Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance 9780367429072, 9780367855178

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
1 Introduction
PART I: History
2 Reviving Vitalism in King Lear
3 Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes
4 Mirrors and Macbeth’s Queer Materialism
5 The Mirror and Age in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
6 Shakespeare’s Babies: “Things to Come at Large”
PART II: Theory
7 Eliot and His Problems: Hamlet’s Correlative Objects
8 Shakespeare’s Virtuous Properties
9 The Power to Die: Liveliness, Minor Agency, and Shakespeare’s Female Characters
10 Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies: Rethinking the Environment in Macbeth and King Lear
PART III: Performance
11 Human Remains: Acting, Objects, and Belief in Performance
12 Shakespeare’s Puppets
13 Art, Objecthood, and the Extended Audience: Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works
14 “Newes from the Dead”: An Unnatural Moment in the History of Natural Philosophy
15 Tail-Piece: Shake That Thing
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

“This dynamic collection of essays explores the theatrical objects, vibrant matter, and more-than-human things that populate Shakespeare’s stage, demonstrating that the new in new materialism isn’t that new after all. Whether analyzing human remains, Elizabethan shoes, atmospheric conditions, or the peculiar powers of baby-props, the authors assembled here by editors Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky offer fresh, engaging readings of Shakespeare’s plays on the page and in production. Shakespeare’s Things is a must-read collection for anyone interested in the intersection of new materialist thought, theatre history, and Shakespeare studies.” —Marlis Schweitzer, co-editor (with Joanne Zerdy), Performing Objects and Theatrical Things “In Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance, Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky offer an imaginative collection of fifteen essays catching the wave of the ‘non-human turn’ in the humanities to search out new territory for the agency of things in Shakespeare’s plays and their performances. Things that do things are essential to the work of theatre, a thingy agency bespeaking the stage as practicing a kind of new materialism avant la lettre. Tracing the animating power of mirrors and shoes, skulls and puppets, rag-bundle ‘babies’ and an actively ecological (not merely symbolic) setting, the essays gathered here resituate the porous—play/stage; stage/world—identities of dramatic theatre, notably by vigorously negotiating the consequential slippage between things and us. Shakespeare’s Things, attending to the historical, theoretical, and theatrical work of things, fashions a network of interpretive, ethical, and philosophical questions that remake a staid confidence in the Shakespearean ‘human’ at the interface with its defining, non-human others.” —W. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia University

Shakespeare’s Things

Floating daggers, enchanted handkerchiefs, supernatural storms, and moving statues have tantalized Shakespeare’s readers and audiences for centuries. The essays in Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance renew attention to non-human influence and agency in the plays, exploring how Shakespeare anticipates new materialist thought, thing theory, and object studies while presenting accounts of intention, action, and expression that we have not yet noticed or named. By focusing on the things that populate the plays—from commodities to props, corpses to relics—they find that canonical Shakespeare, inventor of the human, gives way to a lesser-known figure, a chronicler of the ceaseless collaboration among persons, language, the stage, the object world, audiences, the weather, the earth, and the heavens. Dr. Brett Gamboa is an Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College Dr. Lawrence Switzky is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto

Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture

Series Editor: Karen Raber, University of Mississippi, USA

Literary and cultural criticism has ventured into a brave new world in recent decades: posthumanism, ecocriticism, critical animal studies, the new materialisms, the new vitalism, and other related approaches have transformed the critical environment, reinvigorating our encounters with familiar texts, and inviting us to take note of new or neglected ones. A vast array of non-human creatures, things, and forces are now emerging as important agents in their own right. Inspired by human concern for an ailing planet, ecocriticism has grappled with the question of how important works of art can be to the preservation of something we have traditionally called “nature.” Yet literature’s capacity to take us on unexpected journeys through the networks of affiliation and affinity we share with the earth on which we dwell—and without which we die—and to confront us with the drama of our common struggle to survive and thrive has not diminished in the face of what Lyn White Jr. called “our ecological crisis.” From animals to androids, non-human creatures and objects populate critical analyses in increasingly complex ways, complicating our conception of the cosmos by dethroning the individual subject and dismantling the comfortable categories through which we have interpreted our existence. Until now, however, the elements that compose this wave of scholarship on non-human entities have had limited places to gather to be nurtured as a collective project. “Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture” provides that local habitation. In this series, readers will find creatures of all descriptions, as well as every other form of biological life; they will also meet the non-biological, the microscopic, the ethereal, the intangible. It is our goal for the series to provide an encounter zone where all forms of human engagement with the non-human in all periods and national literatures can be explored, and where the discoveries that result can speak to one another, as well as to scholars and students. Shakespeare’s Things Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance Edited by Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge. com/Perspectives-on-the-Non-Human-in-Literature-and-Culture/ book-series/PNHLC

Shakespeare’s Things Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance Edited by Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-42907-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-85517-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Ayanna, so that she will always love Shakespeare. For Bayan, who can imagine and animate every thing.

Contents

1 Introduction

1

B R E T T G A M B OA A N D L AW R E N C E S W I T Z K Y

PART I

History

21

2 Reviving Vitalism in King Lear

23

A A RO N G R E E N B E RG

3 Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes

36

N ATA S H A KO R DA

4 Mirrors and Macbeth’s Queer Materialism

53

JOH N S. GA R R ISON

5 The Mirror and Age in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

66

HANH BUI

6 Shakespeare’s Babies: “Things to Come at Large”

79

MEGAN SNELL

PART II

Theory

91

7 Eliot and His Problems: Hamlet’s Correlative Objects

93

A N DR EW SOFER

8 Shakespeare’s Virtuous Properties J U L I A R E I N H A R D LU P TON

109

x Contents 9 The Power to Die: Liveliness, Minor Agency, and Shakespeare’s Female Characters

123

KELSEY BLAIR

10 Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies: Rethinking the Environment in Macbeth and King Lear

134

GILES W HITELEY

PART III

Performance

151

11 Human Remains: Acting, Objects, and Belief in Performance

153

AO I F E M O N K S

12 Shakespeare’s Puppets

173

K E N N E T H G RO S S

13 Art, Objecthood, and the Extended Audience: Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works

193

L AW R E N C E S W I T Z K Y

14 “Newes from the Dead”: An Unnatural Moment in the History of Natural Philosophy

206

J A N E TAY L O R

15 Tail-Piece: Shake That Thing

224

M A RJ O R I E G A R B E R

Notes on Contributors Index

235 239

1 Introduction Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky

In the final scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the lovers’ farfetched stories about what transpired overnight in the woods cause Theseus to reflect on what poets do: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.1 (5.1.12–17) Theseus suggests that the poet’s art is essentially one of specifying— naming and arranging the otherwise indistinct products of the imagination. But what happens when things are not given names? Barring the poet’s intervention, observations of what lies between heaven and earth are relegated to a purgatorial realm of indefinition, persisting there as the forms of “things unknown” or so much “airy nothing.” It is tempting to read Theseus’s lines for something of Shakespeare’s own view of his work as a writer, but it is also worth considering how often in his own writing Shakespeare neglects to assign local habitations and names to unknown phenomena or else blurs the boundaries of known ­phenomena by redefining them as “things.” Examples of the former include references to the spectral threat in Denmark (“Hath this thing appeared again tonight?”) and Emilia’s teasing offer to Iago, “I have a thing for you” (3.3.299), while the latter is seen in Leontes’s demeaning address to ­Hermione, “O thou thing!” (2.1.84), or when Hamlet ­declares, “The play’s the thing” (2.2.523).2 What goes undefined remains a “thing”—a catchall, inherently paradoxical term that both limits and delimits, categorizes while simultaneously nullifying the value of the category. The term was versatile for Shakespeare, as for us, describing material objects, abstract ideas, humans, non-humans, the state of the world, and more, and the tensions existing among the range of potential referents contribute to its

2  Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky poetic value. The word’s instability and potential range of meanings clearly interested Shakespeare, as evinced by wordplay wherein the antonymic tension between “thing” and “nothing” is sustained and enhanced by semantic phrases that work to harmonize or equate the terms. Theseus’s lines, for instance, conflate “things unknown” and “airy nothing,” while Lear’s response to Cordelia’s refusal to flatter him—“nothing will come of nothing”—gains energy by suggesting a possible arrival (“will come”) of a non-entity that, because it is a non-entity, cannot come. Similar tension is held in the title of Much Ado about Nothing and is perhaps nowhere more evident than in this example from Hamlet: HAMLET:  The king is a thing— GUILDENSTERN:  A thing, my lord? HAMLET:  Of nothing. 3

(3.5.27–29) A “thing…of nothing” could describe everyone onstage in this play that obsesses about performance, even if audiences continue “minding true things by what their mockeries be” (Henry V, 4.0.53). But it also makes a mystery of Claudius, whose legitimacy as a ruler and even as a human being is threatened by lines that seem to classify him as an inanimate object (“the king is a thing”) and then undercut that classification by suggesting that the resulting material object—and/or subject—was cut from a void (“…of nothing”). In Hamlet, the new king’s legitimacy is already much in question, because Claudius killed the king and because the claim is clouded by Hamlet’s birthright, the reappearance of the former king (Old Hamlet’s ghost), and by players personating kings past and present before an audience that includes Hamlet and Claudius. The language of inanimacy complements the legitimacy problem for a king who is never named in the play, suggesting that he may exist in a realm at or beyond the margins of the human world, like the ghost with whom the play frequently takes pains to compare him.4 In the case of the ghost, when Horatio asks Barnardo whether “this thing appeared again tonight?” (1.1.20), the scene becomes haunted with news of an imminent threat of unknown origin.5 Here, “thing” suggests a non-human entity, but one notable for seeming to possess agency, or at least the capacity to influence the human characters, much as the “airdrawn dagger” that “marshalls” Macbeth on to murder. The potential agency of non-human (or not entirely human) entities appears to have fascinated Shakespeare throughout his career, as is clear from abundant critical attention paid to objects like Macbeth’s dagger, Yorick’s skull, Portia’s caskets, or Desdemona’s handkerchief, all of which seem not only crucial to the plots in which they appear but also somehow to transcend their own inanimacy.

Introduction  3 If the foregoing quotations were isolated, we might dismiss them as wordplay, but Shakespeare routinely deploys the term ‘thing’ to blur lines between subject and object (the word and its variants occur nearly 30 times per play), often in moments when readers and audiences would seem most in need of clarity and definition. It may not be coincidental, then, when Macbeth declares while confronted by Banquo’s ghost, “there’s no such thing” (2.1.47), or when, after taking up the handkerchief, Emilia announces to Iago, “I have a thing for you” (3.3.299). The ghosts of King Hamlet and Banquo are only two of many examples wherein “thing” is associated with a living entity that transcends the human world, the term being also preferred for non-human creatures such as Caliban, Ariel, ass-eared Bottom, witches, divinities, and others. Shakespeare often uses things and their inherent vagueness to ascribe cosmic significance and some degree of agency to material and immaterial objects, and even to landscapes or the atmosphere. As is well known, the storm in King Lear can seem to reflect the interior of the king caught out in it. Lear’s commands for the storm to “rage” and “blow” are not empty personifications so much as signs of a natural world elevated to a role roughly coequal with that of the human characters. It is amid the storm that Lear meets Edgar disguised as Poor Tom, a figure likewise marked out as inhuman and yet somehow quintessentially human. The fact that the naked madman is not really mad gradually recedes for readers and playgoers until Tom seems not a performer but the authentic being that underlies any performance, as Lear indicates by declaring him “the thing itself” (F 3.4.98–99). Lear’s epithet suggests that a human paragon of sorts resides beyond the margins of the world inhabited by the more “sophisticated” characters, thus further animating the landscape and instilling it with life and feeling. The refrain “Tom’s a-cold” would be as applicable to the storm with which he seems contiguous, and its insistent repetitions seem inseparable from the thunder that punctuates them. As with the tragedies so far discussed, Julius Caesar works to lend agency to objects and to make objects of agents. This becomes evident from its very first scene when Marullus insults the commoners—“You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things” (1.1.34)—and later when Caesar’s wounds are bid to speak for Antony, or when the “Ides of March” arrive more like a character in a play than a date in the ­calendar—“The Ides of March are come” (3.1.1). As in King Lear, the storm and landscape of Julius Caesar register the health and status of Rome itself, an idea that Casca posits when he develops a catalogue of the “portentous things” in Rome and the skies overhead on a night “When all the sway of earth / Shakes like a thing unfirm” (1.3.3–4). The heavens are likewise active in responding to and rectifying injustice in Macbeth, which introduces an Old Man to complain of having seen “Hours dreadful and things strange” (2.4.3), during a night

4  Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky when nature seems to become conscious of tyranny and to seek vengeance by undoing itself to reflect and complement Duncan’s unnatural murder. Like the ghost in Hamlet, those of Caesar and Banquo—even when absent from the stage—are thought mighty and agential by the other characters, capable of predicting but also enforcing retribution for their murders. Several non-human elements come together in Shakespeare’s articulation of the witches in Macbeth. They forecast meeting in “thunder, lighting, or in rain” and vanish “into the air” after delivering their prophecies (1.1.2; 1.3.82). After the witches’ disappearing act, Banquo turns to Macbeth and asks suggestively, “Were such things here as we do speak upon?” (1.3.84). Predictably, Banquo refers to the weird sisters as “things.” The word appears often when characters need to describe something indefinite and at the margins of human understanding. Again, it is provocative how the term negotiates a relationship between human and non-human objects or entities, thereby helping to assign a kind of consciousness and agency to non-human elements in the plays. In this case, the witches oscillate ontologically between roles as earthly hags and ethereal beings, as seers of fate and its enforcers, as sisters who “should be women” yet cannot be understood as such because of their beards (1.3.46–48). This last example resonates with Lady Macbeth’s desire to be “unsexed,” suggesting that the play is interested in the relationships between human and non-human entities and potential transitions from one pole to the other. As a result, the quartet can alternate as sexless elements in an object world that reflects Macbeth’s own ambitions and fears back to him, and as gendered subjects that share responsibility for bringing about a tragic outcome. There can be little wonder that the examples we’ve cited so far are drawn from Shakespeare’s tragedies. Tragedy depends for much of its interest on a lack of definition—on making those responsible for a given outcome difficult to identify or blame. Oedipus’s situation is tragic because he does everything imaginable from his perspective to avoid committing the heinous acts expected of him; Othello is a tragic figure because we readily guess that he would not have committed the murder without Iago’s provocation. Or if Emilia had not stolen the handkerchief. Or if Desdemona had not lied when asked to produce it. Or if Cassio was not so easily inebriated. Et cetera. In the case of Macbeth, there can be no doubt that Macbeth is guilty of treason and murder. But considering that he begins the play notably loyal in defeating the Thane of Cawdor, that the witches first raise the idea of him taking the throne, and that this prophecy leads Lady Macbeth to suborn and shame him until the murder is accomplished, it is difficult to consider Macbeth’s guilt without bringing to mind the number of “things” that help force his hand. As parts of an object world, such things may seem merely to reflect his own desire; as subjects, though, they seem to implant the seed of that

Introduction  5 desire and guide it to fruition. Therefore, in the interplay of human and non-human forces that Shakespeare presents in the play, we cannot but receive these things both ways, simultaneously, aiding—or forcing—us thereby to convict and exculpate the protagonist on the same evidence. As a result, it is natural that many of the authors in this collection attend to tragedy—the language, landscapes, objects, weather, and more that influence the human world or those elements of the human world that diffuse themselves into the natural or spiritual dimensions and then exert influence. Returning to Hamlet, it may be that some of its most famous passages are so because of this elusiveness and multiplicity of Shakespeare’s things: “The play’s the thing” (2.2.523); “things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely” (1.2.136–37); “I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me” (3.1.121–23); “There are more things between heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.5.168–69); and “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4.90). In each of these cases, the “thing” seems to exist just beyond our ken, among a range of things the character is unwilling to disclose or cannot quite understand. The weird sisters know that “something wicked” is coming but not what it is (4.1.45); King Lear knows that he wants to do “such things” in revenging himself on Goneril and Regan, even though “What they are, [he] know[s] not” (2.2.449–50). The authors throughout this collection explore in various ways Shakespeare’s fascination with such interplay between subject and object worlds, finding the membrane between them easily and often permeated, and to significant thematic and theatrical ends.

Things Themselves Like Shakespeare, we continue to be captivated by things. In recent years, this persistent fascination has generated eclectic and sometimes contentious critical approaches. Etymologically, a thing (Ding) can mean a gathering of persons, the matters that concern that gathering, and the inanimate objects that are present for and involved in any human assembly. Throughout his books and essays, founding thing theorist Bill Brown calls our attention, as Shakespeare does, to the surprising acuity and plenitude of the word “thing,” the value of its “specific unspecificity” and “semantic vertigo.”6 This vertigo differs significantly from what psychoanalytic critics call the uncanny, where the alien within the familiar is already known but repressed and often spellbindingly displaced. Things are fugitive with respect to knowledge. The simultaneous precision and deflection of the “thing” indicates an evasive if commonplace feature of experience: a desire to name something (or some thing), an object, an atmosphere, or a sensation, that refuses to settle within anthropocentric parameters. In The Universe of Things, speculative realist

6  Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky Steven Shaviro identifies “retreat and eruption” as antiphonal features of things. For Shaviro, things evade both conceptualization and description: “If I cannot control and instrumentalize a thing, this is both because it draws me into extended referential networks whose full ramifications I cannot trace and because its singularity, bursting forth, stuns me in excess of anything I can posit about it.”7 As vibrant materialist Jane Bennett would also remind us, though, things don’t only demonstrate “negative power or recalcitrance” as they slip through our grasp. They also exhibit “thing-power,” the ability to affect our bodies and other things at a pace and scale we seldom apprehend.8 In these overlapping and sometimes contradictory evocations, the “thing” is a verbal bearer of the non-­human; and in that sense, to discuss Shakespeare’s things is also to consider how “animals, plants, organisms, climatic systems, technologies, or ecosystems,” in Richard Grusin’s handy formulation of the non-human constituency, refuse human exceptionalism in their ability to influence, construct, transform, and establish value in our shared world.9 Many things under examination in the following chapters are specific stage objects, but some are more diffuse, distributed, and atmospheric. As even a brief catalog discloses, thinking about things has increasingly become the province of recent philosophical and sociological approaches which can be roughly grouped under the heading of New Materialism. Largely in reaction to scholarship since the 1970s that has focused on subjective experience and the linguistic and cultural basis of that experience, proponents of New Materialism insist on the potency and agency (or quasi-agency) of non-human matter within human affairs. They likewise refuse the model of an inert and inanimate environment that human agents simply act on and exploit.10 Invoking New Materialism in this sense may cause confusion for scholars in Shakespeare Studies, where (lower-case) new materialism has a different origin and meaning. In his foundational essay, Douglas Bruster identifies a “new materialism” in early modern historiography with a challenge to the cultural materialist claim that only vast historical and economic forces determine social forms and artistic creation. Instead, new materialism “boasts an investment in things,” such as furniture, food, props, and body parts, as they reveal everyday cultural practices and relationships.11 At its best, claims Bruster, this criticism can illuminate the development of early modern subjects in relation to a burgeoning object world; at its worst, it devolves into “tchotchke criticism,” the curation of objects disconnected from broader social or political influences. Some of the most inventive uses of new materialism by early modern theatre critics attend to how Shakespeare asks his audiences to imagine space, time, feeling, and language as shaped and disrupted by persons acting with and against the affordances of things.12 For instance, Jonathan Gil Harris’s Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare has become

Introduction  7 a touchstone of recent early modern new materialism (as demonstrated through its citation by several authors in this volume). Harris offers a sophisticated account of how visible, tactile, and olfactory matter in the plays unsettles linear temporality by collating several historical moments in a single object or by inciting new apprehensions of causality, progress, and supersession.13 Where new materialism and New Materialism can join hands is through the light they cast on the suppleness of things onstage. In some sense, every object brought onstage is, or has the potential to be, a thing. Bert States has elucidated the process by which theatre annexes the real, sustaining its conventions, if only temporarily, through “a certain roughage of hard-core reality that resuscitates the illusionary system.”14 States contends that the ingestion of the external environment to form a theatrical image activates the spectator’s “binocular vision”: a dog onstage is at once a real dog and the likeness of a dog in a representational fiction, and our eye oscillates between the two. The traffic runs one way: “the illusion has introduced something into itself to demonstrate its tolerance of things. It is not the world that has invaded the illusion; the illusion has stolen something from the world in order to display its own power” (34). To borrow States’ digestive metaphor, however, things onstage can also get caught in the throat of the illusion-making apparatus. In their introduction to Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ­Natasha Korda (who has contributed to this collection) and Jonathan Gil Harris contend that stage props were dismissed or devalued for centuries as material worthy of analysis precisely because they resisted effective conscription into dramatic illusions: “stage properties potentially introduce into any play a plurality of makers, a multiplicity of meanings, and alternate tales of the body or of artisanal labor.”15 Props, for Harris and Korda, swerve between objects that are put to use by acting and playwriting subjects and things that reflect elusive and manifold creators and itineraries. As Andrew Sofer (another contributor) shows in The Stage Life of Props, props depend on the visible manipulation of an actor and therefore cannot exhibit the autonomous “thing-power” imagined by Jane Bennett. But props behave as things insofar as they participate in what Sofer names the “temporal contract” between actors and audiences, whereby “identity is superimposed on a material object” and is “subject to moment-by-moment renegotiation.”16 Put another way, the temporal contract of props is undergirded by a belief in the instability and dynamism of matter, from joint-stools to crowns to poisoned pearls, moving statues, and floating daggers. Certain props are able to absorb a variety of intentions, desires, and projections—a handkerchief can be first a lady’s accessory, then the potent residuum of the relationship between mother and child, then a volatile charm infused

8  Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky with witchcraft—precisely because they are specifically nonspecific, because they “retreat and erupt” over time. Props are one site that makes Shakespeare’s inquiry into things and their commingling with human agendas uniquely sensuous and immediate. Shakespeare’s climates and landscapes are another, less explicitly bounded kind of thing. Seas in Shakespeare promote a “sea-change,” as Ariel sings in The Tempest, transfiguring human life into “something rich and strange” (1.2.489)—in this case dissolving the bones of a sailor into the plural life of a colony of coral. Shakespeare’s shorelines catalyze the emergence of new selves (most pointedly in Twelfth Night and Pericles), much as his squalls confound the relationship between mind, body, and world. Lear, in a moment of lyrical deftness, describes how “this contentious storm / Invades us to the skin[…]When the mind’s freed,  / The body’s delicate” (3.4.8–15). Today we might, less poetically, describe this as the mood-enhancing influence of negative ions, but that does little to convey the felt experience of the self’s borders giving way, the dermal saturation by wind and rain that, as Lear reminds us, is at once rapturous and terrifying. The theatre is often treated as a ­self-sustaining “world apart” from the complex ecologies outside it: the partition between stage and spectators conditions a more general sense of distance between inside and outside.17 Recently, however, scholars like Una Chaudhuri and Shonni Enelow have argued that the theatre is continuous with the “porousness and diversity of the ecological world, its non-holistic, differential ubiquity […] the matter inside the black-box of theatre is as alive, as lively […] as the matter in a forest or a field.”18 Shakespeare’s theatre has much to contribute to our current comprehension (and incomprehension) of climatically precarious times and to our intimate enmeshment in a network of human and non-human powers. As Giles Whiteley points out in a chapter in this volume, Shakespeare is a precursor to contemporary philosopher Timothy Morton and his notion of the “hyperobject,” a type of thing so large—like global wind patterns and oceanic currents—that we can only sense it partially, in local manifestations, and participate in it non-reciprocally, contributing in miniature to its mighty agglomeration.19 If Shakespeare anticipates many contemporary categories and preoccupations, his plays are also valuable in that they present varieties of thingship we may not yet have noticed or named. One purpose of ­Shakespeare’s Things is to enable readers to approach Shakespeare through New Materialist discourses and new developments in early modern object studies. Another is to extend emergent New/new materialisms by proposing that our greatest humanist playwright may also be one of our most perceptive guides to the place of the non-human in ­human affairs. The chapters in this book demonstrate that at every corner of Shakespeare’s theatre, there are provocations that goad actors, readers, and audiences to reconceive the commingling of persons and things.

Introduction  9 Let’s consider one example. Readers and audiences of Shakespeare will be familiar with the Chorus’s plea at the beginning of Henry V to compensate for the material inadequacies of the stage with acts of projective enlargement: O, pardon! Since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million; And let us, ciphers to this great account, On your imaginary forces work. (Prologue, 16–19) The game with figures is a motif throughout the play, culminating at the Battle of Agincourt when a small number of soldiers is invested with such strength—by audiences inside and outside the play—that it can conquer an army more than five times its size. Mind, aided in battle by entreaties to spectatorial and divine will, emboldens matter. But this largely idealist account is only one aspect of the multiplicative capability of things in the play. Another is advanced by Fluellen, a fictional Welsh Captain in the English army, who claims “there is figures in/all things” (4.7.34–35). Fluellen’s malapropisms, his equation of the high and the low, and his fierce loyalty to Wales mark him as a comedic figure. Gower, an English officer, looks skeptically on Fluellen’s attempts to bend one empire-builder, King Henry, through another, Alexander the Great; or Harry’s (Welsh) birthplace, Monmouth, through Macedon, Alexander’s birthplace; or even the demotic word “big” (Fluellen, mixing bs and ps, says “pig”) through the more ceremonial word “great.” In the fullness of the play, however, Fluellen is a prophetic figure. In the final scene, Henry similarly skews conventional perception by layering his future wife Katherine on top of the cities he has conquered, eclipsing numerous towns with one small body and confusing the substances of flesh and stone: KING HENRY:  …you may, some of you, thank love for my blindness, who

cannot see many a fair French city for one fair French maid that stands in my way. FRANCE:  Yes, my lord, you see them perspectively, the cities turned into a maid; for they are all girdled with maiden walls that war hath never entered. (5.2.315–20) By lensing one thing against another, Katherine’s body against walled cities, Henry also sees the “figures in things.” The superimposition of two very different things, a maid and intact city walls, confuses traditional calculation, spreading one woman across the surfaces of several territories but also combining dispersed lands into one person—“the

10  Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky cities turned into a maid.” In a sense, this is playful rhetoric that calms post-conflict negotiations, uniting warring sides through the insistence on an analogy between unlike elements. As a perlocutionary speech-act, Henry exchanges the hand of a daughter for the return of conquered lands with his future father-in-law. But it is also a proposition about matter that we might call thing-lensing, whereby the properties of one thing are bent “perspectively” by placing it in proximity to another thing, particularly a thing that is much larger or more broadly distributed in time or space. (Astrophysicists note a similar phenomenon called gravitational lensing when light passes through massive objects and is curved, displaced, or multiplied.)20 Thing-lensing is a model for the entire play, which asks us to multiply armies not only in the abstract perfection of mathematics but also through the impoverished means of theatre, where we are asked to refract the sensuous bodies, scenery, and props “perspectively” through the outrageous enormities of armies, fleets, and miles of terrain. What we get is not a stage army actually transformed into a real army, but neither do the lensed actors and stage properties retain their original dimensions. Some glancing transformation, some subtle but irreversible barter, has taken place. This lensing potential of things, and its attendant creation of astounding magnifications and hybrids, is so pervasive in Shakespeare’s theatre that we often notice it most when it doesn’t work. Consider, for example, Macbeth’s soliloquy when he learns that Banquo’s son, Fleance, has escaped his hired murderers: Then comes my fit again: I had else been perfect, Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, As broad and general as the casing air, But now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in To saucy doubts and fears. (3.4.22–26) Macbeth’s inability to harness the stolidity of the stony Scottish landscape or the expansive freedom of the air gives an index of his growing isolation. 21 Crowded in by mind divorced from any soothing transfusion of external matter, longing to be “perfect” in himself (despite reaching toward natural elements for succor), Macbeth can’t participate in the everyday mingling of persons and things that is so frequently available to Shakespeare’s other characters. Despite the ubiquity of things in his plays, Shakespeare has received relatively little attention from thing theorists and New Materialists. Part of the project of building these emergent fields has been establishing a genealogy of thing votaries. Philosophically, the line of thing-thinkers stretches from Baruch Spinoza through Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Lacan,

Introduction  11 and Bruno Latour. On the literary side, which is the predominant concern of this collection, a legacy of somewhat less mainstream figures extends from Henry David Thoreau through Franz Kafka, H. P. L ­ ovecraft, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Philip K. Dick, as well as the reflections of ­Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf on toys, dolls, and furniture. The odd features of thing-life— peripheral yet pervasive, inscrutable yet ­insistent—seem to find purchase in a corresponding set of counter-canonical exempla, proposals by twilight prophets who write in or at the edges of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Marginalized persons have, perhaps, been most attentive to other forms of marginal existence: oddly compelling bars of soap in hotel rooms, out-ofplace pieces of string that excite quizzical conjectures, what poet Dennis Silk names “the life we’re meager enough to term inanimate. Meager because we can’t cope with all those witnesses.”22 The chapters in Shakespeare’s Things attest, however, that Shakespeare too belongs in the motley collective of witnesses to meager life by virtue of how uniquely attentive he was to the full panoply of things, including commodities, props, fetishes, corpses, and relics still invested with the afflatus of officially banished Catholicism. By focusing on the things that populate the plays, canonical Shakespeare, inventor of the human and chronicler of modern subjectivity, gives way to a lesser-known figure, intrigued by the distribution of intention, expression, and action among a network of human and non-human agents. According to Julia Lupton (another contributor to this volume), monolithic accounts of authorship dissolve when we restore Shakespeare to the theatre he worked in and wrote for: a ceaseless collaboration between persons, words, properties, settings, audiences, the earth, the heavens, and the weather. Shakespeare’s humanism, situated within a world of things as well as language and action, “is vulnerable and creaturely rather than triumphalist, pointing outwards towards the environment and upwards towards divinity as sources and reminders of human incompleteness.”23 By placing Shakespeare within the long lineage of New Materialist discourses, Shakespeare’s Things also makes the case that theatre as an art form is uniquely positioned to investigate the couplings and obstructions among human and non-human colleagues. Literature and the pictorial and plastic arts have served many theorists as their primary archive of things. Even as Bill Brown adjures us to attend to the “the task of dramatizing the thingness of objects,” he argues in favor of encountering things mediated through verbal and visual representations, which “disclose an otherwise inapprehensible materiality.”24 Rather than simply reproducing discrete real objects, Brown argues that artistic mediation has the potential to call our attention to the mutability and interrelations of matter in general. By virtue of States’ “binocular vision,” theatre, however, allows us to have both the thing itself and its conscription into a system of representations at the same time. Moreover, it allows us to witness the negotiations between persons and things, as they are scripted

12  Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky and as they emerge out of different forms of matter conspiring to make (or, in some cases, break) a performance. As Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy note in their introduction to Performing Objects and Theatrical Things, social scientists who study the enmeshment of subject and object agencies continually adopt theatrical terminology without explicitly addressing theatre. This is perhaps most evident in Bruno Latour’s use of “actor” in Actor-Network theory to indicate an individual element in the swarm of human and non-human entities that collectively produce social formations. 25 Jane Bennett has likewise described an assemblage of objects that shimmies “between debris and thing” as a “contingent tableau,” an affectively meaningful collation of matter that rests between the tableaux vivants of nineteenth-century spectacular theatre and nature morte paintings. When it demonstrates thing-power, a contingent tableau is most theatrical. As Bennett observes, things demonstrate an “energetic vitality” that is closer to the vivant than the morte end of the spectrum: “In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects had set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics” (5).26 In the realm of ­object-oriented ontology, Graham Harman claims that “theatre lies at the root of the other arts,” arguing that we only make contact with the things that evade our use or perception by actively trying to imitate them, much as “Konstantin Stanislavski’s famous system insists that one try to become the object one portrays as nearly as possible.”27 Why not, then, turn to the theatre itself as the center of operations that generates all these compelling metaphors? Close attention to Shakespeare’s things in Shakespeare’s plays reveals that theatre is not only a reservoir of terms and metaphors that clarify philosophical or social scientific practices but a site of investigation and discovery in its own right. The chapters in this volume adopt theatre as an event, a place, and a series of interpersonal and intermaterial relationships. In so doing, they aim to concretize the abstractions that often (and paradoxically) attend theoretical approaches to materiality. Although several chapters discuss specific performance histories, most focus on the meanings of things as represented—or simply presented—in the field of drama. They understand dramatic writing as an exploration of the potential actions and influences of different kinds of objects in the social and ecological worlds of his plays, which might extend to the social and ecological worlds in which Shakespeare lived. In these approaches, dramatic writing, as the residue of an event or instructions for an event that might occur, always tacitly relies on articulations and extensions of the human by the non-human. The “challenge of stage concretization,” as Michael Quinn evocatively calls it, requires the translation of a verbal text into a network of material things like props, costumes, and sets. It also relies on immaterial things like characters or “stage figures,”

Introduction  13 non-human intermediaries that express the human without being h ­ uman themselves. 28 A tradition of character critics from ­Maurice Morgann on Falstaff in the eighteenth century to Harold Bloom on Falstaff and ­Shylock in the present day has insisted that Shakespeare’s fictional persons aspire to the condition of things more potently than any others in the history of drama, transcending generic conventions to become hauntingly vivid and autonomous. 29 As Andrew Sofer notes in a recent review of scholarship on things in performance, the turn from signs, bodies, ghosts, and the “real” to objects across the humanities means we are in danger of thing-fatigue; and yet, things, in their “mimesis and kinesis, liveness and deadness” continue to tantalize as “a handy synecdoche for performance itself.”30 To refresh and reignite the study of things, we turn back, and look ahead, to Shakespeare’s plays.

An Order of Things We have organized this volume into three parts according to methodological affinities among the chapters rather than thematic similarities or grouped responses to the plays. But like their subjects (or s­ ubject-objects), our ordering is provisional, open to revision and re-inflection. Readers looking for early modern views of things or specific early modern things (breath, beards, plants, mirrors, shoes, baby-props) could turn to the chapters in Part I, “History.” Readers hoping to explore the resonances between more contemporary thing theories and accounts of things in the plays are directed to the chapters in Part II “Theory.” And readers intrigued by the legacy of performing things in Shakespeare’s drama and descendant or adjacent theatres could consider Part III “Performance.” But these categories only evoke one set of conversations among many that we hope this volume will inspire. Aaron Greenberg’s “Reviving Vitalism in King Lear” begins Part I by arguing that Shakespeare’s great tragedy documents a transition in early modern epistemology: from understanding things as autonomous extensions of nature to subjects of encroaching biopower. Greenberg attends to human bodies and residua, vegetal life, as well as “unauthorized” personifications in the play, arguing for the lingering potency of vitalism, the predominant worldview in medieval Europe, which “saw nature, the earth, and society—in short, everything—as alive.” Despite its discrediting in the seventeenth century by mechanistic materialism and the rise of absolute sovereignty, vitalism suffuses King Lear, particularly through rhetorical gestures and inanimate phenomena that trouble lines between life and death, person and thing. In “Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes,” Natasha Korda likewise locates Shakespeare’s plays at a hinge between embodied lifeworlds: the turn from the “processual” relations of the foot in continual contact

14  Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky with the ground to the preeminence of the head and hands over subordinated nature. Korda encourages us to see Shakespeare’s theatre and key moments in his plays from “the perspective of the feet,” the footwork and footwear that were level with the eyes of the groundlings and responsive to the contingencies of irregular surfaces. Drawing inspiration from anthropological and phenomenological discussions of the relationship between the head and the hands, Korda coordinates the emerging technologies of raised and thrust stages, thick-soled shoes, and the increased paving of streets with the foregrounding of “pedestrian aesthetics” and the embodied perception of a changing “walkscape” in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and The Tempest. The next two chapters, John Garrison’s “Mirrors and Queer ­Materialism in Macbeth” and Hanh Bui’s “The Mirror and Age in Shakespeare’s ­Sonnets,” focus on one lively thing in its early modern context: reflective glass. Garrison recaptures the strangeness of an early modern world newly populated by flat, horizontal mirrors. In his analysis, the mirror “queers” the perception of the self and its reproductive futures as well as its relationships to non-human actors. Through a detailed engagement with Macbeth, Garrison examines how mirrors in the play at once allow human agents to consolidate “their ego boundaries and their sense of humanness,” externalize their fantasies, and exert their own “creative force,” simultaneously “creating and displaying” an image of King James’s offspring in the spectacle of 4.1. The mirror’s active participation in the production of the self in time is also at the center of Hanh Bui’s chapter, which situates the drama of aging in Shakespeare’s Sonnets alongside mirrors and mirroring in the plays. For Bui, the mirror produces “unbidden” views of the aging body, showing “how things become enmeshed in the ontology of the human” and supplement discursive accounts of growing old. Refusing merely numeric and biological indications of aging, Bui illuminates how age in the Sonnets is constructed by the affordances and constraints of the mirror as a technology. Through her fine-grained examination, we come to see that age for Shakespeare, enmeshed in an ecology of reflective things, “is something ­multi-temporal and multi-relational, better understood as the effect of a complex series of identifications between the lover and the beloved, which the looking glass intervenes in and construes according to its own vitality.” The final chapter in this part considers a thing in early modern stage practice that masqueraded as a person. In “Shakespeare’s Babies: ‘Things to Come at Large,’” Megan Snell traces Shakespeare’s use of the bundle of fabric or dolls that stood in for infants in enacted drama. By exploring Shakespeare’s ingenious deployment—and explosion—of contemporary theatrical conventions for the presentation and swapping of babies in plays like Titus Andronicus, The Winter’s Tale, and Pericles, Snell argues that the investment of life in the inanimate baby-prop queries “how we extend humanness to other things, and alternatively how those inert

Introduction  15 objects can convey humanness.” Building on philosopher Levi Bryant’s notion of objects as “difference engines,” split between local and virtual manifestations, Snell investigates baby-props as sites of “potentiality and actualization,” stage things with specific material features but unpredictable trajectories. Snell shows that in Shakespeare’s hands baby-props exceed the assessments of their human bearers, enabling defamiliarized glimpses of parent-child relationships and the thinglike qualities of very young children. Part II, “Theory,” considers things in Shakespeare as they rhyme with or grate against later aesthetic and philosophical materialisms. In “Eliot and His Problems: Hamlet’s Correlative Objects,” Andrew Sofer takes up T. S. Eliot’s 1919 essay, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in which Eliot formulates his theory of objective correlatives. According to Eliot, Hamlet is an “artistic failure” because Shakespeare cannot correlate the “external facts” of the play with the evocation of Hamlet’s disgust and anguish. Cocking a snook, Sofer proposes that Eliot got it wrong: he should instead have looked for “correlative objects,” things that punctuate Hamlet’s “journey through the play and materialize Hamlet’s trajectory from scholar to avenger.” As bearers of what Sofer terms “generic irony,” things interfere with Hamlet’s instrumental approach to other persons and objects. Refusing to surrender to his attempts to emblematize, reify, or deploy them in his bid to be a jester in a “pseudo-comedy,” things instead conspire against Hamlet and conscript him into tragic action. Arguing with and through Eliot, Sofer discovers a proliferating world of props that refutes any single causal explanation for Hamlet’s emotions. Julia Lupton also revisits genre in “Shakespeare’s Virtuous Properties,” reconsidering Shakespearean romance in light of Aristotle’s virtue ethics and Martha Nussbaum’s exposition of moral luck. By calling on us to re-inspect Friar Laurence’s osier basket in Romeo and Juliet and Caliban’s gaberdine in The Tempest, Lupton proposes that certain things onstage gather persons and things together in a shared, emerging moral and social ecology. These “virtuous properties,” which allow characters to “test their own capacities as moral actors in a networked scene of openings and closings, invitations and inhibitions,” cohere in romance’s unique openness “to the power or potentiality of things, whether in the full-fledged magical thinking of invisible cloaks and wizards’ wands, or in the more secularized approach to objects as ‘affording’ or ‘inviting’ actions that unfold between actor and setting.” Interweaving ecological psychology, classical and modern ethical thought, and the black natural law tradition, Lupton identifies a category of performing things that offers opportunities for transformation, hope, and courage (the “preeminent virtues of romance”) as well as “signposts, temporary shelters, and aids to action in a moral space alive with uncertainty, possibility, and risk.” Such agential latitude and access to virtuosic things may not be available to all of Shakespeare’s characters, however. In “The Power to

16  Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky Die: Liveliness, Minor Agency, and Shakespeare’s Female Characters,” Kelsey Blair develops an account of minor agency out of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s discussion of “becoming minor” in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature and A Thousand Plateaus. As Blair claims, by deliberately restricting their perceived liveliness—reifying themselves into corpses or statues—several women in the plays, most notably Juliet and Hermione, find “subtly resistant” forms of power. Their minor agency becomes a means of “prompting variation in the majority,” presided over by masculinist authorities, and of escaping lethal dehumanization. By different methods, Juliet and Hermione willfully renounce motion, converting themselves into things to destabilize “the standard operations of power as defined by the majority.” Giles Whiteley further explores reclassifications of persons as things through echoes between Shakespearean tragedy and New Materialist ontologies in “Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies: Rethinking the Environment in Macbeth and King Lear.” Rejecting the Romantic tendency to read nature in the plays through the pathetic fallacy, Whiteley instead deploys object-oriented philosopher Timothy Morton to understand Shakespeare’s environments as “dark ecologies”: “alive to the strange, to the weird, to the uncanny, to death and violence […] which situate the human being as simply one object among many in the ‘mesh’ of being.” Whiteley uncovers the surprising compatibility of Shakespeare’s weather systems, which consign sovereign figures to thingly conditions of abjection and non-transparency, with Morton’s descriptions of “strange strangers”—beings that resist comprehensive knowledge and ­self-knowledge—and Jacques Lacan’s theories of extimacy. For Whiteley, Shakespearean meteorology undoes human exceptionalism and exposes us as the vulnerable things we always were. The final part “Performance,” explores how things onstage—and their extra-theatrical origins and backstories—participate in constructing Shakespeare’s play-worlds, whether these objects are tools for actors, rise to the status of actors themselves, or are cast as audiences for performances by their fellow objects. This part can be understood as a sequence of objects—material remains, puppets, household objects, relics—that transcend their object status, proving capable of participating in and shaping performance. To begin, in “Human Remains: Acting, Objects, and Belief in Performance,” Aoife Monks discusses the extra-theatrical vitality lent to productions of Hamlet when actors and audiences are familiar with the origins of the skull standing in for Yorick’s. By tracing the history of skulls and cremation ashes bequeathed to theatre companies, Monks explores the paradox of acting with things that were once persons (or parts of persons): though human remains seem to offer actors “potent stimuli for performance,” they simultaneously “threaten to derail the process by insisting on their autonomy from illusion and the claims of the actor.” Since skulls consistently prove capable of disrupting the

Introduction  17 illusions in which they participate, Monks reviews the strategies actors have employed to “harness and contain” their power. Along the way, she discusses the Stanislavskian notion that performing objects can benefit actors in transforming their interior lives but also “threaten to reveal the precariousness of acting and the ambivalent subject status of actors.” In this part’s second chapter, “Shakespeare’s Puppets,” Kenneth Gross asks what kind of thing a puppet is and why puppets, as object-actors and as metaphors, thread their way throughout Shakespeare’s career and era. Gross focuses on puppet references in Shakespeare’s plays that remind us of “the insistent presence of the actor’s living body,” through its “raucousness and unpredictable physicality” and its potential puppet-like “woodennness,” revealing how figurative and actual puppets undermine and disclose the status of the actors. Gross also explores “puppet moments” for their potential to illustrate the fact that while Shakespeare’s speakers have highly individualized idioms, their language and forms of speaking are often “passed back and forth from one character to another, lent or stolen.” The result is a meditation on the ambiguous nature of mastery in Shakespeare’s theatre, on how and how much actors onstage—or the characters they play—control or are controlled by others. The capacity of puppets to dissolve subject-object binaries is taken further in Lawrence Switzky’s “Art, Objecthood, and the Extended Audience: Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works,” which argues that an avowedly New Materialist theatre would not simply be about things but also, at least in part, for them. Switzky discusses Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare as theorization through practice of a literalist theatre of things, one indebted to Shakespeare’s uses of theatrical things and to developments in artistic minimalism since the 1960s. In Forced Entertainment’s micro-performances of 36 Shakespearean plays, with household objects playing the characters, the arrangement, contiguity, and interobjective relays between things create moments that are deliberately opaque for human audiences but notionally meaningful for non-human spectators. At once a parody of and homage to the non-human turn, Forced Entertainment’s production, pitched at the reduced scale of an everyday object’s eye view, insists that we reassess Shakespeare’s plays so that the exchange, transformation, and proliferation of things do as much to determine theatrical prestige as the sophistication of language, plot, or character. Combining interviews with the performers with his analysis of the non-human instruments and audiences involved in presenting the plays, Switzky shows how “Forced Entertainments spins a provisional New Materialist theatre out of the plays, one that both harnesses Shakespeare’s flexible attitude to things and responds to contemporary sociological and philosophical materialisms.” In “‘Newes from the Dead’: An Unnatural Moment in the History of Natural Philosophy,” Jane Taylor describes her process of imagining,

18  Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky writing, and producing a modern version of Cardenio, a play that Shakespeare may have written for the King’s Men near the end of his career, and which has been subsequently lost. In composing her own play, After Cardenio, Taylor drew inspiration from the story of Anne Greene, a young woman who awakened on the table of a surgical theatre after being pronounced dead. Her essay thus explores instances of animating the dead found throughout Shakespeare, ultimately arguing that the anatomy theatre, where people become objects at once living and dead, qualifies as the “legitimate inheritor” of Shakespeare’s stage. Taylor invokes a “notional Cardenio,” the First Folio, puppets, human remains, and ideas of reanimacy as part of a larger concern with the force of the “relic” in performance, suggesting how performative objects can hover between the “physical and the metaphysical.” In Shakespearean theatre and its legacies, she locates cohabitations of the mystical and mechanistic. Marjorie Garber concludes the collection with a raucous Tail-Piece, “Shake That Thing.” Garber reminds us that Shakespeare’s things unify scalar extremes, from the sublime to the libidinous, from exalted ontological abstractions to the panting nearness of our private parts. Cruising the length and breadth of Shakespeare, Garber leads a kaleidoscopic tour from high theory to low comedy, from the things that terrify and elevate us to the things that arouse desire, discomfort, and delight.

Notes 1 Unless otherwise specified, references to Shakespeare are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton), 2015. 2 Cf. Brabantio’s reference to Othello “such a thing as thou.” 3 The plays are rife with examples, such as Helena’s response to Bertram’s question about what she wants from him, “Something; and scarce so much: nothing, indeed”, or the title to Much Ado about Nothing, a play that also exploits the word “nothing” for its multiple meanings, including the potential homonym ‘noting’ as well as female genitalia (because lacking a phallus) and sexual intercourse (hence, no longer lacking a phallus). See Marjorie Garber’s “Tail-Piece: Shake That Thing” in this volume for a fuller discussion of this sense of things. 4 This comparison can be contrasted in performance if the roles are doubled, something invited by the dramaturgical structure as well as by several references throughout the text. 5 Compare Julius Caesar 4.3., when Brutus asks Caesar’s Ghost “Art thou any thing?” 6 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 3; Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 42. 7 Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism ­(Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 52. 8 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Materialism (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2010), 3. 9 Richard Grusin, “Introduction” to The Non-Human Turn, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), x.

Introduction  19 10 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 4. 11 Douglas Bruster, “The New Materialism in Early Modern Studies,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 199. 12 See, for example, Catherine Richardson, “Shakespeare and Material Culture,” Literature Compass 7/6 (2010): 424–38 and James A. Knapp, “Beyond Materiality in Shakespeare Studies,” Literature Compass 11/10 (2014): 677–90. 13 Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare ­(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 1–25. 14 Bert States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 39. 15 Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6–7. See Chapter 11 in this volume for a similar discussion about the presence and histories of relics. 16 Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 56–57. 17 Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 18 Una Chaudhuri and Shonni Enelow, “Theorizing Ecocide: The Theatre of Eco-Cruelty,” in Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project: A Casebook, ed. Chaudhuri and Enelow (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 29–30. See also Mark Fisher, “Alas, poor planet,” in The Guardian (7 Feb 2007) for a discussion of how English theatre companies have confronted the perceived climatological apartness of the theatre. 19 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 20 Andrew Sofer investigates theatrical inflections of gravitational lensing in Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). 21 Stephen Greenblatt glosses this passage similarly in Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2018): “In either case, the dream is to escape from the human condition, which [Macbeth] experiences as unendurably claustrophobic” (105). 22 Daniel Silk, “The Marionette Theatre,” in On Dolls, ed. Kenneth Gross (Devon, England: Notting Hill Edition, 2018), 94. 23 Julia Lupton, “OOO + HHH = Zany, Interesting, and Cute,” in ­Object-Oriented Environs, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates (Punctum Books, 2016), 178. 24 Brown, Other Things, 39–40. 25 Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy, “Introduction” to Performing Objects and Theatrical Things (Houndmills, New York: Palgrave, 2014), 7. 26 Rebecca Schneider raises an important objection to this “romantic” expansion of inanimate vitality and agency as it distracts us from the curtailment of human agency through enslavement and reification: “For some people, in some neighborhoods, dead rats would be no surprise…. Some people’s and some things’ lives count more than others, and whose lives count as live matters.” See Schneider, “New Materialisms and Performance Studies,” TDR: The Drama Review, 59/4 (Winter 2015): 13.

20  Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky 27 Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. (London: Pelican, 2018), 83. 28 Michael Quinn, “Reading and Directing the Play,” New Theatre Quarterly, 3/11 (1987): 218–33. Quinn developed the Prague School theory of the “stage figure” as an exchange of signs between an actor and an audience throughout several essays, most prominently “Svejk’s Stage Figure: Illustration, Design, and the Representation of Character” Modern Drama 31/3 (Fall 1988): 330–39, and “Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting” New Theatre Quarterly 6/2 (1990): 154–62. We wish to thank an anonymous reader for suggesting a brief discussion of character as a thing in their comments on the volume. 29 Maurice Morgann, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (London: T. Davies, 1777); Bloom articulates this view across multiple books and essays, for example Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1988) and Falstaff: Give Me Life (New York: Scribner, 2017). 30 Andrew Sofer, “Getting on with Things: The Currency of Objects in Theatre and Performance Studies,” Theatre Journal 68/4 (December 2016): 684.

Part I

History

2 Reviving Vitalism in King Lear Aaron Greenberg

“I know when one is dead and when one lives,” Lear howls with C ­ ordelia in his arms at the close of Shakespeare’s True Chronicle Historie of the Life and Death of King Lear (1606). “She’s dead as earth” (24.255–56).1 For Robert Watson, Lear’s statement “shows only too keenly how it feels to inhabit a world where the willful mysteries of nature have been turned into a passive object, a mass of materiality.”2 How does it feel to inhabit such a world? Audiences have felt disgust and despair upon witnessing this apparently abortive conclusion to the play’s sporadic but resurgent efforts to activate and animate passive objects through dramatic language. It also feels ambivalent to witness a living actor playing dead at the end of a play that questions the ontological difference between the living, the dead, and the inanimate. Lear’s analogy is fraught, moreover, since to be dead as earth was not decisively to be dead according to the inconspicuously ubiquitous collection of beliefs that formed the early modern worldview called vitalism. Through rhetorical devices such as personification, prosopopoeia, and apostrophe, Shakespeare’s characters (re)vitalize things, including the earth, corpses, stools, knives, and feathers. These things may not spring to life in the ways that characters fear and hope, but even their inertia allows and produces effects that motivate and inspire human actors. I contend that Lear captures a nature morte or a not-quite-still life of the vitalism that sprang up in ­seventeenth-century England out of what many thought were its death throes to challenge the emergent paradigms of mechanism and biopower. Vitalism refers to a heterogeneous collective of tenets and traditions. Some iterations represent all bodies and things as intrinsically endowed with life rather than enlivened from without, say, by divine breath. Other vitalisms isolate the phenomena of life as autonomous from and irreducible to their material substrates.3 The predominant worldview in medieval Europe saw nature, the earth, and society—in short, ­everything—as alive. Andrew Mendelsohn has suggested that vitalism did not emerge as a distinctly intelligible position before the sixteenth century, because in a medieval scholastic culture dominated by Aristotelianism, everyone could be described as a vitalist.4 Lear both marks and disrupts the epistemological shift where vitalism transforms from a ubiquitous worldview

24  Aaron Greenberg whose operations appear autonomous and self-evident to a position that must be named, practiced, and defended by human actors. Medieval worldviews saw less need for the rigorous ontological separation of living, dead, and inanimate bodies that became increasingly decisive in the seventeenth century, as practical and ideological motives compelled writers to reimagine things such as the earth as lifeless. According to Carolyn Merchant, the image of the earth as a living organism and nurturing mother had served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of human beings. One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold or mutilate her body, although commercial mining would soon require that.5 Concomitant with devitalizing commercial practices were theological and new scientific paradigms that strictly separated human life from creaturely bodies and material things.6 And yet, notwithstanding the story that vitalism did not survive the seventeenth-century advent of mechanism, vitalism persisted even as it was disavowed and demonized.7 It counteracted what has been called the Disenchantment of the World, or Death of Nature, provoked by Protestantism and empiricism, and it resisted an emergent biopower predicated upon the inertia of bodies and things.8 Beyond fleshing out the history of vitalism, Lear accommodates and qualifies work by New Materialists, who seek “forms of vitalism that refuse” the traditional “opposition between mechanistic and vitalist understandings of (dead versus lively) matter,” undertaking instead to “discern emergent, generative powers (or agentic capacities) even within inorganic matter, and [to] eschew the distinction between…animate and inanimate, at the ontological level.”9 Jane Bennett, for instance, recognizes “vitality distributed along a continuum of ontological types,” identifying “the human-nonhuman assemblage as a locus of agency,” in order to unsettle the notion “that humans are special in the sense of existing, at least in part, outside of the order of material nature.”10 While Lear provides a lexicon for humbling human exceptionalism, it also warns that personifying inanimate things may not suffice to counteract the absolutization of biopower. Germane to my reading of Lear is the New Materialist insistence that “medical, scientific, or religious accounts of the boundary between life and death are currently becoming further enmeshed with issues surrounding sovereignty because increasingly the state must legislate on matters that were formerly left to God or nature.”11 Lear contextualizes New Materialist concerns by capturing the early modern origins of sovereignty’s enmeshment with accounts of the boundary between life and death. The stage directions of the early texts underscore how Shakespeare’s play contradicts the modern assumption that the difference between life

Reviving Vitalism in King Lear  25 and death is always obvious. In the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 First Folio, Lear enters “with Cordelia in his armes.”12 Later play texts decide that Cordelia is dead before the scene begins. In the modern conflated version by Norton Shakespeare, Lear enters “with CORDELIA dead in his arms.”13 The editorial decision to pronounce Cordelia dead on arrival elides the play’s strategic ambiguity between the living, the dead, and the inanimate. It also encroaches on Shakespeare’s dramaturgical decision to keep Cordelia alive, or at least to keep that possibility alive, long enough for audiences to decide for themselves. Criteria for distinguishing the living from the dead and inanimate were in flux throughout the seventeenth century—for example, when Descartes was obliged to argue in 1649 that the difference between the body of a living man and that of a dead man is just like the difference between, on the one hand, a watch or other automaton (that is, a self-moving machine) when it is wound up…and, on the other hand, the same watch or machine when it is broken and the principle of its movement ceases to be active.14 The analogy between human bodies and automatons epitomizes the seventeenth-century mechanistic worldview that regarded things as inert. But the difference between dead and living human bodies is arguably “just like” many analogous differences, including that between the earth conceived as an unambiguous marker of deadness and the earth conceived as an animate source and symbol of vitality. In the centuries following Descartes, Western thought has fixated on his decisive bifurcation of the Great Chain of Being, which divided human life from lifeless automatons and inanimate things.15 Pre-empting the decisive Cartesian split, Lear portrays sovereignty’s oscillation between, on the one hand, a divine right upheld by all subjected persons, creatures, and things on the Great Chain of Being and, on the other hand, a limited set of decisions based and focused exclusively on human life. Scholarship has traditionally dwelled on the opposition between vitalism and mechanism. Shakespeare, however, invokes vitalism to counteract the nascent discourse of biopower that was already discernable in the anonymous King Leir. Vitalism and absolute sovereignty became mutually inimical in the seventeenth century, when according to Foucault, the characteristic task of sovereignty “was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through.”16 Such power over life requires living bodies as subjects, hence Lear’s interest in promoting longevity, curbing capital punishment, and prohibiting suicide. Lear represents the fantasy of “absolute power” (24.293) as it is curtailed by mortality and by an untimely vitalism that sporadically proliferates potential lifeforms that are unauthorized by sovereignty and beyond its reach. For Daniel Juan Gil, Lear concludes “with raw matter that is animated and yet is not

26  Aaron Greenberg fully captured by the sovereign power that imposes stable s­ ocio-symbolic identities.”17 Gil sees this “raw matter” as the substrate of human life, epitomized by “the final tableau of (socially) dead but (biologically) ­living bodies with which the play ends.”18 But Lear also brings sovereignty to its crisis by personifying an array of inanimate things that are unauthorized to act, represent, or be represented. If Giorgio Agamben is right that sovereignty institutes political order through anthropogenesis—“the becoming human of the living being,” which is never fully accomplished “but… always under way…every time and in each individual [who] decides between the human and the animal [and] between life and death”19 —then Lear dislocates extant social orders and political alliances with its alternative ecology of living, dead, and inanimate things. “Inanimate things…may be personated,” Thomas Hobbes wrote four decades after the first performance of Lear as he codified his theory of absolute sovereignty, just not “before there be some state of civil government.”20 In other words, it is for the state to decide which things get represented as persons and by whom. Lest things seem to take on a life of their own beyond that which the sovereign allows, Hobbes posited that “things inanimate cannot be authors nor therefore give authority to their actors.”21 That Lear teems with inanimate things unauthorized to act was perhaps not lost on King James, who believed that the existence and survival of the nation depended on “his absolute power of life and death over his subjects,”22 and who in December 1606 was in the audience at Whitehall for the play’s earliest known performance. 23 James’s potentially absolute biopower was checked by parliament as well as by technological limitations. He had authority to decide who to let live and who to kill. But on the eve of new sciences including Cartesian mechanism and Bacon’s proto-biological experiments in prolonging life, James likely did not foresee that sovereignty would soon entail decisions over which lives to foster and which to let die, or that power would require the capacity and authority to “know when one is dead and when one lives.” The following pages dissect key scenes in Lear ranging from Scene 14 to Scene 24 (the final scene), which conjoin the competing ideologies of biopower and vitalism by staging the sovereign resolve to control and preserve life against a proliferation of (rhetorical) lifeforms that elude sovereign control. First, I observe Gloucester’s beard from Scene 14 to exhibit the play’s vitalism of human excrescences enacted by superfluous bodily things whose inaction grows without and beyond authority. I then take Cordelia’s conjuration of the earth in Scene 18 to represent a vegetative vitalism that ascribes sense, reason, and autonomy to ­non-human things. My conclusion tries to capture the conspirative vitalism that circulates in Scene 24 from Cordelia’s body to a menagerie of animals and things before inspiring audiences to act. It matters less whether things actually spring to life in these scenes than that the mere potential of

Reviving Vitalism in King Lear  27 vitalism in Lear revitalizes human actors by tempering sovereignty’s fantasy of absolute biopower.

Gloucester’s Beard The play’s sporadic vitalism first unfolds explicitly in Scene 14, where Regan and Cornwall torture Gloucester. Cornwall concedes that without absolute sovereignty, he lacks the right to take Gloucester’s life. Although “we may not pass upon his life / Without the form of justice,” Cornwall reasons, “yet our power / Shall do a courtesy to our wrath, which men / May blame, but not control” (14.22–25). It is reprehensible but not illegal to torture Gloucester, in other words, and before gouging out one of his eyes, Regan plucks his white beard, which, like Lear’s beard, sprouts up in the play as an obsolete symbol of reverend senescence. At the nadir of impotence, Gloucester summons his uprooted whiskers to thwart the transgression of hospitality. “Naughty lady,” he chides Regan. “These hairs, which thou dost ravish from my chin, / Will quicken, and accuse thee: I am your host: / With robbers’ hands my hospitable favours / You should not ruffle thus. What will you do?” (14.35–39). Gloucester’s hairs do not “quicken” or come to life to “accuse” Regan, and his vitalist prediction dwindles to a question about human action—but things continue. It is unclear what rouses Regan’s servant to intervene by stabbing Cornwall, whether he is moved by Gloucester’s worldview of witnessing and quickening things or by the old man’s second, more anthropocentric appeal: “He that will think to live till he be old / Give me some help!” (14.66–67). Vitalism makes way here for the paradigm of longevity as a model for human action, according to which virtue is rewarded with long life and vice punished with short life. Another servant standing by submits that if Regan “live long / And in the end meet the old course of death, / Women will all turn monsters” (14.97–99). If one as evil as Regan should reach old age, that is, then all women, presumably desiring long life, will follow her bad example to be rewarded in kind. Fatally wounded, Cornwall slays the servant before removing Gloucester’s remaining eye. “Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?” Cornwall asks, reviving Gloucester’s misplaced but resilient vitalism: “All dark and comfortless. Where’s my son Edmund? Edmund, enkindle all the sparks of nature, to quit this horrid act” (14.80–84). Gloucester’s inert hairs and nature’s apathetic sparks enact the complacency and injustice that bristled eighteenth-century audiences who felt “that under the appearances of things lay an order of justice which it was the job of literature to imitate, not to hide.”24 Such audiences preferred Nahum Tate’s happy, human-centric Lear over Shakespearean things that imitated just inaction, concealment, and recalcitrance. But Scene 14 represents a “form of justice” beyond the cynical sense in which Cornwall uses that

28  Aaron Greenberg phrase (i.e., justice as a façade for murder). Gloucester’s hairs, despite their potential agentic force, do not prevent his enucleation, and nature’s sparks do not produce the flames necessary to “quit this horrid act.” Here, their rhetorically performed inaction stages a crisis of agency and a call to action for humans who, faced with such inertia, can no longer credibly delegate things justly to uphold order. Regan later regrets that Cornwall “let [Gloucester] live” (19.10) because he represents a political liability. Gloucester himself wants to end his life because he cannot “bear it longer” (20.37). On the way to ­Dover, where he plans to commit suicide, he encounters his son Edgar, who stages an elaborate mock suicide to revive Gloucester’s will to live, to “trifle” with his “despair” in order “to cure it” (20.33–34). As he leaps toward what he thinks will be his death, Gloucester calls attention to the central indecision between what lives and what is dead. ‘‘If Edgar live,” he wavers with dramatic irony, since the audience knows that Edgar lives, “O, bless him!’’ (20.40). Edgar marvels that people kill themselves despite knowing that life inevitably ends on its own: “I know not how conceit may rob / The treasury of life, when life itself / Yields to the theft: had he been where he thought, / By this, had thought been past. Alive or dead? / Ho, you sir! Friend! Hear you, sir! Speak! / Thus might he pass indeed: yet he revives. / What are you sir?” (20.42–48) Anticipating Trinculo’s similar inquiry of Caliban in The Tempest—“a man or a fish? dead or alive?” (2.2.23)—Edgar’s questions make Gloucester’s body ontologically ambiguous as it hovers on the precipice of sovereign anthropogenesis. “Away, and let me die” (20.48), Gloucester begs, but Edgar fails or refuses to accept Gloucester’s expressed and persistent wish to die, inveigling the old man to see that “life’s a miracle” (20.55). Yet we see with Gloucester that life is not only a miracle but also a theatrical performance and a state hardly distinguishable from death, characterized by “wretchedness” and subject to biopower that seeks to prolong life at all costs. It is by Shakespeare’s design that moments after Gloucester resolves to live, Lear arrives on scene reclaiming sovereignty. Lear’s notion of kingship has transformed, however, once he grasps that he is mortal and that things are beyond his control: “the thunder would not peace at my bidding…I am not ague-proof” (20.99–102). Lear shifts his gaze to the phenomena of human life, where he figuratively reinstitutes his rule by pardoning Gloucester: “I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause? Adultery? Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No: the wren goes to’t, and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight” (20.105–9). On the heels of Edgar’s dubious lifesaving ploy, Lear’s pardon appears less than merciful. Gloucester does not want to live, and Lear pardons him not out of humanitarian impulses

Reviving Vitalism in King Lear  29 but from a strategy to nourish lives with and over which he can exercise sovereignty: “Let copulation thrive[…]To’t, luxury, pell-mell! for I lack soldiers” (20.110–13). No longer secure by Divine Right and incapable of commanding nature, Lear reconfigures his sovereignty as biopower extorted from the bodies of subjects who are born to die and allowed to live only to be exposed to death. “Then there’s life in’t” (20.187–88), Lear claims after Gloucester recognizes his sovereignty. Here, as in the play’s culminating scene, we are left to wonder if Lear sees life in anything at all. The preposition conjoined with a reifying pronoun (“in’t”) may suggest that Lear imagines sovereignty as the life-source of lifeless things, thus foreshadowing the “artificial soul” of Hobbesian sovereignty without which bodies politic are lifeless and inert. Alternatively, Lear may by now recognize life inhering in “the thing itself” (11.90)—namely, the bare body of the human animal in the wilderness beyond sovereignty. The play’s logic of life-preservation obliges Lear to pardon Gloucester, compels Regan and Cornwall to “let him live,” and prevents Gloucester from killing himself. Earlier when Regan suggests that Lear live with Goneril, Lear scoffs at the idea of begging “to keep base life afoot” (7.365–67). The evolution from Lear’s contempt for undignified “base life” in Scene 7 to his exclusive focus on embodied, mortal life in Scene 20 parallels the transformation of his concept of sovereignty from the power to kill to the power to let or make live. Even as they claim their wish (if not their right) to die, Lear and others prolong life until the end, where the play’s consummating couplet resists such prolongation: “The oldest have borne most. We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long [Exeunt, carrying the bodies]” (24.320–21). Shakespeare’s Lear thus cogently questions biopower by asserting the limits of human life and by recognizing life beyond the human order of things.

The Unpublished Virtues of the Earth Scene 18 proleptically confounds Lear’s decision that Cordelia is “dead as earth” by drawing attention to the earth’s virtual vitality. Embroiled in war near Dover, Cordelia organizes a search for her missing father. She orders her subjects to “search every acre in the high-grown field” for Lear, whom she last saw camouflaged and “crowned with rank fumitor and furrow-weeds, / With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-­ flowers, / Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow / In our sustaining corn” (18.3–6). Unlike Ophelia’s “rosemary,” which represents and/or provokes “remembrance,” or her “pansies,” which signify and/or provoke “thoughts,” Cordelia’s flora seem on the surface to do nothing. That they are “idle weeds” suggests both that they grow without human labor and that they are useless, possessing no active properties or virtues. The “idle weeds” represent vegetative lifeforms that grow autonomously because, unlike “our sustaining corn,” they do not participate in the human-ordered hierarchy of things.

30  Aaron Greenberg Cordelia first fails to see that the virtues of the “idle weeds” with which Lear is “crowned” are, as her metaphor betrays, key to restoring Lear’s sovereignty. She asks the doctor how “man’s wisdom” (18.8) might restore Lear, but the doctor shifts focus from human power back toward the “foster-nurse of nature” and its “many simples operative, whose power will close the eye of anguish” (18.12–16). Lear just needs “repose” (18.12), the doctor says, which can be “provoke[d]” (18.13) with herbs that are active or capable of acting. Cordelia describes them as “unpublish’d” (18.17), but “many simples operative” became widely legible through seventeenth-century herbals—books about plants—such as medical reformer Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physitian (1652), a catalogue of natural remedies to preserve readers’ health and cure their diseases “for three pence charge, and with such things only as grow in England.”25 With the doctor’s knowledge at her command, Cordelia subjects the earth’s virtues to a dramatic personification: All blest secrets, all you unpublish’d virtues of the earth, spring with my tears! Be aidant and remediate in the good man’s distress! Seek, seek for him; lest his ungovern’d rage dissolve the life that wants the means to lead it. (18.16–21) These lines affiliate Scene 18 with the vitalism of Paracelsus, for whom “all herbs, plants, trees and other things issuing from the bowels of the earth are so many magic books and signs” that “speak to the curious physician through their signatures, discovering…their inner virtues hidden beneath nature’s veil of silence.”26 Cordelia’s vitalism yields (to) the biopolitical project of fostering human life. Aided by the doctor, Lear survives for a time, but prolonging Lear’s life may not be a morally virtuous act in a play about the tragedy of overliving. Upon reviving in the next scene, he says as much to Cordelia: “You do me wrong to take me out o’ th’ grave” (21.43). Biopower appears to vanquish vitalism across the play as conjured things remain impassive while sovereignty takes hold of human life. Kent’s life, for instance, is reified “as a pawn” (1.144) whose sole object is to protect the king’s life at all costs. However, residual and emergent vitalisms in Lear resist the absolutization of biopower by proliferating unauthorized personifications and agencies.

So Long Lives This, and This Gives Life to Thee Tate’s 1681 “Reviv’d” King Lear ends with Cordelia’s revival, partly, he admits in the “Dedicatory Epistle,” to avoid encumbering “the Stage with dead Bodies.”27 Tate’s impulse to keep his characters alive allows him to keep them under his dramaturgical authority, which in turn aligns with the paradigm of biopower that involves decisions about

Reviving Vitalism in King Lear  31 which lifeforms represent “Persons” and are therefore worth preserving. That Regan, Goneril, and Gloucester all die offstage suggests that Shakespeare was more interested in the (in)action of their corpses than enacting their deaths. Gloucester is first to die, and Edgar’s account of his death is interrupted by a gentleman with a bloody knife screaming for help. “What means that bloody knife?” Edgar asks, a locution that is more than metaphor in a play that clings to the hope that things such as knives can indeed “mean” or be intentional apart from human subjects. “‘Tis hot, it smokes,” answers the gentleman, still fixated on the knife rather than the human actor who presumably must have wielded it: “It came even from the heart of—O, she’s dead!” (24.218–19; ­Tragedy, 5.3.198–99). That the knife itself “came” from Goneril’s heart obfuscates the human actor that put it there, allowing the object subjectivity and potential personhood, as if to suggest that knives, not people, kill people. However rhetorical and counterfactual it is, the suggestion that the knife is self-moving and intentional performs vital work. It does not so much absolve human actors of ethical and political responsibility for their actions as it does revive an alternative ecology that recognizes the interdependence and shared life of humans, creatures, and things. 28 Personified things can be taken ad absurdum, as when Lear performs a mock trial for a “joint-stool” in place of his daughter. “Arraign her first. ’Tis Goneril. I here take my oath before this honourable assembly she kicked the poor King her father” (13.40–41). When the Fool asks the stool if its name is Goneril, Lear rightly interjects that “she cannot deny it” (13.42–43). Beneath the absurdity, however, is the play’s vital inquiry into the life of things. It is worth noting that English authors through Hobbes gave “things inanimate” the same juridical and political status as “children, fools, and madmen that have no use of reason [and] may be personated by” those authorized to impersonate them. 29 Deodands, “any moveable thing inanimate, or beast animate [that causes] the untimely death of any reasonable…person,” were included in English common law from the eleventh to the nineteenth century, while such guilty actants as animals, boiling pots of water, falling trees, and church bells were put on trial.30 Lear’s trial for the joint-stool draws attention to the potential deodand status not only of stage props such as knives, but also of irrational characters played by actors who are themselves personified by Shakespeare’s authority. If early audiences recognized Shakespeare’s things as deodands, they may have experienced cognitive dissonance in deciding to whom or what these things belonged, which were traditionally “given to God” or the sovereign but now emerged in a pagan, polytheistic play where the king himself is deemed irrational. It is reasonable, however, to read the joint-stool’s trial as a trial of the audience’s capacity to decide what lives from what is dead and inanimate, a capacity brought to crisis by the play’s final scene.

32  Aaron Greenberg When Albany learns that Goneril has poisoned Regan before stabbing herself, he gives a surprising, almost dramaturgical order: “Produce their bodies, be they alive or dead” (24.224). Albany’s indecision or indifference is problematically redundant since the gentleman has already pronounced Goneril and Regan dead. Likewise, when Kent informs Lear that his “eldest daughters have fordone themselves, and desperately are dead,” Lear replies with a peculiar indecision that seems to reduce Kent’s knowledge to mere opinion: “So think I, too” (24.285–87). Lear agrees with Kent but without conviction, leaving unarticulated the decision about what lives and what is dead. What Kent calls “the promised end” (24.259) of Shakespeare’s play culminates in Cordelia’s body as it hangs between life and death. After his chthonic analogy announces how dead Cordelia is, Lear scarcely pauses for breath before checking her vital signs: “She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass; if that her breath will mist or stain the stone, why, then she lives” (24.256–58). Moved by the force of the play’s inertia, Lear negates his hope: “No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all?” (24.299–301). This consummating question marks Lear’s recognition of the play’s virtual cross-ontological vitality. Earlier he declared that human life is exceptional because its needs exceed the biological requirements for sustaining animal life: “Allow not nature more than nature needs,” he stipulated, then “man’s life is cheap as beast’s” (7.419–20). The question on Lear’s dying breath, by contrast, shifts focus from superfluous needs to the more basic faculty of respiration, which humans share at least with animals and plants, and in early modern vitalist worldviews even with minerals. Lear may not descend lower than dogs, horses, and rats in his litany of lifeforms that survive Cordelia, but his emphasis on breath invokes the shared life of all creatures and things, including the earth itself. Lear’s question carries the seeds of subsequent seventeenth-century English rebuttals of Descartes’s mechanistic philosophy, particularly the infamous “beast-machine hypothesis,” which characterized animals as lifeless automatons. Platonist philosopher Henry More, for example, criticized Descartes for “that deadly and murderous sentiment[…]whereby you snatch away, or rather withhold, life and sense from all animals, for you would never conceive that they really live.”31 Inspired by Cordelia’s breathless body, Lear ends by acknowledging, however resentfully, that animals partake of the same life as human beings. That Cordelia no longer shares this common life represents what Laurie Shannon has identified in Lear as “human negative exceptionalism,” which characterizes the human as a privative case rather than paragon of the animal. 32 Descartes posited that the difference between living and dead human bodies is “just like the difference between” working and broken machines, and that

Reviving Vitalism in King Lear  33 a disembodied, immortal faculty of reason distinguishes human life from creaturely mortality and thingly inanimacy. By contrast, Lear’s isolation of breath as that which differentiates the living from the dead preserves a worldview that does not “withhold life” from non-humans but instead recognizes the potential vitality of all bodies and things. The play’s final scene dramatizes the ancient saying, still commonplace in seventeenth-century England, that “all things conspire.” Early moderns understood conspiracy (from the Latin conspīrāre, “to breathe together”) in its metaphorical senses, to signify both covert plotting and cooperation more generally. Pursuing the breath that passes between Cordelia and a menagerie of animals and things including the earth and a looking-glass or stone, Lear articulates a conspiracy that finally overflows the stage to inspire audiences as they take in the expiration of staged corpses. This articulation represents not only the limits of biopower to preserve life but also an alternative anthropogenesis that elicits, if it does not yet enact, new modes of sociopolitical organization and cohesion around a (discourse of) shared vitality. The last object of Lear’s conspiracy is a breath-blown feather that produces an anamorphosis between life and death: “The feather stirs; she lives! If it be so, it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt” (24.260–62). The play does not offer such redemption, but here it compels the audience to rethink the motive agency that Lear tacitly associates with the (in)transitive verb “stirs,” which might refer to Cordelia’s breath or the feather itself. Michael Cody has suggested that “only Lear’s animalistic presence can sense the feather,” where “for the audience, the feather drifts only in Lear’s imagination, and we, yielding to the medium of the drama, only have access to the sounds and images presented us[…]and the tragedy has brushed against its medium’s limit once again.”33 This is not strictly true, especially if Shakespeare has successfully incorporated us into the same animalistic or vitalistic presence as Lear. Even if audiences are not prepared to entertain that the feather stirs of its own vitality, we may still see it stir because of wind blowing through an open-air stage, a draught coursing through an indoor theatre, or by the breath of the living actor who is only playing dead. Rather than brush against the medium’s limit, the stirring feather moved by breath of uncertain provenance momentarily dissolves that limit to include us in the play’s conspiracy. And readers breathe together with the written text no less than audiences breathe together with actors during a live performance, a fact that Shakespeare already underscores in the final couplet of Sonnet 18: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (13–14). Likewise, though she be “dead as earth,” Cordelia lives as long as the earth lives and as long as readers, actors, and audiences decide to revive her.

34  Aaron Greenberg

Notes 1 The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Greenblatt, Cohen, Howard, and Maus (New York and London: Norton & Company, 2008). 2 Robert Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 53. 3 For Hans Driesch, the “main question of Vitalism” was whether the purposive processes of life result from “a special constellation of factors known already to the sciences of the inorganic” or whether such processes issue from “an autonomy peculiar to the processes themselves” (The History of Vitalism [London: Macmillan and Co., 1914], 1). In his essay “Contemporary Vitalism” (1926), Mikhail Bakhtin described the three camps of modern biology: the mechanists, the vitalists, and those who try to accommodate both mechanism and vitalism. The vitalists, he explains, conceive life as autonomous and subject only to its own laws which are unique in nature (“Contemporary Vitalism,” in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy. eds. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992]), 76–77. 4 “Vitalism,” Melvyn Bragg, In Our Time, BBC (October 16, 2008). With Patricia Fara, Fellow of Clare College and Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University; Andrew Mendelsohn, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Imperial College, University of London, and Pietro Corsi, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oxford. 5 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1980), 3. 6 See Margaret Wertheim, Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars (New York: Norton, 1995), 81–103, 92. “For Mersenne, the root heresy lay in the organic philosophy of nature on which magic was based. In particular he objected to the idea that the world had a soul that was the source of its vital activity.” 7 See, for example, David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2005), 65–66. See also Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 11. 8 Ventriloquizing Hobbes, Bruno Latour explains in We Have Never Been Modern (1991) that egalitarian radical groups such as the Levellers and the Diggers are most dangerous “when they invoke the active powers of matter and the free interpretation of the Bible in order to disobey their legitimate princes.” Accordingly, [i]nert and mechanical matter is as essential to civil peace as a purely symbolic interpretation of the Bible. In both cases, it behooves us to avoid at all costs the possibility that the factions may invoke a higher Entity—Nature or God—which the Sovereign does not fully control. (19) 9 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 9. 10 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 37. 11 “Introducing the New Materialisms,” New Materialisms, 23. 12 The Norton Shakespeare, 2487. 13 Ibid., 2565. 14 Passions of the Soul, in Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. Cottingham and Stoothoff (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 331.

Reviving Vitalism in King Lear  35 15 Stuart Shanker, “Descartes’ Legacy: The Mechanist/Vitalist Debates,” in The Philosophy of Science, Mathematics, and Logic in The Twentieth Century, ed. Stuart Shanker (New York: Routledge, 1996), 316. See Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Some would try to restore the continuum by emphasizing that man’s higher capacities could be found in lesser degree down the chain, in animals and even inanimate matter; however the opposite attempt became dominant, and the mechanical movement of matter was analogized to reflex actions and then to thought itself. (33) 16 Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 262. 17 Daniel Juan Gil, Shakespeare’s Anti-Politics: Sovereign Power and the Life of the Flesh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 122. 18 Ibid. 19 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell ­(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 14. See also Daniel Juan Gil, Shakespeare’s Anti-politics: Sovereign Power and the Life of the Flesh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 79. 20 Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 108. 21 Ibid. 22 Shakespeare’s Anti-Politics, 6. 23 A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare’s King Lear, ed. Grace Ioppolo (New York: Routledge, 2003). “The play’s apparently authorised publication in 1608, so soon after its composition in 1606, suggests that King Lear was popular enough to draw reading audiences while not compromising the interest of future theatrical audiences (3). 24 Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 25. 25 The English Physitian (London, 1652), frontispiece. Culpeper listed numerous “vertues” for the plants cited by Cordelia. 26 Qtd. in Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Routledge, 2002), 18. 27 Tate, “The Epistle Dedicatory.” 28 Jane Bennett has weighed the payoffs of recognizing “the power of ­human-nonhuman assemblages”—which include resistance to “a politics of blame”—against the pitfalls of persisting “with a strategic understatement of material agency in the hopes of enhancing the accountability of specific humans” (Vibrant Matter, 38). 29 Leviathan, 108. 30 Thomas Blount, Nomo-Lexikon, A Law-Dictionary Interpreting Such Difficult and Obscure Words and Terms as Are Found Either in Our Common or Statute, Ancient or Modern Lawes (In the Savoy [London], 1670). 31 “Henry More to Descartes 11 December 1648,” in Leonara D. Cohen, “Descartes and Henry More on the Beast-Machine—A Translation of Their Correspondence Pertaining to Animal Automatism,” Annals of Science 1 (1936): 50. 32 “Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative E ­ xceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60/2 ­(Summer 2009): 175. 33 Michael C. Clody, “The Mirror and the Feather: Tragedy and Animal Voice in King Lear,” ELH 80/3 (Fall 2013): 661–80, 674.

3 Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes Natasha Korda

“Sithe the earth is a Stage whereon we play our partes… Be warie how thou walkst upon the same.” —Thomas Howell, “Mans Lyfe Likened to a Stage-play” (1581)1 “To life again, to heare thy Buskin tread, And shake a Stage…” —Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us” (1623)2 “Then to the well-trod stage anon…” —John Milton, “L’Allegro” (1645)3

The well-known epithet “treading the boards (or the stage)” has been synonymous with the actor’s art since Shakespeare’s time, suggesting the reliance of that art upon footwork and foot-skills, as mediated by shoecraft and stagecraft.4 The epithet has garnered little critical attention, however, perhaps because it is deemed to be deliberate (and literal) understatement. This is hardly surprising, as praise of the “well-trod stage” runs counter to the hegemony of the head and hands in Western culture. Within this familiar and still influential hierarchy, traced by Tim Ingold to classical antiquity in his evocative essay, “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet,”5 the primary purpose of bipedal locomotion is understood to liberate human hands to become agents of the head or intellect: whereas the feet merely “undergird and propel the body within the natural world,” the hands “are free to deliver the intelligent designs or conceptions of the mind upon it,” thereby enabling “man’s mastery and control over his material environment.”6 Within this worldview, humanity’s phenomenological and epistemological orientation toward the head and hands is thus understood to be part and parcel of its assumed preeminence over n ­ on-human animals and the natural world. This chapter draws on recent work in pedestrian aesthetics and the phenomenology of perception to argue that the affordances

Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes  37 of the Shakespearean stage—its texts, techniques of footwork, technologies of footwear, and the built environment of the stage itself—had the potential to unsettle this worldview by creating an aesthetic “walkscape” that reorients bystanders’ understanding of everyday modes of movement within the world through its enactment of a play-world performed and perceived through the feet.7 The aesthetic potential of this “walkscape” has likely been overlooked by scholars because the triumphal alliance of the head and hands over the heels is now, Ingold demonstrates, “deeply embedded in the structures of public life in western societies” and in “mainstream thinking in the [academic] disciplines.”8 This is readily apparent within the discipline of theatre history, where far more attention has been paid to facial expressions and hand-gestures in Shakespearean dramaturgy than to footwork or footwear.9 The World Shakespeare Bibliography lists over 200 titles devoted to the face (80) and hands (120), but only rarely does one stumble across feet (fewer than 10 titles), much less shoes (fewer than 5).10 The historiographical lens through which Shakespeare scholars view early modern stage-practice often appears quasi-cinematic in its tight focus on talking heads and posing hands, which seem to float magically above invisible feet and legs, untethered to any material substrate. Through this historiographical lens early modern actors appear to communicate with audiences along a head-hand matrix, conveying meaning through voice, facial expressions, hand-gestures, and handprops, while audiences respond in kind with wide-eyed excitement, gaping mouths, tears, laughter, cheers, and clapping (or grimaces, shouts, boos, hisses, and pippin-hurling). The Shakespearean stage has thus been construed to reflect, and indeed to reinforce, the hegemony of the head and hands as quintessentially human channels of communication. As Farah Karim-Cooper argues in The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage (2016), the most extensive treatment to date of the semiology of Shakespearean hand-gestures: Our hands provide us with the ability to communicate; with them we reach, grasp, hold, express emotion and assert our wills. Our hands carry our thoughts and hang them in the air as we gesticulate and they are the principal organs of the sense of touch. Therefore, the hand is the instrument with which we engage with the physical world and it is the part of our body, apart from the face, with which we [i.e. humans] communicate most expressively and passionately.11 The Shakespearean stage from this vantage functions to elevate the human body off the ground, hoisting it into the air so as to focalize and heighten the head-hand communication matrix. Upon this stage, the hand is cast in its Aristotelian-Galenic role as “the instrument of instruments”: its “unique capacity to reflect cognition” and to “manipulate the environment” is maximized by Shakespearean dramaturgy.12

38  Natasha Korda By instrumentalizing thought, the hand of the human actor is construed to extend the mind outward, hanging thoughts “in the air” or inscribing them onto the surface of the stage—and indeed, the “great globe itself” (Tempest, 4.1.153)13 —as it would onto a blank page.14 Shakespeare’s Globe is in this way positioned as a forerunner to modern theories of “extended mind” or “distributed cognition,” as in Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (2008), recently adapted to the study of early modern theatre by Evelyn Tribble in Cognition in the Globe (2011).15 For Clark as for Tribble, hand-techniques and technologies model “cognitive extension” into and onto the world: notebooks, Filofaxes, and hand-held devices demonstrate for Clark the way in which humans “parasitiz[e] the local environment so as to reduce memory load,” just as actors’ hand-gestures and use of hand-properties demonstrate for Tribble the way in which the Shakespearean actor recruits resources “opportunistically” to instrumentalize “material to hand, across…boundaries of brain, body, and world” so as to “reduce cognitive loads.”16 Actors are described as communicating along the head-hand matrix in a manner not unlike texting, sending facial emojis and disembodied hand-signals to audiences across the ether. Although I do not dispute the widespread influence of the head-hand matrix within early modern culture as in our own, it seems to me worth considering the implications of restricting our frame of reference to this lens, as in the statement “the hand is the instrument with which we [i.e. humans] engage with the physical world.”17 What escapes understanding when we attend only to that which is ready-to-hand, that is, to a domain under the control, power, influence, and possession of the human hand? What goes unnoticed when we overlook what is underfoot, eclipsing the effects of our ongoing engagement with the physical world through the feet? What precisely did it mean to “tread the boards” in Shakespeare’s time? How did this treading function as an aesthetic practice? How did the meanings conveyed by onstage treading differ from, reflect upon, or respond to everyday habits of walking in the early modern world? In turning our attention to “culture on the ground” and to the world “perceived through the feet,” Ingold challenges us to consider how the natural and built environments and changing technologies of footwear “mediate a historical engagement of the human organism, in its entirety, with the world around it”18 —including that of early modern actors and bystanders with the elevated, thrust stage and the environmental surround of the wooden O. The challenge of dislodging the head-hand duopoly is not merely one of expanding the disciplinary parameters of theatre historiography to include new objects (such as shoes) but of shifting the discipline’s objectives and methods. Although Tribble’s recent study of Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body (2017) extends the range of theatrical gesture to include stage choreography

Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes  39 (such as fencing), cognitive extension along the head-hand matrix remains its primary analytical lens. Hand-technics (“skill of weapon”) thus continue to model “preparation for the fast-moving, high-stakes, mindfully embodied practice of making theatre” such that what you “hold in your hand” is what “really matters”19 in the end. Fundamental to the c­ ognitive-extension model of theatrical production as “mindfully embodied practice” circumscribed by the head-hand matrix is a hylomorphic (Greek = “matter-form”) conception of human making as the (manual) inscription or imposition of finite form upon matter. Within this model, human hands inscribe the intelligent designs of the mind onto the world so as to enable “man’s mastery and control over his material environment.”20 Indeed, the model of extended cognition which relies according to Clark upon “a manipulable external environment,”21 onto which the human mind “supersizes” itself, expanding its reach via the tool-bearing or weaponized hand so as to inscribe itself upon everything it touches—all with the aim of thinking less—merits closer scrutiny. Recent critics of the hylomorphic model, including Ingold (who follows in the philosophical footsteps of Heidegger, Simondon, and Deleuze and Guattari), have sought to re-conceptualize human technics in ecological relation to things in ways that are helpful to developing an understanding of the aesthetic potential of the Shakespearean stage as a “walkscape.”22 Ingold conceptualizes “a haptic relation to the world” that is “by no means…limited to the hands,” in which the maker, rather than “standing aloof, imposing his designs on a world that is ready and waiting to receive them,” is instead “a participant in amongst a world of active materials.”23 Maker and materials are here reciprocally “shaped through transformational engagements” that include not only handwork (as manifested in the artisan’s crafted shoe) but also footwork, such as the activity of treading the boards (as mediated by the actor’s worn shoe). Rather than focusing on shoes as “finished objects” defined by their “over-againstness”—that is, as artifacts we may “look at” or touch with our hands but cannot “join with” in the process of formational wayfaring 24 —Ingold follows Deleuze and Guattari in defining making (both handwork and footwork) as processual, in the sense of being ongoing activities or journeys in which “the maker [is] a journeyman.”25 Form is from this perspective not imposed onto matter, as in the hylomorphic model, but rather arises through movement in ever-emergent conformations and deformations. 26 The processual dimension of Ingold’s conception of enskilled bodies joining with material(s and) things in the activity of movement-making suggests a different method or path by which to follow Shakespeare’s shoes treading the boards of the stage in performance. Such an approach would need to consider shoes not solely as static, finished objects defined by their form and function as artifacts of handicraft but as things worn with feet in an ongoing, processual activity of transitive and intransitive

40  Natasha Korda wearing in, on, through, and by an environing, ever-transforming world. As objects of human handicraft, shoes are anthropocentric artifacts worn transitively and prosthetically to protect, facilitate, exhibit, and extend human agency and expression not only in but on and upon the world (we “put” and “have” shoes on and thereby leave our imprint upon our surround). This transitive wearing upon the world inevitably entails waste, damage, destruction, and deformation through use: it wears down, away, and eventually out. Yet the wasting entailed by such transitive wearing is equally inevitably reflexive and intransitive: it also wears out the wearer and the thing worn—“to the stumps,” so to speak. To wear away is also to be worn away. Intransitive wearing is a processual transformation into, a process of becoming: to wear is in this sense to “pass gradually into.”27 The worn shoe continually undergoes a transformative process of conformation and deformation through an ongoing conjuncture of “materials in movement” in the world.28 These materials-in-motion include not only shoe-leather (and other materials used in shoemaking) but also the wooden boards of the stage, and even the skin, sinews, and bones of the feet and legs. The act of treading the boards transforms the contours, and is transformed by the affordances and constraints, of these and other materials assembled in performance, which must therefore be studied relationally. 29 Indeed, insofar as the act of performance is itself relational—occurring through interactions between performers and audience, theatre and world—we would need to consider relations between materials-in-motion onstage as well as off, including those between actors treading the boards and bystanders moving about in the yard (surfaced with hazelnut shells) and galleries,30 as well as between the built and natural environments within and without the wooden O (including the weather-worlds of the outdoor amphitheatres and their environs). To consider shoes as things worn with and within body-worlds, we will need to move beyond the traditional methodology of material culture studies, which seeks to put us in touch with the past, while conceptualizing touch in exclusively manual terms by focusing on the artisanal skill manifested in, and the form imposed upon, the object of handicraft.31 The difference between studying shoes as finished objects of human craft and recognizing their status as things worn with the feet by being(s) in the world is taken up by Stephen Kelly in an essay recounting an encounter with an old pair of shoes in an exhibition of medieval footwear at the Museum of London. Expecting the exhibit merely to confirm his prior knowledge and understanding of medieval shoecraft, Kelly finds instead that the worn shoes, detached from the body and world of their wearing, exert a profound sense of “disorientation.”32 He identifies this disorientation-effect with what Giorgio Agamben calls the “shock” or “jolt of power” conferred upon objects when they are removed from their place within “a given cultural order” and confronted as things.33

Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes  41 Whereas the museum display seeks to contextualize the shoes—to fit or “accommodate” them within “a discourse of cultural significance” for which they are made metonymically to stand34 —the worn shoes, severed from the body-world of their wearing, exert an unintended, disorienting force whereby “the thingness of the thing is violently asserted in a disorientation of perception.”35 Although fascinated by this ­disorientation-effect, Kelly deems it to be beyond the proper purview of the historian (“As historians,” he maintains, “we can only access the means by which things are accommodated into past conceptualizations of social life”), for it belongs to the domain of the aesthetic (and I would add, of the performative) when staged within the “historiographical theatre of the museum.”36 As such, however, this disorientation-effect seems crucial to theatre historiography—at least insofar as the discipline is concerned with theatre’s aesthetic and performative dimensions. Attending to the disorientation-effect of shoes worn in performance may thus allow us to move beyond the head-hand matrix governing scholarship on theatrical gesture to reorient ourselves toward the thingly dimension of materials-in-motion onstage, including Shakespeare’s shoes. What might it mean, then, to understand Shakespeare’s shoes worn while “treading the boards” of the stage from the perspective of the feet? This was, of course, precisely the vantage from which the majority of theatregoers, including bystanders in the yard (known as “groundlings” or “under-standers”) and those in the lower galleries, would have perceived the two or three hours’ traffic of plays unfold on the elevated, thrust stages of the public amphitheatres, which raised the feet of actors to eye- and ear-level, thereby foregrounding footwork and foot-skills— not to mention eye-catching, stage-shaking footwear.37 Situated at the point of contact between the actor’s body and the stage, shoes continually call to mind, with each strut, step, stride, or stomp across the boards, the ­materials-in-motion upon which theatre is grounded. The corporeal experience of playing and playgoing in the broad daylight of the open-air amphitheatres was (and still is) a matter of going: a dynamic, interactive experience of bodies in constant motion. For bystanders in the yard, proprioception or the continual awareness of where one is and how one’s body is feeling and moving during the performance commenced—as Hamlet’s coinage of the term “groundlings” (3.2.11) suggests—on the ground, in the feet and legs.38 This awareness has largely been lost to modern playgoers, who have grown accustomed to fixed seating and darkened auditoria, which immobilize the body and conceal proprio- and alloceptive awareness of ambient movement among those seated. Unscripted, offstage movement is consequently perceived as a distraction or interruption rather than a constitutive element of the performance event.39 Early modern descriptions of “Stage-walkers” and “stalking-­stamping Player[s]” remind us that actors did not merely stand and deliver orations onstage but conveyed meaning in motion on a “walkscape” or

42  Natasha Korda technology designed to foreground “walking as an aesthetic practice.”40 To understand the aesthetic significance of this practice, we must have a better understanding of how treading the boards was produced by a confluence of both shoecraft and floorcraft. Remnants of early modern shoecraft abound in the Museum of London’s archeological finds from the Rose and Globe playhouses, which include several intact shoes, the remains of two boots or “buskins,” and numerous shoe-fragments, all made of bovine leather (showing signs of considerable wear), and significantly, all crafted with doubly reinforced and “welted” soles.41 As growing numbers of streets were paved in the early modern period, medieval “turnshoe” construction (in which single-soled shoes were put together inside-out and then turned) gave way to “welted” construction of doubly and even triply reinforced soles within the span of only a few generations.42 Large-scale road surfacing first occurred in Northern Europe during the sixteenth century, which made walking on thin-soled shoes uncomfortable, as shoe-historians describe: The advent of road surfacing made it necessary to wear footwear with thicker, more impact-absorbing and less wear-prone soles. Whereas hard debris might previously have been pressed into the ground when trodden on, walking on a rubbish-strewn paved street was quite a different matter. … After going about on single-soled shoes for hundreds of years, people were forced within a few generations to switch to shoes with thick soles.43 To accommodate the friction caused by road-paving, “apparently quite abruptly, within a few decades” and taking hold at midcentury, ­turnshoe-manufacture thus gave way to multilayered, welted shoe-soles that were as much as five to ten times the thickness of their single-soled predecessors.44 Cork midsoles were then added to cushion the foot, allowing for a lighter, more flexible—albeit creaky—sole, as seen in several of MoLA’s shoe finds.45 Romeo emphasizes the importance of light, nimble shoes to sprightly footwork when he tells his companions, “You have dancing shoes / With nimble soles, I have a soul of lead / So stakes me to the ground I cannot move” (1.4.14–16). Romeo’s punning description of the sole as the “soul” of the shoe suggests that a “nimble sole” animates the foot—setting it in motion and enabling it to dance—and in so doing, enlivens the soul of its wearer. His observation acknowledges the affordances of shoe-technics for different techniques of footwork onstage and their shaping influence on the human body’s (and soul’s) affective relations to the textured ground and environmental surround. Another notable feature of MoLA’s shoe finds is “pinking”—a technique by which leather is scored or perforated with slits and eyelet holes— found across the vamps as well as on the heels of several of the shoes.46 This technique, first used on shoes and leather garments as a practical

Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes  43 means of easing their stiffness, eventually took on a purely decorative function, reaching its height as a fashion trend across Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in the immediate aftermath of the advent of the welted sole, which rendered shoes far less flexible as they trod the flinty surfaces of newly paved roads.47 Hamlet associates pinked or “raz’d shoes” with actors in particular when he claims that they would get him “a fellowship in a cry of players” (3.2.277–78), intimating that fancy, yet flexible, shoes are among a player’s most valuable assets. His homophonic pun on raz’d/raised verbally sutures the novelty of pinked vamps to the thickened, elevated sole of actors’ shoes, which in their most extreme form, he earlier suggests, could reach “the altitude of a chopine” (2.2.426–27).48 Yet pinking could do only so much to ease the discomfort of shoes made of thick, heavy leather with stiff, multilayered soles. In attending to the worn shoe, we must therefore consider the conformities and deformities of materials-in-motion. One of MoLA’s shoe finds, for example, has a hole deliberately cut into its vamp at the toe, apparently by its wearer, “to accommodate a toe deformity or bunion.”49 Such foot deformities were then “far more common than they are today” and were likely caused or exacerbated by the confluence of hardened walking surfaces and stiffened shoe-soles.50 Makeshift accommodations of this kind are common in extant shoes of the period,51 suggesting that, once worn, shoes are never “finished objects,” but always materials-in-process, continually conforming, deforming, and re-forming as they mediate ongoing frictional contact between bodies and worlds.52 The dramatic transformations of shoe-technics that took place during Shakespeare’s lifetime thus have a great deal to tell us about a material world in transition and prompt further consideration of the techniques and technologies used to bring emotions stirred by this transition to life in and through footwork and other movement onstage. Understanding how changes in the natural and built environments were perceived or felt from the ground up was an integral aspect of the emergent technology and aesthetic function of the elevated, thrust stage as a “walkscape” and of the “wooden O” as a crafted, environmental surround. In elevating the bodies of actors to bystanders’ eye- and ear-level and thrusting them forward into the midst of this O, the technology of the stage was not simply hoisting bodies into the ether, ungrounding the feet and backgrounding the ground (thereby creating a theatre of hovering heads and hands). Rather, it was creating a newly foregrounded ground, an aesthetic “walkscape” whose affordances enabled new modes of embodied perception and new ways of understanding the contact zones between bodies and worlds through techniques of footwork, technologies of shoecraft and floorcraft, stagecraft and theatrecraft. To view the playhouses of early modern London as purpose-built “walkscapes” designed to foreground “walking as an aesthetic practice” is to situate the activity of treading the boards within a long tradition

44  Natasha Korda of such practices, traced by Careri, from Bronze Age menhirs, to Dada and Surrealist deambulations, to performance art, urban happenings, and Land Art of the 1960s.53 Within this longer history, architectural structure and emplacement were crucial to the traversal of space as a symbolic and aesthetic act, and a mode of phenomenological knowledge. What Steven Mullaney terms the “place of stage” on the urban periphery takes on new significance when considered in relation to the longer history of aesthetic perambulations that have reflected upon urban space and built environments in transition.54 Treading the boards of the early modern stage was also distinct from these other acts of traversal in important ways that are crucial to understanding the contemporary significance of the stage as “walkscape”: footwork was both literally and figuratively heightened and foregrounded by shoecraft and floorcraft in performance, when the “walkscape” of the stage was transformed into what Erin Manning terms a “relationscape,” a new ecology of phenomenological experience and performative eventfulness defined by a “spacetime of continuous reorientation.”55 The combined technological affordances of the stage and wooden O enabled heightened awareness of what it meant to “move-with the feeling of the ground,” precisely at a moment when feeling the ground in everyday life was dramatically altered (if not alienated) by thick-soled shoes, road-paving, and coach travel.56 It is perhaps for this reason that those who most insistently call attention to the desensitized feet of the shod world on the Shakespearean stage are those who tread the boards unshod. Isabella in Measure for Measure, for example, as a novice of the discalced Poor Clares, goes barefoot in sympathy with the impoverished and downtrodden, asserting that “the poor beetle that we tread upon / In corporeal sufferance finds a pang as great / As when a giant dies” (3.1.78–80), whereas Angelo, “newly in the seat” of power, lets the body politic “straight feel the spur” (1.2.161–62), claiming “what we do not see / We tread upon, and never think of it” (2.1.25–26). It is the Shakespearean unshod who call our attention to thick-soled shoes’ accommodation of and complicity in such treading and what it feels like to lack such accommodation. We have taken, Lear acknowledges, “Too little care of this” (3.4.32– 33). The this in question is “the thing itself: unaccommodated man” (ll. 106–7; my emphasis) in the person(a) of Poor Tom, who emerges barefoot from his unseen presence underfoot beneath “th’ straw” (ll. 44–45) of the hovel. The Shakespearean “thing itself” is revealed to be “no more than a poor, bare, fork’d animal” (ll. 107–8) defined not by its tool-bearing hands but by its bipedal lower limbs as a two-legged “creature of earth” (l. 119; see OED, “fork, n.,” 12.b, and “forked, adj.,” 2.). Having left behind “the creaking…shoes” (l. 94) of the effete, cork-soled courtier, which elevate and cushion overdelicate feet, Edgar-as-Poor Tom now goes unshod: his “uncover’d body” owes “the

Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes  45 beast no hide” (ll. 102, 104) for shoe-leather. Thus exposed, his feet cease treading upon and now wander feelingly through and with their harsh and heathy surround: “Through the sharp hawthorn…through [ford] and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire” (ll. 46–47, 53). Another barefoot treader of the Shakespearean boards, Caliban in The Tempest, likewise knows intimately the textured ground of his surround, “all the qualities o’ th’ isle,” including its “fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile” (1.2.337–38), its “bogs, fens, flats,” “mire” (2.2.2, 5), and “quick freshes” (3.2.67), encountered on his “barefoot way” and felt by his sensate “footfall” (2.2.11–12). The haptic knowledge he gleans through his walkabouts seems beyond the ken of the island’s shoe-clad denizens, who rely upon his intimate familiarity with “every fertile inch o’ th’ island” (2.2.148–49) and practical know-how for fuel and sustenance. The relationship of the barefoot to the shod in The Tempest is not (no more than it is in Lear) that of brute beasts to “civilized” humanity. Although mistaken by Stephano for “some monster of the isle with four legs” (2.2.64), Caliban is “Legg’d like”—and importantly is—“a man” (l. 33), and although he is resistant to Prospero’s authority and moral instruction (e.g., 1.2.352), he has his own experiential lessons to impart: I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow; And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts, Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmazet. I’ll bring thee To clust’ring filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee Young scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me? (2.2.167–72) Caliban’s invitation to “go with” him, to accept his peripatetic instruction, is an invitation to walk with, rather than merely tread upon, the environing world: to attend to its layered textures, varied scales, and intricate interdependencies, rather than treating it as a tabula rasa, or flat and featureless surface. “[W]alking within the world,” according to Ingold, is quite different from “tramping upon its exterior surface”; rather, “walking is itself a way of knowing,” as it is for Caliban (and Poor Tom, the peripatetic “philosopher” [3.4.156]). 57 To go with Caliban is to know where crabapples grow; how hazelnuts cluster; and why, when one scampers across rocks—the preferred habitat of “scamels” (whatever they may be)—one may only gather their young “sometimes.” It is to use one’s hands to dig feelingly in the earth or to construct a skillful snare for sustenance. Indeed, Caliban’s lyrical description evokes not only an ecosystem but a “walkscape” grounded in an understanding of “walking as an aesthetic practice” rather than a merely utilitarian one. 58 To walk with Caliban is to learn to hear “Sounds,

46  Natasha Korda and sweet airs, that give delight” (3.2.136) and to admire the “nimble” movements of the marmoset, and perhaps even the ingenuity, or what Montaigne terms the “contexture, [and] beautie,” as well as the “profit and use,” of a bird’s nest. 59 Yet to walk with the world, in Ingold’s understanding, is precisely not to tread upon a stage, at least not insofar as the “world-as-stage” topos is imagined to signify a flat and featureless surface, a “sterile promontory” (in Hamlet’s bleak imagining [2.2.299]) awaiting hylomorphic inscription by the head and hands. For, in Ingold’s view, the world is not a homogeneous substrate littered with static, finished objects but rather a contextured, “ephemeral congelate” of generative ­“materials-in-movement,” in which both human and non-human actors play a part.60 In his view, “we must cease regarding the world as an inert substratum over which living things propel themselves about like…actors on a stage” and upon which “artefacts and the landscape” are treated as “properties and scenery.”61 In describing the stage as “an isotropic platform,” however, Ingold forgets that actual stages (as distinct from the theatrum mundi topos) are made of materials-in-motion, which in sixteenth-century England were singularly anisotropic: the grain, texture, density, knots, cracks, and warps of their wooden planks produced singular sounds (as Bruce Smith has demonstrated) and varied vibrations, providing the kinesthetic texture of performance in concert with the movements of actors’ feet.62 Paradoxically, the craft of footwork on the early modern stage required actors to move-with the feeling of the ground—its variable surfaces, angles, textures, etc.—when they were not themselves treading on the earthy ground, but rather on a purpose-built “walkscape”: an artificially heightened “base or foundation,” an oxymoronically elevated “downward limit” or “floor” (OED, “ground, n.,” 8., 4.a., b., respectively) made of materials that were particularly resonant and engineered for maximum, visceral impact. The complex challenge of treading the boards entailed the creation of a textured world through ekphrastic text and embodied movement on what to disenchanted eyes was but a flat and featureless “sterile promontory.” The challenge of moving-with or traversing the textured ground on this stage-­ promontory was a steep one, inasmuch as movement requires the existence of a textured ground. Without it, in a purely empty or smooth space, Manning argues, movement is brought to a standstill, lacking “the relational field that brings motion into action”; the textures and features of the environmental surround make “the injunction to move felt in a way that open [or smooth] space cannot.”63 The task is thus one of creating a textured ground and world—of worlding—­through movement-with. This is precisely the challenge faced by Edgar-as-Poor Tom, unshod on the heath, and later shod (4.1.44, 49) on the sterile promontory of the stage turned “cliff” at Dover (l. 71, 73). After Cornwall literally or

Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes  47 figuratively sets his “foot” on Gloucester’s eyes (3.7.68) in a stunning scene that reverses the sensorial hierarchy by transforming theatrical space from a theatron or forum for viewing into a “walkscape” for wayfaring and worlding via pedestrian “touch” (4.1.23), Gloucester can only walk-with others by feeling the ground anew. Having “stumbled” when sighted (l. 19), he now has “no way” (l. 18), no orientation, and must rely on Edgar-as-Poor Tom, whose unshod, feeling feet have taught him “the way to Dover” not merely by “stile and gate, and horse-way” but by “foot-path” (l. 56). This wayfinding cannot orientate itself by map—the instrument by which Lear had sought to determine his path through space-time with predetermined coordinates at the start of the play—for in wayfinding, Ingold argues, “people do not traverse the surface of a world whose layout is fixed in advance—as represented on the cartographic map. Rather, they ‘feel their way’ through a world that is itself in motion, continually coming into being through the combined action of human and non-­ human agencies.”64 Indeed, maps epitomize the hylomorphic view of the world as a surface to be inscribed, rather than a world that is “continually coming into being as we—through our own movement—contribute to its formation,” one in which “the richer and more varied the texture of the environment, the easier it is to find one’s way about.”65 This texture or contexture is conjured by Edgar, now dressed and shod like a peasant, who transforms the barren stage-promontory into one seething with life, not only textually via his vivid description of the landscape seen from on high (4.6.11–24) but by walking-with his blind father: “You do climb up it [the cliff] now. Look how we labor” (l. 2), he says, drawing attention to the effort of skilled footwork (his slow, unsteady pace, shortened strides, careful placement of each step, etc.) through which he turns the flat, featureless surface of the stage into a precipitous “climb.” Their traversal of the stage is a walking-with in all senses: Gloucester is guided by Edgar’s movements, which re-create the world in order to re-orientate Gloucester within a “relationscape.” “Stand still” (l. 10), he commands, bringing their labored steps to a sudden halt, having placed his body between his father and the precipice of the promontory, as Gloucester begs: “Set me where you stand” (l.24). Edgar draws him slowly forward, claiming, “You are now within a foot / Of th’ extreme verge” (ll.25–26). Whether or not Edgar actually draws Gloucester toward the edge of the stage (a possibility that would heighten the suspense of his impending fall), the entire scene draws our attention to the edgy, spatial dynamics that the stage-promontory as “walkscape” is capable of generating. The command to “Stand still” similarly produces dizziness, calling attention to the micromovements and shifting of balance required to maintain stillness: when asked to stand still, Manning maintains, all one can do is think about how one’s body is moving, being incapable of absolute stilling, and about the effort of posture.66

48  Natasha Korda Footwork combines with shoecraft and floorcraft to create an illusion of aloneness: “Go thou further off,” Gloucester demands, cueing Poor Tom to exit, “Bid me farewell, and let me hear thee going” (ll. 30–31). Yet Edgar does not exit the stage; rather, he creates the sound-effect of leaving through footwork: treading first heavily, then ever more lightly to suggest movement away from his father, continuing the mordant humor of the scene for which he immediately apologizes in an aside: “Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it” (ll. 33–34). This sound effect is generated by the combined affordances of shoecraft and floorcraft, as Edgar’s thick, peasant boots initially stamp and shake the stage, and then gradually fade softly into silence. The gradation from heavy-treading into ever-softer steps echoes the trajectory traced by the other “fork’d” creatures in the play, who stumble although sighted and must learn the lesson of Merlin’s prophecy, “That going shall be us’d with feet” (3.2.94)—whether in the Bronze Age of Lear or on the “walkscape” of Shakespeare’s Globe. This is perhaps why Edgar, still proximate after his father’s fall, and present to lift him “Up—so,” asks, “How is’t? Feel you your legs?” (4.6.65). It is perhaps also why Lear, having forgotten to take off his boots in the storm (3.4.109), asks Gloucester to help him do so immediately after the cliff scene, so that he too may walk feelingly: “Now, now, now, now / Pull off my boots; harder, harder— so” (4.6.173). Freed of his stiff soles, Lear may attend to the “great stage of fools” upon which he has stumbled, calling it a “good block” (l. 183). Although “block” has been read since the eighteenth century as a reference to (1) an imaginary hat block, (2) an imaginary hat, (3) Lear’s crown of weeds, or (4) Lear’s own blockish head, the term most immediately and literally refers to the “great stage” itself defined as “A large solid piece of wood, of which the surface is used for various operations” (OED, “block, n.,” 3.), not the least of which was treading the boards.

Notes 1 Thomas Howell, H. His Devises, for His One Exercise, and His Friends Pleasure (London, 1581), D3r. 2 William Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), sig. A4r. 3 John Milton, Poems of Mr. John Milton (London, 1645 [1646]), 36. 4 The OED dates the earliest usage of “treads the Stage” to 1691 and of “trod the boards” to 1858, citing Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatic Poets, and Edward G. E. Bulwer-Lytton, What Will He Do with It?, ­ olio respectively (“tread, v.” 1.b.). As Jonson’s dedicatory poem in the First F attests, however, “to tread the stage” was in usage in ­Shakespeare’s time. Other early usages of this phrase may be found in Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller (London, 1594), sig. F2r; John Marston, ­Histrio-mastix, or, The Player Whipt (London, 1610), sig. C2r; William Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals (London, 1625), 62; William Hawkins, Apollo Shroving (London, 1627), 26; John Hall, Poems (London, 1647), 27; Richard Brome, Five New Playes (London, 1653), sigs. A2r, A3v. Michael  Drayton uses the related

Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes  49 phrase “strut the stage” in Idea the Shepheards Garland Fashioned in Nine Eglogs (London, 1593), sig. H3v. The phrase “to tread unhallow’d Boards,” referring to the stage, appears in the Prologue to Thomas Horde’s The Pretended Puritan. A Farce of Two Acts (Oxford, 1779), 1. The reliance of acting upon foot-skills is likewise suggested by the superstitious catch-phrase “break a leg!,” of uncertain origin, but apparently not in common usage until the early twentieth century. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Catch Phrases from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (New York: Routledge, 1977), 56. 5 Tim Ingold, “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet,” Journal of Material Culture 9/3 (2000): 315–40, 321. According to Xenophon (citing Socrates), “man is the only creature that they [the gods] have caused to stand upright,” giving him “a better view of things above.” The gods, he adds, “have endowed man with hands, which are the instruments to which we chiefly owe our greater happiness [than that of quadrupeds].” Xenophon, Memorabilia, trans. E. C. Marchant, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1923), 59 (I.IV.11). See also Wiktor Stoczkowski, Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination and Conjecture, trans. Mary Turton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 73–77. 6 Ingold, “Culture on the Ground,” 317–18. 7 Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (Ames: Culicidae Architectural Press, 2017 [2002]). 8 Ibid., 321, 330. 9 On hand-gestures in early modern theater, see e.g. Alfred Harbage, “Elizabethan Acting,” PMLA 54 (1939): 685–708; B.L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting (London: Oxford University Press, 1951); Andrew Gurr, “Elizabethan Action,” Studies in Philology 63/2 (1966): 144–56; David M. Bevington, Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); John H. Astington, “Eye and Hand on Shakespeare’s Stage,” Renaissance and Reformation 22/1 (1986): 109–21; Farah Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden, 2016). Recent studies of actor’s facial expressions include James A. Knapp, ed., Shakespeare and the Power of the Face (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015); Sibylle Baumbach, Shakespeare and the Art of Physiognomy (Tirril, Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007); Annette Drew-Bear, Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage: The Moral Significance of Face-Painting Conventions (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1994). 10 www-worldshakesbib-org. Accessed January 15, 2018. On footwear, see M. Channing Linthicum, Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1972), which contains a section on “Footwear in the Drama” (246–64); Natasha Korda, “How to Do Things with Shoes,” in Shakespeare and Costume, ed. Patricia Lennox and Bella Mirabella (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 85–103; Tom Bishop, “Boot and Schtick,” in Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 35–49; Tripthi Pillai, “Shoe Talk and Shoe Silence,” in Object Oriented Environs, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Julian Yates (Earth: Punctum Books, 2016), 65–80. 11 Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage, 3. 12 Ibid., 13, 20. 13 All references to Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 14 Ibid., 88, 112.

50  Natasha Korda 15 Ibid., 88. Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 99. See also Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58/1 (1998): 7–19. 16 Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 96, 101. 17 Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage, 3; my emphasis. 18 Ingold, “Culture on the Ground,” 331; my emphasis. 19 Evelyn Tribble, Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body (New York and London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2017), 100, 70. 20 At worst, Ingold and his collaborator Jo Lee Vergunst argue, the hylomorphic model “betrays an assumption that underwrites the entire project of colonial expansion, namely that the surface of the earth is presented to encompassing humanity as a space to be occupied, and subsequently perhaps abandoned once its resources are used up.” Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, “Introduction,” in Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot, ed. Ingold and Vergunst (Farnham, Surrey, England and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 6. See also Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 20–22. 21 Clark, “Extended Mind,” 11; my emphasis. 22 See Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” (1950), in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 163–86; Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017 [1958]); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]). The term “technics” is used expansively in the present essay to refer to technical know-how, as well as to corporeal techniques and material technologies. 23 Ingold, Making, 20–21; my emphasis. 24 Ibid., 7, 85. 25 Ibid., 45. See also Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: “The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. To follow the flow of matter is to itinerate, to ambulate” (409). 26 Ingold, Making, 24–25. 27 See OED, “wear, v.1,” 1, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21. 28 Ibid., 85. 29 On the relational aspects of affordance theory, see Harry Heft, “Affordances and the Body: An Intentional Analysis of Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Visual Perception,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 19/1 (1989): 1–30. On the relationality of movement in performance, see Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012 [2009]). 30 On walking in the galleries in relation to sightlines, see Tiffany Stern, “‘You That Walk i’th Galleries’: Standing and Walking in the Galleries of the Globe,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51/2 (2000): 211–16. 31 For a more in-depth account of the potentialities and limitations of material culture studies as methodology for the study of shoes on the early modern stage, see Natasha Korda, “The Sign of the Last: Gender, Material Culture and Artisanal Nostalgia in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43/3 (2013): 573–97; Natasha Korda, “How to Do Things with Shoes,” in Shakespeare and Costume, Natasha Korda, “If the Shoe Fits: The Truth in Pinking,” in Transnational Connections in

Understanding Shakespeare’s Shoes  51

32

33 34 35 36 37

38 39

40

41

42 43 4 4 45 46 47

48

Early Modern Theatre, ed. M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2019). Stephen Kelly, “In the Sight of an Old Pair of Shoes,” in Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and Its Meanings, ed. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson (Farnham, Surrey, England and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 57–70, 58. Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 105. Kelly, “In the Sight of an Old Pair of Shoes,” 68. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 70 (my emphasis), 60. See also Agamben, The Man without Content, 110. On the corporeal and cognitive significance of the term “understanding” in early modern theater, see William N. West, “Understanding in the Elizabethan Theaters,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 35 (2006): 113–43; see also Stern, “‘You That Walk i’th Galleries’: Standing and Walking in the Galleries of the Globe.” Contemporary references variously refer to the length of performance in early modern theaters as two or three hours. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 39. Although Gurr points to this awareness as the most significant difference between playgoing in Shakespeare’s time and our own, in his view it was largely a “distraction” from the poet’s desired communication with the ears of his auditors. Gurr, Playgoing, 1, 42–43. Thomas Dekker, Satiro-mastix. Or the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet. As It Hath Bin Presented Publikely, by the Right Honorable, the Lord Chamberlaine His Servants; and Privately, by the Children of Paules (London, 1602), sig. I3v; W.S. [attrib.; Thomas Middleton?], The Puritane or The Widow of Watling-Streete (London, 1607), sig. F2r. See also Careri, Walkscapes. Julian Bowsher and Pat Miller, The Rose and the Globe: Playhouses of Shakespeare’s Bankside, Southwark (London: Museum of London Archaeology, 2009), 144–46, 192–200. The “welt” was the “strip of leather placed between and sewn to the edge of the sole and the turned-in edge of the upper in soling a boot or shoe” (OED, “welt, n.1,” 1.). Olaf Goubitz, Carol van Driel-Murray, and Willy Groenman-van Waateringe. Stepping through Time: Archaeological Footwear from Prehistoric Times until 1800 (Zwolle: Stichting Promotie Archeologie, 2001), 15, 74. “In northern Europe, the double sole was not commonly adopted until around 1550.” Ibid., 79. Ibid., 75. Bowsher and Miller, The Rose and the Globe, 199. Ibid. M[arie] Channing Linthicum, Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), 153–54; Janet Arnold, “Decorative Features: Pinking, Snipping and Slashing,” Costume 9 (1975): 22–26; Jane Ashelford, The Art of Dress: Clothes and Society 1500–1914 (London: National Trust, 1996), 28; Lucy Pratt and Linda Woolley, Shoes (London: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 1999), 16. A reference to the towering cioppini worn by Venetian courtesans. On chopines, see Elizabeth Semmelhack, On a Pedestal: From Renaissance Chopines to Baroque Heels (Toronto: Bata Shoe Museum, 2010); Andrea Vianello, “Courtly Lady or Courtesan? The Venetian Chopine in the

52  Natasha Korda

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Renaissance,” in Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), 76–93; Lucy Pratt and Linda Woolley, Shoes (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1999), 18–20. For a more extended discussion of chopines on the early modern stage, see Korda, “How to Do Things with Shoes,” 98–99. Ibid., 196. Goubitz, van Driel-Murray and Groenman-van Waateringe, Stepping through Time, 12. Ibid. See Deleuze and Guattari on the way in which “materiality overspills the prepared matter” of a molded form”; A Thousand Plateaus, 410. Careri, Walkscapes, 56, 68, 128. Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Manning, Relationscapes, 18. Ibid., 49. Ingold, Walking, 5, 7. Careri, Walkscapes. Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Caniballes,” in Essays, trans. John Florio (London, 1613 [1603]), 102. Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description (New York: Routledge, 2011), 24, 26. Ibid., 71. Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Ibid., 54. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London and New York: Routeldge, 2011 [2000]), 155. Ibid., 241. Manning, Relationscape, 43–44.

4 Mirrors and Macbeth’s Queer Materialism John S. Garrison

In Act 4 of Macbeth, the ghost of Banquo appears with a spectral group of eight kings that comprise his descendants. The eighth, Macbeth tells us, “bears a glass / Which shows me many more” (4.1.134–35).1 Shakespeare’s audience would have recognized the crystal mirror as an everyday thing, a household object for those who could afford one. We can glean a sense of this type of mirror’s ubiquity and desirability in Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Common Weal on this Realm of England (1594), which depicts streets of London where “shoppes gliste[r] and shine of glasses, as well lookinge and drinckinge.”2 Smith distinguishes between needed goods and luxury goods, with glass items falling in the latter category. The status of mirrors as luxury goods helps explain why we so often see them possessed by the nobility in Shakespeare’s plays, and it suggests that the item would be familiar to playgoers—even if out of financial reach for many consumers. Despite its familiarity to the audience, however, the mirror in Macbeth would also be curiously out of place. The period in which the play takes place pre-dates the introduction of the crystalline glass mirror in England.3 So, while it makes sense on some level that this spectral king from Macbeth’s future could possess a glass mirror, some playgoers might note the anachronism of the play’s protagonist readily recognizing the object. The mirror onstage in Macbeth thus constitutes “untimely matter,” a term which Jonathan Gil Harris has used to describe anachronistic objects circulating in Renaissance theatrical performances.4 And an examination of the role of this object on the stage in Macbeth gives way to a larger awareness of how the play troubles our sense of normative time and queers the connection between reflection and self-knowledge. As this chapter will argue, the mirror offers a flashpoint for how Macbeth attempts to destabilize the normative progress of reproductive history and, in turn, how the play meditates on the queerness of time inherent in theatrical production. We will see further that the mirror appears throughout Shakespeare’s work as an object that enables meditations on timeliness and on identity. Even if it were not temporally out of place, the mirror would stand out to the early modern audience as a particularly intriguing stage object. We can hear the desirability of the glass mirror in The Winter’s Tale

54  John S. Garrison when Autolycus lists one among those things to which buyers “throng”: “a ribbon, glass, pomander, brooch, table-book, ballad, / knife, tape, glove, shoe-tie, bracelet, [or] horn-ring” (4.4.599–600). In Richard III, the protagonist celebrates his rise in status with acquiring a mirror in order to improve his appearance: “I’ll be at charges for a looking glass / And entertain some score or two of tailors / To study fashions to adorn my body” (1.3.276–78). In the time of Shakespeare, the glass mirror was still a relatively new kind of object. It represented a technological improvement over the polished stone or metal mirrors that preceded it, and the introduction of this new technology seems to have spurred new ways of seeing the world.5 As Natasha Korda observes about the importance of including material culture in the discussion of literary texts, “matter matters”: “without taking it into account, it becomes impossible to distinguish ideological from material change, much less to try to grasp the relationship between them.”6 In fact, the innovation of the looking-glass as a material object coincided with an explosion in its use as a metaphor in literary texts.7 The mirror makes for an intriguing stage prop because it operates in a way that resembles the function of the performance ­itself—rendering a convincing replica of life within the context of artifice. Because the glass mirror captures the image of the living being and shows us what our living selves look like, it falls into the category that Jane Bennett terms “vibrant matter,” objects which reveal how “human being and thinghood overlap.”8 We encounter this stage mirror in a play very much concerned with distinctions between the living and the dead as well as between the human world, the natural world, and the realm of the supernatural. Indeed, a reading of the play focused on a material object dovetails with Christine Varnardo’s recent study of weather in the play, which finds that “reading Macbeth in terms of ‘animacy’ makes visible the surface effects—the affects, motions, and senses—that go into the ideological production of human-ness and alive-ness.”9 In a drama where the non-human plays such a forceful role in determining the human, we find a curious scene here in Act 4, where the dead, the not-yet-born, and a material object disturb Macbeth’s very sense of self. The stage mirror reveals the futility of Macbeth’s attempts to shape history as he realizes that he is already dead from the perspective of these future generations and that his attempt to seize his place in history will fail with the birth of these subsequent generations. While the mirror represented an attractive commodity and an increasingly popular literary metaphor in early modern contexts, it also had strong purchase on temporality and futurity. For Shakespeare specifically, the object offered an apt figure for discussing human sexual reproduction and the promise of future generations. In the sonnets, for example, the speaker urges the addressee to “Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest / Now is the time that face should form another” (3.1–3.2).10 The mirror functions as an object that can stir procreative

Mirrors and Macbeth’s Queer Materialism  55 urges, and the speaker likens the child to a mirror in order for the speaker to understand the logic of reproduction. A few lines later, the sonnet states, “Thou art thy mother’s glass,” likening the child to a material object in order to clarify how a child reflects the qualities of the parent and why a child owes it to the parent to continue the lineage (3.9). The mirror not only functions as a metaphor for new life made possible in a child but also, on a more practical level, offers a means to test whether someone is alive. Consider Lear’s request when confronted with Cordelia’s corpse: “Lend me a looking glass. / If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, / Why, then she lives” (5.3.236–38). The stage prop here is a tool with which to diagnose Cordelia’s biological state and also a symbol of Lear’s futurity. The king wants to know if the possibility of a future with his daughter has been foreclosed. If the mirror does not show Cordelia to be alive, then she will not be able to produce children who would reflect the qualities and claim to the throne possessed by their grandfather. The mirror carried by the eighth king in Macbeth similarly raises questions about claims to being alive and hopes for continued life through reproduction. For the audience, the spectral presence is already dead, an ancestor of King James. For Macbeth, however, the character is not yet born and perhaps might never come into being. The mirror troubles our sense that an individual can shape the future, as the object shows both Lear and Macbeth that their fantasies of survival only end up being confirmed as wishes against inevitable termination. As both a tool for imagining progeny and for testing whether a person is truly alive, the mirror throws into relief the problems of reproduction at the heart of Macbeth. Indeed, this stage prop links to a queer temporality in the play not only because its appearance is anachronistic but also because it compels the protagonist to accelerate the passage of time. The stage prop exerts power over Macbeth as it urges him to terminate others’ reproductive capacity. The vision of Banquo’s lineage incites his plan to have Macduff’s wife and children murdered, though this urgency will only stymie Macbeth’s own plans to produce heirs and carry on his lineage that would sit on the throne. This procession generates a moment where Macbeth “wrongly assumes he is being shown a future he can avoid, not a provocation that will cause him to seal that fate.”11 Ultimately, this everyday object is anything but ordinary, as it contributes to Macbeth’s drive to hurry or thwart the arrival of a predicted future and questions the exact now of Macbeth, and derails the reproductive aims of its protagonist.12 This crucial scene dramatizes the tragic and violent impulses that drive the entire play. Macbeth’s foreknowledge drives him to murder in order to hasten the ascension to the throne that the witches position as inevitable. Yet, at the same time, a vision of the future in which his children do not succeed him as ruler will drive him to more violence as he believes he can circumvent the inevitable. All this is more

56  John S. Garrison delightfully complex for the audience who sees the entire drama as history, albeit a history rewritten by Shakespeare. And it seems particularly apt that a spectral character carries this mirror. As Jacques Derrida remarks, “speculation always speculates on some specter, it speculates in the mirror of what it produces.”13 In other words, a gaze into the future or into the past is always based on the present, on an extrapolation of current events. Thus, the vision of the future functions like a ghost of the present moment. The mirror (Latin = speculum) offers a logical object for speculating about the time to come, especially when we consider that future events are shaped by our desire to realize or avoid those events as we approach them from the stance of the present. Any encounter with a mirror can lead an individual to ask, “Who will I become?” Or, if the object emphasizes our own lack of agency, we might find ourselves asking “What will become of me?” Like the magic mirror in Snow White, even our e­ veryday mirrors seem to have insight into hidden truths about ourselves and about the world outside of the room in which we view ­ourselves. Fantasies about the looking glass invite us to speculate about ourselves and to imagine that the mirror speculates about us. Macbeth makes concrete the internal workings of the mind as it uses its mirror to externalize the protagonist’s concerns about the future. Macbeth’s declaration that the mirror shows him “many more” leaves ambiguous whether the mirror shows multiple descendants of Banquo or simply allows Macbeth to imagine further continuation of the lineage. As they move further into the distance, these unseen descendants animate the mirror even more concretely as playgoers would imagine James’s more recent ancestors as more recently alive. The mirror thus has two effects. For the audience, it recounts history and documents a line of human reproduction. For Macbeth, it suggests a possible future where another family’s reproductive capacities symbolize the failure of his own ability to reproduce. For all its reproductive capacities, Macbeth’s stage mirror simultaneously operates as a site of death. For Macbeth, as well as for the specters that accompany him onstage, to see a reflection in the mirror involves reflecting on the inevitability of human demise. This would be especially true in the early modern period, when the mirror functioned as a powerful memento mori. Deborah Shuger has traced a pattern in texts and visual representations where “the majority of Renaissance mirrors […] do reflect a face, but not the face of the person in front of the mirror.”14 In fact, she finds a common thread of depictions where mirrors reflect a skull back to the living gazer. The trope even had material manifestations in fifteenth-century miroirs de morte, in which skulls drawn into the glass overlay the viewer’s face.15 The mirror in Macbeth functions like one of these death mirrors: it is an object that emphasizes not only the inevitability of one’s death but also one’s status as already lifeless.

Mirrors and Macbeth’s Queer Materialism  57 With that realization, we can see how the mirror crystallizes the multiple operations by which Macbeth seizes upon a mode of queerness that disturbs binary distinctions and troubles teleology. While I am arguing here that the mirror in Macbeth instantiates major concerns of the play, I also mean to urge us to look at this object as a particularly charged one for Shakespeare in terms of expressing his complex thinking about identity and history. Across the plays and poems, the mirror seems to have held real interest for Shakespeare. In Hamlet, the prince’s famous lines Hamlet equates the theatre with a looking glass because “the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature” (3.2.20–24). The Mousetrap has important parallels to the procession of spectral kings in Macbeth. Both present a show that theatricalizes the curtailing of a normative lifespan and the interruption of hoped-for lines of succession. Further, they are arguably both instances of mise-en-abyme. This moment in Hamlet is perhaps the most explicit evidence for Shakespeare’s awareness that, as Thomas Adler puts it, “every prominent on-stage mirror serves as a metaphor for the nature of the dramatic work itself.”16 While The Mousetrap dramatizes Hamlet’s statement about theatre, Macbeth productively complicates the famous claim. The procession of future kings locates Macbeth and the audience in their differing places in history and underscores the role of theatre in productively problematizing our relationship to the now. The lines from Hamlet reveal that Adler’s argument also works in reverse. Art mirrors reality, and art also reveals how humanness can be staged and performed through costume and script. Performance thus reveals how humans can be understood as objects, especially as the dramatis personae are simply people wearing masks to resemble recognizable, replicable personality types. Brett Gamboa maintains that Shakespeare’s audience is constantly “harmonizing reality and fiction at one point of perception, excited by the tensions their overlaps occasion, and frustrated in attempts to fix the location, or to evaluate the legitimacy, of the ‘real.’”17 The mirror in Macbeth may contribute to the sense-making process as the scene openly acknowledges the performance to be a fiction, an object out of time. Indeed, both these plays offer layered meanings refracted through their mirrors that capture the living and the dead. The mirror grounds the performance for the audience, given its status as a recognizable commodity, while it also functions as a meta-theatrical sense-making object. Playgoers are invited to see themselves in characters or to see historical personages in characters. Add to this the dynamic where the audience member must see the actor and the character as conflated, each reflecting the other’s attributes. Catherine Richardson nicely captures the role of stage objects in this process: “props tie reality and illusion together, asking their audiences to see the one against the other and to make sense of the illusion in relation to the quality of

58  John S. Garrison their lived experience.”18 The theatre itself thus shares significant characteristics with the mirror, and the specter’s mirror in Macbeth displays a genealogy of figures connected to each other but disconnected from Macbeth by time and space. The witches themselves emphasize that the line of kings and their mirror are inherently theatrical. As they conjure the vision, each of the three witches exclaims, “Show,” and then together they exclaim, “Show his eyes and grieve his heart, / Come like shadows, so depart” (4.1.123–27). Since the late fifteenth century, “show” has functioned as a noun to ­denote theatrical productions: “A performance, exhibition, etc., organized as a public event or form of entertainment, and related senses.”19 As a verb, it expresses a curiously double action, where it could mean, “To cause or allow to be seen, looked at, inspected,” as it does today, but in Shakespeare’s time, it also had a now-obsolete meaning of “to look or gaze upon.” The demand “show,” can be a call to a variety of agents – Macbeth, playgoers, and the apparitions – to pay attention. The multiple perspectives demanded by the verb “show” resonate with the operations of the mirror. Macbeth looks at this show only to have the show reflect its gaze back upon him. His response to the procession takes up the word “show.” First, he designates the witches as individuals directing the theatrical production as he exclaims, “Why do you show me this?” (4.1.132). He then transfers the capability to engender performances from the human agents to the material object. Despite Macbeth’s plea that “I will see no more,” the mirror has an insistent quality as it “shows me many more” (4.1.134, 4.1.136). The mirror thus becomes a procreative agent itself, both displaying and creating the offspring of the final king. In doing so, the object speculates beyond the present of the play’s initial audience to imagine King James’s children (and their children) continuing a long lineage of rulers. The mirror is central to how humans define their ego boundaries and their sense of humanness, but it also troubles our sense of objects. The contents of mirrors are changeable based on what passes in front of them and the contents are often living beings captured in the reflective surface. However, the function of the mirror to render the living visible alerts us to the play’s central concerns with confusing temporality. The mirror possesses creative force, as its refractive power is even more multiple as it reveals in a sense, real kings in the progeny of James. From our perspective, though, we know that James’s lineage did not progress very far. Macbeth and James are more alike than the early modern monarch would want to think. And though this knowledge is a product of our own retrospective knowledge, the precarity of all lineages would make this a possible interpretation for Shakespeare’s original audiences. This particular object makes knowable the transience of reality. The procession of spectral entities and their stage mirror provide a kind of dumb show for what is at stake in the play, especially in terms

Mirrors and Macbeth’s Queer Materialism  59 of Macbeth’s peculiar temporality. This stage mirror underscores the transitory nature of Macbeth’s reign and his fleeting hold on any ­familial claim to the throne. The object foretells the future – ultimately showing us the reign of Banquo’s heir James I – yet the futures foretold by the glass and by the witches constitute the audience’s past history. The mirror stages generational relationality in a way that embodies what Carolyn Dinshaw has described as “a fuller, denser, more crowded now” traceable in pre-modern literature.20 Shakespeare not only underlines the notion of objects as containers of past affects but also suggests that they are vessels for future, speculative experiences. The looking glass in this scene emphasizes the collective nature of a king’s identity as the security of his body and his legacy relies on the presence of heirs. As Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman remark, “relationality always includes a scenic component, a fantasmatic staging.”21 The theatrical stage thus helps the audience make sense of how historical figures relate to other historical figures, as well as how the playgoers themselves relate to history. This particular moment in Macbeth, with its stage mirror, dramatizes how relations have consequences. The audience sees the present encounter with the ghost (which occurs in the playgoers’ historical past) and the succession of kings (which occurs in Macbeth’s future but in the audience’s past). Macbeth dramatizes that we are also always rediscovering the past anew, finding it embodied in new narratives and in our changing relationship to those narratives. As the present moves forward, so too does the past become more crowded because, as Maia Kotrovits puts it, “the past is perpetually unfinished.”22 Part of the queerness of Macbeth’s performed past, though, involves the way that the inevitable future-­ history of the play is also a fabrication. Shakespeare’s play elides the historical Banquo’s complicity in the murder of Duncan. Given that Banquo is an ancestor of James I, this makes sense in Shakespeare’s present moment. However, the decision underscores for the audience that the play’s reflection of history constitutes a fiction. Like the dagger that haunts Macbeth before he kills Duncan or the spot of blood that terrorizes Lady Macbeth after the murder, the mirror is a spectral object. Even if it physically appears onstage, the audience knows it to be an illusion conjured by the witches. The mirror thus profoundly disturbs the binary of presence and absence. Unlike the dagger or the bloodspot, the audience actually sees the physical stage prop all the while knowing it to be an illusion. The same claim can be made of the operations of mirrors in general: whatever one sees in the mirror both appears physically read even though the observer knows it to be a fiction. In the case of this play, the object not only has physical presence but it also has the power to shape Macbeth’s actions. 23 Here, the mirror gives Macbeth a glimpse of the future his actions have driven him towards and it signals the ramifications of the bloody action of the play. The object crystallizes his regret

60  John S. Garrison in the sense that it shows him what he should have foreseen himself or shows him that history will right itself. Macbeth will not reproduce, but Banquo’s lineage will continue. So the descendant of Banquo is oriented towards the mirror to show his reproductive future. Macbeth, though, orients himself towards the object to see the end of his line, or the role he has is continuing another man’s lineage. Macbeth’s reaction to the witches’ conjured vision makes clear that the stage mirror represents the immensity of the threat before him, Thou art too like the spirit of Banquo. Down! Thy crown does sear mine eyeballs. And thy hair, Thou other gold-bound brow, is like the first. A third is like the former. Filthy hags, Why do you show me this? – A fourth! Start, eyes! What, will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom? Another yet? A seventh? I’ll see no more – And yet the eighth appears, who bears a glass Which shows me many more; and some I see That two-fold balls and treble sceptres carry, Horrible sight! (4.1.128–38) When the speech tells us that the future kings are “too like” the spirit of Banquo, we hear the ways that the descendants are mirror-images of the parent. On the one hand, Macbeth recognizes that these heirs clearly descend from a man who does not look like him. On the other hand, because these children look just like Banquo, they increase the visual impact of seeing the dead friend. The weight of such a sight is so heavy that it threatens to “sear mine eye-balls.” The notion that the line might stretch to “th’ crack of doom” suggests, for him, that this procession signifies his forthcoming failure and, for the early modern audience, that James’s line will continue until Judgment Day. The figure with the two-fold balls and treble scepters mentioned here represents James I at his coronation. The reference to the Apocalypse, however, positions this looking glass as able to predict the future of both the character and the playgoer who might imagine gazing into it. This mirror is not simply reflective but generative. It is an engine for what Marjorie Garber identifies as a “proliferation of dangerous gazings and forbidden sights in this scene.”24 This play uses its stage object to illustrate a lineage of children and to illustrate how sexual reproduction ties closely to the narrative logic of history in early modern England. Shakespeare uses the mirror to destabilize not only the logic of objects as static and lifeless but also the logic of history as teleological and objectively narrative. The stage prop here offers a flashpoint for Heather Love’s suggestion that “attention to questions of linearity,

Mirrors and Macbeth’s Queer Materialism  61 temporality, and succession in the play brings out the queerness in [Macbeth].”25 Rather than exerting concretizing force over the character of the scene, this stage object destabilizes a sense of here and now for the protagonist and for the audience. The show of spectral kings holds a mirror up to the nature of those who gaze upon it, but it does so to throw into relief the very strange nature of the onlooker’s place in history. Elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays, characters acknowledge the ­mirror as a problematic tool for predicting the future or for gaining self-­knowledge. The idea that a mirror might yield insight into oneself ­appears in Richard II, when the king demands “a mirror hither straight, / That it may show me what a face I have” (4.1.455–56). With the use of the verb “have,” his demand communicates a desire to have a sense of the present and a comprehension of how he appears to others. Yet the object does not yield the results he desires. When the attendant brings the mirror, Richard says, Give me the glass, and therein will I read. No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struck So many blows upon this face of mine And made no deeper wounds? O flattering glass, Like to my followers in prosperity, Thou dost beguile me! (4.1.266–71) The stage directions tell us that he “Dashes the glass against the ground.” As in Macbeth, the stage mirror brings a form of self-knowledge to the viewer but ultimately reveals his problematic relation to other persons. Richard has been brought down by his need for flatterers. Indeed, the notion that this is a “flattering glass” grants both affect and agency to the object as it seems able to comment on the king’s appearance and does so just as his human “followers” do. The physical object reinforces that the king sought to reproduce himself narcissistically by surrounding himself with people who would reflect his own self-image. Macbeth, too, experiences a tragic fall because he is too much focused on himself. Like Richard’s, Macbeth’s gaze into the mirror is not a solitary activity. Rather, it reminds both men that they rely on a network of others for the ­ acbeth’s maintenance of identity. The mirror interrupts Richard’s and M narcissism by revealing how autonomous selfhood is dependent on others. The mirror serves to predict each king’s imminent demise. While neither man sees a skull in the mirror, as they would in a miroir de morte, the looking glass does inspire these protagonists to contemplate their own destruction. Richard reacts to the broken glass, “For there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers. / Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport: / How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face” (4.1.279–81).

62  John S. Garrison And this exclamation, in turn, leads Bolingbroke – the agent of Richard’s future fall and father to the children that will replace Richard’s intended royal lineage – to proclaim that the mirror accurately predicts the current king’s destruction, “The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of your face” (4.1.282–83). Given that the term “shadow” could describe a ghost or “spectral form, phantom” in the early modern period, Bolingbroke reveals the mirror to be in fact a memento mori object. Richard’s face was already that of a ghost, and the mirror has simply rendered this knowable. His impending death, like Macbeth’s, is crystallized by the stage mirror. Shakespeare seizes on the mirror as a source of self-knowledge, whether that knowledge is desired or not. Even in the absence of a physical mirror onstage, the object appears in dialogues related to the role of reflection in generating a sense of the self. In Julius Caesar, for example, Cassius asks Brutus “can you see your face?” (1.2.53). He replies, “No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself, / But by reflection, by some other things” (1.2.54–55). Cassius’s reply invokes the mirror to explain the difficulty of obtaining a clear sense of one’s self: ‘Tis just; And it is very much lamented, Brutus, That you have no such mirrors as will turn Your hidden worthiness into your eye, That you might see your shadow. (1.2.56–60) The reply suggests that other people are important in the construction of our identities because they serve as our mirrors. The invocation of “shadow” here connects the discussion to the scene with Richard and Bolingbroke where a mirror offers the promise of foreseeing one’s death. Here, Brutus seeing his worthiness involves his “shadow” both in the sense that he will see himself reflected in others and in the sense that his reputation is what will live on after his demise. The need for other people to act as mirrors finds expression in a similar exchange between Achilles and Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida. In a conversation about how an individual’s qualities can only be known as they are reflected in others, Achilles explains to Ulysses, eye to eye opposed Salutes each other with each other’s form. For speculation turns not to itself Till it hath travelled and is mirrored there Where it may see itself. (3.3.102–6)

Mirrors and Macbeth’s Queer Materialism  63 Achilles echoes an idea from classical antiquity that the eye can only behold itself in the eyes of others.26 Self-knowledge requires mirroring, yet the lines emphasize that the wisdom generated will be mere “speculation.” The choice of term strikes at the heart of how mirrors (speculum) queer knowledge by urging us to consider not the present moment but rather to speculate about what might occur in the future. Macbeth goes even further than these other plays in order to complicate the connection between mirroring and reliable self-knowledge. Early in the play, Duncan remarks, “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face” (1.4.12–13). He suggests that, because one cannot have knowledge of another person simply by looking at them, an individual’s interiority must be revealed through some other means. The problem at the heart of Duncan’s remark leads David B. Goldstein to ask, “Is the face a mask or a mirror, a screen or a window?” and to conclude that “Shakespeare’s humans haven’t found a method for divining one’s nature through one’s face.”27 The stage object in Act 4 of Macbeth suggests that insight into one’s nature can be granted by gazing into a mirror. However, that reflective surface does not generate self-knowledge by yielding a straightforward depiction of one’s face or a stable, bounded self. Instead, the mirror functions to reveal the profound precarity of the self. Macbeth’s mirror – both spectral and speculative – illuminates one’s dependency on others and the precarious place that one occupies in a present moment whose future only seems contingent on one’s actions. The play’s object has queer resonances as it troubles characters’ and playgoers’ senses of self-identity and normative time, and in fact the mirror may even reveal Macbeth himself as a queer character. When we take into account Lee Edelman’s now well-known argument that the child is at the center of “a political field whose limit and horizon is reproductive futurism,” we become acutely aware of how Macbeth’s lack of children places him in a precarious position in relation to his own future and how his destructive project largely involves thwarting the promise of other characters’ children. 28 Andrew Sofer urges us to see the stage prop not as a “static symbol” but rather “as an object that creates and sustains a dynamic relationship with the audience as a given performance unfolds.”29 In this way, the mirror exists in Macbeth as much to help the play’s protagonist realize his peculiar place in relationship to history as it does to help the playgoers realize theirs. Yet, given this object’s increasing prominence as a literary metaphor and as a consumer good, its purchase on the playgoers’ imagination would extend far beyond the time and place of the performance. Audience members would return home, go to work the next day, or even pass by the line of shops described by Thomas Smith at the opening of this chapter. When they next saw themselves in a mirror, might they recall Shakespeare’s peculiar scene and regard themselves that much more strangely?

64  John S. Garrison

Notes 1 All quotations from Shakespeare’s work draw from William Shakespeare, The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, William Montgomery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). The stage directions tell us, we have “A Show of Eight Kings, the last with a glass in his hand; and Banquo.” In the history of editing the play, there has been some debate about this stage direction. The First Folio’s stage directions imply that Banquo carries the mirror, although the dialogue makes clear that this is not the case. The current consensus is to emend the stage direction to clarify that the looking glass is carried by the eighth king. For a very recent overview of the debate, see Tiffany Stern, “Inventing Stage Directions; Demoting Dumb Shows,” in Stage ­D irections and Shakespearean Theater, ed. Gillian Woods and Sarah ­D ustagheer (London and New York: Bloomsbury ­A rden ­Shakespeare, 2018), 32–33. 2 Thomas Smith, Discourse of the Common Weal on This Realm of England, Ed. Elizabeth Lamond (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 64. 3 The invention of the crystal mirror can be traced back to the glassworkers in Murano, Italy. Production of crystal glass in England can be traced back to Italy through a Murano glassworker who came to London in the middle of the sixteenth century after spending time in Antwerp. See Derek Keene, “Material London in Time and Space,” in Material London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 66–67. 4 Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Age of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), especially 1–26. 5 For a discussion of the transition from old, crude forms of mirrors to new, more precise forms that enabled increased perspicuity and experiments with light during the scientific revolution, see Alan Macfarlane and Gerry ­Martin, Glass: A World History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 27–98, and Neil MacGregor, Shakespeare’s Restless World: Portrait of an Era (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 116–31. 6 Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 7. 7 Herbert Grabes identifies 398 English books published between 1500 and 1700 whose titles refer to mirrors. Margaret Ezell, too, makes note of a striking increase in texts about mirrors in the seventeenth century. Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 30–37, and Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Looking Glass Histories’, Journal of British Studies 43/3 (July 2004): 317–38. 8 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 4. 9 Christine Varnado, “Queer Nature, or the Weather in Macbeth,” in Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017), 180. 10 For extended discussions of mirrors in sonnets, see Hanh Bui’s chapter in the present volume, as well as John S. Garrison, “Glass: The Sonnets’ Desiring Object,” in Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017), 51–68.

Mirrors and Macbeth’s Queer Materialism  65 11 Gillian Woods, “Understanding Dumb Shows and Interpreting The White Devil,” in Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theater, ed. Gillian Woods and Sarah Dustagheer (London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden ­Shakespeare, 2018), 302. 12 Some productions have particularly emphasized the ways in which the play centers on frustrated sexual reproduction. For example, a recent film ­adaption (Dir. Kurzel, 2015) has the film open with Macbeth and his wife burying their dead child and later has Lady Macbeth speaking to her dead child. 13 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The States of Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 183. 14 Deborah Shuger, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors and the Reflexive Mind,” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 22. 15 Shuger, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder,” 27. 16 Thomas P. Adler, “The Mirror as Stage Prop in Modern Drama,” Comparative Drama 14/4 (Winter 1980–1981), 355. 17 Brett Gamboa, “‘Is’t real that I see?’: Staged Realism and the Paradox of Shakespeare’s Audience,” Shakespeare Bulletin 31/4 (Winter 2013), 670. 18 Catherine Richardson, Shakespeare and Material Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31. 19 All discussions of word definitions and origins are drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary Online, dictionary.oed.com. 20 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 4. 21 Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham and ­London: Duke University Press, 2014), viii. 22 Maia Kontrovits, “Queer Persistence: On Death, History, and the Longing for Endings,” in Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies, ed. Kent L. Brintnall, Joseph A. Marchal, and Stephen D. Moore (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 133. 23 Sara Ahmed notes that “orientations involve directions toward objects that affect what we do,” adding “we move toward and away from objects depending on how we are moved by them.” Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 28. 24 Marjorie Garber, Profiling Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2008), 96. 25 Heather Love, “Milk,” in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the ­C omplete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham: Duke ­University Press, 2011), 201. 26 See William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 126n95. 27 David B. Goldstein, “Facing King Lear,” in Shakespeare and the Power of the Face, ed. James A. Knapp (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 61. 28 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 27. 29 Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), vi.

5 The Mirror and Age in Shakespeare’s Sonnets Hanh Bui

In Richard II, when King Richard is forced to give up his crown, he laments the loss of his royal identity by saying, “Alack the heavy day, / That I have worn so many winters out / And know not now what name to call myself!” (4.1.247–49).1 His allusion to being run down by the cycle of seasons sounds like the grievance of an old man, and his loss of power becomes associated with the loss of youth. Richard calls for a looking glass to “show me what a face I have / Since it is bankrupt of his majesty” (4.1.256–57). Peering at his reflection, he is surprised to discover that his face has not been prematurely ravaged by his changing political fortunes: “No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struck / So many blows upon this face of mine / And made no deeper wounds?” (4.1.267–69). His speech constructs a visual language of old age and suggests how knowledge of one’s changing body is intimately linked to—and betrayed by—the function of a mirror. Calling it a “flatt’ring glass” (4.1.269) for not revealing the true tragedy of his circumstances, Richard dashes it against the ground, thereby reconciling it with his own shattered identity. Richard II suggests a tension between the mirror and age that the sonnets pick up and explore in a deeper vein: how a mirror produces an objective copy of the person before it but paradoxically can force us to see an image different from how we perceive ourselves to be. 2 Put another way, we find that the time of the subject (one’s sense of personal experience, of inhabiting one’s body) is sometimes at odds with the time of the mirror. Unlike typical applications of the mirror motif, Richard’s glass does not reflect a skull or an ape such as we find in memento mori or vanitas iconography; nor does it reflect some inner truth. 3 Instead, as Ernst Kantorowicz has observed, the mirror simply produces Richard’s “banal face”—a body natural now dispossessed of its body politic.4 It is precisely the revelation of Richard’s ordinary physicality that interests me here, since we find a complementary move in the sonnets. For the poet-lover, however, it is the mirrored face of old age rather than youth which challenges the subject’s view of himself. “My glass shall not persuade me I am old” (22.1), Shakespeare writes, yet he also confesses that the mirror “shows me myself indeed, / Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity” (62.9–10).

The Mirror and Age  67 How then does a mirror—a mute object that nonetheless testifies and translates—prompt a subject’s awareness of his aging body, offering views that are surprising or disturbing, and ultimately unbidden? In what way does a mirror go beyond its function as an inert reflective surface to act as a temporal mediator, marking time or even perverting or creating it? In short, how does a mirror produce age? This chapter examines how the looking glass shaped the meaning, representation, and experience of growing old in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, offering a reconceptualization of early modern aging from a technological perspective. Drawing from Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, I argue that the mirror functions as a non-biological “actant” in the formation of aged subjectivity, and that identities of age in part arise from a subject’s engagements with technical objects.5 In Tudor and Stuart England, mirror production was transitioning from metal and convex glass to clear, flat crystal, which fundamentally changed the way people saw and represented themselves.6 As accurate reflections became increasingly available, the regard of one’s aged face as a half-concealed or distorted truth became a less tenable position, generating new anxieties about aging that Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to. Kathleen Woodward has theorized an older person’s preoccupation with his or her reflection in what she calls the “mirror stage of old age.”7 Whereas the Lacanian infant feels a discrepancy between an inner sense of an uncoordinated, fragmented body and a reflected wholeness, an older adult undergoes the opposite experience. For Woodward the mirror’s fracturing effect on aged subjects represents a common psychological fact. What this account leaves out is how the self-confrontation with age is dependent upon a mirror’s physical properties, and that the mirror as an evolving technology reflects the processes of aging in historically specific ways. Thus, my interest in Shakespeare’s mirror is not just as a literary motif but as a neglected site for observing the early modern record of aging and old age. No doubt our bodies—and other people—tell us something about growing old. But so too do the things we use or come into contact with. The Lord Chief Justice asks Falstaff: “Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly  . . . and every part of you blasted with antiquity?” (2 Henry 4 1.2.165–68). The lines indicate how one’s awareness of at least some “characters of age” (ll. 64–65)—those written on the face—is dependent upon a mirrored surface. In Julius Caesar Brutus acknowledges that “the eye sees not itself / But by reflection, by some other things” (1.2.54–55, italics added). Cassius’s desire to usurp the mirror’s function by serving as Brutus’s reflection suggests that the mirror, as a source of self-knowledge, was understood to complement or rival the judgments of other people. Reading the plays alongside Shakespeare’s poetry, we can therefore approach the sonnets as miniature dramas in which the

68  Hanh Bui looking glass exteriorizes the conflict between self-­recognition and self-alienation, contributing to the period’s debates about the nature of identity, the reliability of appearances, and the objectivity of truth itself. After Foucault, we tend to think of subjectivity as the outcome of discursive practices. But the sonnets draw our attention to the preeminence of things in the formation of selfhood: “my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand” (111.6–7). Since a mirror produces an image of the self as an object of contemplation for the self, it challenges the absolute distinction between subject and object, showing how things become enmeshed in the ontology of the human.8 In Shakespeare’s poetry, where the world of things stubbornly impinges upon the world of the self and the imagination, age is not reducible to a strictly numerical or biological designation. Instead, age is something multi-temporal and multi-relational, better understood as the effect of a complex series of identifications between the lover and the beloved, which the looking glass intervenes in and construes according to its own vitality. *** In the introduction to his edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, John ­Kerrigan has discussed how the invention of mechanical timepieces transformed the period’s notion of time, proposing that the real significance of Shakespeare’s clocks lies “not in classical literature and the iconographic tradition which it fostered, but in the springs, coils, and pendula of [R]enaissance machinery.”9 A similar claim can be made for Shakespeare’s mirrors. By the mid-sixteenth century, England was importing a new type of mirror from the continent, where the Italians had honed the art of making perfectly flat, colorless glass and the process to line it with a silvery finish, producing mirrors that were more accurate than the ones made of metal or convex glass available since antiquity.10 Crystal mirrors offered a relatively realistic view of the world never seen before, which challenged the Pauline vision of “through a glass, darkly” and reinvigorated the period’s controversies over the “true” and “deceitful” glass.11 Mirrors made from a steel alloy called speculum, which was cheaper than glass, remained the most common during Shakespeare’s time, and the variety of words used to designate a reflective object—“mirror,” “glass,” “steel glass,” ­“speculum”—attests to the different materials and overlapping technologies then available.12 The 1609 publication of Shake-speares Sonnets coincided with a growing interest in empiricism that would flourish later in the century, when the looking glass still seemed to possess magical properties but was also emblematic of modern science and the latest advances in artistic technique. “The studious man,” the sixteenth-century Italian physician Girolamo Cardano asserts, “should always have at hand a clock

The Mirror and Age  69 and a mirror”: a clock to keep track of time and a mirror to observe the changing state of his body.13 We do not know what kind of mirror Cardano used, but his statement implies a diagnostic link between Renaissance technical objects and old age, which raises the question how developments in mirror technology might have affected that purpose. In the seventeenth century Rembrandt painted an extraordinary series of self-portraits that unsentimentally represented his experience of growing old, and no doubt the ability to see his aging face in finer detail influenced the artist’s autobiographical expressions. For Shakespeare, the interplay between old and new technologies lent itself to exploring the tensions between youth and age, not to mention the ambivalence of growing old. Throughout the sonnets, especially those addressed to a male friend, the poet is preoccupied with mortality and the passage of time. But mutability is not an abstract philosophical problem; on the contrary, Shakespeare routinely portrays time’s deleterious effects on the human body in caustic and violent terms.14 Time is a “bloody tyrant” (16.2), a “wrackful siege” (65.6). Old age is “feeble” (7.10), “lame” (37.9). The beloved’s face will become a “tattered weed” (2.4) or a “map of days outworn” (68.1). Hence there is ample evidence of Shakespeare’s contempt of physical old age, an attitude he shared with his culture at large. As Christopher Martin has commented, The foundational paradox upon which the author builds his Sonnets is the way in which the society depicted therein demands, sponsors, and erects monuments to its own endurance . . . while nonetheless expressing a collective disdain for the effects of longevity itself.15 It is therefore not surprising that when scholars address senescence in Shakespeare’s poetry, they typically highlight its pessimistic themes: bodily decline, the fear of death, or the aging speaker’s narcissism. Yet we can move beyond these negative valuations if we focus on the mirror’s material role in the formation of aged identities. After all, the physical properties of glass, its brittleness and fragility, facilitated Shakespeare’s meditations on the transience of human life. Isabella in Measure for Measure says glasses “are as easy broke as they make forms” (2.4.1153). I want to resist, however, any suggestion of Shakespeare’s technological determinism—that the lover and the beloved only mechanically react to the mirror’s provocations. On the contrary, the sonnets demonstrate that the relationship between what we see and who we are can never be known in advance. By emphasizing the mirror’s transformative potential, I attend to Jane Bennett’s notion of an object’s creative agency: its power to change, disrupt, interfere, and affect other entities without being intentional in any human sense.16 In the sonnets the encounter with one’s reflection is always a creative act, and the mirror is conceived as both object and event.

70  Hanh Bui The link between a mirror and age is established in Sonnet 3, which begins as follows: Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest Now is the time that face should form another, Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother. (1–4) The effort to persuade the young man to produce an heir is framed as an encounter with a mirror, and technical mirroring becomes the prompt for biological mirroring.17 The glass establishes a correspondence between the young man’s face and the face of his future offspring since a reflection, like a child, is different from yet dependent upon the gazing subject. It is notable that the speaker tells the friend that it is his face— and not his person—that should reproduce itself. The sonnet objectifies the friend’s beauty in the Petrarchan style, but more daringly, the youth’s reflection takes on a fate or agency all its own. If the friend has a child, then the child will serve as a copy of the friend’s image, thereby preserving the image even as the friend inevitably ages. But if the friend rejects the poet’s advice, then both the friend and his image will age and wither18: “But if thou live remembered not to be, / Die single and thine image dies with thee” (3.13–14). In other words, the friend is both his image and not his image, his subjectivity split between the virtual (the perception of himself in the glass) and the real (the perception of himself without the glass). A subject’s encounter with a mirror is so clearly visual that it would be easy to overlook its temporal dimension. But Shakespeare directs our attention to the mirror’s multiple tenses later in Sonnet 3: Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime; So thou through windows of thine age shalt see, Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time. (9–12) Here the young man’s face functions as a mirror for his mother by recalling the springtime of her youth.19 Since the friend’s reflection evokes the absent presence of his mother, the mirror draws people into what Steven Shaviro has described as “extended referential networks,” in the sense that the chains of associations sparked when humans and nonhumans interact can never be fully exhausted. 20 “Thou art thy mother’s glass” also encourages the friend to view his face as already old, layered with his mother’s years, which is a notion of age that traverses temporal partitions. In Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Jonathan

The Mirror and Age  71 Gil Harris has considered the polytemporality of objects in two ways: how things collate various time periods (a Renaissance mirror developed from ancient and medieval glass technology is one example), as well as how objects “prompt many different understandings and experiences of temporality—that is, of the relationship between now and then, old and ­ irror in new, before and after.”21 Acting like “untimely matter,” the m Sonnet 3 conjures the subject’s bodily changes and projects their meanings beyond the immediate context of the poem, thereby presenting an ontology where past, present, and future are spatially coextensive. What I wish to emphasize is the mirror’s recursive power to materialize connections between different generations of a family and how the self-­ conception of age is distributed among multiple agencies and ontological types: the viewing subject, the mirror, and other people. Shakespeare was 45 years old when the sonnets were published in the 1609 Quarto, but his age when he wrote them is less certain. When he warns his friend that “forty winters shall besiege thy brow” (2.1), he establishes the threshold of old age and suggests that he has already arrived there. Shakespeare twice puns on numerical age when he advises the friend to “fortify” himself against time (16.3, 63.10) and describes “three-score year” (11.8) as the upper limit of human life. The poet also highlights the years separating him and the young man (63.1), and him and the lady (138.5). Accordingly, John Klause has argued that age difference “colors almost every motive and action in the relationships to which the Sonnets refer.”22 Whether Shakespeare was describing his own experiences or invented them, we can say the speaker feels old, especially in relation to the beautiful youth, and the mirror plays a crucial role in producing such an effect. That the poet and young man are separated by some relevant difference in age is first made explicit in Sonnet 22. Here, Shakespeare turns his attention from the friend’s aging to consider his own: My glass shall not persuade me I am old So long as youth and thou are of one date; But when in thee time’s furrows I behold, Then look I death my days should expiate. For all that beauty that doth cover thee Is but the seemly raiment of my heart, Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me; How can I then be elder than thou art? (1–8) Shakespeare employs the conventional motif of two lovers exchanging their hearts. The specific problem the sonnet raises, however, is how two people divided by age can harbor each other’s hearts. Critics tend to read the opening line as evidence of the lover’s self-deception or a statement

72  Hanh Bui of his aged vanity. 23 But we should consider it also as a tacit acknowledgment that the speaker is already aware of his agedness, as if he were impulsively averting his gaze from an inconvenient truth or preparing for an older version of himself to step out of the glass. Since a mirror offers the illusion of depth, it inspires the fantasy that there are more selves waiting to be revealed. The opening line therefore suggests that the mirror possesses knowledge that eludes and threatens the lover. Fulke Greville writes in Cælica that glass, once broken, is “never brought to that it was” (41.8). 24 While certainly true, in Richard II the shards of Richard’s broken glass nonetheless reconstitute and multiply his reflection, thereby resisting his efforts to destroy his image. In Sonnet 22, even though the lover associates his double with the beloved’s face and not his glassy image, I want to underscore the mirror’s power to compel a response from the poet, the capacity, as Shaviro has described, for “things [to] move us, or force us to feel them.”25 Sonnet 22 hints that the face of old age can appear to belong to someone else. In Richard II the old Duke of York describes his arm as being “prisoner to the palsy” (2.3.103), implying that an inner (presumably younger) self is now captive in a decrepit frame that is somehow separate from him. As a person grows older, the experience of inhabiting the body typically remains unchanged while the body itself attests to difference, and the mirror’s self/other paradox materializes this sense of a divided self. Because glass laterally inverts objects (the right side becomes the left), frames our vision, and casts things in a different light, it can make what is most familiar to us—our bodies—suddenly appear as an Other. 26 In The Hospitall of Incurable Fooles (1586/trans. 1600), Tomaso Garzoni offers an extreme case of this phenomenon from antiquity: [T]here was a certaine decrepit woman . . . who perceiuing hir face in a glasse deformed through olde age, of the discontentment she receiued by this in her minde, she became a Foole; & in this hir mad folly, she spoke to her owne face in the glasse, laughed, and talked to it . . . sometimes shee flattered it, and anone after a franticke manner shee woulde bee angrie with the same . . . 27 Garzoni’s account illustrates several arresting ideas, in addition to the longstanding view of old age as a “narrative of decline”28: the mirror’s profound power to affect consciousness regarding one’s status as an aged subject, how a mirror does not eternalize but offers shifting realities and engagements, the misogynistic link between the mirror and female beauty, and how subjectivity can nonetheless arise out of misrecognition. Likewise, Sonnet 22 demonstrates how objective fact (one’s reflection in a glass) does not always align with subjective meaning (one’s view of the self); thus, a reflection can be both accurate and inaccurate with regard to the same person.

The Mirror and Age  73 Renaissance writers frequently employed the motif of a mirror shining light on things that otherwise would remain unknown. Hamlet threatens Gertrude with a mirror so she can “see the inmost part” of herself (3.4.20). It is a gesture meant to shame his mother for her aging sexuality and remarriage since at her stage of life (at least in Hamlet’s view), the “heyday in the blood is tame” (3.4.68). Yet within narratives of aging, a mirror undermines the idea that the private (the youthful person I feel “inside”) is the realm of the authentic, while the public (how I look on the “outside”) is constructed. As Simone de Beauvoir has written, “So long as the inner feeling of youth remains alive, it is the objective truth of age that seems fallacious.”29 Scholars of aging disagree on the significance of the conflict between “felt” and “chronological” ages. Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth have posited a “mask of aging,” which “conceals the essential [i.e., still youthful] identity of the person beneath.”30 Others have argued that such a view simply manifests a person’s internalized ageism.31 So what, exactly, does the appearance of old age tell us? And what powers are served whether or not one admits the “truth” of old age? In the later years of Queen Elizabeth’s life, it was widely rumored that Elizabeth avoided or even banned mirrors from her presence, since they served as putative reminders of her declining body and power. According to Catherine Loomis, the Queen’s famous comment to William Lambarde—“I am Richard II. Know ye not that?”—may well have been in response to Richard’s call for a glass on Shakespeare’s stage. 32 Ben Jonson offers this account of the monarch’s vanity: “Queen Elizabeth never saw her self after she became old in a true Glass. they painted her & sometymes would vermilion her nose.”33 As reported by Jonson, the Queen’s servants took advantage of her aversion to mirrors by mockingly applying cosmetics on her face, the same products that would have been used to create the illusion of a more youthful woman. We should of course be wary of assuming the accuracy of such rumors. But it is tempting to speculate, as Louis Montrose has done, whether crystal mirrors were the “true glass” that Elizabeth found so threatening to her personal identity and political authority.34 Moreover, these stories suggest that an experience which is ostensibly private—scrutinizing one’s image in a glass—can have much broader ramifications, which points to the active and subversive role of non-human objects in public life. In Sonnet 22 the lover can avert his attention from his aged reflection. But in Sonnet 62 a mirror produces a jarring double from which he cannot distance himself. In Shaviro’s critique of how Western philosophy since the Enlightenment has privileged human consciousness (“our way of knowing”) over the objective world (“what is known”), he writes that “the question of how we know cannot come first, for our way of knowing is itself a consequence, or a product, of how things actually are and what they do” (italics original).35 Shaviro helps illuminate how the

74  Hanh Bui self-discovery of age in Sonnet 62 is to some extent a consequence of the mirror’s reflective ability, where objects precede insight: Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye, And all my soul, and all my every part; And for this sin there is no remedy, It is so grounded inward in my heart. Methinks no face so gracious is as mine, No shape so true, no truth of such account, And for myself mine own worth do define As I all other in all worths surmount. But when my glass shows me myself indeed, Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity, Mine own self-love quite contrary I read; Self so self-loving were iniquity. ’Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise, Painting my age with beauty of thy days. The conceit of the poem is that the lover can only admit to the “sin of self-love” because it is the young man who is perceived as the poet’s true self; hence the sonnet’s panegyric praise is actually directed toward the friend. Yet the full meaning of the sonnet hinges on the turn at the sestet: when the lover looks in the mirror, he is shocked by the reflection of his own agedness. Unlike Sonnet 104, which suggests that time’s theft of beauty is a gradual process—“no pace perceived” (104.10)—here the face of old age appears as a sudden and inadvertent trespasser upon the lover’s awareness. Shakespeare’s language underscores glass’s power to act upon the subject (“my glass shows me”) as opposed to passively accepting the viewer’s actions, such as Leontes’s description of “making practiced smiles / As in a looking-glass” (Winter’s Tale 1.2.118–19). For those who would object that it is not the mirror per se but the poet’s own face which disturbs him, the fact remains that an individual’s reflection cannot be separated from the physical properties of the glass. This idea is evoked in John Lyly’s Sapho and Phao (1584), when the 600-year-old Sybilla tells Phao, the beautiful male youth: “Whiles you looke in the glass, it waxeth old with time” (2.1.482).36 Because subject and object share a material existence, the glass also ages. In Sonnet 62 the mirror acts independently of human will, since the looking glass cannot be manipulated to conform to the lover’s preferred self-image, prompting him to confront a physical reality different from his own expectation or desire. Woodward has raised a pointed question: “Is the obsession with mirrors a symptom of this ‘stage’ in life—old age—or is this stage triggered by one’s mirrored image, by the reflections of others, that is, by the values held up to us by our society?”37 Whether old age is “triggered” by the mirror was a question also explored by early modern writers. In the essay

The Mirror and Age  75 “Of Experience” (trans. 1603), Michel de Montaigne describes how the mirror affords him the occasion to reflect upon growing old. Montaigne expresses the familiar discord between the “outward alteration” of his body and his inward state of mind. But more provocatively he declares, “My visage and eyes doe presently discover me. Thence beginne all my changes.”38 Does Montaigne mean that signs of aging first appear on the face, or, that aging rightfully starts when the eye discovers the body’s transformations in a glass? In other words, does the mirror age us? In Sonnet 62 the mirror forces the lover’s confrontation with old age, and the resulting discomfort can be understood as the opposite of the pleasure evoked from Narcissus’s reflection.39 The looking glass essentially performs a kind of reverse seduction on the poet: instead of offering a vision of beauty, it holds out the promise of decay and death. Yet the poet remains in love with the friend, and the problem of identifying with the youth while falling out of love with his own image is captured in a paradox: “Mine own self-love quite contrary I read” (62.11). Thus Sonnet 62 describes how the mirror destabilizes the certainty of self-knowledge when subjective belief comes into conflict with objects themselves. The poem ends: “’Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise, / Painting my age with beauty of thy days” (62.13–14). For Maurice Charney the couplet suggests Shakespeare’s attempt to “appropriate” the beloved’s youth.40 As an alternative to reading the lines as a mere check on the poet’s narcissistic excess, I emphasize that a mirror becomes critical to discarding an earlier version of the self that no longer pertains. As in Richard II, the mirror of Sonnet 62 does not reflect an idealized picture but a subject who readily exists—an image which is the product of science, not faith. This hardening view of old age is also relevant to the male friend. Sonnet 77 is related to Sonnet 3 insofar as it features a mirror and is concerned with the beloved’s fading youth. But while Sonnet 3 pictures the friend at the height of his beauty, Sonnet 77 envisions his charms as already corrupted: Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear, Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste, The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear, And of this book, this learning mayst thou taste. The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show Of mouthèd graves will give thee memory; Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know Time’s thievish progress to eternity. (1–8) Shakespeare employs three technical objects—the mirror, dial, and book—to show how the friend might use them to process the effects of time. The dial’s “shady stealth” suggests a sundial, but in the period

76  Hanh Bui “dial” could also refer to a mechanical clock or watch. Once again the poet bids the youth to imagine a time when the mirror will no longer reflect physical perfection but an uncomely truth. In the 1609 Quarto, “how thy beauties wear” appears as “how thy beauties were,” which today reads as an even blunter critique of old age.41 Moreover, we are told the glass will “truly show,” not distort, the youth’s face. The unflattering projection of the friend’s impending visage is meant to prompt him into recording his thoughts in a book, which will preserve the freshness of his mind as children would preserve the freshness of his body. But books, the poet writes elsewhere, also decay: “So should my papers, yellowed with their age, / Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue” (17.9–10). Objects in Shakespeare’s corpus become more legible when we think of them as subjects of debate rather than givens of the material world. At the end of King Lear, Lear calls for a mirror to prove Cordelia’s vitality: “If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, / Why, then she lives” (5.3.236–7). But for Lear, much like Richard, the mirror fails to offer him the material confirmation he desires. In Pericles we find that “death remembered should be like a mirror / Who tells us life’s but breath, to trust it error” (Scene 1, ll. 88–89). The mirror—whether actual or figurative, stone or glass—mediated some of Shakespeare’s most profound inquiries into the impermanence of human experience. To paraphrase Lewis Mumford, the objective world that early modern science investigated as well as the subjective world that the poet explored were universes observed both in and through the looking glass.42 In Shakespeare’s sonnets, later life is revealed to be both an undoing and a making, once the looking glass intervenes in the drama of aging.

Notes 1 References to Shakespeare’s works are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008). Sonnets are cited parenthetically by sonnet number and line numbers. 2 See Philippa Kelly, “Surpassing Glass: Shakespeare’s Mirrors,” Early Modern Literary Studies 8/1 (2002): 21–32. 3 Peter Ure, “The Looking-Glass of Richard II,” Philological Quarterly 34/2 (1955): 222–23. 4 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (­Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 40. 5 Bruno Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications,” Soziale Welt 47/4 (1996): 369–81. Robin Bernstein also has theorized how material objects “script” the emergence of racialized subjectivities. See “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 27/4 (2009): 67–94. Early modern scholars disagree, however, on the mirror’s role in constructions of selfhood. Debora Shuger refutes the idea that mirrors in Renaissance texts register a modern self-consciousness since they typically do not reflect an actual person but a paradigmatic figure. Meanwhile, Rayna

The Mirror and Age  77 Kalas, Philippa Kelly, and Miranda Anderson find social mirroring in tension with the processes of self-reflection that a mirror affords. See also John S. Garrison’s chapter on Macbeth in this volume. 6 See Debora Shuger, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors and the Reflexive Mind,” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 21–41; and Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). 7 Kathleen Woodward, “The Mirror Stage of Old Age,” in Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 53–71. 8 The idea that people and things are mutually constituted is not exclusive to post-modernity. Responding to Margreta de Grazia’s pioneering work on Renaissance objects, Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda write that “early modern conceptions of identity always required external things.” See “Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Properties,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have also discussed how Renaissance clothes “inscribe themselves upon a person who comes into being through that inscription.” See Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U ­ niversity Press, 2000), 2. 9 William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and a Lover’s Complaint, ed. John ­Kerrigan (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 34. 10 See Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and the English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 4; and Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine H. Jewett (New York: Routledge, 2001), 13–19. 11 See Grabes, The Mutable Glass, 105, and Benjamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 114–15. 12 See Grabes, The Mutable Glass, 4–5; Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror, 21–26; and Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse, 107–10. Also see Miranda Anderson, The Renaissance Extended Mind (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 165–69. 13 Quoted in Nancy G. Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3. 14 Kathleen Woodward, “Instant Repulsion: Decrepitude, the Mirror Stage, and the Literary Imagination,” The Kenyon Review 5/4 (1983): 49. 15 Christopher Martin, Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature from Queen Elizabeth to King Lear (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 115. 16 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 17 Anderson, The Renaissance Extended Mind, 191. 18 R. Bradley Holden, “Shakespeare’s Sonnet 3,” The Explicator 64/4 (2006): 195. 19 “Glass” also can be read as an hourglass, whose sand marks the passage of time. 20 Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 52. 21 Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 4. 22 John Klause, “Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’: Age in Love and the Goring of Thoughts,” Studies in Philology 80/3 (1983): 305–6.

78  Hanh Bui 23 For example, Zenón Luis Martínez, “True Looking-Glasses: Narcissism and Motherhood in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Sederi 11 (2002): 187–88; and Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: H ­ arvard University Press, 1997), 134–35. 24 Fulke Greville, Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, ed. Thom Gunn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 25 Shaviro, Universe, 8. 26 For a discussion of glass’s Otherness, see John. S. Garrison, “Glass: The Sonnets’ Desiring Object,” in Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 65. 27 Tomaso Garzoni, The Hospitall of Incurable Fooles, printed by Edm. Bollifant, for Edward Blount (1586/trans. 1600), 10–11. 28 Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997). 29 Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Norton, 1996), 296. 30 Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth, “The Mask of Ageing and the Postmodern Life Course,” in The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London: SAGE Publications, 1991), 379. 31 For example, see Toni M. Calasanti and Kathleen F. Slevin, Gender, Social Inequalities, and Aging (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2001). 32 Catherine Loomis, “A Brittle Gloriana: Staging the Deposition of Queen Elizabeth I,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 33/1 (Summer 2007): 4. 33 Ben Jonson, Notes of Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden (London: Shakespeare Society, 1842), 15. 34 Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 243. 35 Shaviro, Universe, 3. 36 John Lyly, Sapho and Phao, 1584. Published for the Malone Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 37 Woodward, “Mirror Stage of Old Age,” 66. 38 Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes, or Morall, Politike, and Millitarie Discourses, trans. John ­Florio (London: V. Sims, 1603), 653. 39 Woodward, “Instant Repulsion,” 55. 40 Maurice Charney, Wrinkled Deep in Time: Aging in Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 47. 41 Online facsimile of the 1609 Quarto is courtesy of the British Library. 42 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955).

6 Shakespeare’s Babies “Things to Come at Large” Megan Snell

In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, the Shepherd stumbles upon the infant Perdita while searching for his lost “best sheep” (3.3.64) and exclaims: What have we here? Mercy on’s, a bairn, a very pretty bairn. A boy or a child, I wonder? A pretty one, a very pretty one. Sure some scape: though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work. They were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here. I’ll take it up for pity.1 Beginning with the ontological inquiry “What have we here?” the ­Shepherd analyzes the mass in front of him and quickly deduces that he has encountered a “bairn.”2 Though admittedly “not bookish,” the Shepherd further concludes that he “can read waiting-gentlewoman in the scape,” as well as various circumstances of the child’s conception. This focused consideration of the baby diverts the Shepherd’s attention from the figure in front of him to other people and temporal moments, to what it “has been,” what “they were,” and finally, what he will do next: “for pity,” he says, he will take up the “poor thing.” The audience knows that the Shepherd’s initial reading of the baby is wrong. Even though Leontes had questioned his daughter’s parentage, we know that the newborn’s mother is Queen Hermione, rather than a “waiting-­gentlewoman.” Yet the Shepherd makes another error in response to his initial question, not directly relevant to the plot but apparent to the audience by believing he has encountered a “bairn” at all. What we have here, on the most literal level in most productions, is a prop. When Shakespeare’s plays call for a baby to appear onstage, we can generally assume that a bundle of fabric or a doll played this part.3 For multiple reasons, the early modern theatre was not an ideal place for a newborn, and a newborn was not an ideal responsibility for a theatre company. Fortunately, babies are quite well suited to be played by props. Unlike older, speaking children (represented by players onstage), the newborn’s lack of lines (“infant” comes from the Latin infāns, meaning “unable to speak”)

80  Megan Snell and independent action largely facilitates the use of a prop.4 Furthermore, babies in the early modern period were unusually inert and object-like by current standards: midwifery books in the period recommended that all infants be tightly swaddled with only the face left exposed, highly restricting their movement for months, even up to a year.5 Not only do baby-props take on the characteristics of babies, then, but babies can take on the characteristics of props. Indeed, as portable material manipulated by other ­actors and transformed in performance, these bundles better fit definitions of a stage property than a character.6 Though less visually striking than skulls or corpses, infants such as Perdita thus join these staples of early modern drama in testing categorical boundaries of personhood and animacy.7 Yet the baby-prop functions perversely, even within this strange subset. Unlike a corpse—a still breathing actor now performing lifelessness—the inanimate baby-prop performs vitality and even serves as a symbol of procreation. Participating in theatre’s illusion means that spectators, to some extent, read this bundle as a “bairn” and endow it with a singular, animated fragility that exceeds its non-human materials. Narratively, we know that the prop is meant to be a baby because other characters “contract” so with it, to use Andrew Sofer’s term, both by verbally labelling it (“Mercy on ’s, a bairn!”) and physically engaging with it in recognizable ways (how he “take[s] it up”).8 Like a puppet master, an actor’s handling of the prop animates the child, signaling the vibrancy of this “performing object” by carefully cradling it or supporting its “head.”9 To an extent, then, an actor manipulating a baby-prop enacts Dassia N. Posner’s definition of puppetry as “the human infusion of independent life into lifeless, but not agentless, objects in performance.”10 At the same time, the baby-prop reverses this puppet process by infusing object-ness into representations of life on the same ontological plane as other actors. Traditionally in the theatre, these transactions of animacy for baby-props are meant to be seamless, invisible even. We are not supposed to give an alternative answer to the Shepherd’s question, “what have we here?” Or are we? Although the baby-prop solves the practical problem of how to represent infant life in the theatre without accommodating a real newborn (or risking interruption), this “solution” introduces its own set of challenges for its fellow characters and the audience. The potential disruptive power of a real infant does not necessarily go away with the substitution of a baby-prop, but rather takes different forms. While no actor plays the part of a baby, the prop nonetheless acts. The baby-prop is a subject whose object lessons can elucidate how we both perceive and misread other forms of animacy, or latent “powers,” especially when analyzed through the vocabulary and critical lenses that theorize the world as a network of interactive materials. In this chapter, I begin by discussing how Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher experiment with the connections between the little baby bundle and similarly

Shakespeare’s Babies  81 shaped objects. The bundle, like a “thing,” reveals itself to be more animate and less ­functional than originally expected, leading to a number of ontological confusions. Ironically, however, the comically incorrect ways that Middleton and Fletcher’s characters read and represent the bundle prove surprisingly accurate. Next, I take up Shakespeare’s exploration of the baby-prop, tracing how he enfolds and distributes personhood inside and through this object. His baby-props add a temporal dimension to the complexities Middleton and Fletcher explore, affording characters an opportunity to narrativize their pasts and project the future, but these visions of linear fulfilment fail to account for how the baby-prop’s intermingled identities generate many potential futures at once. Instead of a straightforward culmination, when a baby does grow up in Shakespeare, I argue, it requires a transformation of the character’s state and a schism in the play’s chronology that blurs our sense of discrete personhood and linear time.

“Some pack of worth” Real infants necessarily position us as their readers, but the baby-prop demands its own kinds of interpretive work. On the page, a newborn’s ­categorical hybridity often causes it to play peekaboo in scant embedded textual clues.11 While a baby can prove elusive in a play’s script, a ­baby-prop’s “script” as a “thing” is markedly nondescript. That is, to ­borrow Robin Bernstein’s terminology, if a “thing” (rather than an object in isolation) offers a “script” to its readers, a culturally specific “set of invitations that necessarily remain open to resistance, interpretation, and improvisation,” the non-specificity of the baby-prop makes it a special case of a “scriptive” thing.12 In its ability to easily resemble and be represented by other things, the baby-prop also demonstrates our capacity to reinterpret scripts. This multiplicity is in part reflected by the potential deployments of the material itself across productions: a toy, blanket, or costume in one play could reappear as a baby-prop in another. Even if an audience is unaware of such repertorial “doubling,” playwrights can underscore the overlaps between the human baby and its non-human analogues. Unlike the Shepherd in The Winter’s Tale, who immediately recognizes the bundle in front of him as human, when a few of Middleton and Fletcher’s characters encounter these baby bundles, they join a long comic tradition of presupposing a different answer to the question “what have we here?”13 In one of the many subplots of Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, multiple characters try to pass off one bundle for a different, similarly shaped bundle. From the moment an infant first enters the stage, we are alerted to its “shape” and what may or may not be inside it. First, the exceedingly fertile Touchwood Sr. tries to shirk financial responsibility for an illegitimate newborn by alleging that it is not a complete baby: “this half yard of flesh” lacks “a nail or two” he retorts, but the

82  Megan Snell unnamed Wench maintains it “hath the right shape.”14 Touchwood Sr.’s accusation of the missing parts alludes to the effects of syphilis, but it also alerts us to the theatrical realities of the baby-prop. Indeed, the bundle probably does lack “a nail or two,” and the play will continue to draw our attention to the bundle’s “right shape,” if questionable contents. In the next scene, two promoters—hoping to confiscate illegal meat during Lent for their own profit—stop a man smuggling a suspicious “lump” under his coat (2.2.108). He tries to pass it off as nothing more than linens, “a pair of sheets, and two /Of my wife’s foul smocks, going to the washers” (2.2.109–10), but the supposed fabric turns out to be “all veal,” young calf meat. Soon after, we watch a r­ efracted version of the same scene when the Wench reenters with her own “lump,” which she tells the promoters is mutton. After gleefully confiscating it, the promoters confidently bet on the cuts they will find inside. Instead, they discover the baby, and thereby perhaps even find a prop made of the “pair of sheets” that the veal smuggler claimed to carry. As these characters misread and misrepresent the bundles’ scripts as baby, veal, and linen, the imaginative “contracts” that signal the prop’s identity to the audience proliferate. Fletcher’s The Chances also features a character fooled by the baby-­ prop’s indistinct script. Don John, perhaps already the father of an illegitimate child or two himself, ventures into a house and readily accepts when a woman hands him a mysterious bundle. He then begins to revel in his good luck: She is gone, and I am loaden; fortune for me; It weighs well, and it feeles well; it may chance To be some pack of worth: by th’ mass ’tis heavie; If it be Coyne or Jewels, ’tis worth welcome: Ile ne’re refuse a fortune: I am confident ’Tis of no common price.15 Despite his confidence in the bundle’s size and weight, Don John holds not “coyne or jewels,” but an infant. Don John, like the promoters, temporarily obscures the bundle’s animacy, subsuming the baby’s social identity to its physical similarities with other bundle-shaped non-humans. When the promoters and Don John fail to see the baby in the bundle, their “mistakes” reverse, and even correct, the ontological exchange we are asked to do as audience members: to take an object for a child. The first comically incorrect guesses of the baby’s identity are technically more accurate in performance, when it likely is an object that they hold, physically more akin to meat or coins than a breathing human. Like the audience, they cannot definitively distinguish its human features. Yet as the baby-prop flattens our ontologies, it also highlights precisely where and how these categories of property and baby may intersect. Namely,

Shakespeare’s Babies  83 these overlapping scripts for meat and coins can suggest a kernel of uncomfortable, metonymic truth about the baby’s disturbing possible utilities or the materials and cost required to raise the child. Middleton and Fletcher’s babies underscore that misrecognition and recognition are not always diametrically opposed. The humor of these baby-swap scenes grows from the characters’ mistaken confidence: they assume that an object’s script conforms to their own desired use. We usually notice an object, as Bill Brown explains, when it seems to make us acknowledge it, specifically when it stops working as expected and makes us confront its “thingness.”16 In such a moment, when the meat or coins do not behave exactly as expected, the perception of the relationship between subject and object changes. Middleton and Fletcher’s babies become noticeable when they fail to meet others’ functional expectations, asserting their “thingness” when characters stop looking through them, and instead look at them. Their eventual disappointment registers the baby as something different from what they desired, something more animate than originally thought. These overt examples underscore a reality that attaches to all theatrical infants, that the choice to write a baby into a play (knowing how babies are portrayed onstage) is a choice to insert a human and non-human amalgamation among human characters, to interweave these two scripts. While Middleton and Fletcher resolve the baby’s identity relatively quickly to supply the punchlines for their jokes, however, Shakespeare’s own investigation into the baby-prop’s unique “thingness” shows that its ability to enfold so many different identities has repercussions not just in the moment of its recognition but in different generational and temporal dimensions.

“This piece / Of your dead queen” While Middleton and Fletcher show the baby traded, ontologically and literally, for something, Shakespeare continually tests how much a baby-­prop can stand-in for someone. To an extent, Perdita is as ripe for an ontological misreading as the babies in Middleton and Fletcher. The Shepherd seeks his sheep when he finds the bundle, and Perdita’s royal identity depends in part on the scroll and jewels that will later be used to help “reassemble” her at the end of play, as Justin B. Kolb argues.17 While the Shepherd easily discerns that she is a “bairn,” he also describes her as “some changeling” (3.3.107). A “changeling,” a folkloric term referring to a child either taken or left behind by fairies, is ultimately a being that has been exchanged for another being. Though not left by fairies, Perdita is a changeling of a different sort in the Shepherd’s initial analysis: he substitutes other people for the child by speaking of her parents, what “this has been,” and what he himself will do. If we typically understand a character’s relationship to their body as a 1:1 ratio (one character inhabits one body), then the baby-prop distorts

84  Megan Snell this math. Stage objects have the power “to take on a life of their own in performance,” says Sofer.18 As the Shepherd’s analysis demonstrates, baby-props are indeed tasked with performing a life of their own, but they also take on a shared life. Not only are baby-props animated by the actors who carefully hold them, but their identities are also entangled with other characters in ways that blur discrete personhood in the plays. This entanglement, furthermore, includes not only the characters of the play’s present but also of its past and future. In sustaining these multiple latent identities, Shakespeare’s baby-props exemplify how we perceive, and can fail to fully fathom, other forms of animacy. One way we can theorize our perceptual limits of objects, Levi Bryant posits, is by thinking of them as “difference engines,” split between “local manifestations” (actualized qualities in a particular here and now) and “virtual proper beings” (concrete capacities of their powers, if not the actualized form those powers take).19 That is, if we apply this terminology to the baby-prop, we can picture it like an acorn, which exists as an acorn in the present moment (a “local manifestation”), and as many other potential manifestations at once (“virtual proper beings”), including an oak tree, lumber, a squirrel’s lunch, a rotted seed, and any number of unperceived possibilities. Bryant argues, then, that “objects are always in excess of any of their local manifestations, harboring hidden volcanic powers irreducible to any of their manifestations in the world.”20 Shakespeare’s baby-props are theatrical “acorns” in that they are in excess of their visible form, staging questions of potentiality and actualization. Their accumulating manifestations and potentials are bundled up in the “poor thing,” the “difference engine” of the baby-prop that disrupts ontological, and subsequently chronological, synchronicities. Other characters can only glimpse its current form and speculate about a few of its possible identities across time and generations. The baby-prop thus functions as a sort of skeleton key to both prop and character, lifeless enough to replace an object, but lively enough to be a proxy, and even a replacement, for other characters. This exchange happens not just in the speeches that the baby inspires (the Shepherd looks at the baby and extrapolates about the mother), but also in a play’s structural organization of characters. The mothers of the newborns Perdita in The Winter’s Tale and Marina in Pericles disappear, albeit temporarily, seemingly vacating space and animacy in the play for the baby-prop to absorb: Hermione apparently “dead” after her trial and later a statue, and corpse-like Thaisa pitched overboard to quiet the seas so that only the “living,” including the baby-prop, are left on board.21 When Lychorida, Marina’s nurse, introduces Pericles and the audience to the infant as a “piece / Of your dead queen” (3.1.17–18), she characterizes Marina as a literal fragment of the mother she replaces onstage. In these generational exchanges, the baby-prop’s emergence establishes an uneasy equilibrium:

Shakespeare’s Babies  85 as the Shepherd says to his son who recounts the death of Antigonus, “thou mett’st with things dying, I with things newborn” (3.3.103–4). Appearing as others recede, the baby-prop is a physical sign of the legacy a child can give the parent, the “piece” that stays behind. The materials of the baby-prop in performance can reaffirm and solidify these familial connections. When Perdita is found wrapped in “the mantle of Queen Hermione’s” (5.2.31–32), for example, this mantle from the mother could be the baby-prop itself, the very object that signifies the baby onstage, and later becomes one of the “proofs” (5.2.31) of her identity. Thus, while a company could potentially use the same prop for all babies, different materials have different implications. Aaron’s son in Titus Andronicus also requires a different prop if a production wants to visibly convey that he is “a blackamoor” like his father, as the stage directions and dialogue specify. But how exactly? The resemblance between Aaron and his son is said to be so readily apparent that it evinces the parents’ affair and endangers the child: the nurse informs Aaron that “the Empress sends it thee, thy stamp, thy seal, / And bids thee christen it with thy dagger’s point” (4.2.69–70). But it also causes Aaron to claim it immediately as “this myself” (4.2.106) and protect it. A production’s baby-prop can either give some visual sign of these external similarities, or it may appear to remain indeterminate, allowing only verbal descriptions and the audience’s imagination to construct its race or parental connections. Shakespeare also shows how an attempt to isolate and prove the existence of a single “virtual” identity can fail. When Paulina attempts to persuade Leontes that Perdita is indeed his own daughter, she describes the infant as a clear facsimile of the father: Behold, my lords, Although the print be little, the whole matter And copy of the father: eye, nose, lip, The trick of ’s frown, his forehead, nay, the valley, The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek, his smiles, The very mold and frame of hand, nail, finger. (2.3.97–102) Despite Paulina’s protestations that the bundle is “the whole matter / And copy” of every feature of the father’s body, Leontes cannot see adequate proof of himself in the child. He rejects this reading of the infant’s script. Paulina’s description evokes, according to Marianne Novy, “the persistent tendency to look for details of resemblance between family members, and to imagine them into existence, especially in relation to babies,” even when they do not actually exist. 22 As a baby-prop, Perdita likely is indistinguishable, perhaps even “doubled” across productions by other props or identical stage babies. Thus, the baby-prop’s material

86  Megan Snell adjusts the degree to which its parental connections are evidently “local,” or, alternatively, imperceptible and in competition with other latent, “virtual proper beings.” Rather than make obvious the connections between infant and parent, the baby-prop may signal that the child is indeed materially different from the parent, not an exact “copy” but something unfathomable of its own. As Fletcher’s Don John and Middleton’s promoters find, it can be tempting to read the baby-prop as wish fulfillment, as the breakfast or bag of coins that one desires. The Shepherd also sees Perdita (and her accompanying gold) as a sign of desire fulfilled: he views the infant not only as a manifestation of the riches he has been expecting from the fairies (3.3.107), but also as a product of the waiting-gentlewoman’s erotic “work.” Leontes, already fully convinced of Hermione’s betrayal, likewise thinks that he finds what he seeks in the child, concluding that “this brat is none of mine” (2.3.92). But all these readings are wrong; they insist on seeing only one manifestation of a thing that proves to be irreducible to a single representational meaning. The baby-prop provides a literal example of the ways that adult longing can attempt to animate a child’s futures while revising its own histories: “for thee” (5.7.18) they fought the war that made his father king, Edward IV explains to his newborn in 3 Henry VI, “That thou mightst repossess the crown in peace, / And of our labors thou shalt reap the gain” (5.7.19–20). “For it is you that puts us to our shifts” (4.2.176), Aaron tells his infant, obscuring his own role in creating their predicament, as he makes plans to raise him “to be a warrior and command a camp” (4.2.178). Edward IV’s and Aaron’s attributions of motivations and hopes to their sons displace their own culpability and desires, lending them narrative control over the uncertain and dangerous future that awaits them. Conversely, Shakespeare’s newborns maintain an inanimate, unbothered affect when juxtaposed with the scene’s human players. 23 As dictated by the prop’s material recalcitrance, the infant remains an indifferent “difference engine” to these articulations of human concerns and perceptions. Although it is a stubborn point of inactivity among animate players, the baby-prop inspires others to look both backward and forward. Like other objects onstage, it is “untimely” in the way it can recall past productions and memories of nontheatrical associations. 24 But it also a portent, energized by anticipated yet unpredictable motion, and the imperceptible activity of growth. Rhetorically, the figure of a baby or child often functions as a metaphor for early indications of what will later be; Nestor in Troilus and Cressida, for instance, anticipates the future by speaking of “the baby figure of the giant mass / Of things to come at large” (1.3.341–43). The baby-prop, a figure that compacts and ensconces the “giant mass / Of things to come at large,” tinkers with exactly who and what it can become, tempting us to assume we can forecast its future manifestations. Whether we get to see one of these

Shakespeare’s Babies  87 potentials realized depends on the play’s temporal scope and how much the play is willing to distort time.

“Motion as well?” Shakespeare’s baby-prop is an object that in some cases, but not all, later realizes a specific “oak tree” form onstage, quite different from a previous local manifestation. Sometimes, an audience knows what becomes of an infant, even if the play does not show it. Despite ­E dward IV’s confident prognostications for his son in 3 Henry VI, an audience who remembers their Holinshed, or the next play in the tetralogy, knows that Edward V will not live long enough to see the “harvest” his father envisions. In Henry VIII, the infant Elizabeth I’s “oak tree” form, and what exactly “time shall bring to ripeness” after the play ends would also be well known to the Jacobean audience (5.4.20). The fate of Aaron’s son in Titus Andronicus, however, is far from clear. Lucius says that Aaron’s son will be kept safe in exchange for information, but performances have chosen vastly different endings for the child, showing this promise kept or broken. 25 A lack of textual indication of what happens to Aaron’s baby at the conclusion of the play makes his already tenuous fate even more uncertain. 26 He remains a conspicuously ambiguous acorn due to the temporal limitations of his play’s tragedy: without the foresight of a narrative voice in the text to tell us what happens next, we never know which of his potential “virtual proper beings” is realized. The infants who do grow up in Shakespeare seemingly alleviate and resolve the uncertainties and conflicts that their baby-props produced: Perdita in The Winter’s Tale and Marina in Pericles each reunite with their families, once again recognized as their parents’ daughters. To get this happy result, however, requires the baby-prop’s greatest feat yet. Perdita and Marina are split in two, twice: they are divided between two different iterations of age—newborn and teenage—and they are objects that reappear minutes later as human actors. Just as their mothers must each return from the “dead,” so too must the baby-props become animated, anticipating the transformation of their mothers with their own changes of state. In the romances, then, we not only witness unlikely reconciliations on the level of plot but also of matter. Upon meeting the grown version of his daughter for the first time, Pericles is particularly struck by her animacy, expressing disbelief: But are you flesh and blood? Have you a working pulse? and are no fairy? Motion as well? Speak on. Where were you born? And wherefore called Marina? (5.1.143–46)

88  Megan Snell While he previously thought his daughter to be dead, of course, Pericles’s amazement at Marina’s “working pulse” and “motion” also describes for the audience his first time seeing Marina as an actor, rather than as a lifeless bundle. Similarly, the very first line that introduces the audience to the human version of Perdita also potentially winks to her new state: Florizel greets Perdita, who is dressed in unfamiliar clothes for the festival, by proclaiming that “these your unusual weeds to each part of you / Do give a life” (4.4.1–2). To achieve this complete transformation from a prop to a character full of motion and life, to realize a potential virtual being, the entire timeline of the play must rupture. Just as acorns disappear underground and emerge (if conditions allow) to appear in their “oak tree” state, so too must these babies “grow” offstage, beyond the view of the audience (and their biological parents), as narrators (Time in The Winter’s Tale and Gower in Pericles) attempt to explain away this jump. The baby-prop is thus a temporally unstable object at work, on its own schedule with unforeseen outcomes: the first mention of Perdita tells us that she “is something before her time delivered” (2.2.26), and now she enables us to time travel. Shakespeare’s baby-prop onstage is a threat that time will not unfold in a predictable or consistently linear fashion. The Shepherd’s question “what have we here?” thus has a knotty answer. Analyzing the baby-prop as an example of agential matter reveals a variety of functions and identities inherent to objects that we usually overlook. The onstage baby is a commodified, interchangeable, lost subject, and a vibrant, affecting, powerful object. Middleton and Fletcher dramatize the interpretations of scripts inherent to both the living infant and representations of it. Shakespeare’s babies further complicate this dichotomy by drawing out the coexistence of their genealogical and temporal variations. For Shakespeare, the baby-prop can be a means of both connection and distinction from the parent. Twice, Shakespeare collapses not just time but the categories of prop and character to make the bundle take a human form. Shakespeare thus uses the baby-prop like no other class of semi-animate object. A seemingly innocuous assemblage of human and non-human identities, the baby-prop toys with fundamental expectations of autonomy and passivity: it creates, confirms, and undermines expectations of “things to come at large.”

Notes 1 The Winter’s Tale, 3.3.66–73. All Shakespeare quotations come from The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), hereafter cited parenthetically. 2 On the question of the child’s gender as “a boy or a child,” see Jennifer Higginbotham, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 117. 3 On the lack of evidence for real babies on the professional early modern stage, see Higginbotham, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters, 104, 137–38n. Real babies do have their own unique stage history, especially

Shakespeare’s Babies  89 in Victorian drama and in modern plays. See, for example, Anne Varty, “The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Stage Baby,” New Theatre Quarterly 21/3 (2005): 218–29; and Barbara Hoffman, “These Six-Month-Olds Are Broadway’s Youngest Stars,” New York Post, Nov. 18, 2018. https://nypost. com/2018/11/11/these-six-month-olds-are-broadways-youngest-stars/. This chapter will proceed with the understanding that babies can be, and usually have been, played by props onstage. 4 Higginbotham posits that stage infants “crystallised in material form the prevailing early modern perception of children as at once human and notquite-human.” See Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters, 104. 5 Popular midwifery books from throughout the period such as Eucharius Roesslin’s Byrth of Mankynde (1540), James Guilemeau’s Child-birth or, the Happy Deliverie of Women (1612), and Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book (1671) all instruct caretakers in the strict swaddling of babies. Infants could even be linguistically synonymous with this cloth, or “brat,” as Leontes repeatedly calls baby Perdita (2.3.92, 162; 3.2.85). See the Welsh etymology of “brat, n.1,” OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, June 2017), www.oed.com./view/Entry/22755. Accessed January 23, 2018. 6 For various definitions of a prop, see Frances N. Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991), 16–18; Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, “Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Properties,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Harris and Korda (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–33; and Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 11–12. Sofer even uses the baby-prop to exemplify different ways that an audience can process any stage prop (50–55). 7 See Andrew Sofer, “‘Take up the Bodies’: Shakespeare’s Body Parts, Babies, and Corpses,” Theatre Symposium 18 (2010): 135–48. 8 Props in the theatre, Sofer argues, are read (or rejected) according to the terms of a “temporal contract,” a meaning proposed by an actor at a particular moment. See Stage Life, 56–57. 9 “Performing object” is Frank Proschan’s term for “material images of humans, animals, or spirits that are created, displayed, or manipulated in narrative or dramatic performance.” See “The Semiotic Study of Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects,” Semiotica 47 (1983): 3–46, at 4. 10 Dassia N. Posner, introduction to The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, ed. Posner, Claudia Orenstein and John Bell (New York: Routledge, 2014), 5. 11 Babies are difficult to locate in a play’s various texts, and in critical apparatuses that quantify their features. Unlike other individual characters, a baby in early modern drama would not have had its own “part,” no roll of dialogue to signify its role, and babies almost never get their own entry in early or modern iterations of dramatis personae lists, unless they have a grown-actor counterpart who appears later in the play. Frances N. Teague’s appendix of all the properties in each Shakespeare play lists “doll (Aaron’s baby)” for Titus Andronicus and “baby doll” for both Pericles and The Winter’s Tale but omits dolls from the Henry VI: Part 3 and Henry VIII inventories, despite both these plays expressly ending with the introduction of a newborn to court. In Teague’s sample, then, the Shakespearean baby counts as a prop about half the time—a statistic that underscores its multiple, and at times conflicting, identities. See Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties, 180, 190, 192, 171, 179. Even Higginbotham’s extensive appendix of infants in early modern drama also omits Shakespeare’s Henry VI: Part 3. See Girlhood, 136.

90  Megan Snell 12 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 11–12. 13 The joke of an objecting masquerading as a human baby dates back at least to Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae and can be found in modern culture in, for example, the I Love Lucy episode “Return Home from Europe” (14 May 1956). 14 Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, ed. Alan Brissenden (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 2.2.184–86. 15 John Fletcher, The Chances, Vol. VI of The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, 1979), 1.3.25–30. 16 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 4. 17 See Justin B. Kolb, “‘To Me Comes a Creature’: Recognition, Agency, and the Properties of Character in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale,” in The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Wendy Beth Hyman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 45–60. 18 Sofer, Stage Life, 2. 19 Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011), 69. 20 Bryant, Democracy of Objects, 70. 21 In Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, Anne also disappears to give birth to Elizabeth and then remains offstage for the rest of the play (soon after to be beheaded). 22 Marianne Novy, Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 71. 23 Modern productions sometimes enable the baby-prop to cry by adding audio technology, but doing so on the early modern stage would presumably have entailed some form of ventriloquism, thus further displacing the prop’s personhood among other actors. 24 See Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Sofer, Stage Life; Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); and Philip Schwyzer, “Trophies, Traces, Relics, and Props: The Untimely Objects of Richard III,” Shakespeare Quarterly 63/3 (2012): 297–327. 25 For example, Julie Taymor’s Titus Andronicus at the Theater for a New Audience (1994) ended with Aaron’s son represented by an infant-size black coffin, while her later film Titus (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1999) centers its final moments on the still-living baby, ending with an extremely long take of Young Lucius carrying him toward the sunrise. For more on these two versions, see David McCandless, “A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor’s Vision on Stage and Screen,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53 (2002): 487–511, at 509. 26 Most editions add stage directions for the baby’s entrances and exits, but tracking the baby proves tricky. For example, Aaron’s son seems to temporarily disappear in the final scene of Titus Andronicus in the Norton 3: the added stage directions specify that Aaron’s child is carried offstage (5.3.15 s. d.), but no specific added direction brings the baby back on in time for Marcus to point to Aaron’s son and say, “behold the child” (5.3.118).

Part II

Theory

7 Eliot and His Problems Hamlet’s Correlative Objects Andrew Sofer

T. S. Eliot’s “Hamlet and His Problems” (1920) is one of the most peculiar essays written by a major twentieth-century critic.1 Notorious for its mandarin pronouncement that Hamlet is “most certainly an artistic failure,” the essay concludes that the world of Hamlet lacks a credible motivation for the disgust its hero expresses. 2 But whereas Eliot faults Hamlet for lacking an “objective correlative,” my argument here is that the play proffers a telling series of correlative objects instead. 3 Hamlet’s things punctuate the prince’s physical, emotional, existential, epistemological, and eschatological journey through the play and materialize Hamlet’s trajectory from scholar to avenger.4 Moreover, correlative objects embody generic irony. The more Hamlet seeks to manipulate props (and people) for pseudo-comic purposes, the more those objects come to seem bent on instrumentalizing him for tragedy.5 Where, for Eliot, did Shakespeare go wrong? “The grounds of Hamlet’s failure are not immediately obvious,” Eliot admits.6 He concurs with J. M. Robertson that “the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother,” but maternal guilt “is by no means the whole story.”7 For might not Shakespeare have brought such an “intelligible, self-complete” emotion into the sunlight as easily as he does Othello’s jealousy, Antony’s infatuation, or Coriolanus’s pride?8 Even once vengeance and guilt have been set in motion, Hamlet exhibits a mysterious emotional remainder: “Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.”9 We sense Hamlet’s subterranean feeling but cannot root it in the play’s language or action. The lumpy plot, inherited from the Ur-Hamlet, tries and fails to express a repressed latent content that bleeds through tonally. That latent content belongs not to the prince but to his creator. Eliot hazards that Hamlet, along with Measure for Measure, belongs to a period of personal crisis for Shakespeare—and this is Hamlet’s fundamental problem. “Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.”10 Like a psychoanalyst unable to grasp why his patient is exhibiting bizarre symptoms when nothing much out of the ordinary is going on,

94  Andrew Sofer Eliot worries over a protagonist whose reactions seem out of all proportion to his situation.11 At this point Eliot passes aesthetic judgment by way of a universal maxim: The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately invoked.12 When the events/dramatic circumstances are presented correctly, “the emotion is immediately invoked” (in the audience, presumably) with an “exact equivalence” between the two sides of the equation.13 Given the chain of circumstances, the character has no choice but to feel and express precisely what he feels; no stray emotion lingers, begging explanation. “The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.”14 Eliot’s Hamlet is an excess of emotion looking for a motive—in short, a drama queen.15 Instead of an objective correlative at the level of situation, we witness a subjective meltdown at the level of feeling: “Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem.”16 Wandering around Elsinore seeking to understand his own moods, Hamlet fails to grasp that he is a symptom of his creator’s aesthetic crisis. Hamlet endures “a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action.”17 It is as if Hamlet were stuck with the emotional fallout of Sonnet 129 or Timon of Athens rather than the crude, melodramatic Ur-Hamlet inherited from Thomas Kyd. Hamlet has an opera to sing but has been handed the wrong libretto. As in adolescence, everything is felt although nothing has happened. Without naming incestuous desire, Eliot hints at it between his own lines. While Shakespeare does provide the seethingly adolescent Hamlet with an aberrant mother, “Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her.”18 Had Gertrude been truly repellent—say, a regicidal adulteress—Hamlet would feel not disgust but some other emotion entirely: “it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.”19 Eliot’s analysis recalls Ernest Jones’s notorious essay “The Oedipus-complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive” (1910). 20 “The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists.”21 Here Eliot also anticipates Civilization and Its

Eliot and His Problems  95 Discontents: “It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions.”22 The “it” of Eliot’s sentence remains darkly obscure. Hamlet’s disease is beyond Eliot’s practice, and the critic-diagnostician throws up his hands. “We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him.”23 Eliot’s simultaneous invocation and disavowal of some “inexpressibly horrible” experience behind Hamlet suggests that Hamlet has become an insufficient objective correlative for Eliot’s disgust rather than Shakespeare’s.24 Some things, Eliot implies, should have remained forever locked in the bard’s closet— and Hamlet is one of them. Eliot’s doctrine of the objective correlative presumes that what the protagonist (or spectator) feels is the play, which becomes as much tonepoem as dramatic action. 25 But is it true that Hamlet’s strings are jerked by a single unwarranted feeling? Might there not be different objective correlatives—or correlative objects—that inspire various feelings and actions in the emotionally labile prince? Rather than locate a single objective correlative, we might ask what story Hamlet’s correlative objects seek to tell as they move through stage time and space. What things does Hamlet take up to complete his journey, and in what order? Using the 1623 Folio version for convenience, we can construct a basic property list for the things the Hamlet actor must actually handle26: 1.4 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 5.1 5.2 5.2

battlements court nunnery scene play scene Claudius at prayer closet scene graveyard court hall

sword, writing tablet Book Ophelia’s love tokens (?)27 recorder sword 28 sword, two pictures (?) Skull Document foil, gauntlet, Laertes’s foil, cup

If we take Hamlet to be using the same sword throughout the action, we are left with eleven indisputable props, of which four appear only in the final scene: sword, tablet, book, recorder, corpse, skull, document, two foils (one Laertes’s), a gauntlet (or dagger in Q2), and a cup. 29 Noteworthy, then, is a structural imbalance between the last scene and the rest of the play. The play’s first half, especially, seems reluctant to arm Hamlet with props against his sea of troubles. He must, as he puts it, speak daggers but use none—at least not until he accidentally slays Polonius. Hamlet’s most protracted stage business—creeping around a boat, pilfering papers from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, unfolding a sealed commission, writing out and signing a new one, sealing

96  Andrew Sofer it with his father’s signet, replacing it, and pocketing the original—takes place offstage. Shakespeare gives Hamlet relatively little to do with his hands for three acts. The prince must stand there and speechify, perhaps exacerbating the actor’s own self-consciousness about gesture devoid of props. Indeed, Simon Russell Beale made staring at his own hands as if they were someone else’s an integral part of his memorable performance as Hamlet for the National Theatre in 2000. Richard Burbage’s proplessness might have especially impressed the play’s original audience during his set piece on self-slaughter, “To be or not to be.” Unlike Kyd’s prototypical revenge hero Hieronimo, “mad” Hamlet enters the scene without dagger and rope, the “stock properties signaling the impulse to suicide” according to editor Michael Neill.30 A contemporary audience faced with “To be or not to be” may well have recalled Hieronimo’s “This way, or that way?” soliloquy on suicide, which culminates in the actor’s dramatic flinging away of dagger and halter, only to retrieve them (3.12.1–24). And Shakespeare’s audience might also have recalled the famous scene in which mad Hieronimo rends his petitioners’ letters with his teeth, which requires myriad props. Hieronimo enters (like Hamlet) with a book; his petitioners thrust official court papers on him; and the actor must serially produce from his own person a bloody handkerchief, a purse, and several additional objects to present to an old man. Yet Hamlet never makes such property demands on Hamlet—why not?31 Perhaps it is because Hamlet’s correlatives are, as Eliot intimates, human subjects. For what else are Gertrude, the Ghost, Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fortinbras, and the rest? Hamlet is prone to treating whoever crosses his path as an externalization of his inner state. Thus the Ghost in Act 1 embodies the paternal injunction to avenge, while the Ghost in Act 3 embodies filial guilt (since only Hamlet sees the latter, it is just possibly a figment). When Hamlet needs an ideal stoic with which to contrast himself, up pops Horatio (3.2.51–72), and when he requires a delicate and tender prince, Fortinbras materializes (in Q2). Hamlet continually encounters correlative “objects” that, mutatis mutandis, emblematize too neatly, simplifying and flattening out his moral, existential, and epistemological predicaments. Thus by turns Polonius can conveniently embody senescent folly, Osric obsequiousness, Horatio stoic endurance, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern duplicity, and so forth, giving the prince ample opportunity to expatiate rather than execute. But the women in Hamlet’s life are too complicated for Hamlet’s parade of walking emblems. Gertrude and Ophelia refuse to emblematize so neatly: they are not personified “Frailty” but exceed the roles Hamlet casts them in (1.2.144). Eliot correctly observes that they do not seem to motivate the excessive disgust Hamlet feels toward them; neither woman is coterminous with poison, as is Claudius. But could one not point to the Ghost as the perfect correlative for Hamlet’s moral bind?

Eliot and His Problems  97 To obey his father, Hamlet must embody the very corruption he seeks to purge. And like Hamlet’s filial oath, Laertes’s poisoned sword embodies the double-bind of the son/revenger. The deceptive rapier emblematizes Laertes’s own corruption by a revenge code he sees as morally unambiguous, unlike his paralyzed rival. Laertes “dare[s] damnation,” which is precisely what Hamlet proves unable to do for almost five acts (4.1.137). But suppose—pace Eliot and Santayana—that Hamlet’s correlative objects are things rather than persons. Can we make sense of Hamlet’s series of properties? I believe Hamlet’s things dramatize the antic scholar-prince’s gradual weaponization or thingification. Hamlet finds himself remorselessly squeezed in the vice of revenge tragedy: a creaky theatrical genre he both disdains and parodies. He would much prefer to play the court satirist. The role of Feste seems well suited to him; in Act 2, especially, he is more an antic Armin than a Dane. But the prince’s objects trace a different arc. On the battlements in Act 1, Hamlet unweaponizes his sword by turning it into a crucifix, on which his companions must swear secrecy.32 But the deadly fencing-foil and goblet of the play’s climax reverse this trajectory, completing a chiasmus of thingified weapons and weaponized things that binds the play’s action. Act 5’s fateful props make use of Hamlet to fulfill their generic destiny, while the skull, drained of memento mori pieties, mocks any attempt to make sense of bloody death under a comforting Christian dispensation. In the interim, Hamlet tries to make the most of the objects that come to hand. His second significant prop, his writing tablet, seems an odd prop with which to fumble after the ghost departs.33 (The repetition of “my tables!” in F, absent in Q2, covers, I think, the time needed for Burbage to find them.) Hamlet’s telling response to the Ghost is that of a scholar, not a man of action. Writing a sententium (that one may smile and be a villain) in his commonplace book echoes Hamlet’s determination to sweep to his revenge not with weapons but “with wings as swift / As meditation, or the thoughts of love”—hardly the revenger’s usual toolkit (1.5.29–30). For Hamlet is a writer first and foremost. He pens love-poetry for Ophelia, forges a commission to kill his schoolfellows, inserts a passage into The Murder of Gonzago, and writes missives to Claudius and Horatio (all offstage). Hamlet possesses the courtly skill of fencing, we discover, but has never been tried in battle. A writing tablet is the perfect correlative for Hamlet’s bookish idea of vengeance. This theme is taken up when Hamlet enters reading in 2.2. Hamlet’s book is unidentified, but it marks Hamlet’s first appearance under his antic disposition.34 It is a strange prop for a man feigning madness (do madmen read?), and Hamlet is unable to do much with the antic prop apart from teasing Polonius with its supposed “satirical” content (2.2.194). The text leaves unclear how Hamlet is to be rid of it; perhaps he tosses it offstage after Polonius. The play then leaves Hamlet’s hands unoccupied for the rest of the act, although it is conceivable Hamlet

98  Andrew Sofer conscripts his sword to act out the scene between Pyrrhus and Priam that he recites for Polonius and the players. Priam’s “antique sword” is “rebellious to his arm” and “repugnant to command,” while Pyrrhus’s “seemed i’th’air to stick” (2.2.466–75)—static props that parallel the prince’s own stuck sword. If Hamlet’s sword and tables help animate Act 1, then Hamlet’s mysterious book, whose unspoken lines he hides behind, retards Act 2. Like his volume, Hamlet turns himself into an ambulatory text open to various interpretation. As noted earlier, Hamlet enters empty-handed in Act 3 to deliver “To be, or not to be.” Unlike Hieronimo’s poniard, Hamlet’s “bare bodkin” remains rhetorical. Ophelia, however, begins her exchange with Hamlet not only with her prayer book (a deceptive prop furnished by her father) but with those material “remembrances” she seeks to return to H ­ amlet. Perhaps the love tokens should be included in the list of H ­ amlet’s things, but the prince disowns them, and the text leaves it unclear how they are to leave the stage, or even if Hamlet handles them following ­Ophelia’s “There, my lord” (3.1.102). It is possible that Hamlet weaponizes ­Ophelia’s gifts or that Hamlet lashes out at Ophelia with words alone. Nonetheless, the distraught Ophelia refers to the mad prince’s “eye, tongue, sword” following the nunnery scene as if that phallic prop has made a particular impression on her, either in her closet or in the nunnery scene we have just observed (3.1.152). Hamlet exits in a fury, only to reappear almost immediately in sententious mode, lecturing the players on their business. He emphasizes speech over action, and the mirror he famously bids the players to hold up to Nature remains figurative rather than literal, as it was in Richard II. Hamlet’s reformist stage poetics has nothing to say about things. ­A fter the excitement of the satiric play-within-a-play, which ends in debacle and confusion, Hamlet is ready for his next property. On seeing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enter, Hamlet calls for recorders, ostensibly as a grotesque musical coda to “the comedy” but possibly in response to his spying schoolfellows (3.2.282). A servant soon arrives with a recorder to interrupt Hamlet’s prose interview. Hamlet turns the phallic (?) prop into a sardonic rebuke, as if it were a correlative object of Hamlet for them: “Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me you cannot play upon me” (3.2.360–61). What becomes of this disposable wind instrument? As with Ophelia’s remembrances and Hamlet’s book, no stage directions explain how the prop vacates the stage. Perhaps the recorder, like the earlier book, is for the prince a satiric throwaway prop that expresses Hamlet’s disdain for an expendable interlocutor (shades of Osric’s hat). Act 3’s hinge between satire and farcical tragedy is Hamlet’s dangling sword. On the way to confront his mother in her closet, Hamlet comes upon Claudius kneeling at prayer. In his previous soliloquy, Hamlet consecrated himself as a proto-Macbeth dying to “do such bitter business

Eliot and His Problems  99 as the day / Would quake to look on” (3.2.381–82), even as he has admonished himself to speak daggers but use none. Now Claudius is alone, with his back to Hamlet, and there are no witnesses. Hamlet draws his sword on the supposedly penitent king, but, Pyrrhus-like, his sword sticks in the air. Hamlet talks himself out of killing with an image that recalls his writing tablet: “That would be scanned” (3.3.75). Hamlet proves unable to imitate his uncle, whose own preferred weapon, poison, is treacherous by definition. But Hamlet puts up his dark sword for the last time; it will indeed know “a more horrid hent,” and soon (3.4.88). When Hamlet stabs Polonius through the arras at the play’s midpoint, the fateful prop (“almost blunted” by the arras, not unlike Laertes’s unbated rapier) determines Hamlet’s tragic trajectory. With blood on his hands, the mad prince is now unambiguously an enemy of the state. Claudius’s machinations against him are perfectly justified, as is Laertes’s own revenge plot. Having crossed the rubicon of murder, ­albeit in impulsive and blind fashion, Hamlet ruefully confesses to ­having been cast as heaven’s “scourge and minister” by fate (3.4.159). As in a farce, it is as if his recalcitrant sword was determined to kill the wrong man at the wrong time.35 Once in his mother’s closet, Hamlet commences the shock treatment designed to break her sexual addiction to his uncle. To do so, he may or may not make use of actual portraits: “Look here upon this picture, and on this, / The counterfeit presentment of two brothers” (3.4.51–52). While Hamlet indicates rival pictures, there is no necessary need for physical properties here. While we are perhaps accustomed to seeing matching miniature medallion portraits attached to the actors’ necks, this practice seems to have originated, more or less, with John Philip Kemble in 1783.36 If portraits do materialize, then Hamlet uses them as mirrors up to Gertrude’s nature, showing her the “black and grieved spots / As will leave there their tinct” (3.4.88–89). This is not yet tragedy, but an impromptu morality play scripted by Hamlet. Yet just as Hamlet’s words—and/or props—seem on the point of converting Vice to Virtue, the Ghost arrives to interrupt Hamlet’s onslaught, and the “counterfeit presentment” is replaced by what seems to be the real thing. The portraits, if they exist, are forgotten, their task left incomplete. Eliot, fixated like the prince on Gertrude’s guilt, erases the irruption of the Ghost into the closet scene. Like some clunky parody of the superego, the Ghost commands his son to recall his “almost blunted purpose” (3.4.100). It is not Hamlet’s mother who provides the Eliotic objective correlative here, but his father. The Ghost externalizes Hamlet’s violation of the paternal injunction. He has neglected his duty to kill Claudius and, ignoring the Ghost’s order to leave Gertrude to her own guilty conscience, has pursued Gertrude’s redemption instead.37 Yet the Ghost tells Hamlet to “step between her and her fighting soul” (3.4.109), as if in sudden approval of his son’s losing the plot. Hamlet urges the Ghost

100  Andrew Sofer to avert his gaze: “Lest with this piteous action you convert / My stern effects! Then what I have to do / Will want true colour, tears perchance for blood” (3.4.117–19). These are puzzling words.38 Is Hamlet now determined to shed his mother’s blood, contrary to his vow at 3.2.385–89? And is the Ghost’s pity all that stands in his way? The dreamlike scene obscures motive; it is, as Eliot intimates, overwritten and hysterical, as if Shakespeare cannot quite get the lines to express his sense. Be that as it may, the scene ends in bathos. The revenant’s apparition blunts ­Hamlet’s invective against his mother, and he drags Polonius (yet another disposable wind instrument?) offstage almost sheepishly. This is one of the first times he has touched another character in the course of the play. ­I ronically, he does so only to convert a person into a property. Up to this point in the play, no prop has acted properly. Hamlet’s book is discarded; Ophelia’s gifts are disavowed; the recorder does not play; Hamlet’s sword kills the buffoon instead of the villain. The play has continually oscillated between “maimed rites” and maimed props (5.1.216). Indeed, Hamlet foregrounds what Frances Teague calls props’ characteristic “dislocated function: the property has a function, but it is not the same function as it has offstage (though it may imitate that function).”39 First, Hamlet converts his sword into an improvised crucifix. Second, Hamlet’s writing tablet literalizes the “the book and volume of my brain” that has supposedly become a tabula rasa, save for the Ghost’s commandment to avenge (1.5.103), and it is unclear if Hamlet even sets quill to paper. Third, Hamlet’s unnamed book in Act 2 fails to edify or instruct. Perhaps it parodies the skeptical philosophy that threatened Renaissance intellectuals with paralyzing melancholy. 40 The book also props up Hamlet’s antic disposition. It is never clear that Hamlet is actually reading, just as Ophelia fails to use her prayer book to pray. Fourth, Hamlet’s recorder sounds no notes but instead mocks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s instrumental attitude to their erstwhile friend: “Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me you cannot play upon me” (3.2.360–61). The silent recorder proves as disposable as Hamlet’s schoolfellows. Even Hamlet’s crucifix-sword cannot avenge when the perfect opportunity presents itself. It backfires, murdering Polonius and (perhaps) the spirit of comedy along with him. From the murder of Polonius forward, though, properties change their tune. Now in the key of generic irony, those objects that ­writerly ­Hamlet has pressed into verbal emblems are bent, willy-nilly, on conscripting him for death. If Hamlet will not seize on his correlative objects to further his revenge, then they will seize him. Act 5 is dominated by Yorick’s skull, “[t]he most famous theatrical prop in the history of drama, possibly in the history of Western culture.”41 A three-­dimensional ­memento mori, the skull was so striking that a litter of skulls populates the ­Jacobean stage thereafter.42 I suspect that S­ hakespeare withholds truly memorable objects from his star actor because he wishes his spectators

Eliot and His Problems  101 to recall one image with searing clarity: a young man holding a skull. Unmentioned by Eliot, who elsewhere credits John Webster with seeing the skull beneath the skin, Yorick is the correlative object par excellence. To paraphrase Horatio, the skull is a property of uneasiness for the prince. The first two skulls thrown up by the gravedigger provide fodder for Hamlet’s mordant wit; they are by turns politician, courtier, my Lady Worm’s, and a lawyer. But Yorick’s skull, once identified, temporarily stops Hamlet in his emblematizing tracks and neutralizes language: “Puh!” (5.1.198). In a play shot through with mortality, here is the anamorphic object that Hamlet and the play have been waiting for.43 A mirror held up to putrefying nature, Yorick provides a glass in which the prince refuses to see his own mortality reflected. The gravedigger’s admission that he became sexton on the day Prince Hamlet was born signifies that the grave the prince dallies by, and will shortly leap into, is his own. The prince is merely passing time in the graveyard, taking a breather from the exertions of the play. But once the clown hands the skull over to the prince (an action made explicit in Q1 and F but not Q2), the prince gags: “how abhorred my imagination is. My gorge rises at it” (5.1.185–86). It is not sexual disgust that consumes Hamlet here, but sheer repugnance at the worm-infested, dirt-encrusted, ­hollow-eyed death’s head.44 For an instant, Hamlet punctures the Christian memento mori symbolism that emblematizes the skull and apprehends the ghastly truth that the cranium is the message. Hamlet no sooner confronts this little piece of the Real than he retreats into his customary language-games.45 If the gravedigger initially “unmetaphored” the skull (in Rosalie Cole’s term) by naming it Yorick, Hamlet performs what we might call a dereification: turning a congealed metaphor—a thing—back into a symbol (Colie 11). Hamlet retreats to the stale ubi sunt motifs (“Where be your jibes now?”) and comfortably misogynistic vanitas clichés accreting to the skull in popular culture (5.1.187–93). Hamlet tries to play Yorick like a pipe, making the skull his mouthpiece. Rhetorically speaking, this is less a case of prosopopeia, the address to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity that is imagined as having the power to speak back, than of prosopropeia. But the one figure Hamlet refuses to see reflected in the skull is his own. He prefers to improvise a mini-sermon for Horatio’s benefit on Alexander the Great and the “base uses” to which a generic “we” may return (5.1.200). Too unnerved to gaze into the mirror for long, Hamlet turns from the skull in sour disgust. Like the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, he stares the prince, and us, in the face.46 Hovering between subject and object, person and prop, Yorick fails to console Hamlet sub specie aeternitatis. Instead, the grinning skull mocks his emblematizing pretensions even as it invites the prince to dance. Like the Chief Gravedigger, for whom death is all in a day’s work, Yorick figures tragedy as irony.

102  Andrew Sofer Hamlet handles just one more property before the duel scene: the royal commission, penned by Claudius, calling for Hamlet’s head to be cut off. This document does little for Hamlet except to underscore his relish at the conceit whereby, “benetted round with villains,” he outsmarted Claudius by forging a new commission (5.2.29). The prop could not be more quotidian for a revenge hero. Hamlet has transformed the play he is in to a melodrama: “Ere I could make a prologue to my brains / They had begun the play” (5.12.30–31). Hamlet even praises his own labored handwriting, which dooms Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. What H ­ amlet hands Horatio is of course Claudius’s original commission rather than his own “changeling.” There is poetic justice in the substitution. Just as Claudius usurped Old Hamlet’s throne and bed, so Hamlet has usurped Claudius’s signature and Danish seal. Yet Hamlet’s signature and seal are themselves borrowed imitations: serendipitously, his father’s signet was in his purse. This unseen prop marks Hamlet’s last connection to his father, and it would not have escaped Shakespeare’s audience that the wax seal is a principal figure for paternal duplication through offspring (as Theseus reminds Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The changeling document “seals” Hamlet’s fate as his father’s double. From this point forward, weapons not writing fill the prince’s hands and direct the audience’s attention. A mostly bare stage fills with people and objects in preparation for the royal entertainment that traditionally ends a revenge tragedy: foils, daggers (Q2) or gauntlets (F), a table, wine stoups, flagons of wine (F1), cushions (Q2), chairs, and possibly two thrones. After three formal bouts, the fencing match degenerates into a scuffle, followed by a massacre. The poisoned sword somehow finds its way into Hamlet’s hand in a confusing maneuver.47 According to Q1, “They catch one another’s rapiers and both are wounded. Leartes [sic] falls down” (17.843. s. d.). Evidently this naked dagger-catching maneuver proved too awkward or dangerous for un-gauntleted actors: F replaces Q2’s daggers with gauntlets, while both texts have the more general instruction “In scuffling they change rapiers.” How are we to interpret this exchange? Laertes’s envenomed sword lures Hamlet into tragedy, first as unwitting victim and then as deliberate assailant. ­Hamlet can no longer bend the play to his own penchant for dark comedy. Phenomenologically, this transformation informs the actor’s own experience. In order to play the duel, the actors must actually strike each other’s swords. The moves are preordained, but it is virtually impossible to distinguish the pretend blows from the real thing in the thick of performance. The (choreographed) stage-duel blurs the boundary between fencing and fighting, imitation and action. Fatal props dispatch the play’s cast in quick succession, accelerating the trend toward thingification. Laertes perishes by the rapier, Gertrude by the cup, and Claudius by both. Laertes’s weapon turns Hamlet not only into Laertes’s “foil” but into a regicidal version of his uncle.

Eliot and His Problems  103 The fatally wounded Hamlet becomes a speaking Ghost: “I am dead, ­ oratio,” he says in wonderment (5.2.287). Hamlet began with one H voice speaking from beyond the grave and completes itself with another. But having dealt Claudius “superfluous death”—killing him twice—­ Hamlet’s ­fi nal act is one of soul-saving (4.1.94). He knocks the poisoned cup from Horatio’s lips, preventing the sin of self-slaughter that foreclosed ­Ophelia’s proper burial. But is saving Horatio a selfless act or one necessary to ensure that his story can be told by his amanuensis, Horatio the human writing tablet (or “recorder”)? That Fortinbras orders for Hamlet the soldier’s funeral that he would wish for himself is the play’s crowning irony. The last thing the audience hears is a peal of ordnance. Fortinbras replaces Elsinore’s visible weapons with audible matériel. I began this chapter by arguing that Eliot’s objective correlative distracts us from the material (and ultimately matériel) stage, not least the correlative objects that drive Hamlet. As we have seen, Eliot’s closet drama has no room for Hamlet’s props. The physical environment of the playhouse is absent from Eliot’s dramatic landscape. But not only the playhouse fades from Eliot’s view. Eliot’s fixation on Gertrude as the (failed) objective correlative for Hamlet’s predicament effaces such “minor” objective correlatives as the Ghost, Ophelia, Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Yorick. One tempting way to read Hamlet is as a series of mirrors held up to Hamlet, in which the prince cannot recognize his own face—an endless succession of mirror-stages and imaginary identifications.48 But the prince’s things tell a slightly different story. In much the same way as he treats people as walking objective correlatives for his mercurial moods, Hamlet serially conscripts correlative objects to emblematize memory (tables), satire (book), irony (recorder), and vanity (skull). But starting with the killing of Polonius, fateful props inscribe the prince within a genre he has outgrown yet cannot escape. Stable in neither tone nor feeling, Hamlet (and Hamlet) moves from nihilism to mania to skepticism to fatalism, with other stops in between. As Bradley Greenburg writes, “to Eliot we might reply that it is not that Hamlet is lacking an objective correlative, but that such an object is in, and ­produced by, the play itself” (230).49 Had Eliot fixed his gaze on Hamlet’s things, something very different might have stared back at him from the play. How might Shakespeare have responded to Eliot’s critique that he failed to suit the action to the emotion, the emotion to the action? Ironically, years before writing Hamlet, Shakespeare had parodied the Eliotic poetics of the objective correlative in the lurid Titus Andronicus. Marcus Andronicus, the humorless tribune, embodies the principle of Roman decorum. Marcus believes that for every circumstance a good Roman finds himself in, however outrageous, there is a correct physical and emotional response, and he stage-manages his persecuted brother Titus accordingly. But the play’s ultraviolence strains the principle of

104  Andrew Sofer decorum to its limit, and Marcus’s 46-line lament for his mutilated niece, who is bleeding copiously while he lovingly addresses her in blank verse, makes this point at agonizing length. At the mid-point of the play, Titus is faced with the surprise gift of his son’s severed head in return for his severed hand. Marcus instructs him to die like the antique Roman he is. Instead, Titus explodes in absurd laughter. Marcus is aghast: “Why dost thou laugh? It fits not with this hour” (3.1.264). Marcus’s chagrin at his brother’s grotesquely inappropriate response to circumstances anticipates Eliot’s horror at Hamlet’s emotional excess. Titus’s laugh explodes tragedy, and the sick humor previously embodied by the villainous Aaron the Moor proceeds to take over the play. The last laugh on “Hamlet and His Problems,” as well as the first, is Shakespeare’s own.

Notes 1 T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen & Co, 1920. Reprinted 1960), 95–103. The essay first appeared as a book review in The Athenaeum, September 26, 1919; it was reprinted in Eliot’s landmark essay collection The Sacred Wood (1920) and several times thereafter, sometimes simply as “Hamlet.” Eliot cut the essay from the revised 1956 edition of his English collection Elizabethan Essays, along with several others. 2 Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” 98. 3 The term “objective correlative” has been variously traced back to Walter Pater and Washington Allston. No doubt inspiring Eliot, Eliot’s former teacher George Santayana writes: “[T]he glorious emotions with which [the poet] bubbles over must at all hazards find or feign their correlative objects.” See “The Elements and Functions of Poetry,” in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), 165. I borrow Santayana’s term to refer to physical objects in performance. 4 For a theoretical discussion of the elusiveness of the theatrical thing, as opposed to the solidity of the prop, see my essay: “Getting on with Things: The Currency of Objects in Theatre and Performance Studies,” Theatre Journal 68 (2016): 673–84. 5 The effect whereby props “deliberately” backfire on Hamlet is, of course, an illusion created by the playwright. Hamlet’s props lack actual agency, since by definition, no prop can act independently of the character (or actor) who wields it. This is not to say that objects never assert their “thingness,” as Thing Theory since Heidegger has proposed; in Bill Brown’s useful formulation, “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop Working for us” in “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001),  4. As I have shown in The Stage Life of Props, the recalcitrant prop is central to post-classical Western dramaturgy. To capture this mock-agency in performance, I will occasionally write as if props sometimes behave independently of, and at odds with, human agents. In one sense they do: Shakespeare has designs on onstage objects of which his fictional creations are ignorant. See The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 12.

Eliot and His Problems  105 6 Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” 99. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 101. This is selective reading on Eliot’s part. After all, one of the literal “facts” that appears in the play is the terrifyingly unheimlisch Ghost, about whom Eliot is silent. Eliot effaces the father in order to pathologize the mother—a move Shakespeare himself does not make in Hamlet, as he will in Coriolanus. 10 Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” 100. 11 This Eliotic strain of worry continues in Lacanian criticism of Hamlet, starting with Lacan’s 1959 seminar on the play. See for example Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 11–52; Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (London: Methuen, 1987), Ch. 6; Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus, Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), esp. Ch. 1; (1977); Christopher Pye, The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), Ch. 4; and Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (New York: Pantheon, 2013). 12 Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” 100. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 101. 15 Hamlet habitually castigates himself not for feeling too much emotion, as Eliot posits, but too little. An exception is where he urges himself not to murder his mother “unnaturally,” as if he were Nero (3.2.377–89). This disturbing image recalls the Bastard’s reference to “You bloody Neroes, ripping up the womb / Of your dear mother England” in King John (5.2.152–3). Is Hamlet fantasizing ripping open his mother’s womb, as Nero reputedly did? After all, Nero’s uncle was named Claudius. 16 Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” 101. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Jones expanded his essay in a 1923 version before publishing his book-length study Hamlet and Oedipus in 1949. Freud had published his own commentary on the play in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), having previously analyzed Hamlet in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fleiss in 1897. Freud’s words surely undergird Eliot’s essay: The play is based upon Hamlet’s hesitation in accomplishing the task of revenge assigned to him; the text does not give the cause or the motive of this hesitation, nor have the manifold attempts at interpretation succeeded in doing so. . . . It can, of course, be only the poet’s own psychology with which we are confronted in Hamlet. (Freud 163–64). See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1950). For Eliot’s problems with psychoanalysis, see Adam Phillips, “The Soul of Man under Psychoanalysis,” London Review of Books 23 (29 November 2001): 19–23. 21 Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” 102. 22 Ibid.

106  Andrew Sofer 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 For Santayana, conversely, a great poem is a kind of play. The poet is like the adolescent daydreamer, peopling his fantasies with imaginary characters that motivate his flights of fancy; like the daydreaming schoolboy imagining “thrilling adventures,” the poet must create an “appropriate theatre” peopled with “correlative objects.” Santayana, 165. 26 For property lists as a clue to Renaissance theatrical and economic practices, see Natasha Korda, “Household Property/Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker,” Theatre Journal 48 (1996): 185–195; and Sofer, “Properties,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 560–74. Frances Teague lists 49 props total in Hamlet, including those that appear only in one version, in Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991), 183. 27 It is unclear from the text if Hamlet actually receives the tokens Ophelia proffers at 3.1.101 or what happens to them—a conundrum for actors. 28 Q1 makes explicit Hamlet’s drawing his sword on the praying figure of Claudius: “come forth and work thy last” (10.15). 29 “F’s reference to ‘Gauntlets’ in place of Q2’s daggers in the entry stage direction has been taken to mean a change in the weaponry used in the duel, at some point between the original composition of Q2 in 1600 or 1601 and the playhouse alteration of F before 1623. In the change, swords and daggers were replaced by swords and gauntlets, to facilitate the grasping of each other’s swords in the exchange, where Q1 records ‘They catch one anothers Rapiers’.” Quoted from Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 156. For the Elizabethan fascination with the rapier, see Jennifer Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 30 Spanish Tragedy 3.12.1 s. d. Hamlet—or Shakespeare—seems consciously to allude to Hieronimo in his ditty at 3.2.283–84. In The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014). 31 Ben Jonson, who himself played Hieronimo (according to Thomas Dekker), lards the stage with props in his own plays, perhaps in revenge for the property demands once made on him as an actor. When Jonson revised The Spanish Tragedy in 1602, he chose to retain and extend the mad scenes. 32 Hamlet has the men swear on his sword at least four times in the scene (1.5.148; 154; 156–59; 1.5.177–78). He draws his sword on his fellows at 1.4.85 but does not use it. 33 The buffoonish Sir Jeffrey Balurdo writes in his tables in Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge in what may be a parodic homage to Hamlet, unless the influence went the other way. Marston’s plays were performed by the very “eyases” derided by Rosencrantz (in F only) as being in fashion—possibly a dig at Marston’s success with Paul’s Boys. The King’s Men, forced as it were to gatecrash their own play while supposedly on tour in Elsinore, would take their revenge by appropriating Marston’s The Malcontent, a Children of the Chapel play. 34 Hamlet’s odd conviction that an “antic disposition” will throw the revenger’s target off the scent only makes sense if the villain has never seen a revenge tragedy before. But then the residents of Elsinore do not seem to get out much.

Eliot and His Problems  107 35 In Romeo and Juliet, similarly, the killing of Mercutio marks the hinge between comedy and tragedy in the play’s two halves. A property sword becomes a literal genre-changer. Compare Hal demanding a sword from Falstaff at Shrewsbury and finding a bottle of sack instead, which he throws at the cowardly knight (1 Henry IV). History and Comedy meet on the field of battle via their respective props. 36 See Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Hamlet, Arden Shakespeare, third ­series (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), p. 339. For further discussion of the debate, see Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare: Hamlet (­London and New York: Methuen, 1982), pp. 516–19. Jenkins sees the famous ­illustration in Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare, which features hanging portraits, as “something of a red herring” (518). 37 While it fails spectacularly in Hamlet, such an “intervention” notably succeeds in The Revenger’s Tragedy, when brothers Vindice and Hippolito use Hamlet-style shock treatment to reform their mother—the one ostensible moral victory in a very cynical play. 38 Q1 is slightly more expansive here: “O do not glare with looks so pitiful, / Lest that my heart of stone yield to compassion / And every part that should assist revenge / Forgo their proper powers and fall to pity” (11.62–65). It is mysterious that Hamlet’s “revenge” (a word absent in Q2 and F) would seem to be directed at Gertrude here, against the Ghost’s explicit command in Act 1; see Note 15. 39 Teague, “Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties,” 17–18. 40 This link between the book and Hamlet’s melancholy pensiveness is made clearer in Q1, in which Hamlet’s entry “poring upon a book” is followed by “To be or not to be,” which precedes Hamlet’s mocking of Corambis. 41 Graham Holderness, “‘I Covet Your Skull’: Death and Desire in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Survey 60 (2007): 223–36, 225. 42 See, for example, Chapter 3 of The Stage Life of Props, and Phoebe S.  ­Spinrad, “Memento Mockery: Some Skulls on the Renaissance Stage,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 10 (1984): 1–11. For the afterlife of stage skulls, see Elizabeth Williamson, “Yorick’s Afterlives: Skull Properties in Performance,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 6 (2011), n.p. 43 A verbal equivalent of the skull’s relentless anamorphism is the pun, which creates two oscillating perspectives through a kind of aural skullduggery. I discuss the skull’s anamorphic nature more fully in The Stage Life of Props. 4 4 For the argument that Hamlet’s post-Reformation disgust “lies between past and future, between Rome and Canterbury, between mediaeval and early modern views of death,” see Holderness’s “‘I Cover Your Skull’: Death and Desire in Hamlet.” This quotation is from 232. 45 In “Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England,” Stephen Greenblatt convincingly equates the Eucharistic wafer with the Lacanian Real, “the excess that always escapes this process of meaning-production and is therefore produced by it,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 338. Further, Yorick’s skull evokes “the primary and elemental nausea provoked by the vulnerability of matter,” in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 161. Conversely, Holderness reads the skull as figuring “a Lacanian desire generated by loss, absence, lack of the loved one’s presence” (234).

108  Andrew Sofer 46 “For there is a way in which Hamlet performs the same operation as ­Holbein’s painting upon the gaze and the trope of vanitas. Its final tableau of the death’s head in the graveyard scene is another critique of the subject” (Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, 136). On Hamlet and Holbein, see also Garber’s “‘Remember Me’: Memento Mori Figures in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Renaissance Drama 12 (1981): 3–25; Jacques Lacan, The Four ­F undamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 79–104; and The Stage Life of Props, 93–94. 47 Jennifer Low reads the fencing match symbolically as dramatizing ­Hamlet’s wish to follow his father’s model of masculinity: “What Hamlet seeks throughout the play is a way to perform the part of a man according to his father’s model” (122). But whereas a Lacanian critic might see Hamlet’s perishing on Laertes’s sword as paternal castration in the Symbolic, for Low, Hamlet’s “desires fall into place” when he realizes that he is in the midst of a duel (123). I am grateful to Mary Thomas Crane for this reference. 48 Such is Lacan’s reading of the play in “Desire and the Interpretation of ­Desire.” Lacan agrees with Eliot that Hamlet lacks an object/desire of his own: “You can say in simple, everyday terms what Hamlet lacks: he’s never set a goal for himself, an object…To put it in commonsensical terms, Hamlet just doesn’t know what he wants” (25–26). 49 Bradley Greenburg, “T. S. Eliot’s Impudence: Hamlet, Objective Correlative, and Formulation,” Criticism 49 (2007): 215–239.

8 Shakespeare’s Virtuous Properties Julia Reinhard Lupton

The Friar’s Osier Cage: Weaving Virtues In Romeo and Juliet, Friar Laurence makes his first entrance holding a basket of herbs and flowers: I must up-fill this osier cage of ours With baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers. The earth, that’s nature’s mother, is her tomb. What is her burying grave, that is her womb, And from her womb children of divers kind We sucking on her natural bosom find, Many for many virtues excellent, None but for some, and yet all different. (2.2.7–14) The Friar handles the word “virtue” as a resource shared by ethics and natural history. Whereas modern readers associate virtue with standards of behavior, Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have understood ­virtue to include the distinctive powers of plants. The phrase “virtues excellent” pairs the Latin- and French-derived virtue or vertue (power, potential, ability, manliness; a distinctive quality or property) with its Greek antecedent, arete, or excellence.1 Arete, derived from the superlative of agathos (good), indicates the best that a thing, person, or activity can achieve within a particular instance of its actualization. In Aristotelian science, virtue names the surging movement of just about anything (the power of a person, animal, plant, or thing) out of dormancy (dynamis) and into actuality (energeia) toward a goal (telos), a gesture motivated by longing, appetite, or desire (orexis). As Jessica Rosenberg notes, vertue “names a force inherent in a specimen or figure, what we might think of as an innate vigor or potential energy waiting to be put into operation by a skilled artisan.”2 The osier cage, woven from willow, is the intricate product of human making conducted in tandem with the pliancy and resilience native to a species of plant life.3 The Friar who

110  Julia Reinhard Lupton handles it is the knowledgeable horticulturalist able to unlock the manifold affordances of the natural world; these “many virtues excellent” participate in a shared potentiality that conjoins human and non-human actors in the exercise of medical arts. The Friar’s osier cage is a “virtuous property,” an object brought onstage that gathers persons and things in a common environment. The word “cage” triggers a scalar shift, projecting the open weave of osiers into a temporary shelter, like Viola’s willow cabin (Twelfth Night 1.5.221–29), Lear’s “birds i’th’cage” (5.3.9), or Marina’s “leafy shelter” (Pericles 5.1.42).4 The Friar is the play’s pharmacist, thanks to his administration of the sleeping potion and his medical attention to the sickness of the Veronese polity (e.g., 2.2.92–93). In the art of medicine, the virtuous properties of plants are dependent for their actualization on the virtuous properties of human actors, which include cardinal virtues, such as courage and judgment, and more modern virtues, such as trust and respect.5 Moreover, both plant and plant doctor exist within an ecology or climate of forces and factors, from the civic to the epidemiological, whose effects cannot be fully predicted or controlled. The Friar’s failure to save the lovers can be taken as evidence of his own misjudgment, but it also reveals the disconcerting role of external factors in all worldly moral activity. Philosophers Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, and Martha ­Nussbaum would speak here of moral luck: the idea that happiness and the good life, though requiring virtuous activity, are also contingent on external affairs, from the circumstances of one’s own birth and social condition (slave or free? rich or poor? male or female? Montague or Capulet?) to the random tricks of timing and the traumas and privations of disease, displacement, and war.6 The scandal of such contingency would lead the Stoics to fashion an ideal of happiness independent of material circumstances and immunized against loss through spiritual discipline, with profound implications first for Christianity and later for Kantianism. Aristotle’s virtues are more worldly, however; realized in the world through practices that act upon the world, virtue also exposes the actor to the world, including the limitations the world places on her own moral projects.7 Nussbaum is attuned to those moments in Aristotle in which the flow of virtue is inhibited, blocked, or redirected by external and internal impediments. This focus leads her to develop what I call a moral ecology, in which virtue is understood to unfold within an uneven social terrain that can variously inhibit or encourage the flourishing of different persons and communities.8 I use the term “status-scape” to describe the way in which relationships of reciprocity and recognition can accrue among persons in possession of different degrees of authority, their social standing naturalized through institutions of inherited privilege and nobility.

Shakespeare’s Virtuous Properties  111 In the Homeric period, arete was derived from the aristeia of the ­heroes, the battles in which great warriors proved their excellence and revealed their gifts as aristocrats (“the best [men]”). This ­heroic-­aristocratic background shapes the hierarchical and masculinist underpinnings of much virtue discourse. Yet there is also evidence that the ancient Greeks and other Near Eastern and early European societies treated human beings as having “a fundamental worth or status,” an inherent capacity for virtuous actualization regardless of a person’s social standing.9 When epic becomes romance, both within the Homeric corpus and between classical and late antique epochs, these other vessels of virtuous potential and inherent nobility—including women, slaves, children, monsters, and even animals—could become knights of virtue in their own right.10 Meanwhile, romance’s cultivation of a range of landscapes (pastoral and sublime, magical and mystical, oceanic and mountainous) brings that multiplicity of virtuous actors into dynamic exchange with the virtues of places and things.11 This romance milieu of manifold nobilities and unexpected excellences is very much the world from which Shakespeare draws many of his narratives, including Romeo and Juliet; Twelfth Night; and the late plays, such as The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Pericles. In these pages, I forage Shakespeare for “virtuous properties.” I focus on Caliban’s gaberdine in The Tempest; other clear instances include Pericles’s walking stick, Desdemona’s handkerchief, Yorick’s skull, and Ophelia’s bouquets. Virtuous properties are physical things onstage that allow characters to test their own capacities as moral actors in a networked scene of openings and closings, invitations and inhibitions. Romance is especially conducive to such virtuous properties because romance is uniquely open to the power or potentiality of things, whether in the full-fledged magical thinking of invisible cloaks and wizards’ wands or in the more secularized approach to objects as “affording” or ­“inviting” actions that unfold between actor and setting. Desdemona’s handkerchief teeters uncertainly between magical and disenchanted ­object regimes in a manner emblematic for all virtuous properties, which retain some memory of an animate world alive with “vertues” or powers. The tendency of a medical or therapeutic vocabulary to collect around these properties distills secular and scientific comportments from the enchanted landscape through techniques of purgation and infusion.12 In All’s Well That Ends Well, Helena’s dual status as a modern physician homeschooled by her “excellent” and “skillful” father (1.1.21–22) and a medieval faith healer clothed in the iconography of the saints manifests the deep connection between magic and medicine that continues to ­animate the search for healing today. Romance is also hospitable to the staging of moral luck, thanks to the range of its virtuous actors, the variety of its settings, and the contingencies to which it exposes them. Romance often moderates pure contingency

112  Julia Reinhard Lupton with some notion of providence or temporal design, i­dentified with the underlying logic of the plot itself. What appears random resolves into a figure, at once tangible and ideal (circle, mirror, labyrinth, tangled yarn, the posy of a ring), whose promise of retroactive meaning (telos) injects minor doses of anticipatory desire (orexis) into the errant and ambient energeia of romance actualization. This incipient providentialism leavens romance spaces with a sense of moral direction and the capacity for hope within the aleatory angst and inherited inequities of moral luck. Romance maps what anthropologist of virtue Cheryl Mattingly identifies as the “inherent narrativity of ethical practice and its self-­ constituting nature.” Mattingly identifies the stories of the households she studies (African-American families caring for chronically or terminally ill children) with “heroic battle, domestic comedy, moral tragedy, elegy, and spiritual pilgrimage,” genres that compose the thirsty and resilient fibers of romance. Matttingly argues that “narrative provides a useful approach for investigating projects of moral becoming riddled by uncertain possibilities and informed by pluralistic moral values, ­concerns and communities.”13 When Juliet holds the medicinal vial prescribed by the Friar and deliberates whether or not to take the drug, Juliet tests her own courage and judgment in the face of a range of uncertain outcomes and conflicting values. Confronted with an existential choice on the narrow platform for action defined by her bed, Juliet’s deliberation generates a stream of alternate endings (mad story, ghost story, suicide story, betrayal story). For better or worse, she chooses the love story. The vial she holds up for consideration distills the loose herbs in the Friar’s osier basket into a toxic agent that advances the plot; emblem becomes actant. Potions in general are more romantic than tragic, bottling up the potencies that percolate in the enchanted landscape and delivering powers such as invisibility or unnatural sleep. Such potions endow the romance hero not with super-powers but with intensified latencies. Falling into a sleep like death is more than a narrative trick; it also expresses a desire for withdrawal into the slow time of healing and hibernation. Juliet’s sleeping beauty will become Viola’s patience on a monument and Hermione’s long retreat. In her elaboration of the inherent narrativity of ethical projects, ­Mattingly draws on Charles Taylor, who defines moral space as a zone “in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary.”14 Romance as a genre seems especially attuned to moral space as a set of orienting energies, while theatre as a medium charges every thing onstage with a sense of meaning and moment. When romance becomes theatre, as it does across Shakespeare’s oeuvre, the capacities for the phenomenological exploration of moral space become elaborated and amplified in the moral laboratory of the stage. In moments of heightened exchange among persons and their sensuous

Shakespeare’s Virtuous Properties  113 surrounds, virtuous properties can erect signposts, temporary shelters, and aids to action in a moral space alive with uncertainty, possibility, and risk. It is my larger contention that romance is the fundamental genre, and ultimately the post-genre (on the model of the post-secular) for Shakespearean drama, precisely because it harbors a multitude of virtuous actors (boys, girls, and boy-girls; fools and madmen; servants and slaves) in a teeming, textured landscape composed of several virtue traditions (Homeric, Hellenistic, and humanist; messianic, medieval, and Reformed) that endow the moral spaces of the plays with their unusual resonances and beckoning ethical tonality.

Caliban’s Gaberdine: Sheltering in Place Caliban enters Act 2, Scene 2 “with a burden of wood” and wearing a gaberdine. At the end of his opening monologue, Caliban “falls flat” to escape the approaching rain, whose “noise of thunder” he merges with the prospect of Prospero’s pinching spirits. Stretched over his head, the gaberdine provides temporary shelter to the roving Trinculo, who alights upon the affordances of the covered prostrate creature: Alas, the storm is come again! My best way is to creep under his gaberdine; there is no other shelter hereabout. Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. I will here shroud till the dregs of the storm be past. (2.2.32–35) Thomas Blount, in his Glossographia of 1661, defines “Gabardine (from the Fr. Gaban or Galleberdine)” as “a rough Irish Mantle or Horse-mans coat; a long Cassock.”15 It is associated with the clothing of priests, especially those who use their rough cloaks to hide nefarious designs: “for you apparell idolatrie with the name of deuotion, you nourish ambition vnder a Friers weed, and seeke an empire vnder a Priestes gaberdine.”16 Shylock’s “Jewish gaberdine” (1.3.105) may be a back formation on the Jesuitical gaberdines of anti-Catholic propaganda. But the word also shows up in pastoral, as when a shepherd’s song begins with a call for elegiac appareling: “Melpomine put on thy mourning Gaberdine.”17 Gabardine here names the sackcloth of mourners (for a romance rendering of sackcloth that resonates with Shakespeare, see Jonah 3:10). In The True Chronicle History of King Leir, the wandering king and his retinue buy passage aboard a ship by exchanging their courtly garb for “a good strong motly gaberdine.”18 The OED suggests that the word may derive from pilgrimage (pelerine), passing from the Middle High German wallevart into Italian gavardina and Spanish gabardina before ending up in English. This traveling word, then, evokes a simple, sturdy garb suited for difficult sojourns, an item whose amorphous shape afforded disguise

114  Julia Reinhard Lupton and whose rough textures allowed dignified persons to dress down for the purposes of mourning or ascetic discipline. These strands thicken the coarse weave of Caliban’s cloak. Barbara Fuchs associates the gaberdine with the Irish: “The presence of the cloak does not prove such a context, but it suggests how English domination of Ireland might take cover under precisely such details.”19 Jodi Byrd, picking up on these and other resonances, concludes that “at the threshold between giving birth and dying…everything under the cloak is translocated into new world indigeneities.”20 These and other colonial readings emphasize the hostility toward strangers evident in the anti-Jesuit renderings of the word. Caliban is a native to the island, but he is clothed like a temporary visitor in an environment lacking a steady human architecture and prone to climatic fanfare. In a 1926 essay, Robert Ralston Cawley suggested that the gaberdine may in fact be large palm fronds, as described by Strachey: “so broad are the leaves, as an Italian Umbrella, a man may well defend his whole body under one of them, from the greatest storme raine that falls.”21 Such an interpretation would place Caliban’s gaberdine in the series of portable booths and temporary shelters built from plant life visible in the scalar shift of Friar Laurence’s osier cage. Caliban’s gaberdine is a “virtuous property,” both a piece of costuming and a swathe of building material exploited by both ­Caliban and Trinculo for its unexpected affordances of shelter and refuge. This makeshift refuge also erects a magic box for disguise and transformation. Emanating from beneath the cloak, Caliban’s island odor communicates information to Trinculo about the creature’s uncertain form: “What have we here – a man or a fish?—dead or alive? A fish, he smells like a fish” (2.2.23). When not one but two creatures huddle beneath the blanket, the possibilities multiply: Stephano surmises that “This is some monster of the isle with four legs, who hath got, as I take it, an ague” (2.2.57–58). As a virtuous stage property, the gaberdine shares affordances with children’s games such as hide and seek, peekaboo, and blind man’s bluff, pastimes that feed the compositional strategies of theatre. 22 This particular suite of games draws on the multi-sensory effects of hiddenness and blindfolding to link the audience’s bodily memories of play to actions onstage in their practical and ethical dimensions. Caliban’s gaberdine borrows some of its virtuous properties from the invisible cloak, familiar to many readers from the Harry Potter series. In romance and folk tale, such cloaks are usually associated with the labors of an outlier hero: a banned youth or returning soldier who gains the cloak from a magical helper (dwarf, old woman, princess) and uses it to solve some problem that brings him home. In some variations, the cloak is gifted to him by a heavenly maiden, who deserts him when he misuses the virtues of the cloak.23 In The Tempest, Ariel is the invisible one, associated with the transparency of atmosphere and the ethereal substance of the soul, while it is Prospero who appears “in magic robes”

Shakespeare’s Virtuous Properties  115 (Folio SD 5.1). Opposed to both of them in the status-scape of the play, Caliban carries not only “a burden of wood” but the burden of flesh. He is a man of mud like Adam. His invisibility is passive, not active: he is granted no visions of secret realms or insights into the actions of others; instead, his cloaked body manifests the denial of recognition that characterizes his enslaved state. Caliban’s gaberdine shares in the same folkloric substratum as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. 24 Yet Caliban’s homely gaberdine, conspicuously devoid of higher magic, is not simply privative: through his actions, the rough cloth reveals its capacities to hide, shelter, obscure, and transform those who huddle beneath it, in scenes of moral luck that dramatize the benighted and lumpen status of the creatures it comforts. In this, the gaberdine recalls the hovel where Edgar as Tom o’Bedlam hides his naked, porous body. Both characters are pricked: Edgar has imitated the Bedlam beggars, “who with roaring voices / Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms / Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary” (2.2.170–73), while Caliban is beset by spirits who pinch (2.2.4) and prick like h ­ edgehogs (2.2.10–11). 25 Edgar has “blanket[ed] his loins,” a minimal rendition of Caliban’s gaberdine, and both are associated with mud and mire, Cinderfellas and hairy potters rejected by their guardians for more seemly children and dressed in sackcloth. Edgar calls his punctured, bristling arm a “horrible object” (2.2.173), evoking the Latin sense of horribilis as the bristling of hair. Edgar’s “horrible object” is another virtuous property, an appareled appendage that links the human actor to the creaturely world through acts of cutting and contriving. According to the great Renaissance herbalist John Gerard (c. 1545–1612), rosemary was used as a breath freshener, a general restorative, and a cleanser as well as a flavoring; we know from Romeo and Juliet that it was used in funeral processions, perhaps due to its aromatic as well as evergreen attributes. 26 “Stick your rosemary /On this fair corse,” the Friar advises Juliet’s bereaved parents (4.5.107). The mortified bodies of Caliban and Edgar, rendered at once thing-like and passionately expressive, become ciphers for suffering humanity; they “smell of mortality” (Lear 4.6.124), a fragrance that marks them as ethical actors finding their way and seeking allies in a moral landscape that has exposed them to abandonment, neglect, and the catastrophic withdrawal of recognition. 27 Edgar is the more obviously virtuous character, outfitted with the good looks and natural athleticism of the “fair unknown”’ familiar from chivalric romance. 28 Yet Caliban is also a nascent romance hero who arises from under the gaberdine ready to test his political capacities for strategic planning (prudence), risky action (courage), and new affiliations (trust). The four-legged monster that Stephano discerns beneath the gaberdine bodies forth the political potential (dynamis) inherent in collective action. The island composes a landscape beset for Caliban by moral luck: his own status as a self-governing person has been revoked,

116  Julia Reinhard Lupton his new political partners are deeply unreliable, and his quest for self-­ determination fails, at least in the form in which he plans it. Yet, as the hidden hero of his own shipwreck play, Caliban has also practiced courage and hope in order to become an able surfer of life’s “flows and ebbs.” When he repurposes his gaberdine as a tent, the virtuous properties of the pilgrim’s cloak enter into alliance with the virtuous properties of the pilgrim who bears it. 29 Caliban’s romance genealogy reaches back to Polyphemos, represented by Theocritus as a despondent lover who is both comic and capable of pathos and dignity.30 Philosopher of technology Mark Coecklelbergh identifies virtue with “environmental skill,” which he links to craft-based forms of tacit knowledge developed in practices such as carpentry, auto mechanics, cooking, and animal husbandry.31 Aristotle establishes the affinity between virtue and skill when he associates the virtues with “many actions, arts, and sciences,” including medicine, shipbuilding, generalship, and household management (1094a). He also speaks of playing the cithara; I would add theatre.32 Philosopher of ancient ethics Julia Annas has argued for virtue as skill, though her emphasis on reasoning downplays the tacit knowledge and distributed cognition cultivated by particular crafts.33 A “virtuous property” is an object that requires a certain skill to manipulate and develops and extends the capacities of its user. In The Tempest, the main possessors of environmental skill are Caliban, who possesses an intimate working knowledge of the island, and the sailors, whose seasoned seamanship and respect for the elements is contrasted with the bookish and corrupted authority of the royals. Stephano has escaped the angry sea by repurposing a butt of sack into a flotation device, a comic version of Sebastian’s survival in Twelfth Night by tying himself to a mast, in an image of cunning that reaches back to Homer. 34 Stephano exhibits further ingenuity when he uses bark to create a bottle for his spirits, working the affordances of the materials at hand in order to solve a problem.35 Stephano’s proverbial quip, “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” voiced as he dives beneath the gaberdine, articulates a practical philosophy of ingenuity exercised under duress. (Compare the declaration of the rain-soaked Lear: “the art of our necessities is strange / That can make vile things precious” [3.2.66–67].36) The only characters who exhibit environmental skill in The Tempest are also the ones who convene a new political body beneath the cover of Caliban’s gaberdine: they are the play’s organic intellectuals, crafting make-shift political virtues out of their skilled interactions with the virtuous properties that furnish the ship and the island with opportunities for action. While writing this chapter, I attended a workshop production of King Lear on my campus. In the storm scene, Poor Tom crawls under a ­discarded coat in order to hide his identity from his father, who has

Shakespeare’s Virtuous Properties  117 just entered seeking to shelter Lear. When Lear, played by Emily Daly, requested “one word in private” with Poor Tom, she crawled under the coat with him. 37 The assemblage they created together instantly reminded me of the minor leviathan composed by Caliban and Trinculo beneath the gaberdine. In both cases, rough clothing becomes temporary architecture. Beneath the messianic canopies of these ad hoc tents, houseless heads convene a creaturely humanity defined by both exposure to the elements and a crisis in recognition. The fabrics used in these scenes are virtuous properties, pliant surfaces reworked by resourceful actors in search of shelter, company, and significance. Retreating into the dark warmth of latency, the subjects who enter these crawl spaces exit adorned with new energies and aspirations. The gaberdines become birthing blankets (“Can he vent Trinculos?”) from which new conjunctions of persons and projects emerge (2.2.76). “Four legs and two ­voices—a most delicate monster!” (2.2.76): walking and talking in concert is the nucleus of politics (Hannah Arendt), and what is uncovered and recovered in this instance of natality is the possibility of the political as such. 38 The elements of practical wisdom, environmental embeddedness, and distributed cognition manifested in the virtuous property characterize the comportment of all insurgent political actors. Caliban is a forbearer of what Vincent Lloyd calls the “black natural law tradition,” which Lloyd defines as the ensemble of reason, emotion, and imagination realized through social movement organizing. Whereas Gonzalo, like Grotius and Locke, derives a theory of natural law through a kind of philosophical reduction, Shakespeare’s Invisible Man resembles Lloyd’s black political theorists, who “draw on both religious and secular European traditions of natural law [but also] on black experiences of enslavement and injustice, elements of black culture, and distinctive black religious ideas.”39 There is a romance element here as well: Lloyd associates secularism with “a certain style of living, one that is confident in the status quo and explains away moments of paradox, tragedy or insecurity”—in other words, #secularismsowhite. Lloyd associates the black natural law tradition with a different, more affectively heterogeneous terrain, a layered moral space formed by the “mixing of religion, culture, ethics, and politics.”40 Black natural law is also a form of black theology.41 By the end of the play, the moral ecology that mires Caliban in the hiddenness of enslavement and the refusal of recognition has become an ecology of grace where Caliban reclaims his dignity as a creature fashioned from metamorphic slime and ensouled with potentiality, desire, energy, and purpose (dynamis, orexis, energeia, and telos). Caliban defines his condition at the end of the play in terms in tune with the virtues tradition: “I’ll be wise hereafter / And seek for grace” (292–93). I would read wisdom here as the form of knowledge produced

118  Julia Reinhard Lupton by romance sojourning: wisdom is affective knowledge wrought from experience, tempered with reflection, and bearing the marks of both personal trial and collective thought, all of which Caliban has ­undergone since emerging from his gaberdine. The search for wisdom also links Caliban with the philosopher; whereas the sophos thinks he already possesses knowledge, the philo-sophos recognizes that wisdom involves ­ isdom dialectical pursuit.42 Caliban’s sophia is also the wisdom of w literature and its uncertain heroes, Job and Jonah; wisdom literature was culled by the curators of the Hebrew Bible from a reserve of Near Eastern teachings and oral traditions and thus harbors a pluralizing potential. (Job was a Gentile, and Jonah preached to them.) Wisdom is virtuous knowledge, developed through practice and hence associated with age, but tending toward paradox and double meaning rather than the transparency of truisms. So too, I would read “grace” not as a reference to Prospero’s sovereign ability to confer or deny recognition and forgiveness but rather as the benign face of moral luck and environmental beholdenness. In Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology, Willis Jenkins defines grace as “a divinely initiated relationship of God and creation” and goes on to define ecologies of grace as settings in which human beings become accountable to a shared creatureliness.43 Caliban envisions grace as both natural and supernatural gift in his dream of the clouds opening and showing “riches / Ready to drop upon me” (3.2.132–33). Caliban, like his mother Sycorax, is a creature of “flows and ebbs” (5.1.269), born like all human beings from mud and mire, taking shape as a virtuous actor through his moral project, and restored at the end of the play as a free inhabitant of the island. Seeking wisdom and grace in response to place, Caliban is uniquely open to the music of the island’s humming energeia and twangling orexis. All action exposes the actor to the worldly entanglements and ­inveterate inequities of moral luck and thus requires hope and courage, the preeminent virtues of romance. When Miranda famously declares, “O brave new world /That hath such people in it,” the word “brave” means “finely dressed” or simply “worthy, excellent,” but it can also point to the virtue of courage that the maintenance and renewal of the world requires. Read this way, “brave” is a virtuous property not of the world that she sees but of the persons addressed by that world as its inmates, stewards, physicians, and organic intellectuals. In 1970, James Cone, the father of black theology, cited scripture in a mood very close to the spirit of The Tempest’s end: The black community as a self-determining people, proud of its blackness, has just begun, and we must wait before we can describe what its fullest manifestation will be. “We are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be” (I John 3:2a).44

Shakespeare’s Virtuous Properties  119

Notes 1 Q1 reads: “Many, for many, vertue: excellent.” The spelling “vertue” can sometimes be read to communicate the natural historical reading over the moral one. www.bl.uk/treasures/SiqDiscovery/ui/record.aspx?Source=text& LHCopy=80&LHPage=28. 2 Jessica Rosenberg, “Poetic Language, Practical Handbooks, and the ‘Vertues’ of Plants,” in Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching, ed. Lynne Bruckner et al. (Farnham: Ashgate: 2015), 61. 3 See Alexander Langlands, Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (New York: Norton, 2017): In the strategies of translation that Alfred adopts for Boethius’s ­C onsolation of Philosophy, he unites the concepts of learning and virtue with making by using cræft in his translation for the Latin of all three. For Alfred, the labor and work associated with making and doing was comparable to the spiritual strivings of philosophy. (21) 4 On Marina’s leafy shelter and Viola’s willow cabin as types of Jonah’s sukkah or booth, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Dwelling,” in Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion, ed. Susan Felch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 86–102. 5 Edmund D. Pellegrino and David C. Thomasma, The Virtues in Medical Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 6 Aristotle acknowledges three types of moral luck that affect a person’s chances to achieve eudaemonia: birth, wealth, and power. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 339. The term “moral luck” was introduced by Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981). James Kearney first alerted me to the importance of moral luck in Shakespeare; see “Hospitality’s Risk, Grace’s Bargain: Uncertain ­E conomies in The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespeare and Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, Exchange, ed. David Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton ­(London: ­Routledge, 2016), 89–111. 7 Flourishing, Nussbaum writes, requires that we “need to be born with adequate capacities, to live in fostering natural and social circumstances, to stay clear of abrupt catastrophe, to develop confirming associations with other human beings” (1). 8 Aristotle acknowledges that virtue can sometimes remain dormant, as when a good person is “asleep or even inactive through life,” or “suffering badly and undergoing the greatest misfortunes” (1096a). 9 Patrice Rankin, “Dignity in Homer and Classical Greece,” in Dignity: History of a Concept, ed. Remy Debes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 21. 10 I am drawing on David Woods’s dissertation on Christian romance, in progress, UC Irvine. 11 On the affinity between romance and ecocriticism, see, for example, Randall Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 113; and Steven Mentz, “Shipwreck and Ecology: Toward a Structural Theory of Shakespeare and Romance,” Shakespeare International Yearbook 8 (2008), 165–82. 12 On romance and early modern science, see, for example, Jen E. Boyle, ­A namorphosis in Early Modern Literature: Mediation and Affect (London:

120  Julia Reinhard Lupton

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23

24

2 5

26 27 28

Routledge, 2017). On virtuous training as a therapy, see M ­ artha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic ­Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Cheryl Mattingly, Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 18. See also Mattingly, The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 28. Thomas Blount, Glossographia, or A Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue (1661). William Charke, A Replie to a Censure Written to a Jesuites Seditious ­Pamphlet (1581). Image 117. Michael Drayton, Idea: The Shepherd’s Garland (1593), 24. The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1605), G4. Barbara Fuchs, “Conquering Islands: Recontextualizing the Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48/1 (Spring 1997): 48. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnestota Press, 2011), 69. Robert Ralston Cawley, “Shakespeare’s Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest,” Modern Language Association 41/3 (September 1926), 707, citing Strachey, 19. Gaberines could also, however, be luxurious cloaks, as M. C. Linthinicum noted from the Great Wardrobe Accounts of Henry VIII. “My Jewish Gaberdine,” PMLA 43/3 (September 1928), 759. On children’s games and theatrical composition in Renaissance drama, see Erika Lin, Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (New York: ­Palgrave, 2012); and Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, “Statues That Move: Vitality Effects in The Winter’s Tale.” Literature & Theology 28/3 (September 2014), 299–315. Alan L. Miller, “Of Weavers and Birds: Structure and Symbol in Japanese Myth and Folklore,” History of Religions 26/3 (Febuary 1987): 309–27. See also Jack Zipes, “The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture,” Marvels and Tales 25/2 (2011): 233. On the folkloric cloak of invisibility and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, see Mark Murphy, “The Costs of Being Invisible,” Social Theory Applied ­( January 29, 2016). http://socialtheoryapplied.com/2016/01/09/the­invisible-man/ On Ellison and classical literature, see Patrice Rankin, ­Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Northrop Frye notes their affinity: “Tom o’Bedlam, who eats live frogs and drinks of the frog pond, is in the context of tragedy what Caliban is in comedy…. The naked kernel of the natural man, man shut out from society and therefore from the distinctively human side of his nature.” Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance, ed. Troni Y. Grande and Garry Sherbert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 243. John Gerard, The Herbal or General History of Plants (New York: Dover, 1975), 1293–294. On mortification in King Lear, see Giulio J. Pertile, “King Lear and the Uses of Mortification,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67/3 (Fall 2016): 319–43. Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 86.

Shakespeare’s Virtuous Properties  121 29 In her ethical reading of the play, Leah Whittington takes Caliban as “an ­alternative center of gravity in the play, a point of identification separate from and opposed to Prospero,” an achievement she links to Shakespeare’s appropriation of Virgilian melancholy as a recipe for empathy. “Shakespeare’s Virgil: Empathy and The Tempest,” in Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics, ed. Patrick Gray and John D. Cox (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 113. 30 Theocritus, Idyll XI. The poem represents song as a cure for love-sickness and is addressed by the poet to the doctor Nicias, and thus belongs to the tradition of remedy enunciated by the Friar in Romeo and Juliet. Idylls, Loeb Classical Library. www.loebclassics.com/. Accessed June 9, 2018. On Polyphemos as a type of the African-American hero, see Rankin, Black Ulysses, 45–65. 31 Mark Coeckelbergh, Environmental Skill: Motivation, Knowledge, and the Possibility of a Non-Romantic Environmental Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2015). 32 On skill in theater, see Evelyn Tribble, “Pretty and Apt: Boy Actors, Skill, and Embodiment,” in Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), doi:10.1093/­ oxfordhb/9780199663408.013.35; and “Skill,” Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), doi:10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199641352.013.9. 33 Annas writes, “The skills and arts are modes in which we reflect intellectually and thereby transform and improve the merely given material in us.” The Morality of Happiness (New York: Oxford, 1993), vii. See also Matt Schichter, “Virtue as a Skill,” The Oxford Handbook of Virtue, ed. Nancy F. Snow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 57–81. 34 Carol Dougherty, The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 35 I develop the idea of affordances from James J. Gibson in Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 36 My dissertation student Christopher Dearner reads Lear’s line as a ­philosophy of affordances. “‘Not Sensible to Feeling as to Sight’: A ­ ffording Phenomenologies on the Early Modern Stage,” dissertation in progress, ­University of California, Irvine. 37 “Nothing Will Come of Nothing: The Lear Project,” directed by Phil Thompson, UC Irvine, March 2018. In an interview with the director about the shared cloak moment, Thompson comments, “I’m afraid I can’t claim that as my own intentional artistic gesture. It arose out of the given circumstances …. It’s tempting to imagine that Shakespeare told them to do this. That is to say, the text contains the cues about physical actions, and about psychological motivations, and the timing of events, and if you gave the text to a different company of actors, you might find the same actions emerging. Now, it does occur to me that I might have made some claim about the coat being emblematic of the rich imagery of clothing and disguise in the play. ‘Robes and furred gowns hide all,’ but ‘how can your looped and windowed raggedness protect you from seasons such as these?’ … In this perpetually peeling onion of surface and interior, I wanted Lear and Edgar to briefly share the same garment. But while this imagery was certainly in all of our heads, there was no intention on my part to frame it in this way. I looked up from my text one day and Michael and Emily were making a coat-fort. Personal communication, March 25, 2018.

122  Julia Reinhard Lupton 38 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958; 1998), 176–77 and passim. Mattingly draws on Arendt in her anthropology of virtue, e.g., 16. 39 Vincent Lloyd, Black Natural Law (New York: Oxford University Press), viii. 40 Lloyd, Black Natural Law, 151. 41 Vincent Lloyd, Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 42 See Pierre Hadot on philosophy not as a body of propositions but as a way of life: “To know oneself means, among other things, to know oneself qua non-sage: that is, not as a sophos, but as a philo-sophos, someone on the way toward wisdom.” Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1995), 90. 43 Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20, 121. 4 4 James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, Fortieth Anniversary ­edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 24.

9 The Power to Die Liveliness, Minor Agency, and Shakespeare’s Female Characters Kelsey Blair Living in patriarchal societies under rules they did not make, many of the women in Shakespeare’s tragedies, histories, and problem plays have limited access to legal authority or physical force. Their bodies are often threatened or attacked: Desdemona is strangled; Cordelia is hanged in her cell; Emilia and Tamora are stabbed; Lavinia is raped, mutilated, and killed. Despite this list, there are instances where the lively or suddenly (and deliberately) unlively body functions as a site of empowerment for Shakespeare’s female characters. In Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale, Juliet and Hermione exert agency through manipulations of the perceived liveliness of their material bodies, Juliet by consuming a sleeping potion and Hermione by appearing in front of Leontes as a statue. Indeed, by surrendering their autonomy, both characters gain power they could not achieve through speech or action. These unusual acts of empowerment are critical for understanding the creative, sometimes unexpected ways Shakespeare’s female characters enact agency. To track such instances of empowerment, I offer a new critical term: “minor agency.” In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987), French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari theorize the concepts of “majoritarian” and “minoritarian” in relation to one another. They explain that “majority” does not refer “to a great relative quantity.”1 Rather, a majority constitutes the standard or ideal and “implies a state of domination” (291). A minority, on the other hand, is defined by that which separates its members from the standard. Following this, ­“becoming-minoritarian,” or “becoming minor,” refers to the process of diverging from the majority. It is a potentially politically transformative act as it puts pressure on the majority through constant variation. As the authors explain, “Becoming-minoritarian is a political affair and necessitates a labor of power, a micropolitics” (292). Following this, minor agency refers to an act that is small in scope but significant as it diverges from, and thus destabilizes, the standard operations of power as defined by the majority. This concept may help readers locate and analyze the subtly resistant ways that some of Shakespeare’s women exercise power. From Hero and Cleopatra, who both faint, to Imogen and Juliet, who consume potions that temporarily suggest their deaths, to Thaisa

124  Kelsey Blair and Hermione, who are resurrected, several of Shakespeare’s female ­characters experience diminished degrees of liveliness onstage in front of other characters and the audience. While Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale were written at different ends of Shakespeare’s playwriting career and present very different female protagonists, Juliet and Hermi­ erceived one are remarkable as they both intentionally manipulate the p liveliness of their material bodies. By putting the plays in conversation with several new materialisms, I read these manipulations through the lens of minor agency, wherein those with minimal power exercise ­influence by diverging from, and consequently unsettling, the logic of majoritarian power structures. Moving in the order of composition, I begin by examining Juliet’s decision to consume Friar Laurence’s s­ leeping potion and analyze how her seemingly dead body destabilizes Capulet’s patriarchal power. I then turn to The Winter’s Tale to analyze how ­Hermione’s manipulation of animacy, performed by a live actorly body in a contemporary performance, affects Leontes, the power s­ tructures of Sicilia, and the audience.

Juliet: “A Thing Like Death” In Act 3, when Capulet marches into Juliet’s bedroom, he intends to cheer up his daughter with the news of her arranged marriage. Instead, his wife tersely informs him that Juliet does not want to marry Paris, and the tirade that follows is a devastating display of patriarchal rage. Capulet warns Juliet that if she refuses to go to the church to be married, he will have her dragged there on a hurdle (3.5.155), and when Juliet begs him to listen to her, Capulet rebukes her, demanding she go “to church o’ Thursday, / Or Never after look [him] in the face” (3.5.161–62). He follows this by undermining their family history, telling Lady ­Capulet, “Wife, we scarce thought us blessed/That God had lent us but this only child,/ But now I see this one is one too much,/And that we have a curse in having her” (3.5.164–67). The insults ­culminate in a series of threats: Graze where you will, you shall not house with me! Look to’t; think on’t; I do not use to jest. Thursday is near. Lay hand on heart; advise. An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend; An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets— For, by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee [.] (3.5.189–94) Capulet’s cruel promises—to drag his daughter through the streets, to refuse to acknowledge her, to change their family history, to kick her out of the household—indicate the relationship between bodies, patriarchal power, and place in Romeo and Juliet. In Verona, the Prince rules the streets while Capulet and Montague preside over their respective

The Power to Die  125 households. While women appear in domestic and, less frequently, civic places, they have little authority in these locations, and, as evidenced by Capulet’s presence in Juliet’s bedchamber, even Juliet’s room is not truly her own. Critically, as a young female character, Juliet has limited spatial mobility. Unlike Romeo, who appears in a range of places—the streets of Verona, the Capulet’s home, the Capulet’s orchard, Juliet’s bed chamber, and Friar Laurence’s cell—Juliet only appears outside ­Capulet-controlled places twice: to marry Romeo in Friar Laurence’s cell and to seek Friar Laurence’s help.2 In these domestic spaces, Juliet’s body is always enclosed: she is contained by the walls of the Capulet halls, the borders of her bed chamber, and the edges of her balcony. As Capulet’s speech reminds her, however, the alternative to confinement is not freedom; it is destitution. Faced with such dire circumstances, it is striking that Juliet locates agency in spatial mobility and the liveliness of her material body. ­Following Capulet’s rant, the adults exit and Juliet is left alone to contemplate her situation. She decides to visit Friar Laurence. In doing so, she chooses to transgress the boundary of her household for the second time. Unlike her marriage to Romeo in Act 2, however, Juliet’s departure from the Capulet home is motivated not by excitement but by desperation. Just before she leaves, Juliet comforts herself, saying, “If all else fail, myself have power to die” (3.5.243). In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that “[y]ou don’t deviate from the majority unless there is a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off” (292). Juliet’s use of “myself” is the detail that lays the foundation for her act of minor agency. Juliet has limited power to alter the logic of exchange that decrees her body should be transferred from one household (Capulet’s) to another (Paris’s). She does, however, have the power to diminish the exchange value of her body by terminating her liveliness. A  dead body cannot wed, and through suicide, Juliet can protect the sanctity of her marriage to Romeo. By expressing the possibility of suicide in terms of personal agency, Juliet begins her process of unsettling the logic of the majority. Reasoning that if Juliet is willing to die to avoid marrying Paris, she will be willing to “undertake / A thing like death to chide away this shame” (4.1.73–74), Friar Laurence offers Juliet the sleeping potion. In doing so, he provides Juliet with the means to manipulate her body’s liveliness, and by accepting the elixir, Juliet modulates her agency by claiming both the power to die and the power to fake her own death. This second power enables Juliet to begin to disrupt the logic of the Capulet household. Under the guise of preparing for her wedding, Juliet gets her nurse to help her select her best robes and then asks to be left alone for the evening. Following this, she takes out a dagger and places it on the bed, giving herself the means to commit suicide if the potion does not work. With costume (robes), set (bed), and prop (dagger) in place,

126  Kelsey Blair Juliet prepares to turn herself into a performer in a complex theatrical fiction where her seemingly dead body will be displayed for her family members. Within the world of the play, this unsettles the Capulet household by transforming her bedchamber into a tomb. Metatheatrically, ­Juliet’s careful attention to costume, set, and prop stages a fiction within a fiction. Like Hamlet and his Mousetrap, Juliet is the director of this fiction; unlike Hamlet, however, Juliet must surrender her subjectivity and intentionally allow her body to be perceived as a body in order to gain directorial power. Her speech at the end of Act 4 reveals that she is acutely aware of the risks of this trade. Earlier, Friar Laurence explained the effects of the potion, telling Juliet: […] presently through all thy veins shall run A cold and drowsy humor—for no pulse Shall keep his native progress but surcease; No warmth, no breath shall testify thou livest; The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade To wanny ashes; thy eyes’ windows fall Like death when he shuts up the day of life. (4.1.95–101) Alone in her bedroom, Juliet considers her decision. First, she w ­ onders whether the friar is trustworthy and considers the possibility that that elixir is poison (4.3.24–27). Concluding that the friar is honorable (4.3.28–29), Juliet decides to take the potion. Her thoughts turn to worries, and she expresses the concern that she might wake too early, ­suffocating before Romeo can arrive to free her (30–35). Critically, Juliet’s biggest fear is that she will wake up surrounded by her ancestors: “Oh, if I wake, shall I not be distraught, / Environèd with all these hideous fears, / And madly play with my forefathers joints” (4.4.49–51). This final fear is ­indicative of the reach of majoritarian power in Verona. Even in death, patriarchy cannot be escaped; the logic of the Capulet household organizes life, death, and the afterlife. Unsure that consuming the potion will affect meaningful change, Juliet’s panic rises. She envisions Tybalt’s ghost coming for her. In this moment, she must make a choice: accept her place in Verona or attempt to undermine patriarchal power through faked death. She chooses the latter and drinks the potion, crying ­“Romeo, Romeo, Romeo! Here’s drink. I drink to thee” (4.3.58). According to Carol Chillington Rutter, when her body goes limp, ­Juliet is “reduced by [fake] death from somebody to the body,” from marginalized subject to object.3 Following Jane Bennett’s work on vibrant matter, however, Juliet’s unconscious body can also be read as becoming minoritarian. Bennett challenges the notion of a firm boundary between the animate and the inanimate. Drawing from Bruno Latour, who argues that agentic capacity “implies no special motivation of human individual

The Power to Die  127 actors, nor of humans in general,” she argues that all matter should be viewed as “vital,” meaning lively, potentially self-organizing, and capable of enacting agency.4 The potential vibrancy of matter underpins Juliet’s consumption of the sleeping potion. By drinking the elixir, Juliet wagers that the friar’s plan can succeed and that the matter of her body is capable of exerting influence. When the Nurse and Lady Capulet discover Juliet’s body the next morning, it appears as if Juliet’s wager has paid off. Earlier, Friar Laurence promised Juliet that the potion would cause Juliet’s veins to “run / A cold and drowsy humor” (4.1.95–96) and make the color of her cheeks and lips fade (4.1.99). These are the precise bodily features that lead the Nurse and Lady Capulet to conclude that Juliet is dead. They are also the features that Capulet observes when he first encounters Juliet’s body. He exclaims, “Out, alas, she’s cold! / Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff; / Life and these lips have long been separated” (4.5.52–54). Capulet’s response to Juliet is critical as it indexes a moment of emotional variation prompted by the vibrant materiality of her body. In Act 3, Capulet called Juliet a “green-sickness carrion” (3.5.156) and a “tallow face” (3.5.157), and when she begged him to listen to her, he responded by calling her a “disobedient wretch” (3.5.160). Juliet’s seemingly inanimate body prompts Capulet to reverse these claims and to express despair, saying, “Death is my son-in-law; Death is my heir; / My daughter he hath wedded. I will die / And leave him all. Life, living, all is Death’s” (4.4.65–67). As the Nurse, Lady Capulet, and Paris lament Juliet’s apparent death, Capulet’s despair turns to grief, and following their short speeches, he cries out, “Alack, my child is dead, / And with my child my joys are burièd” (4.4.90–91). Theatrically displayed for onlookers, the materiality of Juliet’s seemingly dead body finally forces Capulet to acknowledge the value of her life. Critically, the vibrant materiality of Juliet’s body does, indeed, influence the action, and following the family’s expressions of grief, Juliet is moved to Capulet’s tomb and her marriage to Paris is cancelled. These events fulfill the first part of Friar Laurence’s plan and set in motion her reunion with Romeo. Of course, this reunion does not go according to plan. Juliet awakens too late, and she cannot stop Romeo from committing suicide. When she wakes up beside his corpse, she again chooses to enact “the power to die”. By terminating the liveliness of her material body, Juliet exerts a kind of power; this, however, is a lesser expression of agency than Juliet’s prior act. When Juliet drank the sleeping potion, she traded consciousness and mobility for an alternate form of empowerment. Had the plan worked, Juliet’s increased agency had the potential to extend into her future life outside of Verona. In committing suicide, Juliet annihilates her subjecthood and truncates her agentic potential. This is not to say that her suicide is meaningless. Alongside Romeo, her body unsettles the logic of the Montague-Capulet feud, and it is noteworthy that Capulet makes the first peace offering between the two families. Speaking to Montague, he says, “give me thy hand. / This

128  Kelsey Blair is my daughter’s jointure, for no more / Can I demand” (5.3.296–98). Capulet’s promise to give Montague his daughter’s jointure unites the two men based on the patriarchal logic of the marriage exchange. At the same time, however, it is clear that Capulet has been unsettled. Having already experienced an emotional shift after encountering Juliet’s supposedly dead body, Capulet acknowledges the significance of both lovers’ lives and recognizes that Romeo and Juliet’s deaths are “poor sacrifices” (5.3.304) of the feud between families. When the two men shake hands, it prompts the possibility of reconciliation and transformation in Verona. This speaks to the potential rippling effects of acts of minor agency. Indeed, while such acts may appear small or ineffective, they may effect meaningful change by prompting variation in the majority. For Capulet, it was Juliet’s seemingly inanimate body that triggered the possibility of such variation in majoritarian social practices. Unfortunately, it was her truly dead body that completed his transformation, and the play’s final scene functions as a poignant reminder that for marginalized subjects, the effects of majoritarian power can be lethal.

Hermione and Paulina’s Act of Minor Agency In “Man and Object in the Theatre,” Prague School semiotic theorist Jiri Veltrusky examines the perceived agency of objects and subjects in theatrical productions and argues that the existence of the subject in the theatre is dependent on the ­participation of some component in the action, and not on its actual spontaneity, so that even a lifeless object may be perceived as the performing subject, and a live human being may be perceived as an element completely without will.5 To help conceptualize this phenomenon, Veltrusky proposes a ­subject-object continuum; on this continuum, actors and objects signify differently to an audience according to their “action force,” their perceived ability to lead, participate in, or be passive recipients of dramatic action. According to Veltrusky, action force is dynamic: subjects can be demoted to the status of objects, while props and other inanimate objects can be granted quasi-subject standing. Here, I repurpose Veltrusky’s continuum to consider the actual, rather than perceived, ability of an actor or object to influence the action. Putting the subject-object continuum in conversation with minor agency, I suggest that Hermione’s swoon and offstage death in Act 3 of The Winter’s Tale mark the beginning of an act of minor agency that is only revealed in Act 5. Drawing examples from the 2017 Bard on the Beach production of The Winter’s Tale in Vancouver, Canada, I aim to demonstrate how Hermione’s material body unsettles both Leontes and the audience.6

The Power to Die  129 In Animacies, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Mel Chen offers “animacy” as a key term for analyzing the politics of sentience. Drawing from the field of linguistics, Chen uses the term “animacy hierarchy” to refer to “a conceptual structure and ordering that might possibly come out of understandings of lifelines, sentience, agency, ability, and mobility.”7 As evidenced by Leontes’s decision to have baby Perdita abandoned in the woods in Bohemia, Leontes determines the animacy hierarchy of his kingdom. At the end of Act 2, Paulina tries to reason with Leontes by laying baby Perdita in front of him. Other than repeatedly calling the child a brat (2.3.92; 2.3.162) and a “bastard” (2.3.73–75; 2.3.154; 2.3.160), Leontes refuses to acknowledge Perdita as an animate human subject, referring to her as “it” 19 times between lines 76 and 182. Chen argues that “animacy hierarchies are precisely about which things can or cannot affect – or be affected by – which other things within a specific scheme of possible action” (30), and Leontes’s use of “it” not only expresses contempt for the child; it also indexes the conceptual structure that organizes bodies and lives within his kingdom. As a baby, Perdita has little or no access to patriarchal modes of power such as mobility and language. As such, she is unable to affect Leontes and is, therefore, marginalized in Sicilia’s animacy hierarchy. This has potentially lethal consequences. Speaking to his lords, Leontes callously debates Perdita’s fate, asking, “Shall I live on to see this bastard kneel / And call me father? Better burn it now / Than curse it then” (2.3.154–56). Alongside his treatment of Hermione, this indicates that Leontes believes he can eliminate the power of insubordinate female bodies by forcibly removing them from Sicilia through banishment or execution. Ultimately, he decides against having Perdita thrown in a fire. Nonetheless, his d ­ ecision to have her abandoned in the woods is indicative of the potentially ­calamitous ­effects of Leontes’s conception of animacy. Critically, Leontes uses speech to enforce his animacy hierarchy and wield power. In addition to denying Perdita subjecthood through pronoun use, he orders that Hermione be sent to jail when he commands, “Away with her to prison” (2.1.104). He likewise warns Antigonus that if he does not abandon Perdita in the woods, it will not only result in Antigonus’s own death but also in the execution of his “lewd-tongued wife” (2.3.169–71). Later, he condemns Hermione to death, decreeing, “[T]hou / Shalt feel our justice, in whose easiest passage / Look for no less than death” (3.2.87–89). On the other hand, Hermione can speak, but she cannot use language to wield power or influence others. For instance, in the final monologue before her “death,” she attempts to ­admonish Leontes: But yet hear this – mistake me not – no life, I prize it not a straw, but for mine honor, Which I would free – if I shall be condemned

130  Kelsey Blair Upon surmises, all proofs sleeping else But what your jealousies awake, I tell you ’Tis rigor and not law. (3.2.107–12) Leontes does not hear her. In fact, he does not listen to anyone, ­dismissing the oracle’s message when he says, “There is no truth at all i’th’ oracle” (3.2.137). Following the news of Mamillius’s death, Hermione utters no lines; instead, she swoons, exits with Paulina and her attendants, and dies. This seemingly functions to silence her permanently and marks the nadir of her action force. The events of Act 5, however, unsettle this interpretation and recast Hermione’s offstage death as part of an extended act of minor agency. Before revealing Hermione’s statue to Leontes, Paulina primes the other characters (and the audience) to pay close attention to the statue’s materiality. Emphasizing the statue’s animate qualities, she uses “life” and “liveliness” in conjunction, saying, “Prepare / To see the life as lively mocked as ever / Still sleep mocked death” (5.3.18–20). In the first three acts, Leontes could not be silenced. Ignoring Hermione and his lords, he continued to speak and make authoritative declarations; even the oracle’s prophecy could not quiet him, and after hearing its contents, he swiftly decrees, “the sessions shall proceed” (3.2.138). In Act 5, Paulina reveals the statue and then observes the other characters’ reactions. Her first remark ­following the reveal—“I like your silence” (5.3.21)—suggests that Hermione’s physical presence has, finally, rendered Leontes speechless. When ­Paulina prompts Leontes to talk, his first instinct is to comment on the statue’s materiality in relation to Hermione’s living body: Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed Thou art Hermione; or, rather, thou art she In thy not chiding, for she was as tender As infancy and grace. (5.3.24–27) By explaining how the statue “chides” him, Leontes reveals that ­Hermione has finally found a way to be heard. A few lines later, ­L eontes wonders, “Does not the stone rebuke me / For being more stone than it?” (5.3.37–38). Hermione’s statue does not have to respond. By appearing onstage, her stone body effectively admonishes Leontes. In doing so, H ­ ermione diverges from the majoritarian operation of power by using her material body, rather than language, to communicate. Importantly, Hermione’s final speech suggests she may have collaborated with Paulina to manipulate her perceived degree of sentience, making the presence of her stone body in Act 5 part of an extended act of

The Power to Die  131 ­ inor agency. ­Speaking to Perdita following her resurrection, Hermione m says, “I, / Knowing by Paulina that the oracle / Gave hope thou wast in ­being, have preserved/ Myself” (5.3.125–28). The phrase “preserved myself” strongly suggests that while Paulina played a role in Hermione’s ­disappearance, Hermione actively participates in the scheme by going into hiding or allowing magic to be performed. This can prompt the spectator to reinterpret the events of Act 3. If Hermione collaborated with Paulina, then her death was not the nadir of her action force. In fact, Hermione’s offstage death then marks a dramatic increase in ­action force for both Paulina and ­Hermione: the absence of Hermione’s body prompts Leontes to mourn; Paulina successfully discourages Leontes from remarrying; ­Paulina reveals Hermione’s statue to Leontes ­ aulina’s assistance, Hermione revives in the play’s in Act 5; and, with P final scene, setting in motion the reunion between mother and daughter and ­concluding Leontes’s redemption. By diverging from majoritarian modes of power, Perdita and ­Hermione prompt variation in Sicilia. Confronted by Hermione’s statue, Leontes expresses feelings of shame, saying, “Even with such life of majesty – warm, life, / As now it coldly stands – when first I wooed her, / I am ashamed” (5.3.35–37). This shame leads him to acknowledge the effects of his own actions, opening up the possibility for personal and political  transformation. Speaking directly to the statue, he says, “There’s magic in thy majesty, which has / My evils conjured to remembrance” (5.3.39–40), and, in his final speech, Leontes allows Paulina to marry Camillo, admits his wrong-doing, and asks for Polixenes’s and Hermione’s forgiveness. While the play ends before the audience can see or assess the permanence of Leontes’s transformation, his last words indicate that there is a possibility that he will become a more benevolent king with a more capacious understanding of whose feelings and lives matter. Moreover, by proving that tactics that diverge from the norm can successfully destabilize power structures and result in meaningful change, Hermione and Paulina model new possibilities for empowerment in Sicilia. Critically, in contemporary productions, Leontes may not be the only person in the theatre who is unsettled by Hermione’s body. Following Therese Malachy, who argues that when a character dies in a theatrical performance, the audience knows that the dead body is never truly dead, the audience of The Winter’s Tale knows that the statue body is not truly made of stone.8 Because of this, the performer’s body potentially undermines the audience’s suspension of disbelief in the scene. Intriguingly, in the Bard on the Beach production the ambiguous ontology of the “statue” was made a focal site of the drama. Following the initial reveal, the features of the performer’s lively body—the color of her skin, her soft flesh, the gentle rising and falling of her stomach—made it clear

132  Kelsey Blair that the statue onstage was not made of stone. But instead of trying to divert the audience’s attention from the performer’s body, the blocking complemented the dialogue by continuously drawing the spectator’s ­focus to the relationship between Hermione’s body and the performer’s body. Leontes crossed toward the statue as he commented on its wrinkles (explained away by Paulina as the “carver’s excellence” (5.3.30)), and when Perdita approached the statue to kiss its hand, Paulina quickly stepped in front of her. As a result of this interplay, a tension between theatrical illusion and dramatic fiction emerged, prompting spectators to wonder whether the live body onstage was part of the dramatic fiction or the theatrical illusion? This tension prompted even more questions: Did Hermione die? Did Paulina’s magic turn a stone statue into a living person, or was it all an elaborate ruse? The tension culminated when Paulina offered to resurrect the statue. Using exaggerated gestures and pronounced line delivery, Paulina spoke firmly: “Music; awake her; strike!” (5.3.98). A moment later, a bell sounded and light harp music filled the theatre. As Paulina instructed Hermione to “Be stone no more” (5.3.99), the music swelled. Suddenly, Hermione’s chin lifted from her chest. She looked up, first at the audience, then at her surroundings. Continuing to favor the power of the body over the power of language, she crossed toward Leontes and embraced him with opens arms. Finally, Hermione turned to Paulina. The two clasped hands and exchanged a long, knowing, look. Something passed between them: Shock? Gratitude? Understanding? Triumph? It was impossible to know, one of many uncertainties provoked by the scene. Critically, the uncertainty prompted by the performer’s body in the Bard on the Beach production may not be unique. As argued above, the play is constructed so that the dialogue intentionally draws the characters’—and by consequence, the spectators’—attention to the materiality of Hermione’s body. But the unspoken actions of the characters accented the ambiguous aspects of the text, suggesting greater agency for Hermione than may be typical in productions. In so doing, the performer’s body supported, rather than undermined, the fiction by heightening the ambiguity of the statue’s liveliness. In this way, the performer/Hermione not only destabilizes ­L eontes; she also potentially unsettles the spectators, prompting them to vary their interpretation of the play’s action and to reconsider their own conceptualizations of agency.

Conclusion From Portia’s use of rhetoric to Lady Macbeth’s leveraging of p ­ ersonal relationships, Shakespeare’s women employ a variety of tactics to ­enact agency. Minor agency offers a critical tool for tracking instances of ­female empowerment that do not adhere to the logic of the ­majority— such as language, physical force, or mobility. In Hermione and Juliet’s

The Power to Die  133 case, the minor agency enacted by manipulating their ­degrees of ­liveliness helps the characters reclaim ownership over one aspect of their material bodies. This repositions the female body from a site where power is enforced to a site where agency can be enacted. Crucially, Shakespeare’s women are not the only characters capable of enacting minor agency. Shakespeare’s other marginalized bodies—bodies of color, disabled bodies—also have access to alternative modes of power and future work might explore the range of acts undertaken by Shakespeare’s minoritarian subjects. Such analyses offer a bridge between Shakespeare’s plays and contemporary debates regarding liveliness and power. Written over 400 years ago, the fictional worlds of Shakespeare’s drama reflect power structures and conceptualizations of sentience, mobility, and agency from a different culture. Within these fictional worlds, however, the stakes of the relationship between power and conceptions of liveness remain clear: for marginalized people, animals, and organisms, the question of “whose lives matter?” is always politically charged. In contemporary productions, acts of minor agency like Hermione’s and Juliet’s present an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between animacy, agency, and power. As these two characters demonstrate, power does not have to adhere to the logic of the majority; agency can be small or unexpected and still be meaningful. By examining such acts in the context of Shakespeare’s plays, scholars from a range of fields can better understand and more creatively imagine alternative modes of empowerment.

Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: ­University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 291. 2 For more on the dramaturgical significance of Juliet’s visits to Friar L ­ aurence and the spatial mobilities of Romeo and Juliet, see Anny Crunelle-­Vanrigh, “‘O Trespass Sweetly Urged’: The Sex of Space in Romeo and Juliet”’ Cahiers Élisabéthains 49/1 (1996): 39–49. 3 Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter the Body : Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage. (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 2. 4 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 10. 5 Jiri Veltrusky, “Man and Object in the Theatre,” in Paul L. Garvin, A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style: Selected and Translated from the Original Czech (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1964), 84. 6 Bard on the Beach is one of Vancouver’s preeminent theatre companies, and the yearly season, which runs from June to September, is Western Canada’s largest not-for-profit professional Shakespeare festival. 7 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 29. 8 Thérèse Malachy, La Mort En Situation Dans Le Théâtre Contemporain (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1982).

10 Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies Rethinking the Environment in Macbeth and King Lear Giles Whiteley

O, what a world’s convention of agonies is here! All external nature in a storm, all moral nature convulsed,—the real madness of Lear, the feigned madness of Edgar, the babbling of the Fool, the desperate fidelity of Kent — surely such a scene was never conceived before or since! Take it but as a picture for the eye only, it is […] terrific […]. Or let it have been uttered to the blind, the howlings of nature would seem converted into the voice of conscious humanity. This scene ends with the first symptoms of positive derangement.1

In his notes of 1817, the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge ­meditated on King Lear and its excessiveness. For Coleridge, Shakespeare’s achievement in the play was environmental. Commenting on Act 3, Scene 4, Coleridge claims that the world of King Lear impossibly ­coalesces the forces of “all external nature” and “all moral nature.” It was such excessiveness that later famously led A. C. Bradley to call the play “too huge for the stage”2 —and thus the necessity for Nahum Tate’s ­alternative version, reparative in its re-writing of the play, attempting to circumscribe its violence. Coleridge sets up an analogy between two meanings of “nature”: the material world and humanity’s innate character. The physical storm is associated with the moral “convulsion,” which is itemized by four types of “madness,” whether real, mimed, or unconscious, in the figures of Lear, Edgar, the Fool, and Kent. The spectacle turns all the world into a stage, and the storms of nature convert “into the voice of conscious humanity,” so that the writing itself becomes ­ecomimetic, imitating its environment.3 But at the same time, “this scene ends with the first symptoms of positive derangement,” Coleridge concludes, so that it is at this moment when we can say that Lear is mad. It is the storm that mimes the mind and not the other way around. The isocolon of his phrasing, “all external nature in a storm, all moral nature convulsed,” shows the parallelism he sees at work, but the continuation of the argument suggests that Coleridge ranks the terms hierarchically. The environment in King Lear becomes nothing more than a reflection of a certain state of nature, one which associates human character with the conditions of the world beyond.

Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies  135 It is not surprising that we should find Coleridge impressed by the storm in King Lear. As one of the key figures in British Romanticism, we may expect to find him meditating on “Nature.” I capitalize the term to highlight that such an idea is always already conceptual. The Romantics represent an important moment, perhaps the most important moment, in the history of this conceptualization. Figures such as Coleridge responded to the ideologies of the Enlightenment, and the contemporary moments of capitalism and industrialization, by advocating a return to the natural world, which, in its sublimity, promised a moment of transcendence which would produce a new Weltanschauung. If there was something terrifying in this movement, there was also something consoling, a return to a pre-capitalist, agrarian social system: sweet-mother Nature was nurturing at her heart. And whether consciously or unconsciously, it is this Romantic moment which ecocriticism has tended to prioritize in the last half a century. But as Timothy Morton puts it, “putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.”4 For ­Morton, there is no such thing as “Nature,” and the natural world is not i­ntrinsically benign. Coleridge’s reading of King Lear is symptomatic of a Romantic ­objectification of Nature; the natural world is defined, understood, and delimited by the human subject. The particular rhetorical term for Coleridge’s operation had not yet been coined, for it was an aesthetic move which Romanticism was at least partly responsible for making possible. Coleridge reads “external nature” as a mirror of “moral nature,” so that the environment of King Lear becomes a “pathetic fallacy.” The term comes from the Victorian critic John Ruskin, for whom the pathetic fallacy confuses subjective and objective, manifesting “a falseness in all our impressions of external things,” since we assume that the external environment reflects our subjective moods.5 But the pathos imputed to Nature here is itself the fallacy: nature does not care about our feelings. To read the environment of King Lear as pathetic fallacy is a ­retroactive operation, anachronistic since Coleridge interprets it from what we would today identify as a “Romantic” perspective. Such a reading is an effect of Coleridge’s historical moment, but it is also an effect of the shape of Shakespeare’s later career and his legacy. The environment of King Lear, as we shall see, has tended historically to be read through Macbeth.6 In this chapter, I would like to suggest a different approach: rather than seeing the environments as nothing more than the objective correlative of a subjective state, I want to highlight the ways in which they situate the characters in a world which escapes their sovereignty. I want to examine the ways in which the environments in these plays treat characters as objects rather than subjects. In an

136  Giles Whiteley argument inspired by Morton’s work on developing the tools to speak about an ecology without Nature,7 I seek to subvert the hierarchy that undergirds Coleridge’s isocolon. Instead of seeing the storm as a manifestation of a troubled mind, this chapter reads the mind as a product of the state of nature which treats us as nothing more than animals— objects within the environment. As such, to “rethink” the environment in Macbeth and King Lear, as my subtitle promises, means not only to recontextualize the ways in which Shakespeare represents the environment in these two plays but also to rethink just what an environment is in Shakespeare’s texts. I argue that Shakespeare’s environments in Macbeth and King Lear are dark ecologies. But whereas Morton defines “dark ecology” as a mode of queer or contingent ecological critique, which is alive to the ­paradoxes and contradictions of the contemporary Anthropocene,8 I want to use the term more broadly to describe the ways in which the ecologies of Shakespeare’s two plays are themselves “dark” ones—alive to the strange, to the weird, to the uncanny, to death and violence, which situate the ­human being as simply one object among many in the “mesh” of being.

Weirding Macbeth In his notes of 1818, Coleridge argues that although both Macbeth and King Lear are primarily environmental, they differ in how they relate to their environments. While King Lear “is storm and tempest,” Macbeth “is deep and earthy, — composed to the subterranean music of a troubled conscience, which converts every thing into the wild and fearful!”9 The phrasing foreshadows Martin Heidegger, a key resource for both contemporary ecocritical thought and object-oriented ontology.10 For Heidegger, the facticity of the world (human reality and possibility) must be differentiated from the facticity of the earth, which is the space where human beings find themselves “thrown” (Geworfenheit) and where man “dwells” poetically.11 But as the realm of the “wild and the fearful,” Macbeth’s environment is “strange.” This word occurs some 20 times in the text, where looks “speak things strange” (1.2.47), bodies are contorted into “strange images of death” (1.3.98), and books allow men to “read strange matters” (1.5.63). It is a play where Macbeth may suffer from “a strange infirmity” (3.4.84), seeing ghosts at the dinner table, a lack of stable ground that estranges him (3.4.110), with language itself a kind of “extimacy,” as Jacques Lacan would put it, the subject alienated from himself through the very tools which were supposed to bring him self-identity.12 It turns him into what Morton would call a kind of “strange stranger,” an ambiguous being which resists any reductive knowing or self-knowledge.13 Most obvious among the strange strangers in Macbeth are the witches, “weïrd sisters” (1.3.30, 3.4.131) or “weïrd women” (3.1.2). For Morton,

Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies  137 dark ecology is weird, and he notes the etymology from the Old Norse, urth, meaning looped, and the sense in which the weird is that which is fatal, from Old English, wyrd. But as an adjective, “weird can also mean strange of appearance,”14 and Shakespeare’s witches appear strange to Banquo: you should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret That you are so. (1.3.45–47) As such, their weirdness signals a troubling of gender, an “unsexing” which is also proper to Lady Macbeth (1.5.41), and something which precisely problematizes the idea of the “proper,” making it strange. The witches’ relationship to the wider environment is also weird. Act 4, Scene 1 has been read as an “inverted rite,”15 a parodic simulacrum of the banquet of Act 3, Scene 4, but it can also be read as a kind of demonic ritual (another kind of simulacrum). Into the cauldron the witches place a series of objects which, taken together, create a kind of “mesh” of being (4.1.4–38).16 The witches’ pot accepts all sorts of objects: entrails and partial bodies of animals native to Britain (toads, snakes, newts, frogs, bats, dogs, lizards, wolves, goats); local plants (hemlock, yew); more exotic items (shark, tiger, baboon); mythical items (the dragon’s scale); and the human, or rather, subhuman objects: the “liver of blaspheming Jew” (4.1.26), the “Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips” (4.1.29), and the “Finger of birth-strangled babe / Ditch-delivered by a drab” (4.1.30–31). Each of these objects—animal and human—are strange strangers, where even the familiar becomes strange through juxtaposition, and we remember here that the witches have their familiars with them: the Harpier here, half-bird and half-woman, which “harps on,” speaking in an extimate tongue, “’Tis time, ’tis time” (4.1.3). Situating each strange stranger within the mesh opens each alike unto the other, defamiliarizing it, so that the whole world begins to look weird. Most importantly, Macbeth takes place in an environment which is itself “strange,” where animals are acting curiously. Recalling the last 70 years, the Old Man remarks having seen Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night Hath trifled former knowings. (2.4.3–4) The environment is here figured as exceptional for “night’s predominance,” a “darkness” which “entombs” “the face of earth” (2.4.8–9). “’Tis unnatural,” adds the Old Man (2.4.10), quite literally a dark ecology.17 Animals are acting otherwise so that the order of things, the great

138  Giles Whiteley chain of being which stands in for the facticity of the world in Macbeth, is disrupted in a revolutionary moment in which A falcon towering in her pride of place Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed. (2.4.12–13) Likewise, Duncan’s horses, in “a thing most strange” (2.4.14), “turned wild in nature” (2.4.15), escaping their stalls, only to turn cannibals (2.4.16–17).18 The weather too is “strange.” Lennox recalls that the storm blows down chimneys, destroying those symbols of the domestic and civilization, on the “unruly” night of the murder: and, as they say, Lamentings heard i’th’ air, strange screams of death, And prophesying, with accents terrible, Of dire combustion, and confused events New hatched to th’ woeful time. The obscure bird Clamoured the livelong night. Some say the earth Was feverous and did shake. (2.3.55–61) The “obscure bird” (the owl) is a strange stranger, a thing of darkness (from Latin, obscūrus, dark), responding to the earthquake. For many characters in this play, events such as these can only be understood as elements of prophecy. But in point of fact, discussions of the weather never actually precede the events themselves: they always occur posthumously, as in this speech of Lennox.19 It is only after the “lamentings” and “strange screams of death” are heard that “some say” they felt an earthquake. The weather does not actually prophecy anything; it is only later that the link between the environment and the political turmoil of the plot is made. This disjunction between how the characters interpret the events and the order in which they actually take place may be easily missed. For Gwilym Jones, “Macbeth stages storms that conform to the theatrical status quo, in that they provide a backdrop for the supernatural figures.”20 As Simon C. Estok writes, “weather was inexplicable, and Shakespeare’s contemporaries were desperate for answers, for scapegoats, and for blood.”21 But the realities of the environment were changing during the period when Shakespeare wrote these plays (a period now known as the Little Ice Age), and Estok notes that storm activity had increased by some 85 percent in the second half of the sixteenth century. 22 Neo-historicist readings have described the ways in which Shakespeare’s audience likely would have responded to his

Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies  139 storms, and Leslie Thomson notes that the stage directions “Thunder and Lightening”—which appear whenever the witches do (1.1, 1.3., 3.5, 4.1)—would have had specifically supernatural connotations for the Renaissance public. 23 In his Demonologie (1597), King James famously claimed that witches could “rayse stormes and tempestes in the aire, either upon Sea or land, though not universally.” These kinds of storms were supernatural and were “verie easie to be discerned from anie other naturall tempestes,”24 although precisely on what grounds was unclear. 25 Shakespeare himself clearly situates Macbeth’s witches within Renaissance discourse on the supernatural. When the first witch seeks revenge on a sailor, the second witch offers to “give thee a wind” (1.3.11), as does the third (1.3.12), so that they claim power over the environment, scheming to create a storm. For Jones, the performativity of the first witch’s “I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do” (1.3.10), conjuring the storm through the power of her language, shows that “Macbeth’s Witches are in complete control of the weather.”26 Proverbially, “after word comes weird” (OED, “weird,” n. 4a), suggesting the uncanny way in which prophecies may sometimes come true. But there is nothing necessarily weird about the prophecies in Macbeth, since the witches may not augur supernatural events. Their first set of prophecies (1.3.48–50) are less prophetic than an instigation to action, made possible in part by the fact that they are “imperfect speakers” (1.3.70) whose “intelligence” is “strange” (1.3.76). While their words allow Lady Macbeth to dream beyond “this ignorant present” (1.5.57), she comes to see “the future in the instant” (1.5.58), thereby creating it. Likewise, the second set of prophecies (4.1.79–80, 91–93) is ultimately revealed to be far from supernatural, with Macduff having been “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped’” (5.8.15–16), and Malcolm telling his soldiers to carry with them camouflage from the Wood of Birnam (5.4.3). In this context where supposedly supernatural events can be explained more rationally, it is important to note that the witches’ claim that they possess power over the weather comes after a very different reflection on the causes of storms. Earlier, when the Captain retells the events of the battle to Duncan, he uses a meteorological analogy: As whence the sun ’gins his reflection, Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders, So from that spring, whence comfort seemed to come, Discomfort swells[.] (1.2.25–28) As Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason note, the word “reflection” has astronomical connotations, “referring to the sun’s ‘turning back’ at the

140  Giles Whiteley equinox […], a time when storms and thunder occur.”27 As such, the Captain has already given a possibly natural cause for the storms. Given the potential limitations of the witches’ powers, it is at least possible to read their weirdness as a property of the environment, rather than think the environment reflects their weird state. When Banquo first greets the witches, he cries: What are these, So withered and so wild in their attire, That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’ earth, And yet are on’t? (1.3.39–42) Banquo’s use of the word “these” here is more ambiguous than ­ rinculo’s use of the same term as a demonstrative pronoun in The T ­Tempest: “these are devils” (2.2.37). Instead, Banquo uses the word as a demonstrative determiner, where “these” indicates things or persons present or near (OED, “these,” pron. and adj. 3a), but where no more descriptive pronoun is available. The witches are objects; or rather, they stand for objects, both grammatically and in their environment. They are “withered,” “wild,” and “look not like th’inhabitants o’th’ earth” but are “on’t.” This phrasing registers the interconnectedness of strange strangers, of objects that become all the more strange when situated, “the entanglement of all strangers.”28 The “earth” here is a “mesh” in which the witches come into contact with Macbeth and Banquo, entangling all of them alike, and weirding Macbeth, warping him, so that his “fate” becomes a “dark” one, his destiny twisted. The “withered” and “wild” attire of the witches attests to their state of nature, as what is proper to it. Or rather, they find themselves situated “upon this blasted heath” (1.3.77), as Macbeth himself clarifies. The heath is “blasted,” “balefully or perniciously blown or breathed upon” by “parching wind” and “lightning” (OED, “blasted,” adj. 1). 29 No wonder the witches look “withered” and “wild”: they are products of their environment, objects which have been themselves ravaged by the elements. They thus become “instruments of darkness” (1.3.126), and their strange appearance speaks to the dark ecology which has produced them.

King Lear’s “Blasted Heath” As A. C. Bradley argues, the “peculiar greatness” of King Lear is created by the vagueness of the scene where the action takes place […]; the strange atmosphere, cold and dark, […] enfolding these figures and

Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies  141 magnifying their dim outlines like a winter mist; the half-realized suggestions of vast universal powers working in the world of individual fates and passions.30 This vagueness of the environment is key to the plot: like Macbeth after it, King Lear rests on creating a “strange atmosphere” which dislocates the subject. The ambient poetics of Bradley’s own lines evokes a dark ecology in which “things become misty, shifty, nebulous, uncanny,” ­riddled with a “spectral strangeness that haunts being.”31 This very “vastness” makes the play dislocated and its effect is to dislocate the audience. It is perhaps partly because of the effect of such dislocations that the phrase “Lear on the heath” has become a kind of shorthand to describe a man’s struggles with his sanity. But in point of fact, Lear may not be  “on’t’” because the location is never actually specified.32 Perhaps there is something of a psychological wish-fulfilment at play here, a ­necessary and protective méconnaissance in our attempts to locate the action: when we say “Lear on the heath,” we seek to situate the events in a recognizable geography. As Jones puts it, “to locate Lear is to save him from madness.”33 It is perhaps also to save ourselves from a similar fate. Bradley was not averse to the slippage, speaking of “the agony which culminated in the storm upon the heath.”34 Bradley’s own Romanticism causes him to interpret King Lear’s storms as though they are pathetic fallacies, and he quotes another critic of the period, Charles Lamb, in support: “The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano; they are storms […]. It is his mind which is laid bare.”35 “Yes, ‘they are storms’,” Bradley approvingly replies: “the explosions of Lear’s passion, and the bursts of rain and thunder, are not, what for the senses they must be, two things, but manifestations of one thing.” Bradley collapses all the differences between the external and the internal into an identity, so that the storm manifests “the powers of the tormented soul.”36 That commentators from Romanticism onward approach the storms as pathetic fallacies is unsurprising, because Lear himself makes a similar reading.37 True enough, the storm begins almost in response to Lear’s anguish. At the end of Act 2, Lear rails against Goneril and Regan: “You think I’ll weep, / No, I’ll not weep” (2.2.471–72). Here, the Folio stage direction “Storm and Tempest” completes Lear’s half-line, as though the weather replies to his exclamations. But identifying the storm with Lear’s mind becomes problematic from the very next scene. Act 3 begins in the Folio with the stage direction “Storm still,” but Lear is not present onstage through this scene, so the weather clearly exists independently of the person. While the storm could still be read as a symbolic projection of Lear’s mind, this suggests that the environment of King Lear maintains a more natural logic when taken as a fictional world on its

142  Giles Whiteley own terms. Of course, it may be objected that while the scene does not feature Lear in body, his state of mind is indeed its subject. At the opening of the scene, Lear’s actions are reported by the Knight to Kent: KENT:  Who’s there, besides foul weather? KNIGHT:  One minded like the weather, most KENT:  I know you. Where’s the king?

unquietly.

KNIGHT:  Contending

with the fretful elements; Bids the winds blow the earth into the sea, Or swell the curled water ’bove the main, That things might change or cease; tears his white hair, Which the impetuous blasts with eyeless rage Catch in their fury and make nothing of, Strives in his little world of man to outscorn The to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain[.] (3.1.1–11)

Kent’s initial question, using “who” interrogatively, makes “foul weather,” which is already strange, stranger, since weather here may be a ­subject, one which may presumably reply if the Knight does not. Simultaneously, it makes the Knight into an object, simply another strange stranger within the mesh of the storm. While G. K. Hunter argues that the Knight’s first reply definitively establishes the parallel between the weather and the mental state of the characters,38 a simile encodes a difference within itself, built on the basis of non-identity. By definition, the simile tells us that the storm is pointedly not the external manifestation of a given subject’s mind. As such, the Knight’s answer is another example of an extimate language, which reveals that what should be internal to the subject is located outside. It is not that the storm reflects the “unquiet” mind, but rather that it makes the mind into its object, conditioning it. However, Lear himself does not see this, instead “bid[ing] the winds blow” (3.1.5), ordering them to obey his will. We see as much in the next scene, in which Lear’s language is violent and uncontrolled—“like the weather,” we’re tempted to say: Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite flat the thick rotundity o’the world! Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man! (3.2.1–9)

Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies  143 The language is performative; the epanalepsis of the first line, the alliteration of the hard c’s that arrest the speech, the caesuras that cleave lines in two, come together to create an ambient poetics. It is ecomimetic, what Morton might call “timbral,” unleashing “the sound in its physicality, rather than […] its symbolic meaning.”39 Lear makes language itself thingly. But if Lear believes the weather to be under his control, the Fool knows better, exhorting him to go indoors: “Here’s a night pities neither wise man nor fool” (3.2.13). The world cares neither for Lear nor his extravagant claims. So too Kent, when he arrives: Things that love night Love not such nights as these. The wrathful skies Gallow the very wanderers of the dark, And make them keep their caves. Since I was man Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder, Such groans of roaring wind and rain I never Remember to have heard. Man’s nature cannot carry Th’affliction, nor the fear. (3.2.42–49) It is the skies that are “wrathful,” and the animals on this blighted earth are “wanderers of the dark,” nocturnal creatures who meander across these barren spaces, lacking fixed destination or design, like the wind, to which the word “wander” is linked through the Old Germanic, wend. Such strange strangers are “dark,” wandering through an environment which is itself a kind of dark ecology. It is one which turns all exposed to the elements into objects alike, irrespective of the arrogance of man that “cannot carry / Th’affliction.” The noun suggests, etymologically, the state of being struck down, destroyed, or ruined: it makes man subject to the affect, fear, what Heidegger would call the Stimmung, and his frail frame is unable to maintain its coherence in the face of this elemental environment. “The tyranny of the open night’s too rough / For nature to endure” (3.4.2), as Kent puts it later: it does not respect the will of man, still less the facticity of his world. But if Lear initially sees a pathetic fallacy in the storm, then he begins to become more open to this environment as he goes mad. When he meets Edgar dressed as Poor Tom, he mistakes him for a “philosopher” and asks him: “What is the cause of thunder?” (3.4.150). How we take the word determines how we read the motive behind Lear’s question. If he means “philosopher” as in a magician or sorcerer, the cause of the thunder would presumably be supernatural, but if he means “philosopher” as in a natural scientist (more probable given the context), it suggests that Lear is looking here for a natural “cause.”40 Asking “the cause of thunder” means recognizing that he himself may

144  Giles Whiteley not be the cause; it also means recognizing the limitations of man’s sovereignty over the earth.

Lear as Thing From the first scene of the third act, the Knight tells Kent that Lear is “contending with the fretful elements” (3.1.4). He is “contending” with them, striving against them: they are outside, acting upon his mortal frame. Cast out in the storm, Lear lacks the protections of civilization: a roof and clothing. We recall Lear chiding Kent: “Thou think’st ’tis much that this contentious storm, / Invades us to the skin” (3.4.6–7). The rain has not simply soaked through his clothing, but the storm exposes the human body as an object to the elements; it “invades us,” penetrates with hostile intention. The importance of clothing is a theme in Macbeth, where the witches’ attire is “wild,” and in King Lear, too, clothing must be seemly. From the initial scene of the play, in which Lear abdicates his throne, he has cast off his crown, the Fool puns (1.4.152–56), and later, after going insane, Lear enters “crowned with wild flowers” (4.6.80). Clearly, to some degree, King Lear is a world in which the clothes make the man. In the storm, Kent discovers Lear hatless: “Alack, bareheaded?” he ­exclaims in disbelief (3.2.60). Symbolically, it figures Lear as a commoner, but it also speaks to his new-found thingly status. When Kent eventually persuades him to take some shelter, Lear kneels in a contrite moment of prayer: Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? (3.4.28–32) He empathizes with these “poor naked wretches,” naked because they are poor, poor because they are naked, wretches because they are both. The storm is “pitiless,” uncaring of their circumstances and their “looped and windowed raggedness,” which cannot defend their bodies from the elements. Later in the same scene, Lear returns to the topic: Why, thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha? Here’s three on’s us are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no

Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies  145 more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings: come, unbutton here. (3.4.99–107) This time Lear is speaking in prose rather than poetry, unseemly for a king and suggesting his mental dislocation, with the speech ending with him “tearing at his clothes.” For Lear, man would be better off dead than exposed. The “uncovered body” is an object of the “extremity” of the environment, one which has the power to demand an “answer.” The thought leads Lear to philosophize, to consider what differentiates man from the animal. Noting the clothes Poor Tom currently sports, Lear calls him “the thing itself.” I want to pause in conclusion with the significance of Lear’s phrase. In what way is Poor Tom “the thing itself”? For Lear, as the speech makes clear, one becomes the “thing” by casting off the trinkets of civilization. It is only when man is “unaccommodated,” when he is exposed, his body a strange stranger in the mesh, that he is revealed to be what he always already was: the “thing,” “a poor, bare, forked animal.” The resonances of the word may be usefully read through Heidegger, who attempts to distinguish das Ding from objects. In one sense, an object can be known: it can be represented, a move which Heidegger considers quintessentially “metaphysical” and associates with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, for whom the thing is “the object-in-itself.” This Ding-an-sich is noumenal and exists “without the human act of representing it,” Heidegger comments, so that Kant’s thing becomes “an object that is no object for us.”41 For Heidegger, by contrast, the thing is characterized by its “thingness.” This quality is manifested in the thing’s “presencing,” in which it is “unconcealed” so that the fact that the thing things calls us as witnesses to acknowledge the thinginess of the thing. It is not that the thing remains unknowable in the Kantian sense; instead, the thing implicates us as being-in-the-world. “Thinging gathers,” Heidegger writes, so that the thing stands forth not as a thingin-itself but as a thing itself.42 Thus we have Lear’s “thing itself.” Casting off the trappings of civilization, Lear sees the body unconcealed as an animal one. Unrecognizably “human,” it becomes strange. This “thing itself” is an uncanny reminder: it presences, things itself, marking the human as first and foremost a thing. And it is the environment, the dark ecology of King Lear, which allows the thing to unveil itself. Of course, Lear recognizes himself in Poor Tom, and not simply because Poor Tom is his inverted simulacrum but rather because he recognizes in the “thing” laid bare before him what he has already become and what the storm has allowed him to be. It is Lear who has been exposed to these elements, revealed to be a “poor naked wretch” once the trappings of his former life are removed.

146  Giles Whiteley Poor Tom manifests what he already knows: that beneath it all, he too is nothing more than “the thing itself.” For Marvin Rosenberg, Lear’s “thing itself” is “primeval”: Poor Tom’s apparition maddens Lear partly because Tom incarnates Lear’s most dreaded imaginings: to be a houseless, naked companion to the wolf and the owl, to liberate the beast residing in man—in Lear himself. The thing itself is not merely man—it is id, man naked, irrational, careless of social accommodations. Mad.43 Lear had referred to the wolf and the owl, two more “wanderers of the dark,” earlier when rebuking the meagre hospitality offered by Goneril: No! Rather I abjure all roofs and choose To wage against the enmity o’th’ air— To be a comrade with the wolf and owl[.] (2.2.397–99) To be “comrade with the wolf and owl” means being roofless, a strange stranger exposed to the environment. Later in the same scene, he explicitly equates all objects when they are situated in this dark ecology. “Man’s life is cheap as beast’s” (2.2.456), Lear exclaims, meaning that both are strange strangers in the mesh. Rosenberg’s analysis, informed by psychoanalysis, gets halfway to the thingness of Lear’s thing. But rather than simply designating the thing the id, we may be better off approaching it through Lacan in his reading of Heidegger. For Lacan, the animal is differentiated from the human through the symbolic order, and we have seen that clothing in King Lear carries symbolic significance, ­allied with civilization.44 But Lacan also distinguishes between das Ding (la chose), the thing in its “dumb reality,” and die Sache, the thing in the symbolic order.45 Das Ding is “the beyond-of-the-signified” and is allied with the Real, “that which resists symbolization absolutely.”46 It is the object of desire, one which has been “lost” and which is “the absolute Other of the subject.”47 If Lear is indeed mad, then his madness rests on becoming this Lacanian chose, unveiled precisely through a dark ecology which makes him into “the thing itself,” another strange stranger in the mesh. Lear is hysterical in Lacanian terms, seeking “to recreate a state centered on the object,” das Ding.48 Hence, his obsessive return to the “naked wretch,” the condition of the strange strangers, the wolf and the owl, the “unaccommodated” state of “the thing itself.” But it is only on the condition that Lear is not an agent directing his environment and simply one object among others that he can gain this insight. Such is a state which weirds its subjects, revealing them to be strange strangers and thinging things. In plays such as Macbeth and King Lear, strangeness seems to be produced by the environment, rather

Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies  147 than producing it. From the perspective of an ecology without Nature, what Shakespeare’s two plays begin to dramatize is the ways in which the hubris of a Lear or a Macbeth, figures who think they have power to shape their environments, is the hubris of all of humanity. Shakespeare shows that we are all part of the mesh, simply objects in a world of strange strangers. And if these environments are like Gloucester’s world after he has been blinded, “all dark and comfortless” (3.7.84), then it’s these kinds of dark ecologies which portray the true secret of life: in the end, we are all simply things.

Notes 1 S. T. Coleridge, The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. N. Coleridge, 2 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1836), II, 201. 2 A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 228. 3 I take “ecomimesis” from Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature: ­Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 32–33. 4 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 5. 5 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 4.12.5, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903–1912), V, 205. 6 I accept here the standard dating of the plays: see Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (New York: Norton, 1997), 69–144. In addition, perhaps the environments of both these plays have been read through that of Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, in which the storm is figured as a pathetic fallacy, “an insubstantial pageant” (4.1.145). All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from the Arden Third Series editions. 7 While Morton is writing primarily about Romantic and post-Romantic art, his points are applicable to Shakespeare, and he includes a brief but suggestive reading of The Tempest in Ecology without Nature, 81–82. For a different, but consonant, attempt to characterize Shakespeare’s “reframing the Romantic vision of nature in an age of ecological crisis,” see Steve Mentz, “Tongues in the Storm: Shakespeare, Ecological Crisis, and the Resources of Genre,” in Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton (London: Ashgate, 2011), 155–71 (p. 159). 8 Morton, Ecology without Nature, 143. 9 Coleridge, Literary Remains, I, 104. 10 Morton’s relationship with OOO cannot be adequately glossed here, but suffice it to recall that he did, for a while, openly acknowledge the possibilities of a strategic alliance: see Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 16–17. 11 See Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Alfred Hofstadter (London: Harper, 2013), 141–59 and 210–27. 12 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960: The Seminar of  Jacques Lacan: Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 2008), 171. 13 On “strange strangers,” see Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 38–50. 14 Morton, Dark Ecology, 5.

148  Giles Whiteley 15 I borrow the phrase from Walter Pater’s reading of Richard II in “Shakespeare’s English Kings” in Appreciations with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1944), 205–206. 16 On the “mesh,” see Morton, The Ecological Thought, 29: “All life forms are the mesh, and so are all the dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings.” 17 For an alternative approach to the “unnatural” poetics of Macbeth, see ­Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare’s Nature: from Cultivation to Culture ­(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 121–50. 18 For an ecocritical approach to the motif of cannibalism in the play, see ­Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia ­(London: ­Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 24–25. 19 This is a point also made by Gwilym Jones in Shakespeare’s Storms ­(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 94–96. 20 Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, 87. I discovered Jones late in the process of researching this essay, and while I disagree with the distinction he draws between Macbeth (in which storms are supposedly supernatural) and King Lear (in which they are natural), I owe a great deal to him in clarifying my own residual critical “darkness.” For a foundational neo-historicist approach to the ways in which Shakespeare’s audience would have understood “nature,” see Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 21 Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, 20. 22 Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare, 20, quoting Brian Fagan, and see Robert Markley, “Summer’s Lease: Shakespeare in the Little Ice Age,” in Early Modern Ecostudies, ed. Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 131–142. 23 Leslie Thomson, “The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning: Stage Directions and Audience Expectations”, Early Theatre 2 (1999): 11–24. 24 James Stewart, Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogue (Edinburgh: Robert Walde, 1597), 46. Accessed online through EEBO: https://eebo.chadwyck. com. 25 On this point, see Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, 91. 26 Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, 93. 27 S. Clark and R. Wilson, eds., Macbeth (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 132 n. 28 Morton, The Ecological Thought, 47. 29 The heath is also pointedly an economically significant site: it is a “‘wasteland’ of no economic value,” as Richard Kerridge points out in “An Ecocritic’s Macbeth,” in Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Bruckner and Brayton, 193–210 (p. 209). 30 Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 228–29. 31 Morton, Dark Ecology, 74. 32 See James Ogden, “Lear’s Blasted Heath,” Durham University Journal, 80 (1988): 19–26; Henry S. Turner, “King Lear Without: The Heath,” Renaissance Drama, 28 (1997): 161–93; and Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, 62–64. 33 Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, 63. 34 Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 231. 35 Charles Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” (1810–1811), in The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb, ed. Percy Fitzgerald, 6 vols. ­(London: E. Moxon & Co., 1876), IV, 205. 36 Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 248. 37 For two examples of twentieth-century criticism which adopt this view, see F. Catherine Dunn, “The Storm in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 3/4

Shakespeare’s Dark Ecologies  149

38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47 48

(1952): 329–33, and Josephine Waters Bennett, “The Storm Within: The Madness of Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 13/2 (1962): 137–55. G. K. Hunter, ed., King Lear (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 241 n. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 39. For a more detailed analysis of this speech, see Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms, 76–78. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 174. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 172. Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Newark: University of ­Delaware Press, 1972), 217. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 54. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 65. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 65; Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1991), 66. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 63. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 64. The point compares with the ­Discourse of the Hysteric, an idea which Lacan develops in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII, trans. ­Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), 29–38.

Part III

Performance

11 Human Remains Acting, Objects, and Belief in Performance Aoife Monks

In 2008, a real skull appeared as Yorick in a production of Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in Stratford. The skull remained in the role for the Stratford run of the show, but when the RSC transferred to London, the skull was withdrawn, returned to the archive, and replaced by its plastic replica in performance. The brevity of the skull’s stage appearance was due to its discovery by the British press. It was “outed” as the skull of André Tchaikowsky, a classical pianist and Holocaust survivor who, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1979 at age 46, bequeathed his organs to medical research and his skull to the theatre, writing in his will that the skull “shall be offered by the institution receiving my body to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in theatrical performance.”1 Pascale Aebischer tells the story of how the RSC’s props department received the skull after Tchaikowsky’s death in 1982, to “the evident delight of the department dog,”2 relating how the skull was aired on the rooftop of one of the company’s buildings (for two years according to the André Tchaikowsky website)3 in order to dry and bleach it, before it was consigned to a specially made box in the theatre’s prop store. There it languished for 26 years, momentarily coming to life in a photo shoot with Roger Rees in 1984 and appearing in rehearsals for Mark Rylance’s Hamlet in 1989, only to be replaced by its cast replica in performance.4 The actors felt unable to employ Tchaikowsky’s skull, arguing that “it would be inappropriate to use a real skull during the performances in the same way that we would not be using real blood etc.”5 Here, the skull’s story appeared to come to an end, and it waited tirelessly in the props room for its moment in the limelight, until finally, in August 2008, Tchaikowsky’s remains appeared in the role of Yorick. Playing alongside the skull was the actor David Tennant, famous for his leading role in the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who,6 and Patrick Stewart as Claudius, famous for his role in Star Trek: The Next Generation.7 Greg Doran, the director of the show, justified his use of the object by explaining that he had wanted “to make the performance as real as ­possible.”8 However, when the skull’s own reality emerged—its name, occupation, history, desires, trauma—it was hastily withdrawn

154  Aoife Monks and returned to the archive for fear of “’toppli[ing]’ the show”9 and ­“distract[ing] the audience.”10 Demonstrating a mimetic know-how that would have impressed even Plato, the RSC replaced the skull with its exact copy, expecting that the second-order status of the replica would do less to distract the audience. However, during the Stratford run, the skull’s moment in the limelight was by no means assured when the RSC discovered that it needed a permit from the Human Tissue Authority to employ the skull onstage.11 During the previews, therefore, Tennant performed with another real skull, this one coming to the stage not with an autobiography but with a performance history as the prop that had been used in 1813 by the great nineteenth-century actor Edmund Kean. ­Tennant’s acting therefore accessed the “reality” of this replacement skull by virtue of its inheritance, as Doran described: A piece of theatre history happened that night on the Stratford stage as David Tennant, a 21st-century Hamlet, stared into the empty eye sockets that a nineteenth-century Hamlet had used. For those of us watching, a little shiver of connection occurred.12 This story, then, is of a ghostly object that arrives at the theatre with a set of injunctions, demanding action and remembrance. The object is met with prevarication, indecision, and rehearsal, but no acting. It haunts the rooftops of the theatre building, while it is imitated by its likeness onstage. Finally, it appears in the name of truth and then disappears in fear of discovery. It is tempting to read this as the story of the RSC as Hamlet and Tchaikowsky’s skull as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. It is easy to dismiss the media frenzy about this story as an instance of morbid prurience during the silly season. Nonetheless, the power ascribed to the skull—its imagined ability to produce truthful acting and to topple the show, once discovered by the audience—expresses some interesting assumptions about the role that human remains might play in the practices of acting. Objects are imagined to function like catalysts for “real” acting, and human remains—particularly a skull with a past—are viewed as especially powerful for this process. However, just as they seem to offer actors potent stimuli for performance, human remains also threaten to derail this process by insisting on their autonomy from the illusion and the claims of the actor. Once the audience becomes aware of their presence, remains are seen to disrupt the secret equilibrium between actor and object. The language I use here, of “catalyst” and “stimulus,” is not ­accidental. What undergirds this approach to human remains, I argue, is the residue of Stanislavskian acting theory, whose investment in the real status of objects onstage informs the ways in which these human props have been imagined in performance. Stanislavski’s interest in the theories of Pavlov and the science of behaviorism renders the theatrical world of

Human Remains  155 objects a source of stimulus for the psychophysical transformation of the a­ ctor. Stanislavski’s theories were influenced, as Joseph Roach argues, by the behaviorist notion that “objectively controlled manipulation of the physical environment will alter the inward man.”13 However, the equilibrium of the inner-actor/outer-object relationship is a fragile one, and while remains are viewed by artists like Doran as particularly powerful vehicles for the production of a truthful performance, they also threaten to reveal the precariousness of acting and the ambivalent subject status of actors. This chapter examines a range of strategies employed by actors to ­harness and contain the disruptive powers of human remains. I will begin by looking further at how they might be imagined through Stanislavski’s complex and often contradictory approach to objects in performance and argue that their use onstage resembles that of religious relics. I will consider the ways in which communion with objects might facilitate and displace virtuosity in acting, and then examine how Ron Vawter controlled the power of the cremated ashes that he used in his 1992 performance Roy Cohn/Jack Smith by making all of his theatrical strategies public—apart from his use of human remains. These examples help me to investigate how the language of possession, the anamorphic powers of relics, and the struggles over authority and agency in performance feature in the imagined role that human remains play in producing acting. I argue, furthermore, that the abject qualities of relics may function as powerful and disturbing metaphors for the process of acting itself, by underscoring the loss of self that the actor must undergo in order to act. Before I examine these performances, however, I want to spend some time thinking through the ways in which remains have been imagined to work onstage and how they might occupy a Stanislavskian economy of actor/object relations.

Anamorphosis, Belief, and the Relic In the theatre galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) sits a human skull that is missing most of its teeth. Its cranium is signed with names, in blue felt-tip marker, and it is surrounded by paraphernalia of the stage: a portrait of Mozart, a Pink Floyd poster, the score to Jesus Christ Superstar. This is the skull that played Yorick in the 1980 Royal Court production of Hamlet starring Jonathan Pryce, famous for his depiction of a Hamlet possessed by the ghost of his father. The skull, the V&A online catalog tells us, was signed by the cast and entered as a raffle prize at the end of the production. In an oddly Dickensian twist, it was sent to the museum in a cardboard box, like a foundling: It was accompanied by a short note, which explained that the d ­ onor had been given it as a present by someone who had won it in a raffle.

156  Aoife Monks The donor, who confessed to being superstitious, clearly did not want to keep the skull at home and thought we might like to have it for our collections.14 This story is noted by the gnomic statement in the museum’s catalog: “Given anonymously.”15 The skull arrives at the V&A having traveled through a series of “regimes of value,” in Arjun Appadurai’s term,16 moving from self to thing, from commodity to gift, from theatrical metonym to member of a collection. In doing so, it marks the shifting status of human remains as body, theatrical property, conduit for acting (it is accompanied by a picture of Pryce addressing the skull), memento mori for audience and Hamlet alike, debased object-as-prize, and, finally, evidence of a lost performance. Perhaps we can identify in this shifting state the great attraction of human remains for the t­ heatre. Skulls personify our ambivalent relationship to bodies, functioning ­simultaneously as objects and as the remains of selves. Like the Pryce prop, Tchaikowsky’s skull was once “somebody” or “somebody’s”; it was once a self, or owned by a self, and was then owned by a theatre, employed by an actor, and is now the possession of the RSC archive. Its murky status as a property makes visible the dialectical relationship between subjects and objects; it makes concrete the frailty and fragility of subjectivity. The skull stands as a memento mori not only for our ­impending deaths but also for the precariousness of our selves. However, this memento mori quality is not necessarily latent in the skull but is brought to life through the actor’s interaction with it— through touch, as Alice Rayner argues of stage props.17 In the 2009 BBC film of the RSC’s Hamlet,18 first the gravedigger and then Hamlet confronted the skull, coming face to face with a subject-turned-object. Cradling Yorick in his hands and staring intently into its eye sockets, Tennant’s Hamlet addressed his lines to the skull, pausing occasionally to pick at its bristles, teeth, and bone. It was the combined act of looking and touching that brought Yorick (and Tchaikowsky) to life; it was the skull’s incorporation by the actor, Tennant’s embodied act of narrativization, which bestowed it with subjectivity. Here, Tennant’s touch produced the anamorphosis identified by Andrew Sofer19 in bestowing life and subjectivity to the skull, while simultaneously asserting all the more the skull’s inanimate tangibility. By gaining a story and a name, the skull began to look back, returning Tennant’s mildly cadaverous stare with the puppet’s uncanny gaze. 20 It is in this unstable state between subject and object that Sofer ­identifies the power of the stage skull’s anamorphic tendencies, in how it “leap[s] from the ‘literalization’ of the memento mori skull as prop to its personification as character—its refusal to be reified into a dead thing.”21 This ability of a skull to move from its status as object to becoming an uncanny kind of subject always comes with the risk of

Human Remains  157 upstaging the actor who plays across from it, producing a perspectival shift in the theatre audience that is similar to what Stephen Greenblatt describes as the affects of the skull in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors: “[W]e must distort and, in essence, efface the figures in order to see the skull.”22 Sofer and Greenblatt point to the anamorphic power of skulls to disrupt the semiotic and phenomenal planes of the reception of artworks for the spectator. I want to refocus this argument on a study of the imagined relationship between acting and human remains. This approach draws attention to the ways in which actors, in order to produce belief, deliberately harness the skull’s anamorphic powers. This belief is imagined to fuel real and truthful acting. “Real” and “true” are terms that are often used interchangeably and, I argue, emerge from the legacies of Stanislavskian acting theory in which belief, truth, and the real operate in a circular, and often tautological, relation. We can see this circularity in Stanislavski’s argument that “what is conscious and credible gives birth to truth, and truth evokes belief.”23 Stanislavski suggests that this belief is produced through the relationship between a real object onstage and the actor’s concentrated and active focus on this object. Belief emerges through this focus, moving the actor “out of the world of objects and into the world of the imagination.”24 Objects therefore function as vehicles for transformation within the actor, and the reality of these objects is crucial to the successful production of truthful acting: “the more real surroundings are onstage, the nearer to nature the actor’s experiencing should be.”25 This close attention on a real object enables actors to achieve Stanislavski’s aim of manufacturing the experience of being: “completely taken over by the play. Then, independent of his will, [the actor] lives the role, without noticing how he is feeling.”26 Actors therefore ideally lose themselves, or an aspect of themselves, through the medium of the object, and the object is also transformed: “it ceas[es] to exist in its initial form and disappear[s], as it were, to emerge in another, stronger form, fortified by your imagination.”27 By focusing closely on an object, actors are transformed by it, ­forgetting themselves in the process, while at the same time transforming the object by incorporating it into their theatrical world. Based on this system, it is possible to see why human remains might be viewed as so powerful by the inheritors of the Stanislavskian tradition. Here, ­human remains become the equivalents of religious relics in their ability to act as a conduit for belief, and in their particular and peculiar effects on representation. Alexandra Walsham defines the construction of a relic as the process in which objects are imbued with an “autonomous ability to prompt an intense human response.”28 Relics work as a catalyst for belief and as a conduit of it, transfiguring the worshipper’s relationship to reality. In the rhetoric surrounding the use of skulls onstage, we can see that human remains work like religious relics for actors by asserting

158  Aoife Monks their “realness” and commanding the actor’s attention in service to the truth—­transforming both actor and object in the process. Of course, the imagined power of remains relies on a system of faith that imbues the materials of the body (and other forms of remains, such as clothes, souvenirs, burial cloths, and so on) with the status of relic in the first place. An object that has already been interpolated into a broader structure of collective faith therefore affirms individual ­belief. To complicate things further, belief is not only affirmed but produced through this process. Relics therefore both reflect and structure a broader system of belief and the relationship to the material world, reflecting, as Walsham argues, “the logic and grammar of the human and social relationships that such items express and mediate, and which, moreover, they create as active agents.”29 What we see therefore in the rhetoric used by directors like Doran is a faith in the power of human remains to inspire belief in the theatre. ­Actors make belief through their interaction with human remains on which they have bestowed the status of relics, harnessing the narrative resonances of these remains to the labor of believing. These relics thereby transfigure the perceptual landscape of actors, who enter into a system of belief that enables them to make believe. This tautological and circular practice chimes with Stanislavski’s approach to the material world onstage, which Shomit Mitter sums up as “trivially, an action is true because the actor believes in it; far more importantly, the actor is able to believe in the action because it is true. Stage truth displaces actuality by becoming it.”30 The act of make believe through communion with an object produces the making of belief, which reorganizes the materials of the stage to “beget an order of reality which we cannot possess in life.”31 By investing remains with a narrative status that competes with the representational language of the stage, and then by investing this narrative with the status of the real, relics become a conduit for belief that enables actors to relinquish their own reality, in order to access a greater “truthfulness,” as Stanislavski puts it: “truth is inseparable from belief, and belief from truth.”32 Nonetheless, as Sofer and Greenblatt suggest, harnessing human ­remains in service to belief and the production of acting is a risky business. The question of upstaging may be profound—Doran’ s fear that Tchaikowsky’s skull could topple the play suggests that this relationship among belief, object, and the actor’s subjectivity hangs in a delicate balance. If awareness of any one of these elements begins to become too prominent for the audience or the actor, there is a danger of the edifice crumbling and of the actor’s, or the object’s, presence disrupting the system of belief. After all, human remains propose a challenge to the status of theatre as a representational art, continually insisting on their own distinctive history and autonomy. As Walsham argues, “[a] relic is ontologically different from a representation or image: it is not a mere symbol

Human Remains  159 or indicator of divine presence, it is an actual physical embodiment of it.”33 This may be why the cast of Rylance’s Hamlet rejected the use of a real skull just as they would reject real blood: the “realness” of these artifacts ran the risk of piercing the illusion, uncoupling the dramatic sign from its referent. The problem of remains becoming too perceptually prominent for ­actor or audience mimics the tensions between self and object within the actor that is demanded by Stanislavski’s system, relying upon, as Mitter argues, a “combination of censorship and propaganda.”34 ­Actors ­perform “independent of their will” in service to the role and must ­sacrifice some of their agency and authority in order to act. To account for this form of surrender, Stanislavski imagines the actor as fundamentally divided: half communing with the object, half observant of this process; as his fictional protégé Kostya puts it, “I, as it were, split down the middle. One half was the actor, the other watched like an audience.”35 Actors objectify their acting selves, watching and controlling the self critically, as spectators. The actor’s communion with objects necessitates a form of estrangement from the self who performs, producing a secret, repressed relation to things that functions at a distance from the controlling, knowing subject, ensuring that the realness of the actor does not get out of hand and disrupt the sanctity of the illusion. Of course, as Sigmund Freud reminds us, the process of repression always runs the risk of what is repressed making an uncanny return. In The Uncanny (1919), Freud demonstrates how the “unheimlich” is comprised of what was once familiar and has been repressed, making a return that is frightening and strange.36 He particularly emphasizes how the newly rational approach to death represses earlier superstitious beliefs, which “live on in us, on the look-out for confirmation.”37 This, Freud argues, explains the fear of corpses and remains, which is an atavistic one from an animist age, citing “the old idea that whoever dies becomes the enemy of the survivor, intent upon carrying him off.”38 In the fear that Tchaikowsky’s skull might topple the RSC’s Hamlet, we might see some of this magical thinking in operation, centered on the ways in which the repression of the actor’s authorial self might make a reappearance in a competing “actor”—the uncannily animate figure of the skull. The RSC’s replacement of the Tchaikowsky skull with its copy seemed motivated by the fear that this self would “carry off” the precarious and delicately balanced system of repression out of which Stanislavskian acting emerges. Equally, perhaps, the skull in Hamlet and the other kinds of relics (ashes and costumes) I will consider below confront actors with an image of their own art. What we see in the skull, and its source of power, is the limits of the autonomous subject, revealing the boundaries of the self. The uncanny qualities of the cadaver, which Julia Kristeva describes as the “abject,” show us the losses of the “I” through its inadequate traces

160  Aoife Monks in this inanimate object. She describes the corpse as “the most sickening of wastes, [which] is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled.”39 In the corpse, we see the extinguished “I,” the subject that is no more, and in doing so, we experience the limits and borders of subjectivity in the living. The uncanny quality of corpses is to be found in how they bring to light all that the subject must reject and repress in order to maintain the fantasy of autonomous subjecthood: “corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.”40 Of course, as Judith Butler has pointed out in a meditation on the limits of the sexed subject, the abject is a condition of subjectivity and therefore comprises its constitutive aspect, even as it is imagined to function “outside” or “beyond” the borders of the self.41 The corpse, and its remaining relics, therefore functions to unsettle the subject by demonstrating the precariously deathly constitution of life itself. Kristeva’s theory of the abject is useful for thinking about human remains onstage, not least because her description of the abject might apply to the ways in which acting is imagined by Stanislavski and his inheritors. Actors also stage the uncanny boundaries of the self in their apparent ability to give up their own agency, repress their own will in order to be inhabited by another self—voice, subject, and character. The rhetoric used by actors in relation to the risks of acting is often mocked, but perhaps Jill Bennett’s claim about playing Gertrude in the Jonathan Pryce Hamlet that “I feel I am taking my life in my hands” was not simply empty histrionics?42 In drawing attention to the contingencies of subjectivity, the skull stages the practice of acting itself. Actors must take their “I” into their own hands and repress it in favor of becoming a kind of meaningful relic for the audience—a conduit for the spectator’s belief through narrative accumulation, numinous materiality, and a precarious formation of a self at the limits of subjectivity. With this process in mind, we can see that human remains are highly potent objects for the production of acting. But at the same time, they threaten the very art of acting by competing with the actor for the limelight, by acting as an uncanny manifestation of the actor’s process of repression, and by functioning as a memento mori for the actor’s staging of the limits of the self. The skull reminds actors of what they stand to become, what terrors they invite, by the very act of performing. Perhaps, then, the rhetoric that often surrounds modern Shakespeare performance and that indeed emerges from stage fright, as Nicholas Ridout has pointed out, comes from this repression of the self necessitated by Stanislavski’s system of acting.43 To act is to rely on things—and to risk becoming one.

Virtuosity I have argued so far that human remains function onstage to induce ­belief in the actor, facilitating the repression of their authorial selves in the process. In this section, I want to consider how Stanislavski’s system

Human Remains  161 uses objects as a means to circumvent and reconfigure virtuoso performance. The actor’s repression of self, I argue, results in imagining acting as a form of possession by an object, and the practice of possession seems particularly acute when a relic is in play. However, I want to suggest that virtuosity does not disappear in this system but rather that it is displaced onto an object (or relic) whose job is to take on the monstrous aspects of the virtuosic self that must be repressed within the actor. One of the outcomes of the division of the self that we see in ­Stanislavski’s system of acting is the problem presented by virtuosity for the relationship among the actor, the object, and the audience. After all, the technical prowess of the virtuoso risks asserting the actor’s authorial self and disrupting the fragile equilibrium of actor, object, and illusion. As Gabriele Brandstetter argues, this is actually a tension that emerged much earlier, in the mid-eighteenth century, when the virtuosic performer was viewed as a challenge to the theatrical illusion, setting up “a field of conflicting authorities: the authority of the text on the one hand and that of the performer (or interpreter) on the other.”44 Virtuosic performance therefore constitutes a competing authority with the text and its realization through the theatrical illusion, by introducing a rival narrative of actorly presence through “the ethos of the person displaying their individuality.”45 The cultural suspicion of virtuosity, Brandstetter argues, emerges in a rhetoric of monstrosity through the virtuoso’s apparent ability to exceed technical constraint and appear super-human: “a fascination with the technical, with the phantasm of the human-­machine, clings to the virtuoso’s image, lending him a demonic aspect.”46 We might see in the anecdotes about human remains an anxiety ­regarding the potential “virtuosity” of relics onstage. The talent of relics for accumulating narrative resonances inserts a competing “self” into the narrative field of the performance, and the relic therefore takes on a monstrous aspect. After all, in the case of Tchaikowsky’s skull, Yorick performed doubly, having chosen the role for himself and coming to the part as both Tchaikowsky and Yorick. Tchaikowsky’s will—both legal and spiritual—introduced a parallel history, name, value, and actor into the theatrical field. In this, the skull functioned in a very similar way to a virtuosic celebrity actor. Michael Quinn has incisively sketched out the disruptive qualities of the star actor, arguing that “[t]he celebrity figure is an alternative reference, competing with and structuring the role of the stage figure as it promotes its own illusion.”47 In the RSC’s use of the skull, we see a double and uncanny celebrity effect, with Tennant’s accrued persona as Doctor Who interacting with his Hamlet, just as Tchaikowsky’s history and will disrupted and shored up Yorick’ s deathly presence. In both cases, the RSC was at pains to protect the illusion of Hamlet from these competing narratives. Tchaikowsky was replaced by his replica onstage, while audience members were forbidden by the RSC from turning up and brandishing memorabilia from Star Trek and Doctor Who.48 The company desperately attempted to corral

162  Aoife Monks two elements of the theatrical apparatus that should be silent and still— skulls and spectators—but that kept on insisting on getting messily out of hand. In this, the actor who plays Hamlet must face down an object that has come to resemble a fellow performer, exerting an uncanny form of virtuosity by dint of its impossible and monstrous animacy. By virtue of its anamorphic presence, the skull exceeds the technical constraints of the stage, bringing the virtuoso’s seeming transcendence of the material world into direct communication with the abject. Indeed, virtuoso performers might be another category of the abject, in Kristeva’s terms, in how they apparently exceed the boundaries of the subject to such an extent that they no longer appear human. The ability of a skull to be unfeeling and yet animate, to be unconscious and yet disrupt the narrative illusion, and to be rigid and nonetheless command the audience’s attention is a kind of excessive virtuosity that might well define “bad acting” in Stanislavski’s terms. As Declan Donellan says of Stanislavski’s system, with ironic resonances for the analysis of a skull in performance: “the first question must always be ‘what is good acting?’ And the answer will remain the same: ‘when it is alive!’”49 Despite its failure as a Stanislavskian actor, the skull’s virtuosity renders it a worthy adversary for the actor who plays against it (which may partly explain why the role of Hamlet is seen as such a test of the actor’s art). Yorick challenges the actor’s stage presence, his ability to compete with the skull’s powers. This may be why Jude Law insisted on using a 200-year-old real skull to play his Hamlet in New York in 2009, following Tennant’s RSC performance, and suggested that Tennant had not been actor enough to play against Tchaikowsky’s skull: “the guy who was playing Hamlet got a bit fed up with the way the skull was upstaging him, so he changed the skull.”50 Michael Grandage, the director of the show, proposed that the “chemistry” between Law and the skull was too precious to replace, suggesting that he had a greater ability to cope with the anamorphic powers of the object than Tennant did. 51 The skull, then, presented a challenge to, and affirmation of, Law’s ability to remain in control of the materials of the stage and the audience’s gaze. Real skulls compete with the semiosis of the character of Yorick or his equivalents, and with the actors who play against him. In doing so, real skulls display a kind of virtuosity, a monstrous ability to exceed human capability and transcend the imagined boundaries of performance. By coming to “life” onstage and asserting its presence as real, the skull is turned into a star actor. 52 I have presented virtuosity so far as a challenge to Stanislavskian ­acting practice, and certainly the assertion of an autonomous virtuoso persona problematizes the repression of self that Stanislavski imagines to be so crucial to the production of acting. However, this is not to say

Human Remains  163 that virtuosity does not appear in his system; rather, the actor is imagined to be taken over by objects so that it is as if the object itself, rather than the actor, exerts a powerful persona on the stage. The experience of possession is the means through which the actor can repress his actorly “I,” while at the same time displacing a virtuosic persona onto stage objects. In a remarkable passage from Stanislavski’s An Actor’s Work, we can see this peculiar and indeterminate virtuosity of objects at work. Stanislavski’s surrogate younger self, Kostya, and his fellow acting trainees are told to choose a costume from the theatre’s stock by their teacher, the older Stanislavski stand-in, Tortsov. We are offered the correct approach to objects in Kostya’s response to an old coat he finds in the store: It was remarkable for the unusual material from which it was made, a sandy grey-green color I’d never seen before. It was faded and ­covered in mildew and dust and ash. I felt anyone in that coat would look like a ghost.53 His response to the coat is not only to look, but he also experiences an immediate emotional shift within himself: “I felt something vaguely rotten and repulsive, and at the same time fearful and lethal stirring.”54 Despite leaving it behind him in the wardrobe, his response to the coat does not end there. Kostya becomes possessed by the coat; over the next week, his initial impressions of the coat creep into his nervous system, his dreams, even into his physiology. Kostya’s brief encounter with a mildewed coat in the theatre wardrobe has a radically transformative effect on his sense of self. The appearance of the coat, then—how it makes him look—is irrelevant; what counts is how it invades him through the experience of possession, division, and transformation. Kostya therefore succeeds in repressing his authorial self and instead facilitates the emergence of an alien self through his communion with the object. Perhaps this is why he imagines that it would make him look like a ghost; the coat asserts a spectral presence within him, turning him into a host for an alien life that is apparently not his own. Kostya’s use of an inherited object from the costume store, like Tennant’s communion with the skull owned by Kean, organizes his relationship to the object in a similar way to a relic, with the coat functioning as a kind of “body” that has been left behind by another actor to form a catalyst for Kostya’s production of belief and truth onstage. Indeed, Kostya finally uncovers the character that has been plaguing him when he wears the coat again while preparing to go onstage, to be that of the Critic: “‘That’s him, that’s him!’ I exclaimed.”55 It turns out that the character emerging from the communion with the coat is not, in fact, alien at all; instead, Kostya has been possessed by his own internal critic, and when he arrives onstage to perform for Tortsov, he discovers

164  Aoife Monks himself insulting his teacher in a violently shrill and unfamiliar voice: “I was amazed at my own insolence, the hostility of my tone.”56 In the moment of a younger Stanislavski berating the older one in a repressed critical voice that has emerged through the communion with an object, we can see the staging of an uncanny return in which an old coat “performs” through Kostya, enabling him to speak to his older self with a secret hidden voice that is, and is not, his own. However, despite the centrality of the coat to Kostya’s performance, it does not seem to figure at all in how Tortsov reacts to the character. He responds to Kostya’s behavior, not to his clothing, and is pleased by Kostya’s possession, not by his coat. Tortsov overlooks the surface of the costume in order to experience the truth of Kostya’s performance. While the coat might have been central to Kostya’s access to the role, it is superfluous to the spectator’s experience. The coat is instrumental to brokering the relationship between actor and audience, asserting a kind of virtuosity through the vehicle of Kostya, while Kostya displaces his virtuosity onto the coat, and yet it is oddly absent from the reception of his performance. Objects are essential for, but do not necessarily make a visible appearance within, Stanislavski’s system of performance, becoming instead crucial and repressed elements in the imaginary world of actors. However, of course, what this story also makes visible is Kostya’s struggle to harness the power of the object. The story shows us how the coat threatens to control and overpower him, necessitating Stanislavski’s vision of the actor as fundamentally divided, with Kostya’s objective spectatorial self observing this possession dispassionately, just as Tortsov does. We can see, then, that Stanislavski’s system of acting imagines virtuosity as emerging from the communion with an object, which takes over the actor and releases the secret and repressed aspects of the actor’s unconscious self. What is crucial is that the object enables the actor to produce a virtuosic performance inadvertently, whose disruptive qualities are displaced onto an old coat. Objects, or more specifically relics like skulls and coats, take on the role of the monstrous virtuoso.

Secret Possessions Stanislavski’s idea of an object that speaks through, and reveals, its ­medium’s most secret and dangerous self comes remarkably close to the objects from fairytales and myths that threaten and terrorize their possessors. This animistic view of objects comes forth most visibly in the uncanny qualities of ventriloquism with, as Brian Catling puts it, “the theme of a malevolent dummy that becomes psychologically dominant over its master, stealing and warping his personality.”57 The notion that the act of communion with an object is structured as a form of possession chimes remarkably with Kostya’s coat, which works as a kind

Human Remains  165 of incorporated, all-body dummy. Bringing objects life and speaking through them, then, is an activity fraught with the possibility of the actor being taken over and used as a medium by the thing itself. This possibility is exacerbated by the employment of human remains, where the abjected aspects of the actor’s self run the risk of a return through the uncanny mouthpiece of the relic. With the dangers and uncanny powers of relics in mind, it is possible to situate a somewhat unexpected inheritor of Stanislavski’s legacies in the work of Ron Vawter. Vawter, a founding member of the Wooster Group, impersonated two dead men onstage in his show Roy Cohn/ Jack Smith. In doing so, he produced an archival performance in which he became both ventriloquist and dummy. The men he played were Roy Cohn, the Republican homophobic lawyer, and Jack Smith, a New York filmmaker and performance artist, whose chief aesthetic strategy was high camp.58 Both men died of AIDS-related illnesses in the 1980s, and Vawter performed these roles while infected with the HIV virus, which was to lead to his death in 1994. Vawter’s performance was concerned with the relationship among homosexuality, secrecy, and disease and was centered on a transformative relationship with human remains.59 In an interview with Richard Schechner after the first run of the show, Vawter revealed the archival process of research that informed his preparations to play the roles, beginning with contact with objects owned by both men: by going through Smith’s belongings and by being fitted for a tuxedo by the same tailor as Cohn.60 Objects then became the media through which to commune with two dead men, and, like Kostya, the aim was not to inhabit these roles but for the objects to inhabit Vawter. While Vawter insisted that the performance was “not an impersonation,”61 the process of rehearsal that he describes suggests that the performance was a form of “incorporation”—a kind of theatrical ingesting of the stuff of the two men he played. Objects became a means through which Vawter commemorated and ventriloquized the dead. Roy Cohn/Jack Smith was fundamentally concerned with how social repression had produced the polarities of Cohn’s self-hating homophobia and Smith’s excessive camp. Vawter claimed, “I think repression is still far more destructive to the homosexual than the AIDS virus.”62 However, he did something more complex than making repression visible: namely, he showed how the “secret” of homosexuality is always already visible within systems of repression. As he said of Cohn, “he brought one of his regular boyfriends to the White House three separate times. So he didn’t hide it, he just verbally denied it.”63 Vawter therefore made apparent the already visible secret of Cohn’s homosexuality by performing an imaginary speech to the American Family Association that was “the most intelligent persuasive denunciation of homosexuality that we could possibly muster.”64 In the excessive qualities of the

166  Aoife Monks speech, whose exaggerated hatred began to deconstruct its own certainties, Vawter performed the public secret of Cohn’s homosexuality, just as he demonstrated the repressed secret of Smith’s excessive camp, in how it functioned as a symptom of repression. As his sleeves pulled up to inadvertently (or perhaps intentionally) display the sarcomas that marked Vawter’s skin, Cohn’s secret illness emerged through Vawter’s diseased performing body. However, Vawter’s own theatrical strategies functioned as a kind of compensation for the repression that formed both Cohn’s and Smith’s personas. Vawter laid his theatrical apparatus bare by making his own infection with AIDS visible to the audience through his nightly introduction to the piece and through his display of the sarcomas and sores of his illness on his torso.65 In doing so, he insisted on revealing his own controlling, inward spectator, the aspect of his performer-self that Stanislavski’s Kostya keeps hidden away: “the remarks I make to the audience before are as rehearsed as the pieces themselves.…I want the audience to know that there is another personality at work in the room, apart from those created ones.”66 Vawter foregrounded the repressed and secretive dimensions of Stanislavskian acting, while also calling attention to the structures of repression that underlay the formation of Cohn’ s and Smith’s subjectivity. This aesthetic of theatrical revelation was visible in the opening of the second section of the show, in which Vawter appeared onstage dressed in the elaborate costume and makeup worn by Smith. On a Walkman, he played a recording of Smith, making Smith’s uncannily live voice audible to the audience. The recording played out a voice from beyond the grave. Putting on headphones, Vawter made Smith audible only to himself, and he began speaking “in” Smith’s voice. Allowing the audience to hear the recording before he went on to mimic it, Vawter made the Walkman a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy, playing out Smith’s voice from afar. He then turned himself into the dummy—or another kind of Walkman—by becoming the mouthpiece for the object and the recording. However, the effect was not so much of Vawter speaking in Smith’s voice as Smith speaking “through” Vawter. Vawter became a medium for a voice that was not his own, turning the performance into a seance in which he mimicked the telephonic structures of spiritualism. As Steven Connor puts it, “the [dead voice] must be thought of as being facilitated rather than produced by the medium, who acts as a telephonist rather than as a telegraphist, making the connection rather than herself interpreting the signal.”67 The recording not only facilitated access to the direct and uncanny voice of the dead man but also became a metaphor for acting itself. Just as the recording relayed an uncanny voice from the dead—both alive and dead—so also did Vawter function as an object on which voices are imprinted and as a channel for voices to pass through. He claims

Human Remains  167 he did so by bypassing his own subjectivity and working as a conduit— or, in Connor’s terms, “a switchboard operator”68 —explaining that listening to tapes of Smith and Cohn “gives me a lot of unconscious feed.”69 In doing so, the uncanniness of the dead recorded voice made the uncanniness of acting itself visible, laying bare the actor’s status as medium. Vawter’s aim, then, was for transformation and possession: “there’s a moment where you pass over…What I have to be able to do is get to that flip.”70 His aim was to surrender to a voice that was not his own. ­However, while the use of the recording laid this process bare, the performance of Roy Cohn/Jack Smith contained its own visible secret. Vawter recounted how, in preparing to play Smith, he was given some of Smith’s cremated ashes, and because Jack’s sense of how to paint himself for a performance was so extreme, …I thought, well I’m going to use the ash, I’m going to return him to his own makeup…. So I use the ash for every performance. I mix it with the glitter I put on my eyes and it charges me. It empowers me in a way that—I mean, when I’m sitting there and I know that Jack is on my face literally…something spooky comes through.71 Vawter wore the remains of Smith’s body in order to imitate him, constructing and wearing a literal death mask—a mask made of the dead. In doing so, he was transformed and possessed by Smith’s presence and voice. However, crucially, the role of the ashes in this transformation and possession was never made available to the audience: unlike the role of the Walkman or Vawter’s diseased body or his commentating persona, the ashes functioned solely to produce an internalized state for the actor. Even as the audience saw the glittering eye makeup on ­Vawter’s face, the presence of Smith’s ashes remained hidden in plain sight. Instead, the  ashes enabled a dying actor to commune with a dead one, becoming the visible secret of the show. The ashes were imagined by Vawter to enable him to achieve possession and surrender. It was the archival world of objects that allowed him to lose his self in service to the performance: “[when] I’m amidst this whole world of his I’ve carefully engineered to have around me— the slides, the reconstruction of space…I get a very, very heavy charge which pulls me through the performance.”72 Again, like Kostya, Vawter employs a language of possession in which Smith’s ashes speak through him and articulate their shared disease. As Connor points out, the voice during exorcisms is imagined to articulate the state of possession and its cause: “[the voice] gives disease not only a name but also a tongue.”73 Here, the dying man speaks to the dead, and the dead man speaks through the dying; the voice that emerges is one of the disease itself.

168  Aoife Monks There is something profoundly uncanny about Vawter’s description of his acting process. By wearing the ashes on his face, he transformed himself into an anamorphic and anachronistic figure: both alive and about to die, both subject and cadaver. In a sense, by wearing the remains of another dead body, Vawter turned himself into his own skull. In doing so, he embodied the process of displacement necessitated by Stanislavski’s system by rendering his own body as an object through the wearing of ashes and by incorporating the abjection of his disease into the service of his virtuosic performance. The ashes became a means for Vawter to treat his own body just as Kostya harnessed the powers of the old coat, by turning himself into a relic that became a means for communion and the production of belief. We can therefore see in Vawter’s performance a dividedness that also characterizes Kostya’s practices, where an actor actively chooses to commune with a relic that possesses him, speaks through him, and unleashes unconscious voices that render him as a medium and an object—a vessel through which other voices can be heard. Vawter’s body issued forth a subjectivity that was not his own, assuming the role of both ventriloquist and dummy. And yet, at the same time, in his interview with Schechner, we see his agency as an actor, his willful engagement with relics to facilitate his own objecthood, making available retrospectively the secret dimensions of his art.

Conclusion: The Anecdote Smith’s ashes functioned as a crucial mechanism for Vawter’s performance while remaining hidden in plain sight from the audience until he chose to bring them into “view” through an anecdote in an interview. In this way, the anecdote enabled the ashes to make a retrospective appearance onstage, sanctioned by Vawter’s narrative control over their theatrical presence. A similar desire for narrative control may have been ultimately why the RSC withdrew the Tchaikowsky skull and replaced it with its replica in performance. The skull’s secret presence was made available prematurely through an anecdotal intervention by the media, which was beyond the company’s control, thus bringing the skull’s claims to agency, history, and death to light and interrupting the imaginary sanctified and transformative communion between actor and object. This, then, may be why the RSC replaced the skull with its copy, whose mimetic and second-order status diffused the threat that the relic presented to the stability of the illusion and the private communion of acting. Or did the RSC replace it? There is a twist to this tale. In ­November 2009, the Daily Telegraph reported, with some indignation, that the RSC had admitted to having fooled its audiences. The RSC had not withdrawn the skull after all; rather than replacing it with its replica, Tchaikowsky’s skull had remained in role, disguised as a copy of itself.

Human Remains  169 Doran explained that “Andre’s skull was a profound memento mori, which perhaps no prop skull could quite provide.”74 In the end, Tchaikowsky continued to play Yorick under the cover of semiotic subterfuge. The RSC had pulled his skull from its brief sojourn in the limelight, returning it to the secret world of actors and the secret struggle for mastery, communion, and memorial from which audiences were excluded. In doing so, the RSC had used the containing and regulating powers of anecdote against itself, countering narrative with narrative and reincorporating the skull’s powers in service to its own illusion. Crucially, however, the second admission of the skull’s presence onstage by the RSC was permitted by its retrospective place in the history of the performance. The skull could feature correctly as anecdote now that the show was safely over, now that the BBC version of the performance had been filmed and Tennant had moved on to new roles; now, the skull of Tchaikowsky could make a sanctioned reappearance through the anecdote, taking its place in the stories that circulate around stage objects and starring ultimately as a figment of a narrative that was not its own. This relic, which had momentarily emerged as an actor in performance, was reabsorbed into the secret world of the peculiar art of acting.

Notes 1 For this quote and further details of Tchaikowsky’s life and work, see www. andretchaikowsky.com. Accessed June 1, 2012. This chapter originally appeared under the same title in Theatre Journal 64/3 (2012), 355–371. 2 Pascale Aebischer, “Yorick’s Skull: Hamlet’s Improper Property,” EnterText 1/2 (2011): 206–25 quote on 207. 3 See http://landretchaikowsky.com/miscellaneouslskull.htm. Accessed June 1, 2012. 4 Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 86–87. 5 Claire van Kampen, the show’s musical director, qtd. in ibid., 86. 6 Doctor Who is a science-fiction television series that has played on and off the BBC since 1963. Its central premise is that the doctor—a “time lord”—is reborn in new bodies (a highly convenient logic to support changes in casting). Tennant played the tenth doctor and proved highly popular with television audiences, which bolstered the publicity for the RSC’s production of Hamlet. 7 From 1987 to 1994, Stewart played the role of Jean-Luc Picard in the US science-fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. 8 Simon de Bruxelles, “At Last, for Yorick. Bequeathed Skull Stars in Hamlet,” Times (London), November 26, 2008, 27. 9 Qtd. in ibid. 10 “Human Skull Abandoned by Hamlet,” BBC News, December 3, 2008, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2lhi/entertainment/7762012.stm. Accessed February 1, 2011. 11 See de Bruxelles, “At Last, for Yorick.” 12 Qtd. in “David Tennant to Revive Partnership with Real Skull for BBC’s Hamlet,” Telegraph, November 24, 2009, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/theatre/6644720/David-Tennant-to-revive-partnership-with-realskull-for-BBCs-Hamlet.html. Accessed January 22, 2012.

170  Aoife Monks 13 Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 198. 14 The story of the skull’s arrival at the theatre was related to me by e-mail from the Theatre Archives inquiry system on December 12, 2011. 15 See “Skull” in the V&A online catalog, available at http://collections.vam. ac.uk/item/0138197/skull/. Accessed October 10, 2011. 16 See Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63, quote on 15. 17 Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre ­(Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2006), 73–109. 18 The Illuminations Production Company filmed the show on location in a disused Jesuit seminary in 2009. I base my analysis of the graveyard scene on the DVD of this film. 19 Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 92. 20 For an excellent discussion of the skull’s role as anamorphic memento mori that “turns others into its props,” see ibid., 89–116. 21 Ibid., 94. 22 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (1980; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 20. 23 Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, trans. Jean Benedetti (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 18. 24 Ibid., 69. 25 Ibid., 154. 26 Ibid., 17. 27 Ibid., 111. 28 Alexandra Walsham, “Introduction: Relics and Remains,” Past & Present 206/suppl. 5 (2010): 9–36, quote on 14. 29 Ibid., 17. 30 Shomit Mitter, Systems of Rehearsal: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowski and Brook (London: Routledge, 1992), 9. 31 Ibid., 9. 32 Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 154. 33 Walsham, “Introduction,” 12. 34 Mitter, Systems of Rehearsal, 8. 35 Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 527. 36 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (1919; reprint, ­London: Penguin Books, 2003). 37 Ibid., 154. 38 Ibid., 149. 39 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3–4. 40 Ibid., 3 (emphasis in original). 41 “The subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is after all ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation”; see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. 42 Qtd. in Christopher Logue, “Such a Risky Business Interpreting the Complexities of the Character of Hamlet,” Times (London), June 30, 1980, 12. 43 See Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 39.

Human Remains  171 4 4 Gabriele Brandstetter, “The Virtuoso’s Stage: A Theatrical Topos,” Theatre Research International 32, no. 2 (2007): 178–95, quote on 182. 45 Ibid., 185. 46 Ibid., 189. 47 See Michael L. Quinn, “Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting,” New ­Theatre Quarterly 6/22 (1990): 154–61, quote on 160. 48 See Caroline Briggs, “Doctor Who Signing Ban at Hamlet,” BBC News, July 24, 2008, available at http://llnews.bbc.co.ukl2lhil7523210.stm. Accessed February 1, 2011. 49 Declan Donellan, “Introduction,” in Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, ix–xv, quote on x. 50 Qtd. in Tim Walker, “Jude Law Guilty of ‘Skulduggery’ over His Dig at David Tennant’s Hamlet,” Telegraph, October 6, 2009, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/6266384/Jude-Law-guilty-of-­ skulduggery-over-his-dig-at-David-Tennants-Hamlet.html. Accessed June 1, 2012. 51 Grandage, cited in ibid. 52 Of course, this “starry” quality is inscribed in the history of the text i­tself, with the ghosting of Yorick by the figures of William Kemp and Richard Tarlton, the famous Elizabethan clowns, which may have added a further extra-narrative resonance for contemporary audiences; see David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse ­(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11. 53 Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 520. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 523. 56 Ibid., 524. 57 Brian Catling, “Arthur Worsley and the Uncanny Valley” in Articulate ­Objects: Voice, Sculpture, Performance, ed. Aura Satz and Jon Wood (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 81–93, quote on 88. 58 Cohn (1927–86) was an attorney and the chief counsel on Senator ­McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He also appears as a character in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991). 59 Smith (1931–1989) was a film director and performance artist, best known for his 1963 film Flaming Creatures. His work is discussed in detail in Dominic Johnson, Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 60 The show was first performed in the Performing Garage (the home of the Wooster Group) in New York City in 1992 before touring nationally and internationally. It was directed by Greg Mehrton. The Cohn section was written with Gary Indiana while the Jack Smith section took the form of a partial reconstruction of Smith’s 1981 performance piece What’s Underground about Marshmallows? In 1994, Jill Godmilow made a film of the performance, in which she spliced the two halves into a montage. My ­analysis is based on both a video of the original stage show, viewed at the Performing Garage archives, and Godmilow’s film. 61 Ron Vawter, “Ron Vawter: For the Record—An Interview by Richard Schechner,” in O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance, ed. Holly Hughes and David Román (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 444–55. 62 Ibid., 452. 63 Ibid., 453. 64 Ibid., 446. 65 These tumors were visible onstage when Vawter’s sleeves pulled up “accidently” in the guise of Cohn and in his half-naked state when dressed as

172  Aoife Monks

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Smith. See also Tim Etchells’s reminiscences about visiting Vawter backstage and seeing his exposed torso covered with tumors (“Repeat Forever: Body, Death, Performance, Fiction,” in Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment [London: Routledge, 1999], 113–24). Vawter, “Ron Vawter,” 453. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 364–65. Ibid., 370. Vawter, “Ron Vawter,” 449. Ibid. Ibid., 451. Ibid. Connor, Dumbstruck, 114. Qtd. in “David Tennant to Revive Partnership.”

12 Shakespeare’s Puppets Kenneth Gross

In the film version of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), directed by Stoppard himself, we see the dumb show from Hamlet twice. The first time out we watch the traveling players rehearsing the dumb show on a wooden stage in the great hall of the palace, the court absent, but with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern watching the masked actors and their stylized motions. While the player-king is poisoned in his sleep and his widow is wooed by the poisoner, the head player explains just how useful the dumb show is in clarifying a play whose language “makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.”1 The rehearsal is interrupted when Ophelia bursts through a door at the back of the stage and runs into the midst of the actors, chased by Hamlet denouncing the hypocrisy of marriage, crying, “It hath made me mad.” As they run from the hall, Claudius and Polonius enter through the same door, the king insisting angrily that neither love nor madness is Hamlet’s problem. When they in turn leave the chamber, the dumb show resumes, now continuing on past its usual ending and sliding into Hamlet’s own story. In a compressed and frenzied mime, glossed by the head player, we see the poisoner mounting the throne, his lustful cavorting with his new wife, the old king’s son driven mad, his disordered behavior at the court, and finally we’re told of his plan to “catch the conscience of the king.” Whereupon the film suddenly cuts to those players staging the play-­within-a play scene from Hamlet itself. Again with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern looking on—it still seems a rehearsal—the actors who play the murderous king and his queen sit watching a second version of the dumb show. This dumb show is performed not by actors but by rod puppets, figures about a foot high who appear within a smaller, isolated stage that has suddenly appeared on the scene, set before the raised platform on which the rehearsal had been taking place. The puppets (made and moved by the Croatian artist Zlatko Bourek), stiff but expressively sculpted figures, add an intense life and a strange pathos to the spectacle. You feel it in the sudden mad shaking of the puppet-king when he is poisoned and in the grotesque immovable leer of the poisoner when he returns to woo the queen, who readily succumbs. It is as if we have regressed into the starkest version of the dumb show,

174  Kenneth Gross into a theatre at once melodramatic and farcical, inherently schematic, a theatre composed of actors who are by their very nature “dumb” and so at best a prologue to a fuller drama. The puppets evoke Hamlet’s own desolate vision of humanity, nothing but soul-less, inanimate perpetrators or victims of murder and seduction. And yet the puppet show can’t help but tug at our imagination and our hearts. For an interval of the film, the puppets fill the entire screen, tiny things become huge, though we cut back at moments to the masked player-king and player-queen, watching the show and looking at each other with increasing anxiety. Just at the moment when the puppet poisoner is crowned by the queen (who leaps on his back with gleeful puppet energy), the film cuts to a close-up of the player-king, his terrified eyes visible through the slits of his mask. The player-king rises, and then the film cuts again to the face of the real King Claudius rising into the frame, looking on in astonishment, guilt, and fear. And then another cut, and we see what he is looking at: not the puppet show, but the dumb show of poisoning performed by the same masked actors whom we’d seen as audience to the puppet show, now playing before the whole court. We suddenly cross a threshold back into the world of Shakespeare’s own play, as the king storms out crying for “lights,” and then quickly cross back again into the ironic world of Stoppard’s troubled duo, baffled by the court’s and the acting troupe’s having left the scene so suddenly. In one inspired touch, Stoppard has the camera zoom in on the painted wooden face of the puppet-player-queen as she stands isolated and rigid in mourning. Emerging from a shadowed corner of one eye is a gleaming drop of water. It is an actual tear, we are to suppose, poised on the painted surface of the inanimate head. It’s a nakedly cinematic trick, Stoppard’s joke about film close-ups perhaps—throughout his film, the playwright is acutely conscious of what it means to translate so stage-­ obsessed a play onto the screen. (The original script has no puppet show, it should be said.) But the shot of the tear is also tellingly uncanny in its collision of mimetic registers. We move back through increasing degrees of theatrical unreality, from unmasked actors playing kings and queens, to actors playing actors in masks who are playing kings and queens, to the inanimate wooden puppets—and yet we find at the end of things that impossible, liquid tear, fixed in place as an outward, material token of human feeling. Stoppard’s shot asks us to think back to Hamlet itself. That drop of water points us to the moment when Hamlet finds himself so scandalized by the chief player’s power to conjure up tears in his acting out a fiction, as if those drops that we take for the most authentic signs of emotion are in truth nothing but puppets of our own unreal imaginations: “For Hecuba! / What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?” (2.2.535–37). The player’s tears are a promise of an unknown thing, at once authentic and false, as strange as water coming out of wood.

Shakespeare’s Puppets  175

Figure 12.1  T  he puppet-player-queen sheds a tear in Tom Stoppard’s 1990 film of his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Image courtesy of Michael Brandman and Brandenberg International.

The shapes of the puppet play in Stoppard’s film also sharpen our sense of the fantastic backgrounds of the play-within-a-play itself. For one thing, the show heightens our memory of the play’s primal scene of murder, the event conjured up in the ghost’s story, which is the focus of Hamlet’s own rage, pity, and suspicion. This is so because the puppets, in their inhuman substance and motion, evoke some of what’s most unsettling in the ghost’s words: for instance, the way that alien poison, received through the ear, travels through his veins with such an eerie, intimate, killing quickness, even as it solidifies his flowing blood and covers the surface of his body with an inhuman crust or carapace. Urged by the ghost to become himself a revenger, Hamlet has staged his play to put to the test both Claudius and the Ghost’s own report, even as he uses the play to evoke a threatening vision of himself as poisoner. Who in this scene is manipulating whom? Stoppard’s putting in of the puppet play is the more striking because it harks back to a telling reference to puppets in Hamlet. This is one of the very few, perhaps seven or eight, instances in his work when Shakespeare explicitly refers to puppets and puppet theatre. 2 It is these ­moments that I want to reflect on in this chapter. However minor, however much they evoke a minor or childish theatre, these puppet moments have surprising resonance. They point us toward the inner dramatic life of a particular play, even as they elicit broader questions about Shakespeare’s theatre. They can provoke us to feel more sharply the force of a human actor’s gesture, what that gesture both shows and conceals. They can remind us of the insistent presence of the actor’s living body onstage

176  Kenneth Gross in all its raucousness and unpredictable physicality, its grace and gravity, its shamelessness, and of the risk for the living actor of becoming, onstage, a dead thing, soul-less, stiff, “wooden” in his or her acting.3 The puppet moments can also heighten our awareness of how it is that, while Shakespeare’s characters often possess such finely individuated voices, those voices are not entirely their own. Certain forms of speaking are passed back and forth from one character to another, lent or stolen; such channelings of alien voice, such latent ventriloquism, can also set eloquence at risk, making a character’s eloquence seem duplicitous, parasitic, contaminated, the vehicle of a wounded rather than a fully realized presence. These moments ask us to reflect on just how much the actors onstage, or the characters they play, control or are controlled by others, by manifest or hidden forces, invisible hands and strings. Often, indeed, characters are mastered by the very things that they think they control (including words).4 Shakespeare would have understood the force of Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theatre,” where he argues that the peculiar, redemptive life of puppets depends on the puppeteer yielding up his human freedom and mastery to the specific gravity of his inhuman actors, ready to be surprised by the uncanny life of a made, material thing.5 Let me start this rough survey of puppet moments in Shakespeare with that place where talk of puppets emerges in Hamlet itself, a moment that takes us back to the play-within-a-play. It occurs close to the climax of the performance, after the dumb show and well along into the spoken text of “The Murder of Gonzago.” Hamlet has been acting as commentator and kibitzer, mocking Claudius’s worries about “offense,” reassuring the king that the play will not touch “we that have free souls” (3.2.220). As the player-king sleeps alone onstage, the murderer enters and holds up the vial of poison that he will pour into the king’s ear. Hamlet then names the poisoner, speaking his words, as I imagine the scene, directly into Claudius’s ear: “This is one Lucianus, nephew to the king.” At this point Ophelia breaks into the conversation, perhaps to distract Hamlet in his manic attention to his uncle, and with her own slight edge: OPHELIA:  You are as good HAMLET:  I could interpret

as a chorus, my lord. between you and your love, if I could see the

puppets dallying. OPHELIA:  You are keen, my lord, you are keen. HAMLET:  It would cost you a groaning to take off

mine edge. (3.2.224–28)

In this exchange Hamlet, scarcely catching a breath, turns from ­mocking the king to mocking Ophelia. He takes up her words of praise, or rather takes those words out of her mouth, and then turns them against her,

Shakespeare’s Puppets  177 partly by pushing the idea of his being a chorus in such a different ­direction. This turning or theft of words is the kind of thing he does repeatedly in the play; it is almost his signature word-game. Hamlet is always the man in the middle, able to turn in multiple directions, in particular through turning other speakers’ words against themselves. His remark to Ophelia conjures up the image of a low romantic farce performed with puppets, mere dalliance of squeaking wood, an image that fits the contempt he generally shows for human love and sexual appetite, especially in his obscene evocations of his mother’s and uncle’s love-­ making. We can take the word “dallying” in its various ­contemporary senses of flirting, toying, trifling, idling. But Hamlet’s words could mean more bluntly, “I could interpret between you and your love if I could see the puppets having sex.” It is as if, indeed, all sex or love were just a lewd puppet show, as if dallying lovers inevitably become dallying puppets. Think of Romeo and Juliet played by Punch and Judy.6 Hamlet for a moment imagines himself as the man who, as was common at the time, stands in front of a puppet booth and helps explain the puppets’ actions and speeches to the audience. Such an interpreter might indeed have been tasked with repeating the puppets’ words in intelligible English, since contemporary evidence suggests that, like Punch in nineteenth-century England, puppets in Shakespeare’s day spoke in shrill, distorted voices that made their words hard to understand.7 The idea of “interpreting between” gives us a striking image of Hamlet as, again, a man in the middle, a master of verbal nonsense and its varying translations. But such a gloss on Hamlet’s words only gets a part of what he means. For he speaks not of interpreting between puppets and the audience but between lovers, as if he were a go-between or letter-carrier, or something of a bawd. His words also suggest an offer to interpret to Ophelia her own desperate and baffling emotion of love. And then we are aware that Hamlet is himself the chief candidate for “your love.” Part of what makes his remarks so bitter is that he stands both inside and outside of his mocking image of “puppets dallying,” as if he himself might be, or had been, one of those puppets in loving Ophelia. As usual with Hamlet, also “nephew to the king,” his verbal darts are turned as much against himself as against others, he’s poisoning both his own words and his listener’s. Hamlet’s “puppets dallying” also contemptuously points to the very players the court is watching, as if all actors were inevitably p ­ uppets. It’s the kind of reductive metaphor one can find in contemporary ­anti-theatrical tracts, such as Hamlet often echoes, for all that he himself is a player and a clown. You might also think of Robert Greene’s famous attack on the young Shakespeare, where he refers to treacherous actors, now turned ambitious playwrights, as “puppets that spake from our mouths.”8 Hamlet’s hypothetical “if I could see….” adds to the strangeness of the scene, since you might believe that in truth we

178  Kenneth Gross have already watched such living puppets “dallying” in the dumb show, acting as mute “interpreters” between the longer, spoken scenes and its courtly audience. We should also recall that the “dallying” which has chiefly preoccupied Hamlet so far in the play has been less his relations with Ophelia than those of his mother with Claudius. It is this dalliance that he has been so nastily “interpreting” in prior scenes, most often when speaking to himself, half-disgusted by his own imaginings, turning human beings into beasts and rotten plants, things “rank and gross in nature.” The ambiguity of Hamlet’s words to Ophelia, the conflict of perspectives they evoke, points to questions that Shakespeare raises elsewhere in the tragedy about the nature of theatre. It can seem as if we are also crossing the line that divides one kind of theatre from another or caught at a threshold between them, between actor and audience, between being onstage and off; this ambiguity is related to the ways that we are always showing ourselves and others what we fear to see, the fearful things that we either imagine for ourselves or that have been reported to us by others (ghosts, spies, counselors, lovers). Such slippage is part of the condition of being human in the play; it’s also an aspect of what in human life Hamlet is quite content to slander. It’s not just that the conditions of theatre are themselves exposed in Hamlet; it’s that one feels theatre itself has become a stranger thing and that the motives for playing and watching plays have become harder to make sense of than we might have thought. Other moments in Hamlet also evoke the register of puppet theatre, in its materiality, its displacement of gesture and voice, its animation of inanimate objects, its shiftings and manipulations of scale, its evocation of hidden and often paradoxical patterns of mastery.9 These are often occasions where psychological and political questions cross with larger existential anxieties. Think, for example, of the scene in which Hamlet takes up a recorder and asks Guildenstern to play it, Guildenstern protesting plainly enough that he cannot. Hamlet, in responding, gives vent to his rage at having been treated himself like a pipe to be played on by such incompetent musicians as his two old friends, such crude interpreters of his more absolute mysteries—“and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet you cannot make it speak” (3.2.337–39). Hamlet’s rage reflects his fear throughout the play of being a puppet of others’ words and interpretations. Yet, within just a few lines, Hamlet will use his own mask of madness ruthlessly to manipulate and play upon Polonius, making him respond exactly as Hamlet wants him to respond, putting words into his mouth, making him second Hamlet’s shifting vision of a cloud as a camel, a weasel, and a whale. The ghost scenes in Hamlet also evoke a puppet world. This comes through, as I’ve suggested, in the description of the king’s poisoning and in the way that this ghost’s ghostliness inheres in his being a living

Shakespeare’s Puppets  179 actor whose bodily motions are shaped by a case of stiff, jointed armor and who must appear and disappear with uncanny quickness. Indeed, the ghost scenes suggest a particularly fraught intertwining of human bodies and uncannily animated matter, not only in the staging of the ghost himself but in Hamlet’s reference to his father’s tomb having “oped his ponderous and marble jaws” (1.4.31), and in the ghost’s image of Hamlet’s eyes starting from his head, or in his description of the prince’s hairs standing on end “like quills upon the fretful porpentine” (1.5.20). Watching Ophelia’s mad scene, we might ask: What kind of puppet-player is Ophelia, as she distributes flowers, those expressive and symbolic props she gives to her hearers, singing those “snatches of old tunes” that so trouble listeners, that come and go from her mouth as fragments of detached but eerily pointed eloquence? “Her speech is nothing,” a gentleman explains, yet people catch at it, and “botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” (4.5.10). Ophelia’s corpse itself is a kind of puppet, caught up and fought over in her grave, made to speak for the competing interpretations of priest, king, queen, brother, and lover. Lastly, there is the most iconic moment in the play, when Hamlet mockingly reanimates the skulls he finds in the churchyard, tossed up from Ophelia’s grave: “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once” (5.1.70), he says of the first skull he picks up, asking after its lost words (those of a lawyer or land-speculator). Picking up another, that of his old friend, the fool Yorick, he imagines the lost flesh of the lips he kissed, as well as the mouth’s absent jokes, songs, and flashes of wit. Addressing it frankly as “you,” he gives the skull a mission, a mocking message to carry, one that will announce the skull-clown’s own inevitable truth as well as interpreting Hamlet’s: “Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that” (178–80). I have never seen a production in which the actor playing Hamlet did not find some peculiar intimacy with his prop skull, making it look at the audience or at himself, whispering into its nonexistent ear, making it nod, laugh, shake, and speak.10 In Laurence Olivier’s film, even the dust that he accidently dislodges from the skull, causing him to start slightly, seems like an image of the skull’s voice. Hamlet himself both speaks for and doubles Yorick’s skull, even as that skull is a disenchanting replacement, at this moment, for the ghost, a ghost at first terribly silent and then terribly eloquent. In this play’s strange unfolding, we move from that speaking suit of armor, to the mute bodies in the dumb show, to that silent skull, each offering Hamlet a means to confront the mystery of human death. They are parts of the texture of ghostly but embodied voices that organize the play. In the tragedy of Hamlet, puppets belong to the world of the dead.11 Among the other puppet moments in Shakespeare’s plays, a number echo the contempt one hears in Hamlet’s “puppets dallying.” And as

180  Kenneth Gross often with expressions of contempt in Shakespeare, these open up a window on otherwise hidden thoughts and emotions, even as they comment on the broader stakes of the actor’s work, its constraints and freedoms. There is, for instance, the scene in the middle of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where tall Helena insults short Hermia, whom she believes to be behind a game to mock her failed love: “Fie, fie, you counterfeit, you puppet, you!” “Puppet?”, Hermia retorts, letting the word resonate in her mouth with surprise and anger, and sudden insight. “Why so? Ay that way goes the game. / Now I perceive that she hath made compare / Between our statures” (3.2.289–92). Helena in one reading compares her rival to a made-up, false-faced whore, a connotation of “puppet” often at work in the period. But the evocation of the wooden puppet’s reduced scale is also there and indeed seems to be what Hermia most takes in from Helena’s words. Helena’s use of “puppet” also extends to Hermia her earlier accusations of Lysander and Demetrius, whom she says were set on by Hermia herself, compelled by her to pretend to love a woman they despise, so that Hermia can watch the cruel scene unfold before her. Erring as they are, Helena’s words translate her shock at finding ­herself in such a strange position and her hunger for some way to explain this. Part of the pathos of her unjust accusation of Hermia is that the accusation is also true, for Hermia is indeed a puppet, though of a different sort than Helena imagines. And so, for that matter, is Helena, and Lysander and Demetrius as well, for all are at this moment being manipulated by the erring magic of Puck, that sometime ventriloquist and shape-changer, the soul of clumsy accidents and crude practical jokes. Puck himself in this scene stands as audience to his own puppet show. He also stands in for the harder to trace, endlessly shifting forces of disorder, forces of rage and love, that underlie the mad combinations and re-combinations of the forest scene. Helena’s error about puppets and counterfeits is also true in that, like other such errors or theatrical masks, it allows her to uncover her own buried, rage, fear, shame, and longing. In the last scene of Antony and Cleopatra, after the defeat of her and Antony’s armies and after Antony’s death, the Queen of Egypt prepares a play for her own death. Waiting for the young emperor to arrive, knowing she’ll be carried to Rome in triumph, Cleopatra has been worrying that she will be forced to see there “some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’ th’ posture of a whore” (5.2.216–17), even as she warns her lady-in-waiting Iras that Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shall be shown In Rome, as well as I. Mechanic slaves With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shall Uplift us to the view. (204–7)

Shakespeare’s Puppets  181 Cleopatra’s word “puppet” catches both contempt and real anxiety, fear of self-loss, loss of her own playful powers and mutability as well as loss of queenly majesty. (“Puppet” here can mean “whore” as well.) As a way of making impossible or pre-empting this Roman puppet-play, she stages for herself and for us a more private, also a more mortal Egyptian puppet show. It’s significant that the asps or “worms” with which she will c­ ommit suicide, the living tools of her tragic end, arrive from the world of clowns, which is close to the world of puppets. These prop snakes Cleopatra— and the actor playing Cleopatra—must take up and transform, make puppets of, giving them a particular theatrical life, at once tragic and satirical. One asp, biting the boy actor’s non-existent breast, becomes a nursing infant that “sucks the nurse asleep” (310), while another becomes the mouthpiece of her rage. She speaks to the unspeaking thing, angrily demanding its angry bite, its power to un-knot the threads of her life, but also wishing that at the moment of her death, or even after it, the mute snake could speak to Octavius, and ventriloquize the contempt she feels for him: Come, thou mortal wretch, With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate Of life at once untie. Poor venomous fool, Be angry, and dispatch. O, couldst thou speak, That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass Unpolicied! (294–99) Here the serpent that kills Cleopatra—a puppet-representative of the snakes that metaphorically double her throughout the play—also ­interprets for her. The memory of a puppet theatre also hovers around the figure of ­Autolychus in The Winter’s Tale. Named after the son of Mercury, ­Autolychus has many professions: servant, gambler, cutpurse, con man, spy, peddler, and bawd. He also sells scandalous ballads, even as his song, “When daffodils begin to peer,” with its evocations of sexual ­appetite and theft, shepherds us into the complex world of pastoral Bohemia in Act 4. Autolychus also reports of himself that he has been “an ape-bearer, then a process-server—a bailiff—and then he compassed a motion of the Prodigal Son” (4.3.87–88). Autolychus as agent of the law is ironic enough; even more striking is the news that he “compass’d a motion”—“motion” being the English Renaissance word for a puppet show. If a career as a manipulator of wooden persons seems fitted enough to his other suspect occupations, it also associates Autolychus even more closely with the world of “old tales” that Shakespeare is refitting throughout the play—like Mamillius’s

182  Kenneth Gross “sad tale” of a man who “dwelt by a churchyard.” Such old tales were very much the stuff of contemporary puppet shows, along with stories culled from the Bible, stories otherwise banished from the public stage.12 The Winter’s Tale, indeed, contains its own version of a story of true and false prodigals exiled and returning home, the tale of a prodigal father and husband as well as a prodigal son, the former exiled within his own kingdom. There are in Autolychus’s mention of his puppet show no anxieties about identity, nor any fears about lost control, such as we hear in Helena’s and Cleopatra’s talk of puppets. Still, this hint of Autolychus’s past work as “master of the motion,” along with his songs, tricks, and masks, enriches one’s sense of his function in the play, his “compassing” of the world around him. He is like his own father Mercury something of a psychopomp, a carrier of messages between divided realms, always courted with “a double occasion.” If Autolychus takes us into the pastoral realm of Bohemia, he also helps engineer our passage back to the kingdom of Sicily, a kingdom in which living men, in their state of astonished wonder, start to look like stone, even as inanimate images find “motion” in their eyes, come to life and speak. As these instances suggest, the puppet gets evoked in Shakespeare as part of spectrum of ambiguous forms of life onstage. His theatre is indeed throughout obsessed with giving life to dead or inanimate things, even as it suggests how living persons are drawn toward the inanimate, toward inhuman, reified, and static states of being, conditions in which they are moved by inhuman and mechanical impulses. These states of being can seem at once imposed and willed, forms of fate as well as forms of disguise—the drama of their emergence in the plays indeed allowing us to glimpse, as it were, the inner history of masks. Such states of fixation or compulsion may reflect ideals in themselves real and humane enough, may evoke a stance of heroic stability and resistance, a means for the living to brave the depredations of time and change. But such states of fixity are also things toward which characters in Shakespeare are liable to take a false, infectious, or destructive relation. Think of Coriolanus’s fear of becoming a formalized image of public heroism or humility, a mouthpiece for words of praise or accommodation he hates. He is disgusted with the idea of his very wounds not only being counted but, as a citizen says, being filled with the tongues of those commoners who speak for him, a condition that he resists by becoming a nameless, voiceless machine of violence. Then there is Angelo in Measure for Measure, who allows himself to become a blank idol or robot of “the law,” first out of vanity and then out of coercive lust, in the process making the law itself an inhuman robot. Characters like Shylock and Timon seem actively to embrace reduction at crucial moments in their plays when they assume all but inhuman forms of action and speech. Such reduction becomes a tool or mask they can employ to put a hated

Shakespeare’s Puppets  183 public in its place. It also gives them occasions for an increasingly stark, stripped-down, and bitter eloquence, an eloquence that exposes them as much as it protects them. Set against such motions of reduction or de-animation are moments in the plays when objects and props assume an especially charged life. Think of the crown that Richard II holds up in the face of usurping Bolingbroke and makes him take hold of; of the knife that Shylock displays at his trial; of Desdemona’s handkerchief dropped, stolen, surreptitiously misplaced, lied about by Iago, and grimly re-imagined by Othello; of the unwanted gold coins that Timon unburies and throws at his enemies. The life of these objects is lent to them as they’re described, re-described, and mis-described, struggled over, played with, passed between persons, thus fixing them in ever-changing relations, as they become truths, hallucinations, weapons. The puppet interests me in this regard because it represents some mediator or interpreter between these extremes of de-animation and re-animation. It holds a threshold between them, being a thing that, in its theatricality, is at once living and dead. Shakespeare’s plays indeed often evoke states of being or forms of ­action that hover on the verge of puppet theatre. Alongside those examples I’ve already touched on, consider the maddened King Lear’s fiercely expressive way of playing with objects, animals, and human bodies, both present and absent, real and hallucinatory. In Act 4, for instance, looking at the blinded Gloucester, he jests that, in lieu of his lost living eyes, the earl should get himself glass eyes, and so “like a scurvy politician, seem / To see the things thou dost not” (4.5.161–62). Joining the tiny and the vast, as puppet theatre often does, Lear talks of broken lances and pigmy’s straws, and throws down an unreal gauntlet to challenge an invisible giant. He calls to an imaginary falcon and commands an imaginary army. With eerie courtesy, he invites those about him to take off his boots, even as he goes on to frame the “delicate stratagem” of shoeing “a troop of horse with felt” (175) that they may steal silently upon and kill his sons-in-law. In a later scene, awakened from a long sleep, Lear tests his own substantiality by pricking himself with a pin (where does he get it from?); he then touches Cordelia’s face to answer his own amazing question, “Be your tears wet?” (4.6.64), even as he speaks of his own tears as molten lead. At the play’s end, he tests the breath of his daughter’s corpse with a mirror and a feather. Lear’s is a theatre of poor, intimate, fantastical things and gestures, full of curious substitutions, materializations, and shifts of scale, a “weightless gravity,” in Italo Calvino’s phrase. It is an evasive, self-enclosed theatre, yet one invaded by the elements; it is a theatre Lear inhabits in his exile from the world of political and familial treachery, even as it helps him to re-imagine and ironize that world, a world to which, in the end, he is still subject for his life. (I once saw—in Germany in 2008—an uncannily

184  Kenneth Gross schematized version of King Lear in which the only two actors onstage were the maddened king and his manic fool, the latter being a puppeteer who evoked all of the other characters and voices in the play through an array of hand puppets, rod puppets, marionettes, and masks, as if the whole of the play emerged in their storm-refuge.13) And then, in others’ eyes, that external, banished world may also look like a puppet theatre—at least to the banished councilor Kent, who sees there a cruel morality play, one in which Oswald, a mere servant of Lear’s daughter, can happily “take Vanity the puppet’s part against the royalty of her father” (2.2.32).14 Turning from these figurative puppet shows, I want to look briefly at the one English drama that survives from the Renaissance which incorporates an actual puppet play, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. The contrast with Shakespeare is revealing. Jonson’s comedies have an affinity with the hardheaded, opaque ­mimesis of puppet theatre, its anarchic spirit of conflict. His plays face us, as Gabrielle Bernhard Jackson says, with a collision of isolated, unmergeable minds, minds driven by their own distinct illusions of freedom or mastery, illusions that also make them more easily manipulated by others.15 Jonson is no narrow moralist but a fantasist of great power, able to combine a fierce sense of particularity and local color in his characters and their speech with the sense of something phantasmagorical, even occult at work in them.16 Still, however richly strange they appear, Jonson’s characters do not have that Shakespearean sense of stark, unpredictable depth, that sense of an uncanny power to change their minds and being in a moment. Jonson’s characters always end up as isolate creatures driven by their own erring thoughts and desires, more like puppets than full human beings. The staged action of Bartholomew Fair spreads over numerous booths of the vast London fair that gives the play its title, where we see anatomized many styles of vanity, folly, compulsion, greed, and wanton ­trickery. All of these are, in their way, commodities on sale at the fair. At the end of the play, the main characters all converge on the puppet booth of Lantern Leatherhead, where they are offered a version of the tale of Hero and Leander, roughly based on Marlowe’s poem, mingled oddly with puppet characters drawn from the old interlude of Damon and Pithias, by Richard Edwards (from 1571).17 We get only shreds of both works, in truth, in which the characters are converted into obscene, violent, and squeaking denizens of contemporary London.18 ­L eatherhead— whose name marks his likeness to his own puppets, if also his ambition to bring light to darkness—interprets for the puppets to the gathered crowd, even as the puppets themselves mock and assault him. (“Pink his guts, Pythias,” cries Damon at one moment [5.4.249]). The rapid, knockabout movement of the show suggests, I should say, that it’s played by hand puppets.19

Shakespeare’s Puppets  185 As with the play-within-a-play in Hamlet, the climax of the show is its interruption by an audience member. A puritan named Zeal-of-the-Land Busy rushes onto the stage to denounce the puppet show as abomination and idolatry—the same accusations he’d thrown earlier at the dolls, hobbyhorses, and gilded gingerbread on sale at the fair: “Down with Dagon, down with Dagon!” (5.5.1).20 Leatherhead, rather than speak himself on behalf of his art, sets “Rabbi Busy” to debate with one his puppets, a figure he identifies as “the ghost of Dionysius”—this being Dionysius the Younger, a tyrannical king of ancient Syracuse who was at one time the student of Plato, the furred gown of a scrivener or schoolmaster he wears reflecting the legend that after his overthrow he had become a teacher of rhetoric in Corinth. 21 The angry Busy, weirdly enough, agrees to put his arguments to the puppet, who in responding shows a very puppetish penchant for crude games of verbal mastery: BUSY:  First, I say unto thee, idol, thou hast no calling. PUP. DIONYSIUS: You lie, I am called Dionysius. LEATHERHEAD: The motion says you lie, he is called

Dionysius i’the

­matter, and to that calling he answers. (5.5.59–63) The debate between Puritan and puppet quickly collapses into a more childish exchange, in which each speaker becomes the double of the other: “His profession is profane, it is profane idol.” “It is not profane!” “It is profane!” “It is not profane!” (78–79, 81–84). Busy almost becomes himself an interpreter for the puppet who also interprets him. As the debate escalates, the Puritan puts forth what he considers his most damning argument, that “you are an abomination: for the male among you putteth on the apparel of the female, and the female of the male” (113–15). But the puppet ghost shoots back, turning on Busy’s words, You lie, you lie, you lie abominably . . . It is your old stale argument against the players, but it will not hold against the puppets; for we have neither male nor female amongst us. And that thou may’st see, if you wilt, like a malicious purblind zeal as thou art! (116–17, 120–24) And suddenly he lifts up his gown to prove his case, revealing to Busy and all of us that there is nothing, no sex at all, beneath his garment, only the hitherto concealed arm of the puppeteer. Busy, who in earlier scenes had been little more than a puppet of his own “sanctified noise,” declares himself “converted,” though what salvation or Grace he will find thereby is hard to say. Perhaps part of what persuades the Puritan is that the puppet, in confuting the anti-theatricalist attack on actors, has shrewdly quoted from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (3.28), which

186  Kenneth Gross asserts that among the true believers in Christ, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female.” And indeed, in the end, all persons in the play turn out to be more like puppets than they know, more quickly manipulated by others, even in their appetites for mastery and truth, in their illusion that they can cut through illusion. Dionysius’s lifting of his gown acknowledges the puppet as that which receives and reanimates a strictly human or embodied gesture, as if this were the play’s chief and truest image of what it means to be filled with inspiration or zeal. In unveiling himself, the ghost of Dionysius, tyrant and scholar, has seized control of the stage, seized control of both its illusions and its disillusionments, converting his enemy to his own faction and so neutralizing Busy’s threat. The scene indeed reads to me like a parody of the close of one of Jonson’s own court masques, where the world of the ­anti-masque—showing us agents of ignorance, disorder, and r­ ebellion— is defeated or transformed by the appearance of a magical image of kingly authority and reason.22 Still, if the puppets of Bartholomew Fair are Jonson’s image of his contempt for human characters and their ­appetites, they are at the same time objects of real fascination to the playwright. Indeed, in this scene, the ghost of Dionysius speaks less for the hidden puppeteer than for Jonson himself, in his desire to reform the stage as well as to reform his audiences. You see especially Jonson’s habitual wish to contain his audience’s own rage to “interpret” what they see and hear onstage, particularly their habit of putting malicious intentions into the mouth of the playwright himself, making him the puppet of their fears and suspicions. The puppet show suggests the playwright’s ambivalent relation to the very conditions of theatre that he here so valiantly exploits. 23 I always link this moment in Bartholomew Fair to The Tempest. ­Jonson’s own “Induction” indeed suggests he had Shakespeare’s play in mind—declaring, for instance, that there will be “never a servant monster i’the fair,” a creature like Caliban, even as it mocks playwrights who “make nature afraid” with dramas ‘that beget Tales, Tempests, and suchlike drolleries” (Induction 147–51). In particular, Jonson’s image of the puppet-ghost of an exiled scholar-king mastering his enemies even as he exposes his own emptiness mirrors the picture of Prospero relinquishing his magic at the end of the play. To set these two figures side by side points to the very different stakes of Shakespeare’s evocations of puppet theatre. Prospero is Shakespeare’s great vision of a failed puppet-master. It’s telling that, among those spirits whose magical help he renounces in Act 5, the “weak masters” who have helped him create war in the heavens and “wake sleepers from their graves,” are beings he refers to as “you demi-puppets” (5.1.36)—one of the poet’s stranger coinages, for which the OED lists no earlier or later uses. Prospero starts out as “master of the monsters” (something that Leatherhead’s called), yet the play takes

Shakespeare’s Puppets  187 him quite to the limits of his mastery. In the end, what his magic makes most visible are things that cannot be manipulated, reformed, or converted by his control of appearances, those intensely theatrical illusions staged with the help of Ariel. At best, as in the case of Antonio and Sebastian, Prospero has pushed them into revealing their incorrigible moral weakness, their automatic cruelty, cowardice, and passivity. Or else his magic has worked fragile, lyrical consolations, as when he conjures up for weeping Ferdinand the image of a father not drowned, but surviving transformed into a creature of coral and pearl. Prospero tries at the close of the play to undo the monstrosity of his magic, as well as to acknowledge something of that monstrosity. His own helpful spirits, he sees, are curiously unspiritual, embodied, resistant, even mortal—at best demi-puppets, “weak masters,” as he is himself. They have their part in magic, but it is a magic not entirely under Prospero’s control. Watching the play, we come to understand, as even Prospero may, his dependency, his unreadiness and rage, things linked to his subjection to time, the shortness of his interval on this timeless island. Prospero makes an uneasy compromise with time and his own weakness. One feels this starkly in the scene where he conjures up a fantastic wedding masque for Miranda and Ferdinand, full of images of natural and human “increase,” and then suddenly interrupts the spectacle. The show collapses with “a strange hollow and confused noise,” an echo of the storm that opens the play, also Prospero’s creation. Prospero tries to cover the suddenness of the collapse in his wanly elegiac speech about the fragility of mortal things, of “cloud-capped towers” and “gorgeous palaces.” Out of the lovers’ hearing, however, he acknowledges to Ariel that his rage came from suddenly recalling the imminent arrival of Caliban and the clowns, prepared to murder him. The literal threat they pose seems so minimal that, one feels, the rage at their approach must come from something else—I think, in fact, that it comes from Prospero’s sudden, unsettling recognition that he himself, in his desire for revenge and mastery, as well as in his often improvised and satirical magic, is more like the rebellious clowns than he might like to think. He sees that he may be as much of a puppet as they are, as much a creature of the antimasque as he is an avatar of royal order. Such a recognition feels like anything but a reduction or sign of contempt. It rather seems aimed at opening up a space of possibility, of desire for ongoing life in the world. The exposure of Prospero’s limitations, and his renunciation of his grand enchantments, means that his is no longer a magic that brings back the dead or controls the elements. What magic is left to him is something plainer, lighter. For all that he must return to a world in which, as he says, “every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.314), that lightness is of the essence. A certain homely or grave lightness is also part of the essence of a theatre of puppets and part of its power in evoking hidden possibilities within Shakespeare’s theatre.

188  Kenneth Gross A friend and I once tried to imagine a version of The Tempest for puppets, intended to bring out the puppet show already at work within the play. What emerged was a plan for a show with a single puppet onstage among a cast of human actors. Not a puppet Ariel or puppet Caliban, rather, a puppet Prospero. He would be a figure thus strangely at odds with all others in the play—an ordinary hand puppet, in fact, like Punch, agitated, demanding, unready, dependent on unseen hands to move him, very small yet radiating the strange energy of puppet-life. This puppet Prospero would be able for a time to master the more human characters, as potent in his way as the ghost of Dionysius, forcing others to listen to him, to hook their fates to his, to bow to his authority. And yet the human actors would also, while they went about their business, serve as Prospero’s “interpreters,” in the way Leatherhead does for his puppets—for this puppet magician would, like Caliban before Prospero’s arrival, often “gabble like / A thing most brutish” (1.2.359–60), his eloquence crossed by angry squeaks and curses, echoes of storm-noise. Such a framework would give a particularly naked shape to Prospero’s isolation or exile from the other characters onstage, even as he depends on them. The small, enclosed stage space or booth in which this puppet appeared would itself be an image of his magical island world and his always vexed desire to control that world. In the play itself, of course, Prospero’s increasing anger, agitation, and loss of control, if they make him puppet-like, are also among the things that most humanize him. He is a puppet-master who comes to know, as W. H. Auden suggests, that he has been making himself into a puppet of his own conflicted emotions. 24 The staging I’ve proposed risks reducing Shakespeare’s magician, with his hints of interior mystery, to the satiric opacity of one of Jonson’s characters. Still, I should like at least to try out a scene in which a hand puppet Prospero puts Miranda in her place, by growling, “What, I say, my foot, my tutor?” I’d like to hear a wooden-headed magician calling to his offstage servant, “What ho, slave! Caliban,/Thou earth, thou, speak!” demanding that he bring in more wood. And I’d like to hear a puppet-enchanter saying of a human Caliban, at the play’s end, “This thing of darkness I/Acknowledge mine.” We might know something about the characters that we otherwise cannot know. And it might reveal something about the mysteries of puppet theatre itself, puppet theatre’s way of re-writing Terence’s much-quoted aphorism: Something alien is human to me.

Notes 1 Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), 56. This chapter is a revised version of an essay that originally appeared under the title “Puppets Dallying: Thoughts on Shakespearean Theatricality,” Comparative Drama 41/3 (2007): 273–96.

Shakespeare’s Puppets  189 2 In addition to those puppet moments in Shakespeare I’ve taken up in this chapter there are interesting mentions of puppets in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.1.94–95 and The Taming of the Shrew, 1.2.79 and 4.3.103–6. All quotations are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (2nd ed., New York: Norton, 2008). 3 For a further reflection on these matters of theatricality, see my essay “An Imaginary Theatre,” The Yale Review 87/3 (July 1999): 56–75. 4 Harry Berger, Jr., describes acutely the self-undoing and self-ironizing ­energies of particular characters’ languages in Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare’s Plays (Stanford: Stanford ­University Press, 1997). Often, for Berger, the words which characters think to puppet turn out to puppet them. 5 Many of the working puppet artists I’ve talked to over the years—in many different cultures, working in both traditional and experimental puppet ­theatre—are acutely open to those moments when their puppets seem to control them, when the inanimate figures they move surprise them with the trace of an intention, a movement or voice, that they themselves could never have predicted. 6 Frances K. Barasch’s essay, “Shakespeare and the Puppet Sphere,” English Literary Renaissance 34/2 (2004): 157–75, offers an informed survey of the styles and conventions of puppet theatre in Renaissance England, including an account of how puppets glimmer forth in the work of dramatists writing for human actors on the public stage. The peculiar “mingle-mangle” of dramatic action that Shakespeare’s contemporaries seem to have expected in puppet plays is conveyed well by the following passage from Henry Chettle and John Day’s The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Greene (1600), in which a con man disguised as a puppet-player invites his audience to visit his theatre in these words: Gentlemen…you shall…see the famous City of Norwitch, and the ­stabbing of Julius Caesar in the French Capitol by a sort of Dutch Mesopotamians…You shall likewise see the amorous Conceits and Love songs betwixt Captain Pod of Py-corner and Mrs. Rump of Ram-Alley, never described before…Or if it please, you shall see a stately combate betwixt Tamberlayn the Great and the Duke of Guyso the less, perform’d on the Olympic Hills in France. Act 4, Scene 1, from The Works of John Day, ed. A. H. Bullen (1881; rpt. ­London: Holland Press, 1963), 72–73. No scripts from such popular p ­ uppet shows survive from Shakespeare’s time, if scripts for them were even written, nor do any working puppets that I know of. Scott Cutler Shershow, Puppets and “Popular” Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 4–104, also offers a fine account of the ideological uses of the idea of the puppet in the early modern literature and culture, including its associations with banned religious practices, such as the Catholic Mass, the worship of saints, and pilgrimage. See also below, Note 14. 7 That Renaissance puppets spoke with unnatural, even incomprehensible voices is supported by evidence in contemporary texts. The puritan Zeal-ofthe-Land Busy in Bartholomew Fair, for example, complains that one of the puppets “neigheth and hinnyeth” and speaks with a “base noise” and a “treble creaking” (5.5.76, 86–88). The childlike bachelor Bartholomew Cokes, lover of dolls and hobbyhorses, first asks of Leatherhead, “What was that, fellow? Pray thee tell me, I scarce understand ‘em” (5.4.148–49), though he quickly discovers an aptitude for deciphering their squeaks to others. (All quotations from Bartholomew Fair are from The Selected Plays of Ben

190  Kenneth Gross Jonson, ed. Martin Butler, 2 vols. [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U ­ niversity Press, 1989], 2: 153–295.) See also Note 22, below, on the evidence of this distorted voicing in the printed text of the play. What the historical record doesn’t tell us is whether Renaissance puppeteers used any artificial means to distort their voices, for instance, a small reed held in the puppeteer’s mouth such as was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, called in Italian a pivetta, in French a sifflet de la pratique, and in English a “swazzle” (something still used by modern Punch players). On the use of distorted voices in puppet theatre, and the corresponding need for an interpreter as part of the performance, see Speaight, Punch and Judy, 34–36; John McCormick and Bennie Pratasik, Popular Puppet Theatre in Europe, 1800–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 151–55; and Frank Proschan, “Puppet Voices and Interlocutors: Language in Folk Puppetry,” Journal of American Folklore 94 (1981), 527–56. 8 Quoted in Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact ­Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 151. 9 See Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 10 See Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of ­M ichigan Press, 2003), 89–116, for a fine discussion of the many uses of the skull as a dramatic tool on the Elizabeth and Jacobean stage. 11 Puppets are indeed associated not only with the world of the dead but with the world of demonic magic. Sixteenth-century legal records and pamphlets suggest that dolls and “poppets” were among the most suspect possessions of accused witches. Barbara Rosen, in her Witchcraft in England, 1558–1618 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 138, indeed records an instance of an “imp” or familiar that was named “Puppet.” 12 Biblical stories were prohibited on the public stage partly because of their association with the medieval mystery plays, and Catholic piety more generally, also because of how, like any religious subject, they might feed sectarian controversy. On the idea that medieval religious dramas often evaded censorship in Protestant England in the guise of puppet shows, see Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 126–39. 13 I discuss this show, performed by the Leipzig-based company Wilde & Vogel, in Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, 74–77. 14 The idea of puppet theatre also resonates in King Lear’s preoccupation with demonic possession, exemplified in the figure of Mad Tom, in whom Edgar acts out the words and motions of a person who finds himself (or thinks he finds himself) pursued and spoken through by devils. Shakespeare’s use of Thomas Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures as a source for Tom’s speeches is well known, especially for the pamphlet’s argument that possession by demons was a staged act, a kind of knowing ventriloquism, arranged to support the power claimed by Catholic priests to hear, interpret, and exorcise those devils. Stephen Connor, in his Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 174, quotes a passage where Harsnett argues that the exorcists and demons are in truth the same empty and manipulative persons talking to each other: Et quis haec daemon?…there was neither devil nor urchin nor Elfe but themselves, who did metamorphoze themselves in every scene into the person eyther of the devil himselfe or of his Interpreter; and made the devils names their Puppet, to squeake, pipe, and fume out what they pleased to inspire.

Shakespeare’s Puppets  191 15 See Gabrielle Bernhard Jackson’s introduction to her edition of Jonson’s ­Every Man in His Humor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 1–35. G. R. Hibbard also explores well the puppet-like qualities of Jonson’s characters in the introduction to his New Mermaid edition of Bartholomew Fair (London: A. & C. Black, 1991), xvi–xxxii. 16 I have always treasured William Drummond of Hawthornden’s record of Jonson saying to him that “he heth consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen tarters & turks Romans and Carthaginians feight in his imagination.” See Ben Jonson, Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden (1619), ed. G. B. Harrison ­(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 14. 17 See Damon and Pithias, in The Dramatic Works of Richard Edwards, Thomas Norton, and Thomas Sackville, ed. John S. Farmer (London: Early English Drama Society, 1906), 1–183. 18 Proctor John Littlewit, the author of the puppet play in Bartholomew Fair, says that he made his tale a little easy and modern for the times…As, for the Hellespont, Imagine our Thames here; and then Leander I make a dyer’s son, about Puddle Wharf; and Hero a wench o’th Bankside, who going over one morning to Old Fish Street, Leander spies her land at Trig Stairs, and falls in love with her. (5.3.135–41) 19 Also suggesting hand puppets is the fact that they require Leatherhead to translate their “treble creaking” to the audience. See above, Note 7, on ­puppet voices. Aside from the evidence of characters who refer to the unintelligibility of the puppets’ words, the text of the play itself included in Jonson’s 1616 folio Workes, a volume closely overseen by the poet himself, prints the puppets’ words in italics (a choice followed in most modern editions of the play), which somehow indicates the peculiar status of those words in the drama. Almost no human character in this or any other play by Jonson has his or her words printed in italics in the folio, though it’s perhaps telling that the “windy words” that are vomited up by Crispinus in Act 5, Scene 3, of Poetaster—for example, “glibbery,” “lubrical,” and “defunct”—are printed in italics. 20 Busy calls the puppet an idol, a reflex of the fact that Protestant texts and sermons often used the image of the puppet to describe the Roman Catholic use of sacred images and ceremonies. John Foxe quotes a Protestant martyr, Thomas Hudson, speaking of the Mass as “a patched monster, and a disguised Puppet” (Acts and Monuments [London, 1583], vol. 2, part 2, book XII), and in an English translation of one of Calvin’s sermons the reformer claims that Catholics insist on saying their Paternosters “before some puppet,” or find themselves “kneeling before a puppet, as if they spake to GOD himselfe” (The Sermons of M. John Calvin upon the fifth booke of Moses, trans. Arthur Golding [London, 1583], sermon lxviii). Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 75, describes cases where Protestant iconoclasts in fact took despised Catholic images and gave them to children to play with as dolls. 21 See Bartholomew Fair, note to 5.4.329 (p. 285). 22 This kind of change of scene and world was often produced in court masques by the turning of an elaborate stage machine, the kind of material device that Jonson himself mocked in his “Expostulation with Inigo Jones,” something

192  Kenneth Gross that aimed to “make the boards to speak,” like a mere puppet show. See D. J. Gordon, “Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones,” in The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by D. J. Gordon, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 77–101. 3 You see Jonson’s ambivalence in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, where a 2 Book-Holder enters with a scrivener and asks the audience to sign a contract with the players, agreeing that they (the audience) will contain their desires to carp at, criticize, or falsely interpret what they see and hear onstage. In particular he wants them to curtail their habit of finding topical and perhaps slanderous satire in what Jonson intends as general pictures of vice and folly; they must also contain their habit of censuring plays not by their own ideas but “by contagion” from others around them. He condemns any “state-­decipherer, or politic picklock of the scene” who is so solemnly ridiculous as to search out who was meant by the ­gingerbread-woman, who by the hobby-horse man, who by the costermonger, nay, who by their wares; or that will pretend to affirm (on his own inspired ignorance) what Mirror of Magistrates is meant by the ­Justice, what great lady by the pig-woman, what concealed statesman by the seller of mousetraps, and so of the rest. (Induction, 156–68) Jonson seems always to worry that his own satiric characters might become ventriloquist’s dummies, as it were, for the false hearing of the audience, who takes their words to mean things that were never intended. 24 See W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” ed. Arthur Kirsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), especially the opening monologue, “Prospero to Ariel.”

13 Art, Objecthood, and the Extended Audience Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works Lawrence Switzky I LEPIDUS .  But small to greater ENOBARBUS .  Not if the small

matters must give way. come first. —Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.13–14

Othello is undone by a handkerchief. Macbeth’s anxious mind sees the ghost of the murdered Banquo while Lady Macbeth glimpses “but a stool.” The removal of a crown ends Richard II’s reign and transforms Henry Bolingbroke into Henry IV. Valentine is banished when the Duke of Milan discovers a corded ladder hidden under his cloak. Things that are meant to empower or enable often end up disrupting the itinerary of human desire in Shakespeare’s plays. W. H. Auden, a lifelong fan, imitator, and expositor of Shakespeare, once speculated that the comic proceeds from the reverse “flow of volition” from an object to a subject: we laugh when we see a coat putting itself on a man.1 There may likewise be a thingly sense of tragedy, say when an object like a poisoned pearl or a sword, invested with vengeful animus, misfires or backfires. 2 In either case, we might say that comedy or tragedy proceeds, at least in part, from the potential of objects to make and unmake the dignity of the human. Though that, of course, is an account from a human’s point of view.

II Strange—we spent so much of our time in the process not connecting material, but rather trying to keep it separate. Trying to let stuff just sit as itself, ‘as objects,’ we liked to say. ‘The thing is the thing is the thing.’ —Tim Etchells, “A Text on 20 Years with 66 Footnotes” In 2015, the UK-based avant-garde theatre group Forced E ­ ntertainment began performing Complete Works, micro-productions of 36 plays entirely or mostly attributed to Shakespeare (minus Henry VIII) with

194  Lawrence Switzky ordinary household objects, manipulated by the actors, in place of the characters. Each play runs about 45 minutes; each opens with the ­formula “It begins with…” and ends with “And the last thing that happens is…”; each is played on a wooden table, often in sets of three or four a night, often for the benefit of both an audience and a livestreaming camera. When broadcast, the performances invite comparison to instructional videos on YouTube (“How to do Othello for busy people with things you have lying around the house”). The title Complete Works is slyly ironic, since the six performers, who each take six plays apiece, emphasize what is deliberately missing by paraphrasing speeches and dialogue: the florid theatricality of actors and, except for brief and sometimes mutilated quotations, Shakespeare’s language. In this sense, the play-texts become objectlike too, reified into little more than “plot architecture.”3 Each performance features a distinct cast and dares audiences to identify the shifting logic of substitution that undergirds the selection of object-actors. In Terry O’Connor’s Hamlet, a can of flea powder plays Claudius in Hamlet. A heavy iron with a frayed power cord plays Polonius. Hamlet’s acidulous disposition is translated into a bottle of vinegar. Considered in relationship to each other, the choice of objects suggests a conceptual rendering, as though relying on remembered lines shimmering behind the schematic narration. Hamlet—played as an abstracted conflict between dark translucent carafes (Hamlet, Laertes, Horatio) and transparent containers (Ophelia and the visiting actors at Elsinore), those we can see inside and those we can’t—seems spun out of Hamlet’s claim that he has “that within that passeth show” (1.2.287). Richard Lowdon populates his Macbeth with cleaning products. Jars of linseed oil (Macbeth) and big and small bottles of wood polisher (Banquo and Fleance) form an object patois that evokes Lady Macbeth’s prematurely confident “A little water clears us of this deed” (2.2.70) and the play’s central gestus of trying to wash away sin. Jerry Killick relates A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the supernatural characters Oberon, Titania, and Puck played by bottles of alcohol—“spirit[s] of no common rate” (3.1.156, emphasis added), as Titania calls herself, if we pick up on this groan-inducing catachresis. Yet watching Complete Works this way requires hearing the echo of Shakespeare’s language, and the procedures of language in general, in performances that deliberately excise dramatic poetry.4 Realist plays, the first drama that systematically filled the stage with everyday objects, transferred the linguistic devices of metaphor and metonymy from ­contemporary novels to the material scrum of theatre. In Bert States’s elegant formulation, theatrical metonymy attributes “states, or qualities, or attributes, or whole entities like society, to visible things in which they sometimes inhere.”5 Andrew Sofer has likewise demonstrated how props operate through contiguity or “conventional association” (metonymy) with a person and “actual resemblance” (metaphor) between an object

Art, Objecthood, and the Extended Audience  195 and a human referent.6 Thus the silver candlesticks that play Antonio and Brabantio in Claire Marshall’s version of The Merchant of Venice at once resemble the upright bearing of haughty nobleman (especially when set against the squat picture frame that plays abject Shylock) and are the kinds of objects wealthy people might handle. But to be proper props these object-actors would eventually have to reflect or inflect the features of a human actor playing a character—and mimetic enactment is the other component of Shakespearean performance that Complete Works withholds.7 So what’s left in Shakespeare if we’re not listening to the language or attending to the actors? Tim Etchells, Artistic Director of Forced ­Entertainment, proposes that the audience’s own acts of provisional transformation come to the fore when the usual sources of theatrical expression are taken away: On the one hand, it’s a kind of rudimentary ventriloquism, bringing life to these supposedly dead things, but on another, the work taps the half-life that objects have anyway, their speechless speech, the traces of their action and purpose, their haunted existence. […] Watching the objects arranged on the table for the end of King Lear, gathered around the body of Cordelia (as played by a small glass vial), Robin Arthur’s glass vase representing Lear looking down to see if his daughter is still breathing; or watching Terry O’Connor’s Richard II pontificate and philosophise endlessly, you’re confronted in a double sense by the lifelessness of Cordelia, by the inertness of the king. It’s the search for a speculative interiority that’s compelling and baffling at the same time – the conundrum that’s at the heart of puppetry, perhaps at the heart of acting itself.8 Elsewhere, Etchells invokes French filmmaker Robert Bresson’s sense of the actor as a “model” or a “blank” rather than an expressive agent: “we’ve always been i­nterested in blankness […] in a text or image that refuses to articulate itself beyond its presence, which sort of throws you as a viewer or a spectator into a relation of speculation.”9 Thinking about Shakespeare’s plays along these lines might seem bizarre, as though sublime dramatic poetry were merely an ornate frame that primes stimulating “speculative” encounters with the irreducible opacity of things. Yet if this is a distortion of an experience of the plays as verbal and enacted events, I want to understand it as tactical and inspired by the plays themselves. As Bresson wrote, the job of a model in film is to be “Withdrawn into himself. Of the little he lets escape, take only what suits you.”10 Likewise, Complete Works reminds us that things in Shakespeare are partially available for conscription into human projects even as they evade exhaustion through our use and understanding. To think of Hamlet as like a vinegar bottle in his temperament is to engage in what Ian

196  Lawrence Switzky Bogost refers to as anthropocentric caricature: we try to make sense of a non-human thing by viewing it through our “qualities and logic,” yet any comparison of the translated caricature to the recalcitrant original ends up reminding us that there is something unavailable, not like us, about the thing.11 As a performance of Shakespeare, Forced Entertainment takes ­advantage of the tantalizing volatility of things in the plays—­ simultaneously pliable to absorption as symbols, metaphors, and metonyms and resistant to ingenious linguistic sublimation. When the Fool in King Lear cries out during the mock trial of Goneril that he “Took you for a joint stool” (3.6.52), the insult resonates comically because the caricature works (Goneril can be insulted at a distance by comparison to a homely and overlooked object) and tragically because the caricature flops (Goneril can’t be rendered inert as a stool can). When Hamlet ridicules Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for attempting to make him an instrument like a recorder, the poignancy of the comparison depends on its inexactness—that is, on his unlikeness to a pipe: “’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?” (3.2.361–62). Likewise, when Jerry Killick slams the massive trophy cup that plays Caius Martius on the table, it resonates with a resounding clang that calls up the metallic martial clamor of Coriolanus, but as crude parody rather than as plausible mimicry of the soundscape of actual warfare. The gap between material reality and what we are asked to envision in its place recurs throughout Forced Entertainment’s back catalog. The durational piece Speak Bitterness (1995) tasks actors with reading pre-written confessions for hours on end while they remain personally inaccessible, confessing nothing. Dirty Work (1998) exploits the distance between a paucity of means and a surfeit of ambition: two actors on a small wooden stage accompanied by piano music on an old record collaborate (and, occasionally, battle) to describe an impossible ­performance. In these pieces and others like them, Forced Entertainment proposes that theatre occurs in the space between what is and what might be, and through the active assembly of fragments by an audience that is given too many parts and too few coherent grids. Each new production examines the situation (what they have called, after Roland Barthes, the “degree-zero”) of theatre—the fragility, absurdity, and optimism of theatrical belief despite its inevitable interruptions and shortcomings. According to Etchells, one of the foundational principles of the group, which finds a culminating expression in Complete Works, is their resistance to the “theatrical impulse which is there in so much British theatre […] the bold idiocy of any theatrical representation: How can any person be any other person? How can any thing be any other thing?”12 The project germinated out of the group’s discovery that a paltry substitute for an anticipated full-scale production can stoke an

Art, Objecthood, and the Extended Audience  197 audience’s imaginative investment. As a theatre collective in England, Forced Entertainment had long faced the question of when and how they would “do Shakespeare.” After a week of workshops on King Lear in the late 1990s that did not generate a production, Etchells invited his brother, Mark, to travel from Devon to Sheffield (where Forced Entertainment is located) and to read the play, which he had never read before, on the train. They then asked Mark to sit down with a glass of vodka and recite the plot of King Lear as he remembered it while the company’s photographer, videographer, and frequent collaborator, Hugo Glendinning, filmed him. In this impromptu 30-minute performance, Mark Etchells took “all of that poetry and intense drama and boiled it into a sort of everyday language narration” that was not quite Shakespeare’s drama, in all its sublimity and familiarity. Yet the attempt by one performer to recall the play with the slender means of speech, gestures, and an ordinary object (so many of the “actors” in Complete Works are glasses or bottles) poignantly demonstrated, to Tim Etchells, “the power of language to bring images and ideas and events into a kind of present-tense manifestation.”13 It lingered in his memory and around the edges of other productions for the next two decades. Forced Entertainment has been most celebrated for their work that conjures worlds out of words. But there is another strand in their production record that investigates the encounter with things as equally fundamental to the “as if” operations of all theatre. Perhaps the best example of this variant is the 1995 installation and performance piece Ground Plans for Paradise, another tabletop covered with nearly 1,000 internally illuminated balsa wood skyscrapers, surrounded by streets and buildings overlaid with lyrical names that suggest the narratives they might inspire. The model, a desolate environment suggesting the uniform geometry and vacancy of an urban center, was also a “space into which one astrally projects, a dream space.”14 Occasionally, a group of blindfolded actors sat at the back of the gallery, drawing a remembered map of the model in chalk and tracing out paths through it. In Bogost’s terms, they made a caricature of the model in order to imagine it as habitable, much as Shakespeare’s characters make verbal doubles of things in an attempt to live with and among them. If Complete Works charts a new course for Forced Entertainment, it is not only that it “performs” dramatic text in a way the group hasn’t before but also that the object world is not exclusively an occasion to reflect on the transformative designs of actors and spectators. As so often happens in Shakespeare, things in Complete Works submit only to partial narrative and linguistic recruitment. In the only essay-length discussion of the correspondences between Forced Entertainment and Shakespeare, Hans-Thies Lehmann claims that both embrace what he calls Welt-Fuelle (the fullness of the world): “In Shakespeare’s theatre, as in no other, it was possible to express ‘the world’ in all of its unbound

198  Lawrence Switzky fullness and lack of meaning. […] And it is a surprise when—mirroring this idea of theatre, however shifted and distorted in our own day— Forced Entertainment succeed in making the stage mean the world once again.”15 By “the world,” Lehmann means the human arena and its play of identities. But paradoxically, by reducing the means and dimensions of Shakespeare in performance, the world emerges more “fully” in Complete Works: as a matrix of cooperations, adjacencies, and oppositions between human and non-human co-constituents. The rest of this chapter develops a single claim. By exploiting ­Shakespeare’s presentation of objects as only waveringly available for instrumental (primarily verbal) use by human agents, Forced Entertainment spins a provisional New Materialist theatre out of the plays, one that both harnesses Shakespeare’s flexible attitude to things and responds to contemporary sociological and philosophical materialisms. If things never fully become autonomous agents or actors in Complete Works, they do resemble what Bruno Latour calls actants in that they can modify states of affairs and make a difference “in the course of some other agent’s action”—lending shape, size, color, dimension, or sociocultural context to (and sometimes in excess of) their “role” in a play.16 Likewise, each thing in Complete Works performs a version of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, in which an object is “more than its pieces and less than its effects.”17 The jar of paint brushes that plays Nick Bottom is more than its pieces because it submits to alteration—the brushes are repositioned to look vaguely ear-like when Bottom is changed into an ass—while remaining, recalcitrantly, itself. It is less than its effects because it is still a jar of brushes despite being set winsomely adjacent to the bottle playing lovestruck Titania. Perhaps more significantly than its correlations with current theories, though, Complete Works develops its own theatrical poetics of things, one that asks its audiences to cultivate a thing’s-eye view of Shakespeare. Rather than only seeing things metaphorically or metonymically, Complete Works encourages us to see things as things might see themselves—which is to say literally.

III Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. —Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind Literalism has a bad reputation. As Elaine Freedgood has argued, in the object-clogged tableaux of realist fiction, things either exist to produce an illusion of the real or they are promoted to metaphors or metonyms “through a loss of many of their specific qualities.”18 To take something literally “that was traditionally taken figuratively, if it was ‘taken’ at all” violates the “decorous reading practices” (20) that allow us to perceive

Art, Objecthood, and the Extended Audience  199 abstract patterns over time like plots, characters, and themes through a thicket of sensuous details. In the visual and performing arts, it may be easier to interpret things “indecorously” because they do not need to be recovered from prior mediation through language. But theatre is so highly conventionalized that there are habits of seeing (and not seeing) that also tacitly condition spectatorship.19 Minor adjustments to these conventions can upend an audience’s habitual sublation of things. In his object spectacles in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, American performance artist Stuart Sherman unsettled realist viewing practices by stopping the show to rotate or reposition everyday objects. According to Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Sherman’s disruptions of standard theatrical perception converted the usual operations of theatrical metonymy into a tool for “expansion, not reduction, the dilation of other possible worlds based on the same objects, the spinning-out of chains of linguistic and visual representation, rather than the compression of existing worlds to a few representative objects.”20 Sherman’s celebration of the surplus signification of things through reorientation is one way of renewing our relationship with them. Another is to assert the sheer “literal” presence of things in terms of their shapes, dimensions, and materials. Perhaps the most significant formulation of this use of things occurs in Michael Fried’s 1967 ­objection to Minimalist art (which Fried renames literalist art), “Art and Objecthood.” Despite its familiarity in theatrical and art-historical discourses, Fried’s essay repays revisiting in light of Complete Works and the New Materialist moment. Three of Fried’s claims concern me here. First, Fried opposes the tendency of literalist art to eschew representation in favor of self-presentation and to interrupt the spectator’s absorption, both of which he believes are indispensable if the artwork is to triumph over its status as just another object among objects. Instead, literalist art “aims not to defeat or suspend its own objecthood, but on the contrary to discover and project objecthood as such.”21 For Fried, literalist art denies any spectatorial engagement beyond an awareness of the situation of a subject encountering an object in some context. Second, literalist art seems unpleasantly anthropomorphic to Fried. It makes inscrutable and discomfiting demands on a spectator that throws any safe distance as an observer in question: “the beholder knows himself to stand in an indeterminate, open-ended—and unexacting—relation as subject to the impassive object on the wall or floor” (155). Finally, Fried associates literalness and anthropomorphism with theatre, a medium which relies on a series of confrontations and appraisals over time instead of an ideal and instantaneous apprehension of a painting or sculpture. Despite Fried’s contempt for theatre, “Art and Objecthood” might be read as a surprising (and certainly unintended) manual for how to create a theatre of things, one that continually asks audiences to query their “indeterminate, open-ended” relation to the presence of objects

200  Lawrence Switzky without subsuming or paraphrasing them. Rather than surrendering to ­conventions about whether we approach an object literally, metaphorically, or metonymically, a transvalued Friedian theatre would ask us to consider each moment in a performance as a situation that requires a discrete decision about our engagement with things. Minimalist ­performance and film at the time of Fried’s essay, in fact, reveled in successive uncertainties about how to look at things alongside persons. To take one example, Yvonne Rainer’s Trio Film, created and screened in 1968, is about the relationship of two naked dancers and a floppy white ­balloon, which is sometimes their co-performer and sometimes their prop. According to Carrie Lambert-Beatty, whether viewers should “anthropomorphize the balloon or depersonify the performers is crucially and delightfully undecidable: either the balloon has as much personality as the affectless dancers, or they have as little as it does.”22 Literalist theatre continues to flourish in the outposts of the contemporary avant-garde. To cite one prominent example, the continuing importance of Robert Wilson’s lapidary assemblies of persons, things, and scenery demonstrates the long tail of Minimalist/ literalist art. David Bathrick has described how Wilson’s literalism derives, in part, from the self-referentiality of language and objects in his productions. In his 1984 production of Heiner Müller’s play Hamletmaschine, as in subsequent productions, Wilson treated a dramatic text as a thing among things, “as just another piece of furniture, like all objects, props, and even ­human bodies in his zoological world which—given enough time, space, and, yes, tolerance—generate their own raison d’être.”23 Complete Works adopts literalism in these multiple senses—as the ­anthropomorphism of objects, as the depersonification of human performers, and as the abstract self-referentiality of production elements. It is beholden both to developments in the visual and performance arts since the 1960s and to the flickering literalism in Shakespeare’s plays. Any given Complete Works production shifts between moments when things signify for us and, so to speak, for themselves. To take one particularly startling example, Terry Killick’s performance of Coriolanus re-scripts a play that does not include pivotal props, fetishes, or objects-as-metaphors as a choreography of persons and things. In the ruling conceit of the production, Killick translates social rank into perceptible distinctions in scale and material composition. The plebeians are played by batteries, nails, and board game pieces storied inside a box, which itself becomes a plebeian; the senators are medium-sized candlesticks, cups, and a cheese grater; the patricians are played by a large trophy (Caius Martius/Coriolanus), a coffee pot (Volumnia), and a coffee press (Virgilia); while the Volscians are played by blue canisters of drain cleaner sized according to class hierarchies, with sponges as

Art, Objecthood, and the Extended Audience  201 foot soldiers. These demarcations signify in social terms as they render conflicts within the play schematically legible. In Act 3, Scene 1, for example, Killick transforms the verbal stand-off between Coriolanus and the people’s tribunes in the senate chamber into a visual spectacle, an opposition between three sizes and lusters of “Romans” that can be read left to right, patrician to plebeian, across the table. Conversely, the concluding funeral parade through Antium demonstrates Coriolanus’s reabsorption into a foreign nobility as Aufidius and the lords (the larger canisters of drain cleaner) support trophy-Coriolanus as an element in a tableau, with the sponges as witnesses. That’s one way of looking at it. Another would be to notice that the things standing in for characters in the play have demanded a conversion of social prestige into their own terms: size, color, luster, and contrasting or cognate materials. The concluding parade in Coriolanus is then at once a military funeral and an abstract sculpture, a balanced juxtaposition that pronounces the “objectness of objects”—the dullness of blue plastic against the brilliance of silver metal—as much as it does the death of a general. Neither perspective fully dominates. Over the duration of multiple productions, one notices that the plays have been refitted to accommodate the affordances and capabilities of things. Ordinary household objects are especially well suited to arrangement and congregation. Processions and trials receive more emphasis, temporally and spatially, than trysts: the assembly and naming of the participants at the trial of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice or the attendees at the deposition and abdication of the king (a bottle of wine) in Terry O’Connor’s Richard II takes nearly as long as the dialogue that follows. They generate installations as much as scenes. Comedies that have far less canonical standing than the tragedies are elevated in terms of the opportunities they afford for the pleasing collocation of like and unlike objects. The finale of Claire Marshall’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona capitalizes on the geometric and volumetric compositional diversity afforded by the onstage presence of a Duke (a can of Brussels sprouts), a gang of outlaws (identical rows of joined tea lights), two sets of lovers (various cans and bottles), and a dog (a small grater). Terry O’Connor’s The Comedy of Errors creates ludic configurations out of the more-than-human likenesses in thing-performers between Dromio of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus (two sponges with distinctly hued bases) and Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Ephesus (two pepper mills with matching indentations and protrusions but varying widths). A literalist theatre insists that we find pleasure in the alternation and repetition of surfaces and textures as much as in the tease of metonymy and metaphor. The residual meaningfulness of Shakespeare’s plays keeps the object spectacle from collapsing into a pageant of serial flatness, just metatheatre about what we do with things. The unyielding presence of things insists on the

202  Lawrence Switzky irreducible material substrate of theatre and prevents these micro-plays from becoming the “sublime images, the poetry alone” that Romantic critics like Charles Lamb claimed as their essential substance. 24 The relationship between persons and things in Complete Works ­resembles a game of tug-of-war rather than an attempt to dominate: a dual conscription where both metaphoric/metonymic and literalist spectatorial strategies overlap. We might think of Forced ­Entertainment’s achievement in terms of what Bertolt Brecht, as interpreted by ­Raymond Williams, called complex seeing: the perception of “genuine alternatives” with “no attempt at resolution,” applied to collaborations between ­human and non-human performers. 25 Complex seeing in Complete Works delegates the production of character to both sides. The subdued, sometimes affectless delivery and limited mobility of the actors (a hallmark of Minimalist performance) suggest gestures and intonations without ever embodying a character. Likewise, things lend their own literal traits to the characters they approximate, particularly in scenes that demand the inertia and muteness of astonishment, paralysis, and death. The bright red flashlight that plays Romeo in Terry O’Connor’s Romeo and Juliet donates its constitutive silence when Romeo is struck dumb by Juliet across the Capulet hall; indeed, the starkness of his hue marks Romeo as indelibly him(/it?)self (“Thou art thyself, though not a Montague”). Hermione as a statue in the final scene of Cathy Naden’s The Winter’s Tale is still and silent as an actor never could be—and is played, aptly, by a darkened lamp that might be switched on at any moment. While Forced Entertainment reactivates the literalism of things in Shakespeare and in Minimalism, it does so in a renovated historical and cultural framework. In the late 1960s, Fried recoiled from Minimalism because its practitioners denied the transcendent claims of modernist art to focus instead on the ideological grounds of spectatorship, what critic Hal Foster calls the “institutionality” of art. 26 In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the contexts that underlie literalism have shifted: encounters with quasi-anthropomorphic things are less about the boundaries of art and more about the boundaries of the self in its negotiations with the radical differences of other selves and a non-­ human ecology. To consider things now, in Shakespeare and elsewhere, is to glimpse at once the image of our mastery and its limits, a world of things we have made but cannot completely control. Una Chaudhuri has elegantly written about how theatre in an era when human activities both determine and are determined by atmospheric forces must invent “new strategies that will align the theatrical apparatus with the altered conceptual frameworks offered—or necessitated—by climate change.”27 Chaudhuri advocates stretching theatre beyond human-sized social and psychological concerns to a sublime scale of geological time and planetary space. Complete Works compresses theatre to a homely level where playing Shakespeare and playing with things are continuous because

Art, Objecthood, and the Extended Audience  203 both are perversely mundane pursuits: as unspectacular as decluttering the kitchen or bathroom and as unfamiliar as being captivated by the voluptuous sheen off a bottle of sherry. Not just in the theatre or at the rim of the world but in those places too we collaborate and ­struggle with things in their instrumental and their literal aspects, familiar in our hands as household cleaners. Etchells once described the work of contemporary performance as the production of “witnesses rather than spectators,” in which “to witness an event is to be present at it in some fundamentally ethical way, to feel the weight of things and one’s place in them, even if that place is simply, for the moment, as an onlooker.”28 Complete Works continues this adjuration to understand our place in a flow of events and its ethical implications, but with the qualification that we are not the only witnesses at these theatrical events. During each of the 36 micro-performances, behind the wooden table and facing the audience, sit rows of shelves that contain the object-actors, always visible, assembled, and ready for their appearance in a given play (handwritten on masking tape beneath each troupe). They are available for use, but they are also simply and literally there, in opposition to the audience and a mirror of it, like us but apart from us. As we watch the plays, they watch too, and we are invited to imagine these objects as some parallel gallery of salt shakers and Tupperware, ready for the appearance of their favorite translucent jar or molded plastic flashlight even as we await a beloved line or an anticipated reversal of fortune. “Who’s there?”

Figure 13.1  R obin Arthur performs in Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare while an audience of object-actors watches. Reproduced with permission from Hugo Glendinning.

204  Lawrence Switzky

Notes 1 W. H. Auden, “Notes on the Comic,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), 373. 2 Melissa Mueller discusses the distillation of tragic force in things in her study Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For example, Hector’s sword in S­ ophocles’s Ajax gives “embodied form to the nexus of past relationships,” destabilizing “viewers’ sense of where on the continuum between human and nonhuman” (2) it belongs. 3 Tim Etchells quoted in Alexis Soloski, “Their Latest Risk: Household ­Objects Playing Shakespeare,” The New York Times (September 5, 2018). I’ve witnessed performances of Complete Works live in London, England (February 2016); Ghent, Belgium (March 2017); and by broadcast from ­Ipswich, England (October 2018). 4 See, for example, Lyn Gardner’s proposal that overattention to Shakespeare’s language “can be a barrier to understanding and can deny opportunities for performance creativity” in “Words, Words, Words: Are We Too in Thrall to Shakespeare’s Language?” The Guardian (June 30, 2015). 5 Bert States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 65. 6 Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 21. 7 Sofer illuminates how the prop that seems to go awry only calls our attention to the virtuosity of the actor: Playing a drunk or an incompetent fop makes even more spectacular demands on the actor, since for the illusion to work, the actor can never signal his own incompetent grasp on things, merely the character’s. […] [A]n object that is truly independent of an actor’s visible manipulation is not a prop. (24) 8 Tim Etchells, “Tabletop Shakespeare: Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide,” Exeunt Magazine (July 2, 2015) http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/tabletop-tim-etchells/. 9 Personal interview with Tim Etchells, conducted with Brett Gamboa in ­Sheffield, England. March 19, 2017. 10 Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph, trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York: New York Review of Books, 1986), 35. 11 Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing ­(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 66. 12 Personal interview with Tim Etchells. 13 Personal interview with Tim Etchells. 14 Tim Etchells, Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 78. 15 Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Shakespeare’s Grin: Remarks on World Theatre with Forced Entertainment” in “Not Even a Game Anymore”: The Theatre of Forced Entertainment, ed. Judith Helmer and Florian Malzacher (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2004), 105. 16 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 72. 17 Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2018), 53.

Art, Objecthood, and the Extended Audience  205 18 Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 10. 19 See Maaike Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking ­(Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave, 2008) for a catalog of postdramatic theatre contemporaneous with Forced Entertainment that likewise undoes spectatorial habits. 20 Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 122. 21 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 151. 22 Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2008), 189. 23 David Bathrick, “Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, and the Preideological,” New German Critique 98 (2006): 74. 24 Charles Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation,” in English Essays, from Sir Philip Sidney to Macauley (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1910), 325. 25 Raymond Williams, “The Achievement of Brecht,” Critical Quarterly 3/2 (1961): 157. 26 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 56. 27 Una Chaudhuri, “The Fifth Wall: Climate Change Dramaturgy,” April 17, 2016, https://howlround.com/fifth-wall. 28 Tim Etchells, “Introduction” to Certain Fragments, 18; 17.

14 “Newes from the Dead” An Unnatural Moment in the History of Natural Philosophy Jane Taylor

It was much later before religions managed to declare this after-life as the more valuable and perfect and to debase our mortal life to a mere preparation for the life to come. Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death, 1918

I: After “After Cardenio” After: “Succeeding, following on, not prior, not the first”; or, After: “in imitation of, mimicking, in the style of”; or, After: “in pursuit of [as a detective is ‘after a criminal’], hunting down.” This chapter is about the problem of writing what has already been written. Several years ago I was approached by Renaissance Scholar Stephen Greenblatt to write a so-called “missing” Shakespeare play, a work titled Cardenio that has come down through the tradition as a play by the Bard, though no copy of the original play-text has ever come to light. The strongest clue to the play’s possible plot arises from the fact that the title is the name given to a character, Cardenio, a melancholy hero from Cervantes’s celebrated novel, Don Quixote. In that novel, Cardenio has lost his mind and lives disguised in the mountains because he believes that his beloved has been seduced by the local overlord. Greenblatt’s purpose was surely, at least in part, to consolidate the full extent of the Shakespeare oeuvre and identify any works that might make a claim to belong inside rather than outside the canon. He began to explore literary fragments, and ambiguous works, plays of doubtful attribution, or written as collaborations, and thus at the edge of the fixed authentic Shakespearean writings. The question that had arisen was, What was the likelihood that Shakespeare would have written a Cardenio? If so, what might be the concerns, theatrical opportunities, opened up by such an endeavor? What freight did that title carry? There is some skepticism about the authenticity of claims for the existence of a putative Shakespeare play-text with such a title. The implications are beyond our imagining. If a play,

“Newes from the Dead”  207 Cardenio, verifiably by Shakespeare, were to be located lost in a library or hidden in a hamlet, there would be a riot of celebration and an endless proliferation of interpretation on how the play alters the meaning of all other plays in the Shakespeare canon (to say the least). That such a text has not yet been discovered does not mean that it will not or cannot; and thus the horizon of possibility remains unbounded. We have been taught by the master contriver, Jorge Luis Borges, to anticipate the hypothetical import of such a find, through his sparklingly cunning short story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Within that story, the reader is introduced to the literary invention of a fictional author, Pierre Menard. Rather marvelously, the instance that Borges discusses at length is Menard’s Don Quixote, a fact that suggests the stature of Cervantes’s work as the exemplary Ur-novel. Menard is characterized as a prodigious scholar who undertakes to re-write Cervantes’s masterpiece line by line with an unwavering fidelity to the original, in the seventeenth-century language. This “new” literary work far exceeds the original because it supplements the first novel with an infinite texture of ironic commentary and surplus meaning. Through Menard’s asserted mimesis, in an act of supreme imaginative identification (despite being written in the secularizing ethos of a Protestant twentieth century), his Cervantes replica provides a minute commentary on the original. Every line interprets its source. I have invoked the great European rupture of the Reformation in order to bring to mind—for a consideration of Shakespeare and Cervantes—the entangled complex of idea and of matter implicit in the dialogue between the stage and the book, as the icon and the relic are shifting in relation to the status of the word. I recently had the opportunity to visit Stonyhurst Jesuit College, an independent (now co-educational) Catholic school in Lancashire, England. Part of what defines the distinction of the school is its collection of relics. It houses a thorn allegedly from Christ’s mocking crown, the prayer book that Mary Queen of Scots took to the executioner’s block, as well as the ropes said to have been used to torment the Catholic martyr, Edmund Campion.1 Stephen Greenblatt’s discussion of the import of Campion’s legacy can be found in his biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World. He describes the Catholic martyr’s spiritual assurance and resilient idealism. Provocatively, Greenblatt’s account of Campion’s immense intellectual and spiritual authority characterizes him as “living […] in a world […] in which scholars mount their books and ride out to chivalric contests.” In such terms he is a Quixotic figure—at least in Greenblatt’s sketch—with a somewhat delusional attachment to spiritual idealism.2 Greenblatt also asserts that Shakespeare had a wary skepticism of “ideological heroism” (110) or “the fierce, self-immolating embrace of an idea.” In Cervantes, this is deflated through high parody; in Shakespeare, it is the subject of tragedy or high comedy. The Stonyhurst Library owns a First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, ­bequeathed to the school by former pupil Lord Arundel. It is a familiar

208  Jane Taylor adage that “we are the company we keep.” Although the association ­between the First Folio and the school’s prized relics is somewhat oblique, it provokes us to bear in mind that the history of value and material culture is a complex one. While Shakespeare’s plays are available in an infinite number of printed versions, as well as staged interpretations and films, the “folio” is magical because of its ostensible proximity to the playwright and his practice, even though it was only published several years after Shakespeare’s death. In the company of relics this folio seems to participate in the economy of the sacred object; of course, this is in many ways an exemplary instance because the value of the first folios in circulation attests to their status as magical things. What I am suggesting with this allusive anecdote is that ideas and v­ alues articulate through matter and that matter provokes ideas and ­values. Moreover, these signify in particular ways within cultural practices. In After Cardenio I was interested in finding strategies for “staging” this in my interpretation of the dialogue between Shakespeare and Cervantes. The play that I staged in Cape Town in 2011 takes this constellation of enquiries, about idea and matter, as integral to the dramatic question. The incident upon which my drama is based is situated within the ­seventeenth-century anatomy theatre. As the new sciences began to take their place in the history of representation of the human subject, the anatomy theatre took its place alongside the theatre. There the ­dissection took its place alongside the Shakespearean monologue, as an alternate stage for the testing of the limits and pathologies of the human.3 It seems reasonable that “pathology” itself would shift in meaning, as the inner materiality of the individual subject became so manifestly the site of one order of signification.4 The notional Cardenio has an interesting status, hovering as it does between sacred relic and literary text. Perversely, though not surprisingly, the value of the missing play is amplified, rather than diminished, because of its fugitive celebrity. From historical precedent, the discovery of one such manuscript would also not preclude the claims of others (Pretenders?). There are, we know, several silver caskets (each with a murky rose-crystal window) which bear a legend etched somewhere that testifies that we are looking upon the foreskin of Christ or the index finger of John the Baptist. The existence of the series does not jeopardize the singularity. That is a matter for the archive, but it also reminds us that value in the early modern era is on the brink of a radical transformation, with print technologies transforming manuscripts from singularities into multiples. The history of the claims for Cardenio’s lineage is well documented and can be located. The entrepreneurial bookseller Humphrey Moseley in 1653 registered his edition of Shakespeare’s plays, from 1647, and he identified the work as a play by “Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Shakespeare,” though that may well have been a bit of promotional manipulation.5 Nonetheless it does seem clear that a play titled

“Newes from the Dead”  209 Cardenio was performed by the King’s Men between 1611 and 1612, though without attribution.6 The strongest clue to the play’s possible plot arises from the fact that the title refers to a character, Cardenio, the name given to a melancholy hero from Cervantes’s celebrated novel, Don Quixote. In the novel, Cardenio has lost his mind and lives disguised in the mountains because he believes that his beloved has been seduced by the local overlord. When I had received the commission to write a Cardenio my ­instinctive response was that I couldn’t make a pastiche of a Shakespeare play, nor could I avoid wanting to engage with the force of his imagination. What began to interest me was the question of how or why Shakespeare might have written in response to Cervantes. What in the vast, various novel, Don Quixote, full of chivalric idealism, wild buffoonery, and irony could be reconciled with Shakespeare’s psychological portraiture, his wordplay, his scrutiny of statecraft and power? What would the history of the book and the stage tell us about one another? And how does ­seventeenth-century Spanish Catholicism inform us about emergent Protestantism? As I write this, I am wary, lest anyone suggest that Shakespeare and Cervantes exemplify English and Spanish sensibilities because they are so singular that they can represent only themselves, and even then, not very well. Shakespeare is always insecure in his place as Shakespeare, and what is more, Greenblatt’s biography makes a strong case that he cannot be invoked as a Protestant writer, because he was, from Greenblatt’s evidence, a member of a recusant family. The two great writers seem linked by more than chance. Both are recorded as having died on the same date, though not on the same day. Spain and England were on different calendars in 1613; by popular account Cervantes died on 23 April, some ten days before Shakespeare died on the same date, ten days later. Though we would be well advised not to embrace these dates with credulity. I began to undertake research, looking for ways into the project. ­Greenblatt and Charles Mee had written a first experiment—a ­lighthearted comedy based on the motif of the sexual wager: one man challenges his friend to test the virtue of his wife. My response on reading that play was that writing from South Africa in the twenty-first century, it was very difficult to imagine sexual infidelity as quite the same reckless riot they were imagining. The context of AIDS, sexual violence, and infant mortality cast a particular kind of pall over the sport as so imagined. I was interested in the tough questions inside the play around the droit de seigneur, power, sexual domination, and betrayal. In Cervantes’s novel, Cardenio’s love, Luscinda, escapes the enforced ­ ccurred marriage being urged upon her by fainting at the altar and so it o to me that there may well be a pregnancy inside the plot that I was ­devising. (The virgin birth too was in the back of my mind.) I began to undertake research into early modern sexuality and the law and

210  Jane Taylor considered how these circumstances might provide a dramatic situation concordant with Shakespeare’s perennial investigations in the late plays. My first imaginative journey was to consider the project inside social and literary history; this task is in a complex relation to the work of creative and performance interpretation, seeking to place the piece on a continuum of research integrity and creative play. So as a beginning I turned to EEBO (Early English Books Online). Luck has something to do with it; and so does art history, because the text that attracted me was illustrated. As anyone dealing with manuscripts knows, the visual image is a rarity in the published texts of the early modern period and so has a kind of exorbitant glamour that catches one’s attention. The text that caught my eye had a thrilling yet macabre woodcut. That was how I came upon the broadsheet recounting the story of Anne Greene.

II: Anatomy Anne was not just a melancholy fact of history. Rather, she became a cause célèbre because when her body was handed over to the University for an anatomy, she regained consciousness on the anatomy table. As she gathered herself to speak, her first words were allegedly “Behold God’s Providence!” Her survival was testimony to her innocence. What the broadsheet hints at is a bitter saga involving a young working girl, Anne Greene, who was impregnated by the youthful Jeoffrey Read while she was in service of his grandfather, Sir Thomas. Her unhappy situation was disclosed when a fellow servant heard moans coming from the privy and went to investigate. On discovering Anne with a little corpse, the sometime friend immediately ran shrieking to the master and mistress of the house, disclosing Anne’s misery and her alleged crime. Presumably in defense of family and property, the old man was a vociferous advocate that Anne be hanged again after her failed reckoning with the rope. It is the recorded irony that Sir Thomas Read died three days after Anne was acquitted. Richard Watkins, one of the observers who documented these events when Anne’s guilt and innocence were being assayed after her “resurrection,” indicates that Sir Thomas’s sudden death was among the several mitigating factors for Anne. It was held by “some” as evidence of her innocence. The anatomy demonstrations of the seventeenth century were ­opportunities of considerable intellectual (and spiritual) interest. In ­contexts proximate to the great universities, there was a constant demand for corpses, and so it was that in particular kinds of death—that of the executed criminal, for example—the corpse could be legally dissected and examined internally. The rights of the deceased were weighed against the benefits derived from the accumulation of knowledge, and the metaphysics and psychology of personhood became increasingly captive to a vast, diffuse exploration into the biological workings of the

“Newes from the Dead”  211 human being. The anatomy lesson was one of the most highly regarded contexts affording the speculative conjunction of physical and metaphysical substance. Some 15 years earlier, in 1636, The Great Charter of Charles I granted the Oxford anatomy reader the right to demand, for the purposes of anatomical dissection, the body of any person executed within 21 miles of Oxford.7 Previously the cadavers were required to be from the city itself. This new injunction of a range of 21 miles demonstrates a logic that is strikingly different from that which seemed to pertain in Bologna some 200 years earlier, where the statute on dissections stipulated that the body must come from at least 30 miles outside the city.8 There are certainly too many variables—medical, cosmological, theological, and legal—at play in a 200-year difference, between a European and an English University context, for one to speculate on the meaning of such distinctions. However, the rulings do assert one absolute truth: that neither legislation, about proximity or distance, was natural or given. Both practices—the exogamous garnering of corpses, or the endogamous— are surely culturally specific and historically defined. Remarkably, the woman revived on the anatomy table just as the ­doctors were due to begin dissecting the body. Recent research has ­produced a complex picture of the legal entanglements arising from the death of an infant. There was an increasingly official will to curb the  murdering of newborns. Nonetheless, the law is hard-pressed to prove intention in these cases. In some instances, where a mother was able to show several elements of an infant’s provision such as small garments or a cot blanket, this was deemed evidence of an aspiration that the babe be nurtured. The status and meaning of “the infant” were shifting in the seventeenth century, and new constraints and controls were instituted. In 1624, Parliament passed an act to “prevent the murthering of bastard children.”9 William Walsh, by the end of the century, asserts, in A Dialogue Concerning Women (1699), “Go but one Circuit with the Judges here in England; observe how many women are condemned for killing their Bastard children.” The law intervened awkwardly and unevenly in such matters, and so it signaled its purposes through a decree that any birth kept secret could be inferred to signal danger, and the failure to disclose was itself criminal. The stories are grim and the circumstances hard to imagine. Laura Gowing relates several of them: Jane Lockwood confessed that she bore a stillborn child alone and that she left it on her bed, intending to bury it, but that her father’s dogs pulled it off: ‘She was much to blame,’ she admitted, ‘she did not acquaint her mother and neighbours therewith,’ and she put it in back in the bed intending to bury it. […] Jane Hardy, a widow, confessed that she had given birth to twins, both dead, and ‘kept them by her, about a week’s space’ before she had laid them in the earth of her floor.10

212  Jane Taylor These were just some of the ideas percolating in the back of my mind as I began to imagine a viable play. But what was foremost was a visual event: that opening scene with a girl on an anatomy table, about to be dissected, who comes back to life. On the disclosure of the situation, Anne was incarcerated, tried, and found guilty of murdering her infant. This story is ordinary enough and would have had small interest. Her case becomes extraordinary to history when she revives on the anatomy table. Her notoriety is such that there are over 20 pieces of doggerel verse about her by Oxford fellows (one of which is by the young Christopher Wren, who would become the architect of London’s own resurrection). This story was reminiscent for me of the late Shakespeare plays, with his haunting explorations of the possibility of renewal, resurrection, and rebirth. Of course, the puzzle of a return from death is there even in the early plays: Juliet’s feigned death is followed by her regaining consciousness, though tragically too late for Romeo, who kills himself in grief. Cleopatra’s feigned death results in the death of Antony. There is a quality of self-delusional hope in the face of despair that characterizes several of the mature plays. Here I have in mind the enigmatic structure of The Winter’s Tale, in which Leontes accuses his wife, Hermione, of infidelity and banishes her only to learn of Hermione’s blamelessness after her death. Years pass, and the melancholy king has a statue made in commemoration of his wronged wife. The play concludes, implausibly, with Hermione’s statue coming to life, and hope is restored. A comparable logic is implicit in the ending of King Lear. The old king, distraught and deluded, at the end of the play has his loving daughter, Cordelia, cut down from where she has been hanged. She is laid at the feet of Lear, who deceives himself that she still lives and breathes. At this point of wretchedness, he dies from shock and heartbreak, and so never has to come to terms with the fact that his daughter is irrecoverably dead, and that he was cause of her death. Anne Greene’s story is substantially different, but it does allow for the apparently miraculous transformation from death to life of a hanged girl. Seventeenth-century theological discourses intersect explicitly with the emerging sciences on the question of resurrection. In 1675 Robert Boyle, an experimental scientist of immense talent, would publish Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of Resurrection. Boyle’s grasp of bio-medical facts drives him to reconcile his faith with his science through an insistent belief in the “miracle,” though he does also conduct a chemical experiment with camphor and sulfuric acid, through which contrivance he dissolves the camphor until it loses its properties; then restores these through the addition of water, and the camphor reappears.11 This provides him with the evidence that he seeks to demonstrate that a resurrection has taken place. Boyle had been a member of the Royal Society and had worked alongside Willis and Petty, the two men who had “resurrected” Anne Greene.

“Newes from the Dead”  213 What does a scholar of Shakespeare, sensible of Hermione’s transformation from statue to live woman at the end of The Winter’s Tale, make of Boyle’s rather marvelous comments about the human body? As Boyle writes: a Human Body is not a Statue of Brass or Marble, that may ­continue; as to sense, the whole ages in a permanent state; but it is in a perpetual flux or changing condition, since it grows in all its Parts, and all its Dimensions, from a Corpusculum, no bigger than an Insect, to the full stature of Man.12 Are such texts evidence of a profound epistemic shift in the regimes of material culture, as the matter of fact and the fact of matter collide? Is The Winter’s Tale evidence of the contradictions precipitated by that shift? John Donne’s somewhat eccentric but fascinating Metempsychosis: The Progress of the Soul provides a substantial record of the ongoing discussions about the temporal and physical finitude of being and beings. The poetic essay raises several questions about transmogrification, identity, and the flesh. Shakespeare’s philosopher, Hamlet, several years later famously reminded us, “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat/of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that/worm” (4.3.30–32). There is a less easily recalled observation in Twelfth Night that makes a similar case with more levity: CLOWN:  What is MALVOLIO:  That

the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl? the soul of our grandma might haply inhabit a bird. (4.2.52–55)

The matter of the flesh, inside the regime of the new anatomical s­ ciences, disrupts matters of the mind. John Calvin oversaw the burning at the stake (in Geneva) of Michael Servetus, a brilliant Spanish converso accused of Arianism, in part because Servetus asserted that there was no scriptural evidence for the Trinity but also because his experience as an anatomist had given him no indication that anything like a Trinitarian being were possible in the flesh. This emerging cluster of debates about identity and materiality constitutes a node within the intellectual and theological archive, suggesting that the history of ideas is also a history of materiality. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that when I came across the broadsheet giving an account of the Anne Green “Wonder of Wonders,” I was attracted by what seemed to me an irresistibly theatrical event—a woman coming to life on an anatomy table. As I began to consider the theoretical and philosophical potential of this profoundly visual episode, it struck me that the incident could figure (in the sense of “embody”) many of the major enquiries of the seventeenth century. Where did identity locate itself? In the body,

214  Jane Taylor or in some indefinable non-material essence? 1650, the year of Anne Greene’s death, was coincidentally the year in which René Descartes died. His philosophy of the dual character of human identity, as both ­matter and soul, has defined subsequent western metaphysics. This thus becomes a question of practical staging: how to embody these ideas. At the same time the episode provides an emblem of that seventeenth-­ century ­intersection of story and science. My play takes as a kind of implicit point of origin Rembrandt’s very influential painting of the Anatomy Theatre of Dr. Tulp, a work that alludes to an anatomy in 1632. The rather wretched figure in the painting is Aris’t Kint, christened Adriaen Adrienszoon: a luckless petty criminal who in the end bungled the theft of a coat, killing its owner. It has been suggested that Descartes was in all likelihood one of the spectators at Tulp’s anatomy; he was living in Amsterdam at the time while working on his Treatise on Man. He describes his regular habit of visiting the local butcher to watch him slaughter animals.13 There has been much fascinating material written about the painting. One of its enigmas is why the body here is still intact, though the arm has been anatomized. We know from written accounts that in the case of an anatomy, generally the viscera would be removed as one of the first processes in order to delay the corruption of the flesh. Had Tulp requested Rembrandt to manifest the intellectual lineage between himself and Vesalius, that master of anatomy, whose own portrait frontispiece for his 1543 edition of Fabrica shows him in a kind of “double portrait” with an anatomized arm? If we return to scrutiny of the detail of Rembrandt’s painting, we will see a deep Cartesian engagement here. Tulp’s left hand is pinching his thumb and forefinger together, in a demonstration of what one might read as an exemplary demonstration of the fundamental principle of the opposable digits of the human hand. The finger of the corpse is flexed slightly, as if animated. One of the spectators, the figure at the back, somewhat higher than the rest, is flexing his index finger slightly, as if he too is caught in an explanation of the relation between intention and bodily reaction. His gaze is abstracted, as if he looks with an inner eye at an idea. The large folio, open in the dark, beyond the feet of the corpse, is surely Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human); and the spectators variously compare demonstration and instruction, looking now into written authority, now at the body. It seems as if Vesalius is twitching a tendon with his hand in the woodcut, much as Tulp is doing with his forceps. But Tulp is, it seems, showing a relation between tendon and finger—as it were, between intention and action. I wanted my play somehow to invoke Cartesian dualism and at the same time to embrace the relationship between the stage and the book in the seventeenth century. The theatre in some measure gave way to the new authority of private reading, particularly during the Reformation. This was not always piety, however, as we know from the great

“Newes from the Dead”  215 popularity of sensational and salacious publications. However, following the Restoration, the two discursive forms of the printed text and of live theatre must have found a mode of reconciliation. Samuel Pepys is here the exemplary figure: he is an avid if not addicted theatregoer, yet he is also caught within an erotics of private reading and writing.14 In considering the question of form, I also pondered Quixotic idealism as a plot possibility. I was tantalized by the Don’s religious chivalric zealotry and what it means that now (in the twenty-first century), within the international arena, we are again in an unlikely moment of commitment to sublime self-immolation for politico-religious causes. Shakespeare, by contrast, is chock-a-block full of political cynicism, with characters who climb diverse ladders in the pursuit of self-aggrandizement, or for revenge, or out of rage, and Quixote’s outlandish idealism looks rather like folly from outside of the system of its own delusions. What would Shakespeare make of the enquiry? Would this idealism have been legible to him? After Cardenio was performed in what was once the Anatomy Theatre at the University of Cape Town. Such a venue is particularly suited to puppet theatre because of its intimacy; it is constructed at a high angle, to permit observation from above, down into the body. This provides for great proximity to the event onstage. I have for some years been interested in exploring what the arts of puppetry tell us about our disquiet at the uneasy dialogue between body and soul, spirit and matter. The story of Anne Greene provided me with an opportunity to reconsider that mysterious art form for what it could say about substance and being.15

Figure 14.1  T he opening moments of After Cardenio by Jane Taylor at the Anatomy Theatre at the University of Cape Town. Reproduced with permission from Jane Taylor and the photographer, Anthony Strack.

216  Jane Taylor I had discovered three contemporary versions of Anne Greene’s history in EEBO: one is anonymous; one is by Robert Watkins, an Oxford scholar; and one is by William Burdet. I invoke this multiple origin at the start of my play: Anne Greene: My story was written and then was printed. Anne Greene. Three times written down. Being one, yet three stories. Three in one. There was me who died. (My self was hang’d, and given over as dead.) She was first. And there was also me, the resurrection, just like our Lord. That second was all eternity. Then also the babe, so small, and still. “Is it breathing?” The little mouth as blue as water. Who can tell my guilt or my innocence? If you care to find evidence Watch my play, “Behold God’s Providence!” The doctor said those were my first three words. “Behold God’s Providence,” the good doctor said I said. My voice is an occupying army. It has no body and so it sets up camp, inside me. But is always trying to escape. Forcing its way out through the teeth. As she says these words, the lights come up to reveal the group of ­doctors, ­ embrandt, one of whom, Dr. Petty, looks uncannily like the young R whose painting of Dr. Tulp, as I have suggested, informs all such scenes. Dr. Petty and Dr. Willis were the two Oxford anatomists attending the body who managed to save the young woman. They are clustered around a life-sized puppet of a naked female. The puppet was designed and made by Gavin Younge, a South African sculptor whose work I had curated before. Younge has in recent years been making animals and objects from molded vellum: they are simple but profound beings because of the luminous glow of the skin from which they are made. In an enigmatic way, their matter is their spirit. Of course, because the figure is vellum, she is both physical body and book, reminding us of the dialogue between Cervantes and Shakespeare. Younge sourced medical prosthetic eyes for her, and so her gaze had a particular kind of focused intensity. The actress, the primary puppeteer, and the puppet were at times bound to one another as they might be in a Bunraku-style Japanese puppetry performance, but at times they prowled around the stage, as if they were body and soul searching for one another. The volatility of the interchange between them was highly charged, and the question we repeatedly asked is “Is the body the technology for the soul, or is the soul a technology for the body?” As the play

“Newes from the Dead”  217

Figure 14.2  M  arty Kintu operating the puppet of Anne Greene designed by Gavin Younge. Reproduced with permission from Jane Taylor and Anthony Strack.

progressed, it was at times the puppet that consoled and comforted the actress; at times, the actress who defended the puppet. What was most astonishing was that the puppet and the girl could be at opposite sides of the stage and we still read the two as a single being. I was fortunate in having both a great young actress and a brilliant young puppeteer, so, at any time during the scene, the audience is gripped by both performances. Jemma Kahn is the actress and Marty Kintu is the puppeteer. The interrogation of Anne by the Church turned on the question of the death of the child. Here is a fragment of the dialogue as the two wrestle with the resuscitated girl: DOCTOR PETTY:  (as

if studying a case, he observes). Her eyes are open. Is this a scene that knows it is watched? I have heard it said that one life is not sufficient; And we enact through our dreams those things That we do not perform in life.

ASSISTANT:

Some have written that our dreams are prophecies.

218  Jane Taylor

Figure 14.3  T he puppet of Anne Greene consoles the actor playing Anne Greene, permission Jemma Kahn, in After Cardenio. Reproduced with ­ from Jane Taylor and Anthony Strack. DOCTOR PETTY:

Yet another thinking on these matters has suggested That when we sleep, the outward senses, as hearing, Seeing and smell, retreat from their ordinary activities, And the inward powers, as memory and phantasy are enhanced. Perhaps the Soul does at such times inspect its self? ASSISTANT:

I did dream once that I was the devil And the devil I was, did dream of me. The theological drama turns on whether Anne is guilty of infanticide or whether, as she keeps asserting, there had been a spontaneous abortion, with a fetus falling from her while at her place of employment. This is an all-important distinction, it seems. The doctor’s assistant tries to extract the truth from her: ASSISTANT:

A mother is advised to be not dark; not to conceal the birth of a babe. There’s a taint of secrecy that is unlovely to the law’s desire. For this we know, a child undisclosed is a child in danger.

“Newes from the Dead”  219 It is surely damned, having died without Church. Anne looks distressed, her gaze darts across the ceiling. ASSISTANT:

See the child? Look you. It stands outside the door. Its hand too small to make a fist, And cannot even knock at heaven to ask for entry. See, it helpless pats the door. Pat, pat. DOROTEA:

I never did dispatch the child. I’d have loved the boy, For a memento of his father. And besides, had I stayed and feigned My husband would have learned to love the child I think the boy would have looked enough a-like. My brief husband, for all that he himself were an ancient, Ever wooed me saying he wanted a lad. He’d ’ave been ready to see His own eyebrow on the growing child’s forehead. (Aside to Doctor Petty.) Hoar frost sews seeds in whore springtime.

ASSISTANT:

The play includes a meta-critical sequence in which the actress, the ­puppeteer, and the puppet all engage in a discussion about puppetry, the soul, and the body.

III: Of Identity and Number When I first started working on the piece, it occurred to me that John Locke, who was himself a student of philosophy and Anatomy in the decade after Anne Greene’s death, must surely have known about this event; must have had her in his mind when he wrote in his famous chapter on identity and person, from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that consciousness is what makes identity in persons. At the time of writing the play, I asserted as an act of faith that surely, if over 20 fellows had written doggerel about Anne Greene, her case challenged assumptions about personhood and identity. Here is one couplet: Strange metamorphosis this dead-live Woman, Now differs from her self; and are such Common? Another fellow comments on the reprieve that Anne won, on the grounds of her pleas that the infant death was an accidental miscarriage: Thou shalt not Swing againe: come cleare thy brow, Thou hast the benefit o’th’Clergie now.

220  Jane Taylor I have been doing research to strengthen my claim that Locke would have known about her, that she would have informed his thinking. I found a copy of a book that seems to resolve the matter for me: it is a translation of the lecture notes of the Oxford Anatomy lecturer Thomas Willis.16 These seventeenth-century lecture notes are a fascinating rarity and show us the thinking and the theoretical practice of a man deemed now to be the originator of neuroscience in its earliest form. Willis first coined the term “Neurology” and went on to have a substantial career as a medical practitioner. His detailed archive provides an extensive insight into the daily routine of a prescribing medical professional in the seventeenth century, and he is archived in the medical discourses because of the “circle of Willis.” (A “circulatory anastomosis” that supplies blood to the brain is named after him and his celebrated publication, Cerebri Anatome—with prints by Christoper Wren—remained for many decades the standard scholarly treatise on the brain.) Wren’s poem about Anne Greene is not much more than a piece of youthful sardonicism, but it does serve to remind us that the young Wren was closely engaged in the community of scholarship around Drs. Petty and Willis, the two men who oversaw the resuscitation of Anne. Willis’s lectures are examples of their kind, almost unique within medical history, and remarkably they survive because of the notes kept by two students of Anatomy at Oxford: Richard Lower and Mr. John Locke. This was a striking find. They are evidence of an intellectual circuit of enquiry between the anatomist who resuscitated Anne Greene and the foremost empirical philosopher of Europe. In my play, Anne Greene herself suggests that Locke would have been interested in her, and she quotes his comments on resurrections: And thus we may be able, without any difficulty, conceive the same Person at the Resurrection, though in a Body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here, the same consciousness going along with the Soul that inhabits it. One reason why this intrigues me is that it suggests that Locke’s ­influential thinking about being and number in all likelihood arises in some measure from the story of Anne Greene. Philosophy and the ­Natural Sciences were co-emerging. Both of Anne’s anatomists would go on to be of huge significance for history. Petty would become a significant theorist of money and would also oversee the survey to facilitate the “Act for the Settlement of ­I reland.”17 So loathed did he become for his endeavors on behalf of Cromwell in Ireland that Jonathan Swift’s intense satire, A Modest Proposal, is apparently directed at Petty for his work of arithmetical

“Newes from the Dead”  221 calculation in the distribution of Irish lands, a project outlined in his The Political Anatomy of Ireland. (It is worth noting that Karl Marx would come to characterize Petty as the founder of economics.) While in Ireland Petty was visited by the young Robert Boyle, who records how he and Petty together engaged in dissections of live animals, through which Boyle was able to study the circulation of blood, a set of enquiries that must have been fundamental to his thinking about hydraulics. Boyle, however, was, as I have suggested, a deeply ­religious Christian, and he is one of the key spokespersons on the question of resurrection and identity. It is intriguing to imagine him thinking through some of these questions with Dr. Petty. The portrait of Petty by Isaac Fuller in the National Portrait Gallery shows the doctor as a ­seventeenth-century Hamlet, reflecting on mortality with a skull in his right hand. His left hand points our gaze from the skull to the pages of an anatomy book which bears the illustrations of the human skull. While Petty went off to engage in finance and political adventures, Wren meanwhile developed close relations with Dr. Willis. Wren is responsible for the fine illustrations of the brain for Willis’s Cerebri Anatome of 1664. These may indeed be the source of the images of the skull represented in the portrait of Petty. The bond between Wren and Willis is evidenced by a small colored drawing held at the Wellcome ­I nstitute, showing a section of a small intestine. The play itself became a meditation on the archive. As Anne’s ­puppeteer asks: Do we think we understand what such a story must mean? We are, after all, readers, and I found her through reading. I am not a woman’s archivist. But I do know that any woman who enters the archive finds there the archive of women. These are the miserable words: “being got with child by a Gentleman.” There is no choice, it seems, for Anne: “Being got with child.” Perhaps young girls never beget. They are begotten upon. The archive knows nothing about desire. It knows only this: that Anne says that she lost the child when it fell from her while busy with housework in her master’s house. The archive seeks to hold what belongs to the law; only literature keeps what belongs to lovers. This chapter has crossed several purposes, historically and methodologically various. On the one hand, it is an archive of a particular e­ phemeral moment, a theatre performance that exists in a complex sensorium ­deploying the media of sound, space, and time in making an argument

222  Jane Taylor about Cartesian and post-Cartesian questions about subjects and ­objects. It considers in particular the enigmatic art of puppetry, a mode through which sensibility is observed as projected into matter, through an illusion that posits that consciousness and substance are somehow mutually bound in an experiential vitalism. Recent theory, prompted in some ways by the considerations of object-oriented ontology and thing theory, reinvigorates modes of enquiry into the subject-object dialectic, undermining the commodified world of goods that props up a perpetual accumulation of profit. The new ontologies are in some ways associated with a nostalgia for mysticism, and dismissed by materialism as metaphysics. Nonetheless they also are suggestive of Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” a hypothesized event in which substances at massive extension can be observed to act upon one another. I have also explored some of the philosophical significance of Locke’s years as a medical student, in a consideration of how his practice working with and observing human bodies informs and is informed by his distinct metaphysics of the physical. In such terms, it seems not incoherent to treat the anatomy theatre as the legitimate inheritor, in the seventeenth century, of Shakespeare’s stage.

Notes 1 The school apparently emerged from St. Omers, which in 1593 was ­established in the Spanish Low Countries, one of several such institutions operating in Europe during the era, to provide a Catholic education to youths unable to be raised in their faith in Elizabethan England. It was effectively the lay equivalent of Douai, the school in Europe where Edmund Campion had studied for clerical orders. 2 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 107. 3 Inigo Jones, the celebrated theatre designer, was also commissioned to d ­ esign anatomy theatres. He designed the anatomy theatre of the Barber-Surgeons Company in the City of London, and the first dissection there was conducted in 1638. 4 The OED describes two distinct strands of meaning for “pathology” from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; one of these is defined as ‘to do with feelings’ and the other “to do with disease or abnormality.” 5 Fletcher has been associated with Beaumont as co-author of The Knight of the Burning Pestle [KBP], although that is no longer the dominant interpretation. There is a striking echo in KBP of the Don’s encounter at Master Peter’s puppet show, although such doubling is by critical opinion as often attributed to the conventions of satire rather than any overt borrowing. One Walter Burr (publisher) wrote the epistle dedicatory for the 1635 edition of the play, which attributes the work to Beaumont and Fletcher, and there is—this early—enough anxiety of influence for Burre to note, “Perhaps it will be thought to be of the race of Don Quixote.” David M. Bergeron, the author of “Paratexts in Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” suggests that ‘Burre expresses an uncommon literariness by placing the play alongside a work recently translated by Thomas Shelton into English’ (p. 461). That work was Don Quixote, and it is tempting to imagine

“Newes from the Dead”  223 that the imputed association of Fletcher as collaborator on the KBP arises in part from the awareness of Fletcher’s collaboration with Shakespeare on Cardenio. See David M. Bergeron, “Paratexts in Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” Studies in Philology, 106/4 (Fall 2009): 456–467. 6 There is a warrant signed by the Treasurer of the Privy Chamber, dated May 20, 1613, that orders payment to John Heminges and the King’s Men for performing 19 plays, one of which is Cardenno. Roger Chartier characterizes it as “without any doubt the first English theatrical adaptation based on Don Quixote,” the translation of which into English had taken place in 1612 by Thomas Shelton. There is some evidence for a circulation of a partial version available in English from as early as 1607. James Fitz-Maurice indicates that Shelton wrote a partial translation in 40 days in 1607, which he then laid aside for several years. Ben Jonson’s Epicene, or The Silent Woman refers in Act 4 to “Amadis de Gaul, or Don Quixote.” Only in 1653 did the stationer Humphrey Moseley attribute it to “Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare.” 7 See Piers D. Mitchell et al., “The Study of Anatomy in England from 1700 to the 20th Century,” Journal of Anatomy 219/2 (2011): 91–92. 8 See “Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna” by Giovanni Ferrari in Past & Present, 117/1 (November 1987): 54. 9 A. N. Williams, “Child Adoption in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 97/1 (January 2004): 37–38. For further research see also Angus McLaren, “Barrenness Against Nature”: Recourse to Abortion in Pre-Industrial England,” The Journal of Sex Research 17/3 (1981): 224–237; and Laura Gowing, “Secret Births and Infanticide in ­Seventeenth-Century England,” Past & Present 156 (August 1997): 87–115. 10 Gowing, 110–111. 11 Robert Boyle, Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of Resurrection (London, 1675), 25–27. This experiment is recreated and available on YouTube in a video made in 2013/14 in the Materialities, Texts and Images Program, a collaboration between the California Institute of Technology and the Huntington Library. The account of this video is to be found in the blog of Alexander Wragge-Morley (January 3, 2015). www. alexwraggemorley.wordpress.com. 12 To be found in The Works of Robert Boyle, in Six Volumes. Volume 4, ­(London, 1772), 196. 13 Annie Bitbol Hesperies, “Cartesian Physiology,” in Descartes’ Natural ­Philosophy, ed. Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster, and John Sutton ­(London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 355. 14 Pepys is also, tellingly, caught up in the bio-medical sciences, not least of all with the saga of his own bladder stones and kidney stones. He was as keenly engaged with every scientific breakthrough of the Royal Society as he was with seeing the King’s mistresses onstage. 15 Cervantes certainly was interested in the form. In Part Two, chapters XXV– XXVIII of Don Quixote, Quixote finds himself at the puppet show of ­Master Peter. 16 Willis’s Oxford Lectures, by Kenneth Dewhurst (Oxford: Sandford Publications, 1980). 17 The “Petty Down Survey” of 1655–56 (“Down Survey” alludes to the fact that this was the record that was “down”; in other words, it was written and recorded).

15 Tail-Piece Shake That Thing Marjorie Garber

Thus the complex of the fellow human-being falls apart into two ­components, of which one makes an impression by its constant structure and stays together as a thing, while the other can be understood by the activity of memory—that is, can be traced back to information from [the subject’s] own body. —Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology1 …in fact the Project, or rather its invisible ghost, haunts the whole series of Freud’s theoretical writings to the very end. James Strachey, Editor’s Introduction to the Project for a Scientific Psychology 2

After a conversation with Roman Jakobson about linguistics and ­synesthesia, the art historian Ernst Gombrich invented a party game. It consisted of creating “the simplest imaginable medium in which ­relationships can still be expressed, a language of two words only.” Gombrich decided to call them “ping” and “pong.” “If these were all we had,” he asks, rhetorically, “and we had to name an elephant and a cat, which would be ping and which pong?” The answer, he thought, was clear. Or hot soup and ice cream? “To me, at least,” he said, “ice cream is ping and soup pong.” Or Rembrandt and Watteau? “Surely in that case Rembrandt would be pong and Watteau ping.”3 Gombrich found analogs to his party game in the psychological procedures of Charles Osgood, whose book The Measurement of Meaning established “semantic ­differentials” between pairs of words as a way of ­testing interpretation.4 Subsequently Peter McKellar undertook, for a book on creative imagination, some experiments made according to Gombrich’s suggestions. McKellar asked his class of 14 students to classify a wide range of paired things—a mouse and an elephant, an ounce and a pound, a mile and an inch, yellow and black, rubber and putty—in terms of these two words, “ping” and “pong.” The responses, he said, showed “remarkable agreement,” with most students, though not all, making the following binary assignments5:

Shake That Thing  225 Ping

Pong

mouse ounce inch yellow rubber

elephant pound mile black putty

Voted by 13 13 13 11 10

(There is, I suppose, no reason to assume that the same 13 students voted the same way in each of the first three pairings, though it is fascinating to imagine the recalcitrant, or imaginative, student 14 who would then have stood out from this consensus.) In any case, 13 students thought that mouse was ping and elephant pong, that ounce was ping and pound was pong, and so on. Gombrich’s options (ice cream and hot soup, Rembrandt and Watteau) are more innovative and less quantitative (who would really say that mile is ping and inch is pong?), but the exercise is interesting, and not only in terms of synesthesia. In its binary structure, this invented two-word language demarcates the boundaries of signification. For the purposes of this argument, I propose to adapt Gombrich’s terms and to offer a similar binary structure based upon two equally onomatopoetic words that speak more directly to the topic, Shakespeare’s Things. The words I will use, instead of “ping” and “pong,” are “Ding” and “dong.” These two words, like ping and pong, are often found paired together, as indeed they are in Shakespeare in the closing lines and refrains (or “burdens”) of two tell-tale songs: “Tell me where is fancy bred,” in The Merchant of Venice (sung while Bassanio makes his casket choice), and “Full fathom five your father lies,” in The Tempest (sung to Ferdinand by the invisible Ariel). SINGER:  L et

us all sing fancy’s knell. I’ll begin it:  Ding, dong, bell. ALL:  Ding, dong, bell. (Merchant 3.2.71–72) ARIEL:  Sea-nymphs hourly ring SPIRITS:  Ding dong. ARIEL:  Hark, now I hear them. SPIRITS:  Ding dong bell.

his knell.

(Tempest 1.2.404–5) The words “ding” and “dong” are “echoic”; they imitate the sound of a bell. In both of these cases, the word “bell” rhymes with “knell,” the sound of the funeral bell, and in both lyrics, there is the suggestion of

226  Marjorie Garber death or loss: the death of “fancy” (infatuation, fantasy) in the casket choice, and the (false) news of the death of Ferdinand’s father, Alonso, the King of Naples. The solemn two-note progression was familiar in Shakespeare’s time in the chiming of church bells; today—alas—it is more frequently heard in the ring of a doorbell (ding-dong). Sometimes a song can ding and not dong, as is the case with “It was a lover and his lass” in As You Like It: In spring-time, the only pretty ring-time, When birds do sing, hey ding-a-ding ding, Sweet lovers love the spring. (AYLI 5.3.17–19) But even in this more cheerful song an undertone of mortality is present in the carpe diem theme: “A Life was but a flower”; “And therefore take the present time” (5.3.28; 32). The sentiment is conventional rather than startling—it is, as we will see in a moment, the identity of the hearers that might take us by surprise. The Oxford English Dictionary gives this reference: “When birds do sing, hey ding-a-ding ding” as its first example of “ding” as the “ringing sound of a heavy bell or of metal when struck”; it seems possible, though, that what is being echoed is instead what the line says it is: birdsong. “Ping pong,” I might note, is also echoic, said to imitate the sounds of the ball hitting first the paddle and then the table and dates from as recently as 1900. (It is not, as some might surmise, a Chinese word.) The OED in fact—to my surprise and pleasure—adds to its description of this “imitative” term: “perhaps compare also ding-dong n.” So much for etymology. But “Ding” and “dong” in modern usage have, of course, quite different associations, and it is those that I want to appropriate in order to look at the “thing” in Shakespeare. “Ding” is German, and high-theory, from Kant to Heidegger to Freud and Lacan to “thing theory.” “Dong” is modern American slang for penis. What is the relationship, in Shakespearean use, between thing/ding and thing/ dong, and what, if anything, can it tell us about Shakespeare’s Things? As a way of exploring this, let’s return for a moment to the love song in As You Like It. In this scene the serenaded lovers are not the play’s romantic leads, Rosalind and Orlando, but rather that gloriously ill-­ assorted pair—Touchstone, the court fool, and Audrey, the goatherd. Arguably Touchstone, with his frankness of speech, supplies the missing dong (“As the ox hath his bow, …the horse his curb, and the falcon his bells, so man hath his desires” [3.3.65–66]). As he emphasizes, “Audrey” rhymes with “bawdry,” and these distinctly carnal lovers will “press in…amongst the rest of the country copulatives” (5.4.53) to join the crowded final wedding scene.

Shake That Thing  227 This reminder of sexual motives—in or out of marriage—like ­ osalind’s deliberately unromantic “Men have died from time to time R and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (4.1.91–92)—counters inflated idealism with deflating realism. The resulting balance, what we might call the ding-dong effect, stabilizes what might otherwise be a self-defeating tendency to ignore the body, mortality, and the materiality of sexual desire. The sense of “thing” as a euphemism for penis or vagina has a long ­history in English—and in English literature. In Ben Jonson’s ­comedy, The Alchemist, the London gentleman Lovewit, listing an imagined group of “bawdy pictures,” mentions not only “The Friar and the Nun” but also “the boy of six year old, with the great thing.”6 To the  Wife of Bath, and to Shakespeare, “thing” could indicate either male or ­female genitals (the Wife calls them “oure thynges smale”7) and the ­equal-­opportunity use of “thing” in this connection has continued to the present—as, for example, in the lyrics of a popular dance song like “Shake That Thing.”8 Shakespeare uses “thing” in this sense as early as 2 Henry VI. When the licentious King Edward asks the widow Grey to “lie with” him (3.2.69) as the price of receiving back her husband’s lands, his brother Richard—then Duke of Gloucester—anticipates the terms of exchange, remarking, “I see the lady hath a thing to grant/Before the king will grant her humble suit” (3.2.11–12). As it turns out, the Lady Grey is the better bargainer; when she demurs, the King ups his bid and proposes marriage. Unsurprisingly, the bawdy use of “thing” is most likely to be found in the comedies or in the comic sections of the history plays. The concluding couplet of The Merchant of Venice, spoken by Gratiano, contains multiple puns, all of them available to an Elizabethan audience. Well, while I live I’ll fear no other thing So sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring (5.1.305–6) In addition to “thing,” there are puns on “sore” (which could mean “dearly” as well as “painful”) and “ring,” the contested gift supposedly given to the “doctor” and his “clerk,” playing on the Latin word for ring, which was “anus.” So Gratiano’s romantic statement about marital fidelity is also a dirty joke about sexual intercourse (or what the Renaissance called “conversation,” a term that survives in our legal phrase “criminal conversation”). High and low, love and sex, male and female are neatly compressed into the play’s last words, sweeping the cast offstage. There may be a glancing reference to the double meaning of “thing” in the conclusion of Jaques’s “All the world’s a stage” speech in As You

228  Marjorie Garber Like It, where the last of the seven ages of man is “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (2.7.165). The elderly dotard at the end of his life has neither senses nor potency. In the same play the final couplet of a hunting song that jokes about cuckoldry (“Take thou no scorn to wear the horn; / It was a crest ere thou wast born. / Thy father’s father wore it, / And thy father bore it”) underscores the married man’s dilemma: The horn, the horn, the lusty horn Is not a thing to laugh to scorn. (4.2.14–19) More straightforward still is a comment made by Viola in Twelfth Night, when, dressed as the boy Cesario, she is confronted with the prospect of a duel. “A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man” (3.4. 268–69). It’s a laugh line for the audience, though not for Viola/Cesario. That her supposedly terrifying challenger turns out to be the terrified Sir Andrew Aguecheek continues the play’s interrogation of bravery, gender, and what Viola/Cesario has earlier called “mettle”—a word that, while it came to mean “disposition” or “character,” also meant “semen” and was used by Shakespeare in both metaphorical and literal senses. In Henry IV Part 1, Falstaff and Mistress Quickly (aka “Hostess”) ­engage in a typical (for them) piece of badinage, set off by Falstaff’s slang use of “thing”: FALSTAFF:  Go, you thing, go! HOSTESS:  Say, what thing, what thing? FALSTAFF:  Why, a thing to thank God on. HOSTESS:  I am no thing to thank God on.

I would thou shouldst know

it, I am an honest man’s wife. (3.3.104–7) In a much darker moment in The Winter’s Tale, when Leontes accuses Hermione of infidelity, he addresses her as “O thou thing, / Which I’ll not call a creature of thy place” (2.1.84–85), by which he means that he will not, under the supposed circumstances, dignify her with her title or rank. “Thing” here may just mean “I don’t know what to call you,” but “O, thou thing,” spoken to his wife (and queen), is close enough to Falstaff’s “Go, thou thing,” addressed to a bawd, to make the word “thing” resonate bitterly as anatomical synecdoche. Elsewhere in the passage, Leontes labels Hermione an “adultress,” a “bed-swerver,” and a “traitor,” and his mind is clearly on sexual wordplay, since he begins by twisting her pacifying suggestion that he does “but mistake” into a

Shake That Thing  229 direct and bitter accusation (“You have mistook, my lady, Polixenes for Leontes” [2.1.83]). Sexualized and specifically anatomical “things” also appear, from time to time, in the tragedies, sometimes in scenes that, were it not for their outcome, might be generically found in a comedy. For example, when Emilia approaches her husband Iago with a gift he has long wished for, Desdemona’s handkerchief, he at first turns her language into a ­vulgar joke: EMILIA:  I have a thing for you. IAGO:  You have a thing for me?

It is a common thing. (Othello 3.3.305–6)

(The Norton Shakespeare glosses “thing” in this line as “vagina,” and “common” as “available to all.”) The Iagan “thing” heralds a series of other “thing” references, from the famous conversation between Desdemona and Emilia about sexual transgression (“would you do such a thing for the whole world?” “The world’s a huge thing. It is a great price for as small vice” 4.3.66–68) to Othello’s tragically mistaken sense of Desdemona’s infidelity, which he describes as—in part—a property violation: “to keep a corner in the thing I love / For others’ uses” (5.1.275). But in the ding/dong dialectic, equivalence and exchange is created most starkly by the first colloquy cited above, that between Iago and Emilia: the “thing” Iago initially and crudely takes as a term for female lasciviousness is, as Emilia will shortly reveal, the handkerchief, which stands in Othello’s mind as the sign of Desdemona’s sexual fidelity. And, of course, “thing” is part of the omnipresent Shakespearean word “nothing” (no-thing), one of whose many meanings is as a term for the female genitals. In the exchange between Hamlet and Ophelia in 3.2., “nothing” and “(no) thing” are often glossed as female and male: HAMLET:  Do you think I meant country matters? OPHELIA:  I think nothing, my lord. HAMLET:  That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ OPHELIA:  What is, my lord? HAMLET:  No thing. OPHELIA:  You are merry, my lord.

legs.

(3.2.015–110) These are all striking instances, witty, insulting, or poignant depending on the context. But Shakespeare’s use of “thing” in this bodily sense, whether descriptively or aversively, would be of relatively minor interest if it did not operate as one pole of a dynamic of which the other pole is the sublime.

230  Marjorie Garber Lear’s “Thou art the thing itself,” recognizing both the radical identity of Poor Tom and his own stripped condition, elevates the word “thing” to something both fundamental and ineffable. The “bare, forked animal” of Lear’s figure is vividly anatomical (indeed it foreshadows his expressly sexual and anatomical description, in the mad scene with Gloucester, of the “simpering dame/Whose face between her forks presages snow” [4.6.136–137]). But Lear—the “mad” Lear—can read the rune in the ruins: “Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art” (3.4.98–100). And Edgar, as Poor Tom, who enters chanting “Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill” (73), has described himself as a serving-man who “did the act of darkness” with his mistress, “slept in the contriving of lust, and waked to do it” (82–84). So Edgar as Poor Tom is both “things”—the penis/pillicock— and the sublime and abjected “thing itself.” (“Pillicock” as penis is not a nonce-word; it appears in references from Florio’s World of Words [1598] to the poems of Robert Burns and may have been in use as early as the fourteenth century.) Sublime “things” in Shakespeare are not difficult to come by: lofty, elevated, grand, exalted. Sometimes terrifying. From the sighting of the ghost in Hamlet (“What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” [1.1.19]) to Miranda’s heartfelt, but mistaken, first view of Ferdinand (“I might call him/A thing divine, for nothing natural/I ever saw so noble” [Tempest 1.2.421–23]), the “thing” looms as an indescribable but vivid impression. As with the ghost, such a “thing” can frighten as well as impress. Consider, for example, Cominius’s description of the young ­Coriolanus as a “thing of blood” in a passage that makes him into a martial killing machine (“From face to foot / He was a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries” [2.2.104–6]). Or, indeed, Prospero’s famous allusion to Caliban at the end of The ­Tempest: “This thing of darkness / I acknowledge mine” (5.1.279). The curious impersonality of the phrase makes it possible to hear in it a gesture ­toward the speaker’s own mortality as well as toward the unruly and appetitive Caliban who stands before him. The effect is to underscore a relationship between the two “things” at once: ding and dong. It is not so far from this echoic dyad to Freud’s uncanny, the heimlich and unheimlich, homey and strange. We might compare the two poles of “thingness,” in these cases—what I am calling, with considerable anatomical license, the ding and the dong—to the real/ideal or physical/spiritual distinction exemplified in Romeo and Juliet by the words maidenhead and maidenhood. “Maidenhead,” as a term for the hymen and thus for physical virginity, appears in the first scene—when the servants jest about whether they will cut off “the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads” (1.1.25) and twice afterward: in the Nurse’s oath, “by my maidenhead at twelve-year old”

Shake That Thing  231 (1.3.2) and then in Juliet’s lament at the news of Romeo’s exile, “death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead” (3.2.137). “Maidenhood” appears only once, but the context is unforgettable: Juliet’s “Gallop apace” speech of sexual longing as she is waiting for Romeo to arrive: Come, civil night, Thou sober-suited matron all in black, And learn me how to lose a winning match Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods. (3.2.11–14) Maidenhood is a state of being; maidenhead is a physical token. Both terms refer to sexual innocence and initiation, but the difference ­between them, and the poet-playwright’s skillful use of the contrast, produces what is, in effect, a sign or emblem in little of the entire play. On the one side (dong), the brawling servants and the lusty Nurse; on the other side (ding), the lovers, whose mutual desire unites sex and love, losing and winning, death and life. To return, then, and to conclude: The word “Ding,” familiar to contemporary theorists through the work of Heidegger and Lacan, has assumed a certain iconic status. Lacan discussed “the Thing” (la chose in French, das Ding in G ­ erman) in his seminar of 1959–1960. Das Ding is a “dumb reality”; he compares it to Harpo Marx, the “terrible dumb brother” of the Marx brothers, whose smile “leaves us unclear as to whether it signifies the most extreme perversity or complete simplicity.”9 Das Ding is “the beyond-the-­ signified.”10 It is outside language. “The Thing is not nothing, but literally is not.”11 Here we have Edgar, “the thing itself.” Beyond-the-signified. From these heights of what Bruno Latour, citing Heidegger, calls “the celebrated Thing,”12 we can descend, not—as with philosophers and historians of science—to “objects,” technological or manmade, but rather to bodies-as-things, in particular, to sexualized body parts as metaphors, synecdoches (often meant to be reductive or dismissive). Modern rude language does not lack for such terms, nor were the same terms unknown in Shakespeare’s time (consider, for example, the English language lesson in Henry V, where the “French” pronunciation of English words turns them into scandalously frank—and, in the context, comical—utterances). Dong is not one of the words that Alice induces the Princess to speak (though foot and gown, suitably Frenched, emerge as foutre and coun). The OED’s researchers are baffled by the origins of dong, though some suggest that it derives from Edward Lear’s poem, “The Dong with the Luminous Nose.” I mention this in part because of the nice ­coincidence of a poet named Lear contributing to the notional history

232  Marjorie Garber of the term. The poem, though, is not a limerick or nonsense verse, as modern readers might expect from Edward Lear, but rather a song of lost love: the wistful Dong assumes his long false nose, with a glowing lamp at the end, as a way of seeking through the night for his “Jumbly girl,” who has sailed away. As Lear’s biographer Jenny Uglow notes, “It would be simple to say that the noses that stretched and poked throughout Lear’s work had finally fused into a single flaming organ. Yet the luminous nose is poetry itself.”13 She does not say that sometimes a nose is just a nose (or, indeed, that sometimes a Dong, with a capital D, is just a Dong). Still, literary connections between Edward Lear and forthright American authors like John Steinbeck or Philip Roth seem unlikely. I make no claim here for any early modern meaning for “dong” other than as the tintinnabular other of “ding.” Moreover, as my examples have repeatedly shown, I have taken more than poetic license in using “dong” here to name the sexual “thing,” the sex organs, male or female, indicating what Freud called both the “sexual aim” and the “sexual object.” When Falstaff calls the Hostess “thou thing,” he is not calling her a penis, but he is, cartoon-like, transforming her for a moment into a sexual synecdoche. My purpose has been to elucidate the Shakespearean use of “thing,” which can vary from the sublime to the libidinous, within the larger context of consistent (and persistent) themes within the plays. No one had to teach Shakespeare how to shake that thing.

Notes 1 Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” in The Standard ­E dition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 1:331. Emphasis in the original. 2 James Strachey, “Editor’s Introduction” to Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology, SE 1:290. 3 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Originally published 1960. Millennium edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 370–71. 4 Charles E. Osgood, George J. Suci, Percy H. Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957). The authors classified their semantic pairs under three general headings: evaluation, ­potency, and activity. 5 Peter McKellar, Imagination and Thinking (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 65–66. 6 Ben Jonson, The Alchemist (1610) 5.1.25. 7 Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” The Canterbury Tales, 1.121. 8 E.g., from the last verse, Now, it ain’t no Charleston, ain’t no Pigeon Wing,/Nobody has to give you no lessons, to shake that thing./When everybody can shake that thing,/Oh, I mean, shake that thing!/ I’m getting tired of telling you how to shake that thing!

Shake That Thing  233 As sung by Ethel Waters. Lyrics by Nigel Staff, Kevin Blair, Jeremy Jackson, Edward O’Neil. Universal Music Publishing Group, Shapiro Bernstein & Co. Inc. 9 Jacques Lacan, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 55. 10 Ibid., 54. 11 Ibid., 63. 12 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 159. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? trans. W.B. Barton, Jr., and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Regnery, 1967), 95. 13 Jenny Uglow, Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), 466.

Notes on Contributors

Kelsey Blair (PhD, Simon Fraser University) is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English at McGill University. Her areas of ­interest include performance studies, theatre theory, popular performance genres (sport, circus, musical theatre), and affect. She is also a community ­engaged theatre artist and a young adult book author. Hanh Bui is a doctoral candidate in English at Brandeis University. She received her B.A. in English at Stanford University. Her dissertation is titled “Promised Ends: An Exploration of Aging, Medicine, and ­Technology in Shakespeare’s Works.” She currently lives in London. Brett Gamboa has taught Shakespeare and other dramatic literature at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, and Brown University. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Double Plays (Cambridge, 2018), which considers the historical, dramaturgical, and phenomenological bases and incentives for theatrical doubling. His performance-oriented introductions and commentaries appear throughout The Norton Shakespeare. Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of several books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers and Shakespeare After All, as well as of books on ­cultural topics ranging from dogs and real estate to cross-dressing, bisexuality, the use and abuse of literature, and the place of the arts in academic life. John S. Garrison is Associate Professor of English at Grinnell ­College. His books include Shakespeare at Peace (with Kyle Pivetti, ­Routledge, 2018) and Shakespeare and the Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is currently completing a monograph entitled “The ­Pleasures of Memory in Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (under contract with Oxford ­University Press). Aaron Greenberg  holds a PhD from Northwestern University. He served on the Core Faculty of the McGaw Bioethics Clinical Scholars

236  Notes on Contributors Program at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is co-founder of the life-writing company bioGraph. Kenneth Gross is the author of Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic; The Dream of the Moving Statue; Shakespeare’s Noise; Shylock Is Shakespeare; and Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. He is co-winner of the 2011–12 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He teaches English at the University of Rochester. Natasha Korda  is Director of the Center for the Humanities and ­Professor of English at Wesleyan University and 2019–20 vice-­ president of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is author of Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern ­England (2002) and Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (2011), and co-editor of Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (2002) and Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (2011). She is currently editing the Norton Critical Edition of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and writing a book on material ephemera, feminist counter-archives, and early modern theater historiography. Julia Reinhard Lupton  is Professor of English at the University of ­California, Irvine, where she has taught since 1989. She is the author or co-author of five books on Shakespeare, including most recently Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life ­(Chicago 2018). Her new work is on Shakespeare and virtue. She is a former Guggenheim Fellow and a former Trustee of the Shakespeare ­Association of America. Aoife Monks is a Reader in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of The Actor in Costume (Palgrave Macmillan) and co-author of Readings in Costume (also from Palgrave) with Ali Maclaurin and she is a Consulting Editor for the journal Contemporary Theatre Review. Megan Snell is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in Renaissance drama. Her dissertation articulates how babies in drama reframe violence, materiality, temporality, and realism onstage. She has also published in Shakespeare Quarterly on characters and sources in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Andrew Sofer is Professor of English at Boston College. Since 2012, he has taught at Harvard’s Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research. His books include The Stage Life of Props; Wave, a collection of poetry; and Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance. He has directed many new and classic plays.

Notes on Contributors  237 Lawrence Switzky is an Associate Professor of English and Drama at the University of Toronto. He has written on modernism across the arts, theatre directing, and modern and contemporary theatre and drama. His book, The Rise of the Theatre Director: Negotiations with the Material World, 1880–1956, is forthcoming. He co-edits the quarterly journal Modern Drama. Jane Taylor currently holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in Aesthetic Theory and Material Performance at the University of the ­Western Cape. Taylor works across disciplines as a scholar, curator, and theatre practitioner. She has collaborated on several projects with ­Handspring Puppet Company and artist William Kentridge. Giles Whiteley is docent in English Literature at Stockholm University. He is the author of Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death (2010), Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum (2015), Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth Century British Literature (2018), and The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth Century British Literature, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. “absolute power” 25–6 absolute sovereignty 13, 25–7 actants 31, 67, 112, 198 action force 128, 130–1 actor-network theory 12, 67 An Actor’s Work (Stanislavski) 163 Adler, Thomas 57 Aebischer, Pascale 153 After Cardenio (Taylor) 18, 206–10, 215, 218; and Anne Greene 215–19; use of puppet 215–19 Agamben, Giorgio 26, 40 agency 160, 168; minor 123, 125, 128–33; motive 33; of non-human matter 6; to objects 3, 69; in performance feature 155 aging 66–76 The Alchemist (Jonson) 227 Alexander the Great 9, 101 All’s Well That Ends Well (Middleton and Shakespeare) 111 The Ambassadors (Holbein) 101, 157 anamorphosis 33, 155–60 anatomy demonstrations 210–19; infant death 211; legal dissection of corpse 210 Anatomy Theatre of Dr. Tulp (Rembrandt) 214 ancient glass technology 71 Anderson, Miranda 77n5 Animacies, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Chen) 129 “animacy hierarchy” 129 Annas, Julia 116, 121n33 Anthropocene 136 anthropocentrism 5, 27, 40 “anthropocentric caricature” 196–7 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare): “puppet” connotation in 180–1, 189n2

Appadurai, Arjun 156 Arendt, Hannah 10, 122n38, 198; natality 117 the archive 165, 213, 221 arete 109, 111 Aristotelianism 23 Aristotle 15, 110; establishing affinity between virtue and skill 116; on moral luck 119n6; virtue ethics 15, 110; on virtue remaining dormant 119n8 “Art and Objecthood” (Fried) 199–200 As You Like It (Shakespeare) 226, 227–8 Auden, W. H. 188, 193 baby-props 79–87 Bacon, Francis: proto-biological experiments 26 Barasch, Frances K. 189n6 Bartholomew Fair (Jonson) 184–6, 192n23 Bathrick, David 200 Battle of Agincourt 9 Beale, Simon Russell 96 beards 27–8 “beast-machine hypothesis” (Descartes) 32 Beauvoir, Simone de 73 beliefs 155–60; and real objects 157; and relics 157–8; superstitious 159 Benjamin, Walter 11 Bennett, Jane 6–7, 126; and autonomous “thing-power” 7; on object’s creative agency 69; “the power of human-nonhuman assemblages” 35n28; on things demonstrating “energetic vitality” 12; “vibrant matter,” objects 54, 126

240 Index Bennett, Jill 160 Berger, Harry, Jr. 189n4 Berlant, Lauren 59 Bernstein, Robin 76n5, 81 biological mirroring 70 biopower 13, 23; absolute 26–7; absolutization of 24, 30; Lear questioning 29 black natural law tradition 117 Bloom, Harold 13, 20n28 Blount, Thomas 113 body politic 44, 66 Bogost, Ian 196–7 Borges, Jorge Luis 207 Bourek, Zlato 173 Boyle, Robert 212–13, 221 Bradley, A. C. 134, 140–1 Brandstetter, Gabriele 161 breath 32–3 Bresson, Robert 195 Brown, Bill 5, 11, 83 Bruster, Douglas 6 Bryant, Levi 15, 84 Burbage, Richard 96–7 Burdet, William 216 Burns, Robert 230 Butler, Judith 160 Byrd, Jodi 114 Cælica (Greville) 72 Calvin, John 213 Cardano, Girolamo 68–9 Cardenio (Fletcher and Shakespeare) 206–9 Cartesian dualism 214 Cartesian mechanism 26 Catholicism 11, 209 Catling, Brian 164 Cawley, Robert Ralston 114 Cerebri Anatome (Willis) 220, 221 Cervantes, Miguel de 206, 209 The Chances (Fletcher) 82 Charney, Maurice 75 Chartier, Roger 223n6 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Middleton) 81 Chaudhuri, Una 8, 202 Chen, Mel 129 Christianity 110; Protestantism 24, 209 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) 94–5 Clark, Andy 38–9, 50n15

Clark, Sandra 139–40 classical antiquity 36, 63 Cody, Michael 33 Coecklelbergh, Mark 116 Cognition in the Globe (Tribble) 38 “cognitive extension” 38–9 Cohen, Walter 76n1 Cohn, Roy 165–8, 171n58 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 134–6; on environment of King Lear 136; on the environments of Macbeth 136 The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare): Terry O’Connor’s version of 201 Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare 17, 193–203 Connor, Steven 166–7 Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 196, 200–1, 230 corpses 160; see also human remains correlative objects 93–104, 104n3, 106n25 crystal mirrors 68, 73 Culpeper, Nicholas 30 “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet” (Ingold) 36 Dada deambulations 44 Daily Telegraph 168 Daly, Emily 117 Damon and Pithias (Edwards) 184 dark ecologies 16, 136–7; defined 136; King Lear 140–5; Macbeth environment 136; Shakespeare’s 134–47 Das Ding (Heidegger and Lacan), 145–6, 231 Death of Nature 24 A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (Harsnett) 190n14 de Grazia, Margreta 77n8, 107n45 de humani corporia fabrica (On the fabric of the human body) (Vesalius) 214 Deleuze, Gilles 16, 39, 50n22, 123, 125 Demonologie (James I) 139 deodands 31 Derrida, Jacques 56 Descartes, René 25, 214; death of 214; mechanistic philosophy 32 A Dialogue Concerning Women (Walsh) 211

Index  241 Dick, Philip K. 11 Ding-an-sich 145 Dinshaw, Carolyn 59 Dirty Work 196 Discourse of the Common Weal on this Realm of England (Smith) 53 “distributed cognition” 38, 116–17 Doctor Who 153, 161, 169n6 Donnellan, Declan 162 Donne, John 213 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 206, 209 Doran, Greg 153, 158 Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body (Tribble) 38 Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Jenkins) 118 ecomimesis 134, 143 Edelman, Lee 59, 63 Edwards, Richard 184 Eliot, T. S. 93–104 Queen Elizabeth I 73 Ellison, Ralph 115 empiricism 24, 68 empowerment: female and “minor agency” 132–3; women in Shakespeare’s tragedies 123, 127 Enelow, Shonni 8 The English Physitian (Culpeper) 30 Enlightenment 73, 135 environment: dark ecologies 136–7; in King Lear 134–5; in Macbeth 136 environmental beholdenness 118 environmental skills 116 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) 219 Estok, Simon C. 138 Etchells, Mark 197 Etchells, Tim 195, 196–7, 203, 204n3 “extended mind” 38 “extimacy” (Lacan) 136, 142 Featherstone, Mike 73 female empowerment, and “minor agency” 132–3 “finished objects” 39–40, 43, 46 First Folio 18, 25, 48n4, 64n1, 207–8 Fletcher, John 80–3, 86, 88, 222n5 Florio, John 230 Forced Entertainment 17, 193–203; Dirty Work 196; Ground Plans

for Paradise 197; New Materialist theatre 198; Speak Bitterness 196 Foucault, Michel 25, 68 Foxe, John 191n20 Freedgood, Elaine 198 Freud, Sigmund 159, 206, 224, 232 Fried, Michael 199–200, 202 Fuchs, Barbara 114 Fuller, Isaac 221 Gallagher-Ross, Jacob 199 Gamboa, Brett 57 Garber, Marjorie 60 Gardner, Lyn 204n4 Garzoni, Tomaso 72 genre: closet drama 103; comedy 100; morality play 99; pastoral 113; revenge tragedy 97; romance 87, 111–13, 115; tragedy 4, 101 generic irony 93 Gerard, John 115 Gil, Daniel Juan 25–6 Glendinning, Hugo 197 Glossographia (Blount) 113 Goldstein, David B. 63 Gombrich, Ernst 224–5 Gowing, Laura 211 Grandage, Michael 162 Great Chain of Being 25 Greenblatt, Stephen 19n21, 76n1, 107n45, 157–8, 206, 207, 209 Greenburg, Bradley 103 Greene, Anne 18, 210–19; and After Cardenio 215–19 Greene, Robert 177 Greville, Fulke 72 “groundlings” 14, 41 Ground Plans for Paradise 197 Grusin, Richard 6 Guattari, Félix 16, 39, 123 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 2, 5, 14, 42–3, 229–30; dumb show 173–4; generic irony 93–103; ghost scenes in 178–9; and “groundlings” 41; Lacanian criticism of 105n11; mirror in 57; play-within-a-play 185; puppet moments in 176–9; “puppets dallying” 177–8; and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 173–4; Royal Shakespeare Company 153–6, 159, 161; theatrical performance in Complete Works 194

242 Index “Hamlet and His Problems” (Eliot) 15, 93–104 Hamletmaschine (Müller) 200 hand-techniques and technologies 38–9 Hans Holbein the Younger 101, 108n46, 157 Hardy, Jane 211 Harman, Graham 12, 198 Harris, Jonathan Gil 6, 7, 53, 70–1, 77n8 Harry Potter series 114 Harsnett, Thomas 190n14 Hebrew Bible 118 Heidegger, Martin 10, 39, 136, 143, 145–6 Heminges, John 223n6 1 Henry IV (Shakespeare) 228 2 Henry IV (Shakespeare) 67 Henry V (Shakespeare) 9–10, 231 2 Henry VI (Shakespeare) 227 3 Henry VI (Shakespeare) 86–7 Henry VIII (Shakespeare and Fletcher) 87 Hepworth, Mike 73 The History of King Lear (Tate) 27, 30–1 Hobbes, Thomas 26, 31, 34n8 Hobbesian sovereignty 29 “horrible object” 115 The Hospitall of Incurable Fooles (Garzoni) 72 Howard, Jean E. 76n1 Howell, Thomas 36 Hudson, Thomas 191n20 human consciousness 73 human exceptionalism 6, 24 humanism 11 “human negative exceptionalism” 32 human props 153–5 human remains: and actors 158; anamorphic power of 157; and religious relics 157; and Stanislavskian acting theory 154–5; and theatre performance 153–4, 160; and theory of the abject 160; Vawter use of 167–8; see also corpses Human Tissue Authority 154 infant death 211, 219 Ingold, Tim 36–9, 45–7 Invisible Man (Ellison) 115

Jackson, Gabrielle Bernhard 184 Jakobson, Roman 224 King James I 55, 58, 60, 139; and biopower 26 Jenkins, Willis 118 Jones, Ann Rosalind 77n8 Jones, Ernest 94 Jones, Gwilym 138–9, 141; on storms in King Lear 148n20; on storms in Macbeth 148n20 Jones, Inigo 208n3 Jonson, Ben 36, 48n4, 73, 106n31, 184, 227 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 62, 67; making objects of agents 3; works to lend agency to objects 3 Kafka, Franz 11 Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari) 16, 123 Kahn, Jemma 217 Kalas, Rayna 76–7n5 Kant, Immanuel 145, 226 Kantianism 110 Kantorowicz, Ernst 66 Karim-Cooper, Farah 37 Kean, Edmund 154 Kelly, Philippa 77n5 Kelly, Stephen 40 Kemble, John Philip 99 Kemp, William 171n52 Kerrigan, John 68 Killick, Jerry 194, 196, 200–1 King Lear (Shakespeare) 3, 14, 44–8, 134–5; “blasted heath” 140–4; clothing in 144; Coleridge on 134; environment in 134–5; Edgar as Tom o’Bedlam 115; Mark Etchells’ version of 197; mirrors in 55, 76; Lear as thing 144–7; puppet theatre connotations in 183–4; resurrection 212; storms 141, 148n20; sublime and abject things 230; vitalism and biopower in 23–33 Kintu, Marty 217 Klause, John 71 Kleist, Heinrich von 176 The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Beaumont and Fletcher) 222n5 knowledge: affective 118; tacit 116 Korda, Natasha 7, 54, 77n8 Kotrovits, Maia 59

Index  243 Kristeva, Julia 159–60; theory of the abject 159–60; on virtuoso performers 162 Kyd, Thomas 94 Lacan, Jacques 10, 16, 67, 105n11, 108n48, 136, 146, 231 Lamb, Charles 141, 202 Lambarde, William 73 Lambert-Beatty, Carrie 200 Latour, Bruno 11, 12, 67, 126–7, 198, 231 Laurence, Friar 114 Law, Jude 162 Lear, Edward 232 “Lear on the heath” 141 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 197–8 literalism 198–203 literalist art 199 Littlewit, Proctor John 191n18 Lloyd, Vincent 117 Locke, John 117, 219–22 Lockwood, Jane 211 Loomis, Catherine 73 Love, Heather 60 Lovecraft, H. P. 11 Lowdon, Richard 194 Lower, Richard 220 Lupton, Julia 11 luxury goods 53 Lyly, John 74 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 4, 135; clothing in 144; mirror in 53–63; queer materialism 53–63; Shakespeare’s environments in 136; storms in 138–9, 148n20; strange environment of 136–40; theatrical performance in Complete Works 194; weirding 136–40; witches 139 McKellar, Peter 224 maidenhead 230–1 “majoritarian” concept 123; in Romeo and Juliet 126 “Man and Object in the Theatre” (Veltrusky) 128 Manning, Erin 44 marginalized bodies 133 Marshall, Claire 195, 201 Martin, Christopher 69 Marx, Harpo 231 Mason, Pamela 139–40

material body: of female characters 125; liveliness of 126–7 Mattingly, Cheryl 112 Maus, Katharine Eisaman 76n1 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) 14, 44, 69, 93, 182–3 The Measurement of Meaning (Osgood) 224 mechanistic materialism 13 medieval glass technology 71 Mee, Charles 209 Mendelsohn, Andrew 23 Merchant, Carolyn 24 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare): bawdy use of “thing” in 227; Claire Marshall’s version of 195; tell-tale song in 225 Metempsychosis: The Progress of the Soul (Donne) 213 Middleton, Thomas 80–1 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) 1, 180; “puppet” connotation in 180; supernatural characters in Jerry Killick’s version 194 Milton, John 36 Minimalist art 199 “minor agency” 123; and female empowerment 132–3; Hermione and Paulina’s act of 128–32; in spatial mobility 125 “minoritarian” concept 123 miroirs de morte 56 mirroring: social 77n5; technical 70 mirrors: crystal 53, 68, 73; in Macbeth 53–63; Renaissance 71; in Renaissance texts 76n5; in Sonnets 66–76 Mitter, Shomit 158–9 A Modest Proposal (Swift) 220 Montaigne, Michel de 46, 75 Montrose, Louis 73 moral luck 110, 118 moral space: Charles Taylor on 112; defined 112; phenomenological exploration of 112; virtue traditions and 113 More, Henry 32 Morgann, Maurice 13 Morton, Timothy 8, 16, 135, 136–7, 147n7 Moseley, Humphrey 208 The Mousetrap (Christie) 57, 126

244 Index Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare) 2, 18n3 Mueller, Melissa 204n2 Mullaney, Steven 44 Müller, Heiner 200 Mumford, Lewis 76 The Murder of Gonzago (Guildenstern) 97 Museum of London 40, archeological collections 42–3 Naden, Cathy 202 Nagel, Thomas 110, 119n6 National Portrait Gallery 221 nature, romantic objectification of 135 nature morte paintings 12 Neill, Michael 96 Neurology, coining of 220 New Materialism: new materialism and 7; proponents of 6; “New Materialist theatre” 198 new materialism: Douglas Bruster on 6; early modern 7; inventive uses of 6; and New Materialism 7 New Materialists 10, 198–9 Novy, Marianne 85 Nussbaum, Martha 15, 110 object-oriented ontology 12, 16, 136, 198 objects: correlative 93–104, 104n3, 106n25; finished 39–40, 43, 46; horrible 115; household 194, 203; for performance 165; real and beliefs 157; Renaissance 77n8; Renaissance technical 69; Stanislavski on importance of 163–4; ventriloquizing dead through 165; virtuosity of 163; and virtuoso performance 161 O’Connor, Terry 194, 201–2 “The Oedipus-complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive” (Jones) 94 “Of Experience” (Montaigne) 75 “On the Marionette Theatre” (Kleist) 176 Osgood, Charles 224 Othello (Shakespeare) 193, 229; handkerchief in 7 Oxford English Dictionary 226 Paracelsus 30 pathetic fallacy 135, 143

patriarchal power, in Romeo and Juliet 124–5 Pepys, Samuel 215 Performing Objects and Theatrical Things (Schweitzer and Zerdy) 12 Pericles (Shakespeare) 8, 14, 76, 84, 87–8, 111 personification 23, 30–1 Petrarch 70 Petty, William 220–1 “Petty Down Survey” 223n17 Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of Resurrection (Boyle) 212 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (Borges) 207 “pinking” 42–3 plants: herbs and weeds in King Lear 29–30; osier cage in Romeo and Juliet 109–10, 112 Posner, Dassia N. 80 possession 163, of actors by objects and costumes 164–8 power: absolute 25–6; sovereign 26 Protestantism 24, 209 Pryce, Jonathan 155, 160 Punch and Judy 177 puppet artists 189n5 puppet play: in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 174–5; Shakespeare on 175–6; see also puppet theatre puppetry: defined 80; Posner, Dassia N. on 80 puppets 190n11; connotation in Antony and Cleopatra 180–1; connotation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 180; Renaissance 189n7; use in After Cardenio 215–19 puppet theatre: connotations in King Lear 183–4; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 174–5; and The Winter’s Tale 181–2; see also puppet play Quarto 25, 71, 76, 78n41 queer materialism: Macbeth 53–63 Quinn, Michael 12, 20n27, 161 Quixotic idealism 215 Rainer, Yvonne 200 Rayner, Alice 156 realist plays 194 Rees, Roger 153

Index  245 “relationscape” 44 reification 19n26 relics 155–60, 207–8; and beliefs 157–8; religious and human remains 157; virtuosity of 161; Walsham on 158–9 Rembrandt (Dutch painter) 69, 214, 224 Renaissance clothes 77n8 Renaissance mirror 71 Renaissance objects 77n8 Renaissance puppets 189n7 Renaissance technical objects 69 Renaissance texts: mirrors in 76n5 Renaissance theatrical performances 53 resurrection: of Anne Greene 210; in Shakespeare’s plays 212; in seventeenth-century theology and science 212 Richard II (Shakespeare) 61–2, 66, 193, 201; Terry O’Connor’s version of 201 Richard III (Shakespeare) 54 Richardson, Catherine 57 Ridout, Nicholas 160 Rilke, Rainer Maria 11 Roach, Joseph 155 Robertson, J. M. 93 romance 111–12; cultivation of a range of landscapes 111; as a genre 112–13; moral luck and 111 romanticism 135 romantics 135 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 42, 109, 111, 115, 123–4, 230; Juliet’s suicide 126–8; maidenhead and maidenhood in 230–1; majoritarian power in 126; patriarchal power 124–5; Terry O’Connor’s version of 202 Rosenberg, Jessica 109 Rosenberg, Marvin 146 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard) 173; Hamlet dumb show within 173–4; puppet play 174–5 Roth, Philip 232 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 153–4, 156, 159; use of skull 153–4, 161, 168–9 Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (Vawter)155, 165 Ruskin, John 135 Rutter, Carol Chillington 126 Rylance, Mark 153, 159

Sapho and Phao (Lyly) 74 Schechner, Richard 165 Schweitzer, Marlis 12 Servetus, Michael 213 Shakespearean hand-gestures 37 Shannon, Laurie 32 Shaviro, Steven 6, 70, 73 Shelton, Thomas 223n6 Sherman, Stuart 199 shoes: as “materials in movement” 40, 43; medieval 40; from single-soled to thick-soled 42; and “treading the boards” 41, 48 Shuger, Deborah 56, 76n5 Silk, Dennis 11 skulls 16, 56, 66, 179, 221; anamorphic tendencies on stage 156; used in RSC Hamlet 100–101, 153–4, 158–60, 168–9; in Victoria and Albert Museum 155–6; virtuosity 162 Simondon, Gilbert 39 Smith, Bruce 46 Smith, Jack 165–8, 171n59; ashes, used by Ron Vawter 167–8 Smith, Thomas 53 Snow White (Brothers Grimm) 56 social mirroring 77n5 Sofer, Andrew 15, 63, 80, 156–8; metonymy and metaphor 194; on props and actors 204n7; on stage objects 84; “temporal contract” of props 7; on things 13 Sonnets (Shakespeare) 14, 68; age in 66–76; mirror in 66–76 sovereignty: absolute 13, 25–7; Hobbesian 29; Romantic 135, 143 Speak Bitterness 196 Spinoza, Baruch 10 Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Harris and Korda) 7, 77n8, 89n6 The Stage Life of Props (Sofer) 7, 204 “Stage-walkers” 41 Stallybrass, Peter 77n8, 107n45 Stanislavski, Konstantin 154–5, 157, 159; on belief 157; on importance of objects 163–4; system of acting 160–1, 163–4; on truth and belief 158; virtuosity of objects 163 Stanislavskian acting theory 154–5, 157 Star Trek: The Next Generation 153, 161

246 Index States, Bert 7, 194 Steinbeck, John 232 Stewart, Patrick 153 Stoppard, Tom 173–5 subject-object continuum 128 the sublime 18, 230, 232 Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Clark) 38 Swift, Jonathan 220 tableaux vivants 12 tacit knowledge 116 Tarlton, Richard 171n52 Tate, Nahum 27, 134 Taylor, Charles 112 Tchaikowsky, André 153, 156, 158, 159, 161, 168–9 Teague, Frances 100 tell-tale songs 225–6 The Tempest (Shakespeare) 8, 14, 28, 45–6, 111, 113–15, 140, 186, 230; Prospero as failed puppet-master 186–8; tell-tale song in 225 Tennant, David 153–4, 156 theatrum mundi/world-as-stage topos 46 “thing”: 1–5, 12, 98, 101, 104n4, 145, 193, 196, 226, 230; bawdy use in comedies 227; in Complete Works 197, 200, 202, “figures in things” 9–10; inanimate 24–6, 31; lensing potential of 10; literalism of 202, material and immaterial 12–13; in objection to Minimalist art 199, order of 13–18; personified 31; power/potentiality of 111; re-conceptualize human technics in ecological relation to 39, reimagining of 24; sense of 227, sexual connotations 18n3, 229; sexualized and specifically anatomical 229, Shakespeare’s inquiry into 8; Shakespeare use of word 227, 232; thinginess of 145, 146; “A Thing Like Death” 124–8; word use in The Winter’s Tale 228–9 thing-lensing 10 “thing-power” 6–7, 12 thing theory 5, 11, 226 Thomson, Leslie 139 Thoreau, Henry David 11

A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 16, 50n22, 123, 125, 133n1 Timon of Athens (Middleton and Shakespeare) 94 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 14, 85, 87, 89n11, 90n25, 90n26, 103–4 Treatise on Man (Descartes) 214 Tribble, Evelyn 38 Trio Film (Rainer) 200 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) 62, 86 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 8, 111, 116, 213, 228 The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespeare): Claire Marshall’s version of 201; puppet moments in 189n2 Uglow, Jenny 232 The Uncanny (Freud) 5, 159 the uncanny 5, 16, 136, 139, 159–60, 164–5, 176 The Universe of Things (Shaviro) 5 Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Harris) 6, 53, 70 Varnardo, Christine 54 Vawter, Ron 155, 165–6; use of human remains for transforming in character 167–8; use of objects for performance 165; use of props in Roy Cohn/Jack Smith 165–8 vegetative vitalism 26 ventriloquism 164, 166 Veltrusky, Jiri 128 Vesalius, Andreas 214 Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) 155–6; human skull at 155–6 virtue ethics (Aristotle) 15, 110, 116 virtuosity 160–4; cultural suspicion of 161; of relics 161; of skull 162 virtuoso performance 160–4; and object 161 “virtuous property” 110, 114–18 vitalism: conspirative 26; defined 23; of human excrescences 26; in King Lear 23–33; vegetative 26 “walkscape” 14, 37, 39, 41, 43–8; raised thrust stages as 44 Walsh, William 211

Index  247 Walsham, Alexandra 157–8; on relics 158–9 Watkins, Robert 216 Watson, Robert 23 Welt-Fuelle (“fullness of the world”), 197 Williams, Bernard 110 Will in the World (Greenblatt) 207 Willis, Thomas 220 Wilson, Robert 200 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) 14, 53–4, 74, 79, 84–6, 111, 123–4, 128–32, 213; Autolychus’s puppet show 182; Cathy Naden’s version of 202; and puppet theatre 181–2; resurrection 212; use of word “thing” in 228–9

wisdom 63, 117–18 women: liveliness, of characters 123–4; in Romeo and Juliet 123; in Shakespeare’s tragedies 123; in The Winter’s Tale 123; see also female empowerment, and “minor agency” Woodward, Kathleen: on the “mirror stage of old age” 67, 74 Woolf, Virginia 11 Wooster Group 165 World of Words (Florio) 230 Wren, Christoper 220 Younge, Gavin 216 YouTube 194 Zerdy, Joanne 12