1, 5.2.169ff.

Marie-Hélène Besnault

71

is vanquished by death and his immortality depends on others—including his son, who must “learn with awful eye / To sway a throne as dangerous as his” (Part 2, 5.3.234-35)—and, of course, on Marlowe’s dramatic genius. Yet, he remains a heroic figure in an epic play. Tamburlaine is not only at the centre of the two plays of Marlowe, as are indeed his other heroes, Barabas, Guise, and Faustus, but he also embodies selfhood in the sense of “oneself as the centre of one’s own life and action” and one’s own discourse. His parents never being mentioned in the two plays, he appears to have literally made himself, and to be the author of his own life. On the stage he is the central, towering figure who seems to create his own dramatic landscape mapped out by his very extensive conquests, and who seems to define both the action of the plays, which proceeds from his infinite aspiration, and their form, which follows his irresistible ascension. Tamburlaine speaks a third of the time in the first play, more than in the second play—thirty-nine per cent, according to Harry Levin’s statistics (1952, 211)—and he speaks mostly of himself. He is a first-person pronoun lover but, mirroring himself, he also frequently refers to himself in the third person, and is regularly the subject of other protagonists’ discourse, so that his name resounds throughout. In the first part, for instance, it is repeated no less than one hundred and twenty times. This resonant name—which is frequently preceded, or followed, by the sound of trumpets or drums emphasizing his martial triumph—becomes almost incantatory and conjures up a mythic grandeur. Lacking the cinematic facilities of Cecil B. De Mille, Marlowe makes clear Tamburlaine’s energetic impulse and his military feats in bold assertions like “I’ll first assay / To get the Persian kingdom to myself” (Part 1, 2.5.81-82), or “Myself will bide the danger of the brunt” (Part 1, 1.2.151) and in short scenes whose action is supposedly peripheral to the great battles. For instance, after his victory over weak Mycetes, whose Persian crown he had first scornfully rejected on the battlefield with “Here, take it for a while; . . . Thou art no match for mighty Tamburlaine,” he leaves for the battle offstage (Part 1, 2.4.37-40). To the sound of trumpets, he gives the same Persian crown to Mycetes’s brother, Cosroe, for a while also, saying: “Think thee invested now as royally, / Even by the mighty hand of Tamburlaine” (Part 1, 2.5.2-3). A moment later, on the spur of the moment and of Menaphon’s magic phrase, twice repeated, “And ride in triumph through Persepolis,” Tamberlaine claims that “A god is not so glorious as a king” (Part 1, 2.5.49-57). Having then made good his promise to Theridamas to “Make but a jest to win the Persian crown” (Part 1, 2.5.98), he takes the crown from the head of the dying, cursing

72

Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

Cosroe, and puts it on his own head. A double ring of general applause— “Tamburlaine! Tamburlaine!” “Long live Tamburlaine, and reign in Asia!”—answers his question: “Who think you now is king of Persia?” (Part 1, 2.7.56-64). The sequence, chosen almost at random, highlights the self-centred and self-aggrandizing nature of Tamburlaine’s discourse, as well as its gleeful quality, the enthusiastic response he makes to evocative names, or to images of glory. It also shows his absolute governance of an action that is both physical and symbolic, and of the reactions of his onstage audience. It dramatizes the comment of one of the sources, Cambinus: “He delighted chiefly in those enterprises which seemed most difficult to be achieved in the opinion of others” (Thomas and Tydeman 1994, 128). Tamburlaine’s selfhood as “ipseity,” that is to say the “qualities by which he is himself,” many of which have already emerged, I hope, is necessarily shaped by his creator’s sources, tastes, choices, sensitivity and morals. It is also fostered by Marlowe’s cultural milieu and the geopolitical circumstances prevalent at the end of the sixteenth century. I am aware that Marlowe’s “personality” (handsome, sensitive, intelligent, proud, ambitious, learned, rebellious, atheistic, and violent) is itself a construct, part of which is extrapolated from his drama. Among the few things we know for sure about him, one of the most important, I think, is that his plays were all written to be performed by the Admiral’s Men, and meant for their leading actor, Edward Alleyn, an impressive man with a stentorian voice. In delineating the physique of Tamburlaine, Marlowe may have drawn from Alleyn’s, as much as from the portrait of Timur that he found in one of his sources (Thomas and Tydeman 1994, 118). He deliberately leaves out the red hair of the sources, 6 which might have conjured up Judas, the archetype of the traitor in biblical pageants; he also dismisses the long beard mentioned by some chroniclers, possibly because of its Mohammedan connotations. More importantly, he never alludes to his hero’s lameness, a lameness from which his name is derived:7 Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned 6

See the sources and archeological findings of Mikhail Gerasimov and his team, who exhumed Timur’s skeleton in June 1941 and confirmed his exceptional stature, his lameness, his red hair and beard (Kehren 1978, 163-64). 7 Timur’s sobriquet “the lame” (in Persian Timur-i-lang, in Turkish Timur Lank or Lenk, in French Tamerlan) was “the legacy of numerous punitive campaigns to install himself on the throne of Samarkand” (Thomas and Tydeman 1994, 71).

Marie-Hélène Besnault

73

... So large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit, Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear Old Atlas’ burden . . . ... His arms and fingers, long and sinewy Betokening valor and excess of strength. (Part 1, 2.1.7; 9-11; 27-28)

One may also suggest that this portrayal of Tamburlaine by Menaphon owes as much to Renaissance fine arts as to Petrus Perondinus’s far less positive description (Thomas and Tydeman 1994, 118). Probably inspired by the Italian visual achievements of the neo-platonic ideal of human grandeur, the portrait of Tamburlaine savours of Leonardo Da Vinci’s concern with perfect proportions, as evinced in his Vitruvian man, or the lifelike renderings of faces, hands, feet, sinews and muscles in Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s frescoes and sketches for the Sistine Chapel. Tamburlaine’s body evokes the superhuman, virile Hellenistic beauty and power inherited by Renaissance sculptors. One thinks in particular of Baccio Bandinelli’s tall and sturdy Hercules, in Florence, of Michelangelo’s huge statue of David whose furrowed brow and resolute gaze before his fight with the much stronger Goliath evoke tense energy, moral power and cunning; and above all, of his colossal Moses, with his heavy muscles, swelling veins, noble bearing and wrathful looks, ideal models for a man full of irrepressible energy and imperious will. 8 The importance of armour in sixteenth century portraiture of men who wanted to establish their leadership and to immortalize their martial image might also have played a part in the fashioning of Tamburlaine’s image. When the Scythian shepherd, to impress Zenocrate, disdains to wear his shepherd’s “weeds” and appears in “complete armor,” Techelles immediately sees “kings kneeling at his feet” (Part 1, 1.2.41-45; 55). Even if Mongol armour and horses are known to have been much lighter than European ones, we are reminded of Titian’s Emperor Charles V at the Battle of Muhlberg, of his Philip II in Armour, but also of the Portrait of Alfonso I d’Este by Dosso and Battista Dossi, and of Duke Cosimo I de Medici in Armour by Agnolo Bronzino, among many other portraits of powerful armoured men.

8 I have deliberately chosen three mythological or biblical leaders who were, at one point, shepherds before they rose to fame, kingship or even divinity.

74

Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

The classical Roman Triumph re-discovered and imitated throughout Renaissance Europe in sumptuous civic pageantry 9 also appears to have influenced Tamburlaine, who sounds as if Andrea Mantegna’s The Triumph of Caesar or the engravings derived from his huge canvases, now at Hampton Court, were in his mind’s eye. Had the Lord Admiral’s Men benefited from James I’s patronage when Marlowe’s plays were first performed, one can imagine that they would have emulated the splendour of Dekker’s, Middleton’s and Ben Jonson’s masques and triumphs. One of the effects of these analogies is to make Tamburlaine a contemporary of Renaissance men. My references to the influence of fine arts on the Tamburlaine construct are undoubtedly subjective. At this point I wish to draw attention to the subjectivity and relativity of all conjectures. There are many ways in which, for instance, we may respond to the transformation of the Scythian shepherd into a mix of Greek, Arthurian, and Roman heroes, and they do not necessarily coincide with Marlowe’s intentions. Apart from the accusation of youthful improvisation on the part of the playwright, which I dismiss, I can propose four options. We may, for instance, imagine that the playwright is simply adapting to Henslowe’s stock of properties, ending up with as composite a figure as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in the only contemporary sketch we have, the one attributed to Peacham. We may also imagine that this “composition” stands for the diversity of armies in general, and of Timur’s army in particular, as he progressively amalgamates Persian, Turkish, Egyptian, Indian troops with his Tartar soldiers. In doing so, he does not necessarily expose those who are thought to be socially or racially “inferior,” as is done today. We may find Marlowe doubly ironical as he debunks both Tamburlaine’s pretences and those of warriors on all sides, as well as the Arthurian fad at Elizabeth’s court. We may also see in his choices a deliberate challenging of the Scythian’s otherness and barbarity in the eyes of his contemporaries. It is well known that it is on the ground of the supposed descent of the Irish from the Scythians that “English Homer,” Spenser, advocated their genocide. In short, the construction of Tamburlaine’s ipseity depends partly on the way we construe Marlowe’s own selfhood and his reactions to preconceptions and geopolitical conditions in Elizabethan England. It also depends on the geopolitical conditions at the time of the interpretation, and on the selfhood of the interpreter. 9 For Margaret of Anjou or Ann Boleyn, for instance, as far as England is concerned.

Marie-Hélène Besnault

75

Among the scenes which Marlowe is thought to have invented, the burning of the Alcoran scene (Part 2, 5.1.171ff.) is obviously very spectacular, but, even today, very problematic. Tamburlaine’s order to have the Islamic sacred book burnt has, from the start, been the object of shocked reactions and of various interpretations. On Friday November 25, 2005 David Farr, director and adapter, denied in The Guardian that his successful new production of Tamburlaine, with Gregory Hicks in the leading part, “had been censored to avoid upsetting Muslims,” an accusation launched in The Times the day before. What he writes reinforces the point made earlier about the relativity and subjectivity of all judgements, hence of all interpretations and productions: What I did in my version was to focus ruthlessly on the philosophical freedom of my lead character . . . Tamburlaine did burn the Qu’ran centrestage in an old petrol drum—but I wanted to make it very clear that his act was a giant two-fingers to the entire theological system, not a piece of Christian triumphalism over the barbarous Turk. So, in our production, Marlowe’s “heap of superstitious books” were the books of all religions. His act was a hubristic and nihilistic defiant scream at what he saw as an empty universe.

Although I find Farr’s choices intellectually exciting and agree that philosophical freedom, defiance of theological systems, hubris and, I would add, burning of all barriers to expansion and freedom are in character, I cannot see how Christianity and nihilism can be read into Tamburlaine, whose world is empty only when he leaves it and who swears by Mohammed or Jupiter, not by Christ. Marlowe’s double play being often revived in Western countries since September 11, 2001 proves its continued topicality and makes Tamburlaine “still our contemporary.” Cuts, additions, interpretations and impersonations, however, fashion his selfhood differently. So do geopolitical contexts. But let us return to at least one certainty, which is prominent in all the definitions of Marlowe’s protagonist. Tamburlaine’s ipseity is, first and foremost, that of a warrior and a conqueror. As such, the character is fashioned by Mongol martial practices, interpreted by the widely read Marlowe, and the example of the greatest conquerors, Alexander, Julius Caesar, and, of course, Genghis Khan, with whom Tamburlaine shares moral and physical courage, inexhaustible energy, extreme mobility and largeness of vision. The plays show him constantly campaigning, analysing the weaknesses of his potential enemies and, like his predecessors, ready to seize opportunities at any moment. He has the same

76

Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

policy of never leaving an enemy in his rear. He cultivates his reputation as a ruthless warrior ready to wade in blood if necessary, but first trying dissuasion. Using what were reputed to be Asian tactics, he tries to terrify opponents before the battle with a display of power and a “stern appearance.” As Orcanes reckons, he “with the thunder of his martial tools / Makes earthquakes in the hearts of men and heaven” (Part 2, 2.2.7-8). To dramatize this martial ipseity of his hero, Marlowe must needs have recourse to “mighty” words threatening sadistically cruel treatments, and to dramatic makeshifts, like the spectacular handling and clashing of weapons or the use of red ink or bladders full of blood, especially when Tamburlaine, attempting to instil courage into the cowardly soul of Calyphas, cuts his own arm and bids his sons to search his wound (Part 2, 3.2.114-26). The vast spaces covered by marching armies are conjured up by eloquent reports and long epic lists of countries with resonant assonant names. When he draws from his sources, the author significantly replaces the names of vanquished peoples by those of conquered places, so that Tamburlaine, unlike the Turks, sounds more exhilarated by the prospect of geographical conquests than by that of massive killings. When he follows Ortelius’s Theatrum Mundi, he does so, to quote Ethel Seaton, “with the accuracy of a scholar and the common sense of a merchant adventurer, as well as with the imagination of a poet” (1964, 37), qualities which are reflected in Tamburlaine, the map lover. Tamburlaine’s martial ipseity includes his having his own code of honour and prizing above all valour or virtue, the Roman virtus embodied by Coriolanus. His honour demands that he should never swerve from the law of war he has decreed: “my customs are as peremptory / As wrathful planets, death or destiny” (Part 1, 5.2.64-65), he insists, claiming that his enemies have been forewarned. That Marlowe capitalized upon Tamburlaine’s legendary “practice of pitching a sequence of white, red and black tents around towns under siege” (Thomas and Tydeman 1994, 74), a practice reported by Mexia and other chroniclers, is not surprising, given his own aesthetic sensitivity, the frequent symbolic use of colours on the Elizabethan stage—here white signifies peace, red, bloody assaults, black, fierce death—as well as the very spectacular potential of the whole process. We are reminded of the flamboyant pavilions of two quintessentially Renaissance kings on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. What is added to the sources, Tamburlaine’s choice of wearing clothes of the same colour as the tents, and the sorrow that his looking very melancholy expresses, contributes further elements to the hero’s ipseity, suggesting he

Marie-Hélène Besnault

77

has his own æsthetic sensitivity and some compassionate feelings. The “virtue” he extols is clearly not a moral value. When he crowns his “contributory kings,” he legitimates kingship by personal valour, a claim which must have met with Elizabethan younger sons’ and commoners’ approval: Deserve these titles I endow you with By valor and by magnanimity. Your births shall be no blemish to your fame, For virtue is the fount whence honor springs, And they are worthy she investeth kings. (Part 1, 4.4.122-26)

It is also, however, in the name of this virtue that he kills one of his sons for lacking “courage, strength, or wit” (Part 2, 4.2.50) and for endangering his own honour on the earth and in heaven. “Dreadless of blows, of bloody wounds, and death” (Part 2, 3.2.140), Tamburlaine, the warrior, is soon ready to adjust weaponry and tactics to circumstances. For instance, he builds a parallel fort as high as that of Damascus, to secure the efficiency of his battery. In Part 2, to defeat “the million of soldiers” marshalled by Orcanes, King of Natolia, the last Turkish stronghold, and by the Christian King Sigismund of Hungary, he brings “a world of people to the field” (Part 2, 1.1.67): “All Asia is in arms with Tamburlaine . . . / All Afric is in arms with Tamburlaine,” says “stout Orcanes” (Part 2, 1.1.72-76). And the dramatic space, with the help of a few extras, is repeatedly stormed. Meanwhile, his ipseity as a formidable warrior is constructed by looks, words, tactics, reports and the actors’ very rapid movements, as well as the weapons they carry, marching along forcefully with loud and enthusiastic cries. Formidable clashes are conjured up by trampling, smoke and fire of cannons (Brown 1964b, 64ff.). Drawing from hints in his sources, Marlowe also stresses Tamburlaine’s pedagogy. When he wants to fashion his three sons into warriors worthy of him, he evokes not only his own fearlessness, but the frightful casualties caused by the firing of cannons, using current Renaissance images at a time when the use and dangers of cannons were the object of constant debate: Hast thou beheld a peal of ordnance strike A ring of pikes, minglèd with shot and horse, Whose shattered limbs, being tossed as high as heaven, Hang in the air as thick as sunny motes . . . (Part 2, 3.2.98-101)

78

Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

The first of the “rudiments of war” he means to teach them and, we surmise, currently teaches his troops, is endurance, a martial virtue that he and his Mongol companions had learnt from infancy, and which all soldiers have to learn: I’ll have you learn to sleep upon the ground, March in your armor thorough watery fens, Sustain the scorching heat and freezing cold, Hunger and thirst, right adjuncts of the war. (Part 2, 3.2.55-58)

But there soon follows (62-90) a long disquisition about the best means of besieging and of defending a fort which sounds much like a sixteenthcentury treatise; it is an adaptation from a French one, indeed, from The Practice of Fortification, which Paul Ive added to its anglicised version when he edited it in 1589. Yet, when Tamburlaine advocates a “cinqueangle” delineation for a fort, it contradicts Paul Ive’s prescription (Thomas and Tydeman 1994, 156). This disquisition is related to a subject which interested Marlowe personally (while in Cambridge, he had translated the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia), and which was widely discussed all over Renaissance Europe, especially in the England that had just been threatened by the Invincible Armada and which was absolutely intent on conquering new lands in the “golden West.” Besides making Tamburlaine Marlowe’s and Raleigh’s contemporary, 10 this passage, often considered as mere anachronistic padding, can be seen to serve several purposes concerning Tamburlaine’s ipseity. Challenging all preconceptions regarding “barbaric hordes,” it shows us a great warrior keeping himself informed of the latest developments in his field, warfare, and having, rather than a wild disorderly approach, a scientific one: a good pedagogue able to explain complex things with maximum clarity. Among other things, Tamburlaine invites his sons to scientific discrimination before fortifying their men: “In champion grounds what figure serves you best, / For which the quinque-angle form is meet” (Part 2, 3.2.63-64). This lengthy explanation also shows us Tamburlaine curbing his wrathful 10

The dramatist may have had connections with Raleigh when, encouraged by Hackluyt to “seize Fortune’s lucky jowl” and emulate Cortes’s “doughty deeds,” the latter studied the ways of stacking cannon balls on sea vessels and of making or attacking fortifications in the New World to be conquered. (See Hackluyt’s “Epistle dedicatory to Sir Walter Raleigh,” prefacing his 1584 republication of Peter Martyr’s Decades of the Newe World, quoted in Cartelli 1996, 112-13.)

Marie-Hélène Besnault

79

sorrow. Whereas, working himself into a rage before a battle, the warrior must absolutely, as he tells his sons, “being wroth [send] lightning from his eyes” (Part 2, 1.4.76) to terrorize the enemy, he feels that his own unmonitored rage, culminating after the insufferable death of his beloved wife, needs to be cured. We are now given the impression that he channels his emotions and tries to control both his inordinate passions and the insuperable grief of his sons by focusing on something pragmatic and rational concerning their future. One can imagine that the actor playing his part progressively shifts from rant to soberer tones, as Tamburlaine, unusually for him, dwells on defence after having intended to “make whole cities caper in the air” (Part 2, 3.2.61). In so doing he responds to the advice Theridamus gave earlier: “Ah, good my lord, be patient. She is dead, / And all this raging cannot make her live” (Part 2, 2.4.119-20). Indeed, the scene of Zenocrate’s death reinforces our conviction that the eternal loyalty and friendship between Tamburlaine and his fellowkings, mutually promised at the very beginning, has held good. Together with Tamburlaine’s loving relationship with Zenocrate, this warm comradeship is a unifying factor throughout the plays: For she is dead! Thy words do pierce my soul! Ah, sweet Theridamas, say so no more. Though she be dead, yet let me think she lives And feed my mind that dies for want of her. (Part 2, 2.4.125-28)

These simple words convey deep-felt emotion and sincere affection. They tell us that, although not allowing himself womanish tears, Tamburlaine is more vulnerable than expected and that he needs his friends’ presence and compassion in adversity, as well as in his martial enterprises. Although he does not pursue the self-knowledge advocated by humanists, there are elements of self-consciousness and self-control in his ipseity, as well as affective, if not moral, sensitivity. It is clear from start to close of the play that Tamburlaine knows how to endear himself to his men. What might be construed as mere tactics appears more and more sincere as we progress in the plays. He chooses those who immediately inspire him with trust, and whose “valour” is almost tangible. He greets them with offers of friendship and equal shares in benefits. He calls them fellow-warriors, or kings, asks for their advice, and treats them with affectionate joviality, so that a true complicity emerges. 11 On their return from long campaigns in 11

See Part 1: 1.2.85-86; 129; 192-208; 230-45; 2.5.81-86; 2.7.63-67; 5.2.427-31.

80

Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

Africa, he embraces them, shows some concern for their fatigue and tells them how he delights in their presence. When an important battle is won, he summons his entire army to a vast banquet (Part 2, 1.6.91-98). Consequently, the frequent marks of adulation he receives do not sound exacted, but part of a ritual game, as when all his “contributory kings” offer their crowns to him in Part 2, Act 1, scenes 5 and 6. The episode, found in all sources, which exhibits the vanquished Bajazet in a cage, and turns him into a footstool for Tamburlaine, cruelly taunted in various sadistic ways (Part 1, 4.2.1-100), receives a treatment which is most spectacular and conforms to the identity fixed by occidental legendary sources for Tamburlaine, whose fame rests on causing the fall from greatness of the Turk and saving Constantinople from destruction. Although very crude, this central episode in Part 1 avoids showing Bajazeth’s wife forced to serve naked reclining soldiers, “insultingly clad only in sandals and an extremely short military cloak” (Thomas and Tydeman 1994, 109), thus exonerating Tamburlaine from obscenity. Instead, like the parallel episode of the “pampered jades of Asia” in Part 2, 4.4.1ff., it emphasizes the jocular complicity he has with his men, even if some of the jokes appear sick and sickening, as is often the case in the rowdiness consequent upon sports and wars nowadays. These scenes cater for anti-Turkish feelings at a time when hostility to the Turks reached a peak in Elizabethan England. Another major unifying element of Tamburlaine’s selfhood is his temper, which we already broached in the comparison with Hercules. By Elizabethan standards, still founded on the theory of humours, inherited from Hippocrates, Galen and Theophrastus, and according to the modern psychologists who still use the four temperaments model today, recognizing twelve mixtures of the four temperaments, 12 Tamburlaine is a blend of two temperaments, the sanguine and the choleric (René Le Senne and his followers would say the passionate and the choleric) with, in my opinion, a dominance in him of the sanguine temperament, which is characterized, according to ancient and modern characterologists, by abundance of blood, health, vigour, energy and extreme vitality. This sanguine temper makes him warm and ardent as well as cheerful, exuding confidence and optimism. Free from all fear and sorrow, strong-willed and decisive, he is dynamic and active to the end. For Robert Burton, the 12

Characterology is still widely used as a guide to marriage selection and to estimating or hiring competitors, associates in army, business, education, and so on. See Dorland 2003, and Le Senne 1945.

Marie-Hélène Besnault

81

element of the sanguine temper is fire, his colour red, which symbolizes splendour but can also mean bloodiness, when there is an excess of “blood adust.” His sanguine temper makes him “most witty and enthusiastic and stirs him up to be an excellent poet, orator” and “aptest to love” (Burton 1948, I, 400-01). I hope that what precedes has made it clear that Tamburlaine has all the traits of this sanguine or passionate temper. After the death of Zenocrate, intense suffering, which the ancients considered to result in “choler adust,” seems to aggravate the choleric element in him which makes a man a born leader, excelling in emergencies, and organization of others’ activities, thriving in opposition; 13 but, when inflamed, “bold and impudent, . . . apt to quarrel and think of such things as battles, combats, and [his] manhood. Furious, impatient in discourse, stiff, irrefragable . . . and if moved, most violent, outrageous” and inflexible (Burton 1948, I, 400). Just as the death of Zenocrate had first made him rave and rage against the gods (Part 2, 2.4.96-116), before finally submitting to the principle of reality, the realization that he must die also sends him into a rage against Death (Part 2, 5.3.67-77), before he finally submits with noble pride and magnanimity to the principle of necessity (Part 2, 5.3.200-01). Free from fear, proud as ever, still strong-willed and decisive, he plans his sons’ continuation of his work, the conquest of all the unconquered countries on the map he asks for (Part 2, 5.3.145-60). A passionate and hubristic extrovert, a great warrior “sanguine of success,” but also loyal to his friends and to his beloved to the end, pacified Tamburlaine envisages his own death as a divine promotion, and pities sons and friends who will miss his inspiring presence. His last words are: Farewell, my boys! My dearest friends, farewell! My body feels, my soul does weep to see Your sweet desires deprived my company, For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die. (Part 2, 5.3.245-48)

He had, however, first desired to see again the beautiful woman he had loved at first sight and continued to love beyond her death, the constant companion of his warring life, the inspirer of his most eloquent poetry, the unique cause of his breach of inflexibility and, in his view, of heroic masculinity, inviting his soul to “Pierce through the coffin and the sheet of 13 I here summarize the assets of sanguine characters in both Renaissance and contemporary characterologists’ works.

82

Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

gold, / And glut [its] longings with a heaven of joy” (Part 2, 5.3.226-27). By this time—more than fifty years and innumerable conquests have been telescoped within the time of the play—his ultimate goal has become “That perfect bliss and sole felicity, / The sweet fruition” of a heavenly crown shared with Zenocrate (Part 1, 2.7.30). The passionate ipseity of Marlowe’s construct had made him fall in love with an incarnation of beauty, aspire to become worthier and worthier of her love and her hand by valorous victories, respect her honour (Part 1, 5.2.423-24) and her feelings to the point of empathizing with them: “[Zenocrate’s] sorrows lay more siege unto [his] soul / Than all [his] army to Damascus’ walls” (Part 1, 5.2.92-93). The fact that he soliloquises but this one time in the play (Part 1, 5.2.72-127) is not surprising, given his hyperactive, extrovert temperament. This superb soliloquy, however, which is paralleled later by his desperate but ritualised lament—“Black is the beauty of the brightest day. . .” (Part 2, 2.4.1-37)—makes his aesthetic and affective sensitivity, as well as his sensuousness, almost palpable: What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then? If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts, ... Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest. (Part 1, 5.2.97-110)

Unlike Richard Hillman, I feel that this long magnificent period, far from expressing the “fallenness of language,” celebrates the ineffability of love with unsurpassed artistry. Nor do I find “out of character” Tamburlaine’s soaring to such heights, then “fleeing. . . into an essential masculine ‘nature’ and ‘name’” (1997, 174-77) and finally “validating his transcendental self-fashioning and self-naming” by asserting that “his assimilative mastery of beauty proves him superior to the gods” (266). “Nature, that framed [him] of four elements,” with a dominance of air and fire, has taught him, “to have [an] aspiring [mind],” 14 And measure every wandering planet’s course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite,

14

Part 1, 2.7.18-20.

Marie-Hélène Besnault

83

And always moving as the restless spheres, (Part 1, 2.7.23-25)

It causes him to “never rest” (Part 1, 2.7.26). Even dying, he remains himself, an eloquent, passionate, defiant warrior whom “‘will’ and ‘shall’ best fitteth” (Part 1, 3.3.41). Marlowe, by investing his protagonist with epic grandeur and eloquence, suspending both his and our moral judgment for the time of his stage-life, leaves us free to wonder and/or deplore. His anachronisms ensure that Tamburlaine was the contemporary of the Elizabethans, but also that he remains ours, and challenges our loyalties and preconceptions, as proved by the popular Tamburlaine chess-game in the United States, Louise Welsh’s best-seller Tamburlaine Must Die, and the numerous recent revivals of the play in Western countries. To this day, the play remains exhilarating and exciting—such is my experience at least—not only because it is a superb show, but because Tamburlaine’s selfhood is both ambiguous and flamboyant.

Works Cited Primary sources Anon. 1965. Herod the Great [Wakefield]. In Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, ed. A. C. Cawley, 109-29. Everyman’s Library. London: J. M. Dent ———. 1988. The Shearmen and Tailors’ Play [Coventry]. In English Mystery Plays, ed. Peter Happé, 343-80. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Barnes, Barnabe. Rpt. 1815. Epistle “To the Favourable and Christian Reader.” London. Burton, Robert. 1948. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ed. Ernest Rhys. Everyman’s Library. London: J. M. Dent . Ive, Paul. [1589] 1994. The Practice of Fortification. In Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and Their Sources, ed. Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman, 153-56. London: Routledge. Le Roy, Louis. 1594. The Variety of Things, trans. of Vicissitudes . . . by “R.A.” London. Marlowe, Christopher. 1963. Tamburlaine the Great: Parts 1 and 2. In The Complete Plays, ed. Irving Ribner. New York: Odyssey Press.

84

Selfhood in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

Secondary sources Battenhouse, R. W. 1941. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: A Study in Renaissance Moral Philosophy. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press. Besnault, Marie-Hélène, and Michel Bitot. 2002. Historical legacy and fiction: the poetical reinvention of King Richard III. In Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. Michael Hattaway, 106-25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, J. Russell. 1964a. Marlowe and the Actors. Tulane Drama Review 8: 4: 155-73. ———. 1964b. Marlowe’s Style. In Marlowe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Clifford Leech. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Brown, J. Russell, ed. 1982. Marlowe: Tamburlaine the Great, Edward the Second and The Jew of Malta. Casebook Series. London: Macmillan. Cartelli, Thomas. 1996. Marlowe and the New World. In Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture. Ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts. London: Scolar Press. Dorland, Newman. 2003. Illustrated Medical Dictionary. New York: Saunders. Gardner, Helen L. 1942. The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great. Modern Language Review 37: 18-24. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1980. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hillman, Richard. 1997. Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Le Senne, René. 1945. Traité de caractérologie. Paris: PUF. Levin, Harry. 1952. Christopher Marlowe: The Overreacher. London: Faber and Faber. Praz, Mario. 1928. Machiavelli and the Elizabethans. Proceedings of the British Academy 14: 71-80 Seaton, Ethel. 1964. Marlowe’s Map. In Marlowe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Clifford Leech, 36-56. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Steane, J. B. 1965. Marlowe: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, Vivien, and William Tydeman, eds. 1994. Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and Their Sources. London: Routledge. Waith, Eugene M. 1962. The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden. New York: Columbia University Press.

Marie-Hélène Besnault

85

Welsh, Louise. 2004. Tamburlaine Must Die. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

“CULTURAL AMPHIBIANS”: IMPERSONATING THE ALIEN IN JACOBEAN COURT MASQUES LADAN NIAYESH

The early modern period was a time when geography was frequently construed in theatrical terms (as in the title of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum), while theatres such as the Globe nurtured cosmographic ambitions. Engaged in a dialogical relationship, geographic discovery and cultural fantasy offered different, yet complementary and mutually enriching responses to the issue of meeting and claiming otherness, as the theatre took the spectators away to the ever-widening world of distant travel plays, while geographic treatises and atlases, often endowed with an allegorized frame, would also bring otherness back to more familiar moral concerns and classical references. Placed at a point of intersection between political preoccupations and artistic ones, the court masque was one of the theatrical forms which lent itself most readily to this wavering between a distant other and a selfserving allegory, as this celebratory genre purported symbolically to bring together on a perspective stage a redeemed and reconciled world, in a show of allegiance focused on the watching gaze of the English monarch. This exchange between self and other is well reflected in the particular architectural frame of Stuart masques as devised by Inigo Jones. Indeed, if the raised stage and the proscenium arch first created an impression of liminality and a sense of boundary, with the masquers placed at a distance from the audience, the increasing use of the floor in front of the stage for the antimasque, as well as the final descent of the masquers from the stage to take dancing partners from the audience, eventually brought the fictional barrier down, making the proscenium arch appear rather like an open door allowing for the show of otherness to reach outward to the first watching, then participating courtly audience. Thus, in the words of

Ladan Niayesh

87

Stephen Orgel, in a court masque, “what the noble spectator watched he ultimately became” (1975, 39). In a Jacobean court masque, the frontier between audience and spectacle also appears porous because the show involves two categories of actors, one which is made up of professionals playing the speaking parts and acting the antimasque, and another which comprises non-professional nobles belonging to the same social sphere as the audience and bound to remove their disguises and join the spectators for the revels at the end of the show. For them the issue is not “to be or not to be” another, but “to be and not to be” another, that is to say, to be sufficiently disguised to amaze a highly fashion-conscious court audience by one’s extravagant appearance, but to retain enough of one’s original self to be recognized as a high personage of the realm and not a common actor or singer, as a queen or a noble lady rather than a boy actor playing a female part. All these generic circumstances which characterise the Stuart court masques truly lead us to consider alien impersonations in these works as “cultural amphibians,” an expression I borrow from Bernadette Andrea and Edward Said, who apply it to such cultural palimpsests as Othello or Leo Africanus, that is to say outsider figures incorporated or reconstructed by and for the insiders of a given system. My point here is to study the strategies of representation that allow the figure of the distant foreigner both to be another and to ultimately become the self in works whose central subject and action imply most of the time the transformation of “things of darkness” that are acknowledged and claimed in the nascent imperial discourse of a genre devoted to the celebration of the state and its power. For the sake of cohesion and clarity, I have chosen to limit the study to Jacobean court masques, although I will make occasional references to Caroline masques to mention significant variations, departures and evolutions. But let us first see who those alien figures are in Jacobean masques. The first trait that strikes me here is the great variety of their provenances, which can be eastern as well as western. Thus Asia, for example, is often represented by Persia, which is not devoid of a certain topicality in the context of the various Persian embassies led at several European courts by Robert Sherley, taking “this famous English Persian” (in the words of Thomas Middleton 1609, 13) to his native England in the years 1611 to 1613. The opulent oriental costumes worn at court audiences by Robert Sherley and his Persian wife may have inspired Thomas Campion’s choice of representing Asia “in a Persian Ladies habit” in his 1613 Masque of Squires (152), making his English masquer in a Persian costume reenact

88

Impersonating the Alien in Jacobean Court Masques

the show of cultural in-betweenness played in the same room (the first Banqueting hall at Whitehall) by the English ambassador of the Sophy of Persia. Equally topical in the years following the foundation of Jamestown in 1607 is the representation of American Indians in several masques, including Chapman’s Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn, which stages Virginian priests, and the anonymous Masque of Flowers, in which “Floridan” costumes and tobacco pipes intervene (1967, 164). For all their being exotic figures, these embodiments of otherness seem to a certain extent to have been selected for the topical ties linking them to a British referential. It is further worth noticing that whether they come from the east or the west, the aliens are never shown in situ. Indeed, contrary to what happens in the travel plays of the public theatres, the action of a court masque usually does not take the spectator away to foreign lands, but rather brings the inhabitants of those lands to the English court to make them appeal to the monarch or swear allegiance to him. This is a feature which can be inferred from the very title of the first Jacobean court masque, that is to say the anonymous, now lost Masque of the Knights of India and China which was part of the coronation celebrations in 1604. The same pattern reappears more clearly in Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, which shows in elaborate detail the progress of old Niger and his daughters from their native “Æthiopia” to “Britannia” by way of “Lusitania” and “Aquitania,” while in Chapman’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Lincoln’s Inn, the complex stage machinery features a moving island, which has left the Virginian coast to serve as a vessel for transporting a gold mine and a delegation of Indian Sun worshippers to Britain and the King’s presence. Campion’s Masque of Squires goes even further in that direction by making use of a shifting scenery, which first features an anonymous foreign sea-coast and promontories, before removing that décor at the end of the antimasque to reveal a backdrop representing London and the Thames, making the experience of travel and discovery of otherness appear as a mere illusion, a veil that must be brought down for a triumphant English tableau to emerge. In many of these masques, a rhetorical construction of locale further insists on the glorious centrality of Britain. Such is the case in the anonymous Masque of Flowers, in which an allegorical, technically delocalised or a-localised figure of Spring refers to Britain as “the principal island of our universal empire” (1967, 163), a phrase which at the relatively early date of 1614 shows how much, in the words of Nabil Matar, “a British/European discourse of conquest precedes the development

Ladan Niayesh

89

of other constituents of conquest, namely technological superiority and capitalism” (1999, 17). The same Eurocentric discourse (or shall we call it Brito-centric, or even Whitehall-centric discourse?) can be sensed behind the odyssey of Niger and his daughters in The Masque of Blackness, taking them to the only place in the world where, according to their information, an Æthiop can be blanched. That place is of course the promised land of “Albion,” a name which Jonson’s marginal gloss translates as “white land,” following the Latin meaning of “alba” (175), with this ideal of whiteness further incarnated by the royal residence in London where the masque was held, that is to say the aptly named Whitehall. This Black versus White polarization appears to be a recurrent strategy in works whose imaginary geographical locations are above all a means of differentiating an “us” and a “them,” so as to celebrate Britain’s domination over a more or less homogenized ensemble of darker, inferior lands. An example of this phenomenon is provided by the generic appellation of “Moors,” which is used for many of the non-European figures in our masques, whether they belong to the Old World, as in Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed, or to the New World, as with the “two Moores, attired like Indian slaues” of Chapman’s Masque of the Middle Temple (1613, sig. B1v). Flattening out ethnic specificities, the term “Moor” conjures up an all-inclusive idea of difference, one which involves a dark skin colour, geographical distance, exacerbated sexuality and condemnable religious rites. This effect is further enhanced here by the masquers’ Middle Eastern turbans decorated with Amerindian coloured feathers—“on their heads turbants, stucke with seuerall colour’d feathers” (1613 sig. A4v)—creating an impression which I would be tempted to call a cultural synæsthesia, with eastern and western exoticisms yoked together in a single portrait. A similar process of amalgamation of others seems to rule over the geographic precisions provided by Jonson, both in the text and the marginal gloss of his Masque of Blackness. Thus his river Niger is not located in western, but in eastern Africa, more specifically in Ethiopia. “This riuer,” Jonson writes, “taketh spring out of a certaine lake, eastward; and after a long race, falleth into the westerne Ocean” (1970, 169). More than an accurate geographical location, this precision signals an ideological positioning, one which allows the journey of Niger and his daughters to become, not a South-North, but an East-West transit. Witness the welcome song chanted by a Triton and two Mermaids as the company reaches the Western Ocean (that is to say, the Atlantic): “Sound, sound aloud / And welcome the Orient floud, / into the West” (172). With Niger

90

Impersonating the Alien in Jacobean Court Masques

coming to the King’s presence, it is not just Africa that bows down before the British monarch, but the whole Orient. Traces of a cultural synæsthesia are also visible in the costumes designed by Inigo Jones for the daughters of Niger. According to Roy Strong and Stephen Orgel, the artist’s source of inspiration for the headdresses was probably the picture of a Persian mitre in Cesare Vecellio’s celebrated costume manual, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo (Venice, 1598). 1 Yet in his description, Jonson sets out to liken those headdresses to Egyptian pyramids that, incidentally, were to be found neither along the course of the river Niger, nor in Ethiopia: “their hayre thicke, and curled vpright in tresses, lyke Pyramids” (1970, 171). Meanwhile the Oriental topos finds a meaningful extension in his description, through the adjectival use of the term “orient” in reference to the particularly lustrous and radiant quality of the pearls worn by the masquers: “for the front, eare, neck, and wrists, the ornament was the most choice and orient pearle; best setting off from the black” (1970, 171). This last precision is not without ideological incidence on the whole picture. Indeed, whether the pearls come from Niger, Ethiopia, Egypt or Persia, the last word about them is that they “set off” from the black of the natives’ skins, as if the ornaments did not fully suit the wearers, or rather as if the wearers did not fully suit the ornaments, hence their wish to be transformed into white-skinned beauties. Such is the fate which awaits them in the sequel to The Masque of Blackness, that is to say in The Masque of Beauty, which culminates in the black beauties’ metamorphosis and their final welcome by the River “Thamesis” (the Thames), that symbolically washes their blackness away (Jonson 1970, 184). Cultural amalgamation seems also to be the programme in the portrayals of the Amerindians in Chapman’s Masque of the Middle Temple. Technically, the masquers here are supposed to be Virginian princes, while the musicians personate Virginian priests. Graham Parry contextualises this Virginian theme by linking it to the active support that Chapman’s patron, Prince Henry, lent to the Virginia Company in its attempts at contesting Catholic Spain’s grasp on the New World by planting colonies there and spreading the Protestant religion, an element which seems to be taken up with the conversion of the formerly sunworshipping Indians at the end of the masque. This reading appears particularly relevant in the context of the Palatine marriage, for which this masque was written, and which Parry sees as an opportunity to draw the 1

See the designs reproduced in Orgel and Strong 1973, vol. 1, 88.

Ladan Niayesh

91

Elector Frederick (and behind him the German princes of the Protestant union) into an anti-Spanish coalition. Yet, despite the presence of this very strong topical background, we cannot but be struck by traces of a bygone Elizabethan Guianese model behind these would-be up-to-date Virginian portraits. 2 This is most particularly the case with the pearls and silver worn by the masquers, as well as with the central element of the setting, a gold mine which seems to come directly out of Walter Raleigh’s fantasy of the fabulous riches of Manoa (his personal version of the famed Spanish Eldorado) in his Discovery of Guiana (1596). This anachronism (or shall we call it anageographism?) can by no means be attributed to ignorance on the part of Chapman, who had earlier written the poem “De Guiana” (1595) in praise of Raleigh’s endeavours in South America. This element would most interestingly cross-contextualise the masque, as Raleigh was at that time imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of high treason, while he was supported by Prince Henry in his repeated pleas to the King to be released, so that he could return to Guiana in search for the gold he believed was there. So despite the exotica of the masquers’ costumes as the gold mine opens to release them before the King, the parallel with Walter Raleigh in his prison hoping for a similar delivery by the King is worth noticing. Once again, little importance seems to be attached to factual accuracy in these patchwork Indian portraits, which can by turns evoke Virginians, Guianans, Moors, a general effect which Chapman calls “altogether estrangeful, and Indian like” (1613, sig. B4v), only to serve a plea which ultimately remains pro domo. “The Other is the fantasy of historiography,” 3 writes Michel de Certeau (1975, 8). We could add that such is also the fantasy of geographical writing and, a fortiori, of historical and geographical fictions, that are not bound by scientific concerns with objectivity. To greater or lesser degrees, all these forms of writing purport to bring otherness back to sameness by “translating” it in terms of a more familiar referential, even when they use this known reference merely as a starting point so as to signal departures from it. This idea of “translation,” which I borrow from François Hartog in his study (1980, 225-69) of an underlying Greek model in Herodotus’s description of Scythian alterity in his Histories, finds many illustrations with the classicising, mythologizing efforts of the writers of Jacobean masques in their depictions of exotic alterity, as they inscribe a present 2 3

This position is supported among others by D. J. Gordon 1975, 194-202. My translation of “L’autre est le fantasme de l’historiographie.”

92

Impersonating the Alien in Jacobean Court Masques

world of otherness in a past fantasy of sameness. An example of this phenomenon appears with the name “Phoebades,” which is given by Chapman to the sun-worshipping Virginian priests of his masque and which europeanises their beliefs by linking them to a Greek figure of the Sun God (Phoebus), rather than an Amerindian equivalent of the same, such as Caliban’s Patagonian Setebos in Shakespeare’s more-or-less contemporary play, The Tempest. A similar concern seems to rule over Jonson’s classicising efforts in his description of the African setting of his Masque of Blackness. Instead of quoting any modern cartographic authority (for example, Ortelius, who was used by Marlowe in his Tamburlaine plays), we notice that Jonson brushes aside contemporary geographical data about Africa to rely instead on mostly ancient authorities in the text as well as in the lavish marginal gloss of his mythologized African fable. Let us take as an example the precisions he provides to locate the river Niger at the start of the masque: “PLINY, SOLINUS, PTOLOMEY, and of late LEO the African, remember vnto vs a river in Æthiopia, famous by the name of Niger; of which the people were called Nigritae, now Negro’s, and are the blackest nation in the world” (Jonson 1970, 169). Note that no less than four respected old authorities are summoned to locate the river in an act which is presented as one of “remembrance” rather than of discovery. Beyond an obvious will to impress his royal patrons with his erudition, Jonson seems to have wanted to conjure up a cultural heritage on the issue of blackness which is at the core of his plot. Further on in the text, he continues this process of translating alterity by using better-known cultural equivalents when he calls Niger’s daughters African “nymphs” (170). A visual equivalent of this cultural translation, or rather homogenisation, can be found in the costumes designed by Inigo Jones for the six (out of twelve) oriental queens of The Masque of Queens. 4 Again we notice that the Orient (Africa and Asia) is represented by classical figures out of myth and/or mythologized historical accounts. These are Penthesilea (the Amazonian queen killed and subsequently mourned by Achilles in the Trojan war), Thomyris (queen of the Massagets who killed and mutilated Cyrus the Great), Arthemisia (who erected the Mausoleum, one of the Seven Wonders of antiquity to honour her dead husband), Berenice (the Egyptian princess who vowed to cut her hair if her newlywed husband returned victorious from a campaign against the Assyrians, 4

Jones’s sketches for the queens’ costumes are reproduced in S. Orgel and R. Strong 1973, vol I.

Ladan Niayesh

93

with that hair later becoming a constellation in the sky), Candace (the warlike queen of Æthiopia who stopped the progress of the armies of Octavius Augustus in Africa) and Zenobia (another warlike queen from Palmyra, who was also successful in defending her land against the Romans). 5 One common element which strikes us in all these oriental queens’ “résumés” is the rather unwomanly quality of their martial and political engagement, which might account for a certain cultural homogenisation in their costumes. Technically speaking, only the first queen to appear onstage, Penthesilea, is an Amazon, as seems to be suggested by her dress, which recalls ancient armour, and more specifically by the swathe she wears across the torso. If the swathe is to be interpreted as a shorthand for two of the best-known stereotypes associated with Amazons, that is to say their favourite weapon (the bow with its quiver) and their practice of removing one breast for a more effective use of that weapon, the recurrence of that element in other costumes cannot but associate the wearers with an Amazonian model. This is the conclusion reached by Clare McManus in her study of the doubly transgressive quality of the queens’ costumes—highly eroticised and threateningly masculine at the same time (2002, 131). I would agree with this conclusion, for if the reappearance of the swathe can make sense in the Scythian costume worn by Thomyris on account of the geographical and cultural proximity of the two nations, its use in other costumes, such as Berenice’s, cannot but become a pointer to the Amazonian connection of a figure that is by no means either a native of the Caucasus region or a warrior. Interestingly enough, the warlike message sent out by the swathe appears to be largely contradicted by the gauzy material used in several of the designs and which clearly reveals the masquers’ breasts, or sometimes even their full torsos down to the navel. In Penthesilea’s case, this material finds its most meaningful use, as it replaces the expected metal of the Amazon’s breastplate, making the body of this archetypal alien impersonation the site of a conflict between desire and danger. But if the picture leaves the spectator unable to decide whether the alien should be possessed or shunned, what seems to be a given here is the objectification of the selfsame alien. True to the tradition of Jacobean court masques (very different from the Caroline masques in this respect 6 ), the lady masquers do not hold speaking parts, but are indirectly presented 5 6

For details about this see Jonson 1970, 303. On this distinction, see Gossett 1988, 96-113.

94

Impersonating the Alien in Jacobean Court Masques

by the male allegorical character called “Heroic Virtue,” who in a way claims and ventriloquizes alterity by introducing and placing these silent figures as so many architectural ornaments within the two-tiered building of the “House of Fame” which provides the setting for the masque. Safely confined in static passivity, the feminised aliens of The Masque of Queens are thus encoded and articulated by the Chorus (Heroic Virtue) playing the part of a cultural mediator. Or are they? At this point in the study, it is worth pausing to wonder just how much of this cultural encoding and ideological articulation could get across to the audience of a Jacobean masque. In their separate studies, Jerzy Limon and Lauren Shohet insist on the interpretational gap between the experience of the masque as book (that is to say as we know it) and that of the masque-in-performance (that is as James I and his court viewed it). A good example of an encoding which is clearly present in the text but which may not have been all that visible in performance can be found in the costumes worn by the oriental knights of Jonson’s Hymenaei. Jonson’s holograph and subsequently printed text describes the costumes as being a blend of ancient Greek elements and modern Persian ones, or at least what he, the stage designer Jones, and hopefully his audience too, would consider to be modern Persian: That, of the Lords, had part of it (for the fashion) taken from the antique Greeke statue; mixed with some moderne additions: which made it both gracefull, and strange. On their heads they wore Persick crowns, that were with scroles of gold-plate turn’d outward, and wreath’d about with a carnation and siluer net-lawne, one end of which hung carelessly on the left shoulder; the other was trick’d vp, before, in seuerall degrees of foulds, betweene the plates, and set with rich iewels, and great pearle. (Jonson 1970, 229)

These costumes, as described by Jonson and sketched by Jones, hardly strike us as coming anywhere near a genuine seventeenth-century Persian outfit of the kind the British could have heard of, thanks to the earlier diplomatic missions of Robert Sherley’s elder brother, Anthony, sent by the Sophy to various European courts, but not to England, around 16061607, when this masque was written and performed, while the public theatre was applauding a more grand public rendering of the Persian experience with Day, Rowley and Wilkins’s The Travels of the Three English Brothers, one of the greatest stage successes of the Red Bull theatre. More than any realistic vision of modern Persia, Jones’s costumes for his oriental knights conjure up an idea of Persia which mixes the pagan

Ladan Niayesh

95

past of the country (with the Greek-ish, Alexander-like apparels) and its Muslim present (distantly recalled again through the medium of the turbans worn by the masquers). More than a vision of the Orient, these costumes mean to be an interpretation of it, involving all the uncertainties pertaining to an enterprise of interpretation, chief among which was the risk that the audiences might misread the signs presented to them. In the absence of any recorded contemporary reactions to these masquers’ costumes, the issue of the legibility of their encoding appears difficult to settle. But an example of a contemporary reaction has survived to controvert Jonson and Jones’s designs for another of their collaborative works, The Masque of Blackness, for which Queen Anne and her attendant ladies had chosen to paint their faces black and to wear rather indecorously light costumes, conjuring up the picture of an orientalized Africa that appeared both opulent and disturbingly promiscuous. The result is the shocked reaction of at least one courtier, Dudley Carleton, who was present at the original performance of the masque and who wrote about it in a letter dated January 1605 and addressed to another courtier, Ralph Winwood: Their Apparell was rich, but too light and Curtizan-like for such great ones. Instead of Vizzards, their Faces, and Arms up to the Elbows, were painted black, which was Disguise sufficient, for they were hard to be known; but it became them nothing so well as their red and white, and you cannot imagine a more ugly Sight, then a troop of lean-cheek’d Moors. 7

Richmond Barbour rightly notices that in his account, Carleton seems to find the costumes “Curtizan-like,” “not because they are too revealing, but because they reveal black skin” (1998, 140), which poses a serious problem of perspective in terms of what is to be viewed as pertaining to otherness and what belongs to the realm of sameness. In a way that runs quite contrary to the allegorical designs of Jones and Jonson, this viewer does not appear to react to symbols and myths, but to the sheer physical self of the masquers, which he believes to have been diminished through this alien association, rather than contributing to ennoble a reclaimed and redeemed figure of the exotic other. His repulsion clearly transpires in his choice of a derogatory appellation and epithet, “lean cheek’d Moors,” which radically redefine the cultural status of Jonson’s literary and

7

From A Calendar of State Papers, quoted by Orgel and Strong 1973, 89.

96

Impersonating the Alien in Jacobean Court Masques

classical “Nigritae” and “African nymphs” by equating them with more contemporary and negative images of a Muslim Africa. It must be noted that The Masque of Blackness corresponds to the first recorded use of black paint in a courtly masque, instead of the usual velvet masks and gloves to which the courtiers had recourse to personate Moors in courtly revels since at least the time of the 1510 entertainment in which King Henry VIII himself took part (Barbour 1998, 140). The result is a risk of quite literal and physical spreading of blackness as the masquers leave the stage at the end of the show to take dancing partners from the audience. This is a point that Carleton does not fail to notice, concerned as he is with the practical, rather than the symbolical implications of the masque-in-performance: “invited to dance, the Spanish Ambassador took out the Queen, and forgot not to kiss her Hand, though there was Danger it would have left a mark on his lips” (Barbour, 143). If Jonson and Jones’s demonstration meant to show how the Ethiop could be symbolically blanched at the redeeming contact of British royalty, the design seems to have seriously backfired here, with the representative of British royalty herself quite literally spreading blackness among the audience. “Theatre is an Other that comes from and expresses the self,” writes Stephen Orgel (1996, 13). If this statement is particularly true of the Jacobean court masques, determining where the self stops and where the other takes over (or shall we have it the other way round?) can be a problem. If the various civilising, familiarizing strategies used by the writers of these masques, such as the recourse to cultural amalgams and analogies or to antiquating, mythologizing references studied above, purport to bring otherness back to sameness so as to better apprehend and dominate it, the risk incurred in such a process is that of being contaminated by otherness and losing one’s own identity, or to take a particularly popular expression from the public theatre of the period, the risk of “turning Turk.” In this respect, the shocked reaction of a Dudley Carleton before the Jacobean Masque of Blackness seems to herald the objections later voiced in Puritan tracts against the highly unpopular Caroline masques, with a general fear of blurred social and sexual boundaries, as roles and costumes more and more appear charged with potential for usurping a divine prerogative in adulterating one’s God-given essence. As Orgel again rightly reminds us, to Puritan observers of Stuart masques, roles were above all impostures and lies, a denial of one’s true self (1975, 39-40), an offence that would abolish the distinction between a Queen of England and a common actress, making them both enter the

Ladan Niayesh

97

category of “Women-Actors, notorious whores” indexed in William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix, or the Scourge of Players (1633). If to Ben Jonson, classicist and moralist, masques were vehicles of profound ethical statements, teaching virtue by example, while to their Puritan detractors they were proofs of the degeneracy and impiety of the British court, the determining factor in both interpretations is the key definition of the boundary between selfhood and otherness and their respective positions within a logic of domination. Ultimately, rather than holding up a mirror to nature, we can say that the artistic enterprise of a court masque holds up a mirror to culture.

Works Cited Primary sources Anon. 1967. The Masque of Flowers. In A Book of Masques, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campion, Thomas. 1909. Campion’s Works, ed. Percival Vivian. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Chapman, George. 1613. The Memorable Maske of the two Honourable Houses or Inns of Court: the Middle Temple, and Lyncolns Inne. London: G. Eld for George Norton. ———. 1889. The Works of George Chapman, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd. London: Chatto and Windus. Jonson, Ben. 1970. Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Hereford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson. Vol. VII. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Middleton, Thomas.1609. Sir Robert Sherley, sent ambassadovr in the name of the King of Persia. STC 17894. London: John Budge. Prynne, William. 1633. Histrio-mastix. London: E. Allde, Thomas Cotes, Augustine Mathewes and William Iones.

Secondary sources Andrea, Bernadette. 2003. The Ghost of Leo Africanus from the English to the Irish Renaissance. In Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, 195-215. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Barbour, Richmond.1998. Britain and the Great Beyond: The Masque of Blackness at Whitehall. In Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan, 129-53. London: Associated University Presses.

98

Impersonating the Alien in Jacobean Court Masques

Certeau, Michel de. 1975. L’Ecriture de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard. Gordon, D. J. 1975. Chapman’s Memorable Masque. In The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by D. J. Gordon, ed. Stephen Orgel, 194-202. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gossett, Suzanne. 1988. “Man-maid, begone!”: Women in Masques. English Literary Renaissance 18/1: 96-113. Hartog, François. 1980. Le Miroir d’Hérodote: Essai sur la représentation de l’autre. Paris: Gallimard. Limon, Jerzy. 1990. The Masque of Stuart Culture. Newark: University of Delaware Press, McManus, Clare. 2002. Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590-1619. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Matar, Nabil. 1999. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia University Press. Orgel, Stephen. 1975. The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1996. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orgel, Stephen and Roy Strong. 1973. Vol. 1 of Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court. Berkeley: University of California Press. Parry, Graham. 1993. The Politics of the Jacobean Masque. In Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, ed. J. R. Mulryne, 87-117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Shohet, Lauren. 2004. The Masque as Book. In Reading and Literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Ian Frederick Moulton, 143-168. Turnhout: Brepols.

Electronic resources Inigo Jones’s costumes for the daughters on Niger in The Masque of Blackness and Penthesilea in The Masque of Queens may be seen on the internet through the following links (accessed October 17, 2007): http://www.english.uga.edu/cdesmet/jonmasq/NIGER2.gif http://www.english.uga.edu/cdesmet/jonmasq/blackmasq.gif http://www.english.uga.edu/cdesmet/jonmasq/penthes2.jpg

Ladan Niayesh

99

Appendix: A chronological list of Jacobean masques featuring non-European nations (Sources: Thomas L. Berger et al. 1998. An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Alfred Harbage (rev. S. Schoenbaum). 1964. Annals of English Drama. London: Methuen.) Anon., A Masque of the Knights of India and China, 1 January 1604, court, lost. Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness, 6 January 1605, court. Ben Jonson, Hymenaei, 5 January 1606, court. Ben Jonson, The Masque of Beauty, 10 January 1608, court. Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens, 2 February 1609, court. George Chapman, The Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn, 15 February 1613, court. Thomas Campion, The Masque at the Earl of Somerset’s Marriage (The Masque of Squires), 26 December 1613, court. Anon., The Masque of Flowers, 6 January 1614, Gray’s Inn at court. Anon., The Masque of Amazons, or the Ladies’ Masque, 1 January 1618, court, lost. Ben Jonson, The Gypsies Metamorphosed, 3-5 August 1621, Burley, Belvoir and Windsor. Ben Jonson, The Masque of Augurs, 6 January 1622, court.

PART III SELFHOOD AND HAMLET

WHEN ANAMORPHOSIS MEETS APHANISIS: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON (AND FROM) THE CASE OF HAMLET RICHARD HILLMAN

The relation between the two concepts anamorphosis and aphanisis, as appropriated for theatrical criticism—one borrowed from the visual arts, the other from psychoanalysis—deserves more attention than it has yet received with respect to the representation of character in early modern drama. Anamorphosis, of course, is the well-known device of Renaissance perspective painting whereby an object appears in different forms (or formless) when viewed from different angles. The notion readily extends to the plural identities that certain characters, usually tragic protagonists, take on for the audience from one moment to another, thereby acquiring the “texture” of multiplicity. Richard II, for instance, notoriously invites consideration by the audience at times as the emblem of the Body Politic, at times as the incarnation of the Body Natural. Inversely, Lacan’s concept of aphanisis or “fading” (which I must bear the blame for introducing into the critical picture) relates to the character’s view of himself (or herself); it refers to that slippage of self-image along a chain of receding signifiers, typically in soliloquy, which indexes the realization of subjectivity-asabsence and so communicates an illusion of interiority. Of this phenomenon, too, Richard II constitutes a locus classicus, losing his hold by turns on his image of himself as king and on his experiential realization of abject mortal humanity. The ultimate sign of his realized “selfhood” is his self-fragmentation in the shattered mirror. Lacan notwithstanding, there is no question but that we are dealing here fundamentally with representational strategies, techniques contributing a mimetic dimension to the theatrical illusion. The gist of my argument in a book of some eight years ago was that, contrary to the thencurrent fashion, one could not necessarily extrapolate from such “soft” secondary data “hard” scientific conclusions about lived human

Richard Hillman

103

subjectivity or about grand epistemic shifts between pre- and postCartesian selfhood (Hillman 1997). In this essay, I wish to insist on the illusive nature of selfhood as evoked on the early modern stage by adducing further evidence of the relativity of the techniques involved, their contingency on contemporary historical contexts and audience responses that, once recovered, may dispel some of our fondest illusions about the development of the modern subject and, at the least, validate the claim of Lacanian psychoanalysis to take as its field of enquiry an unconscious without depth. Anamorphosis and aphanisis naturally enter into a mutually reinforcing dynamic, since self-representation typically guides the audience in changing its imaginary point of view, the experience of self-absence in one place pointing to presence in another, to invert Lacan’s finger-in-thedike formulation: “when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading,’ as disappearance” (Lacan 1977, 218). 1 The semiotic system is not hermetically self-contained, however, and one element that may be added to the critical dynamic—though at the real risk of destabilizing it—is the possibility of intertextual signals carrying meaning for an audience beyond the scope of the character’s consciousness. That is, language and behaviour may cue an audience to view a character, or an aspect of one, as contingent on external “origins” rather than self-sufficiently generated, as he (or she) implicitly lays claim to be. In proportion as those origins may be recuperated, and proliferated, what modern criticism has been tempted to read as more-or-less incipient selfhood may instead come to smack of authorial allusiveness, even bricolage. Hamlet, of course, has been all-but universally accepted as the quintessential stage-forerunner of the modern “subject” in full psychological panoply. 2 Aphanitic soliloquies in abundance show him trying to get a grip on that slippery essence “within which passes show” (Hamlet, 1.2.85)—that is, which, according to himself, defies representation. In anamorphic terms, they help to position him alternatively as the victim of a primal tragedy (if not the primal scene), 1

“lorsque le sujet apparaît quelque part comme sens, ailleurs il se manifeste comme fading, comme disparition” (Lacan 1973, 199). 2 The long series of such treatments includes my own (Hillman 1997, 132-39). One may now add to the list Marshall, who also draws significantly on Lacan, and who offers a version of aphanisis without the name when she proposes that Hamlet’s “recurrent wish not to be effectively deconstructs his character” (2002, 22-23).

104

New Perspectives on (and from) the Case of Hamlet

and as the self-styled Pyrrhic victor in a new one. The very measure of his modernity, perhaps of modernity itself, has traditionally been his apparently conflicted response to the mission of revenge. But, according to a venerable principle in physical science—namely, the bigger they come, the harder they fall—Hamlet also presents himself as a broad silhouette for demolishing the premise of an epistemological shift and proving that we are dealing with matters of shadow, not substance. As it happens, in this game of shadow-boxing, I have a one-two punch to throw in the form of two hitherto unproposed textual models, both as readily accessible as, say, Montaigne to at least some members of the original audiences, given that both were in the air, and in French. These are aligned precisely along the two principal axes that define Hamlet’s double bind or, if we prefer, contradictory character. One remarkably resonates with Hamlet’s ineffectual, if not half-hearted, aspirations to assert himself on the stage of Denmark’s public life; this is the at-once reckless and over-cautious would-be revenger, who aims to “take arms against a sea of troubles” (Hamlet, 3.1.60), the smarmy superannuated undergraduate “fat and scant of breath” (5.2.290), too sophisticated for his own good and addicted to provoking his enemies, not least through vague talk of his ambitions. My second perspective confers, at least imaginatively, a younger, more passive and more innocent profile, confirming Hamlet as “Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state” (3.1.154), the naïve victim doomed to “suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (3.1.57-58). He is victimized, in this view, by a family drama conditioned by a nefarious royal uncle, his weak-willed mother’s alienation from his father, and that father’s quasi-diabolical commitment to vengeance. In these varying lights, for Hamlet to slip out of his own sight by turns as determined revenger and as victim of circumstances may have entailed for the original audience, not a precocious descent into the psychological depths of post-Cartesian selfhood, but a mechanistic display of intertextual over-determination. Obviously, making the case for two “new” major sources for Hamlet would require more than the space available, so I will briefly summarize the campaign I have launched elsewhere—and conveniently presume its persuasiveness, which I realize depends on fuller documentation. I propose first that the exchange between Hamlet and Horatio over the fencing-match invitation would have set the seal for audiences, by way of Hamlet’s adaptation of Matthew 10:29-31—“There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow . . . ” (5.2.215-16)—on a running parallel between Shakespeare’s protagonist and the historical figure of Antoine de

Richard Hillman

105

Bourbon, First Prince of the Blood and King of Navarre (more than incidentally, the husband of Jeanne d’Albret and father of the current French monarch). The critical moment in the play coincides with several pre-1600 narratives that sound the same providential note on the same biblical authority in the face of an analogous royal conspiracy—one instigated in 1559 by the Guises, who prompted the young and unstable monarch, François II, to summon Navarre to an interview designed to entrap his life by provoking a bloody confrontation. The premonition of danger, a faithful friend’s caution and support, the trust in providence, the rhetoric of the clear conscience, the troubled but resolute heart—in both cases all these elements set the scene for the climactic confrontation, from which, by contrast, Navarre returned alive. Indeed, Navarre’s survival is marked in these texts as providential, although in fact it depended on his abject submission to the king—dubious behaviour for a member of the noblesse d’épée. The most extensive of the narratives in question, published in 1576, was putatively composed by Louis Régnier de La Planche, secretary to the son of Anne de Montmorency, Constable of France. It adapted the memoirs of Jeanne d’Albret and was, in turn, taken up in the Histoire ecclésiastique of 1580 and elsewhere (Bèze 1: 391 [437]). 3 Régnier’s version carries further than most what is nevertheless a constant theme: the hopes staked by Protestants on the protection and leadership of Antoine de Bourbon, who seemed on the verge of outright conversion, then their disillusion and sense of betrayal. For that Prince’s selfish ambitions, irresolute character, vague menaces, and inept manœuvres led him to forfeit his potential power as the most highly placed personage in the realm next to the king himself. He first played into the hands of his Guisean adversaries, then actually threw in his lot with them, only to be killed soon after the outbreak of the first civil war in 1562. For a Shakespearian, the terms in which Navarre’s actions and character are figured by Régnier, in particular, insistently evoke Hamlet in his aspect of one “most immediate” (1.2.109) to the Danish throne who broadcasts his discontent, engages in tortuous cat-and-mouse games with those set to spy on him, and finally falls victim to a tragedy that his indecisiveness has, if not inaugurated, at least compounded.

3

The first page number refers to the original edition, that in brackets to the current one. On the doubtful attribution of this work to Bèze, who, however, at least prepared material for it, see Geisendorf 1967, 340-45.

106

New Perspectives on (and from) the Case of Hamlet

The evocation is all the stronger for an element which is not developed in the contemporary French sources I have seen, but which is documented by English diplomatic dispatches and treated by a handful of modern historians. Navarre’s chronic frustration had less to do with domestic politics than with the loss of his nominal royal heritage, the greater part of which had been annexed by Spain. He sought compensating power and glory in all quarters, and, with the support of German Protestant princes, especially the Elector Palatine, “Towards the middle of the year 1561, a faction developed at the diet which sought to bring Antoine de Bourbon to the throne of Denmark so that he might some day achieve the empire” 4 — that is, of course, the Roman imperial crown. All in all, where a modern audience perceives, as one of its alternative Hamlets, a study in political promise hurtling off its tracks into the path of an onrushing “mighty [opposite]” (5.2.62), Shakespeare’s own age might have recalled, quite concretely, a recent French model whose hallmark was hardly mystery and tragedy, the stuff of inwardness, but futile mediocrity—not Hamlet at all, in short, but Prufrock. To shift the anamorphic perspective, there remains the image that has most richly lent subjectivity to the character—that of the melancholic victim of a family drama on the Oedipal plan (if not constitutive of it, thanks to Freud’s own Shakespearianism). Those Elizabethans who had read Belleforest’s fifth volume of Histoires tragiques were likely, along with Shakespeare himself, to have encountered—perhaps immediately preceding the story of Amleth (depending on the edition)—a still more sensational thriller presenting the “Mort pitoyable du prince de Foix.” 5 4

My translation of “Vers le milieu de l’année 1561, il se forma à la diète un parti qui voulait porter Antoine de Bourbon sur le trône de Danemarck pour le faire arriver un jour à l’empire” (Ruble 1881-86, 2:242). For English knowledge of this scheme, see the Calendar of State Papers, No. 724: 441 (Thomas Shakerley to Nicholas Throckmorton, 14 December 1561). See also Cazaux 1973, 242. 5 The publication history of the Histoires tragiques is extremely complex. Almost immediately—as early as 1572—Belleforest had supplemented his original 1570 collection of eight histoires (including that of Amleth) with four additional tales, although the original edition also continued to be republished, presumably for reasons of privilège (copyright). The expanded collection prints the stories in two different orders: in some editions that of Amleth remains the third, as it was in the original collection of eight; in others it becomes the fifth. The tale of Gaston, Prince of Foix, appears in some editions as the eleventh, but in others, apparently beginning with that of Jean Hulpeau in Paris in 1572 (cited here), it is inserted as number four, immediately preceding that of Amleth. See the description of this edition (listed as No. 97) by Simonin 1992, 257; it was shared with Gervais

Richard Hillman

107

The play’s treacherous fencing match might well have put such readers first of all in mind of the wicked royal uncle in that histoire: “that king, having strung his nephew along,” 6 finally had recourse, we are told with blunt irony, to his preferred weapon, “that is, poison, for those were the weapons with which that valiant prince was accustomed to fence.” 7 The reference to poisoning as if it were fencing is by no means the only intertextual resonance. As the metaphor might suggest, however, the parallels are produced less by the plots themselves than by the rich rhetorical embroidery supplied by Belleforest. True, the wicked king who victimizes his nephew offers a basic common element. (The villain in question also happens to be a king of Navarre, although a fourteenthcentury one—Charles II, “the Bad.”8 ) But the nephew (aged sixteen) is the intended instrument, rather than the primary target, of the scheme, which is aimed at his living father—Gaston Count of Foix (self-styled “Phoebus”), the king’s brother-in-law, not his brother; the motives are financial, rather than political and sexual, although the divided loyalties of the boy’s mother are not remote from Gertrude’s. In any case, the poison is discovered, so it is as if Claudius’s attempt on Old Hamlet’s life had failed; the father then imprisons his innocent son, who had been convinced the powder would magically restore a “union” between his parents (note Shakespeare’s unique recourse to this term for a rare pearl). Before his trial can be held, however, the boy dies, weakened by melancholy and lack of sustenance, when the furious Gaston inadvertently wounds him with a paring knife. Thanks to Belleforest’s ponderous dexterity, this bizarre sequence of events is inflated into a melodramatic histoire tragique that intertextually supplements, and paradoxically sophisticates, that of Amleth. Most to the point is the elevation, or degradation, of Gaston’s obsessive vindictiveness to a quasi-diabolical level. Not only does his “esprit inexorable” come to resemble the ghost’s “perturbed spirit” (1.5.190), but it is made the object of cautionary moralizing, such as, in the play, attaches itself to Hamlet: The spirit that I have seen May be a devil, and the devil hath power Mallot, whose imprint thus appears in certain copies. 6 “Ce Roy ayant tenu le bec en l’eau à son neveu” (Belleforest 1572, fol. 121r). All following translations are mine. 7 “à sçauoir du poison, car s’estoient les armes les plus coustumieres desquelles ce vaillant Prince souloit s’escrimer” (fol. 121r). 8 “le mauvais.”

108

New Perspectives on (and from) the Case of Hamlet T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. (2.2.594-99)

Thus to meddle with the powers of darkness is to risk assimilation to them, according to Belleforest: I do not wish to say that such punishment came upon him because he made use of the advice of an evil familiar spirit, who dictated to him all that he did to himself, for if it is true that he gave himself over to such madness, it is impossible that that evil instrument did not lead him to his ruin and was not the cause of his outbursts of madness, as never does it happen that a man has familiarity with such ghosts who does not finally realize for what occasion Satan shows himself the friend of man, and that he soothes him only in order to deceive him and reveals himself to him only so as to draw him to his perdition. 9

And indeed, the divine retribution visited many years later on Gaston, when he is least expecting it—the deceptively peaceful setting actually recalls Old Hamlet’s orchard—shows him shunted from perdition to purgatory only by a belated call for mercy. Otherwise, like the king “sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head” (Hamlet, 1.5.7879), “He had to pay the ransom of his offence, which lay upon his head.” 10 (As in the play, there is a preoccupation with being dispatched, “Not shriving-time allow’d” [Hamlet, 5.2.47].) The list of parallels, notably in the emotional register, may be extended. When the prince insists that his mother show loyalty to his father despite the “ruses of the King my uncle” 11 he produces similar contrition: “O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain” (Hamlet, 9

“ie ne veux pas dire que ceste punition luy escheut, à cause qu’il s’aidoit du conseil d’vn malin esprit familier, . . . car s’il est veritable qu’il s’adonnast à telle folie, il est impossible que ce meschant secretaire ne l’aye conduit à sa ruine, & n’ait esté cause de ses folies, comme ainsi soit que iamais homme n’eust familiarité à tels fantosmes, qui ne sentist en fin pour qu’elle [sic] occasion est-ce que Satan se monstre amy de l’homme, & qu’il ne le caresse sinon pour le tromper, & ne se communique à luy que pour l’attirer à sa perdition” (fol. 143v44r). 10 “Il falloit qu’il allast payer la rançon de son forfait, qui luy estoit sur la teste” (fol. 143r). 11 “les ruses du Roy mon oncle” (fol. 119v).

Richard Hillman

109

3.4.158); “These words of the child so oppressed the heart of the good lady that she almost collapsed in the arms of her son, and if she had answered him at once, and he had urged her again once more, he would have succeeded in winning her over.” 12 The evocation of the imprisoned boy’s melancholy, “detesting the grandeurs and the comforts of this world” 13 —“How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!” (Hamlet, 2.133-34)—opens abruptly into soliloquy: “Now it must be understood that he who ordinarily brought his food heard all this discourse.” 14 But most striking is Belleforest’s framing of the tale of Gaston, in contradistinction to that of Amleth, as a solemn Christian lesson against rash vengeance. Insistently, the reader is reminded that “reason commands us to think through an action at length before executing it.” 15 The “native hue of resolution” regretted by Hamlet as “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (3.1.84-85) is dismissed as a “strange imperfection in the soul, and a violent transport of the spirit … [which] could not act except in a mad fashion or produce or engender any effects but those of evil consequence.” 16 Far from lamenting that vindictive “enterprises of great pitch and moment / . . . their currents turn awry” (3.1.86-87) and cease to monopolize “the table of . . . memory” (Hamlet, 1.5.98), Belleforest here condemns revengers because “the memory of feeling themselves outraged so torments their spirits that it turns them away from their initial conception.” 17 From this intertextual perspective, then, the very pivot of Hamlet’s anamorphosis—his ambivalence towards his mission of revenge—reveals itself as a matter of external, not internal, definition. The “heart” of his “mystery” (Hamlet, 3.2.357) becomes something worn on his sleeve; 12

“ces paroles de l’enfant outrerent tellement le coeur de la bonne dame, qu’à peine qu’elle ne se pasma entre les bras de son fils, & si sur l’heure elle luy eut respondu, & qu’il eut encore donné vne autre charge, il eut esté pour la gaigner” (fol. 119v). 13 “detestant les grandeurs & les aises de ce monde” (fol. 138r). 14 “Or fault il entendre que celuy qui ordinairement luy portoit à manger, ouyt tout ce discours” (fol. 138v). 15 “la raison nous comande de penser vn fait longuement, auant que l’executer” (fol. 105r). 16 “vne estrange imperfection de l’ame, et vn transport brutal de l’esprit . . . [qui] ne peut aussi ouurer que follement, ny donner ou engendrer que des effects de mauuaise consequence” (fol. 104v). 17 “le souuenir de se sentir outragéz bourrelle tellement leurs esprits, qu’il n’y a raison qui les destourne [cf. “turn awry”] de leur premiere conception” (fol. 105r).

110

New Perspectives on (and from) the Case of Hamlet

aphanisis resolves into a game of “now I see me, now I don’t.” Thus the early modern epitome—“I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe” (Hamlet, 1.3.85-86)—emerges as echoing the nuggets of Neanderthal Nym, “the Mars of malecontents” (1.3.104) in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “I have operations [in my head] which be humors of revenge” (1.3.89-90). 18 But then distinguishing between the authentic and the parodic with respect to inwardness has long ranked precisely as a source of generic instability in early modern English drama—witness Marston’s Antonio, a virtually contemporary Hamlet analogue, whose teasing is enhanced by echoes of Bottom-Pyramus: My heart is great of thoughts—stay, dove– And therefore I must speak. But what, O love? By this white hand, no more! Read in these tears What crushing anguish thy Antonio bears. (Antonio’s Revenge, 2.120-23)

Hamlet is conspicuously fond of setting off his own thought-enlarged heart through what might be termed self-fashioning accessories: to his “trappings” and “suits” we may add the writings of a “satirical rogue” (Hamlet, 2.2.196), and throw in Yorick’s skull—the direct descendant of Richard II’s mirror, insofar as its “favour” (5.1.188) likewise proves, in inverse fashion and across the specious boundary of sex, that “God hath given [us] one face and [we] make [ourselves] another” (3.1.144-46). Finally, then, we should perhaps materialize Hamlet’s supposed primordial desire for his mother into a country-life magazine fancy for “a stool . . . to be melancholy upon” (Jonson [1616] 3.1.117; 119-20), to cite Stephen, the “Country Gull,” in Every Man in His Humour. So reads the 1616 version of Jonson’s satirical comedy. Shakespeare, of course, had known that play as an actor from its 1598 beginnings, just before he turned to revamping the dim tragedy of Hamlet in Belleforest’s glaring light. Originally, Jonson had handled the particular humour in question even less reverently by specifying a “close-stool.” The latter effectively prefigured Shakespeare’s “melancholy Jaques” of the following year, whose existence oscillates between “sullen fits,” when he is “full of matter” (As You Like It, 2.1.67-68), and the replenishing of that “matter” (5.4.185) on all occasions yielding food for thought—from travel to pastoral song to religious conversion—“as a weasel sucks eggs” (2.5.13). 18

With the exception of Hamlet, I cite The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Evans and Tobin.

Richard Hillman

111

Melancholy “as you like it” is an eminently digestible, passing phenomenon. The tragic selfhood of Hamlet, the “noble heart” that “cracks” (Hamlet, 5.2.364) as if from plenitude of inexpressibility, thus came in any case trailing its clouds of glory in the dirt, as is hardly surprising, since “a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (4.3.30-31). But if the messages regarding Hamlet’s mystery were further mixed and mediated by evocations of Antoine de Bourbon, on the one hand, the young prince of Foix, on the other, the very premise of an existential void for the Other to bustle in, is evidently a non-starter. No wonder, then, that the wholesale wiping of the tables of Elizabethan theatrical memory—the virtual passing of a mimetic tradition—was needed before audiences and critics could agree on the high seriousness of Hamlet’s seductively selffashioning manifesto: I’ll wipe away all trivial records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmix’d with baser matter. (Hamlet, 1.5.99-104)

Arguably, for the Hamlet who was Shakespeare’s contemporary, this was impossibly to renounce himself as an intertextual creature, to ridicule the perfectly sensible attempt of Polonius to enquire for his interiority at the sign of the book: “What is the matter, my lord? . . . the matter that you read, my lord” (2.2.193; 195). Clearly, it is not the infinite display of “actions that a man might play” (1.2.84), or that play a man, but the spectre of true denotation, at once fixing and “[puzzling] the will” (3.1.80), that meshes with the modern metaphysics of subjectivity. Such is the dream that may come from beyond the reach of “baser matter” put to “base uses” (5.1.196)—for skulls on stage make little impression nowadays—so as to command and mandate our incorrigible “paintings” (3.1.144): the dream of making up our selves over and over again, world without end.

112

New Perspectives on (and from) the Case of Hamlet

Works Cited Primary Sources Belleforest, François de. 1572. Le cinquiesme tome des Histoires tragiques, etc. Paris: J. Hulpeau. [Bèze, Théodore de?]. 1883-89. Histoire ecclésiastique des églises réformées du Royaume de France. Ed. G. Baum and E. Cunitz. 3 vols. Les classiques du protestantisme français, XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Librairie Fischbacher. Jonson, Ben. 1933. Every Man in His Humour. In English Drama 15801642, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke and Nathaniel Burthon Paradise. Lexington, MA: Heath and Co. Marston, John. 1965. Antonio’s Revenge. Ed. G. K. Hunter. Regents Renaissance Drama Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Régnier de La Planche, Louis [François de l’Isle, pseud.]. 1576. Histoire de l’estat de France, tant de la république que de la religion, sous le règne de François II. N.p. Shakespeare, William. 1982. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen. ———. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans, J. J. M. Tobin et al. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Stevenson, Joseph, ed. 1866. Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1561-1562, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office. London: Longmans, Green, Longmans, Roberts, and Green.

Secondary Sources Cazaux, Yves. 1973. Jeanne d’Albret. Paris: Éditions Albin Michel. Geisendorf, Paul-Frédéric. 1967. Théodore de Bèze. Geneva: Alexandre Jullien. Hillman, Richard. 1997. Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Lacan, Jacques. 1973. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. In Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XI. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1977. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Richard Hillman

113

Marshall, Cynthia. 2002. The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ruble, Alphonse de. 1881-86. Antoine de Bourbon et Jeanne d’Albret, suite de Le mariage de Jeanne d’Albret. 4 vols. Paris: A. Labitte. Simonin, Michel. 1992. Vivre de sa plume au XVIe siècle, ou, La carrière de François de Belleforest. Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 268. Geneva: Droz.

“THEY ARE ACTIONS THAT A MAN MIGHT PLAY.” HAMLET AND CHARACTERISATION: THEORY, PERFORMANCE, CRITICISM 1 PETER J. SMITH

The novel is an unknown man and I have to find him: a situation that I cannot yet even vaguely imagine: a background as strange to me as it was to him at his first entrance. —Greene 1968, 13 A was a man. Take him for all in all. —Hamlet, 1.2.187

On 26 September 1986, Alan Bennett was on location, playing a bit part in the BBC Fortunes of War: Through a gateway I see student actors in a garden rehearsing a play. I can’t hear the dialogue and would be no wiser if I could, but it only takes a minute to see that it is Hamlet. A tall young man stands centre-stage watched by an older couple. Two actors come on, have a word with the older couple, then saunter innocently over to the lone figure and chat before scurrying back to report. Hamlet is in jeans and bomber jacket. He looks tiresome, but I can’t tell whether this is because he is a tiresome actor, or because he is playing Hamlet tiresome, or whether, divested of the poetry, tiresome is what Hamlet is. (Bennett 1994, 149-50)

Bennett’s wearied response to this “tiresome” moment captures many of the play’s quintessential concerns. His lugubrious style is oddly appropriate to the mixture of anonymity and significance which the 1

I am grateful to Anthony and Mary Weaver for their antipodean hospitality and to both of them this essay is affectionately dedicated.

Peter J. Smith

115

spectacle presents. He watches, one actor overlooking the performance of another, and immediately recognizes the scenario of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s oscillation between their spymaster-mistress, Claudius and Gertrude, and their victim, Hamlet. At the same time as the scene is instantly recognisable, it strikes the onlooker that it is simply another version of a play that is in constant performance: even beyond earshot, Hamlet is a text that resonates. In spite of its unenthusiasm, Bennett’s account strikes at the heart of the play, for the problem of the observer is the problem of Hamlet: where does the actor end and the character begin? Put in terms of the title of this collection of essays, how is Hamlet’s selfhood presented, re-presented and so represented by the actor’s selfhood? At which point and by how much is the actor’s self appropriated by the role which he is playing? Moreover, in the representation of what we might (albeit anachronistically) regard as an emotional disposition—such as melancholy—as opposed merely to a functional role within a narrative, this problem of identification is intensified. Notwithstanding New Historicism’s discrediting the notion of contained and individuated human subjectivities, together with its insistence that the subject and its dramatic representation exist solely by virtue of linguistic effects, empathic affiliation is still commonplace. The eccentricities arising from vivifying the role are illustrated most readily in the criticism of the eighteenth century. In 1782 William Jackson insisted that “Shakespeare’s characters have that appearance of reality which always has the effect of actual life” (Knights 1933, 68). Of the characters in the history plays, Richard Hole noted (in 1796) that “His characters. . . are such genuine copies from life, that we must suppose the originals acted and spoke in the manner he represents them” (Knights 1933, 68). Dr Johnson condemns the poverty of the excuse offered by Hamlet to Laertes for the murder of Polonius—that not he, but his madness was to blame—Johnson protests, “I wish Hamlet had made some other defence; it is unsuitable to the character of a good or a brave man to shelter himself in falsehood” (Bradley 1975, 357). The attribution of an off-stage life to a dramatic character is one that has been subject to attacks that are, by now, well-established, yet the tendency to presume the existence of such a life, seems irresistible, as a sample of contemporary accounts will show. As recently as 1992, Bert O. States remarked on Hamlet’s excuse. He found the same inconsistency of character as Johnson: “It is simply beneath his style as demonstrated elsewhere and therefore it is difficult to perceive it as representative of Hamlet. It is like being told that Hamlet got C+’s in philosophy at Wittenberg” (1992, 30).

116

Hamlet and Characterisation: Theory, Performance, Criticism

In 1994, William Kerrigan asserted that “Shakespeare tells stories about coherent fictive individuals. In what other terms could it possibly make sense to speak of their weal or woe?” (1994, 31). Kerrigan refuses to surrender character as a dramatic concept, ascribing a critical degeneracy to his opponents who infer that it is a chimera particular to an outmoded humanism: “I would be reluctant to give up the primacy of character in Shakespeare studies, for that seems tantamount to giving up individualism. That loss . . . is part and parcel of our current decadence” (31). The battle lines seem firmly drawn between those who ascribe to Shakespeare’s dramatic figures a personal autonomy, a psychological room of their own, and those who regard such personality as a dramatic device which is analogous to those novelistic strategies, such as a straightforward chronology or an anonymous narrator, employed in an effort to create verisimilitude in a realist novel. Yet, while the purely functional task prescribed to performers by the actantial models of semiotics usefully directs us away from the idea of dramatic characterisation based on approaching the roles as real people, it nevertheless overlooks the problems raised by the irrefutable visibility of the actor—see Figure 1. Theatre

Text

Actor

Role

Character

Characterisation

Audience FIGURE 1

In a star system, like the theatre of the Royal Shakespeare Company, London’s West End or that of the English Renaissance, this visibility of

Peter J. Smith

117

the actor is ineluctable and an audience is unable completely to separate its apprehension of the character from its simultaneous awareness of the actor. Accounts of performances, be they of Branagh, Olivier, Irving, Kean, Garrick, Kemp or Alleyn, seem to be similarly actor-conscious, and Michael Hattaway insists that this was as much the case in the Renaissance theatre as it is in ours. The Elizabethan actor, he writes, “could draw upon the audience’s knowledge of himself: a great player like Alleyn could assume not simply that his audience had come to see Tamburlaine but to see Alleyn playing Tamburlaine. The ‘star system’ was part of the play” (Hattaway 1982, 96). Henry Peacham’s sketch of Titus Andronicus provides a striking illustration of this simultaneous presentation of actor and role. (The sketch is conveniently reproduced in Shakespeare 2005: xxxi.) Titus is pictured in a Roman toga, while his soldiers are Renaissance halberdiers. This drawing seems to demonstrate that Elizabethan audiences were untroubled by an awareness of the production which ran alongside their apprehension of the play. Such an imbroglio is likely to be greeted with puzzlement nowadays. When Stephen Unwin directed a mixed-costumed Hamlet for the English Touring Theatre in 1993, he explained in his programme note, with the aid of a reproduction of Peacham’s drawing, that “Shakespeare isn’t our contemporary, but we are presenting his play to our own contemporaries who have their own contemporary perspectives. This production of Hamlet is an attempt to express this contradiction.” The fact that such visual anachronism required special pleading is symptomatic of the modern inability (especially in respect of the more established companies) to view the production as anything other than intrusive. In drama, characterisation is partly theatrical, and this interference of the theatre, in the person of the actor, augments the role that arises from the text. However, the mutual appropriation of actor and role is fraught with difficulties; it is a fine balancing act which, if not achieved, can give rise to the following kinds of absurdity. When Tom Jones takes Partridge to see David Garrick’s Hamlet, the latter is convinced by the performance to the point where he takes the drama for reality, arguing with the ghost directly: “Ay, ay; go along with you! . . . Follow you? I’d follow the devil as soon” (Fielding 1966, 757). Garrick’s naturalistic manner masks the actor (for Partridge) under the character of Hamlet. For Partridge, accustomed to the declamatory acting styles of the eighteenth century, the accomplished actor is the visible actor. When asked which of the performances he considers to be the best, Partridge responds:

118

Hamlet and Characterisation: Theory, Performance, Criticism “The king without doubt.” “Indeed, Mr Partridge,” says Mrs Miller, “you are not of the same opinion with the town; for they are all agreed, that Hamlet is acted by the best player who was ever on the stage.” “He the best player!” cries Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer, “Why I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then, to be sure, in that scene, as you called it, between him and his mother, where you told me he acted so fine, why, Lord help me, any man, that is, any good man, that had had such a mother, would have done exactly the same. I know you are only joking with me; but, indeed madam, though I was never at a play in London, yet I have seen acting before in the country; and the king for my money; he speaks all his words distinctly, half as loud again as the other.—Anybody may see he is an actor.” (Fielding 1966, 759-60)

Partridge’s praise for the actor playing Claudius is an ironic critique of the crudity of his performance (as well as being an implicit compliment to Garrick’s plausible naturalism). Of course, this is a reductio ad absurdum, though when Olivier directed himself as Hamlet in 1948, he described how “I wanted audiences seeing the film to say, not, ‘There is Laurence Olivier dressed like Hamlet,’ but ‘That is Hamlet’” (Davison 1983, 17). However, the fact that his performance and the film itself built on the achievements of Henry V, filmed only four years earlier, demonstrates the impossibility of complete anonymity. By contrast, if the actor, rather than the character, is too perceivable, the opposite kind of problem occurs. The comic effect of Pip’s visit to the theatre in Great Expectations results from the oxymoronic running together of the triumphs of Hamlet with the faults of its theatrical realization: Whenever [the] undecided Prince had to ask a question or state a doubt, the public helped him out with it. As for example; on the question whether ’twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some roared yes, and some no, and some inclining to both opinions said “toss up for it” and quite a Debating Society arose . . . When he recommended the player not to saw the air thus, the sulky man said, “And don’t you do it, neither; you’re a deal worse than him!” And I grieve to add that peals of laughter greeted Mr Wopsle on every one of these occasions. . . .The joy attended Mr Wopsle through his struggle with Laertes on the brink of the orchestra and the grave, and slackened no more until he had tumbled the king off the kitchen-table, and had died by inches from the ankles upward. (Dickens 1965, 274-76)

Peter J. Smith

119

Mr Wopsle’s problem is the opposite of Garrick’s. Whereas Garrick is erased by the character he plays, Wopsle never succeeds in assuming the identity of his role. The final sentence which juxtaposes Wopsle and Laertes, the orchestra and the grave, paradoxically foregrounds the separation of theatre and drama by running them into collision. Theirs is a contest rather than a collaboration. If the seam between actor and role is totally disguised, we end up with the absurdity of mistaking the actor for the person he represents. If, on the other hand, the seam is too prominent, we are faced with the obstacle of the performer’s insistent presence. Nowadays actors and directors are forced to make choices. Is the Prince, in a particular production, a victim or a tragic hero, for example? That he must be one or the other has more to do with presuppositions about characterisation and acting than the demands of Hamlet. In the Renaissance theatre the player was required to hold numerous acting parts in his head. There was little if any rehearsal time and the rapid revolution of the repertoire made extended exploration of role and experiential characterisation luxuries that the business could not afford. In contrast, modern actors in a repertory company the size of the RSC, rehearse typically for four to six weeks and play two or three roles for up to eighteen months. In the wake of the Moscow Art Theatre and the realist style it pioneered, much modern rehearsal requires that actors discover their characters. This is especially true in the case of Hamlet, with which, Michael Pennington insists, “Shakespeare [is] pointing a way forward to Stanislavski” (1996, 84). Indeed, W. B. Worthen proposes that Stanislavski provides the dominant discourse for describing what it is the actor actually does on stage: “Stanislavskian principles—continuous characterisation, an organic connection between scenes, the need to develop an inner life for the role, a consistent through-line of action— suffuse thinking about acting today, and particularly suffuse actors’ descriptions of their work” (1997, 212). Part of this process of developing “an inner life” seems to be an intimate meeting, often mystically described, between actor and role. Philip Franks (who played the Prince in the 1987 RSC tour) has noted the degree to which Hamlet, in particular, is prone to this kind of personal investment: “The actor must be true to himself as well as the play. . . . It is also his task to pour as much of himself and his experience . . . into the operation as possible. Hamlet,” he insists, “is the antithesis of a ‘character part’” (Jackson and Smallwood 1993, 190). Pennington, who played Hamlet for the RSC in 1980, shares this sense of confidentiality with the role:

120

Hamlet and Characterisation: Theory, Performance, Criticism Characterisation is difficult to talk about in relation to Hamlet, for the player is working in a specially subjective way, and the production is likely to be reflecting his own basic personality. . . . A man’s Hamlet tends to be one of a kind, and the main challenge is to express fully the deep crises of the part through your own spirit. (Brockbank 1985, 122)

Time and time again, it is Hamlet that draws actors into this confessional mode. Jonathan Holmes describes playing the Prince as a kind of theatrical induction: “the role is configured as a rite of passage, but one which has recently become about maturing as an actor, entering a kind of performative adulthood and moving into the next phase as a performer” (2004, 112). Indeed, such is the part’s propensity to subsume the performer, that Anthony B. Dawson has proposed that when leading actors “take on Hamlet they help to reveal [nothing less than] an era’s understanding of subjectivity” (1995, 25). This identification is intensified through the common practice of hypothesising an extra-dramatic “life” for the character which often involves the composition of a biographical history during which the actor is frequently required to ask the kinds of questions of himself that L. C. Knights parodically posed in his famous attack on the overpersonalization of dramatic characters, How Many Children had Lady Macbeth? (1933). Goethe’s wrestling with the part is such an example. Having volunteered to play the Prince and having learnt the script, his problems were only just beginning: . . . the farther I advanced, the more difficult did it become for me to form any image of the whole, in its general bearings; till at last it seemed as if impossible. . . At one time the characters, at another time the manner of displaying them, seemed inconsistent; and I almost despaired of finding any general tint, in which I might present my whole part with all its shadings and variations. (Bate 1992, 303)

Goethe’s solution was to construct the Prince by imagining the effects of those experiences which had formed him: his father’s death, his mother’s overhasty marriage, his love for Ophelia and so on: “I set about investigating every trace of Hamlet’s character, as it had shown itself before his father’s death: I endeavoured to distinguish what in it was independent of this mournful event; independent of the terrible events that followed; and what most probably the young man would have been, had

Peter J. Smith

121

no such thing occurred” (Bate 1992, 303-04). This kind of dramatic incarnation of the Prince of Denmark is perhaps symptomatic of an anxiety which quite reasonably compels players to be sure about their performance before they go on stage, so that their knowledge of the character becomes a mechanism with which to reduce the vagaries of each performance. Whatever the reasons for actors’ desire for interpretative certainty in respect of characterisation, theoretically interested critics, poised over the ontological void of poststructuralism, are utterly resistant to making those kinds of choices. This difference in approach is largely responsible for the traditional enmity between theatrical practitioners on the one hand and academics on the other. The director Michael Bogdanov is contemptuous of “the gelatinous blancmange of academia” (1990, 241), while Edward Burns maintains that academics know best, “I am not suggesting that we instate any actor as a ‘critic’ of Shakespeare” (1990, 190). In England, an authoritative pronouncement on a literary or dramatic text still smacks of Leavisite tyranny, and the willingness of literary commentators to preface their interpretations with protests of their provisional nature is a virtual, if irritating, necessity. This means that the firmness of characterisation required by theatre practitioners is commonly eschewed by academics in their accounts of the same play. While a pluralistic, open attitude towards a play-text is considered to be a symptom of academic sophistication (and is certainly theoretically de rigueur), that same openness could cause chaos on stage. As far as Hamlet is concerned, this problem is acute, for while we have seen that the degree of personal commitment made by the performer is apparently more extreme than for any other role, the play has had a long history of critical uncertainty. More than any other dramatic work, Hamlet divides actors, of whom it demands almost total subjection, from critics, who acknowledge the play’s plasticity and emphasise its evasive tendencies. In addition, critical and theatrical perspectives are not merely methodologically distinct, they are hermeneutically contradictory. Critical accounts of character are teleological—concerned with the manner in which the outcomes of the play are accomplished by or consistent with its characterisation. A performer’s approach is essentially the reverse; as she or he explores “a way into the role,” so they will need to ask themselves questions relating to their character’s intentions. As Holmes puts it, “the introspective manner in which many actors construct character is more often than not fundamentally at odds with how that character is constructed in the script and subsequently reconstructed by the spectator”

122

Hamlet and Characterisation: Theory, Performance, Criticism

(2004, 17). This distinction raises yet another problem of characterisation which is to do with the presence of a knowing audience (see Figure 1). Because of the fact that the modern audience is likely to know the outcome of the play, it is not unusual for productions to challenge their expectations. For example, in Michael Bogdanov’s 1990 production of The Winter’s Tale for the English Shakespeare Company, the eagerly awaited bear was played by Leontes. In Simon Usher’s 1991 production of the same play for the Leicester Haymarket, the statue in the last scene was played uniquely (in my experience) by a statue (usually the part is taken by the actress playing Hermione standing very still). In these examples characterisation is being defamiliarized against the expectations of a knowing audience, and the fact that defamiliarization is in the eye of the beholder implies that—oddly—this kind of counter-characterisation is, at least partially, an audience activity. Put more simply, in its deviation from audience expectation, characterisation (or counter-characterisation) is reliant upon that expectation. Characterisation is not simply a problem that results from the clash of the theatrical and the academic nor the interaction of actor and audience: it is also, crucially, an issue of history. If a character is a fictional selfhood, then it follows that characterisation is the process of the representation of that fictional selfhood, which, in turn, implies that there is a selfhood to represent. However, Stephen Greenblatt has demonstrated the necessity of our re-evaluation of ideas of subjectivity. He suggests that the autonomous and integral self is a myth. In Renaissance Self-fashioning, he claims that in all the texts he considered from the period, “there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity” (1980, 256). Greenblatt’s challenge to essentialist and ahistorical conceptions of autonomous selves and his embedding of subjectivity within an ideological matrix will have enormous consequences for an account of characterisation. For if Greenblatt is right in his assertion that human subjectivity “was strictly delineated by the social and ideological system in force” (1980, 256), characterisation is a product not of the portrayal of pure or self-reliant personalities, nor even the collaboration of such personalities with those of the actors who represent them, but of a complex negotiation with discursive and historical forces beyond the theatre itself. The humanist idea/ideal of selfhood, against which Greenblatt’s argument is posed, stems from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Romantic aesthetic, predicated on ideas of unified self and imagination, displays the origins of the essentialism which was to become

Peter J. Smith

123

the hallmark of Shakespearean criticism thereafter. This conception of character with its consistency and interiority is, therefore, rarely found in pre-Romantic culture. Yet, in this respect, Hamlet is an exception. Francis Barker has identified it as a text which, while it pre-dates the idea of independent subjectivity, gropes its way towards such a destination: The historical prematurity of this subjectivity places it outside the limits of the text-world in which it is as yet emergent only in a promissory form. . . . At the centre of Hamlet, in the interior of his mystery, there is, in short, nothing. The promised essence remains beyond the scope of the text’s signification: or rather, signals the limit of the signification of this world by marking out the site of an absence it cannot fill. It gestures towards a place for subjectivity, but both are anachronistic and belong to a historical order whose outline has so far only been sketched out. (Barker 1984, 36-37)

History has, however, caught up with Hamlet, and the desire to describe and account for the behaviour of Shakespearean characters in terms of consistent and uniform subjectivities remains one of the most profound tendencies of post-Romantic criticism. What is more, this primacy of the subject is now so entrenched that when visible discontinuities of characterisation occur, discontinuities which, in Barker’s analysis, testify to the incipience of an autonomous subjectivity, they are interpreted as being consistent at a deeper level. For example, when Hamlet exhibits the contradictions that motivate the kinds of questions we ask of his character (intellect or madman; lover or misogynist; warrior or coward?), we account for these reversals in terms of his Machiavellian policy—his “antic disposition.” Thus the apparent discontinuities of Hamlet’s character can be read as the continuities of a buried life, so that the irreconcilablilities of personality noted by Greenblatt and Barker are disarmed and homogenized. Bridget Escolme has illustrated the deep-seatedness of the assumption that Hamlet’s psychology be consistent, albeit at some profound and not necessarily visible level. She cites Clive Johnson’s review of Mark Rylance’s performance of the Prince in a version directed by Giles Block staged at the Globe in 2000: “Hamlet is mad, then, all of a sudden, he is not. . . . Such a lack of complexity makes it impossible to identify with the characters. . . . It fatally means that Hamlet’s dilemma does not appear a dilemma at all” (2005, 66). Escolme contends rather that Rylance’s relationship with the audience “leaps repeatedly back and forth from knowing humour to the vulnerability of exposed grief,” and she concludes

124

Hamlet and Characterisation: Theory, Performance, Criticism

that Johnson’s disapproval resulted from “Rylance’s performance of madness [which] problematises the stable subjectivity that the reviewers would wish to see” (67). Whether or not we agree with Johnson or Escolme in respect of Rylance’s performance, the example illustrates that “stable subjectivity” is one of the key criteria according to which performances of Hamlet are interpreted and even evaluated. That Hamlet, in particular, facilitated Romantic aspirations to read dramatic characters as identifiable people, is clearly demonstrated by its popularity. It was the most frequently performed play and the one which dramatized more than any other the period’s fascination with problems of interiority (Bulman 1991, 26). Criticism from the period confirms the desire to acknowledge Hamlet’s contradictions and thus appropriate the character for a Romantic philosophy of the self. For William Hazlitt, Hamlet’s speeches “are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader’s mind. It is we who are Hamlet” (Williamson 1950, 46). Coleridge was more forthright and egocentric, “I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so” (Bate 1992, 161). Such identifications with Hamlet result in a series of idiosyncratic appropriations and a concomitant animation of the role which continue into the post-Romantic period. In response to Coleridge’s hubris, A. C. Bradley juxtaposes, for the purposes of comparison, the fictional Prince and the real poet: [Hamlet] must have been quick and impetuous in action; for it is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost, killing Polonius, dealing with the King’s commission on the ship, boarding the pirate [neither of which we do see], leaping into the grave, executing his final vengeance, could ever have been shrinking or slow in an emergency. Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things! (Bradley 1975, 87)

Bradley’s method of reading the characters both in and out of the drama leads to the most vertiginous double-takes—of Ophelia’s acquiescence to her father and Claudius, he writes, “One must remember, however, that she had never read the tragedy. Consider for a moment how matters looked to her. . . . She is frightened—why not? She is not Lady Macbeth. Rosalind would have been frightened” (130-31). We see here, and in the infamous “notes” that supplement the main body of the book, a criticism which is essentially a mode of explanation. Bradley’s task is to

Peter J. Smith

125

explicate the drama in terms of the plausibility of actions that real people might take.2 L. C. Knights’s New Critical insistence upon approaching the play through “an exact and sensitive study of Shakespeare’s handling of language” undermines Bradleian procedure as literally minded and critically irresponsible: “Wherever we look we find the same reluctance to master the words of the play, the same readiness to abstract a character and treat him (because he is more manageable that way) as a human being” (1933 17; 26). New Criticism, insists Knights, will avoid the kinds of “pseudo-critical investigations which are only slightly parodied by the title of this essay [that is, How Many Children had Lady Macbeth?]”; yet his linguistic approach, like all close reading, needs to rationalize ambiguities (64). Knights is subject to the tyranny of wholeness which is a defect implicit in his method; he talks repeatedly about “the total effect,” “the total response,” and “the full complex response” (7; 17; 28). Although, as we have seen above, the contradictions of Hamlet’s character can be explained as consistencies at a deeper level, Knights never gets as far as acknowledging the presence of such inconsistencies. Though Bradley’s psycho-biographising may strike us as naïve, at least it occurs in response to the contradictions the play presents, and Bradley is less determined than Knights to iron out discrepancies. In one sense Knights could be seen to be fleeing the afflictions and instabilities of personality brought about by the crisis of Modernism and seeking refuge in a holistic poetics. His prioritization of textual over all other concerns enables him to cast Bradley’s interest in dramatic characterisation as “the most fruitful of irrelevancies” (1). Between its first appearance as an article in 1910 and its final published form as a book in 1949, almost exactly in the middle of which Knights’s attack on the notion of character appeared, Ernest Jones’s theory of Hamlet as an exemplum of the Oedipus complex was being developed. Such a theory, a piece of applied psychoanalysis, relies fundamentally on the “reality” of the patient. In this respect, Jones is unashamedly Bradleian: “No dramatic criticism of the personæ in a play is possible except under the pretence that they are living people. . . . I propose to 2

Now a century old, Bradley’s contribution is still enduring. Recently Michael Taylor proposed that “The age of Bradley in its insistence on the special value of character criticism as a means of understanding Shakespeare’s plays, constitutes […] one of those eternal moments in criticism that will survive the predations of its competitors” (2001, 39).

126

Hamlet and Characterisation: Theory, Performance, Criticism

pretend that Hamlet was a living person” (1949, 17-19). Jones asserts that prior to the Oedipal solution “given by Freud, all the explanations of the mystery [of Hamlet’s delay] end in blind alleys” (127). He points out that Hamlet is distressed before he discovers his father’s murder and that, even after that revelation, “it is still his mother’s incest that dominates his emotions” (95). Claudius now occupies the position desired by Hamlet and is thus an alter-ego of the Prince; this is the reason for his failure to act. Whatever the validity of this approach, and it is one, admits Jones, that requires him to “[brave] the critics [for his investigation of] the unconscious mind of someone who never existed,” its virtue is its reluctance to flatten out contradictions (101). Just as Knights attacked Bradley, so John Dover Wilson led the assault on Jones, remarking in the preface to the third edition of his influential What Happens in Hamlet (1951) that “to abstract one figure from an elaborate dramatic composition and study it as a case in the psychoanalytical clinic is to attempt something at once wrong in method and futile in aim” (vii). Yet the merit of Jones’s approach (which it shares with Bradley’s) is its willingness to preserve tensions and incongruities. Whereas Knights attempts to resolve them in his accounts of language, imagery, style, and so on, Jones asserts that it is the inconsistencies of characterisation that mutually reinforce the discernment of Hamlet’s repression of incestuous drives and the Freudian theory which postulates their existence. Freudian accounts of dramatic characters are currently unfashionable, perhaps because of a reluctance to acknowledge the existence of a self that lies beyond the boundaries of socialised respectability. Nevertheless, it is this tension between desire and repression which, in terms of psychoanalytic models, transforms Hamlet from a fictional role into the embodiment of human contradictoriness. Whether we go along with Freud, Jones or, nowadays, Lacan, the fact that Hamlet seems so hospitable to psychoanalytic readings is simply the latest manifestation of its capacities for dramatising the problems of characterisation and their theatrical impersonation. 3 Hamlet, it seems, continues to inform and to be

3

For all its alleged theoretical difficulty, Lacan’s essay is distinctly Bradleian in places: “If Hamlet had been given his papers to travel to Wittenberg, there would have been no drama” (1977, 18). See Nigel Wheale’s “‘Vnfolde your selfe’: Jacques Lacan and the psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet,” in Smith and Wood 1966, 108-32.

Peter J. Smith

127

informed by each occasion on which the representation of selfhood is interrogated—theoretically, performatively or critically.

Works Cited Primary Sources Bennett, Alan. 1994. Writing Home. London: Faber. Dickens, Charles. 1965. Great Expectations. Ed. Angus Calder. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Fielding, Henry. 1966. The History of Tom Jones. Ed. R. P. C. Mutter. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Greene, Graham. 1968. In Search of a Character: Two African Journals. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Shakespeare, William. 2005. The Complete Works. 2nd edition. Ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Secondary Sources Barker, Francis. 1984. The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection. London: Methuen. Bate, Jonathan, ed. 1992. The Romantics on Shakespeare. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Bogdanov, Michael, and Michael Pennington. 1990. The English Shakespeare Company: The Wars of the Roses. London: Nick Hern Books. Bradley, A. C. 1975. Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Macmillan. Brockbank, Philip, ed. 1985. Players of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bulman, James C. 1991. The Merchant of Venice. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Burns, Edward. 1990. Character, Actor and Being on the Early Modern Stage. London: Macmillan. Davison, Peter. 1983. Hamlet: Text and Performance. London: Macmillan. Dawson, Anthony B. 1995. Hamlet: Shakespeare in Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Escolme, Bridget. 2005. Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self. Abingdon: Routledge.

128

Hamlet and Characterisation: Theory, Performance, Criticism

Greenblatt, Stephen. 1980. Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hattaway, Michael. 1982. Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Holmes, Jonathan. 2004. Merely Players? Actors’ Accounts of Performing Shakespeare. London: Routledge. Jackson, Russell, and Robert Smallwood, eds. 1993. Players of Shakespeare 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Ernest. 1949. Hamlet and Oedipus. London: Victor Gollancz. Kerrigan, William. 1994. Hamlet’s Perfection. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Knights, L. C. 1933. How Many Children had Lady Macbeth? Cambridge: G. Fraser, The Minority Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Desire and the interpretation of desire in Hamlet. Yale French Studies 55-56: 11-52. Pennington, Michael. 1996. Hamlet: A User’s Guide. London: Nick Hern Books. Smith, Peter J., and Nigel Wood, eds. 1996. Hamlet: Theory in Practice. Buckingham: Open University Press. States, Bert O. 1992. Hamlet and the Concept of Character. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Taylor, Michael. 2001. Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williamson, Claude C. H. 1950. The Character of Hamlet. London: W. H . Allen. Wilson, John Dover. 1951. What Happens in Hamlet, 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worthen, W. B. 1997. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART IV SELFHOOD AND SIGNATURE

SIGNS, SIGNATURE, SELFHOOD IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE FRANÇOIS LAROQUE

We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment . . . it is not the act of a settled judgement to judge us simply by our outward deeds; we must probe right down inside and find out what principles make things move . . . 1 —Montaigne 1991, 380

In John Donne’s “A Valediction,” the speaker signs his name in the window and calls it “this ragged bony name” and “my ruinous anatomy,” 2 two phrases that create the image of a skeleton, negative self, possibly referring to the shadowy letters on a painting that may be opposed to the still life objects or to the sitters that are the substance of representation as such. In early modern Europe, the art of signing one’s name was for the artist a way of leaving his imprint in an unobtrusive, ingenious or pompous way, making his name in the painting a form of riddle, rebus or visual conceit. In Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, the question of the name is addressed by way of anagrams, coded initials, secret inscriptions in “his sugared sonnets among his private friends” (Meres

1

“Nous sommes tous de lopins et d’une contexture si diverse, que chaque piece, chaque moment faict son jeu. Et se trouve autant de difference de nous à nous mesmes, que de nous à autry . . . ce n’est pas tour de rassis entendement de nous juger simplement par nos actions de dehors; il faut sonder jusqu’au dedans, et voir par quels ressorts se donne le bransle . . . ” (Montaigne 1969, 10-11). 2 From “A Valediction: Of My Name in the Window,” Donne 1996, 87-89.

François Laroque

131

1932, 46). These marks of identification are then erased in the printed text. 3 I will here address the question of the appearance and disappearance of the name, that of the presence or absence of these signs of intelligence, but also the riddle of the signature which is the ultimate print of selfhood, even though it may not be equated with the presence of the self as such. Indeed, the signature represents a duplication of the self, a shadow, a reflection in a mirror, a kind of masked self-portrait. Such redoubling of the name may be read as a form of echo but also as an epitaph. In most cases, the signature appears as a sign to be read or deciphered. These marks turn the picture into a kind of theatre. I will leave aside all signatures that serve no other purpose than that of illustrating the artist’s ingeniosity, his art of staging his own image inside the picture, in order to focus on the signatures that have been endowed with a blend of authenticity and strangeness (Unheimlichkeit) as in some paintings by Van Eyck, Holbein, Mantegna and Caravaggio. One may also wonder whether some dramatic texts of the period are also resorting to similar effects in order to problematize the question of self and selfhood on both page and stage.

Signing one’s name in early modern painting In his Treatise of Signatures, the German alchemist and professor of medicine Oswald Crollius (1560-†1609) sees in the so-called “natural” signature a character which he says is “not inscribed with the mark but with the fingerprint of God,” and the means through which “things occult are made visible and revealed.” 4 In other words, the signature was thought of as God’s index, or fingerprint, revealing the hidden properties of minerals, plants or animals. This allowed the Renaissance physician to explore and exploit the correspondences between the smaller, inner world of man and the larger outer world of nature in order to develop his pharmacology and means of healing. Now, as opposed to this, the early modern painter resorted to the visual strategy of disegno in his work, 3

See Smith 1991, 243: “Writers of verse in manuscript had a number of . . . ways of indicating such differences in discourse and of signalling the presence of secrets: by giving certain words special emphasis, by writing them larger, by putting them in italics, by using capital letters . . . ” 4 My translation of “non marquees avec l’ancre, ains avec le doigt de Dieu . . . les choses occultes sont renduës visibles & descouvertes . . .” (Crollius 1976, 35).

132

Signs, Signature, Selfhood in Early Modern Europe

where his signature was regarded as a seal of authenticity, as his own trademark, as it were, at a time when the pupils of his workshop certainly had the ability to counterfeit the hand of the master. This signature was also required by the patron and client, whether he was a prince, a bishop or some rich art collector, since buyers were naturally anxious to have a certified original rather than a copy. Indeed, if the pupil could ape his master’s style, he would not forge his signature. In Twelfth Night, Maria’s letter illustrates the confusion of such a situation, in which Malvolio is tricked into believing that he has acquired the possession of Olivia, who earlier on had assimilated her face to a painted portrait. 5 When at the end, Olivia declares that this is not her “hand,” he realizes that he has been the victim of a forgery and exits while crying out for revenge. 6 As against this, the painter’s and patron’s common desire to identify selfhood with some kind of certified signature, inscription or monogram, was also paradoxically responsible for inserting an artificial or even alien element inside a given scene or within a world of things. In which case, the name engraved upon the window, as in Donne’s poem, can only serve to point to a passage, to a form of fleeting presence and finally to absence. Like the poet who returns to haunt his piece by means of a detail that may not be apparent at first sight, the painter may also want to tell the viewer that he has indeed disappeared, that he is now dead. So, in this glance through the looking glass and beyond the grave, signing or engraving one’s own name amounts to writing one’s own epitaph. In Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage, 7 the artist’s signature, rich in scrolls, arabesques and various intricate designs, can be seen on the back wall just above the mirror in which the invisible part of the picture is being revealed to the viewer, namely the image of the artist before the two sitters, that is to say, the couple about to be married. This signature scratches the wall, it appears like a crack or coded writing on it, while its convoluted shapes recall the carpet frame, the complicated ironwork of the chandelier, the lace on the lady’s headdress, the fur-linings of the clothes

5

Olivia: “we will draw the curtain and show you the picture” (Twelfth Night, 1.5.222-23). 6 Olivia: “Alas Malvolio, this is not my writing, / Though I confess much like the character, / But out of question, ’tis Maria’s hand (5.1.336-38). 7 References to paintings and some of their details are available on a number of Internet sites which are all easily accessible. The footnotes give the address of the site where each painting may be viewed. http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sylvain.weisse/arnolfini/explicintf.htm

François Laroque

133

and even the curls of the little dog’s hair. It sets off the mirror, which appears like a strange eye at the back, like the eye of an optical cabinet. “Johannes de Eyck fuit hic. 1434.” The painter’s signature is a way of recording his passage and it also serves to date the painting. But the Latin motto is quite ambiguous and may conceal a quibble. If the first meaning is indeed “Jan van Eyck was here,” the Eyck/hic paronomasia makes the Dutch and Latin words almost interchangeable, so that the inscription may also be parsed as “Jan van Eyck was the one,” a reading which would then refer to the red-hatted man whose reflection is seen in the mirror.8 The painter’s signature is thus completed by a fuzzy, ambiguous self-portrait, 9 as, in another painting dating back to 1433 and now hanging in the National Gallery, London, Van Eyck has represented himself as “the redturbaned man.” So, in the fascinating reversible Arnolfini picture, the spectator stands both in front and behind the scene. Van Eyck makes us see the wings behind the stage, the other side of the coin, thus providing us with an alternative perspective. Through such mise en abyme, the painter is able to transgress the ordinary laws of perception, as in Troilus and Cressida, when Achilles exclaims: . . . nor doth the eye itself, That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself, Not going from itself, but eye to eye opposed Salutes each other with each other’s form. For speculation turns not to itself Till it hath travelled and is mirrored there Where it may see itself. (3.3.106-12)

In Van Eyck’s piece, the scrolls of the letter “k” can be seen just below the ring of the chandelier, immediately level with the first of the ten crenelated teeth of the mirror, that is to say, in the very geometrical centre of the canvas. Jacques Darriulat makes an interesting analysis of such optical games: By reminding the viewer of his presence, Van Eyck unsettles this optical perspective. In order to set it right, he must now focus on the image in the mirror and turn it inside out like a glove. The cheeky signature suggests the possibility of such a reversal. Far from being a curiosity, a mathematical

8 9

http://www.users.skynet.be/litterature/lecture/vaneyck.htm#Arnolfini On this see Genin 1998, 262-63.

134

Signs, Signature, Selfhood in Early Modern Europe fantasy, the curvilinear perspective shows the essence of perception and brings it alive to our eye. It is the real geometry of inwardness. . . . In the marital temple where bride and bridegroom are about to become one, Van Eyck, by using the mirror as a magnifiying glass, has painted in it our tiny shadow. He wanted his name to be written on the wall in order to become immortal like the tourists who write their names on the stones of monuments so that those who come after them may know that they were 10 here. So these letters are only there to signify their absence . . .

The symbolic and iconic elements are here placed side by side, back to back, as it were, as if the signifier had been unfolded and placed alongside the signified. As a matter of fact, signature and self-portrait appear as the two sides of the same coin. The signature is naturally inscribed in the places that are relevant to writing such as book, a letter or a cartelino. 11 In the particular case of an emblematic signature, a flower, a butterfly, a dragon, and so on may become the painter’s trademark, as in the case of a family coat of arms. 12 Some signatures may also be arranged as rebuses, as in Holbein’s Ambassadors, where the skull anamorphosis appears as an image of Hohl[es] Bein (hollow bone), in order to quibble on his own name. 13 Such an ingenious device may be regarded as a visual counterpart of the onomastic polyphony through which Petrarch, in his Canzoniere, plays with the sounds of Laura’s name, successively parsed as laura (the laurel tree), l’aura (the air), l’oro (gold), and then resorting to the lodano (the

10

My translation of a passage from Darriulat 1993, 29-32: “En rappelant sa présence, van Eyck a bouleversé notre optique. Il nous faut maintenant, pour la remettre d’aplomb, rétablir l’image virtuelle du miroir et la retourner comme un gant. La signature insolente suggère ce renversement. . . . Loin d’être une curiosité, une fantaisie de géomètre, la perspective curviligne manifeste et rend sensible l’essence de notre vision. . . . [Elle] est la véritable géométrie de l’intériorité. . . . Ainsi voit-on s’évanouir le peintre dans la goutte d’eau du miroir des Arnolfini. Jan van Eyck enseigne l’art de s’effacer devant soi-même. . . . En ce temple nuptial où s’uniront les époux, van Eyck a gravé, grâce à la loupe du miroir, notre minuscule reflet. S’il voulut que son nom fût inscrit sur le mur, c’est poussé par un désir d’immortalité, comme ces visiteurs de passage qui taillent leurs intitiales dans la pierre des monuments . . . pour les autres qui passeront après eux, afin qu’ils sachent qu’ils sont jadis passés. Ainsi leurs lettres ne sont-elles là que pour indiquer leur absence.” 11 See Alice Vincens-Villepreux 1994, xxi-ii. 12 Ibid., xxii. 13 http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/holbein/ambassadors.jpg.html

François Laroque

135

praise) / la donna (the woman) anagrams. 14 As far as English poetry is concerned, one may think of the famous “Will sonnets,” where the poet quibbles on all possible meanings of the word “will,” as well as on his own name (Will for William), just as the final couplet of sonnet 145 contains an inescapable allusion to his wife, Ann Hattaway: “‘I hate’ from ‘hate’ away she threw, / And saved my life, saying ‘not you.’”15 “And” is probably also to be heard as “Ann” (the “d” being hardly audible when placed before the “s” of “saved”), and “hate away” as an allusion to Ann Hattaway, whom Shakespeare married in 1582 when he was only eighteen. In a similar way, Donne quibbles on his name, as well as on his wife’s maiden name, Ann More, in “A Hymn to God the Father” when he exclaims: “When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For I have more.” 16 This is a way for the poet to stage his own presence by means of an acoustic game or anagram, which may also be seen as the equivalent of some magic incantation. A taste for the secret and the arcane leads to the rebus, a visual equivalent of the pun which spells out the signifiers through a series of sound associations. As already noted, this is particularly striking on Holbein’s Vexierbild, or secret picture. As in the case of the erased inscriptions on tombs, the artist’s signature may sometimes look illegible, hidden or incomplete. This should be placed alongside what Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani describes as “the desire to read, decipher a hardly legible, even unreadable, inscription, graffito, a hieroglyph, half erased letters which might conceal some proper name, an author’s name.” 17 In his painting, the artist plays at making himself invisible in order to invite the viewer to read the image in the carpet and his name somewhere in the general background or in the particular arrangement of objects in the painting. The arabesques of the name, as in Van Eyck’s latinate scroll, are a symbolic design where the various angles and broken lines might be refracted and condensed (as in the case of the triangle formed by the red shoes in front of the sofa), like the spirals and circles that make up the formal structure of the scene. In this particular technique, we are confronted with some kind of learned game, with a form 14

See Fineman 1986, 75. Shakespeare 1986, 149. 16 Donne 1996, 348. 17 My translation of “le rêve de lire, de déchiffrer une inscription peu lisible, voire illisible, à un graffito, à un hiéroglyphe, à des lettres demi-effacées qui cacheraient un nom propre, un nom d’auteur” (Mathieu-Castellani 1996, 165). 15

136

Signs, Signature, Selfhood in Early Modern Europe

of cryptic knowledge, in which signature and image keep duplicating each other in a sort of infinite recession. Holbein’s anamorphosis is another famous tour de force, which I will analyse before analysing the image in the clouds in Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian or in various intriguing self-portraits by Michaelangelo or Caravaggio, where both artists have represented themselves as flayed or beheaded figures.

The hollow signs of selfhood 1. The Ambassadors In Holbein’s famous painting, The Ambassadors, the artist’s selfportrait as a memento mori looks like a fuzzy form below the ambassadors’ feet. Contrary to Van Eyck’s self-image in the mirror, this oblong stain does not belong to the overall décor, as it arouses the viewer’s curiosity and, according to Daniel Arasse, it literally “deconstructs” the painting. It invites us to take a second look which will allow one to discover what this critic calls the “moral meaning” of the piece: Christ dominates the oblique vision that discloses the moral sense. He signs this memento mori which other tiny details (a jumped string on a lute, a death-head brooch on the hat of the ambassador Jean de Dinteville) that correspond to another view (that of the “moral eye”); such memory of death is recalled by the “hollow bone” (Holbein) through which the painter duplicates with a colour sign the signature at the foot of the crucifix. Johannes Holbein pingebat. 1533. The temporary erasure of the scene does not glorify the painter’s art (even though the anamorphosis is a real tour de force) but enhances the spiritual significance that spectacularly reverses the glory of an all-too-human knowledge whose vanity I displayed in the scientific instruments at the centre of the painting.

And the critic concludes his analysis with the following crisp clincher: “The art of painting is cosa mentale.” 18 18 My translation of “Le Christ joue comme un souverain du regard latéral qui fait voir le sens moral. Il signe ce memento mori qu’énoncent d’autres détails, aussi peu visibles (une corde cassée sur le luth, un médaillon à tête de mort sur le béret de l’ambassadeur Jean de Dinteville . . . obéissant à la légitimité d’un regard autre (celui de ‘l’œil moral’); c’est cette mémoire de la mort que rappelle ‘l’os creux’ (Holbein) avec lequel le peintre redouble, par une tache de peinture, la signature qu’il a écrite au pied du Crucifié . . . Johannes Holbein pingebat. 1533. Ce qui

137

The relationship between the signature hidden in the shadow of the pavement underneath the small crucifix does bring together the two sides of signifier and signified in a representation of the name, which appears both as word and thing. The letter is here anamorphosed as ghost: Hohles Bein. Some interpretations go as far as to suggest that the anamorphosis might contain another hidden pun on the name of the bishop who, in this crucial moment of the spring of 1533, was preparing himself to reveal the marriage of Ann Boleyn and Henry VIII and thus the divorce of the latter in spite of the Pope’s opposition to it. He was no other than Thomas Cranmer, whose name may be read in French as crâne mère. In that reading, the hollow bone is the contrary of a memento mori and becomes a matrix, or womb, preparing for a new birth. It has indeed been maintained that, if one places a cylindrical mirror above the nasal cavity of the skull, one may then make out another image which is supposed to look like “[the] shrivelled face of a foetus or of a baby.” 19 These various optical tricks are also onomastic games which call for multiple and contradictory readings. Thus a name game may well hide another, as the anamorphic skull would simultaneously refer to tomb and womb, a form of contrariety which is a visual anticipation of Donne’s metaphysical conceits. The skull becomes a sort of Chinese box where the two in-built anamorphoses are to be seen poles apart, just as the two separate acts pit the vain opulence of secular knowledge and worldly pomp against the bare bones of mortality and spiritual asceticism.

2. Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian 20 In the upper left-hand corner of a painting which depicts the agony of Saint Sebastian shot through by no fewer than fourteen arrows, one may make out a strange form in the cloud which looks like a ghostly figure riding a white horse. Is he a divine messenger, an image of the saint’s soul,

signifie ici la ruine locale du tableau n’est pas l’émergence de la peinture (bien que le crâne soit un tour de force), mais le regard spirituel qui renverse catastrophiquement la gloire de ce savoir trop humain dont les instruments de science et de représentation portent témoignage au centre privilégié de l’image.” . . “L’art de la peinture est cosa mentale,” Arasse 1992, 169. 19 My translation of “[le] visage chiffonné d’un foetus ou d’un bébé,” Lecercle 1996, 110. 20 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Sebastian_(Mantegna)

138

Signs, Signature, Selfhood in Early Modern Europe

a whim of Nature, or even a visual pun deprived of any kind of iconographic meaning? In his book, Sébastien le renaissant, Jacques Darriulat analyses this small-size painting at length, only to conclude that “the knight which, on the Vienna Saint Sebastian, rides the clouds, is an allegory of painting.” 21 Other works by Mantegna like Minerva Chasing the Vices from the Garden of Virtue 22 also resort to this visual conceit of faces hiding in the clouds. What Mantegna wanted, according to Darriulat, was “to leave in his paintings like a characteristic sign, a second signature as it were, an uncanny image generated by a whim of nature.” 23 A good example of this technique is found in another self-portrait in The Wedding Chamber, a fresco in the ducal palace at Mantua (1474). 24 According to Daniel Arasse, “this self-portrait also testifies to the role of the painting hanging in the room: to show something secret, to make something invisible visible.” 25 Incongruous and hardly visible, the signature mascarading as self-portrait in a dark corner of the painting or fresco may come to life only to the eyes of those who can see it, and, most of those who could, had already heard about similar tricks.

3. Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement 26 Another strange signature by way of self-portrait is found in Michelangelo’s weird representation of his own face on the folds of Saint Bartholomew’s flayed skin, which the saint is holding in front of him at arms’ length in a detail of the famous Last Judgement fresco in the Sistine chapel in Rome. According to Marianne Massin, such an “odd signature” is nothing but a rewriting of Titian’s flaying of Marsyas 27 in front of Jesus Christ, the new Apollo, in sparkling daylight. Speaking of the “thematic richness of this Marsyas painted as a martyr,” she adds: 21 My translation of “le chevalier qui, sur le St Sébastien de Vienne, caracole dans les nuées, est une allégorie de la peinture” (Darriulat 1998, 131). 22 http://www.insecula.com/oeuvre/photo_ME0000058002.html 23 My translation of “loger dans ses compositions comme une marque caractéristique et presque comme une seconde signature, une image insolite engendrée par un caprice de la nature” (132-33). 24 http://www.thais.it/speciali/MANTEGNA/pagina_1.htm 25 My translation of “cet autoportrait sert aussi d’indice de la fonction dont est chargée la peinture dans la salle: peindre quelque chose de secret, rendre visible quelque chose d’invisible” (Arasse 1992, 223). 26 http://www.christusrex.org/ww1/sistine/40-Judge.html 27 http://www.abcgallery.com/T/titian/titian90.html

139 Pride and humility, there’s no choosing between them. The self-portrait is torn between the two, just as the martyr is being rent between his sinner’s flesh and his redemption through torture. . . . The ravished bodies are painted side by side all around the solar god. . . . And if the ecstasy of the redeemed body is one of the figures in these gyrating bodies, postures and beliefs, its negative counterpart is found in the weighty, hallucinated 28 sluggishness of the melancholy body . . .

This negative double which represents the materiality of the body prior to its redemption and reincarnation on the Day of Judgement is a signature that may be read in two opposite ways: in malo, as an illustration of the horror of physical torment, but also in bono, as an ugly “perspective” that may “cohere and jump” 29 into a happy shape, that of the glorious body of the saint at the feet of triumphant Christ.

4. Caravaggio’s strange signatures A major figure of the Seicento and the great master of chiaroscuro, Caravaggio also specialized in the painting of severed heads, as in David and Goliath, 30 Judith and Holofernes 31 or the head on Perseus’s shield in Medusa. 32 In all these paintings, he depicts his face with his eyes glazed by death. The painter has become his own ghost in a piece which may be seen as an adumbration of Antonin Artaud’s théâtre de la cruauté. But it is in Caravaggio’s largest piece, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, 33 painted in Malta in 1608, that he worked out what was to be his most stunning effect, powerfully rendered in the bright red colour of Saint John the Baptist’s shirt. In this one and only painting signed in the hand of the artist, Caravaggio has inscribed his name inside the blood streaming from

28 My translation of “richesse thématique de ce Marsyas en martyr”; “Orgueil et humilité, il n’y a pas à choisir. L’autoportrait est partagé entre les deux, comme le martyr est écartelé entre sa chair peccable et sa rédemption par le supplice . . . Les corps ravis s’agglutinent en grappes compactes autour du dieu solaire . . . Et si l’extase du corps rédimé est l’une des figures de ce tournoiement des corps, des postures et des croyances, c’est au même titre que son double négatif: l’inertie pesante, hallucinée du corps mélancolique . . .” (Massin 2001, 208-14). 29 Twelfth Night, 5.1.246. 30 http://www.abcgallery.com/C/caravaggio/caravaggio55.html 31 http://www.abcgallery.com/C/caravaggio/caravaggio22.html 32 http://www.abcgallery.com/C/caravaggio/caravaggio18.html 33 http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/caravagg/10/62behead.html

140

Signs, Signature, Selfhood in Early Modern Europe

the neck of the martyr so as to delineate the ten letters of his name on the floor beneath. Here is what Mina Gregori writes in her biography: This piece of work leaves the viewer in dumbfounded silence, as if he were confronted with something that both implies and transcends him/her; but we cannot read the signature without a certain dread since this signature is painted red with the blood running from the neck of the beheaded saint. This dramatic intensity immediately calls to mind the painter’s biography and what must have been his angst after being banished [for murder]. Such was the secret kept by the artist but which was to be disclosed soon after, thus leading to his arrest, his escape and flight through Sicily . . . 34

The painting becomes a form of exorcism, a confession as well as a cynical provocation, in which the painter would play the dangerous, perverse game of exposing his own crime (he had fled from Rome to Malta because he was under investigation for murder). Symbolically, this piece looks like the visual counterpart of Dr Faustus’s compact signed with the blood of the artist, the bloody signature becoming here a form of self-revelation, as well as a foreshadowing of his oncoming doom. In these examples, where the artist seems to paint his work on his own flesh, the canvas becomes the symbolic equivalent of his flayed skin. One might see here another parallel with the mystery of Saint Veronica (the etymology of her name being vera icon or “true image”), where the face of Christ imprints itself like a photograph on the handkerchief of the saintly woman. The artist would thus turn the idea of martyrdom to his own profit, his canvas becoming then the site of some uncanny exposure, simultaneously representing a sort of visual miracle, as well as the act of painting itself. Van Eyck was also the author of a painting of the Holy Face, a piece now lost (though a painting by the “Maître de la Flémalle,” Robert Campin, 35 now hanging in Frankfurt’s Fine Arts museum, is reputed to be a close equivalent of it). Michelangelo or Caravaggio went 34 My translation of “La vision de cette œuvre laisse dans un silence stupéfait, comme devant quelque chose qui à la fois nous implique et nous transcende; mais on ne peut lire la signature sans éprouver un frisson parce que cette signature est tracée dans le rouge, autrement dit dans la coulée de sang qui jaillit du cou du saint décapité. Cette efficacité dramatique rappelle immédiatement l’existence du peintre et le poids du bannissement capital qui le poursuivait [pour meurtre]. C’était là le secret que l’artiste gardait par-devers lui mais qui devait être découvert peu après, causant son arrestation, puis son évasion et sa fuite à travers la Sicile” (Gregori 1994, 135). 35 http://www.abcgallery.com/C/campin/campin11.html

François Laroque

141

much further than this and, just as Marlowe does not hesitate to damn Dr Faustus, the tragic hero with whom he identifies, the torment or martyrdom is here self-inflicted. The aesthetic contract turns into a bloody pact, in which the artist must pay a heavy price for his genius. The painter, then, is close to Mark Antony’s situation, when he claims that “the shirt of Nessus is upon [him]” (Antony and Cleopatra, 4.12.43). He alludes to the deadly trap which had caused Hercules to die in horrible torments after his own skin, poisoned by the blood of the centaur, had been torn away from him. As far as Holbein, Michelangelo and Caravaggio are concerned, it would also seem as if the artist signs his canvas with his own blood when he paints his own face on a shapeless flayed skin or as a skull, so that he can only spring to life and be redeemed by the look of the viewer. In a way, the early modern painter imagines himself in a position similar to that of Hamlet’s ghost when he reveals his dire fate to his mesmerized son: Sleeping within my orchard, My custom always of the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, And in the porches of my ears did pour The leperous distilment, whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine, And a most instant tetter bark’d about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust All my smooth body. Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatch’d, Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d, No reck’ning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. O horrible! O horrible! most horrible! (Hamlet, 1.5.59-80)

The way old Hamlet paints his own death, after the throes he went through both as victim and spectator of his own suffering, shows his blood curdling under the effect of the poison as his body is being covered with a

142

Signs, Signature, Selfhood in Early Modern Europe

“loathsome crust.” This becomes the signature of Claudius’s crime which cries for revenge and is thus now inscribed in the great book of memory: Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmix’d with baser matter. Yes, by heaven! 36 (Hamlet, 1.5.95-104)

The invisible signature is that of the moral contract sealed between father and son within the “book and volume of [the] brain.” Vengeance is called for in order to reveal the truth. Similarly, in Caravaggio’s aesthetic contract, the artist vanishes behind his own work, entirely absorbed by it, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 37: As a decrepit father takes delight To see his active child do deeds of youth, So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite, Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth: For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit, Or any of these all, or all, or more, Entitled in thy parts do crowned sit, I make my love engrafted to this store: So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised, Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give That in thy abundance am sufficed, And by a part of all thy glory live: Look what is best, that best I wish in thee;

36

On the link between selfhood, or inwardness, and the dramatic soliloquy, see Michael Neill’s analysis (1998, 157): “In such a culture, selfhood, rather than being located specifically within the body of an individual, may be thought of as dispersed through the whole person . . . Yet . . . this way of experiencing the self was already under considerable pressure [through] the rapid development of literary forms concerned in various ways with the exploration or expression of inwardness—the sonnet, the Montaignean essay, autobiographical memoirs, and especially the dramatic soliloquy.”

François Laroque This wish I have, then ten times happy me.

143 37

This sonnet is built on an inversion of the respective places of the painter and his model. The father (the artist) gives pride of place to the son (the young man), since the poet turns himself into a shadow, while his dedicatee becomes the substance. By the same token, the letter’s mysterious monogram in Twelfth Night, M.O.A.I., metaphorically signals itself as a bloody signature which Malvolio is invited to decipher: I may command where I adore, But silence like a Lucrece knife With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore. M.O.A.I. doth sway my life. (Twelfth Night, 2.5.100-03)

When he allows himself to be deluded by vanity and thinks that he is invited to read his own name encrypted in the enigmatic motto, Malvolio is taken in, only to be further victimized by the comic group. Like old Hamlet, he leaves the stage swearing, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” (Twelfth Night, 5.1.368). Maria’s trap chastises Olivia’s overproud steward without allowing him to attain any form of self-knowledge, so that the forged signature or letter works like a distorting mirror. So, in early modern painting and literature, the signature was used as an ambiguous mark of selfhood. In the sphere of painting, it became a fashionable counterpart of the self-portrait, while it is turned into a counterfeit, or “changeling,” in the contrasted genres of the comedy of errors and of the revenge tragedy. The signature was turned into a visual conceit, part of an aesthetic contract in which the painter contemplates his own image sub specie aeternitatis: indeed, in the hic fuit or pingebat mottoes, the imperfect suggests that the painting has been interrupted by the death of the artist and remains as a piece still in the making. In the world of tragedy, the contract amounted to a form of bloody pact like the one signed by Dr Faustus with Mephistopheles. Nomen omen. Names are portentous signs, as the Latin phrase reminds us. The name in the signature signals the dangers inherent in the statement of oneself and in the imprint of selfhood on the early modern stage. The artist’s name anamorphosed as a rebus, as a martyr’s flayed skin or as an 37

Shakespeare 1986, 95.

144

Signs, Signature, Selfhood in Early Modern Europe

inscription in the clouds, may also have been a means of exorcising the evil eye of envy and of redirecting it onto others, just as Perseus reflected the Gorgon’s face on his shield in order to kill her. But the tragic hero is placed centre stage. So, Mark Antony describes the protean shapes of the clouds in ambiguous images that suggest dismemberment on the rack, as well as the dissolution of all forms: That which is now a horse, even with a thought The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct As water is in water . . . . . . Here I am Antony, Yet cannot hold this visible shape . . . (Antony and Cleopatra, 4.14.9-14)

It would seem that the artist empties himself of his own substance and life by forging beautiful images. He is aware that beauty is nothing but an alluring veil that serves to conceal the hidden horrors beneath. When he signs, he bleeds—“signer c’est saigner,” as Derrida puts it à propos of Francis Ponge: Signature as rebus, signature as metonymy or anagram make it simultaneously possible and impossible, they make signature a sort of “double bind.” It is as if the thing . . . must absorb, drink, keep the proper name in order to retain it. But, at the same time, while it keeps, drinks and 38 absorbs it, it is as if it (or its name) lost or sullied the proper name.

In The Ambassadors, the stain which sponges off the name is the anamorphic skull, while, in the Arnolfini, the thing which absorbs it espouses it since it is nothing but a mirror reflecting the distorted image of the painter. The signature, the sign of early modern selfhood, either espouses or reflects. It is also a marker and a guarantee of authenticity which, in painting and dramatic texts alike, also served to put the question of identity

38 My translation of “La signature rébus, la signature métonymique ou anagrammatique sont bien la condition de possibilité et d’impossibilité, le double bind d’un événement de signature. Comme si la chose . . . devait absorber le nom propre, le boire, le retenir pour le garder. Mais, du même coup, le gardant, le buvant, l’absorbant, c’est comme si elle (ou son nom) perdait ou souillait le nom propre” (Derrida 1977, 138).

François Laroque

145

and identification, both as a statement of the artist’s real hand and as a means of erasing his shadowy presence.

Works cited Primary sources Crollius, Oswald. 1976. Traicté des signatures ou vraye et vive anatomie du grand & petit monde. Sebastiani collection. Milan: Archè. Donne, John. 1996. The Complete English Poems. Ed. A. J. Smith. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Meres, Francis. 1932. Paladis Tamia, or Wit’s Treasury (1598). In The Shakspere-Allusion-Book, ed. J. Munro. 2 vols. London : Oxford University Press. Montaigne, Michel de. 1969. De l’inconstance de nos actions. In Essais: Livre II, ed. Alexandre Micha, 5-11. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. ———. 1991. The Complete Essays. Trans. M. A. Screech. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin. Shakespeare, William. 1982. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen. ———. 1986. The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint. Ed. John Kerrigan. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. ———. 1990. Antony and Cleopatra. Ed. David Bevington. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1995. Twelfth Night. Ed. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells. Oxford: University Press. ———. 1998. Troilus and Cressida. Ed. David Bevington. The Arden Shakespeare. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons.

Secondary sources Arasse, Daniel. 1992. Le détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture. Paris: Flammarion. Darriulat, Jacques. 1993. Métaphores du regard. Essai sur la formation des images en Europe depuis Giotto. Paris: Lagune. ———. 1999. Sébastien le renaissant. Paris: Lagune. Derrida, Jacques. 1977. Signéponge. In Colloque de Cerisy Francis Ponge. Paris: Claude Bourgois. Fineman, Joel. 1986. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in The Sonnets. Berkeley: University of California Press.

146

Signs, Signature, Selfhood in Early Modern Europe

Genin, Christophe. 1998. Réflexions de l’art. Essai sur l’autoréférence en art. Paris: Éditions Kimé. Gregori, Mina. 1995. Caravage. Trans. Odile Ménégaux. Paris: Gallimard. Lecercle, Ann. 1996. Le problème du désir dans Hamlet. In Hamlet ou le texte en question, ed. Gilles Mathis and Pierre Sahel. Paris: Éditions Messene. Massin, Mariane. 2001. Les figures du ravissement. Enjeux philosophiques et esthétiques. Paris: Grasset. Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle. 1996. Rue Shakespeare. Les lettres parlantes et l’inscription du nom. In Shakespeare: variations sur la lettre, le mètre et la mesure, ed. Dominique Goy-Blanquet. Collection Sterne. Amiens: Presses de l’UFR de Langues, Université de Picardie. Neill, Michael. 1998. Issues of Death: Morality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Bruce. 1991. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Vincens-Villepreux, Alice. 1994. Écritures de la peinture. Paris: PUF.

Electronic publications (all accessed October 3, 2007) http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sylvain.weisse/arnolfini/explicintf.htm http://users.skynet.be/litterature/lecture/vaneyck.htm#Arnolfini http://artchive.com/artchive/H/holbein/ambassadors.jpg.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Sebastian_(Mantegna) http://www.insecula.com/oeuvre/photo_ME0000058002.html http://www.thais.it/speciali/MANTEGNA/pagina_1.htm http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sistine/40-Judge.html http://www.abcgallery.com/T/titian/titian90.html http://www.abcgallery.com/C/caravaggio/caravaggio55.html http://www.abcgallery.com/C/caravaggio/caravaggio22.html http://www.abcgallery.com/C/caravaggio/caravaggio18.html http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/caravagg/10/62behead.html http://www.abcgallery.com/C/campin/campin11.html

CYRIL TOURNEUR’S DEFINING AND DEFILING THE SELF DANIÈLE BERTON-CHARRIÈRE

In most reference books, 1 selfhood is said to represent the existence of a being, of a subject taken as separate and independent and regarded as a conscious personality. It concerns an individual with a distinct, fully developed self, an achieved personality or an achieved individuality.

Selfhood as one-ness, undivided and undividable One can interpret selfhood as something undivided and indivisible. It presupposes the existence of a fully defined self, perceived and apprehended as an entity through Man’s senses, mind and intellect. This one-ness is an objective and a subjective association of parts (a polyseme, the meanings of which range from components to roles). These parts are of different natures, and one-ness may bear the sense of the combination of matter and soul. Defining selfhood is complex, since the very concept/ion depends on viewpoints, on fields of reference and on the designs and schemes underlying disciplinary branches, whether they be religious, social, scientific or other. Defining selfhood as identity (a paradoxical notion 2 ) raises the questions of comparative sameness, of similarity and of difference; it implies patterns and models; defining it as I-ness or individuality draws attention to the notions of partition and individuation, also to that of the ego, which is so difficult to grasp. Each of these concepts requires its own specific theoretical apparatus.

1

See The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., ed. C. T. Onions (Oxford, Clarendon Press, repr. 1990) s.v. “Selfhood.” 2 It refers to absolute sameness and to individuality (separate existence) at the same time.

148

Cyril Tourneur’s Defining and Defiling the Self

According to a Christian viewpoint, selfhood normally expresses itself as a coherent entity or as a whole whose essence may be pre/supposed to be supra temporal. God is said to have created Man in His image and therefore, in a way, to have pre-set standard analogies and differences that have to be taken into account. Thus, Man, perceived as the expression and representation of God’s image (in other words, as an imperfect copy or imitation of Him who stands as the “icon” of perfection) is necessarily predefined (should we say predetermined?) as similar (analogous) but— and thus—diverse and dissimilar too. The concept of Imago Dei frames the philosophical and theological confines within which Man can evolve and exist as a sublunary creature in temporal reality (Tillyard 1979). The specular nature of our earthly world can be considered as highly limited or as an altered “sub-version,” and for those who do not deny it, Man’s free will can add to the very process of differentiation. As a result, certain questions need asking: should self-determination be added to the nature of selfhood taken as a process and how can a work in progress be perceived through its permanence? 3 The Fall of Man did widen and augment the variance separating him from his Creator, and this is known and even accepted as a never-to-be bridged gap. Hence, discovering or rediscovering what some call “our true selfhood” is a process which includes revelation and redemption and which tends to lead to the re/discovery of the/a true God. 4 Man’s complete self-surrendering to a true or to a fancied origin is questioned by a more modern human fragmenting viewpoint, according to which selfhood is an evolving intra-contextual conscious and unconscious phenomenon and a process. Among others, Adam, Eve, the apple, and the snake, on the one hand, and Christ the Saviour (God made Man), on the other, can be taken as belonging to biblical phases or tales or myths, blurring and complicating the initial hypothesis, although they were originally meant to clarify it and help men understand enigmas such as “where from?” and “where to?”; “why?” and “what for?” Our selfhood is assumed to be not only supra temporal but also supra individual, since individuals cannot exist in themselves and by themselves. They cannot survive on their own; they can exist only as members of a community. Because we are links in a chain or in a network, because we 3

Permanence is currently attributed to selfhood as its essential quality. For further detail on this viewpoint see: http://members.shaw.ca/jgfriesen/Definitions/Selfhood.html (accessed October 2, 2007).

4

Danièle Berton-Charrière

149

and the world in which we live are “web-like,” identity—should we now say individuality?—allows us to distinguish ourselves from others, according to a process that compares, opposes, separates and dissociates the self and the other. It is interesting to note that in biology, the notion of “self” was introduced to facilitate the deciphering of immune reactivity: immunology is said to be the “science of self/non-self discrimination.” 5 As regards Cyril Tourneur’s drama, the notion of discrimination can be fully accepted according to its various meanings. Deriving from this discriminating process, selfhood can be reduced to a more limited focus on “I-ness,” on personality. The concept of individuality could then be regarded as the effect produced by the process of individuation. It helps Man assert himself as one and differentiated from others—a certain heterogeneous category including animals, plants, God the Creator and human beings, that is to say those of similar kind, other men, other social individuals. Cyril Tourneur plays with and on most of these concepts. In the very first lines of The Atheist’s Tragedy, 6 D’Amville and Borachio tend to bridge the gap between the various components or constituents or categories of the universe: D’AMVILLE: Borachio, thou art read In Nature and her large philosophy. Observ’st thou not the very self same course Of revolution both in man and beast? BORACHIO: The same, for birth, growth, state, decay and death; Only a man’s beholding to his Nature For th’better composition of the two. D’AMVILLE: But where that favour of his Nature is Not full and free, you see a man becomes A fool, as little-knowing as a beast. (1.1.3-12)

Following their atheist creed, Borachio and D’Amville half-jokingly declare that Man’s Nature, his essence, is the centripetal force that supports the very gist of life. They think that Man is at the centre of all things and that his earthly existence defines the confines of life. Combined

5

See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/biology-self/ (accessed October 2, 2007). All quotations are taken from Morris and Gill’s edition (1976). Text references are to act, scene and line.

6

150

Cyril Tourneur’s Defining and Defiling the Self

with their hedonistic and epicurean views, this opinion of theirs necessarily leads them to deny the existence of a superior force or being: BORACHIO: That shows there’s nothing in a man above His Nature; if there were, consid’ring ’tis His being’s excellency, ’twould not yield To Nature’s weakness. (1.1.14-17)

In these excerpts from Cyril Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy, disbelieving D’Amville asserts that Man and Beast share the same life pattern, the “self same course of revolution” from birth to death. Although slightly doubtful about it, his villainous “agent” called Borachio adds that human beings should all rely on Nature or on their nature to differentiate themselves from other living categories. Both men are indirectly alluding to the ambivalent process of individuation whereby the undifferentiated becomes a human unity and/or develops individual characteristics, and/or by which the components of an individual are integrated into a more indivisible entity. Thanks to the contrasting words “excellency” and “weakness,” Borachio and/or Tourneur define/s egotism, which is said to be the realization of Man’s strengths but not weaknesses, currently opposed to self-depreciation—the realization of weaknesses but not strengths—and individuation—the realization of both weaknesses and strengths. An oversimplified view of individuation is the conscious realization of the true self, beyond the ego that is presented by the conscious self. 7 It embraces the conscious acceptance and knowledge of both weaknesses and strengths and not just one or the other. The two philosophising villains, D’Amville and Borachio, reduce Man’s existence to its transient passage on earth, deny any supra temporality and praise hedonistic and epicurean comportment: D’AMVILLE: Then if death casts up Our total sum of joy and happiness, Let me have all my senses feasted in Th’abundant fulness of delight at once, And with a sweet insensible increase Of pleasing surfeit melt into my dust.

to which Borachio retorts: 7

See Daco 1960 and Henri Bergson: Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), in Didier Julia, Dictionnaire de la philosophie (Paris: Larousse, 1992).

Danièle Berton-Charrière

151

BORACHIO: That revolution is too short methinks. If this life comprehends our happiness, How foolish to desire to die so soon! And if our time runs home unto the length Of Nature, how improvident it were To spend our substance on a minute’s pleasure, And after live an age in misery! D’AMVILLE: So thou conclud’st that pleasure only flows Upon the stream of riches. BORACHIO: Wealth is lord Of all felicity. (1.1.16-32)

According to both men, selfhood is limited to down-to-earth realities and its construction is necessarily bolstered by greed and charity, of the kind that begins at home. Tourneur’s characters are all self-centred and for these self-devoted, egocentric creatures, selfhood has become a cult. D’Amville and Borachio make this topic the core and gist of their argument, which happens to be the argument of the play and is based on a subverted proverb turned into a kind of ridiculed syllogistic reasoning: D’AMVILLE: …For if charity Be an essential part of honesty And should be practised first upon ourselves, Which must be granted, then your honest man That’s poor is most dishonest, for he is Uncharitable to the man whom he Should most respect. But what doth this touch me, That seem to have enough? Thanks industry, ’Tis true. Had not my body spread itself Into posterity, perhaps I should Desire no more increase of substance than Would hold proportion with my own dimensions. Yet in that sufficiency of state A man has reason to provide and add. (1.1.34-47)

In this excerpt, which is quite representative of his creed and of his self-sufficiency and arrogance, through polysemies such as “substance” and “sufficiency,” D’Amville counters omnipotent pre-determination and praises self-determination. He declares: “As they increase, so should my providence,” (1.1.56), “they” being his posterity and his patrimony.

152

Cyril Tourneur’s Defining and Defiling the Self

Cyril Tourneur’s play shows human beings who, most of the time, are trying to get loose from a set pattern. They attempt to get free from a frame which they find unbearable for various reasons. Some, like D’Amville’s son Sebastian, are avowed rebels. Though archetypes, others cannot be regarded as either allegorical, or emblematic, or symbolical showcases. Yet, they all create a mosaic of strong individualities, some of whom more or less correspond to the Jungian definition of selfhood as “the gradual integration and unification of the self through the resolution of successive layers of psychological conflict”—to which we could add other sorts of conflicts, of course. The question Tourneur wishes to raise deals with how a man can develop and distinguish himself from and within the general and the universal, and how he can integrate and unify his own self through the resolution of successive layers of conflict. In the first two lines of The Atheist’s Tragedy, the notion of individuation is taken for granted by D’Amville: “I saw my nephew Charlemont but now / Part from his father . . .” (1.1.1.). What may be taken as reporting a current, ordinary departure highlights something bearing more symbolic content. The separation reveals the son’s desire to assert himself as a free, mature and complete gentleman. Charlemont acknowledges his lineage as a framing pattern and declares: . . . But my affection to the war Is as hereditary as my blood, To every life of all my ancestry. Your predecessors were your precedents, And you are my example. (1.2.14-18)

He then immediately adds: . . . Shall I serve For nothing but a vain parenthesis I’th’ honoured story of your family, Or hang but like an empty scutcheon Between the trophies of my predecessors And the rich arms of my posterity? (1.2.18-23)

In these lines, Charlemont claims that the construction and the survival of a person can be achieved only through individuation. Yet, some of the failings of the human nature and life can lead a person to individualism because selfhood as a human process can be subverted and perverted.

Danièle Berton-Charrière

153

Greed, ambition and bigotry are tools Cyril Tourneur puts forward as ideal because in such a distorted system the end always justifies the means. In the very first lines of The Atheist’s Tragedy, D’Amville indirectly introduces individuation as the key topic: “I saw my Nephew Charlemont, but now / Part from his Father” (1.1.1-2). Spelt with a capital “F,” “Father” is a signifier with two references, or two referential destinations, respectively in the celestial and in the earthly worlds. Through unexpected disobedience, young Charlemont tears himself away from his roots to become a soldier. His father rejects his purpose “to set forward to the war” (1.1.63) lest death might deprive them/him of any posterity. The decision and behaviour of the “good” son do not derive from pride and arrogance. He is no extravagant and brainless fame-seeker. His duties and lineage imprison him in a pre-set comportment which paradoxically incites him to leave. Maintaining and increasing one’s patrimony and the honour of one’s house is the honest Gentleman’s responsibility under the supervision of Providence, which D’Amville ironically and maliciously claims to be “commodious” (The Atheist’s Tragedy, 1.1.125) because it serves his personal designs. Once again, Tourneur’s villainous agent subverts one of the traditionally taught and acknowledged duties, to be respected and applied by all honest noble young men, and turns it to his own mischievous advantage. Besides, denying God’s power, if not existence, reveals and proves his atheism. By doing so, he differentiates himself from the mainstream ideology. His part is that of a tragic villain. His name— D’Amville (“vile soul”)—pertains to Tourneur’s allegorising. Yet, the dramatist’s work announced as the tragedy of the atheist—whether this word defines an individual or a whole category of people—shows a wide range of possible variations, all derived from egocentric narcissistic behaviours such as D’Amville’s: “Let all men lose, so I increase my gain, / I have no feeling of another’s pain”(1.1.128-29).

The divided self Research demonstrates that Cyril Tourneur cannot have written The Revenger’s Tragedy; 8 if he had been the author of the play, he would have 8

All quotations are from Katharine Eisaman Maus’s edition of the play (1995). For further reading on the issue of authorship, see Danièle Berton-Charrière’s unpublished dissertation (2002), and her online publication of SINRS, Stirling University, Scotland on Cyril Tourneur's authorship, authenticity and forgeries available at http://www.sinrs.stir.ac.uk/news.htm (accessed October 2, 2007).

154

Cyril Tourneur’s Defining and Defiling the Self

created a very good exemplar of an allegorised divided self in the “eponymous” character of Vindice, who turns out to be a double man or a man of two antithetic but complementary parts and faces, or vizors. He is “enrol(l)ed” in the characters of Vindice and Piato, who happen to embody Vengeance and Justice in a staging of a current Elizabethan social, moral, political and religious debate, which is summed up in the hero’s remark: “The rape of your good lady has been quited / With death on death” (5.3.88-89), to which Antonio replies, “Just is the law above!” (5.3.90), before condemning both Vindice and his brother Hippolito to death, lest they might wish to murder him one day. Despite Vindice’s disguising and masking, what is striking is his deep, inherent ambivalence. When he admits, “’twas we two murdered him,” Antonio asks him for an explanation—“You two?” (5.3.97-99)—and he finally includes Hippolito in the villainous duet. There is actually no such indication in the play. Vindice concludes: “’Tis time to die, when we are ourselves our foes” (5.3.109). This self-condemnation is a late reply to Hippolito’s “Brother, we lose ourselves” (4.2.199). Being a dual entity is actually impossible and lethal (should we say fatal?). Providing a metatheatrical discourse, the characters joke about the staging of split personalities and ubiquity, as when Hippolito makes the following remarks in an aside: “An impossible task, I’ll swear, / To bring him hither that’s already here” (4.2.167-68), or when Vindice, on assuming his archetypal, allegorical role, requires a new dramatic introduction: .

LUSSURIOSO: Thy name? I have forgot it. VINDICE: Vindice, my lord. LUSSURIOSO: ’Tis a good name, that. VINDICE: Aye, a revenger. (4.2.169-72)

Vindice’s self and identity are dealt with and debated upon throughout the play. His one-ness is questioned through understatements as the plot unfolds. On their first meeting, Lussurioso exclaims, “This slave is one” (4.2.172), and soon after adds: “Then he’s a double slave” (4.2.181); their agreement turns out to be a fool’s deal in a fool’s game. ` Satisfied with his deceitful part and costume, the title character discusses his own metamorphosis with his brother and accomplice. He fishes for compliments that could confer dignity and honour on his performance; this would also assure him that his new nature and character are “far enough from” his former self, as he puts it (1.3.1). The

Danièle Berton-Charrière

155

confirmation he receives is convincing: “As if another man had been sent whole / Into the world, and none wist how he came” (1.3.2-3). Vindice’s trick has abused the old duke, who now thinks that his “outward shape and inward heart / Are cut of one piece” (3.5.9-10). The vengeful scoundrel is proud to put in that one of his future victims has hired him “by price” (3.5.8-12). The trick is so efficient that Vindice cannot be recognized by anyone—including his brother. He has to reiterate: “’Tis I, ’tis Vindice, ’tis I” (3.5.165); his use of an epanalepsis coupled with a diacope reinforces his dawning uneasiness, veiled in arrogance. It is soon soothed by Hippolito: “So, so, all’s as it should be, y’are yourself” (4.2.1). Through the same rhetorical device, by using the same figure of speech, the brother of the new villain authenticates his identity and reassures him. Verbalizing and encoding duplicity, double entendre also emphasizes dramatic irony. The protagonist is rapidly caught out in his own game. The fraudulent device was meant to kill the lecherous duke, but, through a reflexive process, the stratagem proves more harmful than expected: the division of the self Vindice is submitted to is not superficial, and he wonders: “O I’m in doubt / Whether I’m myself or no!” (4.4.24-25). Besides, the playwright’s didactic purpose reverberates with contemporary homiletic anti-revenge speeches. Backing up their content by asserting that vengeance is homicidal, Vindice admits: “We are made strange fellows, brother, innocent villains” (1.3.165). A little too late, the hero discovers that, under its ambivalent form, the process tends to be suicidal too: “Unto the selfsame form, forget my nature, / As if no part about me were kin to ’em; / So touch ’em—though I durst, almost for good / Venture my lands in heaven upon their blood” (1.3.182-85). His soul will never be allowed to rest in peace. This tragedy of blood and revenge is based on traditional dramatic and theatrical devices, and the main character’s performing two parts in order to avenge an innocent victim both emphasizes a didactic mise en abyme and fits into a pattern by which the end justifies the means, according to the laws of the Old Testament. Yet, as Vindice discovers fairly quickly, being two is not necessarily convenient except when nasty deeds have to be performed. Although his villainous dark side is supposed to be a part to play, it soon overwhelms the whole person, who is thus doomed to be lost. The ambiguity of Vindice’s trying to recover his “old authentic self” by staging the false murder of Piato and admitting his being implicated in the assassination of a certain number of people, including the late Duke himself, leads him to his well-deserved end. Staging his own assassination

156

Cyril Tourneur’s Defining and Defiling the Self

is an element of comic but also of psychological relief. Vindice is glad to get rid of an embarrassing knavish half, but it is far too late: VINDICE: That’s a good lay, for I must kill myself. Brother, that’s I; … that sits for me; do you mark it? And I must stand ready here to make away myself yonder—I must sit to be killed, and stand to kill myself. (5.1.3-6) … VINDICE: Now I remember, too, here was Piato Brought forth a knavish sentence once: No doubt, said he, but time Will make the murderer bring forth himself. ’Tis well he died; he was a witch! (5.3.114-18)

Whatever the problems of authorship may be, the dramatic composition of The Revenger’s Tragedy seems to highlight the doubling Cyril Tourneur had to resort to as a spy, and The Atheist’s Tragedy seems to stage some of the events in which he was involved in real life. It is impossible to give here all the details showing how adventurous an existence he had, thanks to—or owing to—his professional activities as a spy. Still, we can say that the phrase “all the world’s a stage” aptly sums up his experience. We could go as far as to say that the dramatis personae he created for The Atheist’s Tragedy appear to be in his image: many of the characters are not what they seem. In their edition to the play, Brian Morris and Roma Gill acknowledge that D’Amville, in conversation with Borachio, places his finger unerringly on the quality which distinguishes so many of the characters: they are not what they seem. He says of Languebeau Snuffe: … compare’s profession with his life; They so directly contradict themselves As if the end of his instruction were But to divert the world from sin that he More easily might engross it to himself. By that I am confirmed an atheist. (1.2.208-13)

D’Amville thus sheds an eye-opening light on human hypocrisy able to veil a not-to-be revealed immoral or amoral reality. The two editors add that “Levidulcia cloaks faithlessness and promiscuity beneath conventional married respectability” (Morris and Gill 1976, xv). In fact, Tourneur’s characters were created in a complex way. To my mind, there are four

Danièle Berton-Charrière

157

types and categories that were imagined and fashioned according to different methods in order to fulfil different ends: first, some, like Castabella and Levidulcia are archetypes and they help stage vices and virtues in a revisited morality; the two components of their personalities (I mean sweet and light or chaste and beautiful) appear in their names. In their cases, the juxtaposed elements just reinforce each other. As far as Rousard is concerned, the inverted process shows that these two halves confront each other to enhance the young man’s velleity and inability. In a gross, crude attempt at making people laugh, Tourneur played on the resemblance of the adjective “hard” and the pejorative suffix “-ard”; second, others, like Borachio or Languebeau, are stock characters derived from source comedies. Yet, Tourneur distorts their functions through superimposed roles. Borachio is neither a drunkard nor a clown: he is the villain’s agent and a villain himself. Languebeau Snuffe’s use of rhetoric abuses only poor-minded idiots and innocents. The Snuffe side of his appellation or denomination highlights his former profession as a chandler and his theatrical function as a clown or revisited Vice. Third, minor characters like Soquette, Fresco and Cataplasma epitomize the Southwark underground world of stews and theatres: their activities, including prostitution and entertainments of various kinds, were condemned by the Church. A final grouping serves Tourneur’s satirical end through anaphoric historical references, according to which French Damville 9 is the counterpart of British Lord Burleigh, Montferrers hints at Lord Essex (Lord Ferrers), and Belforest 10 is given as one of Tourneur’s continental sources of inspiration. 11

From drama to real life: theatrical political transposition Cyril Tourneur was a state agent, a spy—some even say a double agent—collecting information on very active Jesuits. Like actors, spies are required to “forget” and hide their own names and identities or selves. They pretend to be people they are not and perform politically pre-set parts. Because “might is right,” raison d’état endows them with a certain 9

The Damville-Montmorency family; the Chancellor of the Exchequer. François de Belleforest (1530-1583): a French author, poet and translator. He wrote on cosmography, morals, literature and history. He translated the works of many authors, including Matteo Bandello and Boccacio. 11 For further detail, see Danièle Berton-Charrière’s unpublished dissertation (2002, vol. 4). 10

158

Cyril Tourneur’s Defining and Defiling the Self

legitimacy and, consequently, concealing and cheating 12 are perceived as genuine, well-accepted professional tools or weapons used for the security of the nation. In order to be more efficient, of course, a spy has to pass unnoticed: this can be achieved through hiding and disappearing for a certain period of time. Paradoxically, the same effects can also be attained through some form of “outrageous acting.” Bombastic and eye-catching behaviour could screen the true personalities and functions of agents of the intelligence service, causing them to be perceived as base and foolish knaves and not as witty, professional spies. Historical reports included in the Calendars of State Papers, for example, show this may have been the case for Tourneur, more particularly when he was called “William” or “Captain Turner.” Who would believe that a spy could be so attentiongrabbing and that he could show himself off in such a crude light? Was calm, quiet, serious Cyril veiled in William’s shadow? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writers, poets and playwrights were often soldiers, military secretaries and spies because they could speak several languages, travel, read and write. Moreover, they had to earn their living when their artistic activities were not successful. Cyril Tourneur followed the example of many of his learned contemporaries. Being a dramatist surely impelled his imagination to adapt and master his gait, behaviour and speech. Feigning to be someone else for a period which was longer than the “two hours’ traffic” of a play must have been quite trying. Like many of his fellow lettered men, Cyril Tourneur is known to have been both a military man and a writer, and yet the exact nature of his activities and identity remains a mystery. Even his family name, which was then spelt in many different ways, is not of much help to his biographers. He was officially recorded as a husband, a soldier, a military secretary, a poet, a satirist and a playwright. He was allegedly employed by the intelligence service of the time as a secret agent, possibly called William Turner or Captain Turner and was asked to spy upon Jesuits living or travelling within the confines of Britain and abroad. He therefore travelled to and on the continent, dogging the heels of men like William Baldwin, often called Balden. Anonymity was required to achieve the missions he was given. Hiding, playing parts, deceiving people and forging new identities were necessary in his daily activities; changing names allowed him either to pass unnoticed or to create convenient 12

For further reading on Cyril Tourneur and authorship, authenticity and forgeries: Danièle Berton-Charrière, online publication, SINRS, Stirling University, Scotland: http://www.sinrs.stir.ac.uk/news.htm (accessed October 2, 2007).

Danièle Berton-Charrière

159

confusion. He surely was a double man or a man of many faces. Once accused of being a double agent, he had to write to King James I and to his patron (the Earl of Salisbury) to deny the charges of atheism and of treason which lay heavily on his head. For example, in 1605, in order to be rehabilitated, he sent letters to Salisbury, from Paris, to explain that he was faithful to the English Crown and that he had only met Owen and Baldwin—two well-known Jesuits—to get information which he had sent to the Privy Council straight away. 13 What is striking is how the two interlocking sides of his life complete his puzzling biography. Whether it is as Cyril (the civil servant and “normal” citizen) or as William (the rogue and knavish mercenary), the man named Turner served his Queen and Kings for years, against Rome and Roman Catholics, against Spain and other supporters of the Catholic faith. But who was he? In Laugh and Lie Down, or The World’s Folly, a pamphlet attributed to him (Nicoll 1935, 273), William the narrator jokingly declares that he is a “cipher among figures”(278). According to a few historical letters and reports from Venice and northern France, from which it is possible to build a collage of quotations, one learns that William Turner was “a man of the most vicious life and habits, a great rogue, up to the eyes in evil principles and plans, of a most restless nature”; “a man as short of cash as he is of honour”; “of no faith or rather of any faith”; “the worst fellow alive”; “a dangerous subject.” In 1617, Windwood and Lord Zouch, writing to each other, refer to a certain “Captain Turnour” as being an idle and base fellow. On the important diplomatic visit of Don Francesco (de Castro), Ambassador Henry Wotton, working in Venice, wrote that Turner was cunning and bold and that it certainly was not well that he should be at liberty during the time the ambassador was there. In a letter to the Earl of Salisbury, Wotton rather ironically declares: This man (if anything he sayeth can be believed) is already known to your Lordship, and hath been rewarded by his Majesty, through your favour, for some notable services; in contemplation whereof I will save him from torturing or strangling, which peradventure otherwise might have been his case and his merit. 14

13 14

Calendar of State Papers, Venitian, 1603-1610, No. 611: 544. Ibid., No. 611: 417.

160

Cyril Tourneur’s Defining and Defiling the Self

This paradoxical statement proves that although Henry Wotton thought that Turner was the “worst fellow alive,” 15 and although he hated him, he saved his life. The reason why he did so might be explained by the ambassador’s secretary’s mention of Turner as a spy in the employment of the English government and keeping watch on priests and Jesuits. 16 Cyril and William were worlds apart but perfectly and extremely complementary: we can note that William behaved more like a theatrical character, given to eccentricity, and Cyril like a reserved, ordinary person. Who could imagine William was the same person as Cyril, who served various branches of the politically powerful Salisburies and Cecils? And who could believe the man was capable of being anonymous and of obtrusively showing off at the same time? Did Cyril’s dramatic inspiration and gifts fuel William’s parts and counterparts? Onstage, reality intruded upon the characters’ own fictional lives and contexts; for example, in The Atheist’s Tragedy Borachio, allegedly back from Ostend, delivers a false report of a siege and battle Tourneur is said to have been involved in. Thus, D’Amville and his murderous agent reflect the defiled self their artistic creator was charged with fostering or suffering from. According to Jonathan Swift in A Meditation upon a Broomstick (1710), “an universal reformer and corrector of abuses, a remover of grievances, rakes into every slut’s corner of nature, bringing hidden corruptions to the light, and raises a mighty dust where there was none before, sharing deeply all the while, in the very same pollution he pretends to sweep away” (Ginestier, Hoyle and Shepherd 1965, 301). Vindice and his brother discover that Man’s self is fragile, although highly malleable and fashionable. Unfortunately, modelling it at leisure and convenience can turn into a dangerous game. Like terra cotta, it can harden when fired in the kiln of real life or tragedy, but can also burst into pieces under the pressure and effect of the very process. As a conclusion, we can say that if selfhood derives from an external split, that is to say from the tearing away of a being, regarded as a human entity, either predestined or self-determined, who cuts himself off from the supra/extra temporal creature, Cyril-William Tourneur’s suspected treachery against his divine and earthly sovereigns is an interesting illustrative example, whether it was true or false. His defining the self and his own self cannot be said to be defiling. Moreover, if selfhood is the result of an internal splitting of personality caused by or related to the 15 16

Ibid., No. 611: 476-77. Ibid., No. 611: 308-09.

Danièle Berton-Charrière

161

human being’s power to overcome conflicts—whatever their nature—once again the playwright can be cited as a worthwhile model who could also fashion his characters after himself and after well-known people. Whatever the option, doubts remain about whether Sir Henry Wotton and King James I, along with their collaborators and peers, were right or wrong when they referred to William Turner as a defiling state agent and whether he was the defiled and defiling half of the playwright known as Cyril Tourneur. All in all, we are left with the mystery of a Cyril-William Tourneur who claims in Laugh and Lie Down, or The World’s Folly: “I am a cipher among others” (Nicoll 1935, 278).

Works Cited Primary Sources Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1603-1610. 1857. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts. Nicoll, Allardyce, ed. 1935. The Works of Cyril Tourneur. London: The Franfrolico Press. Tourneur, Cyril. 1976. The Atheist’s Tragedy. Ed. Brian Morris and Roma Gill. London: New Mermaids. ———. 1995. The Revenger’s Tragedy. In Four Revenge Tragedies, ed. Katharine Eisaman Maus. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Secondary Sources Daco, Pierre. 1960. Les prodigieuses victories de la psychologie moderne. Verviers: Gérard et Cie. Berton-Charrière, Danièle. 2002. Cyril Tourneur: vie et oeuvre d’un dramaturge jacobéen. Thèse d’État, Université Montpellier 3. Ginestier, Paul, John Hoyles, and Andrée Shepherd. 1965. Littérature anglaise. Paris: Bordas. Tillyard, E. M. W. 1979. The Elizabethan World Picture. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

Electronic publications (all accessed October 2, 2007) http://members.shaw.ca/jgfriesen/Definitions/Selfhood.html. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/biology-self/ http://www.sinrs.stir.ac.uk/news.htm

PART V SELFHOOD AND ROYAL AFFILIATION

THE MAGISTERIAL HERO?: PERFORMING ROYAL MASCULINITY IN SAMUEL ROWLEY’S WHEN YOU SEE ME, YOU KNOW ME (1604-5) GREG WALKER

This essay sketches out a preliminary investigation of the performance of certain kinds of heroic masculinity in Samuel Rowley’s early Jacobean history play, When You See Me, You Know Me. It looks especially at the play’s ambivalent representation of the kind of mercurial male identity associated with its royal protagonist, Henry VIII, a kind of identity which I shall refer to here as “magisterial heroism,” that combines royal authority with aspects of the traditional hero of chapbook romance. Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me was printed by Nathaniel Butter in 1605, and probably first performed at the Fortune by Prince Henry’s Men (formerly the Admiral’s Men) soon after the theatres reopened, following the death of Elizabeth I and a subsequent outbreak of the plague, on Easter Monday, 9 April, 1604 (Rowley 1952, x). It offers a wildly chronologically inaccurate, quasi-romantic account of events in the later years of the reign of Henry VIII, but the issues with which it grapples are both considerably older and more immediately contemporary than its subject matter might suggest. In one sense the play is an exercise in the romanticisation of the past. Rowley’s representation of Henry VIII harks back to a mythical masculine politics in which power was personalised, seated in the resolute will of a heroic man of action rather than the organs of a “modern” Renaissance state (the administrative offices of the realm, the royal council or parliament). Rowley’s Henry, as well as drawing upon quasi-mythical anecdotes about the King’s personality, embodies a long tradition of heroic masculinity performed in the public arena that was characteristic of the protagonists of several medieval popular romances and later reworked in the chapbook narratives of the Tudor period such as Jack of Newbury or The King and the Cobbler, the latter being one of the play’s principal sources. Set against this model of public male heroism is Cardinal Wolsey

Greg Walker

165

(counterfactually allowed to survive into the 1540s in order to be defeated by the mature brand of Protestantism associated in the play with Katherine Parr). He personifies a conspiratorial, effeminised, and essentially private form of politics associated by Rowley with Catholicism and the Roman curia. His ambition is to win the papal throne and so set himself at the centre of a web of international diplomacy manipulated from the Vatican and enacted by agents in the royal courts of western Europe. The play is thus on one level an extended exercise in counterpoint, opposing the dynamics of personal sovereignty and impersonalised delegation: a counterpoint in which the former is generally commended and the latter condemned. Where Henry is admirably direct in his dealings, the bluff King Hal of legend, Wolsey is habitually indirect and circumspect, setting himself up as the intermediary through whom all business must be conducted, and interposing himself between the King and the ambassadors from France, Rome, and the Empire in order to maintain a monopoly on information and influence. Wolsey’s speeches are from the first characterised by both a circumlocution and an “unpatriotic” internationalism that are to be the hallmarks of his political strategies. 1 Tell him [Francis I] we have so wrought with English Henry (Who as his right hand loves the Cardinall) That un-delaid you shal have audience: And this day will the King in person sit To heare your message and to answere it. (11-15)

The self-defeating indirection of this speech to the French ambassadors (symbolised by that wonderfully cumbersome indicator of haste, “undelaid”) tacitly reveals the dishonesty in Wolsey’s claims, just as the arch references to himself in the third person and to his king as “English Henry” suggest the very opposite of the simple trustworthiness he seeks to convey. The “twelve reverend Bishops” (24) sent to Rome by the French and Imperial courts to further Wolsey’s suit are further examples of his “foreign” and conspiratorial brand of politics, in which everything is

1

As Will Summers, Henry’s fool, tells Wolsey, when the latter exclaims “mon dieu!”, “I pray you my Lord, call upon Mon Dieu no longer, but speake in plaine English; you have deceived the King in French and Latine long enough, a conscience” (2812-15).

166

Performing Royal Masculinity in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604-5)

conducted at one remove, and the assurances of allies and servants never mean quite what they seem. 2 In the course of the play we see the gradual revelation and untangling of Wolsey’s schemes, and the eventual realisation on Henry’s part of his minister’s hidden agenda and his own responsibility to assert himself more effectively in the government of his realm. Fittingly, the action is brought to an end by the unmediated personal encounter between Henry and the Emperor Charles V; for this first face-to-face meeting of the two chivalric princes symbolises perfectly the mythical, romance politics that the play has vaunted. Once the masculine heroes are finally able to talk frankly and openly together in the public arena, Wolsey’s secret conspiracies, like his hidden horde of treasure (“barreld close within the inner seller” [538]) are revealed and purged from the body of the state in the moment of their revelation. The play ends, for Henry, as it had begun, with affirmations of his personal potency, both sexual and knightly, that reassert the prime importance of his royal body as the site of all manly and political virtues. In a joust of ribald rhymes with his fool, Will Sommers, he defends himself, with mock outrage, against a charge of sexual profligacy, (“A wench,’tis sed, was found in your bed, besides the Queene” [3046]), and the scene is set for all the problems of the realm to be dissolved in a bravura display of knightly prowess: First in our Court wee’le banquet merrily, Then mount on steedes and, girt in complete steele, Wee’le tugge at the Barriers, tilt, and turnament. Then shall yee see the Yeomen of my guard Wrestle, shoote, throw the sledge, or pitch the barre, Or any other active exercise… Those triumphs past, wee’le forthwith haste to Windsor; S[t.] G[e]orge’s Knight shall be the Christian Emperor! (3087-94)

2

Similarly contrasted to Henry’s personal heroism is the disembodied, impersonal power of money, another demonised concept associated in the play with the Cardinal and his allies. As Henry recognises when he visits the Counter prison in disguise to see for himself how the realm is faring, it is money that “plays fast and loose” with his subjects’ liberty. Moreover, it is with money that Wolsey’s quest for the papal election is to be pursued. As the Cardinal tells bishop Bonner, “the bastard Fredericke” has bribed the Curia with £60,000 to gain his own election, but Wolsey will covertly commit “Three times thrice double” that sum (1444) to tip the scales in his own favour.

Greg Walker

167

Henry’s authority in the play stems, then, neither from his theocratic position as the Lord’s anointed, nor his constitutional role as head of state, but from his personal prowess as a warrior hero, whose knightly courage, generosity, and “natural” lordship (as opposed to the man-made and fallible kind bestowed upon “base-borne” [2977] Wolsey by his trusting sovereign), inspire loyalty in and of themselves. Thus, having unmasked and revealed himself in an earlier scene in which he visits the Counter prison in disguise, he resolves all of the injustices he uncovers there simply by exposing himself in his own person and promising free access to all of his subjects in future. As a result he leaves the prison with the cheers of his wronged subjects ringing in his ears (1356-57). Even the murderous rogue Black Will (of whom more later), previously devoted solely to selfinterest, dedicates himself to Henry after witnessing his magnanimity at first hand (“I’le live and dye with thee, sweet King” [1382]). Hence the King discovers that his true wealth, as he later declares to the Emperor, lies not in stores of coin or treasure but in the honesty and loyalty of his subjects. Englishmen may live in a cold, northern land, Yet are our bloods as hote as where the sun doth rise. We have no golden mines to leade you to, But hearts of proofe, and what we speake, wee’le do. (2980-82)

And these very qualities, of hot-blooded, passionate integrity are, of course, the qualities of the King as well as of his people. In the bastard feudal dispensation that is re-established around the royal person at the end of the play, Wolsey’s fate, fittingly, is, like Satan, to be banished from sight of the King (“Out of my presence, hateful impudence!” [2993]), leaving him unable to benefit from the munificence that comes with proximity to the sovereign. Such a hero as Rowley’s Henry is thus little different in his essentials from the protagonists of early chivalric romances such as King Horn, drawn as he is in a long tradition of medieval heroism mediated to the sixteenth century through chapbooks such as The King and the Cobbler. In such tales the mere revelation of the royal presence is sufficient to right wrongs, resolve any tensions that the plot has created, and restore the status quo (usually with subtle variations, such as the ennoblement of the more virtuous characters whom the disguised monarch has encountered on his travels). Rather than being the site of internal contradictions or the kinds of inwardness associated with Renaissance selfhood, such heroes are generally a variant of the deus ex machina, an embodiment of power allied

168

Performing Royal Masculinity in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604-5)

to virtue and justice and sufficient unto itself in terms of plot and characterisation. At the same time as it seeks to celebrate the heroic qualities encoded in popular romance, however, Rowley’s play does admit to tensions in the body politic, exploring the inherent contradictions between the individualistic, “competitive assertiveness” at the heart of the chivalricheroic honour system and the demands of a “modern” (or at least “earlymodern”) political culture. 3 In this respect the play is more complex than its plot-line and sources initially suggest and proves, as we shall see, to be very much a product of its historical moment. On one level Rowley’s interests suggest a concern with what Sir Geoffrey Elton famously described as the Tudors’ “revolutionary” transformation of English government from a “medieval” personalised system to a modern bureaucratic one—a transformation that he situated squarely in the third decade of the reign of Henry VIII (Elton 1953, passim). Elton’s distinction was, perhaps, too hard and fast, and the process of “bureaucratisation” took far longer than he initially allowed, but he did identify an important difference between the dynamics of personal monarchy and those of a rapidly developing national governmental administration, differences that the kinds of chivalric displays through which monarchy performed itself to the public gaze in this period sedulously sought to elide (Orgel 1975, passim). Where the personalised system relied primarily upon the presence and active personal involvement of the sovereign (or highly personalised surrogates such as his “friends” or body servants 4 ), and his constant willingness to perform (in every sense of the word) the role of active, pluripotent, royal male, the latter was developing the decentred, impersonalised system of devolved powers and responsibilities necessary for the smooth running of an increasingly complex and diversified national state apparatus. While Rowley’s play seeks, as we have seen, to moralise this process, mythologising the personal rule of the King as the repository of honesty and justice, and demonising the drive to administrative complexity as self-interest and venality on the part of Wolsey, the text nonetheless acknowledges the internal contradictions in its own tendentious claims. The martial hero, and the qualities of competitive self-assertion (in matters personal and sexual, as well as martial) that underpin his quest for honour, are shown to be far

3

For the idea of competitive assertiveness see James 1986, 5-6, and Aers 1988, 158-59. 4 Starkey 1977, 197-224.

Greg Walker

169

from unambiguously positive forces when embodied in the person of a king. Shakespeare, to whom Rowley’s play owes much, 5 had, of course, already undertaken a richly multi-faceted exploration of the implicit tensions between adherence to the aristocratic honour code and the demands of political and social stability in The First Part of King Henry IV. But he had chosen to divide up the contradictory elements among his central characters, setting an honour-bound “thesis” (Hotspur) against pragmatic “antitheses” (the politique Henry IV and the cynical Falstaff), and producing an apparent synthesis in Prince Hal. In When You See Me, Rowley seeks rather to invest all of these contradictory elements in a single protagonist. His Henry VIII is thus by turns majestic and demotic, quarrelsome and irenic, lecherous, uxorious, predictable and quixotic. The result is a hero and a drama that split apart the idealising assumptions of popular romance, in which princes can behave like warrior heroes, pursue personal quests, rivalries and sexual adventures, try the patience of their loyal subjects through practical jokes, jests, and “tests,” and yet the state never totters and all ends well whenever the magisterial hero chooses to reveal himself and return to power. As we shall see, the problems inherent in all of this are explored at some length in the play, as is the ambivalent legacy of Henry VIII himself as a historical figure as it was received at the start of the seventeenth century.

The Performance of Masculinity Both Henry’s majesty and his sexual potency are asserted on his first entrance, as the stage direction “sound trumpets; Enter Henry the Eight, Queene Jane bigge with child” economically demonstrates. Indeed Jane’s brief role in the play (“Like good September vines, loden with fruite” [172]) is essentially to act as a visual symbol of that royal potency, and of the King’s capacity to provide for the stability of the nation by producing

5

Debts to Shakespeare litter the play, most obviously in the comic watchmen lead by the cobbler Prickall, whose similarity to their counterparts in Much Ado About Nothing is clear, not least in the malapropism-strewn speeches of Neighbour Capcase, the second Watchman (“Those stew-houses are places of slaughter and redemption, and many cruell deedes of equitie and wickednesse are committed there” [957-60]). Unlike Dogberry’s constables, however, Prickall’s company cannot prevent crime even accidentally. Still more obvious a borrowing is Henry’s climactic command to Katherine Parr, “Come, kisse me Kate!” (2688).

170

Performing Royal Masculinity in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604-5)

an heir. 6 No contradiction is acknowledged between the King’s sexual profligacy and the need to maintain a single, uncorrupted line of succession. Indeed, Henry’s capacity to take mistresses (and presumably sire bastards) is celebrated as part of his heroism, a reflection of the royal scale of his “manly” appetites. As Will Sommers (punning woefully), later warns the newly married Queen Katherine Parr, the King cannot be expected to remain faithful for long unless she provides him with a suitably “fruity” sexual diet: “Looke to him, Kate, lest he cozen thee; provide civil orenges enough, or hee’le take a Lemman [mistress] shortly” (167-68). But, if the early scenes resist a full critique of the King’s sexual adventuring, they do reveal his principal and disabling political weakness: his over-reliance on the archetypal evil counsellor Wolsey. This dependency is signalled by his request for “some private conference” with the Cardinal prior to the audience with the French ambassadors. More than simply reflecting the briefing sessions detailed in the contemporary accounts of Edward Hall or George Cavendish, this meeting symbolises for Rowley the extent of Wolsey’s “private” control over Henry’s government. As the Cardinal boasts, Great England’s Lord have I so won with words That under culloure of advising him I over-rule both Counsell, Court, and King: Let him command, but we will execute, Making our glorie to out-shine his fame, Till we have purchast an eternall name. (121-26)

The perils of conducting government through unreliable intermediaries are further revealed to Henry during his later visit to the Counter: The officers in Citties, now I see, 6

Will Summers adds his own endorsement to the scene’s vaunting of the royal libido, responding with bawdy double entendres when Henry remarks upon the Queen’s “Angrie soldier’s frowne” (256), “I thincke so, Harrie, thou hast prest her often. / I am sure this two yeres she had serv’d under thy standard” (257-58). For the unpatriotic Wolsey and Gardiner, conversely, Henry’s libido, if unchecked, represents a political threat. As Gardiner declares, “I feare false Luther’s doctrins spread so farre, / Least that his highnesse, now unmarried, / Should match amongst the sect of Lutherans. / You saw how sone his Majestie was wonne / To scorne the Pope’s and Rome’s religion, / When Queen Anne Bullen wore the diadem” (52328).

Greg Walker

171

Are like an orchard set with severall Trees; Where one must cherish one, rebuke the other; And in this wretched Counters, I perceive, Mon[e]y playes fast and loose, purchaces favour, And without that, nought but miserie. A poore Gentleman hath made complaint to mee, “I am undone” (quoth he) “and kept in prison For one of your fellows that serves the King; Being bound for him, and he neglecting me, Hath brought mee to this woe and miserie.” . . . Thus Kings and Lords, I see, Are oft abusde by servants’ treacherie. (1255-65; 1271-72)

As the first stage in righting matters, Henry removes all the intermediary officers between himself and his subjects, and tells the prisoners to seek redress at his hands directly (“Send your petitions to the Court to me, / And doubt not but you shall have remedie” [1351-52].) This theme is reasserted in a minor key in the schoolroom scenes of the sub-plot, where the young Prince Edward learns to cherish personal responsibility and Protestant theology on the advice of his metaphorical good angel (his sister Elizabeth) while resisting the blandishments of the bad angel, his Catholic sister Mary. The magisterial politics of personal presence are reflected in the religious struggle and vice versa. Mary seeks to persuade Edward to adopt the Catholic belief in the intermediary role of the saints, while Elizabeth assures him of the need to pray only to Christ directly: Instead, Edward, pray to Him For preservation that can Himselfe preserve me, Without the helpe of saint or ceremonie. (2405-06)

Just as Wolsey and the Catholic bishops seek to interpose themselves between the King and people for their own ends, so, the play suggests, the Catholic church seeks to keep the believer from direct access to Christ for its own financial gain, and the wise monarch must sweep away all such private “mediation.” While Wolsey can stand between King and realm, obscuring Henry from the sight and access of his people, and blinding him to the true state of affairs, his virtues cannot be effectively deployed. The King’s natural love of justice, his manly, Protestant directness, and personal courage are thus rendered inoperative. Hence on one level the solution to the nation’s

172

Performing Royal Masculinity in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604-5)

ills is, as Henry claims, simply to remove the obfuscatory layers of mediation between himself and his people. Once the royal dog can see the corrupt Catholic rabbit, he can hunt it down in true aristocratic fashion. But the very fact that all of the virtuous qualities vaunted in the play are manifested in the King—and only in the King—identifies both the principal strength and the potentially disabling flaw of magisterial Henrician rule. A political system that relies wholly on the presence of the monarch if it is to function disinterestedly (a theme signalled, of course, in the very title of the play, for it is only when we see Henry that we are able to know him) 7 places excessive demands on both the stamina and the character of the monarch. As Erasmus had acknowledged at the beginning of the previous century, if one were looking for a method of selecting a king, the hereditary principle would not be the first place one would start (Erasmus 1997, xii and 34), for it was as likely to throw up a Nero as an Augustus, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century chroniclers and polemicists alike were still divided over which of these Henry VIII had been. Rowley’s drama does not shirk this awkward issue. The successful operation of the politics of personal monarchy relied, of course, not only on subjects having free access to their sovereign, but also on their being willing to exercise that access. And this could not always be taken for granted, especially when the king was as notoriously emotionally unpredictable and violent-tempered as Henry VIII. After the death of Queen Jane, for example, the whole machinery of government grinds to a halt when Henry retires to his privy gallery and refuses either to come out or to summon anyone inside. The situation leaves his counsellors in a state of quivering perplexity. BRANDON. Unlesse his Highnesse first had sent for me, I will not put my head in such a hazzard; I know his anger, and his spleene, too well. (554-56)

As Lord Gray notes, Henry’s “humor” is so strange “That none dares venture to conferre with him” (559), and none will “indure the storme” (635) when he finally emerges into the public space of the presence

7

The crucial importance of the royal presence is manifested early in the play in Queen Jane Seymour’s resolution to remain within sight of the King despite her increasing labour pains; “Yes, my deere Lord, I cannot leave your sight / So long as life retaines this mantion . . . / To be with thee is my felicitie” (156-57; 163).

Greg Walker

173

chamber again. 8 Thus the very qualities of amorous devotion and emotional vulnerability that conventionally mark the romance hero as worthy of our admiration are here shown to be wholly inadequate as aspects of a kingly personality. 9 A monarch does not have the luxury of indulging his grief in the kind of extended bouts of grief that reveal a Troilus or Sir Orfeo as men of admirable emotional sensitivity and incipient poetic selves. 10 The collapse of Henry’s inner equilibrium has, meanwhile, led to turmoil in the body politic, as Brandon notes: His Grace hath taken such an inward greefe, With sad remembrance of the Queene that’s dead, That much his Highnesse wrongs his state and person. Besides, in Ireland do the Burkes rebell, And stout Pearsie that disclo[se]d the plot, Was by the Earle of Kildare late put to death. And Martin Luther, out of Germanie, Has writ a booke against his Majestie For taking part with proud Pope Julius, Which, being spred by him through Christendome, Hath thus incenst his royal Majestie. (586-96)

And, as subsequent scenes reveal, Henry’s is a very troubled kingdom indeed. As he tells Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, “They say nightwalkers hourely passe the streets, / Committing theft and hated sacriliege, / 8

Later, warned by the Catholic bishops that Katherine Parr threatens his life, Henry again locks himself away in his privy chamber, denying the presence to everyone; the pressing needs of the world beyond are symbolised by the loud knocking on the doors that punctuates the dialogue. 9 The conflict between the qualities required in a romance hero and the responsibilities that personal monarchy place upon the prince are made painfully manifest in the scene in which Henry must decide between the life of his wife and that of his unborn child, that is between the succession and his own affections (380-87). As romance heroes should, Henry finally asserts the virtue of love above the needs of state (394), justifying the decision in terms of chivalric honour and reputation (400-07). But it is too late, Jane dies, and his resignation quickly gives way to “reckless” martial defiance: “I’le give my Crowne, / Nay, all I have, and enter bonds for more, / Which with my conquering sword with fury bent, / I’le purchase in the farthest continent” (435-40). 10 See, for example, the disabling, long-term prostration by grief or love-longing that afflicts Sir Orfeo, Palamon and Arcite in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Aurelius in The Franklin’s Tale, or the Man in Black in The Book of the Duchess (Chaucer).

174

Performing Royal Masculinity in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604-5)

And slightly passe unstaied, or punished” (934-36). Predictably, Henry’s proposed solution to the problem is personal intervention (“This night wee’le see our Citie’s government” [938]) backed by martial courage (“Our swordes and bucklers shall conduct us safe” [941]). 11 But Henry’s incognito adventures in London culminate in at best an awkward compromise between the dictates of impersonal justice, the pragmatic needs of the state, and the King’s personal fancies. Black Will, the ruffian sword and buckler man and pimp (1112-14), who has had at least a share (“some five or sixe stabs” [1069-70]) in the murder of two merchants of the Steelyard “cruelly slaine, found floating in the Temmes” (951-52), is not executed but rather kept in prison, because he has proved his courage in a duel with the King. He is even given a financial retainer to keep him ready for royal service in the event of a war (1370-75). The repeated maxim that “King Harry loves a man” (i.e., that unlike Mistress Quickly he has a lot of time for swaggerers) is thus proved correct, and a kind of rough and ready justice reminiscent of Gads Hill is brought to the prisons of London. Henry’s problem is, as Sir William Compton tells Brandon, that his personal courage frequently runs into conflict with the sort of wisdom required in the head of state: “His Highnesse is too unterous bold, my Lord; / I know he will forsake himselfe in this, / Opposing still against a world of oddes” (1200-02). Even in the latter part of the play his solutions to diplomatic and theological problems remain essentially physical and heroic, involving jumping into the saddle and riding at them with his head down and his lance couched. As he tells Wolsey, . . . by my George, I sweare, if Henry live, I'le hunt base Luther through all Germany, And pull those seven electors on their knees, If they but backe him against our dignities. (674-77)

Thus for part of the play at least, Henry is very much a romance hero in the comic mode, bringing a kind of anarchic festive energy into play in response to each new crisis. But this same scene also makes clear the serious dangers attendant upon the realm’s reliance on the person of the king for the maintenance of good government. For Henry is prone not only to disabling grief, but also to bouts of irrational rage during which his 11

He offers a similar response to the news that Wolsey’s foreign policy has hit difficulties: “I would our selfe in person had been there” (3164).

Greg Walker

175

judgement is also temporarily suspended with friend and foe alike (at one point he is forced to concede to Compton that “I did mistake … / By holy Paule, I am so crost and vext / I knew not what I did” [687-89]). Finally, even when the King is rational and stable, his magisterial authority is represented by a material body that is increasingly frail and inclined to falter (“Bace slave, tie soft, thou hurt’st my legge!” [678], he roars at a groom who attends to his shoes too briskly), exposing the physical as well as psychological weakness beneath the heroic facade. While the king remains vexed in body, “disturb’d in [his] thoughts” (818), and “cannot yet command [his] patience” (704), the ideals of personal monarchy are compromised, with potentially fatal consequences for a troubled kingdom. 12 Henry’s rage with Brandon over the Duke’s marriage to his sister, Princess Mary (“Dares any subject mixe his blood with ours without our leave? . . . Off with his head!” [1719; 1725]), provides a good example of his swiftness to anger. “Go to,” he bellows at the hapless couple, . . . your prayers will scarce save your selfe, Durst ye contract yourself without our knowledge? Hence with that hare-braine Duke to the Tower, I say! And beare our carelesse sister to the Fleet. (1732-35)

But this fury is both fierce and temporary; and is seemingly as much a ploy to try the motives of his counsellors as a long-term strategy. As he assures Queen Katherine, “though thus I seem / A while to threaten them, / I meane not to disgrace my sister so” (1741-43). And having prompted Bonner and Gardiner to agree with him that Brandon’s actions are worthy of death, the King then turns his wrath upon them: You are knaves and fooles, and ye flatter me: God's Holy Mother, I’le not have him hurt, for all your heads. Deare Brandon, I embrace thee in mine armes. . . . I love you both so well, I cannot dart another angry frown To gain a kingdom. (1749-54)

12 Henry’s sense of his own mortality is an increasingly important theme in the latter part of the play. See for example 2185-91, 2654-57, and 2682-87.

176

Performing Royal Masculinity in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604-5)

This kind of capricious conduct actually better resembles the conventional definition of tyrannical behaviour than kingly prudence, and would in a speculum principis or political satire be seen as evidence of Henry’s failings as a king. 13 But in the world of chapbook romance such wilful, inconsistent acts are only problematic if they lead to unwanted ends; and as Brandon and Mary are approved characters, and the marriage for love is the archetypal good event in any romance, Henry’s seemingly sudden switch to approving the match retorts only to his advantage, as does his subsequent berating of the Machiavellian bishops. Such excessive, idiosyncratic behaviour, and the kind of deceptions and psychological games that Henry employs here are actually presented as elements of the king’s engaging personality. The historical details at the heart of the stories are here exaggerated and read as indications of either his “simple,” manly character (too trusting of those about him, swift to anger, yet equally swift to forgive), or his shrewd capacity to wrong-foot those around him through rapid shifts of mood and purpose—or, as here, as both at once. Indeed such traits have always been a component of the magisterial hero’s character. From the disguised King Horn’s pretence that he brings news of his own death to his long-suffering wife Rymynyld, or Sir Orfeo’s testing of his faithful steward upon his return to Winchester, through the mind-games played by the disguised “duke of dark corners” in Measure for Measure, all the way to Sherlock Holmes’s frequent coups de théâtre at the expense of the loyal Doctor Watson’s emotional well-being, the magisterial hero has always employed the dramatic volte face (“I am dead . . . Ha! No I’m not!”) as a crucial element in his performative arsenal. What was in the early romances a necessary defence mechanism for the solitary hero uncertain of whom he can trust in a deceptive world (the kind of wise stratagem that distinguishes the homecoming of Ulysses from that of Agamemnon) became by the nineteenth century simply a marker of the idiosyncrasy that came with genius—the hallmark of the superman who exceeds the limits of polite behaviour and literary genre at one and the same time. In Rowley’s Henry we see the motif poised somewhere between the two roles. As a demonstration of Henry’s power it has clear political functions, but it also has less predictable psychological implications. Unlike the “simple” heroes of popular romance, that is,

13

Interestingly John Skelton had put very similar words to Henry’s into the mouth of Cardinal Wolsey as evidence of his allegedly tyrannical behaviour in the satirical poem, “Colyn Clout” (1522): “Take him, warden of the Fleet, / Set hym fast by the fete! / I say, lieutenant of the Toure, / Make this lurdeyne for to loure” (Skelton 1982, lines 1165-68).

Greg Walker

177

Rowley’s Henry is a complex character, whose contradictions seem to reflect the political circumstances of his creation.

Performing Henry Rowley was writing, it will be remembered, for Prince Henry’s Men: an acting company bearing the name and nominal patronage of James VI and I’s oldest son and heir. And, as Sir Roy Strong has shown (1986, passim), Prince Henry Frederick Stewart (1594-1612) was, despite his youth, a highly significant figure in the political culture of the first decade of his father’s English reign. He was a symbol of hope for many who had lived through the attenuated succession crises of Elizabeth I’s later years. For England had known only two male heirs apparent in the ninety-five years from Henry VIII’s accession in 1509 to the moment of the first performance of When You See Me in c.1604. The future Edward VI had been the first, and Prince Henry himself was the second. Hence his very existence held the promise of a political stability that had been denied to the realm since the death of Henry VIII in 1547. But more than this, Prince Henry represented hope of a more partisan kind. For, as Strong has argued, the young prince provided a rallying point for many who found one or more of his father’s pacifist foreign policy, studiously accommodating religious stance, or excessively self-indulgent lifestyle objectionable. As the reign progressed, many courtiers, intellectuals, and divines who favoured religious reform at home and aggressive action to support their co-religionists abroad were attracted to Henry’s service. But as early as 1604 he was already being associated with a kind of martial, active image and a commitment to religious integrity distinctly at odds with his father’s public persona. The prince thus seemed to promise a belated realisation of the hopes of the first generation of English reformers in the 1540s for a true godly monarch, suggesting an ideal combination of Henry VIII’s physical strength and will to action with Edward VI’s zeal for further Protestant reformation. 14 The young Henry, that is, looked back to both his royal namesake and that namesake’s godly son, but promised to improve on both. Hence the strategy of Rowley’s play, performed in the Prince’s 14

Even in his youth observers praised “his body strong and well-proportioned, his shoulders … broad” (W.H., The True Picture and Relation of Prince Henry . . .), his love of chivalry and martial exploits, and commended his willingness to promote religious reform (“He cherished the true prophets and graced with his attentive devotion and example their ministerial endeavours” [letter from Sir John Holles to Lord Gray, 27 February 1613]). Both sources are quoted in Strong 1986, 8.

178

Performing Royal Masculinity in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604-5)

name, was in many ways understandable. 15 His was a nostalgic historical melodrama that was also a pointing up of present hopes for reform, a rehearsal of England’s past that also set out an agenda for its future. The two quite different forms of heroic masculinity performed in the play (Henry’s bluff heroism and Edward’s pious acumen) were together a blueprint for a new model of godly magisterial heroism that, according to Protestant mythology, England had briefly glimpsed before in Sir Philip Sidney and the ill-starred Elizabethan Earl of Essex (Davies 2005, 35178), but which was now definitively in the making in Henry Stewart. The play thus suggests that, where Henry pulled down the temples of the popish antichrist and his son Edward set in their place the foundations of a new godly commonwealth, so Prince Henry might, in more stable times, be able to perform like Edward at home and Henry abroad, embodying a new kind of muscular Christianity as the counterweight to his father’s more accommodating attitudes. For Rowley, however, this nostalgic logic carried its own inevitable internal contradictions. The conventional trope of situating one’s valorised virtues in a heroic past, and specifically here in a previous royal Henry and his godly son who seemed to embody them, created an obvious dilemma. For the lost England to which he was harking back was, of course, a Catholic England, and Henry himself was a far from unambiguous champion of Protestant values. He, like the nation he governed, was at best “wavering” in its faith (a word that the play harks upon), 16 unwilling to grasp the nettle of thoroughgoing reformation, and both Rowley and his audience knew it. Hence, as Gordon McMullan has recently suggested (Shakespeare 2000, 77-80), the importance of the schoolroom subplot to the play’s political dynamic, and its representation of Prince Edward as the godly imp who would make good the shortcomings of his father’s age. (The play is, after all, advertised on its title-page as “the famous chronicle history of King Henry the eight, with the birth and vertuous life of 15

The play’s vaunting of the Emperor Charles V as Henry VIII’s heroic equal may well also have had a more pragmatic political end. For at this time James VI was tentatively pursuing the possibility of an imperial marriage for Prince Henry. See Strong 1986, 80. I am very grateful to Professor Richard Hillman for generously suggesting this possibility to me. 16 Gardiner talks of “this wavering age” (2110), while Prince Edward declares still more unambiguously that “This Land, ye know, stands wavering in faith / Betwixt the Papists and the Protestants” (1991-92). For an insight into the politics of Protestant nostalgia, I am grateful to Dr David Salter of the University of Edinburgh for the chance to read his unpublished paper, “Remembering the Middle Ages: The Roast Beef of Old England and the Return of the Catholic Repressed.”

Greg Walker

179

Edward, prince of Wales.”) Rowley thus inserts speeches at a number of points in the play in which Henry symbolically hands on the baton of reform to the son who will be better equipped temperamentally and theologically to carry it out. “I tell thee, Cranmer,” he informs the royal tutor and future godly archbishop, . . . he is all our hopes; That what our age shall leave unfinished, In his faire raigne shall be accomplished.

(1557-59) 17

But Edward too would prove a false hope, his reign being all too short to set down firm confessional foundations or represent anything but a brief oasis of Calvinist clarity in a century of vacillation, all of which Rowley also knew well enough. And that knowledge coloured his writing. The play is thus, crucially, already fallen, cursed by the playwright’s knowledge of what lay in the play’s future, and in his own immediate past, even as it seems to look forward to a golden age of Edwardian zeal yet to come. Poised at another, later, moment of wavering (between hope and fear, between another reign characterised by incomplete and imperfect reform and a new regime of doubtful direction), and at a time in which reformist hopes were again being invested in a godly heir who might make good the failings of his father, the play has an unmistakable air of melancholia, despite its apparent triumphalism. There is, throughout, a sense of doubt about the outcomes, prompted by knowledge of the inevitable mortality of kings (even heroic, magisterial ones like Henry VIII), and an awareness of both their imperfection and the all too obvious brevity of their rule. As the King tells Queen Katherine Parr in a moment of prophetic insight: I thinke Old Harry must leave yee shortly; well, God’s will be done: Heer’le be odd shifting then: ha, will there not? Well, you say nothing; pray God there be not. I like not this difference in religion. [Aye,] Gods, deere Lady, and I live but seven yeer longer, wee’le take order thoroughly. (2185-91)

As Rowley knew all too well, Henry would not survive those extra seven years, and nor, crucially, would young Edward. Thus, setting your hopes in kings was always at best a risky venture. What Rowley could not 17

See also 1285-86: “God blesse him, and make him fortunate, I tell yee, Lords, the hope that England hath is now in him . . .”

180

Performing Royal Masculinity in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604-5)

know, of course, is that Prince Henry would prove similarly vulnerable. Like Edward he too would die while still in his teens, the hopes invested in him by the godly unfulfilled. If, then, like most romances, When You See Me is a personal quest as well as a search for origins, then the principal quester must be Henry himself, who, although he does not realise it, must learn to know himself and discover that, like Lear, he is not ague-proof. But the quest can also be mapped, retrospectively, onto Rowley’s own endeavour. In seeking to represent the history of magisterial Protestant kingship and to allude to its hoped-for future, he was also discovering the limits of his own position as one of Prince Henry’s men, a position that, though he did not know it, tied him into a repeating pattern of aspiration and disappointment more familiar to readers of history than of romance.

Works Cited Primary Sources Cavendish, George. 1959. The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey. Ed. Richard S. Sylvester. EETS, OS, 243. London: Oxford University Press for the EETS. Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1987. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Deloney, Thomas. 1597. Jack of Newbury. London. Hall, Edward. 1970. The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Houses of Lancaster and York [Hall’s Chronicle (1550)]. Menston: Scolar Press. Erasmus, Desiderius. 1997. The Education of a Christian Prince. Trans. Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath. Ed. Lisa Jardine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowley, Samuel. 1952. When You See Me, You Know Me. London: Malone Society Reprints. Shakespeare, William. 2000. King Henry VIII. Ed. Gordon McMullan. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson Learning. Skelton, John. 1982. The Complete English Poems. Ed. John Scattergood. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

Secondary Sources Aers, David. 1988. Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360-1430. London: Routledge.

Greg Walker

181

Davies, Michael. 2005. Falstaff’s Lateness: Calvinism and the Protestant Hero in Henry IV. Review of English Studies 50: 351-78. Elton, G. R. 1953. The Tudor Revolution in Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, Mervyn. 1986. Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orgel, Steven. 1975. The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Starkey, David. 1977. Representation through Intimacy: A Study in the Symbolism of Monarchy and Court Office in Early-modern England. In Symbols and Sentiment: Cross-Cultural Studies in Symbolism, ed. Ioan Lewis, 187-224. London: Academic Press. Strong, Roy. 1986. Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance. London: Thames and Hudson.

PASTORAL PERSPECTIVES AND SOVEREIGN SELFHOOD IN RICHARD III CATHERINE LISAK

It is generally agreed that The Tragedy of Richard III was composed in the early 1590s, before the playwright’s “lyrical” period (1594-96), which includes Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. John Jowett leads off his introduction to the Oxford edition of Richard III by presenting the play as “conspicuously a performance piece,” which in many respects is “about the nature of performance” (Shakespeare 2000, 1). He points to the “literary rather than theatrical” nature of “Shakespeare’s most important accomplice,” Sir Thomas More, author of The History of Richard III, the better to emphasize Shakespeare’s reshaping of this historical narrative “into the language and conventions of the theatre” (1), perhaps at the cost of detracting from the import of the play’s poetical foundations. He cites the influential value of writers, playwrights and poets such as Seneca, Thomas Sackeville, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and John Lyly and explains that their works, “are echoed more locally, enriching the play with an allusive literary quality and defining its claim as a work of art over and above the immediate needs of the stage” (2). It is not clear, however, whether such a perspective gives the full measure of the play’s poetic (or, indeed, “literary”) enterprise, which is portrayed as the adjunct or ornament to some bolder dramatic framework. Bearing in mind the prominent role poetry played in Shakespeare’s life at this time of composition—Shakespeare had published the narrative poem Venus and Adonis in 1593 during the closing of the theatres due to plague (1592-93), which brought his dramatic career to a temporary halt— it seems warranted to explore yet further the role poetry plays within the play, the dialectics it establishes between poetry and drama and, at a more general level, to query the poetic stance Richard III holds within the larger scale of Shakespeare’s art. Patrick Cheney has recently explained how Shakespeare’s early awareness of “the cultural import of the Elizabethan

Catherine Lisak

183

competition between poetry and theatre” leads him to use the two media as “the primary modes for his characters’ thought, speech, and behaviour.” Consequently, both Shakespeare’s poetry and theatre “become primary expressions of identity, the principal forms of subjectivity, and the basic grid for one of the major dominants in the canon: the relation between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’” (Cheney 2004, 35). This is an attractive theory that requires qualification. Jowett interestingly describes “Richard’s self-perceptions” as “so ironic and bemused that it is impossible to secure from them a residue of safe and serious content” and remarkably analyses this technique as an “indirect, elusive, and unverifiable depiction of subjectivity,” a “gambit” through which “Shakespeare hints at the experience of inner self behind the mask.” However, this leads him to conclude that Richard’s character “is performative and phenomenological” (Shakespeare 2000, 67), with the use of the word “performative” sounding exclusively synonymous with “theatrical.” In this respect, his analysis comes close to espousing Cheney’s point of view that Richard III splits the “intellectual dyad” between poetry and theatre, by “introducing Richard as a man of the theatre but reserving the discourse of poetry for his brother, Clarence” (2004, 38). Cheney grounds this interpretation of Richard’s aesthetic selfhood on his leading theory that Shakespeare’s writing career superimposes “a fiction of Marlowe’s Ovidian poetry and drama” onto “a fiction of Spenser’s Vergilian pastoral and epic” (2004, 44). It seems restrictive to perceive Richard III as a play primarily following the Marlovian-Ovidian aesthetics: does the play categorically “separate poet and playwright in the characters of Clarence and Richard” (Cheney 2004, 77)? To answer this question, I would query whether such “identities” or “forms of subjectivity” can be sustained in a play that embeds its generic scope (that of history-chronicle play and tragedy) in an ongoing dialogue on “poetics,” that is, on the “performative” value of poetry and, more globally, the theory of literary discourse. I would argue that throughout the play, it is the dialectics between dramatic genres and poetic modes of address (pastoral, lyrical, and epic) that puts to the test the construction of characters. Richard, especially, becomes a locus of insecurity whereby selfhood is denied any lasting consistency, the materialisation of inwardness being thwarted by his ironic and disputative relation to the various poetic modes of address. By arguing that it is through the play’s eponymous character and his search for aesthetic self-definition that the acute dilemma and conflict between forms and modes is brought to our

184

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III

attention, this essay counters the interpretation that Richard is purely a theatrical character. It seems that Richard does not begin as “a man of the theatre” but that the “discourse of poetry” is very much at work in his constructions and de-constructions of selfhood. In fact, he grounds the opening speech of the play in the Spenserian aesthetics of pastoral and epic. This leads to the question of whether Richard’s determination to “prove a villain” implies that he successfully relinquishes the paths of epic and pastoral to follow the single path of action and drama or whether it exemplifies his relentless antagonism with modes and genres. To weigh the destabilizing impact that the play’s dialogical tensions between poetic modes and dramatic genres exert upon the construction and representation of “selfhood” in Richard III, this inquiry chooses to focus on a specific poetic mode, and its episodic appearances in the play in moments of self-perceptions and representation of selfhood: the pastoral mode, especially as it appears in such instances as the references to the “country servant maid” (1.3.107), “this weak-piping time of peace” (1.1.24), or “the idle pleasures of these days” (1.1.31). 1 I will show how, through the periodic appeal to pastoral, Richard III taps into the poetical imagination of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign at a fundamental and instrumental level, thus re-energizing several highly-charged voices of the Elizabethan age—Edmund Spenser’s, Philip Sidney’s, and John Lyly’s, as well as the Queen’s own—and conjuring up past voices of the classical age in order to set off portrayals of royal selfhood against the play’s own poetical counter-discourse on the paradigm of inwardness. Moreover, this investigation is as much concerned with the way Richard III shapes into dramatic material a poetic mode (pastoral) that favours the portraiture of self as with the way pastoral moulds the play’s dramatic narrative. Each section of this essay deals with the confluence of pastoral and tragedy and with the appropriation of pastoral discourse by historical drama. It might be said that by looking into the variety of pastoral metaphors, sub-texts and through-lines that find their way into the play’s non-pastoral setting, this essay partakes of “modern criticism’s search for ‘version of pastoral’ in the most unlikely places” (Patterson 1983, 7). Richard III may, indeed, qualify as one of the most unlikely places in which to encounter pastoral. I talk of “pastoral” in the play, despite the general courtly setting established from the outset by the Tudor image of the wanton courtiers and the reference to the lute, in particular, because the play seems to offer a 1

Unless otherwise specified, my references to the play are taken from The Oxford Shakespeare edition by John Jowett.

Catherine Lisak

185

meeting place between the courtly and the pastoral—a common ground traditionally established by the pre-Shakespearian literature, especially when the presence of pastoral is metaphorical, not literal. This occurs when questions of pastoral ideal versus pastoral reality translate into an urban setting. In the temporal world of court life, itself linked with a sense of social order, the values of the pastoral ideal become depreciated, even immoral. A courtier’s wooing serenade degenerates into “lascivious pleasing.” Richard’s soldier, who turns into a dallying courtier and “capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber / To the lascivious pleasing of a lute” (1.1.1213), shares attributes with the traditional, frolicsome, Arcadian lover. The imagery of the singing courtier also calls to mind the Tudor court composer, Sir Thomas Wyatt, whose lute songs (“Blame not my lute”; “My lute, Awake”) and love poetry (Petrarchan sonnets in English) were characterized by a self-dramatizing spirit. It may be such verse as Wyatt’s that Richard alludes to, in part, in the scornful phrase, “weak-piping time of peace.” The “pipe” is ambiguously musical, in Shakespeare and earlier, and can mean a squeaking or feeble voice, as in the effeminate prattle of amorous courtiers. Additionally, Richard’s coupling of the adjectives “weak” and “piping” evokes Vergil’s tenuis avena (Eclogue 1.2.). The epithets conjure up the bucolic oat-straw pipe and refer to the instrument’s physical appearance (tenuis meaning “slender” or “slight”), as well as to its pejorative connotations (both ethical and aesthetic). Peter L. Smith demonstrates that Vergil’s “weak-piping” avena single reed, also symbolically associated with Tityrus’s instrument, the fistula—the Panpipe or Syrinx—was emblematic of the bucolic mode. The vagueness and ambiguity of the singular references suggest that Vergil intended the literal meaning to yield to the symbolic. Though the term avena was first introduced with a clear and distinct musical purpose, it acquired almost at once the quality of an abstract literary emblem. (1970, 507)

Having turned his back on the epic mode, it is in his attempts to free himself from the pastoral mode of the Panpipes and its courtly equivalent, notably by referring to the theatre world in order to disturb the peaceful setting of Arcadia, that Richard seeks self-definition. Renaissance definitions of pastoral, especially those by Sir Philip Sidney and George Puttenham, take for granted the political applicability of Vergilian pastoral. “Far from being a ‘safe’ form of literature . . . it is a

186

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III

mode with strong political investment . . . joined by religious and satirical elements, making it one of the most politically engaged of Renaissance forms” (van Es 2007, 79-80). An investigation into the pastoral elements in Richard III inevitably endorses the idea of a Renaissance “perversion of pastoral” (Heninger 1961), a theory whereby the shepherd’s Golden Age world underwent a process of corruption, thus favouring the representation of a darker, troubled self beneath a mask. Wyatt’s sonnets reveal a dark use of pastoral imagery. The last line to “Farewell, Love” avows: “Me lusteth no longer rotten boughs to climb” (Kermode 1973, 618); a yet more sombre mood reigns in “I Find No Peace,” where the first two lines to the sonnet immediately reveal the poet’s profound dread of Henry VIII’s corrupted court: “I find no peace and all my war is done; / I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice” (Kermode 1973, 617). Despite the brief spell of frolicsome play conjured up in Richard’s opening speech, there is something of the Tudor court that quickly surfaces, perhaps because, as Penry Williams remarks (1995, 131), “the Henrician court still belonged to the savage political era of the fifteenth century: a small mistake could easily cost a man his life or his freedom.” Both George Puttenham’s definition in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), and Sir Philip Sidney’s in his Defence of Poesie (1595) take their cue from Vergil’s Eclogue 1—a remodelling of Theocritus’s pastoral exchange “into something that looks like a drama” (Alpers 1996, 162). While Puttenham shows, in his own definition of pastoral, how Vergil’s herdsman ensures the cultural shift from “the rusticall manner of loues and communication” to “matters of greater importance,” based on the paradigmatic transfer from an outward appearance (“to counterfait”) to an inward purpose (“to insinuate”) (1936, 38), Sidney is as much concerned with what pastoral can do (namely, with double meaning) as with what it is (a low style, “disdained” by the genera dicendi). His synecdoche of the “poore-pipe” includes “whole considerations” of man’s relation to the world (“wrong-doing and patience,” which express forbearance and suffering) within the pleasing and seemingly anecdotal “prettie tales of Woolves and sheepe” (Sidney 1994, 119). By way “of putting the complex into the simple” (Empson 1935, 114), this version of pastoral offers a poetic anatomy of the suffering self, which reveals the dissonance between the world of shepherds and the world of lords, and underlines the ironic consonance between the reality of sufferance and the safety of a tale. Pastoral becomes a poetic mode that reveals the dramatic gap between the inner self and outer mask.

Catherine Lisak

187

My principal foci will be on the pastoral fictions elaborated by two of the play’s characters: Elizabeth, who momentarily holds the status of queen consort until the death of Edward, and Richard, who becomes king of England half-way through the play. The pastoral fictions consist in the “country servant maid” evoked by Elizabeth in 1.3.; the musical court lover, who appears in Richard’s inaugural speech (1.1.); and the mythical figure of Pan, whose ubiquitous presence in the play remains unnamed, though always revolving around the character of Richard in a radically ambiguous representational strategy—a phrase I borrow directly from Barbara Hodgdon, used to describe “the shape of what is included” (1991, 108). All three figures stand as projections in the shape of “a limited life” of “the full and normal one” (Empson 1935, 110) of a monarch. They also typify a Shakespearean revitalizing and corruption of the SpenserianVirgilian shepherd: in the shape of the post-classical shepherdess, the shepherd-lover and the shepherd-king. Elizabeth’s country servant maid might be defined, in Kronenfeld’s phrase, as a “shepherd-equivalent” (1978, 339)—a socially humble figure who, without being a shepherd, shares the same literary characteristics and possesses the same representative value as its pastoral counterpart. The court lover stands as a counterpoise to the responsible, passionate shepherd swain, while Pan rules amorphously over the play as a tormented, unpredictable spirit. I will argue that all three figures—the unwilling queen, the irresponsible lover, and the undutiful shepherd-king—represent warped (or “perverted”) versions of the biblical good shepherd and dutiful protector, revelatory of the fact that the play has recourse to codified pastoral imagery that endorses the cult of the royal self, in order to challenge and dismantle the unified, singular, and established court image of “Elisa, Queene of Shepheardes” 2 and of her father before her. This will lead me to show how Shakespeare toys with an array of parts and discourses that endow the royal selfhood with—but also divest it of—certain ideological façades.

I Arguably, Elizabeth provides one of the most informing anecdotes of Renaissance pastoral in Richard III. The “country servant maid” is a conceit conjured up relatively early in the play (1.3.107) when the queen consort complains of Richard’s invectives against “that Edward’s wife” (3.4.75) and her upstart advancement to the throne. To voice her 2

Spenser, Aprill in The Shepheardes Calender (1579).

188

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III

grievance, Elizabeth self-consciously resorts to the figure of the rustic domestic, a “shepherd-equivalent” representative of innocence and subordination: I had rather be a country servant maid Than a great queen with this condition: To be thus taunted, scorn’d, and baited at. Enter old Queen Margaret [at a distance] Small joy have I in being England’s queen. (1.3.107-110)

In keeping with the burdens of rule topos, Elizabeth’s plaintive lines deplore the wretchedness of self-exposure to humiliation (“this condition”). Elizabeth recasts herself as a shepherd-equivalent—a country menial—by striking in hypothetical terms a pastoral pose (“I had rather be… than”) that typifies and, somehow, sublimates her role as “England’s queen.” The interplay between the role of Queen consort and her improvised lowly persona reads as the expressed frustration of a woman not groomed for the top position or the trappings of monarchy. This expression of her momentary thought may be acted as some wistful yearning for a plain existence, though more conceivably it strikes as being the haughty and disdainful posture of an upstart. It is an image that combines the experiential (her lines remind us of her relatively plain beginnings as the daughter of an Earl and as the Countess of Kent) and the conventional (the binary opposition of court life reality and rural idyll). Such overlapping tensions of the self also translate as “the rejection of the aspiring mind”—(“Small joy have I in being England’s queen”)—an act of the mind Hallett Smith considers as “the central meaning” of early modern pastoral, because in such moments “the shepherd demonstrates that true content is to be found in this renunciation” (1968, 10). In Elizabeth’s case, however, such “renunciation” does not go beyond the initial stage of a moment’s strained fancy formulated in solicitude. Elizabeth’s brief version of the pastoral brings into play an alternative, antithetical characterisation of the royal self in human bondage—a symbolic state whereby the duty-bound (the “servant maid”) is not burdened by the complications of court. The self-staged queen opposes worldly care and pastoral carelessness. The feelings she purports to express are first and foremost those of an identity in crisis: by drawing her contracted self as maid from her inflated self as queen, she constructs a self within the interstice between the ruler and the ruled, between queen

Catherine Lisak

189

and servant, between the stately pressures of the prominent and the private wishes of the individual. “The essential trick of the old pastoral,” Empson explains (1935, 11), “was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor.” If, as Louis Montrose argues (1987, 34), the “central function of Elizabethan pastoral forms” resides in “the symbolic mediation of social relationships” which are “intrinsically, relationships of power,” Elizabeth unadvisedly betrays all her arrogance towards class distinctions at this point. Elizabeth’s patronising attitude should not induce us to identify “pastoralism with a simple idyllicism”—an equation Alpers warns us against (1996, 352). Her glance towards common anonymity need not imply a renunciation of obligations: the servant is, after all, by definition a person in service and under obligation to work for the benefit of a superior, obeying his (or her) commands (OED). Nor can Elizabeth’s line reduce the pastoral mode to “a negative ethos”—“a wishful dream of a happiness to be gained without effort” (Poggioli 1975, 75). Rather, the working maid, at home with her environment, may well provide the royal self with an imaginary pathway in order to withdraw from the world of court intrigue and recover some sense of dignity and integrity. The king’s scorned wife resorts to the aesthetics of retreat only to a point, for the pastoral activity she conveys does not exclude the ethics of commitment (Shore 1985, 53). The country servant maid remains a representative figure of the dedication to negotium. Elizabeth’s appeal to pastoral in a cry of self-pity does, however, reinforce a royal “sentimental fantasy” (Montrose 1987, 37). It might have been with an amused sense of déjà vu that an audience of the mid-1590s attending a public theatre performance of Richard III witnessed, like Margaret in the background, the queen consort assign herself a new pastoral identity. Both historians and literary critics have brought to our attention Queen Elizabeth I’s fondness for two pastoral personae: the prestigious queen of shepherds and the humble milkmaid. Elizabeth’s lines closely recall Princess Elizabeth’s language of selfhood during a dismal episode under Mary’s reign when she had been kept captive at Woodstocke. According to the anecdote, made famous over twenty years later by John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1583), the lady Elizabeth had wished herself a milkmaid: Thus this woorthy Ladie oppressed wyth continuall sorrowe, coulde not be permitted to haue recourse to any frendes she had, but still in the hands of

190

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III her enemies was left desolate, and vtterly destitute of all that might refresh a doulefull heart, fraughte full of terrour and thraldome. Whereupon no maruell, if she hearing vpon a time out of her garden at Woodstocke, a certaine milkemaide singing pleasantly, wished her selfe to be a milkemaid as she was, saying that her case was better, and life more merier then was hers, in that state as shee was. (Foxe 1583, 12: 2096)

As a being sui generis, Elizabeth I had, very early in life, reportedly created a new character for herself that would follow her throughout her reign. The same passage reappeared in Raphael Holinshed’s 1586 newly augmented Chronicles, ensuring an ever-wider circulation of the image of her pastoral alter ego. The account, which drew a “portrait of England’s Queen as a damsel in distress,” made Elizabeth go down in history as a national martyr early in her career; it consecrated “Elizabeth’s human (and very feminine) vulnerability” and her tragic past, which “united her with her people in their suffering” (McEachern 2002, 331 and 330). Without claiming that this propagandist anecdote accounts for Shakespeare’s lines in 1.3, the comparison of sentiment and purpose between Elizabeth in Richard III, and her namesake at Woodstocke is worth elaborating on. The mode of utterance of both princess and queen consort seems to put forward the idea that their experience of dependency, powerlessness and victimization as suffering subjects brought them closer to the humble community. The complaint is also a form of empowering self-assertion. Montrose’s analysis of Princess Elizabeth’s pastoral self might apply directly to Shakespeare’s fictional character: Elizabeth’s pastoral impulse juxtaposes her experience of contingency and personal danger in a violent, deceptive world with an idealized lowly life in a world of unalienated labor synchronized with the orderly cycles of nature … through Elizabeth’s perspective, the actual powerlessness and compulsory physical labor of the peasant are transformed into a paradoxical experience of power, freedom, and ease. (Montrose 1987, 36)

Despite the structural similarities between Shakespeare’s self-made “great queen” and history’s predetermined Great Queen, Elizabeth I, there are also striking differences. Elizabeth Grey’s lines hardly summon the same degree of pity, indignation, or fear for her life amongst audiences as the story of Lady Elizabeth at Woodstocke might have done, amongst Foxe’s readers, or Holinshed’s. This might be because Edward’s wife finds in the “country servant maid” a stance that releases her from her

Catherine Lisak

191

binding duty to the nation whereas Princess Elizabeth’s self-assimilation to a commoner reveals her sense of communion with the people. The comparison is hardly edifying for the historical queen. The Queen consort’s words open up a variety of critical attitudes and ironic perspectives. The “o’er worn widow,” unlike the young Lady Elizabeth, hardly fits the part of a country servant maid. More significantly, perhaps, when she states her loss of joy in being “England’s queen,” Edward’s wife’s selfish tone goes utterly against Elizabeth’s own ideology and reputed expressions of mutual devotion towards her subjects. Such rhetoric does not configure the bonds of state in a way that typifies the persona Elizabeth Regina designed for herself. Inasmuch as Shakespeare’s Elizabeth takes “small joy” in assuming the role of the good shepherd, she proves to be no pastor felix from the Virgilian Arcadia of the Georgics. Nor is she unwaveringly committed, unlike the Protestant Spenserian pastor bonus heralded in Hobbinol’s lay “Of fayre Elisa, Queene of Shepheardes all” (Aprill, 33-34). Elizabeth cannot stake a claim to the parable of the good shepherd, which the “country servant maid” should incarnate as a shepherd-equivalent from a lapsarian world where all men are bound by the curse of labour. Elizabeth Grey still feels a sense of subjection in her relation to the royal self, whereas Elizabeth’s use of the milkmaid imagery was a statement of boundless freedom and indefinable identity with both the nation and the land of England. One might say that Elizabeth Grey’s self-staging recalls the historical anecdote of Queen Elizabeth, though she also adopts an attitude to queenship that Elizabeth would have abhorred. Edward’s wife resorts to a similar pastoral depiction of the self as her prototype, Elizabeth I, in a way that is double-edged: it shows her in an unsympathetic light, in comparison with Elizabeth’s own loving persona; and it also re-initialises Queen Elizabeth’s rhetorical device, which originally consisted in an exaltation of the self, with deflating irony, in a vexing role that embodies everything Elizabeth considered she was not. For both Elizabeths, the rustic working maid may embody pastoral solace of a sort, but as a projection of that part of their selves that they would preserve from persecution and harassment, their fictional other remains an unreal proposition or a background landscape silhouette construed from behind a prison window (either literally or figuratively). Their pastoral visions do not truly serve as a mode of escapism; the ladies conjure up their alternative pastoral persona too briefly for this to be the case. Their evocation of the pastoral maid is meaningful rather “as a foil to

192

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III

set off sharply the defects of reality” (Heninger 1961, 257), and from which to view their destinies at court.

II Fictions of pastoral in Richard III emerge as early as Richard’s opening speech. In the first four lines of his soliloquy, the seasonal metaphor opposing winter and summer is summoned as a thematic prelude to the pastoral mode in order to celebrate the transition between war and peace. The seasonal debate was traditionally dramatized, in allegorical terms, contrasting attitudes between generations—youth favouring the country in summer and old age preferring the court in winter. The conflict was exemplified in the brief anonymous piece called The Debate and Stryfe between Somer and Wynter (c.1530). This Tudor dialogue left open a possibility for resolution as winter finally conceded to summer’s conciliatory words: “Wynter by one assent our great stryfe let us ceas / And togeder agre we and make a fynall peas” (145-46). In Richard’s preliminary lines (1.1.1-4), summer triumphs over winter not through some agreement but through victory in battle for the House of York over the frowning House of Lancaster. The leap in seasons does not represent a conflict between generations but the coming of a new political phase. The polarity is symbolically robust: Richard outpaces all seasonal decorum, leaving spring out altogether (“winter” is “Made . . . summer”), as he pretends to shake off the bonds of civil war and champions the pastoral ideal of contentment and harmony in the face of hardship and mutability. Clashing moods (“discontent” and “glorious”) are spatially played out with the emblematic ascent to the “sun” in stark contrast with the visionary fall from louring “clouds” to “the deep bosom of the ocean buried.” Here, each word re-enacts the inflicted defeat of the adversary and consigns the House of Lancaster to the depths of an emotional landscape. The framework of these lines is one of “balance-in-opposition,” 3 both in time and space, “of the natural year,” thus reinforcing the iconographical tropes of high and low. This suite of eloquent metaphors accounts for the nation’s change of fate, the people’s strength in relation to the brave new world and the protagonist’s change in mode of utterance, from epic to pastoral. The anaphoric use of the possessive pronoun (“our” in lines 1, 3, and 5 to 8) 3

A phrase Patrick Cullen coins in his study (1970, 41) of Edmund Spenser’s treatment of the calendar device and seasonal debate in The Shepheardes Calender (1579).

Catherine Lisak

193

testifies to the way Richard would “begin to assert himself as the true nation.” 4 Cheney has argued that “as an aspiring Elizabethan author of the 1590s . . . Shakespeare inherits the competition between Marlowe and Spenser,” though he alone makes this “rivalry into something like the main frame of his art” (2004, 41). Following this line of investigation, one might even venture to say that Richard’s inaugural speech stages what is fundamentally at stake in Marlowe’s rivalry with Spenser: “the writing of English nationalism itself” (Cheney 2004, 38). There are several lyrical cross-references that bolster the significance of Richard’s high-and-low imagery. We are familiar with the commonplace landscape of emotions in sonnet 69 of Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (first published in 1591) that filters into Richard’s widely allusive rhetoric, albeit with a slight variation in seasons (69.7-10); but what might also be worth noting is that the sonnet’s very first line hinges upon the codified high-and-low trope: “O joy too high for my low style to show.” This might shed light on Richard’s programmatic passage from the epic to the pastoral mode, signalling a meandering and troubled quest for aesthetic self-definition. Critics have also identified the intertextual relation between Richard’s triumphal speech and Hephestion’s admonition of Alexander in John Lyly’s Campaspe (1584). Despite the contrast in tone, both share in the self-conscious metamorphosis (turned to, converted to / made, changed, instead of) from the heroic deeds of war to the amorous world of Arcadia, 5 from the sound of fury to elegiac dalliance, though Hephestion deplores the change, whereas Richard’s opening cry of victory, as he evokes the passage from epic to pastoral, challenges the Renaissance reverence for epic (1.1.5-13). 6 The change of humours contained in Richard’s words (stern, dreadful, fright, fearful / merry, delightful, capers, pleasing) provides us with the generic grid of epic made pastoral, which is inversely programmatic of a poet’s traditional literary career. Spenser’s announced change in The Faerie Queene

4

This is what Leo Braudy says of Ovid (1986, 135), a comment Cheney extends to Marlowe (1993, 41), who competed with Spenser for national authority. 5 John Lyly, Campaspe: “Is the warlike sound of drum and trump turned to the soft noise of lyre and lute, the neighing of barbed steeds, whose loudness fill the air with terror and whose breaths dimmed the sun with smoke, converted to delicate tunes and amorous glances?” (2.2.40-45) 6 See Cheney: “Unlike both Daniel and Spenser, however, Shakespeare did not bequeath an epic in verse, or, like Jonson, an (unfulfilled) plan to write one” (2004, 265).

194

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III

(1589) 7 —“For trumpets sterne to change mine Oaten reeds”—is echoed in reverse order in Richard’s “Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings” (1.1.7). Thus, “fierce warres and faithfull loves shall” no longer “moralize” Richard’s “song” (1.1.9). On the contrary, his modal agenda comes much closer to Ovid’s opening Elegy, as translated by Marlowe: “Fare well sterne warre, for blunter Poets meete. / Elegian Muse, that warblest amorous laies, / Girt my shine browe with sea banke mirtle praise” (1.1.32-34). One might say that Shakespeare’s anti-hero counters the imperial power of the Vergilian and Spenserian progress from the pastoral world to the world of epic, by reversing the process in true Ovidian fashion. Additionally, the interplay of both modes throughout the speech prepares us not only for the play’s poetical designs but also for Richard’s political ones. The effect produced is one of terror and pleasantness combined. The conflation that emanates from one wanting “love’s majesty” (1.1.16) recalls Thomas Elyot’s definition of what constitutes majesty in a governor: “which, like as the sun doth his beams, so doth it cast on the beholders and hearers a pleasant and terrible reverence” (1962, 99). In this scene, it is both the lexicon (merry meetings; lascivious pleasing; wanton-ambling nymph) and the figure of the lover-courtier that echoes the tradition of Spenser’s vagabonds who “Passen their time, that should be sparely spent, / In lustihede and wanton meryment” (“May” Eclogue, 5.42-43). The Ovidian figure of amorous desire for whom, in Marlowe’s translation, “the bed is for lascivious toyings meete” (Ovid’s Elegies, 3.13.17) here as a ghostly presence steals female chastity away by penetrating “a lady’s chamber.” Richard’s court is hedonistic 8 and his version of pastoral is orgiastic—a place of erotica, music and dance that boasts the delights of pleasure in true Latin tradition. In Robert Albott’s Wits theater of the little world (1599), a clear distinction is made between two contrasting classical traditions of pleasure: “Of Pleasure. How so euer by the Latines, Pleasure is interpreted in the worser sence, by the name of 7

See Maclean: “These lines, recalling the verses prefixed to Vergil’s Aeneid, associate Spenser and his poem with the traditions of classical epic, and announce his movement from the pastoral genre to the more elevated vein of heroic poetry; thus, ‘trumpets sterne’ replace the shepherd’s pipes (‘Oaten reeds’) appropriate for the poet of The Shepheardes Calender” (1982, 5). 8 See Cullen: “One of the main concerns of Mantuanesque pastoral is to restrain eroticism, one of the central, if not the central concern of Arcadian pastoral is to satisfy it” (1970, 25).

Catherine Lisak

195

Voluptas, the Greekes are indifferent, terming it Hedone, whose deriuation is from sweetnes or pleasantnes; it is accompanied with delectation, recreation, oblectation, insultation, ill will, &c.” (Sig. N2v-N3r). It is the theme of voluptuous, Arcadian pleasure that rules over Richard’s monologue, though Richard stands poised in antagonism against it. As his speech unfolds (1.1.14-31), he sets a scene for which he claims to feel unsuited for having been prematurely thrust into it “scarce half made up” (1.1.21). This does not imply that he loses—or denies—his pastoral identity: his presence is, from line 13 onwards, hammered in the first person pronoun, in a manner that echoes the singer in Vergil’s first Eclogue. 9 To this is added a satirical strain, directed as much against himself as the court lover, that defines Richard as a perversion of pastoral. He thus comes across as an anti-pastoral figure that speaks in poignant recognition of his pastoral inabilities to meet with the rules of Arcadia, scorning pastoral ideals with a succession of negations. Nevertheless, such speech remains pastoral in mode, for in essence, as Shore explains, “the pastoral ideal is always liable to disruption” (1985, 86). Richard’s re-creation of an excluded self in the midst of rejoicing ironically draws upon the pastoral cliché of the traditionally forlorn lover who sits “in the shade,” under a tree—a commonplace scenario in most pastoral works. 10 His persona travesties, in many respects, Gallus, the suffering lover in Virgil’s Eclogues, who can neither enter nor become part of the shepherd’s world; or Ergasto, who in the opening setting of Sannazzaro’s Arcadia, stands alone and wretched under a tree, in a world of pleasure where the shepherds gather for sports and musical contests. Richard, however, stretches the limits of love’s despair by making Nature, not a shepherdess, the reason for his “awakening to discontent” (Shore 1985, 81). His trajectory becomes as sombre as that of Spenser’s 9

“Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus avena / Carmen, . . . at nunc horrentia Martis / Arma virumque cano Virgil” (Aeneid, 1.22-25). This is translated by Fairclough as “I am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed . . . but now of Mars’s bristling arms and the man I sing.” The reiteration of the personal pronoun “I” in Richard’s speech recalls both Vergil’s and Spenser’s programmatic declarations. See the opening lines of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene 1.1-4 and 9: Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds, Am now enforst a far unfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, . . . Fierce warres and faithfull loves shall moralize my song. 10 See Spenser, The Shepheardes Calendar: May, 19-44).

196

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III

despondent Colin Clout, for whom, in the opening lines of the December eclogue, the shade becomes a shadowy retreat into secrecy and loneliness: The gentle shepheard satte beside a springe, All in the shadowe of a bushy brere, That Colin hight, which wel could pype and singe, For he of Tityrus his songs did lere. There as he satte in secreate shade alone, Thus gan he make of love his piteous mone. (December 1-6)

In Richard’s opening speech, it seems that Shakespeare picks up from where Spenser left off in The Shepheardes Calendar, in order to construct a “shepherd” that is no longer “gentle” but terrifying. Richard shares Colin Clout’s isolation and withdrawal in December, a theme developed by the imagery of “shade” and “shadow”: “All in the shadowe of a bushy brere / …There he sat in secret shade alone.” As Richard claims to “spy” his “shadow in the sun” (1.1.26), he appropriates Colin’s shade of retreat, and transforms it into a metonymy of existential solitude. The opaque object that intercepts the rays of the sun to create a shade no longer belongs to the outside world—a tree or a bush set in a pastoral landscape. It is internalised and becomes a reflection of self-introspection. Richard is in the shade metaphorically. He stands as an opaque figure, even to himself. When he looks at his self, it is to “spy” (or “see” in F1) nothing clear or distinct, nothing of substance or consistent. His narcissus is but a sombre vacuum, his selfhood but a projection. The character of Richard is in the dark and has only his shadow for his “amorous looking-glass” (1.1.15). Similarly, Richard’s despising “this weak-piping time of peace” (1.1.24) may resound as a statement of departure from the pastoral ideal. In fact, the phrase once again echoes Colin Clout’s own choice, both in Januarye and December, to finally reject his shepherd’s pipe: “fynding himselfe robbed of all former pleasaunce and delights, he breaketh his Pipe in peeces, and casteth him selfe to the ground” (Januarye, Argument), though the difference remains that Richard is not himself a poet-piper. If Richard’s pastoral persona appears in certain regards as a counterpoise to Spenser’s pastoral hero, it also points to several other characters, like Faustus in Mantuan’s first eclogue, who begins his opening speech by recalling the torments undergone for the love of a shepherdess. In keeping with the pastoral tradition, Faustus sets the scene in “this place, this self same shady bushe / That shrowds vs from the heate” (13-14). He then goes

Catherine Lisak

197

on to expose “this curssed fate of myne” (30). In sorrow he forsakes all pastoral pleasures and rejects his oaten pipe: No pleasure I in quiet tooke, No labour did delight . . . Delight of Musicke was heresie, For Pipe I did not passe Compacted of vnegall quilles, My bowe but lothsome was. The slyng & hound were hateful both, No pleasure I did put.

(31-32; 39-44) 11

He finds no voice to accommodate his fate in the Arcadian pipe. Rather, his formal stance is hard-bitten and defiant. His statement, “I am determinèd to prove a villain, / And hate the idle pleasures of these days” (1.1.30-31), introduces a dramatic identity intent on disrupting the world of pastoral (which does not necessarily mean departing from it altogether). In Richard’s universe, the recreative impulse is not so much cast out as warped or displaced: the disturbing shift from a contented mode of being to a fearsome mode of action is shaped to the measure of his bodily deformity and psychological resentment. Pleasure is an object of antipathy, if pleasure is not bred by terror. Richard looks beyond the pastoral yet maintains the mode, which he frames anew to suite his dramatic determination as a disruptive spirit. He turns to speech and action as his dramatic instruments to achieve his own version of pastoral. In this personal narrative of self, he makes “pastoral usages answerable to a dramatic situation and dramatic relations productive of pastoral values” (Alpers 1996, 206), in particular by announcing the arrival of a new persona that will assert himself by refusing to exist within the bounds of pastoral unless it is to undo them, systematically, by putting theatre to work: “Plots have I laid inductious, dangerous, / By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams” (1.1.32-33).

11

See Mantuan, The Eglogs (1572), “The first Egloge of Mantuan, intituled Favstvs” (Sig. Aii.) The original title to the first ecglogue was: “De honesto Amore et felici eius exitu” (“Of lawful love and its happy outcome”). See Shore 1985, 82.

198

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III

III In Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589), there reigns a sense of dismay as the narrator witnesses the way Arcadia is disrupted and precipitated into war. The “straunge Metamorphosis” from idleness to resoluteness, as warring men spring up from the bucolic world, is Ovidian both in gist and in dramatic phrasing: Why, what strange Metamorphosis is this? Are the Plaines of Arcadie, whilome filled with labourers, now ouerlaide with launces? Are sheepe transformed into men, swaines into souldiers, and a wandring companie of poore shepheards, into a worthie troope of resolute champions? No doubt, either Pan meanes to playe the God of warre, or else these be but such men as rose of the teeth of Cadmus. (Arber 1880, 82).

Richard acts out this metamorphosis in reverse while taking his cue from the theatre world (especially through his affinity with the stage Vice), in order to disrupt the secure setting of Arcadia. This does not imply a wholesale rejection of the poetic modes. Far from becoming a character contained solely within a dramatic framework, Richard rules over the play like the versatile pastoral figure that combines ferocity with playfulness. As he announces his departure from the epic mode, Richard stands as the god of war who “means to play” Pan, in all his generic ambivalence. Lavater explains that “Pan” meant “a Lord & Ruler, not of woordes, but of al manner of material substances: whose power is suche, that it is able to create the essence and substance of bodies” (1572, fol. 95). Basing my argument on this definition, I will explore how the spirit of Pan rules over the play through the character of Richard, who, like the Arcadian god, possesses the power of action and introduces into the play’s pastoral mode the modus operandi of plots, prophecies, and dreams (1.1.32-33)—not as a protective spirit but as a predominantly threatening, malevolent, diabolical figure, who appears on stage like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In the following attempt to argue this parallel between Richard and Pan, my purpose is not to find exclusive alternative interpretations to those features in the play that have other, obvious precedents and references. Rather, it is to show that the myth of Pan works in the play like a running metaphor and one of many possible readings. It is not just phrases like “this weak-piping time of peace” (1.1.22) or “a wanton-ambling nymph” (1.1.17) that offer glimpses of the Pan and Syrinx myth (Golding 2000, I: 842-887). Many of the traditions related to

Catherine Lisak

199

the myth of Pan surface in the play. When alluding to his appearance, Richard claims “That dogs bark at me as I halt by them” (1.1.23). That dogs should bark at his ghastly sight partly suggests that as guardians of flocks, they recognize the danger in Richard; indeed, his account casts him as a wolf. It also falls within the larger pattern of the traditional Arcadian festival of the Lupercalia (which took place at the end of winter). 12 There is a chapter on Roman mores, in Amyot’s 1596 translation of Plutarch’s Moralias in which Plutarch wonders why the Luperci offer dogs in sacrifice. His answer, echoing The Aeneid, states that it is done in honour of Pan. This explanation leads Plutarch onto another: it is also because “dogs bark at them, and irritate and anger them.” 13 It is not just Richmond—“the bloody dog is dead” (5.7.2)—but Margaret (the widow of King Henry VI) who calls Richard “a dog” (1.3.213). His attributes are more those of the dangerous wolf (“hell-hound”) than those of the guardians of herds. Placing “his teeth before his eyes”, Margaret seems to depict a cross between the horn-crested Pan (or Wolf-God) and the “rav’ning wolf, whose chaps do long / To lick the bloud of the poore bleating lambe” (Aeneid, 9.69-70): From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death. That dog that had his teeth before his eyes, To worry lambs and lap their gentle bloods, That foul defacer of God’s handiwork Thy womb let loose, to chase us to our graves. (4.4.44-49)

Deformity is another characteristic Richard shares with Pan. Pan’s monstrosity, as one half-man, half-beast, was a commonplace. William Warner shaped his discourse in Pan his Syrinx (1584), following “the forme, or rather the deformitie of Pan, the Pastoral God” (To The Reader). Within the tradition of the Homeric Hymns, the second half of Hymn XIX “To Pan” tells how Pan’s mother/nurse fled, frightened at the monstrous sight of the new-born child: “And in the house she / bare Hermes a dear son who from his birth was / marvellous to look upon, with goat's feet and two / horns—a noisy, merry-laughing child. But when / the nurse saw his uncouth face and full beard, she / was afraid and sprang up and fled and left the / child” (Homeric Hymns, 1914, 445). It is in remarkably similar 12 13

See Wits theater of the little world 1599, (fol. 92v). “les chiens abbayent aux Luperques, & les impportunent et faschent” (470G).

200

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III

terms that Pan’s birth resonates in Anne’s words, as she curses the child of her husband’s assassin, wishing upon the murderer a “prodigious” child, “Whose ugly and unnatural aspect / May fright the hopeful mother at the view” (1.2.21, 22-3). 14 Richard does share with Pan his jocularity, though the Hymn’s strongly positive attitude to Pan, who is treated as a source of delight, contrasts with Anne’s image of a monstrous child, as well as Richard’s “comic and callous” stature as an anti-Christ (Shakespeare 1981, 107). Aware that he cannot comply with his pastoral environment, Richard enters the play with a deadly intent to harm, notably by spreading terror, fear and death through dreams. Many are those, mostly Richard’s victims, who convey the tormenting premonitory dreams that terrorized them on the eve of their deaths (even if not literally in every case): one recalls Clarence’s “ugly sights” (1.4.3), Stanley’s “mock’ry of unquiet slumbers” (3.2.25), Anne’s “timorous dreams” (4.1.80); even the king “harkens after prophecies and dreams” (1.1.54). Interestingly, Pan also had the power to induce panic-terror and nightmares in others. When Pan was disturbed in his slumber, his anger could make the panic-stricken lose their humanity. In Euripides’s Rhesus (unknown to Shakespeare), soldiers are smitten with wild fear by Pan the night before the battle. This was an aspect of the myth that had reached the Renaissance and was fully exploited. 15 In Lavater’s Of ghostes and spirites (1572), for instance, one reads:

14

There were twenty-six different editions of the Homeric Hymns circulating in Europe in the sixteenth century, all except three dating from the fifteenth century, the others of a slightly earlier date. The common ancestor of these editions was a Greek MS. edited in 1488 in Florence, “a book brought to Italy in 1423, and which before 1500 gave birth to this complicated progeny!” (Allen 1895, 20, 47-49). In his study on Spenser, “the New Orphic Poet,” Patrick Cheney, in considering the “archaeological evidence for the primeval link between the bird and the poet” (1993, 71), traces his investigation back to the lyric poetry of Mycenean culture, namely the Homeric Hymns, including “To Pan,” which he argues would have nurtured the Renaissance imagination. The question of the possible “influence” of the Homeric Hymns on Elizabethan literature remains unresolved, as do the manifest parallels, so one is not looking for direct imitation but for similarities in patterns of speech or situation. 15 The first edition of Polybius’s work (in which this version of the myth was told) circulated in Latin as early as 1473; Polybius’s work was translated into English by Meric Casaubon only in 1609, but his stories and myths were known to many, as we can see from Lavater’s works.

Catherine Lisak

201

When Miltiades addressed his people against the Persians, there were heard terrible noises before the battaile, and certaine spirits were seene, which the Athenians afterwards affirmed to be the shadow of Pan, who cast such a feare on the Persians, that they turned their backs and fled. Thereof Terrores Panici tooke their name, being spoken of sodayn feares vnloked for, and terrours, suche as Lymphatici metus are, which driue men out of their wits being taken therwith. (Bk 1, ch.17, fol.81)

The most probable source for Lavater, as for others, was Pausanias, who was abundantly cited in early modern literature—in translations, as well as in Holinshed’s Chronicles and cultural studies such as Matthieu Beroald’s A short view of the Persian monarchie (1590). He was considered as one of the “manie Greeke Historiographers” renowned, amongst other things, for his description of Arcadia. In Pausanias’s Description of Greece, we find out how the army of barbarians “encamped where night overtook them in their retreat, and during the night there fell on them a ‘panic.’ For causeless terrors are said to come from the God Pan” (Book 10, Chapter 23, Section 7). According to the myth, Pan inspires fear (through dreams) amongst crowds. In Richard III, visions of crowds or “legions” inauspiciously splice into nightmares. Thus, one might conceive the myth of Pan as interwoven with Shakespeare’s debt to Ovid and to Spenser’s Cave of Mammon in the Faerie Queene. As Clarence recounts his nights “so full of ugly sights” of death, his dream within a dream is crowded by “a thousand fearful wrecks” and teems with ten thousand drowned men that strewed the deep with their skulls, eye holes, and dead bones (1.4.2231). This vision induces another, where Clarence imagines himself surrounded by “a legion of foul fiends” whose howls and “hideous cries” send him “to hell” even before his time (1.4.55-60). Margaret identifies Richard, “the troubler of the poor world’s peace” (1.3.218). However, when Margaret curses Richard, she outplays him by making his own weapon—“some tormenting dream” (1.3.223)—turn against him. Richard becomes the victim of his own torments (5.3). The myth of Pan seems to have been inverted or perverted. He is haunted by his own dreams when he withdraws to his tent on the eve of the battle of Bosworth Field. This, of course, would have been perceived by the audience as the operation of a divinely inspired conscience, such as Margaret invokes: “The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul” (1.3.219). Neither Richard’s soldiers nor Richmond’s “six or seven thousand” men are filled with dread, only Richard:

202

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III . . . shadows tonight Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers Armèd in proof and led by shallow Richmond. (5.4.195-98)

These night shadows (“their souls whose bodies Richard murdered” [5.4.209]) persecute the man who spied his shadow in the sun: such haunting is of his own making. Their visitation precedes his downfall—his death being determined both by history (King Richard died in 1485) and by divine retribution. The myth of Pan’s uncertain origins also filters through Richard’s account of his family history. Both Lavater (fol. 95) and E. K., Spenser’s anonymous commentator in The Shephearde’s Calendar report the same story of Great Pan being the son of Mercury and Penelope. The identity of his father was, however, problematic. In accounts written after Homer’s Odyssey, stories ran that Pan’s father was Hermes, and that Ulysses had repudiated Penelope for her infidelity. Pausanias goes so far as to make Penelope conceive Pan after having had eighteen suitors. In Shakespeare’s play, Richard also sheds doubt on his brother’s paternity by slurring his mother’s reputation and by alluding to her infidelity when the King was away. To secure his own legitimacy, Richard reinvents the story of his brother’s birth in a way that comes very close to the accounts of Pan’s uncertain filiations. He recounts how his “princely father” soon “Found that the issue was not his-begot; / Which well appeared in his lineaments, / Being nothing like the noble Duke, my father” (3.5.89-91). In The Seconde parte of the booke of Christian exercise (1590), Robert Parsons recounts the same story of Pan’s origins and death as Lavater and E. K. Interestingly, Pan was the only pagan god to die (presumably during Tiberius’s reign). Parsons explains: “a strange voyce, and exceeding horrible clamour, with hydeous cryes, skriches, and howlings, were heard by many in the Graecian sea, complaining that the great God Pan was nowe departed” (Parsons 1590, 314). E. K. also emphasises the wailings that foretold his death; these seem close in nature to those that haunted Clarence’s dreams. Additionally, all three accounts highlight the ambiguity of the “Great God Pan.” They remind the readers that they might be dealing with a messianic figure, the God of all shepherds, in keeping with the Gospel parable of the Good Shepherd (John 10: 1-18). “For Pan signifieth all or omnipotent, which is onely the Lord Iesus” (E. K.’s gloss on “Pan” in the May eclogue). Pan might also be perceived

Catherine Lisak

203

(wrongly, according to E. K.) as “the great Satanas, whose kingdome at that time was by Christ conquered, the gates of hell broken vp, and death by death deliuered to eternall death.” 16 When Richard cons the lord Mayor into believing in his piety, Richard’s travesty of a religious man also offers a parodied version of the good shepherd. He appears in the presence of two Bishops, described as “Two props of virtue for a Christian prince” (3.7.91) and “True ornaments to know a holy man” (3.7.94). This was the same character that made the crowd fall “mum” when they learnt that Richard might become king (3.7.4). Richard’s Pan-like attributes enable him to shift from the Judaeo-Christian pastor bonus to the satanic figure of a Machiavelli. In his study of Clarence’s dreams, Jowett lays emphasis on the “primarily pagan conception of death” of the episode. The same argument might be applied to Richard’s own analogy with the myth of Pan: “At some over-arching level the play is diversifying its status as a retold myth of English political nationhood, claiming its part in a new English vernacular literature that could comfortably assimilate the classical influence” (2000, 49).

IV The link between Pan and Richard would have been a possible association for an audience well versed not only in classical literature but also in Spenser’s work. The association would have led to a new interpretation of the Richard-Elizabeth relationship in Act 4, Scene 4, in the light of the Pan-Syrinx relationship and Spenser’s Aprill from The Shepheardes Calendar. In wishing to be a “country servant maid” in Act 1 Elizabeth has ventured into a pastoral world already tainted and trespassed upon by Richard’s dreadful persona in his opening lines. Elizabeth’s reluctance to concede her daughter’s hand in marriage to Richard is a milder version of Syrinx’s fleeing Pan outright. One also recalls Spenser’s depiction of Queen Elizabeth I’s mother, as Syrinx, in his Aprill eclogue. Montrose has pointed out that in Spenser’s pastoral encomium of Elizabeth in the fourth eclogue, Colin “metamorphoses an Ovidian aetiological myth into a Tudor genealogical myth” (1987, 47). Spenser’s narrative presents Pan and Syrinx as Elizabeth’s mythical parents in a divine relationship:

16

The Shepheardes Calender: May, Renascence Editions online text.

204

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III For shee is Syrinx daughter without spotte, Which Pan the shepheards God of her begot: So sprong her grace Of heavenly race, No mortall blemishe may her blotte. (Aprill, 50-54)

E. K. comments on the link between Pan and Christ as between Pan and Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s father, turning the story of Pan and Syrinx into a political and religious allegory: here by Pan and Syrinx is not to bee thoughte, that the shephearde simply meante those Poetical Gods: but rather supposing (as seemeth) her graces progenie to be divine and immortall … could devise no parents in his judgement so worthy for her, as Pan the shepeheards God, and his best beloved Syrinx. So that by Pan is here meant the most famous and victorious King, her highnesse Father, late of worthy memorye K. Henry the eyght. And by that name, oftymes (as hereafter appeareth) be noted kings and mighty Potentates: And in some place Christ himselfe, who is the verye Pan and god of Shepheardes. 17

The strong religious connotations in this Eclogue ensure that Henry’s sexual image remains undefiled, while chaste Syrinx, who shares the same sinless state as Mary, personifies Elizabeth’s Immaculate Conception. Ann Boleyn may seem altogether ousted from Spenser’s scenario, though it might also be argued that this allegory fits the programme of rehabilitating Elizabeth’s mother through her grandmother. E. K.’s gloss—“By the mingling of the Redde rose and the White, is meant the uniting of the two principall houses of Lancaster and of Yorke”—suggests that in Elizabeth’s complexion there radiates an end to the dynastic feud: “Til the famous Henry the seventh, of the line of Lancaster, taking to wife the most vertuous Princesse Elisabeth, daughter to the fourth Edward of the house of Yorke, begat the most royal Henry the eyght aforesayde, in whom was the firste union of the Whyte Rose and the Redde” (Maclean 1982, 440n5). Shakespeare’s scene does not mention the Pan and Syrinx myth, which operates at several removes from the text. However, there would have been those, amongst a contemporary audience, who would have had Spenser’s 1579 allegory in mind as they attended a performance of Richard III. The scene would consequently have taken on a more sombre and distressing significance, for Richard III does not display a Christ-like 17

Maclean 1982, 439n3.

Catherine Lisak

205

incarnation of Pan (god of shepherds) but enhances the diabolical nature of this mythical being, who would willingly and forcefully interfere with Elizabeth’s natural royal lineage and tamper with her genealogical self. Having “fought the slur of bastardy all her life” (Dusinberre 1975, 58), and this most successfully in Spenser’s stanza, Queen Elizabeth I was being challenged yet once more by this staging of the hypothetical risk that Richard might have been a contender for the conception of the future monarch of England. Despite his statement that he cannot rival the amorous courtier, Richard multiplies his attempts at seducing queens and at winning the hand of a young princess and future queen. Whether his efforts prove successful (as at first) or not (as in Act 4, Scene 4), they place him, to the end, in an unsettling relation to Elizabeth I. It is both Spenser’s gloss, which celebrates the rose-entwining marriage of Henry Tudor with the princess Elizabeth, and Richard’s own failure to prove a successful wooer that purge any such perceived risk and validate the historical genealogy. In Richard III, the Queen Consort also offers a “motherly” version of Syrinx, when she claims to be prepared to deny her natural self and perform a metamorphosis of her condition as mother in order to save her daughter from an awesome fate: “Shall I forget myself to be myself?” (4.4.340). This is the choice the Ovidian nymph made in order not to fall into Pan’s clutches and to preserve her virginity. Elizabeth, who would be the “country servant maid,” is, indeed, George Pettie’s “Syrinx a simple mayde” who “reiected the God Pan” (fol.86). The fact that she rejects him on her daughter’s behalf should not spoil the analogy. As Madonne M. Miner remarks, “Richard pursues a course of action that eventually forces Elizabeth to relinquish her claim” as mother; thus, she “freely abjures her motherhood” and “expresses her willingness to deny the legitimacy of young Elizabeth’s birth to save her from marriage to Richard” (1980, 43). This, of course, introduces a new unsettling parameter to Elizabeth’s genealogy, which is the potential accusation of her illegitimacy. Of course, Richard ultimately fails to obtain Princess Elizabeth’s hand in marriage, though he preys on Elizabeth; but he does go so far as to claim that he would make the Princess pregnant, at least in verb and imaginative verve. This Pan-like figure would make it his chief business to make the flock fertile and pervert the course of the royal lineage: such claims make up the additional fifty-five lines in F, where Richard states, “I will beget / Mine issue of your blood upon your daughter” (4.4.297-98). 18 18

The Arden Shakespeare, edited by Antony Hammond.

206

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III

Again, picking up on a metaphor one will encounter in Spenser’s Faerie Queene of 1596, Richard claims, “But in your daughter’s womb I bury [the murdered princes], / Where in that nest of spicery, they will breed / Selves of themselves” (4.4.343-45). 19 We see how in Richard’s vision of future royal history—Elizabeth’s immediate past, the organic structure of the royal lineage—is wholly commanded by its basic, most primitive, procreative dimension. The royal self is portrayed as a self-engendering species commanded by Richard’s first and single thrust, without further reference to parental action. Incestuous taboos are implicitly violated in Richard’s self-referential system, which inscribes Elizabeth’s future existence within a hermetic frame and a limitless process of selfpossession. Spenser’s idyllic myth of Queen Elizabeth’s virgin birth comes close to becoming a tale of abuse and subjection as Shakespeare’s play unfolds. The royal feminine self is no longer sacred, while a man’s actions become sacrilegious. It might be said that Spenser’s divine Henry VIII is recast, in Act 4, Scene 4, as the base and dreaded rival to the throne and a slur on Henry VIII. Richard III confirms that “pastoral was the standard alternative realm for early modern aristocratic fantasy, an imaginative space in which courtly structures could be escaped, reproduced and criticized” (McMullan 2002, 262). Elizabeth and Richard both prove to be pastoral speakers because they engage central questions concerning the representative value of the royal self as “God of all shepherds.” In The End Crowns All, Barbara Hodgdon argues that the play transfers onto Richard certain attributes (like inconstancy) that the chronicler Hall ascribed to the play’s Elizabeth, in order to protect the name of the ruling monarch, Elisa, Queene of Shepheardes. But there is another set of shifts that occurs in Shakespeare’s plays. The playwright, it seems, teases Elizabeth I’s established, self-determined portrayal of the royal self by reminding her majesty and the audience of the possible disquieting usages one could make of her motley of selves. In the process, the dramatist enhances the vulnerability as much as the strength that characterized both the queen and her self-image.

19

Hammond notes: “Judith H. Anderson points out a parallel between these lines and Spenser’s description of the Garden of Adonis (F.Q.III.vi), in which the Boar is imprisoned and Adonis lies ‘Lapped in Flowres and pretious spycery’ (1984, 118).” This does not mean we should dismiss the fabled nest of the phoenix in Arabia.

Catherine Lisak

207

Works cited Primary Sources Albott, Robert. 1599. Wits theatre of the little world. London: I. R. Anon. 1864-66. The Debate and Stryfe between Somer and Wynter (c.1530). Vol. 3 of Remains of Early Popular Poetry of England, ed. W.C. Hazlitt. London: J. R. Smith. Beroald, Matthieu. 1590. A short view of the Persian monarchie. London: Thomas Orwin. Elyot, Sir Thomas. 1962. The Governor. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent. Foxe, John. 1583. Acts and Monuments. The Variorum Edition. hriOnline, Sheffield 2004. http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/foxe/ (accessed September 4, 2007). Greene, Robert. 1880. Menaphon. Ed. Edward Arber. Birmingham: The English Scholar’s Library of Old and Modern Works. Hesiod. Homeric Hymns. Epic Cycle. 1914. In Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Holinshed, Raphael. 1586. The Third Volume of Chronicles. . . . London: Henry Denham. Lavater, Ludwig. 1572. Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght. Trans. R. H. London: Henry Bynneman. Lyly, John. 1991. Campaspe. Ed. G. K. Hunter. The Revels Plays Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mantuan, Baptista. 1572. The eglogs of the poet B. Mantuan Carmelitan, turned into English by George Turbevile. London: H. Byneman. Ovid. 1973. Ovid’s Elegies. Trans. Christopher Marlowe. In Epigrams, ed. John Davies. Menston: Scolar Press. ———. 2000. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567. Ed. John Frederick Nims. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books. Parsons, Robert. 1590. The seconde parte of the booke of Christian exercise, appertaining to Resolution. London: John Charlwoode. Pausanias. 1918. Pausanias Description of Greece. Trans. W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod. 4 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Pettie, George. 1576. A petite palace his pleasure. London.

208

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III

Plutarch. 1596. Les Oeuvres Morales . . . de Plutarque, Traduictes de Grec en François . . . par Maistre Iacques Amiot. Trans., Jacques Amyot. Paris: Robert Foüet. Poggioli, Renato. 1975. The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Puttenham, George. 1936. The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York and London: W. W. Norton. ———. 1981. Richard III. Ed. Antony Hammond. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen. Shakespeare, William, and John Fletcher. 2000. King Henry VIII (All Is True). Ed. Gordon McMullan. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thompson Learning. Shakespeare, William. 2000. Richard III. Ed. John Jowett. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: University Press. Sidney, Philip. 1590. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. London: John Windet for William Ponsonbie. ———. 1994. The Defence of Poesy. In Sir Philip Sidney: A Selection of His Finest Poems, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, 101-142. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maclean, Hugh, ed. 1982. Edmund Spenser’s Poetry. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton. Spenser, Edmund. 1996. The Shepheardes Calender. Renascence Editions online ext. © The University of Oregon. http://uoregon.edu/~rbear/shepheard.html (accessed September 14, 2007). Vergil [Virgil]. 1978-86. Virgil, with an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough. 2 vols. (vol. 1: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1-6; vol. 2: Aeneid 7-12, Minor Poems). Rev. ed. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Warner, William. 1584. Pan his Syrinx, or pipe compact of seuen reedes. London: Thomas Purfoote.

Secondary Sources Allen, Thomas W. 1895. The Text of the Homeric Hymns. I. The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 15: 136-183. Alpers, Paul J. 1996. What is Pastoral? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Catherine Lisak

209

Braudy, Leo. 1986. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York: Oxford University Press. Cheney, Patrick. 1993. Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ——— 2004. Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cullen, Patrick Colborn. 1970. Spenser, Marvell, and Renaissance Pastoral. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Dusinberre, Juliet. 1975. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women. London: Macmillan. Empson, William. 1935. Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Chatto and Windus. Heninger, Simeon Khan, Jr. 1961. The Renaissance Perversion of the Pastoral. Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (2): 254-261. Hodgdon, Barbara. 1991. The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kermode, Frank, and John Hollander, eds. 1973. Sir Thomas Wyatt. In The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, 616-22. New York and London: Oxford University Press. Kronenfeld, Judy Z. 1978. Social Rank and the Pastoral Ideals of As You Like It. Shakespeare Quarterly 29: 338-48. McEachern, Claire. 2002. Literature and National Identity. In The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller, 313-42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miner, Madonne M. 1980. “Neither mother, wife, nor England’s queen”: The Roles of Women in Richard III. In The Woman’s Part:. Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, 35-55. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Montrose, Louis Adrian. 1987. “Eliza, Queene of Shepheardes,” and the Pastoral of Power. In Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, ed. Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins, 34-63. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Patterson, Annabel. 1987. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shore, David R. 1985. Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral. A Study of the World of Colin Clout. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Smith, Hallett. 1968. Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning and Expression. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

210

Pastoral Perspectives and Sovereign Selfhood in Richard III

Smith, Peter L. 1970. Vergil’s Avena and the Pipes of Pastoral Poetry. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 101: 497-510. Van Es, Bart. 2007. Spenserian Pastoral. In Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion, ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., 79-89. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Penry. 1995. The Later Tudors: England 1547-1603. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Danièle Berton-Charrière is Professor of English Literature at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the life and works of Cyril Tourneur, and she has published many articles on Elizabethan, Jacobean and contemporary drama. Marie-Hélène Besnault was until recently Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Tours, where she taught English Renaissance Literature. She has published many articles on Tudor and Jacobean drama. Pauline Blanc is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lyon 3. She is the editor of this volume and has published several articles in English on Tudor and Jacobean drama. She is the author of a monograph in French about developments in English tragicomedy from the “Vice drama” of the mid-fifteenth century to Shakespeare’s late plays: L’Univers tragi-comique du théâtre shakespearien et ses précédents sur la scène tudor (Lyon: Publications de l’Université Jean Moulin-Lyon 3, 2007). Jean-Paul Debax is Professor (Emeritus) of English Literature at the University of Toulouse 2. A medievalist and Renaissance scholar, he has specialized in Tudor drama, both in its popular and courtly varieties, written a study of the Tudor interludes as “Vice drama” (unpublished) and published many articles on medieval and Tudor topics. He has also worked on dramatic theory both historical and modern. He is currently translating a selection of Tudor interludes for a forthcoming publication for the Pléiade series (Gallimard). Francis Guinle is Professor of English Renaissance Drama at the University of Lyon 2, where he teaches in the Department of English Studies and in the Department of Performing Arts. His research and publications are mainly concerned with the relationship between drama and music in the Tudor period. He is the author of a monograph, The Concord of this Discord: la structure musicale du Songe d’une nuit d’été de Shakespeare (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de

212

Editor and Contributor Biographies

Saint-Étienne, 2003) and has recently translated John Lyly’s Gallathea, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and John Marston’s The Malcontent for the forthcoming publication: Théâtre élisabéthain, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade) Richard Hillman is Professor of English Literature at the University of Tours. His chief specialty is the English theatre of the Renaissance, a field in which he has published numerous articles and several monographs: Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays (New York: Twayne English Authors Series, 1993); Intertextuality and Romance in English Renaissance Drama: The Staging of Nostalgia (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); and Shakespearean Subversions: The Trickster and the Play-text (London: Routledge, 1992). His latest book, Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), testifies to the increasing concentration of his research on links between England and France. He has recently published translations, with introductions and notes, of L’histoire tragique de la Pucelle de Domrémy, by Fronton Du Duc (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2005), La tragédie de feu Gaspard de Colligny by François de Chantelouve, and La Guisiade, by Pierre Matthieu (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2005). François Laroque is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: University Press, 1991) and of Court, Crowd and Playhouse (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), and has co-edited several volumes for Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. He has recently published a new edition and translation of Romeo and Juliet in association with Jean-Pierre Villquin (Paris: Hachette, 2005). He is currently preparing a two-volume anthology (with translation) of nonShakespearean drama (1490-1642) for the Pléiade series (Gallimard). André Lascombes is Professor (Emeritus) of English Literature at the University of Tours. He has published on cultural and theatrical aspects of late medieval and early English drama and organized the biannual international “Tudor Round Table” conferences at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours since 1983, editing the proceedings in six volumes of essays in the THETA Collection (Berne:

Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage

213

Peter Lang), a collection that hosts studies about the drama of the English Renaissance, and about the culture in which it is rooted. Catherine Lisak is Senior Lecturer at the University of Bordeaux 3. She has published many articles on Shakespeare, and is currently editing Richard II for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and working on a monograph about reception theory. Ladan Niayesh is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Paris 7. Her PhD dissertation focussed on cannibalism in early modern English drama, and she has published many articles on the representation of Others and Otherness (mostly Oriental) in early modern travel literature. She is also a co-editor of Cahiers Élisabéthains. Norah Yvonne Phoenix is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Tours. She has published several articles on Renaissance theatre and is completing a monograph on time and space in Tudor Theatre for a forthcoming publication in French. Peter J. Smith is a Reader in Renaissance Literature at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Social Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995) and co-editor (with Nigel Wood) of Hamlet: Theory in Performance (Open University Press, 1996). His essays and reviews have appeared in journals including Shakespeare Survey, Renaissance Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin, Times Higher Educational Supplement and Critical Survey. Since 1992 he has been associate editor of Cahiers Élisabéthains. He is currently writing the volume on Twelfth Night for the “Shakespeare in Performance” series (Manchester University Press) and completing a study of scatology. Greg Walker is Masson Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His publications include Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: University Press, 1991); Persuasive Fictions: Faction, Faith, and Political Culture in the Reign of Henry VIII (London: Scolar Press, 1996); The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: University Press, 1998); and Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: University Press, 2005). He has edited John Skelton (London: Everyman Poetry Library, 1997) and Medieval Drama: An Anthology (London: Blackwell, 2000).