The Immaterial Book: Reading and Romance in Early Modern England

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Introduction The Immaterial Book The scene: a hero in an early modern romance is on a journey. The stakes are high; at one point, the prospects for future happiness seemed enormous, and perhaps success is still within reach, but nothing is certain. Along the way, there have been disappointments, delays, and reversals, suffering and doubt. But now the hero finds himself (or herself) in some extraordinary setting—perhaps he enters an ancient library; or has a vision, while in prison, of long-lost parents and descending gods; or discovers an enchanted theater—and he chances upon a book. Opening the book, which may be enormous, or very old, or obviously magical, the hero reads with great interest: the story seems familiar. In fact, the story is his own, the story of his life. Far from home, he has encountered himself in a book, which seems able to tell him something important, to offer him answers, finally, to the questions he has urgently been pursuing. Yet the hero's reaction is not what we, as readers, might have expected. Rather than feeling immediate satisfaction, the hero is overwhelmed with perplexed wonder—or perhaps does not recognize himself. His reaction is veiled from us, or he has no reaction at all. As readers of romance, we watch romance heroes becoming readers of themselves—the examples just described include Prince Arthur in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Posthumus in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, and Urania in Wroth's Urania. Fittingly for characters in romance texts written in the era of an explosion in print technology, their books are significant: their acts of reading Page 2 → and the books they read seem endowed by their surrounding fictions with outsize significance, with monumental or even supernatural importance. Yet these books prove, time and again, to be less than perfectly readable: they are unfinished, opaque in meaning, superfluous, drowned, or absent. While romance texts themselves have famously been characterized as “endlesse,” expanding and ramifying themselves through dilation and digression, and thus inevitably unfinished, books within romance find their incomplete shapes not in a plenitude of self-renewing narrative threads but in abrupt breaks, deferrals of understanding, and unexpected deflations of meaning.1 In my title for this book, I invoke the immateriality of the early modern book, with two, related purposes. First and most obviously, I intend to distinguish this study from much other criticism of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature that focuses on the history and culture of the “material book.” Instead of seeking to trace the effects of the historical circumstances of early modern authorship, publication, production, consumption, reception, and circulation upon literary texts, as other scholars have illuminatingly and importantly done, I will examine representations of books and reading within those texts—books that are “immaterial” because they are inscribed and portrayed within the pages of other books. Second, I wish to underscore in my title what I think is distinctive about how, as I will argue, books are represented in these romance texts: as notable not so much for their materiality as for the way in which they are always dematerializing, losing the wholeness and heft, the certainty and understandability—the graspability in both the physical and cognitive senses—that seem to be the unspoken corollaries of “materiality.” In the last quarter century, the discipline of book history or “book studies” has become one of the dominant influences on early modern literary criticism. Inspired by Elizabeth Eisenstein's foundational history of the print “revolution”; by the English school of the “New Bibliography” and the French tradition of the histoire du livre; by D. F. Mackenzie's “sociology of texts”; by the work of intellectual historians like Roger Chartier, Anthony Grafton, and Ann Blair; and by the growth of the related field of early modern material-culture studies, literary scholars are now considering from many angles the ways in which the “material book” frames, contains, and mediates literary texts.2 As Jonathan Gil Harris puts it in an important critique of the histories of objects, “The new millennium is arguably the time of material culture.”3 If Renaissance literary studies are currently living in a material world, I contend that it is also time for its practitioners to attend to materiality's inverse, Page 3 → its shadow, the immaterial—to investigate what immateriality might mean in the period and to look for its effects. It will be my work here to complicate our idea

of the materiality of books as they appear, imagined by authors and readers, in texts. I position this book not against the efforts of scholars of the histories of the material book and material culture but, rather, as a complement to them, using the information they have gathered about how “real” historical readers experienced books as material phenomena to return critics' attention to the books that are represented within literary texts, and not only for what they might be telling us about books and reading in the Renaissance. Those “inscribed” books are, of course, informed by their historical counterparts, but because they are not “real,” they are unlimited in what functions they can perform within the text, and so they can, I argue, tell us far more than can “material” traces about the many and diverse ways in which early modern writers and readers thought about books. The interaction between the individual reader and the text has multiple imaginative and affective qualities that are elided in studies of materiality. Ultimately, I will argue, it is not because of their material reality, but because of their immaterial potential, that books are such useful objects for the early modern imagination.4

The Romance of the Book To name the eclectic literary mode of romance is to evoke a highly permeable category, in fact, a category defined by a heterogeneity that resists classification and overflows generic boundaries, even as its durable “memes” and the assumptions of the world in which it unfolds remain sufficiently vivid and distinct for us always to know romance when we read it, as if by smell.5 Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that it is in romance that we find scenes of reading that overturn the expectations of historicism for how books might be represented in an age of cheap print and rising literacy. Romance is always, in a sense, out of time: its narratives take place in an indeterminate long ago, to the delight of its readers, while its aesthetic is always seen by its detractors as nostalgic, naive, and old-fashioned. Yet simultaneously, romance of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is very much of its own moment, because it depended for its success on the printing press and the expanding book market. To consider books as they appear in early modern romance is in some ways a reflexive, reflective exercise, because, in an important sense, romance is about Page 4 → reading, is made of reading. Early modern romance derives heavily from earlier literary models—from the Odyssey and from Apuleius, from Chrétien and from Amadís, among many other models—and is always aware of its links to these other texts, registering connection through repetitions and translations of characters' names, plot motifs, even whole episodes that echo earlier models. Its allusive, citational, self-referential nature, always looking back at classical and medieval modes of narrative and constantly examining its own conventions and traditions, thematizes literary representation itself, while the reader's experience of traversing the text replicates that of the wandering hero. Romance represents its own textuality in such framing conventions as the “discovered-manuscript topos,”6 in which the author or compiler of a romance claims not to have written but to have found the text—underneath a ruined monastery, in the back of a dusty library, sealed in a cave for a thousand years, translated out of Hungarian, and so on. The discovered-manuscript topos is also an extension of the romance mode, allowing the text of the romance to have its own romance narrative of travel, travail, loss, recovery, and reintegration. At the same time, the topos insists on a material origin for romance: if it was discovered whole and not created from nothing, the tale was always a book. Meanwhile, the fact that romance often takes place in an alternate or altered universe, in which the fantastical and improbable are usual, makes it especially hospitable to acts of supernatural reading. As they feature in romance texts, books are magical objects, potent sources of power, prophecy, or revelation; they serve as a medium for communication between gods and humans; they reveal characters' pasts, presents, and destinies. Thus, as elements in romance narratives, which are built from episodes of wonder and quests for self-discovery, magic books are central to formal identity: they are part of what makes a romance a romance. Books are everyday objects that offer a metaphysical opening into other realms of reference, marking the divide—and mediating the interchange—between romance and other modes of mimesis. Literary critics are currently returning our attention to romance as an excitingly dynamic and hetergeneous mode whose various texts share even more cross-genre connections and influences than has been appreciated.7 While earlier scholars of romance have mostly emphasized narrative fictions, the newest romance criticism takes a cross-

genre approach, arguing that deep commonalities of interest and strategy between prose romance and tragicomic drama belie historical differences in the terminology of their classifications. Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne have recently argued for a model of cross-pollination: Page 5 → early modern Londoners, they note, “might well have paused at a bookstore to purchase a popular prose romance…before crossing the Thames to see Pericles at the Globe.” “[D]ramatic romance,” they argue, “did not exist as entirely distinct from prose, verse, or oral romance”; instead, each served to heighten the others' popularity through shared characters, plots, and topoi.8 Whether on page or stage, romance in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England crosses divides of class and gender as well as genre. Its influences—a mix of Heliodoran, Arthurian, and Ariostan; of classical, native, and Continental—become deracinated and reified as seemingly timeless parts of the mode: wandering, chance, the supernatural. Romance is consumed by middlebrow as well as elite readers: while elite men still made up the vast majority of book consumers, if there was any genre that included women and the “middling sort” among its audience, it was romance, as is clear from the anxieties of polemicists and educators, notably the famous condemnations of romance by Roger Ascham and Juan Luis Vives, that romance would ruin the morals of the vulnerable and unsophisticated. Furthermore, while some critics recognize separate categories of “popular” romance (Lodge, Greene, Nashe) and “elite” romance (Sidney), such distinctions quickly collapse from the perspective of reception; as Andrew Pettegree has observed, the Stationers' Register reveals that the same romances produced in expensive folios were also printed in subsequent or simultaneous cheap pamphlet versions, so that, as far as can be surmised, the markets for “low” and “learned” romance overlapped.9 The present book brings together poetic romance with prose and dramatic texts to deepen its account of the various modes of romance in early modern English literary culture. Books in early modern romance are not just material objects that are read. They are material objects read through lenses of delight, fear, strangeness, familiarity, self-forgetting, and self-identification generated out of the immaterial but potent idea of the book: the romance of reading.

The “Book of the World” in the World of Print We do not need to seek far for historical models of the “immaterial book,” books that exist only in the imagination. Spectacular, metaphorical books loomed in late-medieval thought, emerging from Scripture and from the discourses of theology and natural philosophy and serving as rhetorical constructs, as categories of thought, as containers for imagination. References abound to the Page 6 → Book of Life, the list of the names of the saved, to be opened on Judgment Day. Its counterpart is the Book of Doom, in which the names of the damned are inscribed, as in the thirteenth-century Dies irae: “Liber scriptis proferetur / In quo totum continentur / Unde mundus iudicetur.”10 The Book of Memory was one of the mnemonic constructs around which, as Mary Carruthers has documented, medieval memory technology built its systems of information management and retrieval.11 The Book of Nature (or of the World, or of God's Creation), which was imagined as God's second volume, the corporeal counterpart to Scripture's Book of Truth, was the implied subject of all philosophical and (proto)scientific study. Over a half century ago, Ernst Robert Curtius, in a chapter entitled “The Book as Symbol” in his now-classic study European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953), traced this metaphor in medieval academic discourse. He noted that the German translation of the thirteenth-century encyclopedia De naturis rerum, by Conrad of Megenburg, was titled Buch der Natur (Book of Nature), and he cited Paracelsus's image of nature as a set of books “which are entire and perfect ‘because God himself wrote, made, and bound them and has hung them from the chains of His library.’”12 The secular Book of Fame (or of History) contained the names of the great, written “in golden letters”;13 Chaucer describes the House of Fame as a temple on whose walls are brass “tables” (“The House of Fame,” l. 142) inscribed with the verbatim text of Vergil's Aeneid, that who's who of England's classical inheritance and thus a very catalog of greatness, which the narrator reads.14 For Curtius, these images of great books, bestowed through religious and scholarly discourse on various aspects of experience, are indicative of the esteem in which books had been held since antiquity: “[T]housands of years before our era, writing and the book have a sacred character, are in the hands of a priestly caste, and become the medium of religious ideas. Here we encounter ‘divine,’ ‘holy,’ and ‘cult’ books. [But it] was through Christianity that the book received its highest consecration…. Christ is the only god whom antique art represents with a bookscroll.”15 However, Curtius says, over the course of the medieval period, as European culture in general became more secularized, metaphors of the book became more mundane. Using Shakespeare as his example of

Renaissance English literature, Curtius, while admiring the variety and vitality of Shakespeare's book images, maintains that “[t]he sphere of writing and the book as a vital concern, as atmosphere, as the symbolic medium of science and philosophy, is foreign to him.” Shakespeare's primary interest in the book, Curtius says, is expressed in a taste for expensive bindings.16 From Page 7 → the reverence of Paracelsus for the Book of Nature to Shakespeare's ostensible admiration of luxury books as class markers, Curtius sketches a firmly earthward trajectory for the idea of the book in the Renaissance. In this way, remarkably, Curtius, whose interest lay purely with the book as metaphor, anticipated a theme in the arguments of twenty-first-century studies of the material book. Although the idea of the printed codex as a usable “technology” can be traced back to Walter Ong, it has been a particular project of many recent scholars of the social history of books and reading to dispel further the modern, post-Romantic fantasy of reading as an imaginative reverie, a flight of fancy, and to replace it with a utilitarian account of books as practical apparatuses for religious, scholarly, or commercial activity.17 In discussing the growth of private ownership of books in Tudor England, both sacred and secular, Margaret Ford observes, “On a basic level, people owned books which they needed: books were professional tools.”18 In recent studies of the humanist scholarship of John Dee, Jean Bodin, and others, reading has been portrayed as a directed, purposeful activity, with well-defined goals, conventions, and procedures.19 An influential article by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine stresses the utilitarianism (not just the utility) of early modern reading. [R]eading [was] intended to give rise to something else. We argue that scholarly reading…was always goal-orientated—an active, rather than a passive pursuit. It was conducted under conditions of strenuous attentiveness; it employed job-related equipment…; it was normally carried out in the company of a colleague or student; and was a public performance, rather than a private meditation, in its aims and character…. [W]e must emphasize again that [the scholarly reader's] ideals and methods were not idiosyncratic or whimsical.20 More recent accounts have echoed and codified this idea of books as useful first of all. Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, in Book Use, Book Theory, 1500–1700, deliberately choose the word use to stand for all kinds of book consumption, stressing the importance of the reader's active role and the application of what is read. In contrast to “merely gazing on words,” “book use” for Cormack and Mazzio is dynamic and appropriative, and it is both personal and social: it “involves not just the practical application of printed words in the world but also their internalization…. Use simultaneously relocates the book to the intimate, private space of an individual's mind and makes an otherwise hidden knowledge public, thereby embedding the reader in the social realm.”21 William Page 8 → H. Sherman echoes and makes even more deliberate Cormack and Mazzio's vocabulary of utility, in the title of his work on early modern reading habits, Used Books, as well as in its text: “As for ‘reading,’ I have come…to prefer the language of ‘use.’”22 In adopting a discourse of “use” and usefulness from early modern texts that issue advice on reading—indeed, in replacing the word read with use—Cormack, Mazzio, and Sherman seek to historicize their work more fully, to get closer to early modern readers' actual experiences (as Sherman points out, “not all of the uses to which books can be put should be described as ‘reading’”).23 This historicizing work is important and necessary; as Peter Stallybrass has noted, literary scholars engaged with the history of books and reading have a tendency to overemphasize literature and literary texts as a starting point for interpretation, to a degree that misrepresents the proportion of the output of the press in the early modern period that was “literary” or that were even books.24 But it is also important, I believe, for scholars of the early modern period to attend to kinds of interactions with books that are far less within the reader's control, that are not prescribed and scarcely utilitarian, and that are deeply revealing of the complexity of early modern ideas about books. According to this use-centered or “goal-orientated” account of reading, books ought to be stable, rational, transparent containers for knowledge. In the texts I read in this book, however, they are not. The practice of reading as it is mirrored, vertiginously, in romance is like humanist reading refracted through a funhouse mirror. Books that readers find and attempt to “use” turn out to be unfinished, confusing, unsystematic; to “work” very differently from how they are supposed to, deconstructing order rather than creating it; and to demand to be experienced not through intellectual understanding but through wonder, misrecognition, awe. Yet in these romances, the strange and the marvelous, the illogical and spectacular, turn out to hold unanticipated pleasures

and to manifest a larger order of their own. The book appears in romance as a strange, mysterious, and powerful object, whose intimate familiarity to the reader as a physical thing does not diminish its capacity to amaze and overwhelm as a metaphysical idea. In what follows, I hope to show the far deeper engagement of romance with the imaginative possibilities of the book and to suggest that in early modern English literary culture, books retained all the mystical and wondrous associations that had attached to the grand concepts like the Book of Truth, as an undercurrent or shadow of their quotidian existences, even as they entered, as objects, into a new and more intimate relationship with readers' lives and selves. The narrative of functionality, I hope to show, is not the whole story that early modern English culture tells itself about the book. Page 9 →

Of Books and Cheese Although historians continue to debate the question of what proportion of the population of early modern England was functionally literate, or indeed what our definitions of early modern “literacy” should be,25 it is nevertheless clear that the public consumption of books was generally increasing over the course of the period we think of as the English Renaissance. During this time, the activities of reading, studying, owning books, writing books, and writing about books (also, importantly, writing in books) have been described as becoming more common, practiced by a more diverse group of people, including non-Latinists, women, and people of middling means, at the same time as they were becoming more heterogeneous, taking place in more diverse spaces, in private homes rather than only in monasteries and universities. Laurel Amtower argues that this trend was already underway in the fifteenth century: although she agrees with Curtius that in early medieval England, “art mystified the book, distancing it from lay culture” and reserving it as “a metaphor for a higher sacramental and unchanging truth,” she argues that manuscript illustrations from the later end of the Middle Ages, “inundated with images not just of books, but of people reading the books,” familiarized and domesticated the idea of the book and represented “the materialization of a new cultural metaphor—reading as a mode of perception that enables new ways of thinking about both humanistic and ecclesiastical situations.”26 “Reading,” in other words, became a widely used figure for thinking about many other kinds of knowledge, whether esoteric or practical.27 Needless to say, the introduction of the printing press and the Reformation combined to make books more widely available and more central to daily life. In Protestant culture, the translation of the Bible into English, the institution of a common prayer book through which worshipers were supposed to follow along with the service, and the passage of canon laws requiring churches and cathedrals to own and make available certain important texts (e.g., Erasmus's Paraphrases upon the Newe Testament [1548] and Foxe's Actes and Monuments [1563]) reinforced the trend toward viewing books as more accessible, both in perception and in reality; an orthodox Christian was now defined as a person in contact with a book. Although ownership of books remained out of the economic or educational reach of many, they were nevertheless increasingly present, physically as well as functionally, in daily life—offered at booksellers' stalls, secured in churches, displayed in homes, attached to people's belts, and tucked in their sleeves. Page 10 → Many contributions to the burgeoning field of the history of books and reading have attended to this awareness of physical contact with the book, delving into the archive to recover material evidence of historical reading practices, such as names written in books that document collaborative study or marginal annotations that record the reader's reactions, enthusiasms, and objections.28 Such studies particularly claim to be able to bring into focus, alongside the well-documented habits of famous readers like John Dee and John Milton, the experiences of “less extraordinary readers [through] their occasional traces in books.”29 As Heidi Brayman Hackel asserts, “it is these readers, not the celebrated poets or career scholars, whose entry into the print marketplace…changed the definition of literacy in early modern England.”30 These studies, too, assume (explicitly or implicitly) a cultural process of demystification operating on books. Even the titles of two monographs that take as their subject the reading of such “middlebrow” consumers, Margaret Spufford's Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (first edition, 1981) and Tessa Watt's Cheap Print and

Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (1991), with their evocations of books as “small,” “cheap,” and, above all, “popular,” emphasize the idea that books, once singular, individually crafted works of art, rare and precious, had been taken out of the inner sancta of scholars and priests and were now everyday objects. That this general observation has validity is clear in a 1613 epigram by Henry Parrot: “That one may well compare a Booke to Cheese: /…/ No Cheese there was that ever pleas'd all feeders, / No Booke there was that ever pleas'd all Readers.”31 The idea of books as food brings a passage in the Book of Revelation to mind, in which an angel gives St. John a book, symbolizing the prophecy he will convey, and commands him to eat it (Revelation 10:9–10). In Parrot's poem, this biblical moment of sublime strangeness has collided with the new, ordinary book that “one may well compare…to Cheese.”

The Book of Nature and the Nature of Print What happened, then, to these ancient, biblical, and medieval rhetorical constructs—these potent, pervasive ideas and images of the Book of Life, the Book of Nature, and so on—when they entered the age of print?32 What does the Book of Nature have to do with the book that is for sale, perhaps cheaply, alongside a cheese? One answer to the first question, of course, is that nothing Page 11 → happened: metaphors of the book continued their existence into innumerable Renaissance texts. Shakespeare has Mowbray swear on his hope for salvation in Richard II, “If ever I were traitor / My name be blotted from the booke of Life” (1.3.202), while in the same play, Richard tells Northumberland he will go to Hell for “deposing of a king / And cracking the strong warrant of an oath, / Marked with a Blot, damn'd in the Booke of Heaven” (4.1.234–36). Gervase Markham's 1597 translation of an elegy for Henry III, Deuoreux: Vertues Teares, imagines “that Booke, heauens royall Librarie” in which “happy Memory / Inroles the deeds, are worthy of record, / In golden letters (lasting Charractrie)” (stanza 250).33 In the closet drama The Alexandraean Tragedie (1604) by William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, a character representing Aristotle describes how he has delighted “On Natures labours curiously to looke, / And of all creatures finding foorth the kinde / Strange wonders in th'uniuersall booke” (5.1.1–4).34 A casual survey rapidly turns up Books of Fate, Time, Friendship, Truth, Death, Love, and Fame and many more in early modern texts; indeed, Frederick Kiefer has claimed that such expressions are actually more prevalent in texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than in the literature of the Middle Ages.35 Perhaps these formulations are hollow, however: they could be purely rhetorical survivals, familiar but empty phrases from an era past. One might well think that in an age of large-scale “popularization” of the products of the press, of increasing contact with books for a wider spectrum of society, the idea of the book would become less mysterious, that exposure would compromise some of its powerful aura. This argument—that, in essence, familiarity breeds contempt—is articulated by Cecile M. Jagodzinski. Claiming that “the magical powers attributed to books begin to dissipate once the power of the press allows books to proliferate,” she notes that when “[t]he Bible moves from the local parish church into even the poorest worker's household” the book shifts from distant object of veneration to an item of living-room decor.36 More recently, scholars such as Stallybrass, Chartier, and Jeffrey Todd Knight have made important revisions to modern readers' pervasive assumption that the Renaissance book is, by default, a bound codex. As Knight points out, books were sold unbound, as stacks of pages, and their final form depended to a great extent on their buyers' choices; thus, it was not as stately, bound tomes, as closed and apparently perfected objects, that readers always or usually encountered books.37 Stallybrass and Chartier note that small books like pamphlets greatly outsold big books like Bibles in the Renaissance,38 and Stallybrass's examinations of the histories of printing houses show that from Gutenberg's press to Page 12 → Benjamin Franklin's, the high-volume printing of broadsides and other “little jobs,” not books, has constituted the greater part of presses' output.39 Historically, then, books were neither magical nor monumental objects. But I would argue that a continued examination of literary appropriations of the idea of the book reveals that historical reality does not determine imaginative resonance. For Shakespeare, Markham, Alexander, and many others, it seems that the book has lost none of its impact as a rhetorical construct, none of its radical singularity. Books are still deployed to do imaginative work in these expressions, and the idea of the book still seems capable of mirroring the essential order of the universe, of containing ecstatic visions and revelatory dreams about fundamental questions of life and one's purpose in it. As we think about early modern English culture, then, how can we reconcile the fact that books were becoming cheaper, more common, more palpable, and more shapeable

with the lofty rhetoric of the book as remote abstraction, amid such untouchable concepts as Heaven and Fate? This question has bearing not just on these metaphors but on books in Renaissance literature more generally, for, as I will explore in what follows, when books are given important roles in early modern poetry, drama, and fiction, they are often presented as supernatural, magic, or prophetic, rather than as inert objects, just part of the furniture. A book can certainly be like a cheese, bought and sold, but it nevertheless resists wholesale normalization into everyday life, I would argue, in part by remaining a completely unique category of physical thing. Because it both is a thing of paper and ink and, at the same time, “is” the history, poetry, drama, fiction, theology, or encyclopedic information it contains, the book can be at once physical and metaphysical, inhering in compact form and potentially infinite contents, making, as Donne rapturously imagines another marvelous spatial impossibility, “one little roome, an every where.”40

Of Books and Selves The intimacy evoked by Donne's speaker also speaks to the imaginary spatial aesthetics of the book in early modern England, although rather than between lover and lover, the intimacy that can be created in the “little roome” of the book is between the reader and herself or himself. The connection between reading and inwardness has an obvious historical teleology; as Chartier surmises, the development of silent reading, “which allowed the reader to engage in solitary Page 13 → reflection on what he or she read,” effected a profound “‘privatization’ of reading.”41 One might not only read alone but even withdraw into a private room to do it; studies of the architecture of domestic spaces in the period suggest that a newly perceived need for enclosed spaces within a house coincided with the rise of solitary reading and that the idea of privacy itself was thus shaped by and supportive of reading practices.42 Adi Ophir suggests that the early modern “closet” was a place in which books “allowed the self to meet itself without the distortion of public, social life.”43 Meanwhile, as Stephen Greenblatt has observed, the effective replacement of the sacrament of auricular confession with private, book-aided selfexamination in Reformation religious practice powerfully reinforced the identification between self and book.44 Of course, books had served as a powerful metaphor for the reader's self, mind, or consciousness since antiquity. The written text was so completely assumed by early literate cultures to be a supplement or substitute for the “space” of the mind that in the myth of the gift of writing given to the Egyptians by the god Theuth (recounted by Socrates in the Phaedrus), the technology of writing actually destroys memory by making it unnecessary.45 Thamus, the king of Egypt, sees the space of the wax tablet onto which information is impressed as taking the place of and thus becoming analogous to the “space” of the mind. Meanwhile, in the Confessions, Saint Augustine tells a highly dramatic story, in the famous tolle, lege episode, about the moment of his conversion from sin and doubt to the religious life. From a hidden depth a profound self-examination had dredged up a heap of all my misery and set it “in the sight of my heart” (Ps. 18:15). That precipitated a vast storm bearing a massive downpour of tears. To pour it all out with the accompanying groans, I got up from beside Alypius (solitude seemed to me more appropriate for the business of weeping)…. I repeatedly said to you: “How long, O Lord? …Why not an end to my impure life in this very hour?” As I was saying this and weeping in the bitter agony of my heart, suddenly I heard a voice from the nearby house chanting as if it might be a boy or a girl (I do not know which), saying and repeating over and over again “Pick up and read, pick up and read.” […] I checked the flood of tears and stood up. I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find…. So I hurried back to the place where…I had put down the book of the apostle when I got up. I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit: “Not in riots or in drunken parties, not in Page 14 → eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts” (Rom. 13:13–14). I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.

Then I inserted my finger or some other mark in the book and closed it.46 From the depths of despair, Augustine is saved by a miraculous voice that calls him to read. Using Scripture in a kind of bibliomancy, he opens the book at random and finds a passage that seems to be addressed directly to him. He reads himself into the “you” of the passage—inserting himself into the text exactly as he then inserts his finger into the book to mark his place—and finds the answer to all his questions. The book becomes an extension of himself, one that enables him to return from a feeling of self-unintelligibility (he is paralyzed with misery and can only “repeat” the same words) to a sense of resolution and clarity. Crucially, the text is not new to him: his reading of the Bible is a rereading of something known, just as his examination of himself is a weary rehearsal. His continued connection to the book, with his finger in the place like a reader's mark of a tiny hand in the margin, is both a representation of a reading technique (keeping one's place) and a symbol of the contiguousness between book and self. Like Augustine, some Renaissance readers find that thinking about books is profoundly connected to thinking about oneself, that books open up a metaphorical space in which such immaterial concepts as consciousness, identity, and the meaning of lived experience can be manifested and considered. In early modern culture, I propose, books become—not newly, but in a renewed way—“technologies of the self” (to use a term from Foucault),47 metaphorical processes for considering, cataloging, and ordering the figurative space of consciousness. If psychoanalysis is the talking cure, Augustine takes, in a sense, the reading cure. Necessarily, however, it is a cure that cannot be broken down and understood through humanist book practices; it cannot be annotated, only taken whole, surrendered and clung to like Augustine or swallowed like St.John. By here borrowing on Augustine, from a historical period long before the focus of my study, I hope to suggest that, insofar as I participate in the vexed question of the history of subjectivity, my project is not to attribute the textual explorations of books and selves that I examine to any theory of the “birth Page 15 → of modern subjectivity” in the early modern period.48 Books and inwardness were closely connected for Augustine, just as they were for Montaigne (“I am myself the subject of my book”) and for readers in the texts that I will consider. If the early modern period saw a concentration of literary contemplations of the nature of the self in terms of the self as a reader, the self in connection to a book, it is perhaps not because human subjectivity was changing or evolving at this moment in history but, rather, because books were. The circumstances under which people came into contact with, bought, owned, read, or wrote books were changing to include far more people in the milieu of book culture, and thus, in the most basic sense, more people (readers or not) were thinking more things about books in the early modern period than had been the case before. The historical reason for this development is obvious: the advent of the technology of print, which made books and other pieces of textual matter like pamphlets and broadsheets more numerous and cheaper, putting more books in more people's hands and minds. Thinking about the nature of subjectivity, about one's own selfhood and the selves of others, which had been going on in various forms for centuries (and indeed had, at earlier points, engaged with books, as does Augustine), now had far more opportunity to focus on the ways in which the idea of a book could be a tool in its practices of reflection. As I have noted, efforts by social historians to establish statistics on literacy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England have been controversial, and the question is far from resolved. Yet, as evidence for the history of readers' thoughts about themselves in relation to books, more important than a merely quantitative answer, I would argue, is a sense of the dynamism of the culture's experience of reading—the pervasiveness of people's awareness of reading as happening, as spreading, as current. If increased reading were commonly understood by a society as an ongoing trend, individual members of the society would be prompted to consider their own relationships to it. Something of this awareness is suggested in the preface “To the great Variety of Readers” attached to the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare, which begins, “From the most able, to him that can but spell: There you are number'd.”49 Clearly imagining the addressee pausing at a bookseller's stall, Heminge and Condell line up their potential customers in order, from most to least sophisticated, in a sweeping rhetorical gesture that demands a selfdiagnostic response from the reader: Where do I fit on that scale? Naturally, as a piece of promotion, the address is set up to flatter its audience, since if one was reading it, one was already in the category of “able” and thus “number'd” among the elite in Heminge and Condell's Page 16 → microcensus of London. The space of this

preface is the folio compilers' moment to make their pitch; clearly, giving the buyer the opportunity to think of himself as an able reader is, for them, a selling point. This fact suggests powerfully the way in which—for marketing purposes at least—the culture of early modern England linked reading and books to self-regard. In this book, I examine four important works from the period 1590–1620 that participate diversely in the romance mode, including a poetic romance epic, two tragicomedies written for the public stage, and a long prose narrative. Intermingled with my main discussions of these texts, I consider the contemporaneous English translations of some of the most influential Continental romances. Chapter 1, “‘Antiquities, Which No Body Can Know’: Spenser's Books and the Romance of the Past,” examines episodes of supernatural reading in Books II and III of The Faerie Queene, in the context of sixteenth-century best sellers imported from the Continent, such as Amadís de Gaula, Orlando Furioso, and the Lusíads. In romance narratives, I argue, books operate according to a kind of physics of wonder, as locations for information both inside and outside their readers, known and unknown, inspiring amazement rather than enabling rational understanding, puzzling rather than solving any puzzles. When Prince Arthur reads the genealogy of British kings, which is his own history, in the Library of Eumnestes (Faerie Queene, Book II) and when Britomart “reads” her future in her father's mirror (Book III), Spenser engages with the medieval discourse of the memory as a book and, at the same time, makes explicit connections between printed books, specifically the early modern genre of conduct books bearing “Mirror” in their titles, and magic tokens—between inward-looking reading and forward-seeing prophecy. In a climactic, much-disliked, and deeply strange scene of Shakespeare's Cymbeline, which I discuss in chapter 2, the god Jove descends and presents the hero Posthumus with a prophetic book that contains, in an oblique and highly encrypted form, the story of his life, with which he feels a deep connection that somehow stops short of self-recognition. For a reader to conflate or confuse the self and the book—to become carried away by fiction—was, of course, recognized as a dangerous folly by early modern educators and cultural critics and was associated particularly with the reading of romances. Indeed, another, more naturalized scene of reading in the play, Imogen's nightmare transformation into Ovid's Philomel, dramatizes exactly these fears about overidentification. Posthumus, however, underidentifies; the inverse of Don Quixote, he fails (usefully for his reintegration into the play's redeemed society) to see himself Page 17 → in the book where his own story clearly is told; the unreadable book dramatizes Posthumus as a stranger to the self he once was, at the moment when his change of mind turns the play into a comedy. Cymbeline suggests a profound reward—both for character and text, for Posthumus as a reader and for us as his readers—not only of finding oneself but of losing oneself in a book. In chapter 3, “‘Volumes That I Prize’: The Spaces of the Book and the Mind in The Tempest,” I address the book that is ostensibly at the center of Prospero's “art” and yet curiously absent from the stage. The play's insistence on the importance of Prospero's book as an object even as it withholds the book's material reality is symptomatic of its fascination with space, open and contained (libraries, islands, utopias, the distance from Naples to Tunis), and with the kinetic movement of containing. Ultimately, I argue, the play stages an inquiry into the elastic nature of the space that can be enclosed by the covers of a book, and it suggests that an understanding of the space of the book can provide a way to comprehend abstractions that perplexed early modern philosophers, such as the space of the mind and the motion of thoughts. Chapter 4, “‘A Booke Layd By, New Lookt On’: The Romance of Reading in Urania and Don Quixote,” examines two other striking episodes, like those of Spenser's Arthur and Shakespeare's Posthumus, in which a reader in a romance discovers his or her own life story contained in a book. Like Spenser and Shakespeare, Wroth, in her important and still understudied long narrative, engages with the question of how to represent interiority in fiction and how to portray the development of self-knowledge, finding books useful as elements of both mimesis and story. Scenes of reading in Wroth are as mysterious and difficult to “read” as they are dramatically and elaborately presented, and, like those in Cymbeline, they have been glossed by critics as symptomatic of the representational excess of the romance style. Yet, I argue, these scenes overlay sophisticated masque-like fantasy with deeply serious consideration of what it means to know and not to know oneself, to be a reader of as well as a character in one's own life story. Wroth's solemn masque of reading has a comic counterpart in Part II of Don Quixote, in which Quixote reads his own story in a (counterfeit) copy of Don Quixote. Despite the commercial success in England of Thomas Shelton's translation of Quixote (Part 1, 1612; Parts 1 and 2, 1620), there has been

little recent work connecting Cervantes's anti-romance to English romance texts. Read alongside Spenser, Shakespeare, and Wroth, Don Quixote's parody of “moldy tales” reveals deep sympathies with the romance book and its representational possibilities. Page 18 → Each of these chapters is built around a representation of a book that is in some way less than fully readable and around an analysis of inscribed readers' interactions with it. Each book is larger than life, large within the text's mimesis, and yet, at the same time, incomplete, evanescent, ungraspable. Arthur's book is unfinished and incites in him a succession of emotions: surprise, anger, wonder, secret pleasure. Posthumus's book is obscure in meaning and multiple in shape and elicits his sympathy with it and with himself. Prospero's book is magnetic but absent and entices would-be readers to fill in its place with their imaginations. Urania's book is redundant and seems to make her, as well as the narrative, lose interest in her story. In all cases, the point of the reaction is to be incommensurate with the circumstances, to draw our attention to the way in which the book is an object that in some way cannot be represented, because it is functioning in more dimensions than narrative or drama can limn. In the great age of the material book, books in romance seem constantly to resist reduction to their material identity, to insist, rather, on the possibilities of their immateriality. The declining mystery of the book as an artifact in the print age, its descent into materiality, is answered in these literary texts, I argue, by a continuing and consuming mystique of the book as an idea. It is an old idea, yet one that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Wroth reinvigorate for a bold new purpose: to gesture at the edges of unrepresentable concepts of self-reflection, selfunderstanding, and the workings of the mind. Because the book has an immaterial life and history, as well as a material one, it can bring these unrepresentable ideas to life.

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CHAPTER 1 “Antiquities, Which No Body Can Know” Spenser's Books and the Romance of the Past

Magic Books and Material Books Amid the most basic premises of The Faerie Queene as a literary project, among the necessary preconditions of its creation, lies an idea about books: the assumption that books are a powerful medium for transmitting knowledge. “The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline,” Spenser says, in the most remembered line of his “Letter to Ralegh,” testifying to a belief that a book, taken in “generall”—that is, both with respect to the class or genre to which it belongs and also as a whole—could make a self.1 As I will argue in this chapter, despite this confident account of the nature of books in the letter, the world portrayed within The Faerie Queene will turn out to portray a much more complicated relationship between books and knowledge, between reading and understanding. Books, in a “print culture” worthy of the name, ought to be “legible,” that is, intelligible: they should be stable, rational, transparent conduits for information. The book is the sign, the index, of information in early modern thought and iconography. Within The Faerie Queene as it appeared in 1590, and especially in Books II and III, books are set up as touchstones of transcendent knowledge, whether historical or prophetic. But they then fail to produce straightforward understanding. They turn out to be incomplete, confusing, and unsystematic, and they demand to be experienced not through reason, as one might expect, but through wonder. The poem illustrates the way in which no book, not even a supernatural book, can Page 20 → adequately contain or perfectly convey knowledge. In the place of knowledge, however, books in the poem offer to their readers spectacles of wonder and propose a different kind of “knowing” of the past, the future, or the reader's self. As we will see, the mysterious turns out to offer a pleasure all its own. Through spectacles of reading in which understanding fails but wonder overwhelms and delights, Books II and III celebrate not the satisfaction of finding information but the pleasure of seeking, the fascination of being in the presence of the unknowable. In The Faerie Queene as a whole poem, of course, books appear in diverse situations, figuring as locations of power both benevolent and malign.2 The first canto of Book I offers the memorable image of the monster Errour's “vomit full of bookes and papers” (I.i.20), a comment on the proliferation of contentious polemical books and pamphlets in Reformation culture, and also features a concise and emblematic demonstration of the ambivalent nature of books. As a supposed religious hermit, Archimago carries a pocket-sized Bible or devotional work: “And by his belt his book he hanging had” (I.i.29). We are asked to note, as the poem insists on that book's materiality, its solidity and weight, in the relentless iambic alliteration that suggests the heavy little book, presumably a psalter or breviary, swinging against the hermit's side with every step. The same book, of course, mutates and multiplies into “Magick bookes and artes of sundry kindes” (I.i.36), once Archimago reverts to his true form of Popish conjurer; Spenser illustrates how the book as a category of object can slip between iconic and multifarious, between the sacred and the idolatrous.3 Later, when Arthur and Redcrosse exchange tokens to mark the sealing of their friendship, the knight's New Testament is figured as a tool of holy magic: “A booke, wherein his Saueour's testament / Was writ with golden letters rich and braue; / A worke of wondrous grace, and hable soules to saue” (I.ix.19). Interestingly, the gift from Arthur for which Redcrosse exchanges this book is a typically marvelous and precious romance object, a secular magic cure, “a box of Diamond sure / Embowd with gold and gorgeous ornament,” containing a universal medicine “of wondrous worth.” In this moment of reciprocal honor, Redcrosse's book and Arthur's romance accessory or emblem are set equivalent to each other, their interchangeability noted in the parallel use of the intensely romance-coded descriptor “wondrous.” Inevitably, books are historically embedded objects for a

sixteenth-century writer, working in the aftermath of the advent of print in Europe in the mid-1400s (in England in 1476; significantly, the first book printed in England, by Caxton, was a romance, The Recuyell Page 21 → of the Historyes of Troye) and the subsequent, slow but continual diffusion of books and other printed matter across a broader literate spectrum. Yet books as they appear in The Faerie Queene occupy the roles of magic, totemic objects, rather than the places, accustomed or newfangled, of books in the studies, pews, and stationers' shops of Elizabethan England. The argument that immediately suggests itself is that the mimetic mode of the poem, epic romance, almost requires the objects that serve as props within its narrative to take on a supernatural significance. But Spenser's mystical, occult mode of representing books does not necessarily go with his self-staked generic territory. Comparison with one of Spenser's most important and most acknowledged models, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, demonstrates how a Renaissance romance poet might choose to comment explicitly, in this case comically, on the historical circumstances of print culture. In Orlando Furioso, first published in 1516, the wise woman Logestilla gives Astolfo, an English knight, a magic book. In the 1591 translation of Sir John Harington, we find the book described thus: But chiefly to this English Duke she gave Of secret skill a little written book Containing many a precept wise and grave The which of her most thankfully he took; These teach a man from charms himself to save That in the same advisedly doth look, And that to find them out he may be able, The book had in the end a perfite table. (XV.9)4 The “table,” or index, was a technological innovation in the early sixteenth-century printed book, and the way it makes this magic book modern and practical goes comically against the romance mystique, its deliberate archaism. Later, Astolfo has occasion to use the book, when he wants to cause a castle to vanish. He took his book and searcheth in the table How to dissolve the place he might be able, And straight in th'index for it he doth look Of palaces framd by such strange illusion. (XII.14) Page 22 → Not only does Astolfo's encyclopedia of spells have a handy index, but the index seems, conveniently, to have an entry for “palaces: framed by illusion.” Unlike the fairy-tale and nightmare magic books of The Faerie Queene, Orlando Furioso's conjuring book could have come from the study of a humanist scholar or from a London bookseller's stall. In contrast to Ariosto, for whom aspects of print culture inspire a moment of meta-awareness of the conventions of romance (moments of meta-awareness being also one of the conventions of romance, especially in the case of the dryly ironic Ariosto), Spenser is more interested in the ways in which books can evoke, rather than deflate, wonder. Staging two spectacular texts, Books II and III of The Faerie Queene

dramatize that totalizing tendency, that encyclopedic dream, of the book as a capacious and capable form, while simultaneously exploring the possibility that the fascination of the book might lie not in potent totality, but in incompleteness.

Arthur and the “Wonder of Antiquity” The Faerie Queene occupies a unique and self-conscious position at the generic confluence of chivalric romance, on the one hand, and national epic history, on the other. It purports to give the noble reader a complete education in Christian virtue, and yet its idiom is secular, comprised of the adventures of knights and ladies, the stuff of romance, that culturally devalued discourse marked as old-fashioned, condemned by moralists, and derided as low-class, fit only for (but dangerous to the morals of) servants and women. In 1524, Vives was already dismissing “those ungracious bokes…: Amadise, Florisande,…Arthur Guye Bevis and many other” as “bokes but ydle men wrote unlearned, and set al upon fylth and viciousnes…”5 In The Scholemaster (1545), Ascham describes romance as old-fashioned, an insidious waste of time, and now Romish as well. In our forefathers tyme, whan Papistrie, as a standing poole, covered and overflowed all England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, savying certaine bookes [of] Chevalrie, as they sayd, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in Monasteries, by idle Monkes, or wanton Chanons…. Suffer these bookes to be read, and they shall soone displace all bookes of godly learnyng.6 In a way, for Ascham, romance reading does not count as reading at all: it was the characteristic activity of what he sees as a particularly illiterate time in history, when “fewe bookes were read.” Now, in a brighter age, these books Page 23 → (what Jonson would later call “mouldy tales”; here, the source of that “mold” is claimed to be Catholic algae) serve to displace real, “godly” reading. Even defenders of the Arthurian tradition, such as John Leland, acknowledged the texts' state of corruption and urged that it was necessary to purge the romance elements, leaving only true, verifiable history. “It appeareth most evidently, that both obscure and absurde reportes have crept into the historie of Arthure,” he admits, and he urges “casting awaye trifles, cutting off olde wives tales, and superfluous fables…to reade, scanne upon, and preserve in memorie [only] those thinges which are consonant by Authoritie.”7 The Faerie Queene's negotiation of romance and history becomes paramount in the episode, at the heart of Book II, of the chronicles of Britain and Faerieland. It is fitting and perhaps inevitable that the question of genre should emerge here, since Spenser's key source for the British genealogy that Arthur reads in Canto x, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1136), itself contains a very visible interplay between the linear demands of history and the dilatory attraction of romance.8 Geoffrey takes as much space to tell the story of Arthur's life and the adventures of Arthur's court as he does to cover the previous 1,300 years of history, from the time Brutus came to England to Merlin's prophecy of the birth of Arthur. After recounting Arthur's removal, mortally wounded, to the Isle of Avalon, Geoffrey gets back on track, but only another dozen pages are necessary for the remaining 150 years he chronicles.9 This text marks the first account of “King Arthur” as anything but a minor historical figure: Geoffrey's account is the initial point of departure for the ensuing, vastly fertile legend; his history is the first instantiation of Arthurian romance. Arthur is the impetus for Geoffrey's veer from historical chronicle into the romance mode; it is as if Arthur were a dam that turned the swift river of Geoffrey's narrative into what Ascham would have called a “standing pool.” When Spenser acknowledges Geoffrey as his source, he is thus taking on board the epistemological questions of how romance is different from history and of the genesis of romance itself. Further evidence that the problem of generic identification is central to the poem may be seen in Spenser's elaborate explanation to Ralegh that he imagines himself as a “Poet historical” rather than a “Historiographer.” While a historian recounts events as they happened, he famously says, a poet “thrusteth into the middest.”10 In the chronicles passage, The Faerie Queene gives narrative life to the reader's disorientation at being thus “thrust[ed],” and it proposes that the pleasure of disorientation, not the uncovering of historical truth, is the reader's reward. In this episode, which conjures a tactile, sensual experience Page 24 → of “history” and locates it in the monumental yet permeable space of a book, Spenser suggests a romance mode of reading history.

After proceeding through the lower rooms of the House of Alma, which serve as an allegory of the human body, Prince Arthur and Sir Guyon arrive at the last of the three attic chambers of the brain, the library of Eumnestes, or memory. Arthur finds an encyclopedic history of Britain, “An auncient booke, hight Briton moniments” (II.ix.59). Moniments could mean “records,” “chronicles,” or even “evidence,” as in Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1563), his history of the Protestant church; at the same time, a monument is a sepulchre or memorial structure (a signification that is perhaps also contained in Foxe's use of the term for the title of his enormous folio volumes). Guyon, meanwhile, picks up “Antiquitee of Faery lond.” The two knights then settle down separately to study: “Whereat they burning both with fervent fire / Their countreys auncestry to vnderstond, / Crau'd leaue of Alma, and that aged sire / To read those bookes” (stanza 60). Arthur pores over the genealogy of the kings of Britain, starting with the Trojan hero Brutus and continuing through many stanzas and centuries of some glorious deeds and many tragic falls. Indeed, the history of British kings presented here is striking, as Harry Berger observes, for its misfortune: “One inordinate example follows another: carnage, anarchy, sedition; murders not only of kings but of fathers, husbands, brothers, children…. seven hundred years of almost uninterrupted mayhem.”11 Finally, the reader begins to come up toward the present (or what counts as the present in this moment of the poem, which is the time of Arthur, although we also know that, in The Faerie Queene's romance time scheme, if Gloriana is on the throne, Arthur must already be sleeping in his tomb). Then, abruptly, the thread of the narrative breaks off in midsentence. After him Vther, which Pendragon hight, Succeeding There abruptly it did end, Without full point, or other Cesure right, As if the rest some wicked hand did rend, Or th'Authour selfe could not at least attend To finish it: that so vntimely breach The Prince him selfe halfe seemeth to offend, Yet secret pleasure did offence empeach, And wonder of antiquity long stopt his speach. (II.x.68) Page 25 → The chronicle ends in a sudden gesture of violence, enacted by a physically vivid “wicked hand,” made even more corporeally present because the motion of the hand happens in the same grammatical structure as the action of the passage, giving the impression that the air still reverberates with the sound of tearing paper. The text “did end,” and with the two verbs in the same tense, it seems that at the same moment, in the line's answering rhyme, the “hand did rend.” The kinetic activity of the lines, stark and immediate, is balanced against the grammatical construction “As if,” which keeps the whole action contrary to fact. Meanwhile, the startling break in the second line of the stanza makes the strangeness of this moment palpable. Bart van Es observes, “Nowhere else in The Faerie Queene do we find a capitalized verb not preceded by a full stop”;12 indeed, it is, I believe, Spenser's only deployment of such a typographical trompe l’oeil, representing the enjambment, so to speak, of two texts, the edge of Briton Moniments abutting the edge of the Book of Temperance. We, the readers of The Faerie Queene, suddenly disoriented, realize only in retrospect that we have been reading Briton Moniments all this time, have been holding it in our hands, looking through Arthur's eyes. Line 5 introduces another character, as yet unannounced in the chronicle, “th'Author selfe”—an absentminded (or perhaps time-pressed) creator, unable to “attend” to the task at hand, whose capitalized name looks strikingly

similar to the name of the royal reader, Arthur self.13 Like Spenser's “poet historicall,” the author here thrusts into the middest. The focus then changes to “the Prince him selfe” and his initial reaction of half offense at being halted in his reading, at this interruption of service. The stanza, then, moves in increments through a series of subjectivities, assigning agency in the text first to the characters (Uther Pendragon), then to the story itself, then to the author, then ultimately to the reader. Then another emotion, this one untrammeled with “as if” or “half,” bubbles up through the cautious syntax: “secret pleasure” forces out “offense.” Within a few lines, the harshly kinetic “rend” and “breach” and the sharp consonants of “wicked” evolve into the sibilant, almost luxurious s's of “secret pleasure.” Finally, the stanza resolves itself into a suspended, crystalline moment of silence, stillness, and “wonder.” After many cantos of wandering, searching, like a proper romance protagonist, for both beloved and identity, Arthur apparently has found his “self,” suddenly, at the very center of things, at the paused wellspring of the historical record. He has literally found his place in the world, his place in history, marked by this place in the text, the “breach,” that is held open for him. Further, Page 26 → Arthur's place seems to be one of almost unimaginable importance, historically and poetically: he is at the helm of his and England's and the poem's destiny, and neither the narrative of time nor the narrative of The Faerie Queene can continue until he makes his next move. Arthur is, indeed, the Author's self, both reading and writing his own story. Of course, all these circumstances are made available to the reader of The Faerie Queene but not really to the reader of Briton Moniments, who, as we will see, does not completely recognize himself; the revelation is, for now, enacted only in rhetoric. The motif of the hero's discovery of a representation of himself, a vertiginous moment of fiction within fiction, has its own literary history that traverses epic and romance. The locus classicus is the moment early in the Aeneid (I.690–92) when Aeneas finds the image of himself in a mural depicting the Trojan War, inside the temple of Juno on the shore of Libya.14 By the early seventeenth century, this mirror moment has become enough of a romance cliché that Cervantes makes Don Quixote, in one of the innumerable inns he visits, encounter a group of travelers reading aloud from a book called “The Second Part of Don Quixote.”15 Both these literary instances evoke the same sense of the uncanny that we experience here, in Arthur reading Arthur. The motif becomes a symptom and an emblem of the textual self-consciousness of early modern romance, its reflexive bookishness, marked by a meta-awareness of its own history, traditions, and material form. At the time Spenser was writing The Faerie Queene, scholars have recently suggested, the practice of historiography in England was undergoing a significant change, coming into an awareness of the present's cultural separation from the past and a recognition of historicity itself (and, conversely, anachronism) as an important concern. Broadly speaking, one might say that medieval historians, who saw history as cyclical or typological, imagined themselves in direct conversation with ancient sources, who held the most authority because they were the oldest. Renaissance writers began to dissociate antiquity from the ideal of accuracy and to imagine themselves as standing on a high vantage point, able to look back and judge with clarity. As Jennifer Summit has shown, the rejection of the historiography of the past was also theologically motivated: “[T]he task of the post-Reformation library is to differentiate the ‘fabulous history’ from the ‘true history,’ the ‘monument of superstition’ from the ‘monument of antiquity.’”16 As a result, enshrined myths about British national origins were being threatened: sixteenth-century antiquarians from Polydore Vergil to William Camden had been engaged in debunking, through archival research, the Page 27 → cherished and contested myth of the ancient foundation of Britain by the Trojan warrior Brutus. This revision of history was controversial because, stripped of the legend of “Troynovaunt,” English chroniclers would be forced to situate the true origins of British culture in the barbarous race of native Celts, later enslaved by the Roman invaders, rather than in a representative of a classical civilization that predated Rome and, hence, was genealogically independent of the Roman church. To let go of Troynovaunt—or, indeed, of King Arthur, whose myth was another casualty of sixteenth-century humanist scholarship17—was not only to assert the superiority of sixteenth-century chroniclers over medieval ones but, at the same time, to feel the loss of an enshrined narrative. As Andrew Escobedo argues, Early English nationhood in the Renaissance…was linked to a perception of historical loss, the sense that the past was incommensurate with and possibly lost to the present…. Worse still, this temporal

isolation seemed to be a distinctly English fate…. John Foxe, John Dee, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton use narrative representations of nationhood to mediate what they perceive as a troubling breach in history.18

Yet while breaches in history unquestionably exist—the “so untimely breach” in Briton Moniments is one of them—Spenser, at least, portrays historical rupture and historiographical loss as at least as fascinating and mysterious—even as thrilling—as they are troubling. In Book II of The Faerie Queene, history, embodied in incomplete and unreadable books, becomes full of “wonder” even as it becomes inaccessible. The primary source for the Brutus story, as for the story of King Arthur, was, of course, Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey claims that his Arthurian chronicle is based on documentary evidence in the form of “a very ancient book, written in the British language,” which he has merely transcribed into Latin, altering nothing. Importantly, as Escobedo shows, historians in Spenser's era were coming to the conclusion that this book never existed, that Geoffrey made it up as an authority to lend credence to his own inventions. Thus, both chronicles contain an absence, like the absence in Arthur's supposed tomb at Glastonbury, that defines them: just as Arthur's name is missing from the heart of Briton Moniments, so Geoffrey's “very ancient book” is missing from the heart of the History of the Kings of Britain.19 The motif of the missing book is, as it turns out, a recurrent one in romance. Page 28 → Many widely read texts offer the reader, in a preface, a myth of nonauthorial origin, an imaginary source, a claim that the romance is not an invention but a translation from some other, authoritative work. In the Spanish romance Amadís de Gaula (1508), the author-compiler, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, reworked some extant material on the legendary hero and then added a conclusion of his own conception. In his prefaces, however, Rodríguez de Montalvo creates a fictional provenance for this new part of the story, which is a miniature romance in itself. Here, he says, the reader will find two more volumes of Amadís's adventures, which up to now within no one's memory has been seen, for very fortunately it came to light in a stone tomb discovered underground below a hermitage near Constantinople and was brought to this part of Spain by a Hungarian merchant, being inscribed on parchment so old that only with great difficulty were those who knew the language able to read it. (Preface to Book I) Just as the length and antiquity of the past have left many great events for us to remember, so it is equally credible that an infinite number of others have been lost without any memory of them remaining…. Then of course we shall not deem strange after so many years the appearance of this book, which was found hidden away in that very ancient sepulchre. (Preface to Book IV)20 The book both physicalizes the historical record and chronicles that record's rupture; it narrates both the loss and the recovery of information. It is the sepulcher of the past, the “monument” as treasure trove, and also the potentially eternal and “infinite” hiddenness of what remains within that monument. Cervantes, as usual, both uses and parodies this topos, when he creates the pseudoauthor Sidi Hamid Benengeli and the account of the old manuscript in Arabic that supposedly provides the text of Don Quixote.21 Andrew King describes what he calls the “still there” trope in romance, in which narratives refer outward to actual buildings and artifacts that readers can see—Arundel Castle, supposedly built by Bevis of Hampton; Guy of Warwick's purported armor in Warwick Castle; Arthur's tomb at Glastonbury, until it was broken up in the Reformation dissolution of the monasteries—as a guarantee of the tales' historicity.22 But the motif of the imaginary sourcebook is a “never-there” trope; the Page 29 → author uses the icon of an old, venerable book to create a space of authority for his text, but the book is nowhere to be found—it is an idea of materiality that lends credence, not a material artifact—until we readers realize that, insofar as it exists, we have been holding it in our hands all along.

I have already discussed two opposing models of romance books, the fairy-tale magic books in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene and the self-consciously contemporary artifact of print culture represented by Astolfo's humanist encyclopedia in Orlando Furioso. Briton Moniments is a third kind of book altogether, neither mystical talisman nor cheerfully unmystical how-to book. As I noted earlier, the word monument itself is a multivalent one in the late sixteenth century, with meanings that refer to tombs, statues, and effigies as well as meanings involving written documents. The senses of monument that denote material objects are important, because of their evocative suggestion of the book as a kind of physical space, at or in which Arthur locates himself. Like the Renaissance mnemonic technique of the memory theater—an imaginary, metaphysical space for holding information that is literalized in Spenser's account of the library of Eumnestes23—the immaterial, shapeless existence of Arthur's self (for, as Patricia Parker and others have argued, it is shapelessness, nonlinearity, that characterizes the romance quest, and, as we discover in this scene, part of the purpose of Arthur's journey in Fairyland is to look for himself) is contained, organized, and defined in the waiting space provided for him by Briton Moniments. In this way, it makes narrative sense for oblique or deferred self-knowledge to come in the form of a book, that is, something concrete, something detached from the body, with which the self-reflecting subject can have a direct, externalized encounter.24 At the same time, of course, Arthur does not really find himself in Briton Moniments. Since he does not yet know who he is, who he will be—his name and lineage, he says in Book I, “from mee are hidden yitt” (I.ix.3)—he cannot truly recognize himself as the heir of Uther Pendragon, the next in the royal line. He finds only a lacuna, a literal, typographical empty space, like the area of “nought but pressed gras” (I.ix.15) that marks where Gloriana lay after his dream of her that inspires his quest in Book I. Indeed, in the stanza that follows, Arthur's reaction to Briton Moniments is identical to his earlier response to the fleeting vision of Gloriana. After reading the chronicle, Arthur is “At last quite ravished with delight” (69), echoing his words in Book I, “But whether dreames delude, or true it were, / Was never hart so rauisht with delight” (I.ix.14). As in this earlier passage, in which even the distinction between truth and deception Page 30 → is swept away in a flood of pleasure and desire, the value of Briton Moniments for Arthur in this moment seems to have nothing to do with information or the fixing of historical facts. We are left perplexed about “the wonder of antiquity” and how it compares, as an intellectual or affective function, to this ahistorical “delight.” The placement of this suspended chronicle as the climax of the House of Alma episode provides a striking contrast in mimetic technique. Among all the variously “darke conceits” in Spenser's poem, in which a single figure may take on different emblematic meanings at different times and by which characters such as Belphoebe seem to be sometimes symbols and sometimes real people, Alma's castle is perhaps the most obvious, the most readable allegory. Each room corresponds, clearly and stably, to a different organ of the body. For the reader of The Faerie Queene, the pleasure of the House of Alma lies in the elaborately neat transparency of its anatomical symbolism, from the portcullismouth to the kitchen of the stomach to the most private plumbing. It is an exemplar of allegory's potential for imposing a radical, rational orderedness onto representation. But for the reader of Briton Moniments, the “secret pleasure” seems not to be in transparency but in opacity, in the strangeness of that blank on the page, not in rationality but in astonishment—in the root sense of that word, from “astonied,” meaning struck dumb, like stone. Pleasure, and the wonder of antiquity, come not from the communication of history's truths but from a momentary breakdown of order and meaning. Recent critical readings of the chronicles passage have addressed the question of genre by contrasting Arthur's Briton Moniments and Guyon's Antiquities of Fairy Lond as, respectively, history and romance versions of the same story, noting the way in which Arthur's book, with its endless accounts of internecine strife and broken succession in British history, is reflected, supplemented, or rewritten in the more harmonious and providential elfin chronicle.25 Other readings have argued that by setting the romance figure Arthur against the unidealized reality of British history, the poem frees him from “overidentification with [his] genealogical origins”26 or, alternatively, self-deconstructs by exposing Arthur's insufficiency as an epic hero.27 Meanwhile, the episode's vision of “some wicked hand” ripping pages from a volume expresses a general sense of the fragility of books as textual monuments, both in an absolute sense and specifically during the historigraphical controversies of the sixteenth century. As Summit notes, “Hands rending texts fill Page 31 → the literary subconscious of the postReformation era,” implicated not only in the destruction or suppression of books but also in the zealous

“purification” of books deemed “superstitious.”28 Yet neither construing the episode as a comment on the precariousness, incompleteness, or vulnerability of the historical record or reading it as a tempering or exposure of the romance mode seems to me to account for the intensity of affect evoked by the “wonder of antiquity” that Arthur feels, for the way in which that evocative phrase seems to absorb and hold the poetic energy of the stanza just as it absorbs and holds Arthur's attention, “long stop[ping] his speach.” Arthur's reaction is fundamentally not one of lament. Presented triumphantly in the last, summary long line, “wonder of antiquity” has the ring of an incantation, a mystical pronouncement. Further, the phrase does not immediately offer a gloss or commentary on itself in the way Spenser's more complicated concepts usually do; contrast, from an earlier “book” moment, the explanatory aside “God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse traine” (I.i.18), deciphering the allegory almost as soon as it is presented. This “antiquity” is not clear but, rather, marvelous in its opacity, its resistance to interpretation. It is not an archive but a spectacle. Judith H. Anderson characterizes the idea of “antiquity” in Eumnestes's library, in contrast to the decaying “books and scrolls,” as a Platonic “scrine” consisting “of plain truth and timeless admonitions; it is an idealized place of mythic patterns and an undefiled ‘well’ of simple purity. Antiquity resides in memorial scrolls and permanent records…[it] always surpasses yet ever illumines human memory.”29 My view is exactly the reverse: it seems to me that the attraction of antiquity lies in its mutability, in its fragile, friable materiality, revealed so vividly in the missing, possibly ripped-out last page of Arthur's chronicle. There can be no separation between the all-toomaterial library, redolent with age, and the information it contains, and this is precisely why the past is so fascinating and wonder-inducing, because it is so palpably alien. Its decaying media make it the spellbinding opposite of the immediate present. At the same time, however, I cannot agree with Escobedo, who also reads the scene in a way opposed to Anderson's, as rife with anxiety about the perishability of textual “monuments”: Tudor chronicle histories, he says, “depended on anterior physical evidence, such as medieval manuscripts, maps, and inscriptions—all objects the historians feared could be damaged, tampered with, or eventually lost.”30 Ultimately, Escobedo argues, the chronicles passage Page 32 → highlight[s] the vulnerability of texts, their material limitations. The unreliability of the physical text Briton Moniments…threatens to impede the knowledge of history and the completion of Arthur's national identity…. The instances of material insufficiency in Briton Moniments…function as negative moments in a dialectic that yields a positive version in Merlin's prophecy.31 But “material limitations” or “insufficiency” are not, in the final analysis, troubling to Arthur; nor is the kind of “impeded,” occulted knowledge that instead gives him “secret pleasure,” pleasure in that which is hidden. The later episode of Merlin's chronicle is, as I will argue shortly, actually colored as more material by its association with Briton Moniments, rather than redeeming that earlier book's “negative” materiality in its “positive” ephemerality. Instead of reading Briton Moniments as grappling with the complexities of early modern British historiography, I would propose that the chronicle embodies, enacts, and celebrates, in the “wonder of antiquity,” the pleasure of not knowing. Recent scholarship has brought to the fore the concepts or categories of wonder and the marvelous as late medieval and early modern phenomena. Wondering, it is suggested, was a way of experiencing the strange and unknown; indeed, in Stephen Greenblatt's description, it is the way one reacts when one does not know how to react: “When we wonder, we do not yet know if we love or hate the object at which we are marveling; we do not know if we should embrace it or flee from it.”32 Similarly, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park consider medieval and early modern wonder to have “registered the line between the known and the unknown.”33 Caroline Walker Bynum, however, has noted what she sees as an insufficient appreciation of the active engagement of the wonderer's intellectual curiosity. In her view, a more accurate description of wondering must take into account “the capacity to be shocked by the singularity of events in a way that stimulates the search for ‘significance.’” This stimulating shock, she says, is also what motivates academic study, the desire to comprehend the world.34 What Arthur experiences in The Faerie Queene could be read as a kind of scholarly or bookish wonder akin to

what Bynum describes, a wonder that is the beginning of understanding. Certainly Arthur's marveling at Briton Moniments is in some ways framed as a wonder of learning, as it is set in a scholarly library and follows Arthur through study, puzzlement, and apparent reward when he bursts out with love for country. At the same time, I would argue, Spenser's Book II here evinces a strong awareness of, even a valuation of, the experience of wondering as a kind of deep, monumental unknowing, not inciting onward to knowledge Page 33 → but an end in itself. It is not, however, a static, changeless unknowing, for Arthur's wonder contains both the marvelous vastness of all he does not know and the equally marvelous vastness of all he will know, all that is to come later in his adventures but still is yet to be. Arthur's wonder is not a relishing of the thought of gaining such a volume of knowledge, I would argue, but a kind of sublime experience of unknowing's thrilling vastness in the present moment.35 Arthur's wonder of antiquity cannot only represent that fascination that draws us to ask historical questions, because somehow the fascination of “antiquity” is not something that can be accessed through historical research. He wonders not at the orderly narrative of history, the reward of careful antiquarian research, but at the rupture; his pleasure is not in what is revealed but in what is still secret. Elizabethan readers of British history yearn for an intimacy with the past. Like romance protagonists, they seek a recuperation of lost origins. Yet, according to The Faerie Queene, what they desire is the exotic sense of the past as another country, not the inevitable incompleteness, even disappointment, of arrival. What is ultimately more pleasurable is the pastness of the past, its very impenetrability, its remoteness. Arthur's book is thus not misunderstood exactly; it is he who resists understanding it. Unlike Astolfo's indexed magic book or even the other conjuring books in The Faerie Queene, it is wondrous not for what it contains or what it can do—its “use value”—but, rather, for what it embodies: it is an immaterial monument, an idea of the unreadable vastness of history. Like the “historical” Arthur's vacant monument at Glastonbury, Briton Moniments is both full and empty. Standing lost in the “wonder of antiquity” cannot be the final word, of course, either on the history of Britain or on books in The Faerie Queene. As we see in the case of Arthur, whose “speach” is “long stopt,” wonder is the opposite of forward movement in the poem. History cannot go on until Arthur next acts, and The Faerie Queene cannot proceed until he recovers from his astonishment. The spell must break, and history and historiography must continue. At last quite rauisht with delight, to heare The royall Ofspring of his natiue land, Cryde out, Deare countrey, O how dearely deare Ought thy remembraunce, and perpetual band Be to thy foster Childe, that from thy hand Did commun breath and nouriture receaue? How brutish is it not to vnderstandPage 34 → How much to her we owe, that all vs gave, That gave vnto vs all, what euer good we have. (II.x.69) What is remarkable about Arthur's response is that it does not correlate at all with what we have read over his shoulder. The history of Britain's royal offspring as presented here by Spenser is, for the most part, one of corruption and decay, not nourishment and fruitfulness, and many critics have registered puzzlement at Arthur's reaction to what he has read.36 This stanza underlines, I think, not Arthur's reading but his pleasurable misreading.

Not only has Arthur not recognized his own still-obscured place in time, but he has also not really understood the singularly undelightful Briton Moniments. This reader's deferral of engagement with the matter of the text (even as the English reader of The Faerie Queene finds himself or herself too much reminded of the country's checkered past) is suggested by his imprecise language, which is tautologous and fatuously rhetorical (“Deare countrey, oh how dearly deare”), and by the dullness of the chiasmus (“That all us gaue, / That gaue vnto us all”). It is “brutish” not to understand; but misunderstanding is required if the English reader wants to keep Brutus, who connects Britain to the classical past, in the story. All this is not to say that The Faerie Queene condemns the romantic distancing, the exoticization of the past. Spenser, of course, practices his own intentional archaism in language, which has led, in modern editions, to the unintentional effect of making his verse exotic and strange by contrast to modernized spellings of Shakespeare. Rather, Spenser feelingly acknowledges here the powerful attraction of a romance mode of reading history. Whether the facts of history are missing, dubious, or only disappointing, the wonder may lie in their monumental wholeness—the closed book of the past—rather than in their human-scale particulars. The insufficiencies of mere history are swept aside, ravished away, in the wonder of antiquity.

Britomart and the “World of Glas” In Book II, the chronicle of British history that Arthur reads breaks off at the moment of Arthur's own birth, at the border of the agency of its reader. Briton Moniments ends there, but the chronicle begins again, in a different shape, in Book III, in the prophecy Merlin imparts to Britomart and Glauce about Britomart's Page 35 → destiny as the foremother of the Tudor line. Although it is far less materially realized than Briton Moniments, because it is spoken rather than framed in a book, Merlin's chronicle of the future is still a distinct, discrete monologue, with its own prefatory invocation to the Muse (“Begin then, O my dearest sacred Dame…. Begin, O Clio,” III.iii.4), and it is unmistakably the sequel to the story begun in Book II. It is as if Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britanniae intersects the poem at these two points, linking them to each other as well as to this source text. Like Briton Moniments, Merlin's prophecy comes to a sudden end as it collides with the present—in this case, a different present, the historical entrance of The Faerie Queene's ideal reader, Elizabeth: “Then shall a royall Virgin raine” (stanza 49). Merlin recounts some of Elizabeth's political victories in a thin allegorical guise and then breaks off. But yet the end is not. There Merlin stayd, As ouercomen of the spirites powre, Or other ghastly spectacle dismayd, That secretly he saw, yet note discoure: Which suddein fitt, and halfe extatick stoure When the two fearefull women saw, they grew Greatly confused in behaueoure; At last the fury past, to former hew Hee turned againe, and chearefull looks did shew. (III.iii.50) Just as in the “abrupt” end of Briton Moniments, the unexpected interruption of the narrative here is marked by a dramatic rhetorical caesura.37 Merlin's “fitt” is like an exaggerated, violent restaging of Arthur's delicately tracked shift from “offense” to “secret pleasure” at the sudden end of Briton Moniments. Yet Merlin does not stand in

Arthur's place; the reader who discovers herself in the text here is Elizabeth I, whom we may here imagine reading The Faerie Queene. Her reaction, of course, is outside the text. Merlin's chronicle, then, is not marked off within the body of the poem as clearly as Briton Moniments, because its fictionality is coterminous with The Faerie Queene itself. Still, the moments of rupture in both “texts” represent the limits of narrative, the mapping of the edge of what a book can do.38 Merlin's chronicle is not less object-like or book-like because it is broken off; instead, that very quality of simultaneous finishedness Page 36 → and unfinishedness—that wavering between a transcendent, totemic completeness and a radical incompleteness—constantly attends representations of the book in the early modern English imagination, and so Merlin's narrative becomes a reflection of the nature of the book.39 A “real” book can never be as complete as the reader's dream of the book, and yet the real book serves as the material ground onto which those dreams are projected, becoming their occasion. While Merlin's chronicle shimmers between material and immaterial, the question of the reader's interaction with the legible object is also central to Book III. In her book, Britomart also discovers herself through “reading” and finds another touchstone of prophecy and another deferred epiphany of recognition. In accordance with Spenser's own characterization of the poem as a whole, Book III thrusts into the middest, plunges in medias res, with the adventures of “the famous Britomart” (III.i.8), as she unhorses Guyon and then fends off Malecasta, reserving for the second canto the proper introduction of the reader to the heroine of the book. Britomart's epithet echoes the immediately previous reference to Arthur as “The famous Briton Prince” (III.i.1), “to suggest that she is a female Arthur,” as A. C. Hamilton reads it; only they are also referred to in the poem as “royal Infant[s].”40 In contrast to the all-action first canto, the second begins bookishly, with an interjection of the narrator and a brief evocation of another chronicle history. Here haue I cause, in men iust blame to find, That in their proper prayse too partiall bee, And not indifferent to woman kind, To whom no share in armes and cheualree They doe impart, ne maken memoree Of their braue gestes and prowesse martiall; Scarse doe they spare to one or two or three, Rowme in their writs; yet the same writing small Does all their deeds deface, and dims their glories all. (III.ii.1) The canto starts by highlighting the narrator's subjectivity (“Here haue I cause”) and his spatial obtrusion (“Here”). Spenser points to the lack of column inches (“Rowme in their writs”) that male historians have given to women in accounts of “armes and chevalrie,” instead granting to them merely “writing small” Page 37 → (III.ii.1). He then imagines returning to the primary sources himself, leafing through the “record of antique times” to recover forgotten martial women, such as Britomart, in the archive (III.ii.2). “Of warlike puissaunce in ages spent, / Be thou faire Britomart” (III.ii.3), he proclaims; the poem's ensuing movement into Britomart's story suggests that the whole of Book 3 is in some way a discrete chronicle history, a supplemental or substitute book of the valor of women. The chronicle of British history, as we have seen, weaves its narrative thread through both Arthur's and Britomart's adventures. In the rest of Book III, Canto ii, reading occupies as central a place in Britomart's story as in Arthur's and functions for her in a way that complements and expands that sense of books as sites of wonder

that gives Arthur “secret pleasure.” In Book III, the moment of marvelous reading happens not in relation to a literal book but, instead, around another supernatural object that the poem figures in deeply book-colored terms. Britomart's father, King Ryence, owns a magic mirror, which is described as a species of visual encyclopedia. The great Magitian Merlin had deuiz'd, By his deepe science, and hell-dreaded might, A looking glasse, right wondrously aguiz'd, Whose vertues through the wyde world soone were solemniz'd. It vertue had, to shew in perfect sight, What ever thing was in the world contaynd, Betwixt the lowest earth and heauens hight, So that it to the looker appertaynd; What euer foe had wrought, or frend had faynd, Therein discouered was, ne ought mote pas, Ne ought in secret from the same remaynd; For thy it round and hollow shaped was, Like to the world it selfe, and seem'd a world of glas. (III.ii.18–19) Clearly, this mirror is not of the same type as, for instance, Lucifera's “mirrhour bright” (I.iv.10), which she carries as an emblem of vanity. The “looking glasse” in this passage is more like a crystal ball, a glass for gazing, perhaps akin to the one possessed by John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's astronomer, which was said by observers to be “as big as an egg, bright, clear, and glorious.”41 The morphology of Renaissance mirrors, however, makes the hand mirror and the crystal ball Page 38 → more alike than they might be in a modern understanding: as Reyna Kalas observes, in the late sixteenth century, convex mirrors, consisting of half a hollow glass globe backed with lead, were still far more common in England than the flat crystal mirrors that were just beginning to be imported from Italy.42 The motif of a magic mirror has many literary ancestors in romance. Given Spenser's acknowledged debt to Chaucer, we might think first of Canacee's mirror in “The Squire's Tale,” which forewarns those who gaze into it of future trials and will expose a lover's infidelity to his lady: “This mirour eek, that I have in myn hond, / Hath swich a myght that men may in it see / Whan ther shal fallen any adversitee” (ll. 132–34).43 The prophetic or panoptic mirror has a much longer history as a feature of romance narratives, however. As James Nicopolous notes, many magic mirrors in medieval and early modern literature are generally indebted to the pre-eleventhcentury vernacular collection of stories known as The Seven Sages of Rome, which reappears in manuscripts and printed editions all over Europe throughout the medieval and early modern periods,. In the ninth tale, a magician called Virgil sets a magic mirror on a stage in the middle of Rome, in which possible enemies can be seen approaching the city at a distance of seven days' ride.44 Yet Britomart's mirror seems to be unique in the romance canon in offering a universal view, unlimited to the specific function of descrying adversaries or to any finite viewing radius; while it can show “What euer foe had wrought, or frend had faynd,” it also reveals more generally “What euer thing was in the world contaynd…So that

it to the looker appertaynd” (stanza 19). Since, we might imagine, anything the viewer wants to see is by definition relevant to him or her (indeed, it is Britomart who chooses what will be revealed to her, concentrating on “Whom fortune for her husband would allot,” in stanza 23), this is a self-unlimiting description.45 In this respect, Britomart's mirror recalls medieval Neoplatonist writings, which offer mirrors that reflect the universe as philosophical exercises for imagining the universe of forms. Nicopolous refers to two twelfth-century examples, Bernardus Silvestris's De Mundi Universitate, which describes “The Mirror of Providence” that reflects “the model of anything, of whatever sort, and its quality and quantity, and when and how it had come to be,” and the Anticlaudianus of Alain de Lille, featuring a mirror from which “shines clear everything which the heavenly universe holds,” only dimmer, for the easier comprehension of weak human eyes.46 We see, then, that Britomart's panoptic mirror is here ostentatiously allusive (as magic objects and other distinctive motifs are wont to be in the self-referential Page 39 → world of romance texts) to both fictional and scholarly reading lists. I would argue, however, not only that Spenser's magic mirror gestures toward the books and bookish traditions from which it draws but that it also offers itself, as an object, to interpretation as a kind of book. Britomart finds it, after all, in “her fathers closet” (stanza 22), his private room for contemplation and reading, which might alternatively be called his study.47 Moreover, immediately after the description of the mirror, the poem asks the reader to respond to the mirror as if to a text. Who wonders not, that reades so wonderous worke? But who does wonder, that has red the Towre, Wherein th’Ægyptian Phao long did lurke From all mens vew, that none might her discoure, Yet she might all men vew out of her bowre? (III.ii.20) At first, “reades” seems to refer to The Faerie Queene, who reads here about such a wondrous invention. But “the Towre,” set in grammatical parallel, is not the title of a text; the reference seems to be to a legend about the second-century astronomer Ptolemy building his lover Phao a crystal tower from which she could gaze out without being seen, but Spenser scholarship has not identified the source. As he does several times in the poem, Spenser here uses the word read to mean “see.” While the meanings of read were certainly more multiple in sixteenth-century English than they are now—the Oxford English Dictionary catalogs “tell, declare,” and “have an idea; to think or suppose that…to guess”—Hamilton argues that the use of read to mean “see” is “unique to Spenser” and thus the more striking to the reader.48 Indeed, as Anne Ferry argues, in The Faerie Queene, as a result of Spenser's inventive and metaphorical uses of the word, “Reading is thus linked with opening hidden knowledge, and the matter to be read…[is] endowed with magical powers.”49 Both Britomart's mirror and Phao's tower, then, are “wonderous” objects that must be approached through such magical reading. Meanwhile, the use of the metaphor of the mirror in the titles of books—whether conduct manuals, cautionary tales, or encyclopedias—was so prevalent in early modern England that it might almost be said that while a “mirror” was a looking glass, a “Mirror” was a book. (Herbert Grabes counts 398 “Mirror” titles printed in England between 1500 and 1700.)50 In addition to the Page 40 → famous collection of tragedies of the falls of princes called A myrroure for magistrates and the young Queen Elizabeth's own The glasse of the synneful soule, a random sampling of sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century titles includes A myroure or glasse for all spiritual ministers, The mirrour of monsters, A looking-glasse for sea-men, A christal glasse for Christian women, The Cosmographical Glasse, Speculum Britanniae, and Speculum aegrotorum, or the sick-men's glasse. As Debora Shuger has argued, these texts are predicated on a number of distinct understandings of what happens when the reader looks into the metaphorical “mirror.”51 The mirror can unmask and diagnose faults, as a prompt to self-improvement; it can describe an ideal of conduct as a target for aspirations; or it can illuminate the reflected world, offering a trove of specialized or general information. It can thus become, by extension, a suitable

metaphor for all books, as in Fulke Greville's sonnet sequence Caelica, when he praises “books, / The glasse where Art doth to posterity, / Shew nature naked unto him that looks” (sonnet 66).52 Even The Faerie Queene is, in a way, an aspirational, model-of-conduct mirror-book, a guide for the fashioning of a noble person, and Spenser uses language familiar to the rhetoric of the mirror-books to describe its mimetic action. In the Proem to Book I, Spenser addresses Queen Elizabeth as a mirror, in the sense of “exemplar,” with “O Goddesse heauenly bright, / Mirrour of grace and Maiestie divine” (I.Proem.4), while in the Proem to Book III, he invites the “dred Soveraine…in mirrours more then one her selfe to see” (III. Proem.3–5), imagining a more literal mirror in the poem's purportedly accurate representations of Elizabeth's virtues. Britomart's readable mirror is, in place and in name, associated with just the kind of useful or practical book that, as scholars of the history of print culture would suggest, characterizes the rapidly expanding, learned and popular experience of reading in the sixteenth century, when, as we have been told, “books were professional tools.”53 If it is like A Myrroure for Magistrates, it is like Astolfo's handily indexed magic book. But the language and effects of wonder surrounding Britomart's mirror suggest a far less quotidian kind of bookishness, an understanding of reading as, in Ferry's term, “magical,” an entering into the realm of the marvelous, akin to Arthur's rapture at the “wonder of antiquity.” Such a model of wondrous, wondering reading would, crucially, find itself far afield of the currently accepted historical narrative of book “use.” Another book-like mirror, from another sixteenth-century poetic romance, Page 41 → the Lusíads (Os Lusíadas, 1572), the Portuguese nationalist epic by Luis de Camões, serves as a useful and illuminating comparison. As evidenced by Margaret Tyler's translation of the first part of the Spanish romance The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood (1578), Spanish and Portuguese fictions were highly popular in late sixteenth-century England—indeed, along with other Continental texts, they were more so than medieval English romances—and Camões's epic was perhaps the best-known of all Portuguese poems. Thus, although the Lusíads was not translated into English until 1655, it was probably known to Spenser, either in the original or in a Spanish translation.54 In the climactic last book of the Lusíads, the nymph Tethys presents the poem's hero, the historical explorer Vasco da Gama, with a magic crystal that displays the entire geography of the earth and heavens and charts the voyages that he will take in the future. The visual description of the glass quickly moves into terms of reading. (Here I quote from the first English edition, Sir Richard Fanshawe's translation of 1655, but in this passage, Fanshawe has faithfully carried over the language of books from the Portuguese.) Infinite, perfect, uniform, self-poiz'd, Brief, like the ARCHITECT that made the same. Seeing this admirable Globe, surpriz'd With wonder and desire was our De Game. To whom the GODDESS thus: “Epitomiz'd I shew thee heer the UNIVERSALL FRAME, That thou maist read, in Print and Volume small, Whither Thou goest, and shalt goe, and Thine shall.” (X.79)55 Vasco da Gama's magic globe is encyclopedic in scope and is compared to a literal encyclopedia—specifically a printed one—that compresses or “epitomizes” a world of information into a convenient, single “Volume small.” This imagined book is “Universall” yet “Brief”: it is a multum in parvo, a great matter in a small space. As such, it gestures at a manifestation of the complete encyclopedia, the scholarly goal that inspired medieval and

Renaissance humanist writers to compile monumental collections of knowledge—many of them with mirror titles, like the medieval Speculum universale or the sixteenth-century Speculum alchemiae or Speculum astrologiae. But it is not a scholar's mirror, an Page 42 → orderly and rational reflection in print of the higher order of God's creation. Instead it is a glorious, literally radiant object that inspires “wonder and desire,” miraculously able to be, as no actual book could, both “Infinite,” containing everything, and yet “perfect,” finished. Britomart's mirror, too, is a “wondrous work” that is apprehended by reading. Indeed, inspired by the titles of the encyclopedias just mentioned, we might well call it a Speculum—a mirror, which is also a lens through which to see the world, which is also a book. Finding this mirror in a book's place, the reader of The Faerie Queene associates the prophetic glass with Arthur's Briton Moniments, furthering the association between Arthur and Britomart that has already been established. In the mirror, like Arthur in the chronicle, Britomart discovers her own story, that which “mote to her pertaine.” Her selfe a while therein she vewd in vaine; Tho her auizing of the vertues rare, Which thereof spoken were, she gan againe Her to bethinke of, that mote to her selfe pertaine. (III.ii.22) Her destiny and Britain's is her love for Artegall, who, once seen, becomes something lost that she will shortly dedicate her life to finding. In this way, Britomart's mirror moment is like the concatenation of Arthur's dream of Gloriana, which inspires his quest, and Arthur's “wonder” at the end of Briton Moniments. In fact, Britomart does see the image of herself in the mirror, since she too will shortly put on armor and become a knight.56 Britomart seems to have read a conduct book or a chivalric romance—perhaps Margaret Tyler's The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood—and fashioned herself as a gentleman. Yet, like Arthur's book, Britomart's turns out to be less than perfectly legible and thus not to follow conventional narratives of early modern book “use.” Like Arthur's, Britomart's first reaction to her act of self-reading is not self-recognition. The Damzell well did vew his Personage, And liked well, ne further fastened not, But went her way; ne her vnguilty age Did weene, vnwares, that her vnlucky lot Page 43 → Lay hidden in the bottome of the pot; Of hurt vnwist most daunger doth redound: But the false Archer, which that arrow shot So slyly, that she did not feele the wound, Did smyle full smoothly at her weetlesse wofull stound. (III.ii.26)

For both knights, the moment of discovery of the self within a readable artifact—of encounter with what “pertains” to the self there—provokes wordless amazement: the same momentary inability to react that, for Arthur, “long stopt his speach” (II.x.68) sends Britomart into a “weetlesse wofull stound.” Hamilton glosses “stound” as “time of trial,” which is indeed one of its sixteenth-century meanings, but it seems more likely to denote “stupefaction, astonishment” here, as it does for Artegall when he “found himselfe on ground in great amazement” and “Lightly…started vp out of that stound” (IV.vi.11–12).57 “Weetlesse wofull stound” seems also to enfold a group of mixed feelings like Arthur's offense/ secret pleasure/wonder: if she is “weetlesse,” why is she also “wofull,” unless she has the kind of double consciousness of present and future, glorious destiny and painful loss, that Arthur also seems to pack into one ambiguous moment? Arthur will die without issue, which is why Briton Moniments ends before coming to his name, and Britomart, as Merlin shortly tells her, will suffer the death of Artegall after their children have been born. Britomart, who is more simply “unwares,” does not experience the same series of complicated emotions as Arthur; here, in place of Arthur's secret smile, it is the “false Archer,” Cupid, who having “shot / So slyly” then “Did smyle full smoothly at her weetlesse wofull stound” (stanza 26). For Britomart as for Arthur, an experience of reading has produced an experience of wonder. These are two cognitive actions that should be opposites according to the current demystification theory of books as useful objects, scholarly and professional tools. A processing of information and a deferral of processing are here united into a piece of supernatural technology that is supposed to be a knowledge machine, a book or a magic mirror, both of which are framed in The Faerie Queene as totems of romance. The book both creates the record and creates its rupture. Like Vasco's globe, Britomart's “wondrous myrrhour” (III.ii.Argument) is an emblem of a different kind of reading, one that is less immediately “readable.” Page 44 →

“Academicks” versus the Wondering Mind It is significant that the marvelous sights that Tethys shows Vasco da Gama in the Lusíads—the future colonial glory of Portugal and the exotic lands, such as India, that it will conquer and colonize—are imagined as not just seen but also read, in “Print and Volume.” Like The Faerie Queene, the Lusíads presses the question of what kinds of information books can and cannot hold. Earlier in the poem, when Vasco da Gama's crew witnesses a towering waterspout far out at sea, Camões seems to make an ironic distinction between mere scholasticism and experience of the world. I saw those things, which the rude Mariner (Who hath no Mistress, but Experience) Doth for unquestionable Truths aver… But ACADEMICKS (who can never err Who by pure Wit, and LEARNING'S quintessence Into all NATURE'S secrets dive and pry) Count either Lyes, or coznings of the Eye. (V.17) The narrator here discounts what can be discerned by bookish methods, the practices of “Academicks” who imagine themselves infallible (and their lofty rhetoric of alchemical mountebankery—“Learning's quintessence,” “all Nature's secrets”), contrasting mere book-learning with the awesome “Experience” of the waterspout. Thus, for Camões, the book can be that which inspires wonder, even as wonder puts bookishness in the shade. In the Proem to Book II, Spenser, too, links that which is wondrous and unknowable with the colonial gaze and

with reading. Right well I wote most mighty Soueraine, That all this famous antique history, Of some th'aboundance of an idle braine Will iudged be, and painted forgery, Rather than matter of iust memory, Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know, Where is that happy land of Faery, Page 45 → Which I so much doe vaunt, yet no where show, But vouch antiquities, which no body can know. But let that man with better sence aduize, That of the world least part to vs is red: And daily how through hardy enterprize, Many great Regions are discouered, Which to late age were neuer mentioned. Who ever heard of th'Indian Peru? Or who in venturous vessell measured The Amazons huge riuer now found trew? Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew? (II.Proem.1–2) In a passage reminiscent of the debates over the historicity of Brutus and Arthur, Spenser acknowledges that The Faerie Queene asks the reader to make a leap of faith, accepting the account of Fairyland and its inhabitants as history— specifically “famous antique history…matter of just memory”—and not mere romance, “th'aboundance of an ydle braine…and painted forgery.” These opposites, “just memory” and “ydle aboundance,” correlate, of course, to Eumnestes and Phantastes in the House of Alma.58 Reports of the New World serve as a useful comparison: the reader has never seen Fairyland, but he has never seen Peru either, yet he accepts the “Indies” as real. The lesson is that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophies: “of the world least part to vs is red.” Like Camões, Spenser makes “reading,” bookishness, a limited methodology, able to apprehend only a small part of all there is to know. Like Briton Moniments, reading matter is always unfinished. At the same time, Spenser (like Camões) remains fascinated by the book's formal possibilities, by its material reality, placing books at the center of scenes of wonder. For both Arthur and Britomart, partial or oblique selfknowledge comes in the form of a book—something physical, something detached from the body, with which the self-reflecting subject can have a direct, externalized encounter. Yet, significantly, Arthur and Britomart do not

recognize themselves fully or immediately in their books (or “books”); it is left, rather, to the reader of The Faerie Queene to recognize them there and to read their “wonder.”59 As traditional elements in romance narratives, magic books are central to formal identity: they are part of what makes a romance a romance. At the same time, books, as they appear in narrative, become a site for the mode's interrogation Page 46 → of itself and for the reader's own self-reflection—even as self-reflection, too, is rerevealed (as it has been since the medieval chivalric tales) as an explicitly romance-related activity. In an analysis of the imaginative mechanism of allegory in The Faerie Queene, Gordon Teskey vividly describes the textuality effect of Spenser's allegory, which pulls everything into its classifying hermeneutic: “The space of commentary suggested by the edge of the page is extended until it seems as if the world is gathered into the margin of the poem and encyclopedically organized by it.”60 This image of The Faerie Queene as an encyclopedia, that flourishing medieval and sixteenth-century genre, effectively captures the poem's appropriation of ideas and forms from its cultural surround, the age of print. Indeed, The Faerie Queene is an encyclopedia (just as the Shepheardes Calendar is an almanac), with its vast scope and almost Ramistic classifying structure, in which figures continually divide into halves or branch into sets (Una and Duessa, Florimell and Snowy Florimell, the Saracen “Sans” brothers, Gardante and the threateningly multiplying “-ante” brothers of Malecasta's court).61 In the “Letter to Ralegh,” as we have seen, Spenser purports to reject the idea of a system of ordering information such as would have been used by humanist scholars: “For the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne,…but a Poet thrusteth into the middest.” Nevertheless, the text is clearly governed by an elaborate, “orderly” plan (if not a chronological order, then an epistemological one), in which twelve proposed books correspond to twelve moral virtues, the whole subsumed under the composite knightly glory of Magnificence, “the perfection of all the reste,” and epitomized in Prince Arthur—himself a human encyclopedia of goodness. Of course, in the end, the poem defies order, both expanding far beyond its purview as conduct book and falling short of fulfilling its universalizing design. In Books II and III, The Faerie Queene venerates the monumental authority of the book but at the same time denies the idea of ordered, encyclopedic completeness. If, as in the medieval encyclopedic premise, the little book of man is the image of the great book of God's Creation, Spenser argues that mysteries on the human scale—history, the future, the self—are as holy as those on the cosmic level and as impenetrable. “Of the world the least part to us is red,” and as we read, the sublime consciousness of all that we do not know, the wonder of all the books we have yet to open, ravishes.

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CHAPTER 2 Dreaming of the Book in Cymbeline Counters and “Counter-change” Near the end of Cymbeline, in a burst of thunder and lightning, the Roman god Jupiter descends, a literal deus ex machina, to begin the turn of the play from tragedy to comedy.1 He presents the despairing Posthumus, who is languishing in prison and wishing for death, with a book that offers a riddling prophecy of a happy ending for Posthumus himself and for the British nation. The giving of the book marks the pivotal moment between what one editor of the play has called “four and a half acts of bad faith, cruelty, violence, and revenge”2 and a final scene in which all confusions are resolved and in which all parties—husband and wife, father and children, victim and repentant villain, Rome and Britain—are happily reconciled. As the hinge of the two parts of the play—the visible seam between its two genres and also the mechanism that allows them to be knit together—this scene is, essentially, what makes the play a romance, both in its hybrid nature and in its integrative function.3 Like romance itself, that is, the scene brings unlike parts together and makes brokenness whole. In the next scene, as the play's generic rerouting becomes clear and the good are rewarded, Cymbeline remarks, “the Counter-change / Is severally in all” (5.5.397–98). The immediate meaning is that the newly reunited royal family—the king himself, Imogen,4 her brothers, and her husband—are reciprocally and generally exchanging loving gazes, “like harmlesse Lightning” (l. 395, recalling Jupiter's pyrotechnics), and Cymbeline's economic-cum-musical metaphor (“changes” are also the different combinations in which a set of church bells can Page 48 → be rung, “severally” or all together) serves as a good description of the play's structure of reversals of fortune, inversions of identity, genre morphing, and, above all, a kind of labored or counterintuitive harmony.5 At the same time, in the exchange of tragedy for comedy, the book, as the material remains of the transaction, the object that Posthumus carries from prison into the redeemed world of the last scene, is the counter, the chit or token, of generic change.6 As Charlotte Scott has recently noted, the shift from tragedy to comedy is marked by the appearance of a book.7 Given to Posthumus at his lowest ebb of misery and found by him to be incomprehensible at first, the book is reread and interpreted by the Soothsayer in the last scene—one scholar claims that it is the only text read out twice onstage in the whole Shakespeare canon8—and is revealed as the compressed, brief story of the happy resolution itself, a final recapitulation of many anagnorises, the seeds of which had been present, disguised by symbolic language, even in the “tragic” Cymbeline. And, especially since romance is persistently associated with old books, as we hear in the references to the “text” (2.Prologue.39) from which “ancient Gower” (l.Prologue.1) draws his narrative in Pericles9 (and in Jonson's sneer describing the sources on which Pericles is based as “mouldy tales”),10 Jupiter's book is the “counter” (in the sense of abacus bead)—the marker, the representation, the emblem—of the romance mode at work in the play. As this chapter will suggest, the book is also an emblem of its reader's self. As stage properties in Shakespeare's drama, books often signify or advertise specific aspects of the characters who hold them. They appear as illustrations of the identity of their readers, marking scholarly devotion, piety, inward-focused contemplation. Even Prospero's magic book in The Tempest, among its multifarious imaginative uses (to be discussed in chapter 3), is a kind of extension of the character, the site where his supernatural powers reside, and when he renounces the book (or at least promises to), he is also proclaiming his abjuration of the “magician” part of his identity. Indeed, Prospero's book demonstrates the attachable and detachable quality of book-based characterness in Shakespeare: when Richard III appears with a prayer book to decline a worldly crown or when Polonius gives Ophelia a book to normalize her staged solitude, the intention is to put on readership like a costume. Cymbeline, however, marks a significant departure in Shakespeare's exploration of the relationship between book and self. Here, books are not detachable objects that serve a purpose. They are “material,” in that they are props, Page 49 → not rhetorical constructs; but they are also immaterial, imagined things that enable characters to experience and the audience to observe internal dynamics far more subtle than the putting on of a trait. Two

remarkable scenes of reading in the play, in which text overlaps with experience in a manner occluded and confusing to the play's reader-characters, suggest that the book, rather than emblematizing a discrete part of the self, can serve as a representation of something far more difficult to imagine, the self as a whole. Importantly, both scenes, as I will discuss, are scenes in which reading and dreaming touch or overlap. In the first instance, Imogen reads a book she believes to be separate from her own experience, but when she wakes, the book's story turns out, nightmarishly, to come true, to be her own. Later, Posthumus encounters a book that does tell his story and that is offered in a dream, ostentatiously, as a prophecy for his future; it proves unreadable to him but becomes the occasion for him to break through into a truer self-knowledge. In both these cases, I suggest, the book is a kind of occasion or blank canvas for thinking about the complicated relationship between the ideal of a unitary subjectself and the self as a reflexive object of contemplation, the “I” and the “me” of selfhood. In short, in a prepsychoanalytic world, thinking about books makes it possible to think more deeply about oneself. For Posthumus in particular, who must, in the conventional style of a romance protagonist, go through a process of recovering and reconstituting his identity (one he has rejected, not simply lost), the book creates a space of authority in which he can locate himself, can find his life re-presented as a complete narrative. Separate from the self, replete with cryptic meaning when the self, with all its errors, seems too well known, the book confers a wholeness and integrity on Posthumus's identity. At the same time, through its existence as a discrete object, with its own culturally conferred integrity, it keeps the creation of that wholeness separate from Posthumus's subjectivity and provides an external authority as evidence for his selfhood. Posthumus, the relative thinness of whose character (as compared to other Shakespearean heroes) has often been remarked on, endures an enormous change of heart at the end of the play, an emotional reversal that is moving and consequential out of proportion to Posthumus's presence elsewhere in the play. To manage this, Posthumus needs the assistance of another authority. Like a tragicomic revision of Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing, who longs for the permanent confirmation of his identity that can only be provided by its being recorded in a book—“O that Page 50 → I had been writ downe an asse!” (4.2.77–78)—Posthumus requires the literal, cultural, and imaginative structure of a book as an edifice in which to find himself and in which, just as important, to lose the precariousness of self-creation.

Reading before Bed Let us begin with the play's first reader/dreamer, Imogen, who, since the beginning of the play's history, has been many readers' and audiences' favorite part of Cymbeline. In the spring or summer of 1611, Simon Forman, physician and astrologer to courtiers and aristocrats, attended a public performance of Shakespeare's play Cymbeline and set down his impressions in the commonplace book that he called “The bocke of plaies and notes therof.” His sketch of the plot is uneven: he confuses Cloten and Posthumus (just as Imogen does); places events out of order (or at least out of the order of the First Folio text that we now have); records nothing after Act 4, Scene 2; and ends many of his sentences tantalizingly with “&c.” But he remembers one scene in great detail, devoting over a fourth of the space of his summary of the whole play and all of his descriptive energy to that brief episode. Remember also the storri of Cymbalin king of England…. Howe the Italian that cam from her love conveied him selfe into A Cheste, and said yt was a chest of plate sent from her love & others to be presented to the Kinge. And in the deepest of the night she being aslepe, he opened the cheste & came forth of yt. And vewed her in her bed & the marks of her body, & toke a wai her braslet, & after Accused her of adultery to her love &c.11 Perhaps Forman's account reflects not exactly confusion but the different intensities of attention that the play's scenes commanded in him. His entries in the diary for the performances he sees begin, we may note, with the selfinstruction to “Remember,” although his purposes, besides memorializing or capturing his own pleasure in the experience, are unclear. Forman's account is a record of memory in action and also of forgetting (“&c”), as he divides the images he has absorbed into what he would try to retain by writing down, by turning into a book, and what he would allow to be released, in the inevitable attrition of experiences from the busy mind. For a modern audience as well, I suspect, the scene in Imogen's bedchamber Page 51 → is among the most

memorable of the play, not only for Iachimo's emergence from the chest like devils coming from Doctor Faustus's hell-mouth, for his (literally) ravishing language, or for the scene's strong reminiscences of other moments of female victimization in Roman fictions of Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus, but also for the action that comes just before it, a moment of startling familiarity and homey immediacy to twenty-firstcentury readers that stands in contrast to the rest of this notoriously difficult text, with its labyrinthine and improbable plot.12 Before Imogen goes to sleep, we see her reading in bed by the light of a candle. Her book, as we are about to discover, is Ovid's Metamorphoses, specifically the story of Philomel, who is raped by her brother-in-law Tereus. IMO [GEN]:

Who's there? My woman: Helene?

LA[DY]: IMO:

Please you Madam. What houre is it? Almost midnight, Madam.

LA: IMO:

I have read three houres then: Mine eyes are weake, Fold downe the leafe where I have left: to bed And if thou canst awake by foure o'th'clock, I prythee call me: Sleepe hath ceiz'd me wholly.

(2.2.1–7) This scene of domestic intimacy—we are in Imogen's bedroom, watching her going-to-bed ritual—is almost shockingly recognizable to a modern audience: reading in bed and then folding down the page before turning out the light are actions that remind us of ourselves. Imogen's dog-eared Ovid is the more notable in the context of the Shakespeare canon because it is uncommon for such “ordinary” scenes of reading to be staged. The Metamorphoses, however, one of the most important books in the “library” of Shakespeare's influences, seems to appear in extreme circumstances, whether very naturalized or very stylized—almost as if serving as a physical manifestation of literariness, not just as a single book, but also as the representative of Holinshed's Chronicles, the Decameron, all the books that might be sources for the play. The other star turn by the Metamorphoses in Shakespeare, Lavinia's desperate attempt to make Philomel's story tell the tale of her own victimization in Titus Andronicus, while a far less “domesticated” use of a book, Page 52 → is striking in its contextual connection to Imogen's Ovid.13 Unlike Imogen, who unwittingly finds herself trapped in Philomel's part, Lavinia, once her ability to speak or write has been taken away, tries actively to reinsert herself into the story, to gain its transformative ending as well as its horrific beginning, to make others see her as the character in Ovid's fiction. As noted earlier, the more customary use of books in Shakespeare's plays, as indeed on the early modern stage in general, is to signal character, and Imogen's diligent reading habits do, of course, serve in part as an index of her character, a sign of her goodness; in her determination to get up at four after reading until midnight, we might discern a reference to the industry of the virtuous woman of Proverbs, whose “candle is not put out” when the household retires and who “riseth while it is yet night.”14 That good wife's night labor is spinning and provisioning, however, not pleasure reading, which was imagined to hold many dangers for early modern women's morals, and one might interpret Iachimo's assault on Imogen as a kind of overheated cautionary tale. At one moment, Imogen is reading a fictional narrative of a rape, and at the next moment, her bedroom has been penetrated, the precious, private circle of her marital bracelet has been possessed, and she has been violated by the

too-effective creation of a fictional narrative: the very convincing story Iachimo will invent about his supposed seduction of her. Since Iachimo emerges from the trunk he has placed in her room for safekeeping—since he is already in the bedroom before she goes to sleep—the impression is almost created that he is actually coming out of the book she has just laid aside, stepping out of the story of rape. The suggestion is that Imogen has somehow opened her private space to sexual invaders by reading—by going to bed with—such a salacious book as Ovid. Women's reading of potentially arousing texts such as romances, particularly in the excessive way Imogen practices reading here (losing sleep because she can barely stand to put the book down for a scant four hours), had been the target of serious criticism as well as parody. Sixteenth-century conduct books forbid women's reading of romances or poetry, lest such “wanton toyes” provoke “wandering thoughtes,” in the words of Anne Boleyn's chaplain and biographer William Latymer.15 Helen Hackett notes Sir Thomas Overbury's mocking 1615 portrayal of a chambermaid who “is so carried away with the Myrrour of Knighthood, she is many times resolved to run out of herself, and become a Ladie Errant.”16 In The Academy of Love (1641), John Johnson even casts Shakespeare, supposedly one of women readers' preferred erotic writers, as Iachimo: “There was also Shakespeere, who (as Cupid informed me) creepes Page 53 → into the womens closets about bed time…. [If] it were not for some of the old out-of-date Grandames (who are set over the rest as their tutoresses) the young Sparkish Girles would read in Shakespeere day and night.”17 The fact that Imogen does not mention reading as one of her bedroom activities when she gives her own indignant account of the night (or of a typical night in her chamber) reinforces the idea that her dalliance with Ovid is something embarrassing, to be censored from a testimony of innocence and fidelity to Posthumus. False to his Bed? What is it to be false? To lye in watch there, and to thinke on him? To weepe ’twixt clock and clock? If sleep charge Nature, To breake it with a fearfull dreame of him, And cry my selfe awake? That's false to's bed? Is it? (3.4.41–45) Imogen's mention of dreaming here—her claim that she dreamed of Posthumus while Iachimo prowled her chamber—is significant: since the mechanics of the scene are identical to early modern stage conventions for the representation of dreams, in which the dreamer falls asleep onstage and then other actors enter to perform the action of the dream (as in Act 5 of Richard III, in which the ghosts of Richard's victims enter to torment him in a dream), we cannot be sure at first that Imogen isn't dreaming Iachimo's night visitation, experiencing hidden adulterous desires stimulated in her by the explicit fiction. Turning down the page, Imogen has made a physical mark in her book at the moment at which Ovid's Philomel succumbs to her brother-in-law's assault. As Iachimo notes, “here the leaffe's turn'd downe / Where Philomel gave up” (2.2.45–6): thus, in Iachimo's interpretation, apparently as a function of choosing where to end her reading, she has chosen what will metaphorically happen to her, almost in a kind of sortes Ovidianae. Eve Rachele Sanders points out that the parallel of “turned downe” / “gave up” emphasizes the parallel between Imogen's and Philomel's actions.18 Imogen has given up, unbeknownst to her, the privileged knowledge of her body that will enable Iachimo to take control of her story and falsify it in the telling. For Imogen, the accidental bibliomancer, the book becomes all too accurate a mirror of her fate.19 Both Imogen and, as we will see, Posthumus are antiQuixotes: they think they are reading fiction, but they turn out to be reading about themselves. Meanwhile, the play's use of this scene to establish, in the audience's awareness, the naturalness of intimate, Page 54 → private connection between the book and the self—a naturalness that comes across to modern audiences as directly and immediately as it apparently did to Jacobean ones—prepares for the later, more “theatrical” presentation of the dynamic between book and self in and after Posthumus's dream.

“Senseless Speaking”: Unreadable Cymbeline The question of whether Iachimo's entrance into Imogen's bedroom might be perceived initially as a dream is especially important, because the play's other staging of an encounter with a book, completely different, entirely supernatural, does indeed happen within a dream context. Toward the end of the play, as Britain fends off a Roman invasion, the despairing Posthumus—who, in addition to his disappointment with the lack of valor shown by his fellow British soldiers, suffers under the belief that his beloved wife has been killed on his orders—allows himself to be arrested by the British authorities as a Roman sympathizer. Many critics have observed that Posthumus, who goes to England disguised as an Italian, fights the Romans disguised as a British peasant, has himself arrested as a Roman, then reveals his Britishness, is in a state of mutable identity in the later part of Cymbeline. Valerie Wayne says Posthumus is able, in the dream scene, “to recover his own identity through his family connections,” but I would argue that this recovery happens not most notably through his family but through the agency of a supernatural book.20 A remarkable scene ensues that resembles court masque in its static tableau and use of machinery and special effects. In jail, Posthumus dreams that his parents and brothers, long dead, all gather and entreat Jupiter, chief of the gods—who has had a pervasive, echoic presence in the play throughout, as six different characters have sworn by him or invoked him—to have mercy on the last of the Leonati. “Since (Jupiter) our Son is good, / take off his miseries,” his mother says (5.4.85–86). Jupiter “descends in Thunder and Lightning, sitting uppon an Eagle: hee throwes a Thunder-bolt” (5.4.92.1–2). Assuring the family that everything will end happily for Posthumus, he leaves a book on Posthumus's chest. As Posthumus wakes up, all the dream figures exit, but the book remains physically with him. What Fayeries haunt this ground? A Book? Oh rare one, Be not, as is our fangled world, a Garment Page 55 → Nobler than that it couers. Let thy effects So follow to be most unlike our courtiers, As good, as promise. Reades. When as a Lyon's whelpe, shall to himselfe unknown, without seeking finde, and bee embrac'd by a peece of tender Ayre: And when from a stately Cedar shall be lopt branches, which being dead many yeares, shall after revive, be joynted to the old Stocke, and freshly grow; then shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britaine be fortunate, and flourish in Peace and Plentie. 'Tis still a Dreame: or else such stuffe as Madmen Tongue, and braine not; either both or nothing, Or senselesse speaking, or a speaking such As sense cannot untye. Be what it is, The Action of my life is like it, which Ile keepe If but for simpathy. (5.4.133–51)

Posthumus, who has hit bottom in the cosmic registers of luck and happiness, reads out this cryptic message, ostensibly delivered by the ruler of the gods, which seems to prophesy a happy ending for himself and his embattled country. His reaction suggests neither relief nor scorn, however, but utter noncomprehension. He does not seem to recognize his own name in the next-to-last line—“Then shall Posthumus end his miseries”—even as he pronounces it. In the Poetics, Aristotle famously devalues the “casual” dramaturgy that makes recognition depend on inanimate objects, “lifeless things,”21 but here, rather than summoning an anagnorisis ex machina, the play engineers a massive misrecognition. It conjures, from a lifeless thing, a highly dramatic prop, the magic book that should end all miseries—only to dissipate its energy in an anticlimax, when Posthumus fails to see himself in the book. This lacuna or refusal of meaning is all the more remarkable given the extraordinary dramaturgy of the scene. The play seems to be telling us that something very important is happening: a god descending from the heavens, the “thunder” produced by rolling cannonballs across sheets of metal, and the exploding rosin used to create lightning were perhaps the Shakespearean stage's most high-caliber special effects, ones the King's Men reached for relatively rarely.22 The use of such pyrotechnics and machinery would have to be Page 56 → carefully judged, since they had a reputation for appealing particularly to the rabble, hence bringing down the tone of the whole. In the 1610 prologue to Every Man in His Humour, Jonson derides the kind of play in which a “creaking throne comes down, the boys to please,” while in the epilogue to the play The Scholars (1649), Richard Lovelace purports to imagine writing a play solely for the sensation-loving audience, for th' gallery, in which the throne To their amazement should descend alone, The rosin-lightning flash and monster ’spire [exhale] Squibs, and words hotter than his fire.23 For Cymbeline, Shakespeare would have had to balance the danger of going over the top on spectacle with the need for an emphatic reinforcement of the climactic quality of this scene, but these audiovisual effects unavoidably flirt with the slightly ridiculous. The smoke and pulleys seem especially extravagant when contrasted with the low-key, ordinary representation of a reader's interaction with a book that the play has already given us in the scene in Imogen's bedroom (setting aside the horror to follow). Here, baroquely, Jupiter appears, and the magic book, in a “rare” and perhaps “fangled” binding, is handed down from on high, dramatically overdetermined and purporting to resolve all of Posthumus's griefs and “take off his miseries.” Instead, the reward of reading is strangely absent, at least for this moment of theatrical son et lumière.24 The scene of Jupiter's descent and of Posthumus's book has been a frequent target for the kind of denigration that has attended the supposed excesses of the romance mode in eras and contexts in which classicism and formal unity are preferred. Having a deity materialize to sort things out is a dramaturgical trump card, the ace up the playwright's sleeve, and the blatantly theatrical nature of the device, its sheer deviceness, seems to break the rules of representation that the play has been operating under until this point. Historically, this has been, for many eminent readers of Cymbeline, the hardest passage to understand from a play that presents many interpretive difficulties, and one reaction has been to dismiss it as not by Shakespeare. In their eighteenth-century editions, Pope, Johnson (who called the passage “absurd and ridiculous to the last degree”),25 and Steevens all rejected Shakespearean authorship for the scene, and the Victorian period's well-known idolatry of Imogen did not preclude a continued distaste for Jupiter. In the early twentieth century, Dover Wilson, agreeing Page 57 → with Granville-Barker, denounced “the jingling twaddle of the apparitions,” while E. K. Chambers called the whole scene a “spectacular theatrical interpolation” (which it is, but he meant something more like “egregious playhouse addition”).26 While more recent scholarship has accepted it as Shakespearean (or has relaxed its reverence for the purity of authorial intention), the Jupiter scene continues to be perceived as an outlier, beyond the pale, obstructive to an integrated interpretation of the play or to a modern audience's “suspension of disbelief,” and this perception has been a part of what has kept Cymbeline (even as it has received increased attention from literary critics for its complex portrayals of national and gendered identities and even as the other romances have become much more

commonly seen on professional Shakespeare stages) largely absent from undergraduate syllabi and infrequently performed. We should not, of course, be surprised to find Cymbeline fraught with textual problems and difficulties of reading: the play itself presents reading as an imperfect art and presents texts as untrustworthy. Imogen could hardly be clearer on the subject when she laments, on finding that she has been betrayed by Posthumus via letter, “The Scriptures of the Loyall Leonatus / All turn'd to Heresie?” (3.4.81–82), and when she later declares, “To write, and read, / Be henceforth treacherous” (4.2.316–17). Leah Marcus, in one of the most thorough critical accounts of the play, sees the analysis of texts and signs as one of its most important subjects: “Cymbeline repeatedly invites its audience to ‘reading’ and decipherment…. [B]ut [reading] is also directly and repeatedly thematized as fraught with dangers, almost inevitably ‘misreading.’”27 The puzzles that Marcus examines, however, are not books, and it is one of the crucial tenets of my argument, as I have posited in my introduction, that books occupy a special category of objects in the early modern imagination, that it is important to attend to them not only as part of a larger schema of reading and “reading,” texts and “texts,” but as themselves. In a play that is full of moments of symbolic reading and examples of true and false decoding and interpreting, the act of actual reading that takes place as Posthumus reads Jupiter's book is notable for its lack of any interpretation at all. Posthumus declines to settle on a reading: the riddle, or the whole experience, is “still a dream” or nonsense, “either both, or nothing, / Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such / As sense cannot untye.” Either there is no meaning to interpret, Posthumus says, or if there is one, he declines to take it on. Even the shape of the book cannot be determined: Jupiter calls the book a “tablet” (5.5.203), but Posthumus sees it as a “book,” and however many or few pages it seems to have, it does feature an elaborate Page 58 → binding, or “garment” that “covers,” more appropriate to a volume of paper or vellum and boards than to a wax or stone tablet. Perhaps the object changes names when it changes hands, going from almost Mosaic monumentality in Jupiter's possession to Posthumus's more domestic reality. Still later, it becomes, in Posthumus's words, a “label” (5.5.431).28 In Cymbeline, books do not function like letters, whose role in the play is to advance the tragic part of the plot, to enable misunderstandings and betrayals because they are so apparently, deceptively readable. Nor does Posthumus's book function like books that we would expect to find in early modern readers' hands, transmitting useful knowledge in an orderly, stable format. Rather, the book is mysterious, strange, opaque, even shape-shifting; it presents itself as unreadable as well as unclassifiable, and it signifies for Posthumus only as the idea of a mystery, the fact of a cipher. Yet in allowing an access to transformative “sympathy,” it creates order of a different kind.

“Sympathy” for the Self Posthumus finds the riddle in the book completely perplexing, and while it is far-fetched, as evidenced later by the Soothsayer's recourse to strained etymologies, it nevertheless seems strange that Posthumus reads his own name in the next-to-last line and still apparently does not think that it is literally about him: “The Action of my life is like it, which Ile keep, / If but for simpathy.” His language here, “my life is like it” and “simpathy,” describe similarity between two things while explicitly disallowing that they could be one and the same. The fact that the book and Posthumus's life are “sympathetic” but not synonymous enables Posthumus to have “sympathy” (i.e., compassion) for himself, and the action of regarding his own life in such an “objective” way is what makes it possible for him to live it differently henceforward. Modern editions of Cymbeline gloss “simpathy” as “likeness,” “resemblance,” or “similarity.”29 But the word had a more complicated seventeenth-century meaning. Sympathy was a relatively new word in English: the first appearance recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1579. Throughout the early modern period, it seems to have been used primarily in the way modern English deploys symmetry, to mean “affinity, accord; likeness,” but its connotations also often include its modern meaning of compassion or understanding. For Page 59 → instance, in Euphues and his England (1580), Lyly can say of two friends that “nature recompenced the similitude of mindes, with a Sympathy of bodies”;30 while the sympathy here is morphological, not intellectual, the usage is clearly colored by emotional attachment, liking as well as mere likeness. Shakespeare, meanwhile, in his handful of uses of sympathy, always combines “similarity” with “fellow feeling,” in various interesting mixtures. “Oh what a simpathy of woe is this,” says Titus Andronicus, reflecting on the misfortune that unites his family (Titus Andronicus 3.1.149), while Henry VI, on greeting his proxy bride Margaret, hopes for “A world of blessings to

my soule, / If Simpathy of Love unite our thoughts” (Henry VI, Part 2 1.1.22–23); both these instances show, as in Lyly, the idea of symmetry being deployed in an affective context. Yet things that are like each other cannot, by definition, be the same thing. Posthumus hangs onto the book because its story reminds him of his life, which means that it is not the story of his life. Instead of imagining (like a Quixote, as mentioned earlier) that he is a hero of romance narrative, overidentifying, Posthumus thinks that he isn't a character in this romance story, that a communication actually directed at him is an unrelated fiction that merely happens to resemble his situation. Posthumus seems, as the riddle says, “to himselfe unknown.” Earlier in the play, Iachimo had disdained Posthumus's reputation for virtue, claiming that he could regard Posthumus “without the helpe of Admiration, though the Catalogue of his endowments had bin tabled by his side” (1.5.4–6). Iachimo is imagining Posthumus as a book, one that, like Astolfo's magic book, has a handy index, or “table”; Iachimo scoffs that he can read his victim “like a book,” heightening the irony and the importance of the fact that Posthumus cannot read himself. The tragicomic extremes of romance require and shape this metamorphosis of Posthumus's character. After he has committed the unthinkable (ordered his beloved wife to be killed), Posthumus must undergo some dramatic reconfiguration of his self-conception, both in order literally to live with himself and in order for the audience to be able to accept the “happy ending.” Other romances that end in reunion and forgiveness stage magical scenes in which loss, pain, and whatever anger and resentment might hinder reconciliation are dissolved in wonder: the dead Hermione turns from a statue into a living woman; Pericles hears the music of the spheres, and Diana descends to tell him (in a dream) where to find his wife. For Cymbeline, this is the supernatural moment, the play's only exploitation of the smoke and pulleys of stage magic, Page 60 → and yet the divinely enabled reconciliation is not between Posthumus and Imogen or between Imogen and Cymbeline but between Posthumus and himself. In “My life is like it, which Ile keep / If but for sympathy,” it seems at first that the referent of “which” is the book and that Posthumus is simply taking it with him; but could “which” also refer to “my life”? In this moment, whose oddness, whose anticlimactic deflation, could signal its very inwardness, its privacy, its particularity to Posthumus himself, is Posthumus given the gift of an obliquely forgiving “perspective” on himself? With his life enclosed in a book, Posthumus is able to look at it from outside and, from the depths of regret and bracketed by strategic misreading, to feel a glimmer of “sympathy.” The embodiedness of Posthumus's book—it is a physical representation of the self, not just an idea of the self—allows him to have this perspective, and the perspective of sympathy makes it possible for him to continue living.

The Plot of a Life Obviously, drama is different from narrative forms of fiction. While the narrator of a novel may move freely in and out of the consciousness of the characters, the audience at a play cannot read the inner thoughts of a figure onstage. In a discussion of the techniques for the representation of subjectivity used in Hamlet, John Lee has argued that the soliloquies in that play constitute a kind of metatext, a subgenre, a discrete narrative within the play that forms the “autobiography” of Hamlet's self.31 I would argue that Cymbeline contains such a metanarrative as well, an inner story, albeit a compressed one, in Posthumus's book, in a form quite natural to the material expression of a story, which contains the story of his life. The book goes even further in its distinctness and discreteness within the discourse of the play and therefore in its explicit usefulness for changing the reader's perspective, because it is three-dimensional, physically represented on the stage. As a material “autobiography,” it has a theatrical impact greater than that of the soliloquies, a claim to greater representational “continuity” by virtue of the consistency of its physical presence. Lee proposes that Hamlet, a drama, could enclose a narrative; I suggest that Cymbeline encloses one even more explicitly, by staging a book. Building on this proposition, I want to turn briefly to the theory of narrative to pursue the idea of the dynamics of the life story at work in Cymbeline in the form of Posthumus's book. The potential power of such a distinct narrative or inner Page 61 → story and, by extension, of an inner book is suggested by Paul Ricoeur, whose essay “Mimesis and Representation” describes the way in which, by virtue of its being complete, with a beginning, middle, and end, a story, in the broadest formal sense, gains an authority as a kind of entity, more than an assortment of words and punctuation marks. Ricoeur is talking about narrative discourse, not drama, but if we imagine the narrative of Posthumus's self as contained within the play in the same way that, according to Lee, Hamlet's self is narrated by his soliloquies, we may apply his model to Cymbeline. As

Ricoeur says, “the narrative text acquires a semantic autonomy that cuts it off…from the presumed intention of its author [and] from the socio-cultural conditions of its genesis.”32 Posthumus's book, I would argue, commands this “semantic autonomy,” a particular gravity, as an object and as a symbol of literariness, that enables it to act as more than the sum of its contents. Ricoeur further argues that the action of human life, which happens to us as a kind of flow of occurrences and sensations, cannot be understood or discussed without the imposition of a narrative structure, an “emplotment.” In this way, storytelling “makes” experience; representation produces truth.33 If we imagine the literal, material “structure” of a book as a heightened version of Ricoeur's “narrative structure,” we may conjecture that, for Posthumus, the process of reading the story of his life in a book is a necessary step in understanding it and making sense of it. Such an investment of narrative into objects, plots into props, is characteristic of Cymbeline. As Marjorie Garber has suggested, the play repeatedly enacts a process wherein “metaphor is translated into onstage reality”34: verbal imagery of precious jewels (1.1.22) is followed by the appearance of actual jewelry, Imogen's ring and Posthumus's bracelet, as key props (1.1.43–53), while Imogen's dismissal of Cloten as unworthy of Posthumus's “meanest garment” (2.3.134) has an ironic reversal when she mistakes Cloten's dead body, costumed in Posthumus's clothes, for her husband himself (4.2.308). Such a materializing process seems natural to the magical, seemingly sealed universe in which the romances take place: loved ones lost at sea or in far countries are never really lost but return, grown older; in the representation of ideas as props, we see that fleeting images too are never lost but come back, having undergone a romance “sea change” into three-dimensional form. I would argue that the book too is a comparable kind of physical realization of metaphysical form and that in serving as a concrete placeholder for the theoretical and imaginary, the book is, again, material and immaterial at once. Page 62 →

“The Life of Him Which Dreams of Them”: Interpreting the Dream of the Book Earlier in this chapter, I linked Imogen's book and Posthumus's book through the way in which both books interpenetrate with dreams. Imogen “dreams” metaphorically (she does also have a real dream in the play—she awakens next to the corpse of Cloten in Act 4, Scene 2, still talking to someone from a dream of asking for directions; it is perhaps important in retrospect that she is established as an actual dreamer); Posthumus literally dreams. For Imogen, the sexual violence in her real book seems to body forth a dream Iachimo (suggested by stage convention) who, when she wakes, becomes a real violator, while for Posthumus, a (very stagey) dream, evanescent and fleeting, bears in a book that, when he wakes, turns out to be real. I have ranged away from dreams, but I want to return to them now to consider the deep strangeness of Posthumus's dream-delivered book as an object. Interestingly, the interaction between books and dreams is a common mimetic device in medieval and early modern narrative, a way of representing the experientially seamless fiction making of the dreaming mind as akin to the alternative world a reader enters when he or she opens a book. In medieval dream vision, the dream seems often to emerge from a book that the dreamer has been reading. Two of Chaucer's dream visions, The Parliament of Fowles and The Book of the Duchess, begin with the narrator reading a book and then falling asleep and into a dream inspired by his reading, while in The House of Fame, the speaker finds and reads the English text of The Aeneid engraved on the walls of the temple in his dream. Yet, in dream visions as in other notable dreams in medieval and early modern literature, it is not usual for an object encountered in a dream to cross the line between sleeping and waking life. Objects that cross over from dreamworld to real world, that remain after a dream and guarantee its reality or meaningfulness, are more common in Greek and Latin texts; in his classic study The Greeks and the Irrational, E. R. Dodds calls these objects “apports” and cites the example of Athena giving Bellerophon a golden bridle in a dream, to allow him to catch Pegasus.35 There are some apports in medieval poetry, such as the ruby ring in Guillaume de Machaut's Fountain of Love or Cresseid's leprosy in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid;36 early modern dreamers, however, tend to wake in dismay to find that what they had possessed in the dream has now vanished. In Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, Arthur Page 63 → dreams passionately of Gloriana and then wakes up next to the “pressed gras where she had lyen” (the present marker of her absence) and “sorrow[s] all so much, as earst I joyd” (1.9.15, ll. 2–3). In The Tempest, Caliban remembers

how “in dreaming / The clouds, methought, would open, and shew riches / Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak'd / I cri'de to dreame againe” (3.2.140–42). Posthumus's first reaction as he wakes up from the dream and finds his family gone recalls Arthur's and Caliban's disappointment. But (oh scorne), Gone, they went hence so soone as they were borne: And so I am awake. Poore Wretches, that depend On Greatnesse, Favoure; Dreame as I have done, Wake, and finde nothing. (5.4.125–29) Then, however, he notices the book (“Oh rare one!”). For Posthumus, apparently alone among early modern dreamers, this almost primal wish is fulfilled: something found in a dream withstands the transition to waking and miraculously, gratifyingly, stays found. By recalling the classical and medieval “apport” rather than early modern conventions of dream representation, Posthumus's book is also a nostalgic, backward-looking element of romance. The only comparable moment I am aware of in early modern drama occurs in Heywood's Tudor historical romance If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body, Part 1 (1605). In it, the Princess Elizabeth, imprisoned in the Tower, has a dream in which two angels prevent two “Fryars” from killing her, then place an English Bible, which had been lying elsewhere in her cell, into her sleeping hand, open to the verse “Whoso putteth his trust in the Lord, shall not be confounded.” When she awakes, Elizabeth marvels that the book has traveled across the room on its own, concluding, “Then, ’twas by inspiration.”37 Here, as in Cymbeline, a book—or, rather the placement of a book that was already present—crosses over from dream to waking life, with a special, encouraging message for the dreamer. Yet the Bible's heartening, cheering effect on Elizabeth is very different from the resonant strangeness of Posthumus's book, the nonrecognition of his response. In If You Know Not Me, Elizabeth's treatment of her Bible is familiar, domesticated, typical of the book-marking practice of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bible owners, as she writes her name and a rhyming motto in her book.38 Bibliomancy, opening up the Bible at random Page 64 → to tell one's fortune, a version of what the angels do for Elizabeth here, was also a common folk practice.39 Further, while the whole play is about, as its subtitle advertises, “the troubles of Queene Elizabeth,” this scene in particular does not mark a crisis or turning point in her experience or qualify as the most dramaturgically elaborate moment of the play, which has two other solemn dumb shows and ends with a representation of the full ritual of coronation and investiture of the Queen. It is clear, by contrast, that something happens to Posthumus's trajectory through the play in this spectacular and pivotal scene, that the book's message is a key to some crux. What might it mean to dream of a book? First, what might it mean to Shakespeare's audience? Based on the number of extant books and manuscripts devoted to deciphering dreams old and new (from classical sources, such as Aristotle and Averroes, and from anecdotes), it seems to have been a popular pursuit in early modern England. The vigor of condemnation of dream interpretation as superstition by, for instance, Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) or Thomas Nashe in The Terrors of the Night (1594) helps to confirm this conclusion. Remarkably consistently from one dream guidebook to another, dreams were seen as having been of two kinds: either they came from bodily disturbances such as illness, humoral imbalance, or the rising vapors of too much food and liquor and meant nothing, or they came from supernatural intervention and, if inspired divinely rather than diabolically, meant something important, such as a revelation of the future.40 Thomas Hill, in his The moste pleasuante arte of the intepretacion of dreames (1568), devotes much space to distinguishing between meaningful and meaningless dreams. In the dedicatory letter, he says that “true” dreams onelye happen to suche, whose spirites are occupyed with no irrationall imaginations, nor overcharged with the burthen of meate or drinckes, nor geven to any other bodelie pleasures. For

those which are contrary to this order, are not properly dreames, but be named vain dreames, no true signifiers of matters to come but rather shewers of the present affections and desiers of the body. And yet dreames seene by grave & sober persons, do signifie matters to come, and a spirite undoubtedlie shewinge to them, whiche by her nature is a Prophetesse,…al matters imminent.41

In essence, either a dream came from the body and was “vain,” or it came from outside, from a “spirite,” and “signifie[d].” Scot, meanwhile, who utterly denies Page 65 → the possibility that God might speak to humans in dreams in the postmiraculous era, has a remarkably “psychological” interpretation of how dreams happen. During waking life, Scot says, people “see divers and sundrie things, and conceive them severallie in their minds. Then, those mixed conceits being laid up in the closset of the memorie, strive together.” Because the imagination “cannot discerne nor discusse,” a dream is generated out of the random assortment of impressions. It is, of course, just this seeming inarticulacy or indirectness of the imagination that would later make “dream work” interesting to psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, Scot agrees with Hill and others that dreams that come from the dreamer's body, from the mind just as from the stomach, have no significant meaning: “And therefore in mine opinion, it is time vainelie employed, to studie about the interpretation of dreames.”42 The catalogs of dream elements in Hill and in another popular and often-reprinted dream almanac, The Judgement or Exposition of Dreames (1606), the English version of a second-century text attributed to Artemidorus of Ephesus, seem to read dream symbolism in many different ways, whether by associative logic, through conventional literary symbolism (e.g., turtledoves mean love), as simple logical inversions, or according to no apparent logic but perhaps to tradition or anecdotal evidence.43 To take three examples from the same page in Hill, to gather olives in a dream “signifyeth gaine” (since oil is rich), to dream that you “do great workes” foretells “grievous hinderance” (since pride goes before a fall), and to dream that you hear “the sound of an Organ pype, or pypes playinge, declareth most great ire and variances to followe” (?).44 In both books, some of the symbols are grouped thematically (dreams about various parts of the body, dreams about kinds of voyages), but others are listed in no visible order, evoking, in a way, the strangeness and seeming randomness of connections made in dreams themselves.45 What, then, are we to make of dreams of books? Keeping Posthumus in mind, the adjacency of a string of interpretations in Hill's text seems serendipitous: “And to talke with the dead, signifyeth good and profit to follow. And to se bookes[,] reading in them, declareth the[e] not to bee overcome. To read bokes or to see them read, declareth joy, to have gyves or fetters on, signifyeth friendship.”46 Coincidentally, Posthumus is visited by the dead, reads a book, and wears “fetter[s]” (5.4.8) or “Gyves” (5.4.14) all in the same scene; and while Hill's predicted outcomes are as vague and multipurpose as a fortune cookie, it is true that Posthumus, in the next scene, finds good and profit in the preservation of his marriage, is not overcome by despair, experiences joy in the Page 66 → reunion, and gains a number of new “friends,” in the early modern sense of “extended family,” when Arviragus calls him “Brother” (5.5.424). Perhaps even more remarkable, however, is the succinct analysis of the book as dream element in Artemidorus: “Of bookes. Bookes are the life of him which dreams of them.”47 Without attempting to establish a direct connection between Cymbeline and these collections, we can still conclude that dreams about books held significance for early modern oneirology and that the book as a symbol was imagined particularly to speak to the self and to abstract, inner states, rather than to turns of fortune or events in social life. For Hill, books signify personal integrity, “not to bee overcome,” and joy; for Artemidorus, metaphorically, they simply “are” the dreamer's “life.” Oneirologies like Hill's and Artemidorus's consist mainly of pages of lists of dream objects and their real-life correspondences; they are tools for translating between the amorphous concept, like “gain” or “life,” and its embodiment, in “olives” or “book.” The way in which ideas turn into objects for their appearances in dreams is a phenomenon that remained interesting, three hundred years later, to Freud, who explains it in The Interpretation of Dreams as displacement, a part of “dream-work.” The direction taken by the displacement usually results in a colourless and abstract expression in the dream-thought being exchanged for a pictorial and concrete one…. A dream-thought is unusable so

long as it is expressed in an abstract form; but when once it has been transformed into pictorial language, contrasts and identifications of the kind which the dream-work requires…can be established more easily…. This is so because in every language concrete terms…are richer in associations than conceptual ones.48

Freud elsewhere makes clear that a “scientific”—that is, modern—“consideration of dreams starts off from the assumption that they are products of our own mental activity,” but he notes, “Nevertheless the finished dream strikes us as something alien to us [and] extraneous to our minds.”49 Early modern interpretations of dreams, as we have seen, proceed from exactly the opposite point of view: that in order to be taken seriously, dreams must come from outside the dreamer, must be “alien” and “extraneous” to mortal experience. To dream meaningfully is to be acted on by an exterior force; if the dream emerges from the dreamer's mind, it is as inconsequential as it is insubstantial. In Cymbeline, Posthumus's dream is presented as being of divine origin, not just implicitly, but Page 67 → emphatically, with the chief of the gods himself appearing onstage to preside over the vision. Yet, at the same time, the scene clearly undermines the authority of divinity. Jupiter's entrance is weighed down by the ostentatious staginess discussed earlier, as well as through a more general compromising of the dignity of the gods, introduced by the Leonati's scolding of Jupiter, their invocation of his “spight” (5.4.31) and his “Adulteries” (l. 33), and their suggestion that his authority is not supreme but checked by a “shining Synod” of the other gods (l. 89).50 Along with the book's failure to make things clear right away, these circumstances seem to take away from the high significance that Hill, Artemidorus, and others attribute to divinely sent dreams. Yet if Cymbeline discounts, through solemn parody, the idea of dreams as sent by divine influence, it still allows Posthumus's dream to be full of signification, to tell, even if it is not immediately apparent, the story of the rest of the play. Might we imagine that this scene, as ridiculous or unassimilable or strange or parodic as it is, is grappling with the idea that a dream could come not from God but from inside the dreamer, from the imagination, and still mean something? Certainly, the idea that dreams could be occasions for inquiries into the nature of subjectivity and self-regard had been staged by Shakespeare before. In Richard III, after dreaming that the victims of his murderous schemes return to accuse him, Richard wakes up in terror. Cold fearefull drops stand on my trembling flesh. What? do I feare my Selfe? There's none else by, Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I. Is there a Murtherer heere? No; Yes, I am: Then flye; What from my Selfe? Great reason: why? Alacke, I love my Selfe. Wherefore? For any good That I my Selfe, have done unto my Selfe? O no. Alas, I rather hate my Selfe For hatefull Deeds committed by my Selfe. I am a Villaine: yet, I Lye, I am not. (Richard III 5.3.182–92)51 Richard's sense of self is completely disrupted by the dream, broken down into urgent questions with no answers, as he struggles to integrate the knowledge that he has committed profound wrongs against other people with his basic (if extraordinary) self-interest. He is stumped: there is a “Murtherer” present, Page 68 → and yet he is the

only person in the room. In one way, the scene is bleakly, inventively comic—this is what it might be like to be an utterly unscrupulous person visited for the first time by the pangs of conscience—but at the same time, the issue is serious. People do sometimes change, come to regret past actions, modify their views, forgive, arrive at a new understanding, without being moved to do so by any external force. But how does this happen? How can the mind change spontaneously when nothing else changes? Richard, as yet unpunished for his crimes, unchecked, but now doubting, is caught in just this moment and mystified by himself—“I am a Villain: yet, I Lye, I am not!” Famously, one of the key differences between the jealousy plots in Othello and in Cymbeline is that while Othello regrets his murder of Desdemona only when he learns that she was innocent, Posthumus forgives Imogen while still believing that she has slept with Iachimo, revising his judgment of her “crime” from “All Faults that may be nam'd, nay, that Hell knowes” (2.4.179)52 to “wrying but a little” (5.1.5). How does Posthumus come to a new awareness that his love for Imogen cancels his anger, in the absence of any illuminating external circumstance? Furthermore, how can he progress from a suicidal desperation into a more temperate repentance, as I argue that he does in this scene, without knowing that Imogen is still alive? If nothing has changed in the world, how can one change one's mind?

The “Book of Memory” and the Book of Forgetting The question of how revisions and changes can take place in the seemingly enclosed space of the mind is articulated in detail by St. Augustine in the Confessions, in which he uses memory and forgetting as his example. This power of memory is great, very great, my God. […] This power is that of my mind and is a natural endowment, but I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am. Is the mind, then, too restricted to compass itself, so that we have to ask what is that element of itself which it fails to grasp? Surely that cannot be external to itself; it must be within the mind. How then can it fail to grasp it? …[W]hen I remember memory, memory is available to itself through itself. But when I remember forgetfulness, both memory and forgetfulness are present…. But what is forgetfulness except loss of memory? How then is it present for me to remember when, if it is present, I have no power of remembering? Page 69 → […] Who can find a solution to this problem? Who can grasp what is going on?53 Here St. Augustine struggles explicitly and intellectually with the two things that, I argue, Posthumus experiences obliquely after his dream in Cymbeline: the nature of consciousness and the logic of how forgetting works. First, why is it that one cannot perfectly know one's own mind—the closest thing to oneself—but may have blind spots and omissions in one's knowledge of the mind's contents? Second, when one has made some mental omission, how can one be sufficiently aware of the absence to know that something is lost? These philosophical paradoxes—riddles, essentially—were of course still unsolved in the early modern period, and the anxiety of losing information, the sense of being haunted by the awareness of forgetting, must have been even greater then, in a world in which, thanks to the advent of the printing press, there was so much material available to know. By not recognizing himself, not finding any meaning, in Jupiter's riddle, Posthumus is released from painful memory—but only partly, since, as Augustine says, he must still remember the lack. As I argued in chapter 1, both the prevalence of images of memory as a book (or a storehouse, theater, or wax tablet) in medieval and Renaissance thought and the elaborate visual systems for categorizing information that characterize mnemonic practice were instrumental in creating and disseminating the idea of the mind as a place, a materialized container for knowledge.54 We have seen before, when he invoked Posthumus's “table,” that Iachimo is perhaps the most recognizably “scholarly” or utilitarian reader in Cymbeline. Indeed, his carefully memorized, detailed account of the appearance of the inside of Imogen's bedchamber, persuading Posthumus that he has been welcomed into her bed, seems, in its careful procession around the room and in its surrounding language of memory, pointedly to recall the visual-spatial mnemonic techniques described by Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers.

IACH:

First, her Bed-chamber. …it was hang'd

With Tapistry of Silke, and Silver, the Story Proud Cleopatra, when she met her Roman, And Sidnus swell'd above the Bankes,… …The Chimney Is South the Chamber, and the Chimney-peece Page 70 → Chaste Dian, bathing: never saw I figures So likely to report themselves;… …Her Andirons (I had forgot them) were two winking Cupids Of Silver, each on one foote standing, nicely Depending on their Brands. POSTHUMUS:

This is her Honor:

Let it be granted you have seene all this (and praise Be given to your remembrance). (2.4.66–93) It is notable that what Iachimo catalogs here are all human figures; remembering things by human or animal images, especially active, moving figures (the winking, balancing Cupids) or figures that provoke strong emotions, “the grotesque and the beautiful, the scatological and sexual” (e.g., the naked Diana), is central to memory techniques as outlined in, for instance, Cicero's Ad Herennium.55 Through these images, the sight of Imogen becomes, as Iachimo says, “riveted, / Screw'd to my memorie” (2.2.43–44). Also, as several critics have pointed out, the details that Iachimo provides as his evidence are visual representations of scenes from literature, contributing to a sense that he is “reading” her room and her body and participating in a literary mode such as the convention of blazon.56 Transferred to the space of Iachimo's memory, Imogen's room becomes a single great book, one that Iachimo, like a demonic parody of a humanist scholar—and perhaps calling into question the virtues of such scholarship—has compiled or authored. In the Renaissance, theorists of the mind's functions had long considered memory to be central to personhood. However, in a discussion of All's Well That Ends Well, Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. considers memory's inverse, forgetting, as a necessary act of self-creation.57 Sullivan argues that without the facility to forget, the self cannot act autonomously but can only react; it is necessary to clear from the room of the memory the mass of everything one remembers, so that one can think new thoughts. In the essay “Of Lyers,” Montaigne expresses ironic gratitude for his terrible memory: if he were able to retain many “for-raigne inventions and strange opinions,” he reasons, his “minde and judgement” would be overwhelmed with the consideration of others' ideas, never “exercising their proper [own] forces.”58 Sullivan notes that for Montaigne, memory keeps the subject reliant on and hence in a subordinate position to Page 71 → other thinkers, while “[f]orgetting…makes possible the production of a

distinctive interiority, a subjectivity outside of ideology” and others' opinions.59 For Montaigne, says Sullivan, forgetting is not a mere loss of something, an instance of damage or blotting in the book of memory, but a generative and even a creative act. Significantly, as Grant Williams and Christopher Ivic point out, the concept of forgetting as used in the common early modern phrase “to forget oneself” was considered the opposite not of remembering oneself but of knowing oneself.60 Thomas Rogers advises in his The Anatomie of the Minde (1576), “Knowe thy self, and thou shalt not offend: forget thy self, and what wilt thou not do?”61 When Posthumus finds himself named in Jupiter's book—“the Lyons whelpe,” “Posthumus”—he seems, through a kind of forgetting or through a withdrawal from knowing (or seeking to know through interpretation), to dissociate himself from himself, to be “to himself unknown.” The audience feels that Posthumus is intentionally being dense; even if we couldn't get the reference to Leo-natus as the “Lyons whelpe,” the book actually calls Posthumus by name, and the happy ending forecast in the last line is both general and unequivocal. Underscoring Posthumus's failure to recognize himself is the fact that his parents and brothers do recognize him, despite never having seen him before, as Sicilius Leonatus affirms: “Hath my poore Boy done aught but well, / Whose face I never saw” (5.4.35–36). Yet Posthumus is only able to see resemblance, not reflection: “My life is like it.” In this moment, his identity is materialized by the book, which tells his story and yet is distinct from him. What does he gain by not recognizing his name, forgetting himself, failing to read himself? This moment is part of a ritual of self-destruction that Posthumus engages in after realizing his great mistake in punishing Imogen for her supposed infidelity, and yet it is perhaps the moment in which Posthumus abandons the ritual and decides to live on.62 This process of self-forgetting or self-cancellation seems to begin when he decides to turn himself in as an enemy to Britain, identifying himself as “A Roman” (5.3.89). He wishes to reject not only national identity but the owning of a mortal identity at all: he yearns, in a long, elaborate apostrophe to the gods, to give up his life in penance. Is't enough I am sorry?… …take No stricter render of me, then my All. Page 72 → I know you are more clement than vilde men Who of their broken Debtors take a third, A sixt, a tenth, letting them thrive againe On their abatement; that's not my desire. For Imogens deere life, take mine, and though ’Tis not so deere, yet ’tis a life; you coyn'd it, ’Tweene man, and man, they waigh not every stampe: Though light, take Peeces for the figures sake,… If you will take this Audit, take this life, And cancell these cold Bonds. (5.4.11–28)

Posthumus sounds almost petulant with “Is't enough I am sorry?” But the question is really a rhetorical setup for the anticipated answer, no, for he prefers to die and thus repay the murder of Imogen once, rather than pay it back endlessly in penance, a lifetime of being sorry. Indeed, Posthumus insistently uses language of money, coins, and debt when talking about himself throughout the play, from the most casual exchanges, such as his politeness to the French lord (“I have bin debtor to you for courtesies, which I will be ever to pay” [1.5.37–38]) or his thanks to Philario (“I must die much your debtor” [2.4.8]), to intensely felt moments, like the trading of tokens with Imogen (“As I (my poore selfe) did exchange for you / To your so infinite losse; so in our trifles / I still winne of you” [1.2.50–52]), his renunciation of womankind (“my Father, was, I know not where / When I was stampt. Some Coyner with his Tooles / Made me a counterfeit” [2.4.156–58]), and, most compulsively, this scene of desolation. Here he imagines “broken debtors” and counterfeit or illegally “light” coins—as we have seen, preferred images for himself—being reduced incrementally, the debtors' ruin dragged out for maximum profit to their creditors, and the coins shaved or clipped, and he asks instead for a quick, merciful release from the private, punitive economy in his mind and from the bonds of life and the continual obligation of being “sorry.” Interestingly, after the dream of the book, Posthumus seems to abandon, or forget, the language of debt. Immediately upon waking, he describes what has happened to him as good luck: “Many Dreame not to find, neither deserve, / And yet are steep'd in Favours; so am I / That have this Golden chance, and know not why” (5.4.130–32). For once, rather than reflexively imagining himself as in debt for any “favor,” Posthumus sees the vision as a free gift, a windfall. Page 73 → Meanwhile, the language of a “golden chance” seems to poetically convert the idea of money into a romance or fairy-tale boon, like three magic wishes or a golden egg.63 Posthumus seems henceforth cured of his penchant for bookkeeping imagery. When the Gaolers come to take him away to hanging, the First Gaoler launches into a long, comic speech about execution as a “heavy reckoning” that has the bright side of voiding all “Taverne Bils,” finishing with “your necke (Sir) is Pen, Booke, and Counters” (5.4.158–73). Posthumus's reaction to this flood of his own favorite terms, however, is brief and unimpressed: “I am merrier to dye, then thou art to live” (5.4.173). After the dream of the book, Posthumus has left behind the pettiness of his images of debt and counterfeiting. Having forgotten his old language and, with it, his desire to pay the ultimate price, he has moved into a larger and more romance-inflected realm of speech. By the last scene, as we have seen, counter has come to have an entirely different meaning, signifying not commerce but transformation, mutuality, and love. At the same time, to let go of the absolute and final idea of canceling one's debt is to accept the idea of continuing to live in a world where interactions with others are conducted in more complicated and less coldly transparent terms than economic transactions. Posthumus still claims to be eager for death, although with a gallows humor that suggests nervousness: when the First Gaoler asks if he is ready, he replies, “Over-roasted rather: ready long ago” (5.4.153). But with the arrival of the messenger from the king to announce his pardon, a serious ambiguity sets in: the messenger says only, “Knocke off his Manacles, bring your Prisoner to the King” (ll. 197–98), to which Posthumus responds, “Thou bring'st good newes, I am call'd to bee made free” (ll. 199–200). The Norton Shakespeare offers the gloss “Posthumus means ‘set free by death,’” and the notes in other editions are virtually identical.64 Indeed, after Posthumus is led away, the First Gaoler comments on his death wish: “Unlesse a man would marry a Gallowes, & beget young Gibbets, I never saw one so prone” (5.4.204–5). But is the First Gaoler supposed to be an insightful reader—is “made free by death” necessarily Posthumus's whole meaning? Could his pronouncement be the beginning of a readiness to live after all? Posthumus must, in fact, go on; as the prophecy foretold, he will be reunited with Imogen, and they will live happily ever after. Is the process of self-forgetting, in a way, the ordeal through which he must pass to be renewed—in the same way Imogen must “die” through the Queen's narcotic potion and be reborn?65 Even his name, Posthumus Leonatus, tells the story—born (of the lion) after death—and so it is Page 74 → fitting that the moment of dying and being renewed should turn on that name itself, its own rebus encrypted, unrecognized, unread. The last scene of Cymbeline reiterates the sense that Posthumus's mysterious book represented a false or empty interpretive crux. Relegated to the end of the play's long denouement, Posthumus's book and its revelations are drained of dramatic effect. In turn, Iachimo confesses, Imogen and Posthumus are reunited, Cymbeline's sons are revealed by Belarius, the fates of the Queen and Cloten are accounted for, and Iachimo is forgiven. Cymbeline announces a general amnesty to seal Britain's and Rome's new league: “Pardon's the word to all” (5.5.422), he

says, and on this gesture of universal harmony by the king (Shakespeare's plays typically end with a ringing pronouncement by the highest-ranking surviving male character), everyone seems poised to exit. But there is more, a slightly bedraggled and embarrassing remainder. Posthumus is obliged to break in politely and make a request: “Good my Lord of Rome, / Call forth your Soothsayer” (ll. 425–26). When the Soothsayer (who turns out to be more of a linguist than a seer) finally unpacks the prophecy in the last scene—wringing import out of the traditional etymology of mulier, “woman,” from mollis aer, “soft air”—strikingly, nothing happens: there is no import to the revelations, since everything that was foretold by Jupiter has by now already taken place. The “prophecy” becomes an anticlimax, especially because of the pointedly strained wordplay required to get the riddle to make sense. The play ends a few lines later without Posthumus getting the chance to speak again; clearly, the importance of the Soothsayer's explication was not to reveal anything to Posthumus but, rather, to enact a model of crystal clear, emphatically unambiguous interpretation, an antidote to the many uninterpretabilities the play has heretofore presented to its reader-characters and to Shakespeare's audience. With the prophecy's aspect of romance revelation erased, we realize, in retrospect, that the real significance of Posthumus's riddle book is not in the tedium of its unraveling but in the moment of its gnomic wholeness, in the scene in which Posthumus receives it. This is a paradoxical role for a book, which, particularly according to the current historical understanding of reading in the early modern period, is supposed to provide, not suspend, information. But for Posthumus, the most important kind of knowledge is an omission of knowledge, the gift of being able to unknow himself—to have, through a kind of forgetting that is supplied by the insertion of a bookish distance, the “sympathy” for his own life that we in the audience might have for him. The book creates order out of the painful chaos of his existence, but it simultaneously Page 75 → keeps that order sufficiently separate from Posthumus's agency and from his understanding to retain its aura of its wholeness and completeness. Further, this “order” of the book is far removed from the order of an early modern grammar, a cosmography, or a recipe book; it has no index, no “table.” The dramatic function of the book in Cymbeline is to reshape confusing experience into a material text, open to reading, and at the same time to insist, through the text's resistance to interpretation, that distancing, mystery, and strangeness are as much part of the reader's interaction with the book as is rational knowledge. This is a play profoundly interested in exploring the imaginative and mimetic possibilities of books, in placing the book and the self in a distinctive spatial and cognitive relationship. The book can help the self find itself and can help it escape itself, can be a supplementary space and a placeholder. These ideas of cognition and space as they relate to the book will be explored further in the next chapter. As we leave Cymbeline, it is perhaps most important that we acknowledge the book's inherent strangeness in this play, its unreadability and unresolvability, its straddling of the worlds of dream and waking. This strangeness is the essence of its power to estrange, to make known things unknown, and—through an immaterial, unglossable, but transformative “simpathy,” not through the material and rational—to release, liberate, and resolve.

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CHAPTER 3 “Volumes That I Prize” The Spaces of the Book and the Mind in The Tempest

The “Physics” of the Book The Tempest is a play explicitly shaped by books but in which no book explicitly appears. As several critics have recently noticed, while Prospero's book is central to the action of Shakespeare's play, it remains a collection of references, an immaterial presence, not an object. The Tempest is “a play about the power of books that refuses to make a spectacle of the book,” as James Kearney puts it; in Paul Yachnin's formulation, “there are no books in this most bookish of plays.”1 It is not clear what conventions for the use of books as props were in operation on early seventeenth-century London stages, nor does the text of The Tempest offer any internal clues to what Prospero's book might look like or where it might appear, if at all.2 Both the play's controller and its dispossessed, Prospero and Caliban, testify to the book's (or books') existence in the world of the play: some choice “volumes” from Prospero's “Library” came along in the mastless boat from Milan (1.2.167); Caliban warns Stephano and Trinculo to “possesse his Bookes” and to “Burne but his Bookes” (3.2.92, 95); and Prospero vows to “drowne my booke” (5.1.57).3 But the play never actually requires a book to appear onstage—unlike other early modern plays featuring conjuring books, such as Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay or Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. In fact, at the only time a location for the book is mentioned, it is designated as offstage: Prospero says “Ile to my booke” to “performe / Much businesse” (3.1.94–96), an exit line that clears the stage at the end of the scene. Unlike Greene's and Marlowe's magicians, who pore over books, Prospero is Page 77 → never seen reading, and the First Folio stage direction for the opening of Act 5, just before Prospero's famous “abjuration” speech, specifies “Enter Prospero (in his Magicke robes)” but does not call for the book to accompany him.4 Nor does any character describe the magic books' appearance; we only get a suggestion of monumentality, or at least of weight, in the leadenness evoked in Prospero's plan to sink the book “deeper then did ever Plummett sound” (5.1.56).5 The textual effect of The Tempest is to evoke the book's presence by outlining its absence, to include it by leaving a space empty for it. The space of the book—not only of Prospero's book, but of early modern books more broadly—is the subject of this chapter. By “space,” I mean, however, not the literal space a book occupies but the metaphysical capacity that exists within it, as the book—or, rather, the kind of object that is the codex—is imaginatively constructed in the reader's mind. In early modern England, a book's symbolic power as an object is profound, because of the authority of written discourse and the authority of the Bible as the chief of books and because of the book's cultural capital as the record of history, as a storehouse of all knowledge, as the medium of salvation.6 Its authority also has to do, I would argue, with the material shape of a book (more specifically, the shape of a codex), which can be opened and closed, which has an inside and an outside, and which thus delineates and creates a kind of place, both literal and figurative, into which the reader enters. A book is, of course, a unique space, because far more can be contained inside it—information, images, worlds of knowledge and affect—than its portable outside would seem to allow. With the advent of silent reading and the rise of personal libraries, the book might be imagined not only as an object to be used in one's study or private space but, indeed, as itself a private space where the mind can go, a little room for contemplation, a wunderkammer full of the riches of nature and art. In becoming a space, the book becomes much more than a material object. I will argue here, in brief, that in the early modern English imagination, as Shakespeare invites it to engage with The Tempest, the book is a rich and distinct kind of place. In a 1602 satirical pamphlet, Samuel Rowlands portrays a bookseller's apprentice giving a sales pitch for a book that features “a Merrie meeting heere in London, betweene a Wife, a Widdow, and a Mayde.” The apprentice asks, “[I] s it not a prettie thing to carry Wife, Mayde, and Widdow in your pocket, when you may as it were conferre and heare them talke togither when you will?” The customer, hooked, exclaims, “Nay, if your Booke be

of such excellent quallitie and rare operation, wee must needs have some Traffique together.”7 This “rare Page 78 → operation” of the book, compassing much within its pocket-sized space, is to be wondered at whether the contents are natural philosophy or a colloquy of women. The book's sheer physics are marvelously impossible: there is more room inside it than its outside suggests; it occupies a new dimension. To open a book and read is to go somewhere else—here, into an erotic fantasy; elsewhere, into other worlds of knowledge. Kristen Poole has recently called on scholars to historicize our understanding of early modern space and motion, proposing a model of an “Ovidian physics” in which the world was understood as radically mutable and permeable.8 I will consider here an idea of the “physics” of the book: the book as a space and the properties of that space as they are conceptualized in the mind of the reader. The Tempest, a play with a book at its center and a background of travel literature and the “new cartography,” is keenly engaged with exploring how we experience and imagine place and space—through, I will argue, a kinetic mimesis as much as through a visual mode of representation. Its dramatizations of ideas of movement in space, specifically the action of containing and the spatial paradox of very small things encompassing very large things, are also linked to questions about the space of the human mind and the motion of thoughts. What happens in the brain when one thinks, dreams, or reads? Do ideas and concepts exist in space and have motion? How does one “visualize” things too large, too small, or too abstract to be seen with the eye? These are questions whose very terms of asking were in the process of being invented in the early seventeenth century.9 Elizabeth Spiller has argued that in the early modern period, in the moment of transition between scholasticism and empiricism, “art was not separate from the practices that became science but instrumental to them.”10 The Tempest's play with the space of the book seems to me to function as just this kind of intellectual experimentation. Thus, while the place of the book onstage in The Tempest is empty, it is not a vacuum: its space is a complex and dynamic, if imaginary, construct. In The Tempest, the book is a thing to think with, for Shakespeare and for us.11 The ideas of the movement of the mind and of imaginary space that I propose to take up within the context of The Tempest had been debated in the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages, and those debates were preserved and disseminated in printed books. Such questions had become newly relevant in relation to turn-of-the-seventeenthcentury advances in technologies of observation, such as the telescope, which empowered the eye to see things from a greater distance but at the same time revealed that not everything about the Page 79 → universe could be known visually, that worlds might exist beyond the limit of perception from Earth.12 The Tempest, I argue, uses the idea of a book—a thing that is both visible and inherently nonvisual, nonpictorial; an object both profoundly physical and powerfully metaphysical in the early modern imagination; and thus a useful model for thinking about perceptual paradoxes—as a reference point or touchstone for its kinetic experimentation. The play reminds us at regularly spaced intervals that are almost ceremonially precise—near the beginnings of Acts 1 (“volumes that I prize”), 3 (“Ile to my booke”), and 5 (“Ile drowne my booke”)—that the book is (or books are) the mainspring of the magic, the place where the power lies. Thus the idea of the book as a physical object delineates the play's structure and organizes its account of intellectual and physical authority, even as the book remains out of sight.13 The question of its form is suddenly posed in the final mention, “Ile drowne my booke”: is it a book, now, or books, as previously? Because of the moment's great formality and official, testamentary quality, this unexpected uncertainty both calls attention to the idea of the book's body and makes it more mysterious. Invisible in the written text, unstaged during the play as written (if almost always staged in performance),14 yet unquestionably a weighty presence throughout, Prospero's book serves as an apt conceptual tool for raising questions about what kind of sense enables one to perceive another invisible, impalpable, indefinable presence, the space of thought.

“Where Lies That?”: Inquiries into Materiality Epistemological questions about the double categories of materiality into which books might fall—what has a physical place and what is disembodied, what is solid and what is evanescent—are a central concern of The Tempest more broadly. These are concepts with which the play is uniquely positioned to experiment, because it unfolds in a romance world of magic and fantasy, where usual earthly physics and probabilities do not apply. Prospero's book resists its repeated naming by not appearing onstage, and it defies analysis by refusing to be limited even to singularity or multiplicity; such an ambiguous tangibility is characteristic of The Tempest. Early on, uncertainty about the corporeal world is one of the disorienting effects of the shipwreck. When Ferdinand first

appears, he says he has been following a sound of music, which he describes, strikingly, as if it were a living creature or a servant who attends. Page 80 → Where shold this Musick be? I'th aire, or th'earth? It sounds no more: and sure it waytes upon Some God'oth'Iland…. This Musicke crept by me upon the waters,… Allaying both their fury, and my passion With it's sweet ayre : thence I have follow'd it (Or it hath drawne me rather), but ’tis gone. (1.2.388–95) We usually ask where music is coming from, not where it might “be” or what it might be “in,” but Ferdinand perceives this music as a thing, capable of creeping and waiting. His correction of his own grammar in the last line underscores his sense of the music as a being with innate volition, which he might at any moment encounter in the flesh. It is one thing to wonder idly about a personified music, which is perfectly conventional, but the play makes it more interesting: since the music “is” Ariel, who appears visible to the audience, Ferdinand is literally correct to imagine it as an entity. The expected relationship between poetic image and the physical world—in which, in Sidney's terms, poetry's “freely ranging” world of images, “such as never were,” is perfectly immaterial, as opposed to Nature's solid, “brasen” reality15—is taken apart and remade. Ariel steps forward to inhabit the figurative space of Orpheus, so that we, as readers or spectators, can reengage with the old dialectic between art and reality as if it were as brave and new to us as the world is to Miranda. The idea of a concrete place for the immaterial is applied not just to figures of speech but also to mental states. Later, as he encourages Sebastian to assassinate Alonso, Antonio attempts to define the physical location of conscience. I Sir: where lies that? If ’twere a kybe ’Twould put me to my slipper: But I feele not This Deity in my bosome: Twentie consciences That stand ’twixt me, and Millaine, candied be they And melt ere they mollest: (2.1.277–81) Since he cannot feel conscience as he would a bunion, Antonio claims, it must not really exist, or it must be, while still material, so fragile as to “melt” at a touch. Sebastian accepts the proposition, and again the play uses its particular, Page 81 → vertiginous aesthetic to invert what the viewer would expect: rather than being taught the moral lesson that conscience is no less consequential for being merely conceptual, Sebastian is instead subjected to real pain, as he stands immobilized just before the denouement, feeling the same “pinches” with which Prospero punishes Caliban (5.1.77).16 It is not coincidental that, as Frederick Kiefer observes, “the concept of conscience in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is inextricably connected with the activities of

reading and writing.”17 Among many examples is King James's description of conscience in Basilicon Doron as “a Count-booke and Inventarie of all the crimes that wee shall be accused of, either at the houre of our death, or at the Great Day of Judgement,” while the preacher John Hughes, in 1622, imagines conscience as a set of two books that the individual compares within himself: “The one is a lawe-booke…. The other part is a Chronicle, or Registrie, wherein all our workes are written.”18 The metaphor of conscience as a book is drawn not only from the biblical idea of God's word written on the hearts of believers but also from the image of actual books of civil and canon law; it is thus a particularly compelling site for considering the essentially dual nature, at once concrete and figurative, of objects such as books. Most obviously, Prospero's masques and tableaux, like the illusory banquet that suddenly disappears, call into question—or, rather, stage elaborate moments of calling into question—what is solid and what is mere air. The conjurations seem so real as to make Sebastian and Antonio not only “beleeve / That there are Unicorns” (3.3.21–22) but believe anything at all: “what else do's want credit, come to me / And Ile be sworne ’tis true” (3.3.25–26). The neat appearance/reality contrast of this “quient device” (3.3.52.1), the traditional exposure of folly, is complicated, however, by the less easily allegorized masque of Ceres put on for Ferdinand and Miranda. Instead of using his powers to trick his audience, Prospero openly presents the masque as an illusion, an entertainment, and proudly explains its secrets. “May I be bold / To thinke these spirits?” asks Ferdinand. “Spirits, ” Prospero confirms, “which by mine Art / I have from their confines call'd to enact / My present fancies” (4.1.119–22).19 Rather than magic, the betrothal masque is pure theater, like the plays celebrating nuptials near the ends of Love's Labour's Lost or A Midsummer Night's Dream—or, indeed, like The Tempest, performed to celebrate the betrothal of James's daughter Princess Elizabeth. A last turn is given to these questions of how to define material and immaterial in the famous speech after the end of the masque, beginning “Our revels Page 82 → now are ended,” as Prospero so clearly seems to step partway through the dramatic illusion and refer to the “real” world outside the play. Again, the sentiments are thoroughly conventional, fusing “all the world's a stage” with a reminder of sic transit gloria mundi. like the baselesse fabricke of this vision— The Clowd-capt Towres, the gorgeous Pallaces, The solemne Temples, the great Globe it selfe, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantiall Pageant faded, Leave not a racke behinde: we are such stuffe As dreames are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleepe: (4.1.151–58) Readers of The Tempest have not failed to notice the metareference to the “great Globe”; what is less often discussed is that the entire lyrical speech, touched with a frisson of meta-awareness, is a smokescreen, an improvisation to cover the masque's sudden falling apart. Prospero becomes distracted and “starts sodainly,” at which the illusion fails and the spirit-actors disappear “heavily” (4.1.138.3–4)—that is, awkwardly, slowly, the opposite of lightly or agilely.20 He saves the moment with the elegiac lines about how all mortal matter is in time revealed as dust, but to turn the flopped masque into an allegory of the vanity of human life and the inevitability of death is a rather startling reinterpretation of what begins as an embarrassing technical glitch. Prospero improvises and turns the collapse of the masque into a metaconceit. Theater usually exposes the folly of the world through its normal, successful working—“Life's but a walking Shadow, a poore Player, / That struts and frets his houre upon

the Stage / And then is heard no more” (Macbeth 5.5.23–25)—but the analogy here is not the same; even the allotted “hour upon the stage” has been cut untimely off, and the simile becomes more complex. Is the “baseless fabric” of the “insubstantial pageant” baseless and insubstantial as compared to “real life” (because it is a theatrical illusion) or as compared to The Tempest (because it is an imperfect theatrical illusion)? Who are the “spirits” who “melt[] into thin Ayre” at the end of a play, and does the solid and corporeal include Iris, Juno, and Ceres or Prospero, Ferdinand, and Miranda? The whole masque emerges from Prospero's book; he is presumably planning the masque as well as the banquet illusion Page 83 → when he withdraws “to my book” at the end of Act 3, Scene 1. Amid the play's use of books to explore questions of physicality and metaphysicality, it is fitting that it should carry the standard juxtaposition of theatricality and reality a step farther and revivify that clichéd trope.

Books and “Volumes” As it turns out, books and physical space are linked at the most basic etymological level, particularly in the early seventeenth century, when the word volume first began to acquire its geometric meaning. When Prospero initially describes to Miranda his devotion to study, he speaks in terms of space, of a geographical equivalent: “my Librarie / Was Dukedome large enough” (1.2.109–10). Thus, when he next describes the loyal service of Gonzalo—“Knowing I lov'd my bookes, he furnishd me / From mine owne Library with volumes, that / I prize above my Dukedome” (1.2.166–68)—we are prepared, through the spatial equation of library and dukedom and through the value comparison of dukedom and books, to hear in Prospero's reference to “volumes” a reference to both “tomes” and “spaces” or “capacities.” Indeed, even as The Tempest suggests that books have an intrinsic volume, there is evidence that the concept of volume as “capacity” or “size” was itself intricately connected with the idea of the book in the early seventeenth century. The word volume comes from the Latin volumen, meaning “coil, wreath, roll,” and was originally used in English (the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Wycliffe, in 1382) in an exclusively bibliographical sense, to mean a roll or scroll of parchment and, by extension, any material text, whether scroll or codex.21 During the sixteenth century, while keeping the basic meaning of “book,” volume appears to expand in possible usages and connotations. In the vast majority of usages from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, volume either refers literally to actual books or plays figuratively on the idea of a book as a commodious container for text.22 Many figurative usages compare a book's hoard of words to a quantity or collection of some other kind of immaterial quality, such as virtues or vices, joys or sorrows—as in Jonson's The Case is Altered, from the late 1590s, in which the Count Ferneze bewails the deaths of his two sons and his wife, “Which last being printed with my other griefes, / Doth make so huge a volume, that my brest / Cannot containe them” (3.7; emphasis added). In a comic vein, in Chapman's play Byron's Conspiracy Page 84 → (1608), King Henry refers to a specific book in commenting on a voluble courtier, “[H]e hath talkt a Volume greater than the Turkes Alcaron” (5.1). Other uses follow the ancient and medieval metaphoric tradition in which a book can stand for anything about which a great deal exists to be known. Daniel's 1604 masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses has Iris describing the “mysticall Ideas, dispersed in that wide, and incomprehensible volume of Nature.” Josuah Sylvester's 1621 translation of du Bartas's poem Divine Weekes and Works observes that “The World's a Book in Folio” and regrets that we humans “never farther for our lesson look / Within the Volume of this various Book” (ll. 183, 191–92). In Romeo and Juliet (1599), Shakespeare's Lady Capulet urges Juliet to “Read ore the volume of young Paris face / And find delight, writ there with Beauties pen” (1.3.81–82). Clearly, many writers use the word volume to conjure specifically the image of a book of notable size, big in bulk as well as containing a vast amount of information. It is perhaps by association with the idea of large books that the term eventually developed its other modern meaning, of “size” or “geometric dimensions” more abstractly—though at first, importantly, only in relation to the size of books. Jehan Palsgrave's 1530 FrenchEnglish dictionary Lesclarcissement de la langue françoys lists “Volym, for the largeness of a boke,” while John Brinsley's 1612 Ludus Literarius, or The Grammar Schoole, recommends to students, “The fittest volume for their writing booke is, to haue them in quarto.” Metaphorical and literal usages become combined in an exchange in Middleton's comedy Your Five Gallants (1608), in which a potential customer inquires slyly about a prostitute, “Of what volume is this booke, that I may fit a cover too't?” The pimp replies, “Faith, neither in folio, nor in

Decimo-sexto, but in Octavo betweene both, a prety middle sizde trug” (1.1). Notably, it is not until 1621 that the Oxford English Dictionary records the first usage of volume meaning “size” in general, not in relation to books. In his devotional poem “Esther,” Francis Quarles describes the ideal relationship between prince and subjects as being of degree, not kind: “So shall his people even as well as He / Princes (though in a lesser volume) be” (1.83–84). The distinction of meaning is blurred, however, a few verses later, when Quarles uses volume again in the usual, metaphorical, bookish way, asking, of God, “What language shall I use…T’abridge the mighty volume of his worth?” (8.114–15); the OED does not cite these later lines, but reread in their light, the earlier passage may contain the idea of smaller and larger editions of the same book. Many other ambiguous uses that may or may not allude to books appear in Page 85 → the 1630s and onward: when, in Henry Glapthorne's play The Ladies Priviledge (1640), the Genoan Vitelli lauds his friend “to whose spacious merit / Succession shall pay volumes,” it is difficult to determine whether a very submerged metaphor of reputation or honor as a book is in play—indicating whole books of homage—or if “volumes” denotes simply a great deal of praise. The first example that I find of volume meaning “size” without a book or the idea of one anywhere in sight is in Fanshawe's 1647 translation of Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, in the young swain Mirtillo's description of kissing Amaryllis. My heart (Ergasto) to say true, Was at my mouth, and my soul shrunk into A narrow volume; ’twas one kiss, whence all My limbs stood tott'ring like an ill propt wall.23 The passage employs figurative, concretizing language, but it is architectural, not bibliographical; volume seems to have left behind the prop of an association with ideas of the book and to have sprouted a new, separate meaning. Shakespeare's own use of volume encompasses literal books, whose voluminousness is emphasized (Don Armado, inspired with the poetic muse, proclaims, “I am for whole volumes in folio” [Love's Labour's Lost 1.2.176–77]); figurative books, such as Paris's face and, in the promise to “cop[y]” the ghost's words into “the Book and Volume of my Braine” [1.5.101–3], Hamlet's mind); and ambiguously bookish metaphors.24 The Old Man in Macbeth seems to blend Hamlet's book of memory with a more general idea of expansiveness: “Threescore and ten I can remember well / Within the Volume of which Time, I have seene / Houres dreadfull, and things strange” (2.4.1–3); similarly, Imogen's line in Cymbeline “I'th'world's Volume / Our Britaine seemes as of it, but not in't” (3.4.138–39), glances at, without articulating, the idea of a bound atlas. Perhaps it is more than just a joke that Stephano invites Caliban to drink by commanding, “[K]isse the Booke: I will furnish it anon with new Contents: Sweare” (2.2.139–40). Stephano's bottle, almost empty, is a hollow container, a “volume” of air. It is all material and no spiritual substance—or else its “contents” are “Celestiall liquor” (2.2.115), a rather more fleshly kind of “spirit”—and it draws attention to the book's undeniably physical nature.25 Thus we see a word for “book” evolving, over the fairly short time between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-seventeenth, from the literal to the figurative, from the concrete and nominative to the descriptive and qualitative, Page 86 → and, most important, from origins in the technical terminology of books into a much broader field of signification. While keeping in mind, of course, the limitations of the surveying methods used, we may venture to suggest that in the early seventeenth century, a thought about geometrical volume—literal or imaginative, about the capacity of a vessel or the contraction of a bashful soul—remains close, associatively, to its origins as a thought about the book. By the same token, as soon as it was possible to think about volume as a dimension, the latent implications of concreteness, commodiousness, and spatiality in the word's use with reference to books must have been reinforced and reified.

“A Built or Constructed Mind”: Memory as a Place, the Book as a Place

The idea of books as spaces, evident in the etymology of volume, is also rooted in the rhetoric of scholarly practices, such as the medieval ars memoria and early modern humanist print publishing. Comparisons between memory and the book actually predate books per se, dating back to antiquity and wax tablets. Cicero gives an account of memory in the Partitiones oratoriae. [M]emory…is in a manner the twin sister of writing and is completely similar to it, [though] in a dissimilar medium. For just as script consists of marks indicating letters and of the material on which those marks are imprinted, so the structure of memory, like a wax tablet, employs places and in these gathers together images like letters.26 In her landmark work on medieval mnemonic practices, The Book of Memory, Mary Carruthers has observed that images of the mind as a book in which memories are written pervade the literature of the memory arts.27 Linked to the idea of memory as a book is the equally strong sense of memory as a place, quite concretely envisioned, as in the occult memory “theaters” of the Renaissance that Frances Yates describes, in vast and elaborately detailed structures.28 Gunter Walch has argued that the scene in which Prospero asks Miranda if she recalls their voyage to the island makes reference to this practice of “artificial” memory, in which “houses” and figures are used as sites onto which associations are projected.29 Page 87 → PROS[PERO]:

Canst thou remember

A time before we came unto this Cell?… MIRA[NDA]: PROS:

Certainely Sir, I can. By what? by any other house, or person?

Of any thing the Image, tell me, that Hath kept with thy remembrance. (1.2.38–44) The formlessness of “time” must be fixed onto a solid object such as a “house or person,” assigned a place, to be remembered. Such houses or theaters, one of which was actually modeled in wood by Giulio Camillo in 1532, were imagined not just as taking up part of the mind but as the whole, controlling function of thought, to which all other mental faculties were subordinate. In a letter to Erasmus, Vigilus Zuichemus wrote that Camillo calls this theater of his by many names, saying now that it is a built or constructed mind, and now that it is a windowed one. He pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive…everything that is thus hidden in the depths of the human mind.30 The memory theater turns things in the material world into immaterial images in the mind; it can be as large as necessary, can encompass as much as the owner needs to know, and yet fits into the finite space of the individual brain. Camillo took the extraordinary step of reconstructing his theater in physical form, so that others might see the contents of his mind; a more common practice of Renaissance humanists, of course, was to compile a “built or constructed mind” by composing and perhaps publishing a book. Books, too, could be maps of the author's mind, and through the information transmitted, they represent in concrete form a part of the reader's mind as well.31 Walter Ong argued that the memory theater, with its “places” for thought, had a massive impact on the formal evolution of the printed book. In the sixteenth century, because information was imagined as residing in “places”

in the memory, Ong claimed, books themselves became increasingly regarded as objects or places, as evidenced by their titles and the vocabulary used to describe their Page 88 → parts. From genitive-case titles that announce what issue they address, as in Cicero's De fato or Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae, Ong noted, books began to be printed under nominative titles that announce what kind of thing they are: examples include Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour (1531), Hoby's translation of The Book of the Courtier (1561), and Rainolde's A Book Called the Foundation of Rhetoric (1563).32 In authors', printers', and readers' imaginations, books, Ong said, with their new scholarly apparatus, became “hollow objects or receptacles with ‘contents’ which could be charted in a ‘table’ or ranged, for the first time, in a ‘place indicator’ (index locorum).”33 Ong's classic account is part of his larger narrative of the Renaissance as a profoundly visual culture, leaving behind the orality/aurality of the Middle Ages. I would argue that the innovative navigational aids he cites, such as tables of contents, running heads, paragraphing, marginal glossing, and indexes, are not purely or primarily graphic or visual devices; although, obviously, meant to be seen, they are also, in some sense, kinetic, because they facilitate moving through the text, skimming, matching widely spaced references, and thus manipulating the material space of the book.34 Spatiality and a sense of movement, it seems to me, are not synonymous with visuality and the graphic, and it is with the dynamics of space in the book that I believe The Tempest is engaged. In the next section, I will discuss the kinetic imagery of The Tempest and the way in which its central motif of motion in space—the small engulfing the large—is itself one of the characteristic actions that books perform in the reader's imagination.

Gaping Drops, Crammed Ears, and “Romance Kinesis” In beginning with a shipwreck, The Tempest locates itself squarely within the bookish conventions of romance, evoking the popular romance narratives of long journeys and joyful reunions, utter losses and miraculous restorations.35 One could thus argue that the play opens on a metaliterary note—also a characteristic of romance—by acknowledging the audience's expectations of a story in this mode and by making reference to the many romance narratives in poetry and prose whose plots turn on such devices, as well as to tragicomic dramas, including Shakespeare's own Pericles. At the same time, however, this first scene, plunging the audience directly onto an out-of-control ship about to founder in the middle of a wild thunderstorm of wind, rain, and lightning, is perhaps the most violent, immediate, viscerally physical opening of any of Page 89 → Shakespeare's plays.36 Macbeth begins with lightning and thunder, and Hamlet begins in darkness and confusion, but The Tempest overgoes them both. Significantly, some critics (in addition to citing the shipwreck as a romance convention) have noted the scene's “realism,” adducing its accurate nautical jargon as evidence for Shakespeare's interest in seafaring. Perhaps this realism effect is actually a mark of the scene's kinetic success in making one feel as though one were physically experiencing the moment.37 My claim for a “kinetic” quality to the play's language does not imply that visual or auditory imagery is not important in its aesthetic. The play exhibits, in its masque and tableau scenes (3.3, 4.1), a distinctively visual awareness that has been linked to the Jacobean court fashion for masque, while its sonic palette, as Margaret Tudeau-Clayton observes, is rich with music, onomatopoeia, and many other kinds of “noise”;38 it is also often suggested to have taken particular advantage of the possibilities for both visual effect and more elaborate music that were presented by the new Blackfriars indoor theater.39 It is interesting, however, that seeing and hearing are each described at least once in the play with images of visceral physicality. The words Prospero uses to instruct Miranda to look at Ferdinand for the first time emphasize the materiality of her eyelids themselves, as if eyes were a tactile organ, like fingers or feelers: “The fringed Curtains of thine eye advance, / And say what thou see'st yond” (1.2.409–10).40 Alonso describes hearing with a similar corporeal intensity when he is unhappily reminded of his daughter's marriage: “You cram these words into mine eares, against / the stomacke of my sense” (2.1.107–8). Images of physicality, used to convey the evidence of sight and sound, permeate ideas of sight and sound themselves. The vividness and, indeed, the gastrointestinal impact (“the stomach of my sense”) in these lines are typical of the “kinetic” effect I am discussing. Descriptions of the storm at sea, at four different moments in the play, foreground dynamic images of engulfing or swallowing. In the midst of the gale, Gonzalo imagines the sea eager to swallow the Boatswain: “every drop of water…gape[s] at widst to glut him” (1.1.58–59). (Later, Prospero recalls how he freed Ariel from the tree: “It was mine Art /…that made gape / The Pyne” [1.2.291–93]—in this case, a “gape”

precedes spitting out, not swallowing.) Immediately afterward, Miranda laments the plight of the mariners. Had I byn any God of power, I would Have suncke the Sea within the Earth, or ere Page 90 → It should the good Ship so have swallow'd, and The fraughting Soules within her. (1.2.10–13) She imagines a double swallowing, manipulating in her mind, God-like, first the earth engulfing the sea, then the sea surrounding the ship (which itself contains the sailors). Recalling the experience, Antonio says, “[W]e all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast againe” (2.1.251); to “cast” is to vomit, something only humans and animals do, and the hugeness of the sea is thus shrunk in the space of a sentence to the size of some creature with an upset stomach. Ariel uses the same idiom when he tells the Neapolitans that “destiny…the never surfeited Sea / Hath caus'd to belch up you” (3.3.53–56). In an echo of this series of images, Ariel later describes his own swift forward motion as a swallowing of space: “I drinke the aire before me, and returne / Or ere your pulse twice beate” (5.1.102–3). The play seems to return not simply to the idea of one thing swallowing another but specifically to the possibility of something tiny swallowing something huge—a single drop of water gapes for the body of a man, and a mere body thirsts for the vast expanse of the air. This sensation, while evoked in numerous contexts in the play, is, I argue, related to the containing function of an encyclopedia, a book that, in Renaissance humanist scholarship, attempts to gather into a small space all the information in the world, to achieve a compendious compactness.41 An example we might add under this heading is Gonzalo's cry during the storm, “Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an Acre of barren ground: Long heath, Browne firrs, any thing” (1.1.65–67): since a linear acre is the same as a furlong, Gonzalo is not just expressing a fervent wish to exchange ocean for solid ground but is more explicitly setting equal to each other a thousand units and one unit, asking us to imagine first a vast expanse of featureless sea and then, immediately afterward, a small, familiar patch of ground (covered in humble English shrubs). This vertiginous sense of movement, of swooping from one order of magnitude to another, is present at other moments in the play.42 As Sebastian and Antonio keep up a running criticism of Gonzalo's utopia, they sketch a neat oscillation from micro to macro, imagining an island in a man's pocket and an apple filled with baby islands. SEB [ASTIAN]:

I thinke hee will carry this Island home in his pocket, and give it his sonne for an Apple.

Page 91 → ANT[ONIO]:

And sowing the kernels of it in the Sea, bring forth more Islands.

(2.1.91–94)43 As we saw in the quotation from Rowlands earlier in this chapter, of course, books were also things to be carried home in a pocket; carrying books around in pockets was one of the reading practices that enabled close associations between reading, privacy, and reflection. Early modern rural lore held that fairies were tiny beings, and Ariel seems to borrow his shape-shifting characteristic from the folkloric fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who are there said to wear bats' skins as coats and use bees' thighs for candles (2.2.4–5 and 3.1.162) but are played by human beings, being at once small and large. Thus a human-sized actor playing Ariel in The Tempest stands before the audience and sings, “Where the Bee sucks, there suck I, / In a Cowslips bell, I lie…On the Batts back I doe flie” (5.1.89–91), creating another

image of the small containing or coexisting with the large. These examples are visual images of rural life, of course, of bees and cowslips by day and bats by night, as much as they are kinetic evocations of sucking, lying, and flying. But in thinking about these and other moments of engulfing, I would argue that the reader's or listener's experience of these descriptions—the gaping drop, the gulps of air—is overwhelmingly, even exclusively, physical rather than pictorial.44 In the same way that Prospero's “art” transforms will into matter, and in the same way that the theater transforms language into act, The Tempest's kinetic mode of representation turns ideas into physicalized imagery. It is not only in romance, of course, that Shakespeare manipulates this physicalized aesthetic of small containing large. Notably, Shakespeare's most explicit comment on the nature of theatrical representation, the Chorus's famous prologue to Henry V, sets the issue not in terms of visual illusion, of convincing the eye, but in the kinetic language of containing that also characterizes The Tempest. Can this Cock-Pit hold The vastie fields of France? Or may we cramme Within this woodden O, the very Caskes That did affright the Ayre at Agincourt? (1.0.11–14; emphasis added) Page 92 → This passage is often cited in stage histories of Shakespeare to explain how the early modern theater was a sensorium not of the eye but of the ear, in which rich language made up for visual barrenness. Others have countered that the passage is “splendidly disingenuous,” that it “assumes a potent expectation of…visual pleasure, ” and that it “harnesses speech to the…muse of the eye.”45 Setting aside the question of just how bare the Renaissance stage actually was,46 I suggest that members of the audience, who are asked to think about their physical experience of their surroundings, are incited not to visual or even auditory pleasure (except for the alliteration in line 14, this is not a particularly musical or sonically gripping passage) as much as to the kinetic pleasure of the ideas of action and movement. The building they stand or sit in, the Chorus says, is not an inert structure but actively a container, a dynamic space whose properties of “holding” are, at this moment, part of an experiment—Can it hold? May we cram?—that places something at stake in one's very awareness of being inside it. The Chorus's words turn the “O” from “woodenness” into plasticity and make the spectators feel not just crowded, as they presumably were in the Globe's galleries and yard, but excitingly crammed and, indeed, part of the cramming, themselves bodily incorporated into the theatrical mimesis.47 The theater is an encyclopedia of places, compressing the world into its confines. However, The Tempest's preoccupation with containing is a particularly appropriate one for romance, that most heterogeneous of modes, which omnivorously, encyclopedically, contains all other literary forms: in The Tempest, these include revenge play (staging Prospero's revenge against Antonio), “festive” comedy (since the play was performed to celebrate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth), utopian writing (Gonzalo's “plantation”), travel account (perhaps, interestingly, most clearly in Caliban's wondering, “The isle is full of noises”), and lyric (Ariel's songs). Yet partly because of what it does not contain—a wide geographical or chronological span—the relationship of The Tempest to the other “late romances” is complicated. Romance's tendency to reach for vast expanses of space and time—as do, for instance, Pericles and The Winter's Tale—had always been one of its early modern critics' formal objections to it. In The Defence of Poesy, Sidney, writing in the 1580s, devotes a long section to a critique of sixteenth-century tragicomedies, mostly forgotten by modern scholars but popular on the Tudor stage, such as Clyomon and Clamides, The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, and Valentine and Orson. Based on the chivalric romance narratives popular since the Middle Ages, these plays feature Page 93 → such fairy-tale elements as miraculous escapes from shipwreck, magic shields, and flying horses, as well as exotic and far-flung destinations.

[Y]ou shall have Asia of the one side, and Affricke of the other, and so manie other under Kingdoms, that the Player when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or the tale will not be conceived. Now you shall have three Ladies walke to gather flowers, and then we must beleeve the stage to be a garden. By and by we heare news of shipwrack in the same place, then we are too blame if we accept it not for a Rock. Upon the back of that, comes out a hidious monster with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a Cave: while in the meane time two Armies fly in, represented with foure swords & bucklers, and then what hard hart will not receive it for a pitched field. Now of time, they are much more liberall. For ordinarie it is, that two yoong Princes fall in love, after many traverses she is got with childe, delivered of a faire boy: he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is readie to get an other childe, and all this in two houres space: which howe absurd it is in sence, even sence may imagine…. But they will say, how shall we set foorth a storie, which contains both many places, and many times? …[M]any things may be told which cannot be shewed, if they know the difference betwixt reporting and representing. As, for example, I may speake though I am here, of Peru, and in speech digresse from that, to the description of Calecut: But in action, I cannot represent it without Pacolets Horse.48 In short, it is not acceptable for the same small space, the stage, to hold so many different places. Sidney's voicing of the unspoken protests of a weary audience trying to follow a romance plot is remarkably vivid (“we are to blame if we accept it not,” “miserable beholders,” “what hard heart will not receive it”), implying significant tension in this question of representation. For Sidney, the problem is the shortcomings of materialization: the “story” can “contain[]…many places, and many times,” as can the mind—“I may speake, though I am here, of Peru”—but not the wooden “O.” In his view, the theater operates not in the space of the imagination but in real space, which is far less elastic. Sidney's views on drama had not become passé by 1611—Jonson, for one, believed in honoring the supposed classical unities—and The Tempest, on one Page 94 → level, follows the advice of the Defence of Poesy. In referring to faraway places like Tunis and Bermuda and long-ago events in “the dark-backward and Abisme of Time” (1.2.50) without bringing them onstage, The Tempest can work within the tradition of time-leaping, continent-traveling romances and yet remain ostentatiously tightly plotted, giving its island-bound characters nowhere else to go (like suspects in a locked-room mystery) and offering regular reminders of what time it is, which tie the action of the play to “real time” (when Prospero hears from Ariel, early in the play, that it is just past two, he declares, “The time ’twixt six & now / Must by us both be spent most preciously” [1.2.240–41]). Deliberately closing itself off to the sprawling expanses of time and geography that other plays embrace, contracting the shaggy-dog format of romance into a crystalline focus, The Tempest invests instead in extravagances of imaginary motion. At the same time, its attention to this ongoing debate about appropriate modes of dramatic mimesis creates another dimension to its central question of material and immaterial space.

Imaginary Space and Intellectual Volition in Early Modern Natural Philosophy “Real” space, the real dimensions and structure of the universe, was a subject of much speculation and debate in the intellectual culture of medieval and early modern Europe. In the classical theory of Aristotle, space was made up of a finite series of concentric, crystalline spheres, progressing outward from the earth, on which the planets and stars moved in fixed circles. Beyond the outermost sphere of the fixed stars was nothing—neither matter nor empty space nor time. Medieval theologians struggled to reconcile this theory with the belief that God is everywhere and that he is infinite, while also attempting, as the mid-fourteenth-century archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Bradwardine puts it in his De causa Dei contra Pelagium (1344), to respond to the impertinent “questions of the gentiles and heretics—‘Where is your God? And, where was God before the creation of the world?’” Bradwardine concludes that we must imagine a “God-filled extracosmic void space,” that God must be “beyond the real world in a place, or in an imaginary infinite void.”49 The implications of “imaginary” space—the idea that some properties of the universe could not be understood through the evidence of the senses—opened up for theologians a way of thinking logically about many aspects of doctrine that are difficult to visualize. Page 95 →

It is perhaps not irrelevant that Bradwardine also wrote one of the more important medieval treatises on the building of memory systems, De Memoria Artificiali (ca. 1335). Two features of Bradwardine's text are particularly noteworthy: first, he advises students to imagine each memory place as a large rectangular space, like a “page or tablet”; second, he insists, for readier recall, on “active, even violent” motion in each image, such as fighting animals or babies being born. Bradwardine recommends flipping and manipulating images for double meanings: an abbot stands for the syllable “ab-”; and a student may remember “ba-” by imagining turning the abbot over so that he stands on his head.50 Bradwardine's creative role in the doctrine of imaginary space, I suggest, may have been inspired by the thought he had devoted to the kind of malleable, mobile, imaginary places—violent movement in the spaces of pages of a book—found in his memory system. In the Renaissance, protoempiricism gave rise to new theoretical models. Drawing on medieval sources, Renaissance thinkers considered abstract thought, reading, and other forms of cognition to be kinetic motions that happened within mental space. The impact of the “new science” on the early modern literary imagination—as well as the highly literary (as opposed to purely empirical) approaches and techniques of some of its practitioners—have been considered by several critics.51 In her classic essay “Milton and the Telescope,” Marjorie Nicolson argues that the “cosmic perspective” that Milton offers the reader—the sweeping vistas that Satan shows Christ in Paradise Regained, for instance, or, in Paradise Lost, the “sensation of the sudden view at far distance, when as with Satan we look ‘down with wonder at the sudden view / Of all this World at once’” (3.542–43)—reveals the influence of the telescope on Milton's poetics.52 Nicolson believes strongly that Milton must have had the experience of looking through such an instrument, not just that of reading about it, and she argues generally for a distinctive Miltonic/telescopic “vision.” Nevertheless, some of the examples of “telescopic” imagery that she finds seem more like moments when the visual fails, as in Paradise Lost's description of Chaos —a dark Illimitable Ocean without bound, Without dimension; where length, breadth, & highth, And time and place are lost. (2.891–94) Page 96 → This passage “reflects the new space of telescopic astronomy,” Nicolson says, and reveals “the expansion of imagination astronomy has produced.”53 Although Nicolson does not refer to the influence of medieval ideas of the cosmos, I argue that Milton explores not just a new, telescopically enlarged way of seeing but also a longestablished way of thinking about space that requires the imagination to contain what even the glass of a telescope cannot. No one can see darkness and dimensionlessness—these void spaces, although now documented and real rather than “imaginary,” must still be understood in the way Archbishop Bradwardine suggested. Indeed, as Anthony Grafton has argued, early modern theories about the world owed much to preempirical science.54 For instance, the controversy over Copernicus's and Galileo's claims about the motion of the Earth—that it orbited the Sun, rather than the reverse—brought newly to the fore questions dating to the Middle Ages about the motion of thoughts. Scholars of the history of the book have recently pointed out that we should balance our impression of the printing press as the vehicle of Renaissance humanism, producing editions of the classics and new works in the vernacular, with the persistence of medieval materials: the copy-texts for up to three-fourths of the books printed in the sixteenth century in England were medieval in origin.55 It has also been argued that we should recognize the extent to which the empirical observations of the new science were actually based in reading and that reading remained the major paradigm for learning about the world even as science based on hands-on experiment ascended in importance. Grafton notes, “Most sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century scientists…saw their duty not as discovering facts never before seen and drawing inferences from them but as assembling facts from reliable sources in a new and revealing order. Most scientific research took the form of a

search for experientia litterata, the written records of scientific facts, ancient or modern.”56 Given this dependence of all kinds of scholarship on what we would now call “secondary” research, Grafton says, it is not surprising that reading became a more general symbol for learning: “Reading in Kepler's time remained western culture's central, normal way of obtaining important information. Indeed, it offered the model…for all complex forms of learning.”57 Spiller, meanwhile, demonstrates that telescopes themselves were understood as a kind of reading technology. Quoting a number of accounts in which Galileo, Thomas Digges, Roger Bacon, and others prove the efficacy of their telescopes by inviting the skeptical to read inscriptions on faraway buildings Page 97 → through the instruments, explicitly rather than offering to show them the moon or other astronomical objects, Spiller argues, Reading was often associated with the telescope because both were understood as powerful but potentially dangerous ways of acquiring knowledge. As the recurrence of such stories suggests, what reading did was surprisingly analogous to what the telescope did: both were tools that worked across distance and made it possible to see things that were otherwise inaccessible.58 While Spiller's connection between the book and the telescope as tools for bringing distant things close is entirely apt, I suggest that their relationship to the sense of sight is a point on which they are different rather than congruent: while reading does, of course, take place through the eye, and while early modern printers and engravers invested effort in making books visually pleasing and interesting, reading is not fundamentally a visual experience. As soon as one becomes fluent at reading, one is not really aware of marks on a page—the letters turn seamlessly into meaning, and it is the mind that “sees.” The activity of the mind, specifically in reading, was a parallel concern for early modern observers who investigated the movement of the heavens. Among the medieval authors consulted by Renaissance scientists were the works of John Duns Scotus, a late thirteenth-century Oxford theologian and philosopher. Duns Scotus was engaged in disproving Aristotle's dictum Omne quod movetur ab alio movetur, “Everything that is moved is moved by something else,” which he replaced with a doctrine of “universal self-motion.”59 For Duns Scotus, this explained various phenomena, such as hot water becoming cool through no apparent cause, but his prime example was the motion of thought, of ideas and desires: “If the intellect moves itself to think and the will moves itself to willing, there is no need of an outside mover to account for this. Therefore not everything that moves is moved by another.”60 Because of his republication in print in the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries (in at least twenty-nine editions between 1475 and 1650, including a complete works in 1638 that is still the standard text for some of his writings), Duns Scotus had a continuing voice in early modern scientific discourse. His works are included in the Cambridge University syllabus recorded in the Royal Injunctions of 1538.61 When Galileo composed his own refutation of Aristotelian physics, De Motu, in the early 1590s, Duns Scotus was an important source, whom Page 98 → Galileo cites by name.62 As Spiller shows in her analysis of scientific exchanges between Thomas Hobbes and Margaret Cavendish, the question of what kind of motions the brain makes while reading remained an active subject of debate into the seventeenth century.63 The mind, in the favorite Renaissance formulation, is a microcosm of the universe; but in the light of turn-of-the-century revelations about its order and extent, the universe was beginning to seem less like a beautiful machine and more like a limitless wilderness, still in the infinitely perfect control of God, but less comprehensible to humans. It is in reading that the small space of the book and the small space of the brain can contain universe-sized ideas; as Stephano exults anarchically in The Tempest, “Thought is free” (3.2.123). The physics of thoughts and the physics of books, allowing infinite expandability and contractability, helped early modern scientists model the imagined spaces of the cosmos.

“Cartographic Vision” versus Romance Space In a sense, questions about space and place have dominated criticism of The Tempest since the 1980s: the space of the New World and the play's engagement with the geographically inflected power structures of colonialism have been explored in many studies.64 Building on these investigations, a number of critics have addressed place and space more literally in the play, examining the effect of the “new cartography”—the sixteenth-century revolution in accuracy and availability of maps due to technological advances in geographic and drafting methods—on the early modern literary imagination as it is reflected in The Tempest.65 The publication in 1570 of Abraham

Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and the 1595 appearance of Gerard Mercator's Atlas, both high-volume sellers in their Latin and early seventeenth-century English editions, had a profound influence on literal and figurative worldviews in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. P. D. A. Harvey asserts that “maps were little understood or used” before the Tudor “cartographic revolution” but that “mapmindedness” soon spread so thoroughly that “by the end of the sixteenth century the map-maker could see any literate person as a potential customer”—that to be able to read was to be interested in reading maps.66 Meanwhile, Renaissance maps borrowed their rhetorical presentations from the discourse of theatrical spectacle (with titles such as Ortelius's evoking the concept of theatrum mundi), while commercial playhouses borrowed Page 99 → theirs from cartography—as in, most obviously, the Globe.67 Such usages participate, of course, in the ancient philosophical paradigm of microcosm and macrocosm (ubiquitous to the point of cliché in the Renaissance), which imply that “all the world's a stage” and, chiastically, that the public stage is a speculum of all the world, where one may see Hamlet's Denmark and Tamburlaine's Scythia.68 John Gillies asserts, however, that in the shadow of the new maps, the metaphorical chiasmus is not symmetrical; that this semantic relationship actually “masked an intellectual, generic, and linguistic struggle.” According to Gillies, “[c]artography was becoming so powerful as a means both of modeling and manipulating space” that “[t]heater could easily have drifted into a position of subordination,” relegated to simply imitating the splendor of maps.69 Shakespeare, he argues, responds by staging this “struggle” in drama, “represent[ing] cartographized space not as absolute but as contingent upon different human spatial practices,”70 “humanizing” space in the manner examined by Gaston Bachelard and by the philosopher Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space. According to Gillies's reading, dramatic mimesis in this cultural moment must confront a rival “cartographic vision” and must offer a competing mode of representation, one that socializes mere space by investing it with deeper, human meaning. Certainly, The Tempest is interested in the discourses of geography, in navigation, and even, arguably, in maps. Indeed, Prospero's famous “valediction” that I cited near the beginning of this chapter, “deeper then did ever Plummett sound / Ile drowne my booke,” is itself a reference to a kinetic technology of navigation: the depth of coastal waters measured by a lead plummet would correspond to a point on a chart and thus confirm location, transforming a linear measurement into a three-dimensional position. At the same time, in a way entirely of a piece with its participation in the romance genre, its references to places and voyages are overdetermined, productive of a rich sense of foreignness rather than simply indicative. Yet it is not that the overlaid references to locations west and east create a cumulative effect of placelessness, as some have argued,71 but that they are all part of a pervasive fascination with place itself, allowing the play to be about an idea of place and space rather than about an Old or New World. As examples of the text's eclectic appropriation of the revelations of early modern maritime exploration, we might note the way in which navigational and quantitative terms serve as foils to the language of the broadly fanciful in Antonio's description of the distance between Italy and North Africa. Claribel, he says, is Page 100 → She that is Queene of Tunis: she that dwels Ten leagues beyond mans life: she that from Naples Can have no note, unlesse the Sun were post: The Man i'th Moone's too slow, till new-borne chinnes Be rough, and Razor-able:… SEB [ASTIAN]:

’Tis true my brothers daughter's Queene of Tunis,

So is she heyre of Naples, ’twixt which regions There is some space.

ANT[ONIO]:

A space, whose ev'ry cubit

Seems to cry out, how shall that Claribell Measure us backe to Naples? (2.1.246–60) Antonio leaps in to fill the “some space” of Sebastian's cautious understatement with a dynamic jumble of travel speech. Repeated, recognizable (if romance-exotic) place-names and the potential for actual measurement in “leagues” and “cubits” are set against the man in the moon, the image of bearded babies, and the detail that the cubits talk, making Antonio's directions sound like Peter Pan's “Third star on the right and straight on ’till morning,” romance language occupying, for comic effect, the syntax of exactness.72 The contrast here between the precise and the fantastic recalls, skeptically perhaps, the juxtaposition of “real” botanical and zoological observations in explorers' reports, such as Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana, with what seem incongruous fictions to modern sensibilities, such as the reports Ralegh transmits of the headless race of the Blemmyes—which Ralegh not only credits but offers as proof of the truth of Mandeville's Travels, that collection of sideshow attractions “held for fables many yeares” by its Elizabethan readership.73 Further, encountering Ariel's much-quoted use of the specific place-name of the Bermudas, we can see that it is figured as a mnemonic landmark, not for navigating the West Indies, but for remembering a specific point on Prospero's island, where the Neapolitans' ship is now docked, as the place where he had been at the moment of summons to a previous errand: “Safely in harbour / Is the Kings shippe, in the deep Nooke, where once / Thou calldst me up at midnight to fetch dewe / From the still-vext Bermoothes; there she's hid” (1.2.226–29). The mention of the Bermudas works for modern audiences as it must have done for Jacobean ones, as a red herring, a false promise of topicality. A genuine place-name that is also exciting and attention grabbing (in the seventeenth century Page 101 → because William Strachey's account of the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture was in the news; in the twenty-first century because it suggests Shakespeare's gaze turned on “us”) is immediately joined to a romance task (fetching magic midnight dew) that suggests Titania's bower from A Midsummer Night's Dream much more strongly than it does any “real” report of New World wonders. The “Bermoothes” are a memory place in Ariel's mind, not a place in the world. The play's representation of places, spaces, and voyages is invested in a different kind of perception, one that is not visual, as maps are, but physicalized, embodied, kinetic. In these passages, the poetic work of The Tempest does clearly infuse the space represented by two-dimensional maps with an affective vitality, in the manner described by Gillies. However, its refraction of geography goes further and is more complicated and more imaginatively playful in a spatial-dynamic way than the “socializing” of a map. The play's representation of places, spaces, and voyages does not really have to compete with a dominant cartographic vision, with the spectacle of the new maps, because a great deal of its own creative energies are invested in a different kind of perception, one that is not actually visual at all but physicalized, embodied, kinetic. The possibility of such a materialized representation is, of course, part of the nature of staged drama, inhabited by living actors, as opposed to what Donne calls “flatt Maps,”74 but this kinetic mimesis is, as we have seen, actually inherent in the romance language of The Tempest.

The Drowning Mark Another place that is both material and immaterial is mentioned in The Tempest. “Every third thought shall be my grave,” Prospero says (5.1.312). Perhaps one reason why Prospero is willing to drown his book when he leaves the island is because he has another space already in mind. What is the relationship of the book to the grave? Shakespeare's sonnets, the most “bookish” of his works, argue, repeatedly, that books are the only way to defy death: “As long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (Sonnet 18). In The Tempest, the ocean, where Prospero proposes to dispatch the book, has threatened to be the grave of everyone in the play except Ariel and Caliban75—provoking some terrifyingly beautiful imagery of coral bones and eyes of pearl (1.2.398–99), as Ferdinand laments the supposed loss of his Page 102 → father and of soft beds made in the muddy ooze (3.3.100–102),76 when the father bewails his son—but it has turned out to be utterly benign,

metamorphosing mourning into gorgeous verse. The “drowning,” then, in this play where no one drowns, can be no real threat. Is the vow disingenuous—does Prospero mean not to forsake magic but to reclaim the book after it too has been “Sea-change[d] / Into something rich, & strange” (1.2.401–2)? Perhaps our error is in reading this promise to drop a book in the water as a simple transaction with gravity, at the end of a play that should have taught us to ask continually what materiality is, what it means to occupy a place or a solid body. Indeed, the speech is marked by the same romance-colored language of distance and depth that we recall from Antonio's crying cubits in Act 2, Scene 1, precise units coupled with fantastical inexactness or hyperbole. Prospero says he will bury his staff “certaine fadomes in the earth” and drown the book “deeper then did ever Plummett sound” (5.1.55–56), but how far down is that? We should be reminded, if we see a material book in this scene in production, that this is not really the book but only a book; the real magic book is a book of the mind, a malleable, expandable, imaginary space. The real power of the book lies in its existence in the mind as an infinitely manipulable structure, an organizing principle, a model for thinking. Perhaps what is happening in Prospero's drowning of the book is the closing of the space of his book, and of his mind, to the audience. Throughout the play, we have been in Prospero's confidence, kept informed at each step as he brings the threads of his plot together—“Now do's my Project gather to a head,” he announces in the beginning of Act 5 (5.1.1). He is the only character who makes asides or soliloquies and thus the only one who is in direct communication with the audience, serving as our guide to the action. When not part of a scene, he is often watching—“on the top,” “invisible,” or “observing” (3.1, 3.3, 5.1)—or maintaining supervision through Ariel (2.1, 3.2). He is, essentially, everywhere on the island; its whole, isolated, sharply delineated space is contained by his surveillance, which is also, of course, our surveillance.77 At the end of the play, however, when Alonso asks Prospero to tell “the story of your life” (5.1.313), he responds, to the company exclusively, “Please you draw neere” (5.1.319), and everyone exits; we in the audience find ourselves closed out of the circle of Prospero's confidence for the first time. It is a circle literally inscribed onto the ground by Prospero at some point during the same speech in which he vows to drown the book, a circle into which the Neapolitans are then drawn (“They all enter the circle which Prospero had made” [5.1.57.3–4]). If Prospero drowns Page 103 → the book and, in doing so, discards the model of abstract thought that we have been considering (thought laid out like the paragraphs in a book), perhaps he takes up another in the idea of a magic circle, which can also contain infinite riches in a little room. By drowning the book, withdrawing offstage, and going back to Milan—leaving the audience, in some sense, on the island—Prospero is closing off the model of his mind that the reader had access to and beginning to build another. Perhaps this is why his return in the Epilogue seems, despite its unifying references to magic, so incongruously tacked on, in terms of form and style, from another play: the actor who has played Prospero now speaks in rhyming couplets of iambic tetrameter, deliberately old-fashioned and traditional, like Gower in Pericles, and nothing like his earlier speech, because “Prospero” is no longer communicating with the audience. The rhetoric of the speech, a formal posture of supplication, is standard for early modern stage epilogues but is so unlike our experience of the imperious Prospero's language up to this point (Rosalind, in contrast, reprises Ganymede's cheekiness, and Puck's tetrameter epilogue seems to follow directly from the tetrameter benediction he pronounces upon Theseus's house at the end of the play itself) that it seems he is no longer there as a character. The magic book is not exactly coterminous with The Tempest—there is still more play to unfold after the announcement of its fate, its “drowning marke,” in Gonzalo's words (1.1.28)—but it is perhaps contiguous and symmetrical with the space of Prospero's mind, and when our access to one ends, so does our ability to read the other.

The Space of the Mind Perhaps unexpectedly, my reading of The Tempest seems almost to have come around to join a much older conversation. According to a traditional, structuralist explication, the play is “an allegory of mind” or of human nature, with Ariel and Caliban standing, respectively, for the higher faculties and lower instincts of the psyche, component parts of Prospero as the artist-Everyman. James Russell Lowell, writing in 1870, already has the elements in order: “[I]n the Tempest the scene is laid nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on any map. Nowhere then? At once nowhere and anywhere—for it is in the soul of man, that still-vexed island between the upper and the nether world, and liable to incursions from both.”78 Despite its conventionality, this interpretation

seems to provide part of the inspiration for Greenaway's “postmodern” film Page 104 → Prospero's Books, in which Prospero speaks all the parts and the whole action is strongly suggested to be taking place inside the magician's mind. This interpretation certainly underlies the science fiction film classic Forbidden Planet (1956), in which the evil force corresponding to Caliban is the Prospero figure's Freudian id. If we argue that the play's most elemental energy springs from a deep curiosity about how the mind works, do we not risk underreading it, miniaturizing it, reducing it to humanist solipsism? On the contrary, in The Tempest, with its examination of the motion of thoughts, we see not a turn inward but, as evidenced by the diversity of its connections to other realms of thought—etymology, memory theory, theology, natural philosophy—a seeking for connections between that interior traveling and other kinds of action. It also deepens our understanding of romance as a mode, one that voraciously engulfs other discourses and whose flexible mimetic reach, extending from realism to allegory to the fantastic, serves as an ideal laboratory for thought experiments, for mirroring the function of the imagination itself. In The Tempest, the book or the books—or, rather, just books, since there is no visible book in the play—offer a way of thinking about space as plastic, malleable, unlimited. Small objects that can contain—that can make a space for—a whole universe of knowledge and power serve as a concrete model for imagining impossible flights of kinetic fancy. This dynamic sense of space is not limited to one perspective or even to the visual at all; it adds another dimension to representation, beyond the two dimensions of the page or the three of the theater. The expansion and contraction of the play's book that exists only in reference and imagination—from Prospero's “volumes that I prize” in the story to Miranda, to the “book” he adjourns to study at the end of 3.1, to Caliban's “burn but his books,” and back to Prospero's “book” to be drowned—suggests the dynamic manipulability of the book in the mind. Capturing the unpicturable, this kinetic mimesis—epitomized by the complex metaphysicality of the book—becomes another aspect of the uncategorizability of the romance mode.

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CHAPTER 4 “A Booke Layd By, New Lookt On” The Romance of Reading in Urania and Don Quixote

The End of Romance? Early modern romance is a Janus-faced genre. It looks nostalgically backward, to the medieval past and the tales that accrete around English and Continental chivalric heroes: Arthur, Amadis, Guy, Bevis, Roland. At the same time, it pushes the leading edge in generic experimentation, engendering radically new forms, hybrid species such as tragicomic drama, and developing the mode that would ultimately dominate fiction making, the long prose narrative, which became the novel. Evidence that early seventeenth-century English readers themselves regarded romance as participating in such a duality of past and present, traditionalism and modernity, is present in the language of early modern critics of the mode, from Ascham to Sir Thomas Overbury, who dismiss romance's fustian old-fashionedness, denouncing its ties to a pre-Reformed age, even as they inveigh against romance's popularity as a faddish affectation, the latest example of cultural degeneration in a fallen era. Conversely, in the preface to his 1591 translation of Orlando Furioso, Sir John Harington acknowledges that objections had been made to romance as a degraded poetic form, a kind of cut-rate epic that ignores classical models in favor of latterday casualness: “Another fault [imputed to Ariosto] is, that he speaketh so much in his own person by digression, which they say also is against the rules of Poetrie, because neither Homer nor Virgill did it.” (Allying himself with the recent past against the ancients, Harington boldly adds, “Me thinks it is a sufficient defence to say, Ariosto doth it.”)1 Given the continued reprinting and popularity Page 106 → of older romances, native and translated, even as new romances were written and published in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the question remains of whether classifications of “old” romances, such as the medieval tales of Guy of Warwick, and “new” romances, such as Sidney's Arcadia or the fictions of Greene and Nashe, were actually significant to consumers. Certainly in the London book market, the “old” was still current. In his 1615 poem “The Mastive, or Young-Whelpe of the Olde-Dogge,” Henry Parrot envisions a “Countrey-Farmer” standing before a bookseller's stall: “Shewe mee King Arthur, Bevis, or Sir Guy, / Those are the bookes he onely loves to buye.”2 Despite such evidence of romance's equivocal temporal identity in the early modern period, modern critics of the prose of the later Renaissance have often seen romance, in that historical moment, as rooted in the past, as a traditional, nostalgic form from which a new narrative discourse, the novel, is poised to spring. It has been a commonplace for some time, for instance, to say that Cervantes's Don Quixote is “the first modern novel,” specifically because of its parodic reaction against romance.3 Recent critics have rejected the “first modern novel” label, however, seeing Quixote not as a radical departure from the romance tradition but as a deeply engaged response from within.4 Rather than envisioning Don Quixote as an innovation or even a synthesis, then, it is more appropriate to imagine a continuum extending from medieval and early modern chivalric romance through Cervantes's text and beyond. One of the lenses through which this continuum is most visible is the romance motif of the book. In a symptom of its highly self-conscious, self-referential generic identity, romance—as we have seen in previous chapters of the present work—often includes portrayals of readers, even romance readers, as a way of questioning the nature of literary representation and of readerly interpretation. Romance is even suggested to exist in an endless cycle in which textuality engenders textuality: early in Chaucer's dream vision The Book of the Duchess, for example, the narrator calls for “a book / A romaunce…to rede and drive the night away” (ll. 47–49); falling asleep over the book then seems to inspire the dream narrative of Chaucer's romance itself. In this chapter, I will explore these moments of vertiginous perspective—in which the text presses against the limits of representation by attempting to represent everything, even itself, the reader, and the idea of reading—in Thomas Shelton's translation of Don Quixote and in Mary Wroth's Urania. Both these narratives, in presenting readers who find themselves in the texts they read, invite us, as readers, to consider the permeable boundary between book and self. Page 107 →

Obviously, in its comic premise, Don Quixote purports to offer itself as an anti-romance, a satiric gesture against an outmoded tradition represented by the books that inspire Quixote's delusions—“the ill compiled Machina and bulke of those Knightly Bookes, abhorred by many, but applauded by more,” as the author/narrator's emphatic friend says in the Preface, in Thomas Shelton's English translation of 1612.5 But the satire is, at the same time, an homage, as the “real” world comes to seem an inadequate compensation for the destruction of Quixote's bookworm fantasy. It is significant that it is the narrator's visitor, arriving to help cure him of writer's block, and not the narrator himself who pronounces this judgment, an oversimplification that the narrator does not explicitly endorse. The narrative uses the romance tradition to deconstruct romance, both through the usual mechanisms of parody—in order to lampoon quest narratives, it must be shaped like a quest narrative—and also in a more literal and material sense of use, by engaging directly with specific books, as in the priest's and the barber's purgative inventory of Quixote's library, as well as with the pervasive bookishness that characterizes romance of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.6 Yet this deconstructive function is not something that Don Quixote invents or discovers, not what makes it new, because self-consciousness and even self-parody are elements intrinsic to the rich, encyclopedic discourse of early modern romance. Remember the irony of the carefully indexed magic book owned by Astolfo in Orlando Furioso, discussed in chapter 1, which calls attention to that romance's existence as a commodity of print culture rather than a timeless “scrine,” or recall that Cymbeline, for instance, seems to emphasize the creakiness of its own device of lowering Jupiter into the play to manufacture a happy ending. In this chapter, I will suggest the presence of a comparably constructive or creative irony, which had already been a key part of the representational strategy of certain earlier narrative romances (e.g., the tales from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that take up the romance tradition, the much-adapted Amadís de Gaula, and the sophisticated Italian romances of Ariosto), in a romance text contemporary to Cervantes's, Wroth's Urania. Don Quixote may send up an idea of chivalric romance, exposing the limitations of conventional tropes, but its mockery is self-mockery, for even in this satiric mode, it is also the genre's zenith, its point of greatest elaboration and development. Chivalric romances had built a subtradition of unbalancing their own idealizing fiction making with an undercurrent of skepticism; Don Quixote makes the undercurrent the main event, performing a spectacle of romance consuming itself. Page 108 → The prose romance does not, of course, collapse into irrelevance because of Don Quixote; narratives of aristocratic courtship and chivalric adventure continue to be printed, and critics of cultural trends continue to deplore their influence on readers. One such post-Cervantine romance is Lady Mary Wroth's The Countesse of Montgomerie's Urania, the first part of which was published in 1621 (the second part remained in manuscript until a scholarly edition in 1999). As critics have observed, the Urania freely acknowledges its many romance influences, taking formal cues and adopting character names and plot motifs from the catalog of major sixteenth-century romances (among them Montemayor's Diana, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and The Faerie Queene), as well as from its author's family heritage, the Arcadia of Wroth's uncle Philip Sidney. Like Don Quixote, then, the Urania situates itself as a participant in the romance tradition and, at the same time, as a latecomer to that tradition, which already has, as evidenced by these narratives' allusions to other texts, a long history. Don Quixote serves as an important counterpoint to the Urania for two reasons. First, it was an extremely popular fiction that was circulating among English readers at the time Wroth was composing her own text, so it must be considered part of a conversation that Wroth, a highly informed reader herself, knew she was entering. Second, the Urania, which begins with a shepherdess learning that she is really a princess (a “really” that the narrative fully honors), presents itself in 1621 as boldly espousing some of the ideals that Don Quixote had brilliantly lampooned in 1612 (in English), in its decayed small-time landowner who, immersed in a bookish world of fictions, convinces himself, utterly contrary to all evidence, that he is really a knight. If the landscape of romance could never be the same after Don Quixote, how does the Urania respond to the brave new world that it is supposed to have opened up for seventeenth-century fiction making? The Urania, like Don Quixote, questions the nature of romance mimesis and of the reader's experience; like Don Quixote, and perhaps even under its influence, the Urania makes books (and the circumstances of their materiality) central to its exploration of these issues.

Discovered Manuscripts and Dissolved Distinctions

It is clear from a number of contemporary literary allusions that Don Quixote, or at least Don Quixote, was well known in England both before and after the text's rendering into English, in 1612 (Part I) and 1620 (Part II), by Thomas Shelton, Page 109 → the text's first translation (into any language).7 If the line “Now I am armed to fight with a Windmill” in George Wilkins's play The Miseries of Enforc'd Marriage (1606) is indeed an allusion, it could be counted as the earliest.8 Don Quixote is mentioned by name in a poem writen in 1611 for Thomas Coryate; characters in Jonson's Epicoene and The Alchemist, both from before 1612, refer to Quixote; and the lost, apocryphally Shakespearean play entered in the Stationers' Register in 1613 as Cardenno may have been based on the episode of the star-crossed lovers Cardenio and Lucinda in Part I of Cervantes's narrative. Fashionable gentlewomen like Wroth were certainly among Don Quixote's readers: in her diary, Lady Anne Clifford records having read it, and she chose it to appear among her books in her “Great Picture” of 1646.9 Interestingly, it is unclear that early English audiences regarded the text as a breaking away from or turning against the romance tradition. Does Jonson, for instance, class Don Quixote among and not opposed to traditional chivalric romances, when Truewit in Epicoene suggests that in order to understand women, Sir Dauphine Eugenie spend a month reading “Amadis de Gaule, or Don Quixote, as you are wont” (4.1.48), or when Kastril in The Alchemist (the play dedicated to Wroth) regales Surly with an all-purpose list of insults: “you are a Pimpe and a Trig / And an Amadis de Gaule, or a Don Quixote” (4.7.53–54)? One of the poets included in “The Odcombian Banquet” (1611) similarly lines Cervantes up with the classic chivalric epics, placing the anti-romance as the culmination, rather than the cure, when he praises Thomas Coryate, “[w]hose glorious deeds outface and fiercely daunt / Guzman of Spaine, and Amadis of France, / Uterpendragon, Urson, and Termagant, / Great Don Quixot.”10 Does this parallelizing of medieval “original” and modern parody argue for a more nuanced relationship between idealizing and satirical modes within romance? Bookishness is the essential matter of Don Quixote, and its hyperawareness of textuality—its interest in and selfconscious involvement with the material circumstances of the creation and circulation of texts—complements its central conceit of a reader for whom fiction turns inside out and becomes reality. The narrative's obsession with books, metonymically reproducing its protagonist's own obsession with them, is a primary example of the way in which it both participates in and sends up the romance mode. The presence of an actual bibliography, generated by the inquisition scene (Part 1, Chapter 6), for instance, introduces a historicized concreteness that makes an interesting contrast with the text's deliberately romance-like, “once-upon-a-time” opening: “There lived, not long since, in a certain village of the Mancha…”11 Romance thrives on a Page 110 → sense of the lost chivalric past—and is deplored by humanist educators (e.g., the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives, also influential in England) for this reverence for old-fashionedness. Perhaps in an answer to such a criticism, the narrator points out that Quixote's romance texts are unmistakably up-to-date goods: “Methought,…seeing that among his books were found some modern works, such as The Undeceiving of Jealousie and The Nymphs and Shepherds of Henares, that also his own history must have been new.”12 In contrast to the often dreamy nostalgia of romance (Sidney's Philoclea does not read “modern works”), these hot-off-the-press, slightly racy-sounding books are used, like a newspaper glimpsed in a film shot, to establish the date of the action. Whether they are real books or not, they are meant to sound familiar to readers—we readers, who, as Jacques Lezra notes, find ourselves inscribed into the text from the first words of the Preface, “Desocupado lector” (Idle reader), making the narrative's very existence dependent on the conditions of reading, on the presence, in this moment, of a waiting audience.13 In other ways, too, Don Quixote's elaborate awareness of books and of its own existence as a book serves to deepen its relationship to the native ambiguities of the romance tradition. For one thing, in an intentional contrast to the formally conventional appearance of the published Don Quixote—consisting, in the Shelton translation, of two fat quartos with a full complement of decorative formatting (including printer's devices and historiated capitals) and outfitted with translator's and printer's epistles to noble dedicatees—Cervantes repeatedly denies the text's wholeness and integrity, by representing it as composed of disparate, heterogeneous pieces. Part I starts confidently as a straightforward tale (“once upon a time,” “not long since, in a certain village of the Mancha”), but before the first page is spent, the narrator reveals that he is actually not a tale spinner but a compiler, collating many scholarly sources: “Some affirm that his surname was Quixada or Quesada (for in this there is some variance among the authors that write his life).”14 The reader's vision of a jumbled collage of papers underlying the polished book he or she holds is further concretized, of course, by the unexpected break in the text when the narrator's first source abruptly ends. For a moment, there is no Don Quixote, since the narrator's own story has no

immediately apparent place in it, no framing fiction. Then, however, we are offered a miniature quest narrative, in which the narrator is the hero and, in a stroke of luck, is able to continue his account based on a collection of assorted Arabic manuscripts he picks up for a pittance in Toledo: “I bought all the boy's scrolls and papers for a real; and had he been of discretion, or known my desire, he might have…borne away with him, more than six Page 111 → reales for his merchandise.”15 Here is a romance-like turn of fortune framed by the prosaic circumstances of the market and the bargain. Shelton is, of course, taking the currency name real, “royal,” from the Spanish, but his decision not to convert it into an equivalent English monetary term such as “noble” allows for the joke that his narrator is buying from the boy, embodied in the “scrolls and papers,” the effect or impression of the real—and they are worth more “reality” than even the boy knows. Don Quixote now consists of two asymmetrical parts, very visibly sutured together, and its authorial agency is spread onto at least four writers: the narrator; the author of his first source; the Arab historian Sidi Hamete Benengeli, whose exotic name spreads vividly across the page in compensation for his absence from the narrative; and the “Moor” whom the narrator hires to live in his house and translate the manuscripts. What we as readers are holding, we are now told, is a retelling of a translation of an account—and, if we are Anglophones, a translation of the whole.16 The claim that one's text is not invented but is based on archival documents is a customary motif of early modern romance. Michael McKeon discusses this “discovered-manuscript topos,” noting that not just the deployment of the topos but also the parody of it is common in Renaissance romance. McKeon reads the topos not as an inherent part of romance but as a sign that romance, in the early seventeenth century, is becoming something else: he argues that although “scholars usually treat the romance parody of the discovered-manuscript topos as a critique of the claim to historicity,” it is “better understood as an implicit instance of that claim, the most conventional means by which ‘modern’ romance becomes conscious and skeptical of its own customary conflation of ‘history’ and ‘romance.’”17 For McKeon, then, the romance parody of the discovered manuscript is a move toward rejecting the fetishization of the past, the veneration of the old and “original” that characterizes a scribal culture.18 It should be noted, however, that the parody of the discovered-manuscript device is not a symptom of the decadence of late romance; even Amadís de Gaula, one of the oldest and most influential texts in the European romance canon, parodies the convention. The first romance from Quixote's library that is examined by the curate and the barber in Don Quixote's inquisition scene, Amadís is pronounced by the barber to be “the very best contrived book of all those of that kind, and therefore he is to be pardoned as the only complete one of his profession.”19 Yet Amadís's very completeness is part of its self-parody. The version of the twelfth-century narrative that circulated most widely in early modern Spain Page 112 → was that of Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, who transcribed the romance for a print edition in the late fifteenth century and added a fifth book that, he says in a preface to the reader, “came to light in a stone tomb discovered underground below a hermitage near Constantinople and was brought to this part of Spain by a Hungarian merchant, being inscribed on parchment so old that only with great difficulty were those who knew the language able to read it.”20 The imminent appearance of the text in the infinitely reproducible medium of print inspires Rodriguez to create a baroque narrative about its singularity and vulnerability, as if it, too, were a romance protagonist nearly lost on an impossibly treacherous journey. Amadís is the traditional canon, a reference point for all chivalric romances, and at the same time, as it appears in the sixteenth century, it parodies the idea of romance; it is both time-enshrined and “modern.” The dichotomy between “straight” and “ironic” romance does not really exist, of course: there never was a purely sincere iteration, and the motif of a found manuscript must always be both a plot device and also a self-aware metacomment on or acknowledgement of the specific, material circumstances of textuality. Ultimately, then, there is no history of “serious” romance that later texts productively outgrow and reject; the idea of serious romance is a back-formation created by romance itself, and the nostalgia with which we modern readers regard the historical romance canon is another of the genre's own effects. In Part II of Don Quixote, both the text's acknowledgment of a contemporary culture of books and reading and its awareness of itself as a book become prominent to the point of ostentation. We might say that the narrative daringly punctures the illusion of its own fictional universe, were it not for the circumstance (which we have been

discussing) that the nature of romance mimesis had always been to have a permeable fictionality and bendable rules. In the second volume, passersby recognize Quixote as the hero of Part I, establishing that Don Quixote takes place in a world in which Don Quixote already exists. Later, toward the end of Part II, this implied book, or a version of it, obtrudes directly into the story. Quixote is spending the night in yet another crowded travelers' inn. While eating dinner in their room, he and Sancho overhear someone speaking. It seemed that in another chamber next Don Quixotes—divided only by a thin Lath-wall—hee might heare one say, By your life, Signior Don Ieronimo, whilst supper is to come in, let us reade another Chapter in the second part of Don Quixote. Page 113 → Don Quixote scarce heard himselfe named, when up he stood, & watchfully gave eare to their discourse concerning him, & he heard that the aforesaid Don Ieronimo answered, Signior Don Iohn, why should we reade these fopperies? he that hath read the first part of Don Quixote, it is impossible he should take any pleasure in reading the second. For all that, quoth Don Iohn, ’twere good reading it: for there is no book so ill, that hath not some good thing in it. That which most displeaseth me in this is, that he makes Don Quixote dis-enamoured of Dulcinea del Toboso. Which when Don Quixote heard, full of wrath and despite he lifted up his voice, saying, Whosoever saith Don Quixote de la Mancha hath forgotten, or can forget Dulcinea del Toboso, I will make him know with equall Armes, that hee is farre from the truth: for the peerlesse Dulcinea del Toboso cannot be forgotten, nor can forgetfulness be contained in Don Quixote, his scutcheon is Loyaltie, his profession sweetly to keepe it, without doing it any violence. Who is this that answeres us, said they in the next roome? Who should it be (quoth Sancho) but Don Quixote himselfe, that will make good all he hath said, or as much as he shall say?… Scarce had Sancho said this, when the two Gentlemen came in the Chamber doore: for they seemed no lesse to them: & one of them casting his Armes about Don Quixote's neck, said, neither can your presence belye your name, or your name credit your presence. Doubtlesse you, Sir, are the right Don Quixote de la Mancha, North-starre, and Morning-starre of Knight-errantry, in spite of him that hath usurped your name, and annihilated your exploits, as the Author of this Booke, I heere deliver, hath done: and giving him the booke that his companion had, Don Quixote took it, and without answering a word, began to turne the leaves, and after a while returned it.21 After indignantly listing several faults—vulgarities, grammatical mistakes, and inaccuracies—of the false sequel, Don Quixote declines to read any more. Nevertheless, just as the spurious sequel says, Quixote is planning to travel next to Zaragoza, and the two gentlemen begin to advise him about the next episode of his life that is supposed to unfold at a joust there. “For this matter only,” Quixote declares, “I will not set foot in Saragosa: and therefore the world will see what a lyar this moderne Historiographer is.”22 In this dizzying comic moment, Quixote's quest, born from his excessive immersion in chivalric romances, comes full circle when the voracious reader reads himself, encountering himself in his own romance. Cervantes is here Page 114 → making several gestures at once: a joke about the fantastical and preposterous nature of romance (not even the credulous Don Quixote believes this story); a comment on the ambitions of fiction (exposed as flimsy next to “reality”); and a wry aside on the undiscriminating nature of romance readers, even among the gentry, who consume trash as readily as treasure (“For all that,…’twere good reading”). At the same time, the episode is part of the intricate and sophisticated textuality of Don Quixote, characteristic of early modern romance's pervasive fascination with books, as technology and as objects, as media for containing text, and as sites of wonder and

contemplation in their own right. This mise en abyme draws us, as its observers, in as well, to find ourselves symmetrically aligned with Quixote, holding his story in our hands, even as he holds another version of his own. All of us are engaged in the act of reading, all suspended in a moment of mutual presentness: with the question of whether to go to Zaragoza, the counterfeit Quixote Part II, the true Quixote Part II, and Quixote's own “actual” life are all paused at the same point, the threads of inset and framing narrative all coming together.23 In this way, the text plays with the metaphysical possibilities of the physical space of the book, pointing out the paradox of how the volume can contain itself, can contain a whole world in which “real” books, books that we recognize, are sold and read. There is a specific “nonfictional” context for the scene, of course; in the interval between the publications of Cervantes's Parts I and II, an enterprising person, Alonzo Fernandez de Avellaneda, had published an unauthorized sequel, presumably represented by Cervantes in the book Don John and Don Jeronimo are reading. Earlier in Part II, Quixote and Sancho Panza visit a print shop in Barcelona, in which they find the impostor Don Quixote Part II being printed, to Quixote's disdain. In the scene in the print shop, as in the episode previously discussed, Cervantes complains about the audacity of the counterfeiter and perhaps about the vulnerable position of the author and the text in a print-culture world in which books are being produced, bought, sold, and circulated in greater numbers and in wider spheres, increasingly out of the creator's control. Yet even as he takes the opportunity to criticize the style and content of the knockoff, Cervantes also grants it some authority (in addition to the credit given merely by acknowledging it). Quixote's life does align with Fernandez's story—he was, in fact, planning to go to Zaragoza—suggesting that Fernandez somehow shares in the authorial role or co-occupies it with Cervantes. This gesture is as radically (at the root) traditional as it is startlingly generous. The model of authorship imagined here is not a harbinger of the modern novel Page 115 → but is instead suggestive of a Renaissance or even pre-Renaissance embrace of literary collaboration.24 Here, as in Part I (in which he calls himself Quixote's stepfather, “the second writer”) and in the whole structure of the discovered-manuscript topos (with its multiplicity of sources and iterations of translation), Cervantes resists supreme and singular authorship.25 Like humanist writers for whom education was imitatio, who imagined themselves in conversation with ancient auctores and contemporary scholars in a way that defies modern notions of chronology and copyright, Cervantes hints at a fluid exchange among authors, texts, and subjects.26 The scene's deeper involvement, however, is with issues of the reader's identity, of the self in relation to the book. At the level of plot, this is what Don Quixote is “about”: the country gentleman of reduced means who becomes so immersed in volumes of chivalric tales that, his native personhood displaced by fiction, he comes to believe he is someone from a romance. In the process, as the text repeatedly reminds us, he does become someone from a romance, the protagonist of Don Quixote (or, rather, of the Don Quixotes, legitimate and bootleg, original and sequel). If anything is assumed as a given by this intentionally shifting and unstable text, it must be an intimate relationship between book and self. Yet in this scene, that relationship is disconcertingly severed for Don Quixote. Instead of dictating what a knight-errant should do, giving him a ready and private guide to right behavior, as does his copy of Amadis de Gaule when it provides a model for erotic/ascetic penance (in Part I, Chapter 24), the book in the possession of Don John and Don Jeronimo links Quixote's name with scandalous transgressions against honor. The culturally established connection between the book and privacy has here been violated to falsely expose and shame the reading subject and to take away his carefully constructed idea of who he is. This dynamic of exposure and precariousness is underscored by the language of the passage, in the description of the individual rooms in the inn, “divided only by a thin Lath-wall.” A lath wall, made of strips of wood coated in plaster, is not part of the weight-bearing frame of a house but simply a room divider, and “lath” had such strong connotations of flimsiness in early modern English that it could be used to describe anything thin or fragile: the Oxford English Dictionary quotes Francis Quarles as writing in 1633 of a thin man, “His ribs are laths, daub'd or Plaistered with flesh, and bloud,” a description that would suit Quixote. On the early modern stage, meanwhile, laths are prop daggers made of strips of wood, a fact that adds the color of “counterfeit” to the Page 116 → connotation of something “insubstantial.”27 As he will instantly reassert, Quixote believes he can prove that the false book is “farre from the truth” and that “forgetfulness [cannot] be contained in Don Quixote” (emphasis added), but in this moment, his identity is threatened, in just these metaphorically spatial terms, by the suddenly

revealed thinness of the wall or membrane between self and other, “true” Quixote and faked Quixote, what is and is not contained inside the binding of his selfhood. Moreover, the instability of identity even transfers to others in the scene. As Quixote and Sancho first listen to the gentlemen, the unseen speakers have distinct identities. Like characters in a play, they establish each other's names at the beginning of their dialogue, and they take clearly opposing roles: Don John, enthusiastic and good-natured, enjoys a ripping yarn, while Don Jeronimo presents himself as a connoisseur of unusual discrimination. But when the men come into the room, all distinction between them, which should only be heightened by the addition of their appearances to their voices, instead vanishes along with their names, and they are indistinguishable as “two Gentlemen,” referred to now only as “one of them,” “his companion,” and “the Gentleman.” Both equally starstruck at meeting Quixote, they even adopt the poeticizing and hyperbolic diction of chivalric romance that he uses, calling him “North-starre, and Morning-starre of Knight-errantrie, in spite of him that hath usurped your name, and annihilated your exploits.”28 Even as Quixote's identity is destabilized by the treacherous sequel, these readers are beginning to lose their own identities to the same book, as well as to the original book that is emblematized by Quixote himself. Finally, we might note that Quixote's self-assertion in refusing to follow the path that the forged text says he must is a kind of ironic reference to metaphors of the book from the theology of Christian antiquity and the Middle Ages. Medieval writers, following the church fathers (particularly Augustine), imagined the Creation as the Book of Nature and commented heavily on the biblical image of the Book of Life, a master document kept by God that contains the name of every creature destined for salvation.29 Examples come from both Testaments, as in Exodus 32:33, “And the Lord said unto Moses, Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my Booke,” or in Revelation, in which there are at least five references to a Book of Life that contains both the names of the saved and the records of all human deeds: “and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works…. And whosoever was not found written in the booke of life, was cast Page 117 → into the lake of fire” (20:12–15).30 Composed by an ever-present but invisible Author and dictating at every moment what will happen to him, Don Quixote is, for Quixote, a kind of Book of Life. But there is only supposed to be one Book of Life, lodged in Heaven—for another to crop up is disconcerting, to say the least. Of course, here as everywhere in the text, Don Quixote also sends up fiction's posture of being “the truth,” a claim that will increasingly become part of the self-presentation of the novel as a genre.31 Yet, again, this is less an example of Don Quixote's proleptic launching of the rise of the novel as it is a comment on an already-present aspect of the seventeenth-century idea of the supposed (and questionable) authority of printed narrative: as Shakespeare has the gullible Mopsa exclaim in The Winter's Tale, “I love a ballet [ballad] in print, a-life, for then we are sure they are true” (4.4).32

A Book of One's Own: “The Countesse of Montgomerie's Urania” In its exploration of the interaction between the book and the self, Don Quixote is, as it seems in many contexts, a limit case, an idea taken to a brilliant extremity of elaboration. As I have suggested, however, both its awareness of the social and material circumstances of textuality and its delight in juxtaposing and collapsing levels of mimesis are themselves a time-honored part of the romance tradition. Although it comes after Don Quixote chronologically, Wroth's Urania might initially be seen as a traditional or “straight” romance in contrast to Quixote's sophisticated parody.33 It is, after all, primarily a multigenerational saga about aristocratic courtship and knightly adventures, and, as Barbara Lewalski notes, Wroth lines up many classic “romance topoi” (e.g., tournaments, chivalric adventures, and enchantments) to occupy her characters.34 Yet the Urania is most unmistakably a romance not just in the presence of these generic tags but, rather, in their superabundant, even ludicrous profusion. The Urania is not a throwback to the imagined earlier aesthetic derided by Don Quixote; it, too, is highly aware of itself and its mode, participating elaborately and self-consciously in exaggerated forms and conventions. The opening scene, walking a narrow line between pastoral and parody, introduces us to the beautiful shepherdess Urania, a young woman who has sustained the classic romance trauma of being kidnapped as a baby and brought up humbly, in ignorance of her true origins.35 Having just been told by her rustic foster parents that she is not really their daughter, she laments euphuistically, “Miserable Page 118 → Urania, worse art thou now than these thy Lambs; for they know their dams, while thou dost live unknowne of any.” She then promptly breaks

into a sonnet to give proper vent to her feelings: “Unseen, unknowne, I here alone complaine” (I.i.1–2).36 Within the first pages, many more generic flags appear: Urania counsels a prince who has abandoned civilization and become a wild man through grief; stumbles upon a king and his sons and daughter in pastoral exile; meets a prince who turns out to be her long-lost cousin; falls in love at first sight; hears that she was probably born the princess of Naples; and boards a ship, which is promptly seized by pirates—who turn out to be men of gentle birth gone bad through tragic circumstance. The suggestion that Wroth is both exploring and sending up the romance mode, established by this breathless succession of events and confusing panoply of noble, beautiful characters, is reinforced by narratorial comments throughout the text. (The narrator's voice is too intimate already with the reader, too conspiratorial from the start, for her comments to be called “asides.”) As her central group of young noblewomen consider a pleasure outing in a boat, Wroth's narrator seems to anticipate Northrop Frye's wry observation that, in Greek romance, “the normal means of transportation is by shipwreck.”37 Pamphilia hesitates to enter the boat, and the narrator warns, “for what is the Sea but uncertaintie” (I.iii.371)—a point proven only too well in the Urania, in which ships wreck frequently and enchanted boats suddenly whisk characters across the ocean. Another traditional plot device of romance is lightly mocked when Steriamus wonders if he might be destined to play a part in a magical enchantment, despite the fact that he does not quite fit the ordained requirements, remarking, in an almost Wildean deadpan, “Oracles are never without ambiguity” (I.iii.421). Later, to illustrate the “bacenes” of a rebellious and stupid Lord, the narrator remarks archly that “for learning, ore reading above a Romancie, hee never troubled him self withal” (II.ii.213).38 This last metaromance example, the reference to a “Romancie,” is also illustrative of the way in which, in this enormous narrative, books, reading, and writing constitute a major part of the narrative texture. Considering both the status of the text as the first prose narrative published in English by a woman and the many possibilities for reading it in the contexts of Wroth's life and the situation of early modern women writers, it is unsurprising that the Urania's various portrayals of writing, self-writing, and gendered writing have attracted the most critical attention.39 The text, after all, consists principally of narrative making, whether written or oral: inset stories, both true and fictionalized, told Page 119 → by the characters to each other, fill up the bulk of the pages, all woven into the larger stories of the various plots. On separate occasions, both Pamphilia, the true heroine, and her first major rival, Antissia, recount their own romantic disappointments, veiled as stories about other women (I.ii.21ff.; I.iii.499ff.), though listeners can tell that each story is “some thing more exactly related than a fixion” (I.iii.505). Within this imagined salon world woven from the arts of storytelling and conversation, actual books, while appearing somewhat less often than the reams of letters and poems that enrich the romance with other layers of textuality, are still frequently encountered. With the exception of one scene (in which Pamphilia's brother Parselius observes a princess reading to her ladies-in-waiting as they sew [I.i.124]), books appear in more private, less socialized settings than the letters and poems that circulate constantly between lovers and among friends. As in Don Quixote, books and inwardness go together. Pamphilia, for instance, has a locked “Cabinet” in her bedroom “where her books and papers lay” (including some books clearly identifiable as chivalric romance fictions), to which she repairs when she wants to be alone (I.ii.260).40 Pamphilia also wanders pensively into a walled garden in the palace grounds, like Ophelia, “with a Booke in her hand…for a colour of her solitariness…. Seeing this place delicate without, as shee was faire, and darke within as her sorrowes, shee went into the thickest part of it” (I.i.91). In both episodes, enclosed spaces with hidden insides, whether cabinet or hortus conclusus, are obviously serving as externalized symbols for the idea of private, “darke” feelings held within the body—and, significantly, books are closely associated with them. Books, which also have protective outsides that contrast with rich, concealable insides, are presented as another kind of secret space. In an essay about the poems in Wroth's sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Jeffrey Masten argues that, bibliographically as well as rhetorically, this manuscript “stages a movement which is relentlessly private, withdrawing…into an interiorized corporeal space.”41 In another instance, books are part of erotic devotion. Rodomandro, who will become Pamphilia's husband in Part II, declares that he has no higher ambition than to serve as her lectern.

Love your booke, butt love me soe farr as that I may hold itt to you that, while you peruse that, I may Joye in beholding you; and som times gaine a looke from you, if only to chide mee for soe carelessly parforming my office, when love will by chance make my hand shake, purposely to obtaine a sweet looke. (II.ii.272) Page 120 → Rodomandro wants to watch Pamphilia read, but not only as a passive voyeur: he also wants to be able to interrupt. Pamphilia declines to play this bibliophiliacs' game, perhaps mindful of an earlier episode in which books intersect tragically with intimacy between lovers: Pelarina, who styles herself a pilgrim of love, relates how a lover rejected her after reading what she calls “an idle Booke I had written,”42 leaving pages folded down to indicate the parts he disliked (I.iv.133–34). These passages imply that it is dangerous to allow a lover to come between one's book and oneself, because he will insist on having a hand, trembling or censoring, in it; it is better to read alone. Privacy, solitariness, and reading are again linked when the True Sophy, the heiress to the kingdom of Persia, who is in exile near the Bosphorus, grants permission to use her extensive library to her royal guest Rosindy (Pamphilia's brother). She shows him a secret door that leads directly from his bedchamber to the library, where “non butt the rarest of bookes were permitted to bee…all chosen ones,” and invites him to “sollace him selfe in thos rareties,…giving him a key unto the studdy and galery, which hee protested to keepe safe to him selfe” (II.i.171). In this atmosphere of intimacy, as Mary Ellen Lamb notes, the gift of the key to her personal library “would seem to presage romantic involvement,” but Rosindy and the sophy do not become lovers.43 Indeed, to the attentive reader, the language of intense privacy describing the library and its uses, the repetition of “selfe,” and the echo of solitude in “sollace” all make it clear that Rosindy will be perusing the library alone. For the most part, in contrast to how lavishly the enamored characters write letters and lyrics, reading books in the Urania is not part of courtship but is explicitly identified with isolation, with inwardness, and with reflecting on one's own self. There are important historical contexts for the portrayal of women as readers, especially in a romance. Discussing a scene in which the lovesick Pamphilia becomes upset while reading a love story, Lamb argues that Wroth is responding to early modern critics of women's romance reading such as Vives, who, in a censure that sounds designed for Cymbeline's Imogen, claims that fiction's dangerous mimetic spell will entrance the passive woman reader into erotic temptation. Portraying women as moved by reading but ultimately in control of their own emotions, Lamb argues, Wroth negotiates an alternative model.44 The Urania indeed dramatizes the experience of subjectivity through interactions with books such as Pamphilia's—but it also, as I will argue, explores the relationship of books to identity and self-reflection through a more heightened Page 121 → and mysterious mimetic technique, in which passivity and powerlessness are not necessarily the same.

The Spectacle of the Book In addition to its scenes of private, “domestic” reading, the Urania features a very public, highly dramatic central episode showcasing a magical book, an episode set up by the text to carry a huge amount of narrative importance and rhetorical weight. Nevertheless, this spectacular book—as we saw in Cymbeline in the previous chapter—turns into a mysterious anticlimax. As noted earlier, as the romance opens, Urania hears of her royal lineage, then, after some further adventures, is reunited with her father, the king of Naples, hears the story of how she was kidnapped as a baby, and is welcomed into the company of her royal siblings and cousins. Many pages and many adventures amid the Urania's traveling party of princes and princesses later, Urania is shipwrecked off the coast of Corinth with her cousin Pamphilia, the primary heroine of the story, and two other noble ladies, when they happen upon an imposing structure. They found a round building like a Theater, carved curiously, and in mighty pillars…. There was a Throne which nine steps ascended unto, on the top were fowre rich chayers of Marble, in which there were most delicate, and sumptuous imbroider'd cushions, a Carpet of rich embrodery lying before, and under them…. In they goe, and venture to ascend the Throne, when instantly the sweetest

musicke, and most inchanting harmony of voyces, so overruld their sences, as they thought no more of any thing, but went up, and sate downe in the chayers. The gate was instantly lock'd againe, and so was all thought in them shut up for their coming forth thence, till the man most loving, and beloved, used his force, who should release them, but himselfe be enclosed till the freeing of the sweetest and loveliest creature, that poore habits had disguised greatnesse in, he should be redeem'd, and all should be finished. (I.iii.373)

The ladies remain imprisoned in the theater for almost a hundred pages, transfixed by illusory images of their lovers, while Amphilanthus, the beloved of Pamphilia, who (as “the man most loving, and beloved”) is necessary to their release, is engaged on other adventures, including being elected Holy Roman Page 122 → Emperor and falling in love with other women. Eventually he arrives—accompanied, unfortunately for Pamphilia, by his current paramour, Musalina. Finally, Veralinda, a beautiful and suspiciously aristocratic shepherdess dressed in “poore habits,” finds her way to the theater and is able, with Amphilanthus, to release the spell now holding all the major characters. Apollo appear'd, commanding Veralinda to touch them with a rod he threw down; she did so when they all awaked, and held each one his lover by the hand, then stood they up, an as amazed gazed on the Shepherdesse [Veralinda], and Nimph [her traveling companion]…. When this was done, and all the couples stood round as the roome was, suddenly the Chaires were vanished, and a Pillar of Gold stood in their stead, on which hung a Booke, every one there strove to take that down, but none could gaine it; Pamphilia and Urania came, they both resolved to try, but the first place was given by both their consents unto Urania, who tooke it downe, wherewith the inchantment partly ended as the Musique and charme, but the house remayning and the Pillar of Gold, as memory of the bravest inchantment that inclosed the number of the worthiest the world did ever know. The Booke Amphilanthus tooke and tryed to open, but though Urania had got it she must have Veralindas help to open it, which being lent her she got, the house then vanished, and they found in the Booke the whole story of Urania, and how that after shee was stollen by the Duke as before was confessed by himselfe, and then from him by robbers. This wise man who had made this inchantment preserved her, tooke her from those robbers, left the purse and mantle with her to be the meanes for those that took her up to cherish her, and then being Lord of this Island, framed this inchantment, whither he knew she should come and give part of the conclusion to it; the next story was Veralinda's, which was this. The King of Frigia had many children by his first wife, then married he againe, and by his second onely had one daughter, whose nativity being cast, it was found shee should rule a great people, and weare a Crowne; this made doubt that she should governe over that Kingdome, that bred jealousie, and jealousie hate, so as her brothers when she suck'd, laid a plot to destroy her, and brib'd a servant of theirs to kill the Infant. He undertook it, but was prevented likewise by the same divine power Urania was protected by. (I.iii.455–56) Veralinda's story—which goes on to recount her captor's flight by sea, her adoption by a kind shepherd, and the shepherd's delivery of her to her true Page 123 → destiny when the time came—parallels Urania's to a striking degree: the envy and treachery of a less fortunate aspirant to power motivate both kidnappings, both girls are placed with respectable shepherd families, and the kidnappers in both cases are ultimately moved to repent, even “by the same divine power.” Veralinda is clearly, in some way, a version of Urania, a double or second iteration of the title character. What does it mean that Wroth doubles Urania and doubles the revelation in this anagnorisis scene? This episode of the enchanted theater, embellished with extensive, detailed description—of which I have quoted only a small part—is one of only three large-scale, allegorical set pieces in the whole text: highly symbolic real

estate in the mode of the House of Alma or the Bower of Bliss in the Faerie Queene, it is distinctly unlike the nonmagical, though fantastic and idealized, courts and gardens of the majority of the narrative.45 Indeed, in its elaborately detailed scenery, in its sudden disappearances and transformations, and even in the descent of a classical god, the scene of the enchanted theater is highly suggestive of the equally lavish and spectacular, similarly static and tableau-like masques in which Wroth is known to have danced at Queen Anne's court.46 At the same time, this moment, too, is steeped in the genealogy of literary romance: the image of a book that only the chosen reader can open is drawn in part from the Arthurian motif of the sword in the stone that only the destined heir can release. At the same time, it recalls the passage in the Book of Revelation about the book with seven seals that only the Lamb can open: “And I saw a strong Angel proclaiming with a loude voice; Who is worthy to open the booke, and to loose the seales thereof? [3] And no man in heauen, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the booke, neither to looke thereon.” 47 The portentous, highly inflected dramatic and rhetorical buildup, replete with allusions to drama, romance, and the Bible, creates the expectation that this scene will provide a climactic moment of reading. The language, pace, and tone of the text suggest that Urania will here discover, at last, the true circumstances of her being lost as a child. Yet nothing really happens: Urania is not even given a chance to respond, because the narrative goes right on—with only a semicolon, not even pausing for a period—to the story of Veralinda. Without a reaction shot, as it were, Urania seems unchanged, unaffected by the presumably momentous episode. We are never told how she receives the information, and when she reappears in the next scene, her attention as well as that of the narrator is wholly focused on Pamphilia's misery at Amphilanthus's latest infidelity (I.iii.457–58). The great revelation of “the whole story of Urania” in a magical book, heralded by the descent of Apollo and framed by “the bravest Page 124 → inchantment…the world did ever know,” comes as a profound anticlimax.48 In fact, there could have been no satisfaction in a release from suspense, because Urania has long known the truth of her identity. As the romance begins, she has just received the news that her shepherd parents are not really her parents. Almost immediately she meets Parselius, nephew of the king of Naples, who has been helping his Neapolitan cousin Amphilanthus search for a lost Sister of his, who in the first weeke after her birth was stolne away, since which time an old man, whether by divination or knowledge, assured the King her father, shee is living…. But shorter I hope now my journey will bee, since I verily believe, you most faire Shepherdesse are the lost Princesse. (I.i.21–22) Parselius's identification of his cousin turns out to be exactly correct, and if that were not enough, Urania soon has opportunity to hear her story again from the sorceress Melissea: “Fayrest and sweetest, leave off your laments for ignorance of your estate, and know that you are daughter to a mighty King, and sister to the bravest living Prince, …renowned Amphilanthus” (I.ii.190). Now known to herself, Urania needs only to be publicly confirmed in her new role. She meets Amphilanthus, who recognizes her as “dearest Sister, and the one half of my life” (230), and without much delay, they go to Naples, where Urania is reunited with her father, the king. This episode even has an official, symbolic dimension, because it is the point at which Urania ceases to wear her shepherdess clothes and dons “rich robes” (231), marking her reincorporation into the royal family and her true role. Surely the romance meme of recognition and reunion has now been fully deployed (still, let it be noted, well before the episode of the enchanted theater). But another batch of evidence and another reiteration of the authenticity of her identity are to come: while the celebrations for her return are still going on, an old man appears at court and explains that he is the prince of Istria (later identified as the duke), who stole the infant Urania as a hostage while he concocted a plan to bring down the royal heir Amphilanthus, only to have her stolen from him in turn by “Robbers” (I.ii.231–32). Virtually from the start, then, Urania has known who she was, and her identity is confirmed and reconfirmed by this elaborate series of revelation scenes. The only piece of the puzzle left is exactly how she was safely conveyed from the clutches of the robbers to her foster parents in Pantaleria; this information is indeed disclosed by the magic book, but it is so clearly the least important link in the chain of events that it seems expressly calculated to be an anticlimax. The enchanted theater is thus Page 125 → predrained of consequence and impact, even as the reader's attention is forcefully drawn to it. The opposite of Astolfo's indexed magic book in Orlando Furioso, this ostentatiously monumental and supernatural book contains little.

Defusing Magic and Regarding the Self Surveying a large body of English and Continental romance texts from the medieval and early modern periods, Helen Cooper has recently identified a romance trope that she calls “magic that doesn't work,” magical talismans that either fail to function or are introduced with great fanfare and then seem to drop out of the story.49 For example, as Cooper notes, in the twelfth-century chanson de geste known as Huon de Bourdeaux, Huon forgets that a giant gave him a magic ring that makes him invincible, so he risks his life to fight unaided past the guards at the castle of the emir of Babylon.50 In contrast with the less sophisticated fairy-tale mode, Cooper argues, romance narratives de-emphasize the efficacy of magical objects in favor of explorations of human agency and psychological motivation. Magic does not disappear from romance narratives, she notes, but it is deployed almost erratically, in ways that make it seem superfluous, vestigial, and far less important for its efficacy than for its use as a foil for the development of character. Romances therefore rarely make magic the driving factor in the plot, or the decisive factor in the hero's or heroine's success. Magic and the supernatural often appear oddly supplementary: decoration rather than substance…. The wonder that you might expect to expend on the magic is transferred to the ethical or emotional meaning it points to…. It follows from this that it is the authors who have the greatest concern with the sentence, the inner meaning, of their stories, or with the emotional lives of their characters, who will use the motif [of nonfunctioning magic] most fully.51 Cooper's study is concerned exclusively with romances from the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, but her identification of this motif is, it seems to me, entirely appropriate to this seventeenth-century text from the postQuixote period. The anticlimactic moment around the prophetic book in Urania is also, of course, a moment of nonfunctioning magic, a device that, technically, “works,” but whose effect on the plot of Urania is nothing. Rather than working according to the Page 126 → expected logic of oracular pronouncement or prophecy—or, indeed, according to the expected rules of narrative, in which foreshadowing is followed up by resolution—Urania's magic book does not resolve suspense or further the plot. This static, tableau-like scene instead works in the opposite direction from the essential forward movement of “plot.” In this sense, according to the theories of Patricia Parker or Jonathan Goldberg about romance digressiveness, it could be read as deeply representative of the essential mechanics of romance.52 Yet, at the same time, the show of magic in Urania that merely rehearses what is known supplies a material object, a supernatural book, to stand in for and somehow codify and externalize—for the reader in the text and the reader of the text—the story of the character's life. In the scene of the enchanted theater, Wroth does ultimately devise a way to make the stale revelation of Urania's story release its dramatic energy once again, through a displaced retelling. Veralinda's story is a direct echo of Urania's archetypal romance biography. Her tale is essentially a dramatically condensed version of Urania's, with the difference that while Urania's story is ever ongoing and ever twisting, in the true romance mode—the elaborate iterations of which we have already noted in the multistage uncovering of Urania's identity—Veralinda receives a neat happy ending in this very scene. For her, the book is indeed an effective oracle: Veralinda had not known she was a princess or that the supposed “nymph” who had been accompanying her was really Leonius, her future husband, in disguise. The last line of her story has a resounding ring of “happily ever after”: “Thus was she preserved and in her true love had a faire dwelling” (I.iii.457). Veralinda is not a major character in the Urania: she is introduced for the first time after the princesses have already been trapped in the theater, and her role is substantively over after this episode. She appears a few more times in the Urania, but never consequentially, only to listen to someone else's story (I.iii.461, I.iv.559, 1.iv.563–65). In the manuscript of Part II, although she reappears, her appearances are similarly incidental, as a companion and listener to Pamphilia (II.i.109–12, 117–31) and in connection with her sons Verolindo and Amphilonius, who have larger parts to play amid the members of the second generation of Wroth's characters. The eventful, distinctive part of Veralinda's narrative, her courtship by her true love, the most important aspect of anyone's life in the world of Urania, is happily wrapped up. Veralinda's story is the simplified, tidy version of Urania's own. Urania is not surprised to read the record of her own life, because she already knows it; it is her own story. Yet hearing it Page 127 → told again, this time as the revelation of Veralinda's personal mystery, Urania finds what is substantively her biography, told in a neater and shorter form—the fictionalized version, in a sense,

which the truth is stranger than. “Fiction” is not the same as “romance,” since, as is vividly illustrated by the endings of both parts of the Urania, which, like Sidney's Arcadia, halt dramatically in midsentence, romance can deny neat endings—not in a gesture toward “realism,” but as another way of calling attention to the disjunction, the seam, between life and art, like the temporary interruption in Don Quixote. Urania's story will not end; not even her discovery of who she is can seem to end; but Veralinda's story does, satisfyingly. After this episode, Urania, in contrast to Veralinda, continues to be a central figure. In Part II, her friendship and advice are important to other characters, especially her brother Amphilanthus, whom she talks out of committing suicide (II.i.171–72); she is also the protagonist of several distinctive romance vignettes, including another shipwreck (II.i.173–74), a quasi-Arthurian episode in which hands bearing scrolls and golden books emerge from a fountain (II. ii.306–7), and a foiled attack on her castle by despotic Lydians (II.ii.360–61). Interestingly, as she maintains an active and emotionally vivid presence, she appears only in happy contexts: as an empathetic sister and friend, a proud mother, a wife to a good king. It is to Pamphilia, who becomes the emotional center of the text during Part I and rapidly takes over the role of main heroine, who experiences the reversals of fortune that typify romance—the missed connections, separations, and joyful reunions—that Wroth gives compelling moments of grief and ecstasy. Only Urania, who has seen her whole life represented as a book, seems to have found a kind of emotional equilibrium. In her important discussion of women as storytellers and poets in the Urania, Lewalski argues that narrating and writing about themselves is a “major means of self-definition and agency…. These stories allow the narrators to shape their lives artfully, giving them meaning and rhetorical power…. For Wroth's storytellers within the text, the implied fictional ideal is to attain enough aesthetic distance to give artful shape to life experience.”53 For Lewalski, the act of authoring one's own text is congruent with the act of assuming independent agency in one's life. What does it mean, then, not to write but to read your own story? Significantly, Urania's life story is not an autobiographical or creatively quasi-autobiographical narrative that she herself spins (in the manner of Pamphilia's masking her own experience as “fixion”) but something exterior to her that the text, in its portentously theatrical presentation, invests Page 128 → with great authority. The dramatic function of the book is closely related to the function of narrative in Lewalski's account of female storytellers, yet the materiality of the enchanted book adds another dimension. Veralinda's story appears as an object separate from Urania (a separation significant in this text in which, as we have seen, private books and private bodies are linked), and in its distinction, it makes Urania's own life strange and new to her. In this work in which reading, as well as writing, serves as an important practice of inwardness, Urania's “self-in-a-book” can be appreciated by her objectively, as an artifact, rather than simply a stream of passing experience. As an artifact, it can be separated from her and depersonalized. Does Urania (like Posthumus in Cymbeline) understand her story better and find it easier to read and more worthy of her attention when it seems to happen to someone else? What is the value of discovering new interest in one's own life, new regard for it as a consequential thing? A magical book tells the identity-seeking heroine something about herself and yet presents that revelation in such a way that it is already understood, pre-read. How can rereading a story you already know well—your own life—reveal anything useful? In Wroth's text, stories overlay stories within the main narrative: more than a dozen significant, ongoing plot threads are woven together, with characters' pasts and parentage becoming braided into the text's account of the present; and an almost uncountable number of inset, self-contained accounts and tales bring the narrative to a temporary halt. Within this complex structure, the “interlace” so much a part of the aesthetic of chivalric romance, the book is used as a way of materially and conceptually delineating one story from the surrounding narratives. At the same time, as she is being read by us, Urania is magically able to read herself, through the magic book's mimetic displacement onto Veralinda. The reconstitution of her life story as a book about someone else—in fact, a supernaturally endowed, hyperdramatically represented book—enables her, as a reading subject, to stand apart from herself and regard herself. By making Urania's story remarkable and yet unremarkable, familiar and yet strange, and by working within romance's self-conscious narrative modes, Wroth seeks to fix in language the curious action of thinking about oneself. The magical book in this text literalizes the automatic association between reading and privacy and, at the same time, enables the fictional reader to conduct a mental exercise in self-regard. We might agree, then, with Lamb as well as Lewalski, that Wroth offers a pattern

of agency not only in the model of the woman writer or storyteller but also in the woman reader. Going Page 129 → further, we could argue that one can read productively, engagedly, and with surprise and pleasure, even if the story is well known, not only by refusing to identify too facilely with the text (as Pamphilia refuses when she throws away the romance, the opposite of Don Quixote becoming one with his romances) but also by identifying readily, by succumbing to the spectacle, by finding oneself in the book after all. Another hint as to what is gained by reading one's own life is provided in the love story of Urania and her eventual husband, Steriamus. In this case, in a startling metaphor invented by Urania, not merely the story but the book itself is already familiar to its reader. Urania and Steriamus each had first been attached to someone else—Urania, although she met Steriamus first, had fallen in love with Parselius instead, while Steriamus had pined unrequitedly for Pamphilia—but, like the lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, they are cured of these early affections by magic, when they jump into the ocean near the rock of St. Maura on the instructions of the sage Melissea (I.ii.230–31).54 When Steriamus later pledges his love to Urania, they must negotiate trust in one another around the inconvenient ideal of true love at first sight: “‘Shee rejected me,’” Steriamus says; “‘I now thanke Heavens for it, since I was kept for this happiness…. Give me this second [love],’ said hee, ‘which as the first I will esteeme, and cherish it; for a new created one it is” (I.ii.265). One of the ways Steriamus convinces Urania that he is prepared to accept her “second love” is by writing a Book of Sonnets for her, in which he praises the “new heat” given by her eyes, which kindle flames that are “Though not the first, yet as the best,” showing that “Pureness is not alone in one fix'd place”; he thus complements his verbal wooing of Urania by giving her a book to read. “These did I learne,” she says of the sonnets, a romance reader echoing, for once, the industrious habits of the “use” model of early modern reading. Critics have commented on Wroth's remarkably progressive vision of romantic relationships, in which Urania is considered no less virtuous for having loved before. Perhaps even more interesting is the way Urania herself later describes second love. Her cousin Philistella, wife of Steriamus's brother, questions how Urania's passion for Steriamus can be as true as her first love and how she can forget what she felt for Parselius. Urania replies that the groundwork for her relationship with Steriamus was actually laid when she first met him and admired him, even though he did not inspire her love at that time: “[T]hus if I changed, twas from sweete Steriamus to Parselius, for his excellency wonne me first; so this can bee no change, but as a booke layd by, new lookt on, is more, Page 130 → and with greater judgement understood” (I.ii.333). The second look at the old book makes all the difference for Urania, just as it does when she is given a dramatically new vision on the old story of her life. 55 Books, as we have seen, are a unique class of objects in that they are both their physical reality, paper and ink, and the stories they contain. They are thus inside and outside the symbolic schema at once, oscillating between literal and metaphoric—a kind of hybrid mimesis that, fittingly, flourishes in the endlessly experimental mode of romance. Books, especially such impossible or supernatural books, enable these texts to experiment with ways of representing self-reflection in fiction. The copy of Don Quixote that Quixote reads and the “whole story of Urania” are closely associated with the readers/subjects in their respective texts; reading one's own story in a book is like looking in a mirror. The Narcissus myth suggests the folly (and the attraction) of imagining that the person in the mirror is an autonomous, other being; only oneself is there. A book, however, is another thing, separate from the body, which the reader can expect to remain separate from himself or herself. Thus it is an object on which one can get a genuine perspective, from a suitable distance. If the book is analogous to the self and allows one to regard oneself as if from another person's perspective, self-contemplation can escape from selfconsciousness and become unpredictable, unanticipated, new. In The Instruction of a Christen Woman, Vives (in the 1529 translation by Richard Hyrde) dismisses the appeal of romances (“bokes written in our mothers to[n]ges…[of] none other matter but of warre and love”56) to women as mere vanity: “For oftentymes the onley cause why they [women] prayse theim, is because they see in them theyr own condicions, as in a glasse.”57 This moralistic perspective on romance dictates that such reading is “vain” in both the original sense of the word, “erroneous, not useful,” and the modern sense that was to come into use in the seventeenth century, “prideful.”58 A representative of the early modern moralistic critique of romances, Vives denigrates reading that shows the reader only herself, rather than offering improving models toward which to aspire—that is, reading that shows her nothing new, only the sinful self that she already knows.

Yet perhaps self-recognition in the “glasse” of a book—a book belonging to the genre of romance, which both is “erroneous” (dealing in wandering, or erring) and “not useful” (according to moralists) and also represents a kind of reading that is also “not useful” (according to the accounts of recent scholarship on the material book)—is the only kind that is not in vain; perhaps it is there Page 131 → that, like Urania, one can find the kind of closure that only happens in fiction. The materiality of Urania's book (its weight and monumentality and its physical setting) seems far out of proportion to the old news that is contained within it, but rereading that well-known story—rereading herself, like her revelatory rereading of Steriamus—becomes, for Urania, the practice that immaterially, opaquely, but surely, shapes and completes her life.

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Conclusion Eating the Book As I proposed in chapter 4, the sealed book in the enchanted theater in Wroth's Urania calls to mind the book with seven seals in Revelation, perhaps the most book-filled portion of the Bible. There, St. John observes God holding the Book of Truth: “And I sawe in the right hand of him that sate upon the throne, a Boke written within, and on the backeside, sealed with seven seales.”1 Christ appears as a slain lamb and begins to open the seals, releasing more visions and voices with each stage of opening, so that all the images and admonitions of Revelation itself seem to pour forth from this book within the book. Later, John watches the Last Judgment, at which the Book of Life, inscribed with the names of all the saved, is opened, and “Whosoever was not founde written in the boke of life, was cast into the lake of fyre” (20.15). In the midst of these visions, another book appears, a “little boke.” And the voyce which I heard from heaven, spake unto me againe and said, Go and take the litle boke which is open in the hand of the Angel, which standeth upon the sea & upon the earth. So I went unto the Angel, and said to him, Give me the litle boke. And he said unto me, Take it, & eate it up, and it shal make thy bellie bitter, but it shalbe in thy mouth as swete as honie. Then I tooke the litle boke out of the Angels hand, and ate it up, and it was in my mouth as swete as honie: but when I had eaten it my bellie was bitter.2 Page 133 → The little book is the revelation, the vision that John has seen, sweet in its holiness and truth but bitter in the terrible judgment that awaits the sinful, and it is also the Revelation, the text in which he will report it and that will endure to be read by future generations of believers. The image draws on an ordinary and ancient fact about books, that they last longer than mere speech, making it appropriate that John, who must transmit the prophecy far and wide, would receive the information as a book. As with all books, the materiality of the “little book” of John's Revelation underscores the contiguousness, integrity, and authority of the message it carries; the shape of the book that contains the information is like underlining marking off a paragraph, as if to say, “Pay attention to this.” The eating of the book means many things. By taking it, John accepts his commissioning as a prophet; God's book goes into his mouth, and God's words will come out. Eating the book is a figure for Communion, which is itself a figure for the sacrifice of Christ, whose death must be both “sweet and bitter” to believers; and Christ is himself the Logos, the word of God. Commentary exists, then, for each symbolic element of this scene, but at the same time, the moment is sublimely strange, outsignifying glosses and resisting interpretation. A sense of disorientation and noncomprehension is increased by the coupling of the humble corporeality of a stomachache with the words of God and the angels and by the chiastic exchange of bitter and sweet in verse 8 with sweet and bitter in verse 9. The Revelation is a transmission sent from God to disclose the future to humankind, yet this book stands far more for what we do not know and cannot learn about the end of the world than it does for knowledge and understanding; it stands for mystery and obscurity much more than for presented and preserved information. In short, in being incompletely readable, John's little book signifies the opposite of that for which we would expect a book to stand. Nothing is new under the sun of romance, so perhaps it is not surprising that the same limpid quality of strangeness that attends the book in English Renaissance romance texts is present in the Geneva Bible, the foundational book of sixteenth-century English culture. In a scene staged with rhetorical fanfare, plotted as momentous and climactic for the narrative, a reader finds a book, seizes upon it, and eagerly opens it to find what is within, and then wonder of antiquity long stopt his speech. ’Tis senseless speaking, or a speaking such as sense cannot untie. Ile drowne my booke. A Booke every one there strove to take Page 134 → down, but none could gain it. Who is this that answers us? Books are made to be containers for information, and we expect that they should transmit it. Yet, in early modern romance, that transmission breaks down, and rational understanding, the neat

progression across the page of word following word, line following line, is replaced by transforming wonder, which can include misunderstanding, confusion, and breakdowns of sense. Romance readers “understand” the books they read not through the orderly use of humanist book practice (the material habits of marking, noting, epitomizing, commonplacing) but—as does John when he eats the book—by receiving them in their radical wholeness. Readers in romance, and their books, do not behave like historical early modern readers and books, at least according to the material traces those real readers left. But by watching readers on the pages and stages of romance, that genre between the historical and the ahistorical, always old and always new, we may gain access to another, immaterial world of the early modern book.

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Notes Introduction 1. See Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). 2. The interrelated fields of book history and literary studies of the material book have grown at such a rate that it would be impossible to offer even a selective bibliography in a footnote. Some of the most important works for this study have been Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). David Scott Kastan proposes that scholars' current fascination with printed books at the beginning of their history is partly an expression of a nostalgic, preservationist impulse, at a time in which it seems as though the end of that history is nigh, when books made of ink and paper will be superseded by electronic methods of storing text. See Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 111–36. 3. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 1. Skepticism about studies of material culture is also illuminatingly registered in Henry Turner, “Nashe's Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599),” ELH 68, no. 3 (2001): Page 136 → 529–61, and Julian Yates, “What Are Things Saying in Renaissance Studies? ” Literature Compass 3, no. 5 (2006): 992–1010. 4. In this effort, I join a small group of scholars who have studied the early modern book as an idea rather than only as a physical object. Frederick Kiefer, in Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), examines metaphorical uses of books and writing in the language of early modern drama. Chartier issues a more explicit call for a reunion of material culture studies and literary studies, in the introduction to a diverse collection of essays about texts and writing technologies, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Charlotte Scott's concise but wide-ranging Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) touches on much of the Shakespeare canon, offering illuminating local readings of both literal and figurative books. James Kearney examines the vexed idea of the book in the text-centric but anti-object culture of post-Reformation England, in The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 5. Helen Cooper, in The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), has brilliantly appropriated the idea of the “meme” to describe the almost organic, self-replicating, historically mutating quality of romance motifs. See also Barbara Fuchs, Romance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 4–9, for a concise framing of Northrop Frye's, Fredric Jameson's, and Patricia Parker's different, influential twentieth-century accounts of romance. Also highly valuable is Parker's remarkably thorough entry “Romance” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 609–18. As I hope is clear from this introduction, I understand and deploy the term early modern romance to refer to poetic, dramatic, and prose narratives that participate diversely in the romance mode, demonstrating the influence of classical, pastoral, and chivalric romance and taking up themes of travel, wandering, questing, love, virtue, self-discovery, loss, recovery, and reunion, in exotic, idealized, or fabulous settings, but comprising a more diverse generic variety of texts than the more clearly defined medieval romance genre. 6. So named by Michael McKeon in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1987). 7. See the essays in Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne, eds., Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2008); Tiffany Werth, The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Reforming Romance in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).Page 137 → 8. Lamb and Wayne, Staging Early Modern Romance, 2. 9. Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 170. On the diverse readership of early modern prose romance, see also Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 1–45. 10. Quoted in Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 318. 11. See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 16–45. 12. Curtius, European Literature, 322. See also Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 153–79, for other metaphors of the world in scientific discourse. 13. Curtius, European Literature, 310. 14. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 350. 15. Curtius, European Literature, 304–10. 16. Curtius, European Literature, 334–40 (quote on 340). His surmise about fine bindings is based on several brief passages, including Romeo and Juliet 1.3, where Paris's face is described as the “book of love” with “gold clasps.” 17. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2002). 18. Margaret Lane Ford, “Private Ownership of Printed Books,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1400–1577, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 206. 19. On humanist practices and “active” reading, see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (November 1990): 49–51; William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Ann Blair, Theater of Nature. 20. Jardine and Grafton, “Studied for Action,” 30–31, 74. 21. Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory, 1500–1700. Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005), 2. 22. William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), xiii. 23. Sherman, Used Books, xiv. 24. Peter Stallybrass, “What Is a Book?” Seminar led at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, December 4, 2012. 25. See Heidi Brayman Hackel, “Rhetorics and Practices of Illiteracy, or The Page 138 → Marketing of Illiteracy,” in Reading and Literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Ian Frederick Moulton (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2004), 169–83. 26. Laurel Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 5–7. 27. See Anthony Grafton, “Kepler as a Reader,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1992): 561–72, at 565. 28. See especially Hackel, Reading Material; Sherman, Used Books; Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Andersen and Sauer, Books and Readers, 42–79; Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, eds., Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 29. Hackel, Reading Material, 8. 30. Hackel, Reading Material, 8. 31. Henry Parrot, “Ut Caseus Liber,” ll. 2, 11–12, in Laquel Ridiculosi, or Springes for Woodcocks (London, 1613).

32. In Writing on the Renaissance Stage, Kiefer suggestively links three metaphors of the book—the Book of Conscience, the Book of Nature, and the Book of Fate—to a survey of dramatic texts that thematize the abstract concepts behind the metaphors. But Kiefer is concerned more with verbal evocations of these concepts (e.g., Hamlet's “book and volume of my brain” at Hamlet 1.5.103) than with the material texts that might be read as their manifestations. With regard both to verbal discourse and to actual props, he does not distinguish methodologically among different kinds of written documents (whether letters, papers, poems, or books) but sees them all as aspects of the same expanded culture of literacy. 33. Gervase Markham, Deuoreux: Vertues Teares for the losse of the most christian King Henry, third of that name, King of France (London, 1597), fol. 43 (sig. M3r). 34. William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, The Alexandraean Tragedie (London, 1604), sig. L3v. 35. Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage, 12–13. 36. Cecile M. Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 49–50. 37. Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Making Shakespeare's Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in the Archives,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 304–40. 38. Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass, “What Is a Book?” in The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, ed. Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 188–204. 39. Peter Stallybrass, “‘Little Jobs’: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 315–41.Page 139 → 40. John Donne, “The Good-Morrow” (1.11), in The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner (London: Penguin, 1957), 58. 41. Roger Chartier, “The Practical Impact of Writing,” in A History of Private Life, vol. 3, Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 111–59, at 124–25. 42. See Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print, 13–15. 43. Adi Ophir, “A Place of Knowledge Re-Created: The Library of Michel de Montaigne,” Science in Context 4 (1991): 163–89, at 189. 44. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 74–114. 45. Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 520–21. 46. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 152–53 (VIII.xi). On Augustine and reading, see Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996). 47. Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (London: Tavistock, 1988), 16–49. 48. For a perspective on the history of the self in the Renaissance, see John Lee, Shakespeare's “Hamlet” and the Controversies of Self (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000). 49. John Heminge and Henrie Condell, “To the great Variety of Readers,” in Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (London, 1623), sig. A3.

Chapter 1 1. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, Toshiyuki Suzuki, and Shohachi Fukuda, eds., The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser (London: Longman, 2001), 716. All subsequent references to The Faerie Queene by book, canto, and stanza number are taken from this edition. 2. Nevertheless, in his essay “Books in The Faerie Queene” in The Spenser Encyclopedia (ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990], 104), Kenneth Gross noted, “No special study of the iconography of books in literary romance exists,” and no such study has appeared in the twenty years since the Encyclopedia's publication. 3. In The Incarnate Text (especially chapter 2, “Rewriting the Letter: Textual Icons and Linguistic Artifacts

in Book I of The Faerie Queene”), Kearney writes about books in the Legend of Holiness. On this gift exchange, he argues that scholars' long-standing difficulty in interpreting the contents of the diamond box, Page 140 → together with the equivalency between box and book, suggests that the “liquor” symbolizes the difficulty of allegorical reading. 4. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Sir John Harington (1591), ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). Spenser, of course, would have read Ariosto in Italian; I use this near-contemporary translation for the purpose of comparing two Elizabethan perspectives on the book in romance. 5. Juan Luis Vives, A Very Fruteful and Pleasant Boke Called the Instruction of a Christen Woman…Turned out of Latyne into Englishe by Richard Hyrde (London, 1557), D2r. 6. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570), ed. Edward Arber (Boston: Heath, 1898), 164. 7. John Leland, Assertio inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae (1544), quoted in Jennifer Summit, Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 120. 8. Patricia Parker has most notably explored this idea of romance dilatio, or “dilation,” in Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of A Mode (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 9. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1966). The page counts here are from the Penguin edition and are intended only as a ratio. 10. Spenser, “A Letter of the Authors,” in Hamilton et al., Faerie Queene, 716. 11. Harry Berger Jr., The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser's “Faerie Queene” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 90. 12. Bart van Es, Spenser's Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 47. 13. A few previous readers have noticed this visual pun (although none of them seems to have noticed that others have). See, e.g., Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 124; Richard Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 68; Andrew King, “Lines of Authority: The Genealogical Theme in The Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies 18 (2003): 63. 14. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 2006), 64. 15. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Second Part of the History of the Valorous and witty Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of the Mancha…by Michael Cervantes, trans. Thomas Shelton (London, 1620), chapter 59, fol. 399–400. I discuss this passage in greater detail in chapter 4. 16. Summit, Memory's Library, 111. 17. Summit discusses the debunking of the Arthur myth in Memory's Library, 119–20. 18. Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 3.Page 141 → 19. Escobedo suggests, somewhat whimsically, that Briton Moniments “is” Geoffrey's lost source (Nationalism and Historical Loss, 71–72). 20. Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo,Amadis of Gaul, ed. Edwin B. Place and Herbert C. Behm (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974), 1:19–20, 2:309–10. 21. Cervantes Saavedra, The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don-Quixote of the Mancha, trans. Thomas Shelton (London, 1612), chapter 9. 22. Andrew King, “The Faerie Queene” and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 60–61. 23. On the House of Alma (not just the library of Eumnestes) as a “memory palace,” see Grant Williams, “Phantastes' Flies: The Trauma of Amnesiac Enjoyment in Spenser's Memory Palace,” Spenser Studies 18 (2003): 235. 24. Indeed, with the rise of the personal book as a commodity, reading becomes associated with self-regard and self-reflection, both produced by and constitutive of the growth of privacy in early modern culture. 25. King says, “The first book relates the traditional ‘British history,’ the second book presents romance” (“Faerie Queene” and Middle English Romance, 180–81), adding his voice to a tradition of critics, including Berger (Allegorical Temper, 104–14). 26. Gross, Spenserian Poetics, 123. 27. King, “Lines of Authority,” 59–66. 28. Summit, Memory's Library, 125. 29. Judith H. Anderson, “‘Myn Auctor’: Spenser's Enabling Fiction and Eumnestes' ‘Immortal Scrine,’” in

Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 17. 30. Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss, 53n18. 31. Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss, 46, 77. Escobedo's account of Arthur's “secret pleasure” is too simple: he notes that Arthur delights in his “national identity” yet knows that it is better that he not step into this role immediately, since, according to “history,” he will have to die (Nationalism and Historical Loss, 10). This reading seems to me to suppose too much understanding and not enough subtlety in the figure of Arthur. 32. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 20. 33. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 13. 34. Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 39. 35. On this point, my claim is distinct from that of Summit, who discusses the “wonder of antiquity” and the “secret pleasure” of the unknowable in Memory's Library. Summit sees Arthur as embracing the new historiography and its confrontation Page 142 → of the medieval chronicles, choosing uncertainty over certainty and choosing “the perennially fragmentary, incomplete nature of the post-Reformation archive” over the ideals of wholeness and continuity that characterize medieval history (Summit, Memory's Library, 126–27). Instead, in my view, Arthur finds pleasure not in a brave and radical new skepticism but in a suspended, limpid moment of the withholding of questions. 36. King notes but does not address the disjunction of Arthur's reaction: “It is difficult to understand the uninhibited rapture with which Arthur responds to his nation's history” (“Faerie Queene” and Middle English Romance, 183). For Berger, it signifies “the essential goodness of man's life in history, a goodness submerged beneath so many tidal waves of violence and sedition” (Allegorical Temper, 90). 37. Escobedo remarks on this echoing of “There” (Nationalism and Historical Loss, 80n56). 38. Harry Berger Jr., obliquely linking Merlin's chronicle to Arthur's book, argues that “the moniment he [Merlin] presents to Britomart is first rounded to a panacea, then rendered endlesse, or unperfited” (Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 130). 39. Cf. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 38: “The closure of the book is an illusion largely created by its materiality, its cover. Once the book is considered on the plane of its significance, it threatens infinity.” 40. Hamilton et al., Faerie Queene, 306, 310 (notes on III.ii.8 and III.ii.49). 41. In Merlin's Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Renaissance England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), Howard Dobin argues that Spenser particularly intended to recall Elizabeth's 1575 visit to Dee in which she reportedly gazed into his crystal ball: “[H]e would have recognized an excellent opportunity to blend history and legend—Elizabeth with Britomart and Dee with Merlin—in keeping with the allegorical design of the poem” (5). Dee's crystal ball may still be seen in the British Museum. 42. Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 107–10. 43. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 170. 44. James Nicolopulos, The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in “La Araucana” and “Os Lusíadas” (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 180–81. The Seven Sages of Rome was printed at least three times during the sixteenth century in England, and a dramatic version by Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle was performed by the Admiral's Men in 1599. See Killis Campbell's introduction and notes to his edition of The Seven Sages of Rome (Geneva: Slatkine, 1975), xi–cxiv, 75. At least some of the English versions attribute Virgil's mirror to Merlin's manufacture (Campbell, Seven Sages, xciv). For a modern Page 143 → edition of one of the Renaissance printed texts, see A History of the Seven Wise Masters of Rome: Printed from the Edition of Wynkyn de Worde, 1520, ed. George Laurence Gomme (London: Villon Society, 1885). 45. Lauren Silberman suggests that “So that” in stanza 19 could mean “in such a way that,” allowing an even more universal reading (Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of “The Faerie

Queene” [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995], 23). 46. Quoted in Nicolopulos, Poetics of Empire, 194–97. 47. See Chartier, “Practical Impact of Writing”; Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 48. Hamilton et al, Faerie Queene, 305 (note on III.ii.20). 49. Anne Ferry, The Art of Naming (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 12. 50. Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 280–329. 51. Debora Shuger, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors,” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 21–41, especially 37. 52. Quoted in Grabes, Mutable Glass, 96. We can continue to generalize, of course, to the role of all art in “holding the mirror up to nature,” but the particularly close metaphorical connection between books and mirrors remains. 53. Ford, “Private Ownership,” 206. 54. Elizabeth Porges Watson argues that Spenser had read the Lusíadas, but Britomart's mirror is not among the examples of Camões's influence on The Faerie Queene that she cites (Watson, “Camões,” in Hamilton, Spenser Encyclopedia, 312). The eighteenth-century critic Thomas Warton was the first reader—as well as, apparently, the last one until the twenty-first century—to note the connection between the magic mirrors “representing the universal fabrick or system of the world” in the Portuguese romance and in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene. Warton's 1775 History of English Poetry is quoted in The Variorum Spenser, vol. 3, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934), 216. Nicolopulos says that no reader since Warton has examined this connection with the Lusíadas (Poetics of Empire, 179). On the popularity of Iberian romance in sixteenth-century England, see King, “Faerie Queene” and Middle English Romance, 39–40. 55. Luis de Camões, The Lusiads, trans. Sir Richard Fanshawe, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London: Centaur, 1963), 318. The Portuguese reads, “O trasunto reduzido / Em pequeno volume” (This reduced copy / In a small volume). This version in modern spelling is quoted in Nicolopulos, Poetics of Empire, 201.Page 144 → 56. Pointing to the way in which Britomart becomes what she desires, Kathryn Schwarz relates this episode to a “gendered negotiation of identity, implicating both the allegorical relationship between Chastity and Justice and the performative relationship of masculinity to men” (“Breaking the Mirror Stage,” in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Doug Trevor [New York: Routledge, 2000], 273ff.). 57. Hamilton et al., Faerie Queene, 306 (note to III.ii.26). 58. Summit makes this connection, noting that in “Arthur's response…. Spenser implies that the ‘antiquity’ represents the limits of knowledge, rather than its basis” (Memory's Library, 18), but her ultimate judgment, following Goldberg's theory in Endlesse Worke, is that “Arthur's ‘secret pleasure’ over the gap in the record reinscribes an aesthetic of incompleteness that runs throughout The Faerie Queene” (127). My argument goes farther, suggesting that not just this poem but the larger, structural and cognitive concept of the book is imagined as incomplete. 59. Williams discusses a similar notion of self-misrecognition or “self-forgetting” with reference to Guyon but does not touch on Arthur (or Britomart) (“Phantastes' Flies,” 231–52). 60. Teskey, “Allegory,” in Hamilton, Spenser Encyclopedia, 21. 61. On the Ramistic quality of The Faerie Queene's rhetorical and stanzaic structure, see Alexandra Block and Eric Rothstein, “Argument and ‘Representation’ in The Faerie Queene, Book III,” Spenser Studies 19 (2004): 177–207.

Chapter 2 1. For the first four acts and three scenes, the play has hewed convincingly to the tragic mode—convincingly enough, perhaps, to warrant the play's inclusion in the “Tragedies” section of the First

Folio. The generic classification of drama in the early modern period usually took the ending into consideration, however. The most widely accepted theory is that the manuscript text of the play was given to the printer late, once printing was already underway, and could only be added to the end, not integrated into “Comedies,” the first section of the book. 2. J. M. Nosworthy, introduction to Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare, ed. J. M. Nosworthy, Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), xxxvii. 3. Until recently, one might comment here about how Shakespeare and his contemporaries would not have regarded The Tempest or any stage play as a “romance,” a designation reserved for prose and poetic narratives. New research into the history of dramatic romance suggests, however, that the story is more complicated and that early seventeenth-century viewers may well have taken for Page 145 → granted the generic connection between narrative romance and tragicomic drama that is now widely considered a Victorian imposition. See Lamb and Wayne's introduction to Staging Early Modern Romance, 1–20. 4. While I am inclined to credit the many arguments recently forwarded that Shakespeare's “intention” was to call the heroine “Innogen,” it seems to me that rather than emend her name, it is best to think of the name Imogen as containing Innogen and all that name might signify, in the same way that we think of any other word in Shakespeare as rich and multiple in meaning. For the rationale of emending to Innogen, see Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery, eds., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 604. 5. Quotations from Cymbeline are taken from the First Folio of 1623, in the Norton facsimile edition by Charlton Hinman (New York: Norton, 1968), but I have modernized u/v, i/j, and the long s. In addition, for the reader's convenience, rather than use the facsimile edition's continuous line numbering, I have provided act, scene, and line numbers from the Arden Shakespeare edition (2nd series, ed. Nosworthy). Simon Palfrey also says that this line “describes Cymbeline's constructive principle” (Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words [Oxford: Clarendon, 1997], 246). 6. Compare the First Gaoler's words to Posthumus on the “debt” paid by being hanged: “your necke (Sir) is Pen, Booke, and Counters” (5.4.171–72). 7. Scott suggests not only that the appearance of a book here marks a shift from tragedy to comedy but also that the earlier manifestation of a book in the play, in Imogen's bedroom scene at 2.2, had coincided with a mirroring shift from comedy to tragedy (Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book, 43–44). The latter contention seems less tenable to me, since what truly threatens to overwhelm the characters with tragedy is not Iachimo's treachery, a version of the Ovidian story, but Posthumus's crediting of it and his rash actions in response. 8. Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 120. 9. Gower is often imagined as a relic of the oral tradition, but his choruses, here and elsewhere, make clear that the story of Pericles is both a ballad and a specifically written text: “To sing a song that old was sung / From ashes ancient Gower is come,…It hath been sung at festivals…. And lords and ladies in their lives / hath read it for restoratives” (1.0.1–8, quoted from Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series [London: Thomson Learning, 2004]). 10. Ben Jonson, “Ode to Himself” (1629), in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 6:492.Page 146 → 11. The Autobiography and Personal Diary of Dr. Simon Forman, ed. James Orchard Halliwell (London, 1849), quoted in Nosworthy, introduction to Cymbeline, xiv. 12. Valerie Wayne surveys visual representations in productions of Cymbeline from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and finds that the scene of Iachimo's theft of Imogen's bracelet is perhaps the play's most commonly depicted moment (“The Woman's Parts of Cymbeline,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 288–315, especially 304). 13. Scott effectively brings together Lavinia's Ovid and Imogen's Ovid, suggesting that both plays engage the Metamorphoses in “drafting the heroine's consciousness at acute moments of violence and fear” (Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book, 22). 14. Proverbs 31:15, 18, quoted from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), Old Testament fol. 277.

15. Quotation from Latymer's Cronickille of Anne Bulleyne, in Eve Rachele Sanders, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 64. 16. Sir Thomas Overbury, Characters (London, 1615), quoted in Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4. 17. Johnson, The Academy of Love (London, 1641), quoted in Sanders, Gender and Literacy, 47. 18. Eve Rachele Sanders, “Interiority and the Letter in Cymbeline,” Critical Survey 12, no. 2 (2000): 62. 19. Sanders connects the scene of Imogen in bed with a book with later episodes in the play in which Imogen reads and construes letters, arguing that the staging of her reading Ovid as wayward, graphically punished by Iachimo's intrusion, is redeemed by these subsequent occasions in which she demonstrates her fidelity (“Interiority and the Letter,” 62). I would argue, however, that this scene's true requital or answer in the course of the play is not the reading of letters but the reading of another book, completely different, entirely supernatural, by Imogen's estranged husband Posthumus, in the climactic episode in Act 5, Scene 4. 20. Wayne, “Woman's Parts,” 301. Posthumus's dream of Jupiter's descent has received some attention from critics, particularly from a psychoanalytic perspective: see especially Meredith Skura, “Interpreting Posthumus's Dream from Above and Below: Families, Psychoanalysis, and Literary Critics,” in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwarz and Coppèlia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 203–16; Joseph Westlund, “Self and Self-Validation in a Stage Character: A Shakespearean Use of Dream,” in The Dream and the Text, ed. Carol Page 147 → Schreier Rupprecht (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 200–216. Nevertheless, there has been scant commentary on Posthumus's book in studies of Cymbeline. A notable recent entry is Scott's brief but admirable discussion of Cymbeline in her study of books in Shakespeare; Scott is more interested in Imogen's scene of reading than in Posthumus's, however, and her conclusion about “the book” in the play as a whole, that it “negotiates our awareness of other voices within the play and how those voices…enable other voices and signs to appear and determine our ways of seeing” (Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book, 56), claims a unity of mimesis for the play rather than the startling heterogeneity of romance representation that I find. In my view, as I will elaborate later in this chapter, Posthumus's book does not negotiate voice and vision but allows a kind of blind and speechless understanding of the unrepresentableness of interiority. 21. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 1947), 1452a34–35 (also quoted in Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003], 95). 22. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 187. 23. Quoted in Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 221; note that in the indoor playhouses, as in a modern auditorium (unlike in the “wooden Os”), the cheaper seats were high up, in the “gallery,” and the most expensive ones were on the floor, close to the stage. 24. Frances Teague argues that the “confusion” works to destabilize character and, in the context of this scene, to reduce the appearance of omnipotence in the pagan gods, to avoid offending Christian sensibilities (Shakespeare's Speaking Properties [Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1991], 115–16). But such basic confusion does not necessarily attend the many other evocations of a pagan cosmos in Shakespeare, as in, for example, Diana's descent in Pericles. 25. Quoted in Stanley Wells, Shakespeare for All Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 231. 26. Quoted in Palfrey, Late Shakespeare, 243. See also Wells et al., Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, 131–32; Ann Thompson, “Cymbeline's Other Endings,” in The Appropriation of Shakespeare, ed. Jean Marsden (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). 27. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 140. See also David M. Bergeron, “Treacherous Reading and Writing in Shakespeare's Romances,” in Reading and Writing in Shakespeare, ed. David M. Bergeron (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 160–77. 28. Scott classifies it as “in strictly semantic terms…not a ‘book,’” while maintaining that in this scene, nevertheless, “the idea of a book is employed” (Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book, 51n34). Page 148 → 29. “Simpathy” is glossed as “like[ness]” in the Arden Shakespeare edition (ed. Nosworthy), as “resemblance” in the New Pelican Shakespeare edition (ed. Peter Holland [London: Penguin, 2000]), and as “similarity” in the edition of Jean Howard in The Norton Shakespeare (ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus [New York: Norton, 1997]) and in the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition (ed. Martin Butler [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005]).

30. John Lyly, Euphues and his England (London, 1580), fol. 7, sig. Ciiii. 31. Lee, Shakespeare's ‘Hamlet’ and the Controversies of Self, 200. Note that Lee is partly repeating and expanding Stephen Greenblatt's comment that Hamlet's soliloquies are “words that claim not access to the inner life but existence as the inner life” (Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 87). 32. Paul Ricoeur, “Mimesis and Representation,” trans. David Pellauer, Annals of Scholarship 2, no. 3 (1981): 21. 33. Ricoeur, “Mimesis and Representation,” 29. 34. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 819–20. 35. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951; repr., 2004), 105–6. 36. I am grateful to Kathryn Lynch for bringing these examples to my attention. 37. Thomas Heywood, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, vol. 1 (London: John Pearson, 1874), 228–29. 38. Heywood, Dramatic Works, 228. 39. See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971; repr., 1997), 45. 40. Marjorie Garber describes how this classification principle comes from Aristotle and, of course, from Artemidorus (Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974], 5–6). 41. Thomas Hill, The moste pleasuante arte of the interpretacion of dreames (London, 1576), A2r–A2v. 42. Scot adds, “He that list to see the follie and vanitie thereof, maie read a vaine treatise, set out by Thomas Hill Londoner, 1568” (Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584; repr., New York: Dover, 1972], 102–3). Scot's analysis suggests Freud's theory that part of the function of dreaming is to process the “day's residues” (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey [New York: Avon, 1965], 262). As Peter Holland notes, Montaigne had similar opinions on dreams as the trivial flotsam and jetsam of the mind (Holland, “‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ in the Renaissance,” in Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, ed. Peter Brown [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 132–34). 43. On the different methods of interpretation in Hill, see Kathleen McLuskie, Page 149 → “The ‘CandyColored Clown’: Reading Early Modern Dreams,” in Brown, Reading Dreams, 152–54. 44. Hill, Moste pleasuante arte, sig. E3v. 45. McLuskie cautions that although modern readers tend to assume that the stranger and more unlikely Renaissance dreams (like Simon Forman's famous dream of flirting with Queen Elizabeth) are “authentic” and that the more schematic ones are fake, “the range of forms in which dreams are represented does provide an insight into models of perception which are a vital part of the mental life of a past culture” (“Candy-Colored Clown,” 167). 46. Hill, Moste pleasuante arte, sig. D4r–D5r. 47. Artemidorus, The Judgement or Exposition of Dreames (London, 1606), quoted in Jeffrey Masten, “The Interpretation of Dreams, circa 1610,” in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, eds. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (New York: Routledge, 2000), 185. The original text goes on to say that “to dream to eate them is good to schoole maisters & al which make profyt by books & which are studious for eloquence to others it is suddaine death.” Artemidorus also has an interpretation of a dream of suddenly being able to read foreign languages, which, he says, “signifie that they shall go into that Country and have goods and honor there: but to read badly, signifies the contrary” (Judgement or Exposition of Dreames, sig. D1v–D2r). 48. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 375. 49. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 80. 50. Palfrey discusses “Jupiter's glittering, meretricious appearance…designed to undercut rather than to praise the God's percipience” (Late Shakespeare, 244). Marcus argues that the deflation of Jupiter is a subtle “mockery” of the royal pomp and circumstance beloved of James I (Puzzling Shakespeare, 143). 51. For a fuller discussion of this scene, see Garber, Dream in Shakespeare, 15–26. 52. This is the Second Folio reading, here preferred to the First Folio's unmetrical and confusing “All faults that name, nay that Hell knows.”

53. Augustine, Confessions, 187–93 (X.15, 25). 54. See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge, 1966), for the mind as a library or theater. See Carruthers, Book of Memory, for the mind as a tablet or storehouse. 55. Carruthers, Book of Memory, 134–37 (quotation on 137). Scott observes that Iachimo makes Imogen's body “the central loci of his mnemonic storehouse” (Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book, 49), but she does not elaborate the connection between Iachimo's mental notes and memory technology. 56. See, e.g., Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 132–33; Alison Thorne, “‘To Write and Read Be Henceforth Treacherous’: Cymbeline and the Problem of Interpretation,” in Shakespeare's Page 150 → Late Plays: New Readings, ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 181–82. 57. Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 45–48. 58. Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, done into English by John Florio (London, 1603), C2r (quoted in Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting, 47). 59. Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting, 48. Sullivan also refers to Nietzsche's idea of the need for “active oblivion” in The Genealogy of Morals. 60. Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams, introduction to Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, ed. Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams (London: Routledge, 2004), 6. 61. Thomas Rogers, A Philosophicall Discourse, titled, The Anatomie of the Minde (London, 1576), quoted in Williams, “Phantastes' Flies,” 240. 62. Scott does not agree: although she acknowledges that “it is…during this scene that the book signifies anagnorisis” (Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book, 52), she holds that the book can have significance only for us as readers and playgoers and not for Posthumus: “Posthumus takes this book and its ‘sympathy’ as a valediction, since he believes he is about to die. Whereas for the audience Jupiter's book provides a vision of relief and resolution, for Posthumus it is simply a talisman that affords him some comfort in a ‘sense’ he cannot ‘untie’” (53). On the contrary, I argue that Posthumus takes on the meaning of the book not as a cryptic placebo or as a farewell gesture of sympathy from someone else but as the first stirring of a new and powerful sympathy in the self. 63. About this line, Ruth Nevo notes that “although he is still absolute for death even after the dream, and unable to interpret the oracular message, the fantasy of recuperation [implicit in “golden chance”] points to its possibility” (“Cymbeline: The Rescue of the King,” in Shakespeare's Romances, ed. Alison Thorne [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003], 111). 64. Cymbeline, ed. Howard, in Greenblatt et al., Norton Shakespeare, 3033; Cymbeline, ed. Holland, 115. The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition (ed. Butler), says, “i.e., through execution” (225). 65. Imogen, of course, repeats the cycle of dying and reviving when Posthumus strikes her in the final scene: “You ne'er killed Imogen till now” (5.6.231).

Chapter 3 1. Kearney, Incarnate Text, 179; Paul Yachnin, “Eating Montaigne,” in Reading Renaissance Ethics, ed. Marshall Grossman (New York: Routledge, 2007), 157. Page 151 → 2. Scholars have yet to discover much about the actual books that appeared on the Renaissance English stage. Books are not included in the only surviving early modern properties inventory, prepared in 1598 by Philip Henslowe for the Admiral's Men, despite the fact that his company's repertory at that time included Doctor Faustus, for which the company had other special props. For the text of Henslowe's inventory, see Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 317–25. Kearney offers the theory that the absence of books in the props list “may suggest the ease with which books could be obtained—begged or borrowed—for the stage” (Incarnate Text, 264n2). Indeed, in a personal communication with the author, Holger Schott Syme observes that most of the props listed by Henslowe are not common objects, which may have gone uncataloged, but specialized items that were probably made for the company. The absence of prop books' traces in the archives, when we know they existed, offers, perhaps, an echo of the absence of Prospero's book in this book-minded play.

3. As with Cymbeline, all citations for The Tempest are taken from the First Folio, in the Norton facsimile edition by Hinman, with the limited typographical modernizations mentioned in chapter 2 (note 5). Again, I have provided line numbers from the Arden Shakespeare edition (3rd series), edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Thomson Learning, 1999). 4. The First Folio stage directions do not, of course, offer a reliable guide to all the props required by the plays, but “enter…reading on a book” or “enter…reading” is a fairly common direction (see, e.g., Hamlet 2.2.167; Henry VIII 3.2.104). Hackel addresses this question, though not specifically with reference to The Tempest, in Reading Material, 19–25. See also Allen C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 5. Of course, something made of paper would not sink like a lead “plummet”; the strange image of density reinforces the idea of the book as supernatural, while the fact that an ordinary book would have to become thoroughly waterlogged to submerge is perhaps part of Prospero's vivid word “drown.” 6. “[T]he printed word does not serve the spoken,” Stephen Greenblatt observes, “but has a kind of absoluteness, integrity, and finality” (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 86). 7. Samuel Rowlands, ’Tis Merry When Gossips Meet (London, 1602), quoted in Edwin Haviland Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England: A Study of Nondramatic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 28–29. 8. Poole argues that the Newtonian physics that underlies our assumptions about space and time is an artifact of the Enlightenment and that early moderns had a far different understanding of how matter could behave and of the relationship Page 152 → between visible and invisible worlds. See Poole, Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), especially 25–57. I see my work on The Tempest as responding in part to Poole's challenge to historicize space, perhaps particularly by proposing, in the codex, a readily accessible physical model for her “Ovidian physics” of an unstable reality. 9. Mary Crane, whose Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) offers a compelling account of how words work as a kind of spatial map of thought processes, notes the human tendency to think in physical terms simply because we live in physical bodies: “[T] he spatial structuration of so many cognitive concepts reflects the shaping influence that the experience of embodiment has on cognition and discourse” (33). My work in this chapter will not approach The Tempest through contemporary cognitive theory but will attempt to reconstruct a kind of early modern idea of cognition that I believe is accessible through ideas of the book. 10. Elizabeth Spiller, “Shakespeare and the Making of Early Modern Science: Resituating Prospero's Art,” South Central Review 26, nos. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2009): 24–25. 11. Scott's recent reading of The Tempest's books is very different: “The role of books appears to promise disclosure or revelation, definition or design. Within the play, however, Prospero's books fulfill none of these roles. Whilst on the one hand they offer an image of the world through which The Tempest will move, on the other they deny us the vision of that world. What we see instead is the illusion of order and the chaos of art” (Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book, 158). Scott sees the purpose of the absent books as to throw into relief the insufficiency of ordinary forms of mimesis to represent magic and art—that is, books critique their own authority by abdicating the scene. In contrast, I argue that the book, while absent as an object, is very much present as an idea and that rather than being interested in exposing the limits of representation, Shakespeare is engaged in The Tempest with what the book can do as a tool to think with, how the book can unlock new, kinetic modes of representation. 12. On the resonances between the “new science” and The Tempest, see Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature. 13. Kearney's account of Prospero's book as a locus of authority, “the book as both instrument and justification of European domination” (Incarnate Text, 180), is particularized to the postcolonial context in which he reads the play. 14. In a survey of the performance history of The Tempest and in my own playgoing experience, I have not encountered a production that did not bring Prospero's Page 153 → book onstage. Peter Greenaway's 1991 film adaptation, Prospero's Books, uses books as its dominant visual and thematic motif and suggests that the narrative itself is emerging from Prospero's library, via his brain and mouth.

15. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy (1595), in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 216. 16. See Margreta de Grazia, “The Tempest: Gratuitous Movement, or Action without Kibes and Pinches,” Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): 252–54. 17. Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage, 119. 18. James, Basilicon Doron (1599), and Hughes, St. Pauls Exercise, or A Sermon of Conscience (London, 1622), quoted in Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage, 115, 122–23. 19. Prospero is acting as teacher rather than magician here, a role that, I feel, he seems more comfortable in throughout the play. Much of his magic that we see is either educational (bringing Ferdinand to Miranda; staging a masque about the ideal of marriage for the couple) or punitive (tormenting Caliban). 20. “Heavily” is usually glossed as “sadly” or “slowly,” but its literal meaning seems also relevant, particularly in a theatrical context, in which the clumsy moving of furniture or scenery can reduce the sublime to the ridiculous—as in Cleopatra's protracted winching up of the “heavy” Anthony onto her monument (4.15.33) for a staged farewell. 21. While the date range given by the OED is obviously not a precise history, my argument here about the shift in the definition of volume during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from a narrower to a broader sense, is meant to describe a general trend, not to pinpoint a moment of change. From the early sixteenth century, volume also seems to have meant, as now, a subdivision or portion of a larger book (as in innumerable sixteenth-century book titles, e.g., The second tome or volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the newe testament [1549] or Foxe's The first volume of the ecclesiasticall history, containing the Actes and Monuments [1563]); but the relationship could also be reversed, and a book could be a subsection of a volume, as in Richard Eden's 1555 The Decades of the Newe World or West India: Conteyning the nauigations and conquestes of the Spanyardes, in which he notes that to digress on a particular subtopic “wolde requyre rather a hole volume then a booke” (citation from OED, s.v. “volume” 2a.) 22. The examples of the usage of volume that follow were gathered with the assistance of the ChadwyckHealey Literature Online (LION) database. 23. Richard Fanshawe, Il Pastor Fido: The Faithful Shepherd (London, 1647), fol. 51. 24. Interestingly, the front matter of the First Folio uses the word volume more, with reference to the Folio itself (three times), than any one of Shakespeare's plays Page 154 → (no more than once in any play); perhaps, as an unmetaphorical, monumental descriptive, it was better suited to the preparers of that volume than to a writer who was, we are told, less interested in publication. 25. This passage strongly recalls an episode in Thomas Herriot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588; repr., New York: Dover, 1972) in which Herriot introduces the Virginian natives to the Bible. And although I told them the booke materially & of itself was not of anie such vertue, as I thought they did conceiue, but onely the doctrine therein contained; yet would many be glad to touch it, to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their brests and heades, and stroke ouer all their bodie with it; to shew their hungrie desire of that knowledge which was spoken of. (27) 26. Quoted in Carruthers, Book of Memory, 16. 27. In addition to The Book of Memory, see Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 28. See Frances Yates, Art of Memory. 29. Gunter Walch, “Metatheatrical Memory and Transculturation in The Tempest,” in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's Time, ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michele Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 223–38; see 229–30. 30. Quoted in Frances Yates, Art of Memory, 132. 31. Although she does not explore the idea of the book as a place, Scott describes how a commonplace book—the record of a humanist reader's work—could become a mimesis of the compiler's self: “The idea of the commonplace book frequently suggests a relationship between the book, the individual, and the world: drawing in quotations and observations as the mind and body grow up with an expression of their graphic self” (Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book, 3).

32. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 312–13. 33. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 313. 34. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 311. 35. On popular romance, see Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), and Mentz, Romance for Sale. Margaret TudeauClayton's argument that the play's connections to the Aeneid and to Virgil as a site of cultural capital are far more pervasive than has been previously recognized suggests a different kind of bookishness expressed in intertexuality with the classics. See Tudeau-Clayton, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Early Modern Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 194–244. 36. Marjorie Garber calls it Shakespeare's “‘perfect’ storm, distilled of all the Page 155 → Shakespearean tempests we have weathered before, from Othello to King Lear to the romances” (Shakespeare After All, 856). 37. See Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Vaughan and Vaughan, 142. 38. Tudeau-Clayton, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Early Modern Virgil, 200–201. 39. On special effects in the indoor playhouses, see Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, 172–87. 40. A.D. Nuttall deems this line a “wonderful description in the minutest terms of an image glimmering upon the sight” (Two Concepts of Allegory [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967], 141). Imagining seeing as physical was, of course, traditional in the Renaissance, as in Donne's “The Extasie,” with its “eye-beames twisted” (l. 7, in The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner [London: Penguin, 1957], 75). 41. See William N. West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 42. Nuttall remarks on the contrast between the “intimacy” of the tactile images in Caliban's speech about the island's magical noises and the “feeling of immense distances” in the passages about sea voyages, abysms of time, and so on, suggesting that the “combination of a feeling of remoteness with an equally strong feeling of nearness, of intimacy, is an ambiguity characteristic of dreams, and of things half perceived in the instant of waking” (Two Concepts of Allegory, 140). 43. Gaston Bachelard discusses an interestingly similar microcosmic image in a mid-seventeenth-century passage from Cyrano de Bergerac: “‘This apple is a little universe in itself, the seed of which, being hotter than the other parts, gives out the conserving heat of its globe; and this germ, in my opinion, is the little sun of this little world, that warms and feeds the vegetative salt of this little mass.’…In such imagination as this, there exists total inversion as regards the spirit of observation. Here the mind that imagines follows the opposite path of the mind that observes, the imagination does not want to end in a diagram that summarizes acquired learning. It seeks a pretext to multiply images, and as soon as the imagination is interested by an image, this increases its value” (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1969; repr., 1994), 151–52. 44. Even Prospero's description of his magical practices is kinetic or motion connoting: “I find my zenith doth depend upon / A most auspicious star, whose influence / If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes / Will ever after droop” (1.2.181–84). His power is a “zenith,” the highest rising of a star, and his weakness is a “droop,” the declining motion of a plant that needs water. 45. John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 95. See also Pauline Kiernan, Shakespeare's Theory of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 145. 46. Costumes, for instance, could be sumptuous; see Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, 193–200. 47. Andrew Gurr presents evidence that the crowds in the outdoor playhouses Page 156 → “could be enough of a squeeze to be an uncomfortable experience,” and he quotes a 1624 report to the effect that three thousand people made up a modest crowd at the Globe (Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 2nd ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 18). By comparison, in the reconstructed Globe in presentday London, built to the same specifications, the fire code sets the capacity at fifteen hundred. 48. Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 243–44. 49. Bradwardine quoted (and translated from Latin) in Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 173. 50. See Carruthers, Book of Memory, 130–37 (quotes on 131, 133, 135–36). 51. See especially Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

1999); Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature. 52. Marjorie Nicolson, Science and Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956; repr., Hamden, CT: Archon, 1976), 80–109 (quote on 94). 53. Nicolson, Science and Imagination, 99–101 (emphasis in original). 54. See Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). 55. See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 56. Grafton, “Kepler as a Reader,” 564. 57. Grafton, “Kepler as a Reader,” 565. 58. Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature, 102. 59. Duns Scotus quoted (and translated from Latin) in James A. Weisheipl, Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 115. Scotus's other celebrated works included a logical proof of the Immaculate Conception. It is not clear to what extent Scotus's Catholic theology might have affected his reception after the Reformation. 60. Quoted in Weisheipl, Nature and Motion, 116. 61. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 94. 62. Galileo Galilei, “On Motion” and “On Mechanics,” ed. and trans. I. E. Drabkin and Stillman Drake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 49. Galileo is careful to note, however, that, as distinct from his own objective observations, Duns Scotus “arrive[d] at the truth by belief rather than real proof.” See also Richard Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus: The Scientific Context of a Theological Vision (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), especially 214–38; Thomas Williams, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 63. See Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature, 148–50. 64. The bibliography of Tempest criticism that participates in the discourse of Page 157 → postcolonialism is far too long to summarize meaningfully here; see, most recently, Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, eds., “The Tempest” and Its Travels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 65. See Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference; John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan, eds. Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998); Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, eds., Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Rhonda Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 66. P. D. A. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 7, 15. 67. In fact, the convention of giving the name “theater” to atlases as well as to playhouses comes partly through association with the medieval and Renaissance-humanist encyclopedias that designated themselves Theatrums to emphasize their presentation and display of knowledge. See West, Theatres and Encyclopedias. 68. See West, Theatres and Encyclopedias. 69. Gillies and Vaughan, Playing the Globe, 41. On the philosophy of “spatial practices,” see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Bachelard, Poetics of Space. 70. Gillies and Vaughan, Playing the Globe, 41. 71. See, for instance, Jeffery Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from “Utopia” to “The Tempest” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 7, 220–42. 72. In the abutting of sweeping rhetoric and plain arithmetic, we may hear, as well, an echo of a play from much earlier in Shakespeare's career, Love's Labour's Lost, in which the disguised noblemen claim to have “measured many a mile” from Russia to France to visit their beloveds, a hyperbole that the ladies puncture by demanding to know “how many inches / Is in one mile? If they have measured many, / The measure then of one is easily told” (5.2.186–90). 73. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 219. The play seems to refer to this even more clearly in the moment when Gonzalo reacts to the appearance of Prospero's magic banquet by dropping all claim to doubt. “Now I will believe that there are unicorns” (3.3.21–22), he says, presenting the existence of these creatures not as the subject of old wives' tales but as fact. Antonio, too, is inspired not to disbelief but

to a general credulity: “what else does want credit, come to me / And I'll be sworn ‘tis true. Travellers ne’er did lie” (3.3.25–26). 74. Donne, “A Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse,” l. 7, in Gardner, Metaphysical Poets, 89. Gillies notes that this is one advantage the theater has over the map (Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 96). Page 158 → 75. Caliban does come overseas to the island in Sycorax's womb, recalling the fateful ocean crossing of Thaisa and Marina in Pericles; although both mother and son survive, their passage, like all sea journeys in romance, carries the shadow of risk. 76. My paraphrase here obscures the striking, dull music of these lines (evoking muffled thuds, like heavy things landing on the ocean floor, with blunt consonants, double ms and ds) and the vivid pre-echo, in the image of a lead plummet, of Prospero's Act 5 abdication: “Therefore my son i'th'ooze is bedded, and / I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded, / And with him there lie mudded.” 77. It is also a play in which virtually none but past events are recounted rather than told. In contrast to the frequent use in other plays of the Shakespearean device of reporting what has just happened offstage (compare The Winter's Tale, in which the Clown comes onstage from watching the bear eat Antigonus, saying it is happening “Now, now: I have not winked since I saw these sights” [3.3.103–4]) very little happens in The Tempest during the time of the play that we do not see. Exceptions are Francisco's account of Ferdinand walking on water (2.1) and Ariel's report of how he led Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo into the “filthy mantled pool” (4.1). 78. James Russell Lowell, “Shakespeare Once More,” in Among My Books (London: Everyman, 1870), quoted in Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory, 12.

Chapter 4 1. Sir John Harington, preface to Orlando Furioso, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), 1:217. 2. Henry Parrot, The Mastive, or Young-Whelpe of the Olde-Dogge (London, 1615), sig. I1r, quoted in Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 96. 3. In speaking of the novel, Walter Benjamin referred to “the first great book of the genre, Don Quixote” (“The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt [New York: Schocken, 1968], 87). Northrop Frye claimed that it “signalized the death of one kind of fiction and the birth of another kind” (The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structures of Romance [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976], 39. Foucault calls Don Quixote “the first modern work of literature” (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [New York: Vintage, 1994], 48–49). David Quint argues that its essence lies in how it “mimics and charts the arrival of this modern world” (Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of “Don Quixote” [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003], x). 4. “Rather than viewing the novel as reacting against the romance,” Caroline Jewers argues, “the romance reacted to its own conventions in important ways that Page 159 → contribute…to the history of the novel…. The clearest indicator of Cervantes' supposed radical break with tradition is the presence of generic parody, but…such parody is often a basic feature of the medieval romance” (Chivalric Fiction and the History of the Novel [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000], xi, 5). According to Scott Black, “the question we should be asking” is not whether the novel continues to participate in romance modes but “how novelists use the romance forms that not incidentally but integrally organize many of their works…. [T]he pleasures of romance and the kinds of reading associated with it—amused, wary, and self-conscious about the adaptation of self-consciously old stories—are integral to novels' other effects” (“Quixotic Realism and the Romance of the Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 2 [2009]: 240). 5. Cervantes, History of Don-Quixote, sig. A3r. 6. For an analysis of the text as a critique of various cultural attitudes toward reading, see Elizabeth Spiller, “Cervantes avant la lettre: The Material Transformation of Romance Reading Culture in Don Quixote,” Modern Language Quarterly 60, no. 3 (September 1999): 295–318. 7. See Sandra Forbes Gerhard, “Don Quixote” and the Shelton Translation (Potomac, MD: Studia

Humanitatis, 1982), 1–7, and Edwin B. Knowles Jr., Four Articles on “Don Quixote” in England (New York: New York University Press, 1941), 3–6. The fact that so many allusions appear in plays from the public stage may suggest that the book's readership was socioeconomically diverse. The most substantial study on Cervantine influence on English literary culture, Ronald Paulson's Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), focuses on the eighteenth century. 8. Knowles, Four Articles, 9; Gerhard, “Don Quixote” and the Shelton Translation, 2–3. 9. On Clifford and the “Great Picture,” see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 137–38. 10. The Odcombian Banquet, sig. P2v, quoted in Knowles, Four Articles, 574. 11. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The History of Don Quixote of the Mancha, trans. Thomas Shelton, ed. F. J. Harvey Darton (London: Navarre Society, 1923), 3. The 1923 edition, the only modern edition of the Shelton translation, uses modernized spelling. 12. Cervantes, History of Don Quixote (1923), 60. 13. Jacques Lezra, Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 145. 14. Cervantes, History of Don Quixote (1923), 3. 15. Cervantes, History of Don Quixote (1923), 61. Page 160 → 16. A useful analysis of the literary subject positions in the break in the text is given in E. Michael Gerli, Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 61–81. 17. McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 56. 18. Specifically in the case of Don Quixote, McKeon sees the topos of a discovered manuscript as standing in a transitional moment, just as the text is, “obscurely implicated in the progress of the narrative itself from naïve empiricism to extreme skepticism” (McKeon,Origins of the English Novel, 57). 19. Cervantes, History of Don Quixote (1923), 37. No sequel to Amadís is to be tolerated, however, and all go to the fire, a distinction that, of course, adds another level of self-awareness to the second volume of Don Quixote, itself a sequel, as well as to Cervantes's acknowledgment within Part II of the existence of a spurious, bootleg “sequel” by another author, to be discussed shortly. 20. Rodríguez de Montalvo,Amadis of Gaul, 1:19–20. 21. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Second Part of the History of the Valorous and witty Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of the Mancha…by Michael Cervantes (Chapter 59), trans. Thomas Shelton (London, 1620), 399–400. Chartier offers an acute reading of this “vertiginous” scene in Inscription and Erasure, 40. 22. Cervantes, Second Part, 402–3. 23. Compare the Briton Moniments scene in Book II of The Faerie Queene, which I discussed in chapter 1. 24. On early modern collaboration, see Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 25. Cervantes, History of…Don-Quixote (1612), sig. ¶3v (“step-father”), fol. 58 (“second writer”). 26. Three chapters before the end of the book, a character from the counterfeit sequel appears and provides a logical solution, of a sort, to the problem: there are really two Don Quixotes and two Sancho Panzas, and the book by Fernandez is about the other pair. On the one hand, this explanation dissipates the vertiginous sense of clashing levels of mimesis; on the other hand, it is so dizzying in its own science-fictionality that it merely underlines the strangeness of the fictional dynamic. See Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens, Through the Shattering Glass: Cervantes and the Self-Made World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 148–49. 27. OED, s.v. “lath” (n.) 1a, 2a, 2b. 28. Cervantes, Second Part, 400–401. 29. On medieval theological ideas of the book, see Jesse Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Stock, Augustine the Reader. Page 161 → 30. The Holy Bible, conteyning the Old Testament, and the New (London, 1611), sig. Aa5v–6r. 31. See Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996). 32. On the generic connection between ballads and romance narratives, specifically with reference to print,

see Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories. 33. The Urania is conventional even in its status as a roman à clef of Wroth's aristocratic society, since the use of pastoral romance to shadow contemporary events is itself traditional. See Amelia Zurcher Sandy, “Pastoral, Temperance, and the Unitary Self in Wroth's Urania,” SEL 42, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 103–19. 34. Lewalski, Writing Women, 264. 35. Urania is named for the absent object of shepherds' adoration in the Arcadia and thus establishes—along with the Urania's frontispiece identifying Wroth as “Neece to the ever famous and renowned Sr. Phillips Sidney knight”—the text's connection to that great model of romance writing. 36. Quotations from Wroth, referred to by part, book, and page number, are from The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's “Urania,” ed. Josephine Roberts (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1995), and The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's “Urania,” ed. Josephine Roberts, Suzanne Gossett, and Janel Mueller (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999). 37. Frye, Secular Scripture, 4. 38. Hackett remarks on Wroth's sophisticated double consciousness of genre and parody, in Women and Romance Fiction, 182. Roberts notes the self-parody of the Urania as one of the influences of Don Quixote on it (Roberts, critical introduction to The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's “Urania,” xx–xxv). 39. The bibliography on Wroth and writing is by now extensive; see especially Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Jeffrey Masten, “‘Shall I Turne Blabb?’: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth's Sonnets,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 67–87; Lewalski, Writing Women. 40. Even more explicitly, Urania uses a cabinet as a metaphor for inner feelings in a story she tells about a betrayed lover named Liana: “When I had endured a little space (like a Cabinet so fild with treasure, as though not it selfe, yet the lock or hinges cannot containe it, but breake open): so did the lock of my speech flie abroad, to discover the treasure of my truth, and his falsehood” (I.ii.252). 41. Masten, “Shall I Turne Blabb?,” 69–70. In Spenser's Secret Career, Richard Rambuss discusses the way in which text structures privacy and how the Shepheardes Page 162 → Calendar, for instance, “stores secrecy” in the “‘cabinet’ provided by E.K.'s editorial apparatus” (56–57). 42. This phrase is evocatively strange. “Idle” here means “inconsequential” and maybe “useless,” but the implied negation of the work involved in writing it is striking—writing is not idleness, at least not in the Urania's world, in which it is part of women's ongoing and visibly strenuous work of processing emotion. 43. Mary Ellen Lamb, “Women Readers in Wroth's Urania,” in Miller and Waller, Reading Mary Wroth, 222. 44. Lamb, “Women Readers,” 219. 45. The other two are the Temple of Love and the Hell of Deceit, both of which are more reminiscent of Spenser and have received far more critical attention than the enchanted theater. 46. In Women Writers of the English Renaissance (New York: Twayne, 1996), Kim Walker points out the masque-like way in which Wroth's emblematic scenes of enchantment call attention to their own “machinery” (179). 47. Revelation 5:2–3, in Holy Bible (1611), sig. Z5v. 48. Although she does not refer to the scene of the enchanted theater, Sheila T. Cavanagh (uniquely among Wroth critics) notices, “In the world of the Urania, supernatural occurrences tend to be greeted with equanimity. When characters meet figures or events from this realm, they respond without surprise or undue concern.” For Cavanagh, this nonchalance chiefly masks what would otherwise be the disturbingly powerful agency of the enchantress Melissea. See Cavanagh, “Mystical Sororities: The Power of Supernatural Female Narratives in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania,” in Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England, ed. Corinne S. Abate (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 151–65. 49. Cooper, English Romance, 137–72. 50. Cited in Cooper, English Romance, 145. 51. Cooper, English Romance, 143 (“The magic…substance”), 148 (“The wonder…fully”). 52. See Parker, Inescapable Romance; Goldberg, Endlesse Worke. 53. Lewalski, Writing Women, 277–78. Of course, such self-writing does not always succeed, as when Antissia writes a poem about her rejection by Amphilanthus and then burns it, saying, “Alas Antissia how

doe I pitty thee? how doe I still lament thy hap, as if a stranger?” (I.ii.328). Antissia's autobiographical writing does not succeed in shaping her experience of life but distances her from it, “estranging” her from herself. See Kathryn Pratt, “‘Wounds Still Curelesse’: Estates of Loss in Mary Wroth's Urania,” in Abate, Privacy, Domesticity, and Women, 46–47. 54. In Shakespeare's play, of course, only Demetrius needs to be cured of a natural affection by magic—the others only have their magic-induced misorientations corrected. A Midsummer Night's Dream, interestingly, does not concoct any such Page 163 → compensatory backstory to make Demetrius's love for Helena seem to have arisen from his “true” desires. 55. For a theorization of rereading as it pertains to literary interpretation, see Matei Calinescu, Rereading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Calinescu quotes Proust, from A la recherche du temps perdu: “In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps have never perceived himself” (Rereading, 25). Building on Proust's formulation, Calinescu calls our attention to “one of the major, if often ignored, possibilities opened up by reading: the act of rereading and its epiphanies” (Rereading, 280). 56. Juan Luis Vives, A Very Fruteful and Pleasant Booke Called the Instruction of a christen Woman (London, 1529), sig. F1r. 57. Vives, Instruction, D3r. See also Jennifer Lee Carrell, “A Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass: Lady Mary Wroth's Urania and the Magic Mirror of Romance,” SEL 43, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 80–82. 58. OED, s.v. “vain” 1.4, “vanity” 3a.

Conclusion 1. Revelation 5.1, in Geneva Bible, fol. 116) A marginal gloss says, “[H]ere it do signifie all the counsels & judgements of God which are onely knowen to Christ the Sonne of David” (fol. 116). 2. Geneva Bible, fols. 117–18. Page 164 →

Page 165 →

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Index Aeneid. See Vergil Albanese, Denise, 152n12 Alexander, William, 11–12 Amadis of Gaul, 4, 16, 22, 28, 105, 107, 109, 111–12, 115 Amtower, Laurel, 9 anagnorisis, 48, 55, 123, 134, 150n62 Anderson, Judith H., 31 Apuleius, 4 Arcadia. See Sidney, Philip Ariosto, Ludovico Orlando Furioso, 16, 21–22, 29, 105, 107, 108, 125, 140n4 Aristotle, 11, 55, 64, 94, 97, 148n40 Ars memoria. See memory and the memory arts Artemidorus of Ephesus, 65–67, 148n40, 149n47 Ascham, Roger, 5, 22, 23, 105 Augustine, Saint, 13–15, 68–69, 116, 139n46 Bachelard, Gaston, 99, 155n43, 157n69 Benjamin, Walter, 158n3 Berger, Harry, Jr., 24, 141n25, 142n36, 142n38 Bergeron, David M., 147n27 Bible, 9, 10, 11, 13–14, 20, 63, 77, 116–17, 123, 132–34 bibliomancy, 14, 63–64 Black, Scott, 159n4 Blair, Ann, 2, 137n12 Block, Alexandra, 144n61 Bodin, Jean, 7 Boethius, 88

book(s) book history (discipline), 2, 135n2 eaten, 132–34 fragile, decaying, 31–32 indexes and tables to, 21–22, 33, 40, 59, 74–75, 107, 125 magical, 1, 4, 11–12, 16, 19–22, 29, 33, 40, 45, 48, 55–56, 59, 77, 102–3, 107, 121–29 as metaphor, 5–7, 9–13, 81, 84–85, 116–17, 129–30, 136n4, 138n32 and the self, 12–16, 26, 48–50, 52, 60, 75, 106, 115–17, 119–21, 127–31, 140, 144n59, 161n40 “space” or “physics” of, 17, 76–88, 98, 102–4, 114, 127–28 as wunderkammer, 77 See also Bible; encyclopedias and encyclopedism; reading; volume, etymology of Bradwardine, Thomas, 94–96 Brinsley, John, 84 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 32 Calinescu, Matei, 163n55 Camden, William, 26 Camillo, Giulio, 87 Camões, Luis de Lusíads (Os Lusíadas), 16, 41, 43–45 Campbell, Mary Baine, 156n51 Page 180 → Carrell, Jennifer Lee, 163n57 Carruthers, Mary, 6, 69, 86, 149n54, 154n27 Cavanagh, Sheila T., 162n48 Caxton, William, 20 Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote, 16–17, 26, 53, 106–17, 119, 127, 129, 130, 158nn3–4, 160n18, 161n38 Chambers, E. K., 57 Chapman, George, 83–84

Chartier, Roger, 2, 11, 12, 135n2, 136n4, 160n21 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 6, 38, 62, 106, 107 Chretien de Troyes, 4 Christianity, 5–6, 9, 22, 116, 147n24. See also Bible Cicero, 70, 86, 88 Clifford, Anne, 109 Cooper, Helen, 125, 136n5 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 96 Cormack, Bradin, 7–8 Coryate, Thomas, 109 Countess of Montgomery's Urania, The (Urania). See Wroth, Mary Crane, Mary, 152n9 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 6–7, 9 Daniel, Samuel, 84 Daston, Lorraine, 32 de Grazia, Margreta, 153n16 Dee, John, 7, 10 “discovered-manuscript topos” (McKeon), 4, 28, 108–11 Dobin, Howard, 142n41 Dodds, E. R., 62 Don Quixote. See Cervantes, Miguel de Donne, John, 12, 101, 155n40 Doody, Margaret Anne, 161n31 Dover Wilson, John, 56–57 dreams, 12, 29, 36, 42, 49, 53–59, 62–69, 72–75 Duns Scotus, John, 97–98, 156n59 Eden, Richard, 153n21 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 2 Elizabeth I (queen), 35, 37, 40, 63–64, 142n41, 149n45

Elyot, Thomas, 88 encyclopedias and encyclopedism, 6, 12, 22, 24, 37, 39, 41–42, 46, 90–92, 107, 157n67. See also book(s) Erasmus, 9, 87, 153n21 Escobedo, Andrew, 27, 31–32, 141n19, 141n31, 142n37 Faerie Queene, The. See Spenser, Edmund Fanshawe, Richard, 41, 85 Ferry, Anne, 39, 40 Ford, Margaret, 7 forgetting, 5, 50, 68–74, 113, 116, 125, 129, 144n59 Forman, Simon, 50, 149n45 Foucault, Michel, 14, 158n3 Foxe, John, 9, 24, 27 Freud, Sigmund, 66, 104, 148n42 Frye, Northrop, 118, 136n5, 158n3 Fuchs, Barbara, 136n5 Galileo Galilei, 96–98, 156n62 Garber, Marjorie, 61, 148n40, 149n51, 154n36 Gellrich, Jesse, 160n29 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 23, 27, 35, 141n19 Gerhard, Sandra Forbes, 159n7 Gerli, E. Michael, 160n16 Gillies, John, 99, 101, 157n74 Glapthorne, Henry, 85 Goldberg, Jonathan, 126, 135n1, 144n58, 162n52 Gower, John, 48, 103, 145n9 Grabes, Herbert, 39 Grafton, Anthony, 2, 7, 96, 137n19, 138n27 Granville-Barker, Harley, 57 Greenaway, Peter, 103–4, 153n14

Greenblatt, Stephen, 13, 32, 151n6 Greene, Robert, 5, 76, 106 Greville, Fulke, 40 Gross, Kenneth, 139n2, 140n13 Gurr, Andrew, 155n47 Hackel, Heidi Brayman, 10, 135n2, 137n25, 138n28, 151n4 Hackett, Helen, 52, 161n38 Hamilton, A. C., 36, 39, 43 Harington, John, 21, 105 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 2 Harvey, P. D. A., 98 Heminge, John, and Henry Condell, 15 Henslowe, Philip, 151n2 Herriot, Thomas, 154n25 Heywood, Thomas, 63 Hill, Thomas, 64–67 histoire du livre. See book(s): book history Page 181 → Hoby, Thomas, 88 Holland, Peter, 148n42 Homer Odyssey, 4 Hughes, John, 81 immateriality, 2–3, 5, 14, 18, 29, 33, 36, 49, 61, 75, 76, 80, 83, 87, 94, 101, 131, 134 interiority. See book(s): and the self; reading: the self Ivic, Christopher, 71 Jagodzinski, Cecile M., 11, 139n42 James I (king), 81, 149n50 Jardine, Lisa, 7, 137n19

Jewers, Caroline, 158n4 Johnson, John, 52–53 Jonson, Ben, 23, 48, 56, 83, 93, 109 Kastan, David Scott, 135n2 Kearney, James, 76, 136n4, 139n3, 151n2, 152n13 Kiefer, Frederick, 11, 81, 136n4, 138n32 “kinesis” or kinetic nature of romance, 17, 25, 78–79, 88–95, 99–101, 104, 152n11, 155n44 King, Andrew, 28, 140n13, 141n25, 142n36, 143n54 Knapp, Jeffery, 157n71 Knight, Jeffrey Todd, 11 Knowles, Edwin B., Jr., 159n7 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 4–5, 120, 128, 136n7, 145n3, 161n39 Latymer, William, 52 Lee, John, 60–61, 139n48, 148n31 Lefebvre, Henri, 99, 157n69 Leland, John, 23 Lewalski, Barbara, 117, 127–28, 159n9 Lezra, Jacques, 110 Lille, Alain de, 38 literacy, in early modern England, 3, 9–10, 15 Lodge, Thomas, 5 Lowell, James Russell, 103 Lusíads. See Camões, Luis de Mackenzie, D. F., 2 magic, 4, 16, 37–39, 41, 43, 48, 59, 61, 73, 76, 77, 79, 81, 93, 101–4, 118, 123, 129, 143n54, 152n11, 153n19, 157n73, 162n54 “magic that doesn't work” (Cooper), 125–26. See also book(s): magical Mandeville, John, 100 maps and “cartographic space,” 98–101, 152n9 Marcus, Leah, 57, 149n50 Markham, Gervase, 11–12

Marlowe, Christopher, 51, 76, 151n2 Masten, Jeffrey, 119, 160n24, 161n39 material book studies, 2–3. See also book(s) material culture studies, 2–3 Mazzio, Carla, 7–8 McKeon, Michael, 111, 136n6, 160n18 McLuskie, Kathleen, 148n43, 149n45 memory and the memory arts, 6, 13, 16, 24, 28, 29, 31, 44–45, 50, 68–71, 86–88, 95, 101, 141n23, 149n55 Mentz, Steve, 137n9, 154n35 Mercator, Gerard, 98 Metamorphoses. See Ovid Middleton, Thomas, 84 Milton, John, 10, 27, 95–96 mirrors, 16, 37–43, 130–31, 142n44, 143n52, 144n56 Montaigne, Michel de, 15, 70–71, 148n42 Montemayor, Jorge de, 108 Nashe, Thomas, 5, 64, 106 Nevo, Ruth, 150n63 “New Bibliography,” 2 Newcomb, Lori Humphrey, 154n35 Nicolson, Marjorie, 95–96 Nicopolous, James, 38 Nuttall, A. D., 155n40, 155n42 Ong, Walter, 7, 87–88 Ophir, Adi, 13 Orlando Furioso. See Ariosto, Ludovico Ortelius, Abraham, 98 Overbury, Thomas, 52, 105 Ovid

Metamorphoses, 16, 51–53, 78, 145n7, 146n13, 146n19, 152n8 “Ovidian physics” (Poole), 78, 152n8 Palfrey, Simon, 145n5, 149n50 Palsgrave, Jehan, 84 Park, Katharine, 32 Parker, Patricia, 29, 126, 136n5, 140n8, 149n56, 162n52 Page 182 → Parrot, Henry, 10, 106 Pettegree, Andrew, 5 Poole, Kristen, 78, 151n8 Pratt, Kathryn, 162n53 Quarles, Francis, 84, 115 Quint, David, 158n3 Rainolde, Richard, 88 Ralegh, Walter, 19, 23, 46, 100 Rambuss, Richard, 140n13, 143n47, 161n41 reading anticlimactic, 60, 74–75, 121–25 misreading, 34, 42–43, 55, 57, 60, 71, 75 rereading, 14, 128–31, 163n55 the self, 1, 25–26, 29–30, 36, 42–43, 52, 113–14, 127–31, 140, 144n59 in Shakespeare's plays, 48–49, 52 (see also specific plays) unreadability, 34, 42–43, 55, 57, 60, 71, 75 “use” model of, 7–8, 33, 40, 42–43, 46, 58, 69, 77, 128, 129–30, 134 “useless,” 128–31, 162n42 See also book Ricoeur, Paul, 61 Roberts, Josephine, 161n38 romance

as genre or mode, 3–5, 8, 22–24, 30–31, 48, 59, 92–94, 104, 105–8, 110–14, 120–21, 123, 130, 133–34, 144n3 “memes” in (Cooper), 3, 124, 136n5 Rothstein, Eric, 144n61 Rowlands, Samuel, 77–78, 91 Sanders, Eve Rachele, 53, 146n19 Sandy, Amelia Zurcher, 161n33 scholasticism, 44, 78–79, 94–98 Schwarz, Kathryn, 144n56 Scot, Reginald, 64–65, 148n42 Scott, Charlotte, 48, 136n4, 145n7, 146n13, 147n20, 147n28, 149n55, 150n62, 152n11, 154n31 self. See book(s): and the self; reading: the self; “sympathy” for the self Seven Sages of Rome, The, 38, 142n44 Shakespeare, William, 1, 6, 7, 12, 15, 18, 34, 48, 49, 52, 55, 56, 57, 59, 64, 74, 85, 89, 91, 92, 99, 101 Antony and Cleopatra, 153n20 Cardenio, 109 Cymbeline, 1, 16–17, 47–75, 85, 107, 120, 121, 128 Hamlet, 60–61, 85, 89, 99, 119, 138n32 Henry V, 91–92 Henry VI, Part 2, 59 Love's Labour's Lost, 81, 85, 157n72 Macbeth, 82, 85, 89 Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 81, 91, 101, 129, 162 Othello, 68 Pericles, 48, 59, 88, 92, 103, 145n9, 147n24, 158n75 Rape of Lucrece, The, 51 Richard II, 11 Richard III, 48, 53, 67–68 Romeo and Juliet, 84, 137n16 Tempest, The, 17, 48, 63, 76–104

Titus Andronicus, 51–52, 59 Winter's Tale, The, 92, 117, 158n77 Sherman, William H., 7–8, 138n28, 157n64 shipwreck, 79, 88–89, 93, 118, 121, 127, 158n75 Shuger, Debora, 40 Sidney, Philip, 5, 80, 92–94, 106, 108, 110, 127, 161n35 Silberman, Lauren, 143n45 Silvestris, Bernardus, 38 Skura, Meredith, 146n20 Smith, Helen, 138n28 “sociology of texts,” 2 Socrates, 13 Spadaccini, Nicholas, 160n26 Spenser, Edmund Faerie Queene, 1, 16, 17, 19, 20–22, 29, 45–46, 62–63, 108, 123, 140n4, 162n45 Book II, 20–34, 44–45, 160n23 Book III, 34–43 Spiller, Elizabeth, 78, 96–8, 135n2, 156n51, 159n6 Spufford, Margaret, 10, 161n32 Stallybrass, Peter, 8, 11, 138n28 Stewart, Susan, 142n39 Stock, Brian, 139n46, 160n29 Strachey, William, 101 Sullivan, Garrett A., Jr., 70–71 Summit, Jennifer, 26, 30–31, 140n17, 141n35, 144n58 Sylvester, Josuah, 84 Syme, Holger Schott, 151n2 Page 183 → “sympathy” for the self, 18, 58–60, 74, 148n29, 150n62

Talens, Jenaro, 160n26 Teague, Frances, 147n24 Teskey, Gordon, 46 Thompson, Ann, 147n26 Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, 89, 154n35 Turner, Henry, 135n3 Tyler, Margaret, 41–42 unreadability. See reading: misreading; reading: unreadability Urania. See Wroth, Mary “use” model of reading. See reading: “use” model of van Es, Bart, 25 Vergil Aeneid, 6, 26, 62, 154n35 Vergil, Polydore, 26 Vives, Juan Luis, 5, 22, 110, 120, 130 volume, etymology of, 41, 83–86, 153n21, 153n24 Walker, Kim, 162n46 Warton, Thomas, 143n54 Watson, Elizabeth Porges, 143n54 Watt, Tessa, 10 Wayne, Valerie, 4–5, 54, 136n7, 145n3, 146n12 Wells, Stanley, 145n4, 147n26 Werth, Tiffany, 136n7 West, William N., 155n41, 157nn67–68 Westlund, Joseph, 146n20 Wilkins, George, 109 Williams, Grant, 71, 141n23, 144n59 Wilson, Louise, 138n28 wonder, 1, 4, 8, 16, 18–20, 22, 25, 31, 32–34, 39, 42–46, 59, 114, 125, 134, 157n73

Wroth, Mary, 1, 17, 18, 109, 119, 123 Urania, 17, 108, 117–31, 132 Wycliffe, John, 83 Yachnin, Paul, 76 Yates, Frances, 69, 86, 149n54, 154n28 Yates, Julian, 136n3 Zuichemus, Vigilus, 87