Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture 9781442689183

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Introduction: Romantic Spheres of Action
PART 1. Public Speaking
1. Re-sounding Romanticism: John Thelwall and the Science and Practice of Elocution
2. Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act
3. Wordsworth’s Lament
4. Blasphemy Trials and The Cenci: Parody as Performative
5. A Race of Devils: Frankenstein, Romanticism, and the Tragedy of Human Origin
PART 2. Body Language
6. Telling Lies with Body Language
7. Cross-Dressing and the Performance of Gender in Romantic-Period Comic Plays by Women
8. Fox’s Tears: The Staging of Liquid Politics
9. Citational Cosmopolitics: Staël, Byron, and the Foreignizing Effect of Cultural Translation
10. Captain Barclay’s Performance: Decoding Pedestrianism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
Works Cited
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

SPHERES OF ACTION: SPEECH AND PERFORMANCE IN ROMANTIC CULTURE

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Edited by ALEXANDER DICK and ANGELA ESTERHAMMER

Spheres of Action Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture

U N IV E R S IT Y O F TO RO N TO P RE S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9803-0

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Spheres of action: speech and performance in Romantic culture / edited by Alexander Dick and Angela Esterhammer. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9803-0 1. English literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 2. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 3. Language and languages in literature. 4. Romanticism – Great Britain. 5. Speech acts (Linguistics). 6. Performative (Philosophy). I. Esterhammer, Angela II. Dick, Alexander J., 1970– PR457.S64 2009

820.9'145

C2008-904885-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Introduction: Romantic Spheres of Action

3

ANGELA ESTERHAMMER AND ALEXANDER DICK

PART 1: PUBLIC SPEAKING 1 Re-sounding Romanticism: John Thelwall and the Science and Practice of Elocution 21 JUDITH THOMPSON

2 Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act SARAH M . ZIMMERMAN 3 Wordsworth’s Lament

46

73

ALEXANDER DICK

4 Blasphemy Trials and The Cenci: Parody as Performative

100

VICTORIA MYERS

5 A Race of Devils: Frankenstein, Romanticism, and the Tragedy of Human Origin 124 RICHARD VAN OORT

vi

Contents

PART 2: BODY LANGUAGE 6 Telling Lies with Body Language 149 FREDERICK BURWICK

7 Cross-Dressing and the Performance of Gender in Romantic-Period Comic Plays by Women 178 MARJEAN D . PURINTON 8 Fox’s Tears: The Staging of Liquid Politics 194 DANIEL O ’ QUINN 9 Citational Cosmopolitics: Staël, Byron, and the Foreignizing Effect of Cultural Translation 222 JOSHUA LAMBIER

10 Captain Barclay’s Performance: Decoding Pedestrianism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain 248 THOMAS C . CROCHUNIS Works Cited

273

Contributors

293

Index

297

Illustrations

Figure 2.1

Michael Faraday delivering a lecture at the Royal Institution on 27 December 1855 49 Figure 2.2 ‘Scientific Researches! New discoveries in PNEUMATICKS! – or – an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air’ 54 Figure 6.1 Apprehension, from Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action 154 Figure 6.2 Painful recollection, from Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action 155 Figure 6.3 Edmund Kean as Richard III 156 Figure 6.4 John Philip Kemble as Richard III, from The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery 157 Figure 6.5 King Lear, from The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery 160 Figure 6.6 Hamlet, from The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery 161 Figure 6.7 False gesture, from Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action, Plate 34 162 Figure 6.8 False gesture, from Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action, Plate 32 163 Figure 6.9 False gesture, from Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action, Plate 33 164 Figure 6.10 Antony and Cleopatra, from The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery 166 Figure 6.11 Much Ado About Nothing, from The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery 167 Figure 6.12 King John. The smith hears of Prince Arthur’s death. From The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery 168 Figure 8.1 The Volcano of Opposition, by Frederick George Byron 200 Figure 8.2 The Wrangling Friends or Opposition in Disorder, by John Nixon 204

viii Illustrations

Figure 8.3 Figure 10.1

Figure 10.2 Figure 10.3 Figure 10.4 Figure 10.5

Sarah Siddons in ‘Jane Shore,’ by Thomas Ryder, and Sarah Siddons as Isabella, by George Roffe 213 ‘Capt. Barclay, in the act of walking one mile an hour, a thousand miles, in a thousand successive hours, for a bet of 1000 guineas’ 262 ‘Captain Barclay,’ from Pedestrianism 263 ‘Female Running Match,’ by Samuel Howitt 264 Table of Capt. Barclay’s Pedestrian Performances, from Pedestrianism 265 Journal of Capt. Barclay’s Walk at Newmarket, from Pedestrianism 266

SPHERES OF ACTION

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Introduction: Romantic Spheres of Action ANGELA ESTERHAMMER AND ALEXANDER DICK

‘Romanticism has come down to us as an imaginative rather than a performative movement, a movement of mind rather than mouth, as it were; and, like other Romantic ideologies, this bias against speech has coloured not only literary history but the study of language.’ So writes Judith Thompson in the essay that opens this volume. Her call to ‘liberate the bastilled tongue of Romanticism so that it may sound again’ is an apt summary of what the essays in Spheres of Action seek to do. The now-familiar premise that language is a form of action, that people do things when they speak, was already well known and, indeed, of paramount concern during the Romantic period. The contributors to this volume examine how that concern affected the development of Romanticism both as a literary movement and as cultural practice. Liberating the tongue of Romanticism is a broad project that involves recovering the material vibrancy of language, literature, and culture. This project has gained impetus from the various historicalmaterialist approaches introduced into Romantic studies during the past two decades, approaches that have brought about a rediscovery of Romantic drama and performance. As conceived in Spheres of Action, this enterprise necessitates an understanding of the interplay between theories of language and practices of speaking and writing. It engages ideas about orality and the public sphere, and the various ways of studying the effects of utterance, including theories of genre, audience, and reader response. It obliges us to consider how the Romantic ideology of autonomous individuality and imaginative genius is challenged by the material facts of the body and history, but also how matter and mind define and constitute each other. It compels us to confront difference and otherness in the value-laden spheres of gender, politics, and

4 Angela Esterhammer and Alexander Dick

religion. Listening to Romanticism speak with its mouth and its bodies calls into play a critical apparatus that must be equally sensitive to the realities of material practice and the vicissitudes of literary theory. Theory and practice, discourse and agency, behaviour and identity, performance and audience response are the terms addressed by the contributors to this collection. Some of their essays explicitly seek to recover the Romantic speaking voice; some explore the function of gesture, dress, and other forms of embodiment; and some address the determining effects of social practices on textual forms such as poetry, journalism, and the novel. All seek, in diverse ways, to further the study of action in Romantic culture, philosophy, and poetics. They share an approach to Romanticism by way of the critical category that, more than any other, brings action into the sphere of literary-critical discussion: the category of the performative. Over the past half-century, the terms ‘performance,’ ‘performative,’ and ‘performativity’ have been adopted and adapted for many different critical methodologies, some of which have been applied, in turn, to literary and cultural studies of Romanticism. One of the aims of Spheres of Action is to bring these various methods into conjunction – not by imposing a single definition of performativity, but rather by exploring family resemblances among related concepts in various subdisciplines and interdisciplinary fields. These divergent forms of the performative find their common ancestry in the philosophy of language, where ‘performative’ signals the fact that language does things in the world rather than simply describe it. Coined by J.L. Austin and inflected differently by John Searle, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, Jean-François Lyotard, and Judith Butler, among many others, the performative has become a crucial element of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, allowing scholars from a variety of disciplines to understand how words constitute acts. It has also enabled the study of language and literature to become much more attuned to the social and political effects of speaking and writing. Numerous recent studies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in particular, have focused on the era’s preoccupation with the problematics of action, the functioning of language, and the relationship between the two. In her ground-breaking book The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (1984), Olivia Smith demonstrates how knowledge of and control over language translate into political power. Historians, linguists, and literary scholars have all begun to analyse the effect of the French Revolution on linguistic philosophy, and vice versa; these

Introduction 5

include literary critic Steven Blakemore in Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (1988) and historian Jacques Guilhaumou in La langue politique et la Révolution Française (1989), to name only two. With a narrower focus on linguistic pragmatics, Stephen K. Land (The Philosophy of Language in Britain, 1986) and Brigitte Nerlich and David D. Clarke (Language, Action, and Context: The Early History of Pragmatics in Europe and America, 1780–1930, 1996) have begun to uncover the close relationship between word and action in Romanticperiod philosophy. In this vein, but with an orientation toward literature, Angela Esterhammer’s The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (2000) explores the pervasive notion of verbal utterance as cognitive and social action, in literary, philosophical, political, and legal texts of the period 1775–1835. Romanticperiod philosophy of language, Esterhammer argues, overwhelmingly regarded words as active, energetic, powerful, and creative – or what, a century and a half later, we learned to call performative. Of course, the terms ‘performative’ and ‘performance’ are at least as relevant to drama and theatre as they are to linguistic and literary spheres. Thus, in addition to language theory, scholarship on the performative roots of Romanticism recognizes the theatrical stage as an important cultural context. In the last two decades, historical scholars have countered the traditional assumption that Romanticism had little to do with the stage, by revealing that most of the authors we associate with literary Romanticism in fact wrote plays, and that theatre, as the era’s most significant popular art form, played a large part in establishing what audiences in Britain and Europe identified as ‘their’ ‘culture.’ Thus, as Catherine Burroughs, Julie Carlson, and Michael Simpson have shown, the theatre of Romanticism did not consist merely of lyrical dramas intended for the closet, but rather of experiments with various forms of play-making and play-acting that challenged the norms of dramaturgy and personal identity. Jane Moody (Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840, 2000) and Gillian Russell (The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815, 1995) have, through painstaking archival research, uncovered the extensive cultural network encompassing the government, the theatres, their audiences, and the press that produced and indeed performed the British national identity with which people aligned themselves, or against which they struggled. All of these studies adapt the idea of performance or the performative to articulate the efficacy of theatrical action, a component of culture that the major Romantics themselves sought to delineate in

6 Angela Esterhammer and Alexander Dick

their dramatic criticism. As Alexander Dick has cautioned, however, the general notion of ‘performance,’ as theatrical or cultural action, should not be elided with performativity. On the contrary, it is precisely the apparent opposition between the kind of actions performed by bodies and the actions understood to operate through the force of abstractions and institutions that made Romantic drama such a compelling site of literary experimentation and cultural dissent (Dick 98). Implicated in all these studies of Romantic-period language and theatre is the importance of national, personal, and identity politics as a sphere of performative action. William Keach’s recent book Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (2004) relates linguistic agency to political power in a manner that resonates with the concerns of the present volume. The aim, as Keach puts it, ‘is to return to and extend unfinished work on Romantic theories of linguistic agency, practice, and institution and to show how deeply implicated they are in defining social changes and conflicts’ (ix). Equally relevant to this collection is the materially and culturally inflected performativity of Judith Pascoe’s Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (1997), which reveals the pervasive concern with public self-representation and the performance of authorial identity, especially by women writers, during an era that was once exclusively known for its poetics of sincere self-representation. The contributors to Spheres of Action move onward from these and related studies, accepting that Romantic culture is a performative culture in several interrelated senses: it grants efficacy to verbal utterances; it is conscious of (if not obsessed with) various forms of social and political representation; it cultivates performance, on and off the stage, as constitutive of identity. The category of the performative also allows, or obliges, the contributors to this volume to reflect on the complex enfolding of material evidence together with ideological factors in their own critical approaches. Numerous recent studies have emphasized the material conditions from which Romanticism as a literary-cultural phenomenon emerged. They have shown that eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury thinkers were conscious of the tangible transformations underway in their society and often self-conscious about their part in giving those transformations the more abstract form of ideology. It is no longer possible to say that Romantic culture consisted of naively lyrical or sincerely subjective paradigms of literary expression. Yet it is equally disingenuous to claim that Romanticism can be fully accounted for by material forces, neglecting the importance of the

Introduction 7

subject as a philosophical and literary category. By denying the locus of individuality, diversity, and difference, such a claim would gravely weaken the foundations of cultural studies on which the materialist turn in Romanticism rests. Inasmuch as ‘subjectivity’ is an abstract principle that conceals the actual operations of bourgeois capitalism, it is also a powerful – indeed, material – component of capitalist discourse, one that deserves to be addressed and interpreted. As invested as they are in material aspects of speech and cultural performance, then, these essays also point toward a growing awareness that language and action need to be understood in terms that take account of both materiality and subjectivity. Both these contexts are essential if instances of speech and action are to be brought into relation with questions of agency, responsibility, and values. Moreover, the concern that an overly restrictive understanding of language and action would limit access to such questions is a concern shared by late eighteenth-century thought and contemporary theory. In Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (1997), William Jewett formulates precisely this resonance between the two periods: If the [contemporary] revival of interest in agency can be understood as a reaction against Marxist and Structuralist critiques of the autonomous subject, the pervasive interest throughout the Romantic period in the question of what can be known (or believed) about human action may have originated in a similar reaction against eighteenth-century materialism: the eighteenth-century fear that we are (only) our bodies has been replaced with the postmodern fear that we are (only) our words. (xii–xiii)

Jewett goes on to demonstrate how often and how seriously Romantic drama confronts the problem of human agency, obliging characters, audiences, and critics to work through the issues of moral freedom and constraint and to ‘confront the ways in which our language grants us agency’ (ix). Reformulations of these issues recur throughout the essays in the present volume. If the subject’s desire for agency and autonomy is repeatedly countered by forces that the Romantics understood as history, nature, or fate, the same dialectic reappears in postmodern theoretical terms as the tension between the sovereign subject’s fantasy of agency and the power diffused within social discourse. The challenge for contemporary criticism – including the essays in Spheres of Action – is to reconcile, or productively juxtapose, the eighteenth-century concern with moral agency and responsibility with a post-Foucauldian and

8 Angela Esterhammer and Alexander Dick

Butlerian awareness of our subjection to the sedimented norms of speech and behaviour that both permit and constrain individual action. Collectively, these essays suggest that action can be defined neither in purely abstract nor in purely material terms; rather, agency always comprises a tension between material and abstract forces. We have attempted to capture these shared concerns of Romanticism and postmodernity in the concept of ‘spheres of action,’ a resonant phrase that occupied different places on the scientific-philosophical continuum between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The ‘public spheres’ and ‘separate spheres’ that figure prominently in recent criticism deriving from Habermas and gender studies, respectively, have a long (if largely unacknowledged) pre-history that begins in the early modern period and takes on new meaning during the late eighteenth century. An early modern history of ‘spheres of action’ would trace the phrase back to Ptolemaic science and to the world view of early modern theology as the astrological term for the heavenly globes in which the earth, the sun, and the other planets reside. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, following the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions, the term evolved more humanistic connotations. The ‘sphere of action’ came to designate the limit or extent within which human action could be said to take place. Polemically, it demarcated a realm of human agency in opposition to scholastic or pseudo-scientific claims that human power is limited by mathematical or metaphysical determinants. In this sense, the phrase appears in the Earl of Rochester’s Satyre against Reason and Mankind (1679), his pithy rebuke of pedants who explain human action by appeal to astrological or alchemical processes. Rochester notes caustically: But Thoughts are given for Actions government, Where Action ceases, Thought’s impertinent. Our sphere of Action is Lifes happiness, And he who thinks beyond, thinks like an Asse. Thus whilst against false Reasoning I enveigh, I own right reason, which I would obey; That Reason which distinguishes by Sense, And gives us Rules of Good and Ill from thence: That bounds Desires with a reforming Will, To keep them more in vigour, not to kill. Your Reason hinders, mine helps to enjoy, Renewing appetites yours would destroy.

(lines 94–105)

Introduction 9

Life’s happiness defines the human sphere of action, and anyone who attempts to think beyond the practical limits of ‘right reason’ – that which is appropriate for any given context – ‘thinks like an Asse.’ With this redefinition of the sphere of action, Rochester champions humanist values and moral agency in opposition to purely materialist determinism. Notably, the ‘right reason’ that operates within Rochester’s sphere accommodates a ‘reforming Will,’ one that concedes to the subject the discretion and power to alter the limits of conduct if the situation demands. It is also significant that Rochester associates an individual’s ability to alter the sphere of action with common sense. In the later eighteenth century, the notion of common sense became the ground for a new epistemology that was responding to the strong materialism and the threat of scepticism contained in Humean philosophy. Thomas Reid, the founder of the Scottish ‘Common Sense’ school, used the agentive function of language – the type of utterance he classed as a ‘social act’ – to mount an influential critique of the so-called ‘theory of ideas’ laid down by Locke and Hume. If utterances could only ever be ‘solitary acts’ that refer to ideas, as Locke and Hume believed, then such common-sense verbal actions as promises and contracts could not exist, since there are no ideas corresponding to them outside of the act of speaking. Highly controversial in its time, but extremely influential on thinkers as diverse as Godwin, Bentham, and Coleridge, Common Sense philosophy also had a longer-range impact on the twentieth-century philosophy of performative language. Reid insisted that the principles of common sense, and particularly social acts, represented the epistemological foundation for legal and political action. In his lectures on jurisprudence and political economy delivered at the University of Glasgow in the 1760s and 1770s, Reid outlined his idea of the ‘sphere of Action’: All Laws circumscribe a Mans actions and confine him within a certain Sphere within which he may exercise his power and act according to his pleasure but he cannot go beyond this Sphere without transgressing the laws and thereby becoming obnoxious to punishment. And this sphere of Action within which if a man confined himself, he was no way obnoxious was called his Right. The Law not onely circumscribes my Actions and fixes certain limits to them, but it likewise directs & prescribes certain actions to be done by others that respect me & tend to my benefite. Thus it obliges those who owe me to pay their just debts, & those who have contrated with me to perform their Engagements. (141–2)

10

Angela Esterhammer and Alexander Dick

The sphere of action, as Reid conceives it, is an entirely pragmatic limit of human power. It is commensurate with the institutions that define legal rights; hence, the sphere of action is synonymous with the ‘sphere of law.’ This sphere of action is prescriptive, not constitutive. It defines what I may or may not do, and what others may or may not do to me, but it does not tell me what or who I am. Within a Romantic context, however, the sphere of action becomes constitutive of identity by taking on organic and transcendental connotations. In the 1818 lecture ‘On Poesy or Art,’ Coleridge writes of the ‘self-witnessing and self-effected sphere of agency’ of the object whose form proceeds organically out of its own nature, rather than being artificially imposed (262). Under the influence of Kant and German idealism, more generally, the sphere of action moves out of the institutional and into the metaphysical realm. In a marginal note on Kant’s Metaphysik der Sitten, reflecting on the relation between one’s own interests and the interests of others, Coleridge refers to the sphere of action as a transcendental category that designates the extent of moral agency: If to make them happy be the best means to this End in their case, so must it be in my own – therefore in both alike my final aim ought to be the realizing of the Kingdom of God on Earth, in myself & all others as far as & in proportion as they lie within my sphere of action & power – (Marginalia III 263–4)

The conversion of the sphere of action from institutional to transcendental category helped inculcate the divisions among the disciplines that became the hallmark of nineteenth-century intellectual life. In Kant and Hegel, a ‘sphere’ demarcates a distinct zone of human action – as in the political sphere, the domestic sphere, or the aesthetic sphere. Added to this is the increasing popularity of the idea of the ‘separate spheres’ distinguishing public from private life, which played a crucial role in entrenching normative ideas of gender and sexuality. The rise of the nation-state is another factor that works to transform the concept of the sphere of action. The end of the Napoleonic Wars brought with it a new confidence about the autonomy of European nations and the strength of their respective empires. It is this period, much more than the preceding centuries, that saw the rise of a concept of ‘national identity,’ as opposed to the various local and regional identities that people had previously claimed. One’s nationality, that is, becomes one’s sphere of action, that which defines the characteristics

Introduction

11

of the self from outside or beyond the self. At the same time, the material and institutional means by which the nations and empires of the nineteenth century created and sustained themselves were in full operation. It is on this point that the paradox surrounding the transformation of the sphere of action in Romanticism comes into plain view. On 19 April 1885, the Earl of Granville sent to Count Münster, Bismarck’s foreign secretary, a ‘Memorandum of Agreement for separating and defining the spheres of action of Great Britain and Germany in those parts of Africa where the Colonial Interests of the two countries might conflict’ (Hertslet 3: 868). The idea of the sphere of action that Granville records here was used in political and historical discussions about the extent and validity of the imperial and transnational powers during the first half of the twentieth century and especially during the Cold War, when it became known as the ‘sphere of influence’ problem. The point, though, as Sir Edward Hertslet’s massive compendium of memoranda and correspondence relating to the imperial parcelling out of Africa shows, is that the ‘spheres of action’ of the European empires were not abstract entities, even if many people believed that they were ordained by destiny or deity. Rather, they were textual constructs created through social action, verbal dialogue, and written declaration. As J. Hillis Miller argues in Topographies (1995), making maps and determining territories is the ultimate speech act, not because it determines once and for all the boundaries and characteristics of a place and its people, but rather because it betrays the materiality – that is, the performativity – of that very process. The transformation in the notion of the sphere of action from institutional process to transcendental category, as it was first articulated in the framework of Romantic idealism, was therefore not a complete transformation. The sphere of action did not cease to be an institutional entity, materially grounded and open to pragmatic change or reform. The tensions that have accrued within the sphere of action are nicely expressed at the fin de siècle in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Critic as Artist.’ In the context of an ironically dialectical argument that ‘what is termed Sin is an essential element of progress,’ Wilde’s two interlocutors raise the question of the practical and epistemological limits on human action: ernest: You think, then, that in the sphere of action a conscious aim is a delusion? gilbert: It is worse than a delusion. If we lived long enough to see the results of our actions it may be that those who call themselves good

12

Angela Esterhammer and Alexander Dick would be sickened with a dull remorse, and those whom the world calls evil stirred by a noble joy. Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilisation, more marvellous and more splendid than any that has gone before. But men are the slaves of words. They rage against Materialism, as they call it, forgetting that there has been no material improvement that has not spiritualised the world, and that there have been few, if any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world’s faculties in barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammeling creeds. (1023)

On the most literal level, Wilde’s ‘sphere of action’ opposes ‘action’ (as the larger context makes clear) to ‘dreams,’ to the mental and aesthetic realm. However, Gilbert’s response to Ernest’s question binds the material and the abstract inextricably together. Moral intent is subject to material forces, which are represented by allusion to industrialized capitalist society as the ‘great machine of life,’ but also with the awareness that ‘Materialism’ itself is a verbal and ideological spectre. These material forces are then immediately subsumed back into spiritual abstraction – or, more tendentiously, ideology (‘empty or trammeling creeds’). The ironic point of the dialogue is that spheres of action are inescapably ethical spheres, yet the moral impact of human action cannot be known or fully intended by the agent, whose vision is limited by the local horizon of the action’s sphere. It is this tension between subjective abstraction and material institution that makes the idea of the sphere of action so compelling for critical theory and literature alike. It can be met with again in Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, where the public sphere designates a zone of free and open discourse to which participants come as private citizens, independently of their public roles as heads of families, members of a court hierarchy, or working professionals. The heyday of the public sphere, Habermas claims, was the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its sites the coffee houses of London in the 1670s and 1680s and the salons of Paris in the 1750s. With the rise of the bourgeois marketplace, soon accompanied by the emergence of German idealism and Marxist critique, the public sphere, which had challenged the centrality of the church and the court as centres of knowledge and governance, grew into and was then usurped by the market and the nation as institutions that defined who

Introduction

13

and what a person was. But, unlike the church or the court, which set limits on individual action by means of the hierarchical designation of roles, and unlike the coffee house and salon, which accommodated more dynamic roles shaped by the activities of reading, writing, and speaking, the market and the nation imposed their own categorical imperative. People moved and changed, but they did so according to the apparently universal laws of the exchange of capital and the entrenched ideologies of national citizenship. The public sphere, or, broadly speaking, the sphere of human action, was transformed from a materially constitutive field of competing and intersecting interests into a fully fledged institutional entity with palpable social effects. Especially since Habermas’s Structural Transformation appeared in English in 1989, a significant amount of historical scholarship has challenged his larger claims about the public and private realms, and about society and agency. It now appears that Habermas’s account of the coffee house as a locus of rational discussion between private individuals has as much to do with his attempt to revive liberal democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany during the mid-twentieth century as it does with coffee drinking and philosophical debate in London during the 1670s. Significantly, however, since publishing The Theory of Communicative Action in 1981, Habermas has adopted terms and concepts from the philosophy of language to develop his model of social action. Speech-act theory provides a means of conceptualizing verbal action in philosophical terms that also enables scholars to address sociological considerations, such as the pragmatic limits imposed on individual agency by socioeconomic processes and institutions. A similar intuition that history in itself is not quite sufficient to understand the material foundations of culture motivates us to bring together various objects of study – language, drama, politics, and critical practice – in this book under the theoretical heading of performativity. In proposing a reading of Romanticism as intersecting spheres of action, therefore, the essays in this volume bring theories of language and performativity to bear on the material data of literary, legal, and political texts, theatrical practice, and cultural history. The book’s two subdivisions represent two material-philosophical hybrids: ‘Public Speaking,’ where the predominant focus on language nevertheless necessitates considerations of the physical spaces, media, and institutions in which words have their effects, and ‘Body Language,’ where the attempt to interpret material performance and bodily action can only occur by way of verbal or ideological contexts. Each individual

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Angela Esterhammer and Alexander Dick

essay, in its exploration of a dimension of performance or performativity, further complicates the apparent binary. The five essays in Part 1 thus focus on the implications of orality and various forms of public speaking, particularly in the work of major Romantic writers: Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Shelleys. Judith Thompson lays the groundwork for a recovery of orality in her essay ‘Re-sounding Romanticism: John Thelwall and the Science and Practice of Elocution,’ which contributes to a growing body of scholarship on public speaking, pronunciation, and elocution during the late eighteenth century. By rediscovering the elocutionary theory of Thomas Sheridan and the linguistic philosophy of Dugald Stewart, among others, and by beginning to re-evaluate the influence of Coleridge and Hazlitt on public speaking, a number of scholars have recently questioned what Thompson calls the ‘bias against speech’ in traditional Romanticist scholarship. Thompson argues for the importance of John Thelwall’s interdisciplinary theory of elocution, in which the study of speech and the practice of speech therapy are bound up with social and political principles. Reading Thelwall’s 1794 political lecture on the ‘Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers’ together with his later work on speech theory and rhythm, Thompson puts this interdisciplinary approach into practice, demonstrating the importance of attention to audience, address, and voice in understanding Thelwall’s own political and verbal practice and, more generally, in making it possible to ‘hear’ Romantic voices meaningfully once again. A second essay on public speaking highlights audience relations and explores the subtleties of agency in oral delivery. Sarah M. Zimmerman’s ‘Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act’ takes an original approach to the study of Coleridge’s lectures by amassing historical information on their performance venues: the dimensions and layout of lecture theatres, the terms of admission, the size and composition of the audience, the sightlines from and to the stage. Zimmerman argues that we have lost sight, not only of the performed delivery, but of the performative mode of composition of these lectures, which derive from the face-to-face encounter with an audience. The Romantic-period public lecture needs to be understood as a literary genre with its own parameters and determinants, inherited but also significantly shaped by Coleridge. With special attention to Coleridge’s lectures on dramatic performance itself, such as the lectures on Hamlet, Zimmerman shows how the pragmatic context of composition and delivery influenced audience reception, the evolution of taste, and the values of a listening and reading public.

Introduction

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By contrast, in ‘Wordsworth’s Lament,’ Alexander Dick treats the emphasis on orality in Wordsworth’s elegiac style as a conservative response to the use of elegy, lamentation, and complaint as tools of subjective agency and political protest in eighteenth-century print culture. For Dick, the lament is a performative genre in the sense that it promotes the authority of a subjective voice through the material power of writing and printing. In company with a number of eighteenthcentury philosophers, and in keeping with changes in British funeral customs during the early nineteenth century, Wordsworth transformed the lament into a particular kind of poetic mourning that negotiates the poet’s relation to community and helps to reify the practices and bonds that hold the community together. On this basis, Dick pursues a revisionary reading of authorial voice in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ and, especially, in Wordsworth’s later poem ‘Queen Mary’s Lament,’ a revision of Helen Maria Williams’s poem of the same title, in light of its historical moment at a time of public mourning for the death of Princess Charlotte in 1817. The last two essays in Part 1 situate public speaking within legal and anthropological contexts, respectively. Victoria Myers’s ‘Blasphemy Trials and The Cenci: Parody as Performative’ draws a direct connection from public discourse in the legal system to Romantic drama. Myers addresses the use of parody to question institutional guarantees of justice in the trial scene of Shelley’s Cenci, and in the actual blasphemy trials of Daniel Isaac Eaton and William Hone that took place during the same decade the play was written. Parody, in these contexts, functions performatively to effect changes in public perception. Applying contemporary legal, literary, and speech-act theory, Myers demonstrates how the testimony at these historical and staged trials subtly undermines the power of institutional discourse and proposes alternative sources of verbal agency. These negotiations of verbal power through parody open up new readings of the blasphemy and tyranny of Cenci, and the parodic relationship of Beatrice’s behaviour and identity to that of her father, in Shelley’s drama. ‘A Race of Devils: Frankenstein, Romanticism, and the Tragedy of Human Origin,’ by Richard van Oort, looks to generative anthropology for a new way of understanding the rhetoric of victimization, as it applies to the multiple narrators, and even the reader, of Mary Shelley’s novel. The ‘originary hypothesis’ proposed by anthropologist Eric Gans, which accounts for the origins of sacralization, dispossession, the relationship of centre and periphery, and other fundamentals of social organization, is used here to probe the history of victimary rhetoric in

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Western culture, from Sophocles and Shakespeare to Rousseau and Shelley. Expanding the perspective to include Frankenstein’s construction of subjectivity in the context of bourgeois market culture, van Oort offers wide-ranging conclusions about the significance of the novel as a performance of the victim-centred Romantic aesthetic. Part 2 of the volume, ‘Body Language,’ moves from the performative as encountered in Romantic literature and theory to the implications of material performance in several Romantic-period ‘theatres’: the stage, the House of Commons, the salon, and the sporting arena. By investigating changes in the use and meaning of gesture in Romantic-period theories of acting, Frederick Burwick’s essay, ‘Telling Lies with Body Language,’ shows how Romantic drama thematizes action and performativity. With increasing attention to body language in eighteenthcentury scientific and aesthetic theory, gestures could be used by actors on stage to construct space, define character, and reveal emotion – and even to express feigned emotion or to simulate madness. Drawing on several Romantic dramas, theoretical writings, and engravings of actors performing Shakespeare, Burwick explores the paradox of how actors could use body language to feign emotion, thus bringing about a ‘dual perception’ that calls attention to the actor playing a character who is also playing at being something other than he or she is. Body language on the Romantic stage is also the subject of ‘CrossDressing and the Performance of Gender in Romantic-Period Comic Plays by Women,’ in which Marjean D. Purinton demonstrates how cross-dressed characters made the unstable categories of gender and sex visible. Focusing on ‘breeches parts’ in comedies by Elizabeth Inchbald, Jane Scott, and Catherine Gore, Purinton refers to postmodern research on the performativity of gender to show how gender markers are exposed in these plays as constructed and theatrical. The responses of audiences, and other characters, to cross-dressed actors are complexly determined by dialogue and body language, as well as by costume. Over the transitional period spanned by these plays (1786 to 1844), Purinton traces a shift from fluid and discursive gender identifications in the revolutionary era toward more corrective and normative gender identities in the mid-nineteenth century. In ‘Fox’s Tears: The Staging of Liquid Politics,’ Daniel O’Quinn shifts the focus from the sexual politics of Romantic comedy to the comedy of Romantic politics by analysing the rhetoric and theatricality of a momentous political exchange between Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke. Reacting to the oratorical attack of his friend Burke,

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who disagreed with him over the British response to the French Revolution, Fox broke into tears in the House of Commons during an evening debate in May 1791. Extreme oratory and inflammatory metaphors, newspaper coverage, political cartooning, and elocutionary theory are important frames for interpreting the shifts of allegiance that occurred during and after this very public scene. This physical performance needs to be read in the context of Romantic-period theatrical practice, O’Quinn argues; indeed, contemporary responses suggest that was precisely the framework in which Fox’s tears were interpreted after the event. By addressing questions of masculinity, ‘Fox’s Tears’ also contributes to the discussion of fluid sexual identities opened up by Purinton in the previous chapter. Joshua Lambier shows how body language figures in the construction of the foreign and the domestic in ‘Citational Cosmopolitics: Staël, Byron, and the Foreignizing Effect of Cultural Translation.’ His essay sets itself in the context of recent studies of Romantic cosmopolitanism, which are revising the traditional assumption that the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment gave way to Romantic preoccupations with nationalism and nation-building. Rather, Lambier argues, a Romantic mode of material and embodied cosmopolitanism finds its ideological heritage in Kant’s early essay Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Lambier identifies resonances between Kant’s typology of dispositions and contemporary theories of identity, including Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and Butler’s theory of gender as a sedimentation of norms. In their problematizing of cosmopolitanism – as a fatal hybridity of character in the case of Staël’s Corinne, and as Babel-like confusion in Byron’s Don Juan – the nineteenth-century literary examples adduced by Lambier illustrate the ‘untranslatability’ of fragments cited from different cultures and sedimented within individual bodies. An entirely different kind of bodily performance is the subject of the final chapter in the volume, ‘Captain Barclay’s Performance: Decoding Pedestrianism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain.’ Using the example of the long-distance walking champion Robert Barclay, Thomas C. Crochunis examines the contexts and implications of pedestrian athletics in the Romantic period, including the discourse about walking contests in the popular press, and the genre of pedestrian poetry. Equally important, however, are the reflections generated by this material about how to study historical modes of physical performance today, and whether such a study should take pragmatic as well as textual forms. Calling attention to a mode of performance that has largely

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been ignored by Romantic scholarship, even after its cultural turn, Crochunis makes a plea for extending workshop approaches and other forms of embodied scholarship, which have heretofore been limited to the study of drama, into other branches of Romantic studies. As Crochunis explicitly, and the whole collection implicitly, suggests, the turn to performance has far-reaching methodological implications. In bringing together different facets of Romantic culture, from elocution to election, from government to graveyard, from the primal scene of human societies to the future of European cosmopolitanism, Spheres of Action pursues the analysis of literature and culture at the junctures of theory and material practice. A network of methodologies and disciplines is held together here by the shared theoretical premise, and the continually re-encountered practical illustrations, that words act. These essays are concerned, historically speaking, with the fascinating consequences that ensued when Romanticism itself came upon that realization. Methodologically, we hope that they will raise productive questions about the motivations and aims of Romantic scholarship today – about the possible dimensions of its own sphere of action.

PART 1 Public Speaking

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1 Re-sounding Romanticism: John Thelwall and the Science and Practice of Elocution JUDITH THOMPSON

It is better [...] to be immured in a Bastille, than to have the Bastille in one’s mouth, to lock up the tongue from all communication with the heart. John Thelwall, ‘The Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers’ 29

In one of his best-known essays, William Hazlitt defines ‘The Difference between Writing and Speaking’ in the Romantic era. The essay is built around the following anecdote: The most dashing orator I ever heard is the flattest writer I ever read. In speaking, he was like a volcano vomiting out lava; in writing, he is like a volcano burnt out. He was the model of a flashy, powerful demagogue [but …] what he delivers over to the compositor is tame, and trite, and tedious […] The thunder-and-lightning mixture of the orator turns out a mere drab-coloured suit in the person of the prose-writer. (12: 264–5)

Hazlitt’s disillusionment with the printed speech of this unnamed contemporary becomes the foundation for an extended critique of speech in general: What we read is the same: what we hear and see is different […] The orator’s vehemence of gesture, the loudness of the voice, the speaking eye, the conscious attitude, the inexplicable dumb shew and noise […] are no longer there, and without these he is nothing; – his ‘fire and air’ turn to puddle and ditch-water, and the God of eloquence and of our idolatry sinks into a common mortal, or an image of lead, with a few labels, nicknames, and party watch-words stuck in his mouth. The truth is, that these

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Judith Thompson always made up the stock of his intellectual wealth; but a certain exaggeration and extravagance of manner covered the nakedness, and swelled out the emptiness of the matter: the sympathy of angry multitudes with an impassioned theatrical declaimer supplied the place of argument or wit. (12: 265)

Despite his own pungently plain-spoken style and experience as a lecturer, Hazlitt is unequivocal in his condemnation of speech, which he associates with bombastic superficiality, immediate but transient gratification, and expedient mob sympathy, in stark contrast to the intellectual depth, permanent truth, and transcendent originality of writing. Hazlitt is, of course, by no means alone in making this negative judgment; indeed, his essay is merely one entry in a debate about speech and writing which began in the eighteenth century (most famously between Johnson and Sheridan)1 and continues in our own time (in the opposition between Derrida and Ong, for example). In the Romantic period, as Nicholas Hudson has pointed out, the best-known proponent of the ‘writing’ side of the argument was Coleridge, another ‘apostate’ speaker who turned against the medium of his own popularity, most memorably in the critique in Biographia Literaria of Wordsworth’s ‘real language of men,’ but also in his rabid attack in The Friend on ‘sleight of word jugglers’ who ‘traded for gain […] in the character of demagogues and orators’ (437–8). Coleridge’s suspicion of ‘Jacobinical’ public speaking was widely shared in the reactionary milieu of the early nineteenth century; it is an attitude from which not even Hazlitt is free, despite his more radical sympathies. By distancing good (that is, written) language from the tawdry and turbulent, politicized and commercialized culture of public speech in their time, Coleridge and Hazlitt not only mask their own investment in that culture but obscure for posterity the extent to which English Romanticism participates in and is shaped by it. Due in large part to their influence, Romanticism has come down to us as an imaginative rather than a performative movement, a movement of mind rather than mouth, as it were; and, like other Romantic ideologies, this bias against speech has coloured not only literary history but the study of language itself. After two decades of deconstruction, Coleridgean critical values still prevail in the scholarly tendency to value the word-as-sign over the word-as-voice: texts are studied more than performances even as publication counts for more than lecturing; reading is assumed to be a solitary, silent process rather than a public, spoken performance; and the

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public sphere is taken to be synonymous with print culture, with little attention to its significant oral dimensions. Only recently have scholars begun to apply the contemporary speech and performance theories of Austin, Bakhtin, and Butler to Romantic literature and culture, paying attention to the actual circumstances and active effects of particular speech acts, utterances, genres, and performances. As yet, however, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the major source of speech theory in the Romantic period itself: the elocutionary movement. Historians of language agree that elocution dominated eighteenthcentury British language theory and had a huge impact upon performance practice (of literature as well as political speech and drama) throughout the nineteenth century, especially in America. Yet, like W.S. Howells, they frequently dismiss elocutionists as ‘poseurs and charlatans’ who reduced rhetoric to a ‘lowly estate […] in which it began in the modern vocabulary to mean declamatory rather than fully persuasive utterance’ (243). Few have taken elocution seriously as a form of legitimate literary theory rather than a set of rote rules or table-thumping quackery. While scholars have begun to re-evaluate its role in American culture, there has been no history of elocution in Britain since Frederick Haberman’s 1947 The Elocutionary Movement in England 1750–1850, a published thesis now little read. Elocution is not mentioned at all in Hans Aarsleff’s influential The Study of Language in England 1780–1860 or Olivia Smith’s valuable The Politics of Language 1791–1819; it is dealt with more seriously, but still tangentially, as a variation or aspect of broader histories of linguistics and writing, respectively, in Murray Cohen’s Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England 1640–1785 and Hudson’s Writing and European Thought 1600– 1830, while Denyse Rockey’s Speech Disorder in Nineteenth-Century Britain deals with elocution in relation to the history of speech therapy, with no attention to literary language. Patricia Howell Michaelson’s Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading and Speech in the Age of Austen is a welcome sign of reviving interest in the subject, but much remains to be done to recover and re-evaluate elocutionary history and theory in relation to Romanticism. Thomas Sheridan (1719–88) is justifiably regarded as the most important and representative elocutionary theorist of the eighteenth century; but a more important figure for the Romantic movement is an elocutionist barely mentioned by Howells, Cohen, and Hudson, yet singled out by speech therapist Denyse Rockey as the first truly scientific and therapeutic practitioner and theorist of speech in Britain: John

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Thelwall. Closely connected with two of the most influential Romantic poetic theorists, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Thelwall stands at the intersection of three disciplines which are crucial to any reconsideration of speech in the Romantic period: politics, literature, and medicine. Furthermore, Thelwall was a focal point for debates about speech in his own time: he is widely accepted to be the ‘dashing orator’ who initiates and focuses Hazlitt’s critique of speech and is also, almost certainly, the target of Coleridge’s attack on sophists in The Friend.2 Thelwall is best known today as a political figure, a leader in the democratic reform movement of the 1790s, and a notorious radical lecturer whose speeches were printed in his own periodical, the Tribune (to which Hazlitt refers directly). By the time Hazlitt’s essay appeared in 1820, however, Thelwall had long fallen out of the political limelight, having been driven away from his political forum to become first a ‘poet in retirement’ after the manner of his friends Coleridge and Wordsworth, and then a professional elocutionist who successfully realized Sheridan’s failed ambition to open a school to revive the lost art of British elocution. At his Institute for the Cure of Speech Impediments and the Cultivation of Oratory in London, as well as in itinerant lectures delivered throughout Britain, Thelwall spent over thirty years promoting and applying his theoretical ideas and therapeutic methods for the ‘enfranchisement’ of the voice (Letter to Henry Cline 9). Although much of this work is pragmatic and technical, with an explicit aim of diagnosing and healing speech defects, Thelwall consistently draws a parallel between intellectual, moral, and physiological impairment such that, ultimately, his speech theory emerges as part of a total system to reform the body politic. Although compelled to distance himself from his earlier activism, he refused to disavow his radical principles, and it is both impossible and unwise to separate Thelwall’s elocutionary activities from his ongoing social commitments and literary ambitions: just as he acknowledges that his experience as a radical orator and a Romantic poet gave birth to his ‘science and practice of elocution’ (Letter to Henry Cline 3), so in turn his elocutionary theories inform the literary lectures and political journalism that he continued to deliver between 1802 and 1832, in direct rivalry with his erstwhile friends Hazlitt and Coleridge, whose published attacks are probably motivated (at least in part) by Thelwall’s greater popular and financial success. A passionate, persistent, and powerfully effective speaker and champion of public speaking as an art and a science crucial to the health of both body and body-politic, Thelwall has suffered like no

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other Romantic-era figure both from the general devaluation and neglect of elocution and oratory in literary history and from the specific charges of demagoguery and sophism brought against him by Hazlitt, Coleridge, and others. Until very recently, the few scholars who noticed Thelwall at all merely repeated Hazlitt’s evaluation, taking for granted or at best apologizing for his ‘tame, and trite, and tedious’ writing style, without bothering to examine the threads in that reputedly ‘drab-coloured suit.’ And while political and literary historians like Gregory Claeys and Michael Scrivener have now begun to pay increasingly respectful attention to Thelwall’s early political writings and their rhetoric of ‘seditious allegory,’ there has as yet been little close analysis of either his political or his literary practice in relation to his elocutionary theory, which remains scattered in obscure periodicals and instructional materials and thus is almost entirely unknown.3 Yet, while Thelwall failed to produce the long-promised key to his elocutionary system, what remains is no less coherent and intelligible than Coleridge’s similarly incomplete literary theory, and a thorough and fair-minded reading of his ‘logopaedic’ writings (to borrow Denyse Rockey’s term) reveals a sophisticated ars rhetorica with wide-ranging interdisciplinary applications. To introduce the ‘Science,’ ‘Art,’ and ‘Act’ of elocution, as Thelwall calls it (Introductory Discourse 2), I will here undertake a close rhetorical analysis of one of his best-known political lectures, the 1794 lecture on ‘The Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers’ as an interactive spoken performance, in the light of the logopaedic science he articulates in such later texts as his 1806 ‘Introductory Essay on the Study of English Rhythmus’ and his 1810 A Letter to Henry Cline. By reading these texts in conjunction, I consciously violate the separation between early and late, the political and the elocutionary, that has thus far dominated scholarly discussion of Thelwall. I do this in part for practical reasons: since he prided himself on his extempore abilities, none of Thelwall’s elocutionary lectures was ever transcribed, as far as we know;4 the earlier political lectures, having been taken down in shorthand, offer the only print record of his performance practice. More importantly, however, I bring the early and late Thelwall together strategically, in order to stress the continuity between his political and his logopaedic theory and practice. For it is above all its political source and contexts, as well as its scientific orientation, that make Thelwall’s elocutionary theory unique and valuable, in his own time and in ours. Arguing for the coherence and continuity of Thelwall’s achievements as a logopaedic thinker and stylist rather

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than merely a ranting demagogue, I hope both to foster a better understanding of Thelwall’s work and to draw attention to an untapped resource for the study of Romantic literature, in an elocutionary theory that combines rhetorical study and physiological inquiry into a politically informed ars rhetorica. Thelwall’s lecture on the ‘Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers’ is a tour-de-force performance whose circumstances of delivery – to a mixed lecture-room crowd of over six hundred, including a party of government informers listening in from the next room – are integral to its intellectually complex and self-reflexive, yet brilliantly entertaining, style and theme. For this is a lecture about delivery, in every sense of the word: about oral delivery as a means of political deliverance and about obstructions and impediments to both in an age of verbal repression, intimidation, and instability. Originally delivered just before his imprisonment for treason in 1794, the lecture was transcribed in shorthand (a common practice, in anticipation of prosecution) and republished four times after Thelwall’s famous trial and release, with revisions, footnotes, and forewords which allow him repeatedly to replay the trial, incorporating notes for the defence he never gave, transforming successive audiences into alternate juries, and using the lecture to engage in the ongoing counter-parliamentary debate of his own ‘British Forum’ at the Beaufort Buildings.5 It therefore occupies a unique position in time and space between several audiences and discursive contexts, and between oral and written speech, one which readily problematizes Hazlitt’s reductive binary opposition between speech and writing and invites consideration as an example of ‘the Romantic performative,’ a mode which Angela Esterhammer locates in just the revolutionary legal and political milieu that generated Thelwall’s lectures. Many features of this lecture would repay close analysis in terms of current performance and speech-act theory, including its clever multiple relocations, re-iterations, and re-citations not only of Thelwall’s address to the jury, but of a range of literary and political authorities past and present, including Ben Jonson’s Sejanus and Thelwall’s ‘philosophical friend’ William Godwin. Given the limited (and introductory) aim of this paper, however, I will focus my analysis on three related features of this lecture that are most characteristic of Thelwall’s ‘science and practice of elocution’ in the 1790s and beyond: (1) his strategies to build, maintain, and manage sympathy in and with his varied audience; (2) his awareness and use of body language (including

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gesture and tone, as well as physical comedy); and (3) his rapid-fire mixing, inconsistency, or alternation of voice, mode, and register. Each of these features corresponds to a characteristic of oratory criticized by Hazlitt and theorized and practised by other elocutionists; each also anticipates the fundamental principles underlying Thelwall’s later elocutionary theory, which I will use to counter Hazlitt’s dismissive evaluation and to develop a more balanced, accurate, comprehensive understanding of Thelwall’s uniquely politico-physiological approach and contribution to both elocution and Romantic theory. It is in these later elocutionary writings that Thelwall articulates the two ‘elementary principles of oral utterance’ that underlie his lifelong theory and practice: ‘the sympathy between the perceptive and executive organs’ (Letter to Henry Cline 8) and ‘that universal principle of action and reaction, which forms the paramount law of all reiterated or progressive motion, organic or mechanical, from the throb and remission of the heart, to the progress of the quadruped or the reptile, and the sway of the common pendulum’ (Letter to Henry Cline 24). The philosophy of Sympathy stands at the heart of the elocutionary movement as of so much eighteenth-century and Romantic thought. As Cohen points out, theories of language in the eighteenth century were at once expressive and responsive, seeking to discover and systematize rhetorical principles and strategies to ensure and control a perfect sympathetic correspondence between the inner thoughts and feelings of the author/speaker, his external expression and delivery, and the intellectual or emotional response of his reader/audience (see 105–21). Speech was considered to be a more direct and immediate form of language than writing, since sounds were more essential to communication than words, conveying more of that ‘language of emotion’ which was ‘of much more consequence in our social intercourse, than the mere conveying of ideas’ (Sheridan 100). According to Sheridan, ‘there is not an act of the mind, an exertion of the fancy, or emotion of the heart, which have not annexed to them their peculiar tone, or note of the voice, by which they are to be expressed, all suited in the exactest proportion, to the several degrees of internal feeling […] Nature has annexed to every act, and feeling of the mind, its peculiar tone, which spontaneously breaks forth, and excites in the minds of others, tuned invariably by the hand of Nature in unison to those notes, analogous emotions’ (100–1). Thelwall shared his elocutionary precursors’ assumption that mind and language operated sympathetically, according to a quasi-musical

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system of harmonious correspondences between head and heart, thought and speech, speaker and listener; and, like them, he sought for a means to systematize and performatively realize these correspondences through a form of graphic notation.6 But compared with other and earlier elocutionists, Thelwall’s understanding of sympathy and of its operation is more scientific in its origin, more pragmatic in its applications both physiological and sociopolitical, and more sophisticated in its literary implications. It is based on an anatomical understanding of the structure and operation of the body founded in Thelwall’s medical studies under Henry Cline in the 1790s and fostered by his ongoing correspondence with other amateur scientists, autodidacts, and professionals.7 From one of these correspondents, he adapted the notion that speech is created by means of a sympathetic ‘resounding’ among organs of the body, which he classifies into three categories: the executive organ (the larynx), in which the primary impulse of speech originates; the perceptive or secondary ‘organs of modification’ (nostrils, skull, chest, and diaphragm), which ‘modify impulses through responsive vibrations’ to produce varieties of individual and expressive ‘correspondent tone’; and the enunciative organs (lips, tongue, teeth, gums), which articulate the vibrations into syllables (see Letter to Henry Cline 30ff., and ‘Elements’ xxix–xxxv). Out of his work on enunciative organs Thelwall developed an original system of phonetic classification;8 but it is the relationship between executive and perceptive (or primary and secondary) organs that is of most interest to the literary historian and theorist, since it is, at least potentially, as broadly applicable to Romantic literature understood as performative act as Coleridge’s theory of primary and secondary imagination is to Romantic literature understood as symbolic art.9 According to Thelwall’s anatomical rhetoric of resounding, the poet-speaker is to the readeraudience as the larynx is to the chest or diaphragm: the primary organ is the source of the impulse, but the power of sound depends upon its relation with recipient or resounding organs. This leads to theories of both literary creation and social expression that are much more democratic, interactive, and multivocal than dominant Romantic theories of imagination or solitary genius that follow the Coleridgean model. In effect, Thelwall literalizes one of the most familiar Coleridgean metaphors, that of the Aeolian harp, representing the body as a complex musical instrument which can sound properly only when all the parts vibrate sympathetically with one another. Speech defects and impediments result from mistuning among the organs, the result

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sometimes of organic deficiencies or accidents, but more often of complicated interactions among physiological, psychological, and sociological causes (in Thelwall’s terminology, ‘organic,’ ‘mental,’ and ‘moral’ causes), which he elaborates in the case studies that make up a large part of his book-length A Letter to Henry Cline. The job of the elocutionist or orator, analogous to that of a piano tuner or orchestral conductor, is to bring the parts of the instrument into harmony, to direct ‘the influential or secondary vibrations, that respond to the original impulses’ and, ultimately, to bring listeners, patients, and pupils to ‘an accurate comprehension of the instrumentality by which [their] functions […] are carried on’ so that they might ‘command the correspondent tones’ themselves (40–1). The crucial difference between Thelwall’s physiological understanding and application of the sympathetic harp metaphor and the imaginative or symbolic ones of most Romantic poets and critics is in the amount of instrumentality and agency resting with the recipient or responder. In the classic Romantic figuration (in Coleridge’s ‘The Eolian Harp,’ for instance, or Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’), the harp is a symbol of random, unconscious inspiration in which the recipient (instrument, audience, poet, or reader) is merely a passive vessel for an outside force (nature, God, the poet) that sweeps his or her strings and makes them sound in harmony with some kind of mystical, universal ‘one life.’ In Thelwall’s anatomical formulation, however, the perceptive organ is not simply a passive recipient of external impulses but an active, co-creating, co-responding instrument in turn. Just as all organs of the body cooperate in the making of sound, so all participants in the body politic must co-respond in the exercise of the power of speech. While the primary impulse remains important (Thelwall idealizes individual orators and poet-geniuses as much as any of his contemporaries), the true power of speech, as of democracy, happens when the many and the one, the mass audience and the singular hero-orator, are in tune with one another, bound into a harmonious corresponding society in which each and all are individually and collectively responsible for, and capable of, tuning their own instruments. Clearly then, for Thelwall, sympathy is not the simple, mindless process that critics of elocution from Hazlitt to Howells make it out to be. While Hazlitt acknowledges sympathy to be the central principle of an orator’s art and the source of his (apparent) authority, he repeatedly figures it as a mechanical, automatic process, associated with bodily gestures and electric forces and explicitly dissociated from intellect,

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conscious technique, wit, difficulty, or knowledge. For Thelwall, by contrast, oratorical sympathy is a complex matter requiring conscious attention and thought, rational direction, and disciplined education on the part of both speaker and listener. In other words, for Thelwall, mind and body are sympathetically connected: as he so memorably puts it, the mouth is ‘parcel of the mind’ (‘Introductory Essay’ xvi).10 Furthermore, as Michael Scrivener has pointed out, mind in Thelwall is a concept not individualistic but collective: a ‘product of “associated intellect” within the public sphere’ (Seditious Allegories 181). The phrase ‘associated intellect’ comes from the end of the lecture on ‘Spies and Informers’ and it sums up the image and thematic function of the audience in that lecture: a collective force that is at once an actual (and very active) presence, responsively shaping Thelwall’s lecture during its initial delivery, and a fictional construct shaped by Thelwall in response to the original audience in successive revised (or, more correctly, reiterated) printed versions of the lecture. None of these audiences appears to be Hazlitt’s ‘inert mass’ (12: 268); rather, they are heterogeneous, loosely associated, actively responsive bands of people of different classes, occupations, interests, abilities, and shades of political opinion, including outspoken opponents and secret informers. And at the heart of this lecture, as of all Thelwall’s oratory, is his respect for their varied intellectual abilities and aspirations. Rather than pandering to the lowest common denominator (as Hazlitt assumes the orator must do), Thelwall works on the democratic assumption that, whatever their education and interests, his listeners have an ability to think and inquire, a rational capacity not necessarily inconsistent with self-interest, bodily drives, or emotional desires. His reasoning and rhetoric therefore engage with them on multiple levels, moving back and forth between low and high, popular and philosophical diction, examples, and allusions. The lecture ‘Spies and Informers’ begins with an extended exercise in identification or sympathy with and within the audience, in which, to use the terms of Thelwall’s later theory, the orator tunes his instruments, actively bringing speaker and listener, executive and perceptive organs, into that co-responsive harmony that is necessary for their collective improvement. This exercise is of course integral to his subject: how to identify, guard against, and overcome the impediments to free speech inherent in the current intimidating system of spies and informers. So he begins by encouraging his audience to recognize and identify themselves with him, as friends to peaceful, disinterested

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inquiry and discussion, while at the same time turning the tables on the informers in the crowd by informing upon them, forcing them to identify themselves. At first distinguishing himself as the one who has assembled the crowd and has the singular privilege of speech, Thelwall soon identifies himself with his listeners as part of an expansive and collective ‘we’ who ‘cannot but feel’ unhappiness at the current atmosphere, even though ‘we’ may be ignorant of causes and principles, and ‘half-stupified’ by fear and prejudice (4–5). When he goes on to point out that ‘the enemies of liberty themselves cannot but see’ (5) the truth of his words, he divides that ‘we’ into those who are driven by ambition (that is, potential or real informers) and those who are driven by disinterested inquiry based on fellow feeling (as he is). Having constructed the gathering as a space for such inquiry, he drives the distinction home with images of sacred spaces of community and fellowship (a bird’s nest, a family dining table) that are violated by the widespread use of spies and informers: ‘even our own houses and our own tables furnish no longer a sanctuary and an altar where it is safe to offer the free incense of friendly communication; and the very domestic who eats our bread stands open-mouthed behind our chairs to catch and betray the conversation of our unguarded moments’ (6). On first glance it might appear that Thelwall is being manipulative here, stirring up fear and paranoia to prepare his audience to turn on their enemies. But in an example of that characteristic rhythm of tonal alternation or action-and-reaction which I shall discuss more fully below, Thelwall no sooner evokes fear than he allays it, turning not on but to the enemy, addressing the informers directly and inviting them to ‘Come then from your lurking corners, ye tools of perjured treachery – ye spies, ye dark assassins, ye venal associators for the most detestable purposes! – Bring all the terrors of your chains and dungeons; ye shall not daunt the soul that virtue fortifies, nor prevent the free discussion of those truths which conscience tells us are important for man to know’ (8). It is a brilliant strategy: for bidding those whose power is secrecy to come into the open destroys their power, which can exist only in darkness and fear. Even if the informers do not actually show themselves, they are exposed (because if he knows they are there, so does everyone else). So even as he calls them dark assassins and bids the audience brave their chains and dungeons, those hyperbolic terrors are revealed as mere words, not real weapons that skulking no-name in the corner has at hand (and of course, if the informers are secreted away in some vestibule next door, the laugh is on them, for who is

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really in the dark dungeon now?). And so Thelwall proves his point, and gets most of his audience in tune with him, by demonstrating how they already have the weapons they need – the power to overcome their enemies simply by knowing and naming them: the power to inform (themselves) and to identify (with one another), the power of sympathy and of speech. It is a powerful performative moment analogous to the one that brings about the climax of Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy: a moment of transformation when the hidden power shows itself to have been there all along, the balance of justice shifts, and liberation is achieved by its own inner necessity. Indeed it is likely that Shelley learned this strategy from orators like Thelwall, whom he also echoes both in his address to the soldiers at Peterloo and in his syntax, which plays variations upon the oratorical parallelism of Thelwall’s ‘let us enquire,’ ‘let us remember,’ ‘let us not forget,’ ‘let us be prudent,’ ‘let peace be our object,’ ‘let reason be our weapon,’ and so on. In locutionary terms, the ‘let’ construction is an interesting one, for it hangs halfway between exhortation and supplication, leaving a space for the audience to exercise its judgment. In this respect it is typical of much of Thelwall’s rhetoric: he is passionate, exclamatory, and authoritative, and it is clear what direction he wants his audience to take, but he neither commands nor expects automatic sympathy. Instead, the kind of mindless, instinctive sympathy that Hazlitt attributes to the radical demagogue is for Thelwall associated with his opponents the informers, whom he characterizes (ventriloquizing Jonson’s Sejanus) as lacking identity, and as chameleon-like, matching their voices and actions to the bidding of their masters. The active, expansive, thoughtful sympathy that Thelwall advocates is literally embodied in the passage that follows immediately upon his apostrophe to the informers where he contrasts (their) ‘blundering instinct’ (8) with the upright, healthy stature of the rational man of virtue who ‘feels and enjoys the noble superiority of his nature – his faculties expand, his heart dilates […] – he looks abroad on the universe […] he looks in the face of his fellow creature; and he sees indeed a brother – or a part rather of his own existence; another self – He contemplates in every individual the faculties of sufferance and enjoyment, and feels one nerve of sympathy connecting him with the whole intellectual universe’ (9). Inviting comparison with Wordsworth’s ‘man speaking to men,’11 Thelwall’s ‘man of virtue’ passage is one which preserves most clearly the oral, performative context of the written lecture, as we can easily picture Thelwall acting the part, looking healthy and expansive,

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making eye contact with each of his fellow creatures as he names them (he repeatedly uses the image of looking Truth and Justice in the face, no doubt for this reason). He evidently takes advantage, too, of every sign of racial, physiognomic, or class difference in the room as he goes on to dilate upon how peculiarities of feature, opinion, party, or nation do not excite the horror of the man of virtue, whom he characterizes as both ‘contemplating’ (the felicity of his fellow man; hence implicitly genteel) and ‘labouring’ (to mitigate their calamities; hence workingclass) (9). There is little evidence in this passage of the extreme body language that Hazlitt remembered: the bosom ‘writh[ing] and swell[ing]’ until ‘the poison frothed over at his lips’ (12: 264–5) (a recollected overflow of sour grapes on Hazlitt’s part, I suspect). Still, it is clear Thelwall took full advantage of what Hazlitt calls the ‘vehemence of gesture, the loudness of the voice, the speaking eye, the conscious attitude.’ His tone of voice in particular is preserved in the frequent typographical markers used by his shorthand man (upper-case letters, italics, exclamation points, dashes) to indicate pauses, emphasis, and volume. These in turn point to the second key feature of Thelwall’s science and practice of elocution, and of Romantic-era elocutionary theory in general: that is, the quest for a form of graphic notation that would adequately recognize and represent the unwritten forms of body language (tone, pauses, accent, rhythm, emphasis, gestures, looks, etc.) that are so crucial to rhetorical expression and response alike. Elocution is founded upon a recognition of the subtlety and importance of these performative elements of delivery, forms of language which, though still not fully theorized by modern scholars, are just as important to Romantic rhetorical art as the symbolic and figurative elements so fully and influentially theorized by Coleridge. Of all these unwritten parts of speech, the most central in Thelwall’s elocutionary system is cadence or ‘rhythmus,’ for which he develops a system of graphic notation, prosodic analysis, and intensive instruction too complex and idiosyncratic to do justice to here. But tone also plays a crucial role in the creation and maintenance of the sympathetic relation between primary and secondary organs that is the source of vocal power and freedom for Thelwall. Following elocutionary theorists like Sheridan, he asserts that there is a natural correspondence between each particular emotion and its appropriate tone, although he insists that the exact correspondences ‘defy the impotent pedantry of critical discrimination’ (Selections n.p. [headnote to Sterne’s ‘The Captive’]) and must be understood from the inside, sympathetically: ‘all

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must depend upon the sense, the sentiment and the feeling; and, if I may so express myself, on the metaphysical and philological perception of the arrangement of the thoughts and language’ (‘Introductory Essay’ xvi). Although he is reluctant to systematize and dogmatize the mechanics of tone to the extent that other theorists did (or to the extent that he himself does with the mechanics of rhythmus),12 Thelwall offers a practical guide to sympathetic tonal performance in the headnotes to his elocutionary exercises and selections. These headnotes point to one of the most original literary aspects of his rhetoric of resounding in their insistence that the reader (who in Thelwall’s system is always a speaker) must enter into or tune himself to the spirit of the words that he is reading: the mouth should be ‘parcel of the mind,’ and of a mind that can identify itself with its author, or its subject, and modulate its tones and motions accordingly; so that the manner may be a comment upon the matter […] In all, it is necessary to consult the genius and modulation of the author; for his tune will be found to be parcel of his thought; and in verse or prose, his meaning will be marred if his tune be not attended to. (‘Introductory Essay’ xvii)

Out of this, Thelwall develops a program of performative education and therapy in which the reciter exercises his organs on a series of successively more difficult, rhythmically varied, and tonally complex readings, being instructed to enter into the spirit of the speaker and/or poet in much the same way that the poet ‘recompounds’ and reanimates the dead matter of his predecessors (Selections n.p. [preface to his own poem ‘The Fall of Egypt’]). By literally re-sounding his models, by taking their words into his mouth and making them his own, the reader-poet not only will add grace and power to his delivery, but will heal himself, overcoming his own particular speech impediments. Even more than this, however, he will also empower himself politically, becoming aware of, and preparing to overcome, larger moral and social causes of speech impediment. For it is apparent that Thelwall’s principle of selection is neither random nor merely aesthetic, but is based on a broadly political pedagogy. In his Selections, Thelwall’s erstwhile enemies Burke and Pitt stand cheek by jowl with the speakers of his own satirical ballads, with philosophical washerwomen like Anna Barbauld,13 and of course with Thelwall’s twin champions of ‘poetic liberty,’ Milton and Shakespeare, whose speakers challenge authority, as Thelwall did, with ‘nothing to

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depend upon but [their] eloquence and [their] art’ when ‘the popular voice and the voice of existing power are equally against [them]’ (Selections n.p. [headnote to examples of ‘Popular Eloquence’ from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar]). The effect is not unlike that of the oppositional and mixed audience in Thelwall’s own lecture room, and the message, though guarded and softened, is also similar. One can easily imagine a reader like Thelwall himself – self-educated, working-class, eager to enter the public sphere – following his curriculum, entering into each of these poets and speakers with the recommended ‘ardour of conviction’ (Selections n.p. [headnote to example of ‘Senatorial Elocution’ from Lord Chatham]), progressively reanimating or giving mouth to each of their opinions and positions, finding his own voice, forming his own identity, and discovering and testing his own principles, by trying various voices and ideas on for size and setting them in debate with one another, so that the anthology becomes the textual equivalent of a corresponding society. Of course, this system of reiterative poetics as a tool for the formation and articulation of public identity and agency is not fully developed until later in Thelwall’s career. But something of the same rhetoric of re-sounding operates in Thelwall’s early political lectures as he models the mode of performative delivery that he wants his listeners to follow. The most important example of this in the lecture ‘Spies and Informers’ is in a climactic passage near its end where, in a nice echo of the opening address to the hidden informers, Thelwall addresses a group of absent reformers, the Scottish martyrs who in 1794 had just been convicted of treason and sentenced to transportation and exile. In some of the most heightened rhetoric of the entire lecture, Thelwall apostrophizes one of them, Margarot, assuring this now-silenced hero that the ‘sacred cause’ for which his ‘voice has ever been uplifted’ will be upheld, as his words are reanimated and amplified in the mouths of the masses: – Yes – glorious patriot! there shall be found – and the tyrants of the earth shall see it, and shall tremble! – there shall be found (the hour is at hand that shall verify the prediction) thousands – and tens of thousands of enlightened citizens, who, warmed to generous enthusiasm by thy virtues, shall avow to the very teeth of thy oppressors, the incontrovertible truths which have plucked down upon thy head the vengeance of an insolent and unprincipled faction! – […] The voice of general indignation already begins to articulate, in tones indeed ‘not loud but deep;’ – tones that

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At this moment, the voice of the hero and the voice of general indignation, of the individual orator and the mass audience, are manifestly interdependent and co-respondent. Both are necessary to avow incontrovertible truths; both are resoundingly interrelated here as they are in Thelwall’s later pedagogy and therapy of recitation. Indeed the complexity of Thelwall’s later elocutionary writings is anticipated here in the self-reflexive, ventriloquistic way that he strategically positions himself at a middle point between hero and audience, individual and mass, high and low, mirroring each and modelling both. As he speaks, he stands above his listeners, in the position of Margarot, a freedom fighter persecuted and imprisoned for his opinions. At the same time, however, insofar as his speech has been enabled by the jury that released him, he stands below them, dependent upon the ‘vox populi.’ Yet he also stands among them, looking up to the great champion and martyr in whose footsteps they all must follow. Furthermore, in directly addressing the absent martyr, he is actually addressing the audience, as if he were speaking through them or as if the spirits of Gerrald, Skirving, and Margarot were there among them. And, of course, that is precisely the point: the spirit of the absent patriot is (in) the audience. For by the time he says that ‘there shall be found (the hour is at hand […]) thousands of enlightened citizens,’ Thelwall would be looking at a crowd swelling by the day with each repetition of the lecture. By the time he says ‘the voice of general indignation already begins to articulate, in tones [...] prophetic,’ the ‘audible murmur’ would already be rising loud around him. And by the time he concludes by telling Margarot ‘then shall thy manly virtue meet with the applause it merits,’ the room would already be applauding: for Margarot, for Thelwall in the spirit of Margarot, but also, most crucially, for themselves, since they are really the ‘you’ being addressed. So, cleverly, the praise for manly virtue is refracted back upon the audience – but only prospectively, in the future, when they shall deserve it. In a masterful example of

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the ‘Romantic performative,’ Thelwall makes the truth of his words in the performance of them, drawing together executive and perceptive organs into a perfect co-respondence. A slightly different aspect of performative co-respondence is found in Thelwall’s use of physical comedy both visual and verbal, a technique that transforms his lectures into a hilarious hybrid of print caricature and stage pantomime and shows why, despite their insistently serious philosophic claims and repeated exhortations to virtue and moral enquiry, they were so wildly popular. Here Thelwall spends about fifteen minutes in the middle of the lecture performing a comic anecdote of the extremes to which the system of spies and informers has gone in trying to regulate not only words but even thoughts and dreams. It is the ‘singular case’ of a local innkeeper who was actually tried for the crime of ‘dreaming sedition’ after one of his guests, an informer, overheard him mumbling about guillotines and kings’ heads in the middle of the night. Thelwall begins in a mock-serious, mocklegal mode, introducing it as a precedent-setting case worthy to be preserved among the annals of law, but parody soon shifts into farce as he sets up the scene of the bumbling informer peering through a knothole in a dark room to hear the publican’s dreamy mumbles (clearly another jab at our friends in the next room). It culminates in a scene of outright caricature, as the trial of the ‘seditious’ publican before the city magistrates becomes a confrontation between ‘Honest Tankard’ and a row of Bellies and Wigs: The grave Divan assembled; the great armed chairs were seated, and the great bellies of the aldermen demanded the admiration of the meagre multitude: for, you must know, that whereas in Westminster-hall the most conspicuous objects are the large wigs that decorate the bench; so, at Guildhall, the most striking features are the magisterial bellies that dignify the great armed chairs. – And to deal plainly with you, I do not know why a belly as big as a tun should not be as much revered as a wig of the dimensions of a bushel. Well, the portly bellies were assembled, over which the useless excrescences called heads, just made their diminutive appearance. (17)

In yet another modulation of his central ‘mouth’ metaphor, Thelwall confuses and subverts hierarchies of power by objectifying both authority figures and common men in terms of appetite and consumption, bringing them all down to the level of mouth and belly. At the

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same time, by paralleling the verbs ‘dignify’ and ‘decorate,’ he selfreflexively comments on his own over-decorated rhetorical technique, playfully comparing it with the ‘dignified’ discourses of law and asking why one form of superficial, inflated, arbitrary, ridiculous language should be given authority over another. Concealed in the bawdy body language, however, and more evident upon repetition, is a witty but sophisticated disquisition upon language in its relation to imaginative and material reality, a disquisition that speaks to the central themes of the lecture and reopens the ongoing politics of Thelwall’s critical reception. From the beginning of the lecture, Thelwall has been concerned as much with the status of language itself as with techniques of and obstacles to its oral delivery, since, in an age of spies and informers, language itself loses its grounding in reality and becomes an unstable system.14 No sooner does he state the purpose of his lectures (to stimulate inquiry into the rights of man and educate citizens of the world) than he breaks into a digression upon one of the terms (‘natural enmity’) used by his opponents to attack this aim, and this digression in fact strikes the keynote upon which the rest of the lecture plays variations, as Thelwall introduces an ever more elaborate series of definitions and redefinitions, reiterations, analyses, deconstructions, subversions, and qualifications of terms, many of them signalled by tonal markers (as frequent font changes graphically represent), in order to demonstrate the causes and consequences of this instability. Sometimes he is philosophic and serious, appealing to rational principles, natural law, or common sense to undercut his opponents’ premises, and replying to their ‘unintelligible jargon’ with logical syllogism, precept, and maxim. More often he is playful, parodic, or ironic, as when he apologizes in a footnote for the ‘perfectly inexcusable’ levity of some of his expressions, which he is forced by law to reproduce exactly, for ‘I republish these lectures to shew the foundations of the charge brought against them; and am not therefore at liberty to strike out the exceptionable passages’ (17). But probably the most common and crucial technique he uses to confront and overcome the instability of language is one he calls ‘perspicuity’ or ‘circumspection’: In this age of spies and informers […] the most guarded caution is evidently necessary, both in our conduct and expressions; and that this caution on the one hand may not degenerate into tameness and inactivity, nor be frustrated, on the other, by the snares of designing men, it becomes

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more requisite than ever, that we should cultivate, with diligence, every species of political knowledge; because it is by such means alone that a fund of intelligence can be obtained, that may enable us to utter our complaints with perspicuity [… and] peculiar circumspection; that we may baffle, if possible, the machinations by which every friend of liberty and mankind is surrounded. Let us not, however, mistake cowardice for prudence. (5–7, 23; my emphasis)

By perspicuity and circumspection, Thelwall does not mean fearful passivity or craven capitulation. Rather these words suggest an active mental and more importantly vocal orientation: an awareness of multiple meanings and conflicting contexts; a knowing, strategic mode of utterance in which there is much more going on under the surface than there appears to be; the all-around, ever-ready mobility necessary to ‘baffle’ the machinations of spies and informers. Of course Thelwall was the acknowledged master of this kind of utterance, famously knocking heads off mugs of ale and barnyard Chaunticleers;15 it was the basis of his ‘seditious allegory,’ a rhetorical mode at once allusive and elusive that, as Michael Scrivener has pointed out, allowed radicals like Thelwall to avoid prosecution by forcing reader-listeners into acts of interpretation beyond the control of the authorities. What this lecture makes clear is that Thelwall not only performed seditious allegory but taught it to others, exhorting them not only to interpret but actively to reproduce it in their own speech and action. In so doing, they will develop the ‘practical fluency’ that will allow ‘the swinish multitude’ to become ‘formidable antagonists to the whole college of aristocratical declaimers’ (Rights of Nature 399–400). It is this fluency that Thelwall is modelling for his listeners, this skill that he exhorts them to cultivate and exercise in themselves, this re-active rhetorical art that he is teaching them in his 1790s lectures even as in his later elocutionary lectures and Institute. The practical fluency or mobility that stands at the heart of Thelwall’s elocutionary and poetic theory, as of his political theory, corresponds to the second of Thelwall’s two great ‘elementary principles of oral utterance’: ‘that universal principle of action and re-action, which forms the paramount law of all reiterated or progressive motion, organic or mechanical, from the throb and remission of the heart, to the progress of the quadruped or the reptile, and the sway of the common pendulum’ (Letter to Henry Cline 24). The ‘progressive motion’ of ‘action and re-action’ is the law of language and of society as it is of organic nature

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and mechanical force; and it underlies all aspects of Thelwall’s lifelong theory and practice. It is the principle upon which he constructs his work (the thesis-antithesis of his lectures and odes), selects his recitation materials (one perspective, position, or speaker playing off another), teaches and heals his pupils (from impairment to recovery), and narrates his life (as a series of setbacks followed by rebounds). Thelwall develops this principle most fully and technically in his complicated laws of prosody or rhythmus (based on the thesis and arsis, or ‘instinctive progress from heavy to light’ in speech [‘Introductory Essay’ v]), but it governs every aspect of his style, from the smallest syntactic units (he insistently modifies nouns and verbs of rousing action or emotion with adjectives and adverbs of reason and thought, or vice versa) to his overall form, tone, and idea structure, in which caution and indignation, sarcasm and seriousness, law and subversion, politics and sentiment, constantly alternate. And yet it is precisely this feature of Thelwall’s style that has been the most misunderstood by critics, in his time as in our own, who have frequently interpreted it as a sign of intellectual weakness and unevenness, if not of outright insincerity and intemperance.16 Here again, modern literary interpretation has been guided by Hazlitt, who criticizes orators such as his transparently anonymous Thelwall for patching together a facile and inflammatory hodgepodge of ‘commonplaces’ which operate mechanically and demand no intellectual exercise from an audience, although they depend upon its applause: An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does, he gets beyond his hearers […] A COMMON-PLACE does not leave the mind ‘skeptical, puzzled, and undecided in the moment of action:’ – ‘It gives a body to opinion, and a permanence to fugitive belief.’ It operates automatically, and opens an instantaneous and infallible communication between the hearer and speaker. A set of cant phrases, arranged in sounding sentences, and pronounced ‘with good emphasis and discretion,’ keep the gross and irritable humours of an audience in constant fermentation; and levy no tax on the understanding. (12: 265–6)

With his hyperbolic shifts from pontification to precept, clarion call to caricature, Thelwall does appear to fit Hazlitt’s critical bill. Like ‘honest Tankard,’ he serves up a fermented style, tax-free; but his language is brimming with intellectual nutrition, as long as we are willing to

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think, as we drink, deeply. As illustration, let us savour a passage in the lecture on ‘Spies and Informers’ that seems to epitomize what Hazlitt would call the orator’s ‘appeal to established maxims, an echo of popular clamour, some worn-out metaphor newly vamped-up,’ a passage in which Thelwall plays variations on the popular catchphrase ‘the swinish multitude’: It is not the free communication of sentiment then, that I wish to restrain – it is the imprudent, intemperate manner of expression, into which indignation sometimes betrays the best intended individuals. Let us enquire into the nature of our rights, but let us enquire with deliberate firmness. Let us be anxious to learn and to discharge our duties, but let us remember that of those duties, violence or intemperance is by no means to be accounted one. Let us remember that PEACE is better than the SWORD OF SLAUGHTER; – though this is one of the propositions which the sagacious luminaries of a certain honourable assembly have thought fit to call in question: – When tranquility might have been preserved by candid negociation, they preferred the bullying haughtiness which could not but terminate in war. – But we are a Swinish Multitude, who can neither participate in their motives, nor understand their logic: All that we know about it is, that our troughs are empty, while the purses of our OWNERS appear to be swelling every day with the price of those of our diminished herd who already have been sold and butchered. – Let us not forget, then, that as PEACE is better than the SWORD OF SLAUGHTER, so reason is better than turbulence and invective; and that though an honest indignation may now and then indulge itself, it ought always to be so restrained by the curb of prudence, as to be able to look Truth and Justice steadily in the face, and say, Behold, we have not trespassed upon your sacred laws. (11–12)

That Thelwall’s tone is strikingly inconsistent here is obvious, as the philosophical register of his carefully qualified, logical address to reasonable and reasoning men gives way to the Swinish Multitude lines, dripping with sarcasm, bulging with bombast and confrontational punctuation. By the time Thelwall returns to his opening message of moderation and prudence, it is hard not to feel that he has undermined his own claims to be taken seriously as a political philosopher. It is hard not to conclude (as readers since Godwin have done) that Thelwall is indulging here in the very vices of rant and cant that he attacks in his opponents;17 that he is, in short, the very ‘model of a flashy, powerful demagogue’ that Hazlitt proclaimed him.

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However, such a response relies, like Hazlitt or Godwin, upon a view of the audience as a passive and inflexible mob, lacking the intellectual and verbal resources to follow and interpret ironies, capable only of immediate, unthinking, visceral response to sensational sounds and images. Yet close examination reveals that Thelwall has constructed the swinish multitude passage so as to allow, indeed to teach, even the most uneducated, lower-class members of his audience to follow his rhetorical shifts, to understand his irony, and hence to cultivate something more than mere indignation. When he says ‘But we are a Swinish Multitude, who can neither participate in their motives, nor understand their logic: All that we know about it is, that our troughs are empty,’ he is saying three things at once: (1) they assume we are the swinish multitude who do not understand reason and logic, but know only appetite and primal drives; (2) we are in fact to a certain extent the swinish multitude, because we know the evidence of our senses; and (3) we know we are not just the swinish multitude, because we understand the fallacy of their assumptions; we know ourselves and we have voices to speak this knowledge. It is not unreasonable to assume that any audience would understand all three levels, especially if it was used to hearing this kind of allegory; the very popularity and longevity of the swinish multitude trope is proof of this. Obviously, then, this commonplace operates rather differently from the mechanical way that Hazlitt assumes a commonplace must; while it may not leave the mind ‘skeptical, puzzled, and undecided in the moment of action,’ it does more than pander to prejudice and incite irrational ‘ferment.’ Rather it exploits the space between these two extremes, of Hamlet-like intellectual detachment and violent mob mentality. Thelwall sets the extremes at odds with one another, even as he sets ‘us’ against ‘them’ in the swinish multitude passage. His aim is not simply to incite disgust and anger at ‘them’ – rather, by constantly juxtaposing ‘their’ narrow and belittling concept of ‘us’ against ‘our’ much more capacious and flexible concept of ourselves, he strives to create in his audience that perspicuity, active circumspection, and capacious mobility that will allow it to move between extremes and baffle the verbal machinations of its opponents. By assuming that his listeners will be able to move back and forth among different conceptions of their own identities, he makes them do so. By urging honest indignation to ‘look Truth and Justice steadily in the face,’ he encourages his listeners, both individually and collectively, to recognize different parts or movements of their own characters (indignation and steadiness, invective and reason) and

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to balance them. Such a balance of conflicting interests or tuning of different organs and impulses, while difficult to manage and sustain, is neither a rhetorical trick nor an impossible ideal. On the contrary, it is the foundation of democracy. Finally, then, it is clear that the ‘active and reactive’ alterations and inconsistencies so characteristic of Thelwall’s style, disconcerting as they may be to readers raised on Romantic ideologies of aesthetic unity, are not symptoms of facile and inflammatory demagoguery. Rather, they are manifestations of a style that is at once theoretically sophisticated and pragmatically flexible; a style necessary and coherent to its subject, time, and place, and integral to the development and expression of a mind and a society understood democratically and sympathetically as forms of associated intellect. Analysed with care and circumspection (or better still, savoured with intellectual gusto), this style may serve as an introduction to the dynamic and coherent body of elocutionary theory that it grew into, a body of theory that has the potential to reshape our views of language and its relation to society in the Romantic period. In ‘Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers’ Thelwall grounds his argument in ‘the great law of nature, the arrangements and revolutions of seasons and elements’ (4), thereby anchoring the instability of his own rhetoric in a place beyond the storms of its immediate circumstances. In A Letter to Henry Cline, this same universal law reappears as Thelwall narrates his own post-revolutionary impairment and recovery, in the first of his case studies for the reform of the nation’s ‘bewildered senses’ (Letter to Henry Cline 15). His prescription depends upon a recognition that the causes of impairment, whether individual or social, whether organic, mental, or moral, ‘run a circle, and become alternately cause and effect […] The consolation, however, is – that, if the whole of the complication be properly understood, and the plan of operation be conducted accordingly, the causes that have acted in a circle, will re-act in a circle, also’ (66). The circle of action and reaction in literary history has now progressed to the point where we are ready to take Thelwall’s prescription once again. The principles ‘capable of the most extensive application’ (14) that he discovered in exile, rooted in his radical medical, political, and poetic researches, deserve now to be applied more broadly, not only to the work of Thelwall himself but to that of his Romantic-era contemporaries. Further study of Thelwall’s elocutionary writings, in their interdisciplinary contexts, will restore his place

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within the interlocking circles of correspondence among mouths and minds in the Romantic era and promises to liberate the bastilled tongue of Romanticism so that it may sound again: If the enfranchisement of fettered organs [… and] the developement and melioration of dormant faculties, be consequences of the discovery, and health (even in many of those cases where popular prejudice would least expect) should be found improvable […] the medical man and the philanthropist will not be insensible to the value of this new science; and there are thousands, who may be expected to feel a personal interest in its diffusion. (Letter to Henry Cline 9–10)

NOTES 1 Summarized in Hudson 100–10. 2 E.P. Thompson identified Thelwall as the likely object of Hazlitt’s opening anecdote (158). Thelwall is an obvious target of the Friend essay, insofar as Coleridge attacks particular characteristics of sophists (their entrepreneurial skills, their itinerancy, their materialism) that are hallmarks of Thelwall’s oratorical and pedagogical practice and philosophy. 3 Recent critical and archival work on Thelwall’s elocution by Andrew McCann and Judy Duchan complements my own and may signal the beginning of a revival of interdisciplinary interest in Thelwall’s elocutionary writings. 4 Given the disappearance of much of the Thelwall archive (recorded by E.P. Thompson 218–20), his elocutionary practice must be reconstructed from the outlines, notes, and essays attached to his Selections, as well as from a single lengthy newspaper review of his final lecture series, published in the Bristol Mercury in 1834. 5 See my ‘From Forum to Repository: A Case Study in Romantic Cultural Geography’ on Thelwall’s concept and use of the Beaufort Buildings site. 6 According to Cohen 116, Joshua Steele’s was the most detailed, and John Mason’s the most influential, of the many systems of graphic notation for spoken sounds and other elocutionary elements that were developed in the heyday of the elocutionary movement. Of these, Steele’s Prosodia Rationalis is the only influence acknowledged by Thelwall. 7 In A Letter to Henry Cline, Thelwall reprints substantial selections of his correspondence with John Gough, a blind ‘philosopher and philanthropist’ from whom he adapted ‘my theory of secondary vibrations; or of the complication of resounding organs’ (30).

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8 See Robin Thelwall. 9 It is possible that Thelwall was another of the myriad influences on Coleridge’s famous theory of imagination, primarily in its quasi-scientific labelling (as primary and secondary, etc.), but also in its content, insofar as Coleridge’s metaphysical theories are animated, throughout the Biographia and beyond, by his antagonism against Thelwall’s ‘Jacobin’ materialism. 10 Thelwall’s materialist theories of mind, first articulated in his 1793 ‘Essay on Animal Vitality,’ offer further evidence of continuity between his early and late careers and are the foundation of his lifelong intellectual debate with Coleridge. 11 For Thelwall, the superiority of the speaker lies not in his feeling more than his audience, like Wordsworth’s speaker, but in his sympathetic connection with other selves in whom he recognizes the same noble faculties. 12 Thelwall appears at his most strident, authoritarian, and monologic (indeed monomaniacal) in defending and explaining his system of rhythmus, whose extremely difficult and complicated rules he insists the reader must follow, leaving no room for individual interpretation or variation. 13 Barbauld’s ‘Washing Day’ appears in Thelwall’s earliest Selections, less than five years after its publication in the Monthly Magazine, where Thelwall’s poems regularly appeared. 14 For further commentary and analysis of problems and complexities of language in the 1790s, see Scrivener, Seditious Allegories, Olivia Smith, and Klancher, Making of English Reading Audiences, among others. 15 Thelwall’s most famous ‘seditious allegory,’ reprinted in radical periodicals and recounted to great effect at his trial, was the fable of Chaunticleer, decapitated king of the dung heap. See Scrivener, Seditious Allegories 112–18. 16 For example, Reiman criticizes Thelwall’s ‘serious weaknesses in execution’ (x), while Olivia Smith faults his ‘convoluted, multisyllabic style’ and his inconsistency between two styles of language, one for ‘the emotive heart’ and the other for the political mind (87). 17 Thelwall inserts in the fourth edition of the printed lecture on ‘Spies and Informers’ ‘a note written in the margin of a former edition by a philosophical friend’ (probably Godwin) who criticizes Thelwall for expressing ‘sarcasm, resentment, contempt and vengeance’ (11).

2 Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act SARAH M . ZIMMERMAN

On the afternoon of Friday, 15 January 1808, Coleridge faced London’s beau monde who were gathered to hear his first lecture on literature at the Royal Institution. He stood in a semi-circular space behind a wooden desk large enough to hold apparatus for the science lectures that were the Royal Institution’s main agenda. The theatre is the only room in London in which Coleridge lectured that survives.1 It was naturally lit, but a movable ceiling could be lowered to darken it for scientific demonstrations. Not far from the desk, eleven rows of semicircular benches rose at a steep angle toward a low-hanging balcony that held another three rows of auditors. In Coleridge’s day, the benches drew as many as one thousand persons close together on green velvet cushions and trained their attention on the lecturer; the seats’ small circumference ensured that roving eyes would encounter one’s neighbours. Coleridge’s own gaze would have fallen naturally on the auditors directly in front of him; the benches’ tight curve and sharp ascent required the lecturer to crane his neck to look up to the balcony or turn his whole body to address those perched on the benches’ ends. He could have been confident of being heard. According to The Microcosm of London, ‘though it is sufficiently capacious to contain one thousand persons, a whisper may be distinctly heard from one extremity of it to the other, and not the slightest echo is distinguishable on any occasion’ (Combe and Pyne 3: 30). To this day, the theatre possesses a remarkable intimacy. What happened next? That question has echoed down the history of Coleridge’s lectures. Literary critics have grappled with the ‘wellknown fact’ that ‘what he said in those public lectures has never been properly transmitted to us,’ since Coleridge never published them; nor

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did he usually prepare full scripts (Klancher, ‘Transmission Failure’ 174). This loss has bedevilled literary critics because his lectures are key to the cultural profile of the Romantic critic and to the period’s literary criticism. Across a lecturing career that spanned more than a decade, Coleridge developed a body of work that comprises the bulk of his Shakespeare criticism, along with running commentaries on a wide range of British and Continental writers.2 His celebrity helped make these events a vital forum for defining literary ‘taste,’ setting criteria for literary judgment, and shaping an English canon that included ‘living poets.’ ‘We have no actual text of these ambitious lectures,’ Jon Klancher observes, ‘only the scattered Coleridge notes and an array of second-hand reports by listeners.’ For a long time, these surviving texts were cobbled together by editors striving for the semblance of coherent monologues.3 More recently, R.A. Foakes, editor of the invaluable standard edition of Coleridge’s lectures on literature, concludes that ‘at best the notes provide the skeleton of a lecture, which may have seemed very different when fleshed out before the audience’ (see Introduction to Lectures on Literature 1: lxxxii). Foakes points toward the double nature of the lectures’ loss: we possess neither adequate texts nor the events themselves as historical performances. Theatre historians have long grappled with ‘the evanescence of performance’ (Roach 293).4 While literary historians have been preoccupied with the grave uncertainty surrounding the texts of Coleridge’s lectures, theatre historians have a darker tale to tell, since ‘performance’s only life is in the present’ (Phelan, Unmarked 146). Although we can be reasonably confident that we know what Coleridge said that first afternoon at the Royal Institution, since he read from a script, we can only speculate about the event itself: ‘The houselights go up, and the audience goes home.’ A play may be staged night after night, but ‘one cannot step twice into the same show’ (Wolska 88, 84). Even the relatively full textual record that we have for some of the lectures leaves ‘a wistful sense of incompletion’ (Roach 293). Haunted by the ‘fragility of their subject,’ theatre historians have developed a vocabulary of loss to manage ‘the perceived contradiction of writing the history of so notoriously transient a form as theatre’ (Roach 293). In addition to these theoretical questions of loss, theatre historians have raised more practical questions of methodology. Attilio Favorini argues for an understanding of performance as an interaction between the speaker and auditors: he wants to ‘relocate’ the theatrical event, moving it ‘away from what transpires on the stage to some mid-point’

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that marks the exchange ‘between performer and audience’ (4). This notion of focusing on the theatrical dynamic that defines a performance rather than on the solitary figure on stage suits the Romantic public lecture on literature. Lecturers aimed to exert their pedagogical authority in shaping listeners’ literary ‘taste,’ but they remained radically dependent upon them, since listeners could shut down a series merely by staying at home. Successful speakers grasped that lectures were two-way streets and couched their arguments with particular live audiences in mind (since audience demographics varied by venue and neighbourhood). Lecturers also sometimes responded in the moment and revised in light of the responses they received. For a predominantly extemporaneous speaker like Coleridge, this phenomenon was heightened, but even speakers who read from full scripts departed from them in order to hold auditors’ attention, which was alarmingly easy to gauge in expressions of amusement or boredom, approving nods, or restless movement, whispering, and the occasional hiss. The speculative work of treating historical performances thus involves collecting multiple perspectives for the best sense possible of these events. Lecturers’ accounts survive in their notes, letters, and conversations recorded by interlocutors; auditors’ views were captured in newspaper notices and in private letters, memoirs, and diaries, some of which have been published. Marvin Carlson reminds us that understanding a performance also requires an intimate knowledge of the stage on which the two parties met, which includes not only the room – Coleridge lectured in a variety of venues, including lecture theatres, assembly rooms, and a tavern – but also the historical associations of particular buildings and neighbourhoods (Places of Performance 1–13). Visual and verbal representations of those spaces are therefore particularly valuable, especially since we have so few. Perhaps the closest we come to glimpsing Coleridge at the Royal Institution is Alexander Blaikley’s coloured lithograph of Michael Faraday lecturing there in 1855 (fig. 2.1). This image captures several key aspects of that theatre. The importance of science itself may be measured in the heft of the lecture desk, which imposes itself between the lecturer – small in relationship to it – and his auditors, who crowd around that desk so closely that they might feel they were participants in the scientific demonstrations they observed. Literary historians have discovered that a wealth of materials survives for piecing together a vital – if necessarily tenuous – picture of the animated world of public lectures, and together historians of literature

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Figure 2.1: Michael Faraday delivering a lecture at the Royal Institution on 27 December 1855. Lithograph with watercolour. By Alexander Blaikley, c. 1856. Courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

and science have effected a brilliant repopulation of that arena. David Hadley’s seminal 1993 essay laid a foundation upon which Klancher, Peter Manning, and Gillian Russell have elaborated vivid accounts of Coleridge’s and William Hazlitt’s performances and the scientific and literary institutions that sponsored them. Historians of science have provided the most in-depth view of the institutions themselves and a broader public culture of science (to paraphrase Jan Golinski) that fostered the emergence of the Romantic public lecture on literature. Now that we possess a more detailed picture of that world, I propose to shift the focus to the lectures themselves, to ask how we might read them as oral arguments delivered to live audiences, rather than as print artifacts. The arguments that Coleridge launched from behind the lecture desk were consumed differently than his published works.

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When his literary criticism circulated as lectures, it reached the auditors gathered around him first before radiating outward from that close encounter, over the theatre’s threshold in conversations carried on by dispersing crowds, resurfacing sometimes in newspaper notices, travelling to correspondents near and far, and lodging in print for future readers in auditors’ memoirs, journals, and diaries. In the lectures, Coleridge’s literary criticism was also produced differently than in his published writings. Robert Darnton argues that the period’s print works must be read as reflecting their participation in the ‘communications circuit,’ as writers became readers of reviews that would, in turn, affect what they wrote (111). I would argue that the critical arguments developed in the lectures’ face-to-face encounters were far more susceptible to being inflected by the means of their production. Once again, historians of science have anticipated this point: Sophie Forgan deems ‘problematic’ any understanding of public science lectures ‘implying a top-down dissemination of knowledge.’ She contends that ‘it is more revealing to consider lectures and discourses in terms of circuits of communication, where audience reaction and the making of meaning is as significant as an individual authorial voice’ (35). I would contend that the arguments that Coleridge developed in that arena were affected by it in turn, a phenomenon heightened by his preference for extemporaneous speaking. The claim that Coleridge’s lectures reflect the immediacy of performance rather than the mediation of print demands an understanding of the public lecture on literature as a genre with a history and conventions of its own.5 I aim to begin the work of defining that genre and developing a critical approach to it by asking what Coleridge made of ‘London’s newest cultural arena – the scientific, philosophic, and literary lecturing institutions’ (Klancher, ‘Transmission Failure’ 173). Coleridge was the first to attain celebrity as a public lecturer on literature that would be rivalled only by Hazlitt. By the time he first spoke at the Royal Institution in 1808, public lectures on science and elocution were a popular draw, and lecturers on literature included the Reverends John Hewlett and Thomas Frognall Dibdin. But the combined visibility of Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Thomas Campbell, whose fame has since faded, heralded the arrival of a newly viable critical genre. Coleridge helped to define the Romantic public lecture on literature by providing an early, prominent example of these events. His efforts to negotiate his own intense ambivalence about appearing as a public lecturer reflect two central conflicts that would come to define the

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genre: its vexed relationship to a 1790s culture of Radical speaking and to the increasingly commercial literary marketplace in which the lectures participated. In two crucial acts of self-positioning, Coleridge developed a memorable lecturing persona during his apprenticeship at the Royal Institution and his second, celebrated series, the 1811–12 lectures on Shakespeare and Milton. First, he cast himself against his most prominent public-speaking role prior to his appearance at the Royal Institution – as a political lecturer in Bristol in 1795 – and thereby underscored the debt that the Romantic public lecture on literature owes to a recent political past. Second, Coleridge obscured the commercial aspects of the lecture circuit that he became adept at manipulating in order to dissociate his lectures from the imperatives of the literary marketplace. In attempting to distinguish his lectures from popular entertainment, he also aimed to distance them from the modern stage. His star turn, however, was his effort to align his literary criticism with his central critical object, Shakespeare’s plays, and in particular Hamlet. In a covert self-portrait as the title character, Coleridge developed a lecturing persona that might make auditors forget that he was, in fact, a paid performer. I shall make the case that his reading of the character of Hamlet must be understood in part as a self-portrait as lecturer, an effort to reconcile himself to the indignity of appearing on stage. Some of Coleridge’s best-known critical arguments gain a new layer of meaning once they are understood to reflect upon their own production. Coleridge at the Royal Institution: The Literary Lecturer’s Debut Coleridge’s first appearance at the Royal Institution in 1808 launched an effort to reinvent himself as a public lecturer that required banishing some ghosts – both former selves and representatives of past lives. This phenomenon was perhaps most strikingly realized in Mary Todd’s approach to the podium at a lecture’s end in April. As Mary Evans, she had refused Coleridge’s courtship, but when he agreed to dine with her and her husband he discovered that her unhappy home life manifested ‘the very worst parts of my own Fate, in an exaggerated Form’ (CL 3: 91). If his romantic disappointments were embodied by Todd, then his political disillusionment hovered in the figure of John Thelwall, who was already a competitor on the London lecture scene when Coleridge debuted at the Royal Institution.

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Tried and acquitted of high treason in 1794, Thelwall initially served as exemplar for Coleridge, who, beginning early in 1795, gave public lectures and delivered sermons in Dissenting churches in which he spoke against the war, the Two Acts, and the slave trade. Coleridge had approached Thelwall by letter as an admirer in 1796, and both men continued addressing political events even after they were, in Coleridge’s words, ‘obliged by the persecutions of Darkness’ to abandon overtly political themes (CL 1: 155). Thelwall spoke on classical history until 1797, and Coleridge was still preaching in January 1798, when Hazlitt heard him denounce the war from the pulpit in Shrewsbury. Although Coleridge and Thelwall were never on precisely the same page – even during the period of greatest fellow feeling they were at odds over the role of religion in their social politics – their careers continued to dovetail as both sought to remake themselves in Regency London. In their revived speaking careers, Coleridge once again followed in Thelwall’s footsteps, since Thelwall had begun lecturing on elocution on provincial tours in late 1801 and had added literature to his repertoire by 1802. When Thelwall established a school in his home in Bedford Place (dubbed the Institution for the Cultivation of Oratory, and Cure of Impediments in 1807), literature was part of the curriculum, and he opened his lectures to the public. Beginning in 1808, Coleridge’s career fanned out from the Royal Institution’s illustrious address across London and beyond, east to the City and south of the Thames, west to Bristol, and, once, back to the West End. As he crisscrossed London and strayed from it over more than a decade (1808–19), Coleridge addressed a range of the middle and upper classes, from the aristocracy and gentry who gathered at the Royal Institution and Willis’s Rooms, off of St James’s Square, to the professional and Dissenting audiences of the City. Even as Thelwall and Coleridge recast themselves as aesthetic critics in Regency London, they continued to lecture extemporaneously, in marked contrast to competitors such as Hazlitt and Campbell – lingering evidence of their shared, dual training as preachers and political speakers. Coleridge was aware of these persistent parallels and distanced himself from Thelwall at the Royal Institution. Rehearsing an anecdote from Thelwall’s 1797 visit to Nether Stowey, Coleridge identified Thelwall only as ‘a friend’ with whom he had a disagreement about educational practices: Coleridge had ‘led him into his miserably neglected garden, choked with weeds.’ In response to Thelwall’s question, ‘What is this?’

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Coleridge had responded, ‘Only a garden […] educated according to Rousseau’s principles’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 106). The Bristol Gazette reports that in an 1813 lecture on education, Coleridge identified Thelwall as the friend in repeating an anecdote that aimed to distinguish between both their former political programs and their new pedagogical projects (Lectures on Literature 1: 586).6 While renouncing Thelwall as a representative of his own political past, Coleridge followed the example of Humphry Davy, whose own trajectory from Bristol to London suggested tantalizing possibilities for self-reinvention. By the time he became Thomas Beddoes’s assistant at the Bristol Pneumatic Institute, Davy had already made significant progress in a career that critics charged was fuelled alike by scientific talent and ardent self-promotion. Klancher notes that Davy’s brief association with ‘Beddoes’s circle of Radical intellectuals – William Godwin, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and S.T. Coleridge’ came ‘at a time when the anti-Jacobin media campaign was beginning to discredit the discourse and procedures of Britain’s Radical provincial science’ (Klancher, ‘Sir Humphry Davy’ 479). Davy’s brush with provincial radicalism was compounded by his well-publicized experiments with nitrous oxide, or ‘laughing gas,’ which ‘were widely ridiculed as symptomatic of the anarchy and delusion unleashed by supporters of the Revolution’ (Golinski 9). Soon after they met, Coleridge participated in these experiments: Davy provides a memorable sketch of Coleridge reporting that he ‘could not avoid, nor indeed felt any wish to avoid, beating the ground with my feet; and after the mouth-piece was removed, I remained for a few seconds motionless, in great extacy’ (Researches 517). When, in May 1802, James Gillray published his well-known satire on those experiments that played on their revolutionary associations, he helped banish them from the public lecture stage (Golinski 201). In the cartoon, Thomas Garnett, first professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution, helps one of its managers, John Hippisley, ingest the gas with unexpected results, while a ‘slightly demonic’ Davy, holding a pair of bellows, looks on (James 6) (fig. 2.2). Gillray also mocks the audience’s earnest engagement in this experiment gone awry: does the startled expression of the male auditor taking notes reflect his sudden awareness of the absurdity of the scene? Nevertheless, the viewer’s perspective, peering through the plumed hats of the fashionably dressed women, acknowledges the lectures’ status as cultural and social events. Davy’s star continued to rise.

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Figure 2.2: ‘Scientific Researches! New discoveries in PNEUMATICKS! – or – an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air.’ Coloured etching. By James Gillray. 1802. Courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

He had been invited to the Royal Institution by one of its founders, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, in early 1801. By 1802, he was resident professor of chemistry, a position to which he had ascended on the strength of both his research and his popularity as a lecturer. The Royal Institution provided a glittering stage for Davy’s ambitions, and when in 1806 Coleridge was asked to offer his own series of lectures, he was invited to join a dazzling roster. A fellow lecturer reports that ‘the lectures of Sir Humphry Davy and the Rev. Sydney Smith attracted large audiences, of which the first of rank and fashion formed a considerable portion’ (Dibdin 1: 225–6). Coleridge’s admiration of Davy was qualified by his worry that the scientist’s ‘Ambition’ might turn into ‘Vanity’ in such a setting, but he recognized the possibilities that the Royal Institution offered for establishing his own public profile (CL 2: 927). A complex set of individual, class, and national aims drove the founding of the Royal Institution. The alleviation of rural poverty, spurred by

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the enclosure acts and significant rises in the price of grain, became a more urgent goal when domestic unrest, in the form of food riots, coincided with the aftermath of the French Revolution. The Royal Institution was founded at a meeting in the home of Sir Joseph Banks, a substantial landowner and naturalist who had attained celebrity as a member of Captain James Cook’s expedition to the Pacific and who became president of the Royal Society in 1778. He was one of a group of fifty-eight men who contributed fifty guineas each to become Proprietors of a new Royal Institution that aimed to promote experimental science and technological innovation, particularly as they applied to ‘agricultural improvement.’7 The Royal Institution’s primary focus was experimental science, and as Frank James has observed, its establishment in 1799 must be understood in light of Britain’s need to harness technological advances for the domestic economy while access to foreign markets was restricted. James observes that ‘the Institution was seen as a place where scientific knowledge could be practically applied to agricultural improvement, industrialization and the consolidation of the Empire’ (2). Morris Berman notes that for the improving landlords who shaped the Royal Institution’s early mission, ‘philanthropy, profit and estate activity, and service to the nation seemed to run together quite naturally’ (Social Change 52). From the beginning, lectures were key to pursuing ends that were both defensive (class anxiety, nationalism) and aggressive (financial gain, imperial expansion, ‘self-improvement’). The lectures’ role in the Royal Institution’s mission was identified in its 1800 Prospectus as ‘the general diffusion of a spirit of experimental investigation and improvement among the higher ranks of society’ (15). In an 1810 address to the Royal Institution, Davy explained that lectures were vital, since ‘the great object of public instruction in a scientific establishment, ought […] to be, to communicate that kind of information which cannot be gained from books or from private instruction’ (Lecture 22). Public lectures were thus juxtaposed to solitary reading and private tutelage as a form of education in the service of the nation. Science may have held centre stage at the Royal Institution, but the arts had an important supporting role in attracting the well-to-do audiences whose individual pursuit of self-improvement might fuel national ambitions. The season of Coleridge’s debut featured courses on a wide range of topics, including ‘Architecture,’ ‘Belles Lettres,’ ‘English Literature,’ ‘German Music,’ and ‘the Music of the 18th Century.’8 When Davy renewed a campaign to lure

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Coleridge to the lectern after his return from Malta in 1806, he identified a role for him in the Royal Institution’s mission: ‘In the present condition of society, his opinions in matters of taste, literature, and metaphysics must have a healthy influence’ (quoted in Holmes 107). Coleridge was highly susceptible to Davy’s flattering visions: in an 1801 letter to Thomas Poole, he reports gratefully that ‘Davy in the kindness of his heart calls me the Poet-philosopher,’ a role he developed in earnest in the Royal Institution’s theatre (CL 2: 668). During his first series, Coleridge probably did not yet fully appreciate the ideal setting that the Royal Institution offered for selfreinvention, beginning with its urban location. The Royal Institution was within easy walking distance of Carlton House (residence of the Prince of Wales) and the meeting places of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Converted from a residence, no. 21 Albemarle Street (by 1896 the Royal Institution acquired and expanded into the adjacent house, no. 20), the Royal Institution’s housing connoted private wealth directed toward public endeavours. In London (1807), David Hughson notes its modest exterior: ‘The front of the house is barricadoed by double windows, which prevent the entrance of the cold in winter, and of the heat in summer’ (4: 349). The Royal Institution’s housing reflected its aims, by projecting a sense of propriety, private property, and domestic comfort. The room in which Coleridge spoke was, according to The Microcosm of London, ‘acknowledged to be one of the most beautiful and commodious scientific theatres in Europe’ (Combe and Pyne 3: 30). The Royal Institution’s desire to conjure the ghosts of ancient learning was articulated in its plans for the theatre: ‘This theatre will be semicircular, and very lofty […] according to the excellent models left us by the ancients’ (Journals of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 1: 12). Thus the Royal Institution attempted to establish architecturally the ‘loftiness’ of its enterprise in a room that offered an ideal setting for Coleridge’s ‘Poet-philosopher.’ The American painter Washington Allston, who met Coleridge in Rome in 1806, had already testified to the persuasiveness of that self-portrait: ‘when I recall some of our walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, I am almost tempted to dream that I have once listened to Plato in the groves of the Academy’ (Flagg 64). At the Royal Institution, Coleridge found the perfect room for establishing a lecturing profile that gratified him and his audiences, who could imagine themselves, like Allston, listening to the voice of ancient learning.

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This sense of seriousness was jeopardized by the lectures’ proximity to popular entertainment, a threat often associated with the women who flocked to these events. Their presence as auditors was highly desirable, since only they could render a series fashionable. Gillian Russell notes that women were ‘essential to the legitimation of [the scientific and literary institutions’] claims to politeness and civility as well as to their financial survival’ (133). In his 1810 lecture on the Royal Institution’s evolving mission, Davy welcomed women auditors but admonished them not to treat the lectures as a mere diversion. He elicited instead ‘an attention which is independent of fashion, or the taste of the moment, and connected with the use, the permanence, and the pleasure of intellectual acquisitions.’ Coleridge was keenly aware of his dependence upon women auditors and courted them with predictable ambivalence. Russell notes that he was ‘careful to mark his lecture-room as distinct from the world of commercialized public culture’ (137). Like Davy, he aimed to redirect auditors’ acquisitiveness away from ‘the taste of the moment’ toward something more ‘permanent.’ After his apprenticeship at the Royal Institution, Coleridge launched his second lecture series, the 1811–12 lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, with a stern admonition about the ‘obstacles’ to his auditors’ acquisition of ‘the essentials of a sound Judgement concerning the comparative Merit of Poems.’ His notes outline two kinds of ‘obstacle[s],’ the ‘permanent’ and the ‘accidental’ (or, particular to the historical moment). The ‘Permanent Causes’ include ‘the greater delight in being reminded of one’s knowledge than of ones [sic] Ignorance’ and ‘the effort & at first the very painful Effort of really thinking – really referring to our own inward experiences.’ We prefer to rely on ‘the opinions of those about us.’ We are susceptible to external influences – not only other people, but also events. In an argument that echoes William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge contends that the ‘accidental’ threats to a ‘sound Judgement’ include ‘the enormous stimulant power of Events making the desire to be strongly stimulated almost an appetite in a large majority of the World’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 186–7). In his report for The Times, Henry Crabb Robinson identifies those events more specifically as ‘the wonderful political events of the age’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 194–5). John Payne Collier’s notes indicate that the ‘importance’ of those events had, in Coleridge’s view, ‘created a world of readers’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 189). Coleridge suggested that those readers’ fascination with public figures was generating a nascent celebrity culture. He explains that

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‘Cities’ have relegated to irrelevance the curiosities of small-town life and its satisfactions – ‘observations about Miss or Mr Such a one’s Dress or Behavior at the village Church or the last Ball’ – and replaced ‘ordinary gossip’ with ‘a rage for a more dignified Gossip about public Characters’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 186). It was, as he would lament in The Friend in 1818, an ‘AGE OF PERSONALITY,’ an ‘age of literary and political Gossiping’ (1: 210). The result is a new world, ‘a World of Readers,’ whose desire ‘to know what is going on in the world’ is met by a proliferation of publications, including ‘Reviews, Magazines, Selections […] Newspapers & Novels.’ This flood of print is augmented, Coleridge warns, by ‘the passion of public Speaking’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 186). According to Collier, Coleridge derided ‘the practice of public speaking which encouraged a too great desire to be understood at the first blush’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 189). Thus Coleridge found himself in the paradoxical position of condemning the means of his own success. As a lecturer, he relied upon print ephemera (newspaper advertisements, prospectuses, and favourable notices) and ‘the passion of public Speaking’ to draw crowds. It furthered his cause when he was news: his own celebrity was proclaimed after Lecture 4 by the Morning Chronicle in a declaration that ‘the critical appearance of this Gentleman in public constitutes a prominent feature in the Literature of the times’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 257). The lectures were a decidedly commercial enterprise, undertaken by Coleridge primarily as a means of income, and by his reckoning he was thus immersed in the flux that threatened his auditors’ development of literary ‘Judgement.’ Spending Time: The 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton In a February 1818 letter to William Mudford, editor of the Courier, Coleridge frames his objection to lecturing as a problem of time, which could either be wasted or invested in something that would last. He laments, ‘Woe is me! that at 46 I am under the necessity of appearing as a Lecturer, and obliged to regard every hour that I give to the PERMANENT, whether as Poet or Philosopher, an hour stolen from others as well as from my own maintenance’ (CL 4: 838). In a December 1818 letter to the painter William Collins (that anticipated a dual set of lectures on philosophy and literature delivered that winter) he expanded on that theme:

Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act 59 Spite of the decided approbation which my plan of delivering lectures has received from several judicious and highly respectable individuals, it is still too histrionic, too much like a retail dealer in instruction and pastime, not to be depressing [… but] lecturing is the only means by which I can enable myself to go on at all with the great philosophical work to which the best and most genial hours of the last twenty years of my life have been devoted. (CL 4: 892–3)

In both letters, Coleridge worries about what happens to time. In lecturing, his ‘hours’ are spent in exchange for income to support his family and – paradoxically – his ‘great philosophical work.’ Only as the ‘Poet-philosopher’ is he able to invest time in something ‘PERMANENT.’ As a ‘retail dealer in instruction and pastime,’ he contributes to the devaluation of literature by reducing it to a ‘pastime,’ like novel reading, a practice he lamented repeatedly, beginning in the 1808 series. Speaking slightingly of ‘the Devotees of the Circulating Libraries,’ he warned, ‘I may not compliment their Pastime, or rather Kill-time, with the name of Reading’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 124). To Wordsworth, who sat in Coleridge’s audience for two lectures during the 1808 series, it must have felt like the literary marketplace had come to life, the Royal Institution a forum in which its threats were all too present and animated. In the lecture theatre, both poets and ‘Poet-philosophers’ were immediately subject to a buying public, dependent on its approbation and purchasing power, without the mediation of the book trade. A series could fail even before it began if a lecturer was unable to secure enough subscribers to cover the cost of the room, or end midstream, if attendance fell away. On a nightly basis, the verdict was even swifter: a speaker could read success or failure in looks of rapt attention or boredom, whispers or departures, and the rare outburst. Conversely, the lecture theatre could serve as a site for promotion and sales, the lectern as a kind of auctioneer’s podium. Before a February 1818 lecture on Dante and Milton, Coleridge urged the publication of a new edition of Henry Francis Cary’s translation of Dante’s Commedia. The lecture spurred a run on the three-volume edition when the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews reiterated Coleridge’s praise. According to Cary’s son, ‘the effect of his commendation […] was no other than might have been expected.’ He explains: ‘The work, which had been published four years, but had remained in utter obscurity, was at once eagerly sought after’ and ‘in less than three months a

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new edition was called for’ (Cary 2: 28). Cary credits Coleridge with establishing his father’s reputation. A new edition was quickly needed, after the first had sat on booksellers’ shelves. The practical Dorothy Wordsworth was anxious that William’s ‘White Doe of Rylstone’ appear before the 1808 series ended. Coleridge had already quoted from ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ in the third lecture with William present. Dorothy urged Coleridge: ‘It is of the UTMOST IMPORTANCE, that it should come out before the Buz [sic] of your Lectures is settled’; William nevertheless deferred publication (CL 3: 114). From the beginning, Wordsworth exerted his formidable influence against the lectures and initially succeeded in derailing them altogether. Coleridge first accepted Davy’s invitation in 1806 but submitted to pressure from Wordsworth and Robert Southey to abandon the plan. Wordsworth’s tone is urgent when he writes ‘to entreat that you would not on any account entangle yourself with any engagement to give Lectures in London, and to recommend your coming hither where you may sit down at leisure and look about you before you decide’ (CL 2: 1188n). Wordsworth succeeded in luring Coleridge to the rural retreat of Coleorton and forestalled the lectures for two years. His voice joined Southey’s in a melancholy chorus decrying paid public performance. In 1804, Coleridge had worried with Southey that Davy was guilty of ‘prostituting and profaning the name of Philosopher,’ a concern that must surely have reflected a measure of self-doubt (CL 2: 1032). He was nonetheless dismayed by Southey’s stance ‘strongly disapproving of my scheme of giving Lectures’ (CL 2: 1188). His disapprobation extended to the entire genre. In the fictional Letters from England, Southey’s tourist attends a lecture at the Royal Institution. Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella asks pointedly, ‘What think you of philosophy in fashion?’ In England, he reports, they ‘have made many short cuts to philosophy for the accommodation of ladies and gentlemen.’ He explains: ‘The arts and sciences are now taught in lectures to fashionable audiences of both sexes; and there is a Royal Institution for this purpose, where some of the most scientific men in the kingdom are thus unworthily employed’ (3: 284–5). In the view of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge himself, his lectures would have been worthwhile had they become books. As lectures, they only added to a seemingly endless flood of literary productions and drained his ability to make something that would last. In the first series that he planned without institutional support, the 1811–12 lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, Coleridge nevertheless

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displayed not only a shrewd commercial sense of the genre but also a certain delight in his own entrepreneurial flair. Without the sponsorship of the Royal Institution, his first task was to find a suitable stage. He devoted assiduous attention both to interior space and to the connotations of urban place. He initially considered the Coachmakers’ Hall, but rejected it – not for its architecture, but for its associations with political speaking and popular entertainment. He objected to it as ‘having no literary or philosophical Redolence, or rather smelling somewhat unsavory to the nares intellectuales of all my wealthy acquaintance, partly from past political spouting clubs, and partly from it’s [sic] present assignment to Hops & the Instruction of Grown Gentlemen in Dancing’ (CL 3: 342). In his memoir, Thelwall recalls that his ‘public career commenced at the debating society at Coachmakers’ Hall’ (Poems xxiii). The close proximity of both threats could be measured in newspaper column inches: the first announcements of Coleridge’s lectures in the Morning Chronicle appeared alongside advertisements of Thelwall’s elocution lectures and a Mr Hopkins’s lessons in ‘fashionable dancing’ at Coachmakers’ Hall (11, 14 November 1811). Coleridge found, ‘at length,’ in a building then known as Scot’s Corporation Hall, ‘another Room every way answering my purposes.’ The house at the back of Crane Court had an ‘illustrious’ history: it had housed the Royal Society, and Sir Isaac Newton had attended meetings. Christopher Wren may have supervised the house’s renovation for the Society’s use (Bradley and Pevsner 504). The room was rented by the London Philosophical Society, whose meetings Coleridge attended; he shrewdly enhanced his series’ respectability by securing permission to highlight the series’ association with the Society on prospectuses. Coleridge was delighted with his stage, ‘a spacious handsome room with an academical Stair-case & the Lecture room itself fitted up in a very grave authentic poetico-philosophic Style with the Busts of Newton, Milton, Shakespeare, Pope & Locke behind the Lecturer’s Cathedra’ (CL 3: 342). Although his tone was light, he was clearly relieved to have found a stage that conveyed sufficient gravitas: he would speak surrounded by representatives of a national ‘poeticophilosophic’ culture. Coleridge was pleased with the room and the building, but he understood the crucial importance of urban location and must have felt a painful contrast with the Royal Institution’s house in Albemarle Street. To Godwin he confided: ‘I begin very much to doubt, whether my scheme will answer, for few if any of my Friends at the West End of

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the Town will condescend to attend a Lecture in the City’ (CL 3: 345). Coleridge understood that not only the building, but also the approach to it, was vital, and there he was at a disadvantage. To Crabb Robinson he explained, ‘My Acquaintance at the West End of the Town recoil from the LONDON PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, SCOT’S CORPORATION HALL, CRANE COURT ENTRANCE FROM FETTER LANE.’ He lamented to Andrew Bell that Fetter Lane was ‘renowned exclusively for pork and sausages’ (CL 3: 346, 349). Yet despite his palpable anxiety, these laments must also be read as one more display of Coleridge’s canniness in pursuing his ‘Lecture scheme,’ for they were also calculated pitches to both Godwin and Crabb Robinson for help in promoting the series. Coleridge eagerly sought the assistance of friends and acquaintances in getting his lectures noticed in print. He asked the indefatigable Crabb Robinson to ‘say what you can for me among your Friends,’ to use his contacts at the Times to arrange for advertisements, to place copies of the prospectus in the ‘Library or Chatting Room’ at the Russell Institution (a literary and scientific institution established in Bloomsbury in 1808), and to ‘distribute’ the rest ‘as your judgement dictates’ (CL 3: 342–4). Coleridge himself left copies at the Westminster Library and liberally sprinkled tickets for sale at various booksellers, including ‘J. Hatchard’s, 190, Piccadilly; J. Murray’s, Fleet Street; J. and A. Arch’s, Booksellers and Stationers, Cornhill; Godwin’s Juvenile Library, Skinner Street; W. Poples, 67, Chancery Lane’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 180). Coleridge issued very particular requests for advertisements to Godwin: he sent ‘a Prospectus so marked as I would have it appear in the M[orning].C[hronicle].’ He understood the vital importance of timing and pressed Godwin ‘to have the Advertisement inserted regularly in some conspicuous part of the Paper,’ reminding him to be prompt, since ‘to delay in this is far worse than to have declined it at once’ (CL 3: 344). Coleridge hesitated only once in his surviving correspondence about such relentless self-promotion, evincing distaste for ‘puffs’ of his lectures. He confessed to Crabb Robinson, ‘I never feel my Poverty so painful as when I see my name & a puff tacked to it.’ But although pained, Coleridge once again allowed practicality to trump pride and asked Crabb Robinson for ‘about 20 lines’ in the Times. He even provided his own ‘precious Recipe for a Puff’: ‘notice that it was not in etymologic severity a Lecture – for tho’ the reasoning, the arrangement, the &c bore the clearest marks of long premeditation, yet the language, illustrations &c were as evidently the children of the Moment’

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(CL 3: 348). He wanted the lectures both to reveal storehouses of time spent in reflection and to turn on spontaneity and immediacy. The success of his ‘Lecture scheme’ may be gauged by the flurry of newspaper notices that appeared detailing his first lecture (in which he condemned a flood of print, including ‘Newspapers’). The Courier declared itself ‘pleased’ at the ‘very respectable audience’ and noted that ‘among the company who attended, we recognised several Fashionables who were his auditors in Albemarle-street.’ The reporter eagerly anticipated ‘more entertainment’ from the lecturer’s promise to discuss ‘some of his contemporaries’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 195). As the Courier confirms, all of the parties concerned were glamorous: the celebrity lecturer, the living poets on whom he planned to speak, and some of his auditors. The series was an event. Coleridge must have deplored his lectures’ classification as ‘entertainment’ but had himself advertised them as ‘the children of the Moment.’ The Pedagogy of Permanence: ‘Fixed Principles’ and Extemporaneity Coleridge the lecturer traded in impermanence not only in planning and promoting the series, but more integrally in the lectures themselves, in a pedagogy that emphasized extemporaneity. He did not wish to impart a body of knowledge to auditors – an aim better achieved by a prepared script that ensured a more economical use of time. Indeed, he often frustrated auditors, who wished to walk away with the satisfaction of intellectual acquisition. The historian and novelist Katherine Byerley Thomson recalls: ‘There was such a combination of wit and poetry in his similies – such fancy, such a finish in his illustrations; yet, as we walked home after the lecture, I remember that we could not call to mind any real instruction, distinct impression, or new fact imparted to us by the great theorist’ (2: 59–60). Coleridge did not, however, wish to peddle ‘new facts,’ but rather to teach auditors the practice of ‘really thinking – really referring to our own inward experiences.’ As a lecturer, he ‘was not as a man carrying furniture into an empty house but as a man entering a well furnished dwelling and exhibiting a light – which enabled a man to see what was in his own mind’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 286). In an 1813 lecture on education, Coleridge developed this pedagogical theory in organic metaphors that emphasize interiority. The Bristol Gazette reports that he paused over ‘the word Education’ in order to define it: ‘it was to educe, to call forth; as the blossom is educed from

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the bud, the vital excellencies are within; the acorn is but educed or brought forth from the bud’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 585). In order to avoid rendering auditors passive himself, he modelled what he wanted readers to do. According to Coleridge, ‘the purposes of a lecture’ were ‘to keep the audience awake and interested during the delivery, and to leave a sting behind.’ The ‘sting’ was ‘a disposition to study the subject anew, under the light of a new principle’ (CL 4: 924). For Coleridge, the view from the lectern both in his political lectures in Bristol and his literary lectures in London was similar: he saw crowds who, undisciplined by ‘principles,’ might easily be swept up in the tides of political unrest or the successive waves of the commercial marketplace, rather than navigating by their own, internal compass. Despite Coleridge’s fervent efforts to dissociate his 1795 political lectures and his Regency literary lectures, he employed the same pedagogical strategies in them. In Bristol, Coleridge propounded ‘the necessity of bottoming on fixed Principles,’ in order that ‘we may not be the unstable Patriots of Passion or Accident.’ At the Royal Institution, he launched an inquiry into the ‘Principles of Poetry,’ asking whether taste ‘have any fixed Principle,’ and if so, ‘what those Principles are’ (Lectures on Politics and Religion 1: 33; Lectures on Literature 1: 27). In Bristol, he worried that ‘Patriots’ who were ‘unillumined by Philosophy’ could be ‘stimulated to a lust of revenge by aggravated wrongs,’ while in London he was concerned that readers might be caught in the cross-currents of the literary marketplace (Lectures on Politics and Religion 38). Addressing a ‘world of readers’ in London, he aimed to shape ‘their habits’ by ‘erecting some standard under which all true Poets might be ranged’ (as he explained to Collier; Lectures on Literature 1: 186, 156). Angela Esterhammer points out that, in Coleridge’s view, ‘taste may be different for everyone, but there are universal principles that enable us to understand and often acquiesce in others’ tastes’ (‘Critic’ 144). Thus he titled his debut series at the Royal Institution ‘Lectures on the Principles of Poetry.’ In Coleridge’s view, the ‘principles of poetry’ were ‘permanent’ because they lay within for anyone to discover. Shakespeare provided his primary example across his lecturing career because ‘none of the Plays of Shakespeare were built upon anything but what was absolutely necessary for our existence and consequently must be permanent while we continue men’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 317). That ‘permanence’ lay in thought and feeling: Shakespeare ‘availed himself of his psycological [sic] genius to develope [sic] all the minutiae of the human heart’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 306).9 He wanted to teach auditors how to read Shakespeare, so that they might recognize those same

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‘principles’ in their own minds. In an 1827 letter to the son of a friend, Coleridge asserts that ‘all knowledge […] that enlightens and liberalizes, is a form and a means of Self-knowledge’ and ‘such knowledge must be founded on Principles: and those Principles can be found only in the Laws of the Mind itself’ (CL 6: 630). Coleridge describes his lectures as a theatre of meditative spontaneity in an 1819 letter to John Britton, who had invited him to lecture at the Russell Institution. The letter must be read in part as a defensive response to a request that he could not fulfill: Britton asked him to reprise a series of lectures he had delivered at the Surrey Institution in 1812–13, but he could not repeat them because he had not written them down. This rare discussion of his lecturing methods nevertheless serves as a valuable glimpse of how he understood his pedagogy. He explains, first, how the topics of his lectures came to fruition, through long study and contemplation: ‘I would not lecture on any subject for which I had to acquire the main knowledge, even though a month’s or three months’ previous time were allowed me; on no subject that had not employed my thoughts for a large portion of my life since earliest manhood, free of all outward and particular purpose.’ Coleridge’s more immediate preparation repeats that process in brief: ‘During a course of lectures, I faithfully employ all the intervening days in collecting and digesting the materials, whether I have or have not lectured on the same subject before.’ He concludes, somewhat defensively, ‘I take far, far more pains than would go to the set composition of a lecture, both by varied reading and by meditation; but for the words, illustrations, & c. I know almost as little as any one of my audience […] what they will be five minutes before the lectures begin’ (CL 4: 923–4). His extensive notes for some of the lectures belie this claim without undermining his central point: that he waited for a live audience to elaborate his critical arguments fully so that he might demonstrate ‘really thinking.’ Coleridge may have learned from sitting in Davy’s audience to engage auditors by staging invention, seeming to produce new insights and to mint fresh words before readers’ eyes. Bereft of the scientific apparatus that Davy had at hand to enliven his lectures, Coleridge enacted the ‘habits of reading’ that he espoused. The artist Joseph Farington records a scene in his diary from the 1808 series: When Coleridge came into the Box there were several Books laying. He opened two or three of them silently and shut them again after a short inspection. He then paused, & leaned His head on His hand, and at last

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It is a consummate performance: Coleridge had to steel himself to maintain a long silence as auditors awaited his first words. In a small dumb show, he enacted a search through books before ceasing even that movement for a moment of quiet expectation. Finally, resting ‘His head on His hand’ in an intimate, familiar gesture, he shared with auditors the results of reflection: a new word to denote a quality in Milton’s poetry. Coleridge deemed a sense of immediacy so crucial that he scripted digressions. Notes for his third lecture in the 1808 series record praise for Davy followed by an apology: ‘I have been seduced into a Digression’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 64). Certainly, however, not all of his digressions were deliberate. The 1808 series established his reputation as a genuinely unpredictable speaker: ‘No one could tell from one performance to the next if he would be inspired or obscure, rambling or provocative’ (Holmes 132). Chronic illness and struggles with addiction undermined his consistency, and some observers charged that he simply did not bother to prepare. Nor was his spontaneity universally appealing – while Crabb Robinson suggested in an indulgent moment that ‘Coleridge’s digressions are not the worst parts of his lectures, or rather he is always digressing,’ Aaron Burr was exasperated: ‘Il parlait une heure sans ordre ou suite ou connection’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 118, 263). The fluidity of time could itself become an enemy at the podium: on at least one occasion, he had to apologize for having ‘miscalculated the proportion of my matter to my Time’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 75). Writing to Catherine Clarkson after a 7 May lecture on Milton, Crabb Robinson complained that ‘the word poetry was not used till the lecture was two-thirds over, nor Milton’s name till ten minutes before the close’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 114). There were more serious dangers of this pedagogy: both he and his audience might get carried away. In an 1803 letter to his patrons Sir George and Lady Beaumont, Coleridge offered an apologia for his Radical speaking, blaming extemporaneity for succumbing to the powerful tides of political passion. In Coleridge’s account, it was precisely the dynamic exchange between lecturer and auditors on which his pedagogy relied that led him astray. ‘What wonder,’ he asks rhetorically, ‘if in the heat of grateful affection & the unguarded Desire of

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sympathizing with these who so kindly sympathized with me, I too often deviated from my own Principles?’ He reports having found himself moved not only by the presence of auditors, but also by his own words. He recalls once being swept along on his own ‘Stream of wild Eloquence.’ Despite its risks, however, he preferred the fluidity of extemporaneity to the fixity of prepared scripts. In a miniature selfportrait as lecturer, Coleridge informs the Beaumonts that he possesses ‘an ebullient Fancy, a flowing Utterance, a light & dancing Heart, & a disposition to catch fire by the very rapidity of my own motion, & to speak vehemently from mere verbal associations’ (CL 2: 1000). Having discovered that a prepared script elicited only ‘a cold suffrage of approbation,’ Coleridge preferred to play with ‘fire’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 286). As extemporaneous performances, the lectures deal in the transience that defines the market’s commercial exchanges. Despite his flair in organizing and advertising his series, Coleridge continued to worry that he was simply, and perhaps culpably, ‘killing time.’ Yet his pedagogy simultaneously seemed to resist the market’s imperatives by his refusal to sell ‘new facts’ and thus turn literature into a readily consumable commodity. Instead, he developed his own brand of difficulty by insisting on ‘first the very painful Effort’ of acquiring literary ‘taste.’ The lectures turned on these contradictions, which Coleridge made a dramatic effort to resolve in some of his literary criticism. In his account of Hamlet, Coleridge develops an important, if implicit, case for his own lectures as offering a kind of ‘PERMANENCE’ based on performance rather than print. Suspending Disbelief: Hamlet in the Lecture Theatre In the lecture theatre, Coleridge attempted to align his literary criticism with Shakespeare’s plays, and in doing so to banish from his lectures his own political past, the literary marketplace, and the modern stage. Hamlet was a tantalizing figure for defining his literary-critical enterprise because, as he explained in an 1808 lecture on the history of drama, ‘the character of Hamlet, &c., affects all men’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 55). Contemporaries immediately recognized Coleridge’s own Shakespearean turn. Klancher describes the phenomenon: ‘Witnesses pointed to a startling event in the London lecturing halls: Coleridge transforming himself into a Shakespearean presence’ (‘Transmission Failure’ 175). Peter Manning adds that ‘if readers saw Shakespeare

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through Coleridge, they also watched Coleridge create an image of himself: to lecture on the genius of Shakespeare, under these particular conditions, was an occasion for the performance of contemporary genius’ (236). Crabb Robinson was only one of many auditors who discerned in Coleridge’s reading of Hamlet a strain of self-reflection. After hearing Coleridge lecture on Hamlet in the 1811–12 series, he wrote to Catherine Clarkson: Last night he concluded his fine development of the Prince of Denmark by an eloquent statement of the moral of the play ‘Action’ he said ‘is the great end of all – No intellect however grand is valuable if it draw us from action & lead us to think & think till the time of action is passed by and we can do nothing.’ Somebody said to me, this is a Satire on himself; No, said I it is an Elegy. A great many of his remarks on Hamlet were capable of a like application. (Lectures on Literature 1: 391)

Coleridge’s reading of the play juxtaposes thinking and acting and privileges the latter. In Coleridge’s account, Hamlet simply reflects until it is too late to act, and in this belatedness fails. It is this portrait of ‘grand’ failure – rather than commercial success – that Coleridge borrows for his lecturing persona. Coleridge himself asserted a vital relationship between his literary criticism and the character of Hamlet: ‘Hamlet was the Play, or rather Hamlet himself was the Character, in the intuition and exposition of which I first made my turn for Philosophical criticism, and especially for the insight into the genius of Shakespear [sic], noticed first among my Acquaintances’ (Lectures on Literature 2: 293). In Hamlet, Coleridge found a figure of ambivalent identification, and his reading of this character serves as a reckoning with his own appearance on stage. In brief: Coleridge’s lectures were, like Hamlet’s soliloquies, a substitute for ‘action,’ defined as progress on his great philosophical work that was to represent his lasting contribution. Yet if Coleridge the lecturer failed in his duty, he was, like Hamlet, a glorious failure. What did Coleridge gain in promoting an image of himself as contemplation personified, a man of ‘thought’ rather than ‘action’? Most obviously, he obscured the personas that he feared haunted his lectures – the political lecturer and the ‘retail dealer’ – in favour of a persona defined by Hamlet’s ‘ratiocinative meditativeness’ (Lectures on Literature 2: 299). In interpreting the Danish prince, Coleridge focuses

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less on the character’s deferral of action than on the qualities that prolong his delay: This admirable & consistent character, deeply acquainted with his own feelings, painting them with such wonderful power & accuracy, and just as strongly convinced of the fitness of executing the solemn charge committed to him, still yields to the same retiring from all reality, which is the result of having what we express by the terms a world within himself. (Lectures on Literature 1: 388; my emphasis)

The very qualities that prevent Hamlet from avenging his father give him ‘power’ as a ‘Poet-philosopher’: The aversion to externals, the betrayed Habit of brooding over the world within him, and the prodigality of beautiful words, which are as it were the half embodyings of Thought, that make them more than Thought, give them an outness, a reality sui generis and yet retain their correspondence and shadowy approach to the Images and Movements within. (Lectures on Literature 1: 540; my emphasis)

Like Milton’s dove, Hamlet ‘broods’ over an abyss, in this case the vagaries of the human heart and mind. In Coleridge’s account, both he and Hamlet resemble the poet envisioned by Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800): his critical arguments are ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,’ but developed by ‘a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply’ (Lyrical Ballads 744–5). As Manning notes, Romantic public lectures ‘helped to create and familiarize the image of the Romantic poet’ (229). I would add that the mantle of the poet effectively cloaked the public performer. According to Coleridge, all three parties involved in his reading of Hamlet – Shakespeare, Hamlet, and himself – were philosopher-poets, rather than playwrights, actors, or lecturers. During his 1813 lectures in Bristol, Coleridge confided to his auditors that ‘he never saw any of Shakespear’s plays performed, but with a degree of pain, disgust, and indignation’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 563). Recalling ‘the poor & scanty Scenery of Shakespear’s Stage’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 542), he dismissed the importance of props, physical gesture, and even the actors themselves, in favour of poetry. He repeatedly lamented the modern stage and its stars: ‘He had seen Mrs. Siddons as Lady, and Kemble as Macbeth – these might

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be the Macbeths of the Kembles, but they were not the Macbeths of Shakespear.’ He disclaimed a wish to reform the modern stage, however, precisely because its faults ‘drove Shakespear from the stage, to find his proper place, in the heart and in the closet’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 563). The plays belonged not in the public space of dramatic theatres, but rather in the solitary reader’s own ‘world within.’ That effect depended upon auditors forgetting that they were, in fact, staged. Thus Coleridge implicitly invited auditors to practise one of the tenets he developed while on stage himself, phrased in Biographia Literaria as ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’: they were to relinquish their awareness of the lecturer as a paid performer and envision him instead as poet with a ‘world within him,’ who expressed something of that world at the podium. This was Coleridge’s disappearing act, the lecturer turning himself into the ‘Poet-philosopher’ before auditors’ eyes by donning the mantle of Hamlet. It is significant that Coleridge developed his key concept of ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ while he was himself on stage. In the Royal Institution’s theatre, he ventured the notion of ‘a sort of temporary Faith which we encourage by our own Will.’ It is thus a ‘remission of the judgement,’ the ‘end’ of which is ‘to produce illusion’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 129–30). He implicitly solicited his own auditors’ ‘temporary Half-faith’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 134) in seeing him as Davy’s ‘Poet-philosopher’ rather than the political speaker that he had been, or the ‘retail dealer’ and ‘histrionic’ actor that he feared he had become. By the time this key critical concept appeared in print in Biographia Literaria, however, it too had been transformed by Coleridge’s disappearing act: it had been removed from the lectures’ urban arena and attached to the rural poetic project of Lyrical Ballads. Born in the lecture theatre to describe a theatrical experience, it became a tenet of the poetic imagination. In chapter 14, Coleridge describes the importance for poetry of ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’ (Biographia Literaria 2: 6). Coleridge warmly acknowledges his auditors in chapter 10, but the importance of their presence as he generated some of his most influential critical definitions and readings was obscured. The history of that loss began in the events themselves, as Coleridge elicited his auditors’ ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in forgetting the theatre in which that concept – and others that, like it, finally comprised much of his ‘great philosophical work’ – was produced.

Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act 71 NOTES 1 The theatre was renovated in 1928, ‘modeled closely on the original but built to modern standards of safety and fire protection’ (Tyrell 10). Renovations completed in 2008 continued this practice of modernizing the theatre while preserving its historical presence. 2 Coleridge also delivered two short series of fourteen lectures on the history of philosophy in the winter of 1818–19. They alternated with a series on Shakespeare (he lectured twice weekly, on Mondays and Thursdays) and were given at the Crown and Anchor tavern. See Lectures on the History of Philosophy. 3 Klancher narrates the history of these arduous editorial efforts and deems the result a signal instance of ‘transmission failure, a moment when Romantic discourse fell into history’ (‘Transmission Failure’ 174). 4 Although performance is ‘an essentially contested concept,’ it is worth pausing to consider how Coleridge’s lectures are performances (Carlson, Performance 5). I would emphasize, first, the importance of a live audience to Coleridge: his insistence upon largely extemporaneous speech placed a premium on the importance of the presence of listeners to the elaboration of his critical arguments. Carlson observes that ‘performance is always performance for someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as performance’ (5). I would argue, second, that one of Coleridge’s central pedagogical aims was to demonstrate how to read and reflect upon poetry so that his auditors might learn from his example. Carlson also suggests that performance requires the ‘physical presence of trained or skilled human beings whose demonstration of their skill is the performance’ (3). 5 Public lectures on literature were ‘public’ in varying degrees in this period. Independently organized series were often open to anyone who could afford the price of entrance. Scientific and literary institutions such as the Royal Institution limited admission to members and subscribers (in different categories), but transferable tickets made their way into the hands of a somewhat broader public. 6 The incident is documented in a letter of 19 November 1818 (CL 4: 879–80). In the 1813 lecture, Coleridge’s anecdote develops into a fuller renunciation of the political speaking for which Thelwall became synonymous: ‘A friend of the Lecturer (Mr. Thelwal) at one time was called a traitor, but though he did not deserve that appellation, he was doubtlessly a mistaken man; it was at a period when men of all ranks, tailors and mechanics of various descriptions, thought they had a call for preaching politics, as Saints had a call for preaching the Gospel’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 586).

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7 Morris Berman notes that ‘twenty-five of the fifty-eight original Proprietors, and fourteen of the nineteen governors (Managers and Visitors) whom they elected, were members of the Board of Agriculture, and eight of these fourteen were among the most outstanding agricultural improvers and industrial entrepreneurs of the age’ (‘Early Years’ 210–11). 8 The season’s slate of lectures was announced in the Morning Chronicle on Monday, 30 November 1807, in a regular section, ‘The Mirror of Fashion’: Hewlett was to speak on ‘Belles Lettres’ and Dibdin on ‘English Literature.’ 9 Coleridge defined his approach to the development of Shakespeare’s work as ‘psychological.’ The Morning Chronicle reported that ‘in examining the dramatic works of Shakespeare, Mr. Coleridge said he should rather pursue the psychological, than the chronological order which had been so warmly disputed.’ Coleridge’s main point about ordering Shakespeare’s plays is that the evidence should be internal rather than external, or ‘psychological’ rather than ‘historical’ (Lectures on Literature 1: 257, 253).

3 Wordsworth’s Lament ALEXANDER DICK

When Coleridge died in July 1834, Wordsworth wrote a consoling letter to his friend’s nephew, Henry Nelson. ‘We are much obliged to you,’ Wordsworth wrote, ‘for entering so far into the particulars of our ever-to-be-lamented Friend’s decease, and we sincerely congratulate you and his dear Daughter upon the calmness of mind and the firm faith in his Redeemer which supported him through his painful bodily and mental trials’ (D. Wordsworth and W. Wordsworth, Letters 727). He then related that Hartley Coleridge reacted differently to his father’s death: ‘He was calm but much dejected, expressed strongly his regret that he had not seen his Father before his departure from this world, and also seemed to lament that he had been so little with him during the course of their lives’ (728). The difference between these two laments is striking. Wordsworth’s is philosophical and reflective; Hartley’s, expressive and remorseful. It confirms something Wordsworth had long suffered in Hartley and his father: their lack of discipline. Hartley ‘promised to go over to Rydal, but did not appear till after Post-time’ (728). Wordsworth also seems to find something effeminate in Hartley’s reaction. Wordsworth ‘wished to see poor Hartley,’ but it is Mary Wordsworth who actually visits him. A further distinction: Hartley speaks his lamentation; Wordsworth writes his. Whereas Hartley expresses his regrets orally, Wordsworth uses a letter to mourn with propriety and decorum. But these distinctions do not really do justice to the complexity of Wordsworth’s letter. He writes that he is determined not to ‘give way to the expression of my feelings upon this mournful occasion’ nor ‘to yield to the solemn and sad thoughts and remembrances which press upon me’ (728). Writing can subdue feeling, but it can also lead to

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dejection. So Wordsworth uses the conventions of letter-writing to imagine a scene of disciplined mourning: I have seen little of [Coleridge] for the last 20 years, his mind has been habitually present with me, with an accompanying feeling that he was still in the flesh. That frail tie is broken and I, and most of those who are nearest and dearest to me must prepare and endeavour to follow him. Give my affectionate love to Sara, and remember me tenderly to Mrs. Coleridge; in these requests Mrs. Wordsworth, my poor Sister, Miss H – , and Dora unite, and also in very kind regards to yourself, and believe me, my dear sir, Gratefully yours, W. Wordsworth. (728–9)

Wordsworth writes for the other members of both families, all of whom are female, through his salutations and under his signature. The various responses of the family are ‘united’ in the conventional greeting and thus transcend their individual dejection.1 But here lies the complexity. The scene of unity only takes place in the future imagined by the letter. The family cannot lament Coleridge; instead, Coleridge is ‘ever-to-be-lamented’ (my emphasis). Readers familiar with the deconstructive turn in Wordsworth studies will recognize in this letter the epistemological tensions of elegiac verse.2 Elegy compensates for loss by making grief the basis for community. But this compensation is also robbed by the materiality of writing. The text can never bring back the beloved. In response to this epistemological conundrum, Wordsworth developed an elegiac style that both acknowledges the contingency of its own prescription and makes that contingency its subject. Wordsworthian mourning is performative: its authority comes from a conventionality that it also abjures. In Kurt Fosso’s words, Wordsworthian elegy turns ‘the apparent impossibility of mourning the dead’ into ‘an interminable debt and an irretrievable possibility that enunciates the text’s performative and repeated desire to mourn’ (634). I want to offer a new reading of Wordsworthian mourning by looking at a different verse form, one that Wordsworth invokes twice in his letter on Coleridge: the lament. Often defined as a poem of grief or loss,3 the lament collapses conventional poetic structures and makes itself felt in the interstices of Sentimental, Romantic, and Victorian poetry as ‘ohs!’ and ‘ahs!’. The lament has been heralded

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by Peter Levi as a ‘pure’ poetic form (9) because it disavows the closure that, as Wordsworth’s poetry illustrates, it cannot find. Linda Austin argues that the form ‘veers away from the cognitive and the pictorial and toward sound’ (279) and owes much to medical accounts of madness and to the aesthetics of the sublime. Others show that the lament has generic conventions – a female speaker, frequent personification, political allegory (Kamusikiri 59) – but also exposes conventionality itself as somehow inadequate to mourning. The lament is championed as a subversive poetic mode. But until the early nineteenth century, laments were by no means ‘pure’ in Levi’s sense. They were loose assemblages of literary and rhetorical genres, textual conventions, and speech acts written for particular events and occasions. They could be quaintly simplistic or outrageously violent. They emphasized the temporality of their own utterance and the contingency of universal norms. Whereas the reflective voice of Wordsworth’s poetics might be characterized as quintessentially masculine, laments were consciously, even defiantly, feminine.4 The lament questions the subordination of the body (human or text) to the level of signifier, imitation, or even ‘parasite’ of mental processes often seen in Romantic poetry and in theories of language and action. Wordsworth’s lament, I argue, marks the moment in the history of the lament when its occasional, material nature became, in Suzanne Clark’s term, ‘unwarranted’ (3). The situation-specific expressiveness of the lament gave way to critical reflection; the ground of poetic mourning shifted from history to universality and from body to mind. This was accomplished through the mediating persona of the poet, whose critical distance from the act of lamentation made it possible for the various political and sexual perspectives that the lament could voice to become the epistemological conundrum crucial to Wordsworth’s poetics. Public action became private ineffability. Wordsworth’s adaptation of the lament tempered its agentive power by incorporating it into scenes of conversation or reflection. This discipline also had a political purpose: to connect the endlessness of personal grief and self-reflection to the formation of a national identity. In transforming the lament, Wordsworth taught the nation how to mourn. Genres of Mourning I want to retell the history of the lament, and Wordsworth’s relation to it, by suggesting that the lament is a genre. I borrow the term from

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Bakhtin’s description of the ‘diverse’ and ‘widespread’ speech genres that make up the shifting dynamic of communication (‘Problem of Speech Genres’ 79). For Bakhtin, a genre is not a timeless literary form or set of conventions. A particular genre will be used and adapted by a particular subject or group for a specific occasion and then readapted by another group for an entirely different reason. Genre in Bakhtin’s sense resembles the contingent, improvisational mode that Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, and Judith Butler use to describe language as a practice rather than as a system. For both Bakhtin and Bourdieu, the early nineteenth century marks the point when the changing material practices that constitute the dispositions of various groups and individuals – what Bourdieu calls their habitus – congealed into standards that could be used to define the purpose and, if necessary, curtail the efficacy of human action.5 Linguistic and literary standardization evolved over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as writers and critics tried to classify available genres according to purposes and meanings. Wordsworth’s lament is one such effort. Prior to the Romantic period, laments did not respect generic distinctions, as we can see by comparing their textual appearance. Many had complicated titles featuring names, dates, places, and outlining the reason for their publication: some were titled simply lamentation, elegy, complaint, or epitaph. Others had hybrid titles like the ‘lamentable complaint.’ Some were visually elaborate, featuring prominent black borders and the occasional memento mori. Some featured classical epigrams befitting the honour of the deceased. Others were printed very plainly. Some appeared as pamphlets meant to be seen or read. Others were printed as broadsheets and were meant, we assume, to be sung. It is possible to correlate particular genres with particular political positions. In the Stuart period, public funerals were occasions for Britain’s aristocratic families to assert their power and prestige. Elegies were frequently published to announce and commemorate the passing of important people. These were published throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mainly as vanity publications for family and friends. Some, however, commemorated executions. These were particularly common at times of political unrest, such as the Restoration, and tended to confirm the disciplinary power of legal or royal authorities. An Elegy on the Death of William Lord Russell, Who was Beheaded for High-Treason, in Lincoln-Inn-Fields, July the 21st, 1683 not only features some rather bizarre legal logic – ‘Ah me! it is too true! His now lost Head / Confirms whatever has on him been said’ – but also a black

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border, an epitaph, and a memento mori ordinarily reserved for aristocratic subjects, along with a dire refrain (set apart on the page): ‘Unpity’d, therefore, let each Traytor die, / While all that Loyal are, Amen, do cry.’ An Elegy on the Lord Viscount Stafford, Beheaded this 29th Day of December, 1680, on Towerhill, having catalogued the traitors, rebels, and criminals who had previously threatened the monarchy, concludes with the following warning: ‘We’ll leave his Soul to God, but may he be / Set for Example of foul Treachery: / That Traitors by him, their Reward may Read, / Who still for Murther, and for Treason Bleed.’ These injunctive poems take the generic name elegy and adopt a third-person voice, as many of Wordsworth’s later mourning poems will do. Here, however, the intent is not reflective but openly disciplinary. The poem’s genre marks an occasion for ideological correction. Laments were not necessarily commemorative in the way that elegies were. They could be vehicles of patriotic fervour or political protest. The Lamentation, published in 1679 during the Popish Plot, begins with a stylized first-person declaration: ‘Brother Foxhunters pity my Case, / Who once was so happy as I?’ and then goes on to catalogue the factions threatening the monarchy, not only Catholics and Puritans, but also the Prince’s friends, and the bishops, and even the King himself, who ‘did help this Plot to lay, / For taking his own life away.’ The purpose of the lamentation, which in this case borders on satire, is to warn of the potential downfall of the monarchy. In the process, it appeals to a particular audience – monarchist Whigs concerned about the king’s own Catholic tendencies – and declares the anti-factionalism of that particular faction. Whereas the generic rigours of the elegy lend themselves to acts of ideological discipline, the looser generic associations of the lament are useful for social critique. Works published under the heading of ‘complaint’ and ‘lament’ comprised addresses, pamphlets, poems, speeches, and sermons. Many of them protested specific policies or laws.6 Broadsides were popular venues for complaints and lamentations. The Complaint of the Poor, on Stopping the Counterfeit-halfpence (1797) protested the decision by the Mint to make low-grade metal coins illegal, making it all but impossible for many people to have any currency at all. The Complaint of the Female Swine, Against the Minister, for Taxing Tea: A Ballad (1795), supposed to be sung to the tune of ‘Ally Croaker,’ attacked William Pitt’s taxation policies and included on its verso that additional song ‘The Wrongs of Man,’ which began ‘Since the minions of power keep mortals still blind.’ The Country Lamentation (1750) opens with the gathering or ‘cloud of folk met all at once’

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who argue about rent increases and the shift in the economy from agriculture to manufacturing. Sometimes laments and complaints were published together or as the hybrid genre, the ‘lamentable complaint.’ The 1641 pamphlet The Lamentable Complaints of Hop the Brewer and Kilcalfe the Butcher, As they met by chance in the Country, against the restraint lately set out by Parliament against Tapsters and Cookes: which hath caused them to cracke their credit, and to betake them to their heeles is a radical indictment of the parliamentary injunctions against the practice of moneylending among London merchants. The publication of a poem also helped to alter its political valence. ‘Lament for General Wolf,’ a rousing song about the English victory at Quebec, was published in 1790 in An Excellent Garland Containing Four New Songs, a collection of various verses on English military conquest. Fifteen years earlier, it appeared as ‘Wolf’s Lament’ (as if sung by him, rather than about him) alongside ‘The Farmer’s Complaint, Or Jockey’s Dream, showing the Pride and Ambition of the FARMERS, FACTORS, and VICTUAL MONGERS; and the distressed and deplorable condition of the POOR at this day’ (see Two Excellent Songs). It is also notable that many of these pamphlets and broadsides were published outside of London, in Manchester, for instance, and especially in Scotland, which had a long-standing folk tradition of sung laments, many of which were collected in the eighteenth century. The distinction between elegy and lament carries over into Wordsworth’s poetry. Wordsworth’s elegies, including the two ‘Elegiac Stanzas,’ commemorate particular people – his brother, for instance – and reflect on the process of mourning. Wordsworth uses the term ‘lament’ to invoke the emotional intensity of political debate. But what distinguishes Wordsworth’s poems from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century laments and complaints is his use of their generic inconsistency to inspire critical reflections on the political conflicts of which they are a part. Wordsworth’s laments, in other words, demonstrate a process of ideological restructuring. A good example of this is ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ (Lyrical Ballads 76), first published in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. Whereas earlier laments put the speaker in the midst of social action, Wordsworth’s poem removes its speaker from that world so that he can contemplate it critically. The natural world which the poem recollects is an idealization of the social world. It is crucial, moreover, to stress that this is an act of recollection. The ‘I’ of the poem ‘sate’ among the ‘thousand blended notes’ and ‘fair works’ of nature in harmony (literally, through a cunning use of assonance) with the periwinkle that

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‘trailed,’ the birds that ‘played’ and the ‘motion’ that they ‘made.’ By contrast, but still in the past, the ‘heart’ of the poet, which he distinguishes from his soul, ‘grieved […] to think / What man has made of man.’ Turning on the repetition of ‘made,’ the natural motions of the birds are contrasted to the selfishness of human society. It is this dismay that leads to the insistent, though affirmative, present-tense declarations of the poem – ‘’tis my faith,’ ‘I must think’ – and the final question. The poem is not only an expression of dismay but also a plea for redemption. The irony of the poem, however, is that the lament also belongs to the present, the time of material social pursuits; hence the repetition in the final lines: ‘If I these thoughts may not prevent, / If such be of my creed the plan, / Have I not reason to lament / What man has made of man?’ Not incidentally, Wordsworth’s use of the word ‘lament’ as the most important verb of this final question jars with the otherwise dreamy nostalgia of the rest of the poem. It is part of a ‘creed’ or ‘plan’ that recreates an idea of nature in scriptural form; the poem is, after all, called ‘Lines Written in Early Spring.’ The ruminative voice of the poem, with its characterization of nature as a series of links that includes the soul of the poet himself, acts as a counterpoint to the poet’s own insistence that he must lament and the admission that he does so in writing. What is at stake in the poem is the ability of the poet to transcend the present of acting and writing and lamenting through his imagination. The answer to the poem’s question is yes. I have a reason to lament, because I have access to the natural, contemplative forces that will soothe and control my lamentation. The poet’s claim that he must lament is a kind of boast. I understand the difference between natural harmony and social unrest; therefore my lamentation will end in solace and understanding in a way that others will not. This is a new kind of lament, one not based on the demands of penury or grief or the failure of governmental policy, but rather on the confidence of personal autonomy. Wordsworth experimented with the lament in his later sonnets. The sixth of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, ‘Persecution,’ begins with an injunction to LAMENT! for Diocletian’s fiery sword Works busy as the lightning; but instinct With malice ne’er to deadliest weapon linked Which God’s ethereal store-houses afford:

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The opening call to ‘lament!’ locates the sonnet in a collective moment of awe at the violence of anti-Christian fervour, an awe duplicated not by an oral cry but rather by textual effects: capitalization and punctuation. The insistent present tense of these opening lines recalls the immediacy of the lament. We are, however, invited to take a much longer look at the scene of battle than the cry to ‘LAMENT!’ intimates. While the injunctive voice echoes the clamour of the battlefield, the indexical pointing, ‘some […] some […] others,’ removes both speaker and reader from the battle itself. In the sestet, the poet explains this opening invocation: Thus was Alban tried, England’s first Martyr, whom no threats could shake; Self-offered victim, for his friend he died, And for the faith; nor shall his name forsake That Hill, whose flowery platform seems to rise By Nature decked for holiest sacrifice.

(Sonnet Series 143)

With the shift into past tense, the poem makes a universalizing connection between the historical past of Alban’s sacrifice and the perpetual reminder of it latent in the epitaphic hill. This reading in turn becomes Alban’s epitaph. In both of these instances – that of the lyrical ballad and the ecclesiastical sketch or sonnet – Wordsworth is working with generic conventions of writing and speech that he negotiates into a hybrid form. He does this in part by accentuating generic conventionality or, in the case of ‘Lines Written in Early Spring,’ dramatic irony. In the process, Wordsworth elevates genre itself from a material practice to an object of critical reflection. The lament thus remains a practice – political statement or religious rite – that the poems demonstrate is in need of correction. How was Wordsworth able to do this? How could a poet transform a genre of immediacy, protest, even violence into a poetic mode that asserts the need for its own disciplining? To answer this question we need to shift focus somewhat and delve into the political

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and social tensions surrounding lamentation itself. We need, that is, to consider the way the British buried their dead. Custom and Commerce Overcrowded cities and bad sanitation meant that death was an uncomfortably common occurrence in Romantic-era Britain, especially among the poor. Urban cemeteries were reaching capacity. Many buried their dead in basements or streets. Attending a funeral was an appalling experience. As James Stevens Curl describes it, ‘a perfunctory funeral with all the attendant horrors of overcrowded burial grounds, drunken gravediggers, body-snatchers, the ever-present stench of corruption, and the sight of bones carelessly thrown up from yawning graves had been the normal experience of city dwellers […] Body-snatchers, over-crowded graveyards, and corrupt sextons gave no assurance that a body would rest in peace’ (22). Ruth Richardson points out that in spite of efforts to clean up public burials, many of the old customs and superstitions surrounding death lingered both in the practice of burial itself (through such events as the wake) and in the way the deaths were reported and announced. Grim tales of mourned loved ones waking up and walking away from their graves filled the popular newspapers. The feeling among the middle classes that something had to be done to instill a sense of decency and distinction around death remained through the nineteenth century. Such demands gave rise to the professional undertaking industry. Needless to say, fashionable decorous funerals were very expensive: ‘in an age of quality and respectability the funeral finisher was able to provide his clients with merchandise of the highest quality’ (Litten 60). Great emphasis was placed on the size of the retinue and the demeanour of mourners, all dressed in costumes and provided with elegant sustenance before and after the service. Poetry played no small part in these arrangements. The services always featured psalms and hymns usually printed for the congregations. Among the mementoes provided by the undertakers were cards with short poems on them, the precursors of the Hallmark card. Their sentiments were quite platitudinous. One reads simply: ‘A sudden death, a mind contented; / Living beloved, dead lamented’ (quoted in Curl 15). Another commemorates the death of a child: Adieu! My sweet one, sleep in peace Upon thy pillow lone and chill;

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The dual aim of these cards was sympathy and respectability. It is worth noting, in the last case particularly, how neatly these cards summarize the Wordsworthian ethos of community outliving mourning. The commercialization of mourning in the nineteenth century made public burial decent; it also meant that people of different classes could be buried in different ways. The demand of the middle classes for burial outside the crowded cities was met in 1818 by the Church Building Act. One hundred seventy-four new churches were built in the now familiar neo-Gothic style as a way to provide space for the dead (Curl 24). People demanded that death and the rituals associated with it be picturesque – moving, and natural, perhaps even a little grotesque, but never more than what might be viewed with pleasure. As Richardson shows, the Anatomy Act of 1831 was instituted to curtail body-snatching by having the bodies of those who died in the streets or the poor-houses donated to hospitals and schools, while the bodies of the middle and upper classes could be treated in an appropriately dignified manner distinct from the treatment of the bodies of the poor. Richardson thus distinguishes between ‘commercial death,’ taken care of by the professional undertaking industry, and ‘secular death,’ the responsibility of anatomical supply companies. Most historians of British funeral customs of the early nineteenth century note the influence of Wordsworth on the direction that the reform of public burials took. Indeed, the Wordsworths themselves had very high standards for proper burial. In an entry in her Grasmere Journal, Dorothy Wordsworth describes the funeral of a neighbour: About 10 men & 4 women. Bread cheese & ale – they talked sensibly & cheerfully about common things. The dead person 56 years of age buried by the parish – the coffin was neatly lettered & painted black & covered with a decent cloth. They set the corpse down at the door & while we stood within the threshold the men with their hats off sang with decent & solemn countenances a verse of a funeral psalm. The corpse was then borne down the hill & they sang till they had got past the Town-end. I was affected to tears while we stood in the house, the coffin lying before me. There were no near kindred, no children. When we got out of the dark house the sun was shining & the prospect looked so divinely beautiful as I never saw it. It seemed more sacred than I had ever seen it, & yet more allied to human

Wordsworth’s Lament 83 life. The green fields, neighbours of the churchyard, were green as possible & with the brightness of the sunshine looked quite Gay. I thought she was going to a quiet spot & I could not help weeping very much. (20)

What moves Dorothy Wordsworth is not death itself, but the solemnity and decency of the funeral. She parallels the singers’ ‘countenances’ with the neatness of the cloth draped over the coffin, its ‘neat’ lettering and ‘decent’ appearance. The lamentation is affecting because it is tidy. The singers sing only ‘a verse of a funeral psalm,’ the appropriateness of which is implied by its lack of any specific content. The account of the funeral makes the various elements of the scene of mourning (her own tears, the song, the lettering on the casket, the landscape) comprise a spiritual unity that transcends the loneliness of the death by being ‘allied to human life.’ Dorothy was very irritated when the priest arrived: ‘He did not look as a man ought to do on such an occasion – I had seen him half drunk the day before in a pot-house’ (21). William Wordsworth’s most succinct statement on the propriety of mourning is his Essays on Epitaphs. These essays have long been of interest to critics, who recognize in them the tension between testimony and writing in Wordsworth’s poetry. Yet, viewed from the perspective of the history of the lament, the tension between speech and writing in the Essays can also be understood as part of an effort to delineate a proper manner of burial and commemoration. Wordsworth begins the essays not with the rise of monumental inscription from public acts of ritual lamentation, but with the presumption that even in cultures without writing public remembrances of the dead will feature visual markers. ‘It need scarcely be said that an Epitaph presupposes a Monument, upon which it is to be engraven. Almost all Nations have wished that certain external signs should point out the places where the dead are interred. Among savage tribes unacquainted with letters this has mostly been done by rude stones placed near the graves, or by mounds of earth raised over them’ (Prose Works 2: 49). But Wordsworth goes on to conflate the writing of epitaphs with oral communication: ‘The first requisite, then, in an Epitaph is, that it should speak, in a tone which shall sink into the heart, the general language of humanity as connected with the subject of death – the source from which an epitaph proceeds – of death, and of life’ (2: 57). The ‘excellencies’ of the epitaph will be found to lie in a due proportion of the common or universal feeling of humanity to sensations excited by a distinct and clear conception,

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Alexander Dick conveyed to the reader’s mind, of the individual, whose death is deplored and whose memory is to be preserved; at least of his character as, after death, it appeared to those who loved him and lament his loss. The general sympathy ought to be quickened, provoked, and diversified, by particular thoughts, actions, and images, – circumstances of age, occupation, manner of life, prosperity which the deceased had known, or adversity to which he had been subject; and these ought to be bound together and solemnized into one harmony by the general sympathy. The two powers should temper, restrain, and exalt each other. The reader ought to know who and what the man was whom he is called upon to think of with interest. A distinct conception should be given (implicitly where it can, rather than explicitly) of the individual lamented. – But the writer of an epitaph is not an anatomist, who dissects the internal frame of mind; he is not even a painter, who executes a portrait at leisure and in entire tranquility; his delineation, we must remember, is performed by the side of the grave; and, what is more, the grave of one whom he loves and admires. What purity and brightness is that virtue clothed in, the image of which must no longer bless our living eyes! (2: 57–8)

The words ‘lament’ and ‘lamented’ in this passage are not used as synonyms for grief but rather indicate grieving of a particular kind: the recollection of the beloved in a proportional, clear, and distinct manner. To lament, for Wordsworth, means to ‘diversify’ the image of the dead into the myriad circumstances of life. This biography, however, must be tempered and ‘restrained’ by both ‘general sympathy’ and ‘general language.’ For Wordsworth writing too much or too erratically can distort the sympathetic experience of the epitaph. Mourning, then, is not for Wordsworth a visceral or immediate reaction to death or, for that matter, political conflict, but rather the result of critical reflections on those reactions after the fact. We do not lament, Wordsworth might say, without a clear intention or purpose. The epitaph, being a form of writing, allows Wordsworth to associate this intentionality with the rational deliberation implied, for him, by the act of writing and commensurate with his formulation of the writing of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ or more simply as ‘thought.’ I am arguing that Wordsworth’s lamentational poetics helped to validate the ways in which death was administered in nineteenth-century Britain through the growth of the undertaking industry, the segregation of funeral customs by class, and the building of churches. That Wordsworth should understand the best form of mourning to be the churchyard epitaph also links his poetry to the changes that were fast

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occurring in that administration. Wordsworth’s account of the epitaph signals a version of what Clifford Siskin has labelled Wordsworth’s professionalism. A professional is a man whose work is also his life and whose status is associated with his commitment and feeling toward that work, not the productivity or exchange value of the work itself (106). Inasmuch as the epitaph is the site of an epistemological conundrum – as many critics have argued – it is also the site of a historical forgetting, the forgetting of the commercial and class contexts for dying in the Romantic era. Lamentations and the Feminine Sublime My argument is that through the efforts of writers like William Wordsworth, the lament was removed from social practice to become a reflective poetics. In the previous section I suggested that the abstraction of the lament from social practice was tied up with changes in the class dynamics of public burial. In this section, I want to substantiate this claim further by showing that the change in the lament is also apparent in its gender dynamics. In the ancient world, laments were sung by groups of women over the bodies of their dead husbands and sons. Many of the women who sang these laments were paid for their services. Their songs were often highly conventional and formulaic, but they were nevertheless rooted in oral customs and would likely have changed significantly depending on the family or subject. In fifthcentury BCE Athens, to cite only the most famous instance, it was customary for women to mourn in sometimes violent ways the death of their kin and, if the death occurred in battle or inter-family squabble, to express outrage against the perpetrator. This seems to have made patriarchal state officials of classical times very nervous. Fearing that acts of public grief might incite general social unrest or, worse, provoke feelings of clan kinship that might threaten the power of the Athenian state, the dictator Solon outlawed these female laments and designed mourning practices that stressed transcendence rather than revenge and contemplation rather than sorrow. Maeera Shreiber contends that women’s lamentation went ‘underground’ and then reemerged in modern times as ‘part of an alternative social order, constructed out of an adversarial relation to dominant institutions’ (303). But the lamenting woman did not really go underground. Anthropologists have noted extensively how much female lamentation plays a role in the folk customs of Greece, Hungary, Finland, Ireland, and India.7 In the 1780s and 1790s, the figure of the lamenting woman

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appeared in many popular media. The cult of sensibility was built upon the idea that literature was a vehicle for sympathy and participation. In such popular texts as Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets lamentation evokes desperation but also power. The words ‘lament,’ ‘lamented,’ and ‘lamentable’ appear frequently in Gothic novels such as Lewis’s The Monk and Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho both to heighten the sense of emotional intensity in the novel and, at the same time, to satirize the irrationalism of Catholic ritual and southern European characters. One literary movement that did appropriate the lament as a vehicle of political protest was the antislavery movement. William Cowper’s ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ (1778) features many conventions of lament poetry: the speaker’s exile, unanswered questions, and the interplay of personal loss with the destruction of the nation. It was reprinted and excerpted in a number of anti-slavery tracts of the period, notably on the title page of William Fox’s much reprinted Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar & Rum (1792). ‘The Sorrows of Yamba’ (1795), not written but published by Hannah More as part of her Cheap Repository Tracts, is subtitled ‘The Negro Woman’s Lamentation.’ In all of these forms, a scene of mourning and complaint is vibrantly produced and reproduced through the distributive power of print. Already in the mid-eighteenth century, critics were devising ways of controlling the lament by narrowing its generic parameters and altering its sexual dynamic. While in the instances discussed above, the lamenting woman is a figure of power, in eighteenth-century philosophy and criticism she is an object of sexual curiosity. British empirical philosophers used figures of lamentation to demonstrate the dangerous effects of association. John Locke uses the ‘wailing woman’ to explain not only the association of ideas but also how to correct it: The Death of a Child, that was the daily delight of his Mother’s Eyes, and joy of her Soul, rends from her Heart the whole comfort of Life, and gives her all the torment imaginable; use the Consolations of Reason in this case, and you were as good preach Ease to one on the Rack, and hope to allay, by rational Discourses, the Pain of his Joints tearing asunder. ’Till time has by disuse separated the sense of that Enjoyment and its loss from the Idea of the Child returning to her Memory, all Representations, though never so reasonable, are in vain; and therefore some in whom the union between those Ideas is never dissolved, spend their Lives in Mourning, and carry an incurable Sorrow to their Graves. (398–9)

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The cure for such associations, Locke continues, is the correct use of words. Of course, Locke distrusts words to provide this logical framework: this is why the codification of words and ideas must take place through custom and habit, a duplication best facilitated in writing. The horrors of association, exemplified by an irrational and effeminate grief, are cured through the early application of the very thing that cannot cure them once they have taken hold: rational discourse. The lamenting woman was particularly useful to the Scottish philosophers in their attempt to paint and frame a picture of sensibility which, they argued by contrast to Locke, could be harnessed into a new liberal ethics. In the process, the lamenting woman came to exemplify a particular type of affective performance, rather than an agent in herself. In the first chapter of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, she illustrates the affective power of sympathy as opposed to the irritation of physical pain: What are the pangs of a mother, when she hears the moanings of her infant that during the agony of disease cannot express what it feels? In her idea of what it suffers, she joins, to its real helplessness, her own consciousness of that helplessness, and her own terrors for the unknown consequences of its disorder; and out of these forms, for her own sorrow, the most complete image of misery and distress. The infant, however, feels only the uneasiness of the present instant, which can never be great. (12)

In the chapter ‘Ideal Presence’ in his Elements of Criticism, Lord Kames also uses the figure of the mother crying for her lost child: ‘I saw yesterday, a beautiful woman in tears for the loss of an only child, and was greatly moved with her distress: not satisfied with a slight recollection of bare remembrance, I ponder upon the melancholy scene; conceiving myself to be in the place where I was an eye witness every circumstance appears to me as at first; I think I see the woman in tears, and hear her moans’ (1: 89). Here the lamenting woman is devoid of agency. She has become an aesthetic object. The most influential account of the lament of the period was Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, published in English translation by Joseph Johnson in 1787. Lowth’s Lectures is a protoanthropology of the social and cultural roots of poetic form. One example of these is ‘Elegy,’ though Lowth is actually describing the lament. Lowth repeatedly underscores its ambiguity. The lament ‘may indeed be more properly termed the dictate of Nature than of Custom, to follow to the

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grave the remains of a friend with grief and lamentation. The ancient Hebrews were not ashamed of obeying the voice of nature on this occasion, and of liberally pouring forth the effusions of a bleeding heart’ (2: 123). Accordingly, ‘the language of grief is simple and unaffected; it consists of a plaintive, intermitted, concise form of expression, if indeed a simple exclamation of sorrow may deserve such an appellation.’ Yet this expressiveness ‘may be traced into their manner of celebrating their funeral rites.’ Public displays of sadness inspire collective acts of grieving: ‘wayward grief is frequently desirous of a more complete and ostentatious display of its feelings; it studies not only its own alleviation, by publishing its uneasiness, but endeavours to incite and allure others into a society in affliction’ (2: 125). Formally, the lament combines shock and grief with logic and variation: The Lamentations of Jeremiah (for the title is properly and significantly plural) consist of a number of plaintive effusions, composed upon the plan of the funeral dirges, all upon the same subject, and uttered without connexion as they rose in the mind, in a long course of separate stanzas […] In the character of a mourner, he celebrates in plaintive strains the obsequies of his ruined country; whatever presented itself to his mind in the midst of desolation and misery, whatever struck him as particularly wretched and calamitous, whatever the instant sentiment of sorrow dictated, he pours forth in a kind of spontaneous effusion. He frequently pauses, and, as it were, ruminates upon the same object; frequently varies and illustrates the same thought with different imagery, and a different choice of language; so that the whole bears rather the appearance of an accumulation of corresponding sentiments, than an accurate and connected series of different ideas, arranged in the form of a regular treatise. (2: 131–2)

Lowth’s account of the lament resembles Smith’s of the way grief inspires sympathy. But like Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads – which alludes to Lowth’s balanced account of ‘spontaneous effusion,’ rumination, and variation – Lowth stresses that the power of poetry is not simply affective. The lament is, rather, a form of ‘ostentation’ containing significant pauses and shifts in diction. The aim of the lament is the ‘appearance’ of sentiment for the purpose of reflection leading to communal action. Lowth’s sense that the lamentation can be experienced as a ‘whole’ in the first place – not an improvisation that comes and goes, swelling and falling with pain and sorrow, but rather

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a complete aesthetic investment in a distinctly literary genre modelled on an already known ‘dirge’ – further suggests that his lament, while sorrowful, associative, and expressive, also implies reflection. It is also worth noting that in the above instance Lowth’s reflective lamenting poet is male. But like Smith and Kames, Lowth also aestheticizes female grief to define the critical distance necessary for appropriate mourning: In my opinion, there is not extant any poem, which displays such a happy and splendid selection of imagery in so concentrated a state. What can be more elegant and poetical, than the description of that once flourishing city, lately chief among the nations, sitting in the character of a female, solitary, afflicted, in a state of widowhood, deserted by her friends, betrayed by her dearest connections, imploring relief, and seeking consolation in vain? (2: 137–8)

The lamenting woman’s affliction is simply not the point. It is in her desire for consolation, not its achievement, that the lamenting woman in turn becomes an object of desire. She suffers, and because she suffers, she is sublime. Many of Wordsworth’s most moving poems turn on this move from embodied action – signified by the suffering female speaker – to mental reflection – signalled by the observing reader. One poem that illustrates this turn is ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’ (Lyrical Ballads 111–13). Alan Bewell has suggested that Wordsworth was inspired to write this poem by attitudes towards death that he found in Samuel Hearne’s 1795 Journey from Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean (Bewell 199). For Bewell, the poem’s ironic and heartwrenching tale of a woman left to die in the frozen tundra protests the materialistic attitudes toward death that Hearne described in his Travels. There is, however, a further irony in the poem between the complaint and the reactions that Wordsworth wanted to encourage in response, an irony that hinges on the question of gender. When, in stanza 3, the Indian woman regrets that she ‘yielded to despair’ and asks of her fellow travellers ‘Why did you listen to my prayer?’ she acknowledges a power in language over which she does not have complete control. She states that her wish to die was a response to the pain she felt in the moment, whereas when the band departs she suddenly feels stronger again and thus responds negatively to her own wishes:

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The ‘as if’ produces a split figuration between the lament the woman wishes that she had not expressed when she cried for her own death and a notion of ‘manly’ action that the child will eventually learn. The poem underlines the mother’s incomprehension of the child’s physical reaction to his loss. The stanza stresses the physicality of action: the ‘taking’ of the child, the strangeness of his bodily contortions as he struggles, and finally his outstretched arms, an image that Wordsworth uses many times (in The Borderers, for instance, and in The Prelude) to characterize despair and hopelessness. But through Wordsworth’s description of this scene, the complaint becomes an opportunity for reflection, an opportunity that is implicitly paralleled to the child’s ‘manly’ future. In other poems, the turn away from poetic expression includes arguments against not simply female agency but female production. In the late sonnet ‘Monument of Mrs. Howard in Wetheral Church, near Corby, on the Bank of the Eden,’ part of the series ‘Composed or Suggested During a Tour in the Summer of 1833,’ Wordsworth makes the bold claim that sculpture, the ‘still medium’ of epitaphic remembrance, not only is ‘triumphant over strife / And pain,’ but leads to a reverence worth much more than lamentation: STRETCHED on the dying Mother’s lap, lies dead Her new-born Babe; dire ending of bright hope! But Sculpture here, with the divinest scope Of luminous faith, heavenward hath raised that head So patiently; and through one hand has spread A touch so tender for the insensate Child – (Earth’s lingering love to parting reconciled, Brief parting, for the spirit is all but fled) – That we, who contemplate the turns of life

Wordsworth’s Lament 91 Through this still medium, are consoled and cheered; Feel with the Mother, think the severed Wife Is less to be lamented than revered; And own that Art, triumphant over strife And pain, hath powers to Eternity endeared.

(Sonnet Series 601–2)

This sonnet dovetails with the blessed babe section of The Prelude and other lyrics in which Wordsworth celebrates motherly sensation as the vessel of poetic imagination and perfect understanding. In the sonnet, however, the child is stillborn – dead before it is ever really alive. Sculpture redeems death at the cost of agency. In celebrating the statue’s pathos as a better medium of reflection than lamentation, which he associates with ‘strife / And pain,’ Wordsworth encapsulates the enlightenment complaint against female production. The turn from female production to male reflection recurs in many of Wordsworth’s poems, including ‘The Mad Mother,’ ‘The Ruined Cottage,’ and The Prelude. It may in fact suggest a connection between Wordsworth’s experiments with the lament and contemporary Malthusian anxieties about overpopulation – anxieties that are further reflected, moreover, in the sanitization of burial in this period. Tim Fulford argues that the masculinist turn in Wordsworth’s poetics does not absorb feminine sensibility completely into Romantic reason but establishes a hierarchical distinction between poetic expression and aesthetic judgment. Similarly, we might say that Wordsworth’s elegiac poetics does not abandon lament but rather reshapes it or disciplines it. In the final section, I want to consider the corrective tendency of Wordsworth’s textual practice in relation to the sexual and cultural politics of the lament. Queen Mary’s Lament Wordsworth wrote only one poem called a lament: ‘The Lament of Mary Queen of Scots, On the Eve of a New Year.’ Not only is it Wordsworth’s most succinct articulation of his poetics of mourning, but it is also an excellent example of the way Wordsworth collected the various components of the lament’s practical history – those of genre, class, and gender – into a single form. Two additional things make this an especially noteworthy poem. First, manuscript evidence suggests that Wordsworth completed a draft sometime in 1817 but worked on the poem over the next two years until he published it in the River Duddon volume in 1820. This dating puts the poem squarely in the context of

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the most significant incident of public mourning in the period: the funeral of Princess Charlotte. Second, neither the style nor the subject nor the content nor even the title is Wordsworth’s own. ‘Lament of Mary Queen of Scots’ is a revision of Helen Maria Williams’s ‘Queen Mary’s Complaint,’ first published in her 1786 volume Poems. Royal mourning played a special part in the changes in funereal customs in Britain during the early nineteenth century. In the previous century, public mourning went through a period of decline. Unlike the Stuarts and their aristocratic coterie, the Hanoverians were buried in private family ceremonies. This did not stop political pamphleteers from using the occasion of the monarch’s death to put forward a particular political or religious argument. But during the first half of the nineteenth century, the funerals of important people once again became grand occasions for organized public mourning. And no royal funeral had as much influence on the national psyche as that of Princess Charlotte. In November 1817, Charlotte, the only daughter of the Prince Regent, died after giving birth to a stillborn son. Her funeral, like all royal funerals before it, was a quiet, modest, and highly exclusive affair (Wolffe 20). But the death of Princess Charlotte inspired a huge outpouring of commemorative poems and pamphlets. What is striking about this response is not simply its scope but also its diversity, from the populist radical to the highest Tory.8 Stephen Behrendt notes two things in particular about these responses. First, all of them attempted to ‘translate individual mourning for Charlotte into a community activity for the nation as a whole’ (128). Second, the communal potential of these calls for public mourning was augmented by the relatively new power of mass media. But this had the counter-effect of diversifying public opinion even as that opinion was directed (at least ostensibly) toward the common purpose of national unity. The emphasis in all of this literature is on a public response to the idea of Charlotte’s death, what it means for the country and its hopes for peace and reform, and not necessarily to the loss of the princess herself. ‘Lament of Mary Queen of Scots’ was Wordsworth’s contribution to this general outpouring of grief. While the great majority of the poems published on this occasion were meant to inspire sympathy and affection, Wordsworth’s redirected sympathy toward reflection. But why did Wordsworth revise another poem on this occasion? And why this poem? Though she began publishing in the 1780s, Williams’s poetry remained quite popular and inspired many imitators.9 Wordsworth

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knew and admired Williams and met her on at least one occasion (Todd 464). But her sentimentalism exemplified the style Wordsworth spent his career decrying. The sentimental vogue seemed to Wordsworth to be asserting itself again after Princess Charlotte’s death; and indeed, ‘Queen Mary’s Complaint’ was republished in 1823 after a host of poems on the same theme appeared. Williams’s poem is an excellent example of how the lament can combine effusive expressions of regret and pain with highly conventional, melodramatic pomp: PALE moon! thy mild benignant light May glad some other captive’s sight; Bright’ning the gloomy objects nigh, Thy beams a lenient thought supply: But, O, pale moon! what ray of thine Can soothe a misery like mine, Chase the sad image of the past, And woes for ever doom’d to last? Where are the years with pleasure gay? How bright their course! how short their stay! Where are the crowns, that round my head A double glory vainly spread? Where are the beauties wont to move, The grace, converting awe to love? Alas! had fate design’d to bless, Its equal hand had giv’n me less! Why did the regal garb array A breast that tender passions sway? A soul of unsuspicious frame, Which leans with faith on friendship’s name? Ye vanish’d hopes! ye broken ties! By perfidy, in friendship’s guise, This breast was injur’d, lost, betray’d – Where, where shall MARY look for aid? How could I hope redress to find, Stern rival! from thy envious mind? How could I e’er thy words believe?

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(Williams 2: 164–9)

The poem uses a number of lament conventions. The speaker is a woman. There are the requisite ‘Ohs’ and one ‘alas!’ signifying her anguish. The rhythm of the poem is almost perfect, but there are a few metrically awkward lines: ‘Thy beams a lenient thought supply’ demands that lenient be read as ‘len(y)ent’; only a reader familiar with the convention of syllabic compression will get the rhythm right. With the exception of the conventional ‘move/love,’ the rhymes are also perfect throughout. The poem thus celebrates its own poetic nature. It is also an elaborate chain of metaphors and comparisons: the light of the moon is compared to a crown of glory, which is further reflected in her heart. This is in turn contrasted to the ‘cold bosom’ of Elizabeth. Williams’s poem exemplifies the power of the eighteenth-century lament. It does not so much mourn the dead as express the potency of life. Wordsworth’s version veers away from the spectacle of the Queen herself and toward the poet contemplating that spectacle:

Wordsworth’s Lament 95 ‘SMILE of the Moon! – for so I name That silent greeting from above; A gentle flash of light that came From Her whom drooping captives love; Or art thou of still higher birth? Thou that didst part the clouds of earth, My torpor to reprove! ‘Bright boon of pitying Heaven! – alas, I may not trust thy placid cheer! Pondering that Time to-night will pass The threshold of another year; For years to me are sad and dull; My very moments are too full Of hopelessness and fear. ‘– And yet, the soul-awakening gleam, That struck perchance the farthest cone Of Scotland’s rocky wilds, did seem To visit me, and me alone; Me, unapproached by any friend, Save those who to my sorrows lend Tears due unto their own. ‘To-night, the church-tower bells will ring Through these wild realms, a festive peal; To the new year a welcoming; A tuneful offering for the weal Of happy millions lulled in sleep; While I am forced to watch and weep, By wounds that may not heal. ‘Born all too high, by wedlock raised Still higher – to be cast thus low! Would that mine eyes had never gaz’d On aught of more ambitious show Than the sweet flowerets of the fields! – It is my royal state that yields This bitterness of woe.

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Alexander Dick ‘Yet how? – for I, if there be truth In the world’s voice, was passing fair; And beauty, for confiding youth, Those shocks of passion can prepare That kill the bloom before its time, And blanch, without the owner’s crime, The most resplendent hair. ‘Unblest distinction! showered on me To bind a lingering life in chains; All that could quit my grasp, or flee, Is gone; – but not the subtle stains Fixed in the spirit – for even here Can I be proud that jealous fear Of what I was remains. ‘A Woman rules my prison’s key; A sister Queen, against the bent Of law and holiest sympathy, Detains me, doubtful of the event; Great God, who feel’st for my distress, My thoughts are all that I possess, O keep them innocent! ‘Farewell desire of human aid, Which abject mortals vainly court! By friends deceived, by foes betrayed, Of fears the prey, of hopes the sport; Nought but the world-redeeming Cross Is able to supply my loss, My burthen to support. ‘Hark! the death-note of the year Sounded by the castle-clock!’ From her sunk eyes a stagnant tear Stole forth, unsettled by the shock; But oft the woods renewed their green, Ere the tired head of Scotland’s Queen Reposed upon the block!

(Shorter Poems 228–9)

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Most obviously, Wordsworth’s use of quotation marks to demarcate Mary’s speech as something heard along with the final commentary on that speech illustrates his disciplining of female performance. But what is interesting about the poem is how invested it is, initially, in the power of that performance. While Williams compresses multisyllabic words into complicated syntax, Wordsworth uses very few words with more than two syllables and keeps the syntax very plain. Like Williams’s, Wordsworth’s poem derives from a single image – the moon shining into Mary’s prison-cell window – as the speaker contrasts her plight at the hand of her ‘sister Queen’ to the ‘soulawakening gleam’ of her ‘higher birth’ represented by the ‘smile of the Moon.’ The reader is not asked to sympathize with someone expressing her loss and, thus, in that expression, her power; rather the reader overhears a philosophical meditation on loss. This meditation takes the form not of a harangue but of a conversation. Mary names the moon in order to acknowledge its ‘greeting.’ However, the formality of the greeting leads Mary to question the moon’s moral ‘intentions’: is this comfort or reproof? What is actually being mourned here is a breakdown of community. The ‘soul-awakening gleam’ revives Mary, but it is fleeting: even her country has stopped thinking of her. Wordsworth revises Williams’s depiction of Elizabeth as a ‘tyrant,’ ‘skill’d in every baser art’ of deception and betrayal, to a woman who simply cannot feel, as God and we can. The contrast is complex. Elizabeth is a woman who cannot feel and so substitutes systems of reason for communities of sympathy. Mary can feel, and the loss of that feeling is thus also a loss of faith, the end of the (verbal) contract that assures humanity of its salvation. The final stanza displaces Williams’s sensibility. The poem shifts from present to past tense, turning Mary’s lament into a narration. The poem is, finally, not the lament of a woman, but the recollection of a man. Wordsworth understood the democratic appeal of the lament. But he also realized that he could temper this power by shifting the emphasis from the one who mourns to the one who watches the one who mourns. Wordsworth might be said to have invented the modern lament as a ‘pure’ or reflective genre, though it would be fairer to say that he helped give the new practices of polite mourning already being produced in commerce, criticism, and politics their literary mode. But Wordsworth’s poetics also enables us to recognize that this transformation was not simply literary but also historical; by extension, performativity – be it of the

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purposeful sort that Wordsworth’s poem exemplifies or the embodied, gendered, and material sort that he abjured – has a history as well. Wordsworth’s lament shows us how the modern idea of performed mourning developed and what it left behind.

NOTES 1 I am drawing here on Derrida’s remarks on the signature at the end of ‘Signature Event Context’ (20–1). 2 See, for instance, Hartman, Levinson, and de Man; for a review of the method see Mills-Court 140–202, and Clymer. 3 The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines the lament as ‘any poem expressing profound grief or mournful regret for the loss of some person or former state, or for some other misfortune.’ 4 For discussions of the challenge to Romantic gender binaries, see Fulford and the essays collected by Mellor. Discussions of the problematizing effects of gender on the mind–body dualism in performative language theory are outlined in Parker and Sedgwick (7–13). 5 Bakhtin: ‘Nineteenth-century linguistics […] while not denying the communicative function of language, tried to place it in the background as something secondary. What it foregrounded was the function of thought emerging independently of communication’ (67). Bourdieu: ‘Only when the making of the “nation” [i.e., in the early nineteenth century], an entirely abstract group based on law, creates new usages and functions does it become indispensable to forge a standard language, impersonal and anonymous like the official uses it has to serve, and by the same token to undertake the work of normalizing the products of the linguistic habitus’ (Language and Symbolic Power 48). 6 The Eighteenth Century Collections Online lists 386 works with the title ‘Complaint’ and 87 with the title ‘Lamentation’ published between 1660 and 1800. These complaints are not to be confused with ‘the complaint tradition,’ which was the starting point for the standardization of language and rhetoric in Britain over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Milroy and Milroy 29–54). 7 Alexiou describes women’s laments in ancient Greece. For anthropological accounts of female lamentation in the modern era, see studies by Serematakis, Caravelli, Kriza, and Lysaght. 8 The literature on the death of Princess Charlotte is exhaustively surveyed by Behrendt. See also Schor (196–229) and Bland (108–18).

Wordsworth’s Lament 99 9 A number of Queen Mary poems were published in the early and middle 1820s. They include Hutchison’s Queen Mary’s Lamentation and Chalmers’s ‘Mary’s Lament’ published in his Poetic Remains of Some of the Scottish Kings.

4 Blasphemy Trials and The Cenci: Parody as Performative VICTORIA MYERS

Blasphemy is a speech act that posits a legitimate authority and simultaneously assaults it. When launched against a state-supported religion, blasphemy allegedly weakens the ideological underpinning of the government by ridiculing the justification for its power. While the blasphemy charge had been used in England after the Restoration mainly to persecute religious nonconformists, especially Unitarians, by 1812 the charge had become a favoured legal strategy to be used against radical reformers. Prosecutors held that disrespect for the Christian religion undermined the ability of government to function because its legal institutions depended on belief in established religion to guarantee its oaths and declarations. Without such grounding, these speech acts would lack the vital component that ensured their force upon the behaviour of the populace. In arguing from this premise, however, government showed reformers the way to impugn the government’s own legitimacy by substituting another religious ground and securing public uptake for a different conception of the constitution. The argument went further: it also betrayed the performativity of legality itself by implying that law was a fiction that required this uptake.1 In this essay, I argue that Shelley integrates blasphemy into a concept of political reform as appropriation of the traditions available in existing institutions. Intensely interested in legal cases that promised to transform the jury into an institution permeable to public opinion and thus to social change, Shelley found this process attempted in the notorious blasphemy trials that took place within a few years of his composition of The Cenci. He commented directly on Daniel Isaac Eaton’s 1812 trial in his open ‘Letter to Lord Ellenborough’; and in his 3 November 1819 letter to Leigh Hunt (on Richard Carlile’s blasphemy

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trial) he even captured some of the parodic style of William Hone’s 1817 defence. Aware of the broad definition of blasphemous libel employed in trials at common law – any utterance that tended to bring Christianity into contempt could legally count as blasphemy – Shelley also saw blasphemy in historical perspective as a potentially powerful performative. The government’s revelation of legal performativity, evident in the Eaton and Hone trials, was available to Shelley, for whom it contributed to the sceptical spirit that could open the minds of others to radically resituating authority. In one of his fragments on reform, Shelley envisioned ‘a system of government by juries,’ believing that once jury trials were freed of the bias of precedent, they would function as the local and immediate operation of enlightened public opinion (Shelley’s Prose 263). In his ‘Philosophical View of Reform,’ furthermore, Shelley proposed to excite public opinion by using the courts, ‘overwhelming’ them with political libel cases and ‘confound[ing] the subtlety of lawyers with the subtlety of the law’ (Shelley’s Prose 259). The combination of blasphemous acts and judicial allusion in The Cenci suggests that he saw these cases as transforming the courts by parodying their methods. When blasphemy is viewed as a kind of parody, as it is in the contemporary blasphemy trials, it alludes to repeated acts within a tradition whose meaning can be shifted over time. In The Cenci, Shelley dramatizes acts of blasphemy: first, in Count Cenci, to show the ability of individuals to appropriate the grounds of belief underpinning performative power, and, second, in Beatrice Cenci, to show the possibility that individuals, though confined within a specific historical horizon, can still fundamentally reconceive their moral standpoint and thus change the grounds of belief. The moral ambiguity that clings to Beatrice’s acts concedes that she incompletely extracts herself from the standpoint of traditional authority, but that ambiguity enforces Shelley’s point about reform. Like parody, reform works by equivocal shifts of meaning that retain the potential for regression as well as progression. Once performed, however, these acts offer a text requiring interpretation and thus activate the mind to contest, more overtly, traditional – and even revolutionary – structures of believing. Eaton and the Shadow Tradition Daniel Isaac Eaton was tried in 1812 for publishing ‘Part III’ of Thomas Paine’s deistic Age of Reason. As Leonard Levy points out, there were few prosecutions against deism during the enlightened eighteenth

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century, but with Paine’s publications that tacit toleration ended: Paine represented the deeply threatening combination of religious nonconformity with radical politics (324). Echoing the early forays into the higher criticism exploited by eighteenth-century deists, he attacked the Old Testament passages that orthodox divines cited as prophesying the acts of Christ, and he impugned the evidence for the New Testament miracles that corroborated Christ’s divine origin and mission. Paine meant his examination as a serious study rather than as a satire on Christianity. Yet, using its results to ridicule revealed religion, he certainly parodied biblical scholarship: These repeated forgeries and falsifications create a well-founded suspicion that all the cases spoken of concerning the person called Jesus Christ are made cases, on purpose to lug in, and that very clumsily, some broken sentences from the Old Testament, and apply them as prophecies of those cases; and that so far from his being the Son of God, he did not exist even as a man – that he is merely an imaginary or allegorical character, as Apollo, Hercules, Jupiter, and all the deities of antiquity were. (Paine 404)

The responsibility for this ridicule, Paine averred, belonged to the perpetrators of falsehoods that constituted ‘an insult to the creator and an injury to human reason’ (394). ‘Is it not,’ he asked, ‘a species of blasphemy to call the New Testament revealed religion, when we see in it such contradictions and absurdities?’ (393). By subsuming the deity into pagan allegory, orthodoxy parodied the rational God of nature. Paine’s notorious reversal of the blasphemy accusation – ‘HE THAT BELIEVES IN THE STORY OF CHRIST IS AN INFIDEL TO GOD’ (417) – pointed the way for successive defendants in the state trials to appropriate government strategy. Eaton repeated Paine’s arguments in his trial, foregrounding his parodic accusation of blasphemy. He asserted that his own views, too, resulted from a close, independent reading of the Bible, and he emphasized the unworthiness of the biblical representation of God in the same paganizing terms. More broadly, he followed Paine in targeting an orthodox religious tradition that sanctified state power. Eaton, however, did not dismiss the power of tradition but took a leaf from Unitarian and other counter-histories of Christianity. According to these, Christians originally considered Jesus a mere man, a position maintained by Gnostics, Essenians, Ebionites, and others in the subsequent contestations with the imperializing church, while the Evangelists

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played the part of sell-outs to the orthodox party (State Trials col. 946). This history, then, left ‘traditions’ which are ‘contrary to those which we have read in our holy scriptures’ (col. 943). Eaton thus doubled the established church’s accounts of its contests with heresy and in that sense parodied orthodox tradition, suggesting that the orthodox tradition itself parodied original Christianity. When Shelley came to characterize Count Cenci, he followed this line of impugning the orthodox appropriation and corruption of an original truth. What was it that the government feared in all this? The picture Eaton developed of an alternative tradition suggested a threat lurking in the shadow cast by orthodoxy. The attorney general, Sir Vicary Gibbs, repeatedly returned, as to an epitome of the heinous crime, to Paine’s assertion, ‘He that believes in the story of Christ is an infidel to God’ (col. 929). Employing the usual strategies of the prosecution in past trials for blasphemous libel, Gibbs targeted the supposed effect of the publication, rather than the author’s or publisher’s intention, or any actual outcome. He told the jury that the ‘pernicious tendency’ of Paine’s book would be to persuade them that ‘the whole of [religion] is a fiction’ (col. 929), and thus it would ‘inevitably’ destroy the sense of duty in their children and domestics. Besides appealing to the jury’s self-conception as fathers and masters, a theme Shelley would foreground in The Cenci, this language opens a gap in the law. It asserts that rendering Christianity fictional made it less efficacious, that ‘belief’ in the ideological underpinnings of this governmental and legal system could be verbally ‘exterminated’ and that real society could thereby be dissolved. The argument rests on the assumption that the judicial system, and in consequence society itself, is secured in much the same way as felicitous illocutionary acts. Belief in Christianity is (to translate Gibbs’s diatribe into John Searle’s terms) a preparatory condition for the efficacy of oaths. Without it the judge’s oath of office, the witness’s testimony under oath, and the jury’s oath to render an honest verdict, all of which ground the existing justice system, would collapse (col. 930). Francis Holt’s ‘quasi-official’ Law of Libel (1812) recalls the extent to which government understood the fictional status of its legitimacy and yet turned that very condition into an exploitable fear: ‘All governments are founded, either in fact, or in a fiction, the utility of which gives it the authority of a fact, upon a compact between the people and their governors in which the former give up all their force and will, all their power and independence, to government’ (quoted in Gilmartin 57). Holt here

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refers to the fiction of the social contract, which in its Tory/High Whig interpretation entails transference of liberty to the state. The concept, moreover, encompasses all of the lesser oaths and promises that enforce social relations. Reformers liked to point out that if the people ceased to believe in the utility of the government, the contract would be broken. A similar consequence afflicted belief in orthodox religion’s grounding of government: if public opinion considered that belief untrue or pernicious, it could no longer ground legal oaths, declarations, and other performatives. Part of the government’s paradoxical strategy was to avow this vulnerability and thus to implant the fear of dissolution in the jury and the populace: merely to hear blasphemous words was to be infected by them. This assumption precluded all defence, since to defend was to allow the dangerous words to be repeated. This quality of infection is exactly what Cenci finds in Beatrice’s verbal assault in act 1, although it is he who later overcomes her in a ‘contaminating mist.’ By arguing that Eaton’s publication had an automatic performative result, Gibbs not only referred to its perlocutionary effect but implied that it exerted illocutionary force. To bring about perlocutionary effect, J.L. Austin has shown, is to persuade someone to believe by means of words (99–100). This concept implies that, between utterance and effect, there would be a temporal gap in which counter-persuasion, second thoughts, or fading impressions could thwart the effect. To exert illocutionary force, however, is to bring about the very condition uttered in the words: there would be no temporal gap between naming someone a blasphemer and his officially being one. This power, according to Austin, belongs only to words uttered with the felicity conditions of the proper conventional context, for example utterance by a judge or jury in a court of law (105). The distinction between perlocutionary effect and illocutionary force is fraught with ambiguity. As John Searle points out, all performative utterances have perlocutionary and illocutionary aspects; they all have effects on their listeners, and in some sense they perform their saying (18). In her analysis of litigation regarding hate language in Excitable Speech, however, Judith Butler shows that the perlocutionary and illocutionary distinctions have become more than two aspects of any given utterance; they have come to be considered two different types of utterances. To classify an utterance as an illocutionary performative is to make it indictable as an action and to deny it protection under whatever constitutional measures exist to protect freedom of speech. In early nineteenth-century Britain, whether the constitution recognized a right to free speech was

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very much a matter for specific court rulings. Prosecution arguments tended to assimilate objectionable language to overt acts. In Eaton’s trial, therefore, the attorney general was willing to grant illocutionary power to blasphemous words in order to consider them more as acts than as speech. How did Eaton take advantage of this situation? He recognized that the power conceded by the attorney general to his words was only a pretext for destroying that power. He knew, furthermore, that his immediate audience – a hand-picked jury – was not with him, but he intended to publish the proceedings after the trial and kept in mind the audience outside the courtroom. Eaton therefore performed a parody on the court proceedings in mock usurpation of their illocutionary power. Copying the form of prosecution, namely the reiteration of precedent, he gave the form of repetition to his own argument. By suggesting how a version of history can become a validated and validating tradition, he advanced the opinion that legitimacy arises in the act of repetition itself. In the affidavit presented at his sentencing hearing, he availed himself of a counter-legal tradition, as he did of a counterreligious tradition in the case proper, by bringing in the minority arguments in past prosecutions of heterodox publications. Defenders of this minority argued that their speech acts had no power to undermine Christianity or to call forth aggression against the state (Levy 293–328); in effect, they argued that opinion, which as constative speech act merely attempts to describe truth, is quite different from ‘overt acts’ or even from performative speech acts. Eaton echoed the ingenuous tone of these defences to dispel similar fears of his heterodox performative power. Yet, at the same time, he ironically posited the power derived from reiterating these arguments in the courtroom. He said he had innocently assumed that everyone now granted that truth benefits from unhindered discussion in which error can be openly corrected, citing two crucial reasons for his assumption. First, he ‘published the said libel in the mistaken notion that it was lawful to discuss the authenticity of any passage in the Holy Scriptures, and to draw any inference therefrom which appeared agreeable to natural reason […] he had believed the same to be the practice of many of the divines of the church of England and others’ (State Trials cols. 951–2). Second, he referred to the example of America, where Paine had ‘been published without any legal censure’ even though ‘the law concerning libel is the same with the law of England’ and even though ‘the Christian religion is […] in full force’ (col. 952). The phrasing in these excuses casts earlier

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arguments in terms of an accomplished legality: the reiteration he refers to operates as custom does in the common law, giving the impression of recognizing public belief. In this way, Eaton not only conveyed to his outside audience that an alternative system, with its own warranting precedents, shadowed the reigning system and waited to be set in place; he also behaved as if that alternative had already succeeded, since it had found its place in public opinion. Margaret Rose describes such a parodic strategy as ‘internalising and foregrounding both the target and the process by which it has become canonised, in the process of quotation itself’ (44). The effect, she says (quoting Tuvia Shlonsky), is ‘to reduce what is of normative status in the original to a convention or mere device’ (44). By reducing legal tradition to mere repetition, Eaton exposed an important crux concerning legitimacy in the governing ideology. J.G.A. Pocock’s sketch of ‘the traditionalist mind’ suggests what Eaton may have sensed: A tradition, in its simplest form, may be thought of as an indefinite series of repetitions of an action, which on each occasion is performed on the assumption that it has been performed before; its performance is authorised […] by the knowledge, or the assumption, of previous performance […] Furthermore, it may well be that it is the assumption, rather than the factual information, of previous performance that is operative; each action provides the grounds for assuming that it had a predecessor. (237)

Pocock here explains the basis, ‘prescriptive and presumptive,’ on which Edmund Burke was interpreted as justifying the British status quo at the end of the eighteenth century. By focusing only on the element of repetition and leaving out the context of official settings and personnel in which repetition occurs, indeed by suggesting that these might only be other forms of repetition, Pocock reveals that the court’s official fear of blasphemy is vulnerable to ironic reversal; its adoption of tradition ‘in its simplest form’ grants a simple way to oppose that tradition. Hone and the Identity-Stealing Shadow While Eaton’s trial followed the strategy of launching counter-tradition against tradition – advertising a contest between ‘system and countersystem,’ in Kevin Gilmartin’s words (121) – William Hone tried to

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conform the existing legal practice to its professed standard of justice. The works Hone was prosecuted for publishing, unlike Paine’s Age of Reason Part III, were all deliberate parodies, in which the religious texts (the Catechism, the Litany, and the Creed) served as vehicles for satirizing the ministerial party, but were not themselves (he claimed) the object of satire.2 While Eaton referred to a competing (Unitarian) account of Christian history or to an alternative (American) scheme of toleration to replace English legal tradition, Hone constructed legal precedent in relation to a cultural tradition known to English subjects of every description. This tradition was explicitly parodic in form, since it shifted meanings and implicitly relied on equivocation. Insisting that law must rely on the general culture for guidance in interpreting acts, Hone showed the law’s permeability to parodic shifts. These shifts in turn lend their character to legal precedent. Sir Samuel Shepherd, the attorney general and prosecutor in Hone’s three trials, argued, in the same manner as Sir Vicary Gibbs in Eaton’s trial, that the great danger of Hone’s texts was their ability to destabilize: ‘Even in better cultivated minds, the firmness of moral rectitude is shaken, and it often becomes necessary to make great mental exertion to shake off the influence of these productions, and recal [sic] the mind to a true feeling towards sacred truths’ (Hone 1: 5). Shepherd gave a psychological turn to his analysis, averring the performative power of parody to sap the will and to shift the direction of the mind. Not just children and menials, but the educated – even the attorney general himself – might be infected. Shelley later used similar images of psychological instability when he depicted Count Cenci’s perception that Beatrice’s persuasive power confused his mind and weakened his will. Hone’s counter-strategy was to satirize the government’s claims on clarity and to appear as an advocate for clarity himself. Instead of threatening the court with a shadow tradition like Eaton, Hone asserted that the law of libel itself was deliberately vague: ‘It was, in fact, a shadow – it was undefinable’ (1: 38). As Gilmartin (among others) has shown, this accusation proved a popular one among radicals: ‘Imprecision and insubstantiality were treated as key features of the corrupt English version of a reign of terror’ (116). As the ironic answer to the prosecutors’ assertions that the blasphemy publications contaminated the textual foundations of law and society (Hone 1: 45), Hone argued that government’s accusation of blasphemy unseated his very identity by maligning his text. This was the effect Shelley would treat so problematically in the transformation of Beatrice.

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Like Eaton, Hone made belief an issue, but focused on legal reasons for believing a person is what he says he is, on evidence and evidentiary rules, rather than focusing on the foundation in belief for the performative acts of law. Nonetheless, evidence too became a performative issue in Hone’s trials. In blasphemy cases, the prosecution usually adduced the fact and cost of publication to prove malicious intention and relied simply on reading the publication in court to show its self-evidently dangerous tendency. In Hone’s first trial, Shepherd, however, also took advantage of what he found to hand in the court. Interrupted by the audience’s laughter while quoting from Hone’s parody of the Ten Commandments, he followed Judge Abbott’s sharp rebuke with a comment of his own: ‘My Lord, if there be any person here who can raise a smile at the reading of the Defendant’s publication, it is the fullest proof of the baneful effect it has had’ (1: 6). Hone observed the weakness of this argument: ‘The Attorney-General had stated, that the very smile of a person was an evidence of the tendency of that publication. He [Hone] denied that. The smile might arise from a thing wholly different from the feeling of the person who wrote that publication’ (1: 13). He later interpreted the smile as corroborating his own argument that the parody was political satire, not religious blasphemy. Hone, in short, made the point that acts of blurring and shifting characterized the illogical, opportunistic argument of the government, not his own publication. Yet the smile remained a sign of audience collusion in parody, a gesture whose potential as a sign of subversive power Shelley would centre in Count Cenci and thus suggest that claims concerning performative power are equivocal and that both authority and challenge depend on uptake. Hone’s project of clarifying was not overtly parodic but took the form of direct and literal attacks on the court’s practices. In the disputes he thereby occasioned, however, he involved the court in a parody of its own current procedures and promoted the de-legitimizing laughter it proved futile to control. Hone especially faulted the court’s concept of proof in libel cases. In the attorney general’s informations filed against him, he found that the exact language ‘did not charge him with blasphemous publications; it charged, that he, being an impious and wickedly disposed person, and intending to excite impiety and irreligion, did publish that which was stated in the information’ (1: 11). Hone gives the words their common meaning: the attorney general reflected on his character by making a statement about his actual intentions in publishing. The legal interpretation of this language was, of

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course, quite different. William Wickwar explains in regard to criminal libel that publication with ‘malicious intention’ legally defines the crime, but that ‘a “malicious intention” meant a foreseeable tendency.’ Withdrawn from the realm of common usage, ‘malice did not mean spite and intention did not mean motive’ but rather pointed to ‘the possible ill consequences of a publication.’ From this possibility the court ‘construed […] an evil intention’ by means of ‘the fiction of “constructive malice” or the doctrine of “presumptive intent”’ (19–20). Here, as in Eaton’s trial, belief in a fiction was required to uphold the force of legal pronouncements. More clearly in Hone’s trial, however, that fiction constructed the procedure for determining innocence and guilt. Marcus Wood (121–30) and Olivia Smith (178–201), who have extensively commented on the trial, link Hone’s parodic defence to his strategy of evoking a popular, therefore subversive, literature.3 To their description, I would add that Hone’s project, which entailed showing the jury how to read a parodic text within a legitimate literary tradition, also insinuated that tradition is rewritten parodically. On the surface, Hone intended to demonstrate only how it is possible for a parody to do no damage to the text it parodies and to show that, unlike Eaton, he did not contumaciously repeat the very offence for which he was being tried. He meant therefore to reveal that the only reason his parodies were prosecuted was that they were aimed against the current ministerial party, while other parodies of religious texts, such as the pro-ministerial parodies of George Canning and John Reeves, were passed over. In his exemplary parodies the discrepancy between tenor and vehicle illustrated Hone’s assertion that scripture was not the target, even though it might be the object parodied. The scriptural intention, he suggested, remains in the reader’s mind intact and alongside the intention expressed in the altered version. Yet this juxtaposition also reveals how heterodoxy could arise within orthodoxy through reinterpretation. By repeating accepted parodies in a new context, Hone conveyed the method of radicalism working within traditions and institutions. As Rose asserts of parody, ‘the target text may not only be satirised but also “refunctioned”’ (21, quoting Brecht). Hone was bringing literary tradition and interpretation into a judicial venue, which the court wanted to keep stable by exercising performatives and limiting constative speech acts. In light of this insinuating evidence, Hone’s attack on Ellenborough’s power of declaration forms part of a coherent parodic project. Ellenborough had countered Hone’s evidence by ‘declar[ing]’ it ‘inadmissible’ (2: 13).

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After asserting categorically, ‘I shall not receive it,’ Ellenborough then threw upon Hone the responsibility for continuing to use the parodies. Hone, however, refused to treat the declaration as a felicitous performative. He pressed Ellenborough to explain its ‘meaning’: MR. HONE.

– I really don’t clearly understand what your Lordship means by the word evidence. I am ignorant of the technical rules of evidence, and therefore I apply to your Lordship for a more explicit statement of your meaning […] I don’t know, as a man of plain understanding, what may and what may not be given in evidence. But my intention is to read to the Jury certain other publications that I consider […] so essential to my defence that I cannot defend myself unless I do read portions of these publications […] LORD ELLENBOROUGH. – You may go on, and exercise your own discretion. I tell you what rule I shall adopt in my direction to the Jury […] MR. HONE. – If your Lordship had condescended to explain to me your meaning, by saying that these works are not admissible in evidence at all, I should know at once what I am to expect […] Mr. Hone paused for a few moments as if waiting for an answer, and then continued his address to the Jury. (2: 13–14)

Hone’s text gives the impression that Ellenborough, not Hone, is silenced, while Hone continues his same line of defence. He thus takes charge of the court and, through parody, shifts its procedure while making it conform to its avowed standard of impartiality. Hone’s various comments show that he was quite savvy about the conventions governing speech acts in a legal context. He made it his business to ensure that the court’s declarations would meet the felicity conditions required, and he explained those conditions to the jury: the defendant’s clear understanding of the charges, a trial by a jury properly selected, a jury free to consider law as well as fact, not prejudiced by outside or inside pre-judging or intimidation – and, to cap all, free to hear evidence appropriate to the case. In these confrontations, Hone carried further Eaton’s project of illustrating the conditions on legal performativity. Eaton had pursued this line by reducing the form of legitimacy to mere repetition and pointing to the power of audience uptake. Hone relied on repetition, with a difference, and uncovered the performative structure of legal identity formation. Not only his own identity, but also (unexpectedly) that of the prosecutor and the judge, depended upon uptake by the audience-jury.

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In the equivocations and elusiveness of Shepherd and Ellenborough, there is frequently some question about who is on trial. In one of their confrontations, Hone so far succeeded in putting Ellenborough on the defensive that the judge was already launched on an elaborate explanation of his behaviour, when Hone interrupted him: ‘My Lord! my Lord! it is I who am upon my trial, not your Lordship’ (2: 21). Hone’s outcry can be read as merely a protest against the judge’s practice of interrupting him. But it can also be read as an ontological assertion. If the state has the power of declaring, through its judicial system, then Hone’s identity is conditioned by law. As Judith Butler argues, along with Louis Althusser, individuals are linguistic beings inasmuch as they are social beings. They attain being-in-language by being ‘called,’ as one is hailed by a policeman, and they are interpellated into society with whatever invidious distinction may attend that calling. Hone anticipated this conclusion when he argued that merely to be called had done permanent injury to himself as a social being. He cited the post-indictment newspaper reports and speeches in parliament in which he was named ‘blasphemer’ before the trials had even begun, and he tried to confine the calling to the courtroom and specifically to the jury, whom he had some hopes of instructing in the literary interpretation of his intention. Making himself a complex text, which they had to read within a conventional tradition, he set this instruction against the instruction of the judge, challenged the court’s departure from the constitution, and, more fundamentally, undercut the performative power of the judge and conferred it on the citizen. Like Butler, he asked who had the power to do the calling. Butler shows that the state is normally viewed as the ‘prior and more powerful subject,’ with authority to ‘call,’ but in hate speech cases the perpetrator is also figured as having that performative power. ‘The inflated and efficacious utterance attributed to hate speech […] is itself modeled on the speech of a sovereign state, understood as a sovereign speech act, a speech act with the power to do what it says’ (Excitable Speech 77). In bringing such accusations, the victims implicitly ascribe illocutionary performative power to other citizens. Hone’s political opponents, the ministerial party, hailed him into court, accusing him of hate speech against Christianity. In doing so, however, they constituted him as juridical subject, giving him a public voice and permitting him (albeit reluctantly) to repeat his offence, enhance its dramatic power, and broaden the scope of its effect. Hone pointed this out when he asked, ‘What was gained by indicting? […] Prosecution created a demand for the thing prosecuted; and, in consequence either of

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prosecution or suppression, curiosity was always excited to a publication supposed to be unattainable or scarce’ (3: 35). Hone’s question follows the logic of Butler’s argument against prosecuting hate speech but points out the potential advantage of prosecution to the forces of reform. As prior subject, the government literally had the power it accused the perpetrator of possessing, and in calling the perpetrator it allowed him to participate in its power. Depicting itself as victim, the government lost power by that transaction – and Hone, the real victim, gained. Hone (we could say) antecedently hailed the government into court, since his published parodies were a calling to which the government answered by its legal accusation. In this sense, he usurped the interpellating role of the state, linguistically calling it into being: the trial became his fiction in the agon of his self-proving. Although, like Eaton, Hone frequently returned to the concept of an ancient constitution, he also appropriated a common literary tradition, showing that it comes into the present by acts of adaptation. Unlike Eaton, who recurred to an originary moment, Hone used the model of literary transmission to appropriate the more complex (though still Burkean) concept of an always altering constitution. Eaton’s approach was akin to what James Epstein observes in English radical appeals to an ancient constitution: ‘While historical in form [it] was often a simultaneous appeal to some notion of natural law’ (21). Hone availed himself of the historical form more extensively than did Eaton, assuming (as Epstein says) that ‘there was a structured interdependence between these two modes of reasoning within English political discourse since certain rights “inherent in the People” had been either fully or partially realized historically’ (21). Using the argument of an always altering tradition, Hone, like radicals referring to the ancient constitution, was able ‘to participate in a powerful national myth structure, to evoke the authoritative force of a “master fiction” of British society’ (76). Gilmartin, however, observes that this strategy risks absorbing the ‘counter-system’ of radical reform back into the ‘system’ of oppression entrenched in legal precedent (53–65). By alluding to a continuously altering tradition, even one outside the law itself, Hone might have done no more than reiterate Burke. But it is important that he would be foregrounding the Burke who defended gradual change, backgrounding the Burke who defended the status quo. If we read Hone’s parodic method within the performative framework articulated by Butler, moreover, he did more than rely on the slow evolution of the system: he revealed that when the institution

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called someone into court, it gave him a public voice capable of calling a different judicial process into being. Shelley’s The Cenci: ‘Shadow after Shadow’ When Shelley takes up the question of appropriation in The Cenci, he wrestles with the same problem of whether reform is to be absorbed into the slowly evolving system or to effect some substantial, immediate change. Although the play can be read as placing Beatrice on the horns of this dilemma, the readers’ judgment is complicated by Count Cenci’s participation in acts ambiguously anti- and pro-establishment. The two modes in which Eaton and Hone collar the prosecution for blasphemous libel – mocking the foundation of law with a shadow of itself and exposing the law as an encroaching, identity-stealing shadow – turn up in the play in the shifting of power between Count Cenci and his daughter. In straightforward allegory, Beatrice functions as the mocking shadow of Cenci as representative of authority; Cenci in turn functions as the contaminating shadow which confuses and transforms her identity as innocent subject. Yet Cenci is also the mocking shadow of the pope, and he also perceives Beatrice as a contaminating agent of rebellion. Cenci’s parodic language appropriates the religious tradition even as it violates this tradition. Critics have usually allied Cenci with the church-state as target of the play’s criticism; however, as several readers have pointed out, the papal church-state barely tolerates him.4 Even though the papacy colludes in covering up his crimes in order to extort large gifts from him, it finally (albeit belatedly) ends its support, recognizing that alliance with him threatens the moral basis of its legitimacy. In his treatment of the paternal state in the play, Michael Kohler has effectively argued that the persecuted characters actually appeal to a state that bases its claims to legitimacy on the coincidence of its legal acts with a moral ground. Against Cenci’s continued cruelty to Beatrice and her family, the pope would intervene, like a Court of Chancery, if their pleas could reach him. For Kohler, Chancery symbolizes an important change in Hanoverian England, where the state was attempting to preserve the metaphysical grounds of moral legitimacy and draw these grounds into its transition from direct patriarchal exercises of power to indirect paternal ‘influence’ diffused through institutions and agencies (549, 559–63). It was already becoming the liberal institution that reformers like Bentham and Brougham were trying to

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effect. Cenci, by contrast, stands for merely an individual instance of power, embarrassing to the emergent liberal state. My interpretation likewise emphasizes Cenci’s conflict with constituted authority, but without relinquishing the ways in which he repeats that authority – especially his claiming the religious ground to sanction his violent (speech) acts. Insofar as he usurps that religious ground, he repeats the history of the papacy, which Shelley (like Eaton) believed had appropriated the Christian religion for self-aggrandizement, and Cenci thus figures the tyranny of establishments. To the extent that he explicitly attacks the moral hypocrisy of the papal state – for example, by baiting Cardinal Camillo – he parodies the church-state and figures the revolutionary attack on establishments. As usurper, Cenci is a throwback to ancient assumptions of the father’s absolute power, on which an ideology of patriarchal state power was based; as blasphemer, however, he not only deserves Paine’s and Eaton’s accusation of orthodox blasphemy, he also unexpectedly anticipates a philosophy of individualism, his charismatic and self-declaratory power bringing in some of the Sadean undertones of the French Revolution as he defends his own autonomy and resents those who ‘revile a man’s peculiar taste’ (1.1.95). His references to father-power expose the operation of legal performatives, in the way Eaton and Hone expose it, as the effect of repetition secured by a fiction and exercising the power to call the identity of his victims. But dialectically he also represents the vulnerability of legal performatives, by requiring the uptake of his version of the fiction by which, for example, he declares the deity’s sanctioning of his acts. He figures the need and the possibility for anti-establishment attacks to claim a similar basis. Shelley brings from the trials two issues concerning belief: the use, and usurpation, of religious grounds to warrant performatives and the vulnerability of one’s social identity in receiving and exercising such acts. With Cenci’s double figuring of repression and revolution, his blasphemies argue that anyone, not just the reigning legal system, can appropriate religious belief to ground his or her performative language. For the legal system to rely on such a ground means ‘at once to destroy the barrier which reason places between vice and virtue, and leave to unprincipled fanaticism a plea whereby it may excuse every act of frenzy which its own wild passions and the inspiration of the Deity have engendered’ (Shelley’s Prose 76–7). In this passage from his ‘Letter to Lord Ellenborough,’ Shelley draws out the consequences of resting law upon opinions which have no rational and therefore no

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stable basis: they can be used by the establishment and by its sectarian critics equally well – the consequence that Eaton himself hinted in his reduction of legal tradition to mere repetition. In the letter, Shelley uses that consequence to startle the government into self-reflection, but it may also serve as advice to reformers. Like Eaton, they too could parody the government’s strategies. In doing so, however, they would need to discriminate between repeating government strategies to gain power and parodying those strategies to expose and demystify them. Shelley makes these discriminations a crux in interpreting Beatrice’s post-rape acts. The double use of Cenci makes problematical the difference between legal performative and the reformist appropriation of legal performative. By combining the same functions of representing the religious tradition and holding its uses up to criticism as Cenci does, Beatrice more obviously situates the problem in would-be reformers. But she also figures a historical solution Shelley was trying to define by 1819. Even though he links church-state oppression with ‘the dead hand of the past,’ he also asserts that radical breaks require a precedent tradition. In ‘A Philosophical View of Reform,’ for example, he reconstructs an encouraging lineage of radical acts, beginning with Jesus Christ, ‘that great Reformer’ (Shelley’s Prose 230). This radical tradition is embedded as contradiction in the ideology of establishments, which took ‘names’ from the work of reformers and turned them into ‘symbols of domination and imposture’ (230). Like Eaton, Shelley asserts an original truth (though not the only one) and argues that, while subsequent history is dominated by the usurpation and corruption of the truth, the original continues to be accessible and fuels reform: Jesus as great reformer persists in scriptural and doctrinal subtext. Rather than arguing that reformers should work to substitute a shadow tradition for the reigning ideology, however, when Shelley contemplates reformist breaks with the past, he also advises saving as much as possible from preceding formulations: ‘When the people shall have obtained, by whatever means, the victory over their oppressors […] there will remain the great task of accommodating all that can be preserved of ancient forms with the improvements of the knowledge of a more enlightened age in legislation, jurisprudence, government, and religious and academical institutions’ (Shelley’s Prose 260). Thus, in this respect, his argument is more like Hone’s invocation of parodic tradition, which perpetually changes what it preserves. Not only does Shelley argue for gradually changing institutions through enlightenment, he also finds a positive

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value in institutions with a persisting tradition. This is not simply appropriation; it is also approximation to a still-emerging rational standard. Hugh Roberts has argued that Shelley’s complex, and often contradictory, concept of history is an attempt to negotiate between ‘a skeptical revolutionism that conceives of political change as absolute negativity,’ as total ‘effacement of former identity,’ and a therapeutically conservative idealism that would ‘“heal” the division between mind and world, subject and object, citizen and state, that the radical Enlightenment has forced open’ (35–6, 50). Shelley’s recommendation of rapprochement between tradition and change instances his attempt to turn the experience of history into a reformist credo. This concept of history as appropriation and approximation informs Shelley’s characterization of Beatrice’s performative speech acts early in The Cenci. In Lucretia’s description, Beatrice’s language is Christlike: at the celebration of his sons’ deaths, which Cenci believes his curse brought about, she ‘with strong words / Checked his unnatural pride’; and Lucretia testifies, ‘I could see / The devil was rebuked that lives in him’ (2.1.44–6). Associating Beatrice with Christ as intercessor and protector against a vengeful father, Lucretia’s remarks show that Beatrice’s ‘strong words’ have exercised a persuasive power long before the time at which the play opens: ‘you have ever stood / Between us and your father’s moody wrath […] your firm mind / Has been our only refuge and defence’ (2.1.47–50).5 At the same time that, saintlike, Beatrice exhibits a performative power resting on a religious tradition, she also approaches a rational perception of religion. She discriminates between what God should do and what He does do, struggling (like Hone with regard to legal tradition) to bring His behaviour into accordance with the precepts of Christian mercy and justice. Believing the traditional claims that God will protect the innocent and punish the wicked, she rejects Cenci’s claim that God effected his curse upon his sons: ‘Had it been true, there is a God in Heaven, / He [Cenci] would not live to boast of such a boon’ (1.3.52–3). Once convinced the report of the sons’ death is true, she urges her father to ‘Bow thy white head before offended God, / And we will kneel around, and fervently / Pray that he pity both ourselves and thee’ (1.3.157–9). In light of Roberts’s historical argument, Beatrice is trying to reconcile traditional religion with a rational morality. Their coincidence would in turn maintain continuity in her social identity and ground her challenge against paternal oppression as well as reveal the (il)legal practice that sustains it. Her failure points to Shelley’s argument that the moral

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ground for legal decisions has become ambiguous because of efforts to protect vested interests against social change. Shelley located the reformist project in the moral dimension of belief and its relation to legal performatives at least as early as Eaton’s trial. In his ‘Letter to Lord Ellenborough,’ he scrutinized the judge’s legal ‘decrees,’ asserting that the court has adduced ‘antiquated precedents,’ which have only ‘palliat[ed]’ – not legitimated – his speech acts (Shelley’s Prose 73). He lays down the premise that legitimacy requires conforming the decree not simply to positive law, and not simply to policy, but to justice, to a rational standard that eludes the arbitrary repetition of antiquated precedents. Justice as rational standard is immutable, while religion, being opinion, changes over time. Shelley therefore disputes the court’s assumption that a religious ground warrants legal performativity, but he does not dispute whether there is legal performativity and a ground for it. Admittedly, rational morality, which Shelley defines as ‘the duty of a man and a citizen,’ also produces judgments susceptible of variation, in that it ‘is founded on the relations which arise from the association of human beings, and which vary with the circumstances produced by the different states of this association’ (76). Shelley, however, expected legal procedure to rest on facts which are the givens of human psychology and social relations; legally enforced duties ought to be consistent with ‘other facts, physical and moral, which, depending on our organization, and relative situations, must remain acknowledged so long as man is man’ (78). This utilitarian view concedes that the terms of morality can change, but only when the givens of psychology and social relations change. There must still remain a consistent relation among these. Injustice becomes perceptible when contradiction arises between psychological or social givens and the terms of morality. There is no need to wait for the impartial verdict of history. Even the temporally confined individual, like Beatrice, can perceive the discrepancy between her psycho-physical suffering and the justice claimed for religionsupported law. By assuming that the conception of Christianity should conform to ‘nature and reason’ (Shelley’s Prose 78), and by demonstrating Cenci’s inconsistency with that conception, Beatrice holds him to an immutable standard supposed at one time to have been instantiated in Christianity (a standard analogous to the hypothetical ancient constitution). Her adherence to this standard is evident in the banquet scene, where she explains her justification for pleading against Cenci. When she

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‘entreat[s]’ the assembled guests to use their power to remove her and her family from Cenci’s authority, she points to the contradictions between the premises legitimizing authority and Cenci’s actual behaviour. The company have already witnessed his unnatural joy at the death of his sons. She follows up: ‘What, if we, / The desolate and the dead, were his own flesh […] whom he is bound / To love and shelter?’ (1.3.103–6). She further invites them to ‘think’ through the psychological process by which ‘a child’s prone mind,’ initially taking for granted the coincidence of the father’s authority with his educative function, attempts to reconcile his cruelty (her experience of bodily and mental pain) with that standard by supposing he exercised ‘paternal chastisement.’ That effort has taken her through crises of doubt by which she finally relinquishes respect for her father and maintains the rational standard by supposing it located in God. Thus, Beatrice at this point evidences Shelley’s 1812 confidence that it is possible to attain a moral concept of justice, one developed by the normal exercise of reason and the senses. But in 1819 Shelley recognizes the need still to link rational morality to traditional belief in order to preserve the beauty of moral elements in that belief. Once Beatrice exercises her analysis, however, her belief in God’s justice must also meet the test of consistency. Her rational application of the religious ground eventually breaks into sceptical questioning of that ground, a move which for Shelley presages the Enlightenment’s gradual destruction of superstition. Her vacillation – even at the end of the play she is not ready to abandon trust in God’s justice, though it leaves her ‘cold’ (5.4.89) – shows that the destruction of superstition is incomplete in the historical moment of the play because the community does not support its destruction. That belief still defines the ground of legal identity formation. Beatrice’s identity and her sense of herself as innocent still depend on comparison between her acts and a Christian moral standard which a pusillanimous community has (in effect) allowed Cenci to alter in favour of his individual exercise of power. In this play, Shelley psychologizes the operation of legal performativity, carrying out the hints already present in Hone’s trial. The banquet scene functions as a quasi-trial, with the noble guests as a panel of judges. In this context, Beatrice’s rebuke to Cenci – ‘Retire thou, impious man’ (1.3.146), a parody of his ‘Retire to your chamber, insolent girl!’ (1.3.145) – is an attempt to appropriate the religious grounds of justice that should animate the guests by exercising them performatively herself. Beatrice’s retort inflicts on Cenci the confused state described by

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the attorney general in Hone’s trial as the effect of blasphemous parody: ‘My brain is swimming round’ (1.3.164). It disorganizes his faculties, weakens his will, and temporarily prevents him from acting. His fear of impotence argues that, with the cooperation of the company, Beatrice could successfully overthrow Cenci’s government. The guests refuse her evidence, not because it is unconvincing, but because (she discerns) it does not qualify in a judicial context, in which the de facto possessor of power is re-legitimated by repeated recognitions of his power. Their refusal to speak at the crucial moment signifies a defection of justice from her case: ‘Can one tyrant overbear / The sense of many best and wisest men? / Or is it that I sue not in some form / Of scrupulous law, that ye deny my suit?’ (1.3.133–6). In this trial Cenci’s blasphemy against God is forgotten (like Canning’s in Hone’s trial), Beatrice’s attack against Cenci is condemned (by the refusal of the guests), and she is successfully dismissed from the social scene (by his labelling her ‘insane’). Shelley exhibits Cenci’s success in reproducing his rupture of the moral-religious ground in other characters as well. Psychologizing Eaton’s parodic depiction of legitimacy as reiteration, characters who promise to back Beatrice mentally repeat Cenci’s performative acts. In act 2, Cenci visits Beatrice after the aborted celebration of his sons’ deaths; ‘one little word; / One look, one smile,’ awakening Beatrice to Cenci’s threat to her identity, performatively changes her psychological state (2.1.64). Cenci’s smile, a prelude to the ‘contaminating mist’ of act 3 (3.1.17), accompanies other demonstrations of his performative power when he asserts that God fulfilled his curse against his sons and, again, when he gains the belief of Giacomo’s family in the tale that Giacomo squandered their wealth. Evoking the attorney general’s appropriation of the equivocal courtroom smile, Cenci’s smile recurs in the ‘false smiles’ of Orsino (1.2.33), just as his abuse of the blasphemy accusation reappears in Orsino’s reprimand of Lucretia’s ‘blasphemy’ (3.1.181). Orsino has studied the Cenci family, especially the Count, and has discovered that the source of his power for conscienceless evil lies in the ‘self-anatomy’ which ‘teach[es] the will / Dangerous secrets’ (2.2.110–11). Self-anatomy, in the casuist’s grip, acquaints him with his desires, which the familiarity borne of repetition renders acceptable because they thus appear to him natural.6 Then, as Cenci imagines begetting a demonic image of himself upon Beatrice, Orsino endeavours to beget an image of himself upon Giacomo, inducing him to ‘look / Upon the monster of [his own] thought, until / It grew familiar

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to desire’ (5.1.22–4). He opens Giacomo to imagining murder by prompting him to the self-anatomy that has freed Cenci’s conscience and his own. The self-anatomy awakens the imagination, only to subject it to a reiteration of Cencian strategies. By producing Cenci’s effect both upon Orsino, a secret enemy to Beatrice’s innocence, and upon Giacomo, her brother and well-wishing companion of her revolt, Shelley gives psychological dimension to the history of appropriation. The psychological dimension recasts reiteration as the contamination of the thinking process. In villain and victim alike, Shelley outlines a world in which Cenci’s prayers, curses, and charms can have performative power. Shelley, however, does not confine his concept of appropriation to the model of Eaton, though he gives full play to radical fears that appropriation will result in self-corruption. He shows that power weakens as it diffuses through those reiterations. Orsino’s rationalizing echoes the government’s accusations against Eaton and Hone, and thus recapitulates the weak logic of institution-supported self-interest. Like the Count, Orsino possesses an imagination capable of picturing the object of desire and an intellect capable of strategizing the means. Yet because he equivocates with his still-speaking conscience, these abilities do not give persuasive power to his urging words. He declares to Beatrice vows she easily dismantles, and instead of imposing a ‘contaminating mist,’ as do Cenci’s words and acts, which, ‘substantial, heavy, thick,’ will ‘[glue] / [Her] fingers and [her] limbs to one another’ (3.1.17–20), he can manage only to ‘clasp the phantom of unfelt delights’ (3.1.141). Lacking the physical force behind Cenci’s virtually illocutionary speech acts, his promises can succeed only as rhetorical persuasion with vacillating souls like Giacomo. Yet if Orsino’s strategies against Beatrice repeatedly backfire and ultimately bring him down, an illustration of the progressively weaker links in the chain of corruption, Giacomo’s fluctuating moves also illuminate the everpresent potentiality for the defeat of rebellion. He produces language neither illocutionary nor persuasive. Since he ‘dares not fashion [his desires] into words’ (2.2.85), he merely accedes to the decision of Beatrice, finding in her the sanction and the performance of his desire. At the supposed moment of the murder, he imagines himself like Cenci, a father whose son awaits word of his assassination; his thought is an act of compassion for fathers but also subsumes his identity in Cenci’s. If belief can be corrupted, corruption vitiated, and reform assimilated to corruption, how is a break possible? Beatrice’s adoption of violence after the rape reveals that the experience of the body could confine one

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to a mere repetition of the bodily violence it has always experienced. There must be for her a social, public venue in which she can repeat this bodily difference as language and, as Rose says, refunction it. By thus forcing it to legal recognition, she could make one of the many individual breaks in institutional history that would eventually alter the norms that ground legal practice.7 Much as Hone fears his identity will be defined within tautological legal fictions, however, Beatrice believes that the act of rape, interpreted in the context of a father-justifying institution, will tautologically define her. In this impasse, Shelley illustrates two scenarios of revolutionary outcome. In the first, Beatrice’s usurpation of institutional justice, her act of murder by proxy, performs a violent repetition of her initial parody of Cenci. ‘Retire thou, impious man!’ now takes the form of an overt act. Instead of being the shadow which Cenci’s act casts, Beatrice decides she can be the act which casts the shadow: the thing she aims to do ‘shall make / The thing that I have suffered but a shadow’ (3.1.87–8). But before she even moves into action, she senses an ‘undistinguishable [and undistinguishing?] mist / Of thoughts, which rise, like shadow after shadow, / Darkening each other’ (3.1.170–2). In terms of Shelley’s ‘Philosophical View of Reform,’ the murder is the act of revolution contaminated by revenge, both justified as an act of desperation and deplored as retarding genuine reform. Beatrice’s desire for revenge absorbs her into Cenci’s identity. Reiterating Cenci’s parody of Christianity, she too invokes God to sanction desires naturalized by self-anatomy. In the second scenario, Shelley alludes to another alternative presented in his ‘Philosophical View of Reform,’ which argues that public opinion in England ought first to [be] excited to action, and the durability of those forms within which the oppressors intrench [sic] themselves brought perpetually to the test of its operation […] For this purpose government ought to be defied, in cases of questionable result, to prosecute for political libel. All questions relating to the jurisdiction of magistrates and courts of law respecting which any doubt could be raised ought to be agitated with indefatigable pertinacity. (Shelley’s Prose 258)

Shelley therefore gives us another scene of legal performativity at the end of the play, an alternative to murder. Although here necessarily subsequent to murder and, in consequence, rendered ambiguous, the scene nonetheless depicts what Beatrice might have accomplished had she brought Cenci to trial. Conducting her own defence, like Hone she

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makes an issue of the evidence which is to warrant a declaration of what she is. She purposes to conform the court’s practices to a rational standard of justice. We should not be detoured by the fact that she focuses on torture, a mode of proof which had been banned from English legal procedure; her target is the court’s confidence in decisions bound to reiterated legal practice. She persuades Camillo, the pope’s chief justiciary, to imagine himself under torture and willing to ‘confess any thing’ (5.2.55), even the murder of his beloved nephew. Having brought Camillo to urge her innocence, she also applies to Marzio, the confessed murderer, to recant his testimony to her complicity. Here she performs an act of mental torture which brings him to deny she is a ‘parricide’ (5.2.106). Through this ‘torture’ (5.2.110), she both confirms her argument to Camillo and parodies the court’s procedure, which performatively brings about the confession it requires. She thereby frustrates, by reproducing, the court’s conception of evidence. This process also restages or refunctions the word ‘parricide.’ She is as guilty of the act of murdering her father as Hone was of publishing parodies criticizing the government, but just as he availed himself of the fact that he was charged with blasphemous rather than political libel, she uses the fact that she is charged with killing her father, whereas morally Cenci never was a father to her. Even if Beatrice does not gain from the legal system a declaration of innocence, as Hone does, she bequeaths her story as a case which requires interpretation of an equivocal object (Shelley’s Prose 259). It thus pushes the limits of the legal institution beyond the boundaries of legal form into the realm of moral distinction – or, conversely, brings moral distinction (the problematics of casuistry) within the court. Like Hone, Shelley learned the way to include interpretation of intention in the judicial procedure. Where there can be no utter sincerity, the victim must present her opponents with a literary text which can be interpreted by reference both to the reigning and to a revolutionary fiction. Both are tautologies, but the equivocation signals the excess of imagination which looks beyond the present complicity to an as-yet-unarticulated social structure. As Hugh Roberts says, in his Lucretian explanation of Shelley’s concept of historical break, ‘no effect is the complete and only possible expression of its cause’ (259). As a result, although ‘we constantly try to reproduce the past in the present […] there is always more “information” in a culture, or cultural practice, than we can accept as “significant”’ (266–7); an excess of information eludes the efforts of an establishment to control it, and thus ‘innovation arises out of the infinite complexity of the

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tradition itself’ (271). The tautologies of institutional practice are open to the breaks already experienced in the individual’s psyche: ‘At each stage the attempt to repair a perceived error in the present state of things leads, through a feedback loop, or spiral, of historical development, to a new “stage” of social complexity’ (215). This conclusion asserts that Beatrice participates in a cultural change she does not herself wholly understand. Like the illustrious in ‘A Philosophical View of Reform,’ she joins ‘the priests of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present’ (Shelley’s Prose 240).

NOTES 1 The emphasis on uptake in this essay is much influenced by Esterhammer, Romantic Performative 43–6. 2 Marcus Wood has observed that Hone’s argument was ingenuous since precisely these texts formed the core of the educational curriculum which the British government, in a move toward ideological control, was attempting to impose on lower-class children through its controversial Lancastrian system (107–11). 3 Although she emphasizes Hone’s promotion of a working-class radical tradition, Smith admits that Hone’s citation of parodies was meant to overcome the court’s assumptions of a superior and separate literate tradition. See 183, 185. Wood also notes that Hone deliberately avoids citing this radical literature in his trial (113). 4 Sperry, for example, makes the arrival of the pope’s legate to arrest Cenci an ethical and interpretive crux in the play (123–33). 5 On Shelley’s developing conception of God and Jesus, see Scrivener, Radical Shelley 93–4, 100–1; Bryan Shelley 56–74; and Ryan 193–223. 6 Although Wasserman argues that self-knowledge differs from self-anatomy (110–11), his Manichaean reading obscures the dependency of rationality on social knowledge and leads him to conclude that human beings can sublimate desires for revenge if they prevent them ‘from entering consciousness, where they would act as irresistible motives’ (111). Shelley senses, however, that this repression would subvert self-knowledge rather than promote it, as well as produce quietism rather than inspire healing self-respect. 7 This argument rests on Butler’s analysis of the two accounts of performativity that include the body, those by Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida (Excitable Speech 142–55).

5 A Race of Devils: Frankenstein, Romanticism, and the Tragedy of Human Origin RICHARD VAN OORT

The spirit that I have seen May be a devil … (Hamlet) a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth … (Victor Frankenstein)

Almost two centuries after the nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, her monster is so firmly entrenched in the popular imagination that the novel’s title is frequently mistaken for the name of the monster himself. The desire to associate the monster with a proper name is natural enough, for by naming him we implicitly accept him as our moral equal. But ‘our’ moral reciprocity with the monster is undermined by the ethical reality depicted by the novel. No one else sees fit to name the monster. Is this why Shelley leaves her monster unnamed? Is his anonymity a condition of his subaltern status as the permanent victim or scapegoat of society? In fact the novel’s representation of scapegoating is more subtle than that. To be sure, the monster recalls his encounter with society in terms of a narrative of persecution. From his first contact with human society when he is expelled from the village ‘grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons,’1 he consistently casts himself in the role of scapegoat or victim. But the fact that his account comes to us in heavily mediated form – that is, nested within the narratives of two previous speakers, speakers who ‘imitate’ to varying degrees the monster’s righteous sense of moral indignation – should warn us against reading his narrative with too much credulity. In what follows, I will

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not rehearse the usual claims for the monster’s ‘otherness,’ his status as a victim of one or another political injustice or ‘ism’ (racism, colonialism, imperialism, sexism, scientific rationalism, ethnocentrism, and so forth). Rather, I will delve beneath the victimary reading to grasp its underlying anthropological source.2 As J.L. Austin recognized, naming works by a curious paradox. The individual is both singled out from the group (‘you are the unique bearer of this name’) but also incorporated into it (‘we give this name to you’). But this paradox is that of the originary anthropological scene of representation, which defines its centre only by excluding its periphery. According to Eric Gans, alienation from the centre is the condition of human consciousness, insofar as the latter is defined as existing only within the context of that scene (Originary Thinking 18–20). Frankenstein is a prolonged meditation on the experience of resentful dispossession from the anthropological birthright of the originary scene. But since none of us is present at this scene, which is by definition available to us only as a representation (Derrida), we share the same belatedness or supplementarity as the solitary protagonists/narrators of Frankenstein. Paradoxically, the experience of dispossession, voiced and acted upon with increasing violence by first Walton, then Victor, and finally the monster himself, defines the condition of membership in the community one also accuses of rejection. What was formerly protected by the public scene of sacrificial ritual is now opened to appropriation by the resentful ‘secular’ periphery. The Romantics interpreted this opening of the centre to the peripheral self as an indication of the more fundamental role of the aesthetic in establishing the self’s relationship to the social order. But the Romantic faith in the aesthetic as the key to social organization turned out to be an illusion, a substitution of one (religious) asymmetry for another far more terrifying one. The attempt to make good on the harmony promised by the aesthetic imagination, to expel resentment once and for all in a centrally managed ‘final solution,’ failed, as all such projects must fail if humanity is to survive. This failure is anticipated by Shelley’s novel, which describes both the failure of aesthetics to transcend politics and the reason for this failure in the persistence of the self’s resentment toward the centre. What the monster acquires in his aesthetic education is not the paradise of linguistic and moral reciprocity but a lesson in what Gans calls ‘victimary rhetoric’ (cf. Signs of Paradox, ch. 12). He is the reductio ad absurdum of the technique whereby the Romantic artist justifies his claim to our attention by announcing the scandal of his worldly anonymity.

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Victimary Rhetoric In Mary Shelley’s day, the celebrated master of victimary rhetoric was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Frankenstein was composed on the shores of Lake Geneva where Rousseau was born. The scenes of Victor languishing in his sailboat come directly from Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which we know (from her journal) Mary Shelley read at the time.3 Percy Shelley and Byron sailed the lake in imitation of Rousseau. Together with Mary, they read and discussed his work constantly. It is impossible to grasp the irony of Frankenstein without some sense of this context. Consider, for example, the opening lines of Rousseau’s Reveries: So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own. The most sociable and loving of men has with one accord been cast out by all the rest […]. Could I, in my right mind, suppose that I, the very same man who I was then and am still today, would be taken beyond all doubt for a monster, a poisoner, an assassin, that I would become the horror of the human race, the laughingstock of the rabble, that all the recognition I would receive from passersby would be to be spat upon, and that an entire generation would of one accord take pleasure in burying me alive? (27–8)

In order to place Frankenstein in its specific intellectual and literary context, we need to grasp its relationship to Rousseau, particularly the Rousseau of the Reveries. But in order to grasp the anthropology implicit in Frankenstein and Romanticism more generally, we also need to step back from this context to see why Rousseau’s language of persecution is much more than just a literary strategy adopted and parodied by Mary Shelley. It implies a fundamental ethical paradigm shift, the long-term historical effects of which we are only just beginning to recognize. In his discussion of the ethical significance of victimary thinking after the Second World War, Gans describes Rousseau as ‘the greatest contributor to the arsenal of modern victimary rhetoric’ (Signs of Paradox 180). As the label implies, victimary rhetoric is the language of the victim. The latter is defined by his or her marginality with respect to the social order. The initiation of individuals into this order is the traditional task of culture, which works by the ‘conservative’ practice of extrapolating on the basis of previous tradition. Tradition thus serves

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as the ‘natural’ or unquestioned model for present practice. This is the argument of Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. But it is also the argument of the early anthropologists of traditional religious societies, such as those documented by Arnold van Gennep in his Rites of Passage (first published in French in 1908). Victimary rhetoric expresses the awareness that this conservative practice benefits the establishment rather than the individual. But because the individual is defined only in relation to the establishment, victims of this order must make their case on the basis of their relative exclusion from it. In other words, victimary rhetoric is based on a dynamic or generative understanding of the individual’s relationship to the traditional centres of political and economic power, which in ritual societies are subsumed more generally under the sacred category of ritual exchange.4 Victimary rhetoric is concerned not with sacred transcendence, but with historical transcendence. It is the rhetoric of and for historical change. But victimary rhetoric is based on a paradox. For how are we to use the language of the victim without ourselves becoming victims? How are we to flaunt the aesthetic of the peripheral sign without succumbing to the tragedy of the centre? Rousseau’s answer to this paradox, which Gans takes as prophetic of Romanticism in general, was to deny the validity of the centre altogether. The peripheral individual becomes a world unto himself, a new centre who needs only to ‘write’ himself autobiographically into existence. This is indeed the argument of the first paragraph of the Reveries. After describing how he has been expelled from society by ‘one accord,’ Rousseau proceeds to deny the very existence of that society: ‘So now they are strangers and foreigners to me; they no longer exist for me, since such is their will’ (27). Having turned his back on society, Rousseau is free to devote his attention to the chief object of his writing, himself: ‘But I, detached as I am from them and from the whole world, what am I? This must now be the object of my inquiry’ (27). Having removed himself from the violence of the sacrificial centre, Rousseau is free to turn his attention to himself as an autobiographical subject, which is to say, a textual subject who ‘names’ himself into existence. It is this shift from self-as-content to self-as-form that makes Rousseau the crucial figure in the emergence of the Romantic aesthetic. ‘The Rêveries,’ Gans writes, ‘are the first work to exhibit a modern sense of textuality; the praxis of textual production becomes not merely a recuperative but a transcendental experience’ (Originary Thinking 162).

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Frankenstein exhibits a similar concern for the text as the locus of personal transcendence. But Mary Shelley also departs from the naive victimary persona of Rousseau’s Reveries. By multiplying the number of her narrative personas, she returns the text to the collective (and therefore more overtly agonistic) context of classical tragedy. But this agon, which in classical tragedy takes the ‘sacrificial’ form of the designation of the scapegoat, is rerouted through Rousseau’s personal aesthetic of the peripheral narrative subject. Consequently, there is no catharsis or purging of emotion in the expulsion of a victim. What takes place is rather a contest between successive narrators who compete for the attentions of the reader by designating their own victimhood. The unquestioned victor in this struggle is the monster, whose very anonymity suggests a literary textuality that encompasses the selves of the other two narrators, Walton and Victor. The fact that the monster has now become more or less synonymous in the popular imagination with the name ‘Frankenstein’ demonstrates the greater centrality of his narrative in our imaginations than those of the other two ‘lesser’ victims. Of the three narrators, Victor dies before the narrative ends and Walton is forced to turn back a defeated man, left only with the letters to his sister, the text of Frankenstein. The monster’s death is anticipated by the text but not represented. The last sentence of the novel describes him being ‘borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance’ (198). The text pays its respects to the reader by pointing to but not representing the scene of the monster’s death. This is as close as any textual subject can get to making himself the sacrificial subject of his own tragedy. This paradox between the monster as both narrator and victim, or, in originary terms, between peripheral sign and sacred centre, is everywhere apparent in Shelley’s novel. It is most clearly illustrated by the question, Why is the monster so aesthetically repulsive? The obvious answer is to point out that in the novel monstrosity exists, quite literally, in the eye of the beholder. For despite the fact that those who see the monster are instantly repulsed by him (so much so that they automatically condemn him), it is also true that any sympathy he does manage to elicit is a consequence of his capacity for language. The latter response is self-evidently true of the novel’s readers. Lacking a perceptual image of his hideousness, we have no difficulty identifying with what he says. What guarantees our attachment to this being is not the collective desire to identify a scapegoat, whose sacrifice explains and therefore purges the community of its collective misfortunes. It is far more ambivalently the aesthetic or literary desire to permit his

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sacrifice within the formal limits of the text itself. Our identification of the victim as a moral being is a consequence of this formal limitation. In the fictional world of the text, the scapegoat of sacrificial ritual is transformed into the protagonist of literary narrative. In thus delaying the passage from sign to object, from text to worldly sacrifice, we identify the object as another instance of the form of the sign. This is the source of our intuition of the literary, the notion that the work is a selfcontained form expressing a unique ‘generative’ content. Within the limits of this form and our identification with its content, the sacrificial victim is not merely someone to vilify. He becomes someone to imitate. Literary identification with the victim is not original to Mary Shelley’s novel. As I have suggested, Rousseau exploited it as a means to ensure his own literary immortality. Insofar as Shelley recognized and parodied this tactic, she understood both the originality and the naïveté of Rousseau’s position. But not even Rousseau can be granted the privilege of having invented victimary identification. The latter is implicit in Greek tragedy. Indeed, it is the underlying assumption of all acts of aesthetic identification. In order to understand the originality of Mary Shelley’s contribution to aesthetic history, we must therefore first make a brief detour through this history. This will require us to consider not only Greek tragedy, but its first radical revision in the ‘neoclassical’ drama of the early modern period. Thence we will return to Frankenstein, as a specifically Romantic incarnation of classical tragedy. The Romantic text’s greater self-awareness of its status as an anthropological discovery procedure also indicates its historical distance from the classical prototype. In the case of Frankenstein, this greater self-consciousness is suggested by the desiring relation existing between narrator and narratee, and ultimately between author and reader. Within the fictional world inhabited (temporarily) by the reader’s imagination, the author functions as the transcendent or ‘external’ mediator of the latter’s ‘monstrous’ desires. Tragedy and the Culture of Resentment The horrific nature of the monster’s physical appearance is both a tribute to and a parody of classical tragedy. It points to the violence of the sparagmos suffered by those like Oedipus who attempt to usurp the central position toward which all human desire tends. As Gans notes in his discussion of the classical aesthetic (Originary Thinking, ch. 8), in Greek tragedy the central position is structurally given by the tragic

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protagonist. His presence on stage is sufficient guarantee of his centrality. The Greek amphitheatre reflects the spatial or ‘scenic’ structure of human desire. In observing the onstage actions of the protagonist, the spectators participate vicariously in his being. But in classical tragedy, the indulgence of the spectator’s desire for central being is ‘purged’ when, in a sudden reversal, which Aristotle took to be a condition of the well-constructed tragedy, the hero is revealed to be a monster, a criminal guilty of transgressing the social order’s most sacred taboos. Greek tragedy is structured by (without ever thematizing) the ambivalence of this relationship between central protagonist and desiring spectator. Oedipus begins his quest for the murderer of Laius as the most admired of men, but the play ends with the recognition that he is in fact the source of Thebes’s pollution, the cause of the plague decimating the city. Classical tragedy is a literary thematization of ritual sacrifice. It repays the literary desire to identify with the central victim with a narrative that ends in the horror that such a ‘monstrous’ desire leads to. But classical tragedy does not thematize desire as ‘novelistic,’ which is to say, mediated by the scene of representation.5 The latter is the explicitly Judeo-Christian contribution to Western culture. The radical iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation that preceded the spectacular experiments of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage is not an evacuation of the spectator’s desire in the classical scene but a further opening to it. This opening in the aesthetic sphere corresponds to an opening in the economic sphere. The early modern period is the first historical period to possess a reasonably ‘free’ market, that is, one not ritually constrained by an ontological hierarchy of the human, as was the case, for example, in the slave-driven economies of the Greek and Roman empires. But the rise of the market in the West is not, as some have rather optimistically understood it to be, the ‘end of history.’6 The free circulation of desire in the goods and services bought and sold in the marketplace leads to a concomitant rise in the overall level of resentment in those who feel unfairly marginalized by this system. But because in a genuinely free market this desire is also always changing, so is resentment. In an open economy, it therefore becomes increasingly difficult to mobilize resentment collectively in a ‘final [sacrificial] solution.’ Resentment is rather recuperated by the market itself, a phenomenon well known by those who nostalgically bemoan the ‘commercialization’ of the once-radical counterculture of, for example, the 1960s. But as peripheral countercultures become homogenized by the

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dominant culture, new resentments emerge together with new countercultures, which in turn become the object of a new recuperation. This dynamic situation contrasts with the social mechanisms governing Girard’s analyses of so-called ‘sacrificial’ cultures. As Girard shows in Violence and the Sacred, in the ‘closed’ systems of ritual cultures, desire and resentment are periodically purged in sacrificial ritual. In the ‘open’ societies of the modern market, on the other hand, desire and resentment are made a condition of the exchange system itself. The systemic and dynamic nature of the ‘counterculture’ of resentment is first portrayed on the stage of the Renaissance dramatists, the most celebrated example of which is Hamlet. G. Wilson Knight called Hamlet the ‘ambassador of death’ because of the prince’s obsession not just with death but with the failure of Claudius and his court to adopt the prince’s resentful point of view (32). Hamlet’s resentment or ‘melancholy’ is not merely a consequence of his father’s unexpected death and his mother’s overhasty remarriage. It is, as Knight suggested, a structural feature of the play. Thus, in what Gans calls ‘the most pregnant scene of modern tragedy’ (Originary Thinking 156), Hamlet first appears dressed in black, shocking us with his disdain for the king and his court. Silent for most of the scene, Hamlet is drawn only reluctantly into the dialogue of the central figures, and then not without his signature irony when he mocks the efforts of his king and queen to coax him into a better humour. In his analysis of the ‘neoclassical aesthetic’ represented by the drama of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Racine, Gans argues that the classical scene of the Greeks, with its straightforward opposition between ‘high’ centre and ‘low’ periphery, becomes problematic. The protagonist’s centrality in Greek tragedy is unquestioned. Neither he nor the audience questions his right to be represented on stage. But in the neoclassical aesthetic, this ‘unquestioned exemplarity that separates the classical protagonist from the world of the spectator is no longer sufficient.’ Instead, ‘it must be derived from the locus of the scene’ (Originary Thinking 151). Gans attributes this change in aesthetic structure to a change in ethical structure. The neoclassical aesthetic reflects the historical changes wrought by Christianity during the Middle Ages: ‘The so-called Middle Ages were the cocoon in which the modern bourgeoisie gradually came to maturity, to emerge in the early modern era as the bearer of a new social order’ (Originary Thinking 150). More precisely, by making ‘every human being an equal participant in the sacred,’ Christianity

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subverts the ‘worldly hierarchy’ that is an ontological assumption of the Greek and Roman empires (151). This ‘ontological hierarchy of the human’ (151) is an unexamined assumption of the classical aesthetic, which justifies its opposition between tragic protagonist and peripheral spectator by appropriating its central figures from the ‘preselected’ religious categories of myth or historical legend. The problem confronting the humanist scholars of the Renaissance was how to reproduce the classical aesthetic in the context of this radical change in ethical structure. How were they to reconcile the moral message of Christianity’s ‘equality of souls’ with the worldly hierarchy implicit in the classical opposition between central protagonist and peripheral spectator? The solution, Gans argues, was to put the classical scene, with its unproblematic opposition between centre and periphery, on stage. The neoclassical protagonist attacks what he takes to be the source of the old classical opposition, the central figure of the scene of representation. Hamlet’s resentful stance toward his uncle’s court exemplifies this structure. In the prince’s first stage appearance, we contemplate the brilliance of the public scene with Claudius at its centre. Our response is in this sense similar to that of the audience of Greek tragedy. We immediately identify with the king, whose presumed centrality is given by the mythology of the ‘divine right’ of kings. But then our attention is drawn away from Claudius and toward the prince, whose significance is not given but generated by his ‘supplementarity’ with respect to the more central figure. This supplementarity is above all a ‘literary’ or, as Girard would say, ‘novelistic’ strategy of resentment. The prince undermines the court’s unthinking imitation of the king’s ‘festive’ actions by his eccentric dress and sardonic asides. In this manner, Hamlet insidiously woos our attention away from the king and toward himself, to the point that by the end of the play he has successfully inverted the original hierarchy between centre and periphery. The displaced prince is now at the centre of our imagination, and Claudius is dispatched, like the ‘incestuous, murd’rous, damnèd’ (Hamlet 5.2.326) villain he is, to the monstrous position of the originary scapegoat. What is truly remarkable about this literary strategy, and what is all too easily forgotten in the heaps of criticism that continue to mythologize the Danish prince as the ‘real’ persecuted victim of Claudius’s villainy, is that this persecution is explicitly represented by Shakespeare as internal to Hamlet’s resentful imagination. As W.W. Greg pointed

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out long ago, the actual evidence Hamlet uncovers against Claudius remains to the end subjective, which is to say, mediated by Hamlet’s private imagination. This is obvious enough in the case of the Mousetrap play, which Hamlet devises as a trap to catch the conscience of the king. But it is also evident in the sole witness to Claudius’s crime, the ghost. Critics indignant at the idea that Hamlet could also be the quintessential modern man of resentment like to point out that the ghost is objective (and by implication therefore also a credible witness), for it is seen by no less than four characters. But this proves nothing except that Hamlet is not alone in his resentment. More to the point, of these four characters only Hamlet is able to converse with the ghost, and then only privately, the implication being that only Hamlet is ‘poetic’ enough to imagine within his private ‘literary’ theatre a concrete object of his resentment. The first critics to discern the resentful structure of Hamlet were the Romantics. Not coincidentally, they were also the first to understand Hamlet as a poet – the Hamlet of the soliloquies rather than the Hamlet who avenges his father. Hence Coleridge made Hamlet’s delay the central problem of the tragedy. What is significant about Hamlet, Coleridge argued, is not that he kills, but that he talks an awful lot about killing. Hamlet is an eloquent poet, but a reluctant murderer. Indeed, he is a reluctant murderer precisely because he is such a good poet. As Coleridge put it, no doubt thinking as much of himself as the dark prince, he has that ‘aversion to action which prevails among such as have a world within themselves’ (Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare 68). It is easy to make fun of Coleridge’s narcissism, as indeed it is to make fun of anyone who enjoys taking opium and reaching deep into his inner soul. But the intuition behind the Romantic interpretation of Hamlet is basically sound. Deprived of what Friedrich Schiller called a ‘naive’ belief in the legitimacy of the traditional figures of authority (for example, in the patriarchal family, church, or state), the Romantic looks inward for signs of his election to the centre, for ‘that within which passes show’ (Hamlet 1.2.85). Yet what he finds there is not an awareness of his own divinity, but a sense of his distance from past tradition. This is the source of the protagonist’s resentment. It is also the source of the historicity of modernity. Frankenstein is a variation on this peculiarly modern obsession with the resentful rejection of history, which is to say, the rejection of tradition. Shelley adopts the myth of the monster (the ‘ghost story’ of folktale, referred to briefly in her preface to the 1831 edition) and attaches to it the sentimental

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category of the Bildungsroman. But by denying her monster entry into the human community, Shelley reverses the typical sentimental trajectory. The result is tragedy, but of a distinctly ironic and Romantic type. Frankenstein is Oedipus Tyrannus without the tyranny.7 At least Oedipus gets to rule Thebes for a few years (just long enough to marry his mother and raise his two daughters/sisters). Shelley does not even grant her central protagonist the possibility of a minimal social integration within the nuclear family. The monster thus bears a closer resemblance to the infant Oedipus abandoned on Mount Cithaeron than to the adult male who marries a queen to become a king. The Romantic infatuation with the child is the counterpart to the Romantic denigration of tradition, which is inevitably a preoccupation of adults rather than children. The child’s perceived innocence in the face of the harmful effects of the social order is also the basis of the psychoanalytic model of desire (though Freud himself suffered no illusions about the necessity of civilization). The child-monster of Shelley’s youthful ghost story is the prototype of so many subsequent victims of the repressive social order, of which Marx’s proletariat is only the most famous nineteenth-century example. The Rhetoric of Monstrosity Like the divine figures of countless myths and legends, Victor’s monster is a projection of human desire. But where the myth sacralizes the object of desire as forbidden to human appropriation, literature encourages us to identify with the central figure as a fellow human being. The latter is thus not an equivalent of the divine figure of myth, whose original status as the scapegoat of the community has been forgotten or repressed. He is a wholly human protagonist, a being no different from the hearer or spectator who listens to his story. But it is precisely this lack of divine or sacred difference that makes our attention to his story a specifically ‘textual’ problem, one to be resolved, as in Rousseau’s Reveries, by the text itself rather than designated as external to it. Our devotion to the text is rewarded not by any material benefits (as in collective ritual, which typically ends with a communal feast). What we gain in attending to the text is instead a purely imaginary satisfaction, a literary catharsis in which our attention to this content is ultimately expelled when we reach a satisfactory sense of closure. The simplest example of this literary catharsis is provided by the classical aesthetic. In attending to the desires of the tragic protagonist, we

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imagine ourselves in his place, the sole possessor of the forbidden centre that in ritual and myth is always represented by a god. Our desire for centrality is first indulged in an imaginary self-centralization, but then expelled or purged in a catharsis when we learn that the tragic hero with whom we have identified during the performance is in fact guilty of a monstrous crime or sacrilege. The locus classicus is Oedipus, whose twin crimes of parricide and incest Sophocles makes dependent upon the narrative of Oedipus’s own ‘hubristic’ desire to save Thebes from the plague, to be, as the priest at the beginning of the play says, ‘Greatest in all men’s eyes’ (Sophocles 12). The specifically Romantic contribution to the tragic aesthetic of the Greeks is to conceive of the sacrificial victim as no longer a negative model, the real-life imitation of which is considered a monstrosity to be avoided at all costs, but on the contrary as a model of desire in general. Romantic protagonists, unlike their classical counterparts, wear their monstrosity proudly on their sleeves. This is Rousseau’s contribution to Romanticism. The Romantic aesthetic is thus based on a constitutive paradox. The more marginal the protagonist, the greater his claim to centrality. But since centralization implies marginality, the Romantic aesthetic operates by continually raising the stakes of the latter. Frankenstein’s nested series of narrators, as we move from Walton to Victor to the monster himself, illustrates this competitive agon for the centre from the margins. Each narrator usurps the narrative of his precursor by upping the ante of the claim to victimhood. But the overall effect is to erase the distinctiveness of the individual voices. After listening to each character explain how he is more persecuted than the others, we get the impression that we are no longer listening to a series of distinct voices but to a blend of voices, all stridently proclaiming their ultimate victimary status. Everyone has the same tired story of persecution to tell. Walton is persecuted by his dead father who would not allow him to go to sea. Victor is persecuted by an unsympathetic father who denigrates his youthful reading of the alchemists. At the university, after some initial modest success (‘I made some discoveries in the improvement of some chemical instruments, which procured me great esteem and admiration at the university’ [36]), he is ostracized because he turns his attention to the occult, which promises a transcendence unavailable to the mere technical researcher (whom Victor caricatures in his description of the modern man of science, Krempe). This preoccupation with the occult culminates in the construction of the monster, an event that signifies Victor’s lasting attachment to the ‘novelistic’ or ‘literary’ scene of

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his own persecution. The monster and Victor are textbook examples of Girard’s monstrous double. Each feels morally certain that he is the victim of the other’s persecution. Even the characters within each narrator’s story are emblematic of the narrative structure of resentment, beginning with the story of Beaufort victimized by his ill luck in the marketplace and ending with the monster’s account of the victimized De Lacey family. Monstrosity, Shelley suggests, is the natural endpoint of this mimetic rivalry. It is the inevitable outcome of Victor’s obsessive desire for transcendence, which is to say, for the prestige and glory he associates with scientific discovery. At the generative centre of the novel lies the monster’s aesthetic contemplation of the De Lacey home. It functions as the mise en scène of the literary trajectory of desire. The monster’s desiring relation to the De Laceys mirrors the oscillation of the aesthetic sign in the originary scene. In the first moment of desire, we identify with the object pointed to by the sign. But this experience of identification is limited by the fact that it is, after all, only imaginary. The moment of aesthetic detachment gives way to an act of aggression toward an object that is no longer imaginary but real. In the originary scene, the buildup of resentment is unleashed in a collective act of mimetic aggression, when the participants converge violently on the central object that had once withheld itself from their appropriative gestures. In the De Lacey episode, Shelley represents this oscillation between the individual’s aesthetic identification with the object and its resentful destruction in the sparagmos. The narrative of the monster’s acquisition of language takes place as a scene in which the monster situates himself on the periphery of his protectors’ home. From his outside position in the ‘hovel’ or woodshed attached to the cottage, he can contemplate unobserved, by way of ‘a small and almost imperceptible chink through which the eye could just penetrate’ (89), the actions of his family. It is his position on the periphery of the scene that enables him to construct this idealized image of the cottagers as his protectors and benefactors. That these peasants are described as a noble French family brought low by the misfortune of political circumstance does not undermine the sentimentality of the image. On the contrary, it dignifies the ‘low’ subject matter with the Romantic narrative of persecution. In the new Romantic dispensation, beggars are the true victims of the social order. But, as Shelley shows, the dispensation is itself dependent on an aesthetic fiction. As long as the monster can refrain from introducing himself into the aesthetic scene before him, he is free to imagine

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himself a member of this intimate world of egalitarian domestic relations. The wall separating the monster from his ‘benefactors’ represents the formal barrier separating the individual spectator from the aesthetic object, or, in other terms, the form of the artwork from its internal content. Once the monster crosses this threshold the image collapses, and he is left with nothing but a deserted cottage. In thus moving from the aesthetic ideal to its worldly counterpart, the subjective experience of the community as an aesthetic totality gives way to the objective experience of the individual’s necessary peripherality. The monster discovers that he is alone. It is the scandal of this discovery that triggers resentment. Mary Shelley insists on both the necessity of resentment and its deferral. On the brink of releasing his resentment in a violent act of physical destruction, the monster is reminded momentarily of his former attachment to the aesthetic whole: For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them, but allowing myself to be borne away by the stream, I bent my mind towards injury and death. When I thought of my friends, of the mild voice of De Lacey, the gentle eyes of Agatha, and the exquisite beauty of the Arabian, these thoughts vanished and a gush of tears somewhat soothed me. But again when I reflected that they had spurned and deserted me, anger returned, a rage of anger, and unable to injure anything human, I turned my fury towards inanimate objects. (118; my emphasis)

The passage reproduces the characteristic oscillation of aesthetic experience. The monster’s desire to vent his rage in an act of destruction is deferred momentarily by the soothing images of his protectors. But in contemplating these images of the objects he loves, he is reminded of their absence in reality. In a fit of rage, he turns from the image back to reality.8 After destroying ‘every vestige of cultivation in the garden,’ the monster lights a firebrand and dances ‘with fury around the devoted cottage’ (118). His dance climaxes with the setting of the moon, at which point he lights the cottage and watches it burn with vengeful satisfaction. In his desire to satisfy his resentment, the monster pays scant empirical respect to the notion of economic scarcity. Instead, in an action that is more reminiscent of the ‘conspicuous consumption’ of a potlatch, but notably without the collective ritual context, he destroys the garden he had once worked so lovingly and burns the ‘devoted cottage’ that was his shelter. Never again will he be associated with the economic necessities of food and shelter.

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Instead, he will become the monstrous embodiment of human desire and resentment. Less a person than an idea, the monster represents the negative underside of the Romantic view that the self is originary. Divorced of its attachment to the traditionally defined public centre, the self is forced to reinvent itself as unique and self-originating. But then the self is confronted by a multiplicity of other selves who seek to affirm their originality. The belief in personal uniqueness thus risks being exposed as an illusion, a fantasy nurtured by the sheltered world of the child but undermined by the reality of the marketplace. Upon entry into the adult world, which in the Romantic era is increasingly synonymous with the competitive world of the bourgeoisie, the self finds it hard to sustain the original optimism of its childhood. The prospect of success or failure in the market is mirrored by the wild swings in mood of the Romantic protagonist. Until his death, Victor oscillates between extreme optimism and extreme despair. Toward the end, he is sustained only by the prospect of final victory over his monstrous double. But the more he conceives this victory as an act of ultimate transcendence, the more hopeless and despairing his situation becomes. The North Pole represents both the transcendence and the futility of this vision. On the one hand, it is a place of ‘eternal light,’ on the other, of ‘desolation and frost’ (1). The retreat of the Romantic subject into the sublimity of nature, where he is supposedly free to commune in private with the world spirit, is in reality a retreat from the challenge of a world governed by nothing more stable than the centreless exchange system. For there is no ultimate (sacrificial) transcendence of desire. Despite Victor’s repeated attempts to locate a personal scene wholly impervious to the fortunes of mimetic desire, each attempt fails. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene of his encounter with the monster on the ice field below Mont Blanc. Standing amid the impressive majesty of the scene, Victor addresses the mountains as if they were gods: ‘Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life’ (80). Yet no sooner has he uttered this prayer for sanctuary from the rivalrous world of mediated desire, than the latter abruptly returns to haunt him. He sees the ‘figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed’ (80). Prayer leads not to the hoped-for transcendence of desire but to its worldly antithesis, the mimetic confrontation between two rivals who compete

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for the attentions of a third, the reader of the text. Religious transcendence is transformed into narrative desire, the literary culture of and for the marketplace. The Literary Subject and the Marketplace Walton’s early letters chart the dynamics of literary desire as it oscillates between the optimism and despair experienced by the participant of the modern exchange system. We know, for example, that this twenty-eight-year-old has had a rather spotty career, replete with false starts and hesitations. First he wanted to be a poet. ‘I imagined,’ Walton writes in his first letter, ‘that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated’ (2). But his artistic aspirations only lead to failure and disappointment. Then, with the help of an unexpected inheritance from a cousin, he receives the financial resources to pursue an early childhood dream of becoming a great explorer and seafarer. He had formerly been banned from this career by both his father and his uncle. But with a fortune now at his disposal, Walton is no longer dependent upon his family; he is free to indulge his childhood desire, a desire that was first planted by his ‘passionately fond’ reading of the ‘history of all the voyages made for purposes of discovery’ in his uncle’s library (2). As in Victor’s narrative, the objects of Walton’s desiring imagination are represented as transcendent or sacred with respect to those familiar objects rendered profane by their everyday traffic in the world of vulgar ‘bourgeois’ market relations. Walton, like all the other young Romantics in this novel, defines himself by his disdain for the quotidian world of the bourgeoisie. This disdain has an obvious Oedipal dimension and is associated most often with the repressive regime of the father. Victor describes Henry Clerval’s father as ‘a narrow-minded trader,’ who sees nothing but ‘idleness and ruin’ in his son’s desire to pursue ‘a liberal education’ (30). Victor also implies, rather ungratefully, that when his father dismisses his Romantic interest in the alchemy of Cornelius Agrippa, the father is to blame for his son’s misfortunes.9 Even Walton implies that his father is an obstacle to his desire because he has forbidden him from going to sea. But this interdiction is short-lived. After acquiring independent wealth through an inheritance, Walton ‘buys’ himself passage on board various whaling ships. Here is Walton’s account of his ‘qualifications’ for his present expedition:

140 Richard van Oort Six years have passed since I resolved on my present undertaking. I can, even now, remember the hour from which I dedicated myself to this great enterprise. I commenced by inuring my body to hardship. I accompanied the whale-fishers on several expeditions to the North Sea; I voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I often worked harder than the common sailors during the day and devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventurer might derive the greatest practical advantage. Twice I actually hired myself as an under-mate in a Greenland whaler, and acquitted myself to admiration. I must own I felt a little proud when my captain offered me the second dignity in the vessel and entreated me to remain with the greatest earnestness, so valuable did he consider my services. (2–3)

What is most remarkable about this passage is its deadpan sincerity. Walton lacks any sense of irony concerning his authenticity. Like a Hollywood celebrity, he simply accepts the status bestowed on him by his adoring audience (his sister). But as today’s celebrities well know, or are quickly forced to discover, public admiration can easily turn to public vilification. Walton is no exception to this rule. Let us therefore read his text with a little dose of irony, which is to say, literary ressentiment. What motivates Walton’s seafaring adventures is not economic necessity, which is presumably the motivation of the ‘common sailors’ with whom he is so keen to rub shoulders. It is, rather, the desire for an intangible – one is tempted to say, sacred – experience. But the irony is that this intangible experience is itself represented as a commodity. Walton buys his passage on board these whaling ships. (How else are we to explain the fact that he is only able to go to sea once he has acquired his cousin’s fortune?) One need not even deny Walton the satisfaction of believing he ‘works’ harder than the regular sailors, nor assume that he must be lying when he claims that twice he ‘actually hired’ himself as an ‘under-mate’ and was rewarded with a job offer of ‘second dignity’ by the captain. For ‘work’ here implies not the material labour upon which the economic viability of the whaler is based, but the altogether less easily measurable economy of Walton’s desire for a singular transcendent experience. Walton’s desire to experience the life of a whaler marks the beginning of a new economy of desire, the fledgling consumer economy. Walton is a precursor of the modern eco-tourist. Whaler by day, scientist by night, he works ‘harder’ than anyone else, because he alone understands that the end of these

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‘careers’ is self-fulfillment rather than the dross of economic production. Walton is a prototype of the modern consumer. This is why Walton cannot seriously accept an offer to remain permanently as ‘the second dignity’ on board a Greenland whaler. As he exhausts each new experience, his desire moves on to pursue a different one. This is the real motivation of his trip to the North Pole. The latter is attractive because it remains untainted by human presence. Like the ‘undiscovered solitudes’ of the ‘heavenly bodies,’ it remains ‘a land never before imprinted by the foot of man’ (1–2). The openness of the terrain is a metaphor of Walton’s infinite desire. The latter suffices to guarantee the Romantic subject’s quest for centrality. When Walton feels the north wind blow on his face, his ‘daydreams become more fervent and vivid’ as he tries ‘in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation’ (1). Walton genuinely believes he deserves ‘to accomplish some great purpose’ (3), not because he is the best sailor and navigator in England, but simply because his imagination is more vivid than anyone else’s, or at least so he believes. What ultimately qualifies Walton to become an intrepid explorer is not the six years he claims to have spent hardening himself to a sailor’s way of life, but his one-year apprenticeship as a disciple of the poets in his uncle’s library. But all this changes when he meets Victor. Walton’s boyhood dreams of becoming a great protagonist, to be universally admired and sympathized with, are effortlessly trumped by the more experienced ‘poet.’ Shelley transfers our desire from the solitary and friendless Walton to the yet-more-solitary and yet-more-friendless Victor. As Victor’s relationship to Walton demonstrates, the poet works by mediating the desires of his readers. The trick is not to point directly to the object, but to narrate the story of the object’s (permanent) absence. Victor leads Walton through a suspenseful story that makes Walton’s letters to his sister seem like the amateurish and desultory creations they are. Victor’s more powerful eloquence overwhelms the ‘illiterate’ (5) would-be poet Walton. The latter immediately grasps he is in the presence of a master storyteller and becomes Victor’s disciple, carefully recording the words of the great poet. Victor, of course, realizes this too, and he pauses dramatically to comment on the reaction of his disciple at precisely the moment when he seems to be on the point of revealing his great ‘secret’: I see by your eagerness and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with

142 Richard van Oort which I am acquainted; that cannot be; listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject. I will not lead you on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery. Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example. (37–8)

Learn by my example, not by my precepts. That is, learn by imitating my actions, not by interpreting my words. The instruction is paradoxical because in order to grasp the precept to imitate the model’s actions, one must interpret the model’s actions as a precept, which is to say, as words. But this is already to remove oneself from the aura of direct imitation, the originary model of which is the aborted gesture of mimetic appropriation. By treating the other as a subject of language, one removes oneself from the crisis of unmediated mimetic relations. Victor understands all too well that his narrative power over Walton is secured by his ability to continue to mediate Walton’s desire. Indeed, Victor must consider himself extremely fortunate to have come across such a willing literary disciple. (Compare, for example, the reaction of the magistrate, who dismisses Victor’s story with cynical professional condescension.) This asymmetrical relationship between narrator and listener, model and disciple, is sealed in the moment when Victor, near death and stranded on an iceberg, refuses to accept Walton as his rescuer. Instead, he politely inquires whither Walton is bound, consenting to come on board only when he learns he will be joining a ‘voyage of discovery towards the northern pole’ (10). Victor recognizes in Walton a fellow Romantic, a reader ripe for the mediation of desire by the literary subject. The ‘secret’ that Victor demonstrates in his story is the necessary presence of the mimetic other for the story to continue. Without a reader to (as Walton puts it) ‘participate my joy’ (4), there can be no periphery to define the centre. And without a periphery, there can be no narrative of desire for the centre. Frankenstein unfolds as a movement from periphery to centre, as the reader’s desire passes through progressively more violent narratives of persecution. The endpoint of this desire is the ‘monstrosity’ of the sparagmos, the convergence of the periphery on the central victim. Both Victor and the monster justify their hold on the reader’s imagination in terms of this victimization. Thus the story of their victimization lasts only as long as the reader is willing to participate in, or identify with, their persecution. On his deathbed Victor expresses a hope that Walton may continue the persecution of the monster. But this is too much to

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ask of the reader, who, after some two hundred pages of relentless victimary rhetoric, is only too happy to see the protagonist and his monster die. Their claim on our imagination has long outstayed its welcome. In the final pages of the novel, we are quickly returned from centre to periphery, from the ‘tragic’ deaths of Victor and the monster, who predicts his own magnificent ‘funeral pile’ where he can ‘exult in the agony of the torturing flames’ (198), to the altogether more ‘bourgeois’ image of Walton returning home to his sister, tail between his legs. When Walton, confronted by his mutinous crew, agrees to turn his boat around rather than pursue individual glory, he removes himself from the tragic trajectory of Victor’s narrative. This reversal is also that of the reader, whose desire has been fulfilled (at last!) in the sacrifice of the protagonist, Victor. But Victor’s death is hardly a tragedy in the traditional sense; we are neither horrified nor cathartically purged by it, for his death has been predicted from the beginning by the text itself, when his feeble and exhausted body is pulled from the ice by Walton’s crew. We are more likely frustrated by Victor’s massive ego. Not even death seems to bring humility to this egocentric character. This failure of the desiring imagination to respect reality is imitated by his truest disciple, the monster. In a veritable parody of his master’s victimary discourse, the monster addresses the dead body of Victor in order to assert his superiority over his victim: ‘Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine, for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them forever’ (198). The reaction seems tasteless and crass, until we realize that it is merely a duplication of Victor’s reaction to the characters he ‘kills’ in his story. On the eve of Justine’s execution, Victor can only imagine the superiority of his suffering: ‘Despair! Who dared talk of that? That poor victim, who on the morrow was to pass the awful boundary between life and death, felt not, as I did, such deep and bitter agony. I gnashed my teeth and ground them together, uttered a groan that came from my inmost soul’ (70). Victor’s ‘literary’ suffering in imitation of Justine’s is a prelude to further attempts by the narrator to imitate victimhood. Justine’s death is but the second in a series of horrible murders that Victor promises to recount to his infatuated listener. In a perverse elegy to his remaining characters, who exist fictionally on a sort of literary death row, Victor addresses them with the paradoxical pleasure of an aesthetic spectator: ‘Ye weep, unhappy ones, but these are not your last tears! Again shall

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you raise the funeral wail, and the sound of your lamentations shall again and again be heard! […] Thus spoke my prophetic soul, as, torn by remorse, horror, and despair, I beheld those I loved spend vain sorrow upon the graves of William and Justine, the first hapless victims to my unhallowed arts’ (71). Like the monster’s observation of his beloved cottagers, this is tragic metafiction. And like Hamlet’s prophecy of his uncle’s villainy (‘O my prophetic soul!’ [1.5.40]), which Shelley explicitly alludes to in this passage, Victor’s metafiction demonstrates the reader’s complicity in the act of sacrifice. In these moments of metafiction, Hamlet, Victor, and the monster stand outside the world of their victims and comment on their tragic fates. The commentary reproduces the formal opposition, derived from classical tragedy, between central victim and desiring spectator. But unlike classical tragedy, this opposition is thematized in the work itself. Frankenstein, with its concentric arrangement of multiple narrators, represents the narrative relationship between text and reader as a desire on the part of the reader for the sacrifice of the work’s protagonist. Hence the increasing monstrosity of the narrators, as we move from Walton, who is a rather timid and childish ‘bad boy,’ to Victor, who is a self-confessed ‘monster,’ to the monster himself, who is Victor’s mimetic double, the natural endpoint of the reader’s insatiable desire for victims. Walton’s decision to abort his voyage of discovery is, by contrast, as Victor himself suggests, a recipe for mediocrity. No one wants to hear the story of a loser. But the loser of this story is also the ultimate winner. Of the three narrators, only Walton survives to tell his tale. He is also the only character who appears to grasp the hypocrisy of the victimary rhetoric that pervades the speech of the other two narrators. After the monster makes a great show of mourning over his dead master’s body, Walton points to the creature’s hypocrisy, which is also Victor’s: ‘It is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and when they are consumed, you sit among the ruins and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend!’ (196). As a ‘mere’ peripheral consumer of desire, Walton stands outside the tragic cycle of desire figured by Victor and his monstrous appropriation of the sacrificial centre. But Walton’s peripheral relationship to Victor and his monster is a reflection of the centreless world of the market. The latter operates not by channelling resentment into a monolithic public centre, where it is periodically purged in ritual sacrifice, but by distributing resentment throughout the centreless periphery of

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the exchange system itself. But the recuperation of resentment by the market also leads to the radical proliferation of the victimary rhetorics of those who feel unfairly excluded by this system. Rousseau is the exemplary model of the Romantic exile-cum-celebrity. He turned Hamlet’s purely literary strategy of resentment toward the centre into a worldly practice, the success of which is measured concretely in terms of the ‘brand-name’ status of the literary persona. Rousseau was the first theoretician of the social order to transform resentment into a marketable product. Frankenstein is both an adoption of and an ironic commentary on this strategy. The monster figures the reader’s complicity in worldly resentment. But this resentment is ‘contained’ by the text when Walton, out of respect for his crew, abandons his intended expedition to the North Pole, thereby also implicitly rejecting Victor’s dying wish that he pursue the monster to the ends of the earth. Walton thus refuses to adopt the victimary position modelled for us by Victor and the monster. Instead, he offers us Frankenstein. Walton’s desire for transcendence is transformed into a few hours of literary satisfaction. He returns us to the place where he began: in his uncle’s library reading of great voyages of discovery.

NOTES 1 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus (New York: Signet, 2000), 87; hereafter cited in text. This edition is based on Mary Shelley’s revised 1831 edition. The first edition was published in 1818, two years after it was begun. 2 For a trenchant analysis of the ‘anti-method’ of political or moral criticism, see Bauerlein. See also Lipking, who argues that although recent political readings of Frankenstein differ markedly in their underlying assumptions, they are nonetheless unanimous in their anti-Victor/pro-monster stance. Lipking notes that ‘late-twentieth-century critics, when they look at Frankenstein’s creation, no longer see a Monster, as earlier generations did; they now see a Creature’ (317). Lipking himself follows this ‘late-twentieth-century’ preference for calling Shelley’s protagonist a ‘creature’ rather than a ‘monster.’ My own preference is for the older terminology because it is less fastidious about admitting the ‘monstrosity’ of the protagonist’s desire (‘monster,’ from the Latin monere, ‘to warn,’ not, as some mistakenly believe, from monstrare, ‘to show’). Monstrosity is linked to the paradoxical experience of the sacred, which both attracts and repels.

146 Richard van Oort 3 I am relying on Marshall’s excellent account of Mary Shelley’s use of Rousseau (ch. 6). See also O’Rourke. 4 The centrality of sacred exchange in the ‘closed’ economies of archaic societies is the premise of Mauss’s celebrated analysis of the gift. See his The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, first published in French as Essai sur le don in 1923–4. 5 In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard reserves the term ‘novelistic’ desire for those novelists who understand the mediated structure of desire – ‘vérité romanesque’ rather than ‘mensonge romantique.’ 6 The most eloquent contemporary spokesperson of this view is Francis Fukuyama. See his The End of History and the Last Man, which is an expanded version of his article ‘The End of History?’ 7 On the importance of the Greek distinction between tyrannos (ruler by successful coup) and basileus (hereditary king), see Pope. It is no coincidence, Pope argues, that Sophocles almost always refers to Oedipus as tyrannos rather than basileus. The irony of the play is that Oedipus’s discovery of his real or inherited kingship is what leads to his downfall. Oedipus’s kingship is revealed to be inseparable from the tragedy of mimetic desire. 8 The same oscillation characterizes the monster’s contemplation of the miniature of Caroline Beaufort, which hangs from the neck of his first victim, William: ‘In spite of my malignity, it softened and attracted me. For a few moments I gazed with delight on her dark eyes, fringed by deep lashes, and her lovely lips; but presently my rage returned; I remembered that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow’ (122). 9 More precisely, Victor’s accusation is that his father did not bother to explain why Agrippa is outdated. Victor claims that if he ‘had taken the pains to explain to me that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded […] I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside’ (24). But Victor is merely deluding himself here. Later, when Krempe ‘explodes’ the scientific status of alchemy, Victor defiantly chooses to ignore him despite, or more likely because of, this ‘bourgeois’ dismissal of the supernatural.

PART 2 Body Language

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6 Telling Lies with Body Language FREDERICK BURWICK

In the period from David Garrick (1717–79) through Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) and John Philip Kemble (1757–1823), the use and understanding of gesture underwent radical changes that affected conventions in acting. Classical works on gesture discussed ways in which movement of the body, hands, legs, and feet, as well as gait and tilt of the head, display attributes of gender, of age or state of health, of social class and profession. Studies of chironomia had, from Elizabethan times, replicated the same description of arm and hand gestures with the same prescription for their rhetorical use. During the latter half of the eighteenth century there was a growing recognition of how gesture revealed or defined character. Gesture in acting was seen to have other implications beyond expressing thought or feeling. With the point of a finger or the sweep of an arm, a character could define height, depth, direction, and space. Books on gesture began to deliberate complex instincts and motives influencing the body’s movement. Corresponding changes were taking place in figure painting and in acting. An important factor in new theories of gesture was the difference between true and false emotion. Michael William Sharp’s ‘Essay on Gesture,’ delivered as a lecture to the Philosophical Society at Norwich in 1820, makes the case that gestures reveal not only emotions but even those feelings that a person might strive to conceal.1 Sharp’s point is that gesture is an instinctively honest language, often exposing a truth that a speaker may attempt to deny or disguise. Thirty-five years before Sharp, Johann Jakob Engel introduced the discrimination of true and false gesture in his Ideen zu einer Mimik (1785). In ‘Adapted to the English Drama’ in Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action (1807; 2nd ed. 1822), Henry Siddons retained Engel’s critique of false or

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feigned gestures as opposed to ‘natural’ gestures.2 By augmenting Engel’s commentary with cross-references to the English stage and numerous examples drawn from the acting of his uncle and his mother, John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons, Henry Siddons provided a correction to the formulaic presentation of acting style in Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia, which was published just the year before Siddons brought out his first edition. Whether a spectator could distinguish a natural from a feigned gesture was a crux implicated by Denis Diderot in Le Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773).3 During the eighteenth century, dramatic illusion was generally defined as the heightening of emotional response to the point that the reason is overwhelmed.4 The spectator is then affected by the dramatic imitation as if it were reality. Illusion in these circumstances is often attributed directly to the success of the actor. The actor, so it seems, ceases to be himself and becomes the character he plays. In examining how this apparent transfer is wrought, critics argued the same distinction between reason and emotion in acting that they used to address the problem of audience response. But in explaining the success in acting, the argument took the opposite turn. The idea of artistic control conflicted with the notion of ‘feeling’ the part. If actually caught up in the throes of emotion, Diderot argued in Le Paradoxe, the player would lose all rational command of mime, gesture, and elocution. Thus, to create the illusion of powerful emotions affecting a character, an actor must play the role with studied deliberation. Total constraint enables the actor to concentrate artistic training and skill toward performing the very extremes of passion.5 Should an actor actually surrender himself to the sway of feelings, the performance would become awkward and uneven. The paradox thus has a positive and a negative aspect: if the spectator ceases to behold the actor and sees only the character caught up in emotional agitation, then it is certain that the actor has repressed emotion to achieve the effect; contrarily, if the spectator becomes aware of the actor’s inconsistent performance, the fault may well lie in the actor having been affected by the emotional conditions of the role. The emotional response is excited in the audience when it is only mediated, not felt, by the actor. Seen merely in the terms described, it may seem that Diderot expected the actor to be cold and dispassionate. The opposite is true; it is not insensibility but extreme sensibility that belongs to the psychological nature of the actor.6 The actor must be a keen observer of human behaviour and have the capacity to understand the expressions

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of passions that she or he may never have personally endured. May the role of a woman whose husband is killed be played only by a widow? No, but it must be played by one who has witnessed human grief and can imitate its effects, who can mime the physical convulsions of the passions without actually suffering them on the stage. Because acting a passion is distinguished from feeling a passion, this theory of the drama considers all stage gestures counterfeit. The body language is merely mimicked. Successful acting, of course, requires that the gestures be successfully replicated so that the audience does not perceive the artifice. In Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–6), Wolfgang von Goethe has his title character propose a method of acting which requires that the actor recreate in his own mind the circumstances and experiences which brought the dramatic character to the situation confronted in the play. The player must nurture her or his own ‘memory’ of the events which presumably belong to the character’s life. In recounting her experiences on the Weimar stage under Goethe’s direction, Karoline Jagemann stated that entering into a character’s memories and emotions was an exercise to be conducted in rehearsing a role so that in the actual performance the emotional intensity could be controlled as remembered re-enactment (26). The psychological and emotional aspects of acting were, however, subsequently stressed even further by such influential theorists as William Archer (1856–1924), Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938), Jacques Copeau (1879–1949), and Béatrix Dussane (1888–1969). The efforts to create genuine emotion by constructing a fictional ‘memory’ and fabricating a psychological ‘identity’ were aimed at reconciling the difference between acting a passion and feeling a passion, thus overcoming the crux of Diderot’s paradox. The theorists succeeded in internalizing the mimicry, giving it a subjective or psychological centre. Yet even these new approaches recognized that body movements corresponded to emotional states. Therefore, the player must still master the body language of the emotions even before attempting to master the lines of a play. If all stage gestures are essentially false, and the players are merely feigning emotions, how might a player then proceed to play a character who is feigning an emotion? It is one thing to feign an emotion, another to feign the feigning of an emotion. The purpose of this essay is to analyse the revelations and artful deceptions of body language as crucial attributes of acting. Performances of Shakespeare, and engravings of them, are important references for the analysis. What subtle

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deviation does an actor or actress employ to portray a scene of deception? The task is easier if the playwright has alerted the audience to expect dissimulation. Iago, for example, announces in the opening scene of Othello, ‘I will wear my heart upon my sleeve […] I am not what I am’ (1.1.64–5). If he is to succeed in convincing Cassio, Roderigo, and Othello to accept his reports and advice, he cannot always appear lurking with dark malignancy in a corner. In his monologue on ‘the winter of our discontent’ (1.1.1–40), Richard III reveals his scheme and then proceeds to gain power precisely through his skill in dissimulation. In playing Richard, Kemble made the most of vile hypocrisy wearing the disguise of piety. Iago and Richard provide occasions for an actor to assume the role of a character disguising not his outward garb but his motives and the verity of his words. Within the last quarter-century, the popular book trade has seen a number of books promising to reveal how to read body language for signals of insecurity or dishonesty and how to use the body to communicate sincerity even in situations where truth might be distorted. One title announces clues for detecting ‘Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage’; another offers skills in interpreting and using body language to attain ‘Love, Wealth and Happiness.’7 Engel’s attempt to distinguish natural from false gesture anticipates the study of body movement that two centuries later became a major subject of behavioural research.8 A shift towards a more scientific method of analysing gesture was already evident during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Handbooks on chirologia and chironomia were being superseded by studies of gesture and expression which endeavoured to establish a typology and to interpret observations of body movement in terms of a physiology of musculature and the nervous system. The earlier work of Charles Le Brun, A Method to Learn to Design the Passions (1734), is dismissed by Engel as partaking ‘too much of caricature’ to be useful as a guide (Siddons 70). Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente (1775–80), translated into English as Essays on Physiognomy (1789–98) with illustrations by Lavater’s former pupil Johann Heinrich Fuseli, argued a relationship between psychological character and the formation of facial expression.9 Lavater’s typology was uninformed by scientific knowledge of anatomy. The first scientifically grounded study was Charles Bell’s The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1806). Bell’s detailed understanding of the nervous system and the

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facial muscles made it possible for him to show the actual effects of nervous disorders and certain mental conditions on the muscles of the face. Engel/Siddons proffered a very different argument by insisting on an active strategy of counterfeiting emotions and using body language to deceive. Engel distinguished five provinces of gestural communication: to mime is to act out a situation; to pantomime is to act out words as in a parlour game of charades; to mimic is to copy the movements or expressions of another person. Representation can be mimetic, concerned with reacting to and interacting with the external world; but it can also be mimismetic, revealing the internal process of discovery or realization. The pace and the movement of arms are synchronized with the movement of the mind: now moving slowly, now irregular, now agitated and quick. ‘The moment that a difficulty presents itself, the play of the hands entirely ceases – the eye, which, as well as the head, had a gentle and placid motion, while the thought was easy, and unfolded itself without labour […] in this new situation looks straight forward, and the load falls on the heart, until, after the first shock of doubt […] suspended activity resumes its former walk’ (Siddons 60). Henry Siddons modifies Engel’s account of Doubt and Apprehension to describe John Philip Kemble’s performance of Hamlet’s soliloquy (fig. 6.1). Here, Hamlet’s reflections bring him to a crux: ‘To die, to sleep; / To sleep, perchance to dream.’ Hamlet comes to a full halt, pauses a moment, then exclaims ‘ay, there’s the rub,’ and at the same moment he should give the exterior sign of that which his interior penetration alone has enabled him to discover (3.1.66–7). Another example of the mimismetic is Lear’s recollection of the unworthy treatment he has experienced from his daughters (fig. 6.2). Again the pace, the tilt of head, the agitation of the hands and arms, must undergo a transformation. As though catching himself, he stops still, changes his tones, and suddenly exclaims, ‘That way madness lies’ (3.4.22). Even though he must appear as ‘honest Iago,’ Shakespeare’s villain is given frequent occasions to reassert his dark purpose. Richard III too is a notably dramatic villain. John Philip Kemble kept Richard’s limp but avoided a display of physical deformity. He internalized Richard’s villainy and rendered it most obvious by playing the scenes of outrageous hypocrisy with icy aloofness (fig. 6.4). When James Northcote invited Kemble to his studio to pose for this scene, he complained that

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Figure 6.1: Apprehension. Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action. Plate 10.

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Figure 6.2: Painful recollection. Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action. Plate 11.

Kemble displayed little emotion and did not seem to enter into the part. Kemble responded by telling Northcote to come to the theatre and watch him in the role.10 In fact, restraint was the key factor in Kemble’s performance of Richard. Kean would subsequently play this scene with a lurid display of false affection in welcoming the princes. Kemble’s Richard, however, maintains an apparently passive unconcern even as he plans their imprisonment and murder. Act 3 opens with the arrival of the young princes and concludes with the appearance of Richard upon the balcony with two bishops who have been attending his pious devotions. In playing Richard, Kemble made the most of vile hypocrisy wearing the disguise of piety. It was an occasion for an actor to assume the role of an actor. An audience expecting a stronger display of passion found it in 1814, when, as Leigh Hunt expressed it, Edmund Kean did ‘extinguish Kemble,’ or at least hastened his going out (fig. 6.3). Kean played Richard III, that ‘foul hunch-backed toad’ (4.4.81), preying upon his victims with Satanic cunning. When Kemble retired from the stage in 1817, Edmund Kean (1787–1833) had already gained considerable prominence. Kean’s passionate intensity presented audiences with a striking contrast to the studied precision of Kemble’s style.

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Figure 6.3: Edmund Kean as Richard III. Act 4, scene 4. Painted by J.J. Halls; engraved by Charles Turner (1814).

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Figure 6.4: John Philip Kemble as Richard III. Act 3, scene 1. Painted by James Northcote; engraved by Robert Thew (1791). Pape and Burwick eds., The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (1805). Vol. 2, plate 22.

There was nothing of the cold, calculating aloofness in Kean’s rendition of Richard III, described by William Hazlitt as ‘a perpetual succession of striking pictures.’ Like Kemble, Kean was a poser, but his poses were more varied and rapidly modulated. In Hazlitt’s account, Kean played the scene with Lady Anne as the serpent confident of his seduction of Eve. ‘His attitude in leaning against the side of the stage before he comes foreward,’ Hazlitt writes, ‘was one of the most graceful and striking we remember to have seen.’ As he approached and spoke to Lady Anne, his body language involved gradual transitions in a series of pictorial attitudes: ‘smooth and smiling villainy,’ ‘wily adulation,’ ‘encroaching humility.’11 In the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and August Wilhelm Schlegel gave detailed attention to dissimulation in dramatic plot and character. When dramatic intrigue calls for a character to disguise her or his actual motives, the

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player must presumably reveal to the audience the very deceit and cunning which is concealed from other characters in the play. Certainly this poses a special problem for the use of gesture in acting, but it raises an even greater challenge for the visual artist. Can the artist capture in the frozen moment of a single scene the nuances of body language by which the deception might be conveyed? As an example of dissimulation (Verstellung) in the drama, Lessing discusses Francesco Scipioni di Maffei’s Merope (1713), drawn from the Fabulae of Hyginus. Telephontes, the son of Merope, returns to Messenia, where Polyphontes has usurped the throne by killing Telephontes’ father. Polyphontes has offered a reward for the murder of Telephontes, and Telephontes himself comes to claim that reward as a way of gaining an audience with Polyphontes and possibly finding a way to avenge his father. Suspicious of duplicity, Polyphontes tells Merope that he has given hospitality to her son’s murderer. Merope enters his chamber with an axe, intending to kill him. His true identity is revealed just in time, and together they plot their revenge. Merope pretends that she has forgiven Polyphontes. Telephontes, still in his guise as the stranger come to collect the reward, is called upon to slaughter a sacrificial animal before the throne to celebrate the reconciliation and upcoming marriage. Instead, he kills the usurper and reclaims the kingdom for himself. All three principal characters are implicated in dissimulation. Noting Maffei’s clumsiness in representing the dissimulation of Polyphontes and Merope, as they each pretend, with different motives, to believe in the dissimulation of Telephontes, Lessing comes to the conclusion that such an elaborate game of pretense loses credibility and becomes illsuited to tragedy: ‘It is more permissible for the writer of comedy thus to pit conception against conception, because to arouse our laughter does not require the same degree of illusion that is necessary to arouse our sympathy.’12 Dissimulation can be effective in tragedy, but Lessing cautions against allowing it to turn into a complex comedy of errors. He also points out that dissimulation may demean the dignity of the hero. Boxing someone’s ear may be suited to comedy, but not to tragedy. It is the unhappy consequence of the dissimulation in John Banks’s The Earl of Essex; or, The Unhappy Favourite (1682): ‘Without dissimulation the character is lost; with the dissimulation the character’s dignity is lost.’13 In his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–8), Lessing attempts to define the respective limits for dissimulation in comedy and tragedy. August Wilhelm Schlegel, in his Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur

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(1809–11), is concerned, rather, with the way in which dissimulation adds depth to the spectator’s perception of character. When Shakespeare has a character assume another identity, or disguise his or her actual motives, the audience must exercise a dual perception of the character, constantly adjusting the words and action of the revealed character in order to fathom the concealed character. The dual perception not only is a complication of dramatic illusion, as Lessing argued, but repeats the primary engagement of illusion; we see a replication of the actor playing a character, as that character plays another character.14 In addition to the duality of dissimulation, another duality of character representation is even more problematic: the character who becomes mad or who feigns madness. Duality of perception is challenged when we must witness a character who seems to move in and out of derangement, feigned or real, whose delirium alternates with, or is interrupted by, rational clarity. Hamlet’s pretended ‘Wildness,’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed, is ‘but half-false.’ Observing that ‘subtle trick to pretend to be acting only when we are very near being what we act,’ Coleridge sees but a gradation of intensity that renders ‘Ophelia[’]s vivid Images nigh akin to and productive of temporary mania’ (Lectures 1808–19 on Literature 1: 541–2; 11 Nov. 1813). Benjamin West’s depiction of madness in Lear on the heath is acclaimed among the best work contributed to Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (fig. 6.5). West also painted the madness of Ophelia, which has garnered very little critical praise. Admittedly, his Ophelia lacks the heroic composition of his Lear, but it does use gesture to achieve dramatic complexity (fig. 6.6). Like Fuseli, West sought to intensify the dramatic moment by exhibiting the passions in vehement extremity. He depicted Lear, crossing the heath with Kent and the Fool, encountering Edgar disguised as a madman and Gloucester bearing a torch. West centred Lear in the virtual eye of the storm of passions. In the illustration from Hamlet, the mad dance of Ophelia is also the dramatic centre of the composition, providing the leitmotif for the entire scene. But the scene is much confused. The court of King Claudius has become a madhouse. Distraught at the affliction that has befallen his sister, Laertes appeals to heaven for divine aid. The guilt-tormented king looks as wild and deranged as Ophelia. The Switzers whom he has sent to guard the door seem, rather, to stare upon the furled banner that leans against the arch. The gentleman who brought Ophelia to court, with the news that her mood will need to be pitied, seems indeed to pity her strange antics, also

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Figure 6.5: King Lear. Act 3, scene 4. Painted by Benjamin West; engraved by William Sharpe (1793). The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (1805). Vol. 2, plate 39.

watched by the ladies-in-waiting who stand behind the queen’s throne. The queen, however, has lapsed into such deep brooding that she seems totally oblivious to those around her. Pantomimic gesture, widely used on the baroque and classical stage in France and Italy, had been advocated in Luigi Riccoboni’s Dell’arte rappresentativa (1725). Engel objected that pantomimic gesture distracted the audience from the actual power of the drama.15 Metaphoric language may effectively communicate impressions of the sublime, noble, or horrific to the imagination, yet when a player attempts to conjure the same images through gesture, the results, Engel says, may well appear farcical. Pantomimic gesture may work in scenes of comic buffoonery, as does mimic gesture when a character narrates, by reenacting, a previous event. When pantomimic gesture is used to act out words, not thoughts or feelings, it will inevitably undermine the effects of more serious scenes. Engel cites as example a scene from

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Figure 6.6: Hamlet. Act 4, scene 5. Painted by Benjamin West; engraved by Francis Legat (1802). The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (1805). Vol. 2, plate 45.

Noverre’s Les Horaces (adapted from Corneille’s tragedy, which, as Henry Siddons adds, was played as The Roman Father, Drury Lane 1750). The speech of Camilla (Horatia in the English version) is described by Engel as noble and grand and at the same time terrible for the imagination: Quelle-même [Rome] sur soi renverse ses murailles, Et de ses propres mains déchire ses entrailles! Les Horaces, act 4 (quoted in Siddons 248)

In the imagination Camilla’s curse conjures an immense and profound gulf, which opens like the jaws of some terrible monster to consume and destroy the whole of a vast and puissant people. The terror of the curse is rendered ludicrous, Engel argues, when delivered in pantomimic gesture (fig. 6.7).

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Figure 6.7: False gesture. Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action. Plate 34.

Camilla is described as pointing to the bottom of the scene (apparently to indicate the spot where we are to imagine the city of Rome), subsequently agitating her hand, directed downwards to the earth; afterwards suddenly opening, not the jaws of a monster, but her own little mouth, and thither conveying her clenched fist, from time to time, as if she meant to swallow it with the greatest avidity (Siddons 248–9; plate 34). As another example of a false use of pantomimic gesture, Engel recalls the scene from Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (4.7), in which Countess Orsina reveals to Odoardo that his daughter’s bridegroom has been killed and that his daughter is in danger. Impatient for the

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Figure 6.8: False gesture. Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action. Plate 32.

Countess to complete the worst of her report, he exclaims, ‘Weaken not this drop of poison in a large vessel’ (quoted in Siddons 225). The scene calls for Odoardo to express increasing horror at the details the Countess has already revealed together with his eagerness to learn the fate of his daughter. How strangely incongruous the actor was who delivered this speech in pantomime is shown by Siddons’s reproduction of his ‘False gesture’ (fig. 6.8). An exact observer of the rule prescribed by Riccoboni, he lifted up the right arm methodically, and, curving his hand, held it

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Figure 6.9: False gesture. Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action. Plate 33.

down to the ground as if he were pouring something on the earth. This movement was meant to designate the drop of poison. ‘After this first gesture, stretching out his arms, with the fingers widely scattered, he seemed to wish to embrace something of vast circumference, and this was […] the painting of the tub’ (Siddons 225–6; fig. 6.9). As illustrations to his commentary, Engel drew upon contemporary performances on the Berlin stage. Siddons, in the sixty-nine illustrations that accompanied his translation, substituted poses of John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons and provided cross-references to the London stage. The illustrations, of course, are stymied by the same temporal limitations confronting the history painter. The motion of the player upon the stage is caught in the stasis of art. The resolution of the frozen movement, as Lessing described it in his essay on the Laokoon (1766), is to show rising motion just prior to its apex, so that the entire causal sweep is revealed. Art attains its illusion of temporality by enabling the viewer to imagine the before and after, the inception and consequence of a depicted action.

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Turning to Antony and Cleopatra, Henry Siddons discusses the exasperation and self-contempt that overcomes Antony in his dotage to the Egyptian queen. It is his own shame at having been unmanned, Siddons suggests, that explains why Antony has Thyrseus, Caesar’s noble ambassador, whipped like an errant schoolboy (Siddons 125–6). The gesture of shame and exasperation (Siddons 178) is appropriately adapted by Tresham to his depiction of Antony (fig. 6.10). Antony has led Cleopatra’s expedition against Octavius at sea. In the very midst of the battle, Cleopatra’s vessel turns in flight and Antony follows. Tresham depicts the scene in which Cleopatra approaches Antony after this humiliation in battle. As model for Cleopatra he has taken Lady Emma Hamilton, who effectively renders the feminine ploy of feigning a faint. ‘Have you reflected on the very great difference which exists between the painter and the actor?’ Engel has two answers to this question: a simple answer and an answer that is ingeniously complex. The simple answer is that the actor ‘has merely to modify the features of his own face,’ while the painter must ‘invent the face and all, besides the difficulty of conforming to all the rules and principles laid down in the art of physiognomy’ (Siddons 206). The one is aided by nature; the other must rely on convention. The matter becomes complex when Engel proposes the need for the actor or actress to know when it is permitted to make use of painting in the play of gesture. Engel, that is, distinguishes between ‘the veritable gesture […] which expresses the sentiment of the moment,’ and the feigned or foreign gesture which is adopted as a mode of pretense or deceit (Siddons 211). The natural gesture he calls expression; the feigned gesture he calls painting (Siddons 206–11). The painted gesture may be effectively controlled to reveal the duplicities of Iago, but should the actor resort to painted posing when the action requires an exhibition of sincerity, the performance is inevitably undermined. The painted gesture is appropriate for Cleopatra feigning a faint, but Hero’s swoon, in Much Ado About Nothing, must appear as a natural expression (fig. 6.11). Don John, jealous of Hero’s affections for Claudio, resorts to slander to break up the match. He first arranges for his man Borachio to make love to a waiting-maid in Hero’s chamber, then he invites Don Pedro and Claudio to a meeting outside the chamber window. In this scene at church the following morning, Claudio and Don Pedro, deceived by Don John’s evil stratagem, reveal to the congregation

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Figure 6.10: Antony and Cleopatra. Act 3, scene 9. Painted by Henry Tresham; engraved by Georg Siegmund and Johann Gottlieb Facius (1795). The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (1805). Vol. 2, plate 31.

what they had witnessed, or thought they had witnessed, the night before. The innocent Hero falls in a swoon. Beatrice and Benedick come to her aid, and the compassionate Friar Francis disbelieves the evil report. William Hamilton may well have seen the performance of Much Ado at Drury Lane in April–May 1788, just prior to his rendition of this scene. Whether or not he adapted particular details, his setting and gesture reflect contemporary theatrical practice. Much Ado played again at Covent Garden in September 1793 and October 1797. While the debate stirred by Lessing’s essay on the Laokoon prompted much discussion of the frozen moment, the comparison between the presumed stasis of the spatially defined visual arts and the presumed dynamism of the temporally defined verbal arts often overlooks the function of stasis in the drama. There is, after all, a dramatic power in the frozen moment on stage. As I have already shown with the plates of Hamlet and Lear, Engel and Siddons described the pause as a natural mimismetic gesture. Engel also

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Figure 6.11: Much Ado About Nothing. Act 4, scene 1. Painted by William Hamilton; engraved by Jean Pierre Simon (1790). The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (1805). Vol. 1, plate 17.

asserts that the frozen posture is a natural response to a shocking revelation (fig. 6.12). His example depicts the public response to the news of Prince Arthur’s death in King John: I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus, The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool, With open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news. (King John 4.3, 193–5)

Henry Siddons elaborates Engel’s assessment of the dramatic efficacy of the frozen moment, and he notes the instances in which Sarah Siddons pauses in a striking pose and allows the motionless gesture to displace speech. Boaden, too, comments on Siddons’s silences (1: 271). As Belvidera in Venice Preserved, ‘she rises at the bidding of Renault and the conspirators, the alarmed yet searching survey which she took of them was one of those expressions in which the actress writes the

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Figure 6.12: King John. The smith hears of Prince Arthur’s death. Siddons Plate 14.

characters of fire: you felt that there was a language more eloquent than speech, and saw beauty and intelligence interpret the very silences of the poet’ (Boaden 1: 321). In speaking of her self-possession, Boaden also notes reliance on the sustained pause: ‘In the hurry of distraction she could stop, and in some frenzied attitude speak wonders to the eye, till a second rush forward brought her to the proper ground on which her utterance might be trusted’ (2: 231). From Riccoboni, to Lavater, Engel, Bell, and Sharp, theories of gesture and expression underwent radical change. The legacy of the Enlightenment was its emphasis on empirical observation, scientific method, and typology. This was also the period that saw the rise of experimental psychology and reform in the treatment of mental disorders. Artists and players were wary of stylized mannerisms, even as they adopted a new set of stylized mannerisms that would conform to notions of selfreferentiality (an actor’s playing a character who is playing another character) and the pathology of madness and emotional torment. Gesture, in the review provided by Engel and Siddons, is described as it both accompanies speech and provides a complement or emphasis to the spoken words. In the natural mode, gesture may be deliberate or spontaneous; in the pantomimic mode, it is nothing more than playing charades with each and every metaphor. For Henry Siddons, there was no greater example of the power of physical presence on the stage than the remarkable Sarah. She, more than any other player, could demon-

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strate how gesture may construct or annihilate an ideal, how gesture, as expression of powerful feelings, may completely displace speech. Pantomimic gestures, Engel grants, are often used as signs to express defiance or scorn, to refuse to speak, to trespass social or sexual mores, to defy authority. Mimismetic gesture, the struggling with internal thoughts, may well be enacted in silence as if waiting for words that are yet to come. Unlike previous expositions on gesture, the Engel/Siddons account elaborates the differences between expressing an emotion and dissembling an emotion. The Practical Illustrations of Engel/ Siddons are not informed by the anatomical explanation of nerves and muscles provided by Charles Bell, but they do, with Siddons’s additions, consider the aberrational pathology of Kemble’s De Monfort or Hamlet, or Sarah’s Lady Macbeth or Ophelia. Rather than insist upon theatrical illusion, the actor becoming the character, as an all-or-nothing phenomenon, Henry Siddons fully endorses Engel’s appeal to the dual perception of performance. No matter what role she played, as her enthralled viewers always knew, Sarah Siddons was physically present in that character. Engel/Siddons acknowledge the motionless gesture of the frozen moment as at once psychologically natural and dramatically effective, yet as Henry underscores the point, Sarah Siddons made the audience feel the suspended power of that momentary pause. It was the ominous lull before the storm, the hesitation before the outburst that would shatter the ideal. Her reliance on gesture works, Henry Siddons emphasizes, because of her perfect sense of timing. Her control of the moment in the confluent flux of physical and psychological movement defines the greatness of her acting. Because lying and dissimulation dominated much of the plotting of Romantic drama, the critical attention to acting such roles naturally followed, and the playwrights, too, became more attentive to the details of physical movement. Characters were made to comment on their motions and poses and to call attention to telltale gestures of other characters. Indeed, the characters might even, on occasion, provide instruction on the art of dissimulation and how to discriminate shrewd from clumsy prevarication. Dramatic strategies of performative self-reflection vary significantly in comedy and tragedy. Hannah Cowley’s A Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783) and Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort (1800)16 will provide suitable representatives. Both playwrights not only involve their characters in situations of disguise or dissimulation calling for false or feigned gestures; they also use these occasions to comment on how to conceal or expose the subterfuge.

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In the opening scene of A Bold Stroke for a Husband, Hannah Cowley introduces Pedro as a simple rustic newly entered into service and not yet proficient in lying: SANCHA.

There he is: do’st see him? just turning by St. Antony in the corner. Now, do you tell him that your mistress is not at home; and if his jealous Donship should insist on searching the house, as he did yesterday, say that somebody is ill – the black has got a fever, or that – PEDRO. Pho, pho, get you in. Don’t I know that the duty of a lacquey in Madrid is to lie with a good grace? I have been studying it now for a whole week, and I’ll defy Don or Devil to surprize me into a truth. Get you in, I say – here he comes. [Exit. Sancha. Enter Carlos.] [Pedro struts up to him] Donna Laura is not at home, Sir. CARLOS. Not at home! – come, Sir, what have you received for telling that lie? PEDRO. Lie! – Lie! – Signor! – CARLOS. It must be a lie by your promptness in delivering it. – What a fool does your mistress trust! (1.1)

Thoroughly familiar with the ploys of lying servants, Don Carlos exposes Pedro’s lie but also tells him what he should have done to deliver that lie successfully: ‘A clever rascal would have waited my approach, and, delivering the message with easy coolness, deceived me.’ He goes on to explain to Pedro how he has betrayed his ineptitude: ‘thou hast been on the watch, and runnest towards me with a face of stupid importance, bawling, that she may hear through the lattice how well thou obeyest her, – “Donna Laura is not at home, Sir.”’ Truth and lying are marketable commodities. Just as servants are paid to lie, truth may also be purchased at a slightly higher rate: CARLOS.

There, take that, [gives money] and if thou art faithful I’ll treble it. Now go in, and be a good lad – and, d’ye hear? – you may tell lies to every body else, but remember you must always speak truth to me. PEDRO. I will, Sir, – I will. (1.1)

This introductory scene is thematic, for all the subsequent disguises depend upon deception cunning enough to escape detection among those who are themselves experienced in intrigue and who have learned to exercise an alert wariness. Don Carlos, however, is not as

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wary of duplicity as he ought to be. Having abandoned his wife, he has fallen into the clutches of the wily courtesan Donna Laura, who plies him with liquor and persuades him to sign over the deed to his wife’s estate. To regain her home and win back her husband, Donna Victoria disguises herself as a suitor, Don Florio. This clever rationale for a charming ‘breeches part’ also provides Cowley with an occasion to have her character talk about how she changes her manner to seduce the seducer. She can act the male suitor better than a male precisely because she has observed them as a woman: OLIVIA.

Ha, ha, ha! most doughty Don! pray let us see you in your feather and doublet; as a Cavaleiro, it seems, you are formidable. So suddenly to rob your husband of his charmer’s heart! you must have us’d some witchery. VICTORIA. Yes, powerful witchery – the knowledge of my sex. Oh! did the men but know us, as well as we do ourselves; – but thank fate they do not, ’twould be dangerous. OLIVIA. What, I suppose, you prais’d her understanding, was captivated by her wit, and absolutely struck dumb by the amazing beauties of – her mind. VICTORIA. Oh, no, – that’s the mode prescribed by the Essayists on the female heart – ha, ha, ha! – Not a woman breathing, from fifteen to fifty, but would rather have a compliment to the tip of her ear, or the turn of her ancle, than a volume in praise of her intellects. OLIVIA. So flattery then, is your boasted pill? VICTORIA. No, that’s only the occasional gilding; but ’tis in vain to attempt a description of what changed its nature with every moment. I was now attentive – now gay – then tender – then careless. I strove rather to convince her that I was charming, than that I myself was charm’d; and when I saw love’s arrow quivering in her heart, instead of falling at her feet, sung a triumphant air, and remember’d a sudden engagement. (2.2)

In the later eighteenth century, growing interest in the language of gesture resulted in the publication of numerous guides, manuals, and disquisitions on physical movement as crucial to oratory and acting. At the same time, the playwrights themselves became more attentive to the on-stage movement of their characters. This attention is evident in stage directions, which, with the advent of melodrama, usurped dialogue with an elaborate attention to mimic and pantomimic action. An inevitable consequence of melodrama was that psychological subtleties of

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characters were abandoned. Villains were expected to be villains, and their victims were duped simply because of their innocence and naïveté. The emphasis on body language also had the opposite effect: not the reductive stylization of melodramatic gesture, but the highly nuanced attention to psychological manifestations of grief, jealousy, and anger in physical behaviour. A dramatic theory founded on witnessing aberrational behaviour provided the ‘Introductory Discourse’ to Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions (1798). Her intention was to reveal how a character succumbs to a compulsive emotion, which then wreaks its dramatic consequences. She also emphasized the sympathetic propensities that prompt a strong curiosity to observe the changing moods of others. In her plays, dramatic action compels not just the audience but the characters themselves to watch those changes unfold. Baillie chose to represent dramatic character not in terms of traditional literary models, but rather in relation to the accounts of mental pathology in contemporary medical science.17 In the effort to comprehend its own nature, the human mind, even its daily social occupations, seeks to trace the varieties of understanding and temper which constitute the characters of men. Among the common occurrences of life, evidence of vanity and weakness puts itself forward to view, more conspicuously than virtues, and behaviour that is marked with the whimsical and ludicrous will strike us most forcibly. Curiosity and sympathy are the driving impulses in Baillie’s theory of the drama, and her subject is the exposure of a person in the thrall of strong emotion. The theatre provides an acceptable arena for the voyeurism that can otherwise be satisfied only by chance and stealth. To witness a fellow being in the throes of extreme mental agitation and emotional turmoil holds a powerful attraction over our sympathetic curiosity. Whenever passions are displayed, the gaze must follow. Unlike the momentary sensations of joy or pain, the emotions of fear, despair, hatred, love, and jealousy embed themselves deeply into mind and character, influencing all one’s thoughts and actions. In our experience of watching the turbulent passions, we soon learn to detect the advanced signs of inner turmoil, the telltale facial expressions and physical gestures that indicate the struggle to conceal anxieties or desires.18 With her insistence that drama should address the power of emotions to dictate behaviour and compel the overwrought individual to acts of irrational excess, Baillie engages aberrational psychology. She seeks to ground her analysis of behaviour on empirical observation and to identify the looks and gestures which foreshadow an emotional crisis: the restless eye, the muttering lip, the half-checked exclamation, and the hasty start.

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In De Monfort, she not only depicts an incremental sway of madness; she thematizes the act of watching. The play opened at Drury Lane in April 1800, with Kemble as De Monfort, Sarah Siddons as Jane De Monfort, and Talbot as Rezenvelt – the object of De Monfort’s irrational hatred. From the very opening scene of De Monfort, Baillie reveals that the mind of her central character is unsettled. He is not the man he was, his servant, Manuel, tells their landlord. He has become difficult, capricious, and distrustful. The audience need not strain to pick up the peculiarities of De Monfort’s gestures. They are observed and commented on by the other characters. When Rezenvelt appears, his very presence drives De Monfort into frenzy. They duel, but Rezenvelt, the superior swordsman, easily disarms his opponent with a deft manoeuvre of his sword. Rezenvelt disarms him, then offers to return the weapon when his opponent is calmer (4.2). But no calm comes to De Monfort; rather, he continues to rave in mounting delirium. Rezenvelt is last seen wandering alone in the woods. Baillie provides the final act with a Gothic setting: a convent in the woods, torches burning over a grave, lightning flashing at the windows, sounds of wind and thunder. A young pensioner, with a wild, terrified look, her hair and dress all scattered, rushes in upon the assembled nuns to report hearing horrid cries of ‘murder!’ echoing from the woods. Found and brought to the convent, De Monfort reacts with violent perturbation when the corpse of Rezenvelt is shown to him. Left alone with his murdered foe, De Monfort is overcome with wild anguish and attempts suicide. In his translation of Engel’s work on gesture, it is Henry Siddons who comments on the detailed attention to the physical debility of De Monfort’s madness: ‘The man tormented by his own conscience is the object of self violence; he is fearful and trembling; a leaf falling, a zephyr whispering fills him with terror, and inclines him to flight’ (Siddons 82). Baillie founded her theory of the drama on a ‘sympathetic propensity’ that compels individuals to watch fellow human beings, seeking to discern in their outward movements the secret springs of their internal feelings. Although this concern with the behavioural symptoms of extreme emotional duress is articulated more thoroughly by Joanna Baillie than by other playwrights of the period, it is nevertheless true that many others shared her attention to how a person may be saying one thing while his or her body communicates something very different. The theatricality of asides and marivaudage, fondly recalled by Charles Lamb in his essays ‘Stage Illusion’ and ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century,’19 initiated the audience into a

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complex repertory of dedoublement in which the actor could move with subtlety and dexterity in and out of character, or shift from one character into another. Lamb praises especially John Bannister for his art of ‘perpetual subinsinuation’ in making the comic coward a laughable rather than a merely pitiable character. The doubleness of stepping out of a role or of disguise or dissimulation (Schlegel’s Verkleidung or Verstellung: counterfeiting appearance or attitude) has a venerable tradition dating from Aristophanes, indeed from the very origins of drama. The Romantic contribution was to thematize the activity and have the characters reflect upon the manner and means of their performance. In adapting Engel’s work to current practices on the English stage, Henry Siddons gave emphasis to the London stage, and the acting styles of John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons, replacing Engel’s original attention to Friedrich Ludwig Schröder and August Wilhelm Iffland on the Berlin stage. As a clue to unstated motives, hidden guilt, and mental duress, and as a mode of expression in its own right, body language gained considerable attention from both actors and playwrights. In forwarding models for using body language to communicate moods and passions, Henry Siddons implicated more conflicting issues than he could master in his commentary. For one thing, body language both interprets and is influenced by cultural norms. Henry Siddons had to arbitrate between English and German examples. In advocating effective models, he also had to recognize the peculiar idiosyncrasies of individual style. Not every actress could imitate a pose of Sarah Siddons. A third conflict resided in the way in which the idiom of body language, as in any other language, evolves and changes. Major changes were already at work at the time of Henry Siddons’s first edition of 1807, and even more by the time of his revised second edition of 1822. Yet these changes are largely ignored. Henry Siddons does not approve the simplified and radically stylized gestures of melodrama; nor does he, in his revised edition, acknowledge the differences in acting styles that occurred after the era of Kemble and Siddons had passed. Although Fanny Kemble could still win applause in striking a recognizable Siddons pose (for example, as Queen Katherine in Henry VIII), Madame Vestris brought an entirely new and different repertory of physical mannerisms to the stage. So did Edmund Kean, whose erratic style was totally at odds with the choreographed precision of J.P. Kemble. Because the criteria for emotional authenticity in physical movement had changed, it was also necessary for the new generation of players to find new strategies for telling lies with body language.

Telling Lies with Body Language 175 NOTES 1 In Sharp’s theatre paintings, the exaggerated attention to gesture suggests more the flailing of the ‘silent movies’ than the subtleties of accomplished stage performance. See especially his scene from Shakespeare’s King John with Eliza O’Neill as Queen Constance before the Tents of the English and Foreign Sovereigns (1819). A more intriguing study of gesture is his An Author Reading His Drama to an Assemblage of the Performers in the Green Room of Drury Lane (n.d.), which depicts the ways in which the players imagine themselves entering into the action. 2 Johann Jakob Engel (1741–1802) based his observations in his Ideen zu einer Mimik primarily on the performances of Friedrich Ludwig Schröder and August Wilhelm Iffland. Engel, contemporary with Lessing, Mendelssohn, Goethe, and Schiller, was a recognized critic of the drama. Following his work Über Handlung, Gespräch und Erzählung [On Plot, Dialogue, and Narrative] (1774), his study of gesture was recognized as the major work on mimic, mimetic, and mimismetic expression. See Bachmann-Medick 78–137. 3 See Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien, Oeuvres complètes 8: 79–137. 4 See Hobson 18; and Burwick, Illusion and the Drama 26. 5 Diderot refers to the acting of David Garrick and Claire-Joseph Clairon as examples of this paradoxical doctrine of the illusion of overwhelming emotion achieved through emotional constraint. See Garrick; in his letter to JeanBaptiste-Antoine Suard, 7 March 1776, Garrick promises a commentary on Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien. See Clairon; on La Clairon’s acting, see Lancaster, French Tragedy in the Time of Louis XV and Voltaire, 1715–1774. 6 In Entretiens sur le Fils naturel (1757), Diderot had declared that actors, like all artists, must possess an exquisite sensibility: ‘The poets, the actors, the musicians, the painters, the singers of the first order, the great dancers, the tender lovers, the truly devout, all this enthusiastic and passionate troop feel vividly but think very little [Les poëtes, les acteurs, les musiciens, les peintres, les chanteurs de premier ordre, les grands danseurs, les amants tendres, les vrais dévots, toute cette troupe enthousiaste et passionnée sent vivement, et réfléchit peu]’ (Oeuvres complètes 7: 108). 7 See, for example, Nierenberg, Fast, Delmar, Ekman, Wainwright, LloydElliott, and Quilliam. 8 See Birdwhistell; Blacking; Bull; Buck; Burgoon, Buller, and Woodall; and Knapp and Hall. 9 See Siddons: ‘Lavater is a book which I have not ready at hand, and even if I had, I should not consult him very frequently. Strange notions, whose depth and value I have not thoroughly fathomed, might perplex my own

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10 11

12

13

14

15

16

ideas. If you happen to have the book, I beseech you to read what is there said concerning attitudes’ (53). See Pape and Burwick 264. Figures 4, 5, 6, 10, and 11 are from this edition. See Hazlitt 5: 180–4: ‘Mr. Kean’s Richard,’ Morning Chronicle (15 and 21 Feb. 1814) in A View of the English Stage (1818); and see 4: 298–303: ‘Richard III,’ in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1818). See Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 42. Stück (22 Sept. 1767): ‘Dem komischen Dichter ist es eher erlaubt, auf diese Weise seiner Vorstellung Vorstellungen entgegen zu setzen; denn unser Lachen zu erregen, braucht es des Grades der Täuschung nicht, den unser Mitleiden erfordert’ (Werke 4: 428). See also Siddons 87. See Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 57. Stück (17 Nov. 1767): ‘Ohne Verstellung fällt der Charakter weg; bei der Verstellung die Würde desselben’ (Werke 4: 494). See Burwick, Illusion and the Drama 164. The first aspect of dual perception is readily achieved in theatre painting. In Johan Zoffany’s David Garrick as Abel Drugger in Ben Jonson’s The Alchymist, for example, we recognize David Garrick even before we begin imaginatively to reconstruct his role in the play. Zoffany has not neglected to give us the lifted shoulders, the wry expression that we can recognize from other portraits of Garrick. The second aspect of dual perception is more difficult to realize, but surely Zoffany has also succeeded in revealing the confidence game, as Subtle and Face watch with amusement the entrapment of Drugger. Subtle, pretending to be an alchemist and wearing the doctor’s cap and gown, and Face, a servant who has decked himself out as master of the house, have just succeeded in duping Dapper, and Drugger, their second gull, has entered bringing tobacco in payment for promised revelations in alchemy. To the extent that we can see Garrick as Abel Drugger, and Abel Drugger as the dupe of Subtle and Face, Zoffany’s painting effectively solicits the dual perception of the ruse being played out at the close of act 2. Redressing the bad effects of requiring an actor to give sole attention to attitudes of gesture and posture, Engel gives an example from the pedantic rules of Riccoboni. ‘[On the motion of the hand, Riccoboni asserts] “In lifting up the arm, the superior part, i.e. that from the shoulder to the elbow, ought to be first elevated: the hand ought to be the last part in action,” &c. &c. Is not all this a species of pedantry, as Engel [says], and more adapted to complete a set of puppets than to form a race of great orators and accomplished comedians?’ (Siddons 29–30). Listed by the date of first performance (rather than the date of publication), the text for these plays is cited from Literature Online: http://lion.chadwyck.com/.

Telling Lies with Body Language 177 17 See Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination 11; Matthew Baillie’s Gulstonian Lectures (read before the Royal College of Physicians, May 1794) (Lectures and Observations on Medicine 122–48); the supplements to Morbid Anatomy (1795), including the symptomatology added to the second edition (1797) and published separately as An Appendix to the first edition of the Morbid Anatomy (1799); and A Series of Engravings, accompanied with Explanations, which are intended to illustrate The Morbid Anatomy (1799–1802). 18 See Baillie’s ‘Introductory Discourse’: ‘It is not merely under the violent agitations of passion, that man so arouses and interests us; even the smallest indications of an unquiet mind, will set our attention as anxiously on watch, as the first distant flashes of a gathering storm. When some great explosion of passion bursts forth, and some consequent catastrophe happens, if we are at all acquainted with the unhappy perpetrator, how minutely shall we endeavour to remember every circumstance of his past behaviour! and with what avidity shall we seize upon every recollected word or gesture, that is in the smallest degree indicative of the supposed state of his mind, at the time when they took place’ (3). 19 See Lamb, Life and Works: ‘Stage Illusion’ (3: 29–34); ‘On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’ (4: 275–87); ‘On Some of the Old Actors’ (4: 257–74); and ‘On the Acting of Munden’ (4: 288–91).

7 Cross-Dressing and the Performance of Gender in Romantic-Period Comic Plays by Women MARJEAN D . PURINTON

It has become a commonplace that incidents of cross-dressing in Romantic-period plays by women anticipate the ‘questioning’ or relativistic arguments about gender in postmodern feminist and queer theories of performativity.1 There has been less attention, however, to the way the performance of gender during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries helped to change the meanings and functions of cross-dressing. Breeches plays written in the late eighteenth century suggest several ways in which the general idea of ‘gender’ was being figured and codified as a discourse, as performance, and as a normative category. Both contemporaneous commentary about cross-dressed performers and contemporary theory about the performativity of gender point to the ways in which actresses in male roles were objectified for the sexual pleasure of male spectators even as they embodied a subversive resistance to the limitations of femininity and an appropriation of the power and privilege of masculinity.2 The actress’s protofeminism may have been viewed as transgressive and disruptive, but only temporarily, as the cross-dressed performer’s femininity was clearly legible to the audience, her pseudo-masculinity generally contained within the performance of the play, and her gender fully recuperated by the play’s end. Breeches performers were also often boyish, their adolescent portrayal falling short of adult manhood and thereby limiting the ‘feminist’ potential of the actress and undermining her as a serious threat to social order.3 Historians of this period have shown us that the stage was not the only site for these historical transformations of gender, for the numerous legal cases of the period that attempt to ascertain and codify clearly identifiable gender markers suggest that the law, especially, was struggling to formulate gender roles.4

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By the middle of the nineteenth century, gender play-acting in comedies began to resonate with serious dimensions of its transformation. In some comedies, gender play-acting took on the role of a corrective by showing to theatre audiences how delinquency and deviance were bound to occur when gender-bending was performed.5 Cross-dressed performers were no longer viewed as playful, fanciful, albeit provocatively disruptive, dramatic conventions. By 1855, female performances of masculinity met with harsh criticism, no longer popular with audiences that came to view them with increasing suspicion and cast them as immoral. Female theatrical transvestitism lost its legitimacy by midcentury, and, as Elizabeth Mullenix asserts, ‘the female cross-dressed performer became instead a highly specialized, dangerously sexual actress with certain transgressive powers – powers that were ultimately contained through her physical marginalization within lowbrow theatrical establishments’ (233). In other words, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the role of cross-dressing had changed considerably both within and without legitimate theatre from what it meant at the end of the eighteenth century. Sensitive to the historical conditions under which they wrote, Romantic women playwrights exploited comedy and the stage, sites where they could legitimately perform gender in the very midst of dichotomous gender formations. This chapter demonstrates how the emergent standards of normative sexuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed by consigning the performative mode of discourse to the realm of theatricality and then establishing normative ideas of gender through the restoration of ‘proper’ gender identifications blurred by cross-dressing. But it also suggests that the Romantic-period actress responded to historical pressures that rendered her role multivalent in its transformations between the 1780s and the 1840s. Cross-dressing on the stage brought to the British cultural consciousness the ‘naturalness,’ intelligibility, and immutability of gender. At a time when medical and legal discourses sought to establish clearly marked gender differences, masquerading, cross-dressing, and breeches roles highlighted the ways in which gender markers were in fact constructed and theatrical. It was not that cross-dressing was new to the stage, for cross-dressed actresses delighted Restoration audiences, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, the breeches role was a popular theatrical practice.6 Rather, the significations of cross-dressing took on different referents in the context of the emergent separate-sphere ideology that the stage helped simultaneously to construct and to destabilize.

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It is therefore not surprising to see the transvestite featured in Romantic comedy written by women as a recognizable figure with which to perform what postmodernism has come to call the polymorphous subject. What is important for us to explore, however, is the ways in which the meanings and functions of the cross-dressed performer shifted profoundly during the period between 1786, the year that Elizabeth Inchbald’s Spanish farce The Widow’s Vow was performed at the Haymarket, and 1844, when Catherine Gore’s domestic comedy Quid Pro Quo; or, The Day of the Dupes was performed. For Inchbald, perceptions of gender are produced in and by language. The year 1786 was a time when binary gender codification was fluid enough to be susceptible to connotative pressures. As Michel Foucault reminds us in The Order of Things, discourse, with its gender nuances and connotations, was, at the end of the eighteenth century, very much a performative mode in which reality was shaped through expression and representation.7 For Inchbald, gender is discursive. It exists in and through the language of its articulation and is, consequently, entirely fluid. By 1844, the notations of gender had become more regularized and readily identified by language, and the devices that made up representation as such became centralized around standards and norms. Again, Foucault explains that these standards were not obvious, for they were ideals that no one could actualize; but, at the same time, they functioned as instruments of examination and correction. Thus Gore’s Quid Pro Quo, which ostensibly celebrates cross-dressing, ultimately shows it to be deviant, ironizing and marginalizing it as abnormal, comic, delinquent behaviour in a critical way that contrasts with Inchbald’s discursive cross-dressing. So that we may see the significance of the historicity of cross-dressing as performance of gender, I will also take a brief look at Jane Scott’s 1816 comedic melodrama The Old Oak Chest; or The Smuggler’s Sons and the Robber’s Daughter as a representation of cross-dressing in transition between the discursivity of Inchbald’s play and the ironic normativity of Gore’s play. The plot of Inchbald’s farce The Widow’s Vow promotes marriage between the Countess and the Marquis, an aristocratic Spanish courtship marked by disguises and play-acting. The Marquis comes to assume female identity, but his ‘femaleness’ is imbued by language only. While he does not actually ‘dress’ the woman’s part, he is nonetheless perceived as ‘woman’ by a host of characters who are convinced of his gender by the mere suggestion that he is female and the

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vocal impersonations he enacts. In other words, the Marquis is deemed female because that is the gender he acts out in ‘verbal drag.’ The resulting confusions perform the postmodern theory of performativity: gender is representation, and, at the same time, that very representation of gender is its construction, what Marjorie Garber would term a ‘category crisis.’8 In the context of a late eighteenth-century theory of representation that was undergoing change as the universal foundation of all possible orders and modes of being, language was losing its privileged position as the link between objects and their representation (Foucault, Order of Things xii–xiii). These representational slippages are what Inchbald’s farce demonstrates in its discursive construction and deconstruction of gender. After her first marriage, the Countess makes a vow to sequester herself from the whole male sex for eighteen months in her castle with her uncle Don Antonio and his old servant Jerome. The Marquis’s sister Donna Isabella devises a scheme to trick the Countess into violating her ‘widow’s vow,’ by asserting that she, disguised as a man, will visit the Countess; by prevailing upon the Countess to consent to marriage and then throwing off her mask, she will make this vow ‘the jest of the whole kingdom’ (1.2.9). Isabella makes certain that the Countess learns that it is none other than she who will call as the male visitor, but Isabella has no intention of appearing as a cross-dressed suitor; instead, Isabella sends her brother, the Marquis. The Marquis does not know that he is to be taken for a woman – a woman assumed to be disguised as a man – for, as Isabella proclaims, ‘he has nothing to act, being the very person he represents, and therefore shall not know of the art by which he is introduced’ (1.2.10). The Countess will be tricked by what she assumes to be cross-dressed disguise; the Marquis will be confused by his not realizing that he is perceived as the woman he is not. The servants’ confusions over the gender of the ‘body’ that will appear as the Countess’s visitor amplify the ways in which gender is constructed by language. The Countess’s maid Flora wonders whether Isabella will ‘be dres’t all over like a man’ (1.3.13), and more importantly, she speculates, ‘Lord, I wonder how I should look in men’s clothes!’ (1.3.12). This is an allusion to the breeches role, very popular during the eighteenth century, in which women performers took on male stage roles. Jerome characterizes the Countess’s visitor as ‘the maid of Orleans’ (2.2.32), a reference to the cross-dressed and androgynous Joan of Arc. When the Marquis arrives, Flora assures the Countess: ‘Well, I declare she looks like a man’ (1.3.20). The body at which

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Flora and Jerome stare and laugh is, of course, the Marquis, but they are convinced that what they see is the female Isabella disguised as a man, and so they read the body in its ‘breeches role’ as scripted by Isabella’s charade because they have been told to see the gender markers in that way. The comic effect here is achieved by the disconnection between the signifying element and the sign, the unstable linguistic basis upon which characters struggle to know gendered identities. Their conversation constitutes discourse that Foucault would define as ‘merely representation itself represented by verbal signs’ (Order of Things 81). Flora’s efforts to discern the sex of Isabella, despite men’s clothing, compels her to question the gender markers of identity she has come to assume about other bodies. During a scene when she encounters Carlos, the Marquis’s ‘pretty’ footman, she exclaims: ‘O Lord, I hope this is not a woman too! But I dare say it is – Lord what a pity! but I’ll talk to him, and I shall soon be able to find out – and if he does not fall in love with me, I’ll conclude it can’t be a man’ (2.1.21). This time, Flora’s gender determination will be guided by voice, and her standard implies that there are specific normative voice registers and vocal mannerisms for masculinity and femininity. After brief conversation, Flora is convinced that he is too conceited for a man, but then when he ventures to ‘protest’ to her, Flora amends her gender reading of the body: ‘No – he protests – ’tis a man’ (2.1.22). Not thoroughly convinced, Flora tests his gender by having him help her arrange her hair ribbons, remarking, ‘Now shall I see by the dexterity, whether it is a woman or not’ (2.1.22). Carlos deftly arranges the ribbons, and in a sighing aside, Flora proclaims, ‘’Tis a woman, pashaw’ (2.1.22). Returning the ribbons, Carlos kisses Flora, who again vacillates, ‘No – it must be a man’ (2.1.22), but when Ursula chides her for flirting, Flora exclaims, ‘Lord bless you – it is only a woman […] Aye, in men’s clothes, like the master, and so there could be no harm you know’ (2.1.23). So sure that Carlos is a woman, Flora successfully persuades Ursula, who recants her first reading of the footman’s body: ‘Aye, now I think of it again, I am sure it is not a man’ (2.1.24). Besides assuming that desire can be expressed in heterosexual configurations, this scene demonstrates how slippery the category of gender was in 1786 as a stable and decipherable marker of identity, so fluid that it could be constructed on bodies with language – despite outward appearances or costumes and movements. It is not just the servants who are deceived by the performative genderbending, as the more educated aristocrats of the play are similarly

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duped by verbal transvestitism. Antonio’s first impression of the Marquis is that he has never seen ‘a handsomer man’ (1.2.17), and when the Countess tells him that ‘this self-same Marquis is a woman’ (1.3.18), Antonio admits, ‘That is, then, the very reason why I thought her so – “a fine creature,” now that is intuition, instinct, love without knowing it’ (1.2.18). After musing, Antonio adds, ‘Now I think of it again, she was devilishly awkward – and I believe wore her sword on the wrong side’ (1.3.19). Assured by his niece that the Marquis is a woman, Antonio mimics the femininity that they believed to be performed by their visitor: ‘To be sure it is – and I’ll be hang’d if it did not strike me to be a woman the moment I laid my eyes on her – for she came up to me slipping and sliding, and tossing her head, just as the fine ladies do’ (1.3.19). Judith Butler points out that the success of a speech act, such as the ones we have seen in Inchbald’s farce, as performative depends on ‘the extent that it draws on and covers over the constitutive conventions by which it is mobilized’ (‘Burning Acts – Injurious Speech’ 205).9 Inchbald’s farce shows how dependent gender is upon socially articulated expectations and observations. Gender intelligibility is produced in the context of its fulfillment of social norms, norms that were at the end of the eighteenth century as slippery as the Marquis in definition. In exceeding categorical definitions of masculinity and femininity, The Widow’s Vow exposes the category as performance and process. The verbal drag functions so strongly in the second act as to suggest language’s power in constructing gender and maintaining gender performances. Antonio pretends to discuss army battles with the Marquis, but in an aside, he remarks, ‘Damn me but she has a good leg’ (2.2.24), and laughs at thinking what a ‘pretty soldier’ she would make (2.2.25), an allusion to the ‘warrior women’ of popular ballads. The references to the Marquis’s leg and beauty also point to a reason why breeches roles were popular on the late eighteenth-century stage: the appeal to the male gaze. As boys or young men, women would have legitimate reason to show off their legs and thus to gratify men on and off stage. Satirizing gender-specific behaviours, Antonio tells the Marquis how he would like to command a whole regiment of bodies like his, for then he would realize some new military achievements. Inchbald’s readers and spectators would not miss the sexual undertones in the words of Antonio, whose army of pretty soldiers, like the Marquis, could quell an enemy attack with their perfume and wig powder. Inchbald adds one more instance of verbal gender performance in this act when a

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gentleman comes to the parlour looking for Antonio. Questioning the gender markers of other bodies he encounters, Antonio sneers in an aside, ‘How like a man she looks – Impudent hussey’ (2.2.26). Antonio experiences what Foucault terms ‘anatomic disarticulation,’ for Antonio cannot satisfactorily reconcile the relationship between the visible elements of the Marquis and those that are concealed in the depths of the body, including the voice of the Marquis (Order of Things 269–70). The Countess likewise is tricked into reading bodies gendered by verbal cross-dressing cues from Isabella’s script. Praising the assumed gender-bending performances of her visitor, the Countess remarks: ‘Well, I positively do think you some of the cleverest of your whole sex’ (2.2.27). The Countess assures the Marquis that he looks like ‘a sweet pretty man’ (2.2.28), and when Isabella, veiled, enters the room, the Countess assumes that she is the Marquis’s brother in women’s clothes. As Isabella removes her veil, the Countess sighs, ‘It is a woman,’ and turning to the Marquis, she asks, ‘Why what are you (After trembling as if much terrified) aren’t you a woman?’ (2.2.34). The eyes finally reframe both bodies’ genders and therefore stage how one method of culturally configuring a body, speech acts, leaves the category vulnerable for remaking. Isabella’s scheme has successfully confounded all the characters’ abilities to read bodies and articulate gender, their readings prompted by the verbal and visual markers responding to Isabella’s charade. Isabella’s script tricks the Countess into breaking her ‘widow’s vow,’ but, more importantly, it stages the artificiality of gendered bodies and behaviours by showing how easily gender as a category of identity can be confused and transgressed by linguistic and visual effects – that is, by performances. Inchbald’s farce is performative: it consists of powerful speech acts capable of constructing an identity that violates visual inspection. The word becomes the body it signifies, and characters’ gender identities are enacted in a space in which saying and being become indistinguishable (Esterhammer, Romantic Performative xii). Scott’s comic melodrama The Old Oak Chest deploys disguises and features the performativity of gender rooted in Inchbald’s discursivity while at the same time anticipating the correction of improper gender behaviours, as staged in Gore’s comedy. The most popular melodrama written before 1843, The Old Oak Chest was performed ninety-six times at the Sans Pareil Theatre between 1816 and 1819, with Scott playing the role of Roda.10 Like Inchbald’s farce, Scott’s melodrama takes place in the rustic mountains of Spain, probably sometime during the

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Reconquest, between 1248 and 1492, and involves a plot wrought with political intrigue and romantic love. To rescue the heroine Roda, Tinoco devises various disguises, including that of an old shrew named Jugget, who is then mistaken for the robbers’ cook. The robber Shabrico determines to abduct Jugget to replace their cook, and, punning on her name, he asks: ‘Suppose we make old Jugget jugg it to the castle?’ (2.1.161). In the second act, Tinoco constructs his own theatrical. Assembling his props and setting the stage for his script of deception and rescue, Tinoco instructs Paulo: ‘Bring out my bag with disguises […] I have face enough for anything’ (2.1.158), a hint that representation of gender will be a visual matter. The first disguise Tinoco assumes, however, is that of a hermit, a religious man whom the robbers mistake for a woman when they overhear the hermit in conversation – a verbal representation of gender that they misinterpret. The transvestite Tinoco quickly improvises an explanation for the supposed female voice: ‘’Twas an ancient woman at confession […] ’Twas poor Old Jugget, the peddler’s wife of Astroga’ (2.1.160). Gender in these scenes takes on the ‘verbal drag’ that we saw performed in The Widow’s Vow, and, like Inchbald’s, Scott’s play shatters the ordered relationship between the visual and the verbal upon which gender identifications depend. Tinoco realizes that he is going to have to improvise a disguise in order to give substance to his statement about the old woman at confession, a performance that requires his physical presence. Deftly, Tinoco transforms himself into ‘an old woman, hobbling with a stick’ (2.1.161). The transvestitism enables Tinoco to enter the very space where he designs a plot to rescue Roda, which he effects by disguising a dead doe that he is supposed to cook, as Roda. When a scuffle breaks out, Tinoco/Jugget laments the constrictions of his female costume: ‘O Curse these petticoats! I could have maintained a running fight, till had limbed all the rascals, but these infernal trammels will not let me move. If ever I command an army, I’ll put my soldiers in petticoats. Then they must fight […] Ah! Here they come and here I go. (Attempts to run.) O these damned petticoats!’ (2.4.169). The feminine costume is shown here for its physical restrictions in public spaces where freedom of movement is required, for Tinoco’s garment is as functional for combat as the perfumed and powdered army in Inchbald’s farce. As in Inchbald’s comedy, cross-dressing in Scott’s The Old Oak Chest confuses the characters; it disrupts their readings of bodies according to normative gendered behaviours. The melodrama’s deployment of

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cross-dressing in the rescue scene combines theatre’s visual markers of gender with verbal cues, but, more importantly, it cleverly stages the disciplinary power of a properly embodied and dressed femininity as a play within a play, in which its cross-dressing has to be corrected for the resolution of the play proper, a resolution that reifies binary gender roles that were becoming increasingly normative at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, the play-within-the-play dramaturgy provided a space where the political technology of power could be played out on the cross-dressed body in its function as discipline. Gore’s comedy Quid Pro Quo relies upon the breeches role as metaperformance so as to interrogate prevailing identity constructions and conventions at a time when doing so was risky.11 Gore wrote her award-winning comedy with the part of Lord Henry Bellamont as a breeches role, and Mrs John A. Nisbett performed the role in the 1844 production. Bell enacts a part that requires Nisbett to displace her femaleness with performed masculinity, but the slang-talking, cigarsmoking, Eton schoolboy Bellamont created considerable controversy, a ‘reversal of gender expectations that most offended the audience and critics’ (Franceschina, Gore on Stage 26). I suspect that audience indignation had much to do with the ways in which dichotomous gender behaviours had become more solidly codified and normative by the middle of the nineteenth century, and so any deviation from those norms might seem more challenging than cross-dressing occurrences we have seen in the earlier plays The Widow’s Vow and The Old Oak Chest. Women who did not comply with the prevailing standards of heterosexual romantic love were deemed, for example, by the midnineteenth century, ‘spinsters,’ or, even more pejoratively, sapphists or tribades by sexologists. Public women were, furthermore, ‘fallen,’ morally corrupt, and possibly prostitutes, especially those public women connected to the theatre, where there was already in the cultural imaginary an association between performing women and prostitution. Mrs Nisbett not only played the part of ‘Bell,’ a homonym for the obviously feminine belle, but also acted out sexual behaviours that, categorized as deviant, announced themselves to be in need of discipline. Quid Pro Quo thus illustrates that the constructions of women are instrumental in the characterization of men and masculinity as well as in the establishment of a normative heterosexuality. Bell’s character recalls the schoolboy trope popular in eighteenth-century satire, and his characterization is erotically charged with the boy-play trope,

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feminized and sexually overcharged in seeking ‘improper’ objects of his desires.12 The son of the Earl of Hundson, he behaves like a ‘playboy,’ an aristocratic outlaw or rake of Restoration comedy. His role is a sexual spectacle in the face of the emergent regulating femininity in the play’s heterosexual romantic plot. As Bell, Nisbett confounds the cultural messages inscribed on the surface of the female body as he flirts with Ellen Grigson. With clear irony, Bell announces during the private theatrical being staged at Hundson Castle, ‘There is an imposter in the house!’ (4.1.489), for he is, of course, the spectacularly displayed gender imposter who shows how it is possible for a female body to behave with masculinity. There is no unmasking of the crossdressed character at the end of the play; Bell therefore resists the recuperation of a stable femininity or the formation of heterosexual relationships in the comedy’s plot, although the audience would have known from the outset about the breeches role. The subtitle of Gore’s play, Or the Day of the Dupes, signals how the play reframes Bell as an ambiguously gendered character played by Nisbett. While ‘dupe’ identifies a person easily deceived, and there are many deceptions in this play, it also points to a person who is the tool of another person or power. Bell might well be Gore’s ‘dupe,’ her instrument in displaying the performativity of gender role assignments by a culture intent on the submission of bodies through the control of ideas. The significance of the breeches role in gender performance is further complicated by its appearance in a play-acting scene embedded within Gore’s comedy. We learn that residents of Hollyhock Lodge have been planning and preparing a private theatrical for entertainment. They are to perform a play set in Spain, much like Inchbald’s farce and Scott’s melodrama, but taken from the French – in other words, it refers to places where people are more likely to violate gender norms. Carpenters have been hired to build a stage, complete with curtain and machinery, as well as scene painters, all under stage manager Captain Sippet’s direction, in order to make the estate look like a ‘real theatre’ (1.2.461). The transformation of the estate seems to be effective, from the Countess’s assessment: ‘I never saw anything look more like Sadler’s Wells!’ (3.3.485). In an aside, Sir Mordent identifies Sippet as the Earl’s ‘theatrical chap, the prompter of their clap-trap and stage tricks!’ (1.2.460). For Sir Mordent, Hundson Castle, ‘like most theatrical houses nowadays, is turned upside down, and the proprietors out of their wits!’ (3.2.479). The Countess reminds us of the artificiality of the space now layered with gender performances: ‘If

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one had only to pay at the doors, one might fancy oneself in a playhouse!’ (4.2.491). But the private theatrical is only one layer of meta-performance taking place within the play. Following Mrs Dorothy Grigson’s instructions, Henry Grigson first impersonates his messmate Lord Algernon Fitz-Urse, son of the Marquis of Plantagenet, recently returned to Great Britain from India. Mrs Grigson marvels at how well Henry plays his part: ‘Lord love him! How well he does it! Would not any one swear he was born a lord!’ (2.1.469). Duped by Henry’s deception, the Countess remarks to Lord Fitz-Urse: ‘To judge from appearances, young man, you must have spent a great part of your life in India?’ (2.1.472). Appearances and their mis-readings are exactly that upon which the comedy turns and the gender performances depend. Dorothy Grigson is convinced that the Hundsons will announce Henry ‘in their playbills – “the son of the Marquis of Fitz-Plantagenet, his first appearance on any stage”’ (3.1.478), for she and others involved in the fantasy of playacting have been duped by disguises and identities based on their abilities to read bodies. Tracy Davis has argued that theatricality is generally seen in the context of masculinized viewing, and Gore’s use of disguise emphasizes the ways in which spectators might have enjoyed being tantalized with remembrances of those legendary women warriors who were crossdressed as sailors or messmates like Lord Algernon Fitz-Urse.13 But here, the regulatory pedagogy of the performative is persuasive in its inculturation of habits and norms as a technology of power that disciplines, corrects, and controls the body so that such performative and historical instances of gender-bending are not seen as appealing and worthy of imitation. While the masquerading is serious in its preparations, the unmasking of disguises is comic in Quid Pro Quo. Bell unmasks Henry Grigson as Algernon when he realizes that his clothes are branded with the initials ‘H.G.,’ and he announces to the theatrical group that the person they believe to be Algernon is not the son of the Marquis of Plantagenet. Sippet proposes a counterplot to help Bell so as to keep up the performativity of identities: ‘What if we spread a report in the castle that Lord Algernon has returned home from India, after mortally wounding a gallant brother officer in a duel? Under such an aspersion, take my word for it, the ass will throw off his lion’s skin!’ (4.1.490). Bell enthusiastically agrees and adds, ‘We’ll spring the mine to-night at the rehearsal’ (4.1.490). This scheme succeeds in forcing Henry Grigson to

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reveal that he has been impersonating Lord Algernon as ‘a hoax, a joke, an imposition’ (4.2.495). Sir Mordent joins the troop of comedians when he convinces Rivers to take on the role of a musical protégé by the name of Francis who will serve as the theatre orchestra’s conductor. His role puts him in a position to encounter Ellen Grigson and her beautiful voice singing the role of Donna Floranthe di Villa Franca. Her performance, according to Sir Mordent, lacks the artificiality of the other playacting we have seen throughout the comedy: ‘Amid all their artifice and stage-trick, ’tis some comfort to discover a trace of feelings that are genuine!’ (4.1.486–7). Mrs Grigson’s commendation of Bell’s/Nisbett’s acting abilities might be applied to all the gender performances and meta-performances of Quid Pro Quo: ‘Seeing’s not believing, but hearing is’ (4.1.489). Mrs Grigson speaks here to the historical transformation of gender we have been tracing in its regulatory mode: a body manipulated by authority and discipline is properly (that is, naturally) docile, subjected to compulsory gender behaviour, and conformed to constant surveillance, the disciplinary regime of Foucault’s panoptic theatre (Discipline and Punish 138–222). The denouement attempts to unravel all the mistaken identities, disguises, and gender performances left masked. Rivers concedes that they all have ‘had too much masquerading’ (5.1.501). Sir Mordent mawkishly sighs: ‘So much for private theatricals!’ (5.1.502), and yet he concludes: ‘But, for the good of the rising generation, if I might suggest a little change in the dramatis personae’ (5.1.504), a mighty suggestion that by the middle of the nineteenth century audiences were becoming less receptive to cross-dressed, breeches-roled actresses on the British stage. He takes the hand of Lord Bellamont in a gesture of recognition of the female body he might read beneath the schoolboy’s costume and mannerisms. The Epilogue is rendered, for the most part, by Nisbett as herself, but she is interrupted by Mrs Humby (Bridgett Prim in the play), who asserts: ‘Your scruples, and the writer’s, who have thus / Assumed a garment so indeckorous?’ (505), a reference to the male costume that Nisbett has worn during the play, but also a self-conscious nod to the playwright Gore’s dramaturgy that casts women in breeches roles. The ‘garment’ may also well be the performance itself, a space where a woman behaving as a man is perceived by the audience and society as indecorous. Nisbett reacts to this indictment against gender performances with good-natured humour consistent with what we find throughout the play:

190 Marjean D. Purinton And though our sex’s diffidence, awhile Hath been abjur’d, to cheat them of a smile, Still will their generous hearts protection yield When’er – where’er – a woman takes the field!

(505)

The theatre, Nisbett and Gore attest, is the ‘field’ of play-acting and playwriting that enables women to perform gender roles that might open onto multiple identities, a space where the fantasy of new gender codes might be possible, where challenging prevailing rules of gender might be staged – until these roles are ultimately restored with the removal of performance costumes and scripts. Bell, Mrs Nisbett, and Gore’s play itself are examples of gender delinquency, controlled illegalities, all fallen as they have outside social structure, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but capable of rehabilitation, especially since both the play-within-the-play and the breeches role take an ironic and marginal position relative to the ‘proper’ and ‘serious’ play in which they are suspended. The breeches role is corrected and rehabilitated by the critical surveillance of the characters finding fault with its disorder. They bring what Foucault calls the ‘coercive technologies of behavior’ to bear upon the delinquents so as to ensure the return to the norms of gender (Discipline and Punish 253). The Widow’s Vow, The Old Oak Chest, and Quid Pro Quo show us how cross-dressing and the performance of gender in Romantic comic drama respond to different historical imperatives that shaped its expression, how the drama used cross-dressing differently in response to cultural attitudes and ideological changes. The category of gender was mutable and mobile during those years we now identify as the Romantic period, but too often our interpretative work essentializes and replicates binary notions of gender in ways that deflect its historicity; consequently, we do not always perceive the subtle transformations that theatrical cross-dressing might signify in the period’s comic drama. Perhaps our postmodern inquiries are moving past the commonplace that Romantic theatre audiences knew all along – the performative foundations of gender. Inchbald’s, Scott’s, and Gore’s plays variously dramatize gender performances when the biological and social constructions of gender dominated cultural activity, and they reflect the changing attitudes about the codification and performance of gender difference: the performative gender as discursive play for fun, the performative gender as the physicality of the breeches role for comic effect, and the performative gender as a normalizing structure for instruction and correction.

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NOTES

1

2 3 4

Quotations from plays are referenced in the form act.scene.page number. My thanks to Alex Dick for his thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this essay. Burroughs has demonstrated, for example, how women playwrights utilized theatre practices to theorize social performances of gender (17–20), and Esterhammer has explicated performativity as intrinsic to Romantic texts, with drama, in particular, illustrating how speech acts operate within a system of societal conventions and structures of authority (Romantic Performative 187–239). See also Straub’s discussion of female cross-dressing in the eighteenth century (Sexual Suspects 127–41). Among Butler’s theoretical writings, see Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.’ Dolan asserts that postmodern feminists have unmasked the naturalized biology of the dominant culture within which performance works and theatre represents (17–41). Similarly, Phelan delineates the connections among feminism, poststructuralism, and performance as signifying practices (‘Feminist Theory, Poststructuralism, and Performance’ 157–82). Feminist lesbian studies that link performance, gender construction, and sexual identity with institutionalized discourses and fields of social meaning include de Lauretis’s ‘Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation’ and Case’s Feminism and Theatre. See, for example, Friedman-Romell, Bullough and Bullough, Donkin (‘Mrs. Siddons Looks Back in Anger’), and Anne Russell. In the context of Anglo-American theatre, see Mullenix (8–9). In 1745, Hannah Grey joined the British army as James Gray, and she became known as ‘The Widow in Masquerade or the Female Warrior’ (Bullough and Bullough 134–5). In 1746, Mary Hamilton disguised herself as a man, adopted the name Charles Hamilton, and tricked several women into marriage, including Mary Price. Her subsequent trial for fraud made headlines for the newspapers (Friedl 238–40 and Castle 602–22). Charlotte Charke’s Autobiography details how she was able to explore a number of roles and occupations normally reserved for men, but her role as actress in the 1760s may have protected her from prosecution, since play-acting legitimized the fraud of gender disguise (Friedl 240–2). In 1777, Ann Marrow was prosecuted and convicted for wearing men’s clothing and marrying three women (Friedl 245–58). The courts entertained the case of Mary Ann Talbot, who in 1778 dressed as her captor’s footman John Taylor and then escaped by adopting disguises as a regimental drummer, a sailor, and a powder boy (Bullough and Bullough 136–7). Another infamous legal case

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5 6

7

8 9

10

involved the French diplomat and spy, the Chevalier Monsieur d’Eon, who cross-dressed male to female beginning in the 1760s (Friedl 244–6; Kates xxix). Mullenix cites a decline in the performance of the breeches role by midcentury (231–3). Restoration and eighteenth-century actresses who performed breeches roles included Susan Verbraggen, Kitty Clive, Peg Woffington, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Charke. According to Shevelow, the tall and slender Charlotte looked dashing in her breeches roles: ‘Probably few, if any, actresses could wear breeches as convincingly, or move in them as confidently, as she. The pleasure audiences received from watching a lithe, attractive actress perform these roles was varied and complex. Some spectators inevitably disapproved on grounds of morality or propriety, but they were in the minority: breeches parts were popular’ (176). See Straub (‘The Guilty Pleasures of Female Theatrical Cross-Dressing and the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke’). Merrill discusses the popularity of Charlotte Cushman in the breeches roles on British and American stages (110–37). In The Order of Things, Foucault argues that the system of divisions that ordered modes of being was radically transformed at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, so that there was a dissolution of the homogeneous field of orderable representations. Language was therefore separated from the visible sign of that which it seeks to represent, and discourse ceased to function within representation as the first means of ordering representation. In other words, during the transition between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, language came to convey less of a one-to-one signification and to open more multiple meanings (243–304). See Garber (1–17). Conversely, Kirsch asserts that drag (parodic gender) does not confront ‘ideal’ categorical identities on the political level (86–7). Huston claims that although performance interrupts language, it depends intimately on meaning that, once delivered, functions as language (47). In the context of the oral and evocative language of feminist theory, Salvaggio adds that, like sound, bodies signal motion in language (67). In Excitable Speech, Butler argues that a speech act is a bodily act and that the ‘force’ of performance is never fully separable from bodily force (141). Bartky asserts, however, that practices that produce a body in which gesture and appearance are recognizably feminine include size, gestures, postures, movements, and bodily display (25). For performance discussions of The Old Oak Chest, see Franceschina (‘[Introduction to] The Old Oak Chest’), and Bratton (88–90).

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11 Donkin explains that the fundamental distinction between genders was fluid in the context of theatrical practice, with ‘breeches roles’ being common, but there was some animus attached to a woman writing a breeches role, an act that seemed to imbue gender mobility with different, perhaps more dangerous, meaning (‘Mrs. Gore Gives Tit for Tat’ 63). 12 See also Ferris’s discussion of the ‘breeches role’ in eighteenth-century British theatre (148–59). 13 Dugaw has demonstrated public enthusiasm for ‘warrior women’ crosseddressed as sailors and soldiers in popular ballads of the seventeenth century (143–62).

8 Fox’s Tears: The Staging of Liquid Politics DANIEL O ’ QUINN

On the evening of 6 May 1791, during debate on the Quebec Bill, the two most powerful Whigs in the House of Commons publicly disagreed about the appropriate British response to the French Revolution and brought to a crisis schisms in the party which had been forming from at least 1788, if not before.1 Having barely recovered from the embarrassment of the Regency crisis, the party had been in a state of anxiety since Edmund Burke’s publication of Reflections on the Revolution in France, but internecine political conflict took on an unexpectedly theatrical form. In response to Burke’s oratorical assault, Charles James Fox stood before the House weeping over the shredded bonds of friendship. In this most public of spaces, the struggle between the principal actors was both private and public to the extent that key political terms such as party, liberty, and even the constitution become loci for intimate, yet public, negotiation. Recent scholarship on Georgian theatre and Romantic sociability has reinvigorated our understanding of the theatricality of late eighteenth-century society, and the evening of 6 May offers an entry point for an argument regarding the centrality of the literal and figurative body to the political developments that accompanied the emergence of a new social order. My primary interest in this essay is to explore not only how the specific moment of oratory – its singular performance – always already involved a remarkable level of citationality, but also how its reception and dissemination in the press capitalized on the potential for reading Fox’s tears as the repetition and modification of past political and theatrical performances. I have written elsewhere about the symbiotic relationship between late eighteenth-century newspapers and theatrical culture.2 The theatre was the only cultural practice regularly

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discussed on a daily basis in the papers, and the papers were arguably the most frequently invoked form of reading, with the important exception of the private letter, on the London stage.3 At the very least, almost every prologue and epilogue to a play in the patent houses was likely to discuss the papers’ coverage of theatrical reception. These two media, still largely overlooked in conventional accounts of Romanticism, were mutually involved in the propagation and negotiation of what Arjun Appadurai has helpfully designated as the ethnoscape: the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live […] moving groups and individuals [who] constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree. This is not to say that there are no relatively stable communities and networks of kinship, friendship, work, and leisure, as well as of birth, residence, and other filial forms. But it is to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion. (33–4)

Appadurai develops this notion in order to deal with the globalization of culture in late modernity, but it is important to recognize that the similar flows of persons, populations, discourses, and performances were increasingly a part of everyday life in the late eighteenth-century British empire. The ethnoscape, like Bourdieu’s combined concepts of habitus and field, attempts to capture conceptually a complex nexus of social and cultural practices which come to disseminate, reinforce, and resist styles of ethnicity without reverting to a static notion of spatial identity. In my earlier work on this matter, I have described the mutual project of the press and the theatre as autoethnographic: a set of practices which night and day presented consumers of both of these forms of mass culture with representations of themselves, and of increasingly present others, both on and off the stage. It is in this mediascape that the negotiation of class, gender, sexuality, and race converged to generate not only ethnicity, but also styles of ethnic performance. The ongoing representation and recalibration of social norms in the space of the theatre itself and the continual meditation on the relationship between representation, sociability, and reception in the papers is, I believe, crucial to understanding social transformation at this historical juncture. That historical juncture – the period following the loss of the American colonies and prior to the declaration of war with France – plays no

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small part in the kind of questions I pursue in this essay. This is a period suffused with anxieties about Britain’s place in the global flow of capital and about its governmental relation to its subject citizens both at home and abroad. Whether one looks at the activism surrounding the Atlantic slave trade, the complex debate over the sovereignty of the East India Company, or the multifarious attempts to reform parliament itself, political discourse in this era continually opens onto questions of national and regional identity, class, and ethnicity whose resolution lay very much in the future. As we will see, the political performance I am dealing with in this essay is permeated by racial fantasies whose import would not be realized until well after the debate. But at its simplest level, the conflict between Fox and Burke is an extremely important political event whose repercussions would be felt throughout the 1790s. My analysis of the break between the two men ultimately argues that it is as important for the way it engages with long-standing issues in Whig political theory and practice as it is for any notion of political rupture. Getting at that continuity requires close attention to how Fox’s and Burke’s performances were allegorized in the press and also to how they themselves activated allegory and citation in their performances. Both the primary actors and the commentators assume an extraordinary level of sensitivity to the performativity of their words and actions. Everyone involved – actors, commentators, visual satirists – strategically reiterates and relies upon previous social and cultural performances in order to exert pressure, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, on how the particulars of this performance will be replayed and re-signified. But on a less obvious level, this evening in the House of Commons is an auspicious occasion for exploring two seemingly unrelated topics: the vexed notion of masculine friendship and the biopolitical connotations of bodily fluids in the late eighteenth century. It is my contention that both of these topoi are in the process of fundamental re-signification in the period following the loss of the American colonies and that their co-activation in this performance moment is more than simply coincidental. Friendship, tears, and blood are all implicated in the figural economies which attend central tenets of eighteenth-century British political subjectivity, and all three terms have the capacity to figure forth strikingly new social and political relations. Personal and political amity are crucial components of Locke’s notion of civic friendship and thus resurface throughout eighteenthcentury political theory. Tears are the bodily signifier that underwrites

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much of the politics of sentiment and thus are a key factor in a wide range of discourses pertaining to gender normativity and civility. And finally blood is as important for notions of aristocratic election as it is for theories of monarchical government. The place of all of these terms in emergent discourses of race is more complex, but I think we can discern how they might come to activate one another in the performance under scrutiny here. Perhaps the best way of thinking about this is to suggest that the re-signification of these terms has the potential to fundamentally alter the very notion of governmentality, because they are so proximate to the body – to the entwined notions of desire, affect, and reproduction that would play such a crucial role in the deployment of sexuality. As Foucault and Stoler have suggested, sexual deployments are crucial not only to understanding emergent discourses of race and class in the early nineteenth century but also to comprehending the mechanisms of imperial and national governance. That sense of the potential for political re-figuration permeates this performance event, and thus the scene of Fox weeping in the House of Commons opens up the possibility for interrogating the complex relationship between historical continuity and historical change. One of the most intriguing things about Fox’s tears is the way they speak to Burke’s deployment of racial tropes – specifically those connected to blood – in the debate. At its most speculative point, my argument resuscitates a specific instance of bodily performance and its connotations in order to build a larger argument about the dangers of bodily figuration at this historical moment. It is here that Appadurai’s notion of the ethnoscape and Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus are so illuminating, because what emerges from the performance and reiteration of this event is a sense of how culture both mediates and constitutes social and bodily dispositions. I suggest that these dispositions are themselves significantly connected to the emergence and resistance to biopolitical imperatives that would eventually subsume more abstract models of the state. So within a broad historical purview, I tendentiously push on Fox’s performance in order to read the evening of 6 May 1791 not simply in terms of the immediate context of the French Revolution but in the larger trajectory of imperial transformation. I am not going to be able to show conclusively how the social and cultural fields change, even in this brief temporal interlude, but I think a careful reading of Fox’s performance, and its reception, gives a sense of the historical and theoretical possibilities afforded by the kind of attention that I pay to gesture, utterance, and their reinterpretation in the press and in the satirical prints.

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Bad Blood Roughly three weeks prior to the night in question, Fox impetuously declared to the House that ‘he for one admired the new constitution of France, considered altogether, as the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty, which had been erected on the foundation of human integrity in any time or country’ (The Speeches of the Right Honourable Charles James Fox 199–200). Fox’s panegyric would haunt him for years to follow, and it was interpreted by the Pittite media as a direct rebuttal of Burke’s hyperbolic account of French affairs in the Reflections. At this time Fox saw the foundation of the new French constitution as a universal application of Whig principles, which could only be good news for Whigs in Britain. What he valued was precisely the exemplarity of the French Revolution: It will teach Ministers not to endanger the just influence of the Crown, by giving an advice to any King to stretch it beyond its allowed limits. And the confusions which have given occasion to so much lamentation, though they are trifling in comparison of the benefits to which they have led, are yet sufficiently great to warn the people of England from rashly giving way to innovations which might devote them to similar calamities. (Morning Chronicle, 7 May 1791)4

This was almost a précis of Whig notions of the perennial need to resist monarchical despotism and is not at all distant from similar pronouncements during the Rockingham period, during the constitutional crisis of 1784, or in the years that followed. Fox’s remarks were not controversial to most Whigs at the moment of their utterance, but they became a kind of albatross when events in his own party and in France became more volatile. With the September massacres still a few months off, Fox found himself embroiled in internal party conflict, which unfolded differently than he at first expected. He initially thought he would be mediating between the radically divergent views of Sheridan and Burke but suddenly found himself in direct public conflict with his closest political associate. For his part, Burke had been growing sceptical about the moral foundations of politics itself during this period. For much of his career, Burke’s understanding of the political was inextricably tied to the concept of party.5 As B.W. Hill summarizes,

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For such a man, born in a period when ‘factious’ political opposition was considered unconstitutional, the possession of principles to support opposition was a necessity. But after 1784 Burke felt obliged to justify his position by seizing upon issues of morality so broad that the principles they involved […] conduced to party advancement only in the long run if at all. (23)

By August of 1789, after the embarrassments of the Regency crisis in 1788 and the lagging public interest in Burke’s grand moral objectives in the Hastings impeachment, Burke himself was beginning to question the existence of sufficient numbers of virtuous men capable of being joined together by similar political principles: Party is absolutely necessary at this time. I thought it always so in this country ever since I have had any thing to do in public business; and I rather fear, that there is not virtue enough in this period to support party, than that party should become necessary on account of the want of virtue to support itself by individual exertions. (Correspondence 6: 9–10)6

As Hill has argued, this doubt prompted Burke to relocate virtue in the constitution itself, because without some kind of moral ground there was no basis for opposition. This of course shifted Burke’s analysis of politics from a highly pragmatic practice necessarily embedded in the sociability of party members to a far more abstract articulation of largely ideological figures for national interest, belonging, and identity. It is this shift that accounts for much of the rhetorical excess in the Reflections, because what matters in that text is rhetorical, not social, performance. If we understand the Reflections as an attempt to figure forth the constitution as an agent of social regulation in its own right through the compulsive reiteration of highly sentimental and inflammatory tropes, then perhaps Fox’s tears can be understood as a similarly virtuoso social performance which aimed to reactivate and secure the notions of political virtue, whose supposed decay had pushed Burke away from the Whigs during this period. Despite efforts by Portland and others to avert a crisis between the two prominent Whigs, the eruption was violent, and its effects were permanent. I use the term ‘eruption’ advisedly because a print entitled The Volcano of Opposition (fig. 8.1) figures forth Burke’s oratory on the occasion as an eruption of epithets. Raining down on the weeping Fox

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Figure 8.1: Frederick George Byron, The Volcano of Opposition. Engraving. London: Holland, 1791. British Museum 7863. Used by permission.

are the phrases ‘Black as ten furies! Jacobite Miscreants, the very dregs of infamy, Terrible as Hell, Infernal Spawn, Damnation, Jacobite renegades, Friends of Hell, Pimps Panders Parasites Devils.’ The specious charge of Jacobitism – not Jacobinism – is part of a rhetorical gambit aimed at figuring Fox’s resistance to George III in terms of the most extreme anti-Hanoverian position imaginable.7 The suggestion is that Fox’s critique of the king’s manipulation of the ministry in the 1780s threatened the domestic stability of Britain in much the same way that the dynastic clashes of the 1740s and ’50s threatened to unravel the state. But this charge also implies that Burke’s antirevolutionary fervour is a sort of mania which fails to recognize the distinction between specific historical events. But the slide from unusual allegations of ‘Jacobite’ tendencies to those of sexual and personal vice is symptomatic of most attacks on Fox – his long-standing efforts to rein in George III’s power were frequently tied to his rakish behaviour and to his gambling. As Deutsch

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has admirably demonstrated, critiques of Fox’s gambling were especially important to the discourse surrounding the constitutional crisis following George III’s intervention in the passage of Fox’s East India Bill and the contested Westminster election of 1784.8 As we will see, the question of moderation is quite significant to the commentary on Fox and Burke’s conflict. Burke’s oratory that evening was extreme, and I will be discussing its most disturbing moments shortly. But the fictional catalogue of epithets actually fills in a discursive absence in the debate itself. In the process of defending himself from Burke’s assault, Fox refers to ‘the severe and pointed epithets which his Right Honourable Friend had so profusely loaded him with,’ but ‘Mr. Burke said, just audibly, that he did not recollect any epithets.’ Fox turned immediately on Burke’s interruption: ‘My Right Honourable Friend […] does not recollect the epithets – they are not of his mind – then they are completely and for ever out of mine. I cannot cherish a recollection so painful, as from this moment they are obliterated and forgotten.’ In this instance, the scene of speech seems remarkably intimate: Fox hears Burke murmur and turns to directly address him. Such a move shifts the axis of communication to emphasize the place of friendship in this political conflict. This is striking because Burke’s manipulation of the debate over the Quebec Bill was ostensibly theoretical. Recognizing that ‘the House, by the Bill, was going to do a high and important act; to appoint a legislature for a distant people, and to affirm a legal authority in itself, to exercise this high power,’ Burke asserts Britain’s right to do so and then embarks on a survey of constitutions – American, French, and British – in order to determine which should serve as the model for governance. As Burke moves into his diatribe on French principles, the general debate on political theory becomes an occasion to attack Fox for his remarks on the French constitution. But the immoderation of Burke’s speech becomes evident when he mobilizes the spectre of race war to prove the folly of French political innovations. Burke’s polemic turns on the anxieties generated by the following example: But let this Constitution be examined by its practical effects in the French West India Colonies. These […] were most happy and flourishing till they heard of the rights of men. As soon as this system arrived among them, Pandora’s box, replete with every moral evil, seemed to fly open, Hell itself to yawn and every daemon of mischief to overspread the face of the earth. Blacks rose against Whites, Whites against Blacks, and each against

202 Daniel O’Quinn one another in murderous hostility; subordination was destroyed, the bonds of society torn asunder, and each man seemed to thirst for the blood of his neighbour, ‘Black Spirits and White, ‘Blue Spirits and Grey, ‘Mingle, mingle, mingle.’ All was toil and trouble, discord and blood from the moment that this doctrine was promulgated among them, and he verily believed that wherever the rights of men were preached, such ever had been and ever would be the consequences. France, who had generously sent them the precious gift of the rights of men, did not like this image of herself reflected in her child, and sent out a body of troops well seasoned too with the rights of men, to restore order and obedience. These troops, as soon as they arrived, instructed as they were in the principles of government […] began asserting their rights by cutting off the head of their General.

The tightly interwoven racist fantasies of this passage are breathtaking, but hardly novel. As David Simpson has observed, anti-Semitic slurs are a fundamental component of Burke’s argument in Reflections (57). But in this case, one is immediately struck by the prolixity of Burke’s rhetorical flourish. Through the quick transitions from stated exemplarity to the figure of Pandora’s box opening to destroy civil society to the complex allusion to Macbeth to France’s infanticidal desires and subsequent devolution into parricide, Burke is pursuing an assemblage of hellish figures aimed at linking race war to specific allegations of rebellion and treason that were routinely levelled at Fox in the 1780s. At the centre of this diatribe is Burke’s citation and modification of Hecate’s lines from Middleton’s The Witch, which had drifted into eighteenth-century versions of Macbeth via Davenant’s preparation of the play for the King’s Men in 1674.9 In all the source texts, the unnatural witch(es) are assisting one whose aims are to destroy the natural order of society either through regicide or murder. If the primary resonance is Middleton’s play then the crime is perpetrated by an adulterous woman. Hecate recites the lines while preparing a potion for the ambitious Duchess. The implication of course is that feminized Liberty embodied in ‘the rights of men,’ like the Duchess, aims to destroy all subordination and destroy the bonds of society.10 If the primary resonance is Macbeth, then the crime is the result of unrestrained ambition and is associated with the perversion and madness of Lady

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Macbeth. Errant ambition and suspect sexuality are conjoined into a fantasy of bloody treason. This kind of rhetorical move is not uncommon in anti-Foxite rhetoric, and Burke may well be an expert in its use, because, as Fox’s primary adviser, he was commonly on its receiving end. Allegations of all manner of perversions, of ambition, of bankruptcy, and of course of treasonous tendencies were frequently mobilized against the Whigs throughout the 1780s, especially during the Westminster election of 1784. But Burke’s singular innovation at this juncture was to reorient the lines such that the colours take on new and fearsome political significance. The preceding account of slaves and planters killing each other in a frenzy of ‘liberty’ thoroughly racializes the colours black and white in the opening line. This recasts the fear of treason and of unnatural alliances as anxieties around blood: both bloodletting between races and the ‘unnatural’ mingling of blood among the races. The spectres of race war and of miscegenation lurk behind Burke’s attack on Fox, but intriguingly he plays out two parallel admixtures: that between white and black and that between blue and grey. This latter admixture carries sharp connotations, and it is here that Burke’s attack is most acute. By substituting ‘blue’ for ‘red’ in Hecate’s lines, Burke not only invokes the colour most frequently associated with France, but also figures forth the buff and blue of Whiggery and most notably of Fox himself. All of the hand-coloured prints associated with the debate render Fox in these colours. Nixon’s The Wrangling Friends foregrounds Burke’s citation as the sharp edge of his rhetorical sword (fig. 8.2). There is also the further pun on the name of Charles Grey, who at this time was publicly affiliated with elements of the party pushing for parliamentary reform. All of these gestures suffuse the second line with connotations of Foxite identity, and it is the implicit comparison between the conflict between Black and White in the first line, and the conflict among Whigs, that drives Burke’s citational assault. In this context, the devolution of civil society into race war and the contravention of racial boundaries is comparable to a meltdown within the party over the interpretation of the French Revolution – that is, the Whigs are themselves becoming an unnatural mixture of notions of liberty who ultimately threaten the bonds of society as expressed in the British constitution. At one level, this captures the very real political heterogeneity of the opposition under Fox; and for Burke it was this heterogeneity that undermined the Whigs’ ability to operate as a party. But the most

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Figure 8.2: John Nixon, The Wrangling Friends or Opposition in Disorder. Engraving. London: Fores, 1791. British Museum 7855. Used by permission.

disturbing aspect of Burke’s citational and figurative attack is that he allows the racial conflict both to figure forth political schism and to linger on as the result of Fox’s and others’ admiration for the French Revolution. Racial bloodshed and insinuations about species devolution move from a position of dubious historical exemplarity to a position of prophetic futurity that thoroughly racializes political judgment. In this light, the ‘mingling’ Fox stands accused not of crimes against the state but of crimes against the blood of the nation.11 Fox responds to this accusation by crying, and I believe that Fox’s tears are staged to counter Burke’s mobilization of the symbolics of blood.12 Broken Clauses The moment of Fox’s breakdown is eloquently recorded, and I want to draw attention to the way that Fox’s utterance is first presented and then broken into pieces:

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Mr. Fox rose again, but so much was his mind and heart affected by the circumstances, that it was some moments before he could proceed – Tears rolled down his cheek – and he strove in vain to give utterance to feelings that dignified and exalted his nature. We never saw him so moved; and in justice to the House, we must say, that they sympathized in the suffering of his ingenuous temper. He said, that not withstanding all that had been said by his Right Honourable Friend, he must still call him by that endearing appellation – for his friendship was not of a nature to be affected by the circumstances of one day’s debate – it was planted in his heart as a child – it had grown and ripened with his knowledge – It was a friendship improved and riveted by the intimate connexion and intercourse of three and twenty years, it could not be weakened, much less extinguished, in his bosom, by the heat or intemperance of a day. [It was between each of the broken clauses that Mr. Fox was interrupted by the force of his feelings, and that the whole House accorded to his sensation.]

The reader here is left reconstituting the paratactic structure of the second paragraph as a sequence of broken clauses uttered under extreme distress. The careful anaphoric repetition in the second paragraph is held in tension with reported moments of weeping. Fox was widely considered to be the greatest extempore speaker of his age, and more than one paper was struck by the novelty of seeing the great man lose his composure. However, it is perhaps more accurate to speak of a shift in composure, or of a transition from one kind of oratorical performance to another, for what Fox allowed to come forth here was the ever-present relationship between the body of the orator and the words of his oration. However, before we explore that relationship, it is important to recognize the significance of Fox’s remarks which immediately follow the chain of broken clauses. As he regains his composure, Fox shifts the topic of discussion from constitutions to friendship, from abstract principles of governance to the practical problems of intimacy: But when [Mr. Burke] went further, and insinuated that their friendship must be lessened, because for the last five years of their lives they had not met so frequently as formerly, what anguish must he feel to be so cruelly treated by the man, whom of all others he loved the most! That, perhaps, they had not met so frequently for the last five years, was a matter of incident to human life. – What two friends enjoyed uniformly the

206 Daniel O’Quinn same opportunities? Different circumstances – local – casual – arising from modes of life, and utterly independent of any change in temper or affection, might prevent the constant intercourse of those who coveted most to be together – but that this should be insinuated as a ground of change, was not less curious than it was severe.

In the context of Burke’s conclusion in the late 1780s that there was insufficient virtue among the members to give purpose to the party, but that virtue could be extracted from the constitution itself, Fox’s turn from matters of constitutionality to pragmatic questions of intimacy shifts the entire debate to more fully consider the relationship between friendship and political virtue. And thus he is reversing the overall trajectory of Burke’s argument. With this careful accounting of the last five years of friendship, Fox refers the members of parliament back to the lead-up to and the inception of the Hastings impeachment – that is, to a moment when the two men were in constant company. It was fairly well known that Fox’s interest in the impeachment waned quite quickly. But the insinuation seems to be that a certain drift set in at this period, and it is hard not to read Fox’s gesture as a retroactive assertion of a point of separation that pre-dates events in France. This would suggest that Burke’s apostasy was already emergent before the drafting of the French constitution. This seems to be borne out by the available historical evidence: there is little correspondence between the men during this period, and other correspondence rarely refers to them together except in political contexts. As Hill states, ‘the friendship which Burke renounced in the House on 6 May 1791 was mainly a political one’ (6). However, by keeping the question of intimacy on the table, Fox’s tearful remarks present a subject caught between two spatio-temporal arcs. The first corresponds to the abstract time of constitutions. This is the time of the statesman, of one whose utterances are in conversation with the history of parliamentary democracy. The subjectification attendant upon this history was fraught in the case of Fox – he was both at home in this discourse and pushing on its restrictions. The second chronotope corresponds to the temporality of friendship. This is the history of love and admiration between Fox and Burke, a time at once congruent with their shared relation to party and with the exigencies of intimate private life. These chronotopes converge and diverge over time, but they intersect in the space of the House of Commons. This does not exclude other spaces and moments where

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these chronotopes overlap, such as the private residences of Whig strategists or Brooke’s Inn, but it is in the House where these different modes of subjectification have to be internally calibrated. In the majority of parliamentary utterances, the distinction between the statesman and the friend is carefully regulated such that the latter is subordinated to the former. The category of friend is stripped of its intimate qualities and subsumed into the abstract notion of party. ‘Friend’ is thus most frequently the appellation one uses to address one’s parliamentary enemies. The statesman here emerges as the visible portion of a much larger construct whose intimate embodied elements remain below the surface. Because the effect of oratory lies not in the words of a speech, but rather in the conjunction of words and bodily performance, the relationship between gesture and text is crucial. In an effort to prevent the language of the body from communicating errantly, many elocutionary texts recommended a careful regulation of decorum and in particular an avoidance of direct visual contact between orator and listener. As de Bolla states, this avoidance [of any intimate or indecorous eye contact] amounts to the erasure or covering up of the subject to and within itself; a negation of those inner thoughts and desires which we take to be the very representatives of subjectivity, personality and individuality, in favour of the complete or total legibility of the social subject, the public self. The trajectory of the legislation is clear: public sociability should erase private subjectivity. (151)

What makes the night of 6 May 1791 so important is that Fox breaks with decorum, speaks doubly, brings both elements of the subject into the light, and in so doing, he reveals something not only about politics but also about friendship. And this has significant implications for Whig political theory. Much of Burke’s reputation as a political theorist prior to the Reflections rested on his definition of party in Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770). That definition famously relied on an exalted notion of friendship. In his effort to demonstrate that ‘connexion’ and ‘faction’ are not equivalent terms, Burke argued that ‘the best patriots in the greatest commonwealths have always commended and promoted such connexions. Idem sentire de republica, was with them a principal ground of friendship and attachment’ (Thoughts on the Present Discontents 316). It

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is extremely difficult not to hear Burke’s repeated admonitions in favour of ‘hard essays of practised friendship and experimented fidelity’ in the essay of 1770 returning to haunt him in Fox’s impassioned performance of intimate attachment in 1791 (317). The Whig press and the print satirists were quick to point out the way that Fox’s performance of private affection trumped Burke’s excess with noble sentiment. The Morning Chronicle hailed Fox as the very incarnation of honour: Mr. Fox, in no moment of his life appeared so graceful, or even so forcibly in esteem of every gentleman, as in the kindly and complacent manner in which he replied to the harsh treatment that he received from his friend – Every manly bosom accorded to the generous sensations he displayed; – and every Philosopher at the same time must rejoice that, thus placable in emotions, he was not to be moved in principles. His species beheld in him a Statesman who disdains all authority, but that which is derived from compact. (10 May 1791)

The press was replete with approbation for Fox’s sensibility – some of it no doubt ironic – but this passage is particularly resonant because it directly invokes the following passage from Burke’s Thoughts on the Present Discontents: It is therefore our business carefully to cultivate in our minds, to rear to the most perfect vigour and maturity, every sort of generous and honest feeling that belongs to our nature. To bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service of and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots, as not to forget that we are gentlemen. To cultivate friendships, and to incur enmities. To have both strong, but both selected; in the one, to be placable; in the other, immovable. To model our principles to our duties and our situation. (320)

Both passages work on an apparent opposition between the placable emotions of friendship and the immovable principles which drive public action. But these latter principles are not understood as abstract moral categories, but rather as the ‘authority which is derived from compact’ or, to paraphrase Burke in 1770, the virtue made practicable through connexion. In this light, both placable emotions and the immovable principles are different moments of the same construct: friendship. This is why Burke understands them as aesthetically combined:

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It was their wish, to see public and private virtues, not dissonant and jarring, and mutually destructive, but harmoniously combined, growing out of one another in a noble and orderly gradation, reciprocally supporting and supported. (316)

The harmonious integration here partakes of the discourse of the beautiful and resonates with Burke’s theorization of musical beauty in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (280–1). Burke’s emphasis on gradation and evenness is a fundamental tenet of his analysis of the beautiful; therefore, his brief definition of musical beauty focuses almost exclusively on dynamics and harmony. Fox’s performance during the debate on the Quebec Bill is, I believe, cognizant of this need for harmonious integration of emotion and principle, of bodily affect and public utterance, because it is fundamental to the definition of virtue which had sustained the Whigs from as early as the Rockingham era. With Burke now questioning whether there were sufficient men of similar virtuous principles to sustain a political party, the performance of political friendship was more heavily freighted than ever and thus subject to intense aesthetic scrutiny. But we need to shift to the realm of the theatre to fully understand the nature of Fox’s aesthetic and political intervention, for his counter-attack involves both a redeployment of Thoughts and a subtle engagement with the theatrical tropes of the Reflections on the Revolution in France. Hypocrites in Tears With the Whig press quick to pick up on Burke’s inconsistency, the Pittite papers not only offered counter-theories of party, but also became quite concerned with the performativity of tears.13 Accusations that Fox’s tears were those of a crocodile surface almost immediately.14 But the most complex intervention comes in the form of a letter to the Public Advertiser in which an ostensibly Junior Member of the House of Commons looks for advice on how and when to cry for best political effect. Despite epigraphs from A Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII which by turns characterize Fox as a noble clown and as the truest of men,15 the assumption is that Fox’s tears are as contrived as any other theatrical tears: It is a great happiness that the discharge by the eyes, which is certainly as necessary as any other natural discharge, is now likely to have vent in politics. – The tragedies of modern times have so little to cause tears, that

210 Daniel O’Quinn we are more disposed to laugh at them. The ‘pearly drops of sensibility,’ will now, however, decorate the modest and fair cheeks of manly orators; and a bill for the good of the nation will swim from House to House, upholden by a tide of patriotic tears! […] I am now beginning to collect precedents of crying from the accession of Oliver Cromwell (and that made a great many cry) until the battle of Canada, fought on May the 6th, 1791. These I shall arrange, so as to form a ‘A Complete System of Political Weeping,’ a publication which I am certain will be of great service. (Public Advertiser, 13 May 1791)

The suggestion that tears may be generated for political ends picks up on resonances from the Reflections that were no doubt on Fox’s mind and that the letter writer recognizes must be contained to secure the position of both Burke and the Ministry in relation to French affairs. The containment strategy is evident from the letter’s penultimate paragraph: I conceive, Sir, and almost with tears in my eyes, that this crying fashion has been imported from the French, who, in the whole business of the Revolution, have shewn themselves great masters of stage effect. When the Queen appears before ‘her beloved people’ she cries; pinches the Dauphin, and he cries, and then they all cry – and it was but the other day that M. Fayette went a step farther, and actually fainted! – This probably was because he could not cry, for the Doctors say that in all such cases, you must do one or the other. (Public Advertiser, 13 May 1791)

The invocation of such topics as stage effect, false tears, and the inability to cry is in dialogue with Burke’s famous discussion of tears in the Reflections. Just as Fox’s engagement with Thoughts on the Present Discontents maintains Burke’s definition of party against him, the engagement with the Reflections attempts to refute Burke’s dramatization of politics and thus one of his primary modes of political analysis. As we will see, Fox’s performance not only counters Burke’s own remarks on crying, but also questions Burke’s understanding of constitutionality. The Reflections frequently mobilizes the power of emotion by conforming historical events to the form of sentimental tragedy.16 Burke’s famous representation of Marie Antoinette as the threatened woman prepared to defend her honour attempts to evoke an emotional response similar to that drawn by Sarah Siddons’s performances at Drury Lane. The theorization of emotional affect which follows

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Burke’s presentation of the crowd scene in Marie Antoinette’s boudoir insinuates that the failure of Dr Price and the Revolution Society to be drawn into sympathy with the queen’s distress is a sign of their perversion. Defending his own tears, Burke argues that he feels for the queen because it is natural I should; because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons. (175)

Burke insists that his feelings regarding the queen’s vulnerability and his judgment of the French Revolution itself are natural. This double naturalization rests on the proposition that ‘in events like these our passions instruct our reason’ (175). By declaring the normativity of specific passionate responses Burke is able to pathologize those who do not share his feelings of sympathy. But the way Burke pathologizes his political opponents is revealing, less because he explicitly offers his own response as normative, but more because he is so invested in the continuity and repeatability of affective response: Some tears might be drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage. I should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial, theatric sense of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life. With such a perverted mind, I could never venture to show my face at a tragedy. People would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or that Siddons not long since, have extorted from me, were the tears of hypocrisy; I should know them to be the tears of folly. (175–6)

In this passage, it is the contradictory response that indicates perversion. The shame lies in the inconstancy of the affect, for the tears shed in the theatre must not have been the result of natural feelings of sympathy – since the real events occasion no such affect – but rather of effeminacy. These tears are now a sign of ‘painted distress’ that attest to the effeminate artifice of both those enthusiastic for the French Revolution and those who question the moral significance of sympathy. The letter’s assertion, that La Fayette is not only incapable of tears but also prone to fainting, seems to indulge in precisely the rhetoric of effeminacy activated by Burke in the Reflections. But Fox’s ‘pearly drops

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of sensibility’ and the almost ubiquitous assertion of the manliness of his tears throughout the press distinguish him from La Fayette. If the letter appears Burkean in its larger gestures, then one can also discern a counter-current of critique. Perversion is not confined to the Revolutionaries because in addition to its attack on La Fayette, the letter clearly indicates that both Marie Antoinette’s tears, and the tears of the Dauphin, are put on like cheap theatrical tricks. Unlike Burke’s analysis, the letter suggests that hypocritical tears infect the entire French nation and are therefore a function of ethnicity, not political judgment or rank. In this light, Burke becomes a poor judge of character, especially when that character is Marie Antoinette. Burke’s dramatic analysis of politics is susceptible to precisely this kind of failure, because it does not sufficiently account for the distinction between character and type in sentimental tragedy. That distinction lies in the performance of a normative gestural economy. In the print satires which attempt to capture Burke’s spontaneous overflow of hatred, Fox is consistently represented in precisely the attitudes that Sarah Siddons made famous. Standing contraposto with his weight on his right foot, his left arm bent in a tragic attitude and his right hand wielding a handkerchief as the very prop of sensible tears, Fox replicates one of the gestures most frequently associated with Siddons’s performance not only of Isabella in David Garrick’s adaptation of Southerne’s play of the same name but also of Jane Shore. The Fox represented in The Wrangling of Friends is remarkably similar to that represented in The Volcano of Opposition. Both images are comparable to Thomas Ryder’s Sarah Siddons in ‘Jane Shore’ of 1790 and a series of images circulating in 1791 of Siddons as Isabella (fig. 8.3). The most instructive of these – and probably the template for most of the others – is De Wilde’s Sarah Siddons as Isabella (ca. 1791), which shows the tragic heroine contemplating the ring of her former husband while raising her other hand to ward off the emotions generated by the combined force of her amorous memory and her growing sense of entrapment. This gesture was literally a showstopper, for these gestures were culled from manuals, and such manuals, written in the service of realism, encouraged a contrived disposition of the face and body at key moments in the action of the play. These so-called ‘points’ were eagerly awaited by audiences and were frequently held by the actor for several seconds to allow for applause. (West 16)

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Figure 8.3: Thomas Ryder, Sarah Siddons in “Jane Shore.” Sepia color print. 1790. Edwin Roffe, Sarah Siddons as Isabella–Il Penseroso. Engraving. N.d. The Huntington Library. Used by permission.

With these prints in circulation at roughly the same time as those figuring the weeping Fox, it is difficult not to interpret the attitude in a specific fashion. Fox, now figured as Siddons’s Isabella, weeps for an intimate connection that he believes is lost. In this figural economy, Burke, like Biron (Isabella’s ostensibly dead husband), haunts the action like the living dead. Such a description of Burke at this juncture is far from outrageous for he is literally without party, and thus stranded in the realm of political ineffectivity. As H. Butterfield has documented, Burke was quite literally without political friends through most of 1792 (294). Reading Fox as Siddons’s Isabella is especially helpful for decoding The Volcano of Opposition because the print also figures Sheridan as Villeroy, the potential new ‘husband,’ and thus warns against the

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dangers of Fox being seduced by Sheridan’s more revolutionary sympathies now that Burke is ‘dead.’ In this light, marital illegitimacy comes to stand for political error, and thus Fox’s placement between these two men transfers the tragic predicament of Isabella to his own political predicament. And this predicament captures Fox’s political failures from the Regency crisis onward; like Isabella’s multiple erotic affiliations, his heterogeneous political friendships significantly undercut his agency as party leader. Fox’s inability to successfully bring the Whigs together during this period is a recurrent point of critique both in the press, and in the historical appraisal of his career. As Laura Brown has persuasively argued, the body of the heroine of she-tragedy, like that of Isabella and Jane Shore, ‘is constituted by the violence it elicits, and that violence is a discursive product of the construction of female sexuality as passive and vulnerable, a structural product of the implicit allusion to female power, and thus an ideological assertion of vengeance against the threat of the unruly woman’ (85). The implicit feminization of Fox’s suffering is thus remarkably complex: it simultaneously renders him a passive victim and an unruly threat. If we remember the title of Southerne’s play, The Fatal Marriage, and the concluding scenes in which Biron is murdered and Isabella kills herself in despair, it becomes clear that even in the articulation of Fox’s noble suffering, the print conjures up the death of the party. Furthermore, the Burke that haunts this scene embodies precisely the perversion he described so forcefully in the Reflections, for in none of these prints does he shed a tear. And thus, in his attitude, Fox not only answers Burke’s extremity but also reverses the flow of perverse attribution, for it is now Burke who fails to cry in the face of a performance which evoked tears from the entire House. And this failure raises questions regarding both Burke’s self-proclaimed virtue, and his patriotism, because, as de Bolla emphasizes, such a disjunction of word and body, both in the orator and in the audience, amounts to a sign of national weakness (165). It is for this reason that the most devastating critique of Burke’s position comes from the pen of a self-appointed ‘Real Briton’: Sir, Tears are in many instances laudable, as evincing sensibility not known to the brutes, as evidencing emotions of the mind which the unkindly and ungrateful spirit never feels. Hypocrites in tears, like hypocrites in religion, may bring the one and the other into disrepute with inconsiderate men – but the worthless, and worthless only, dare ridicule, on such

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pretext, either one or the other. To be ashamed of tears, the effusions of a manly mind, would be as infamous as to be ashamed of truth – and of truth to be ashamed, however hateful to unrighteous men, and however libellous it may be deemed by men, is to be ashamed of what will one day appear of more lustre than the sun which enlightens the world, and whose rays shall then penetrate the recesses of the heart, and triumph beyond the reach or interruption of human decision. (Public Advertiser, 18 May 1791)

With Fox firmly emanating the rays of enlightened normativity, and Burke languishing in the zone of hypocrisy and inconsistency, whose very negativity he famously defined, it is now possible to unfold the ethnocentric implications of the allusion to Henry VIII which opens the letter on ‘How to Cry.’ As noted earlier, the letter opens with the lines ‘Look; the good man weeps!’ from Henry VIII (5.1.152), and the reading public would have been very familiar with the import of these lines because Kemble’s production of the play, and Siddons’s triumph in the role of Katherine, were the highlight of the theatrical seasons of 1788 and 1789.17 The line is uttered by Henry VIII to describe the nobility and integrity of Thomas Cranmer, and thus Cranmer’s tears are the sign of loyal service to the crown. Throughout the scene Cranmer is figured as the embodiment of virtue, and the king reassures him that in spite of the calumny mobilized against him, he will nevertheless be protected from harm. The overall structure of the scene is revealing because Cranmer is about to face a group of enemies who are trying to construct him as disloyal. His chief inquisitor is the notorious Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who, like his historical analogue, operates as the arch enemy of Reformation in the play and, thus, as the character who stands counter to the play’s prophetic figuring forth of Elizabethan England as the elect Protestant nation. Cranmer’s victory over Gardiner in the play turns on the question of moderation. As Gordon McMullan argues, the play’s Gardiner has a strong belief in the need for moderation and restraint […] This Lenten rejection of pleasures, though, marks the opposite boundary of the temperate from that occupied by his master [Henry VIII]; in his failure to recognize that leading the temperate life does not entail the outright renunciation of pleasures but rather their proper distribution across the course of life, he becomes the play’s Malvolio. It is, in fact, the paradoxical excess of Gardiner’s zeal for and expression of his

216 Daniel O’Quinn sense of the moderate and appropriate that enables the unshakeably temperate Cranmer to escape his plot in Act 5. (84–5)

Gardiner’s Catholicism, his zeal for moderation, and his excessive yet failed assault on Cranmer make him the very type of Burke, for throughout his career Burke was regularly satirized as a Jesuit, as a prig, and as oratorically ruthless.18 The allegory both undercuts Burke’s claim to patriotic motives by dislocating him from normative Protestant masculinity and re-politicizes the question of moderation for late eighteenth-century Britain. Fox’s enemies frequently charged him with immoderation, but here it is Burke who is unable to properly regulate his cruelty. The figuration of the weeping Fox as Cranmer effectively subordinates his personal libertinism to his political equilibrium, and therefore what was once pathological dissolves into a figure of temperate and judicious Truth. With this comes a consolidation of Fox’s masculinity, whose bodily implications are resonant. Cranmer’s self-defence before his king not only provides the allegorical apology for Fox’s position, but also provides a model for bodily and moral consistency. The good I stand on is my truth and honesty. If they shall fail, I with mine enemies Will triumph o’er my person, which I weigh not Being of those virtues vacant. I fear nothing What can be said against me.

(5.1.123–6)

In this context, divergence from truth and honesty amounts to selfmurder, and suddenly the figure of Burke, already figuratively dead, crystallizes as the embodiment of political vice. This has further significance in that the king in Shakespeare’s play demonstrates both a compromised masculinity and a questionable relation to the emergent Protestant Britain – it is Elizabeth, not Henry, who is celebrated as the true Reformer. Henry and thus George III are implicitly critiqued for their absolutist tendencies. But unlike Henry VIII’s recognition of Cranmer’s virtue late in the play, George III fails to recognize that Fox’s life-long attempt to restrain the king’s prerogative is the epitome of parliament’s moderating influence on the power of the crown and thus demonstrates that George III’s political practice runs counter to the precepts of the Glorious Revolution. This locates Fox in a zone of virtuous patriotism that supersedes that of the present sovereign, in

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which he defends the spirit of the British constitution against George III’s absolutism as well as Pitt’s and Burke’s pathological ambition. Constitutional Spirit With some sense of Fox’s performative critique of Burke’s dramatic theory of politics, we can return to the politics of liquids at the heart of both Burke’s oratorical assault and Fox’s interpretation of the rights of man. In the midst of Burke’s inflammatory link between liberty and race war lies the troubling notion of blood: the very blood which Burke used so resonantly to define the British constitution in the Reflections. Referring to the way ‘our political system’ inheres through time, Burke famously stated that in this choice of [political] inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars. (120)

Burke’s explicit recognition of the figural economy of blood here not only aligns the constitution’s ‘life’ with the generational capacities of the family but also takes the notion of life and attaches it to the propagation of political and religious institutions. Looking back from the nineteenth century, it is difficult not to hear the early phases of a biopolitical imperative which yoked the reproductive capacities of middling orders to the institutions of the imperial state. With the benefit of hindsight, the crucial recognition here is that the ‘image of a relation in blood’ works both within a long-standing discourse surrounding monarchy and national identity and within an emerging discourse about the family where sexuality and population become crucial sites for the articulation of the state. Fox’s long speech following his lachrymose remarks on friendship is aimed at offering a counter-tropology: one that will enfold Burke’s position no matter how fiercely he attempts to isolate himself. Fox’s key move is to make ‘the rights of man’ the very spirit not only of the constitution but also of humanity and thus to resist the rendering of the political in physiological terms. This amounts to shifting the emphasis of the citation of Hecate’s song away from colour differential

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and refocusing it on notions of spirit. And along the way Fox emphasizes the centrality of party to the development of the British constitution and misses no opportunity for praising Burke for his effective resistance to George III’s absolutist incursions on the power of parliament in the constitutional crisis of 1784. Both gestures are part of a larger argument regarding the evolving nature of constitutions which re-engages the terms of Burke’s excessive attack. Asserting that there was little separating the two men, Fox argues that the rights of man resist even the bonds of slavery: The Right Hon. Gentleman confessed, that the British Constitution was founded on mutual compact. By admitting that there was a compact, he admitted what he so vehemently disclaimed, the rights of man – for in the making of the compact, men must excercise [sic] these rights. That there were rights inherent in man, and coeval with his being – rights which no conquest could take from him – which no sophistry could withhold, which no tyranny could extinguish, tho’ it might stifle, and which the mind of man, that could not be enthralled even when the body was in fetters, would proudly maintain.

The movement into the discourse of bondage is significant in light of Burke’s earlier treatment of slave rebellion in San Domingo. Without directly engaging in a critique of Burke’s deployment of race, Fox opts instead for a direct refutation of any British monopoly on liberty: ‘Was there a man so narrow as to wish that human freedom, and consequently human happiness, should be confined to the soil of Britain? He hoped in heaven that he had not such a fellow-creature.’ Clearly, Burke is drifting towards such a nationally defined notion of freedom and humanity. But beyond the attack on Burke’s earlier remarks, the shift from skin colour to soil is crucial and amounts to a subtle refutation of bodily tropes for national and constitutional identity in favour of a more familiar tropology based on space and climate.19 In short, Fox’s response to Burke’s racialization may be one of the last great eighteenth-century attempts to resist the conflation of nation and the bodily health of the middle classes that would eventually define British society in the nineteenth century.20 So we are left with the confrontation of two divergent liquid politics.21 In his tearful expressions of personal and political friendship, Fox deploys the liquid politics of sentimental tragedy, which he had learned so well from Siddons, against the emergent liquid politics of bourgeois

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blood nascent in Burke’s political rhetoric. It is tempting to see the conflict as epochal, with the former bearing all the accommodations of mercantile and aristocratic power that underwrote Whig identity prior to the ruptures of the 1790s, and the latter exhibiting, in vestigial form, an altogether new social formation which would not fully cohere until years later with the onset of biological state racism. However, such a conclusion carries all the flaws of arguments based on rupture and ignores the degree to which Burke inhabits both sides of this divide. Fox was cognizant of this transition in his friend’s historical situation and thus represented Burke to himself as a divided subject: one whose theorization of Whig identity, of party, and of constitutionality was living and breathing not only in the body of one who now was moving away from these principles, but also in the body of his friend. The tears of broken friendship shed on the evening of 6 May 1791 are ultimately about the simultaneous insistence of multiple and historically distinct arcs of Whig political theory. In the weeping body of his friend, Burke found himself confronting the spectre of his historical self. And likewise Fox, perhaps unconsciously, found himself weeping for a future in which the personal and political ties which defined his life would melt into air and be replaced by the bureaucratic administration of populations, not citizens.

NOTES 1 For a helpful discussion of Fox’s and Burke’s divergent relations to the party in the late 1780s see B.W. Hill. 2 See the ‘Introduction’ to Staging Governance. 3 This of course does not adequately deal with the integration of written text into pantomime and other more illegitimate forms of theatre. To my knowledge little work has been done on the practice and representation of reading in late eighteenth-century theatre. 4 Morning Chronicle, 7 May 1791. This source offers the most detailed account of debate over the Quebec Bill and will be the primary text of the debate for this essay. All subsequent references to the speeches will be to this issue and day of the paper. 5 This is not the place to address the suggestion that parties as we now understand them did not exist in this period. For a useful overview of the history of political parties in the eighteenth century, see J.C.D. Clark.

220 Daniel O’Quinn 6 Burke to the Earl of Charlemont, 9 August 1789. See Hill (1–3) for a useful discussion of Burke’s relation to the Whig party following the death of the Marquess of Rockingham in 1782. 7 See Mitchell for a detailed discussion of Fox’s long-standing struggle with George III’s incursions on the rights of parliament. 8 See Phyllis Deutsch, ‘Moral Trespass in Georgian London: Gaming, Gender, and Electoral Politics in the Age of George III,’ for a detailed discussion of this issue. 9 Current editorial practice inserts the song from Davenant’s adaptation and argues that he derived it from an earlier prompt-book of Shakespeare’s play. See Spencer 124, and Schafer xiv–xv. 10 Whether Burke is going after the Duchess of Devonshire is difficult to prove conclusively, but it certainly fits with a wide range of attacks on her affiliation with Fox in this period. It is highly unlikely that Burke would have been aware of her adulterous relationship with Charles Grey and the fact that she was pregnant with his child while in exile in 1791. Regardless, Burke’s remarks pre-date the pregnancy, but the invocation of The Witch and the integration of Grey’s name into the verse is strangely prescient. 11 It is difficult to ascertain the degree to which Burke’s attack here is also aimed at Fox’s speeches on the abolition of the slave trade in the spring of 1791. For these speeches, see The Speeches of the Right Honourable Charles James Fox, in the House of Commons 11–16, 180–94. The most substantial of these came on 19 April, and one could argue that Burke is engaging with Fox’s remarks on political and personal freedom presented during that debate. The salient detail is Fox’s universal interpretation of human rights: ‘Several gentlemen had considered this question, as a question of political freedom; whereas it was no such thing. No man would suspect him of being an enemy to political freedom; his sentiments were too well known to leave him subject to such a suspicion. But this was a question not of political, but of personal freedom. Political freedom was undoubtedly as great a blessing as any people under Heaven – considered collectively as a people – could pant after, or seek to possess; but political freedom, when it came to be compared with personal freedom, sank to nothing, and became no blessing at all in comparison. To confound these two, served, therefore, only to render all argument on either perplexing or unintelligible. It was personal freedom that was now the point in question. Personal freedom must be the first object of every human being; and it was a right, of which he who deprives a fellow-creature is absolutely criminal in so depriving him, and which he who withholds, when it is in his power to restore, is no less criminal in withholding’ (182–3).

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12 Foucault’s discussion of the emergence of biological state racism as a resignification of the political signification of blood in the History of Sexuality, 1: 135–59, and his analysis of race war in ‘Society Must Be Defended’ 43–62, are helpful here. 13 For a fairly extended critique of the Whig theorization of party implicit in both Fox’s speech and the Whig press coverage, see the Public Advertiser for 11 May 1791. The Public Advertiser was the chief Pittite paper at this time. 14 Take for example the following ‘Impromptu: On a late Shedding of Tears in the HOUSE of COMMONS’ from the Public Advertiser for 10 May 1791: WHEN Reynard’s tears began to flow, The Corps responsive cried ‘Heigh! ho! Even Edmund wondered for awhile, To see a Fox – turn Crocodile. 15 The author alludes to the Clown’s speech regarding gentlemanly tears in A Winter’s Tale 5.2.144. The allusion to his clownish yet gentlemanly behaviour may be an ironic caricature of Fox as Man of the People. 16 See Hindson and Gray. 17 For a discussion of the importance of these productions and Siddons’s crucial intervention in the play’s performance history, see Booth; Richmond 36– 54; and the account in Genest 303–4. For a consideration of the relationship between Henry VIII and Mansfield Park, see Armstrong 58–89. 18 See Robinson for a sampling of these recurrent tropes. 19 For a discussion of eighteenth-century racial figures for the nation and of the importance of climatological theories of ethnicity, see Wilson 6–15 and Wheeler 1–48. 20 For a full elaboration of this development, see Stoler’s extrapolation of Foucault’s discussion of blood and the deployment of sexuality (95–136). 21 The phrase ‘liquid politics’ is Tom McCall’s figure for the affective politics of bourgeois tragic drama.

9 Citational Cosmopolitics: Staël, Byron, and the Foreignizing Effect of Cultural Translation JOSHUA LAMBIER

Until recently, little attention has been paid to the importance of Romanticism for contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism, discussions that too often draw a strict historical and intellectualhistorical distinction between Romantic nationalisms and Enlightenment cosmopolitanism.1 For a number of intellectual historians, the Enlightenment ideal of cosmopolitanism is characterized as a universal humanism transcending regional differences, while Romanticism is cast, rightly or wrongly, as a reactionary endorsement of national particularities, such as the development of a common territory, religion, culture, language, or even racial demographic.2 Recent studies, however, have begun to revisit and problematize this unstable historical schema. What this narrative fails to account for are the complex ways in which British and Continental Romanticisms reformulated the cosmopolitan ideal, developing alternative forms of political identification that both preserve and unsettle the Enlightenment promise of universal social and political progress by focusing on local, national concerns. Among the British Romantics, Byron brings to the fore an alternative cosmopolitanism that complicates the division between the particular and the universal. In her recent study of Byron’s Don Juan, Kirsten Daly persuasively argues that many of the ‘tenets of benevolent Enlightenment cosmopolitanism were retained, negotiated and reformulated in the Romantic period’ (190). Indeed, Byron’s Don Juan is an indeterminate, cosmopolitan character. He spends his mature life in haphazard travels, moving from Spain through Greece, Turkey, Russia, and England, among other countries and cities, each of which noticeably influences and transforms his character and disposition, both bodily and

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psychically. Similarly, in Corinne, which bears the traces of a deep understanding of German, French, and British Enlightenment thought, Madame de Staël unsettles the idea that national identity should be homogeneously singular, and, conversely, that cosmopolitan identity should be abstractly universal. What is immediately striking about Corinne is her indeterminacy: she is neither a particular instance of the national characters described as ‘Italian’ or ‘English,’ nor is she so disinterestedly removed from either that it would be appropriate to call her a ‘citizen of the world’ devoid of national characteristics. In his introduction to a recent collection of essays on the contemporary importance of cosmopolitanism, Bruce Robbins makes the case for a new form of cosmopolitanism that consists of ‘habits of thought and feeling that have already shaped and been shaped by particular collectivities, that are socially and geographically situated,’ and therefore both ‘located and embodied’ (Cheah and Robbins 2–3). But insofar as Robbins frames his discussion with the presupposition that this is a new development, I argue that his recasting of the cosmopolitical ideal as an embodied, lived experience is prefigured by certain Romantic renegotiations of cosmopolitan identification. The hybrid subjectpositions of Staël’s Corinne and Byron’s Don Juan are concrete instances of what Robbins, following James Clifford, refers to as the world’s ‘discrepant’ or ‘comparative cosmopolitanisms’ (Cheah and Robbins 246–64). My contention is that Staël’s Corinne and Byron’s Don Juan develop notions of cultural identity where national difference is formed through a complex system of relations among a plurality of disparate and competing cultures, relations that can be figured as a process of cultural translation. My primary concern is to explore how recent performative theories of identity formation can be used to account for an under-researched citational cosmopolitics emerging in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in the work of Staël and Byron, whose basic tenets are anticipated by the pre-Critical work of Kant. Rather than taking up Kant’s late moral-political writings, I will illustrate how the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) outlines a system of classifications for human nature that ultimately sets out the theoretical groundwork for an emerging conception of cosmopolitanism concerned with cultural and anthropological difference. In contrast to Kant’s later and more widely regarded interest in a cosmopolitan point of view leading to perpetual peace, the Observations develops a cosmopolitics calibrated on the more material differences among nationality, sex, and race, or, in other

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words, biopolitical differences manifesting at the level of the lived body. The ‘dispositions’ and ‘national characteristics’ enumerated in the Observations can be read as a typology organizing the characteristics and relations among the various human ‘types’ during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This essay, however, suggests that the cosmopolitical encounters in Corinne and Don Juan uncover the translatability of cultures and the mutability of nineteenth-century taxonomies, thus anticipating the contemporary view that cultures are not self-contained, transhistorical entities, but rather networks of intra- and cross-cultural relationships. To limit my discussion, I will focus on the last section of Kant’s Observations on national character, Corinne’s improvisational performances, and some representative passages from Byron’s final ‘English Cantos.’ Comparative treatments of Staël’s and Byron’s cosmopolitanism have recently produced some remarkable studies, notably Joanne Wilkes’s and Jonathan David Gross’s juxtapositions of Staël’s fiction and criticism with Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which draw on the personal relationship and clear literary-historical links between the two authors. Famously, in a footnote to the fourth and final canto of Childe Harold, Byron eulogized Staël (‘Corinna’), presciently announcing that ‘she will enter into that existence in which the great writers of all ages and nations are, as it were, in a world of their own,’ that is, an otherworldly existence of international fame that Byron felt she had been unjustly denied in her lifetime due to her sex.3 My analysis, however, shifts the point of comparison from Childe Harold to Don Juan, placing emphasis on the plurality of particular embodied characters representative of a range of cultural forms in Don Juan that are almost completely absent or obliterated in Childe Harold. This is especially the case in the fourth canto, where the disembodied voiceover of the speaker announces that the strangely absent Childe Harold has been annihilated just like other ‘forms which live and suffer,’ just like other ruins, fading away into ‘Destruction’s mass’ (4.164). Yet the disappearance of Childe Harold comes as no surprise. Byron’s introductory ‘Dedication’ announces the dissolution of his character because his readers failed to find ‘a distinction between the author and the pilgrim’ believable (146), leaving his descriptions of Italian ‘literature and manners’ (147) somewhat at odds with the account given by Staël in Corinne. The distinction lies in the fact that her text foregrounds a comparative treatment of English, French, and Italian cultures by creating characters that embody the ‘national characteristics’ or ‘dispositions’ schematically set out in Kant’s Observations (97).

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Oswald’s reaction to Corinne’s embodiment of a mixture of divergent national dispositions is a telling example of Staël’s effort to unsettle normative cultural identifications. After bemoaning the beautiful frivolity of Italian culture throughout the opening chapters, Oswald is thunderstruck by Corinne, or, as Count d’Erfeuil will later call her, the ‘beautiful foreign lady’ (111). Meandering through Corinne’s house, Oswald is further bewildered by the ‘agreeable mixture of everything that is most pleasing in the three nations, French, English, and Italian, the taste for social life, the love of literature, and the appreciation of the arts’ (37). He is similarly perplexed by the novelty of Corinne’s disposition, by the impressive ‘mixture of every kind of mental activity’ in her conversation, leading Oswald to wonder whether ‘the link between so many opposing qualities was inconsistency or superiority’ (39). The mediating ‘link’ between cultures is, of course, the body, which, in the case of Corinne, manifests the intertwining of a plurality of national identities and inner dispositions, both beautiful and sublime, disturbing conventional gendered and nationalized performances of identity. Moreover, Staël’s Corinne requires an embodied character for the success of her role as an improvvisatrice, a role demanding the spontaneity of onstage, dramatic performances rather than the sobriety and careful crafting associated with the written word. The representation of Corinne’s body, of her embodied performances at the Capitol or at Cape Miseno outside Naples, often speaks more about her disposition than the wealth of examples Staël discloses through Corinne’s conversationally written discussions with Oswald on the subject of Italian culture, literature, and manners. Similarly, the success of Don Juan’s character, irrespective of whether it is Byron’s, Molière’s, or other incarnations of this figure, requires the act of seduction, an act that presupposes the material presence of the body. Whether it is a linguistic or a bodily seduction, or the necessary interweaving of both, the Don Juan myth, as Shoshana Felman asserts, requires the mediation of the body, and more specifically, the mouth: ‘One might say that the Don Juan myth of the mouth is the precise place of mediation between language and the body. Don Juan’s mouth is not simply an organ of pleasure and appropriation, it is also the speech organ par excellence, even the organ of seduction’ (37). Unlike other versions of the Don Juan myth, Byron’s figure is also a cosmopolitan world traveller, whose seductions almost always occur in different nations and geographic climes. With the exception of the initial seduction of Donna Julia, taking place in Juan’s

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native Spain, each successive seduction introduces a new language, new clothing, different dispositions, races, cultures, or manners of comportment: in Greece, Haidée and Zoe dress him ‘like a Turk, / Or Greek’ (2.160); in Turkey, Don Juan is transformed into the divided image of a ‘Mussulman’ and a ‘maid’ (5.83), a disguise devised by Sultana Gulbayez to keep Juan as her clandestine lover; and, during his affair with Catherine the Great, the narrator suggests that Juan ‘grew a very polished Russian’ (10.21). By the end of the poem, Don Juan embodies a complex and often conflicted mixture of dispositions and cultural norms which both pluralize and particularize the cosmopolitan ideal by critically recasting the codes governing sexual, racial, and national ideologies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.4 The body, then, is the site for a complex cosmopolitanism, which is to say that the characters of Corinne and Don Juan are composites of the historical and geographical contexts that have produced and altered their cultural identities, material contexts that are reflected in their embodied dispositions. But is there a model of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism that Byron and Staël were consciously aware of, and, moreover, consciously deviating from to open up new possibilities for cosmopolitan identifications? In her reading of the relation of Don Juan to Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism, Daly suggests that there is in fact such a model, and that Byron is playfully reciting but also revising it: ‘Byron positions Enlightenment cosmopolitanism as an implied model, which, negotiated through the perspective of irony, allows him to uphold Enlightenment values whilst also signalling his historical distance from them’ (190). That Byron could recite this ‘implied model’ of cosmopolitanism suggests that it had become normative by the time he was writing Don Juan, not to mention his earlier work Childe Harold; but what has remained uncommented on here is the fact that Byron’s citation of the norm implies that the role of the ‘cosmopolite,’ or literally, ‘world citizen,’ had become to some degree performative, materializing itself through the reiteration of previous performances that were now sedimenting into a normative identity-position. Further, it can hardly be denied that the terror of the French Revolution and the following threat of Napoleon’s wars of conquest produced an international reaction against cosmopolitan ideals, and towards isolationist and nationalist positions that are now too vaguely referred to as ‘typically’ Romantic. During the early Romantic period, the Westphalian state system as it is known today was still very immature and

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had not yet congealed, which means that the explosion of emerging nationalisms across Western and Eastern Europe was still in a state of flux, that the definition of what it meant to be ‘English,’ ‘French,’ ‘German,’ ‘Italian,’ ‘Spanish’ or even ‘Russian,’ ‘Turkish,’ ‘Greek’ or ‘American,’ was not yet settled. And yet, if some nationalisms were without definitive ‘statehood,’ such as Germany and Italy, which did not become nation-states until the early 1870s, there was certainly an incessant drive to develop definitive criteria as to how one was to comport oneself, being of a certain nationality. This could also be said of countries such as Britain and France, which were relatively cohesive nation-states at this point in history. Kant’s Observations is one such text of the Enlightenment that sets out to detail how the sexed, nationalized, and racialized body was to properly materialize according to the regulatory practices of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the paragraphs concluding the Observations, Kant speculated that the discoveries of Enlightenment arts, sciences, and morality might soon bring to light the undiscovered secret of the proper education of young world citizens. While the Observations is still often considered a naive pre-Critical text, it provocatively anticipates, but interestingly complicates, Kant’s later and more widely regarded interest in cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace, which still serves as an important foundation for contemporary historical, legal, and political approaches to globalization and international affairs. The dispositions he is outlining in the Observations, however, are less the speculations of a philosopher than the observations of a discerning world spectator. What I want to suggest is that the typologies he produces are not unlike what Judith Butler has critically described as ‘regulatory ideals’ with reference to the category of ‘sex’ in Bodies That Matter (1). Of the utmost importance for Butler’s theorization of the materiality of the body is the idea that the body itself is the result of a ‘process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter’ (9; original emphasis). The material and materializing body is thus the productive effect of a temporal process compelling the subject to repeat implicit and explicit norms that have accumulated, and therefore sedimented, over time. Drawing on speech-act theory, Butler illustrates how the materialization of an embodied norm is in fact a material effect of performative language, where by the performative she understands a ‘discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names’ (13). Each recitation of the norm as a singular act is always already a repetition or ‘citation’ of a norm or system of norms

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that have accumulated and materialized through time. Butler therefore complicates the seeming transhistoricity of regulatory schemas governing the body by disclosing their historicity, but more importantly the attempt to dissimulate this historicity. With each recitation of the norm, Butler argues that gaps and fissures emerge, presenting the possibility for a failure to properly reiterate the norm or, more transgressively, to expose the norm and ‘refigure’ it by reciting it in alternative, excessive ways (107–10).5 Now, if the contemporary performance of gender identity can be understood as a ‘reiterative and citational practice’ (2), the same could certainly be said of the assumption and recitation of an embodied nationality in the early nineteenth century, where national characters were determined according to a number of affective identifications that had, to use Butler’s terms, ‘forcibly materialized through time’ (1). This conception of the materiality of the body as a process of citationality brings to light the prescriptive character of what Kant refers to as a purely descriptive schema of human types (‘In philosophical terms, the constative claim is always to some degree performative,’ writes Butler [11]). It is in this sense that Kant’s Observations can be interpreted as an Enlightenment schema, taxonomically organizing how bodies were differentiated and circulated, a schema that can then be used productively to illustrate how Staël’s Corinne and Byron’s Don Juan both uphold and challenge regulatory regimes operating in the nineteenth century. Published when Kant was forty, the Observations outlines a system of classifications of human nature that sets out how a particular subject is inclined towards others and the world. For Kant, these inclinations manifest themselves according to a number of identifications to which the subject is exposed, namely, the predispositions of human character, sex, virtue, class, nationality, and race specificities – all of which contribute to the subject’s overall sense of ‘taste.’ As a schema to differentiate these human characteristics, Kant appeals not to categorical distinctions but rather to the two most basic modes of pleasure and displeasure, the beautiful and the sublime, which, taken together, constitute and organize human experience. But the beautiful and the sublime, here, are not formally separated from ordinary feelings; nor is the beautiful linked to the understanding and the sublime to reason, as they are twenty-five years later in the Critique of Judgment (1790). Instead, both modes of aesthetic experience are distinguished only within the context of the culturally refined human character types he describes.

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So, where Kant distinguishes between the beautiful and two types of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment, the dynamical and the mathematical, here he presents four human character typologies roughly attached to four aesthetic qualities: the beautiful and the noble, terrifying, and magnificent sublimes.6 These aesthetic qualities can be discerned in each subject, but in general particular subjects will manifest these qualities to a greater or lesser degree according to the regulatory schemas and conditionings, both geographical and cultural, that constitute the process of what Foucault later calls ‘subjectivation.’7 While the beautiful subject is concerned with pleasurable experience, the sublime subject is elevated to general principles, or, rather, what Kant calls a ‘universal moral feeling’ (Observations 60). Among the four character traits, the highest feeling for human dignity is achieved by the noble sublime subject, whose melancholia and world-weariness lift his reflections towards a concern for highest moral principles, moral feelings that roughly anticipate Kant’s later analysis of ‘Regulatory Ideas’ in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). The sublime-melancholic subject, too, is the one who most adequately embodies the role of Kant’s citizen of the world, or what Hannah Arendt will call the Kantian ‘world spectator,’ precisely because his vantage point is universal and disinterested. This is akin to the position of the narrator in Byron’s Don Juan, who expresses a concern for all nations and men, and condemns all forms of tyranny in his ‘sworn, downright detestation / Of every despotism in every nation’ (9.24). Byron’s narrator, however, complicating his notion of perspective, makes clear that he is not entirely disinterested, that he expresses a clear interest in the world, affiliating himself with Britain, which, throughout the rest of the poem, is itself ironized and undermined. Historically, it is uncertain how widely the Observations were read in England and France, though it certainly was one of Kant’s more popular texts during his lifetime due to its brevity and eloquence. It was translated early into French in 1797, suggesting that some of Staël’s French readers may have also been familiar with it (David-Menard 83). In England, the Observations was part of the first English edition of Kant’s writings released in two volumes in 1798 and 1799 by John Richardson, Kant’s first English translator (Wellek 15–20). Nevertheless, both authors were certainly familiar with Kant’s philosophy; it is well known that Staël devoted an entire chapter of On Germany to Kant’s philosophy, notably as a way to ‘explain in the following chapters the influence it has exercised over literature, the arts and science’ (quoted in Macherey 25). It is

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also useful to note here that Byron has Juan pass through Königsberg, the home of ‘the great Professor Kant’ (10.60), and Staël’s British character, Oswald, recites one of Kant’s most famous, sublime maxims: ‘I know but two fine things in the universe, the starry heaven above our heads and the feeling of duty in our hearts’ (181; original emphasis). But whether or not they consulted the Observations matters little, as Kant’s intention, which he makes clear at the outset, is only to provide a descriptive organization of what he sees to be the rules of ‘taste’ guiding sex, nationality, race, virtue, among other culturally determined identifications, time out of mind. In other words, the Observations is meant to provide an objective account of things as they are rather than a subjective idealist account of how things ought to be, which means that his results should be objectively reproducible by a similarly disciplined, acculturated world citizen – indeed, the very world citizens to whom he directs his text in the closing paragraph. Kant’s Observations, as such, is an early model for contemporary anthropological and sociological inquiry, prefiguring Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus,’ a term he defines as ‘a system of dispositions, that is of permanent manners of being, seeing, acting and thinking, or a system of long-lasting (rather than permanent) schemes or schemata or structures of perception, conception and action’ (Bourdieu, ‘Habitus’ 27). Bourdieu’s word disposition, not unlike Kant’s notion of ‘character’ or ‘type,’ describes the historically produced and reproduced sensibility that congeals or sediments according to past lived experiences to form schemas of perception, action, and understanding for particular subjects and entire collectivities; these are schemas that then manifest themselves to the disciplined observer as long-lasting, embodied dispositions. The word system refers to the fact that the habitus of an individual or group will produce unities and commonalities that Bourdieu calls ‘styles,’ which then constitute a ‘loose systematicity’ (29) differentiating and characterizing human behaviour. This is certainly akin to what Kant called a shared sense of taste and, later, a sensus communis, or, further, what Byron’s narrator in Don Juan calls the process of ‘turning human nature to an art’ (15.3). Like Butler, however, Bourdieu is wary of an overly voluntaristic notion of agency or, conversely, a notion that one’s disposition is essential and unchanging. There is a productive convergence between Butler’s refiguration of performativity and Bourdieu’s notion of habitus that can be read back into Kant’s Observations to introduce an element of change into his seemingly static character typologies, a change that I

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argue can be found in Staël’s Corinne and Byron’s Don Juan.8 Dispositions, like performative categories of identity, are productions of regulatory schemas that have sedimented through time. Where Butler suggests that the body assumes normative identifications according to the forcible reiteration of sedimented norms, Bourdieu proposes something similar, that dispositions tend to ‘perpetuate, to reproduce themselves’ (‘Habitus’ 29) because the structures of habitus are incorporated in the mind and body as normative. Nevertheless, Butler also speaks of the possibility of a ‘productive crisis’ in the temporal reiteration of seemingly naturalized identity categories, such that ‘gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm’ (Bodies That Matter 10). Bourdieu also speaks of a potentially productive moment where the ‘structuring structures’ (31) of an individual or group habitus can become innovative rather than simply a mere repetition or reproduction of existing social positions. As the environment or field for the dynamic play of dispositions, habitus can be ‘a principle of invention, a principle of improvisation’ (Bourdieu, ‘Habitus’ 30–1), suggesting that structures of habitus are open to their own restructuring. I would like, here, to juxtapose the last section of Kant’s Observations on national characteristics with Staël’s Corinne and Byron’s Don Juan to illustrate how both characters embody an unsettling mixture of all Kant’s typologies of human nature, but primarily the types referred to as the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘noble sublime.’ Indeed, both characters possess what Byron refers to as ‘mobility’ (16.97–9) as well as a talent for improvising, inventing, and mixing nationalities that reveals the instabilities and indeterminacies of cultural and gender identities, bringing to the fore what I am calling here a more subversive citational cosmopolitics.9 Staël is certainly closer to the material cultural anthropology of Kant’s Observations than, say, the speculative idealism of the Critical project with which she was certainly familiar; this is due, in part, to what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy somewhat dismissively call her ‘curt’ and ‘very “French”’ ‘resistance to theory,’ that is, to her perplexity over seeing ‘philosophical systems applied to literature’ in the work of Jena Romantics like the Schlegels and Novalis (12–13). During one of her conversations with Oswald, Corinne similarly criticizes the English tendency towards ‘deep melancholy and knowledge of the human heart’ as a problem that might be more suited

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to ‘philosophical writers than to poets,’ a position that marks a sort of congruence between Corinne and Staël (109). Along these lines, Staël is less interested in propounding a speculative project to unite the disparate nations into a more cohesive unity (such as Kant’s idea for a ‘federation of free states,’ or a system of international commerce in Perpetual Peace [Political Writings 102, 114]) than in theorizing how cultures in their own particularity engage with and mutually benefit other cultures while preserving their difference. Georg Forster, an eminent German anthropologist of the time, offers another prominent example in addition to the early Kant of a culturalist approach to cosmopolitanism that Staël may have been familiar with (cf. Kleingeld 515–18). Forster’s comparative anthropological method of studying the dispositions of different cultures through the material aspects of culture – in addition to a concern for religious, social, political, and moral structures – privileged cultural difference and toleration, which is also the thrust of Corinne’s attempt to instill within Oswald an appreciation for cultures outside of his own English taste. It is precisely the arrogance and pompousness of Count d’Erfeuil’s French character that do not allow him to appreciate or celebrate any cultures, languages, landscapes, or climates other than that of the French. In one representative scene, Count d’Erfeuil’s witty rather than profound contribution to a discussion of the merits of different national cultures and literary traditions is to suggest that ‘our [French] theatre is a model of refinement and elegance; that is what makes it outstanding, and to introduce any foreign element into it would be to plunge us into barbarism’ (Staël, Corinne 119). The exaggeratedly vain disposition of Count d’Erfeuil, alongside the haughtiness of his descriptions of French culture, cast him as a typically French character. His rejection of outside influence, but willingness to assert French literature, poetry, and drama as exemplary, is also a hint of the contemporary imperialism of Napoleon, not to mention the presiding influence of French classicism. But Count d’Erfeuil is certainly not the only typical national character in Corinne. Oswald’s defence of the speculative, tragic, and melancholic character of English drama, particularly Shakespeare, depicts his ‘noble style’ (117) as typically English. Further, Corinne’s descriptions of Italian drama bring to light what it means to be characteristically Italian; like the French character, this is represented as beautiful, exaggerated, frivolous, and prone to comedy and jest. (Because Staël’s famous travels and contacts in Germany came after the writing and publication of Corinne, there are no types of

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Germany represented here; however, it is of related interest to note that Staël’s intimate and influential knowledge of its customs, language, and literature as set out in her multivolume study On Germany further attests to Staël’s continued interest in comparative literatures, even comparative anthropologies.) In Corinne, Staël’s descriptions of the various national cultures through the vehicle of a debate between competing national dispositions follows, with precision, Kant’s organization of the national character types according to the qualities of the beautiful and the sublime, a schema that I will cite at length to note the similarity between Staël’s and Kant’s observations: Of the peoples of our part of the world [Western Europe], in my opinion those who distinguish themselves among all others by the feeling for the beautiful are the Italians and the French, but by the feeling for the sublime, the Germans, English, and Spanish. Holland can be considered as the land where the finer taste becomes largely unnoticeable. The beautiful itself is either fascinating and moving, or laughing and delightful. The first has something of the sublime in it, and the mind in this feeling is thoughtful and enraptured, but in the second sort of feeling, smiling and joyful. The first sort of beautiful feeling seems to be excellently suited to the Italians, and the second, to the French. In the national character that bears the expression of the sublime, this is either that of the terrifying sort, which is a little inclined to the adventurous, or it is a feeling for the noble, or for the splendid. I believe I have reason to be able to ascribe the feeling of the first sort to the Spaniard, the second to the Englishman, and the third to the German. (Observations 97–8)

It is important to reiterate how and why this debate is started: to impress the visiting Englishman Mr Edgermond, Oswald attempts to put on stage Corinne’s conversational talents by challenging her to defend Italian literature against the claim that English poetry is superior; yet in bringing out her ‘natural liveliness’ (109), the conversation culminates in a further challenge, that Corinne introduce an English tragedy into the beautiful Italian language. It is a fitting choice that Corinne decides to perform her Italian translation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, the activity of translation can be applied metaphorically to understand three cosmopolitan translations that are at work in the performance of Shakespeare’s play. The first translation occurs in that Corinne, who is both English and Italian, uses her linguistic translation, hybrid identity, and onstage

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performance to translate the English characterization of Juliet back into the original Italian settings and passions where Shakespeare presumably acquired the inspiration for the drama. Corinne’s translation takes the sublimity of English tragedy into the Italian language to produce what the narrator calls a ‘beautiful tragedy’ (126), paradoxically mixing two opposed terms that catachrestically warp the associations attached to the beautiful and sublime. But it is precisely Staël’s willingness to mix types and dispositions that distinguishes her theory of literature from Kant’s schema of the beautiful and sublime. In On Literature, Staël recasts the distinction between the beautiful and sublime, roughly, as the difference between Northern and Southern European nationalities, a distinction that reintroduces the elements of historicity and geography – both in terms of climate and landscape – that Kant largely neglects in the Observations (‘Whether these national differences are contingent and depend upon the times and the type of government, or are bound by a certain necessity to the climate, I do not inquire here,’ writes Kant [Observations 97]). In Staël’s judgment, true genius must possess the gift of being able to mix the dispositions and cultural forms of both the North and South to produce works of art regarded as exemplary across national boundaries. And for Staël, the artist who possessed and embodied the traits of both major cultural groupings, those of the North and the South, was Goethe, who, as she says, ‘unites astonishing contrasts in himself’ in a way that ‘one recognizes in his poems many traces of the character of southern peoples’ (quoted in Wilkes 112–13). Similarly, we are told in Corinne that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet with ‘the full power of the southern imagination’ (123); the genius of his drama lies in the fact that Shakespeare, ‘better than any other foreign writer, understood Italy’s national character,’ embodying and drawing forth ‘a brilliance of language which is characteristic of the country and its inhabitants’ (123– 4). We can similarly see in Corinne’s Anglo-Italian character an ingenious mixture of both the beautiful and the sublime, the North and the South, placing her as both a translating and translated character – and yet, a multinational, even multiracial, character who retains a kernel of untranslatable inner foreignness. This leads to the second translation that occurs in this scene at the level of the audience: where Mr Edgermond is excited to see Shakespeare in Italian (‘“And you will act him [Shakespeare] in Italian!” […] “How fortunate we shall be to see such a performance,” he added with embarrassment’ [122]), the Italians in the audience are similarly

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delighted to see Shakespeare’s representation of his tragic characters, Romeo and Juliet (‘When Romeo drew near to whisper to her of her grace and beauty in lines of verse, so brilliant in English, so magnificent in the Italian translation, the audience, delighted at being interpreted in this way, all ecstatically identified with Romeo and the sudden passion which gripped him’ [124]). The translation that occurs here is to treat cultures as analogous to texts, translating one foreign text/cultural form into the other according to the values, manners, and systems of the target language/culture without disfiguring the unique character of the original. The result is a ‘cultural translation’ that, depending on the disposition of the translator, will either retain or dissolve the cultural difference of the original text being translated. In his 1813 lecture on the different methods of translation, Friedrich Schleiermacher suggests that there are two methods of translation: ‘Either the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him’ (49). In other words, the translator has a choice between two options: on the one hand, the translator can domesticate the translation by reducing the original text to the values of the target language; or, on the other hand, the translator can foreignize the translation by retaining as much cultural and linguistic difference as possible, a method that Schleiermacher himself clearly favoured. In her own essay on translation, Staël promotes a similar foreignizing approach because it is precisely retaining the foreign influence of the original that gives ‘the national style new turns of phrase and original expressions’ (‘Spirit of Translations’ 163). She denigrates the French precisely for employing a domesticating method of translation that functions to add ‘their own color to everything they translate’ (163). One can sense Staël’s voice behind Corinne’s rebuke of Count d’Erfeuil for suggesting that French forms should serve as the example to be infinitely reproduced without change across national traditions; indeed, Corinne claims that she has ‘difficulty in believing that it would be desirable for the whole world to lose all national colour, all originality of feeling and thought’ (Corinne 111). Corinne, like Staël, suggests that translations should retain their own cultural and national particularity, that translation should never simply emulate the original but join ‘precision with inspiration’ (‘Spirit of Translations’ 166) to produce new works. Translation, as such, contains a creative and innovative function that not only ‘preserve[s] a country’s literature from banality’ (163) but, by analogy, also ensures that one’s dispositions of

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national character are always changing and developing via crosscultural exchange. ‘No loftier service can be rendered to literature than transporting the masterpieces of the human mind from one language to another,’ writes Staël (162). This goes some way to introducing the third notion of translation that is at work in Corinne’s performance of Romeo and Juliet, namely, that Corinne’s performance before a multinational audience produces a foreignizing cosmopolitical spectacle, bringing forth her talent not only for theatrical improvisation but also for improvising and mixing nationalities without privileging any culture at the expense of the other. But the spectacle of her performance therefore has the additional foreignizing effect of unsettling the implied international audience of Staël’s text, which, more subversively, communicates alien sensibilities and ideas that challenge the closures of various cultural nationalisms and further problematizes the presupposition that cosmopolitanism implies the subsumption of cultural difference into a more universal ideal. Pierre Macherey also links Staël’s ‘infinitely open cosmopolitanism’ to the improvisational performances of her characters; he writes that Staël’s Corinne and Delphine have a ‘sovereign talent for improvisation allow[ing] them to slip into any situation, to act out the most diverse roles by bringing out the very features that make them different’ (22–3). The mutability of Corinne performs what Macherey calls a ‘conciliatory cultural politics,’ wherein the embodied figure of the improvvisatrice serves as a ‘mediator’ that ‘brings together cultures while maintaining the differences and contrasts between them’ (23, 36). Corinne’s performance at Cape Miseno is an exemplary instance of Staël’s use of the improvvisatrice to translate between disparate cultures. Mediating between the Northern and Southern dispositions, the ‘sombre tone’ of Corinne’s improvisation catches the beautiful Neapolitans by surprise, but leaves them no less in admiration at the ‘harmonious beauty of her language,’ while the English in the audience are delighted by the ‘melancholy feelings expressed in this way with Italian imagination’ (238). Thus, the beauty of Corinne’s Southern imagination, combined with the sombre speculations of her more Northern thoughts, translates the dispositions into a plural and particular cosmopolitan community of listeners. Yet the community that arises should not be understood as organic, reducing the bits and pieces of different cultural forms into one homogeneous whole. Rather, the community arises in a mutual recognition of the foreignness of the

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intra- and intercultural translation that occurs within Corinne’s sombre, melancholic performance in the characteristically beautiful Italian language. As strange as it may appear, Corinne’s role as a mediator is to ensure that there is always an imperfect translation between cultures: what is required for cosmopolitan transculturation is the maintenance, indeed the conscious preservation, of elements of untranslatability in every cultural translation. Now, as is often the case with Byron, things are much more complicated, much more ironic and pessimistic, even more untranslatable. The link between Byron and Kant, to return to my original point of comparison, is much more tenuous than with Staël; but Byron’s Don Juan is unquestionably closer to the materialism rather than idealism of Kant’s philosophy. A few rather cursory examples will suffice to support this claim: firstly, Byron’s introductory ‘Dedication’ to Don Juan disparages Coleridge’s attempt at ‘explaining metaphysics to the nation,’ a criticism that runs throughout the poem as an ongoing critique of Coleridge’s German-inspired speculative philosophy (Major Works 2); further, the narrator of the poem incessantly chastises and censures himself when he begins to wax metaphysical; and, as a final instance of his resistance to the speculative, Juan is said to have ‘cared not a tobacco-stopper / About philosophy’ (10.60), let alone for Kant’s idealism. That being said, there are certainly a sufficient number of cases where characters are described as either beautiful or sublime to suggest that Byron, like Staël, is working with an implied schema similar to Kant’s. Yet Byron’s use of the beautiful and the sublime is nowhere near as systematic as Staël’s or Kant’s; in fact, he seems to be consciously avoiding systematicity. But there is a specific reason for this: Byron is consciously and ironically using the figure of Juan to sow confusion, both in terms of form and content, particularly in his representation of post-Waterloo England in the final six cantos of the poem. The thematic of confusion – arising ominously throughout this text, crystallizing into what I interpret to be the guiding figure of the poem, namely, the figure of Babel – makes its presence felt as early as Byron’s criticism of Wordsworth’s Excursion in the ‘Dedication’: And Wordsworth, in a rather long ‘Excursion’, (I think the quarto holds five hundred pages) Has given a sample from the vasty version Of his new system to perplex the sages: ’Tis poetry – at least by his assertion,

238 Joshua Lambier And may appear so when the dogstar rages; And he who understands it would be able To add a story to the Tower of Babel.

(4)

The story of Babel sets out the mythic origins of the multiplicity of the world’s languages. According to the narrative in Genesis 11.1–9, a united humanity speaking one language was prevented from building a tower reaching to heaven by God himself, who, by confounding their universal language, produced the irreducible multiplicity of tongues and disseminated the peoples across the earth. Babel now serves as a trope for overambitious projects which end either in incompletion or ruin. It is not without a certain touch of irony, then, that Byron’s Don Juan remained unfinished; at the time of his death in Greece, he left behind an unfinished seventeenth canto and, as his manuscripts illustrate, evidence that he had planned to write at least one additional stanza to add to this fourteen-stanza canto (Byron had written the number ‘15’ below stanza ‘14’ without continuing [Byron, Manuscripts 172–3]). The poem itself has a Babelian architecture, especially if we follow Jacques Derrida’s suggestion that Babel has transformed into a figure for ‘an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics’ (‘Des Tours de Babel’ 165). In a letter to John Murray in 1821, Byron left open the possibility for additional adventures for Don Juan that never came to fruition: ‘I meant to take him the tour of Europe […] and to make him finish as Anacharsis Cloots – in the French revolution […] I meant to have made him a Cavalier Servente in Italy and a cause for a divorce in England – and a Sentimental “Werther-faced man” in Germany – so as to show the different ridicules of the society in each of those countries – and to have displayed him gradually gaté and blasé as he grew older – as is natural’ (Byron’s Letters and Journals 8: 78). In light of Byron’s own remarks, juxtaposed with the poem that we do have, one could read Don Juan as a veritable Babelian performance, narrating the confusion of Juan’s unpredictable and precarious travels from Spain through to England alongside the narrator’s own seemingly haphazard divagation. What goes on without much notice from scholarly critics, perhaps due to the smoothing effect of the narrator’s role as a kind of translator, is the fact that each new country and city Juan passes through necessarily involves different languages, customs, and manners. In effect, the narrative proceeds rather naturally, rarely

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skipping a beat due to untranslatability, with the noticeable exception on a few occasions where the narrator-poet admits his difficulty at pronouncing, and moreover rhyming, Russian names in English verse (7.14–16, 9.48). Or does it? A careful eye for problems of translation reveals the entire poem, beginning with Juan’s departure from Spain into ‘Babel’s waters’ (2.16), to be a series of averted tragedies, deferrals, miscommunications, misadventures, and scenes of untranslatability carefully and ironically orchestrated by Byron to read in a very natural way – and yet, subtly disclosing the confused story-action through a succession of strategically placed references to Babel and Babylon. Thus, if Staël’s politics is one of conciliation, retaining lingering traces of her commitment to the universalism of the Enlightenment, Byron’s politics is much darker and more complicated: his politics, indeed, is one of cultural and linguistic contami-nation. Like no other character in literature, Byron’s Don Juan is completely and utterly lost in translation. To this end, the cosmopolitanism of Don Juan lies in this: that Juan is completely in excess of the conventional associations attached to gender, nationality, and racial identifications, so much so that his travels do not create cultural communication – as in the case of Staël’s Corinne – but rather sow cultural confusion, bringing to light the gaps and fissures in the citational chains of normative identity categories. Byron’s Don Juan is much too rich (and too long!) to survey as a whole, so I will only turn to a few scenes in London leading to the final scenes at the Amundevilles’ Norman Abbey, which is referred to as ‘The Gothic Babel of a thousand years’ (13.50). However, a few cursory comments from the previous adventures are necessary to situate my discussion. What can never be lost sight of while reading Don Juan is the fact that we are rarely, if ever, certain as to what language Juan is communicating in, or, for that matter, whether the languages of the characters are even commensurate. Strangely, this sort of investigation oftentimes needs to proceed in the negative, as we are never definitely informed as to which languages Juan adequately speaks and understands, but more frequently as to which ones he cannot speak: a point that seems to be very important in such a multinational and multilingual poem. For example, we know that his idyllic seduction of Haidée is without language, as Juan does not speak Greek. Similarly, during the ‘Siege of Ismail,’ itself a Babelian performance of the violence of translation, we read that Juan could neither understand his orders from his general because he ‘knew / As much of German as of Sanscrit’ (8.57), nor prevent the regrettable death of a valiant Sultan and

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his sons because he and his friend Johnson had not the ‘Eastern phraseology’ (8.108) to negotiate. Byron’s representation of the battle is similar, in many ways, to Matthew Arnold’s quick, condensed description in ‘Dover Beach’ of a ‘darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.’ And in Russia, the relationship that sparks between Juan and Catherine the Great strangely does not indicate any linguistic communication between the two, but rather a different economy of exchange, one of seduction, whereby Juan ‘grew a very polished Russian’ in ways ‘we won’t mention’ or ‘need not say’ (10.21). But when Juan comes to London, a trip orchestrated by Catherine to cure Juan’s illness from being in too northern a climate, he has become a ‘gay Russ Spaniard’ (13.53). This sort of confused identity performance, certainly more scandalous than Corinne’s Anglo-Italian mixture of North and South, would have utterly horrified Kant as the worst sort of grotesquery. Juan’s trip to London, itself referred to as ‘mighty Babylon’ (11.23), is not without its own dangers. His first significant meeting with any English citizen is with murderous bandits who mistake him for a ‘Frenchman’; unfortunately, Don Juan is again in no state to secure his passage without violence because he ‘did not understand a word / Of English, save their shibboleth, “God damn!”’ (11.12). Now, with this additional disclosure of linguistic ignorance, the question must arise: What languages does Juan understand besides Spanish, especially if we are to believe the narrator’s rather surprising suggestion soon after in stanza 53? Juan knew several languages – as well He might – and brought them up with skill, in time To save his fame with each accomplished belle, Who still regretted that he did not rhyme. There wanted but this requisite to swell His qualities (with them) into sublime: Lady Fitz-Frisky, and Miss Maevia Mannish, Both longed extremely to be sung in Spanish.

(11.53)

If we know that Juan’s knowledge of foreign languages is wanting in at least English, German, Sanskrit, Greek, Turkish, ‘Eastern phraseology,’ and potentially Russian, one wonders whether the ‘several languages’ that Don Juan knows are not foreign tongues instead – or, better, languages of seduction. Thus, if Felman finds the mouth to be the ‘speech

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organ par excellence, even the organ of seduction’ in Molière’s version of the Don Juan myth, I would say the same of the tongue for Byron. Interestingly, too, the passage cited above suggests that if Juan could only make his foreign tongues ‘rhyme,’ he would be more ‘sublime’ in the eyes of his lady admirers. Certainly, shifting Byron’s word ‘language’ to ‘tongue’ better captures the implicit meaning of this passage: a more skilful use of his beautiful foreign tongue might translate his fame as a seducer of women into English, a language that requires ‘his qualities’ to further ‘swell’ from being simply Spanish and beautiful to a more sublime English. The implication is that Juan’s knowledge of foreign language is not just linguistic but also an embodied, erotic language, one in which Fitz-Frisky, a proper name indicating her sensual disposition, desires to be ‘sung,’ or, rather, seduced. Juan’s seductions, like Corinne’s improvisations, are performances that disclose more through the language of the body than through the words being spoken; or, to appropriate Felman’s phrase, Juan’s seductions and Corinne’s improvisations are performances of the ‘speaking body’ that are in excess of the performative norms that have forcibly materialized the body. Judith Butler similarly writes: ‘There is no speech act without the body, and at the same time the body limits the role of intention in the speech act. Performative speech acts are forms of doing, often spoken ones, and they draw upon the body to articulate their claims, to institute the realities of which they speak’ (Afterword 113). If the embodied performances of different identities and nationalities are forcibly compelled to recite certain sedimented norms, then the incorporation and assimilation of different dispositional characteristics into one’s own performances produces a crisis in the citational chain. In multilingual and multinational contexts, Juan’s identity performance is in excess of any type or model, producing an undisciplined body that disfigures the regulatory schemas demarcating gender, race, and nationality. The final scenes at the Amundevilles’ Norman Abbey in Cantos 15 and 16 are certainly some of the most Babelian performances of the ‘English Cantos,’ utterly lost in the seemingly untranslatable confusion that Byron casts over his native Britain, whose ‘race,’ the narrator says, ‘butchered half the earth, and bullied t’ other’ (10.81). Unlike any other episode in Don Juan, Byron’s depictions of the events at the Amundevilles’ are replete with satirical representations of the culture of taste that presided over England at the time, such as the etiquette of the feast of the Amundevilles, social parties, the intricately described

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interactions between men and women, between foreigners and nationals, members of government and the nobility, privileged and lower classes, scenes of justice and criminality. The manners, then, that Byron outlines in the English Cantos are analogous to the affective identifications that Kant outlines in the Observations. Not unlike Kant’s descriptions, the narrator suggests that ‘taste’ is ‘the thermometer / By whose degrees all characters are classed’ (16.48); the difference being, however, that Kant’s system of dispositions is utterly scandalized by Byron such that any seemingly privileged system of manners is thrown into ironic disrepute. As the narrator says to a presumably English readership, not without Byron’s laughing voice coming through, ‘You are not a moral people, and you know it / Without the aid of too sincere a poet’ (11.87). What is perhaps most telling about these scenes is that they are located at the Norman Abbey, which is not only cast as the ‘Gothic Babel’ of modern Babylon, or Britain, but also a Babel figure which is in the process of undergoing ‘restoration’ (16.58), a revival of the great project of building towards the heavens. But just as the original Babel dissolved into confusion, so too will the modern Babel of Byron’s poem. The feeling of Babelian confusion does not escape Juan, who by the last feast of the final Canto discloses his own jaded bewilderment provoked by his English hosts: Dully past o’er the dinner of the day; And Juan took his place, he knew not where, Confused, in the confusion, and distrait, And sitting as if nailed upon his chair; Though knives and forks clanged round as in a fray, He seemed unconscious of all passing there, Till some one, with a groan, exprest a wish (Unheeded twice) to have a fin of fish.

(16.87)

Why would Byron choose the scenes of feast to bring out the confusion and perplexity of Juan, who now sits among the highest of Britain’s culture of taste? Might this have something to do with the sense of ‘Indigestion’ that Byron’s narrator intimates when he can nowhere look as a world spectator without seeing the global ‘confusion of sorts and sexes, / Of being, stars, and this unriddled wonder, / The World, which at the worst’s a glorious blunder’ (11.3)? Is it not uncanny that T.S. Eliot, too, finds that Don Juan ‘upset[s] the reader’s stomach’ (96)?

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My response to these rather daunting and enigmatic questions is this: the confusion and ‘Indigestion’ evoked by Byron’s Don Juan situates the poem as a proto-existential text, not unlike the experiences of Roquentin in Sartre’s Nausea. But where Roquentin has the uncanny experience of having his identity stripped away, bringing on his nausea, Byron’s poem evokes a sense of confusion and ‘Indigestion’ at witnessing the utter confusion of nationalities, ‘sorts and sexes,’ and the general unworking of the typological organizations of human experience that presided over Byron’s time. Yet, Byron’s interrogation of the ‘Nothingness of life’ (7.6) has less to do with an existential reading of his individual characters (although one might attempt such a reading of the connection between Byron and his narrator), who are not as psychically complex as Roquentin, than with Byron’s attempt to systematically destroy typologies of human nature by sowing Babelian confusion. One of the ways in which he does so is by producing wildly extravagant and exotic scenes of consumption and assimilation. Indeed, more unsettling than his war scenes, which one finds everywhere in his works, are Byron’s scenes of feasts in the English Cantos. ‘Great things were now to be achieved at table,’ writes Byron’s narrator not without a touch of sarcasm (15.62). Now, if I noted earlier that the bits and pieces of foreign idioms are largely domesticated under Byron’s narrator, which is especially interesting given the multinational setting of the poem, this is certainly not the case during his ‘modern dinners’ (15.62). The narrator, in fact, worries that if he does not cram his descriptions of the feast and food into one quick, messy account he might produce squeamishness or, to recall Kant’s analysis of the temperaments, upset the peccant humours of his audience. One last, longer citation will illustrate the excessive, foreignizing effect of these few stanzas, rife with images of strange and alien dishes and delights soon to be consumed by the upper crust of English society, that go on for thirteen stanzas: Fowls à la Condé, slices eke of salmon, With sauces Genevoises, and haunch of venison; Wines too which might again have slain young Ammon – A man like whom I hope we shan’t see many soon; They also set a glazed Westphalian ham on, Whereon Apicius would bestow his benison; And then there was Champagne with foaming whirls, As white as Cleopatra’s melted pearls.

244 Joshua Lambier Then there was God knows what ‘à l’Allemande,’ ‘A l’Espagnole,’ ‘timballe,’ and ‘Salpicon’ – With things I can’t withstand or understand, Though swallow’d with much zest upon the whole; And ‘entremets’ to piddle with at hand; Gently to lull down the subsiding soul; With great Lucullus’ Rôbe triumphal muffles – (There’s Fame) – young Partridge fillets, deck’d with truffles.

(15.65–6)

The effect of Byron’s stanzas is a nauseating description of a gluttonous feast of foreign foods mixed with images of ancient heroes and wars of conquest, disclosing Byron’s shrewd anticipation of imperial Britain’s attempt to consume and assimilate everything alien. And yet, he retains many foreign words in their foreignized original (such as ‘l’Espagnole’ rather than Spanish, or ‘l’Allemande’ rather than German), leaving them to stick out like Juan, the foreigner, amid the English. Of course, nausea, consumption, assimilation, digestion, even vomit, are all intimately linked to the organic systems and erotics of the mouth – such as speech, laughter, ingestion, elimination, and, in the case of Juan, seduction – which means that the mouth, or the tongue, are the mediating links between language and the body. More importantly, the analogy is drawn between the foreign foods and Juan’s foreign body, his foreign exoticism and the attempts by FitzFulke and Fitz-Frisky to seduce and consume him; and, on a much larger scale, the association is made between his foreign disposition and the attempts of English culture to consume his identity, translating his foreignness without remainder into English subjectivity. While it seems, by the end of the poem, that Juan is being increasingly marginalized from English society, the opposite is the case. We leave Juan in an unfinished poem, with feelings more sublime, more elevated and melancholic than we have ever seen in him before. Ironically, then, it is at this point that he could not be more melancholic and English, ‘full of sentiments, sublime as billows / Heaving between this world and worlds beyond’ (16.110). And yet, what would restore Juan’s unsettling influence to sow confusion, to problematize determined identity categories, would involve the Don Juan figure doing what he does best: the act of seduction. Had Byron delivered on his promise to Murray to make Juan ‘a cause for a divorce in England,’ the poem would take a markedly different turn, one that would unwork the disciplinary system by making a failure of the paradigmatic

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performative speech act – the act of marriage. As Judith Butler says of Molière’s Don Juan, or at least Felman’s reading of Molière’s Don Juan, ‘It will turn out that the body in its sexuality guarantees the failure of the speech act’ (Afterword 115). If this were the case for Byron, it would add a further chapter to his modern story of the Tower of Babel. Thus, Byron and Staël find common ground in their conscious attempt to bring to the fore a heavy criticism and alternative conception of the Enlightenment model of cosmopolitanism, one that I have been calling throughout my analysis a more subversive, Romantic citational cosmopolitics. But what allows Byron and Staël to posit a located and embodied conception of cosmopolitanism is the quality of ‘mobility,’ namely, the innate ability of their characters to step into and out of different roles temporarily performed to adapt to different circumstances, whether political, social, cultural, or even geographical, with an ease and grace that allow them to be all things to all people. Don Juan is said to possess a temperament that allows him to change his disposition spontaneously, as though it were his dress, to fit whatever circumstance he finds himself in. This is certainly a quality that Byron admired in his heroes, if not himself, a quality that the narrator describes as ‘The art of living in all climes with ease’ (15.11). Staël’s Corinne similarly possesses an improvisational talent of reconciling seemingly opposed characteristics, both beautiful and sublime, in such a way that her artistic genius mediates between disparate multinational cultures. To this end, we are told that Corinne’s conversation demonstrates a ‘mixture of every kind of mental activity, enthusiasm for the arts and knowledge of the world, subtle ideas and deep feeling’ (39). And yet, the character trait of mobility also reveals the instability and unpredictability of the characters that possess it, often leading people to mistakenly interpret this quality as ‘want of heart’ (16.97), as the narrator of Don Juan explains. In his definition of this temperament, a manner of style and disposition, Byron writes that while mobility is ‘apparently useful to the possessor,’ it is often ‘a most painful and unhappy attribute’ (1071). This threat comes to light in Staël’s novel as Corinne, seemingly rejected by Oswald in favour of her half-sister Lucile, punishes herself by withdrawing from society and eventually dying due to some strange, psychically induced malady. If it is the case that the mobile character is the one who is punished, the reason for this is certainly not that there is an attempt to reconcile competing cultures, which, in the end, leaves the mediating character in a position of dejection and abjection, as so many have suggested.

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Such an interpretation, which is certainly too domesticating, fails to account for the unsettling, foreignizing effect of either Juan or Corinne and runs the risk of merely leaving in place the Enlightenment systems that they ultimately undermine. This interpretation, indeed, also retains the hope for a perfect translation between cultures, of a consensus between disparate and competing nationalities; moreover, it upholds a normative model of cosmopolitanism that Corinne and Don Juan ultimately deconstruct. Behind Juan’s and Corinne’s mobility there is a much darker imperative, a drive towards estrangement rather than reconciliation: what we find here is not a domesticating cultural translation but one whose uncanny effect is to reveal the foreign within the familiar, a politics of cultural untranslatability that retains the bits and pieces that cannot be transmitted across cultures. Corinne’s death, like Juan’s sowing of confusion, complicates any possibility for a universal politics of reconciliation that an Enlightenment cosmopolitanism seeks to achieve. If neither the original nor the translated text remains unaltered in the process of transformation, this is also the case for the cultural translations of Corinne and Don Juan, for both texts bring to light the foreignness within each character and culture – or, in other words, the foreignizing effect of a more Romantic cosmopolitanism.

NOTES 1 Some remarkable work on this issue has been published in European Romantic Review 16.2 (2005), which documents the 2004 NASSR Conference on ‘Romantic Cosmopolitanism.’ See also Daly. 2 See Schlereth, Cheah’s Introduction II in Cheah and Robbins, and Meinecke. Meinecke develops the distinction between a political nationalism, based on the ‘unifying force of a common political history and constitution,’ and cultural nationalism, based on a ‘standard language, a common literature, and a common religion’ (10). 3 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in The Major Works (203). Hereafter, all references to Byron will be given by page number (in the case of Don Juan, by canto and stanza number). 4 The thought to ‘pluralize and particularize’ the cosmopolitan ideal comes from Bruce Robbins’s Introduction I in Cheah and Robbins. 5 In ‘Phantasmatic Identification,’ Butler invokes Foucault’s discussion of resistance in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality as a way of refiguring the

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normative citational chains in alternative ways: ‘Foucault’s point in The History of Sexuality, Volume One, however, was even stronger: the juridical law, the regulative law, seeks to confine, limit, or prohibit some set of acts, practices, subjects, but in the process of articulating and elaborating that prohibition, the law provides the discursive occasion for a resistance, a resignification, and a potential self-subversion of that law’ (Bodies That Matter 109). For further discussion, see the essays by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Susan Meld Shell in Rockmore. See, for example, Foucault’s History of Sexuality; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; and ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. For further discussion, see Butler’s reading of Bourdieu, particularly his notion of ‘habitus,’ in the last chapter of Excitable Speech. Here, Butler examines ‘how norms come to inhabit the bodily life of the subject’ (135), an issue that is of the utmost importance to Bourdieu’s analysis in Language and Symbolic Power. Putting Butler and Bourdieu together here, my intention is to foreground how Kant’s notion of the ‘type’ or the ‘disposition’ prefigures contemporary discussions of the formative rather than simply constrictive power of cultural norms. See also Butler’s ‘Performativity’s Social Magic.’ This is an addition to Butler’s notion of a ‘citational politics’ (Bodies That Matter 21).

10 Captain Barclay’s Performance: Decoding Pedestrianism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain THOMAS C . CROCHUNIS

Between 1 June and 12 July 1809, on a stretch of public road at Newmarket-heath, Robert Barclay Allardice, Esquire of Ury (also known to the sporting world as Captain Barclay), walked one thousand miles, one each in one thousand consecutive hours. This pedestrian performance, one of the most impressive if idiosyncratic in the heyday of pedestrian athleticism, ensured Barclay’s reputation as one of the greatest footmen of his era. Barclay, who was approaching thirty when he undertook this walk, had since the late 1790s been engaging in match races and solo wagered performances, gradually building his reputation. Of Barclay, owner of considerable estates in Scotland (some sources earlier in his career rated his income at four thousand pounds per year), it was said, ‘the improvement of his extensive estates has occupied much of his attention, and he is well acquainted with every thing relative to modern husbandry’ (Thom 206). In fact, his father, himself an impressive pedestrian, was especially noteworthy for having acquired, cultivated, and rented two thousand acres of previously unproductive land in Kincardineshire. Barclay, who seems to have shared his father’s interest, seems to have seen analogies between agricultural and athletic management that piqued his tactical intelligence. By the time of his legendary 1809 performance, ‘having completed those measures of improvement […] and his estate being brought to a system of management that required little exertion on his part, he entered into the service of his country, and obtained a commission in the 23rd regiment’ (Thom 213). It was reported that only five days after concluding his one thousand miles in one thousand hours walk, ‘he joined the expedition to Walcheran, and embarked with it as Aid-de-camp to Lieut.-Gen. the

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Marquis of Huntly’ (Thom 155).1 In 1842, after a visit to the United States and Canada to consult with family about a land purchase, Captain Barclay published his own remarks on British ‘scientific agriculture,’ emphasizing that the success of British (as compared to North American) farming was due to the careful management of both the production and utilization of waste and marketable products. Pedestrian Athletics in Britain around 1800 When his father died in 1797, Robert Barclay Allardice was only seventeen. He ‘went from being a schoolboy […] to being head of a family of seven children’ (Radford 34). Twelve guardians – six Scottish and six English – were appointed to oversee young Barclay’s education and affairs until he was twenty-one. Finances were difficult, since Robert’s father had ‘borrowed heavily’ (Radford 34), and yet despite his youth and seeming failure to grasp the intricacies of management of his family’s affairs, Robert forthrightly asserted what he believed his father would have wanted to be done in key decisions, often contradicting the advice of his elders. He and his guardians disagreed vehemently on numerous occasions, and the entire family’s relations were strained by the battle for authority. During the years between his father’s death and his own twenty-first birthday, Robert Barclay began to engage in wagers on sporting performances – his own and those of others. Through these forays into sporting circles, Radford notes, Barclay began his associations with ‘The Fancy,’ the ‘group of men who financed sport, wagered on it and attended the events as spectators’ (59). The Fancy, according to Radford, ‘became the inner sanctum of sport. It had no formal membership or structure, and was not a club, but its “members” did have well-known meeting places, had a favourite drink, gin, and even developed their own slang and way of dressing’ (59). The social influence of The Fancy came from ‘the excitement and uncertainty’ stirred by ‘money and the thrill of risk-taking’ (60). In a sense, Captain Barclay’s choice was between the struggle to claim responsibility for his family’s affairs and the comparably risky but more playful sociable activities of other men involved in sport. He became one of the key figures among The Fancy in the early years of the nineteenth century, for his talent for athletic performance, when bolstered by his wilful desire to do things his own way and his fascination with calculated sporting risks, produced many of the most noteworthy pedestrian performances of the era.

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Pedestrian performers in Britain from the 1770s to the early part of the nineteenth century were an unusual mixture – from Foster Powell, an attorney’s clerk in the late 1700s, to a wide variety of soldiers, farmers, and footmen. Some of these men had careers ten or more years long; others performed once (opportunistically) and thereafter disappeared from the historical record. They were from various parts of Britain, of widely varied ages, ranging from their teens up into their nineties. Accounts of their performances suggest that a pedestrian’s peculiar characteristics were instrumental in gaining the interest of spectators and stimulating lively betting. Though like boxing in its link to gambling, pedestrianism was more respectable, a similar test of determination and diligent conditioning but without the unsettling spectacle of brutality. Typically, pedestrian events were contested over specified, markedoff distances either on public roads, on horse-race courses, or in public parks. When public houses organized the events, they were staged near the sponsoring establishment. There are records of pedestrian events in many different parts of England, Scotland, and Wales in this era. Many were held on well-travelled roads or in large public spaces so that crowds of people, some merely passersby, would be drawn to them. The Sporting Magazine reports a typical case of how passersby became involved during Barclay’s 1801 performance of ninety miles in twenty-one and a half hours: The West York militia, who were on their route from Hull to York, halted and filed in single divisions to the sides of the road, leaving him a free passage; which had a most beautiful effect. The soldiers greeted him, as he passed along, with ‘We wish you may win!’ (‘Mr. Barclay’s Walking Match against Time’ 95–6)

It is interesting that the reporter should pause to note the ‘most beautiful effect,’ suggesting that pictorial aesthetics also influenced reception of this form of pedestrian event. One thing that makes pedestrian events in the years around 1800 peculiar by our standards is that accounts suggest a failure to differentiate absolutely between what for us are two distinct fields of pedestrian performance: walking and running. We would hardly expect a walker to break into a run in the final stretch, yet it was reported of Barclay in his 1801 ninety-mile walk that ‘he was so fresh, that the last mile he came in at a run’ (‘Mr. Barclay’s Walking Match against Time’ 94). Though most events were contested within their own specified

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parameters (‘fair heel and toe walking’), many of the greatest pedestrians tried their feet at both walking and running. Sometimes competitions were contested over race distances we would recognize today – a quarter-mile, a mile, ten miles. Contests would sometimes traverse long stretches of road from one destination to another but at other times would cover the same one- or two-mile stretch of road or field repeatedly. In some cases, competitors would nominate referees to judge on their behalf, with a neutral judge appointed to resolve any disputes. Often idiosyncratic or extreme distances designed to stimulate curiosity, betting, and increased buzz about the sport were chosen for contests – a thousand miles, one each in a thousand consecutive hours; or ninety miles in twenty-one and a half hours. Others were even more peculiar. According to The Sporting Magazine of October 1822, Townsend performed another surprising task, by gathering with his mouth one hundred stones placed at the distance of one [hundred] yard[s], and walking four miles backward, and running eight, making in the whole eighteen miles […] He gathered the one hundred stones in forty seven minutes, equal to a distance of nearly six miles. (103; quoted in Cone)

The boundary between stunts and races was frequently blurred, particularly as athletic pedestrianism entered its second generation. Peter Radford notes that ‘because sport had not yet been codified, controlled and regulated, it could be almost anything you wanted it to be’ (58). Such rules as existed were primarily ‘concerned with settling disputes related to betting, as with the detailed conduct of the event itself’ (58). Knowing past performances and wagers, assessing probabilities and athlete conditioning, and identifying the most promising wagering opportunities were essential parts of sport in this era, and Captain Barclay was both an athlete and a player in the broader sporting sphere. Pedestrian feats were particularly compelling to spectators and readers of the era. Consider, for example, that Barclay’s famous walk on Newmarket-heath and its account are from roughly the same era as William Hazlitt’s well-known ‘On Going a Journey,’ marking for us the wide range of performances and published writing about them that co-exist in Britain’s Pedestrian Era. Captain Barclay is only one of the most interesting and welldocumented pedestrian performers of the era. But outlining some of the details of his life allows me to lay out some of the interesting features of this ‘other’ pedestrianism. While not literary, nor explicitly

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Romantic in its sensibility, athletic pedestrianism was very much of its time. It was featured alongside theatre reporting in newspapers and sporting periodicals, in the writing of Pierce Egan, one of the first prominent sportswriters, in Walter Thom’s detailed 1813 compendium Pedestrianism, and in other books on prominent pedestrians published in the forty years around 1800. Richard Mandell observes that before the acceptance of standardized, precisely measurable, abstract accomplishment that was accessible to all and theatrically or publicly performed apart from the world of work, there were heroes such as the determined pedestrian ‘Captain’ Barclay, or the strongman ‘Sandow’ […] Their renown while living was perhaps due more to the fact that they were actors and conceivably even freaks who were unselfconscious enough to perform dramatically (but not precisely – or measurably) before large numbers of noncognoscenti. (284)

Mandell underscores pedestrian athletics’ function as cultural performance. In pedestrianism’s heyday, its performances seemed to comment upon human physiological capacity, calculation of land and human resource use, and the probabilities of athletic performance. How can we account for this alternative to literary pedestrianism and how can discourses about its performances help us understand the counter-meanings given to walking by Romantic writers, investigate the prehistory of certain forms of contemporary sporting culture, and evaluate the adequacy of our methods of inquiry for studying other forms of public performance? Pedestrian Practices and Their Social Situations A number of cultural contexts inform our understanding of athletic pedestrianism – changes in pedestrian travel, the roles of gambling and tavern culture, views of sport and physical fitness, and shifts in land-use policy and practice. At one time, walking may have marked a traveller as someone without means. Over the course of the longRomantic era walking became a significant alternative means of transportation and recreation. Walking was also a discourse that signified in new ways. De Certeau’s observations on urban walking are apt here: The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has a

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triple ‘enunciative’ function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic ‘contracts’ in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciation is an ‘allocution,’ ‘posits another opposite’ the speaker and puts contracts between interlocutors into action). (97–8)

In Britain around 1800, walking took on special significance as a key type of performative enunciation in the public sphere. Pedestrian travel guides, peripatetic poetry, journals of walking tours – all of these signalled and served to promote a new significance for walking. At the same time that walking as consumer experience gained increased visibility, pedestrian athletic performance was reaching its height as a site for enacting the possibilities of what human determination, physical training, and probabilistic calculation could produce. Within the past fifteen years, several important books have taken stock of pedestrian culture in the British Romantic era. Anne Wallace argues that changes in available transportation that began taking place in the mid-eighteenth century altered the ‘socio-economic content of walking […] removing [its] long-standing implication of necessity and so of poverty and vagrancy’ and also ‘fostered a shift in the traveller’s attention from destination to process’ (10). Celeste Langan examines the ideology at work in the Romantic era’s historical moment when walking, serving as a trope for freedom, brought Romantic poet and vagrant into relation with each other. Robin Jarvis documents the etymological emergence of a language about pedestrianism and weighs the evidence in Thom’s record of considerable late eighteenth-century athletic pedestrianism along with considerable pedestrian touring previous to 1800. Jarvis then questions the historical timing upon which Wallace’s explanation for the emergence of Romantic pedestrianism depends, noting that many pedestrians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ‘must somehow or other have been confronting the still dominant prejudicial social assumptions about walking when they undertook their tours’ (19). Though they disagree on what pedestrian historical phenomena mean, Wallace, Langan, and Jarvis all agree that changes in the conditions for walking in Britain occurred in relation to the meanings of pedestrian activity. Clearly, something was ‘afoot’ in Britain in this

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era, and we need to look at the entire pedestrian corpus – both its aesthetic/recreational and athletic limbs – to understand the public rightof-way that was being enacted or enunciated through walking. Gambling was an essential part of the popularity of pedestrian athletics. As Radford notes generally of sporting wagers in Britain in this era, many events were individually created simply to bet on, by two people with opposing views […] These sporting wagers were as much about thinking, and pre-event planning, as they were about muscle and sweat. The main protagonists set each other physical puzzles to solve. (56)

Pedestrianism had a particular appeal perhaps because it built its probabilistic puzzles upon a fundamentally familiar activity estranged through peculiar conditions. Likely almost any citizen who was aware in advance of a planned match would have had some opinion about what the enactment of the performance would require of participants. A kind of easy identification with the physical task, even if it misled many observers into misjudging the potential effects of the established conditions, probably stimulated interest in pedestrian events. Mandell writes that the British ‘propensity for weighing hazards, a talent for abstracting likelihoods on distant events, and for betting on the basis of superior information were all sure signs of a novel and creative mental outlook that later characterized the entrepreneurs of the industrial age’ (146). Athletic pedestrianism developed in intimate dialogue with this ‘mental outlook,’ for wagering ‘on distant events’ was essential to its interest. Pedestrian contests were typically organized around wagers staked either by participants themselves or by those who chose competitors to represent their interests. Sometimes events were sponsored by owners of taverns, who then organized betting at the event, and sometimes tavern owners or others managed on-site betting independently of the competitors and their representatives. Pedestrianism stimulated two kinds of wagering. There were large bets before the start on the outcome of the event – whether against the proposed standard, between competitors, or both. These were typically made by those competing or their sponsors. There were also ongoing wagers throughout the contest as the event unfolded and as the odds changed accordingly. With the idiosyncrasies of these athletic performances and their competitors being used to stimulate wagering and interest, the events relied on comparability, but not the kind of standardization of track and field

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today. While I have read no accounts about other business considerations involved in holding pedestrian events, some of the wellattended longer events no doubt allowed for opportunities to sell food and drink in the vicinity of the performance (accounts report thousands, even ten thousand or more, attending pedestrian events). Likely, other businesses – legitimate and illegitimate – took advantage of opportunities related to these events. A further sphere of entrepreneurial calculation was athletic training. In Captain Barclay’s era, training was still an uncertain science and was discussed as often in terms of what it might contribute to society as in terms of its particular effects on the athlete’s physical performance.2 Thom frames his history of British pedestrianism as an argument for the training of the nation’s soldiers, and these purposes and meanings inform the scientistic meticulousness of training regimens outlined for would-be pedestrian athletes – including strict adherence to codes governing sleep, exercise, diet, bathing, and even dress. John Hoberman quotes French army doctor Michel Levy (1809–72), who in 1850 wrote that England’s long-distance race-walkers had submitted to a course of preparation they call training, the point of which is to reduce the weight of the body and increase respiratory force. To this end, one reduces the fat content of the body and the excess of liquid which impedes the cellular tissue with the help of purgatives, dieting, and morning fasts supported by the ingestion of tea. After this first state, which expels useless fluids from the body, one sets about developing the muscles and providing more energy to the nutritive processes through regular and gradual exercise combined with a proper diet. (164)3

As Hoberman observes, Levy’s description reveals that the training done by pedestrians was in its own time viewed as a kind of ‘experiment in human physiology’ rather than an accepted part of athletic preparation (164).4 Many discussions of the value of exercise hint at its possible social influence when describing its bodily effects. Thom quotes Dr Churchill, who writes of exercise that ‘increased impetus of the blood through the whole system produces an effectual determination to the surface of the skin; and free perspiration is the consequence’ (38). He then cites Dr Willich, who writes that one of exercise’s many advantages is that ‘if any obstruction should begin to take place, it will thus be effectually removed’ (39). Barclay himself, in preparing for his ninety miles in

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twenty-one and a half hours performance in November 1801, trained ‘under Mr. Smith, an old farmer in Yorkshire, on Lord Faulconberg’s estate,’ who was reported to be ‘very knowing in all sporting science’ (‘Mr. Barclay’s Walking Match against Time’ 94; also recorded in Thom 104 and Marples 26). When discourses of production and circulation are applied to athletic pedestrianism, they often parallel the ways in which arguments about land enclosure contest control of land productivity and its effects on social circulation. By the time Barclay’s 1842 Agricultural Tour was published, links between the ‘systems approach’ to agriculture and land management and parallel approaches to managing an athlete’s training and physical response were firmly established among his habits of mind. As G.E. Mingay notes generally of the long history of parliamentary enclosure, there was ‘a great renewal of interest [in enclosure] in the period of very high food prices during the Napoleonic Wars of 1793–1815’ (21). W.G. Hoskins in The Making of the English Landscape writes that most parishes underwent a complete transformation, from the immemorial landscape of the open fields, with their complex pattern of narrow strips, their winding green balks or cart-roads, their headlands and grassy footpaths, into the modern chequer-board pattern of small, squarish fields, enclosed by hedgerows of hawthorn, with new roads running more or less straight and wide across the parish in all directions. (179; quoted in Wallace 71)

Enclosures often altered long-standing paths and built more systematized roads, leading some near Oxford to complain that ‘the former pretty, winding trackways were replaced by “dull and dusty” footpaths along the newly made, formally direct roads’ (Mingay 5). Pedestrian performances often – but not always – chose these less interesting paths and even the roads themselves in order to use well-maintained, easily measurable, and comparable courses in publicly visible places. In addition, one can see the intensive rationalization of land use that structured and justified enclosure as parallel to the meticulous structuring of training and performance in pedestrianism. Many pedestrian performances no doubt were staged within the mise en scène of landscapes that had been, were being, or soon would be altered profoundly by patterns of enclosure. Mandell, however, indicates a more indirect connection between athletics and the kinds of social change with which land enclosure interacted, writing that

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English sport […] supported, reinforced, and reflected fundamental assumptions that were necessary to maintain a public consensus when the folk and local culture were uprooted. They underlay the social discipline needed for subjection to industrial work. (151)

While it would be hard to claim a uniform significance of pedestrian athletics in relation to the politics of land enclosure, seeing pedestrianism as a performance on the land invites further consideration of the landscapes and particular venues in which pedestrian events were enacted. Whatever its intentions, pedestrianism, in De Certeau’s terms, appropriates the topographical system, acts out the place, and implies relations between actors and spectators. To understand how pedestrian athletics operated within its cultural context, we need to theorize and analyse the particular data of British pedestrian athletics more carefully. Our challenge may be developing a method adequate to make sense of such a wide-ranging and eclectic set of culturally inflected phenomena. Close reading of one pedestrian performance would be insufficient to interpret pedestrianism’s meanings. Methodology, Data Sets, Practices Because pedestrian athletics are performative – publicly embodying their complex meanings rather than discursively unfolding them in language – the historical record of athletic pedestrianism consisting of obsessively detailed accounts of events can seem almost to be written in code that is impossible to penetrate. De Certeau explains the potential problems of interpreting cultural practices like urban walking: Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or ‘window shopping,’ that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten. (97)

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Though athletic pedestrianism is a different kind of performance object than urban walking, De Certeau’s observation applies. We, too, need to make sense of traces that can sometimes replace, rather than reveal, the practices they record. The historical record on early athletic pedestrianism consists of peculiar sources: forty-page tables recording performance details such as time, distance, weather; daily (or hourly) journals kept by handlers of the performer’s condition; and sketchy news summaries of seemingly random selections of pedestrian events. Sporting periodicals, one part of the boom in periodical publishing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cover pedestrianism’s major and minor events. There are numerous full-length biographies of the lives and narratives of the great matches of leading pedestrians, each filled with circumstantial details of their development, training, and key matches.5 These are the documents in which the phenomena of pedestrian performance are preserved, but their peculiar opacity impedes our interpretation of these Pedestrian Era performances. While theatrical performance yields much more literarily interesting accounts, the case of athletic pedestrianism can remind us that our familiar ways of interpreting materials that aim to have complex agency – poems, novels, histories, political tracts – may not be adequate to the complex collation and analysis of textual data that historiography about performance, such as theatre-going, sport, and other embodied social practices, demands. We are just beginning to design methodological tools that will allow us to engage in the next phase of cultural performance scholarship. We are faced with two problems: how to achieve new kinds of theoretical sensitivity and how to work with new kinds of data sets that include documentary records with complex relationships to the performance practices they record. Let me outline a path we can follow by first taking an indirect route. Performance Revival and Historiography When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, in 1973 or 1974, I took up long-distance running. During the years when I was training for track and cross country, the years immediately following Frank Shorter’s victory in the marathon at the Munich Olympics, identified by some as a watershed event in pedestrian athletics in America, the local cerebral palsy organization began holding a twenty-mile walkathon. At the time, this kind of event was rare. In the region of Pennsylvania

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where I grew up, road racing was quite uncommon at the time, and even when races were held, the fields were small. I have often thought about how different pedestrian practices are today. Charity walkathons are regular events, certainly in urban centres. They no longer have an aura of exoticism or strangeness. On a recent weekend in Boston while riding mass transit, I noted ad campaigns for four different fundraising walks along the Charles River in upcoming months. Road races are perhaps even more normalized – they are part of the ‘exercise culture,’ and what we would have called in the seventies and eighties ‘non-runners’ fill out their fields of competitors. I mention this personal background I bring to the work because it informs my sense of the complex interplay between bodily performance and cultural context as I begin to frame questions about the pedestrianism data from Britain’s early nineteenth century. To put this in more methodological language, I enter into qualitative inquiry into cultural practices by bringing my own embodied history into play, using it to hypothesize about the phenomena in question. There are precedents for this kind of embodied historical inquiry in some of the recent work done on the British playwright, actor, and theatre manager Jane Scott by Gilli Bush-Bailey, Jacky Bratton, their students, and professional theatre colleagues at Royal Holloway University in London. In a special issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film in 2002, Bush-Bailey, Bratton, and numerous collaborators describe how they formed a company of actors to rehearse a range of texts selected to represent one season’s repertoire from Jane Scott’s Sans Pareil theatre. In addition to casting actors with varied experiences, the project brought to rehearsals expert historical advisers – on dance, music, costume, and stage combat – and involved the actors in activities that moved them beyond merely staging the plays for performance and into the work of, as Bush-Bailey terms it, ‘revival.’ She explains how a deliberate engagement between present and past informs the work of ‘revival’: Revival seeks to connect with the past through present consciousness. By wearing nineteenth century clothes, we sought not to erase our twentyfirst century bodies but to draw attention to the historical distance and difference in modern physiques that strained against the restrictions imposed (sometimes with disastrous consequences to seams and fastenings). We ‘remembered’ how to stand, walk, and sit, not in a regimented way but in response to our bodily individuality. (8)

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Perhaps ‘revival’ as a method in theatre history studies will not seem a strange idea; I suspect that is part of what makes Bush-Bailey’s choice of the term tactically astute. However, with similar methods, exploration of pedestrian athletic performance could break new ground in cultural historiography. Why should we not apply the methodology of ‘revival’ to our investigations of athletics as well as theatre? There are other precedents for using performance as a method of qualitative inquiry. In an essay in the 2001 book Design Research, contributor Bonnie McDaniel Johnson describes how design researchers use performance to investigate contexts, practices, and users of designed objects: The goal of ‘informance’ […] is to create, through performance, characters that can speak about their world, express informed opinions about product features, answer questions about design possibilities, and even design products. Informance […] begins with ethnographic study – questioning and observing people […] Researchers move on to interpreting their data through empathy: seeing situations, uses, and elements as the studied consumers would see them. The next step is informance itself: acts of pretending which transform empathy into action. (39)

The informance actor/investigator’s engagement with elements of others’ practices in order to open new avenues of interpretation has much in common with the work of the Jane Scott project. Using performance to investigate people, periods, and practices has the potential to sensitize us to the kinds of questions and hypotheses that might be most important, precisely the challenge we face when inquiring into the history of pedestrian athletic practices. Inquiry: Enactment and Decoding The aim of performance investigation of pedestrian athletic phenomena in Britain in the years around 1800 is not to falsely equate what our contemporary bodies experience with what bodies of that era experienced. Instead, we use performance to sensitize ourselves to the nuances of practice buried beneath the documentary record. Because I am particularly interested in understanding Captain Barclay’s most famous performance, I am faced with the challenge of investigating such a massive undertaking through using performance. And so, I would begin my next phase of work on Captain Barclay’s famous walk

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of one thousand miles in one thousand consecutive hours by conducting a series of small performance experiments: • Walk one mile each hour for six consecutive hours on a treadmill at a public gym. • Walk one mile each hour for six consecutive hours on a public bike path. • Walk one mile each hour for six consecutive hours on a street passing from one town to another. Conduct this experiment once in the daytime and once beginning at midnight. I expect that engaging in these performances and contemporary investigations will bring sharply into focus some of the details of physical and social practice that Barclay’s pedestrian performance negotiated. For example, experimenting with the bodily experience of intermittent pedestrian activity will bring into focus the challenges of going back and forth between exertion and rest. In addition to helping me consider what Barclay’s performance felt and looked like, this experiment will help me think more carefully about what spectators might have observed, anticipated in their wagers, and even reflected on about the human body during and after the event. By enacting my pedestrian mini-performances in different venues, each complexly modern and yet reminiscent of certain aspects of Barclay’s performance (repetitive walking venue, public right of way, proximity to everyday public transport), I will get a sense of how these different features of the performance mise en scène interact with the scripted event, both physically and socially. How do features of the setting support and complicate the pedestrian performance? And what kinds of spectator responses raise questions about the nature of pedestrianism’s ‘enunciation’ within public space? Building upon some of the briefer pedestrian performances outlined, I would then go back to some of the data sources from Barclay’s era. Some images of Captain Barclay accentuate his physiological characteristics and clothing. Figures 10.1 and 10.2 are typical examples. These contrast with engravings such as Samuel Howitt’s ‘Female Running Match’ (1800) from The Sporting Magazine (fig. 10.3). The visual rhetoric of the images of Barclay – ‘Behold, Captain Barclay’ – in the two portraits is obviously different from the bemused anecdotal quality of the Howitt engraving. Of course, gender politics informs these types of visual gestures, but both types were familiar in both image

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Figure 10.1: Robert Dighton. ‘Capt Barclay, in the act of walking one mile an hour, a thousand miles, in a thousand successive hours, for a bet of 1000 guineas.’ June 1809. (National Portrait Gallery, London; NPG D10727)

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Figure 10.2: Anonymous. ‘Captain Barclay.’ Frontispiece to Pedestrianism. 1813. (General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations)

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Figure 10.3: Samuel Howitt. ‘Female Running Match.’ Sporting Magazine, vol. 16, September 1800, opposite p. 252. (General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations)

and text in the pedestrian era. Sporting periodicals often included a series of brief summaries of pedestrian events without fanfare; their tone is familiar to readers of the ‘notes’ sections of sports pages today. Pedestrianism, without having become a bureaucratically administered sport, had achieved a certain kind of cultural familiarity. The assumption that readers and spectators would find reading such brief accounts worthwhile gives us a window into the years after the ‘great man era’ of which Barclay was perhaps the ultimate example. Other data sources use different rhetorical patterns. Walter Thom’s account of Barclay’s life gives listings of Barclay’s most famous matches; it also includes pages that document the essential data of Barclay’s performance (figs. 10.4 and 10.5). The challenge with these kinds of documents is to respond to the rhetorical structure of quantitative information. Something is being shown to us, and as readers we are interpellated as interested observers

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Figure 10.4: ‘Table of Capt. Barclay’s Pedestrian Performances.’ Pedestrianism. 1813. (General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations)

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Figure 10.5: ‘Journal of Capt. Barclay’s Walk at Newmarket.’ Pedestrianism. 1813. (General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations)

of the march of pedestrian data. But what kind of role are we being invited to enact in relation to our own bodies, the bodies of athletes, and the physical spaces of the pedestrian public sphere? In our own era of highly administered sports, the presentation of pages of data is a familiar part of sports reporting, but pedestrianism was one of the earliest forms of sport to be documented in these ways. In fact, the design of pedestrian events often seems to have been readymade for such data reporting. What aspects of the pedestrian era’s cultural mindset are revealed in its data? How will I understand that mindset differently after conducting performance experiments myself? I become more aware of how I present my own body to spectators when I enact my pedestrian performances. My pedestrian experiments also invite me to consider how to tell the story of my performance – reporting details of my own encounters, anecdotes of my own activities:

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‘On April 14, Crochunis set out to walk one mile in each of six consecutive hours at Davol Square Fitness, in Providence, Rhode Island …’ I might also discover that record-keeping provides an essential link between performance and narration, as I have over my years of recording my running in training logs. Why do records of pedestrian activities particularly lend themselves to careful records? Perhaps because of their similarity to everyday activities, record-keeping offers an opportunity to alienate oneself from what is otherwise barely conscious. I might come away from my questions about the documentary record ready to engage in more detailed investigations: • For twenty-four hours while in your house, get up and be on your feet and awake for twelve to fifteen minutes of each hour. • Measure and record one thousand consecutive hours, noting the physical activity/exercise done during that time period in the course of everyday life. • Observe as much as twelve hours of time surrounding one road race held on public property, noting details of crowds, alterations of public access required to conduct the race, time used to set up and remove special apparatus, etc. • Try to cover the marathon distance by running only one mile per hour, walking or resting at other times. • Interview contemporary pedestrians (distance runners, fitness walkers, participants in charity walks, all varieties) and ask them what they make of Barclay’s peculiar pedestrian feat, its difficulty, what might happen if someone tried such a thing today. Ask them what they imagine they might feel like if they were to undertake such a performance. Based on the kinds of questions raised for me by these experiments and others they might suggest, I would then begin to form questions to be investigated through further examination of some of the archival data from the period. By bringing my experience as performer/investigator into relationship with the data on historical phenomena, I could prevent documentary reports on past practices from causing ‘a way of being in the world to be forgotten,’ as De Certeau cautions us that they can. The wealth of possible data could be significantly narrowed, tracked down, and encoded in order to answer particular questions. Detailed analysis of data sets might then point towards other portions of the historical documentary data, and new corpora of data could be compiled and encoded. Performance experiments by the actor/investigator

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designed to explore particular questions or hypotheses that emerge from systematic work with sets of data would remain a recurring method. For example, it might seem important at some point to experiment with wearing certain articles of clothing or consuming certain food and drink while engaging in pedestrian performance experiments. We might feel some tentativeness or even bemusement about relying on performative dialogue between present and past, between contemporary performer/investigator and historical events and their actors, as we seek to interpret the past. Perhaps the idea of bringing our scholarly bodies into view in our historical work unsettles something comfortable about our position as disembodied investigators of embodied practices, but our own contemporary subjectivities need not overwrite the particular practices of the past. Such methods can help us make sense not only of the pedestrian past but also of our own culture’s relationship with it. The Pedestrian Present Pedestrianism continues to provide a compelling genre for a range of cultural performances: • As part of the activities surrounding the 2003 London Marathon, a group of selected pedestrians set out to imitate – or revive – Barclay’s famous one-thousand-miles-in-one-thousand-consecutivehours walking performance, and then better Barclay substantially by running the London Marathon after completing the walking feat. More than 170 people applied to compete, and in the end six were chosen – four men and two women. Five completed the onethousand-mile challenge, and the winner by a half-hour of the follow-up marathon in a time of just over three hours was Shona Crombie-Hicks, a Scotswoman who was at the time the sixth-ranked female marathoner in the UK. The challenge event raised money for charity, and Crombie-Hicks received 11,000 pounds sterling (‘Athletes Face 200-year-old Challenge’; ‘Flora 1000 Mile Challenge’; Fordyce; ‘Scot Wins Endurance Challenge’). • In the week leading up to the 2004 Boston Marathon, the Boston Globe ran an article about Peter Ferris, a Northern Irish pedestrian who planned to take Barclay’s sensibility global by running the London Marathon one weekend and then travelling to Boston to complete a second marathon. Ferris engages in pedestrian performances to

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collect money for charity, specifically cancer research. As medicine becomes increasingly concerned with epidemiological statistics, it seems particularly appropriate that a modern pedestrian would work the odds to support cancer research (Indrisano). • In the run-up to the 2007 Boston Marathon, U.S. and international media reported on astronaut Sunita Williams’s plans to run the marathon distance on a treadmill on the Expedition 14 space station to coincide with several astronaut colleagues running the race in Boston. A NASA report previous to the marathon noted: ‘Regular exercise is essential to maintaining bone density while in space for astronauts. “In microgravity, both of these things start to go away because we don’t use our legs to walk around and don’t need the bones and muscles to hold us up under the force of gravity,” Williams said.’ Like many pedestrians before her, Williams saw herself making a larger point about fitness: ‘She wants to educate and motivate others about being physically fit in general,’ the story underscored (Valentine). Coverage also emphasized Williams’s geographic ties to the Boston area and the technologies used to support her performance and integrate it into the space mission (‘In Space Odyssey’; Malik; ‘NASA Astronaut’). • Two middle-school teachers at East Pennsboro Area Middle School in Pennsylvania chose another way to adapt long-distance pedestrianism to the promotion of fitness and health. They selected sixteen seventh- and eighth-grade students to run weekly beginning in January 2007 with the aim of completing the 26.2-mile marathon distance in increments by May. In addition to raising money for a school-based charity, students participated to build fitness, teamwork, and self-esteem. Further, their performance demonstrated to those watching what young people their age could accomplish, in a sense adapting to local needs the fluid purposes of pedestrian performance (Gleason). What is it about pedestrian performances that make them such interesting subjects for spectators, interesting enough to promote wagering, charitable giving, or feature writing? We are all pedestrians, and our lives, viewed one way, must often feel to us like pedestrian practices taken to idiosyncratic excess. To understand pedestrian athletics is to understand something about our complex sense of ourselves as performers of public identity, perhaps our citizenship in the world, amid the datamatrixed mise en scène of contemporary social and bodily practices.

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If you travel to a location along the route of the Boston Marathon, you see some portion of the many thousands of runners, walkers, and wheelchair athletes who set out to cover the now-familiar marathon distance, a steady stream of participants sometimes inspiring and sometimes numbing. You may even one day be among the participants, dragging your body along the course, listening to the ebbing and flowing sounds of participants and spectators, seeing the roads and surrounding landscape roll by. Or perhaps you will watch the race on television, experiencing the event in the comfort of your own home or a local pub, its chaotic details organized for you by television coverage. The Tuesday after the race, you can open your Boston Globe to find pages and pages of listed participants, their times, their hometowns. What will these data mean? What are their stories and how does the race figure in them? What does this annual event and the rhetoric of its coverage reveal about life as we live it now? Perhaps you will find yourself sometime caught in the throng of walkers and runners walking along rivers and parkways in a city to raise money for a major illness or join with family, friends, and strangers in a performance to remember those who have died and to honour those who live on. How will you understand these walking performances and our society in which such demonstrative excesses are now familiar – dare I say, pedestrian? The place to begin is with close investigation of the practices surrounding these events. Follow these until you can see the nuances of structure and organization and can uncover the tactical practices of particular participants, spectators, and administrators of the event. And ask, too, how Captain Barclay might have understood this year’s Boston Marathon or Walk for the Cure. On whom would he have wagered? On whose behalf might he have pledged a gift to a favourite charity? How we answer our questions about Romantic-era athletic pedestrianism performs our relationship with the past and with our interpretations of pedestrianism’s present meaning. Our methods, then, should aim at revival.

NOTES 1 Peter Radford, in his 2001 biography of Captain Barclay, takes issue with Thom’s rosy view of the thirty-year-old pedestrian’s perhaps ultimate performance and its military aftermath. While Radford recognizes the fame that came with Barclay’s performance and his then joining the Walcheran

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expedition, he also explains that this ill-fated military action had disastrous effects on the British army: ‘Six months later […] of the 40,000 men that set sail 11,513 were still sick, 3,960 were dead (but not from action), 106 were killed in action, 84 had deserted and 25 were discharged’ (Radford 154). Barclay returned in fine health, unlike so many of his fellow soldiers. On the contemporary value of athletics, Thom quotes a suggestion from ‘Dr. West’s’ dissertation that prizes given by ‘prudent governor[s] of a state […] may excite in the husbandman, the manufacturer, and the mechanic, as well as in the soldier and the sailor, and men of superior orders and professions, such an emulation as may tend to promote industry, encourage trade, improve the knowledge and wisdom of mankind, and consequently make his country victorious in war, and, in peace, opulent and happy’ (34–5). This vision may seem impractical in the era of scattered, if popular, pedestrian feats, but often on the fringes of manuals of athletic training of this (and other) eras are hopes of national superiority. Levy’s retrospective comment about the training preoccupations of British pedestrians recalls Barclay’s fascination in his Agricultural Tour with the management of manure. (See, for example, Allardice 142–4.) U.S. astronaut Sunita Williams’s geographically dislocated ‘completion of the Boston Marathon’ on a treadmill 210 miles above Earth aboard the space station Expedition 14 in April 2007 recently underscored the link between pedestrian performances and applied science (see Valentine). Lovesey and McNab provide a detailed bibliography of these in The Guide to British Track and Field Literature 1275–1968. Their records suggest that in Barclay’s era publications that covered pedestrianism at least in part were of increased interest, perhaps particularly among The Fancy.

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Contributors

Frederick Burwick, professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, has dedicated his teaching and research to the interactions of literature with art, science, music, and theatre. In twenty-two books, a hundred articles, and numerous reviews, he addresses problems of perception, illusion, and delusion in literary representation and theatrical performance. He was named Distinguished Scholar by both the British Academy (1992) and the Keats-Shelley Association (1998). His book on Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (1996) won the Outstanding Book of the Year Award of the American Conference on Romanticism. Thomas C. Crochunis is assistant professor of English specializing in secondary English education and drama at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. He has published work on gothic drama, theatre history, women playwrights, and humanities scholarship online in Romanticism on the Net, Gothic Studies, European Romantic Review, Victorian Studies, and various edited volumes. He is co-editor (with Michael EberleSinatra) of the British Women Playwrights around 1800 Web project and the forthcoming Broadview Anthology of British Women Playwrights, 1777–1843. He also edited the collection Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays for Routledge (2004). Alexander Dick is assistant professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He has published articles and chapters on William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, Romantic drama, and political economy. His article ‘The Ghost of Gold: Money, Forgery, and the Standard of Value in Shelley’s

294 Contributors

Mask of Anarchy’ won the Best Article Prize from European Romantic Review for 2007. He is also the editor (with Christina Lupton) of Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century: Writing between Philosophy and Literature (2008). He is currently completing a book on Romantic-era debates about the relationship between economic and aesthetic value in the wake of the introduction of the first gold standard. Angela Esterhammer is professor of English literature at the University of Zurich and distinguished university professor at the University of Western Ontario. Her publications include Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake (1994), The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (2000), and articles on British and European literature, performance, and philosophy of language from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. She is the editor of Romantic Poetry (2002) in the series Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. Her most recent book, Romanticism and Improvisation 1750–1850 (Cambridge UP, 2008), investigates the performance, reception, and influence of extemporized poetry in European Romanticism, a topic she is continuing to explore in current research. Joshua Lambier is a PhD candidate and Trudeau scholar at the University of Western Ontario. He is completing a dissertation entitled ‘Romanticism and the Vital Life of Rights,’ which will critically assess the claims of current rights discourses by returning to their genesis in the turbulent political, cultural, and literary debates of the Romantic period. Victoria Myers, professor of English and Blanche E. Seaver professor in humanities at Pepperdine University, has contributed articles to book collections and journals on rhetoric and rhetorical theory in the long eighteenth century, on law and drama in the Romantic era, and on Romantic-era authors such as Godwin, Baillie, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Blake. She is currently co-editing the diaries of William Godwin for the Bodleian Library website. Daniel O’Quinn is professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). He has co-edited the Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830 (2007) with Jane Moody, and has edited the

Contributors

295

Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan for Broadview Press (forthcoming 2008). His articles on the intersection of race, sexuality, and class in Romantic culture have appeared in various journals including ELH, Studies in Romanticism, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, European Romantic Review, and Romantic Praxis. Marjean D. Purinton is professor of English and associate dean of the University Honors College at Texas Tech University. A member of the Texas Tech University Teaching Academy, Purinton is also affiliated with the Women’s Studies Program. She is the author of Romantic Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Joanna Baillie and Staging Grotesques and Ghosts: British Romantic Techno-Gothic Drama (under review) as well as numerous articles about Romantic drama and women writers. Purinton was president of the International Conference on Romanticism from 2004 to 2006 and currently serves on the editorial boards for the South Central Review and Intertexts. Judith Thompson is associate professor of British Romanticism in the department of English at Dalhousie University and the University of Kings College, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has edited John Thelwall’s The Peripatetic (Wayne State UP 2001), has co-edited (with Marjorie Stone) Literary Couplings (U of Wisconsin P, 2006), and has published articles on Thelwall, Coleridge, genre, and print culture in Studies in Romanticism and European Romantic Review. After making a major archival find in 2004, she is now preparing an edition of Thelwall’s poetry and finishing a book on his poetic relations with Wordsworth and Coleridge. Richard van Oort is assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is interested in the general anthropological question of why humans need such things as art and religion. His book on this topic is entitled The End of Literature and is forthcoming from the Davies Group Publishers. Sarah M. Zimmerman is associate professor of English at Fordham University. She is the author of Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (1999) and is completing a study of the Romantic public lecture on literature. Both projects reflect an interest in reading various genres in relationship to historical audiences that also informs her essays on Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlotte Smith, and John Clare.

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Index

Aarsleff, Hans, 23 Abbott (Judge), 108 acting, 13, 16, 32, 68, 79, 149–51, 158, 169, 171, 174, 175n, 179–80, 187–90, 191n, 230 actors/actresses, 16, 69–70, 150–2, 155, 159, 163, 165, 167–99, 174, 175– 6n, 178–9, 189, 191–2n, 194, 196, 212, 257, 259–60, 267–8 agency, 4, 6–10, 12–15, 29, 35, 87, 90– 1, 113, 199, 214, 230, 258 Agrippa, Cornelius, 139, 146n Alexiou, Margaret, 98n Allardice, Robert Barclay, 17, 248–71 Allston, Washington, 56 Althusser, Louis, 111 Appadurai, Arjun, 195, 197 Archer, William, 151 Arendt, Hannah, 229 Aristophanes, 174 Aristotle, 130 Armstrong, Isobel, 221n Arnold, Matthew, 240 audience, 3, 5, 7, 14, 26, 28–32, 36, 40, 42, 45n, 52, 140, 151, 234–6; in court of law, 105–6, 108, 110; of lectures, 30, 35, 47–9, 54–6, 59–60, 63–6, 71n;

of parliament, 214; reading, 77, 243; response of, 4, 14, 16, 27, 50, 53, 150; theatre, 131–2, 151–2, 155, 158–60, 169, 172–3, 178–9, 186–7, 189–90, 192n, 212 Austin, Gilbert, 150 Austin, J.L., 4, 23, 104, 125 Austin, Linda, 75 Baillie, Joanna, 169, 172–3, 177n Baillie, Matthew, 177n Bakhtin, M.M., 23, 76, 98n Banks, John, 158 Banks, Joseph, 55 Bannister, John, 174 Barbauld, Anna, 34, 45n Bartky, Sandra Lee, 192n Bauerlein, Mark, 145n Beaumont, George, 66–7 Beaumont, Lady, 66–7 Beddoes, Thomas, 53 Bedford Place, 52 Behrendt, Stephen, 92, 99n Bell, Charles, 152, 168–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 9, 113 Berman, Morris, 55, 71n Bewell, Alan, 89

298 Index Bildungsroman, 134 Birdwhistell, Ray L., 175n Bismarck, Otto von, 11 Blacking, John, 175n Blaikley, Alexander, 48–9 Blakemore, Steven, 5 Bland, Olivia, 99n blasphemy, 15, 100–2, 106–8, 114, 119 Boaden, James, 167 body, 3, 4, 6–7, 24, 27–30, 46, 73, 75, 81–2, 85, 90, 98n, 118, 120–1, 123n, 140, 143, 149, 151–2, 173, 194, 196– 7, 205, 209, 212, 214, 216, 218–19, 222, 224–8, 231, 241, 244–5, 248–71; actor’s, 71n, 168–9, 171–2, 174, 179, 181–90, 192n; bodily performance, 13, 17, 90, 192n, 197, 207, 259; body language, 13, 16, 17, 26, 33, 38, 151–3, 157–8, 172, 174, 207, 241, 244; body politic, 24, 29; materiality of, 227–8, 241, 247n Booth, Michael, 221n Boston, 259, 268–70, 271n Bourdieu, Pierre, 4, 17, 76, 98n, 123n, 195, 197, 230–1, 247n; habitus, 17, 76, 98n, 195, 197, 230–1, 247n Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, 159– 61, 166–7 Bratton, Jacky, 192n, 259 Bristol Gazette, 53, 63 Bristol Mercury, 44n Britton, John, 65 Brougham, Henry Peter, 113 Brown, Laura, 214 Buck, Ross, 175n Bull, Peter, 175n Buller, David B., 175n Bullough, Bonnie, 191n Bullough, Vern L., 191n Burgoon, Judee K., 175n

Burke, Edmund, 16, 34, 106, 112, 127, 194–221 Burr, Aaron, 66 Burroughs, Catherine, 5, 191n Burwick, Frederick, 16, 175–7n Bush-Bailey, Gilli, 259–60 Butler, Judith, 4, 8, 17, 23, 76, 104, 111–12, 123n, 183, 191–2n, 227–8, 230–1, 241, 245, 246–7n Butterfield, H., 213 Byron, Frederick George, 200 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 17, 126, 222–47 Campbell, Thomas, 50, 52 Canning, George, 109, 119 Caravelli, Anna, 98n Carlile, Richard, 100 Carlson, Julie A., 5 Carlson, Marvin, 48, 71n Carlton House, 56 Cary, Henry Francis, 59–60 Case, Sue-Ellen, 191n celebrity, 47, 50, 55, 57–8, 63 Certeau, Michel de, 76, 252, 257–8, 267 Chalmers, George, 99n Charke, Charlotte, 191–2n Charlemont, Earl of, 219n Charlotte, Princess, 15, 92–3, 99n Cheah, Pheng, 246n chirologia, 152 chironomia, 149, 152 Churchill (Doctor), 255 citationality, 194, 228 Claeys, Gregory, 25 Clairon, Claire-Joseph-Hippolyte (La Clairon), 175n Clark, J.C.D., 219n Clark, Suzanne, 75

Index Clarke, David D., 5 Clarkson, Catherine, 66, 68 Clifford, James, 223 Cline, Henry, 28 Clive, Kitty, 192n Clymer, Lorna, 98n Coachmakers’ Hall, 61 Cohen, Murray, 23, 27, 44n Coleridge, Hartley, 73 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 9–10, 14, 22, 24–5, 28–9, 33, 44–5n, 46–74, 133, 159, 237 Coleridge, Sara (C’s daughter), 74 Coleridge, Sara (C’s wife), 74 Collier, John Payne, 57–8 Collins, William, 58 comedy, 16, 27, 37, 158, 169, 179–80, 184–8, 232 community, 15, 31, 82, 92, 97, 118, 125, 128, 134, 137, 236 complaint, 15, 76–8, 86, 89–92, 98 Cook, James, 55 Copeau, Jacques, 151 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 8 Corneille, Pierre, 161 cosmopolitanism, 17–18, 222–4, 226– 7, 232, 236, 239, 245–6 costume, 4, 16, 81, 152, 182, 185, 189– 90, 259 Courier (London), 58, 63 Covent Garden, 166 Cowley, Hannah, 169–71 Cowper, William, 86 Crabb Robinson, Henry, 57, 62, 66, 68 Crane Court, 61–2 Crochunis, Thomas C., 17–18 Crombie-Hicks, Shona, 268 Cromwell, Oliver, 210 cross-dressing, 178–93 Curl, James Stevens, 81

299

curses, 116, 120, 161 Cushman, Charlotte, 192n Daly, Kirsten, 222, 226, 246n Dante, 59 Darnton, Robert, 50 Darwin, Erasmus, 53 Davenant, William, 202, 220n Davy, Humphrey, 53–7, 60, 65–6, 70 de Bolla, Peter, 207, 214 deceit, 158, 165 deception, 97, 151, 158, 170, 185, 187–8 declarations, 11, 58, 77, 100, 104, 110, 122, 195 de Lauretis, Teresa, 191n Delmar, Ken, 175n de Man, Paul, 98n d’Eon, Chevalier, 191n Derrida, Jacques, 4, 22, 98n, 123n, 125, 238 Deutsch, Phyllis, 200, 220n Devonshire, Duchess of, 220n De Wilde, Samuel, 212 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, 50, 72n Dick, Alexander, 6, 15, 191n Diderot, Denis, 150–1, 175n Dighton, Robert, 262 disguise, 149, 152, 155, 157, 159, 169– 71, 174, 180–1, 184–5, 188–9, 191n, 226 dissimulation, 152, 157–9, 169, 174 Dolan, Jill, 191n Donkin, Ellen, 191n, 193n drag, 181, 183, 185, 192n drama, 3, 5–7, 13, 15–16, 18, 23, 129, 131, 151, 158, 160, 169, 172–4, 175n, 190, 191n, 221n, 232, 234 Drury Lane, 161, 166, 173, 210 Duchan, Judy, 44n Dugaw, Dianne, 193n

300 Index duplicity, 158, 165, 171 Dussane, Béatrix, 151 East India Bill, 201 East India Company, 196 Eaton, Daniel Isaac, 15, 100–10, 112– 15, 117, 119–20 Edinburgh Review, 59 education, 30, 34, 53, 55, 63, 125, 139, 227, 249 Egan, Pierce, 252 Ekman, Paul, 175n elegy 15, 68, 74, 76–8, 87, 143 Eliot, T.S., 242 Elizabeth I (Queen), 93–7 Ellenborough, Lord, 100, 109–11, 114, 117 elocution, 14, 18, 23–7, 29, 33, 44n, 50, 52, 61, 150 embodiment, 4, 138, 215, 217, 225 Engel, Johann Jakob, 149–50, 152–3, 160–2, 164–9, 173–4, 175–6n Epstein, James, 112 Esterhammer, Angela, 5, 26, 64, 123n, 191n Evans, Mary, 51 extemporaneity, 63, 66–7 Facius, Johann Gottlieb, 166 Faraday, Michael, 48–9 farce, 37, 180–1, 183–5, 187 Farington, Joseph, 65 Fast, Julius, 175n Faulconberg, Lord, 256 Favorini, Attilio, 47 Felman, Shoshana, 225, 240–1, 245 Ferris, Lesley, 193n Ferris, Peter, 268 Foakes, R.A., 47 foreignness, 234, 236, 244, 246

Forgan, Sophie, 50 Forster, Georg, 232 Fosso, Kurt, 74 Foucault, Michel, 7, 180, 182, 184, 189–90, 192n, 197, 221n, 229, 246– 7n Fox, Charles James, 16–17, 194–221 Fox, William, 86 Franceschina, John, 192n French Revolution, 4, 17, 55, 114, 194, 197–8, 203–4, 210–11, 226, 238 Freud, Sigmund, 134 Friedman-Romell, Beth H., 191n Fukuyama, Francis, 146n Fulford, Tim, 91, 98n Fuseli, Johann Heinrich, 152, 159 Gans, Eric, 15, 125–7, 129, 131–2 Garber, Marjorie, 181, 192n Garnett, Thomas, 53 Garrick, David, 149, 175–6n, 211–12 Genest, John, 221n genius, 3, 28, 34, 64, 68, 234, 245 George III (King), 200–1, 216–18, 220n Gerrald, Joseph, 36 gesture, 4, 16, 21, 27, 29, 33, 66, 69, 108, 136, 142, 149–52, 158–69, 171– 4, 175–7n, 189, 192n, 197, 203, 206– 7, 212, 218, 261 Gibbs, Vicary, 103–4, 107 Gillray, James, 53–4 Gilmartin, Kevin, 106–7, 112 Girard, René, 131–2, 136, 146n Godwin, William, 9, 26, 41–2, 45n, 53, 61–2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 151, 175n, 234 Golinski, Jan, 49 Gore, Catherine, 16, 180, 184, 186–90 Gough, John, 44n

Index Granville, Earl of, 11 Gray, James, 191n Gray, Tim, 221n Greg, W.W., 132 Grey, Charles, 203, 220n Grey, Hannah, 191n Gross, Jonathan David, 224 Guilhaumou, Jacques, 5 Haberman, Frederick, 23 Habermas, Jürgen, 4, 8, 12–13 Hadley, David, 49 Hall, Judith A., 175n Halls, J.J., 156 Hamilton, Emma, 165 Hamilton, Mary (Charles), 191n Hamilton, William, 166–7 Hartman, Geoffrey, 98n Hazlitt, William, 14, 21–2, 24–5, 27, 29–30, 32–3, 40–2, 44n, 49–50, 52, 157, 176n, 251 Hearne, Samuel, 89 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 10 Hertslet, Edward, 11 Hewlett, John, 50, 72n Hill, B.W., 198–9, 206, 219n Hindson, Paul, 221n Hippisley, John, 53 Hoberman, John, 255 Hobson, Marian, 175n Holt, Francis, 103 Homer, 139 Hone, William, 15, 101, 106–16, 118– 22, 123n Hoskins, W.G., 256 Howells, W.S., 23, 29 Howitt, Samuel, 261, 264 Hudson, Nicholas, 22–3, 44n Hughson, David, 56 Humby, Anne, 189

301

Hume, David, 9 Hunt, Leigh, 100, 155 Huntly, Marquis of, 249 Huston, Hollis, 192n Hutchison, R., 99n Hyginus, 158 idealism, 12, 116, 231, 237 identity, 4–6, 10, 15–17, 32, 35, 42, 75, 107, 110–11, 113–14, 116, 118–21, 151, 158–9, 180, 182, 184, 186, 188– 90, 191–2n, 195–6, 199, 203, 217–19, 223, 225–6, 228, 231, 233, 239–41, 243–4, 269 Iffland, August Wilhelm, 174, 175n illusion, 150, 158–9, 164, 169 imagination, 28, 45n, 70, 79, 91, 120, 122, 124–5, 128–9, 132–3, 142–3, 160–1, 234, 236 improvisation, 88, 231, 236, 241 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 16, 180–1, 183–5, 187, 190 inspiration, 29, 114, 234 Jagemann, Karoline, 151 James, Frank, 55 Jarvis, Robin, 253 Jewett, William, 7 Joan of Arc, 181 Johnson, Bonnie McDaniel, 260 Johnson, Joseph, 87 Johnson, Samuel, 22 Jonson, Ben, 26, 32, 176n Kames, Lord (Henry Home), 87, 89 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 17, 223–4, 227– 34, 237, 240, 242–3, 247n Keach, William, 6 Kean, Edmund, 155–7, 174 Kemble, Fanny, 174

302 Index Kemble, John Philip, 69–70, 149–50, 152–3, 155, 157, 164, 169, 173–4, 215 Kirsch, Max H., 192n Klancher, Jon, 45n, 47, 49, 53, 67, 71n Knapp, Mark L., 175n Knight, G. Wilson, 131 Kohler, Michael, 113 Kriza, Ildiko, 98n Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 231 La Fayette, Marquis de, 210–12 Lamb, Charles, 173–4, 177n Lambier, Joshua, 17 lament(ation), 73–99 Lancaster, Henry Carrington, 175n Land, Stephen K., 5 Langan, Celeste, 253 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 152, 168, 175n Le Brun, Charles, 152 lecturing, 22, 45, 46–72 Legat, Francis, 161 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 157–9, 162, 164, 166, 175–6n Levi, Peter, 75 Levinson, Marjorie, 98n Levy, Leonard, 101 Levy, Michel, 255, 271n Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 86 Lipking, Lawrence, 145n Lloyd-Elliott, Martin, 175n Locke, John, 9, 61, 86–7, 196 London Philosophical Society, 61–2, 259 Lovesey, Peter, 271n Lowth, Robert, 87–9 Lyotard, Jean-François, 4 Lysaght, Patricia, 98n Macherey, Pierre, 236 madness, 16, 75, 153, 159, 168, 173, 202

Maffei, Francesco Scipioni di, 158 Makkreel, Rudolf A., 247n Malthus, Thomas, 91 Mandell, Richard, 252, 254, 256 Manning, Peter, 49, 67, 69 Margarot, Maurice, 35–6 Marie Antoinette (Queen), 210–12 Marlowe, Christopher, 131 Marrow, Ann, 191n Marshall, David, 146n Marx, Karl, 7, 12, 134 Mary (Queen of Scots), 93–7, 99n Mason, John, 44n Mauss, Marcel, 146n McCall, Tom, 221n McCann, Andrew, 44n McMullan, Gordon, 215 McNab, Tom, 271n Meinecke, Friedrich, 246n Mellor, Anne K., 98n melodrama, 171, 174, 180, 184–5, 187 Mendelssohn, Moses, 175n Merrill, Lisa, 192n Michaelson, Patricia Howell, 23 Middleton, Thomas, 202, 220n Miller, J. Hillis, 11 Mills-Court, Karen, 98n Milton, John, 34, 51, 57, 59, 60–1, 66, 69 mind, 3, 22, 27, 30, 34, 40, 42–4, 45n, 63, 65, 69, 73–5, 84, 88, 98n, 101, 106–7, 109, 116, 151, 153, 171–3, 177n, 214–15, 218, 231, 233, 256 Mingay, G.E., 256 Mitchell, L.G., 220n modernity, 133, 195 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 225, 241, 245 Monthly Magazine, 45n Moody, Jane, 5

Index More, Hannah, 86 Morning Chronicle, 58, 61, 72n, 176n, 208, 219n Mudford, William, 58 Mullenix, Elizabeth, 179, 191–2n Münster, Count, 11 Murray, John, 238, 244 Myers, Victoria, 15 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 231 Napoleon, 10, 226, 232 Nelson, Henry, 73 Nerlich, Brigette, 5 Newton, Isaac, 8, 61 Nierenberg, Gerald I., 175n Nisbett, Louisa Cranstoun (Mrs John A.), 186–7, 189–90 Nixon, John, 203–4 Northcote, James, 153, 155, 157 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 231 Noverre, Jean-Georges, 161 oaths, 100, 103–4 O’Neill, Eliza, 175n Ong, Walter J., 22 O’Quinn, Daniel, 16–17 orality, 3, 14–15 oratory, 17, 21–2, 24–5, 27, 29–30, 32, 36, 40–1, 52, 171, 176n, 194, 199, 201, 205, 207, 210, 214 O’Rourke, James, 146n Paine, Thomas, 101–3, 105, 107, 114 pantomime, 37, 153, 163, 219n Pape, Walter, 176n Parker, Andrew, 98n parody, 15, 37, 101, 105, 107–10, 118– 19, 121, 123n, 129, 143 Pascoe, Judith, 6

303

pedagogy, 34, 36, 63, 65–6, 188 pedestrianism, 248–71 performance, 3–7, 13–14, 16–18, 22–3, 25–6, 34, 37, 47–50, 60, 66–8, 71n, 87, 97, 106, 120, 135, 150–1, 153, 155, 164–6, 169, 174, 175–6n, 178–9, 183–90, 191–2n, 194–7, 199, 205, 207–10, 212, 214, 221n, 224–6, 228, 233–4, 236–41, 248–71 performative(s), 4–6, 9, 16, 26, 37, 98, 101, 104, 110, 114–15, 117, 188, 227 performativity, 4, 6, 11, 13–14, 16, 98, 100–1, 110, 117–18, 121, 123n, 178, 181, 184, 187–8, 191n, 196, 209, 230 performers, 48, 51, 69–70, 178–81, 250–1, 258, 267–9 Phelan, Peggy, 191n Pitt, William, 34, 77, 198, 217, 221n Plato, 56 Pocock, J.G.A., 106 Poole, Thomas, 56 Pope, Alexander, 61, 146n Portland, Duke of, 199 postmodern(ity), 7–8, 16, 178, 180–1, 190, 191n Powell, Foster, 250 Price, Mary, 191n Price, Richard, 211 Priestley, Joseph, 53 print culture, 15, 23, 25, 37, 49–50, 58, 63, 67, 86 Public Advertiser, 209, 221n Purinton, Marjean D., 16–17 Quarterly Review, 59 Quebec Bill, 194, 201, 209, 219n Quilliam, Susan, 175n Racine, Jean, 131 Radcliffe, Ann, 86

304 Index Radford, Peter, 249, 251, 254, 270n readers, 3, 15, 27–9, 34–5, 39, 41, 43, 45n, 50, 57, 64–5, 67, 70, 74, 80, 84, 89, 94, 97, 105, 109, 113, 128–9, 139, 141–5, 183, 235, 242, 251, 264 Reeves, John, 109 Reid, Thomas, 9–10 Reiman, Donald, 45n Reynolds, S.W., 156 Riccoboni, Luigi, 160, 163, 168, 176n Richardson, John, 229 Richardson, Ruth, 81–2 Richmond, Hugh M., 221n Robbins, Bruce, 223, 246n Roberts, Hugh, 116, 122 Robinson, Mary, 192n Robinson, Nicholas K., 221n Rochester, Earl of, 8–9 Rockey, Denyse, 23, 25 Rockingham, Marquess of, 198, 209, 220n Rockmore, Tom, 247n Roffe, Edwin, 213 Rose, Margaret, 106, 109, 121 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 16, 53, 126– 9, 134–5, 145, 146n Royal Institution (London), 46–72 Royal Society, 55, 61 Russell, Anne, 191n Russell, Gillian, 5, 49, 57 Russell Institution, 62, 65 Ryan, Robert, 123n Ryder, Thomas, 212–13 Sade, Marquis de, 114 Salvaggio, Ruth, 192n Sans Pareil Theatre, 184, 259 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 243 Schafer, Elizabeth, 220n Schiller, Friedrich, 133, 183

Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 157, 158, 174, 175n, 231 Schlegel, Friedrich, 231 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 235 Schlereth, Thomas J., 246n Schor, Esther, 99n Schreiber, Maeera, 85 Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig, 174, 175n Scot’s Corporation Hall, 61–2 Scott, Jane, 16, 180, 184–5, 187, 190, 259–60 Scrivener, Michael, 25, 30, 39, 45n, 123n Searle, John, 4, 103–4 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 98n sensibility, 69, 86–7, 91, 97, 150, 175n, 208, 210, 212, 214, 230, 252, 268 Shakespeare, William, 14, 16, 34, 42, 47, 51, 57, 60–1, 64, 67–70, 71–2n, 124, 131–3, 139, 144–5, 151, 153, 159–61, 165–9, 175n, 202–3, 209, 216, 220–1n, 232–5 Sharp(e), Michael William, 149, 160, 168, 175n Shell, Susan Meld, 247n Shelley, Bryan, 123n Shelley, Mary, 14–16, 124–46 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 14–15, 29, 32, 100–23, 126 Shepherd, Samuel, 107–8, 111 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 198, 213 Sheridan, Thomas, 14, 22–4, 27, 33 Shevelow, Kathryn, 192n Shorter, Frank, 258 Siddons, Henry, 149–77 Siddons, Sarah, 69–70, 149–50, 164, 167–9, 173–4, 210, 212–13, 215, 218, 221n Siegmund, Georg, 166

Index Simon, Jean Pierre, 167 Simpson, David, 202 Simpson, Michael, 5 sincerity, 122, 140, 152, 165 Siskin, Clifford, 85 Skirving, William, 36 Smith, Adam, 87 Smith, Charlotte, 86, 88–9 Smith, Olivia, 4, 23, 45n, 109, 123n Smith, Sydney, 54 sociability, 194–5, 199, 207 Solon, 85 Sophocles, 16, 129–30, 134–5, 146n Southerne, Thomas, 212, 214 Southey, Robert, 60 speaking, 3, 4, 9, 13–15, 21–2, 24, 50– 2, 58, 61, 66, 71n, 238, 241 spectacle, 94, 187, 211, 236, 250 spectators, 130–2, 134, 137, 143–4, 150, 159, 178, 183, 188, 192n, 227, 229, 242, 249–51, 257, 261, 264, 266, 269–70 speech, 3, 7–8, 14, 21–40, 71n, 76, 80, 83, 104–5, 111–12, 163, 167–9, 201, 207, 225, 244 speech acts, 11, 23, 75, 100, 105, 109– 11, 114, 116–17, 120–3, 183–4, 191– 2n, 241, 245, 252–3 speech-act theory, 13, 15, 26, 227 Spencer, Christopher, 220n Sperry, Stuart M., 123n spontaneity, 63, 65, 66, 225 Sporting Magazine, 250–1, 261, 264 Staël, Germaine de, 17, 222–39, 245 stage, 5, 6, 14, 16, 37, 47–8, 51, 53–4, 61, 67–70, 130–2, 150–1, 155, 157, 160, 164, 166, 168, 171, 174, 178–9, 181, 183–5, 187–9, 192n, 195, 210– 11, 225, 233, 256 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 151

305

Steele, Joshua, 44n Stewart, Dugald, 14 Stoler, Ann Laura, 197, 221n Straub, Kristina, 191–2n Suard, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine, 175n subject(s), 7–9, 107, 111–13, 116, 138, 141–2, 197, 206–7, 219, 223, 227–30, 247n subjectivity, 7, 16, 196, 207, 244, 268 sublime, 75, 89, 160, 225, 228–31, 233–4, 237, 240–1, 244–5 Surrey Institution, 65 sympathy, 22, 26–30, 32, 82, 84, 86–8, 92, 96–7, 128, 158, 172, 211 Talbot (Romantic-era actor), 173 Talbot, Mary Ann, 191n Taylor, John, 191n theatre, 5–6, 14, 16, 46–8, 50, 56, 59, 65, 67, 70, 71n, 130, 133, 155, 172, 175–6n, 179, 186–7, 189–90, 191n, 193n, 194– 5, 209, 211, 219n, 232, 252, 258–60 theatricality, 16, 173, 179, 188, 194 Thelwall, John, 14, 23–45, 51–3, 61, 71n Thelwall, Robin, 45n Thew, Robert, 157 Thom, Walter, 252–3, 255, 261, 263, 265–6, 270–1n Thompson, Benjamin (Count Rumford), 54 Thompson, E.P., 44n Thompson, Judith, 3, 14, 44n Thomson, Katherine Byerley, 63 Times (London), 57, 62 Todd, Mary, 51 Townsend (Romantic-era athlete), 251 tragedy, 127–31, 133–4, 143–4, 146n, 158, 161, 169, 209–10, 212, 214, 218, 233–4 Tresham, Henry, 165–6

306 Index uptake, 100, 108, 110, 114, 123n utterance(s), 3, 5–6, 9, 23, 27, 39, 67, 75, 101, 104, 111, 168, 197–8, 204–7, 209 van Gennep, Arnold, 127 van Oort, Richard, 15–16 Verbraggen, Susan, 192n Vestris, Madame, 174 voice, 4, 14–15, 21–2, 24, 27, 32–3, 35– 6, 42, 50, 56, 60, 75, 79–80, 88, 96, 111, 113, 135, 137, 182, 184, 189, 224, 234, 242 Wainwright, Gordon R., 175n Wallace, Anne, 253 Wasserman, Earl R., 123n West, Benjamin, 159–61 Westminster Library, 62 Wheeler, Roxann, 221n Wickwar, William, 109

Wilde, Oscar, 11–12 Wilkes, Joanne, 224 Williams, Helen Maria, 15, 92–4, 97 Williams, Sunita, 269, 271n Willich (Doctor), 255 Wilson, Kathleen, 221n Woffington, Peg, 192n Wood, Marcus, 109, 123n Woodall, W. Gill, 175n Wordsworth, Dora, 73–4 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 60, 74, 82, 83 Wordsworth, Mary, 73–4 Wordsworth, William, 14, 15, 22, 24, 32, 45n, 57, 59–60, 69, 73–99, 237 Wren, Christopher, 61 writing, 3–4, 13, 15, 21–3, 26–7, 73, 79–80, 83–4, 269 Zimmerman, Sarah M., 14 Zoffany, Johan, 176n