Shakespeare’s World of Words 9781472515292, 9781472593955, 9781474252911

Table of contents :
FC
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Paul Yachnin
1. Well-Won Thrift: Michael Bristol and Sara Coodin
2. Proper Names and Common Bodies : The Case of Cressida: David Schalkwyk
3. Antique / Antic : Archaism, Neologism and the Play of Shakespeare’s Words in Love’s Labour’s Lost and 2 Henry IV: Lucy Munro
4. Learning to Colour in Hamlet: Miriam Jacobson
5. Recasting ‘Angling’ in The Winter’s Tale: J. A. Shea
6. ‘What may be and should be’: Grammar Moods and the Invention of History in 1 Henry VI: Lynne Magnusson
7. Othello and Theatrical Language: Sarah Werner
8. Slips of Wilderness: Verbal and Gestural Language in Measure for Measure: Paul Yachnin and Patrick Neilson
9. ‘Captious and Inteemable’: Reading Comprehension in Shakespeare: Meredith Evans
10. ‘Time is their master’: Men and Metre in The Comedy of Errors: Jennifer Roberts-Smith
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Shakespeare’s World of Words

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REL ATED TITLES Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language, edited by Sylvia Adamson, Lynette Hunter, Lynne Magnusson, Ann Thompson and Katie Wales Shakespeare’s Language, Jonathan Hope Shakespeare Up Close, edited by Russ McDonald, Nicholas D. Nace and Travis D. Williams

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Shakespeare’s World of Words Edited by Paul Yachnin

Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Arden Shakespeare 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Paul Yachnin and Contributors, 2015 Paul Yachnin and the Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-1529-2 ePDF: 978-1-4742-5291-1 ePub: 978-1-4742-5290-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shakespeare’s world of words / edited by Paul Yachnin. pages cm. -- (Arden shakespeare library) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-1529-2 (hardback) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Knowledge--Languages. 2. English language--Early modern, 1500-1700--Rhetoric. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Language. 4. Literature and society--England--History--16th century. 5. Literature and society--England--History--17th century. I. Yachnin, Paul Edward, 1953- editor. PR3069.L3S53 2015 822.3’3--dc23 2015006698 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  vii Notes on Contributors  viii

Introduction  1 Paul Yachnin

1 Well-Won Thrift  33 Michael Bristol and Sara Coodin

2 Proper Names and Common Bodies: The Case of Cressida  59 David Schalkwyk

3 Antique / Antic: Archaism, Neologism and the Play of Shakespeare’s Words in Love’s Labour’s Lost and 2 Henry IV  77 Lucy Munro

4 Learning to Colour in Hamlet  103 Miriam Jacobson

5 Recasting ‘Angling’ in The Winter’s Tale  125 J. A. Shea

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vi Contents

6 ‘What may be and should be’: Grammar Moods and the Invention of History in 1 Henry VI  147 Lynne Magnusson

7 Othello and Theatrical Language  171 Sarah Werner

8 Slips of Wilderness: Verbal and Gestural Language in Measure for Measure  187 Paul Yachnin and Patrick Neilson

9 ‘Captious and Inteemable’: Reading Comprehension in Shakespeare  211 Meredith Evans

10 ‘Time is their master’: Men and Metre in The Comedy of Errors  237 Jennifer Roberts-Smith Bibliography  263 Index  279

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the support of a number of individuals, institutions and organizations. The work on this book, first of all, has been fostered by the Shakespeare and Performance Research Team, which is headquartered at McGill University and which, from its inception in 1993, has been committed to crossing the boundaries that usually separate the fields of literary history, performance studies and theatrical practice. The Shakespeare Team has received generous, long-term funding from agencies of the Quebec government, first FCAR (Fonds pour la formation des chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche) and then FQRSC (Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture). I am grateful for the support. The McGill Department of English has also been a valued supporter of the work of the Shakespeare Team. I am grateful to the members of the Shakespeare Team who took part in the work that led to the present book, especially those who participated in the November 2010 Shakespeare Language Workshop at McGill. That includes Michael Bristol, Sara Coodin, Meredith Evans, Wes Folkerth, Leanore Lieblein, Patrick Neilson, Karen Oberer and J. A. Shea. At that workshop, we were joined by a number of distinguished guests – Miriam Jacobson, Lynne Magnusson, Lucy Munro, David Schalkwyk, James Siemon and Sarah Werner. James Siemon was not able to contribute his essay to the book, but his work was valuable for our thinking then and has remained valuable since. To the other visitors, who very graciously did give their work to this book, I am profoundly grateful – for their creativity, extraordinary scholarship, collegiality and great patience. Finally, I must acknowledge the support and unfailing patience of Margaret Bartley at Bloomsbury Publishing. This book could not have had a better friend.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Michael Bristol is Greenshields Professor of English Emeritus at McGill University. Much of his work has been concerned with situating Shakespeare’s works in the social context of their production and reception. His books include Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England; Shakespeare’s America / America’s Shakespeare; and Big-Time Shakespeare. He has edited or co-edited several books, including Shakespeare and the Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity; Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England; and Shakespeare and Moral Agency. His most recent publication is ‘Macbeth the Philosopher: Rethinking Context’ in New Literary History. Sara Coodin is Assistant Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on classical philosophy’s importance to thought and action in Shakespeare’s plays, as well as classicism and Christian Hebraism in Renaissance England. She has published on these topics in several Shakespeare journals and edited collections, and is currently completing a book-length study of the moral agency of Shakespeare’s Jews that focuses on the use of biblical citation in The Merchant of Venice. Meredith Evans is Associate Professor of English at Concordia University, Montreal. She has published articles on Enlightenment philosophy and literature, seventeenth-century natural philosophy, critical theory and, most recently, on

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Renaissance drama. Her current work on Shakespeare and political theory focuses on the highly equivocal value of action and personal agency. Miriam Jacobson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia and the author of Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England, a book that examines how trade with Asia and the Levant reconfigured early modern English attitudes toward classical poetry. Jacobson locates evidence of early modern Mediterranean trade in poets’ importation and appropriation of new, non-Western words and concepts. In addition to her work on trade, language and classical antiquity, Jacobson has published essays on material texts in the natural world, and is at work on a book about mummies, corpses and the resurrection of the past in early modern drama and poetry. Lynne Magnusson is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University of Toronto, with research interests in Shakespeare’s language, the social rhetoric of the early modern letter, early modern women’s writing, and discourse analysis. The author of Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters, she has recently edited Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the Norton Shakespeare and is working on Shakespeare’s Language and the Grammar of Possibility and co-editing The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Language. She is past Director of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and has served as a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and on the editorial board of Shakespeare Quarterly. Recent honours include election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, and the Canada Council’s Killam Research Fellowship. Lucy Munro is a lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at King’s College London. Her research focuses on

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drama of the period 1580–1660 and its afterlives on stage and screen, on editing, book history and textual scholarship, on literary style and genre, and on dramatic representations of childhood and ageing. She is the author of Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory and Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674, and the editor of Sharpham’s The Fleer, Shakespeare and Wilkins’ Pericles, Brome’s The Queen and Concubine and The Demoiselle, and Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed. Her essays have appeared in the Huntington Library Quarterly, Modern Philology and a number of journals and edited collections. She is currently editing The Witch of Edmonton for Arden Early Modern Drama. Patrick Neilson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at McGill University. He is a founding member of the Shakespeare and Performance Research Team. Recent mise-en-scène credits include Julius Caesar, Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. For the last he staged the bed-trick in choreographed dumb-show to the haunting trumpet strains of Dear Old Southland. In retrospect, he feels Measure for Measure would have benefited from a similar approach. Jennifer Roberts-Smith is Associate Professor of Drama in the Department of Drama and Speech Communication at the University of Waterloo. She has published on early modern English metrics in language and literature. Her current research interests also include practice as research in early English theatre history, digital visualizations of theatrical text and performance, and technologically assisted environments for the interpretation of cultural phenomena. She is Principal Investigator of the Simulated Environment for Theatre project, and serves as Associate Editor, Performance for Queen’s Men Editions. Roberts-Smith received an Ontario Early Researcher Award for her work on digital tools for theatre education with the Stratford Festival.

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David Schalkwyk is currently Academic Director of Global Shakespeares, a joint venture between Queen Mary University of London and the University of Warwick. He was formerly Director of Research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly. Before that he was Professor of English at the University of Cape Town, where he held the positions of Head of Department and Deputy Dean in the Faculty of the Humanities. His books include Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays; Literature and the Touch of the Real; and Shakespeare, Love and Service. His most recent book is Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare, published in 2013 by the Arden Shakespeare. He is currently working on a monograph on love in Shakespeare. J. A. Shea received a PhD from McGill in 2011 and, as a faculty member in the Department of English at Dawson College in Montreal, lectures and writes on subjects including Shakespeare adaptations; horror films; and early modern con artistry and popular magic. Shea was Associate Editor of Poetry East’s 20th anniversary anthology, Who Are the Rich and Where Do They Live?; contributing author to Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture; and co-author of ‘The Well-Hung Shrew’ in Ecocritical Shakespeare. Other research and teaching projects are emerging from work with the Miskatonic Institute for Horror Studies, Montreal (faculty) and the Shakespeare and Performance Research Team, McGill University. Sarah Werner is the author of Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage, the editor of New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies, and has written and spoken in numerous venues on subjects ranging from Shakespeare and performance to book history and digital media. She works at the Folger Shakespeare Library as their Digital Media Strategist.

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Paul Yachnin is Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas at McGill University. He directed the Making Publics (MaPs) Project (2005–10) and now directs the project Early Modern Conversions: Religions, Cultures, Cognitive Ecologies (2012–18). He is Past President of the Shakespeare Association of America and Director of the McGill Shakespeare and Performance Research Team. Among his publications are the books Stage-Wrights and The Culture of Playgoing in Early Modern England (with Anthony Dawson); editions of Richard II and The Tempest; and five co-edited books, including Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (with Bronwen Wilson). His book-in-progress is Making Theatrical Publics in Shakespeare’s England. His ideas about the social life of art, and those of his MaPs collaborators, were featured on the CBC Radio IDEAS series, The Origins of the Modern Public.

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Introduction Paul Yachnin

The eighteenth-century writer and lawyer Arthur Murphy once imagined himself at Parnassus. Among the poets he saw there, he found Shakespeare: The great Shakespeare sat upon a cliff, looking abroad through all creation. His possessions were very near as extensive as Homer’s, but, in some places, had not received sufficient culture. But even there spontaneous flowers shot up, and in the unweeded garden, which grows to seed, you might cull lavender, myrtle, and wild thyme. Craggy rocks, hills, and dales, the woodland and open country, struck the eye with wild variety … Even Milton was looking for flowers to transplant into his own Paradise.1 ‘Natural’ writing, which is what Murphy thinks Shakespeare created, is based on lived experience rather than cobbled together from bits of other people’s literary works. It is ‘woodland and open country’ rather than a tidy garden. It is the kind of writing Philip Sidney aimed at in his first Astrophel and Stella sonnet. He had laboured in vain to express his love by adapting the work of others until, at last, he heard an inner

Arthur Murphy, The Grey’s-Inn Journal 4 (11 November 1752), 35–6 (Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) http://gdc.gale.com/products/ eighteenth-century-collections-online/, accessed 23 May 2014), italics in original. 1

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voice tell him just to be natural: ‘Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write.’2 The linkage between Shakespeare and natural, as opposed to bookish, writing goes back to his own time. For many in Elizabethan England, the country-boy, non-university graduate, yeoman-class Shakespeare became exemplary of natural, experience-based composition. In the university play, The Return from Parnassus (c. 1601), we are told (likely with a bit of tongue in cheek given Shakespeare’s evident love of Ovid): ‘Few of the university men pen plaies well, they smell too much of the writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina & Juppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe.’3 In his commendatory poem to the 1640 Poems: written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent., Leonard Digges expanded on the idea of Shakespeare’s natural genius: Poets are borne not made … … the patterne of all wit, Art without art unparaleld as yet. Next Nature onely helpt him, for looke thorow This whole Booke, thou shalt find he doth not borrow, One phrase from Greekes, not Latines imitate, Nor once from vulgar Languages Translate, Nor Plagiari-like from others gleane …4 For many in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and even in our own time, Shakespeare is a natural genius whose

Philip Sidney, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. David Kalstone (New York: Signet, 1970), 123. 3 Quoted in The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (2nd edn, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1962. All Shakespeare citations and quotations are from this edition. 4 Quoted in Riverside, 1972. For a judicious account of Shakespeare’s reputation as a ‘natural’ poet, see Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), esp. Ch. 6, ‘The Original Genius.’ 2

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representations of people, their actions and their ways of speaking come from experience of the world, from how people naturally are, rather than from reading literature. For Thomas de Quincy in 1823, Shakespeare was not even the poet of nature; he was nature itself: ‘Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea.’5 For Michael Bristol (himself a contributor to this book) writing in 2000, Shakespeare is a great vernacular writer, a dramatist whose main stock of material comes from experience rather than from books. ‘[I]t might also be worthwhile,’ he says, ‘to take a second look at the assumption that what we know of the ordinary people who inhabit our social and personal lives might be a reliable basis for the interpretation of Shakespearian drama.’6 Bristol identifies the eighteenth-century man of letters Samuel Johnson as one of the first who grasped the importance of Shakespeare’s ‘vulgarity’, his intimate knowledge about how people naturally act and speak.7 Is Shakespeare really the original, natural genius he has appeared to be to so many since his own time? The contributors to this book certainly have no quarrel with Samuel Johnson’s insight into Shakespeare’s particular ability to create ‘just representations of general nature’, or with Johnson’s characterization of Shakespeare as ‘the poet of nature’, in the sense that he is ‘the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life.’8 All great artists have their eyes and ears tuned to the world. The contributors to this book seek to enrich the understanding of Shakespeare’s art, not by arguing against Shakespeare’s first-hand knowledge of

Thomas De Quincy, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, in Shakespeare Criticism: A Selection, ed. D. Nichol Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1916), 378. 6 Michael Bristol, ‘Vernacular Criticism and the Scenes Shakespeare Never Wrote’, Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): 89–102, quotation on 92. 7 Bristol, ‘Vernacular Criticism’, 92–3. 8 Quoted in Shakespeare Criticism, 92. 5

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general human nature, but by developing an account of him also as a genius of rewriting and re-creation, someone able to generate new languages and new ways of seeing the world by orchestrating existing social and literary vocabularies. The book’s enabling idea about the orchestration of existing social and literary languages draws on the work of the Russian critic and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. The novelist, Bakhtin tells us, organizes a host of different languages (‘social dialects … professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups … languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions’) into a complex, ‘heteroglossic’ literary text, that is, a text having a diversity of voices, styles of discourse, or points of view. Each particular social language embodies a particular way of seeing the world, certain assumptions about what counts as real knowledge about the world, and ideas about who should hold power over others.9 Literary orchestration, when it is operating at the top of its form, has the capacity to reveal the made-up axiological character of social languages, the mere constructedness of the worlds and hierarchies embodied in particular idiolects. And Bakhtin does not ignore literary language’s capacity also to construct influential, single-voiced ways of describing the world. He tells us that genres like epic, lyric and drama tend not to open language up to critical objectification. He sees the novel as the genre most able to orchestrate all other languages, including literary ones, and therefore as an especially critical and liberating literary form: He [the novelist] welcomes the heteroglossia and language diversity of the literary and extraliterary language into his own work not only not weakening them but even intensifying them … It is in fact out of this stratification of language, its speech diversity and even language diversity, M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 262–3.

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that he constructs his style … The prose writer does not purge words of intentions and tones that are alien to him, he does not destroy the seeds of social heteroglossia embedded in words.10 The authors of this book find Shakespeare’s art as manyvoiced, as capable of the critical orchestration of social and literary languages, and as liberating as the novels discussed by Bakhtin. In sum, this book makes an argument for the artistically and socially creative pre-eminence of Shakespeare’s world of words. The contributors undertake the task of making a case for Shakespeare’s artfulness, learning, critical attention to language, and social creativity by developing particular case studies. Each chapter begins with a key word or phrase from Shakespeare and builds toward a broader consideration of the social, poetic and theatrical dimensions of his language. The chapters capture well the richness of Shakespeare’s linguistic orchestrations by including discussions of biblical language, Latinity, the philosophy of language and subjectivity, the technical language of dyes and colour, languages of commerce, criminality, history and education, the gestural vocabulary of performance, as well as accounts of verbal modality and Shakespeare’s metrics.

Shakespeare’s language arts The close attention we pay to what Shakespeare did with language is of a piece with his own craft as a writer for the theatre. That craft is fourfold. It includes the language training he received as a boy at school in his home town; the conventionally interlinked practices of reading and writing in Elizabethan England – writing down or marking bits and pieces Bakhtin, ‘Discourse’, 298.

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of texts while reading them and then using those bits in one’s own writing; the demands of writing for the new commercial theatre, which encouraged someone like Shakespeare to listen alertly to and put to use the multiple ways of speaking in early modern London; and, lastly, the interrelationship between speech and action in theatrical performance: for the actor and playwright Shakespeare, language was always also gestural and embodied as well as verbal. Shakespeare’s language arts were fashioned first of all by his education at the King’s New School in Stratford, where he learned Latin grammar and the arts of rhetoric and where he read Latin poetry and prose, always with attention to how the writing was constructed, a focus inculcated by instruction in grammar itself and by translation exercises from English to Latin and from Latin to the vernacular. Among many other classical writers to which he was introduced, there were figures like Horace, Terrence, Sallust and, most notably, Ovid, whose Metamorphoses informs a great deal of his work, from the early Titus Andronicus, where a copy of the poem serves as a stage prop and a key to the mystery of Lavinia’s rape and mutilation (4.1), to the late play, The Tempest, where Prospero’s ‘renunciation’ (5.1.33–57) is an adapted translation of Medea’s speech in Metamorphoses, book 7. In his early comedy, The Taming of the Shrew, he indicates just how important and pleasurable and just how unbookish Ovid could be when Lucentio’s servant Tranio praises his master’s aspirations in philosophy but reminds him that Ovidian poetry is the stuff of life: ‘Let’s be no Stoics nor no stocks, I pray, / Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks / As Ovid be an outcast quite abjur’d’ (1.1.31–3). At the New School, Shakespeare also acquired the principles of ‘copiousness’, famously advocated by Erasmus in his work De Copia (1512) – the ability to produce rich, layered writing made up of repetition and variation and the use of myriad figures of speech, word play and modes of address. The Sonnets provide wonderfully accomplished models of the language arts Shakespeare began to cultivate in boyhood.

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The first two quatrains of sonnet 55 repeat with variation the idea that the poet’s praise of his beloved is not subject to time. Eventually, even the ‘gilded monuments / Of princes’ will be ‘unswept’ and ‘besmear’d with sluttish time’ while the poet’s beloved ‘shall shine more bright.’ Stanza two gets more specific about the causes of destruction and the things destroyed. Now it is not the sheer passage of time, but ‘wasteful war’, ‘Mars his sword’ and ‘war’s quick fire’ that do the damage, and what war lays waste to are ‘statues’ and the ‘work of masonry.’ What remains untouched by all this carnage is ‘the living record of your memory’ – not exactly the beloved but rather the poem about the beloved. The gravitational force of the theme of the shining immortality of poetry pulls the poem’s lexicon into a particular orbit: the gilding of the monuments gives us the bright shining of the beloved; ‘war’s quick fire’ is bright also but not as bright as the beloved; and ‘quick’, which also means ‘alive’, is assimilated into ‘the living record’, which is the poem itself. The pattern of surpassing the agents and subjects of time and war and at the same time transplanting their attractive qualities into an argument about the power of poetry culminates in a brilliant bilingual pun. ‘’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity,’ the poet says, ‘Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room.’ ‘Pace’ suggests how beautifully the beloved will move forth into public view, and it also points to the meter of the poem itself, folding the movement of the beloved’s body into the movement of the verse. ‘Room’ brings the pattern to a close since the English word ‘room’ is ‘stanza’ in Italian. After death, the beloved will indeed find room to pace forth, but only in the stanzas of Shakespeare’s poetry. Finally, sonnet 55 confirms how well Shakespeare learned the classics. The first two lines, ‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme’, derive from and help keep living the work of the Latin poet Horace, whose Ode 3, 30 begins like this: What I have just completed will be a monument more lasting than bronze and more imposing than Egypt’s royal

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pyramids, one that rain can never deface or wind destroy – or the passage of time over the endless years. I shall never die completely, for some of me will persist, eluding the Goddess of Death’s grip. I shall grow and thrive, refreshed by the praise of all my future readers.11 *** Shakespeare’s recollection of Horace in sonnet 55 is one instance of the general practice of recording notable passages in the literature one was reading or marking them in the texts themselves, both as a memory aid and in order to create a store of valuable literary material for reuse in one’s own writing. Erasmus recommended that readers keep careful track of the memorable parts the books they were reading: [A]s you read the authors, methodically observe occurrences of striking words, archaic or novel diction, cleverly contrived or well adapted arguments, brilliant flashes of style, adages, examples, and pithy remarks worth memorizing. Such passages should be marked by an appropriate little sign.12 The marking of texts was one of the language arts taught in school. In a recent study, William Sherman recounts how John Brinsley, one of the leading pedagogues of the period, explained how and why students should mark their texts. They should ‘doe it with little lines under them, or above them, or against such partes of the word wherein the difficultie lieth, or by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or marke may best … cal the knowledge of the thing to remembrance.’ They Odes [of] Horace, trans. David R. Slavitt (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 151. 12 Erasmus, De ratione studii, quoted and translated in Ann Rose, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 98. 11

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should mark their books in these ways, Brinsley says, to make them easier to remember; they should also mark them so as to make use of what they have read: ‘To read and not to understand what wee read, or not to know how to make use of it, is nothing else but a neglect of all good learning, and a mere abuse of the means & helps to attaine the same.’13 What Shakespeare learned to do as a boy very likely stayed with him into his adult working life as a playwright, a life that unfolded within a world of books, what Sherman calls ‘a dynamic ecology of use and reuse’ (p. 6). Marking texts would also certainly have been supplemented by note-taking on separate sheets or in a table-book, an instrument that Hamlet says he makes use of in order to remember the lesson he has just learned from his father’s ghost (‘My tables – meet it is I set it down / That one may smile and smile, and be a villain! (1.5.107–8)). Note-taking of the kind Hamlet seems to be practising was not restricted to England (or Denmark). Montaigne tells us that his foundational practices as a writer grew from his reading, recording and rewriting: Is not that which I doe in the greatest part of this composition all one and the selfe same thing? I am ever heere and there picking and culling, from this and that booke, the sentences that please me, not to keepe them (for I have no store-house to reserve them in) but to transport them into this … thereby to make a glorious shew, therewith to entertain others, and with [their] help to frame some quaint stories or prettie tales.14 Shakespeare also picked and culled from this and that book the sentences that pleased him. We have already seen how John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius; or, The Grammar Schoole (1612), quoted in William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 4. 14 Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (1603), ed. N. John McArthur (NP: Kindle, 2012), loc. 2945. 13

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passages from Ovid and Horace turn up in his plays and poems. So close are some parts of his plays to the work of other writers (like Enobarbus’ exuberant praise of Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.191–218), a close versification of a passage in Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans) that students sometimes say that Shakespeare must have been an arrant plagiarist. What is easy to miss is how Shakespeare resituates, rewrites, critiques and makes new what he takes from others (Montaigne does the same with his borrowings). One example among very many is something Shakespeare took from Montaigne himself, a passage of praise of the natives of the Americas in the essay ‘Of the Canniballes.’ Shakespeare puts the passage in the mouth of the counsellor Gonzalo in a scene of time-killing small talk among the shipwrecked courtiers, chief among which group is Alonso, King of Naples (the man that Gonzalo serves). In Florio’s translation of Montaigne, the passage goes like this: It is a nation … that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, but common, no apparell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulations, covetousness, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard amongst them.15 The bolded words and phrases in the passage from The Tempest below suggest how closely Shakespeare is following his source, but the differences are more significant than the parallels. Shakespeare situates Montaigne’s ideas in a

15

Montaigne, Essayes, loc. 4435.

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particular narrative and among particular characters in ways that open those ideas to critique but not in ways that empty them of their force. What is key is Shakespeare’s orchestration of different ways of speaking and different ways of seeing. Gonzalo makes explicit the ideal of a paradisal life in nature, a new ‘golden age’, that remains implicit in Montaigne’s ethnographic description. It’s just the kind of highbrow speechifying a counsellor might make to entertain a king – not seriously meant and not to be taken seriously. Antonio and Sebastian make fun of Gonzalo; and even though they are the villains of the play, they are not wrong to point out the absurdity of his plan to create an egalitarian commonwealth over which he would hold sovereignty. Still, Gonzalo’s vision is hardly to be discounted, especially in a world, the one he and the others inhabit, that is wracked by a fierce and violent competition for power and property. That is why Gonzalo adds a catalogue of weapons to those things he would not have in his commonwealth; there is perhaps a sharp edge of remembrance here since he was the man who (under orders from the King and with Antonio’s connivance) led the ‘treacherous army’ (1.2.128) that kidnapped Prospero and his daughter and left them to perish at sea: GONZALO I’ th’ commonwealth I would, by contraries, Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation, all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty –

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SEBASTIAN Yet he would be king on’t. ANTONIO The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. GONZALO All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavor: treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have; but nature should bring forth, Of its own kind all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people. SEBASTIAN No marrying’mong his subjects? ANTONIO None, man, all idle – whores and knaves. GONZALO I would with such perfection govern, sir, T’excel the golden age. (2.1.148–69) *** Shakespeare borrowed abundantly from ancient and contemporary literature. He is bookish, not in the sense of being pedantic, but rather because he read widely, insightfully and very far beyond what he would have needed to read in order to craft his plays for the commercial theatre. He read for pleasure and out of deep curiosity, and also in a hunt for new words or words used in new and interesting ways as well as for the ideas embedded in those words, as he did in his critical resetting of the passage from ‘Of the Canniballes.’ He also invented scores of new words. An estimate of his vocabulary puts him at the top of writers in

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English. His works contain some 25,000 different words; his closest competitor in the period is John Milton, at around 12,000.16 Not all those words came from books. They came also from the speaking going on all around him – in the playhouses, the inns, the street, at home, at court (both the royal court and the law courts), at sermons, in shops and in many other places where people gathered to converse. It is very important to recognize how misleading is the traditional characterization of Shakespeare as a poet of nature or a poet who draws on how people actually, naturally act or speak, as opposed to a poet who draws on bookish knowledge and language. The fact is that all writers do both to varying degrees, but that some do it poorly while others do it brilliantly. After all, human beings don’t live in earth like plants; they live in a world of signifying practices, chief of which practices is language. We can get a taste of Shakespeare’s critical use of everyday language by looking again at his resetting of the passage from Montaigne. Among the other words that draw his attention is the word ‘idle’, which describes life in a paradise where nature brings forth everything humans need to live. But in Shakespeare’s society, the word is also pejorative, and especially so about people who do no work or who waste their time by doing frivolous things like going to plays. ‘The Idle man is the Devils cushion,’ says one preacher in 1614, ‘whereupon he sits and takes his ease.’17 Part of Antonio’s mockery of Gonzalo is in his resetting of ‘idle.’ Gonzalo says, ‘all men idle … but innocent and pure’; Antonio’s version is ‘all idle – whores and knaves.’ The irony of Antonio’s comeback is enhanced by rhythm and vocabulary. Antonio and Sebastian score points against Gonzalo by the way they talk. Their

These figures are from Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Introduction’, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 63. 17 Thomas Adams, The Devills Banket Described in Foure Sermons (London, 1614), 76. 16

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short, sharp comments in prose and their everyday words can make Gonzalo’s iambic verse and heightened vocabulary sound artificial and even foolish, as if what he is saying were some idle thing confected merely to please the King. Like the novelists held is such high regard by Bakhtin, Shakespeare ‘does not purge words of intentions and tones that are alien to him, he does not destroy the seeds of social heteroglossia embedded in words. The word ‘idle’ contains within it different ideas about how to live the good life. In the particular dramatic resituating of the word, it also takes part in critical social thinking by bringing into view – in ways always open to debate – the idleness of courtiers as well as the idleness of the audience at the playhouse. Are the playgoers sinfully idle, a whole assembly of cushions for the devil’s backside, or are they virtuously free of the preoccupations of a violent, power-hungry political world? As we have already heard, Michael Bristol has credited Samuel Johnson as one of the first to recognize the value of Shakespeare’s multidimensional language. This is what Bristol says: For Johnson the heterogeneity of Shakespeare’s language, its wide ranging familiarity with obsolete, common, and colloquial idiom as well as with foreign languages, is something of an ‘embarrassment for the reader.’ Nevertheless, he was astute enough to recognize that Shakespeare’s use of colloquial or vernacular speech is integral to his achievement as a writer of lasting value … Johnson is really after something more than philological description here. The larger point revealed in Shakespeare’s language is in the way it is used to work through the social and ethical exigencies of ordinary life.18 In the chapters that follow, we will hear about how Shakespeare mines deeply into particular words such as, among others, 18

Bristol, ‘Vernacular Criticism’, 92–3.

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‘well’, ‘colour’, ‘slip’, ‘antic / antique’, the name ‘Cressida’, phrases like ‘may be’ or ‘should be’, and the little demonstrative word ‘this.’ Each of these words and phrases emerges as a site for creative rethinking about language, theatrical art, and life in society. The point is that, while Shakespeare thinks about things that matter and invites us to think with him by way of narratives, themes, characters and larger verbal features such as soliloquies, exchanges and image and word patterns, he also thinks with individual words since the words he transplanted into his plays from myriad written and spoken sources were themselves filled with heteroglossic social and ideological content to which his particular re-creative genius was able to give voice. *** The signifying practices that transform the natural environment into a human world include embodied vocabularies as well as verbal ones. People communicate by throwing up their hands, turning their backs, hanging their heads, raising their eyebrows, shaking their fists, opening their arms for an embrace. Of course they also use their voices in non-verbal ways. They laugh or cry or sigh with pleasure, or like King Lear near the end of his tragedy, they howl in pain. Shakespeare’s language, which grew to maturity in the playhouse, includes complex gestures as well as complex words. In the theatre, embodied language was as meaningful and as socially creative as its verbal counterpart. Kneeling is something that Shakespeare’s characters do with surprising frequency. In his plays the gesture of kneeling is like an interlaced cluster of related words made out of physical movement. Katherine kneels before her husband Petruchio at the end of Taming of the Shrew. It is a quasiritual act of wifely obedience and also the culmination of a scene that mixes submission and self-assertion. Isabella kneels to plead for Angelo’s life in Measure for Measure; she is asking the Duke for mercy and also performing an act of solidarity

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with Mariana. Lancelot kneels for his father’s blessing in The Merchant of Venice in a comic recollection of Genesis 27, where Jacob tricks Isaac into bestowing his blessing on him. Lear overturns family and political hierarchies when he kneels movingly to his daughter Cordelia. Kneeling was a gesture of considerable social, political and theological import for Shakespeare and his real-life contemporaries. Early modern English people kneeled to their parents, to secular rulers and to God: it was an everyday gesture that reinforced relations of power and authority. It was ethically meaningful too: people kneeled to others, including to God, for favour, forgiveness or blessing. In Shakespeare’s time, after almost a century of shifting between Catholic and Protestant national churches and several generations of divided political loyalties, the practices of bowing and genuflecting began to arouse scepticism, especially in relation to religious practice. Radical Protestants questioned the value of kneeling and other outward signs of devotion. One reformer quoted St John Chrysostom: ‘Their lips are moved only, but their mind is without fruit, and therefore are the ears of God deaf … I have bowed, thou sayest, my knees. Thou hast bowed indeed thy knees within, but thy mind wandereth abroad. Thy body is within, but thy thought is without.’19 In Shakespeare’s play Richard II, the Duke of Bolingbroke, the future King Henry IV, kneels to Richard II after the King’s capitulation to the rebels. ‘Stand all apart,’ says Bolingbroke, ‘And show fair duty to his Majesty. / My gracious lord’ (Richard II, 3.3.187–9). The rebel duke is making a show of his loyalty to the monarch, but it is not clear at this moment that it is mere show, so it is somewhat surprising and even self-defeating for the King to characterize his subject’s dutiful gesture as a piece of sheer hypocrisy:

See Ramie Targoff, ‘The Performance of Prayer: Sincerity and Theatricality in Early Modern England’, Representations 60 (1997): 49–69, quote on 57–8.

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Fair cousin, you debase your princely knee To make the base earth proud with kissing it. Me rather had my heart might feel your love Than my unpleased eye see your courtesy. Up, cousin, up, your heart is up, I know, Thus high at least, although your knee be low. (3.3.190–5) The rebel duke’s kneeling coupled with the King’s scepticism could have opened the actor’s gesture to interpretation and debate among the audience at the play. An action such as Bolingbrook’s genuflection, where the authenticity of the represented inward feeling is in question, could have enabled early modern playgoers to think about the meaning and value of their own practices of embodied communication, especially their frequently performed gestures of social, political and religious fealty and submission. Admittedly, there is a methodological problem facing anyone who wishes to study Shakespeare’s gestural language. Shakespeare’s words survive almost fully intact in the quarto and folio texts, but we can be certain about the gestures performed on Shakespeare’s stage only when they are indicated either by original stage directions or are clearly called for by the dialogue. That means we have to be both imaginative and careful in our attempts to reconstruct what the actors did in performance; that, however, is not very different from the chances and precautions we must take in the historical study of Shakespeare’s words. A focus on embodied language also brings forcefully to our attention the history of the performance of the plays, an attention that can foster new insights into how the plays might have worked in Shakespeare’s time. Ian McKellen’s recollection of performing Richard II in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1969, where his kneeling to touch the ‘dear earth’ of his native England called forth silence and then weeping from the whole audience, can open our eyes to how the play in 1595 might well have used performed action (including kneeling, sitting and bleeding) to transform the wooden stage of the playhouse into the earth of England

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and thereby to arouse deep patriotic feelings among its first audiences.20 Five of the ten chapters that follow focus at least in part on performance and on Shakespeare’s gestural language. They undertake to grasp the plays’ poetic and performative inventiveness and the way those dimensions work together. In this respect, the present book aims to breach a barrier in Shakespeare studies between performance studies and literaryhistorical criticism, a divide that, we think, has stood in the way of a full understanding of Shakespeare’s art since at least J. L. Styan’s book, The Shakespearean Revolution, undertook in 1977 to redress a long-standing imbalance that had made Shakespeare a poet first and a playwright after.21 Our accounts of Shakespeare’s gestural and verbal language will, we hope, suggest that his art is theatrical and literary, embodied and verbal, at one and the same time.

The body of the book Michael Bristol and Sara Coodin lead off the book with ‘Well-Won Thrift’, an essay on The Merchant of Venice. The chapter is fundamentally about learning to listen to Shakespeare. Too many critics have not paid enough attention See Kate Welch, ‘Making Mourning Show: Hamlet and Affective PublicMaking’, Performance Research 16 (2011): 74–82. 21 In fact, the arguments go back to Shakespeare’s time, appearing in the numerous disparaging remarks about playhouse performance in the prologues by dramatists like Marlowe and Jonson and in the playful but serious antitheatricalism of Shakespeare’s own drama. For more recent arguments, first for the literary character of Shakespeare’s art, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); for arguments on the other side, see J. L. Styan, The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 20

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to what Shylock says or to how his language signifies. To tune up our ability to hear Shylock, the chapter connects Shylock’s language with the language of the Jewish Bible and Jewish commentators. Bristol and Coodin consider one of Shylock’s most controversial utterances, his account of why he charges interest. Where Shylock’s arguments about moneylending are typically glossed as attempts to rationalize usury, the authors consider the speech from the perspective of Shylock as a self-identified Jew. By looking at the biblical parable of the parti-coloured lambs that Shylock invokes in the scene, they open the hermeneutic possibilities of the verse, inquiring into how rabbinic commentators constructed the meaning of the Jacob stories. They devote some wonderfully imaginative attention to the different kinds of ‘wells’ in the play and in the Jewish Bible. Investigating the Judaic significance of Jacob’s wealth, the chapter offers a biblically-based model for Shylock’s understanding of his prosperity that draws on the older sense of thrift as thriving or moral flourishing. Chapter 2, David Schalkwyk’s ‘Proper Names and Common Bodies: The Case of Cressida’, invites us to attend to the freedom of one of the most maligned characters in literature. The combination of Cressida’s proper name and the performance of the character by an actor open up possibilities of altogether new accounts of the woman that has stood conventionally as an epitome of ‘untrew[th].’22 The chapter addresses the question of what role proper names play in the presentation and possibilities of action of a character in a play. Starting with Saul Kripke’s causal theory of reference, it argues that a proper name like ‘Cressida’ is a rigid designator: it picks out its referent independently of any (contingent) properties of that object (like infidelity). Given that this is so, the proper names of characters allow for the imaginary

The word is from Troilus and Criseyde, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (2nd edn, Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1957), book 5, line 1774.

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exploration of other characteristics, destinies or events with which such names have been associated, in fiction or history. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida stages the nature of the proper name, both through the characters’ invocation of their names as signifiers of an immutable, essential signified, and by showing the gap that always exists in the theatre between the common bodies bearing such names and the names as they have been passed down through history. This staged gap, combined with the logical nature of the proper name as rigid designator, enables the theatre to entertain a different destiny for the name. On the stage Cressida can thus always be other than her name. Chapter 3 is ‘Antique / Antic: Archaism, Neologism and the Play of Shakespeare’s Words in Love’s Labour’s Lost and 2 Henry IV.’ In it, Lucy Munro explores a pair of early modern homonyms, ‘antique’ and ‘antic’, and considers what they suggest about two specific aspects of Shakespeare’s language: archaism and neologism. Archaisms might be ‘antique’, carrying the gravity of age, but both archaisms and neologisms were potentially ‘antic’, deforming the language with grotesquery and disorder. The chapter focuses on two plays in which the tension between old and new forms of language is particularly striking: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Second Part of Henry IV. Exploring ambiguous figures such as Don Armado and Pistol – both use both archaism and neologism – and the archaic pageant of the nine worthies in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the chapter examines the performative qualities of archaism and neologism, and their potential links with ‘antic’ gestures or postures, and also the ways in which these plays commodify language, selling themselves in part through their linguistic experimentation. The Chamberlain’s Men successfully marketed to their audiences a rich combination of new and old words, styles and postures – the ‘antique’ and the ‘antic’, in a state of productive disjunction. Munro turns to modern performances of Don Armado, where the two meanings and styles of antic and antique remain formatively in play.

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Chapter 4, Miriam Jacobson’s ‘Learning to Colour in Hamlet’, studies the fascinating confluence among the materiality of the early modern technologies of colour, the languages of colour and Shakespearean ideas about chameleon-like personhood. The chapter takes as its starting point Polonius’s injunction to Ophelia that reading on a book (or pretending to read a book) might ‘colour’ her ‘loneliness’ (3.1.44–5). What does it mean to ‘colour’ one’s loneliness? Drawing on the material history of imported pigments and dyes used in art, cosmetics, ink and textile manufacture, the chapter argues that in the play, ‘colouring’ becomes associated with theatrical performance, specifically with masking and inking over multiple versions of selfhood. But the argument does not stop there: in order for Hamlet to accomplish his task of avenging his father’s death, he must learn to colour, in other words, learn to mask his feelings through emotional and psychological performance. And colouring as performance does not entail masking or forced blushing alone; it involves embracing a less stable identity, becoming a protean, fluid being, like the chameleons Hamlet references before staging his own play (3.2.90). In its metamorphic precariousness, colouring mimics early modern language’s own plasticity. Hamlet’s performance of his ‘antic disposition’ is an act of colouring, one that entails not only performing multiple roles, but speaking in multiple voices. J. A. Shea’s ‘Recasting “Angling” in The Winter’s Tale’ takes us into early modern criminal practices and language in order to open new avenues toward understanding Shakespeare’s great romance and his theatrical art more generally. This chapter, the fifth, explores the linguistic weight and dramatic depth of ‘angling’ in The Winter’s Tale. More than just ‘fishing’, the word ‘angling’ in the play refers to linen thievery and other criminal practices that government statutes, antitheatricalist tracts and cony-catching literature associated with the entertainment industry. As well as the word, images of angling gesture toward cultural fantasies about con artists and criminal networks. By relating the references to angling in

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The Winter’s Tale to the cony-catching literature by Thomas Harman, Robert Greene and Thomas Dekker, this chapter suggests that the influence of cony-catching extends beyond the Autolycus subplot, and that we should see these texts and also Greene’s Pandosto as informing the whole play. It also proposes that Autolycus is the play’s foremost angler and structural middleman. He is the touchstone for other evocations of angling in the play. Finally, it argues that Autolycus’s profession, more than his person, contributes most to the restorative structure of the play. The chapter proposes that, in The Winter’s Tale, angling comes to stand for the beneficial potential of Shakespeare’s own theatrical practice. Chapter 6, ‘“What may be and should be”: Grammar Moods and the Invention of History in 1 Henry VI’ by Lynne Magnusson, shows how even very little words can do the most significant kinds of intellectual work and how his education in Latin language could have shaped Shakespeare’s dramatic historiography. The chapter attends to the small words ‘may’, ‘should’ and ‘would’ in 1 Henry VI. It considers how the interplay in English of three grammatical moods related to the Latin subjunctive form contributed to the shaping of English history in the theatre as something beyond Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘bare was’ of indicative narration. The subjunctive, the optative and (above all) the potential mood – that is, the mood known in English ‘by these signes, may, can, might, would, should, or ought’ – are all in evidence in the early play 1 Henry VI. Sidney’s characterization of poetry as ‘borrow[ing] nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be’ but ranging into ‘consideration of what may be and should be’ is not usually taken literally as suggesting a special role for the grammar of the ‘potential mood.’ Instead, it is taken metaphorically to gesture at the special character of fiction, at how literary mimesis (and by extension, we might imagine, theatrical representation) creates a hypothetical, projected or shadow world. The chapter asks whether lessons about early modern English inadvertently learned in the Latin classroom played a role in creating a ‘what may be and should be’

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– or complex forms of ‘potential action’ – to distinguish the English theatre’s new kind of history. The chapter argues that grammatical categories associated with Elizabethan schooling served as potent imaginative and performance resources in Shakespeare’s early history-writing. In Chapter 7, ‘Othello and Theatrical Language’, Sarah Werner considers the interplay of text and performance in Shakespearean performance. Very near the beginning of the play Othello, Iago says, ‘I am not what I am.’ This enigmatic declaration sets the stage for a play whose verbal and gestural languages challenge our grasp of the meanings of words and actions. The opening scenes are remarkably unclear about who is being discussed and what events have transpired before the play’s beginning. The demonstrative ‘this’ is exemplary of the design of the play. The word directs attention toward something, but in this play that something is seldom clear. There is also a host of pronouns without clear referents, and even in moments of apparent clarity, meaning turns back on itself: a ‘he’ that seems to refer to Brabantio slips a few lines later to seem to refer to Othello. Othello himself goes unnamed until the third scene, in spite of the fact that he is central to the action from the start. The audience finds itself without a firm footing from which to understand the action. What makes this disorientation effective is how the audience’s position mirrors that of Othello. What can we know when we’re not sure whether we can trust what our eyes and ears tell us? Nothing is stable in this play, from Iago’s ‘I am not what I am’ to the handkerchief to the time scheme of the story. The degree to which the play destabilizes not only Othello but the audience itself – a destabilization that is central to the play’s considerable power – depends on its successful manipulation of early modern theatrical conventions and the capacity of language to intrigue, to obfuscate and to draw us into a shared experience of faith and doubt. Chapter 8 develops further the relationship between poetry and performance. ‘Slips of Wilderness: Verbal and Gestural Language in Measure for Measure’, by Paul Yachnin and

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Patrick Neilson, brings together literary and theatrical ways of thinking about Shakespeare’s language in order to explain the remarkably productive life of the word ‘slip’ in Measure for Measure and in order to suggest how poetry and performance are made into a single dynamic thing in the play. The discussion finds verbal and physical ‘slips’ proliferating throughout the play, shaping the characters, the slippery plot and the themes. This exfoliation of a single word points to the metaphorical character of Shakespeare’s thinking. Shakespeare cultivates a multiplex system of metaphors that allows him to ‘project patterns from one domain of experience in order to structure another domain of a different kind.’23 The phrase derives from the work of Mark Johnson and George Lakoff. Shakespeare’s use of ‘slip’ exemplifies Lakoff and Johnson’s argument for the essentially metaphorical, embodied character of our descriptions of the world; Shakespeare also develops, in anticipation of Lakoff and Johnson, a critical account of the ways by which metaphor is able to constitute the world itself. The chapter develops this argument about Shakespeare’s world-making embodied language by drawing also on the rehearsal process and performance of Measure for Measure at McGill University in 2010. Chapter 9 is by Meredith Evans. ‘“Captious and Inteemable”: Reading Comprehension in Shakespeare’ extends Chapter 7’s linking of the experience of the characters in a play and the audience members watching the play. The chapter studies how the perplexities of Shakespeare’s language weave together the same kinds of semantic and intellectual questions with which his characters are often presented. For example, it is not enough to say that ‘to be or not to be’ is ‘the question.’ As centuries of scholarship attest, for better or for worse, one must go on, as Hamlet does, to ask just what kind of question

Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1, xiv–xv. 23

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this is. As the studiously formal tenor of his speech suggests, it is an inescapably linguistic, declensional question with significant thematic and socio-political implications. The chapter examines the ligatures of the semantic and the thematic in Act One, Scene Three of All’s Well That Ends Well. In place of Hamlet’s either / or, Helena’s description of her love for Bertram presents a both / and, expressing a peculiarly inexhaustible capacity and a rare comprehension of otherwise inscrutable affects: ‘Yet, in this captious and inteemable sieve, I still pour in the waters of my love, / And lack not more to lose’ (204–6). The extended metaphor is notoriously opaque. But, the chapter argues, the metaphor is also theoretically and philologically capacious. Setting it within its immediate, historical, literary and mythological contexts – including Ovid’s rarely cited tale of incest between Myrrah and Cinyras – the chapter shows how Helena’s heart-sieve offers a way of speaking about otherwise unspeakable desires. Absolving her of the charge being ‘a mere humour of predatory monogamy’, the chapter builds on Helena’s language in order to articulate a way of having without holding.24 The final chapter brings together the latest thinking about early modern prosody with an acute understanding of performance practice. The chapter, Jennifer Roberts-Smith’s ‘“Time is their master”: Men and Metre in The Comedy of Errors’, shows how Shakespeare’s poetry is an integral part of his dramatic design. In the play, Luciana reassures her sister that men are subject to time: ‘Time is their master,’ she promises, ‘and when they see time / They’ll go or come.’25 The conventional Elizabethan senses of the word ‘time’ occur frequently in the play and articulate its central theme, but Shakespeare also puts time to work at the levels of narrative, plot, genre and – perhaps most surprisingly, in a play that has never been

The quote is from E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950), 126. 25 2.1.8–9 24

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considered a masterpiece of versification – as meter. Theorists writing during Shakespeare’s lifetime saw timing as an essential element not just of verse forms we would describe as accentual, but also of the form we have for centuries thought of as accentual-syllabic: the English iambic pentameter. In addition to ‘accent’ or salience, it was the ‘quantitie, (which is Time) long, or short’ (in Ben Jonson’s words) of syllables, not their number, that determined the length of a line. With the help of recent phonological theory, the chapter applies a working definition of the timed Elizabethan iambic to The Comedy of Errors. Scanned from this perspective, not only are the play’s accentual meters structurally related to its ‘iambic pentameters’ (for want of a better term) and linked to them by what we might call border lines straddling the two meters, but also the play’s systematic metrical scheme reflects, at the line level and across the play, its theme, genre and narrative. In The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare materializes time as meter, and by doing so defines theatrical style, turns dialogue into stage direction as well as utterance and provides metametrical commentary, helping to create the ironic distance between characters’ and audiences’ perceptions of time that is perhaps the play’s central goal.

Shakespeare’s world of words Shakespeare wrote in the neighbourhood of 38 plays, two long poems and 154 sonnets. He published in all nearly 900,000 words.26 That is a great deal of published writing, but why, it has to be asked, does it make sense to call his published writing a ‘world of words’? What exactly is that phrase meant to describe? If it does make sense to call his writing a world, Folger Shakespeare Library, Shakespeare FAQS, http://www.folger.edu/ Content/Discover-Shakespeare/Shakespeare-FAQs.cfm (accessed 6 January 2015).

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what are his writing’s most salient, world-like features? And how did all those published words become a world? There is a good set of answers to these questions. People have since antiquity recognized that all the writings authored by a single person should have something like a family resemblance one with another and that the body of writing by a single author should be capable of being judged as a whole. That ancient idea was as normal in Shakespeare’s time as it had been in the age of Ovid and Virgil or as it is in our time.27 That traditional linking of authors and their works is exemplified, for instance, by Francis Meres’ 1598 assessment of Shakespeare, where he surveys Shakespeare’s poetry, comedy and tragedy, remarking that ‘the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare’, and places Shakespeare at the very top among English writers for both comedy and tragedy.28 The normal identification of writers and their works gives us the foundation condition of possibility for the world-like coherence of a body of authored work. A world (like a body) is whole and complete, something to which nothing can be added and from which nothing need be taken away. Some version of this idea lies behind the publication of the 1623 Folio, which gathered Shakespeare’s individually printed plays and his plays still in manuscript into a single large book with the playwright’s name on it. More than that – the book was the author. Shakespeare’s fellows, John Heminge and Henry Condell, called the quarto editions of the plays ‘surreptitious

There is a large theoretical literature on the relationship between authors and writing, the latest phase of which begins with Roland Barthes’ and Michel Foucault’s different but related critiques of how the idea of the author has served to rationalize and rein in the intertexual field of writing. For a brief critical survey, which redefines the author as ‘the chief witness and ethical sponsor of the work’, see my ‘Rejoicing in the Law: The Performance of Authorship in A View from the Bridge’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 60 (2012): 77–89. 28 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, in Riverside, 1970. 27

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copies, maimed, and deformed.’ Folio publication gave readers the plays ‘cur’d, and perfect of their limbes.’29 In his short poem facing the portrait of Shakespeare at the front of the book, Ben Jonson advised any reader who wanted to know Shakespeare to ‘looke / Not on his Picture, but his Booke.’30 The Folio issues, then, from an idea of the organic wholeness of Shakespeare’s many and various plays (and certainly also from a desire to honour the company’s chief writer as well as from a wish to make some money). The Folio in turn provided the keystone textual apparatus that enabled editors, scholars, adapters, commentators, actors and many readers to begin the long-term process of transforming the approximately 38 plays and 150+ poems into a towering monolith called ‘Shakespeare.’ The process began mainly in the Restoration and early eighteenth century. It grew from the work of scholarly and readerly cross-referencing among all the plays; attempts to understand individual words and phrases by setting them beside other, related words and phrases from elsewhere in the works; comparative analysis of characters, plots and plays; competing assessments of Shakespeare’s bookish learning as opposed to his natural genius, his understanding of human conduct, his moral and political acuity; and his standing as a literary artist in relation to great competitors such as Chaucer and Jonson. All of this helps us understand the development of ‘Shakespeare’ as a whole and coherent body of writing. But nothing we have said so far allows us to see Shakespeare or his words as a world, since a world is more than an exemplar of coherence and completeness. A world is also something of supreme value: it is so big that no amount of exploration can reveal everything about it; and it is a place where people live. There are other writers from Shakespeare’s time who enjoyed folio publication as well as a significant degree of

29 30

Quoted in Riverside, 95. Quoted in Riverside, 90.

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scholarly and readerly attention. The folio volume Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher was published in 1647; the Ben Jonson folio appeared in 1616. Beaumont and Jonson were held in high regard in the seventeen and eighteenth centuries, but few commentators thought theirs were works of supreme value or inexhaustible variety, and very few readers, scholars or actors have ever seemed willing to live in their books. The same is not true about Shakespeare. Not only is his work very generally held to be supremely valuable and limitlessly meaningful, but many people (scholars, actors, other literary artists and readers) have lived large parts of their lives in his plays – in scholarly study, editing, performance, rewriting and reading. Some people (the late Maya Angelou was one of them) have said they found themselves in Shakespeare.31 So we must look beyond traditional ideas about the coherence and completeness of the writing by a single author and also beyond more recent ideas about how material, institutional and socio-political conditions are said to create canonical writing and writers.32 A return to Bakhtin will show us the way forward and lead us toward the end of this Introduction. In a short essay written in 1970, Bakhtin talked about the richness and longevity of works of art. Literary works do not merely survive over the long term, he said, but rather they grow larger and richer the longer they live:

‘What Maya Angelou Means When She Says “Shakespeare Must Be a Black Girl”’, The Atlantic, 30 January 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/ archive/2013/01/what-maya-angelou-means-when-she-says-shakespearemust-be-a-black-girl/272667/ (accessed 6 January 2015). 32 Two major contributions to a political and materialist understanding of literary canonicity are Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 31

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Works break through the boundaries of their own time, they live in centuries, that is, in great time and frequently (with great works, always) their lives there are more intense and fuller than are their lives within their own time.33 How is it that works of literary art are different in kind from other made things? Literary works are able to grow larger in future time, Bakhtin says, because they are filled with past time: [T]he work cannot live in future centuries without having somehow absorbed past centuries as well. If it had belonged entirely to today (that is were a product only of its own time) and not a continuation of the past or essentially related to the past, it could not live in the future. Everything that belongs only to the present dies along with the present.34 Bakhtin takes Shakespeare as the model of works that live larger lives in ‘great time.’ Shakespeare made his works out of words that were filled with the socially diverse and heteroglossic meanings of past time: The semantic treasures Shakespeare embedded in his works were created and collected through the centuries and even the millennia: they lay hidden in the language, and not only in the literary language, but also in those strata of the popular language that before Shakespeare’s time had not entered literature, in the diverse genres and forms of speech communication, in the forms of a mighty national culture

M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’, in Speech Genres and other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 4. 34 Ibid. 33

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… that were shaped through millennia … Shakespeare, like any artist, constructed his works not out of inanimate elements, not out of bricks, but out of forms that were already heavily laden with meaning, filled with it.35 Bakhtin’s account of Shakespearean heteroglossia fits squarely with what we have seen about how Shakespeare borrows words from written works (from a very wide variety of traditions, disciplines and periods), from spoken, social languages, which themselves had sedimented within them centuries of past meanings, and from the multiple ritual and everyday gestural vocabularies of early modernity. Bakhtin’s most striking insight – that words have worlds inside them – is something that we have begun to see already by considering Shakespeare’s literary art. Shakespeare’s re-creative genius gives voice to the complex meanings inside words such as ‘room’ or ‘idle’ or inside an embodied utterance such as Bolingbrook’s kneeling. Added to that is the creation of networks of interlaced meanings among words, a process of semantic enrichment that began with Shakespeare’s own literary practice of repetition and variation and that has been augmented by hundreds of years of Shakespeare scholarship, theatrical performance, rewriting and reading. If we put these three attributes together – the extraordinary gathering of different languages in the works, the way Shakespeare opens up the worlds within words, and the exfoliating networks of meaning across his works – then it becomes possible to grasp why it makes sense to characterize Shakespeare’s writing as a ‘world of words.’ His writing comprises a language that is coherent and complete, a language of great value on account of its beauty, critical energy, historicity and semantic inexhaustibility. Finally, his words comprise a world in ‘great time’, a world that has been and continues to be inhabited by many thousands of people – readers, playgoers,

Bakhtin, ‘Response to a Question’, 5.

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students and teachers, researchers, performers, playwrights, film-makers, composers, novelists and many more – including the Shakespeareans who have contributed their work to the present book.

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1 Well-Won Thrift Michael Bristol and Sara Coodin

‘Shakespeare’s principal merit may be conveyed in saying that he of all men best understands the English language, and can say what he will.’1 Ralph Waldo Emerson thought Shakespeare created a world of words, fully populated with widely diverse social intonations and technical vocabularies. Stanley Cavell finds in Shakespeare’s language the potentiality for emancipation from ‘melancholia, idolatry, entrapment in the views of others, and blindness to the existence of others.’2 Maybe it would be more accurate to speak of deliberate ignorance or deafness to the utterances of others. The genius

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures, in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Centenary Edition, 12 vols, vol. 7 (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 210. 2 Stanley Cavell, ‘Skepticism as Iconoclasm: the Saturation of the Shakespearean Text’, in Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Los Angeles, 1996, ed. Jonathan Bate, Jill Levenson and Dieter Mehl (Newark: University of Delaware Press 1996), 241. 1

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of Shakespeare’s dramatic art lies in letting his characters speak for themselves. But how attentively do we listen? The candour of these fictional utterances often provokes a strong resistance to what the characters actually say. Blindness to the reality of others and deafness to their utterances is a recurring theme in many of Shakespeare’s plays, but it is nowhere so extreme as with Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Well, Shylock is not one of Shakespeare’s more engaging characters. And there is a further difficulty in that resistance to what he has to say is linked to the history of anti-Semitism, both in the fictional Venice and in the historical reality of our own cultural traditions. The play is often approached with deliberate ignorance of Jewish thought and Jewish culture. Barbara Lewalski explains The Merchant of Venice as a theological allegory, suggesting that such a reading, based on patristic sources, provides extenuation for the historical reality of anti-Semitic persecution. She reads Jewish tradition as an allegory for ‘thrift’ and ‘niggardly prudence.’ These qualities serve as counter-points to self-sacrificial Christian ‘venturing.’3 Exactly how unselfish love for Bassanio explains the contemptuous vulgarity of spitting on Shylock in public, something Antonio never denies, remains unclear. Lewalski appears to be completely oblivious to her complicity with the historical reality of Christian antiSemitism, though maybe it is only a case of entrapment in the views of others. The Church fathers who distinguished ‘letter’ from ‘spirit’ as theological abstractions provided a respectable intellectual framework for much more consequential expressions of anti-Semitic violence against actual Jews at the hands of actual Christians. The other Venetian characters see Shylock in this way and pay no respect to his utterances. However, this should not prevent us from attentive

Barbara Lewalski, ‘Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 330.

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listening and close reading of what he tries to express as we consider the play from within our own world.4 We take seriously Shylock’s sense of himself as a Jew. Our discussion of his character acknowledges his integrity, and pays attention to him as a decision-making agent rather than as a symbolic figure whose thought and speech allegorize other things.

The well at Haran Shylock’s first words in The Merchant of Venice are ‘Three thousand ducats – well’ (1.3.1).5 His next line is ‘For three months – well.’ And his next line is ‘Antonio shall be bound – well.’ ‘Well’ is a common word in English, and so it is not surprising to discover that it occurs over 2,000 times in Shakespeare’s works, including somewhere between 65 and 75 instances in The Merchant of Venice. It is often used without any grammatical construction to introduce a remark or statement, which is how Shylock uses it in his first speeches. ‘Well’ marks a pause and acknowledges the continuation of dialogue, but it has no semantic content. The usage is more important as an adverb of manner, suggesting that something has been done in a good way, in accordance with a proper standard and thus leading to good results, or even thrift in Shylock’s sense of affluence or wealth. This is the sense it has for Shylock in his brief reflection on the reasons for Antonio’s manifest antipathy. SHYLOCK He hates our sacred nation, and he rails, Even there where merchants most do congregate,

James Siemon, Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 36ff. 5 This and all following quotes from the play are from The Merchant of Venice: Texts and Contexts, ed. M. Lindsey Kaplan (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002). 4

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On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift, Which he calls interest. (1.3.38–41) Shylock has his own view of the source and the meaning of his wealth. ‘Each man … has to get by according to the abilities God has given him. He is justified in this so long as he uses what is his own and does nothing prohibited.’6 ‘Thrift’ is mentioned three times in The Merchant of Venice, all in 1.3. ‘Wealth’ occurs seven times and ‘money’ roughly twice as often. There are 12 mentions of ‘gold.’ Even more important is the Venetian currency, ‘ducats’, which are referred to 25 times. Conspicuous by its absence is ‘happiness’, something that money can’t buy. The network of wealth-words radiates out from Shylock’s notion of thrift in ways quite typical of Shakespeare’s dramatic art, though there is nothing here that seems particularly far-fetched. The more far-fetched possibility is that ‘well-won’ could be an adverb of location with the sense of thrift that is won at a well. The sense of well as a spring may be a subtext if Shylock, in thinking of his own well-won thrift, might at this point be remembering the story of Jacob and the thrift he won at the well at Haran according to Genesis 29.1-10: Then Jacob went on his journey, and came into the land of the people of the east. 2 And he looked, and behold a well in the field, and, lo, there were three flocks of sheep lying by it; for out of that well they watered the flocks: and a great stone was upon the well’s mouth. 3 And thither were all the flocks gathered: and they rolled the stone from the well’s mouth, and watered the sheep, and put the stone again upon the well’s mouth in his place. 1

Charles Spinosa, ‘The Transformation of Intentionality: Debt and Contract in The Merchant of Venice’, English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 394.

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And Jacob said unto them, My brethren, whence be ye? And they said, Of Haran are we. 5 And he said unto them, Know ye Laban the son of Nahor? And they said, We know him. 6 And he said unto them, Is he well? And they said, He is well: and, behold, Rachel his daughter cometh with the sheep. 7 And he said, Lo, it is yet high day, neither is it time that the cattle should be gathered together: water ye the sheep, and go and feed them. 8 And they said, We cannot, until all the flocks be gathered together, and till they roll the stone from the well’s mouth; then we water the sheep. 9 And while he yet spake with them, Rachel came with her father’s sheep: for she kept them. 10 And it came to pass, when Jacob saw Rachel the daughter of Laban his mother’s brother, and the sheep of Laban his mother’s brother, that Jacob went near, and rolled the stone from the well’s mouth, and watered the flock of Laban his mother’s brother.7 4

The story as related in the King James Version has its own wordplay with well, similar to what we’ve just seen in Shylock’s opening speeches. Jacob asks the local shepherds if his uncle Laban is well, and then he asks about a well covered with a stone. In his commentary on Genesis, Martin Luther suggests that since water was scarce in the desert, wells would often be protected by stones that would be too heavy for one person to move. He then adds that ‘in the Jewish commentaries we read that the holy spirit came upon Jacob so that he was greatly strengthened and could roll away the stone when he saw Rachel … and by exhibiting his manly strength, he also

The Bible, Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). All following quotes from the Bible refer to this edition.

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wanted to win Rachel’s heart.’8 Luther’s idea is consistent with rabbinical interpretations, which maintain that Jacob’s strength was evidence of divine favour. Thomas Mann’s redaction of the story in his Tales of Jacob provides a more plausible description of Jacob’s actions. The shepherds are unwilling to alter the conventions of daily existence. Mann’s description of Jacob’s alacrity is nicely captured in the Hebrew word seichel – an expression with the dual sense of strategic intelligence or ‘street smarts’ combined with an ability to think things through and to grasp the larger picture. It is often translated as ‘wisdom’ but it might equally well be taken as ‘foresight’ or even ‘prudence.’ A well is a deep subject, and the well at Haran is no exception to this proverbial truth. The story of Jacob finding his bride at a well is already belated – a re-enactment of an earlier story of Abraham’s servant and the search for Isaac’s bride. Rebecca, Jacob’s mother, is an important part of his well-won thrift, and, like Rachel, she was also found at a well. Much later, Rebecca will devise a plan for Jacob to win his father’s blessing by disguising himself as the more favoured brother Esau. She knows, because God has told her so, that Jacob is the true son and must receive the blessing even if an element of deception is involved in bringing this about. And we may even think, as Thomas Mann would have it, that the whole affair was a kind of ‘open secret’ where everyone played out his role in a drama that was only partly an actual event and partly the completion of a narrative that had already been written. ‘Is it possible for a man to become blind, or as nearly blind as Yitzchak was in his old age, because he does not like to see, because seeing is a torture to him?’9 Martin Luther, Commentary on Genesis, trans. J. Theodore Mueller, 2 vols, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1958), 144–5. 9 Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers: The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, Joseph the Provider, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Everyman Library, 2005), 130. 8

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Just in case the idea that ‘well-won thrift’ is a reference to the story of Jacob and the well at Haran isn’t far-fetched enough, we’d like to have another look at Shylock’s characterization of Antonio as someone who ‘hates our sacred nation.’ The sacred nation is the ‘sons of Israel’, the name given to Jacob after he wrestles with – someone – and is confirmed in the blessing he has received from Isaac. It is not a nation in the sense of nation-state but rather a people who share a cultural identity, a preferred way of life and a blessing or promise that hasn’t always been fulfilled. Shylock certainly has a grievance with Antonio, who maliciously spat upon his Jewish gabardine in one of the many scenes Shakespeare never wrote. But why is this an ancient grudge? We are told, in Genesis 25.21-3, that even before they were born, Jacob and his fraternal twin brother Esau were locked in conflict. Their embryonic conflict is, in fact, embryonic in another important sense in that it foreshadows the enmity that will exist between two distinct nations, one fathered by Esau, and one by Jacob. And Isaac intreated the LORD for his wife, because she was barren: and the LORD was intreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived. 22 And the children struggled together within her; and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to enquire of the LORD. 23 And the LORD said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger. 21

The two nations originally refer to Israel and to Edom, or to the Canaanites. Later commentaries speak of Israel and the Roman Empire. In the Jewish biblical exegesis and in other sixteenth-century sources, the two nations are the Jews, identified as descendants of Jacob and the Christians, descendants of Esau.

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The third possessor Jacob is a significant role model for Shylock, signalling generational entitlements that extend all the way back to Abram, the first forefather to enter into God’s covenant. As Shylock begins to negotiate the loan of 3,000 ducats with Antonio, he recounts the biblical story of Jacob and the parti-coloured lambs by recalling Jacob’s place in the line of succession. ‘When Jacob grazed his uncle Laban’s sheep – This Jacob from our holy Abram was, as his wise mother wrought in his behalf, the third possessor; ay, he was the third’ (1.3.62–3). While Jacob may have been the third possessor, Shylock here positions himself directly in Jacob’s line, poised to take up his substantial wealth. And Jacob’s wealth in the Genesis story is substantial, including his flocks of sheep and goats, his herds of camels, his manservants and maidservants, his wives and concubines and his 12 sons: the whole glittering entourage. The Jacob depicted in these verses from the Torah is someone whose presence generates prosperity – ‘The Lord hath blessed me for thy sake’ are Laban’s words at 30.27. Jacob has observed his growing household and surveyed the practical resources needed to sustain his flourishing flock of cattle, women and children. While Jacob is without question the object of divine entitlement in the Hebrew commentaries, of equal importance is his much more ordinary entitlement through hard work, and his commitment to supporting his family. One commentator explains, ‘There are shepherds who feed but do not keep guard, and shepherds who keep guard but do not feed. I will both feed and keep guard. Beloved is labor, for all the prophets engaged in it.’10 Jacob’s divine entitlement and his wealth are made possible because of his

Menahem Kasher, Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation: A Millennial Anthology, trans. and ed. Harry Freedman, 9 vols, vol. 4 (New York: American Biblical Encyclopedia Society, 1953), 108. 10

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hard labour; the two are, in an important sense, coterminous. That hard labour is also what affords him Rachel’s hand in marriage – a privilege for which he works an additional seven years after Laban changes the terms of their agreement and substitutes the older, less desirable Leah for the younger, prettier Rachel. And Laban feels enriched by Jacob’s presence and grateful for it so long as their wealth is held in common. However, once Jacob decides to split his cattle from the common stock, both Laban and his sons react angrily. After Jacob’s breeding success, Laban and his sons behave as though Jacob had cheated them of their property: And he heard the words of Laban’s sons, saying, Jacob hath taken away all that was our father’s; and of that which was our father’s hath he gotten all this glory. 2 And Jacob beheld the countenance of Laban, and, behold, it was not toward him as before. (31.1-2) 1

The same uneasy mixture of dependency and resentment evidenced by Laban is also present in The Merchant of Venice, where a Christian businessman is compelled to seek credit from a Jewish moneylender whom he despises. If Shylock sees himself as Jacob’s descendant, then the wealth he possesses is generational, dynastic wealth – wealth that signals his place within that succession and his membership in the nation established by his forefathers. Material affluence is really the least of it, though, when it comes to Jacob’s importance to Shylock. That significance is also deeply ethical. Jacob’s ethos – his way of life or moral orientation – is something Shylock understands as significantly tied to his own present-day lending practices. By citing biblical precedent in the way that he does and casting himself as a character in a pre-Christian biblical narrative, Shylock suggests that, for him, the loan constitutes a re-enactment of an ancient biblical story. And the story comes with a particular set of ethical parameters strongly implied in Shylock’s description of how Jacob succeeds, along with a cast of characters whose attributes and behaviours are

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well known to him and so, in a sense, predetermine the story from his perspective. Shylock’s reference to Genesis 30 in 1.3 describes the strange bargain between Jacob and Laban and the even stranger way that Jacob uses the terms of this agreement to acquire his wealth. Jacob persuaded Laban to agree that all the parti-coloured lambs would constitute his hire and then took steps to ensure that the ewes would give birth to lambs that had these markings. According to Shylock, ‘this was a way to thrive, and thrift is blessing if men steal it not’ (1.3.80–1). Shylock’s story about Jacob and the particoloured lambs has often been described – or interpreted – as an attempt to justify usury. This is certainly the way Antonio understands the passage, and many commentators have been willing to accept this characterization of Shylock’s intention here. But there can’t really be any question of a justification of usury. Just usury – like just war – is a contradiction in terms. Early modern Christian moralists were acutely aware of this point and often took pains to foreground it. George Downame, a renowned seventeenth-century logician and bishop, commented in 1604 that ‘although letting [i.e. lending] in it selfe be a lawfull contract, yet usurie in it selfe is simply and utterly unlawfull.’11 Furthermore, the word ‘usury’ is never actually mentioned anywhere in The Merchant of Venice. Shylock’s own term is ‘usance’, which can refer to simple moneylending but also has a range of other meanings in early modern English usage. The primary meaning of ‘usance’ according to the OED is custom, wont or habit. In early modern England, that sense of the term is often tied to national custom and ways of life. Seventeenth-century Venetian Rabbi Leone Modena wrote Historia de gli Riti Hebrei to explain the customs and mores of European Jews to King James I, and the term ‘usance’ is the one used by Modena’s 1650 English translator Edmund

George Downame, Lectures on the XV Psalme (London, 1604), 300.

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Chilmeade to describe the diversity of practices among Jews living in the diaspora. ‘Usance’ arises in Modena’s account of ritualistic inconsistencies among Jews: ‘These usances have sprung from the Dispersion of the Jews into divers and severall Countries.’12 This understanding of usances as things that concern customs points up the importance of those very practical, routine elements of ethical experience – the habits (both in the sense of practices and styles of dress), rituals and professional choices that condition daily life. What we know about Jewish moneylending in the Renaissance is that it, too, was a profession practised routinely. Lending money at interest in many parts of early modern Europe was a distinctively Jewish livelihood – one often born of necessity rather than choice for Jews who typically found themselves excluded from professional guilds. Italian physician and Rabbi David de Pomis had personally suffered the loss of his professional licence subsequent to Pope Paul IV’s bull that prevented Jewish physicians from being employed by Christians. In 1587, de Pomis published De Medico Hebraeo Ennerato Apologica, which argued for the reinstitution of Jewish physicians and defended both the integrity of the Jewish faith and the practice of lending at interest. De Pomis reasons that moneylending represents a way to thrive amidst the difficult circumstances of life in the diaspora, and the Jewish practice of lending to Christians arises out of necessity rather than malice. ‘If the Jews do “bite” with usury [i.e. charge usurious interest rates], this is not by permission of the law, but by a cogent necessity which, as it is thought, may make this excusable.’13 Although de Pomis does not excuse the practice of usury, he does provide 12 Leo Modena, The History of the Rites, Customs, and Manner of Life, of the Present Jews, Throughout the World, trans. Edmund Chilmeade (London, 1650), 3–4. 13 David De Pomis, De Medico Hebraeo (Venice, 1587), in H. Friedenwald, The Jews and Medicine, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1944), 404, quoted in Kaplan, Texts and Contexts, 219.

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some clarification about the motives behind it – motives which foreground the presence of a strong work ethic blunted by the constraining circumstances of life in exile.14 Shylock echoes these appeals to cogent necessity and permissibility when he exclaims, ‘Signior Antonio, many a time and oft in the Rialto you have rated me about my moneys and my usances’ (1.3.97–9). Shylock’s point is that he seeks a chance to practise his profession in a self-respecting way – one that does not involve being spat on or insulted in public. (‘You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, and spit upon my Jewish gaberdine. And all for use of that which is mine own’ (1.3.102–4).) Moreover, it is clear that Shylock regards what he does as self-respecting, even if Antonio does not, and his appeal to ‘usances’ here may very well refer to customary habits that Antonio saw fit to mock. But perhaps Shylock here refers to the financial practice widely known in England as lending at usance, which involved trading in foreign currencies. When lenders extended credit at usance, they agreed to assume the risk of transporting a sum of money – for example 3,000 ducats – from Venice to London. The lender would charge a fee for moving the money as well as a currency exchange fee. It was the exchange fee that constituted the most profitable aspect of the arrangement since currency values would be fixed in advance by the lender at a rate beneficial to him but typically out of line with standard values. The intervening time between loan and repayment – either a month at usance, or two for double usance – would offer a further opportunity

The sixteenth century saw even more direct rabbinical arguments in favour of charging interest as a matter of general practice. Both Isaac Abravanel’s and Abraham Farrisol’s commentaries on the Torah elaborate on the idea that economic actualities make lending at interest entirely sensible. See Benjamin Ravid, ‘Moneylending in Seventeenth Century Jewish Vernacular Apologia’, in Studies on the Jews of Venice (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 279–80.

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for lenders to speculate on foreign currency markets and profit tidily.15 If Shylock’s ‘usance’ refers to the financial practice of lending money at interest, is he necessarily attempting to justify predatory financial practices, as Antonio and many critics have suggested? Several early modern English treatises on moneylending condemn usance and double-usance as unsound and unChristian forms of lending. Usance, according to George Downame, is merely a clever term concocted by lenders to trick unwitting borrowers into usurious loan agreements. If we read the term ‘usance’ in the way that Downame does, Shylock appears shrewd and deceptive for appealing to the euphemistic ‘usance.’ And yet in Downame’s own account, usance is not an illegal practice but an immoral one. What Downame refers to as ‘counterfeit’ or ‘dry’ usance amounts to foreign currency speculation explicitly motivated by profit-seeking, and it is incredibly lucrative: ‘The gain which is reaped by exchange, is greater than any other which is tollerated by the magistrat.’16 Usance allows speculators to operate independently of state regulation and set their own currency values. It is at once threatening and potentially seductive. If Shylock makes his living selling ‘usances’, it is clear from his use of this term that he regards his own business practices as legitimate. Antonio, by undercutting the going rates, is seen by him as prodigal and unscrupulous. This is also the way Henry Clay Folger, himself a highly successful man of business with a law degree from Columbia University, sees the overall situation in an unpublished essay on the play entitled ‘Shylock’s Bond from the Merchant’s Standpoint.’ The Venetians in general are a prodigal and vulgar bunch. And as

Shylock hints at this in 1.3.131–2 when he brings up a Dutch unit of currency – the doit – in his appeal to Antonio: ‘I would … supply your present wants and take no doit of usance for my moneys.’ 16 Downame, Lectures, 188. 15

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for Antonio, his ‘sadness, an enigma to himself, is clearly to us but the dawning consciousness of incompetence … his wealth must have been an inheritance.’17 Antonio dismisses Shylock’s reference to the story of Jacob and the parti-coloured sheep by calling him a devil who cites Scripture for his purpose. But if we actually listen to Shylock’s unfolding of the story of Jacob’s breeding successes we can equally recognize it as an act of self-explication. Shylock views Jacob as a role model. The Folio edition of the play even substitutes ‘I’ for ‘ay’ in the lines This Jacob from our holy Abram was, As his wise mother wrought in his behalf, The third possessor; ay, he was the third –

18

(1.3.63–5)

In this version of the speech, Shylock presents himself not only as Jacob-like; he is Jacob, the third possessor. For Shylock, the present negotiations with Antonio may well represent a recasting of biblical narrative. After all, Shakespeare’s plays routinely do just this – rework old scripts into new objects of entertainment. What’s more, at various points throughout The Merchant of Venice, current investments and desires are cast as heavily conditioned by scripts from the past. This is true of the casket test orchestrated by Portia’s dead father, of Jessica’s desire to escape her father’s house and convert from Judaism, and even of Bassanio’s need to seek Antonio’s financial help because of his own bad credit history. In Shylock’s case, the ‘script’ being appealed to is the so-called Old Testament. We say so-called because for Shylock, as for any Jew, invoking the Genesis Jacob parable is a way of invoking an episode from the Torah. In a sense, there is no ‘Old’ Testament, Henry Clay Folger, Jr, ‘Shylock’s Bond from the Merchant’s Standpoint’, unpublished MS. 18 On this point, see Marc Shell, ‘The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice’, Kenyon Review 1, no. 4 (1979): 65–92, esp. 68. 17

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at least not where Shylock is concerned; there is only Torah, with nothing ‘new’ required to redeem or complete it.19 What Shakespeare does by staging an exegetical dispute in the midst of the loan negotiations in 1.3 – and incidentally, this represents the only exegetical dispute in Shakespeare’s entire dramatic canon – is foreground the contested nature of scriptural interpretation and the presence of multiple interpretive perspectives. In a very real sense, there are multiple Jacobs being invoked in this scene. On the one hand, there is Shylock’s Jacob, descendant of Abram, whose cleverness and important connections help generate his material success; on the other, there is Antonio’s Jacob whose success is endorsed by supernatural force, and whose elect status or ‘blessings’ obviate human agency. Throughout 1.3, Shylock attempts to invoke Antonio’s participation in an age-old biblical conflict, which requires an investment that is neither aesthetic, token nor simply financial; in scriptural terms, it is a function of establishing a covenant between them. The Jewish covenant, or brit in Hebrew, is one that requires active and deliberate affirmation from every member of the community. Moreover, it requires not exactly a pound but a certain amount of flesh in the form of circumcision or what is referred to as a briss. Edward Andrew has argued that Shylock’s attempt to solicit Antonio’s friendship in this scene represents a desire to convert the merchant to Judaism.20 There certainly is anecdotal evidence that some legal prosecutions of Jews in early modernity for attempting to forcibly ‘circumcise’ a Christian were actually attempts to re-establish religious claims over conversos.

This principle was explicitly formulated by Maimonides and forms part of his Thirteen Principles of Faith. See Moses Maimonides, Maimonides’ Introduction to the Talmud: A Translation of the Rambam’s Introduction to His Commentary on the Mishna, trans. Zvi L. Lampel (New York: Judaica Press, 1975). 20 Edward Andrew, Shylock’s Rights: A Grammar of Lockian Claims (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 36–8. 19

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While the notion that Shylock is attempting to convert or circumcise Antonio in 1.3 is undoubtedly a far-reaching one, Jessica’s desire to abscond with her Christian lover offers a related way of approaching the notion of covenant that is directly grounded in The Merchant’s story. If entry into the covenant is defined by circumcision or briss, Jessica’s story is the desire for an anti-circumcision – a physical and spiritual exit strategy from her father’s house. Genesis presents us with a young female character who also desires to ‘go out’ from her home, although the extent of her desire to effect a permanent break from her faith and family is something the narrative leaves open, unlike Shakespeare’s portrayal of Jessica. We are referring to Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, who in chapter 34 winds up in a messy romantic entanglement with a local non-Jew. In both Shakespeare’s play and in Genesis, the seduction of a Jewish woman is associated with the charms of music and poetic language. The commentaries tell us that Shechem ‘attracted her [Dinah’s] attention by playing music within her hearing’, and ‘seduced her with words.’21 In both cases, the woman in question is reputed to be very beautiful; with Dinah, the commentaries tell us that, ‘her image stayed in his [Shechem’s] mind, so great was her beauty.’22 Genesis 34 recounts: And Dinah the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land. 2 And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.23 1

The King James translation uses the word ‘defiled’ to describe what happens to Dinah when she leaves her family and

Kasher, Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation, 4:174–5. Ibid., 4:175. 23 Genesis 34.1-2. 21 22

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explores the surrounding area. The translation from the Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation prefers the less pointed ‘humbled’ – ‘and he humbled her’ – but the sense of violation is roughly equivalent, and where the Encyclopedia chooses a more moderate verb, its commentary is clear about the egregiousness of the ‘humbling’ that takes place. The exegetes are inconclusive on the point of whether there was actual sexual contact between Shechem and Dinah, but even in the absence of that kind of violation, verbal seduction, according to one commentator, would have constituted a grave and irreparable harm to her reputation and the reputation of her family.24 Jacob’s sons initially enter into a compact with the nation of Shechem in which the Shechemites agree to undergo circumcision to try to rectify the messy Dinah debacle, with the understanding that intermarriage between the tribes will be permissible in the future. Part of this deal also establishes that Jacob’s sons will be given full access to Shechem’s commercial networks. In effect, Jacob’s family is offered the chance at full and free socio-economic participation. On first inspection, this appears to be an auspicious and equitable arrangement for everyone – a non-violent ending to a potentially explosive series of missteps, and the first stage of successful multicultural coexistence. Of course, things work out very differently, and the overture of circumcision-as-peace-offering turns out to be merely a ploy to catch the Shechemites at their most vulnerable. The sons of Jacob slaughter them all while they are recovering from their surgery, and Dinah is returned to her family. Although there is no denying the unmitigated violence of the Hebrews’ attack on the men of Shechem, the Jewish commentaries point out that there was considerable deception and double-speak in the negotiations between the Shechemites and Hebrews. There is the matter of Dinah’s initial defilement,

Kasher, Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation, 4:174–6.

24

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which the commentaries suggest could never serve as the basis for any form of valid contract, be it among nations or between God and men. One commentator reflects upon Abraham’s circumcision, the archetypal referent for the principle of covenant: With this my covenant, which was said unto our father Abraham: If ye will be as we are, that every male of you be circumcised – for the sake of Heaven and not in order to contract marriages. For the circumcision that we underwent when we were admitted to the covenant of Abraham our father was at eight days old, a circumcision of holiness and not one of defilement.25 In this commentator’s view, daughters are not to be exchanged for trade privileges, nor for the privilege of marrying attractive foreigners. The basic prohibition here is not unlike the problem of Shylock’s bond with Antonio: living human flesh cannot be the stuff of bartered exchange. This prohibition also recalls the so-called Noahide commandments summarized in Genesis Chapter 9, which specify, among other things, not to eat flesh cut from a living animal. According to rabbinic law, there is something fundamentally un-kosher about a business agreement that traffics in live flesh. It becomes clear enough how Shylock’s initial bond is most decidedly un-Jewish, and not only un-Jewish according to a series of partisan Jewish rules, but also in a much broader sense of bartering human flesh in the context of a business arrangement. But the play also shows ways in which the un-Jewishness of the bond is something the Christian participants willingly agree to and even take pains to orchestrate. The Christian interest in the bond may, as in the case of Jacob’s sons and the Shechemites, have more going on beneath the surface than a mere loan of 3,000 ducats. That ‘something

25

Ibid., 4:179.

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more’ is directly related to a pound of flesh, or rather, several pounds of living flesh that are hotly desired by Lorenzo, and, once stolen, bitterly mourned by Shylock: Jessica herself. Dinah is absolutely central to the Genesis account of what happens at Shechem. Even when the narrative appears to have shifted concerns and moved on to the subject of lifting trade restrictions and opening up possibilities for intermarriage, the brutality of that final act of revenge hammers swiftly home the conclusion that it was really about Dinah all along. The possibilities for overcoming deep-seated enmity and for peace and even friendship are obvious red herrings in the Genesis account, and they may well be in Shakespeare too. Shakespeare’s comedy, seen through the lens of this biblical intertext, dramatizes how genuine gestures of friendship are often much more fraught than they appear and much rarer too. Shakespeare’s play certainly seems initially to be ‘about’ the need for a loan of 3,000 ducats to finance a romantic business venture. The fact is, Antonio’s agreement to the terms of Shylock’s bond and the subsequent relationship that bond generates between them – including Shylock’s being called out to dinner, and leaving Jessica the opportunity to abscond with Lorenzo – results in the same kind of theft as the one scripted in Genesis, the theft of a prized daughter. A Christian motivational scenario that includes the deliberate and premeditated theft of daughters, unconventional and far-reaching as it may seem, is not something Shakespeare’s text ever precludes. The play’s treatment of the loan raises the question: why do Antonio and Bassanio approach Shylock for a sum of money which Shylock is incapable of staking and for which he must approach Tubal, a third party, in order to raise? Why Shylock? What does he have, in particular, that they want so badly, and would they not have known whom to approach directly for such a large sum of money? If the pound of flesh, thus understood, constitutes the play’s underlying motivational scenario, the Jewish commentaries on the final verse of the Dinah episode raise an interesting point in relation to the final verse of Genesis 34.31: ‘Should

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one deal with our sister as with a harlot?’ One commentator writes that ‘Their answer was telling and final. It teaches us that Dinah had been forced, and had not consented to Shechem.’26 An earlier observation made by one commentator suggests that consent is really the central issue of the entire Dinah affair. The Hebrew text uses the word na’ara in verse 4, which translates into ‘damsel’, when Shechem says ‘get me this damsel unto wife.’ When (as in the case of this verse) the Hebrew word for damsel lacks the final hei, it shows that the girl has not yet reached puberty.27 In the Masoretic Hebrew text, Shechem’s words for ‘get me that damsel unto wife’ are ‘kach li et hayeladah hazot le-ishah.’ Yeladah is the word for a female child in modern Hebrew, yeled is a male child, and the resonance is unmistakeable.28 One commentator states the matter clearly: ‘Dinah was eight and a half years old.’29 Although physically able to effect an escape from her father’s house, it is not clear what it means for Jessica to escape from the faith that has defined her life at such a tender age. Perhaps she, like Dinah, has not yet grown into a mature sense of Jewish personhood, or developed the agency to reject or make concerted alterations to that dimension of her person. Perhaps she simply doesn’t possess enough prudence, common sense, or seichel, to be able to fully understand the implications of intermarriage – something that the scene with Lorenzo at 4.1 would seem to suggest. Perhaps the most telling account of what it means for Jessica is the story we hear of her, that she sold her mother’s ring in exchange for a monkey. This theft of a precious object belonging to her parent makes her not like Dinah at all but like Rachel who steals her father’s idols and hides them in the blankets of her camel’s saddle before she leaves her paternal home. These Ibid., 4:185. Ibid., 4:176. 28 The Holy Scriptures: A Jewish Bible According to the Masoretic Texts (Tel Aviv: Sinai Publishing, 1979). 29 Kasher, Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation, 4:176. 26 27

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idols or ‘teraphim’ were pagan objects reputedly endowed with the power of speech. One commentator writes that Rachel’s reason for stealing them was to prevent them from revealing her location. The ring that Jessica pawns serves the opposite function, revealing precisely where she is and where she has been, like pawning a van Gogh painting. This is an object that narrates her movements and calls attention to her whereabouts. But even more than that, the stolen ring is an object clearly endowed with enormous sentimental as well as economic significance for Shylock’s family. Objects like rings or household gods report on a family’s domestic history. In Rachel’s case, there is a sense in which her father’s pagan idols and her own pagan upbringing are things she will have to keep hidden, because they no longer have a place within the household into which she has married. In Jessica’s case, such objects and their history are sloughed off in exchange for a worthless diversion, perhaps because she is yet to have truly laid claim to them in the first place.

Without effusion of blood ‘Shylock, crushed by the law that should have supported him, was certainly equal to the task of cutting the pound of flesh, paying the penalty, and making the play a Hebrew tragedy. But Shakespeare had fallen in love with his Portia, and the vision of her troubled brow and brimming eyes, decides the fate of the play. It ends a Christian comedy.’ This is the conclusion of the already mentioned essay by Henry Clay Folger, another man whose thrift was won at a well.30 At the end of the trial scene, Shylock’s last speech is:

Folger served as CEO and later as chairman of the board of the Standard Oil Company. He protected John D. Rockefeller’s considerable wealth during the extensive litigation by the Justice Department to break up the Standard Oil Trust. Folger was amply rewarded for his skilful handling of this challenge.

30

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I pray you, give me leave to go from hence; I am not well. Send the deed after me, And I will sign it. (4.1.390–2) It is late in the day and Shylock is now a very long way from the well – the source or the origin of the blessing enjoyed by Isaac and by Jacob. Harold Bloom has famously declared that an honest production of this play would be unbearable after the Shoah. But even in Shakespeare’s day, something almost as terrible had already happened. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. Some of the families went north and west, eventually winding up in places like Amsterdam and possibly even London. Others went south and east to Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece and also to Venice. Still others ended up in the hands of the Holy Office. If they were lucky they would be able to save their own lives by agreeing to convert to Christianity and to the confiscation of their wealth. The proceeds of these confiscations were originally taken by the Spanish Crown, but later they went directly to the Holy Office itself, thus helping to create a thriving heresy industry. As for the supposed religious conversions, it is quite apparent that you can force somebody to go to church, receive the sacraments and outwardly profess the forms of Christian observance, but you cannot be sure what they believe in their hearts. The new Christians were always at considerable risk of denunciation by their neighbours. Protestant England had its own heresy industry that staged any number of impressive spectacles, based in large part on the model of the Spanish Inquisition. There is an even more sinister reference to the Inquisition in the play, however, and that is in the much applauded ‘judgment’ issued by Portia in the trial scene:

See Michael Bristol, ‘Henry Clay Folger, Jr.’, in Great Shakespeareans, ed. Cary DiPietro (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

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PORTIA Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh, But in the cutting of it if thou dost shed One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods Are by the laws of Venice confiscate Unto the state of Venice. (4.1.303–7) Priests are traditionally forbidden to shed blood and therefore it was thought the death penalty for heretics could never take the form of bloody methods such as beheading. In those extreme cases where the death penalty was unavoidable it had to be carried out ‘without effusion of blood.’ Hanging would be one way to do this, but the Inquisition chose instead the more spectacular auto da fé: the burning of heretics or recalcitrant Jews or Muslims at the stake.31 Scriptural authority for this is found in John 15.6: ‘If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.’ Portia is terribly clever to have come up with this ingenious device, and it provides a very tidy and on the whole satisfying resolution to the affair of the bond. There is something uncanny in Portia’s use of this legal fiction to avert violence. It is intended to save Antonio’s life, but it can also be read as a cautionary admonition – or even a threat – to Shylock about the possibility of retaliation. In this sense it reminds Shylock that he is likely to be under the kind of life-and-death surveillance experienced by the new Christians in Spain. To suggest that this comic strategy has something to do with the gruesome equivocations of the Spanish Inquisition may seem more than a bit outré to a sensible reader, but the specific prohibition on shedding ‘a drop of Christian blood’ is part of a larger ‘judgement’ that clearly echoes the overall policy

Cecil Roth, The Spanish Inquisition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 115ff. See also James Reston, Jr, Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition and the Defeat of the Moors (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 74ff. 31

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of the Holy Office. And of course there is the parting shot directed at Shylock by Gratiano: In christening shalt thou have two godfathers. Had I been judge, thou shouldst have had ten more, To bring thee to the gallows, not the font. (4.1.393–5) Gratiano is making him an offer he can’t refuse – the likeness to The Godfather couldn’t be more striking, especially once you’ve seen Al Pacino perform the role of Shylock. It seems that the Venetians have not really finished with Shylock – if you’ve ever visited the Doge’s palace or seen the Bridge of Sighs you know what we’re talking about. When Mayer Rothschild, the founder of the banking dynasty, died, his widow said ‘even the deepest well can run out of water.’32 Well, Shylock was no Rothschild, though he definitely thinks of himself as Jacob. But his only child has abandoned him and there is no reason to think he was even a particularly rich man. No wonder he says ‘I am not well.’ He should have taken the money. Tzachi Zamir comments: Hatred, it seems, cannot be bought. They try several times, doubling and tripling the money owed. But he persists in refusing. No amount of money will buy Shylock … the dramatized oxymoron of a money shunning Jew.33 In the end the Christian debt remains unpaid. The bond was neither well nor wisely wrought. Melodramatic pursuit of retaliation is not sensible and it is not characteristically Jewish either. The affair of honour at Schechem was mainly engineered by Jacob’s crazy sons. Jacob himself was much more inclined to settle conflicts by judicious redistribution of

Amos Elon, The Founder (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakesperean Drama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), xi.

32

33

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his wealth, even when this amounted to buying off his enemies. Even the feckless Esau could appreciate the value of Jacob’s generous peace offering when the brothers were eventually reunited. Jacob’s success was the sign of God’s favour, but Jacob enjoyed God’s favour because he knew what he had to do in order to thrive. Shylock thought of himself as another Jacob. He was at home in the narrative of what Jacob did and what his mother wisely wrought on his behalf. His gloomy fate at the hands of Christian Venice came about because he let himself forget how to live the story of his own life.

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2 Proper Names and Common Bodies: The Case of Cressida David Schalkwyk

Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy: Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s a Montague? It is nor hand nor foot Nor arm nor face nor any other part Belonging to a man. O be some other name. What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet; So Romeo would were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name, And for thy name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself. (2.2.33–49)1

All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, eds John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor and

1

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When Juliet reflects on the name of the rose and the name of her love, in what Jacques Derrida calls ‘the most implacable analysis of the name’,2 she fails to see that the names of roses and the names of men work in disparate ways. The names of men (and women) constitute webs of social relations that cannot be reduced to the body or its parts. In an inverted blazon of her love, Juliet wishes to reduce the distance represented by Romeo’s name to immediate deixis, in which there is no need for proper names. In her view, proper names are improper adjuncts to common bodies. Neither ‘hand nor foot / Nor arm nor face nor any other part / Belonging to a man’, Romeo’s name is, as Derrida puts it, ‘inhuman.’3 Since it is ‘no part of a man’ he should be able to put it aside, taking in its stead that which his name resists: the body of Juliet, freed from the impediment of her name and conjoined lovingly to his. This desire to strip the object of denomination of that which does not belong to it is related to the reiterated (and conventional) thought in the Sonnets that language corrupts nature: ‘I never saw that you did painting need, / And therefore to your faire no painting set’ (sonnet 83). The beloved’s body, uncorrupted by words, should be left to shine in its pure splendour. But there is another movement in the Sonnets that takes a different view of the relation between names and bodies. It is most cogently expressed in sonnet 54: OH how much more doth beautie beautious seeme, By that sweet ornament which truth doth giue, The Rose lookes faire, but fairer we it deeme For that sweet odor, which doth in it liue: Stanley Wells (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). References to Shakespeare’s Sonnets are to the facsimiles of the 1609 Quarto in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). 2 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 427. 3 Ibid.

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The Canker bloomes haue full as deepe a die, As the perfumed tincture of the Roses, Hang on such thornes, and play as wantonly, When sommers breath their masked buds discloses: But for their virtue only is their show, They liue vnwoo’d, and vnrespected fade, Die to themselues. Sweet Roses doe not so, Of their sweet deathes, are sweetest odors made: And so of you, beautious and louely youth, When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth. It is hardly a coincidence that this sonnet celebrates the power of names (‘by verse’) to distil the essence of the body by appealing, like Juliet, to the scent of the rose. But whereas Juliet insists that names are essentially superfluous in her claim that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’, Shakespeare’s poet insists that such sweetness can live on only in language. Words both intensify the sweetness of the rose and preserve that essence against the inevitable fading and departure of the body. If Juliet discovers in the course of the play that different forms of logic govern the name of the rose and the name of Romeo – the common and the proper name – then what is the peculiar logic of the proper name? It is spelled out by Saul Kripke in his theory of the rigid designation. This theory attacks the traditional view that proper names are abbreviations of a series of descriptions of their referents.4 In the conventional view, the name ‘Shakespeare’ stands in for various descriptions of the man that are known to be true: that he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, married Anne Hathaway, wrote Hamlet, was a member of the King’s Men, died in 1616, and so on. But all these descriptions are contingently, not necessarily, true of the person called

Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).

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William Shakespeare. Any of them could turn out – upon further research and new evidence – to be false. And if any of them could turn out to be false, then there is no logical reason why all of them might not turn out to be mistaken. It would then make no sense to say that the name ‘Shakespeare’ is a placeholder for all such descriptions, for if none of the descriptions apply to the referent, we would be left with an empty referent, something to which we could not refer. But we would still have to be able to refer to Shakespeare in the very process of saying that everything we thought about him is in fact false. They would be false about Shakespeare! The name ‘Shakespeare’ therefore cannot be a placeholder for a cluster of contingently related descriptions. It must be something that designates its referent rigidly, or necessarily, across all possible worlds, worlds in which none of the things held to be true of Shakespeare are applicable to the referent of the name.5 In Kripke’s view, a proper name is attached to its bearer by an original baptism and remains connected to that bearer via a series of causal links, independently of any properties that may be attributed to that person.6 The name has to be able to pick out precisely the person of whom the set of descriptions does turn out to be false. It does so, in Kripke’s view, not through any sense that it may have (and which might match its bearer through the latter’s contingent properties), but through an original act of baptism and a series of reference-preserving, causal links in the subsequent use of the name. 6 In a subsequent essay, Kripke has tackled the problem of names in fiction, in which there is no referent. He argues that names in fiction have referents, not in a ghostly Meinongian sense, but rather as entities in works of fiction. To say of Sherlock Holmes that he exists is simply to talk about him in the world created by Conan Doyle. Kripke argues that statements that could be said to be true or false of the character are similarly true or false in that fictional world. He does not, as I do here, consider the possibility of a fictional name (‘Cressida’) that operates in different fictions, each offering possible worlds for the character that may diverge from or contradict each other. I see no reason, given Kripke’s view of fictional names, why his historical theory of reference – that the designation of the name is established by an original baptism carried forward through causal links – cannot be applied to names in fictional worlds. See Saul Kripke, ‘Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities’, in 5

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Romeo and Juliet enacts the rigidity of the proper name that Kripke spells out, even though Romeo is a name of a fictional character.7 Juliet’s invocation of her love in his absence, despite her urging him to abandon his name, demonstrates that she has to do so in his name: ‘Romeo.’ This speaks of a paradoxically simultaneous separability and inseparability of bearer and name. One can call (to) Romeo (or anyone else) in his absence only because the name is not part of him – it is no part of his body. On the other hand, that one can call to him is an indication of his inseparability from his name. This ‘inhumanity’ of the name paradoxically constitutes Romeo’s very humanity, for it is what ties him to a family and social world.8 Romeo is thus Romeo in all possible worlds, including the world in which he has denied or renounced his name. The common name of the rose is different from the proper name Romeo. For ‘Romeo’ ties its bearer to a set of obligations, relations and values in a way that the word ‘rose’ does not bind the flower. Romeo may try to set himself apart from those ties, but the logic of his proper name means that it will dog him forever, like his shadow. Romeo is at the very least Shakespeare’s character who renounces his name: ‘Romeo would not be what he is, a stranger to his name, without his name,’ as Derrida puts it. If roses were called cankers,

Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 7 For a fuller discussion of this in the context of current philosophical debates, see my ‘“What’s in a name?” Derrida, Apartheid, and the Name of the Rose’, Language Sciences 22, no. 2 (April 2000): 167–92. 8 ‘This analysis is implacable for it announces or denounces the inhumanity or ahumanity of the name. A proper name does not name anything which is human, which belongs to the human body, a human spirit, an essence of man. And yet this relation to the inhuman only befalls man, for him, to him, in the name of man. He alone gives himself this inhuman name. And Romeo would not be what he is, a stranger to his name, without his name. Juliet, then, pursues her analysis: the names of things do not belong to the things any more than the names of men belong to men, and yet they are quite differently separable’ (Derrida, Acts, 427; emphasis added).

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however, this fact would change none of their properties as material bodies: they would smell as sweet. Like Romeo and Juliet and the Sonnets, Troilus and Cressida explores the burden of the proper name, but it does so in a different mode. The story is woven around names that bring with them centuries of accumulated (and sometimes contradictory) ideological and narrative signification. In the stories from which such names are derived (Homer, Virgil, De Ste Maure, Caxton, Lydgate, Henryson, Chaucer), there are no real, physical bodies: the body is evoked by the name, and the name accumulates a series of descriptive properties passed on and reinvented, from poet to poet. For this process to be possible, the real body must be missing; it must fade so that its essence may live on as name or idea, like the fair youth as distilled rose in sonnet 54. Such idealization can occur only if the body is distilled in verse as pure idea – if petal is turned to perfume. To render its essence, the body of the rose must be crushed. In the theatre, however, the body cannot be reduced or eradicated. On its stage the common body of the actor is always forced to bear the burden of a proper name that is, strictly speaking, improper to it. Take one such proper name, ‘Helen of Troy’: a rose from which a cumulative poetic tradition has distilled the essence of beauty. That (es)sense can be called upon, again and again – ‘truth tired with iteration’ (3.2.172). ‘Helen of Troy’, once a mere instance or example of embodied beauty, has been turned into a paradigm or rule by which the very meaning of beauty is now determined. Shakespeare’s sonnet 54 shows that no actual body present to the senses can encompass this (es)sence: the rose must be crushed and transformed by language to live on as ideal of sweetness. What happens when that process of distillation is reversed, when the proper name is carried by the body of the common player? If a paradigm like ‘Helen of Troy’ is an historical sample withdrawn from its circulation in ordinary propositional discourse, so that it can become the measure of beauty as such, the theatre recirculates it within such discourse: it reduces its status as ideal

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paradigm to local occasion. The proper name is assumed by the common player, the once-distilled ‘bloomes’ of the rose are re-embodied, to ‘play … wantonly, / When sommers breath their masked buds discloses.’9 In other words, if language can use the body as paradigm to idealize, theatrical embodiment can de-idealize, turning rule back into sample, reducing paradigm to ‘instance.’ ‘Helen’ as received poetic idea is no more than a thin mark, a distilled essence, around which a series of reported events conglomerate. But, as an embodied figure on the stage – her ‘greatness’ ‘boyed’ by a ‘squeaking’ youth – her role as standard or ideal becomes contested, rendered common by the practice of playing. The embodiment of Helen on stage returns concept to flesh. But can anyone represent, in the flesh, the most beautiful woman in the world? Marlowe anticipates the structural problem that this question poses for the theatre in Faustus’s ambiguous question in the face of Helen conjured up by Mephistopheles: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’10 The question divides the body of each actor (Faustus and Helen) into representing and represented selves: the expression of overawed desire that Faustus feels for Helen is bifurcated by a simultaneous scepticism expressed by the actor playing Faustus that this face before him (and the audience) could launch a thousand ships. In Troilus and Cressida Helen’s value is the function of a certain masculine wilfulness, her beauty ‘painted’ by the blood of brawling warriors, her paradigmatic idea reduced to this boy. Against her role as transhistorical ideal, her embodiment on stage must be a let-down, a counter-ideal that, through the mere quiddity of specific incarnation, speaks against a tradition of paradigmatic elevation. Thus the stage exemplifies her ‘monstrosity’, See Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. Von Wright (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1979), 81–8. 10 The Tragical History of Dr Faustus: A Critical Edition of the 1604 Version, ed. Michael Keefer (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2008), 5.1.90. 9

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engendered, like the ‘monster in love’, by the gap between ‘infinite will’ and ‘confined execution’ (3.2.82–3). To sum up, three things are in play: (1) the proper name as rigid designator (‘Helen’); (2) the name as disembodied ideal (‘the paragon of beauty’); and (3) the common body that is made to bear the name on the stage. Each of these may be related to each other in different ways. The rigid designation of the proper name enables the story of Helen to be repeated, and also for different, counterfactual stories to be told of Helen, as in ‘Helen was not especially beautiful, and besides she was a wanton hussy.’ Note that every reiteration of the story involves a different world to some degree. The logic that governs (1) makes it possible to contradict (2). Helen is Helen in all possible worlds, even one in which she is ugly. Also, (3) supports (1) and can be made to underwrite (2), but it tends to work against (2) in the theatre. For (2) requires the death of the body – the disembodying idealization exemplified by Shakespeare’s sonnets 54 and 84, whereas (3) cannot do without the body. Physical bodies may be held up as ideals of beauty, but such an idealizing move always to some degree dematerializes the specificity of the body, turning flesh into concept. And in the theatre the body cannot be completely transformed into concept or text: an excessive remainder escapes, providing a space for different ways of seeing the body as a material ‘instance’ rather than as a wholly conceptualized idea or ideal. But it would be a mistake to claim that the theatre reduces or evades completely the essentializing force of idealizing words to plain body. Language and body are in continuous dialogue; the body shuttles between being distilled as ‘essence’ and de-essentialized as mere ‘instance.’ The ‘monstrosity’ of love, of which Cressida reminds Troilus, lies in its entrapment between the ideal and the local. As Troilus puts it, ‘this is the monstrosity of love, lady, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit’ (3.2.75–7). Taken back to its Latin roots, the monstrous is the instance, the example, that which can be pointed at or shown. Its abnormality as monster arises from its oscillating in a liminal position between the absolute and

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the empirical, the ideal and the instance, the desire and the act, the proper and the common. It is this oscillation that prompts Troilus’s bewildered response to the figure who ‘is and is not Cressid’, the ‘soul of beauty’ and ‘greasy relic.’ Shakespeare prepares for this moment of bewildering duplicity earlier in Act Three, Scene Two, when he shows the self-idealization of proper names in the common body of the player: TROILUS True swains in love shall in the world to come Approve their truth by Troilus. When their rhymes, Full of protest, of oath and big compare, Wants similes, truth tired with iteration – ‘As true as steel, as plantage to the moon, As sun to day, as turtle to her mate, As iron to adamant, as earth to th’ centre’ – Yet, after all comparisons of truth, As truth’s authentic author to be cited, ‘As true as Troilus’ shall crown up the verse And sanctify the numbers. CRESSIDA Prophet may you be! If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth, When time is old and hath forgot itself, When water drops have worn the stones of Troy And blind oblivion swallowed cities up, And mighty states characterless are grated To dusty nothing, yet let memory From false to false among false maids in love Upbraid my falsehood. When they’ve said, ‘as false As air, as water, wind or sandy earth, As fox to lamb, or wolf to heifer’s calf, Pard to the hind, or stepdame to her son’, Yea, let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood, ‘As false as Cressid.’ (3.2.168–98)

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Troilus founds the idealization of his name upon his own supposed embodiment of truthfulness as being ‘as true as truth’s simplicity’ (165), whereas Cressida asks her audience to use her name as the distillation of the very idea of infidelity if she were to prove unfaithful. Each embodies the process by which human figures may become the paradigmatic or defining instances of the conceptual or ideal. ‘Troilus’ and ‘Cressida’ as names are thus not only ‘rigid designators’ of historical figures; they also encapsulate the ideological process whereby these names come to epitomize the concepts of ‘fidelity’ and ‘faithlessness.’ The performative quality of this process is underlined and ironized by the dramatist’s decision to make the characters themselves agents of their future idealization and de-idealization. Ironically unaware of the generic self-reflexivity of the moment, Troilus and Cressida (and Pandarus) turn themselves, through the performative action of the jussive voice, into the historical paradigms that precede Shakespeare’s play. Troilus’s claim to renew in his own name the tired inventory of Petrarchan comparison reflects on the reinvention of poetic language through the invocation of a particular name as a conceptual paradigm, and the historical, iterative process by which such freshness is in turn worn away into cliché. Fashioning himself as the paradigm of Truth after the paradigmatic example of Helen as the universal standard of Beauty, Troilus is looking forward to being drawn into the inventory of ‘fresh invention’ rather than abandoned as an instance of ‘truth tired with iteration.’ But looking backward from a historical perspective by which the name ‘Troilus’ has itself become ‘tired with iteration’, Shakespeare’s play can reflect on the peculiarity of a convention by which truth is defined diachronically, by invention, rather than through the constancy of unchanging repetition. That is to say, the rigid designation of the proper name enables the playwright to entertain an alternative possible world in which such idealization is, at the very least, complicated or ironized. In effect, Cressida is calling upon her own distillation or idealization in ‘louers eies’ or ‘the eyes of all posterity’ as the

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pure idea of infidelity. This is indeed a moment which, as Linda Charnes puts it, seems to ‘cast every present moment as a past moment.’11 But it does so only if we treat the speech as we would sonnet 54, as forcing a pure idea from the crushed body. The incorrigible body on stage, however, opens the idealization of the name to the multiple facets of the body that carries it. Troilus calls upon his name as ‘truth’s authentic author’ of its own accord, as it were, in an exorbitant act of self-idealization. He does not begin to entertain the possibility of change posited as an inevitable consequence of either ‘wastfull time’ (sonnet 15) or the more insidious ‘million’d accidents’ (sonnet 115) which beset the body. This very claim to truthfulness imputes a deleterious forgetting, a conspicuous lack of truth, in his own view of himself. Cressida, on the other hand, is as conscious of the necessity of change over time as the poet of the sonnets, encapsulated by the wearing away of the stones of Troy – the immemorial erosion of ‘mighty states’ – but she also encapsulates the capacity of the name to live on after the destruction of the body. Her use of the conditional (‘If I be false’) sets her apart from her lover. For if Troilus is captured and captivated by the unchangeable idea of himself as Truth, she entertains the thought of herself as an actor in a different possible world from the one she occupies at the present moment: a world which, of course, readers and audience ‘remember’ (in the future) as the ‘true’ world of ‘false Cressid.’ Just as the young man’s beauty is supposed to live on in the lines of the sonnets, so Cressida’s treachery, entertained here merely as a possibility, will live on – and in fact has already lived on – in her name. The play can thus embody a process that the Sonnets, caught in speculative speech acts that are as yet tied to the moment of their production, can only promise. But, of course, the very ‘iteration’ by which the Sonnets establish their

11 Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 79.

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‘truth’ guarantees change, if only through the wearing away of invention into cliché. Troilus and Cressida’s appeal to their respective names as pure ideas in the future, as distillations from the dross of the body, condenses the semantic total of a certain selection of speech acts into a designating phrase that is only apparently rigid, or rather, that has the empty rigidity of a tautology. By picking out only certain descriptions and holding them together under a title that is itself a shorthand description, such designating epithets run foul of Kripke’s most important insight about proper names as rigid designators: that they allow for alternative descriptions, other possible worlds, different ideological significations for their referents.12 As Juliet analyses it in her famous speech in Act Two of Romeo and Juliet, ‘Romeo’ is a true proper name, a rigid designator that can neither be ‘torn’ nor abandoned, for it designates Romeo in all possible worlds. ‘Troilus’ and ‘Cressida’ on the other hand, as the characters themselves invoke their names in the scene under discussion, are turned into epithets, carriers of a particularly ideological, semantic weight: the (intrinsically) ‘true’ knight, the (inevitably) ‘false’ woman. But they also, necessarily, act in the play as rigid designators. As such, they allow the dramatist to explore modalities different from those entertained by Troilus and Cressida themselves or carried within folk memory. They allow for an alternative exploration of the very thing that, in Cressida’s utterance, her name will keep alive ‘out to the ending doome’ (sonnet 55). Unlike the

. See Heather Dubrow, ‘“Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d”: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996): 291–305. In this essay, Dubrow subjects the critical and ideological assumptions underlying the reading of the Sonnets which regards them as a narrative of mutual homo-social or homosexual love destroyed by the dark duplicity of woman to devastating criticism. I am deeply indebted to her argument that there is no evidence for the traditional ascription of addressees to the poems, although the logical terms in which I analyse the issue here are very different from hers.

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‘Dark Lady’ and the ‘Fair Friend’ of the sonnets, who are without proper names, and whose respective ‘fairness’ and ‘darkness’ are merely bundles of circularly derived propositions collected under ideological signs, the ‘truth’ that Troilus appropriates to himself and the ‘falsehood’ that Cressida entertains for herself may be qualified by different modalities embodied by the play that bears their names, which is in effect the play of common bodies. Whatever Cressida may say about the meaning of her name as a repository of historical significance, the rigid designation of the proper name allows that name to be used in a different possible world: a world in which Cressida does not have to bear the ideological weight of her name. It is possible to write a play in which the names ‘Troilus’ and ‘Cressida’ appear as rigid designators of received characters, but in which they do not act as the defining instances of (male) truth and (female) infidelity. The theory of rigid designation explains how we can entertain the possibility that Troilus was not faithful, Cressida not faithless; or, for that matter, that Homer was not a single poet but an oral collective, or that Shakespeare did not write ‘Shake-speare’s’ plays.13 The question that names in Troilus and Cressida raise is not whether Cressida is false or not, but whether her name is inevitably the epitome of falsehood, its paradigm case or essence. The theatricality of Troilus and Cressida can thus achieve what the Sonnets considered as mere text on a page cannot: in ‘the two-hour traffic of our stage’ the players’ medium can combine the embodiment of character with the phenomenological fusion of change through time and space, in order to present figures whose historical paths may be charted differently. The theatre itself possesses a ‘bifold authority’ (5.3.147) by which a character, especially a historically received one, both ‘is and is not’ him or herself.

For a classic account of the ‘descriptive’ theory of names, see John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 157–75.

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The modal positions that Troilus and Cressida respectively occupy when they distil their names into pure ideas appear to correspond to those traditionally assumed to be inscribed in the Sonnets: the presumed fidelity of the ‘man right fair’ seems to match the ‘truth’ of Troilus, while the promiscuity of the ‘woman coloured ill’ (sonnet 144) is assumed to correspond to Cressida’s faithlessness. At the time of their invocations of their names, Cressida is not yet unfaithful. Yet such a possibility is entertained exclusively for her, not her lover. The subject positions that can be adopted by men and women, through the modalities of different speech acts, are clearly related to the struggle in the Sonnets with the possibility of falsehood in the ‘fair friend’, the certainty of falsehood in the ‘dark woman’, and the ambivalent self-recrimination of the poet who is shaped by both modes. The copulatio by which Cressida projects her anticipated falsehood posits a world in which women are always already untrustworthy: ‘yet let memory / From false to false among false maids in love / Upbraid my falsehood’ (3.2.186–7). Cressida is herself aware of the ways in which women are always already trapped in an inescapable cycle of falsity – of necessarily being what they are not – through the received idea that they are expected to mask their erotic desires. This awareness is expressed in a particularly clear-sighted way in the form of a sonnet with which Cressida brings Act One, Scene Three to a close. Like sonnet 126, it is in rhyming couplets: Words, vows, gifts, tears, and love’s full sacrifice He offers in another’s enterprise; But more in Troilus thousandfold I see Than in the glass of Pandar’s praise may be. Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing; Things won are done. Joy’s soul lies in the doing. That she beloved knows naught that knows not this: Men price the thing ungained more than it is. That she was never yet that ever knew Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.

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Therefore this maxim out of love I teach: Achievement is command; ungained, beseech. Then though my heart’s contents firm love doth bear, Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear. (1.3.260–73) This passage is not merely a conglomeration of 14 lines. It has the structure that we have come to expect from the 1609 Quarto: three logically distinct quatrains, followed by a concluding couplet that succinctly conveys Cressida’s double course of action and position. Unusually, it presents the female, Petrarchan beloved speaking directly to an audience that excludes her lover, in a confession of why she is adopting the female Petrarchan role of withholding her favours – as if Rosaline (in Romeo and Juliet), or the dark mistress, or Stella were suddenly to bare their hearts. The message is striking not so much for what it tells us about Cressida’s heart or character, but for its revelation of the role of the Petrarchan mistress: a fantasy figure constructed out of the generic necessity of endlessly deferred desire. By self-consciously drawing attention to her required role as a ‘false maid in love’, Cressida unfolds the iron but unspoken law of the Petrarchan mode: once the beloved is won, the Petrarchan mode is done. Cressida is therefore already marked, before she gives up her name as the epitome of falsehood, by an imposed falsehood, which is the product not of names or bodies but of a discourse that has always already ascribed an unmistakable language to the body: ULYSSES Fie, fie upon her! There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip; Nay, her foot speaks. Her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O these encounterers so glib of tongue, That give accosting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every ticklish reader, set them down

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For sluttish spoils of opportunity And daughters of the game. (4.6.55–64) Unburdened by Romeo’s reticence, which refrains from assuming to know what the female body speaks or to whom that speech is addressed (‘I am too bold. ’Tis not to me she speaks’ (Romeo and Juliet, 2.1.56)), Ulysses articulates an attitude by which the ‘idealized body’ is distilled as the alwayscommon body of the woman – ‘lilies that fester’ (sonnet 94). The question here is whether it is really Cressida’s body that speaks, or whether that body is merely ‘fair paper’: the ‘most goodly book, / Made’, in Othello’s anguished phrase, ‘to write “whore” upon’ (Othello, 4.2.173–4). This extraordinary scene encapsulates the oscillating relationship that I have been analysing among name as rigid designator, name as distilled essence, theatrical body as bearer of both forms of the name, and discourse as a way of making the body speak. We now have four rather than three entities: to the double roles of the name and the presence of the body, description is added, the very thing that Kripke’s theory or rigid designation excludes from the logic of the proper name.14 Shakespeare prepares us for this discursive appropriation of the body in the second scene of the play, where Pandarus sets himself up as the commentator upon the Trojan warriors entering from the battlefield. There Pandarus’s judgements are in contestatory dialogue both with proper names that already bear a degree of traditional idealization (Aeneas, Antenor, Hector, Paris, and so on) and Cressida’s reading of the figures, which, since it does not bear the weight of poetic history, enjoys a relative independence. For the theatre audience, the bodies of the common players who bear those names offer To be able to designate their referents across all possible worlds, proper names have to have reference but no sense, for any sense that a name bears would confine it to the contingent properties of only one possible world. Helen would be beautiful and Cressida faithless of necessity if Kripke were wrong.

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resistance to both idealized poetic tradition and Pandarus and Cressida’s commentary. The common bodies of the players speak, as it were, with their own voices, which may confirm or contradict what is said about them through description or condensed in their proper names. The speaking body is precisely what is presented to us in Cressida’s unhappy transfer to the Greeks, initially in Diomed’s remark to Cressida that, ‘The lustre in your eye, heaven in your cheek, / Pleads your fair usage’ (4.5.118–19) and then in Ulysses’ expansive commentary, ‘There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip.’ In the reception of Cressida by the Greek men there is no focus on her proper name as bearer of any significance other than as her father’s property, ‘Calchas’ daughter’ (4.6.14). The focus is on her body, as it is appropriated by the men in what some cannot help regarding as a kind of gang-rape. I don’t wish to offer an interpretation of this scene, but rather to point out its mechanics, insofar as it involves the interplay of body, name and utterance. For the Greeks at this point, the name Cressida is nothing but a placeholder for Calchas’ daughter – it is certainly not weighted with the burden that Cressida herself places upon it, Shakespeare inherits and the theatre audience has come to expect from that poetic tradition. For that audience, ‘Cressida’ is anticipated as the distillation of faithlessness, a sense that would presumably predispose them to reading her body as Ulysses does. But as rigid designator that refers to Cressida in all possible worlds, the proper name makes possible the embodiment of Cressida in ways that contradict or complicate her incarceration in the image distilled by her name. That embodiment takes the form of the actor on stage, who cannot be reduced to or wholly consumed by either the meaning of the name or what others say about her. Herein lies the difference between the possible world created by verse or prose and that performed by the theatre: in the latter a medium of expression or resistance is the substance of representation that renders impossible the pure textualization of the figure, either as sonnet 54 distils the essence of the rose

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by crushing its body or as Ulysses tries to distil the essence of Cressida by speaking the supposed language of her body. However much the actor plays along with such discursive appropriation, the body nevertheless resists complete appropriation: it speaks a language that cannot be reduced to misogynist commonplaces that project the monologue of male desire as the free speech of the univocal female body. The fourfold relationship that I have been tracing renders the usual physiognomic picture of the ‘art / To find the mind’s construction in the face’ (Macbeth, 1.4.11–12) problematic. It is not simply a matter of determining the hidden interiority from whatever exterior physiognomy faces us. Whatever we may finally think of Cressida, our interpretation will be the product of the extraordinarily complex mutual interrogations of proper name and common body in the theatre. The name as rigid designator allows the body on stage to participate in a possible world that interrogates the name as distilled essence – it allows us to say that this ‘is and is not Cressid.’ And the language of the body will always be in a dialogical tension with whatever discourse is offered as descriptive judgement of that body. A rose by any other name would certainly smell as sweet. But it is the proper name, ‘Cressida’, borne by common bodies, that allows the theatre to open up possible worlds in which what counts as sweetness or rankness in human behaviour is contested.

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3 Antique / Antic: Archaism, Neologism and the Play of Shakespeare’s Words in Love’s Labour’s Lost and 2 Henry IV Lucy Munro

[T]hree such Antiques doe not amount to a man[.] SHAKESPEARE, HENRY V

This chapter explores a pair of early modern homonyms, ‘antique’ and ‘antic’, and their implications for our consideration of two specific aspects of Shakespeare’s language: archaism and its evil twin, neologism. The spellings and senses of these words overlapped,1 making them a productive source As David Bevington notes in an essay on the problems faced by editors modernizing Shakespeare’s texts, ‘“Antic”, “antike”, “anticke”, and

1

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of aesthetic and intellectual play for early modern writers. In particular, the two words share a connection with temporality. While old words might be ‘antique’ – in the sense of old, ancient and time-worn (OED antique, a. 1–2) – both old and new words could be ‘antic’, that is, grotesque, disorderly and foolish (OED antic, a. 2). Moreover, the word ‘antic’ brings with it a series of bodily and performative associations, making it peculiarly effective within drama. As a noun, it refers to caryatids or other human figures which are represented in impossible positions (OED antic, n. B. 1b), to grotesque or ludicrous gestures, postures or tricks (OED antic, n. B. 2), to grotesque pageants or theatrical shows (OED antic, n. B. 3), and also to the clowns or mountebanks that might appear in such shows (OED antic, n. B. 4). As an adjective, it can also describe grotesque or bizarre clothing (OED antic, a. 2.c), or a face contorted into a disturbing grin (OED antic, a. 3). The ‘antic’ therefore highlights the extent to which temporally deformed language is aligned on the early modern stage with a self-consciously performed bodily disorder, signalled through movement, facial expression and costume. Two of Shakespeare’s enduring comic characters – Don Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Pistol in 2 Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V – embody the temporal and performative associations of the antique / antic. Both characters use not only neologism but also linguistic and stylistic archaism, and both roles make very particular demands upon the actor playing them. Moreover, Don Armado also participates in the inset play that appears towards the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which itself depends for part of its effect on archaic diction and style, and which is twice referred to as an ‘antique.’ Analysing the interplay of the antique and antic in these plays, I focus here on “antique” are reasonably interchangeable in early modern English.’ See ‘Modern Spelling: The Hard Choices’, in Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama, ed. Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidnie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 143–57 (151).

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two features in particular. The first is the way in which the performance of roles such as Don Armado and Pistol, and of the inset play in Love’s Labour’s Lost, capitalizes on the physical and vocal skills of the Chamberlain’s Men. Particular words or styles may imply certain performance techniques, or make specific requirements of the plays. ‘Antique’ or ‘antic’ language may bring with it ‘antic’ gestures or postures, but dramatists might also resist these associations, creating something more dramatically hybrid and volatile. The second feature is the ways in which these plays commodify language, selling themselves in part through their linguistic experimentation; this tendency is thematized within the plays and is also evident in the ways in which they were marketed in print to readers. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Don Armado, Holofernes et al. attempt to please the King, Princess and their courts with a play written in a ‘high’ style that was rapidly becoming outmoded. This attempt meets with little success within the dramatic fiction, but Shakespeare paradoxically manages to pass off aspects of the same style to his audiences – past and present – in the shape of Don Armado and, in the later play, Pistol. *** Before looking at these plays in detail, however, it is worth surveying Shakespeare’s wider uses of ‘antic’ and ‘antique.’ Although he draws on the full range of meanings available to him, Shakespeare occasionally uses ‘antique’ to mean merely ‘old’ or ‘ancient.’ In Othello, the handkerchief that Othello gives to Desdemona is described as ‘an Antique Token / My Father gaue my Mother’ (ll. 3505–6),2 and in Coriolanus, In order to preserve the interplay between ‘antic’ and ‘antique’, I have used old-spelling versions of early modern texts. Unless noted otherwise, all references to Shakespeare’s plays are taken from The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, prepared by Charlton Hinman (2nd edn, New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

2

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Caius Martius complains sardonically about the fact that he must submit to custom and display himself to the citizens: What Custome wills in all things, should we doo’t? The Dust on antique Time would lye vnswept, And mountainous Error be too highly heapt, For Truth to o’re-peere. (ll. 1509–12) In As You Like It, Orlando praises the faithful old retainer Adam by referring to ‘The constant seruice of the antique world, / When seruice sweate for dutie, not for meede’ (ll. 761–2), while Orsino in Twelfth Night calls for ‘that peece of song, / That old and Anticke song we heard last night’ (ll. 885–6), the value that he places on the song suggesting that it is prized for its antiquity rather than singled out for its grotesquery. ‘Antique’ might also recall the ancient world. Horatio declares that he is ‘more an Antike Roman then a Dane’ (Hamlet, l. 3826) – his behaviour is in keeping with a classical ideal, in contrast with that of a (then) modern Christian – while the Chorus in Henry V likens the Mayor of London and his fellows when they welcome King Henry back to London to ‘the Senatours of th’antique Rome’ (l. 2876). The sonnets feature a number of references to ‘antique’ songs, pens and books, drawing on notions of classical antiquity while also conjuring images of the time-worn or wasted, or, in some cases, the grotesque or disorderly.3 In contrast, some Shakespearean uses tend towards the ‘antic’ end of the spectrum. In the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, the leading player claims that he and his fellows will be able to cope with whatever eccentricity Christopher Sly may display, with a reference to the theatrical associations of the ‘antic’: ‘we can contain our selues / Were he the veriest anticke in the world’ (ll. 110–11). Two plays draw in part on the classical associations of the ‘antique’ but seem to signal

3

See, for instance, sonnets 17, 19, 59, 68 and 106.

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more strongly the disorder of the ‘antic.’ Hamlet’s declaration that he will put on an ‘Anticke disposition’ (l. 868) alludes to a Brutus-like stoicism (as Miriam Jacobson argues in Chapter 4 of this book), but it also strongly suggests something grotesque or disjunctive, which might involve not only chaotic speech but also unsettled gesture, posture or clothing. A similar set of associations are in play in the closing stages of the ship-board revels in Antony and Cleopatra; Caesar comments that: Strong Enobarbe Is weaker then the Wine, and mine owne tongue Spleet’s what it speakes: the wilde disguise hath almost Antickt vs all. (ll. 1476–9) Used here – with additional bite – as a verb, ‘Antickt’ perhaps gains yet more force from the play’s setting in the ancient world; its primary associations are, however, of disorder and folly, bodily confusion, and of the dramatic associations of the ‘antic’ as a grotesque pageant or play. As this might suggest, in many of Shakespeare’s uses of antique / antic, the various meanings are intertwined and are difficult to separate. In the Player’s speech in Hamlet, Priam is found by the vengeful Pyrrhus ‘Striking too short at Greekes. His anticke Sword, / Rebellious to his Arme, lyes where it falles / Repugnant to command’ (ll. 1510–12). Priam’s sword is presumably old, like its owner, but its refusal to serve him properly is also both disorderly and grotesque. Similar is the description in sonnet 17 of ‘a Poets rage / And stretched miter of an Antique song’,4 where the reader is compelled to stretch out the second line’s meter on ‘stretchèd’, enacting the potentially antic archaism that the narrator describes. Especially potent are the very similar descriptions of Death in 1 Henry VI and Richard II, in which Old Talbot and King Richard both figure it as a grinning, ‘antique’ parody

Shake-speares Sonnets Neuer Before Imprinted (London, 1609), B4v.

4

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of a King (1 Henry VI, ll. 2249–53; Richard II, ll. 1520–30). Figuratively, Death is ancient, but it is also ‘antic’, grinning like one of the fantastic statues of neo-classical architecture. Richard also likens Death to a kind of supernatural stagemanager, allowing earthly kings ‘a breath, a little Scene, / To Monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with lookes’ before their inevitable fall ensues (ll. 1524–5). I will pause for a moment on the use of antique / antic in Romeo and Juliet, where it appears in the context of Mercutio’s sardonic caricature of Tibalt as ‘the Couragious Captaine of Complements’ (ll. 1124–5). In the version printed in the First Folio, Mercutio declares that Tibalt: fights as you sing pricksong, keeps time, distance, and proportion, he rests his minum, one, two, and the third in your bosom: the very butcher of a silk button, a Dualist, a Dualist: a Gentleman of the very first house of the first and second cause: ah the immortall Passado the Punto reuerso, the Hay.5 (ll. 1125–30) ‘The what?’ is the somewhat baffled Benvolio’s response, and Mercutio shifts his tone: The Pox of such antique lisping affecting phantacies,6 these new tuners of accent: Iesu a very good blade, a very tall man, a very good whore. Why is not this a lamentable thing Grandsire, that we should be thus afflicted with these strange flies: these fashion Mongers, these pardon-mee’s, who stand so much on the new form, that they cannot sit at ease on the old bench. O their bones, their bones. (ll. 1131–9) On the fencing terms, see Jill Levenson, ed., Romeo and Juliet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 228–9. 6 The phrase appears as ‘limping antique affecting fantasticoes’ in the first quarto: An Excellent Conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet (London, 1597), sig. E1v. 5

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As editors from Wilson and Duthie onwards have noted, the actor playing Mercutio is probably expected to act out the fencing passes as he speaks – he ‘antics’ in a physical sense.7 Furthermore, the bodily expression of language is maintained in his next speech, as Mercutio first acts out the style adopted by fashionable young men – ‘Iesu a very good blade, a very tall man, a very good whore’ – and then addresses an imaginary ‘Grandsire’ or, possibly, casts Benvolio in that role. When he describes the ‘antique lisping affecting phantacies, these new tuners of accent’, Mercutio refers to ways in which pretentious jargon – here the fashionable language of duelling – deforms the language; the ‘tuners of accent’ express new forms of English, or pronounce their words in bizarre and affected ways. But the resonant use of ‘antique’ here, and its juxtaposition with both ‘phantacies’ (which can mean spectres, hallucinations or caprices)8 and neologistic fencing jargon also invokes implicitly the late-Elizabethan debate about language, and the relative status of new and old words.9 The word antique / antic thus takes us to the heart of some key debates about language in the late sixteenth century. Self-conscious archaisms might be ‘antique’, carrying the weight and gravity of age, but both archaisms and neologisms might be ‘antic’, deforming the language with grotesquery and

John Dover Wilson and G. I. Duthie, eds, Romeo and Juliet, The New Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 167. 8 OED fantasy/phantasy, n. 2. 9 For recent summaries of this debate, see Paula Blank, Broken English: The Politics of Language in Renaissance Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 40–52, 100–20; Charles Barber, Early Modern English (2nd edn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 53–70; Manfred Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 136–69. On the Elizabethan language debate as a context for Love’s Labour’s Lost, see Blank, Broken English, 45–52; Lynne Magnusson, ‘To “Gase So Much at the Fine Stranger”: Armado and the Politics of English in Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, ed. Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 53–68 (esp. 60–8). 7

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disorder. These associations are developed in detail in Love’s Labour’s Lost and 2 Henry IV, in which Don Armado, Pistol and the play of the Nine Worthies are temporally disjunctive ‘antics’, self-consciously theatrical constructs within their fictive and performative worlds.

Child of fancy: Don Armado Shakespeare introduces Don Armado and Pistol with notable care. In Love’s Labour’s Lost he sets out Armado’s character and language before the actor even sets foot on the stage. In the opening scene, the King and Berowne discuss Armado in some detail. The King declares: our Court you know is hanted [sic] With a refined trauailer of Spaine, A man in all the worlds new fashion planted, That hath a mint of phrases in his braine: One, who the musicke of his owne vaine tongue, Doth rauish like inchanting harmonie: A man of complements whom right and wrong Haue chose as vmpier of their mutinie. This childe of fancie that Armado hight, For interim to our studies shall relate, In high-borne words the worth of many a Knight: From tawnie Spaine lost in the worldes debate. (ll. 173–84) The King emphasizes the artifice involved with Armado’s linguistic self-presentation: the Spaniard is ‘refined’ or polished in his manners; he has ‘a mint of phrases in his braine’; his words are (at least to Armado himself) an ‘inchanting harmonie’; he is ‘A man of complements’, the latter term referring both to formal politeness and to the acquisition of set phrases or jargon; and he will recite Iberian romances to

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them in a high style. Navarre chooses his words carefully, describing Armado as ‘This childe of Fancie that Armado hight’, the final, archaic word of the line being carefully placed so as to rhyme with ‘Knight’ two lines later; he also shifts into rhyme for the entire speech, mirroring Armado’s artificiality in his own style. Berowne’s following two-line character sketch, ‘Armado is a most illustrious wight, / A man of fire, new words, fashions owne Knight’ (ll. 188–9), picks up the King’s parody of Armado’s style, as the rhyming hight / wight / knight suggests. Like the King, Berowne skewers Armado neatly, the emphasis on his status as a coiner of ‘fire-new words’ being balanced by the use of the poetic archaism ‘wight’ which, like the King’s ‘hight’, was rarely used outside poetry in the 1590s. The association between archaic words and an outmoded and pretentious style of knightly behaviour is carefully gauged, but the artificiality of Armado’s stance is underlined by the juxtaposition of these words with the description of his tendency to neologize. The extent to which the King and Berowne are mimicking Armado’s own style becomes evident when Armado’s letter is read out later in the scene. In it, Armado refers to Costard as ‘that base Minow of [the King’s] myrth … hight Costard’ and employs further archaisms such as ‘welkin’ for ‘sky’, ‘ycliped’ for ‘called’, and a repeated use of ‘swain’ for ‘man’, which in the 1590s would also have been associated with poetic archaism (ll. 256, 258–9, 231, 249, 256, 270). His dialogue also incorporates a number of proverbial phrases: ‘my snow-white pen’, ‘the ebon coloured Incke’, ‘a childe of our Grandmother Eue’, ‘the weaker vessel’ (ll. 251, 252, 263, 269), linking him with established patterns of speech and thought. Simultaneously, however, Armado inserts recently coined or obscure Latinate words such as ‘dominator’, ‘obscene’, and ‘preposterous’ (ll. 232–3, 250, 251); indeed, one could argue that the use of the poetic ‘ebon’ is also a 1590s affectation, as it is rare before this decade but ubiquitous during it. The ‘high’ style noted by the King also appears in Armado’s careful rhetoric patterning,

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the alliteration of phrases such as ‘that base Minow of thy myrth’, and the internal rhyme of statements such as ‘sorted and consorted’ (ll. 256, 259). The King’s shift into rhyme when he initially describes the ‘refined traveller’ suggests that he is enacting something of Armado’s style, as does, perhaps, the line ‘With a refinèd trauailer of Spaine’, with its stretched-out meter. It is not unlikely that the actors playing the King and Berowne are required to imitate the tonal and physical ticks – and, perhaps, accent10 – that the actor playing Armado will demonstrate when he finally enters later in the play. This technique is still more evident in the sequence in which the King reads Armado’s letter, in which he is required to ventriloquize the Spaniard’s actual words. Shakespeare heightens this effect, moreover, by juxtaposing Armado’s style with that of Costard and Dull, the former’s blunt statement ‘With a wench’ contrasting effectively with Armado’s string of euphemisms and the simulated passion of the King’s delivery. Appearing in his own person later in the play, Armado confirms the accuracy of his portrayal in absentia. In the next scene, discussing his melancholy with the page, Moth, he uses the Latinate words ‘congruent’, ‘apatheton’ (i.e. epitheton or epithet) and ‘nominate’ (ll. 324–6), all used rarely before the mid-sixteenth century.11 Similarly, at the opening of Act Two, he tells Moth, ‘go tendernesse of yeares: take this Key, giue enlargement to the swaine, bring him festinatly hither: I must imploy him in a letter to my Loue’ (ll. 775–8). These lines demonstrate the truth of the King and Berowne’s mockery, the archaism of ‘the Swaine’ jarring with the neologism ‘festinately.’12 Later in the play, Armado uses more new Armado’s name periodically appears as ‘Armatho’ in both the quarto and folio texts, which may suggest the intended use of a soft, faux-Spanish ‘d.’ 11 OED congruent, adj. 1; epitheton, n. 2; nominate, v. 1.a. 12 This is the OED’s earliest use of the adverb ‘festinately’ (s.v. festinate). ‘Festination’ appears in texts dating from the 1540s, such as Thomas Elyot’s The Image of Government (OED, festination), while the verb appears in 10

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words, including ‘annothanize’ (l. 1048) and ‘perambulate’ (l. 1815),13 but he also employs old-fashioned diction and verse forms. For instance, in Act Three he drops into a rhymed Poulter’s Measure for two lines, telling Moth, ‘No Page, it is an epilogue or discourse to make plaine, / Some obscure precedence that hath tofore bin saine’ (ll. 855–6). This metrical archaism heightens the artificiality of Armado’s dialogue: it is noticeable that Shakespeare elsewhere uses it mainly in metadramatic or heightened sequences, such as the workers’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the appearance of the ghosts in Cymbeline. In Armado’s use of both archaism and neologism, Shakespeare satirizes both sides of the Elizabethan language debate; simultaneously, however, he levels out the distinction between old and new forms of language. Armado is, in Mercutio’s terms, ‘an antique lisping affecting phantac[y]’ – indeed, Boyet refers to him as a ‘Phantasime, a Monarcho’ (l. 1080).14 A ‘tuner of accent’ who lacks real linguistic substance or roots, his status as a Spaniard in Navarre makes him marginal, but his temporally unstable language may render him truly ‘other.’ Nonetheless, his exaggerated comic language makes him theatrically engaging, and – as we will see – the

Thomas Hyll’s translation of Bartolommeo della Rocca Cocles’ A Brief and Most Pleasaunt Epitomye of the Whole Art of Phisiognomie (London, 1556), sig. C3v (this predates by nearly a century the OED’s first example). The pretentious quality of the word in a 1590s context can be seen in its use by Thomas Nashe in a parody of Gabriel Harvey at his most verbose: ‘he would accelerate and festinate his procrastinating ministers’ (Have With You to Saffron-Walden. Or, Gabriell Harveys Hunt is Up (London, 1596), sig. O3r). 13 Some definitions: ‘annothanize’: annotate, anatomize or ‘explain analytically’ (not in the OED and in EEBO found only in Love’s Labour’s Lost); ‘perambulate’: walk or go before. See the OED, perambulate v.1; H. R. Woudhuysen, ed., Love’s Labour’s Lost, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (Walton on Thames: Bloomsbury, 1998), 178, 229. 14 A ‘monarcho’ is defined by the OED as ‘[a] person who is the object of ridicule for absurdly grandiose beliefs’ (Monarcho, n. 1).

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opportunities that it offers actors have been enthusiastically embraced.

Swaggering rascal: Pistol A similar linguistic concoction appears to be presented in the form of Pistol, who makes his first appearance The Second Part of Henry the Fourth and returns in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V. However, this is in fact a more complex example, not least because of its generic context and because Pistol is a native speaker of English. The use of archaism in a history play itself deserves comment.15 Unlike twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury writers of costume drama, early modern dramatists rarely attempt to historicize the dialogue of history plays. Instead, they employ deliberately up-to-date language, apparently in order to underline the applicability of the historical narrative to their own day.16 This style of language is accompanied by the frequent appearance of anachronistic elements: references to Elizabethan costume, popular songs, artefacts and customs. In this context, it is therefore intriguing to find a character in a history play that is given sustained use of archaic diction and syntax, but unsurprising to find that archaism goes hand-in-hand with neologism and other presentist techniques.

For more detailed discussion, see Lucy Munro, ‘Speaking History: Linguistic Memory in the Late-Elizabethan History Play’, Huntington Library Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2013): 519–40. 16 For instance, Jonathan Hope argues that the pronoun choice – that is, the overwhelming use of ‘you’ over ‘thou’ forms – in Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Henry VIII suggests that ‘a consciousness of authenticity might manifest itself in the language of the play, and specifically in the language of upperclass court interchange: perhaps the language of the play is deliberately modern, aping contemporary court usage, just as the events portrayed are self-consciously related to the contemporary events of the Jacobean court’, The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 82–3. 15

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Such interplay between past and present is evoked even in Pistol’s name, which Shakespeare takes care to emphasize. On his first appearance in Act Two, Scene Four of 2 Henry IV he is introduced as ‘Ancient Pistol’ in both dialogue and stage direction.17 The primary meaning of ‘Ancient’ here is ‘ensign’, but it also evokes the antique or old-fashioned. In contrast, the word ‘Pistol’ had been coined relatively recently: it was first used in England perhaps as late as 1560.18 Moreover, Pistol is associated with another new word before he even appears on stage. When the Drawer announces his arrival, Doll Tearsheet cries, ‘Hang him swaggering rascal, let him not come hither: it is the foule-mouthdst rogue in England’ (D3v), and Mistress Quickly picks up the term, repeating it in various forms – swaggerers, swaggering, swagger – eight times in the forty or so lines before Pistol enters. The repetition suggests that these words might have been unusual, and a comparison of the OED and electronic resources such as EEBO suggests that ‘swagger’ was a 1590s coinage.19 A ‘swaggerer’ or ‘swaggering rascal’ is a roaring boy, an Elizabethan tavern lout, and the term is at odds with the military professionalism suggested by the term ‘Ancient.’

The Second Part of Henrie the Fourth (London, 1600), sigs. D3v, D4r. All citations are taken from this edition, which appears to be a more accurate text than the folio for the scenes with which I am concerned here. 18 The OED’s earliest citation, and the earliest that I have been able to find, is from Thomas Norton’s Orations of Arsanes Agaynst Philip the Trecherous Kyng of Macedone (London, 1560 ?), sig. B4v; it is perhaps notable that a 1546 proclamation regarding the use of hand-guns refers only to ‘hand gounnes, hagbusshes, or other gunnes’ (A Proclamacion Divised by the Kynges Highnes with Thadvise of his Most Honourable Counsaile, for the Restraynte of Shootyng in Handgunnes [London, 1547]). As A. R. Humphreys notes, Shakespeare’s character ‘is well named, the early pistol being erratic, stupendously noisy, and less dangerous than it sounded.’ See Humphreys, ed., The Second Part of King Henry IV (London: Methuen, 1977), 67–8. See also Paul A. Jorgensen, ‘“My Name is Pistol Call’d”’, Shakespeare Quarterly 1 (1950): 73–5. 19 See the OED swagger v. 1; swaggerer, n.; swaggering, n.; swaggering, adj. 17

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Before he appears on stage, therefore, the swaggering Ancient Pistol is presented as a complex oxymoron, both ‘antic’ and ‘antique.’ And this first impression is complicated yet further when he finally enters the stage. Pistol’s initial lines are violent and sexually charged bluster, but he sounds a different note in his first extended speech, in which he exchanges insults with Doll and refuses to leave: Ile see her damnd first, to Plutoes damnd lake by this hand to th’infernal deep, with erebus & tortures vile also: holde, hooke and line, say I: downe, downe, dogges, down faters haue we not Hiren here? (sigs. D4v-E1r) Repeating the word ‘damned’ as ‘damnèd’, and lifting his register into classical allusion, Pistol takes flight linguistically. For S. Musgrove, this moment reflects Shakespeare’s own indecision: ‘It looks as though it was precisely here that Shakespeare paused, and wondered what Pistol was to say next. “Damned” suggests hell, with all its literary associations, the idea is born, and Pistol starts to talk like a stage play.’20 While appealing, this theory is not entirely necessary; Pistol’s linguistic flight may be less spontaneous than it appears, given that Shakespeare has already prepared his audience for its combination of new and old. As J. W. Lever notes, many of the characteristics of Pistol’s speech – its corruption of the ‘high’ style, with its classical allusions, rhetorical questions and exaggerated threats – are drawn from the style of ‘Seignior Cocodrill’, a ‘Bragger’, in John Eliot’s idiosyncratic French language manual, Ortho-epia Gallica (1593).21 But while Pistol’s speeches echo that of the Bragger, they are richer and more multiple in their effects, including proverbial language (‘Hold hook and line’) and archaism. When Pistol refers to the other characters on

20 21

In ‘The Birth of Pistol’, Review of English Studies 10 (1959): 56–8 (57). ‘Shakespeare’s French Fruits’, Shakespeare Survey 6 (1953): 79–90.

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stage as ‘faitors’, or rogues, he uses a word that appears to have become outmoded by at least the 1560s, when Richard Grafton glossed it in his Chronicle. By 1590 its use was mainly restricted to literary texts.22 In addition, the Bragger’s reference to ‘Mahound God of Turkes and of Arabians’ (sig. r4r) appears to have mingled with quotations from contemporary drama: in referring to Pluto and Erebus, Pistol echoes George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar. Moreover, his final question, which puns on ‘Hiren’ (‘Irene’) and the ‘iron’ of Pistol’s sword, is probably a quotation from a lost play, Peele’s The Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek, dating from around 1594.23 Later speeches continue in this vein, incorporating quotation from plays such as Marlowe’s Tamberlaine, snatches from an Italian madrigal and a song supposedly written by Anne Boleyn or her brother while awaiting execution, heavy-handed classical reference, newly fashionable words such as ‘humour’, and an old-fashioned emphasis on alliteration. In response to Falstaff’s declaration, ‘nay, and a doe nothing but speak nothing, a shall be nothing here’, Pistol exclaims: What shall we haue incision? shall we imbrew? then death rocke me a sleepe, abridge my dolefull daies: why then, let grieuo[u]s ghastly gaping wounds untwind the sisters three, come, Atropose I say! (sig. E1r) Pistol manages paradoxically to embody both the old and new, his language as temporally unstable as his ‘Ancient Pistol’ sobriquet. The Spenserian and chivalric touches in words such as ‘welkin’ (sig. D4v) and lines such as ‘Sweet Knight, I kisse thy neaffe’ (sig. D4v) become ironic as they are A Chronicle at Large and Meere History of the Affayres of Englande and Kinges of the Same (London, 1569), 2:598 (sig. 3F6v). 23 See The Battle of Alcazar, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: Malone Society, 1907), ll. 1230–54; E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 3:462. 22

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spoken by an otherwise up-to-date 1590s tavern swaggerer. However, Pistol’s linguistic volatility is an appropriate match for his violently unpredictable behaviour. It is sometimes said that Pistol echoes the dramatic ‘hits’ of the 1570s and 1580s,24 but Shakespeare’s target is actually more precise than this: the plays that the swaggering Ancient quotes and mimics are popular works written in the late 1580s and early 1590s and with a continued life on the late 1590s stage. In particular, he homes in on the high style associated with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and its imitators; as Russ McDonald notes, ‘Attempting to pass himself off as a valiant warrior, the coward has filched the rhetoric of a hero.’25 In Henry V, this stance becomes increasingly hollow, and the Boy comments of Pistol, Bardolph and Nym: As young as I am, I haue obseru’d these three Swashers: I am Boy to them all three, but all they three, though they would serue me, could not be Man to me; for indeed three such Antiques doe not amount to a man[.] (ll. 1145–8) The Boy’s criticism is finely calibrated: the trio are indeed ‘antics’ in the context of the war with France, embodying an increasingly grotesque parody of proper martial behaviour, but they are also throwbacks to the tavern world of Hal’s apparent youthful rebellion, relics from an earlier age. Pistol in particular is also a theatrical ‘antic’, the Boy later scornfully describing him as ‘this roaring divell i’th olde play’ (l. 2450), suggesting the extent to which the ancient’s mock-heroic

See, for instance, Alison Thorne’s otherwise excellent essay, ‘There is a History in All Men’s Lives: Reinventing History in 2 Henry IV’, in Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-Histories, ed. Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Stephen Longstaffe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 49–66 (64). 25 ‘The Language of Tragedy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Claire McEachern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 23–49 (23). 24

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persona is outmoded in this new world of warfare and politics.

Playing the antic It would be possible at this point to argue that both Don Armado and Pistol may be ‘antic’ in terms of the performance style required from the actor playing each part. There has been a tendency for twentieth- and twenty-first-century productions to treat Don Armado and Pistol as dramaturgically similar figures, and for both characters to be performed in a self-consciously dated style, something that Paul Menzer and Thadd McQuade have described in a recent paper as ‘gestural antiquing’ (a wonderfully evocative term for my purposes here).26 Recent performers of the role of Don Armado have generally employed extravagant delivery and gesture, and, often, a highly exaggerated Spanish accent, making the character into a self-consciously archaized embodiment of knightly affectation. Two contrasting takes on the role, seen in two British productions in autumn 2008, illustrate this tendency in different ways. Peter Bowles’ performance in Peter Hall’s revival at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, was criticized by some reviewers for the actor’s failure to adopt the expected accent. In the Sunday Telegraph, for instance, Tim Auld lamented that: Hall’s production falls into the trap of being just a bit too mature for its own good. I’d have liked to have seen his star turn, Peter Bowles, camping it up with a cod Spanish accent as Don Adriano de Armado – instead he gave an old-timer’s comic take with posh accent and rolled r’s and accentuated t’s[.]27 Paul Menzer and Thadd McQuade, ‘Ink, Inc’, paper delivered at the ‘Shakespeare’s Globe Gesture Lab’, London, 5 November 2010. 27 ‘New Labour’s, New Danger; … but Peter Hall’s Staging Lets Shakespeare’s Comedy Speak for Itself’, Sunday Telegraph, 2 November 2008, 31. 26

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No such inhibition was felt in Gregory Doran’s revival for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which opened in Stratfordupon-Avon a month earlier. Here, Joe Dixon drew on a broader tradition of British comic performance and was described by Paul Taylor in The Independent as being ‘hilarious as the English-mangling Spanish braggart Don Armado (‘Men of piss, well encountered’).’28 A similar tendency towards exaggeration and self-conscious theatricality has been at work in actors’ interpretations of Pistol. Reviewing Mark Wing-Davey’s production of Henry V at the Delacorte Theater in New York in 2003, for example, Charles Isherwood describes the ‘cartoonish exuberance’ of Bronson Pinchot’s ‘Teddy-boy’ Pistol and Tom Alan Robbins’ Bardolph, and the way in which Pinchot ‘ad-libs a fair portion of his dialogue to general delight.’29 A particularly rich example of this tradition can be seen in Robert Newton’s performance as Pistol in Laurence Olivier’s film version of Henry V, which draws heavily on stage convention. As Anthony Davies points out, apart from the Chorus only Pistol breaks the fourth wall and addresses the camera directly, making eye-contact with the cinema audience.30 This harking back to theatrical tradition is part of the paradoxically up-to-date archaism of Olivier’s film in general, with its opening and closing scenes in a reconstructed Globe theatre, its picture-book scenery at the French court, and its vibrant realism in the Agincourt sequence. Powerful as it can be, however, this tradition may underestimate the contextual differences between Armado and Pistol, and downplay the complexity with which Shakespeare presents the Ancient. It is not that there was no sense in the early modern period that gestures could – like words ‘Tennant’s Labours not Lost on Bard Lovers’, Independent, 9 October 2008, 12. 29 ‘France Under Siege in Central Park’, Variety, 21–27 July 2003, 37. 30 Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook, Akira Kurosawa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 32. 28

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– become outmoded. For instance, Thomas Tomkis’s early seventeenth-century university play, Lingua (published 1607), features a sequence in which Phantastes the poet instructs Communis Sensus on how to perform Terence’s Eunuchus, and a stage direction states that ‘he acts it after the old kinde of Pantomimick action.’31 This apparently refers to exaggerated gestures; Communis Sensus comments, ‘I shold iudge this action Phantastes most absurd, vnles we should come to a Commedy, as gentlewomen to the commencement, only to see men speake’ (sig. H3r). However, it is unlikely that Pistol was originally performed in an ‘old’ or ‘Pantomimick’ manner, given the currency of his dramatic exemplars and his characterization as a tavern ‘swaggerer.’ Indeed, his gestures when he declares that he ‘will discharge upon’ Mistress Quickly ‘with two bullets’ (sig. D4r), or shouts ‘when Pistol lies, do this, and fig me, like the bragging spaniard’ (sig. K3r), may be all too contemporary. The tendency to play Pistol as a theatrical revenant may have begun with Theophilus Cibber in the late eighteenth century, and with Henry V; according to Francis Gentleman, Cibber ‘made more of the popgun Ancient Pistol than possibly ever will be seen again, by a laughable importance of deportment, extravagant gestures, and speaking it in the sonorous cant of old tragedizers, he exhibited a very entertaining piece of acting merit.’32 With its comic exchanges between Pistol and Fluellen, Henry V is more adaptable to such crowd-pleasing ‘gestural antiquing’ than 2 Henry IV, but even in the later history play it may cause problems. As Gary Taylor has argued: for modern actors ‘the sonorous cant of old tragedizers’ has dwindled from a particular and recognizable grand style, capable of being taken seriously in the proper context, Lingua: or The Combat of the Tongue, and the Fiue Senses for Superiority (London, 1607), sig. H3r. 32 The Dramatic Censor; or, Critical Companion, 2 vols (London, 1770), 2:364. 31

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into a merely embarrassing, repetitive, generalized display of over-acting; as a consequence Pistol’s marvellous tightrope balancing of grandeur and incongruity too easily degenerates into unfunny and unbelievable shouting and posturing.33 Ancient Pistol becomes, in such interpretations, merely antic, diminishing the potential power of the high style, which, as Taylor stresses, is capable of considerable theatrical impact if it is handled carefully. It is rare for productions to resist the temptation to ham Pistol up, but when they do the results can be unusually effective. Stephen Booth writes of the 1977 production of a conflated 1 and 2 Henry IV and full-text Henry V by the California Actors Company, ‘Tom Ramirez was a subdued Pistol and more than usually comic for being less a noisy clown than usual and a more efficient and threatening fraud.’34 A rather noisier Pistol in Dominic Dromgoole’s production of both parts of Henry IV at Shakespeare’s Globe in London in 2010 was also powerful, partly because the same actor, Sam Crane, doubled Pistol and Hotspur. Pistol thus represented a parodic debasement of Hotspur’s vibrant but problematic model of military masculinity, retaining in the process a certain edge. Moreover, Crane appeared to have modelled aspects of his performance of Pistol on the comedian Russell Brand, a figure who similarly manages to combine parodic verbal archaism with flashes of genuine outrage and disturbance. The character’s verbal violence was matched by an abrupt physical energy. Despite the similarities in the diction of Don Armado and Pistol, and the fact that both draw at least part of their dramatic heritage from the braggart soldiers of classical comedy and the

Gary Taylor, ed., Henry V (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 65. ‘Shakespeare in the San Francisco Bay Area’, Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978): 267–78 (271).

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commedia dell’arte,35 there are some important differences between these characters, not least in the ways in which they are introduced to spectators. While Armado is relentlessly mocked and parodied before he even appears on the stage, in 2 Henry IV the repeated use of the word ‘swaggerer’ creates an impression of violence that is only reinforced by Pistol’s abrupt and volatile behaviour when he appears. Moreover, his presentation forms part of the gradual darkening of the way in which the tavern underworld is represented in this play. In contrast, the more consistently comic presentation of Don Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost is reinforced through the inclusion of the inset play of the Nine Worthies, which not only features him in a prominent role, but also mimics his archaic diction and metrical proclivities.

I am ycliped Machabeus: The play of the Nine Worthies There are marked similarities in the dramaturgical means through which Armado and the play of the Nine Worthies are introduced, similarities that suggest the connections between Armado and the play even though he is not its author or the major force behind its performance. Before the actors take to the stage, the nobles discuss what they are about to see, the King saying: Here is like to be a good presence of Worthies; He [Armado] presents Hector of Troy, the Swaine Pompey ye great, the Parish Curate Alexander, Armadoes Page Hercules, the Pedant Iudas Machabeus: And if these foure Worthies in

For detailed discussion of Don Armado’s dramatic heritage, see Daniel C. Boughner, ‘Don Armado and the Commedia Dell’Arte’, Studies in Philology 37 (1940): 201–24.

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their first shew thriue, these foure will change habites, and present the other fiue. (ll. 2477–82) Towards the end of this speech the King appears to quote from the paper that he has been given by Armado, and he and Berowne quickly slip into a parody of its rhyme and its long, ragged lines: Ber[owne]. There is fiue in the first shew. Kin[g]. You are deceiued, tis not so. Ber. The Pedant, the Braggart, the Hedge-Priest, the   Foole, and the Boy, Abate throw at Novum, and the whole world againe, Cannot pricke out fiue such, take each one in’s vaine. King. The ship is vnder saile, and heere she coms   amain. (ll. 2483–9) As in the presentation of Don Armado, the inset play that follows reinforces the impression given by the King and Berowne. It takes Costard a while to properly begin his first speech, as his audience keep interrupting him, but he eventually manages to finish his opening line and get on to the old-fashioned fourteener lines that follow: Pompey surnam’d the great: That oft in field, with Targe and Shield, did make my foe to sweat, And trauailing along this coast, I heere am come by chance, And lay my Armes before the legs of this sweet Lasse of France. (ll. 2499–504) The authors of the play of the Nine Worthies appear to believe, with their contemporary Gabriel Harvey, that the ‘braue long verse, stately & flowing’ was suited to ‘heroical discourse, or statelie argument’, a view that was increasingly

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out-of-kilter with late sixteenth-century tastes.36 The use of the long line thus suggests the unwillingness of the inset play’s author to conform to up-to-date styles, and it also underlines its pedantic quality. The courtiers’ hostility towards linguistic and stylistic aberrance is reinforced later in the play, when they mock mercilessly the inclusion of an archaic word, ‘ycliped’ (used – as we have seen – by Don Armado in his letter to the King). Holofernes enters and introduces himself: Ped[ant]. Iudas I am. Dum[aine]. A Iudas? Ped. Not Iscariot sir. Iudas I am ycliped Machabeus. Dum. Iudas Machabeus clipt, is plaine Iudas. Ber[owne]. A kissing traitor. How art thou proud   Iudas? (ll. 2548–53) Pretending to confuse the great warrior Judas Maccabeus with the traitor Judas Iscariot, the courtiers drive Holofernes to a point of humiliation at which he can only say ‘This is not generous, not gentle, not humble’ (l. 2582). The courtiers reject two aspects of the inset play’s style – its weakness for long, fourteener lines and its recourse to archaic diction – and in doing so they cruelly reject the performers and belittle their genuine attempt to please. However, while the courtiers mock the play of the Nine Worthies, the very stylistic quirks for which they condemn it seem to have been successfully ‘sold’ to a paying public by both the Chamberlain’s Men and the London publishers. The title-pages of the 1598 quarto of Love’s Labours Lost and the 1600 quarto of The Second Part of Henry the Fourth both deploy carefully chosen adjectives as part of their sales pitch,

Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, collected and edited by G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), 170.

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alongside other tactics such as the boastful advertisement of court performances, multiple public performances, claims to textual authenticity, and the authorial imprimatur. The titlepage of Love’s Labour’s Lost describes it as ‘A PLEASANT Conceited Comedie CALLED, Loues labors lost As it vvas presented before her Highnes this last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented By W. Shakespere.’ The key word here is ‘conceited’, a term highlighting the play’s wit, intelligence and capacity to amuse but also, simultaneously, registering the affectation of characters such as Armado.37 2 Henry IV is presented on its title-page as ‘THE Second part of Henrie the fourth, continuing to his death, and coronation of Henrie the fift. With the humours of sir Iohn Fal-staffe, and swaggering Pistoll. As it hath been sundrie times publikely acted by the right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare.’ The key words here are ‘humours’ – that late 1590s buzzword – and ‘swaggering’, as the publishers pick up Pistol’s most important attribute. Furthermore, they are attached to characters, as potential readers are expected to be drawn by ‘the humours of sir Iohn Fal-staffe, and swaggering Pistoll.’ Armado, with his richly ‘conceited’ language, is a prominent element in Love’s Labour’s Lost’s appeal to readers, while Pistol is singled out, along with Falstaff, in the advertising of 2 Henry IV.

Conclusion In a recent essay on Love’s Labour’s Lost, Lynne Magnusson notes that Don Armado is ‘a surefire stimulus to theatrical pleasure.’38 The title-pages of Love’s Labour’s Lost and 2 Henry IV suggest the ability of Armado and Pistol to provoke pleasure in both playgoers and readers. Yet I have argued in 37 38

See the OED, conceited, 1c, 2a, 4a. ‘Armado and the Politics of English’, 53.

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this chapter that their appeal is based on an odd, potentially unpredictable amalgam of novelty and archaism, one that is rooted in the language of the plays but which also depends on the body of the actor to bring it to life. Through these characters, Shakespeare and the Chamberlain’s Men successfully market to their audiences a rich combination of new and old words, styles and postures – the ‘antique’ and the ‘antic’, in a state of productive disjunction.

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4 Learning to Colour in Hamlet Miriam Jacobson

Colour your loneliness Early in the third act of Hamlet, right before the prince in his antics tells Ophelia to join a nunnery or a brothel because he has ‘heard’ of her ‘paintings’, Polonius places a book in Ophelia’s hands. ‘Read on this book,’ the councillor advises, ‘That show of such an exercise may colour / Your loneliness’ (3.1.44–5). But what does it mean, to ‘colour … loneliness’? Is loneliness a black and white printed page? A charcoal drawing before it is transferred to a painter’s canvas? An actor’s face in need of make-up? Editors have glossed the verb ‘colour’ here in various ways. Stephen Greenblatt and the Norton editors take the word ‘colour’ to mean give reason to, paraphrasing the passage with ‘may explain your solitude and also give it a virtuous or pious look.’1 David Bevington dispenses with William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, vol. 2, Later Plays, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, Katherine Maus and Andrew Gurr (New York: Norton, 2009), 153.

1

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the notion of ‘colouring’ as explaining Ophelia’s solitude, interpreting it instead as giving ‘a plausible appearance to’ her loneliness, which suggests that this moment is more about fakery and staging than about rationalizing Ophelia’s appearance in that particular hall of Elsinore.2 Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson’s gloss of ‘colour’ in the Arden gets closer to the sense of ‘colouring’ as painting, offering both ‘provide an excuse for’ and ‘camouflage.’3 ‘Camouflage’ seems to get closer to the meaning of colouring here by suggesting a disguise, but then Polonius would be suggesting that Ophelia camouflage or disguise her loneliness, when her solitude is exactly what Polonius, the King and Queen are trying to heighten. What Polonius wants to camouflage is this scene’s orchestration. If this is the case, then ‘colour’ may operate to make Ophelia seem more realistic and less posed. These are all excellent readings of the way ‘colour’ works metaphorically in the line, but few of them point to the material dimension of the word. In other words, we still have that word ‘colour’ which suggests a transition from a state of colourlessness to something brighter and more, well, colourful; a kind of enhancement or performance of loneliness. But what if ‘colour’ in the early modern period indicated something different from what it suggests to modern readers? Just as early modern language was shifting and plastic, so was the early modern understanding of colour, which depended upon the metamorphic nature of words. The system of primary and secondary colours was not proposed (by a physician rather than a painter) until 1601, and it remained one of several competing theories for most of the seventeenth century. Newton did not identify the prismatic spectrum until 1672. How, then, did people conceive of colours? The

David Bevington, ed., The Necessary Shakespeare (3rd edn, New York: Longman, 2008), 574. 3 Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson, Arden Shakespeare (London: Thompson Learning, 2006), 283. 2

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language of colour has always been problematic: scholars are still arguing about whether Homer’s kuan means dark blue or a foggy absence of light, or precisely what shade of red or violet the Romans meant with purpura.4 As new pigments, dyes and colour-fixing techniques arrived in Europe from non-Western countries, a large number of new words for colour entered early modern English, all tied to coloured textiles, pigments and dyes. Nearly every new early modern English name for a colour bore an imported material and geographic signature: for reds there were scarlet (from Persian saqalat, meaning a richly coloured cloth), crimson (from Turkish Kirmizi, meaning the kermes beetle, once thought to be a grain or berry) and later cutchenel (cochineal, deriving from the Italian word for a scarlet-robed magistrate). For blues, indigo (originally from India, though in Hakluyt the dye is sometimes called anil from the Sanskrit word for blue), byce (made from smalt and glass), perse (a blue from Persia), turquoise, named for the blue-green stone mined in Turkey and Iran (frequently spelled ‘Turkeys’) and ultramarine, a precious deep-blue pigment made from crushed lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan for centuries and used by artists to colour the veil and dress of the Virgin (the Virgin in Van Eyck’s Annunciation that hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, sports one such cloak). Ultramarine did not mean that the pigment mimicked the depths of the ocean, but that it came from far away, beyond the sea. Yellow included Saffron (from the Aramaic and Arab root zafran), which briefly flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the English wool town of Chipping Walden, officially renamed Saffron Walden in the sixteenth century.5 And then there’s purple, derived from ancient Greek (porfura), which has continued to perplex classicists because

See Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Colour (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 23–5. 5 See Victoria Findlay, Colour: A Natural History of the Palette (London: Ballantine Books, 2002), 228–9. 4

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no one can figure out whether it refers to red or violet or a variety of shades in between. However, in the sixteenth century purple was also the name for the murex, a small, endangered mollusc living on the island of Tyre and responsible for one of the most historically expensive dyes by that name, so expensive that it was reserved for ornamenting a small strip on the hem of Roman senator’s robes, and so valuable that after 1453 when Tyre and its precious dyes belonged to the Ottoman Empire, European cardinals switched from purple to red. Cleopatra’s purple sails must have been expensive Eastern commodities indeed, and this may have been heightened if her barge actually appeared on an early modern stage later on in the play, after Enobarbus has already described her entry at Cydnus in lavish, Plutarchian detail. This chapter will argue that not only were words for specific colours fluid and unfixed in early modern English due to England’s increasingly global role in mercantile trade and conquest, but that the very notion of changing colour, or colouring oneself, mirrored the semantic fluidity of early modern English. In other words, if colour terminology is key in understanding a culture, then the early modern English nouns and adjectives for names of colours, and verbs for changing colour, not only embody the protean, associative nature of language in early modern England, but also enact and describe it. And the play that most clearly dramatizes the connection between colour-changing, shape-shifting and linguistic mutability is Hamlet, where to colour means to act (as in Polonius’s remark to his daughter), and Hamlet’s survival and success depend upon his ability to learn how to change his colour, and with it, how to move fluidly from one linguistic register to another, exploiting the material instability of early modern English. As I have noted elsewhere, imported dyes and pigments were precious commodities in early modern England, gathered from central Asia and the New World.6 Colourfast dyes were

6

See Miriam Jacobson, Chapter 4, ‘On Chapman Crossing Marlowe’s

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prepared in Europe (Venice) and the Eastern Mediterranean and Asia (Turkey and Persia), using carefully hidden, secret formulae. The brightest and darkest crimson ‘grains’ (kermes) and madder (rubia tinctorum) were imported from Eastern Europe and Asia to dye European textiles, but these reds were likely to fade unless kept in a cool, dark place. Persian and Turkish carpets, on the other hand, continued to look dark and fresh in their reddest spots for hundreds of years. The Ottoman recipes for making reds colourfast were guarded from European merchants until 1750.7 Perhaps on account of impenetrable Ottoman trade secrecy, European merchants, in around 1560, turned away from Eastern kermes and embraced cochineal from the New World, a related white scale insect that when crushed produced larger amounts of deeper red dye. Though only related to pigments tangentially through trade, one early modern use of the verb ‘to colour’ involves secretive and deceptive mercantile practices. Obtaining Ottoman dye formulae was one of English merchants’ secret missions.8

Hellespont’, in Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 174, 176–7. Whereas in Barbarous Antiquity I am chiefly concerned with the mediating role of poetry, here I examine the elastic and material nature of the early modern English language and its relationship to theatrical performance. 7 Once chemical dyes overtook natural dyes, the exact recipe of the secret was lost and the recipe only recently rediscovered in 1998 by the British chemist John Edmonds. See Robert Chenciner, Madder Red: A History of Luxury and Trade (Richmond: Curzon, 2000), 293. The problem was not how to extract the purple dye from the Murex shell, but how to dissolve the pigment into an alkaline solution. Edmonds discovered that another type of shellfish, cockles, provided the necessary alkalinity when mixed with Murex shells to produce the vivid violet colour. 8 The itemized list authored by Richard Hakluyt senior in the Principall Navigations urges merchants ‘to learne of the Diers to discerne all kind of colours; as which be good and sure … Then to take the names of all the materials and substances used in this Citie or in the realme, in dying of cloth or silke’ (233–4). Dye ingredients and colour pigments feature prominently in

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These merchants trading for the first time with the Ottomans were urged to conceal their entire mercantile agendas, not only from other merchants trading in the Mediterranean, but also from the English public. In a private letter to the first members of the Levant Company in 1581, Elizabeth’s secretary and spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham urges merchants to conceal their journey’s purposes and to let ‘lies be given out.’9 Walsingham’s advice to English traders is both not to reveal any information about which commodities they are trading with the Ottomans as well as to conceal the fact that they are trading with the Ottomans at all. Though Elizabeth’s Protestant England formed an alliance with Muslim Turkey to confront a common European Catholic enemy, the general English populace may still have felt politically and religiously betrayed by their own government if they were to discover the full scale of Anglo-Ottoman diplomatic trade relations. Jonathan Burton’s analysis of early modern Anglo-Ottoman trade goes further: ‘[F]rom its foundation, England’s policy on trade with the Ottoman Empire depended upon saying one thing and doing another.’10 If English trading privileges with the Ottoman Empire were publicized, whether in print in England or by word of mouth in the Mediterranean, such publicity would have threatened the entire Anglo-Ottoman enterprise. The Bark Roe affair serves as a good example of this. In the middle of one of his diplomatic missions to Turkey, William Harborne’s merchants

the shopping lists Walsingham sent Levant Company officers departing for the East: indigo, rubia, kermes, gum lac, sal ammoniacke and alum, all materials used in the dyeing and paint-making processes appear of chief interest to English importers. See ‘Lord Burghley’s notes on towns and commodities of the Levant’, in S. A. Skillerter, William Harborne and the Trade with Turkey 1578–1582 (London: British Academy, 1977), Document 30, 177. 9 S. A. Skilleter, William Harborne and the Trade with Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), Doc. 1A, 33. 10 Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 59.

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sailing a ship known as the Bark Roe revealed information about the Anglo-Ottoman trade alliance to the French ambassadors assigned to protect the ship’s passage. The French complained to the Sultan, and Harborne and his mates were arrested and accused of spying and seeking the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. Harborne’s Levant company came dangerously close to forfeiting all of its trafficking privileges and ruining the Anglo-Ottoman alliance. In the formal letter of apology to Sultan Murad III, Queen Elizabeth’s rhetoric paints a picture of mercantile deception spiralling out of control.11 Dominating her imagery is a powerful instance of the word ‘colour’: ‘whether it were true or fained, we knowe not … but under the colour thereof they have done that, which the trueth of our dealing doeth utterly abhorre.’12 Feigning an activity ‘under the colour thereof’ does not simply suggest the switching of heraldic allegiances. If we look at mercantile uses of the verb ‘to colour’, Elizabeth’s usage here can also indicate both deceptive masking and misconstruing. Unwilling to admit her subjects’ complete and knowing guilt, Elizabeth’s rhetoric suspends the indeterminacy between disguise and mistake, profiting from the ambiguity of early modern English. To perform an action under a colour is to act under pretext or pretence, as Shakespeare’s Lucrece acknowledges when she confronts her rapist Tarquin, demanding ‘under what colour he commits this ill’ (The Rape of Lucrece, 476). Tarquin converts this phrase into a reference to heraldry’s ‘colours’, claiming that the colour in Lucrece’s cheeks serves as the banner under which he performs his act of violation (The Rape of Lucrece, 477). Elizabeth’s use of ‘under colour thereof’ to refer to painting one’s actions with pretence also suggests a kind of nautical heraldry, though here we may imagine both ship’s flags and shady mercantile practices. One meaning of ‘colouring’ relates

See Skilleter, William Harborne, 154–8. Ibid., 167.

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to the illegal mercantile practice of forging the ‘marks’ or cipher signatures of different, foreign merchants in order to avoid paying a particular country’s customs fees, as Alan Stewart has revealed.13 A merchant would ‘colour’ a ship’s bill of lading in order to pretend that his own goods belonged to another merchant, thereby having the customs bill sent to the wrong person. Early modern English merchants engaged in this practice ubiquitously, as did European traders in general. Mercantile ‘colouring’ has affinities with theatrical performance, but also with rhetorical and poetic practice. Early modern poetic theorists and poets frequently describe poetic ornament or rhetorical dissimulation (all figurative language in effect) as cosmetic painting, adding artificial colour to the skin.14 In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham’s Allegory takes the shape of ‘a dissimulation under covert and darke intendments.’15 Because metaphor, allegory and all other figurative tropes ‘draw’ language ‘from plaineness and simplicitie to a certain doublenesse’, all figurative language is thus ‘forraine and coloured talk.’16 Extending the metaphor of colouring to rhetoric was well established by the late sixteenth century: medieval commentators described poetic ornament and rhetorical tropes as coloures, and their treatises appeared in well used rhetorical handbooks in the Latin grammar schools of sixteenthcentury England.17 Puttenham’s treatise takes the notion of coloures further, describing these tropes as cosmetic paints

See the OED, ‘colour’ v. and Alan Stewart, ‘“Come from Turkie”: Mediterranean Trade in Late Elizabethan London’, in Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 157–77. 14 See George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), 150. 15 Ibid., 166. 16 Ibid. 17 See James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 151–205. 13

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and a painter’s palette of ‘rich, Orient colours’, and to ladies’ cosmetics. For Puttenham, overuse or indecorous application of figurative language mimics putting cosmetics in the wrong place on the face: ‘[I]f the crimson tainte, which should be laid upon a ladies lips or right in the center of her cheekes, should by some oversight or mishap be applied to her forehead or chinne, it would make (ye would say) but a very ridiculous bewtie.’18 Puttenham seems to advocate both ladies’ use of cosmetics and poets’ uses of rhetorical figures, but only if they are placed properly. Mercantile and rhetorical instances of ‘colouring’ thus indicate forgery, disguise, dissimulation and even cosmetic painting, a practice important to theatrical actors and audiences alike.19 By posing Ophelia with a prop to ‘colour’ her loneliness, Polonius is essentially setting Ophelia up to dissimulate, or to say one thing and mean another, which is exactly what Hamlet then observes: ‘God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another’ (3.1.145). Ophelia obviously fails at this dissembling – Hamlet can see right through it, as he sees through Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: ‘there is a kind of confession in your looks, which your modesties have not craft enough to color’ (2.2.246). ‘Colouring’ also functions metatheatrically (or meta-meta-theatrically), as the play is hyper aware that these are actors playing roles, not only a boy acting out the part of Ophelia, but an obedient daughter acting out Polonius’s little marriage proposal scene gone wrong. Therefore we can also imagine Ophelia’s act of reading, ‘show of such an exercise’, as a show itself, a secret pageant put on by the King and his advisor in order to entrap Hamlet into

Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 150. In Chapter 4 of Barbarous Antiquity, I connect mercantile colouring and diplomatic dissimulation to rhetorical and poetic colouring as well, but that argument goes on to make larger claims about Anglo-Ottoman diplomacy itself as poetic, and early modern poetry as diplomatic, whereas here I pursue a different line of inquiry, investigating the role of rhetorical and theatrical dissimulation and its connection to the materiality of writing in Hamlet.

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declaring his love for Ophelia. Ophelia’s ‘show’ of reading is echoed by the dumb show and The Mousetrap, which Hamlet will use in turn to ‘catch the conscience of the king.’ Polonius calls Ophelia’s reading ‘an exercise’, which encodes the book as a devotional object and the activity of reading as a religious exercise. Hamlet confirms and interpolates this when he hails Ophelia with ‘Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered’ (3.1.91–1). But ‘exercise’ also suggests Ophelia’s feigned reading as a kind of physical exertion that might bring colour in the form of real blushes to Ophelia’s chaste (or unchaste) cheeks. Ophelia’s pretence of reading might also bring a real blush to her cheeks, a blush of shame in her deceitfulness. Thus the book itself functions as a cosmetic as well as a prop. Mercantile colouring sheds new light on Polonius’s words as well, suggesting that reading a book will make Ophelia’s artificial loneliness seem more realistic. Further, like an early modern merchant, Polonius is masking his own ‘goods’ here, passing them off as belonging to someone else. As Polonius’s goods, Ophelia is a precious commodity: a young, marriageable maiden, presumably a virgin, and it is an early modern commonplace to metaphorize virginity and chastity as a bright, colourful gemstone – Lucrece is Collatine’s ‘rich jewel’, Hero’s virginity is an ‘inestimable gemme.’20 Ophelia is deliberately placed in Hamlet’s way for the prince to encounter and (Polonius hopes) take up as his own through marriage. Ironically, Polonius had earlier warned Ophelia to be wary of men who say one thing and mean another, using the same language of colouring, in this case dyes: ‘Do not believe his vows, for they are brokers / Not of that dye which their investments show / But mere implorators of unholy suits’ (1.3.125–7). The personified vows are dressed in one colour, Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (London: Richard Field, 1594), 34; Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander (London: Paul Linley, 1598), 2.77–8. I have argued in the final chapter of Barbarous Antiquity that in most early modern English texts and images, virginity’s jewel usually figures as a pearl. 20

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but disguise themselves as another. Taylor and Thompson wonder whether this means a black (sinful) vow in white (truthful) robes, but the words ‘dye’ and ‘in-vestments’ and ‘un-holy suit’ (with a pun on ‘suit’ as suing and clothing) suggest a red, magisterial or clerical garment (and both judges and priests were called ‘Scarlet’ in this period). Following Ophelia’s colourful reading, Claudius takes up the language of cosmetic painting, in an aside that compares his own deception to ‘the harlot’s cheek blistered with plastering art’, admitting that his crime is concealed by ‘my most painted word’ (3.1.51–2). Like Polonius, Claudius’s colouring can also be seen as mercantile: in addition to the murder, the King is also trying to disguise the commodities he possesses, the Queen and the kingdom, though in his case, Claudius passes off his late brother’s possessions as his own.

Inky cloaks and grained spots Hamlet, it turns out, is full of the language of colour, dye and ink. If colouring suggested both rhetorical and mercantile dissimulation in early modern England, it is only a small jump to connect Hamlet’s own dissimulative rhetoric with colour, the ‘antic / antique disposition’ he adopts in order to, Brutus-like, overthrow Claudius’s tyrannical regime at the end of the play.21 And Hamlet’s antic actions have colourful, material resonances. In his early modern English lexicon Margreta de Grazia and George Walton Williams both point out the connection Hamlet is making between himself and a long line of Brutuses by adopting a disposition that is both antic (ludic) and antique (Roman). See Margreta de Grazia, ‘Hamlet the Intellectual,’ in The Public Intellectual, ed. Helen Small (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 89–109; George Walton Williams, ‘Antique Romans and Modern Danes in Hamlet and Julius Caesar’, in Literature and Nationalism, ed. Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), 41–55. See also my Introduction to Barbarous Antiquity.

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of 1604, Robert Cawdrey lists the definition for ‘antic’ as ‘disguised.’22 Furthering this notion, ‘Antik sutes’ are found in Alleyn’s 1598 costume inventory for the Admiral’s Men, which Jones and Stallybrass surmise are jesters’ motley suits, caps and bells, which would be very colourful outfits indeed.23 Hamlet’s ‘antic’ behaviour calls to mind a colourful material practice associated with clowns. But in morality plays, clownish antics could be devils, too. According to Pastoureau, polychromatic fabric like striped damask was frequently associated with the daemonic due to the preponderance of sumptuary laws, so a fool’s motley (the word has an uncertain origin, but the OED editors suggest it derives from ‘mote’ which can mean ‘pigment’) might also be devilish.24 But according to John Cox, stage devils, just like Hamlet, wore black.25 Unlike his ‘antic disposition’, Hamlet’s black suit is meant to reveal, not to conceal. But part of Hamlet’s journey is learning that insides and outsides sometimes do not correspond, and learning how to exploit this opacity. When the Queen urges him to ‘cast thy nighted colour off’ (1.2.68), Hamlet clings to his mourning weeds, responding that the cloak helps to articulate his inexpressible grief: Tis not alone my inky cloak, good(F) / cold(Q2) mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black … For they are actions that a man might play But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.77–86)

Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall (London, 1604). Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 248. 24 Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Colour (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 98; and The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 25 John Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5–6. 22 23

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As a ‘suit of woe’ the inky cloak indicates Hamlet’s pre-modern interiority, something that intrinsically resists presentation – ‘that within which passes show.’26 At this point in the play there is a correspondence between Hamlet’s outside and his inside. The inky cloak is the signifier, and Hamlet’s interior subjectivity, the unreachable signified. And yet throughout the play, Hamlet repeatedly oscillates between dissimulative ‘show’ and honesty, as he learns to adapt to his circumstances and become like early modern language itself: plastic and iridescent. At this moment in time, Hamlet eschews ‘actions that a man might play’ in favour of something inaccessible but true. What he has yet to learn is that there is nothing that distinguishes good play-acting from having ‘that within which passes show.’ Even as he rails anti-theatrically against Ophelia’s colouring and cosmetic painting, he acknowledges that the players are the ‘abstract and brief chroniclers of our time’ (2.2.504) and puts on an antic disposition, becoming more and more like a player himself. Hamlet next compares his own, supposedly more genuine rage (supposedly because Hamlet is a performance, too) with the First Player’s well feigned tears, trying to conjure a similar change in himself in his soliloquy, as I will discuss in more detail in the next section of this chapter. Yet Hamlet’s task in learning to change his colour depends upon the ineffectiveness of other characters in colouring themselves. Claudius’s words must remain visibly ‘painted’, they can never go deeper than the surface; otherwise Hamlet will not be able to find him out. Hamlet’s main proof of Claudius’s guilt lies in an involuntary physical colour change that mimics the bleaching process: ‘if a but blench, / I’ll know my course’ (2.2.574–5). The technique of a good actor is to shift not only one’s words, but one’s emotions as well, to be able to change colour at will, instead of involuntary

Patricia Fumerton has argued that early modern interiority is something that resists signification, in Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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blushing or blenching. Polonius remarks of the First Player, ‘Look where he has not turn’d his colour / and has tears in’s eyes’ (2.2.457). The indication that the actor is skilled at his craft lies in his ability to call forth his own blushes. Unlike Hamlet, whose ‘native hue of resolution’ (red? black?) gets ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’, (white? 3.1.83–4), this player is in full control of his face, painting it with what emotional colour he chooses. Claudius must change colour involuntarily for Hamlet to be right about him. The irony, of course, is that both Hamlet and Claudius are performances, portrayed by even more skilful actors, who must conjure such colours in their faces in order for the audience to agree, along with Hamlet, with both Claudius’s guilt and in Hamlet’s convincingly ‘genuine’ emotions. The play is not only Hamlet’s crucible, but also his dye bath. If all goes well, it will function (al)chemically, catalyzing a physical colour metamorphosis in Claudius (which is also humoral), causing him to turn from sanguine red to phlegmatic white. In the early modern dyeing process, the fibre went through several different shades, changing colour more than once. Material dyed with Tyrian purple and crimson would appear mottled green in the vat, and only turned purple or red when it was taken out and exposed to the air. Woad and indigo produced a dark yellow colour in the vat; the blue was achieved when the fibre was exposed to oxygen. It was always risky, since the dyer would only know if the dye worked, and the mordant was strong enough for the dye to take once the fibre was exposed to the air. Since humours were associated with colours, and unbalanced bodily humours connected to excessive fluids in the body (black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm), perhaps there is more of a connection between dyes, ink and humours in the period than has previously been established. As regards Hamlet’s suit of sables, it was not until the mid-seventeenth century that black and white began to be considered extrachromatic, and only in the early eighteenth century, with Newton’s discovery of the prismatic spectrum,

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and his arbitrary designation of the seven colours of the rainbow, that people understood black as an absence of light and therefore a lack of colour, and white as all the colours of light.27 Michel Pastoureau has demonstrated the shift in book history from colour to black and white: medieval illuminated books and even simple brown and beige manuscripts were polychromatic, whereas the early modern printing press made black and white dominant colours.28 A fabric dyed black had to pass through several different coloured dye baths, layering red over green over blue over brown, until the fabric was so saturated and so dark that it appeared black. Therefore, Hamlet’s ‘inky cloak’ calls to mind multiple material practices: clothing, the many-staged dyeing process, writing and printing. All of these practices are connected in the image of his ‘inky cloak’ through references to gall, which, depending on context, could indicate the bitter bile produced by the liver or gall-bladder, general bitterness, poison, an appetite for revenge, and the tannin-producing oak galls used in dyes and ink. Other Shakespearean characters create more obvious puns on ‘gall.’ In Twelfth Night, Sir Toby urges Sir Andrew to write a fierce and vicious challenge to Cesario with ‘let there be gall enough in thy ink; though thou write with a goose-pen’ (3.2.41), suggesting that the letter will have a bitter and hurtful effect on its victim, as well as supply Sir Andrew with a bit more of the courage he so sorely lacks. In Cymbeline, Posthumous engages in a moment of imaginary bibliophagia, telling Imogen during their adieus, ‘I’ll drinke the words you send / Though ink be made of gall’ (1.1.101–2) And finally, when Lady Macbeth summons demons to unsex her, to ‘come to my woman’s breasts / And take my milk John Gage narrates this moment in the history of science from an art historian’s perspective in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (New York: Little, Brown, 1993), 153–76. 28 Pastoureau, Black, 119. Pastoureau compares polychromatic images from medieval illuminated manuscripts with black and white woodcuts and text from early modern printed books. 27

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for gall’ (1.5.45–6) she simultaneously calls for a blanket of sinister darkness to blot out her action: Come thick Night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoake of Hell, That my keene knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peepe through the blanket of the darke, To cry hold, hold. (1.5.48–52) It is thus no accident that Hamlet describes his cloak as ‘inky’, dyed as it was with the same caustic and bitter galls found in the darkest printing and manuscript inks. An ‘inky cloak’ is therefore also an inky coat or coating. By associating his black cloak with ink, Hamlet connects his dress to a parallel form of signification, the material practice of printing. Just as Hamlet’s black suit of woe can only weakly indicate the depth of grief he feels inside, so the glassy / glossy black ink of the early modern printed text repeatedly risks semantic instability. But this semantic precariousness is precisely what Hamlet thrives on, as he shifts the shape of his linguistic registers throughout the play, embodying the very instability of language and rhetorical dissimulation that his messy black inky cloak and antic disposition permit. A dye whose status improved markedly during this period was crimson, as faster access to kermes and cochineal made deep reds more accessible, and slightly more affordable. The phrase ‘dyed in grain’, which first appeared in the fifteenth century, originally meant dyed in colourfast crimson, though poets as early as Spenser began using the verb ‘ingrained’ to describe anything saturated with a fast colour unlikely to fade. Olivia’s reply to Viola’s piquant suggestion that at least some of Olivia’s face might be enhanced by cosmetics, is that her face is ‘in grain, Sir. ’Twill endure rain and weather’ (Twelfth Night, 1.5.227). Continuing her own witticism comparing her face to a veiled portrait, Olivia seems to be saying that the colours God – or she herself – has used are undetectable. Gertrude’s curious half-admission of guilt in the closet scene

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describes her interior self as dyed in grain: ‘O Hamlet speak no more: / Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul / And there I see such black and grained spots / As will not lose their tinct’ (3.4.97–100). Unaware of the dark interiority lurking under Hamlet’s inky cloak in 1.3, Hamlet’s no-longer-‘cold’ mother is forced to look inside herself. But ironically, all she sees there is another inky cloak. Is this her soul’s natural state or has Hamlet permanently dyed it with his accusation that she has sinned against her previous marriage? Has he dyed her soul with the colours of rhetorical persuasion, or has he merely bullied or ‘galled’ her with guilt? And what colour are these spots anyway, black or red? ‘Dyed in grain’ could mean either dyed with scarlet grain beetles, or dyed deep in unwoven wool with a colourfast dye. Perhaps they are both black and red: I am reminded of the ‘crimson’ moat of blood that circles Lucrece’s corpse, some of it ‘crimson’ and pure, and some of it stained black with her shame. Hamlet’s predilection for black also marks him as a melancholy aristocrat. As Pastoureau has demonstrated, black fabric was expensive and therefore highly desirable among the aristocratic males in early seventeenth-century Europe: ‘Until the mid-seventeenth century,’ he writes, ‘the famous “Spanish etiquette” triumphed everywhere. Black was part of this, as it had been part of the Burgundy protocol in the preceding century, all the more so because the emperor Charles V (1500–58), grandson of Mary and Maximilian, demonstrated a personal taste for this colour in all areas.’29 Although we can assume that Hamlet stays in black throughout the play, at least from his reference to his ‘inky cloak’ in 1.2 to his jokingly calling for ‘a suit of sables’ in 3.3, Hamlet’s dress changes when he assumes his antic disposition (which he describes as ‘putting on’, as if he were donning a cloak): from Ophelia’s report, he has unbuttoned his doublet and loosened his stockings, ‘down-jived to his ankle.’ If Burton is to be believed, this is the

Pastoureau, Black, 103.

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traditional garb of the melancholic. In early modern medicine, gall or bile was produced by the liver or the gall bladder, and early modern physicians generally understood it as bitter tasting and yellow in colour. But it could also be black like ink, and black bile in excess produced melancholy. Michael Bristol and Olga Valbuena have already connected Shakespeare’s use of ‘gall’ as bitterness and melancholy to the material oak galls used to give ink its black colour in the Sonnets.30 Valbuena connects the figure of the dark mistress to bitter ‘blotting,’ the nexus of ink, publication and betrayal, which ultimately unravels the poet’s intention to immortalize the fair youth in the first 126 sonnets. Bristol, on the other hand, reminds us that any early modern poetic invocation of blackness materialized as ink and gall must necessarily participate in a larger philosophical discourse of melancholy, which is a public performance. For Bristol, Hamlet performs melancholy, but Shakespeare publishes melancholy in the Sonnets. The Sonnets gain their power as experiments in materialized melancholy and in smudgy betrayal, by the poet’s activation of the space of the printed page through publication. But I want to suggest that Hamlet stages more than the performance of melancholy; it stages the performance of early modern language. What happens when ink, gall, melancholy and the blot take a more physical and animated shape, moving around the stage in Hamlet’s cloak? By drawing attention to the connection between his suit of sables and the smeary, volatile medium of ink, Hamlet gives us a glimpse into the metamorphic and fluid nature of early modern language in action. When Hamlet compares his true grief with the First Player’s artificially coloured grief, Hamlet’s grief diminishes Michael Bristol, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Publication of Melancholy’, in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe, eds Paul Yachnin and Bronwen Wilson (London: Routledge, 2009), 193–211; Olga Valbuena, ‘“The Dyer’s Hand”: The Reproduction of Coercion and Blot in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York: Garland, 2000), 325–46.

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in authenticity: ‘for it cannot be but / I am pigeon-livered and lack gall / To make oppression bitter’ (2.2.554–6). Here, ‘gall’ isn’t simply bile or bitterness, but a desire for revenge. In the following lines, Hamlet works himself into a frenzy with language, physically building up the bitter gall in his liver until he ends with a string of expletives and invective: ‘Bloody, Bawdy villaine, / Remorseless, Treacherous, Lecherous, kindless villain! O, Vengeance!’ (adds the Folio, 2.2.515–16). Over the course of this soliloquy, Hamlet shifts from wanting to change his colour at will, to being able to do so, summoning gall from deep in his bowels, pushing the words out into the physical soundspace of the stage. By the time the guests arrive at The Mousetrap play, Hamlet believes he has achieved his goal of internal and external colouring, manipulating the semantic instability of words into puns as he answers Claudius’s question as to how he fares. Hamlet’s response is to translate ‘fare’ (feeling) into ‘fare’ (food and drink), replying that he fares ‘of the chameleon’s dish’ (3.2.90), and eats the ‘air, promise-crammed’, turning the belief that chameleons sustained themselves entirely on air into a gibe at Claudius’s lack of ‘heir.’ In early modern England, chameleons were thought to be mercurial, transparent creatures that absorbed whichever colour was closest to them. As a chameleon, Hamlet allies himself with the actors and the performance they are about to see, announcing that he has mastered the protean art of rhetorical and physiological dissimulation.31 The word ‘gall’ appears in Hamlet five times (the only other Shakespearean play to use the term so much is Troilus

Chameleons were emblems of the protean aspect of nature itself and were frequently featured in cabinets of curiosities. See Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 298–303. Findlen cites the Dutch naturalist Isaac Schookius (1671), who compared the chameleon’s colour-changing to an actor’s role-playing, as well as Pico della Mirandola, who saw human nature’s adaptive abilities illustrated in the metamorphic nature of the chameleon. Findlen, Possessing Nature, 300.

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and Cressida, which has seven instances of the term). There is a lot of galling going on; the play seems to list the word’s full polysemia. Hamlet describes Gertrude’s eyes seduced too soon by Claudius as ‘galled’ or dominated: ‘ere yet the salt of most / Unrighteous teares had left their flushing / in her galled eyes; she married’ (1.2.154–6). And he sarcastically rejoices in The Mousetrap’s hoped for success in frightening Claudius: ‘let the gall’d jade winch: our withers are unrung’ (3.2.236). In the song that follows, Hamlet changes Claudius from ‘gall’d jade’ (a spooked horse) into a weeping ‘stricken deer’, whereas Hamlet is now its opposite, a fearless ‘hart ungalled’ (3.2.249–50). The inky gall that Hamlet has managed to conjure from his own emotions takes physical form in his inky cloak, performative form in his antic disposition, and linguistic and aural form in his repeated use of the word ‘gall’ in the play’s dialogue. The echoing of ‘gall’ twice after the end of The Mousetrap to describe Claudius’s lack of courage, and Hamlet’s excess of it, almost billows out into the play’s speech like an ink-splattered word on a page.32 Here Hamlet shows off his conjured gall, physically, vocally and emotionally. But as Horatio notes, this has gone too far, and Hamlet must reign it in: when Hamlet verifies the success of The Mousetrap by telling Horatio that he ought to invest in a full share of the theatre, Horatio dubiously responds with ‘Half a share’ (3.2.256). Unfortunately it is almost impossible to control the wayward fluidity of early modern ink, just as it is difficult for Hamlet to control the gall that he has awakened in himself. This leads to a number of mishaps, including Polonius’s death. It is not until the ghost arrives to remind Hamlet not to stray too far (like watery ink) from his purpose that Hamlet finally Impressed by the gravedigger’s wit, Hamlet intimates that the classes are mingling if a peasant is able to scratch a blister on his toe, or ‘gall his kibe’ (5.1.130) on the heel of a courtier. This unsettling image of galling as scratching, oozing and mingling reminds us not only of the wayward nature of early modern ink and language but also of the early modern argument that the printing press was common.

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manages to quell his billowing gall: ‘This visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose’ (3.4.100–1). The ghost describes Hamlet’s purpose as if it were a dull, edgeless knife. But quills, like knives, also had to be sharp in order to keep the ink from sliding and around smudging the page. If Hamlet’s purpose is a quill, with which he will write his revenge in gall, then it is time to blot the page and sharpen the quill, not to keep spattering ink everywhere. Throughout the play, Hamlet continues to worry about the precariousness of his desire for revenge. ‘Do not look upon me,’ he rebukes the ghost in Gertrude’s closet, ‘Lest with this piteous action you convert / My stern effects! Then what I have to do / Will want true colour, tears perchance for blood’ (3.4.123–6). It is as if the ghost’s imploring glance will ruin Hamlet’s dye, draining it of gall and therefore colour. This demonstrates that Hamlet’s gall itself is artificial, like a weak or non-colourfast dye, subject to leaking or fading. Like Lady Macbeth’s, it has to be conjured and repeatedly sustained. When Hamlet finally succeeds in his mission, he drives his point home by simultaneously stabbing Claudius and forcing the poisoned wine down his throat. Laertes has already associated his foil’s deadly tip with gall, punning on two meanings of gall as poison and intimidation: ‘Ile touch my point / With this contagion, that if I gall him slightly, / it may be death’ (4.7.147–9). In carrying out his revenge, Hamlet galls Claudius inside and out, while with his last two breaths he performs two metaphorical acts of inky inscription, writing a will and voting: Hamlet bequeaths his story to Horatio, and casts his ballot for Fortinbras. A final inking follows as Hamlet dyes, his silent pen finally at rest.

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5 Recasting ‘Angling’ in The Winter’s Tale J. A. Shea

In his 1893 book Shakespeare as an Angler, a clergyman and fishing enthusiast by the name of Henry Nicholson Ellacombe calls for readers to trawl the depths of Shakespeare’s plays for the words that got away. One elusive term was of special interest to Ellacombe, who writes, ‘[I]t is worth while to notice the way in which Shakespeare, and other early writers, use … “angle”; for the word has a curious history, and gives a good example of the way in which words rise, change their meaning and disappear.’1 The reverend then presents a selective etymology and sentimental analysis that indeed reaffirm the protean nature of language, but he achieves this goal as much by omission as by what he includes. Ellacombe explains that ‘angle’ derived from the AngloSaxon word for the hook on the end of a piscator’s line and later, by extension, came to name the rod, line and other

Henry Nicholson Ellacombe, Shakespeare as an Angler (London: Elliot Stock, 1883), 14. I thank Sara Coodin for introducing me to this book.

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tackle to boot.2 The word also functioned as a verb, meaning literally to fish or figuratively, as the author’s collection of ‘angling’ quotations by Shakespeare implies, to ensnare – though Ellacombe, following a long literary tradition of romantic defences of fishing, largely ignores the question of ‘angle’s’ association with corruption, trickery and criminality.3 His book, instead, focuses on Shakespeare’s knowledge of the pike and what he sees as the playwright’s nostalgic representation of fishing holes, the likes of which dappled the Stratford countryside of Shakespeare’s youth.4 Shakespeare may or may not have been ‘a brother-angler’, as Ellacombe imagines him.5 What we do know is that the playwright was adept at wielding ‘angling’ metaphors as well as tapping the word’s primary definition: the practice of fishing. Yet this chapter recasts ‘angling’ as a term that, for Shakespeare, meant more than fishing. ‘Angling’ was a word of considerable linguistic depth, and its dramatic weight, especially in The Winter’s Tale, warrants greater consideration. In this play the word ‘angling’, along with angling images, persons and activities, points outward beyond the play’s fictional world. References to angling suggest criminalized cozening practices that Elizabethan and Jacobean

Ibid., 15. I am thinking here of what is perhaps the most famous English treatise on angling, Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653) and also of John Dennys’s earlier work The Secrets of Angling (1613). Both texts present angling as a Christian and contemplative art, one which demands patience and wit and gives the angler the rare opportunity to experience the diversity of God’s natural wonders. See Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation (London, 1653). See also John Dennys, The Secrets of Angling Teaching, the Choisest Tooles Baytes and Seasons (London, 1613). 4 Ellacombe says, ‘Yet I think there is little doubt that he [Shakespeare] was a successful angler, and had probably enjoyed many a day’s fishing in the Warwickshire and Gloucestershire streams, to which he looked back with pleasant and refreshing memories while he lived and wrote in London’ (8–9). 5 Ibid., 5. 2 3

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legislation, antitheatricalist tracts and even cony-catching literature associated with theatrical role-playing and entertainment markets.6 Images of angling in the play gesture toward cultural fantasies about con artists, who were believed to operate not independently but as part of criminal associations. Ranked among these organized con men and women were linen thieves called anglers. Authors of cony-catching narratives, including Robert Greene, suggested that such thieves disguised themselves, lured people into lechery and stole bed sheets, occasionally selling them through brothels. In essence, anglers promoted a cycle of sullying both sheets and the social fabric itself. As well as indicating real social practices fictionally represented, angling in The Winter’s Tale also gestures inward, where it functions variedly in the dialogic world of the text. In The Winter’s Tale, angling is a source of chaotic energy and meaning making; it is a locus of slippery play that escapes reductionism. This chapter argues, however, that there is some logic behind angling’s extended metaphors. Angling is also a site of cohesion amidst a vast network of seemingly disconnected metaphors involving theatrical playing versus sexual playing; hospitable entertainment versus professional, sexual entertainment; and legitimate families versus criminal families.7 Shakespeare uses forms of the word angling only

I revisit antitheatricalist discourse and especially cony-catching literature later in this chapter. For the treatment of con artists in legislation, see England, and Sovereign Wales, An Acte for Punishment of Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdie Beggers (1598). This act criminalized wandering players along with masterless entertainers and con artists, classifying them together as rogues and vagabonds. 7 According to the OED, definitions of ‘entertainment’ in the period included: Def. 2a, ‘The action of maintaining persons in one’s service, or of taking persons into service. Also, the state or fact of being maintained in or taken into service; service, employment’; and also Def. 2b, meaning ‘wages’ or ‘pay.’ This and all subsequent entries are from OED Online (accessed 23 August 2013). 6

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four times in The Winter’s Tale but employs images that suggest angling throughout the play. By following images of angling as they appear throughout The Winter’s Tale and by placing them in the context of cony-catching literature written by Thomas Harman, Robert Greene and Thomas Dekker, this chapter pursues a threefold thesis. First, following the lead of Steven Mentz and Barbara Mowat, I suggest that the influence of Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets extends beyond the Autolycan subplot and that we should see these texts, along with Greene’s Pandosto, as informing the rest of the play.8 This chapter carefully considers the influence of other cony-catching authors as well as Greene, and it ventures into largely uncharted territory by arguing that angling is the specific criminal occupation to which Shakespeare gives much line. Second, I argue that Autolycus is more than the rogue that critics have rightly called him. He is the play’s foremost representative of the angler; and as the play’s structural middleman, he is the touchstone for other evocations of angling in The Winter’s Tale. Finally, in the tradition of B. J. Sokol, this chapter suggests that Autolycus contributes to what is, for the most part, a restorative structure to the play.9 However, diverging from this line of criticism, I argue that, more than his person, his practice – angling – takes on a mostly positive and increasingly self-reflexive trajectory over the course of The Winter’s Tale. Initially filthy, then clean if criminal, then life-giving if deceptive, angling comes to refer to the beneficial potential of Shakespeare’s theatre. See Steven R. Mentz, ‘Wearing Greene: Autolycus, Robert Greene, and the Structure of Romance in The Winter’s Tale’, Renaissance Drama 30 (1999): 73–92. See also Barbara Mowat, ‘Rogues, Shepherds and The Counterfeit Distressed: Texts and Infracontexts of The Winter’s Tale 4.3’, Shakespeare Studies 22 (1994): 58–76. Greene wrote six cony-catching texts between 1591 and 1592, and most critics suggest that it is Greene’s The Second Part of Conny-catching that most influenced the Autolycan subplot (Mentz, ‘Wearing Green’, 73n. 1; Mowat, ‘Rogues’, 61). 9 B. J. Sokol, Art and Illusion in The Winter’s Tale (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). 8

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Act 1: Leontes and the angler in con-texts After jealously imagining his wife ‘entertaining’ Polixenes, Leontes responds to Hermione as she prepares to retreat with her husband’s boyhood playfellow: HERMIONE If you would seek us, We are yours i’ th’ garden. Shall’s attend you there? LEONTES To your own bents dispose you; you’ll be found, Be you beneath the sky. [Aside] I am angling now, Though you perceive me not how I give line. Go to, go to! How she holds up the neb! the bill to him! And arms her with the boldness of a wife To her allowing husband! (1.2.178–84).10 Almost invariably editors either ignore the extended metaphor of ‘angling’ in this passage (Pafford, Blakemore Evans) or gloss it as the art of fishing used figuratively (Orgel, Snyder).11

Unless noted otherwise, citations from the play come from G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare, with corrections and additions (6th edn, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 11 See The Riverside Shakespeare; The Winter’s Tale, ed. John H. P. Pafford (London: Methuen, 1963); The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); The Winter’s Tale, ed. Susan Snyder and Deborah T. Curren-Aquino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Leontes, in the lines above, will rely on secrecy and cunning as did the early modern fisherman. In one of the earliest extant manuals on fishing, Juliana Berners suggests that ‘the fyrste and pryncypall poynt in anglynge’ is to ‘kepe ye euer fro the water fro the sighte of the fysshe: other ferre on the londe: or ellys behynde a busshe that the fysshe se you not’ (sig. H4v). See Juliana Berners, The Booke of Hauking, Huntyng and Fysshyng (London, 1518). The idea 10

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That Shakespeare is, on one level, referring to fishing and particularly unlawful poaching becomes increasingly clear as the metaphor crystallizes a few lines later. After watching Polixenes and Hermione exit arm in arm, Leontes adapts the image as he searches for cold comfort in a vulgar fantasy of universal betrayal. To him the linked arms of husband and wife (1.2.193) form a loose and illusive bond. Many a husband clings fast to his wife unaware that his neighbour’s pole is fishing her pond (1.2.185–207). Leontes’ monologues open up further when we consider yet another definition of ‘angle’, besides fishing and the curved hook used to do it. As it does now, angle then described other hooks, corners and bends. Aptly, this episode is filled with curvature and crookedness, from the imagined ‘bents’ (1.2.179) of Hermione and Polixenes, to hooked arms (1.2.183–4, 1.2.193), to ‘practiced’ smiles (1.2.116, 1.2.196).12 The metaphor of fishing and the hook works something like this over the course of the first two acts, though not precisely in this order: Leontes imagines his own wife to be an alluring and easy catch for Polixenes. He conceives of Polixenes as the crafty fisherman and thief who has snagged his wife – again, visualized gesturally in

that the fisherman should disguise or hide himself must have persisted into the sixteenth century, for Dennys advises wearing camouflage garments while fishing (sig. B5v) and Walton suggests that the fisherman ‘get secretly behinde the tree’ so that the fish don’t retreat in fear (p. 52). Leontes will also rely on the fish’s own instinct to retreat. Giving line describes giving fish the free play to tire themselves out – a technique used then and now, one facilitated nowadays by the drag mechanism. As Dent noticed, giving line was also proverbial for giving someone enough rope to hang himself (Orgel, Snyder). 12 See OED ‘angle’ Def. n.1.1–2: ‘fish hook,’ fishing ‘apparatus’, or 2. fig. someone or something that ‘ensnares like a hook.’ Def. n.2 describes ‘angle’ as, among other things, a ‘corner’, ‘vertex’ or ‘projection.’ See ‘Etymology’ on the word’s relationship to ‘ancient Greek ‘ἀγκών bend of the arm, nook, bend, angle, ἀγκύλος crooked, curved.’ While OED suggests that the English word didn’t come to mean bend or curve until the eighteenth century (Def. n.2.7), MED Def. n.2(c) demonstrates that ‘angle’ was used to describe curves as early as the fourteenth century.

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the hooked arms of Polixenes and Hermione. Using the terms and tools of ‘angling’, Leontes finds appropriate recourse (and perhaps revenge) by exchanging roles with Polixenes, recasting himself in the part of angler.13 This role reversal is emphasized by the line’s emphasis on I (‘I am angling now’). Through craft, Leontes will beguile and ensnare his prey – though circumstances dictate that he must seek a more accessible catch than Polixenes: ‘for the harlot king / Is quite beyond mine arm … but she [Hermione] / I can hook to me …’ (2.3.4–7). As one can see, Leontes’ portrait of an angler is hardly flattering, instead suggesting the crook and coward. Undoubtedly Shakespeare had fishing in mind when he summoned up angling in 1.2, especially when we consider the popular equation at the time of fish with ‘whores’, a category to which Leontes clearly believes Hermione belongs. It seems, though, there is another kind of angling at play here, one that has surprisingly gone overlooked. Angling also referred to a commonly discussed cony-catching practice whereby con artists fished for goods, especially sheets and clothes, in open windows and other vulnerable spaces. Though absent from the OED, the angler, who was also known as a ‘hooker’ or ‘curber’, is described in works on cony-catching by Harman, Greene and Dekker and later in the canting dictionaries of the seventeenth century. Harman in A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors (1566) writes: These hokers or Anglers be perillous and most wicked knaues, and … when they practise their pilfryng, it is al by night, for as they walk a day times from house to house to demaund charitie, thei vigilantly mark where, or in what place they may attayne to there pray, casting their eyes vp to euery window, wel noting what they sée ther, whether The metaphor of recasting, one which at once refers to fishing and acting, seems particularly apt here as Leontes is baiting Hermione and Polixenes, waiting for them to slip as he pretends to grant them a certain amount of latitude.

13

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apparell or linnen, hanging neere vnto the sayde wyndows, and that wil they be sure to haue [the] next night folowing, for they customably cary with them a staffe of v. or vi. foote long, in which, within one inch of [the] top therof is a little hole [b]ored through: in which hole they putte an yron hoke, and with the same they will pluck vnto them quikly any thing … thei may reach therwith, which hoke in the day time they couertly cary about the[m], and is neuer sene or taken out till they come to the place where they worke their feat.14 In his Second Part of Conny-Catching (1591), Robert Greene depicts the angler (whom he calls a courber or hooker) in similar terms, but Greene adds an explanation as to how anglers might have passed for honest citizens.15 In his ‘discovery’ of what he calls ‘the Courbing law’, Greene explains that the hooker’s nine-foot rod is ‘made with joyntes like an angle rod, and can be convaid into the forme of a trunchion & worne in the hand like a walking staffe.’16 Greene, Harman and Dekker suggest that angling was not a solitary practice (as fishing often was). Courbing, according to Greene, involved two persons: the ‘Hooker’ or ‘Courber’, and a ‘Warpe,’ who stood as lookout for the theft and stuffed the goods underneath a long coat.17 In The Belman of London

I cite here the 1573 edition of Harman’s Caveat. When possible, I have retained the original spelling, though for ease of reading I have modernized certain letters, bracketed above. See Thomas Harman, A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones (London, 1573), sigs. B4r–B4v. 15 Greene uses the term ‘angler’ throughout The Blacke Bookes Messenger Laying Open the Life and Death of Ned Browne One of the Most Notable Cutpurses, Crosbiters, and Conny-catchers, That Euer Liued in England (London, 1592). 16 See Robert Greene, The Second Part of Conny-Catching Contayning the Discouery of Certaine Wondrous Coosenages, Either Superficiallie Past Ouer, or Vtterlie Vntoucht in the First (London, 1591). 17 Ibid., sigs. E3v–E4r. 14

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(1608), Dekker writes that ‘Diuer[s]’, criminals very similar to Anglers, used young boys known as ‘Figgers’, presumably in the place of hooks. These Divers performed what Dekker calls their ‘iugling feats’ by hoisting young, light-of-hand figgers into windows where, in order to get inside, they often had to pick locks (a practice known commonly as the Black Art).18 In The Blacke Bookes Messenger (1592), Greene suggests that often the angler would use a female accomplice, who was usually the mistress of the male cony-catcher. This accomplice, or ‘wife’ as she was called, would play the role of the interested and available woman. Such wives would then sleep with and set up men, leaving their prey vulnerable to the angler’s hook.19 The practice of employing so-called ‘whores’ in these theatrical set-up schemes was called crossbiting.20 Greene’s cony-catching mouthpiece Ned Browne recounts a story of a crossbiting and angling operation thwarted. Ned’s wife, after making a compact with an angler, lures a man to bed, asking him to stay with her and whisper stories in her ear during the

Thomas Dekker, The Belman of London Bringing to Light the Most Notorious Villanies that are Now Practised in the Kingdome (London, 1608), sigs. G2v; G1r–G2v. Greene in Second Conny-Catching also mentions the ‘figging boy’ (sig. E4r). 19 In The Blacke Bookes Messenger see, for instance, ‘A merry [J]east how Ned Brownes wife was crosse bitten in her owne Arte’, sigs. D2v–D3r. 20 In A Notable Discouery of Coosenage, Greene defines the ‘Cros-biting law.’ He says, it ‘is a publike profession of shameles cosnage, mired with incestuous whoredomes’ where ‘base rogues … doth consent, nay constraine their wives to yeeld the use of their bodies to other men, that taking them together, he may cros-bite the partie of all the crownes he presently can make … that the world may see their monstrous practises.’ See A Notable Discouery of Coosenage (London, 1591), sig. D1r. See also the character Nan, a female cony catcher, in Greene’s A Disputation, Betweene a Hee Conny-catcher, and a Shee Conny-catcher (London, 1592). Nan says to a male cony catcher, ‘you know Laurence that though you can foyst, nyp, prig, list courbe, and vse the blacke Art, yet you cannot crosbite without the helpe of a woman, which crosbiting now adaies is growne to a maruellous profitable exercise’ (sig. C1r). 18

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night. Before sleeping, she convinces him to lay his clothes by the window. Waking up to use the chamber pot in the middle of the night, the man sees the window spring open and a hook enter. Surprised and sleepy, the man dumps the chamber pot out the window, drenching the angler in its contents. Before going back to bed he exchanges his own window-side clothes for the wife’s clothes, which are later that evening stolen by the half-drowned, yet persistent angler.21 As one might glean from Browne’s tale, angler accounts made for good fish stories. Harman’s five-foot pole becomes a nine-foot retractable pole in Greene, and the plight of Greene’s naked accomplice calls to mind an even more implausible story told by Harman in which an angler robs a man and two large boys of their sheets and also plucks their britches clean off their bodies: I was credibly informed that a hoker came to a farmers house in the dead of the night, and putting abacke a drawe windowe of a low chamber, the bed standing hard by the said window, in whiche lay thrée persons, a man and two bigge boyes: this hoker wyth hys staffe plucked of their garments which lay vpon them to kepe them warme, with the couerlet and shete, and left them lying a slepe naked sauing their shyrtes, and had away all cleane & neuer could vnderstand where it became. I verely suppose that when they were wel waked with cold, they surely thought that Robin good fellow, (according to the old saying) had bene with them that night.22 As well as telling stories of anglers in the act of stealing, courbing accounts described what ensued. After the sheets and other textiles were stolen, they were delivered to a fence, ‘either … a Broker or some bawd (for they all are

21

The Blacke Bookes Messenger, sigs. D2v–D3r. Harman, Caveat, sig. B4v.

22

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of one feather)’, writes Dekker.23 They were then resold by merchants, according to Dekker, and by ‘doxes’ according to Harman, doxy being another name for the cony-catcher’s mistress or a ‘prostitute’, according to the OED.24 These stories and descriptions give us a sense of how angling and related cozening operations were described figuratively as gaming or hunting practices and also as theatrical enterprises. As for the latter metaphor, there are costumes particular to the trade, scripts to be followed and nimble-fingered feats to perform, which authors represented as acts of legerdemain and juggling. We will recall, for instance, that Dekker depicts the handiwork of Divers as ‘juggling feats’; literally this meant the tricks of performing street magicians, but in the period ‘juggling’ had many diverse meanings, including the one intended by antitheatricalists who used it to describe the diabolical illusions of theatre.25 More importantly perhaps, the selections I’ve chosen underscore what these authors depicted as the reach of angling, from the extending rod to the spanning network of criminal associations that cony-catching authors claim to lay bare like the angler’s victim. Angling, these writers suggest, was not a solitary but a confederate operation, one involving many players and feeding into other markets. For instance, these authors link angling, along with other cony-catching practices, to the sex trade. From the seduction set-up to the circulation of tainted sheets on the black market, loose women and bawdy houses are implicated. We may notice too that the criminal associations these authors highlight are not only broadly social, but also figuratively familial. Crossbiting operations are carried out by accomplices called ‘aunts’ and ‘wives’, terms that were often synonymous with Dekker, The Belman of London, sig. G2v. Ibid.; Harman, Caveat, sig. B4v; OED, ‘doxy’ Def. n.1. 25 For more on juggling and its relationship to angling, see J. A. Shea, ‘The Juggler in Shakespeare: Con-artistry, Illusionism, and Popular Magic in Three Plays’ (PhD diss., McGill University, 2011). 23 24

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whores in cony-catching literature. In keeping with this language, Dekker describes angling as a kind of ‘husbandry.’26 He may be referring sarcastically to cultivation and crossbreeding, ‘industrial occupation’, economic management of a household, and other definitions of ‘husbandry’ in the period (OED). But there is, of course, a ‘husband’ at the root of ‘husbandry’, and by using the term he seems to gesture toward what emerges in cony-catching literature as the criminal antifamily: a broken household of scheming husbands, whoring wives and house-breaking boys. Turning our attention back to The Winter’s Tale, we see why angling is a fitting metaphor for Leontes and for Shakesepeare to employ. Angling, when understood as confederate and theatrical thievery, lends some coherence to the vast network of seemingly disparate metaphors in Acts One and Two and gives shape to Leontes’ anxieties as they ramblingly unfold. Leontes fears ‘playing’, both theatrical and sexual, and he uses theatrical metaphors frequently. It is, in part, Hermione’s playing that prompts him to act out his own roles from cuckold to angler to perhaps, I would suggest, Hamlet-like director. Leontes ‘giv[es] line’, stage directing Polixenes and Hermione to ‘Go to, go to’ (1.2.181) and adapting the scene before him to reflect his jealous mind frame. Leontes’ ‘line’ at once evokes the ‘play’ lines he will insert into the scene, the fishing line that will catch the fish, the blood line that hangs precariously in the balance, the clothes line from which thieves (like Stephano and Trinculo in The Tempest) stole apparel, and the rope lines on which anglers and other thieves met their end. More than Leontes fears Hermione playing around, he fears an organized ‘plot against [his] life, [his] crown’ (2.1.47) perpetrated by a web of professional tricksters and complicit audiences. Polixenes is a poacher who laughs with Camillo at Leontes’ misfortune (2.3.24). Camillo has been ‘pre-employ’d’

Dekker, The Belman of London, sig. G2r.

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by Polixenes and is ‘A federary with her [Hermione]’ (2.1.49, 90). Paulina ‘baits’ Leontes (2.3.93). And even unnamed characters are ‘whisp’ring, rounding’ (1.2.217) about his cuckoldry while Leontes helplessly stands by, ‘a pinch’d thing; yea, a very trick’ for others ‘to play at will’ (2.1.51–2). Leontes describes those around him as if they have participated in a nefarious ring of theft and sexual exchange. Polixenes is a ‘harlot king’ (2.3.4); Camillo is Polixenes’ ‘pandar’ (2.1.46); Paulina is a ‘most intelligencing bawd!’(2.3.69); and Hermione is ‘a [hobby]-horse’ (1.2.276) and overly-hospitable wife. As it does in cony-catching literature, ‘wife’ becomes, for Leontes, a word loaded with the suggestion of sex for sale and of thieving kinship networks. In the midst of rehearsing playing and angling scenarios, Leontes fixates on Hermione’s offering up of her arm to Polixenes ‘with the boldness of a wife to her allowing husband’ (1.2.183–4). Leontes here and in the scene that unfolds depicts a secret family that threatens to steal from and corrupt his line. Because Leontes fears scheming wives and thieving anti-husbands, and because they are summoned up alongside images of angling and sexual entertainment, we should reconsider Leontes’ curious comparison of Hermione’s sigh to the ‘mort o’ th’ deer’ (1.2.118). ‘Mort’ likely refers to the killing tune of a hunter’s horn, but in canting language a mort was a so-called ‘harlot’ and criminal accomplice.27 If we locate the play’s references to angling in the context of hooking teams and other criminal cohorts described by Greene and others, Shakespeare’s vast field of semantic possibilities opens wider; more delimiting interpretations give way to other potential meanings that are less accessible to modern readers but that Shakespeare and his audience may well have entertained. When Leontes looks at his boy’s skirts and envisions his childhood-self ‘unbreech’d’ (1.2.155–8), is he not beginning For musical definition, see Blakemore Evans, Riverside Shakespeare, n.1.2.118. The term ‘mort’ is used to mean ‘harlot’ throughout cony catching literature. See, for instance, Harman, Caveat, sigs. F1v–F4r.

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to imagine his adult pants plucked off by Sir Smile’s angling rod? Shakespeare was likely familiar with stories like the one mentioned earlier, of emasculating night visitors who penetrate windows and leave grown men pantless. More importantly, as I discuss further in the next section, we might see his preoccupation with his own sleeplessness and stolen and corrupted sheets as part of an extended angling reference.

4.3: Autolycus – The angler as middleman Trickery takes a turn in Act Four, the play’s structural centre. Suspicion begins to make way for good-natured confidence, despite the fact that deception is now real and not imagined. Autolycus, unlike Polixenes or Hermione, is actually a thief, a cony-catcher the likes of which Harman, Greene and Dekker describe. Autolycus is reminiscent of several trickster types. His strategy of feigning injury recalls the practices of Rufflars (who claimed to have suffered injuries in war) and Palliards (who opened up wounds on their legs with arsenic) (Harman).28 His adeptness at stealing wallets aligns him with ‘Foists’, or pickpockets (Greene).29 His claims to seek out some kinsmen (a scam dependent on the pretence of long-lost kin is where the term cozener comes from) calls to mind the Rogue (Harman).30 While Autolycus’s strategies affiliate him with many types of thieves, his preferred plunder and his word choice align him mainly with the angler. ‘My traffic is sheets’ (4.3.23), Autolycus announces, suggesting that he is a professional Harman, Caveat, sig. B1v, C4r. Greene, Second Conny-Catching, sigs. C3v–D2v. Greene suggests that foists are like nips, but use their hand to lift pockets rather than a knife to cut purse strings. 30 Harman, Caveat, sigs. B4v–C1r. 28 29

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angler securing his livelihood through pilfering and selling sheets and apparel. When Autolycus says he is a ‘snapper-up of unconsider’d trifles’ (4.3.26), he uses a phrase straight from Greene’s Second Cony Catching and Dekker’s Belman. Both Greene and Dekker call the spoils of Anglers ‘snappings’, a word which these texts associate exclusively with Anglers and their counterparts, Divers.31 Of course Autolycus’s traffic in sheets connotes more than fabric business. Autolycus is also involved in the sex trade, winning his clothes through ‘die and drab’ (4.3.26–7) – drab meaning a female sex worker or supposedly promiscuous woman. Perhaps he is the kind of middleman bawd whom Dekker describes as brokering for anglers, though this can only be conjecture. Finally, he is a theatre man and storyteller, donning various disguises and peddling unbelievable tales in the form of ballads. It is not surprising that critics including Richard Meek have compared Autolycus to the playwright who, in bringing us The Winter’s Tale, spins a far-fetched yarn and breaks more than a few dramatic rules.32 Autolycus with his traffic in sheets associates angling with playing (theatrical and sexual), just as Leontes does; but in the pastoral world, angling, playing and the connections between them re-emerge as comic, if still criminal. Singing of Spring’s rebirth, Autolycus awakens images of peering daffodils followed by thoughts of ‘dox[ies]’ and ‘aunts’ (4.3.2–12). The cheating family that Leontes dreams up, one with ‘allowing husband[s]’ (1.2.184) and whoring wives, reappears comically here as Autolycus describes his mistresses, presumably his

Greene says, ‘The Courber, which the common people call the Hooker, is he that with a Curbe (as they tearme it) or hooke, do pull out of a windowe any loose linnen cloth, apparel or other houshold stuffe what soeuer, wh[at] stolne parcells, they in their Art call snappinges’ (sig. E3v); Dekker, The Belman of London, sig. G2r-v. 32 Richard Meek, ‘Ekphrasis in The Rape of Lucrece and The Winter’s Tale’, Studies in English Literature 46, no. 2 (2006): 389–414. See especially 396–401. 31

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partners in angling, in beggars’ cant. Autolycus’s thoughts turn from doxies to other rousing images of Spring, including ‘a white sheet bleaching on the hedge’ (4.3.5). If Spring is the season of Florizel and Perdita, it belongs also to Autolycus. His affiliation with vernal (and venereal) trickery is suggested by both his list of descriptions and his subsequent wordplay of springe (trap) / Spring when he marks the gullible clown: ‘If the springe holde, the cock’s mine’ (4.3.35). Spring, it would appear, signals not only the renewal of nature but also of trickery. In other words, this is a season favourable for conycatching, a time of easy cocks and liftable linens practically growing on trees. Spring’s arrival also marks a more symbolic renewal of the imagination, as now Leontes’ sullied images of both con-artistry and sexuality begin to come clean. One image aired in Act Four is that of the freshly laundered sheet Autolycus covets. These call to mind the sheets mentioned earlier in the muddying accusations of Leontes against Hermione. With the appearance of Autolycus, the angler returns, stealing back and purifying the sheets so besmeared by Leontes’ imagination. The sheet as Autolycus describes it is bleached, we will recall, and though still associated with the paintedness of bawdry, it flags a movement toward more playful evocations of whoring specifically and less suspicious views of sexuality generally.

4.2, 4.4: By hook or by crook Another image partially reformed is the angling hook itself, taking the shape of a shepherd’s crook in the fourth act. This is not to say that the crook here is a radical counterpoint to Leontes’ hooks, that it is redeemed as an unequivocal sign of pastoral innocence, or even that it remains in the firm possession of herders. When Polixenes wields the sheephook as metaphor and perhaps as disguise, he underscores the crook’s paradoxical status in representation as well as its

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affiliations with angling. Like images of angling hooks, crooks sometimes came to stand in for ‘something that misleads’, deceives or seduces according to the MED.33 When Polixenes says of the shepherdess Perdita, ‘(I fear) the angle that plucks our son thither’ (4.2.46), he activates the crook’s more insidious cultural associations, including the tool’s resemblance to the cony-catcher’s gear. Crook and angle, shepherd and charlatan continue to merge when Polixenes recharacterizes his son. Florizel shifts from stolen property to angling affiliate when Polixenes recycles the metaphors he used to describe Perdita: Florizel is now ‘a sceptre’s heir, / That thus affects a sheephook!’ (4.4.420). Reminiscent of Greene’s anglers, Florizel dresses outside of his station and bears a hook.34 Of course, Polixenes’ angling plot is not just a cultural echo, but also an intertextual one. Both Leontes and Polixenes fear they have fallen victim to conspiratorial thievery and seduction, which they similarly describe in angling terms. In response, both men play out the hunted-turned-hunter motif as they take up an angle of sorts – Leontes, I suggested earlier, when he baits Polixenes and Hermione (‘I am angling now’), and Polixenes when he disguises himself – probably as a shepherd – in order to catch Florizel in the act of deception. At first sight, ‘angling’ here is ugly; it is a term cast as insult, and it is a theatrical role adopted to entrap. Looking closer, however, we see that subtle wordplay and the pastoral love plot sanction and even at times sanctify the practices of angling. Behind Polixenes’ depiction of Perdita as ‘angle’ is the nearhomograph ‘angel’, a word that David Garrick chose in place

MED, 4.c. Such connotations were striking counterpoints to the crook’s iconic status as a symbol of good guidance – Jesus is represented throughout the Geneva New Testament as both a fisher of men and a shepherd of lost souls, and our English words ‘pastor’ (Christian spiritual leader) and ‘pastoral’ (the genre to which play’s subplot belongs) come from the Latin ‘pāstor’, shepherd. See pastor, n and pastoral n. and adj. (OED). 34 The irony here is, of course, that Polixenes does the same thing. 33

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of ‘angle’ in his version of the play (Variorum).35 While this is likely an editorial corruption, ‘angel’ seems appropriate in the context of Camillo’s praises of Perdita, a shepherdess of ‘rare note’ whose reputation, like the angling hook, reaches far and wide (4.2.41–4). And the play of angle / angel makes sense when we consider how fishing and shepherding functioned alike, especially in the Bible, as metaphors for spiritual guidance.36 Bad angling is also made good in the play’s dramatic arc: the young lovers stealing away to Sicily is a precondition for finding the lost heir. And as Perdita herself learns, engaging in a theatre of deception is sometimes necessary. Disguised and bound for Sicily she admits, ‘I see the play so lies / That I must bear a part’ (4.4.655–6). Initiated by Autolycus and consummated by the lovers, Act Four’s complex resuscitation of con artistry and playing paves the way for angling’s reappearance in the fifth act.

Act Five: The angling of theatre In 5.2, three gentleman tell an angler’s tale: 1. GENTLEMAN The dignity of this act was worth the audience of kings and princes, for by such it was acted. 3. GENTLEMAN One of the prettiest touches of all, and that which angled for mine eyes (caught the water, though not the fish) was when, at the relation of the Queen’s death … she [Perdita] did, (with an ‘Alas!’), I would fain say, bleed

Furness, however, suggests this may be a printer’s error. See Horace Howard Furness, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Volume 11, The Winter’s Tale (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1898), 4.2.46–7. 36 See above, footnote 33. 35

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tears; for I am sure my heart wept blood. Who was most marble there chang’d color … (5.2.79–90) In the history of the play’s critical reception, the recognition scene, including this, the relation of Hermione’s death, has elicited charges that the playwright is being deceptive. For instance, Sir Quiller-Couch claimed that Shakespeare cheats us here,37 while recently in a more generous reading of the play, Richard Meek argues that Shakespeare exercises cunning by employing inherently deceptive narrative strategies like ekphrasis.38 The language of this passage appears to suggest that Shakespeare knowingly plays the con artist, that he is having fun letting the gentlemen steal the scene. Here Shakespeare arouses suspicions of criminal and conning practices, while at the same time he disarms them; this we see particularly in his alignment of angling with theatre. Not a person but theatre itself plays the angler. The scene that angles for our eyes and ears, one of bleeding tears and moving statues, recalls Catholic animation hoaxes, also cony-catching of sorts, the likes of which Reginald Scot describes in his Discovery of Witchcraft (1584).39 More

He remarks, ‘Are we not baulked? In proportion as we have paid tribute to the art of the story by letting our interest be intrigued, our emotion excited, are we not cheated when Shakespeare lets us down with this reported tale?’ (266). See Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, Notes on Shakespeare’s Workmanship (New York: Henry Holt, 1917). 38 See Meek, ‘Ekphrasis’, especially 393–5. 39 See both Reginald Scot’s (1584) and Nicholas Partridge’s (1538) account of the discovery of the mechanics behind the Rood of Grace, a statue of Christ that was said to have movable eyes and shed tears (Scot 137–8; Butterworth 124–5). See also Leo Koerner’s discussion of the Jetzler hoax at Bern, in which two Dominican monks supposedly made a statue of the Pietà bleed tears (146–7). Reginald Scot, The Discouerie of Witchcraft (London, 1584); Letter by Partridge rept. in Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 37

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than just summoning papist puppetry, the episode calls to mind antitheatricalist precepts inflected no doubt by residual beliefs in extramission and persistent beliefs in the transformative imagination. These ideas held that theatre had the potential to turn one to stone or to reach into audiences, transforming viewers through a spectacle that was both visual and tactile. For instance, Stephen Gosson (1582) in Playes Confuted writes that those who ‘gape vpo~ plaies’ are like men that ‘stare on the head of Maedusa & are turned to stones.’40 Gosson warns also that those same hardened audiences may become criminals; having learned lessons in criminality from the theatre, one day they ‘may priuately breake into euery mans house.’41 William Rankins in A Mirrour of Monsters (1587) suggests that Players are Satan’s ‘armes that stretch out [to] catch the people within the compasse of his chaine.’42 In The Winter’s Tale, we should notice that the episode under consideration is rendered both theatrically and tactilely. Perdita’s weeping is one of the ‘prettiest touches’ (5.2.82) in a moving ‘act’ (5.2.79) that reaches out and transforms its audience into likenesses of the spectacle beheld. By underscoring the tactile nature of a theatre with pretty touches, by associating a scene, which reaches out to touch, with angling, and by alluding to an audience once marbled, Shakespeare engages with both detractors of theatre and detectors of trickery. At the same time the scene recycles images deployed by Leontes, who in Act One plays, along with cuckold, the angler, the angler-catcher and antitheatricalist. If we take into account only this episode’s imagery and not its dramatic function, the scene appears to reaffirm anxieties concerning con-artist players and playing con-artists; such would seem to be a counterintuitive undercutting of the

Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted (London, 1582), sig. E7v. Ibid., sig. C7r. 42 William Rankins, A Mirrour of Monsters (London, 1587), sig. B2v. 40 41

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play’s redemptive scheme and of Shakespeare’s own theatrical practice. Rather than merely echo antitheatricalists like Leontes, however, the scene answers back with a difference. Angling as represented in Act Five may activate associations with criminal and conning practices, but it functions dramatically here as a positively-charged metaphor for the emotional hook of theatre. The rod’s re-rigging for beneficial effect reflects another stage in the resuscitation of the play’s earlier anglings. The practice of angling is employed insidiously by Leontes, entertained comically by Autolycus and invoked creatively here to suggest the life-renewing impact of performance. If the theatre leaves audiences petrified with wonder, it also quickens them. The play encourages us to read the transformed audience not as automated statues but as social beings, the warming of their empathy legible in their newly-sanguine hue. The Third Gentleman says, ‘Who was most marble there chang’d color’ (5.2.89–90). Theatrical angling is graced here with the power to bring stone to life. Thus, Shakespeare conditions us to embrace the play’s greatest deception: the illusion of Hermione’s death and the fact that Shakespeare nabs the Queen from the grave. *** This chapter aims to bring to the surface the lively play of angling in The Winter’s Tale. With an emphasis on close reading and an eye to socio-cultural and literary influences, I have looked at how words, practices and people invoking angling behave dialogically – both in specific textual environments and through those largely arbitrary structural divisions that critics of the play (including myself) tend to reinforce. I am proposing that Shakespeare is aware of and makes use of the word angling’s polysemic potential. I am suggesting that criminal angling in The Winter’s Tale speaks doubly: as a practice to watch out for and as one to embrace with greater confidence. And I am arguing that representations of angling in Shakespeare engage with detectors of criminality and speak also to a readership versed in the social language of thieves.

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What is at stake here in recuperating angling’s former meanings for a modern reader is both political and poetical. By examining crude articulations of angling in the period (like those made by Leontes) we might consider the possible ways in which imagined associations between ‘loose women’ and anglers came to influence our language now. Our slang word ‘hooker’, for example, is a term of unknown origin. Might we not consider that it derived from writings, like those by Greene (or Shakespeare), which implicate women in so-called ‘hooking’ operations? Shakespeare, especially through the character of Leontes, may have joined Greene in bequeathing us burdensome legacies, but Leontes has the final word neither on sexuality nor on angling. Shakespeare leaves us with an angling play of pretty touches, blushes and new life; angling exits as a complex and fertile metaphor promising to deliver more, if we pay it heed.

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6 ‘What may be and should be’: Grammar Moods and the Invention of History in 1 Henry VI Lynne Magnusson

It is time, that I did, Look a litle, into the Potential. FRANCIS BACON

And yet I would that you would answer me. MARGARET TO SUFFOLK, 1 HENRY VI

This chapter considers how the interplay in English of three grammatical moods or modes related to the Latin subjunctive form that are identified in Lily’s Latin Grammar contributed to the shaping of English history in the theatre as something beyond Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘bare was’ of indicative narration.1 Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 110.

1

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The subjunctive, the optative and (above all) the potential mood – that is, the mood known in English ‘by these signes, may, can, might, would, should, or ought’ – are all in evidence in the play I will focus on, 1 Henry VI.2 Sir Philip Sidney’s characterization of poetry as ‘borrow[ing] nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be’ but ranging into ‘consideration of what may be and should be’3 is not usually taken literally as suggesting a special role for the grammar of the ‘potential mood.’ Instead, it is taken metaphorically to gesture at the special character of fiction, at how literary mimesis (and by extension, we might imagine, theatrical representation) creates a hypothetical, projected or shadow world, or – from another perspective – a more substantial world of which the actual can be taken as the shadow. I ask whether the grammatical modes in Early Modern English historically associated with the Latin subjunctive played a role in creating a ‘what may be and should be’ to distinguish the theatre’s new kind of history. This is a chapter about that dreaded and generally avoided subject, grammar, and it argues that historical grammatical categories associated with Elizabethan schooling served as potent imaginative resources in Shakespeare’s and his collaborators’ early history-writing.

William Lily [and John Colet], A Shorte Introduction of Grammar (1567), introd. Vincent J. Flynn (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1945), sig. B3v. For a complementary articulation of the importance of grammatical mood in early Shakespeare, with examples from Titus Andronicus and Richard III, see Lynne Magnusson, ‘A Play of Modals: Grammar and Potential Action in Early Shakespeare,’ Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009): 69–80. Also treating grammatical mood in ways relevant to the interpretation of Renaissance drama or literature and influential on my approach are Alysia Kolentsis, ‘‘Mark you/ His absolute shall?’ Multitudinous Tongues and Contested Words in Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009): 141–50; Hugh Craig, ‘Grammatical Modality in English Plays from the 1580s to the 1640s’, English Literary Renaissance 30 (2000): 32–54; and Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 3 Sidney, Apology, 102. 2

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I will isolate four movements of 1 Henry VI and consider them as discrete ‘inventions’ or experiments in finding a grammar of mood suited to staged history. The authorship of this play is contested, and, in approaching it as a series of improvisations towards the discovery of historical drama in the ‘potential’ mood, I am not positing a single controlling authorial intelligence. Those persuaded by the arguments for multiple authorship set forth by Gary Taylor and Brian Vickers might well understand the four ‘mood’ experiments I distinguish as derived from as many as three or four different collaborators.4 Indeed, the four examples of mood experiment I have isolated – the battle scenes introducing Talbot and others in Act One, the invented Countess of Auvergne scene in Act Two, the battle scenes culminating in Talbot’s death in Act Four, and Suffolk’s wooing of Margaret in Act Five – come from sections of the play that Taylor has assigned to four different hypothetical collaborators, the first and third of whom he conjecturally identifies as Thomas Nashe and William Shakespeare.5 Even favourers of Shakespeare’s single authorship acknowledge a considerable degree of unevenness in this play’s composition rather than a fully unified effect. If they choose to regard my argument for four distinct tactics being tested out as consistent with Shakespeare’s own myriadminded habits of experimentation, there is still no necessity of regarding the linguistic choices made in the microcosm of the play’s speech action as matters of fully conscious deliberation. We need to formulate new ways of understanding how imaginative problem-solving and linguistic innovation may draw at times on unconscious cognition and nonetheless constitute a significant form of literary achievement.6 See Gary Taylor, ‘Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 7 (1995): 145–205; and Brian Vickers, ‘Incomplete Shakespeare: Or, Denying Coauthorship in 1 Henry VI’, Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 311–52. 5 Taylor, ‘Shakespeare and Others’, esp. 168–9 and 196. 6 Compare the arguments based on cognitive theory in Mary Thomas Crane, 4

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As we shall see, the first movement of 1 Henry VI, focused mainly on the siege of Orléans, relies heavily, and bathetically, on indicative was and shall. Even here we find a recognition that theatrical representation of the historical past necessarily differs from prose narration or historiography in that indicative was cannot be counted upon as a chief verbal resource. To stage the past, to bring complex historical action alive onstage in present moments, one must, paradoxically, cast it into the future. My three further examples explore ways of casting futurity not, as in Act One, as a bare indicative shall but instead in the ‘potential’ mood – treating the potential might of a subjunctive Talbot in the Countess of Auvergne scenes; creating and extinguishing possible futures in the scenes of Talbot’s and his son’s defeat; bringing different potentialities related to desire, obligation, will and compulsion into play where Suffolk woos Margaret as England’s future queen. All of these methods come into play in Shakespeare’s later history plays – plays, I am arguing, that gained some of their imaginative power from an engagement fostered in the Elizabethan schoolhouse with Latin grammar and its English translation. In comparison to the arts of rhetoric and oratory, the history of grammar is underexplored in relation to Shakespeare’s theatrical arts and dramatic representations. As sixteenthcentury English grammar-school boys, Shakespeare, his fellow playwrights, the more educated among his fellow players, and many in his audience would have passed through a stage of life when they were being drilled daily in their ‘accidence’, that is the Latin parts of speech and their inflexions. Learning the ‘accidence’ involved schoolboys in regular activities that were closely related to the work and skill sets of the theatre performer. As these activities are described by an educator like John Brinsley in his Ludus literarius, or The Grammar Schoole, they included memory work to learn a text (or, indeed, a ‘part’)

Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 18–19.

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so fully as to be able to recite it perfectly ‘without booke’, group rehearsal of parts as a reinforcement of understanding and memory work, vocal performance before a monitor or schoolmaster and assembled classmates, and deployment of memorized material in apparently improvised question-andanswer dialogue.7 It is commonly acknowledged that many Elizabethan players acquired acting techniques by way of the oratorical training of the grammar schools and school performances of actual plays.8 It is not, however, clearly recognized that the protocols internalized by boys in the earliest grammarschool forms (as young as seven or eight years) for perfecting the complex grammar-text or script ‘without booke’ would undoubtedly have contributed to the habitus or embodied knowledge of players so schooled. Admittedly the theatre of the Elizabethan classroom was not always the place of gentle reinforcement and group solidarity represented by Brinsley. There can be no denying what critics like Lynn Enterline have forcefully emphasized: the prevalent associations of grammarschool Latin – and especially the risk-filled difficulties of the noun and verb declensions – with regimes of brutal punishment.9 Indeed, we can find the modal categories of the verb quite specifically being evoked when Gabriel Harvey writes in Pierces Supererogation of a sadistic schoolmaster ‘that experimentally prooued what a rod [soaked] in lye could do with the curstest boy in a Citty; and founde the Imparatiue

John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, or The Grammar Schoole (London: Thomas Man, 1612), 53–70. See also the repeated accounts of recitation regimes in T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), for example vol. 1, 426. 8 John Astington, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time: The Art of Stage Playing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 38–47. 9 Lynn Enterline’s book, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), accents regimes of punishment as a key part of the theatricality of the Elizabethan classroom, a topic she brings to life in exciting new ways. 7

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moode a better Oratour, then the Optatiue.’10 But in other instances, Renaissance writers appropriated the terminology of modal categories as welcome expressive resources. Francis Bacon, for example, deploys it to structure and develop his proposal for a new British history to the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Egerton, Lord Ellesmere: ‘Thus much, if it may please your Lordship, is in the Optative Mood. It is time, that I did, Look a litle, into the Potential.’11 Before Prince Hal thought (or I imagine he did) ‘I may, I can’ and then pronounced ‘I do; I will’ (1 Henry IV, 2.5.439), before Richard Gloucester mused of King Edward, ‘He cannot live, I hope, and must not die’ (Richard III, 1.1.145), before the boy playing Olivia voiced desire for Viola in the words ‘I would you were as I would have you be’ (Twelfth Night, 3.1.133),12 before all these theatrical projections deploying English auxiliary verbs to contrast the indicative with the potential or optative mood, Elizabethan schoolboys in the thousands voiced and rehearsed the English words that gave meaning to their voicing and rehearsing of the interminable Latin verb declensions. A highly repetitive practice, they recited all the tenses and conjugations of the Latin potential with their English translations: ‘Amem … I maie or can loue’, ‘Amarem … I might or could loue’, ‘Amauerim … I might, would, should, or ought to haue loued’,

Gabriel Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, or a New Prayse of the Old Asse (London: John Wolfe, 1593), 118. 11 Francis Bacon, ‘A Letter, to the Lord Chancellor, Touching the history, of Britaine’, in Resuscitatio, Or, Bringing into Publick Light Severall Pieces of the Works, ed. William Rawley (London: William Lee, 1657), sigs. Ddd3v– Ddd4v (Ddd4r). The online Bacon Correspondence Catalogue (developed by Alan Stewart and Jan Broadway and based at the Centre for Early Lives and Letters, http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/bacon/baconindex.html) dates this letter to Thomas Egerton, Lord Ellesmere, 2 April 1605 (accessed 23 August 2012). 12 All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are cited from The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition, 2nd edn, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2008). 1 Henry IV, 2.5.439; Richard III, 1.1.145; Twelfth Night, 3.1.133. 10

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‘Amauissem … I might, would, should, or ought to had loued’, ‘Amauero … I maie or can loue hereafter.’13 Shakespeare’s early plays including the histories, as T. W. Baldwin made clear, repeatedly refer to specific elements of grammatical training and even quote from Lily’s Grammar, the one Latin grammar textbook authorized for use in English schools from the Reformation through the seventeenth century.14 Jack Cade, the rebel leader in 2 Henry VI, lambasts Lord Saye for corrupting ‘the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school’ and having ‘men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear’ (4.7.27–8, 32–4). Queen Margaret’s repetitive speeches in Richard III calling Queen Elizabeth a ‘sign of dignity’ and offering to ‘Decline all this’ (4.4.90, 97, emphasis added) make explicit use of the Grammar’s terminology, for schoolboys were quizzed about the ‘signs’ in English for the various Latin forms and the most frequent instruction issued would be to ‘decline’ a noun or verb. Her references would likely be all the more salient on the Elizabethan stage, being voiced by an adolescent boy-actor whom audience members would recognize as not long past the recitation of noun and verb declensions. Furthermore, such references in the drama of the early 1590s were by no means confined to Shakespeare. In Summer’s Last Will and Testament, Thomas Nashe, a likely collaborator with Shakespeare and other dramatists in 1 Henry VI, has his satirical character Will Summer professing himself like Jack Cade ‘[a]n open enemy to Inke and paper’ and ranting against repetitive educational regimes reinforced by harsh discipline: ‘Ile make it good vpon the Accidence body, that In speech is the diuels Pater noster: Nownes and Pronounes, I pronounce you as traitors to boyes buttockes, Syntaxis and Prosodia, you are tormenters of wit, & good for nothing but to get a

13 14

William Lily, A Shorte Introduction of Grammar, sigs. B4r–B4v. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Smalle Latine & Lesse Greeke, 1:557–80.

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schoolemaster two pence a weeke.’15 In a completely different vein, as we shall see later, Christopher Marlowe explicitly invoked the terminology of grammatical mood to characterize the ambitious determination of his imperial overreachers in Tamburlaine. Since schoolboys learning the ‘accidence’ were constantly quizzed about the ‘signs’ in English for the various Latin forms, the Latin lesson also supplied a wide-ranging initiation into early modern English grammatical forms. There is no doubt that distortions were created by the transfer of Latin’s synthetic (or inflexion-based) grammar onto the increasingly analytic vernacular language (registering distinctions by function words and word order). Nonetheless, one quality of their own English tongue that must have stood out as they encountered three overlapping mood categories – optative, potential and subjunctive, all signalled mysteriously in Latin by exactly the same subjunctive endings – was the suggestive variety of their English counterparts. We can see how the schoolteacher John Brinsley’s drill in The Posing of the Parts – intended to assist schoolboys in understanding and learning Lily’s definitions for the three different moods by heart – labours to sort this all out: Q. How know you the Optatiue? A. It wisheth or desireth. Q. What signes hath it? A. These signes: Would God, I pray God, or God grant. Q. What hath it ioined with it in Latine? A. An Aduerbe of wishing: as, vtinam Amem, God grant I loue. Q. How know you the Potentiall Moode? A. It sheweth an abilitie, will, or duetie to doe any thing. Q. What signes hath it?

15 Thomas Nashe, A Pleasant Comedie, called Summers Last Will and Testament (London: Water Burre, 1600), sig. G3v.

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A. May, can, might, would, should, ought or could: as, Amem, I may or can loue. Q. How differs it in Latine from the Optatiue and Subiunctiue, seeing how they haue all one termination? A. Because it hath neither Aduerbe nor Coniunction ioined with it.16 The subjunctive mood proper as labelled in Lily (sometimes called the conjunctive) would most likely have made the least imaginative mark on young Elizabethans’ understanding of English. It was defined in purely formal terms, as having ‘evermore some Conjunction joyned with him: as “Cum amarem, When I loved”, and it is called the Subjunctive mode, bicause it dependeth of an other verbe in the same sentence, either going afore, or comming after: as “Cum amarem eram miser, When I loved, I was a wreatche.”’17 In this example, the equivalent in English is actually a verb in the indicative. This is not to say that early modern English did not have a separate subjunctive form, used at times in hypothetical and counterfactual ‘if’ clauses, but Lily’s grammar would have done nothing to identify that English verb form or to associate an imaginative dimension distinct from the potential with this category. The optative was, on the other hand, defined by function (wishing or desiring) as well as form (following vtinam). This chapter will focus more attention on the ‘potential’ than the optative mood, but Shakespeare and his (educated male) audience members would easily recognize the optative as the key mood of prayers and curses, a speech mode exploited in Richard III when Queen Margaret’s repetitive use of it constructs an imaginative world in which her speech acts lay claim to a power or force she lacks in the actual world.

John Brinsley, The Posing of the Parts (London: Thomas Man, 1612), sigs. E4r–v. 17 Lily, Shorte Introduction of Grammar, sig. B2v. I have modernized i/j and u/v. 16

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While we often use the term ‘subjunctive’ to gesture at a hypothetical realm, for the educated Elizabethan it was the more evocative ‘potential mood’ that most readily signalled the kind of alternative reality gestured at when Sidney distinguishes the poet’s ‘what may’ or ‘should be’ from the historian’s ‘bare was.’ Unlike the optative, a longstanding grammatical category identified in the earliest extant Greek grammar of Dionysius Thrax, the potential mood was only introduced into the Latin grammar in the first decade of the sixteenth century by the Englishman, Thomas Linacre.18 Linacre’s Renaissance innovation – creating this system of three closely related moods in Latin all formally identical – would not stand up to the scrutiny of modern-day linguists like F. Th. Visser, who insists that ‘a linguistic description must be based either on form or on function (meaning), but not on both simultaneously.’19 Nevertheless, it had the effect of highlighting a very interesting development in the vernacular language. As schoolboys traced the possible variations upon this ‘potential’ mood of loving (for the verb ‘amo, amare’ served as the principal example for verbs in Lily) through every imaginable tense and voice, variations that filled up pages of Lily’s grammar, they would have gathered out of the exercise a very full acquaintance with the developing range of English modal auxiliary verbs and their own language’s resources for setting forth what the Latin grammarian Priscian had called the ‘inclinations of the mind.’20 As I have previously discussed in ‘A Play of Modals’, the fourth and most accomplished play in Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy, Richard III, also exploits the potential mood to suggest, in keeping with Aristotle on the trajectory Ian Michael, English Grammatical Categories and the Tradition to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 114–15. 19 F. Th. Visser, ‘The Terms “Subjunctive” and “Indicative”’, English Studies 36 (1955): 205–8, esp. 205. 20 See Michael, English Grammatical Categories, 114, and Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, 125–6. 18

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of dramatic plot, the creation, at its outset, of multiple possible worlds (or states of affairs) and then, by its finale, of the illusion of a necessary state of affairs. The initial speech patterns of Richard Gloucester, the internal plotmaker in Richard III, initially highlight the potential mode, in catachreses like ‘He cannot live, I hope, and must not die’ (1.1.145, emphasis added) and in dizzying word play on grammatical ‘signs’ like ‘may’: ‘What may she not? She may – ay, marry, may she’ (1.3.98, emphasis added). This chapter asks if we can see a similar focus on grammatical moods in the earlier composition that is more usually associated with Shakespeare’s apprenticeship, and often also with collaborative authorship, 1 Henry VI.

‘How would it have ioyed brave Talbot’ 1 Henry VI may seem like an unlikely place to look for a sophisticated play of grammatical mood. Indeed, what a close look at verbs in the early movement of the play discovers is a kind of pedestrian allegiance to the bare indicative of chronicle history. In a strangely reflexive moment when the French have been beaten back near Orléans, the Duke of Alençon makes explicit reference to history as a matter of record that even their patriotic spirit cannot gainsay: ‘Froissart, a countryman of ours, records / England all Olivers and Rolands bred / During the time Edward the Third did reign’, and he claims this to have been ‘now … verified’ in the skirmish (1.3.8–11). While we would imagine that a play whose plot turns on warring armies and warring factions must inevitably stage a competition between alternative or potential futures, this does not initially appear to be imaginatively realized in the microcosms of the language. Instead, we find characters talking to themselves and to others in odd report-like ways about what is happening or what they expect to occur and

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little in the way of what I would call ‘potential action’, hypothetical projections based on characters’ assessments of what they want, what is possible, what resists them, what they might have power to effect.21 ‘Valiant’ Talbot’s deeds are first introduced into the play in the past tense of historical narration, when a messenger arrives at Westminster Abbey to ‘inform’ the English lords ‘of a dismal fight … wherein Lord Talbot was o’erthrown’ (1.1.105–8). Then, when we first meet Talbot, newly released from prison, he is spurred by Salisbury’s instruction, ‘Discourse, I prithee, on this turret’s top’ (1.6.4), to provide a report in the past indicative on the circumstances of his own prison sojourn and release. A similar indicative style for recording ongoing action occurs in the present tense, as in Talbot’s description of action before Orléans: ‘A woman clad in armour chaseth men. / Here, Here she comes’ (1.7.3–4). Similarly, after the same skirmish, Joan in turn reports, ‘Rescued is Orléans from the English’ (1.8.2). Even more curiously, both sides tend to report intended action in the future indicative, as if uncertainty and supposition have no part in projecting futures: And here will Talbot mount, or make his grave. Now, Salisbury, for thee, and for the right Of English Henry, shall this night appear How much in duty I am bound to both. (2.1.34–37; emphasis added) The alternating future indicatives of the French and English combatants contribute to an effect in the war scenes of sudden and unprepared reversals. Still, the future indicative can never simply show ‘a reason true or false’,22 as Lily’s Grammar defines the role of the indicative; the future being always uncertain, will and shall must inevitably project some modal

Magnusson, ‘A Play of Modals’, esp. 79–80. Lily, Shorte Introduction of Grammar, sig. B2v.

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element of wishing or hoping or possibility that allies them to the optative or the potential mood. Indeed, this is what makes Tamburlaine’s praise of Theridamus’s shall in Marlowe’s play so outrageous, when he self-consciously comments on grammatical mood and vaunts the match of will and shall to his project of world domination: Well said, Theridamas, speak in that mood, For Will and Shall best fitteth Tamburlaine, Whose smiling stars gives him assurèd hope Of martial triumph ere he meet his foes. (1 Tamburlaine, 3.3.40–3)23 The oxymoron ‘assured hope’ accents Tamburlaine’s audacity and overreaching as he takes ownership of a pure future indicative, giving dramatic motivation not to the ‘bare was’ of history but the unqualified shall of prophecy, revelation or divine foreknowledge. 1 Henry VI is an uneven play, and, even if its bare and somewhat lame indicatives disappoint in this early movement, we need to ask how it achieved, for its first audiences, the extraordinary effect that Thomas Nashe claimed in 1592 in Piers Penilesse for the onstage triumph of Tamburlaine’s warrior counterpart, Lord Talbot. Nashe celebrates Talbot’s staged resurrection in terms closely allied to Sidney’s celebration of poetry’s subjunctivity, inventing his own subjunctive or hypothetical scene in which the long dead Talbot contemplates and responds to his own theatrical representation: How would it haue ioyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and haue his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten

Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. Joseph Sandy Cunningham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), Part One, 3.3.40–3.

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thousand spectators at least (at seuerall times), who in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.24 Here, in one of the earliest examples of Shakespeare criticism, we have a critic vividly distinguishing the theatre’s representation of the historical person from his representation in the ‘English Chronicles’ or in ‘worm-eaten bookes.’25 It is, of course, conceivable that the effect Nashe articulates derives primarily from the powerful onstage presence of the great tragic actor who played Talbot, probably Edward Alleyn.26 But the question I am raising here is whether there is anything in the play’s deployment of grammatical mood that is answerable to Nashe’s evocation of poetic history as this powerfully moving ‘speaking picture.’27

Subjunctive Talbot: Substance and shadow My answer is that the subjunctive mood of Talbot’s encounter with the Countess of Auvergne in Act Two, Scene Three self-reflexively foregrounds and explores this issue of how dramatic poetry can create a separate and superior reality. In an invented episode not deriving from Hall or Holinshed, the Thomas Nashe, Piers Penilesse his Supplication to the Diuell, in Works, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904), vol. 1, 149–245, esp. 212. 25 Ibid., 212. 26 There is some controversy about this definition. On Alleyn, see Michael Taylor, ‘Introduction’, Henry VI, Part One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4; on Richard Burbage as a candidate, see Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 14. 27 If Gary Taylor’s attribution of Act One to Nashe is valid, then (ironically) Nashe himself is the one collaborator who does not contribute significantly to the invention of history in the potential mood in this play that I am arguing for. 24

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French Countess invites the warrior who has just conquered Orléans to visit her castle, on the pretence that she wants to boast of having ‘beheld the man / Whose glory fills the world with loud report’ (2.2.42–3). When he arrives, apparently letting down his guard at a ‘lady’s courtesy’ (2.2.58), she declares him her prisoner, only to be foiled in her attempt to become ‘famous … by this exploit’ (2.3.5) by the fact that Talbot has protected himself against this contingency by ensuring that a company of English soldiers is within hearing of a loud blast on his horn. In one sense, it would seem to be merely a scene in which the Frenchwoman’s trickery is countered by the English hero’s superior trickery, but the language of the interaction transmutes the simple plot devices into something far more interesting. Talbot’s representation in this episode tests not only the French Countess’s courtesy but also the adequacy of the bare indicative to articulate or contain the potent representations of the theatre’s historical persons. First of all, in contrast to the battles anticipated simply by the competing future indicative projections of the opposing camps, this episode deploys the subjunctive or, more specifically, the potential mood and the auxiliary periphrasis that is its expression in early modern English to prepare (or set the ‘mood’) for the encounter: MESSENGER All hail, my lords! Which of this princely train Call ye the warlike Talbot, for his acts So much applauded through the realm of France? TALBOT Here is the Talbot. Who would speak with him? MESSENGER The virtuous lady, Countess of Auvergne … By me entreats, great lord, thou wouldst vouchsafe To visit her poor castle where she lies, That she may boast she hath beheld the man

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Whose glory fills the world with loud report. (2.2.34–43, emphasis added) Indeed, this exchange (‘Here is the Talbot. Who would speak with him?’) marks an interplay of the indicative and potential moods signalling the announcement of a change in mood in the invented episode at the Countess’s castle. A change in key is also signalled by the Duke of Burgundy’s metadramatic suggestion that the woman’s desire to orient the hero’s action changes the dramatic genre: ‘Nay, then I see our wars / Will turn unto a peaceful comic sport, / When ladies crave to be encountered with’ (2.2.44–6). When the scene shifts to the lady’s castle, the Countess expresses her wishful projection of the encounter by way of a hypothetical condition and the optative mood: COUNTESS The plot is laid. If all things fall out right, I shall as famous be by this exploit As Scythian Tomyris by Cyrus’ death … Fain would mine eyes be witness with mine ears, To give their censure of these rare reports [of Talbot’s feats]. (2.3.4–10, emphasis added) But it is when Talbot enters that the scene’s remarkable contrast between alternative planes of reality – the apparent facticity of the indicative and the truth-telling supposition of the subjunctive – is fully played out in the complex interrogation of Talbot’s identity. In Shakespeare’s mature play, Troilus and Cressida, we have the actors representing the great heroes and personages of the Trojan war repeatedly greeted with paradoxical identifications, variations on ‘this is and is not’ Ajax, Hector or Cressida.28 Something similar See, for example, the identifications and misidentifications of Trojan heroes in Troilus and Cressida,1.2, including comments like ‘Troilus is Troilus’ (1.2.61) and Troilus’s comment in 5.2 when observing Cressida with Diomedes that ‘This is and is not Cressid’ (5.2.146).

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occurs with this scene’s initial denial and then ‘subjunctive’ affirmation of Talbot’s identity. It works to interrogate the conditions of theatrical representation, whereby no actor on the bare Elizabethan stage – not even a great tragedian like Edward Alleyn – can be a fully convincing stand-in for ‘valiant Talbot’, ‘the scourge of France.’ When the messenger announces Talbot’s arrival, the Countess questions whether the actual figure who stands before her can be the authentic Talbot: COUNTESS What, is this the man? MESSENGER Madam, it is. COUNTESS Is this the scourge of France? Is this the Talbot, so much feared abroad … ? I see report is fabulous and false. I thought I should have seen some Hercules, A second Hector … It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp  Should strike such terror to his enemies. (2.3.13–23, emphasis added) Talbot offers to leave, claiming ‘she’s in a wrong belief’ so he goes ‘to certify her Talbot’s here’ (2.3.30–1), and then the scene’s central dilemma is communicated in the Countess’s response as a competition between subjunctive and indicative moods: ‘If thou be he, then art thou prisoner’ (2.3.32). Talbot laughs, and then he articulates in a riddling language of ‘here’ and ‘not here’, ‘shadow’ and ‘substance’, how literary representation in the subjunctive mood can create a realer Talbot than the shrivelled figure of the stage actor, the static picture of him that hangs in the Countess’s gallery, or even the actual Talbot were he standing on stage – that is, a Talbot as what might or should be:

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TALBOT No, no, I am but shadow of myself. You are deceived; my substance is not here. For what you see is but the smallest part And least proportion of humanity. I tell you, madam, were the whole frame here, It is of such a spacious lofty pitch Your roof were not sufficient to contain’t. COUNTESS This is a riddling merchant for the nonce. He will be here, and yet he is not here. How can these contrarieties agree? (2.3.50–9; emphasis added) In plot terms, the contrarieties are resolved by the appearance of Talbot’s soldiers, but the grammatical subjunctive is deployed to harness the audience’s imagination and to amplify the capacity of theatrical representation to persuade that its shadow world is substantial. This episode builds a situation where declarative report, glimpsing at shadows, ‘is fabulous and false’, and ‘substance’ is to be discovered in such theatrical potentialities as can be articulated with the help of subjunctive and potential moods.

Would but cannot: Tragic potential and plot trajectory in Talbot’s downfall In direct contrast to the clashing shalls of Act One, the scenes of Talbot’s defeat and death in Act Four, Scenes Two to Seven (scenes regularly assigned to Shakespeare’s authorship) tap into a complex play of possibility afforded by the English language’s resources for the potential mood. It is commonplace to suggest that Shakespeare borrows from other genres to structure his mature history plays, adapting elements of

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tragic form in Richard II and elements of comic form in Henry IV, Part One. Not recognized, however, is how the strategic deployment of grammatical mood at the microcosmic level of speech action can sketch out a tragic or a comic plot trajectory or how the trajectory of the speech action in 1 Henry VI tests out a tragic arc in Act Four’s defeat of Talbot and then a comic arc in Suffolk’s wooing of Margaret. Lord Talbot, appearing with army and trumpeter before Bordeaux, sounds a parley with the French general and sets forth his preferred and dispreferred projections of future action: ‘English John Talbot, captain, calls you forth, / Servant of arms to Harry King of England / And thus he would’ (4.2.3–5). The future projection he offers in the positive, what ‘he would’ is their humble surrender; the grim alternative, his ‘But if’, is ‘Lean famine, quartering steel, and climbing fire’ (4.2.9, 11). The dramatic encounter that follows is not merely a matter of stage action – of drums, trumpets, artillery and clashing swords. The general’s verbal response sets up a collision of modals: set against what Talbot would is the challenge that he cannot – ‘On us thou canst not enter but by death’ (4.2.18). In contrast to the Countess of Auvergne’s judgement on seeing Talbot that ‘report is fabulous and false’, Talbot hears the general’s challenge to his own construction of futurity, reinforced by ‘the Dauphin’s drum, a warning bell’, as substantial: ‘He fables not’ (4.2.39, 42). As with the other episodes in 1 Henry VI where I am arguing that the playwrights improvise in the potential mood to create contested futures, there is other strong evidence for strategic shaping of material from English chronicle history. Peter Saccio emphasizes Shakespeare’s revision of his source material as he conflates events from other campaigns to ‘arrange for this defeat to result from the domestic antagonisms of the English.’29 Shaping plot in microcosm as well as macrocosm, in the scenes

Peter Saccio, Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama (2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 109.

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of the English nobles’ betrayal of Talbot, Shakespeare deploys modal verbs to pick up and ring variations on the drama of contested futures. Against what should be, Richard Duke of York and the Duke of Somerset set forth fables of disability. In Scene Three, York blames Somerset, claiming that he is ‘louted by a traitor villain / And cannot help the noble chevalier’ (13–14) and shutting down any imagination of alternative possibilities: ‘No more my fortune can / But curse the cause I cannot aid the man’ (43–4, emphasis added). In the next scene, Somerset reiterates this miniature narrative of disability: ‘It is too late, I cannot send them now’ (4.4.1). When Sir William Lucy arrives, disgusted with the noblemen’s inaction and offering news of how seriously Talbot is beset, a debate ensues over what should and might have been: ‘York should have sent him aid’ and ‘might have sent’ Somerset protests, while Lucy presses the case that ‘the fraud of England, not the force of France’ has entrapped Talbot, predicting ‘Never to England shall he bear his life’ (38). A subtle shift is occurring, with verbs signalling potentiality increasingly cast in the past tense (‘might have sent’) to mark the frustration of Talbot’s hope and closing down of possibility. The scene’s climax captures Talbot’s plight by foregrounding a tragic play of potentiality in modal wordplay: ‘He is ta’en or slain, / For fly he could not if he would have fled, / And fly would Talbot never, though he might’ (42–4, emphasis added). The tragic trajectory of the remaining action closing in on Talbot’s and his young son’s deaths is also crafted in the potential mood. The young son is brought into the action to open up a new arc of possibility, projecting the fresh hope ‘That Talbot’s name might be in thee revived’ (4.5.3) to intensify the tragic element of its extinction. Once Talbot expresses the hope that John will escape to preserve his life and Talbot’s name, the tragic conflict between and within them is foregrounded in stichomythic dialogue pitting the potential against the future indicative mood: ‘TALBOT: Part of thy father may be saved in thee. / JOHN: No part of him but will be shamed in me’ (4.5.38–9). When the final defeat comes and English soldiers lay John’s body in dying Talbot’s arms,

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the hero’s last words succinctly register the extinction of future possibility by merging the potential and indicative moods: ‘I have what I would have, / Now my old arms are young John Talbot’s grave’ (4.7.31).

I would, I can’t, I may, I shall: Suffolk’s comic potential The other key scene where an English mood related to the Latin potential mood is brought into imaginative prominence is also an interpolation to Hall’s historical account of this reign – an invented scene involving a complicated encounter with a French woman and a debate over suppositious bondage. Upon the defeat of the French forces before Angiers, the Earl of Suffolk takes Margaret of Anjou prisoner, announcing, in words that echo the Countess of Auvergne’s, ‘Be what thou wilt, thou art my prisoner’ (5.5.1). Very quickly, however, as Suffolk’s desire is sparked by Margaret’s beauty, a situation develops whereby, in the words Prospero will use, years later, of Ferdinand and Miranda’s first encounter, ‘[T]hey are both in either’s powers’ (The Tempest, 1.2.454). This wooing episode dramatizes an unsettling of possible futures, both the personal future and trajectory of selfhood for Suffolk and Margaret and the political future of England as Suffolk switches gear and woos not simply for himself but for his king. What is skilfully played out in the language or microcosm of the encounter is a kind of action seldom previously explored in this play, and little explored in Shakespeare criticism, but ultimately crucial to dramatic form – that is, potential action, projections of and conflicts over what might or can be, what may or ought to be. Indeed, this scene turning on Suffolk’s debate with himself, expressed as a competition among the plurality of English signs for the potential mood, makes it clear how the linguistic realization in early modern English of ‘potential’ action contributes at once to effects of plot complexity (foregrounded

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with a tragic accent in Act Four) and of character complexity (foregrounded with a comic accent here). The linguistic key to the creation of an effect of character complexity or inner psychology in this scene is somewhat bizarrely highlighted in its punning on ‘wood.’ As Margaret comments after an extended passage in which Suffolk has been present with her but talking to himself, oblivious to her repeated questions about ‘[w]hat ransom’ she ‘must’ pay (5.5.33): MARGARET And yet I would that you would answer me. SUFFOLK [aside] I’ll win this Lady Margaret. For whom? Why, for my king – tush, that’s a wooden thing. MARGARET [aside] He talks of wood. It is some carpenter. (5.5.43–6; emphasis added) In her first remark, Margaret echoes Suffolk’s language, and the punning interplay on ‘wood’ (as in trees) and ‘wooden’ (as in dull, blockish or inert) is triggered by the word Suffolk has been repeating over and again throughout his monologue, one of the key words referred to in Lily’s grammar as a ‘sign’ for the potential mood – that is, the English modal auxiliary verb, would. Indeed, in keeping with the sometimes overly ingenious wordplay that the play’s editor, Michael Taylor, critiques as apprentice enthusiasm,30 the scene’s punning even associates ‘would’ – the modal verb – not only with ‘wood’ but also with ‘wooed’ – the complex speech act or social speech genre of courtship, a mainstay of the comic genre. Suffolk’s debate with himself about wooing Margaret is choreographed

Michael Taylor, ‘Introduction’, 67.

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to proceed through a complex interplay or competition among the variegated signs in early modern English for the potential mood. The trajectory of Suffolk’s self-debate moves through would woo – a sign at once of volition and uncertainty: [Aside] I have no power to let her pass. My hand would free her, but my heart says no. (5.5.16–17) … Fain would I woo her, yet I dare not speak. (5.5.21); to can or (more specifically in this situation) can’t – a sign of ability or power: How canst thou tell she will deny thy suit Before thou make a trial of her love? (5.5.31–2) … Fond man, remember that thou hast a wife; Then how can Margaret be thy paramour? (5.5.37–8); to may – a sign of permission or possibility: And yet a dispensation may be had. (5.5.42) … I’ll win this Lady Margaret … for my king … Yet so my fancy may be satisfied. (5.5.44–5, 47); and finally beyond potential to resolution: It shall be so, disdain they ne’er so much. Henry is youthful, and will quickly yield. (5.5.54–5) Here, the playwright has discovered how a competition among the English modal auxiliary verbs can articulate inner conflict and mental deliberation within a single character, or a struggle of wills between two or more characters, as the opposing claims of volition, ability, obligation, possibility and power are played out among the various English signs for the potential mood. It is important to recognize that while this interplay is an expressive resource that may have been suggested by Lily’s Latin grammar, it is a resource that Shakespeare and his fellow poets discovered in the English language. It is not available in Latin’s grammar of inflexions. As noted earlier, in Latin the optative, subjunctive and potential mood are all covered

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by one unvaried ‘termination.’ But more significant for the example of Suffolk’s ‘potential’, where the Latin potential mood itself provides only the one unvaried termination or linguistic form, English affords a bountiful variety of conflicting projections of future possibility in the variety of available ‘signs’, including may, can, might, should, would, ought, and others. In improvising with the English language, Shakespeare and / or his collaborator seems to discover that wooing, putting desire into action through words, is not only more than ‘willing’ but also more than a singular unidirectional act of ‘woulding.’ It involves an anticipation of and encounter with resistant voices – not in this case just Margaret’s voice that Suffolk is actually managing to close off in his anti-social spinning out of asides. Just as cognitive grammar hypothesizes a debating society in the brain (not a unitary homunculus), so English historical grammar gives boy and men actors more ways of dividing up and uttering the various inclinations of the mind than even Linacre envisaged when he added to the number of discrete Latin moods. And the Elizabethan playwrights tapped enthusiastically into this theatre of mental deliberation, extending their options for representing subjectivity and intersubjectivity by using grammatical mood to script speech or dialogue as potential action. Moving beyond hypothetical deliberation, once Suffolk has returned to England and aroused his monarch’s desire, he ends the play, like Tamburlaine, with a shall and will of ‘assured hope’: ‘Margaret shall now be queen and rule the King; / But I will rule both her, the King, and realm’ (5.7.107–8). But, unlike Tamburlaine’s, his is a negotiated shall, a resolution issuing out of that potent imaginative space for mental deliberation to be found in the grammatical variability of the English potential mood. Furthermore, in 1 Henry VI, Shakespeare and his collaborators discover, paradoxically, how to stage the past and develop the genre of the history play by tapping into the resources of early modern English for projecting futures.

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7 Othello and Theatrical Language Sarah Werner

‘This’ is a powerful word in the theatre, a pointer that can indicate physical objects, subjects of discussion and stage actions. ‘This’ is a word that can conjure imaginary places on a bare stage and contain new worlds in its utterance. ‘This is Venice’ (1.1.107), we are told, and we are in Venice. ‘Here, stand behind this bulk’ (5.1.1) and we know that the stage pillar, which might have been something else in another scene, is now a shop stall. ‘Take me this work out’ (3.4.175) and we understand the speaker means to have the handkerchief in his hand copied, not the work on some other object.1 If ‘this’ can localize objects, it can also create a space inhabited by gestures. ‘And this, and this, the greatest discords be / That e’er our hearts shall make’ (2.1.195–6) makes it clear (even without the quarto stage direction ‘they kiss’)

All quotations from and references to Shakespeare’s plays are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

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that some sort of action is performed at these two moments, although the specifics of ‘this’ are made clear only in seeing the actors’ gestures. Such flexibility is part of the word’s strength, working as it does both to bridge language and action and to link specific moments and larger circumstances. Desdemona states, ‘I have not deserved this’ (4.1.236), and the audience concurs: she has not deserved being struck. But ‘this’ also stands in for more than the specific action. She does not deserve that, nor does she deserve the distrust and anger that lies behind the blow. Emilia tells Othello after Desdemona’s death, ‘This deed of thine is no more worthy heaven / Than thou wast worthy her’ (5.2.167–8), and Othello’s deed is, most immediately, the murder of his wife. But it is also clear from Emilia’s vehement objections to the accusations of Desdemona’s infidelity that ‘this deed’ expands to include Othello’s lack of faith in his wife. But if ‘this’ can clarify a story on stage, ‘this’ can also obfuscate it. Consider this beginning of a play: two men are alone on a bare stage, one man speaking about an event that has upset him: ‘I take it much unkindly / That thou, Iago, who has had my purse / As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this’ (1.1.1–3). The second speaker, Iago, protests ‘If ever I did dream / Of such a matter, abhor me’ (5). He goes on to describe his outrage that ‘he’ has not made the speaker his lieutenant, but has rather chosen ‘Michael Cassio, a Florentine’ (19), while Iago must be ‘his Moorship’s ensign’ (32). After another speech in which Iago describes how he is only seeming to serve as ensign, but really is looking after his own interests, the speakers’ attention returns to the upsetting matter that started the scene off: ‘What a full fortune does the thick-lips owe / If he can carry’t thus!’ (66–7). Our first clue of what the ‘it’ of this ‘matter’ might be comes with Iago’s reference to ‘her father’ (67) and their subsequent cries, ‘Awake, what ho, Brabanzio, thieves, thieves, thieves! / Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags. / Thieves, thieves!’ (79–81). In response to Brabanzio’s question, ‘What is the matter there?’ (83), Iago finally answers the play’s

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opening question: ‘Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe’ (88–9). I take my time replaying these opening moments of Othello to remind us of how little the audience knows what is happening at the beginning of this play, particularly, as is key to my investigation, if we imagine an audience contemporary to the play’s creation, one for whom the story of Othello has not yet become omnipresent. For such an audience – for us, if we can imagine ourselves back in that place – something is clearly afoot, and we must rely on the dialogue to begin to put the pieces together, establishing where we are and what is happening. This technique of thrusting the audience into the middle of a story is not unique to this play, of course. As You Like It begins with Orlando complaining feelingly to Adam of Oliver’s mistreatment of him, leading almost immediately into the brothers’ fight. Nor is the manner of introducing major characters through the eyes of minor ones unusual: Antony and Cleopatra starts with Philo’s disapproving description of Antony’s behaviour in Egypt. What is striking about Othello is how long Shakespeare withholds crucial information about the action. Not all information is withheld, of course: we learn Iago’s name within two lines of his entrance, Cassio is named the first time he is mentioned, and Brabanzio’s name summons him forth. It takes 30 lines before Roderigo’s name is revealed, a bit of a delay, but not an important one since it is clear from his opening lines that his function is to be Iago’s tool. Other context is established more generally: there is an ongoing war, the action seems to be set somewhere in Italy, and there is a Moor. But the event that sets off Roderigo’s dismay in the opening lines, the ‘this’ about which he is so upset that Iago didn’t tell him – how long does it take to establish what ‘this’ is? Iago’s response doesn’t immediately clarify what the matter is that is upsetting Roderigo, but insists on his innocent ignorance: ‘If ever I did dream of such a matter, abhor me’ (5). Roderigo wavers – ‘Thou told’st me thou did hold him in thy hate’ (6) – and Iago’s lengthy reply focuses on the proof of his hate of this

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‘him’ rather than explicating what ‘such a matter’ is. Here is Iago’s response in full, so we can experience what information is shared and how it is presented: Despise me If I do not. Three great ones of the city, In personal suit to make me his lieutenant, Off-capped to him; and by the faith of man I know my price, I am worth no worse a place. But he, as loving his own pride and purposes, Evades them with a bombast circumstance Horribly stuffed with epithets of war, Nonsuits my mediators; for ‘Certes,’ says he, ‘I have already chose my officer.’ And what was he? Forsooth, a great arithmetician, One Michael Cassio, a Florentine, A fellow almost damned in a fair wife, That never set a squadron in the field Nor the division of a battle knows More than a spinster – unless the bookish theoric, Wherein the togaed consuls can propose As masterly as he. Mere prattle without practice Is all his soldiership; but he, sir, had th’election, And I – of whom his eyes had seen the proof At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds Christened and heathen – must be beleed and calmed By debitor and creditor. This counter-caster, He in good time must his lieutenant be, And I – God bless the mark! – his Moorship’s ensign. (1.1.7–32) There are some odd details in this speech, even aside from the fact that it has veered away from the question of what has upset Roderigo. The first is that although Iago is very clear that he hates him, who is the object of his hatred? To whom were the great men making suit? While that question is left

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dangling, we learn not only the name of Iago’s rival, but his nationality and other specific details, including the tantalizing description that Cassio is ‘a fellow almost damned in a fair wife’, a phrase that scholars still puzzle over, given that Cassio does not appear to be married in the play. The plethora of detail lavished on Cassio’s characterization spills over so that the pronouns referring to Cassio blur confusingly with those referring to the as-yet-unnamed ‘he’ in lines 26 and 27: ‘he [clearly Cassio, given the previous context and the phrase immediately following] has th’election, / And I – of whom his eyes [his eyes? Cassio’s eyes?] had seen the proof / At Rhodes, Cyprus [and wait, these can’t be Cassio’s eyes, given Iago’s insistence that Cassio knows only the theory of warfare and has never ventured onto the battlefield; these eyes must belong to the unnamed he].’ That usage of ‘he’ to refer to both Cassio and the unnamed man comes again in the penultimate line of the speech – ‘He in good time must his lieutenant be’ – and it is not until Iago’s last line, and the last clause of the last line, deferred by Iago’s interjection, ‘God bless the mark!’, that we finally get a referent for the unnamed: ‘his Moorship’s ensign.’ If this blurring of pronouns seems confusing, the deictics get even more muddled when Iago turns his attention to waking Brabanzio. In response to Roderigo’s musing, ‘What a full fortune does the thick-lips owe / If he can carry’t thus’ (remember: what is ‘it’ here?), Iago proclaims: Call up her father, Rouse him, make after him, poison his delight, Proclaim him in the streets; incense her kinsmen, And, though he in a fertile climate dwell, Plague him with flies. Though that his joy be joy, Yet throw such chances of vexation on’t As it may lose some colour. (1.1.67–73) ‘Her father’ is clear enough, even though we don’t know yet who the woman is, and the first three uses of ‘him’, and the first ‘his’, seem to refer to ‘her father’: ‘Call up her father, /

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Rouse him, make after him, poison his delight, / Proclaim him in the streets.’ The second ‘her’ surely refers to the same woman – Iago wishes not only to disturb her father but her other kinsmen. So, on to the next part of the speech: ‘And, though he in a fertile climate dwell, / Plague him with flies.’ That ‘he’ and ‘him’ could refer back to her father, too: his delight is being poisoned, he is being plagued with flies. But does Brabanzio live in a fertile climate? I suppose, yes, but does Iago worry about Brabanzio’s fertility? A sense that things are not quite so settled grows stronger in the next lines: ‘Though that his joy be joy, / Yet throw such chances of vexation on’t / As it may lose some colour.’ Again, this could certainly refer to Brabanzio, but it seems, especially with reference to losing colour, to invoke the Moor as well. The venom that Iago expresses seems in keeping with the hatred he has insisted he feels towards the Moor – if there is anyone that he has insisted he wanted to plague and vex, it is certainly the Moor. Editors of the play do not find the matter settled. Norman Sanders, in the New Cambridge Shakespeare, flatly declares that all the pronouns in line 69 refer to Othello and then questions the rest of the passage no more.2 But Ernst Honigmann, in the Arden 3, glosses line 68 as referring to Brabanzio; though he notes that some editors think the ‘him’ throughout is Othello as suggested by the Folio punctuation, he rejects that on the basis that there is nothing authoritative about that punctuation.3 Michael Neill, in the Oxford, takes a more judicious route: ‘Editors are divided as to whether the pronouns refer to Othello (as F’s punctuation might suggest) or Brabantio (as Q appears to indicate). Though “rouse” might seem to anticipate the noisy wakening of Brabantio which follows, the other injunctions seem more appropriate to Othello.’4 The question Othello, ed. Norman Sanders, New Cambridge Shakespeare (updated edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1.1.69n. 3 Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 1.1.68n. 4 Othello, the Moor of Venice, ed. Michael Neill, Oxford Shakespeare 2

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of punctuation – the difference is primarily that of Q’s comma following ‘streete’ versus F’s period after ‘streets’ – is the sort of editorial quibble that obscures the larger play of meaning here, in which one pronoun seems to call forth two separate, yet simultaneous, referents. Although these editorial rabbit holes might not seem connected to theatrical language, there is a purpose to this journey. My overarching theme is that it is very hard to know what is going on in these opening moments. It is not only that we do not know where deictics are pointing, but that even in moments of seeming clarity, meaning turns back in on itself. The speech that these two slippery uses of ‘he’ bracket is perhaps the best instance of this point. This is the speech in which Iago explains that his service as ensign meets his own designs, not his master’s: ‘I follow him to serve my turn upon him’ (42). But that might be the speech’s greatest moment of clarity. Compare it to the culmination of the speech: for, sir, It is as sure as you are Roderigo, Were I the Moor I would not be Iago. In following him I follow but myself. Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, But seeming so for my peculiar end. For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In compliment extern, ’tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at. I am not what I am. (1.1.55–65) Here, even when the referents seem to be the most spelled out, they circle back in on themselves. ‘Were I the Moor I would not be Iago.’ ‘I am not what I am.’ What does an audience learn from this, other than to not be sure about trusting Iago,

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 201.

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even as he seems to be the only one who has any information to share? I first began to be bothered by the opacity of the play’s opening when I noticed how long it takes for anyone to use Othello’s name. He is referred to, in order of usage, as ‘he’ (1.1.12), ‘his Moorship’ (32), ‘the Moor’ (39, 57, 118, 127, 148, 165, 178), ‘the thick-lips’ (66), ‘an old black ram’ (88), ‘the devil’ (91), ‘a Barbary horse’ (113), ‘an extravagant and wheeling stranger’ (137) – but never is he named in the first scene. In the second scene, he finally appears on the stage, but again is not named. It is not until the Duke greets him in the third scene as ‘Valiant Othello’ (1.3.48) that anyone uses his proper name. This deferral of his name, combined with his absence from the stage for the first 230 lines of the play, leaves the audience with little way to refer to him other than by using Iago’s racially loaded terms. It is not only Iago who cannot think of Othello outside of these epithets, but the audience as well, who has only Iago’s evocative language to go by. My point is not only that Iago is the audience’s entry into the world of the play, but that the nature of the play’s theatrical language normalizes the audience’s dependence on Iago’s viewpoint. In a theatre without extensive scenery or playbills, for a recent play that has not yet entered the canon of our memory, the audience relies on a play’s dialogue in order to establish its mise-en-scène. The funeral procession at the start of 1 Henry VI, described as mourning ‘King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long’ (1.1.6), establishes the time and location of that play. The beginning of a play might not always locate the story as clearly in terms of geography or chronology: ‘In sooth, I know not why I am so sad’ (The Merchant of Venice, 1.1.1) – but in this case it sets Antonio’s mood and his subsequent relationship with Bassanio that drives the plot. But Othello begins with the unclear ‘this’; and its opening lines, with their emphasis on unspecified events and repetition of indeterminate pronouns, mystify rather than clarify. It is a deliberate strategy of obfuscation and it

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is successful because the audience does not have the tools to supply the information withheld. The absence of Othello’s proper name and the shiftiness of pronouns are only some of the ways in which the audience is left to fend for themselves in this play. Consider, again, the matter that so troubles Roderigo. Initially we do not know what it is. Then we gather that, as Iago tries to convince Brabanzio, it is that the Moor has stolen his daughter. Brabanzio, in turn, proposes a slight modification to this story: the Moor has enchanted her. It is not until many lines later, more than 300 lines later, that the counter-narrative of a mutual elopement is presented, with Othello and Desdemona falling in love over tales from his ‘traveller’s history’ (1.3.138). Given the length of time in which Iago’s presentation dominates in the absence of any other narrative, how easily is it displaced? How does the audience decide to shift from one narrative to another? Do they make that shift, or do both stories exist, a single event pointing in two different directions at the same time? In experiencing this shift, the audience’s position mirrors that of Othello’s in the course of Iago’s trickery. Which story do we believe? What can we know when we’re not sure whether we can trust what our eyes and ears tell us? Nothing is stable in this play, from Iago’s ‘I am not what I am’ to the dual time scheme of the story (does the action in the play happen over a few days or many months?).5 If Othello is a play about searching for ocular proof, it is also a play that achieves its proof, and undermines it, through the theatrical techniques of descriptions of offstage action and the heightened significance of props. But while the audience is not duped to the same degree as Othello – we know what Cassio and Iago are discussing when Othello is spying on them, we know how Cassio got hold of the handkerchief – the audience Honigmann’s introduction to his edition provides a concise overview of the critical debates about the time scheme of the play’s action (68–72). Even the play’s textual history and the differences between the quarto and folio versions adds to the play’s instability.

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is also kept from understanding other key mysteries of the play, including insight into Iago’s hatred. The obfuscation of the opening scenes and the theme of not knowing what to believe carry over the rest of the play. Othello is successful in destabilizing the audience because it successfully manipulates early modern theatrical conventions. Theatrical practice is a nuanced language that can be turned to the playwright’s devices just as well as English can. Brabanzio’s insistence, when he confronts Othello, that he already knows that she was enchanted, is key here: Damned as thou art, thou hast enchanted her, For I’ll refer me to all things of sense, If she in chains of magic were not bound, Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy, So opposite to marriage that she shunned The wealthy curlèd darlings of our nation, Would ever have, t’incur a general mock, Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as thou – to fear, not to delight. Judge me the world if ’tis not gross in sense That thou hast practised on her with foul charms, Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals That weakens motion. I’ll have’t disputed on. ’Tis probable, and palpable to thinking. (1.2.64–77) ‘’Tis probable, and palpable to thinking.’ It is clear enough from Brabanzio’s perspective why his explanation is probable – it fits in with his conception both of Desdemona (so tender even curlèd darlings weren’t good enough for her propriety) and his notion of Othello. But what makes this palpable to thinking? It is a phrase that, in contrast to the problematic ‘he’s, does not get glossed in most editions. And certainly the sense of it as meaning ‘obvious to thought’ is clear enough. But palpable does not only mean ‘obvious.’ Its primary sense is, as John Bullokar’s 1616 An English Expositor puts it, ‘That which may bee felt with the fingers: manifest,

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notorious.’6 Brabanzio’s emphasis throughout this speech on sense – ‘I’ll refer me to all things of sense’, ‘Judge me the world if ’tis not gross in sense’ – keeps the double meaning of sense and palpable at the forefront: he might be asking about what can be judged, but he is always doing so in terms of our senses, what can be seen and felt. ‘’Tis probable, and palpable to thinking.’ Does not theatre make things palpable? Is it not the work of players to take written words and attach them to moving, feeling bodies? And isn’t that work done in conjunction with an audience, who must judge whether to see character or personator, who must decide what is probable? A player who is not probable in his role, who is only visible as an actor rather than as part of the story, is usually failing as a player. Describing theatre as palpable has its own pitfalls. Audiences do not, generally, reach out and touch the players. It of course is not Henry V on stage, nor should it be (that’s not theatre; that’s celebrity). But theatre does turn thought and words into visible and audible presences, into something that can be seen and heard and could, potentially, be felt. It is one of the few art forms that brings living artists into the same physical space at the same time as their audience. If one of the pitfalls of thinking of theatre as palpable is that you do not actually reach out and palpate it, another is that, in this play, what is palpable to thinking is exactly wrong. Brabanzio assumes incorrectly that Othello has enchanted Desdemona; Othello assumes incorrectly that Desdemona is having an affair with Cassio. It seems that what is palpable to thinking are our own worst thoughts, our prejudices and fears. So is Othello a play that is fundamentally antitheatrical? A play that teaches us not to trust theatre? I think, rather, the reverse is true. Othello is a play that investigates the problem that all people face – how to judge John Bullokar, An English Expositor Teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest Words Vsed in Our Language. With Sundry Explications, Descriptions, and Discourses (London: Iohn Legatt, 1616), sig. L6v.

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people, how to trust a story, how to know when something is or is not true. It is able to investigate that truth in the theatre precisely because it is theatrical language that allows us to look at the question. Just as the opening of the play succeeds because it draws on theatrical language to heighten the audience’s disorientation and then uses that disorientation to align them with Othello’s disorientation in the play, so the question of what is palpable to thinking is central both to theatrical language and to the play’s urgency. To emphasize what is palpable to thinking puts the audience’s and Othello’s disorientation in terms of theatrical performance that then must resolve those paradoxes. By the end of the play, the obfuscating ‘this’ becomes the dramatic ‘this’ that carries the story forward. ‘Set you down this’ (5.2.360) asks Othello of his witnesses, just before he points out ‘No way but this: / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss’ (368–9). ‘This is thy work’ (374) Lodovico tells Iago and then takes on the burden of the play, ‘This heavy act with heavy heart relate’ (381). The importance of thinking about Othello in terms of its theatrical language lies not in how it enables us to understand new aspects of the play, but in what it suggests for how scholars should understand early modern drama. If we are no longer in danger of understanding the plays too much in terms of real life, reading the characters as people rather than as roles, current critical habits are too inclined to study the plays in terms of historicity – reading through the lens of historical difference, linking the language and politics of plays to pamphlets, or colonialism, or an emerging rhetoric of science. With the exception of the work of performance scholars – those of us who take performance as the focus of our inquiries and therefore who read the plays in terms of theatre and other performance media – very little scholarship on Shakespeare thinks of the plays in terms of theatrical performance. There might be discussion of how geography is connected to the humors, an analysis of the connections between sleep and political discourse, or a teasing out of the resonances of animal imagery. But if that scholarship is

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drawing on Shakespeare’s plays, then where is the recognition that the staging of those texts might somehow be involved in shaping their meanings? Is the effect of describing humours on stage the same as reading a description of those humours in a receipt book? I do not want to reopen those tiresome debates about whether the plays can only be understood through performance, a point of view that denies the long history of the plays as texts that were and are read and that sees all performance as the same, as if how it is staged today reveals how it was experienced then.7 I am not arguing that we can only understand the plays through performance; nor am I insisting that Lukas Erne’s promotion of Shakespeare as a literary dramatist is leading us down a path of peril.8 But it is important to remember that there are stages there and that those stages were not just platforms on which the players strode, but a way of making meaning, a language. There are some significant challenges to working this way, not least the fact that it is hard to separate what we might know about early modern theatres from what we imagine we know from our own experiences. After the first wave of optimistic and joyful insistence that we could rediscover Shakespeare’s real meaning through performing him, came a second wave of caution, one correctly pointing out that the nature of performance changes as its material conditions and producing cultures change. We ought not go back to assuming that our theatrical habits can be merely transferred wholesale onto Shakespeare. But it is not impossible to see traces of earlier theatrical languages. Andrew James Hartley recently

For a brief overview of the history of performance scholarship and Shakespeare, see my introduction to New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–11. 8 See Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); for a critique, see W. B. Worthen, ‘Intoxicating Rhythms: Or, Shakespeare, Literary Drama, and Performance (Studies)’, Shakespeare Quarterly 62 (2011): 309–39. 7

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argued that even as many aspects of performance have changed over the centuries, enough is constant that modern performances might in fact teach us something: there are still actors and audiences and they still work together to create a character out of the written role.9 Carolyn Sale connects the wrestling with written language and alphabets she sees in Titus Andronicus with Shakespeare’s wrestling to create a new theatrical language.10 Those are just two quick examples of how some scholars have found ways of thinking about theatrical practices even as they might not know the full scope of how drama was realized on early modern stages. But it is clear that there are rich possibilities in thinking about plays in terms of how theatre makes meaning. In thinking of theatrical practice as a language, I am arguing that all scholars – not only performance scholars – need to push past the recognition that Shakespeare’s plays were informed by early modern staging practices to an understanding of the constitutive power of those stagings.11 Theatrical practice does not merely provide the platform from which his plays speak; theatrical practice is the language through which the plays speak and with which they make meaning. When Iago asserts ‘I am not what I am’, he is telling us something more true than the obvious statement that his schemes run deeper than his surface actions. No matter what Andrew James Hartley, ‘Page and Stage Again: Rethinking Renaissance Character Phenomenologically’, in New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies, 77–93. 10 Carolyn Sale, ‘Black Aeneas: Race, English Literary History, and the “Barbarous” Poetics of Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly 62 (2011): 25–52. 11 There is a long history of thinking of theatre through semiotics; see, for example, Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theater and Drama (London; New York: Methuen, 1980); and Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). I am less interested in theatrical semiotics than I am in seeing theatrical languages as relevant to literary study. 9

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else might be true about Iago, he is not who he is: he is not a man named Iago, but an actor playing a character named Iago. The work of theatre is to make things other than they are: a man represents a character, a wall stands in for a castle, a pair of chairs and a table become a tavern. The audience knows what these things are because we accept the terms of the fiction. The man tells us he’s waiting for his lover and it’s cold outside; he gestures at the wall and wishes she would emerge from the castle; they sit at the table and hold tankards in their hands and we understand that the wall behind them is no longer the castle but a tavern. These things are obvious enough to us that the inability of others to follow those rules is a source of laughter – think of the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the grocers in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. They are also a source of tragedy – Romeo cannot perceive the difference between Juliet asleep and Juliet dead, the Duchess of Malfi mistakes the artificial figures of her family as their corpses. But what if the terms of the fiction are lying to us? What if all the women on stage are played by boys because female characters are always played by boys, but one character is revealed to be played by a boy because the character is actually a boy? What if a play teases its audience with knowledge of a precipitating event that it refuses to share and then reveals that event only through competing stories even as it tells us not to trust reports of news? How does the audience know what to make of what’s happening on stage? This is what makes Othello such a powerful play. The lack of clarity about what is happening, our inability to decide what is probable – the struggles the characters face in the play are mirrored in the struggles the audience faces in watching the play. This examination of Othello and call for reading the plays with an awareness of theatrical language has been grounded in the practices of the early modern theatre. But the recognition that theatrical practice is a constitutive language holds true for any performance, not only early modern ones. Today we are generally so habituated to mainstream theatre that we do

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not dwell on its conventions. It is the unusual practices that catch our eye and make us look at theatre anew. Performance scholars have used the multi-media and multiply layered Shakespeare performances of The Wooster Group to explore how acting techniques and mediation shape the story they are telling with Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida.12 The five hours of the Toneelgroep’s Roman Tragedies, with its projections and microphones and onstage audience, is another out-of-theordinary production the theatrical language of which prompts scholars to consider its impact on how the performance’s meaning is created.13 But even the usual theatrical language is also constitutive, enabling and disabling meanings, as the work of W. B. Worthen, Barbara Hodgdon and others have shown.14 The specialization of fields within the larger body of Shakespeare scholarship has meant that performance scholars, theatre historians and literary scholars have too often talked within their own circles, as if they have nothing to offer each other. But Shakespeare’s works and Shakespeare’s reception do not exist within silos. We need to think of Shakespeare’s plays not as literary vehicles or as theatrical ones, but as works that draw on multiple languages to create their rich play of meanings. For more on their production of Hamlet, see Sarah Werner, ‘Two Hamlets: Wooster Group and Synetic Theater’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 323–9; W. B. Worthen, ‘Hamlet at Ground Zero: The Wooster Group and the Archive of Performance’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 303–22; and William N. West, ‘Replaying Early Modern Performances’, in New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies, 30–50. For Troilus and Cressida, see Thomas P. Cartelli, ‘“The Killing Stops Here”: Unmaking the Myths of Troy in the Wooster Group / RSC Troilus & Cressida (2012)’, Shakespeare Quarterly 64 (2013): 233–43. 13 See Christian M. Billing, ‘The Roman Tragedies’, Shakespeare Quarterly 61 (2010): 415–39; and Sarah Werner, ‘Audiences’, in Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, ed. Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 165–79. 14 See, for example, W. B. Worthen, Drama: Between Poetry and Performance (Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); and Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Introduction’, A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 1–9.

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8 Slips of Wilderness: Verbal and Gestural Language in Measure for Measure Paul Yachnin and Patrick Neilson

In this chapter, we bring together literary and theatrical ways of thinking about Shakespeare’s language. We seek to explain the life of the word ‘slip’ in Measure for Measure; this single word grounds our argument about how poetry and performance are incorporated – made into a single dynamic thing – in the play. That means that we use the word ‘language’ in a special way, to mean both verbal and gestural kinds of expression. We think about poetry and performance as intertwining art forms, and we therefore also consider play-reading and play-watching (as well as literary interpretation and theatrical performance) as interrelated practices. The key phrase in our title comes from Isabella’s tirade against her brother Claudio, a young man condemned to die for having sex outside of marriage. He asks her to submit to

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being raped by the judge so that his (Claudio’s) life may be spared. ‘Heaven shield my mother played my father fair,’ she says angrily, ‘For such a warpèd slip of wilderness / Ne’er issued from his blood’ (3.1.144–60).1 A ‘slip’ is a young shoot, something that grows out of the stem of a plant and that might be grafted onto another plant or might be planted on its own. A ‘warpèd slip’ is a shoot that grows crookedly. ‘Wilderness’ means ‘wildness’, a quality of radical naturalness outside human cultivation. It can also suggest a confused and desolate space, just as in modern English.2 The OED tells us that in this particular case the word means ‘wildness of character, licentiousness’, but Isabella’s speech is the only instance the OED is able to adduce, so it likely makes sense for us to stick with the basic meanings. The whole sentence imagines an illicit grafting of crooked wildness onto the licit, patrilineal bloodline of the family by way of Claudio’s mother’s alleged adultery. ‘Slip’ also means an immoral act, a sudden falling downward from moral uprightness, which is what Isabella imagines her mother doing – her immoral ‘slip’ issuing in the ‘warpèd slip’ of the bastard child Claudio. Isabella uses the word to mean ‘sinned’ explicitly in her first scene with Angelo: ‘If he had been as you, and you as he, / You would have slipped like him, but he like you / Would not have been so stern’ (2.2.64–6). The word here might be intended by Isabella to diminish the gravity of her brother’s trespass, especially by suggesting its ordinary and even merely accidental character. Escalus’ use of the word later in the play, however, unmistakably designates an act of grave wrongdoing (though Escalus still retains the connection between moral slipping and sexual heat): I am sorry one so learned and so wise As you, Lord Angelo, have still appeared, This and all following quotations from the play are from the edition by N. W. Bawcutt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 2 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘wilderness’ (accessed 27 June 2011). 1

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Should slip so grossly, both in the heat of blood And lack of tempered judgment afterward. (5.1.473–6) Together, these three uses of the word tell us that sin is a violation of natural goodness and a disordering of natural growth, whether of a plant or a family; but they also suggest that there might be something slippery and sinful within the order of nature itself. To use the word ‘slip’ as a synonym for ‘sin’ is to shift from an exclusively theological understanding of wrongdoing and to insist on the natural and physical dimensions of transgression. Acts borne of natural human desire and the shoots of young growing plants can both be ‘warpèd slips of wilderness.’ That the unnatural is of a piece with the natural suggests that the wild slips and warps of the characters’ actions might at the end be recuperated as the unfolding of natural processes. After all, Claudio’s ‘sin’ or ‘crime’ of getting Julietta with child in advance of their intended marriage seems indeed merely a ‘slip’ in the most innocent sense of the word.3 But since ‘wilderness’ is something set apart from the natural order as well as a synonym for ‘natural’, it cannot designate an untroubled understanding of the natural. ‘Wilderness’ thus points to the play’s critical account of the internal contradictions in early modern ideas about ‘the natural.’ That interest in unnatural nature, which this play shares with Hamlet and King Lear, is gathered perfectly in the word ‘slip’ – both a natural growth and a sinful transgression of nature. These readings of the word ‘slip’ were part of what was taken up by the actors in a production of Measure for Measure at McGill in autumn 2010, directed by Patrick Neilson. Using the word and its cognates to create a verbal network was not an accident of the rehearsal process but rather a deliberate

Isabella’s initial response (1.4.45–9) to the news of Julietta’s pregnancy sounds like happy surprise. The Provost and Escalus share her lack of moral disapproval. See 2.1.4–16 and 2.2.3–6 respectively.

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creative strategy. Neilson and the actors hoped that this verbal network (or guide-words, as they thought of them) would become a practical tool during rehearsals. The guidewords represented a series of initial choices to help steer the performers through the play’s notorious inconsistencies. In this way, the actors found themselves creating links between text and stage from the beginning of the rehearsal process. Preselecting these guide-words provided the student actors with early pathways into their characters’ thoughts and emotions and an initial direction for embodying their roles, incorporating the language of the play and using their bodies to write that language on the stage through movement. Slips, slippages and the network of closely related words that link to ‘slip’ through its several valences current in the seventeenth century became integral to the actors’ thinking about the play. The play uses both verb and noun forms of the word and appears to pun on almost the full range of its meanings. Once recognized, their traces seemed to surface everywhere in the text. Inconsistencies and changes in tone became less troublesome if looked at through the lens of slippage. A series of puns emerged pointing to a multilayered metatheatricality. That lens became an invaluable tool for making interpretive choices not only about character, narrative style and movement, but also about costumes and properties. The student actors were encouraged to develop individual lists of guide-words for their character or characters (some actors played multiple roles). The actors who played Isabella and Angelo, for example, both had ‘seeming’ on their lists. ‘Seeming’ was related to ‘slip’ through ‘counterfeit’ and thus to ‘false’ and its homophone ‘faults’, and further to ‘error / sin.’ ‘False’ and ‘seeming’ also pointed to the metatheatrical disguisings, storytelling, parabasis and the play within a play that is Act Five. The multiple related verbal clusters became a unifying linguistic network. While not a substitute for other forms of textual analysis, this approach had the advantages of being evolutionary in nature in ways that allowed the actors to

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come to a better understanding of the text through their own invention and exploration. As the actors became more familiar with their lines, they discovered new links among words that greatly expanded the verbal network. The root words provided a ready map of this expanding and increasingly coherent vocabulary that could be shared by actors and director. In this growing verbal world, the word ‘slip’ retained its centrality. *** In what follows, we want to develop two interrelated lines of thought. One approach finds ‘slips’ and its cognate words proliferating everywhere in the play, shaping the play’s characters, plot and themes. This exfoliation of a single word points to what we suggest is the remarkably metaphorical character of Shakespeare’s thinking. In our account, Shakespeare develops a critical representation of personhood, action and the world by cultivating an unfolding, multiplex system of metaphors that allows him to ‘project patterns from one domain of experience in order to structure another domain of a different kind.’ The phrase is Mark Johnson’s; throughout this chapter, we draw on his work and on his collaborations with George Lakoff.4 Shakespeare’s use of ‘slip’ exemplifies Lakoff and Johnson’s argument for the metaphoricity of language itself and for the essentially metaphorical character of our descriptions of the world. Shakespeare also develops, in anticipation of Lakoff and Johnson, a critical account of the ways by which metaphor is able to constitute the world.

Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1, xiv–xv. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980; rpt. with a new Afterword, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). See the foundational work by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (rpt. London and New York: Routledge, 2010), esp. 202–32.

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In Shakespeare, metaphor is both a world-making form of language and an instrument of critical inquiry. For instance, sonnet 129’s first line, ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’, brings together the monetary, sexual and spiritual by playing on ‘expense’ (outlay of substance or funds; sexual ejaculation), ‘spirit’ (vital principle or immaterial being; bodily substance such as semen) and ‘a waste’ (an act of dissipation; a waist, i.e. female genitals).5 The line invites us to think about sex in terms of at least two related kinds of ‘spending’, as if the bodily act were neither a form of procreation nor a means of shared fulfilment but rather a reckless dispersing of material goods and spiritual being. The line is exemplary of how metaphor can make us see something in a particular way. But the Sonnets as a whole cultivate a more complex representation of sex than we see in the first line of sonnet 129, a multifaceted depiction that invites a manifold judgement and that also reveals the constructedness of human sexuality itself. In sonnet 2, to take one example, we find a monetary metaphor similar to sonnet 129’s, but this time the yoking of money and sex argues in favour of sex as a way of fostering beauty and community against time and old age. If the beautiful young man addressed in the sonnet fails to have children, the poet says, it will be ‘an all-eating shame.’ What the young man should do instead is ‘use’ his beauty – both employ it and invest it at interest – by fathering a child whose beauty in turn will ‘sum [his] count’ (i.e. add up and thereby balance his father’s account): How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use, If thou couldst answer, ‘This fair child of mine Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’ Proving his beauty by succession thine. (ll. 9–12)

All Shakespeare quotes other than those from Measure for Measure are from the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (2nd edn, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

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A second approach leads us to Shakespeare’s gestural language, which, we argue, is closely tied to the words of the play. Bodies and minds and their respective expressive repertories are bound together in Shakespeare. Lakoff and Johnson are important for us here also since they have developed a rich argument about how we make sense of the world, which finds any meaningful grasp of the social and physical environment grounded in metaphorized embodied experience. They argue that we organize the world by projecting metaphorically from one domain to another: ‘our normal conceptual system is metaphorically structured; that is, most concepts are partially understood in terms of other concepts.’6 The non-metaphorical ground from which this tree of metaphor grows is bodily experience. In answer to one key question – how do we make space and movement humanly meaningful? – they point to how we experience our bodies – proprioceptively, perceptually and kinaesthetically: The concepts front and back are body-based. They make sense only for beings with fronts and backs. If all beings on this planet were uniform stationary spheres floating in some medium and perceiving equally in all directions, they would have no concepts of front or back. But we are not like this … We have faces and move in the direction in which we see. Our bodies define a set of fundamental spatial orientations that we use not only in orienting ourselves, but in perceiving the relationship of one object to another.7 Lakoff and Johnson’s insights into the embodied and metaphorical nature of the human world inform our linked accounts of the poetic and performative ‘slips’ of Measure for Measure. In the rehearsals for the McGill performance, Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 56. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 34.

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the actors’ lines grew more meaningful as they developed an understanding of the play’s metaphorical system, and they also adjusted their gestures, carriage and movement to the emerging slipperiness of the poetry. The two, poetry and performance, grew up together quite naturally. Thea Fitz-James, the actor playing Lucio, for example, was able to incorporate slipperiness into her movement. Gracefully athletic, she could slide, stop, dip and glide about the stage. Her carriage and movement suited the character’s speaking, which could slip easily out of prose into verse, as it does when Lucio substitutes for Claudio on his mission to Isabella in 1.4.8 And her movements, gestures and facial expressions could be just as self-consciously performative and ironic as were her character’s lines. It is also worth suggesting that understanding embodied metaphorical meaningfulness might go some way toward drawing together performance studies and literary approaches to Shakespeare. Movement and facial and gestural expression on stage are of a piece with poetry, character and story on the page. Indeed, Shakespeare’s theatrical art, founded in the necessary and natural commerce between embodiment and poetry, makes visible and accessible the metaphorical and ‘body-based’ quality, not only of theatrical performance, but also of the humanly meaningful world itself. *** Because the word ‘slip’ has multiple meanings, it serves well to create a metaphorical network that is able to shuttle meaning from one zone of thinking and feeling to another. ‘Slip’ is one example of Shakespearean wordplay (‘expense’, ‘waste’ and ‘use’ are others), where a single word contains within it a number of potential meanings, which Shakespeare is able to draw out. Consider one of the most difficult passages in the play. Here the Duke, about to go into disguise as Friar Lodowick, tells Friar

8

Claudio enjoins Lucio to ‘Implore her in my voice’ (1.2.178).

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Thomas how he hopes Angelo will restore the moral order that he, the Duke himself, has allowed to break down: We have strict statutes and most biting laws, The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds, Which for this fourteen years we have let slip, Even like an o’ergrown lion in a cave That goes not out to prey. (1.3.19–23) The imagery is complex, but the primary meaning of the lines is clear enough: Vincentio admits that for 14 years he has neglected to enforce (‘we have let slip’) the laws that might have served to maintain order in the city; thus the lion-like law has stayed indoors and has grown fat and slothful. Many editors since the eighteenth century have emended ‘weeds’ to ‘steeds’ or to ‘jades’ because ‘bits and curbs’ seemed the language of equestrianism rather than of horticulture. The Oxford editor, who retains the original reading, points out that ‘weed’ could refer in Elizabethan English to a troublesome person and that Promos and Cassandra, Shakespeare’s source for the play, uses the word in just this way.9 Accordingly, ‘weeds’ are bad people; we note that the word connects with Lucio’s description of himself later as a ‘burr’ (4.3.174), and that Vincentio later imagines Angelo as both weedy garden and weed-loving gardener: ‘Twice treble shame on Angelo, / To weed my vice and let his grow!’ (3.1.523–4).10 But weeds, of course, are also weeds. A straightforward interpretation of the word invites a secondary reading of ‘let slip’, not as ‘neglected’ (in relation to ‘biting laws’) but as ‘allowed to put forth shoots’ (in relation to ‘headstrong weeds’).11 Furthermore,

Measure for Measure, ed. Bawcutt, pp. 231–2. Iago develops an elaborated version of the ‘weed / garden / gardener’ metaphor in Othello, 1.3.320–2. 11 For a suggestion along these lines, see Measure for Measure, ed. Brian Gibbons (updated edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1.3.21n. 9

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the image of uncontrolled weedy growth connects with the ‘o’ergrown lion’ that reclines in his cave like (to quote another play obsessed with nature and sin) ‘the fat weed / That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf.’12 In Vincentio’s speech, ‘slip’ links the abrogation of moral responsibility with weedy germination. It is the same metaphor that animates Isabella’s denunciation of her brother – bad human actions connect with rank and ugly plants. A ‘warpèd slip’ and a ‘weed’ are bad plants and bad people in equal measure, but the metaphorical relationship between them also invites reflection on a system of categorization that makes some people and some plants illicit and unnatural and others legitimate and even perfections of nature. In the play, horticultural metaphor lies at the root of a critique of the operations of power and the delegitimation of natural desire – how the law transforms naturally sexual persons into sexual transgressors. Importantly Claudio and Isabella seem to grasp this point but demur from making it in any sustained way. They embrace the guilt the law ascribes to Claudio’s natural sexual slip; and their softening under the pressure of the law is formative of their characters in ways that reveal slipping, not as a deviation away from a true line of conduct, but rather as the most natural path toward a fulfilled personhood. Before we come to that, however, we want to track the word ‘slip’ into several more fields of practice and thought. *** ‘Slips’ are people and plants, and they also have a place in the economic, political and social domains of the play-world. It makes sense for Isabella to call her brother a slip, not only because slips are moral faults, but also because slips are counterfeit coins (just as Isabella suggests that Claudio is a counterfeit son). ‘You gave us the counterfeit fairly last

12

The ‘fat weed’ is from Hamlet, 1.5.32–3.

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night,’ Mercutio says to Romeo, ‘The slip, sir, the slip, can you not conceive?’ (Romeo and Juliet, 2.4.45–8). The slip as counterfeit coin was resonant for the McGill production. Act Four is filled with counterfeits. Vincentio’s gnomic ‘When vice makes mercy, mercy’s so extended / That for the fault’s love is the offender friended’ puns on ‘faults’ and ‘false’ but glances also at the idea of the counterfeit (4.2.112). The Provost attempts to tame the incorrigible Barnardine: ‘We have very oft awakened him, as if to carry him to execution, and showed him a seeming warrant for it; it hath not moved him at all’ (4.2. 150–3). Claudio’s death is counterfeited and Ragozine’s head is presented to Angelo as proof of the execution (4.2.99). The Duke uses Marianna as a counterfeit Isabella and has her slip into Angelo’s garden house for the bed-trick. Ironically, Marianna is not a counterfeit at all; rather, she is Angelo’s true wife. The idea of the slip as counterfeit coin raises important questions about political and social power – what is legitimate and what is not? How do some things and people achieve legitimacy while others don’t? How are we to tell the difference between the legitimate and the illegitimate? Ideally, the image of the monarch impressed on the coin’s face confers legitimacy and value on the coin. Angelo’s second speech in the play is: Let there be some more test made of my mettle, Before so noble and so great a figure Be stamped upon it. (1.1.49–51) ‘Mettle’ and ‘metal’ were interchangeable spellings. In Angelo’s formulation, all the value and legitimacy belongs to the figure of the ruler and all the uncertainty to the metal, but in the play and in real life, the relationship between image and metal can never be so straightforward. The government of Shakespeare’s day tried several times to reduce the precious metal content of the coinage; in each case, the marketplace rejected the debased coinage, and the government backed

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down.13 In the play, the nobleness of the Duke’s figure is similarly put in question by his strategy to impose himself on Angelo and to impose Angelo (a man he does not trust – 1.3.50–4) on Vienna; and at the end, his figure is cast into doubt again, ironically enough, by his offer of himself as a sexual partner to Isabella, a young woman whose religious vocation he has laboured to preserve. In view of these actions, it is hard to resist Lucio’s characterization of Vincentio as ‘the old fantastical Duke of dark corners’ (4.3.154–5) and harder still not to hear what is surely an unintended pun in Isabella’s lines – ‘we [women] are soft as our complexions are, / And credulous to false prints’ (2.4.130–1), where ‘false prints’ (false prince?) suggests how the powerful impress themselves upon the credulous. Isabella’s metaphor brings sex and gender into the picture: men dominate women by imprinting upon them just as Vincentio impresses his figure on Angelo. Claudio refers to writing rather than to printing when he explains Julietta’s pregnancy to Lucio – ‘it chances / The stealth of our most mutual entertainment / With character too gross is writ on Juliet’ (1.2.151–3) – but his metaphor nevertheless shares with Isabella’s an understanding of sex and gender in terms of the material processes of impressure. Angelo brings the domains of sex, coinage and power together when he describes sexual transgressors as counterfeiters of natural forms (he goes so far as to equate having a child out of wedlock with murdering a living person): It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stolen A man already made, as to remit Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image In stamps that are forbid. ’Tis all as easy Falsely to take away a life true-made,

C. E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 81–112.

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As to put metal in restrainèd means To make a false one. (2.4.42–9) In addition to the outlandish equating of conception outside marriage with murder, what is striking about Angelo’s speech is how his metaphor recalls his earlier lines, in which he asked the Duke to make ‘some more test’ of his mettle before stamping him with ‘so great a figure.’ An important feature of Shakespearean metaphor is its systematic organization, which allows particular instances to generate critical insights unconnected with what characters might mean to say. Isabella does not intend to suggest that the prince is false, but the suggestion is being put forward anyway; Angelo might or might not recall his earlier use of the metaphor of metallic impressing, but his repeated usage of the metaphor nevertheless reflects critically on the Duke. *** Printing, writing, minting (including counterfeiting), fathering children and ‘stamping’ subjects with the figure of the prince share with the word ‘slip’ a focus on how impressive force works and how substances and people respond to pressure. It is useful to note that, among its other meanings, a ‘slip’ is also ‘a semi-liquid material, made of finely-ground clay or flint, etc., mixed with water to about the consistency of cream’ (OED). So far as we can tell, this is not a Shakespearean meaning, but it is one that suggests the processes of softening, liquefaction and heightened mobility that enable the actions of the characters as well as their movement toward the fulfilments they are afforded by the play. Any progress that the major characters make toward their goals is made by slippage. The major characters undergo some kind of force that causes them to slip in ways that are central to their stories. The force might be internal (desire or fear), external (the law, ideology, state power, social approval), or a mix of the two, but in each case, the degree to which the characters slip under

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pressure demonstrates that none of them is of metal sufficiently pure to take an impression straightforwardly. Indeed, the pressure of the force upon or within them produces heat that warms and softens them, allowing them a greater degree of mobility, even including an ability to deviate from what they themselves might have thought would be their normal lines of feeling, thinking and acting. No major character reproduces the impressive figure of the law, ideology, power or society truly; all deviate in ways that reveal their individual qualities, leading them along an irregular course toward something like a revelation of self. Vincentio differs from the other characters because his slips are often intentional whereas those of the others (Claudio, Isabella, Angelo) tend to be unintentional, but he too discovers his true path by way of a series of slips, swerves and deviations. The pattern of slipping toward fulfilment shows Shakespeare adapting the central story-form of Judeo-Christian culture, the ‘fortunate fall’ of Adam and Eve. *** Mark Johnson identifies ‘forceful encounters with other objects and persons’ as one of the fundamental kinds of bodily experience that grounds our metaphorical conceptualization of social life:14 Everyone knows the experience of being moved by external forces, such as wind, water, physical objects, and other people. When a crowd starts pushing, you are moved along a path you might not have chosen, by a force you seem unable to resist. Sometimes the force is irresistible, such as when the crowd gets completely out of control; other times, the force can be counteracted, or modified.15

14 15

Johnson, Body in the Mind, 42. Ibid., 45.

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What Johnson calls ‘image-schematic gestalt structures’ are formed as ‘patterns of typical experiences of force work their way up into our system of meaning and into the structure of our expression and communication.’16 The characters’ slips (whether intended and strategic sleights, impetuous moves in the face of changing circumstances, or movements of surrender to desire, fear or social or political power) are all meaningful actions grounded in the physical experience of force and motion. The various slips of the characters are body-based image schemata that are capable of being performed by the actors physically and verbally and experienced deeply and even proprioceptively by the playgoers as physical, emotional and cognitive events. Claudio enters the play having already slipped, prompted by mutual passion with Julietta, and he goes on slipping in the face of the power of the state. One of the meanings of ‘slip’ is ‘leash for a dog … so contrived that the animal can readily be released’ (OED). In the McGill production, Neilson and the actors briefly entertained the idea of putting Claudio on a leash led by Elbow. Instead, given the contemporary costuming, they opted for handcuffs as a more immediately recognizable visual metaphor. Claudio is being displayed on the stage in an early seventeenth-century version of what is now known as a ‘perp walk.’ Under the pressure of what seems to be a summary conviction (there seems to have been no trial) and a public shaming, and rendered actually and symbolically powerless by the handcuffs, Claudio’s changeability is perhaps not surprising. He shifts back and forth between seeing the Viennese law as tyrannous and seeming to take the law’s judgement deeply to heart. When the Provost explains to him that he is being shown ‘to the world’ (1.2.115) by special order of the Deputy, Claudio responds by seeming to decry ‘authority’ as a ‘demi-god’, equating the capability of the earthly judge and unfathomable

Ibid., 42.

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power of divine election, which Bawcutt suggests correctly is ‘daring, even blasphemous’, and ending with a simple declaration of the justice of his punishment, which, given the speech as a whole, is anything but simple:17 Thus can the demi-god, authority, Make us pay down for our offence by weight. The words of heaven: on whom it will, it will; On whom it will not, so; yet still ‘tis just. (1.2.119–22) When Lucio asks him, ‘whence comes this restraint?’ his answer is a baleful self-accusation coupled with a redescription of the operations of the law as if they were natural processes: From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty. As surfeit is the father of much fast, So every scope by the immoderate use Turns to restraint. Our nature do pursue, Like rats that raven down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die. (1.2.124–9) And against this naturalization of his crime and punishment is his claim, twenty-five lines later, that Angelo is imposing the ‘the drowsy and neglected act’ on him merely to bolster his own position as governor. Claudio’s slippage between blaming himself and blaming the governor is a fitful attempt to counteract the seemingly irresistible force of the law. It is his character note, but it is also something he shares with the other characters. It might look, moreover, like mere weakness and impressionability, but it is in fact the source of his and the other characters’ strength. ***

17

Measure for Measure, 1.2.121n.

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Lucio hopes that Isabella will be able to ‘soften Angelo’, elsewhere characterized as ice-hard, by her ‘fair prayer’ (1.4.69–70).18 In the event, she succeeds, but not in the way Lucio or the others expected. Angelo ‘slips’ when desire for Isabella heats his ‘austereness’ (2.4.156) and leads him to prosecute his evil plan against her. The action of slipping is a quick movement caused by a partial softening of character under the pressure of the law or natural impulse, or under the oppression of an untenable situation. Angelo’s moral slip takes place when the pressure of desire melts his congealed blood. Angelo’s accusation in 2.4 that Isabella ‘seem’d of late to make the law a tyrant / And rather prov’d the sliding of your brother / A merriment than a vice’ became more confessional than accusatory (2.4.115–16). It was as if he were saying to Isabella that she should take Claudio’s sliding more seriously that she does, especially since Angelo knows well the horror of his own sliding. Were Angelo as upright as he imagines himself, his sexual slipping might suggest only the particular attractiveness of Isabella, but this is in fact the second time he has injured a woman who had only one protector, in each case a brother, and in each a brother in extreme peril. The first was Mariana, whom he abandoned and slandered when her brother Frederick was drowned. This time he intends to coerce Isabella into sex by promising to spare her brother when he intends to have him killed anyway. His present sexual slipping is therefore not a single instance but rather the revelation of a pattern. The Duke of course is the master of verbal and physical self-obfuscation and self-display. He likes to imagine his action in the play in terms of upright carriage and forward movement: He who the sword of heaven will bear Should be as holy as severe;

For Angelo’s coldness, see 1.4.57–9 and 3.1.370–2.

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Pattern in himself to know, Grace to stand, and virtue, go. (3.1.515–18) In fact, he is the slipperiest of the characters. He surprises by appointing Angelo rather than Escalus as the deputy. His re-entry is a massive piece of indirection, about which even Isabella complains (4.6.1). To top off these and other slippery stratagems, he makes an astonishing ‘motion’ of marriage to Isabella at the end. Vincentio’s approach to governing owes something to Machiavelli’s Prince, which Shakespeare evidently drew on for the ‘strict deputy’ plot, and which recommends to rulers the advantages of impetuous over circumspect action, especially in the face of the unpredictability of fortune.19 At the start, Vincentio seems to leave Vienna. In his hurry, he is brusque with Angelo. He avoids giving him an explanation of his actions. Rather than exiting with the pomp his station merits, he chooses to slip away: ANGELO Yet give leave, my lord, That we may bring you something on the way. DUKE My haste may not admit it. … Give me your hand; I’ll privily away. I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes. Though it do well, I do not relish well Their loud applause and aves vehement,

For the connections between Machiavelli and the play, see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 88–92. For Machiavelli, see The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 79–82.

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Nor do I think the man of safe discretion That does affect it. Once more fare you well. (1.1.63–8) The lines suggest the gestural language of the character. Apart from the obvious handshake, the speech seems to call for companion gestures by the actor: first to ward off Angelo’s token of amity, then to emphasize the hastiness of affairs and then to dismiss the notion of a public send-off. Escalus’ parting wish, ‘Lead forth and bring you back in happiness!’ (l. 75), with its suggestion of fanfare and procession, draws ironic attention to the Duke’s light-footed solo exit. The McGill version captured this contrast between public and private forms of leave-taking by way of staging: a video camera captured a proscenium-filling image of Spencer Malthouse as Vincentio in close-up, and camera flashes brightened his broad smile as he vigorously shook Angelo’s hand only to drop it instantly and exit quickly once the photographer had departed. Vincentio can sometimes seem the master of the action. But before the action of the play even begins, he was, by his own account, a governor who let things slide. His disguised ruler strategy provides him with little more real mastery of events. Several times we see him contending with unpredictability, including the impasse created by Angelo and Isabella, Angelo’s reneging on his promise to spare Claudio, Barnardine’s refusal to be executed and an ardour for Isabella that seizes him at some point. His plot was to have the severe judge Angelo bring moral order back to Vienna and also to ascertain if the ‘seemer’ Angelo was as virtuous as he appeared. The original plan therefore was not without some serious shortcomings. When faced with Angelo’s thoroughly bad conduct, the Duke, we might think, could simply reveal himself and denounce Angelo. But he doesn’t do that. Likely it would be embarrassing to have to break off his disguise without any opportunity to stage a triumphant reappearance. In any case, the Duke makes a proposition of his own to Isabella – that she play along with Angelo, set up the sinful assignation and allow him, Vincentio,

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to arrange for a substitute, Mariana, to have sex with the unwitting judge. That will be no sin, Vincentio assures Isabella, because Mariana was supposed to marry Angelo anyway. It is a harebrained scheme, full of moral, ethical and legal pitfalls. How exactly would sex between Angelo and Mariana be different in law from sex between Claudio and Julietta? How could it be ethical to sponsor an evidently illegal tryst? What would Mariana suffer on account of having sex with a man who had so grievously betrayed her? That her husband had sex with her only because he thought she was someone else would not greatly improve the marriage that she would thereby consummate. Who could possibly accede to such a proposal? Isabella readily does just that: ‘The image of it gives me content already, and I trust it will grow to a most prosperous perfection’ (3.1.260–1). It is perhaps not surprising that she immediately elects to go along with the Duke since she finds herself at that moment at a tragic standstill, one that can end only with either her brother’s death or her defilement and damnation. Vincentio’s plan, the swerve in the plot that turns the action away from tragedy, is a piece of idiocy by any measure, but it is also a nimble, unexpected divergence from what appears to be an inevitable, downward pathway. Shakespeare invariably gives his actors breathing space after a particularly intense scene, and the actor playing Isabella has had indeed an intense few minutes, but this shift nevertheless seems particularly abrupt. Her credulous commentaries ‘Can this be so? Did Angelo so leave her?’ (3.1.226) suggested to Neilson and his assistant director Alexandra Meikleham that the Duke’s Mariana narrative was in fact a dramatically efficient, one-man inset play. In the production, the actor playing the Duke performed the narration with a series of signifying mime postures and stances for each of the characters in the tale, an approach that highlighted the weird, vaudevillian inventiveness of the scheme. The effect of the scene as well as of Vincentio’s other acts and speeches was of a man making it up as he went along, someone negotiating (to quote Johnson again) a series of ‘forceful encounters with

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other objects and persons’, though not by open confrontation but rather by subterfuge and slippage. As it turns out, Isabella’s support for the bed-trick is not decisive for the working out of the comic plot. Even though he believes he has had sex with the condemned man’s sister, Angelo still sends a special warrant for Claudio’s execution. Since Vincentio is unwilling to reveal himself, matters are saved only by accident when a prisoner named Ragozine, dying of fever, supplies the head that Angelo has demanded as proof of the execution. Isabella’s acquiescence to the bed-trick is decisive in a larger sense, however, since it is of a piece with how the characters achieve a peculiarly human flourishing by slipping around or away from the seemingly irresistible pressure of the law, power, custom, the seeming fatality of desire and even the coherence of human personality. Isabella’s story is exemplary of the pattern that we have been sketching. At the start, she seeks an even greater restraint on her speech and action than is enforced by the famously strict Sisters of Saint Claire, the order in which she is a novice. Ironically, her insistence on rigorous external government demonstrates her own self-assertiveness and hardness, but she still shares some of her brother’s impressionability. Her first response to the news that he has got Julietta with child is simple and sympathetic: ‘Someone with child by him? My cousin Juliet? … O let him marry her!’ (1.4.45–9). By the time she gets to her first audience with Angelo, however, her view has changed: ‘There is a vice that most I do abhor, / And most desire should meet the blow of justice’ (2.2.29–30). While she is made malleable by the force of the law and authority, the hardness of her ‘mettle’ persists in the rebuke of her brother with which we began, when, as we have seen, she responds to his unmanning fear of death with a fierce accusation of bastardy. Isabella’s last act in the play recapitulates and reforms the gestural and verbal slips that, as we hope we have begun to show, characterize the poetry and action of the play. Of

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course, kneeling is more deliberate and graceful than slipping, but both are downward movements that enable the debased to rise and be renewed. In the scene, Isabella moves and speaks under pressure that comes at her from two sides. Mariana asks her to kneel with her as she (Mariana) pleads for Angelo’s life. Vincentio insists that Angelo deserves to die for having killed Claudio. The pressure also comes from within – from her evident feeling of sisterhood with Mariana and from her grief for Claudio and anger against Angelo. Mariana does not ask Isabella to speak for Angelo’s life, but asks only for a gesture, a simple movement of her body and a corresponding uplifting of her hands: ‘Sweet Isabel, do yet but kneel by me. / Hold up your hands, say nothing; I’ll speak all’ (5.1.438–9). The pressure is redoubled as Mariana and Vincentio each reiterate in turn what they would have the silent, thoughtful Isabella do or not do. In the McGill production, Kate Sketchley, who played Isabella, registered both the outward and inward pressure as it worked its way upon and through her. At first, her head went down and away from Mariana on ‘Sweet Isabel, take my part.’ Vincentio stood centre-stage on a little wooden box. At his ‘Against all sense’, his riposte to Mariana’s first plea, Isabella’s head came up to look at him. She then looked down and drew back slightly from Mariana, who was scrabbling at her skirts for ‘Isabel, / Sweet, Isabel’, the start of Mariana’s second plea. She looked up at Vincentio when he said, ‘He dies for Claudio’, then paused, closed her eyes for several beats before she began her petition for Angelo’s life. She said, ‘Most bounteous sir’, then she paused again, and then she knelt in supplication before Vincentio. But she looked at Mariana, not at Vincentio, as she spoke her final lines:20 The speech, of course, is intended to be spoken to Vincentio. The production’s decision to have Isabella speak to Mariana turned the speech into a gesture of solidarity between the two women, as if the real forgiveness had to come from Mariana rather than from the Duke. The shift changed the focus of the scene from the political and legal to the psychological.

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Look, if it please you, on this man condemned As if my brother lived. I partly think A due sincerity governed his deeds Till he did look on me; since it is so, Let him not die. My brother had but justice, In that he did the thing for which he died. For Angelo, His act did not o’ertake his bad intent, And must be buried but as an intent That perished by the way. Thoughts are no subjects. Intents but merely thoughts. (5.1.445–55) This is the most moving speech in the play. It is also the most slippery. In law, of course, the intentions of the accused, especially in a capital crime, must be ascertained in order for judgement to be rendered. ‘Thoughts are no subjects’ is true only if the thought in question is not connected to an action. In this particular case, Angelo’s intentions are certainly pertinent since the distinction between his use or abuse of power is a matter of the thought-content of his act. It only makes matters worse to claim, as Isabella does, that Angelo was well intentioned until he looked on her. The judge cannot be exonerated from wrongdoing because his wickedness was occasioned by lust for the accused man’s sister. Isabella is twisting logic and law and bracketing her first-hand experience of Angelo’s brutality. Her speech is itself a ‘warpèd slip’, a crooked utterance that comes from a former straight-talker. But, like the other slips we have noted, it emerges as a form of self-disclosure and, here but also elsewhere in the play, as a means toward the achievement of a complex goal. Isabella’s genuflection and crooked speaking are ways of moving under pressure. She fulfils Mariana’s request, resists the authority of the Duke, asserts her independence, and honours her own espousal of the value of judicial mercy in a way that anticipates and facilitates the mercy of the state that ends the play.

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9 ‘Captious and Inteemable’: Reading Comprehension in Shakespeare1 Meredith Evans

What each night she had given with such extravagance, – … when she woke, had not been given. FRANK BIDART, ‘THE SECOND HOUR OF THE NIGHT’

The perplexities of Shakespeare’s language weave together the same kinds of semantic and intellectual questions with which his characters are often presented, and which they present to us in turn. Here I will essay an interpretation of If it wouldn’t implicate my student in this chapter’s flaws, I would name John Casey co-author. For helping me to develop an inchoate paper into something more substantial, I am grateful to the members of the 2013 SAA seminar on ‘Sovereignty and Sexuality in Early Modern Drama’, especially Daniel Juan Gil for facilitating the seminar, and Aaron Kunin for his characteristically shrewd and generous feedback. Finally, I thank Paul Yachnin for his kind patience and for some very timely words of encouragement.

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Helena’s speech in 1.3 of All’s Well That Ends Well and in particular the ‘captious and inteemable sieve’ to which Helena, attempting to read her desire and make it legible, compares it.2 I will argue, further, that through this process of reading – in the specific sense I will lend it here – political and subjective sovereignty emerges through ongoing affective, social and sexual transactions. The fugitive tenor of Helena’s speech has a suitably capacious vehicle: intellectually engaging and densely allusive, it comprehends otherwise inscrutable affects. It is also notoriously opaque and textually unstable. Like the desire it attempts to describe, the speech is capacious and potentially deceptive. I draw these adjectives from its pivotal turn, from the impotence of love to its miraculous capacity and resilience: ‘Yet, in this captious and inteemable sieve, I still pour in the waters of my love, / And lack not more to lose’ (1.1.204–6). Since the metaphor is partly informed by its immediate context, it is worth providing a portion of it here. And so, Helena: I love your son. My friends were poor, but honest; so’s my love: … it hurts not him That he is lov’d of me; I follow him not By any token of presumptuous suit, Nor would I have him till I do deserve him; … I know I love in vain, strive against hope; Yet in this captious and inteemable sieve I still pour in the waters of my love And lack not to lose still. … … if you yourself, Whose aged honour cites a virtuous youth,

All’s Well That Ends Well, ed. G. K. Hunter, Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1994). Unless otherwise noted, quotations are from this edition.

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Did ever in so true a flame of liking, Wish chastely and love dearly, that your Dian Was both herself and love – O then, give pity To her whose state is such that cannot choose But lend and give where she is sure to lose; …. But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies! (1.3.189–212; italics added) At the pivotal turn of l.197, Helena’s love is no longer described in simple terms of ‘honesty’ or ‘desert’, as her declarative, largely monosyllabic speech gives way to a series of compacted metaphors, allusions and analogies that shuttle between grammatical moods. The shift to figurative language at this particular moment is significant. ‘Yet’: Helena’s ‘captious and inteemable’ sieve can plausibly function (or be read) as negation, diminishment or an alternative to the vain hopelessness she has conceded. Insofar as metaphor opens a descriptive and conceptual distance between the speaker and what she is speaking of – between her arduous affect as it is experienced and her affect as represented – it is a form of consolation, affording a momentary transcendence of limited agency and linguistic capacity. As a concession to futility, Helena’s heart-sieve offers a metaphorical framework in which subsequent actions can be interpreted. It is an alternative way of sense-making that enlarges the stage on which both the intellectual drama and comic plot unfold. Describing Helena’s speech in these terms – taking ‘captious’ possibly to mean deceitful; ‘inteemable’ to mean bottomless – I have already offered an interpretation of it. However, the sense of these words remains a matter of editorial debate. And the senses make a world of difference. Among their textual variants are, for example, David Bevington’s ‘captious and intenable.’ Emphasizing ‘intenable’ as ‘incapable of holding’, this gloss does not allow for the miraculous capacity of retention accorded to threateningly autonomous virgins, nor for Helena’s capacity to usher her desires into

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a place of holding: a pause, at least, complete in itself. 3 The 1997 Riverside edition, like Bevington, offers ‘intenable’ as ‘unretentive’, and glosses ‘captious’ as ‘readily receptive’ – a reading that connotes a plain sieve with nothing miraculous or puzzling about it. Both Hunter and Bevington gloss ‘captious’ as ‘capacious’ or ‘absorptive’ and as ‘deceitful’ or ‘deceptive’, and emphasize the latter. ‘Deceitful’ is the less obvious choice. It allows for the ambiguity of whether it is Helena’s heart that deceives, or the sieve: an ordinary everyday object that is, in fact, extraordinary. In any case both meanings, taken together, provide yet another angle on – or reading of – Helena’s situation: another way of grasping the play’s sustained interest in the indeterminate source of actions, events and affects. Further, the emphasis on ‘deceitful’ rightly underscores the play’s riddling epistemology; that is, its interest in reading comprehension, by which I mean not only our interpretive capacities as readers of Shakespeare, but also the plays’ diverse representations and enactments of hermeneutic effort; the attempt, more often than not, to position one’s self more or less comfortably, less or more coherently, in relation to a social world composed of seemingly incomprehensible prohibitions and unanticipated elusive affordances. But thus whether the sieve is defined by its limitlessly absorptive capacity, or by its constitutive inability to retain what is poured into it, the etymological justification for emphasizing deceitful lies in its definition as ‘a taking [in]’, itself a gloss on capere: to catch or to teach.4 To get it; to have it. Taking ‘teem’ as the root word of ‘inteemable’, Hunter paraphrases the line as: the lover’s hope is like a sieve in that ‘what has been poured in cannot be “teemed” (i.e. poured Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: Longman, 2008), 1.3.240, differs from Sylvan Barnett’s 1965 Signet edition, which, like Hunter’s 1994 Arden edition, prints ‘captious and inteemable’, and gives basically the same gloss (1.3.240f.). 4 OED a.1, and Hunter (31n. 197). 3

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out again)’; it is not only captious but retentive.5 Yet, the ‘still common’6 use of ‘teem’ requires further definition. To pour out, to drain, to empty – or else to be full of, swarming with life: these are all at play in the metaphor Helena draws, just as being drained or overflowing are not mighty opposites in All’s Well, but recurrent, overlapping tropes for multiple actions or states. For instance, the King’s fistula needs draining; Helena’s ‘too capable’ heart / memory threatens to undo her if it isn’t lanced (1.1.93); virginity ‘breeds mites … consumes itself to the very paring’ (1.1.139–40). Instead of allowing for a multiplicity of meaning, Hunter’s paraphrase is disorienting. Surely it matters whether the emphasis falls on love’s parthenogenetic capacity to sustain and reproduce itself (to breed mites, as it were) or constitutive deprivation (its cheesy selfconsumption). If what’s been ‘poured in’ cannot be ‘poured out again’, is that because what passes through a sieve will be a different and therefore, by definition, an irrecoverable substance? Or is it that something designed to lose the substance it momentarily holds (hope; love; desire; what have you) is a kind of indemnity against loss? Part of the difficultly of Helena’s speech derives from the generous space it gives to impossibility: its capacity to hold contradictory or incompatible properties and claims in solution. Separated from Bertram by the impermeable boundaries of sex and class, not to mention by the contingent but non-negotiable laws of nature and attraction, she is acutely aware of the odds against her. Remarkably, though, this awareness is not paralyzing, for she also invests her love with an inexplicable capacity to transcend impossibility. The fugitive tenor of her speech is given a suitably accommodating vehicle. The description of Helena’s desire as a ‘captious and inteemable sieve’, of infinite capacity and law-defying retention, tells of a miraculous performance she

Ibid. Ibid.

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must replicate: to enter a scene where her integrity is tested and proved. Less remarked but at least as significant, the (ob-) scene in which Helena is tested also tests the King’s bodily and political integrity, already compromised by the brute fact of his fistula.7 Ultimately, what Helena and her readers are enjoined to think about is comprehension itself, understood as both an affective capacity and intellectual ability, and the questions to which it gives rise. As, for example: how can one get something without having to give anything away? What does it mean to ‘get it’, and what are the rewards, if any, of doing so? What is it to hold (or, to be able to hold) what’s beyond one’s capacity? Is holding something the same as having it? The alliterative, familiar phrase ‘To have and to hold’8 would seem to suggest their basic commensurability, if not identity. However, the historical, juridical origins of the phrase argue otherwise. The traditional preface to conveyances of titles and lands (i.e., to contracts governing the terms of the transfer of property), ‘to have and to hold’ sharply distinguishes between ‘having’ and ‘holding.’ Whereas the first clause (also known as the habendum) denotes the object of negotiation and transfer, the second (the tenendum) signifies the subject thereby entrusted and, most importantly, stipulates the conditions of ownership to which both parties are bound. For all its mythological and romantic resonance, then, the ‘captious’ love that would both have and hold Bertram must also be grasped in these more legal and propriety terms. *** But it all starts with a dying king and a girl whose sole possession is the ‘remedy’ to cure him (1.2.225). Despite her willingness to give this possession away and against This is a point to which I shall return. The phrase would have been familiar from the Book of Common Prayer and as a term of jurisprudence.

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the counsel of his advisors, he initially rejects her proposal, convinced she is incapable of success and himself past cure. Like the fox in Aesop’s fable, what he cannot reach he pronounces sour. Once she has finally seen to him, his reach is considerable, but even then we are far from pronouncing ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’, for reviving the King is but a means to a further end. By demonstrating her worthiness and gaining the King’s favour, the girl hopes to gain access to her beloved (indifferent at best, contemptuous more often than not) and, ultimately, win his hand. This much at least is clear: Helena’s sovereign touch restores the sovereign’s body.9 The nature of the mysterious transaction between Helena and the King takes place between Act One, Scenes One and Two – or more precisely, during 1.2. It occupies a good part of the pages to follow, and small wonder. For, the philosophical drama of All’s Well is built on the presumed antipathy of ineffable events (‘mysteries’) and mundane exchanges (‘transactions’). Whereas the former is presumed to be non-agential and serves no immediate or discernible end or need, the latter is a rule-based exchange, generally commercial, stipulating such human capacities as consent, calculation and responsibility. Yet the drama itself transpires on quite another stage. Conveniently dark bedrooms, for instance, or situations measured, if they are measured at all, blindfolded; places, I mean, that reduce one’s capacity to tell human plots from heavenly design, disrupting the comfortable alliance generally presumed of intention, action and authority. When Helena presents her suit to the King, she mollifies his masculine pride by suggesting he regard the operation as God’s handiwork, not hers: ‘it is presumption in us when / The help of heaven we count the act of men. / Dear sir, to my endeavours give consent; / Of heaven, not me, make and experiment’ (2.1.150–4). The context in which this ‘Sovereignty’ as ‘Supreme or pre-eminence in respect of excellence or efficacy’ (esp. the efficacy of treating or healing). Cf. OED, ‘sovereignty’ n. 1a., which cites All’s Well, 1.3.219.

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argument is advanced compromises neither its coherence nor, evidently, its persuasive force. After all, what Helena faces is not more merely a dull generic ‘masculine pride’, but a king. Her government, that is, and, if the authorities are to be believed, the closest thing to heaven on earth. In any case, she rightly assumes it will be easier for the sovereign to submit to his Sovereign than to the mere slip of a girl, even if she is a credit to her father and bears his reputation and authority, and that it will feel better (not great, but better) to be indebted to God than to be in someone else’s debt. And so the King swallows her argument and everyone almost benefits and so forth. However, Helena’s ‘sovereignty’ (1.3.221) pushes gently but firmly on the sovereign power she is tasked to restore. Her relationship to the King is therefore a useful framework for articulating questions concerning the nature and source of authority: legitimate or illegitimate; in theory and in practice; occulted or verifiable. In the work of Carl Schmitt, the sovereign decision is likened to a miracle. Indeed, the miracle as guiding metaphor for sovereign power, and for the sovereign decision especially, informs much of Schmitt’s political philosophy.10 All’s Well recruits the same metaphor for its representation of sovereign power. Specifically, it sets Helena’s ostensibly miraculous power alongside the ostensibly transcendent of political sovereignty. But the play’s apposition of miracle and decision is not strictly drawn and seems to raise more questions than it answers. No one in All’s Well engages these questions more persistently, or is more engaged by them, than Helena, but they are primarily directed at her. Is Helena’s power a reflection or an illustration of the King’s power? A challenge to and rival Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, foreword by Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also Chapter 4 of Bonnie Hoing’s Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

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of it? An assertion of each, or the demystification of both? The play traces both individual and corporate authority to multiple, possibly incompatible sources, leaving their relative legitimacy and / or efficacy undecided. For instance, Helena’s authority – confirmed by her restoration of the King – is patrilineal. It derives from her physician father, since deceased, and the knowledge he bequeathed her. But this is not the only or even the most important source to which her singular capacity is attributed. At various points, it is also attributed to some intangible quality or unique talent she possesses: an ineffable something ‘more than [her] father’s skill’ (1.3.238); divine inspiration (cf. 2.1.150); or else simple resolve: in her own words, an inexplicably ‘fix’d’ intent to grasp that which she knows to be beyond her reach (1.1.225). Now here is a person who will eat grapes. Whatever drives Helena’s resolve, it is, I have suggested, most powerfully expressed in 1.3, where she confesses her love for Bertram to his mother, the Countess. I do not say, most clearly expressed, for the riddle of her desire is inseparable from her articulation of it, capturing the wonder that it should exist at all. Her central preoccupation, the thing of which she is most certain, is a confounding and inscrutable object. The riddling form of her reply reflects this, reproducing it in other terms, and is woven into the play’s interrogative texture. Like most riddles, it is marked by guarded obscurity, an alluring capacity to tell the future, the intimation of dark pleasures sensed but rarely ever known. As such, it is both an invitation and medium of thought.11 To thinking, that is, but more specifically to reading.12 As we witness Helena’s attempt to make her desire comprehensible, we are required to read her interpretive efforts in turn. See Daniel Tiffany’s exquisite Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 40–2. 12 See the OED entry for ‘read’, v. 1(b), which links reading to the OE Riddle, and describes it in terms of conjecture; discernment; linguistic comprehension or study. See also Tiffany, Infidel Poetics, 40, n. 9. 11

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The name for what Helena wants to have most, for which cultural conventions and class distinctions have set well beyond her reach, is ‘Bertram.’ I say ‘Bertram’ because the object of her desire is a cipher. One of Shakespeare’s least charismatic characters, he is also strikingly unsympathetic; not in the way of an Iago, mind; rather more in the manner of a tool. As Helena is well aware, this also makes her subjective desire difficult to decipher. Further, it allows that ‘Bertram’ (i.e. the object of her desire) may refer to several things, including the satisfaction of lust, naked ambition, the affect or experience of loving, the ideal of ‘love’ itself, or – who knows? – maybe even the man himself. Her attempt to explain just how she loves Bertram gives rise to a series of related, equally perplexing questions. Given the knowledge that one’s actions will likely be fruitless, how and why might one proceed? If one proceeds, what purchase does knowledge have on one’s actions and decisions anyway? At least the burden of these questions is broadly distributed. The play is saturated by perplexity about what it means to have something – and therefore, also, to let things slip, fail to ‘get it’, or lose someone. Here, for instance, are the play’s opening words, pronounced by the recently widowed Countess as she sees her only son off to war: ‘In delivering my son from me, / I bury a second husband’ (1.1.1–2). The grieving Countess is promised she will ‘find of the king a husband’ (1.1.6), a fit substitute for her husband’s substitute. Likewise, while Bertram still ‘weeps o’er [his] father’s death’, he is now devoted solely to the King’s authority. As it turns out, then, part of what it means to have and have lost someone is to receive someone else in their place. *** At least as it is presented here, Helena’s interpretive capacity supplies a nearly adequate antidote to a heart too readily impressed and altogether ‘too capable’ (93). And if this makes her ‘fancy’ ‘idolatrous’, well, she seems to say, so be it

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(cf. 95–6).13 The hopes invested in this ‘young gentlewoman who had a father’ (1.1.16), the authority she is believed to carry, threaten to lose vigour and specificity. Such enervation is reflected even in the Countess’s otherwise passionate apostrophe, whose focus shifts from Helena’s immediate loss to a more general register of loss, and, from there, to a purely hypothetical ‘death of the king’s disease’ (1.1.21–2): This young gentlewoman had a father – O that ‘had,’ how sad a passage ‘tis! – whose skill was almost as great as his honesty; had it stretch’d so far, would have made nature immortal, and death should have play for lack of work. Would for the king’s sake he were living! (1.1.16–22; emphasis mine) As the Countess remarks the sad passage of ‘had’, Helena is still passing through the continuous present of ‘having.’ Yet in her subsequent appearance before the Countess, her ongoing condition is readily legible according to the social and literary codes of courtly love. Jumpy, pale and hollow-eyed (see 1.2.134–47), she inadvertently communicates her otherwise unspeakable desire. Betrayed by her body, Helena is then asked to ‘disclose / The state of [her] affection’ in words (1.3.184–5). Already provided with evidence that speaks for itself, ‘the state of [her] affection’ could presumably be stated briefly and directly. And so it is – briefly. ‘I love your son,’ she declares (1.3.189). This forthright declaration, with its authoritative positioning of subject and object, is immediately qualified. As if embarrassed by her affective capacity, Helena goes on to assure the Countess that by loving Bertram she ‘hurts not him’, and that she harbours no illusion her love will be reciprocated. Bertram, she continues, is merely ‘lov’d of me’ (1.3.189–92; emphasis

According to Hunter, Helena ‘worships, and despises herself for it’ (8, nn. 95–6). I fail to see any evidence of self-contempt here, or elsewhere.

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mine). Even this slight grammatical shift from the nominative to the dative signals Helena’s self-protective deflection, if not disavowal, of her personal agency and authority. Properly speaking, Helena seems to be suggesting, he is not and cannot be the ‘object’ of my affection; as if he belonged to a species different from my own, he is someone to whom I am inexplicably drawn and cannot help but admire, but who remains beyond any influence of mine, good or bad; he has the power to hurt; I, none. In All’s Well, self-representation can and does bend to the exigencies of occasion – underplaying authority here, inflating it there.14 Despite Helena’s qualification of agency and the self-declared limits of her authority in 1.3, however, the scene is not one of those occasions. What dramatic interest and affective tension the scene has would be lost were we to read Helena as disingenuous. If she neither believes in the benign nature of (her) love, nor genuinely despairs of it, she would indeed be, as E. W. M. Tillyard thought, ‘a mere humour of predatory monogamy.’15 Put another way, the play would be less ‘problematic’, certainly, but also less engaging and challenging than it is. And yet … None of this blunts Helena’s resolve. Irrespective of her deflection of personal agency and the earnest admission of her attenuated authority in 1.3, her wager with the King pitches her sovereign powers against his. The lines of their contest are sharpened by the fact that the authority she derives from her father has an unnamed supplement that, while never precisely located, is never really in doubt. At least, not for Helena. After considering the matter at some length, the Countess finally asks her for simple assurance, ‘Dost thou believe it?’ (244),

See, for example, the entire exchange between Parolles and Lord Lafew at 2.3.11ff. 15 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950), 126. 14

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to which Helena replies, ‘Ay, Madam, knowingly’ (1.3.245). This reply leaves little room for doubt. Simple and direct, it wins the Countess’s full confidence more surely than the prior inducements and explanations Helena has offered. It is less certain what the Countess has confidence in, exactly. The ‘success’ of ‘his grace’s cure’, certainly, for which Helena is requesting leave to ‘try’ or test. Yet this success is predicated on several other objects of faith or confidence, among them a vague ‘something … / More than [her] father’s skill’, the professional knowledge behind that skill, as well as the ‘luckiest stars in heaven’ – stars, Helena claims, that will ‘sanctify’ her father’s reputation and secure her proper ‘legacy.’ Any one of these might be the object of contention requiring a leap of faith, and, although they are interrelated, are not easily to be reconciled. Slightly reframing the Countess’s question, Helena’s reply does, then, leave a little room for doubt. For it is one thing to believe and another thing to know, just as the objects of belief (say, miracles) are different kinds of objects from those attributed to knowledge (the verities demonstrated by natural science). If believing and knowing are so different, is it possible to do both at once? Does Helena’s ‘knowingness’ come from an ineffable, unnamed ‘something’ that surpasses skill, or does it refer to a worldly and embodied quality, something more than her father could possibly offer, something more frankly transactional than a miracle? The possibility that ‘Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven’ (1.1.212–13) would be especially uncomfortable to entertain if one has staked one’s life on their success. If there is any suspense in All’s Well That Ends Well, it probably lies here. In the figure of Helena, we are confronted with the unsettling hypotheses that what one knows has little to do with how one will act, and that how one acts may have little influence on what happens. Before surrendering to Helena’s proposal, the King decides the terms of the wager: should Helena fail, she will surrender her life, extinguishing the happiness of ‘Youth, beauty, wisdom, courage’ (2.1.180). Having spelled out precisely what

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she stands to lose should she accept his terms, he resolves to ‘try’ her ‘physic’ after all, opining, ‘What impossibility would slay / In common sense, sense saves another way’ (2.1.176–7; cf. 2.1.174–85). For her part, Helena is hardly reluctant to venture her bare life on untried ‘confidence’ (2.1.168), or on whichever sense of ‘sense’ the King has in mind. In keeping with the logic of the play’s usurious estimation of virginity, Helena estimates her value to the King in negative terms, plus interest, emphasizing the remunerative excitement that her ‘divulged shame, / Traduc’d by odious ballads’ (2.1.170–2) could arouse. She is nevertheless emphatic about her terms of the agreement, as precise as he about what she stands to gain or lose. Should she succeed, she is promised the very thing she will be unable to do, the one thing that exceeds her capacity: namely, the power to choose a husband from among those in the King’s power to command, exempting ‘the royal blood of France’ (2.1.194). Her chosen one turns out to be Bertram, a figure at least twice removed from the centre and substance of sovereign power, but upon whom the proof of sovereignty (whether as decision or pardon) now seems to depend. This makes Helena’s ‘socially transgressive claim to a husband’ all the more so, especially insofar as it is also an ‘incidental’ ‘claim to his property, the transmission of which only she can guarantee by providing him with heirs.’16 Incidental or not, her claim is clearly couched in terms of social stability and political gain. Yet Helena’s claim is also, unmistakably, an assertion of right to the free enjoyment of Bertram’s body – ‘the great prerogative and rite of love’, as Parolles puts it (2.4.39). As it turns out, her enjoyment is in fact (re-)productive, thus securing patrilineal continuity. So far as Helena is concerned, though, this is merely a collateral benefit. With the terms of their wager agreed upon, 2.1 ends with the King extravagantly offering Helena ‘[his] hand’,

Harry Berger Jr, Making Trifles of Terrors (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 298.

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promising that her ‘will by [his] performance shall be serv’d’ (200–1). Despite or because of the several ironies engendered by the sovereign decision, the scene strikes a judicious balance between competing interests, casting promises in rhymed couplets that seem imported from another play. Meanwhile, many of the assumptions we rely upon to order and interpret experience are being quietly exploded. The assumption, for instance, that there is a substantial, legible difference between intention and action, willing and performing, having and holding. Between standing up, say, or just standing by. Despite their judicious ring, the King’s parting words implicitly accede to a somewhat scandalous equivalence. By staking her body on the King’s body in order to win Bertram’s, Helena has assumed an underlying commensurability of these bodies.17 The idea implicit in the terms of their transaction – namely, that they can each (and do) stand in for another – is ratified by the King’s decision to be Helena’s ‘resolv’d patient’ (1.2.223). By the same token, the legitimacy of Helena’s desire and her ‘right’ to see it satisfied are conceded before even being tried. When the King offers Helena his hand, Bertram’s is as good as lost. As I have said, Helena is no mere ‘predator of monogamy’, but she is not the virginal saint to whom she sometimes compares herself, either. Her relationship to her own sexual desire is something altogether more mysterious than the laws of predation or, for that matter, their exception. Wishing she could be at once chaste and unchaste, both Dian and love (1.3.208), she presents her predicament as essentially tragic; she is one ‘whose state is such that cannot choose / But lend and give where she is sure to lose’, and, ‘lives sweetly where she dies’ (1.3.209–10). The common Shakespearean sense of ‘to die’ as ‘orgasm’ is no doubt at play here, but it goes only so far in elucidating this passage, which proceeds to describe

This is not to say that Helena intentionally or consciously assumes it, only that the terms of wager dictate it.

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her desire in less obviously compliant terms. Her further articulation of her desire or love as ‘riddle-like’ mimes a satisfying solution, only to present another riddle in turn (‘Thus, riddle-like …’). In what sense is her present state like a riddle? Maybe Helena is riddled because the idea of death is greater than our capacity to understand it; maybe one lives only so long as death exceeds full comprehension, which can only be achieved, if at all, by dying. However tragic, though, this dilemma also suggests that the inability to grasp something fully, or to arrive at a satisfying resolution, can be a spring of agency. Or at least a means of persisting. Before Helena goes on to describe her desire in more diaphanous terms of transcendence and sanctification, she comprehends both the urgency and recklessness of her desire for Bertram in a less riddling analogy: ‘The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love’ (1.1.89–90). Despite the familiar motif of dying of / for love compounded by punitive social restrictions, nowhere else is Helena’s desire more frankly stated. She wants to – no, she would be, indeed wills to be – mated. There are more expansive terms of comparison at her disposal, more finely-tuned instruments of understanding and communicating, but this analogy gets us closest to the King’s obscene bedchamber, and to the quasi-incestuous surrogacies that shape the play’s philosophical drama. Helena’s relationship to her own desire is defined by the object of desire and the sovereign power that can as easily obstruct as facilitate it. In 2.1, these relationships converge in the extra-diegetic time that elapses between this scene and the following. It is ob-scene because it is off-stage, and because, like Helena’s love for Bertram, it transgresses proprieties of class, family and generation, as well as ‘honour’ in the putatively feminine and masculine applications of that term.18 Eventually, however, Helena does gain access to the royal

18 Cf. also OED, ‘obscene’, adj and`n, which derives the word from the Latin partes obscenae, and the genitals (Obs.).

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body and expends on it her only inheritance: namely, the book in which her father’s knowledge has been preserved and was his ‘only darling’ (2.1.106). His ‘only darling’? Let me try that again: Finally, though, Helena does gain access to the royal body, and expends on it her only inheritance: namely, her self. Helena is given three days to ‘enforce her office’ and restore the King’s failing body, or, in more clinical terms, to cure him of his fistula. Today ‘fistula’ is a more specific term, referring to ‘an abscess external to the rectum.’ Its earlier definition was looser, covering a range of ailments and a variety of unusual bodily protrusions. In the play’s source-text, Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, the French king is said to be suffering from ‘a swelling upon his breast, which by reason of ill cure, was growen to be a Fistula’,19 while in Jacques Ferrand’s 1623 Treatise on Lovesickness, ‘fistula’ refers to ‘a specific disease of the eye.’20 None of this means, however, that the King’s ailment and Helena’s cure are all above board and within sight. In the Treatise, a ‘fistula’ is a clear symptom of ‘erotic melancholy’, and is introduced within a broader discussion about the potential medical benefits that might be had from sex. He pointedly denies that illicit sex could be of any medical benefit, attributing this view to ‘Mohammedans and infidels’ (334). It is less clear whether he thinks there are such benefits to be had from sex tout court. ‘Indian-like’ and ‘Religious in [her] error’ (1.3.199–200), as she describes herself, Helena probably would not grant such distinctions as readily. The text is clear about the nature of the King’s restored health, if not the precise nature of his ailment and cure: I have seen a medicine That’s able to breathe life into a stone, Quicken a rock, and dance canary Quoted in Hunter, n. 31, and Appendix, 146. Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness (1623), trans. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 278. 19 20

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With sprightly fire and motion; whose simple touch Is powerful to araise King Pippen, nay, To give great Charlemain a pen in’s hand And write her a love-line. (2.1.71–7) While the King is not immediately convinced that Helena’s sovereign ‘simple touch’ (2.1.74) will suffice to ‘araise’ him, its power is very much in evidence. As Lafew remarks of him, ‘Your dolphin is not lustier’ than he; he is, even, ‘Lustique’, the old lord continues, though not without a twinge of homosocial jealously: ‘I’d like a maid the better whilst I have a tooth in my head. Why, he’s able to lead her a coranto’ (2.3.41–3). Having proved his power already, the King still has something to prove, something that will make his power manifest: ‘My honour’s at the stake, which to defeat, / I must produce my power’ (2.3.149–50). In exchange for his life, he has assumed Bertram’s compliance and promised his hand to Helena. Bertram is impertinently reluctant, and roundly rebuked. Yet this alone will not suffice to ‘produce’ his power, for by commanding Bertram’s assent, indeed staking his very honour on it, the King also attests to the contingency of his power. He is confronted by the double bind of sovereign power, whereby power’s requisite manifestation simultaneously discloses its dependence on and continuity with other merely natural bodies. Confronted thus, he might well want to know what Helena wanted to know: ‘Is there no military policy how virgins might blow up men?’ she asks Parolles (1.1.119). The full interest of the question emerges only when, having been rebuked, Bertram is made to know precisely what is at stake for him: ‘It is in us,’ the King reminds him, ‘to plant thine honour where / We please to have it grow’ (2.3.156–7). Given his dependence on other bodies (Helena’s, for instance), the threat is a concession. His power, and the sovereign decision above all, cannot but draw attention to its captious and arbitrary nature (‘where we please’). Here, power is as vulnerable to the variegations of honour; as vulnerable, at least, as Bertram’s ‘honour’ is to sovereign whimsy. With this

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threat, the King might just as well be asking (of both Bertram and himself, since they have both been blown up by virgins in one sense or another): is there no policy how men might blow up virgins? What policy is there for men who have been blown up by virgins? Once planted, has the destiny of his honour, bound as it is to Bertram’s dubious honour, already been determined? For All’s Well to end well, the play must see its heroine legitimately coupled with the guy she somewhat inexplicably desires, and she must receive the King’s benediction. As in other Shakespearean comedies, here one of the primary functions of sovereignty is the legitimation of sex, whether sex that’s been had or sex still to be won. Indisputably, it is one of the primary means through which sovereign power reveals and asserts itself. In All’s Well That Ends Well, the final coupling is presented as a miracle of sorts, even though we have been privy to the various contrivances that have in fact brought it about: exchanging this head for that, say, or, provided the lights are sufficiently dim, one willing body for another. In effect, the King gives Helena Bertram’s hand in exchange for his own life, but that life – what remains of the King – depends on Bertram to take it. Another way of putting this is to say that the ‘legitimate’ heterosexual couple amplifies sovereign power. With its worldly and immediate legibility, and its implicit promise of continuity, the couple also serves as a figure of this power. Whether this figure is ultimately celebrated or whether some taint of moral ambiguity and coercion still clings to it, will be contingent on the specific literary, historical and cultural contexts in which it is delivered and received. As the crowning figure of Shakespearean comedy, however, it intimates the genre’s deep and broad investment in sovereign power. Other generic markers, like the havoc wrought by desire, or the frantic pursuit of illicit sex, only strengthen this investment – and not by virtue of any cycle of containment and release, either. The function and proof of sovereign power as the legitimation of sex is perhaps clearer in Measure for Measure,

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where the rights of marriage are bestowed to reward but more often than not to punish. As Lucio, condemned to marry his ‘punk’, remarks, ‘[It] may prove worse than hanging.’21 This is bitter comedy. It attests to sovereignty as the power to decide the exception, and as the power over life and death above all. In All’s Well, the King’s authority, particularly as expressed as legitimizing benediction, is no less punitive than the Duke’s. Certainly it is a punishment for Bertram, one he has earned but which, one feels, he does not deserve. As for Helena, she has earned her reward, though not before staking her life on it. In All’s Well, the punitive function of sovereign power, and the violence embedded in it, are not as broadly and self-consciously applied as they are in Measure for Measure. However bitter, All’s Well is an easier pill to swallow. The darker cast I have been pointing to is marked from beginning to end, but not to the extent that it obscures the play’s other, less ‘problematic’ registers.22 Nevertheless, it is intrinsic to the play, whose most revealing and consequential acts are, after all, performed in the dark. That is, it is intrinsic to the play’s adulterated cynicism: its invitation, or rather demand, not only to read but positively credit incompatible generic, ethical and philosophical positions. Insofar as these are also embodied positions, it is also intrinsic to how Helena answers – or fails to answer – the same demand, and our evaluation of it. The transaction between Helena and the King has twin accomplishments, though they do not emerge until the end of the play. Having given Bertram’s hand in exchange for his own life, the King claims to speak for Justice, and justice has been served. In addition, at least one miracle, maybe more, has been performed. Helena gets to be the ‘Dian[a]’ who

Measure for Measure, ed. Jonathan Crewe (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000), 5.1.358. 22 Including that announced by its title, however hedged by conditionals and unfinished business (see 5.3.311–28). 21

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‘Was both herself and love’ (1.3.208), and to ‘[live] sweetly where she dies’ (212). When all is said and done, she gets to be chaste and get laid, as if, ‘riddle-like’, or king-like, she can avail herself of two bodies – and while presumed dead, procure a third. The King’s threat, it appears, has turned fact, confirming his claim that ‘it is in [him]’ to ‘plant’ Bertram’s honour wherever he would ‘have it grow’ (2.3.156–7). Diana, for whom Helena had served as surrogate, once in a dark room in Florence, reappears in Act Five. She has come to repay Helena who, by lying down for Diana (i.e. the real, not the mythical girl), preserved her honour and protected her chastity. As the prologue to Helena’s ‘miraculous’ reappearance, Diana presents a riddle of her own, claiming Bertram ‘knows himself my bed he hath defil’d; / And at that time he got his wife with child. / Dead though she be she feels her young one kick. / So there’s my riddle: one that’s dead is quick, / And now behold the meaning’ (5.3.294–8). And so, behold the meaning. The riddle isn’t hard to grasp, but it does require the visual image Helena’s body can provide in a way that her heart-sieve cannot. For anyone troubled by Shakespeare’s implausible temporal schemes, the implication that the King has stood in as a surrogate father would at least make some sense of Helena’s advanced stage of pregnancy in the final act. Just as he provided Helena with a temporary stand-in or surrogate for Bertram, so Bertram, after a fashion, serves as the King’s surrogate, now charged with husbanding the seed planted by someone else. ‘Thou know’st she has rais’d me from my sickly bed,’ comes the King’s paternal admonition, urging his adoptive son to take Helena’s hand and accept a new role. The familiar retort comes just as quickly: ‘But follows it, my lord, to bring me down / Must answer for your raising?’ (2.3.111–13). Well, yes; and yes. ***

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By advancing this obscene interpretation of the King’s cure, I do not mean to say that Helena’s motives are pure and her affections merely misplaced. My reading does not necessarily contradict, much less cancel, Helena’s idealized and idealizing account of her desire. I would argue that her affections have been displaced, had she not already made that argument herself. Charged with the task of carrying and disseminating ‘the credit of [her] father’ in her own person (1.1.75–6), alone, she confesses to her infidelity – a source no doubt of both anguish and relief.23 Since Bertram has assumed her father’s place in her imagination, the King, who has assumed the place of Bertram’s father, is a likely stand-in for Bertram. If anything, this contributes to the erotic incitement of her prohibitive station: ‘My master, my dear lord he is; and I / His servant live, and will his vassal die. / He must not be my brother’ (1.3.153–5).24 What I am suggesting is that what transpires between the King and Helena off-stage is a rehearsal of what later transpires, unbeknownst to him and also off-stage, between Bertram and Helena. Not exactly the consummation of their marriage, but, just as surely, a realization of Helena’s desire. As she is aware, the impropriety of her desire has to do with transgressions of gender, class and station, as well as the factum brutum of desire itself, and female desire in particular. They also include her ‘idolatrous’ worship of body above spirit and, worse, image above body. And so, in Act Five, Helena stands before her audience repenting that ‘’Tis but ‘I think not on my father / … / … What was he like? / I have forgot him; my imagination / Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s’ (1.1.77–81). 24 The tale of Myrrha and Cinyras in Metamorphoses X: 297–511 is an uncannily resonant but, to my knowledge, unremarked source-text. Like Helena, Myrrha may choose from among ‘Young lords from every land’, but ‘there is one who can’t belong / to those from whom [she chooses]’ (338): her father, the one man with whom she longs to mate. Helena begs the Countess not to call her ‘daughter’, since that would make Bertram her ‘brother’ (cf. 1.3.133ff.). Similarly, for Myrrha ‘filial’ is a term of chastisement and prohibition; hearing it, ‘she lowers her eyes: she knows she’s criminal’ (339). See The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993). 23

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the shadow of a wife you see; / The name and not the thing’ (5.3.301–2). But in fact she is both ‘name’ and ‘thing’; only the King’s closing benediction remains. Such knowingness prompts a re-reading of her earlier claim that, in worshiping Bertram as she does, she is ‘religious in [her] error.’ Instead of a forthright admission of the carnality or impurity of her love, it is a clear-sighted recognition that such an ‘error’ might consist precisely in its religiosity; that, for all its embodied erotic force, it remains incorrigibly attached to the pathos of distance, ideals of transcendent love, and an abiding faith in miracles. Or, that for all its enduring faith in miracles, religiosity cannot but comprehend – take note of, experience, register – embodied force, be it erotic or political. Through the mysterious transaction between 2.1 and 2.3, All’s Well stages sovereignty’s need to recruit licit and illicit forms of sexuality to its own ends. It might stipulate, further, the fundamental irrelevance of the distinction between ‘licit’ and ‘illicit’ forms of sexuality: however obliquely; in spirit, if not in word. Helena’s uneasy cohabitation of sexual assertion and subjection argues the same point. This is not a simple debunking, for to question the arbitrariness and materiality of certain objects of worship (whether Helena’s miraculous cure, Bertram’s erotic appeal, or the King’s potency) is, again, to attest to their power. To describe sovereign power in terms of one of its primary functions – namely, the legitimation of sex – says only so much about that power per se. Nevertheless, it would be reductive to read this ending or resolution as dependent solely on the intervention of sovereign power, just as it would be mistaken to see the legitimation enacted on this particular stage as a process aimed, more or less successfully, at correcting the defects of human sexuality.25 In All’s Well That Ends Well, the quiddity

Or, in more traditional terms, to read it as the intervention of grace working through divinely appointed deputies. Here again, Measure for Measure would prove the better example.

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of sex is too persuasively frank and too broadly distributed to be accommodated by such neat remedies. Perhaps, then, it is neither personal nor political sovereignty that is asserted, but the sovereignty of desire in its various manifestations? In this case, one might reasonably (and, in my view, rightly) conclude that sovereign power and sexuality are coextensive, if not co-constitutive, and so begin to tease out its theoretical and practical implications. But we’re not done yet. To be sure, the realization of Helena’s sovereign desire is an act of subjugation (the King’s), but it is no less an act (Helena’s act) of submission. And not even to the object of her idolatrous fancy, to which she would happily subject herself, but to the King. In a last-ditch effort to gain access to his body, she does question both the justice and the potency of the sovereign decision: ‘Inspired merit so by breath is barred’ (2.1.147). But she does so only hypothetically: as if incredulous that a king’s breath could deflate ‘inspired merit’; as if the binding power of the sovereign decision were inconceivable. Helena is not only complicit with the King; she is also compliant to his wishes and desires. Upon presenting herself to him, she says she comes ‘to tender’ her father’s gift (the remedy) and her ‘appliance’ (her compliance together with the remedy) (2.1.112). We have been primed for this note of subjection already. However capacious or deceitful, Helena’s heart is adamantly ‘too capable’ (1.1.93): too passive, too receptive; impressionable to a fault. *** In this politically restricted context, where knowledge vies with belief and only rarely wins, the most devastatingly eloquent voice of dissent belongs, of all people, to Parolles. ‘Of all people’, I say, but, more than anyone else on this stage, it is he who most fully grasps what it means to live in a world of words and is best equipped to live there. Stripped of his honour, his standing and his clothes – all

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that which presumably makes a man – he is, of all things, ‘thankful’ (4.3.319, my emphasis). ‘If my heart were great, / ‘Twould burst at this,’ he continues, thus drawing Helena’s comprehensive heart-sieve to where it most properly belongs: where swords rust, blushes cool and, riddle-like, one is ‘Safest in shame’ (4.3.319–27). There, Parolles invents a stark definition of his self: ‘Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live’ (4.3.322–3). This announcement of radical autonomy is, at the same time, a powerful renunciation of the subject as an entity dependent on and defined by sovereign power. Persisting in a world that may well turn out not to ‘have place and means for every man alive’ (328), Parolles cuts an interestingly fragile figure. Like Helena, he has, in equal measure, little to lose and much to gain. They are both threatened by the possibility of losing their honour; both have traded on it, too. Who’s won and who’s lost, who’s in or who’s out: at the end of All’s Well That Ends Well, these remain tangled, open questions, of utmost significance but little importance. Unlike everyone else in the play, who live in fear of losing ‘honour’ and are sustained by the hope of winning it, only Helena and Parolles have seen it for the ethically insubstantial trifle that it is. To snatch a line from Dorothy Parker, they may have already lost it, but they still have the box it came in.

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10 ‘Time is their master’: Men and Metre in The Comedy of Errors Jennifer Roberts-Smith

Introduction: Metre and timing Early in The Comedy of Errors, when Adriana’s husband is late for lunch, her sister Luciana reassures her that although men’s liberties are great, they are subject to time: ‘Time is their master,’ she promises, ‘and when they see time, / They’ll go or come’ (2.1.8–9).1 The literal and conventional Elizabethan senses of the word ‘time’ occur frequently in the play and articulate what has long been recognized as its central theme. Despite the action’s apparent temporal chaos, which culminates in a reversal of time in Act Four, when Syracusian Dromio complains, ‘It was two ere I left [my master], and

All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (2nd edn, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

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now the clock strikes one’ (4.2.53), men are not ultimately masterless in Ephesus. True to romance conventions, ‘there’s a time for all things’ (2.2.65), as the play’s protagonists grope blindly towards a resolution that is guaranteed by the play’s structural and generic chronologies. Perhaps surprisingly – in a play that has never been considered a masterpiece of versification – Shakespeare puts the ordering influence of time to work in The Comedy of Errors at the metrical level as well.2 Of course, as George T. Wright explains in his seminal book, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter is not normally thought of as literally timed. There are two categories of rhythm in English poetry; one is timed and the other is not, and iambic pentameter belongs to the latter: If the meter is accentual, it measures the intervals between stressed syllables by the time that elapses between them, without specifying how many unstressed syllables appear in that interval … But if the meter is not only accentual but also syllabic, then the interval between its accented syllables is marked not by a measured time-lapse but by the occurrence of a fixed number of unaccented syllables (usually one). In such meter we hear a pulsation … in each stressed syllable, but the intervals between stressed syllables are not so regular.3 Wright sees ‘grave theoretical problems’ (p. 3) in the effort to explain the iambic ‘pulsation’ by means of an analogy

The comments in the Oxford edition give a good indication of the play’s metrical reputation. See Comedy of Errors, ed. Charles Walters Whitworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 6–7. See also Brennan O’Donnell, ‘The Errors of the Verse: Metrical Reading and Performance of The Comedy of Errors’, in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Roberts S. Miola (London: Routledge, 1997), 403. 3 George T. Wright. Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 3. 2

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between a line of verse and a line of music. His reservations notwithstanding, however, he uses the analogy in a concession to the voice’s tendency to compensate for trochaic inversions in spoken iambic verse. The voice slows or quickens, he says, in order to articulate the ‘beat’ of a line of iambic pentameter at equal intervals in time: As I make it out, either there is a pause before the stressed syllable of a trochaic foot, or else the voice lingers on the preceding syllable (if the trochee is medial) while enough time passes to let the next syllable be positioned to accept the beat. (p. 187) In this brief surrender to his intuition as a performer, Wright hears iambic pentameter for a moment in the way that Shakespeare’s contemporaries did. For Elizabethan metrists, the distinction between timed accentual meters and untimed accentual-syllabic meters was not so clear-cut: the ‘English Iambick’, as Thomas Campion called it, was widely understood to organize syllable duration as well as accent (or stress) and syllable-count in its rules.4 Elizabethans thought that the line ‘whiche hath in it fewest syllables, shalbe founde yet to consist of words that haue suche naturall sounde, as may seeme equall in length to a verse which hath many moe syllables of lighter accents.’5 In addition to ‘accent’ or salience it was the ‘quantity’, or time (long or short) of syllables, not just their number, that determined the length of a line. In other words, Elizabethans heard the same tendency for salient syllables to occupy ‘beats’ in a line of

Thomas Campion, Obseruations in the Art of English Poesie (London, 1602), sig. B1v. See also Samuel Daniel, A panegyrike congratulatory … With a defence of ryme, heeretofore written, and now published by the author (London, 1603), sig. G1–I1. 5 George Gascoigne, Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English … The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire (London, 1575), sig. T2v. 4

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verse as Wright does, whether one or two non-salient syllables or no syllables at all fell between them. The ‘English iambic’ was to them more like native English accentual verse than it was like the continental models identified by more recent theorists as its precedent. Like Wright, modern theorists have tended, sometimes regretfully, to understand the Elizabethan characterization of the iambic as misguided;6 but recent developments in the field of linguistics suggest that Shakespeare’s contemporaries may have been right after all. In particular, Kristin Hanson has provided phonological evidence that Philip Sidney accurately identified the durations of syllables he used in his quantitative dactylic hexameters.7 Her methodology, applied to Thomas Campion’s work, confirms that both his theory and his composition of quantitative ‘English iambics’ were as phonologically grounded as Sidney’s classical meters.8 Even more importantly, Hanson has shown that Shakespeare moves in thematically motivated ways in Richard II between a purely accentualsyllabic iambic pentameter, which she identifies as common in contemporary lyric forms such as sonnets, and an iambic pentameter that also systematically organizes syllable duration, which she identifies as a contrasting dramatic form of iambic pentameter.9 This is an important discovery: if Shakespeare

The most sympathetic but still sceptical treatment of the so-called quantitative movement in English verse theory and practice is Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 7 Kristin Hanson, ‘Quantitative Meter in English: The Lesson of Sir Philip Sidney’, English Language and Linguistics 5, no. 1 (2001): 41–91. 8 Jennifer Roberts-Smith, ‘Thomas Campion’s Iambic and Quantitative Sapphic: Further Evidence for Phonological Weight in Elizabethan English Quantitative and non-Quantitative Meters’, Language and Literature 21, no. 4 (2012): 381–401. 9 Kristin Hanson, ‘Shakespeare’s Lyric and Dramatic Metrical Styles’, in Formal Approaches to Poetry: Recent Developments in Metrics, ed. B. Elan Dresher and Nila Friedberg (Berlin and New York: M. de Gruyter, 2006), 105–27. 6

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could generate meaning perceptible to a live theatre audience by switching between timed and untimed iambics, a whole new mode of performed linguistic expression has opened up for exploration in Shakespeare’s world of words. The Comedy of Errors is a useful starting place for an exploration of how Shakespeare’s timed dramatic iambics may have made meaning in performance because it incorporates the two categories of English verse most clearly distinct not just to Elizabethan but also to modern ears. Although The Comedy of Errors is mainly written in what has traditionally been described as an accentual-syllabic iambic pentameter, a significant passage is written in a meter identified by Brennan O’Donnell as an ‘accentual or strong-stress verse’ that especially encourages a timed delivery in performance.10 Because of the play’s thematic preoccupation with time, it also offers an opportunity to explore the relationships among meter, theme, structure, style and genre in performance. In The Comedy of Errors, I suggest, Shakespeare gives metrical form to Elizabethan ideas about time as the bringer of order. The accentual meters and quantitative iambic pentameters are linked by what I call border lines, with features that straddle the two kinds of meter. The play’s metrical scheme as a whole operates as a meta-level commentary on the action in which male characters are most fully mastered by time when they are least able to master themselves. This structural gesture helps to create the ironic distance between characters’ and audiences’ perceptions of time that is perhaps the play’s central goal.

Time and tune Shakespeare never uses the word ‘time’ with reference to meter anywhere in his corpus of 90,000 or so words. In fact, he almost never discusses meter at all. He never uses the term O’Donnell, ‘Errors of the Verse’, 403.

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‘iambic’; he names no other classical foot-type; nor does he ever use the words ‘pentameter’ or ‘quantity’ with reference to syllables. Of four instances of the technical terms ‘foot’ or ‘feet’, three are in a seven-line prose passage in As You Like It where Rosalind and Celia mock Orlando’s bad love poems; the fourth, in Gower’s prologue to the fourth act of Pericles, regrets ‘the lame feete of my rime’ (4.4.48–9). There was probably good reason for Shakespeare to eschew metrical terms in general: they were rare, specialized, classical imports, ‘words of art’ which Samuel Rid explained in his 1611 Art of Iugling or Legerdemaine when he said that ‘you must also haue your words of Arte, certaine strange words, that … may … breed the more admiration to the people.’11 Even Samuel Daniel, with his regular-English agenda, invoked the rarity of the term ‘iambic’ and its Latin and continental cachet when he complained: [W]hat a doe haue we heere, what strange precepts of Arte about the framing of an Iambique verse in our language, which when all is done, reaches not by a foote, but falleth out to be the plaine ancient verse consisting of tenne sillables or fiue feete, which hath euer beene vsed amongest vs time out of minde.12 Shakespeare did not think his poetry needed help from continental practices – ancient or contemporary. As Mercutio puts it, ‘The pox of such antic lisping affecting [phantasimes], these new tuners of accent! … Why, is not this a lamentable thing … that we should be thus afflicted with these strange flies, these fashion-mongers, these [pardon-]me’s, who stand so much on the new form, that they cannot sit at ease on the old bench?’ (Romeo and Juliet, 2.4.28–35). In Mercutio’s play

Samuel Rid, The Art of Iuggling or Legerdemaine (London, 1611), sig. B3v. 12 Daniel, Defence of Ryme, sig. H4r. 11

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on words in this passage, Shakespeare displays the bias of his own metrical vocabulary, an English inventory of terms less precise or technical than the classical lexicon. English ‘accents’ are ‘tuned’ and they do not need to be ‘new tuned’; attempts to ‘new tune’ them merely ‘affect’ the ‘antic’ (both clownish and ancient) and the ‘lisping’ (Spanish?); those who make such attempts are ‘strange [i.e. foreign] flies’, ‘fashion-mongers’ and Frenchified ‘pardon-me’s.’ And what is an ordinary English ‘tune’, from which our ‘accent’ need not be trained? A ‘tune’ is a ‘time’, as Shakespeare explains in As You Like It – not primarily a pitched pattern, but a rhythmic one. When Touchstone is offended by the Pages’ song ‘It was a lover and his lass’ in Act Five, he complains, ‘Truly, young gentlemen, though there was no great matter in the ditty, yet the note was very untuneable’; and the First Page objects, ‘You are deceiv’d, sir, we kept time, we lost not our time’ (5.3.34–8). For the Page, the temporal rhythm of a note is as integral to its ‘tune’ as its pitch, and although ‘tune’ did often refer to works of sung pitch in Elizabethan English, it also referred to spoken metrical works, especially those written in the native English tradition, as described in the specialized contexts of treatises attempting both to associate the English tradition with and distinguish it from the classical and continental traditions.13 To my knowledge, this exchange in As You Like It is Shakespeare’s only reference to metrical time.

Measure and due time For modern readers of Shakespeare, ‘measure’ is a term that perhaps more recognizably links metrics to ‘time’ than ‘tune’, in part because the analogy between dance measures For a discussion of Puttenham’s use of the term ‘tune’, see Jennifer Roberts-Smith, ‘Puttenham rehabilitated: the significance of “tune” in The Arte of English Poesie’, Computing in the Humanities Working Papers/Text Technology 12, no. 1 (2003): 75–91.

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and metrics is recognized (however vaguely) by the Oxford English Dictionary at sense 16a: ‘Rhythm in poetry as defined by syllabic quantity or stress; a kind of poetical rhythm; a metrical group or unit, such as a dactyl or two Iambuses, trochees, spondees, etc. … Also: a metrical foot.’ One of the citations offered by the OED in support of this sense is from Shakespeare’s Henry V, in which King Henry apologizes to Princess Katharine of France for the fact that ‘for the one [i.e. verses], I have neither words nor measure; and for the other [i.e. dance], I have no strength in measure, yet a reasonable measure in strength’ (5.2.134–6). George Puttenham is more explicit than either the OED or Shakespeare when he explains that ‘meeter and measure is all one … and is but the quantitie of a verse, either long or short.’14 A contemporary of Puttenham and Shakespeare like John Florio extended the analogy from the organized rhythmical timings of music, dance and verse to a general sense of order when he associated ‘due time and proportion’ with ‘measure and order in syllables or verses.’15 This is exactly the association Shakespeare makes between conceptual and experiential timeliness in The Comedy of Errors by materializing his characters’ (and his audiences’) sense of the appropriateness of the play’s action in terms of its metrical temporality. The approximately 1,125 occurrences of the word ‘time’ in his corpus as a whole16 do generally reflect the most common senses of the word (then and now), as described in the OED. Yet although The Comedy of Errors by no means contains the most frequent references to time in Shakespeare’s works, the occurrences of ‘time’ in the play

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), 55. John Florio, ‘Numero’, in A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious, and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (London, 1598). 16 This is a rough calculation, based on results returned by Internet Shakespeare Editions’ search function. I have calculated occurrences in modern-spelling editions where they are available; in the Folio where an alternate text is available; in the Sonnets and narrative poems as well as the plays; and in Edward III and Henry VIII as well. 14 15

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overwhelmingly focus on the idea of ‘due time’, the right moments for particular events. The right time of day for particular activities is essential to the plot: it may be time for ‘dinner’ (1.2.11; 2.1.5; 2.2.10), ‘supper’ (3.2.174), or ‘bed’ (1.2.28); ‘time … to trudge’ (3.2.153) or ‘that I were gone’ (4.2.53); or more urgently ‘hie time’ (3.2.147). Characters hope that events will unfold ‘in good time’ (2.2.57, 64) and ‘lest I come not time enough’ (4.1.40–1) is a worry; in general, ‘there’s a time for all things’ (2.2.65). When time is personified as Father Time (2.2.70), his credit is good, since the idea that ‘Time were in debt’ (4.2.57) or ‘bankrout’ (4.2.58) is preposterous. On the other hand, time’s rule is inflexible and unavoidable, since he ‘comes stealing on’ (4.2.60) unperceived. In The Comedy of Errors, time organizes human behaviour as though it were subject to a metrical schema of the kind described in the OED’s special and technical uses: ‘III. 23. Prosody. A syllable, regarded as a metrical unit or unit of duration’; ‘III. 26. a. Music. Rhythmic quality of precision in singing or dancing’; or ‘III. c. The rhythmic pattern or character of a piece or passage of music, typically expressed in terms of the way in which beats are grouped into recurring groups, and the temporal relationship between these larger groups and their smaller subdivisions.’ Ultimately, as Adriana predicts in Act Two, Scene One, ‘time is [mens’] master, and when they see time, / They’ll go or come’ (2.1.8–9): once characters understand timeliness, they will respect it. Shakespeare is testing our sense of the ‘time for all things’ (2.2.65) by materializing it in verse.

Accentual verse in The Comedy of Errors For the most part, my metrical analysis of The Comedy of Errors will avoid the technical details of historical linguistic analysis, although there is much potentially fruitful work to be

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done, for example, on the ways word-stress in Shakespeare’s English may have differed from our own. In general, I follow Hanson in accepting that ‘as a system, the length distinctions relevant to syllable weight [in early modern English] were completely parallel to those of the present-day language.’ 17 Since Hanson’s approach to scansion draws on linguistic theories of phonology and generative methodologies for analysing metrics, however, two concepts need explanation. First, in early modern as in present English, a syllable that was phonologically short contained only one unit of sound (the technical term is one ‘mora’) in its nucleus and coda combined. So, if C stands for consonant and V for a short vowel, the following syllable-types are short: V, CV (‘a’, ‘the’). A syllable was long if it contained more than one mora in its nucleus and coda combined. So, if VV stands for a long vowel, the following syllable-types are long: VV, VC, CVV, CVC, CVCC (‘oh’, ‘at’, ‘too’, cat’, ‘cats’), and so on. It is helpful to remember that phonological time is functional rather than material. Since two-mora syllables do not behave any differently in phonological processes than do syllables containing more than two mora, English syllables have only two ‘phonological durations: they are either long or short.’18 As native speakers of English, we perceive equivalences in phonological time even when they are expressed differently (measuring in fractions of seconds) by different speakers. Second, to illustrate my scansions, I will borrow the model used by generative metrists to visualize metrical structure.19

Hanson, ‘Quantitative Meter’, 52. On changes to the English stress system from old to early modern English, see P. Fikkert, Elan Dresher and Arunditi Lahiri, ‘Prosodic Preferences: From Old English to Early Modern English’, in A Handbook of the History of English, ed. A. Van Kemanade and B. Los (London: Blackwell, 2006). 18 See Bruce Hayes, Metrical Stress Theory: Principles and Case Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 19 See Morris Halley and Samuel Keyser, ‘Chaucer and the Study of Prosody’, College English 29, no. 3 (1966): 187–219; Halle and Keyser, ‘Illustration and 17

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It hypothesizes a series of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ ‘positions’ organized into sequential groups to create ‘lines.’ Each ‘position’ is filled by one or more syllables; usually ‘strong’ positions are filled by stressed syllables and ‘weak’ positions by unstressed syllables. The model for a given line of meter is called a ‘template’, on the understanding that it will be filled in a variety of ways by actual words, which conform more or less to the pattern the template establishes. Positions are normally numbered. As an example, the general template for a line of iambic pentameter looks like this, where ‘W’ stands for ‘weak’ and ‘S’ stands for ‘strong’: W1 S1 W2 S2 W3 S3 W4 S4 W5 S5 With that framework in mind, I begin with accentual verse in The Comedy of Errors.20 The longest continuous passage of accentual verse in The Comedy of Errors (sixty-five lines long) occurs in Act Three, Scene One, the structural climax of the play known as the ‘lock-out scene.’ The template for a line of accentual meter in The Comedy of Errors consists of eight weak positions alternating with eight strong positions. It looks, very generally, like this: W1 S1 W2 S2 W3 S3 W4 S4 W5 S5 W6 S6 W7 S7 W8 S8 The impression that each line of accentual verse is equal in duration in these lines is created by five of its characteristics: rhyme, the alternation of primary and secondary stresses in strong positions, mid-line caesura, a line-final ‘rest’ and the treatment of weak positions.

Defense of a Theory of Iambic Pentameter’, College English 33, no. 2 (1971): 154–76; and Kristin Hanson and Paul Kiparsky, ‘A Parametric Theory of Poetic Meter’, Language 72, no. 2 (1996): 287–335. 20 My complete scansion of The Comedy of Errors may be consulted at http:// www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~j33rober/rts-.html

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First, the lines of accentual verse in The Comedy of Errors almost always rhyme: 95 of 106 (or 90 per cent) do so. Line-final rhyme emphasizes line-endings as predictable recurring events; this encourages the impression that line-endings occur at regular rhythmic, and hence temporal, intervals. Second, there is a strong tendency in the accentual verse to fill strong positions with alternating primary and secondary stresses, particularly in the second half of the line: in seventynine lines (or 75 per cent), the following pattern appears. In this representation, primary salience is in BOLD CAPS and secondary salience is in CAPS: S5 primary – S6 secondary – S7 primary In sixty-nine lines (or 65 per cent), the first half of the line shows an identical pattern: S1 primary – S2 secondary – S3 primary This alternating pattern is so regular that it, too, emphasizes the rhythmic, hence temporal, equivalence in line-structure. That this is true at the half-line level as well as the line-level only reinforces the effect. Third, the meter shows a strong tendency to create a mid-line caesura, realized as a ‘rest.’ Position S4 is left empty in 51 lines (47 per cent). Since positions S1, S2 and S3 are always filled, and since the convention is to begin with a primary stress and then alternate, the auditor expects position S4 to be filled with a secondary stress. Position S5 shows an even stronger conventional tendency than S3 to be filled with primary stress; so if the stressed syllable after S3 carries primary stress, the speaker’s preference is to place it in S5, rather than disrupt the pattern of alternation. Position S4 can be filled; it is filled in fifty-five lines (53 per cent) of the time; and when it is, it almost always continues whatever alternating pattern has been established in the first half of the line (forty-eight out of fifty-six times, or 86 per cent of

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the time). Again, the pressure of the binary pattern and the slight preference in the meter to fill position S4 mean that S4 is experienced as essential to the structure of the line. The speaker’s tendency, then, is to acknowledge it even when it is empty by leaving a ‘rest.’ 21 Fourth, the same structural technique applies to position S8. Although position S8 is never filled, by the end of the line, the structural prediction that another secondary stress will follow is so strong that we allow a rest after every line. The rest operates like punctuation, reinforcing the line-ending (and hence the rhyme) and also emphasizing the equality of each half-line (S1–S2–S3–[rest]; S4–S5–S6–[rest]). The meter’s treatment of weak positions, the fifth characteristic creating the impression of temporal equality, reinforces this impression. Weak positions at the beginning and end of the line are often left empty: W1 in fifty-three lines (50 per cent) and W8 in ninety-five lines (92 per cent). The extreme outer strong positions – usually filled by syllables bearing primary stress – hence supply more predictable line-boundaries than the outer weak positions, especially since S1 and S7 are always filled; the textual part of the line is generally perceived to begin at S1 and end at S7. W7 is empty in only four lines (4 per cent), providing an up-beat to S7, which, in combination with line-final rhyme, draws further attention to the line-ending as a marker of time. Line-internally, when two syllables fill a weak position, there is a strong tendency to use syllables that can be elided or whose vowels are reduced when they are not stressed. That is, almost all can be encouraged to occupy the phonological duration of a single long, or bi-moraic, syllable.22 In the

For other, helpful observations about the role of rhyme, alternating strong and weak stresses, and mid-line caesura in accentual verse, see Derek Attridge’s Chapter 4, ‘The four-beat rhythm’, in his Rhythms of English Poetry (London and New York: Longman, 1982). 22 My description of the forms of syllable reduction employed in the accentual verse of The Comedy of Errors may be consulted at http://www.arts. uwaterloo.ca/~j33rober/rts-.html 21

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stress-timed meter of The Comedy of Errors, vowel reductions can be made in the vast majority of weak positions containing two syllables. Exceptions are rare: in W1, syllables are irreducible in only thirteen lines (12 per cent); in W2, eleven lines (10 per cent); in W3, six lines (6 per cent); in W4, two lines (2 per cent); in W5, ten lines (9 per cent); in W6, ten lines (9 per cent), and in W7, ten lines (9 per cent). Two syllables adding up to more than two mora in duration occur in 62 of a possible 848 weak positions in 106 lines of stress-timed verse; that is, only 7 per cent of the time. This reduction of unstressed syllables has two effects. The first is to give the impression that the duration of a weak position is fixed at two mora; that is, the phonological time that elapses between strong positions is predictable and consistent. The second effect is that when speakers utter two unstressed syllables in a row, they are hurrying. Auditors are aware in every case of the kind of reduction being employed, just as, when native English speakers hear contractions such as ‘can’t’ for ‘cannot’, they understand that two semantic elements normally represented by two separate syllables have been optionally combined. So the syllable reductions used in weak positions are experienced not as a regularity in the meter but, to borrow another metaphor from generative metrics, as a ‘complexity’ through which Shakespeare can manipulate the auditor’s experience of the passage of time. By cramming additional syllables between strong positions operating as markers of time, he creates the impression that time is moving faster than text. We might summarize the characteristics of a line of stresstimed verse in The Comedy of Errors as follows. In this representation, optionally filled positions are in parentheses, the least often filled positions are in double parentheses, and the letter A indicates that the line is a member of a rhyming couplet: ((ww1)) S1 (ww2) S2 ww3 S3 (ww4) (S4) (ww5) S5 (ww6) S6 ww7 S7 ((w8)) [rest] A

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Accentual metre and dramaturgy The longest passage of accentual verse in The Comedy of Errors occurs, as I have said, occurs in Act Three, Scene One, at the structural centre of the play. This climax is anticipated by the exposition in Act One, Scene One, where a scheme is established according to which five elements must be united in an unreasonable time frame in order to resolve Egeon’s misfortune: his Syracusan son, his son’s twin, his son’s servant, the twin’s servant, and 1,000 marks in ransom, all by five o’clock. Act One, Scene Two provides four of these elements: a young Syracusan in search of a brother who is in possession of 1,000 marks, and whose servant has a twin, reducing their pressure on the dramatic action from absence to misplacement, and hence isolating the still missing fifth element, the protagonist’s lost brother, as the greatest problem of the play. Act One, Scene Two also articulates the metaphorical significance of that problem at the moment when Syracusan Antipholus, the protagonist, does not recognize his servant’s twin. If he had recognized Syracusan Dromio’s double, he might have had some hope of discovering his brother, but at this moment he commits an error in perceiving identity. Syracusan Antipholus’s error in perception is the dramaturgical crisis that will drive all of the subsequent action, reaching its climax in Act Three, Scene One, when the fifth element required to redeem Egeon and resolve the problem of the play – Ephesus Antipholus – is at last supplied. From the moment of Ephesus Antipholus’s first entrance, the audience perceives (even if the characters cannot yet) that it is has become possible for the protagonist to meet and recognize his twin (the resolution that will complete the action in Act Five). Shakespeare explicitly enacts this potential by means of a visual mirroring of characters – the other two characters who could resolve the action if only they could recognize one another – when the audience for the first time can see both Dromios on stage simultaneously.23 I argue that Shakespeare intended both Dromios to be visible on stage for two reasons: there is no specification in the stage directions that Syracusan Dromio 23

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Metrically, he reinforces it at Ephesus Dromio’s entrance with the scene’s first line of accentual verse, a line that is noticeably longer and more rhythmic than its iambic predecessors. The tendency of the scene’s accentual lines to fall into two halves, equal in duration and stress contour, as well as their tendency at the stanza level to fall into rhyming couplets, create an auditory image in parallel to the visual image of the mirrored characters. Both visually and metrically, then, the audience experiences a structural balance in the play that the characters do not perceive, and the hilarity of that dramatic irony drives the ensuing farcical action of near-misses in the scene. The shift in the metrical pattern here is as much a stylistic shift as it is a structural one, moving us from comedy into farce. By organizing characters’ speech into unnatural, structured rhythms, the accentual meter provides an auditory image of the characters’ increasing sensation that they lack control over events. The 2003 Complete Arkangel Shakespeare audio recording of The Comedy of Errors offers a widely accessible illustration of the impact of this image in performance. The beginning and end of the accentual passage are clearly audible at lines 11 – Ephesus Dromio’s ‘Say what you will sir, I know what I know’ – and 88 – Balthazar’s ‘Herein you war against your reputation’ (Arkangel 2003, Disc 1, track 5, 0:26 and 4:16).24 Lines 31 and 32 are particularly good examples of the meter’s influence on delivery. Both are lists of names (or nicknames): E. Dro. Maud, Bridget, Marian, Cis’ly, Gillian, Ginn! Enter S. Dro.

is ‘off’ when he speaks, and when Adriana joins the fray thirty lines later, she gets a stage direction to ‘Enter’ (3.1.62). For more on the possible original staging of this scene, see Kent Cartwright, ‘Staging the “Lock-Out” Scene in the Folio Comedy of Errors’, Shakespeare Bulletin 24, no. 4 (2006): 1–12. 24 The Comedy of Errors, The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare, prod. Bill Shepherd and Tom Treadwell, Arkangel Productions, 2003, Audio CD, Disc 1, track 5, 0:26 and 4:16.

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S. Dro. [Within.] Mome, malt-horse, capon, coxcomb, idiot, patch! Each member of each list is equivalent in semantic and grammatical terms, so there is nothing in their phrasing that makes it necessary to speak them according to the alternating stress contour pattern, with mid-line caesura, of the accentual meter. Allowing for common contractions (Marian pronounced ‘Mar-yan’, Gillian pronounced ‘Gill-yan’, and Idiot pronounced ‘Id-yot’), each line arguably contains ten syllables. Nor is there anything in their verbal stress-patterns to prevent them being delivered as iambic pentameters, like this: Maud, BRID-get, MAR-ian, CIC-ly, GILL-ian, GINN! Mome, MALT-horse, CA-pon, COX-comb, I-diot, PATCH. Yet both Alan Cox and Jason O’Mara (who play the two Dromios) prefer the accentual rhythm, pronouncing all syllables, following the primary–secondary–primary stress contour in each half-line, and resting at the mid-line caesura: O’ MARA MAUD, BRID-get, MAR-i-an [rest] CIC-ly, GILL-i-an, GINN [rest] COX MOME, MALT-horse, CA-pon [rest] COX-comb, I-di-ot, PATCH [rest] (Arkangel 2003, Disc 1, track 5, 1:18–1:20) The meter here exerts an external pressure on words, so that rhythm overrides thought, and this in turn is a classic condition of farce: characters behave not as they should, but as they for some reason believe they must, and the singular overriding principle that motivates their actions – whatever it may be – renders them incapable of self-reflection or appropriate behaviour.

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In The Comedy of Errors, that singular overriding principle is ‘due time’, the sense that the characters have that things ought to happen when they ought to happen, and this sense is materialized metrically not only at the verbal level but also at the level of the farcical stage business suggested by the meter in Act Three, Scene One. In the action preceding this sequence, the Duke feels compelled to ‘limit’ Egeon’s life to the length of a day; Adriana insists upon a fixed ‘dinner time’ (1.2.45, 2.1.3); and the lock-out scene begins with Antipholus of Ephesus insulting his wife to his business partners, complaining of their disagreement about ‘hours’ (3.1.2). By line 84, this anxiety about ‘due time’ so rules the characters that the rest in a line where Ephesus Antipholus chastizes Ephesus Dromio begs to be punctuated by a blow. In the Arkangel production it sounds like this: E. ANT. GO GET thee GONE BANG GET me an I-ron CROW (Arkangel 2003, Disc 1, track 5, 4:10–12) The rhythmic punctuation is funny – a classic farce trick – and the line provokes Balthazar’s ‘Have patience sir, O, let it not be so!’ (3.1.85) all the more effectively. Here as elsewhere in the scene, characters are ruled by timing, in the sense that they are preoccupied with literal, material, measureable time. Their perspective is the one that has caused the crisis in Act One, Scene Two, when it seems impossible to unite all five essential elements of the play’s resolution by five o’clock. Like all farce characters, the two Dromios and Ephesus Antipholus in Act Three, Scene One suffer from limited perspectives upon the scenarios in which they find themselves. But whereas they as characters are preoccupied with literal time, the farcical behaviour resulting from their limited perspectives draws the attention of the play’s audience to the fact that they – we – are experiencing time differently from them. Theatrical time from an audience’s perspective is measured not in minutes, hours or beats, but in the

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passage of events leading to the conclusion of the play’s conflict. When a theatrical event is anticipated as potentially occurring at some point in the future, time is experienced by the audience in terms of the number of intermediary events between the creation and the fulfilment of their expectation. The comedy of the lock-out scene derives from the possibility that the two Dromios, on stage simultaneously for the first time, could meet at any moment; that if they met and recognized one another as twins, and their meeting led to a meeting of the two Antipholuses, the conflict of the play would be resolved. The climactic scenario, then, of Syracusan Antipholus’s entrance and the simultaneous onstage presence of the double Dromios, situates this scene structurally at the moment immediately before the play’s conclusion. Since that conclusion is not accomplished, the structural moment is extended indefinitely. While for the characters, ‘due time’ is like clockwork determining their actions, for the audience, it is as if time is stretching to allow more occurrences to intervene before the anticipated resolution of the action. At the metrical level, the shift to accentual verse in Act Three, Scene One provides an auditory experience of the expansion of time by increasing the number of metrical events occurring between anticipated metrical markers of time (line-endings). In other words, metrical time, like dramaturgical time, is perceptually expanded at the centre of Act Three, Scene One. This sensation of the stretching of time perhaps explains the curious chronology of the plot in the second half of the play: in Act One, Scene Two, we learn at line 11 that ‘Within this hour it will be dinner-time’; by line 45, ‘The clock hath strucken twelve’ and the dinner is burnt and cold; and only sixty-three lines (and one scene-break) later, ‘it is two a’ clock’ (2.1.3). These two hours and a bit have passed quickly. That is, very little has happened between the markers (times of the clock) we recognize as measuring units of time. Two o’clock, however, lasts an astonishing 721 lines and 18 French scenes, since the event Syracusan Dromio is referring to when he says ‘It was two ere I left him, and now the clock strikes one’

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(4.2.54) occurs at 4.1.108. This is partly a result of the fact that the hours between one and two, as Syracusan Dromio reports and Adriana confirms, ‘come back’ (4.2.55); they are experienced at least twice (once forward, once backward, and possibly a third time forward, en route to five o’clock at the end of the play). Chronology perhaps seems to reverse in Act Three, Scene One, because anticipated events do not happen. Before that scene, the action moves forward: Syracusan Antipholus’s money, despite confusion, is deposited safely at the Porpentine in Act One (reported at 2.2.1–2); the man summoned to dinner with Adriana eventually dines with her in Act Two. However, in Act Three, Scene One, Ephesus Antipholus never does manage to get his friends into his house for lunch. In fact, between Act Three, Scene One and the play’s conclusion in Act Five, the characters never accomplish what they intend. Of course, the ironic distance between characters’ and audience’s perspectives in the second half of the play, following its metrical and dramaturgical climax, has the function of exaggerating the audience’s sense that there is a larger, ordered temporality at work in the world of the play, of which the characters are unaware. It opens up an experiential exploration of the perceptual nature of time and its relationship to human purpose, the preoccupation that underpins expressions like ‘due time’ and the ‘time for all things.’ Five o’clock, like every other quantitative measure of time in the play, is an impossible limit, whereas ‘due time’ and ‘the time for all things’ are more flexible ideas, linked at their core to what is necessary for human beings to accomplish in order to achieve the conditions of the ‘time’ they wish to experience. The dramatic irony of the lock-out scene emphasizes the frustrated agency of its characters who, in their desire to master time, become slaves to it instead; they cannot see, as the audience can, that there will be a ‘time for all things.’

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Timed Iambics There are obvious differences between the accentual and the iambic meters in The Comedy of Errors: the line is shorter, containing only five strong positions alternating with a potential six weak positions; strong positions are never left empty; and weak positions are empty only 5 per cent of the time. However, the iambic pentameter also shows certain surprising similarities to the stress-timed meter. The most important of these similarities is the treatment of weak positions. There is a slightly stronger tendency than in the accentual verse to limit weak positions to one syllable (two syllables fill each of positions W1, W3, W4 and W5 no more than 8 per cent of the time). When two syllables do occur, they are reduced to a total of two mora in duration as often as and by a wider variety of means than analogous syllables in the stress-timed meter. They are never irreducible in more than 8 per cent of lines (position W4 allows 8 per cent); but the pattern is most clearly illustrated in position W2, which in forty-three lines (27 per cent) contains two syllables, irreducible in only one case. The iambic pentameter, even more strictly than the stress-timed meter, fixes the duration of the interval separating strong positions at two mora. The frequency with which two syllables occur in W2 is matched exactly by the frequency with which W1 is left empty. This can be explained by the familiar convention that the first foot of a line of iambic pentameter may be reversed; that is, the initial iamb is replaced with a trochee. However, in combination with the tendency to reduce the syllables after the first strong position, the effect of the so-called ‘trochaic substitution’ in The Comedy of Errors is not a rearrangement, but a reduction of the line. Since two of the ten syllables are squeezed into the duration of one, the line seems shortened to the duration of only nine syllables. It is probably also relevant, as I noted above, that the stress-timed meter shows a similar, though less marked, tendency to fill W2 with two syllables

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when W1 is empty. ‘Trochaic substitution’ of this kind, then, is not unique to iambic pentameter; rather, it is a convention that allows both meters to manipulate the impression of the passage of time. The treatment of weak positions in the iambic pentameter also emphasizes the first and last strong positions as the boundaries of the line, with particular focus on the lineending. In Act One, Scene One, W1 is empty 27 per cent of the time; W6 is filled only once in 157 lines. So the line has a similar symmetry, centred at S3, and slightly weighted, like the stress-timed line, towards its ending. This symmetry is reinforced by the second important similarity: the treatment of the strong position at the centre of the line. In thirty-four lines (22 per cent), position S3 is filled by a word that bears only tertiary stress. This is by far the highest proportion of tertiary stresses occurring in any strong position in the line: the next highest occurrence is 12 per cent in W4; the others are 5 per cent or under. The words always bear some stress relative to their neighbours: twenty-four of them, for example, are prepositions bearing some stress because they introduce phrases. They therefore cannot share a weak position with the unstressed syllables immediately following, leaving the kind of caesura attested in the stresstimed meter. The effect of the pattern is to weaken the centre of the line, creating an impression that the line is divided into two equal halves, much like the line in the stress-timed meter. Finally, in two scenes, most of the iambic pentameter verse is organized into rhyming couplets. The first of these scenes is Act Two, Scene One, occurring about halfway to the stress-timed centre of the play, Act Three, Scene One. In it, 68 per cent of iambic pentameter lines rhyme; this is the first major departure from the conventions for the meter established in Act One, Scene One. The second is Act Four, Scene Two, in which 83 per cent of iambic pentameter lines rhyme; this occurs about half way between the stress-timed centre and the most highly regulated (and longest) stretch of iambic pentameter in the play, Act Five, Scene One. These two rhymed sections of pentameter, then, arguably function

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as transitional markers between two metrical modes, or treatments of time at the metrical level. All of these characteristics of the iambic pentameter in the play make it susceptible to comparison with the play’s accentual meter. We might represent the line like this: ((ww1)) S1 (ww2) S2 (ww3) S3 (ww4) S4 (ww5) S5 ((ww6)) (A) Unlike the accentual verse, however, timing in the iambic pentameter is entirely consistent with the interior characteristics of the natural language. It is phonologically regular, never requiring characters to unnaturally twist their pronunciations of words in order to achieve an arbitrary external sense of order. Rather, the play’s timed iambics express the rightness of the order that already exists, embodying the sense of ‘due time’ and the faith that there will be ‘a time for all things’ that constitute the worldview of the Romance genre. Act Five, the longest stretch of iambic pentameter in the play, delivers 1,000 marks, reunites lost twins, and in its final act of resolution, provides a longed-for life partner; in doing so, it reinstates the pre-chronological order of the distant past described in iambics by Egeon at the beginning of the play. Ultimately, as Adriana predicts in Act Two, Scene One, ‘time is [mens’] master, and when they see time, / They’ll go or come’: once characters understand timeliness, they will respect it. Men are masterless in Ephesus only when they fail to recognize that more flexible, functional order; they master themselves most fully when they give over to it.

Conclusion: Ambimetricality Of course, in Act Five, theatrical – or Romance, or functional – time does not entirely supersede measurable material time, since five o’clock does finally arrive. Rather, as the gap

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between characters’ and audience’s perceptions of time is bridged, characters become able to see the ways in which material time enables and manifests a larger order: looked at one way, five o’clock is a death knell; looked at another way, it is a celebratory clarion. It is not accidental, then, that the similarity between the accentual meter and the accentualsyllabic iambic pentameter of The Comedy of Errors is so extensive that certain lines can be scanned in both meters; I count twenty-one of these in total. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best examples are the lines forming the borders between the iambic pentameter and the accentual verse in Act Three, Scene One. At the beginning of the passage of accentual verse, line 9 is clearly iambic pentameter, line 10 is what I would call ‘ambimetrical’, and line 11 is the first of a rhymed accentual couplet. In Table 1 syllables bearing primary stress are in BOLD CAPS; syllables bearing secondary stress are in CAPS; syllables bearing tertiary stress are bold; unstressed syllables are in regular type. Line 10 is not the model line for either meter: it differs from line 9 in that it contains an additional secondary stress that must be placed in a weak position; it differs from line 11 in that it does not display an alternating primary–secondary–primary stress pattern in each half-line. However, it is not unmetrical in either meter: the additional stress is a secondary one, and the stress contour in strong positions is an alternating one. At the end of the passage, lines 85 and 86 (Table 2) are not only ‘ambi-metrical’ but also accomplish the transition between meters by degrees. Line 85 is closer to the model stress-timed line in that it preserves the mid-line caesura, the alternating primary– secondary–primary stress contour in the second half-line, and alters the stress contour in the first half only by filling S1 with a secondary stress. Line 86 is closer to the iambic in that it reverses the stress contour and fills the mid-line ictus. These two border lines also rhyme; they can function as a rhyming stress-timed couplet, a rhyming iambic pentameter couplet, or as a rhyming mixed-metrical couplet.

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Table 1 W1 9

E. Anti. And

S1

W2

S2

W3

S3

W4

S4

W5 S5

that

I

DID

de-

NIE

my

WIFE

and HOUSE;

Thou DRUN kard THOU, WHAT didst

10

thou MEANE by

10

Thou

DRUN- kard

THOU,

11 E. Dro.

SAY

WHAT you

WIL

but

I

S6

W7 S7

W8

THIS? WHAT

Sir,

W6

didst MEANE by THIS? thou

KNOW

WHAT

I

KNOW

Table 2 W1

S1

W2

S2

For a

FISH

wi-

THOUT a

W3

S3 FINNE,

THER’S a SI-

84 [Ant] If a

CROW

HELP

us

IN

85 Ant.

GO,

GET

thee

GON,

85

GO,

86 Balth

GET

thee

GON, PA-

HAVE

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86

HAVE PA-

tience SIR,

87

Hee-

you

RIN

W4

S4

tience SIR, OH

LET

S5

W6

FOWLE wi-

rra, PLUCKE a wee’ll

S6

ron

OH it

GAINST your

W7 S7 FE-

ther,

CROW to-

GE-

ther.

ron CROW.

CROW. LET

NOT

be

SO,

RE-

pu-

TA-

it tion,

W8

THOUT a

FETCH me-an I-

FETCH me-an I-

WARRE a-

W5

NOT

be

SO,

262

SHAKESPEARE’S WORLD OF WORDS

I favour this last option, because a rhyming ambimetrical couplet embodies the differences between the two lines as well as their similarity, emphasizing the metaphorical resonance of the relationship between the accentual and the iambic meters in the play. Lines such as these illustrate the permeability of apparently hermetic systems, modes of expression, temporal rhythms or points of view. They are a metaphorical expression of the Romance worldview: that ‘errors’ are errors in perception only; what seems contradictory (the behaviour of an Antipholus or a Dromio) is the result of an underlying unity (the presence of a twin). Like the two Dromios in the final lines of the play, apparently contrasting metrical structures underlyingly ‘go hand in hand’ (5.1.426). One advantage of thinking about the meter of The Comedy of Errors in the way that Shakespeare and his contemporaries did – in terms of timing – is that it makes clear why poetic rhythm mattered in this performative medium in its time and why it might be meaningful in our own. The metrical structures of The Comedy of Errors are not optional ‘ornaments’ to the play’s arguments, as sixteenth-century rhetorical theorists would put it. On the contrary, meter is an essential element of the play’s dramaturgical structure, and it makes thematic arguments in itself; it also provides guidance to actors about some aspects of their performances that might contribute to those arguments. More broadly, if The Comedy of Errors and Richard II both demonstrably employ metrical timing in systematic ways to organize audience responses to the plays, linguistic and stylistic evidence have combined to create a new opportunity to explore Shakespeare’s world of words at the prosodic structural level.

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INDEX 1 Henry IV (Shakespeare, William) 96 1 Henry VI 81–2, 178 authorship 149 grammar and 150, 157–8, 159–70 mood experiments and 149 Suffolk, Earl of 167–70 Talbot, Lord 158–65 2 Henry IV (Shakespeare) 89, 95, 96–7, 99–101 Pistol 89–93, 94–7, 100–1 2 Henry VI 153 accentual-syllabic iambic pentameter 240–1, 260 see also iambic pentameter accentual verse 241, 247–51, 252–3, 255, 257, 260–4 actors 115–16, 151, 181, 189–91, 194 see also performance All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare) 212 authority and 218–19, 222–3 Bertram 220 captious 213–16 fistula 227 Helena see Helena King, the 216–18 knowingness and 223

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miracles and 218, 223 Parolles 234–5 reading comprehension and 212, 214, 216, 219 sexual desire and 212–15, 219–20, 221–2, 225–7, 229, 232–4 sieve 213, 214 sovereignty and 217–19, 228–9, 230, 233–5 ‘to have’ in 216, 220–2 unteemable 213–16 wager terms and 223–5, 230–1 Angelo (Measure for Measure) 203 angle 125–6 angling 126–31 cony-catching and 131–6 Winter’s Tale, The and 126, 127–31, 136–43, 144–6 anti-Semitism 34 Merchant of Venice, The and 34–5, 39 antic 77–84, 90, 92–3, 101, 113–14 antique 77–84, 90, 92–3, 101 antitheatricalism 144, 181 Antonio (Merchant of Venice, The) 35, 39, 44–7 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 10, 81, 106, 173

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archaism 77–9, 83–4 2 Henry IV and 89–93, 100–1 Hamlet and 81 Henry V and 92–3, 94, 95–6 history plays and 88 Love’s Labour’s Lost and 78, 84–8, 97, 98–101 performance and 93–5, 96 Art of English Poesie, The (Puttenham) 110–11 Art of Iugling or Legerdemaine (Rid) 242 As You Like It (Shakespeare) 80, 173, 242, 243 Astrophel and Stella (Sidney) 1–2 authors 27 Autolycus (Winter’s Tale, The) 128, 138–40 Bacon, Francis 152 Bakhtin, Mikhail 4, 29–31 Bark Roe affair 108 Battle of Alcazar, The (Peele) 91 Beaumont, Francis 29 Belman of London, The (Dekker) 132–3, 134, 139 Bertram (All’s Well That Ends Well) 220 Bevington, David 103–4, 213–14 biblical stories 36–42, 46–53, 57 black 116–17, 119–20 Blacke Bookes Messenger, The (Greene) 133–4 Bloom, Harold 54

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bodily experience 193 see also body, the body, the 60–1, 64–6, 69, 73–6, 193 Bowles, Peter 93–4 Brinsley, John 8–9 Ludus literarius, or The Grammar Schoole 150–1 Posing of the Parts, The 154–5 Bristol, Michael 3, 14, 120 Campion, Thomas 239–40 Cassio (Othello) 175 categorization 196 Catholic animation hoaxes 143 Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, A (Harman) 131–2, 134–5 Cawdrey, Robert 114 chameleons 120 Chilmeade, Edmund 42–3 Chronicle (Grafton) 91 Cibber, Theophilus 95 circumcision 47, 49–50 Claudio (Measure for Measure) 187–9, 201–2 Claudius (Hamlet) 113 clothing 106, 114–15, 116–17, 119–20 see also linen thieves clowns 114 colour 116–18 dyes and pigments 106–7 Hamlet and 103–4, 106, 111–16, 118–20 language and 104–6, 107–11 Newton, Isaac and 104, 116–17

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Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher 29 Comedy of Errors, The (Shakespeare) accentual verse in 247–51, 252–3, 255, 257, 260–2 farce in 252–4 iambic pentameter in 241, 257–62 meter in 241, 245, 247–55, 257–62 mirroring in 251–3 performance and 252–3, 254 plot of 251 time and 237–8, 241, 244–5, 254–6, 259–62 trochaic substitution in 257–8 cony-catching 131, 133, 135, 138, 140 cony-catching literature 127–8, 131–6 Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 79–80 counterfeit coin 196–9 courbing 132, 139 n.31 cozeners 138 Crane, Sam 96 Cressida (Troilus and Cressida) 69–76 criminals 127–8, 131–8 see also crooks crimson 118 crooks 140–2 crossbiting 133, 135 currency, trading in 44–5 Cymberline (Shakespeare) 117 Daniel, Samuel 242 De Copia (Erasmus) 6

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De Medico Hebraeo Ennerato Apologica (de Pomis) 43 Death 81–2 death penalty 55 Dekker, Thomas: Belman of London, The 132–3, 134, 139 Desdemona (Othello) 180 devils 114 Digges, Leonard Dinah (Genesis) 48–9, 51–2 Discovery of Witchcraft (Scot) 143 Dixon, Joe 94 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe) 65 Don Armado (Love’s Labour’s Lost) 84–8, 93–4, 97–9, 100–1 Downame, George 42, 45 dramatic iambic pentameter 240–1 dyes and pigments 106–7, 116, 118 education 150–5 Eliot, John: Ortho-epia Gallica 90 Elizabeth I 109 Ellacombe, Henry Nicholson: Shakespeare as an Angler 125–6 embodied metaphorical meaningfulness 193–4 Erasmus 8 De Copia 6 Esau (Genesis) 39 fabric 106, 114, 116–17, 119 see also linen thieves faithfulness 67–73, 75

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farce 252–4 Ferrand, Jacques: Treatise on Lovesickness 227 fistula 227 Fitz-James, Thea 194 flesh 47, 50–2 Florio, John 244 Folger, Henry Clay 45, 53 ‘Shylock’s Bond from the Merchant’s Standpoint’ 45 foot/feet 242 forces 199–201 future indicative tense 158–9, 166–7 gall 117–18, 120–3 Genesis 36–42, 48 see also biblical stories Dinah 48–9, 51–2 Esau 39 Jacob 36–42, 46–7, 56–7 Rachel 52–3 genres 4 gestures 15–18, 193 Measure for Measure and 193 Richard II and 17–18 Godfather, The (film) 56 Gosson, Stephen: Playes Confuted 144 Grafton, Richard: Chronicle 91 grammar 147–53 1 Henry VI and 150, 157–8, 159–70 2 Henry VI and 153 character and 167–70 education and 150–5 future indicative tense 158–9, 166–7

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indicative tense 158–9, 162–3 optative mood, the 154, 155, 156, 162 plot trajectory and 164–7 potential mood, the 154, 156–7, 161–2, 166–70 Richard III and 153, 156–7 subjunctive mood, the 154–5, 160–4 Summer’s Last Will and Testament and 153 Grammar (Lily) 147, 153–6 grammar schools 150–4 Greenblatt, Stephen 103 Greene, Robert 127–8 Blacke Bookes Messenger, The 133–4 Pandosto 128 Second Cony Catching 139 Second Part of ConnyCatching 132 guide-words 190 Hamlet (Hamlet) 113–16, 119–23 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 9, 80, 81 Claudius 113 clothing and 114–15, 117, 118, 119–20 colour and 103–4, 106, 111–16, 118–20 gall in 120–3 Hamlet 113–16, 119–23 language and 120 Ophelia 112 Hanson, Kristin 240, 246 Harborne, William 108–9 Harman, Thomas: Caveat or Warning for Common

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Cursetors, A 131–2, 134–5 Hartley, Andrew James 183–4 ‘Helen of Troy’ 64–6 Helena (All’s Well That Ends Well) authority and 219, 221, 223 curing and 216–17, 223, 226–8 Diana and 230–1 knowingness and 223 pregnancy and 231 sexual desire and 212–15, 219–20, 221–2, 225–6, 232–3 sovereignty and 218 submission and 234 wager terms and 223–5 Henry IV Part One see 1 Henry IV Henry IV Part Two see 2 Henry IV Henry V (film) 94 Henry V (Shakespeare) 80, 92–3, 94, 95–6, 244 Henry VI Part One see 1 Henry VI Henry VI Part Two see 2 Henry VI heretics 54–5 heteroglossia 4–5, 41 Historia de gli Riti Hebrei (Modena) 42–3 history plays archaism and 88 grammar and 147, 150 homonyms 77–8 Honigmann, Ernst 176 hooker 146 hooks 140–2

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Horace 7 humours 116 Hunter, G. K. 214–15 Iago (Othello) 172–5, 177–8, 184–5 iambic pentameter 238–42, 257–62 idle 13–14 indicative tense 158–9, 162–3 Isabella (Measure for Measure) 206–9 Israel 39 Jacob (Genesis) 36–42, 46–7, 56–7 family of 49 Jessica (Merchant of Venice, The) 48, 52–3 Jews 42–3, 47 see also anti–Semitism moneylending and 43–4 Spain and 54 Johnson, Mark 191, 193, 200–1 Johnson, Samuel 3, 14 Jonson, Ben 29 juggling 135 King Lear (Shakespeare) 16 kneeling 15–17 Kripke, Saul 61–2 Lakoff, George 191, 193 language 30–1, 33, 60–1, 187 see also antic; antique; gestures; grammar; meter 83–4 colour and 104–6, 107–11 drama and 79

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Hamlet and 120 heteroglossia 4–5, 41 homonyms 77–8 metaphors 24–5, 126–31, 136, 191–9, 212–13, 218 metrical terms 242–3 neologism 77–8, 83–8, 89–93 Othello and 171–2, 180–2 performance 183–4 pronouns 175–9 punctuation 176–7 syllables 246–7, 249–50 theatre and 79, 171–2, 180–2, 185–6 Latin 147, 150–1, 152–4, 156, 169–70 legitimacy 197 Leontes (Winter’s Tale, The) 129–31, 136–7 Lewalski, Barbara 34 Lily, William: Grammar 147, 153–6 Linacre, Thomas 156 linen thieves 127 see also angling; cony–catching Lingua (Tomkis, Thomas) 95 literary works 29–30 Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, The (Plutarch) 10 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare) 78–9, 84–8, 93–4, 97–101 Don Armado 84–8, 93–4, 97–9, 100–1 Ludus literarius, or The Grammar Schoole (Brinsley) 150–1 Luther, Martin 37–8

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Macbeth (Shakespeare) 117–18 Machiavelli, Niccolò: Prince, The 201 McKellen, Ian 17 Mann, Thomas: Tales of Jacob 38 Marlowe, Christopher Doctor Faustus 65 Tamburlaine 154, 159 measure 243–4 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) 15–16 Angelo 203 Claudio 187–9, 201–2 counterfeit coin 196–9 force and 199–200, 208 guide-words and 189–91 Isabella 206–9 mettle/metal 197–200 performance and 189–90, 193–4, 201, 205, 206, 208 sexual desire and 229–30 sexual transgression and 187–9, 196, 198–9, 203, 205–7 slip 187–9, 190–1, 193–7, 199–204, 207–9 sovereignty and 229–30 Vincentio, Duke of Vienna 194–6, 198, 200, 203–6 weeds 195–6 melancholy 120 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare) 16, 34, 51, 178 anti-Semitism and 34–5 Antonio 35, 39, 44–7 biblical stories and 36–42, 46–9, 50–1

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flesh and 47, 50–2, 55 Jessica 48, 52–3 Judaism and 47, 50, 52 Portia 54–5 Shylock 35–6, 40–2, 44–7, 50–1, 53–4, 55–7 usance 42, 44–5 usury 42 wealth 35–6, 40–2 well 35–9 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 6, 232 n.24 metaphors 24–5, 126–31, 136, 191–9, 212–13, 218 meter 238–44, 246–7 Comedy of Errors, The and 241, 245–5, 247–55, 257–62 metrical terms 242–3 mettle/metal 197–9 Comedy of Errors, The and 241 Mirrour of Monsters, A (Rankins) 144 Modena, Leone: Historia de gli Riti Hebrei 42–3 moneylending 43 Montaigne, Michel de 9 ‘Of the Canniballes’ 10–11 mora 246 Murphy, Arthur 1 music 245 names 60–1 in fiction 62 n.6 Helen of Troy 64–6 Kripke, Saul and 61–2 Romeo and Juliet and 60–1, 63, 70 Sonnets, and the 71, 72

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Troilus and Cressida and 64, 67–72, 74–6 Nashe, Thomas: Piers Penilesse 159–60 Summer’s Last Will and Testament 153 ‘natural’ writing 1–3 Neill, Michael 176 Neilson, Patrick 189–90, 201, 206 neologism 77–8, 83–4 2 Henry IV and 89–93 Love’s Labour’s Lost and 84–8 Newton, Isaac and 104, 116–17 Newton, Robert 94 Noahide commandments 50 novel, the 4–5 ‘Of the Canniballes’ (de Montaigne) 10–11 Old Testament 46 see also Genesis Olivier, Laurence: Henry V 94 Ophelia (Hamlet) 112 optative mood, the 154, 155, 156, 162 Ortho-epia Gallica (Eliot) 90 Othello (Othello) 178 Othello (Shakespeare) 79, 172–5 Cassio 175 Desdemona 180 disorientation and 178–82, 185 Iago 172–5, 177–8, 184–5 language and 171–2, 180–2 Othello 178 palpable 180–2

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pronouns and 175–9 punctuation and 176–7 this 171–5, 178–9, 182 Ottomans 107–8 Ovid: Metamorphoses 6, 232 n.24 Painter, William: Palace of Pleasure 227 Palace of Pleasure (Painter) 227 palpable 180–2 Pandosto (Greene) 128 Parolles (All’s Well That Ends Well) 234–5 Pastoureau, Michel 117, 119 Peele, George Battle of Alcazar, The 91 Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek, The 91 performance 17–18, 182–6 see also actors 1 Henry IV 96 2 Henry IV 96 Comedy of Errors, The 252–3, 254 Hamlet 115–16 Henry V 94, 96 languages 183–4 Lingua and 95 Love’s Labour’s Lost 93–4 Measure for Measure 189–90, 193–4, 201, 205, 206, 208 Romeo and Juliet 83 techniques 78–9 time and 254–5 Pericles (Shakespeare) 242 Petrarchan sonnets 73 Piers Penilesse (Nashe) 159–60

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Pinchot, Bronson 94 Pistol (2 Henry IV, Henry V) 89–93, 94–7, 100–1 players see actors Playes Confuted (Gosson) 144 Plutarch: Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, The 10 Poems: written by Wil. Shakespeare. Gent. 2 poetry 238–40 Polixenes (Winter’s Tale, The) 140–1 Pomis, David de 43–4 De Medico Hebraeo Ennerato Apologica 43 Portia (Merchant of Venice, The) 54–5 Posing of the Parts, The (Brinsley) 154–5 potential mood, the 154, 156–7, 161–2, 166–70 Prince, The (Machiavelli) 204 pronouns 175–9 prosody 245 punctuation 176–7 Puttenham, George: Arte of English Poesie, The 110–11 Rachel (Genesis) 52–3 Ramirez, Tom 96 Rankins, William: Mirrour of Monsters, A 144 Rape of Lucrece, The (Shakespeare) 109 religion 16 Return from Parnassus, The 2 Richard II (Shakespeare) 16–18, 81–2, 240

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Richard III (Shakespeare) 153, 155, 156–7 Rid, Samuel: Art of Iugling or Legerdemaine 242 Robbins, Tom Alan 94 Roman Tragedies (Toneelgroep) 186 Romeo and Juliet 60–1, 63, 70, 82–3 (antique/antic, use of), 242–3 roses 60–1, 63–4 Rothschild, Mayer 56 Sale, Carolyn 184 Sanders, Norman 176 Schmitt, Carl 218 Scot, Reginald: Discovery of Witchcraft 143 Second Cony Catching (Greene) 139 Second Part of Conny-Catching (Greene) 132 seichel 38 sex trade, the 135, 137, 139 sexual desire 229 All’s Well That Ends Well and 212–15, 225–7, 229 Measure for Measure and 229–30 Shakespeare, William 1 Henry IV 96 1 Henry VI see 1 Henry VI 1623 Folio 27–8 2 Henry IV 88–93, 95, 96–7, 99–101 2 Henry VI 153 All’s Well That Ends Well see All’s Well That End’s Well

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287

Antony and Cleopatra 10, 81, 106, 173 As You Like It 80, 173, 242, 243 Comedy of Errors, The 237 Coriolanus 79–80 criticism and 160 Cymbeline 117 deception and 142–3, 145 education 6, 150–1 Hamlet see Hamlet Henry V 80, 92–3, 94, 95–6, 244 King Lear 16 Love’s Labour’s Lost 78–9, 84–5, 93–4, 97–101 Macbeth 117–18 Measure for Measure see Measure for Measure Merchant of Venice, The see Merchant of Venice, The meter and 240–3 name 61–2 as natural genius 2–4 Othello see Othello Pericles 242 Rape of Lucrece, The 109 reading and 12 Richard II 16–18, 81–2, 240 Richard III 153, 155, 156–7 Romeo and Juliet 60–1, 63, 70, 82–3, 242–3 sonnet 2 192 sonnet 17 81 sonnet 54 60–1, 64 sonnet 55 7–8 sonnet 129 192 Sonnets, the 6–8, 71, 72, 80, 120

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Taming of the Shrew, The 6, 15, 80 Tempest, The 6, 10–14 time and 238, 241–3, 244, 250 Titus Andronicus 6, 184 Troilus and Cressida 64, 65–76, 162 Twelfth Night 80, 117, 118 Winter’s Tale, The see Winter’s Tale, The word invention and 12–13 wordplay and 194 works of 26–9 writing craft and 5–15 Shakespeare as an Angler (Ellacombe) 125–6 Shakespearean Revolution, The (Styan) 18 Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Wright) 238–9 Shechem 48–9 Shylock (Merchant of Venice, The) 35–6, 40–2, 44–7, 50–1, 53–4, 55–7 ‘Shylock’s Bond from the Merchant’s Standpoint’ (Folger) 45 Sidney, Philip 240 Astrophel and Stella 1–2 poetry 148 sin 189 slip 187–9, 190–1, 193–7, 199–204, 207–9 social languages 4–5 see also heteroglossia sonnet 2 (Shakespeare) 192 sonnet 17 81 sonnet 54 (Shakespeare) 60–1, 64

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sonnet 55 (Shakespeare) 7–8 sonnet 129 (Shakespeare) 192 Sonnets, the (Shakespeare) 6–8, 71, 72, 80, 120 Spain 54 Spanish Inquisition, the 54–6 Spring 139–40 Styan, J. L.: Shakespearean Revolution, The 18 subjunctive mood, the 154–5, 160–4 Suffolk, Earl of (1 Henry VI) 167–70 Summer’s Last Will and Testament (Nashe) 153 syllables 246–7, 249–50 Talbot, Lord (1 Henry VI) 158–65 Tales of Jacob (Mann) 38 Tamburlaine (Marlowe) 154, 159 Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare) 6, 15, 80 Taylor, Gary 149 Taylor, Neil 104 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 6, 10–14 templates 247 texts, marking 8–9 theatre 66, 71, 76, 185 see also history plays and performance antitheatricalism 144, 181 criticism and 160 disorientation and 185 language and 171–2, 180–2, 185–6 see also language mise-en-scène 178 palpability and 181

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this (Othello) 171–5, 178–9, 182 Thompson, Ann 104 thrift 34–6, 42 time 30, 241–3, 244, 250 Comedy of Errors, The and 237–8, 241, 244–5, 254–6, 259–62 performance and 254–5 poetry and 238 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 6, 184 Tomkis, Thomas: Lingua 95 Toneelgroep: Roman Tragedies 186 Torah, the 46–7 trade 107–10 Treatise on Lovesickness (Ferrand) 227 trochaic substitution 257–8 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) 64, 65–76, 162 Cressida 69–76 Troilus 67–72 Troilus (Troilus and Cressida) 67–72 tune 243 Turkey 108–9 Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek, The (Peele) 91

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Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 80, 117, 118 usance 42–3, 44–5 usury 42, 43–4 Valbuena, Olga 120 verbal network 189–90 Vincentio, Duke of Vienna (Measure for Measure) 194–6, 198, 200, 203–6 Walsingham, Sir Francis 108 weeds 195–6 wells 35–9 wilderness 188–9 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare) angling and 126, 127–31, 136–43, 144–6 Autolycus 128, 138–40 deception and 142–3, 145 hooks/crooks and 140–1 Leontes 129–31, 136–7 Polixenes 140–1 Wooster Group, The 186 ‘world of words’ 26–31 Wright, George T.: Shakespeare’s Metrical Art 238–9

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