Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (April 1996): Contents ----------------------------------------------------------------- This ASCII issue is derived from files used for the WWW edition of EMLS. ----------------------------------------------------------------- (c) 1996, R.G. Siemens (Editor, EMLS). Foreword: * Critical Shakespeare. [1]. Joanne Woolway, Oriel College, Oxford. Articles: * Article Abstracts / R‚sum‚s des Articles. * Personations: The Taming of the Shrew and the Limits of Theoretical Criticism. [2]. Paul Yachnin, University of British Columbia. * The Madness of Syracusan Antipholus. [3]. Robert Viking O'Brien, California State University, Chico. * "The price of one fair word": Negotiating Names in Coriolanus. [4]. David Lucking, University of Lecce, Italy. * Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, and Martin Luther. [5]. Steve Sohmer. Note: * Blending Popular Culture and Religious Instruction: Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs. [6]. Paul Moon, Auckland Institute of Technology, NZ. Reviews: * Eric S. Mallin. Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. [7]. Tony Dawson, University of British Columbia. * The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade. Ed. John Guy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Henry VIII in History, Historiography and Literature. Ed. Uwe Baumann. Bern: Peter Lang, 1992. [8]. Steven Gunn, Merton College, Oxford. * Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice. Eds. Jean R. Brink and William F. Gentrup. Aldershot: Scolar P; Brookfield, Vt: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1993. [9]. A.W. Johnson, Åbo Akademi University, Finland. * John Donne. Pseudo-Martyr. Ed. Anthony Raspa. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1993. Dennis Flynn. John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. [10]. Elizabeth Hodgson, University of British Columbia. * William M. Hamlin. The Image of America in Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare: Renaissance Ethnography and Literary Reflection. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. [11]. Donna C. Woodford, Washington University at St Louis. * Michael Murrin. History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. [12]. James Loxley, University of Leeds. * Richard Strier. Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. [13]. Mark Robson, University of Leeds. * Jonathan Sawday. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. [14]. Mary Bly, Washington University at St Louis. * English Verse Drama: The Full-Text Database. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1995. [15]. David L. Gants, University of Virginia. * "That Liberty and Common Conversation": A Review of the SHAKSPER Listserv Discussion Group. [16]. Sean Lawrence, University of British Columbia. * Reviewing Information, Books Received for Review, and Forthcoming Reviews. Readers' Forum: Responses to articles, reviews, and notes appearing in this issue that are intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- EMLS: Masthead Publishing Information, Journal Availability, Contact Addresses Editorial Group Submission Information ----------------------------------------------------------------- Publishing Information, Journal Availability, EMLS Contact Addresses EMLS (ISSN 1201-2459) is published three times a year for the on-line academic community by agreement with the University of British Columbia's English Department, and with the support of the University's Library and Arts Computing Centre. EMLS does not appear in print form, but can be obtained free of charge, along with Interactive EMLS and EMLS On-Line Resources, in hypertextual format on the World Wide Web at http://unixg.ubc.ca:7001/0/e-sources/emls/emlshome.html and by electronic mail subscription by sending a message to Subscribe_EMLS@arts.ubc.ca Contact us! * Journal E-mail Subscription: To subscribe to the version of EMLS that is distributed through electronic mail, please send a message including your name, affiliation, and electronic mail address to Subscribe_EMLS@arts.ubc.ca. * Journal Information, Comments, Mailing List: For more information, to join our mailing list, or to offer your comments on EMLS, please contact our Editorial Assistant at Ed_Asst_EMLS@arts.ubc.ca. * Site Information, Comments, &c.: All correspondence pertaining to our site may be sent to our Electronic Editors at Webmaster_EMLS@arts.ubc.ca. * Editor: Correspondence to the Editor may be sent to EMLS@arts.ubc.ca. * Hard-copy correspondence may be addressed to: o Early Modern Literary Studies, Department of English, University of British Columbia, #397 - 1873 East Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6T 1Z1. o Fax: (604) 822-6906. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Editorial Group The EMLS Editorial Group is representative of the on-line academic community as a whole and includes scholars with wide-ranging interests and experience, from junior to well-established senior academics. Senior Editorial and Advisory Board: o Gordon Campbell, University of Leicester o Hardy M. Cook III, Bowie State University o Roy Flannagan, Ohio University o W. L. Godshalk, University of Cincinnati o Ian Lancashire, New College, University of Toronto o Graham Parry, University of York, England o Paul G. Stanwood, University of British Columbia Advisory Editors: o John Archer, University of British Columbia o Richard W. Bailey, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor o Glenn Black, Oriel College, Oxford o Ronald Bond, University of Calgary o Luc Borot, Centre d'Etudes et de R‚cherches sur la Renaissance Anglaise, Universit‚ Paul-Valery, Montpellier, France o Douglas Bruster, University of Texas, San Antonio o Thomas Corns, University of Wales, Bangor o Peter Donaldson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology o A.S.G. Edwards, University of Victoria o Jane Finnan, University of Toronto o Antonia Forster, University of Akron o John K. Hale, University of Otago, New Zealand o Robert S. Knapp, Reed College o F.J. Levy, University of Washington o Lawrence Manley, Yale University o John Manning,University of Wales, Lampeter o Mark Morton, University of Winnipeg o Stephen Orgel, Stanford University o Milla Riggio, Trinity College, CT o Alan Rudrum, Simon Fraser University Editor: o Raymond G. Siemens, University of British Columbia Associate Editors: o Patricia Badir, University of British Columbia (Reviews) o Jeff Miller, University of British Columbia (Interactive EMLS, Site and Resource Management, On-line Development) o Joanne Woolway, Oriel College, Oxford (EMLS, Interactive EMLS) Editorial Assistants: o Alasdair Bradley, University of British Columbia o Cathryn Gunn, Oxford o Sean Lawrence, University of British Columbia o Catherine Lyons, Oxford University o Jennifer Read, University of British Columbia Electronic Editors: o David L. Gants, University of Virginia (Managing Editor, Electronic Texts) o Joseph Jones, University of British Columbia o David Thomson, University of British Columbia o Perry Willett, Indiana University (Managing Editor, On-line Resources) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Submission Information EMLS invites contributions of critical essays on literary topics and of interdisciplinary studies which centre on literature and literary culture in English during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Contributions, including critical essays and studies (which must be accompanied by a 250 word abstract), bibliographies, notices, letters to the editor, and other materials, may be submitted to the editor by electronic mail at EMLS@arts.ubc.ca or by regular mail at Early Modern Literary Studies, Department of English, University of British Columbia, #397 - 1873 East Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6T 1Z1; reviews and materials for review may be sent to the associate editor (reviews) at Review_Editor_EMLS@arts.ubc.ca or by regular mail at the same address. Brief hard-copy correspondence may be sent by fax to (604) 822-6906. Electronic mail submissions are accepted in ASCII format. Regular mail submissions of material on-disk are accepted in ASCII, Wordperfect, or Microsoft Word format; hard-copy submissions must be accompanied by electronic copies, either on-disk or via electronic mail, and will not be returned. All submissions must follow the current Modern Language Association Handbook, in addition to the following conventions used by Early Modern Literary Studies for ASCII text: bold text is indicated by tags which surround the text that is to appear in bold, likewise with italicized text, underlined text, and superscript; superscript is used for note numbers in the text, and notes themselves appear at the end of the document. A document outlining the representation of non-ASCII characters is available on-site or by request. Materials published in EMLS are (c) R.G. Siemens (Editor, EMLS). For more information regarding submission of materials, send a message to Ed_Asst_EMLS@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Critical Shakespeare Joanne Woolway Oriel College, Oxford emls@sable.ox.ac.uk [Woolway, Joanne. "Foreword: Critical Shakespeare." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 1.1-7 .] 1. Welcome to the first issue of the second volume of EMLS and the beginning of a new year of publishing for the journal. With Shakespeare bibliography, criticism, and electronic tools having recently hit the headlines in relation to Professor Don Foster's attribution of "A Funeral Elegy" to William Shakespeare, it seems especially appropriate that this should be an all Shakespeare issue, and an issue that will doubtless lead to further debate. The intricacies of the individual discussions aside, it is fascinating to watch the interest that Shakespeare generates, not just among members of the academic community, but also in national presses. Clearly, there is far more at stake in discovering an unknown Shakespeare elegy than one by, say, Alexander Pope, and the arguments and counter-arguments, when they fly, tend to be correspondingly more heated. Uncertainties will not suffice; we seem to have a need for a definite attribution. 2. Yet it is often the case that the questions are more interesting and revealing than the answers, if they were found, might be. For example, printed below the "Funeral Elegy" are the initials "W.S." If the poem is not by Shakespeare, was the publisher aware that these initials might be the source of some potentially profitable misunderstanding? Or, was there an aspiring but self-effacing young William Smythe out there who did not realize that, if he were as successful in his outpouring as he hoped (and we now debate), confusion with the rather better known playwright would spoil his moment of glory? If the elegy was written by Shakespeare, was he so sure of its quality as to feel that initials would be enough to identify him as the author? Did he want to be identified? Did maintaining a certain kind of reputation matter to Shakespeare? How aware was he not only of his success in the eyes of his contemporaries, but also of the potential for the success of his plays in the future--even after his death? 3. There are many more questions that could be asked. But the larger issue surrounding this and other debates in our own time is that of the reputation and status of Shakespeare today. This includes the matter of how good we expect Shakespeare to be, and what criteria we use to decide this, but it also touches on the place of Shakespeare within our cultural heritage. Although Ben Jonson carefully distinguished between respectful admiration for Shakespeare, and uncritical adulation ("I lov'd the man, and doe honour his memory [on this side Idolatry] as much as any" [8:584]), later critics have not been so restrained and have often combined adulation with a marked determination to appropriate Shakespeare to their own political, social, or national agenda. As a result, the author has become, as Michael Dobson has expressed it, "as normatively constitutive of British national identity as the drinking of afternoon tea, and it is now probably as hard for any educated Briton to imagine not enjoying the former as it would be to imagine forgoing the latter" (7). Similar status has been accorded to Shakespeare this century and in other countries in the form of what George Bernard Shaw mockingly termed "bardolatry." When Shakespeare's writing is discussed, therefore, more is at stake than a literary reputation. 4. Leading on from these issues is the question of the import of Shakespeare criticism, from Jonson, via Dryden, Coleridge, and various eighteenth-and nineteenth-century critics, to the present day. What social purposes does their work serve? What are the rewards for "getting it right"? How and why do we try to "own" Shakespeare's "meaning" in our own interpretations? Why is Shakespeare criticism often a testing ground for literary theories, whether bibliographical, or, recently, historical-theoretical? Is our criticism expressed differently because people with different approaches and concerns--from actors, to theatre critics, to school teachers, to university professors, to dedicated theatre-goers--all have an interest in the author? 5. The articles contained in this issue of EMLS further these interests by challenging Shakespeare studies in different ways. Paul Yachnin questions the theoretical assumptions which inform our discussions of the plays and proceeds with an interpretation of Taming of the Shrew; Steve Sohmer asks us to consider sources and their potential impact on traditional interpretations of Hamlet; David Lucking posits a traditional understanding and general notion of nomenclature in the drama and builds upon that to discuss Coriolanus; and Robert Viking O'Brien proposes a reconsideration of character within socio-theoretical paradigms. 6. We are confident that these pieces will generate discussion through our Readers' Forum. Steve Sohmer's piece has already provoked some comment (New Yorker, Nov 20, 1995 66-83), and we hope that debate will continue once readers have had the chance to read the full article and to reflect on all of these ideas in the context of his wider argument. Considered responses to any of the articles or reviews can be sent to the editors at EMLS@arts.ubc.ca. ------------------------------------------------------------ 7. As well as the slightly new format for our Web site, you'll also see that we've developed the interactive section to include more conference programs; in the coming year this will be expanded further to include conference proceedings, discussions of papers, and "work-in-progress." Readers will also notice that, with this issue, our ASCII edition (available to our electronic mail subscribers) is now derived directly from the files on our Internet site using Netscape, and that our GOPHER site is no longer available. Works Cited * Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660-1769. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. [Work by critics such as Jonathan Bate, Brian Vickers, Gary Taylor and Terence Hawkes on the reception and reputation of Shakespeare's work has also recently opened up this area of enquiry.] * Jonson, Ben. Timber in Works. Ed. C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1947. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Article Abstracts / R‚sum‚s des Articles (Translations from English courtesy of Luc Borot, Centre d'Etudes et de R‚cherches sur la Renaissance Anglaise, Universit‚ Paul-Valery, Montpellier, France.) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Personations: The Taming of the Shrew and the Limits of Theoretical Criticism. Paul Yachnin, University of British Columbia. This essay challenges a range of recent work on Shakespeare by arguing that feeling, thinking, and intending persons--as opposed to the operations of discourse and power--constitute the elemental components of actual and Shakespearean life-worlds. I suggest that the semantic unit--the quantum of theatrical meaning-making in Shakespeare's playhouse--comprised the person rather than the transpersonal formation. In this view, meaning was produced on the early modern stage through personation rather than by developing systems of ideas abstracted from the dramatic action. I note that the word "personation" was coined in 1599 or 1600 to designate the innovative theatrical emphasis on the representation of particular persons. In light of the idea of personation, I critique three approaches to Shakespeare--one (the position of power) which finds that literary texts can achieve no purchase on the ideological complex, another (the position of knowing) which claims for literature an illuminating vantage point over ideological reproduction, and a third (new historicism) which oscillates between the first two in an attempt to account for both the cultural determinations of literary meaning and literature's capacity to reflect back on the culture which determines it. Focussing on Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, I show how these three positions are vexed by their attempts to "depersonalize" complex dramatic texts. Specifically, these approaches attempt to abstract and universalize, as the place where Katherine happens, the thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations which make up the personation of a particular person whose complexity we confront in the theatre and even in the book. Personations: The Taming of the Shrew and the Limits of Theoretical Criticism. Paul Yachnin, University of British Columbia. Le pr‚sent essai s'attaque … une s‚rie de travaux r‚cents sur Shakespeare en soutenant que le sentiment, la pens‚e et les personnes implicites--par opposition aux op‚rations g‚n‚rales du discours--constituent les composantes essentielles du monde et de la vie r‚els et de leurs ‚quivalents shakespeariens. Je suggŠre que l'unit‚ s‚mantique--la quantit‚ de production th‚ƒtrale de sens dans la salle de th‚ƒtre de Shakespeare--impliquait la personne, plut“t que l'int‚raction interpersonnelle. De ce point de vue, dans la p‚riode moderne, le sens ‚tait produit sur la scŠne par l'incarnation d'un personnage plus que par le d‚veloppement de systŠmes d'id‚es d‚tach‚s de l'action dramatique. Je relŠve que le mot anglais 'personation' a ‚t‚ forg‚ en 1599 ou 1600 pour d‚signer l'innovation th‚ƒtrale mettant l'accent sur la repr‚sentation de personnes particuliŠres. la lumiŠre de l'id‚e de 'personation', je critique trois approches de Shakespeare--l'une (la position du pouvoir) qui trouve que les textes litt‚raires ne peuvent prendre prise sur le complexe id‚ologique, une autre (la position du savoir) qui revendique pour la litt‚rature un point de vue dominant permettant un ‚clairage particulier sur la reproduction id‚ologique, et un troisiŠme (le n‚o-historicisme) qui oscille entre les deux premiers en essayant de rendre compte … la fois des d‚terminations culturelles du sens litt‚raire et de la capacit‚ de la litt‚rature … r‚fl‚chir sur la culture qui la d‚termine. en me concentrant sur Katherine dans La m‚gŠre apprivois‚e, je montre comment ces trois positions sont vou‚es … l'‚chec par leurs tentatives pour 'd‚personnaliser' des textes dramatiques complexes. Tout particuliŠrement, ces approches tentent de rendre abstraits et universels, en tant que lieu où Katherine survient, les pens‚es, ‚motions et sensations physiques qui constituent la 'personation' d'un personnage particulier, avec la personnalit‚ complexe duquel nous sommes confront‚s au th‚ƒtre et mˆme dans le livre. The Madness of Syracusan Antipholus. Robert Viking O'Brien, California State University, Chico. In The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare uses the possibility that Syracusan Antipholus is genuinely threatened by madness, and therefore death, to manipulate the audience's anxieties. The character's status as a wanderer newly disembarked from a ship draws on strong cultural associations between water, wandering, and insanity. Syracusan Antipholus himself makes these associations in several speeches. Unlike the parallel character in Plautus's Menaechmi, Syracusan Antipholus fears that he is wandering mentally as well as physically. The character's supernatural and natural explanations for his disturbed mental state draw on contemporary psychological ideas. One of these ideas lies behind the question he asks after a confusing encounter with Adriana: "What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?" On one level, the question suggests a possibility not thought of by other characters in the play: mistaken identity is responsible for their confusion. On another level, Syracusan Antipholus's question suggests an actual disordering of the senses. Shakespeare here plays on "error" as "fury" or "extravagance of passion." In Elizabethan physical psychology, extreme passion--an upsurge from the lower regions of the psyche--destroys the higher faculties, producing "horrible and fearful apparitions." If not corrected, this upsurge leads to madness and death. The Comedy of Errors thus touches on a genuine anxiety for the Elizabethan audience. This anxiety darkens the play's entertaining confusions much as Egeon's possible execution provides a dark frame for this generally light-hearted comedy. The Madness of Syracusan Antipholus. Robert Viking O'Brien, California State University, Chico. Dans La com‚die des erreurs, Shakespeare exploite l'hypothŠse selon laquelle Antipholus de Syracuse serait v‚ritablement menac‚ par la folie, et donc par la mort, pour manipuler les angoisses des spectateurs. Le statut du personnage, un errant r‚cemment d‚barqu‚ d'un bateau, emprunte … de fortes associations culturelles entre l'eau, l'errance et la maladie mentale. Antipholus de Syracuse lui-mˆme recourt … ces associations dans plusieurs discours. la diff‚rence du personnage ‚quivalent dans le Menaechmi de Plaute, Antipholus de Syracuse a peur d'ˆtre en train d'errer aussi bien mentalement que physiquement. Les explications surnaturelles et naturelles offertes par le personnage pour rendre compte de son ‚tat mental perturb‚ empruntent … des id‚es de la psychologie de l'‚poque. C'est l'une de ces id‚es qui se cache derriŠre la question qu'il pose aprŠs une rencontre d‚concertante avec Adriana "Quelle est cette erreur qui d‚range nos yeux et nos oreilles?" un certain niveau, la question suggŠre une possibilit‚ … laquelle les autres personnages de la piŠce ne pensent pasla cause de leur confusion est une m‚prise sur leur identit‚. un autre niveau, la question d'Antipholus de Syracuse suggŠre un r‚el d‚rŠglement des sens. Ici, Shakespeare joue sur le mot "error" au sens de "fureur" ou "extravagance de la passion". Pour la psychologie phyique ‚lisab‚thaine, la passion extrˆme--une remont‚e des r‚gions inf‚rieurs de la psych‚--d‚truit les facult‚s sup‚rieures, produisant ainsi "d'horribles et effrayantes apparitions". Si on ne la corrigeait pas, cette remont‚e conduisait … la folie et … la mort. La com‚die des erreurs touche ainsi … une angoisse authentique du public ‚lisab‚thain. Cette angoisse obscurcit les confusions divertissantes tout autant que la possibilit‚ de l'ex‚cution d'Egeon fournit un cadre obscur … cette com‚die par ailleurs l‚gŠre. "The price of one faire word": Negotiating Names in Coriolanus. David Lucking, University of Lecce, Italy. This essay considers some of the implications of the dense pattern of linguistic metaphors (consisting in recurrent allusions to words, speech, voices, etc.) to be found in Coriolanus, with particular attention being directed towards the issues of names and naming in this play. The argument is that the ambivalence attaching to proper names--the fact that they in some sense "belong" to the individual but depend for their status on a communal code and a public consensus--also surrounds the concept of personal identity itself, which is articulated by means of culturally situated systems of value and belief that are potentially manipulable and not necessarily consonant among themselves. One of the things that the play repeatedly illustrates is that the values in terms of which individuals define themselves are subject to negotiatory processes of which the market transaction is the paradigm. The self-idealizing protagonist of Shakespeare's play considers himself superior to such processes, identifying both his intrinsic self and the agnomen which is the sign of that self with absolute values he believes he alone embodies, and seeking to discredit and disenfranchise those for whom words are essentially objects of barter. The irony of his position--and the ultimate cause of his downfall--is that in spite of himself, and very largely unknowingly, he participates in precisely those negotiatory practices he professes to despise, seeking to aggrandize himself through the codes of the community without acknowledging the real dynamics according to which those codes operate. "The price of one faire word": Negotiating Names in Coriolanus. David Lucking, University of Lecce, Italy. Le pr‚sent essai envisage certaines implications du dense r‚seau de m‚taphores linguistiques (constitu‚ d'allusions r‚currentes aux mots, … la parole, … la voix, etc.) pr‚sent dans Coriolan, en se concentrant tout particuliŠrement sur le problŠme du nom et de la nomination dans la piŠce. L'id‚e directrice est que l'ambivalence qui se rattache aux noms propres--le fait qu'en un certain sens ils "appartiennent" … l'individu tout en d‚pendant pour leur statut d'un code partag‚ et d'un consensus public--d‚termine ‚galement le concept-mˆme d'identit‚ personnelle, qui est formul‚ par des systŠmes de valeurs et de croyance culturellement d‚termin‚s, qui sont potentiellement manipulables et ne sont pas n‚cessairement compatibles entre eux. L'une des questions illustr‚es par la piŠce … de nombreuses reprises est que les valeurs selon lesquelles les individus se d‚finissent sont sujettes … des processus de n‚gociation dont la transaction commerciale du march‚ est le paradigme. Le protagoniste de la piŠce de Shakespeare, avec son auto-id‚alisation, se pense au-dessus de ces processus particuliers, en ce qu'il identifie … la fois son moi intrinsŠque et l'agnomen qui est le signe de ce moi, … des valeurs absolues qu'il croit ˆtre le seul … incarner, et en ce qu'il vise … discr‚diter et … disqualifier ceux pour qui les mots sont essentiellement des objets de marchandage. L'ironie de sa position--qui est aussi la cause ultime de sa ch–te--est que malgr‚ lui, et dans une large mesure inconsciemment, il participe pr‚cis‚ment … ces pratiques de n‚gociation dont il professe le m‚pris, en visant … accroître sa stature au moyen des codes de la communaut‚, sans reconnaître la r‚elle dynamique selon laquelle fonctionnent ces codes. Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, and Martin Luther. Steve Sohmer. In Shakespeare's England the principal calendar was the church calendar. Letters, appointments, contracts, liens, leases, and tenancies were dated with reference to this calendar's orderly succession of holy days. Consequently, it is not surprising that scholars have identified scenes in Shakespeare's plays where the playwright has linked action to a recognizable holy day, effectively infusing the scene with religious and/or metaphysical overtones. This article suggests that the links between principal scenes in Hamlet and specific holy days were apparent to Shakespeare's first audiences. The author traces linguistic cues in the text which identify these holy days, which include three important Catholic feasts which had been rejected by English Protestants: All Souls' Day, Candlemas, and Corpus Christi. Further, the author argues that all the dates alluded to in Hamlet are recoverable, and that identifying these dates casts new light on the reason why Hamlet did not succeed to the throne on his father's death. This information illuminates Hamlet's "dram of eale" speech (Q2 1.3.17-38), which at least one editor considers the greatest crux in Shakespeare. Reflexively, the author argues that the recovered holy days and dates tend to support the view of several contemporary scholars that Hamlet is concerned with the Protestant Reformation. The author argues that Shakespeare was knowledgeable about the life and theology of Martin Luther, and exploited the information available to him in the writing of Hamlet. Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, and Martin Luther. Steve Sohmer. Dans l'Angleterre de Shakespeare, le calendrier principal ‚tait le calendrier de l'glise. Le courrier, les rendez-vous, les contrats, les gages, les baux et les locations ‚taient dat‚es en r‚f‚rence … la succession ordonn‚e des jours de fˆte de ce calendrier. En cons‚quence, il n'est pas surprenant que les sp‚cialistes aient identifi‚ dans les piŠces de Shakespeare des scŠnes dans lesquelles le dramaturge a li‚ l'action … une fˆte religieuse identifiable, introduisant effectivement dans la scŠne des ‚chos religieux et/ou m‚taphysiques. Le pr‚sent article suggŠre que les liens entre les principales scŠnes de Hamlet et des fˆtes religieuses sp‚cifiques ‚taient ‚vidents pour les premiers spectateurs de Shakespeare. L'auteur repŠre dans le texte des indices linguistiques permettant d'identifier ces fˆtes religieuses, qui incluent trois fˆtes catholiques importantes qui avaient ‚t‚ rejet‚es par les Protestants anglaisla Toussaint, la Chandeleur et la Fˆte Dieu. En outre, l'auteur soutient que toutes les dates auxquelles il est fait allusion dans Hamlet peuvent ˆtre retrouv‚es, et que l'identification de ces dates jette un ‚clairage nouveau sur la raison pour laquelle Hamlet n'est pas mont‚ sur le tr“ne … la mort de son pŠre. Cette information ‚claire la tirade de Hamlet sur le "dram of eale" (Q2, 1.3.17-38), qu'au moins un des ‚diteurs de la piŠce considŠre comme ‚tant le problŠme textuel le plus important de l'oeuvre de Shakespeare. AprŠs r‚flexion, l'auteur soutient que les fˆtes et les dates retrouv‚es tendent … renforcer l'id‚e de certains sp‚cialistes actuels, pour qui Hamlet est une piŠce sur la R‚forme protestante. L'auteur soutient que Shakespeare avait une bonne connaissance de la vie et de la th‚ologie de Martin Luther, et qu'il a exploit‚ pour ‚crire Hamlet les informations dont il disposait. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Personations: The Taming of the Shrew and the Limits of Theoretical Criticism Paul Yachnin University of British Columbia yachnin@unixg.ubc.ca [Yachnin, Paul. "Personations: The Taming of the Shrew and the Limits of Theoretical Criticism." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 2.1-31 .] 1. Many Shakespeareans believe that what counts most in Shakespeare consists in the operations of power. In this essay, I challenge the adequacy of power's retelling of Shakespeare, the idea that literary texts such as The Taming of the Shrew can achieve no purchase on the ideological complex that "in-forms" the social formation, that literature is itself a product and merely reproductive of that formation. At the same time, however, I challenge the opposite, rationalist view of literary discourse (what I call the position of knowing) which claims for texts such as Taming of the Shrew a privileged and illuminating vantage point over ideological reproduction. A third position which is put in question here is that of new historicism. New historicism is not a position so much as it is a restless shifting between power and knowing, an approach which oscillates in order to attempt to account for both the cultural determinations of literary meaning and literature's capacity to reflect back on the culture which determines it. 2. Here the theoretical positions in question include a materialist-feminist view ("power") which reads Taming of the Shrew historically for information about early modern, and modern, gender relations (see Boose, Fineman, Garner, Hodgdon). Representative of this view is Kathleen McLuskie's rejection of authorial intention and readerly interpretation and her localizing of Shakespeare's plays within both the all-male institution of the theatre and the visual field of early modern patriarchal culture: "This procedure differs from claiming Shakespeare's views as feminist in refusing to construct an author behind the plays and paying attention instead to the narrative, poetic and theatrical strategies which construct the plays' meanings and position the audience to understand their events from a particular point of view" (92). 3. Roughly opposite to the position of power is the rationalist view ("knowing") which rehabilitates the play in terms of the self-aware consciousness of the author over the constraints imposed on the production of meaning by cultural specificity and historical change (see Kahn 104-18, Bean, Huston). The position of knowing sees Shakespeare's plays as fundamentally vitalized, as depoliticized and transhistorical by virtue of their self-consciousness. The interpretive techniques of the position of knowing include a variety of intentionalist, metatheatrical, and deconstructive approaches. The drive underlying these diverse approaches consists in the desire to discover that Shakespeare's plays are alive in some uncanny way, persistently conscious of their own production of meaning and therefore free of the history in which they were produced and in which their meanings are constantly being revised. "As a heterosexual feminist," Linda Bamber comments, ". . . I have found in Shakespeare what I want to imagine as a possibility in my own life" (43). More than merely a pragmatic investment, Bamber's identification with Shakespeare's articulation of life-possibilities is akin to what Stanley Cavell describes as the skeptic's attentiveness to the objective realm, a fascination that suggests a desire to be gazed back at--"It is not just careful description, or practical investigation, underway here. The philosopher is as it were looking for a response from the object" (8). 4. Finally there is the new historicist view which oscillates between the rigid determinations of culture and history on the one side and the self-awareness--usually projected onto some hypostatized version of "the text" or "history"--which transcends those determinations on the other (see Newman). At the end of a formidable historicizing analysis of Measure for Measure which details the stage's contribution to the disciplinary powers of social control, Steven Mullaney allows that Shakespeare's theatre also produced a certain kind of awareness. In Mullaney's account, however, this awareness could be grasped only by future cultures and not by the audiences of Shakespeare's day: "If the apprehensive power of the stage produced what Norbert Elias would call an expanded domain of the superego, and hence an expanded avenue of access for forces of social and cultural control, it also produced an expanded cultural and self-awareness that the period in question was not fully equipped to manage or turn to its own advantage" (113-14). While the theatre inculcates a kind of mindless subjection, it also enhances awareness. The difficulty is that this awareness must be a property of the text or of history itself since it seems to be held in suspension over the heads of the spectators in Shakespeare's playhouse. 5. Although my argument might have some general application, I do not intend to develop a master theory of Shakespeare criticism. Much work on Taming of the Shrew simply cannot be accounted for by my tripartite model. Marianne Novy's 1979 essay on "patriarchy and play" recuperates Taming of the Shrew for feminist criticism by way of a historical contextualizing analysis, and makes no appeal to transhistorical, authorized meaning (also see Hibbard). This limitation of my theoretical discussion of Taming of the Shrew criticism connects with one of my central points, which is that theory cannot provide a bedrock interpretive model. On the contrary, theory can never offer a global explanation because theory itself is an analytical practice which operates only at a certain level of generality. 6. In contrast to the usual procedure of bringing theory to bear on the text, I situate current theoretical positions in Shakespeare's drama. That the ground of possibility of Shakespeare criticism is already in his plays might go without saying, but the particular claim I develop is that these strategies are never organized into transpersonal systems in Shakespeare and that they cannot, therefore, account adequately for the production of meaning in his drama. I argue that materialist, rationalist, and new historicist positions are contained within the sphere of the person. In this view, such positions are concerned primarily with the effects of persons rather than the other way round. This is not to suggest that persons, real or imagined, can exercise mastery over language, biology, or society; but it is to claim that feeling, thinking, and intending subjects--as opposed to the operations of discourse and power--constitute the elemental components of actual and Shakespearean life-worlds. 7. There is no doubt that the person was a key element in the social formation of early modern England. Then as now, the operations of power, the configurations of identities in terms of gender, sexuality, rank, race, and age, the construction of the body, the phenomenology of bodily experience, and the pleasures of dramatic texts and theatrical performances are represented and experienced by persons. The pre-Shakespearean theatre tended to favour the production of allegorical meaning in relation to which the characters in plays such as Castle of Perseverence or Everyman represent a virtue or a vice or a certain state of becoming in a Christian narrative. Against this background, Shakespeare's drama is remarkable for its elaboration of particularized characters, a new emphasis signalled, as Andrew Gurr suggests, by the emergence in 1599-1600 of the word "personation" (97-98). In her brilliant contextualizing analysis of theatrical personation, Katharine Maus argues for multiple connections between representations of interiority in the playhouse and an intense, new interest in the culture at large in inward personhood. The experiential fact of personal experience, Shakespeare's innovations in the construction of character, and the Renaissance fascination with personhood suggest that recent attempts to read early modern drama in terms of discourse and power--to the exclusion of character analysis--constitute a triple misrepresentation. On historical and theatrical grounds, and in light of the forms of Shakespearean characterization, I suggest that the semantic unit--the quantum of theatrical meaning-making in Shakespeare's playhouse--comprised the person rather than the transpersonal formation (or the allegorical theme). In this view, meaning was produced on the early modern stage through personation rather than by developing systems of ideas abstracted from the dramatic action. ------------------------------------------------------------ 8. I survey some of the key positions in recent Shakespeare criticism before considering how the transpersonal positions of power, knowing, and power/knowing have tended to determine interpretation of Taming of the Shrew. My discussion might seem to be doing violence to a number of first-rate studies. In part this is the inescapable violence of categorization, the reductive effects of any attempt to group complex and diverse essays according to one major element that they share. But some sharpness is also appropriate given what I suggest is the failure of much recent Shakespeare criticism to come to terms with its own theoretical assumptions, especially its inability to deal consistently with its vexed investments in personhood. The adequacy of Foucauldian models of power and subjectivity as a linchpin in a liberatory critical discourse has been put in question by Jürgen Habermas (266-93), yet many Shakespeareans continue to deploy Foucault's ideas about depersonalized power in a critical project bent on the enlightenment and empowerment of their readers and themselves. In this criticism, persons count for nothing and for everything. I suggest that the problems in the three approaches of knowing, power, and power/knowing are precisely a consequence of this general project of "depersonalizing" theory, an effect in particular of the attempt to produce internally consistent, abstract analyses of the normal and mundane inconsistencies contained within theatrical personations of lived experience.[1] 9. Shakespeare's drama participated in the early modern struggle between the opposite positions of knowing on the one side and power on the other. An adequate account of that drama requires giving back to it the contending twins which I call power and knowing, siblings which were born together in the plays in the theatre, but which are kept separate in theory-driven interpretation. To restore the twofold position of power and knowing to its home within the sphere of the person is to begin to overcome the impasse between power and knowing in terms of a Shakespeare family history--the persons and personations of the actors giving birth to the incomplete and warring twins of power and knowing, the person hollowed out, and its particular powers and knowledge excluded from the divided universe of the real, the twins born of the person becoming monstrous in their claims to self-authorship and totality. I follow the suggestion of Barbara Freedman's discussion of The Comedy of Errors in seeing the theoretical positions taken up by Shakespeare criticism as the Antipholi (84-89); I add the idea of seeing the person in Shakespeare's theatre as the sequestered Aemilia. 10. Shakespeare gathers into his texts the burgeoning skepticism of Renaissance thinking, an interrogation of conventional signifying practices that was one manifestation of the so-called Renaissance "crisis of representation" (see Agnew). In contrast to the Comedies, where skepticism tends to liberate the protagonists, Shakespearean tragedy raises the skeptical interrogation of the world to crisis pitch, pitting the hero's consciousness of his identity against the world which threatens and constitutes (and threatens by constituting) it, producing the hero's knowing as a contentless but absolute position, a radicalized cogito that splits the Christian-idealist universe (where the omniscience of God underwrites the existence of the world) into two opposing positions--on the one side, the position of mind, "mind" not hypostatized as substance but as the sheer activity of skeptical knowing which empties out the world, the operations of power (including the omniscience of God), the socially constituted identity of the subject, leaving itself, knowing, as exclusively real; on the other side, the materialist position, whose operative, power, empties out the position of knowing, leaving itself, power, as exclusively real. In Shakespeare's theatre or text, that is, when we are watching or even reading the tragedies, and in the sphere of the tragic hero's person, the positions of power and knowing persist in complex relationships. Hamlet or Macbeth's absolutist skepticism threatens to reveal power itself as a fantasy, but power nonetheless both surrounds and fills them, pressing upon them its terrors and attractions, and also determines them, putting in question even the autonomy of their knowing. Macbeth is incandescent with the surge of his insight into the nothingness of life, but the voice that articulates that knowledge also bears the burden of the speaker's desiccation, the sound of one whose life "[i]s fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf" (5.3.23).[2] 11. Recent Shakespeare criticism has been unable to tolerate this theatrical embodiment of contradictory positions. Driven by theory's longing for totality and for mastery over the personal and the experiential, such criticism has pushed away from the emphases of character analysis and has split into three camps distinguished by each one's particular alignment with the two master-positions of power and knowing. The opposing positions of power and knowing each attempt to overcome contradiction by emptying out the other--power suggesting that the individual's knowing freedom is a mere discursive effect, knowing suggesting that power itself is a fantasy. In contrast, new historicism oscillates between power and knowing, even stages the theoretical impasse between contradictory positions. 12. New historicism might appear at first to be affiliated with the position of power; and indeed in its beginnings, in Renaissance Self-Fashioning at any rate, there is an attempt to erase the position of knowing. Stephen Greenblatt's well-known reflection on his project makes the case for power against knowing: "In all my texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity; indeed, the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society" (256). According to Greenblatt, what the subject knows as freedom is, in reality, an effect of power. Importantly, it is the totalizing claims themselves of the position of knowing which seem to make inevitable Greenblatt's either/or radicalism--personhood is fundamentally either "the ideological product of the relations of power" or "pure, unfettered subjectivity." 13. Greenblatt's repressed position of knowing has returned through new historicism's Americanization of deconstruction, a maneuver that has allowed new historicists both to track power's inexorable production of subjectivity, gender and the "free space" of literature, and yet to sweeten their account of such productions by emphasizing the foregrounding of representation in texts such as the Henry IV plays or Taming of the Shrew. Who it is that is supposed to see and grasp the representation of the production of ideology is never made clear.[3] In the case of Greenblatt's 1981 "Invisible Bullets," the position of knowing is projected onto a mystified version of the text into which is folded a range of meanings belonging, putatively, to different historical periods. There is no end of knowing, but it belongs to no one and is never of the nature of an insight which a reader might grasp and turn to account in the real world or in present time; instead, if knowing is anywhere at all, it belongs to the text itself as an accident of its travels through history. 14. Louis Montrose's shifting affiliations with the master-positions of power and knowing provide another version of the same struggle. In his 1980 essay, "The Purpose of Playing," knowing was central to Montrose's project. At the same moment that Greenblatt was declaring "pure subjectivity" to be an artifact of power, Montrose was undertaking to historicize metadramatic criticism of Shakespeare in order to make a case for the Renaissance theatre as a site of consciousness-raising rather than as a site of subjection. Montrose wrote: "In the society in which Shakespeare lived, wrote, and acted, the practical effect of performing his plays may have been to encourage the expansion and evaluation of options. Plays are provocations to thought and patterns for action" ("Purpose" 68). Montrose's subsequent turn away from an emphasis on knowing towards an emphasis on power produced, as Edward Pechter has noted, some "waffling" in Montrose's 1983 essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream concerning whether that play reproduced patriarchy or subverted it by foregrounding the constructedness of gender.[4] That a rigorous thinker such as Montrose waffled on a crucial point with wide theoretical ramifications suggests the depth of the dilemma that faces new historicism. This dilemma is a consequence of the ways in which new historicists have "disappeared" the persons who wrote, read, and were represented in early modern English literature. That is the case because eliding the person who is the sphere in which power and knowing interact has left new historicists facing the maddening scene of contradiction itself.[5] ------------------------------------------------------------ 15. In Shakespeare, the positions of knowing and power are always poised in readiness to sever their relations with the person; more important, their rivalry itself tends to have the effect, especially in the view of recent Shakespeare criticism, of occluding the personal ground of what in consequence appears to be an originary contest for mastery between pure and universally applicable theoretical positions. What would happen if we were to resituate power and knowing within the sphere of the person? We would have to relax our claims concerning their totality and purity, and we would have to allow the substantial existence and limited explanatory power of both. What would be lost by virtue of this "personalizing" of theory is theory's claim to mastery over the person. What might be found is an ability to see Shakespeare in terms of an embodied dialectic between power and knowing rather than as constituted exclusively by either one or the other, or by an dizzying oscillation between the two. 16. But what, it must be asked, can Shakespeare's characters tell us?[6] How can theatrical "personations" expand our understanding of the plays or put in question the adequacy of current theoretical positions? What follows is a tentative rethinking, in terms of the embodied, personalized dialectic of power and knowing, of The Taming of the Shrew--a highly visible site of contestation between power and knowing in Shakespeare studies. I suggest that personalizing theory might allow us to hear, in her closing speech, Katherine's expression of many-sided resistance against Petruchio's attempt to dominate her, but also her evocation of her own bodily pleasure--her overall sense of physical well-being, being cared for, made warm and comfortable, being erotically delighted. I suggest that by hearing Katherine's voice (the voice must speak always from and of both mind and body) and by attending to her personalized knowing and power, we might productively put in question the adequacy of our present theoretical positions to stand for themselves without people to live them. In other words, hearing Katherine's voice might suggest that power and knowing live in people rather than the other way round. 17. For Christopher Sly, Katherine's counterpart, physical pleasure is consuming. The Lord's joke on Sly, an impractical, playful exercise of power carried out by means of the husbanding of privileged information, simply fails to connect with the Sly body which, evidently, would be happy to adopt any name, rank, or identity in order to "smell sweet savors . . . feel soft things" (Ind.2.71). The Sly body makes a joke of power's joking attempt to practice on the drunken Sly: the body "stands" only for pleasure--olfactory, gustatory, visual, auditory, tactile, erotic--and seems largely unimpressed by name, rank, or identity. Contrary to what the Lord would like to see, Sly's apparent transformation does not necessarily turn on the irresistible attractions of lordly rank in itself;[7] instead, it turns primarily on the sweetness, softness, and erotic excitations which comprise, in Shakespeare's wonderfully satirical version, the day-to-day domestic life of the aristocracy: Am I a lord, and have I such a lady? Or do I dream? Or have I dream'd till now? I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak; I smell sweet savors, and I feel soft things. Upon my life, I am a lord indeed, And not a tinker, nor Christopher Sly. Well, bring our lady hither to our sight, And once again a pot o' th' smallest ale. (Ind.2.68-75) 18. Katherine's pleasure is different from Sly's in that it marks power's success rather than its failure. Sly issues from violence, cold, poverty; the Lord's world of pleasure therefore constitutes a goal to which Sly would devote himself in any case, to which indeed he is devoting himself when discovered by the Lord. In contrast, Petruchio produces both Katherine's pain and her pleasure. As a consequence, the satisfactions she expresses in her closing speech suggest the success of Petruchio's brutal exercise of power--the fact that she has succumbed to and been changed by her husband's physical and psychological mistreatment of her. 19. Katherine unknits her resistance to patriarchal marriage in the same way that she instructs the Widow to "unknit that threatening unkind brow." She relaxes into the pleasurable and erotic. Importantly, her first image of woman in the "submission" speech consists in the figure of female erotic power to wound men by means of "scornful glances," a sadomasochistic image of female dominance which is rejected and then replaced by the figure of woman as a fountain from which men sip or do not sip depending upon the clearness and beauty of its water--an image of passivity and nurturing rather than of wounding, but eroticized nonetheless, and keyed to the kiss in the street which closes the previous scene (the moment of the kiss being the turning point at which Petruchio finds Katherine's waters sufficiently clear and beautiful). Further, Katherine's repeated description of women's bodies as "weak" while in line, as Brian Morris has pointed out, with the Second Book of Homilies ("For the woman is a weake creature, not indued with like strength and constancy of minde" [qtd. in Morris 146]), is nonetheless erotically inflected by collocation with "soft" and "smooth"--words reflective of Katherine's knowing her body as a site of pleasure: Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth, Unapt to toil and trouble in the world, But that our soft conditions, and our hearts, Should well agree with our external parts? (165-68) 20. Katherine's allusions to the husband's care for his wife are evocative of the deprivations inflicted during the taming process, deprivations which have inculcated a formative bodily dependence and gratitude: Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee, And for thy maintenance; commits his body To painful labor, both by sea and land; To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, Whilst thou li'st warm at home, secure and safe (146-51) 21. What Katherine's body knows puts in question the attempt to bring the play in line with the ideal of "the marriage of true minds." More generally, resituating knowing in the personalized sphere of the conjoined mind and body has the effect of dividing the position of knowing against itself and so disallowing it to stand as a totalizing interpretive strategy. However far Katherine knows her inner freedom at a conscious level (and I do not deny the validity of this knowing), her body knows, and is grateful for, the pleasure Petruchio affords her. 22. Katherine's pleasure puts in question the position of knowing, especially its attempt to recuperate Petruchio's exercise of coercion in terms of a model of play which is based on the idea of the subject as interiorized, knowing, and free, and therefore capable of unconstrained mutuality--Petruchio and Katherine playing at, rather than living in, patriarchy. J. Dennis Huston argues that "[Katherine's] speech is undoubtedly proof of her pronounced debt to [Petruchio], for it takes as its model his own harangues . . . Yet the very nature of Kate's performance as performance suggests that she is offering herself to Petruchio not as his servant, as she claims, but as his equal in a select society which includes themselves, the playwright, and perhaps a few members of his audience: those who, because they know that man is an actor, freely choose and change their roles in order to avoid the narrow, imprisoning roles society would impose upon them" (64). How well can this recuperative version account for the Katherine's sense of physical well-being, a sensation of comfort which arises out of the contrast between the privations inflicted upon her at first and their relief and recompense--in food, sleep, warmth, company, and erotic pleasure shared with Petruchio once she has submitted to his "rule, and right supremacy" (5.2.109)? 23. Outside the classroom and theatre, approaches to Taming of the Shrew in terms of the position of knowing are not commonplace now. That is because intentionalist interpretive models have been displaced by functionalist models of cultural reproduction and contestation and because aestheticizing interpretive practices have been replaced more or less by politicizing practices. It is also because theories of subjection have replaced ideas of self-mastery. In the case of Taming of the Shrew, however, the central reason for the present dominance of "power" readings is that feminist Shakespeareans have marked this play off as beyond redemption. Shirley Nelson Garner has argued that history has passed Taming of the Shrew by (117-18). As such, it can no longer be said to be a work of literature which might be saved in one way or another by virtue of the presence of a knowing author; instead it is of the nature of a joke whose spirit has long since vanished, the dead letter of an outmoded misogynist culture. 24. Even a more theoretically sophisticated approach such as that of Linda Boose restricts the meaning of the play to the historical moment of its original production. Because Boose views Taming of the Shrew as a document of oppression rather than as a representation of oppression, she is able to reverse recuperative interpretations like Huston's. Boose's version of the play, like Garner's, fixes its meaning in terms of the misogyny of early modern England. She arrests the play's playfulness by connecting it with the horrific practice of "bridling"--the use of a specially-made bridle for the punishment and shaming of women deemed to be "scolds." These iron bridles and Shakespeare's comedy are said to have contributed equally though in different ways to the silencing of women's voices. 25. To contextualize Taming of the Shrew in relation to material practices of antifeminist oppression is not, however, to deproblematize the play's representation of gender, or indeed to justify reading the play in terms of power rather than knowing.[8] While the slipperiness of literary discourse in relation to its putative cultural effects or parallel practices cannot guarantee that the play was not an instrument of patriarchal subjection, there is nevertheless no warrant in these historical accounts to show that it was. Elizabethan attitudes towards female speech were more various than is suggested by the evidence of the scold's bridle or the cucking stool. Indeed, the theatre valorized women's speaking as well as women's silence. Finally, of course, the case against the play cannot be decisive because literary discourse can turn the tables on even the most rigorous contextualizing interpretation and because the claim that Taming of the Shrew is not literature must be the enabling presupposition rather than the conclusion of any reasoned attack on the play. ------------------------------------------------------------ 26. To resituate power in the sphere of the person is to foreground power's failure to account for the full range of effects produced by the actor's personation of Katherine. Just as attending to the conjoined physical and mental personhood of Katherine disallows the rehabilitation of Petruchio's coercion in terms of role-playfulness, so listening to Katherine's voice, or even imagining it as we read, has the effect of splitting power into contradictory operations while leaving the person intact. Power is over Katherine, but she has power too. 27. The position of power might seem able to account for the idea that Katherine has power. As Foucault has argued, "[p]ower must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody's hands" (98). This depersonalizing and totalizing idea of subjection is unable to take into account the fact that power is indeed in Katherine's hands when she commands the centre of the playing-space, and that it is also in her voice and body. Three leading actors who have recently played the role comment that Katherine's "submission" speech is the scene of her, and their, greatest theatrical power--"the play lands back in Kate's hands. It's her play at the end" (see Rutter 21-25). So while there is no doubt that Katherine is subjected to power, it is also true that she wields an irreducible force of her own. 28. In the sphere of the person, moreover, Katherine's power is bound up with her knowing. While what Katherine's body knows puts in question the humanist recuperation of the play, her knowledge of her history, her analysis of her present position and her articulate act of choosing all lend her power. It is not clear, in her closing speech, whether Katherine is confessing her discovery of the "naturalness" of patriarchy or acknowledging its sheer coercive power. "My mind hath been as big" suggests the former since it implies her recognition of her overweening unworthiness; "My heart as great, my reason haply more" points in the opposite direction by suggesting her awareness of the value of her own moral and intellectual capacities: My mind hath been as big as one of yours, My heart as great, my reason haply more, To bandy word for word, and frown for frown; But now I see our lances are but straws, Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare, That seeming to be most which we indeed least are. Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot, And place your hands below your husband's foot. (170-77) 29. In view of the complexity of Katherine's character, new historicism's oscillations between power and knowing might seem to offer an adequate interpretive model. New historicists find innovative ways of suggesting how English Renaissance theatre both reinscribed and made visible the operations of power. In spite of her spirited argument for the oppressive social function of the play, Boose indicates her affinity with new historicism by including suggestions of the liberating capacity of representation: "By means of constructing so precarious and controversial a resolution, the play works ever so slightly to unsettle its own ending" (184). But by whom, for whom, and in whose interests is the ending unsettled? Power/knowing, because of its systematic elision of the person, can neither speak about the power or knowing that belongs to persons nor identify whose consciousness it is that is supposed to be raised by the theatre's visible representations of power. In 1980, Montrose was able to refer that function to the theatre-going audience in general. But that audience now are seen to have lost their minds. In Karen Newman's essay on Taming of the Shrew, knowing is projected onto an amalgamation of Renaissance audience, modern readership, and text itself. The subliminal promotion of a transhistorical, depersonalized knowing of power which might rehabilitate the play as a feminist text is carried out here in the unchecked play of past and present tenses: The Shrew both demonstrated and helped produce the patriarchal social formation that characterized Elizabethan England, but representation gives us a perspective on that system that subverts its status as natural. The theatrically constructed frame in which Sly exercises patriarchal power and the dream in which Kate is tamed undermine the seemingly eternal nature of those structures by calling attention to the constructed character of the representation rather than veiling it through mimesis. . . . Kate would have been played by a boy whose transvestism . . . emblematically embodied the sexual contradictions manifest both in the play and Elizabethan culture. The very indeterminateness of the actor's sexuality . . . foregrounds its artifice and therefore subverts the play's patriarchal master narrative by exposing it as neither natural nor divinely ordained, but culturally constructed. (42, 49-50) 30. What is the relationship in Newman's analysis between early modern playgoers and modern scholars? Taming of the Shrew "helped produce the patriarchal social formation" of Elizabethan England, yet representation "gives us" a view that subverts that formation. We are aware of the framing device that foregrounds "the constructed character of the representation." Was the view of Shakespeare's first audience as enlightened as our understanding of the play? At first, Newman suggests that we see more clearly than they. But the word "demonstrated" connects with the Elizabethan boy-actor whose sexual indeterminateness "foregrounds its artifice," and that leads to the implication that there is no difference between our enlightenment and theirs. The play is an instrument of patriarchal oppression, but it is also an agent of liberation in the eyes of a floating, transhistorical readership. The floating audience of the play is nothing more than the critic's projection onto a pseudo-historical screen of a certain idea of the text's enlightened self-consciousness. 31. I suggest that the contradictions in the characterization and story of Katherine are not difficult to grasp in the theatre where they are always rooted in the persons of the actors. These contradictions are not inaccessible even in play-texts so long as readers work to contain power and knowing within the spheres of the imagined persons of the play. The complex personhood of Katherine is, however, impossible to grasp in the terms of the totalizing, transpersonal positions of either power, knowing, or power/knowing, the first two because they disallow contradiction, the third because it attempts to lift contradiction out of the bodies and minds in which contradiction happens and transform it into the site where bodies and minds happen. In other words, with regard to The Taming of the Shrew, the position of power/knowing attempts to abstract, hypostatize, and universalize, as the place where Katherine happens, the thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations which make up the theatrical personation of a particular person whose complexity we confront in the theatre and even in the book. Notes 1. For theoretical criticism's discomfort with theatre's heterogeneity, see Dawson. 2. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare. 3. Critiques of the new historicist dissolution of intentionality include Patterson and Porter. 4. Montrose's "waffling" is in "Shaping Fantasies" 74-75. Pechter's comments are on p. 167. 5. Montrose has since adopted ideas of limited autonomy and "internal distantiation" in order to allow back into his accounts of Renaissance drama some measure of the knowing that was central to his view in 1980. See "Professing." 6. The issue here is not one of stage vs. page, or the "order of the body" vs. the "order of texts" (Berger 147). That is so because my argument is not that the stage delivers the goods and the page does not, but rather that the measure of meaning in Shakespearean drama is the person/character rather than the transpersonal discursive system, and that theatrical performance foregrounds the person/character as the quantum of meaning-making in Shakespeare. 7. For the opposite view, see Leggatt 37-38. My claim that the joke on Sly is unsuccessful is based on the fact that it is very unlikely that the Lord's "experiment" could have a negative outcome (i.e., Sly refusing to act like a lord), and that there are two separate explanations as to why it does have a positive outcome (i.e., Sly acting like a lord). One is that Sly is tricked into forgetting himself; the other is that he is not fooled but goes along with the charade anyway because he does not want to impede the flow of food and drink. There is no way to adjudicate between the two explanations, and indeed they tend to blur into each other. 8. Hodgdon develops a powerful argument, from the point of view of its history in the theatre, for seeing Taming of the Shrew as irredeemably antifeminist. Works Cited * Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. * Bamber, Linda. Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1982. * Bean, John. "Comic Structure and the Humanizing of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew." In The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980. 65-78. * Berger, Harry. "Bodies and Texts." Representations 17 (1987): 144-66. * Boose, Lynda E. "Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member." Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 179-213. * Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. * Dawson, Anthony B. "Performance and Participation: Desdemona, Foucault, and the Actor's Body." In Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance. Ed. James C. Bulman. London: Routledge, 1996. 29-45. * Fineman, Joel. "The Turn of the Shrew." In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. London: Methuen, 1985. 138-60. * Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon, et al. Brighton: Harvester, 1980. * Freedman, Barbara. Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. * Garner, Shirley Nelson. "The Taming of the Shrew: Inside or Outside of the Joke?" In "Bad" Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon. Ed. Maurice Charney. London: Associated UP, 1988. 105-19. * Greenblatt, Stephen. "Invisible Bullets." Rpt. in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. 21-65. * ---. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. * Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980. * Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1987. * Hibbard, G. R. "Introduction." The Taming of the Shrew. Penguin Shakespeare. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. 15-40. * Hodgdon, Barbara. "Katherina Bound, or Pla(k)ating the Strictures of Everyday Life." PMLA 107 (1992): 538-53. * Huston, Dennis J. "Enter the Hero: The Power of Play in The Taming of the Shrew." In Shakespeare's Comedies of Play. London: Macmillan, 1981. 58-93. * Kahn, Copp‚lia. Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981. * Leggatt, Alexander. Shakespeare's Comedy of Love. London: Methuen, 1974. * Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. * McLuskie, Kathleen. "The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure." In Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985. 88-108. * Montrose, Louis Adrian. "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture." Representations 1 (1983): 61-93. * ---. "Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture." In The New Historicism. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. 15-36. * ---. "The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology." Helios ns 8 (1980): 51-74. * Morris, Brian. "Introduction," The Taming of the Shrew. Arden Shakespeare London: Methuen, 1981. * Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. * Newman, Karen. "Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew." In Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. 33-50. * Novy, Marianne L. "Patriarchy and Play in The Taming of the Shrew." English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979): 264-80. * Patterson, Annabel. Shakespeare and the Popular Voice. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989. * Pechter, Edward. "Teaching Differences." Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 160-73. * Porter, Carolyn. "Are We Being Historical Yet?" South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (1988): 743-86. * Rutter, Carol, with Sinead Cusack, Paola Dionisotti, Fiona Shaw, Juliet Stevenson and Harriet Walter. Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today. Ed. Faith Evans. London: The Women's Press, 1988. * The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Madness of Syracusan Antipholus Robert Viking O'Brien California State University, Chico robert_obrien@macgate.csuchico.edu [O'Brien, Robert Viking. "The Madness of Syracusan Antipholus." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 3.1-26 .] 1. Many readers of The Comedy of Errors notice that Egeon's possible execution provides a dark frame around what appears to be one of Shakespeare's most light-hearted comedies. Yet the threat of death that hangs over Egeon in the frame plot also hangs, in the main plot, over his Syracusan son. This threat results from Antipholus' Syracusan origins, of course, but also--less obviously and more significantly--from the possibility that Syracusan Antipholus is losing his mind. The Elizabethans believed that, without correction, insanity usually led to death; for Shakespeare's audience, the deaths of Lear and Ophelia probably seemed inevitable as soon as the characters went mad. I shall argue in this essay that, in The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare uses the possibility that Syracusan Antipholus is genuinely threatened by madness, and therefore death, to manipulate his audience's anxieties. I shall also show how, despite the play's dependence on a classical source, Syracusan Antipholus' descriptions of his "transformed" mind draw on specific, Elizabethan ideas about both supernatural and natural causes of madness. 2. The character's first appearance on stage, as a wanderer newly disembarked from a ship, draws on strong cultural associations between wandering, water, and insanity. Michel Foucault explores these associations in Madness and Civilization when he investigates a reality behind the imaginary Ship of Fools. Boats of mad people did in fact ply European rivers, for boatmen were often charged with removing the insane to the countryside or to another city.[1] Foucault sees these mad boats both as a practical solution to the social threat posed by the insane, and as a ritual laden with significance. The water over which the mad are carried purifies them at the same time it excludes and confines them (7-12). He relates this ritual to older cultural material relating madness and sea-borne passengers.[2] 3. When Syracusan Antipholus arrives in Ephesus "stiff and weary" from his long journey over the sea, he gives his money to his servant and sends the servant away. He says that he plans to wander the town and look at its buildings and inhabitants. When the only other person in Ephesus who knows his identity leaves, Syracusan Antipholus is in the position of a lunatic released from one of the ships of fools described by Foucault. Antipholus soon discovers that he is incapable of interpreting what is said to him, and the city's inhabitants see him as mad. 4. His situation is the same as the parallel character's in Plautus' Menaechmi, Shakespeare's primary source. If the resemblance between Syracusan Antipholus and Foucault's released madmen stopped there, it would be difficult to claim that features of the scene resemble the cultural pattern described by Foucault. Antipholus' first soliloquy reinforces that pattern, however, by using water as its central metaphor: He that commends me to mine own content Commends me to the thing I cannot get. I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, (Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself. (1.2.33-38)[3] 5. We find the metaphor of water dissolving into water elsewhere in Shakespeare as an expression of "losing one's self." It appears, for example, in Richard II's deposition scene, when Richard describes himself as melting "away in water drops!" (4.1.263), in Hamlet's famous soliloquy, "O that this too too sallied flesh would melt,/Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!" (1.2.129-30), and in Antony and Cleopatra, when Antony describes himself as being like the shapes one sees in the clouds: "That which is now a horse, even with a thought/The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct/As water is in water" (4.14.9-11).[4] If these characters associate their own unsettled identities or extreme melancholy with water, the great mad characters immerse themselves in it. Lear tears off his clothes in the driving rain and asks for the land to be submerged: "You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout/Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!" (3.2.3-4). Ophelia enters the water of the weeping brook "like a creature native and indued/Unto that element" (4.7.179-80). The connection between water and madness does not, of course, originate with Shakespeare. According to Foucault, it either begins with the ritual of the mad ships, or the ships themselves reflect an older cultural pattern: "One thing at least is certain, water and madness have long been linked in the dreams of European man" (12). 6. Wandering and madness are similarly linked. Foucault outlines how the wandering madmen of pre- and early-modern Europe typify this connection, which reflects a reality similar to that found in the late twentieth-century United States. In Elizabethan England, mentally-disturbed vagrants were a "ubiquitous presence" (Rosen 153) represented in ballads by the figure of Tom o' Bedlam, who wanders in search of his "stragling sences" (Lindsay 35). Edgar's soliloquy in King Lear reflects this presence as well: The country gives me proof and president Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Strike in their numb'd and mortified arms Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary; And with this horrible object, from low farms, Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills, Sometimes with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers, Enforce their charity. (2.3.13-20) 7. Syracusan Antipholus also connects mental confusion and wandering when he bids farewell to the merchant in the second scene: "I will go lose myself,/And wander" (1.2.30-31). "Lose myself" and "wander" mean much the same thing here, but the first phrase hints at a loss of identity, an unsettling of the psyche that is more explicitly described in Antipholus' first soliloquy. Significantly, this soliloquy ends by describing the effect of Antipholus' wanderings: "So I, to find a mother and a brother,/In quest of them, unhappy lose myself" (1.2.39-40). 8. Wandering defines Syracusan Antipholus' character. Indeed, the first Folio uses Syracusan Antipholus' status as a wanderer to distinguish him from his twin. The Folio's stage directions call him "Antipholis Erotes" (1.2.S.D.), while his brother is called "Antipholis Sereptus" (2.1.S.D.). Surreptus, or "stolen away," was a common Renaissance epithet for Plautus' town-dwelling twin. Erotes, on the other hand, appears only in Shakespeare's play. Textual scholars have suggested several meanings for the name, but most see it as a corruption of Erraticus, formed from the verb errare, to wander (Foakes, xxvi-vii). The epithet fits the Syracusan twin, who, like his father, has presumably traveled "in farthest Greece,/Roaming clean through the bounds of Asia" (1.1.132-33). Ephesian Antipholus, on the other hand, has had a settled life. 9. If we take "wandering" as a mental rather than physical state, the distinction applies to the play's present action as well. Ephesian Antipholus' wife may believe that he is wandering mentally, but despite this diagnosis and his treatment by Dr. Pinch, the Ephesian twin remains "settled" in his sense of reality. His situation is thus safely in the realm of error as "mistaking." Just as various characters mistake him for his twin, his wife and Dr. Pinch mistake him for a madman. He knows they are wrong. The Syracusan twin's situation is altogether different. The state of mind described in the first soliloquy becomes more unsettled in the confusing confrontations that follow. Syracusan Antipholus never thinks the characters he meets are mistaken or mad--instead, he doubts his own sense of reality. When confronted by the raging, jealous Adriana, for example, Syracusan Antipholus wonders if he married her and was unaware of it, or if he is now dreaming: "What, was I married to her in my dream?/Or sleep I now, and think I hear all this?" (2.2.181-82). This kind of questioning continues to the very end of the play: even after most of the problems of mistaken identity have been cleared up, Syracusan Antipholus alludes to the possibility that he is still dreaming (5.1.376). 10. These are the questions of a madman, for as Robert Burton, citing Avicenna, says, madmen "wake as others dream" (335). The wandering twin in the Menaechmi does not ask such questions. Unlike Shakespeare's Syracusan Antipholus, Plautus' Syracusan Menaechmus never doubts his own sense of reality. He pretends to be insane, "adsimulem insanire" (831), rather than thinking he is insane. Unlike Hamlet's "antic disposition," this pretence is never ambiguous: Plautus continually shows us the character's sanity. When confronted with someone's inexplicable words or behavior, Menaechmus assumes that the other character, not he, is mad. 11. A comparison of the confused-identity scenes in the Menaechmi and The Comedy of Errors reveals the difference. In the Menaechmi, the humor in these scenes often results from arguments over who is insane. For example, in the first such scene, a cook mistakes the wandering twin for the settled one. Syracusan Menaechmus immediately decides that the man is insane--"certe hic insanust homo" (283)--and when the cook insists that he knows Menaechmus well, Menaechmus gives him money to be purified by a priest, "nam equidem insanum esse te certo scio" (292). An argument follows over who is sane. Neither character doubts his own sanity for a moment. 12. In Shakespeare's play, scenes involving the settled twin provide similar humor, as do some scenes involving the wandering one. Yet when Syracusan Antipholus is mistaken for his brother, he is bewildered in a way that Syracusan Menaechmus never is. Shakespeare's wandering twin rarely argues with characters who confuse him with his brother, and even when he does argue, the exchange has an unsettling quality not found in Plautus. In The Comedy of Errors' first scene of mistaken identity, for example, Syracusan Antipholus meets his servant's twin and asks how he has completed his errand so quickly: How chance thou art return'd so soon? Eph. Dro. Returned so soon? Rather approached too late . . . . (1.2.42-43) The exchange is the first in a series of unsettling disruptions of Antipholus' sense of time. The period's "faculty psychology," which derives ultimately from Aristotle's De Anima, associates such disruptions with the decay of the sensitive soul's perceptive faculties, a decay that, like the decay of the intellective soul, signals the onset of madness (Park 465-73). 13. G. R. Elliot describes how disrupted time gives the play a feeling of "weirdness" absent in Plautus (95-106). While Elliot explores this feeling as a feature of the Comedy's atmosphere, more recent scholars have seen the play's strangeness as a representation of psychological states. For example, in an essay on the relation of the frame plot to the interior plot of mistaken identity, Barbara Freedman asks what it means to be recognized as someone else. She sees Syracusan Antipholus' situation as representing "a present persona confused with a past, denied persona--a part of the self with which [one] no longer identifies" (367). In Freedman's reading, the play's mistaken identities realize repressed parts of the psyche. This realization can be frightening, and Freedman sees the play as a kind of nightmare. That the play does not have what Harry Berger calls a "green world" (3-40) makes it all the more terrifying: "By not removing the play's action to a magical island or forest, Shakespeare stresses the essence of nightmare: the imagined fulfilment of repressed fears and desires in everyday reality" (Freedman 363). 14. The threat of death hangs over this "farce," as does the threat of madness that appears again in Hamlet and King Lear. Syracusan Antipholus struggles with this threat throughout the play. When the first confusions arise, he tries to determine their nature and includes the possibility that he has lost his senses: "Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?/Sleeping or waking, mad or well advis'd?" (2.2.212-13). In the third act, he decides he is on earth and that witches are twisting his mind (3.2.155). He generally adheres to this explanation for the rest of the play. When he falls in love with Luciana, he believes he is surrendering his mind to a witch's power (3.2.161-63). In the fourth act, he attributes various confusing offstage encounters to "Lapland sorcerers" (4.3.11). 15. Antipholus has been prepared for this explanation by stories he has heard about Ephesus, which is said to be inhabited by "Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind" and "Soul-killing witches that deform the body" (1.2.99-100). Significantly, no such association exists in the Menaechmi. Like Shakespeare's Ephesus, which "is full of cozenage,/As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,/ . . . Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks" (1.2.97-98, 101), Plautus' Epidamnum is filled with tricksters of various kinds (260-61). None of these is said to be practicing black magic, however, and scholars have suggested that Shakespeare changed the play's setting to allow for the possibility of such magic (Foakes xxix). 16. For Shakespeare's audience, the city would have been most familiar as a center of pagan worship. In Acts, devotees of Diana drive Paul from of the city. Before his expulsion, however, Paul performs a number of exorcisms. When these exorcisms are unsuccessfully imitated by "vagabond Jews," the failed exorcists are attacked by a possessed madman: "the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded" (19.16). This failure and Paul's successes lead to conversions and the burning of magic books: "Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men" (19.19). In the Bible, Ephesus is associated with magic--"curious arts"--and with madness caused by possession. 17. Both in the first-century Near East and in Elizabethan England, people commonly attributed madness to possession that in turn was often attributed to black magic. In both places, people tried to exorcise madness-inducing demons with different degrees of success, and the successes were often conscious frauds. Shakespeare uses an account of such frauds to create Edgar's pretended madness in King Lear: the names of Poor Tom's demons come from Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of egregous Popish Impostures, to withdraw the harts of her maiesties Subiects from their allegeance, and from the truth of Christian Religioun professed in England, vnder the pretence of casting out devils (1603).[5] If, in King Lear, Shakespeare used pretended exorcisms to create pretended madness, in Twelfth Night he had one of his characters use pretended exorcism to harass another character. Feste's exorcism of Malvolio--"Out hyperbolical fiend! how vexest thou this man!" (4.2.25-6)-- remains comic as long as the audience feels certain that Malvolio is sane: the scene's sinister undertone results from a vague fear that he may lose his sanity. The parallel scene in The Comedy of Errors lacks this undertone because, as mentioned earlier, Ephesian Antipholus' sanity is never in doubt. The audience is free to laugh at what might otherwise be a frightening exorcism: I charge thee, Satan, hous'd within this man, To yield possession to my holy prayers And to thy state of darkness hie thee straight; I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven. (4.4.52-53) 18. This passage may allude to the fraudulent exorcisms described later in Harsnett's Declaration. The earliest dates given for The Comedy of Errors' composition, 1584-89 (Foakes xvii), would make those exorcisms contemporary events; the latest would make them recent history. Even if Shakespeare is not alluding to fraudulent exorcisms, his audience probably saw Doctor Pinch much as Ephesian Antipholus does, as "a mountebank,/A thread-bare juggler and a fortune-teller" (5.1.239-40). We should note, however, that although Shakespeare's audience may have regarded Pinch as a fraud or a quack, they would have seen nothing unusual in his treatment of Ephesian Antipholus' supposed madness: "They fell upon me, bound me, bore me thence,/And in a dark and dankish vault at home/There left me" (5.1.247-49). The "dark-room treatment," which also appears in Twelfth Night (4.2), was "one of the chief methods for the treatment of the insane in both Elizabethan and seventeenth-century England" (Reed 11). Shakespeare's audience probably took its efficacy for granted. The problem with this treatment in The Comedy of Errors results from the sanity of the patient and the (possible) fraudulence of the practitioner. The same is true of Pinch's attempted exorcism. Its ridiculousness should not lead us to conclude that Shakespeare and his audience did not believe in genuine exorcisms or in madness caused by possession. Even a thinker as relentlessly skeptical as Thomas Hobbes, writing in the middle of the next century, felt compelled to take possession-induced madness seriously, if only to dispute it (142-46). Before Hobbes, supernatural causes for mental illness were taken for granted, even by those who favoured explanations based on physical humours. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, for instance, Robert Burton departs from his description of humor-induced melancholy for a lengthy "Digression of the nature of Spirits, bad Angels, or Devils, and how they cause Melancholy" (157-79). 19. As the preceding example shows, belief in supernatural causes for mental illness was not limited to the illiterate, who were less familiar with "physical" explanations based on the theory of humours. The learned explanation for madness was in fact more likely to be supernatural than natural (Porter 30). Even medical doctors who ordinarily pointed to "natural" causes would, in extreme cases, point to supernatural ones (Rosen 146). For the Elizabethans, these causal categories were not contradictory. The Bible lent authority to supernatural interpretations; the classics lent authority to natural and supernatural interpretations: in the Phaedrus, for example, Plato describes both kinds of madness (265A). Throughout the Middle Ages, the idea of natural causes coexisted with that of supernatural intervention (Clarke 82). By the late sixteenth century, learned discussions of madness often focused on distinguishing between the two explanations (Kocher 297-305). 20. In his struggle to understand what is happening to him, Syracusan Antipholus wavers between the two explanations. Generally, he provides a supernatural explanation, but this explanation is itself bound up with the physical, for the play continually connects mental transformations to physical ones. Syracusan Antipholus' initial description of the inhabitants of Ephesus--"Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,/Soul-killing witches that deform the body" (1.2.99-100)--makes this connection, as does the following exchange between Syracusan Antipholus and Dromio: Syr. Dro. I am transformed, master, am I not? Syr. Ant. I think thou art in mind, and so am I. Syr. Dro. Nay, master, both in mind and in my shape. Syr. Ant. Thou hast thine own form. Syr. Dro. No, I am an ape. (2.2.204) 21. Dromio's words foreshadow his later questioning of Syracusan Antipholus: "Do you know me sir? Am I Dromio? Am I your man? Am I myself?" (3.2.72). In this scene, Dromio's fear of transformation results from his encounter with his twin's lover, the hideous kitchen wench who knows various "privy marks" on his body, so "that I, amazed, ran from her as a witch./And I think if my breast had not been made of faith, and my heart of steel,/She had transformed me to a curtal dog" (3.2.143-45). Dromio's description of this comically terrifying encounter immediately follows Antipholus' wooing of Luciana. Like Dromio's encounter, this wooing also involves transformation, but what Dromio feared, Antipholus desires: "Are you a god? would you create me new?/Transform me then, and to your power I'll yield" (3.2.39-40). 22. Antipholus repudiates this wish after he hears Dromio's story. He realizes that his desire is leading him toward madness and suicide, so "lest myself be guilty to self-wrong,/I'll stop mine ears against the mermaid's song" (3.2.161-63). Antipholus here wards off the enchantments of a woman he believes to be a witch (3.2.155). At the same time, he resists the love-induced madness that could lead him to commit the sin of self-murder. 23. Madness brought on by love appears so frequently in the period's literature that we tend to think of it as a convention--something Cervantes could mock, for example, by having Don Quixote, in the Sierra Morena, imitate Orlando Furioso (197-203). Yet these literary madnesses reflected a reality. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton supplies a long list of mad, suicidal lovers from literature and then tells his readers to Go to Bedlam for examples. It is so well known in every village, how many have either died for love, or voluntarily made away themselves, that I need not much labour to prove it; Death is the common catastrophe to such persons. (763-64) Burton, who devotes almost a third of his Anatomy to love melancholy (see Reed 106), provides what may strike us as a strangely physical description of how such love is engendered: the beloved infects the lover through the eyes, for "rays, . . . sent from the eyes, carry certain spiritual vapours with them, and so infect the other party" (681). Once the infection has occurred, Burton says, the passion lodges in lower regions of the psyche, from whence it rises to distort the lover's senses, and, in extreme cases, drive him or her mad. 24. A similarly physical idea of madness appears in The Comedy of Errors. After Syracusan Antipholus' confusing encounter with Adriana, he asks "What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?" (2.2.184). On one level, his question suggests a possibility not thought of by other characters in the play: mistaken identity is responsible for their confusion. On another level, Antipholus' question suggests an actual disordering of the senses. Shakespeare is playing on a meaning of "error" largely lost to us, that of "fury" or "extravagance of passion" (OED). As in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, in Elizabethan physical psychology, extreme passion--an upsurge from the lower regions of the psyche--destroys the higher faculties (DePorte 115-18). Timothy Bright's Treatise of Melancholy (1586), for example, describes how "vehement contemplations" disorder the senses (35). 25. Bright says this disordering can "cause horrible and fearfull apparitions" (131). If not corrected, it leads to madness and death. Indeed, Elizabethan parish records often list, as causes of death, mental states like "frenzy" and "thought" (Forbes 117-18). Shakespeare's drama reflects the idea that uncorrected madness is ultimately fatal; as Foucault notes in Madness and Civilization, "In Shakespeare . . . madness . . . occupies an extreme place, in that it is beyond appeal. Nothing ever restores it either to truth or reason. It leads only to laceration and thence to death" (31-32). 26. The Comedy of Errors is not King Lear. Nevertheless, as I have argued here, this seeming farce touches upon what would have been a genuine anxiety for the Elizabethan audience. Syracusan Antipholus is struggling for his mind and his life when he cries out, near the end of the play, The fellow is distract, and so am I, And here we wander in illusions-- Some blessed power deliver us from hence! (4.3.40-43) Such outcries are comic because the audience is aware of the cause of Syracusan Antipholus' confusion. But however faint, the anxiety produced by fear of madness remains, darkening the play's entertaining confusions. Notes 1. For the transportation of the insane during the Middle Ages, see also Rosen 140-41. 2. Foucault believes that the relationship had special significance for Europeans "on the horizon of the Renaissance" (18), when madness to some extent replaced death as a theme for meditation (13-15). Foucault briefly traces the literary use of madness from Erasmus' Praise of Folly to Cervantes and Shakespeare (12-17, 27-32). Curiously, Foucault's description of this development has been blamed for the relative lack of new work on madness in Tudor and Stuart England. Carol Thomas Neely claims that, in Madness and Civilization, Foucault's "Renaissance" has few distinguishing characteristics: it is merely a continuation of his "Middle Ages" (779). This has led younger scholars to focus on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of Foucault's "great confinement," when the older view of madness is replaced by one continuous with the present view. It seems to me that Foucault does distinguish between notions of madness before the late seventeenth century. In any event, we can hardly blame him for inadequately describing those differences: as its subtitle indicates, Madness and Civilization focuses on "Insanity in the Age of Reason," not earlier periods. 3. Quotations from The Comedy of Errors come from the New Arden edition. All other Shakespeare quotations come from The Riverside Shakespeare. 4. See Foakes' note on 1.2.33-38 in the New Arden edition of The Comedy of Errors. In his list of water-into-water metaphors, Foakes also includes the Duke's comment in The Two Gentlemen of Verona that "love is as a figure/Trenched in ice, which with an hour's heat/Dissolves to water, and doth lose his form" (3.2.6-8). 5. In Shakespearean Negotiations, Stephen Greenblatt explores the political and cultural implications of Shakespeare's use of Harsnett (94-128). For a different reading of those implications, see Murphy. Works Cited * Aristotle. Aristotle's De Anima, Books II and III. Trans. D. W. Hamlyn. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968. * Berger, Harry, Jr. Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. * Bright, Timothie. A Treatise of Melancholie. Containing the causes thereof, & reasons of the strange effects it worketh in our minds and bodies: with the physic cure, ad spirtuall consolation for such as have thereto adjoined an afflicted conscience. London: Thomas Vautrolier, 1586. Facsimile. The English Experience 212. Amsterdam: Da Capo P, 1969. * Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1927. * Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha. Trans. Samuel Putnam. 2 vols. New York: Viking P, 1949. * Clarke, Basil. Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain: Exploratory Studies. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1975. * DePorte, Michael V. Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne, and Augustan Ideas of Madness. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1974. * Elliott, G. R. "Weirdness in The Comedy of Errors." University of Toronto Quarterly 60 (1939): 95-106. * Foakes, R. A. Introduction. The Comedy of Errors. William Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1962. xi-lv. * Forbes, Thomas Rogers. Chronicle from Adgate: Life and Death in Shakespeare's London. New Haven: Yale UP, 1971. * Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. * Freedman, Barbara. "Egeon's Debt: Self-Division and Self-Redemption in The Comedy of Errors." English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 360-83. * Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. * Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. C. B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1951. * Kocher, Paul H. Science and Religion in Elizabethan England. New York: Octagon Books, 1969. * Lindsay, Jack, ed. Loving Mad Tom: Bedlamite Verses of the XVI and XVII Centuries. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970. * Murphy, John L. Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and "King Lear". Athens: Ohio UP, 1984. * Neely, Carol Thomas. "Recent Work in Renaissance Studies: Did Madness Have a Renaissance?" Renaissance Quarterly 44:4 (Winter 1991): 776-91. * Park, Katharine. "The Organic Soul." The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy. Eds. Eckhard Kessler, Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 464-84. * Plato. The Dialogues of Plato. Trans. B. Jowett. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953. * Plautus. Menaechmi. In Plautus, 2: 364-487. Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heinemann, 1917. * Porter, Roy. Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. * Reed, Robert Rentoul, Jr. Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1952. * Rosen, George. Madness in Society: Chapters in the Historical Sociology of Mental Illness. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968. * Shakespeare, William. The Comedy of Errors. Ed. R. A. Foakes. Arden Shakespeare 4. London: Methuen, 1962. * ---. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- "The price of one fair word": Negotiating Names in Coriolanus David Lucking University of Lecce, Italy dlucking@mail.clio.it [Lucking, David. "'The price of one fair word': Negotiating Names in Coriolanus." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 4.1-22.] 1. A curious episode occurs in the aftermath of the battle in which the protagonist of Coriolanus secures for himself the name from which the play itself derives its title. It is an incident which, although of no great importance in itself, receives sufficient emphasis as to stand out in suggestive relief from its immediate dramatic context, hinting at a perspective in which the play as a whole can be viewed. The undisputed hero of the day, Caius Martius, recalls, or professes to recall, a citizen of Corioli who in times gone by has offered him hospitality, and who has now been taken captive in the storming of the town. He requests that his former benefactor be set at liberty, a suit that is willingly granted by his grateful general Cominius. When the officer charged with releasing the captive asks "Martius, his name?", however, the unexpected reply he receives is "By Jupiter, forgot!" (I.ix.88).[1] Things proceed no further than this, for having stumbled upon this mysterious lacuna in his memory, Martius casually lets the matter drop, attributing his forgetfulness to fatigue and inquiring whether there is any wine to be had. The incident continues to reverberate in the mind, however, if only because of its proximity to another event pivoting upon names. This is the improvised ceremony at which Martius is invested with a new name of his own, the agnomen Coriolanus, conferred in recognition of the decisive role he has played in the conquest of Corioli. The implication would seem to be that there is a symbolic connection between the two events, that in some elusive way it is precisely because the name of the defeated town itself has been assimilated to Martius' own that the name of one of its inhabitants should have lost its status as such. 2. As various critics have remarked, such incidents as these suggest that Coriolanus might be read as a drama about names and naming, about who is empowered to name and on what basis, about what a name designates, and about the relation between names and identity.[2] The play has aptly been described as "the tragic history of a name,"[3] and it is this history that, in some of its broader implications, I propose to examine in the course of the following discussion. It will perhaps be agreed by many readers of this tragedy that among the issues it explores is that of personal identity in its relation to the various communal codes through which selfhood is fashioned and sustained, systems of belief and value which are not necessarily mutually reinforcing or even commensurable, and in the light of which different evaluations of the individual's worth and conduct will be formed.[4] A conspicuous instance of such a cultural code, one that looms into particular prominence in this play, is the ethic of heroic individualism which Coriolanus embodies in so trenchant a form, but there are others which are no less powerful and with which such an ethic will inevitably come into collision. Insofar as these different systems of value are characterized by the distinctive modes of discourse or "languages" that articulate them, the individual's relation to such systems might manifest itself in his attitude towards language as well -- in the way he uses language and also in the way he interprets the function of language. The relevance of names in this context lies in the fact that it is the name by which the individual is known that situates him within the network of heterogeneous and only partially overlapping languages which in their totality make up the linguistic environment of a community. To the extent that the "meaning" of an individual's name resides in a linguistic matrix that corresponds in some way to the complex of cultural codes through which that individual defines himself, the "history of a name" will also be the history of an identity. 3. In terms of such a perspective, the language of which names comprise a constituent element might almost be perceived as the true medium of action in Coriolanus, human beings themselves being frequently represented merely as voices, in their relation to voices, or as constituted by voices. Attention is directed towards the spoken word in the opening line of the play, when the First Citizen delivers what amounts to an extra-dramatic instruction to Shakespeare's audience: "Before we proceed any further, hear me speak" (I.i.1). What we hear the citizens speak is only one language among the several that the play presents, but it is one which reflects with particular clarity some of those problematic aspects of language which Shakespeare repeatedly brooded over in his drama: its relative, provisional status, its uncertain relation to the objects of its own discourse, its liability to demagogic excess, distortion and outright manipulation. Though not wholly lacking in discipline or its own canons of relevance, the language spoken by the Roman populace is characterized from the first as being volatile, transactional, constantly subject to revaluation. One of its most distinctive qualities is illustrated in the reply one of the citizens makes when asked whether Martius' services to his country do not merit consideration, that he "could be content to give him good report for't, but that he pays himself with being proud" (I.i.31-3). This is the idiom of the market place, unabashedly economic in spirit as well as in vocabulary, an oral currency that participates in a complex network of exchange relationships and that accordingly resists being anchored to fixed meanings. Even the celebrated Fable of the Belly, the "pretty tale" with which Menenius attempts to convert the incensed crowd to the patrician point of view in the first scene of the play (I.i.89), proves not to be exempt from the market laws that govern all discourse. Although Menenius is clearly of the opinion that the significance of his tale is luminously self-evident, what becomes apparent on the contrary is that it is susceptible to and indeed in a sense actually generated by interpretation, that the meaning of the story is not somehow contained within itself but externally determined by the community of listeners. 4. In his public pronouncements, at least, Martius evinces a conception of language which is radically opposed to that of the market place. His willful disregard for the practical dynamics of language use mirrors his equally deliberate refusal to acknowledge the social mechanisms by which values, including the values upon which his own sense of self is dependent, are created and sustained.[5] Whereas the plebeians are aware that meaning is contingent on viewpoint, the patrician Martius professes to be an unshakable believer in intrinsic meanings, just as he is a staunch believer in such absolute virtues as his own valour and integrity.[6] One of the things he most detests about the plebeians is precisely that their language is relative, incessantly shifting, conditioned by the mutating conditions of the moment: "With every minute you do change a mind, / And call him noble that was now your hate" (I.i.181-2). That language is not to be compromised or prostituted, but exacts its own inviolable standards of integrity, is the linguistic corollary of Martius' severely aristocratic value system. It is symptomatic of this linguistic puritanism that he should be able to think of no more vehement phrase to express his abhorrence for the Volscian general Aufidius than to say that "I do hate thee / Worse than a promise-breaker" (I.viii.1-2). Keeping one's word being for him a supreme psychological, as well as strictly ethical, imperative, he strenuously resists the notion that words might merely be exchangeable tokens, and that they might therefore fluctuate in value like any other currency. It is his anxiety about the linguistic ramifications of the market ethos, his awareness that "things created / To buy and sell with groats" (III.ii.9-10) might buy and sell with words as well, that leads in the end to his rupture with his society. When he falls foul of the tribunes by unambiguously speaking his mind he refuses to salvage the situation by making even a token concession to the law of equitable exchange, defiantly insisting instead that "I would not buy / Their mercy at the price of one fair word" (III.iii.90-91). 5. At least as regards Martius' conscious motivations, then, it might appear that James Calderwood is right in asserting that this militant insistence on the integrity of language represents an attempt "to fashion a private language whose words, unlike those of the plebeians, are cemented to their meanings and incapable of distortion."[7] This is not, however, all that there is to the matter. There is considerable evidence to suggest that what is ultimately responsible for Martius' almost perverse inflexibility in matters pertaining to speech is his own intuition that what language generates are, in the final analysis, inevitably no more than relative truths, truths that are both provisional and manipulable. Furthermore, I think it might reasonably be argued -- though the majority of recent commentators on the play would doubtless disagree with me -- that Martius himself participates, more than he is prepared to admit, in precisely those linguistic practices he most condemns. That Martius is aware of the real nature of language is indicated, among other things, in the fact that he is himself perfectly prepared to exploit its rhetorical potential, even if only in determinate circumstances. Although he protests that he is constitutionally incapable of flattery, for instance, it is difficult to imagine what more appropriate term might be applied to his exhortation to his soldiers on the battlefield, men who belong to the detested plebeian order and so under normal conditions would be beneath his notice altogether: If these shows be not outward, which of you But is four Volsces? None of you but is Able to bear against the great Aufidius A shield as hard as his. (I.vi.77-80) This invigorating specimen of rhetoric, triggered by the spectacle of the soldiers enthusiastically casting their caps into the air (I.vi.76 SD) comes a few scenes after that in which Martius has excoriated the Roman citizens in the most contemptuous possible terms, deriding them among other things for precisely the same gesture of throwing their caps into the air (I.i.211-13). Apparently Martius believes that there is ample justification for dissembling one's true feelings and intentions in war, that it is entirely honourable, as his mother Volumnia puts it, "to seem / The same you are not" (III.ii.46-7) at least as a matter of tactical policy. The principle of dissimulation having once been admitted, however, whether in words or in conduct, the question of where the line of demarcation is to be drawn between the legitimate and the illegitimate use of "seeming" becomes overwhelmingly problematic. 6. This contradiction between the linguistic absolutism that Martius professes and the pragmatic manipulation of language to which he often resorts in practical affairs appears elsewhere as well. Commentators on the play, evidently acquiescing in its protagonist's monolithic conception of his own character, have not on the whole taken adequate account of his posturing, the histrionic dimension to much of his conduct, his tendency to play roles,[8] and have consequently minimized or overlooked altogether the element of ambiguity and even of insincerity in his character. Ironically, it is the supposedly benighted citizens of Rome who are able to penetrate his mask and perceive not only that he is desperately avid for celebrity but that in his all-consuming dedication to fame he is guilty of unconscious duplicity: I say unto you, what he hath done famously, he did it to that end: though soft-conscienced men can be content to say it was for his country, he did it to please his mother, and to be partly proud, which he is, even to the altitude of his virtue. (I.i.35-9) Martius' much-vaunted patriotism is subservient to, or at least closely allied with, his impulse to self-aggrandizement, his craving to have his exploits extolled publicly. While he may not indulge in the comparatively naive kind of "narrative self-fashioning" that Stephen Greenblatt ascribes to Othello,[9] he does seem to be continually striving to induce others to enshrine his exploits in the elevated language of epic favoured by such exponents of patrician values as Cominius. Volumnia reminds her son at one point that "My praises made thee first a soldier" (III.ii.108), and whatever Martius says or believes about the matter, it is on praise that he continues to subsist.[10] Although Martius frequently proclaims his aversion to being made the object of what he terms "acclamations hyperbolical" (I.ix.50), he invariably does so in circumstances in which, as he cannot fail to be aware, his remonstrations will go unheeded, in which they will avail not to stifle praise but to magnify it. Such affectation is not incidental to his character, for as the prominent strain of theatrical imagery in the play suggests, Martius is constantly playing to an audience, always on stage in one form or another, until the moment of reckoning at last comes in which "Like a dull actor now / I have forgot my part and I am out, / Even to a full disgrace" (V.iii.40-2). And the primary function that this role-playing discharges is of course that it also imposes roles on others, obliging them to say of Martius what he wants to hear, to transform his life into heroic narrative, to immortalize his deeds and character in that "good report" which Volumnia says would have served as a satisfactory substitute for her son even in the event that he had died in battle (I.iii.20-21). Menenius displays considerable insight into the covert motivations of his friend when, seeking to confer with him in the Volscian camp towards the end of the play, he bases his claim to consideration on the fact that he has been "The book of his good acts whence men have read / His fame unparallel'd, haply amplified" (V.ii.15- 16). The name of Martius' mother, Volumnia, may be assimilable to the same pattern of imagery. 7. It is in the light of Martius' eagerness to have his deeds and virtues commemorated in words that we should read such scenes as that following the capture of Corioli in which the hero is invested with his new name. What has perhaps been insufficiently emphasized by critics examining this episode is the pertinacity with which Martius contrives, through irritable disclaimers and patently insincere exhibitions of modesty, to keep the limelight focused uninterruptedly on himself, notwithstanding the fact that there are presumably more pressing matters to attend to in the wake of a major battle than the awarding of palms. Cominius gives credit where credit is due by telling Martius that an exhaustive narration of his exploits would strain even his own capacity for belief -- "If I should tell thee o'er this thy day's work, / Thou't not believe thy deeds" (I.ix.1-2) -- and assuring him that a suitably glowing report will be delivered in the appropriate quarter. When Lartius adds his tribute to that of his general, however, Martius suddenly begins to disparage his own performance, declaring that he has done no more than what his sense of duty has required of him. As occurs elsewhere in the play, the effect of this ritual of self-deprecation is not to stem the flow of praise but positively to oblige the others to intensify their efforts to render the honour that is due. Lest Martius suspect him of trying to buy him off with a handful of compliments, Cominius assures him that there is no question of attempting to discharge a debt, that the public proclamation of Martius' value performs a symbolic rather than a compensatory function: `Twere a concealment Worse than a theft, no less than a traducement, To hide your doings, and to silence that, Which, to the spire and top of praises vouch'd, Would seem but modest. Therefore I beseech you -- In sign of what you are, not to reward What you have done -- before our army hear me. (I.ix.21-7) But Martius continues to demur, saying that "I have some wounds upon me, and they smart / To hear themselves remember'd" (I.ix.28-29). Possibly growing somewhat impatient at Martius' obstinacy, his stubborn refusal to let the matter of his merit be decently settled and dismissed, Cominius proposes more tangible tokens of appreciation: Of all the horses -- Whereof we have ta'en good, and good store -- of all The treasure in this field achiev'd and city, We render you the tenth (I.ix.31-4) Such an offer would almost constitute an affront to Martius, since what it amounts to is a tacit attempt to quantify his merit, to measure it according to the criteria of the market place. Martius has already expressed the most scathing contempt for those soldiers who, looting the city, "prize their hours / At a crack'd drachma" (I.v.4-5), and he now declines Cominius' offer on the grounds that he "cannot make my heart consent to take / A bribe to pay my sword" (I.ix.37-8). It is at this point that Cominius offers Martius the only recompense he is likely to accept, the formal recognition of absolute rather than relative value, a public acknowledgment that Martius has not only made a valuable contribution to the success of the day but has converted that success into an exclusively personal triumph. This acknowledgment takes the form of the supreme trophy of the name by which Martius is consecrated as hero of his people and indelibly inscribed in the language of his country: Therefore be it known, As to us, to all the world, that Caius Martius Wears this war's garland: in token of the which, My noble steed, known to the camp, I give him, With all his trim belonging; and from this time, For what he did before Corioli, call him, With all th'applause and clamour of the host, Martius Caius Coriolanus! (I.ix.57-64) Martius not only does not refuse this name, conferred amid accolades of precisely the sort he claims to detest, but totally appropriates it as his own in words which hint at a ceremony of self-baptism: I will go wash; And when my face is fair, you shall perceive Whether I blush or no: howbeit, I thank you. I mean to stride your steed, and at all times To undercrest your good addition, To th'fairness of my power." (I.iv.66-71) It is immediately after this, when attention is deflected from himself towards the more urgent business of negotiating with the defeated Volscians, that Coriolanus once again thrusts himself to the center of the stage by recollecting the old citizen of Corioli whom, in a fine display of soldierly magnanimity, he petitions to be released, but whose name he has so inexplicably forgotten. 8. If Martius' tendency to monopolize the limelight already betrays the essential hollowness of his pretensions to lofty self-sufficiency, there are overtones to the foregoing scene that are even more ironic in potential, even more at odds with the absolutist aristocratic ethic professed by both Martius and Cominius. For although what Martius and Cominius are ostensibly talking about is the attribution of honour in recognition of an order of merit that transcends considerations of mere price, they are also, in a certain sense, though perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, engaged in a subtle process of bartering. While Cominius augments his offer by successive increments, Martius persists in holding out for more, until at last a price is arrived at that Martius does consider commensurate with his dignity, the price of one fair word. Martius too, in other words, is in his own way playing by the rules of the market place, negotiating so that the maximum amount of glory will accrue to himself. It is the fact that such tacit bargaining does occur even in patrician circles that gives ironic point to the scene in which Menenius and Volumnia compile an inventory of Martius' wounds and eagerly compute their number, arriving by meticulous calculation at a figure of twenty-seven (II.i.144-55). Martius affects to regard his wounds as the purely private tokens of honour, and will not demean himself before the Roman populace so far as to "Show them th'unaching scars which I should hide, / As if I had receiv'd them for the hire / Of their breath only!" (II.ii.148-50). The fact that the nature and number of his scars is a matter of public knowledge, however, suggests that they have become, to all intents and purposes, negotiable units of value on the patrician honour market.[11] And since Martius' acquisition of honour -- and of the name which is the linguistic embodiment of that honour -- does after all have more than a little in common with a market transaction, it is ironically appropriate that when one of his admirers remarks that "there's wondrous things spoke of him," Menenius should reply "Wondrous! Ay, I warrant you, and not without his true purchasing" (II.i.136-8). 9. Coriolanus' tragedy, if tragedy it can be called, proceeds from a category confusion, a failure (or refusal) to discriminate between dimensions of value or, more accurately, to openly acknowledge what his own behavior confirms: that all value is in the final analysis relative and therefore subject to negotiation. The crux of the problem appears in Volumnia's account of her motives for instilling the desire for achievement into Martius, "considering how honour would become such a person -- that it was no better than picture-like to hang by the wall, if renown made it not stir" (I.iii.10-12). Whereas Volumnia draws a pragmatic distinction between honour and fame, however, Coriolanus is convinced that there exists a necessary correlation between the two.[12] If honour is essentially a private matter, or at least for most ordinary purposes can be equated with self-esteem, fame is necessarily public, and depends upon the estimation of others. Coriolanus however believes, or believes he believes, that fame and honour are merely different aspects of the same thing, that public recognition is necessarily due to one who has amassed a sufficient amount of honour, and that the individual's honour increases in direct proportion to his renown. As long as he is dealing solely with members of his own class no incompatibility emerges between the concepts of honour and renown, because in the patrician world the criteria according to which these are determined are essentially identical. It is when he is compelled to descend into the market place, and thereby make explicit what has already been implicit in his bargaining session with Cominius, that a fatal contradiction arises. 10. This contradiction is dramatized once again in terms of the linguistic metaphor which constitutes a dominant leitmotif in the play and, more specifically, of contrasting conceptions of the status and authority of names. Martius has been invested with a new name at Corioli, and credited in Cominius' dispatches to Rome with "the whole name of the war" (II.i.133-4). When he returns to Rome a herald proclaims that he "hath won, / With fame, a name to Martius Caius" (II.i.162-3), and Volumnia reinforces the association between name and fame when she greets her son with the salutation "By deed-achieving honour newly nam'd -- / What is it? -- Coriolanus, must I call thee?" (II.i.172-3). At first no complications arise for the simple reason that the entire city is united in its admiration for the newly-returned hero, that "All tongues speak of him" with equal adulation (II.i.203). To the profound dismay of the tribunes, who fear that his growing ascendancy might pose a threat to their own prerogatives, Coriolanus' name has become a household word. But it is precisely because a name is only a word, and therefore subject in the final analysis to the forces that govern all language, that Coriolanus is destined to a downfall. 11. The critical test comes when Coriolanus is obliged to present himself before the common people in order to obtain their ratification for the decision of the Senate to bestow upon him the office of consul. In view of his popularity, no one anticipates any difficulty in Coriolanus' securing the necessary endorsement, provided that he plays by the rules prescribed by custom. As one of the citizens says: ... if he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them. So if he tell us his noble deeds, we must also tell him our noble acceptance of them. (II.iii.5-9) The language here is transactional: if Coriolanus does one thing, the citizens will reciprocate by doing something in return. At least in form, this is the logic of the market place, the law of quid pro quo, expressed not only in linguistic but in explicitly lingual terms. But Coriolanus has a conception of language which is very far from transactional, and is consequently, as North's Plutarch says of him, "altogether unfit for any mans conversation."[13] When he presents himself before the commoners he fulfills the tribunes' prediction that he "will require them / As if he did contemn what he requested / Should be in them to give" (II.ii.156-8). Actually confronted by members of the plebeian class, he discovers that "I cannot bring / My tongue to such a pace" (II.iii.52-3) as to formulate the humble request that is expected of him, and provokingly announces that it is "Mine own desert" (II.iii.66) that brings him before them. He repeatedly and offensively identifies the plebeians exclusively with their voices, having maliciously taken his cue from the tribunes' insistence that "the people / Must have their voices" (II.ii.139-40), and pointedly mocks the logic of the market place at the same time that he travesties the conventions of courteous speech: Coriolanus: Well then, I pray, your price o'th'consulship? First Citizen: The price is, to ask it kindly. Coriolanus: Kindly, sir, I pray let me ha't. I have wounds to show you, which shall be yours in private. Your good voice, sir. What say you? (II.iii.74-8) By failing to comply with all the requirements of the ceremony, refusing to display his wounds on the grounds that it would seem "As if I had receiv'd them for the hire / Of their breath only!" (II.ii.149-59), Coriolanus is denying the plebeians access to what they themselves have obliquely described as "mouths" through which they would willingly have voiced a favourable opinion of his worthiness. 12. This scene brings to a sharp focus the fundamental contradiction in Coriolanus' view of things, a contradiction that permeates his conception of identity, his notion of what it is to be a man, as well as his attitude towards language. The paradox latent in his position is, as I have already suggested, that the codes through which he seeks to define himself in isolation from his community are themselves derived from that community, that even the image he projects of heroic self-sufficiency is constructed in relation to a social context in the absence of which it would be empty of significance. The fact that Martius presents himself as a candidate for the consulship at all, that he pursues a public office together with a title that confers social definition, indicates that he wishes to situate himself within the institutional framework of his city, to establish (or elaborate) his identity in terms of an antecedent system of cultural conventions. On this occasion as well, as D. J. Gordon points out, "in seeking the voices Coriolanus is a subject looking for his name,"[14] aspiring to yet another "addition" to complement that acquired at Corioli. As is also the case in the scene in which he receives his agnomen, however, Martius is playing by the rules of the game only up to a certain point. What he is actually striving to do once again is negotiate a title for himself without committing himself to the broader implications of the process in which he is engaged, to enhance his personal status through the acquisition of a name without acknowledging that all names depend for their meaning upon a public consensus. When Martius mocks the voices and tongues of the citizens whose votes he is soliciting, in other words, he is placing himself in a position that might be described as one of linguistic inauthenticity, since he wants to be "nam'd for consul" (III.i.194) by the very people whose authority to name he emphatically denies. 13. Although they initially consent to Martius' nomination as consul, the plebeians are aware of the derision with which they have been treated, and the tribunes adduce this as grounds to arraign their enemy publicly. What is dramatized in the course of the ensuing scenes is, among other things, a contest between rival conceptions of language, a specifically linguistic exemplification of the phenomenon that in more general sociological terms has been referred to as "legitimation crisis."[15] When the tribunes announce that the people have withdrawn their authorization, Coriolanus criticizes their want of linguistic responsibility -- "Have I had children's voices?" (III.i.29) -- and follows this up by challenging their right to speak at all: "Must these have voices, that can yield them now / And straight disclaim their tongues?" (III.i.33-4). Language being for Coriolanus a medium of self-definition, it cannot be compromised as the plebeians have done without compromising the self as well. For his own part, when one of the tribunes charges him with having spoken against the distribution of grain to the poor he defiantly stands by his words even though in so doing he is knowingly committing political suicide: "This was my speech, and I will speak't again" (III.i.61). It is perhaps significant that the issue of the grain, introduced in the opening scene of the play, should present itself again at this critical juncture, because what Coriolanus is in a certain sense doing at this point is claiming a monopoly over words analogous to that which the patricians have been exercising over the food supply.[16] His conception of language as a "servant of essences he alone can recognize because he alone embodies them," to borrow Stanley Fish's useful phrase,[17] precludes the possibility of conciliation or even of genuine communication, because it effectively denies the collective authority of the community to legislate meaning according to its own conventions. In one of Coriolanus' more impassioned outbursts, references to wounds as the index of personal honour, to coinage, and to words coalesce in a revealing association of ideas: As for my country I have shed my blood, Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs Coin words till their decay ... (III.i.75-7) If Martius seems on this occasion to be invoking the conception of words as currency -- the transactional view -- it is only because he is simultaneously claiming for himself the exclusive authority, by virtue of the wounds he has sustained in the service of Rome, to mint that currency. His linguistic despotism becomes increasingly blatant as he urges the patricians to "pluck out / The multitudinous tongue" (III.i.154-5) by abolishing the office of tribune, thus occasioning dismay even among his closest allies. It is at this point that the true basis of linguistic authority, which for better or for worse can only be vested in the community itself, begins to reassert itself as one of the tribunes summons the people "in whose name myself / Attach thee as a traitorous innovator / A foe to the public weal" (III.i.172-4). 14. It is perhaps worth reiterating that there is nothing homogeneous or compact about the "community" that Martius is defying at this point, just as there is nothing homogeneous or compact about the patrician class he represents. It is made perfectly clear in the play that the tribunes are not simply voicing the will of the Roman populace in whose name they profess to be acting, but are seeking to promote their own particular interests in accordance with canons of Realpolitik which represent one possible, but no more than one possible, conception of rational social conduct. The patricians, similarly, though they formally subscribe to the same absolute values that Martius defends, are prepared in practice to compromise their principles in order to safeguard their privileges. Menenius in particular, though he fully shares Martius' elitist convictions, is also aware that language is transactional by its very nature, and cannot with impunity be deployed merely as a private instrument. He advocates "Only fair speech" (III.ii.96) as the sole means by which Martius might yet extricate himself from his predicament, and is seconded in this counsel by Volumnia herself, who points out that in the present emergency her son might honourably resort to the policy of dissembling he has employed to such good effect in warfare. Despite his unabated repugnance -- "Must I / With my base tongue give to my noble heart / A lie that it must bear?" (III.ii.99-101) -- Coriolanus does in the end yield to pressure, promising his mother to descend into the market place and to "return consul, / Or never trust to what my tongue can do / I'th'way of flattery further" (III.ii.135-7). It is ironic that in the trial which follows Martius, for whom keeping one's word is a supreme imperative, and who hates promise-breakers only to a slightly lesser degree than he hates Aufidius, should perjure himself by failing to honour that undertaking. Provoked by the tribunes, he repeats his error of disregarding the transactional character of language, defying his adversaries with the statement "I would not buy / Their mercy at the price of one fair word" (III.iii.90-91). He is therefore banished "in the name o'th'people" (III.iii.99), and his retaliatory gesture of banishing Rome in his turn (III.iii.123), through the logical culmination of his attempt to usurp the language and judicial procedures of the city for his own purposes, is self-evidently bankrupt as a response. 15. Martius has been evicted not only from a physical community but from an environing social order in terms of whose conventions he has, while affecting to scorn them, established his own sense of self. When he is subsequently seen in Antium he is shorn of identity, "disguised and muffled" as a scene direction informs us, and his subsequent actions might be understood as attempts to recover what has been forfeited. He presents himself before Aufidius confidently expecting to be recognized but, notwithstanding the broad hints with which he attempts to elicit his own name from his enemy, he is obliged in the end to pronounce it himself. It is tempting to suspect the presence of a parodic undercurrent to this scene, a kind of travesty of Martius' own epic conception of himself, as the literary convention of the disguised hero's unmasking himself to the infinite confusion of his enemies degenerates into something bordering on bathos: Aufidius: Whence com'st thou? What wouldst thou? thy name? Why speak'st not? Speak, man: what's thy name? Coriolanus: [Unmuffling] If, Tullus, Not yet thou know'st me, and, seeing me, dost not Think me for the man I am, necessity Commands me name myself. Aufidius: What is thy name? Coriolanus: A name unmusical to the Volscians' ears, And harsh in sound to thine. Aufidius: Say, what's thy name? Thou hast a grim appearance, and thy face Bears a command in't. Though thy tackle's torn, Thou show'st a noble vessel. What's thy name? Coriolanus: Prepare thy brow to frown: know'st thou me yet? Aufidius: I know thee not! Thy name? Coriolanus: My name is Caius Martius, who hath done To thee particularly, and to all the Volsces, Great hurt and mischief: thereto witness may My surname, Coriolanus. (IV.v.54-69) "Only that name remains" (IV.v.74), he complains a moment later, apparently forgetting that this name can hardly have the meaning for the Volscians that it has for himself, since its significance depends upon conventions specific to the community from which he has been exiled. Although Aufidius, who has evidently already determined to exploit Martius' vulnerabilities for his own purposes, refrains for the moment from pointing out the inappropriateness of Martius' invocation of his agnomen in the present circumstances, the issue will assume crucial importance in the final scene of the play. 16. Aufidius, explicitly aware of the relativity of value as Martius is not, knows that in the final analysis it is a function of a public consensus and therefore inevitably subject to the shifting circumstances of the moment. As he later says: So our virtues Lie in th'interpretation of the time, And power, unto itself most commendable, Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair T'extol what it hath done. One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail; Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail. (IV.vii.49-55) This perception gives him an immense advantage over Coriolanus, who continues to adhere to the doctrine of absolute value that his own behavior has exposed as specious. With a view to securing his own advantage, Aufidius astutely supplies Martius with exactly what he most craves at this moment, the exterior tokens of boundless admiration, the prospect of reconstituting himself in the esteem of his former foes, "fair words" in abundance: I lov'd the maid I married; never man Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here, Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart Than when I first my wedded mistress saw Bestride my threshold. Why, thou Mars! (IV.v.115-19) It is symptomatic of the torpor into which his critical faculties have lapsed that Martius fails to perceive the glaring insincerity of such remarks as this, or finds anything in the least suspicious in Aufidius' subsequent asseveration that the Volscians would attack Rome "Had we no quarrel else to Rome, but that / Thou art thence banish'd" (IV.v.128-9). The individual who has scorned flattery in any form now becomes hopelessly entangled in its toils, incapable of discriminating between a candid expression of esteem and calculated deception. The irony of this situation becomes almost comically manifest in a servant's report on the scene in which Coriolanus is introduced to other Volscian worthies: Why, he is so made on here within as if he were son and heir to Mars; set at upper end o'th'table; no question asked him by any of the senators but they stand bald before him. Our general himself makes a mistress of him, sanctifies himself with's hand, and turns up the white o' th'eye to his discourse. (IV.v.196-202) 17. The project that Martius conceives at the instigation of Aufidius to unleash a Volscian army upon Rome in order to wreak exemplary vengeance effectively belies, though he does not know it, the parting words with which he has turned his back on his countrymen: "There is a world elsewhere!" (III.iii.135). His thoughts continue to gravitate obsessively towards Rome, because it is Rome which is the origin and ground of everything he has been and stood for, which continues to embody the authority of community even when he is permitted no option but to define himself in a negative relation to that community. Notwithstanding his new formal allegiance, therefore, he remains essentially bereft of personal coordinates, resembling less a human being than a mechanical colossus devoid of conscience or sentiment, "a thing / Made by some other deity than nature" (IV.vi.91-2). It is Cominius, who after the events at Corioli is uniquely in a position to appreciate the importance that names have for Martius, who comes nearest to comprehending that what the renegade is afflicted with is a tormenting loss of identity, and that his unspoken objective in marching on Rome is nothing other than to fabricate a new name for himself: "Coriolanus" He would not answer to; forbad all names: He was a kind of nothing, titleless, Till he had forg'd himself a name o'th'fire Of burning Rome. (V.i.11-15) In terms of the premises of the play, such a design might seem to possess a certain grim logic. But as Menenius discovers to his chagrin when he visits Martius in the Volscian camp, and is at first rebuffed by the sentinels with the comment "the virtue of your name / Is not here passable" (V.ii.12-13), names have meaning only within the context of a specific linguistic community. For this reason Coriolanus' project is ultimately self-defeating, because the name he intends to forge for himself in the fire of burning Rome is to be acquired through the complete annihilation of the only linguistic community that, in the view of a Roman such as himself, can underwrite names and endow them with significance. 18. The contradictions latent in Martius' stance with respect both to his own name and to the identity which that name designates become manifest when his family visits him in an effort to intercede on behalf of Rome. Notwithstanding Martius' declaration of his intention to act "As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin" (V.iii.36-7), Volumnia and Virgilia make an initial attempt to reclaim Martius for their community on the grounds of personal affiliation, contesting in effect his radically simplified conception of what a name consists in, his exclusive identification of it with individual renown. If Coriolanus' agnomen is a purely personal token of honour, his nomen Martius designates the clan to which he belongs, the "noble house o'th'Martians" of whose history, as even the tribunes obliquely acknowledge, any scion might legitimately be proud (II.iii.236-43). When Volumnia describes Martius' son, who has inherited his name, as "a poor epitome of yours, / Which by th'interpretation of full time / May show like all yourself" (V.iii.68-70), she is invoking another possible basis for identity than that which is to be located in a personal reputation alone. She is also, in a certain sense, unwittingly supplying her own commentary on Aufidius' remark that "our virtues / Lie in th'interpretation of the time" (IV.vii.49-50), since the "interpretation of full time" through which a child arrives at maturity belongs to a realm of human experience unaffected by the provisional status of reputation. Martius' wife Virgilia reiterates this idea when she tells her husband that she has "brought you forth this boy, to keep your name / Living to time" (V.iii.126-7).[18] What is being suggested -- or what at least might reasonably be inferred -- is that the only kind of immortality to which the individual can attain is to be found not in the endless reverberations of undying fame but in what Shakespeare refers to in the sonnets as "increase,"[19] and that the perpetuation of the self achieved through such means affords access to a domain of value which, though certainly not absolute, is perhaps not entirely arbitrary either. 19. From the point of view of the personal tragedy depicted in this play, however, what is chiefly significant about this phase in the conference is that Martius does not draw such an inference, or at least does not allow himself to be swayed by it. He tries instead to terminate the discussion, and it is at this point that Volumnia changes verbal tactics, this time shrewdly striking her son where he is most vulnerable. If the concept of "name" has been briefly associated with familial self-perpetuation in her abortive appeal to Martius' paternal sentiments, it is once again firmly coupled to fame in her subsequent remarks, though in the unexpectedly negative sense this time of notoriety. For the first time it is given Martius very clearly to understand that a famous name might be the token not of honour but of its precise opposite: ... if thou conquer Rome, the benefit Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name, Whose repetition will be dogg'd with curses, Whose chronicle thus writ: "The man was noble, But with his last attempt he wip'd it out, Destroy'd his country, and his name remains To th'insuing age abhorr'd." (V.iii.142-8) Volumnia goes even further, and warns that she herself might become the mouthpiece through which this unenviable chronicle finds utterance. This occurs at the climax of the impressive sequence of rhetorical variations on the theme of speaking in which, in a devastating crescendo, she ranges over the entire spectrum of human and social obligations that Martius is violating and then, unsure of the effect her words are having, pronounces what amounts to a threat of anathema: Yet give us our dispatch: I am husht until our city be afire, And then I'll speak a little. (V.iii.180-82) The idea that his own mother, who more than any other person has been responsible for inculcating his insatiable craving for a name, might be moved by allegiance to her city to render that name synonymous with betrayal, is intolerable to Martius. For the first time he is compelled to recognize what has always been the case: that his reputation, his name, and hence in the final analysis his very identity, are not in his own hands, that he does not possess an exclusive monopoly on language, that neither in the literal nor the figurative sense can any man be author of himself. In capitulating to his mother at this point he is tacitly deferring to the authority of the community in whose codes he is inscribed, and it is dramatically very appropriate that he should be -- as the eloquent scene direction "Holds her by the hand silent" intimates (V.iii.183) -- left quite literally without words. 20. While what occurs subsequently might appear to be more in the nature of an epilogue than anything else, there is a certain ambiguity attaching to the conclusion of the play that hints at the possibility of an obscure redemption for Martius and even of a partial vindication of the essentialism he has defended so tenaciously. Aufidius, who is himself chafing under the ignominy of being, as Cominius describes him, merely "The second name of men" (IV.vi.126), and who is seeking a pretext to eliminate his old enemy once and for all, publicly impugns the name of which Martius is so proud: "Dost thou think / I'll grace thee with that robbery, thy stol'n name / Coriolanus, in Corioles?" (V.vi.88-90). Not only does he despoil him of his name, but he even denies his right to name, adjuring him to "Name not the god, thou boy of tears!" when Martius apostrophizes Mars (V.vi.101). Since it is the name of this deity that inspires that by which Martius is familiarly addressed, what Aufidius is contesting in effect is his entitlement even to invoke his own nomen.[20] Angrily asserting his undiminished preeminence in the face of this relentless expropriation of the names in which his sense of self is vested, Martius confronts his enemies with the chronicle of one of the greatest exploits of his career, which is also as it happens the chronicle of one of the Volscians' most humiliating defeats: "If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there, / That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I / Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioli" (V.vi.113-15). But Martius' heroism, like everything else about him, lies in the interpretation of the time, and it is this final effort to affirm his identity through an appeal to the epic quality of his personal story that supplies Aufidius with the justification he needs for killing him. 21. This death can be construed in different ways: as a kind of coup de grace delivered to a man who has already demonstrated the inauthenticity and ultimate bankruptcy of his notions of value and meaning and selfhood, or as a supreme gesture of personal affirmation on the part of a genuinely exceptionable individual who immolates himself willingly on the altar of his own heroic conception of life. I have been arguing that Coriolanus can be read as a play about the paradox inherent in the concept of personal identity, and that it raises questions concerning the status of selfhood in a world in which all definitions of selfhood are socially given. But perhaps it should also be pointed out that if the contradictions latent in Martius' ideal conception of himself are exposed with relentless clarity in the course of the play, there is no alternative viewpoint -- neither that of the patricians or the tribunes or the Roman populace -- that receives the tacit endorsement of unambiguously sympathetic treatment.[21] It is true that the sheer single mindedness of Martius' quest for absolute meaning has severed him from the only possible ground of meaning, leaving him without a name and without an identity in the end. But it is no less true that, with the expulsion of Martius and what he stands for, Rome has disintegrated into a babel of quarreling factions. The dialect of the marketplace now appears as the travesty of itself, with Menenius assuring the citizenry that Martius will "pay you for your voices" with wholesale destruction (IV.vi.137), and one of the tribunes, referring to the report that Martius has joined forces with Aufidius, expressing the wish that "half my wealth / Would buy this for a lie!" (IV.vi.160-1). And if Rome does in the end achieve a precarious unity which is signaled in the communal festivities surrounding Volumnia's triumphal return after her final conference with her son, it must not be forgotten that this unity is the direct consequence of a decision that Coriolanus has taken, one for which he personally assumes full responsibility. Whatever his defects, and they are without question monumental defects, it is arguable that even amid the ruins of his ambition Martius remains the noblest Roman of them all. 22. Because the ambiguity surrounding Martius' life attends its termination as well, both possible views of the significance that is to be attributed to the circumstances of his death may be equally valid. Coriolanus is the tragedy of a man who, in the name of a realm of absolute value he believes to be worthily exemplified only by himself, seeks first to manipulate the conventions by which selfhood is socially constituted, and then, when those conventions prove intractable to his efforts at total appropriation, resolves to dispense with them altogether. He begins by inciting others to become "The book of his good acts whence men have read / His fame unparallel'd, haply amplified" (V.ii.14-16), and arrives at the point of proclaiming, in a pun that is no less suggestive for being involuntary, his intention to act "As if a man were author of himself" (V.iii.36). The posthumous destiny that awaits him is that anticipated, once again in narratological terms, in the words of the conspirator who urges Aufidius to kill him before he can address the Volscians, so that "When he lies along, / After your way his tale pronounc'd shall bury / His reasons with his body" (V.v.57-9). The final irony of the play may be that the man who has lived his life as his own epic narrative is fated at the last to be absorbed into the narrative of another, to survive even in memory only as an interpretation of the tale he has not been granted sufficient time to relate. Or the final irony may be of another kind altogether, consisting in the possibility that Aufidius will honour his solemn undertaking that his victim "shall have a noble memory" (V.vi.153), that Martius will therefore achieve in the end precisely what he desired to the exclusion of all other imperatives, and that the man who has lived for a name and died for a name will after all go down in history by that name. Notes 1. The edition of Coriolanus cited here and in all subsequent references is that prepared for the Arden series by Philip Brockbank (1976; rpt. London: Routledge, 1990). 2. The interpenetrating issues of names, language, and identity in Coriolanus have been explored from various points of view by a number of critics, the insights of whom have influenced my own reading of the text. See for instance D. J. Gordon, "Name and Fame: Shakespeare's Coriolanus," in G. I. Duthie (ed.), Papers Mainly Shakespearian (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964); Norman Rabkin, "Coriolanus: The Tragedy of Politics," Shakespeare Quarterly 17 (1966), 195-212; James L. Calderwood, "Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words," in James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver (eds.), Essays in Shakespearean Criticism (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970); Carol M. Sicherman, "Coriolanus: The Failure of Words," ELH 39 (1972), 189-207; Stanley Fish, "How To Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech-Act Theory and Literary Criticism," in Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?--The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980); Stanley Cavell, "Coriolanus and Interpretations of Politics," in Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (1987; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); Marcella Quadri, Coriolanus: L'arma della parola (Pisa: ETS Editrice, 1990). 3. Brockbank, Introduction to the Arden Edition of Coriolanus, 41. 4. Brian Vickers makes very much the same point when he suggests that "the central experience of the play is of a man caught in the various social roles that we all hold, simultaneously, each with its own loyalties -- as son, husband, father, to the family; as soldier, to his comrades and his social rank; as political man to the party of his class -- a man caught in these roles and destroyed by the conflict between them." Vickers, Shakespeare: Coriolanus (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), 11. In the view of Vickers, for whom the issue of "the evaluation of action and value" is a crucial concern in this play (Ibid., 9), "Coriolanus is the centre of the play, the focal point towards which every pressure converges. For this reason his character is under constant discussion from all groups, and a mass of conflicting evaluations of him can soon be assembled. Yet it is not enough to say that Shakespeare intends there to be a final 'mystery' about him. Each evaluation tells us as much, if not more, about the person or group making it than about Coriolanus himself" (Ibid., 11). 5. Lars Engle characterizes these mechanisms as essentially economic in their operation, arguing that "the play presents Roman politics in economic terms, as the exchange of one value for another in a public consensual market, and Coriolanus sets himself and his nobility against precisely this aspect of his world." Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), chap. 8 (this quotation p. 171). Since there is a certain affinity between my reading of Coriolanus and that which Engle develops in this study, some partial clarification of my position with respect to his is perhaps called for. It will be clear from my comments that I am in substantial agreement with Engle's analysis of the market like character of those communal processes through which, in this play, values are denominated and identity constructed, and that I concur also with the view that Martius' pronouncements on the subject articulate conceptions of value and of individual worth which are deliberately opposed to such processes. I part company with Engle, however, in two important respects. The first is that my own preference is to approach these key issues by way of precisely that "master metaphor" that Engle, in the introduction to his study, deems to be less useful than that of economy, the metaphor that is of "conversation," or of the linguistic processes involved in conversation (Ibid. 4-6). It seems to me not only that Shakespeare's probable indebtedness to Plutarch's characterization of Martius as "altogether unfit for any mans conversation" (see note 13 below) would constitute a sufficient warrant for such an approach even if there existed no other, but that a focus on the linguistic metaphor in Coriolanus evidences a continuity of thematic concern between this play and others in which economic issues do not arise (unless we broaden the connotations of the economic metaphor to the point that it becomes meaninglessly vague). Secondly, I place considerably more emphasis than Engle does upon Martius' covert complicity with precisely those negotiatory strategies he defines himself against. One of the points I am concerned to make is that although Martius publicly contests the market mechanisms through which value is determined, he avails himself of the identical mechanisms in order to augment his own value. Such a point emerges intermittently in Engle's analysis as well, but it does not seem to me to be central to his argument. 6. For a general discussion of the "dilemma between linguistic scepticism and faith in the power of words" which Shakespeare projected into the tension between these opposed conceptions of language, see M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (1957; rpt. London: Routledge, 1988), chap. 8 (this quotation 179). 7. Calderwood in Calderwood and Toliver, op. cit., 550-51. 8. Among the more notable exceptions is Michael Taylor, who discusses the matter at length in his article "Playing the Man He Is: Role-Playing in Shakespeare's Coriolanus," Ariel 15:1 (January, 1984), 19-28. See also Anne Righter Barton, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962; rpt. Westport [Conn.]: Greenwood Press, 1977), 189-91, and Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Political Drama: the History Plays and the Roman Plays (1988; rpt. London: Routledge, 1992), 208-9. 9. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980; rpt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 234, 244. 10. One of the few critics who have recognized Martius' craving for praise for what it is Charles Mitchell, who argues that "though praise is cheap and many may receive it, Coriolanus would still fain have it, not only in order to prove and prolong his achievement, but also to immortalize it." "Coriolanus: Power as Honor," Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965), 199-226 (this quotation 208). The majority of commentators tend toward the opinion that Martius' rejection of praise is sincere, because to accept praise would imply an acknowledgment of the right of others to confer it. 11. The quantification of Martius' value as an "investment-object" in terms of the number of scars he has accumulated is discussed in Vickers, op. cit., 21. 12. The history of the philosophical debate concerning the relation between honour, fame and opinion is admirably summarized by Gordon in Duthie, op. cit., especially 45-9. 13. North's translation of "The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus" from Plutarch's Lives of Noble Grecians and Romanes is reprinted as an Appendix in the Arden Edition of Coriolanus cited above. This quotation is on 314. 14. Gordon in Duthie, op. cit., 50. 15. See Michael D. Bristol, "Lenten Butchery: Legitimation Crisis in Coriolanus," in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Conner (eds.), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (1987; rpt. London: Routledge, 1990). The concept of legitimation crisis is derived from Jurgen Habermas. 16. For a discussion of what is termed the "equation of words and food" in Coriolanus, see Cavell, op. cit., 163. 17. Fish, op. cit., 206. 18. It is perhaps worth noting that Martius earlier addresses his wife as "My gracious silence" (II.i.174), words which suggest that she in some sense belongs to a dimension of value that has nothing to do with those articulated by, or mediated through, language. Insofar as she speaks at all in the earlier part of the play, it is only in order express mild dissent from the martial values which Volumnia and her friend Valeria celebrate so enthusiastically, and to decline an invitation to leave her home in order to venture into the public world which is the arena of her husband's activities (I.iii). 19. Supposing that she is not dissimulating, this suggests that Volumnia's own value system has undergone a process of adjustment, since she has earlier asserted that if her son had died in battle "his good report should have been my son, I therein would have found issue" (I.iii.20-21). By the end of the play Volumnia is presumably in a position to recognize the shortcomings of her former perspective. The tragic dimension to Volumnia's character is examined by Christina Luckyj in her article "Volumnia's Silence," Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 31 (1991), 327-42. 20. It might be recalled that Aufidius has earlier addressed Martius as "thou Mars" (IV.v.119) and prevailed upon the other Volscians to treat him "as if he were son and heir to Mars" (IV.v.196-7). See the note concerning Martius' name in Brockbank, op. cit., 93. 21. Jan Kott has argued that it is precisely the ambiguity arising from this refusal to endorse any position that is responsible for the comparative unpopularity of this play. See Shakespeare Our Contemporary (trans. Boleslaw Taborski; 1965; rpt. London: Routledge, 1988), 141-67. I have already suggested that the value system implicit in Volumnia and Virgilia's appeal to Martius' paternal and familial instincts in V.iii. might be perceived in a generally positive light, but it occupies too marginal a position with respect to the other perspectives dramatized in this play to seriously counterbalance them. Works Cited * Barton, Anne Richter. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood P, 1977. * Bristol, Michael D. "Lenten Butchery: Legitimation Crisis in Coriolanus." Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. Eds. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Conner. London: Routledge, 1990. 207-24. * Brockbank, Philip. "Introduction" to the Arden Edition of Coriolanus. London: Routledge, 1990. * Calderwood, James L. "Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words." Essays in Shakespearean Criticism. Eds James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970. 548-59. * Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. * Engle, Lars. Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. * Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class?--The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1980. * Gordon, D. J. "Name and Fame: Shakespeare's Coriolanus." Papers Mainly Shakespearian. Ed. G. I. Duthie. London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964. 40-57. * Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. * Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. London: Routledge, 1988. * Leggatt, Alexander. Shakespeare's Political Drama: the History Plays and the Roman Plays. London: Routledge, 1992. * Luckyj, Christina. "Volumnia's Silence." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 31 (1991): 327-42. * Mahood, M. M. Shakespeare's Wordplay. London: Routledge, 1988. * Mitchell, Charles. "Coriolanus: Power as Honor." Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 199-226. * Quadri, Marcella. Coriolanus: L'arma della parola. Pisa: ETS Editrice, 1990. * Rabkin, Norman. "Coriolanus: The Tragedy of Politics." Shakespeare Quarterly 17 (1966): 195-212. * Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Ed. Philip Brockbank. Arden Edition. London: Routledge, 1990. * Sicherman, Carol M. "Coriolanus: The Failure of Words." English Literary History 39 (1972): 189-207. * Taylor, Michael. "Playing the Man He Is: Role-Playing in Shakespeare's Coriolanus." Ariel 15:1 (January, 1984): 19-28. * Vickers, Brian. Shakespeare: Coriolanus. London: Edward Arnold, 1976. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, and Martin Luther Steve Sohmer drsohmer@aol.com [Sohmer, Steve. "Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, and Martin Luther." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 5.1-51 .] 1. The recognition that Hamlet owes something to the life and theology of Martin Luther is hardly a novelty. Edmond Malone noted in his edition of 1821, In Shakespeare's time there was an university at Wittenberg, to which he has made Hamlet propose to return. The university of Wittenberg, as we learn from Lewkenor's Discourse on Universities, 1600, was founded in 1502, by Duke Frederick, the son of Ernestus Elector: "which since in this latter age is growen famous by reason of the controversies and disputations there handled by Martin Luther and his adherents." Luther and Melancthon, he adds, were both bred there (Malone 7: 200).[1] In our time, too, there have been many excursi on the connections between Hamlet, Luther, and the Reformation. In 1941, John Hankins interrogated Hamlet's biblical allusions, and the play's obsessive concern with repentance. Roy Battenhouse saw Old Hamlet's ghost as a spectre of old Catholicism, and Young Hamlet as his reluctant scourge. Fredson Bowers perceived Hamlet as heaven's instrument, both scourge and minister. Likewise did Sister Miriam Joseph. In The Question of Hamlet, Harry Levin explored Shakespeare's extended pun on the "diet" of worms. Georgia Christopher detected allusions to the Old Testament in "Hamlet's Devotional Reading." Roland Frye ambitiously contextualized the play in The Renaissance Hamlet, and examined its portrayal of Protestant penitence. In 1973, Dawn Amott produced an ingenious survey of correlations between Shakespeare's play and the life and theology of Luther. David Kaula produced a brief typological reading of the play's "apocalyptic" passages. Bridget Lyons looked at the typology of Ophelia, and Michael MacDonald and Maurice Quinlan at Ophelia's Catholicism. In 1989, Raymond Waddington published "Lutheran Hamlet," identifying Hamlet's "conversion" with Luther's sola fide, sola gratia. By contrast, Charles Cannon took the view that Hamlet was Shakespeare's sally at Calvinist dogma, while Lisa Gim traced Hamlet's faith in predestination to the Gospel of St. Matthew. Both Jerah Johnson and Stephen Greenblatt have examined the possible connection between the transubstantiation debate and Hamlet's "The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body, etc." In 1994, David Daniell explored the influence of the language of Tyndale's Luther-based Bible on Shakespeare's diction. In the same year our leading expert on the cultural impact of the Renaissance church calendar, R. Chris Hassel, Jr., examined the play's interrogation of original sin. Finally, one must acknowledge the indefatigable Linda K. Hoff, whose Hamlet's Choice provides a virtual line-by-line exegesis of the play before settling on an allegorical reading. The many recent scholarly publications which examine the theological dimensions of Hamlet suggest there is a wealth of religious significance yet to be mined from Shakespeare's play. The present essay takes the view that Shakespeare linked the principal events in Hamlet to particular holy days, and that the play's first audiences could identify these holy days from cues in the text. Performance Dates and Holy Days 2. Scholars have long been aware that Shakespeare's acting company consulted the church calendar when selecting performance dates for their repertoire. Occasionally, the company matched plays to dates with what appears to be a conscious sense of irony. For example, we know that Twelfth Night was performed before Queen Elizabeth on 2 February 1602, the Feast of Candlemas. This Catholic holy day celebrated the purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. But in Twelfth Night a virgin referred to as 'Madonna' attempts a seduction--an irony which could not have escaped an audience comprising the Virgin Queen and her court. This instance of an ironic wedding of play-with-date is not unique. The company performed Henry VIII, which deals with the circumstances leading to that monarch's break with Rome, on the feast of the papacy, St. Peter's Day, 29 June 1613. Dates in the secular calendar were apparently fair game, too. Thomas Platter's famous letter tells us that Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's play about the man who decreed the Julian calendar, was performed on 21 September 1599. This was the "official" date of an autumnal equinox which Londoners had observed on 11 September because the English were still living under Caesar's scientifically discredited Julian calendar, which was then ten days in error.[2] 3. Thanks to recent publications by Francois Laroque, Richard Wilson, David Wiles, and others, we are beginning to understand that the calendar also plays a defining, structural role within Shakespeare's plays. For example, Laroque argues that in Romeo and Juliet, "when the nurse refers to the Lammastide festival [1 August] to work out Juliet's age, the Elizabethan public would, as it counted back nine months, immediately arrive at the implied festival of Hallowe'en as the likely date of Juliet's conception" (205). Of course, Elizabethan poets routinely exploited the calendar as a structural device. Edmund Spenser's Shepheard's Calendar (1579) comprises twelve eclogues which follow the months of the year, and his Epithalamion (1595) digests the 24 hours of Midsummer Day. But Laroque argues that the built-in religious and cultural resonances of the calendar were more useful to a dramatist who must find "visual and gestural equivalents to the abstract categories of thought and speech" (203). According to Laroque, Shakespeare exploited "the various traditions and games of the major festivals [to] endow his plays with the extra semantic dimension of temporal symbolism" (203). 4. Elizabethan audiences had reason to be more alert to temporal symbolism than we are. Their dominant calendar was the church calendar, a consecrated state document which regulated the uniform observance of an authorized, precomposed national liturgy. The Book of Common Prayer begins with elaborate calendars which prescribe biblical readings not only for each of the Sundays and festival days of the year, but for every single day. So important are these calendars that the two great pulpit Bibles of the day, the Bishops (1568) and the King James (1611), include them in red letters just before Genesis. (Hassel, Church Year 8) In a manner of speaking the calendar was the invisible finger turning the pages of the liturgy. Along with the Bible, the Homilies, and the Book of Common Prayer, the Elizabethan church calendar constituted "a coerced formulary of worship intended for 'soul control'-- that is, to force the parson and people in a direction predetermined by their sovereign and Council . . . . The very life of the Elizabethan, his sense of the calendar year as well as his doctrinal and liturgical orientation, was inevitably touched by this dominant cultural force" (Hassel, Church Year 7-8). Correspondence, contracts, leases, liens, and tenancies--all were dated with reference to the church calendar. "In fact, so extensive is this influence that to many [Elizabethans] distinctions between secular and religious calendars would have been unnecessary" (Hassel, Church Year 10). 5. Like Scripture itself, the church calendar was revelatory. Its orderly succession of lunar- and solar-based holy days "revealed a profound logic of resonances and connections. The meaning of these may escape the modern mind, but their ancient significance was perfectly familiar" to Elizabethans (Laroque 202). "In the liturgy and in the [seasonal] celebrations which were its central movements . . . people found the key to the meaning and purpose of their lives" (Duffy 11). Laroque argues that Shakespeare infused the action in his plays with religious and cultural overtones by connecting scenes with particular holy days which were recognizable to Elizabethan audiences. Encountering Old Hamlet's Ghost 6. As the first scene of Hamlet unfolds, Shakespeare is at pains to provide a series of diminutive clues to the time and date on which the opening action takes place. As to the hour, Barnardo tells us "'Tis now struck twelve." It is after midnight, and deeply dark. Though we can see Barnardo and Francisco, they cannot see each other. They identify each other by sound of voice. Bar. Who's there? Fra. Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself. Bar. Long live the King! Fra. Barnardo? Bar. He. (1.1.1-5) [3] When Horatio and Marcellus enter, Francisco again identifies the arrivals not by sight but by voice: Fra. I think I hear them. Stand ho! Who is there? Hor. Friends to this ground. Mar. And liegemen to the Dane. (1.1.13-15) As Francisco makes his exit, Horatio and Marcellus still cannot see Barnardo. Marcellus must ask "who hath relieved you?" and Francisco must explain "Barnardo hath my place" (1.1.18-19). Marcellus then calls out "Holla, Barnardo!" (1.1.20). Even now Barnardo cannot see the arrivals and replies, "Say, what, is Horatio there?" (1.1.21). Such emphasis on overwhelming darkness suggests a moonless night. 7. It is also cold. Franciso has told us "'Tis bitter cold" (1.1.8). When Hamlet comes to the parapet in 1.4, he will tell us "The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold" (1.4.1). Successive frosty nights suggest a wintry season, perhaps the months September through March. We can be more precise about the season from clues which Shakespeare provides. For example, Marcellus reflects Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our saviour's birth is celebrated The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad, The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallowed and so gracious is the time. (1.1.163-9) That is, a ghost cannot be encountered during the season of Advent. So the dates on which Old Hamlet's ghost walks must fall during the cold days prior to 27 November, or after Christmas (Leduc and Baudot 47).[4] 8. Barnardo also makes reference to a celestial object: Last night of all, When yon same star that's westward from the pole Had made his course t' illume that part of heaven Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, The bell then beating one-- (1.1.38-42) The very offhandedness of Barnardo's reference--"yon same star that's westward from the pole"--suggests the star is conspicuous enough to be identified by Horatio and, perhaps, by members of the audience who were versed in astronomy or astrology.[5] There are a variety of reasons to conclude the star to which Barnardo refers is Deneb, a bright second magnitude star in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. Modern readers may be unfamiliar with this constellation. But English Christians knew it as "The Northern Cross" from the time of the Venerable Bede, and held it in awe. Because the Cross stands erect over Europe at 9 p.m. on the night before Christmas, the constellation was regarded as a divine portent of the crucifixion. In the night sky above London, the Northern Cross stands erect, and Deneb lies precisely "westward from the pole," circa 1 a.m. during the period 30 October - 10 November. The adjacent graphic [The western sky above London, England] depicts the western sky above London, England, at 1 a.m. on the night of 2 November 1601 (D=Deneb, V=Vega, P=Polaris).[6] No one who views the sky from the northern hemisphere in this season can fail to be struck by the prominence of this constellation. 9. The Northern Cross not only signifies the death and resurrection of Christ, but has an even more ancient association with a myth of recrossing the bourne separating the living and dead. Under its pagan designation, Cygnus, the constellation was dedicated to Orpheus--perhaps because of its close proximity to Lyra, the harp or cythera. The lyre was the instrument Orpheus used to enchant the creatures of the underworld in his quest for Euridice.[7] A third, nearby, and related constellation is Draco, the Great Northern Serpent. Orpheus' beloved Euridice died from the poisonous bite of a snake, as did Old Hamlet: "The serpent that did sting thy father's life Now wears his crown" (1.5.38-9). Together, the three constellations present an eternal tableau vivant of the archetypal myth of contact between living and dead. 10. As the Swan, Cygnus also has a mythological connection with a story of adulterous love. Zeus, king of the gods, desired Leda, wife of Tyndareus. In order to couple with her, Zeus transformed himself into a swan. One issue of this union was Helen, wife of Menelaus, who was abducted by Paris and became his adulterate concubine. Hamlet centers on the adultery of Gertrude and Claudius (1.5.42). The other issue of Zeus-Leda were twins Castor and Pollux. Hamlet is populated with numerous "twins."[8] In astrology, Cygnus is the patron of persons born with an "adaptable, intellectual, contemplative, and dreamy nature. It generates disorderly and unstable relationships" and "causes talents to mature late . . . ." (Sesti 324), qualities which read like a horoscope of Prince Hamlet. 11. The hypothesis that Barnardo alludes to Deneb and the encounters between sentinels and ghost take place during the period 30 October - 10 November, is supported by a definitive clue, i.e. the name Shakespeare gives to Horatio's companion: Marcellus. In the prevailing Catholic church calendar the feast of "Marcellus the Centurion" fell on 30 October. This Marcellus was a soldier who was converted to Christianity and subsequently refused to engage in violence. He was martyred in AD 298.[9] 12. To Shakespeare's series of seasonal, astronomical, and calendrical clues--1 a.m., a cold and perhaps moonless night, not in Advent, Deneb westward from the pole signifying the Northern Cross erect, and a namesake of Marcellus--we may add one other. As the action unfolds, we learn the ghost has already walked twice: "this dreaded sight twice seen of us" (1.1.28). In 1.2. Horatio tells us these appearances occurred on successive nights: Two nights together had these gentlemen, Marcellus and Barnardo, on their watch In the dead waste and middle of the night Been thus encounter'd . . . . (1.2.196-9) Horatio also tells us that the ghost appeared again on a third successive night: "And I with them the third night kept the watch" (1.2.208). On the fourth night the ghost appears again, and discourses with Hamlet (1.4.38ff). In this oblique way Shakespeare informs us that the ghost has walked on four nights in succession. It is no coincidence that the Feast of Marcellus precedes a sequence of successive holy days on which Elizabethans might well have expected unquiet souls to prowl the earth: Date Holy Day 30 October Marcellus the Centurion (feast) 31 October All Hallows' Eve 1 November All Saints' Day 2 November All Souls' Day[10] Each of the three holy days which follow the Feast of Marcellus is associated with the bond between the living and the dead. The vigil of All Hallows' Eve derived from the Celtic festival of Sambain, on which night the spirits of the dead were thought to return to visit their earthly homes. The first of November was All Saints' Day, an observance which dates from the 7th century and celebrated all dead saints known and unknown.[11] All Souls' Day observances remember baptized Christians believed to be in purgatory because they died without benefit of Extreme Unction.[12] Old Hamlet's ghost appears to speak of purgatory when he describes his circumstances: I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confin'd to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purg'd away. (1.5.9-13) He declares the cause of his punishment is that he died unshriven: Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd, No reck'ning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. (1.5.75-9) Of course, Shakespeare offers a further cue to his audience by providing Horatio's companion with the name "Marcellus." Likewise, the "inky cloak" (1.2.77) which Hamlet wears in 1.2 is appropriate All Souls' Day attire for a son mourning a father who died without benefit of Extreme Unction. Dating the Principal Composition of Hamlet 13. The identification of the four ghost-walking nights with 30 October - 2 November has intriguing implications for dating the principal composition of Hamlet. Scholars differ over whether the play should be referred to 1600 or 1601. All editors have noted the entry in the Stationers' Register of 26 July 1602 which refers to the play as having been "latelie acted" by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and there are passages commonly cited which appear to date the play's composition to 1601.[13] On the other hand, Gabriel Harvey's praise of Hamlet in his copy of Speght's Chaucer (1598) appears in association with a reference to the Earl of Essex being alive (he was executed in February 1601). But calendrical indicators may support the arguments for 1601 as the year of principal composition (or substantial revision) of the text. 14. The four-day sequence of holy days 30 October - 2 November did not, however, unfold sequentially in every year. When All Souls' Day fell on a Sunday, the sequence was suspended. Thus, in 1600, the other year suggested for the principal composition of Hamlet, 2 November was a Sunday, and the observance of All Souls' Day was postponed to Monday 3 November. That is, the church calendar for 1600 ran: Weekday Date Holy Day Thursday 30 October Marcellus Friday 31 October All Hallows' Eve Saturday 1 November All Saints' Day Sunday 2 November Monday 3 November All Souls' Day On the other hand, in 1601 the four feast days succeeded one another in an uninterrupted sequence: Weekday Date Holy Day Friday 31 October Marcellus Saturday 1 November All Hallows' Eve Sunday 2 November All Saints' Day Monday 3 November All Souls' Day This perhaps lends weight to the argument that the principal composition of Hamlet and the play's first performances took place in 1601.[14] The relation of the play to this sequence of holy days may also imply a more intense engagement with theological issues than has previously been supposed. Hamlet and the Purgatory Debate 15. The controversy surrounding the existence of Purgatory was certainly not new in 1601. It had been energetically argued since at least the time of Erasmus. The name most notably associated with this debate was that of Martin Luther. In Hamlet, Shakespeare takes pains to stress the Danish setting of the play (Sjogren). Denmark had been a Lutheran country since the accession of Christian III after the civil war of 1534-6.[15] Luther, we know, nailed his Ninety-Five Theses, which principally concern indulgences and Purgatory, to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on All Hallows' Eve, 31 October 1517. Shakespeare's Hamlet and Horatio were fellow-students in Wittenberg.[16] There are four references to Wittenberg in Hamlet, which are unique in the Shakespeare canon. It is, therefore, perhaps more than coincidence that 1517 and 1601 share a common calendar. In both 1517 and 1601 the four feasts fell on these same four weekdays: Year Weekday Date Holy Day 1517,1601 Friday 30 October Marcellus Saturday 31 October All Hallows' Eve Sunday 1 November All Saints' Day Monday 2 November All Souls' Day This concordance of weekdays and holy days is extremely rare. It occurred only four times in the 175 years 1517-1691, and only once during Shakespeare's working lifetime: in 1601.[17] This phenomenon raises a series of intriguing questions: Is the 1517-1601 correlation coincidence? Or did Shakespeare take this into account when he undertook the principal composition of Hamlet? Or, perhaps, did Shakespeare turn (or return) to the writing of Hamlet in 1601 because the calendar of holy days was the same as 1517? Before addressing this question, let us first ask whether Shakespeare could have known 1517 and 1601 shared a common calendar. While this knowledge may seem arcane to us, it was easily accessible to literate Elizabethans. 16. Neither 1517 nor 1601 is divisible by 4. Therefore, neither was a leap year. Both were common years of 365 days. The church calendar for any year can be described by cataloguing the dates and weekdays of the solar and lunar holy days. The solar holy days recur on the same dates each year, e.g. Christmas on 25 December. Therefore, the weekdays on which the solar holy days fall in any common year may be determined by finding the "Dominical Letter." This is the date of the first Sunday in January. Tables of Dominical Letters were provided by the popular almanacs. The Dominical letter for both 1517 and 1601 is D. That is, the first Sunday in both years fell on 4 January, and the solar-based holy days on the same weekday in both years. 17. To determine the calendar of lunar holy days for a year, it is necessary to identify the date of Easter Sunday from which all other lunar holy days are reckoned. Since the time of the Council of Nicea (A.D. 325), Easter has been observed in the West on the first Sunday following the Paschal moon, i.e. between 22 March and 25 April. To facilitate the dating of Easter, in A.D. 525 the monk Dionysius Exiguus published a table of "Golden" numbers which identify the moon's position in its nineteen-year cycle. To find a year's Golden number, add 1 to the year and divide by 19. The remainder is the Golden number. For 1517 and 1601 the computations are: o 1517 + 1 = 1518 / 19 = 79 and 17; Golden number = 17 o 1601 + 1 = 1602 / 19 = 84 and 6; Golden number = 6 With Dominical Letter "D" and Golden numbers 17 and 6 in hand, an Elizabethan would next consult the Easter tables in the popular almanacs. Here one would find that Easter Day fell on Sunday 12 April in both 1517 and 1601. Consequently, the calendars for 1517 and 1601 were identical. 18. As noted, scholars since Malone have detected the glimmer of a connection between Hamlet and Luther from Shakespeare's four allusions to Wittenberg (1.02.113, 119, 164, 168). But--even if Shakespeare knew that 1517 and 1601 had identical calendars--can we demonstrate that the playwright had Martin Luther in mind when he drew his audience's attention to the four ghostly days 30 October - 2 November 1601? Luther at Elsinore 19. Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on 31 October 1517, the day before All Saints' Day. Our analysis of the four ghost-walking days suggests Hamlet encounters his father's ghost on 2 November, the day after All Saints' Day. To reconcile this apparent anomaly, we need to know what information Shakespeare might have had about the life of Martin Luther. 20. In fact, there were several "lives" of Luther in print in Shakespeare's lifetime. The earliest in English appears in Sleidanes Commentaries by Johannes Phillipson, published in London in 1560 (STC 19848). Phillipson gives no date for the posting on the Castle Church, but only records that Luther sent "certen questions which he had lately set up at Wittenberg" to the Archbishop of Mainz on the first of November (Fol. B1). Another life of Luther appeared in Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563). Intriguingly, Foxe gets the date of Luther's posting wrong. He writes that Luther published certaine propositions concerninge indulgences, which are in the fyrst Tome of his worckes, and set them openly on the temple that joyneth to the castel of Wittenberg, the morrow after the feast of al sainctes, the yere 1517 (403). I have added italics to emphasize that Foxe erroneously states that Luther nailed up his Theses on 2 November, the day after All Saints' Day. In his preamble to his life of Luther, Foxe acknowledges his source: The laborious travayles, and the whole processe, and the constant preachinges of this worthy man [Luther], because they are sufficiently and at large in the history of Johannes Sleidane, and shall not neade to stande thereupon, but onely to runne over some briefe touchying, of his life and acttes, as they are briefly collected by Philippe Melanthon (402). Philip Melancthon (1497-1560) was Luther's close associate, sometime amanuensis, and successor as leader of Lutheranism. The obscure book to which Foxe refers (STC 1881), is a translation from Melancthon's life of Luther, by one Henry Bennet of Calais, entitled: A famous and godly history, contaynyng the Lyves and Actes of three renowned reformers of the Christian Church, Martine Luther, John Oeclampadius, and Huldericke Zuinglius. The declaracion of Martin Luthers faythe before the Emperoure Charles the fyft, and the illuste Estates of the Empyre of Germanye, wyth an Oration of hys death, all set forth in Latin by Phillip Melancthon, Wolfangus Faber, Capito. Simon Grincus and Oswald Miconus, Newly Englished by Henry Bennet Callesian.[18] On signature C2r of Bennet's translation, Melancthon recalls that Luther published certain proposicions of Indulgences, whych are in the fyrst Tome of hys woorkes, and fixed them openlye on the Temple that joyneth to the Castell of Wittenberg, the morrowe after the feast of all Saynctes, the yeare. 1517. I have added italics to emphasize that Bennet gives the wrong date for Luther nailing up his Ninety-Five Theses. Bennet writes that Luther nailed his Theses to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg on 2 November, the day after All Saints'. Bennet's source, Melancthon, had written edidit Propositiones de Indulgentiis, quae in primo Tomo monumentorum eius extant, & has publice Templo, quod Arci Vuitebergensi contiguum est, affixit pridie festi omnium Sanctorum, Anno 1517 (B2r). I have italicized pridie to emphasize Melancthon wrote the correct date, i.e. 31 October, the day before All Saints'. Bennet mistranslated pridie as after. Foxe parrots Bennet's error. 21. To suggest that Shakespeare set Hamlet's encounter with the Ghost on 2 November because his source(s) provided an erroneous date for the posting of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses implies an intimate negotiation between Shakespeare's knowledge of Luther and his creation of Prince Hamlet. This hypothesis may not be as far-fetched as it first appears. Commentators have already identified numerous parallels between Luther's conversion and Hamlet's (Waddington, Hassel, Hoff; Amott 69-74). Young Martin Luther suffered a long period of guilt and depression (anfechtung), and eventually found conversion through humble surrender to God and His preordained providence.[19] Hamlet undergoes a similar course of spiritual development, from lamenting his "too sullied flesh" to believing there's "a special providence in the fall of a sparrow." After returning to Denmark, Hamlet declares he was led by a "divinity that shapes our ends" to discover the perfidious commission of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet writes to Claudius that he has returned to Denmark "naked" (4.7.50). In this word which so puzzles the king and Laertes, Lutherans of the Elizabethan era and our own recognize an allusion to the keyword Luther employs to describe his conversion through humble surrender to God: nackt.[20] 22. Elizabethans of all religions would also have recognized another and perhaps more obvious parallel between Hamlet and Luther. In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet confronts a king who has married his dead brother's wife. It was widely remembered that Martin Luther had an exchange of rancorous pamphlets with a king who had married his dead brother's wife, Henry VIII.[21] Three Disputed Holy Days 23. In his preface to Hamlet, Harley Granville-Barker wrote that in performance the five-act play divides itself into three "movements" (1: 73). The first movement, which comprises two days, begins at the opening of the play, and ends after Hamlet's encounter with the ghost and his decision to put on an antic disposition (1.5). According to our calendrical analysis, these scenes unfold in the period 1-2 November. 24. The second movement begins with Polonius' drill of Reynaldo (2.1). From their conversation we cannot determine how long Laertes has been in Paris. But when Ophelia enters we recognize significant time has elapsed since Polonius enjoined her from sharing Hamlet's company: Pol. What, have you given him any hard words of late? Oph. No, my good lord, but as you did command I did repel his letters, and denied His access to me. (2.1.108-11)[22] The anxious Polonius determines immediately to report Hamlet's condition to Claudius and Gertrude: "Go we to the king" (2.1.118). On this day Cornelius and Voltemand return from their embassy to Norway. Rosencrantz and Guildernstern arrive, summoned to the court (perhaps from as far away as Wittenberg) on account of Hamlet's antic behavior. The action proceeds seamlessly through Claudius' and Gertrude's interview with Rosencrantz and Guildernstern, the ambassadors' report, Polonius' reading of Hamlet's Valentine to Ophelia, Polonius' conversation with Hamlet ("You're a fishmonger, etc."), the Prince's confrontation with Ophelia, his welcome to Rosencrantz and Guildernstern, and the arrival of the Players. All this takes place on a single day. As the players exit, Hamlet says, "We'll hear a play tomorrow" (2.2.524). On the following night "The Mousetrap" is performed, Hamlet confronts Gertrude in her closet and slays Polonius. Hamlet is dispatched to England before dawn, and passes the army of Fortinbras (4.4). This movement also comprises two days. 25. The third and final movement of the play begins at 4.5 with Gertrude's interview with mad Ophelia. Again through the agency of Ophelia we learn that significant time has elapsed since the death of Polonius: when Claudius observes Ophelia he demands, "How long hath she been thus?" (4.5.65). A moment later Laertes enters, having journeyed to Elsinore from France seeking revenge. Letters from Hamlet are delivered to Horatio and to Claudius. Claudius and Laertes fall to plotting Hamlet's murder, and Gertrude brings news of Ophelia's death. All this action unfolds continuously on a single day. We know that Ophelia's funeral is held on the following day because Claudius reassures Laertes with a reference to their plotting against Hamlet: "Strengthen your patience in our last night's speech. We'll put the matter to the present push" (5.1.284-5). Claudius and Laertes immediately set the murder plot in motion, and the action runs continuously through to the end of the play. 26. By this analysis each of Granville-Barker's three movements lasts for two days. Calendrical details in the text suggest Shakespeare ties these movements to three holy days which were sacred to Catholics but disdained by Reformation Protestants: All Souls', Candlemas, and Corpus Christi.[23] 1. All Souls' Day. 27. In the play's first movement we have noted that calendrical and astronomical details coupled with reports of a ghost walking on four successive nights would have drawn the attention of an Elizabethan audience to the interval 30 October - 2 November, and that All Souls' Day was devoted to masses for those who had died without benefit of Extreme Unction. Since Reformation theology denied the existence of Purgatory as having no basis in Scripture, Protestants disdained the holy day of All Souls. 28. I have argued that, for two reasons, the year 1601 is rich in associations with Hamlet. Firstly, because the four ghostly holy days occurred in succession in 1601. Secondly, because 1601 and the first Reformation year, 1517, shared a common calendar. Likewise, it may be significant that the succeeding years, 1602 and 1518, shared a common calendar. In 1602, Candlemas, Good Friday, and the first day of Corpus Christi observances all fell on the second day of the month: Candlemas 2 February Good Friday 2 April Corpus Christi 2-3 June[24] This concordance of holy days and dates is extremely rare. It occurred only twice in Shakespeare's working lifetime--in 1591 and 1602.[25] 2. Candlemas. 29. If the ghost-walking scenes of the play's first movement are identified with the four ghost-walking days 30 October-2 November, then the play's second movement--which includes "The Mousetrap," the closet scene with Gertrude, the murder of Polonius, the final appearance of Old Hamlet's ghost, and Claudius decision to banish Hamlet to England--must occur on 2 February, the holy day of Candlemas. We can deduce this date as follows. 30. Before "The Mousetrap" Hamlet and Ophelia banter about how long Old Hamlet has been dead. Hamlet says "my father died within 's two hours," and Ophelia responds, "Nay, 'tis twice two months, my lord" (3.2.118-9). Ophelia, who is the reliable reporter in this exchange, declares Old Hamlet dead four months on the night of "The Mousetrap." By our reckoning Horatio, Barnardo, and Franscico encounter the ghost on 1 November. They determine to report what they see to Hamlet, and their scene closes as Marcellus says: "Let's do't, I pray, and I this morning know Where we shall find him most conveniently" (1.1.156-7). Therefore, the scene at the court of Claudius (1.2) must take place on the following day, 2 November. Claudius opens this scene: "Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death The memory be green . . . ." (1.2.1-2). Old Hamlet's death is recent. But how recent? Hamlet will shortly tell us that Claudius and Gertrude were married within a month of Old Hamlet's death: But two months dead--nay not so much, not two-- . . . . . . . . . . A little month . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . within a month, Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married. O most wicked speed . . . . (1.2.138~155) Just as Hamlet condemns the brevity of Gertrude's period of mourning ("a beast that wants discourse of reason Would have mourned longer"), Claudius remonstrates against the protraction of Hamlet's grief: 'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father; But you must know your father lost a father; That father lost, lost his; and the survivor bound In filial obligation for some term To do obsequious sorrow. But to perserver In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness, 'tis unmanly grief, It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, An understanding simple and unschooled . . . . (1.2.87-97) When Claudius alludes to a "term" of "filial obligation," an Elizabethan audience would have recognized an allusion to the "Trental," or "month's mind." By the late middle ages, the "term" for which a survivor was "bound In filial obligation" to do obsequies had been conventionally fixed at thirty days. "Corporate intercession for the dead, being one of the most central aspects of late medieval religion, was highly regulated, highly formalized" (Duffy 368).[26] Extended obsequies were proscribed, and Claudius chides Hamlet in strong language. Hamlet's mourning beyond the Trental is "impious . . . unmanly . . . incorrect to heaven." When Claudius adds "unfortified" and "impatient" he comes close to pronouncing Hamlet's behavior heretical. Throughout Hamlet the dead are disposed of with perilous expediency. Old Hamlet's widow remarries before his Trental expires. Polonius is interred "hugger-mugger" (4.5.80). Ophelia is shoveled-under on the day following her questionable death. Claudius' commission had ordered Hamlet be put to death with "no leisure bated, No, not to stay the grinding of the axe" (5.2.24-5). Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are "put to sudden death, Not shriving-time allowed" (5.2.46-7). Like Old Hamlet, all who die in the play go to their graves without shrift. This hasty pace suggests that Old Hamlet's Trental has only just ended when Claudius and Gertrude importune the Prince to give over mourning. Since a Trental commenced on the day after an individual's death, Old Hamlet has been dead 31 days on 2 November. Therefore, Old Hamlet died on 2 October. 31. As noted above, by Ophelia's reckoning Old Hamlet has been dead four months on the night of "The Mousetrap." Four months after 2 October is 2 February, the date of Candlemas. The dialogue on Mousetrap-night is rife with parodic allusions to St. Luke's account of the Presentation and Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Luke 2:22-39), the Gospel for Candlemas. "Lights" are called for. A mother is purified. A small animal ("A rat, a rat") is sacrificed. Most important, a spirit appears whose "form and cause conjoined, preaching to stones, Would make them capable"--a brazen allusion to Christ's admonishment of the Pharisees on Palm Sunday: "And He answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these [my adherents] should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out" (Luke 19:40). Luther rejected the intercession of saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Candlemas was the second major Catholic holy day disdained by Reformation Protestants.[27] 3. Corpus Christi. 32. Hamlet's insistence that his father has been dead "two hours" is significant for identifying the holy day associated with the third and climactic movement of the play. When Hamlet speaks these words (ca. line 2000), an Elizabethan audience would have been approximately two hours into the performance of the play.[28] The striking clock of St. Mary Overy in Southwark could certainly have been heard within the playhouse, and the audience would have been sensible to the time elapsed since the performance had begun. If Hamlet began circa 2 p.m. as Thomas Platter tells us Julius Caesar did, the cathedral's tower clock would have just struck four times. A Globe audience must have heard the clock strike, and would have recognized Shakespeare's device.[29] Hamlet's allusion to "two hours," coupled with Ophelia's allusion to four months, conveys that in the dramatic time of Hamlet two hours = four months. The balance of the play, which runs another two hours (ca. 1900 lines), spans another four-month interval, which takes us from 2 February to 2 June. As noted above, in 1602 the two- day festival of Corpus Christi was held 2-3 June. 33. This calendrical clue to Corpus Christi is supported by numerous details in the playtext. On the first of the two days which close the play, Ophelia performs her mad scene with songs and herbs, Laertes arrives at the door of Elsinore at the head of a mob, and Ophelia's death is announced. On the second day, Ophelia is buried, Claudius and Laertes contrive an elaborate murder-plot, and Hamlet's swordplay with Laertes and its consequences concludes the action. Corpus Christi celebrated the "real presence" of Christ in the Eucharist. From 4.5 through the end of the play, Shakespeare contrives a series of parodies of the principal rituals of the feast. There are two processions, one of the temporality and another of the spirituality, i.e. the mob of commoners following Laertes, and the priest leading the corpse of Ophelia. A pageant or play is staged in the form of the rigged fencing match. The final catastrophe centers on what Henry VIII defended as "the Altare sacrament," i.e. the mystery of transubstantiation parodied through the onixe/union in the lethal chalice (4.7.135). Not incidentally, the defeat of the elaborate Claudius-Laertes murder plot by Hamlet's faith in providence would have been unmistakable to an Elizabethan audience as a triumph of God's predestination over the planning and plotting of unrighteous men. 34. As noted, these three holy days--All Souls', Candlemas, and Corpus Christi--had a vital connection with the Reformation. These were among the most sacred holy days in the Catholic calendar, but had been discarded by Luther and the Protestants. Just as the four ghost-walking days fell in sequence 30 October - 2 November in the years 1517 and 1601, Candlemas fell on 2 February and Corpus Christi on 2/3 June in both 1518 and 1602.[30] By this reckoning, the visit of "The Dead Man," Lamord ("two months since" 4.7.80) fell on 2 April, which in 1602 was the anniversary of the death of Christ, Good Friday.[31] Testing the Calendrical Design of Hamlet 35. Can we test whether this analysis of the calendrical design of Hamlet is valid, and whether Luther and the Reformation are closely linked to the play? One way might be to examine the event which was the sine qua non of the drama in Hamlet--that is, the marriage of Old Hamlet to Gertrude. We might ask: is the date of the Old Hamlet-Gertrude marriage recoverable from internal evidence in the play? And, if it were, would it prove relevant to Luther? 36. We are not told anything about the date of the Old Hamlet-Gertrude marriage. However, in "The Mousetrap" Shakespeare provides imagunculae of Old Hamlet and Gertrude, and alludes to the date of the wedding of these puppets, the Player King and Queen. Full thirty times hath Phoebus' cart gone round Neptune's salt wash and Tellus' orbed ground, And thirty dozen moons with borrowed sheen About the world have times twelve thirties been Since love our hearts and Hymen did our hands Unite commutual in most sacred bands. (3.2.150-55) The repetitive cadence of this speech--"thirty times . . . thirty dozen moons . . . twelve thirties"--makes it curiously memorable.[32] Its arithmetic tells us that these imagunculae of Old Hamlet and Gertrude were married one solar month of thirty days plus thirty synodic years on the day of the murder.[33] The many obvious parallels between the Player King-and-Queen and Old Hamlet-Gertrude might have tempted Elizabethan auditors to compute the length of this marriage as follows. 37. "Full thirty times hath Phoebus' cart gone round" describes 30 solar days. "And thirty dozen moons with borrowed sheen About the world have twelve times thirties been" describes 360 synodic months. The synodic period of the moon equals 29 days, 12 hours, and 44 minutes. 360 X 29.5 days = 10620 days To account for the 44 minutes, add: 360 X 44 minutes = 15840 minutes 15840 minutes / 60 per hour = 264 hours 264 hours / 24 per day = 11 days Which yields: 10620 days + 11 days = 10631 days To this we must add the 30 solar days: 10631 days + 30 days = 10661 According to the Player King's speech, on the day of his murder 10661 days have elapsed since the wedding. If this precisely determines the duration of the Old Hamlet-Gertrude wedding, the computation allows us to answer a question which has haunted scholars for centuries and is, perhaps, the greatest mystery in Shakespeare: why didn't young Hamlet succeed to the throne immediately on his father's death?[34] Calculating Hamlet's Nativity 38. On the vigil of Corpus Christi, 2 June, Hamlet returns to the precincts of Elsinore and engages a Clown in badinage. Ham. How long hast thou been a gravemaker? Clow. Of all the days I' th' year I came to 't that day that our last King Hamlet o'ercame Fortinbras. Ham. How long is that since? Clow. Cannot you tell that? Every fool can tell that. It was the very day that young Hamlet was born . . . . I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years. (5.1.138-57)[35] According to the Clown, Hamlet is thirty (solar) years old on the day of this encounter. Hamlet has already remarked "How absolute the knave is!" (5.1.130), and Dowden insists "we must accept dates so carefully determined" (195). Dover Wilson declares the passage "fixes the age of Hamlet in so pointed a fashion that . . . Shakespeare clearly attached importance to it" (236). Shakespeare's device becomes transparent when we remember that Old Hamlet and Gertrude had been married 29 years plus 69 days when he died on 2 October of the prior year. The interval from Old Hamlet's death on 2 October to young Hamlet's encounter with the Clown on 2 June is eight months (243 days). Consequently, Old Hamlet and Gertrude would have been married 29 years plus 312 days when Hamlet encounters the Clown. But if Hamlet is 30 years old, he must have been born at least 29 years plus 365 days before his encounter with the Clown. Therefore, Hamlet must have been born at least 53 days before the Old Hamlet - Gertrude wedding. 39. Now we understand why Shakespeare created a grave-digging Clown who is "absolute." Hamlet is illegitimate--which explains why he did not succeed to the throne on his father's death.[36] Testing Hamlet's Illegitimacy 40. Can Hamlet's awareness of his illegitimacy be supported by internal evidence in the playtext? If we accept that the Player King's speech comprises some of the "dozen or sixteen lines" (2.2.529) Hamlet proposed to interpolate in the existing revenge play perhaps no further support is required. On the other hand, Hamlet may also refer to his illicit conception and pre-marital birth as he stands with Horatio and Marcellus awaiting the appearance of the Ghost in Act One. At 1.4.7 the quiet night is disturbed by the trumpets and ordnance of the king's rouse. Horatio asks, "Is it a custom?" and Hamlet responds Ay marry is't, But to my mind, though I am native here And to the manner born, it is a custom More honoured in the breach than the observance. (1.4.13-16) Harold Jenkins' note on "to the manner born" is useful: "Not merely familiar with the custom from birth, but committed to it by birth. It is part of his heritage" (208, 15n.). In Q1 and the Folio Hamlet's speech ends here and "observance" is the Ghost's cue to enter. But in Q2, Hamlet continues with a speech which picks up the twinned themes of heritage and heredity: So oft it chaunces in particuler men, As in their birth wherein they are not guilty, (Since nature cannot choose his origin) By the ore-grow'th of some complextion Oft breaking downe the pales and forts of reason, Or by some habit, that too much ore-leavens The form of plausive manners, that these men Carrying I say the stamp of one defect Being Natures livery, or Fortunes starre, His vertues els be they as pure as grace, As infinite as man may undergoe, Shall in the generall censure take corruption From that particuler fault: the dram of eale Doth all the noble substance of a doubt To his own scandle. (1.4.17-38) In these sixteen lines Hamlet enumerates three ways in which a man's virtue may be corrupted: by accident of birth; by an imbalance of "humours"; by the practice of an offensive habit. Accident of birth is morally the most intriguing mode since the man is "not guilty." A child "cannot choose" his parentage or the circumstances of his nativity. But Hamlet believes the "vicious mole of nature" so pollutes its victim with "the stamp of one defect, Being Nature's livery" that, were all his other virtues "pure as grace," notwithstanding he "shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault." 41. When Shakespeare wrote these lines the word "vicious" had not achieved its savage modern sense. Rather, it was closely related to the notion of vice. When applied to habit and behavior, the word carried the sense of "vice; contrary to moral principles; depraved, immoral, bad" (OED 3625). Applied to persons, the word meant "addicted to vice or immorality; of depraved habits; profligate, wicked." The word "mole" had two principal meanings: a "spot or blemish on the human skin . . . a fault," or the familiar small mammal (OED 1832). In the latter sense it might be applied to persons who exhibited mole-like qualities, i.e. "one whose (physical or mental) vision is defective" or "one who works in darkness." 42. As to "the stamp of one defect," this figure is related to coining and coinage. Shakespeare routinely applies the term "stamp" to equate counterfeiting with the begetting of illegitimate children, as in Measure for Measure: Ha, fie, these filthy vices! It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stolen A man already made, as to remit Their saucy sweetness that do coin God's image In stamps that are forbid. (2.4.42-46) Likewise in Titus Andronicus, when the Nurse presents Tamora's illegitimate child to Aaron: "The Empress sends it thee, thy stamp, thy seal, And bids thee christen it with thy dagger's point" (4.2.69-70). There is also a series of echoes of Hamlet in Posthumus' rant: We are bastards all, And that most venerable man which I Did call my father was I know not where When I was stamped. Some coiner with his tools Made me a counterfeit; yet my mother seemed The Dian of that time: so doth my wife The nonpareil of this. O vengeance, vengeance! (2.5.2-8) In Hamlet's mind this counterfeit status--the unshirkable livery of bastardy-- confounds a man's other virtues and condemns him to "the general censure," which most editors parse as public odium but may also refer to the Last Judgement. 43. Hamlet's speech concludes with what Jenkins calls "the most famous crux in Shakespeare" (449): . . . the dram of eale Doth all the noble substance of a doubt To his own scandale. (1.4.36-38) No commentator has satisfactorily defined "eale," and "of a doubt" is suspect. But Jenkins conjectures Shakespeare wrote: The dram of evil Doth all the noble substance often dout To his own scandal. "Dout" means "put out, extinguish." Jenkins argues that "the general sense is clear: the small amount of evil in some way gets the better of 'the noble substance'" (451). 44. Shakespeare's diction becomes unambiguous if we remember these words are the summation of Hamlet's response to Horatio's question about the king's rouse. The theme of Hamlet's speech is wine and excessive drinking, and its language is drawn from associated jargon. "Dram" is a word Shakespeare uses elsewhere in both its senses, as a measure of avoirdupois weight (1/8 ounce) and a measure of fluid (1/8 fluid ounce).[37] He also quibbles with the word in an ethical sense dram=scruple=compunction.[38] At the close of Hamlet's speech Shakespeare is using the word "dram" in the sense of a fluid measure and quibbling on an unspoken word: "bastard."[39] In addition to this word's familiar meaning of "born out of wedlock, illegitimate," the homonym "bastarde" described a "sweet kind of Spanish wine, resembling muscadel in flavour; sometimes any kind of sweetened wine" (OED 174).[40] Shakespeare uses the word in this sense in I Henry IV: "Score a pint of bastard[e] in the Half-moon" (2.4.30).[41] 45. These bastarde sweetened or fortified wines--in the Elizabethan era the list included sherries, ports, muscatels and numerous other defunct variants--differ from "pure" vintages by what the French call dosage.[42] That is, the natural wine--the French term is nature, the German naturwein--is adulterated by the addition of a dollop of foreign substance. In the vinification of Falstaff's favorite, sack (modern: sherry), there are two intrusions into the fermentation and aging process. The first is flor--a mold which is peculiar to the Xeres region of Spain which gives the wine its nutlike flavor. Secondly, sherries are aged (and dated) by the solera method. Small quantities of older sherries are added to young wines. The introduction of a few drams of older wine alters the new wine's character by a remarkable degree--a phenomenon well-known to sherry vintners and drinkers in Shakespeare's time. In an oenological sense then, the dosage procedure adulterates the natural wine by the intrusion of a small quantity of foreign fluid. Wine adulterated in this way forfeits its varietal appellation. It loses its claim to a "name"--and is left a nameless "bastard(e)." Viewed in this context, Hamlet's "dram of eale" is recognizable as a metaphor for semen.[43] 46. As to the etymology of the mysterious "eale," the word may be a variant derived from "ealdren," an obsolete dialectical form of "elder." "Elder" has two principal meanings. The name of the familiar elder tree, Sambucus nigra, derives from the Old English word "ellfrn," itself derived from an unknown Old Norse word but related to the Danish "hyld" or "hyldetrf" (OED on CD-ROM elder n1). The elder is typically a low tree or shrub, and its young branches are remarkable for their abundance of pith. The qualities of elder wood were well-known to Shakespeare, who refers to its soft, removable pith in Henry V,[44] and to the tradition that it was the tree upon which Judas was hanged in Love's Labour's Lost.[45] We may detect a glance at this quality of the elder tree in Hamlet's "indeede it takes From our atchievements, though perform'd at height The pith and marrow of our attribute" (1.4.20-22). 47. In the context of Hamlet's speech about excessive drinking, three attributes of the elder are significant. First, the tree produces the elderberry, from which a "wine" has been fermented in England since ancient times. Owing to the low sugar content of elderberries, the juice was "bastardized" with a quantity of sugar or honey as an aid to fermentation. Second, the English vernacular name for the elder is "Danewort," from the tradition that the plant sprang up in places where Danes slaughtered Englishmen or vice-versa.[46] Third, the unfermented juice of the elderberry was employed in English folk medicine as a diuretic from at least medieval times.[47] That is, the elderberry is unique in that its juice can be associated not only with the consumption of fluid but with effluence.[48] 48. The second meaning of "elder" which is relevant to the "dram of eale" is the comparative of "old," i.e. "one who has lived longer." The epithets "bastard eigne" and "bastard elder" were employed interchangeably in Elizabethan legal documents to describe "the bastard son of a man who afterwards marries the mother" by whom he begets succeeding issue (OED on CD- ROM bastard n1a).[49] Legally, Hamlet would become a "bastard eigne" were a sibling to be born in wedlock to Claudius and Gertrude. A law book of 1536 outlines the prevailing English practice: A man hath a sonne of a woman before marriage, that is called a bastarde, and unlawful. And after he marrieth the mother of the bastarde, and they have another sonne, the seconde sonne is called Mulier, that is to say lawfull, and shall be heire to his father; but that other cannot bee heire to any man, because it was not knowen for certaine in the judgement of the law who was his father, and for that cause is said to bee no mans sonne or the sonne of the people, and so without father, according to these old beliefs. (Rastell 131-2) Hamlet may have been legitimated by the subsequent marriage of his parents. But, were the Claudius-Gertrude marriage to produce legitimate issue, that child would take precedence in the succession and Hamlet would be disenfranchised from the crown.[50] 49. "Eale" may be a lost tipplers' colloquialism, or an Elizabethan nonce-word for an alcoholic drink derived from "ealdern." If so, the tiny and inscrutable "eale" is pregnant with a remarkable concordance of ideas appropriate to Hamlet and his circumstances: wine, bastard(e), Danes, diuretic qualities, effluence of fluid, illegitimate conception, a first-born son whose stigma of bastardy was incompletely moderated by the subsequent marriage of his parents, a bastard eigne's lost entitlements. Hamlet's Illegitimacy, and Luther's 50. Hamlet's illegitimacy provides another connection between Shakespeare's prince and Martin Luther. Controversy still surrounds the date of Luther's birth. His leading Catholic opponent, Johannes Cochlaeus (Johannes Dobeneck, 1479- 1552), wrote that Luther was a bastard conceived when his mother copulated with the Devil in a bath-house (Friedensburg v.1.541, 14-18).[51] In fact, Luther's mother swore that she could remember the date of Martin's birth but not the year.[52] Melancthon writes: I have some tyme enquired of her [Margarethe Luther] at what time her sonne was borne: she answered, that she remembred the houre and the day of his nativity but of ye yeare she was ignoraunt. She affirmed he was borne the x [10th] day of November at night, about a leven of the clocke. And ye cause why he was called Martin, was for that the morow after he received Baptisme, was S. Martins day. But his brother James, an honest and upryght man, said: the whole famely held opinion, he was borne the yere after the Nativity, 1483. (Bennet B2r-v) The date of Luther's parents' marriage is unknown. What is known is that the couple moved house twice in the years 1482-4, first from Eisenach to Eisleben, and thence to Mansfield. A young couple occupying three residences in as many years is remarkable for that era. These movings of house--and the necessity for Luther's mother to conceal the year of his birth--would be understandable if Martin had been conceived out of wedlock. The "official" year of Luther's birth is given as 1483 or 1484. But an earlier birthdate, say 1482, would resolve "definite difficulties in the chronology of Luther's youth, such as his four-year period of schooling in Eisenach, for which it is difficult [i.e. impossible] to account" if a birthdate in 1483 or 1484 is accepted (Brecht 1). Luther's father, George, began his career as a miner. This explains Hamlet's epithet for his own father's ghost: "Well said, old mole. Canst work i'th' earth so fast? A worthy pioner" (1.5.170-1). In Shakespeare's parlance, the term "pioner" or "pioneer" signified a miner. In Conclusion 51. Since 1941--and particularly since 1973--there has been a renewal of interest in reading Shakespeare's Hamlet as a Reformation document. If the calendrical design which this essay alleges is integral to Shakespeare's structure for the play's three "movements," scholars may now address the theological dimensions of the text in a broader context. Each of the scholarly works remembered at the outset of this essay has ingeniously interrogated a particular passage or character or theme in Hamlet for its theological content. In a manner akin to literary archaeology, each scholar has described an individual tile which is part of a larger mosaic. Recognizing the calendrical framework of Shakespeare's Hamlet may provide a matrix in which these tiles of meaning find their places, and in time reveal the playwright's grand design. Notes For D.F. McKenzie. 1. Malone appends two of his predecessors' speculations as to how Shakespeare might have become familiar with Wittenberg. "Our author may have derived his knowledge of this famous university from The Life of Iacke Wilton, 1594, or The Hystory of Doctor Faustus, of whom the second report (printed in the same year) is said to be 'written by an English gentleman, student at Wittenberg, an University of Germany in Saxony.' --Ritson." Boswell speculated Shakespeare might have learned about Wittenberg "from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, or a multitude of other publications of that period." 2. Pope Gregory XIII had given the Catholic world a reformed calendar in 1582. The English stubbornly continued to live by the scientifically discredited Julian calendar until Lord Chesterfield's reform in 1751. 3. Text and lineation after Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. London: Arden-Metheun, 1987. 4. Advent marks the beginning of the ecclesiastical year, and engrosses the four Sundays prior to Christmas. Advent can begin no earlier than 27 November and no later than 3 December. However, in medieval France Advent began on the Feast of St. Martin (11 November), and encompassed forty days and six Sundays. 5. The possibility that Bernardo's "star" is a planet is discussed below in Note 14. 6. Prepared by the author from "Distant Suns" software (c) Virtual Reality Laboratories (1991-2) on an ALR 2X100Mhz. 7. Alpha Lyrae--Vega--the fifth brightest star in all the sky is visible from London and northern Europe year-round. However, at 1 a.m. during the period 30 October - 10 November, Vega was visible from London only a few degrees above the northern horizon, which does not sort with the description "westward from the pole." 8. The play's "twinned" males include: Old Hamlet with Old Fortinbras; Young Hamlet with Young Fortinbras; the "impotent" Old Norway with the childless Claudius; Hamlet and "my brother" Laertes (5.2.189); Cornelius with Voltemand; Rosencrantz with Guildernstern. 9. Marcellus is not the only namesake of a early convert found in Hamlet. In 1.2, Shakespeare introduces a character named Cornelius. In Acts 10, St. Luke tells the story of the conversion of a Roman centurion named Cornelius. This persuaded Peter that God intended Christianity to be preached to the Gentiles. Shakespeare pairs his Cornelius with another character named Voltemand, i.e. the "turned" or "changed man." 10. An unspoken pun may be encoded here. Shakespeare's sentinel, Marcellus, holds the vigil on the Catholic church's vigil of Marcellus. Each holy day began on the previous evening with Vespers. The "vigil" of Marcellus began at dusk on 29 October, of All Hallows' on 30 October, of All Saints' on 31 October, and of All Souls' on 1 November. This may explain the uncertainty about the time of the Ghost's appearance to Hamlet on the fourth night, i.e. whether Horatio is correct that "It lacks of twelve" or Marcellus is correct that "No, it is struck" (1.4.4-5). Hamlet has said he would arrive on the platform "'twixt eleven and twelve" (1.2.254). Given his eagerness to see the Ghost it's hard to believe he would arrive behind his time. In order to make its fourth appearance on All Souls' Day, the Ghost would have to appear before midnight. 11. November was commonly regarded by Elizabethans as the month of the dead. In The Shepheardes Calendar, Spenser's November eclogue characterizes the month as this "sullen season." Dennis Kay has noted: "November, the eleventh month, is traditionally associated with the commemoration of the dead. Further, the connection of the number eleven with mourning goes back to Sparta in the time of Lykourgos, when eleven days became established as the period of mourning . . . . In accordance with these ideas, presumably, Colin's elegy [in Spenser] consists of eleven stanzas of lament . . . . a meaning apparently accepted by Thenot, whose final words are 'Up Colin up, enough thou mourned hast . . . .'" (Kay 30, 36-7). [Spelling modernized.] 12. This holy day was established in the time of Isidore of Seville (d.636). 13. Rosencrantz' allusion to "the late innovation" (2.2.331) is considered by some to refer to the attempted Essex putsch, and the reference to "eyrie of children, little eyases" (2.2.337) to the Children of the Chapel who began to act at the Blackfriars in late 1600. 14. 2 November 1601 was a moonless night, both in London and at Elsinore. The planets Mars, Neptune, Venus, and Jupiter were east not west of Polaris. In any case, Barnardo speaks of a time when "no planet strikes," suggesting he knows the difference between a star and a planet. 15. The question of Denmark's "elective" monarchy is considered in Note 34. 16. As were Rosencrantz and Guildernstern, whose namesakes were found among the Wittenberg student body in the decade 1586-95. 17. And again in 1612, after he had retired to Stratford. 18. Printed by John (Sampson) Awdelie or Awdley (d.1575; Plomer 23). In the same year, Awdley printed George North's The Description of Swedland, Gotland, and Finland, etc. (STC 18662). In the prior year, Awdley had printed two editions of The Epistles and Gospels in Englishe (STC 2980.2, .4). 19. A selection of useful biographies of Luther follows. Of the historical: Heiko A. Oberman, Luther (New York: Doubleday, 1989). Of the psychological: Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther (New York: Norton, 1982). Of the theological: David C. Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986). 20. One must not ignore the numerous parallels between Horatio and Melancthon. Both were Renaissance men with antique names (Melancthon="black earth" in Greek). Both were at Wittenberg. Luther was critical of Melancthon's philosophical approach to religion, just as Hamlet stresses the limits of Horatio's "philosophy." Hamlet asks Horatio to write his "history." Melancthon says he writes his life of Luther because "hys [Luther's] fatal day hath prevented the publicacion of such an history" as Luther had promised to write of himself. Hamlet knows a lot about flutes ("recorders"), and Luther was an excellent flautist. Horatio's name comprises both "ora = pray" and "ratio = reason." Melancthon was principally known for his logical confession of the Lutheran faith in Loci Communes, which ran through several editions beginning in 1521. 21. In 1520, Luther published Of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, a polemic against the pope and Roman rite, which denied five of the seven sacraments. Luther argued that the Scriptures provided for two sacraments only: baptism, and the Lord's Supper (communion). Luther deplored and dismissed the other five so-called sacraments (marriage, confirmation, ordination, penance, and extreme unction) as man-made "custom." In response, and with an eye to currying favor with the pope, Henry VIII published his Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus M. Lutherum (1521, STC 13078), defending the sanctity of all seven Catholic sacraments. In 1522, Luther replied to Henry with a vitriolic pamphlet published in both Latin and German, Contra Henricum Regem Angliae. Luther vilified Henry, repeatedly deplored "custom," and affirmed only Scripture could designate sacraments. This broadside of Luther's is so scurrilous that it went unpublished in English until 1928, and does not appear in the English edition of Luther's Werke. (See S.E. Buchanan, Martin Luther's reply to Henry VIII, etc [New York, 1928].) Among the many linguistic details in Luther's reposte which find correlatives in Hamlet, "custom" is one of the most intriguing. Melancthon-Bennet-Foxe emphasized Luther's disdain for "custom" as superstition, folly, and fashion: "Nevertheles it is certain, ther were seedes of supersticion in the tyme of the Fathers and auncient Doctors, & therefore S. Austen ordeyned some thyng of vowes, although he wrote not therof so straungely as other: for both ye best some tymes shal be spotted wyth the blemysh of the follyes that reygne in theyr age. For as naturally we love our Country, so fondly we favour the present fashions, wherin we be trained & educated. And very wel alludeth Euripides to thys. 'What cusomtes we in tender youth by Natures love receave: The same we love & lyke alwayes, and lothe our lust to leave'" (Melanchton C.8v-D1r). The word "custom" appears more frequently in Hamlet than in any other Shakespeare play. (M. Spevack, The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare [Hildesheim: Olms, 1969, 259].) Looking at each appearance of the word, one sees that "custom" appears in conjunction with references to holy days, or parodies of religious rituals, e.g. when Hamlet seeks to "purify" Gertrude. Though Luther's Contra Henricum was not published in English until our century, it was available to Shakespeare in Latin. When Henry VIII and Luther exchanged salvos in 1525, Henry published a book containing both letters, Literarum, quibus invictissimus princeps, Henricus octavus, respondit, ad quandam epistolam M. Lutheri, etc., (1526, STC 13084). The same was published two years later in English: Answere unto a Certaine Letter of Martyn Luther, etc., London, 1528. Tantalizing linguistic details in these pamphlets will suggest to scholars that Shakespeare was familiar with at least the first exchange between Luther and the king. Rarities such as "videlicet" and "perpend" appear in Melancthon and Bennet, as they do in Hamlet. 22. This is not the first time Ophelia has reported Hamlet's advances to Polonius. After her father's warning to her on the day of Laertes' departure (1.3), Ophelia has reported Hamlet's "solicitings, As they fell out by time, by means, and place" (2.2.125-6). Again, this suggests the passage of a substantial period of time. 23. Just as 1517 and 1601 shared a common calendar, so did 1518 and 1602. 24. Corpus Christi, nominally the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, was celebrated with processions and pageants staged by local "Corpus Christi Guilds." Because of the elaboration of the spectacles over time and the development of "Mystery Play" cycles, in some cities the feasting began as much as three days prior to the holy day. The feast of Corpus Christi fell on 3 June 1602 (Hutton 59). 25. And fewer than 40 times in the 1600 years since the birth of Christ. 26. For a fuller discussion of the Trental, month's mind, and Purgatory, see Duffy 338-76. 27. Hamlet's sea-voyage and his encounter with the pirates takes place on 3 February, feast of the patron saint of Denmark, St. Anskar. 28. I am indebted to M.A. McGrail for this observation. 29. Hamlet's "dead two hours" is a subtler form of the kind of self-referential moment the playwright injected into Julius Caesar (1599) when Cassius asked "How many Ages hence Shall this our lofty Scene be acted over, In State unborne, and Accents yet unknowne?" (1326-8). Likewise, Cassius' "The clocke hath striken three" occurs at line 825 in Julius Caesar, i.e. approximately one hour into the performance which began circa 2 p.m.. 30. Candlemas had a particularly poignant connotation for Shakespeare. His son, Hamnet, was christened on Candlemas 2 February 1585. 31. Henry VIII's brother, Arthur, died on 2 April 1502. The 100th anniversary of his death may be remembered in Lamord's visit to Elsinore. There can hardly be any question that the decisive event in English religious history 1500-1600 was the death of Arthur and the subsequent wedding of Henry VIII to Arthur's widow, the Catholic Catherine of Aragon. 32. Hamlet asks the Player King, "You could, for a need, study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert in't [the play], could you not?" (2.2.528-30). Hamlet would be painfully aware of the date of his parents marriage, and it may be that this speech is his interjection. Its vocabulary certainly sorts well with Hamlet's penchant for classical allusions to Hyperion, satyr, Niobe, Hercules, Nero, Jove, Mars, Mercury, etc. 33. Shakespeare may have tuned his auditors' ears to catch this calendar play through the similarly repetitive dialogue ("two hours . . . twice two months") between Hamlet and Ophelia immediately preceding the playlet. 34. The received reason why Hamlet did not succeed his late father is that Denmark was an elective monarchy, and the electors had the power to bypass a lineal heir for another claimant. This is not sustained by historical fact. Until the 11th century, the kingship of Denmark was settled by violence. In 1047, Sweyn Estridson was elected king, and his dynasty reigned until 1319. However, when King Erik Glipping was murdered in 1286, his 12-year-old son was forced to sign a charter by the so-called "hof" comprising bishops and magnates. A stricter charter was signed by Christopher II in 1319. The males of this royal line died out in 1375. By then the "hof" had become a permanent institution, the Rigsrade, which proceeded to elect kings for some 70 years with indifferent success. In 1448 the Oldenberg dynasty began with Christian I. This line ruled until 1523, when the unpopular Christian II abdicated in favor of his uncle Fredrick I, who invited the first Lutheran preachers into Catholic Denmark. When Fredrick died in 1533, the election became (momentarily) important. The obvious choice for king was Fredrick's great nephew, Christian. However, the Catholic bishops and nobles who dominated the Rigsrade feared Christian would turn the country Lutheran. In 1534 they tried to invoke the old charter and elect a younger brother, Hans, a reliable Catholic. Denmark was shortly plunged into a brief civil war which ended when Copenhagen surrendered to Christian's forces in 1536. He was named King Christian III, and the Rigsgade sanctioned a Danish Lutheran church the same year. Christian's son Frederick succeeded in 1559, and reigned until 1588. During that period the electoral powers of the Rigsgrade were reduced to a rubber stamp. Christian IV succeeded in 1588 and reigned until 1648, etc. 35. Dover Wilson (202) recognizes the connection between the Player King's speech and the Clown's. "The repeated insistence upon 'thirty' years of married life [sic] agrees with Hamlet's age given at 1.5.143-57." 36. Henry VIII had at least one son who could not succeed to his throne because he was illegitimate: Henry Fitzroy, born in 1519 to Elizabeth Blount, lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. Fitzroy was created Earl of Nottingham and Duke of Richmond in 1533, and married to Mary Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. He died at St. James palace in 1536, and suspicion of his poisoning fell on Anne Boleyn and her brother, Lord Rochford. Shakespeare was personally associated with another man thought to be an illegitimate son of Henry VIII, Henry Carey (1524?-1596), son of Anne Boleyn's sister, Mary. Carey was said to have borne a strong resemblance to Henry VIII. He was Queen Elizabeth's favorite cousin, and she created him Baron Hunsdon in 1559. Hunsdon founded a company of players before 1565, and James Burbage claimed to be "Lord Hunsdon's man" in 1584. A year later Hunsdon was named Lord Chamberlain. Hamlet, of course, was acted by the Chamberlain's Men, as the entry in the Stationers' Register for 26 July 1602 testifies. 37. Cymbeline, 1.4.135; Winter's Tale, 2.1.138. 38. II Henry IV, 1.2.130; Twelfth Night, 3.4.79. 39. See Mahood for other examples of Shakespeare's puns on unspoken words. 40. The quibble has an after-echo at 1.4.40 when Hamlet speculates whether the ghost is a "spirit of health." 41. There are numerous references to bastarde in medieval and Renaissance literature, e.g. "The fellows of Merton . . . purchase some bastard in 1399." Rogers, Agric. & Prices (London, 1866), 1.xxv. 619. 42. "Bastards . . . seeme to me to be so called because they are oftentimes adulterated and falsified with honey." Surflet and Markham, Country Farm etc., (London: 1616), 642. 43. "Semen" may have been considered too rude a word for the stage in Shakespeare's time. Three detectable references are scrupulously oblique: (1) when Cleopatra refers to her eunuch, Mardian, as being "unseminared" at 1.5.11; (2) when Emelia upbraids Iago at 1.4.149-52 for allowing his wit to be turned "the seamy side without" to suspect her of infidelity with Othello; (3) when Hamlet refers to the "rank sweat of an enseamed bed" at 3.4.92. There's also a concordance in King John: "let wives with child . . . let seamen fear no wreck" (3.1.15-8). 44. " . . . that's a perilous shot out of an elder- gun" (4.1.198). Elder pith could be hollowed out to leave a tube suitable for the making of a toy gun. 45. " . . . Judas was hang'd on an elder" (5.2.606). 46. OED Disc citations: 1538 Turner Libellus; an annoymous Herbal of 1568, and 1578 Lyte Dodoens, iii. xlv. 380: This herbe is called . . . in Englishe Walwort, Danewort, and Bloodwort. "While suggested in part by the abundance of the plant at certain spots historically or traditionally associated with slaughter, there was also an element of fanciful etymology in explaining the Latin name Ebulus from ebullire to bubble forth, with reference to the flowing of blood." This may also be associated with the plant's diuretic qualities. 47. OED Disc citation: 1398 Trevisa Barth. De R., xvii. cxliv. (1495) 700, The Ellern tree hath vertue Duretica. 48. That Shakespeare was familiar with the diuretic qualities of elderberries may be deduced from a previously overlooked concordance in The Merry Wives of Windsor: "Host. What says my Aesculapius, my / Galen, my heart of elder, ha? Is he dead, bully stale, Is he dead? Caius. By gar, he is de coward jack priest of de vorld. He is not show his face. Host. Thou art a Castalion King Urinal Hector of Greece, my boy." (2.3.26-32) Shakespeare begins by quibbling the soft heart of elder against the traditionally resolute "heart of oak." But the quibble quickly switches focus to the ecclesiastical sense of "elder" with the introduction of "priest," a word derived from "presbyter," which was the literal translation into ecclesiastical Latin from the Greek prysbyteros, meaning church elders (OED Disc, elder 3, 4a). Finally, Shakespeare quibbles on the diuretic powers of the elderberry by the introduction of "Urinal" in close concordance with (a) the name of the Greek god of healing, Aesculapius, (b) the celebrated Graeco-Roman physician, Galen, and (c) the word "stale" (urine), as in "Thou didst drink The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle Which beasts would cough at." Antony and Cleopatra (1.4.61-3). Oliver parses the phrase as a reference to "the urinal used by the hated Philip II of Castile," but overlooks the Galen-elder-stale-urinal quibbling (Oliver 65n). 49. "Eigne" is a corrupt spelling of "ayne," i.e. "first-born, eldest." Citation: "1528 Perkins Prof. Bk. i.49, A bastard eigne who is mulier in the spirituall law." 50. Shakespeare glances at the possibility that offspring of a royal remarriage may disenfranchise an existing heir in Two Gentlemen of Verona (3.1). Hamlet's illegitimacy may explain why he is so determined that Gertrude abandon her conjugal relationship with Claudius (3.4). We know from King John and Measure for Measure that Shakespeare keenly understood the legitimacy laws of England. Under prevailing law, if a step-sibling were born to Claudius-Gertrude in wedlock, that child would take precedence in the succession. Hamlet would be reduced to the legal status of "bastard eigne." 51. The allegation was currency among Luther's detractors as late as the 19th century. 52. Recounting this anomaly, Melancthon feels obliged to defend Margarethe Luther's character: "Hys Mother named Margaret, besydes that she had vertues worthy an honest Matrone, thys was syngular. Ther shined in her continency, feare of God, and invocacion, and al other vertuous persons constantly planted their eyes upon her, as on a patron president of al moral vertues" (Bennet, Luther, B.ii.r-v). Works Cited * Amott, Dawn. "Hamlet's Salvation and Luther's Justification by Faith." Diss. Carleton University, Ottawa, 1973. * Hankins, John. The Character of Hamlet and Other Essays. Raleigh: U North Carolina P, 1941. * Battenhouse, Roy W. "The Ghost in Hamlet: A Catholic 'Linchpin?'" Studies in Philology 48 (1951): 180-1. * ---. "Hamlet's Evasions and Inversions," in Shakespearean Tragedy. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1969. 244-65. * ---. "Hamlet's Apostrophe to Man." PMLA 66 (1951): 1073-1113. * ---. "The Significance of Hamlet's Advice to the Players." The Drama of the Renaissance. Ed. Edward Blistein. Providence: Brown UP,1970. 3-26. * Bayer and Schiller. Coelum stellatum christianum. Heidelberg, 1627. * Bennet, Henry. A famous and godly history, etc. [Imprinted at London by John Alwdely, dwellying in lytle Brittaine Streete, by great Saint Bartelmewes, Anno, 1561.] University Microfilms Incorporated, Early English Books 1475-1640, Reel 377. * Bowers, Fredson. "Hamlet as Minister and Scourge." PMLA 70 (September 1955): 740-49. * Brecht, Heinrich. Martin Luther: His Road to Reformation. Minneapolis: Fortress P, 1993. * Cannon, Charles K. "'As in a Theater': Hamlet in the Light of Calvin's Doctrine of Predestination." Studies in English Literature 11 (1971): 203-22. * Christopher, Georgia B. "Carrion That God Kissed: Hamlet's Devotional Reading." HamletS 5 (1983): 75-79. * Daniell, David. "The Language of Hamlet." [Hilda Hume Memorial Lecture, 29 November 1994.] London: Senate House Printing, 1995. * Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. * Foxe, John. Actes and Monuments, etc. London, 1563. * Friedensburg, Wilhelm. Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland 1533- 1559. Gotha, 1892. * Frey, Roland Mushat. "Prince Hamlet and the Protestant Confessional." Theology Today 39 (1982): 27-38. * ---. The Renaissance Hamlet. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984. * Gim, Lisa."Hamlet and Matthew X: Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow." University of Mississippi Studies in English 4 (1983): 56-61. * Granville-Barker, Harley. Preface to Shakespeare: Hamlet. London: Batsford 1970. * Greenblatt, Stephen. "The Mousetrap." [Unpublished]. * Hassel, R. Chris, Jr. "Hamlet's 'Too too solid flesh." Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 609-22. * ---. Renaissance Drama & the English Church Year. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1979. * Hoff, Linda K. Hamlet's Choice--A Reformation Allegory. Lewiston: Mellen, 1988. * Hutton, Ronald. The Rise and Fall of Merry England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. * Johnson, Jerah. "The Concept of the 'King's Two Bodies' in Hamlet." Shakespeare Quarterly 18 (1967): 430-4. * Kaula, David." Hamlet and the Image of Both Churches." Studies in English Literature 24 (1984): 241-55. * Kay, Dennis. Melodious Tears. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. * Laroque, Francois. Shakespeare's Festive World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. * Leduc and Baudot. The Liturgy of the Roman Missal. London: Burns Oates, [n.d.]. * Levin, Harry. The Question of Hamlet. Oxford UP, 1959. * Lyons, Bridget Gellert. "The Iconography of Ophelia." English Literary History 44 (Spring, 1977): 60-74. * MacDonald, Michael. "Ophelia's Maim‚d Rites." Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 309-17. * Mahood, M.M. Shakespeare's Wordplay. London: Routledge, 1988. * Melancthon, Philip. Historia de vita et actis Martini Lutheri . . . MDXLVIII. [Microfilm: OmniSys Corporation, 211 Second Avenue, Waltham, MA 02154. Roll 130.] * Miriam Joseph, Sister." Hamlet, a Christian Tragedy." Studies in Philology 59 (April, 1962): 119-40. * Oxford English Dictionary. Compact Edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971. * ---. CD-ROM. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992-3. * Phillipson, Johannes. A Famouse cronicle of our time, etc. London, 1560. * Plomer, Henry R. Wills of English Printers and Stationers. London, East&Blades, 1903. * Quinlan, Maurice J. "Shakespeare and the Catholic Burial Services." Shakespeare Quarterly 5 (1954): 303-6. * Rastell, John. An Exposition of certaine Difficult . . . Words and Terms of the Lawes of this Realme. London, 1536. * Sesti, Giuseppe Maria. The Glorious Constellations. New York: Abrams, 1991. * Shakespeare, William. Plays and Poems. Ed. Edmond Malone. London, 1821. * ---. Hamlet. Ed. Edward Dowden. London, 1899. * ---. Hamlet. Ed. John Dover Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1934. * ---. Hamlet: Second Quarto 1604-5. Ed. W.W. Greg. London: Sidgwick, 1940. * ---. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. London: Arden-Metheun, 1987. * ---. The Merry Wives of Windsor. Ed. H.J. Oliver. London: Arden-Methuen, 1990. * Sinfield, Alan."Hamlet's Special Providence." Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980): 89-98. * Sjogren, Gunnar. "The Danish Background in Hamlet." Shakespeare Survey 4 (1968): 221-30. * Venerable Bede. Rhythmical Version of Bede 'De Ratione Temporum.' Paris: Libraire Ancienne Edouard Champion, 1927. * Waddington, Raymond. "Lutheran Hamlet." English Language Notes 27:2 (1989): 27-39. * Wiles, David. Shakespeare's Almanac. Cambridge: Brewer, 1993. * Wilson, Richard. Julius Caesar. London: Penguin, 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Blending Popular Culture and Religious Instruction: Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs Paul Moon Auckland Institute of Technology [Moon, Paul. "Blending Popular Culture and Religious Instruction: Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 6.1-6 .] 1. Every literary period harbours within it traces of the popular culture of the age. Certainly, the poetry of George Herbert (1593-1633) reveals fragments, for example, of the sentiments that were to lead to the ascendance of Puritanism in England within a decade of his death--sentiments such as the emphasis on personal salvation (The Pilgrimage), the importance of prayer to the Christian life (Prayer, Denial), and the need to seek absolution for sins from God (Love 3). Yet, for all Herbert's longing for personal spiritual reconciliation with God, his diversion into recording and possibly inventing proverbs betrays his vocational imperative, as an Anglican priest, to provide lessons to his congregation, in which common sense, natural imagery, and "conventional" Christian teachings are presented. 2. Over three-quarters of the 1032 proverbs in the collection which appears under Herbert's name[1] have French, Italian, or Spanish origins or equivalents[2] although it is quite possible that many of these proverbs emerged independently in various countries. In addition to the uncertainty over the authorship of this collection of proverbs, it is not clear when Herbert started to collect the proverbs, and for how long he gathered them. Just under 100 of the proverbs found in the collection under Herbert's name appear in a work entitled A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611) by Cotgrave. In addition, Herbert had great respect for two writers who also had made collections of proverbs: Bacon, whose A Promus of Formularies and Elegancies was published in 1594, and William Camden, whose Remaines contained nearly 400 proverbs.[3] 3. However, of more importance than their origins is the subject matter of these proverbs. Far from being "outlandish"[4] as the title of the collection suggests, most of the proverbs are examples of what could be termed "folk wisdom" and, notwithstanding the pun contained in the title, their relevance to early seventeenth century traditional European societies transcends national boundaries. Many of these proverbs utilise references to nature as a means of making them more relevant to a predominately rural audience (Herbert stated that rural congregations were not always interested in the formal aspects of the Anglican service[5]): 16. The Wolfe knowes, what the ill beast thinkes; 23. Looke not for muske in a dogges kennell; 73. Flies are busiest about leane horses. The poverty and contrition which a large portion of the English population endured during Herbert's period[6] also gave rise to proverbs (recorded in this collection) that emphasised the need for thrift: 93. Sleepe without supping, and wake without owing; 436. He that hath little is the lesse durtie; 1003. Hee that goes to bed thirsty riseth healthy. 4. There are two aspects of Outlandish Proverbs which make them significant both in the period in which they were written and today. The first is that the proverbs appear in a written form. It is one of the few traces early seventeenth century English rural popular culture has left on the historical landscape. Coupled with this preservation of elements of a predominately oral culture[7] is the way in which Herbert, presumably deliberately, has included in his collection proverbs with a specifically Christian content, as though Christianity was an inherent part of English popular culture during this period. Frequently, allusions to nature are incorporated into the religious proverbs in order to heighten the impact on their intended audience: 342. He that sowes trusts in God; 207. The river past, and God forgotten; 867. To a close shorne sheepe, God gives wind by measure. Even without the references to nature, the religious proverbs in this collection are no less direct for their readers or listeners: 384. God comes to see without a bell; 729. He that will not have peace, God gives him warre; 983. When God is made master of a family, he orders the disorderly. 5. As well as being an encapsulation of minute traces of an oral culture that has now practically vanished, Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs offers an insight into the way a highly educated Anglican cleric[8] successfully managed to bridge what would be a fairly considerable intellectual gap with his largely illiterate and uneducated rural congregation. (It is known that his congregation was predominately rural,[9] and that literacy rates among rural communities at the time were less than ten percent[10]). As Hutchinson put it: "No one could have written of the pastoral life as Herbert did without having experienced [it]."[11] That there was a wider readership after Herbert's death may be incidental--there is insufficient evidence to point to Herbert's purpose for this collection of proverbs in terms of its intended readership. There is no record of Herbert having intended to publish the collection,[12] and it was not until the Restoration that it received a broader readership. It seems that the primary use, particularly of the religious proverbs, was to deliver a message to others--to provide rough guidelines to popular ethics and morality. This was a period of transition in England in particular from an oral, non-literate culture to a largely literate one (there are cases recorded during this time of books being used by literate individuals to read out to groups of people who were keen to learn from books, but who lacked the skills to do it themselves).[13] 6. Herbert also used some of these proverbs in his writings and letters,[14] and probably in his sermons as well. Religion had been largely absent from the oral culture of England up until the time of the Restoration, and so the Outlandish Proverbs filled a vital need in closing the gulf that existed between popular culture and the religious message of the Anglican Church. Notes 1. See Herbert (ed. F.E. Hutchinson) 321-335. 2. Ibid. 573. 3. Among other compilers of proverbs in this period, with whom Herbert was familiar, were James Sanford (whose collection was published in 1573) and Thomas Draxe (whose collection was published in 1616.) 4. "Outlandish" suggests foreign (as in "ausländer") thus possibly indicating the origin of some of the proverbs. Certainly, the authorship of the proverbs is unsure, although the word "outlandish" appears twice in The Temple and twice in A Priest to the Temple. 5. See Herbert's A Priest to the Temple chapter VI, lines 20-32. 6. Wrightson, chapter 5. 7. Reay 198-243. 8. Abrams 1334-5. 9. Ibid. 1335. 10. Reay 4, 49, 62-4. 11. Herbert (Hutchinson) xxxviii. 12. The first reference to the published version of the collection appears on 24 September 1639. 13. Reay 4. 14. Herbert (Hutchinson) 572; see A Priest to the Temple chapter IV. Works Cited * Abrams, M.H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Fifth Edition, Volume I. New York: W.W. Norton & Sons, 1986. * Herbert, George. The Works of George Herbert. Ed. F.E. Hutchinson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1941. * Reay, Barry, ed. Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England. London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988. * Wrightson, Keith. English Society 1580-1680. London: New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1986. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Eric S. Mallin. Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 276 pp. Tony Dawson University of British Columbia dawson@unixg.ubc.ca [Dawson, Tony. "Review of Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 7.1-9 .] 1. Here is a sophisticated, historically and theoretically informed, cleverly written, and highly intelligent book--but one that at the same time is strangely disappointing. As I read it, I was bothered by a sense that a certain brilliance of scholarship and style had gone to waste. The book might even be said to occupy a symbolic place at the dead-end of new historicist analysis, where the problem of historical evidence which has plagued new historicism since the beginning finally seems to undo the whole enterprise. It is not as though Eric Mallin is not aware of the dangers. He devotes an introductory chapter to a reasoned discussion of some of the problems that have beset the movement, and defends topicality as a way of combating the tendency to construct large generalizations from skimpy anecdotal evidence. Along the way he makes concessions to several of the critiques that have periodically been launched against new historicism: against the tendency to totalize, he espouses haphazardness and multiplicity; conscious of the accusations of determinism, he tries to allow for autonomy; and perhaps a bit embarrassed by various feminist critiques, he readily adopts their perspective. He is aware too of new historicist waywardness with chronological and geographical speculation, such as evidence from France doing service in England or from 1615 being adduced to explain texts from 1595. His response to this problem, topicality, is a version of micro-history, now a popular strategy whereby immediate contexts can be invoked to explain particular aspects of texts-in-history. 2. On the question of how history affects texts, perhaps the key new historicist crux, Mallin develops a kind of open-ended determinism. He takes the metaphor of inscription in the title quite literally. Writers write, but what they write is not under their control; it is "infiltrated," poisoned, infected, by history even down to its textual materiality: the "culture inscribes, lodges itself in texts" and the texts can do little besides "write out the meanings of this occupancy" (16). Authorial agency, invoked here and there, is nevertheless finally banished; there is authorial choice but it is everywhere subject to cultural infection. At the same time, the temptation of indeterminacy, the post-structuralist understanding of language and discourse that has always threatened to undermine new historicism, is a central presence: Mallin insists on the primacy of the undecidable. This insistence sits uneasily with the pervasive emphasis on historical allegory that the book as a whole promotes. 3. But there is one frequently heard criticism of new historicism that he never mentions--its obsession with royalty and the upper aristocracy. And there is good reason for this omission, since the whole book is devoted to arguing that the three plays he considers, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night, are culturally coded dramatizations of the vicissitudes of Elizabeth, James I and the Earl of Essex, in various relations to the problems (of marriage, succession, faction, or plague) that beset them in the first years of the seventeenth century. Shakespeare, willy nilly, was apparently incapable of writing about anything else. In this kind of reading, Essex turns up as both Hector and Achilles, as well as (briefly) Hamlet, where he is "granted... a wished-for prerogative he never quite attained: the chance to pronounce and thereby apparently control the succession" (143). Olivia, on the strength of her being the "most powerful woman in Illyria" and her abhorrence of yellow, is deemed to be Queen Elizabeth. Mallin, to his credit, acknowledges that this connection "has a certain amount of strain built in," but then he instantly withdraws the qualification: "but this is the strain of every representation of the queen near the end of her reign" (178). James is both Hamlet and Fortinbras (this comes dangerously close to absurdity: "Hamlet naming Fortinbras [as successor] is a translated version of James naming James" [151]). Put thus baldly, the topical criticism does indeed read like parody, a danger that Mallin alludes to following the identification of James just quoted; he suggests that the literary text can avoid such parody, but at times I'm afraid, the critical text cannot. 4. One is led to wonder about the motivation as much as the evidence behind the kinds of claims this book makes. Historical allegory, despite the work of Leah Marcus, has for good reason gone out of fashion, and heroic attempts to resurrect it seem quixotic. One of the marks of Mallin's misplaced chivalry is his reliance on thorough-going allegorists such as Lilian Winstanley and Leslie Hotson. But at the same time, he is impressively au courant with all kinds of current scholarship and theory, and when he discusses the texts without reference to what at times seem like hobbyhorses, he is astute and perceptive. I am troubled by the spectacle of a thoughtful and engaging mind, expressing itself in elegant, even witty language, constructing theories which seem Laputan in their misplaced ingenuity. 5. The basic problem, as I said, is one of evidence. Despite the marshaling of impressive documentation, there are really no grounds for many of the assertions Mallin makes. On Troilus and Cressida, he bases his argument on the prevalence of factionalism in Elizabeth's court, and claims that Essex himself is "part of the cultural pen and ink, the material conditions of conceptual possibility for Troilus and Cressida." In other words, the play could not have been written without Essex, his factions and his "motivational complexity." Achilles is "pulled back to the battle, even as Devereux was inexorably drawn to court" (33). This is a fair example of the mode of argumentation: first an allegorical connection between historical figure and text is posited, then it is bolstered by a tenuous analogy, and then the whole is read as a two-way inscription of text by cultural figure and vice versa: "Essex inscribed as much as he is inscribed." That "emulous faction" was a feature of life at Elizabeth's court as much as it is a feature of life among the Greeks at Troy is certainly true. But this proves little. Such faction is as visible in Renaissance Italian city states and modern university departments, and indeed anywhere else where politics reign. The evidence lacks specificity, for all the careful topical references introduced. 6. A more serious problem of evidence arises in connection with the two central chapters on Hamlet, which take up just about half the book. The initial difficulty, one that plagues the whole argument, has to do with Mallin's choice of texts. He decides to rely on Q2, first published in 1604. Although he knows all about the many puzzles surrounding the relations between Q1, Q2, and F, he chooses simply to finesse them and adopt Q2 as the text to be discussed in relation to his twin themes of plague and royal succession. He treats it as though it were written in 1604, rather than published then; since it was probably written around 1600, and since Mallin wants its meanings to be readable in terms of the twin events of 1603 to which he draws our attention, the plague and the accession of James I, he is forced to ignore the question of the actual date of writing and initial performance. Instead he adopts the bold strategy of imagining the printed text as a product of its specific time, as though passages in it and not in Q1 (1603) somehow appeared through cultural infiltration, written as it were by the culture in response to cataclysmic events. One example is the fact that in Q2 (and F) Laertes speaks of the poison he has purchased and will use to anoint his sword, while in Q1 the idea comes from Claudius. Mallin's interpretation of this is revealing; he argues that the plague of 1603 has affected the later text, re-writing Laertes's character and indeed character in general: "after the onset of plague, character and interiority prove unstable, and subterfuge is a communicable ailment [i.e., caught from Claudius] .... This moment epitomizes a radical, inevitable invasion of history into Hamlet: pestilence infiltrates theater as a characterolgical device of communicated similarity" (71). This breathtaking claim begs several questions. 1603 was not the first major plague in London during Shakespeare's writing life; why should 1603 have had an effect on the writing of character, and not, say, 1592? Or, consider the word "inevitable" in the passage just quoted; the suggestion is that there is no other explanation for this deviation between texts. But of course there is; for example: Q1 mis-remembers a prior version, probably something like F, i.e. a slightly reduced, theatrical version of Q2. In other words, though there have been arguments to the contrary, the ms. behind Q2 almost assuredly existed before that behind Q1, and the deviations of the latter from the former can be explained either as problems of memory or as the result of players constructing a playable text on the basis of a partially remembered plot, one perhaps "infiltrated" by memories of the famous "ur-Hamlet." Hence Laertes's plot to anoint his sword was undoubtedly part of the text as written and performed around 1600. The thing is that Mallin knows this--as is clear from his footnotes; he simply chooses to ignore it. By his logic, though he specifically disavows this possibility, the differences noticeable in the 1623 Folio version should be attributable to royal events of 1622. It might be wiser to think of Shakespeare, rather than history, as responsible for the subtleties of metaphor and idea in Hamlet. Even if we were to accept the argument that Mallin makes, how could we explain the mechanism by which these new passages got into the printed text? Are we to imagine a busy acting company or writer inserting the passages for publication sometime in 1604? 7. The ultimate problem is that the argument is circular. Mallin first of all assumes a theory of cultural inscription. He notes that there was a serious and worrying plague in 1603, and that there were connections between the presence of the plague and a certain uneasiness surrounding James's accession. He then surveys passages in the printed text of 1604 not in Q1 and notes that some few of them have something to do with poison, plague and contamination (not by any means all of them). He then deduces that their presence both proves the validity of his theory of cultural inscription and grounds his interpretation of the play. Similarly, in the following chapter, he assumes a connection between the events of Hamlet and the events of James's early life, including the murder of his father, and then uses it to interpret the play as proof of what he has earlier assumed. In both cases, what is first assumed is later "proven" on the basis of the assumption. The culture produces the text and the text is hence a sign of the cultural conditions that are inscribed in it. This is a hermeneutic circle that feels more than a little confining. 8. In fact the whole argument is reversible, like a chevril glove. Rather than seeing the action and language of the play as a direct result of cultural writing, it could just as easily be argued that Shakespeare wanted to engage certain political and moral issues in Hamlet and adopted the language of plague as an appropriate and topical medium for their expression, as a salient metaphor that would be readily understood by his audience. Mallin's insistence on cultural inscription seems unduly arbitrary. 9. The final question is why a smart critic like Mallin should have got himself into the hermeneutic jam he appears to be in here. I don't have an answer to that, but I do have a question about the purpose of such interpretation. The emphasis on undecidability raises the spectre of endless changeability of semantic counters, a result that tends to undermine the interpretive enterprise itself. One gets the feeling that units of potential "meaning," either historical events or elements in a text, can be made to mean anything one wants; the consequence is that they can end up meaning nothing. There is no brake to such interpretive ingenuity, just because there is no criterion of evidence that one can rely on. Thus the idea of history as adopted by such extreme new historicists as Mallin would seem the polar opposite of history as traditionally conceived by historians, because the demand for rigor in the marshaling of evidence has been abandoned. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade. Ed. John Guy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. xiv + 313 pp. Henry VIII in History, Historiography and Literature. Ed. Uwe Baumann. Bern: Peter Lang, 1992. 327 pp. Steven Gunn Merton College, Oxford [Gunn, Stephen. "Review of The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade and Henry VIII in History, Historiography and Literature." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 8.1-7 .] 1. Few would deny that recent decades have seen profitable exchange between historians and scholars of literature, especially perhaps in the study of the English renaissance. The collections of essays reviewed here suggest that the result has been the elaboration of an impressive range of strategies for the interpretation of texts and contexts; but that the Holy Grail of interpretation equally satisfying to both academic constituencies often remains just out of reach. Each volume features the work of thirteen scholars drawn from both disciplines, though the historians are in the majority amongst John Guy's contributors and in the minority amongst Uwe Baumann's. Both collections hold together better than such books often do, because each pursues a fairly clear theme. Guy's aims to characterize the 1590s as a distinctive period within Elizabeth's long reign--her "second reign," the introduction tags it--and to examine the interaction of politics, religion, social change and literary production within it. The texts addressed in Baumann's volume range widely in time, from the poems celebrating Henry VIII's accession in 1509 to the film Henry VIII and his Six Wives of 1972 and two historical novels of the 1980s, but they are all reflections upon Henry's character and reign; only a sketch of the relations between Henry's England and Germany, interesting in some of its detail but very questionable in some of its wider judgements, falls outside the pattern. 2. Some of the chapters in The Reign of Elizabeth I revise our understanding of the politics of the 1590s without much direct implication for literary studies. Natalie Mears and Paul Hammer, not without overlap, review the relationship between Essex and the Cecils, finding more cooperation, less Cecilian hegemony and more fluid political alignments than previous interpreters, both stressing the disruptiveness of Essex's ideological attachment to noble privilege and aggressive war and the queen's failing grip on political rivalries. Hiram Morgan exposes Lord Burghley's shameful part in the destruction of Sir John Perrot, on charges of treason so ludicrous that the victim protested it was as possible for him to perform the design of which he was accused "as it is for me to dance around with Paul's Steeple on my thumb." Simon Adams tackles a larger theme, the changing world of politics in the late sixteenth century, concentrating on two features: the replacement of land and estate office by the customs and monopolies as the main currency of royal patronage, and the developing notion of public service rather than personal service to the monarch as the criterion of reward. In the second area he combines attention to the wider context of a stressful war with scrutiny of the increasing use of classical terminology in political discussion. Like Mears, Hammer and Morgan but to a greater extent, he is writing political history with a helpful eye on political culture. 3. Other contributors do so still more explicitly. John Guy shows how Archbishop Whitgift's conformity campaign relied for its prosecution not only on political circumstance in the deaths of Leicester, Walsingham, Warwick and Mildmay, but also on the reassertion of Henrician notions of the monarch's imperial supremacy over the church and on the assimilation of continental canonical practice in ex officio actions in the ecclesiastical courts. Linda Levy Peck substantiates the complaints of late Elizabethan noblemen, especially those of the younger generation, that the queen failed to reward their services, but argues that it found its most common expression not in defiant revolt but in hopes for an improvement under King James. She probes contemporary interest in the medieval great offices of state to suggest that it did not reflect an assertive aristocratic constitutionalism; here her analysis perhaps chimes better with the "diverse and pluralistic" early Stuart chivalry expounded by John Adamson in his contribution to Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. K. Sharpe, P. Lake (1994), than it does with his earlier work with which she takes issue. 4. Those chapters in Guy's book which concentrate on the elucidation and contextualisation of texts are more directly comparable with the contributions to Baumann's collection. Some instructively examine the gap between a distant author's perception or representation of a situation and the perceptions of those directly involved in it. Jenny Wormald shows how Richard Bancroft's attacks on the pretensions of the Scottish presbyterians reveal more of his own fears of an English puritan bogy than of the Scottish situation, which he badly misconstrued. Anglo-Scottish misunderstandings are also examined by Ulrike Morët and Sonja Väthjunker. They show how the image of Henry VIII conveyed by Scots chroniclers of the 1560s and 1570s was determined by the religious and political loyalties of the authors, though they might have tried to do more to situate their authors precisely in the world of Scottish politics in those years. At a greater distance from Henry but equally hostile was Jonathan Swift, whose view of the king is impressively reconstructed by Dirk Passmann and Heinz Vienken. They use his marginalia on Herbert's Life--"Dog of a King" and worse--to analyse his antipathy to a monarch who weakened clerical finances, upset the nation's political balance and personified cruel tyranny. They then set these views in the context of those expressed by Swift's contemporaries, many of whose works he certainly owned. Perhaps the only trick they miss is the link between Swift's attraction for Harrintonian mixed government, which they note, and his argument about the dislocation of the social and political balance by the dissolution of the monasteries, which may well have come from Oceana. 5. Where these contributors look for gaps between authors and subjects, others look for affinities between authors and audiences. Richard McCoy finds Essexian resonances not only in Francis Davidson's Masque of Proteus of 1594-5 but also in the verse miscellany he published a year after the earl's fall, A Poetical Rhapsody. Rainer Holtei and Fritz Levy both take a cool approach to the vexed question of political reference in drama. Holtei argues that Skelton's Magnyfycence is a sufficiently generalized speculum principis that it might have been written for a number of political occasions or none at all. Levy examines the interplay between theatre and court at a number of levels, focussing on Jonson's Sejanus as a commentary on the late-Elizabethan court and on the dramatic self-presentation of the dying Essex; he deals subtly with the ways contemporaries sought for political allusions in drama but also with the difficulty for us of identifying what may have been fleeting recognitions sparked by a phrase, a gesture, an intonation or a prop. 6. Many of Baumann's authors are more concerned with internal analysis of texts. Beate Lüsse examines the rhetorical structure and aims of the verses penned by Skelton, Hawes and More on Henry's accession, though she does not open the question of the ambivalence of the classical parallels chosen by More and Skelton, as David Rundle has done in Renaissance Studies 9 (1995). Uwe Baumann shows how William Thomas's The Pilgrim and Ulpian Fulwell's The Flower of Fame construct humanist-inspired portraits of Henry as a model ruler. Hans Peter Heinrich and Wolfgang Müller discuss Shakespeare's Henry VIII, one reading its apparent incoherence as a comment on worldly mutability and the other inspecting its picture of the king and the rhetoric employed by various characters in constructing it. Jürgen Beer deals with the image of Henry in the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, again showing how conventional virtues are attributed to the king, but running out of steam after 1529 when Hall is less detailed but still merits attention. He fails to comment, for instance, on the deliberate falsehood of the account of Henry marching in person against the Pilgrims of Grace, or on the set-piece parliamentary speech of 1545. He is also perhaps less sensitive than he might be to Hall's choice of words: he discusses Hall's praise of Henry for "the augmentacion of his Croune" only in the most general terms of the king's power, without considering the many resonances that both the crown and its augmentation would have had for contemporaries faced with the rhetoric and image of the imperial crown and a vast new financial institution called the Court of Augmentations. More skillful in this respect is Theo Stimmler, whose examination of the vocabulary and rhetoric of Henry's love-songs and love-letters provides fascinating evidence of the conventional and the highly individual in Henry's amatory expression. 7. So far we have mostly dealt with the links between literature and political history, but as Jim Sharpe reminds us in a cogent review of the economic and social strains of the 1590s, it is our understanding of such aspects of Tudor England that has increased fastest in recent years. Sharpe's own contribution usefully reminds us of the air of pessimism amidst dearth, war, crime and sedition that characterised the late-Elizabethan elite, but three other pieces examine the literature of social change in more detail. Alistair Fox attributes the decay in literary patronage in Elizabeth's last decade to the changing composition of the political elite, as hard-faced administrators like Lord Keeper Egerton took the place of open-handed noblemen. Characteristically, Essex was seen as the last of the latter, receiving sixty-six dedications of printed books in the 1590s, ten more than the queen. Marie Axton situates Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament in the context of fears of Scottish-style reform of calendar customs not only amongst players and playwrights but also amongst the English episcopate. And in probably the most stimulating chapter in either book, Patrick Collinson examines the interactions between the Martin Marprelate tracts and their conformist counterblasts, the popular theatre of Dick Tarleton and Will Kemp, the local culture of mocking rhymes and festive disorder, and the emergence of the stereotype stage puritan in the decade following Martin's appearance. Here at last, perhaps, is a set of texts placed in a context to keep both historians and their literary colleagues happy. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice. Eds. Jean R. Brink and William F. Gentrup. Aldershot: Scolar P; Brookfield, Vt: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1993. xi + 232 pp. A.W. Johnson Åbo Akademi University, Finland anthony.johnson@abo.fi [Johnson, Anthony W. "Review of Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 9.1-6 .] 1. As a discipline, Cultural Studies presents a number of problems which are clear enough to comprehend. In an area where anything may qualify as a suitable subject for examination; where approaches tend toward the interdisciplinary; and where a multiplicity of critical discourses may be brought into play, it becomes necessary for the cultural critic to engage in what is at least a three-way balancing act between the constraints of specialised knowledge, the cross-disciplinary imperatives of the area in which that knowledge is being contextualised, and the level of knowledge which may be assumed on the part of the audience. 2. Even when it focusses on a particular stratigraphic area, such as that of the Renaissance, a volume of conference proceedings by different authors is likely to present such problems in a particularly acute form. In the face of fourteen papers subgrouped by the editors under the headings, "British Literature in Context," "Geography, Religion and History in Context," and "Imitation and Italy in Context"--with individual contributions on subjects as diverse as Shakespeare's dialogic imagination; the international gem trade from Columbus to James I; the Batavian tradition in Dutch humanistic historiography; or genre, harmony and rhetoric in the late sixteenth-century Italian madrigal--we may feel justified in asking which Renaissance, culture(s), context(s), theories and practices are being invoked, and in inquiring as to the rationale for their assemblage within the covers of a single volume. For what would be the purpose of presenting random samples from different cultural locations--each eked out with different tools in order to achieve a variety of ends? 3. There is a sense in which such a sampling could be justified in a post-Lyotardian world where grand narratives have been abandoned and the density of the local in itself may be deemed sufficient as an object of scholarly investigation. In this case, the serendipities of the individual contributions themselves would tend to take on a foregrounded significance, and it is in the serendipitous that the value of Renaissance Culture in Context could be expected to reside. Seen from such a perspective the volume certainly has its findings: Bruce Lenman's elegant analysis of the relation between the economics of precious stones and the spread of geographical knowledge; Howard Brown's discursus on Giaches de Wert's splendid madrigalian setting of Tasso's Giunta alla tomba; or Zirka Filipczak's commentary on Jacob Matham's use of the three Graces (perhaps overlaying an allusion to the Fates), as a personification of printmaking in hismemorial engraving on the death of Hendrik Goltzius. Other felicities of the volume include Jacqueline Glomski's shrewd diagrammatic re-envisioning of the structure of Jan Kochanowski's Lyricorum libellus, and Norman Farmer's succinct case for the importance of the Pauline terms sarks and soma in an understanding of Spenser's Faerie Queene Book II . (Despite the clarity of his argument we may demur none the less--as Ralegh, Jonson or Sir Kenelm Digby surely would have done--at Farmer's attempt to foreclose the resonances of the allegory within the confines of a rigorously Hookerian reading. Those approaching Spenser with Book V of Trissino's Italia liberata in mind might, likewise, wish to take issue with the baldness of his suggestive assertion that "Du Bartas" Sixth Day--from the "stately Bowr" onwards--was Spenser's poetic model for the "castle of Alma.") Among the other contributions there is also mileage to be gained from Jozef Ijsewijn's exploration of the hinterland between imitatio and furtum in the Neo-Latin works of Erasmus's colleagues in the Netherlands, or Francis Higman's inquiry into the local forces at work determining the export or import of particular translations in the early Reformation. For these reasons alone, the papers in the present collection would have been well worth publishing. 4. As a volume, however, Renaissance Culture in Context hangs together much more coherently than its apparent plurality of topoi may suggest. The original title of the 1990 conference on which the book is based was "The European Renaissance: National Traditions," and (with the aid of no more than a little editorial justification for Bart Westerweel's piece on Shakespeare's mature comedies), all the papers could have nestled to greater effect under this, or a similar, rubric. It is the construction of national identity--not so much through new myths of origin as through the intensification of details already sanctioned in the course of the humanist reconfiguration of classicism--which forms a focus for Karin Tilmans when she examines sixteenth-century Dutch appropriations of Tacitus' account of the Batavians. The same concerns re-emerge (this time in a mildly Gothicised inflection), when Karen Skovgaard-Petersen overviews the ways in which Danish and Swedish historians rewrote their narratives of state during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to accord with the demands of conflicting territorial interests. The dynamics of national identity inform Ijsewijn's, Filipzac's and Brown's investigations of the complex two-way dialogues between the culture of Italy and that of the Netherlands over the sixteenth century. The twists and turns of nationalisms are deeply implicated in Minna Skafte Jensen's tracing of the changing faces of the muses in their movement from the Germany of Celtis to the Denmark of Sadolinus and Franciscus; or in the case studies by Jacqueline Glomski and Paul Knoll on the dissemination of humanist thought into Polish culture. Behind the usual touchstones of the European Renaissance, as Francis Higman points out, there are a number of less than household names, such as those of Urbanus Rhegius, or Heinrich Bullinger--Zwingli's successor in Zurich--who were of considerable importance in the formation of local colours of thought or language and enjoyed, within the texture of their contemporaries' world, not only a large international readership but also a familiarity that is now largely lost on us. It is a virtue of the papers in this volume that they are interconnected by the narratives of these and a number of other minor figures--such as Erasmus Laetus, Reinier Snoy, or the disingenuous Aurelius Cornelius-- whose repeated appearances encourage at least some degree of deliberation on the processes of valorisation which sanction the creation, survival, or disappearance of particular cultural icons and voices. 5. In the main, Renaissance Britain is represented in the present collection by five essays. In their discussions of Tudor culture, Norman Farmer emphasises the figuration of Reformed England as the "world's 'new' bodie" in the Faerie Queene Book II, while Bart Westerweel considers Renaissance space-time (through Bakhtin's figure of the chronotope), by way of a Shakespearian rather than Boiardan or Colonnan vision of Arden and Ilyria. Within the context of Jacobean culture--seen here from what in 1990 would have been a refreshingly Scottish perspective--Arthur Kinney closely documents an ultimately persuasive case for Macbeth as a critique of James VI and I's early imperial aspirations. The same play features--by way of Ralph Fitch's 1583 expedition to Aleppo on board the Tyger--alongside a discussion of Jacobean interventions in the gem trade in the closing pages of Bruce Lenman's paper. More generally, R. D. S. Jack begins the volume with a brief review of Scottish literary canons from the Renaissance onwards and calls for a revaluation of linguistically or culturally anglophilic Hibernians, such as Drummond of Hawthornden, who have suffered neglect on both "English" and "Scottish" syllabi. Indirectly, these papers fuel Robert Crawford's more recent argument that the concept of Britain and British Literature provided Scottish writers with a means of demarginalising their own endeavours, and demonstrate that Crawford's ideas could be fruitfully extended back to the early decades of the seventeenth century. 6. Since 1989, the study of national cultures and constructions has been a growth industry in many fields. The essays in this volume--clearly written, complete with illustrative and musical examples, and attractively edited with a useful index of names and major topics by Jean Brink and William Gentrup--provide a welcome addition to this scholarly labour. At both Graduate and Undergraduate levels, Renaissance Culture in Context should prove both provocative and informative to students of Cultural Studies and the European Renaissance. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- John Donne. Pseudo-Martyr. Ed. Anthony Raspa. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1993. 430 pp. Dennis Flynn. John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 181 pp. + appendix. Elizabeth Hodgson University of British Columbia ehodgson@unixg.ubc.ca [Hodgson, Elizabeth. "Review of John Donne. Pseudo-Martyr and John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 10.1-7 .] 1. Scholars of early modern English literature have been busily working on the corpus of John Donne recently; not only is the multi-volumeVariorum edition of his poetry in preparation, but we also have a new edition of his prose work Pseudo-Martyr edited by Anthony Raspa and a new biographical study by Dennis Flynn. 2. The 1610 Pseudo-Martyr, Donne's first published text, attempts to persuade English Catholics that they can take James I's Oath of Allegiance and still remain spiritually loyal to Rome. Raspa's is the first modern edition of the text, and for this all Donne scholars and students of the religious politics of Stuart England should be profoundly grateful. Given the length and complexity of its imposing argument, such a beautifully presented, readable text is a significant contribution to Donne scholarship. Raspa has also provided notes and a bibliography which help to catalogue the bewildering library of doctrinal and theological documents to which Donne's cryptic marginal notes allude. In his introduction Raspa aids the reader further by explaining that Donne's allusions really only stem from three main bodies of work: the sixteenth-century documents which argue that new Protestant "saints" are either genuine or only "pseudo" martyrs; sources for three historical precursors of England's division between church and secular power; and works on canon law vis-…-vis the Oath of Allegiance itself. In setting out these issues for us Raspa makes the intellectual context of Donne's argument much more accessible. Raspa's extensive introduction, which discusses the occasion of the tract, the meaning of the text, and the parameters of his textual editing, also helps to describe the many complex strategies and positions of Donne's work. 3. Raspa's edition, as welcome as it is, could have been more useful still. Raspa chooses to use not one but two copy-texts, and it is not clear from the textual introduction why he makes such a decision. Some of the emendations also seem rather arbitrary; why silently correct the punctuation of a single sentence of Donne's? It would also help if Raspa could more convincingly "sell" Pseudo-Martyr in the introduction; his rather careful prose doesn't quite convey his own fascination with this work. Pseudo-Martyr clearly does have tremendous value in illuminating Donne's role as a published author and polemicist, his patronage-relationships with James I and the court, Donne's own (and his culture's) preoccupations with martyrdom and self-canonization, and Donne's spiritual affiliations amidst the tensions between the Roman church and the English state, but Raspa could have done more to make this clear. 4. Nobody can fault Raspa for a lack of scholarly labour, however, and the same is true of Dennis Flynn's work, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility. In the first of what Flynn plans to be a five-volume collaborative biography of Donne, Flynn argues that the standard biographies have systematically underestimated Donne's connections to the powerful Catholic elites of England and their traditions of dissent, martyrdom and exile. He begins with the earliest of Donne's portraits and points out its emphasis on honour, nobility and militant courage rather than the foppish amoral ambition with which Walton and Bald credit the young John Donne. Starting from this reconstructed image of Donne's youth, Flynn traces the Catholic heritage of Donne's extended family in Part One, beginning with Thomas More and descending through the Heywoods (Ellis and Jasper) and Donne's own immediate family. Part Two tracks the interrelationships of Donne's family, the Jesuit missions in England during Donne's childhood and youth, and the great Catholic earls (especially Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby). 5. The strengths of Flynn's arguments are many. He contributes several new insights and findings, including a convincing case for Donne spending his teenage years not at Oxford but in Europe in religious exile/education among the other Catholic exiles of his family. He points out the fundamental contradiction of Bald's description of a poor outsider who mysteriously becomes a close affiliate of Egerton, emphasizing the very real power-alliances of the Donne/Heywood families. He helps to explain, much more convincingly than Carey, how and why the issues of exile and martyrdom are clearly so central to Donne throughout his life. He also provides complex contextual readings of the Latin Epigrams, both in Chapter Eight and in a special appendix. Flynn writes with eloquence, humour, and controlled passion, and his narrative of the dynamic Catholic gentry in Elizabethan England is convincing. 6. Flynn's text does raise some difficulties, partly because of its hybrid purpose and narrow audience. As a biography of Donne this text would frustrate newcomers, for it contains in fact very little direct discussion of Donne himself beyond the clearly significant new findings about Donne's adolescence. If, as seems clear, Flynn's primary goal is rather to re-educate Donne critics raised on Bald and Walton, he is asking them to wait quite a while before they see how his discussions will illuminate their understanding of Donne himself. And, since the text stops short of explaining how Donne managed to shift away from the powerful influences of this Catholic community, his readers are left with a central question unanswered. It would help if Flynn was clearer that this work is only the first in several volumes and is not meant to stand on its own. 7. One is also curious about Flynn's stake in this argument. His goal seems to be to correct Bald and Walton's Protestant bias, and in this he admirably succeeds. He also seems keen, however, to show the nobility of Donne's Catholicism, and this is an ancient and problematic argument. Flynn clearly finds it more attractive to think of Donne as a youthful warrior than as a desperate social climber, even while he implicitly acknowledges that these two identities may be more apposite than opposite. One hopes that in the next volumes Flynn will keep adding to the complexity of his vision until this binarism collapses. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- William M. Hamlin. The Image of America in Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare: Renaissance Ethnography and Literary Reflection. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. xx + 234 pp. Donna C. Woodford Washington University at St Louis dcwoodfo@artsci.wustl.edu [Woodford, Donna C. "Review of The Image of America in Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare: Renaissance Ethnography and Literary Reflection." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 11.1-5 .] 1. "To speak of Renaissance ethnography," notes Hamlin at the start of his book, "is to risk the charge of anachronism" (1). Early Modern attempts to describe the customs and practices of other cultures are seldom free from personal or political motives which distort their depictions, and such works are often so riddled with ethnocentrism and xenophobia that they "confuse in the very attempt to clarify" (1). While admitting these limitations, Hamlin nevertheless manages to build a convincing case for the existence of an inchoate ethnography in the Renaissance. He examines the journals, letters, and reports of Early Modern explorers and historians such as Columbus, Las Casas, Ralegh, Sahagun, Lery, Martyr, and many others. Hamlin focuses on the descriptions of non-European peoples in these early accounts of the New World, and he then attempts to trace the influences of these ethnographic descriptions on the works of Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare. In doing so, he places these writers and their works not just in a general historical context but, more specifically, within their contemporary ethnographic context. 2. Hamlin begins his project of ethnographic contextualization by examining the state of ethnographic studies in the Renaissance. He admits that most Early Modern examinations of other cultures are marked by bias and sometimes overt inaccuracy, but he points to the abundance of literature about the New World and its inhabitants as proof of an Early Modern interest in ethnography, and he asserts that Renaissance ethnographic works are "in many instances as important for what they tell us about the cultural other as for what they tell us about their writers" (2). Hamlin goes on to discuss the contradictions inherent in Renaissance portrayals of these cultural others. New World inhabitants are alternately portrayed as ignorant, and thus inferior to Europeans, or as innocent, fully-human equals of the Europeans. According to the first view, the natives of the New World are, at best, blank pages on which Europeans can inscribe culture and religion, and at worst, completely dehumanized and suitable only for enslavement. Viewing the native Americans as innocent proto-Christians, however, is also problematic since this view encourages the projection of European values onto the natives. Hamlin builds on Todorov's schematization of these views, according to which "one can either acknowledge equality and conclude identity or acknowledge difference and conclude inferiority" (8). Hamlin expands on this binary formula, illuminating the many distinct positions contained within each of these two views, and he applies the terms of this expanded formula to the works he examines. 3. While Hamlin's discussion of Early Modern ethnography is useful and informative, its accuracy falters when he begins to discuss Bartolome de Las Casas. Though Las Casas is renowned for his valiant defense of the rights of native Americans, his ethnographic views are not without their limitations. Nevertheless, Hamlin seems so anxious to defend the "Defender of the Indians" from any criticism that he fails to analyze the priest's ethnography in the necessary critical spirit. Hamlin excuses Las Casas's tendency to project European values onto the native Americans by suggesting that the priest, engaged as he was in a battle against "brutal exploitation, de facto enslavement, and possible genocidal annihilation," used the most persuasive argument available to him: "the assertion of the essential non-difference of native Americans on the grounds of Christian universalism" (22, 21). To ignore this context, claims Hamlin, is to "risk the myopic mistake of attacking his words while ignoring his actions" (22). Yet, by not subjecting Las Casas to the same critical examination applied to other Early Modern ethnographers, Hamlin contributes to an equally distorted view of the priest's work. This distortion is further complicated by Hamlin's use of Kantian idealism to justify both Las Casas's Christian essentialism and his own uncritical examination of Las Casas. He cites Kant's admission that he "found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith" as proof that we can never truly know either the past or the cultural other unless we participate in the "abandonment of strict reason in favor of the adoption of a view based in part on faith" (27, 30). While it is, without doubt, true that we perceive both the past and the other through the distorting lenses of our own culture and environment, this fact necessitates, rather than eliminates, the need for critical analysis. By ignoring this need, Hamlin, like the Early Modern ethnographers he discusses, falls into the trap of confusing "in the very attempt to clarify" (1). 4. A lack of textual support and critical analysis also haunts Hamlin's discussion of Montaigne. Hamlin begins this chapter by offering a lengthy list of possible sources for Montaigne's views on the New World, but he offers us little reason to believe that Montaigne really did draw on these particular works or even that he had access to them, and his admission that it is more important to establish the conceptual environment in which Montaigne was writing than to make positive source identifications arrives too late to justify this lengthy source study. After this detour, Hamlin proceeds to argue that Montaigne, contrary to what most critics have said, was not a proponent of primitivism, but rather was an essentialist. This argument, while interesting, is never adequately supported. Hamlin's interpretation of these passages seems rather stretched as the textual evidence on which it relies could just as easily been used to argue the opposite point. 5. Fortunately, Hamlin's book improves considerably in its later chapters. He argues convincingly that the often noted uncertainty of the latter parts of The Faerie Queene may be attributed to Spenser's increasing awareness that the New World "provided more models of human behavior and of possible relationships between human cultures and the realm of nature than were conventionally accepted in Christian Europe," and he suggests, credibly, that the increased brutality of the wild man figure in the late sixteenth century may be due to the numerous ethnographic accounts depicting the "savages" of the New World (70). Likewise, in his chapter on Shakespeare, Hamlin offers an interesting discussion of the human or monstrous status of Caliban in light of Renaissance ethnographic views of native Americans, suggesting that the ambiguity of Caliban's nature is due to the "genuine uncertainty regarding the human status of cultural aliens" revealed in Early Modern ethnographic descriptions (105). Hamlin does not, as he did with Montaigne, attempt to identify specific sources for the New World allusions of Shakespeare and Spenser. He notes, in fact, that "source study relying on parallel passages and grounded on the principle of a writer's actual familiarity with source texts quickly loses its air of objectivity and shades into varying degrees of speculativeness" (98). He does, however, assert that there was in Early Modern England "a general and provocative consciousness of the New World" stimulated by the recent voyages to the Americas and the widely available accounts of those expeditions (70). It is these accounts and the general interest in the New World and its inhabitants that, he suggests, influenced Shakespeare and Spenser. Unlike his discussion of Montaigne, Hamlin's interpretations of the works of Spenser and Shakespeare are supported with ample textual evidence, and his analysis of these works is much more thorough. Hamlin's ethnographic contextualization of Early Modern literature is intriguing, and at its best, informative and enlightening, but it is unfortunate that he does not consistently employ the sharp critical analysis which such a study requires. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Murrin. History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 371pp James Loxley University of Leeds engjwsl@arts-01.novell.leeds.ac.uk [Loxley, James. "Review of History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 12.1-4 .] 1. History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic is nothing if not an ambitious piece of work, almost on the scale--despite its comparative brevity--of the very texts with which it concerns itself. Michael Murrin has read broadly and deeply in European romance and epic from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, tackling the labours of Italian, Spanish, Portugese, French and English writers. Within this impressive frame of reference, Murrin is concerned to probe the effects of developments in warfare on the practice of heroic literature. Technological change is the fundamental motor of all such developments in Murrin's account: we are treated, for example, to an engaging discussion of changes in the technological basis of naval warfare and their impact on strategy and tactics, an impact which in turn influences the ways in which imaginative literature may represent such warfare. 2. At the heart of History and Warfare, however, sits the fundamental technological innovation which altered warfare and its literature most profoundly--the increasing, and increasingly effective, deployment of gunpowder. The "gunpowder revolution," Murrin contends, was responsible in no small measure for the transformation and replacement of romance, a genre whose outlines, conventions and codes were established before the effect of the gun really began to be felt. The response of writers as various as Ariosto, Milton and Camoes to the full range of the gun's effects on the European culture of war provide not only the centre but also the most compelling section of Murrin's book. 3. That is not to say that the rest of History and Warfare is lacking in interest to any degree. In addition to the cogent account of the poetry of naval warfare mentioned above, Murrin offers an illuminating comparison between the literature of war on the continent of Europe and the simultaneous literature of Iberian colonialism, tracing differences in form to the determining force of the very different modes of fighting that these contrasting circumstances required. 4. Murrin justifies his singular focus on the changing technology and tactics of conflict with the assertion that "war was the main activity in the West during the early modern period" (9). While this may be true, the claim can also be used to highlight what seems to me the particular failing of this always interesting book. War's very ubiquity in Renaissance European culture means that its impact was never simply or centrally a matter of hardware, and a literature of war responded to conflict in ways which go far beyond the representation of battle on which Murrin focuses. The book's declared intention to concentrate on such a circumscribed range of material determinants means that there can be no space for the more diverse impact of conflict on poetry, an exclusion which leads to sometimes eccentric judgements. For example, the assumption that an absence of detailed representations of the Armada engagements of 1588 corresponds to a literary neglect of those events is surely unsustainable. Murrin's reluctance to integrate his detailed examination into an account of the period's broader representations of military conflict makes his work, inevitably, less of an achievement than it might otherwise have been. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Strier. Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. xiii + 232pp. Mark Robson University of Leeds M.Robson@leeds.ac.uk [Robson, Mark. "Review of Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts. Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 13.1-5 .] 1. Provocative, stimulating and impassioned, Richard Strier's Resistant Structures is a compelling intervention into current debates on reading early modern texts, attempting to reconcile formalism with historicism to provide a new model for contextualized close readings. Throughout the book, however, he refuses to elevate this practice to the level of a "scheme," since schematic readings are the target of Strier's polemic. Addressing himself to the blindspots which such readings create, he provides many judicious and eloquent debunkings of critical assumptions. 2. The book is divided into two sections, the first theoretical, and the second consisting of close readings of Herbert, Donne, Shakespeare and Nahum Tate. Part One opens with a restaging of the critical disputation between William Empson and Rosemond Tuve, introducing the confrontation of "formalism" with "history." Prevailing opinion, according to Strier, has it that Tuve's "old" historicism (which he describes as a form of argumentation based upon an appeal to "tradition") won this particular encounter. However, Strier asserts that Empson's advocacy of reading with a "clean palate" reveals Empson as the more rigorous historicist since, freed from the burden of preconception that tradition imposes, he is able to respond to the text, rather than to any assumed notion of what the text must be saying. For Strier, (un)critical assumption inevitably leads to error, and Empson remains the model reader throughout Resistant Structures. Countering perceived dogmatisms, Strier advises a pluralistic and anti-systematic mode of reading and espouses a methodological modesty, resisting claims to present the reading of any text. His purpose is to raise possibilities, to identify strong (particularly "radical") presences within the texts and their moments of production, and to prevent the suppression of surprise and perplexity in his readings. 3. Part One continues by engaging with the work of Stanley Fish, moves on to contrast (and compare) Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman's collection of essays under the heading Shakespeare and the Question of Theory with Terry Eagleton's work on Shakespeare, and concludes with an essay on New Historicism. Strier is generous in his use of all the critics cited, but where he gives with one hand he takes back with the other: deconstruction provides many insights (and see p.131), but is attacked for schematic oversimplification and its seeming preoccupation with language at the expense of politics; Eagleton is praised for his ideological awareness, but chided for being an ideologue. Confronted with both older forms of historicism and with New Criticism, Strier's analysis of New Historicism, and Stephen Greenblatt's work in particular, interestingly centres upon the question of intention. Geertz's influence on Greenblatt is seen to be positive, offering a way to reconstruct the specificities of a culture, but the lack of agency within Greenblatt's models of self-fashioning and the circulation of social energy are criticised for preventing empathy with historical subjects. 4. Part Two consists of compelling readings of Renaissance texts, beginning with Herbert's "The Church-porch" and "The Church" in the context of "devout humanism." Strier's general point is that the difficulty that New Historicism has with religion is the result of its concentration upon strategy and cynicism in social interaction, and he argues that to be able to read Herbert's poetry the critic must be aware of theology as well as ideology. John Donne's "Satire III" reveals the possibility of combining seemingly divergent strands of radical thought within a single work. "Jack Donne" is not for Strier the Catholic poet who converts into Doctor Donne the Protestant preacher; he is a poet who examines the question of individual religious conscience at a profound level. Strier's reading of Shakespeare's King Lear centres upon obedience, moving from a reconstruction of intellectual context, including material from Castiglione, More, Luther and the Homilies, to an analysis of the play which focuses upon the paradox of obedience through non-obedience. Strier's final chapter traces this theme through Tate's reworking of Lear, arguing that the play is a Whig, rather than a Tory, revision. 5. There is much to ponder here. Strier's nuanced and careful approach produces fertile and detailed readings, but in places he does not live up to his own rhetoric. Strier's treatment of deconstruction is particularly troubling--his engagement with Derrida consists of one brief quotation (hardly a close or contextualized reading)--leading him to restate commonplaces of anti-deconstructive dogma (p.40). Similarly, despite proposing that it is possible to decide what Shakespeare's own views on obedience were by tracing the theme through other plays, Strier makes no mention of Richard II, Measure for Measure, the treatment of the rebellion of Jack Cade, or Shakespeare's contribution to The Book of Sir Thomas More. This is a fascinating, important and enjoyable book, which should provoke careful consideration of critical practices, but much remains to be elaborated. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jonathan Sawday. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. 327 pp. Mary Bly Washington University at St Louis mbly@artsci.wustl.edu [Bly, Mary. "Review of The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 14.1-6 .] 1. Jonathan Sawday's The Body Emblazoned is a fascinating, learned and intelligent investigation of the culture of dissection in early modern Europe. The book is daunting in its scope: the author discusses astutely, and with accurate scholarship, Vesalius, Rembrandt and Donne; the Royal Society, the Theatres of Anatomy, the 1832 Anatomy Act and its predecessor, the Murder Act of 1752; recorded executions, corpse-thefts and the development of scientific imagery; Vasari, Du Bartes, Bacon; Descartes; Crashaw, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare; the Bishop of London in 1614, Queen Elizabeth, Milton, Traherne; even the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage. He combines his impressive knowledge with a delicate and readable use of theory (he seems particularly informed by the work of Foucault, Freud and various feminists and new historicists). 2. The core of Professor Sawday's argument is that there was a Renaissance culture of dissection, which was not sharply divided from the imaginative arts as it is in the twentieth century. People flocked to see dissections of executed criminals, whose corpses had been surreptitiously yanked from scaffolds, or wrestled away from waiting families. Early anatomists were seen as heroic explorers who acted to map the body and harness its organs, creating a language of investigation clearly echoed in poetry. One of Sawday's primary focuses is the work of John Donne, and Donne, with his anxious, celebratory, misogynistic attitude towards his own enfeebled body and his mistress' shapely one, gives Sawday a forum for some of the best analysis in this book. For example, Donne's colonizing ethic translates the female body into a regime of ownership, in a direct parallel to the anatomist Vesalius' attitude towards a dissected female corpse. 3. Sawday's thesis is that the early modern fascination with dissection led to a shift in thinking and speaking about the body itself. In the early Renaissance, investigation of the body could not be separated from analysis of its sensibility or its soul. This dualism was gradually replaced by an image of the body as a machine: "Forged into a working machine, the mechanical body appeared fundamentally different . . . . [The body as a machine] silently operated according to the laws of mechanics . . . entirely divorced from the world of the speaking and thinking subject" (29). Such a mechanical body has little to do with a "soul." Liberated from theology, the body loses its ability to stand as an image of government or rebellion, whereas it had earlier been seen as the "ultimate guarantee of a hierarchical arrangement of society" (130). 4. Sawday concludes with an assertion that, by the late seventeenth century, the body had become "the locus of a confrontation between two radically different conceptions of the natural world," the new rationalism, which sought to reject extravagant metaphors and describe the body's "usefulness," and the old intellectual order, which sought to give the body spiritual significance (231). He concludes with a look at two rebellious writers, Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Traherne, both of whom fought a losing battle against the division between poetry and science, if for different reasons: "From henceforth, poetry, or the world of the human imagination, which had once seemed perfectly harmonious with the discourse of reason, was held to exist as an entirely separate area of enquiry" (265). Professor Sawday is right, of course: one rarely finds premed students warming the seats of creative writing classes, and if they do, they have no aims to reproduce their cadaverous experiments in blank verse or rhymed couplets. But one can think of exceptions (Gertrude Stein, with her experience in dissecting brains, her near medical degree, and her interest in versifying the physiology of the brain is a good example). 5. A large part of Sawday's book describes the complexity of the confrontation between new and old science, particularly as it appears in the "imaginative arts," as he calls them. The term allows him to look not only at poetry and prose, but also at architecture, design and painting, including Rembrandt's several dissection paintings. Chapter Seven, "The Realm of Anatomia: Dissecting People," discusses the blason, that curious Renaissance vogue for emblazoning female bodies, in an effort to relate the popular poetic genre to the similarly avid thirst for dissected corpses. The comparison is fascinating and clearly relevant to some degree, especially, perhaps, in terms of Donne's poetry. Using the work of Eve Sedgwick and Nancy Vickers, Sawday argues that the blason should be seen as a form of aggressive competition between male poets, not as a celebration of female beauty. But the link between this argument and anatomy theatres is not wholly convincing. Sawday argues that "anatomy theatres, second only to playhouses as sites of large-scale public performances, provided the perfect stage upon which clever and ambitious men could demonstrate their skill" (212). I see several problems with this suggestion. The career of anatomists in the period does not easily compare with those of the majority of blasonneurs, even granted that the court was the center of preferment for both groups. Inigo Jones' Theatre of Anatomy, designed in 1636, may well have been a popular resort, but there is little evidence for attendance, whereas records indicate that courtiers attended the theater up to five times a week. Moreover, in an anatomy theatre presumably only one person performed at a time; in the private theatres, performance (and thus ambitious possibilities) extended well beyond the players to the courtiers sitting on the stage and in the boxes. 6. The Body Emblazoned is so varied and complex in its interwoven arguments that I am acutely aware of doing it little justice. It deserves to be read widely, perhaps even in Renaissance core classes. Jonathan Sawday's fusion of wide-ranging scholarship with thoughtful analysis of poetry, art and cultural material will be useful to all students of the Renaissance. Interestingly, the complicated relation between body and self/soul which Sawday demonstrates to have been, in some sense, born in the sixteenth century, is still with us. In other words, we have not moved completely into the arena of the mechanical body, but some three hundred years later still hover between the two versions. On March 13 of this year, an ex-boy scout leader killed sixteen children in Dunblane Primary School gym. A few weeks later, the papers reported that the gym was to be razed, and the murderer's body cremated. As Sawday points out, the mechanistic body did not resolve our fascinated taboo regarding the body itself. He aptly concludes that the reconstitution of the body in new forms of discourse has done nothing to banish our fear of our own bodies' interiors, nor, it would seem, our fear of the bodies of criminals. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at EMLS@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- English Verse Drama: The Full-Text Database. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1995. [Two CD-ROMs or 2400 ft. 1/2" magnetic tape (1600 bpi).] David L. Gants University of Virginia etext@virginia.edu [Gants, David L. "Review of English Verse Drama: The Full-Text Database." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 15.1-11 .] 1. When a humanist scholar first discovers the electronic textual database, fantasies begin to appear similar to those woven by Faustus upon calling up his first apparition: "Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, / Resolve me of all ambiguities?" The possibilities afforded by the rich store of words seem endless, and the scholar immediately tries to "Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, / And search all corners of the new found world / For pleasant fruits and princely delicates." All too frequently, though, flaws of design and content quickly sour the experience and the scholar turns away from the resource in frustration, seeking to "repent and save his soul." 2. At first glance the Chadwyck-Healey English Verse Drama electronic database opens a "new found world" for the researcher interested in both large- and small-scale investigations of one of the most important genres in modern English. If the database is sound, if it holds up to complex scrutiny and sophisticated searches, then it will be a most welcome addition to the field of literary studies. 3. Four essential criteria form the basis for an informed judgement of a literary database: overall scope, editorial integrity, reliability of data, and encoding scheme. One might also want to examine the search and display engine that comes with the database, particularly if the manufacturer has decided to use a proprietary mark-up system designed for a single software package. Because Chadwyck-Healey has chosen to make the database available as an SGML-encoded, platform-independent datafile, thus allowing its use by a variety of search engines, I will not discuss this aspect of the database, noting only that the CD-ROM version comes with DynaText software included. 4. Chadwyck-Healey states as their project's bibliographic basis the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, and as their aim the publication of the complete verse dramas of all writers listed in the Bibliography who were active before 1900. In addition to full-length dramas written for the public and private stage, the collection includes masques, short dramatic pieces, selected translations, works written for children, literary adaptations, and certain closet dramas excluded from the Bibliography. The editors have used a fairly flexible definition of the genre verse drama when making their selections, including works intended for or acted on the stage, and either wholly in verse or containing significant amounts of verse material. In terms of numbers this translates into 2284 separate titles by anonymous or named authors first published from the early 16th through the early 20th centuries. Such a wide scope makes the database an extremely useful pedagogical tool for teachers of English literature at all levels, offering wide access to frequently published standard works as well as to the large number of titles published but once and now accessible only in university rare book reading rooms. 5. The choice of editorial principles adopted by a database designer will play a significant role in the ultimate worth of the collection, especially one comprising large numbers of texts printed during the handpress period. In the first paragraph of this review I cited a few lines from Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, a play registered with the Stationers Company in 1601, printed in quarto in 1604, 1609 and 1611, with a revised text then printed in 1616, 1619, 1620, 1624, 1628, 1631, and 1663. Each individual printing contains internal variants introduced during the process of printing, as well as a large number of textual differences among the editions as a group. Chadwyck-Healey has eliminated the problem of dealing with the second group of inter-edition variants by choosing to reproduce an old-spelling textual facsimile of a single copy of an edition rather than edit anew each work from multiple witnesses. While practical, this approach does not reproduce the text as intended by author and printer, allowing stop-press corrections and revisions made during the original printing to go unnoticed. 6. To demonstrate the possible dangers of facsimile editions I'd like to use as an example the text of Ben Jonson's tragedy Sejanus, a play printed in quarto in 1605 and folio in 1616, 1640 and 1692. The EVD editors wisely selected for their copy-text the version of the play as it appeared in the 1616 Workes of Ben Jonson, a volume overseen sporadically by its author. A mechanical collation of 50 copies of the folio has revealed that 13 out of 42-1/2 formes (a compositional unit containing two pages) contain variant states of the text (a total of 142 textual variants), with a number of formes existing in three states and two formes completely reset. As variant pages occur randomly throughout these copies the editors may or may not have seen the corrected state, depending upon which copy they chose to use. In the case of Sejanus they seem to have had about average luck: of the 13 formes, nine showed the final state of the text while four contained the earlier, uncorrected states. Of the four uncorrected formes only one (2L3:4 outer) showed evidence of later authorial revision. If we take the selection of uncorrected states in Sejanus as representative of the works within the EVD collection as a whole, then the database is potentially marred by significant amounts of missing or misleading data. When the original text experienced extensive revisions early in its history the editors have included multiple versions in the database, as with the 1604 and 1616 editions of Faustus (but oddly not the Quarto and Folio editions of Shakespeare's King Lear). 7. Databases built upon old-spelling facsimiles also pose problems for many search engines, as the variation in spelling and typography of even simple words complicates search techniques. Prior to the 1630s printers used the common letter pairs i/j and u/v in a much different fashion from today. In addition, 16th- and 17th-century spelling conventions had not solidified, and printing-house compositors felt free to spell words according to their individual preferences. Hence a search for the phrase "my love" (love with "v") will return a different set of passages from that generated by a search for the phrase "my loue" (loue with a "u"). Likewise a word such as "loudly" might also appear as "lovdly," "loudlie," or "loudlye." A scholar seeking to carry out extensive searches of the EVD must select a search engine that allows for wild-card input to compensate for the database's variant spellings. Happily DynaText software supports such searches. 8. Similar to editorial integrity is the question of data reliability. During the conversion of print matter to digital form a certain amount of entry error will inevitably creep in, a problem exacerbated by the damaged or unfamiliar letterforms and faces used by early printers. A dense blackletter face with extensively ligatured characters and unfamiliar, arcane spellings will challenge both data entry and proof reading personnel. Chadwyck-Healey claims an overall accuracy rate of at least 99.99% or one error per 10,000 characters. Again using Sejanus as an example, a concordance created from the electronic text reveals remarkably few errors. In the almost 4000 lines of verse and stage directions I could find only five cases where the EVD text deviated from the 1616 Folio copy text: a transposition error, "Casear" for "Caesar;" a dropped quad, "Westand" for "We stand;" and three instances of character misrecognition, "chamels" for "channels," "Ivfiter" for "Ivpiter," and "Romanc" for "Romane." 9. While a database's scope, editorial integrity and data reliability all contribute to its value, perhaps the most important but frequently overlooked element is its encoding scheme. The care and foresight taken by the editors in fashioning the structural, interpretive, analytical and presentational information determines absolutely how it will finally be used. In this crucial aspect of database design the Chadwyck-Healey editors have done an excellent job. The collection as a whole is encoded in Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML), a system widely used in humanities computing that provides great mark-up flexibility as well as platform independence. 10. The EVD structure first breaks the database into subsets by author, then into single works. This provides the user three basic levels of search: by entire collection, by author corpus, and by individual work. Each work has further structural marking to distinguish act, scene, stanza, metrical and prose line, stage direction, argument, preface, prologue, epilogue and like elements. Information such as language use, publication details, author attribution, original author (in the case of adaptation), rhyme scheme, and location of caesura is also included. Recognizing that many users will want to build searches not only upon the familiar structures listed above but also by historical period and genre, the editors have additionally incorporated in each work values for one of nine time spans and one of 20 genres. This last feature sometimes causes mis-identification problems, such as marking Anthony Munday's 1611 civic pageant Chryso-Thriambos as Elizabethan, or William Congreve's 1710 play Semele as pre-1700 Restoration. Slightly more troubling is the lack of multiple genre values for these works. While Chadwyck-Healey need not go as far as Polonius' "tragical-comical-historical-pastoral" distinctions, recognizing major combinations such as comedy and pastoral or history and tragedy would lend greater subtlety to the database. However, such a minor oversight should not obscure the immense value afforded by the thoughtful mark-up apparatus. 11. Overall, the Chadwyck-Healey English Verse Drama database stands as a significant contribution to the field of literary study. Despite the drawbacks inherent in the practical editorial choice of pursuing a textual facsimile rather than re-editing the entire corpus anew, EVD should present scholars and critics with a fresh angle of inquiry into the genre, particularly with the variety of subtle search options built into the database. One hopes that this resource quickly becomes available to academic users world-wide. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- "That Liberty and Common Conversation": A Review of the SHAKSPER Listserv Discussion Group Sean Lawrence University of British Columbia sean@unixg.ubc.ca [Lawrence, Sean. "'That Liberty and Common Conversation': A Review of the SHAKSPER listserv discussion group." Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 16.1-16 .] 1. The SHAKSPER listserv discussion group has been growing since July 1990, when it was founded by Ken Steele, then of the University of Toronto[1]. In 1992, the task of editing was assumed by Hardy Cook of Bowie State University, where the files were transferred late last year, with the first digest from the new address being mailed on January 4, 1996. Recent postings have covered topics as diverse as the role of bastards in Shakespeare's drama[2], or the originator of the term "Bardolatry" (George Bernard Shaw, for those who are interested)[3]. If SHAKSPER as a whole has a structure, it is the interplay of an open, democratic debate with various controls. While I hope that this review imparts a sense of what some might call, "the free play within the system," I will concentrate largely on two threads which dominated SHAKSPER in the first three months of 1996: Shakespeare's possible authorship of "A Funeral Elegy," and two associated questions regarding the ontological status of the characters in Shakespearean drama and the historicity of the individual as self-conscious subject. 2. A debate on the historicity of the individual was initiated by Jesus Cora's request for bibliographical suggestions in late 1995. Thomas Bishop sensibly suggested that we should "distinguish between individuality as fact and as value." This would, he argued, avoid an absurd belief that the medievals had no self-consciousness, while simultaneously allowing a discussion of the "cultural institution with specific investments of ideological and discursive effort" being formed in the Renaissance.[4] Robert Appelbaum also made a plea for conceptual clarity, arguing that: We need to distinguish theories of the self from representations of the self, discourses of the self from technologies of the self, and all of these things from that which concerning someone other than ourselves we can never have direct knowledge, namely the experience of the self. He also implied that such conceptual clarity would avoid the temptation towards ahistoricism. David Reed expressed an interest in finding "the terms that express/define why individualism is quite relevant" for the period. Victor Gallerano, on the other hand, distinguished the modern and post-modern view of the self constructed by the "will to power" with earlier views of selfhood. He seemed to be moving toward what Appelbaum was warning against, "the a-historicized work of setting the two opinions side by side." The two arguments passed liked ships in the night for the simple reason that they were posted concurrently.[5] It was two days later that SHAKSPERians could read Victor Turner responding to Appelbaum that he would not know what to do when he had "artfully segregated these categories, except perhaps to explore their modes of reintegration."[6] Bill Godshalk queried Appelbaum's historicism by pointing out that the belief in the Christian soul espoused by Jehovah's Witnesses is "straight out of John Milton."[7] 3. Jonathan Sawday's reference to "Cartesian fish" and speculation that the "historical Shakespeare" must have shared Spenser's contempt for the Irish[8] prompted Chris Fassler to speculate on the use of "reflective constructions" such as "methinks" and their relationship to Descartes, as well as to question Sawday's apparent historical determinism.[9] This tended to produce two debates, running in almost perfect concurrency. Ron Macdonald corrected Fassler's labelling of "methinks" as reflective, and Jonathan Sawday corrected his quotation of Descartes. Sawday then moved the question to whether one can determine the level of individuality in a time period by examining its artistic representation, and offered pre-print copies of an upcoming article on the subject to anyone interested.[10] Bill Godshalk seemed to take a similar tack, asking if "artist's periods [are] really correlative to the artist's perception of her or his world and her or his self? Did Picasso think of himself as a cube?"[11] Meanwhile, Chris Ivic argued in favour of Shakespeare's contempt for the Irish, citing the wish expressed by the chorus of Henry V to see Essex return victorious.[12] Fassler responded by changing his example to juxtapositions of "methinks" with "I," and writing that the arguments of Ivic merely indicated that Shakespeare's support for genocide was likely, not certain. He nevertheless claimed to be willing to accept an argument starting from this likelihood ("After all, colonialism sucks.")[13] W. Russel Mayes picked up on the two questions, arguing against the historical determinist position on Shakespeare's views of Ireland, and offering a few bibliographical suggestions on inwardness and Elizabethan language, as well as trying to bring the whole debate back to Shakespeare by suggesting a consideration of The Comedy of Errors.[14] 4. The advice was not followed, however, as the whole debate was revolutionized by an apparently straightforward inquiry. Suzanne Lewis asked whether SHAKSPERians thought that Hamlet and Ophelia slept together, and suggested that this might explain Ophelia's song.[15] Apart from a few witty responses regarding the proclivities of actors, the result was to shift debate from "individualism" to "character." The question was overwhelmingly popular, with several people suggesting that an implication of physicality would make for a better play. "It raises the stakes," wrote Andrew Tsao.[16] Jonathan Drakakis, on the other hand, responded that: Whether [Ophelia] is pregnant or not is about as irrelevant as whether Gertrude and Claudius had a clandestine affair before the death of Old Hamlet, or whether Lady Macbeth had any children (and how many).[17] In the same digest, Hardy Cook pointed towards the different characterizations in the Q1 and Q2/F1 texts, and asked whether it is legitimate to perform close readings for "character." Michael Yogev and Michael Saenger made explicit the distinction between a theatrical reading, in which constructing character is vital, and a textual reading. Harry Hill, on the other hand, contended that a Stanislavskian acting style is not inevitable, and that he, Hill, occasionally acts for surfaces.[18] Heather Stephenson also denied such an easy separation between the theatrical and the critical.[19] Nevertheless, the binary continued to inform contributions for weeks. 5. Janis Lull made the perfectly sensible argument that one need not confuse fiction with reality in order to perform character criticism, quoting Samuel Johnson to this effect: Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind . . . We are agitated in reading the history of Henry V, yet no man takes his book for the field of Agincourt.[20] John Lee made a similar argument in saying that "Shakespeare's dramatic persons insist on being treated as real persons." He also argued that the distinction between "real" people and "characters" tends to become increasingly clouded as we consider ourselves products of culture rather than autonomous individuals.[21] Robert Appelbaum made a yet more subtle distinction in saying that while Ophelia may be only a textual signifier: I would like to add that part of the feature of the persona as a textual signifier is that this signifier is understood to have the nature of what Barthes called a "precious remainder." In other words, signifers like Ophelia are more than the sum of their (textual) parts; they signify as subjects who have pasts and possible futures, not all of which are necessarily disclosed in the texts to which they seem to belong, and they signify as subjects with identities over time, from textual locus to textual locus, even if those identities are not necessarily deep, psychologistic, or philosophically coherent. 6. Steve Urkowitz (who signed himself "Urquartowitz") argued that while there are many Ophelias, found in different texts and productions, the correct response is not to seek one which is "true," but to "PLAY these scripts." Yu Jin Ko's posting, which immediately followed Urkowitz's, would seem to support him in saying that there is a good deal of "play" in a play script. While psychological questions are raised, Ko argued, they are frustratingly unanswered by the play. Trying to figure out why so, he further argued, is just "self-obsessed indulgence."[22] For this he was taken to task by Surajit A. Bose, who concluded her long and witty contribution by declaring that "Yes, the play is a mousetrap; let's see how it works, let's figure out the technology behind the play's words, so we can imagine a way out of the trap."[23] Clark Bowlen seemed to agree with Urkowitz and Ko in insisting that the play presents only incomplete characterizations, which should be treated as "skeletons to be fleshed out by the actor."[24] To this, John Drakakis replied that whether created by the author, or augmented by the actor, characters nevertheless "emanate from a constellation of ideological assumptions," and that, moreover, the concept of character is anachronistic.[25] Mary McKenzie, similarly, argued that Bowlen's position was ahistorical, proceeding from a view of character solidly lodged in modern, western theatre.[26] John Lee demured that "whether or not 'character' is anachronistic is a debate, not a self-evident fact."[27] More damningly, Joseph Green showed that the word "ideology" is also anachronistic to Shakespeare's time.[28] A general disagreement can be seen in the more recent posts between viewing a text as determined by ideology, or as open to "play." 7. The second major thread of the year concerned Shakespeare's possible authorship of "A Funeral Elegy." After a number of members expressed interest in the published reports of a "new" work, Don Foster wrote a summary of how he had first come to suspect that this poem was by Shakespeare, how he had brought it to light with the publication of his 1989 book Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution, and what further study of the subject had been undertaken by him and others since. Though admitting that "If you go to the Elegy looking for the poetic richness of the Sonnets, you'll be disappointed," he nevertheless declared that "I am now persuaded that the Elegy is indeed Shakespeare's, partly for reasons spelled out in my book, and partly for what I take to be a whole web of conclusive new evidence of Shakespearean authorship."[29] At the suggestion of Sean Lawrence and Michael Yogev, he posted the full text to the SHAKSPER fileserver a day later,[30] and provided a more detailed bibliography in the next week, concluding that: While waiting for the next round of attributional and critical work to appear in print, we have in SHAKSPER an excellent forum for critical discussion of the poem. Speaking strictly for myself, I'd be happy to see criticism of any kind, including even the less sophisticated, "ooh, it's yucky," variety of readerly response.[31] The last phrase has proven particularly pregnant, since the merit of quantitative stylistic analysis over subjective judgement has formed an important sub-thread of discussion. 8. Richard J. Kennedy waited until the end of the month, forty digests later, before challenging Professor Foster's labelling of "less sophisticated" criteria above, and arguing that the ascription is incorrect for the reason that the elegy is "like a long babbling stream that is shallow the whole length." He queried the findings of the Shaxicon database on the grounds that "a computer . . . cannot tell . . . whether to weep, or laugh, or to be stunned by some understanding of the human condition."[32] This argument was answered by Terry Ross, who did not, however, praise the quantitative method of ascription but the poem itself, remarking upon its "remarkable enjambment."[33] Harry Hill, enjoying the unique perspective of being midway through making a recording of the poem, responded that "What some praise as enjambement turns out in practice--and such poems were read aloud as we know or presume--to be thumping, thunking, clunking carpentry that is all but unreadable."[34] The poor quality was defended by David Kathman on the grounds that it was probably written in a hurry, and that most Elizabethan and Jacobean elegies are bad poems anyway: The verse of W.S. seems almost effortless beside the funereal labors of such noted poets as George Chapman, John Davies, or Thomas Heywood, and beyond comparison with the doggerel of such hacks as George Wither and Joshua Sylvester.[35] The "hacks" fans, including Richard Kennedy, were not impressed by this argument.[36] 9. David Schalkwyn raised another defense of the elegy's lack of rhetorical flair in questioning whether "the poem by WS enacts the disparagement of . . . rhetoric by the poet of the Sonnets."[37] It may be awful, in other words, but it's meant to be awful. Kennedy, facing this and similar arguments, rebutted that the "plain-style," which some saw accomplished in "A Funeral Elegy," was merely an invention of its defenders.[38] David Evett challenged this claim by producing a series of previous uses of the word, going back at least as far as translations of the ancient rhetors.[39] 10. Gabriel Egan also questioned the use of the Shaxicon database, but on the more constructive grounds that it only measures rare-word usage. He suggested the occurrence of feminine endings as another possible criteria for comparison.[40] His announcement that "A Funeral Elegy" has far from the Shakespearean mean for feminine endings was clarified by David Kathman, who noted that it has precisely the Shakespearean average for rhymed, non-dramatic poetry written in iambic pentameter,[41] to which Egan replied that such analysis "requires a model of the creative process in which some features are more intended than others. What evidence is there that the decision to use rhyme makes a poet less likely to use feminine endings?"[42] Not to be easily dissuaded, Kathman showed that a large number of Elizabethan poets employed feminine endings overwhelmingly more often in unrhymed than rhymed verse.[43] Egan answered simply that correlation is not the same as causation,[44] though this did not disturb Kathman at all.[45] The two only ended their dispute on realizing that their names were appearing in the context of another thread on the "excessive discussion of any one topic."[46] 11. Bill Godshalk asked the obvious question of why "A Funeral Elegy" was published anonymously by George Eld instead of taking advantage of Shakespeare's fame to sell more copies. David Kathman's answer was simply that it was probably printed for private circulation,[47] though this begged the question of why it would be circulated in print, rather than manuscript ("the classy way").[48] Kathman's speculation that since all printed books were preserved in the Bodleian, the medium might lend itself to an immortalizing project[49] was answered by reference to the many surviving manuscripts from the time.[50] The theory of private circulation also raised the awkward question of why Thomas Thorpe, a publisher, entered it in the Stationer's Register if he couldn't make any money off it,[51] though this was met by surmise that he may have been securing the rights in order to publish it commercially later.[52] The two agreed to differ, but only after driving the question into the realm of speculation about possible relationships between Shakespeare, his publisher, the publisher's printer, and a poem Shakespeare may or may not have written. 12. By way of parodying the ascription of "A Funeral Elegy" to Shakespeare, Kennedy proposed (electronic tongue in electronic cheek) that portions of the anonymous Dr. Dodypoll may have been written by him.[53] By way of bringing the debate back to quantifiables, Donald Foster reverted to the question of feminine endings, coming down on the side of David Kathman.[54 In the same digest, Roger Gross made the observation that "Elegy" contains a use of "sour" as two syllables, something only found one other time in Shakespeare,[55] and Bill Godshalk made the sensible suggestion that the sonnets would probably provide the best stylistic comparison. In the next digest dealing with the issue, David Kathman presented statistics linking the sonnets and the elegy, and Richard Kennedy referred to the vastly different number of lines beginning with "of" in the two works.[56] The utility of this evidence was disputed by Don Foster who, bolstered by more statistics produced by Kennedy, argued that enjambed lines are more likely to begin with "of."[57] Patrick Gillespie queried the usefulness of the Shaxicon database, on the grounds that it cannot distinguish parts of speech.[58] A number of contributors made this issue more important by questioning the statistics regarding the use of the form "whilst" in the elegy as compared to other works.[59] The need for lemmatising a text before submitting it to computerized stylistic analysis became clear. Matters of issue not only to the authorship of "A Funeral Elegy" but also to computerized stylistic analysis generally were raised in this thread and though the level of discourse may not always have been entirely elevated, the debate was free-spirited but nevertheless productive. 13. There are those who object that the broad range of discussion on SHAKSPER detracts from scholarly integrity. Michael Saenger argued in favour of creating two lists, "One dedicated to high-level dialogue, the other answering basic questions and open to any kind of banter."[60] To be fair to Mr. Saenger, he was clear in recognizing that "The basic idea of this list is a noble one--a truly democratic forum for ideas, a way of weaving any one with a modem into the academic community." In a later posting, he recognized the value of SHAKSPER as it stands and argued that his proposed new list would be more in the way of "a panel discussion with an open audience," rather than a "Shakespeare cafe."[61] The reaction was not always quite so even-handed, however. The next digest included six responses to Saenger, all but one of them negative, of which Louis Scheeder's "And dialogue, drama, conflict, and controversy would end" was most damningly brief.[62] Accusations that Mr. Saenger was "elitist" were met with suggestions that the list is used by undergraduates looking to plagiarize their next paper. Ellen Edgerton pointed out (sensibly enough) that any editorial policy would be bound to irritate somebody, and asked rhetorically "Where do these schisms ultimately end, anyhow?"[63] More practically, Timothy Reed indicated that editing the list as it stands is already a "Herculean task," and choosing posts on the basis of content would make it even harder.[64] Ken Steele, the founder of SHAKSPER, observed that: Michael Saenger's naive announcement of a new list, although he has no particular passion to run it, no idea which backbone Listserv would control it, and no editor to volunteer the roughly 80 hours a month it would take to edit it, is doomed to failure before it begins.[65] Joanne Woolway convincingly argued that since most subscribers to the hypothetical new list would probably maintain their subscription to SHAKSPER anyway, the only result would be to banish serious discussion from the older forum.[66] Discussion of the proposal has ceased. 14. Although not always charitable, the response to Saenger's modest suggestion indicates the high level to which the heteroglossia which is SHAKSPER is both recognized and valued. Kay Campbell Pilzer called on us all to "Keep this democracy, with its messy, chaotic mish-mash of peasants, bourgeoisie, and nobles."[67] Chris Gordon's comment that "The delight of SHAKSPER for me has been its variety, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous"[68] was typical. 15. On the other hand, some filtration occurs inevitably. Gabriel Egan observed that "Those who get Internet access free as part of their work will necessarily be over-represented, and those who do not and cannot afford the equipment and online time [will] be excluded entirely."[69] A number of contributors remarked that since the contents of each digest are listed in the subject header, anyone can just delete articles in which they are not interested. Moreover, Hardy Cook certainly excludes some postings. Speculation that Shakespeare may have been the assumed nom-de-plume of someone else, for instance, was banished months ago. This selectivity, I believe, tends towards more serious discussion, while allowing the conversational tone which many participants enjoy. Electronic sources are increasingly recognized as meriting proper scholarly citation. In fact, the MLA provides a reference to SHAKSPER as its example of how to cite information obtained through the internet. Certainly my own experience justifies Robert Teeter in claiming that the list has "a good signal-to-noise ratio" as it presently stands.[70] 16. The first three months of discussion on SHAKSPER justify both the praises and the criticisms of the list. Discussion could teeter dizzingly on the brink of absurdity, but often rose to careful considerations of important critical paradigms. The very breadth of the list's membership forces a dialogue between enthusiasts of different critical approaches, and devotees of incompatible ideologies. Rather than being split into self-ratifying groups of like-minded people, the discipline of Shakespeare studies is represented whole. Neither SHAKSPERians nor Shakespeareans always agree, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Notes 1. Vol. 7, No. 0199. Wednesday, 13 March 1996. 2. Vol. 7, No. 0110. Tuesday, 13 February 1996. 3. Vol. 7, No. 0194. Monday, 11 March 1996. 4. Vol. 7, No. 0023. Tuesday, 9 January 1996. 5. Vol. 7, No. 0037. Saturday, 13 January 1996. 6. Vol. 7, No. 0042. Monday, 15 January 1996. 7. Vol. 7, No. 0060. Wednesday, 24 January 1996. 8. Vol. 7, No. 0055. Tuesday, 23 January 1996. 9. Vol. 7, No. 0060. Wednesday, 24 January 1996. 10. Vol. 7, No. 0065. Thursday, 25 January 1996. 11. Vol. 7, No. 0070. Friday, 26 January 1996. 12. Vol. 7, No. 0065. Thursday, 25 January 1996. 13. Vol. 7, No. 0070. Friday, 26 January 1996. 14. Vol. 7, No. 0075. Friday, 26 January 1996. 15. Vol. 7, No. 0093. Saturday, 3 February 1996. 16. Vol. 7, No. 0100. Friday, 9 February 1996. 17. Vol. 7, No. 0101. Saturday, 10 February 1996. 18. Vol. 7, No. 0104. Monday, 12 February 1996. 19. Vol. 7, No. 0108. Tuesday, 13 February 1996. 20. Vol. 7, No. 0104. Monday, 12 February 1996. 21. Vol. 7, No. 0105. Monday, 12 February 1996. 22. Vol. 7, No. 0114. Wednesday, 14 February 1996. 23. Vol. 7, No. 0125. Monday, 19 February 1996. 24. Vol. 7, No. 0136. Thursday, 22 February 1996. 25. Vol. 7, No. 0139. Tuesday, 27 February 1996. 26. Vol. 7, No. 0145. Wednesday, 28 February 1996. 27. Vol. 7, No. 0148. Thursday, 29 February 1996. 28. Vol. 7, No. 0230. Wednesday, 20 March 1996. 29. Vol. 7, No. 0030. Thursday, 11 January 1996. 30. Vol. 7, No. 0036. Friday, 12 January 1996. The placement of an edited version of the text on the fileserver was announced in Vol. 7, No. 0186. Friday, 8 March 1996. 31. Vol. 7, No. 0048. Wednesday, 17 January 1996. 32. Vol. 7, No. 0089. Thursday, 1 February 1996. 33. Vol. 7, No. 0092. Saturday, 3 February 1996. 34. Vol. 7, No. 0107. Monday, 12 February 1996. Professor Hill announced the release of a compact disk of this carpentry in Vol. 7, No. 0159. Monday, 4 March 1996. 35. Vol. 7, No. 0102. Saturday, 10 February 1996. 36. Vol. 7, No. 0112. Tuesday, 13 February 1996. W. Russel Mayes points towards some fairly good elegies in Vol. 7, No. 0138. Tuesday, 27 February 1996. 37. Vol. 7, No. 0120. Thursday, 15 February 1996. 38. Vol. 7, No. 0142. Wednesday, 28 February 1996. 39. Vol. 7, No. 0159. Monday, 4 March 1996. 40. Vol. 7, No. 0127. Monday, 19 February 1996. 41. Vol. 7, No. 0135. Thursday, 22 February 1996. 42. Vol. 7, No. 142. Wednesday, 28 February 1996. 43. Vol. 7, No. 0152. Saturday, 2 March 1996. 44. Vol. 7, No. 0159. Monday, 4 March 1996. 45. Vol. 7, No. 0172. Wednesday, 6 March 1996. 46. Vol. 7, No. 0186. Friday, 8 March 1996. 47. Vol. 7, No. 0102. Saturday, 10 February 1996. 48. Vol. 7, No. 0107. Monday, 12 February 1996. 49. Vol. 7, No. 0112. Tuesday, 13 February 1996. 50. Vol. 7, No. 0116. Wednesday, 14 February 1996. 51. Vol. 7, No. 0107. Monday, 12 February 1996. 52. Vol. 7, No. 0120. Thursday, 15 February 1996. 53. Vol. 7, No. 0190. Sunday, 10 March 1996. 54. Vol. 7, No. 0193. Monday, 11 March 1996. 55. He credits the other use of "sour" to The Comedy of Errors 5.1.45. 56. Vol. 7, No. 0202. Wednesday, 13 March 1996. 57. Vol. 7, No. 0205. Thursday, 14 March 1996; Vol. 7, No. 0211. Friday, 15 March 1996; Vol. 7, No. 0222. Sunday, 17 March 1996. 58. Vol. 7, No. 0214. Saturday, 16 March 1996. 59. Vol. 7, No. 0228. Wednesday, 20 March 1996. 60. Vol. 7, No. 0164. Monday, 4 March 1996. 61. Vol. 7, No. 0170. Wednesday, 6 March 1996. 62. Vol. 7, No. 0165. Tuesday, 5 March 1996. 63. Vol. 7, No. 0215. Saturday, 16 March 1996. 64. Vol. 7, No. 0165. Tuesday, 5 March 1996. 65. Vol. 7, No. 0215. Saturday, 16 March 1996. 66. Vol. 7, No. 0220. Saturday, 16 March 1996. 67. Vol. 7, No. 0199. Wednesday, 13 March 1996. 68. Vol. 7, No. 0178. Thursday, 7 March 1996. 69 Vol. 7, No. 0223. Sunday, 17 March 1996. 70. Vol. 7, No. 0170. Wednesday, 6 March 1996. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the editor at emls@arts.ubc.ca. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reviewing Information Books Ordered for Review Forthcoming Reviews ----------------------------------------------------------------- Reviewing Information EMLS invites reviews of recent scholarly works--critical editions, commentaries, and theoretical, historical, literary, or interdisciplinary criticism which centres on sixteenth- or seventeenth-century English or related literary culture. We also encourage reports of all resources which are relevant to literary studies of the period, including those available exclusively in the electronic medium. Our aim is to publish reviews of a consistently high standard, which are both engaging and critically fair, written by a broad range of people at different stages of their academic careers with varied disciplinary backgrounds. Requests to review books listed below, or proposals for reviews of other new titles, together with a brief description of reviewers' academic qualifications, publications or research interests should be sent to the Review Editor at Review_Editor_EMLS@arts.ubc.ca. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Books ordered for review as of April 1996: * Aughterson, Kate. Women: A Sourcebook of Constructions of Femininity in England. New York: Routledge, 1995. * Bennett, Susan. Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. New York: Routledge, 1995. * Breight, Curtis C. Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era. New York: Macmillan, 1995. * Bulman, James. Shakespeare, Theory and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1995. * Burns, Edward ed. Reading Rochester. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. * Cerasano, Susan and Marion Wynne-Davies eds. Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents. New York: Routledge, 1995. * Donne, John. The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Vol. 8. The Epigrams, Epithalamions, Epitaphs, Inscriptions and Miscellaneous Poems. Gary A. Stringer gen. ed. William A. McClung volume commentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995. * Dutton, Richard. Ben Jonson: Criticism, Authority, Authorship. New York: Macmillan, 1995. * Hamilton, Donna B and Richard Strier eds. Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. * Hinds, Hilary. God's Englishwomen. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. * Holmer, Joan Ozark. The Merchant of Venice: Choice, Hazard and Consequences. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. * Howarth, David. Images of Rule: A Social and Political Analysis of English Renaissance Art. New York: Macmillan, 1995. * Jarvis, Simon. Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. * Kernan, Alvin. Shakespeare the King's Playwright. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. * Liebler, Naomi. Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre. New York: Routledge, 1995. * Lindley, David. The Trials of Francis Howard. New York: Routledge, 1995. * Luxon, Thomas. Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation. Chicago: U of Chigaco P, 1995. * MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. * Maley, Willy. Edmund Spenser and Cultural Identity in Early Modern Ireland. New York: Macmillan, 1995. * Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. * Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. * Parker, Douglas ed. A proper dyaloge betwene a Gentillman and an Husbandman. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. * Parker, Patricia. Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. * Parry, Graham. The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. * Pugliatti, Paula. Shakespeare the Historian. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. * Smith, Peter J. Social Shakespeare: Aspects of Renaissance Dramaturgy and Contemporary Society. New York: St. Martin's P, 1995. * Todd, Margo ed. Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 1994. * Warren, Austin. Becoming What One Is. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1995. * Watkins, John. The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. * Weimann, Robert. Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. * Wills, Garry. Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Forthcoming Reviews: * Aston, Margaret. The King's Bedpost: Iconography and Reformation in a Tudor Group Portrait. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. * Chernaik, Warren. Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. * Dutton, Richard. Jacobean Civic Pageants. Keele: Ryburn Renaissance Texts and Studies, Keele University Press, 1995. * Estrin, Barbara. Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne and Marvell. Durham NC: Duke UP, 1994. * Farago, Claire ed. Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America. 1450-1650. Yale: Yale UP, 1996. * Finucci, Valeria and Regina Schwartz eds. Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. * Fitter, Chris. Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. * Gregerson, Linda. The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. * Hall, Kim. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. * Lestrigant, Frank. Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. * Marotti, Arthur. Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. * Norland, Howard B. Drama in Early Tudor Britain 1485-1558. Nebraska: U of Nebraska P, 1995. * Parr, A. Three Renaissance Travel Plays. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. * Sams, Eric. The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-1594. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. |---------------------------------------------------------------------- (c) 1996, R.G. Siemens (Editor, EMLS).