Shakespeare's Possible Worlds 9781139959148, 9781107058279

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Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds New methods are needed to do justice to Shakespeare. His work exceeds conventional models, past and present, for understanding playworlds. In this book, Simon Palfrey goes right to the heart of early modern popular drama, revealing both how it works and why it matters. Unlike his contemporaries, Shakespeare gives independent life to all his instruments, and to every fraction and fragment of the plays. Palfrey terms these particles “formactions” – theatre-specific forms that move with their own action and passion. Palfrey’s book is critically daring in both substance and format. Its unique mix of imaginative gusto, thoughtexperiments, and virtuosic technique generates piercing close readings of the plays. There is far more to playlife than meets the eye. Influenced by Leibniz’s visionary original model of possible worlds, Palfrey opens up the multiple worlds of Shakespeare’s language, scenes, and characters as never before. simon palfrey is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the joint founding editor of Shakespeare Now! His books include Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (1997), Doing Shakespeare (2004, 2011 – named a TLS International Book of the Year), Shakespeare in Parts (with Tiffany Stern, 2007 – winner of an AHRC Innovations Award and the MRDS David Bevington Award for best new book on Medieval and Renaissance drama), and Poor Tom: Living “King Lear” (2014).

Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds Simon Palfrey

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107058279 © Simon Palfrey 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Palfrey, Simon. Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds / Simon Palfrey. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-05827-9 (hardback) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Technique. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Dramatic production. 3. English drama – Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600 – History and criticism – Theory, etc. I. Title. PR2995.P35 2014 822.30 3–dc23 2014002510 ISBN 978-1-107-05827-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Jo

Contents

Acknowledgements A note on texts Part I

Entering Playworlds

page ix xii 1

1

Where is the life?

2

Purposes

10

3

Embryologies

21

4

Shakespeare the impossible

33

5

Popular theatre and possibility

43

6

Shakespeare v. actor

56

7

Playing to the plot

67

8

Middleton

77

9

Jacobean comi-tragedy

88

Everyman tyrant

98

10

Part II

Modelling Playworlds

3

107

11

The monadic playworld

109

12

Formactions

123

13

The truth of anachronism

147

14

Possible history: Henry IV

160

15

Anti-rhetoric

177 vii

viii

Contents

16

Falstaff

183

17

Scenes within scenes

187

18

Strange mimesis

199

19

How close should we get?

206

20

Metaphysics and playworlds

213

21

Pyramids of possible worlds

228

Part III

Suffering Playworlds

243

22

Perdita’s possible lives

245

23

A life in scenes

275

24

Scene as joke: Much Ado

282

25

Buried lives: Macbeth

286

26

The rape of Marina

297

27

Life at the end of the line: Macbeth

316

28

Dying for life: Desdemona

330

Epilogue: life on the line Bibliography Index

360 364 375

Acknowledgements

This is a book about Shakespearean possibility. Inevitably, I barely scratch the surface of my subject. But there is another smaller reason why I see my book as incomplete. Throughout much of its making, as it was dreamt and researched and drafted and redrafted, I was working towards one particular culminating example: Edgar-Tom in King Lear. But the material on Tom and Edgar started to build and build, and eventually threatened to overwhelm the enterprise, and so I decided to omit it completely and make it the subject of a separate work. This has become Poor Tom: Living “King Lear”, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014, an intensification and extension of my approach in Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds. I hope that anyone stimulated by either one of these books may also find things to enjoy in its partner. In many ways my most important interlocutors have been my students at Brasenose College, Oxford. It was in tutorials and classes with them (and lectures to the wider student body) that I had the chance to test my ideas and find compelling examples; and of course they contributed many of their own. And so I want to thank them all, particularly those of the last three years: Harry Ford, Rob Williams, Alice Gimblett, Georgia Mallin, Richard O’Brien, Katie Carpenter, Jessica Edwards, Celia Berton, Emily Hawes, Brogan Kear, Lucy Fyffe, Saranna Blair, Duncan Morrison, Dani Pearson, Savannah Whaley, Chloe Wicks, Chloe Cornish, Emily Hislop, Amy Lewin, Amy Rollason, Trisha Sircar, Pari Thomson, Christopher Webb, James Fennemore, Maria Fleischer, Josie Mitchell, Joshua Phillips, Namratha Rao, Rachel Rowan-Olive, and Alexandra Sutton. I owe enormous thanks to Joanna Picciotto. A year or so ago I showed her what I took to be the more-or-less finished manuscript. She gave it a fierce and passionate reading, enthusiastic and exacting, and I realised ix

x

Acknowledgements

how very far I actually was from doing justice to the subject. Subsequent edits and additions have, I hope, brought me just a little closer. Ewan Fernie has read very little of this, but he abides as a soul partner, our efforts always a kind of mutually galvanised tilting at possibilities. Vimala Pasupathi has throughout offered close and trusted counsel. Much of this book builds upon work done in the past with Tiffany Stern. An Oxford MA course we designed and taught together helped me to refine some nascent ideas and dismiss some others; our work remains at once radically different and surprisingly coordinate. And I am indebted to many others across the world who have helped with ideas, encouragement, and criticism. There are too many to recount, but among them are Sylvia Adamson, Jacquelyn Bessell, Graham Bradshaw, Ben Burton, Dermot Cavanagh, Philip Davis, Margreta de Grazia, Elisabeth Dutton, Sos Eltis, Larry Friedlander, John Gillies, Andreas Hoefele, Peter Holbrook, Laurie Johnson, Farah Karim-Cooper, Philippa Kelly, Theresa Krier, Aaron Kunin, Erika Lin, Ruby Lowe, Julia Lupton, Raphael Lyne, Laurie Maguire, Steve Mentz, Paul Menzer, Edward Muir, Eve-Marie Oesterlen, David Parker, Mireille Ravassat, Yasmine Richardson, Kiernan Ryan, David Schalkwyk, Regina Schwartz, Elizabeth ScottBaumann, John Sutton, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Henry Turner, William West, Ramona Wray, Bob White, Michael Witmore, and Paul Yachnin. And then there is Sarah Stanton at Cambridge University Press. She must get tired of authors saluting her professionalism, so I will instead praise her dauntlessness. Two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press produced very engaged, very insightful reports, which I have benefited from hugely in revising. Kate Boothby has been an acute proofreader, and Fleur Jones has helped see the book very efficiently through production. And I must thank Istvan Orosz (Hungary’s successor to Escher) for allowing me to use his poster for the book’s cover image, and for requesting only a couple of copies of the book in return! I am lucky to have been invited to speak at a number of venues where I have tested out bits of the work-in-progress: these include the University of Edinburgh; the Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham; the University of Cambridge; the School of Oriental and African Studies and Royal Holloway, University of London; Lancaster University; Queen’s University Belfast; Chinese University of Hong Kong; the

Acknowledgements

xi

University of Melbourne; the University of Queensland; the University of Oxford; Rutgers University; and University of California, Berkeley. I have also tried out parts of it at Shakespeare Association of America meetings in Chicago, Bellevue, and Toronto, the World Shakespeare Congress in Prague, the German Shakespeare Society in Zurich (disastrously . . .), the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) in Turin, the Modern Languages Association in Seattle, and the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-upon-Avon. I am grateful to the various organisers, and to the many thoughtful (and sometimes sceptical) respondents, far too many to list by name. Small portions of the material have appeared elsewhere, either earlier versions when the work was in process, or more recently as tasters for the forthcoming book: some of chapter 27 in “Macbeth and Kierkegaard”, Shakespeare Survey 57, edited by Peter Holland (Cambridge University Press, 2004); some of chapter 26 in “The Rape of Marina”, Shakespeare International Yearbook, edited by Graham Bradshaw and Tom Bishop (Ashgate, 2009); some of the Middleton material in “Middleton’s Presence”, Middleton in Context, edited by Suzanne Gossett (Cambridge University Press, 2012); some of chapter 7 in “Formaction”, Early Modern Theatricality, edited by Henry Turner (Oxford University Press, 2013); some of chapter 20 in “Strange Mimesis”, edited by Paul Menzer and Jeremy Lopez, The Hare (Online Journal, 2013). I am grateful to all of them for supporting the work (and where necessary for permission to reproduce it). This book is dedicated to Jo. She avoids reading anything I write, a forbearance which I happily construe as faith, sanity, and permission. And which daily reminds me there are worlds elsewhere.

A note on texts

Unless otherwise noted all quotations from Shakespeare are taken from The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile, prepared by Charlton Hinman, second edition (W. W. Norton & Company, 1996). Line references are to the through-line-number (TLN) of the Folio edition. In the case of Pericles I use the Malone copy of the 1609 Quarto in the Bodleian, edited by W. W. Greg (London, 1940). Likewise, unless otherwise noted all Middleton quotations and references are from Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Clarendon Press, 2007).

xii

Part I

Entering Playworlds

1

Where is the life?

This book begins with a simple question: where is the life in Shakespeare’s playworlds? What produces it, or counts as it? How small, or brief, can playlife be? How many lives make a world, or worlds a life? These are questions about possibility or potentiality, as much as they are about any palpable, self-consciously articulated actuality. And they are questions that pertain as much to me, the reader or witness of the play-event, as they do to the life or the worlds in motion. What is at stake in my recognitions? Are habitual ways of naming or admitting possibility adequate to the life in playworlds? (Are they adequate to life?) And what if playlife is far more manifoldly possible – has more materials, instruments, locations, layers – than is often presupposed in our frequently theme-driven, commonsensical, or sentimental responses to plays? Playlife need not correspond to an actor’s visible body, or to a named character. There are points of life everywhere. Not organic life, as we usually understand the term; not machinic life either: playlife. To feel out its variations, we mustn’t rush to regularise or naturalise a playworld’s moment-by-moment phenomena, as though all that we witness has to be self-evidently familiar. Instead, we need to take seriously the strange factitiousness of playlife: its synthetic morphology; its intermitted dispersal or disappearance; its assemblage or disassemblage in this or that formal unit; its distribution into ostensible unities which have to be gathered or inferred from quantum assertions of presence. What can it mean to allow such a confection as a measure of human possibility? Our basic understanding of the playevent might have to change – of our complicity in it, our strangeness or intimacy to it. And with this, our understanding of how plays render what it is to be an existing thing. How then to touch the life in plays? 3

4

Where is the life?

A good start is attending to particulars. The play may be a feast for the eyes, with display abundant, skills and charisma, the centre-stage demand to watch the juggler juggling. But the balls will fall, and should be followed as they roll slowly into corners. The ears may likewise suffer assault. Drums and music, words, words, words, intoned at speed and impossibly self-certain. Allow the noise, let it sweep us somewhere new. But again: stay to listen once the spit and bluster passes. There will be much that belies self-announcement. And so let’s imagine, beyond the clamour, or inside its appeal, that these worlds are also designed for – are designs of – the most delicate hypersensitivity. Anything might flinch at a touch, or describe its own tiny ellipses. There are centres of feeling at every turn, so be careful as we tread. Let’s step out of shared visible continuities, out of evident plot or articulated purpose, and move in less imperative, less brightly lit passages. Or step more deeply inside, collapsing distances, allowing discomforting intimacies. Inside the fidget, an itch that is rarely reached. There is no detail unworthy of our attention. Let us split and magnify, zoom in and zoom out, look intently at the surfaces, discover action where before was emptiness, movement where things seemed still. Imagine that we have never seen these things before (perhaps we haven’t). How else to feel what the possibilities are? Allow them to be new, or strange, or changed. Cast off our daily bodies, the neutralising banality of all of these senses, cancelling each other out, sensing only what we expect to sense. Instead, slow things down, and stretch the spaces in-between matter. Or blow things up – perhaps inflate them so that the air around them breeds; perhaps detonate them, such that we witness the shrapnel they render. Imagine surrendering to entirely different agents of knowledge: say the pressure of fingers, such that we feel a world, and only touch can confer reality; or the most refined touch of all, a world rendered in sound, in which silence is impossible, and the quietest gap, however unspeaking or unheard, is never noiseless. Or find the human by imagining the animal: ear of dog, nose of bear, eye of rat. Imagine yourself a deer, alive to the fact that hearing is vibration, a curtain upon the very possibility of continuing life. Enter the life in anything, however beyond the human, or the pale, or even the visible horizon. After all, this is what Shakespeare does all the time.

Entering Playworlds

5

Some lines will be so famous as to be difficult to process. But the worlds they make can be alarmingly strange: When shall we three meet againe? In Thunder, Lightning, or in Raine?

(Macbeth, 1. 1. 1–2)

It is tempting to take the three elements as one, assuming that they are, as Frank Kermode has said, “in the same hedgerow; they do not differ so completely as to be presentable as mutually exclusive alternatives”.1 But these are the play’s first words: we might say the Macbeth-world’s founding words. Shakespeare is doing much more than setting up false equivocations and parodies of choice (although he is doing this too). In a minute or two we hear of “Cannons over-charged with double-Crackes” (58): this is the kind of world we have entered, where noises crackle and split, where rounded things, like a cloud or a cannon, are at once monstrously self-exceeding and shivered into angles, in which each splintering crack is intensely centred, purposive, a motive unto itself, while also marking a breach out of which who knows what life may tumble. It is a world, remember, in which the earth hath bubbles! We can only conceive of such a thing by imagining prodigies unknown to daylight (TLN 180). The opening couplet discharges into just such an environment. Its principles are in a sense simple enough. The enduring condition is storm. But the storm is not a single blanketing fury, any more than earth is merely solid, air merely gas, or time a rolling continuum (thunder here precedes lightning). We should not instantly reblend what the script so clearly separates. In Thunder – in Lightning – in Rain: each can be entered, one at a time. Each place is simultaneous, and it is separated; each moment too. This world is weirdly quantumised, as though happening in discrete sheets of place or event: a sheet of thunder; a plate of lightning; a bubble of rain. The constituents are spaced apart, as though before the daily joining. The elements really are elements, the substances that constitute a world, reduced to their simplicity for these three alone. How else to slip into one and then the other, be wrapped inside its secrets, unless creation has marvellously resolved into its rudiments? Only

1 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 83.

6

Where is the life?

the diabolic hand, perhaps, can feel such changes, turn sound into place, open the lightning, enter the raindrop. Only the diabolic eye, perhaps, can so distinguish such parts, each one an epitome of possibility, when the eye of day sees only chaos or conflation. This sort of touch and sight is the witches’: but it is also Shakespeare’s. The world is indeed blown up. Shakespeare’s possible worlds have little or nothing to do with utopias, dreamscapes, fantastical visions of paradise. They have everything to do with travel across space and time – but the travelling does not require displacement to the moon or Atlantis or the Americas. Of course, Shakespeare’s heterocosmic imagination plays its part in larger stories of travel, adventure, and speculation (philosophical, scientific, colonial, economic); in all kinds of ways his work is symptomatic of an age in which worlds and perspectives were multiplying. I take this larger story as a given: one which Shakespeare’s play-forms contribute to, perhaps rival, perhaps explosively concentrate – and perhaps at times exceed. For Shakespeare’s creation is often at odds with customary ideas of lives and worlds, which presume extension in time and space (her life, that world), a communally agreed physical presence (the life can be seen, the place can be entered), and a public name to accord with this essentially single entity (Juliet, Verona).2 There is more to life than this. Think of how impoverished our sense of life must be, if we understood it only as human life, and then only as that element of human life that could be seen, now, like serried commuters at a bus stop, and which could be downloaded in present time to a spectator who instantly understood everything. What would such a world be like? No memory, no confusion, no competing planes, nothing unfinishable; no birdsong, no moss, no germs or bones or smells. Just these more or less finished exemplars, telling us what they are for. The dead plays do pretty much this, the ones that only scholars bother with, for completeness’ sake.

2 For a comprehensive study of early modern “worldmaking” in the more usual sense of the term, see Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cornell University Press, 1999): “In my use of the word ‘world’ I will not . . . imply that for every proposition or axiom or even semantic pattern there is an implied world for which it is true. For my category of ‘worlds’ I would like to retain as an attribute the social concept of the habitable or inhabitable.” But Campbell allows this to include the worlds of a particular novel: “the unspecified habitability of the ‘innumerable worlds’ of Giordano Bruno’s controversial speculations, and the extension and non-human sentience with which the microscopic ‘world’ is represented in the first decades of its accessibility”, 10.

Entering Playworlds

7

But not the living ones, the ones that remain possible, because they are alive, like any ecology is, with potentiality. Touching such possibilities isn’t only about being super-subtle hermeneuts. We need to combine delicate attendance – probing gaps, attending to silences – with openness, in ourselves, to passion. We have to banish preemptive sentimentalism, which will always tend to serve established shapes and templates. Instead we must be open to anything bearing life. This will certainly not be limited to the actor-character’s body. Here we need to recover more forcibly the early modern age’s predilection for allegory, for all kinds of micro-thinking, and for a dynamic understanding of nature which potentially saw personified emotions or nano-machines everywhere. It is hardly a stretch to give any formal instrument its own conatus, or soulappetite, both in its generic purpose and at each instantiation: so, scenes are animate with desire, a cue is hungry for connection, metalepses house competing endeavours. Perhaps we simply miss existing lives because we are not expecting to find them, or to find them in such form. This proposes something very different from a conventional understanding of playlife, in which our experience hinges upon the sympathetic recognition of named, visible characters. We might fear them or for them, laugh at them or with them, but the basic contract is assumed to be with actor-sized figures, more or less shaped and moved like us. Obviously, such identifications are indispensable to a play’s success. But if playlife is composed and distributed in the cellular or molecular way I am suggesting, then this must substantially modify how we understand the lives at issue. It suggests that we have an insufficient grasp, far too approximate, of the sources of our affects, which will not be so readily attributed to a self-surveying, self-articulating, cognitively centred character; it suggests that we are far too ready to normalise what we witness, leap from a play’s synthetic concatenations to as-though complete, coherent lives; it suggests we need to open up our sense of a playworld’s possible life forms, and of the kinds of activity that may bear, produce, or secrete passion and action.3

3 Compare Bert O. States: “plays, in their fashion, are efficient machines whose parts are characters who are made of actors. All characters in a play are nested together in ‘dynamical communion’, or in what we might call a reciprocating balance of nature: every character

8

Where is the life?

The path to possible life, then, is a combination of patient, scrupulous, repeated attendance; resistance to those presumptive expectations which, from timidity or conformity or complacency, consign certain matter to non-being; and strategically naive affect, a mode of negative capability, feeling each possibility as though a new-born aspirant for actuality. It means entering spaces which are not presented front-on, and which in the presentation are finished with. Playlife may be attenuated, or interrupted, or prevented, or waiting, or alone. It may exist anachronically, moving simultaneously between spatio-temporal planes, be subvisible as much as visible, virtual as much as concrete. It may move between palpable things, like lines, speeches, referents, or an actor and his character. Often it will seem to be contingent upon recognition, and yet strangely not press its presence into our consciousness. Playlife may be at once exploded and unexploded. The challenge to our experience is potentially huge. Where is the life? Have you recognised it? What can it mean if you haven’t? What Elaine Scarry says of flowers, we might equally say of playlife, and of the fineness and rarity of its materials: Pre-image and after-image, subsentient and supersentient, the plant exposes the shape of a mental process that combines the almost percipient with a kind of transitory exactness. It is as though the very precision required to find the exquisitely poised actuality of the flower’s “vague sentience” manifests itself as a form of acuity.4

Similarly pertinent is what Timothy Morton calls the “ecological thought”: It is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise – and how can we so clearly tell the difference?5 ‘contains in itself’ the cause of actions, or determinations, in other characters and the effects of their causality. (Dialogue, by this token, is a continuous oscillation of cause and effect: each line is the effect of the preceding line and the cause of the line to follow.)” Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 146–7. 4 Dreaming by the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 68. 5 Morton continues: “The ecological thought fans out into questions concerning cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and the irreducible uncertainty over what counts as a person . . . the ethics of the ecological thought is to regard beings as people even when they aren’t people.” And later: “There’s something slightly sizeist about viewing life as squishy, palpable substances, as if all life forms shared our kinds of tissue. This prejudice breaks down at high resolutions. Viruses

Entering Playworlds

9

This last is the really necessary question. What actually counts as sentience, or sub- or super-sentience, in a playworld? To whom or what does it belong? What exactly generates or houses it? The witness, certainly, as phenomenology demands: but not only that. We might again borrow from biology – perhaps the unit of selection is the gene, or the group, or the ecosystem, or some intra- or supra-subjective organism, as much as any discrete unified individual subject. The existing need not be humansized, or even human; it may be something fugitive, alive only beneath layers, or as unevenly identified potentiality. We may get percipience without accompanying recognition – in Hegelian terms, a kind of incipient or disregarded subject or event, awaiting the founding mirror. This links to the question of the incompossible, the prevented life, or what the ancients often termed privation. If playlife can only be rescued belatedly, after the event; if it can only be glimpsed, snatched or guessed at, or dimly apprehended as the carnival passes by; if only one in a hundred, or in a hundred thousand, feels its occluded potentiality: then what kind of existing is this? If the playlife is fathoms deep, locatable only via rare interpretive whimsy, or stolen affect, or overcurious morbidity – then is it truly possible? Who can say it is not? are large crystals . . . At the base of the daffodil, where it joins the stem, you see traces of how the flower looked when it started to spread upward and outward. You’re looking at a daffodil’s past, as well as at the past development of the flower as a species . . . Material organization turns out to be sets of formal relationships, not squishy stuff.” The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 8, 67–8.

2

Purposes

To recover Shakespeare’s particularity depends above all upon technically informed imagination. This is crucial for anyone seeking to bring these playworlds alive (student, actor, historian, director, teacher, composer). Without imagination – the willingness to construct things from virtually nothing, to enter into the minds or bodies of never-known others, to sympathise with actions or appetites that we may abhor, or that leave us cold, to feel out the fullness in apparent emptiness, to find adjacencies or connections where the daily mind sees only separation – we risk being no more than number crunchers. But I stress: imagination is of little use without technique; and, more than that, without moment-by-moment alertness to specifically theatrical technique. Everything else follows in its wake. Without such imagination the play is nothing; without it I don’t write a word. This is hardly a novel claim. In fact in many ways it is scrupulously historical. Shakespeare’s period was one of burgeoning self-reflectiveness about method and technique, and about the surest path to knowledge of the world and communication of such knowledge. And whatever the art (oratory, geometry, war, playmaking . . .), imagination and improvisation were repeatedly invoked as essential for good invention.1 Today’s scholarship often runs shy of anything so potentially groundless, rather as it does the modal range, dialogical liberties, and disciplinary compounds of so much Renaissance discourse. One aim of my book is to recover something of this, at least as a permission to think leapingly as well as metonymically, and to adventure out of over-trodden comfort zones. 1 Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

10

Entering Playworlds

11

Consequently, as well as conventional academic critique, the book features occasional polemical episodes, a few creative apostrophes and thought-experiments, and a number of sustained experiments in superclose reading. I don’t think there is much point in reading Shakespeare in any way other than super-closely; not if we want to discover things we don’t think we know. For my purposes there is no use in staying at a polite distance, content with approximation. But inevitably this kind of attention comes at a price. It means that the readings have to be close; it means that I linger and labour over details. My findings may at times feel obscure, or simply too ingenious, particularly to the more casual eye. But if I seem to some readers to find too much, so be it. It’s a price I am content to pay. I tend to think that there is far more to see and to say than I can ever imagine. But without at least some agreement to imagine possibilities that may not always seem self-evident, and to imagine them closely – at the level of Shakespeare’s most delicate forms, and sometimes at the level of my own sentences as I try to probe these forms – no reader will much enjoy this book. It is by no means a remorseless punishment. A lot of the book, I think, is easy and straightforward enough. But some of it has considerable density or concentration (in line with its subject), which I hope repays attention. My approach to Shakespeare is distinguished by a few intertwining purposes. First, in my abiding interest in how words work, both as instruments in the theatre and as embodiers of meaning. This means that I do not use the playtext as an occasion for exploring other discourses: it is the fundamental occasion. Second, in bringing the same intense close reading to bear on all the materials and instruments of theatre, textual and extratextual: I see every moving unit as a potential mode or node of language. Shakespeare’s habit of concentrating possibilities into single moments has long been recognised. Here is Hypollite Taine: “Behind the word is a whole picture, a long train of reasoning foreshortened, a swarm of ideas. . .These various forms of speech do more than denote ideas, they all suggest images. Every one of them is the concentration of a complete mimic action”;2 and here Peter Brook: “Shakespeare, alone in all playwriting, 2 Hypollite Taine, Romeo and Juliet Variorum, ed., Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1874), 441–2.

12

Purposes

made plays like those sorts of figures, and . . . each word is like a little figurine, vibrating with all these layers of meaning.”3 But it has rarely been recognised how every single one of Shakespeare’s instruments – not only his figures of speech – is potentially endued with multiple “mimic actions”. It is these instruments that I will call “formactions”. This more distributed understanding of theatrical forms means that I approach the playtext in a distinctive way. Many of the things I concentrate upon are beneath or beyond the attention of modern textual editions – things specific to the actor’s part-text, such as cues, cue-spaces, divergent instructions between an actor and a character; the scene as an existential unit, or as a site of numerous hyper-scenes or sub-scenes. Equally, my approach to well-known aspects of Shakespeare’s writing – for instance, his figurative densities – is often much more detailed than the brief notes of editors can ever allow. Every one of my play-readings is generated by the same very basic imperative – to study formactions. This means starting at the cellular level, often “bracketing” much of interest in the same scene, in the same dramatic moment, in the interest of focusing very particularly upon how a form-inaction expresses possibility. I don’t start with themes or contexts, and then try to find symptomatic passages. I positively try not to pre-empt how the particular formaction might contribute to larger stories, because such preemption necessarily prescribes and delimits the possibilities of the part. A basic purpose of mine is to redress the critical bias in the hermeneutic circle, whereby it is almost always some or other putative whole that determines what parts are admitted. Meta-narratives have to be resisted, or at least suspended. The parts are not always determined by a whole, whether the putative organic form of the play, or genre, or theme, or context. The parts can be self-determining; the instruments that make them can have a conation and a morphology that is neither derived from nor resolves into the whole: or at least parts of the part may claim their own unassimilable motive force.4 I want to return some appetite and surprise, some generative purpose, to the bits and pieces. 3 Interview with Peter Brook, in Ralph Berry, ed., On Directing Shakespeare (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977), 121–2. 4 Compare Roland Barthes’ distinction, writing about photographs, between the studium – perceptions determined by cultural preparation, “what we know without knowing it, what we

Entering Playworlds

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I have consulted only original facsimiles, Folio and Quarto, in developing my readings. I don’t pretend that working from photos of early texts endues my working playtexts with purity, any more than I pretend that constructing actor’s parts from these texts infallibly returns us to what the actors used. Of course it doesn’t. But modern editions cannot but impose their own hermeneutic decorums, their prescriptions and proscriptions, and I prefer to start from the ground up, without guidance or map other than a scrupulous awareness of the numerous instruments at work at every moment. This is really a continuation of the method that Tiffany Stern and I used in Shakespeare in Parts, where the fiction was that these things had never been seen before, as we tried to put ourselves in the minds of their first actors and playmakers.5 The principle of lonely imagining seems a good one for any book whose chief aim is to draw out the sources and generators of dramatic life. There is also the question of the specificity or otherwise of my claims: are they applicable only to Shakespeare, or to drama, or to writing of this period, or might they speak much more widely to literature’s worldmaking capability? I can answer some but not all of this. I do think that Shakespeare’s work is exceptional among his theatre contemporaries. No other playmaker generates worlds and lives in anything like the same fashion – not even Marlowe, despite coining the perfect line for the forms that I am describing: “Infinite riches in a little room”.6 However, this is not so clearly the case with early modern poetry. It may well be that the most skilful poets – Spenser, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Marvell – are open to similar analyses as I offer of Shakespeare’s forms. All experiment with modal shifts, active silences, grammatical recursiveness, unexpected metalepses, serious puns. Some of this, I expect, is actively due to Shakespeare. For instance, Donne was a great frequenter of plays, and who knows how much he learnt about lexical density and rhythmic variation from attending to the labile, endlessly surprising verse-forms of see without seeing it”, and the much rarer punctum, “the wound” made by a “detail”, which “paradoxically, while remaining a “detail”, “fills the whole picture”, a seeming “accident” in which the photograph seems “to annihilate itself as a medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself”: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 26, 45. See States, Great Reckonings, 11–12. 5 Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 6 Jew of Malta, 1. 1. 37.

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mid-1590s plays such as Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. (Although even if in some ways as copious as Shakespeare’s, Donne’s conceits tend to be roped back by the libidinally controlling authorial mind, and set fair against unpredictable proliferation.) Likewise, it is obvious that Shakespeare powerfully informs Milton’s developing art – manifest not only in the sensuousness of the early poetry and Comus, but also immanently in the teasing grammar and polyploid temporalities of Paradise Lost. (I dare say Milton ended up wanting to bury this influence – almost literally, in Samson Agonistes.) But clearly it is absurd to pretend that Shakespeare is above all such influence himself, or that he wasn’t foundationally affected by cultural radiation. He was probably familiar with Donne’s songs and sonnets in manuscript – he may have hated their crabbed qualifications and microcosmic conceitedness, but must have recognised a similar prosodic libertytaker. More broadly, all these writers share in the early modern period’s wonderful facility at worldmaking, private, or fantastical, or universal.7 Linked to this is how they all depend upon, indeed believe in, encapsulative metaphor. Again, this is probably less a gift of unique poetic genius than of the culture’s nervous theological hyper-consciousness, putting intense, potentially explosive pressure upon particular chosen signs: perhaps because thinking every moment freighted by all moments (as in original sin thinking); perhaps because thinking life belated, expectant, and raddled by inadequate imitation (as in eschatological or Christological thought); perhaps because believing the body to be a kind of unholy rental, not quite owned, not quite true, and so forever prone to allegory or transformation (as in virtually anyone touched by Christian thought). Whatever the specific orientation, in this mind-world the tiniest node can concentrate historical and spiritual possibility. Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the layers and load in apparent singularity is hardly unique. Indeed one might go further: it may be that much that I diagnose about his formactive methods could be applied, with some modifications, to any writing, perhaps any narrative art, that makes rather than mimics worlds, and that continues to come true beyond its putative originary context. 7

Campbell, Wonder and Science, esp. 111–220.

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So it may be; but equally it may not, and the necessary modifications are the nub of the matter. For it is important to recognise that I am not just evoking an artform in which a lot is going on, or which can give the illusion of being full with life. The key here is craft-particularity. Formactions are event-specific. And in Shakespeare’s case this means the event of the play – writing to it, learning for it, acting at it, attending to it, living in it. The event is in time in ways that a poem never is, in space likewise: not one time, or one space, but all the same palpably happening in these dimensions. In such a context, poetic forms – such as shifty syntax, figurative density, the ligatures of dialogue, the simple fact of a rhyme – all work and mean differently than they possibly can in a non-dramatic medium. And if no one else wrote plays like this, it means that no one else wrote like this, tout court (still no one else has written like this). We are no longer talking about poetic forms – but about dramatic formactions. ∞ Part I of the book interweaves introductory explorations of Shakespeare’s methods with a brisk overview of the popular theatre, using summary examples from Greene, Marlowe, Webster, Marston, and Jonson, before a more extended analysis of Middleton, as perhaps the period’s exemplary playmaker. I also compare Shakespeare’s methods with more conventional understandings of rhetoric and mimesis. Shakespeare’s work is embedded in these theatrical and rhetorical worlds, but also radically distinct. It is with sounding out this distinctiveness that the book is primarily concerned. Initially the set-pieces I offer are brief, but they get more extensive as the book develops, culminating in Part III with a sequence of chapterlength readings which try to delve deep into formactive playlife, usually by honing in upon very particular moments or speech-actions. The examples all in different ways complicate simple notions of presence and coherence. I concentrate upon scenes produced by the recesses of metaphor; or reported but not witnessed; or possible but unconfirmable – experiences that are so deep in body that they are impossible to see, or which we have to rely upon the ludic blankness of props to infer; thought-knots that defy or exceed the social animal we see before us. All work against summary-assumptions, pre-empting or post facto, of what

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counts as (a) life. In all of these readings, I try both to reveal new things about the works at issue, and to assay how theatre itself might model possible worlds: how the artform is alive with its own bespoke physics and metaphysics.8 Part II makes various attempts at newly modelling Shakespearean forms, and articulating my understanding of formactions. It involves an engagement with a number of philosophers, old and new, who to my mind speak particularly revealingly of possibility. By far the most important of these is the astonishing seventeenth century polymath, Gottfried Leibniz: indeed, many of the other thinkers who have influenced me themselves owe enormous debts to his visionary work. However, with the partial exception of some of David Lewis’s work, I have not found so-called “possible worlds” philosophy (which names Leibniz as its founder but in the main skirts around or generalises his thinking) particularly helpful when it comes to modelling playworlds. It is often too eager to systematise literary forms, and sometimes to reify actuality.9 Usually its focus is far distant from mine, being interested in theorising logical space or stipulative semantics.10 But Leibniz is another matter entirely: there is I think far more for literary criticism to learn from his original model of possible worlds, and the dizzying “monadology” that houses it, than has been recognised. I don’t know of any other body of thought that uses Leibniz to help to theorise theatre, or indeed 8

Also see Michael Witmore, Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007) and Shakespearean Metaphysics (London: Continuum, 2008). 9 Marie Laure Ryan: “We construe the world of fiction and of counterfactuals as being the closest possible to the reality we know. This means that we will project upon the world of the statement everything we know about the real world, and that we will make only those adjustments which we cannot avoid”: “Fiction, Non-factuals and the Principle of Minimal Departure”, Poetics 8:3/4 (1980), 406; for more nuanced accounts, see Laure Ryan, “The Modal Structure of Narrative Universes”, Poetics Today 6:4 (1985), 717–55; “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typology of Fiction”, Poetics Today 12:3 (1991), 553–76. 10 For example, Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972). For a sustained consideration of the useful but limited ways in which such philosophy can speak to “fictional worlds”, see Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Also see Lubomir Dolozel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), which is more optimistic, seeing literary fiction as “probably the most active experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise” (ix), but still avoids identifying the possible worlds of literature with the possible worlds of logic and philosophy (10–20ff).

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Shakespeare, but I hope my efforts will encourage others.11 The closest precursor is perhaps the eighteenth century German aesthetician and phenomenologist, Johann Gottfried Herder, who wrote only one short essay on Shakespeare, along with scattered comments and tributes elsewhere, but which are informed in many of their details by a view of the world deeply indebted to Leibniz’s dynamic “monad-poem”.12 The old quarrel between poetry and philosophy is surely false and damaging, a jealous superstition. Literary criticism shouldn’t run shy of metaphysics, as though foundational questions of ontology or epistemology have no concourse whatsoever with imaginative narratives. It isn’t that either defers to the other, or that they can harmlessly melt into each others’ arms. I for one will always prefer poetry (including plays) for its power to touch and transform life – and indeed it is often in revealing Shakespeare’s distinctiveness that philosophy is most illuminating. But there is much to gain from a more imaginatively duplex vision. Are the playworlds brought into new focus, new life? Do the results persuade, or move, or reveal? If they do, then no rules of procedure are relevant. Nor are scruples about proximate cause or influence, which isn’t my concern. This isn’t a law court; it is the theatre of possibility. This book is not structured in continuous form but is instead jagged, sometimes self-interrupting, sometimes recursive. I take inspiration here from Montaigne, who when he coined the term “essay” was referring above all to the form’s probing, interrogatory quality, and to the way in which each individual piece is a fragment of a gradually accreting, forward and backward portrait. I haven’t aimed to write a series of watertight reports, the evidence weighed, the conclusions modest and irrefutable. I don’t attempt finality. Instead, each episode should be read as a test, trial, or taste – putting things to the proof in a form that is systemically unfinished. In this I am guided by my core subject. So at times I use drama as a potential model for the shapes that thinking might take. Occasionally a 11 Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) uses Leibniz to help to theorise lyric poetry, riddles, ballads. 12 Herder’s term, in ‘On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul’, in Herder, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 195. Also see ‘Critical Forests: Fourth Grove’ and ‘Shakespeare’ in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Gregory Moore (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). For further discussion of Herder see Chapters 12 and 21.

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chapter or set-piece might better be understood as a scene, or as spoken in character, offering a particular snapshot, or perspective, or temporal enacting, a thought-experiment which speaks for subjective or experiential possibility more than objective fact. I sometimes follow a trail, or a trace, and see where it takes me, or I allow a temperamental bias, or I bracket certain knowledge or information in order to concentrate more avidly upon the thing at stake. Furthermore, I conceived some segments rather as Leibnizian monads, miniature possible worlds in their own right, alive with refractive action, at once severed from and apperceiving all others (with varying degrees of distinctness). And this entails a further consequence, particularly in the chapters devoted to Shakespeare. They are each in a sense self-sufficient – essayistic polyps instantiating their own predicates and coordinates, implicating the basic motions of Shakespearean creation; they apprehend existing possibility rather than serve a critical or historical teleology; and so they can be experienced in any order (as I think Shakespeare’s plays often are when read, studied, adapted, or simply recollected). Ideally the chapters could revolve, like a bicycle chain or cassette, linked and coterminous, constantly exchanging position, eschewing falsifying spatial hierarchies. As it is, Shakespeare’s own work has been a prime model for my own. Think of the multiple narrative sets and subsets into which his Sonnets can be divided; of the primacy of the single poem; but then of the units within each sonnet, at once discrete and tributary, such that a single word might refract numerous possible worlds at the same time as it contributes to a particular line, or quatrain, or poem. Or think, even more pertinently, of the multiple narrative cells of a playworld, nesting here, shooting there, resisting as much as pursuing resolution. Clearly I cannot hope in a critical work truly to recapitulate such motivic and illocutionary variety. But I have wanted to respect it, and to allow that criticism might be most truthfully performed if it keeps faith and in touch with the often de-familiar processes of plays. Rather than literary historicism, I think of what I am attempting as a form of historical-imaginative recovery: trying to discover what was possible to be done, or thought, or said. Whenever I even sniff the vestiges of past times – if I enter the Duke Humfrey reading room in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, or even open a very old book – I am forcibly reminded how very

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little I know about how things were really thought of or spoken about in the past, and moved to think how necessarily approximate our masterful textbook narratives must be. In the interests of expedience we often pretend that past possibilities can be summarised, or that a roughly accurate model, for various things fit for purpose, will allow for, or even account for, the exceptions. In the main they won’t – and it is often the exceptions that are truest to possibility. When we were writing Shakespeare in Parts, we began with a series of general propositions, inferred from all sorts of contemporary evidence, about how theatrical exchange worked, the movement between writers and actors, actors and parts, parts and rehearsal, rehearsal and performance, cues and speeches, and so on. Pretty much every inference was radically modified, qualified, often turned on its head, when it came to bringing the same questions to the Shakespeare part-texts, as we imagined these lost things or non-things into existence, and began to think about how each one might actually have worked. The closer you get, the more things wobble and move out of the shapes that the distant view prescribed. Just imagine what London in 1600 might have sounded like, if only we had ears to hear! And let us not forget that apparently inconsequential things – a rhyme, a suppressed laugh – are as much an event, and can be as potent augurs of possibility, as a statute or an insurrection. Once you go to ground, history changes. In many ways my ambition in this book is no different from any performance of these troubling and exciting works. I don’t so much want to bed them in their contexts as take inspiration from them, the aim being to let them come newly true, in ways perhaps not quite witnessed before. Perhaps my studies will seem the huffings and puffings of critical ego. But all of the readings arise from a genuine passion on my part, in a double sense: I love the plays and want to communicate this love; but I also try to surrender to their forms, lapse my own volition inside them, without coercion, and allow them to move. This posits a mode of strategic passivity.13 Let us risk

13 T.S. Eliot apposes “creative” to “passive” responses to poetry, identifying the latter with “interpretation”, but concludes thus: “poetry is poetry, and the surface is as marvellous as the core. . .The work of Shakespeare is like life itself something to be lived through. If we lived it completely we should need no interpretation; but on our plane of appearances our interpretations themselves are a part of our living.” “Introduction”, G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (Routledge, London and New York, 1930; repr. 2001), xxi–xxii.

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dwelling in spaces that may seem like ours alone. Invariably they will be shared, but the fact and terms of the sharing may require loneliness to discover. The strange recognitions and comings-to-life that, for me at least, have repeatedly arisen strike me as a good thing. Certainly, much in my daily life, with its carelessness and complacency, feels rebuked by Shakespeare’s possibilities. And very obviously: the possible worlds I actually visit in this work are the tiniest fraction of what is there, and indeed have seemed to be a smaller and smaller fraction of Shakespeare’s creation the more I have progressed with my studies. As ever, his achievement simply astonishes.

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Another entrance, another world: the opening notes to The Tragedie of King Lear. Let’s dwell a little deeper. Two nobles are talking, as they await the king’s nation-splitting ceremony. A younger man is noticed. “Is not this your son, my Lord?” says one of the lords. “His breeding, Sir, hath been at my charge” replies the other. Already we find two quibbles, each helping to hatch this unknown world. The pun on “charge” involves perhaps three referents, other than the general one of “responsibility”: the act of conceiving was a kind of “charge”, a bullish headlong violence; it has cost him money to raise this son; it is an arraignment or crime to which he must answer. Likewise “breeding” invokes both conception – delivering the originating seed – and growth – bringing him up, acculturating him. The effect is to conflate effect with cause, and process with product. The as-yet unnamed child will gather into himself the energies that went to the making of him. He is the result of this act; he is also its continuance. We are witness here to the basic processes of characterisation. The father continues in similar vein: “I have so often blushed to acknowledge him that now I am braz’d to it” (12–14). He means he has been embarrassed so often by having to admit to the bastard son that he is now inured to its shame. But this paraphrase purports to describe an achievement. The father’s words, by contrast, reproduce rather than exceed or escape the process. For the words generate ontological presence: “now I am”. The question is of essential identity or substance. Hence the procreative fashion in which the verbs connect: he is “braz’d” by the action of “blush”-ing. The blushing is a fire, a furnace: he is rendered like “brass” from it, but the brass is less a finished metal (or individuating mettle, as in characters of brass) than an eternalising or inescapable condition of burning, of being exposed to the action of fire. That is the parent’s “I am”. 21

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By association the “brazed” state suggests punishment, martyrdom, hellfire. But it is specifically not only metaphysical. The fire is produced by blushing. The image is of a burning face, of a blush which irradiates the father’s entire body and being. Clearly we are not to think of the “blush” merely as a passing social embarrassment. It is more even than a coruscating exposure – to judgement, or to the public gaze, which by reflection becomes a vision of one’s own self in the raw. The blush of shame sends us back to the original crime: to the sudden consciousness of a sexualised body, to a mind ashamed of its wilfulness, and to desires which produce punishment (mortality, death, labour . . .). Consequently, every act of “acknowledging” the son becomes a repetition of the primal crime – that of Eve and Adam, necessarily, but also of this father and the “young fellow’s mother” as its repetition. The blushing, then, is both the revealed pudendum (shame) and the pink burning face of the man in heat. This act –the man “charging” into breeding, dis-charging into the fair young maid, growing red and hard (braz’d) in the act – is re-enacted every single time he “acknowledges” his child. The son then is a reminder, a remainder, of things that cannot be left behind. The logic is close, in its imbruing primitive logic, to original sin as the predicative contract: but one which proceeds not only from father to son, but from son to father. For the son is truly the consequence of this act: not only in the sense that he results from it, but that he acts back upon it, avenging it simultaneously as the scanted illegitimate second son, and as the predestined return of the law. So, the son’s actions will enact the judgement and punishment correspondent to the “charge”. But as much as the act that determines him and his father is in the past, more pertinently it is born in this moment – as the father is too, along with his son. Any supposed distinction between a play-textual part and its extension in a story or society, or between a world and its constituents, is a non sequitur. Each part, each substantial detail, is everything. The named setting of a scene is never sufficient in Shakespeare. His language is always traversing time and place, the physical and metaphysical; its physics are as much occult as punctilious, generating strange causal magnetisms, actions at a distance, telepathic relations. Likewise, place is always subjectivised, and psychology placialised. Anything might be alive; anything might be a world; place can be as nested as individuality. The simplest repetitions do enormous amounts of work:

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Do you smell a fault? I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it, being so proper. (TLN 19–21)

The word “fault” bears a kind of consciousness, alive with memory, apperception, forward recollection. The father’s pseudo-question is as much lubricious as moral: he means his addressee to smell the woman’s “fault”. By taking up the word, this addressee (still neither man has been named) transfers both the act and its ethical quality onto the present bastard child: he is the “fault” that cannot be undone, as much as its issue. Already “fault” includes the act of sex, the judgement upon it, the vagina, and the son who issued from it; the word becomes a metonym for almost world-historical consecution. Indeed the “fault” opens onto the entire moral and physical ecology of this playworld: causes and consequences go well beyond human lives; it is the founding crack in the fabric, from which any catastrophe might follow. As such, it is the first in a terrible series of such “faults” – the Fool’s eggs, Lear’s “thick rotundity”, “spilled germens”, “sulphurous pit”, Edgar’s “dark and vicious place” – which in effect are the place of this play, a tragic environment compounding woman, land, hell, and the abyssal imagination. The “fault” is at once covert inside a single body, and shared amongst all: and either way it is the gash from which almost anything might emerge. Poor Tom, for instance, is among other things the palingenetic result of just such over-concentrated reference, whereby an image generates possibilities that (have to) find human-shaped, but not necessarily human, form.1 Every moment is seeded with futures; which means every moment is also a backward casting. But still I am neglecting possible lives. It is almost impossible not to; there is too much going on. Even so let’s try to catch up with what is already gestating. Let’s return, then, to the father’s blushing and brazening. Whenever Shakespeare uses two such linked physical metaphors – “blushed” and “brazed”, linked alliteratively, rhythmically, grammatically, one verb producing and acting upon the next – then it is certain that any words swept up in the combining effect will be similarly pressed upon. So – as should already be apparent – “acknowledge” has to mean 1 See my companion book to this one: Poor Tom: Living King Lear (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

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more than a bland sense of “admit to a relation with”. The root verb is “to acknow”, meaning to recognise or confess something; more specifically, to be acknown means, as the OED has it, “to be (self-) recognised in relation to anything”, or “to avow or to confess (to a person)”. These meanings die out after the seventeenth century, but they are clearly being used here by Shakespeare: self-recognition in another; avowing knowledge; confession. The man appears to be speaking lightly, but the locutionary context is insistent, demanding of the words their fullness. To acknowledge paternity is far more than a formal admission. It brings and takes a world with it. The suggestions of confession commit enormous weight to this “acknowledgement” – in the sense of promissory gravity, or of acts that truly were witnessed, however furtive and stolen they seemed at the time. To confess this child is thus in part to recognise himself: a recognition, it seems, that he once could barely escape (“I have so often . . .”), but to which he has now become insensibly plated. It is this insensibility, clearly, that the play is readying to be shattered. For the confessor here is not only the friendly interlocutor, and not only the speaker (rehearsing an old routine). He doesn’t quite know it, but the father is also confessing to his attendant son, silent at the father’s shoulder, and all the while clocking the old man’s sins from behind his invisible grate. Of course this son is no kind of émigré priest: but that is part of the point. Confession, recognition, avowal, the stuff of church or law or perhaps family – scrape at the words here, and already it is clear that there are no such institutions left working, or none that will survive the ceremony that is heavily pending. The job of acknowing is left to personal whimsy and private reparation. Hence, again, the lurking son, ready to transport just such breakdown into commission. For it is precisely the son’s present silence – rather like Hamlet’s in his first scene – that breeds menace. The son waits, he glowers at the fringes, acknowledged in the abstract but not yet addressed, not yet truly faced. Typical of Shakespeare, his arrival will be graduated (in a moment the son answers questions, with brief, opaque courtesy – “Sir, I shall study deserving” – reinforcing the fact that, handy dandy, we must wait for him too). But already he is present, a possible life, a possible world, irresistibly made. The lords pretend to speak no more than filler, an accidental digression as they wait for the king. But it is the son’s visible waiting that is more salient; this is what ensures the

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words’ extension into story. As Maynard Mack puts it, Shakespeare “could hardly have chosen a more vivid way of giving dramatic substance to the unpredictable relationships of act and consequence”, or to the idea of “consequences come home to roost”.2 And the dark humour of the moment (very dark) is that the father is right now obliviously re-enacting the very “charge” that he recalls. He thinks now as he thought then – that it is all about him, his recollected pleasure, his recollected shame. Both times, he neglects the child. So, the father speaks of the “fayre” mother, the “good sport at his making”, and repeats the crucial word: “the horson must be acknowledged”. Perhaps he doesn’t think the horson hears – it is only now that he addresses his son directly (“Doe you know this Noble Gentleman, Edmond?”), and it is perfectly possible that the whole chortling conversation happens sotto voce between the old comrades. And perhaps the horson doesn’t hear, and is called into listening only on cue. Performance choices will vary: but such choices are not in truth the crux. Because listening or not, he is here. In this world, words work telepathically, osmotically; they compose a consciousness even in its absence. As sure as day, Edmond takes it all in. Consequently, the motives that will move him are all the while being seeded in this opening conversation. The effect is a kind of duplex embryology – now and then, actual and virtual, mimetic and meta-dramatic. The subject of the mini-scene is the son’s “making”; the action of the mini-scene is the same character’s making. The coordinates of each inform the other. In both cases, the crucial “issue” is this child; in both cases, he wasn’t asked, he wasn’t considered, he wasn’t noticed until too late. There is ample reason for Edmond to hate, we already know that, because he was and is so slighted. But still he has something over all of them, a secret knowledge that no one but we can share. Way back then, on that sportful night, the thing truly at stake wasn’t the father’s lust, or his guilt, or his fear of discovery: it was the child who was the act’s consequence. As we have seen, this child collects the act absolutely into himself, bears it as a project-defining memory. And yet – and here is the scandal – according to 2 Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (London: Methuen & Co., 1966), 96: “Edmund . . . is seen more intelligently if he is seen in part as a figure whose name could be Appetite – sprung from his father’s appetite and seeking to devour all that lies in his way”, 60.

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the father’s logic, he wasn’t there. The son wasn’t there as the soon-to-be father charged into the “fault”. There was spilt milk, an over-eager accident, the failure to mop it away, and then some invisible strange mutation into a life. The father’s world implies the foundational scandal of individuation: how by-the-way it is, how inessential. This alone, we might think, is ground enough for revenge – general against the guiltiness of life, particular against the guiltiness of parenthood. But Edmond (individual and character) is created for a still more absolute rejection of his father’s world. For of course he was there, just as he is here now. He was there then, waiting for his moment to be born (“I should have bin that I am . . .” 459–60), just as he is present now, absorbing so much more than the time-serving patriarchs can ever know. Once again the logic is almost schizoid, both a subjective condition and a meta-theatrical fact. So, right now, before we hear him speak, the fact of Edmond’s presence-before-notice is nothing to do with psychology or pre-formation or metaphysics. It is to do with the logic of plays, and here of the play’s first puns, already digging down to the originary principles of this world. For lest we forget – this is playlife. And in the logic of a playworld, Edmond was indeed there, already present, plotted and cast, just waiting for the permitting device. He was and remains the predicate of the “charge”. Without this character there is no quibble, no hatched world, no cast back to the past. The father’s present confession wouldn’t exist without the son’s current presence, silent on stage, waiting to speak his mind. It perhaps seems a paradox, but it is the simplest fact of how life is composed in plays. But then Edmond is also subject to the puns that he generates. It is true that they wouldn’t be spoken without him - but their specific attributes, the worlds-within-worlds they begin to open up, are hardly the character’s to pre-empt. Instead he is shaped, placed, impelled by them. Imagine this as a conception scene, and we get a glimpsed access to creation in-the-moment, at once pre-determined and improvised, layered with precedent but also radically unexpected. The rules of creation apply, with foundational symbiosis, to Edmond, to the scene, to the playworld, and to Shakespeare. The writing is extraordinarily precise, the words charged with the responsibility of coming true: deeply cogitated, charged with a clear thematic purpose, and dazzlingly on the wing, surprised by

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the turns and tropes of invention. The horson is the child of this; so is Shakespeare; and so I trust are we. ∞ Necessarily, then, all of this duly informs the character’s fierce psychology – avidly attuned to his determining “childness”, rabidly fixed on life’s revenge (against life, on behalf of life). So, the moment he is let off the leash, Edmond returns to this founding conversation, dwells in its focal scene as his formative act, and starts to speak what every child knows – they could never not have been coming; they were the principle of their own conception, its simple inevitability; any other thought is impossible: Why brand they vs With Base? With baseness Barstadie? Base, Base? Who in the lustie stealth of Nature, take More composition, and fierce qualitie, Then doth within a dull stale tyred bed Goe to th’creating a whole tribe of Fops Got ’tweene a sleepe, and wake?

(343–9)

These are Edmond’s first moments alone. “No medieval devil ever bounced on to the stage with more scandalous self-announcement”, suggests J. F. Danby: but the true scandal at issue is I think differently pitched.3 For Edmond’s words continue the theme that the first mention of him inaugurated: an obsession with the conditions of conception. “Barstadie” is a social stigma and an economic handicap, but still more it indicates just how “unhoused” such “composition” can be. That is, Edmond insists upon the compositional scandal that allows him. It is his dignity and his difference, to know the reigning principles of propagation and becoming. So, when he returns to the theme, ridiculing his father’s superstitious astrology, Edmond goes beyond any familiar radical scepticism. He delivers an obsessive auto-narrative which has the radiant familiarity, the propelling energy, of his very own private nativity tale: My father compounded with my mother vnder the Dragons taile, and my Natiuity was vnder Vrsa Maior, so that it followes, I am rough and Leacherous. I should have bin that I am, had the maidenlest Starre in the Firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. (458–60) 3

Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (London: Faber & Faber, 1949), 32.

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Edmond is mocking the superstitious tracing of cause and effect. Nevertheless, there is here an insistence and pressure, a volatilised paranoia, which is not quite the modish secularism it resembles. Instead there is a movement from one kind of conceptive magic – his father’s ecliptic “sequent effects” (I. ii. 106) – to another: “my bastardizing”. For it is this, Edmond insists, which makes him “that I am”. And so the father’s particular gift to his son is the gift of this one moment: his conception, at once furtive, sportful, and explosive – just like its product. Edmond takes the tale and turns it into a promise, as though an actor’s part to unfold and enact: “my bastardizing”. He becomes the agent as well as consequence of his own conception. But the crucial thing to notice is how Edmond’s way of thinking entirely mimics Shakespeare’s. Both endorse a radical realism in which polysemic conceit becomes the living thing. It is as though the materials of theatre have literal, genetic capability. Partly this is to say that Edmond (like Shakespeare) is a force of “nature”, more primal and true than factitious precedent or sclerotic institutions. So, the “lustie stealth of Nature” might suggest silent growths from fructifying pollen, or beneath a blanket of snow, something untamed, indigent, indigenous (perhaps still like Shakespeare). But Edmond also – no less strangely and fiercely – exults in the illicit sensory facts, the stuff that children usually shy away from: so, “lusty stealth” imagines the father’s felt-footed steps towards crime, his compounding with a mother, his virile goatish effusions. The process is one of osmosis, as the son concentrates himself, his origin and growth and future extension, into the promise of a tale; an oak accelerates from a dropped acorn. In this way, “lustie stealth” is not only the adulterer’s but Edmond’s own supra-legal libertarianism. The phrase is a general tribute to remorseless nature; an evocation of a furtive fuck; and a soliloquial self-confession. The act of speaking, as often, traverses vast times and spaces – or rather, it contracts objectively vast gaps of time into nothing. Edmond is in that moment – he is always in that moment – never more active than when hidden, never more a catalyst than when retrieving the appetites and re-entering the space where he was compounded. The pun is dark and deep, returning to his founding moment and predicting its aptness: “pounded” into form, thumpingly onomatopoeic, like a statue returning to dust or a steak being beaten; “compounded” as in made out of contraries and bearing them; “compounded” as in “made

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worse”; “compounded” as in remaining, somehow genetically, not-quitehuman, because so propelled by text and conceit, and by an ethical disdain that, for all its galvanising charisma, is also robotic. Edmond’s obsessive harking upon conception, then, is a mode of psychopathic self-separation: that is me; I never was more than that, a flow from, and of, and into transgression and secrecy. But then the irony is that he is also the most public of figures, appealing, as no one else in the play does, directly to our present admiration, daring us not to feel a secret thrill with him, daring us not to throw to the winds the moribund forms and categories of convention: I grow, I prosper: Now Gods, stand up for Bastards.

(355–6)

The key to the speech is not only the embrace of namelessness, or the mockendorsement of labels of generic contempt. By “grow” and “prosper” he means get land, get powerful, and so on. But he speaks in the present tense, apparently about what hasn’t yet happened (grow, prosper). So if the verbs are taken to really be in the present tense, then they have to be explained, paradoxically, by his obsessive inhabiting of his moment of conception: “I grow, I prosper” recalls the processes of his development since that conception; blessed with both foresight and hindsight, he watches himself get conceived, get born, and grow to a man. What is more, if he is in his moment of conception; if he really is immersed in the “lustie stealth” of the seed-man; if he too finds his way to the “dark and vitious place” of compounding: then Edmond is his own self-making penis. If he isn’t exactly his own father, certainly he claims inheritance of the materials of his conception. So Edmond will watch his “inuention thrive”: he is framing a charter of self-reproduction, as matter accelerates (“if this Letter speed”) into a world taking on the form he wills. Again, “my bastardizing” is the key. Hence the joke in the next line: “Now Gods” – now, now, now! – “stand vp for Bastards”. It is in part a meta-theatrical appeal, to the groundlings (be proud as you stand, my fellow semi-enfranchisees), to the privileged seated (stand, you bastards), and to his father (because this call to stand is also the cue for the actor to enter). The father, ever desire’s dupe, is doing his bastard son’s work, a fact meta-dramatically underscored when in a few moments he reads out

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the lengthy letter written by Edmond. The letter duly “speeds” into action, just as the adulterous seed sped into Edmond’s mother (and into Edmond). The twin conceptions are “compounded” in Edmond’s growth. Characters’ births are on-going and evental, their “composition” ensuing from all sorts of theatrical moments and materials. Possible worlds are spawned from the staggered, shuttered life in words. Inevitably, Edmond’s words are also a lewd joke: come on Gods, he says, get erections, join me and the rest of the “unhoused” party. So, “I grow, I prosper” is contextualised by “stand up”: his growing is the tumescence of the organ of generation. The phallic insinuations have little to do with murky repressions; Edmond is perfectly happy to steal and distil himself into his father’s ancient pillicock. Edmond controls his meanings, just as he fully intends his transgressions, and the permeated, potentially evacuated identities they are premised upon. Likewise, Edmond appears to luxuriate in what for Edgar is a castrating diminution (“Pillicock sat on Pillicock hill, alow, alow, loo, loo” TLN 1858). Whereas Edgar evokes the individual-aspenis as a lonely abject, to Edmond the implicit wounding is barely even a self-reduction: more of a return, a distillation, a honing of self into figurative consonance, almost a distinctive decorum of individuation. So the appeal of this soliloquy, this anti-prayer, prepares for how Edmond wends his libidinous way: in and out of the chambers of legitimacy, in and out of the playworld’s scenes. Let me, if not by birth, haue lands by wit, All with me’s meete, that I can fashion fit.

(503–4)

The plea is basically for elbow-room, for space that his “wit” may take tangible effect. He wants land, he wants to trump his brother, he wants to challenge his own faculties of daring and invention. Clearly there is a shadow of the old Vice in Edmond, gaining the breath of dramatic life from the audience, as they hiss, or gasp, or applaud; the overtness of the appeal is also another kind of “let”, a caveat: this life is on lease, and will expire with our affection. However, any appeal to the audience is also unacknowledged, or rather sublated by a more primary addressee. Edmond is at the cusp of the stage, alone before us, but to whom really does he speak? On whom does he depend for movement? As ever, it is himself. “Let me” stands alone, as Edmond’s attendant spirit and catalytic sentence: “Let

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me”. Hence, the second line seems to predict a pathway where every glance, every turn, meets its own reflection: “All with me’s meete”. Of course he means everything is permitted, and so a bald statement of nihilistic will. But this nihilism is in fact the most spellbound and pathological solipsism: I meet me wherever I go. The homophonic pun confirms Edmond’s primary meaning: all that is “meete” – all that is acceptable, desirable – is an extension or dilation or a re-greeting of “me”. The manner is flippant and careless, as the alliterative silliness turns all to play; but it is also utterly pointed, his eye always on the ball, upon the murderous process of his own fashioning. Hence the syntactic to and fro, the way his phrases slip from one subject-object to another: “that I can fashion fit” refers to anything that Edmond, as prime mover, can make appropriate to the moment. Equally, the subject is “fashion”, as in changeability, or public image, the thing that he toys with and employs; or, the thing being made “fit” is “I”, his identity as made by his “wit” and by what he meets: that I can be moulded (that one there), again expressing Edmond’s capability of self-separation in the interests of constructing a more efficient “I”. The prediction is of merciless conquest. Thus the subsidiary pun, returning to the lewd register of “Stand up for Bastards”: all with me is “meat”, that I can fashion “fit” – or make fit for sexual congress. The twin rhymes – m/m: f/f and eet/it – drum home Edmond’s ironic boast, of plasticity, of sculpturing virility, of antinomian ascendance. It is thrilling, and chilling, to be at once so compelled and so utterly contingent, so happy to seize upon an accident as one’s destiny. It is, of course, pathological as much as exultant. The pathology derives from the way Edmond transforms childlike insistence upon repetition, an almost autistic literalness – this was his moment, these were its constituents, hear them and see me – into other-erasing self-prediction. Truly, in the mind’s eye of such compositional solipsism, no one else really exists, or not as anything other than a counter in his game. We might say that Edmond here exemplifies the potential antinomianism of theatre: conventions are merely rights of way, they signify nothing true, anything is permitted. Equally, we might see almost the opposite. Here is a man who takes his founding conceits terrifyingly literally. He imagines a scenario, gives it the energy of wit and role-playing deceit, and insists that it is and shall be the case. In this way, the pathology of

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Edmond really is that of theatre; or rather, of the monstrous notion that theatre is true, that a life is made as a character’s: a cue here, a word there, and out he shoots, a fully formed simulacrum, a volatile robot imitating the motives of a man. The Edmond-role is given access to the principles of its own composition. This is the key to the peculiarly constitutional permissions the character arrogates. Edmond embraces his provenance like no one else in his playworld: what for Edgar is a passion, a multi-pronged suffering, is for Edmond an action, a motive with the clearest end. But even Edmond is only superficially in control of his motions, just as his actor need not, perhaps cannot, know the forward and backward networks in which the words he speaks partake. True, the Edmond-character appears to summarise his motives with directorial expertise. But the things that really take him are either planted in the character, as an inheritance or direction that it can only ever catch up to – a narrative of conception, a sceneleaping metalepsis, a Vice-type whose burning-up by plot is necessarily prehended – or they operate beyond the actor’s or character’s knowledge – the limitless violence of his confederates, for instance; or the fact that his own death-scene will be surpassed by that of others, and he will be left to dwindle in a strange self-wondering silence, and then removed offstage to die, denied the magnetic epitaph that his initial self-sculpting fatalism might seem to demand. Edmond, for all his exceptionalism – indeed perhaps in his exceptionalism is an allegory of Shakespearean playlife. The instruments that render theatrical possibility are the active, actual model of living. Watched, as by an audience; scripted, as by a playwright; carried, as by metaphor; shuttered, as in scenes; folded and doubled, as by puns; disguised, cued, rehearsed, hoping to repeat, and in repeating forget that this has been done before; made by borrowed forms, like verse and rhyme and generic type. And yet for all this, open to suddenness, dependent on other agents – human and non-human, emotional, interpretive, technical – and never quite in command of one’s own passage. Characters are metaleptic, catachretic, allegorical; so too are their stories, and the basic principles of motive and motion. Life is not only figured via such tropes, but constituted as them, their very morphology beholden to them. This is a crucial fact for the congress between Shakespearean form and life.

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Shakespeare the impossible

Perhaps three things, all inevitably interdependent, most characterise Shakespearean form. First, the instinct to split and double all phenomena, such that everything is shadowed by alternatives it cannot escape; second, a feeling of the potentiality for life, and for the release of or into emotion, in all things, animate and inanimate, including instruments of his craft, objects used in it, and abstractions; third, a knowledge that every surface hides dimensions, and can be tented like a wound, or magnified into multiplicity, and that this spatial variety speaks equally of temporal extension, backward and forward in history, such that all phenomena contain their sources, their struggles, and their possible futures. We seem never to be given something – word, concept, emotion, institution – without being asked to imagine it otherwise, inside out, upside down, conjoined.1 In Shakespeare, the named things are invariably patterned with variations and discontinuities, constituted by all kinds of parts and planes and vectors. Very often they exist in more than one place and more than one time, even as they appear to be just where we can see them. Very often location is metaphysical, a thing of memory or projection, as well as physical. It is easy enough to think of a world as a potential concatenation of lives. But the converse is true: each life is a potential concatenation

1 Norman Rabkin borrows a term from twentieth-century physics – “complementarity” – to help define Shakespeare’s irreducibility to a single view, quoting Robert Oppenheimer: “any given application of classical concepts precludes the simultaneous use of other classical concepts which in a different connection are equally necessary for the elucidation of the phenomena”. The most famous application of complementarity is the discovery that light is both corpuscular and wave-like. Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 23ff.

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of worlds.2 Then there are worlds within worlds, and lives within lives. A world needn’t have its own geography or weather, just as a life need not have its own name. The Chorus to Henry V, as in so many things, encapsulates an aesthetic that is at work in every nook and cranny of Shakespeare: O pardon: since a crooked Figure may Attest in little place a Million, And let us, Cyphers to this great Accompt, On your imaginarie Forces worke . . . Peece out our imperfections with your thoughts: Into a thousand parts divide one Man, And make imaginarie Puissance.

(TLN 16–26)

Or here is Richard II: I have been studying, how to compare This Prison where I live, unto the World: And for because the world is populous, And here is not a Creature, but my selfe, I cannot do it: yet Ile hammer’t out. My Braine, Ile prove the Female to my Soule, My Soule, the father: and these two beget A generation of still breeding Thoughts; And these same Thoughts, people this Little World In humors, like the people of this world, For no thought is contented.

(TLN 2668–78)

Richard begins as though there is one agreed “World”, measured by mundane perception: but his “study” forces him to “hammer” things out more faithfully. Soul and brain beget thoughts, which breed humours, which in turn produce more people, each with their little world. But it isn’t just that Richard imagines his thoughts having bodies or passions; nor even that these thoughts each become theatrical parts (“Thus play I in one prison [Q: person], many people” 2697). It is that each single link in the chain claims its own bespoke procreativity, opening up endless worlds inaccessible to the eye. Shakespeare’s puns do much of the work: “and 2 Herder: “In Othello, the Moor, what a world! What a whole!. . .And what complexity! All these different cogs turning within a simple mechanism!. . .[Shakespeare] breathes life into it right down to the smallest detail of time, place, and even the apparently haphazard episodes in between. . .The individual quality of each drama, each separate universe, accompanies time and place and composition throughout the plays.” Aesthetics, 300, 302.

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these two beget/A generation of still breeding Thoughts”. Soul and brain beget a “generation”: that is, a whole new line of thoughts, like children, or the children of children. But more than that, to beget a generation is to beget the action of begetting: not a delivered family or tribe, but an unending capability of reproduction. This is further extended, with pleonastic dizziness, when the “generation” is of “still breeding” thoughts, each thought like a miniature Spenserian Garden of Adonis: “Infinite shapes of creatures there are bred,/And vncouth formes, which none yet euer knew.”3 There is no fulfilment; as Richard says, no “content”. Again he puns: each thought, like each person, is “in humors”. This means unsatisfied, ever-questing, appetitive (dis-contented); but more than that, it means that no thought, like no person or world, can be contained (contented). Lives and thoughts and worlds breed and interbreed with internecine fury, breaching all boundaries; neither “prison walles” nor “Flinty ribbes” can stop the “tear” of this mental “passage” – a passage into a single life’s, even a single moment’s, multiple generations, wretched or relieving. A life is its possible worlds. Moments such as Richard’s soliloquy – almost an abstract of Shakespeare’s creation – should make us think carefully about what or where we grant life in a playworld. It is easy to observe hierarchies here, whether knowingly or not. Some things are more real, more true, more necessary than others. And often the things that are granted life are the big things, easily available to empiricism, to a shared recognition, perhaps most of all to summary and paraphrase. Our understanding of the given reality comes down to a poetics of obviousness, sized and shaped much as things usually are in offstage worlds. The prime units in this poetics are: actor-sized characters; scenes with a defined place and time, happening in due succession; speeches with a definable rhetorical purpose, making this or that claim upon the affections and inclination of its hearers; language in which most words are, in rough order of importance: (1) instrumental, in that they execute a prescribed function, (2) descriptive, in that they indicate a thing already in the world, or (3) figurative, calling attention to themselves as ornamental or emphatic, livening up the speech by reinforcing or colouring the sentiment. Shakespeare’s creation, however, 3

Spenser, Faerie Queene, III. 6.35, 1–2.

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everywhere exceeds such limitations and confuses such distinctions – and, with that, exceeds and often embarrasses criticism’s usual heuristic strategies. Shakespeare’s isn’t a sensibility like, say, Shelley’s in Mont Blanc or Prometheus Unbound, where imagination dwells upon things, silence and snow and the slow evolution of rock-forms, that derive their petrifying sublimity from being far beyond human witness, either eons past or at an unsurpassable height. Shakespeare’s mercurial agents are always at the place imagined: indeed so much at the place as often to be the place, or to be responsible for it. A typical example is Macbeth’s “Making the Greene one, Red” (724). David Womersley writes interestingly of how Shakespeare got this image from two lines in Anthony Munday’s Robin Hood plays: “The multitudes of seas died with blood” and “And made the greene sea red with Pagan blood.”4 Womersley notes approvingly that Shakespeare, unusually, resists the pun on “die”. But he doesn’t mention that Shakespeare introduces a quibble with the newly ambiguated noun phrases (the comma cannot be relied upon as a determiner of sense). Is the green made one red? Or the green one made red? Either way, the “green one” is something at once newborn and, like some doomed ecology, lost. The word “green” doesn’t signify only the sea. It becomes a reifying allegory of numerous pendent conditions, each now rendered terminal, de-naturally finished in “red” – the sick, young, inexperienced, bucolic, piscatorial, nostalgic (and so on). What is more, Shakespeare’s choice of “making” as his verb is hardly neutral: Macbeth’s is an original, procreative act, indeed like a poet’s (a maker’s). Very terribly, he means it: the elements have been made anew by his act. This is the world of Macbeth. It is a classic example of what we might call Shakespeare’s metamorphic modal realism. Similar principles are at work wherever we look. Consider Venus as she sees the maimed Adonis: Which seen, her eyes as murder’d with the view, Like stars asham’d of day, themselves withdrew.

4 The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington (1391); The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington, line 1880. See David Womersley, Divinity and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 301–3.

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Or as the snail, whose tender horns being hit, Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain, And there all smother’d up in shade doth sit, Long after fearing to creep forth again. (Venus and Adonis, 1031–6)

The twin similes of retreat (stars and snail) evoke the twin qualities of Venus’s eyes (emanations of light, polyps of flesh). But the entire creation is implicated in Venus’s grief, as though symptom and partner of her lovelashed solipsism. All things become the traduced servants of her monstrous passion – and of Shakespeare’s monstrous gifts. But – and this is the unique thing – they are also themselves. The stars are indeed ashamed of day and its garish revelations; these lusts do belong to night; the stars truly are wounded in their sense of decorum, in the impatience of love that will not wait its true hour; the snail actually joins in the general mourning, not only for Adonis, but for his own constitutional vulnerability, his too-sensitive horns, allergic to gross touch, retreating into the cave that he thinks will protect. At the same time we know that this cave will not in fact protect, that it is a habitation of “fear”. The snail is as fragile in his frame as the justdead boy is in his. In turn, the snail’s childlike delusion suggests Venus’s, who has likewise retreated into her “shelly cave”, closing her eyes as though back into amniotic nascence. Simile has the touch of life – touched into life, touching others to life in turn. There is no real hierarchy of referent. The snail connects Venus to her original myth; she gives to the snail a feeling mind, and a body that is magically consonant with it. Both of them, like the star, are. Each connects to each, nesting and extending each other: and yet, as ever in the Shakespeare-verse, each is at its own centre, a conative subject. Every point is a potential subject, alive with the tracery of lives. The possible is the actual.5 It is one thing to write like this in a poem. A poem can be paused over and re-read; even if the poem is being read aloud with friends or family there is no imperative to keep going, nothing to stop someone interrupting proceedings with a question. But in a play? Surely writing like this is 5 Keats famously admired this conceit (“he (Shakespeare) left nothing to say about nothing or anything . . . you know what he says about Snails . . .”), epitomising an imagination which overwhelms the lover of “poesy”, forcing him to retreat, like the snail, into silent subjective amneosis. Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 22 November 1817 taken from Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed., The Letters of John Keats, 1814–21 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).

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impossible. For there is an enormous difficulty with Shakespeare, one that is obvious to anyone who has ever come cold to a speech of his: the fact that the world’s most popular dramatist is impossible to take in at first hearing. No doubt many other playwrights, albeit mainly from the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, write work that is less hospitable, more obviously abrasive or alienating. But no one else writes words such that even as we absorb enough to keep us engaged with story and characters, we know that bundles of meaning are getting dropped and left behind, disregarded or unregardable. The only early modern work really comparable to Shakespeare here is Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which the process of reading demands constant revision of our inferences, as the meaning of particular lines or clauses is modified, or often contradicted, by the full sentence to which it contributes. But Milton never wrote for the public stage – and his insistence on choice, the fact that every single one is right or wrong for all time, makes his worlds very different from Shakespeare’s. At its most local and lived-in Shakespearean form does not pull things back into an authorially prescribed order. Instead, Shakespeare’s most characteristic writing seems to imply that no two moving things – a mind, a manner, a meaning – will ever be quite identical. He also has an extraordinary, perhaps arrogant improvidence – a nonchalance about results that belies the intensity of his creative processes – and often he seems not to mind that things will pass beneath notice, regularly embedding scenes and speculations which escape attention, or permit only furtive, half-swallowed recognition. Often these things cannot be acted, any more than they can be acted upon, onstage or offstage. Of course this is not the whole story. W. B. Worthen writes of Shakespeare’s “misleading verbal density”, stressing how much of his meaning depends upon unwritten performance conventions.6 This is true too. But still the epistemological scandal remains: that his forms pulse, like sperm, with unlived or possible lives, implied more than explicated, dwelling beyond conventional knowledge. It is the most implicate order imaginable.7 What is more, Shakespeare’s fissioning semantics and forward and backward syntax means that significance never rests in any single moment. 6 7

Drama: Between Poetry and Performance (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 55. I take this term from David Bohm.

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His writing simply defies adequate understanding in “real time”. He thus threatens the most basic contract of understanding: not in every dialogue or even in every scene, but very often, and reliably so whenever he is working at high intensity. It isn’t simply that Shakespeare writes for readers as much as playgoers: reading can help identify some of what momentary listening misses, but it can hardly sweep it all up into neatness. In a basic way reading Shakespeare is to suffer much the same challenges as listening, just distributed differently in time and space. The problem, if such it is, is endemic to Shakespearean playlife; it isn’t going to be dispelled by any perceptual regime, or hermeneutic strategy, or phenomenological rationale. Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests that it is impossible “to decompose a perception, to make it into a collection of sensations, because in it the whole is prior to the parts”.8 Perhaps this is true of how we perceive Shakespeare’s playlife. But I don’t think it is true of this playlife per se, or of the playlife’s (or perhaps Shakespeare’s) immanent perception of itself. The whole (however phenomenally small or contained) need not be prior to its parts; each perception has indeed been “decomposed” before being experienced by a witness; and what feels like a singularity may well itself be a “collection”, composed of still other singularities. At every turn Shakespeare’s playworlds partially subvert his chosen media, with its supposedly shared and galvanising immediacy. Shakespeare often baffles the very possibility of unanimity. We are moved with the flow and suddenly stopped: What did he just say . . .? Did he mean . . .? Why that . . .? Stanley Cavell says we “occupy the same time” as the playaction: but in basic ways we do not, we cannot.9 It keeps dropping things that we can’t pick up, or if we try to pick them up we must fall behind. These things are often semantics, but not only: they can be the simplest questions of motive and event. Not just what did so and so say, but why did they do that, and indeed did they do that? (And if they did, what then . . .?) Puzzles about the event, its facticity or ontology, become puzzles about ethics, about our own adequacy or accounting. We are 8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Eadie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 15. 9 Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love”, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 105.

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one in a crowd, and at the same time lost or hunting in our own private minds. We move away, in part, from community, just as we do from a time shared with the playworld. It is an excess that speaks of the inadequacy of present symbolic orders and institutional definitions. It speaks for and to what may come – ideas, forms, audiences – a promise that exceeds our possession, opening onto unfinished possibilities, whether culturally attested or frighteningly new. Shakespeare’s work presupposes future attenders – spectators and readers – ones who might have the time to return to these multiplying lost moments. Writing of Shakespeare’s dizzying phonetic and ideational combinations, Stephen Booth makes a useful distinction here: he acknowledges that not “every one of them acts even minimally on every member of an audience”, but nevertheless the nature of such scripting is “to excite the mental faculty by which we make puns and see ironies, by which frivolously or solemnly we leave one logic and slip into another, by which our arbitrarily focused minds suddenly recognize and acknowledge impertinent but undeniable other ways and realms of thought”.10 Shakespeare’s craft seems to assume – or more than that, to create – a layered auditory, correspondent to a layered public, nominally one but potentially many, with sets and subsets: and not least the sets and subsets of each present individual. Take this moment from Macbeth as an allegory: MALCOLM.

What’s the newest griefe? That of an houres age, doth hisse the speaker, Each minute teemes a new one.

ROSSE.

(Macbeth, 2011–13)

We might hear in this an impatience with audiences similar to Hamlet’s (“caviar to the general”): an auditory eager for sensation and novelty, dwelling upon nothing long enough to feel its meaning. Scotland gone to the dogs is like a theatre engrossed by a mindless, affectless, buzzing rabble. Clearly this kind of attendance is inadequate – not least, inadequate to the very moment being witnessed. In Shakespeare’s worlds, each minute is a new “one”, each a grief and a life all its own. Equally,

10 Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 37.

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each minute “teemes” with grief(s), not one but thousands. In such a dispensation, “one” is singular and many, just as an hour is an “age”. But even this alertness to the immediate is too regulated, too chronological, for Shakespeare. The audience here implied, hissing for sensation, is itself about to be silenced by a “newest grief” that we already know: the slaughter of Macduff’s family. This grief will outlast the hour, let alone the minute. But there is no pause for, no cause for, self-congratulation, because we too must get left behind by this calamity, or must leave it behind, obscurely aware that our grief could never match a father’s. There’s no pretending life proceeds evenly, any more than does the experience of witness. Shakespeare prehends all these angles, including the simple guilt that another’s “one” (say, Macduff’s) can never quite be ours. Such phenomenological facts pose a problem for attempts at thematic coherence or emotional clarity: a problem usually bypassed by critics in the interests of enumerating some more cogent extra-textual theme. But this problem surely represents an opportunity: not just to enumerate multiple readings, but really to explore why Shakespeare writes like this. What worlds are issued? What can it mean to compose in these layered planes, often without clear hierarchies of reference? What can it mean not to live at the same pace or in the same time as one’s auditors? But Shakespeare’s style, for all its difficulty, is not exclusive. It is very different, for example, from much twentieth-century modernist art, where the style begins with resistance to immediate comprehension, and its satisfactions depend upon working out the difficulty. Shakespeare does not privilege intellectual aristocratism; there aren’t esoteric meanings to be gleaned; he doesn’t set his listeners hermeneutic tests, or suggest impatience with those unschooled in literary decorum. His work is permissive, unjealous, open. Above all, his writing is generous, in the invitations and the trust that it affords to both actors and attenders; a trust that necessarily extends to his own creations, that they will remain open, and partially yielding, when the actors and attenders return, as they must. It is this generosity that is the key to Shakespeare’s sustained popularity. When I say that his most characteristic effects work in gaps, are subvisible, anachronous, and so on, I am not saying that Shakespeare presents one set of visibly plotted lives, whilst all the time proffering (and preferring, as

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more refined, as higher in the existential hierarchy) a secret world known only to initiates in the mysteries of his art. It is almost the opposite of this. The basic stuff of the play, felt by anyone who is present and attentive, is passionate immediacy: the immediacy of emotions in action, on probation, risked and tested and transformed. It isn’t that the stories we think we are experiencing are not what we are in fact experiencing, or that the feelings we have are somehow misconceived.11 The feeling is invariably true: it is the thing at stake. But the reasons given, if any are given, are invariably inadequate. Likewise with the stories. They are happening as we tend to think they are happening. It’s just that there are far more tributary tales, adumbrated paths, possible lives than is often recognised. Such things help to give the main story its experiential richness, but they also open up lifelines not recuperable by an abstractable plot. Simply put: we miss or mistake the sources of what we value; we miss or mistake its particularity, its difference from the type or pattern that we believe we recognise.

11 Noting how often critical approaches are “inclined to reduction”, Norman Rabkin suggests “one must recognize the impulse to simplify as an authentic part of the plays’ action on an audience”. Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 63.

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What worlds are made possible by plays? The anti-theatricalists saw more clearly than most. They were horrified by the capability of civic theatre to make lies or fantasies come true: essentially, by building possibilities upon impossibilities.1 The play-haters wanted the whole industry shut down, not just because it encouraged scum to congregate, but as a spiritual corrosive and ontological insult. These playthings were dangerous. They laid slippery possibilities, promiscuous impossibilities, like veritable turds on the soul. It was all diabolic pretence: lowly men dressing up as kings, or boys as women; plots depending upon disguise or deception; language little better than meretricious ornament, gilding impudence in false plate. Then there were the fools, and all their rote-rehearsed obscenities, as though theatre arrogated for itself the privilege of the jester, only with little fear of suffering a good whipping for their pains. And all those people congregating, forgetting religion and occupation, gawking instead upon untenable migrations, as though in their souls they are spiritual pioneers rather than serviceable subjects of the Lord (or crown, city, guild, husband, father . . .) Theatre preyed upon people’s gullibility and hedonism, their willingness to abandon themselves to fancy, sentimentality, vindictiveness, vicarious greed: a baleful alliance of mob emotion and private fetish. The anti-theatricalists identified a foundational scandal at the heart of the transaction. These shows were pretence, illusion, the cheapest mountebankery, possessing no more substance than the stale wafers secretly nibbled by

1 Michael O’Connell, “The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theater”, English Literary History 52:2 (1985), 279–310, suggests that the theatre “could be viewed as a competing – idolatrous – religious structure” (307).

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recusants. And yet the charisma of the event could seem to transform these simulacra into unholy possibilities: an alchemy of dross, a diabolical capability of generating something from nothing, commanding a venturesome, voyeurised, you-go-first credulity, ethically cowardly and ontologically disgraceful. Above all, it was a willing capitulation to what is not, as for the long afternoon the headless crew pretend to forget themselves and their maker: And these be the fruits of plays and interludes, for the most part. And whereas you say, there are good examples to be learned in them, truly so there are, if you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; . . . if you will learn to jest, laugh and fleer, to grin, to nod, and mow; . . . if you will learn to become a bawd, unclean, and to divirginate maids, to deflower honest wives; if you will learn to murder, slay, kill, pick, steal, rob and rove; if you will learn to treble against princes, to commit treasons . . . if you will learn to play the whoremaster, the glutton, the drunkard, or incestuous person . . . and finally, if you will learn to condemn God and all his laws, to care neither for heaven nor hell, and to commit all kind of sin and mischief, you need to go to no other school, for all these good examples may you see painted before your eyes in interludes and plays.2

The godly anti-theatricalists – Philip Stubbes, John Northbrooke, Stephen Gosson, William Perkins, William Prynne – are much condescended to. But they were far more keyed in to the possibilities of theatre than any number of sanguine humanist apologists.3 And lest we forget, they won. The theatres were shut down for nearly twenty years; crafts and memories lapsed; a culture died, if it hadn’t done so already; and even when some version of the popular city theatre re-opened, it was never again the hyperalert creature it had been. For the civic theatre of the glory years wasn’t simply an entertainment, or a gift of cheerful community. Its metabolism was tensile and contagious, shockingly intimate, inviting the feastgoers to think the unthinkable: all those citizens, crammed in a public space, craning to see and hear, relishing the tiniest details, seizing on mistakes, irreverence, the slightest unexpected thing. And this was repeated at the level of the actor, getting his part, one amid four or five he may play that week, quickly 2 Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses (1583); see Tanya Pollard, Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 118–23. 3 John Northbrooke, A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes (1577); Stephen Gosson, Schoole of Abuse (1579); William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1608); William Prynne, Histrio-mastix: The Player’s Scourge (1633).

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learning it, and risking bringing it into the world. This is far distant from much theatre today, when audiences often go to see an acknowledged classic, one that has been rehearsed for months, and sit back and wait to see what is done with it. The early London theatre was a different animal – the physical haphazardness, the same actors seen in new roles every day, numerous plays speaking to each other, parodies and sequels, the daily need for surprise to spice familiar fare.4 All of this speaks of an entertainment where the smallest swerve or emphasis will be noticed. Think of football today and we might be closer to the active attention in play: nothing escapes the eager attention, with often-morbid supportership fuelled by febrile, jealous, comically opportunistic morality. We need to recall the pre-routinised excitements of recognition: the conscious feeling that these things matter; that they speak to present imperatives or imaginings. It is something like this, I think, that took the place of settled instruction. This was true of all public discourses at this time, whether rogue pamphlets or sermons. Even a confessedly high-cultural work such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene demands of its readers an intensely probative experience, in which temptation and false certainty, of character and reader alike, are far more to the point than any passive acceptance of diktats. This is how popular humanism worked: more often than not it was ambitious, interventionist, self-arraigning, self-arrogating, tuned to novelty and emergence, recommending one thing, satirising another, very busy, very bodied. And plays became, for a couple of decades, the very heart of this sociality.5 We need to recover something of the medium’s moral, almost physical, agitation – and the concomitant confidence in the reach and importance of plays. From the very inception of the permanent London theatres, we are witnessing something new, volatile, a remarkable cocktail of intimacy and community. It was a demographic and physical set-up just waiting for

4 See Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites: the Admiral’s Company 1594–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and The Shakespeare Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, esp. part I. 5 See Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. ch. 5.

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the right minds to make the most of it. Possible worlds, impossible possibilities, might be breeding from every detail in the fabric. The basic contract involves an opening to possibility. This is not the same thing as an expectation of being transported into some happier world – though of course it can be this. The stock genres of the stage cater to the wish, both private and shared, that obstacles be at once admitted and overcome: the pleasure not being found in the obstacle’s abolition, but in its fictive overcoming. It has been fashionable to see such narratives as a delusive sop – a little bread, a little circus – to keep the citizens pliant and productive: but as much as there is truth in this, there is never enough to account for the abundance and irreverence, or still less the unappeased questions and memories generated by many of these productions. By the same token, possibility is not to be understood only romantically, or as a remainder left to humanistic self-projection, speaking for our shared or individual potential in a world less subjected or more free. Theatre may express possibilities that other institutions cannot countenance; equally it can be complicit in confirming certain things unthinkable, or in turning away from terror and privation. But more foundationally, popular theatre posits altered worlds, given force by an implicit dialectic with routinised inheritance.6 The simplest escapism carries political and existential charge, speaking for frustrations, wistfulness, perceptions of lack or injustice. This is partly a necessary accident of theatre’s function, to provide diversion and entertainment to busy citizens, who will wish to see more for their money than what they can already see, unfiltered in its banality, when standing in the street or at their fireplace: and so who will inevitably be served plays in which reality is edited for their pleasure and edification – magnified, distilled, accelerated; satirised or parodied; transformed into more ribald, cheering, or satisfying forms; even elevated into patriotic or heroic myth. The spectator’s eye looks differently at a play than at the daily world. The freedom from true accountability allows for more generous assimilation, an openness to learn or to the new. Equally, the fact that events on stage cannot be truly indifferent to us, that we have paid for them to express things, to 6 See for example Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985)

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produce emotions or articulate ideas, means that our minds are busy, more alert than usual, knitting shapes from the flux, pushing towards opinions, evaluations, some sense that the thing we have witnessed creates a world that has not quite been seen before. This is the environment with which Shakespeare never loses touch: where there is no such thing as a minor role; no such thing as a word that can be ignored, or a joke that spurns a laugh, or a dance or leap that doesn’t warrant amazement; a culture brewed in the look-at-me singularity of the most seemingly random or inconsequential action; a paradise (or inferno) of autopoieisis, where pretence matters, where role-play is, and where impossibilities are in danger of coming true. There were numerous things about the theatrical economy without which Shakespeare’s work could not have taken the shapes it did. Among the most important was the constitutionally fragmental physical and agential attributes of theatre. Plays were not necessarily thought of as discrete, organic units. Consider the relative limits to the influence of a single directing author. Look at the lists of plays performed in Elizabethan and Jacobean London, and we will find only a small proportion solely composed by the individual geniuses so honoured by posterity. A majority have been lost, invariably bespeaking unknown or uncelebrated writers, or plays that were never sold as playbooks at all. Many are anonymous. Many are authorial collaborations. Many were chopped and augmented without a second thought to any putatively organic whole. Indeed, the more successful the play the more its scenic composition was likely to change: think of Spanish Tragedy, Faustus, Tamburlaine, Mucedorus. Even Shakespeare’s plays enjoyed an afterlife in the seventeenth century mainly as collections of possibilities, almost anthologies, to be cut or chosen or changed as taste or opportunity saw fit. It was scenes that particularly lived on, as occasions for the display of passionate inclinations (for instance to love or jesting) as embodied in well-known names (Falstaff, Beatrice, Perdita). Notions of the play, even a play, may begin to seem like a nostalgic – or perhaps premature – holism.7 7 Compare Lydia Goehr’s deconstruction of the “work-concept”: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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The suddenness with which many plots routinely shifted direction – indifferent to psychological or even situational verisimilitude, the show topped and tailed and sometimes interrupted by comedians and dancers and puppets and the rest – might often have made an afternoon at the theatre more like a rumbustious circus or satiric revue than a moral interlude. A named play may have been the occasion or frame for a variety of more or less familiar entertainments, in which the pleasure came from familiar routines cropping up on cue, or as the delightful leavening of something high-strung or exotic: witness Jonson’s complaints to his audiences, sustained throughout the Jacobean period. Such an economy suggests what Louise Clubb has called theatergrams, an inter- and intracultural trade of moveable parts – character types, set-piece situations, units of dialogue, stage business, all those skills and gestures and cognitions, individual and ensemble, that animate a playworld into action – which travelled from work to work in various recognisable recombinations.8 The theatergram proposes adaptive miscegenation rather than strict imitation as the compositional principle; it allows that improvisations or sudden opportunities might themselves produce imitations, or furnish their own mutations. Each individual play owes debts to hosts of others, affinities often relished by audiences who went regularly to plays, were alert to allusion, parody, generic rhythms, and who pretty much instinctively recognised permeability as the basic rule of the artform, as conceits and situations, types and actors repeatedly cropped up, sometimes deadly serious, sometimes parodic, in playworld after playworld. There is a memory of this in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, in which he advertises the play’s individual features like a master of ceremonies might a comedy bill, banking on the familiarity of his figures whilst explicitly refusing other exhausted tricks. In this context, any given story or mimetic world is more like the straight line around and upon which the variations can be played, usually by comic scene stealers who deride or delay the main plot (Mouse in Mucedorus, Strumbo in Locrine, Will and Shakebag in Arden of Faversham). For all its genuine possibilities of terror, even a play 8 Louise Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven, CT: University of Yale Press, 1989).

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like Faustus conforms in part to the model of an episodic entertainment, with the descent into hell the delayed crescendo to a string of spectacular inset shows and burlesque pageants. The English popular theatre really puts that blithe age-old tenet – that poetry or stories should “delight and instruct” – to the test. You put even a nominal paragon of virtue on the stage, a Diana or Lucrece, and she is instantly degraded into the materials that make her: some debauched adolescent boy, turning his voice to a flute and poncing around in a wig. Shakespeare was no doubt familiar with earlier romances like Locrine and Mucedorus, which struggle to put a proto-Spenserian world of ideals and their opposites on the stage. As soon as the ideal is literalised before the eyes, it risks disappointment or derision; the body is too particular, its constituted parts (props, make-up, jingle-jangle lines) too much on show to allow simple belief. Marlowe in Faustus sees the problem and deftly overcomes it: partly by pre-empting scepticism through comic scenes that parody the main action; partly by turning Mephistopheles into an urbane, ironic plenipotentiary of eternity and its secrets; partly by the pleonastic slapstick of its miracles; and partly by the simple effect of deferral and tension, such that ultimate possibility – and impossibility – is held constantly in the mind’s eye as a threat or fate, waiting beyond or beneath the visible action. When the devils do indeed come onto the stage in the final scene, it is horrid confirmation of all that has been foreshadowed and previously deflected. We can see here how theatre’s scenic freedoms, often veering into licentiousness, were also the seed of serious innovations. Shakespeare was hardly alone in sophisticating theatre’s sometimes fragmental structures; nor was Jonson the only playwright frustrated by popular taste, or with more exalted ambitions for his art: Webster is a prime example, with his earnest prefaces comparing his labours to Euripides’ and bemoaning the misfortunes of winter staging and an uncomprehending auditory; likewise Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, which for all its generosity to its grocers and citizens also takes for granted that their taste in plays is ludicrous. These reprovals themselves testify to an established belief in theatre’s seriousness, pioneered by the great plays of the 1590s. For example, one of Marlowe’s many

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innovations, seen in both Jew of Malta and Edward II, is to incorporate the situational expectation of holiday tomfoolery and improvising subversion into the principals, such that Barabas, Gaveston, and Edward can all be understood as antic intra-play plotmakers, their parts almost generated by meta-theatrical dissidence. Technical-cumtheatrical multiplicity is beginning to be internalised as personality. At the other end of the spectrum, Jonson takes advantage of the mixed publishing economy – for playhouse and book trade – to rewrite his plays as thematically coherent works. Partly because of his resistance to so much in it, Jonson is perhaps our most alert witness to the London theatre scene. In many ways he wanted to rein-in the whole impertinent alliance: by making his comic characters either shape-changing illegitimates or impossible grotesques, unalterable symptoms of a single humour; by caricaturing the folly and tastelessness and corruption all around (indeed tragic characters like Sejanus and Tiberius are much the same); by unmasking pretension, exposing causes, and demystifying the slightest hint of irrationalism; by policing his actors and his auditory, and purporting to contract only with a select moiety of “understanders”; and by rendering superstition powerless. (Except that his aversion to untethered possibility is itself a kind of superstition, a recoil from the unknown that appeals to Horatian instruction, rooted in gainsayable precedent, a captain’s anchor in troubled seas.) In Jonson’s playworlds, every word is rhetorical. This means that the speaking has claims upon the audience. We are its primary addressees, and there is never long in-between one moment of recognising this and the next. Even if we do bury ourselves in the entertainment, we do so through a consistent referencing of our taste, endorsing it because it is in line with that of the tastemakers on stage. Above all, Jonson presents his scenes, just as he presents his characters’ dominant humours.9 He, the playmaker, does the placing and the characterising. And this goes for all of the contributory details as well. Never 9 “Shakespeare . . . learned from the Aristotelian plot structure of Roman New Comedy to produce a heightened sense of cause and effect, of an intelligible from an apparently natural sequence, by indicating the passage of time impressionistically, combining a sense of rapidity and proleptic anticipation with references to longer, repetitive sequences of habitual time, suggesting an anterior temporal space, as it were, ‘behind the scenes’. Jonson, by contrast, invented a form of plot which strove to make the accidents making up the present moment seem precisely accidental, so that what the audience follows and discriminates between as these

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has there been more purposive playwriting than Jonson’s. This is true especially in the knife-edge contingencies upon which his plots appear to balance. It may well be the case, as Lorna Hutson argues, that “Jonson’s best drama, by plotting near misses and directions not taken, produce[s] a sense of the potential latent in each encounter, and of the continually developing possibility of unexpected outcomes.”10 But nothing hinges on such suspense but the game at issue; what is more, the play would end precipitously were the danger not avoided: and so it is always avoided. His playworlds are not of the fabled liberties, but rather of punctilious directedness. All the details serve the prior conception, just as his characters extend the promise of their names. He never lets a metaphor fly free. His actors shall not improvise, even as to the timing of their pre-scripted words (note the meticulously interwoven lines in Bartholomew Fair, in which even interruptive polyphony is scripted in separated, consecutive parts). This expresses a powerful ambivalence about the medium that made Jonson’s name. Jonas Barish puts it like this: Somewhere in Jonson there lurks a puritanical uneasiness about pleasure itself, and also a distrust of movement, which connects with . . . an ideal of stasis in the moral and ontological realm. But whatever exists in time, and unfolds in time, and utilises human actors, must also involve motion as one of its mainsprings. To banish motion, to attempt to arrest or disguise it by ruling out the devices of stagecraft that exploit it, is in a sense to deny the intrinsically kinetic nature of the theatrical medium.11

In some ways this amounts to a refusal of the idea that theatre, its manifold contractions and fraudulence, might truly model possibility; for Jonson, in some basic way, it doesn’t; it even mustn’t. Instead theatre is a device for exposing impossibility. Hence the way, at the end of his best works, it is almost as though the whole stage world asks to be folded up into a little box and carried away, as a ventriloquist might his doll. Life goes on, it shall go moments accumulate are the processes by which a range of characters (mostly men) attempt to shape these accidents into something intelligible and prosperous.” Whereas Shakespeare “prevents the audience from reconstructing exactly what it thinks it has seen”, in Jonson, “the audience has seen everything, and, as Dryden noted of Epicoene, everyone in the audience is a ‘proper judge of what he sees’ because ‘all faults lie open to discovery’”. Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 317. 10 Hutson, Invention of Suspicion, 316. 11 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 135.

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on through gritted teeth: but not as it has in the set-piece tableaux just witnessed. After all, an audience probably doesn’t believe in Jonson’s tricksters and grotesques. They are cartoons, negative exemplars, part of a show. This is not to doubt that sometimes they produce ambivalent responses, or make us question, briefly, our own delight. Jonson is forever abusing wrong-minded audiences, facile pleasures, bad taste, populist atavism. But there is an implicit assumption that we, the understanders, are not swept up in the indictment (there is both proleptic flattery and condescending threat in Jonson’s coinage here, which puns on the “under-standers”, the groundlings who should, by spatial and contractual logic, defer to the playwright’s authority). Similarly, if an audience has relished clever criminality, laughed as improvised plotmaking snares its proud and stupid gulls, it is probably unlikely to care when or indeed if it is punished. Mosca gets away with it, Face and Subtle do not: or is it the other way around? I’m not sure it matters. Jonson finishes with the show, the visions disappear, and off we go. It is enough to have seen figures on stage being so swiftly adequate to the possibilities of stagecraft. That will do. So we are condoning criminality? No we’re not. We’re applauding taste and ingenuity. There is more to this, however, than appreciation of wit, or of this or that character’s cleverness. Jonson, for all the fineness of his observation, is about the macro: it is the big picture that matters, the answer to which the elements or numbers point. And so the decisive subject, reflexively enough, is art, and more particularly stagecraft. It may be true to call Jonson the age’s greatest anti-theatricalist.12 But in basic ways his career evinces a passionate commitment to theatre as a model of possibility. This isn’t ultimately borne out in his own articulated prescriptions, or expressed by his onstage spokesmen (they are always men). It is instead everywhere at work in the efficiency and coordination of his inventions, the unique Jonson-machine or Jonson-motion. The possibility at work is utterly unlike Shakespeare. Jonson will never release a discrete formaction to its own purposes. He will not allow any instrument of his, any actor or type or trope or cue, its independent conation, other than what can be seen and judged and disciplined by the larger mechanism, to which it is joined 12 The classic analysis of Jonson’s anti-theatricalism is Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 132–54.

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and contributes. So, rather than granting possibility to any particular formaction, Jonson grants it to the clicking synchronisation of the collective. The collective is organised hierarchically; many of its agents are little more than cogs in the machinery that the author sets, and observes in motion. No doubt the product could be allegorised in terms of instrumentalised labour, or early modern guild capitalism; alternatively, the jointed coordination of his materials, the intra- and inter-scene sinews of his plots, unobtrusively operative as the characters preen and intrigue, can be understood as an exemplary application of Horatian decorum. But there is more than the poet-scholar’s observance at work; more than serviceable civic politics. Jonson’s achievement is easily taken for granted, precisely because of its efficiency. But his best works perfect a self-sufficient playmachine hardly less influential than Shakespeare’s for the development of English narrative and characterisation (the pair’s influence is just as much upon fiction as plays). The pay-off is that it works; that it has been shown to work, right now, in executing its passage to conclusion. Jonson assays a true craft ethics. And what this means is that his truly possible worlds are already here, discovered in the fact of being an understander. In this Jonson commits himself to a career as the corrective superego to the monstrous id-child, Shakespeare. This is epitomised in his complaint in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, that Shakespeare’s plays “make Nature afraid” (127). The thought has the most enormous temerity. Jonson says this in the context of agreeing a supposed covenant between author and auditory, where he rails at various of the theatre’s absurdities, both crass and pseudo-sophisticated, and excuses himself from pandering to what he sees as false expectation or impudent appetite. But Jonson’s kick at his great rival has a different tone: it is more defensive than confident, with that hint of religious terror that occasionally surfaces in Jonson’s discourse when, no longer scoffing or disdainful, he really believes that things have gone too far. In The Alchemist (1610), Jonson had criticised plays that “run away from Nature and be afraid of her” – a more conventional reminder that art’s great teacher is always nature.13

13 “To the Reader”. This appears only in the 1612 Quarto and not the 1616 Folio. Bartholomew Fair’s more extensive report on stage decorum was published with the rest of the play in the second Jonson Folio (1631–1640). It is impossible to know whether the Induction was

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To “make Nature afraid” seems a far graver accusation. How can a play possibly do such a thing? Can it presume to rival nature, or genuinely to be a second nature? Can nature be left cowering in a corner, masking its eyes from Shakespeare’s auto-genetic dispensation? Or is it human nature that trembles, as though faced with mirrors or shadows it fears to recognise? No doubt such claims seem inordinate. But the challenge, and I think the continued claim of these things on our attention, rests precisely in theatre’s ontological inordinacy, an inordinacy innate to the media’s presumption in proffering unreal, substantially factitious relationships – between script and character, player and audience, phrase and line and sentence – as the stuff of a supposedly self-sufficient world. How can such fabricants pretend to life? And, in pretending to life, actually mattering, such that they have a claim upon, or secret knowledge of, their witnesses? It truly is an uncanny possibility – and something that I think Jonson would not finally countenance. And perhaps he was right; perhaps Shakespeare’s mysterious realism, his positing of a rival nature, his production of layered worlds, his generating of secrets, his opaque motives, his expectation that we, his beholders, will happily go along with something even as we know we are missing so much of it – is as fearful as it is so evidently fearless. And what is more: perhaps Shakespeare would have agreed. There is a deep puzzle about his commitment to this world of theatre. He had written the two most successful narrative poems of the age, and a dazzling poetic career beckoned. But he left it behind, preferring to become housescripter and ensemble actor for a barely tried company, in a medium that was still only tenuously respectable, which had so far produced a bare handful of decent works. Clearly there was some sort of compulsion, a need for the smell of the thing. But perhaps this compulsion became a curse. Why else does his work at once so depend upon the theatrical medium, making it move with an oxygenated naturalness that has never been rivalled, and yet at regular intervals, more and more as his career goes on – especially from the time, around Hamlet, when he seems to have performed in 1614, once or repeatedly, or whether it post-dates the performances, or was revised for publication. Either way, it comes after Shakespeare’s career is over; and it may be relevant that Bartholomew Fair was not performed by the King’s Men.

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given up acting – does he subvert its comforts, exclude both players and audiences from possession of the script’s purposes, and devote himself to making worlds that, even as they please and accede to popular understanders, are all the time moving elsewhere, as though the realest worlds are beyond shared games of language or gesture, and are instead active or immanent in some silent or intervallic or virtual dimension that is here, even as it cannot quite be seen, and is felt, even as it cannot securely be known? Perhaps Shakespeare, not Jonson or Stubbes or Perkins, was the greatest anti-theatricalist of the age, suffering a resistance to his own world exactly in proportion to his love and his need for it. It is a resistance which generates his ever-restless movement: bored by imitation and yet condemned to his fracturing mirror; by turns burrowing from light and risking cliffs: and either way daring us to follow. Anti-theatrical, precisely because – even more than his theatre’s direst enemies – Shakespeare felt all too acutely the living possibilities of his craft.

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Shakespeare v. actor

No doubt the layered multiplicity of his work reflects Shakespeare’s distinctive sensibility. But there is also a very simple, historical explanation for his uniqueness, almost an accident of circumstance. That is, only Shakespeare worked with a single company of actors; no other writer could even begin to develop the same intimate knowledge of an ensemble’s skills and predilections, and the role-by-role history of every player in it. Unlike all his rival playwrights, after 1594 (when he became a stockholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men) Shakespeare didn’t need to hawk or pitch his plots to any other company.1 He knew exactly who would play it, both which company and which individual actors. And this meant that he didn’t need to write to plots in the same way as other playwrights. From the very inception of a work, he could be thinking both more closely and more far-reachingly. He could write to the particulars: to the individual actor and part; to the parts within each part; and to implications that even these specifically addressed collaborators need not possess. The economy and technology of actors’ parts was the perfect medium for Shakespeare’s imagination. This part was the basic working text of the theatre: a “roll” for each individual part, consisting of its cues and speeches, and nothing else.2 The cues were unattributed, with no indication as to who speaks them, or when. This meant that much of the playworld was unwritten, indicated only by lacunae. Actors had to feel out its intervals – in-between a cue and a speech, or one clause and the next, 1

For discussion of plots, see Chapter 8. In what follows I am summarising what I have written about at length elsewhere, with many examples, in Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts; and Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare, 2nd rev. edn (London: Arden, 2011). 2

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or inside a metalepsis – and try to find ways of channelling the apprehensions into performance. Each such gap bespoke an insufficiently known world, each interval potentially bearing a life-altering surprise. Actors conned their roles in private, often alone. There were no modern-style directors. This meant that every point in the part-text had to be carefully scanned. The different units in a part – cues, cue-spaces, prosody, rhetoric, and the potential disjunctions between part-text and full-text, rehearsal and performance – provided endless opportunities to make or remake scene, action, and character. The slightest pause might have actorly purpose and expressive effect; each sign, however unglamorous and instrumental, may produce possible worlds. The kind of creative attention implied by writing to parts produces quite different worlds than if the play is written to a plot. It opens up all of the conventional certainties of a scene: its place in space and time, its given perspective, its order of occurrence, its sequential entrances and exits and listed speeches, its unity of action, its reliance upon visible bodies and discrete minds interacting, its very singleness as a dramatic unit. It makes them all potentially multiple or rivalrous. Action will no longer be defined by what can be seen or described.3 The authority of theatre’s representational stock-in-trade – dialogue, soliloquy, diagetic narration, mime, dumb show, pictorial tableau, the demarcation of locus and platea – will become more doubtful, as trust lapses in what seems palpable to the eyes, and every mode of action is open to splitting and recombining. A scene becomes far more than a synecdoche of a single inferred place and event; it can be as layered and labile, as hyper-placial, as any other dramatic language. For if words no longer merely execute or ornament a plot, supplementary potential accrues in them to produce rival plots, virtual scenes, even virtualised subjects. Writing intensely for theatrical parts can resemble writing for musical parts: alive with words that split and spawn, moving up and down and along registers;

3 Lorna Hutson identifies widespread participation in English legal processes, and familiarity with classically informed forensic rhetoric, as influencing Shakespeare’s development of an “inferential dramaturgy . . . that deployed the rhetorical topics of circumstance in order that audiences should infer the details of times, places, motives, and intentions with a more vivid and spacious imaginative power than direct representation could ever mastre.” The Invention of Suspicion, 309 passim.

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interweaving voices, separate but co-dependent; staggered points of beginning and ending; movement both vertical and horizontal; expressive instants that can break free from the continuum and seem frozen as eternal instants. Every unit of expression potentially has its own pathos, its own valency and timing. The upshot of this is a radical liberating of the fragmentary or fractional. In Shakespeare’s playworlds, the putatively neutral mechanics of playmaking, the tiny levers in the machine, are no longer the affectless cogs in a contrivance. They may be nested worlds, nested lives. For it is misleading to think of parts as simply cut-out from a pre-existing whole. The theatrical event is better understood as an unpredictable assemblage of such parts, which in all sorts of ways precede, succeed – even secede from – both the complete playtext and any performance of it. But we can take this perception still further: the actor’s part is a model, host, and generator of many other points of particulate-life, each potentially endued with its own conatus, a soul-appetite which may or may not serve more palpable entities. Writing to parts – and so to the numerous parts that compose and move each part – potentially gives experiential independence to any instant or recess in the playworld: fractions and fractals that unpredictably divide and reassemble, with individuation, action, and passion distributed differentially at each and any point or interval in the fabric. What is more, the experience of the actor, his perceptions and apperceptions, become an anticipated part of the fiction. Every choice that a part-text gives an actor – and there are many – is a pressurised gift in an economy of compulsion, misinformation, and suspended purpose. Playlife is not a supermarket, where the actor cruises along the aisles with his trolley, assessing options in the white light, life at an optimum temperature. The part-text requires the actor, again and again, to decide things, but the choices are rarely any kind of freedom. Choice may be between unholy possibilities; choice may be panicked or contingent, its consequences profoundly invidious. This imports a delimited but powerful space for scripted improvisation: the actor has choice over timing and address; we get more layered action, minds in motion, emotions under assault. At the same time, a profound unfreedom is immanent to the parttechnology – founded in the fact of scripting, the inadequacy of rehearsal,

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the uncertainties of entrance or address, the repeated cognitive dispossession effected by polysemy. Shakespeare often ambiguates the passage between cue and cued, delaying or stretching time, making possession of the moment an uncertain struggle between one player and another, or between an actor’s assumptions and their in-the-moment experience. When scripting incorporates moment-by-moment living in this way, performance can recover something of the contingency and tension of real existing: which in turn informs the possibilities of scripting. The benefits in terms of cognitive depth and variation are almost incalculable. In macro-organised, often collaboratively written plot-based plays, characters tend to be types, however vivid. By contrast, a character produced by the fiercely possessed part is much less predictable: putatively selfsufficient, but defined at every moment by nervous dependency on others: just like her or his actor. For the actor with his part is always at once radically alone and necessarily reaching for others, his world pre-scripted only to the extent that it is also abyssally unknown. The actor chooses this or that address or intonation or movement, which decides the matter for them, right there and then: but that is all. The moment remains to be returned to; this moment, this enacting, is not all there is to life. Alternatives can be recalled or apprehended; other decisions wait, the preserve of this or another player, on another afternoon, or in some future playhouse, ready to erase the one just made. The unexhausted life in each cell is a kind of crystal of actorly futures: certainly this means future performances, at once prehended and made strangely necessary; but it also means the choices at each acting-instant – one taken, a multitude not. Merely to hear the words is to intuit things lurking, a body half-awakened, or turning in its sleep, promised to the future. This in turn helps to constitute a shivering emotional immediacy, as the acting surfs upon these unseen currents. This isn’t to say the actor always realises the paths not taken, or feels the difficulty of choice: no doubt he often doesn’t. But there is a kind of pathos, simply in the fact of choosing. Partly the pathos belongs to the things denied or delayed, the possible lives embedded in Shakespeare’s textures, often with deep moral or political claims. But the pathos also belongs, I think, to the individual actor: because he so strives for our faith; he lives for this moment; he is this moment; there is nothing but what he gives. And yet it is only ever an

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attempt, a dressed audition, never sufficient, never certain not to be outdone tomorrow. There is nothing truer to this trade than those prologues and epilogues and choruses, which can seem so formulaic in their pleas for love and forbearance: but they must be believed. Actors are life’s pioneers, risking as daily craft the reality which the rest of us suppress. This, I think, is why Shakespeare’s writing habitually exceeds his actors’ craft: not because actors are inadequate to life’s possibility, but because their experience – half-taking, half-taken, half-owning, half-owned, halfknowing, half-not – so perfectly embodies the inadequacy of the possessed life to its possible worlds. This necessary shortfall is felt – the truer the actor the more so. Hamlet knows it: what’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? It is an essential question. Hamlet touches upon the capacity of the player to believe in his own pretence, as though in simulation and surrogacy is truth: What’s Hecuba to him? But still more profound is the character’s alarming commandeering of life, the uncanny sense that the character might be looking at me – what’s he to Hecuba? It is partly about the actor as a vehicle of the human: he feels for us and before us; he steps into disguise as though into unadmitted sources or dimly apprehended futures. In doing so, he doesn’t only predict the shapes and turns of emotion. Much more profoundly, much more frighteningly, he seems to take on what we are, or dare us to believe that this might be what we are. It is a fiction, and can be indulged, and then cast off as a game. But this casting off, this attempt at forgetting, is in fact the game. Here is the ontological scandal.4 The terms of the fiction are as true as things get – and yet still they are not enough. For the player knows in his bones what really listening to Shakespeare tells us: a single actor’s voice is never enough. We need five voices at once, or eight, interwoven, contrapuntal, lower and higher, one that we hear at the front of our minds and others that lurk, or we hear without knowing we are hearing them; we need to listen inside the presumed units of sound, allow the swirling repetitions, as in a motet or madrigal, the different but simultaneous timbres

4 On the problematic ontology and ethics of actorly pretensions to “mime” the real, with specific reference to Hamlet, see Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 75–86.

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No other playwright is so much the actor as Shakespeare, or so close to other actors. And precisely because of this, I think, no one is so palpably restless with inherited practices. This is the gist of Hamlet’s famous tutorial to the players: every last “word” and “action” must be respected, as a unique instance of possibility; a crowd’s applause exonerates nothing, proves nothing; there is often more going on than is immediately apparent; and it is better to be truly heard by one judicious ear than laughed at by the barren. Shakespeare’s impatience with inherited modes of playing and attendance is palpable: . . . they imitated so abhominably. I hope we have reform’d that indifferently with us, Sir. H A M L E T . O reforme it altogether. HAMLET

PLAYER.

(TLN 1882–6)

Reform it altogether: there should be nothing left of actorly egomania, poor men’s Alleyns, sawing the air and shouting, or “pittifull” fools ingratiating themselves with spectators. The ambition for playmaking could hardly be more scrupulous or exacting: to show “the verie Age and Bodie of the Time, his forme and pressure” (TLN 1871–2). The player’s “mimetic” job encompasses age and body: that is, time and space, the personal and the general. The physical modesty recommended by Hamlet is to waylay false satisfactions, or misleading notions that the player’s verbal or visible skills are somehow the thing at stake. They are not. The player is a vehicle, a medium, whose body keeps within bounds precisely to allow the fiction its scope.5 Renaissance acting manuals invariably concentrate upon the visible portrayal of the emotions, in face or gesture.6 For instance, Thomas 5 W. B. Worthen: “Despite its anxious regard for the ‘interpretive’ excess of acting, Hamlet also refuses a vision of theatre reduced to speaking by the card . . . we are mistaken . . . if we take the ‘text’ for the behaviour itself, Schechner’s kernel of originality, what Burke calls the ‘constitutive’ dimension of acts, their newness . . . [T]he acts that seem to define performance in Hamlet . . . at once imply a script and exceed its writ . . . performance that will at once demand and frustrate ‘interpretive’ reduction to a script.” Drama: Between Poetry and Performance, 110–11. 6 Joseph R. Roach: “Actors discover the passions of the mind with their bodies – larynx, limbs, torso, and head together – thereby transforming invisible impulse into spectacle and unspoken feeling into eloquence”: The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 32–3. Roach recovers the scientific or pseudoscientific understanding of rhetorical theory, the historic links between acting, rhetoric, and ancient physiological doctrines.

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Wright defines action as an “externall image of an internall minde”, an image that involves the whole body: “by mouth [the actor] telleth his minde; in countenance he speaketh with a silent voice to the eies; with all the universal life and body hee seemeth to say, Thus we move, because by the passion thus we are moved.”7 Inevitably, Shakespeare exploits these skills at all kinds of crucial moments – witness Othello’s rolling of the eyes, Lady Macbeth’s washing of her hands, or the famous account of the Othello performed at Oxford in 1610: “when she was killed she was even more moving, for when she fell back upon the bed she implored the pity of the spectators by her very face”.8 But no less than Ben Jonson, who regularly bemoaned the theatre’s slavishness to spectacle, Shakespeare’s work insists that eyes are radically insufficient.9 Herder’s comparative preference (probably inspired by Leibniz) for touch and hearing over the “coldness” and self-composure of sight, and within hearing his preference for “tones” over mere “sound”, speaks acutely to Shakespeare’s subvisible “vibrations”: The effects of that which agreeably enters our ear lie, as it were, deeper within our soul, whereas the objects of the eye lie serenely before us. The former are produced in one another, so to speak, through vibrations that give rise to other vibrations; they are thus not as discrete, not as distinct. . .[I]f hearing, precisely because of its inwardness and successiveness, were not more difficult to develop than sight, which effortlessly takes wing and can always return to find the same world unchanged; then those who are blind from birth show how many fine nuances, unknown to us, might be distinguished in hearing, nuances that today belong only to sight and that could be difficult to articulate, even for the blind, and barely made comprehensible to people who do not share with them the profound sensibility needed for the experience. . . . I assume that sight can show us nothing but surfaces, colors and images and that we can receive concepts of anything that has volume, sphericality, 7

The Passions of the Mind (1604), 176. Henry Jackson, Letter to “G.P”, Sep. 1610, Corpus Christi Fulman Papers, X, 83r–84v; translation from Gamini Salgado, ed., Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975), 30. 9 Compare Paul Kottman’s critique of Hobbes’s privileging of an anti-theatrical, all-intoone “visibility”, an image of “monstrous spectacularity” that sucks all agency away, arguing for the greater political and human potential of the scene, broadly conceived as “the horizon of a particular here and now, established and confirmed through . . . especially spoken interaction”, and characterised by embodied voices, acoustic resonance, spoken interaction, risk, alternative stories, and so an openly felt excess beyond programmatic definition, the logic of borders, identity politics: “it is a politics whose participants are first and foremost actors, who respond actively to the fact of being-with-others in the world”: A Politics of the Scene (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 51, 184. Also see 63–4, 167–94. 8

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and solid form only through touch and long, repeated feeling of objects . . . The beauty of a form, of a body, is not a visual but a tactile concept; thus every one of these beauties must originally be sought in the sense of touch. 10

Unlike Herder, I think of hearing as a modulation of touch; but either way I suspect Shakespeare would agree; as he might likewise with Luce Irigaray: “Vision is effectively a sense that can totalize, enclose, in its own way. More than the other senses, it is likely to construct a landscape, a horizon.”11 Shakespeare does not give us “landscapes”, unless framing the fact of such framing; he does not admit “horizons”, unless risking the regions beyond. What we think we see, then, is always only a kind of surfacesynecdoche of deeper movements: as we found with Edmond, even charismatic self-confidence cannot possess all that is moving in the language.12 Vision in Shakespeare is always at best co-active with hearing – even pregnant moments of silence must be listened to, listened within, rather than seen – and with the words that shape and complicate whatever is being seen.13 Necessarily, then, Shakespeare’s scripting required the actors to develop all kinds of subtle modifications to established styles, necessarily phasing out more histrionic manners. Every line in Shakespeare – let alone every character, dialogue, complete play – is what Heinz von Foerster has called a “non-trivial machine”; whereas a “trivial machine” is defined by the fact that “it always bravely does the very same thing that it originally did”, invariantly determined by its “input state”, a non-trivial machine contains other input–output machines within it, producing “feedback loops” and “internal states” which thus generate 10 Johann Gottfried von Herder, ‘Critical Forests: Fourth Grove’, in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Charles Moore (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 206, 207, 210 (italics in original). 11 An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 175. 12 Lucretius: “a voice is distributed abroad in all directions, since voices beget other voices when one voice uttered has once leapt asunder into many, just as a spark of fire is often accustomed to scatter itself into fires of its own. Therefore places hidden away from sight are filled with voices, and all boil and stir round about with sound.” De Rerum Natura, 4. 603–10, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 323. 13 Although compare Herder: “If sight did not ceaselessly distract us; if sight and hearing were not, after a certain fashion, adversaries who are rarely found together in equal measure . . .”: Aesthetics, 206.

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unpredictable outcomes.14 And one implication of this is that the actor, surfing or suffering this kind of economy, cannot possibly remain sovereignly in control. And not just the individual actor – I think the ensemble’s possession of a Shakespeare-world is likewise radically limited. Evelyn Tribble has stressed the importance of group coordinacies and company expertise, of practices and skills distributed not only amongst all of the players but amongst other indispensable cogs in the inherited “system”, textual, material, professional. The individual actor and the individual part must often give way to shared aims and “mutual modulation”.15 Tribble stresses efficient coordination in the interests of “the smoothest possible performance”, the event of which is the ultimate purpose of each “cognitive artifact”: “Affordances are relational; they are only meaningful within an environment.”16 But there are many more environments for a Shakespeare-world, and for each of the bits that compose it, than any singular performance. A “smooth” show is not the endpoint or purpose of all of the moving units in a playworld, any more than it is an adequate definition of the theatrical event. Of course, a playworld’s multifarious instruments will invariably contribute to such a performance: but not always, and not only. The parts may exceed the play – and any player or group that purports to own it. Because in Shakespeare’s hands these cognitive motors – the levers and triggers that bring the parts to life – are themselves latent with expressive possibility. Such possibilities need not be subdued to any shared phenomenology, or to the business aims of the company, or even to a collective wish to put on a good show. Shakespeare’s fellow players must have known that much in the scripting continued to defy their praxis, however sensitive and alert and experienced. Shakespeare’s rhythms often stress or isolate words that are doing a lot of work, asking the actor to notice them, and so to let them be heard. Polysemic words can be carefully enunciated, spoken with some

14 Understanding Understanding (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Press, 2001); quoted in Ranulph Glanville, “Machines of Wonder and Elephants that Float through Air”, Cybernetics and Human Knowing 10:3–4 (2003), 98–9. 15 Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 61–6. 16 Cognition in the Globe, 66, 67.

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lingering appreciation of wit, some feeling for phrasal intensity, but the polysemy itself cannot be spoken, can only rarely be mimed, and will often be missed. And this also suggests that the decisive moment, even the decisive movements of acting, will not always be available to the senses (actors’ or spectators’); not always, perhaps, even be coincident with the action witnessed on the stage. For how to display, or even intonate, a doubtful cognitive shift, a shadowy memory, a gradation of feeling that does not issue in volition? Some twentieth-century performance theory gets close to what Shakespeare’s scripting suggests: not the dominant Stanislavskian tradition (which in many things does, I think, resemble the living-in-the-part habits of early modern players), but the tradition most powerfully represented by Stanislavski’s rival Soviet theatre director, Vsevolod Meyerhold: Stage acting is not a question of static groupings but of action: the action of time upon space . . . When you look at a bridge you notice that it is a leap fixed in metal. In other words, not immobility but movement. It is the tension expressed in the bridge which is essential to it, not the ornamentation of its railings. It is the same with the actor on stage . . . When the visible, the external (the body), does not move, then the invisible, the internal (the mind), must be in movement. Like a swan on water: it glides impassively, but its feet, hidden from view, are always working. Motionless while moving, in stillness not still . . . Immobility is the norm, movement is an occurrence. The word and the occurrence are abnormal states. Every movement must emerge and emanate from the immobility which is the background upon which the movement is designed.17

What Meyerhold says here of bridges, Shakespeare seems to ask of his cues, midline breaks, and other such transitional nodes; what Meyerhold says of the swan, perhaps, Shakespeare asks of his actors. Another suggestive performance theorist is the contemporary Italian director Eugenio Barba – much influenced by Meyerhold. In particular, their shared interest in pre-acting and the pre-expressive: In the instant which precedes the action, when all the necessary force is ready to be released into space but as though suspended and still under control, the performer perceives his/her energy in the form of sats, of dynamic preparation. The sats is the moment in which the action is thought/acted by the entire organism, which reacts 17 From Meyerhold, Ecrits sur le théâtre, quoted in Eugenio Barba, The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, trans. Richard Fowler (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 53–4.

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with tensions, even in immobility. It is the point at which one decides to act. There is a muscular, nervous and mental commitment, already directed towards an objective . . . It is the spring before it is sprung . . . The energy which is accumulated in the trunk and presses on the legs can be canalized into a caress of the hand or into the hurried steps of a run, into a slow movement of the eyes . . . It is a question of subliminal surprises, which the spectator does not become aware of with the conscious “eye” but with the “eye” of the senses, with the kinaesthetic sense. To give life to the sats, to those continuous changes of muscular tonus which makes the leaps of thought visible, the performer . . . must know how to control the action as if it was under a microscope . . . The work on sats is the means by which one penetrates into the cellular world of scenic behaviour.18

The cellular world of scenic behaviour: no doubt it is a rare actor who can truly enter this; but to do so assuredly is the challenge.

18 Barba, Paper Canoe, 55–7. See also Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, trans. Richard Fowler (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).

7

Playing to the plot

Shakespeare’s uniqueness is better realised if we look further around at the world that seemed to house him. So although Jonson was the most classically informed of all playwrights, obedience to classical precepts, programmatic or instinctive, was everywhere at work. Above all this implied obedience to Aristotle, especially to his Nicomachean Ethics (the Poetics was much less widely known, and then usually through commentaries, or conflations with Horace’s Ars Poetica). This is exemplified in Sidney’s generally more Platonic or neo-Platonic Apology for Poetry, in which the foundational purpose of poetry is pure Aristotle: it transforms the mustiness and mistakes of history, renovating the actual in the name of the ideal. The influence endures throughout and beyond Shakespeare’s time. For instance (perhaps ironically) Aristotle’s “actuality” clearly informs definitions of “possible” in seventeenth-century neoclassical genre theory: here a “possible” means the perfect, original, ideal shape or form of something, a model in which all the coordinates are ordered so as to provide an abstract for the real. We find this in Boileau’s theory of literary genres, in which each play or poem is a symptom of a determining model, its possibilities accordingly prescribed. Ernst Cassirer writes of Boileau’s attempt in his Poetic Art to arrive at a general theory of the genres of poetry, just as the geometer attempts to arrive at a general theory of curves. In the wealth of actually given forms he seeks to discover the “possible” form, just as the mathematician wants to know the circle, the ellipse, the parabola, in their “possibility”, that is, in the constructive law from which they can be derived.1 1 The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelin and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 290.

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The pertinent move is from such merely “derived” phenomena back to the pre-existing, primary form or law: The genres and types of art correspond to the genera and species of natural objects; the former like the latter have their immutable and constant forms, their specific shape and function, to which nothing can be added and nothing taken away . . . Neither the artist nor the natural scientist creates order; they merely ascertain what “is”.2

In this sense, possibility is a thing of the past, indeed of the origin, rather than of the future. What is possible describes the pre-formed, pre-assured limits of reality; or it predicts the ideal which on-going experience, observation, or creation may or may not discover. It may be that Shakespeare eludes this kind of thinking. But most Renaissance drama does not. Indeed it is just such a model of creation – an abstract plan, delivered to a maker, who delivers the possibility into actuality – which underlies the way the vast majority of plays were produced. The type came before the instance, the genus before the individual, the product before the process. That is, the job of a playmaker was to fulfil the promise of an anterior plot (or “plat”), or what Tiffany Stern has termed (after modern films) the plot “scenario”: a brief document recording the proposed sequence of a play’s scenes, with a précis of each, detailing entrances, meetings, and decisive switches in mood or passion.3 Each scenic block thus possessed its own integrity and purpose (e.g. a violent confrontation, a dumb show, a move from obedience to rebellion). Often the scenarios were written by professional plotters, who would hawk them to a company, with no necessary expectation that they would be the ones asked to furnish the complete play. This was the job of the “poet” or “playmaker”, perhaps someone bought in by the company, perhaps someone already employed by them, who would be answerable to the company that purchased the plot. Correspondingly, the same word (plot/plat) is used to denote the list of scenes, detailing the order of entrances and exits, and often any required props, nailed up backstage to be consulted during 2

Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 290. Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Also see D. Bradley, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Playhouse: Preparing the Play for the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 83–9; Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 44–54. 3

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performance by actors or prompter.4 First the plot generates the scripting; then it regulates the performance. From go to woe, the play is beholden to this single abstracting page of information. There is little choice but to use such plots in an economy when so many plays were conceived and composed collaboratively. This is true even of the most episodic entertainments – for instance where relatively simple stories provided a through-line which entertainers could ornament and interrupt, or where linked “playlets” were played in sequence. The actors had to know exactly when the jester or juggler or nest of ninnies were to appear, regardless of whether they knew how long any semi-extemporised solo would hold the stage. And as the popular theatre developed, the plot scenario probably grew in importance as a sifter and organiser of the corpus. The stock of plays to imitate got bigger; audiences became more discriminating: playplotters had to be hyper-aware of the market and the competition, the failures and the fashions. As more talented and more educated young men entered the scene, with ambition to do more than merely make a living, and as the stage took over as the pre-eminent popular organ for political critique and experiential possibility, so plot abstracts became a crucial medium for this ambition – perhaps almost a mini-genre of its own, coherent, distinctive, pointed, and thematically driven. Inevitably, the fact of plots helped shape the style of plays. There were implications for the scripted word. Canny imitation becomes more valued than passionate authorial inspiration. Language tends to serve or embellish a thought already composed, rather than generate new possibilities (the words come after the defining emotion, movement, cognition). Metaphors and similes will be illustrative. In this way, a rhetorical economy rooted in repetition and emphasis will be epitomised by language that repeats and emphasises a synoptic, panoptic, prescripting plot. These writers had stories to get told. Even when they try their hands at extravagant conceits, such as Webster or Marston or Chapman occasionally do, or their writing became catachretic or 4 For facsimiles of extant plots see W. W. Greg, Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses: Stage Plots, Actor’s Parts, Prompt Books, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931).

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swollen, it is invariably from a mixture of two purposes: to ornament or colour an already-existing idea, often via a more or less degraded mode of epic simile; or to characterise the speaker’s excess, for example as overweening flattery, or euphuistic vanity, or splenetic malcontent: How servile is the rugged’st courtier’s face! What profit, nay, what nature would keep down Are heaved to them are minions to a crown. Envious ambition never sates his thirst Till, sucking all, he swells and swells, and bursts. (Marston, Malcontent, 1. 4. 77–81)

Both idea and image, however flamboyant, are already in circulation, albeit given a kind of adrenalised injection. Webster’s work is more genuinely tortured than Marston’s, but no less instantly accessible. It can seem heavy with metaphor, but his ruling trope is in fact simile (even when the comparison is not framed with “as” or “like”). He paints each action or emotion through a vivid, often grotesque analogue, which at once encapsulates, judges, and completes the moment’s scene. Whether simile or metaphor, the effect is a miniature epigrammatic parable: Your followers Have swallowed you like mummia, and, being sick With such unnatural and horrid physic, Vomit you up I’th’kennel. (White Devil, 1. 1. 16–19) Suppose me one of Homer’s frogs, my lord, Tossing my bulrush thus. What a damned impostume is a woman’s will!

(White Devil, 2. 1. 112–13) (White Devil, 4. 2. 150)

The words are satisfied in the moment of their speaking; it is assumed that interpretations or judgements, by onstage or offstage addressees, can be made in this moment. Writing such as this has almost none of Shakespeare’s latency or projective memory. Writing to plots effectively precludes doing what Shakespeare is always doing – generating tropes which compete with the apparent scene, layering the action with hyper-scenes to leave the witness blinking. Perhaps the most necessary symptom of writing to plots is that everything that matters becomes apparent on the stage, either told or shown.

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Take Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c.1589).5 It begins with a series of conventional types and situations: the comi-pastoral release into countryside; the love-melancholy of the man; the beautiful paragon, blazoned in mythic terms, holding fast to her chastity in the face of masculine desire; male joshing and witticisms, assuming that the basic wish is to bed the woman (a shared and shame-free ambition); the difficulty, in the midst of the peer group, to dissent from the compulsory manner without being condemned as a killjoy; the uniformity of wit. It is all given, articulated, presented. We know it all. Likewise when the action moves to Oxford and the magicians: again there is the boastfulness of men and the hints of transgressive ambition, but scenically it is simply presented to us. This is true even though the topic is telepathy and necromancy – Bacon performs a conjuration and the woman from Henley appears, as proof that he had magically witnessed Burden’s secret alchemical experiments. The magic works to effect space-travel, time-travel, in such a way as to flatten metaphysical difference entirely, banalise the impossible by bringing it effortlessly into the room. Nothing is withheld in Friar Bacon. Consider the “through the glass” scene, where Bacon holds up the magic mirror and a supposedly distant scene is played on the stage before us (Scene 6). The knowledge is all one way. There are no gradations of seeing. Even when the sons see their fathers duelling (Scene 13), and then abruptly dying, the scene they see works with glib instantaneity, like an anecdote given physical form. The scene is a simple method for quickly telegraphing information. The only consequence that seems to matter is Bacon’s recognition that he has gone too far, the simple obverse of his earlier gloating delight at his power. The same goes for the brazen head, speaking and flashing with lightning: “Time is, time was, time is passed” (Scene 11). It means nothing, really, apart from being an occasion for pyrotechnics and a mordant allegory of Bacon’s superannuation as future-effecting wizard (as distinct from patriotic prophet). The problem with this, its basic limitation, is that theatre or drama is never really the medium; never truly the body doing the expressing or the 5 See David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen, eds, English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 129–81.

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assaying. Basically the play takes existing scenes or discourses and translates them onto the stage – pastoral frolics, university games of wit, ambassadorial negotiations, parody-conversions – all once-removed from the moment of their occurrence, or perhaps recurrence, all protected by the play’s knowingly imitative satire. It is genial and sometimes funny. But everything is satisfied in its moment; it is spoken and it melts away. This is true even of Margaret’s to-and-fro conversion (Scenes 10, 14). Nothing moves, nothing remains, there is no growth or novelty possible: I don’t mean this in the sense of aesthetic “originality”, but in the more literal, descriptive sense of things leftover or unrecuperated in a speech or a scene, that linger to live on and discover as-yet unwritten relations. In this play, even the closing prophecy has already happened. Marlowe, unsurprisingly, is more suggestive. He is so restlessly, mischievously alert to the way any moment on stage might be turned or troped that he often seems to anticipate Shakespeare in writing as much to the moment as to scenic consecution. But still it is always an extraordinarily assertive presentation of often-mercurially glimpsed possibility. Consider Gaveston in Edward II.6 As in Greene’s work, the emotions, the sense of what is at stake, the terms of the challenge, are given absolutely to the actor, the character, and thereby to the audience. We are told everything – confided is too secret a term – by the exultant Gaveston: “My father is deceased. Come, Gaveston, And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend.” Ah, words that make me surfeit with delight! What greater bliss can hap to Gaveston Than live and be the favorite of a king? Sweet prince, I come.

(1. 1. 1–6)

He invokes mythic precursors in the same utterly possessing fashion: Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape, With hair that gilds the water as it glides, Crownets of pearl about his naked arms, And in his sportful hands an olive tree To hide those parts which men delight to see, Shall bathe him in a spring, and there hard by One like Actaeon peeping through the grove 6

Bevington, et al., English Renaissance Drama, 351–420.

Entering Playworlds Shall by the angry goddess be transformed, And running in the likeness of an hart By yelping hounds pulled down and seem to die. Such things as these best please His majesty, My lord. – Here comes the King and the nobles From the parliament. I’ll stand aside.

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(1. 1. 60–72)

Diana and Actaeon are his. To the extent that his appropriation is subversive, ironical, dangerous, he knows it; he even seems to know the dark prophecy of his destruction, and, by transference, the king’s. Destruction is the price, almost the premise, of their passion. Likewise the audience is his. The rest of the scene is timed by Gaveston’s asides, as we watch him watch the king and nobles, and wait for him to spring the delightful surprise of his presence to his beloved king. As with Friar Bacon, there are nominal similarities to Romeo and Juliet – a love that is fierce yet prevented by vested interests; a passion that draws upon large myths of defiant self-truth; the immolating power of infatuation, and so on. But in decisive ways Shakespeare is different. He engineers highly sophisticated staggered entrances for his main characters, who are given no soliloquies, no easy intimacy with the auditory, and who thus appear without truly arriving: Romeo is reported before we meet him, stealing from view, glimpsed askance at dawn in the wood; then he enters, and speaks inept Petrarchan cliché; Juliet is reported in ghostly terms by her father, pre-emptively claimed by Paris, and then enters surrounded and drowned out by her garrulous Nurse and jealous mother. The true arrival of either waits upon their meeting. There is thus an uneven relationship between an actor’s and a character’s presence. Actors can be fully present on stage, yet their characters are in the shadow. This isn’t because they need be secretive or nervous or some such thing: it is because Shakespeare knows that presence in a playworld is mediated by all kinds of essentially factitious, not-real techniques; that self-declaring speech is merely one of numerous modes of expression; and that every moment is in fact a metastable concatenation of instruments and collaborations, textual and human, so there are untold “presential” gradations available to the playmaker who realises the potential accruing to every last one of them. In Marlowe, by contrast, actor and character are always fully coincident. Hence the importance of asides, which work as straightforward

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continuations of the soliloquies that introduce the characters: the entire role of Barabas, and indeed the whole Jew of Malta, is structured around the dependable candour and outrage of this intimacy. Obviously there is much more to Marlowe than this. He has unrivalled gusto; he fearlessly possesses the materials of his craft, and makes them move at his command. But if this is the strength of his best work, it is likewise its limitation: everything is subdued to charismatic intelligence. His great actor Alleyn is here Marlowe’s perfect emissary. Marlowe shapes the materials, subdues and releases them, like a sculptor with extraordinarily confident hands. But it makes little difference to talk about what the play or the scene or the actor or the trope is doing, as distinct from the author or the character. Marlowe’s reputation is for nonchalant carelessness, but in truth he is much more possessive of his instruments than Shakespeare. It is well known that Marlowe foreshadows many of the techniques that Shakespeare develops: the pliable verse line; ironic scenic syntax; outrageous juxtapositions; a pitiless feeling for the price of aesthetic delicacy. But these things are his tools, to serve his purposes. It would never have occurred to him to grant them their own mind or existential passion. Take Marlowe’s employment of repeated cues – that is, when the cuewords occur more than once in quick succession, inviting the cued actor to speak his line “early”. Marlowe sophisticates the simple slapstick uses of the technique current in plays like Mucedorus.7 For example, Barabas hugs his money bags with other-oblivious, ravished eroticism (“my bliss . . . Oh, girl, oh, gold, oh, beauty, on, my bliss) as Abigail first gives 7

Although it is interesting that the repeated words at the end of Zabina’s suicide speech in Tamburlaine Pt. I, “I come, I come, I come” (5. 1. 318) are clearly not working as a repeated cue. They cue the entrance of Zenocrate, who, 20 lines into her speech, explicitly sees the brained body of Zabina – “But see, another bloody spectacle!” (5. 1. 339) – meaning that she cannot have been cued to enter “early” and witness Zabina’s suicide. Less certain is the moment that the hero-villain Guise receives his “death’s wound” in The Massacre at Paris: the murderers close in on him, and then “All” say “Down with him, down with him!”, followed by the stage direction, “They stab him”, and Guise’s “O, I have my death’s wound! Give me leave to speak” (Scene 21, 70–3): all perfectly explicable in terms of a crowd scene, in which the repeating cue-phrase can be shouted more or less randomly by the present players, and Guise struggles to make himself heard. Shakespeare does something similar, but more dramaturgically sophisticated, with Gloucester’s death at the end of Richard III, using a repeated cue (“[my kingdom] for a horse”) to orchestrate a crowd scene that segues into a death scene (see Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 184–6). Shakespeare is the first to risk repeated cues at moments of true pathos.

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them to him (“There’s more, and more, and more”) and then vainly begs him to part to avoid suspicion (Jew, 2. 1. 46–56); or later on Marlowe doles out repeated cues explicitly designed to produce overlapping discourse: BERNARDINE.

Barabas, thou hast– Ay, that thou hast– B A R A B A S . True, I have money; what though I have? B E R N A R D I N E . Thou art a– J A C O M O . Ay, thou art a– B A R A B A S . What needs all this? I know I am a Jew. B E R N A R D I N E . Thy daughter– J A C O M O . Ay, thy daughter– B A R A B A S . O, speak not of her! Then I die with grief. B E R N A R D I N E . Remember that– J A C O M O . Ay, remember that– JACOMO.

(4. 1. 31–41)

Marlowe creates here a variation on his favourite technique of the aside, giving the actor just that little more choice as to whether it is an aside or not. The second statement in Barabas’s line is each time liberated from the cueing sequence. It can thus be spoken as he wishes, viciously, plaintively, sarcastically, to his interlocutors or to his regular confidantes, the audience. Shakespeare learns much from this: it will be no surprise that the part of Shylock is built around just such repeating locutions and ambiguous invitations.8 But there is a crucial difference, showing Shakespeare moving far beyond the territory so audaciously tracked by Marlowe: Shakespeare allows his materials a quasi-independent appetite, or morphs his mind into their potential for such. The instruments are not simply one more trick for his ascendant actor/characters to enjoy. They can move, as it were, on their own; they can travel between different agents; they can switch and surprise, just like a character. So, Shylock spends much of the play in full possession of repeated cues: the timing and direction of address is his to determine. In the trial scene, with awful suddenness, this switches: the actor is marooned inside his part, without comfort or volition, as he is subjected to the repeating cues of his character’s enemies. Part-based actorly techniques, not articulated sentiments, mediate Shylock’s terrible estrangement. Likewise in Richard III, Shakespeare’s 8

See Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, ch. 11.

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great exercise in the Marlovian manner: even here the rhythms and connotations of Gloucester’s famous opening soliloquy partly escape his control, just as does the actor’s possession of prosodic gaps, and therefore his command of the stage, once power begins to slip from his character.9 Marlowe’s characters fail – but they never lose control of the stage, just as their actors never lose possession of its materials.

9 I have developed these readings at length elsewhere: Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (Gloucester’s soliloquy); Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (actorly prosody); Palfrey, Romeo and Juliet (Chippenham: Connell Guide, 2012).

8

Middleton

Writing to plots imports limitations. But the plot scenario can be far more than a technical aid, or a text to pitch to potential producers. It claims knowledge, and a kind of originating possession, of the fundamental reasons for a play’s being. Whether it dilates upon a specific “seeding” scene, or chops up a long and unwieldy story into performable highlights, the scenario seeks to abstract the logic, the basic rules of motion and motive, which give to the playworld its purposive drive. Consequently, to believe in plot scenarios, or even to allow their previsioning facility – to accept that they encapsulate the larger play – may imply serious assumptions about a playworld’s rules and orientation, indeed its theology and teleology. For example, that events will not outrun their source; that improvisation must play inside defined permissions; that the world is written rather than unfinished or unpredictable; that irruptiveness does not produce the new, either subjectively or historically, and still less in terms of metaphysical teleology; and that apparent suddenness or outrage proves the truth of what is already fore-ordained. Above all, it turns the full play into a repetition – a backward-casting execution – of the predicative model. The exemplary dramatist of such a vision is Thomas Middleton. Like most plays of the period, his are generic fusions (and often authorial fusions) but distinctively spiced, often mixing up satire, tragedy, grotesque comedy, religious allegory, and sensational melodrama. They play by different rules and ask for different attendance than Shakespeare’s. In many ways they simply defy customary taxonomies. Revenger’s Tragedy, for example, is basically a morality comedy, in which lines and lives go off like firecrackers; the revengers are formally punished, but only once the bright sky of vengeance has been thoroughly relished, and the smoky air 77

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returns us in quiet to our sanity. Women Beware Women culminates in a stupendous technical tour de force, in which sin, rampant throughout, finds its consummating rhyme in spectacular theatrics. Calvinism is probably the explanation here: original sin is the implacable assumption, large and immovable, and everything, however toned or modulated, is its symptom. Middleton contrives his very own mode of double predestination, as the different makers’ plots combine. So the most risqué joke or feckless soteriological scepticism is instantly framed by the truth that precedes and awaits.1 Middleton’s work (sole-authored and collaborative) is the acme of plotderived playmaking – and so of a sense of possibility that, however unruly or perverse, is explicable both in terms of scenic unfolding and historical– theological context. And, coincidentally or not, the abstracting, pleonastic pre-determinism of the plot scenario is the perfect medium for his theology. Each moment turns upon or towards the founding contract, which in due course finds spectacular scenic presentation.2 Possibility is in God’s keeping alright, but things in the world are cast off from all deserving, sordid repetitions of original susceptibility and perversion, indentured to fleshly love, indentured to death. To reach to such an apprehension of presence, we have to put aside models of possibility like Shakespeare’s, with its abundant feeling for imminence and alternatives.3 In Middleton, possibility is a redaction of necessity: personal divagations must return home; all shades of colour leech back to the white and black of the original chessboard; the plot has been written. To the extent that other motives are breeding, it is despite this known scenario, which remains immovable. 1 John Kerrigan: “In revenge tragedy, the point of maximum stylization is often the moment of repetition. It is also that phase of an action in which characters most behave like puppets . . . The ‘mechanism’ can be humanly contrived, but often . . . comedy springs from a sense that providence itself reduces persons to puppets.” Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 202. 2 For a Calvinist reading of Changeling and Revenger’s Tragedy, see John Stachniewski, “Calvinist Psychology in Middleton’s Tragedies”, R. V. Holdsworth, ed., Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1990), 226–47. 3 Douglas Bruster: “life means turning rather than going. His characters make rotations, for they are pieces that, instead of moving from one side of the game board to another, remain in place . . . To speak of their volition can be to use the wrong language”, because “his characters are products less of realism than of Calvinism”. “Middleton’s Imagination”, Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 532.

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Writing the plot scenario, and then writing the play to this plot, was Middleton’s foundational technique.4 This is obvious because he wrote for many different companies, men and boys by turns, in numerous different theatres; and because he often wrote collaboratively. There are usually two collaborators and two main plots (but sometimes more of both, as in Spanish Gypsy). He (or he and a co-writer like Dekker or Rowley) may have written the plot scenario and, on the basis of it, been employed to supply the play; he may have written plots for another playwright to finish, or taken the plots of others and furnished plays from them. But whatever the exact permutations, it was not possible for Middleton to develop the intimate relations with actors that Shakespeare did over many years, nor Shakespeare’s intense part-sensitive scripting. Only the plot scenario could have given the mobility and concision that Middleton required. Furthermore, each plot scenario determined whether or not there would be a play: if the company didn’t buy it, then there would not. It might be expected that in such a scheme every scene will have a roughly similar claim to attention, based on the simple fact that to warrant being a scene is to have a purpose; that this purpose is essential to the story; and that it is adducible in terms of motive, determining passion, shifting relations – rather like instalments in a periodically published fiction. But this is not quite true of Middleton. His scenes are not conatively equal. Some are serviceable, some are served: some have more consequence than others. For with Middleton, more than perhaps any other playwright, the plays seem to be born out of one specifically imagined scene, which is also the point to which all the action is heading: both origin and completion, trigger and climax. There is usually a catalysing mental picture in his plays, which the action moves towards revealing in its ghastly purity. In Lady’s Tragedy, it is Tyrant with the corpse; in 4 Middleton seems to have thought in schematic, symmetrical blocs, like a chessboard, or parallel columns. He often organises his meanings through graphically or spatially organised dialectics. This is indicated in the “Observations to be taken in reading this book” that he offers in his biblical hermeneutic The Two Gates of Salvation: “So that after you have read the words of the prophets at the upper end of the first leaf, marked . . . with a circled cross, you are, if you would truly follow the method of this book, next to read the words of the evangelists on the other side, marked likewise . . . And so still if you read any verse quoted with any other marks, as + Ŧ ¶ etc, behold the like mark on the other side just opposite to it; for the matter of the one is answerable to, and makes plain, the other”. Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 685.

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The Changeling (written with Rowley, but main-plotted by Middleton) it is Beatrice recognising her congress with the devil; in Women Beware Women it is the apocalyptic masque. Such scenes freeze the characters in their pre-made casts, arrest them as monument and example. So, everything in The Changeling waits for and turns upon the moment when Beatrice catches up, as it were, to De Flores, when their contract is sealed, dependency acknowledged, and they are charged fully into their destined form. The “scene” is staggered, so that De Flores sees it, then we do, then Beatrice, then Alsemero, then everyone. The duo are revealed as less flesh and blood humans than holograms of original degradation – as though all the time just waiting to be turned at the right angle, towards the jaundiced light, and recognised in all foulness as the crouched beasts that they are (De Flores like the cormorant of Milton’s Satan, or the tailed devils in Faustus; Beatrice an impostor-virgin like Spenser’s Duessa).5 The scene garners iconic animation; it delivers a picture, as though from well-known tales, mythic and immovable, horribly returnable. Such moments epitomise Middletonian possibility. The characters truly come into themselves, demonic inversions of St Paul’s “putting on the new man”: arrival is the end, just as the plot is at once kernel, extension, and consummation.6 Or consider Middleton’s language. For the most part his characters speak in a few recurring illocutions: furtive asides expressing their obsessions or plots; self-announcing soliloquy, far beyond shame, in which intention is less to do with acts to be performed than with the maintenance of a thoroughly possessed and articulated perversity; a reckless directness, sometimes oblivious of an addressee’s mind, sometimes indifferent to it, sometimes demanding it change, and always convinced that one’s own desires should be sovereign (hence the ubiquity of insult, rebuke, command, mockery); wheedling, insidious, or threatening seduction, where it is not so much rhetorical persuasiveness as the addressee’s mortal fear or carnal susceptibility which wins the day. In all these cases the speaker’s integrity – even in the form of commitment to dishonesty, rapacity, fraudulence – is the only measurement that matters. In other jurisdictions, soliloquy might 5 David L. Frost notes that one of the meanings of “changeling” was an “inferior substitute, someone who has undergone transformations”. “Notes on Women Beware Women and the Changeling”, Holdsworth, Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies, 222. 6 Ephesians IV, Geneva version.

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compensate for absent civic systems, for a lack of voice in law or government. But not in Middleton’s tragedies, in which politics rarely goes much further than a knee-jerk hatred of flattery (because intrinsic to the primal crime). Indeed speech itself is raddled with this recoil from flattery, producing an aural mirror-image of remorseless, disingratiating frankness. Jonathan Hope has noted Middleton’s “preference for simile (‘resembles much’) and explicit comparison (‘so are we’) over metaphor and implication”, adding that it is “tempting to link this preference for literalness and explicitness to the sense that Middleton conceives of the world as independent from language where Shakespeare allows metaphor (and therefore language) the potential to be constitutive of reality”.7 This is exactly right. Likewise, Middleton doesn’t use wordplay to spin out alternative possibilities: instead the puns remorselessly underline what is already fact, already predicted. Take this from A Yorkshire Tragedy: “Pox o’ th’ last throw, it made/Five hundred angels vanish from my sight./I’m damned, I’m damned. The angels have forsook me,/Nay, ’tis certainly true, for he that has no coin/Is damned in this world, he’s gone, he’s gone” (2. 25–9)

Husband speaks of social things, of money and credit and shame, of how low he is in the eyes of men. But at the same time the context is cosmic and spiritual: loss of money is explained by, or is the harbinger of, spiritual isolation: the angels evoke with horrid immediacy the exile of grace. Nothing proliferates like the magnetic premise. A Yorkshire Tragedy, written early in Middleton’s career – it was first played between 1606 and 1608, by the King’s Men, one of four short allegorical “plays in one” – crystallises his scenic methods. The play is generated by a crime pamphlet – and by one image in particular: [I]n short time so weakened his estate, that having not wherewithal to carry that port which before he did, he grew into a discontent, which so swaid in him, hee would sit sullenly, walke melancholy, bethinking continually, and with steddy looked naild to the groud, seeme astonisht, that when his wife would come to desire the cause of his sadnesse, and intreate to be a willing partner in his sorrow . . . Hee would eyther sitte still without giving her an aunswer, or rising uppe, depart from her with these wordes; A plague on thee, thu art the cause of my sadnesse.8 7 “Middletonian Stylistics”, Taylor and Henley, Oxford Handbook, 258. Hope notes further: “For all his consciousness of the materiality of textual culture, language was for him primarily speech: an event occurring in one space, and at a particular time, between people.”, 252. 8 A Yorkshire Tragedy, ed. A. C. Cawley and Barry Gaines (London: Palgrave, 1988), 98–9.

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It is an image and mood that Middleton memorably recreates: He sits and sullenly locks up his arms, Forgetting heaven, looks downward, which makes him Appear so dreadful that he frights my heart, Walks heavily, as if his soul were earth.

(2. 15–18)

To realise Middleton’s aims we simply need to realise the moving sculpture. We have already heard (from Sam the servant) of Husband’s brutality – he “beats his wife . . . has consumed all, pawned his lands . . . calls his wife whore and his children bastards . . .” (1. 42–58) – but now his hideous carelessness gathers a kind of plastic iconicity. The wife’s terror makes the prediction clear enough – “which makes him Appear so dreadful that he frights my heart” ( 2. 16–17). But Wife’s sketch does more than supplement the brutal hatefulness sketched by servant Sam. It moves it from gossiping, broadside-style naturalism into allegory. This allegory is partly a religious one. The Husband is “Forgetting heaven” – (and note the present imperfect tense – this is still going on) – his mind turned towards damnation. But the portrait achieves its statuesque force from particularity: here, a domestic particularity that really places the despair. When not sitting moodily, he is walking without purpose, shaking the floorboards and scowling like the hungry ogre in Jack and the Beanstalk. The violence of the walking repeats the violence of the locked arms, rendered strangely simultaneous by the present-tense facticity of the actions: he sits, he locks his arms, he looks downward, he walks heavily. The tragedy is that, even in imagination, he can effect nothing but repetition. His walk reverberates with the heaviness of earth, just as his gaze is magnetised downwards and his arms are locked, as though horizontal in burial. And indeed there are hints of horrible ghoul-like automatism, spectral or zombielike. So, he is sitting, and violently pressing his body inward; this intensified constriction gives morbid energy to the “downward” look, which is not simply “downcast”, as in depressed or defeated, but appetitive, yearning, even plunging. He is in despair, doubtless, but he is not finished in it; he is not catatonic, nor is he curled in a ball like a hedgehog. He wants more – he wants to punish. All of this makes his walking continuous with his downward look, as an affect of it, in the way of casting after some correspondent action: perhaps to repair or, more likely, to embed him still further in his despair.

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In this way, Husband is given something like Macbeth’s violent wistfulness, marooned in his situation, pegged to the boards like fate’s clown, and pushing imaginatively into releasing action that can only compound his sin and loss. This is so even as the content of his wishes is remorselessly cheap and trivial. The placial allegory ensures this, as he forgets heaven and looks downward, towards not only earth but, necessarily, hell: “as if his soul were earth” (2.18), his eternal jewel traded for dross. It is a substantial exchange, a transmogrification from spirit to clay. Hence, perhaps, the monumental quality of the picture Wife offers. It is all fixity; even in its movement it can get nowhere. The image resembles tragic portraits or sculptures, where the eyes express a heaviness of gait that will never move from the plinth or the brushwork that fixes them. Husband’s walking is no more than a mime of perambulation. It can get nowhere – he is still in his kitchen, circling his stool like some mock-bear. The sum effect is more than a conventional allegory of a man gone to the devil. Stillness moves, or movement is stilled. His body is ahead of itself, enacting things rehearsively, feeling nothing, overcoming the mental obstacles to their achievement in the future. The geography is metaphysical, just as his journey is. He is already there, in hell. With one glance, his unbodied body walks ahead of him, like a spirit released into dreadful commission. With another, he remains where he was, where he is, all the more emptied for having done, imaginatively, the acts which will end everything. So as he sits in this knot he is killing his family, ridding himself of all burdens, shutting the eyes of those whose look produces shame. This portrait is the mime that will come true – that will walk into sound and commission any moment: “O, yonder he comes . . .” (2. 22). The mimical here is precisely the possible, in all of its hideous enormity. The closing scene of Yorkshire Tragedy shows Middleton’s plotted scenic technique at its most effective. The scene recalls Faustus’s great final moments. But instead of confirmed damnation the story is a delicately mingled one of coincident redemption and perdition. In a sense Husband has already suffered the stakes of the great trade of soul. But now, his eternal punishment looming, he also achieves liberation. The strength of this scene comes from the fact that it is so predestined. It is not an afterthought to the main-game; there is nothing nominal or notional here, as there can seem to be in some of Shakespeare’s reconciliations,

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where the closing chords offer anything but closure. Husband’s condition forgets nothing. It is instead the result: everything that has happened is concentrated in these moments – recalled, replayed, recurring. This is relatively speaking a very sustained scene – 80 lines of a very short play. And it is unusually extended in another way: taking the action beyond the temporal world and into the space of judgement. Husband has been to all intent dead from the play’s beginning, communing with the demons that possess him. He is in this sense always beyond Faustus: whereas the dilemma for Marlowe’s anti-hero was whether or not to eschew temptation and embrace Christ in this life, the dilemma for Husband is whether there is any hope for grace or forgiveness when he is already damned. In the most literal sense imaginable, the play asks how ineradicable is original sin, or how truly double is predestination. As we have seen, the first glimpse of Husband has him pushing to sinful earth; his first speech has the angels flying from him. He is deep-brewed in sin, and as such the possibilities of the play are predicted: this is a man in hell. But what do we get in this final scene? “But thou hast devised/A fine way now to kill me, thou hast given mine eyes/Seven wounds apiece” (8. 16–18). The number seven will irresistibly evoke Revelation, and the seven heads of the beast. Husband turns into this, as though into nightmarish destiny. Each eye has seven wounds: he is seeing judgement, seeing all of the dead rise up from the seas, seeing everything that has ever been done, all the lives that have ended, and all of them his responsibility, every last one of them a pre-shadow or reprise of him. But the fact of seeing is also the possibility of a different judgement; to notice the rebuke is also to recognise the mixed gift of returning humanity. The thing that is killing him is guilt, felt here in the form of impotent pity and sorrow. He sees the wife he has wounded, and the grief he has caused, and he weeps. Each tear marks a wound; each tear is blood. But also, in its separateness, each tear is counted and valorised and individuated in origin: a kind of jewel. The “eyes” thus indicate profound recognition. And recognition, in the fullest bodily sense, is both punishment and repentance. Middleton here presents a concentrated narrative of suffering and contrition. “Now glides the devil from me”, he says. The devil “departs at every joint, heaves up my nails” (8. 19). His joints are being stretched and his nails pulled off. That his nails are dead things might suggest that

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all that is dead in him is leaving, and so imply some sort of celebration; but if so it hardly mitigates the violence and the pain. It is reminiscent of the tortures inflicted on Cutwolfe in Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller. But it is also possible to interpret it as an exultant exorcism. He observes his tears as they “glide” from his eyes and down his body. He is dying, he is enduring the act of a killing: but part of this is the murder of the devil inside him. It marks the possibility of truly substantive alteration. The “possibles” at play are intensively poised and cuspal. Simultaneously at work are spiritual renewal; exorcism; a returning human feeling that is also self-dissolving or even self-murdering; and a transferred or anticipated judicial punishment. The Husband is left at once free of the devil, and suffering a body maimed by the act of this freeing: his limbs twisted, eyes and fingers bleeding, “gliding” into dissolution. He wants now to punish the devil that has possessed him, and so presumes to speak of him as a third party: “O, catch him new torments that were ne’er invented,/ Bind him one thousand more, you blessed angels,/In that pit bottomless, let him not rise/To make men act unnatural tragedies” (8. 20–3). The meta-dramatic reference speaks Husband’s wish to be separated from the very acts that we have witnessed. More than that, he wants to undo the ontological identity that has been apparent from the off. But this cannot happen merely by speaking of the devil as a “him” – after all, he has spoken of himself in the same way often enough before. Husband was always “cleft” in this way, and the torments he is willing upon the devil are, like the heaved-up nails, intended for himself. The angels that once fled from him have returned; they are now his collaborators. Equally, they are busy taking their revenge, organising original tortures. It is clear that this speech returns to his first ones; the scene in this sense satisfies these earlier possibilities. But it also introduces new ones. The play would be much more trite if there really were forgetfulness, or if Husband’s substance as man and demon were so easily reduced to “natural” singleness. The scene allows nothing so easily mollifying. The “bleeding boys” are “laid forth upon the threshold” (8. 34) – their blood is also general tears, their bodies’ martyrs, and the “threshold”, clearly enough, the margin between the worlds here being traversed (earth, hell, heaven). Husband turns the laid-out bodies into metaphysical symbols:

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Middleton Here’s weight enough to make a heartstring crack. O were it lawful that your pretty souls Might look from heaven into your father’s eyes Then should you see the penitent glasses melt And both your murders shoot upon my cheeks.

(8. 35–9).

The writing resembles Shakespeare’s in its metaleptic concentration. The father’s eyes are now “penitent glasses”, at once memorial jewels, cups that might spill, mirrors that might show him his crime, and blood imaginatively transubstantiated into tears. The tears are latent with the action that made them, an action that can repeat as endlessly as guilt, present and horridly alive every time they are remembered (the suggestion of Macbeth is once more striking). It is interesting how much of the enduring message is concentrated in such baroque images: as in the principals’ first scene, the action resolves into iconic moments, visions that glisten, almost literally shine, with a jewel- or tear-like brightness beyond the surrounding gloom. There are many such moments in this play’s visionary final scene. No one could be guiltier than Husband, more a proof of inveterate sinfulness: and yet he is found turning in a gyre between punishment and redemption. The logic remains essentially allegorical: “My dear soul,” Husband says to Wife, “whom I have too much wronged” (8. 29), as he locates a differently embodied locus for the soul that had earlier been lost to “earth”. And their final exchange, uniquely, has the cued actor (Husband) rhyming with the cuer (Wife), symbolising ultimate union (8. 55–6). Possibility, in the sense of prophesied or predicted destination, is captured less in action or diagesis than in such symbolising vignettes, perhaps most memorably of all in Husband’s final image of his dead boys: “But you are playing in the angels’ laps/And will not look on me” (8. 40–1). Dead and living bodies are savagely, miraculously shared, in the most audacious return of family and love. Can we really want these slaughtered children to look upon their slaughterer? Can we really want sin forgiven? How can we not? His necessary exile from heaven is suddenly the locus of the deepest pathos. Middleton’s most iconic scenes are often marked, as here, by a figural baroqueness otherwise rare in his work. Language steps out of his usually instrumental purposes, and becomes in itself scene-making. The words

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possess a resistant, visual spatiality, as though inscribed by a picturemaker. There is an effect of delayed intensity, as cherished images push themselves into speech, or seem to crystallise out of the tumid fog of error. But still such language is serving the story: consummating it. The metaphors are prophesied. The picture has always been there; we know it even if we haven’t seen it – but in due course see it we most certainly shall.

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Jacobean comi-tragedy

There are other implications of a theatrical economy whose enabling unit of exchange is the plot scenario. One of them is a persistent requirement for familiar novelty, or for sensational variation: a one-upmanship that takes a routine premise just that little bit further. Another way of putting this is that it encourages a kind of indecorous decorum, a formal leakiness that yet remains within expected bounds. Granted, there is hardly a play in the popular canon of the time that really conforms to the precepts appealed to in Sidney’s Apology: the neo-classical curse was yet to descend. But even so, this world had its genres, its prescribed worlds, however mongrel: a chivalric picaresque with slapstick interludes; a revenge tragedy with some comic burlesque, and so on. The generic coupling might be superficially irreverent, but still the plays served populist expectation. This raises basic questions about the reach and remit of theatrical possibility. For one of the effects of genre-thinking is to pre-empt credulity. The genre prescribes one thing, forbids another. An audience knows what world they are in, and allows any surprises, even seemingly illicit titillation, because they are never really anywhere but home. The chimera is in a box, the lid down; or it isn’t in truth some fabulous mélange of serpent, goat, and lion, but our familiar pet. Possibility, in the fullest sense, is sacrificed to sensation: felt in the moment, a pleasing sub-catharsis, emptying us of boredom. What does it mean to be in such a pre-emptively defined playworld – in a comedy, say, or a revenge comi-tragedy? What can it mean to act in ways that are at once scandalous and permitted? Or – a more specific application of such questions – how truly can we take words that the genre seems to mock, or to fritter into air? Consider the city comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Here Middleton frequently appears to ridicule the 88

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trapdoor morality of his tragedies, in which the floor suddenly goes from beneath the feet of his sinners, revealing the true hellish ground and end of their transgressions. In Chaste Maid, however, Sir Walter, who has been spending his seed for the gain of others, threatens to unsettle the balance with a sequence of coruscating speeches that could have come straight from one of Middleton’s tragedies: None knew the dear account my soul stood charged with So well as thou, yet, like hell’s flattering angel, Wouldst never tell me on’t, let’st me go on, And join with death in sleep; that if I had not waked Now by chance, even by a stranger’s pity, I had everlastingly slept out all hope Of grace and mercy.

(5. 1. 26–32)

So accuses the injured Sir Walter, to which Allwit immovably responds: “Now he is worse and worse.” Sir Walter speaks of spiritual renovation; Allwit’s indifferent aside would assure us that such revelations carry no truck in this particular game. In a different playworld, Sir Walter’s words would certainly mean something. But here it is not so clear. Does Allwit’s response instantly frame the repentance as impossible? As an affect merely of Sir Walter’s defeat, a vengeful ricochet of his sudden inadequacy? When Wife weeps at the thought that he will die and the money dry up, his response could be seriously choric: “There’s nothing but thy appetite in that sorrow – /Thou weep’st for lust” (5. 1. 58–9). Likewise his articulation of remorse, desolation, spiritual despair: “Who sees me now, her too and those so near me,/May rightly say I am o’ergrown with sin” (71–2). He speaks of foundational things with Middleton’s trademark literalness: he is overgrown with sin; sin itself is the principle of his growth, his active DNA, a second skin for the second death that awaits: Still my adulterous guilt hovers aloft, And with her black wings beats down all prayers Ere they be halfway up. What’s he knows now How long I have to live? O, what comes then?

(5. 1. 75–8)

He is staring into a mist, knowing that he has done as all Middleton’s men do, and repeated the Faustian exchange: “Her pleasing pleasures now hath poisoned me,/Which I exchanged my soul for” (80–1). Still Allwit

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speaks at distant odds from all that surrounds him, framing Sir Walter as a puzzling refugee from some other world entirely: “Speak to him, Nick”, he says to his boy, with the previously unheard name suddenly suggesting the Devil: “I dare not, I am afraid”, says Nick, as though the Devil himself needs a long spoon to sup with such weird and confronting recognitions. It is a nice joke, and in a Kierkegaardian sense truly demonic: in this world fear of the good keeps the game afloat. There is no place for truer truths here. Remembrance becomes the temptation, the thing not to communicate with if ever it should find voice. Even secular comedy, it seems, has its superstitions, its absolute incompossibles. “O, what comes then?” Nothing comes then, not in this world. What then of Jacobean tragedy? How possible are its worlds? In many of these works, a sexualised theopathology possesses all motion, all plot, scene, and speech.1 Everything is infected, as the infection releases a demented syphilitic glee, eating away the brain and dissolving all action into what T. S. Eliot memorably called the “skull beneath the skin” (in his poem, “Whispers of Immortality”). And in the meantime everything is articulated: every speech and action figures and propels these passions. Even in their dying, these men and women observe themselves; they have words for every occasion. But Jacobean tragedy is not, for all the plots’ sudden lurches and precipitous punishments, a drama of surprise. Instead these tragedies are works of remorseless prevision; the bone has been pointed from the opening moments. The sustained modern popularity of the best of these works – released by Eliot’s advocacy – has much to do with this atmosphere of deathly unremission. As John Kerrigan observes, “Jacobean drama has an accessibility which disguises its strangeness”, noting especially the pre-modern literalism with which it traffics in keywords such as “blood”.2 There is no retreat here into metaphor. Likewise there is no escape from the basic contract: power is corrupt; virtue is exiled; desire is a trap; idealism gets 1 Canonical plays here include Webster’s White Devil and Duchess of Malfi; Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy, Women Beware Women, Lady’s Tragedy (formerly known as The Second Maiden’s Tragedy), and The Changeling (written with Rowley); Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy; and Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois. On the margins at the Elizabethan end are Henry Chettle’s Hoffman and the tragicomic Malcontent of Marston; at the Caroline end is John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. 2 Revenge Tragedy, 48–9.

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warped into sinful complicity; the women are either femme fatales or angelic paragons; the men either pathological tyrants, passive dupes, agents of cynical nihilism, or morbid sexual perverts. But just this knowledge of entrapment produces brilliant parries of nihilistic critique, disgusted indignation, fatalistic metaphysics. The plays speak with pungent directness of sick polities and of repressed or resurgent desire. But it is only superficially a case of would-be good citizens fighting corrupt authority – recall the haplessness of decency in these plays, those colourless nobodies, as though rendered by cardboard cut-outs, the kind that will sag and collapse with the first sign of rain. For the strangeness of these plays is that age and office share in the high-wired rage, the unleashed desire, an imaginative looting of all modesty and propriety. The dissident impatience that so appeals in these works animates hero and villain alike – think of the wild anarchism of madmen like Webster’s Cardinal and Ferdinand, or Middleton’s Tyrant. They are avatars of life’s appetite, stripped of hypocrisy, exemplars of negative integrity. Living is irruptive, irregular, baffled, painful, and everywhere, in everything, violent, and all played out in language of sculpted, epigrammatic – almost epitaphic – self-display. (It is no surprise that Webster was Harold Pinter’s favourite playwright.) Actions in this world are genetically coded, as helplessly fractal as a fingerprint. Take the ghostly family life of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi: it exists only in the break between scenes. The effect is to make such normative existence something barely creditable; in being defined by suppression and denial, it too seems like a perversion, a scandal to decency. It really is the weirdest ethical inversion. The Duchess’s choices – surprising her household steward with a proposal; effecting the marriage contract through the device of a concealed overhearing servant; having children in secret; kicking her husband out of her bed every morning before dawn; spending years with the reputation of a whore and harlot, spawning “bastards” for the hell of it; concocting a financial scandal, declaring her husband’s guilt, and sending him into shameful exile – seem like brazen provocations of her brothers’ pathologies, or compulsive ricochets from them. The things that are actually witnessed stain everything that is not, like blood through sheets. Reality, however illicit or repressed, dead or dying, will come to the surface.

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Whether this reality is truly possible is another question – or whether it was once possible, in a lost thought-world of original sin and hellfire, but has now become an entertainment, a curiosity, a bit of a laugh. Middleton’s Lady’s Tragedy focuses such questions as well as any. Formerly known as The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, it is a classic example of a play clearly answerable to an anterior plot. The play is premised upon two stories that seem already to exist, fully formed, before the play begins. This is strictly true in that the story of the Wife is adapted from Cervantes (part of the 1605 first edition of Don Quixote, also published separately in 1608). Equally to the point, Lady’s Tragedy is marked by the almost perfect symmetry of its two plots: the Tyrant’s love for the resistant Lady of the deposed former king; the husband’s need to pander his wife to his best friend in order to try her virtue. They are perfectly balanced both in size and subject, offering two complementary instructional tableaux. There is almost nothing of the nervous metabolic interchange of Shakespeare’s double plots and surrogacies. The characters in the two plots never meet each other – the closest it gets is the former king entering moments after his brother, the cuckold, is killed. The fatal irony of this suggests that Middleton was setting himself a strict technical task, directed by a clear ethical programme. It seems likely that the same actors played the main parts in each plot: the two brothers tested, embarrassed, bewildered by what it means to be a man; the deranged Tyrant and the deranged Husband, morbid fools for love; Wife and Lady, the one who has already fallen, the other who cannot. The spectators see actors trying on roles, just as an individual might rehearse existential possibilities. The inter-subjective spaces are voids; the characters are atomised examples, moved by the plot’s necessity. In some very basic sense, life in such a playworld cannot change. The rules are set. It is this fact that seems to produce perversities. The first soliloquy of Sophonirus is a typical example. This comes early in the play, immediately after Tyrant’s first long speech when he declares his love for Lady. Sophonirus responds with an aside wishing that the king might have chosen his wife for a mistress instead. He goes on to tell us that he already allows his wife one male lover, who services her for him, gets him all his children, and so on. It is both prudent economics and a way of warding off death:

Entering Playworlds Beside I draw my life out by the bargain Some twelve years longer than the times appointed, When my young prodigal gallant kicks up’s heels At one-and-thirty, and lies dead and rotten Some five-and-forty years before I’m coffined.

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(1. 1. 44–8)

It is a curious speech because it comes from and goes nowhere. We never meet the wife or the gallant; Sophonirus’s identity as a willing cuckold is likewise invoked and then forgotten. The purpose seems to be to sketch a brisk receding perspective of the city, in which we can presume no one is free from the reigning enslavement to erotic surrogacy and voyeurism. Substitution is the order of the day. People act for you, and get killed for you – or you for them. Sophonirus is in due course stabbed in the act of being messenger to Lady for Tyrant: killed by, killed as, substitution. Never can characterisation have been more emptied of anything but formal, sub-antinomian repetition. What could Emmanuel Levinas have said, with his ethical probity and life-redeeming attention to the Other, confronted by this kind of substitution? Nothing. It is a vocation, an inheritance, a function. We can only witness it from a distance – just as, in a basic sense, Sophonirus can too. There is no real substance to it, because it bears no forward memory, it endures no motion. And, without motion, its claims upon any future are null. It has no ethical content whatsoever: or none beyond being a symptom of a predetermined condition. In this playworld, all the men stumble into abjection as though into a birthright, or a male-only club. Take Votarius, the man entrusted with testing his friend’s wife’s honour. He falls into giddy, guilty lust, which he repeatedly repents of and repeatedly commits. He fails in faithfulness to his friend, again in his attempt at stoic self-denial, commits without fortitude to the love affair with Wife, and then helplessly, almost accidentally, tells his friend that Wife was caught “yielding” to a “common bawdy-house ferret”, a man Votarius just happens to loathe. He fatally betrays and condemns Wife and himself, and for what? For some hapless enmity and jealousy; because of his abject membership of men. Govianus is no better. He has the misfortune to have as a beloved the Lady desired by Tyrant. But even so, his response is pathetically ignoble. He is a failed king, an ex-king: in this the epitome of Middletonian man.

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He has lost the throne for who knows what reason – something not worth the telling; perhaps because he lost his mind (“He’s lost the kingdom, but his mind’s restored” 1. 2. 6); perhaps because he allowed himself to be swollen with flattery, which “makes us die like beasts fat for destruction” (1. 1. 62). It is not something this sublimely de-political play cares about (its only “politics” is the easiest kind of anti-flattery, anti-tax, anti-tyrant populism). The main effect of this perfunctory pre-history is to prepare us for Govianus’ recurring feebleness. He doesn’t respond well to pressure; he is weak and easily alarmed. In due course he shoots at his beloved’s father with sudden and unprepared precipitousness (“I missed thee purposely”, he explains); he cold-bloodedly kills the king’s messenger; he then suffers a prolonged bout of unmanly nerves and paralysis which turns his Lady wild with impatience: “Have you leisure to stand idle?”, “Then is your care so cold?”, “Come on, sir, /Fall to your business, lay your hands about you!”, “Sir, you do nothing. There’s no valour in you./ You’re the worst friend to a lady in affliction/That ever love made his companion!”, “Dull and forgetful man”, “Cowardly flesh,/Thou show’st thy faintness still: I felt thee shake/E’en when the storm came near”, “Art thou yet ignorant?” (3. 1. 63–141). He then runs at her with his sword, as she has been demanding, but unfortunately falls “by the way in a swoon” (148). She thinks he has dropped down dead (“O thou poor-spirited man!/ He’s gone before me”, 150), and peremptorily dispatches herself, going to death convinced of her beloved’s cowardice. Govianus wakes too late, like an aged and inverted Romeo: “Why, it was more/Than I was able to perform myself/With all the courage that I could take to me. It tired me. I was fain to fall and rest” (171–4). It tired me: this really is as abject as heroic recognition gets. Survival itself is an accusation of bad faith, or false promise, or the most lamentable stay of execution. How possible is this? The whole scene is grimly comic, black and leering, on a cusp between a joke and horror, more like Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal than the Moralities it is indebted to. Much of this is to do with an abiding inter-theatricality: we have seen this before, we can recognise the models, we know what is supposed to happen. Shakespeare hovers over the lovers’ climactic scenes: the humiliation of Mark Antony’s failed suicide attempt; the mistake of Romeo in the tomb, dying too early, leaving Juliet to take the knife. But above all Macbeth: the knocking at the door

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throughout this central episode reprises the ominous knocking of the Porter scene; Lady echoes both of Macbeth’s Ladies – the “evil” Lady Macbeth when she rebukes Macbeth for cowardice, the “saintly” Lady Macduff when she rebukes the absent Macduff for the same. This will suggest how Lady, no less than Tyrant or Govianus, works at the very edge of easily swallowed ethics. She hates Tyrant, she will not live to be raped. Her chastity is her virtue, and her identity as a self-governing entity begins and ends with it. She admirably outfaces both the king and her father in defence of it. And yet how to measure the scorn she heaps on her beloved, when he hesitates to wield his sword and end her, when the holy trembling of his arm is met by her cold emasculating resolution? How not to feel the pitilessness of this, as she effectively annihilates her lover and their love, forgetting all else in protecting her own innocence? No less than with Isabella in Measure for Measure, the subject is the difficulty of invidious choices, when to turn either way is to struggle with extremes. It is as though humanity can only be defined in extremities, so that even a body’s instinctive doubts, the terror of imminent commission, become instantiations of absolute judgement, of contemptible mortality and failure. Lady is the true partner to Tyrant. She is keyed in to the tyranny of the life-sentence. Often in Middleton it is as though the only frame for the human is the absolute – or its fake-abrogation in hollow laughter. In the face of this absolute, the most human thing, because weak and modest and placatory, because afraid of the grim imperative, must always suffer humiliation: either usurpation, or the patronising sympathy of others, or the dismissal to equivocal survival. It is absolutism – not political, but ethical and eschatological – that must define the stakes and complete the circle. These tragedies embody unbridled commitment to the terror logic: the logic that knows that everything kills, especially the things most intimate to our being, such as love. Middleton’s tragedy-world is like Spenser’s palace of Busirane, where the courtly lover tortures his beloved, skewering her heart and placing it on a dish, and leading her in a daily pageant in which the tyrant Cupid flaunts the pain and despair of love: only for Middleton’s captors and captives there is no release, or even really the hope of it. There is instead (no less than in Spenser) more or less culpable repetitions – sometimes in a busily oblivious cellar, as in Chaste Maid;

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sometimes in full flaunting view of the stakes, where absoluteness produces its correlative scene: Women Beware’s explosive closing masque; Lady’s Tragedy’s actual catacombs. So to what does Govianus survive? He survives to be visited by Lady’s ghost, with which he at once falls fiercely in love (“if this be horror, let it never die! . . . I’d not change/This fever for felicity of man/Or all the pleasures of ten thousand ages” 4. 4. 48–53). His besotted desire for a dead thing is another in the play’s almost parodic symmetries: he loves Lady’s ghost, while Tyrant loves Lady’s corpse. Govianus’s penultimate move, having painted the corpse’s face with poison, killing Tyrant through his necrophiliac kiss, is to take over as Pygmalion, hoisting the stiff into the throne and crowning her “our queen”. From go to woe the plot is built upon such hideous mirrors and repetitions. There is no swerving, no surprise: even in perversity and extremity a life can be played scrupulously to type, on cue, exactly as the plot prescribes. It can be surprising to recall that Govianus is a king, who at the play’s end resumes sovereignty – his first act to place the corpse on his throne and to “crown her our queen”. It promises next to nothing, and least of all an heir. “We cannot reverence chastity too much” (5. 2. 210), he says, appearing to conflate Lady’s admirable living honour, with his own vow of future bachelorhood, with a still-helpless sense that the lady sitting cold in the chair remains the cynosure of all eyes and object of all desires, so much so that he can hardly bear to pull himself away: “Lead on.” goes the attenuated next line, lapsing into a silence that speaks volumes for Govianus’s struggle to move anywhere beyond the range of this magnetic deathliness. Original sin shrivels political possibility. Middleton has little to say, really, of kings or politics. There is a very deep temporal cynicism in his work, to do with the uselessness of banality and moderation, its crushing irrelevance in the main-game. In Middleton’s playworlds (his pageants are different), there is no hope held out for such consoling fictions as consultative government, or a monarch who places faith in good counsel, or even a good citizenry shoring themselves up through prudence, or guild solidarity, or vocational pride, against the ruin and corruption all around. These are all gigantic, mollifying redundancies, of no more import than a good wife. He only wants the absolute.

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Middleton’s is a metaphysics and a politics in which everything is already defined for all time, whatever the frenzied kinetics of the shadowplay before us: all that is left is repetition, or else a trivial pissing in the margins, drenching the hedges that can never be levelled. Jonson’s Sejanus might be considered a cynical political document, with its refusal of pity or catharsis to either the complicit nobility or raptor-like mob, and its sober expectation that the cycle of corruption will merely repeat. But Jonson’s pessimism is at least rooted in political analysis (of ancient Rome and contemporary England) and derives its pathos from the classical ideals, or perhaps private religious conviction, that are everywhere traduced. Compare this to Tyrant and Govianus: one falls, the other rises, the other falls, the first one rises, and the only context for any of it is a more or less desperate sexual adoration. Middleton’s pared-down princes and courtiers belong to no polity. They are appetite, premised on defeated survival.

10

Everyman tyrant

In the tragic world of Middleton, Tyrant speaks truest of all. He is commensurate with a realm in which every emotion, even the most ravishingly beautiful or self-sacrificing, devolves upon corpses. As I said: the bone has been pointed. But the question remains: can such a world truly point at us? Burke says in his treatise on the sublime, we shall be much mistaken if we attribute any considerable part of our satisfaction in a tragedy to a consideration that tragedy is a deceit, and its representation no realities. The nearer it approaches the reality, and the further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect its power.1

And so to put the question slightly differently: is this world possible? Tyrant enters the play with its first speech. Speaking from the newness of his throne, he has the world at his command. It is his to define, even to make. And yet he possesses a strange belatedness that seems to segue backwards into antecedent dramatic usurpers. It is as though he has already experienced Henry IV’s wan apprehension of disappointment, that dulling recognition that no act, however religious, can compensate for the violation that brought him what he thought he wanted; or the paralysed melancholy of Macbeth, knowing how possession of a crown, or any desire, is nothing, that the icy horizon continues to mock us with its distance. For the only reason that Middleton writes Tyrant – the only purpose he seems to have, really – is to say, over and over again, that he cannot get what he wants, that he burns with hopeless longing, that he loves with an ardency that no lover shall ever outdo. 1 Sect. XV. “Of the Effects of Tragedy”, Edmond Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful: And Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1998), 93.

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It is his only motive. The actor looking at the part would have seen that every speech is pushing towards the same target, and demanding pretty much the same emotional modality: strenuous, unsleeping longing. And to drive the hopelessness home, Middleton gives to the parallel plot all hope of seduction. Wife, we know, is assailable; Lady, we know, is not. Her first line says it all: “I am not to be altered”, and, like Tyrant, every single speech of hers speaks the original resolution. Tyrant cannot even raise himself to enacting what his name declares. For he is no tyrant! He is marked by suffering, impotence, paralysis; the fierceness of his love takes all efficient fierceness from him. As a ruler, he is all prevarication, equivocation, justiciable mercy. His enemy will not suffer exile; if his counsellors fail him they shall not be punished: all lest it turns his beloved still more stonily away from him. Tyrant embodies one of Middleton’s recurring and, it would seem, compulsive strains: the man condemned to love. It is tempting to leave it like this, and to say that love per se is suffering and damnation. Love is the damnation, a consequence of some anterior stain or fall or predilection. For love is the true human thing. It is folly, sin, forgetfulness of God; it is a sacrilegious and absurd belief that knowledge resides in the body of another; it is all the fateful emotions enumerated by Spenser in Busirane’s castle, among them grief, fury, dissemblance, cruelty, fear, spite, change, dread – and, most emptying of all, the vice of hope. Love for Middleton is a desperate consolation for our aloneness, unprepared as we are to accept that to live is to be thrown, naked and alone, hanging hopefully upon the undeserved gift of grace. But Tyrant suffers a more particular Middletonian curse. He is condemned to love a woman who not only can never return his love – the lovelorn hero is hardly Middleton’s to own – but whose ontological predicate is violent impossibility, impossibility in the most absolute sense imaginable. Think of Middleton’s two most celebrated male characters – Vindice in Revenger’s Tragedy and Bosola in The Changeling. Vindice is supercharged into revenge by love for a dead woman; he loves her not only as a memory, but as a present body, a “shell of death” whose “ragged imperfections” and “unsightly rings” still speak of the beauty who was years ago murdered. Bosola loves a woman who, more than merely loathing him, fears him as one might a terrifying life-murdering prophecy – fears him precisely, that is, as death: “I loathed him/As much as youth and beauty

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hates a sepulchre” (2. 2. 67–8). This is Middleton’s possibility – sheer deathmagnetised necessity. Tyrant is the abstract and extension of just this. So, he is the only character in the play to be given a personal metaphysical geography. The basic technique is found in his asides: “O, he kills me/At mine own weapon. ’Tis I that live in exile,/Should she forsake the land” (1. 1. 196–8). The sentiment harps upon the familiar loneliness of power, but the wider effect is to turn geography and geo-politics, the daily materiality of power, into macrocosms of his suffering: “I stand as in a shade, when a great cloud/ Muffles the sun whose beams shine afar off/On towers and mountains, but I keep the valleys,/The place that is last served” (1. 1. 212–16). He says this the moment Lady leaves the stage: but it is his eternal condition. It describes the very things that he, as a king, might supposedly visit upon others: far from the sun, exiled from home and glory, the last to be served. Shuffling alone in the valleys, with the high peaks distant and unreachable on every side, it presages a kind of existential shrinking. He creates and collects the scene, which arrows in upon him like the zoom lens of a camera. Lady’s absence prompts the effective annihilation of all other humanity. There is no one else; he is the last man. In this it looks ahead to what happens when Lady actually dies. “The place that is last served” is not only oblivious of all other men; it is oblivious to God. He is forgotten. This miniaturised scene becomes a prolepsis of damnation. Unusually for the imperative- and indicative-laden Middleton, the modality is fleetingly subjunctive: if she goes, then I am lost . . . But this trace of the subjunctive is also deceptive. For there is nothing in this play more certain, more prescribed, than that Lady will go and Tyrant will pass terminally into the land of the lost. Unlike Shakespeare or Spenser, Middleton’s subjunctions never have the tantalising prestige of contingent or virtual possibility: if they are given, they already are. And so it is here. The true difference is not so much modal as spatial-metaphysical. Tyrant’s plaintive metaphors, turning the macro micro, prepare for his entrance into fully charactered subjectivity – a subjectivity defined not by temporal but by metaphysical place. He enters, that is, the eternalised terrain of the predestined. Tyrant truly comes into his own when he knows Lady is dead. She has always been dead to him, and now she is perfect. Consequently, the

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set-piece to which all events have been leading is Tyrant’s entrance to Lady’s tomb: The monument woos me; I must run and kiss it. Now trust me if the tears do not e’en stand Upon the marble. What slow springs have I? ’Twas weeping to itself before I came.

(4. 3. 9–12)

He forces his terrified soldiers to smash the tomb and lift out the corpse within. He then takes the body back to his palace, treats it with honey and restoratives, and cherishes it as his sex-doll. Is it enough to understand this as insane necrophilia? That it is this – insane and necrophiliac – is hardly worth disputing. Likewise, taking his cue from Herod (“I once read of a Herod whose affection/Pursued a virgin’s love . . .” 4. 3. 117–18) damns him as a generic tyrant. But if pejorative adjectives could really capture the scene’s dynamics – words like psychopathic, sacrilegious, terrorising, degenerate – the scene would either be comic or lamentable, to be rankly dismissed either way. But is it?2 We can admit that all of these adjectives are appropriate, and still think there is a residue of something else: a passage beyond bourgeois ethics, and merely grotesque aesthetics, into spiritual territory more faithful to the playworld’s terrible logic. The scene gets its charge from the contrast between Tyrant, reverently beholding his Lady, and his soldiers, trembling with religious fear at their transgression. They express this fear through simple superstitious dread (“I love not to disquiet ghosts/Of any people living” 4. 3. 35–6) or nervous jokes (“Tis the first stone that ever I took off/From any lady” 59–60, “I’ve took up many a woman in my days,/But never with less pleasure, I protest!” 80–1). The fear they suffer is normative, and in some ways choric: but it is also inadequate to the stakes, being time-serving and afraid of ultimacy: “Very fear will go nigh to turn me of some religion or other, and so make me

2 Paul Budra thinks it is: “squirm-inducing transgression and terror . . . designed to fill the audience with shivers of (perhaps delighted revulsion) . . . Revulsion mixes with humour; the scene is so gross the audience has no choice but to laugh. Such ghoulish humour is a staple of popular culture and may be found in the Grand Guignol theatres of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the horror comic books of 1940s and 1950s, in television series such as The Twilight Zone, and in any number of horror movies”: “The Emotions of Tragedy”, Taylor and Henley, Oxford Handbook, 495.

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forfeit my lieutenantship” (48–9). The soldiers, that is, are essentially clowns, or as Tyrant has it, “slaves”, working in counterpoint to, working for, the hero. Their job is to frame Tyrant, and to point to his terrifying absoluteness. As much as we look with their eyes at his strangeness, they melt away from him, into chattering unanimity and anonymity, as Tyrant crystallises into his fate. His beloved appears, and Tyrant is deaf to all other voices. He is a monomaniac, certainly, but the effect is a gaze that shines hard and exclusively upon the only source of value: “O, blest object!/I never shall be weary to behold thee./I could eternally stand thus and see thee” (62–3). He ascends to a rare lyricism, exalting his Lady as the rising moon, moving into an intimate love-coddle (“Art thou cold?/. . . ’Tis I, sweet lady, prithee speak/ ’Tis thy love calls on thee, the king thy servant./No, not a word?” 86–90). He ministers to her, feeling his own impotence, calling upon her with as fierce and desperate a tenderness as Lear does the dead Cordelia. He is the marooned love-swain, as though cold in his valley, lost to service, lost to pastoral, recalling only a kind of fractured carpe diem with which to mockingly rebuke his love: By th’mass, thou’rt cold indeed; beshrew thee for’t! Unkind to thine own blood? Hard-hearted lady, What injury hast thou offered to the youth And pleasure of thy days!

(94–7)

He is acting out all of the roles that living life has forbade him, such as husband, father, priest: “O I could chide thee with mine eye brim-full,/And weep out my forgiveness when I ha’ done” (99–100). There is real wistfulness in Tyrant’s ministrations. Certainly it imports the abrogation of normative morality. But he is doing the thing he was born to do: at once discover and sacrifice his own humanity by revering and possessing the dead. He has crossed the threshold into a spectacular culmination, a kind of stripped exposure, of what John Kerrigan calls the “drama of extroverted concealment”.3 In this playworld, the more hidden and unspeakable, the more irresistibly displayed.

3

Revenge Tragedy, 203.

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Middleton’s primal scene is at once singular and endlessly repeated: framed frames, one inside the next, back and forth from dawn to doom. This scene is the original dispensation, when God simultaneously conceived and predicted us; it is the original garden, when sin entered, along with all the things that populate his playworlds, like folly, pride, avarice, appetite, deception, weakness, ignorance, sex, shame, childbirth, and death. Then there are our own repetitions of these original primal scenes: the action of sex; the moment of conception, which Middleton seems to see as a terrible gift, a responsibility which our fecklessness and impoverishment, material and spiritual, cannot possibly do justice; the scene of birth, when pain and sorrow briefly give way to joy, but lingeringly to care, disappointment, and abject repetition. The sum effect is that love is always mortgaged to death, error, and pain. The bones and veins of body are micro-capsules of the infernal, mere slaves of the place from which humans come and to which they are headed. Within or without sex, the body kindles as a disgusting repetition of the primal scene. This is why Middleton gives the beloved corpse scene duration; why the space for intimacy widens, as the soldiers retreat and Tyrant and his virgin possess the stage. It is a rare and hallowed space, where we face our fear and confront our failure. All of Middleton’s tragic heroes desire to enter this kind of territory, by crossing the threshold of possibility into actions that society condemns as sacrilegious. Tyrant cannot bear “abstinence” from his lovely corpse; he is like a brand-new groom. All marriages (as Livia in Women Beware Women advises) are headed for the marital coffin, with spouse and spouse lying side by side in cold detachment. Tyrant merely compacts all stages in one, both the hungry rapacity of love’s heat and its long chilling unto death. Middleton’s plots are always headed for this revelation. As Alsemero has it in The Changeling, “The bed itself’s a charnel, the sheets shrouds/For murdered carcasses” 5. 3. 83–4). The trope is executed tragi-comically in Chaste Maid, when the prevented lovers, Moll and Touchwood Junior, stage their deaths only to rise with happy abruptness from their coffins, hailed by Touchwood Senior with “Here be your wedding sheets you brought along with you; you may both go to bed when you please to” (5. 4. 45–7). All of these murderously wistful heroes – Bosola, Vindice, the incestuous uncle Hippolito in Women Beware Women – long to sack the temple by overmuch cherishing, or to

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fornicate inside it. In one sense they are simply male exemplars, extrapolations of irrational appetite, or of the violent bias that is love, preferring one person above all others and imagining that the remainder of the world vanishes next to the beloved’s unsurpassable perfection. But Middleton also makes them exemplars of the primal scene that all of gender and all of love, as he imagines it, can only repeat, until at the last it is sublated into it. And so he is always waiting to enter, or re-enter, this unspeakable space where man is most himself. Tyrant’s destination is one ultimate version of just this. He makes love to a corpse. This is less perversion than extension, a coming true of love’s predicative coupling, in and as death, at inception. St Augustine is the true mentor here: to be flesh is to be dying; to love flesh is to hang on to death; you live a dying life. Vindice expresses this with ferocious relish in his opening soliloquy, as the parade of vices troop across the stage, crawling out of medieval allegories, or Cupid’s pageant in Spenser, like sundry thawed deaths. Middleton doesn’t take the tradition and release it with improvising, unpredictable procreativity, as Shakespeare does. He displaces it so as to repeat it, and make it come true again. Middleton offers a different take from Shakespeare on possibility, on what a tragedy might irradiate beyond the phenomenal. He genuinely seeks to extend scenic place into the world of perdition and grace. In this sense, the scenic consummations of Middleton may bring to mind what the contemporary Catholic phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion says of Kant: “before any phenomenal breakthrough toward visibility, the horizon waited in advance”. The anterior concept will not only catch up with us, it will determine our horizons. But are Middleton’s phenomena always pre-empted by his concepts? If so, then the possible worlds apprehended at his playworlds will be necessarily limited. Marion apposes this understanding of experience with what he calls “saturated phenomena”. By this he denotes a sublime occurrence, “phenomena with n + 1 horizons”, in which the phenomenal experience exceeds any governing concept. These “saturated phenomena” are “neither foreseeable (on the basis of the past), nor exhaustively comprehensible (on the basis of the present), nor reproducible (on the basis of the future)”. They are instead “absolute, unique, occurring”, and assume the “character and the dignity of an

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event” (38–9).4 Marion’s key terms are astonishment, bedazzlement, revelation: an access of affect embarrasses conceptual understanding or intellectual preparation, and we are left to absorb something truly new. Such phenomena cannot be programmed in the way of Middleton’s habitual scenic teleology. And indeed Middleton’s more overtly revelatory gestures do not elicit the requisite astonishment: Lady’s resurrection as a white-robed angelic ghost¸ for instance, is always likely to be weighed down precisely by allegorical “intentionality”. But as for Tyrant with the corpse – I’m less certain. The pre-articulated idea comes true; and it may be in a way that invites derision or recoil. But there is also, potentially, a phenomenal excess in this scene whose intensity stuns rather than teaches the imagination. We witness a literal recklessness – seeing the stakes of sin and persisting, almost joyfully. An irradiating permission floods the scene. In some ways this turns to horrid farce, Tyrant tarting up the corpse with make-up, a clownish and diseased Pygmalion, mocked by the disguised Govianus, who duly paints poison on the corpse’s lips and watches as Tyrant kisses his death. The comedy is emphasised if the corpse is played by a puppet, flopping from his grip or sagging limply to the stagefloor. But Middleton is also deadly serious. This is clear from the fact that Tyrant continues to speak with remorseless faithfulness to the founding contract – that life kills, that we labour all our days for a life that cannot come. Accordingly, this fatal kiss is also Tyrant’s attempt at a birth scene. He is the imaginary mother, “labour”-ing to bring his baby through the “door of life”. He would repeat one primal scene by having sex with a corpse; he would repeat another by giving birth to life from death. It is all monstrous and grotesque, a belated simulation of loss. But then what isn’t? In this world, everything is belatedness and simulacra, inescapable losses turning on a loop. Such is possibility. Tyrant exemplifies Middleton’s method of presenting the big issues of life and death: the passage between the two, the concourse of one with the other. He tells it and he shows it; the effect is of letting us in on all secrets, however dark, such that secrecy becomes a kind of existential solecism: no 4 Jean-Luc Marion, “The Saturated Phenomenon”, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), esp. 32–42.

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one’s sin is peculiar to them; no one’s sin can stay hidden. The combination of spectacular scenography and exhaustive articulation means that nothing whatsoever is left to guess at. The action arrives where it was always heading; visible theatrical technology is capable of the stakes; we can see or hear everything that matters. Whether we are faced by puzzles of soteriology or private perversion, the access to knowledge is shared and empirical. The worlds of Shakespeare are not, I think, much like this. We need a different model entirely.

Part II

Modelling Playworlds

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The monadic playworld

It is time for a thought-experiment. As a means of modelling the possible worlds of Shakespeare, I want us to enter the dizzying monadic world of Gottfried Leibniz – a world in which every single part, every interval and unit, is full of elastic life. Let’s not worry for the moment if we are unfamiliar with the thought of Leibniz, the German polymath who was born 30 years after Shakespeare died. Instead, let’s imagine that his strange and wonderful world of monads is the strange and wonderful world of Shakespeare. Let’s imagine that Leibniz’s Monadology is the secret gloss that explains Shakespeare’s formactive creation. Imagine that here we find the principles, physical and metaphysical, which govern the playworlds’ dynamic motion. Forget about the histories we think we know or think we do not, and for the first time witness the invisible webbing of the Shakespeare-world. We begin with simple predicates. The first one is God, who has apperceived all possibles, present or not, consistent with this world or not. The second, predicated on God’s supreme rationality, is that all things have a sufficient reason. In turn, if there must be a reason why each particular thing exists in this way and not otherwise, then there can be no two things exactly the same. Nor can one thing stay the same from one moment to the next. Consequently, substance is action. Nature never makes leaps; every apparent interval is in fact full; there is no void, no empty space, no absolute rest, no soul without thought, and no part of time or place or matter that is completely uniform.1 Instead, the creation is fractal – ascending or descending repetitions, endless iterations, but every one 1 G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 54–7.

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distinct. The creation has nothing arbitrary, nothing truly excessive. Apparent excess speaks compulsion. So it is for Leibniz: and so it is with Shakespeare. It is the simplest, most marvellous challenge to any work that has claims to be possible: Imagine there were a machine which by its structure produced thought, feeling, and perception; we can imagine it as being enlarged while maintaining the same relative proportions, to the point where we could go inside it, as we would go into a mill. But if that were so, when we went in we would find nothing but pieces which push one against another, and never anything to account for a perception. Therefore, we must look for it in the simple substance, and not in the composite, or in a machine. And that is all we can find within a simple substance, namely perceptions and their changes; and that is all that the internal actions of simple substances can consist in.2

What Leibniz says of this machine, we might say of playworlds. Often, no doubt, a playworld is indeed an artificial automata, or collection of such. But the Shakespeare-world, miraculously enough, seems closer to what Leibniz calls a “natural automaton”: [A] machine constructed by man’s art is not a machine in each of its parts. For example, the tooth of a brass wheel has parts or fragments which . . . no longer indicate the machine for whose use the wheel was intended. But natural machines, that is, living bodies, are still machines in their least parts, to infinity. That is the difference between nature and art, that is, between divine art and our art.3

The important point isn’t the divinity of this creativity, but the multiple locations of its intelligence. This is what it means to say, as has been said so often: that Shakespeare’s art is a “second nature”: In nature, everything is full. There are simple substances everywhere, genuinely separated one from another by their own actions, which continually change their relationships.4

There are so many such simple substances that they often escape our notice. But they are here, striving for what we can call life: There is in possible things a certain demand for existence – a straining to exist or (if I may so put it) a claim to exist . . . all possible things strive with equal right for 2 G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, no. 17, Philosophical Texts, trans. and ed. R. S. Woodhouse and Richard Francks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 270. 3 Monadology, no. 64; G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1989), 221. 4 G. W. Leibniz, Principles of Nature and Grace, para. 3, Philosophical Texts, 259.

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existence in proportion to their quantity of essence or reality, or to the degree of perfection which they contain.5

Some of these things are more visible than others, more named or more recognised: but not therefore more real – or, what amounts to the same thing, more possible. And what I have been calling formactions, Leibniz calls “monads”.6 The monad is not an atom, as Lucretius popularised it; nor the semina of Fra Castor; nor the minima of Giordano Bruno: all these are corporeal.7 Monads exist in or at bodies – a king, a cat, a sponge, the striations of a leaf or the planed wood of a chair-leg – but they are not these bodies (the theory presupposes a kind of Higgs boson “Godparticle” to allow the move from monad to mass). The monad requires a body, but it is never identical to the bodies that it ghosts, or that ghost it: [W]e must not imagine . . . that each soul has a mass or portion of matter of its own, always proper to it or allotted by it, and that it consequently possesses other lower living beings, forever destined to serve it. For all bodies are in a perpetual flux, like rivers, and parts enter into them and depart from them continually.8

The monad precedes and survives all carriers: the corporeal thing is a host or medium of the monad’s essential soul-appetite. What is more, “a single 5 G. W. Leibniz, “On the Ultimate Origination of Things” (1697), The Shorter Leibniz Texts, trans. Lloyd Strickland (London: Continuum, 2006), 32. 6 Leibniz probably derives his term, “monad”, not from Giordano Bruno, as is sometimes assumed, but Anne Finch Conway (1631–1679), protégé of Henry More, and author of the Kabbalistic/Quaker/animist work, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. As Leibniz acknowledges in 1697: “My philosophical views approach somewhat closely those of the late Countess Conway, and hold a middle position between Plato and Democritus, because I hold that all things take place mechanically, as Democritus and Descartes contend against the views of Henry More and his followers, and hold too, nevertheless, that everything takes place according to a living principle and according to final causes – all things are full of life and consciousness, contrary to the views of the atomists.” Quoted in Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. Alison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xxx. 7 “If the world were full of hard particles which could be neither bent nor divided, as atoms are represented, then motion would indeed be impossible. But in fact hardness is not fundamental; on the contrary fluidity is the fundamental condition, and the division into bodies is carried out according to need.”: New Essays on Human Understanding, 151. This is not to deny that Leibniz is influenced by atomist and animist thinking (going all the way back to the preSocratic Anaxagoras and his preformational spermata). See Jurgen Lawrenz, Leibniz: The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature: A Study of Leibniz’s Double-Aspect Ontology and the Labyrinth of the Continuum (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 4–16; Justin E. H. Smith, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 175. 8 Monadology, no. 71.

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individual will move from species to species, for it is never entirely similar to itself for more than a moment”.9 Immediately, we might recognise an affinity with playworlds, in which the specific actor may seem incidental, borrowing a flame from elsewhere, a source of life precariously hard to pin down. The monad may move, slowly, imperceptibly from one host to another; it may move like lightning between various bodies; it may animate numerous bodies at once, or parts of bodies. And it is the same in reverse. A single body may be moved by one monad at one time, another at another; it may harbour more than one monad, indeed infinite such, arranged in relations of service and dominance and competitiveness: Each monad, together with its own body, makes up a living substance. Thus not only is there life everywhere, together with limbs or organs, but there are infinite levels of life among monads, some of which are dominant over others to a greater or lesser extent.10

The smallest node harbours lives. These lives may be of a species, or share a name. Equally they may not. Who knows what possibles are lurking? There is a world of creatures – of living things and animals, entelechies and souls – in the smallest part of matter. Every portion of matter can be thought of as a garden full of plants, or as a pond full of fish. But every branch of the plant, every part of the animal, and every drop of its vital fluids, is another such garden, or another such pond.11

Their bodies may be gross and obvious. Equally, they may move in what appears no more than a blank, an interval of nothing: [A]ny change from small to large, or vice versa, passes through something which is, in respect of degrees as well as of parts, in between; and . . . no motion ever springs immediately from a state of rest, or passes into one except through a lesser motion . . . All of which supports the judgment that noticeable perceptions arise by degrees from ones which are too minute to be noticed. To think otherwise is to be ignorant of the immeasurable fineness of things, which always and everywhere involves an actual infinity.12 And although the earth and the air in between the plants in the garden, and the water in between the fish in the pond, are not themselves plants or fish, they do nevertheless contain others, though usually they are so tiny as to be imperceptible to us.13 9 10 12

New Essays on Human Understanding, 308. Principles of Nature and Grace, para. 4. New Essays on Human Understanding, 57.

11 13

Monadology, nos 66–67. Monadology, no. 68.

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In the main, these things pass unnoticed, so much so as not to exist in the acknowledged daily theatre: and that theatre, like all things, is forever altering, as things retreat from or move into light: Every organised substance has in itself an infinity of others, and even has fellow creatures in its centre; no substance will perish, and those that are in the darkness of their centres will in their turn appear in the larger theatre.14

There is no stillness in this world. Its fullness teems; it is appetite and transformation: and yet it is all written: [T]here is no uncultivated ground in the universe; nothing barren, nothing dead. There is no chaos, and all confusion is merely apparent.15

Bodies and monads work by different laws, but they do so necessarily harmoniously – rather as we might distinguish between the body of the actor (organised by glands, organs, etc.), which facilitates the animating of his craft (organised by formactions): The soul follows its own laws and the body also follows its own; and they agree in virtue of the harmony pre-established between all substances, since they are all representations of a single universe.16

Body necessarily traces the motions of the monad, the cooperative synergy like a troupe of actors: each with their discrete parts, unknown to any other player, intensely self-sufficient, and yet all working in what Leibniz calls “concomitance”: [T]he springs in bodies are ready to act of themselves, as they should, at precisely the moment the soul has a suitable volition or thought; the soul, in turn, has this volition or thought only in conformity with the preceding states of the body. Thus the union of the soul with the machinery of the body and with the parts entering into it, and the action of the one on the other, consist only in this concomitance that marks the admirable wisdom of the creator . . . [T]his concomitance I maintain is like several different bands of musicians or choirs separately playing their parts, and placed in such a way that they do not see and do not even hear each other, though they nevertheless can agree perfectly, each following his own notes, so that someone hearing all of them would find a marvelous harmony there, one more surprising than if there were a connection among them . . . [W]ith the help of his imagination, he would no longer think of the choir where he was, but of the other, and he would mistake his own choir for an echo of the others.17 14 16 17

15 Letter to Andre Morel (1698), Shorter Leibniz Texts, 39. Monadology, no. 69. Monadology, no. 78. Leibniz, Letter to Arnauld, 30 April 1687, Philosophical Essays, 84.

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Necessarily, there is an original cause, apperceiving all possibility (God), organising all of these parts. And this in turn implies the necessity of preformation. All possibles express this preformation; therefore they all express (perceive, contain, connect to) all of creation from their own distinct point of view. We get a world of both dazzling interconnectedness and unimpeachable separation.18 This redeems the truth, the living reality, of both metaphor and metonym – and in a sense collapses the supposed distinction between the two tropes: inventive metaphor is true, because each individual thing owns its discrete existential substantiality, and yet the creation teems with unnoticed resemblances (“I strongly favour inquiry into analogies: more and more of them are going to be yielded by plants, insects and the comparative anatomy of animals, especially as the microscope continues to be used. . .”19); metonym is true, because everything connects (“any change from small to large, or vice versa, passes through something which is, in respect of degrees as well as of parts, in between”20). The world vibrates with – as – radically non-customary tropes. Each monad is at once uniquely individual and a crystal repetition of the entire universe, past and future, distant and close at hand. Every monad is a sentient, soul-endued centre, to a greater or lesser degree possessing brain-like qualities of “understanding”: [I]t is not uniform but is diversified by folds . . . this screen or membrane, being under tension, has a kind of elasticity or active force . . . it acts (or reacts) in ways which are adapted both to past folds and to new ones coming from impressions of the species. The action would consist in certain vibrations or oscillations, like those we see when a cord under tension is plucked and gives off something of a musical sound.21

In a sense, all things are what Leibniz calls “spermatic animals”: never detached from their source; always incipient with their own possibilities. Everything that shall be, already is: in other words, nothing passes

18 The “monad has no windows through which something can enter or leave”: “Les Monades n’ont point de fenêtres, par lesquelles quelque chose y puisse entrer ou sortir.” Monadology, no. 7. 19 New Essays on Human Understanding, 473. 20 New Essays on Human Understanding, 56. 21 New Essays on Human Understanding, 144–5.

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into nothing; indeed there is no such thing as nothing. This is Leibniz’s law of continuity: Equality as a particular case of inequality, rest as a special case of motion, parallelism as a case of convergence, etc., assuming not that the difference of magnitudes which become equal is already zero but that it is in the act of vanishing; and similarly in the case of motion, not that it is already zero in an absolute sense but that it is on the point of becoming zero.22

There are no gaps in nature; apparent rest is in fact an abated state of motion; nothing ever passes away: [P]lants and animals, do not come from putrefaction or from chaos . . . but from preformed seeds, and therefore from the transformation of pre-existing living beings. There are little animals in the seeds of big ones, and through the process of conception they take on a new casing which becomes their own . . . And just as animals in general do not entirely originate with their conception of generation, so they do not entirely come to an end in what we call their death . . . throwing off their cloak or tattered coating, they merely return to a more subtle stage on which nevertheless they can be just as perceptible and orderly as they were on the larger one . . . For in nature, everything goes on to infinity. Thus not only souls, but even animals, are ingenerable and imperishable; they are only unfolded and refolded, recovered and stripped bare, transformed. Souls never leave behind their whole body, and never pass from one body to another which is entirely new to them. There is therefore no metempsychosis, but there is metamorphosis. Animals change, merely taking on and leaving off parts.23

And what this means – it may seem miraculously, but it is in fact the simplest logic of a monadic dispensation – is that nothing can ever finally pass into oblivion:

22 Leibniz continues: “Rest, equality, and the circle terminate the motions, the inequalities, and the regular polygons which arrive at them by a continuous change and vanish in them. And although these terminations are excluded, that is, are not included in any rigorous sense in the variables which they limit, they nevertheless have the same properties as if they were included in the series, in accordance with the language of infinites and infinitesimals, which takes the circle, for example, as a regular polygon with an infinite number of sides. Otherwise the law of continuity would be violated, namely, that since we can move from polygons to a circle by a continuous change and without making a leap, it is also necessary not to make a leap in passing from the properties of polygons to those of a circle”: Leibniz, “Justification of the Infinitesimal Calculus by that of Ordinary Algebra”, Philosophical Papers and Letters, trans. and ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1956), 546 c:d. 23 Principles of Nature and Grace, para 6.

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And what we call generations are developments and growths, as what we call deaths are enfoldings and diminutions.24

What Leibniz says of the monad, Shakespeare knows of his formactions: death is impossible. This is inevitable in a world without void or vacuum, in which every interval is in fact teeming with action. Likewise there are no such abstractions as “time” or “space”, any more than these things are containers that precede and envelop the things or events “in” them: Space is no more a substance than time is . . . it is a relationship: an order, not only among existents, but also among possibles as though they existed.25

Time is contingent on events, just as space is constituted by objects: “Space is the place of things.”26 If there were no things, there would be no space: therefore the world is full. The same applies to time: there is no time without events. If there is such a thing as future time, then it is already event-full. The present is full with all events, past and future – and so is every object and occurrence that constitutes each such present. Welcome to the Shakespeare-world. ∞ One of Leibniz’s favourite analogues for his monads is a point in geometry, at which an infinity of lines meet: “Just as in a centre or point, in itself perfectly simple, are found an infinity of angles formed by the lines which meet there.”27 We might think that Leibniz is comparing the monad simply to the point: a point resembles one of Democritus’s atoms, because tiny, beyond empirical observation. But Leibniz’s analogy is more dynamic and dimensional than this, the point more a polymorphic crystal than an indivisible atom. This point is implicated in a multitude of lines or vectors, straight and curved, which extend at once into and away from it. The monad is thus more profoundly a concatenation of angles, coming from all directions and all times. The criss-crossing, looping vectors produce potentially infinite planes, glimmering in glimpsed parcels of space and time. 24

25 Monadology, no. 73. New Essays on Human Understanding, 149. Fourth paper to Clarke, H. G. Alexander, ed., The Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956). 27 Principles of Nature and Grace, para 2. 26

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The point is at once supra-temporal and punctiliously located: the angles collect many more than three dimensions, more indeed than the four made up by the dimension of time. For this point is virtual as well as actual, as abstract as any geometrical model, but also physical, because it is dependent on bodies if it is to live and even to be imagined (we can hardly conceive of an invisible point). We might compare Leibniz’s understanding of differential ratios: specifically the point of convergence of two angular, criss-crossing lines, as they move along a shared horizontal. The lines produce triangles, the angles of which remain the same even as the triangles get smaller and smaller. Eventually the triangle disappears into a point. Yet Leibniz shows that this point too must retain the angles and dimensions of the triangle: so we can imagine the tiniest node, impossible to measure, yet still retaining its essential coordinates. Leibniz imaginatively enters the point, and finds life still moving. The infinitesimal retains dimensions, each “moment” (for Leibniz a unit of time and space) its own conation.28 Likewise, each Shakespearean formaction is just such a crystallographic point, with all that meets in it and spools from it. In this world, a thing like the plot scenario or abstract is but one competing formaction, a skeletal one, in truth, because so distant from the quicksilver delicacy of singular life. The epitome of this kind of world will instead be smaller, closer formactions, waiting upon our entrance and animation – a cue-space, a line-hinge, a metalepsis. Just as some formactions are as-though human characters, and others impersonal cues or rhymes or vizards, only some monads are blessed with self-awareness and memory – what Leibniz calls “apperception”. Leibniz here explicitly modifies Locke’s understanding of individuation, rooted as it is in conscious reflection upon past experience, and upon memory as the 28 Leibniz competed with Newton for the honour of first discovering (or inventing) the calculus – a battle for cultural priority which goes a long way to explaining the widespread ignorance of Leibniz in the Anglophone world. He made high claims of this calculus: what he called his “universal characteristic”. It was a “compass which will pilot us through the ocean of experience, an inventory of things, a table of thoughts, a microscope to scrutinize the closest objects, a telescope to individuate those most distant, a general calculus, a guiltless kind of magic, a kind of writing that everybody will read in his own language”: Paolo Rossi, “The Twisted Roots of Leibniz’s Characteristic”, The Leibniz Renaissance (Florence: Olschke Editore, 1985), 289. Leibniz’s calculus – the study of change in “incomparably small” or infinitesimally tiny differentials – is essentially a mathematical monadology.

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indispensable engine and constituent of identity. Only a tiny proportion of monadic activity is self-conscious (200 years before Freud, we find in Leibniz a fully developed model of a determining unconscious). Humans are distinguished by their reason. But Leibniz knows that most of our perceptions are in fact insensible.29 Most of what we experience is unrecognised by us; if we do think we perceive it, we invariably do so inaccurately; likewise if we think we understand it. It isn’t only Locke that is indicted here. The great mistake of the whole Cartesian tradition, according to Leibniz, was “that they took no account of perceptions which are not apperceived”:30 [The] individual . . . is characterized by the vestiges or expressions which the perceptions preserve from the individual’s former states, thereby connecting these with the present state.31

As a model of aesthetics, Leibniz speaks for the importance of unnoticed perceptions. He knows that understanding does not work through the precise tabulation of perceived quanta, as though the experience of a play amounts to a series of semantic equations or spatially arrested moments. We are always catching up to what we have already perceived, or what already is animate in us. This combination of lurking presence, unconscious meanings, dimly perceived relations, faint echoes, nested resemblances – all of this speaks for a creation which is constituted feelingly, by un- or semi-recognised associations or kinships. Leibniz’s monadic apprehension offers a powerful model of how Shakespeare’s playworlds work: both the multitudinous, often unperceived nodes of life, and our intuited experience of these works, in which we can feel the presence of things whose precise source we may not recognise: These minute perceptions . . . are more effective in their results than has been recognized. They constitute that je ne sais quoi, those flavours, those images of sensible qualities, vivid in the aggregate but confused as to the parts; those impressions which are made on us by the bodies around us and which involve the infinite; that connection that each being has with all the rest of the universe.32

29 31

30 New Essays on Human Understanding, 51–7. Monadology, no. 14. 32 Monadology, no. 14. “Preface”, New Essays on Human Understanding, 55.

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He moves from this to one of his most celebrated inferences: It can even be said that by virtue of these minute perceptions the present is big with the future and burdened with the past, that all things harmonize, . . . and that eyes as piercing as God’s could read in the lowliest substance the universe’s whole sequence of events.33

This is a crucial point: a single, lowly substance is dense with the entire “sequence of events”. Narrative consecution is not played out only in temporal or spatial extension: it is at the instant. This is very different from the idea of a plot, divided into scenes, which each moment incrementally serves, like a brick of a building. The point and the moment implicates, is constituted by, all possible progression. This is what it means to say, as Leibniz does, that substance is change. There really is no external telos or plotmaker. Instead, the isomorphism of God and monad is more akin to a holographic principle of reality. The world we witness with our senses and interpret with our minds is a projection of some other plane: supradimensional as we may imagine God; two-dimensional if we imagine something like a disc or surface of recorded information; multi-dimensional if we imagine the numerous texts, skills, and contexts of theatre. Crucially, this plane at once pre-exists, survives, and is coterminous to the witnessed phenomena: just like formactions. ∞ The monad is not anthropomorphic. It does not allow ontological priority to humans (let alone a race or culture). All things express all things, pregnant with past and future history. And this is not even restricted to “living” organisms – for all things alter. A door handle is a monad, and contains infinite others. Sponges, bacteria, the severed trunk of an elephant: monads all. As Daniel Tiffany puts it, “monadic perception must be characteristic of all entities, including objects and creatures without minds – not to mention the materials of language and other sign systems, with the implication being that words are perceptive, in addition to being perceptible”.34 For the playworld is a monad (or formaction) composed of many more monads (or formactions), every one of them a mobile mirror of 33

“Preface”, New Essays on Human Understanding, 55.

34

Infidel Poetics, 114.

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actual possibility. In such a vision, a playworld will not be reducible to a derivative account of a prior dispensation. It utterly does away with conventional hierarchies of reference, in which the primary job of language is to denote objects or record actions. Instead it gets much closer to a proprioceptive conception of language, in which narrative and metaphor are understood as almost-instinctual spatial cognitions, ways of adjusting to and orientating oneself successfully in a particular space – the refinement being that the metaphor or narrative is the space, which has no reality outside these cognitions. Indeed the monad, considered as language, is also the expressive subject, which is its perceptions. And, equally, it grants life to things often dismissed as mere tools or as inanimate. Monadic thinking can thus help recalibrate the very ontology of theatrical language – its substance as action and, conversely, its action as substance, distinguished by dynamic, evental expression rather than derivative instrumentality. Language is no longer the translation of something already thought; no longer even a vehicle or carriage for cognition and emotion; it is the active percipient: [A] monad, in itself and at a moment, can be distinguished from another only by its internal qualities and actions, which can be nothing but its perceptions (that is, the representation of the composite, or what is external, in the simple) and its appetitions (that is, its tendencies to go from one perception to another) which are the principles of change. For the simplicity of substance does not prevent a multiplicity of modifications, which must be found together in this same simple substance, and which must consist in the variety of its relations to external things.35

Monadic perceptions are not things that are had or observed, more or less detached products of our survey of the object-world around us. These perceptions or expressions (the words are interchangeable) are our substance. They are what we are. In positing individuals that are symbiotically indicated and constituted by their perceptions, Leibniz can help us think more precisely about what it means to be a theatrical subject. So, something is only a substance if it acts; in which case it is also potentially a subject. If the apperceiving, selfconscious speaker is a dominant monad, then the language s/he uses is itself animate with monads. So each metaphor, and then each shoot of possibility 35

Principles of Nature and Grace, para 2.

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in the metaphor, can garner monadic potentiality: be percipient, substantial, appetitive. In this world-view, “complete” individuals may at the same time function as subordinate constituents of greater individuals: to be alive, to truthfully observe life, is to concede levels of individuality. But any such node of life need not be a mini-person: it might be a fraction or counterpart of an identified subject; it might simply be an event, a glimpsed possible world, not fully claimed by any singular self-consciousness; it might be a sub-performative trigger, known only to the actor. We get at once worlds within worlds – such that each monad expresses everything – and a radical proliferation of potential subjectivity. And so with Shakespeare. Wherever there is a monad – or a formaction – there is playlife. ∞ An individual, then, is as much an event or a process as a discrete unit. An individual subject might constitute one such mobile event, but so too will innumerable other events nested within the subject. There is far greater potential here than some rough notion of intended and unintended, conscious and unconscious meanings. Ontology is perception; perception is expression; expression is being. Every word, or cue-space, or costume, agitant with on-going history, might be a subject-altering or subjectmaking event, or a fold of one. Each such instrument can tremble with life. We can compare this profoundly subjectivised object-world to the priorities of Newton’s Principia. Newton is interested in the way one body produces a reaction in or reacts to another: Impressed force is the action exerted on a body to change its state either of resting or of moving uniformly straight forward. This force consists solely in the action and does not remain in a body after the action has ceased . . . [T]here are various sources of impressed force, such as percussion, pressure, or centripetal force.36

For Newton, bodies stay at rest or in motion unless affected by some external force. “A change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and takes place along the straight line in which that force is 36 Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. and ed. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Miller Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 405. Italics in original.

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impressed.”37 In turn, every action produces an equal opposite reaction. Newton’s emphasis is on observable or mappable behaviour: and because observable and mappable, therefore predictable. It is God’s clockwork. All such action happens, in turn, inside absolute space and absolute time, two infinite containers. Understood theatrically, this posits an empty space, called the stage, open to house action. Action will speak the motives of a figure on stage; it should be explicable, and again observably so. The identified motive will produce predictable results. For example, one character tells the audience, in soliloquy, of his intentions towards another character; this other character enters, and the predicted consequences ensue. Action is like billiards, as one then another body is struck into position, temporary or terminal. The acme of this kind of action, abstracting it as the very template of necessity, is the plot or the plot scenario. The more the action is distilled to its essential vectors, the truer it is: a map, giving direction, points to pass through, and a destination. Compare the monadic playworld. Once again, there is a directing God. However, the action is not found in external actions and reactions, but in internal dynamics. Leibniz recognises that geometry can describe perfect mental pictures, and can help us in our attempts at understanding. But the world is not, in truth, geometrical. You will not find in nature a circle, or a line, or a triangle. The very idea of a shape, obedient to a prior description, is a fancy of the disciplining mind. It isn’t real. The closer you look, the more things fold and unfold, endlessly fractal, endlessly unique. Every last object is a subject, and each one is a suffering in motion. The barest matter is inherent with force. This activity is not motion (contra Descartes) – something visible and measurable – but a spontaneous internal predisposition, a dynamic futurism that is the passion’s basic physics and morphology. (Leibniz here anticipates modern field theory, in which material particles, far from passive carriers, are concentrated fields of force.) Suffering or passion is less an excessive grief or rare subjection and instead the basic condition of all being, whether a young girl in love or a pebble. It becomes a simple thing to intuit a world in which the tiniest thing might be personified: and so, again, with Shakespeare. Formactive playlife is monadic; Shakespeare’s possible worlds are a monadology. .

37

Principia, 416.

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1 –You are playlife– Imagine entering the gap between two scenes, and existing in that void. Imagine waiting inside a cue-space, between a cue and a response, eternally suspended. Imagine cracking open a metaphor and slipping inside, touching its wet clay, surveying its buried actions and startling collisions, forbidden to abstract or to normalise a thing. Or imagine that your possible world is a single connotation of a polysemic word, or a fugitive rhyme, or a hiatus between phrases in the middle of a line. Live there, exactly there, and discover what possibles you can. Or imagine a life not just in, but as disguise; imagine that identity can be ended or created by a single switch of garment. Or conceive of possibility, all memory and hope, subsisting at the end of a line, in that hanging space after the last word of one line and before the first word of the next. Or determine always and only to act before an audience, in front of faces you do not know, people that cannot intervene, and yet whose presence is the very predicate of your existing. Imagine that you are playing a role, and every word you say was there before you, and cannot be deviated from. Think of an image that no one has ever seen or heard or even entertained, a construction that neither speaker nor listeners can understand – and there you are, the one and only you, settling in the uncomprehending ears of strangers. Imagine that the action of these words, that and nothing else, constitutes possibility.

2 I think this kind of imagining is second nature to Shakespeare, a basic reflex of his creativity. Its unique particularity asks for a new critical term, more alert than present critical vocabulary is to the autopoetic verisimilitude of Shakespeare’s play-instruments, and to the monadic life and movement proper to each. The term I propose is formaction. First, because it plays on formation, the formative or making principle that is the essential purpose of 123

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poetry and plays. Second, because in a playworld form and action are always symbionts. Third, because insofar as a playworld is genuinely possible, there is no such thing as a random action, without some claim of prefigured purpose or iterative potential. Fourth, because there is no form that does not move with its own internal action. Fifth, and somewhat more accidentally, because I can hear crushed in its harsh second syllable that unloved word, matter, which, far from Aristotle’s inert preparatory to form, or Plotinus’s unsouled and unreal privation, is always and already coordinate in playlife: as art historian Henri Focillon puts it, “matter, even in its most minute details, is always structure and activity, that is to say, form”.1 Consequently, I mean by formactions the active forms of playworlds, their working parts and craft materials – often simultaneous, clustered, overlapping, invisible – which do not so much mediate things in the world, as are vital with possible life: cues, scenes, metaphors, rhymes, parts, entrances, lines, lexical repetitions, scene breaks, puns latent and overt, soliloquies, midline breaks, exits, onstage silence, a player’s type, mime shows, a present audience, and so on and so on. Each is an instrument, to be learnt, used, played – and to be in this very functionality humanly expressive.2

3 –You are cue– You always do, you always are, much more than a prompt for an actor to speak. Look at you in your part-text, dividing the world at your beck and call. You are greedy, and jealous, and secret, and teasing, and promiscuous; you are generous, and yet you withhold; you are shared, and yet you divide yourself, give yourself to two, allow them both to think that you belong to them exclusively. This sharing is unequal and competitive. You are held by one actor and wanted by another. You wait on another, and yet you are already possessed. You mean one thing to one party, something different to another. Your meanings are guessed at but often got wrong. You are lacunal, a fraction, a remainder; you should be impoverished and needy, but it is you that is needed, you that holds all the cards. You give time and rhythm and

1 The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan and George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 96. 2 On theatre as a craft tradition see Edward Gieskes, Representing the Profession (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 162–214.

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permission to a world that feeds upon lack. It cannot be healthy! A life timed by you must be febrile, neurotic, anxious, grasping, guessing, impatient. You stand for an otherwise missing world, but you will not safely predict or distil that world – sometimes you seem to, often you won’t. What fullness there is can only be guessed at, and then once it arrives it gives way, instantly, to the next anxious wait for Cue. You do not allow safe possession; you forbid relaxation; all codes are limited. The moment of your event is unknown. The direction of your arrival is unknown. The agent of your delivery is unknown. Whose are you, Cue? You create suspense and anticipation, you distribute suffering – and then, once you come, you demand instant action. You arrive unexpectedly, deliver unexpected news, which requires sudden accommodation or improvisation. And if this doesn’t happen, the world fails! Your promised connection is threatened, always, by severance or misattribution, by precipitousness or belatedness. You turn all to passion’s fools and occasion’s slaves. Life with you is jealous, dependent, hopeful, perilous, at endless potential crosspurposes. Cue, you are cruel: the only compensation is that you must suffer all you do yourself. For you can never escape your own space, your Cue-Space, perfect capsule of a word that can never sleep –

4 Formactions are more than actions. Action alone may lack form. It is simply a deed, a something done or in the doing, whether gesture or influence or event. It need not be predicted. No one need make it but the actor of the action. It may have neither past nor future, it may live and die in its moment, with no more memory, no more forward recollection than a raindrop. But insofar as our subject is the possible worlds of plays, there are no mere actions: only formactions. Let’s leave mere actions to the offstage world and its haphazard amnesia. For playlife endures differently from real life. All its active phenomena are also forms, however apparently fleeting: they compose a possible tendency or attitude; they propose a possible shape of life: possible because unfinished, because indentured to future breath and shape and attendance. Clearly there will be random actions on the stage – a stubbed toe, a fallen screen, a burnt-out light – but unless these are swept up into the fiction they are not what I am calling formactions. For in a playworld, even spontaneity has the seal of technique, and so of context-specific inevitability. They are coded, programmed, practised; they are skilful and allusive, forethought and addressed, and alive with time- and craft- and species-travelling memory. This is so even when the movement is extemporary, a supernumerary skill, a sudden improvisation, or a hurried (even

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panicked) reaction to the unexpected. Once thus enacted, it is in the world, in its own way a pattern of perfection; otherwise contingent action is granted a mime-like certainty. It could only be exactly what it is. And yet this perfection, granted by the forethought and professionalism of its coming-to-be, by the fact that these present shapes are also pre-formed, also entails the thought of future, different repetitions.

5 –You are scene– You are this scene, then the next, then the next. What kind of a life is that! You are here, and things happen. People enter, and usually they quarrel; people come and go, decisions are made, and then the stage is emptied. You are done with, or rather that fraction of you is done with. It has its own perfection, it stands forever as that time and that place, that action, absolutely particular. But then – and isn’t this weird, Scene? – you can come again, on another afternoon or evening, same place, same time, same people, pretending that they haven’t happened before. You come, and you go, and it is done. Time passes – who knows how long, it might be a moment, it might be days or weeks or centuries – and then you come again. This is your rule. You cannot escape it. It is true of a single performance. It is true of the history of you. You are premised on this return from the blank. You can never finally pass away. But you are never finally here, either. Strange condition! Do not you envy lives that can escape from the scenic impasse? But then – are there any such? Can anything happen without you, Scene? Or do you garner everything to yourself, all action yours and yours alone, such that if you do not show it then it isn’t, it hasn’t, it cannot and shall not be! – But what does it mean, Scene, to show? Does it mean you must be seen, with eyes, on the stage? No! For you rely on words to paint your pictures. Does it mean that the words you allow will be in the present, animating the visible person’s actions? No! For the words remember things, predict things, they keep on rendering moments and places that are not exactly now. Are you one thing at all? Do you realise that all these other scenes are battling inside yours, insufficiently noticed, never complete? You pretend continuity – this action produces the next, which generates the next, which answers the previous, and all the time you make us think that all will be answered if we follow your train – but really there is no such thing! How have we not seen what you do? Pretending logic, cause, effect, when in fact everything is inadequacy and interruption! And what is more, Scene, every one of you is captive to passion. That is what you are for. These stick-figures arrive and collide, and solely for the purpose of sparking the necessary passion. Spark, passion, transition – and exit into your secret between-scene blank. You, Scene, are symptom of a world in hock to passion, every agent suffering and appetitive, in a persisting state of susceptibility. This is why you are as you are! That is why your agents exist, that and only that – to suffer a sudden alteration. In your world there is no choice, no

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freedom. No true action at all. Just dupes, their lives hideously contracted to the suffering that allows them to move –

6 The fact of formactions means that theatre defies what Peggy Phelan has called the “catastrophe” of its apparent disappearance: the performance passes, of course; but unlike all other things in life, its passing is simultaneous with its recurrence, or the promise of such.3 No formaction is finished. Each waits upon others to embody it; it always moves forward and backward in space and time, at once anachronous and simultaneous, recessive and cross-thatched; each formaction at once embeds pasts and wants futures. To adapt Angela Leighton’s nice formulation, formactions are “morphologically greedy for substance”, predicated upon changing hosts or carriers: words will be said in different ways, the identity of actors will change, mimes and gestures will come and go.4 The formactive event is always temporally staggered, even when there is only the single performance: far from a one-off happening, the event is sketched, learned, rehearsed, performed, revised, rehearsed again, performed again, an unpredictably to-and-fro process in which no single instantiation ever quite possesses the act. Imagine a virtual skein of precursive events, unwinding further and further back to some real or imagined prototype; at the same time, this virtual skein winds forwards, spinning its potential at the new event. Such recurrence can be understood as a kind of substitution: implying a chain of replicas belonging to more than one historical moment simultaneously, looking backward and forward, ghosted by past possibilities.5 Both the processual experience of the work, and the

3

Compare Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London: Routledge, 1997). 4 On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8. 5 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood: “The principle of substitution generates the effect of an artefact that doubles or crimps time over upon itself. The time of art, with its densities, irruptions, juxtapositions, and recoveries, comes to resemble the topology of memory itself . . . The substitution of work for work produces a picture of history resembling a mnemonic topology without presupposing the workings of any actual memory”: Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 45. Also see Nagel and Wood, “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism”, Art Bulletin 87:3 (2005), 402–28.

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claim of the work, pushes beyond what is simply given, and heralds the transvaluation of finished objects. Thus the artwork is not so much mimetic, as a moving force that models possibility. In Leibniz’s apposite phrase, it is a dynamic specimen. Plays can be an instance and abstract of things not-yet: in this its very morphology anticipates, rivals, even becomes, nature.6

7 –You are scene break– – What are you, Scene Break? Are you anything at all? Perhaps you are the hidden God of the Scene. Scene comes from you, and returns to you. Are you Scene’s home? Its origin and resting place? Its end? What strength do you give to Scene, Mistress Blank, you dark gap to which Scene seems so attracted? What is in you! Perhaps it isn’t true that what Scene gives is what Scene is. Perhaps it isn’t true that all life happens only there, where Scene allows itself to be seen. Can we enter you, Scene Break, the white space where Scene lapses? You seem quiet, but you are not, in truth, any kind of rest at all. You are merely the relief of thoughtlessness, anaesthesia, the mind turned away, the head in the pillow, while life goes on, breeding in the intervals, billions of like-minded lives, each one of them, too, pretending that their conscious scenes are all that there is, when their own scenes are far, far more than consciousness knows. Your blankness is no blank at all. You are the non-void, where all the possibles reside –

8 A formaction’s purpose is never limited to a play-specific situational context. It always draws upon the on-going history of the particular formaction, understood as a generic theatrical technique or instrument: what Henri Focillon calls “the formal vocation of the substance of art”, such that “within these substances a definite technical destiny is implicit . . . Forms are always tending toward realization.”7 Consequently, each formaction has to be understood both as a functional genera or species (a rhyme, a costume) and as a particular instantiation of it (this rhyme,

6 Timothy Morton: “For a mutation to count, it must be passed on. A single mutation is not an event. For something to happen, it must happen at least twice.” Ecological Thought, 64. 7 Life of Forms, 125, 127.

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that costume). The genera possess certain characteristics, some of which are inevitably at work in each instant of its use: a cue cues something, a line helps to measure speaking rhythms, a metaphor suggests resemblances. An enormous reservoir of potential experience is thus latent in every formactive occurrence. It has long been recognised how central the “Theatrum Mundi” metaphor is to Shakespeare’s craft and imagination, to his basic understanding of human life and emotion and occasion. But formactions propose a multi-point particularising of this stock conceit – and in a way a radical inversion of its basic premise. As Anne Barton puts it, from “the beginning of the Elizabethan age itself, the actor had been associated with dreams and shadows, had been a symbol of that which is illusory and insubstantial”.8 But Shakespeare renders this shadow – and all of its cognate, dependent, and enabling theatre-instruments – the substance. In a sense he recovers the allegorical realism of medieval Mysteries, in which props or actors, palpable craft, acquired strange liturgical-cum-talismanic authority. In the Shakespeare-world, these instruments are not primarily mimetic, at least as that term is often casually understood. They do not so much imitate a prior dispensation as produce one correspondent to their own purposes.9 So let’s ask second-order mimesis to take a back seat, and welcome instead formactive autopoiesis, in which every instrument is truly an instrument – designed for a purpose but as expressive as it is useful; playable by anyone, but requiring skill and application if anyone is to stay

8 Anne Barton, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962). Barton sees intimations of this strange auto-realism throughout Shakespeare’s career, although she argues that it only fully takes over in The Tempest, where there is a “superimposition of illusion upon illusion”, like “a set of Chinese boxes” (202), and ultimately “the condition of the actor and the man who watches his performance have become identical, and the relationship of the audience with the play made strangely disturbing. Always before in Shakespeare, the play metaphor had . . . guided that relationship of actors and audience upon which Elizabethan drama relied, reminding the latter that life contains elements of illusion, that the two worlds are not as separate as might be supposed. Now, the barriers have been swept away altogether; the play metaphor, like the distinction upon which it as based, no longer exists” (203). 9 Bert O. States: “The longstanding problem of mimetic theory is that it is obliged to define art in terms of what it is not, to seek a source of artistic representation in the subject matter of art, and to point to a place where it can be found.” States goes on to analyse Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as “the imitation of an action”, adding that “the term action seems to want to refer to something inside the play, an ‘indwelling form’, a ‘soul’, an ‘order of events’, etc., and so the term imitation takes on a second character as the medium in which the work presents its representation. Could we have it both ways, prior to and concurrent with, inside and outside? I do not see why not.” Great Reckonings, 5–6.

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to listen; with its own unique timbre, but a sound which precedes and survives even the player who makes it.10

9 –You are vizard– You are a practical tool and a sign. You signify a certain type, usually grotesques. You are a neat device for trading places, a means and symbol of hidden identity, good for deceiving, or self-protection, or experimentation. You evoke monomania, or the fixity of vice. But you do more than serve the fiction, don’t you, Vizard? You have an electric volatility all your own, an erotic freedom from normative accountability. For who really owns you, Vizard? You are intensely individuated, belonging to one particular character, perhaps to one particular actor. But you are also a corporate object, belonging to the company wardrobe. A single actor wears you, but you always return to the tiring house. Is this why the expression of your mask is so eerily de-naturalising? Your fixity robs from the individual. But so too does the history of your uses. For who really can possess such memory? The fact that your face belongs to others, to present stockholders, to actors past and characters to come, threatens to make corporate the very notion of character. You turn a person’s most personal mark into a kind of rental! The actor puts on you – you, this thing that sundry others have worn in the past. He smells their sweat and their make-up, he sees the stains and abrasions of past use. And yet you – this! – become his character’s face! What strange derangements this theatre does to nature. For the actor you pretend to be a badge of ownership, of profession, of communal belonging. But for the character? You are a badge of being owned, preowned, essentially mortgaged. But do you differ from any actor’s face, Vizard? Are they not all painted masks, slapped-on allegories, hideously fixed in expressions that are somebody else’s? –

10 Formactions are existential allegories, personifications of past and future possibility. To understand this we have to overcome any idea that allegorical

10 Lubomir Dolozel in Heterocosmica advocates a “possible-worlds semantics of fictionality”, distinguishing a “realist ontology” from “literary realism”, which he associates with the “reductive operations” of mimesis (or even worse, “pseudomimesis”) in which “the vast, open, and inviting fictional universe is shrunk to the model of one single world, actual human experience” (x); it “accounts only for those fictional entities that can be matched with actual prototypes” (9); “The fatal defect of all one-world semantics of fictionality is this: they cannot account for fictional particulars” (10). Dolozel treats fictional entities as “constituents of a higher-order, “emergent” structure, and fictional worlds as “ensembles of nonactualized possible states of affairs” (16).

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thinking is necessarily totalising, such that the allegorical instrument is employed to serve a transcendent organising power or purpose. Allegory here is particular to the formaction: it is the accumulating residue of its own history, active and altering at each instantiation. Each specific application produces derivatives of this species-purpose, folds or fractions or modes of it. But no two uses will ever be exactly the same. The uniqueness of each context demands this. For each formaction is equally a departure, an annexing or irruptive performance: directed by an agent-atthe-moment, which might by turns be understood to be the playwright, character, situation, even the self-authorising discharge of a single word or action. Formactive playlife, consequently, should elicit a kind of democracy of attention, which in turn entails ontological – if not necessarily social or sensory or even ethical – equality: what Levi R. Bryant has called a “democracy of objects”, or, elsewhere, a “strange mereology”: Mereology is that branch of mathematics, ontology, and logic that studies the relationship between parts and wholes . . . [for example] that relation between objects where one object is simultaneously a part of another object and an independent object in its own right . . . Likewise, the larger object composed of these smaller objects is itself independent of these smaller objects . . . objects are not merely aggregates of other objects, but have an irreducible internal structure of their own . . . larger scale objects contain autonomous smaller scale objects . . . From a certain perspective it can thus be said that all objects are a crowd. Every object is populated by other objects that it enlists in maintaining its own existence.11

And whatever the object – an aggregate of many, a fleeting conjunction, an atomised singularity – it is also potentially a subject. This doesn’t necessarily mean an as-though-real human; it might be a fragment or fold of such a human; it might be a multi-party situation; it might be a piece of non-human ecology, a tree or a stone or a wave, as propounded by metaphor or conceit: and it might be the formaction itself, the instrumentality of the craft-instrument per se: the cue-as-subject, the rhyme, the scenic break, the disguise.

11 Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011), 213–14, 216.

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11 –You are player– Yours is the divided life. Always the imposter, always watched, always waiting your turn. You stand in the wings, or behind the arras, awaiting your moment. You play a role. I am not who I am, you say it daily: but you must only half-believe it. For you are also not who you were, nor who you will be again once the part ends. Your being is suspended, and in its place – who can say what is in its place – your body’s place! – when everyone knows you are not what you pretend? The voices are lost from source. Or you are in your body, in front of all those people, petrifyingly separate, and yet dependent on these unknown others for your very right to be. Speaking what you are told to speak, and not a breath more; entering and exiting on cue; returning when the play ends to something smaller, more haphazard, and waiting for this borrowed life to return. And when it does, then you enjoy the most reckless undressing of obedience. You say all the things that others cannot. You vent frustration, repair grievance, speak of how things might or must or should be! You take life’s killing indicatives and coercing imperatives, you put on a false face, and you transform every last thing into possibility! What if . . .? To live in the if! The if is life, lived to the uttermost, risked and dared, in the fullest knowledge that there is no safe passage to the other side, that the path will abruptly stop, and it will be over – and yet living life like this, at the if, feeling moment by moment the great prohibition, the limits of the possible – living in the if is the only living worth the name! You are the Modal Prince! But then – you shall not go beyond if, into is. The if is allowed you, for a while. But then the wooden planks end, the pier of the stage stops, and after that? Nothing –

12 A kind of pathos hedges the function of each formaction: not quite the pathos of classical rhetoric, which describes a felt appeal to the emotions, but rather an affective modality that inheres as that formaction’s particular condition (perhaps closer to what Hegel means when he speaks of the “pathos” of a specific attitude), even as it is necessarily variantly at work at each singular instantiation. That is, we need to recognise the residual characteristics of each formaction: how the primitive action and passion of its purpose can vitally inform the expressiveness of playworlds – or can do whenever the playmaker intuits the plaintive living reality of these instruments. Shakespeare certainly does. Whether through immersive practice over years, or an uncanny sympathy with any object or condition, or

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species-traversing clairvoyance, he seems to apprehend what it might mean for life truly to be at stake or epitomised at each particular formaction. And the vital point is that all of Shakespeare’s materials – animate or inanimate, concrete or imagined – can possess such expressive capability. In this, Shakespeare enormously intensifies and virtualises the Renaissance’s widespread alertness – in arts such as architecture, carpentry, and engineering – to craft-specific technique and praxis.12 There develops an isomorphic relation between playthings and playworld – a correspondence between formal-material instruments and expressive-mimetic life. The action of a playworld, that is, comes from submitting to the possibilities of its forms, allowing them their agency and suffering and history.13 As Viola says to the Captain: Conceale me what I am, and be my ayde, For such disguise as haply shall become The forme of my intent.

(Twelfth Night, 105–7)

It might seem that Shakespeare is preparing a conventional ontology, by which Viola’s true form is concealed by her disguise. If she had said, “Conceal what I am”, this would be simply expressed; likewise “conceal me”. But she says “Conceale me what I am”: the odd mix of ellipsis and tautology turns “conceal” into an active transformative verb, an actionword conferring an otherwise uncreated I. The pun on “become” is the key: the disguise will suit her purposes; the disguise will turn into her very form. And note the contingency of the effect: “haply become” means happily, luckily, usefully; but it also means hopefully, or if circumstances allow. The essential things – form, I, me, my – are dependent upon the successful translation of craft. Inert matter isn’t shaped by the inspiriting intent of form. It is the other way around, as theatrical stuff becomes substantial. The 12

See Turner, English Renaissance Stage. Paul Kottman: “Must not the actor present us with more than a mimetic portrait or imitation, more than an image or product, more than a name or title? . . . A scene’s revelatory force cannot be separated from a here-and-now context of embodied actors who make themselves seen and heard . . . And yet . . . the disclosure of the singular ‘who’ of the protagonist is not the same thing as the sheer bodily display of the performing actor . . . the word ‘mimesis’, in its dramatic valence, is perhaps nothing other than the name for this disjunction . . . [P]recisely because this disclosure can be repeated mimetically . . . the revelation, in word and deed, of who we are has a sense that is not reducible to the exhibition of our singular bodies.” A Politics of the Scene, 25. 13

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“forme of my intent” is thus a neat gloss on formactions – the formaction here being the metamorphic facility of disguise. We get a play-specific modal realism. In this world, possibility breathes in the instruments.

13 –You are disguise– You pretend to be something simple, a bit of material to take on or off. A cloak, a moustache, a wig. But this material is only a cipher of your dark substance. Nobody knows it, but you are nobody. And because you are nobody, you can do anything. Who can say that you did it? It wasn’t you; it wasn’t anybody. There is no accountability; no law but play. There are actions, but no self-responsible actors. The actions of the world are shadows on a wall. But then, because nobody knows that you are what you are, and nobody knows there is another beneath you, you can be truer than anything. You are those actions when no one is watching, when the door is shut or the mouth is clamped and hiddenness can erupt. You are more real than the real, because free from the lies of recognition. Or so you like to pretend. But are you truly so free? – What you are is not granted by the recognitions of those on the stage with you – those who interact with you, who can physically influence you, impress themselves upon you. It is granted by the recognitions of those offstage, whom you mainly pretend do not exist. So your identity, the truth of your self, is a precarious contract between different planes of being. After all, you are not at the same level as those who allow you. But unless the audience grants you a true identity, underneath Disguise, then you have none. And what is worse: sometimes you melt away, don’t you? You take over the person entirely! Disguise melts away, and becomes the real; you become the real by dissolving the real thing beneath. It doesn’t happen often. But it happens. And when it does, aren’t you enacting what every costume enacts, indeed what all playlife always is? That is, a doubled process of dissolution. You pretend to be exceptional, but in fact you are exemplary. The real goes, and the show becomes real – the disguise becomes real – by itself lapsing into non-being. In your world, Disguise, nothing is but what is not –

14 It is the Leibniz monad that best resembles what I intend by formactions. But there are also later intimations, perhaps more familiar to literary criticism, and invariably directly influenced by Leibniz. Herder is perhaps the most forceful and individuated: The more we thoughtfully observe the great drama of effective forces in nature, the less we can avoid everywhere feeling similarity with ourselves, enlivening everything

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with our sensation. . .Mass seems to us a yearning for the mid-point, for the goal and place of rest; inertia the little partial rest on a thing’s own mid-point through its connection with itself; motion a foreign drive, a communicated and onwardly effective striving which overcomes rest, disturbs the rest of foreign things, until it finds its own rest again. What a wonderful phenomenon elasticity is – already a sort of automaton, which can indeed not give itself motion, but can restore motion to itself; the first apparent spark towards activity in noble natures.14 The sensing human being feels his way into everything, feels everything from out of himself, and imprints it with his image, his impress. Hence Newton in his system of the world became a poet contrary to his wishes, as did Buffon in his cosmogony, and Leibniz in his preestablished harmony and doctrine of monads.15 I run after images, after similarities, after laws of harmony into One, because I know no other play of my thinking forces (if indeed one must think), and moreover believe that Homer and Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare and Klopstock have supplied psychology and knowledge of humankind with more material than even the Aristotles and Leibnizes of all peoples and times.16

Herder here opens the door to a proto-Romantic celebration of “living” form, and of imaginative literature as its generative epitome. This inspired a gathering Europe-wide programme, typified by Schiller and Coleridge, set against anything rigid or programmatic, and always preferring (in true Shakespearean style) that form be a verb, an active present participle, honouring the inspiriting energy of creativity. Indeed, we may recall various of the Romantics’ observations concerning Shakespeare, all of which suggest something of what I am calling formactions: Schiller’s dictum that “the object possesses him entirely”;17 Coleridge’s that he “darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion”;18 Keats’ “negative capability”, in which the poet can disinterestedly inform any imaginable condition;19 or Hazlitt’s, that Shakespeare “had only to think of any thing to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it . . . to pass from one to another, like the same soul successively animating

“On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul”, Aesthetics, 187. 16 Aesthetics, 188. Aesthetics, 189. On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795), translated by William F. Wertz, Jr, http://www. schillerinstitute.org/transl/schiller_essays/naive_sentimental-1.html (33). 18 Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions (Collected Works vii), ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (2 vols.; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), ii. 27–8. 19 Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 Oct. 1818, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–21, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958, 386–8). 14 15 17

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different bodies”.20 But while these judgements seem to me simply true, they stick too close to the recognisably human. Only Herder, in his prosopopoeiac sympathy with physical forces, really hints at how much further Shakespeare’s osmotic inhabiting goes – into his materials, the objects and instruments of his craft, the non-human tools or technologies that he humanises.21 Shakespeare himself perhaps says it best, albeit with bitter regret: “public means, which public manners breeds/Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,/And almost thence my nature is subdued/To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand” (Sonnet 111).

15 –You are aside– You say brave things. It is perilous to speak truth to power; families force us into secrecy; fathers and sisters can be awful; our private truths are beleaguered. You are a cry in the interstices of treachery. You seem to recognise your witnesses. You seem to ask them to recognise themselves in you. Then you disappear, and expect them to take secret refuge in this side-space, as though a promise, an easement for hearts, and to wait for you to reappear. You are too good for this world, or too honest. But can you be trusted? You are a secret passage to the silent audience, a stratagem borrowed from Vice. Do you not speak demonic superabundance, a disdain for due process? You seem aware that the fiction proceeding on stage is a charade. How proud are you, Aside? You advertise this awesome foresight, leaping beyond immediacies into consequences that are already in play, already on their way, but which no one else knows, or if they know will not admit. You break the veil. You remove the carapace of allegory, of thisstands-for-that, and suddenly claim – what? – that you are real, on the level, on their level? You say, Aside, that all the audience has witnessed is not true, perhaps not even real. You imply that you and they, the listeners, share a prior and future place. The Vice knew this place as Hell: what do you know it as, Aside? This place is not in the

20 “On Shakespeare and Milton”, Hazlitt, The Fight and Other Writings, ed. Tom Paulin and David Chandler (London: Penguin, 2000), 85. 21 Michael Witmore notes how objects are given a distinctive power of motion in Shakespeare’s late plays, a “causally diffuse realm in which agency is evenly distributed among people, objects, spirits, and the gods” (Pretty Creatures, 170), implying a “counterfactual physics” (170), exemplified by Hermione’s statue’s animation, which “resembles the action in the charmed worlds of pageant motion. Both join movement and music in such a way that mechanisms and the feeling of life begin to feel interchangeable . . . The spectacle was not perfected in a single place but grew out of the great variety of early modern spectacles that deliberately mimicked the activity of nature and the living soul, spectacles that imply that motion (and so life) could be conjured through craft” (165–6). Life-machines included theatrical engines, puppet shows, animated statues, and jointed effigies.

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pretend-world of the playworld. But it is also not in the world to which they return when they leave the theatre. Where is it, then? In the future, or the past? If the future, how can they hope to recognise it? If the past, how can it be waiting? Where do you come from, Aside? And where do you go to? Where in God’s name are you? –

16 A suggestive comparison with formactions is the radical modal realism of the American philosopher David Lewis, the most influential recent thinker of possible worlds. Lewis posits a kind of physicalism, whereby all ideas, purposes, coherences, and principles are generated by or grow from the particular local qualities of things: [A]ll there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another . . . For short: we have an arrangement of qualities. And that is all. There is no difference without difference in the arrangement of qualities. All else supervenes on that.22

For worlds, read playworlds; for the vast mosaic, read the numerous particular formactions, textual and material, that give to each playworld motion and matter: The world has its laws of nature, its chances and causal relationships; and yet – perhaps! – all there is to the world is its point-by-point distribution of local qualitative character. We have a spatiotemporal arrangement of points. At each point various local intrinsic properties may be present, instantiated perhaps by the point itself or perhaps by point-sized bits of matter or of fields that are located there. There may be properties of mass, charge, quark colour and flavour, field strength, and the like; and maybe others besides, if physics as we know it is inadequate to the descriptive task. Is that all? Are the laws, chances, and causal relationships nothing but patterns which supervene on this point-by-point distribution of properties? Could two worlds differ in their laws without differing, somehow, somewhere, in local qualitative character?23

Metaphysics depends on the details; the master-narratives on the particular local points, not the other way around. In Lewisian terms: the details inside details, noticed or not, are tiles of the mosaic, or pixelated dots in

22 Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), ix–x: supervenience is a relation of ontological or morphological dependency, such that change in one state entails change in another. 23 On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1986), 14.

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the picture, and possible worlds supervene on every last one of them. It isn’t just that the playtext or stage is made up of discrete physical actants, each of which contributes to the effect. It isn’t even that each such physical instant bears a potential for feeling. It is that our very ideas of possibility supervene upon each local thing, which has to be understood both in terms of its situational occasion – who and what is active at it – and its potential for metaphysical or existential extension. The actual stuff of the play is not derivative of some primary truth or place; it is not what Austin calls “constative”, or even really mimetic. Instead, we get a world of severed, potentially asymmetric instants, bites of time, correspondent to specific technologies. Each formactive event – a line, entrance, cuespace, metaphor, disguise – produces its own laws, chances, causes, and character.

17 –You are rhyme– You are echo with a difference. When shared you speak agreement, harmony, connection; you suggest comfort, unity, buoyancy, hope. Your listeners expect your rhythm, cherish the congruities, take pleasure from the conjoined sympathy. Although this can always fail! You may go unanswered, your offer may be refused. At other times, more private times, you do not share at all. You shelter and exclude, you are an aural wall, preventing ingress or overhearing. At these moments, hunkereddown and separate, your fullness is present in denial. You can hear it whispering just out of sight, a severed and impossible community. Rhyme, Rhymer, Rhymed: there is great pathos in you: it is the pathos of unfreedom. Shared or unshared, comic or tragic, connecting or severing – you speak the speaker, more than they speak you. Your speaker is taken, carried as though on wings, or compelled as though by fate. Volition, individuation, choice: such things are skin-deep next to the airy invincibility of Rhyme –

18 A more recent model for formactions is the object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman, contemporary leader of a movement he calls speculative realism. Influenced in particular by Martin Heidegger’s tool-analysis (the hammer is not so much a thing to be used as a use, shifting with occasion) and Leibniz’s monadology (every monad is a windowless world

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of change and perception),24 Harman rejects the idea that the nature of things is determined by what we can know of them, insisting instead that all objects have far more to their substance than any encounter with them can ever realise. And this applies, in Harman’s analysis, to all relations between objects, whether animate or inanimate (“even fire oversimplifies oxygen while consuming it”25): [E]ven inanimate objects are caught up in something like a “hermeneutic circle”. No object ever sucks all the juice out of another object . . . there is an additional reality in this strange artificial material [plutonium] that is in no way exhausted by the unions and associations in which it currently happens to be entangled.26 Once we accept that an object exceeds all possible relations to it, we know that it has independent reality. And once it has such a reality, it must have it as a specific reality, or all objects would be alike . . . Yet this does not entail any of the dangers normally associated with essence. There is no need for us to say that essences are eternal, that they are unchangeable . . . It is nothing more than to insist that objects are not exhausted by their relations to other objects.27 To meet with a phenomenal realm is not the unique burden of the exceptional human or animal: rather it is the very stuff of relation . . . The same is true even of material things, which cannot slap one another directly, and hence deal with each other only in mediated form. All things, both human and nonhuman, must encounter other things in the form of sensual caricatures.28

Harman’s thinking is useful for theorising formactions because it reinforces the surprising reality of inauspicious instruments; because the move to “objectify” humans (who are merely one amid trillions of objects) is equally a move to personify objects; and because it protects against the false absolutism of much materialist thinking (even a kind of inverted sentimentalism) which presumes that non-human objects engage each other in relations of full disclosure, all the more ontologically sufficient for lacking self-consciousness. The effect of such thinking is abstraction and approximation, the reduction of objects to merely apparent function. The same problem can apply to thinking about theatre in resolutely practical terms, 24 “For years Leibniz had been the thinker dearest to my heart. But I also saw a number of flaws in his theory in need of some remedy.” Circus Philosophicus (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), 32. In particular Harman rejects the idea that the monad need be “simple”, i.e., not an aggregate. 25 “Space, Time, and Essence: An Object-Oriented Approach”, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (Winchester: Zone Books, 2009), 156. 26 “Object-Oriented Philosophy”, Towards Speculative Realism, 100, 103. 27 “Space, Time, and Essence”, 163–4. 28 Circus Philosophicus (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), 69.

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as though the measure of truth is a praxis defined by the successful application of tried and trusted technique. Technique is indispensable, whether as readers or performers: but still it “can never be radical enough to do justice to the reality of things”, which it always tends to cut down to size.29 What is particularly suggestive about Harman’s thinking, then, is that he identifies the actuality of objects with unexpressed possibilities. This entails questioning the concept of “potential”: To say that an acorn is a potential oak tree is clearly true, but the real question is this: what actual aspect of the acorn allows it to be potentially an oak tree? [E]ach is both a real thing and a fabrication that brings other things into relation; each is both a form that unifies its constituents and a matter from which other substances may be built. A corollary of this is that there is no such thing as a mere accident or mere relation. Every relation forms a kind of new reality which could represent a kind of inscrutable substance viewed in different ways by numerous other realities.30

“Every level of reality seems to be two-faced”: so, a cue has its substance, so too the cue-space it hearkens and co-produces, and the word or entrance it elicits; these words in turn help constitute new substances – a clause, line, sentence, speech, dialogue, and so on. The same thing happens backwards and forwards, as relational networks generate new formactive substances. Contra Leibniz – in so many things Harman’s primary inspiration – there is no substantial distinction between singularities and aggregates. The same applies to formactions: the play is one formaction, made up of many formactions; so too is each character; so too is every single formaction that composes each play, character, scene, and so on. The crucial distinction of a playworld is this: as in the extratextual world these things do exist independent of anyone’s notice, but they are inoperative without such notice; the unexhausted qualities of the object are otherwise unacted possibles.

29 Graham Harman, “The Revival of Metaphysics in Continental Philosophy”, Towards Speculative Realism, 113. 30 “Revival of Metaphysics”, 117, 118–19. He is influenced here by Bruno Latour, who likewise rejects Aristotelian potentiality: “if history has no other meaning than to activate a potentiality – that is, to turn into an effect what was already there, in the cause – then no matter how much juggling of associations takes place, nothing, no new thing at least, will ever happen, since the effect was already hidden in the cause, as a potential”. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 152.

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19 –You are trope– Metaphor! What has become of you? Once upon a time you were an ornament, neatly dressing thoughts that had already come. You discovered resemblances, a world of family congruence and harmony. One thing complemented another, coloured it, dressed it, gave the primary thing a kind of homage. It was an ordered creation. But now in this world, this strange vertiginous world, you seem to move a little differently. You do not serve or illustrate something prior: you are alive with your own possibilities. Do you really claim to be self-authorising? What can it mean to inhere only as you – to be a carrier of nothing but yourself, a pure vector, a groundless possible? How audacious are you, Metaphor, you and your virtualised possibilities? Do you occupy a different plane than those things that exist as visible fact? You reorder nature, produce novelty, imply a world in constant process, a creation abrupt, fissiparous, proliferating. And any one of you – every one of you – claims its very own possible world. For you have partners, don’t you, Master Trope, modes or attributes of you? There’s catachresis, figure of abuse, the more extravagant the comparison the better – there is nothing beyond your yoke! And there’s prosopopeia, turning everything – animal, vegetable, mineral – into a besotted human or a hungry fragment of man. And there’s allegory, your shameless extension, taking abstractions, beautiful ideas, giving them bodies, exchanging them in stories, leaving nothing free from profanising complicity and laughter. In your world, Metaphor, anything can concatenate – and anything can be replaced! How to know what truly is? On what ground can we safely lay down our heads? Is possibility truly so tabled and open? Can it possibly come to good? – And here comes your cousin and rival, Metonymy, murmuring of connection. There should be comfort in that! Things should connect. An attribute can stand for the whole. The large can indicate the small, the small the large, the cause the effect, the effect the cause. But in this world, where do you draw the line! If the effect stands for cause then what is it that moves things? Who is in control? And what happens if the relation slips from view and all that is left is you, Metonymy (or is it Synecdoche?), a single word estranged from source and asserting some novel independence? And who is this, your spaced-out child, Metalepsis? Metonymy of metonymy, some bastard slip of a slippery parent? What can that mean! A man is called not by his name or his trade or his parts but by something he does, he makes, he suffers? Is that then what he is? An action is called not by the act or its effects but the guilt these effects produce? What is real in this world? Where is the ground! –

20 Another suggestive model is Gilbert Simondon’s notion of how “preindividual forces” make possible the emergence of individuality (of a

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subject, an event, a material form).31 These pre-individual forces at once pre-date, constitute, and survive any singular individual. Consequently, the individual is always, in a sense, more than itself; there is a continuing potential to undergo further changes, because the “milieu” of the individual’s emergence always contains an unassimilated excess, a remainder that can go towards future becomings. Pre-individuality, then, proposes a kind of supra-individuality, which will characterise both the discrete formaction and the larger field of play to which it contributes. So no cue can spend the potential of cueing; no metaphor can stop the potential for further resemblances. In turn, the cue gives way to another character’s speech; a metaphor forms parts of a phrase, and a line, and a sentence. The instrument – like Simondon’s pre-individual potential – is both material and ideal; it cannot be exhausted. Simondon’s concentration upon process means that he doesn’t privilege – barely even identifies – the “finished” individual: One cannot, even with the highest rigour, speak of an individual, but only of individuation; one must go back to the activity, the genesis, instead of trying to apprehend the being as entirely made in order to discover the criteria by which one will know whether it is an individual or not. The individual is not a being but an act.32

It is better to think in terms of “regimes of individuation”, or a “theatre of individuation”. The subject need not be human: the same processes apply to a protozoa or a brick. What distinguishes life – say, an animal from a crystal – is that it engenders continuous individuals internally. This proposes what Simondon (after Norbert Wiener) calls a metastable system – that is, a state that transcends the classical opposition between stability and instability, and is instead charged with potential for becoming. This is the formactive playworld: nascent with provisional resolutions, unactualised virtualities, which is not a passing instability but its super-saturating condition. And, crucially, this metastability inheres not only in the system as a whole, but potentially in any node or subject of life within it: and such

31

Simondon (1924–1989) was a French social scientist and philosopher. Quoted in Gilbert Simondon, Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, ed. Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, and Ashley Woodward (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 213; translation by Arne de Boever. 32

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life may always engender further individuations or self-modifications. This is so whether this life is a named person, a multi-party event, even a possible world that exists only as the virtual material of a trope. So too with formactions: even if materially a kind of synthetic or even protocellular life, they do not only grow at the extremities, like inanimate materials or machines. They morph and mutate from within.

21 –You are end of the line– A strange, hanging, vertiginous space, after one line and before the next. Why are you here? Are you the accidental consequence of a line, and the fact that the line must end? Are you silence, emptiness, a still blank, like some country station, after one train has gone and before the next arrives? There is no such thing! There are no blanks in nature. Hear the voices echo, the unfinishable conversations continue, as they might have been, as they may yet be, in some future place. The line’s final phrase echoes, just for a moment; you are full with things that cannot be answered. You are a place of haunting. At the same time you must prepare for what impends, for what is just around the corner. Will it satisfy expectations? Will it surprise, divert, disappoint? Perhaps it will not come! You are a place of imminence. Who can say what succeeds you? You release possibilities, which may or may not come true; you foreshadow alternatives, recall motives, glance at possible judgements. You make the line a line; without you there is none. Oh, there is tremendous backward pressure in you, as you force the line into its compression, as you force the thought to breathe through you and into a succeeding line! And yet, for all this power, you can never claim more than a moment’s duration. There is never enough time! The moment passes and is gone, and the air is thick with attenuation and prevention, with wistful and unspeakable foreboding. There is never enough time; the world is too crowded! But you are there, aren’t you, open for recovery. You are there, a capsule of memory and apprehension. A line ends, but in what? In you. A line begins, after what? After you. You are the concertinaed space of possibility –

22 Thinking in terms of formactions can release the life often denied in more disembodied or academically static conceptions of form. Plato’s theory of forms suggests something of the problem. He asserts an ideal that is only ever dimly shadowed by things in the world; we don’t know how the ideal form confers its imitation, if at all; truth is always elsewhere, its sources and workings mystified. Aristotle makes just this complaint about Plato’s

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theory, but his alternative form, as a sculpting principle of individuation, retains traces of magical essentialism: form is the determining principle of a thing, acting upon stupid matter. It is apparent that my neologism, “formactions”, risks tautology here, in that Aristotelian form already implies an active individuating capability. But even so, such inspiriting form tends to be associated with a finished, perfected shape: the form of a horse is here. This is what provokes dissatisfaction with hylomorphic thinking: not just that action is the sole preserve of form, but that this form is presupposed, a once-and-for-all determinate shape.33 Formactions, by way of contrast, are always moving beyond apparently finished states, becoming modified, qualified and supplemented as a tendency of their constitution, or in their meetings with neighbouring formactions. Hamlet says it well when he speaks of drama’s purpose being to show “the verie Age and Bodie of the Time, his forme and pressure” (TLN 1871–2). This kind of “forme” is far distant from Aristotelian shape, or indeed from any formalist notion of definition or completion. Form is qualified, agitated, even endangered by “pressure” – Shakespeare’s only use of the word, and suggesting the intense force inherent to his “forms”, their potential imbrication in suffering (the primary meaning of “pressure” at the time was torture), a violence that can be at once pressed upon the “form” and dynamic to it. This likewise suggests something very different from the notion, argued powerfully by Kant, that form is a kind of supra-sensible perfection or beauty, available to a pure perception, uninfluenced by what Kant calls “charm” or “emotion”. Form here is the product or articulation of design, which pleases by way of essentially impersonal taste. This prepares the ground for formalism, implying the rule-bound observance of outward order, such as a delineated stanza or rhyme scheme, which can be understood independent 33 Simondon: “Contrary to the clams of the Aristotelian, ‘hylemorphic’ model – a model born of a simple reductive interpretation of simple technological operations, such as the molding of a brick – the individual is not the result of a molding which, in a single blow as it were, provides a homogeneous and formless matter with its determinate form. Rather, it is a (temporal process) through which the crystalline form acts like a ‘recurrent germ of information’ in a medium already rife with singularities and energetic differences”: http://fractalontol ogy.wordpress.com/2007/11/28/a-short-list-of-gilbert-simondons-vocabulary. The sixteenthcentury philosphers Bruno and Campanella made earlier assaults upon hylomorphism, which Shakespeare implicitly if not knowingly emulates. See Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 315–19.

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of any particular use of it. In many ways this kind of studied model is remote from the abstract perfection of Platonic form: but these different conceptions of form are united by their remoteness from embodied action, and by a self-eternalising ideality that often dismisses body and tools as mere material impedimenta.

24 –You are spectator– Are you one or many? So many eyes, so many minds, every one of them unknowable. You exist at all angles. Here you are a groundling, looking up. You are tiny, you are jostled, your forehead flat against the back of that man. You can see almost nothing, and hear only disembodied voices. Listen then! Here you are a cushion-holder, looking across, at a distance. You have no spectacles, can your eyesight take the strain? The actor smiles and all at once you smile with him. Here you are on the stage, watching the backs of actors, pipe in palm. You see a half-turned head on the stage, you cannot see the mouth, you see spit flying through the air and make-up dripping. And now you are there, and there, and there again, tracing these shadows on the stage. You never, ever, see the same thing twice. At one point everything is foreshortened, at another it stretches horizontally into distance. Occasionally you are above things, looking safely down, the dancers circling beautifully. Occasionally you are directly in front of what you see, confident, measuring, equidistant, as the player seems to whisper just to you. Here you are at an oblique angle. What can you see? That man’s profile, this man’s belt? Do you correct what you see, and turn the squeezed sidelong view into stretching spacious splendour? Or do you settle in your perspective, allow that it alone is the world of this play? Or do you do both, sometimes correcting and generalising, seeing in your mind what you think everyone is supposed to be seeing, and sometimes resting in the accidental things that you can actually see? Don’t just look at her – I mean at him – observe the whole scene, don’t be distracted – pay attention! All you see are actors, acting; actors and paint, painted backdrops and painted faces and occasionally a painted sign. It’s better not to see, sometimes. Close your eyes for a moment, Spectator. See better –

25 It might be argued that thinking like this runs the risk of hypostasising all the instruments and techniques of drama. In a sense that is precisely the point: to hypostasise is to endue with substance. As with allegory, so with hypostases: we need to redeem the potential singularity of the action or condition (to hypostasise, to be a hypostasis). Hypostasising becomes a

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conceptual sin when it presupposes “essential” conformity to a hegemonic ideal, one invariably rooted in the violence of ownership and the forgetting of difference. But my approach is the opposite. I want to hypostasise the quotidian stuff of theatre, in the sense of recover its multiple nodes of substance: not to wash everything in the bland light of the divine, or still less do service to a centralising or centripetal ideologeme. Rather, I want to give what often seem to be merely “accidents” – figurative ornaments, necessary tools of the trade, serviceable instruments of the craft – their own substance, their own reality. Perhaps this is a hypostatic move on my part: but how else to respect the strange life in playworlds?

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The truth of anachronism

Much of my thinking in this book is flagrantly anachronistic. But anachronism is worth defending, as an inescapable condition of dramatic form, historical process, and our own heuristic methods. Of course it is often understood simply as an error – a mistake in chronology, producing false equivalences and preposterous conclusions; more than that, in disrespecting historical difference and riding roughshod over the specificity of particular places and particular times, it is a kind of methodological imperialism, or arbitrary whimsicality, and as such represents political regression and ethical failing.1 The aversion is easy to understand: but also important to resist. Hayden White has written powerfully of the lie of historical objectivity, the fact that all history and historicism is “rhetorical”, “figurative”, subliminally shaped by qualitative judgements or interestedness.2 The fear of anachronism, as Margreta de Grazia wryly notes, reflects the protested division between subject and object which has long defined scholarship: It is not the loss of the distant object that is dreaded, but the loss of the distance that keeps him from that object. To lose it would be to lose historical consciousness, to fall back into the kind of historical oblivion or “diachronic innocence” with which [Thomas M. Greene] has stigmatized the medieval period. It would be a reversion of relapse into the “naivete” that is the period feature of his Middle Ages . . . It is the 1 “Anachronism”, Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds, Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2010), 13–14. 2 “For it is by figuration that the historian virtually constitutes the subject of the discourse; his explanation is little more than a formalized projection of qualities assigned to the subject in his original figuration of it . . . [T]he discourse of the historian and that of the imaginative writer overlap, resemble, or correspond with each other.” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 106, 121. At issue for White isn’t “what are the facts?”, but rather “How are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another?” (134).

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loss of consciousness that is feared . . . the collapses of the barrier that stands between subject and object and holds them apart, with the subject in control.3

Plays are written to be played and returned to; our emotions are indispensably constitutive of the event, and so of any definition of its history. Levinas nicely evokes how thought, memory, the intensity of a private mind, produces dimensions and temporalities that reach far beyond the punctual seriality of calendars and clocks: Memory recaptures and reverses and suspends what is already accomplished in birth – in nature. Fecundity escapes the punctual instant of death. By memory I ground myself after the event, retroactively.4

We should be careful of assuming a magical cultural telepathy, whereby some supposedly ubiquitous discourse saturates all cultural products:5 Each instant of historical time in which action commences is, in the last analysis, a birth, and hence breaks the continuous time of history, a time of works and not of wills. The inner life is the unique way for the real to exist as a plurality.6

Each instant is a potential breach, stolen from evident, recorded, historical continuities; each breach is a birth, and each birth a “way”, an alternative path for the will. With Shakespeare perhaps more than any other writer, we need to be alert to the transaction in the moment. For his way of thinking epitomises what the humanists called “ingeniousness”: [A] radically metaphorical activity in which the psyche, regarding the matter before it in its sensuous plenitude, cognizes it affectively and tropes it, creating meaning out of mere res by transferring to it a significance – configured from an already interested subject position – and declaring, in effect, “this is (like) that”, thereby expanding the semantic field of its world.7

This way of conceiving possibility – responsive to the moment, extemporary, eluding pre-empting teleological trajectories – is effectively opposed De Grazia, “Anachronism”, 30. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 58. 5 For various critiques of formally flattening historicism, see Stephen Cohen, ed., Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 6 Totality and Infinity, 58. 7 Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 21. 3 4

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to “apodeictic” thinking, which resists such improvisatory creativity, “arresting its activity and referencing as a self-evident datum what is in fact the result of an antecedent transaction between world and psyche”.8 Such ingeniousness is always likely to explode the datum, render it otiose or slow-witted or unrecognisable. Even when we know Shakespeare read something, the knowledge mainly asks us to see how little he “applies” his reading, as though a learnt lesson, and how much he chooses, transforms, falsifies, ironises, or buries what he inherits, his appropriations always unpredictable and discontinuous. Even direct quotation might be parodic or ironic. He can spin his sources every which way, and history is translated. Just consider the almost incredible conceptual and physical violence Shakespeare does to the 1590s plays that we know he rewrote: we have the evidence of Lear before us, transforming an amiable Christian tragi-comedy into the wound-bearing beast we all know. We can only imagine what the earlier Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida were like – but there can hardly have been two more iconoclastic, genre-busting plays ever written than Shakespeare’s versions, so we are safe to assume that his attitude to his precursor-texts was, at the very least, one of superconfident sublation, if not irreverent, fearsomely intelligent, fearlessly original trumping.9 The context in Shakespeare is always shape shifting. This is true however we think of context: cultural discourses, local events, the public event of the play, the immediate situation of the characters. We know that clock-time is irrelevant to play-time. We know that the dimensions and extension of objects in the world are different on a stage. So there is no need to cling to the idea that all of these disjunctions are in the service of a conventionally regulated world, or that our job is to harmonise the playworld with the non-playworld, to treat each of its multiple phenomena as synecdoches of a truer, more primary reality – parts that get their true meaning from the whole that they remember.

8

Altman, Improbability of Othello, 21. We do have the evidence of the surviving “plot” for the earlier Troilus, albeit a ripped fragment. Its order and distribution of scenes looks much more orthodox and decorous than Shakespeare’s – more like Dryden’s edited and rejigged version, Truth Found Too Late. See facsimile in Greg, Dramatic Documents, vol. 2. 9

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Was Shakespeare’s achievement probable? Surely not. Was it foreseeable? I doubt it. Was it even possible? It depends what we mean by the word. Literary historicism invariably works backwards from the achieved play or poem, and identifies this achievement’s continuousness with the culture in which it was produced. Bergson is salutary here: Because our ordinary logic is a logic of retrospection . . . [i]t cannot help throwing present realities, reduced to possibilities or virtualities, back into the past, so that what is compounded now must, in its eyes, always have been so.10

Events that happened, must have happened; if they happened, they must have had a due and discernible cause; possibility becomes probability: Under the influence of physical science, the task of history has recently been limited to the narration of mere sequences. This ideal of knowledge is the triumph of matterof-fact . . . Such history confines itself to abstract mythology. The variety of motives is excluded . . . It is a make-belief. There are oceans of facts.11

Sometimes it can be a paltry thing, false to thought and imagination, to pretend that everyone lives at the same pace, or their minds always in the same place. As Michel Serres nicely has it, “Time doesn’t flow; it percolates”, one of various metaphors he uses to evoke the necessary polychronicity and multitemporality of history.12 History does not come true evenly, nor all at once in the moment of its occurrence. Cultural institutions do not mature at the same pace, arm in arm down the aisle of history. Theatre might get there first. Indeed, we might conceive of poetic 10 The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Carol Publishing, 1992), 26. 11 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: The Free Press, 1938), 17–18. 12 Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 58. Particularly influential in recent literary studies has been Serres’s idea of “a time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats” (60) or a folded, crumpled handkerchief (59–60), e.g. in Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Howard Marchitello, The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of Shakespeare and Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Serres too is decisively indebted to Leibniz (the subject of his dissertation and first book, The System of Leibniz): e.g.: “This is what the classical or baroque age discovered, along with Leibniz and his calculus: the infinitesimal germ of form, the topological atom of the fold, beside the algebraic or ensemblist atom of the element; from this moment and this philosophy on, everything is folding.” Serres, Atlas (Paris: Éditions Julliard, 1994), 49.

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or dramatic forms as mobile, adaptive institutions, modelling or structuring possibilities in ways that concurrent institutions, such as family or law or education, are incapable of doing. Agamben has a suggestive concept of the poetic stanza – or room as it is in the original Italian – as a “phantasmatictopos”, the “being-in-language” of the “coming community”. It finds no place in the actual world – yet.13 More recently Zizek has suggested that the truth in a poem or philosophy is often an “excess which cannot be incorporated/integrated into the socio-historical Totality”, such that “poetry gives voice to that which an epoch was UNABLE to include in its narrative(s)”. Poetry speaks “what Schelling called the ‘indivisible remainder’, that which STICKS OUT from the organic Whole”, such that sometimes “only an ‘anachronistic’ reading from the future can discern its true meaning”.14 But the same thing goes for a putatively single institution, like the “Elizabethan theatre”. It is hardly one thing. As Focillon says of the history of art, “juxtaposed within the very same moment” are “survivals and anticipations, and slow, outmoded forms that are the contemporaries of bold and rapid forms”; a work of art may be “a phenomenon of rupture”, of “cleavage and discord”.15 What is more, an act, like a thought or a word or a character, may or may not come fully true. Most things simply arrive and pass away, or so it seems. But things are also stored, they wait, or hunker, like virtual ovum, waiting to be touched and entered and opened. The potential in some things is latent, and may not be recognised or take effect until something happens subsequently to allow its recognition. Here is Walter Benjamin: The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different, it does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.16

13 Agamben calls it a “utopia”. Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); also see Tiffany, Infidel Poetics, 130. 14 On Belief (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 96–7. 15 Focillon, Life of Forms, 141, 155–6. 16 “The Storyteller”, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 90.

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For Benjamin, all individual works of art are original, and none can be translated into another: “A major work will either establish the genre or abolish it; and the perfect work will do both”: There takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history. Origin is not, therefore, discovered by the examination of actual findings, but it is related to their history and their subsequent development.17

Hence Benjamin’s attraction to Leibniz’s monadology – the idea is a monad, with past and future concealed in its form, bringing “an indistinct abbreviation of the rest of the world of ideas”.18 The critic’s purpose is to feel this: If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a burning funeral pyre, then the commentator stands before it like a chemist, the critic like an alchemist. Whereas, for the former, wood and ash remain the sole objects of his analysis, for the latter only the flame itself preserves an enigma: that of what is alive. Thus, the critic inquires into the truth, whose living flame continues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been experienced.19

Benjamin keys into the way artworks are their nascence, or their possible worlds: the greater such future-harking possibility, the more truly original, and the more the work demands our returning attention.20 The history of the work is a process of it coming true – which means recognition of that which is already there. The purpose of criticism isn’t to recover histories that precede, explain, or supersede the action of the artwork. Rather, our “experiment” is the more true the more it hears the thinking of the object: [O]bservation fixes in its view only the self-knowledge nascent in the object; or rather it, the observation, is the nascent consciousness of the object itself.21

18 Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, 44. Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, 45–7. Benjamin, “The Storyteller”, 298. 20 Theodor Adorno often writes similarly: “By emphatically separating themselves from the empirical world, their other, [artworks] bear witness that that world itself should be other than it is; they are the unconscious schemata of that world’s transformation.” Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 233. Also see Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 54–61. 21 Walter Benjamin, “Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism”, Selected Writings 1913–1926, Volume I (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 148. 17 19

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Better to allow the motions and structures of plays to inspire and inform our own motions and structures; better to give more credit to the novel possibilities of imagination and form, and of the play-asevent.22 Certainly this is the case with any artwork that lasts, and especially those that seem to rise again, as though seen for the first time (which happens even with Shakespeare, as we find with once unpopular plays like All’s Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure). There are levels of truth, distinguishable according to prophetic or promissory capability. Things become historical by being recognised; the past comes to life only in its future, so history is marked by sudden, uneven, accordion-like compressions of temporally distant events. The work of twentieth-century German historiographer Reinhart Koselleck is instructive: That which makes a history into the historical cannot be derived from the sources alone: a theory of possible history is required so that the sources might be brought to speak at all.23 Every event produces more and at the same time less than is contained in its pregiven elements: hence its permanently surprising novelty.24

Koselleck identifies three modes of temporal experience: 1. The irreversibility of events, before and after, in their various processual contexts. 2. The repeatability of events, whether in the form of an imputed identity of events, the return of constellations, or figurative or typological ordering of events. 3. The contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous . . . Within this temporal refraction is contained a diversity of temporal strata which are of varying 22 Bruno Latour: “[A]n experiment is an event. No event can be accounted for by a list of the elements that entered the situation before its conclusion, before Pasteur launched his experiment, before the yeast started to trigger the fermentation, before the meeting of the Academy. If such a list were made, the actors on it would not be endowed with the competence that they will acquire in the event . . . This is precisely why an experiment is an event and not a discovery, not an uncovering, not an imposition, not a synthetic a priori judgment, not the actualization of a potentiality . . . because actors gain in their definitions through this event, through the very trials of the experiment.” Pandora’s Hope, 126. 23 Reinhart Koselleck, “Perspective and Temporality: A Contribution to the Historiograpical Exposure of the Historical World”, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 151. 24 Koselleck, “Representation, Events, Structure”, Futures Past, 110.

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duration, according to the agents or circumstances, in question, and which are to be measured against each other . . . They refer to the prognostic structure of historical time, for each prognosis anticipates events which are certainly rooted in the present and in this respect are already existent, although they have not actually occurred.25

History does not operate only as visible physical laws seem to (Hume’s strictures against inferred causal relations are worth keeping in mind) such that one visible cause always precedes one visible effect. The life of ideas, of artworks, of love or faith, of people or nations – or almost anything worth recovering – is precisely not measurable in these gross, physical, positivistic ways. After all, how many contexts make a context? How do we judge similarity? We see two churches with similar spires and similar windows, in similar villages, and we are likely to think they bear similar histories. The assumption is absurd, even insolent, as soon as we remember the irrecoverable lives and moments that have happened inside each, and remember that history gets truer and truer, more particular and more vivid, the less visible it is to the synoptic eye. It isn’t that such correlations are necessarily misguided: only that there is always more. The closer we look the more we will see differences from the presumed analogy, see movement inside the named object, such that it ceases to be single at all and instead is seen to be made up of all sorts of particles, each a potential source of life, and each of which might itself divide and reveal still more. The corpus of history can seem simple and self-evident – even if we don’t know the details we know what it is and where to find it. But these things are always in a process of change, just as concepts of time are. Take one simple instance, of someone who believes in Edenic creation and Christian revelation. How does history work for such a person? In one sense, it might seem to work simply doubly. There is secular time and eternal time, and we can never quite know how they map onto or intervene in one another. The same person might believe in the immanent presence of history’s decisive events, in particular the crucifixion, resurrection, and revelation. Past and future are in some very real senses now. Equally, this

25

“History, Histories, and Formal Time Structures”, Futures Past, 95.

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same person might accept the biblical dating for scriptural events. The world is a measurable number of years old, and revelation will happen at a knowable date in the future. The event which will make us, and make sense of everything that has been or will be done, is drawing closer. So the events in this world are indeed in some ways moving along the self-same tracks as the city of God. History is possibility, it is then, now, and to come, and everything will continue to change, including all past and future possibility, until the time of change is over. As the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has it, “as a result of the figural relation, every individual story . . . becomes a commemorated past, a prefigured future, and a mysterious present”.26 Much the same temporal confluence is at work in any life and any imaginative narrative, regardless of religious belief. It isn’t clear how history, as a lived and living thing, can be apprehended without a duly to-and-fro, always-incipient understanding of duration. The past we choose to find has to be a tiny fraction of the infinite fractions available. How to know what was actually making things move? Clearly the circles are ever-widening. Geological time is one thing: rocks change very slowly. Plant life is much quicker. The life of a thought might be less than a splitsecond. The thought might find words, which take considerably longer to speak. The words are listened to, and as they are listened to uncountable numbers of thoughts might be coming and gone in the minds of those who listen. These thoughts may each take a split-second, but reach in their content over who knows what stretches of time and space. When we consider that a play is made up in large measure by these events, dizzyingly multiplied, then it becomes a hazardous thing, perhaps ludicrous, to try to demarcate the events’ place and time. In the humanities we mainly still roll along in an unexamined everyman’s anaesthesium, where everything has the approximateness of what seems probable, attested, observably the case – as though law, or journalism, two discourses that depend for their social plausibility on agreed precedent and shared grammar, really do accurately speak the world. But law does not describe human behaviour, any more than newspaper 26 Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 125.

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articles are adequate to the events they report. The humanities tend to fudge together, as method, an approximate mixture of empiricism (without really attending to the senses, and their variety, and their unreliability) and rationalism (without really thinking rationally, because that would require that we (a) place our common-sense observations under erasure, and (b) follow trains of logical thought that take us far beyond the evident proof). We need to be more aware of our own pre-empting narratives, and perhaps to distrust the academy’s – education’s – rage for coherent information. Life is very incoherent. It is often scruffy and abrupt, always unfinished, if not in body then in memories and traces. But in scholarship we often massage disparate things together, tidying and combining, making any stray matter serve the chosen relevance. We should put away our dustpan and brush, and allow the matter’s mutations.27 Artworks frequently embarrass positivistic notions of cause and context. Art is imperative, optative, subjunctive: it urges things, wishes things, imagines things. It is invariably, in some basic way, out of time, such that the very notion of a present and indicative environment is dubious. As Wittgenstein assays (in tentative answer to his bafflement at Shakespeare’s aberrance): Can I say that drama has its own time which is not a segment of historical time. i.e. I can speak of earlier and later within it but there is no sense to the question whether the events in it took place, say, before or after Caesar’s death.28

Certainly Shakespeare’s plays – unlike, say, many of Jonson’s – are never broadly continuous with the world offstage.29 Schiller writes of the necessary present tense of all drama, in that the event of the play can only 27 Norman Rabkin: “all intellection is reductive, and . . . the closer an intellectual system comes to full internal consistency and universality of application – as with Newtonian mechanics – the more obvious become the exclusiveness of its preoccupations and the limitations of its value . . . The eddying signals communicated by a play arouse a total and complex involvement of our intellect, our moral sensibility, our need to complete incomplete patterns and answer questions, our longing to judge, and that involvement is so incessantly in motion that to pin it down to a ‘meaning’ is to negate its very essence”: Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning, 20, 22–23. 28 Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 13e. 29 On Jonson see Sean McEvoy, “Hieronimo’s Old Cloak: Theatricality and Representation in Ben Jonson’s Middle Comedies”, Ben Jonson Journal, 11 (2004), 67–87.

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happen now, in the moment shared by actors and audience: “All narrative forms make of the present something past; all dramatic form makes of the past a present.”30 But at every level Shakespeare’s playworlds embody anachrony, spatial slipperiness, placial coincidence: they mix historical times, geographical places, political institutions, ideologies, technologies.31 Characters live at different speeds or place-times; scenes too, as some events dilate, others accelerate, others repeat; figures (both tropes and characters) step out of consecution and occupy their own gravitational field, or they are suspended, as though in abeyance, while action goes on around or without them. Histories are written from after their conclusion, looking at once backward and forward, or they chop or superimpose different temporal apprehensions – evental, emotional, psychological, telepathic, providential, national, prophetic, eschatological. In play after play secular continuity is interrupted by visitants from some other world, parallel, spectral, from the past or from the future, metaphysically perhaps coordinate with the temporal world but their provenance and purpose inscrutable, such that we (and the characters they visit) cannot know where they are from or where they are going, in time or in place. Shakespeare’s ghosts, witches, even his mime shows, become agents or consequences of layered, fractured, irruptive history.32 We can never know exactly what is coming – the more complex the system or involved the parties the more so. It is only once it has come that

30 Friedrich Schiller, “On the Tragic Art” (1792), Essays Aesthetical and Philosophical (London: George Bell, 1875), 356. Also see Martin Meisel, How Plays Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. ch. 6. 31 The figure that most obviously approximates anachronism is hysteron proteron, or the “preposterous” (Puttenham’s coinage) meaning to put what comes after first. Patricia Parker in particular has identified the ubiquity of this figure in Shakespeare and others, especially in Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Routledge, 1988). 32 Nagel and Wood: “To perceive an artefact in substitutional terms was to understand it as belonging to more than one historical moment simultaneously. The artefact was connected to its unknowable point of origin by an unreconstructable chain of replicas. That chain could not be perceived; its links did not diminish in stature as they receded into the depths of time. Rather, the chain created an instant and ideally effective link to an authoritative source and an instant identity for the artefact . . . The dominant metaphor is that of the impress or the cast, allowing for repetition without difference, even across heterogeneous objects and materials . . . The image bent the linear sequence of events back upon itself, as if exerting a pull on time. This was a psychological fact that followed from the capacity of the figure to embody materially its own signified”: Anachronic Renaissance, 30, 33.

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we identify a cause of it. Of course, we might say that this is not true of artworks, and least of all narrative art, precisely because the beauty of a story is that it can be scripted, each bit of it plotted, every connection apprehended, with no possibility of accident or chance in the final design (however much serendipity or surprise formed part of the scripting). Every surprise can be superintended in the process of revision; every accident is intended.33 However, the fact that subsequence is known – by the writer, often by the reader or spectator as well – does nothing to make chronology the arbiter of meaning, or successiveness the “real” meaningful order in which things happen. A story distils how the meaning of an event has to wait for its realisation: plots are laid, prolepses set in motion, characters are blind to their own or to others’ motives. The fact that so many tales hinge upon secrets, suspense, and mystery is merely the most obvious way in which stories wait upon their own self-resolving history. We may well read or hear things one after another, but this can never prevent all sorts of imaginative divagations, recursions, diagonals, as we think back and across and make whatever connections come to mind. We can start at the end and go backwards, enter halfway through and skip as we wish; a play is premised on the hope of repeat performances; old plays were repeatedly performed alongside new ones; the First Folio’s most powerful injunction was for purchasers to “read him, therefore, and again, and again”. Past times mingle with present experiences, all the while expecting old things to come again, and yet be new. In such contexts an appeal to “chronology” is, at best, belated. Playworlds have their own rules and physics, and do all kinds of violence to time and space as habitually experienced. For one thing they force us to see relational structures that we usually take for granted. They de-nature space, through radical semiotic attenuation; they contract things at will, make invisibilities visible; they magnify particularities by the simple fact of choosing specific actions, which thereby become exemplary, and neglecting 33 Compare Jorge Luis Borges (writing in the persona of a demonically civilised Nazi): “[E]verything which can happen to a man, from the instant of his birth until his death, has been preordained by him. Thus, every negligence is deliberate, every chance encounter an appointment, every humiliation a penitence, every failure a mysterious victory, every death a suicide. There is no more skilful consolation than the idea that we have chosen our own misfortunes; this individual teleology reveals a secret order and prodigiously confounds us with the divinity.” “Deutsches Requiem”, Labyrinths (London: Penguin, 1970), 175.

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others, which thereby disappear, as they never quite can in life. Mimesis demands change: it enacts and argues for transformation. A play, then, is less taken with re-presenting what can be witnessed outside the magic box than with pushing, often with the most thrilling peremptory briskness, backward or forward from this presentness: into causes, into consequences. And of course a play is written for future presents – or at least any play that is still worth bothering with centuries after its first composition. It necessarily generates what Kierkegaard called a “forward repetition”: its passionate appropriation by others, so that iteration is subjective possession and spiritual transformation.34 Such afterlives are hard to track and impossible to programme. But the fact of them is never separate from a potential inhering in the source; they are not impositions of wilful posterity. In other words, future possibilities depend upon realising (in various senses) what is already present. Anachronism is absolutely necessary if a work is to live beyond its moment. But some anachronisms are better than others, and the best of all, I think, find the anachronies already lurking in the source. The historical is the possible.

34 See especially Repetition: Repetition/Fear and Trembling, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

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A basic premise of this book is that possibility is Shakespeare’s actuality, even his world’s necessity. Clearly this is to question ancient and common-sense distinctions between these conditions. If all life in playworlds is virtual, then it follows that traditional existential hierarchies cannot quite apply. Furthermore, if distinctions between possible and actual are in doubt, then so too must be putative differences between the virtual, or hypothetical, or fictional. All of these, I want to suggest, are bound up in the category of possible. This is Shakespearean reality, Shakespearean history: philosophical taxonomies are a necessary casualty of a formactive creation. The ontology of playworlds is not the same as what we take to be daily life; nor is its basic modality. It is not the same as what we take to be historical truth. A playworld is irreal: it is a string of ifs, attended by wishes and fears, contingent upon interpretation. In a playworld, subjunction is. But this is much more interesting than the idea that a fiction is a pretend-world. It isn’t a uniform, downloaded block, some wedge of fancy to appraise as-though real. This supposes a far too static idea of the real, but also of the playworld as a pretend-reality. It is more like irreality is the predicative condition of these playworlds. They are made of formactions, as their basic material and substance, and this means that every moment involves a potential negotiation with the fact of irreality. Action isn’t secured in a place or a time, unless someone says so; but then if such security depends upon saying, it might instantly be unsaid. How deep into earth are the tendrils of any claim-of-being in a playworld? No deeper, I think, than the formactions that produce the claim: formactions that always come from and move to other places than the one they first seem to be in. 160

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What is more, a formal economy such as Shakespeare’s means that each instant, each expressive unit, remains definitively unfinished. Every last unit of speech lurks immanently in every single moment of the play, liable to be sparked into connection at any point. Words are not trapped in the action of their utterance, as though each word is an indivisible atom, cast upon the void. Each substantial word or phrase is animate with connections and confluences, which in turn move forwards and backwards into further relations; they supplement or modify what has been, and can be supplemented and modified in their turn, both by what has been and what is yet to come. We thus have to allow words both an achieved and a potential energy. They can be understood as still active in a kind of battle as to what they might mean, or waiting to be newly discharged into commission. Meanings can come true unevenly, quite outside punctual succession – which comes to seem a paltry way of measuring events, static and fossilising. Things arrive, are even born, as though for the first time, in repeat performances or private readings. This means, in the most basic sense, that the history in the language is, from its very conception, anachronous, overlaying or latent with different times, events, possibilities: Warwick. There is a Historie in all mens Lives, Figuring the nature of the Times deceas’d The which observ’d, a man may prophecie With a neere ayme, of the maine chance of things, As yet not come to Life, which in their Seedes And weake beginnings lye entreasured: Such things become the Hatch and Brood of Time; And by the necessarie forme of this, King Richard might create a perfect guesse, That great Northumberland, then false to him, Would of that Seed, grow to a greater falsenesse, Which should not finde a ground to roote upon, Unless on you. King Henry. Are these things then Necessities? (2 Henry IV, 1498–1511)

Shakespeare’s sense of history breeds upon the paradoxes in this exchange. A man’s life “figures” the nature of times “deceased”: in some ineluctable sense we are always ghosts, moved by and into buried events. History’s uncanniness must be divined through figuration, which charges dead things with prophetic volatility. But the hermeneutic act (figuring the “figuring”)

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can do no more than aim at the “main chance of things”: prophecy may miss its aim, or its “chance”. These chances are possible lives, deep-lying “seeds” which may or may not “hatch” (the seeds now eggs) into a “brood” (of chicks). History is no rolling continuum; it imports intervention and struggle. So, the possibility of life depends upon ingenious plots (one meaning of “hatch”) and studied meditation (one meaning of “brood”). But then a further twist: such multiply-contingent mediations issue in a “necessary form”, a necessity, presumably, of capability rather than inevitability. This necessity, however, “might create” merely a “perfect guess”, a perfect oxymoron for the necessary possibles at work: “perfect” implies completion, whereas a “guess” always waits upon futures; perfect is finished and flawless, a guess approximate and haphazard (this speech everywhere anticipates Macbeth, the man who would be “perfect”, as does Henry’s earlier wish that “the Times” should make “the Continent . . . melt it selfe/ Into the Sea”, 1468–71). What is more, the “perfect guess” was never at the time hazarded; it only arrives by retrospection, which duly furnishes inevitability. This is history in the making: essentially an exercise in catching-up. But even if this seed is discerned, extracted from the treasury of chance, sown in earth, it still requires fertile “ground to root upon”. Without it the seed will lie fallow, or be blown harmlessly into the all-forgetting sea. All of these accreting inevitabilities, and still time may not be ripe! Once we press gently on the speech’s self-undoing logic, it becomes a wonder that anything happens, ever. For as much as Warwick wants to speak for predictable repetitions, for a history open to be deciphered, each rhetorical synapse in fact breeds with warring agents and vulnerable issues and the contingencies of occasion. The theme seems to be prediction, but the modality is repeatedly one of qualification, or of negative plausibility: the Times deceased, may prophecie, a neere ayme, the maine chance, yet not come, weake beginnings, hatch and brood, might create, perfect guesse, false to him, greater falsenesse, shoulde not finde, unlesse on you. The clauses accumulate, rendering certainty dubious and eventuality a thing of whispers, ghosts, subjunctions, such that the visible world can only ever be the tiniest fraction of the possible lines of becoming, murmuring subterraneously. As Henry himself had it a moment earlier, “how Chances mocks/And Changes fill the Cuppe of Alteration/With divers Liquors” (1473–5). And yet such mocks and changes are indeed necessity.

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In Shakespeare even apparently straightforward scenes of fact-reportage, narrating seemingly incontrovertible public events, are often layered and fractured and interrupted, such that history becomes a symptom of constitutionally a-linear materials.1 The opening scene of I Henry IV is characteristic. Its purpose seems simple enough – to set the scene in terms of imminent conflicts; to fill the audience in on what has happened, as it were, since Richard II finished. The first scene, then, might be understood as a kind of historical summary, an abstract of things pertinent. A plot scenario might have read something like this: Henry to Lords and counsellors; announces end to civil broils, vows to go on crusade to the Holy Land; Westmoreland to King, tells of renewed troubles in Wales and the North, where Harry Percy refuses to hand his prisoners to the King; crusade postponed.

This reports the facts, and adequately serves the basic scenic movement. But it is not in truth what the scene presents. The king begins: So shaken as we are, so wan with care, Finde we a time for frighted Peace to pant, And breath shortwinded accents of new broils To be commenc’d in Stronds a-farre remote.

(TLN 1–4)

Nothing here is as crisply informative as we might expect. The first uncertainty is the subject. Is the king the “we”? Or the nation for whom he speaks? Or perhaps it specifically references all those assembled, the Lords of a shaken realm? The ambiguity is clearly purposeful – whether this man can truly be sovereign, and by that truly embody his nation, is a chief subject of the wars past and to come. Likewise whether noble cabals, forever buffed and stirred by emotion, should be the weathervanes of England. The second line seems to hinge on a further ellipsis, concerning the basic modality of whatever action is at issue. “Finde we a time . . .”: does he mean can we find a time, or we must find a time, or we have found a time? And if the latter, does he mean that this time is now, as he is speaking? Or that he has found such a time, which he is reporting, or which he has 1 Emrys Jones notes the “unnaturalistic mimetic nature of Shakespeare’s drama”, involving a doubled conception of time: a closely articulated, highly pressured plot sequence, with event after event in close causal connection; and an immanent sense that the action is happening over a much longer time than is consistent with the apparent markers of duration (tonight, tomorrow, etc.): Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 43, 49.

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witnessed or stumbled upon as though from the outside (this man who is never at home in his kingdom): but a time that is already beleaguered or even lost because of the state of “fright”? The ellipsis thus further ambiguates Henry’s possession of agency. It is unclear how much he and his nation are as one, or how much his land is “frighted” beyond his power to share or even feel. If the king is outside his nation, observing his people’s fear, then his authority is riven, and his use of the royal “we” merely nominal; if he is the one “frighted”, then he can barely collect himself to “pant” the necessary words of “Peace”, which are confuted in the act of being uttered with such breathless agitation. Either way, authority staggers. Henry perhaps wishes to claim a perch above the fray, or at least resilience amid assault, such that he can be separate from the prevailing exhaustion and look beyond to more thrilling visions. But this presumption is confounded by Shakespeare’s anti-rhetorical grammar. So, one grammatical unit seems simple enough: “find we a time for frighted Peace to pant”. Peace is panting, because the running for dear life has for a moment ceased, everyone is catching their breath, and as a result he can now “breath[e]” of new excitements. But the prosody is double. The thought does not end with the line, any more than the clause does. It continues over the line by means of the hendiadys: “for frighted Peace to pant and breath shortwinded accents of new broils”. The verbs express both a style of speaking, and a condition of breathlessness. In turn, breathlessness connotes both the struggle to enunciate forcibly (already apt enough for the Henry-role) and undesisting toil and endurance. In other words, the peace is already overtaken; it hardly stopped to take breath before it was off again, running from and towards danger. The presumption of a recess is a rhetorical sleight, over-run by the verse’s coterminous subjection to something other than the speaker’s will, or his understanding of occasion. Shakespeare’s chosen form (verse drama; speech in lines of roughly equal length) threatens political and illocutionary decorum. The formaction prehends political possibility.2

2 David Womersley, Divinity and State (chs 10 and 11) concludes thus of Shakespeare’s experiments in shaping dramatic form to embody historical time and process: “In the process, the nature of the play itself was transformed. From being a literary receptacle for pre-existing

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Sentences attempt one meaning; lines imply another. So, whereas line 2 is semi-subverted by its enjambment into line 3, line 4 is semi-subverted by the discrete meaning of line 3: “And breath shortwinded accents of new broils”. These broils are not ahead in some distant land. We haven’t yet reached those “Stronds a-farre remote”. Henry hasn’t; the crusaders haven’t; and the verse hasn’t. These broils are exactly now: the selfsufficient modality of the single line rushes events into what Henry claims, or pretends, has not yet happened: new wars, today, for the same people who have been enduring old wars. The effect of this is that the “a-farre remote” lands are already pre-empted, shrunk to the forms and places already at hand, brought violently and enclosedly home. Shakespeare is already anticipating both the rest of the play and the enormous failure of Henry’s missions: Jerusalem will never be found beyond his own house. The overlayering, inter-vertebral structure of formactions models the play’s basic take on history. But something still more foundational is subverting the king’s attempt to set the plot in motion: the fact that we have been exactly here before. The same character, the same actor, grim-faced and over-burdened, surrounded by Lords, announcing “a voyage” to far-off lands: so Richard II ended, not so many months past, and here is the sequel, taking up exactly where the former left off. Henry hasn’t gone anywhere: which means he still won’t go anywhere, whatever the apparent resolve. The fact of a sequel doesn’t so much move the story on as animate the otherwise empty interim separating the two works. So, out in the country there is “intestine” war; back at court, there is guilt, stasis, the impotent witnessing of atrocity. And as we already know, the interim extends. There is thus an immense pre-empting irony, a tired sigh, attending the king’s vow to chase away pagans in holy fields. It cannot happen, because already it has not. This is true because Henry never had the resources (personal or financial) to take on such a mission. But also because he never did it: as everyone watching the play in 1596 knew, Henry IV was no crusader. All Shakespeare has to do is give to each formaction its own take on possibility, each one a mini-world of historical conation. Puns, thought, the play became itself a mode of political cognition” (298). Shakespeare develops a “subtly heterodox political reflection” in which loyalty to monarchy is not a given, but may be a reasoned decision (Bastard in King John) or refused (Richard II, 1 & 2 Henry IV).

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metaphor, grammar, each instant has a claim at definition; so too the line as a discrete unit; so too the spectral presence of a recent play, and a previous part of the Henry-actor. And as so often in Shakespeare, the latent formactions are ahead of the game; they see things before their apparent rhetorical masters; they have prophetic capability; they may even come true beyond the play. The scene goes on to make this fact come true, over and again, with an almost sardonic remorselessness, as the apprehension of history given to the latent or ghostly formactions becomes visibly manifest. First Henry admits his own baffling paralysis. His resolve to go, he tells us after he has made it, is already twelve months old: it is useless saying he will go as he has no money for the exercise: unless, perchance, his Council spoke about it “yesternight” . . .? They spoke, comes the answer, but the discussion was instantly overtaken by news: a thousand good men have just now been butchered in Wales, their corpses obscenely desecrated. “It seems then”, responds the king, we must “brake off our businesse for the Holy land” (51–2). If this sounds a perfunctory abdication of purpose, even a wan sigh of relief, then it is because the resolve was never in truth possible. Typically, though, Shakespeare doesn’t stop. It is not obvious why. Henry has already given over his apparent purpose. With war rampant and the Holy Land lost, his entire opening speech is at best redundant. But now he begins to hear just how wrong: Westmorland. [M]y gracious Lord, Farre more uneven and unwelcome Newes Came from the North, and thus it did report: On Holy-Roode day, the gallant Hotspurre there, Young Harry Percy, and brave Archibald, That ever-valiant and approved Scot, At Holmeden met, where they did spend A sad and bloody houre: As by discharge of their Artillerie, And shape of likely-hood the newes was told: For he that brought them, in the very heate And pride of their contention, did take horse, Uncertain of the issue any way.

(53–65)

The speech evokes events over-running purposes, the swirl and contingency of unfinished history, outcomes suspended in doubt. The king’s

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exordium has already warned us how treacherous dramatic diegesis can be, warped by private passion or special pleading or rhetorical purpose. Westmorland’s “report” is even more frankly inadequate: his messenger has run away, in fright or on instruction, the battle still in abeyance. But things are always in abeyance; possibility will breed: it is a basic principle of Shakespearean “history”. Crucial to this is that Shakespeare doesn’t really work chronologically (as his telescoping of events and lives suggests, witnessed over and over in this first scene’s conflation of discrete battles, councillors, and rebels). A fight is interrupted – and there we leave it, the opposites poised against each other, freeze-framed, numerous counterfactuals incipient. Events don’t roll out like carpets; they are cut and folded; they cut and unfold. But this doesn’t mean that events are untried improvisations, the spinning-out of happenstance, like some broken machine flinging its parts to the four quarters. Henry’s first speech clearly frames present dilemmas in a providential context: England the chosen nation, doing God’s business, preparing the way for the prayedfor messianic return, each babe from “their Mothers wombe” inspired and measured by Christ’s example: Forthwith a power of English shall we levie, Whose armes were moulded in their Mothers wombe, To chace these Pagans in those holy Fields, Over whose Acres walk’d those blessed feete Which fourteen hundred yeares ago were nail’d For our advantage on the bitter Crosse

(26–31)

The crucial thing to notice is the inter-penetration of times, places, and parties, at once telepathically joined and moving at radically different speeds. The unborn babies gestate slowly in the womb, imbrued with apocalyptic purpose. Their slow, determinate evolution is waiting for the day when they might suddenly accelerate, and “chace” the heathens across holy fields. The day may never arrive, but the thought, of impending or promised acceleration into purpose, is of the essence: the whole of the play awaits such a joining. Shifts in speed accompany shifts in space. So, subtle variations in noun phrase allow the “a-farre remote” place to seem at first incommensurably distant – “As farre as to the Sepulcher of Christ” – and then miraculously, almost swooningly, near at hand – “in those holy Fields” (TLN 23). The decisive touch is “Fields”: not a holy land,

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but fields, with familiar grass just waiting to be stepped upon. Henry is virtually there, at the place where pastoral, the longed-for host of unbruised “Flowrets”, found its ideal; he can measure the very plot of it (“Over whose acres”), trace the path of those feet that made the place “blessed”. Fourteen hundred years contract in a jiffy; for a rhapsodic moment Henry achieves the dream. But the mere mention of the centuries at once re-establishes the gap in time; with the gap the violence of severance and the deferral of return; and so a violence that returns once more to the unfinishable imperatives of now, and to a man and a king, strung between the individual and the collective, redeeming neither: “nail’d/For our advantage on the bitter Crosse” (TLN 30–1). Shakespeare keys into the alarmingly expectant logic of this Christian historicity: in the logic of typology any act can bear an umbilical relation to the cause; each scene that is played can potentially re-stage and repair the original Golgotha. The logic is fractal: hence Shakespeare’s intra-scenic scenography, the inset animations which help to give such recessive layers to the action. The invocation of the Holy Land isn’t done only for satiric or deflationary purposes. Everything that happens in the play – as always in Shakespeare, the world we enter is lapsed from divine or messianic presence – happens as an evasion, or a necessarily disappointing emulation, of this “a-farre remote” action. Of course, it sets up the king’s particular tragedy, the stain that will not be cleansed. But this is also a genuine aspect of the playworld’s historicity. As many as 1,400 years ago, for our advantage, those blessed feet were nailed to the cross. It is the original stain and accusation, the responsibility which no one can adequately assume, the debt no one can pay. It literally frames Henry’s life-story: hence Pistol’s confirmation to Falstaff at the end of Part 2: FAL.

What, is the old king dead? As naile in doore. The things I speake, are just.

PIST.

(TLN 3145–7)

But this final nail cannot drive out the first one: the play forever awaits the re-commission of truly “blessed feete”.3 3 For a sustained argument stressing Hal as a successful hero of Reformation, see Michael Davies, “Falstaff’s Lateness: Calvinism and the Protestant Hero in Henry IV”, RES 56 (2005), 351–78.

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This is why the immediately narrated battle in the North happens “On Holy-Roode day”: the day that remembers Christ’s cross, and more particularly its removal from Calvary, its subsequent rediscovery, and its virtual travel into futures. The fight between Hotspur and Archibald, then, is a miniature re-staging and pre-emptive stealing of the great retarded “purpose” of Henry’s oration. This speaks in part to Henry’s belatedness, even redundancy; equally, it speaks to the temporal frameswithin-frames in which Shakespeare is already distributing the action. There are numerous purposes and motives at hand, but this one alone – the idea of crusade, righteous battle, redemption of the multitude through a single man’s passion – has already been staggered and fractured into numerous imperfect instantiations, each with its own specific temporality: the nostalgia for Calvary, fourteen hundred years ago; the memory of Richard II, “twelve month old”, and the consequent knowledge of stalled purpose; the king’s resolve, first debated “yesternight”, then deferred, and then trumped by a “contention” in the North, already under way on Holy Cross Day. As much as this battle in the North is a fractal enacting of the unfinishable holy cause (equally holy on both sides, no doubt) it is also its own thing, a fight for land or boasting rights which will not, it is already plain, satisfy typological hopes, but will instead be resolved according to much the same emotions and delusions as already, 50 lines into the play, we can see shaping history. But Shakespeare has a further surprise in store – one which seems to subvert everything we have been told by both Henry and Westmorland, indeed subvert his own energetic narration. That is, Henry already knows that the battle in the North is over and done. The breathless diegesis we have just heard, captured in media res, made urgent by narrative aposiopesis, is itself out of time, as belated as Henry’s was before that. The issue is not uncertain at all. Ten thousand Scots lie “balked” (stopped/piled up) in their own blood – apparently “smooth and welcome newes”. Prisoners – the Earls of Fife, Atholl, Murry, Argus, Menteith – have been captured: “is not this an honourable spoyle?” Henry luxuriates in their names, and then embarks upon a wistful apostrophe to the victorious Percy, whom Henry wishes might yet be his true changeling boy, swapped at birth by “some Night-tripping-Faiery” for the degenerate child he is cursed to call his own. More myths are thus added to the melting-pot, each of them a

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variation upon the Christ-story already in play: the prince and the pauper; the prodigal son; the child transfigured in the cradle. If this is history, it has a curiously romantic strain, with everything hinging upon serendipitous returns. But still Shakespeare has not finished: he is setting up yet another deflation, another deferral, another layer of un/finished action. For this prodigy of the North is also proud. He will in fact not release his prisoners to the king, the same noble names which the king tolled like bells of joy a moment earlier. His actual son dishonours him, but so does his longed-for son. The king has sent for Percy to answer this neglect: already sent for, before any of this news was delivered in the play, before the king made his grand announcements of civil war’s end and crusade. It is thus Hotspur’s disobedience, and nothing else, that causes the postponement of crusade. This isn’t, of course, true. As we have seen, postponement is so overdetermined as to make the very idea of leaving for the Holy Land a sort of sarcasm. But this reason is as good as the next; if not necessarily true, it is plausible enough for the record; it gets the king and lords offstage, a necessary appointment pending (“on Wednesday next . . .”); they are in charge. What is Shakespeare up to? At a push we might conclude that Henry has been teasing with his audience all along, and that the “trenching Warre” which has ended is not old civil wars, but these new broils in northern counties; we might infer that this will be a historical romance, like Locrine, with the good king its wistful narrative angel. As the Variorum editor assures us, “It seems practically certain that he does know of Glendower’s victory, and that throughout the scene he is playing the part of innocent ignorance.”4 “It seems practically certain . . .” Such rationalising is clearly a stretch too far, not least because it requires the opportunistic appeal to either psychology or accident, and the retrospective erasing of the scene’s most basic sentiments and passions: It is unlikely . . . that the king, at the beginning of the scene, was ignorant of the disturbing news from Wales which had interrupted the meeting of his council on the

4 A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Henry the Fourth Part I, ed., Samuel Burdett Hemingway (Philadelphia and London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1936), 23.

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previous night and which had “broken off his business for the Holy Land”. His opening speech is, therefore, insincere; he allows Westmoreland to be the bearer of ill news; he reserves for himself the role of introducer of the bearer of good tidings; and in the excitement which follows, over the further problems arising from Hotspur’s victory, the plans for a crusade are forgotten.5

What such explanations really amount to is a convenient fobbing-off of the script’s strangeness. The recent Cambridge editors are less flagrant in their casting around for coherent explanations (“A sense of urgency created by rapid reassessments may be more important than the clarity of the King’s motivation”), but still the appeal is to vague mimetic gestures (“a sense of urgency”), which can forgive inconsistencies and the controlling cognition of the scene’s dominant speaker (“the King’s motivation”).6 We need a different model of events than these, one that doesn’t shy away from what Shakespeare actually does, as though he was careless or rushed in writing his play’s very first scene. The key to the scene’s sense of history is superimposed narrative principles: at one level happening in a continuous timeframe, one of policy, wishful thinking, cross-purposes, delayed revelations, in which the staggered production of information is meant to mimic something like the urgency and vicissitudes of events; and at another level happening in frozen snapshots, scenic gobbets that are not so much superseded as hanging in the air, staying in play as memories and prolepses of the varying scenes of action, their modality in a strange limbo between indicative and subjunctive, optative and predictive, such that even if they are finished, they remain, and even if they are impossible, they may come true. And the key to this second mode is the substantial integrity of formactions. They don’t merely contribute to some blithe setting of scene and unfolding of plot. This is why Shakespeare allows a series of set-piece narrations – the end to civil war, the vow to crusade, the unfinished Northern battle, the straightness and loyalty of Percy – to first be spoken as though the action’s predicative cause, and then revoked as past or impossible or mistaken. The effect is that not one of these events settles in

5

Variorum: Henry the Fourth, 16. The First Part of King Henry IV (Updated Edition), ed. Herbert Weil and Judith Weil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; repr. 2007), 87. 6

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a consecutional series; none of them fit to a plot, because each one, in terms of clear cause and consequence, is illogical or errant.7 But the effect of this manifest spuriousness is precisely not to assuage or resolve all that we have so far heard. Each intra-scenic set-piece (even the news of the Welsh atrocity, which the king greets so neutrally as to appear either anaesthetised or forewarned) is logically superfluous. But this fact produces the opposite of redundancy. It makes each of them a possible world. Each discrete formaction (the inset scene as one such) can be understood as an agonistic claimant to history, often serving the composite picture, or the ruling momentum, at the same time as they contradict or even combat it. Just as the discrete line can be part of a sentence and independent, a sub-scene can be part of a dialogue and an arrested moment in time: because it is not physically present it’s all the more impossible to wipe it from the record. H. Ax notes these discrepancies – not only Shakespeare’s numerous diversions from Holinshed, but those from the apparent logic of his own play: The king’s plan to go to Jerusalem presupposes an entirely appeased political situation . . . Therefore if his first speech is to be taken as sincere, the king must not know of Mortimer’s defeat nor of Hotspur’s victory. The victory was, indeed, an additional ground for undertaking the crusade; but the news of Hotspur’s denying the prisoners . . . was sufficient to annihilate the other plan . . . And he does not seem to have had any knowledge of the battle of Holmedon when Westmoreland ceases speaking . . . But he must have spoken already to Blunt . . . Then, on a sudden, he calls Hotspur proud (we find the transition from praise to blame very abrupt) . . . and finishes by saying that he has sent for him to answer this . . . Consequently the reason why the holy purpose to Jerusalem could not be performed was already existent in the king’s knowledge before he uttered his very first words, and these cease to appear any longer sincere. Linda Charnes distinguishes between calendar time and “affective time”: “for every chronicle there is a necessary antichronicle, for every reconstruction of calendrical events there is a condensation of signficant intensities that cannot be intercalated into the resulting narrative. This isn’t to say that ‘affective time’ achieves no representation. Rather, its representation is the specifically unwritten, undocumented, illegible . . . affective time seeks its representational truth in the non-narrativity of bodies.” “We Were Never Early Modern”, John J. Joughin, ed., Philosophical Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2000), 56. Charnes sees Hamlet as the paradigm of the anti-chronicle – and the Henriad as the model of chronicle history, modelling “a positive recursiveness” (58): “Richard II will retroactively be installed as Hal’s vanishing mediator, the mystifying element that will enable him to secure his own legitimacy . . .” (58). 7

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Nonetheless Ax concludes: These irregularities are far from injuring the beauty of the play . . . they cannot be discovered on the stage, they are only to be found by reading word by word, . . . and these dramas were not intended to be read.8

Again the rationalisation is inadequate, asking us to turn away from the evident eccentricity of the writing. And these effects can be experienced on the stage: first, in the fact that each sub-scene is imagined, given credence and eventuality; second, in the challenge this poses to interpretation, by actors as much as audiences. It is possible to try to smooth over the inconsistencies via the secondary revision of psychological inference – making Henry a tease, or a schemer, or a liar, or even a deluded melancholic. But even so, the fact of deeply interested history remains: of events not quite folding into each other, of jagged edges, cross-purposes, changed minds, jarring interpretations, contested narratives; of numerous moments crammed into one, or of disjuncts crushed and rolled into spurious continuity. This can translate, for mimetic or hermeneutic ease, into notions of “urgency” or “uncertainty”: but, much more profoundly, the disjuncts speak the structure of events. This is how the world happens. The consecution of Shakespeare’s playworlds – its laying-out of scenes, events, images, characters, indeed the hoariest generic patterns – is always structured typologically. Shakespeare’s allegory-rich forms, in which multiple images vibrate simultaneously, are in some ways closer to medieval “double-think” than they are to early modern rationalism or empiricism: In contrast to the Renaissance rhetoric of mastery, adequation, and intelligibility, the medieval image . . . presents an opacity, a disruption of the coded operations of the sign, a disjunctive openness by which the image is opened onto a dizzying series of figurative associations well beyond the logic of “simple reason”.9

In the context of history writing such as this, it should be clear how Shakespeare’s notorious anachronisms cannot be explained away as

8 Variorum I Henry IV, 23; quote originally in H. Ax, Relation of Shakespeare to Holinshed (Dissertation: Freiburg, 1912), 18. 9 Nagel and Wood, “A New Model of Renaissance Anachronism”, 411.

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mere expediency (to make a smoother, swifter play) or carelessness (because accuracy in such things is a matter of indifference). Instead, I think it speaks a genuine vision of how history works. He draws disparate events, places, and people together, so that what in punctual terms existed far apart become simultaneous, or newly coordinate. This isn’t, I think, because Shakespeare couldn’t understand chronological models, or the difference of one age from another. He isn’t primarily interested in these things. True to someone for whom metaphor is the key trope, he finds more life in resemblances than differences. What is more, to think in terms of rigorous historical or generic divisions is to assume that events arrive, exhaust their particularity, and end. But this isn’t how Shakespeare sees things. He understands history, just as he understands words, scenes, and characters, as things that come true unevenly, not all at once, and that are often defined by latent or unrecognised potential. This bears equally upon his understanding of motive, and more broadly of historical causation. In play after play he problematises the simple idea that intentions produce actions, or volition is consequent upon a process of rational cognition, or the cause of a particular event is clear and proximate. The proximate cause is just as likely to be an impulsive reflex or accident, a psychic explosion or obtuse negligence. Often events will be moved by some version of action at a distance, such as scenic rhymes, prophecy, or words coming telepathically true. And this isn’t just the whimsical architectonic of theatrical structures. It speaks a deep-hewn understanding of history, in which disparate events genuinely do join together in motivic force-fields. The policy of Henry is the most basic example: it isn’t defined only by immediate political or military exigencies; Christ is active in it right now, just as is the future Hal, just as are various other fables competing for prehension’s crown. But, as ever, it is the particular form that best embodies the action. Shakespeare doesn’t commit accidentally to such things as the attenuated line, halfway through the report of Percy and Archibald’s battle: A sad and bloody houre: (TLN 60)

It isn’t enough to invoke, as editors tend to do, the actor trying to catch breath, gasping because he has a lot to say, or because sentimentally one

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with the exhausted combatants. The crucial point is that the half-line is not finished by the line that follows (“As by discharge of their Artillerie”). It instead shifts in subject, thereby confirming the fact of an unspoken ellipsis. The half-line thus lapses into its own implications, produced by the words’ simple plaintiveness: a sad and bloody hour. Imagination will easily populate the gap – with dying men, savaged limbs, sorry waste. The image is in our safe-keeping; no one else quite owns it. But equally it is in the keeping of time to come. For the half-line – I want to say literally – also stops time. Not all time, of course, even as the pause leaves everyone hanging for the resumption. But it stops the particular time of this event. It has not finished. It matters not that Henry in his next speech pretends to trump the suspense with “smooth and welcome newes” of successful slaughter. His celebration of “Ten thousand bold Scots, two and twenty Knights,/Balk’d in their own blood” in fact barely answers to the “sad and bloody houre”. We don’t need to be modern pacifists to note the disparity in affect between Westmoreland’s terse accounting and Henry’s glamorous quantification. It is a powerful theme throughout this play and its successors: the fact that small men die for the glory of kings. Henry rakes the sands – of time and over bodies – far too “smooth”-ly. (Henry is always punctiliously separate from the multitude, who are measured solely by their devotion or usefulness to him.) This is what the lineation insists upon: the single formaction, yet again, generates its own forward and backward memory. The half-line begs completion, and the completion does not come. It isn’t in the king’s power to supply the gap. Henry speaks to the halfline’s bloodiness, certainly: but not to its sadness, and still less to the fact that so short a space can define so much. And it is in particular this brief gap in time – remember, in a temporal context that has already apprehended millennial expectations – that demands our closest attention. For this is what Shakespeare’s formactions are doing. Taking the vastest of spans, and honing in upon a tiny moment where just as much might be at stake. This “hour”, then, is the hour of battle, when one then another then another man fell in pain to his end. But it is also the “hour” of now, the hour of this very action, the play. The gap is in part supplied by Hotspur, whose very first speech curses the “popinjay” who seemed as decadently remote from death’s sadness as Henry proves himself here. But clearly this

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isn’t enough. It waits upon who knows what surrogate-action. The halfline wants the play. Hence, I think, the meta-dramatic implication of this attenuated line. If the half-line records one hour (“sad and bloody”), then the completed line requires one more hour, its specific attributes up for grabs. And after all, what else is the two-hour traffic of the stage? Two hours is a playworld – and a lifeline.

15

Anti-rhetoric

As the opening scene to I Henry IV powerfully suggests, Shakespeare defies customary understandings of what public speaking should do. This speaks to a view of language fundamentally at odds with most sixteenth-century rhetorical theory. Thomas Wilson’s The rule of reason, for example, argues for a logic in which words and being have a precisely coordinate structure: [S]earching where every worde is setteled, & knowing to which of al these most general words he may best referre it: he shal faithfully know the nature of all thynges, no man better . . . the Predicables, set forth the largenesse of words, the Predicamantes do name the verey nature of thynges, declaring (and that substantially) what they are in very deede.1

Wilson proceeds to list the ten “predicaments” which must be established if one is to know the “propre nature” of a word: substance, quantity, quality, relation, manner (action), suffering (passio), when, where, situs, and arraying or clothing (habitus). Words are here being considered as at once discrete substances, containing quasi-Aristotelian “accidents” like any others, and busy sites of social relations, epitomes of being in the world. George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesy continues in a similar line, albeit with less talk of consubstantial essence and more of vernacular elegance and trimness, as he places classical figures of speech in an immediately recognisable vernacular environment. Each trope or figure gets a nickname, sometimes an action, sometimes a person or vocation, such that rhetoric itself is buffed up in the familiar garb of an emergent community, by turns courtly, domestic, and mercantile. Certainly we are halfway to a

1 Thomas Wilson, The rule of reason, conteyning the arte of logique, set forth in Englishe (1552), Fol. 15.

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world in which any trope might be personified, if not as a recognisable character then as a socially responsive action. However, none of this is quite preparing for Shakespeare. Consider Wilson’s approach to ambiguity. He recognises that many words – crown, bear, sage – carry quite contrary meanings: A beare, signifieth a brute beast that is baited with dogges, & also signifieth the cophine where in a dead man is carried to his burial.2

But his answer to the fact of double meanings is to eradicate them: Those are only to be received and used, for the mayntenaunce of all truthe whose name, and nature is all one, or the which are ever more to be taken and understanden after one sorte.3

If you must use a word that can be construed two ways, make it very clear how it is being used, such that no ambiguity is in action. Of course Wilson regrets that the language abides such lazy, arbitrary homonyms. But the reason for his regret is profound: ambiguity is false to substance, to truth. Each word has a self-evident definition, because each thing in the world is perfectly self-defining. His etymology, and therein his ontology, serves a perfectly orthodox, predictable, iterative ideology – “A woman hath her name so geven her, because she bryngeth wo unto man.”4 There is certainly a weird potential in this, for words to gather almost talismanic properties. But in truth it is far distant from Shakespeare’s understanding of words (and of women). This isn’t a simple matter of Shakespeare embracing rather than decrying verbal “ambiguite”. Far more importantly, Shakespeare conceives of substance, of life, as repeatedly, involutedly doubled, flush with change and counter-change: and words, luckily or inevitably, have a coordinate structure. It is no surprise that Shakespeare exploits the very homonym that Wilson regrets – “But Beare-like I must fight the course” (Macbeth 2397). Macbeth here is at one and the same time the beast being menaced by dogs, the corpse (“course”) being borne to burial, the person doing this bearing, and the undead man fighting and surviving the death that is to come. The reality Shakespeare finds in words is rooted in this kind of active extemporary functional shift: the noun

2

Ibid., 16–17.

3

Ibid., 17.

4

Ibid., 28.

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becomes a verb, which in turn adds to the referents of the noun even as the word is becoming a verb. A word isn’t a counter for Shakespeare; it isn’t a sign; it doesn’t indicate or describe or constate an existent finished external thing: as contemporary French director Valère Novarina has it, “Speech does not name, it summons.”5 All Shakespeare’s functions are prone to shift. Even when his nouns are not also verbs they are always likely to become one, and move beyond any presumed object into a kind of subjecthood. Words can be metaphorised as stages, or subjects, or history: it doesn’t matter. The point is that they bear life: their physics suffers the world, and actively constitutes it. No one had written like this before. We couldn’t project forward from Wilson or Puttenham and get Shakespeare. This isn’t to deny Shakespeare’s indebtedness to rhetorical lore. Rhetoric is intimate to theatre, and not just because all actors were expert rhetoricians. Joseph Roach suggests that the entire theatrical exchange can be understood as an application of rhetorical sensibility: It constituted an entire system of analysis, composition, expression, persuasion, and audience psychology . . . [B]efore the orator can move men, he must know what kind of creatures they are – how they think and feel and why they act the way they do. One branch of rhetoric, therefore, consisted of the study of the Passions and Affections of men – terms defined spaciously enough in the 1600s to admit much of what we would term behavioural science.6

Rhetoric is here the crucial art that mediates – even emanates – the inner passions of characters, such that they take on outward form, shaping the actor’s voice and body, and in turn acting upon the receptive bodies of the spectators/auditors. Rhetoric is passionate action, and as such powerfully informs everything that Shakespeare writes. As numerous critics have shown, Shakespeare had the tried and trusted methods of Cicero, Quintilian, Erasmus, and so on at his fingertips.7 If he wanted to, he knew how to construct an argument through patterns of logic, copia, contrast, amplification, proof, and the rest. And it is easy to see how things like 5 “During Matter”, The Theater of the Ears, trans. and ed. Allen S. Weiss (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1996), 145. Compare Gabriel Harvey’s notion of poetic language as providing “iconosmi”, verbal icons. See Turner, English Renaissance Stage, 107. 6 The Player’s Passion, 28–9. 7 Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

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prosopopoeia, hyperbole, hendiadys, and metalepsis all contribute to Shakespeare’s generating of possibilities beyond what is simply present and given.8 Prosopopoeia (or personification) for example, is the most basic figure for creating someone from nothing, a kind of literally composed persona.9 But as much as Shakespeare draws upon such instruments, he is always exceeding them – and in exceeding them making them well-nigh unrecognisable. Brian Vickers closes In Defence of Rhetoric with an appendix listing about fifty classical rhetorical figures and tropes, and illustrating each with an example from Shakespeare. It is, in its own way, rather wonderful. But as much as each example is apt, it is also the case that not a single example can be limited to the figure or trope it is used to exemplify.10 Shakespeare seems to commit every vice in the rhetorical/grammatical book, time and again, mocking strict adherence to rules. What is more, Shakespeare’s self-conscious playing with rhetorical decorum and figuration reaches a height in the mid-1590s (with Richard II and Love’s Labour’s Lost). After that he goes his own way, and only rarely even avers to any such training in correct style. Indeed there can be little doubt that Shakespeare shared Philip Sidney’s sense of rhetorical theory’s limitations: The grammarian speaketh only of the rules of speech, and the rhetorician and logician, considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question.11

The most characteristic Shakespeare-language commits abuse upon abuse, such that catachresis (the figure of abuse, or far-fetched analogies) becomes thoroughly normative. It is telling that Brian Cummings, searching for the trope that best describes Shakespeare’s language use, reaches for metalepsis, or “transumption”, as a kind of final, least-worse resource.12 8 Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 9 Gavin Alexander, “Prosopopoeia: The Speaking Figure”, Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber, eds, Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 96–112. 10 In Defence of Rhetoric, 491–4. 11 Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander, (London: Penguin, 2004), 9. 12 “Metalepsis: The Boundaries of Metaphor”, Adamson, et al., Renaissance Figures of Speech, 217–36.

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It is the figure of repeated substitutions, of metonym upon metonym, or when “divers Tropes are shut up in one word”.13 To quote Richard Sherry’s very apt definition from 1550, “Transsumpcion, is when by degrees we go to yt that is shewed as: he hyd hymselfe in the blackedennes. By blacke, is vnder stand ful of darkenes & consequently stepedowne, and verye depe.”14 Metalepsis is a stretching, interval-filled, almost vertiginously organised figure (nicely exemplified by Sherry’s 1550 illustration) that can just about encompass the strange liberties of Shakespeare’s accumulations and simultaneities, those silent dark steps he makes, begging the reader’s or auditor’s untrackable, usually intuitive entrance.15 But the tropical observance, if such it is, is coincidental; and certainly the recommendations or warnings that hedge the trope’s definition – or other roughly apposite ones such as catachresis – can tell us next to nothing about Shakespeare’s purposes. The fact is that in terms of common understandings of rhetoric – as speech that has a clear design, mediated consciously by the speaker, to persuade or move its audience; or as taxonomies of tropes and figures used by orator or poet to ornament or intensify their discourse – Shakespeare is very often not rhetorical: indeed he is often thoroughly anti-rhetorical. Rhetoric speaks one type of possibility – articulated in sentences, understood in the front of the mind, inducing an acknowledged feeling, seen and approved by the addressee: a feeling of being moved to tears; or a feeling that something is unjust and needs to be changed. Possibility here is tangible. Rhetoric, as the exemplary humanist practice, requires action in the world, the possibilities it recommends continuous with the communities of speaker and auditors. And this precisely is its limitation.16

13

OED, metalepsis, J. Smith Myst.Rhetorique 3 (1656). OED, metalepsis, R. Sherry Treat. Schemes & Tropes sig. Cv. 15 Metalepsis is “the rhetorical figure consisting in the metonymical substitution of one word for another which is itself a metonym; (more generally) any metaphorical usage resulting from a series or succession of figurative substitution”. George Puttenham Englished it as “the far-fetched”: “The figure Metalepsis, which I call the farfet, as when we had rather fetch a word a great way off then to vse one nerer hand to expresse the matter aswel & plainer”: Arte of English Poesie (1589). 16 Raphael Lyne probes the subterranean affinities between Renaissance rhetoric and cognitive linguistics. In this model, rhetoric is not primarily defined by its effects upon its addressees. Instead it is a heuristic device, part of a process of experiential testing and discovery, for poet and for speaker; tropes and figures such as synecdoche, metalepsis, 14

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Attend closely to Shakespeare, and we cannot but see how the work is always exceeding the apparent occasion – and yet only very rarely in such a way that the indecorum is there to be noticed and judged as such. Even the most blatant examples of linguistic “indecorum” – the “salvage monster” Caliban speaking beautifully modulated verse, the princess Imogen reduced to frenetic jabbering puns – reach far beyond prearticulated rhetorical taxonomies for their effects. But the larger point is that even Shakespeare’s most characteristic verse, spoken by his most sensitive or suffering heroes, is inveterately indecorous and anti-rhetorical: obscure, punning, catachrestic, illocutively doubling, and often impossible to take in on a single hearing. The most basic morphology of Shakespearean language, the very way one bit attaches to and moves with another, flouts the rules of rhetoric. It cannot be understood in time; it exceeds or even embarrasses its occasion. It is the very least of its refusals, its ontological and social disobedience, that it leaves the great canon of classical and Elizabethan rhetorical instruction lying inept in the corner, a manual designed for some machine that the Shakespeare-engine has left far behind. Rhetorical theory suffers an unavailing deficit in metaphysical adventure. It can account for bits and pieces, but must always be like a child holding to a racing dog’s tail: the dog is ahead of us, pulled by smells we know nothing of.17 metaphor, and aposiopesis do not so much shape what we speak as trace and pattern how we think (especially at moments of high pressure). Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 17 Valère Novarina: “Don’t cut everything up, don’t cut everything up into intelligent slices, into intelligible slices . . . like a salami, underlining certain words, loading them up with intentions . . . sentences cut up into sentence-verb-compliment . . . words actually form something more like a tube of air, a pipe with sphincters, a column with irregular openings, spasms, sluices, cut off flows, leaks, pressures.” “Letter to the Actors”, Theater of the Ears, 43. Or again: “Language is not a tool; language is always our very body which is there to be entirely traversed again, and one never writes except to escape alive once again from the human prison . . . Each word is a drama, because each word remains silent. The smallest among them contains the entire mystery of speech . . . No message in speech: speech is a passage. He who speaks is on a threshold . . . Speech denies, fulgurates, unsettles the stupidity of objects, awakens everything . . .” “Each Word is a Drama”, Theater of the Ears, 66–7.

16

Falstaff

The opening scene of 1 Henry IV is remarkable scripting: showing a king in charge, dictating proceedings, the to and fro of counsel, and yet repeatedly implying, in ways we may hardly notice and yet ineluctably feel, that he is inadequate. A performance may choose to make Henry obviously deficient – crafty, mendacious, confused – but only by inferences that do not in fact get substantiated in anything Henry says or is said about him, and so remain rationalisations of Shakespeare’s eccentric reportage. Henry remains the titular cause and cynosure: but equally this emperor has no clothes. The formactions peel them off, one by one, in a prolepsis of action to come in which this man cannot be a substantial agent, other than as a cue for others’ positive reactions. He must be replaced by surrogates, by more or less likely men who can dress the barren royal mannequin. In political and scenic terms, this will primarily be the function of the two young adversaries, Hal and Hotspur. But it is equally Falstaff: the man who enters the instant the king limps away: Now Hal, what time of day is it Lad?

(TLN 115)

It is at once immensely galvanising, as though the world has suddenly woken up from the monarch’s fragmenting amnesiac dream, and a joke: midday or more, and the fat man truly has just awoken. But the scenic switch is absolutely plotted. The king leaves, and Falstaff enters – the issue of the king, his failure, nightmare, consequence, and doppelganger. The transfer is existential and spiritual, disappearing monarch into capacious cipher. Equally, Falstaff is the issue of this first scene: the parent, child, and necessity of its anti-efficient historicity, at once distended and over-folded, like the skin of a very fat old man. Falstaff thus brings to the surface and shamelessly orchestrates all that the king suffered in the 183

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opening scene, from latent formal subversions to almost-gloating pleonastic embarrassments, as the scene’s secret promise comes truer and truer and truer. What the formactions do to Henry and his part, Falstaff declares as his vocation: one who does not so much change as unalteringly decline; whose every word is a true lie; who does almost nothing, ever, and in that indolence allows nameless men to die; whose purposeless fullness at once evades and embodies the confusion of war; who is time-server and time-keeper of a lapsed world, haunted by the calendar of eschatology; who is suspended in the interim, between staining acts and an unreachable coming-to-account; who leaves Part 1 carrying the violated corpse of Hotspur, like some obscene carnivalised cross, and gets ambiguous public redemption from the consequences;1 who cannot pay his debts; who is in everything belated, and who dies a cross-purposed reprobate, powerless to transcend whatever he has been.2 Falstaff embodies formactive eventuality, and in that Shakespearean history. The character is deeply keyed in to the play’s sense of time: not just because he makes events subject to any occasion that his wit finds, and discovers in the tiniest mundanity the lurking stench of eternity, but because he is the figure who fears, feels, and somehow abides in that unmet gap of time which the play so strangely halts upon at its start. Fourteen hundred years ago, something happened: its consequences will surely arrive, if not in this world then eventually; the account must be paid. The same thing applies to the figure’s compositional principles. Almost everything Falstaff does or says flies beyond the power of plot to predict or even describe. His most characteristic speeches are sheer copiousness, turning and turning upon inescapable facts, his troping (like his toping) a kind of deferral of their imminence; his most characteristic scenes are dilated suspensions between more necessary actions. His part constantly pushes beyond chronicle obedience. He thrives upon improvised counterfactuals (role-playing in the tavern, counterfeiting death, stabbing Hotspur), all of which at once have predictive or parodic value and cannot change a thing. His grotesqueness feeds like a pig upon the invincible exuberance of carnival and the revivable hopes of romance 1 2

Womersley christens Falstaff “Pseudo-Martyr”: Divinity and State, 318. Compare Davies, “Falstaff’s Lateness”.

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(“Art thou alive?/Or is it fantasie that playes upon our eye-sight? I prethee speake, we will not trust our eyes/Without our eares” 3100–3). Dreams of miraculous transformation constantly leaven his otherwise slowly sinking degradation. He actually prefers a tale to a truth; it has more relish of life in it if wit and fancy take the place of accuracy or punctuality. He really believes in offstage or extra-textual scenes (“I shall be sent for in private to him . . . I shall be sent for soone at night” 2 Henry IV, 3289, 3301) as though the life allowed by the script is never quite enough, any more than the possibilities sanctioned by the myth-makers (“Old-Castle dyed a Martyr, and this is not the man”, 2 Henry IV, Epilogue). He is always bursting beyond plot, as though beyond the bounds of genre or story. And yet he needs the playworld like few characters can ever have done.3 Perhaps only the death of Cordelia rivals the pitiless banishing of Falstaff in affective cruelty, for all its reformatory or political necessity: he clings to the world that knows him, that has made him. He resists the truth of endings; life is truer than death, hopes truer than succession. This, perhaps, is the key to the second banishment of Falstaff, when the Chief Justice steps in to execute Hal’s sentence: CH. IUST.

Go carry Sir Iohn Falstaffe to the Fleete, Take all his Company along with him. F A L . My Lord, my Lord. C H . I U S T . I cannot now speake, I will heare you soone. Take them away.

(3302–5)

These are Falstaff’s last words: “My Lord, my Lord”. He passes, as do most of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes and heroines, upon a repeated cue. It is the authentic dramaturgy of dying. The Chief Justice can cut him off, bored or busy or contemptuous; the Falstaff-actor has his second appeal (my Lord . . .”) in safekeeping, for his character alone, spoken to everyone or to no one, spoken beyond the obedient imperatives of script or occasion. Perhaps Falstaff tries twice to appeal to the implacable Lord Chief Justice. But the scripting allows other options. One appeal to justice is

3 Jonas Barish: “Falstaff embodies the vitality of life lived on the level of improvisation . . . he lives exclusively in the present with a chameleonlike adjustment to the needs of the moment . . . Since he possesses no certain identity, he must possess one anew at every moment.” Antitheatrical Prejudice, 128.

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perhaps enough to know that justice has been done – or at least is done with the “old man”. And so the second “my Lord” may be for other ears: perhaps his personal Lord, sweet Hal, royal Hal, called for with wistful longing; or, just perhaps, the Lord whose claims have never been far from Falstaff’s reprobate mind (“Fall to thy Prayers”). The moment casts forward to unknowns, and backward to comforts that now have gone. It is very like a death, but a death that is suspended in the possibilities of acting. It is the perfect exit/non-exit for formaction man. There is real plaintiveness in the Epilogue’s appeal on Falstaff’s behalf, promising to continue the story “where (for any thing I know) Falstaffe shall dye of a sweat, unlesse already he be kill’d with your hard opinions”. The appeal is partly conventional, but it also harks directly back to the performance just witnessed: asking for approbation, but also for remembrance; projecting forward both to a sequent successor (Henry V) and to future performances of this play, both of them contingent upon present applause.4 The “sweat” Falstaff may die of is partly an appropriately unheroic end, but also a double joke: first, about the Falstaff-character in the final scene (“I will leere upon him, as he comes by: and do but marke the countenance that hee will give me . . . sweating with desire to see him . . . but to see him” 2 Henry IV, 3214–34); second, about the Falstaff-actor right now, steaming in his fat-suit, swathed in the unholy juices of labour. Perhaps the words allow a renewed sniff of dismissal. But equally they are a call to remember, and to pity, and to confirm, if confirmation were needed, the impossibility of death on stage (a recurring scenic trope through the play, with the differently “false” deaths of Falstaff, Hotspur, and Henry). Falstaff, perhaps more than any other character, is premised on the dark impossibility of such endings. Come what may, the play will end. And yet the end of a play is also a kind of oxymoron, an ontological solecism, opening onto nothing, no life or continuance whatsoever, unless a possible return to what we have just witnessed. This is the passion of formaction man, so intimate to Shakespeare. It is only right that Falstaff should die by report, offstage: it is the only way he could possibly have passed away. Equally, it means he has not. History is unfinished.

4

See Stern, Documents of Performance.

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Shakespeare never writes, in the fineness of his details, or the intensities of his imagination, to preordained plots. The small amount of “objective” security provided by the backstage plot – as to the timing of entrances and exits, or the broad succession of scenes – is almost irrelevant once the actor is actually on the stage. The intimacy and immediacy of a part’s moment-by-moment detail dwarfs, even mocks, any such approximate synoptic abstractions.1 Neither a plot scenario nor a backstage “plat” can do more than approximately gesture to the places and actions in motion. Shakespeare’s worlds – with their byways and divergences, opacities and mixed meanings, excesses and ellipses – simply defy such abstraction. Perhaps Shakespeare drafted plots, and used them to explain upcoming work to his partners; perhaps he sketched a few ideas, got approval or advice, and went off and embellished and invented as he wished; perhaps he wrote it all off the cuff, his scenic syntax as self-generating as his language. No doubt he kept the scenic consecution in mind, just as all of his scenes contribute to the onward movement of plot. But they are rarely beholden to such movement, or adequately defined by it. Just as a Shakespeare speech invariably both performs a clear-enough illocution (a prayer, curse, plea, report, joke), and compounds numerous other actions, by turns modifying, complementing, undermining, or extending the overt illocution, so too with his scenes: they are habitually composed

1 Compare Evelyn Tribble’s understanding of the practical efficacy of the backstage plot: “Plots can be seen as a two-dimensional chart of the play designed to be mapped on to the three-dimensional space of the theatre and to be used in conjunction with the parts, the space of the stage, and the playbook . . . The play is here, and only here, given a shape easily graspable to all members of the company . . . plots facilitate shared attention.” Cognition in the Globe, 52–3.

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of numerous inset or adumbrated places and occasions, as well as the one that is clearly mappable on the plot-grid. Where exactly, for example, is Sebastian here: I saw your brother Most provident in peril, binde himself (Courage and hope both teaching him the practise) To a strong Maste, that liv’d upon the sea: Where like Orion on the Dolphines backe, I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves, So long as I could see. (Twelfth Night, TLN 61–7)

This is a classic Shakespeare sub-scene, reported rather than seen on stage. As such it delivers past news that travels into the future, as both an immediate satisfaction (of Sebastian’s condition right now) and a promise of eventual return (at the due moment in the plot). But at the same time as Shakespeare pictures the fortitude of Sebastian, he is busy characterising place. So, the “strong Maste” is every bit as much a subject of this world as the shipwrecked youth. The ship has been split, the mast felled by waves or lightning. In any real storm it would be dead and done, a floating piece of detritus. But here it lives: more than that, it “liv’d upon the sea”. It not only endures throughout all vicissitudes, but it is instantly habituated to the element, as though it was always of the sea. Accidents, it seems, are the simplest necessity. Ontology, identity, indeed home – all these foundational things are creatures of circumstance, or indeed happenstance, rather than inheritance or normative function.2 In this world, evidently, you can enter a place, or a place enters to you, and you are altered, touched like magic into new possibilities. In turn these possibilities become spontaneously, even genetically inevitable – like some selfdetermining code, concealed until this very moment. The physics here works like an electrical current, infusing each participant with energy that ensures life beyond the moment. The “strong Mast” acts as a physical metonym and promise of Sebastian (and his irresistible masculinity), as 2 Michael Witmore: “something is not going to happen until the occasion is just so. The metaphysical outlook here is one that assumes the world or environment is always ‘doing’ something and that the individual’s plan of action – even crucial aspects of her [Viola’s] identity – are themselves conditioned by that action . . . We are being given a tutorial in the immanence of theatrical substances to themselves and others, their exquisite dependence upon sets of spatial relations and future-entailing promises”: Shakespearean Metaphysics, 43, 45.

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he binds himself to its life; Sebastian grows with the mast; he “holds acquaintance” with the waves that are now his home too; the conversation is easeful, courtly, blessed by adaptive sprezzatura. (Men like this are truly unsurprisable.3) Any grounded vocation must defer to the speech’s metaleptic transferences. Hence the way that the lyrical Captain, having bedded down all of this narrative promise, must himself get left behind by the superior transformations open to this youth (“So long as I could see . . .”). The conversation morphs into song, Sebastian into Arion, the mast into a dolphin: satisfaction heads towards the saving shoreline, as unstoppable as waves, or indeed sound waves. A crucial implication of Shakespeare’s metaleptic, catachretic, prosopopoeic use of words is that the scene is very often not simply seen. The characters may all stay physically in one place and time, and yet move into who knows what and where in the course of speaking. This suggests a considerable sophistication of the old debate about observing the unities – given immense authority by Aristotle and Horace, and its most formidable recent articulation by Sidney in his Apology for Poetry. It might be thought that Sidney’s Apology, with its disdain for tragi-comical hybrids, is foundationally unsympathetic to Shakespeare’s aesthetic. Indeed, it is tempting to say that the whole debate is simply irrelevant, a superannuated formalism, reprised by Boileau and the neo-classicists but to all intents dead throughout the period of the English popular theatre’s greatest years. Jonson aside, almost no one bothered about “violating” these rules, just as everyone (except perhaps Jonson in single-authored guise) mixed modes with promiscuous expedience. Shakespeare observes the unities in two plays only: Comedy of Errors near the start of his career, and The Tempest near the close. In both cases, however, the observance seems to be mainly a technical challenge, which helps Shakespeare discipline both plays’ remarkable traversing of places and layering of times. Mostly Shakespeare moves around as he sees fit, without anxiety. Shakespeare lacks Sidney’s deep-brewed classicism, and probably his fervent Protestantism. Sidney, for all his brilliance, is also the child of his 3 Witmore: “The sea, which is where the first accident that began the play occurred, is capable of supporting travel in any direction: so much the better if the person it carries has no fixed desire of his own, for he will always be satisfied with the result.” Shakespearean Metaphysics, 59.

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education, and is everywhere more alert to authorities, above all their moral force, than Shakespeare. Likewise, as a man of affairs, Sidney writes in the expectation that doing so should alter things in the world: it isn’t knowing, but doing, that is the aim;4 virtue requires virtu, as befits a truly active Christian humanist. For Sidney, poetry’s truest modality, the purpose that justifies its “virtue-breeding delightfulness”, is the imperative one of should: “in troth, not labouring to tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be”.5 As Hazlitt suggested, Shakespeare is far more the poet of would, of contingent imaginative permission.6 Nonetheless, of all recent or contemporary writers, probably only Marlowe can rival Sidney in the influence he had upon Shakespeare’s development. Shakespeare must have relished the sinuousness of Sidney’s prose, the fearlessness of his scorn and his enthusiasms, his insistence that poetry matters. Above all, Shakespeare would have found in Sidney someone who repeatedly insists that the poet has “no law but wit”7: Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature . . . So as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts but freely ranging only with in the zodiac of his own wit.8

This strikes a true chord; these are words that the young Shakespeare might have inscribed on his heart. For Sidney gives one a sniff of how poetry, which of course includes drama, might furnish genuinely novel possible worlds: [T]he skill of each artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself . . . which delivering forth also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air, but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him.9

“It is not gnosis but praxis must be the fruit”: Alexander, Defence, 22. Alexander, Defence, 34. 6 Hazlitt, “On Shakespeare and Milton”. See Lynne Magnusson, “A Play of Modals: Grammar and Potential Action in Early Shakespeare”, Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009), 69–80, for analysis of Shakespearean modalities at the level of the phrase. 7 8 9 Alexander, Defence, 11. Alexander, Defence, 8–9. Alexander, Defence, 9. 4 5

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Sidney’s message seems in part conflicted: he begins as though Platonically, or perhaps neo-Platonically, arguing that the dignity of the artwork derives from its perfect “idea”. The work itself can only be a second-order simulacrum, which aspires to the condition of the “fore-conceit” (similar perhaps to Plotinus’s Ideas or Intelligibles). But halfway through the sentence Sidney’s neo-Platonism seems to be superseded by some greater ambition for his passion (“which delivering forth is also . . .”). That is, the poetry now “build[s]” and “worketh” substantially. It is the thing itself, which in turn can encourage real-life repetitions. It isn’t only that poetry makes models that can furnish better materialisations in the future (as virtuous humanism demanded). It is that poetry in itself is a possible world – not a castle in the air, but a substance. Shakespeare never quite picks up the mantle to renovate a present fallen world – or at least not with the proto-evangelical enthusiasm that recurs in Sidney. But Sidney’s implicitly poetic materialism is different. Here we really can see a seed of the radical substantiality, the coming-true, the haecceity, of theatrical forms achieved by Shakespeare. No doubt this achievement is far beyond what Sidney has in mind, tied as he is to humanist models of imitation and emulation. Nevertheless, Sidney’s idealism intimates the reality and futurity of poetic form: a form which incorporates an unfinished apprehension of possibility, and thus potentially combines all the modalities, not merely is or should, but might, could, would. Form itself bears a subjunctive relation to history, and thereby animates a new or other or even better “nature”. This is what Shakespeare animates. A corollary of this transformative energy is that the question of nominal time and place is rarely where the game truly lies: or rather it is only ever a beginning, an entrance point. Shakespeare’s spaceand-time travel is distinctive. It is a very different thing from the geographical hopscotch derided by Sidney, notoriously impatient with the way stage-plays ask us to accept arbitrary, quick-fire spatial and temporal removes: [W]here you shall have Asia of the one side and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived? Now you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and by

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we hear news of a shipwreck in the same place, and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock.10

Perhaps Sidney sounds in some ways simply obtuse, if not in a patrician bad temper, insisting that the wooden stage be understood with static literalism rather than of a piece with the permissions that he gives to poetry. But Sidney’s real target, I think, is not so much the indecorum of rule violation, as that of unskillfulness. He wants more trust placed in poetry, not less: and this means using discretion, and realising the power of words to produce place precisely in its absence: Again, many things may be told which cannot be showed, if they know the difference betwixt reporting and representing.11

He means by this to recommend the classical practice of recounting through verbal narration events that happened in other times and places; and of starting stories not ab ovo, from the egg (as doltish, garrulous literalists do) but at “the principal point of that one action which they will represent”.12 Shakespeare is far too much a man of the theatre, and far too intimate with popular appetites, to be bothered by Sidney’s cleanfingered pedantry. But Sidney’s more refined distinctions, and his strictures against a sort of bovine full-frontalism – such if it isn’t directly seen with the eyes then it isn’t – give direct support to an ambition like Shakespeare’s: to dramatise lives and minds not simply in one place – here, now – but here and there, now and then. And to do this requires an apprehension of presence – of the scene – that dispenses with visible scenography as its measure. For in a curious way Shakespeare does indeed observe the unities: but not the externally measurable unities of a defined action happening in a space and time correlative to that of the audience. Instead he recovers something like the nested unity of occasion; the fact that one moment harbours many. Here is Peter Brook: I think that the freedom of the Elizabethan theatre is still only partially understood, people have got used to talking in clichés about the non-localized stage. What

10 12

Alexander, Defence, 45. Alexander, Defence, 46.

11

Alexander, Defence, 46.

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people do not fully face is that the non-localized stage means that every single thing under the sun is possible, not only quick changes of location: a man can turn into twins, change sex, be his past, his present, his future, be a comic version of himself and a tragic version of himself, and be none of them, all at the same time.13

There is indeed a difference betwixt “reporting” – speaking of possibilities past and to come – and “representing” – giving these actions mimical form, with or without supplemental words. And we should immediately see here another reason why Shakespeare may have taken Sidney’s disdain as a technical challenge. For the visible re-presenting of an action does, in a sense, complete that action. Here it is, watch it, possess it – and leave it behind. To speak an absent action is something quite different. The action is glimpsed, recalled, adumbrated; it is never fully present, and never quite finished with. Let’s take as a typical example Claudius’s soliloquy in Hamlet. It is not in fact an obviously difficult speech, being clear enough as to its basic purpose. But all the same it bears depths and possibilities that no other playwright would dream of: In the corrupted currants of this world, Offences gilded hand may shove by Justice, And oft ’tis seene, the wicked prize it selfe Buyes out the Law; but ’tis not so above, There is no shuffling, there the Action lyes Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, In his true Nature, and we our selves compell’d To give in evidence. (Hamlet, TLN 2333–40)

Claudius imagines the great tribunal “above” as a place where his body is not quite his own, subject to an imperative violence that threatens to make him unrecognisable. There are all kinds of transumptions going on here, in which one thing travels across or substitutes for another. Identity is not so much a singular embodied thing as a moving wave of actions. The metaphor of “shuffling” suggests cards, but this particular king cannot be hidden in the pack; instead he must “lie”, bared to the eye of judgement. We can conceive of this face-up card as a plane of identity or event – or rather of identity as defined by a single event. So, one plane morphs or melts into another, or the cards are superimposed, such that 13

“Finding Shakespeare on Film”, Tulane Drama Review 11:1 (1966), 118.

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the face of the present king becomes the “action”, which becomes the face of the murdered king. Claudius’s imagination gives new force to the scandalous substitution of one brother by the other. Alternatively, the “shuffling” is what Claudius would like to do: to shuffle sheepishly or furtively out of view, not raising his feet, kicking a little dust in the eye of his arraigner. But he knows there is no “shuffling” there; he cannot slip quietly sideways from the face of law, just as he cannot cut the cards or hide in the pack. Instead he must stand before the judge, exposed as the “true” “lye” that he is. In this sense, Claudius himself is the “Action”, in “his true nature”. Notice the personal pronoun: the action is not only “his” (as in he did it): the action is a his, a mode of man. At the same time, this true nature is defined eternally by one particular action – “A Brothers murther”. Claudius’s wistful “shuffle” turns into the enacting – or re-enacting – of fratricide. His substance is this action. But this action necessarily involves his brother’s corpse. The “Action” exists like some shuttered event, eternalised in frames: it is what he has done; it is the allegation against him, and so the proceeding in a court of law; it is his own guilty form, arraigned in judgement; and it is his brother’s corpse, “lying” there in full horrid view, more accusing even than a dumb show. The image thus culminates in the two “true natures”, two brothers’ bodies, both now dead, one slaughtered and the other called ultimately to account. This is a classic instance of how Shakespeare’s vision is estranging to the human as normatively seen. There is something in his vision that is also found in da Vinci, Michelangelo, Leibniz. The body isn’t opaque to these men. They seem to see through the surface and into the organic machine behind it. But it isn’t merely an anatomical vision. It is more like layered holograms, as each movement is adumbrated by ghostly others whose presence is not dependent on shared, rectilinear, agreed perception, and still less upon some gridded perspective, prescribing optic hierarchies. Instead of a body in space, they see motion as body, action as body: substance does not precede the action (cause it, experience it, survive it) but rather is produced by the action, as the action. Consider the strange phrase: “we our selves”. It encapsulates this uncanny recurrence of one life, and one death, in the other. We suggests both each king considered separately, and the two of them combined.

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Likewise “our selves” is both singular and plural. Claudius knows he is finished, declared: the deal is done, the hand is shown, the card gets laid face-up. But at the same time as he is seeing himself as though from above, being exposed to the glare of luminous judgement, he is also seeing in this upturned face the repeated, unstoppable enacting of his founding act – as he murders his brother, as his brother’s body moves from the living to the dead, and as this corpse lies there, another stiff on the eternal slab, to judge Claudius, but equally to be judged itself (as Hamlet recognises moments later: “he tooke my father grossely, full of bread,/With all his crimes broad blowne, as fresh as May,/And how his Audit stands, who knows, save Heaven”) (TLN 2356–8). The card-figures move – again, they are less a static picture and more a hologram, with the face of the king most truly constituted by the “Action” that is revealed every time the “laser” of percipience (God’s, his, ours) shines upon it. This is why the face that Claudius sees is not the face that he daily sees in his glass. It is the monstrous countenance of his action that he sees; it is the face of consequences: “Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults” (TLN 2339). It is difficult to pin down exactly how the images here work, or what tropes are conflating to make them work as they do. A paraphrase of the line might be something like, “to the smallest degree of our faults”, “leaving nothing aside”: there is no shirking, no “shuffling”, here defined retroactively (after this contextualising line) as “evasion”. But this paraphrase is hardly confirmed by the actual words used. The hendiadys would seem to propose “teeth” and “forehead” as having coordinate meanings: the teeth of our faults, the forehead of our faults. Put this way, the words suggest going to the very centre of something: the teeth of the storm; the forehead as the fount and centre of all volition. Equally, each part of the hendiadys works as a discrete metalepsis, a metonym of a metonym: teeth chew, or bite, or are bared in a smile, and so perhaps invoke appetite, ambition, savagery, or hypocritical pleasure; proverbially, the forehead is frowned, and therein worried and guilty; or it is horned, and therein ashamed and humiliated (further conflating the two kings in one image); or it is bounded by a crown (ditto). Taken together, the metalepsis/hendiadys captures cause and consequence, antecedence and subsequence: thwarted desire, sexual and political competition, the jealous possession of bed, office, and nation.

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But all of these interpretations still feel like derivative rationalisations of a more primary and simply physical recognition. The teeth and forehead of our faults is what Claudius sees on his terminal playing card. Again the image is holographic. The face is a monstrous, demonic translation of his sins. It is teeth and forehead only; this is the result of his “faults”, which here evokes the word’s base meaning: an omission, a shortfall. The rest of the king’s countenance is erased. What is he left with? With bared teeth and globed forehead: a skull. Or as the Bastard has it in King John, “in his forehead sits/A bare-ribbed death” (5. 2. 177–8).14 Shakespeare is dramatising Christianised possible worlds, playing with the terrible paradox of a “wicked prize”. He means the usurped crown; but he also means a prize that will truly last, that bears eternal, damnable duration, the suffering obverse of the clean slate for which Claudius hungers. He projects beyond his present moment into unremittable death; equally, the image casts back in time, as though to some more primitive original state that makes images of cuckolds and kings feel trivial and accidental. There is a horrible gorging disgust in this image, all the more powerful for not being dwelt upon and fetishised, as Hamlet so often does his more habitual morbidity. It is as though Claudius fears or recognises a foreign morphology, lurking within, waiting to claim its victim, which it will do with a thrusting atavism: the teeth and forehead are bone, but aggressive bone, the kind that bites or butts; the teeth and forehead are waiting to claim their man. This is what he is, what he has become, what he has always been: the full fleshy face, desiccated by its “faults”, and reduced to the jutting bone of gnashers and dome. In all of this we see an epitome of Shakespeare’s procreative words: his situating of action in time, via a coming-true of the figuring potential of language, not only in terms of the pictures that the words’ referents supply, but through Shakespeare’s distinctive way of making experiential 14 William Empson: “Perhaps, too, the forehead covers the brain where the fault is planned, while the teeth are used (whether for talking or biting) in carrying it out, so that they stand for the will to sin and the act of sin respectively . . . ‘The Last Judgment will give little or no margin to the flesh; we shall have to go right down to bedrock in turning up our faults.’ . . . All we are given is two parts of the body and the Day of Judgment; these have got to be associated by the imagination of the reader. There is no immediate meaning, and in spite of this there is an impression of urgency and practicality, and being in the clutches of an omnipotent ferret.” Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: The Hogarth Press, [1930] 1984), 91–2.

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possibility supervene upon the structures of his tropes. Claudius’s soteriological anxiety doubles as a metaphor of Shakespearean scenography: there the Action lyes.15 Shakespeare is constructing worlds through substitutions that are by turns fractal (differently sized repetitions of an asymmetrical form) and fractional (variations in the value of the substance, or in the relation of part and whole or effect and cause). The very creation is metaleptic, produced by the substitution of figures/metonyms by further figures/ metonyms, at increasing removes from any substantive origin, such that the substituting figures become the reality. Essentially, what Shakespeare does is to concentrate, in single instants, events that in earlier theatre were extended in space and time.16 A single word, phrase, or figure compounds numerous scenes, folded in upon each other, or laid one on top of each other, ready to be shuffled differently, or laid out in a row so that all can be seen at once. As Hazlitt nicely puts it (his own language melting back into Shakespeare’s): “The passions are in a state of projection. Years are melted down to moments, and every instant teems with fate.”17 The figure concentrates scenic movement, concertinas it into a single moment: once pressed upon, this opens like the lid of a magic box, evoking who knows what distant times and disparate places. We might compare clicking hyper-textually on the internet, as page after page opens, sometimes complementing existing pages, always likely to blank them out, or in turn be blanked out, remaining a 15 Compare Peter Mack: “The soliloquy depicts thought which moves by statement, response, and reflection on that response, just as Montaigne’s Essais do. Shakespeare portrays in Claudius’s soliloquy something of the movement and changeability of the human mind, which Montaigne asserts as a general principle on the basis of collecting different examples and testing their implications against his introspection.” Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), 18–20. 16 Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), notes how in most mummings a herald read a ballad while the mummers mimed the action in accordance with each verse; actors embodied the narration of the play, such that three different actors could take turns playing Saint John in one 1505 auto (168); speeches or mimed action often reiterated what narrative had already explained, or represented what was to come; scenic display could reduplicate the kind of explanation that might be spoken by a narrator (168). Early printed texts often descriptively explained speech, as merely a particular kind of action (169) – which “mirrored the mingling of instruction, narrative overlay, and direct speech in performance” (169). Shakespeare concentrates all such actions into single conceits. 17 “On Shakespeare and Milton”, 89.

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presence but often only contingently, seeming to be an either/or (in that you can’t hold all the scenes in view at once) but actually being an and, and, and . . . Empson made this point, quite brilliantly, in Seven Types of Ambiguity. But ambiguity, I think, isn’t quite the right word. It means to be doubtful, shifting, to drive both ways at once, or around and around. It suggests hermeneutic uncertainty or irresolution. But Shakespeare’s dispensation is much more positive than this suggests. There’s no doubt about it. These worlds and lives are here.

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Writing such as this complicates orthodox notions of mimesis. Clearly Shakespeare is never simply imitating some pre-given offstage world. But the challenge Shakespeare poses to conventional understandings of the relationship between poetic invention and assumed reality goes still deeper. Consider Paul Ricoeur’s reading of the term made famous by Aristotle: [A] tension is revealed at the very heart of mimesis, between the submission to reality – to human action – and the creative action which is poetry as such . . . Aristotle’s mimesis, which holds together this closeness to human reality and the farranging flight of fable-making . . . submission to reality and fabulous invention, unfaltering representation and ennobling elevation . . . To present men “as acting” and all thing “as in act” – such could well be the ontological function of metaphorical discourse, in which every dormant potentiality of existence appears as blossoming forth, every latent capacity for action as actualized. Lively expression is that which expresses existence as alive.1

There is a lot in this that is strikingly apt for Shakespeare. As Aristotle has it, metaphor “sets the scene before our eyes” (Rhetoric 1410 b 33); “the things have the effect of being active because they are made into living beings” (Rhetoric 1412 a 3); unlike history, poetry recounts what “could” have happened, and thus the “spectator believes in the possible” (Poetics 1451 b 16). Metaphor does more than resemble, it makes. But as much as this seems basically right, Ricoeur’s understanding of the “life in metaphor” is also always restricted, on moral as much as logical grounds. He criticises as “ontological naivete” or “primitive animism” understandings 1 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen Mclaughlin and John Costello, SJ (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 44–8.

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of metaphor which “call directly for expression in terms of life”, such as Philip Wheelwright’s “tensive” and “presential” metaphors, which produce a semantic “plus value”, as the language opens up to “new dimensions, new horizons of meaning”.2 “Indistinctness bathes all these traits”, says Ricoeur, disdainful of the “intuitionist and vitalist tendency” in claiming that metaphors should be understood literally: [T]here is no other way to do justice to the notion of metaphorical truth than to include the critical incision of the (literal) “is not” within the ontological vehemence of the (metaphorical) “is”.3

Ricoeur sees in poetic experience the acme of “ontological vehemence”, the “ecstatic moment” in which language goes beyond itself. But he insists that “the poet himself does not commit this error”, endorsing Douglas Berggren’s view that the poet “preserves the ordinary differences between the principal and subsidiary subjects of his metaphors, even while such referents are also being transformed by the process of metaphorical construing”.4 However, this assumption of “ordinary differences” strikes me as far too complacent for Shakespeare’s dramatic poetics, too tied to binaries of signifier and signified. Shakespeare’s metaphors are very often not organised with clear hierarchies of principal and subsidiary referent; the “principal” referent – the one assumed by commonsensical, conventional use – is often the least probative, the least forcibly present; and “subsidiary” connotations again and again garner a space and time all their own. Consider Bushy’s sage advice to the Queen in Richard II, warning against trusting the eye of grief. Or at least this is what the character thinks he is doing. More pertinently, the words are an advertisement precisely for the fractalising arts of Shakespeare: Each substance of a greefe hath twenty shadows Which shewes like greefe it selfe, but is not so: For sorrowes eye, glazed with blinding teares, Divides one thing intire, to many objects, Like perspectives, which rightly gaz’d upon Shew nothing but confusion, ey’d awry, Distinguish form. 2

(Richard II, 966–72)

3 Rule of Metaphor, 293–300. Rule of Metaphor, 301. Rule of Metaphor, 301. See Berggren, “The Use and Abuse of Metaphor”, Review of Metaphysics 16:2 (1962), 237–58; 3 (1963), 450–72. 4

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This is Shakespearean mimesis, less a rectilinear mirror, more a faceted tear, dividing the single substance into swarming differentials, every one a kind of fate. Only the eye awry will distinguish form; look too head-on and you will miss it. (And by the way the Queen here is quite right to fear the “heavy nothing” which makes her “faint”: 980–4.) We always need to be shifting our position, wielding a virtual mirror to see things right, or to see how one thing inverts or extends or reflects another. In Shakespeare, every space, however miniscule, is a plenum. His truly is a strange form of mimesis. It is Hamlet who says that a play holds a mirror up to nature. The thought perhaps seems straightforward: but clearly in the Shakespeare-world it is nothing of the kind. After all, there are various kinds of mirror; and as for nature, who knows where it begins or ends? Here is another take on the theme: But man, proud man, Drest in a little briefe authoritie, Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d, (His glassie Essence) like an angry Ape Plaies such phantastique tricks before high heaven, As makes the Angels weepe: who with our spleens, Would all themselves laugh mortall. (Measure for Measure, TLN 874–80)

Isabella is railing here against Angelo, the “pelting petty Officer” who has condemned her brother Claudio to death. Her theme is the inordinate exercise of power. But as her temper heightens, the speech moves somewhat beyond its immediate rhetorical purpose (to dissuade Angelo from executing sentence) into this embracing indictment of humankind. It is a multi-pleated allegory, its swift movement between apes and angels tightly tuned to the playworld’s unstable ethics and permeable ontologies. Isabella’s speech is self-evidently risky, even reckless. But this isn’t only because of her perilous situation as helpless suitor to an autocrat. Her speech conjures a kind of phylogenetic obscenity: man stripped naked, bent before a mirror, exposed as an ape before the weeping eyes of angels. The risk is partly in the imputation of some kind of species-fraud, as though man was always an over-dressed impostor; and partly in the reminder that our shortfalls truly matter. Enormous trust, unearthly faith, was placed in the fact of our creation: and now just look at us! Power is tiny beneath the

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heavens, made still tinier by the fact that it can be seen in all its hideous effortful triviality, as at every moment the distance can be appraised between expectation and achievement. Isabella thus manages to combine disgusted contempt with religious pity. Little wonder Angelo soon feels terrifyingly understood by this maiden; little wonder he wants to renounce himself to her, or that the act must be violent and secret, safe from laughing or weeping eyes. And little wonder, therefore, that the only escape from this withering exposure is a hidden bed-trick, in the abyssal space of offstage inter-scenic action: because Isabella is identifying the awful distilling truth of public theatre. A meta-theatrical thread runs through Isabella’s indicting sentence, framing man’s very existing as a multiply-observed performance.5 She speaks an ethics, a fierce anthropology, of dramatic art. As such it expresses, with metaleptic compression, Shakespeare’s peculiar version of mimesis. So, “proud man” is first imagined as being “Drest in a little briefe authoritie”. The first pun emerges out of the near-tautology of “little briefe”: it means “tiny tiny”, or “passingly minor”. But “briefe” also has a legal application – specifically applicable to Angelo – referring to a royal letter or mandate, or a factual summary or abridgement of the cause to which a law officer speaks. As an abstraction, the brief is in danger of forgetting the personal and the particular; as a sheet or letter, it is a flimsy scroll with which to cover one’s person. That Shakespeare is precisely visualising such a thing is clear from the sentence’s progression: proud man, dressed in next to nothing, playing tricks before a mirror like an ape. The only thing distinguishing man from ape is the bit of paper covering his privates; without the legal carapace he is all hairy bum and leering mouth. In one of Shakespeare’s favourite conceits, authority is the flimsiest disguise. The impending application to Angelo is clear enough. But Shakespeare is doing more than bedding-down proleptic ironies. Isabella’s accidentally prophetic “glass” directly picks up Angelo’s boast, spoken a mer 20 lines 5 Anne Barton notes that the passage “conjures up one of the most traditional of all play metaphors, the image of the world as a stage displaying the endless drama of human life for the benefit of a heavenly audience . . . For Isabella, however . . . the costumes are a source of groundless pride; the furious gestures of the players resemble the senseless imitations of apes.” Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, 177.

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earlier, that the Law “like a Prophet/Looked in a glasse that shewes what future evils . . . Are now to have no successive degrees,/But here they live to end” (845–54). The repetition of “glass” – once as crystal ball, once as mirror – tells us that Shakespeare is pushing at the image’s connotative field. It is something to peer into, because a container; to see through, because transparent; to look at, because opaque. These different spatial extents in turn open onto different agents and temporalities.6 The glass is a thing in which to see others, or to see oneself. It figures a projected future, one that will secretly happen (Angelo the exposed ape).7 Equally, it figures an already-born future, which will not be permitted to come true. This is the chilling import of Angelo’s “glass”, which works as an avidly jealous scan and scalpel, picking out “new conceived” futures and aborting them before they can be “hatc’hd, and borne”. The implicit reference is not just to sinners, cut off before they can do worse, but to the actual progeny of sexual misdemeanour, understood as a kind of literal proof of original sin. It isn’t that Angelo is actually going around aborting illegitimate foetuses (he allows provision to be made for the “Fornicatresse” Juliet). Rather, abortion becomes a metaphor for a particular attitude to narrative gestation, rooted in the prevention of possibility: “But here they live to end”. Angelo’s “glass” thus gives a doomed, distanced, laboratory presence to what Leibniz might call the incompossible: possibles that lack the warrant to enter the “greater theatre” permitted by “Law”. In other words, the “glass” as crystal ball has the qualities of a counterfactual speculum: we might say of a playworld. The lives which Angelo would “end” are implicitly transferred into Isabella’s care: a care expressed not just in her response to the Deputy’s proscriptive resolve (“Yet shew some pittie”), but in her swift return to the image of a glass: Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d, (His glassie Essence) like an angry Ape 6 For history of mirror as metaphor see Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), esp. ch. 4, on Plato’s discussion of the mirror in Republic 10. 7 Francis Bacon distinguishes the mind of man from a “clear and equal glass”, saying it is rather “like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture”: Advancement of Learning and the New Atlantis, ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), Bk II.

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Strange mimesis Plaies such phantastique tricks before high heaven, As makes the Angels weepe: who with our spleens, Would all themselves laugh mortall.

It is clear that her glass supplements Angelo’s; the mirror-image is thus also a crystal ball. But a still more basic doubleness in the mirror metaphor is often missed. So, the glass at once gives back to the ape a reflection of his present body (which the ape is too self-absorbed to recognise) and reserves to itself, as though in glassed safe-keeping, a truer reflection of his essence: a correction or reminder that present fury cannot heed. The ape is at once ignorant of the grotesque image he creates, and oblivious to the true image staring out at him. If we superimpose Angelo’s en-glassed vision onto Isabella’s, then the “essence” not heeded is precisely the lives waiting to hatch. We can allegorise these lives in terms of Angelo’s own possibilities (his complicity in the crimes he condemns, his susceptibility to love); or in terms of the Law’s duty of care towards a community and its citizens (the Law is not above the people, but its better image and protective expression). Either way, the thing seen in the glass is the thing looking into it. It is therefore missing much of the point if we simply hypostasise “glassie essence” as man’s intellectual soul or Godlike faculties.8 Just as Angelo’s glass is given form by the lives “conceiv’d” in it, Isabella’s is given form by the “Ape” that “plaies” for tears and laughter before it – plays, that is, in the cosmic theatre. The meta-theatrical referents frame the ape as a common player: to “ape” is to act or mimic; players were regularly likened to apes; the “heavens” are the vault above the stage, the “Angels” painted on the roof or the columns. What is more, it may be that “Angels” – already punning on Angelo, the man fallen from his source and station – tropes on the audience, those whose grace is always appealed to, or who have paid their “angel” (coin) for the superior pleasures of attendance. The angels are imagined as suffering spectators, unsure of the mode of play to which they are subjected – this estranging, death-tempting tragi-comedy in which 8 For philosophical discussions of “glassy essence” as the “intellectual soul” or mirror of God see Charles S. Peirce, “Man’s Glassy Essence”, The Monist 3:1 (1892), 1–22; Richard Rorty, “Our Glassy Essence”, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), esp. 41–6; J. V. Cunningham, “‘Essence’ and The Phoenix and the Turtle”, ELH 19 (1952), 266.

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tears and laughter are dangerously co-active (exploiting the unpredictable variations in “spleen”, as at once the seat of caprice, melancholy, and laughter). The glass is thus the most basic metaphor of theatrical mimesis, whether understood as a timely mirror or predictive capsule. Partly it asks the audience to recognise themselves on the stage; equally it implies that here is a “glass” in which inadmissible lives, prevented lives, discover shadowy animation. As a prospective glass it has rare perdurability, seeing beyond immediate presents to incipient possibilities or suppressed pasts. At the same time it is inherently fragile, as easily shattered as a girl’s virginity: ANG.

Nay, women are fraile too. I, as the glasses where they view themselves, Which are as easie broke as they make formes.

ISA.

(1135–7)

But the shatter too holds memory and promise; each shard, like each image or form, may be a remembering or prognosticating crystal. The “glassy essence” thus encapsulates Shakespeare’s creation, rooted in the image’s dazzling paradoxes: the glass reflects and projects; it is a flat plane and a deep container; it moves equally with visible and subvisible agents, with actualised presents and prevented pasts and foreshadowed futures; it is an essence which, like theatre, has no substance other than the materials that render it; its palpability can be seen through, as though nothing; or it exists only as a replica of some putatively more real thing elsewhere, but a reality which cannot be seen other than as a reflection; it may shatter into untold fragments, perhaps an essence in pieces, impossible to reconstitute; perhaps an essence in fractals, with each part potentially a host of substance. In other words, the force of the image-in-the-mirror comes from the range of possible lives it admits: everyday sinners, babes unborn, fantastic apes, reverend justice, vulnerable maidens – and girls in the privacy of their chambers, trying out shapes, projecting into lives as yet unlived. The glass is latent with all such life; it doesn’t need anterior realities or governing rules to spark such possibles into motion. There is in this world no “essence” independent of the modifying glass; no glass independent of its materials; no lives without the glass that generates, receives, and recognises the desire.

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Shakespeare’s work post-dates the magnifying glass, is contemporary with the telescope, and a little ahead of the first microscope. Is there a point where you have to accept that some things are not intended to be noticed? Is there a necessary truthful decorum in drawing back? Ricoeur, for example, would see a twin danger in detaching metaphor from the cohering theme, the fable that the metaphor supposedly serves: Abstracted from this referential function, metaphor plays itself out in substitution and dissipates itself in ornamentation; allowed to run free, it loses itself in language games.1

How are we know what is too small? How to establish the “reality” which metaphor, according to Ricoeur, must partly submit to? And how are we to adjudicate exactly where the metaphor’s transfiguring modalities take wing? If the phenomenon is too small, then perhaps all we truly see are our grubby fingers, our over-wilful intervention, obscuring or even destroying the fineness in the act of our attention. Surely, we might think, there is an absolute limit to the size of the thing we can observe in a playworld. Perhaps we should take heed of the strictures of subatomic particle physics: In order to give an absolute meaning to size [to stop matter from being endlessly divisible] such as is required for any theory of the ultimate structure of matter, we have to assume that there is a limit to the fineness of our powers of observation and the smallness of the accompanying disturbance – a limit which is inherent in the nature of things and can never be surpassed by improved technique or increased skill on the part of the observer. If the object under observation is such that the unavoidable limiting disturbance is negligible, then the object is big in the absolute sense and we

1

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Rule of Metaphor, 45.

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may apply classical mechanics to it. If, on the other hand, the limiting disturbance is not negligible, then the object is small in the absolute sense and we require a new theory for dealing with it.2 If a system is small, we cannot observe it without producing a serious disturbance and hence we cannot expect to find any causal connexion between the results of our observations.3

But how do we judge such things, especially when so much of what we dwell upon in a playworld is more intellectual or imaginative than it is physical? It may be argued that art is precisely not nature, a fact that imposes limits upon reasonable curiosity. We assume that, in the natural world, the closer we look the more intimate we get to the cause of things, or to matter at its most fundamental. But you can often get too close to a painting. It starts to smudge; you see the evident brushworks and shouldbe invisible tracery. The illusion loses form and becomes either chaotic or deceptive. We may start discerning forms that are far from the purpose.4 In such cases the part contributes to the whole, but does not repeat or epitomise it; nor does it purposively compete with it. The brushstroke is instrumental, no more. And it may be that going up very close – or indeed magnifying the picture with optic-enhancing machinery – breaks the implied contract between viewer and viewed. The fractals disappear in a way they never do in nature.5 However, there are many exceptions and qualifications to this. For instance, with some sketches of Michelangelo or Leonardo you really can hardly get too close; each line is intelligence and feeling, trembling with the strings of life. Magnify an El Greco mural and it is the same, as

2 P. A. M. Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 3–4. Italics in original. 3 Dirac, Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 4. 4 Emrys Jones compares the effect of set-piece scenes (Malvolio tricked by the forged letter, Benedick eavesdropping, Mark Antony in the forum) with painting: “When such scenes are read, they may seem almost childishly obvious . . . too loud, too insistently emphatic. But, like the figures in a ceiling painting which when seen in close-up appear crudely distorted, such scenes come into focus to release their energy when watched by a large audience; the presence of large numbers of spectators provides the psychic distancing.” Scenic Form in Shakespeare, 14–15. 5 Timothy Morton: “Evolution jumbles bodies like a dream jumbles words and images. There is no negation in the unconscious and none in evolution. Things don’t disappear; they become vestigial or mutate.” Ecological Thought, 65.

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each flick of paint seems to suffer or to promise. Many Renaissance and Baroque pictures demand a kind of de-naturing eye, being full of semihidden images and figures – and not only in anamorphic perspective painting. A picture need not be limited to a single pictorial scene. Any fugitive image, however apparently closed to all other visible phenomena, can possess space and emanate possibility. Magnifications can suggest counter-logics, deeper patterns, or compositional fractions, which may or may not answer to the artist’s ostensible purpose. Likewise with Shakespeare’s scenes. There is always more than one perspective; each scene produces insets, which can do much more than simply thicken the basic pictorial scene. They can work discretely, as snapshots of possibility, remembered or foreshadowed; or they can animate an intra-scenic grammar, qualifying or modifying what is presented, projecting into causes or consequences, layering its modal claims or its tense, or making them wobble between categories. And indeed Shakespeare’s “named” scenes (3.1, 3.2, 3.3 . . .) are often constructed somewhat like figures of speech, with similar potential for forward and backward grammar and referential folds. Thomas Pavel expresses this nicely: While in a mystery play the scenes could afford to be short and not well-connected, since the biblical text provided a background that filled in all gaps, in King Lear, in Macbeth, or in Antony and Cleopatra the rapid montage, the quick shifts of perspective, the transient secondary lines of action, all induce a nontectonic tension between fragments, which support themselves, as it were, by their own dynamism, not unlike a baroque painting, without resting on a basic, more complete, validating groundtext.6

It isn’t that there is an “apparent” (deceiving) picture and then a “hidden” (correct) one. This is far too hierarchical, empirically open-and-shut for Shakespeare. The scene – like his language – is constitutionally as well as compositionally anamorphic. Perhaps there is in Shakespeare nothing absolutely small or absolutely big – or at least not when his work is at its most densely intense. Deleuze neatly encapsulates the choice – our choice as critics or thinkers – as one between Aristotle’s common sense and Leibniz’s dizzying rationalism:

6 Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 109.

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[T]here is a famous scream from Aristotle. The great Aristotle – who, let us note, exerted an extremely strong influence on Leibniz – at one point proposed in the Metaphysics a very beautiful formula: it is indeed necessary to stop (anankstenai). This is a great scream. This is the philosopher in front of the chasm of the interconnection of concepts. Leibniz . . . does not stop.7

Shakespeare too perhaps does not stop. There is a long tradition of critics who bemoan just this – an overcopiousness that wearies more regulated imaginations. Traditionally the resistance has been to Shakespeare’s puns, or to the extravagant indecorum of his metaphors. It began with Jonson (“would he had blotted a thousand”),8 was admitted by his fellow King’s Men Heminge and Condell (“if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him”),9 and became a dominant theme from Dryden (“the fury of his fancy often transported him beyond the bounds of judgment”)10 through Dr Johnson, Hugh Blair, Coleridge, and beyond. Empson’s Seven Types may seem to have redeemed Shakespeare’s wordplay from charges of waste and tastelessness – but Wittgenstein was seeing a familiar prodigal monstrosity in the 1940s, judging Shakespeare’s similes to be “in the ordinary sense, bad”.11 We might flatter ourselves that we’re beyond such queasy rectitude: but in the main we’re not. The neo-classicists are routinely decried for their intolerant proscription of so much that makes Shakespeare whatever he is – the puns, metaphors, scenic unpredictability, generic disobedience. But the academy today is hardly less Augustan. We are always improving Shakespeare, or protecting ourselves from his excess. It is still thought necessary to cut Shakespeare in productions for stage or film, and to simplify or paraphrase him in schools. Teachers and editors alike police Shakespeare’s meanings, for understandable professional reasons. There’s only so much time and space available, and the audience is restless. Teachers, forced unwillingly or not to teach the Bard to children, are 7

http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/on-leibniz.html Timber: or, Discoveries, (F2 of 1641), reprinted in E.K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930). 9 ‘To the great variety of Readers’, The First Folio, A3. 10 ‘The grounds of criticism in tragedy’, prefixed to Troilus and Cressida (1679), in George Watson, ed., Of Dramatic Poesy: and other Critical Essays, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1962), i. 257. 11 He goes on: “So if they are nevertheless good – & I don’t know if they are or not – they must be a law to themselves.” Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 56. 8

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desperate for familiarity, not surprise. The more recognisable the material, the more analogous to already-known stories, the better. Even editors of the plays don’t always want to look deeply at what the words might mean; they consult other editions, a dictionary here and there, hope for the occasional serendipitous discovery, and attend to their collations. But there are also moral reasons underlying all of these expediencies. We want discipline, we want order, we want to know what’s what. Perhaps, above all, we need clarity. Clarity is a virtue, perhaps the principle virtue of Enlightenment-informed pedagogy.12 But what it means is in fact a bit muddy. Does it mean that the language can be seen through? That it describes something that we can clearly see? These are very different. One problem with Shakespeare is that we can very clearly see the words, but not always the actions or thoughts that they express. But this is partly because both of these definitions of clarity fail to measure up to what Shakespeare’s language routinely does. You cannot see through it to some pre-existing thing (as Hazlitt says of Shakespeare’s “mixed metaphors”, “They are the building and not the scaffolding to thought”13). And the action this language describes, in the sense of a visible, sensible motion, is very often only a part of the actions embodied. Shakespeare’s lines often do not describe, in the way of a single line outlining a particular shape. Instead they shiver and cross and merge, much as the lines do in Michelangelo’s or Leonardo’s sketches, or the superimposed drypoint lines in Rembrandt’s etchings – or indeed some of Matisse’s pictures, where he flagrantly retains lines that are “not” those of the represented figure, but which seem to express earlier thoughts, rehearsals towards this final proffered shape.14 The closer you look, the more the shape wobbles into its environs, and foreground and background swap places or join. And perhaps the wish for clarity goes still deeper, touching upon guild dignity, or even species dignity. Proliferation is something that defines lower forms of life: the promiscuous travel of seeds, the spawn of fish or frog, the rhizomes in the soil, the undifferentiable noise of a crowd. We like our rooms and our walls; the richer we are, the more we have of them, or the

12 For a refutation of the essential truth of clarity, see Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), ch. 3. 13 14 “On Shakespeare and Milton”, 93. See Focillon, The Forms of Life in Art, 41.

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bigger we build them, the better to be separate from the crowds. We turn our minds away from our common-species inheritance in sessile sea-life, or from our individual trace in the blind pre-consciousness of spermatozoa: There are perspectives of the universe to which morality is irrelevant . . . The notion of the unqualified stability of particular laws of nature and of particular moral codes is a primary illusion which has vitiated much philosophy. For example, consider the application of our moral notions concerning family relations to beings such as fish, who produce hundreds, nay thousands, of eggs in one year.15

Proliferation might take us too close to such matters, which is our purpose and dignity to overcome. It is a difficult thing, as Michel Serres has written of his own philosophic ambition, to “conceive of the multiple as such, directly, without unification coming to its aid”; a hard task to “speak of multiplicity itself without ever availing myself of the concept [i.e. a preempting, unifying idea]”.16 That the multiple – Shakespeare’s proliferant forms – is no more than “the ordinary lot of situations” does not make it easier to do justice, or fully to hear. We might well discern a great swarm of meanings, passing us by like a flock of birds, and resign them to some collective noun, a school or an aggregate, that stands mainly for distant incomprehension. As Serres says, “we are tied down to a spot, our limitation, our definition is our point of view, we are chained to scenographies”.17 The limitation here is a kind of fixed subject-position, akin to the Cartesian ego. Against this Serres advocates radically upending Leibniz’s famous pyramid of possible worlds (where only the one at the very pinnacle is granted presence in this world), such that we might truly attend to the incompossible lives imprisoned in its endlessly descending chambers: we do not hear “harmony”, but “noise itself. Leibniz’s system turns over like an iceberg.”18 Possibility opens, it “gapes”, in the form of disregarded “background noise”, a chaos of possibles, waiting to be drawn from their obscurity. Shakespearean possibility always includes the presently incompossible: the stuff that cannot otherwise be seen; the worlds that cannot yet be 15

Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 11–13. Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 4–5. 17 Serres, Genesis, 19. 18 Serres, Genesis, 21. For discussion of Leibniz’s pyramid see section 24. 16

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reached; the ideals, terrible or redeeming, which cannot yet be put to the proof, and which exist on probation as much as we do. And so let’s try not to massage all Shakespeare’s clay back into the shapes we expect. Let’s allow some possibles to be lonely, or vertiginous, such that to dwell in them is truly to lack ground beneath our feet. Possibility is all of the things that imagination or intimation sees, or faith or despair apprehends, often out of the reach of daily continuities: and all of them, in Shakespeare’s dispensation, already here.

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The most influential thinker of possibility available to Shakespeare remained Aristotle. Although under assault from various angles – from Campanella and Bruno for his hylomorphism (i.e. form shapes matter to produce substance), from Bacon and the new scientists for his metaphysical assumptions – Aristotle’s methods were the orthodoxy against which innovations or renovations were measured, and remained the almostinstinctual scaffolding for much intellectual endeavour. But to realise Shakespeare’s distinctiveness we only have to recall Aristotle’s identification, in the Nicomachean Ethics (by far the most widely read of his works at the time) of virtue with voluntary action: virtuous activity is chosen and purposive, implicitly praised by what it works towards, which is the Good. Shakespeare understands this as a basic cultural and ethical orthodoxy.1 It is the premise of mimetic art, ruled by notions of probability rather than necessity or possibility. But every play of Shakespeare’s complicates this orthodoxy, and builds worlds upon the complications, such that the very possibility of a voluntary act can seem practically and ethically dubious, either a humiliating non sequitur or a charter for ruthless efficiency, if not superseded by other motive forces entirely – actions at a distance, automated somnambulism, ghosts, or an akratic captivity to sensory drives that can be neither fully owned nor finally renounced. But then how could it be otherwise, we might ask, when his craft is built upon and written to that of actors – for Aristotle exemplars of lapsed virtue, performing to another’s script, without foundational self-control? 1 Aristotle: “Man is the originating cause of his actions; deliberation has for the sphere of its operation acts which are within his own power of doing them; all that we do is done with an eye to something else, it follows that when we deliberate it is about means and not ends”: The Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), III, 2 and 3.

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The evident difficulty of acting purposively or virtuously – experienced by so many Shakespeare characters – shadows this more primary condition: roles that in the real world do not exist, played by actors who are not whom they play, who are spoken rather than speaking, helpless to alter a thing. In a sense this contract is the most basic formaction of all: a scripted life. It can make us think the puzzle of a dependent ontology, or a split identity, where what we are – not merely what we do, or the roles we must perforce play, but what we are – is contingent upon another’s unreachable presence: our life as a kind of holograph or shadow, not ontologically selfauthorising. The puzzle saturates Shakespeare’s work in large and small compass: think of those tragic heroes cripplingly in hock to mysterious supra-natural prescription (Hamlet, Macbeth), or to impossible models of martial ascendance (Mark Antony, Coriolanus); think of his comic heroines’ refuge in disguise, without which (before and after the play’s itinerant action) they are trapped or immobile, substantively vaporised; or of the later heroines’ loss of civic self-possession, as men dismiss their real bodies and reconceive them as virtual pornographic manikins, begging for punishment, a reconstruction they cannot survive intact (Isabella, Desdemona, Ophelia); or how other women-characters, to avoid punishment, submit themselves in their plots to much the same, and live into the future only in a strange halflight, as of bed-trick or voyeurised mime, furtively casting after unshareable erotic memories or projections (Cressida, Helena); or think of the weird, wired, ontological contingency of Edgar/Tom. This sort of life is play-specific. These are not conditions that philosophy – or perhaps even theology – really cater to. According to Aristotle, for instance, unless something can become actual it is not possible. There is no potentiality that cannot be realised; that which will never be realised is not possible, but impossible. He thus identifies actuality with entelechy, or soul, into which potentiality is sublated: the chicken comes before the egg.2 But such firm distinctions between matter and form or between potentiality and actuality are of dubious use when it comes to Shakespeare. Likewise any assumption that “the play” has an actuality separate from the processes 2 Aristotle writes about potentiality in various ways in various treatises, notably De Anima (“On the Soul”) and The Metaphysics.

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that animate it; or indeed that the play-as-object even exists in the way that a man or a building evidently does.3 Even in his Poetics Aristotle is resolutely matter-of-fact, presupposing a daily reality which poetry falsifies for our pleasure and purgation. It is the artwork’s purpose either to transcend the mundane world or to harness more efficient relations to it. That this daily reality is essentially shared and known is never in question (on what principles it works is obviously more complicated). There are hints of a more drama-sensitive metaphysics in Aristotle’s idea that potentiality “resides” in the thing being built, and in his concession that, where there is no “function over and above the actuality”, the actuality can reside in the subjects – “seeing in the see-er”, “well-being, a certain quality of life” in the soul. But in the main the Aristotelian view understands things in the world as defined, finished, their forms perfected and given: or else such ends are the purpose and justification of our endeavour, usually achieved by returning to the achieved forms or precepts of the past. Aristotle’s privileging of actuality over potentiality depends upon assumptions about species, kinds, and ends. He presupposes these things, because he thinks that the created world presupposes them. Sperm issues in a boy, and the boy issues in a man: the man is the perfected form, the end to which the process aimed. An architect’s sketch generates a process of building, which issues in a building. The Aristotelian model always and already knows the “principle”, the “end” to which all matter aims: “the end is the actuality, and it is for the sake of this actuality-end that the potentiality is brought in”: [T]he point of matter’s being in potential is that it may progress to the form . . . The fact is that a thing’s active function is its end, and its actuality is its active function . . . For the act of building resides in the object of building and has both its becoming and its being simultaneously with the house . . . [T]he actuality resides in what is made.4

3 Compare the Italian humanist natural philosopher, Telesio, who objected to Aristotle’s account of physics on the basis that it “made nature wasteful, a slumbering storehouse of ideal forms waiting to be put to work”: “Rejecting metaphysical principles prior to the natural object because he considered them redundant, Telesio insisted that all the object’s features are precisely coextensive and simultaneous with its organic development”: Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, 312. 4 Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1998), 274–5 (Theta 8).

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For all that he engages with motion and change, Aristotle’s ultimate interest is in regularities, and the things in the world that attest it: the noun always trumps the verb, just as the species (man, house, horse) preempts any unfinished individual (becoming-man, -house, -horse). The “actuality-end” in fact substantially creates the potentiality, just as the generic thing creates each singular instance of it. As we have seen, this way of conceiving possibility continues to account for most early modern drama – anything that is written first and foremost to a plot. But it only speaks superficially to Shakespeare. Among the ancients it is perhaps Plotinus (a foundational influence on St Augustine, and widely disseminated in the sixteenth century after Ficino’s translation of his Enneads) who best hints at Shakespearean possibility:5 In soulless things the one power, so to speak, lies asleep in them . . . But the work of soul is something awake, both that within it and in the same way that which goes out to something else. Soul therefore makes alive all the other things which do not live of themselves, and makes them live the sort of life by which it lives itself.6

Plotinus speaks profoundly to the possibilities of an agonistic, questing, imperfect dispensation such as a playworld. So, there would not be discrete things at all were it not for a foundational disobedience – Plotinus calls it “audacity” – by which souls desire individuated experience. We get a creation “boiling with life”, in which all souls and bodies are at once hungry for metabolism and animate with a desire for the good. For Plotinus, as for Shakespeare, each fragment is a fractal: in one sense an insufficient shard of the true substance; in another sense, a promise-crammed instantiation of everything. Each node of creation is thereby endued with a radical futurity: in a wonderful formulation of Plotinus, souls create time, a life defined by seriality and change, in the action of fragmenting from the realm of pure ideas. Plotinus’s dispensation tantalisingly suggests formactive playworlds: all things in the world are simulacra, generated by a mixture of the generative plenitude of the whole and the conative independence of each part. 5

See Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, 15–16, 133–6. Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), IV. 3. 10. 6

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Consider his memorable image of how body floats in soul “like a net in the sea”: implicitly capturing hints and vestiges of its potential, a necessary capture, perhaps, for daily life to intuit the truth, but equally a paltry impoverishment next to soul’s abundance.7 Or again: But how are we to speak about the soul? For it is potentially a living being, when it is not one yet, but is going to be, and is potentially musical, and so with everything else that it becomes and is not always . . . No, the soul is not these things potentially, it is the potentiality of these things.8

It is the closing, very fine distinction which best suggests Shakespearean forms. To be something potentially is to know what this thing will be; to prehend it, possess it, effectively wait for it to be manifest as actuality. Possibility is previsioned. To be the “potentiality of these things” is far more dizzying and unknown: it is to be the sea, open to one or another net, which will sink itself into plenty and trust to a catch; or it is to be a form before shape, holding in potential infinite shapes that future contingencies may make come true. If Shakespeare is neo-Platonic, this is how. Transformational possibility is immanent in his materials, his formactions. All things depend on this push into future states and tendencies. But clearly even Plotinus, for all the beauty of his vision, is still too abstractly metaphysical to speak to the quiddity of Shakespeare’s theatre. Shakespeare’s world is emphatically not a world of the One. It is a world of many ones; of souls uninsured by any unifying original. The playworlds’ pieces and players do not reflect or trace some truer realm that at once vouchsafes existence and eludes knowledge: they foundationally lack the security of philosophical metaphysics. Shakespeare’s is a kind of penultimate creation, but a penultimacy without the ultimacy that might stabilise it, or make it safely derived. This is not to say he was a merely secular writer – rather that his worlds do not reach any settled place beyond this one, even if he often travels into what cannot be vouched by sense and reason. If theatre has its own metaphysics – which surely it does – it is founded in its craft-particular physics, which are never only physical.

7 Plotinus: “The universe lies in soul which bears it up, and nothing is without a share of soul. It is as if a net immersed in the waters was alive, but unable to make its own that in which it is. The sea is already spread out and the new spreads with it, as far as it can.” Enneads, IV. 3. 9. 8 Enneads, II. 5. 3.

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This means that in some ways Shakespeare’s world can be understood animistically or vitalistically or even atomistically – one in which all objects are animate with soul. Here is Giordano Bruno: TEOFILO.

But if the soul, present in the whole, is also in the parts, why do you not admit it in the parts of the parts? D I C S O N O . I do, but only in the parts of parts of animate things. T E O F I L O . But what are these things that are not animated, or that are not parts of animated things?. . . And which things do not possess life, or at least the vital principle? D I C S O N O . . . Then a dead body has a soul? So, my clogs, my slippers, my boots, my spurs, as well as my ring and my gauntlets are supposedly animated? T E O F I L O . . . in all things there is spirit, and there is not the least corpuscle that does not contain within itself some portion that may animate it. D I C S O N O . Ergo, quidquid est, animal est. [Therefore, whatever is, is animal] T E O F I L O . . . That is not only plausible but true, for that spirit is found in all things which, even if they are not living creatures, are animate.9

Certainly Shakespeare is continuous, in a broad sense, with this sort of animism – and with the belief in “innumerable worlds” that often rose irresistibly from animistic cosmology.10 Far from arbitrarily floating or colliding, these “minima” mediate between mind and matter; each particle is endued with motion, and with a God-endowed creative programme.11 Bruno’s work is marked by what Peter Sloterdijk calls “the luminous literalness of his real thoughts” – utterly different from Shakespeare in fundamental ways, but pulsing with something of the same unpredictable faith in the truth of imagination.12

9 Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, trans. and ed. Robert de Lucca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Dialogue 2, 43–4. 10 Common to Bruno, and Kepler, and before them Lucretius and Nicholas of Cusa. See Campbell, Wonder and Science, 116ff. 11 For Bruno the monad or “minima” is a fundamental metaphysical unity, spatially extended and psychically aware. Individual souls (and not only the human soul, but the soul of every individual essence, since for Bruno everything is animate) are the passing shades of the eternal becoming of the world. 12 Sloterdijk, Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 26. “[Bruno’s] work attests to a misunderstood aspect of the myth of the modern era: it illustrates the birth of modernity out of the spirit of a philosophy of imagination. In the wake of the rediscovery of Bruno’s doctrine of the worldconstituting achievements of “imagination”, the lazy penchant of intellectual historians to construct modern thought entirely on the basis of Descartes becomes more dubious than ever. One must go back to the universe of Bruno, Shakespeare, and Bacon to find the keys to largely unknown treasures of incipient modernity. Like hardly a thinker before him, Bruno immersed himself into the cosmo-dynamic of memories.” (25–6).

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In thought-worlds such as these – and other seminal sixteenth-century natural philosophers like Campanella, Telesio, Fracastoro, Paracelsus – creation’s details teem with potential: anything, animate or inanimate, visible or invisible, human or non-human, may bear a promise of life.13 This implies no fixed poles or centre, or perhaps an endless multiplying extension of them: as Bruno put it, there are “a thousand hearts”.14 Each particle of matter possesses the power to reproduce, with a viscosity allowing it to adhere to different bodies. Certainly there are suggestions here of a kind of poetics of nature, whereby almost-intangible matter can reproduce, and where affects are carried on the air, like music or metaphor. As Fernand Hallyn puts it, the world had a “poetic structure” – not airily inspired, but fractally self-making.15 But the analogies remain strictly limited – principally because vitalist and atomist thinking (Bruno partially excepted) does not allow these seeds or corpuscles sufficient expressive or perceptive or passionate capability of their own, such that substance can be conceived of as a mode of living language. Equally, in some ways Shakespeare anticipates Descartes, in particular the belief that the visible world, available to the senses, depends upon and replicates invisible machinic sources. Shakespeare has many differences from Descartes: he is not a dualist; body and mind are everywhere

13 The semina of Girolamo Fracastoro’s On Contagion (1546) are prime indivisible bodies from which the whole universe was originally composed, ebbing and flowing, their corporeal substance renewed moment by moment. Instead of a seed or atom, Fracastoro’s seminarium is the vehicle by which putrefaction in one body is transported to another. Telesio’s Lucretianinspired De Rerum Natura (1563) rejected an Aristotelian conception of body in terms of matter and form, preferring a temperature-sensitive creation in which immaterial, natural agents enter into lifeless matter and thereby animate it. Paracelsus had it that nature as a whole is a panspermia, the seeds of life imbuing the entire universe: De Natura Rerum (1537). The Paracelsian Peter Severinus, in his Idea Medicinae (1571), understood semina as the link between the celestial and the terrestrial world: the invisible spiritual principle of matter, originating with God and endowed with spiritus mechanici, a kind of programme responsible for the origin and development of all natural substances. This in turn had a strong influence on early seventeenth-century medicine and science, notably on Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy. See Daniel Garber, “Physics and Foundations”, Katharine Park and Loraine Daston, eds, Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 34; see Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy. 14 Bruno, De l’infinito universe e mondi; translation in Dorothy Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought, with Annotated Translation of His Work on the Infinite Universe and Worlds (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), 280. 15 The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, trans. Donald M. Leslie (New York: Zone Books, 1990).

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coordinate in his work; there is no transcendent mover in his plays like Descartes’ God. Nevertheless, there are suggestive correspondences if we understand a play as a type of machine – remembering that, for Descartes, all organisms were living machine-bodies, pulsing with multiple subvisible machines and internal symbionts.16 Descartes claimed that the only difference between natural and man-made machines was size: the motion of a clock is in principle no different from the growth of a tree from a seed. Rather as Galileo and other mathematicians tried to uncover hidden “macroscopic masked levers” operating in pulleys, winches, beams, and the like, “the mechanical philosophy aimed at uncovering different types of machines, often microscopic ones, in the folds of and behind natural phenomena”.17 This posits an invisible nanostructure of hooks and screws and triggers, making the world move and cohere: rather like cues, prosodic shifts, scenes, and so on “invisibly” organise the visible action of a play. What is more, if we cannot get access to this invisible micro-world – to the hidden sources and causes of the natural world – then we must move from what we can see to what we cannot. This can only be done by imagination: by assuming that subvisible mechanisms are duplicated in visible ones, and that we may get knowledge of this subvisible world through metaphor and comparison: [I] examined the principal differences that could be found between the shapes, sizes and movements insensible on account of their smallness alone, and what sensible effects could be produced by the various ways in which they impinge on one another. And finally, when I found like effects in the bodies perceived by our senses, I considered that they might have been produced from a similar concourse of bodies. For I can see no difference, between those [bodies made by art] and those made by nature alone, excepting that the effects of machines depend for the most part on the operation of certain pipes, springs or other instruments. Since men necessarily make them, they must always be large enough to be capable of being easily perceived by

16 In much seventeenth-century thinking “organism” effectively becomes a synonym for “mechanism”. See Smith, Divine Machines, 105–7. This differs from the now standard distinction made between organisms and machines, which received its classic formulation in Kant’s Critique of Judgement: an organism’s whole determines its form and relation of its parts; the parts mutually form each other; the whole reproduces itself. 17 Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 138.

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the senses. On the other hand the pipes and springs that cause the effects of natural bodies almost always are too small to be perceived by the senses.18

Descartes’ corpuscularism necessarily entails imperceptible particles, which need metaphor in order to be imagined – that is, literally presented to the mind as an image. What is more, as much as Descartes’ notion of “understanding” is of something entirely non-corporeal, the impressions made by perceptions have a specific location in the brain: they literally impress themselves, as upon wax: This fancy [used interchangeably with imagination] is a genuine part of the body, of sufficient size to allow its different parts to assume various figures in distinctness from each other and to let those parts acquire the practice of retaining the impressions for some time. In the latter case we give that faculty the name of memory.19

If we want to imagine a playworld as a kind of machine, then there will be suggestive similarities to this Cartesian model of perception. First, subvisible machines have the same form as visible machines, which they mediately help to create; second, cognition has physical locations; third, imaginative troping is necessary to the discovery and understanding of nature. Of course, these similarities are rough and general. But they do point to a world in which “machines” are far more than inanimate harnesses of anterior natural forces, or zombie-instruments of efficient and productive repetition; in which knowledge of nature depends, almost primordially, upon metaphor; and in which invisible pulleys and levers not only help to produce visible worlds, but are of a coordinate structure to it. This mechanistic thinking suggests something of the involved, instrumental thickness of Shakespeare, the as-though physical depth of its organisation. But in truth it lacks the procreative spark. As a model of action it is occasionally parallel to Shakespeare, but not genuinely revealing. The main reason for this, I think, is Descartes’ absolute separation of subject and object. His superintending cogito is like a spectator at some

18 Descartes, Works, vol. 1, 297–300; quoted in Peter Galison, “Descartes’ Comparisons: From the Invisible to the Visible”, Isis 75 (1984), 325. 19 Works, I, 338; quoted Galison, “Descartes”, 320. Also see M. W. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1927); E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975).

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impossibly ideal theatre, positioned dead centre, watching and appraising what he sees pass in front of his eyes: Visual sensation, Descartes considered, passed through the optic nerves to be mapped onto this gland in the middle of the brain, where the mysterious ego could study the image. What Descartes installed in the centre of the skull was effectively a miniature theatre where the self could contemplate reality and decide how to deal with it, before sending appropriate messages down the hydraulic system to the body. This miniature theatre was a secure home for the self or ego to reside in, safe from the Inquisition that nobbled Galileo, but the price was a certain detachment.20

This detached objectivity in turn posits a linear, uni-directional understanding of time, premised upon establishing space as a metric – a geometrically measurable absolute that governs the realm of extended things, radically distinct from the non-metric realm of the understanding. Descartes paves the way for the whole central Enlightenment tradition that still dominates the humanities: but in crucial ways this tradition is inadequate to Shakespeare, who is far more primitive, even occult, than it allows, the physics of his worlds and his language irregular and selfconcatenating, directed by craft exigencies and mercurial emotion (anxiety, wonder, desire) as much as by any surveying intelligence or design.21 For all their differences, the English empiricists – Bacon, Hobbes, Hooke, Locke – would probably have agreed in rejecting much in Shakespeare’s address as fantastical and harmful whimsy, an ecstasy of vagrant metaphors and action at a distance. (Margaret Cavendish probably loved Shakespeare for just such wildness, but she was barely tolerated by the Royal Society tastemakers herself.) No doubt Shakespeare’s sharp eye for false worship and nature-in-motion would have endorsed much of the Baconian enterprise, or at least found its imperatives understandable. But

20 David Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4–5. 21 James A. Knapp uses Merleau-Ponty to help critique Descartes’ “ocular-centrism”: “Prior to the ascendancy of Cartesian scepticism and its overt goal of rebuilding ‘a thought sure of its rights’, the visual occupied a middle space between the realm of eternal (but inaccessible) truth and the material (but ephemeral) world of embodied experience. In returning the visual to this status in an effort to dismantle the Cartesian system, Merleau-Ponty offers an approach to ethics and vision that sheds light on Shakespeare’s exploration of motivated human action”: Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 112–13.

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as much as in local details Shakespeare frequently anticipates new scientific intelligence, his informing shapes, the way his scenes, language, and stories secrete or process life, do not. The most suggestive thinker here is perhaps Leibniz’s great rival among seventeenth-century metaphysicians: Benedict Spinoza, a world-maker to rival any. It is well known that Coleridge likened Shakespeare to the “Spinozistic deity, an omnipresent creativeness”:22 Shakespeare shaped his characters out of nature within – but we cannot safely say, out of his own Nature, as an individual person. – No! This latter is itself but a natura naturata – an effect, a product, not a power. It was Shakespeare’s prerogative to have the universal which is potentially in each particular, opened out to him – . . . as the Substance capable of endless modifications of which his own personal Existence was but one – & to use this one as the eye that beheld the other and as the Tongue that could convey the discovery.23

But in fact Coleridge was developing an insight of Herder’s, 50 years previous: If only I had the words to describe the one main feeling that prevails in each drama and courses through it like a world soul. . .we see that the whole world is merely the body belonging to this great spirit: all the scenes of nature are the limbs of this body, just as every character and way of thinking is a feature of this spirit – and we might call the whole by the name of Spinoza’s vast God: ‘Pan! Universum!”24

Spinoza’s deity is not a bearded father in the sky; he has no intentions for humankind; he has no moral programme, no teleology, no personality; he neither praises nor punishes. He is Nature: the single existing substance. Everything is a mode or attribute of him: but this means that his nature can only be recovered, only be understood, from the minds and bodies in the world, and the actions and passions that characterise them. There is no separation of subject and object: they are irreducibly symbiotic. Likewise, the “order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things”, meaning that “thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended through this and

22 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk I (Collected Works 14), ed. Carl Woodring (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 125. 23 The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1836), Lecture VII, 105. 24 Herder, “Shakespeare”, Aesthetics, 301–2.

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now through that attribute”.25 Spinoza’s understanding of emotion is correspondingly mechanistic: “I shall regard human action and appetites exactly as if I were dealing with lines, planes, and bodies.”26 However, this does not imply an indifference to purposive action: far from it. Action, for Spinoza, is associated with understanding, with an “adequate idea” of something. Emotions, by way of contrast, he calls “a passivity of the soul”, bespeaking a “confused” or “inadequate” idea.27 This is the overwhelming condition of most people, for whom understanding is the merest delusion: “the decisions of the mind are nothing save their appetites, which are various according to various dispositions of the body. For each one manages everything according to his emotion, and thus those who are assailed by conflicting emotions know not what they want.”28 Like Shakespeare, Spinoza understands the body as a host of multiple individualities; but he sees this as a source and symptom of confusion, irresolution, mental indistinctness: [T]he waverings of the mind generally arise from an object which is the efficient cause of each emotion. For the human body is composed of many individuals of a different nature, and therefore it may be affected by one and the same body in many different ways; and, on the other hand, because one and the same thing can be affected in many ways, therefore it can affect one and the same part of the body in different ways. From which we can easily conceive that one and the same object can be the cause of many contrary emotions.29

His basic attitude to these maelstroms of emotion is a haughty regret that humans so lack the faculty of understanding, that they are such passive dupes of what they take to be willed desire, but which is in fact a besotted somatic dependency. But if this is true of the mass of humankind, it is doubly true of playthings, the quintessence of a dependent ontology. We might well conclude that Spinoza’s geometric metaphysic is the ultimate antitype to passion-fuelled drama. After all, in diagnosing the passions he indicts the very foundations of playworlds – things like the borrowed lines of players, the movement of sympathy, and the implicit error that is imagination: Imagination is the idea with which the mind regards anything as present, which nevertheless indicates rather the present disposition of the human body than the 25 Ethics and Treatise on the Correction of the Intellect, trans. Andrew Boyle, rev. G. H. R. Parkinson (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 42. 26 27 28 29 Spinoza, Ethics, 83. Ethics, 84. Ethics, 87–8. Ethics, 95–6.

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nature of the external body. Therefore emotion is imagination in so far as it indicates the present disposition of the body: and therefore the mind is only liable to emotions which are referred to passions while the body endures.30

The imagination is tied to body and to time. It isn’t truly present – and nor is the thing imagined, which is rather a projection of the desires and appetites of the body. For Spinoza, the imagination has intrinsically less reality than anything perceived by the active intellect. Images, then, are the parts that must “perish”, that immanently speak the fact of expiration. Imagination, far from a Romantic proto-divinity, is indentured to death: only true mental freedom can overcome mortal fear.31 Furthermore, the consummate medium of errant imagination is precisely words: [S]ince words are a part of the imagination – that is, because we feign many concepts in accordance with the inconstant way in which words are combined in the memory, as a result of some indisposition of the body – it is not to be doubted that words, too, just as much as the imagination, can be the cause of many grave errors, unless we take great precautions against them. Further, they are established in accordance with the will and the understanding of the crowd, in such a way that they are merely the signs of things as they are in the imagination, and not as they are in the intellect.32

Obviously, it is words, images, and emotions, in all their febrile confusion and oblivious self-assertiveness, which overwhelmingly furnish and characterise what we take to be reality. But it isn’t, for Spinoza, substantial reality. And here we get a paradox. As we have seen, Spinoza believes in one substance only, which he calls God; he proceeds to identify a world saturated with passion; he then says this: God is free from passions, nor is he affected with any emotion of pleasure or pain. Proof.– All ideas, in so far as they have reference to God, are true, that is, they are adequate: and therefore God is without passions . . . God cannot pass to a higher or lower perfection: and therefore he is affected with no emotion of pleasure of pain . . . God, to speak strictly, loves no one and does not hate any one.33

Spinoza rebuts anthropomorphic fantasies of a caring God; we may find this thrilling, we may find it appalling, but it isn’t, I think, the really provocative thing. Far more troubling is Spinoza’s conclusion that God is 30

31 Ethics, 213. Ethics, 205–6. Ethics, 251–2; also see Spinoza’s “Note” on truth and error at the end of the Ethics’ Second Part (76–81). 33 Ethics, 204–5. 32

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without passion. For if God is the only substance, and everything in the world is a mode or attribute of God – then where are the passion-fuelled fools in this world? It is one thing to say that imagination and passion falls short of truth, or of an adequate apprehension of God. It is quite another to posit God as the sole substance, and characterise this substance as desire, and then explicitly to exclude most desire from belonging. This seems to posit human life, in its majority – a majority of its members; or a majority of the members that make each individual life – as a mode of privation: literally, an ontological lack or absence. And yet this absence is. And this, I think, is what Shakespeare’s formactions recover, and his characters suffer, condemned in their passions to just such comi-tragic entrapment. The key here remains the diagnosis of mankind’s ubiquitous captivity to passion – not merely its feeling, but its power to make the world in its image.34 We think we possess ourselves, and direct our minds accordingly: but in truth we are composed by desires that make us constitutionally unfinished, layers removed from completion, feeding upon the immanent bodily fact of our perishing. The order of things is constructed emotionally, relationally, contingent on passions that we do not know the source of, or whose source we mistakenly understand as our freedom: inadequate ideas literally form the given dispensation. I paraphrase Spinoza, but it equally describes the world of Shakespeare: [T]he mind and body are one and the same thing, which is now conceived under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension . . . the order of the actions and passions of our body is simultaneous with the order of actions and passions of our mind . . . yet I scarcely believe . . . that men can be induced to consider this calmly, so firmly are they persuaded that the body is moved by the mere command of the mind, or is kept at rest, and that it performs many things which merely depend 34

Compare Michael Witmore’s reading of The Tempest in the light of Spinoza’s Ethics. He sees the play as animate with “the harmony of understanding that is only possible in and through reflection on embodied being, an understanding of precisely ‘how and why’, as Spinoza puts it, our own thoughts and bodies can be said to be part of a substance that comprehends them”. (Shakespearean Metaphysics, 112). Witmore’s concentration upon the “ambient” quality of the play’s “sonic mode of interrelation” (114) – a “frictionless species of touch”, making the characters “part of a single vibrating membrane or envelope” (100), connoting “states of shared affection” (114) – allows a more achieved, apperceptive, holistic vision of Shakespearean Spinozism, in which the imbrication of part and whole, action and environment, is immanent in the play’s material forms and, perhaps incipiently, in the Ariel-led recognitions of Prospero.

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on the will or ingenuity of the mind . . . For no one has yet had a sufficiently accurate knowledge of the construction of the human body as to be able to explain all its functions: in addition to which there are many things which are observed in brutes which far surpass human sagacity, and many things which sleepwalkers do which they would not dare, were they awake: all of which shows that the body can do many things by the laws of its nature alone at which the mind is amazed . . . [E]xperience more than sufficiently teaches that there is nothing less under men’s control than their tongues, or less in their power than the control of their appetites . . . [W]e can do nothing by a decision of the mind unless we recollect having done so before, e.g., we cannot speak a word unless we recollect having done so. Again, it is not within the free power of the mind to remember or forget anything . . . [W]e must necessarily admit, that this decision of the mind, which is thought to be free, cannot be distinguished from imagination or memory, nor is it anything else than the affirmation which an idea, in so far as it is an idea, necessarily involves. And therefore these decrees of the mind arise in the mind from the same necessity as the ideas of things actually existing. Those therefore, who believe that they speak, are silent, or do anything from the free decision of the mind, dream with their eyes open.35

Are you not in truth a baffled sot, your passions a diversion, an ethical anaesthetic? Are you not in everything, especially what you take to be your will, radically unfree? Are you anything but appetite, an appetite that isn’t even truly yours, but rather an accidental necessity of the fact that you are body, and you exist in time, and you shall pass away? We are spoken; we are taken. And yet: as Prospero says to Miranda: ’tis new to thee. This is the fact of playworlds. Not a step taken is free: but still each and every moment is barely known, felt as new, a missed cue away from never existing. Shakespeare redeems as pathos what Spinoza decries as pathetic – seizing the truth of suffering, passion, privation, of baffled or inordinate or even inauthentic desire. It is a truth felt and animate in playlife.

35

Ethics, 85–8.

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And so, having raced through these great thinkers of possibility, from ancient times to the late seventeenth century, we arrive once more at Leibniz. The return, I think, is necessary. It may seem that Leibniz, with his belief in a universal mathematic and his preference for harmony, is exactly the wrong model for Shakespeare’s unsystematic procreativity. Certainly the differences are beyond dispute. Leibniz read English and visited England a number of times, but there is no record of him knowing Shakespeare’s work. The playwright’s negative capability, resistance to systems, and efficient secularism might seem the ultimate antitype to the philosopher’s theoontological rationalism. And at the most basic experiential level, much about Leibniz is radically unfamiliar. Shakespeare is routinely celebrated as the unlearned natural genius, producing worlds from native wit and sympathy; Leibniz is quite possibly the most widely read man who has ever lived. Leibniz knew nothing, really, of love or sex. He didn’t seem to suffer for desire, other than in his unquenchable but somehow happy thirst for knowledge; he acknowledges emotion, but the fact of it rarely disturbs his rationalism; and above all, he writes from and to an unswerving faith in beneficent divine preformation, the necessary correlative of his belief in sufficient reason. Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds is premised upon the prevention or inhibition of myriad other life forms, both possible and incompossible. Leibniz essentially celebrates this, or at least everywhere justifies it: he will not allow God’s choice to be anything but good: “if we could understand the structure and economy of the universe, we should find that it is made and directed

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as the wisest and most virtuous could wish it, since God cannot fail to do thus”.1 This is summarised in the parable with which Leibniz ends his Theodicy, in which he seeks to justify the given dispensation. He imagines that Sextus Tarquinius – the Tarquin of The Rape of Lucrece – travels to the temple of Jove, unsatisfied by what the Delphic oracle had told him about his ill-starred future. Jove refuses Tarquin’s request to change his fate or admit that the oracle was wrong. Tarquin abandons himself to his destiny – or, in Leibniz’s terms, to his part in this, the best of all possible worlds. But Jove’s priest, Theodorus, wants to know more. He visits the temple of Pallas in Athens, where he falls into a deep sleep and dreams that he has travelled to an unknown country. There the goddess shows him the Palace of Destinies, an immense pyramid that shines at its peak, extending infinitely downwards: Thereupon the Goddess led Theodorus into one of the halls of the palace: when he was within, it was no longer a hall, it was a world . . . Theodorus saw the whole life of Sextus at once glance, and as in a stage presentation.2

It is a hall, which once entered becomes a world, and once looked at becomes a theatre. And then in this theatre is a book: There was a great volume of writings in this hall: Theodorous could not refrain from asking what that meant. It is the history of this world which we are now visiting, the Goddess told him; it is the book of its fates. You have seen a number on the forehead of Sextus. Look in this book for the place which it indicates. Theodorus looked for it, and found there the history of Sextus in a form more ample than the outline he had seen. Put your finger on any line you please, Pallas said to him, and you will see represented actually in all its details that which the line broadly indicates. He obeyed, and he saw coming to view all the characteristics of a portion of the life of that Sextus. They passed into another hall, and lo! another world, another Sextus . . . They went into other rooms, and always they saw new scenes.3

Theodorus sees a sequence of cheerier possibilities – Tarquin tending his garden and loved by all; Tarquin marrying a king’s daughter and becoming a loved and happy king, venerated by all; Tarquin living a painless if mediocre life elsewhere – and so on. But in fact the happiest world, 1 Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God and the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard (Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press, 1951; first publ. 1710), I. 201 (p. 181). 2 3 Theodicy, I. 415, p. 269. Theodicy, I. 415, p. 269.

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however contrary to ostensible sense and ethics, is the world that is – Tarquin leaving the temple in a rage, raping the wife of his friend, becoming a standard-bearer for terror and tyranny. The palace is a metaphor of God’s mind, which, as Leibniz writes, “contain[s] possibilities for all eternity”. It guards the image of what was not, but could have been. God (or Jupiter in the fable) has chosen the best of all possible worlds, and sometimes visits this immense mausoleum “to enjoy the pleasure of recapitulating things and of renewing his own choice, which cannot fail to please him”.4 There is much to say of this parable, and its pitiless moral dubiety (as Michel Serres asks, “Might harmony . . . be an antechamber of death?”).5 Giorgio Agamben is powerfully indignant: It is difficult to imagine something more pharisaic than this demiurge, who contemplates all uncreated possible worlds to take delight in his own single choice. For to do so, he must close his own ears to the incessant lamentation that, throughout the infinite chambers of this Baroque inferno of potentiality, arises from everything that could have been otherwise, but had to be sacrificed for the present world to be as it is. The best of all possible worlds projects an infinite shadow downward, which sinks lower and lower to the extreme universe – which even celestial beings cannot comprehend – in which nothing is compossible with anything else and nothing can take place.6

Agamben’s dismay is, in part, the only human response. Leibniz is never more pitiless than at moments like this, when his rationality seems to see so far that he cannot really feel the thing before his eyes. But what if Leibniz is right? Not perhaps morally right (whatever his rationalisations), but right that this is how the game goes – or does in plays. Playworlds too apprehend more than a single visible “apartment”; they too are pyramids of crystal possibility, some manifestly present, others apparently inadmissible; they too harbour things incompatible with the given dispensation, with what Leibniz calls the “greater theatre”, but which nonetheless are possible, in the sense of conceivable by God or imagination or interpretation. Peter Fenves notes of this passage that 4

Theodicy, I. 414, p. 268. The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 127. 6 “Bartleby, or On Contingency”, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. and ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 266. 5

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Leibniz “succeeds in imagining a medium of communication very much like the Internet” – and we might say, in its move from theatre to lines to virtuality, very much like Shakespeare.7 We might be reminded here of this tribute from Lewis Theobald, Shakespeare’s ground-breaking eighteenth-century editor (and posthumous collaborator): The attempt to write upon SHAKESPEARE is like going into a large, a spacious, and a splendid Dome thro’ the Conveyance of a narrow and obscure Entry. A Glare of Light suddenly breaks upon you, beyond what the Avenue at first promis’d: and a thousand Beauties of Genius and Character, like so many gaudy Apartments pouring at once upon the Eye, diffuse and throw themselves out to the Mind. The Prospect is too wide to come within the Compass of a single View: ’tis a gay Confusion of pleasing Objects, too various to be enjoyed but in a general Admiration; and they must be separated, and ey’d distinctly, in order to give the proper Entertainment . . . In how many points of light must we be obliged to gaze at this great poet!8

Likewise, the book in Leibniz’s fable is no kind of closed script: there is a number, which indicates a line, which once pressed upon generates a possible life. These lines are not visible; they are not written about; they are not part of what we take to be history. But they are. And, as in Shakespeare, the possible is precisely the actual. Each of the innumerable apartments that compose the palace represents one of Sextus’s possible destinies, to which there corresponds a possible world that has only been realised here, in this theatre-world. A play can always be conceived of as a chamber in the pyramid, an alternative world that no one will know of unless they enter it. But a Shakespeare play might also be conceived of as the pyramid itself, a hive of cells, each cell a contributor to the design and a rarely entered world of its own. Theatre’s compositional immateriality – a web of words 7 Peter Fenves, Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 65. 8 “Mr Theobald’s Preface” (2nd edn, 1740), in The Plays of William Shakespeare: In Twenty-one Volumes, with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators, to which are Added Notes, vol. I (J. Nicols & Son, 1813), 188–9. Gefen Bar-On Santor identifies the influence here of Newton’s Opticks and its prismatic understanding of light: ‘The Culture of Newtonianism and Shakespeare’s Editors: From Pope to Johnson’, Eighteenth Century Fiction, 21:2 (2009), 609. Theobald’s engagement with Leibniz in his Rape of Proserpine is explored in Dennis Todd, “‘One Vast Egg’: Leibniz, the New Embryology, and Pope’s Dunciad”, English Language Notes 26:4 (1989), 24 ff.

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and gestures generating worlds, not obedient to facts, or apparencies, or public record, or the inculcation of examples – is precisely what lets it animate so many possible lives. Press on the line, and the life extends in its fugitive actuality. The playworld may harbour things that in one way or another are out of time: perhaps because not in the vanguard of evident plot or clearly articulated purpose; perhaps because without the power or the leisure for free expression; perhaps because they are censored or proscribed; perhaps because other institutions, political or social, hermeneutic or academic, have not caught up, and they are present but unrecognised; or perhaps, very simply, because we are not ready for them, we are insufficiently alert or alive. The prevented thing is partly the future thing. Theatre is anticipatory, unsleeping, accusatory. And these incompossibles are also here, moving and active in theatre’s modally multiple present. At base this has little to do with utopias or science fiction or pending revelations. For the truth of this dispensation – the psychological truth, the historical truth – is that “unacted” possibilities decisively constitute “acted” actualities. Part of the horror of rape is the lives it crushes. Certainly this means those of Lucrece: the unlived lives that she can only rehearse and lament before her suicide. But it also means the lives of Tarquin. This is the sickening weight of guilt: the possibilities thrown away as much as committed; the heavy load of vanquished alternatives: She bears the load of lust he left behind, And he the burden of a guilty mind.

(Lucrece, 734–5)

This awareness is everywhere at work in Macbeth, Shakespeare’s greatest treatment of the Tarquin-theme. The play’s terrible intimacy hinges on the experiential “firstlings” that Macbeth at once glimpses and arrests, given the briefest life precisely by his sin and despair. His crime is defined not only by the murder of innocents, but by the prevention of myriad possibilities for his own existing (honour, friends, marriage, sleep, and so on): each one a hive of subjunctions, each one a snuffed candle. Far more feelingly than Leibniz, Shakespeare recognises the moment-by-moment truth of possible worlds, and of the co-dependency of possible and incompossible. Shakespeare mourns such prevention, even as he dramatises it. Everywhere in his plays he gives thrilling extension to appetites that are customarily

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suppressed, or experienced only furtively. This makes Shakespearean possibility a highly sensuous, political, and often gendered phenomena. Leibniz has little of such pioneering sympathy, or the resistance to constricting authority that it often implies. Whereas in Shakespeare possibility often waits or irrupts in defiance of authority or masterscripts (for good or ill), Leibniz so requires universal harmony that he is the most inveterate meliorist and optimist. Where Shakespeare feels every flaw and hurt, the philosopher can seem experientially anaesthetised, suggesting a weird affectlessness accommodating any kind of suffering. Shakespeare’s characters often express the inscrutability of universal laws, the world’s baffling moral engineering, but the plays never revert to a trusting premise of divine goodness; they never make the sanguine leap urged by Leibniz (which is in fact no leap, but the most inevitable rational connectivity), trusting that our very gaps in knowledge are the sign that all is for the best. Shakespeare’s worlds exist, instead, in what Lessing memorably called the “ugly great ditch” of epistemological and experiential contingency.9 Even so, there are strange affinities. Leibniz’s father, a philosopher of jurisprudence, died when his son was six. The child entered his father’s vast library and, untrammelled by anything but his own curiosity, started reading. There is always this sense in Leibniz of the young boy, heading unabashed into vast chambers of possibility, remaining, for all his monstrous erudition, somehow naive. His reputation is of a temporiser, obsequious to princes and patrons, maintaining correspondence with a vast network of influential men and women, cutting his thoughts for each missive. No doubt there is truth in this. But much in Leibniz was secretly unassimilable. He remained in his soul the autodidact, yoking unfamiliar things together, risking absurdity, some basic part of him unhinged from the measurement and permissions of his peers.10 He was employed as one thing – a tutor, or a librarian, or a historian – but was forever doing more. 9 Gotthold Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power”, Henry Chadwick, ed., Lessing’s Theological Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956), 55. 10 Peter Sloterdijk sees different “typologies” coming together to produce the Leibniz “phenomenon”: a Faustian “Renaissance magus”, committed to “magical universal science” and “encyclopedism”; a “Baroque” intellectual “polyathleticism”; a modern “organizer of science”; and a “courtier-theorist”, “prince of the consultants to princes”. As a consequence, the “happily restless, proficiency-addicted, multi-focused intellect of the thinker radiated in all

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He became a jurist, mathematician, physicist, metaphysician, theologian, ethicist, engineer, diplomat, etymologist, linguist, biologist, economist, inventor . . . We might say that in some ways he comes close to living a Shakespearean plenty in a single life. Shakespeare’s famous impersonality, capable of living in anything and yet somehow always slipping away from recognition, finds curious echoes in Leibniz’s infamous elusiveness, his many faces and occupations, something weightless or depthless about the man, even as his thoughts promise to reveal the world’s hidden matrices as never before. And what is more, Leibniz’s ultimate appeal is not to faith or rationalism, but to the faculty that sublimely unites them: I hold that a very useful way to get some conception of the perfection of Spirits above ourselves is to think of perfections of bodily organs which surpass our own. To raise ourselves above ourselves in that manner, what we mostly need are the richest and liveliest imaginations – or, to use the untranslatable Italian phrase, l’inventione la piu vaga.11

∞ Perhaps the closest anyone else has come to seeing Shakespeare’s playworlds as an anticipatory monadology is the eighteenth-century German aesthetician and phenomenologist, Johann Gottfried Herder.12 His bracingly modern aesthetic phenomenology is vital with Leibnizian principles: “no branch, no bond, no little knot is in vain” in a creation “manifoldly directions”, in which the “subject is allowed to move, still without any scruples, as the agent of a rational deity within a universe rich in perspectives and full of mysteries worthy of investigation.” Philosophical Temperaments, 37–40. 11 New Essays on Human Understanding, 307. 12 A number of still-influential German aestheticians have adapted Leibniz’s monads to their purposes, without making the connection to Shakespeare or indeed to drama: Schlegel: “A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself”: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Rodolphe Gasche (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), Athenaeum frag. 206; Benjamin used it to characterise densely concatenated historical moments, alive with incipient futures (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 47–8); Adorno used the monad to suggest great artwork’s power of particular concretisation: “[the artwork] represents the universal within its own walls. That is to say, its own structure is objectively the same as that of the universal. It may be conscious of this in different degrees . . . The relationship of the work and the universal becomes the more profound the less the work copes explicitly with universalities, the more it becomes infatuated with its own detached world, its material, its problems, its consistency, its way of expression. Only by reaching the acme of genuine individualization, only by obstinately following up the desiderata of its concretion, does the work become truly the bearer of the universal.” “Theses Upon Art and Religion Today”, no. VII, Kenyon Review (1945), 239–40.

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ensouled in its diverse parts”.13 Crucial to this is an instinctive apprehension of both world and thinking as a kind of play, or piece of music (the “string-play of the deity”)14. And it should be no surprise that everything Herder writes of the forces of life – derived in its expressive essentials from Leibniz, with a few materialist nods to Newton – equally informs his appreciation of Shakespeare: who as the exemplary writer of modernity gives us “the dynamics of human souls”.15 Here is Herder on embodied life: A mechanical or supermechanical play of expansion and contraction means little or nothing if its cause from within and without were not already presupposed: “irritation, life”. . . If we were to see through the infinitely subtler and more complexly woven animal body, would we not likewise find each fiber, each muscle, each irritable part in the same function and in the same force, of seeking life-juice in its own way?

And here on Shakespeare’s organic machinery: [A] multiformly simple and uniformly complex entity, and thus (according to all metaphysical definitions) a perfect whole . . . individual impressions of people, estates, souls, all the most various and independently acting machines, all the unwitting, blind instruments – which is precisely what we are in the hands of the Creator of the world – which come together to form a single, whole dramatic image . . .16

Here on the universe of appetites and sensations in each living being: Hunger and thirst in the whole machine of an animal body – what mighty spurs and drives! And why are they so powerful but because they are an aggregate of all the obscure wishes, the longing yearning, with which each little thicket of life in our body thirst for satisfaction and its own preservation. It is the voice of a sea of waves whose sound gets lost in each other more obscurely or more loudly, a flower garden thirsting for juice and life.17

And here on Shakespeare’s scenic interlacement: Step before his stage as before an ocean of events, where wave crashes into wave. Scenes from nature come and go, each affecting the other, however disparate they appear to be . . . dark little symbols forming the silhouette of a divine theodicy.18

13 15 16 18

14 Philosophical Writings, 206–7. Philosophical Writings, 206. Philosophical Writings, 219: “dynamics” is Leibniz’s coinage. 17 “Shakespeare”, Aesthetics, 297, 299. Philosophical Writings, 192. “Shakespeare”, Aesthetics, 299.

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Here on the divine interconnection of all things: Quite generally, nothing in nature is separated, everything flows onto and into everything else through imperceptible transitions.19

And here on Shakespearean details: I would have to list each and every scene if I wanted to give a name to this setting that is so perfectly in keeping with the spirit of this unnameable whole . . . that is the soul of the play and breathes life into it right down to the smallest detail of time, place, and even the apparently haphazard episodes in between.20

Herder stresses the whole – but it is the interconnective particulars, including things barely noticed or apparently accidental, that express, modify, and produce the whole. Such a creation – whether of nature or of Shakespeare – defies abstractions or abstracting, because life is uniquely moving at every point, at once sensuously present and bonded endlessly to others: If no two things in the world are the same, if no dissector has ever yet found two identical arteries, glands, muscles, or canals, then let this difference be pursued through a whole human structure right down to each little cog, each irritation and vapour of the mental life-stream – what an infinity, what an abyss! A sea of depths where wave upon wave stirs and where all the abstractions of similarity, category, general order are only boarded walls of neediness or colourful houses of cards to play with.21

The same morphology, moral and physical, is found in Shakespeare’s characters: [I]t is ascribed to the human mind in an especially splendid analogy with the mind of the deity that only the mind of the human being knows what is in the human being, so to speak, rests on itself and explores its own depths. If no one else, then the poets’ prophecies and secret intuitions have proved this. A character created, conducted, maintained by Shakespeare is often a whole human life in its hidden springs; without

19

Philosophical Writings, 195. “Shakespeare”, Aesthetics, 302. Cf: “He who embraces a hundred scenes of a world event in his arms, orders them at his gaze, and breathes into them the one soul that suffuses and animates everything” (Aesthetics, 300). 21 Philosophical Writings, 197. Cf. “No two poets ever used one meter the same way, or probably felt in the same way either . . . For the one poet his Muse is sight, image, for the other voice, for the third action. One prophet was awakened through the play of strings, the other through visions. No two painters or poets have seen, grasped, depicted a single object, even if only a single metaphor, in the same way.” Philosophical Writings, 204. 20

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knowing it, he depicts the passion right down to the deepest abysses and fibers from which it sprouted.22

And the upshot of such a creation, once we begin to hear it, to touch its motion, is unutterable promise, possibilities that wait upon futures to be discovered: If an object of which we did not dream, from which we hoped for nothing, suddenly appears so close to our I that the most secret drives of our heart willingly follow it, just as the wind stirs the tips of the grass blades and the magnet stirs the iron filings . . . it is new experience, which may no doubt follow from the system of the best world, but does not exactly follow from our system now. It is a new, prophetic river which promises us enjoyment, makes us intuit this obscurely, jumps over space and time, and gives us a foretaste of the future.23

And precisely this is the prophetic integrity-to-experience of Shakespeare: There should be no need to remind anyone that time and place always accompany action just as the husk always surrounds the kernel . . . For if you are an artist, no clock strikes on tower or temple for you, because you create your own space and time . . . Is there anyone in the world who requires proof that space and time in themselves are nothing, that in their connection to existence, action, passion, train of thought, and a degree of attention within and without the soul, they are entirely relative? . . . The poet’s space and time lie in the unfolding of the event, in the ordine successivorum et simultaneorum of his world. How does he transport you? As long as he transports you, you are in his world.24

It is the poetry in Leibniz’s thinking – “the great inventor of the monadpoem” – a poetry in which every detail is invested with sympathetic life, that most attracts Herder.25 This helps Herder express his own marvellously elastic, vibrant, expressivistic affirmation of a living sensorium. But this very appreciation also points to the limitations, perhaps a certain approximateness, in Herder’s appropriation of Leibniz: Homer and Shakespeare were certainly great philosophers, as Leibniz was a thinker with much wit in which it was usually a metaphor, an image, a casually written simile that produced the theories which he casually wrote on a quarto sheet and from which the weaving guilds after him spun thick volumes.26

22 24 25 26

23 Philosophical Writings, 199. Philosophical Writings, 200. “Shakespeare”, Aesthetics, 301, 304–5. “On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul”, Philosophical Writings, 195. Philosophical Writings, 210.

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This is an alluring thought: but it isn’t true. Leibniz’s distinctive poetry – or what is the same thing, the details of his metaphysics – is the effect above all of his rationalism, and more particularly his studies in logic, physics, engineering, mathematics, and to a lesser extent the natural sciences. No doubt there was much of Leibniz’s scattered and voluminous output that Herder hadn’t read (he isn’t alone). But as a matter of principle Herder resists the bits of Leibniz that are inhospitable to his preference for vigorous good sense, purposive cognition, and politico-existential liberty. Principally this means preformation (“the philosophy-of-preprintedforms”)27 and its concomitant, the “windowlessness” of monads, both of which attract Herder’s mockery: Human souls . . . lay formed in the moon, in limbo, and waited, doubtless naked and cold, for their preestablished sheaths, or clocks, or clothes, the not-yet-formed bodies; now the housing, garment, clock is ready and the poor, so-long-idle inhabitant gets added to it mechanically, that he may – by the body [bei Leibe]!, not affect it, but only in preestablished harmony with it spin thoughts out of himself, just as he spun them there in limbo too, and that it, the clock of the body, may strike in agreement with him.28

This is nice satire. The robustly “enlightened” Herder is a true harbinger of Romantic-cum-revolutionary modernity, nowhere more so than in this libidinal, essentially political resistance to what he probably sees as occult solipsism. Like the pre-Critical Kant, and many other thinkers influenced by Newtonian physics, he prefers to think in terms of material monads, undergoing real relations with each other.29 But wishing that “the great inventor of the monad-poem” had dispensed with pre-established harmony is to mistake the system’s most basic principles. Leibniz’s understanding of time, space, change, force, difference, and so on – all enthusiastically endorsed by Herder – are inextricable from his belief that every monad expresses all of the creation, all things and all events – and hence must be pre-formed, even as it is constituted by endless dynamic alteration. In resisting Leibniz’s deeper undertows, Herder limits his own critical reach, for all its intuitive perceptiveness and gusto; he doesn’t get 27

28 Philosophical Writings, 208. Aesthetics, 193. For discussion of the younger Herder’s grappling with Leibniz’s system, see Nigel De Souza, “Leibniz in the eighteenth century: Herder’s critical reflections on the Principles of Nature and Grace”: British Journal for the History of Philosophy (2012). 29

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inside the Shakespeare-animal as much as he might; it remains an iterative rather than revelatory discourse. Of course Herder’s resistance is understandable. Many thinkers otherwise enraptured by Leibniz have followed Herder’s lead in finding aspects of his metaphysics off-putting. Deleuze’s criticism is typical: Leibniz, for his part, never saw any contradiction between the law of continuity [nature never makes leaps] and the principle of indiscernibles [there are no two things the same] . . . difference remains subordinated to identity, reduced to the negative, incarcerated within similitude and analogy.30

Alain Badiou (no confederate of Deleuze) similarly applauds Leibniz’s genius, but sees his thinking as fatally unifying: For us, it is effectively indisputable that there are multiple worlds, a divergent series of worlds, and that none may claim to be the best in the absence of a transcendent norm that would sanction their comparison . . . Leibniz ends up disappointing us. To my mind, the true content of his disappointment is the desperate retention of the power of the One . . . his limit lies in always wanting a convergence of series, a recapitulation of the infinite in the One.31

Likewise, the chief caveat for Bergson (as it was for Herder) was Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony, of a God who subsumes all things, and so of a creation that is in essence always present and entire: for Leibniz “reality as well as truth are integrally given in eternity”, meaning opposition “to the idea of a reality that creates itself gradually”, and therefore opposed to Bergson’s “absolute duration” and the possibility of novelty.32 In Leibniz’s “radical finalism”, as Bergson calls it, “if there is nothing unforeseen, no invention or creation in the universe, time is useless again”: “all is given”, the sole difference being that it “substitutes the attraction of the future for the impulsion of the past”.33 “How could

30

Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 2004), 58. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 329. 32 Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1911), 268: “We perceive duration as a stream against which we cannot go. It is the foundation of our being, and, as we feel, the very substance of the world in which we live. It is of no use to hold up before our eyes the dazzling prospect of a universal mathematic; we cannot sacrifice experience to the requirements of a system. That is why we reject radical mechanism” (40). Bergson’s critique here applies equally to Spinoza. 33 Creative Evolution, 40. 31

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we know beforehand,” asks Bergson, “a situation that is unique of its kind, that has never yet occurred and will never occur again?”34 But we precisely can know this in a playworld. It is constituted by change, its substance is action: but it truly is pre-formed. Bergson’s protests are stirringly on the side of life, novelty, creativity – but not quite the life in playworlds. As tempting as it may be to do so, we cannot dispense with Leibniz’s preformation, identify some unhinged, vertiginous, fractal wonderland, and see in the release from God something kin to Shakespeare’s heterocosmic possibilities. (Although Derrida characterises his philosophy as “Leibnizianism without God”35). If we take away Leibniz’s pre-established harmony, and yet stick fast to his vision of infinite points of substance, we are left with a chaos of polysemy and conation – an anarchy of monadic clocks, turning in cartoonish, mutually oblivious purposelessness. For all Shakespeare’s fissioning multiplicity, his playworlds are never like this. Every point is invested with purpose; every moment is interested, dynamic with appetite for happiness (of course, a happiness that is often foiled or destructive). Exactly the same applies to Leibnizian preformation. Admittedly this can result in simply facile rationalisations (torture and earthquakes are a good thing, if only we knew it), a foolish or even disgusting sentimentality. But forget its adequacy or inadequacy in the face of rampant suffering and inequity, and think of how plays work. First, we know when we witness a play that it is made, shaped, formed, directed, curated, if not by a single genius than by a synergy of interested parties. Second, think of how a playworld moves in tune to moral or simply human imperatives. Always, it moves towards what we can call the good, even if a good that is hideously transgressed or denied. The monadology, like the playworld, is at once programmed and percipient; so too is each monad and each formaction: scripted for all time, but only in the world in the form of endless embodied alterations. It is preformation – a 34 Creative Evolution, 33. “If we put the possible back into its proper place, evolution becomes something quite different from the realization of a program: the gates of the future open wide; freedom is offered an unlimited field . . . When they spoke of indetermination, of freedom, they meant by indetermination a competition between possibles, by freedom a choice between possibles – as if possibility was not created by freedom itself!” (104). 35 Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Doris (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 71.

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God who has apprehended everything – that uncannily suggests theatre’s anachronic, self-shadowing, futuristic possibilities. Leibniz is not Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss (Voltaire’s failure to engage seriously with Leibniz is kin to his eventual rejection of Shakespeare, both writers dismissed as absurdly or grotesquely beyond the pale of ethical decorum). Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds is one of change, not of perfection. It proposes a state of continual alteration – alteration at every single point in the creation, a world that trembles with promise and incipience. There are infinite “possibles”, some compossible with the present dispensation, most not (‘incompossible’). But the crucial point is that every single such “possible” has the same urge to exist, the same striving for recognition and duration: One may say that as soon as God has decreed to create something there is a struggle between all the possibles, all of them laying claim to existence, and that those which, being united, produce most reality, most perfection, most significance carry the day. It is true that all this struggle can only be ideal, that is to say, it can only be a conflict of reasons in the most perfect understanding.36

What is important for my purposes isn’t whether these incompossible things exist in virtual or real or purely ideal worlds. It is that they experience the same struggle, the same action and passion, as all of those things that are granted present life. Leibniz absolutely anticipates our modern world of quantum vertigo and quivering superstrings, in which what holds for big things – the measurements that seem to guarantee common sense and rectilinear order – are simply untrue when it comes to the finer particles of existing, like subatomic quarks or memory. And because every unending part of every single thing is unique, the particular expression of possibility at work in any one thing has its own dignity. It demands a scrupulous attention all its own, and quite possibly its own bespoke epistemology. Spectatorial eyes won’t do it: like Macbeth, we need a third ear. And this, I contend, is where Leibniz supremely touches upon the Shakespearean universal sympathy. Leibniz can give substance to this sympathy; make it more than a sentimental gift, more than humane genius. Leibniz’s vision allows these things to have more than counterfactual possibility: they are. He gives us a deep-hewn theory for apprehending things beyond common 36

Theodicy, I. 201, pp. 181–2.

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sense and common senses, beyond the perceived and the apperceived and even the imagined. To think monadologically is to enormously expand our most basic sense of what is – what is alive, what is allowed life, what is valued, what is disallowed, not permitted entrance or recognition only because it is not valued, not expeditiously “united”. For all of Leibniz’s insistence on dominance and subordinacy, each monad owns an absolute dignity, a right to be, concordant with its striving to be: each instantiates the ever-changing, insatiate creation. It is a pitiless as much as an optimistic vision. But the vision is there, to savour or to mourn. It isn’t that Leibniz was seeing what Shakespeare wrote. More that he was seeing what Shakespeare saw – or hearing what he heard. Call it the waves of the sea: [A]t every moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions, unaccompanied by awareness or reflection; that is, of alterations in the soul itself, of which we are unaware because these impressions are either too minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying, so that they are not sufficiently distinctive on their own . . . I like to use the example of the roaring noise of the sea which impresses itself on us when we are standing on the shore. To hear this noise as we do, we must hear the parts which make up this whole, that is the noise of each wave, although each of these little noises makes itself known only when combined confusedly with all the others, and would not be noticed if the wave which made it were by itself.37

The challenge is stirring and beautiful. Listen therefore, and again, and again. What exactly are we hearing?

37

New Essays on Human Understanding, Preface, 54.

Part III

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Perdita’s possible lives

Shakespeare saw and shows what Racine sees and hides. Behind each wave, there was also a man.1

Let’s tune in more closely to this monadic-cum-formactive life – both what constitutes it, and what it constitutes. I want to do so by attending to one particular playworld, and one of its illustrative figures: The Winter’s Tale, and its young heroine, Perdita. First I will summarise the basic physics of this world; then consider the worlds in which Perdita is born, and the worlds in which she grows up, and finally the worlds in which she ends up. What are the possible lives of Perdita? And do they – or does she – epitomise Shakespeare’s formactive creation? ∞ There is no play more intent than The Winter’s Tale on probing the weird magic of the theatrical medium, or more serious in its theorising of art: no other Renaissance criticism I know of gets close to it for sophistication, or closer to being adequate to the worlds that theatre creates. The play’s design is stunningly original. It is as though Shakespeare goes right back in his imagination to the start of his career, and to the provoking judgements of Sidney’s Apology, in which Sidney ridiculed the placial liberties and literalism of the popular theatre, and suavely wondered if these playmakers had ever understood what might be achieved by deftly reported action. In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare takes on the accusation and doubly overcomes it. First, by discharging the most extravagant spatio-temporal leaps of his career: moving the action from a cold

1

Serres, The Parasite, 56.

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southern island to a landlocked coast, from (apparently) remorseless tragedy to (apparently) forgetful comedy, with nothing mediating the gap but hysterically all-and-nothing narrations; and then leaping a further 16 years in a single moment. Second, by making almost everything hang upon tales – that is, upon reported scenes. These reports and setpieces usually have a double-aspect, at once speaking the “tale” and apostrophising its methods. We get a kind of meta-ekphrasis, in which each description echoes the others, producing a cumulative, mobile reflection of the play’s own creative principles. To mention only some of the most obvious: Mamillius’s unheard “sad tale” of the man who dwelt by a churchyard; the report of the oracle at Delphi; the deaths of Mamillius and Hermione; the ghostly Hermione; the bear eating the man and the sailors sinking to their deaths; old man Time; Perdita’s growing-up; Autolicus’s various pasts, his ballads and trumpery and “motions” and tricks, none of them quite witnessed, all reliant on assertion and tale; Perdita’s flowers of the spring; the opening of the fardel; the reconciliation of father and child; Julio Romano’s sense-beggaring statue (there are many others, secreted in the dialogue). Each one relies on narration, and so on a withholding of mimetic presence; each falls purposely short of self-sufficient dimensionality; none is quite spatially and temporally now; concomitantly, none has quite passed away. Each event makes of its witnesses “nothing”, a word that echoes through these reports as though the heart of the offered dare: Leontes’ agents at Delphos have their senses “so surpriz’d” that they are “nothing”; the “violent carriage of it” (“it” invoking equally Leontes’ accusation and the oracle’s stupefying authority) “Will cleare, or end the Businesse” (TLN 1157–68); Florizel praises Perdita’s arts, of speaking, singing, dancing, such that he wishes she “might ever do/Nothing but that” (TLN 1958); Autolicus laughs at how his audience admired the “Nothing” of the Clown’s song, producing a “Lethargie” that he compounds by picking their “purses” (or minds) empty and almost dead (TLN 2489–91); Julio Romano, the famed sculptor-pornographer, “would beguile Nature of her Custome, so perfectly he is her Ape” (TLN 3106–7); at the opening of “the farthell” (containing secrets of Perdita’s past), when the gaps between the years and the nations melt, “they look’d as they had heard of a World ransom’d, or one destroyed” (TLN 3024–6).

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Throughout all these reports the play appears to work on a principle of absent evidence: events we have to take on trust, or not at all, and whose import is always absolute, or else nothing whatsoever. The contract between spectacle and witness is something like this: believe this or don’t believe it: if the beholders believe it, they do so by handing over, as though the price of the contract, all volition and even cognition: to believe is to be stupefied; but then not to believe is to believe in nothing, for there is nothing else to link the play’s events than these weightless assertions of verity. Again and again the thing that is presented demands an absolute belief in its truth, but at the same time this thing threatens to quite undermine faith in customary methods of understanding. And think of the bearers of this always-extreme truth: a riddling child, a disguised prince, a non-shepherdess, an oracle, a bear, a clown, a pedlar, a pornographer, a statue. All of them demand assent, but all of them are also of dubiously authentic ontology: none of them quite is. It is thus typical of the play’s audacity that Leontes’ lunatic assertions, far from being exceptional, are the playworld’s recurring rationale: Is this nothing? Why then the World, and all that’s in it, is nothing, The covering Skie is nothing, Bohemia nothing, My Wife is nothing, nor Nothing have these Nothings, If this be nothing.

(TLN 385–9)

Everything in this play is counterfactual, hanging on faith in media that are wildly discontinuous with anything like inductive proof. And so it is that the pivotally surprising events which we do witness happening – Leontes’ conviction of his wife’s adultery, the destruction of the pastoral feast, Hermione’s return – are extravagant comings-true of the same contract: feeding on nothing, ransoming everything on the truth or falsity of a single undreamt-of possibility, producing faith from nothing, allowing a reality because the state of affairs can be spoken or unspoken. ∞ Everything hangs by a thread. As Perdita always intuits, any feeling of ease is a dangerous dream: too weightless, somehow factitious, liable to be sucked down a hole any second. The pastoral scene’s long spring-and-summer extension, for instance, is the merest suspended moment: as Perdita says,

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“Nor yet on summers death, nor on the birth/Of trembling winter” (TLN 1888–9). It is a fracture in time, a subjunctive envelope, a stolen recess that all of its principal agents know cannot last. It holds temporal extension as though the strings on an open bag, which might at any moment be pulled tight, and what appears dilatory time is suddenly concertinaed, all oxygen spent. In this context, praise must compound rather than relieve the playworld’s basic principle of ontological dubiety. Consider Camillo’s words: “I should leave grazing, were I of your stocke,/And onely live by gazing” (TLN 1922–3). The conceit invokes delighted paralysis, a bestilled astonishment that seems to want to remove life out of the flux of weather and seasons and into a condition of frozen recapitulation. As such, even this brief statement makes a claim to encapsulate the play’s physics. Perdita, characteristically, shakes herself free of the stranger’s attempted arrogation: “Out alas:/ You’ld be so leane, that blasts of Ianuary/Would blow you through and through” (TLN 1924–6). She is a real shepherdess, with real sheep to raise, who can have no use at all for a too-lean lamb. A knife glints somewhere in her pun, keyed in to the fact of meat. (She does a similar thing a moment later to Florizel, with a double-edged rebuke, effectively accusing him, the fake shepherd, of using false words to tumble her, the genuine shepherdess, into bed.) And yet her riposte is not adequately explained as homely materialism. More profoundly, Perdita is keyed in to this world’s Ovidian physics, so dangerously permeable and transformative (“Iupiter became a Bull, and bellow’d: the greene Neptune/A Ram, and bleated: and the Fire-roab’d God/Golden Apollo, a poore humble Swaine,/As I seeme now” TLN 1828–32). She takes Camillo’s conventional conceit with a literalness at once catachrestic and paralysing: she leaps beyond his flattering intentions, imagines a six-month endurance of starvation, and sees the result: a man reduced to hollow rib and bone, punished with the form of his passion, like one of Spenser’s petrified, eviscerated hostages to lust or jealousy or despair. At one hearing, her words are sensibly deflating. But they are also mercurial, alert to violent and instantaneous transfigurations, in which great gaps in time and space and even species are traversed in the blink of an eye. The physics are electric and magical, identities subject to instantaneous re-annunciation: “Sure this Robe of mine/Do’s change my disposition”

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(TLN 1949–50). Perdita isn’t quite in control of this compact; rather she watches herself alter, half-in and half-out, hostage to theatre’s quicksilver ontological larceny. Perdita might seem to insist upon a simple homeliness, stressing the primary truth of material facts: she is a shepherdess, these “pranks” are for a single holiday only, the love which promises to transform her is dangerous. But we never quite meet the non-holidaying, non-pranked-up shepherdess. In a paradoxical way, this too is only a reported reality, no less and no more present than the memorable litany of spring flowers that Perdita does not have (“Daffadils,/That come before the Swallow dares . . . Violets . . . pale Prim-roses . . . bold Oxlips . . . Lillies of all kinds” 1932–40). The flowers are not visible, but they are powerfully present to mind, not least as miniature allegories of possible girls’ lives: each non-present flower has quite as much possibility as the residual non-holidaying Perdita, or as the princess we also know her to be.2 The scene releases a series of counteror alter-factual Perditas – each flower is a possible Perdita-myth, as is the Perdita of Florizel’s praise, as is the Perdita of romance loss-and-return, as is the georgic-cum-pastoral Perdita that she prefers to hold to. She is all of them, discretely and cumulatively, one allegorical synecdoche after another, each a bio-allegory, proffering a life defined by its relation to prototypes of passionate subjection. ∞ Perhaps the play’s most memorable apostrophe to Perdita is Florizel’s speech of praise – a speech used by Brian Vickers to illustrate Shakespeare’s mastery of the “formal schemes of rhetoric”, as he skilfully manipulates symmetries, repetitions, and rhythm to “produce new and expressive structures of feeling”. This is undoubtedly the case, as is Vickers’ judgement that the “mature” Shakespeare so absorbs rhetorical structures as to allow listeners and readers to ignore them, and instead engage “with the life and feeling direct”.3 But as true as this is, rhetorical devices such as ploce, polyptoton, 2 The imaginative intimacy of the absent flowers suggests Elaine Scarry’s thesis in Dreaming by the Book, 40–71, that flowers are the perfect size, shape, and material for vivid, as-thoughpresent percipience. 3 Brian Vickers, “Shakespeare’s Use of Rhetoric”, Kenneth Muir and Samuel Schoenbaum, eds, A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 97–8.

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and isocolon also help release far deeper resonances, a number of them working at odds to the ostensible purpose of rhetoric to move or persuade an audience. Florizel, young and courtly, might be expected to speak with skilful and affecting oratorical measure, and to be content to be judged by his aplomb in so doing. But Florizel is not Shakespeare: What you do, Still betters what is done. When you speake (Sweet) I’ld have you do it ever: When you sing, I’ld have you buy, and sell so: so give Almes, Pray so: and for the ord’ring your Affayres, To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you A wave o’th Sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that: move still, still so: And owne no other Function. Each your doing, (So singular, in each particular) Crownes what you are doing, in the present deeds, That all your Actes, are Queenes. (The Winter’s Tale, TLN 1951–62)

He praises her speech, then her song, then her dance, each perfect, each perfecting the previous. I want to concentrate only on the culminating art, Perdita’s wave-like dance. Florizel is talking about fluid bodily movement: crucially, however, the “dance” is not yet here. It is not seen on the stage, but imagined or remembered or predicted. We see Perdita as Florizel addresses her, and endue her visible body with the potential that his praises animate. Full presence, then, depends upon a mixture of verbal promise, visual gift, and sensory deficit. In other words, the wistful precision of the praise is that it enacts possibility: partly because the purr of her perfection is a kind of actualised, spontaneous potentiality; partly because Florizel’s modality, as befits the tension of the scene, is optative: I wish you.4 The praise is for verbs and movement, not titles and statues. As such, it is perfectly meta-theatrical. These acts and deeds are what we are right now hearing and seeing, both a present doing and a future gift or inheritance (“deed”). In turn, the beneficiaries are multiple: Perdita, Florizel, the audience, and anyone in the future who may attempt the roles or attend the plays. The present deeds, at their most basic, are not so much Perdita’s imagined dance as the tale enacted before us, which in 4 Inga-Stina Ewbank: “The thinking is not naïve, it is wishful, and consciously so.” “The Triumph of Time in The Winter’s Tale”, REL 5 (1964), 95.

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the same moment claims the right to repeat. Shakespeare is everywhere invoking his own craft. Shakespeare’s wordplay takes the praise beyond reiteration. Each your doing/crowns what you are doing: the doing is spontaneously self-coronating, blessed in its motion with legitimating rightness. But each act exceeds the previous, trumps it in a never-ceasing perfecting of perfection. Florizel’s praise allows change, even progress, yet without teleology: it does not depend on a destination to confer recursive purpose or fineness; and it does so without the slightest intimation of lack. The secret of this Zeno-like speech, then, is how it understands indivisible stasis, a kind of divine perfection, as a product of endlessly divisible change. There is no part so small that it cannot be divided further, into still more exquisite delicacy; no part too small for appreciation, or too fine that it does not own the singularity of action. Every singular moment is complete; Perdita’s continuance in the doing is simply a miraculous addition.5 The centre of gravity in Florizel’s speech is its bounding of erotic intensity in rhythmic repetitions: what you do – what is done when you speak – when you sing I’ld have you do – I’l have you buy Sell so – so give alms – pray so you do dance – ever do move still – still so each your doing – what you are doing

Listen to the repeating words themselves: what, you, have, do, so, do, still, you, doing. They could hardly be more basic, more emptied of anything but thrumming existential compulsion, as though life force itself is discovered in its cradle, without accretion or accident, magnetised by the simple fact of this you. The primalcy of rhythm informs the hint of ellipsis at the line’s end (still so something . . .), delicately suggesting how even words fail when erotic rapture is at its zenith. The line closes on a hanging suspension, as though 5 Compare Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “intertwining” or the chiasm, wherein embodied experience involves doubling back and moving forward; and his understanding of “flesh”: “The flesh we are speaking of is not matter. It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing . . .”: The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 146.

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searching for an adjective to do justice to such promise. We can see here that it is rhythm, or rather the symbiosis of rhythmic and sonic repetition, which at once mimics the sea-dance and admits the superior possibilities of movement over lexis. It isn’t that semantics fails, or is even unworthy of the event. The various referents of still are all precisely in action, evoking a phenomena that is equally in time (stay forever) and in space (stay here), past (as recalled), present (as self-enacting speech), and future (as prediction). Time and space inextricably compose one another, extending via contraction, continuing via stasis. Furthermore, in repeating the word, its various moods and actions are subtly potentiated, such that the agency of the stillness, or the still-ing, is at once confluent and competitive. In one sense Florizel imagines Perdita stilled into stasis, the force of his adoration like a magic wand; in another sense, he imagines her silenced and obedient, as though her very perfection demands still more jealous superintendence, lest it escape his control. But the subsidiary puns reinforce the impossibility of Florizel’s wish. To “still” the sea is to level the waves, and so destroy the very movement he loves. What is more, he knows that this girl, low born or not, is no supine follower (“I told you what would come of this” 2292). Accordingly, she is the one who can “still” the scene – distil its essence; command it into silenced adoration. But there is something else to which even this super-subtle exactness is subordinate: a sculpting, hypostasising, mimical arrest of function (own no other . . .), epitomised in the chiasmic folding-into-one of the phrases. It evokes unsurpassable rapture and reverence, such that progression beyond this is barely conceivable.6 Indeed there is violence in this urge to miniaturise, some kind of ontological absolutism in the very fact of theatre – its rage for perfection, its belief in epitomes – that can threaten to make the ragged proof of daily life seem an uncohering accident. Hence the pun, move still, whereby movement primarily serves the image of it in the mind of the beholder, as though arresting kinetic life for the greater 6 Bergson: “we should never realise these images so strongly without the regular movements of the rhythm by which our soul is lulled into self-forgetfulness, and, as in a dream, thinks and sees with the poet. The plastic arts obtain an effect of the same kind by the fixity which they suddenly impose upon life, and which a physical contagion carries over to the attention of the spectator . . . the pale immobility of the stone causes the feeling expressed or the movement just begun to appear as if they were fixed forever, absorbing our thought and our will in their own eternity.” Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Co., 1913), 15.

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god of reverent recollection: life, like play, should provide a snapshot to lull us into sleep and dream. But the speech also works against such jealous petrification, precisely because of the intensely particular movement it gives to its subject. So, any miniaturising performed by Florizel’s speech is most profoundly in the name of the miniature. This is epitomised in one of Shakespeare’s most marvellously monadic single lines: (So singular, in each particular) (TLN 1960)

The balancing main words, “singular” and “particular”, seem close to synonymous, or vanishingly complementary: we might compare Florizel’s very next speech: “so Turtles paire/That never meane to part” (1972–3). But in this play so full of doubles and partnerships, no harmony is ever without difference. Accordingly, whereas “Singular” means individual or separate, and thus proposes a whole (or a one, the monad), “particular” means a part of a whole. But there is a further delineating twist. The apparent hierarchy of parts and wholes – in which a part is subordinate to or derived from the whole – is inverted by the line’s grammar: so singular in each particular. In other words, the whole thing is in the part; indeed every single part seems to contain the whole. It is Shakespeare’s summary of his own arts: an art of the part, and a kind a monadology before the word was even coined. This is reinforced by the functional shift in “particular”. In wobbling between adverb (modifying “doing”) and noun (signifying each part), the word derives its own bespoke action, is rendered a kind of verb. The particular, like the parts, have dynamic force; they inwardly move; they are formactive. What is more, “so singular” gives to every last particular its own unique endeavour; it evokes a world, or a sea, or a girl, or a dance, of ceaselessly abundant procreativity, the abundance being precisely that of more active particulars. It is a vision of dizzying fractal replication. The closer the attendance, the more will be noticed, and the more unexpected fineness will come to life. But “so singular” also insists that each such fold, every last instant and moment, is essentially unrepeatable. This is the lodestone of singularity. Repetition is differential. Once again Shakespeare prehends Leibniz: here his Identity of Indiscernibles, the necessity that no two things can be the same, and, indeed, that no single thing can ever be the same from one moment to the next. Substance is change. To the extent that this marvellous apostrophe to love

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and theatre encapsulates Shakespeare’s forms, it is leaving behind classical physics, with its points and actualities, and anticipating a quantum field in which apparently rigid bodies or defined particles are in fact patterns of movement. A singularity is not so much an object, or a point, as a region of “very intense field”.7 Theatre’s modal realism, its radical materialism, is always creating worlds that go well beyond the human. In comparing humans to other things, to hares or blankets or bottles, it gives to these things their quiddity. And so it is with Perdita’s waves. Shakespeare has waves of the sea genuinely in view: he sees one, and then another, and then another, each one unique, its brief claim of existing verified by the crisp glitter of its cap, of sun or salt, that he names its crown, like some tiny secret unfolding. The wave is, just as metaphors are. Perdita is each wave in the singular, and the flow of one into the next; she is the aggregate, but the aggregate derives its grace from the centred sufficiency of each wave. A wave is one thing, it arrives and then it passes away. But then another wave must always come, in an endless series of rising and ebbing and flowing.8 Consequently, Florizel’s optative vision doesn’t imagine automated repetition, but differential recurrence. And yet each wave is Perdita; she doesn’t so much own it, as one might a quality, as she becomes it. Human characters are at once perdurable agents and graduated events. Florizel isn’t imagining a nature beyond human presence, even as it is in some irreducible way beyond the human. For the life in Shakespeare’s formactions always supervenes upon the most basic crafts and coordinates of theatre. So: the vision presupposes a witness, watching or hearing or both. It presupposes a scripter, which renders the action, however beautiful and indigenous to the mover, both an observance and a repetition. Without spectator and scripter, there is no dance: and so the dancer, too, is also always an actor. A dance may invite improvisation, but it is always partly imitation. We can intuit, whether we watch or perform the dance, an invisible webbing, as though of earlier dancers, moving moments ahead of 7 David Bohm, “Quantum Theory as an Indication of a New Order”, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (New York: Routledge, 1980), 158. 8 Ralph Berry notes that for Shakespeare “wave” is “the metaphor for rhythmic movment, and thus the principle of life itself”: Shakespearean Structures (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1981), 125.

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the dancer, whose moves seem right because magically foretold, and for coinciding with this unfurling imaginary web. The dancer moves into places that have already been moved into. Likewise, a theatrical formaction does not merely tell of existent things; it does not ask us to behold a declared and completed action. It is action as form. The action moves into – is invisibly collected by, or is a satisfaction of – a premonitory ghost of the self-same action. In Herbert Blau’s apt phrase, theatrical formactions play to “a skein of vanishings”.9 Compare Bergson: The aesthetic feelings offer us a still more striking example of this progressive stepping in of new elements . . . Let us consider the simplest of them, the feeling of grace . . . as those movements are easy which prepare the way for others, we are led to find a superior ease in the movements which can be foreseen, in the present attitudes in which future attitudes are pointed out and, as it were, prefigured . . . Thus the perception of ease in motion passes over into the pleasure of mastering the flow of time and of holding the future in the present . . . As we guess almost the exact attitude which the dancer is going to take, he seems to obey us when he really takes it: the regularity of the rhythms establishes a kind of communication between him and us, and the periodic returns of the measure are like so many invisible threads by means of which we set in motion this imaginary puppet . . . Thus a kind of physical sympathy enters into the feeling of grace . . . its affinity with moral sympathy, the idea of which it subtly suggests . . . in anything which we call very graceful we imagine ourselves able to detect, besides the lightness which is a sign of mobility, some suggestion of a possible movement towards ourselves, of a virtual and even nascent sympathy. It is this mobile sympathy, always ready to offer itself . . . Perhaps the difficulty which we experience in defining [the beautiful] is largely owing to the fact that we look upon the beauties of nature as anterior to those of art . . . But we might ask ourselves whether nature is beautiful otherwise than through meeting by chance certain processes of our art, and whether in a certain sense, art is not prior to nature.10

Art is anticipatory – a transaction that is somehow before itself, trembling on the brink, where we take a hint and imagine its fruition, wait deliciously or nervously for the satisfaction. In this, the very form of art, precisely as its experience, is unfinished and proleptic. The formaction is in time, as all actions are: but it is also moves as a model or pattern, configured, prefigured, rather than merely enacted. What ultimately survives is not, at heart, 9 “Elsinore: An Analytic Scenario”, The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976– 2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 70–1. 10 Time and Free Will, 13–14.

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individual agents, still less a particular actor, and still less one dressed up, as Perdita is here, as they all always are, in a fleeting-false costume. What survives is the fact of repeatable iteration in the minds of rememberers, or in future performances, or in the potential for either: this is the continuance envisaged in “still so”. At every moment, that moment’s Perdita is put away, as into a time capsule, at the very instant of its expression. In daily life that would seem to be that – the moment and all its agents have gone. But not in playlife. The wave is enfolded, then it unfolds, and then it is once more enfolded, into what David Bohm has called the “implicate order”. Bohm would understand such order as the semi-hidden ur-truth of all creation: if so, playworlds apprehend it.11 Formactions are the prior and surviving truth. Consequently, the waves characterise not just formactive playlife, but the formactive playworld. No wave can happen without precursors. In turn, each occurrence promises a further one. But the series does not work by successive consecution, even as it may appear to. So, one wave follows another, as though drawn on by it; but this later wave is itself pushed forward by a still later one, and it by another. Each swell partakes in things subsequent to it, as much as supplements what rolls on ahead of it. We cannot hear, cannot give true credit to, every single wave. Indeed, each wave moves with who knows how many constituents. Accordingly, each wave is also a point: an endless series of singularities, which in turn produces the always-moving aggregate: an aggregate we are always liable to take as the only prevailing singularity. The point enfolds its own potential extension into action and recognition. Equally, the preceding wave is hurried on, limited in its span, by this subsequent. Therefore we can see that what appears to be affectless repetition is in fact an epitome of conative force: and force that, crucially, does not work in only one causative direction.

11 Wholeness and the Implicate Order, esp. chs 6 and 7. In Science, Order, and Creativity (New York: Routledge, 1989; repr. 2011), 172–5, Bohm and F. David Pleat illustrate the implicate order through the Feynmann diagram, which represents the movement of waves in a diagrammatic structure of lines: a wavelet radiates from a fixed point A; reaches another point, which becomes the source of another wavelet, and so on; the total wave at point B is “the sum of the contributions of all possible paths” that connect A to B. Bohm and Pleat point out that the same movement that unfolds from each point towards the whole (B), can be seen enfolding from the whole to the point (A). This way of understanding waves was first proposed by Christiaan Huygens in 1670.

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Things behind (in space and time) act upon things ahead, which act on things behind. The “sea” is a theatre of successiveness and recursion, chronology and anachrony – and all this before we even consider the great suck of outflowing tides and the every-which-way swirl of currents. The same goes for the playworld. Florizel thus speaks to the synecdochal economy of theatre, where one thing stands for an extended series. His vision has powerful exemplarity, yet each of the numerous series it implies – of speaking, singing, dancing; of praying, buying, giving; of would-be exclusive admirers; and of Perditas – must have its day. Any desire for fixity is equally at odds with the theme: move still means “keep moving”. Accordingly, the chiasmic phrase partakes in the playworld’s forward and backward scenic telepathy: an interlacing network of meta-aesthetic verbal tableaux, competing or complementary epitomes of the wider “Tale”. The play “moves” from one such set-piece to another, the qualities recalled and supplemented, neither absorbed nor sublated, but rather made returnable, potentially or in fact, by the fact of recurrence. Nothing is swept away. As much as one set-piece seems to render the previous one “nothing”, the play beds these possibilities down, like the slips of flowers that Perdita sets in her garden, each one planted for memory. Appropriately, therefore, an actual dance immediately follows onstage, to which Florizel’s praise gives a kind of text. We might assume that, however lively and gracious, the dance will not possibly satisfy Florizel’s epideictic idealism. Polixenes’ brief comment – “She dances featly” – speaks of an act and appreciation that have returned to the here and now, something clockable and comparable. And yet it isn’t that action is simply diminished by the prior apostrophe to it. There may also be something more in the visible dance, an abundance or carefreeness or excitement, which will not be answerable to Florizel’s speech, and may indeed correct her lover’s hypostasing pretences. But in turn the dance itself is superseded – explicitly so – by the dazzling entrance of Autolicus (“O Master: if you did but heare the Pedler at the doore, you would never dance againe after a Tabor and Pipe” 2006–11), which then gives way to the still more amazing twelve satyrs – they have danced before the king! they each jump twelve foot and a half! Adoration and admiration are opened out to a kind of competition, measured by the power to command attention and transport

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beholders. This may be the momentary transport of astonishment (as at Autolicus’s songs), of ardour (as at Perdita’s dance), or of admiration (as at the dance of the twelve satyrs). And yet at the same time the scene is clearly anticipating the redundancy of pyrotechnic facility: as Old Shepherd says, “here has beene too much homely foolery already. I know (Sir) wee wearie you” (2153–5). Such excitements shall be superseded by matters with more power of memory, and so of forward recollection: not least Florizel’s speech (whose petrifying ambition clearly prepares for Hermione’s breathing statue). ∞ Florizel’s speech also plays its part in the continuing making of its subject, Perdita. Shakespeare doesn’t simply download his principal characters, fully formed. They may endure multiple births, remade not just by the apostrophes or descriptions of others, but by plots and scenes and symmetries of which they may know absolutely nothing. So it is with Perdita. Here is Emilia, Hermione’s lady in waiting, on the child’s initial delivery: On her frights, and greefes (Which never tender Lady hath borne greater) She is, something before her time, deliver’d. Paulina. A boy? A daughter, and a goodly babe, Lusty, and like to live: the Queen receives Much comfort in’t: says, my poor prisoner, I am innocent as you.

(TLN 847–54)

The child is born upon “frights, and greefes”, “something before her time”. That is, she is born amid a clamour that echoes through Antigonus’ dream and Bohemia’s storm. Her prematurity precisely awaits a second arrival, a future and fuller coming-to-be. This gives more loaded context to Paulina’s words, a moment later, when she demands the child be given to her to show the lunatic king: This Childe was prisoner to the wombe, and is By Law and processe of great nature, thence Free’d, and enfranchis’d, not a partie to The anger of the King, nor guilty of (If any be) the trespasse of the Queene.

(TLN 889–93)

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There is a suggestive difference between the two interpretations. To Hermione, the child is still a “prisoner”, falsely incarcerated like herself, and implicitly not to be freed until Hermione herself is. To Paulina, the child was a prisoner, but she is now enfranchised, free from the guilt or trespass of parents. Which is true? Or are they both true? The stakes are both existential and political. Is Perdita yet in the world, or not? If she is, then on what terms, and with what liberties or obligations? If she isn’t, when will she be? The answer seems to be something like this: the baby already is in the world, but she is also imprisoned. In a formal sense she is “free”, and can work towards enfranchisement; this reflects the politics of the role, sometimes explicit, always implicit, whereby Perdita is at once a figure of grounded integrity, frank and self-vindicating, and a vehicle for popular dignity. But equally she is also unfree, partly because prevented, partly because burdened by symbolising responsibilities. But this also works at a deeper level, at which freedom means nothing less than life itself: to be a prisoner was to be enwombed; if she remains imprisoned, she remains still in utero, awaiting independent oxygen. The effect – very typical of late Shakespeare – is a strange kind of above-ground incubation. Consequently, what Emilia appears to say of the mother is also said of the as-yet unnamed child: “never tender Lady hath borne greater”. Perdita is burdened with terrible transverterbrations. It is a basic principle of her characterisation; she can barely move for the specular anticipations of her growth in her begetters: “Although the Print be little, the whole Matter/ And Coppy of the father: (Eye, Nose, Lippe . . . the Very Mold, and frame of Hand, Nayle, Finger)” (TLN 1022–5). Shakespeare is composing the child upon quite pitiless fractal principles, wherein the tiniest piece of her is a repetition, and shall be an extension, of the forces that made her. I am innocent as you. The transference of responsibility is absolute: surrogacy is identity. In this playworld surrogacy is not only between characters, but between scenes and set-piece reports. Nowhere is this truer than the next stage of Perdita’s staggered emergence – the scene of “savage clamor”, when the doomed Antigonus speaks to the poor “Blossome” babe of her ghostly mother’s “fault”, when the bear eats the man, and the ship goes down, and the “grimly” skies fill with the roars of dying men. This, pretty much literally,

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is Perdita’s “lullabie too rough” (TLN 1497): the song which beds her down, which passes into her susceptible mind, and initiates her into individuation and sociality: “There lye, and there thy charracter”, says Antigonus, as the scene writes Perdita’s future, impresses its figures upon her wax. The storm scene repeats, and scenically releases, the narrated conditions of Perdita’s birth. This is less to do with conscious memory, or even inherited narrative, as scenic osmosis. Consider the bear, in many ways the genius of this pivotal dying-into-living scene. It can be understood in various ways: as a consequential reincarnation of Leontes, his error or tyranny; as a kind of living prop, via which the materiality of theatre literally consumes its characters; as a meta-generic convenience, taking into itself the mode’s ravaging antinomies and hijacking arts; as a memory and prolepsis of other spectacular mediators of possibility, such as the oracle, Time, Autolicus, and Julio Romano. But what of the bear’s relation to the babe? It doesn’t much matter here if it is a real bear or not. (It’s real enough for the man it eats.) What matters is that it doesn’t eat Perdita. This will sound callous and antinomian, but this is part of the risk and responsibility that Shakespeare is busily piling onto his heroine. The baby is saved. The context of this is Antigonus’ impotent, compelled, but still treacherous performance of duty: “most accurst am I/To be by oath enioyn’d to this” (TLN 1494–5). He is rightly cursed, because he believes that the queen was false, that the child is Bohemia’s, and that some part of this miserable compact is “right” (TLN 1488). Of course, he had no choice: but that doesn’t stop his fate from opening onto undetermined choices, not least our own, all of which breed upon the survival of the baby. Without this survival, there really can be no second half to the play. In this context we have the bear to thank. It enters as the necessary pilot of plot, but equally as the clamorous executor of the curse laid upon Antigonus by Hermione’s ghost. The man will die; and the baby will live. The bear roars in to defend the child from death, snatching it from the jaws of her reluctant sacrificer, in a kind of pleonastic taking on and taking away of the savage place that could kill her. The bear is a mother, and Perdita her child, licked into shape like a cub. If this is not actually Perdita’s birth scene, then certainly it is her nativity: where her horoscope is read, and her name delivered, as though

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by supernatural instruction. Everything in it is making her, and in the same action predicting her. Shakespeare beds this forward and backward action deep in his structures – not so much through puns, as through duplex scenic snapshots. For instance, the Clown reports the ship going down in the storm, and this report irresistibly evokes the cries and roars of sex and the savage clamour of conception: I would you did but see how it chafes, how it rages, how it takes up the shore . . . Now the Shippe boaring the moone with her maine Mast, and anon swallowed with yest and froth, and you’ld thrust a Corke into a hogshead. (TLN 1530–6)

Antigonus reports the dream-ghost of Hermione, a picture of inscrutable violence, pain, and portent. But we can hear the same cries and roars as birth pangs, as the mother screams the child into air: Sometimes her head on one side, some another I never saw a vessel of like sorrow So fill’d, and so becoming . . . thrice bow’s before me, And (gasping to begin some speech) her eyes Became two spouts; the fury spent, anon Did this breake from her.

What breaks but the baby, and the speech that stands for its existence? Good Antigonus, Since fate (against thy better disposition) Hath made thy person for the Th[r]ower-out Of my poor babe . . .

(TLN 1462–72)

The Clown’s speech is likewise a midwife: Heavy matters, heavy matters: but looke thee here boy. Now blesse thy selfe: thou met’st with things dying, I with things new borne. (TLN 1552–4)

He records the fact of new birth: of birth precisely out of the clamour, not only of the mimetic storm, but of the immediately preceding formactions: first, Antigonus’s report of Hermione’s spouting mother-ghost; second, the bear’s savage interruption and “exit”; third, the Clown’s report of the men in the act of perishing. The baby twice appears, once to the old man, once to the young man, as the subsequence of stage action – and, true to the contagious physics of these scenes, as its consequence. She takes on her origins, is substantially answerable to them.

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Let’s now look a little closer at what these origins are. ∞ The Shepherd enters The Winter’s Tale’s storm scene looking frantically for his lost sheep, risking attack from wolf or bear, notorious in these wilds, in the desire to secure them. He has lost his two best sheep (losses come in pairs in this world, like Hermione and Mamillius, or Antigonus and the sailors). The two sheep are familiar to him. He values them, he knows where they like to browse the ivy. But then he finds the baby changeling, and everything is transformed: [K]eepe it close: home, home, the next way. We are luckie (boy) and to bee so still requires nothing but secrecie. Let my sheepe go. (TLN 1563–5)

What happens to the sheep? Are sheep nothing? Sheep, the denizens of innocent, therapeutic, hopeful pastoral, nothing? Let my sheep go: these words speak the abrogation of any duty of care; the abrogation of pastoral itself, shepherds without sheep, shepherds become mercantile freebooters. No doubt pastoral in its courtly mode is always liable to just such washing of hands. But unlike the Sidneian “Doricles”, these are real shepherds. The Old Shepherd’s time-grafted, place-rooted connectedness is intrinsic to the sheep-shearing scene, with his hearty old wife and her “face o’fire/With labour”, playing pantler, butler, cook, toasting her guests, rubicund with her good luck. The old man’s paean to her insists on the continuities between ancient humility and present prosperity. And so I want to insist on the sheep. If they are let go, they too can be remembered. Cue the next appearance of the sheep owners. The once-young Shepherd re-enters, a couple of scenes and many years later, trying to achieve an exact addition of sheep and gain: “Let me see, every Leaven-weather toddes, every tod yeeldes pound and odde shilling: fifteen hundred shorne, what comes the wooll too?” (TLN 1700–3). The two storm-sheep have been “let go”, exchanged for fairy gold – and this is the multiplying, miraculous, something-from-nothing result: fifteen hundred of them! The Clown has turned true pastoralist. We are clearly to feel something of the miracle’s illegitimacy. He can’t add up (“I cannot do’t without Compters”); it doesn’t add up; he deserves what is about to happen, when Autolicus, the man who

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clocks everything, rips off the Good Samaritan and duly rips off the Clown. Adieu, adieu, remember the lost sheep. Likewise, can we forget those awful narrations in the storm scene, as the ship goes down, and Antigonus’s shoulder-bone is torn out, and they are all crying for help? Everything is present and continuous; it is happening “now, now”, “he’s at it now”, the “men are not yet cold under water”. Hence the famous line, “thou met’st with things dying, I with things new borne”. Dying goes on; it has terrible duration. Of course, the action now moves on to what is “new”: but the “dying” is still happening in the scene break. In a sense it always is in this play. Antigonus continues dying, like the men in the ship continue drowning, still warm, their organs shutting down but not yet quite done with, flickering with some memory of function. It is a principal theme of the play: dying goes on; guilt endures; do not forget. Consider the grieving Leontes, who leaves the immediately previous scene vowing to visit the death-chapel daily, “So long as Nature/Will beare up with this exercise”. It is very typical of the play to insert the semi-joking word-rhyme here: the “exercise” that Leontes’ nature will “beare up” is taken up by the “Beare”. The bear’s action is partly a repetition of the murderous tyranny, as the storm scene offers recurring, inescapable snapshots and consequences of Bohemia’s error; and partly an acting-out of Leontes now, suspended in the scene break, dining miserably on death, condemned to live in that “curst” event until the backstage plat calls his actor back onto the stage. The story longs to move on; perhaps we do too. But these tableaux are like capsules, little framed vignettes, presented to be remembered. It is unclear how much of the “Gentleman” will be left once the bear has finished dining. But the dialogue asks us to at once think the horrible thought and instantly to repress it: “if there be any of him left, Ile bury it”; “That’s a good deed: if thou mayest discerne by that which is left of him, what he is, fetch me to the sight of him” (TLN 1570–3). Are we meant to see what the Shepherd speaks of here – the mangled remains of limbs, the mince and bone, those leavings that are still meant to speak for “him”? (How many of us do see it, or spend the time to imagine it?) The modality, as it tends to be in Shakespeare, is subjunctive, conditioned by repeated ifs: here is a contingent act, a contingent survival of body parts, a contingent promise to do “good”, a contingent invitation to imagine horror and look upon death.

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We don’t get to see any of it with our eyes. Instead we are asked to believe in proleptic reports. We may or may not allow that the Shepherd and his son will do the “good” thing and lay the remains in the ground. Burial happens if we imagine it; so too does remembrance. The point is our activity. For the shepherds are our models, as we too gape and wonder at amazing events, as we hear cries for help, as we render nothing. Stumbling upon treasures, more or less accidentally, and letting the casualties go hang in the name of future riches. Isn’t our attendance just the same? Burial never happens. This playworld, like all of Shakespeare’s playworlds, never really allows it. It is the lodestone of their possibility that everything bears potential forward recollection. Nothing is safely forgotten. Likewise, the irruptive moment of return is quite unpredictable, a persisting possibility: in this much the same as unwelcome exposure (of true status) or wondrous revelation (of survival). This impossibility of forgetting is everywhere bubbling in The Winter’s Tale: “Of that fatal Countrey Sicillia, prethee speeake no more, whose very naming, punishes me with the remembrance . . .” (TLN 1633–4), says Polixenes, but the plea is self-evidently in vain. At the same time we know we are being asked to recall, and somehow to hold in question, the “penitent (as though calst him)” Leontes, and the “even now to be a-fresh lamented” loss of the “Queene & Children”. Note the hedges and modifiers: “as though calst him”, “even now”. We must not leave these calamities (loss) or these possibilities (recovery) alone. They are happening even now. This is the import of the play’s scenic architecture: organised around reports that lack immediate sensory verification, and which therefore invite a more resolving coming-true; and around inset scenes that require imaginative work to hold them in view, and which are therefore possessed and treasured by us, as though instants of desire or reparation, speaking for our better selves, which the story can satisfy. Both techniques establish the need for reprises of scene or event, which might variously reinforce, parody, dismiss, vindicate, or renovate whatever possibilities are in play. The playworld is recessive with life, nibbling at its fringes, to be returned to any moment: “This dreame of mine/Being now awake, Ile Queen it no inch farther,/But milke mine Ewes, and weepe” (2293–5). The ewes are waiting. To every blade and flower belongs a history, to the

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hedges too (“I will but looke upon the Hedge, and follow you”, 2706–7). But then these teeming nodes of life are anything but free. The hedges enclose land and protect accumulating wealth; they are the site of domestic industry and larceny (“the white sheet bleaching on the hedge”). The flowers recall imprisonment, rape, death. The life in the details is always generated, as a founding principle, by purposes beyond the subjects’ ken. It isn’t a question of identifying clever scenic repetitions, which exist merely as formal structuring nodes, as though to give the play rhythmic harmony or symmetry. It is about possibilities, hideous or precious, being presented and re-presented, and thereby remaining possible; it is about possible worlds spooling from the basic material organisation of playworlds, here manifest in scenes that differentially recall and replay each other. If plays have moral and political force, if plays can genuinely animate possibility, this is the kind of forward and backward modelling that does it. The Shakespeare world is networked. He is the least systematic of writers: and yet every detail is wired to the system that allows it. And this system is at base not politico-economic, but theatrical–metaphysical. It isn’t that every stray connotation or actorly improvisation is harnessed to a unifying theme. The playworld is alive with surprise, just as it is with tenacious individualism. But life is inter-dependent more than independent; the past will not release the present; and surprises are scripted. Perdita’s dread is real enough: “even now I tremble/To thinke your father, by some accident/Should passe this way, as you did” (1818–20). And he shall pass her way: there is no such thing as an accident. ∞ Shakespeare’s telepathic scenography and parcelled identities imply passionate subjection to the world’s formative materials. In The Winter’s Tale, Perdita in particular is the one burdened. She is never free from foundational exchanges: giving and taking life, one for another’s. Let us remember the basic conditions of her discovery, her retrieval from the experiential limbo-land of the “desert”. First, the shepherds discover money. Second, they let the lost sheep go. All of their futures are predicted in this exchange. The price of Perdita is such sacrifices. Consequently, she is the one who, in this play of switch and interchange, is shadowed by the

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full possibilities of substitution: taking on the possibilities of her dead brother and mother, the dead mariners and murderous bear, and silently emerging in the play’s final apotheoses, at once over-burdened with “unspeakable” possibilities and emptied like a saint. It is again perhaps Florizel’s “waves” speech that best evokes the responsibilities latent in Perdita. And it does it – without the slightest intention on the speaker’s part – by recalling to Florizel’s beloved the nested lives that are the predicate of hers. Remember the abandoned sheep, and remember the drowning men, and listen once more to this: When you do dance, I wish you A wave o’th Sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that: move still, still so: And owne no other function. Each your doing, (So singular, in each particular) Crownes what you are doing, in the present deeds, That all your Actes, are Queenes.

The words carefully pick up the osmotic, permeable ontology of the storm scene. In this speech, as in the earlier scene, each element, human and nonhuman, promises a kind of palingenetic transference into Perdita’s substance. No doubt we are to imagine Florizel’s tribute as partially inspired by the scene’s magical seascape, with Perdita as its cynosure and epitome, the coming true of its semi-piscatorial, semi-pastoral potentiality. But the sea is far more than some pretty trompe l’oeil back-hanging. Among other things, it is the site of death and of burial. To the extent that it allows survival, it only confers Perdita. If she is the wave of the sea, then, what kind of memory is there of those men that, the last we heard, were “not yet cold under water”? The sea rolls blithely on, awful in its roaring sublimation of all articulation, including those of the men’s limbs, fighting to reach air. Is this Perdita’s inheritance? Is this what it means to be (as Paulina had it), the sublime force of “Nature”, free and enfranchised? There is a price to be paid for survival, we all know it, and guilty or not there are few of us who pause to consider the disappointees, those whose lives are cut short, or those who fail to make the original cut. Does Perdita move serenely upon the death of the very agents who brought her safe to shore? Or does she remember, even incarnate, exactly in her motions, their living memory and possibility?

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Perhaps this is one of the things Shakespeare is evoking, as Florizel’s speech goes on to particularise the stilled and moving, still moving sea. Each wave is a man (so singular, in each particular): and, as the storm scene’s transferential identities ask us to recognise, each your doing. Their dying is her doing: her doing is their continuance. On this reading, Perdita’s dance – that is, the substance of her action – is one of profound responsibility and reanimation. The speech invokes delicate remembrance; its politics are proleptic, inclusive, and quietly tenacious, as Perdita’s likewise are throughout this great scene. In turn, this ethical-cum-political reading gives new point to Florizel’s closing metaphor: “Each your doing . . . Crownes what you are doing, in the present deeds,/That all your Actes, are Queenes.” All your acts are Queen’s: the words move, with a characteristic mix of prosopopeia, metalepsis, and catachresis, from Florizel’s private erotic rapture to a bracingly projective politics. This politics is at work both in Perdita’s “present deeds” and in the allegorised body politic that these same present deeds prophesy. Clearly the politics are monarchical, but import popular superintendence and accountability to all estates. Perdita, in the allegory’s present and future vision, has inherited the crown, picking up her mother’s mantle (of justice, open speech, etc.), and correcting the tyrannous monarchy of her father. But everything here is contested. There is no easy acknowledgement of such responsibility. How could there be, when Florizel is indifferent to it, or when Perdita, for all her groundedness, knows nothing of the playworld’s nested identities? These responsibilities are no kind of choice; if they foreshadow democratic sentiments, this is our interpellation. They are a burden, even an imaginary taking-hostage. Far from being politically enlightened, we might just as easily understand it as insufferably cruel. If Florizel’s praise threatens to turn his beloved by turns to a statue or a puppet, then the politics of the moment hinges on similar difficulties. It requires too much memory, too much knowledge of violence, of complicity, of the simple cost of continuance. The clear social idealism that frames Perdita, like some aureole of truth amid lies, can begin to seem like ugly special pleading. The idealism itself requires that we either sentimentalise those lost, as never-dead martyrs, or consign them to some list on a cenotaph, the necessary dead sublated to romance teleology. How can a girl take on so much?

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There are few characters in early modern drama whose formation, whose simple permission to be, is more closely attended than Perdita’s, or whose possible directions are more exactly foreshadowed, plotted, traced. It is the necessary upshot of being born and at once cast away. Her life is a struggle for permission, for the conditions under which she might be. We witness a kind of playmaking embryology: the laborious processes whereby her character is conceived, composed, brought point by point through peril into being. This is achieved through a bewildering variety of agents: including loving mother, lunatic father, struggling servants, ghosts and dreams, winds and waters, bears and shepherds, and many dying men. All these things make Perdita a role of awesome prediction: truly a figure for as well as of formactive construction. Indeed, it is a kind of compositional contagion, whereby material accidents – mother’s oppression, father’s nose, seacoast atavism – become her, directly or indirectly touch her into shape. We can call this environmental, and so it is, as she will go on to speak the possibilities, far more than any other character, for social and political freedom. But – and this is the other side of the contract, the compositional unfreedom that always shadows her part – it is also theatrical, to do with the fact that she is what makes her, which is what conceives her, which includes all of those who gaze upon her, or appraise her, or give her a voice when she as yet has none: Camillo, Florizel, Polixenes in the sheep-shearing scene; Hermione, Paulina, Leontes immediately after her birth; Antigonus, the ghostly Hermione, the bear, and the drowners in the storm scene; and, of course, throughout all of these appraisings: us. Perhaps this is why, as Perdita’s response to Florizel’s speech has it, the “praises are too large”: not only because the pretence of calling her “Queen” depends on her pranked-up Whitsun robes; but because, rather terribly, the words move way beyond what she is sure she is, refashioning her as creation’s epitome, and sublating her into spellbinding, repeating, supra-subjective art. The implication: you are what makes you; every action is a passion.12

12 Compare Michael Witmore’s judgement of Mamillius “as both external origin of events in the play and internal pawn, subject to its vaulting turns” (Pretty Creatures, 153). Perdita is probably scripted to be played by the same actor as Mamillius, and clearly the role is at once the continuation, repetition, and in many ways inversion of Mamillius.

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This means that Perdita is forever in danger of becoming the frozen exemplar. As ever in Shakespeare, each glimpsed hint, each folded connotation, awaits its scenic extension.13 So, throughout the encomia to Perdita the play is looking ahead to the closing scene, when it is Perdita’s turn to gaze reverently at her mother’s statue, as others once gazed upon her: And give me leave, And doe not say ’tis Superstition, that I kneele, and then implore her Blessing. Lady, Deere Queene, that ended when I but began, Give me that hand of yours, to kisse.

(TLN 3234–8)

Shakespeare is orchestrating strange transferences here, and one of the things lost in the exchange – lost if by no means forgotten – is the Perdita of Bohemia: PAULINA.

Shall I draw the Curtaine. No: not these twentie yeeres. P E R D I T A . So long could I Stand-by, a looker-on. LEONTES.

(TLN 3285–8)

But it isn’t quite right to see Perdita as merely the reverent bystander at superior miracles. It is true that the final scene makes her endure some sort of paralysed temptation in this direction, when she kneels before the statue and is asked to imagine that this is her destination. Here is one answer to the fixating praise of her earlier – a scenic memory which allows us to think that this might be true, as the box snaps neatly shut on the magic ballerina, lonely and pointless, circling on her plinth. But this isn’t the end. The statue moves. Whether or not Hermione has come back to life, Perdita’s mother has certainly left her prison. Consequently, if the logic of the birth scene plays true, Hermione’s release marks Perdita’s simultaneous de-imprisoning (“my poor prisoner,/I am as innocent as you”). Hermione is redeemed by life (“Deare Life redeemes you” TLN 3311) and in doing so gives life to Perdita. It is Perdita’s final birth, and at once she receives a blessing: 13 Wilson Knight: “The supreme plays are always explications in imaginative detail on a big scale of experiences which are worded, with just the same quality, colour, and profundity, in scattered metaphors, speeches, or incidents, in his earlier work.” Wheel of Fire, 295.

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Perdita’s possible lives You Gods looke downe, And from your sacred Vials poure your graces Upon my daughters head: Tell me (mine owne) Where hast thou bin preserv’d? Where liv’d? How found Thy Fathers Court? For thy shalt heare that I Knowing by Paulina, that the Oracle Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserv’d My selfe, to see the yssue. (TLN 3333–40)

These are Hermione’s last words, and they are strange. She asks her daughter three direct questions, and receives an answer to none of them. She turns the wonder of her own survival, her own issue from blankness, into wonder at her daughter’s: but still the daughter offers nothing. Perdita is told that the sole reason her mother preserved herself – remained suspended or cocooned, a chrysalis of possibility inside the stone or the grave or the catacomb – was that this daughter was “in being”. It is another curious phrase: somehow less than “alive”, more a potential, an abated possible, awaiting full commission. The “issue” has waited until now. Clearly Shakespeare is once again “delivering” Perdita. And once again she must take into herself all that produces her. At the very least, this means all that was animate in her mother, and before that the statue: which is indeed all. For the returning mother is the ultimate in scene-stealing, sense-numbing art, an attempt to fold-up all possibility into a single recessive impossibility. So, every one of the play’s set-pieces is resolved in the statue: the oracle, bear, pedlar, dance, waves, and so on. They all merge into it, like myriad pixels disappearing into a single image. It seems to be a way out of multiplicity, out of proliferation, out of the guilty rush of alternatives that is Shakespearean possibility, as though wanting to put a stop to the delirious procreativity of imagination. But equally the statue is all of these precursors, as recessively present as any memory, or the possibility of repetition.14 They are all settled and asleep in it; they are animate and awake in it.

14 Michael Witmore writes of the statue scene: “there is an almost causal linkage between the accuracy of a particular representation and its disposition to movement, but one never gets the sense that likeness and life could actually be separated . . . Indeed, the redemptive myth of the theatre that Shakespeare is developing in this play requires that imitation and continuation be one and the same thing . . . The process whereby likeness becomes its own kind of offspring . . .” Pretty Creatures, 164–5.

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These are the possible worlds – and all somehow waiting upon Perdita’s answer. And so what to make of her silence? In play after play Shakespeare’s women and their actors are left alone with their bodies in their final scenes, their part-texts ended. Here the Perdita-actor gets three questions, and can answer none of them. We might call them false cues: the action stops, all heads turn to the one cued, and no words at all are returned. Who is to say what happens in the gaps? The Hermione-actor has some control – over the length of silence, for example, and the intonation of the first question. But after that the Perdita-actor can do whatever he wants. No doubt he won’t have his character scorn, or sulk, or spit in her mother’s face. But some other turning away, or inclosing reserve, or holy fear? Who is to say? Shakespeare does not script such things accidentally. He leaves the interval because he requires waiting. Potentially, I think, this means everyone’s. Shakespeare seems to apprehend possibilities that cannot be trusted to speech, or to acceptable generic patterns. All such things are too indentured to the corrupt institutions, as yet only projectively reformed, which created the playworld’s suffering and chaos in the first place. We may feel sure that Perdita’s silence isn’t quite sister to the infamous silence of Isabella at the end of Measure for Measure. But its possibilities are no less prescribed by what has come before. In Isabella’s case, this was repeated sexual coercion, and her repeated resistance to it: the assumption that Isabella continues to resist is hardly less likely than that she finally capitulates, as though to necessary comic-rape logic. In Perdita’s case, as we have seen, the precursors are varied, and alive with difficult responsibilities as much as ecstatic rapture. The return from non-being or barely-being is the scene’s theme, hers as much as her mother’s. It seems the simplest logic, and metaleptically true, to admit the desire, if not the possibility, for other such returns. The questions that Perdita fails to answer are our best guide as to what these returns might be. Where was she “preserved?” Where has she “lived?” How did she find her father’s court? These simple questions return scrupulously to the storm scene, to the sheep shearing, and to the mysteries of the concealed “fardel”. We return, that is, to Perdita’s on-going composition, and the

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numerous parties and actions that war within her for possession, or for her to possess them: and, as the moment’s heavy unspeakability attests, continue to do so. ∞ What to conclude, then, of Shakespeare’s formactive characterisation, and of Perdita as its epitome? I quoted Bergson earlier on the dancer as our “imaginary puppet”. He was clearly drawing on Heinrich von Kleist’s famous essay on the marionette theatre, an essay that can nicely frame these foundational questions about playlife. It is written in the form of a dialogue with a renowned puppeteer: Each movement, he said, had a center of gravity; it would suffice to control this point from the center of the figure; the limbs, which are, after all, nothing but pendulums, would follow mechanically on their own without anything else needing to be done . . . Each time the center of gravity is moved in a straight line the limbs trace curves . . . This same line was something very mysterious. For it was nothing less than the pathway of the dancer’s soul; and he doubted it could be produced in any other fashion than that the machinist adopted the center of gravity of the marionette, in other words, he danced.15 The manipulative relation between the movements of his fingers and the movement of the puppets attached to them is really rather ingenious, more like the relation between numbers and their logarithms or between asymptotes and hyperbolae.16

What advantage, asks the interlocutor, can such lifeless replicants have over a human dancer?17 The advantage? First of all, a negative one . . . namely that it never strikes an attitude. For attitude, as you well know, arises when the soul (vis motrix) finds itself twisted in a motion other than the one prescribed by its center of gravity. Since, wielding wire or thread, the machinist simply has no other point at his disposal than this one, all the other bodily articulations are as they should be, dead, pure pendulums, and merely follow the law of gravity; an admirable quality that one may seek in vain among the vast majority of our dancers.18

15 “On the Theater of Marionettes”, Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist, trans. Peter Wortsman (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2010), 265–6. 16 “Marionettes”, 2. 17 On theatrical automata and puppets, see Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 113–39. 18 “Marionettes”, 268.

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The marionette achieves a kind of negative sublime, free from all human contingency – the flaws and susceptibilities of body, the curse of self-consciousness19 – as epitomised in the mortal actor: Take P– . . . when she dances the part of Daphne, and turns around to peer at Apollo, who is pursuing her, her soul sits in the axis of the spine; she bends as if she were about to break . . .20

Clearly the Perdita of Florizel’s encomium is nothing like this toocorporeal “P”. But does this make her kin to the puppeteer’s “dancing hyperbola”, her movement to all intents determined by her beholder? The puppets only need the ground, as do the elves, to graze it, and thereby to reanimate the swing of their limbs against the momentary resistance.21 [G]race return[s] once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite – such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, such as in the jointed manikin or the god.22

The doll is blessed in being a zombie. And this blessedness, presumably, is in the grace – as beauty of movement, as potential for moral sympathy, as an unearned gift from an unknown maker – it imparts to its user and its beholders.23 Clearly the human implications are troubling. If there is a trace or memory of Perdita in the marionette (it is possible that Kleist had the play in mind; the essay also features a violently revelatory bear), then it suggests that the price for her innocence is inanimacy: some kind of mechanised subjection to the strings and materials that render her, and, via this, subjection to the puppeteer. Radical self-loss is the predicate of 19

Kleist invokes a 16-year-old boy, of fabled physical grace, who glances in a mirror, discovers his resemblance to a famous statue of a young man pulling a thorn from his foot (a metaphor of violated innocence and the struggle for repair), and is lost: he cannot pull away from the mirror, and as he stares transfixed, one then another charm falls from him. The boy becomes a kind of Mamillius, premature hostage to jealous adult desire, marooned forever in his narcissistic witticisms and ghoulish tale, essentially discontinued. “Marionettes”, 270–1. For the significance of Mamillius’s exchange with Hermione’s ladies, see Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 109–12. 20 21 22 “Marionettes”, 268. “Marionettes”, 269. “Marionettes”, 273. 23 Kenneth Gross: “. . . the marionette’s grace comes from a leap into the limitations of the puppet itself . . . That’s where the puppet’s soul is found, in its merely physical center of gravity, which is the line of its spirit. The soul lies in the motion it has as a material object and not a living body, and it is this to which the puppeteer must give himself up, to which he must lend his own living soul, desire, and bodily motion.” Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 63.

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grace; we are swept clean, bleached of self-superintendence, moving through abjection into transcendent emptiness. But of course we cannot rest with Perdita as we can rest in a puppet, happy enough that it feels nothing. Kleist’s puppet, whose limbs are pendula, merely follows the laws of gravity, echoing automatically the movement of the centre. We can get some purchase on Perdita’s difference from Kleist’s doll by recalling Leibniz’s understanding of the pendulum. Influenced by the great mathematician Huygens, Leibniz moved from calculations establishing how uneven the speed of the pendulum is – fastest at its centre, slowest at the point of its descent – to the conclusion that the pendulum’s fluctuations are in fact the sum of two energies: one kinetic, one potential. This leads to Leibniz’s celebrated modification of Descartes’ law of the conservation of movement: it isn’t movement that is stable, but the totality of energy. Mechanics, then, is in fact far less “mechanical” than was previously assumed. It is dynamic, constituted by internal force, whereby measurable qualities are stored as well as manifest in movement. It is no accident that Leibniz called this internal predisposition vis viva, or living force.24 Likewise, Shakespeare’s formactions are alive, where Kleist’s is a manikin: because if Perdita is a puppet, she is also a girl, alive and passionate. She sees herself becoming a fiction; she can do nothing to undress herself of it; but as much as there is no getting off the play-train, she never quite folds-up into any of the techniques that determine her. Indeed it may be precisely the fact that she is made up of so many formactive acts, competing and complementary and always begging a supplement, which stands for the unplummetable abundance of a life.25

24 Cf. Bert O. States: “the most important resemblance to drama lies in the closed field of force itself. The interest, as in a play, arises from the fact that we begin with a given number of elements and use them up as efficiently as possible . . . nothing is left over, not a hint of independent liveliness, that is not consumed in action – or . . . in interaction.” Great Reckonings, 145–6. 25 M. M. Mahood: “Drama comes nearest to life of all forms of mimesis because it is continually reanimated by living actors; and in acknowledgement of this Shakespeare entrusts the weight of the play’s meaning at this climax to a boy-actor’s silent mimetic art. When Perdita dances, the old antagonism of art and nature disappears, for there is no way in which we can tell the dancer from the dance.” Shakespeare’s Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957), 186.

23

A life in scenes

How do we know when something in a playworld exists – whether it is alive, or happening, or has happened? We might recall how quantum physicists puzzled over wave functions – do they express our state of knowledge of a system, or the actual physical state of a system? Playworlds can bring this conundrum horribly home. For what life can there be beyond our knowledge, or without it? In a playworld, is it not our observations that make, mar, or otherwise measure existence?1 Or is this a reckless assumption, as complacent as it is ignorant? Once start thinking about what makes playlife, and the most basic questions multiply. What can it mean if the basic question of life is contingent on glimpses, private fancy, refined and barely shareable intellectual inferences? If we don’t feel it, does it mean it didn’t happen? And if suddenly we do feel its possibility, does it make it come true, give the possibility sudden life? What if existence – the claim of an action or a passion to be in the world – depends upon fugitive recognitions, or upon the passing affective experience of a play? Or, perhaps worse, upon the formal organisation of what is or is not presented to us: an admitted articulation; or the placial extension of this, a staged scene.

1 The dilemma is famously expressed by Erwin Schrödinger’s thought-experiment of the cat in a radioactive box; he thought the example intuitively absurd, but not everyone has agreed: “consider a sealed box with a hamster in it. Let the box be surrounded by a highly lethal gas that kills instantly upon contact. We wish to determine whether the hamster is dead or alive and let it be given that the only means we have of doing this is to open the box to see. Clearly, every time we look into an opened box we will find a dead hamster, no matter what the state of the animal before the box is opened. The act of observing the system (here, the hamster) has forced the system into a given state”: James T. Cushing, Philosophical Concepts in Physics: The Historical Relation between Philosophy and Scientific Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 297.

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What can it mean to live on stage, in scenic allotments? We might think that if something happens in a play it has to happen inside the span of a scene: just as a football match has two halves or four quarters, in which all action is equally present, and outside of these time-containers everything is just hot air and rehearsal.2 But is this true of plays? Certainly playaction is basically acted out before us, by speaking players, reacting one to the other. But there are gradations of presence. Shakespeare doesn’t take entrances for granted. Likewise, he doesn’t turn his mind away when an exit is proposed. This is clear from the sustained use he makes of repeated entrance and exit cues, allowing actors to enter “early”, a visible but only potential presence in the scene; or remain on stage after they have departed, ghosting into subsequent conversations or scenes.3 He knows that no exit is final, and that we wait in the wings: just as no body dies on stage, and we breathe in our stilled silence. He knows these things as an actor, and frequently transposes them in to his writing for parts. The absent body is alive. Or consider “event-points” that are reported but we do not see: Oliver’s “conversion” in As You Like It (4. 3); Hamlet when he meets the pirates; All’s Well’s Helena’s “sweet” and “saucy” congress in the “pitchy night” with Bertram (4. 4); or Duncan’s slaughter in Macbeth. Let’s think a little more about this last example. The main reasons Shakespeare does not show Duncan being killed, or his bloodied corpse, are to do with his murderers. To some degree it protects us from having to see them as sordid killers; it remains a murder of the mind, an intent or emotion; it allows the act to remain somehow dialectical, part of a process of moral and mental suffering, rather than a “brute” action. It allows the act to exist spectrally, to haunt and return, and to be a kind of radically negative ideal, a pattern or typology of sinfulness. All of this is to say that Duncan never quite goes, in some senses never quite dies – it is very different from Julius Caesar, where we first witness Caesar stabbed like a pig, and 2 The best analysis of Shakespeare’s scenic syntax remains Emrys Jones’s Scenic Form in Shakespeare, concentrating upon Shakespeare’s interest in sequence and tempo more than duration, in tight connections of cause and effect, and “brilliant expediency” in the use of time. 3 A striking example of this is the possibility of the scene-straddling Edgar’s ghostly presence at his father’s blinding: see Simon Palfrey, Poor Tom: Living King Lear (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), ch. 12. Also see section on “Repeated Cues” in Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts.

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then see his corpse displayed on the ramparts and apostrophised over at great length. He remains the cynosure of all eyes, in his life, in his dying, and in his death. His death – the killing, the dead body, the remembered life – is the brute inescapable fact that dominates the play. As though by contrastive design, Macbeth pivots upon an assassination and a corpse that we never see. Likewise, no one talks about Duncan once he has gone. He isn’t missed. He doesn’t haunt. What haunts is the acting of murder. Shakespeare knows what he is doing. He has Rosse ask the obvious question: “Where is Duncan’s body?” (2. 4. 32). Macduff tells him it has been carried to “the sacred storehouse of his predecessors” at “Colme-kill” – in other words, utterly out of sight. But the other answer is staring everyone in the face. Duncan’s body is here, speaking at you right now. Duncan is now Macduff, arriving belated at the door, too late to stop the murder that allows the actor to swap roles. Shakespeare does not use such theatrical expediencies innocently. He gives reality to each passing show, each instrument of his purposes. Macduff’s body remembers Duncan’s, and so he carries posthumous or ghostly charge. When finally Macbeth faces Macduff, for the first time after the murder-night, his words are tellingly double: Of all men else I have avoided thee, But get thee back, my soul is too much charg’d With blood of thine already.

(5. 8. 4–6)

The haunted dupe thinks he is seeing the very king he sent to death. The man dies, but the actor and the act will not.4 It is only lives distributed in scenes that permit such specular structures: there is no chance of doubling without the factitious, experientially quantumising phenomenon of scenes; it is scenes, then, that uniquely lend themselves to Shakespeare’s fractal storytelling and characterisation, organised as they invariably are in differential homologies. More basic still, the fact of scenes is the perfect instrument for focusing upon the truth-claims of physical seeing (such a preoccupation of Macbeth). 4 Compare the peculiar end of The Winter’s Tale, when Paulina is abruptly paired up by Leontes with Camillo. Stephen Booth writes that the pairing would have “seemed less arbitrary, less an act of mere authorial tidiness, to an audience that saw one actor play Antigonus in Acts II and III and Camillo in the other three acts”. “Speculations on Doubling in Shakespeare’s Plays”, Philip C. Maguire and David A. Samuelson, eds, Shakespeare: The Theatrical Dimension (New York: AMS Press, 1979), 103–31 (120). Or see Booth, Indefinition, 147.

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If we don’t see it happen, then did it? Or, if it happened, did it happen in some different way, some different possible world, from those things that we do see?5 Perhaps things that we see differ in their possibility from things that we merely hear about. Or perhaps things that we only see, and do not also hear, animate still another possible world. Perhaps the purely mimical thing, such as a dumb show, is a counterpart to the playworld, or to persons in it, adumbrating virtual or vicarious possibilities that do not quite come true.6 (And there are gradations of dumb show: those that belong to the play’s self-framing, as in Pericles; those that belong to a play within the play, as in Hamlet.) And what of action that has no corresponding real-time agents, but exists only as a scenic conjecture in the folds of words, and perhaps only in the minds of those alert enough to seize it? Or a demoralising variation upon this – scenes which people see, but which haven’t in fact happened (as in Much Ado and Othello). Are they nevertheless possible? Can even cruel mendacity attain counterfactual reality? Other playworlds explore still less tangible hypotheses – for example, experience that is neither seen nor reported, and yet begs inference: Edgar’s in-between the hollow of the tree and the irruption of Poor Tom (or Cordelia’s still longer absence after being sent into exile); Marina’s in-between her abduction by pirates and her appearance in the brothel. Does the length of hiatus make any difference? Or do we simply assume that they remain wherever they were in their final speech, or where they were headed in their last departure?7 Or perhaps the economy of scenes arrests things, such that if they are not “scenified” they are implicitly without Jones: “The amount which Shakespeare takes for granted, the great gaps between scenes which we are obliged to leap (and whose contents we are forced to supply), are the most obvious reason for our sense that, by the end of the play [Macbeth], we have travelled a distance almost incredibly incommensurate with the brevity of the text as performed or read”: Scenic Form in Shakespeare, 198. 6 “Counterpart” is David Lewis’s term: “What comes from trans-world resemblance is not trans-world identity, but a substitute for trans-world identity: the counterpart relation. What [someone] cannot do in person at other worlds, not being present there to do it, he may do vicariously through his counterparts . . . What something might have done (or might have been) is what it does (or is) vicariously: and that is what its counterparts do (or are).” Counterfactuals (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), 39–40. 7 Cf. Bert O. States: “When a character leaves the stage we think of him as going elsewhere in the same world. In the wings, he continues to live in the dotted-line realm of etcetera behaviour, moving (if we happen to think of him at all) more or less at that same momentum that took him out of the play.” Great Reckonings, 151. 5

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essential motion, bereft of all capability of change: in which case we may ask if they exist at all. Should we see scenes as quanta – there is one, then another, and absolutely nothing in the interim? Or must a character negotiate these leaps, be sustained in-between the scenes as much as in each one? In playworlds like Shakespeare’s, such thoughts can have more than whimsical reality. Likewise the experience of being in a scene, present on stage, yet not in it, because the written part has finished, or the player hasn’t yet been cued, or cannot be seen by anybody, onstage or off. There are gaps and lapses everywhere, begging the question of life. After all, the slashes and compressions of time that make a scene, and that happen inside the scene, are in many ways not constitutionally different from the more evident slash that separates one scene from the next. All such folds can be experienced, survived into – or died into. Consider again the case of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. By all the rules of theatre she dies. She is announced dead, her loved ones are cast into mourning. The scene ends, and the next scene, in not returning her secretly to us, tells us that she has indeed gone. She appears as a dreamghost to Antigonus, assuring us that Hermione now inhabits posthumous realms. Verily, Hermione no longer partakes in this world. She is as dead as any dramatic character can ever be, as dead as her son Mamillius. But then we are surprised, in the final scene, to find she is no longer dead. A statue of her is unveiled, and she walks out of the marble and back into life. If it was a statue, as we are told over and over it is, then it is no longer a statue. If she was dead, she is no longer dead. It must be one of the two, unless we accept the comparably impossible report that she has hidden for sixteen years, very close to her husband but never seen or suspected, fed daily but otherwise immobile: a cruel and incredible tale of privation, truly suitable for the torture-relishing fantasist, Autolicus.8 What is more, our only authority for what happens – at her initial death, in her reanimation, in the lost interim – is unreliable. Paulina may lie or she may not, once or repeatedly: there really is no difference. What is clear is that life goes on in the scenic break, or can be retrieved from it, in ways that we can never have imagined; that these things have life beyond any agreed or 8 For a powerful protest of the plot’s ethical ugliness, see Eric Mallin, Godless Shakespeare (London: Continuum, 2007).

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implied contract with us; that what we took to be death, or stasis, or even contentless continuity, is nothing of the kind. The interval is alive. It might seem that The Winter’s Tale presents an outrageous exception – delivering life only retrospectively, mocking the assumptions that underpinned our initial experience of the play. But then perhaps this only makes explicit, turns into a plot-point, what Shakespeare is always like. We retrieve life after the event; what we thought was dead or forgotten was nothing of the kind. It is hard to know what to think; hard to know what to give credence as happening, or as life. Traditionally our admittance of such things doesn’t really depend upon plausibility or presentability, but simply upon genre. In some sorts of plays certain things simply do not happen. If the mode allows it, then it is. If it doesn’t, then it is impossible. This is the faith we bring with us. In a comedy, let us say, death or rape doesn’t happen. If it does happen, this isn’t a comedy. But how to know if such an event has happened or not? Can we presume before the facts? Or rather: we regularly do presume before the facts, but should we? Clearly, in plays like The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare is bending genre into unforeseen shapes. He does it often. But he never entirely dispenses with genre-thinking’s framing expectations. Genre is best thought of as one more formaction, macro more than micro, open to the same tropes and swerves and stutters as any other instrument. The imperative is to stay alert to what is actually (potentially) happening, and not to presuppose shapes that may be present only as a skeleton or a ghost. The obvious danger of genre-thinking is reducing a playworld’s actants to symptoms of an anterior prospective, or to metaphysical abstractions. Genre becomes the antidote to true possibility. It reduces possible worlds to a hierarchy of the admitted and the permitted, one that replicates Leibniz’s celebration of this dominant dispensation, and yet without his tragi-comic vision of teeming prevention and unapprehended life. We may remember Leibniz’s designedly provocative climactic example in Theodicy: a rape, inaugurating tyranny, which nonetheless plays its part in the best possible world. I want now to explore some comparable Shakespeare-scenes, so as to test the questions that have been accumulating. First, I will look briefly at the comedy of Much Ado, and in particular its way with cruel jokes and false deaths; second, the tragedy of Macbeth,

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a retelling of the Tarquin story as regicide; third, the ultimate in elided rape scenes, that of Marina in the tragi-comic Pericles. I want to ask how much protection from true possibility is granted by a life doled out in scenic instalments, and what is more couched in a specific, event-limiting genre (as a basic organising formaction). Shakespeare’s subject, very often, is the interim: the moment before volition, or the interstice of an action and its discovery. Might the most possible worlds be found in the recesses between visible scenic quanta? Where exactly is the life?

24

Scene as joke: Much Ado

When I think of Much Ado About Nothing, I am reminded of a very narrow ballroom I once visited in a Genoa palace. It suggested to me a kind of infernal waiting room, all gaudy mirrors and bovine statuettes, a floor so polished that you floated more than stepped, and seeming to demand that all who entered should slide along, in narrowing lines and uncomfortable clothes, pretending to hide behind their masks. A place in which it must have been, in its glory days, truly impossible to be anything but an opaque fake, or perhaps a fake so transparent as to be seen right through, and life’s very substance the gaudy mirrors and bovine statues and chintzy fake-diamond chandeliers. In such a place, as in Much Ado, true calamity is averted. Life floats and slides in a specular anaesthesium, where everyone’s actions ape everyone else’s, kindly or not, and life, even where it is bitchy and garrulous, has no more traction than a rouge-heavy mime. It is, we might say, a high-end comedy, peopled by nobles, defined as the genre where there is cruelty, cruelty upon cruelty, but neither memory nor consequences of it, because the nastiness happens in a house where invisible servants carry away the shit. Much Ado has a curious dynamic, in which each scene feels strangely paralysed in its moment, not so much terror-struck as pointless, an evacuated repetition of routines long ago fixed. Consider how possibility works in this world. Everybody desperately seeks amusements, and in the absence of anything else these amusements must stand in for everything. Life is forced into the shape of a joke, one practical joke after another, which all who witness are dared not to forget. The play is structured in scenes that repeat the same strange mood: sudden, unreliable, self-occluding, 282

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severed from any grounded source, fuelled by compulsory mirth and fakeamnesia. Clearly the play (like Love’s Labour’s Lost) is directed partly against callow men and their meretricious inflations: a country house mock-pastoral, indicting these courtly constellations as foolish, vaporising fakery. We get the determining power of plots and games, often malicious, stoked by untethered emotion (boredom, envy). Repeatedly we find characters trying to manufacture memories, frozen tableaux that might repeat, as joy or nightmare, in the victim’s private mind: but often the attempt is concocted from a kind of settled scepticism about the very idea of a sustaining emotion, other perhaps than covetousness and ennui (Don John here is the exemplar). The necessary comic– romantic transitions (admitting love) are produced by tricks that appear to the principals as serendipitous accidents or even miracles (overhearing conversations, the “second” Hero). But the gifts demand acceptance: to worry over procedural scruples is to want a different world. We know that the empty diversionary world of the men will continue: that its leisures and envies are somehow invincible, like golf or cocktails. Each scene, smoke and mirrors or not, is a plane that stands for endless repetitions. One scene after another is piloted by stooges, in which the only weightiness possible, in the sense of a thing that might last or matter, has to be projected out of something which, once probed or revealed, really is nothing. How much the averting of gravity is a kind of reflex aversion to truth, the contingent gift of comic teleology, is open to question; certainly the fact that such nothing might produce quiet, unregarded devastation stands as an existential insult, as though life itself is irredeemably trivial and accidental. But then, rumbling just apart from these surface conventions, we get things that are less easily accommodated, things we perhaps know as a fact but put to one side, or witness happening but do not know quite where to file, and so again put to the side, for a future occasion. I am thinking of things like the wars escaped by the survivors, the unmentionable cruelty of which somehow gives license to the dead-eyed callowness of the men’s games; the past loves half-glanced at; the barely speakable inkling of a domestic partnership that doesn’t require the daily approbation of “friends”; the unexplained grudges and jealousies sublated into badinage and plots; and these words of Hero’s father:

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Scene as joke: Much Ado O one too much by thee: why had I one? . . . O she is falne Into a pit of Inke, that the wide sea Hath drops too few to wash her cleane againe, And salt too little, which may season give To her foule tainted flesh . . . Hence from her, let her die.

(TLN 1792–817)

Notwithstanding the comic mode, these words are spoken: they must be listened to and allowed. And, in doing so, we touch upon the deeper-lying weather in this playworld, the bass-notes that shall, however furious our diversions, claim and survive everything. Hence the strangely insistent resistance of the dirge for lost or slandered youth, the “solemne hymne” over Hero’s entombed body. For this song too is sung: Midnight Assist our mone, helpe us to sigh and grone. Heavily, heavily. Graves yawne and yeelde your dead, Till death be uttered, Heavenly, heavenly.

(TLN 2538–42)

In one sense the song is in a comic mode, a requiem for no one: Hero is not dead. But everything in this play feeds on nothing. All we have are scenes where one simulacrum, one confected, synthetic snapshot, tries to outface another. There is barely such a thing as grounded, forensically attested truth – confirmed by the fact that the champion malaprop Dogberry is the play’s stumbling, accidental authority on such matters. Even when Benedick arrives at what we take as the truth – Hero is faithful – he does so purely on the strength of his love for Hero’s friend, Beatrice, and her faith in Hero’s honour.1 We might call this knowledge beyond proof; we might just as easily call it another blind leap. Either way, the empirical difference between one attested truth and another is wafer-thin. And so the death-song for Hero has as much claim on possibility as anything else – and far more if we understand possibility as forward memory. Like the exquisite dirge over the non-dead Fidele in Cymbeline, the song for Hero floats beyond its moment like very few things in this world do. The effect is next to unique in this Teflon-plated playworld. The scene presents her death as a fact. It is a fact that must be faced: exactly now, for those 1

Compare Hutson, Invention of Suspicion, 343–6.

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who think the body before them is indeed gone from the world; if not now, for those who “know” she is not dead, then soon enough. This death is not absorbed into convention for the benefit of her lover or his friends, those men of surfaces who elsewhere claim this play for possibility. The dirge is sung, the refrain echoes through the house – heavily, heavily – and the scene closes. But the “nothing” being lamented is precisely that: absence, the stony silence of a dead girl – and the fact that this nothing will return. “Till death be uttered”, goes the song: and death shall be uttered. And – here is the paradox – it is a possibility that is consistent with this playworld’s remorseless superficiality. What is seen, is.2

2 G. Wilson Knight: “the parallel concepts ‘nothing’ and ‘soul’ . . . are, indeed, almost interchangeable in Shakespeare”: Wheel of Fire, 293.

25

Buried lives: Macbeth

A man of parts has endured unspeakable things.1 He has witnessed a milky paragon, a hero to cleave to, who for no reason at all – because of a scent in the wind – undoes everything and turns monster. He has heard of a kind old father killed in his sleep; a loving mother left undefended as soldiers enter and make merry; a roost of children slaughtered on a whim. He beholds the end of all families, as the laughter dies away, and the screams cannot be heard, and the final bodies fall as though in a mime. He has seen the milky man’s head held high on a pole, and the world resigned to anonymous old–new men, hailing the accession of some unknowable aristocrat fool. Neither woman nor child remains alive. Such witnessing, we might think, needs no special clairvoyance. He has beheld the end of any world he might wish to recognise. So what does he do? He goes for a drink, and he goes home, having gaily considered whether the atrocities moved him, or whether he believed in the actors who performed them. We do this all the time; it’s the agreed behaviour of our attendance at the feast. We do it in the academy, we do it in reading groups, we do it in impassioned or desultory conversation. But what would it mean really to witness these things? What would it mean to give ourselves to the tragedy, to be transported by the sublime event, as Longinus recommended?2 Let’s imagine truly surrendering. 1 I am indebted throughout this chapter to conversations and collaborations with Ewan Fernie. 2 Cf. Wayne Booth’s analysis of the ethics of reading, in which he posits narratives as friends with whom we keep company. Our interest depends upon desire; the story stimulates us, begs us surrender to its pleasures. While it attempts seduction, we provisionally become this or that type of “desirer”: The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 201, 239.

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Let us forget, for a moment, the supposedly coherent individual who arrives at and departs from the event. Instead, let us imagine a kind of virgin experience, with neither past nor future, but rather a subjectivity composed in and of the moment. What might this be like? Perhaps such a self will be experienced as a succession of emissaries, parcelled-out at uneven intervals as sympathies and recognitions expand and contract. Perhaps we can take a cue from Badiou, and call this experience “evental”: an irruptive space of coming-to-be, potentially producing a brand-new subject. We may find our daily self being defied, embarrassed, or made barely recognisable. For in this experiment the artwork is no longer a separated object. It is a subject, and many subjects, perhaps fearfully familiar, perhaps never known before: and every one of them might be you or me. Now let’s take this a step further. Let’s imagine, as a metaphor for the event of a play, the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth. Imagine that we are newly in the mix, there to be mixed and made and unmade. We are the dissevered ingredients – the eye of newt, gall of goat, the slip of you – unstitched from completed organisms, no longer quite the unified thing we were before entering this space. Instead, we are the radically unfinished materials of an emergent dispensation. And we are also – not alone, but also – the witches, happy to latch like incubi upon one then another agent of our purpose, and to put these to the de-creative, re-creative cut. Something like this is assayed by Byron in Manfred, his exercise in “mental theatre” – an explicit return to the territory of Prometheus, Faust, Hamlet, Macbeth, and the cliff scene in Lear – in which the hero, defined by an unspeakable sin and the impossibility of forgetfulness, refuses the consolations of knowledge, sociality, and even spiritual pacts, and determines to try the fact of existence-as-void, as the vertigo of lonely guilt.3 In other words, he resists Faustian accommodations, and resolves truly to be one with Macbeth in his desolation: “I would not make/But find a desolation . . . What I have done is done” (3. 1. 126–7; 3. 4. 127). Manfred would leap from the cliff, like Gloucester (1. 2. 100–10); or be distilled to “bodiless enjoyment”, as though into Hamlet’s dew: but he cannot. He is stuck in Macbethian despair, “ploughed by moments” (1. 2. 72), grafted to memory, 3 Manfred, Lord Byron, The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 274–314.

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and to a life utterly without crutches. Splendid gestures of escape are a romantic lie. And so the only end, in the end, is an unlamented vanishing, sublime crime reduced to a kind of wiped stain. Byron’s fable isn’t pretty; it tempts with aggrandising self-pity, and indeed psychopathia, reducing world-historical suffering to an offstage echo of the hero’s incestuous love; it really has no future. Nonetheless, it is a true cry from the heart, in which the poet’s guilt is blended and sublimed with Shakespearean demonism. Byron takes on the hideousness of complicity, the terrible truth of seeing Macbeth in the mirror. Perhaps it is histrionic. But forget for a moment that this is Byron, being Byronic; forget that he uses Macbeth and Faust as analogues of his own lived destructiveness; forget that most of us have sufficient superego not to act upon our more shattering desires: and allow that Manfred speaks the strange exceptionalism, admitted to us all, of living tragic possibility. For in entering such possibility, is this not what we admit to? Perhaps moves such as Byron’s romanticise the whole exchange, and pretend it is far more perilous than in fact it is. Unless we are lunatics like the later Artaud, we will return to our comforts. Perhaps, in this exchange, we are most profoundly the witches’ cauldron: the container for the experiment, the capsule that will survive any subjunctive violence. Perhaps we toy with options precisely so as not, finally, to be tempted. This is how theorists of the sublime, such as Burke, often rationalised the attraction of terrible, would-be annihilating phenomena: “terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close”.4 We enjoy pain because we survive the apprehension of pain; we compare ourselves to those who do not survive, or with the prospect of not surviving, and feel better for the fact. The more our experience has a “mental cause”, and “the pain is not carried to violence”, it produces “a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which as it belongs to self-preservation is one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime.”5 Even Kant’s notion of the sublime, as a subjective experience of our imaginative and intellective inadequacy in the face of the absolute, turns into a blessing:

4

Burke, Sublime, 92.

5

Burke, Sublime, 165.

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we can only feel this lack if it (the noumenal) is somehow innate to us. We are dwarfed by the sublime: yet there is delight, even mental pride, to be had in knowing we can feel its enormity without being crushed. And if this is the case, maybe literary criticism, speaking always from the safety of survival, is right to be such a domesticated animal. We speak from afterwards, beyond the event, because this is where we always were. Nevertheless, let us return to our man of parts. There he is again, steady on his stool, witnessing this same mime of horrors. (Why would he do that?)

But there he is. He has resumed his position and started to experience it all over again. He has been here before and he knows what is coming. He knows what is coming but will do nothing to stop it. Instead he shelves the foreknowledge, and acts as though he does not know. Of course at the same time the knowledge remains, like an unspoken prophecy. He can re-experience the doubts about action, the moral scruples, feel again the doomed old Duncan’s goodness. All of this is part of the pleasure; he would have no one change it.6 He is no zombie amid repetitions; he has forgotten nothing, merely semi-erased their presence whilst relishing their imminence. He will not leave, and still less would he dream of interrupting the action during its course. Indeed he is seeing it now because he has seen it before. Repetition is essential rather than accidental: satisfaction depends upon it. Nothing in life is so chosen as this choosing! He is the sultan at a horror-mime, happy in his choreographer, sagely nodding as the pretended calamities pass before him. (But why does he choose it?)

Our man abdicates will as a specific instantiation of desire: he gives himself to a sequence that is already composed; to a punctual succession he can do nothing but submit to, even as he feels his mind welding the pieces together. So, his consciousness is both in and ahead of the action, temporally ghosting, yet still necessarily waiting for the phenomenon to unfold as it always

6 Compare Stephen Booth on the “persistence of first impressions”, and how “we do regularly undergo such reexperiences” as surprise, hope, doubt, even after we know what happens: Indefinition, 121–5.

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must, in due order. Repetition is the experiential condition, onstage and offstage, as witness and sufferers endure the events over and over. But should this give us pause? Mustn’t such submission to repetition screen the experience from feeling? If it didn’t entail affective and ethical bypass, how on earth could he return as he does? (How could you?)

The repeating witness of art-experience is not like the experience of living in history. Many things in history return, many routines and functions repeat themselves over and over – a beating heart, a daily commute, a bed in which to sleep – but there is always the chance of a stutter or a swerve or a stop. History is contingent in ways that our man’s witnessing simply is not. There may be numerous local differences, unique instances of gesture, accent, movement, cuts to the script for speed or clarity. But nothing will stop the old man from being killed. Everything depends on it; everything, all pleasure and horror, in us or in the characters, depends upon this simple event that has already happened millions of times over. Everything happens whether we want it to or not – and the fact of our return tells us that we do want it. We want it just as it is. If Duncan wakes from his sleep, then the play is no longer possible. What does it mean to attend, over and over, to a plot like this? Certainly we are never surrogate-Duncans, getting everything wrong, recumbent in his chair, and drawn resistlessly into the darkness. But does that make us surrogate-Macbeths, leaning into the act, sharpening minds and daggers to the task? Let’s consider some of the actual things that our man of parts has witnessed. He has witnessed men and women, and occasionally children, talking. He has witnessed various forms of thinking – moral cogitation and ethical decision – put to the test. Reason is put to the test and emerges with valiant certainty: there is no reason to hurt a thing, no social or political or emotional justice; there is every moral reason not to slaughter the innocent. This is decided. It is irrefutable. But then – and here is the nub – the horrors “happen” anyway. We don’t actually see them. Duncan’s killing is an ultimate example of the unstaged scene. Did it happen? Can you be sure? It is the “Gorgon” that no one can safely see. Or it happened, but no one quite did it. Such passive constructions are methodically put into play, as

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volitional suspension becomes the predicate of action: “I go, and it is done” (2. 1. 12). And perhaps what is true of the Macbeths is equally true of our man of parts – likewise a sleepwalker amid ghosts, a passive engineer, a revenant, his blood drained dry as the price for entrance to this diabolical metaphysical land. For what volition has he brought to the party? None, or none that bears upon the action he has come to allow; none he does not pleasurably renounce. Coleridge wrote of the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith”.7 But even this formulation, casually invoked to mean permission or fake naivety, is far too taut and tensile for the permissive passivity suggested by repeated, pleasurable attendance at the play-feast. Coleridge’s suspension is a consciously willed thing, a choice made in full awareness of possible disbelief. The ontological scandal of the fiction is acknowledged; the permission is “for the moment”, which garners its own precarious exceptionality and exemplarity. The suspension might be of a bridge over a cleft, some chasm which only poetic faith keeps tight and horizontal. And this faith, in turn, proposes a positive trust that something true exists, that the subjunctive claims of the artwork have sufficient reality to warrant the subjective leap. Has our man of parts committed to anything of this? Isn’t he by comparison a tourist, a museum visitor? This may suggest the need to revise our sense of what the playworld’s action is. Perhaps the horrors of the play per se – slaughter, tyranny, the slow parching of love and coruscations of guilt – are not the thing that our man of parts is truly experiencing. Perhaps the named, plotted events are accidental to the experience, and the true substance is something like ethical and agential abeyance: the suspended point where morality, however agreed, is placed in a bracket, a bracket like a hammock, and allowed gently to rock itself to sleep. Perhaps the answer is that a playworld is its own possible world, happening in or enduing some dimension beyond the local. It is a place where quotidian things, like murder or betrayal, are accidental details – ciphers of an immanent event whose substance lies in sub-sensual or supra-sensory

7

Biographia Literaria, ch. XIV.

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rhythms and rules and motions. The true pull of the art, perhaps, is a particular scenic or narrative syntax; the physics of dramatic motion; the rhythms of recurrence; the contracting or stretching of time between events; the particular magnetism or repellence between moments. We become immersed in a virtually staged metaphysics whose forms will be less seen or heard than felt. What matters is immersion in a virtual reality in which everything is sped up, and cause and consequence are assayable. The world and its waste have been edited just for us! The primary thing is the pleasure of saturation in expected rhythms: a transcendent apprehension of what will be; a proto-achievement of survival; the surrender to forms that are not ours, with the relief of this like a rehearsal and overcoming of death. Perhaps this is the true passion of play. Like sex or surfing or drinking, the pleasure lies deeper than taste or technique, indeed deeper than any conscious recognition. Volition lapses, and we sail from daily accounting into rhythms that are not anyone’s either to master or critique.8 But if this is at some level irrefutable, surely it is also inadequate. Surely the kind of immersive permissiveness I have recounted is only one, limited way of experiencing playworlds: as story, one thing linking to the next, which, known or not, we allow. But this is not the sole path to experience, or the sole rhythm of attendance. To “like” Shakespeare’s work, to feel its possibilities, demands more: as his partners and first editors insist, read him therefore, and again, and again. The play will not really open without this again. Such repeated return is the predicate of Shakespeare’s possible worlds. As it happens, Macbeth itself points the way to an answer. The worst atrocity of the play is the murder of Macduff’s wife and kids. They are killed, presumably, because Macbeth cannot reach Macduff (and perhaps

8 Booth: “The glory of such a play as Macbeth is in its power as an enabling act – one by which we are not merely relieved of physical involvement . . . but by which we are also genuinely, though temporarily, as we would be if we were superior to the sovereign fact of the human condition – superior to the helpless relativism in which the human mind is tapped . . . [A]n audience to Macbeth cannot keep itself within the category dictated by its own morality, even though its moral judgements are dictated entirely by that morality. The achievement of the play is that it enables its audience to endure the experience of such potential in itself . . . I do not mean . . . ‘experience of recognizing such potential’ . . . the triumphant mental superiority . . . is possible only because they are oblivious to the logical confllict in their responses . . .” Indefinition, 114–15.

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Banquo): no other reason; it is the purest malicious caprice. The guilt is Macbeth’s: “Oh Hell-Kite!” (2066). But not, perhaps, only Macbeth’s. Macduff knows it: Sinfull Macduff, They were all stroke for thee: Naught that I am, Not for their own demerits, but for mine Fell slaughter on their soules.

(TLN 2074–7)

He left them to fend for themselves, and for that they died.9 Or did he? Were they alone when the murderers entered, and proceeded to do what murderers do? Macduff asks the question: Did heaven looke on, And would not take their part?

(TLN 2073–4)

It is the necessary question. And it is no accident that Shakespeare frames the question meta-theatrically. Could heaven watch, and not intervene? Or more than intervene – could it sit as spectator, anticipate and witness the slaughter, and not take the part of the victims? (Could we?)

The art itself is guilty – but attending it more than playing it. Macduff knows it, looking on from the safe distance of England (England in this play is always a place to look on from, rehearse horrors in the mind, like that dickhead Malcolm does, as the suffering proceeds just out of earshot). There is nothing guiltier than this witnessing. And what constitutes the guilt is the passive enduring of repetition. Macduff is asking for more than sympathy; more even than protection. He is asking that the show be stopped, the actors removed, and their parts taken by agents with more foreknowledge, and more history of survival. He is asking for a kind of ultimate substitution, a taking on of suffering, such that the spectator becomes the player, risks the stakes, and, unless the plot is altered, gets killed for his pains. The moral act is to interrupt. 9 Adrian Poole notes “the ethical drama embodied in [Macduff’s] quick turn of pronouns from the third person through the second to the firsts: Heaven (third), Macduff (second), I (first)”, adding that “unlike the first or second person, the third person occupies in principle a limitless domain, within which all kinds of position and predicament are possible”. “Macbeth and the Third Person”, Proceedings of the British Academy 105 (2000), 79, 81.

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Of course we cannot; even if we jump onto the stage, deck the hero, exit running with the would-be victim draped on our shoulders – we change nothing.10 However, perhaps it is just this remission from self-responsibility, permitted by our impotent attendance, which brings responsibilities newly home. Herbert Blau writes this of the end of Hamlet: “Take up the bodies.” The mind boggles, yielding nothing. There’s a crucial difference between that “Take up” and “Remove” – the barest shift in the linguistic space, having to do with the responsibility of a political order. There’s no punishment to make use of, no amnesty even; there’s a story to be told . . . if there’s a point to the theatre it’s to not let ourselves forget: What did it all mean?11

Recognition may slowly turn in us, or arrive suddenly: either way, it is the permission to leave ourselves that allows other lives to return to ours – or not to return. If they do, precisely because the return is not willed, not compulsory, it can have the grace of a true birth. It might not have come home in this way; because it did, the coming home has the seal of necessity. In Stanley Cavell’s nice formulation, “It is the enveloping of contingency and necessity by one another, the entropy of their mixture, which produces events we call tragic.”12 The contingency and necessity of the event – a state of affairs at all moments felt by Shakespeare – is partly that other paths were possible, and remain possibles even when they can bear no actuality. But this modal intensity is also ours: we let go, we require nothing but to be entertained; and then we find that the feast has ghosts: the life we had left behind returns, and which because unbidden gathers all the more implacable and predictive force:

10 Stanley Cavell: “Do I believe he will go through with it? [Othello murder Desdemona] I know he will; it is a certainty fixed forever . . . The question is: What, if anything, do I do? I do nothing; that is a certainty fixed forever . . . Tragedy is meant to make sense of that condition . . . We know we cannot approach him, and not because it is not done but because nothing would count as doing it . . . Put another way, they and we do not occupy the same space; there is no path from my location to his . . . We do, however, occupy the same time . . . But if I do nothing because there is nothing to do, where that means that I have given over the time and space in which action is mine and consequently that I am in awe before the fact that I cannot do and suffer what it is another’s to do and suffer, then I confirm the final act of our separateness. And that is the unity of our condition”: “The Avoidance of Love”, 101, 105, 110. 11 Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 28. 12 Disowning Knowledge, 112.

Suffering Playworlds The times has bene That when the Braines were out, the man would dye, And there an end: But now they rise againe With twenty mortall murthers on their crownes, And push us from our stooles.

295

(TLN 1350–4)

The stools are also those of the spectators. If it is true that Macbeth is our surrogate, then perhaps this is above all the case in his return to the same crimes, over and over: Strange things I have in head, that will to hand, Which must be acted, ere they may be scand.

(TLN 1421–2)

As much as Macbeth is here the conning actor, scanning his part, he is also the spectator, witnessing what has been acted. He resolves to “return” to bloody deeds – and so “to sleepe” (TLN 1419, 1425). Are we with him in this too – anaesthetised atrocity, and then sleep? Shakespeare anticipates our alternatives. As Adrian Poole puts it: As a third person you may be out of the firing line or the conversation, but you are not safe . . . In performance we eagerly look on the choices made by all these secondary and tertiary figures, no less than we look on the primary agents . . . We do not go to tragedy for fantasies of immunity. Macbeth reminds us that there is no safe place for the third person, not even for the reader, and no pinnacle of surveillance outside the making of history.13

We need to counter the punctual successiveness of playtime. Few of us will spoil an evening out, no doubt. But we can return to the event, once it has passed, and refuse to surrender it to peace. Banquo was a time-serving liar in life, but in death he comes true, precisely in his mute, blood-bolted interruption of decorous process. Playtime is not our time. Our return to the play, consequent upon the playworld’s own demand to be repeated, is the only interruption possible to us.14

“Macbeth and the Third Person”, 92. Levinas: “In the impossibility of evading the neighbor’s call, in the impossibility of distancing ourselves – perhaps we approach the other (autrui) in contingency, but henceforth we are not free to distance ourselves from him or her – the assumption of the suffering and failings of the other (autrui) in no way goes beyond passivity: it is passion. This condition, or noncondition, of the hostage will therefore be nothing less than the primary and essential modality of freedom and not an empirical accident of the Ego’s freedom (in itself proud)”: “Substitution”, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 95. 13 14

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Such return can easily be the gently swinging hammock I evoked earlier. But there are better kinds of surrender, just as there are pains to prick our delight. We should wake up and feel the passion. The plot is always happening again, repealing what it is always in the act of burying. To really attend to plot is to realise that it is only accidentally punctual, or superficial, or satisfied in its moment. To really attend to plot is to realise that true consecution – the order of events and their consequences – is not the same thing as succession. It is a chief theme of the play. We should find out the buried lives. An expanded version of the essay is in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). Compare James Knapp: “the play calls on interpretation; and its ethical demand is an invitation to animate the aesthetic’s potential through interpretation . . . The provisional nature of all interpretation is the cost at which we purchase consequence, and it is a bargain”: Image Ethics, 182.

26

The rape of Marina

Here’s the scene. A 14-year-old girl is taken to a beach to be secretly executed, because she is beautiful and accomplished and puts the queen’s child in the shade. Before the fatal knife can be delivered, the girl is abducted by pirates, who relish the thought of a gangbang. The foiled assassin waits on the beach, ready to watch the roasting and kill the child if they leave her breathing. The next we see of her she is being sold by the pirates to a brothel. Verily, a sad and demoralising sequence. The rule of law has lapsed, or is indistinguishable from chaos. Men go roaming, alone or in gangs, habituated to violence, and girls and women get raped. If such a world is anything, we might think, it is possible. But which of us recognises Pericles’ heroine, Marina, in this grubby, too-common tale of exploitation? And if we don’t, then why don’t we? ∞ I want to explore simple linked questions. First, what happens? Second, how are we supposed to understand it? And third, what is at stake in our answers to these questions? Potentially crucial here is Pericles’ unusual methods of storytelling. It neither invites nor rewards psychological inference or biographical backtracking, the kind of things that actors like to intuit to give their character traction in a more or less known world. It can seem as though everything we need to be told has been told; everything we need to see has been shown: and this because the playworld is a kind of pageant, its purposes allegorical and exemplary. The actors are often like verbal mime-artists, modelling actions for the future, or repeating moves that seem already to have happened: and so too, in many ways, are the characters. Correspondingly, the job 297

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of piecing things together is given to narrative diegesis and dumb show, either summative or predictive. But this surface frankness is also a deceptive screen. The text is full of ellipses and reticence. No doubt this is in part the result of Pericles’ uncertain ontology – a mangled text, untried collaboration, unequal contributions, unknown provenance, uncertain relation between performance and texts (the 1609 quarto, and Laurence Twine’s prose tale, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, that probably transcribes other scenes played on the public stage). We don’t know whether the difficult ellipses in the playtext are scripted or negligent or accidental: perhaps they indicate textual corruption, perhaps the residue of a primitive plot scenario. We cannot trust that the scenes or dialogue as we have them in the Quarto faithfully record what was written or performed. The scenes lack copiousness, the customary Shakespearean pre-possession, and can seem scruffy and half-baked. It seems likely that Shakespeare inherited some sort of skeleton, probably from George Wilkins, which he then adapted to his purposes.1 Corruption or not, it is clear that these inherited scenes were formulaic, little more than programmatic moving pictures, each one with dreamlike similarity to the previous. This makes it difficult to trim our expectations of the play, or to know in advance the margins of permission. It makes it difficult to be sure of the kind of world we have entered, its rules or permissions. In other words, it makes it hard to be sure what in this playworld is truly possible. However, rather than decrying these problems, I want to take them as a clue to the play’s peculiar form. My hypothesis is that Shakespeare took this very flatness as an opportunity, or, more particularly, as a structuring cue. So, when we first enter this world, the action will be less than present, less than alive. But this is the point; we are meant to feel a deficit in reality and emotion. The question then will be: when shall life arrive? It is a variation on Shakespeare’s favourite method of staggered arrival – only here it is not so much a character that suffers a graduated arrival as the playworld itself. And this is the necessary context for understanding the central Marina-scenes. Their provoking ellipses are not simply an 1 See Macdonald P. Jackson, Defining Shakespeare: “Pericles” as a Test-Case (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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accident of transcription and bibliography. I think that the curious relating of these events, the mix of explicit telling and mimetic reticence, is in fact a perfect instance of this playworld in action, and more specifically its birth-pangs, or life-pangs, and our potential to be born to it. And so the real questions for the Marina-scenes are these: Are the scenes alive and present? Is she alive at them? If we feel out this rarely felt event, perhaps we feel the play come almost literally into life. ∞ Pericles’ ellipses are not just textual mishaps. They are plotted gaps that we are asked to notice and to fill. Indeed, the gaps between scenes are explicitly inhabited: Where our scene seems to live. I do beseech you To learn of me, who stand i’th’ gaps to teach you The stages of our story.

(Pericles, 4. 4. 8)

These gaps are stood in throughout by Gower, the narrator. But notice the meta-theatrical pun: he stands in the gaps to teach the stages of the story. The gaps, then, are necessary increments in the plot’s consecution; and they are virtual stages, sites of action and passion into which, to quote Gower once more, we must “take our imagination” (4. 4. 3). The gap is a stage to be filled: if not explained, then imagined. Apparently there are things at stake in this knowledge. Gower has come from ashes to teach us. Perhaps there is danger in ignorance, the danger of misconception or obliviousness or carelessness, dangers that Gower sedulously endeavours to warn us off. Perhaps the gap will close upon terrors, or give birth to monsters. But what then happens if Gower is not there? – which is exactly the case with the relevant Marina-scenes. Who can supply the intervals? Let’s get closer to the event. ∞ So again: here’s the scene. A young girl of 14 is grabbed at knifepoint by a group of fierce strangers. The girl is very beautiful, and the men have been at sea for a long time. “Halfe parte”, one cries to his mates, “halfe part”. He is excited but also anxious. He doesn’t want to miss out, so he appeals to the great tradition of equity among seafarers. They will share her, one after the other. “Come lets have her aboord sodainly” (F3r). We need to

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hear what he says. “Let’s have her”: that is, let’s “board” her.2 They are all set for a fabulous group-rape. Her would-be assassin, Leonine, then says this: [T]hey haue seiz’d Marina, let her goe, ther’s no hope shee will returne, Ile sweare shees dead, and throwne into the Sea, but Ile see further: perhappes they will but please themselues vpon her, not carrie her aboord, if shee remaine/Whome they haue rausiht, must by mee be slaine. (F3v)

The moment describes something unimaginably horrific that, related like this, becomes remote, neutered, screened. In this it typifies its playworld. For the scene, entirely characteristically, is like a dream-rehearsal of an option at the very edges of possibility: and, crucially, an option that will not here be taken up. This is implied by the casualness with which Leonine rehearses the stock motifs and movements of the play – sea, sex, and slaughter, but also the romance aura of redeemable finality and suspended temporality. So, “ther’s no hope shee will returne, Ile sweare shees dead, and throwne into the Sea” is an exact reprise of the “death” of Marina’s mother, Thaisa. For Pericles and Marina, she remains buried fathoms deep; for us, however, she does not. The same split-effect works again: Marina will indeed return, just as Thaisa did. But if Leonine doesn’t know this, then how do we? Marina’s abduction can be explained away as a typical romantic exigency – an unlikely, exciting, geographically expansive instance of serendipity, which never tries to escape its generic quotation marks. It is not an accident (with accident’s trace of arbitrary cruelty). It is proof, if proof is needed, that Marina is a special one, protected by (a more or less) humorous providence. Some kind of “absolute” – an absolute that is not quite present, that must be awaited – permits an essentially comic toying with life. In other words, the event serves romance teleology, the endpoint where all that is lost will return. We can appeal here to Pericles’ usual method of framing its action through distancing effects. But it is not enough to note how terror here is hedged by genre, or how we seem to witness all such horrors through the silence of glass. Calamities are invoked, but not quite presented to our eyes. 2 Quotations taken from the Malone copy of the 1609 Quarto in the Bodleian, edited by W.W. Greg (London, 1940).

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We get a kind of intra-scene gap: however, it isn’t Gower, but Leonine who supplies the absence. He becomes the narrator, our only source for what’s happening right now, and our only guide as to what is imminent. He stands in the gaps. He does so by explaining what has just happened (“they have seiz’d Marina”), speculating about what is about to happen (“but Ile see further: perhappes they will but please themselues vpon her, not carrie her aboord”), and girding himself for possible future tasks (“Whome they haue rauisht, must by mee be slaine”). He will “see further” – we, presumably, cannot. The “gap” Leonine enters is the scene break – a rare and almost sacred privilege. He anticipates an offstage “stage” of violation, degradation, and pitiless sacrifice. Do we detach ourselves from our only source, close our ears to diagetic authority? How can we? Do we follow him into the scene break, and imagine what he has foreshadowed? Can we? ∞ Rape is constantly in sight in the world of Pericles; perhaps more so than incest, it looms as the primal threat and temptation. Accordingly, Leonine is hardly less culpable here than the incestuous King Antiochus earlier, who similarly fobbed off his responsibility through a combination of mythic dressing up (“this faire Hesperides”, A3r; 1. i. 28) and coerced surrogacy (the riddle spoken as his daughter’s pliant report, “I found that kindnesse in a Father”, A3v; 1. i. 68). But as much as we can recognise this reprise of the play’s original sin, the foundational completeness of Antiochus’s actions can make subsequent aberrations seem somehow less guilty – they are shadows, or backward glances, angled rehearsals of a guilt that belongs most fully to the origin. Such things contribute to the play’s distinctively torpid attitude to calamity, whereby we get the conditions for suffering but little feeling of its experience. Hence Leonine’s response to Marina’s abduction: both his almost-programmatic dispassion (“let her goe”) and his adoption, in the midst of the most terrible possibilities, of an attitude of resistless spectatorship. Leonine bears the traits of the play as one might a fingerprint. His lack of feeling, this oddly detached willingness to allow the worst to occur, both traces and provokes our own. We only need compare the way Shakespeare places the audience in relation to the slandering of Desdemona or murder

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of Cordelia to see how we really do allow Marina’s suffering. We might dignify such a habitual attitude elsewhere with a term like Christian patience. But this lulled collusion with cowardly, voyeuristic evil suggests another interpretation. Leonine is absolutely the creature of genre here, and it is a genre that has very little to do with its conventional reputation, with magic or fancy or courtliness. It is not good enough to evoke the romance genre and to appeal to some kind of late-Shakespearean search for peace from strife or accommodation with bad fortune; this is to put a hobbled cart before the horse. If we take the evidence as given then it might just as easily invite conclusions about antinomian callousness, or a sub-Nietzschean pitilessness in the face of suffering. Tragi-comic romance seems rather to be about testing how much cruelty can be both accumulated and tucked away; how much rape – as the crime that men will not desist from – can be at once acknowledged and, exactly in the acknowledgement, emotionally “let goe”: just as Marina is. ∞ Let’s step back for a moment and offer some general observations about the play’s manners and techniques. So, Pericles retreats from psychologically revealing speech-acts; it presents calamities as though from a great distance, forcing us into relative passivity as spectators (e.g. to dumb show) or auditors (e.g. to Gower’s narration). The action can appear to be happening in a dimension moments beyond our own, at once familiar and estranged, as though in supra-historical slow motion. The play engineers a very distinctive telescoping. The effect is a kind of lulling, as we watch and hear but strangely do not participate. The details of experience are no longer the micro – small quiddities of desire or suffering – but are rather the “macro”, a generic shape which finds repeated scenic encapsulation. It is as though a meta-narrative comes before the feeling, at once impelling and interpreting it. The play wears a grave aspect through all of the tribulations it presents. We get a number of different sufferers, and their experiences fold into one another’s. The experience of suffering, the knowledge of its ubiquity, grows by accretion. Meanwhile, its present feeling is lessened by the technique of substitution. Rather than penetrating deeper and deeper into one figure’s affliction, we are released from any harrowing contemplation by the shift

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to a new object. Something mathematical or academic takes the place of dramatic immediacy. Hence the importance in the play of semi-post-facto apostrophising (or mime, dumb show, etc.) as though over a body that will never quite expire, whereby a figure records the sufferings borne and perhaps the lessons learnt from a state of affairs we are always just about to leave behind. One important effect of this is that complicity (in temptations or abdications) remains in shadow, or is deflected. Contiguous perversions or corruptions remain hypotheses, possibilities rather than commissions. Experience here is somehow on hold – as befits a play in which the hero is almost literally never at home, never on the job. That each figure should have two dimensions, and two dimensions only, that they should be as flat as glass, is the determining effect. Some dimension of vertical depth is simply absent. These planes or dimensions can, of course, be gathered together into something fuller. But the flatness allows the play its romantic freedom, the sense that experience here is both on probation – asked to avoid temptation, put through an ordeal – and on a strange kind of speculative vacation – asked exactly to experience temptation, only in the knowledge that it is never quite “you”, or never quite the daily recognised you, that is scenting things forbidden. Whereas naturalistically represented action can seem to be happening before our very eyes, in a shared present, these mimical techniques of Pericles render action as hypothesis, a sketched possibility: one that has happened far away or long ago, not so much in the past or in the future as in some parallel space, in which an action is important not for its experience, its tensions, its struggles or uncertainties, but for its almost programmatic results (for example, Pericles gets information and departs in mourning). The organising formaction in Pericles – perhaps the mimetic model that inspires and underlies Shakespeare’s novel experiment – is, I think, the dumb show. But this is less simple, less mutely iterative than perhaps it seems. The dumb show purports to encapsulate often complicated actions in brief, simplified compass; in doing so it pretends to be done with these actions. But in fact the dumb show always awaits the flesh and noise of some fuller and more clinching act in the future. The thing enacted in mime, that is, does not receive the full seal of experience. It belongs to the

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story; it is mortgaged to the genre’s ethical teleology: but it is separate from the feeling body, on stage or off. Detached from somatic proof, it is exemplary, or textual, or merely a rehearsal: true possibility awaits the clinching repetition. ∞ The difficult question of the status of what ifs – whether they are, what they mean, the kinds of possibility they foreshadow – is suggestively explored in David Lewis’s theory of counterfactual conditionals. In Lewis’s theory, he assumes that the counterfactual conditional A is usually considered false: but in the event of A, then B – in which case B is conditionally true; and then if B is the case, then C, and so on. Lewis argues that not all counterfactuals should be considered: “those that differ gratuitously from our actual world should be ignored”; “we should consider the A-worlds most similar, overall, to our world”.3 For Lewis, such likeness is necessary if we are to take the possibility of the possible world seriously. We take it seriously, that is, because the possible world reveals the conditions of the actual. It is only through counterfactuals that we discover – perhaps for the first time, perhaps with the immediacy of objective recognition – what is at stake in our actuality. If the counterfactual is “gratuitous” – untethered, remote from experience, unearned, insufficiently indebted – then it won’t come home to us, it will drift into arbitrariness, into impossibility. Lewis outlines a series of possible worlds, each pivoting around whether or not President Nixon presses the button, and, if so, whether it causes a nuclear holocaust. His aim in doing this is trying to work out which of these possible worlds is true – or rather most true, because truth is comparative and qualitative: “Roughly, a counterfactual is true if every world that makes the antecedent true without gratuitous departure from actuality is a world that also makes the consequent true.”4 Clearly the actual world is one in which Nixon doesn’t push the button, but if he had done, there would have been nuclear catastrophe. What then of Lewis’s alternative possibilities? 3 Michael D. Bristol analyses Macbeth in the light of Lewis’s philosophy in “How many children did she have”, Joughin, Philosophical Shakespeares, 19–34. See David Lewis, “Truth in Fiction”, Philosophical Papers, vol. 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 261–80. 4 “Counterfactual Dependence and Time’s Arrow”, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, 41.

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In one possible world (w1), everything is exactly the same as actuality, except that a “miracle” happens (a miracle meaning a violation of the laws of nature). An errant neuron fires in Nixon’s brain, and he presses the button: the world explodes. In another (w2) there are no miracles, but he presses the button, and again the world explodes. In w3, he presses the button, but something short-circuits in the system, the signal fails, and the world doesn’t explode; there are, however, numerous tiny traces of the non-fatal act of pushing the nuclear button. And then comes w4, the most suggestive of all for Pericles: Nixon pushes the button, again nothing happens, but this time there is a miraculous, comprehensive erasure of the evidence.5 There is no trace of the act at all, neither its fact nor the almostimpalpable traces and consequences that any normal event would leave behind (fingerprints on a button, light waves bearing on incriminating images, clicks on tapes, etc.). It happened, but it has not the remotest continuing presence in the world: it left not a rack behind. The event is erased through a process of systemic violation of the laws of nature. This may seem like a merely formal objection. More pertinently, however, it proposes a kind of ethics of the event. A possible world is truer if the events that happen happen: they cannot be wiped away. This is so whether or not the consequences of the erasure are, in terms of loss and gain, in terms of the life that continues, apparently neutral. Otherwise we live in some weightless world, without existential ground, where things are ontologically contingent. Not in the sense that their existence depends upon accidents or unpredictable happenings, but because they can appear, and then disappear, as though they have never been: a substantive nothingness. The scandal is that this nullity, this evental nihilism, isn’t merely at the level of inaccessibility to our tools of measurement, our microscopes or microphones: the traces truly vanish, like Macbeth’s witches, into thin air. Only it is even more diabolic. Because there is not even the memory of the event in a third party’s actions or minds, as there is with Banquo and Macbeth, and as there is, immanently and dynamically, in the stories that ensue in the Macbeth-playworld. We instead have guilt that is absolutely

5 For Lewis the most true is w1, because it involves the least divergence from the actual world: such an accident can at any moment happen, as much as the consequences of the accident make everything unrecognisable.

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beyond discovery: a circumstantial and ethical event-horizon. By extension, this possible world is demonically illegitimate – morally impossible – because it legitimates, as the system, as the annexing “nature”, spiritual and political corruption. The world that is made possible is one that reifies, as order, what Whitehead might call metaphysical evil. This is the evil of event erasure. And isn’t event erasure precisely the term for the rape of Marina? ∞ How real or present is this in-between space, or the events that occurred inside it? Should we understand the whole “gap” as simply without substance – in Lacan’s terms, a password (mot-de-passage)? That is, the episode is akin to radically empty speech, in which the substance of the action is literally nothing. It has no substance for us as fear, suspense, excitement, recognition, conversion-tale, comedy, and so on – nothing at all. It is before or beyond all pleasure, all recognisable narrative or empathy. As such, it is also outside of ethics. But if it is outside of aesthetics and beyond ethics, then how to account for it other than a phenomenon of faith – or of the demonic? At the very least the loss–return of Marina’s virginity treads a tightrope between absolute faith and absolute doubt. Here we might recall Kant’s distinction between noumenon and phenomenon. Does the missing action – or perhaps rather Marina “inside” this action – fit into either category? Is it “an object of a non-sensible intuition” – that is, we intuit the experience even though we cannot see it or hear it? Or do we simply posit no realm at all beyond the phenomenal; our epistemology cannot reach to any kind of knowledge of this event. Marina experiences precisely nothing in the interim: she is suspended in a narrative white hole. All that is salient is her reappearance, fully intact, when the pirates come to sell her. What matters are the conclusions that her emergence confirms: she has survived unlikely peril; she is a romance heroine, protected by the hedge of ideality. ∞ It is as well here to recognise the play’s specific innovations. The play is more emphatic than the sources about the pirates’ sexual intentions, and

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about Marina having to endure it all alone. In Gower the Marina-figure, called Thaise, greets the pirates as saviours – “Ah, mercy, helpe for goddess sake”.6 They are “theves”, but they have no voice; she is taken on board, the ship is buffeted by storms, then they arrive at Mytilene where the maiden is proffered for sale. In Twine the pirates “rescued” Marina – “Thou cruel tyrant, that maiden is our prey and not thy victorie”, words repeated in Wilkins.7 She joins numerous other captives on board (“manie mo men and women”), to be offered en masse for sale as bond-slaves. The pirates are trawling for commodity. Marina is not here exceptional; it is easier to imagine her being bundled below deck to join the other captives. In the play, by contrast, there is no one else. She is alone: it is the pirates who are many. This multiplies the simple threat of violence, making rape the immediate and inevitable apprehension. Equally, it separates Marina from all others. What happens to this girl once “aboard”? The pirates triumphantly declare their intention to act precisely as pirates would act in such circumstances. She is a lucky spoil; they claim her; they exit the stage and set to work, we are asked to infer, in the wings. Let’s look again at what Leonine says, taking it clause by clause: Let her go – There’s no hope she will return – I’ll swear she’s dead – And thrown into the sea – But I’ll see further – Perhaps they will but please themselves upon her – Not carry her aboard – If she remain – Whom they have ravish’d – Must by me be slain.

There is not the slightest thought here that the pirates will not rape her. Leonine takes this for granted. Indeed we can interpret the past tense “Whom they have ravish’d” in terms of a reported fait accompli: it is

6 Confessio Amantis, 1403; in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (Routledge: London, 1977), vol. vi, p. 406. 7 Laurence Twine, The Patterne of Painefull Adventures, Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vi, p. 454.

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already done. The scene’s closing speech thus enacts a temporal telescoping, as Leonine watches the rape and waits to see if his own knife is needed. There we leave him, as there we leave Marina. She returns in the very next scene, albeit after 40 or so lines of brutally reported sexploitation; but a still briefer dramatic–temporal space was plenty both for Macduff’s family to get slaughtered and for us fully to internalise the horror. If we don’t think that the pirates rape Marina – then why don’t we? Isn’t it the most screaming, hideous possibility? ∞ I should say here that I don’t flatter my own responses. Before I had a child of my own, it never occurred to me to wonder what was happening. It never occurred to me to ask why I didn’t wonder about these things, why I didn’t simply believe the pirates and the would-be assassin when they advertise the fact that she will be raped. What else did I think would happen? The truth is, I didn’t think anything else would happen: Marina entered a blank. But recall what Milton says of the blank space (or as he prefers to spell it, the blanc). It is the bleached space of annihilation, of negative ontology, of literal life denial. It is the blank other to innocence. Very belatedly, I imagined Marina in this blanc– for some reason I went searching for her in it – when I had a baby girl, two weeks old, and I was in a strange cold house in a strange cold city and she wasn’t. I don’t say that was why I searched for Marina, or felt the horror of what no one will ever think can have happened. But the thoughts coincided. Some possibility was born. Too late, I don’t doubt. ∞ Perhaps we believe the pirate when he claims she’s a virgin (“O sir, we doubt it not”). No doubt we believe Marina when later she vows “Untied I still my virgin knot will keepe” (G1v; IV. I. i. 146). But it is the interim that matters, the “gap” from which we turn our minds. Don’t look too hard, don’t think too hard, choose what and what not to believe. The pirates save Marina from execution; they sell her on to the place where she will meet her future husband and her father. That is all we need to know; they are necessary; they serve romance teleology.

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Dramatic phenomenology is here worryingly antinomian. The moral character of willing, as Kant might have it, is irrelevant; all that matters is the on-going consecution of the plot. Romance teleology chooses its moments. Some moments matter, other moments do not; some suffering counts, other suffering does not. Whether a moment counts or not depends, it would seem, on its place in the process of repetition. It works something like this: a repeated scene or acting of loss, violation, or threat, but a trust that the threat of loss will not in this instance result in irreparable loss; consequently, a contingent loss, or proleptically ameliorated terror; because the end is allayed, an erasing of the terror that would attend it; in this, a simultaneous suspension of experience even as it is being experienced. This accumulation of non-ultimate loss – as though rehearsals that are never quite the act itself, wounds upon wounds that are yet never quite fatal, violations that never quite enter the sacred space – embodies the conviction that fullness will return. So we get a hierarchy of possibility. Some events are fully possible, some not. And what is possible depends not on what we hear (because we hear about it, very clearly), and not on what we see (for we believe plenty of things that we do not see), but on what we stop to register. The registering may be emotionally neutral, as it probably is with the poor raped child of Antiochus. But at least we admit she is raped. If we don’t admit it – still less feel it – then it isn’t. Ben Jonson dismissed Pericles as a “mouldy tale”, but perhaps it deserves the more severe rebuke that Jonson dealt Shakespeare’s other late comedies: it “makes Nature afraid”. Who would not tremble at the possibilities it allows? After all, how can a genre with supposed claims upon our morality pivot upon acts of terrible cruelty, which we allow, which we observe without horror, almost without feeling? What kind of ethics is bartered by a pre-emptively scripted, pseudo-sudden need for fake-accidents? If we take the act literally, then the horror is simply horror and must be abjured or fought against. If we view this play or plays like it without generic presuppositions (and where do we get these from?) then it is evil. ∞ Such pathways have been memorably tracked by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, his meditation upon Abraham’s undertaking to murder his

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son Isaac at God’s instruction.8 The ethical thing to do is refuse the arbitrary command, as cruel, purposeless torture. But the ethical is precisely the temptation: faith in the absolute demands ignoring ethics. And part of this is faith in what Kierkegaard christens “the absurd”, in the form of the patriarch’s irrational conviction that his son will be returned to him. Abraham wagers everything on this faith. He is either lost, a criminal without son and without God – or all things return, doubly possessed for being imperilled. His risk is that there really is no safety net. Either way, there are no precedents, no narrative modes to assure him in his passage. He goes up the mountain a generic pioneer, all things in suspense. Let’s imagine that Marina is Isaac. Not when Leonine brings her to the beach to murder her – there is no question that this is a crime; everything urges the ethical response: this cold killing must not happen. But when she is taken into the “gap” between scenes – what of that? If we allow it, like Abraham allowed it, then what do we allow it for? A capricious deity is one thing; we may well resent or disbelieve it, but at least it has some claim to be a genuine absolute. But a tragi-comic playworld – what kind of absolute is that? Perhaps the scandal is that it might be just such a thing – or might be for the figures that must suffer it. And so if we allow any of this (in any sense of the word), what can this mean but that we follow Marina into the gap, just as Abraham took his son up the mountain, every last moment one to be endured and thought through. But who does this? We allow it, and then shut off, or bury our heads like moral ostriches. ∞ This next scene is – apparently – a sudden change of milieu, as we encounter a city brothel. It is the most violent such scenic transposition in the play, the most stark and abrupt alteration in language or decorum. We can take this leap in various ways: as standing for a large gap in time between this scene and the last; as representing a place far away from what we have just witnessed; or, more insidiously, as invoking less a temporal or geographical shift than a moral or behavioural one, in the 8

Fear and Trembling/Repetition, 154 passim.

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way of a sudden lurch into consequences. The floor has been lifted, and here, we might surmise, is the effluence. None of these possibilities imply much hope for Marina. And this before her present situation seems almost gloatingly, callously recalled to mind: Wee were never so much out of Creatures . . . and they can doe no more then they can doe, and they with continuall action, are even as good as rotten . . . the stuffe we have, a strong winde will blowe it to peeces, they are so pittifully sodden. (F3v; IV. Ii. 6–18)

In one scene, a young girl is dragged off to have sex with numerous men; in the very next scene there is a description of the same, reinforced by the nautical tropes of “strong wind” and “sodden”. In a play full of scenic recapitulations, the message seems pretty obvious. What do we think is happening? Are we in suspense? Are we terrified or horrified? I repeat the question: if not, why not? Forget romance’s reputation, for picaresque itinerance and courtly disguise. Remove the ear-muffs, and listen to what we listen to: B O U L T . I haue cryde her almost to the number of her haires, I haue drawne her picture with my voice . . . I, he, he offered to cut a caper at the proclamation, but he made a groane at it, and swore he would see her to morrow. B A U D . Well, well, as for him, hee brought his disease hither, here he does but repaire it, I knowe hee will come in our shadow, to scatter his crownes in the Sunne. B O U L T . Well, if we had of euerie Nation a traueller, wee should lodge them with this signe. (4. 2. 91–112)

This is another sexual assault – again not staged; again Marina’s body is absent, this time provoking rampant masturbation: the Spaniard goes to bed to “her verie description”, the French knight “made a groane at it”. They are witnesses to nothing more than a description, to an idea of future sex. But it is exactly such voice-portraits that theatre depends upon, and which this play too has used to establish beauty, whether virtuous or depraved. The “inclination of the people, especially of the yonger sort” (IV. ii. 93–4), is as close as this popular play comes to a direct evocation of its audience. The speech almost asks the actor to cast a knowing eye over the crowd: “if we had of euerie Nation a traueller, wee should lodge them with this signe”: the “signe” is at once brothel, theatre, and this tasty new exhibit. Bawd and Boult travesty the ethical responsibilities of theatre, mocking the very idea that health or virtue should ever be thought the

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duty of public entertainment. But are they really the anti-masque, the anti-type, to romance ethics? They turn Marina into the merest sign, a password for our always-redeemable pleasures and appetites. Is this any different from romance consecution? Are they not romance ethics incarnate, and we its customers, having our cake and eating it, as we enjoy the beauty and its imperilling and swiftly abjure responsibility? Is the brothel not tragi-comic ethics incarnate – perhaps theatre incarnate – and we its customers? ∞ If some kind of rebellion against this kind of playworld seems called for, then perhaps Marina eventually provides it. If she does so, it isn’t because she is a puritan. It will be because she bears and recognises – in the fullest sense of the word – the repetitions she endures. She feels them; she resists them; and in so doing she refuses to sublate them into anaesthetising dialectical narrative, in which vicissitudes are never more than necessary: Alacke that Leonine was so slacke, so slow, he should have strooke, not spoke, or that these Pirates, not enough barbarous, had not oreboord throwne me, for to seeke my mother. (F4v; IV. ii. 60–3)

She gives reality here to actions that are otherwise missing – her terror, her horror at her captors’ barbarism, her enduring of very real violence. There is more than mere recollection here (invoking a casting back of memory). She is back in these earlier moments – when threatened with Leonine’s knife, or anxiously awaiting whatever the pirates have in store. It is a kind of negative repetition: she is reliving past cruelty, wishing it were more absolute, because present cruelty promises to be still worse. What is more, she is also endued with a distinctive meta-awareness. It is as though she reads her helplessness as that of a clichéd romantic heroine, prey to some joking architectonic and its devotion to absurd narrative rhymes and repetitions (throw me overboard, just as my mother was). Give me such contemptible coincidence, she seems to say, rather than subject me to these disgusting liberties. She is both victim and opponent of romance’s casual violence and feckless ethics. But there is more to Marina’s attitude than scorn or stoicism. “For to seeke my mother” is also the most plaintive appeal to the missing link, to the connection that

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might heal. The allusion is fierce, but not only in its mocking appropriations of super-scripts. It is fierce in the way of love, and, more specifically, in the way of a love that is nourished daily by the fact of its violent denial. Her ordeal, then, embodies a recollection and a repetition of being born and made from such storm and loss. Indeed every one of Marina’s scenes replays this original one. It is the thing she chooses to speak about to Leonine, it is the first thing she returns to when the pirates sell her to the brothel, it is the necessary password to reconciliation with her father. For Marina absolutely will not forget: she discovers story in the body, and keeps it there. Her body and mind must bear the repetitions, and must do so despite rather than because of her choices. With Marina in the brothel and beyond, speech is no longer primarily a serviceable descriptive agent (as it is with Gower); it is not a means of lamenting what cannot be altered (as it is with the play’s succession of abject princes): speech now acts. This leap into suffering’s experience – for both audience and character – is equally a leap into a less shameful, less furtive, less self-occluding mode of drama. The playworld itself experiences a graduated coming-to-be, and here at last it is present. The effect is that possible worlds, past and future, start to crystallise from vagueness, gathering moving dimensions where before there was only a flat plane.9 ∞ It is tempting to say that it is this forward and backward potentiality, rooted in the present possession of experiential repetition, which makes the final scenes of the play so moving. Certainly Marina brings to the reconciliatory events an accumulation of responsibility and possibility: besieged subjecthood, both individual and collective; resistance to coercion; a pastoral duty of care; a courtly-cum-humanist accomplishment which demands space and breath, beyond corruption of either courts or commerce. She has long taken into herself all of Thaisa’s promise, and 9 Compare Proust’s allegory of recovered memory: “filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable”. Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 54–5.

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always possesses inestimably more than her mooching father, who is essentially a catalytic cipher, awaiting others (including Marina) to fill out his remainder. But in truth the closing scene, for all that it presents recovered pasts, more profoundly allows forgetfulness, a foregoing of civic responsibility, a deeply atavistic instinct that all possibility is essentially given and lost at birth, in the oneness of parent and child. Pericles is always tempted by hibernation, by a shutting-down of the cerebrum when things get too much to process. The closing scenes give us the original of this, as father and mother and child converge like petals, each the others’ coverlet. The “maid-child” Marina’s final words beautifully speak a kind of physical memory, a memory honoured precisely by immersive forgetfulness: “My heart/Leaps to be gone into my mother’s bosom” (V. iii. 44–5). Her heart thrums as it never has before, like ours perhaps do too, as together we witness the acceleration into happiness. She will repair the “viper” of incest, long ago lodged in Antiochus’s bosom: her “leap” becomes the play’s truly resolving repetition. She is the girl, wanting to be the baby, inside the mother or at her breast, demanding the intimacy stolen from her at birth; she will renounce adulthood, marriage, individuation itself, in the instinct of primal recognition. If only we could stay babies, safe in our mother’s nest; if only our babies stayed with us, and never ventured from our bark. But we do not, and they do not; possibility will not stay our nostalgia. We have to open our eyes, and risk the untried gaps, and remember. ∞ Shakespeare knows how comedies are structured for forgetfulness. At times he allows it, and lets scruples or complications be tossed away. But he also often doesn’t, and instead forces us to doubt our pleasures. The comedies especially are full of moments where unguarded delight is shadowed by suspicions of cruelty. Crucial here is the fact that our feelings in any moment may not be best trusted; they might return on us, or linger as a kind of trouble. There is much in the very structure of playworlds that produces affects and cognitions, sleepy or perfervid – permissions, forgettings, complicities, desires – that should be impossible. Not just sleepy subsavagery, as we lean into murders, or smirk at some dolt on the rape-trail.

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More profound, more immanent to the act of attendance, is the idea that only this, the on-rolling phenomena of chosen action before us, really matters. But, as I suggested with Macbeth, playworlds are the more possible the more they make us resist this on-rolling permission, and make us enter the gaps that its technologies – part, scene, metaphor, a co-present but not coincident audience – at once produce and, in the assuredness of performance, often elide. We have to resist motion, and dwell in what is missing. Shakespeare’s formactive dispensation is a dizzy provocation: often ambiguating what is present to be reckoned with, what might be recognised, and so what asks not to be forgotten or, through the caprices of pleasure, simply blanked. Let us not forget that the price for Marina’s life – beautiful, saving Marina – is first the throwing overboard of her mother; second, a gang-rape that we pretend, for decorum’s sake, for peace of mind, must not have happened; and third, the profit of the “cursed bawd”, thus sustaining the hideous daily slavery of the house’s poor sodden “stuffe”. Let us not forget that Perdita’s life, beautiful saving Perdita, is explicitly exchanged for a bear-eaten man, drowning sailors, and numberless pastoral subjects: let my sheep go. Things carry on, for better and worse. But once refuse to let these things go – as these playworlds also do in reporting the catastrophes – and the lives remembered in the heroines exponentially multiply. They have responsibility; their lives are never only their own. Life is magically and terribly implicate.

27

Life at the end of the line: Macbeth

The main purpose of this book has been to bring out the multiple points of life in Shakespeare, and the wide extension and distribution, both spatial and temporal, of suffering, appetite, and percipience. I have tried to recover more distributed nodes of action and passion than are often noticed, and a correspondingly unsleeping moral-cum-political memory, of the past and into the future. In the main I have not attempted to go deep inside the affective or spiritual conditions of playlife. I have occasionally touched upon the kinds of layered, instrument-dependent, discontinuous inwardness allowed by formactions, for instance in analysing moments in the parts of Edmond, Claudius, and Falstaff. But insofar as I have engaged in psychological or emotional inference, rather than explore the psyche of this or that character, I have offered imaginative apostrophes of being this or that formaction, suffering its coordinates as a distinctive passion: the assumption being that characters are differential symptoms of these instruments, rather than the individuated employers of them. Characters can seem self-evident: but it is perhaps more accurate to see them as the most symptomatic expression and extension of formactions, and thereby of playlife. As such, a character is always both a contingent unity and answerable to networks or functions of which the character need know nothing. It can be a cog in a machine, serviceable in the way of any instrument, but deferring in terms of reality to some more primary thing – a more or less generic service; a supra-individual discourse; a nested-box of characters who work principally through addition and comparison. It is not quite an organism, because written by a text or programme, and because, strictly speaking, it is purely virtual. It is not quite a machine, because it is partly ideal. Flesh and blood is animate in 316

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its making, it is measured by passion, and yet it survives all physical instantiations. We can see it as human and non-human; as a human under erasure, one whose humanness, as actor, defers to the non-existent existing of the character; as a simulated human, even a kind of zombie uploaded with words, instructions, commands; in this almost like a computer or artificial intelligence. We can understand it modally, as a possible subject of the kind that may, might, could, should, or would be if certain conditions applied. We can think in terms of a potential for substance, produced through performance akin to a laboratory. A character may be seen as an aggregate, which contributes to other aggregates; and just as the character retains discrete identity even as it contributes to corporate networks or character-hives, so too might the parts that make up the character garner discrete life of their own. And there is always the chance that the fraction is the individual thing – that there is no whole number at all, no unified character, only aggregates whose unity is as chimerical as a square, accreting and diminishing according as occasion takes them. There can be all kinds of series, all kinds of aggregates, none of which can claim to be the essential living being. It is this kind of thinking that has led me to Leibniz, and more broadly to the tradition of would-be systematic physics and metaphysics. But this tradition has an obvious limitation. Its preoccupation with universally applicable motion and motive can lead to a generalising of the actual experience of being alive. For instance, in this tradition passion overwhelmingly means passivity, or the simple state of receiving the action of another: the vice or emotion that is felt so uniquely by the individual is abstracted into a symptom of a universal tendency; indeed, so is the human sufferer. There is a point at which any such philosophy can no longer reach to the most intimate experiences. Philosophy that attends more finely to the gradations and subterfuges of subjective turmoil can help – for example, Kierkegaard’s theo-existentialism offers wonderful microscopies of the lonely soul, severed from God and captive to all kinds of evasion. But in the final analysis I think Shakespeare’s plays get closer to life than any philosophy. A large part of this is that plays can embody the truths that philosophy must articulate. It isn’t that the truth, once abstracted or summarised, must be substantially different. It is that in one discourse (philosophy) the

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truth-claims ask to be accepted; in the other (plays) they ask only to be felt. The feeling is ours; and very often it is also the characters’. The fact that suffering, for example, is composed by theatrical instruments does nothing to allay the reality of inferred inwardness, any more than a figure’s partaking in numerous cross-play networks vitiates an assumption (ours, the character’s, the actor’s) of centred subjectivity. The playworld allows both. Because for all the parts inside each part, for all the endless changes and divisions that constitute its being, we still think in terms of an individual with emotions, perceptions, appetites, relations, a knowable thing with an inferable past and present and a future. Hence the pathos of their irreality. ∞ In Shakespeare’s worlds even the deepest inwardness profoundly returns to the instruments that render it. Any number of characters could provide a test case. In this chapter I want to return to the figure of Macbeth, one who I think suffers the authentic horror of formactive life. Pretty much everything he says betrays a foundational captivity to play. There are many famous examples of this – he is the poor player, or the bear at the baiting, or the actor who must act things in hand before they are scanned. But there is more to his captivity than such set-pieces. To live amid a script already written; or at the end of the line; or in a single eternally recurring scene; or in the abyssal gaps of metalepsis, where nothing is, but what is not, or the instant is the future, and the only prevailing substance is metonyms of metonyms of metonyms: this is Macbeth’s moment-bymoment sentence.1 He embodies the torture of being a shadow. It can seem as though Macbeth’s passage is not only into the deepest sin and guilt, but into other-oblivious solipsism that resembles nothing so much as the actor alone with his part, the rest of the world literally cut away, or stilled to a kind of background rumour. But then Macbeth is also always more than the actor. I have suggested in a previous chapter that he is the guilty audience, at one with us in his paralysed return to already-written crimes. And he is also the fugitive

1

Bert O. States: “Macbeth is the image of a hypothetical man.” Great Reckonings, 27.

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playwright, inventing scenarios of sublime transport. Consider his rapturous apostrophe to murdered sleep: Macbeth does murther Sleepe, the innocent Sleepe, Sleepe that knits vp the rauel’d Sleeue of care, The death of each dayes Life, sore Labors Bath, Balme of hurt Mindes, great natures second Course, Chiefe nourisher in Life’s Feast.

(TLN 692–6)

He affects an egregious show of self-forgiveness (“sore labours Bath”), figuring his exertions as homely, even spinsterly (“the rauel’d Sleeue of care”), making himself their primary victim (“Balme of hurt Mindes”), and banalising the act as though the kind of honest day’s graft familiar to all such “initiate” apprentices. The rhythms, paratactic and pleonastic, certainly suggest the kind of knowing disintegrity that Coleridge identified (I think less appropriately) in Macbeth’s “silver skin laced with golden blood”. However, this is not just because they seem so immoderate. It is because they brazenly steal from the most celebrated sonneteer of the age: Philip Sidney’s Astrophil: Come Sleep, O Sleep, the certain knot of peace, The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe, The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, The indifferent judge between the high and the low; With shield of proof shield me from out the prease Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw. O make in me those civil wars to cease: I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.2

The appropriation is surely meant to be heard, and so bespeaks an almost-scandalous artistic self-pity. At the same time, however, we get genuine insight here into Shakespeare’s concept for Macbeth, and how he makes him tremble with lost possibility. We can see what Shakespeare sees in his tortured hero, this besotted fool who really feels himself the true victim: the poor man; the prisoner; the would-be saint at whom false Despair throws darts; the humble province, wracked by civil wars, vaulted into imperium but longing only to pay his tribute, once more the loyal and serviceable Thane. Above all, Astrophil–Macbeth posits himself as love’s

2

Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 39.

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pioneer, risking and remaking all for conquest. Who could refrain, that had a heart, to love . . .? As ever, Macbeth’s authority is definitively false. He has committed the murder moments ago, and already he speaks wistfully of something he has not in fact yet lost; he languishes in recollection even though everything might seem to be newly and unpredictably ahead of him. In other words, time itself has concertinaed. The single sleep in his mind – Duncan’s – cues Macbeth’s sudden flooding awareness of the full force of possibility: “Macbeth shall sleepe no more” (II. ii). His paean to sleep is thus also an entrance – his insomnia like an ever-yawning curtain onto arctic wastes – into the post-murder Macbeth: unable to occupy his moment, unable to achieve forgetfulness, experiencing existence as eternal waking.3 Narratives tumble out of the prostrate body, and in an awful way it doesn’t matter to him what he does, because nothing he does, however vicious and massive, can catch up with his intimations. Virtuality is actuality; imaginative possibility is history-in-motion; playlife is the real. Hence the immeasurable wistfulness of Macbeth’s speeches. He would construct a dimension parallel to “fate”, a bolt-hole of despair which works as virtual compensation for all he has sacrificed: If this which he avouches, do’s appeare, There is nor flying hence, nor tarrying here. I ’ginne to be a-weary of the Sun, And wish th’estate o’th’world were now undone. Ring the Alarum Bell, blow Winde, come wracke, At least wee’l dye with Harnesse on our backe.

(2371–6)

Consider the superbly pointless relief of the closing couplet. Part of the effect comes from a knowing bathos: Macbeth is off to work, out to the killing fields; he will be buried in his work like a mad ploughman. But inside this there is exultancy, or a strained casting after something like it, as though a juvenile conviction that present function is somehow at one with old nostalgias. Hence the way his rhyme manages to join the deracinated sociopath with the young man who once upon a time admired heroes in tales. For is there not some whisper of georgic redemption, of 3

Compare Stanley Cavell, “Macbeth Appalled”, Disowning Knowledge, 235.

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Macbeth the happy tiller of the good soil, as the “Harnesse” invokes a distant but fleetingly possible alternative world? As a desperate return to youth, a last-ditch tracking back through a suddenly wasted life, the words convey a terrible overgrown vulnerability. He pictures what he was, pays homage to lost hope. But at the same time as the memory is an act of mourning, it is equally one of almost sarcastic burial. As usual, Macbeth’s honesty is in a lie; as usual, any earnestness is located exactly in its sacrifice. Somewhat like Timon’s shoreline monument – lashed by the waves, inviting ruin, fiercely resisting accommodation – Macbeth’s image simulates defiance in terminal symmetry with the reality of collapse. So, the rhymes are like successive memorial effigies, as though petrifying the falling hero in a strip of frieze; or he is rehearsing epitaphs, perhaps a series of cenotaphs, seeking in the imagined reliquary the kind of remembrance that no one still living will allow.4 It is not one single sculpture, but a series of briefly captured attitudes, retrieving consolation from his entropy, as one ghostly self-simulacrum floats out after another.5 The images evoke (to recall Wittgenstein’s metaphor for Shakespeare’s “objectivity”) a dance with his (anti)-selves, in a curious manner animating the promise of the “crack of doom” mirrors.6 Macbeth assumes a face of monumental fearsomeness, which is time and again shadowed by a sort of self-gargoyle, dribbling the effluence of other dreams, other appetites, offering relief or hydration even from within the stony fixity of his misery. At the same time, the gestures have no more power of record than a joke. 4 Compare Nietzsche’s “Apollonian” art in Birth of Tragedy, retrieving “plastic” form from imminent torture and dissolution. See The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), chs 4–7. 5 Kierkegaard: “The most terrible words that sound from the abyss of evil would not be able to produce an effect like that of the suddenness of the leap that lies within the confines of the mimical. Even though the word were terrible, even though it were a Shakespeare, a Byron, or a Shelley who breaks the silence, the word always retains its redeeming power, because all the despair and all the horror of evil expressed in a word are not as terrible as silence . . . This spring in the leap, reminding one of the leap of the bird of prey and of the wild beast, which doubly terrify because they commonly leap from a completely motionless position, has an infinite effect.” The Concept of Anxiety, ed. Reidar Thomte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 131–2. 6 Culture and Value, 36–7. “Suppose someone said: every familiar word, in a book for example, actually carries an atmosphere with it in our minds, a ‘corona’ of lightly indicated uses. Just as if each figure in a painting were surrounded by delicate shadowy drawings of scenes, as it were in another dimension, and in them we saw the figures in different contexts”: Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Bascombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1958; repr. 1992), II. vi (p.181).

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It is no surprise that A. C. Bradley praised Macbeth as having “within certain limits, the imagination of a poet”.7 He can never get at the reality of his acts except through the visual simulacra that everywhere pursue him (the dagger, Banquo’s ghost, professional murderers), or the phantoms that find form along his speech-act’s multiple shelves. Likewise, the suffering of others is little more than a hypothesis of his own possibilities, a kind of diabolical self-metaphor, or a back-hanging at his own private show. For example, his incantation before the witches (“Though you untie the winds . . .” 1582) reduces even apocalypse to a momentary symptom of Macbeth’s impatience. The devastated future that he conjures is already here: it is he who has confounded and swallowed navigation, and who has at once pre-empted and seen all possibility: Though the treasure Of Natures Germaine, tumble altogether, Even till destruction sicken: Answer me

(TLN 1588–90)

Macbeth is the answer: the treasury of his seeds, all of his possible futures, have so tumbled together – the image is of demonic battening beneath the blanket, a diabolic, seed-swallowing orgy, as the castle topples and the heads slope down to their foundations – that even “destruction” is sick from its own surfeit. As Kierkegaard has it, “He has thought everything possible, and yet he has not existed at all.”8 He can think anything, do anything, but this doing can for him alter nothing. It cannot subtract from infinite possibility, but nor can it mitigate implacable necessity. Macbeth’s openness to possibility, then, is also the recognition of impossibility, while the premise of his fatalism is his vision of absolute possibility. Each sucks the life out of the other; each is irrevocably vaporised. The result, uncanny and horrible, is a mime-like relation to reality: as though life has become imitation, or rehearsal, or recollection, a thing experienced most palpably as an incommunicable thought, quizzical, humorous, metaphysically in suspension: if it were done, when ’tis done . . .; had I but died an hour before this chance . . .; nothing is, but what is not . . . The things Macbeth actually performs develop a peculiarly sleepwalking quality: 7

Shakespearean Tragedy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1904; repr. 1985), 295–6. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 253. 8

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the mind that attends the actions is either elsewhere (following one or other trajectory of Macbeth’s figurations) or a ghostly servant of a thought already processed.9 The result is an estranged, aporetic dwelling, outside both communal and temporal continuity – and precisely in this discontinuity fiercely attentive to subjective possibility, which commands the weird ontological impregnability of mime. Just imagine it: all of living is a mime; all action a tracing of possibility, a semi-palpable sketch. And then you move from the anaesthetised moment, and leave strewn on the floor a family of corpses. But then this vision is another mime, in its moment faintly unreal, which yet lodges in the mind, impossible to unload, and burns like a scorpion when sleep will not come. ∞ It is this kind of slow-motion, recursive, “mimical” take on possibility that takes the place of more conventional mimesis: I had else been perfect; Whole as the Marble, founded as the Rock, As broad, and general, as the casing Ayre.

(TLN 1280–2)

Macbeth is trying to build a horizon, some kind of founding limit – but, as ever, he cannot quite reach it; or if he does, it ends nothing.10 He imagines himself the rock, the large promontory, foundations pitched deep. Equally, he sees himself on the rock: perhaps as upon battlements, the “general” surveying his empire, breathing in the air and letting its unfettered space embrace him; perhaps as upon a cliff edge, tempting the dissolving leap. The air is casing, meaning that he isn’t alone: it protects; it is a cushion or a truckle bed, precluding any fall, extinguishing memory, sweetening insomnia. Alternatively, the air is becoming a case, or effecting a casing: it 9 Cavell: “‘to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching’ – seems most literally a description of the conditions of a play’s audience, and play-watching becomes, along with (or as an interpretation of) sleepwalking, exemplary of human action as such, as conceived in this play”: “Macbeth Appalled”, 208. 10 Nietzsche: “a living thing can be healthy, strong and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon; if it is incapable of drawing a horizon around itself, and at the same time too selfcentred to enclose its own view within that of another, it will pine away slowly or hasten to its untimely end”: “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 63.

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is a sheath, a bag, a box. The “Ayre” risks turning to a living coffin. These apparent opposites are anticipated in the word’s simple root: case comes from the Latin casus, from cadere, meaning to fall. The air, so safe and holding, is at the same time an active plummet. These are the antinomies on which the line ends, as would-be wistfulness arrives at its own impossibility: safety in self-murder; self-murder suspended in duration. Macbeth hangs in this interim: it is the paradigmatic Macbeth-event, or Macbethcorrespondent space. For the line-end is committed to succession, even as it can only be, can only establish its own conatus, in resistant defiance of the succession that beckons. Another line is always coming, has always and already been written: But now I am cabin’d, crib’d, confin’d, bound in. (1283)

The metaleptic leaps in “casing air” – the movements it intimates, from openness and oxygen into suffocating entrapment – are recalled, attenuated, and resolved in the succeeding line’s grim tautologies, with their tightening litany of containment. He falls into the crib, the cabin, the coffin, the boxes that are always falling, as recollection and the impossibility of escape constitute an infinite sentient falling. Topography is subjectivised, as the marble, rock, and air become Macbeth. The case that would contain is a fall; the rock wobbles into air. He watches himself disappear, over and over again. This is death: and yet there is no such thing. The line-end is despair. It isn’t that the first image is revoked by the next: this isn’t how Shakespeare operates. They are both existent, pushing into futures and back to pasts. It is the attempt at finality – sculpting an image that might do, that might attain to epigrammatic conclusiveness – which is impossible. This is where Shakespeare so differs from a Webster or Middleton. The modality is subjunctive, or perhaps optative; and no image, however memorable, is finally sufficient to the facts. For as much as each image is a kind of captive block of experience, each one is also ghosted and ghosting, in an unstoppable chain of superimposition. Macbeth is at the end of the line, suspended in that interim; and then he is also at the next line, shut irrevocably in. Existing is quantumised, like a life in scenes, contracted into increasingly small recessive slices, each one a would-be self-sufficient attitude – a line, a clause, a word, this connotation, another connotation,

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and then every one of them hanging and blending and separating in the line break. Life is thus figured as shuttered moments of time, each one a kind of eternity, each denied peace or surcease by the superseding fact of another moment. Life, and indeed death, is reduced to a cue for still more scenic repetition, and the rehearsal of lines already tolled. Take another typical moment: when Macbeth hears the cry of women presaging the death of his wife (TLN 2529). The interruption alters nothing. His thoughts keep their pattern, and the most dreadful news can be no more than a cue for another, almost desultory, turning of the page of his mental autobiography. And yet his consequent speeches are more than expressions of desolation. They at once re-enact the process of self-unravelling, and project into hypothetical scenarios. Shakespeare thereby manufactures a kind of sur-reality, which retrieves, rehearses, and replaces all possibility: I have almost forgot the taste of Feares: The time ha’s beene, my sences would haue cool’d To hear a Night-shrieke, and my Fell of haire Would at a dismall Treatise rowze, and stirre As life were in’t. I have supt full with horrors.

(TLN 2530–4)

As befits his straddled subjection to time, Macbeth is speaking as a kind of dead thing. Nothing can “rowze” him now. He remembers how once upon a time it could seem that even the dead parts of him had life. It was a tactile illusion; there was never life in hair. There was never life at all, it was always a trick of the too-susceptible mind. The speech records the heaviest force of depression sinking home. All fullness now seems a bloated emptiness, all feeling a kind of fraudulence. The past too becomes subject to present euthanasia. But then the dual temporality of the speech is also a dual perspective upon what is at stake. Macbeth is inhabiting present and past, animating and neutering both. It is characteristic that Macbeth should be thus “rowzed” through a cliché: so many of his life-thoughts flicker and expire in just such proverbial childlikeness.11 It is the only life left to him, lurking barely communicably 11 Kierkegaard: “The self is bound up in immediacy with the other in desiring, craving, enjoying, etc., yet passively; in its craving, this self is a dative, like the ‘me’ of a child. Its dialectic is: the pleasant and the unpleasant; its concepts are: good luck, bad luck, fate”: The Sickness Unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton

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in his locutions. Macbeth records a figure of speech coming true (my hair stood on end), at the same time observing his prostrate mind drowsily rising, rather like the somnolent “cow” with which he soon identifies, into a browsing form of sentience. He now stares at this past self in scorn, as at an illusorily stirring corpse. But equally he does so nostalgically, in the full knowledge that here, now, in the meltdown of his fugal rage, such milky consolations have never been more necessary. Or – and this becomes much the same thing – more the measure of what is possible: To lack possibility means either that everything has become necessary for a person or that everything has become trivial . . . The determinist, the fatalist, is in despair . . . because everything for him has become necessity . . . Personhood is a synthesis of possibility and necessity . . . The self of the determinist cannot breathe, for it is impossible to breathe necessity exclusively, because that would utterly suffocate a person’s self . . . Therefore the fatalist’s worship of God is at most an interjection, and essentially it is a muteness, a mute capitulation: he is unable to pray . . . Nevertheless, possibility alone or necessity alone can no more be the condition for the breathing of a prayer than oxygen alone or nitrogen alone can be that for breathing . . . if there is nothing but necessity, man is essentially as inarticulate as the animals.12

This truly is life at the end of the line – after the taste of fears and the senses have cooled; after the fall of hair; after the rouse and stir. More than casting after presentable pasts, Macbeth is casting for life in death. The brief ellipsis between each line is like an experiment in impending terminal blackness – the candle snuffed, the dust sniffed, the future in the instant. The speech is also playing with alternative biographies. Macbeth is nostalgic for a time when he could be scared half to death; it is a horrid enough joke, as though wishing himself Medusa’s petrified victim. But the nostalgia is not so much for innocence as for guilt. Being so, it evokes a very specific past moment, the same one as so often: it describes the night of the regicide, or the simple image of it, when indeed Macbeth’s hair stood on end and the smallest sound was an amplifying alarm (in his first soliloquy Macbeth spoke of the “horrid Image” which “doth unfix my Heire” (246), suggesting the coalescence, again, of pre-image, act, and remembrance). Macbeth’s saintliness was within his murderousness, never University Press, 1980), 51. Lady Macbeth presses upon just such infantile craving: “looke like th’innocent flower, But be the Serpent under’t” (420–1), “’tis the Eye of Child-hood, That feares a painted Devill” (713–14). 12 Sickness Unto Death, 40–1.

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more present than it was that night, in his need for blessing and in his preternatural fears. But it is a night that is here not so much remembered as transfigured. The ironies run in both directions. Macbeth is replaying the murder both as it was and how it might have been. It becomes as though the last, lost night of his sensitive humanity. He killed, and he was alive to it all. The terror and pathos is that Macbeth would turn murder into an act of fear and piety. It was no such thing, we may rejoin, it was a cold-blooded slaying. But did you see him as he went to do it, or when he returned? Did he not shiver with the felt fact of goodness? Possible lives turn on a knife-edge. Hence that hint of monody, and of mourning for all that he has killed. Choked remorse here takes strangely speculative somatic form, like a rippled breathing upon Macbeth’s stilled underground waters. Nowhere is there a more shivering embodiment of the “fear of the good” (Kierkegaard’s definition of the demonic). Macbeth is nostalgic precisely for the feeling of guilt; yet he is horrified by the thought of goodness, by the terrifying power of conscience. Characteristically, he at once reaches for and refuses consolation or repair. The memory is thus absolutely poised between implacable brutality and a glimmer of possibility. Might he start again? Might he be there again, with a choice once more between feeling and anaesthesia, a choice for life or for death? It is the most intimate, almost self-amazed confession, and a momentary recovery of the wonder of being. There could hardly be a more tactile thought than this, one more in touch with the inscrutable plumbing of a body, or the queasy surprise that we even belong to one. And this disbelief precisely marks the tragic loss: could that really have been me? In Kierkegaard’s phrase, Macbeth here knows the “breaking wave”. The creeping self-insurrection of Macbeth’s body evokes the fear or intimation of a rival creator, some unrecognised seat of conscience and decision, or untapped source of purpose or action or destination. Alternatively, the hypersensibility he recalls was perhaps merely proof that he was always, in some pre-frozen fashion, written for guilt, and that he could thaw only into bloody terror. Even in innocence he was in dread. If Macbeth was waiting for or expecting something, perhaps it was simply for this fearful shiver truly to be worth it. For it is also a speech of horrible self-recognition. He

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somehow knows that a “dismall Treatise” was his cue to rise; that he would “stirre” into “life” only in the darkest hour. So it is to be the predestinate tragic fool. Existing here is in the aporia, the half-light: less than alive, less than present, by turns a sketch, or a statue, or a rough-cheeked hologram of unspeakable darkness. Life devolves into simulacra and rehearsal, the hypothetical inhabiting of alternative fictional narratives – in other words, into a catastrophic version of the pleasures of play. Here once more is Kierkegaard: There is probably no young person with any imagination who has not at some time been enthralled by the magic of the theatre and wished to be swept along into that artificial actuality in order like a double to see and hear himself and to split himself up into every possible variation of himself, and nevertheless in such a way that every variation is still himself . . . In such a self-vision of the imagination, the individual is not an actual shape but a shadow, or, more correctly, the actual shape is invisibly present and therefore is not satisfied to cast one shadow, but the individual has a variety of shadows, all of which resemble him and which momentarily have equal status as being himself. As yet the personality is not discerned, and its energy is betokened only in the passion of possibility . . . each of its possibilities is an audible shadow.13

The “magic of the theatre”, for Kierkegaard, is not any kind of night off from the daily business of living. We subsist as a series of shadows, hanging upon the substance that only the god-relationship can confer. In Kierkegaard’s theologised ontology, to exist without possessing God, as do all but the sainted few, is to lack a self entirely: “to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession, an infinite concession, given to man, but it is also eternity’s claim upon him”.14 Lacking such a “concession”, identity becomes a sequence of “aesthetic” fragments – partial, multiplying adumbrations of some fuller subjective possibility, one which for the present is beyond conceivable possession. The entire event of theatre becomes a constellated macrocosm of this un-possessed self. It isn’t that there is a self who watches potential versions of themselves, in the way of alternative lifelines, or glimpsed but impossible choices, and returns to the safety of the self they have become. Rather, theatre is the phantom self in action, in “the passion of possibility”. Life is experienced via once-removed simulacra; we 13

Repetition, 154–5.

14

Sickness, 21.

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watch ourselves, or we act ourselves, and this very self-removal and selfconsciousness is proof of our subjective dispossession; we experience ourselves as though in a mime, or through subterfuges, such as jokes or tropes or disguises, of often bewilderingly baroque sophistication; or we exist as epiphenomena, never quite the thing itself, but rather secondary symptoms of a reality that stays firmly in the keeping of an absent God. There are other ways of living; and other ways for theatrical forms to come true. But this is Macbeth’s crepuscular version of formaction man, a comi-tragic entrapment beyond all hope of remittance. Life’s but a walking shadow.

28

Dying for life: Desdemona

It is the most basic principle of Shakespeare’s work that immediacy harbours things, felt but not articulated, intuited but not quite seen, heard but not understood; that things remain semi-disclosed, begging inference or retrieval. And nowhere is this more so than when his plays touch the point where life passes – not necessarily into death, but out of evident living. In traversing such territory, Shakespeare does not rely upon articulated sentiments. These are not the kinds of states that can be described, as though someone has been there, taken notes, and returned to sketch the shapes of dying. Instead, Shakespeare communicates through his most intense formactions. To the extent that these resources are semantic, the words will spark with electrical connections: often the words will be simple (“nothing”, “cause”, “light”) but they will gather intense inter-scenic charge, associating forward and backward with other moments, which are likewise rendered present at this one. Conversely, where the language is punning or figurative, every last referent must be taken literally, as the conceits produce worlds within worlds, moving across space and time, impossible to take in at a single hearing, but thick with the swarming layers of consciousness in peril. But many of the formactions will not really be semantic at all. They will be rhythmic or dramaturgic, silent to the ear and invisible to the eye, even as they inform the words spoken or the movements made: cue-spaces; prosodic breaks; scenic gaps; the impasses between an actor and his part, or one part and another; the extra-scriptural inferences of the actor, faced by contingency and suddenness: all of them types of interval, but all intensely alive with motion and meaning. In his most charged moments, Shakespeare writes simultaneously to all of the participants in the scene – human and non-human – touching their potential, feeling their alertness to sensation. Eloquence, rhetoric, poetry, 330

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even gesture – all defer to a kind of sub-performative, even sub-subjective tactility, invested equally in all the working agents: including words, all of their folds and options and relations; including actors, and all of theirs. Perhaps the vital thing is the tensile movement between release and enclosure; between what can and cannot be shared; between community and privacy. It is the job of plays to communicate. But sometimes, it seems, Shakespeare knows they cannot: or rather, that at certain points they can do so only by recognising the impossibility of speech, the redundancy of all patterned structures of mediation: and through putting fearless pressure upon his most intimately worked formactions – subterranean, often subvisible – the work communicates just such impossibilities. And right at the heart of this is the actor, relying on his part, playing in an ensemble of other actors likewise reliant on theirs. In many ways this is the paradigmatic condition of his playworlds – its possibilities held as much in its limitations as its invitations. Let’s approach such questions through one of the most infamous scenes in all of Shakespeare: that of Desdemona’s dying. This is the subject of one of the very first eyewitness reports of Shakespeare in action. It is from Henry Jackson, watching the King’s Men’s Othello in Oxford in 1610: Moreover that famous Desdemona killed before us by her husband, although she always acted her whole part [or, plead her case] supremely well, yet when she was killed she was even more moving, for when she fell back upon the bed she implored the pity of the spectators by her very face.1

Much has been written about Jackson’s report, often focusing on the elision of Othello’s blackness (he is simply “her husband’) or the actor’s gender – this Desdemona is simply female. She is a wife, who fights for her life, and is killed by her husband. But something else about Jackson’s report seems more immediately striking. He talks of the actor’s countenance, and how it implored our pity: not when Desdemona was living, but interfecta: that is, when she was killed, or in her death. But what exactly does this mean? Did her face implore once she was dead, a study in 1 Jackson, “Letter to ‘G.P.’”, Sep. 1610, Corpus Christi Fulman Papers, X. 83r–84v; translation from Gamini Salgado, ed., Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975), 30. The original reads: “At vero Desdimona illa apud nos a marito occisa, quanquam optime semper causam egit, interfecta tamen magis movebat, cum in lecto discumbens spectantium misericordiam ipso vultu imploraret.”

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defeated pathos? Or as she was being killed, expressing struggle, terror, imminent demise? Does it matter which? I think it does. Desdemona’s dying has long caused offence, for its indecorum and unlikelihood. Recall the basic scene. Othello comes to Desdemona’s bed; he murders her on the bed; he hears Emilia knocking at the door; he draws the curtain around the bed; and then from behind the curtain Desdemona speaks: O falsely, falsely murder’d. A guiltlesse death, I dye. Oh who hath done this deed? No body: I my selfe, farewell: Commend me to my kinde Lord: oh farewell.

(3384) (3390)

AEMIL. DES.

(3391–3)

The objections are easily understood. Shakespeare is laying on the pathos too thick; or it is damagingly reminiscent of the elongated stage deaths burlesqued in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.2 Or it is simply impossible. It is usually assumed that Othello strangles her, in which case it makes little medical sense that his wife could engage in conversation after suffering the fatal contraction.3 She must have suffered fresh violence – hence the convention that developed in the eighteenth century, to have Othello finish Desdemona off with a loving knife at “So, so” (3349), after which she can bleed languishingly to death, reviving briefly before the final darkness.4 My preferred rationalisation is simpler. In the violence of the assault Othello has done more than asphyxiate – he has burst her arteries, or punctured her lungs, and she is haemorrhaging slowly to death.5 2 “Come teares, confound: Out sword, and wound/The pap of Piramus: /I, that left pap, where heart doth hop;/Thus dye I, thus, thus, thus./Now am I dead, now am I fled, my soule is in the sky,/Tongue lose thy light, Moone take thy flight,/Now dye, dye, dye, dye, dye. /Dem. No Die, but an ace for him; for he is but one./Lis. Lesse then an ace man. For he is dead, he is nothing./Du. With the helpe of a Surgeon, he might yet recover, and prove an Asse” (Dream, TLN 2093–104). 3 For complaints about Desdemona returning to life and then dying without fresh violence, see A. C. Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors: The Stage Business in his Plays 1660–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), 215–16. 4 See Julie Hankey, ed., Shakespeare in Production: Othello, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 277. 5 The Variorum has four pages of notes from eminent physicians, responding to these questions from the Editor: “1. Do you think it likely that Othello stabbed Desdemona at ‘So, so’? 2. If he stabbed her, could her smock be pale? 3. If she were smothered, could she be

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But logistical accommodations do not really satisfy the moment’s strangeness. Nor do assumptions that Shakespeare has sentimentally erred, with Desdemona a lachrymose precursor of the slow vanishing into the ether of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (although a memory of Desdemona in Clarissa seems very likely). Something else is going on. The first thing to acknowledge is that this event is indeed an obscure scandal – scandalous partly because so obscure and equivocal. Her return interrupts an almost instinctive movement towards idealisation and reification. It is at once shocking and banalising, as the perfection of death is traded for unhealthy, stuttering continuance. Understood in this frame, the real offence is that she should speak at all, and then uselessly, a false promise, a kick in the guts to any imaginable emotional accommodation. After all, what can she mean by these words? Desdemona’s final statements invite explanatory inference. Perhaps she knows they are untrue, and she is a liar; perhaps she excuses her husband, mad with connubial faith; perhaps she doesn’t know they are untrue, and she is taken by motives beyond prudence or reason; perhaps she wants to end the cycle of revenge, and is projecting into peaceful worlds that may succeed her own sacrifice;6 perhaps her words are complicit in her own sacrifice, and she desires violent death, a radically passive murderee. Or, more simply, perhaps her words are self-contradictory: she is swooning, in-and-out of consciousness, she barely knows her own mind. Alternatively there is Harry Berger’s R. D. Laing-like unravelling of her words’ perlocutionary force: “Let nobody blame him” solicits pity and praise for the innocent victim who has the charity to forgive. But at the same time, the phrase arraigns his unkindness by creating the presupposition that he is to blame and is being blamed by others, so that her charity only intensifies our sense of the wrong he did, and the instruction coded in her speech act is, Let everyone blame him. The same effect is serially produced in her final three utterances.7

Perhaps this is true, regardless of Desdemona’s purposes. But at a more simple register, we might see her departing words as a betrayal of her living pale? 4. In either case, could she speak after apparent death? 5. If she could speak, why did she not quite revive? 6. From what cause, then, did she really die?” The Variorum Shakespeare: Othello, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1886), 304–7. 6 I owe this thought to my student Chloe Cornish. 7 Harry Berger Jr, “Impertinent Trifling: Desdemona’s Handkerchief”, Shakespeare Quarterly 47:3 (1996), 235–50.

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spirit. What has happened, we might ask, to the life-affirming resistance that she showed all the way through her husband’s accusations, as she was forced to confront the fact that her beloved intended to murder her and that her life was about to end? Recall her protests: I hope you will not kill me Not yet to dye Heaven have mercy on me. Banish me, my Lord, but kill me not. Kill me to morrow, let me live to night. But half an houre. But while I say one prayer.

What happens to the resistance that continues all the way through the hideous labour of the murdering, as Othello’s wish not to stain the bed sheets with blood forces her to die slowly, in self-aware horror, as her throat is pushed closed, or her lungs are punctured, as the oxygen gradually empties from her body and all the time Desdemona is kicking for dear life? Where has she gone? But the essential scandal is I think simpler still. The curtain is drawn upon a life, and even so that life returns. This is the event that needs our closer attendance. At the most basic level Othello draws the “Curtaines” to hide his wife’s body and allow Emilia’s entrance. But this simple act has to ratchet attention precisely upon the curtain. We may be desperate for exposure of the crime, anxious that the space be revealed; we may feel protective towards Othello, and anxious that it should not. Either way, our minds are sure to be at least partly upon the curtain, upon its capacity to hide, or to signify an end – and upon the question of whether all such closures are in fact revocable. Here we need to recognise – as so often in Shakespeare – the importance of the circumstantially inessential; the substance in situational excess. For whereas Othello must be returned to what lies behind the curtain (for his necessary exposure as a criminal and tragic fool), there is no need for Desdemona, as Desdemona, to return. The story does not require it. And yet return she does. Or rather, her voice returns – whether she in fact returns from the shuttered space perhaps remains in question. What is certain is that her words return all who hear her to this place. If Desdemona didn’t speak, the curtain would be for her a coffin, and for us

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a metonym of her death, departure, and burial. But her words speak the persisting reality of this place. Rather than Desdemona re-entering “our” world, perhaps we enter hers: the curtained place between life and death. We need to enter the intervals – and here this means the space created by the curtain. As Michael Neill writes: The pattern of alternating revelations and concealments in the final scene is enacted through and largely organised around the opening and closing of those bed-curtains which, like theatrical inverted commas, figure so conspicuously in representations of the final scene.8

First let’s be clear whether anything can be seen through it. Of course the direction to draw the curtains clearly indicates that the thing behind them will be lost from sight; our mind’s eye will grant hiddenness, whatever the practical exigencies of the stage.9 But thinking about likely materials helps to focus the possibilities. We might imagine the curtain as a veil, made of cotton or silk or even white satin, through which shapes may be descried; as Spenser punningly had it: “to enfold/In covert vele and wrap in shadowes light”.10 In this case, Desdemona’s presence on the bed could remain in view, a silhouette whose simple visibility indicates the potential to rise. The white curtain becomes a backdrop to the on-going stage action, a potential screen for a counterpointing shadow-theatre. The effect – whether or not Desdemona moves – will resemble an allegorical dumb show, a mime of a memory that will not shut down (we might recall Banquo’s Ghost, lurking behind Macbeth at the feast). More than a ghoulish visual irony, the adumbrated body speaks an action that will not die, a sleepless, implacable fate. And yet, as apt as this may seem, it is unlikely. The bed-curtain was almost certainly richly coloured and embroidered, and whether made of tapestry, rich velvet, or brocatelle (silk strengthened with linen), probably opaque. But even so, this needn’t imply absolute invisibility; there may be 8 “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello”, Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989), 385–412 (402). Neill emphasises the importance of the marital bed, as the cynosure of all desires, and finally all eyes. The “representations” he refers to are the numerous paintings of the bed scene, particularly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 9 For example, in Thomas Heywood’s Iron Age Part Two (London: Nicholas Okes, 1632; performed 1612–13), Egisthus enters with his sword drawn and “hideth himself in the chamber behind the Bed-curtaines” (411–14). 10 Faerie Queene, II. Proem 5.

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a foot showing; there may be different views from different angles, sight of the body from the side but not the front, or a gap where the fringes meet.11 The point that Shakespeare is exploiting, I think, is precisely the imperfection of the prop. It is not complete. The curtain is an enclosure, but not enclosed; it marks off private from public space, but can shift in a trice from one to the other; it is susceptible equally to entrance or egress; it is a kind of box, but short of a coffin; it is a mode of burial, yet dangerously above ground. To draw the curtains on a marriage-bed is traditionally to enter the space of ritual – most obviously, of sexual consummation, as the well-wishers melt away and the newly-weds are left starkly alone.12 But it is equally an entrance into the time of ritual enacting – and who is to say what time in the process the parties have at any moment reached? It may be over, or in commission, or about to begin. The curtain is drawn, but the shutdown remains contingent. Perhaps we can see nothing; perhaps we can see shadows, or glimpses of a stopped body; perhaps the fabric ruffles, and we cannot quite tell if it is flickering from the wind or touched by a wakening limb. The prop’s imperfection, in other words, speaks for potentially unfinished business. And for as long as that curtain and the body it hides are there, teasing our knowledge at front- or centre-stage, nothing will ever quite die.

11 Nathalie Rivere de Carles “[C]urtains are sometimes used as material reminders of an absent body . . . This gives them a certain level of symbolic autonomy . . . ‘Surrogation’ [coined by Joseph Roach] describes the moment when actor and prop are fused . . . When the actor transfers human characteristics on to the object, the prop becomes more than a substitute; it becomes a performing object . . . When the actor largely disappears behind a curtain but leaves a hand or a leg to be seen or a voice to be heard, the effect produced on the spectator is that of ‘remanence’. The actor’s body, though incomplete or thoroughly invisible, is recalled in the spectator’s mind through association with the prop. The concept of remanence explains how an image can remain partially present after it has disappeared . . . our retinas likewise retain the ghost image of some event already seen when we look at certain props. In the case of surrogation, the prop fully substitutes for the actor while, in the case of remanence, it reminds us of the actor’s semi-invisible presence, functioning almost like a surface on which the actor’s body can still be seen. The curtain is defamiliarised and reinvented in the immediate memory as it comes to seem a materialisation of a spectral body.” “Performing Materiality: Curtains on the Early Modern Stage”, Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern, eds, Shakespeare’s Theatre and the Effects of Performance (London: Arden, 2013) 51–72 (65). 12 See Sasha Roberts, “‘Let me the curtains draw’: The Dramatic and Symbolic Properties of the Bed in Shakespearean Tragedy”, Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, eds, Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 155–9.

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Death is a necessary casualty of Shakespeare’s telepathic methods: death, but not perhaps the passage of dying. This is what the curtain marks. Place and time shiver between different dispensations, secular, transcendent, and some in-between contingency – perhaps an aevum of would-be angels, perhaps merely the slow parch or rattle that marks the transition from the healthy body’s thoughtless continuance into the super-apperception of dying. Shakespeare is not allowing an easy passage from one world to the next. It is never easy. Desdemona goes fiercely to her death, kicking and scratching to stay alive. And even as the volition leaves her body, still something perseveres. The curtain is never transparent, just as it is never perfect in occlusion. We must imagine what is happening, in that secret space from which no one returns. Othello is given the first and in some ways decisive text to his drawing of the curtain around the corpse: Oh insupportable! Oh heavy houre! Me thinks, it should be now a huge Eclipse Of Sunne, and Moone; and that th’affrighted Globe Did yawne at Alteration.

(TLN 3360–4)

Othello is calling for a cosmic event equal to Desdemona’s death. He wants sun and moon eclipsed; all light blanked out, smothered like a candle. The “Alteration” is more than a violent change, more even than a disorder or disease (OED, alteration, 1.b). The compounded eclipse evokes “alteration” in its musical sense, in which the value of a note is doubled: as the great early modern composer John Dowland had it, “the doubling of a lesser Note in respect of a greater”, or “the doubling of the proper value”.13 So, Othello’s words also imagine – perhaps observing what he sees before him, certainly recommending a suitable scene – what the stage and the spectators might at this very moment look like. That is, the stage dark, the spectators agape, as “th’ affrighted Globe/Did yawne at Alteration”. In referring so directly to the Globe, Shakespeare makes the present place, with its present materials – stage, props, actors, audience – far more than indifferent mediators or witnesses. These things are the very constituents of the tragedy, its hosts and materials; they possess its possibilities. And, as

13

OED, “alteration”, 1.b.

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Sasha Roberts has noted, the bed too “operates like an intimate stagewithin-a-stage, framing the actor”.14 But what we are seeing isn’t enough. Drawing the curtain makes this fact very palpable. And so too do Othello’s words. For the scene they call forth is more than what spreads before us on stage. It is what Desdemona is experiencing, right now: her “light” suddenly put out, passing from this dusky world, with its quenchable candles, into some supra-mundane space where familiar cosmic sky-marks are no more, and instead consciousness, if such it is, comes face to face with a vast abyssal question mark: “it should be now a huge Eclipse/Of Sunne, and Moone . . .”. And so the curtain is drawn. I don’t think it is the dead body per se that is the unseeable, unspeakable thing here. The thing beyond witness is the travel that dying opens onto. Crucial here is the continuing potential for the curtains to move. They might be drawn open at any moment. They figure blankness, but also an incipient promise of revelation: the curtains can be opened onto who knows what hidden vistas? And whatever this hidden place is, Desdemona is there: she has entered “Alteration”. ∞ It seems right that Desdemona, dying or dead, should be behind the curtain, hidden from eyes, with one material (curtain) occluding another (the actor’s body), allowing the imagining of possibilities. But really this begs a question. Is Desdemona present in the body behind the curtain? And when the curtain is drawn open, is she present in the body before us? Such questions bear upon the life on stage. Is there such life? And if so, where might it come from, and where might it go? The event of Desdemona’s dying focuses these questions with rare and elusive delicacy. Even a straightforward mimetic approach comes upon difficulties. For this is a classic moment where the facts cannot definitively be settled – or rather can be settled in flatly incompatible ways. The likely train of events is the one invariably played on stage: Othello assumes he has killed his wife; he hears Emilia, he panics and heaves and moans, and he quickly covers the evidence as the lady-in-waiting bursts in. But I’m not sure this is enough. It recognises the brute fact of a crime: but it 14

Roberts, “Let me the curtains draw”, 165.

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doesn’t sufficiently remember the event’s gradations, visible and not, and the layers of travel that mark it. One thing is sure, and yet easily forgotten. Othello has felt Desdemona as her life ebbs away. For all his wildness, Othello’s touch, as befits a professional soldier, is scrupulous as a surgeon’s. He is alert to the smallest fidget, and knows that life can hang upon a twig. He wants a gentle departure, which makes the job harder. And so I repeat: he feels his wife’s graduated exit. Perhaps he believes, when he allows Emilia into the chamber, that the job is done. Perhaps he is uncertain. All that is sure is that he reckons the movement. This gives the fullest awareness of the stakes, logistical, existential, spiritual – all breathtakingly coordinate throughout this scene – to Othello’s every action. It is important, therefore, to be clear about what he actually does. But can we be? Can we know at which moment exactly he draws the curtain, or what he does immediately afterwards, or even who or what he addresses once he has done it? Here is the Folio version: AEMIL.

I do beseech you That I may speake with you. Oh good my Lord. O T H . I had forgot thee: oh come in Aemilia. Soft, by and by, let me the Curtaines draw. Where art thou? What’s the matter with thee now? Enter Aemilia. (TLN 3365–9)

And here the Quarto: EM.

I doe beseech you I may speake with you, good my Lord I had forgot thee: O come in Emillia. Soft, by and by; let me the Curtaines draw, Ent. Emil. Where art thou? What’s the matter with thee now?

OTH.

Emilia’s moment of entrance differs in the two versions. We cannot be sure of her entrance cue, or whether she in fact has a staggered entrance: perhaps first onto the stage, at “Alteration”; and then into the bedchamber, at come in Emilia, or the Curtaines draw, or where art thou?: and then finally into speech at with thee now? The suspense intensifies with this intermitted movement towards exposure. But so too does the witness of Othello’s actions – Emilia’s witness, and our’s, and his own – as Othello feels the every-which-way eyes upon him, the competing claims upon his attention and competence. Emilia’s remorseless knocking and calling is at

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once the cry of justice, like an alarm, and a coarse transgression, this nagging lady unaware of the extreme delicacy of the transaction being effected on the bed. For there is surely a painstaking decorum in Othello’s actions here, cold-eyed and outrageous, as he hunkers over his wife, protects her from prying eyes, refuses to admit the profane world before covering her white flesh. After all, Emilia’s entrance is a kind of invasion. She shouldn’t by rights be doing it, not when the husband is present at the sanctified matrimonial precinct. This, I think, is what Othello feels, lunatic as he is, all of his love still garnered in his heart. Now that his beloved is dead, and she can no longer shit upon his devotion, he can give her the care she deserves. Hence the unspeakable softness of his address: Soft. . . by and by . . . let me the Curtaines draw . . .

He draws the curtains, and cradles the body sleeping within. He is doing it for her, for the sweetness of rest and for safety. He murmurs words of love and wonder. Her eyes are closed shut, and she seems so peaceful. She has left this betraying world; he is assured of that; but who can tell where she is now: Where art thou . . .?

But wherever she is there is no complaining, as he lightly admonishes his beautiful girl-bride, always a silly thing, too playful in life, far too playful, but now nestled just where she belongs: What’s the matter with thee now . . .?

And then Emilia bursts in, interrupting their ineffable intimacy, with news that is always unwelcome but never more than now, when the parent-husband has finally got his child-bride purring: What? now?

His peace is broken, and, who knows? hers is too.15 15 Coleridge: “Othello had no life but in Desdemona:- the belief that she, his angel, had fallen from the heaven of her native innocence, wrought a civil war in his heart. She is his counterpart; and, like him, is almost sanctified in our eyes by her absolute unsuspiciousness,

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Clearly this is just one rendering of the moment. The point to grasp is how alert the scripting is to Desdemona’s liminal condition – at the verge of possibilities, as though something ever-so precarious, like an unglazed vase, or a baby’s sleep, liable at any slip to be broken. Because it is only his nervous care of this that allows Othello’s words their delicacy, focused in ambiguated address and intonation. But ambiguity here isn’t simply a matter of actorly choice, or hermeneutic options. It is the event. We may well recall Augustine’s analysis of the process from life, through dying, into death: No one . . . is dying unless living . . . The same person is therefore simultaneously dying and living . . . But if, when the soul has departed, the man is still not in death, but after death, who shall say when he is in death? . . . On the other hand, if a man in whose body death is already at work should rather be called dying, and if no one can be living and dying simultaneously, I do not know when he is living.16

Desdemona’s dying suggests the uncertainty principle as the condition not only of our knowledge of others, but of life tout court. For this moment – when Othello draws the curtain – is the perfect Schrödinger’s cat situation. We need to open the box to see if the cat lives or dies; likewise, Desdemona’s condition waits upon drawing the curtain; until we do, cat and wife are at once living, dying, and dead.17 Even if we know that she will die, we do not know if right now she is dead. Knowledge has to catch up with life, or with death. At such moments, theatrical formactions truly apprehend possibility, realising the passage from visible to invisible, past to future – or vice versa. Regulated reality insists upon one or another condition: but the scene truly does not. The ambiguity continues once Desdemona’s voice is heard from behind the curtain: cued by Emilia’s “[what cry is] that?” Othello says, “That? What?” (3385). Is he pretending not to hear, desperate to evade exposure of his crime? Does he not hear it? Does he hear it and not know what it is? Does his “What?” express fake innocence, fake incredulity? Or and holy entireness of love”: Notes on the Tragedies (1836–9), quoted in Andrew Hadfield, ed., A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare’s “Othello” (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 50. 16 Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), XIII. 9, 549–50. 17 Einstein pointed out that the state of an unstable keg of gunpowder will, after a while, contain a superposition of both exploded and unexploded states.

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real disbelief, that his act of love might be called murder? Or superstitious terror, that something can return from the dead? The words as scripted do not tell us. We might say that the acting is all. Equally, we might say that our own inferences are all – or perhaps our own preferences. For the fact is that the scene almost explicitly virtualises Desdemona: she isn’t safely at home in the actor’s body, which is hidden behind the curtain; she isn’t to be securely found in her voice, which in speaking from behind the curtain, unhinged from a visible face, has something of the airy uncanniness of ventriloquism; and she is neither certainly alive nor certainly dead. The effect is a renewed concentration upon the instruments that render her. In being detached from a secure source, these derive potentially discrete characterising force. She might be discovered, newly identified, in the float of her voice, or Othello’s conceits, or her own wordplay, or the silence and inertness of the actor’s play-dead body. But if we can differently find her in each of these things, then Desdemona’s very being becomes differential, here and there, this and that. In other words, if play-reality is formactive, and possible life supervenes upon every point in the fabric, then Desdemona has herself become a superposition of “exploded” and “unexploded states”. ∞ It is no wonder, then, that Desdemona’s words from behind the curtain are such a shock, and can seem a kind of category mistake. It isn’t just that we assumed her heart had stopped beating. We assumed that she was in death, the pale from which no one returns. Her return from this place, then, makes the very ontology of character exponentially exceed its ostensible bounds. For instance, as much as Desdemona’s last words can be interpreted as continuous with her supposedly familiar social being (clinging by turns to defiant virtue, marital fidelity, spousal obedience, reckless trust) she is also one of Shakespeare’s ghosts. Correspondingly, everything in this scene is previsioned. Desdemona’s words from behind the curtain are not some gauche afterthought. They are a primary destination – and cause – of the scenic event. So, Othello’s famous soliloquy at the start of the scene (“It is the Cause, it is the Cause (my Soule)”), spoken over Desdemona’s sleeping body, harps on the impossibility that a killed life might “re-Lume” and be

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given “vitall growth againe” (TLN 3240–62). But this is exactly what happens to Desdemona: first, at this soliloquy, as she wakes from it; second, at her murder, as she wakes from it. Even after she has stopped “mooving” and is “Still as the Grave”, Othello notes that “she stirres againe”. The sentence ends halfway through the line, producing the terrible pause in which he can “smother” (F) or “stifle” (Q) her once more, for the third, fourth, fifth time. She has stirred from the grave already: Shakespeare is at once suppressing and sowing thoughts that it might happen again. Surely she cannot; surely she might! Who can tell if the wick is beyond kindling? Listen again to the famous words: put out the Light, and then put out the Light. What can they ever have meant? He blows out his candle, and then ends Desdemona; he ends Desdemona, and then blows out his candle; he ends Desdemona, and this ends everything? Or he ends Desdemona, and then ends her again, and again, and again? Only one of these solutions is truly true to theatre: the last, in which the light may always re-lume. And perhaps theatre knows things we do not. The very act of dying may be the strangest double-movement; what we take to be darkness may be something else again. Shakespeare is taking us into truly hallowed territory. The scene is probing the mystery of mind-in-body, or soul-in-body; and then inside the incommensurable transport of dying, its strange illegitimacy, stealing a soul and a mind when all that is truly stopped is a body. Indeed, perhaps the scene is imagining the very possibility of dying, of being on this ultimate threshold, as itself an experience of indeterminacy: am I dead, or not; have I passed over, or not; will I return, or not? After all, who is to know if any unconsciousness – sleep, faint, or coma – will be our last? It is our last (certainly our latest) unless or until we return from it. Perhaps we need to adjust our sense of the ends to which tragedy reaches. Such ends are not simply foretold: they are possibilities, trembling in the imperfect moment. ∞ Corresponding to this profoundly ambiguous departure, Shakespeare gives to Desdemona her own uncanny mental trajectory, dreamy and haunted, independent of the gross assaults of her husband. Clearly this is true of her three “posthumous” statements. We might at a push construe

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her first two such statements as calls from the grave, speaking truths that no one else knows, or as the cries of Othello’s conscience. But, far more importantly, the words are hers, and join to profound effect with her similarly spiritualised mind in the willow scene. Her murder makes the willow scene come true: but so too do her ghostly words. For already, in the willow scene, Desdemona is being taken – taken from herself, taken hostage by voices and lives that are not quite hers to own. Recall the basic situation of the willow scene. Othello has told Desdemona to dismiss her maid and get ready for bed. Desdemona fears him, she is conscious of not knowing what moves “his checks, his frownes”, the unknowable weather of his face. In this scene, very consciously, Desdemona is thinking the strange world of grown-up men, and of sex. There is a half-articulated prehension of the weakness fuelling masculinity, the violent nostalgia that underpins desire, a disquieting instinct that she is in above her head: “O these Men, these men!” (so many men, so many proper men, so many men in pain, causing pain, would a woman, could a woman, men are very violent . . .). She has already transgressed: in eloping, obviously; in imagination, right now; in somehow taking on the burden of her sex, if not consciously then in the fact of her status in the play. She is unready, a child or ingénue, who has ghosted, as though for a dare, or because she could, into relations or responsibilities that she can barely live up to, or indeed live to. More than ever before, the Desdemona-part is hostage to the terrible possibilities of the playworld. This makes everything she says heavy with transgression, death, and an alarming kind of ethical and ontological misprision. Consider the first question Othello asks Desdemona, when she wakes from his soliloquy. It is whether she has “pray’d to night” (TLN 3266). She has; we heard it, the closing words of the willow scene: Good night, good night: Heaven me such uses send, Not to picke bad, from bad; but by bad, mend.

(TLN 3077–9)

We can construe the words to mean something normative, such as, “I will learn from bad examples, I will not repeat them, I will reform others” and so on. But the words more immediately say that she will “by bad, mend”. Can she mean this? Or is she simply the chosen vessel of possibilities for

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which “she” cannot be responsible, but for which her part is? Again and again, possibilities speak through Desdemona. Hers is a prayer that, behaviourally, allows anything; it strings her out between error and repair; it promises recovery out of the blackest privation. What can await but the travel of dying? For Desdemona is everywhere a traveller. She remembers, she doesn’t know why, her mother’s maid: My Mother, had a maid call’d Barbarie, She was in love: and he she lov’d prov’d mad, And did forsake her. She had a Song of Willough, An old thing ’twas: but it express’d her Fortune, And she dy’d singing it. That Song to night Will not go from my mind: I have much to do, But to go hang my head all at one side And sing it like poore Brabarie: prythee dispatch.

(TLN 2996–3003)

The speech is almost unbearably predictive. The song will not go from Desdemona’s mind “to night”. Barbarie died singing it: and so, perhaps, will Desdemona. Hence the actor’s note, “I have much to do/But to go hang my head all at one side/And sing it”: an instruction for the song that follows, but also for her return from the dead, when the curtain is drawn, and she is on the bed, her head hanging at one side, her countenance imploring the spectators’ pity, readying herself for the final move into silence: “Prythee dispatch”. Desdemona is already here a thing of ghosts. She is travelling in multiple ways – backward and forward in time, from actor to character, gesture to gesture, white skin to black, mistress to maid, lover to lover, living to dying, herself in this scene and herself in her next, from premonition into execution. She travels into Barbarie, the maid whose song already inaugurates the crucial transversal movement. She died singing, but the music does not cease in death, as its passage into Desdemona attests. It carries across the waters. Shakespeare is scripting futures – that of his own play, and of his heroine, and her song – fully aware that memory, of character and audience, fastens upon these repetitions. All who hear also travel across these realms. We all shall. But the shadows on stage do it first; they soften the passage for us, lay reeds upon our path. As Emilia says – already canonising her mistress, as though the play’s first chronicler:

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Dying for life: Desdemona What did thy Song boad Lady? Hearke, canst thou heare me? I will play the Swan, And dye in musicke: Willough, Willough, Willough.

(TLN 3545–7)

Desdemona too dies in music: her words from death are a singing. And so attend to the ghost: No body: I my selfe, farewell: Commend me to my kinde Lord: oh farewell.

There is nothing gruesome here, no patched sentiment, no “liar gone to burning hell”, as Othello has it a moment later. Once we allow that Desdemona truly is a revenant; once we hear Barbarie singing in her intervals – or her “alterations” – then she becomes here an ultimate amanuensis of erotic love, a subliminal, barely admitted consciousness that is carried almost entirely through scenic transpositions and narcissistic, almost childlike wordplay. She is bidding her old familiar self adieu: “I my selfe, farewell”; she is the traveller, far distant from the child and lady she was so recently; she is “No body”, the still-warm ghost, rapturous and ecstatic. This is the moment’s truly transgressive intimacy. Her “farewell” remembers how the madman in the willow song “did forsake her”. On this reading, Desdemona is not mendaciously forgiving her husband’s crime. She is reaching for him as he passes into distance, reliving embraces, or living them fully for the very first time. Of course, the event is also ugly, as ugly as sin, it stinks to heaven. The scene on the bed is beyond awful: a “Tragicke Loading”. The pun is rank and repelled, the corpses transmogrified into sorry ejaculate. But Lodovico’s pun also insists upon what Desdemona discovers: as the panting ghost has it, “I dye”. Shakespeare absolutely insists upon Desdemona’s experience of this dying. This is the audacity and terror of it. There’s no point denying that this moment of passage is orgasmic; the throat is compressed, oxygen fails, an all-consuming headiness ends everything. No doubt, from the perspective of regulative sanity, this is perverse, a horrible concession to atavism, a disgusting amelioration of a man’s evil. But this is Shakespeare, possible worlds nesting everywhere. Shame, regret, guilt, injustice, the brute fact of violation, the consciousness of irrecoverable waste – all and more are here. But so too is this dark pleasure. We may well recall an earlier death-headed heroine: Juliet. From the moment she committed to her desire, Juliet sought

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this place, with a fervent and fearless articulacy that Desdemona would blush to claim. But Desdemona too sings the liebestod. The superimposition of Desdemona and Barbarie prepares for the murder scene’s superimposition of life and death. In each case, we touch the life in dying, or the life that may be rescued from death. Dying – Barbarie as she dies for love, Desdemona as she loves to die – is the recovery of another life, retrieved from extinction. Barbarie’s life is remembered in Desdemona’s; Desdemona’s finds virtual prediction in Barbarie’s. To the extent that Shakespeare risks damaging indecorum – not for the first time, letting the still waters of Desdemona run deep with erotic adventure – he does so because to exist in the intervals, half out of sight, between stations, before or beyond social possessions, must necessarily exceed visible conformities. The ghosting voice of Desdemona speaks the sensual exorbitance of dying, a passage as tremendous and ravishing as a woman’s orgasm. In giving Desdemona’s final moments this strange, secret text, Shakespeare provides a transcendent fleshing-out of the transport beyond living, through dying, into nobody knows what.18 ∞ And a crucial point here – one which I think Shakespeare is carefully superintending – is that possibility is not determined by what we attenders may or may not notice. Formactions work without such notice – certainly without our conscious, hyper-critical notice. They even breed upon the lack of such, deriving a fierce perdurability from the fact that they lurk beneath common attention, whether contributing beyond our awareness to felt emotions, or as hidden possibilities, waiting upon futures that may have passed, or be still to come. We only notice those we notice: but what Levinas: “Interiority is the very possibility of a birth and a death that do not derive their meaning from history. Interiority institutes an order different from historical time in which totality is constituted, an order where everything is pending, where what is no longer possible historically remains always possible . . . In the totality of the historiographer the death of the other is an end, the point at which the separated being is cast into the totality, and at which, consequently, dying can be passed through and past . . . The death agony is precisely in this impossibility of ceasing, in the ambiguity of a time that has run out and of a mysterious time that yet remains; death is consequently not reducible to the end of a being . . . The non-reference to the common time of history means that mortal existence unfolds in a dimension that does not run parallel to the time of history and is not situated with respect to this time as to an absolute.” Totality and Infinity, 55–6. 18

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is ever clear with Shakespeare is that new things are always becoming noticed, things that were always there, but unclaimed. We can be pretty sure that the stock of possibilities is not yet exhausted. Scenes such as Desdemona’s dying show how this should be. It isn’t only the subtlety of the scripting or the inadequacy of empiricism. It is that the scene’s most basic coordinates embody the fact of differential, step-by-step knowledge. First, there are the characters’ differing measures of awareness: and then there are ours. In Shakespeare’s playworlds – uniquely – there is no guarantee that we all recognise even roughly the same reality; no guarantee that even if we all see the same thing (say, a drawn curtain) that we will all agree about what it is, or about the life it signifies or secretes or denies. The play hinges upon the baleful untimeliness of Othello’s presuppositions – too early here, too late there – and we often wish he might catch up with what we think we know. But it is not the case that we always know what he does not. In this scene, he may well know more than we can. Equally, he may be as ignorant, or as falsely confident, as we are. Either way, it is clear that knowledge is not the imprimatur of life, any more than is conscious witness. Instead, the scene presents a blank, ludic signifier – the drawn curtain – in place of empirical certainties or experiential inferences. The point is not just that the curtain hides the evidence (is she living or dead?), or that it makes us aware how we hang upon longpending confirmations. More than that, the curtain stands for the necessarily distributed nature of playlife: distributed among different objects and agents, animate and inanimate, verbal and visual, all of which formactions contribute to the life-assemblage, and none of which quite possess it. Instead they are unreliable metonyms of life, or of substance. Clearly all metonyms are incomplete. But conventionally the metonym stands perfectly for the complete thing: the hand of God; the head of cattle. Shakespeare’s most characteristic metonymic application, however, is metalepsis: a metonym of a metonym, which dares the interpreter to enter the gap in-between the metonymic word or phrase and its putative referent. There is contiguity, perhaps, but not necessarily continuity; there may be dark gaps between the metonymic parts; and there is no longer assured identity. For consider: to what precisely does the drawn curtain connect? If it is an effect, then of what cause? If a cause, then of

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what effect? If a part, then of what whole? Might the curtain, in its very blankness and opacity, be the whole to which the hidden parts are mere fractions? In this way, our inadequate knowledge shares ontological ground with the other participants in making playlife, distributed on stage as we listen and observe, wait and remember. Each participant is indispensable: but each one is partial and inadequate, lacking full possession of the very life that it vouches (and that vouches it). At moments of intense dramatic pressure, Shakespeare is always likely to put his most elemental materials under the same pressure: as though to say that they can take it; more than that, that they make it. For example, he often starts probing at the delicate composition of a play-character, feeling out the discrete, differential reality of its constituent parts, worrying at the delicate membrane between actor and part and character. We can conceive of a character as a group or ensemble, with its own members, nested and co-dependent. Each requires the other: but is not finally accountable to these others. So: the actor precedes and survives the part; the part can be learnt and played by other actors; the character has a life elsewhere, which the part gestures towards but at crucial points ignores or does not know. Consequently, all three – actor, character, part – are exceeded by the other. All know more than the others – and less too. Life exceeds knowledge, just as it exceeds text. It breathes in the gaps, just as it is, in Desdemona’s case, crushed in the gaps. “Desdemona” is an ontological hybrid, constituted by metaphysically differential fractals of identity, or selfmetonyms, each grounded in a home to which the others have no final access. Just as the Desdemona-character has lived on, vulnerable to accident and assault, after her life: so too will the Desdemona-part: and so too will the Desdemona-actor.19 Indeed, can it be any other way? For what can it mean to say that each “member” of the character – separately, potentially

19 Stanley Cavell: “You can say there are two women, Mrs. Siddons and Desdemona, both of whom are mortal, but only one of whom is dying in front of our eyes. But what you have produced is two names. Not all the pointing in the world to that woman will distinguish the one woman from the other . . . you can’t point to one without pointing to the other; and you can’t point to both at the same time. Which just means that pointing here has become an incoherent activity . . . the empirical and the transcendental are not as clearly separate as, so to speak, we thought they were.” Disowning Knowledge, 99.

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at very different moments – must ebb into their own particular nothing? What can it mean to say that each part of the part must die? It was a commonplace that parts died with their actors; and actor’s parts, as texts, seem almost never to have survived their season. The comprehensive erasure of the role, then, is in some sense anticipated. But still: isn’t it impossible for the whole thing to die in the span of the show? Isn’t survival intrinsic to any particular stage-dying? ∞ Plays are a social art, played before groups, by groups, showing other imaginary groups. The actor can feel protected by playing in company – the to and fro of dialogue, the adrenalin and agonism of acting towards or against others, each actor winched to his partners by invisible ropes, the actors’ bodies corporative and coordinate. He can be carried by prosody, syntax, clausal organisation, by balanced or antithetical phrases, by the almost magical gift which the “forms, moods, shapes” of speech seem to offer, as though some preordained dispensation, just for the actor, in which the aspiring breath and the mind that attends it is already there, already written. The actor is relieved of the burden of making it up, or of ultimate responsibility. He is a conduit more than an origin, dependent on some prior creation. In this too there is comfort. He can be cocooned inside his costume and persona, inured by the simple fact of simulation, such that the body of the actor alone already contains company. He is not alone, he is not only himself, he is also a king or a clown, as all of these eager eyes and attending ears attest. The story is an extension of the same pretence. And then there are all the metaphors, transporting matters beyond the here and now, thickening the texture of the present, making it less vulnerable, less thinly unique, layered with associations, family resemblances, a virtual community of rhyming phenomena. We can imagine all of these things as forms of company. Indeed we can imagine art itself as company, a buffer against ghastly solitude. Plays are a social art: but also in some ways the loneliest. They never quite escape the monadic dispensation. We act for a company, but we learn our parts, in the main, alone. We act in company, but still we stand before thousands of others, in our own bodies, with no one to do our breathing or our actions but us. We act alone in company, always a mistake away from

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crippling judgement, our own or another’s. There are fatal limits to theatre’s collaborative comforts. It is far less social an act than most of the music of this period, vocal or instrumental, in which the individual is buttressed in harmonic networks. And the mere fact of singing, or of playing an instrument, can take us away from our embedded complicity in a body that will die. The musical medium transports, implicitly sublime. But Shakespeare’s players only rarely escape anxious inner surveillance, aware that a call to arms might at any moment come, uncertain when or from where, assured only that theirs is an art of sleeplessness: of undying sleeplessness; of sleeplessness even in death. ∞ Let’s return here to Jackson’s 1610 eyewitness report. As much as Jackson seems to speak of Desdemona very ingenuously, he doesn’t take the scene as simply real: elsewhere in the letter he praises the “decorum” of the actors, which helped elicit many “tears” from the spectators; he clearly measures the effect of the performance against classical expectations of the arousal of pity (“spectantium misericordiam”); the acting is passionate, voice and face both plausible and expressive; there is a sense that this educated witness allows himself to be moved because the playing is appropriate; it is not too histrionic, it is finely judged, she spoke very plausibly. But still this begs one huge question. I am happy to let go the problem (or not) of the boy playing a girl. For this is really just a more specific application of a bigger scandal: that of someone playing someone else; or, to put it more strangely, of one person’s body being in the exact same place as another person. Now this, surely, is an impossible ghosting: made all the more strange if one of these bodies is supposed to die. Where, then, is the actor during these moments, in-between being smothered by the Othello-actor, and speaking these words from the nearly grave? Very little of Desdemona’s dying, the process of it, is detailed in the actor’s part. The part has no words at all during the whole period in which Emilia knocks at the door and Othello “smothers her”: a smothering which has about ten intra-speech-action cues asking Othello to renew the action, pressing down with body or pillow upon the Desdemona-actor:

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Dying for life: Desdemona Not dead? Not yet quite dead? I would not have thee linger in thy paine? So– So. By and by. Shee’s dead. The noyse was here [Quarto] Hah– No more moving? Still as the Grave. I thinke she stirres againe.

Each one of these speech-units either succeeds or precedes a pause, mostly in the middle of a line or in the cue-space, in which the Othello-actor should renew his assault. Desdemona has to endure it all, discover and act her excruciation, inside palpable ellipses: first, the gaps inside Othello’s speeches; second, the prop of the curtained bed; and third, the suspended cue-space. The actor is always Shakespeare’s fall-back existential pioneer, told to enter the spaces we fear, or dimly apprehend, or cannot help but remember. But what if the actor is bereft of the fiction’s or the profession’s familiar comforts? These will be moments when friends, story, costume, metaphor, prosody, the assumed relation with an audience – the role itself – might all somehow peel away, like so much rind, and reveal the palpitant within, or leave the actor groping, if only inside, for some passable repossession of purpose or function. The actor is made suddenly aware that he is not being carried by the forms; that he is not able to depend on their selfindependent force, but rather has to make them himself. The prospect to imagine here is the sliding away of function – not just a hiatus, or a moment of uncertain volition – but exile from the engine of sociality, when no one is calling for them, no one needs them, and the part slips towards its own event-horizon. Think of the actor; think of him as the real existent thing; think of the devices and conventions that render his world, that give motion and therein substance. Is it possible to withdraw them all? To have an evacuated world? Does Shakespeare ever do this to his actors? The murder of that, if he did it, this man for whom playlife is life, each instrument in it a source and measure of emotion.

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Perhaps he never quite does. Perhaps he never finally abandons his actor, up there on the scaffold: perhaps he never commits to that suicide. But think of the terrors of ignorance that he demands. Gloucester blinded, the Gloucester-actor, I believe, necessarily blindfolded. The Macbeth-actor often not knowing if he is speaking to anyone at all. The Edgar-actor, speaking the ruin of prose, the ruin of verse, in a lexis that intermittently, again and again, no one understands and no one hears, onstage or offstage.20 And then there are repeated cues. Their sustained employment throughout Shakespeare’s career, especially at moments of tragic passing, suggests that the technique per se developed for him its own existential pathos.21 Among the parts that end upon repeated cues are Richard III, Mercutio, Juliet, Falstaff, Brutus, Hamlet, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, Othello – and Desdemona: EMILIA.

Out, and alas, that was my ladies voice. Helpe, helpe hoa, helpe. Oh Ladie speake againe, Sweet Desdemona, oh sweet Mistris, speake. D E S D E M O N A . A guiltlesse death, I dye. E M I L I A . Oh who hath done this deed? D E S D E M O N A . No body: I my selfe, farewell: Commend me to my kinde Lord: oh farewell. O T H E L L O . Why, how should she be murdred?

(TLN 3387–94)

Recall how the technique works: an actor sees that his cue appears two or more times in close succession; he knows that a single articulation of the cue will elicit a fellow actor’s speech; and so the second or third occurrence of the cue-words potentially escape punctual succession, indeed escape the immediate context. When will they be spoken? Need they be spoken at all? If they are spoken, can anyone respond? What is the actor to do? There is no one to tell him but himself, and then perhaps no one to listen when he does. The very possibility of repeated cues becomes an allegory of the human contract: we enter and we leave this world alone; when most in need of others, when most in peril, when in danger of losing possession of our very 20 For the part-scripting of Macbeth, see Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 463–94. For Gloucester and Edgar-Tom, see Palfrey, Poor Tom. 21 See Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 157–307.

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selves, likewise we are alone. The actor is placed in-between the fiction and something else, something not-written, something only he can make. Not only is there no clear illocutionary context – the moment itself is somehow in abeyance, existentially bracketed. Is it happening at all? It steps out of theatre’s protective continuum, or is endued with its own weirdly precipitous fatality. The final cue passes away; it dies before it can be spoken; there is no need for it, no cause, or none that any other player can allow or enable or even recognise. All of those diers, in their dying, alone with cues that no one can ever answer, and so to which no formal or functional end can be granted. What of that condition? I’m reminded of Luther’s horror of solitude, his repeated admonitions to keep company, to ward off despair with wine and song and above all others, anything to produce heat and noise and obliviousness and to screen life on earth’s bewildered loneliness. With repeated cues, there is suddenly no noise at all, or none that speaks to you. The stage is sectioned, the role is in its own cocoon, the actor in a kind of white silence. Of course there is knowledge – Shakespeare’s actors knew the technique. But what happens when you cannot return from the neverending cue? When you die, and yet do not die, because you cannot die on stage, you can never finally be sure of dying, there may always be one more return, one more repeat – what of that? Does the cue take the knife for the role it serves? The cue passes into oblivion, into a no-space all of its own: and death is waylaid. The dying repeated cue at once speaks the imminence and impossibility of death. Shakespeare sees his creations in these horrid black spaces, where they hear everything – everything! – but must not move, must not intervene, must not let on that they survive. And the same goes, potentially, for all of the tragic souls whose passing is orchestrated by a repeated cue. The difference with Desdemona is that her suspension in the action of dying, encapsulated in the repeated cue, is extended into the scene’s action. And so when, exactly, does Desdemona bid her final “farewell”? There is absolutely no way of knowing. She could still be saying it; it might still be waiting to be said, a revocation of life and part that is forever deferred. Perhaps the actor simply sits on it, the unspoken echo of his own abandonment. Consider what happens to this actor, now that his character

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is presumed finally dead. He stays there, dead, for three hundred lines, addressed, stared at, hugged and prodded and turned and pointed at. What is more, the Desdemona-actor still has actorly cues for which he has to listen out – or, even worse, perhaps he has no cues on his part at all, and is instead assaulted without notice. Perhaps the dying Emilia, asking to be laid by her mistress’s side (TLN 3534), is borne easily enough. But what of Othello’s “Oh Desdemon! dead Desdemon: dead. Oh, oh!”? – in which it seems clear that the Desdemona-actor is manhandled by Othello, who frantically checks if his wife may still have life, if she can be resuscitated again, perhaps even resurrected; or when Othello finally dies, “Killing my selfe, to dye upon a kisse”, and collapses onto the prostrate body of his fellow player? The Desdemona-actor had to act alive from dead before; now he has to act dead in death. But still the Desdemona-part is not done with, not until the very last speech of the play: Lodovico’s “Looke on the Tragicke Loading of this bed”, before his final, disgusted instruction, “Let it be hid” (TLN 3676–9). And at last the curtain is drawn. Throughout this long scene the Desdemona-actor has been kept waiting, unable to visibly breathe, or flick open an eye, or get his body comfortable for the assaults to come. The whole contract is marked, for all parties – actor, characters, spectators – by protest: the feeling that this is wrong, that it shouldn’t be like this, or be done like this. This may be a protest on behalf of theatrical decorum: as Lodovico says, “The Object poysons Sight” (TLN 3678). How disgusting to be played in this way! It is hardly to be wondered that for many years the curtain was drawn on the whole scene, the murder not seen, the girl’s body kept hidden, Othello’s dying kiss not played, the “poisonous” closing tableau not to be imagined. Perhaps the actor survives inside death as our probationer of ultimate possibility, a refusal on behalf of life. He will rise from this death, with our blessing and knowledge, defying the final curtain. But Shakespeare, I think, takes things further. There is something still more primal than disgust (or its sophistications): and that thing is curiosity, the need to know, to open the envelope into untravelled space. This is what we do if we can endure such scenes without turning away, or taking refuge in moral dismay. And here again the actor is experience’s spaceman. How else to understand things here, when he is forced to persist, fully alert, in prevented, part-less silence? A body and mind, in

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the exact same place as a dead thing, aching, agonised, fearful, hopeful, forced not to move, but in every moment alert. If plays are about passion, in the fullest sense, then here is its consummate suffering (Shakespeare perhaps takes things still torturously further with Cordelia – assuming she is not a mannequin carried in by the Lear-actor – and with Hermione).22 Of course, who can tell if any particular actor, boy or man, thought anything. But Shakespeare felt it; the instruments feel it. Imagining the reality of anything, extrapolating possible worlds from impersonal technic – this is the key to Shakespeare, typically at work in this scene’s formactive meta-consciousness: in threatening the actor’s bodily self-control, opened to unpredicted assaults, the Desdemona-actor pummelled and punished in the gaps of his part; in abandoning the actor to blind folds of the scene, behind the curtain, or inside repeated cues; in composing a staggered departure from the scene, one of cuts or stages, granted and then annulled; and in creating a part which is complete and yet, in its completion, further assaulted, woken from its sleep, revoked in its perfection, and forced all the time to maintain an unearthly self-control, suppressing all sign of life, even as the adrenalin of purpose passes and attention should rightly be elsewhere: which it never quite is for the actor, who must always be centred in himself. The result is a sustained dramatising of the gradual, intermitted separation of life or mind or soul from body; of the strange, secret, gritty, sedulous survival of just such life and mind and soul even in a departed body, even in a departed body that yet cannot depart. As Stanley Cavell puts it: “The transcendental and the empirical crossing; possibilities shudder from it.”23 In cases like Desdemona’s dying, the character’s unquenchable life – a surviving that defies mimesis, defies naturalising coherences, defies common sense – supervenes upon the irreducible facts of play-composition, and the elusively doubled ontologies that result: the closing words of a speech are also always a cue; a named character is also always an actor: and so on. “Desdemona” is both absolutely alive, because the actor does not die, and the part subsists as a text – meaning the part can be played 22 On substitutions of unreal for real bodies or body parts on stage, see Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage, ch. 7. 23 Disowning Knowledge, 101.

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again and again – and absolutely dead, because her lungs have been punctured, she is haemorrhaging behind a cruel curtain, she is turning blue. She is unexploded and exploded, a living-and-dead superposition. Any presumed “persona” is not the ultimate reality, just as words speak actions that always belong to both an imaginary scene and a profession. If we infer a reality, whether persona or event, it is always an abstraction from the phenomena at work. Consequently, any “substance” which these phenomena serve has to encompass interdependent metaphysical layers – epitomised by the relationship between character, actor, and parttext. It is impossible to establish ontological priority, or which is the more real or factitious or synthetic, or which serves or sublates the other, or which is most in need of the others’ supplement. For the fact is that each is mortgaged – tied unto extinction – to the other. In some ways these instruments will be simultaneous and symbiotic, in some ways anachronous and untouching. And it is precisely this strange substance-swapping misprision which allows formactions to traverse otherwise unreachable territory; to assay the places we move into, perhaps as blanks, perhaps as sentient remainders, when the common senses have passed. ∞ The essential coordinates of theatre are strung between parties that in some ineluctable sense cannot know each other, cannot share affective or ontological ground. They do not share a common space-time. A character obviously has a different temporality to both actor and audience. The actor, when in character, is always on the stage, whereas the character may go anywhere. The actor leaves the stage, and the character is – who can say? Even the actor and the spectator, for the duration of the event, can never quite join, as even a lord and a loon might in life. The weird privilege of pretending transports the actor into some special space, beyond reach or interruption, even as his subsistence depends absolutely upon our remaining just where we are, and, beyond that, enjoying the fact of our enduring. They cannot reach each other – and yet they cannot exist without each other. Perhaps it is only a second-order attribute of theatre that it represents more or less familiar social actions. Perhaps the true representation is found in theatre’s ghostly metaphysics: granting as-if real status to what we know

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are simulacra; allowing instantaneous credence to the possibility of anything said, such that if it is spoken it is, whether the thing is an emotion, a purpose, or a place. Actions on stage – paradigmatically speech-actions – have spontaneous reality. We know that this reality is chimerical. But perhaps the chimera is our real; perhaps plays move us because they show how insubstantial – how merely phenomenal – our daily bodies are; perhaps our moment-by-moment sensations are representations of a prior but inaccessible substance. Who can possibly know? Be that as it may, it seems likely that the rare intimacy of playworlds is because whatever we experience is at once new to the moment and preformed. It has never happened before: yet it is projected by and answerable to something ontologically prior. Not only because the “play” or “speech” or “character” exists, as both achievement and potential, before any particular enactment of it: but because the body that makes the move, the voice that speaks the words, even the face that smiles or grimaces, is not quite the thing, though it is absolutely coincident with it, and the truething is inadmissible, unexistent, without this body. The actor-as-carrier is thus the most obvious example of a principle that governs the whole playworld. Reality is holographic. These creatures, for all their unique self-sufficiency, are never ultimately their own. This is the other side of the pathos I have tried to invoke throughout my book – the pathos of atomised playlife, a trope, or cue-space, condemned to repeat its specific passion. There is unimpeachable integrity in this suffering, but almost because of this – because it cannot waver or die – it can always get left behind for another day. I say again what I said of Perdita: there is no getting off the play-train. Concomitantly, there is no release from its responsibilities. This is Shakespeare’s suffering. Play isn’t just play. In the divinity-lapsed world of Shakespeare, it is the real thing. This, I take it, is Shakespeare’s inescapable premise. His playworlds have to take it all on, all possibility, without remission, without once even blinking. And this means his formactions: they take on experience, without release in gods or in death, and still less in some get-out clause that says that this is all, in the end, merely play-acting. Macbeth lives this as sin, guilt, despair; Desdemona dies it as half-incredulous ecstasy. In doing so each part brings horrible life to the sleepless responsibilities of Shakespearean formactions.

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Obviously these instruments per se are not guilty. But they are burdened, inescapably, with whatever they are charged to do. They can be missed or ignored for centuries: but once attend to them, and there they shall be, moving as their passion. Each formaction is this passion, condemned to it inescapably; it only sounds at our notice, but pay attention and it is there: plucked (suffering the world) and vibrating (expressing its world). To believe in this, as I think Shakespeare does, is to give rare and undying power to their existing, a power that really is strangely ethical. It occurs to me that every one of Shakespeare’s instruments at once suffers and communicates the strenuous call of what Levinas terms substitution: experience as an “unlimited accusative”, in which one is responsible for what one did not will, for the struggles one undergoes, and therein the duty, remote from subjective freedom, to become the hostage of another, to take on the burden without the remotest thought that the burden can be abated.24 Perhaps this sounds an unlikely anthropomorphism. But surely it would be far more absurd to expend such attention were these things not strangely ahead of us, suffering in ways we can learn from. How else can it be that we are still struggling to be worthy of them, as they struggle to be worthy of their own worlds? We only need touch them as they shiver, feel these forms in their nakedness, and we should likewise tremble at the access to unfinishable possibility. No doubt such passion cannot compare to the richness of a human life. No human could ever want it! But playlife is also exemplary: more spare, more pared, more existentially committed to the specific responsibilities that give it breath. This is what it can mean to embody possible worlds.

24 ‘Substitution’., 90–1. Levinas: “Will it be said that the world weighs with all its suffering and all its fault on the ego because this ego is a free consciousness, capable of sympathy and compassion? . . . Let us admit for a moment a free ego, capable of deciding for solidarity with others. At least it will be recognized that this freedom has no time to assume this urgent weight, and that consequently it is as checked or undone under the suffering. It is impossible to evade the appeal of the neighbour, to move away. One approaches the other perhaps in contingency, but henceforth one is not free to move away from him. The assumption of the suffering and the fault of another nowise goes beyond the passivity: it is a passion. This condition or unconditionality of being a hostage will then at least be an essential modality of freedom, the first, and not an empirical accident of the freedom, proud in itself, of the ego”: Otherwise than Being, 128.

Epilogue: life on the line

There is a spider, and she lives along the line. Each line seems enormous to her. Her little feet move as quickly as she can move them, but still it is an effort to scale a single letter. Each word is a hump, full of lumps and divots and abrasions; a long clause can feel like a mountain range, flushed with ravines and thunderous streams. There are dangers at every touch. For the line never stops moving. She scales a word, scuttles up and down its contours, but every time she thinks she’s secure something happens – suddenly it lurches, or a vast chasm opens up, or a whole new stretch of terrain starts growing, literally, as she touches what she thought was finished. The problem, she grows to realise, is that these things aren’t really solid at all, however big and immovable they look. The solidity is a sort of joke, she has come to think, a trick to repel the lazy and then trap the unwary. She is slowly, very slowly, learning to enjoy the travel. The secret is to step very carefully, press down as delicately as possible upon the surface, and feel for those little tell-tale movements, when the surface crimples, or depresses, or promises to crack. Press a little closer, gently, delicately, and the crack will start to widen. And here’s the secret. You don’t get scared of the crack, or scamper away from it, because you fear the ground is unsteady. No: you enter the crack – because in truth there is no ground at all! Through the crack, there are caverns to explore, caverns that are made for spiders like her. This is what she has realised. The spider-life is truest when it gets off the ground – gets off its feet – and starts living along the line. She can hang in the air, bobbing up and down like an angel, observing the world around her. She can swing on her silk, kite into unknown lands, allow the wind to take her where it will. She can build a nest, a little pup tent, and shelter and moult and build. She can make a web, and watch the life that attaches. She has her needs as well as pleasures. But

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she knows, more than anything, how small she is, and how vulnerable, suspended in one then another cavern, aware that this world is never at a stop. She has her favourite caverns. She gets scared of the ones inside words: they seem never-ending, so busy and fraught with history. She rarely dwells in the middle of lines – she feels all of those heads turning, violent switches, shadowy memories, heavy portents that rarely come to good. And as for those cue-spaces – the electricity is murderous, and all of that doubt as well: best leave them to the combatants. No: the caverns she likes are at the end of the line. She likes to hang on her own sticky line and slowly swing in these spaces. She likes them for their quiet. No one spends any time there, always rushing off to the next line. They seem to her hushed plains, where busyness is abated, where the fact that life murmurs on elsewhere grants to this place a dozy horizontal ease, as of an after-dinner nap. She could sway on her pendulum and happily drift into sleep. She could do so, if only she didn’t have such eyes! Eyes, eyes, everywhere, and not a lash to blink. She has seen other creatures, large stomping thunderboots, crushing lives that they don’t even know are there, staring ahead, seeing only what is in front of them, trampling through grassland, at every step getting swathed in pollen and gossamer and never appearing to notice. Strange oblivion! She finds it hard to believe there could be such privation. But then perhaps it is a blessing. She has too many eyes for sleep. Every other spider manages to nod off: not this one. Eight eyes, every one of them a world! Can you imagine? She gets a couple closed, sometimes even four, but that is about it. Every time she begins dreaming of sleep she sees something move, or emerge out of darkness, or turn from what she thought was grey nothingness into some brand-new creature, luminous and staring in its pain. She can see all the way around: 360 degrees of watching! It’s a blessing, she knows that, she’s thankful for it, it keeps her alive – but still. Can you imagine? It means there is no such thing as ahead or behind. Everything is here, moving before her eyes. And not only that. She is also blessed – her mother told her to keep it secret, and she has, she has – with tetrachromatic sight! Imagine seeing in four dimensions. Imagine ultra-violet vision. Everything glows! More than that, it means she can see the history behind objects, untold years of it, unpeeled to her eyes. She can see ghosts! But they’re not ghosts – not the sheeted ghosts of the dead – they are lives, forgotten or lurking, human and not, left alone at the end of the line.

361

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Perhaps she sees too much; perhaps she does. But she sees, and she feels for what she sees. These lives are not to be denied. Once seen, they must be felt, turning slowly in the gap between lines: Threescore and ten I can remember well____________ So many memories, far too many to speak, but here they dwell, waiting to be addressed . . . And my Imaginations are as foul____________ As foul? As foul as what? As foul as that? Endless similes, waiting for recognition, and every one complicit . . . And being troubled with a raging tooth____________ Poor tooth! Can you hear it rage? Infinite points of feeling, every second a torture, and none there to share the pain . . . Fetch me this herb, and be thou here again____________ How on earth to be here, now, again? Returned before he departed, how swift the move, multiple places to exist in at once . . . For which, if I be lapsed in this place____________ In this place, a lapsed man, a lapsed life, what can it mean to live as a lapse . . .? And to the field goes he; where every flower____________ Every single flower? Every one? This flower, that flower, this one, another . . . The fair Ophelia. Nymph, in thy Orizons____________ Every waking moment, on your knees, in your prayers, murmuring, murmuring; and then every dead moment, in your horizons (can you hear the boy’s cruel joke?) you have floated away, over the evident lip, only nearly out of sight, and soon enough you will almost disappear . . . Defiles the pitchy night, so lust doth play____________ The play doth replay, over and over, a shuttered ecstasy, black night not dark enough, so they tumble and squeeze, squirting pitch, as if we cannot see; as if memory can shut down; as if they are not at it still; as if her experience could be new; as if it could not; as if it is not happening again, just like that, over and over, here and there and everywhere; as if she is anything but taken, possessed by lust, melted into allegory, she and all the rest of them; as if it can be so reduced; as if her thought is not

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a wonder, lust is vigour, lust plays, play is possibility, possibility is now and then and to come; as if as if as if as if as if enough . . . With violent hefts: I have drunk, and seen the Spider____________ See the spider seeing, drink and risk the violence, see what you dread or dream. The spider lives the Shakespeare-worlds. Weaving its golden mesh, trapping hearts, life on the line – awake!1 1 The spider’s lines: Old Man in Macbeth, 925; Hamlet in Hamlet, 1934; Iago in Othello, 2062; Oberon to Puck in Dream, 550; Antonio in Twelfth Night, 1504; Alexander about Hector in Troilus, 166; Hamlet to Ophelia, Hamlet, 1743; Helena in All’s Well, 2466; Leontes in Winter’s Tale, 642.

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Index

action at a distance, 22, 174, 213, 222 actor: attention of 56–7; body 351, 355–6, 356–7; challenge to 56–66; choices 25, 58–9; and cues 124–5, 353–5; dependent ontology 214, 357–8; doubling 277; ensemble, 64, 350; excluded from knowledge 54–5, 64, 213–14, 352–3; as existential allegory 129, 132, 331, 351; existential pioneer 352–3; experience 58–60, 350–7; manuals 61–2; in Marlowe 72–5; in Middleton, 99; and monads 112; relation to character 12, 59–60, 186, 341–2, 349–50, 355–8; Shakespeare’s intimacy to 61; survived by formactions 129–30, 354–7; visible body 3, 7, 130; writing parts to 56, 330–1 actor’s part, 12, 13, 19, 349–50, 351; opening scenic possibilities 56–60 see also actor; cue; cue-space; repeated cues Adorno, Theodor, 210n12, 234n12 Agamben, Giorgio, 151, 230 allegory: character as 32; particularity of 130–1; predilection for 7; proneness to 14 All’s Well That Ends Well, 214, 276 anachronism: as error 147; necessity of 147–8, 159; Shakespeare’s 174 anachrony, 41, 148–55, 174–5, 256–7 animism, 111n6, 218–19 see also corpuscularism anti-theatricalism, 43–4, 52, 54–5 Antony and Cleopatra, 94, 214 Arden of Faversham, 48 Aristotle, 67, 124, 129, 135, 143, 189, 208–9; actuality v potentiality 213–16; mimesis 199–200 asides: in Marlowe 72, 74; living as 136–7 As You Like It, 276

attention: delicate 4, 7–8, 19, 41–2, 280; ethics of 286–7, 290–4, 310, 314–15; how close 206–7 see also memory; understanding audience: acting before 123; complicity 288–95, 309–10; future 40; individuals in 39–40; Jonson’s, 52–3; layered 40–1; London theatres 44–6; partially alienated 38–40, 54–5; responsibilities 286–7 see also spectator Augustine, 104, 341 autopoeisis, 47, 123, 129 Ax, H., 172–3 Bacon, Francis, 203, 213, 222 Badiou, Alain, 239, 287 Barba, Eugenio, 65–6 Barish, Jonas 51, 52n12, 185n3 Barthes, Roland, 12n4 Barton, Anne, 129, 202n6 Beatrice (Much Ado) 47 Beaumont, Francis, 49 Benjamin, Walter, 151–2, 234n12 Berger Jr., Harry, 333 Bergson, Henri, 150, 239–40, 252n6, 255, 272 Berry, Ralph, 254n8 Blair, Hugh, 209 Blau, Herbert, 294 Bohm, David, 256 Boileau, Nicholas, 67, 189 Booth, Stephen, 40, 277n4, 289n6, 292n8 Booth, Wayne, 286n2 Borges, Jorge Luis, 158 Bradley, A. C., 322 Bristol, Michael D., 304n3 Brook, Peter, 11–12, 192–3 Bruno, Giordano, 6n2, 111, 213, 218, 219 Bruster, Douglas 78n3

375

376

Index

Bryant, Levi R., 131 Budra, Paul, 101n2 Burke, Edmund, 98, 288–9 Byron, Lord, 287–8 Campanella, Tommaso, 213, 219 Campbell, Mary Baine, 6n2 Cassirer, Ernst, 67–8 Cavell, Stanley, 39, 294, 323n9, 349n19, 356 Cavendish, Margaret, 222 Chapman, George, 69, 90n1 character: constitution 32, 316–17, 318, 349–50, 356–7; doesn’t define playlife 3, 7; embryology 23, 25; graduated arrival 24; human and non-human 316–17; processes of composition 21–3, 27–30; subjective dispossession 328–9; sympathy with, 7; unique temporality 357 see also actor; individuality Charnes, Linda, 172n7 Christological thinking, 14, 167–8 Chubb, Louise, 48 Cicero, 179 Coleridge, S. T., 135, 209, 223, 291, 340n15 comedies: structured for forgetfulness 282–4, 314–15 Comedy of Errors, the 189 Coriolanus, 214, 353 corpuscularism 218–21 counterfactuals 277–8, 304–5 critical methodology 17–18 cues, 7, 12, 56, 57, 59, 124–5, 131, 140 see also cue-space; repeated cues cue-space, 12, 57, 123, 140, 330 dance, 254–5, 257, 272–4 da Vinci, Leonardo, 194, 207, 210 death: impossibility on stage 186, 350; despairing of 324; and repeated cues 353–4; and scenic telepathy 337 de Grazia, Margreta, 147–8 Deleuze, Gilles, 208–9, 239 Democritus, 111n6, 116 Derrida, Jacques, 240 Descartes, Rene, 111n6, 118, 122, 211, 219–22 Desdemona (Othello): actor’s face 331–2; and Barbarie 345, 347; between life and death 334–5, 337, 341; body 338; eyewitness report of dying 331–2, 351; experience of dying 346–7; final words 333–4; ghost 342–3, 344–5, 347; logistics

of murder scene 332–3, 338–40, 343; protests 334; relation to actor’s body 342; returning voice 334–5, 346; superpositions 342; travel of dying 338, 343, 345; virtualized 342; wordplay 342 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 155 Dirac, P. A. M., 206–7 disguise 32, 60, 123, 131, 133–4, 138, 214, 247, 329 Dolozel, Lubomir, 16n10, 130n10 Donne, John, 13, 14 Dryden, John, 209 dumb show 57, 68, 194, 278, 298, 302–4, 335 Edmond (Lear): allegory of playlife 32; conception 21–5, 27–30; lack of control over part 32, 63; like Shakespeare 28; meta-theatrical 28, 31–2; psychology 27 Edward II (Marlowe), 50 Einstein, Albert, 341n17 El Greco, 207 Eliot, T. S., 19n13, 90 empirical knowledge: approximate 155–6; artworks separate from 152n20; insufficient 35, 173, 208, 284, 348; and Middleton 106; and monads 116; and the transcendental 349n19, 358 Empson, William 196n15, 198, 209 entrances, 68, 74n7, 138, 187, 334; ambiguated 57, 59, 73, 276, 339 Erasmus, 179 event: ambiguity of 341–2; of experiment 154; of history 154–5; of the play 15, 43–6 exits, 57, 124, 126, 186, 187, 261, 276, 307 Falstaff, 47; embodying formactive historicity 183–6; exceeding plot 185–6 Fenves, Peter 230–1 Fernie, Ewan, 286n1 Ford, John, 90n1 formactions, 3, 32; anachronic 8; autopoetic 123–4, 129; beyond notice 347–8; close attention to 11; contingent on notice 275, 315, 341; craft-specific 15, 124, 125, 128–9, 132–3, 217, 254–5; definition 123–4; distinguished from form/ formalism 144–5; embodied in characters 186, 329; full of action, 11–12, 14, 160; generic 128–9; and hylomorphic thinking 144; hypostasizing 145–6; latent playlife 7, 9,

Index 35, 210–12, 232; measuring possibility 341; monadic 117–21; more than actions 125; not always articulated 330; own conatus 7, 12, 58; as possible subject 131–46, 316; potential for life 33, 55, 123–36, 216, 274, 315, 355–7; prehending political possibility 164, 166, 175–6, 184–5; and repetition 125–6, 254–5; residual characteristics 132–3; suffering possibility 358–9; temporally staggered 125, 127, 256 figurative language see metalepsis; metaphor; wordplay; words Finch Conway, Anne, 111n6 Focillon, Henri, 124, 128, 151 Foerster, Heinz von, 63 forgetting see memory Fracastoro, 219 futurity, 127–8, 217, 237; Plotinian 216; presupposed by dense forms 39–40 gaps: see intervals genre, 46; ethical teleology 304, 309; exceeded 149, 152, 185; morality 309–10; neoclassical 67; permissions 282, 300, 302, 309; pre-emptive 12, 88, 280–1; theory 67–8 grammar: recursive 13, 14, 164, 166, 253 Greene, Robert: Friar Bacon 71–2 Gross, Kenneth, 273n23 Hallyn, Fernand, 219 Hamlet, 54, 60–1, 144, 149, 214, 276, 278, 287, 294; Claudius’s soliloquy 193–7 Harman, Graham, 138–40 Hazlitt, William, 135, 190, 197, 210 hearing, 60, 62, 63, 113, 242, 254; first hearing not enough 182, 330; and touch 4 Hegel, G. W. F., 9, 132 Heidegger, Martin, 138 1 Henry IV, 98; opening scene 163–76, 183 2 Henry IV, 161–2 Henry V, 34, 186 Herbert, George, 13 Herder, Johann Gottfried: hearing over sight 62–3; influenced by Leibniz 17, 234–5; life in everything 134–6; Shakespeare’s dynamism 235–7; resistance to preformation 238–9; world in characters 34n2 Heywood, Thomas, 335n9 historicism: assumptions 149–51; causation 150, 154, 174

377 history: discontinuous 148–51, 157–8, 161–2, 167–70; forward and backward 33, 154–5, 157, 160; getting closer to 19, 154; as latent promise 152–4, 162–3, 167–8; and memory 148; superimposed narratives of 170–3; typological 153, 168–9, 173–4, 184; unfinished 186 Hobbes, Thomas, 222 Hope, Jonathan, 81 holographic reality 194, 195–6, 358 Hooke, Robert, 222 Horace, 67, 189 Hutson, Lorna, 50n 9, 51, 57n3, 284n1 Huygens, Christiaan, 256n11, 274 imagination: escape from 270; faith in 218; former states of 118; Macbeth’s 299; our 10, 153, 175, 212, 299; as possibility 230; self-visions of 328, 344; Shakespeare’s 6, 10, 37, 56, 187; for Spinoza 224–5; of the subvisible 220–1; technically informed 10 improvisation: essential for invention 10 incompossibles, 9, 90, 203, 211–12, 228–9, 241; codependency with possibles 232 individuality: of audience member 40, 287; Bruno’s ‘minima’ 218; and collective 168, 313, 351; constituted by perceptions 120; discrete substance 114, 265; and fixity of props 130; fraction as 317; and genus/species 68, 216; inferred 318; as mobile event 121, 254; naturalized 3, 318; nested 121, 131, 224, 265–7; pre- 141–2; as potential 46, 92; as privation 226; resistance to concept of 142–3; as shadow 328; shared 9; as singularity 253, 318; supra-subjective 9, 112, 316; trace in pre-consciousness 211; of artwork 234n12 see also character; monad ingeniousness, 148–9 instruments of playlife see formactions intervals: Desdemona’s 346; life in 55, 109, 112, 116, 128, 280, 347; and metalepsis 181; need to enter, 7, 41, 175–6, 271, 279–81; 298–9, 330, 335; in part-text 56, 57–8, 271 Irigiray, Luce, 63 Jackson, Henry, 331–2, 351 Jacobean tragedy, 90–1 Jew of Malta (Marlowe), 50 Johnson, Samuel 209

378

Index

Jones, Emrys, 163n1, 207n4, 276n2 Jonson, Ben, 62, 67, 156, 189, 309; Alchemist, 52, 53; anti-theatricalism, 51–2; Bartholomew Fair, 48, 51, 53; corrective to Shakespeare 53–4, 209; forms, 52–3; scenes 50–1; Sejanus 97 Julius Caesar, 276–7, 353 Kant, Immanuel, 144, 220n16, 238, 288, 306, 309 Keats, John, 37n5, 135 Kermode, Frank, 5 Kerrigan, John, 78n1, 90, 102 Kierkegaard, Soren, 90, 158, 317, 325n11; Fear and Trembling 309–10; fear of the good 327; life as shadow 328; the mimical 321n5; necessity and possibility 322, 326 King Lear, 21–33, 102, 149, 287, 353; EdgarTom 23, 32, 214, 278, 353; opening exchange 21–5 see also Edmond Kleist, Heinrich von, 272–4 Knapp, James A., 222n21 Knight of the Burning Pestle (Beaumont), 49 Koselleck, Reinhart, 153–4 Kottman, Paul, 62n9, 133n13

117–20, 239–40; natural machines 110; no two things the same 109, 253–4; and passion 122; pendulum 274; plenum 110–12, 115; poetry of 237; possibles 110–11, 241–2; preformation 114, 119, 228, 238–40; and Spinoza 223; substance is action 109–11, 120; present big with past and future 116, 119; pyramid of possible worlds 211, 229–32; time and space 116; waves of the sea 242 see also monad Leighton, Angela, 127 Lessing, Gotthold, 233 Levinas, Emmanuel, 148, 295n14, 347n18, 359 Lewis, David 16, 137–8, 278, 304–5 line: end of 123, 143; enjambed 163–5; half-line 175–6; living in-between 318, 324, 360–2 Locke, John, 117–18, 222 Locrine, 48, 49, 170 Longinus, 286 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 14, 180, 283 Lucretius, 63n12, 111 Luther, Martin, 354 Lyne, Raphael, 181n16

Lacan, Jacques, 306 Lady’s Tragedy (Middleton), 80, 91; answerable to plot 92; ethical absolutes 93–7; Lady 95–6, 101–2, 105; magnetized by death 98, 100–2; love 99; politics 96–7; primal scene 103–4, 105; repetitions 93–4, 96, 103; Shakespearean influences 94–5; Tyrant 97, 98–105 Latour, Bruno, 153n22 Leibniz, Gottfried, 16–17, 128, 138, 140, 152, 194, 208–9; aesthetics 118; apperception 117–18, 242; best of all possible worlds 229–32, 241–2, 280; calculus 115n22, 117n28, 150n12; criticisms of 238–40; differences from Shakespeare 228–9; dynamics 122; and embodiment 111–13; energy (kinetic and potential) 274; and field theory 122, 254; fractal creation 109; and God 109, 114, 119, 228; harmony 233; holography 119; and imagination 234; impossibility of death 116; influence on Herder 62, 234–7; law of continuity 114–16; life of 228–30, 233–4; limitations 317; model for critical method 18; model of unconscious 118; monadic playworld 109–11, 116,

Macbeth, 5–6, 36, 40–1, 83, 178, 214, 232, 280–1, 305, 318–29, 335, 353; and Middleton 83, 94–5, 98; Duncan’s killing 276–7; challenge of witnessing 285, 286–96, 315 see also Macbeth Macbeth: captivity to play 318, 328, 358; composition 319–20; couplets 320–1; disintegrity 319–21; formaction man 329; life as rehearsal 322, 325, 328; living antinomies 323–4; living as mime 322–3; and possibility 322, 326–7; subjection to time 325–6; virtuality as actuality 320; simulacra 321–2, 328 machinic life, 3, 7, 53, 58, 63, 136n21, 194, 219, 220–1; character as 316; organic 110, 113, 235 see also puppetry Mack, Maynard, 25 Mack, Peter, 197n16 Mahood, M. M., 274n25 Mallin, Eric 279n8 Marina (Pericles): abduction 299–302; bearing repetitions 312, 313–14; de-individuation 314; and event-erasure 306–7; as Isaac-figure 310;

Index meta-awareness 312–13; responsibilities 313–14; as sign 311–12; speech 313; vulnerability 306–8 Marion, Jean-Luc, 104–5 Marlowe, Christopher, 13, 48, 49, 50, 190; Edward II 72–3; Faustus 47, 48–9, 80, 83, 84, 287; Jew of Malta 74–5; Tamburlaine 74n1 Marston, John, 69, 70, 90n1 Matisse, Henri, 210 Measure for Measure, 95, 201–5, 214, 271 memory: as apperception 117; and characterisation 25, 99; and cognition 65, 312; in comedy 282; creating place 33; at end of the line 123, 143; as error 225, 227; ethical importance of 263–4, 266, 267, 284, 287, 305, 314, 316, 324, 345; as fancy/imagination 221, 227; forward 93, 175, 258, 284, 345; intrinsic to playworlds 6; irrevocable 335; of materials 205, 257, 270; as nostalgia 321, 324; physical 314; and possibility 324, 327; and props 130, 270, 336; recovered 325n11; scenic connections 260, 269; temporal folds 148, 241; and topology of art 127; of words 23, 70, 225 see also scene Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 39, 222n21, 251n5 metalepsis 7, 13, 141, 180–1, 189, 193–4, 195, 197, 348; characters as metaleptic 32, 37, 318, 324; Middleton’s 86 metaphor, 141, 174, 206; alive with action 14, 23–4, 114, 200, 204–5, 254; entering 123; creative 199–200; and Leibniz 114, 120–1; non-Shakespearean 70; predictive 22–3 see also metalepsis; wordplay metatheatricality 202, 204–5 see also formactions metonym, 23, 141, 181, 188, 195, 335, 348; creation as 197, 318; not distinguished from metaphor 114; self-metonyms 349 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 65 Michelangelo, 194, 207, 210 Middleton, Thomas: and actors 79; allegorical places 82–3, 84–6; and collaboration 79; and genre 77–8; Changeling, 80, 99–100, 103; Chaste Maid in Cheapside 88–90, 95, 103; language 80–1, 84, 86, 324; and Moralities 94, 104; and predestination 77–9, 89–90, 100, 103; Revenger’s Tragedy 77–8, 99; scenic relationships

379 79–80, 83, 85, 101–3; Spanish Gypsy 79; spectacle 78, 102, 105–6; Two Gates of Salvation 79n4; Women Beware Women 78, 80, 96, 103; writing to plots, 77, 79; Yorkshire Tragedy 81–7 see also Lady’s Tragedy Midsummer Night’s Dream, a, 14, 332 Milton, John, 13, 14, 38, 80, 308 mime 60, 65, 83, 124, 126, 127, 157, 197n17, 214, 286, 289, 297, 302–4, 321, 322–3 mimesis: exceeding traditional 129, 199, 330–1, 338; Shakespearean 201–6, 323–4 modalities, 13, 162, 163, 165; imperative 45, 156, 168, 185, 190, 240; intensity of 294; of Middleton 99, 100; modal realism 36, 134, 137, 254; optative 156, 250, 254, 324; simultaneous 171, 191; subjunctive 156, 191, 248, 263, 288, 291, 324; transfiguring 206 monad, 119–20, 134, 138–9; not anthropomorphic 119; as crystallographic point 116–17; connection to bodies 111–13; expressing events 120; as language 120; isomorphic with God 119; levels of individuality 121; material monads 238; mobile mirror of possibility 119–20; perception as expression as being 117–18, 120, 121; proliferating subjectivity 121, 241–2; repetition of universe 114; as subject 120; as theatrical subject 120–1 Morton, Timothy, 8–9, 128n6, 207n5 Mucedorus, 47, 48, 49, 74 Much Ado About Nothing, 278, 280, 282–5 Nagel, Alexander 127n5, 157n32, 173 nature: made afraid 53–4, 309 Neill, Michael, 335 neoclassicism, 67, 88, 189, 209 neoplatonism see Plotinus Newton, Isaac, 235, 238; calculus 117n28; model of playworld 121–2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 321n4, 323n10 Novarina, Valere, 179, 182n17 object-oriented philosophy 138–40 original sin, 14, 22, 78–9, 80, 84, 92, 96, 103, 196, 203 Othello, 62, 214, 278, 301; curtain 334, 335, 337–8, 348–9; stage materials 337–8; willow scene 344–5 see also Desdemona

380

Index

Paracelsus, 219 Parker, Patricia, 157n31 parts: and whole 220n16; differential reality 349; inside a part 318; moveable 48; not determined by whole 12, 34, 39, 149, 218, 242, 253; not burying 263; play not organic whole 47, 58; self-determining 12, 58, 64, 124, 317; soul in each 234 see also formactions part-text see actor’s part passion: acting of 61–2, 179, 351; action as 61–2, 268; ours, 7, 292, 308; distribution of, 7, 58, 122, 135, 169, 219, 223, 241, 299, 316; drama as 224, 275, 356; of forms/instruments 74, 125, 126, 132, 358–9; individual suffering 32, 34, 73, 90, 169, 248–9, 318, 356; ontological condition 122, 186, 219, 274, 317; beyond passivity 295, 308; of possibility 328; state of projection 197; and rhetoric 179; scenic definition 79, 170; and sublime 268; submission to the event 292, 317; switches 68; un-freedom 225–7 pastoral, 71–2, 102, 168, 247, 249, 262–3, 266, 283, 313, 315 Perdita (Winter’s Tale) 47; composition 258–62, 268, 271, 274; event erasure 305–6; existential peril 247–8, 273; multiple births 258–9, 260–1; possible lives 245, 249, 256, 260; praise of 248–9, 249–50; responsibilities 259, 265–9, 271, 315, 358; subjection 249, 265–6, 273, 315 Pericles, 278, 281; allegorical mode 297–8, 300; changes from sources 307; complicit witnessing 301–2, 308, 310; ellipses 298–9, 301; mime-like 297, 302, 303; Marina-scenes 297–314; romance teleology 300, 308–9, 311; scenic recapitulations, 310–12; sexual violence 297, 301–2, 306–8; 310–12; substitutions 302–3, 315; textual corruption 298 see also Marina Peters, Julie Stone, 197n17 Phelan, Peggy 127 philosophy: and poetry 17, 317–18 Pinter, Harold, 91 place: of actor’s body 132, 351; anterior 138; of asides 136; compounded 23, 155, 157, 197; defined 35; made by words 22, 36, 188, 189, 191–2, 358; metamorphic 6, 155, 189, 260; metaphysical 5, 33–4,

82–6, 100, 217, 324, 334–8, 342; mobile 160; not uniform 109; object/subject as 36; opened-up 57; primal 103; and props 348; rooted 260; and scenes 126, 128; simultaneous/superimposed 5, 33, 165, 169, 210; of sound 63n12; and space 116; subjective 324–5; virtual 130, 168, 255, 293; of witnessing 295 see also interval; playworld Plato, 111n6, 143, 145, 191 playlife see formactions playworld: beyond the local 91–2; distinctive ecology/ontology 5–7, 8–9, 15, 160, 217, 234–6; dynamic with appetite 240; physics 248, 292; preformed 240–1; temporality 157–9; worlds within worlds 33–5 see also place; temporality plot: backstage 187; exceeding 185; forward and backward 158–9; more than evident 4, 163, 291–2, 294–6 see also plot scenarios plot scenarios: competing formaction 117; inadequate to scene 163; influence on playmaking 69–70, 88; limited influence on Shakespeare 187; making of 68–9; and Middleton 77–9; Newtonian model 122; philosophical/theological implications 77; residue of 298; and scenes 70–2; Troilus 149n9 Plotinus 124, 191, 216–17 Poole, Adrian, 293n9, 295 popular theatre, 43–6; formal looseness 47–50; scenic freedom 48–50; socially/ politically proleptic 46, 150–1, 232 possibility, 3, 7; Aristotelian 213–15; as actuality 37, 160; concentration of 11; contra actuality 214–15, 294; contra probability 213; existential 319–22; dynamic specimens 128; as forward memory 284; historical and spiritual 14, 46, 150–5, 159, 211–12; neo-classical 67–8; philosophers of 16 see also potentiality possible worlds philosophy 16 potentiality, 3, 7, 9, 67–9, 215; Aristotelian 140, 214–16; for life 33; of metaphor 199; monadic 121; resistance to concept of 140, 153n22 see also possibility props 15, 335–6 prosody, 163–5, 251–2

Index Proust, Marcel 313n9 puns: see wordplay puppet, 48, 78n1, 105, 136n21, 255, 267, 272–4 Puttenham, George, 157n31, 177–8, 179 Quintilian, 179 quantumised worlds, 5, 277, 324 Rabkin, Norman, 33n1, 42n11, 156n27 Rape of Lucrece, 229, 232 reading: closely 11, 15–16 Rembrandt, 210 repeated cues, 276, 353–4, 356; Falstaff 185–6; in Marlowe 74–5 repetition: differential 253, 254; and graduated reality 309, 312; immanent to theatre 125–6, 289–91; and interconnected life 264–5; our returning to the event 292–6, 304, 314–15; shuttered moments 324–5 Ricoeur, Paul 199–200, 206 Rivere de Carles, Nathalie, 336n11 rhetoric, 177–8; and actors 179; style exceeding definitions 35–6, 163–5, 181–2, 249–50; diagesis inadequate 167, 169, 177; indebtedness to 179–80 rhyme 15, 19, 31, 32, 117, 123, 131, 138, 320–1 Richard II, 14, 34–5, 163, 165, 169, 172n7, 180, 200–1, 353 Richard III, 75–6, 353 Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa, 333 Roach, Joseph R., 61n6, 179, 336n11 Romeo and Juliet, 14, 73, 94, 346, 353 Rowley, William, 79, 80, 90 Ryan, Marie Laure, 16n9 Scarry, Elaine, 8, 249n2 scenes, 7, 126–7; afterlife 47; constructed like language 208; forward and backward 23, 174, 208, 257, 264–5, 269, 326–7, 330; gaps between 123, 128, 202, 278, 280–1, 306, 308, 330; hyper-scenes 12, 57, 126, 208, 323–5; as joke 282–3; living in 276–80, 324–5; produced my metaphor 15, 21–3, 126, 196–7; reported 188–9, 192, 193, 246–7, 290; scenes within scenes 25, 126, 167–8, 171–2, 187, 208; specular 277, 282–3, 310–11 Schiller, Friedrich, 135, 156 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 234n12 Schrodinger, Erwin, 275n1, 341

381 senses: heightened 4; insufficient 4, 6, 35, 62, 155–6, 241–2; contra sentience 8–9 Serres, Michel, 150, 211, 230, 245 Shelley, P. B., 36 Shylock (Merchant of Venice) 75 Sidney, Philip, 67, 88, 319–20; Apology for Poetry 189–92, 245 sight: Cartesian 221–2; co-active with hearing 63; lack of 290; not sufficient 4, 15, 35, 57, 62, 145, 200–1; truth claims 277–8, 284–5 see also subvisible silence: active 13, 24, 124; attending to 7, 63; Edmond’s 24, 32; end of actor’s part 342, 354, 355; end of the line 143; and exits 276; Hero’s 285; impossible 4; leap from 321; Perdita’s 271 simile: illustrative 69; epic 70; Middleton 81; and touch of life 37; Webster 70; Wittgenstein on Shakespeare’s 209 Simondon, Gilbert, 141–2, 144n33 Sloterdijk, Peter, 218, 233n10 sources, 149, 153, 307 Spanish Tragedy, 47 spectator, 6, 40, 61, 62, 65, 92, 145, 158, 179, 207n4, 241, 254, 293, 295, 331, 337, 351; Cartesian 221; passivity 302; separated 357 see also audience Spenser, Edmund, 13, 35, 45, 49, 80, 95, 99, 100, 104, 248, 335 Spinoza, Benedict: and emotions 224; God/ Nature like Shakespeare 223; and imagination 225; and passions 225–7 States, Bert O., 7n3, 129n9, 274n24, 278n7, 318n1 Stern, Tiffany, 13, 68 Stubbes, Philip, 43, 55 subject: distinct or otherwise from object 221–4 see also individuality sublime 98, 104–5, 273, 286, 288–9, 319, 363 subvisible 8, 41, 62, 205, 220, 331 see also empirical knowledge surrogacy, 92, 93, 183, 259, 290, 295 Taine, Hypollite, 11 Telesio, Bernardino, 215 Tempest, The, 189 temporality: frames within frames 166–71, 323–5; shifting 6, 15, 28, 33, 149, 156, 191, 248 see also anachrony; history; playworld

382

Index

theatergrams, 49 Theobald, Lewis, 231 Tiffany, Daniel, 17n11, 119 Timon of Athens, 321 Tribble, Evelyn, 64, 187n1 Troilus and Cressida, 149, 214 Twelfth Night, 133, 188–9 Twine, Laurence, 298, 307 uncertainty principle 275, 341 understanding, ours of playlife: differential 347–8; ethics of 263; in Jonson, 52–3; too naturalising, 7, 156; not in real time 39; resist presumptions 8, 13, 19–20, 308; threatened 38–9 see also attention; memory unities, 189, 192 Venus and Adonis, 36–7 Vickers, Brian, 180, 249 virtuality 8, 25, 100; as actuality 320; of character 316, 342, 347; of craftconsciousness 133; and Leibniz 117, 231; of metaphor 141, 350; of mime 278; of possibles 241; of playlife 55, 57; and repetition 127; scenic gaps 299; staged metaphysics 292; of sympathy 255 vizards, 117, 130 Voltaire, 241 Webster, John, 49, 69–70, 90–2, 324 Wheelwright, Philip, 200 White, Hayden, 147

Whitehead, Alfred North, 211 Wilkins, George, 298, 307 Wilson, Thomas, 177–8, 179 Wilson-Knight, G., 269n13, 285n2 Winter’s Tale: final scene 269–72; Florizel’s ‘waves’ speech 250–8; Hermione’s return 279–80; meta-theatrical 245–6, 250–1; Ovidian 248; set-piece narrations 245–7, 259–60, 263; spatio-temporal leaps 245–6, 248; storm scene 259–65; transfigurations 248–9 Witmore, Michael 136n21, 188n2, 189n3, 226n34, 268n12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 156, 209, 321 Womersley, David, 36, 164n2, 184n1 Wood, Christopher S., 127n6, 157n32, 173 wordplay, 13, 21–2, 23–4, 28–31, 34–5, 40, 123, 251–3; acting of 64–5; characters subject to 26; Middleton’s 81; resistance to Shakespeare’s 209–10 words: coming true 26–7, 29, 30–1, 123, 196–7, 326, 330; embodying worlds 11, 29–30, 179, 190–1, 196; escaping notice 38, 41; as error 225; as events 194; fractal 197, 200; superimpositions 323–5; telepathic 21–5, 28–9, 38–9, 161–2, 330; theatrical instruments 11 see also metalepsis; metaphor; metonym; wordplay worldmaking: early modern, 6n2, 14, 218–19 Worthen, W. B., 38, 61n5 Wright, Thomas, 61–2 Zizek, Slavoj, 151