Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance [1 ed.] 080142271X, 9780801422713

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
1 The Subject of Tyranny
2 The Likeness of the Adversary: Renaissance Tyrants
3 Tyrannical Vices: Morality Plays and Humanist Drama
4 Thriftless Ambition: The Tyrants of Shakespeare and Jonson
5 Tyrannical Theater: The Plays of Stuart Tyrants
Index

Citation preview

TRAGEDIES OF TYRANTS

ALSO BY REBECCA W. BUSHNELL

Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles' Theban Plays

TRAGEDIES OF TYRANTS POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THEATER IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

REBECCA

W.

BusHNELL

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 1990 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 148so. First published 1990 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number o-8014-2271-x Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 89-77175

Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. @The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39·48-1984.

Dedicated to Betty Wold Johnson, Ruth Louise Toner, and the memory of my mother, Margaret Meeker Bushnell

Contents

Preface

IX

I

The Subject of Tyranny

2

The Likeness of the Adversary: Renaissance Tyrants

37

3 Tyrannical Vices: Morality Plays and Humanist Drama

So

I

4 Thriftless Ambition: The Tyrants of Shakespeare and

Jonson 5 Tyrannical Theater: The Plays of Stuart Tyrants Index

rr6 I

54

I89

Vll

Preface

D

OES anyone feel sorry these days for E. M. W. Till yard? Ten years ago, The Elizabethan World Picture was routinely ordered for undergraduates seeking the "background" for English Renaissance literature. As Jean Howard writes, in the days of New Criticism "history, when broached at all, usually meant the history of ideas," 1 and until recently Tillyard was still the handiest expounder of intellectual history for students of English Renaissance poetry, drama, and prose. Today, however, history means something else. In the "new historicism," as well as in cultural materialism and other "historicisms," the historical event or image has replaced the idea as the means of constructing history as context: whereas an "idea" is an abstract or formal construct, an event or image has a textual or material shape, and the new history is a material history. In effect the idea has been converted into ideology: whereas consciousness was once conceived of as a static entity, now it is a field of force. The history of ideas, as represented in the works of intellectual historians such as A. 0. Lovejoy and literary historians such as Tillyard, has foundered because it is neither sufficiently historical nor conscious of its own politics. I do not mourn the passing of the old history of ideas, but I think that we lost something when we turned our backs on it. The old ljean E. Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 14. IX

x

Preface

history of ideas has been accused of presenting so-called classic texts as representative of universal culture rather than as the political voice of the elite. In effect, this recent reaction against the privileging of elite culture recapitulates the revolution of the Annates school in the 1940s. Roger Chartier describes this new social history as a "history of collective psychology," accessible through study of a wide range of historical documents and the relics of popular culture, not through analysis of classic literary and philosophical texts. 2 Its orientation informs the practices of both the new historicism and cultural materialism. Thus Tillyard's contention that Richard Hooker and other Humanist authors represent "far more truly the background of Elizabethan literature than do the coney-catching pamphlets or the novel of low life" 3 has been openly damned. Even though in fact many of the new historicists are interested in elite culture and aim at a "reading" of canonical literary texts, a glance at the bibliographies of both the new historicists and cultural materialists reveals that Hooker and his ilk have drowned in a sea of pamphlets, contemporary memoirs, biographies, travel accounts, letters, court records, household accounts, marriage manuals, and public speeches. For every gain there is a loss. In this case, what has fallen out of the new definition of historical documents is what Tillyard called didactic prose, including both canonical and lesser-known works on many subjects, most notably those on the political controversies of the era. The absence of Humanists such as Hooker and Sir Thomas Elyot might be understandable, given the interest in what Jonathan Dollimore calls the "marginalised and subordinate of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. " 4 But if new historicists are so interested in opposition or alternative voices in the culture, why, for example, do so few mention the sixteenth-century resistance tracts of George Buchanan, John Ponet, or Christopher Goodman, works that were highly influen2 Roger Chartier, "Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories," in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 30. 3 E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, r963), p. 22. See comment of Jonathan Dollimore, in "Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism, and the New Historicism," in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 6. 4Dollimore, p. 6.

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xi

tial in both the Tudor and the late Stuart periods? 5 Although many Tudor and Stuart writers did defend the policies of the crown, the intense debate on ecclesiastical issues also encoded political disobedience.6 Radical English Protestantism culminated in the extraordinary florescence of opposition political writings by the Ranters, Diggers, and other English Revolutionary sects. 7 Earlier controversial tracts by English Catholics, such as Robert Southwell's An humble supplication to Her Majestie (to name just one), appeared to offer humble "apologies" and "supplications" rather than defiance, but no one doubted that they were seditious. 8 These texts were printed, if secretly and often with false imprints, and no doubt they were widely read. We need to account for all such texts-resistance tracts, Catholic "supplications," orthodox defenses of the throne-in our version of early modern English political discourse. The licensed and underground political texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries articulate a great variety of ideological positions rather than "a single political vision." 9 Any given text-poem, play, treatise, or tract-may be composed of many different political languages and views, often quite contradictory. By reading the political prose of the period, we 5Renaissance scholars are beginning to turn to such texts in defining early modern political discourse. See, for example, Richard Strier, "Faithful Servants: Shakespeare's Praise of Disobedience," in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Richard Strier and Heather Dubrow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); David Norbrook, "Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography," in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Alan Sinfield, "Macbeth: History, Ideology, and Intellectuals," Critical Quarterly 28 (1987): 63-77. David Kastan, Victoria Kahn, and Arthur Kinney are also working on these and similar texts in forthcoming books. 6See the account of J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1951), pp. 199-230. ?for a fascinating account of the radical pamphlet literature of the English Revolution and the new historicists' neglect of that literature, see James Holstun, "Ranting at the New Historicism," English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 189-225. Holstun also argues against the "new historicists' tendency to claim a premature totalization of early modern culture on the basis of an immanent analysis of canonical literary works" (p. 192). ssouthwell's Humble supplication appeared, most likely in 16oo, with a false date of 1595 on the title page, and with no author or place of publication named. Many Catholic resistance texts printed in English appeared with pseudonyms, false dates, and often falsified places of publication (or they were in fact published abroad). 9 Stephen Greenblatt, The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), p. 5. Greenblatt uses this phrase, in fact, in differentiating new historicism from the "earlier historicism," which "tends to be monological: that is, it is concerned with discovering a single political vision."

x11

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can identify the range of words, rhetorical devices, idioms, and imagery in which politics was construed and represented in 1590 or 1603. As I am implying, much new historicist and cultural materialist work in fact repeats the mistake of the old New Criticism in a different form. Its own political vocabulary is ahistorical, partly because its agenda is admittedly polemical and partly because it is too narrowly based on its own new canon of texts that are called political. Wary of Tillyard's and others' anachronistic vision of a Golden Age of Elizabeth, new historicism has invented new anachronisms in its language and its models of political practice. 10 Recent theories of the history of political thought offer strategies for reading political tracts and fiction without returning us to the reductive images of the old history of ideas. For instance, Quentin Skinner and John Pocock describe political thought linguistically in a way compatible with historicist methodology (even if subject to deconstruction, insofar as their work is grounded in ordinary language philosophy).l 1 Rather than present political ideas as abstractions, 10See Leeds Barroll, "A New History for Shakespeare and His Time," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 441-64, on the limitation of this approach, which privileges a small set of texts in constructing an unexamined version of political history: "It would be unfortunate were we to restrict the new historicism to those approaches to Shakespeare built upon the unquestioning acceptance of an extremely narrow set of documents, creating a configuration of 'events' ensconced in traditional narratives and premised upon elementary concepts of political process" (p. 464). In Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Leah S. Marcus calls for a return to "local" reading, in reviving the notion of topicality as a matrix of meaning. Marcus, however, is primarily concerned with historical events as opposed to historical discourse. 11 To some extent, Pocock's and Skinner's methodology can be construed from their practice; see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and Feudal Law: English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957; rpt. with additional material, 1987); Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971); and The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). Both, however, have written on the theoretical dimensions of their methods. For Pocock, see "The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry," in Philosophy, Politics and Society, 2d ser., ed. P. Laslett and W. C. Runciman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962); "The Reconstruction of Discourse: Towards the Historiography of Political Thought," Modern Language Notes 96 (1981): 9598o; "Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought," in Sharpe and Zwicker, Politics of Discourse. For Skinner, see "The Limits of Historical Explanations," Philosophy 41 (1966): 199-215; "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 8 (1969): 3-53; "Motives, Intentions, and the Interpretation of Texts," New Literary History 3 (1972): 393-408. For an account and critique of both Pocock and Skinner, see David Boucher, Texts in Context: Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985); on Skinner, see Gordon J. Schochet, "Quentin Skinner's Method," Political Theory 2 (1974): 261-76.

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xm

both Pocock and Skinner see the writing of political texts as a speech act and thus a social act. As a speech act, political writing can be practiced only in terms of the conventions of the political languages in which the author is composing and the conventions of the act of writing itself (by "languages" here are meant the vocabularies, idioms, and rhetoric of class, institutions, traditions, and many other categories). These conventions of writing are retrievable from the entire field of political texts of a given time and not just from so-called classic or popular texts. Skinner is concerned primarily with eliciting the intention an author had in writing a specific text; Pocock, however, looks at a wide range of texts to describe the idioms and conventions of political languages that were current at a particular time. 12 He recognizes that any text may be traversed by multiple languages and thus multiple contexts; thus as many meanings exist in a text "as there are idioms and languages in which it may be seen as performing." According to Pocock, texts themselves are events both insofar as they are "actions performed in language contexts that make them possible, that condition and constrain them," and insofar as they "act upon the languages in which they are performed: as they perform they inform, injecting new words, facts, perceptions, rules of the game, and, whether gradually or catastrophically, the language matrix becomes modified by the acts performed in it." 13 Political language is thus in a process of constant change; when "a plurality of specialized languages, each carrying its own biases as to the definition and distribution of authority ... converg[e] to form a highly complex language, in which many paradigmatic structures exist simultaneously, debate goes on between them [and] individual terms and concepts migrate from one structure to another, altering some of their implications and retaining others." 14 Pocock's theory of political language is valuable because it refines the primarily Foucauldian notion of discourse currently used in the new historicism. It calls our attention to the temporal and conceptual specificity of political language, and further, it allows us to see that in any political-or fictional-text, the languages may be multiple: any text may possess several discursive strata in the process of change. The 12See Boucher, p. r 5 r. t3Pocock, "Texts as Events," pp. 28, 29. 14Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, p.

22.

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Preface

English political language of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in particular was not monolithic: it was immensely unstable, full of ambiguities and contradictions, synchronically and diachronically. This book investigates the language and idioms that were used to discuss and represent tyranny in political prose and drama during the reigns of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs. Rather than suggesting that political prose necessarily supplied the foundation or background for drama in this time, I am interested instead in how political prose and drama shared a language and mode of representation. This book thus seeks to create a method for discussing the relationship between political thought and theater which does not simply return to the categories of the history of ideas. What I am trying to uncover is the early modern "language" or rhetoric of tyranny, in the sense that Pocock uses the term, a language that is shared but differently translated in the conventions of the genres of tragedy and the political treatise. I am less interested, for example, in the recurrence of certain theories of resistance or nonresistance in plays than in the association of tyranny with hypocrisy or acting, which itself undermines the effort of tracts and plays to establish the difference between a bad tyrant and a good king. To discover this language, Tragedies of Tyrants covers a wide range of texts of many genres, including the morality plays, Humanist statecraft, and Protestant resistance literature, all of which have been neglected lately in the emphasis placed on absolutism in studies of Renaissance politics and literature. I was lucky to receive generous help from friends and institutions when I was writing this book. I am particularly indebted to Gordon Schochet, who, without undue paternalism, wisely guided me in my first reading of Renaissance political thought. Phyllis Rackin was also generous with her valuable time, encouragement, and incisive criticism. Other friends read all or part of the manuscript and helped to reform it and to sustain me: Jennifer Green, Susan Greenfield, Beverly Haviland, Constance Jordan, Gwynne Kennedy, Gail Kern Paster, Maureen Quilligan, Barbara Riebling, Gilbert Rose, James Shapiro, Susan Snyder, Peter Stallybrass, Robert Y. Turner, Kevin Van Anglen, Wendy Wall, and Froma Zeitlin. Georgianna Ziegler, curator of the Furness Shakespeare Library, helped me find many of the books I needed. Sara Beasley and Mark Loewenstern kindly assisted in check-

Preface

xv

ing the references. Many thanks are also due to Bernhard Kendler and Barbara Salazar, of Cornell University Press, and to Lise Rodgers, copyeditor, for helping to make this project into a book. My family offered their love, and I am grateful to them for that. I am also indebted to the American Council of Learned Societies and the University of Pennsylvania, for financial support, and to David DeLaura, chairman of the English Department at the University of Pennyslvania, for helping to make my work possible. The Folger Institute provided the funds to bring me to the Folger Shakespeare Library and to take Gordon Schochet's seminar on British political thought. An earlier version of part of this book appeared in Classical and Modern Literature 7 (1987): 71-85. I am grateful for permission to include this material here. The title of the book is adapted from Heinrich Bullinger's Tragedies of tyrantes exercised upon the church of God, from the birth of Christ unto the present yeare, translated by Thomas Twyne (London: W. How, 1575). Whenever possible, I have reproduced the orthography of the original texts, except that u is silently normalized to v and i to j. Short passages cited from Greek texts are transliterated according to the ALA Cataloguing Rules for Author and Title Entries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1949). Iota subscripts are indicated in parentheses or brackets. Unless I have indicated otherwise, translations from foreign languages are my own. The text of Shakespeare's plays cited throughout is that of The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). REBECCA

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

W.

BusHNELL

TRAGEDIES OF TYRANTS

C H A P T E R

I

The Subject of Tyranny

I

is a commonplace of the literary criticism of the Renaissance that by offering a prince the mirror of tyranny, tragedy persuades him to rule well; further, in showing a tyrant his own image, tragedy brings him to shame. In his Boke Named the Governour Sir Thomas Elyot recommends the reading of tragedies for gentlemen so that they might "execrate and abhorre the intollerable life of tyrantes." 1 In The Defence of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney offers the most familiar Renaissance defense of tragedy as a school text for princes when he argues that poetry moves men to be virtuous: T

So that the right use of comedie will I thinke by nobodie be blamed, and much !esse of the high and excellent Tragedie, that openeth the greatest woundes, and sheweth forth the ulcers that are covered with Tissue; that maketh Kings feare to be Tyrants, and Tyrants to manifest their tyrannicall humours; that with sturring the affects of Admiration and Commiseration, teacheth the uncertaintie of this world, and uppon how weak foundations guilden roofes are builded: that maketh us knowe, Qui sceptra saevus duro imperio regit, Timet timentes, metus in authorem redit. tSir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour [15 31] (London:

J. M. Dent,

I 907;

rpt. 1937), P· 41. I

Tragedies of Tyrants

2

But how much it can move, Plutarch yeeldeth a notable testimonie of the abhominable Tyrant Alexander Pheraeus, from whose eyes a Tragedie, well made and represented, drew abundance of teares, who without all pittie had murthered infinite numbers, and some of his own bloud: so as he, that was not ashamed to make matters for Tragedies, yet could not resist the sweet violence of a Tragedie. And if it wrought no further good in him, it was, that he in despight of himself, withdrew himselfe from hearkening to that which might mollifie his hardened heart. 2

Sidney presents a conventional view of tragedy's didactic and exemplary effect, resembling that of George Puttenham, who wrote in his Arte of English Poesie that tragedy proves tyranny to be an unhappy state in a mutable world. 3 But what did Alexander Pheraeus learn from tragedy, if "moved"? Alexander wept at the sight of a tragedy, yet he had murdered before and would murder again. As Sidney says, he could not resist the "sweet violence" of a tragedy, but his tears only proved that violence is sweet to a tyrant's heart. The play that so moved this tyrant, notorious for his lust and cruelty, was Euripides' The Trojan Women, a pageant of the sufferings of women in war. 4 It provides a fine example of the theater of pain, "well made and represented," which affords the tyrant pleasure rather than teaching him through the spectacle of cruelty. Alexander Pheraeus' tears for Hecuba certainly did no good for him; Sidney can only end his illustration of tragedy's power over tyrants by lamely saying that Alexander withdrew "from hearkening to that whiCh might mollifie his hardened heart." Plutarch says Alexander Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London: 1595), sig. qr. Jonathan Dollimore notes, "Puttenham in The Art of English Poesy had said that tragedy revealed tyranny to 'all the world', while the downfall of the tyrant disclosed (perhaps incongruously) both historical vicissitude ('the mutability of fortune') and God's providential order (his 'just punishment')"("lntroduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism, and the New Historicism," in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985], p. 9). See Jonathan V. Crewe, "The Hegemonic Theater of George Puttenham," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 71-85, for a more complete account of Puttenham's version of the relationship between tragedy and tyrants. Thomas Heywood evokes this passage in Sidney, applying it to contemporary tragedy, when he remembers the tragedy of Richard III, "acted in Saint Johns in Cambridge, so essentially ... that had the tyrant Phaleris beheld his bloudy proceedings, it had mollified his heart, and made him relent at the sight of his inhumane massacres" (Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors [London: N. Okes, 1612], sig. g1v). Heywood refers to a different tyrant, Phalaris, tyrant of Acragas (c. 570-5 54 B.c.), who was as renowned for cruelty as Alexander of Pherae (369-358 B.c.). 4 See Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas, 29.5, in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romaines, trans. Sir Thomas North (London: Richard Field, 1612), 301-20. 2

3 As

The Subject of Tyranny

3

left the theater because he was ashamed that the people should see him weep; yet, as Sidney says, he was "not ashamed to make matters for tragedies." 5 To be "moved" in this case is not, as Sidney suggests elsewhere, to be impelled to action; rather, to be "moved" is to experience the emotional and aesthetic pleasure of witnessing a well-crafted spectacle of violence. Sidney's anecdote thus only confirms the accusations of the antitheatricalists, who argued that tragedy is not didactic because it moves. Stephen Gosson reminds his readers that while "the argument of Tragedies is wrath, crueltie, incest, injurie, murther either violent by sworde, or voluntary by poyson," 6 no one learns from the experience of the "womanish" pleasure of sorrow tragedy arouses: instead, "the beholding of troubles and miserable slaughters that are in tragedies, drive us to immoderate sorrow, heaviness, womanish weeping and mourning, whereby we become lovers of dumpes, and lamentation, both enemies to fortitude. " 7 Some scholars suggest that the Renaissance theory of the didactic effect of tragic violence echoed the function of public executions, meant to demonstrate the disastrous consequences of criminal behavior. Michel Foucault has argued that in early modern Europe, public ritual executions had a "juridico-political function," insofar as they showed the criminal's body subjected to the sovereign's power: for Foucault, the public execution "is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sov5Sidney's own theory of tragedy's ability to "move" blends Aristotelian and medieval concepts of tragedy. On the one hand, he suggests that tragedy stirs us with the affects of "admiration and commiseration," that is, pity and fear, a form of "moving" that is not a moral response. See J. V. Cunningham on these terms: "Admiration, of course, is simply the Latin term for 'wonder,' as commiseration is for 'pity'" (Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy [195 r; rpt. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1964], p. 21). On the other hand, Sidney claims an effect that is the proper response to de casibus tragedy, the recognition of the "uncertainty of this world." Cunningham suggests that in the Donatan tradition of literary criticism the emotional and didactic aspects of tragedy are compatible, insofar as "the emotional disturbance of tragic incident is resolved in resignation," more specifically in "a resignation to death in the Christian sense" ( pp. 40-41). Further, Cunningham argues that the effect of "admiration" or wonder, while described by Aristotle as pleasurable in itself, was also regarded as the "occasion and motive for learning" ( p. 63). 6 Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (London: r 582), sig. csv. See also Cunningham, citing The Rape of Lucrece, 764-70: "This passage constitutes a congeries of the fundamental notions and attitudes associated with the concept of tragedy; its objective content is murder, death, whispering conspiracy, dose-tongued treason, rape; it deals in sin ... ; its atmosphere is dim, vast (that is, 'disordered'), black, blind (that is, 'irrational'), dark, grim" (p. s6). 7 Gosson, sig. esr-c6v.

4

Tragedies of Tyrants

ereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular." 8 As Foucault himsri£ recognizes, however, the public execution offered the opportunity for the opposite political phenomenon to occur: sympathizing or identifying with the condemned's defiance, the mob who had been called to witness might break out in revolt, celebrating a saturnalia that converted the criminal into a hero or saint. 9 What Foucault does not discuss is what Sidney recounts, the possibility that the audience enjoyed the spectacle for its own sake, whether for the pleasure of sorrow or pity, or more cynically, for the pleasure of seeing blood or watching the elaborate ritual that let that blood. The comparison of the public execution to the spectacle of stage violence is suggestive, yet there is one important difference: the audience of executions was most often "the mob," but tragedy's audience might be the sovereign, as well, who would see on the tragic stage the brutal deaths of princes and others of high estate (indeed, such writers as Sidney and Elyot assumed a prince or gentleman would be the audience for tragedy). In the cases of Richard III and Macbeth, not only is the tyrant explicitly depicted as committing bloody acts of punishment, thus associating punitive violence with tyranny, 10 but the tyrant-sovereign himself is the victim of a "public" execution, perversely confirming Foucault's observation that "in the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king." 11 The dynamic of tragic violence and punishment, mixing what Alan Sinfield calls "legitimate violence" with the tyrant's illicit violence, thus confuses the distinctions between torturer and victim, sovereign and subject, which the political spectacle of punishment is meant to enforce. 12 Sidney's account of Alexander's pleasure in viewing tragedy thus complicates our view of the political ambivalence of tragedy in early modern England. The apparent opposition between Sidney's view of tragedy's political orthodoxy and Gosson's view of its subversiveness itself collapses with the exhibition of tyrants on the stages of both city 8 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), p. 48. 9foucault, pp. 59-61. 10 0n the association between public execution and tyranny, see Foucault, p. 73· 11 Foucault, p. 29. 12 Alan $infield, "Macbeth: History, Ideology, and Intellectuals," Critical Quarterly 28

(1987): 65.

The Subject of Tyranny

5

and court. 13 The tyrant figures a kind of improper authority that makes authority itself problematic, at the same time that the tyrant is destroyed to reestablish legitimate sovereignty. The very existence of tyrants, after all, was the main sticking point for those who enjoined complete obedience to princes. Franco Moretti argues that in putting the tyrant on stage, English tragedy after Gorboduc "disentitled the absolute monarch to all ethical and rational legitimation. Having deconsecrated the king, tragedy made it possible to decapitate him." 14 Other Renaissance scholars would claim with equal vehemence that the English monarchy and its elite used tyrant plays to establish their own legitimacy and to argue for the primacy of obedience. Yet, as Sidney suggests inadvertently and Gosson says explicitly, the public representation of the tyrant may circumvent all moral purpose in arousing the pleasure that "sweet violence" excites.15 A deeper knowledge of the classical history of tyrant plays would not have consoled the defenders of tragedy's moral and political role, because that history tells us of playwrights who were the servants as much as the tutors of tyrants. 16 Tyrants first appeared on the stages of fifth-century Athens, a city that celebrated tyrannicide and yet boasted of its own hegemony in the Athenian Empire. The proliferation of tyrants in Attic tragedy indicates the democratic culture's fear and hatred of tyranny; 17 however, the tragic tyrant can also be seen as a figure for Athens itself, the bully of its empire. 18 At the same time, 13 See Dollimore, pp. 8-9, on the issue of tragedy's subversiveness and "effectivity": "Contemporary formulations of the tragic certainly made reference to universals but they were also resolutely political, especially those which defined it as a representation of tyranny. Such accounts, and of course the plays themselves, were appropriated as both defences of and challenges to authority" (p. 9). 14franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: NLB, 1983), p. 42. 15Crewe notes that despite the power of the theater's demystification of the tyrant, "what apparently has still to be risked in the last resort is the audience's identification with represented unpunishable 'lusts and licentiousness' (their own writ large) and hence with the tyrant-sovereign" (p. 83). 16As Crewe notes, Puttenham suggests that "during the reign of the tyrant, the poets themselves are silenced (or implicitly reduced to flattery) while in his 'great prosperitee' the tyrant will be 'feared and reuerenced in the highest degree'" (p. 8r). 17See, for example, Anthony J. Podlecki, The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), chap. 6. lSSee Bernard Knox, Oedipus at Thebes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957; rpt. New York: Norton, 197r), pp. 5 3-66, on Oedipus' signifying Athens as tyrant. On Athens's association with tyranny, see W. R. Connor, "Tyrannis Polis," in Ancient and

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we should remember that many Greek tragedians, including Aeschylus and Euripides, most likely wrote plays while guests of the tyrants of Syracuse and elsewhere. 19 In The Republic Socrates speaks ironically of the playwrights' definition of tyranny, as opposed to his own, suggesting that playwrights serve tyrants first, and then perhaps democracies, but never good government. Adeimantus reminds him that Euripides had praised tyranny as godlike: kai hos isotheon g', ephe, ten tyrannida egki5miazei. 20 The philosopher retorts that such wise tragedians will understand when they are banned from the commonwealth for praising tyranny, even though he is sure that they will still go to work for tyrants-and democracies. You will find them "gathering together crowds and paying actors with beautiful, loud and persuasive voices to sway the people towards democracy or tyranny. Further, they make money for this, and are honored, mostly, as is likely, by tyrants, and secondly by democracies" (Republic 568B-C). In this passage, Socrates thus condemns playwrights as subversive because they attempt to persuade audiences that tyranny is desirable, not despicable. He sees the theater as being explicitly political, serving the needs of both tyrants and democracies-and funded by them-to influence an impressionable populace to support a constitution that allows men to act like beasts, in a city where the rule of pleasure and pain replaces that of law. 21 From the accounts of the historians, the Roman tragic theater also functioned as a kind of imperial propaganda. Like Greek tragedy, Roman theater was state supported, and the emperors themselves were notorious for their "private" theater as well as public performances. Renaissance accounts of the abuses of the theater dwell at length on the way that imperial power was exercised theatrically. Lumping together the Syracusan and Roman tyrants, William Prynne cites Plato's condemnation of playwrights who incite men to tyranny: Modern: Essays in Honor of Gerald F. Else, ed. John H. D'Arms and John W. Eadie (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center for Coordination of Ancient and Modern Studies, 1977), pp. 95-109, and Jacqueline de Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism, trans. Phillip Thody (Oxford: Oxford University Press; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963), p. 124. 19The Vita of Aeschylus tells us that Aeschylus was greatly honored by Hieron of Syracuse. 20The text of The Republic is that of Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902; rpt. 1972). Hereafter cited in the text. 21 Republic 6o7A. s-8. See Bruce Rosenstock, "Rereading the Republic," Arethusa r6 (1983): 238; alsop. 235.

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The ... effect or product of stage-playes is cruelty, fierceness, brawles, seditions, tumults, murthers, and the like, as is evident by sundry testimonies and examples. Hence it was, that Plato banished all Tragedies out of his Common-weale, because they would draw men on to tyranny and cruelty, by acting, by applauding them, and breed quarrels and commotions among the people .... Hence we find it recorded of Dionysus, Nero, Caligula, and other bloody tyrants; that they delighted much in Tragedies and Stage-playes: as being suitable to their tyrannical disposition.22

What survives of Roman tragedy indicates that the relationship between Roman tyrants and tragic playwrights was complex, indeed. Not only did Seneca write speeches for Nero and defend his murder of Agrippina, but the rhetoric of his plays gave the tyrant an identifiable and powerful voice. 23 In antitheatrical-and antityrannical-rhetoric traceable from Plato through the Renaissance, tragic theater is described not only as sponsored by tyrants but as the natural element of tyrants, a figure for tyranny itself. The tyrant is identified with the tragic actor both because he personifies the violence and cruelty that is tragedy's essence and because his nature is fundamentally histrionic. In contrast to a proper king, the tyrant presents a multitude of different faces, pretending to be good while full of malice. Sidney says that Alexander Pheraeus wept when watching The Trojan Women, yet he had a hardened heart. In effect, Alexander had a "theatrical" experience at this theatrical event: one might ask, as Hamlet did of the player, "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, I That he should weep for her?"(2.2.543-44). The tyrant's acting is so effective that one hardly knows where his "heart" is: as Vincent Farenga writes, "because he accedes to power more as an imposter than an embodiment of the traditional king, the tyrant suggests that under his rule the locus of the Self is always already occupied by an alien, by some Other masquerading as the Self." 24 The very instability and multiplicity of the tyrant's self thus also 22William Prynne, Histrio-mastix, The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragaedie, pt. 1 (London: E. A. and W.]. for Michael Sparke, r633), p. 517· 2JSee Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. rs-r6. 2 4 Vincent Farenga, "The Paradigmatic Tyrant: Greek Tyranny and the Ideology of the Proper," Helios 8 (I98r): rs.

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counteracts the didactic effect of tragedy. What happens to a tyrant when he watches himself in a play? In the literary criticism of the Renaissance "watching" means imagining one's relationship to the stage prince, deploring the tyrant or identifying with him: a king should see on stage what not to be, and a tyrant should see himself and despise it. Sidney's own story, of course, contradicts this supposition: the audience can experience the pleasure of witnessing the tyrant's violence and then deny that pleasure; the tyrant can see cruelty and not see himself. The theatricality of the tyrant's self thus undermines the theory of education by opposition and identity, at the same time that the tyrant's love of pleasure breaks the link between delight and profit. As much as the tyrant disrupts the theater's teaching by his desire and hypocrisy, he also destabilizes the discourse of classical and Renaissance political thought. Constitutional theory, going as far back as Herodotus, is founded on drawing differences between governments, primarily monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. In Renaissance political thought this schema usually coalesces to an opposition between monarchy and tyranny. Didactic statecraft literature, which begins with Plato's Republic, translates this constitutional scheme into practical advice: statecraft educates a prince by showing him the features of the tyrannical monster he should not be, as well as the paragons he should emulate. This rhetoric of opposition was thought to have great didactic utility; 25 yet, insofar as the theatrical and statecraft representations of tyranny share a rhetoric and an ideology, 26 both are equally vulnerable to the disruptions of the tyrant, who is as histrionic and uncontrolled in statecraft literature as he was on the stages of city 25 Robert P. Adams identifies this ideologically useful opposition in the statecraft literature of sixteenth-century England as two "opposed Tudor myths of power," that of the illegitimate tyrant and the legitimate Christian king (Robert P. Adams, "Opposed Tudor Myths of Power: Machiavellian Tyrants and Christian Kings," in Studies in the Continental Background of Renaissance English Literature: Essays Presented to john L. Lievsay, ed. D. B.]. Randall and G. W. Williams [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1977], p. 73). 26Walter Benjamin suggests that baroque tragedy or "Trauerspiel" can be classified according to a comparable opposition: "For the 'very bad' there was the drama of the tyrant, and there was fear; for the 'very good' there was the martyr drama and pity. This juxtaposition of forms appears strange only as long as one neglects to consider the legal aspects of baroque princedom. Seen in ideological terms they are strictly complementary. In the baroque the tyrant and the martyr are but the two faces of the monarch. They are the necessarily extreme incarnations of the princely essence" (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne [London: NLB, 1977], p. 69).

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and court. The tyrants of Renaissance stages and political writings are thus complexly related: they share features colored by a fear of the ruler's susceptibility to pleasure and ability to shift shapes. To understand the representation of the tyrant on the Renaissance stage, we need to investigate the origins of this ideology of opposition constructing the tyrant's unstable figure in the tradition of Western political thought that stems from Plato and Aristotle. Looking at this tradition clarifies how antithesis worked in the Renaissance discourse concerning tyranny; it also shows how this discourse was structured in terms of sexuality, gender, and identity. The Platonic tradition describes the tyrant as giving in to excessive desire, which unseats the sovereignty of reason. The tyrannical revolution of desire is associated, in turn, with the fragmenting and multiplying of the tyrant's self. In practical terms, of course, the tyrant had to learn to act to disguise his cruelties, but his self-division is depicted as more radical than that; if, as Foucault suggests, in Greek thought self-control was seen as a means to establishing one's self as an "ethical subject," the tyrant's indulgence of desire loosened the boundaries of the self. 27 Finally, the tyrant's love of pleasure, his impulse to shift shapes, and his improper sovereignty often generate the accusation that he is, in effect, "feminized." The tyrant thus draws to himself everything that does not fit quite properly into the Western tradition of rationality.

PLATO'S DREAM

"If wrong must be done, it is best to do wrong for the sake of tyranny; otherwise, piety is to be observed": so proclaims Euripides' Eteocles, when he seizes the Theban scepter from Polynices. 28 These lines concisely articulate the horror and admiration that tyranny evoked in Greek politics and culture. To Eteocles, tyranny is "the greatest of the gods" (ten theon megisten tyrannida, l.so6), and yet he knows that its greatness entails injustice. If tyranny is the only good reason for doing 27Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol.2, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 77· 2Beiper gar adikein chre, tyrranidos peri kalliston adikein, tal/a d'eusebein chreon: Euripides, Phoenissae, 504-5 (text from Euripidis Fabulae, ed. Gilbert Murray [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913]). On this ambivalence as it is further expressed in Euripides, d. Phoenissae, 504-10; and Supplices, 409-25.

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wrong, it is also equated with doing wrong, so that means and ends become confused in a paradox of desirable evil. Eteocles thus expresses what Plato suppresses, the lure of tyranny, which indulges the need to do wrong. 29 Such language Plato detested, and he and all defenders of kings have had to reject it in constructing an ideology of "natural" monarchy. The resurgence of monarchical sentiment in the fourth century B.C. engendered an obsession with tyranny, the reason why people fear kings. 30 In face of the threat of tyranny, law and reason rather than might were used to legitimize kings, and tyranny became the antithesis of kingship rather than just another word for monarchy. 31 (The word tyrannos meant "monarch" in the Archaic period and gained a negative political denotation only gradually. Although it first appears in Greek in Archilochus' poems in the mid-seventh century B.c., it occurs interchangeably with the word basileus [king] up through the fifth century.) 32 This rhetoric of antithesis called for a primarily moral rather than legal definition of tyranny, where legal terms were unclear or lacking. For a long time, the distinction between the tyrannical usurper and the legitimate king was thus overshadowed by the problem of the exercise of power. 33 Plato is primarily responsible for the influential psychological and moral model for tyranny, opposing the irrational tyrant to the rational king. 34 Fundamental to Plato's definition is that a tyrant must not be 29 As Ernest Barker suggests in his history of Greek political theory, "tyranny, indeed, in all its forms-whether that of the individual tyrant or of the tyrant city-seems to have had at once an attraction and a repulsion for the Greeks; and 'the tyrannical life' appears sometimes as the basest, and sometimes ... as the best" (Greek Political Theory: Plato and His Predecessors [London: Methuen, 1918; rpt. I96I], p. 84). See also Thomas Alan Sinclair, A History of Greek Political Thought (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, I 9 5 I), p. 3: "The able and unscrupulous popular leader who made himself sole ruler (tyrannos, tyrant) was both abhorred and admired, and Thrasymachus spoke no more than the truth about his fellow countrymen when he said (Plato, Repub. I 344) that their detestation of a tyrant's injustice was due not to fear of committing his crimes but to fear of suffering them." 3 °Cf. Claude Mosse, La tyrannie dans Ia Grece antique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), p. 138. 31 As Claude Mosse observes: "In fact, tyranny is a monarchy in the etymological sense of the word, and the principal concern of political writers of the fourth century is to oppose tyranny and royalty and accent that which distinguishes them" (Tyrannie, p. 139). 32 As A. Andrewes writes, "the contrast, kings are good and tyrants are wicked, was not fully established until the fourth century" (The Greek Tyrants [London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1956; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, I963], p. 30). 33 See John L. Lewis, with Oszcar Jaszi, in Against the Tyrant: The Tradition and Theory of Tyrannicide (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), pp. 4-5. 34 See Mosse, Tyrannie, p. I 4 I: "In effect, for the men of the fourth century, tyranny was

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described in terms equivalent to those used to depict a strong king, but rather he must be shown as the opposite of a king and of all that is truly good and desirable. By this rhetoric of opposition, the philosopher distances the tyrant who threatens him. As Jean-Marie Benoist observes, the Platonic "exorcism" of tyranny is "a rite by which he repels into the outer darkness of enmity a tyrannical figure which haunts him within." 35 Plato's tyrant transgresses the boundaries that separate human from beast: he becomes a monster, a wolf, an animal masked as a human being, while the king's virtues are "natural." This separation occurs even though Plato recognizes that, either in the human character or in history, the two may be the same. The trend toward a moral or psychological rather than wholly legal representation of tyranny really begins before Plato, in Herodotus' Persian Wars. Xenophon has been credited with the first legal distinction between tyrant and king, whereby "the king rules willing men, according to the laws; the tyrant rules unwilling men and not according to the laws" (Memorabilia, 4.6.12). 36 Further, his Hieron, a dialogue between Hieron I of Syracuse and the poet Simonides, investigates the life of the tyrannos, who lives constantly in fear of his resentful subjects. But while Hieron demonstrates the personal consequences of absolute rule, it does not portray tyranny as a moral condition, the life of a corrupted soul. Herodotus' description shifts the emphasis to tyranny's arising from the worst tendencies of human nature. In the discussion of different constitutions in Book 3 of Herodotus' history of the Persian Wars, Otanes describes a typical monarch as a tyrannos, among other terms for king. It is inevitable, he says, that a king will act despotically: How indeed can monarchy [mounarchie] be suitable, when the man who is not accountable can assert his will? For even in the best of all men such a rule should raise strange thoughts. On the one hand pride [hybris) shall rise in them on account of their present virtues, on the not only a form of politeia, it was also a moral issue, and the abstract portrait of the tyrant depends on the portrait of the tyrannical man." See also Sinclair, p. r 6 5. 35jean-Marie Benoist, Tyrannie du logos (Paris: Minuit, 1975), p. 15. See also Farenga, p.

2.

36But cf. Gerhard Heintzeler, Das Bild des Tyramzen bei ?laton: ein Betrag zur Geschichte der griechischen Staatsethick (Stuggart: W. Kohlhammer, 1927), who argues that while Xenophon gives the first clear definition of tyrant vs. king in Memorabilia 4.6. 12, Plato was the first to develop an ethical model of tyranny (p. 44).

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Tragedies of Tyrants other hand envy immediately grows by nature in a man. But having these two he possesses the greatest of evils; sated with pride and with evil, he goes on to do great violence and wickedness. 37

Otanes thus maintains that, given absolute power, even a good man will be brought to commit both moral and political crimes: the man in power deteriorates until he "removes the country's law, takes women by violence, and kills men before they have been judged." 37 In the short argument that ensues about the merits of different constitutions, Darius has the final word in support of monarchy, but Herodotus has introduced the possibility that a monarch will naturally grow to be a tyrant in his souJ.38 In his condemnation of tyranny in The Republic, Plato tries to avoid this slippage from king to tyrant, while at the same time constructing his own argument on the recognition that tyranny is potentially in each of us. Plato's description of the tyrant's political acts is not historical but rather predicated on his portrait of the tyrannical character, concluding his parallels between governments and the character types that express them. 39 Socrates says that "constitutions do not grow out of oak trees or rocks"; rather, he reasons that they come into being from "the characters [ton ethan] of those of the city," so that if there are five sorts of constitutions, there must be five forms of individual character (Republic 544D-E). To fit his description of the tyrannical character, Socrates narrates the tyrant's rising from the conditions of lawless democracy to seize power for himself40 (a claim quite different from Otanes' idea that tyrants are kings who have been corrupted by 37 Herodotus, Historiae, 1:3.80, ed. C. Hude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927; rpt. 1976). 38 In Herodotos on Tyrants and Despots: A Study in Objectivity (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1971), Kenneth H. Waters argues that Herodotus' attitude toward tyrants is entirely objective: "Neither in these particular aspects nor in his general treatment can one find a dominating attitude to tyrants which would possibly lend colour to the view that he used them as puppets, to behave badly and meet bad ends. He has no attitude to them as a group; he neither approves nor disapproves of them en masse, any more than he shows a blanket admiration or loathing for Eastern despots, Kings of Sparta, or Athenian politicians" (p. 9). 39 ln particular, there are historical problems with Plato's demonstration that tyrannies arise from the conditions of democracy; Aristotle himself criticizes this notion, in pointing to the tyrannies that issued from oligarchies. While demagogues were common in archaic Greece, certainly in the fourth century tyranny more often took the form of absolute monarchy (see Mosse, Tyrannie, p. 137). 40 ln fact, the pattern in the preceding century was that tyrants emerged from the conditions of aristocracy, breaking the hold of wealthy landowners.

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3

absolute power). As a character type, Plato's tyrant is a man who gives free rein to desire, differing from the democratic man in that while the latter randomly satisfies all his "unnecessary" appetites, the tyrannical man becomes dominated by one overwhelming desire (epithumia). This desire employs madness (mania) as its bodyguard, killing or expelling any good thoughts or desires, until the tyrant is purged of self-restraint (sophrosyni) and is filled with forms of madness brought in from outside (Republic 573B). The lecher, the drunkard, and the lunatic are the types of the tyrannos (Republic 573C); dominated by passion, they are driven to terrorize others. 41 Like Herodotus' tyrant, Plato's tyrannos is thus a creature of violence and desire, but Plato seems concerned to strike a difference between his and Herodotus' version. Otanes describes a situation in which absolute power corrupts a good man; in Plato, however, the will and need to do ill are there from the beginning, opposing reason, and the illusion of absolute power is sought to gratify that compulsion.42 In giving in to the unlawful desires that most of us satisfy only in our dreams, the tyrant does, waking, what we all secretly want to do: in Plato's terms, eat forbidden foods; sleep with mother, man, god, or beast; and murder indiscriminately. These desires, says Socrates, constitute the "bestial and savage" (to de theriodes te kai agrion) part of the soul, which, when "full of food and drink, leaps forth, and putting aside sleep, searches to satisfy its nature [ta ethe]" (Republic 571C). According to the Platonic definition of what is truly "human," Plato's tyrannos is an animal that each person cages in him- or herself. To illustrate this point, Socrates recounts the legend of the Arcadian shrine of the Lycaean Zeus: there, one who ate the sacrificial flesh mixed with a bit of human flesh was said to be changed into a wolf. Such, says Socrates, is the tyrant, who having killed a kinsman in a mad rush to power ceases to be a human being and becomes a wolf (luko[i] eks anthropou genesthai) (Republic s6sD-s66A). For Plato to say here that the tyrant is "inhuman" thus suppresses the initial recognition that such tyranny is in each of us, if only in our dreams. This is a characteristic gesture of self-sabotage for Plato: he sees deep41See janine Chanteur, Platon, le desir et Ia cite (Paris: Sirey, 1 980), on the power of desire in Plato's city. 42See Diego Lanza, II tiranno et il suo pubblico (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. 40.

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ly enough to find such tyranny in each of us, but this human desire must then be called inhuman. The Republic's portrait of the tyrant complements that in the Gorgias, in Callicles' argument for the despot as "natural" man. 43 In the context of a discussion of power and rhetoric, Callicles expresses his admiration of the tyrant, who rules according to the law whereby the strong prevail over the weak. Callicles believes that the man who is strong will have the power to recognize and satisfy his desires (Gorgias 492D). In this argument the tyrant is "natural" man (houtoi kata physin ten tou dikaiou tauta prattousin), who is not bound by the conventions of law or society (Gorgias 483B-E). A tyrant is a man strong enough to shake off the bonds of convention, "trampling down our writings [grammata] and conjurations and charms and laws, all against nature." Then "our slave in rebellion stands forth to be revealed as our master [despotes], and there the light of natural justice is illumined" (484A). In his response to Callicles, Socrates avoids the problem that man by nature seeks the gratification of all his appetites. Rather, he attacks the claim that such gratification (and by implication, tyranny) is the highest good; happiness, he says, is identical with self-discipline, not self-indulgence. As in The Republic, Socrates contends that the very satisfaction that the tyrant appears to achieve is false or illusory in comparison with "the true and authentic [alethes] pleasure which the philosopher experiences. " 44 Both dialogues suppress the recognition that man in a state of nature is, in effect, a tyrant; when one defines the good as what is proper to humanity, the tyrant exists in "nature" as an animal, not a human. In The Republic and the Gorgias with Plato's concern with controlling desire is thus based on the understanding that the pleasure that results from gratifying desire is a field of power. As Michel Foucault concludes in his study of Greek sexuality, the themes of sexual control and austerity in Greek literature "should be understood, not as an expression of, or commentary on, deep and essential prohibitions, but as the elaboration and stylization of an activity in the exercise of its 43 For a revealing discussion of the Gorgias, see Farenga, pp. 5-ro. The text of the Gorgias is that edited by E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon, r959). Hereafter cited in the text. 44 Rosenstock, p. 230. Rosenstock provides an interesting perspective on the illusory nature of the tyrant's desire: "The desire of the tyrant is never one's own desire, never one's proper desire. It is rather the desire of a dream-like phantasm, a 'representation' of the self which substitutes for the soul's proper godliness ... the mere illusion of divinity" ( p. 2 3 3 ).

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power and the practice of its liberty." 45 In other words, in this literature sexuality is described in political terms: the individual fights for power against his desire, and a man who is slave to his passions has lost all liberty. 46 Freedom from slavery to the pleasures gives one personal autonomy, but it also grants one the right to rule over others. The man who cannot exercise moderation is rightly mastered by "the best man, who has the divine ruler in himsel£." 47 Plato's drive to suppress tyranny as the manifestation of desire shapes much of the drama of The Republic itself, where Socrates tries to master his antagonists' potentially disruptive and tyrannical language. The Republic is a first-person narrative-Socrates' account of what happened when he walked down to Piraeus one day. Yet the text continually draws our attention away from that fact. What we remember is the dialogue, which is not, for the most part, written as indirect discourse. To believe Socrates we must forget that it is a narrative, because the narrative is implicated in The Republic's project of ideological control; after all, we may think we are reading "free" conversation, but in fact we are hearing what Plato has Socrates "remember" or care to tell us. In the narrative asides, which sometimes condense or report a stretch of conversation, what we usually hear is "Socrates, recording his own success. " 48 On the one hand, these descriptive additions that elide the objections or speech of his opponents signify Socrates' control of the discourse; on the other hand, for the most part our attention must be focused on their speeches, so that his interlocutors seem free to choose the good. That Plato eventually condemns all drama and even the mixed mode of narrative and drama in which he writes is, of course, ironic, in view of his own powerful use of it. In his ideal commonwealth, the Guardians will assume control over all fiction making with the subtlety Socrates has demonstrated. The most interesting cases of Socrates' control occur in his inter45foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 23. 46foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 66. 47 Cited from Plato, Republic 59oC, by Foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 8o; also see pp. 6o6r. 4 BF. E. Sparshott, "Socrates and Thrasymachus," The Monist 50 (1966): 421. Sparshott suggests that "the normal implication of dialogue form is that the author is disengaged from his characters .... That is to say, a writer of dialogues is necessarily an ironist" (p. 421). Plato's relationship to Socrates raises questions about Plato's control over the kind of narrative control that Socrates exercises in "recording his success." See also Farenga, pp. 89, on Plato's "detour" into mimesis.

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changes with the sophist Thrasymachus, the advocate of might as right. At one point, an argument arises concerning the interests of those who rule, given the cases of a physician, a ship's captain, and a groom. Contradicting Thrasymachus, Socrates concludes that such arts are concerned not with the interests of the stronger party but with those of the weaker. The text then slips into narrative, eliding Thrasymachus' response, when Socrates recalls that Thrasymachus at last agreed, although he tried to fight the conclusion (epecheirei de peri auta machesthai) (Republic 342D). The reader anticipates hearing Thrasymachus' protests, but the narrative merely depicts Socrates as the victor, silencing Thrasymachus' voice. Thrasymachus must be silenced, because he stands in the dialogue as a type of the tyrant, figured as a wolf and beast. Socrates recounts that Thrasymachus abruptly interfered in the argument, raging like a wild beast (hi5sper therion) who would tear the philosopher and his companions to pieces (Republic 3 3 6B ). Socrates toys with this metaphor a little later on, playfully evoking the old superstition that if a wolf sees you first, you will be struck dumb. He tells the reader that upon hearing Thrasymachus' attack he was terrified and was glad that he had looked at him first or he might have become speechless (Republic 3 3 6D ). 49 Socrates' metaphors thus point throughout to the violence of attack and lack of reason that inform Thrasymachus' philosophy, making his the voice of tyranny; yet Socrates' irony constantly undermines the force of his opponent's rage. When Thrasymachus is finally struck dumb, another sort of bestial metaphor is used to suggest the transformation. As Glaucon says, Thrasymachus seems to relent too quickly, like a snake Socrates has charmed (hi5sper ophis kelethenai) (Republic 3 5 8B). Thrasymachus' bestiality figures first as a mark of his strength, but inevitably Plato transforms it into his weakness. Thrasymachus' serpent nature is a sign of both his poisonous nature and his vulnerability to the magic of Socrates' words and the power of the narrative itself. Benoist describes Plato's strategy, which is the strategy of Western logic and metaphysics, as a "conjuring act" whereby philosophers "think they can conjure away the Other, but do no more than protect themselves against their double, that is, the image of themselves inscribed most intimately inside them."SO 49Elsewhere, he says that to outwit Thrasymachus is to "beard a lion" (xurein leonta) (Republic 341C). sosenoist, p. 1 5.

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7

In these sardonic asides, Socrates' power resembles magic and superstition more than reason, evoking what Callicles condemns as the magic spells in which convention has bound human beings. It is ironic that Thrasymachus himself most acutely understands how such ideological control works, yet Socrates overcomes him handily. Thrasymachus advocates the doctrine that what is "just" or "right" is defined by the interests of the powerful. The "stronger" party in this dialogue, however, is the sardonic and self-deprecating Socrates, who not only proposes an astonishing program of ideological control but also gives the last word as to what is right and wrong. Socrates' victory reflects the status of the philosopher-kings, who in their perfection need not rule according to law, and thus possess a kind of absolute power. Barker calls this one of the great paradoxes of The Republic, in which Plato was aware that he was "enunciating a dangerous doctrine." 51 The inherent similarity between tyrant and philosopher-king, between Thrasymachus and Socrates, thus undermines the edifice of difference defining the moral condemnation of tyranny. 5 2

HYPOCRISY AND DIFFERENCE

Plato is as wary of drama as he is of desire, because both lead to the disintegration of self and thus the decay of society. Socrates argues that imitation is dangerous, not only because a man might become a woman, a slave, or a madman if he acts like one; there is a greater danger in the mimetic production of multiple selves. As Socrates asks Adeimantus, "Do we want our Guardians to be mimics [mimetikous] or not? Or doesn't the answer follow from what we said before, that each man can practice only one way of life [epitedeuma] well?" (Republic 394£). 53 Like Socrates and Plato, the leaders of the Republic should not "dramatize" but tell a narrative. 5 4 Further, if they mimic stBarker, p. 237. As Barker describes the situation: "Here Plato, as we have seen, leaves behind the ordinary Greek conception of the State as an association of equals, owning only the sovereignty of law; and he comes near to the adoption of tyranny, the form of rule in which the sovereignty of law disappeared and a personal rule usurped its place." 52See Farenga, p. 5. SJSo Socrates concludes that any person who comes to his Republic who can imitate should be admired for his power to give pleasure but should also be escorted quickly to the border (398B). HThis narrative will be like Homer's and will contain both imitation (mimeseos) and

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voices when telling a story, the Guardians should imitate only what is appropriate, that is, men who are virtuous and brave. The rejection of drama is inseparable from Plato's argument against tyranny, for the tyrant is described as a kind of actor, and the threat that tyranny poses is also the threat that drama poses. 55 On a simple level, tyrant and actor endanger the state through the power of illusion. Socrates asks us to look past the tyrant's dazzling exterior to glimpse the corrupt inner man. He asks us to judge him not as a child would, when struck with wonder by the tyrant's entourage and adornments, but rather as someone seeing right through him. We should rely on the judgment of someone who has lived intimately with the tyrant in his own household and has seen him stripped of his "tragic costume" (tes tragikes skeues) (Republic 577A-B). More significantly, Plato connects theater and tyranny through their power to cloud reason as well as obscure insight. In his final argument against mimesis, rejecting all poetry along with drama, Socrates complains that theater appeals to the lower part of the soul, which is feeling or emotion ordinarily controlled by the authority of reason. So, Socrates concludes, we would be justified in excluding the dramatic poet from a well-ordered state, because he nurtures and strengthens this lower part of the soul, "as in a city where bad men rule, ruining the better men. Just so we can say that the mimetic poet sets up a bad government [politeian] in a man's soul," by creating illusions and fostering that "senseless part" (to[i] anoeto[ij) (Republic 6osB-C). The political imagery of this passage strongly connects the subversive powers of theater and tyranny. Theater, in undermining reason, leads exactly to the kind of violence that characterizes the tyrant: it is both the image and cause of tyranny. 5 6 The fragmentation of the tyrant into various theatrical images and roles, in turn, is associsimple narration (haples diegeseos), but certainly less imitation (Republic 396E). A man who is not of the best type, conversely, will exploit unlimited mimesis, imitating music and animals as well as human speech. 55 See Farenga, who argues that Plato's own use of mimesis, in using Socrates' voice, "does even more than reveal an interior 'tyrant deferred' in the philosopher's desire for power and an interior inaugural act of mimesis as the foundation en abime of the Platonic logos" (p. 9 ). 56 As Rosenstock puts it, for Plato mimetic poetry is "nothing less than the discourse of the tyrant, of the philosopher's phantasmic double" (p. 2.40). He adds: "The seduction of tragedy ... lies in the fact that it puts a front of beauty over the truth of tyranny and thereby replaces the Eros of our soul's truest nature, of its 'philosophical element,' whose object is the 'irresistible beauty' ... of the Good, for an Eros of a phantasm."

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ated with the proliferation of desire. If, as Foucault argues, in Greek culture practice of self-control was seen as "indispensable in order for an individual to form himself as a moral subject," 57 the reverse was also true: the lack of self-control was associated with the subject's disintegration. 58 It is Oedipus who in Greek culture-and our own-epitomizes this connection between tyranny, hypocrisy, and desire. The figure of Oedipus tyrannos poses a crisis of political difference intertwined with a crisis of identity and sexuality: Oedipus is first presented to us as a strong and benevolent king, yet he is exposed at the play's end as having committed the paradigmatic tyrannical crimes of desire: incest and parricide. 59 The king is stripped to reveal the criminal tyrantwho is still the hero of the play. The issue of difference is further complicated by the fact that Oedipus' crimes are not simply crimes of desire; they are also crimes based on the eradication of difference, striking at "the most fundamental, essential and inviolable distinction within the group. " 60 As Rene Girard suggests, it is Oedipus' very doubleness that makes him a monster, necessitating his victimization and expulsion to root out the plague of violence. Indeed, in every way, Oedipus is the central figure for the problem of social, sexual, and political difference, insofar as he is the one who is many, the father who is brother, the husband who is son, the king who is tyrant. The problem of difference in Oedipus the King can be construed in terms of Oedipus' status as a hypokrites or actor, one who plays a multitude of contradictory and improper roles. 61 The construction of a hierarchy of appearance and reality, whereby we distinguish the "real" face of Oedipus from the "illusion," offers the simplest way of differentiating between king and tyrant. This is the solution that the play provides in having Oedipus recognize his own criminality and in 57J); he gives in after being put on the rack. Butler calls this play "a vigorous and popular polemic against all aspects of court life and luxury" ("Romans in Britain," p. 162).

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tyranny thus reproduces the sexual model of male tyranny, which emphasizes possession, obsession, and vulnerability. The female tyrant also covets absolute autonomy, insofar as she dominates men and is free from them in her disdain. Yet she, too, ultimately falls through her dependence on her desire, whether lust or ambition. The emphasis on Domitia's tyranny in The Roman Actor both magnifies Domitian's image as a tyrant and suggests the slipperiness of the gender categories used to establish that image. That Domitian and Domitia look so much alike, both powerful and dispossessed, and literally consumed by desire, doubly condemns the tyrant. Yet through their identity, their mutual tyranny ultimately destabilizes gender difference at the same time that it undermines political difference. In the earlier tyrant plays such as Cambyses, even when the tyrant submits to his love for his lady, the play clearly distinguishes between male and female, insofar as the beloved is the prisoner of the lust she has aroused. In The Roman Actor, however, emperor and empress are both subject and object; both have the power to make the object of their desire submit to their will, while they are constricted and defined by the tyranny of their own lust. While Domitian's taking of Domitia thus defines his tyranny of lust, Massinger also makes it clear that this sexual gesture is a political act as well. The seizure of Domitia epitomizes Domitian's tyranny both in his overwhelming desire and in his taking what belongs to his subject. Parthenius declares of Domitian that "as his rule is infinite, his pleasures I Are unconfined" (r.2.46-47): the emperor's power is thus identified with his pursuit and enjoyment of pleasure. Yet here it is made clear that there is a difference between the law and Domitian's will. When Parthenius comes to seize Domitia, Lamia asks, "Is this legall?" Parthenius replies, "Monarkes that dare not do unlawfull things, I Yet bare them out, are Constables not Kings" (r.2.85-88). Thus Parthenius does not deny that what Domitian does is illegal; the emperor's will is not law but rather goes beyond the law. As Martin Butler notes, more is at stake here than the prince's character, insofar as Domitian's "conception of his power exhibits exactly that challenge to the fundamental freedoms of the subject which was so feared from Stuart Government." 68 In such a scene the play explicitly criticizes the 68Butler, "Romans in Britain," p. I 54·

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absolutist equation between the sovereign's will and law. Like Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger thus strikes out at present kings while returning to the images of tyrants in the older plays. Massinger's play, however, speaks most boldly in exploring theater's role in serving and fashioning princes. Domitian is at first less an actor than a patron of the theater, who pays the actors to provide him pleasure. 69 Domitia, too, commissions a play and falls in love with the actor Paris. The situation only too acutely suggests what Cohen and others describe as the contemporary popular theater's decline and the court's increasing control of plays. In The Roman Actor, however, not only does the tyrant kill the player; the actor betrays empress and emperor, for Paris is willing to cuckold Domitian, and Domitia is condemned when she is found with Paris. It is Massinger's play, after all, that kills off the tyrant, staging the scene of Domitian's stabbing by the men and women he has wronged. The mutual dependence of actor and emperor destroys them both in the end. In The Roman Actor the theater's power and destructiveness are linked to its providing pleasure for its spectators rather than moving them to virtue. The players' opening discussion of their profession's decline suggests that now the theater is simply a better class of brothel. The players complain that the Romans no longer frequent the public theaters, for "Pleasures of worse natures I Are gladly entertayn' d, and they that shun us I Practice in private sports the Stewes would blush at" (r.r.IJ-rs). In leaving the theaters the Romans are not necessarily forsaking virtue for pleasure; rather they are simply seeking private, if worse, pleasures. When Paris then comments that it is a shame that the people are forsaking virtue in the theater, insofar as they "yet grudge us I That with delight jayne profit, and endeavour I To build their minds up faire," Aesopus takes Paris's word "profit" to mean financial profit69Qn Domitian and the theater, see Patricia Thomson, "World Stage and Stage in Massinger's Roman Actor," Neophilologos 54 (1970): 409-26. Thomson notes the difference between Massinger's and Suetonius' Domitian, who "condemned the younger Helvidius to death on the grounds that in a stage farce he had, under the character of Paris and Oenone, censured the emperor's divorce (Vlll,x), and who did away with license in the theatre and the publication of lampoons" (p. 412). We might compare here Nero's wish to see the end of Rome in flames (The Tragedy of Nero, 3. 3). He enjoys it as a play or spectacle: when a mother enters with her burned child, he rejoices: "Ay, now begins the scene that I would have .... Play on, play on, and fill the golden skies I With cries and pity; with your blood, men's eyes" (3.4).

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Tragedies of Tyrants And for the profit Paris, And mercinarie gaine they are things beneath us, Since the while you hold your grace and power with Caesar We from your bounty finde a large supply Nor can one thought of want ever approach us. [I.126-3o]

"Profit" here is thus not moral insight, but the money that Domitian gives the players. The players' task, in turn, is to provide pleasure to the tyrant, as much as to the people. While the players speak of being brought to task because they have "galled" Caesar's spy, they expect protection from "that great Domitian, whom we oft have cheered I In his most sullen moodes" (I.I.40-41). The pleasure that the theater provides is equivalent to that of the stews, and the players profit from the king's delight. The senate calls Paris to answer the accusation of committing "treason I As libellers against the state and Caesar (1.3.32-34), but it seems that players have offended not the state and its ruler but its ruling class, who dislike Paris's influence. Aretinus complains that You are they That search into the secrets of the time And under fained names on the Stage present Actions not to be toucht at; and traduce Persons of rancke, and qualitie of both Sexes, And, with satiricall and bitter jests Make even the senators ridiculous To the plebeians. [1.3·36-43]

The senate thus complains that through satire theater undermines the dignity of authority, or of "persons of rank and quality of both sexes." But what bothers the senate most of all is that Paris himself has political influence and protection, not because he is an effective teacher but because he holds "grace and power with Caesar." As Parthenius reminds Paris, " 'Tis confessed many men owe you I For Provinces they nere hop'd for; and their lives, I Forfeited to his anger" (2.1.77-79). In this remark Massinger alludes to Juvenal's complaint that "it is Paris who appoints men to military commands, it is Paris who puts the golden ring round the poet's finger after six months' service. You can get from a stage-player what no great man will give you." 70 Paris ?OCited by Gibson, p. 64.

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has power from Domitian to grant things to others and to act as he wishes, and that power comes from serving Domitian's pleasures: as Rusticus says, "They are onely safe I That know to soothe the Princes appetite I And serve his lusts" ( r. r. 79-8 I). The senate certainly seems to have no authority over the actor. Paris's trial ends with the return of Domitian, to whom is given "the censure of this cause." When attacked by the senate, Paris defends the theater conventionally. He claims that plays instruct by representing evils to be avoided and virtues to be emulated; further, he claims that the players are not responsible if people see their own vices in what is enacted on stage. However, when Paris's claims for theater's political innocence and social benefit are tested against the three plays that Domitian and Domitia command, they fail miserably. 71 In each case, the theater serves Domitian's needs. While "The Curse of Avarice" is put on at Paris's own suggestion, it is meant to gratify the Emperor. Domitia requests "lphis and Anaxarete" to see her beloved Paris perform, and Domitian himself demands the performance of "The False Servant" to punish Paris. The players thus respond to the emperor's will, and when they do so, their plays may be effective, but not in the ways that Paris claims. The play of "The Curse of Avarice" seems designed to prove Paris's point about theater~s power to instruct through the representation of vice-but in fact it demonstrates the opposite. Paris proposes its performance to cure Parthenius' father Philargus of avarice, so that he "may see his owne deformity, and loath it" (2.r.98-99). In the play a miser dreams that his child steals his gold: upon waking, he begs for a chance to make amends. After the play is completed, Domitian impatiently insists that Philargus now feel true compunction; when Philargus refuses to reform, Caesar orders him to be hanged instantly. In this reversal, theater's didactic persuasion is replaced by the tyrant's violent punishment. Exemplary images give way to exemplary 7tJonas Barish, in "Three Caroline 'Defenses' of the Stage," in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English and European Dramatic Tradition: Essays in Honor of Eugene M. Waith, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and J. C. Bulman (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1986), discusses how the play does not in any way support Paris's claim about theater. Butler, in "Romans in Britain," concludes that Massinger was deliberately writing the most antitheatrical play of the English Renaissance, presenting Paris and his fellows in a light that is powerfully "puritan." He also notes the continuity between antitheatrical polemicists and radical political pamphleteers such as John Reynolds and Thomas Scott (pp. r6o-6r).

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violence, warning men not to tgnore theater's-and Domitian'scommand to be virtuous. The only real effect of "The Curse of Avarice" is that it arouses Domitia's lust for Paris, confirming the worst suspicions of the Puritan antitheatricalists that theater arouses desire rather than moving men to virtue. Domitia commands a performance of "Iphis and Anaxarete" in order to see her beloved Paris act (and incidentally to annoy her rival, Domitilla). For her the theater is a vehicle for erotic pleasure and punishment rather than a vehicle of edifying example. She, like Domitian, has the power to end the performance when it ceases to please her: the play exists only to fulfill her fantasy and gratify her eye. Like the Wife of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Domitia is so rapt with "lphis" and with Paris that she begins to take the play for reality. Domitian plaintively asks, "Why are you I Transported thus Domitia? 'tis a play, I Or grant it serious, it at no part merits I This passion in you" (3.2.283-.,86). Yet in the final play of "The False Servant," Caesar himself steps over the line faintly marking "play" from his own world. After seeing Paris kiss Domitia, 72 Domitian commands the players to perform the domestic tragedy of "The False Servant," with Paris acting the adulterer and Domitian the cuckold. Domitian claims to play it "to the life," changing his costume from an emperor's to a subject's for this performance of private theater: Off with my Robe and wreath; since Nero scorn'd not The publike Theater, we in private may Disport ourselves. This cloak, and hat without Wearing a beard or other propertie, Will fit the person. [4.2.224-27]

In Blackfriars, the emperor's removing robe and wreath to substitute a cloak and hat effected a change from Roman trappings to "realistic" contemporary dress. To fit into the fiction of "The False Servant," Caesar thus distances himself from the Roman fiction, reinforcing the audience's sense that this play is "reality." Domitian's amateur status as an actor also makes his actions seem ironically more genuine and authoritative. Impatiently waiting for the play to begin and his cue to 72 Paris himself has had no choice in this: as Barish says, "he has been trained to please, and he almost literally does not know how to say no" (p. 199).

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enter, Caesar waits to "come to execution"; in fact, he misses his cue, and has to be told what to do: Now, Sir, now. Aesopus: Caesar: I must take them at it. Aesopus: Yes sir, be but perfect. Caesar: 0 villaine! Thanklesse villaine!-I should talke now But I have forgot my part. But I can do, Thus, thus, and thus. Kills Paris. [4.!.278-83]

His stepping out of his role creates the illusion that he has indeed slain Paris, because he says he does not know how to play.73 When most threatened, Domitian thus needs to reestablish his sovereignty and self-possession through playing a role. In this he epitomizes the tyrant's traditional role as an actor, even when he is a poor one. As the imperial actor, Domitian is both powerful and an empty shell. The players claim that in defending themselves, they "will act our selves" (r.r.53). But what those selves are, outside of the theater, is unknown. In effect, the play's representation of the self is tautological: both the actors and Domitian are like the selves they play, and Domitian, like the players, has no self outside of his roles. In Believe as You List Massinger suggests that the deposed Antiochus' kingship should be evident to everyone, both because he has the marks on his person and because he has a king's character, especially in his refusing to renounce his own identity or change his mind in the face of torture and temptation. (Ironically, the other kings refuse to recognize him because of the danger to themselves.) But Domitian is recognizably a tyrant in both his hollowness and lack of constancy, that is, in his nature as a player. Domitian's association with the theater is thus twofold, insofar as he is patron and actor. His identity as actor corresponds with the tyrant's traditional portrait as the hypocrite. His role as patron, however, expands his histrionic madness, when he takes over the theater for his own purposes and pleasures. Caesar announces that his slaying of Paris is his tribute and comfort to him. He could have tortured him, 73 As Barish writes, "'The False Servant' belies any view of the theater as a protected world in which violent actions are merely exemplary because they are make-believe" (p. 201).

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Tragedies of Tyrants but, as thou didst live Romes bravest actor, 'twas my plot that thou Shouldst dye in action, and to crowne it dye With an applause induring to all times, By our imperiall hand. [4.2.294-99]

One imagines the hollow sound of Caesar's single applause, as the stunned actors watch, and Paris himself is forever silenced. Caesar's imperial hand is the one that kills and the one that applauds. Paris has no death speech, the tragic actor's privilege; his death is not honorable except that Caesar thinks it so. Domitian gives the player an elaborate eulogy, revealing a passion for Paris that approaches what he feels for Domitia, a passion that smothers its object in love and favors. Like the tyrant's love for his lady, the "private" and theatrical execution of Paris is both a tribute and an act of seizure. 74 The Roman Actor thus returns us to where this book began, with Alexander Pheraeus' contemplating his image in the tragic mirror of tyranny. Sidney's image of Alexander is fulfilled in Domitian, the tyrant who orders a tragedy to be performed so that it might move him-but only to tears of passion, not to those of repentance. In Domitian's world the celebrated didactic functions of the theater are diverted and deconstructed. His theater fails to teach any moral or social lesson, but it can punish by death. Just as Domitian shortcuts the didacticism of "The Curse of Avarice" by converting the exemplary representation of vice to a didactic display of violence, in "The False Servant" tragedy's own imitation of exemplary punishment is exploded, when the line between theatrical and "real" violence blurs. Further, in "The False Servant" it is the tyrant who is the punisher rather than the punished. Contradicting the theory that tragedy teaches by representing the downfall of tyrants, this play within the play shows the tyrant using theater to display his strength. Like Cambyses' example of Praxaspes' violent execution, all Paris's plays teach in the end is that Domitian is powerful. When Domitian himself turns actor, his tyrannical theater also breaks down the division between theater and audience, ironically fulfilling Sidney's dream of a didactic 74 lndeed, only in the execution of Rusticus and Sura does Domitian encounter actors who refuse to play the parts that Domitian has assigned them. See Thomson on the idea that "their 'lntegritie of life' (III, i, 103) is not shattered in the moment of greatest stress, that is, in the torture scene" (p. 414).

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tragedy that envisions the tyrant watching himself on the stage. In essence, Domitian does exactly that when he puts himself in the play as the avenging husband and applauds his own actions. At the same time, however, The Roman Actor is a play that enacts the tyrant's as well as the player's death. The theater has its revenge in this play, and not solely in Domitia's preference for Paris, the actor. Tragedy obsessively repeats the tyrant's death scene; as Moretti and others have suggested, staging the tyrant's death makes it familiar, no matter how much playwrights tried to defuse that death's meaning by punishing the assassins. Domitian's crossing over the line between "reality" and theater will be reversed when the scene of killing a king, known to the people only from the tragic stage, is enacted before Whitehall on January 30, 1649. Further, like the criminal's public execution, the tyrant's death scene may be meant to restore the image of pure sovereignty insofar as the restored and legitimate prince has the last word. Yet that closure is often not complete. For example, the character who speaks at the end of The Roman Actor is a tribune, whose political position is ambivalent. Though in Rome the tribunes were the officials responsible for defending the rights and interests of the plebeians, throughout The Roman Actor they swear their undying allegiance and obedience to Domitian. That the tribune has the final say thus contradictorily both reaffirms Domitian's sovereignty, however corrupt, and intimates a new order by restoring rule to the people and to the Senate, which had so complained about Paris's theater. The Roman Actor thus exemplifies the political ambiguity of tyrant tragedy, which undermines both Humanist and absolutist strategies deploring tyranny and celebrating sovereignty.75 On the one hand, The Roman Actor may be read as an allegory of the Stuart court's patronage of the theater, suggesting that in that time all theater was in effect tyrannical theater. The play's image of the theater symbolizes the fullest realization of absolute power, which subordinates morality to the claims of sovereignty. What is most important in Domitian's theater is not that it teaches, but that it serves and represents his power. The very existence of The Roman Actor, however, questions how obsequiously the theater served the Stuart court. If all the theater 75 See Richard A. Burt, "'Tis Writ by Me': Massinger's The Roman Actor and the Politics of Reception in the English Renaissance Theatre," Theatre ]ourna/40 (1 980): 33 2-46, who argues that the theater easily escaped strict service to either royalist or opposition politics.

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was directed to pleasing the court, how would this play's portrait of a depraved and theater-loving emperor have been accepted? The play is, after all, a devastating theatrical satire of a world in which satire is not functional. The ideological function of The Roman Actor is thus unclear: Did its representation of Domitian cynically acquiesce to court tastes, titillating the audience with Domitian's luridness, or was it a defiant gesture against it? In representing tyranny, tragedy thus more often confuses rather than supports the antithesis between king and tyrant. On one level, tyrant tragedy brings out the contradictions at the heart of the Humanist formulation of the tyrant's theatricality. In his acting the tyrant is paradoxically powerful and vulnerable. In Humanist descriptions of tyranny, the tyrant's theatrical hollowness signifies his weakness, because he lacks the "true" and centered self that is attributed to the king. Yet the Humanists also recognized that theatricality is the tyrant's means of achieving and maintaining his power: his acting makes him truly dangerous, because it disguises his real intentions and makes him indistinguishable from a king. When the tyrant and the king are put on the stage, both are presented as acting roles, and the play relies on the power of their acting for its effectiveness. The very mode of the theater thus inevitably dissolves the distinction between the proper king and improper tyrant in bringing both into the realm of play and hypocrisy. On another level, tyrant tragedy also questions whether theater itself can be restricted to articulating a single ideological position. For different reasons, Humanist and absolutist discourse needed the tyrant to construct a proper, contained, and authoritative image of the ruler, in opposition to the improper, unrestrained, and powerful Other who is called the tyrant. Humanist writers used the image to purify the authority of kings and to unseat the ruler who did not live up to the standards of rule set for him. Absolutist writers, in turn, called up the tyrant's image to reinforce their claims for the absolute ruler's untouchability: not only was tyranny what the good king should avoid, but the tyrant was also the extreme case that one must accept if one argues for absolute kingship. Like the Humanist and absolutist writers, playwrights too depended on the image of the tyrant, but in their case it is harder to say what they were trying to prove when they summoned it up. Especially in the case of The Roman Actor, The

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Maid's Tragedy, or Sejanus, the play's political message is unclear. In their preferring the claims of legitimacy over those of character and in their dramatic deconstruction of character, Beaumont and Fletcher's plays seem to dramatize the absolutist thinking that rejects the tradition of the ruler's moral authority. Yet their representation of tyrants on stage works both ways: Beaumont and Fletcher may be seen as confirming the authority of legitimate kings by showing bad tyrants, but they never let us forget the corruption in the king's nature, and in this sense, moral character remains preeminent. Sejanus, too, may be seen as a bitter satire of tyranny-but what, then, is the significance of Jonson's ending the play with Tiberius firmly in power? Even the political meaning of Macbeth and Richard III, which appears to be so clear, can be muddied. If it is a truism that Richard III represents the Tudor orthodoxy concerning Richmond's claims, it is also a truism that Richard is more fiendishly attractive than his legitimate opponent, just as Macbeth is more fascinating than the virginal Malcolm. In tragedies of tyrants, the theatrical power of evil and the appeal of violence are as much exploited as they are condemned. The theater locates the tyrant at center stage, even though he was meant to be pushed to the margins of political life and of humanity.

Index

Absolutism, 72-77, I39-42, 151-52, I59-63, I67-68, I85-86 Adams, Robert P., 8n, 47n Adelman, Janet, I26n, 127-28n Aeschylus, 6n Agamemnon, 24 Oresteia, 33 Prometheus Bound, 23 Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 24 Agamemnon (Seneca), 33 Agrippina, 34-35. See also Tragedy of Julia Agrippina Altman, Joel B., I05 Ambition, II6-I8 in Jonson, 131-37 in Shakespeare, I I 9-3 I Andrewes, A., IOn Antithesis, 8-II, 17, 75, r86 in Humanist statecraft, 42-49 in Macbeth, r 39-42 in Plato, IO-I7 in Richard III, 137-39 in Second Maiden's Tragedy, I 54-56 Apius and Virginia (R. B.), 89-91, 97 Aquinas, Thomas, 43n Archipropheta (Grimald), I06-8, I rorr, 113

Aristotle, 12n, 36-38, 48 and Phyllis, 67 Poetics, 28 Politics, 26-29 theatricality in, 2 7-28 Armstrong, W. A., 40n, Son, r I 9n Arthur, Marylin B., 2m Athens, 5, 3 8 Axton, Marie, 39n Aylmer, John, 65-66

Bacchae (Euripides), 24-25, 173-74 Bamber, Linda, I30 Baptistes sive calumnia (Buchanan), 8283, Io3, Io6, Io8-rs, I32 Barish, Jonas, 99n, I8In, r82n, I83n Barker, Ernest, ron, I7 Barroll, Leeds, xi in, I 4 3n, I 57n Barton, Anne, I35 Basileus, ro, 43 Baumann, Uwe, 38n Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, 159-71, 187 Bloody Brother, or Rollo, Duke of Normandy, I67n characterization in, 163, I68-71 Cupid's Revenge, I 67n

190

Index

Beaumont and Fletcher (cont.) Burton, K. M., I son Humanism in, I63-64, I7I Burton, Robert, 56 King and No King, 160-65, 167-68, Butler, Martin, I43n, I57, I63n, I74n, I70 177n, I78, I8In Loyal Subject, 169n Maid's Tragedy, I66-67, I69-71 Calder, William M., III, 3m Phi/aster, I68-69, I71 Caligula, 3o, 6 2n sexuality in, I 60-67 Cambyses (Preston), 8o-8 3, 89-92, Tragedy of Valentinian, 164, 166-67, 95-I03, II9-20, 129 I69, 171 Cantor, Paul A., I43n Wife for a Month, 165, I69n Caspari, Fritz, 5 2n Beauvoir, Simone de, 2In Cato, 44, 78n Believe as You List (Massinger), 183 Censorship, 72, I s6-s8 Belsey, Catherine, s8n, 93, 96n Chanteur, Janine, I3n Benardete, Seth, I9n Characterization Benjamin, Walter, 8n, 84n, n4n in Beaumont and Fletcher, I63, 168Benoist, Jean-Marie, n, I6 7I Berger, Harry, Jr., 128n in Shakespeare and Jonson, 15 2-5 3 Berry, Edward 1., 123n Charles I, 75-78 Bestiality, 21, 24, 114, II9n, I47 Charles II, I 6 2 in Plato, I 3-I6 Charney, Maurice, I46n in Renaissance tyrants, so-s6, 59 Chartier, Roger, x Bevington, David, 8on, 94n, 96 Churchill, George B., 12on Beza, Theodore, 71n Cicero, 6o Biggins, Dennis, 128n Claudius, 34-35 Blackburn, Ruth H., 84n, ro4n Cohen, Walter, I56 Blau, Herbert, I61n Coke, Sir John, 73n Bliss, Lee, I 67n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, I59-6o, I7I Bloody Brother, or Rollo, Duke of Nor- Colley, Scott, 8sn, 87n mandy (Beaumont & Fletcher), 167n Connor, W. R., sn Bodin, Jean, 45n, 47, 49, 69-70n, 78, Constitutional theory, 8, I2-I3, 26-27, 132, I4I, 168 37-38 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 144n Bake Named the Governour (Elyot), 1 Creon, 23 Bolton, Edmund, 52n, 63-64 Bondman (Massinger), I72 Crewe, Jonathan V., 2n, sn, 8rn Cunliffe, John W., I03n Born, Lester K., 40n Cunningham, J. V., 3n Bradbrook, Muriel, r6I Cupid's Revenge (Beaumont & Braden, Gordon, 7n, 29n, 30n, 3I-32, Fletcher), r67n l30n Briefe discourse upon tyrants and tyranDanby, John F., r6o, I62 ny, 78 Danson, Lawrence, I46n Brodwin, Lenora Leet, I73n Buchanan, George, I4In Davis, Natalie Zemon, 66, 67n, 69n Baptistes sive calumnia, 82-83, I03, Davison, Peter, r6on, r68n, r69n, 173n De dementia (Seneca), 3 r I06, I08-I5, I32 De jure Regni Apud Scotus (Buchanan), De jure Regni Apud Scotus, 4I, 4546, 48, 53-54, I 14 4 1 .45-4~48, 53-54, I14 Burckhardt, Sigurd, I 46n Democracy, I2-I3, 6In. See also Constitutional theory Burt, Richard A., 185n

Index Deoices, 20 Desire. See Sexuality Dio Chrysostom, 35-36, 64-65 Dionysus, 24-25, I73-74 Dollimore, Jonathan, x, 2n, I 5 rn Donaldson, Ian, r 2on Duke of Milan (Massinger), 172-73 Dunkle, J. Roger, 29n, 46n, 145n Edwards, Philip, 1720 Effeminacy in Beaumont and Fletcher, 1 67n in classical discourse of tyranny, 2o25, 34-36 in Humanist drama, ro6-15 in Macbeth, 126-31 in morality plays, 90-93 in Renaissance tyrants, 63-69 in Richard Ill, 119-26 in Roman Actor, 175-78 in Sejanus, 131-37 Elizabeth I, 6o, 64 Ellis-Fermor, Una, 161 Elton, G. R., rorn Elyot, Sir Thomas, x Bake Named the Governour, I Of the Knowledge Which Maketh a Wise Man, 51-53 Emerton, Ephraim, 39n Emperour of the East (Massinger), I73 Engel, Wilson F., III, qrn Erasmus, Desiderius, 40n, 47, 50-51, 6o, 68-69 Etymologies of "tyrant," ro, 42-47 Euripides, 3 3 Bacchae, 24-25, 173-74 Heracles, 23 Phoenissae, 9, 33-34, 104 Suppliant Women, 9n, 23 Evans, K. W., I son Farenga, Vincent, 7, 14n, I 8n, 19n Ferrarius, Johan (Montanus), 44, so, 57-ss Finkel pearl, Philip J., I s6n, I 570, I6rn Fishman, Burton J., 8rn Fletcher, John. See Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher Foakes, R. A., 146n

191

Forset, Edward, 750 Fortune, 134 Foucault, Michel, 3-4, I4-15, 19, 21 French, Marilyn, r 22n Frye, Roland Mushat, I I 8n Fulbeck, William, I49n Gardette, Raymond, I44n Garter, Thomas: Most Virtuous and Godly Susanna, 89-90 Gascoigne, George, and F. Kinwelmersh: Jocasta, I04n Gataker, Thomas, 73n Gentillet, Innocent, 5 s-56 Gibson, C. A., I74-76n Girard, Rene, I9 Goldberg, Jonathan, 6o, I39n, I son, I5Ill Gooch, George P., 72n, 73n Goodman, Christopher, 4I, 70-7In Goodwin, William, 74n Gorboduc (Sackville & Norton), I05 Gordon, D. J., q6n Gorgias (Plato), I4 Gosson, Stephen, 3-5, 59, 61, 82-83 Greaves, Richard L., 74n Greenblatt, Stephen, xin, 58n Greene, Gayle, I46n Griffin, Miriam T., 3m Grimald, Nicholas: Archipropheta, 106-8, IIO-II, 113 Gross, Allen, 172n Hall, Edward, 13 8n Hamilton, Gary D., r34n Hamlet (Shakespeare), 84, n8n Hammond, Anthony, II9n Happe, P., 8m, 88n, 96n Harvey, Gabriel, r 32 Hawkins, Michael, 127n, I39n Heilman, Robert B., I23n Heinemann, Margot, 157, r6o, 162, 171n, I72ll Heintzeler, Gerhard, I rn Henderson, Katherine, 66 I Henry IV (Shakespeare), 8I I Henry VI (Shakespeare), 122 Heracles (Euripides), 23 Hercules and Omphale, 67, I76

192

Index

Hercules Furens (Seneca), 32 Herod, r2o in Humanist drama, I05-I5 in mystery plays, 84-88 Herodias. See Herod Herodotus, I r- r 3, 2on Heywood, Thomas, 2n Hie Mulier/Haec Vir tracts, 68 Hill, Geoffrey, I 3 4 n Hobbes, Thomas, 3 7 Hogan, A. P., I73n Holstun, James, xin Honig, Edwin, I 5o-5 m Hooker, Richard, x Hotman, Fran