Humankinds: The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies (Pluralisierung & Autoritat)

Humankinds The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies

Pluralisierung & Autorität Herausgegeben vom Sonderforschungsbereich 573 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Band 25

De Gruyter

Humankinds The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies

Edited by

Andreas Höfele · Stephan Laque´

De Gruyter

ISBN 978-3-11-025830-1 e-ISBN 978-3-11-025831-8 ISSN 2076-8281 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ” 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Andreas Hçfele and Stephan Laqu Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

Literary Sites of the Human Aleida Assmann Liminal Anthropology in Shakespeare’s Plays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Verena Olejniczak Lobsien The Space of the Human and the Place of the Poet: Excursions into English Topographical Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

41

Religious Beings Brian Cummings Among the Fairies: Religion and the Anthropology of Ritual in Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Enno Ruge Golding’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Puritan Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Negotiating the Foreign Richard Wilson When Golden times convents: Shakespeare’s Eastern Promise . .

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Bettina Boecker “Cony Caught by Walking Mort”: Indigenous Exoticism in the Literature of Roguery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

Cornel Zwierlein Renaissance Anthropologies of Security: Shipwreck, Barbary fear and the Meaning of ‘Insurance’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

157

Human and Non-Human Paul Yachnin Shakespeare’s Public Animals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

185

Markus Wild “Fellow-brethren and compeers”: Montaigne’s Rapprochement Between Man and Animal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

199

Ulrich Pfisterer Animal Art / Human Art: Imagined Borderlines in the Renaissance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

217

Thinking the Human Tobias Dçring “Now they’re substances and men”: The Masque of Lethe and the Recovery of Humankind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Stefan Herbrechter Shakespeare Ever After: Posthumanism and Shakespeare . . . . . .

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Introduction Andreas Hçfele and Stephan Laqu “Humankinds” is a strange and uneasy word, for if ever there was a word that one feels confident is safe from pluralization – grammatical or otherwise – it is the term used for the title of this volume. While there are obviously all kinds of human beings, surely, there is and can be only one humankind. Indeed the very acknowledgement of the fact that there are all kinds of humans requires an all-encompassing singular ‘kind’ which includes and unites these various ‘kinds’, a hypernym under which all existing and all thinkable ethnic, cultural, religious, genetic, etc. varieties of humanity can be subsumed. One could argue that the more we are politically and ethically committed to the protection of plurality, the more we need to insist on a common singular referent to which this plurality is moored. If we hold human rights to be universal, inalienable and indivisible, if we want to avoid a hypocritical state of equality in which some are more equal than others, it would appear imperative to maintain that emphatically there is and can be only one humankind just as according to a related political agenda there is and can be only One World. The plural of the word “humankinds” is therefore deliberately awkward since it serves to point towards a disconcerting and disruptive process in the history of European culture or, more specifically, in the way in which that culture conceives of what it means to be human. So “humankinds” appears to be an impossible plural, but during the early modern period which this volume addresses it became possible to think otherwise. Giordano Bruno is a thinker who comes readily to mind. He regarded the notion of an infinite world theologically inevitable and deemed it not only thinkable but regarded it as a certainty that an infinite universe contain an infinite number of worlds1 and if “that spacious field which is the air or the heaven, or the void” contains an infinite number of worlds, then it follows that “all those worlds […] contain an1

For the classical and medieval ancestry of this thinking cf. Arthur O. Lovejoy’s magisterial and still relevant disquisition on the “principle of plenitude” in Lovejoy 1974, 99 – 143.

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imals and inhabitants no less than can our own earth.”2 Which is not to say that these other humankinds necessarily all differ from us; they might in fact be replications of ourselves, but they might – and according to Bruno must – also be improvements on us. Since God is infinite and unstinting in his grace, he must have created an infinite number of worlds – since he is perfect, he must also somewhere have created a perfect race above the strikingly fallible and imperfect species which inhabits our modest planet. However, regardless of the exact nature of these infinitely plural worlds, the emphatic singularity and centrality that man lays claim to in a geocentric universe can here be seen to dissolve into endless multiplicity. Though science fiction has by now familiarized us with a host of extraterrestrial fellow beings, Bruno’s infinity of parallel worlds with its concomitant infinity of humanoid populations is still awaiting empirical proof. At the same time, however, the sublunar world of early modern Europe did, in fact, offer a plurality of humankinds. This world was an intellectual hothouse, an arena of heightened pluralization in all fields of knowledge and speculation and the comfortable collective singular ‘humankind’ was, of course, not immune to this intellectual energy. ‘Humankind’ increasingly came under pressure and came to yield a plurality of different ‘humankinds’. Of course, a plurality of ‘humankind’ is not a notion that would actually have been entertained at the time, let alone a notion that would have been perceived as positive, but it is a notion that may serve as a heuristic focus for the pressure that was working on a unified notion of what it means to be human. While the Renaissance did not in any emphatic sense ‘invent’ the human, the period that gave rise to ‘humanism’ witnessed an unprecedented diversification of the concept that was at its very core. The question of what defines the human became increasingly contested as old certainties were challenged by new developments like the emergence of the natural sciences, religious pluralisation and colonial expansion bringing confrontation with non-European peoples. The resulting plurality – though in no way exclusive to the Early Modern period – is a cultural formation which emerged in particular ways, in particular contexts and with particular force during the Renaissance. Virginia Woolf famously claimed that “in or about December 1910 human character changed.”3 We venture to suggest that it is possible to make a similar claim for an earlier date and say that “in or about 1500 2 3

Bruno 1584. Argument of the Third Dialogue, ninethly. Woolf 1992, 70.

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human character changed”. Without wanting to confuse the beginning of 20th-century modernism which Virginia Woolf is addressing with the incipient modernity of the Renaissance, it is instructive to briefly consider the sense of mission which caused Virginia Woolf to make her bold proclamation. The new human character which she saw emerging at that curiously precise date, December 1910, was less distinct, less clearly circumscribed than the realist tradition of English writing had been willing to acknowledge. The meticulous precision with which attire and the physical and social environment was described in 19th-century fiction appeared to Virginia Woolf to be woefully inadequate for the characterization of individuals who were increasingly waiving the rules of standard social behaviour and striking up new and unexpected relationships, inscribing themselves in new and disconcerting contexts. Virginia Woolf ends her essay with a plea to respect human indistinctness: “Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.”4 While Virginia Woolf is here, at the beginning of the 20th century, defending the elusiveness of the individual, Early Modern culture at the beginning of the 16th century was faced with the elusiveness of the whole species, which found itself caught up in new and problematic contexts, related in uneasy proximity to non-human animality and inscribed in disconcerting contexts which defied the medieval ordo that had defined an authoritative and stable position for humankind. There is another peculiar detail of Virginia Woolf ’s dictum that is worth highlighting and, indeed adopting. In her essay it is not human nature or humanity itself that changes, but human character. In borrowing her phrasing we want to suggest that around 1500 not some essence of humanity, but human character changed. The Greek etymolgy of “character” (“charatten”) links the word to engraving, and thus to an artistic practice of creating pictorial representations. When human character changes what changes is ‘the engraving of the human’. What changes is the picture of humankind which a culture holds. In his seminal essay “The Age of the World Picture”, Martin Heidegger posits an even more fundamental shift. The modern age (die Neuzeit), he explains, is not defined by a change in the world picture – in “the character of the world”, as it were – but by the emergence of the world as picture: The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age [Neuzeit]. For the Middle Ages, in 4

Woolf 1992, 70.

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contrast, that which is, is the ens creatum, that which is created by the personal Creator-God as the highest cause. Here, to be in being means to belong within a specific rank of the order of what has been created.5

Of course, Heidegger’s confidently rigorous opposition between a Middle Ages situated before and outside the episteme of representation and a Modern Age teeming with pictures and founded in its entire Being on its capacity for representation is far too neat for comfort. With this caveat in mind, however, Heidegger’s bold distinction can serve as a fruitful heuristic point of departure. As the essays in this volume attest, the age of emerging modernity is both busy creating new and conflicting pictures of the world and of the creatures which inhabit the planet and it is disposed to reflect upon these pictures in philosophical writing and, with a view to the texts discussed in the following chapters, over and above everything else in its literature. During the Renaissance the definition of the human in terms of its status as an eminent though flawed divine creation came to lose credibility. This loss of theological certainty about the position of mankind induced a search for new ways of ordering the cosmos. The method for gaining a new sense of order which Heidegger perceives at work in Early Modern culture is nothing if not radical: the world is newly ordered through representation. Humanity now conceives of the world and of everything that exists as those things which the human mind has set up before itself, as that which man has represented for himself. As Heidegger goes on to explain, this new way of seeing the world, of regarding the world only in terms of its being seen and represented, could not fail to have major repercussions for the way in which humankind regarded itself. By conquering the world through representation, humankind begins to picture itself. The result is a picture of man, an anthropology: [T]he more extensively and the more effectually the world stands at man’s disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i. e., the more importunately, too, does the subjectum rise up, and all the more impetuously, too, do observation of and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man, into anthropology. It is no wonder that humanism first arises where the world becomes picture.6

The rise of the world picture causes the rise of anthropology and it is here, in the realm of representedness, that a process of pluralization sets in. The middle ages had regarded the world as the extent of divine 5 6

Heidegger 1977, 130. Heidegger 1977, 130 [italics added].

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creation and humanity as the fallen image of God in need of redemption through the power of divine grace.7 Once subjected to the force of representation, this stable and neatly circumscribed rank of the world and of man gives way to pluralization, it is given new and, importantly, numerous different ‘characters’. The formation of pictures of the world and of humankind presupposes a specific form of human agency. In creating a picture of ourselves, we are turning our God-given identity into an object of modification and manipulation, we are quite sacrilegiously dabbling in creation. As Heidegger notes, picturing the world is tantamount to conquering it: The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word “picture” [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before.8

Along with the world around it, humankind (in its Early Modern European variety) began to conquer itself, to look at itself and mould its perception of itself according to its wants, to its needs and, arguably, also to its irrational whims and fancies. An illustration of the active shaping involved in the picturing of man which the title of this volume tries to capture is given in the physiognomical studies of Charles Le Brun that were presented to the Acadmie FranÅaise in 1671. Epitomizing over a century of Renaissance physiognomy, these drawings offer a strong sense of the extent to which anthropology has been and, we might add, still is prepared to go beyond faithful mimetic reproduction and to engage in active representation. Indeed, the specimens Le Brun has drawn or “characterized” bear only limited resemblance to human beings. They are thinly disguised eagles, lions, owls, rabbits or parrots with the only clear marker for their claim to humanity being the shirt collars at their necks.9 Clearly, these images are not mimetic reproductions of human beings but emphatically pictures of man, samples of anthropological fashioning, showing 7

8 9

Cassirer 1944, 10. As Ernst Cassirer has asserted the historical scope of this notion: “Such is the new anthropology, as it is understood by Augustine, and maintained in all the great systems of medieval thought. Even Thomas Aquinas, the disciple of Aristotle, who goes back to the sources of Greek philosophy, does not venture to deviate from this fundamental dogma.” Heidegger 1977, 133. Walking erect is a defining feature of humanity celebrated by Ovid in the Metamorphoses and by Cicero in De natura deorum. cf. August Buck, “Einleitung”, in: Manetti 1990, ix. This notion is also pervasively present in Milton’s Paradise Lost where it is the first defining feature which the newly-created Adam notices about himself when he awakes in the Garden of Eden.

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Fig. 1 Charles Le Brun, Physiognomical Study (‘Confrence sur l’expression des passions’) 1668, Reproduced by permission of Corbis.

that man is not only the object but in important ways also the product of Early Modern anthropology.

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What anthropologists of today are at pains to avoid was thus an integral and even programmatic part of the Early Modern anthropological impetus: a productivity that is not afraid to shape its object even as it records and describes it. This productivity is at the heart of the writings on the dignity of man. Introducing the notion of homo faber, a force of unlimited creative capabilities, these writings proclaim man himself the foremost object of this creativity. This is the much-quoted speech with which God addresses the new Adam in Pico della Mirandola’s On the Dignity of Man: Thou [‘like a judge appointed for being honourable’] art the moulder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the higher natures which are divine.10

Having just performed the crowning feat of His divine creativity by making Adam, God does not hesitate to cede to his creation the divine prerogative of moulding and shaping. Bold and radical though this view may appear, it is firmly rooted in a larger medieval frame which goes back to the Church Fathers. As Charles Trinkaus elaborates in his magisterial study on Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, “the new vision of man in this period found its inspiration in a revival of the patristic exegesis of the Genesis passage: ‘And He said: “Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness”.’”11 In the medieval tradition this initially perfect, because perfectly God-like, creature is fundamentally marred by the Fall. Despite its redemption through Christ’s sacrifice, its earthly, human condition remains irrevocably fallen. Hence the unrelieved desolation of postlapsarian humanity, as described in a spate of tracts De miseria humanae conditionis. 12 One of these, by Pope Innocent III, occasioned Gianozzo Manetti’s groundbreaking rejoinder De dignitate et excellentia hominis. Without ignoring the darker sides of the dignitas literature that flourished in the wake of Manetti, Trinkaus submits that it is “difficult” for the historian of ideas “to escape the sense of a gradual and powerful predominance of what is possibly the most affirmative view of human nature in the history of thought and expression. In making trial 10 Mirandola 1988, 5. 11 Trinkaus 1970, xiv. 12 This medieval tradition continued well into the early modern period and surfacing, for example, in the third book of Magnus Hundt’s Anthropologium de hominis dignitate, natura et proprietatibus which discusses the misery of human life.

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of his powers,” Trinkaus continues, “man comes to be seen more as manifesting his inherent divinity than as risking the danger of transformation into the beast.”13 This view, which is clearly in the tradition of Jacob Burckhardt, has by no means gone uncontested. Pico della Mirandola’s famous oration known under the title On the Dignity of Man may be, as Burckhardt enthused, “one of the noblest of that great age”,14 but, as Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, its neo-Platonist celebration of unlimited human perfectibility is also the record of a fundamental aporia and as such “anything but edifying”.15 Rather than giving substance to the notion of man, Agamben argues, it “verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human – [a] being always less and more than himself ”.16 In placing homo, not between ‘animal and divine’, but between ‘animal and human’, Agamben is obviously misreading Pico. But he does so in a way that clarifies rather than distorts. In Pico’s Oration, the category of the ‘human’ is not the middle part of a triadic symmetry, equidistant between two poles, but always already predicated on the exclusion of animal nature. As early as Pico, man emerges as “a field of dialectical tensions always already cut by internal caesurae that […] separate […] ‘anthropophorous’ animality and the humanity which takes bodily form in it.”17 The point we would like to stress is not so much the choice between higher and lower, the dualism of aspiration and degeneration, it is not so much the vertical division but the remarkable horizontal mobility that comes with man’s unlimited shape-changing faculty. In Pico’s famous phrase: “Who does not wonder at this chameleon which we are? Or who at all feels more wonder at anything else whatsoever?”18 Though free from the bleakness of the human misery tracts, this picturing of man as the most changeable of animals is very much fraught with uncertainty. The misery of man as a fallen god-like creature may have been less than chreeful, but at least it entailed a degree of stability: it was reliably humble in its hope for grace. But with humankind boldly beginning to draw its own picture, the notion of its being created in the image of 13 14 15 16 17 18

Trinkaus 1970, xiv, cf. note 11. Burckhardt [1860] 1990, 229. Agamben 2004, 29. Agamben 2004, 29. Agamben 2004, 12. Agamben 2004, 12 cf. note 9.

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God could no longer afford humanity the reassuring notion of holding a fixed position in the cosmos. Being endowed with godlike faculties and being placed in a postlapsarian world, suspended between redemption and damnation, came to be perceived as at once an exhilarating gift and a daunting prospect. Humankind’s position was at once elevated and precarious, offering infinite promise but also incalculable danger, giving an immeasurable divine gift but also making enormous demands on human responsibility. As should be clear, this pluralizing mobility is not a Kantian “emergence from [man’s] self-incurred immaturity”19, it does not constitute a break with the religious frame of medieval thought. The human chameleon may no longer be confined to its role as a flawed mimetic reflection of God, but its creative and self-creating dignitas is far from being wholly secular. Indeed, what it registers is a rigorous thinking through of the implications which the quasi-divine status of man, according to Genesis, has for human actions and human cognition. Humankind sub specie dignitatis could proceed in many different directions, and it could hope to find grace, redemption and divine approval by following a broad range of different ideals, by implementing a diverse spectrum of pictures of man, a plurality of anthropologies: While Pico della Mirandola was championing the vita contemplativa, Giannozzo Manetti argued that human dignity was to be found in the vita activa. While Thomas More was devising a political system according to humanist precepts, Machiavelli’s theories on statesmanship were markedly anti-humanist. While Pico warns man of the danger of becoming like an animal, Machiavelli eloquently details precisely which animals political leaders should try to emulate. The Age of the World Picture is thus also centrally the age of the irreducible and often contradictory plurality of pictures of humankind. In or around 1500, then, human character changed, humankind was ‘charactered’ and became diverse – and, needless to say, it has never changed back. In 1501 the term that was eventually to designate an academic discipline made its first appearance in Magnus Hundt’s Anthropologium de hominis dignitate, natura et proprietatibus. The term went on to furnish the title of a treatise by Galeazzo Capella in 1533. Quite the exception in a tradition which focuses almost entirely on the male of the species, his L’Anthropologia dedicates one of its three parts to the qualities of women. Hundt and Capella could be claimed as precursors for the branch of academic anthropology concerned with the universals of 19 Kant 2006, 17.

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human existence, the branch which especially in Germany is usually referred to as “philosophical anthropology”. With Bernardino de Sahagffln, the father of ethnography, and his encyclopedic Historia general de las cosas de Nueva EspaÇa, General History of the Things of New Spain, the mid-16th century also saw a forerunner of anthropology as the term is understood in Britain and the US: the investigation of cultural and ethnic differences, “social-” or “cultural anthropology”. The plurality of pictures of humankind (or of humankinds) which this collection of essays explores cannot be limited to any one branch of philosophy or to the academic discipline of anthropology. As the titles indicate, anthropology is here approached as a discourse with stakes in many genres of representation, social practices and in a great many, if not in all, academic disciplines, in the sciences, in economics, in law and, of course, in the humanities. Arguably, all of these disciplines are involved in the regulation of the discourse of man: what is humanly possible and permissible in the sciences, what is ethically proper in law and in politics, what is plausible and thinkable when considering the nature of humankind in the humanities, in philosophical reasoning and artistic representation. In times of crisis, the need to stabilize, adapt or reconfigure this discourse makes itself felt with particular urgency. This urgency speaks eloquently from Ernst Cassirer’s Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture, entitled An Essay on Man, written between 1941 and 1944: If we wish to grasp [the] real meaning and import [of anthropology], we must choose not the epic manner of description but the dramatic. For we are confronted, not with a peaceful development of concepts or theories, but with a clash between conflicting spiritual powers.20

Only the dramatic can provide an adequate mode of description when dealing with a subject whose instability and contestedness had been dramatically highlighted by a World War and the atrocities which the author had fled from to his exile in America. It seems hardly accidental that the formative years of 20th-century philosophical anthropology (represented by the work of Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen) followed the upheaval of the First World War. Anthropology has thus aptly been termed a Krisendisziplin (a discipline of crisis). By extension, what we propose to discuss here is the anthropological discourse of the Renaissance as a Krisendiskurs – a discourse that emerges at times of crisis. There 20 Cassirer 1944, 9.

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is no shortage of crisis and drama in a time that is markedly “out of joint” as its most famous anthropologist famously declares. This brings us to 1600 when, at last, we might say, human character changed in Britain, too, when Elizabethan drama introduced new and powerful ways of creating pictures of humankind. If these creations bring about, as Harold Bloom has notoriously claimed, the invention of the human, then it is crucial to recognize that this invention can always only be conceived as a stage in an interminable process of re-invention. Putting a date on the beginning of this process is patently impossible. The years we have highlighted in this introduction – 1500 and 1600 – certainly do not capture it with any degree of factual objectivity. And neither would 1400 or even 1300, which scholars of Italian culture would no doubt prefer. If the origin of the anthropological impetus remains elusive, its abiding productiveness manifests itself in ever new cultural configurations – just as the one that Virginia Woolf identified in December 1910, which belatedly brought the Postimpressionists to London whose paintings introduced an entirely new and unheard-of way of ‘charactering’ humankind. * * * The enterprise of anthropology presupposes a specific sort of human being, a creature that is capable of and willing to reflect on itself – a creature, moreover, that will not shy from the contradictions and the abyss it may find within itself. Looking at the richly varied contributions to this volume, we feel that we have here managed to gather precisely such creatures. The two papers in the first section open up the fundamental question of the location of the human, the question of its place within the intellectual space of early modern discourses and within physical space. In her paper “Liminal Anthropology in Shakespeare’s Plays”, Aleida Assmann considers the definition of the human as a process of reduction. Liminal anthropology defines the human ex negativo as a minimal, basic condition. As examples, the essay adduces the dramatic characters Richard II and Lear, both of whom give up their royal dignitas and claim for themselves the dignity of the human individual – an only gradually emerging and highly fragile concept in Shakespeare’s time. A further example is furnished by Shylock’s rhetoric in The Merchant of Venice where he makes a similar appeal to a dignity which is common to all human beings. In all of these cases, the strategy of reduction is directed against the particular:

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while the kings abandon their royal dignitas, Shylock tries to dismiss his religious persona in order to lay claim to a common human dignity. In Act IV, the play takes Shylock literally as the Jewish merchant forfeits his possessions, his status and his religion and is indeed reduced to bare essentials – only to be recreated as a Christian. In Othello, Emilia appeals to a minimal notion of humankind which she defines in terms of weaknesses that are common to all human beings regardless of their sex. As this plea shows, the dignity of common humanity need not be a set of positive characteristics and it is in all of these cases not one of merit and individual excellence, but, on the contrary, one which is based on the absence of all individuating features. Post-Auschwitz anthropology also looks at a reduction of individuals to the bare minimum of human life. In the concentration camps, this reduction did not reveal a common dignity, but rather stripped all dignity from the victims of Hitler’s regime. After 1945, this negative reduction was turned into a blueprint for the positive definition of inalienable basic human rights. Aleida Assmann’s examination of liminal anthropology charts the development of a sense of human dignity from individuating merit to common human frailty and through the degrading experience of an absolute reduction to the formulation of human rights. It thus provides a instance of the processes which generate an ever changing sense of humanness through rhetorical strategies of delimitation, reduction and definition. Verena Olejniczak Lobsien’s paper “The Space of the Human and the Place of the Poet: Excursions into English Topographical Poetry” offers a topological poetics and, at the same time, traces an early modern topological anthropology. The houses and places we live in are extensions of ourselves. They are expressive of who we are or want to be and they are an important factor determining the ways in which others see us. Houses delimit the identity of their inhabitants: The human as perceived by those on the inside resides within the house while other social strata are kept on the outside along with the world of nature. However, English country houses – the focus of this essay – are surrounded by their estates and these signal a transitional space where nature is assimilated to the cultured inside of the house, where nature is thus assimilated to the human. Often conceived of in terms of an earthy paradise and as representative of an idealized England, the country house is the object of projections and desires. Both projection and desire are ways in which poets relate to country houses which are often the properties of their patrons. Patronage entails the gaining of a place inside the house and projection is a form of the praise of the house and its owner whereby the poet tries to write himself

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into the estate. As the essay demonstrates in a reading of Aemilia Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-ham”, both patron and poet can in the process be made to merge with the estate. This transfer is also developed in Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House”, where the site of the country house is the poet’s mind. The space which this poem creates is not confined, but is allowed to transgress boundaries as a demonstration of the force of the poetic imagination. While human beings define themselves in terms of delimited dwelling-space, the poet is a human being who transcends this strategy. The second section of this volume looks at religion, and more specifically at the Reformation, as a seminal force in the creation of different notions of humankinds. In his paper “Among the Fairies: Religion and the Anthropology of Ritual in Shakespeare”, Brian Cummings considers the ineluctable ritualistic dimension of humankinds, the extent to which and the ways in which human beings are disposed to rely on ritual in their lives. Ritual and ceremony are fundamental to the study of humankinds as both social practices can be seen to compensate for falsehood in human communication by anchoring signification in reliable patterns. The scope of ritual is thus far-reaching and even in the case of religious ceremony applies both to the individual and to the incorporation of human beings in a collective whole. Current debates on ritual not only acknowledge this importance of ceremony, but have given rise to a ritualist polemics which regards the Protestant reformation of the rituals of the mass as a dangerous demystification. The paper goes on to examine the fairyworld of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare’s fairies come across as a ‘primitive’ society, but one which practices elaborate and highly formalised rituals. The fairies are mimetic in that they represent a longedfor imaginary past and open up views of a ritual world. As part of a stageplay they also invite the audience to immerse themselves in that world and to rediscover the pertinence of ritual and ceremony for the human and for the permeable boundaries which define the non-human. The ways in which different concepts of what it means to be human, how different ‘anthropologies’ can be brought into contact, recombined and fused on the stage of the theatre is the subject of Enno Ruge’s paper “Golding’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Puritan Anthropology”. The example which the essay analyses is the character of Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Malvolio rejects the Pythagorean theory of the transmigration of the soul and thus presents a perfectly orthodox Christian view. Still, he is abused for this position because, as M.E. Lamb has argued, the world of the play demands an acknowledge-

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ment of the sort of change which metempsychosis can serve to symbolise. By rejecting Pythagoras, Malvolio thus reconfirms his mental rigidity. But for all his inflexible joylessness, Malvolio fails to fit the mould of the stage puritan and his ‘gulling’ aims to make him conform to this clich. As attempts are made to turn Malvolio both into a Pythagorean and a puritan, the play points towards some uneasy similarities between the teachings of Pythagoras and the puritans’ notion of human nature. “Negotiating the Foreign” is a section which inquires into processes of exchange, of distancing and approximation, of delimitation and inclusion between self and other. The dubious anthropological universalism which quotations from Shakespeare were made to support in the British Museum’s lavish Shah Abbas exhibition of 2009 serves as the entry point to Richard Wilson’s discussion of “Shakespeare’s Eastern Promise”. The essay offers a reading of Twelfth Night which traces the play’s engagement with the highly charged politics of Anglo-Persian relations around the time of the Essex rebellion. The ‘silken suits’ of Twelfth Night, Wilson suggests, tell a story that lies beyond the British Museum’s bland display of beautiful objects – and beyond “much of the virtual shopping” for such objects in “current Renaissance studies”. Centring on two recusant brothers, Anthony and Robert Sherley, on a far from peaceful mission to the court of the Shah, this is a story of violent contradictions not only in distant Persia but also in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare’s humanist vision of universal peace never allows us to forget the divisive forces that intervene before that ‘golden time convents’. Bettina Boecker’s “Cony Caught by Walking Mort: Indigenous Exoticism in the Literature of Roguery” examines the literature of roguery. These texts purport to give an account of the criminal underworld of England, the world of rogues and cony catchers. Though demarcated from official English social life, the realm of the rogues is not only an alternative, but importantly a parallel society which mirrors England much like a microcosm mirroring the macrocosm: the rogues live within hierarchical structures and follow specialized professions within their illegal trade. In these pamphlets, the rogues are identified as an indigenous other and their otherness constructed in a way that suggests at once mysterious distance and controllable proximity – their culture is exposed and in turn transformed into a foreign world. At the same time, the otherness which the literature of roguery constructs is not only an other to be repressed and subjected, but an exotic other, an other that is alluring, thrilling and an object of wishful identification. Situated between factual account and fiction, the literature of roguery is here made the subject of a

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case study on the anthropological assumptions and mechanisms which govern the cultural creation of societies and of the human as other. Cornel Zwierlein considers the anthropological implications of the history of the insurance business in his paper on “Renaissance Anthropologies of Security”. While the middle ages tended to be dominated by a sense of predestination and inevitable fate, the modern self came to think and act according to the science and knowledge of its time. This emerging orientation toward abstraction is the environment in which insurance business was going to thrive, which belongs to a world of values and balances. Concepts of risk and insurance are not, as is often claimed, products of the late 17th century, but were well established as early as the 14th century. Indeed, around 1600 there was a heightened awareness of the danger involved in traversing dangerous spaces and a rise in artificial security, i. e. insurance, which is reflected in many late Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. The modern self began to try and calculate risk and to control that risk through insurance, to control reality through planning. There is a much-contested border which separates the human nature from animal nature as the epitome of the non-human. This border is the subject of the section on “Human and Non-Human”. In “Shakespeare’s Public Animals” Paul Yachnin considers Shakespeare’s ‘animal-people’ – characters in the plays who, like Shylock or Caliban, are strongly associated with animals and thereby cast as non- and below-human beings. These animal-people challenge their animality by seeking a public voice – something animals are by definition never granted. Indeed, according to Hannah Arendt, it is only through publicity that we become fully human. Thus, while today a unitary idea of personhood is taken for granted, the boundary between human and animal was less clearly located and more porous and permeable in Shakespeare’s England. A striking example for this permeability is the character of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. In his language and in his hunger for flesh, Shakespeare’s conception of the Jewish money-lender is essentially canine, but Shylock’s position is more generally that of an animal as he assumes the position of a baited bear. Importantly, though, Shylock goes public, he takes his case to court and seeks a public rather than a private revenge on Antonio. Shakespeare’s animal-people resemble playwrights and actors in their low social status and in their need for publicty giving the status and definition of the human a metatheatrical dimension. Markus Wild’s contribution on “Montaigne’s Rapprochement Between Man and Animal” considers the subversion of the traditional distinction between humanitas and animalitas in Michel de Montaigne’s Es-

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says. Pyrrhonian sceptic that he is, Montaigne undermines the comfortable notion of a stable “anthropological difference” not only by extending the hermeneutic condition to animals and granting them a perspective of their own, but he also undertakes what might be termed an “animalisation” of human nature. Going back to the Aristotelian distinction between a first and a second nature, Montaigne maintains that in spite of the radical differences between cultural formations, habits, and customs, all human beings are subject to a basic anthropological condition that is rooted in their corporeal nature, in their capacity for suffering, ageing and dying. It is from this notion of a shared animalitas, from this “animalisation” of the human that Montaigne’s well-known arguments against cruelty and in favour of virtue draw their particular force. Ulrich Pfisterer’s “Animal Art / Human Art” traces the convoluted trajectories of the common notion that above all other faculties it is art which defines the human in contradistinction to the animals. However, there are strong traditions going back to antiquity which acknowledge on the one hand the capacity of animals to produce artful objects which are easily on a par with human artistry, objects which human art takes as its own point of departure, and, on the other hand, the sensitivity of animals to appreciate art, to respond to works of art in a way whose natural innocence human beings are incapable of. But the Renaissance began to distinguish between human and animal art by attributing imagination, creativity and fantasy to human art and by denying these qualities to the productivity of animals. Art was thus not in itself regarded as a definiens of the human, but became a site for the conceptualisation of an ideal of human creativity. The two papers in “Thinking the Human”, the last section in this volume, address two distinct ways in which the human is a product of a specific way of thinking, of a mental process – either in that cognitive skills are made to serve as defining traits of the human or in that humankind comes into its own by reflecting on the instability of its own claims to human stature.Tobias Dçring’s contribution on “‘Now they’re substances and men’: The Masque of Lethe and the Recovery of Humankind” looks at the way in which the genre of the court masque regards human beings as determined by opposing principles. Jonson’s Masque of Lethe is unusual in this regard, since it does not have a separate antimasque in which convention demands that the forces of disorder and transgression be contained and expelled. Here, the antimasque is integrated into the main action where memory and oblivion are put on stage as rival powers over mankind. The text’s rejection of a formal binary structure of masque

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and antimasque is reflected in its handling of the force of oblivion which is not dismissed as a disruptive force, but invested with constructive and even healing powers as the plot shows lovers who have been charmed by Cupid regaining their full humanity only through an act of forgetfulness. This productive process of forgetting is replicated in the audience who are supposed to forget the physical side of the stage production in order to assist the memorization of the moral and intellectual content of the play. Jonson’s Masque of Lethe thus explores unexpected ways in which being human both on stage and in the audience is predicated on forgetfulness. Finally, in his paper on “Shakespeare Ever After: Posthumanism and Shakespeare” Stefan Herbrechter traces the numerous ways in which the theoretical discourse of posthumanism and the academic discipline of Shakespeare Studies have interacted in the wake of the ideologically charged ‘theory wars’ of the late twentieth century. The term “posthumanism” does not signify a simple dismissal of ‘the human’, but has to be conceived of as a radical pluralisation of the human, a meticulous deconstruction of the essentialism that has dominated the traditional humanism. The space of ontological indeterminacy between the human and the non-human that has been opened up by postmodern cultural theory and late-capitalist techno-culture has alerted critics to parallels between the “posthuman condition” of late modernity and similar constellations in early modern culture. Thus, the Bard notoriously credited with the “invention of the human” has come to be re-read as always already ‘post-technological’, ‘post-theoretical’ and ‘post-humanist’.

Texts Cited Agamben, Giorgio (2004): The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bruno, Giordano (1584): De l’infinito universo e mondi. (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds) URL: http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/brunoiuw0.htm. Burckhardt, Jacob [1860] (1990): The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. London: Penguin. Cassirer, Ernst (1944): An Essay on Man. An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1977): “The Age of the World Picture”, in: The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row.

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Kant, Imanuel (2006): “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”, in: Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History. Ed. by Pauline Kleingeld, trans. David L. Colclasure. New Haven / London: Yale University Press. Lovejoy, Arthur O. (121974): The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Manetti, Giannozzo (1990): ber die Wrde und Erhabenheit des Menschen / De dignitate et excellentia hominis. Hamburg: Meiner. Mirandola, Pico della (1988): On the Dignity of Man. Trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J.W. Miller, Douglas Carmichael (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett. Trinkaus, Charles Edward (1970): In Our Image and Likeness. Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought. Vol. 1. London: Constable. Woolf, Virginia (1992): “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, in: A Woman’s Essays. Ed. by Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Literary Sites of the Human

Liminal Anthropology in Shakespeare’s Plays Aleida Assmann How did the human (made out of humus) become anthropomorphized? (Hayden White, in conversation)

I. Introduction In the Renaissance, a highly consequential shift occurred from a pessimistic anthropology within the Christian medieval framework to an optimistic anthropology in the context of a new secular humanism. The religious concept of man as created in God’s image was transformed into the secular concept of the godlike divinity of man. Many Italian tracts of the 14th and 15th century praise the dignity and excellence of man within such an optimistic anthropology, holding on to the idea of man’s share in a divine nature while at the same time affirming an independence from God’s divine plans for salvation.1 Secular humanism is based on an anthropology that affirms a continuum between the human and the divine, ushering in a new era of progress that is built on the chance and task of human self-perfection.2 Shakespeare’s ‘liminal anthropology’ that I want to introduce in this essay does not fit into the categories of either pessimist or optimist visions of man as defined by Christian or humanist anthropology. It must be placed in a secular context, but it refrains from praising human potential or achievements. On the contrary rather: It focuses on the human as a quality that is discovered only ex negativo in the very absence of positive traits and accomplishments. Instead of attaching a maximal value to the human, we are dealing with the minimal condition to which humans can be reduced. Devoid of all excellence and dignity, they appeal to what Wolfgang Schadewaldt has termed ‘the solidarity

1 2

Manetti 1532; Manetti 1990; Mller 1969; Hentschel 1992. O’Malley / Izbicki / Christianson 1993.

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of the destitute’.3 In this paper, I will reread famous passages from four Shakespearean plays in which such a minimal and basic condition of human existence is referred to. In a second step, I will analyze these passages in the context of contemporary discourse. II. Richard II and Lear – the unmaking of a king and the making of a human being In the play which bears his name in the title,4 Richard II is pitted against his adversary Henry Bolinbroke in a strikingly symmetrical way that is also emphasized in metaphors such as the bucket moving up and down in a well. The fate of both characters is intimately tied to each other; the rise of the one is the downfall of the other. Due to his exalted hyper-imagination, King Richard anticipates the worst before he actually hits rock bottom. Long before his actual demise and murder in the fourth and fifth act of the play, he already experiences fits of self-annihilation in the third act. The bad news that arrives from the battlefield causes Richard to fall from a state of omnipotence into a state of utter helplessness. His peers have to admonish him: “Comfort, my liege, remember who you are”, to which he responds: “I had forgot myself, am I not king?” (3.2.82 – 83) However, despite this conscious reminder, the situation is not much improved. Richard evades the pressure of the present situation by engaging in role playing. The first role is that of a lamenter: “Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs” (3. 2. 145); this is superseded by the role of a story teller: “For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings” (3.2.155 – 156). These stories all end in death who is personified as the universal ruler of the world. Ri3

4

Schadewaldt 1975, 61: “Die Solidaritt der Hinflligen”. In sharp contrast to the Renaissance ideal of human excellence Schadewaldt reconstructed a ‘Delphic’ tradition of humanism that is characterized by two axioms: One is the positive emphasis on the frail human body (over against Platonic traditions that discard the body in favor of the soul); the other is the insurmountable abyss between the human and the divine. Humans were defined in this tradition by their common vulnerability and mortality. This minimalist, anti-heroic idea of the human was reintroduced by Schadewaldt in postwar Germany within the framework of a philosophy of humility and acquiescence (see Heidegger’s notion of ‘Gelassenheit’). While this popular ‘anthropological’ stance expressed the experience of a common crisis of humanity, it occluded a re-inspection of recent German history in an ethical perspective. All references to King Richard II are from The Arden Edition 2nd series, 1964.

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chard bows to Death as the super king who keeps his court within the round of his crown: He comes to realize that the life he lives and the power he wields are gifts borrowed from Death as the ruler of all rulers. In his theatrical mood, he shifts roles; after the lamenter and the storyteller, he embraces the role of the mortal subject as his last resort. In doing so, the king forgets himself once more. He leaves his perch at the top of the social hierarchy and exposes himself as a mere human being. His peers, however, are far from accepting his plea for human solidarity. On the contrary, their aim is to reinforce and reinstate his regal status in a destabilized world. These are the words with which Richard tries to step down and meet his peers on an equal level: Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood With solemn reverence; throw away respect, Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty; For you have but mistook me all this while. I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends – subjected thus, How can you say to me, I am a king? (Richard II, 3.2.171 – 177)

In this speech, Richard presents himself to his peers as the mere ‘flesh and blood’ to which he is reduced as soon as the pomp and circumstance of rite and ritual are withdrawn. In this way, he provokes them into looking at him in a radically different light. Arriving at this new stance requires a total change of frame and perspective. He asks them to abstract all of the attitudes and values with which he had been invested in making him the king – such as respect, tradition, form and ceremonious duty. In doing so, he paradoxically calls on his own peers to join in the sacrilegious act of deposing the king. Deprived of his royal ornateness and office, he is but one human being amongst others, with an animal nature dependent on nourishment and shelter as well as on sympathy, personal bonds and emotions. In this scene, the king perplexes his peers by prematurely disposing of his dignitas. As a king, he is invested and endowed with various dignities, which are all summed up in the legal term dignitas that stands for the official ceremonial body of the king.5 According to medieval law, the dignitas of the ceremonial body is an immortal essence. For this reason, it must be separated from the mortal human body of the king after 5

Cf. Kantorowicz 1957; Agamben 2002, 66 ff., on the juridical origin of the concept of dignity.

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his death and transferred to an effigy of the king, which is publicly displaced. In this way, the perpetuity of the sacred office of kingship is guaranteed across the rift of death. Consequently, Richard’s spontaneous plea to engage in a process of unmaking the king is received by his peers as a shocking and even blasphemous command. He asks them to dismantle the royal dignitas which is designed to survive the king by all means. This perplexity is transformed into a very different response in the contemporary audiences of Shakespeare’s play who witness how, underneath the royal dignitas, another kind of dignitas is revealed, namely that of the mortal human body which is subject to basic needs, pain, love and grievances. The play, therefore, is not only symmetrically divided between power (incorporated by Henry Bolinbroke) and dignitas (represented by Richard), but it is further complicated by the introduction of two separate kinds of dignity: A premodern dignity related to the medieval philosophy of sacred kingship and a modern dignity related to the sacred value of the individual. While in Shakespeare’s time, the first kind of dignity was an established cultural concept, the second kind of dignity had yet a long way to go before it was culturally codified and legally enforced in the political doctrine of human rights. Until then, it was not totally absent; it has a prehistory, as I want to argue, that takes us back to ‘Renaissance Anthropologies’ in general and to some of Shakespeare’s plays in particular. While Richard’s speech to his peers is yet totally uninformed by our discourse on human rights and human dignity, it presents already a poetic adumbration and anticipation of a cultural concept that is to be developed much later in an explicit form. Let us compare Richard II’s case with that of another Shakespearean king whose humanity is also foregrounded. Lear is in a rather different situation from Richard, as he has already given away his royal dignitas before his death and is thus reduced to his natural human body.6 The play presents the divestiture of this king on many levels: firstly, he hands over the insignia of his symbolic power to his daughters; secondly, his daughters reduce his physical power by taking his militia of 100 knights away from him; thirdly, they turn their father out of their house and expose him as a fragile human being to the rage of the elements. Lear experiences a liminal situation in which he falls back on the bare essentials of life. At this minimum of existence, he learns that 6

All references to King Lear are from R. A. Foakes’ Arden Edition (Third Series), 1997.

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The art of our necessities is strange, And can make vile things precious. (Lear, 3.2.70 – 71)

In this liminal situation, the proud and egotistical Lear slowly discovers a capacity for empathy in himself. He takes less and less notice of himself and more and more of others. Significantly, the following speech is not about his fate but about that of his fellow human beings: Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just. (Lear, 3.4.28 – 36)

Rather than following Richard’s example and pointing to himself in a theatrical Ecce Home-gesture, Lear takes the part of a student who is being taught a lesson here. He neither presents himself, nor pleads nor makes a claim. Instead, he learns – while simultaneously teaching – a lesson in humanity as a naked wretch responding to other naked wretches: Why, thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncover’d body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. […] thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. (Lear, 3.4.99 – 106)

Similar to Richard II, Lear is also subject to sudden fits of enacting selfdeprivation, for instance when he starts to tear off his clothes in the hovel: “Off, off, you lendings: come, unbutton here.” (Lear 3.4.106 – 107). These incidents, however, are informed by madness rather than by a theatrical disposition. Lear’s liminal anthropology is twofold: he is not only an example of the naked human being that is deprived of all necessary contexts and comforts, but he is also simultaneously the one who responds to the ecce homo appeal, confirming the universal bond of human solidarity. In a manner which is much more explicit than that of Richard II, Lear moves from the position of pre-modern royal dignitas

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to the highly precarious modern dignitas of the naked and destitute human being. III. Shylock’s plea for the humanity of a ‘dog’ In the center of the play The Merchant of Venice,7 Shylock, the banker of Venice, delivers a famous speech of self-presentation. In this speech, the character, who is more often referred to as ‘the Jew’ than called by his name ‘Shylock’, makes a strong plea for his humanity. It is questionable whether this speech does in fact arouse empathy or not. This has been the issue of a long debate on the allegedly anti-Semitic character of the play. The basic question therefore is: Does Shakespeare succeed in humanizing the Jew or does he reinforce the older stereotypes by combining them with other dramatic traditions of morality play and satire? In his presentation, Shakespeare’s Shylock oscillates between an individual person and the embodiment of various generic types: the villain, the Jew, the personification of a particular vice. There is no question that the play presents Shylock from the point of view of all the other characters as different, hateful, sometimes comical but generally as alien. For his construction of Shylock, Shakespeare could draw on at least five different traditions of shaping negative characters: (1) the Christian stereotype of the Jew as a stiff-necked nonbeliever and even murderer of Christ who is also accused of perverse ritual activities which threaten the Christian communities with murder of their innocent children (2) the dramatic tradition of the vice-figure in the morality play that is presented as a demonic embodiment of Satan (3) the Roman tradition of satire in which particular human vices such as greed and avarice are displayed and defeated in comically exaggerated terms (4) the dramatic tradition of the Elizabethan villain with a Machiavellian love for power and manipulation (5) the vernacular tradition of hate speech and verbal abuse with its huge repertoire of animal metaphors. In this notorious language of spite, common membership of the human species is continuously called into question. 7

All references to The Merchant of Venice are from Leah Marcus’ Norton Shakespeare Critical Edition 1997.

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Although Shakespeare availed himself freely of all these traditions except the fourth, his image of the Jew is strikingly different from that of his rival Marlowe in The Jew of Malta. One of the most obvious differences between Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s presentations of the Jew is the insertion of the speech in which Shylock claims a common bond of humanity both with the other characters on stage and with the members of the audience. This speech is delivered by a character who is stigmatized as an outsider from the outset and whose outsider position is reinforced with the help of religious and literary traditions. In addition to his collective otherness as a Jew and his individual otherness as an embodiment of evil, this ultimate and non-assimilable other is constantly referred to throughout the play as a ‘dog’. It is this ‘dog’ then, the target figure of collective hate and abuse, which makes the claim to a common humanity: Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? – if you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? (Merchant, 3.1.49 – 56)

Like Richard II, Shylock makes a claim to sameness with his fellow human beings. However, in this particular case, the speaker is divided from those around him not through rank or status, but through religion. Similar to Richard II who had two bodies (his royal dignitas and his mortal natural body), Shylock also has two bodies: a religious and a natural body. While the religious body has to respect social restrictions and clear borderlines: “I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following. But I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.” (Merchant, 1.3.29 – 32), the natural body knows of no such differences and boundaries: “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food […]” (Merchant, 3.1.49 – 52) Shylock’s self portrait consists of a series of six rhetorical questions, which call for an affirmative answer. While most of the spectators might indeed be inclined to respond with an affirming yes, Solano and Salerio, however, his addressees on stage, are very unlikely to supply a sympathetic answer. While Shylock insists on sameness, they insist on difference. In the same scene, they have just disputed Shylock’s use of the phrase ‘flesh and blood’. Shylock had used these words to refer to his daughter who has deserted him. Salerio’s answer is: “There is more difference between thy flesh and hers, than between jet and ivory, more between your bloods, than there is between red wine and Rhenish”

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(3.1.33 – 35). In contrast to the dark skinned Morocco who was ready to prove that his blood is as red as that of “the fairest creature northward born” (2.1.4), Salerio negates the sameness of blood even within Shylock’s family. After Jessica has changed sides and left her father, she has cut the bond of kinship and is no longer considered to be his blood relative. While the daughter who has become Christian and who is about to marry is assimilable, her father is not. He stands ostentatiously apart from all the others in his emphatic and unredeemable otherness. In this situation, after the cruel separation from his daughter, the lonely and isolated Jew points to himself as a representative of the human species. He claims participation in the common essence of humanity on the level of bodily organs and functions. In these lines, Shylock transforms himself from a willful and intentional agent into a passive and vulnerable human being that is steered by sensations and exposed to pain and mortality. He asserts the universal bond of humanity that is based on the naked, dependent and vulnerable body from which all of the differentiating marks of culture, tradition and religion have been eliminated. We are dealing here with the same liminal anthropology of abstraction, privation and divestiture that Richard II resorted to and that Lear experienced on the heath. For all of these characters, human sameness is what remains after all of the distinguishing and shaping features of the social and cultural person have been cancelled. As was already mentioned, there is an ongoing controversy about the emotional impact of this speech. Some read it as a pathetic revelation of a common humanity,8 others as the calculated speech of a mischievous character.9 The answer depends on whether we focus only on the lines 8

9

The ambivalence can be demonstrated in the rhetorical question ‘If you tickle us do we not laugh?’ This question points to laughter as a genuinely human quality. It is squeezed in, however, between two experiences of invasive aggression: ‘If you prick us do we not bleed?’ and ‘If you poison us do we not die?’, which suggests that this laughter does not emerge from a mental insight but issues from a mere physiological stimulus. Thus, the ennobling feature of laughter is reduced to a bodily function. Hence it is placed on the same level with Shylock’s speech in the first scene of the following act. In this speech, he describes himself in terms of compulsive actions, thereby replacing the higher human faculty of rational reflection by the lower faculty of bodily reflexes. Cohen argues from the point of view that Shylock is conceived by Shakespeare as a comic villain. “It is undoubtedly true that Shylock’s ‘humanity’ has frequently been given full – even excessive – play in the theatre. But it is always useful to bear in mind that he is the play’s villain. All his words, even the most convincingly aggrieved among them, are the words of a cold, heartless killer and should there-

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which I have singled out or whether we look at the speech in its entirety. The plea for humane compassion is framed by the theme of revenge which introduces and closes this famous self-presentation. Having started with Jessica as Shylock’s flesh and blood and with the cutting of her bond, the dialogue shifts to another bond and another flesh, namely that of Antonio which is intended to replace the lost flesh of Shylock’s daughter. (The concomitant theme of blood is for the time being repressed or suspended, but will resurface later and introduce the dramatic reversal of fortune in the fourth act.) Shylock’s famous speech is prompted by Salerio’s simple question: “thou wilt not take his flesh, – what’s that good for?” (3.1.43 – 44) Shylock’s long answer can be summed up in one word: revenge. In the end, he answers all of his rhetorical questions himself with a passionate repetition of this word. To bait fish withal, – if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge; he hath disgrac’d me, and hind’red me half a million, laugh’ed at my losses, mock’d at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, – and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. […] and if you wrong us shall we not revenge? – if we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? – why revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (Merchant, 3.1.45 – 61)

With the final resolve for revenge, Shylock’s self-presentation as a passive and exposed human being is replaced by an assertion of aggressive agency. This has a special effect on the audience. For them, the surprising middle part of the speech that introduces the theme of human suffering together with the idea of sameness between Jews and Christians is framed with the well known topos of Jewish hate and revenge. It reappears here in a phantasmagoric form, presenting Shylock as a predator that feeds on Antonio as a sacrificial animal. With this sinister announcement, Shylock moves in the perception of the audience from a stranger refusing conviviality (‘I will not eat with you, nor drink with you’) to a threatening monster. The following claim to a common bond of humanity (‘fed by the same food’) is paradoxically built into confirmations of perpetual mutual agfore be regarded skeptically. […] Instead of eliciting sympathy for an underdog, Shakespeare intended the speech to elicit detestation for one in a privileged and powerful position who knowingly and deliberately abases himself in a plea for unmerited sympathy.” Cohen 1980, 59 – 61.

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gression. In the oscillation between irreconcilable claims on the audience’s emotions, the speech carries a deeper unsettling message to the Christian conscience: whatever pain has been accumulated and endured by the Jews over the ages, the time has finally come to pay back for all. The frame of revenge has a chilling effect on the pathos built up in the middle part: Compassion gives way to feelings of threat and insecurity, restoring the audience’s sense of alienation and insurmountable difference towards this character. With its mixed messages, this speech perplexes spectators to this very day. In doing so, it dramatically reenacts the pathologically deformed relationship of Christians to Jews. It has been convincingly argued that Shylock’s great moment of claiming human sameness and arousing compassion does not occur in the third but in the fourth act towards the end of the trial scene.10 This scene brings about a transformation from villain to victim that is experienced in the audience as a shift from ‘alienity’ to ‘alterity’.11 After the verdict has been pronounced in the trial scene, Shylock is muted while Gratiano mimics his voice with vitriolic spite. In this scene, it is his silence rather than his words that endow him for us with the pathos of a tragic character. It is here that Shakespeare shifts gears as it were, introducing a tragic strain into his comic plot. The comic plot would have relished the heroic triumph over the villain, saturating the audience with a feeling of complacent satisfaction. The tragic strain, on the other hand, gives a bitter taste to the same victory by exposing a victim in whose overthrow we cannot truly rejoice. While the ending of Marlowe’s play stages the triumph over the Jew in terms of violent exclusion, Shakespeare’s play aims at a triumph via forced inclusion. While we can only speculate about the sentiments of the Elizabethan audience, the contemporary audience is bound to witness this scene in a very different light. The reason for this lies in the fact that it is bound to respond to the second part of the trial scene as a reenactment of liminal anthropology. Instead of the overcoming of the villain, we witness the unmaking of Shylock. After the servant and his daughter have left him, everything else is taken away from him: his money, his possessions, his social status and finally his religion. There is a decisive difference between the undoing of a villain and the unmaking of a character. Shylock is divested of every mark of his social and cultural person and left with nothing but his mere life (to be reinvested as a Chris10 Cohen 1980. 11 I owe the terms ‘alterity’ and ‘alienity’ as graded forms of strangeness to: Mnkler 1997.

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tian). The public exposure of a Jewish character stripped down to his naked existence reenacts for us in a subliminal way the traumatic memory of the Holocaust and arouses the empathy of the spectators even more effectively than his famous plea for sameness in the third act. IV. O, these men, these men! Emilia’s temptation My last example for Shakespeare’s liminal anthropology comes from the play Othello. 12 The scene which seems most relevant here is the last one of the fourth act. Here, Emilia assists Desdemona in her boudoir as she gets undressed and goes to bed on the last fateful evening of her life. The scene is filled with anticipations and adumbrations of Desdemona’s imminent violent death; the themes of going to sleep and of meeting her death as a lover in her bridal dress are tightly connected on a metaphorical level. Desdemona, accused by Othello of having been unfaithful, sings the song of a woman who died of grief when her lover proved false and turned to other women. It ends with the following stanza: I called my love false love; but what said he then? Sing willow, willow, willow: If I court moe women; you’ll couch with moe men. (Othello, 4.3.54 – 56)

There is a glaring dramatic contrast between Desdemona’s singing voice on the one hand (with Desdemona as the apex of female fidelity, constancy and purity) and the male voice in the song that justifies his unfaithful behavior by referring to the promiscuity of both sexes. A psychoanalytic reading against the grain might show that Desdemona on this evening is in fact directing her thoughts and possibly her desires to another man, namely the handsome ambassador from Venice: “This Ludovico is a proper man.”13 One could argue that, on a deeper level, this reference to her father’s kinsman calls her choice of marriage into question, highlighting the deep rift between the ‘flesh and blood’ of her own family and that of her heavily exoticized husband. But the topic of the ensuing dialogue between Desdemona and Emilia revolves not around the differences of race but around differences of gender. The song presupposes a symmetry between male and female sexual practices which Desdemona 12 All references to Othello are from E. A. J. Honigmann’s The Arden Edition (Third Series), 1997. 13 The line is given to Desdemona or Emilia in different editions.

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finds utterly scandalous: “If I court moe women, you’ll couch with moe men”. As she cannot believe that there is any truth to these words, she asks Emilia’s opinion on the topic: O, these men, these men! Dost thou in conscience think, – tell me, Emilia, – That there be women do abuse their husbands In such gross kind? (Othello, 4.3.59 – 62)

The dialogue between Desdemona and Emilia presents not only two opposite points of view but also a striking confrontation of classes, rhetorical styles and literary genres. Shakespeare dramatizes a clash between the tragic and the comic genre in this exchange on the theme of female (in)constancy. Des. Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world? Emil. Why, would not you? Des. No, by this heavenly light! Emil. Nor I neither, by this heavenly light: I might do’t as well i’th’ dark. (Othello, 4.3.63 – 66)

What is considered an unthinkable blasphemy for the one is but “a small vice” for the other. While Desdemona cannot “think that there is any such woman”, Emilia knows a dozen and many more who fall into this category. She explains and excuses the infidelity of wives by way of the promiscuous behavior of their husbands. In so doing, she continues the theme of the willow song from the female perspective. If both sexes are equally prone to infidelity, then there is no one to blame. At this point, Emilia transforms the defensive argument into an assertive speech of female self-empowerment: Why, we have galls: and though we have some grace Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know, Their wives have sense like them: they see, and smell, And have their palates both for sweet, and sour As husbands have. What is it that they do, When they change us for others? Is it sport? I think it is: and doth affection breed it? I think it doth. Is’t fraily that thus errs? It is so too. And have not we affections? Desires for sport? and frailty, as men have? Then let them use us well: else let them know, The ills we do, their ills instruct us so. (Othello, 4.3.91 – 102)

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Emilia’s speech shows a number of striking similarities with Shylock’s speech. Firstly, both characters speak not only for themselves, but also for a discriminated group, i. e. for Jews and women respectively. Secondly, they both affirm a physiological human sameness below the cultural differences of race, religion and gender in order to claim personal recognition and social status. Thirdly, both invoke the logic of retaliation, justifying their own behavior and actions by taking the other’s abuses as their ‘instructions’. Fourthly: Like Shylock, Emilia makes excessive use of rhetorical questions. In her case, however, they are not addressed to an opponent but to another woman with whom she hopes to bond in an alliance of complicity. This is where the differences start. Emilia’s impassioned speech is part of an ongoing battle between the sexes, but it does not revolve around the theme of vengeance. Her rhetoric is not spiteful but subversive. It does not elicit compassion but backs up an argument of self-empowerment. It must be immediately added, however, that Emilia’s speech about female emancipation and self-liberation does not spark any resonance in Desdemona. The reason for this obvious gap, for this exhibition of non-communication, is that one woman is separated from the other not only by rank but also in terms of literary genre. Cutting corners is possible and acceptable in the low mimetic genre of comedy, but it is unthinkable in the high seriousness of tragedy. In the low genre, Emilia’s logic of common sense is irresistible: What is tolerated and esteemed in males should not be scandalized and persecuted in females. This logic nowadays may work with the larger part of the audience, but it cannot tempt Desdemona, because the pragmatic logic of common sense has no place in the heroic world of tragedy. Tragedy calls for clearly defined characters that are guided or obstructed by absolute norms and values which do not allow for negotiations. In the high amimetic genre, these values define ideals of purity and constitute rigid barriers which are transgressed with tragic consequences. As with Shylock, we have to avoid the danger of anachronism and thus we should not mistake Emilia’s speech for a feminist manifesto. Again, we have to acknowledge that Shakespeare does not share the modern credo of human universalism; for him, it is a topic only of the low mimetic genre of comedy. Emilia’s impressive speech is couched in the voice of a subaltern who is embedded into the rigorous caste system of tragedy. In this case, the subaltern can indeed speak and is heard, but she cannot be understood by her lady. Emilia’s challenging voice on the stage does not call into question the hierarchy of a society and the

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order of a world that prescribes the differences of rank and role to the sexes. We are still a far cry from the cultural claim of a universal code of conduct for all social classes, races and sexes. Emilia’s plea for the sameness of the sexes beneath cultural norms and social roles refers to a basic physical similarity which in this case is the Christian natura corrupta, the fallen status of humans. Her speech is therefore more about human frailty than about human vulnerability; in this Christian universe, women claim to be entitled to the same sins as men. For Emilia, it is this shared frailty of their flesh that constitutes the bond of common humanity among men and women. V. Conclusion: Liminal and post-Auschwitz anthropology The calling into question of our quality as men provokes an almost biological claim of belonging to the human race. (Robert Antelme, The Human Race)

Characters invented by Shakespeare which are as different as Richard II, Lear, Shylock and Emilia have one thing in common: they all point to themselves by calling attention to a sameness of human nature below differences of status, religion, race and gender. They participate in a discourse of ‘liminal anthropology’ which redefines the conditio humana from a precarious position on the margins of culture and society. In all the speeches that we have here submitted to a rereading, the sameness of humans is something that becomes visible only momentarily, requiring radical shifts of perspective. The new gaze pierces through the trappings of society and culture and exposes a forgotten underlying quality of sameness. This vision of sameness emerges only after the subtraction of all individual and collective features, exposing the ‘degree zero of humanism’, the animal life of the naked body. This common denominator that binds together all humans is evoked to elicit the emotional response of a ‘solidarity of the destitute’. This liminal ‘perspective’ draws a clear distinction between culture and nature; it exposes the constructedness of cultural markers while simultaneously essentializing the physical basis of human nature. We can no longer follow Shakespeare in these premises; for us, the concept of a homogenous human nature is as much a cultural construct as all of

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the other distinctions of religion, race, class and gender. Nowadays, human sameness is no longer anything that automatically appears when all the layers of cultural shaping are withdrawn, but it is a value and a cultural norm that has to be discursively constructed. The plea for human sameness and solidarity elicits no longer a merely sentimental but also an ethical response in a framework of codified and enforced universal human rights. Even though, historically speaking, Shakespeare does not yet subscribe to such a moral stance, this stance is already adumbrated in the effects of his dramatic art. Shakespeare’s speeches can be read within the wider context of a contemporary anthropology of dressing and undressing. According to this constructivist or skeptical tradition, human beings are no longer defined by pre-established social rank or stamped by innate traits of personal character but by contingent and acquired features such as clothes and behavior. If it is true that ‘manners maketh man’, then education and behavior rather than origin and lineage becomes the basis for human development and placement in society.14 Difference, under such conditions, is de-essentialized and shifted, as it is today, to more contingent conditions such as the problem of access. In more politicized contexts, the notion of the naked human being as the basis of human sameness could be invoked to claim equality. In his Istorie Florentine, Machiavelli described the revolt of the wool makers of 1378, putting the following words into the mouth of one of the insurgents: All humans have the same origin and are therefore of the same age. Nature has made them all in the same way. Take off the clothes of the nobles, and you will see that they are just like us. If we change clothes with them, we will be the nobles and they will be the poor.15

Within a revolutionary speech, the reference to basic human nakedness aims at overthrowing age-old systems of rank and hierarchy. When Edward Morgan Forster returned to the anthropology of dressing and undressing in 1939 under the threatening impact of communism and fascism, he gave it a more individualized turn, invoking it as an antidote against enforced collective commitments. Forster echoed biblical language and Lear’s humility when he wrote: “Naked I came into the

14 The line comes from the bishop William of Wykeham (1324 – 1404) and was adopted as a motto by Winchester College and New College Oxford. 15 Bock 1986, 181.

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world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its color.”16 In order to move from these historical versions to the contemporary discourse of nakedness and sameness, we have to come back once more to the concept of dignitas and its radical shifts of meaning. In pre-modern times, dignitas was a term that referred to the superhuman institution of divine and eternal kingship with which the acting king was endowed during his lifetime. In the time of Renaissance, the term dignitas was applied to the human dimension, this time, however, not in the religious sense of affirming the basic sameness of God’s creatures but in the secular sense of highlighting qualities and achievements of particular human excellence. According to Pico de la Mirandola’s famous Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486), the dignity of humans lies in their potential to transcend their given properties by and thereby surpassing all other creatures of God’s creation. Shakespeare’s liminal anthropology moves in the opposite direction. It defines human dignity not in terms of special achievements but in terms of the absence of all qualitative assets. It is this emphasis on the nakedness of a mere life that allows us to built a bridge to contemporary post-Auschwitz anthropology. Our contemporary norm of human dignity has taught us to respect it exactly in situations where all claims to personal dignity (such as endowments, achievements or performance) are forfeited. Both Shakespeare’s liminal anthropology and post-Auschwitz anthropology are based on this dramatic semantic shift from a dignity that is based on merit to a dignity that is revealed when no other claim to dignity is left. While Shakespeare reenacted scenes of liminal anthropology in various plays, discovering and revealing in dramatic moments the utter exposure of certain characters, post-Auschwitz anthropology is based on the trauma of the holocaust and discourses that try to frame this exceptional historic experience. The bio-politics of Nazi Germany indeed reduced those whom they defined as ‘the ultimate other’ to the status of utter nakedness. In doing so, they construed an essential difference and produced a striking dissimilitude between themselves and their victims who were excluded from membership in a common humanity. Survivor-witnesses such as Robert Antelme and Primo Levi have described this experience from within. They focused on this process of traumatic dehumanization in the light (or better: darkness) of a new post-Auschwitz anthropology. 16 Forster 1951, 85. It is rather ironic that in a late colonial period, Forster refers to the colors of shirts rather than to the colors of skin as a divisive marker.

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The titles of survivor memoirs such as Robert Antelme’s The Human Race and Levi’s Is this a man? (the English title Survival at Auschwitz does not at all capture this radical skeptical dimension of the book) engage in the anthropological dimension of the crime of the Holocaust. They describe in detail the experience of being excluded from the human species in a process of utmost degradation, highlighting how they were deprived of all social bonds and marks of a common humanity. Having been stripped of everything but their biological life, they are forced to enter a state of pre-civil nature which is accompanied by a humiliating loss of dignity, self-respect and feeling of subjective shame. This feeling of shame can only be numbed by adopting a diminished self in a process of de-personalization and de-subjectification. In his book Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben has introduced the Greek terms ‘bios’ and ‘zoe’ to distinguish between a qualified life that is saturated with social and cultural norms and a mere animal life.17 In the liminal state of exception of the concentration camps, Jews and other victimized groups were divested of all features and traces of a qualified life creating personal difference in the sense of ‘bios’ such as material property, social reputation and identity, as well as bonds of kinship and friendship to be left with nothing but their naked existence, creating a basic sameness in the sense of ‘zoe’, which was then exploited or extinguished. Post-Auschwitz anthropology starts from the experience of this fatal exclusion from common humanity of one group by another, transforming after 1945 the negative evidence into a positive norm. The norm of human rights does not affirm the sameness of human beings, instead, it affirms their equality through access to basic human rights, starting from the right to be different. These rights are a late European invention to protect and guarantee what, in the course of violent history, is always first and foremost at stake: the status of civilians and the dignity of an unqualified animal life. In this process, the word ‘dignity’ was disconnected from the qualified life of ‘bios’ and changed sides to guard the deprived status of the unqualified life of ‘zoe’. For Agamben, the Muselmann, the spectral inmate of the concentration camps that appeared to the survivors as a living dead, has become “the touchstone by which to judge and measure all morality and all dignity. The Muselmann, who is its most extreme expression, is the guard on the threshold of a new ethics, an ethics of a form of life that begins where dignity ends”.18 Agamben, who relishes the extremes, has put his point into even stronger terms: “the 17 Agamben 1998. 18 Agamben 2002, 69.

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only one bearing witness to the human is the one whose humanity has been wholly destroyed”.19 We know that there are many forms of human life that continue where dignity ends. The more general application of the lesson of the Holocaust to our contemporary world is that dignity has to be protected exactly where it has been withdrawn, is absent or felt to be at stake. Like Shakespeare’s liminal anthropology it forces us to recognize a basic human sameness through manifest shades of difference and otherness. The modern norm of human rights, however, is more than a plea to the solidarity of the destitute, it is a moral (if not a legal) right with liabilities for social and political action. Where Shakespeare’s characters make an emotional appeal to sameness, our post-Auschwitz anthropology makes an ethical claim to equality. The two, however, should not be separated too neatly. In order to be effectively enforced, the ethical claim to equality must be supported by an emotional response to sameness. In a world divided by lethal polemics and bloody confrontations, ‘difference’ can no longer be cherished as the last unqualified value. “The right to diversity and alterity”, writes Samir Amin, “must be coupled with the ‘right to be similar’”, which, he adds, is clearly different from a demand for radical sameness.20 At this point, the different paths of Shakespeare’s plays and of human rights cross, because the former can sensitize us to moral issues as they mould our emotions and dispositions. Though the appeal of Shakespeare’s protagonists is never granted by the other characters on stage, is likely to evoke emotional resonance in the (contemporary) audience. The arts are principal cultural agents in constructing sameness and otherness among human beings. Strangeness, in the sense of uncomfortable distance, is something that can be upgraded or downgraded in the dramaturgy and psychic engineering of empathy. Adopting once more the terminology of Herfried Mnkle21, we may say: ‘alterity’ is heightened into ‘alienity’ through a blocking of empathy, while ‘alienty’ is reduced to ‘alienty’ through the flow of empathy. Empathy is possible if and only if, notwithstanding fundamental differences, we can discover some common ground between ourselves and the characters on stage. The universal recognition of otherness is an ethical claim, but it is more likely to be enforced if it is backed up by the vision of a common bond of humanity. 19 Agamben 2002, 133. 20 Amin 1999, 42. 21 Mnkler 1997, cf. n. 11.

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Texts cited Agamben, Giorgio (1998): Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: University Press. Agamben, Giorgio (2002): Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books. Amin, Samir (1999): Spectres of Capitalism. A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions. New Dehli: Rainbow Publication. Antelme, Robert (1998): The Human Race. Evanston: Marlboro Press / Northwestern. Bock, Gesa (1986): “Machiavelli als Geschichtsschreiber”, in: Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 66, 153 – 192. Cohen, Daniel M. (1980): “The Jew and Shylock”, in: Shakespeare Quarterly 31/ 1 (spring), 55 – 63. Forster, Edward M. (1951): “What I believe”, in: Two Cheers for Democracy. London: Edward Arnold & Co, 77 – 85. Hentschel, Beate (1992): “Zur Genese einer optimistischen Anthropologie in der Renaissance oder die Wiederentdeckung des menschlichen Kçrpers”, in: Schreiner, Klaus / Schnitzler, Norbert (ed.): Gepeinigt, begehrt, vergessen. Symbolik und Sozialbezug des Kçrpers im spten Mittelalter und in der frhen Neuzeit. Mnchen, 85 – 105. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. (1957): The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Manetti, Giannozzo (1532): De dignitate et excellentia hominis. Basel: A. Cratandrus. Manetti, Giannozzo (1990): ber die Wrde und Erhabenheit des Menschen. Trans. Hartmut Leppin. Hamburg: Meiner. Mller, Gregor (1969): Bildung und Erziehung im Humanismus der italienischen Renaissance. Grundlagen, Motive, Quellen. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Mnkler, Herfried (ed.) (1997): Furcht und Faszination. Facetten der Fremdheit. Berlin: Akademieverlag. O’Malley, John W. / Izbicki, Thomas M. / Christianson, Gerald (ed.) (1993): Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation. Essays in Honor of Charles Trinkaus. Leiden: Brill. Schadewaldt, Wolfgang (1975): “Der Gott von Delphi und die Humanittsidee”, in: Der Gott von Delphi und die Humanittsidee. Aufstze und Vortrge. Frankfurt / M.: Insel, 59 – 75. Shakespeare, William (1997): The Merchant of Venice. Ed. by Leah S. Marcus (Norton Critical Edition). New York / London: W.W. Norton. Shakespeare, William (1997): King Lear. Ed. by R. A. Foakes (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series). Ontario et al.: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Shakespeare, William (1964): King Richard II. Ed. by Peter Ure (The Arden Shakespeare, Second Series). London: Methuen & Co. Shakespeare, William (1997): Othello. Ed. by E. A. J. Honigmann (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series). Ontario et al.: Thomas Nelson and Sons.

The Space of the Human and the Place of the Poet: Excursions into English Topographical Poetry Verena Olejniczak Lobsien I. Dwelling Humans are spatial beings. We are always somewhere, and we fill a certain, measurable amount of space, corresponding to the size of our bodies. With other creatures we also share the inclination to choose and occupy a habitat. For as we move and orient ourselves in space, we also tend to ‘build’ – that is, to single out and furnish places which we like to refer to as our homes. We use them for sheltering, eating, sleeping, entertaining, bringing up our young, and generally for living in. We also use them for signalling to other human beings who we are or who we aspire to be. We regard the places we live in as extensions of our selves; and even if we wish to avoid this and try to reduce what our places say about us to a minimum, others will observe their representative, symbolic function. That there is an important difference between ‘building’ and that other, signifying and characteristically human activity of inhabiting which involves the turning of a place into a ‘house’ which communicates something about its inhabitants, provides the starting point for one of the most interesting minor literary genres of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England: the country-house or estate poem.1 In the wellknown final line of his seminal poem “To Penshvrst”, Ben Jonson articulates the formula for the major criterion of what is at stake: Now, Penshvrst, they that will proportion thee With other edifices, when they see Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else, 1

There is a considerable body of research on this and related topics, such as gardening, landscape aesthetics, and architecture. The following titles indicate the scope of aspects which appear to be most relevant for the purposes of my paper: Hibbard 1956; Fowler 1994; Dubrow 1979; McClung 1977; Hunt 1986; Hunt & Willis 1975; Malins 1966; Moore, Mitchell & Turnbull 1988; Turner 1979; Scoular 1965; Ritter 1974.

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May say, their lords haue built, but thy lord dwells. (99 – 102)2

My contribution will try to explore some of the implications of this early modern notion of dwelling by looking at some of its poetic realizations. Why is “dwelling” superior to “building”? What are the ideas of the human foregrounded by the poetry of place? How is topographical writing related to literary topoi and their tradition? What are the ways in which estate poetry becomes a site of contest for competing concepts of humanity, including divergent notions of the social order as well as the order of the sexes? How does it negotiate modes of stability and mobility? How does it at the same time come to function as a medium for literary self-reflection and self-constitution? Where is the place of the poet? In what follows, I shall propose a four-fold literary-anthropological model3 – a topological poetics, if you prefer – of the country-house poem, consisting of Dwelling, Nature, Happiness, and the Place of the Poet. The dynamics, which puts my hermeneutic machine in motion, is a quintessential fifth element: the kind of transformation which I find in the poetic practice of a seventeenth-century poem which, in a manner more complex and aesthetically more rewarding than any other contemporary instance, focusses, intertwines, and questions these concerns – Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House”.4

2 3

4

In Jonson 1970 (Herford & Simpson), Vol. VIII, 93 – 96. All quotations from Jonson follow this edition, with line numbers directly after the quotation. If this appears to resemble, as Markus Wild points out to me, the semantic “Geviert” proposed by Heidegger in his 1951 lecture on “Bauen Wohnen Denken” (Heidegger 1967, 19 – 36), I hasten to add that apart from a general interest in some of the more fundamental meanings of building and dwelling, my own construction has hardly anything in common with Heidegger’s philosophical model, with its Wagnerian and Black Forest connotations and its constellation of earth and heaven, gods and mortals as jointly providing a foundational definition of what it means to dwell, i. e. to be human (cf. ibid., 23). For all it is worth, my own is a mere figure of thought, an instrument for reading a certain kind of poetry in an attempt to give play to a few of its major topical as well as structural aspects and to balance potentially universal with specific historical implications. Its formal ambition rises no higher than a modest gesture of deference to the pattern of natural elegance which Thomas Browne finds in the quincunx (cf. Lobsien, Anglia [forthcoming]). “Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax” is quoted according to Smith 2003, 210 – 234; Line numbers are given in brackets after the quotations.

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II. Nature An important criterion of country-house topology is what is considered to be outside the house, beyond bounds in a primarily spatial sense; also, what constitutes its limits defining what belongs to it and what is excluded. There are various outsides, not all of them natural. The symbolic potential of the country house appears to be first of all directed towards a social and political exterior. This defines building as making a dynastic statement which asserts familial continuity and permanence as well as personal memory and secures remembrance of virtues and achievements in durable form. The architecture of the country house also puts on display aristocratic power, values and aspirations of various kinds – monetary, military, religious, moral. The very size and shape and materials of the house raise claims, which could be disputed but which were well recognized.5 “Thou art not, Penshvrst, built to enuious show, j Of touch, or marble” (1 – 2): Jonson’s poem begins by offsetting the soberness and modesty of the Sidney domicile against alternative models and proceeds to distinguish mere architectural ostentation from the genuine sprezzatura which arises from true nobility. And Marvell, too, praises the indigenous humility of Appleton House while disparaging the aesthetic and, by implication, moral and spiritual hubris of “foreign architect[s]” (2), which only aim at amazing and intimidating the beholder, but which, fortunately, had no hand in raising its “sober frame” (1). One reason why architectural modesty is preferable is that it points towards the function of the house as a place for ‘dwelling’, to be precise: as a place where wealth is not merely put on show but consumed in community with others, thus for the good of a (smaller or greater) commonwealth whose order it mirrors in its internal organisation. The English country house is modelled as a place where unstinting hospitality forms part of everyday practice and is hailed as something not only essential to good house-keeping but essentially human. This involves a social and class-related boundary. Inside are those who sit at the table, are being served or serve; outside are those who wait or beg for alms. In addition to these cultural and social outsides there are others; above all, the origin and site of some of the strongest forces builders have to contend with: nature. At a first glance, it seems plausible that nature should function as the most important exterior for the country house 5

Cf. especially McClung 1977.

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poem, as a limiting but also antagonistic, if not hostile environment of the house itself. But of course the house is also surrounded by, and situated in, its estate. And this, its woods, rivers, and meadows together with its park and gardens, constitutes an extended liminal area which significantly distances nature. At the same time, it provides a transition towards it, as it models and thus assimilates elements of nature, reducing them to human scale. As part of the space appropriated by the dwellers the estate pushes the frontiers of nature conceived as wilderness outward, while it affords a space where savage and domesticated elements may interact, overlap, mix or even fuse. Thus, the estate poem from the first undermines any simple dualism which would oppose nature to the human.6 6

A brief digression on possible ways and modes of transgressing this inside-outside boundary appears to be in place here. For of course, and famously, the estate poem also likes to toy with the imagined antagonism between wild and domesticated areas, the forces of nature and the pains taken to conquer, cultivate and tame them. Thus, even Charles Cotton’s 1681 description of the Derbyshire estate of Chatsworth, which forms part of his long poetic travelogue on “The Wonders of the Peake”, still opposes its “stately and stupendious pile” (1247) to the surrounding “barren Vale, j Which else bleak winds and nipping frosts assail j With such perpetual war, there would appear j Nothing but winter ten months of the year.” (1249 – 1251; all quotations follow the excerpts printed in Fowler 1994, with line numbers given in brackets). The “palace” is contrasted with the “wild prospects” (1253) at the foot of the “black mountain” (1255), sheltered but perhaps also threatened by the “scorned Peak”, whose ruggedness ambivalently “rivals proud Italy” (1264) because it serves as a foil to Chatsworth’s stately gardens. In fact, it is the wildness of its surroundings, indeed, “nature’s shames and ills”, which define the unique beauty and excellence of the building not only as the creation of “art […], spite of nature” (1330) but as a version of the earthly paradise and harmonious order triumphing over chaos. Art here claims to have re-created nature, much as a goldsmith enhances the brilliancy of a jewel by contrast with its setting: “ So a bright diamond would look, if set j In a vile socket of ignoble jet” (1321 f.). But even in this fairly late text, where the principle of maximum contrast seems to reign, the result is an interesting interaction, a mutual dependency of “mountain gloom” and (architectural) “glory”, with the pictorial effects of the artifice viewed from the graceful park and groves against the bleak environment from which it has been salvaged approaching the sublime (cf. also Nicolson 1997). – Here of course we touch upon one of the great themes connected with this kind of poetry and the major role played by its topographical functions in preparing and helping to establish the idea of ‘landscape’ and indeed the romantic notion of nature as a reflection of human subjectivity. I do not wish to broach the issue of landscape aesthetics at this point, but would like to suggest that the estate poem serves as a medium for its development in two respects: first, in its variant of the prospect poem, as famously epitomized in John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” (first printing 1642), and secondly by means of its allegoriza-

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In fact, if offers a suggestive paradigm for the ‘humanization’, indeed, as we shall see with Marvell, ‘subjectivization’ of nature.

tions, which, although they may appear to belong to an older aesthetics, can be seen to point towards another type of the ‘humanization’ of nature – at least in the case of Marvell’s poetry (cf. Lobsien 1978). For Denham, the central topographical and at the same time domesticating strategy is what he calls his “wandring eye” (112; I quote from the 1655 version as printed in Denham 1969). As his gaze sweeps the countryside visible from the speaker’s elevated vantage point with the Thames meandering through it, the City’s skyline in view, and its miniaturised scenes perceived from a distance, it appropriates and shapes what it sees, reducing it to a human format and interpreting it. There is no untamed natural wilderness in this poem. The only incalculable, potentially sinister and threatening force is human nature. “Nature” herself is free from desctructive excess (cf. 53 ff.), on the contrary, she is well-ordered and ordering, because governed by divine wisdom, herself a designer and “builder”, creating harmony even from discord (203 – 206) and pleasing by variety (197 f., 228). Above all, nature provides a stage on which various dramas are played – such as the hunting of a stag and its death in the waters of the stream, or certain episodes from English history – and where they are permitted to unfold meanings which exceed the visible. In that, they appear to be guided by what the poet’s persona in the beginning refers to as his “Fancy” and considers “More boundless […] than my eye” (12). The most important drama, thus, is that of the roaming eye turned into the central device of poetry itself, of imaginative poetic composition conscious of its moral (and discretely political) purpose. It is this “quick Poetick sight” (234) which is the real protagonist of the poem, and it is its own meanderings and the changes of perspective it offers to the reader which create a sense of him or her being indeed in a position of monarchical rule, if not ownership with respect to the landscape. Thus Denham’s verse flows as the river Thames in the celebrated self-descriptive couplet: “Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull j Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full.” (191 f.). But it also resembles its subject in its almost divine self-reflexivity: “But God-like his unwearied Bounty flows; j First loves to do, then loves the Good he does.” (177 ff.). “Cooper’s Hill” combines a sense of natural plenitude, inexhaustible generosity, and attachment to, indeed enjoyment of, its own activity of giving, pleasing, and providing as well as showing and interpreting, thus appropriating the objects of its perception from a secure vantage point. Denham’s poem both describes a Petrarchan moment of nature turning into landscape and practises this kind of transformation in its sweeping, metonymical movement through the space surveyed by the poet’s vision. That nature becomes a mirror for human concerns is something which might also be observed with regard to Marvell’s “Appleton House”. However, the strategies preferred by this text appear to be almost the opposite of Denham’s.

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III. Happiness The third concept I need for my discussion of the space of the human involves a temporal dimension of a specific early modern type. For the country-house poem also, and often pointedly, refers to ancient ideas of happiness and transforms them according to its own cultural interests. That the country house is a place eminently suited to the good life; that it provides everything needed for human felicity, is one of its central motifs and commonplaces since its very first pretexts in classical antiquity. Nonetheless, there is no consensus as to which kind of felicity this is precisely. Depending on whether the critic focusses his or her attention on the house and household or on the gardens and the management of the estate, the suggestions vary between stoical or epicurean eudaimonia;7 and again, according to the pretexts referred to, the happiness afforded by life in the country house is perceived as pastoral or georgic respectively. In recent times there seems to be a tendency to relate estate poetry to the Virgilian Georgica with their advice for rural economics and its seasonal rhythms, breeding animals, cooking and hunting, home-making, founding a family and educating children,8 rather than to the Bucolica with their concern for sheep and song, love-making and poetry contests, loss and exile caused by civil war.9 Still, what these competing approaches do have in common is the stress on distance from the city and its business as essential condition of happiness. Besides, it is their conflations in the texts which seem to matter more than their differences. 7

8

9

Epicurean readings usually rely on the topoi of Epicurus’ garden as the meeting place with his friends and pupils as well as on the sensualism and hedonistic naturalism propounded in (and, more often than not, projected onto) Lucretius’ De rerum natura; also on Sir William Temple, in: Temple 1814. See also the important study of the Epicurean Renaissance garden of Bomarzo (which in some of its spectacular effects strongly resembles Marvell’s Appleton House) by Bredekamp 1991. For the English reception of Lucretius cf. Gillespie 2007; cf. Also Hopkins 2007– Stoicist readings tend to refer to Seneca’s Moral Epistles, e. g. ep. XXVIII or XC; cf. also Morford 1987, and Hinnant 1980. Alastair Fowler argues this point strongly and repeatedly in his introduction and notes (Fowler 1994). Cf. also Chalker 1969; Cambers 1993. The topical references in the poems are usually to Virgil’s Georgica II, 458 – 542 (“O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint”), to Horace’s Epistles I, 14, and to his Epodes 2 (“Beatus ille qui procul negotiis”). For pastoral, particularly in its Virgilian versions see Alpers 1979. For pastoral in general, cf. also Alpers 1996; Empson 1959; Poggioli 1975; Rosenmeyer 1969; Røstvig 1962.

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It is one of the characteristics of early modern poetry that its major examples do not as a rule conform to just one philosophical pattern adopted from classical antiquity. Instead, they select from, and experiment with a plurality of types and styles of thinking, albeit with a perceptible preference for hellenistic thought. This will often result in hybrid formations, whose coherence is due less to philosophical consistency than to the demands of artistic structure and to poetic quality. Also, a further colour needs to be added to the palette of stoical, epicurean, and sceptical hues early modern poets appear to be working with: a shade of neoplatonism. It is needed in particular for the pastoral and idealizing strains, which more often than not turn the country house into an earthly paradise10 and England into a – lost – Arcadia. Accordingly, an additional version of felicity is brought into play which aesthetically keeps open a dimension of transcendence which is in the process of being lost in the field of metaphysics. This has, in fact, already vanished almost wholly out of sight in the writings of some contemporaries. In the second half of the seventeenth century, it is Thomas Hobbes who has begun to replace felicity by something else.11 Thus, although he, too, must have known at least some country-house happiness at Chatsworth, home of his own patron William Cavendish,12 Hobbes points out in the part on Human Nature in his Elements of Law (1640):13 […] for an utmost end, in which the ancient philosophers have placed felicity […], there is no such thing in this world, nor way to it, more than to Utopia: for while we live, we have desires, and desire presupposeth a farther end. […] Seeing all delight is appetite, and appetite presupposeth a farther end, there can be no contentment but in proceeding […]. Felicity, therefore 10 Cf. also McClung 1983. – For a contemporary prose example of many of these aspects in a characteristic mixture, including a special version of neoplatonism, see Evelyn 2001. 11 As David Wootton has recently pointed out in his review of Thomas 2008 the conceptual shift from felicity to ‘happiness’ took place precisely in the period under consideration (cf. Wooton February 27, 2009. 3). Meanwhile, stronger, certainly metaphysically more highly charged notions of felicity appear to be migrating into texts and contexts of a more pronounced theological cast, such as the work of Thomas Traherne, who sings the praises of man as fortunate inhabitant and indeed spiritual owner of the world. 12 And later subject of a neolatin poem by Hobbes to which Charles Cotton’s “Wonders of the Peake” appears to be indebted, De Mirabilibus Pecci (1678). 13 Hobbes 1994, 44 f. (Part I of Human Nature, Ch. VII, sections 6 f.).

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(by which we mean continual delight), consisteth not in having prospered, but in prospering.

This reduced version of felicity has, significantly, lost its place. For Hobbes, the summum bonum is nowhere, literally utopian. This endless striving for a “farther end” may perhaps still be called happiness – it is at any rate based on an idea of man as a being radically and metaphysically homeless. But although this may be a substitute which was there to stay, in Marvell we shall encounter a version of it which is at the same time topologically anchored and, paradoxically, ‘beyond place’, perhaps even “beyond the heavens”.14 IV. Poets’ Corner Balancing on this conceptual threshold, let me add yet another aspect to my hermeneutical frame. Where in the picture of happy fulfilment of human nature by dwelling in a country house is the place of the poet? In an important sense, country-house poetry is patronage poetry. The paradigmatic example of the genre is an encomium on the owner of an estate and his family through the medium of praise for the estate. The patronage relation this implies may be real or wished-for, but it will usually figure in the text itself. And since the poet addresses his (would-be) patron from a situation of lack, this places him in a precarious position which requires careful negotiation of tone and register. It incurs the dangers of sycophancy15 on the one hand, unwelcome brazenness on the other. The very first English instances of the genre are instructive in this respect, and at least one of them seems to overstep the mark in the very act of making it. For the challenge to the poet’s competence for decorum takes on an additional twist if the poet is a woman. 14 In his Phaedrus, Plato speaks of “that place beyond the heavens”, which is the proper goal of the soul’s desire and her flight (247c). This huperouranios topos is the dwelling place of “true being”; it is also the home of gods, ideas, and all true knowledge, “the plain of Truth” (248b); cf. Plato 1973. I am grateful to Christoph Helmig for alerting me to this passage and to its ambivalences – it appears to be at the same time a place and a non-place –, its resonances and reinterpretations in the work of various neoplatonic writers, in particular Proclus (detailed references in Helmig’s edition and commentary of Simplikios’ Corollarium de loco [in preparation]). 15 On the problems the encomiastic quality of country-house poetry may give rise to see the brilliant essay by Heather Dubrow (1979).

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In Jonson’s “To Penshurst”, Robert Sidney is praised above all for his hospitality – not least in so far as it extends to the poet himself. He is always welcome at the Sidney’s table, there are no class divisions here and no petty reckoning of the amount of food and drink the guest consumes. Where comes no guest, but is allow’d to eate, Without his feare, and of thy lords owne meate: Where the same beere, and bread, and self-same wine, That is his Lordships, shall also be mine. And I not faine to sit (as some, this day, At great mens tables) and yet dine away. Here no man tells my cups; nor, standing by, A waiter, doth my gluttony enuy: But giues me what I call, and lets me eate, He knowes, below, he shall find plentie of meate, Thy tables hoard not vp for the next day, (61 – 71)

Even if he eats to excess, the poet is permitted to indulge himself, for his host and the place he dwells in are the source of unlimited plenty, images of a copia almost divine. Jonson quite confidently and self-evidently locates the portrait of his persona in the centre of the poem. We already see him where he wishes to be. He can even afford to ironize his “gluttony”. Like everything else at Penshurst, it comes naturally. There is no grudge and no resentment. There is a certain degree of cheek, but it amuses rather than annoys. The place of the poet is undisputed. In Aemilia Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-ham”,16 written before 1612 (i. e. possibly even earlier than Jonson’s text), nearly everything is different. The way her speaker tries to place herself with respect to her patroness is a far cry from Jonson’s poet locating himself by simply taking a seat. To begin with, Lanyer’s relationship to her addressee, Margaret Clifford, the Countess of Cumberland, is wholly insecure. We cannot be certain whether Lanyer ever was, as she insinuates in the poem, a member of the Cliffords’ household at Cookham. Her speaker, too, seems to test just how much she can claim. Her insecurity shows in the 16 I have discussed Lanyer’s poem in a different context in Lobsien 2008. See this essay for a fuller panorama of recent research on Lanyer (also on the ‘Dark Lady’ debate triggered by A. L. Rowse). For my present purpose, the following contributions are particularly relevant: Grossman 1998; Greer et al. 1988; Lewalski 1983; Lewalski 1991. My quotations from Lanyer follow Lanyer 1993 (line numbers in brackets after the quotation).

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way she wavers between distance and an uneasy, almost startling intimacy whose foundations and history she appears to invent as she goes along. Her long poem begins with an extended topography of the estate of Cookham. It sets out in a pastoral vein, which clearly seeks to link itself to the Virgilian bucolics of exile in the First Eclogue, with the poet in the role of forced emigrant driven by the cruelty of fate from her rural paradise. At the same time, this description of the landscape’s enthusiastic response to its mistress’s presence and the whole of nature mourning her absence makes use of another, platonizing convention of pastoral which stresses the universal sympathy of all beings, also known by the 19th century derisory term of pathetic fallacy. Apart from demonstrating her artistic skill, this allows Lanyer to enter into the neoplatonic strain which will enable her right at the beginning to exchange her position of marginality for one of closeness to her noble patron, whom she has fashioned as the centre of inspiration, power, and, by implication, wealth: Farewell, sweet Cooke-ham, where I first obtained Grace from that grace where perfect grace remained, And where the Muses gave their full consent I should have power the virtuous to content; (1 – 4)

From the first, social difference and the desire for proximity are cast as antagonists. Still, in this conflict of “power” and “love” the speaker has, under the guise of only doing her patron’s will, already managed to participate in this power, drawing off a little of the aristocratic abundance for her own literary purposes. The poet’s next step, however, after she has created this space of an unimpeded, mutual exchange of “grace”, takes her even further. For now she ‘remembers’ a scene which in turn stages and initiates precisely the reciprocal memory which she needs in order to be remembered permanently – and financially. The scene she evokes is one of petrarchist leave-taking. As the lovers part, the one who remains behind ‘steals’ the kiss the other has imprinted on the bark of her favourite oak-tree: And with a chaste yet loving kiss took leave: Of which sweet kiss I did it soon bereave, Scorning a senseless creature should possess So rare a favour, so great happiness. (165 – 168)

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By means of this imaginative ‘platonic’ give-and-take,17 the two competing topologies of power and love appear artfully reconciled. What “Unconstant Fortune” (103) and arbitrary “degree” (106) had placed so far apart now appear united, at least inseparably connected. The device is a poetic “conceit” at whose boldness the speaker coyly pretends to bridle – at least for a moment: But whither am I carried in conceit? My wit too weak to conster of the great. (111 f.)

But she quickly regains her balance, brazening it out with surprising defiance: Why not? Although we are but born of earth, We may behold the heavens, despising death; And loving heaven that is so far above, May in the end vouchsafe us entire love. (113 – 116)

Through this poetic manoeuvring, noble patron and needy poet have virtually changed places. With a vaguely biblical licence, we glimpse a situation in which the first shall be last and the last first. But Lanyer amazes not only by her courageous (if not foolhardy) rearrangement of the social topography. In the final lines of her poem she also imagines a reciprocal linkage in which the spiritual and the economic become indistinguishable: This last farewell to Cooke-ham here I give: When I am dead, thy name in this may live, Wherein I have performed her noble hest Whose virtues lodge in my unworthy breast; And ever shall, so long as life remains, Tying my heart to her by those rich chains. (205 – 210)

Just as Cookham and Margaret Clifford, place and patron, have become interchangeable in the poem, patron and poet now are imagined as identical. The patron’s praise will boost the poet’s fame, while the poem’s success redounds to the patron’s glory. This is indeed a never-ending circle, a mutual communication of virtue, as unbreakable as “those rich chains”

17 For implications of the kiss in the context of neoplatonic doctrine see Bembo’s rhapsodic exposition in Book IV of Castiglione 1967.

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which the text has forged. Aemilia and Margaret literally dwell in each other. This remarkable effect of Lanyer’s poem is the result of happy gendering. What at first appeared to be a severe drawback – the female poet’s marginality – has been turned to advantage. It has given rise to a defiant inventiveness, legitimised to some extent by neoplatonic topoi, but also licensed and ‘made safe’ by the exclusiveness of this paradise of women. Having no secure place at the patron’s table has been transformed into a source of poetic energy. By inscribing herself into Clifford’s life and estate Lanyer has made a space for herself, finally even in the early modern canon. V. Transformations In conclusion I shall try to turn my framework for mapping the space of the human into a quincunx, with its four corners – Dwelling, Nature, Happiness, and the Place of the Poet – serving as points of reference for a selective reading of one of the most famous and certainly most sophisticated examples of the country-house genre: Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House”. However, while, on the one hand, this text may appear as an almost paradigmatic fulfillment of generic requirements, on the other it can be seen to erode precisely those defining criteria by conflating the binary oppositions on which they are built. Finally, our literary-anthropological model will also help us to discern how Marvell’s poem re-draws some of the outlines of early modern ‘humankind’ in a manner which, while it seems to align itself with certain aspects of neoplatonic thinking, points towards profiles usually ascribed to later periods.18 18 Like many other poems by Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House” has found numerous interpretations. For a comprehensive outline of recent approaches see Smith 2003. Closest to my own, while still unsurpassed both in its exhaustiveness, its attention to figurative detail, its depth of insight into Marvell’s generic experiments, and its sensitivity to the poem’s structuring of aesthetic experience, is Rosalie L. Colie’s brilliant reading in her Marvell study (Colie 1970). In the afterword to her long but elegant analysis she stresses the noncommittal, nondoctrinal and a-systematic quality of the poem as well as the absence of philosophical “ideas” (298). Marvell cannot be identified, she insists, with any of the available -isms. But she also indicates that what emerges precisely from this avoidance of discursive explicitness in combination with the specific aesthetic strategies of his text is an introduction, even habituation to a kind of “general-

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To begin with, Lord Thomas Fairfax,19 the dedicatee of Marvell’s poem, already seems to unite, in Appleton House and in his person, ized” neoplatonism by means of a presentation not of the processes or concepts of understanding, but of its “experience” (cf. 298). Neoplatonic epistemological theory, she concedes, is “called up […], with no need of its direct mention. […] The Many-in-One and the One-in-Many are suddenly there, in the poem, in our minds; naturally, it seems.” (300) It is not my aim to make Andrew Marvell an out-and-out neoplatonist either; but I would argue, in accordance with Colie, that his long poem is structured along the lines of neoplatonic thinking and that it is this which goes some way towards explaining the irregularities, (con-)fusions, and disjunctions of the text together with its transgressive dynamism and its irritating capacity to insinuate further meanings just beyond our grasp (cf. 295). In the present context, it is above all the constructions of space and self which interest me most, for it seems to be these which are central to the notions of the human the country-house poem is capable of exploring as well as problematizing. Hence, the “amphibiousness” (199, 271 – 275, 286 and passim), which figures so largely in this text as one of its paradigms of liminality (and which Colie, surprisingly, does not relate to its neoplatonic undercurrent), will coincide with one of my major concerns (see below). – Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker have co-authored two important historicist readings of the poem: cf. Hirst / Zwicker 1993; cf. also Hirst / Zwicker 1999. While the latter explores the political implications and literary consequences of Marvell’s liminal sexuality, the former convincingly dates the composition of the poem in the summer of 1651 and situates it firmly within the context of Fairfax’s resignation and his political retreat after he had refused to invade Scotland. 19 This is Thomas, Third Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1612 – 1671), commander of the Parliamentary forces, married to Anne Vere in 1637. Between 1650 and 1652, Marvell served as tutor to their daughter Maria at the Fairfax Yorkshire residence of Nun Appleton. Lord Thomas Fairfax inherited Nun Appleton from his grandfather Thomas, the First Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1560 – 1640). William Fairfax, whose 1518 marriage to Isabel Thwaites is referred to in the dynastic narrative of the poem and who is the hero of the nunnery episode, was the father of Sir Thomas Fairfax of Denton and Nun Appleton (1521 – 1600), who constructed the garden fort, and – if my genealogy, which combines the informations given in Smith 2003, 210 – 241, and in the articles of the new Dictionary of National Biography, is correct – he was the great-great-grandfather of the successful Civil War general Thomas Fairfax to whom the poem is addressed. (Sir Thomas Fairfax of Denton and Nun Appleton is the father of Sir Thomas Fairfax, First Lord of Cameron, who fathered Ferdinando Fairfax, Second Lord of Cameron [1584 – 1648], who is the father of Thomas Fairfax, Third Lord Fairfax, whose only daughter Mary was, in 1657, married to George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham. Since Fairfax had no son, the estate had to be entailed away from the male line. Brian Patton explores these issues in his otherwise insightful essay cf. Patton 1996, but incorrectly refers to the Lord General as William’s great-grandson [830] and to William as Mary’s great-great-grandfather [834], in each case missing a generation). Marvell seems deliberately to blur

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the two aspects of building and dwelling around which the poetry of place revolves. Through his ancestors, pre-eminently William Fairfax, with whom the poem seeks to identify him in its first 35 stanzas, the present Lord Fairfax has built,20 indeed created the place in his image – an image of sober piety and perfect humility, eschewing all kinds of architectural and fashionable excess. This country house is indeed “proportioned” (cf. 10) to its inhabitant, as its comparative lack of spaciousness is converted from an allegory of modesty into one of perfection. For, in Appleton House, the impossible is possible, as its builder has managed “t’immure j The circle in the quadrature!” (46). The circle is squared both literally and figuratively, as the house strives to accommodate the gigantic moral stature of its master: “the square grows spherical” (52).21 So, as the house imitates the man, translating his idealized humanity into spatial terms, the essence of the Fairfax dynasty is always present within its walls.22 these genealogical niceties in order to emphasize the Fairfaxes’ dynastic success, the slightly disquieting power of their spouses, and the rightness of letting the line continue through Mary. Thus, as Rosalie Colie has rightly stressed, “[f ]or the purposes of the poem, all Fairfaxes are fused into a single generic heroic figure.” (Colie 1970, 227, cf. 239). 20 For the uncertainty as to precisely which building the poem is referring to see the headnote (Smith 2003, 210 f.). 21 It turns into a metaphor of perfection, in which the good man, compared since antiquity to a tetragonon, and the divine endlessness of the circle, which alone is capable of enclosing the square, become one (cf. Plato’s Protagoras, in: Plato 1973, 339b: the reference is to a fragment by Simonides with whom the comparison may have originated), cf. also Aristotle’ Rhetoric, 1926, 3.11, where the comparison is cited as example for an imperfect metaphor. The square is also imitated in the prosodic shape of the poem’s stanzas – eight lines with eight syllables each (called by Puttenham, as Colie 1970, 197 and Smith 2003, 215 point out, the “square or quadrangle equaliter”) –, which might raise a similar claim to essentially human perfection: “These holy mathematics can j In ev’ry figure equal man.” (47 f.). 22 Even though its owner is conscious that no earthly dwelling can be a permanent home for the soul: “The house was built upon the place j Only as for a mark of grace; j And from an inn to entertain j Its Lord a while, but not remain.” (69 – 72). Indeed, even in Jonson’s “To Penshvrst”, the point of Robert Sidney’s ‘dwelling’ within it was that his generous presence had permeated the place so much that his hospitable spirit seemed to be present to welcome chance guests, even if he was forced to be actually somewhere else in person. The category of ‘dwelling’ can be abstracted from an actual sojourn in the place, if the master has become associated with his house to a sufficient extent. Cf. also Donaldson 1986.

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If Marvell recreates the house in Fairfax’ image, this holds not only in a topographical, but also in a historical sense. For, as the poem recounts part of the Fairfax family history in the embedded narrative of the dissolution of the nunnery from whose stones the house was built, another contrast is marvellously dissolved and transformed into identity: that of the old faith versus reformed spirituality. The relation of the house’s fate first appears to follow the familiar pattern of anti-papist polemic. A crafty nun tries to insinuate herself into the trust of Isabel Thwaites, engaged to William Fairfax. She succeeds to paint the advantages of life in the convent in such dazzling colours that the unsuspecting victim is drawn in by her blandishments and the match is in danger of being broken off. It – and with it the “blooming virgin Thwaites” (90) – is rescued only at the very last moment, before Lady-Fairfax-to-be can be enticed into taking her permanent vows, because the dissolution of the monasteries permits Fairfax to take the cloister by force and appropriate it. The poem depicts this act, which ends Catholic life at Nun Appleton and marks the beginning of Protestant culture in the place, as ultimate fulfilment of the intentions with which the house was originally built: At the demolishing, this seat To Fairfax fell as by escheat. And what both nuns and founders willed ’Tis likely better thus fulfilled. For if the virgin proved not their’s, The cloister yet remaind her’s. Though many a nun there made her vow, ’Twas no religious house till now. (273 – 280)

But now it is, as now the “truly bright and holy Thwaites” (263) can at last be married to the conquering hero who will father the dynasty whose latest scion, Mary Fairfax, the author himself is at the moment serving as tutor. However, this is not the only continuity which is to persist. For although the nun’s speech is a brilliant caricature of Popish cunning, the ideas of spiritual perfection and holy bliss it articulates and the projected images of a life-style which fulfills all human requirements and wishes are, though politically incorrect, highly vivid and indeed alluring. They hold the promise of aiding the human soul in its desire to communicate with the divine as well as of a union of the sensual with the spiritual: “Here pleasure piety doth meet; j One perfecting the other sweet” (171 f.). In that, they ultimately give rise to a hope the nun articulates

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in a neoplatonic commonplace, namely that “All beauty, when at such a height, j Is so already consecrate” (145 f.). Although the text casts this promise of transcendence by means of a beauty which also works through the senses as artful, false, and illusory, because made by an untrustworthy speaker who “alter[s] all” (215), its central idea persists, and will return again and again in the poem – as will the idea of an alteration by a fantasy which grows increasingly duplicitous and uncanny. Much as the house finds its religious identity only in a transformation which is at the same time a continuation of earlier formations of faith, the estate will come into its own in a similarly transformed permanence of – potentially – transcendent beauty. This may also be seen as we now turn to nature after this amazing confusion of Protestant and Catholic cultures at the beginning of the Fairfacian dwelling at Appleton. For if the house is Fairfax’s portrait, its gardens are his battlefield. Now that he has refused to lead his troops against Scotland, he appears to be enjoying his retreat into a garden world where the civil war is reduced to the proportions of bees and flowers. Both, house and garden, are designed by “Nature, orderly and near” (26). The horticultural idyll, microcosmically mirroring the human macrocosm and at the same time reducing its military rituals and ambitions to amusing miniatures, may thus, once again, achieve an effect where “Things greater are in less contained” (44). However, it also comes to function as a frame with a rather disturbing inset. The speaking voice abruptly breaks into a lament: Oh thou, that dear and happy isle The garden of the world ere while, Thou Paradise of fofflr seas, Which heaven planted us to please, But, to exclude the world, did guard With wat’ry if not flaming sword; What luckless apple did we taste, To make us mortal, and thee waste? (321 – 328)

In these lines, it becomes clear that in contemplating Appleton estate we are talking about another garden as well – about England as earthly paradise which its unfortunate inhabitants have laid waste. Civil war is thus figured both as Fall, which critically endangers and makes necessary the salvation of humankind and divides history into periods of happy ‘be-

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fore’ and sad ‘thereafter’.23 It also appears as something which endangers the previously instituted natural order like some rampant pest which has infected everything: “But war all this doth overgrow: j We ordnance plant and powder sow.” (343 f.). While the succeeding lines reliteralize the garden metaphors by changing the multi-coloured tulips back into Swiss guards, the complaint raised in stanzas XLI to XLIII seems, in its note of despair, to anticipate the even more radical one towards the end of the poem: “’Tis not, what once it was, the world” (761). The military theme is not over as we now leave the garden and pass into the meadows. On the contrary, it will remain with us throughout the text, and not as a mere backdrop either. The experience of the civil war is present not subliminally, but liminally in a literal sense. For whenever we cross what ought to be, at least in the standard country-house poem, a boundary – between house and gardens, dynastic presence and past, park and meadows, fields, forest and river – military metaphors are woven into the account and spring to mind in the most unexpected places.24 War permeates everything. It is no longer ‘outside’: In Marvell’s text, the dividing line between peace and war does not correspond to that between inside and outside, house or estate and nature.25 Perversely, war becomes at times something like a structuring force, even a medium for transcendence, at least for the overstepping of boundaries between the realms of nature and civilization as well as of nature and art. The hay-making episode, which is presented in the next thirteen stanzas (st. XLVII to LX), is in many ways paradigmatic for this imaginative modelling of nature. For while the tone becomes more ‘personal’, the perspectives more idiosyncratic, the conceits even bolder, and their wit even 23 For the poem’s “terrible nostalgia for pre-war England” see also Colie 1970 (223; cf. 240, 248, 261, 288). 24 Cf. also Colie 1970 for remarks on the ubiquity of the civil war theme (239, 240, 263, 287). 25 Indeed: “Nothing is ever entirely “in” or entirely “out” in this poem, but is now the one, now the other, in some contexts the one, in others, the other.” (Colie 1970, 238). Some thirty years after the assumed composition of Marvell’s poem, however, this dividing line is already firmly in place again, as can be observed in Cotton’s “Chatsworth” (see above, n. 6). – In her essay, Anne Cotterill explores Marvell’s transgressiveness in another direction and in another element: linking the poem’s wanderings with the death of the poet’s father by drowning, she finds in his narrator’s “deviance” (Cotterill 2002, 104) above all a “vertical” diving into his own psyche, “almost drowning yet always finding ground to dive further within” (Cotterill 2002, 105). I am grateful to Julia Schoen for drawing my attention to this article.

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more disturbing; while, in other words, the metapoetical level which draws attention to the poet’s artistic skill grows more prominent, the text at the same time claims to lead us further into the wilderness. We move from house to gardens, through meadows and fields to floods and rivers and tangled woods. Still, in spite of several extremely disorienting effects,26 there is no danger of getting wholly lost. For the wilderness we are made to enter is that of the speaker’s mind. This is the topos Marvell’s poem leads us to explore. The strategies used in this humanization – or better: subjectivization – of the natural are, however, of such an explosive kind that they render this text anything but a ‘domestication’ or ‘containment’ of nature.27 To begin with, there is no metaphorical or allegorical security in the poetic figuration of the meadows: They are made to appear as ocean, as watery waste crossed by the mowers like the Red Sea by the Israelites (st. XLIX); next they are countryside laid waste by marauding civil war troops, who “massacre” (394) every living being they come across; then they seem to be the tabula rasa necessary for a new beginning, as blank as an unpainted canvas awaiting the first stroke of the brush (st. LVI),28 or as a sheet of paper ready for the first line of a poem (455 f.),29 but also similar to an empty ring before a bullfight (447 f.), or, with equally sinister undertones, as the “naked equal flat, j Which Levellers take pattern at” (449 f.), and finally the meadows are transformed into the site of a flood which eliminates all topographical contours and renders the animals amphibious. In terms of the values they might be seen to advocate, the meanings of these shifts appear obscure. Increasingly, they seem to be brought about for their own sakes. In addition, the alterations of the landscape are introduced by meta-dramatical phrases which present the subsequent events as if they were “scenes” (441) in a masque, or possibly a garden spectacle: “No scene that turns with engines strange j Does oftener 26 Resembling, in some respects, those awaiting the visitor to the ‘sacred wood’ of Bomarzo; cf. Bredekamp 1991. 27 Colie describes Marvell’s poet-figure as “[…] a personality with no fixed boundaries” who appears related to Montaigne’s fluid and tentative subjectivity and “glides through a series of experiences rendered, and therefore interpreted, in very different contexts, literary languages, and literary moralities.” (Colie 1970, 182; cf. 250). However, different from Montaigne’s self, Marvell’s persona perambulates “a world with no fixed reference-points” (ibid., 184). 28 With an allusion to Sir Peter Lely. 29 With a mocking allusion to Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert.

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than these meadows change.” (385 f.) Natural change is thus translated not only into the mechanic (and, possibly, military), but further into the artistic. What happens is at the same time the product of nature, of humanity, and, above all, of the artist’s imagination. Thus the meadows’ flora and fauna are described with meticulous precision, while they become, simultaneously, the stage on which bucolic scenes are played, a battle-ground, a bloody massacre, the setting for a story of expulsion and exile, equally of fall and flood.30 As one frame of reference is projected onto the other, everything is always something else, while, paradoxically and due to the acuteness with which it is observed, it remains very much itself. It is in consequence of the poet’s activity that the mowers are Israelites, that the meadows are sites both of nourishment and death, that they are pastoral paradise, promised land and at the same time a wasteland devastated by human warfare, dystopia as well as utopia. The place thus appears both intensely real and wholly fictional. Nature appears capable of infinite transformation – but these changes are literally engineered by the poetic imagination. In the following twenty stanzas (LXI – LXXXI) the poet-persona assumes the role of protagonist – or rather, of a willing object of natural, non-human agency. With him we enter the adjoining natural worlds of forest and river, our meanderings still accompanied by uneasy conflations of military and biblical associations.31 And here, the poem’s repeated inversion of inside-outside relationships becomes particularly ingenious. For the forest becomes another building, indeed a “temple green” (510), peopled by birds of very precise description (and again of highly dubious allegorical significance),32 and complete with “columns” and 30 Here, as well as at other points in the poem, Colie notes the fusion of pastoral with georgic (as well as with numerous other modes); cf. Colie 1970, 185, 192, 224 and passim. 31 Thus, the speaker takes “sanctuary” (482) in the wood and “embark[s] j In this yet green, yet growing ark;” (483 f.) which will save him from the flooding, and with him “all creatures […] j Although in armies, not in pairs” (488). Stanzas LVII and LXXVI to LXXVIII also strongly abound with military diction; but, as pointed out above, this is never far from the speaker’s mind. 32 Cf., for instance, the stock-doves, continually moaning for no conceivable reason (except those of pastoral tradition in the allusion to Virgil’s Eclogue I, 58), and thus rather ambiguously reflecting the Fairfax marriage: “O why should such a couple mourn, j That in so equal flames do burn!” (527 f.); or the heron, who “from the ash’s top, j The eldest of its young lets drop,” (533 f.); or, above all, the “hewel” or green woodpecker (picus viridis), matching in colour the world he lives in and recognizable by his ‘laughing’ call, who, for all his laud-

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“Corinthean porticoes” (508). Its appearance from the outside is so dense that it forbids all entrance to the uninitiated, and even rearranges the distribution of darkness and light: “Dark all without it knits; within j It opens passable and thin;” (505 f.). In addition, it is transformed into a site for further transformations and ultimately turns into a forest of the mind (stanzas LXXI to LXXVII). As the speaker imagines himself one of the birds or trees,33 he also acquires their language and becomes, quite literally, a reader in the book of nature (cf. 584). However, in “these scattered sibyl’s leaves” (577) and in their cabbalistic “mosaic” (582), he deciphers no pious meanings but a history of the world. In that, he not only assumes, hyperbolically, a role simultaneously prophetic and hieratic (“Like some great prelate of the grove”, 592), but experiences, as medium of this universal legibility and overwhelming significance, an almost manic happiness.34 He is not, however, surrounded only by signs which obtrude their meanings, but also by sensuous experiences which force themselves upon him.35 From reading, he is promoted to feeling. As the plants of the forest envelop and disguise him (cf. 586 – 591), his thoughts are blown through by “cool zephyrs” (598). And he is not only safely ensconced in the wood (stanza LXXVI) but actually permeated by it, wishing the ties which form this union to grow even closer: Bind me ye woodbines in your twines, Curl me about ye gadding vines, And oh so close your circles lace, That I may never leave this place: But, lest your fetters prove too weak, Ere I your silken bondage break, Do you, O brambles, chain me too,

able activity in cleaning the trees from various insects, also suspiciously comes to resemble a regicide as he probes the “hollow oak” (548), which (who?) then “fall[s] content” (559), as it had harboured within a “traitor-worm” (554), whose “treason” is now also punished (560). Still: “Who could have thought the tallest oak j Should fall by such a feeble stroke!” (551 f.). 33 Playing on the commonplace of man as an inverted tree, but, in typically Marvellian fashion, uncovering its uncanny implications by literalizing it. 34 This is, paradoxically, simultaneously universal, as it taps into natural wisdom, and esoteric in the highest degree, as indicated by the allusion to Hermes Trismegistus: “Thrice happy he who, not mistook, j Hath read in Nature’s mystic book.” (583 f.). 35 In a manner rather similar to “The Garden”.

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And courteous briars nail me through. (609 – 616)

To the poet-persona, it is intensely pleasurable to be forced to feel. If this eroticized fantasy of natural bondage masochistically envisages a loss of mobility and agency at the mercy of animated nature; if this appears as a first culminating point in a process of increasing identification, preliminary to an even more complete merging of the subject with his surroundings, the next flight of his imagination is possibly even weirder. Set in the element of water, it figures, again, an enjoyable mode of transgression. After the flood, the river has returned to its bed and its formerly troubled waters have cleared to such a degree of glossy smoothness that passing narcissists would “doubt j If they be in it or without” (637 f.) and must needs fall in love with their own reflection. The auto-erotic note is continued in this semi-aquatic fancy, which half submerges the speaker: Oh what a pleasure ’tis to hedge My temples here with heavy sedge; Abandoning my lazy side, Stretched as a bank unto the tide; Or to suspend my sliding foot On th’osiers undermind root, And in its branches tough to hang, While at my lines the fishes twang! (641 – 648)

The speaker casts himself as a Miltonic36 figure, but divested of all mournful or tragic connotations. Happily he floats with the river, at the same time recumbent and suspended, occupying simultaneously positions by and in the water, his embodied self stretched from the banks to the depths, and his will abandoned to the movement of the “tide”. If this circumscribes the place of the poet, these self-placements are, to say the least, paradoxical. They are doubtlessly experiences of heightened selfhood. Still, they are also experiences of a pleasurable yielding of autonomy. They are self-referential, the poetic consciousness bending back on itself and mirroring itself, while they at the same time communicate a sense of lost boundaries and a blurring of outlines. They appear both clearly centred and radically decentering. They imagine a kind of participation in, if not union with, nature, but they articulate this in a language of the human body. They 36 Reminiscent of the river-god Camus in Lycidas (cf. also the commentary in Smith 2003).

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are sensuous and material, yet also imply an odd inclination to dissolve such essential qualities of matter as weight and gravity, as the speaker’s body needs to be fixed, tied, indeed nailed to the spot. Corporeally, he does not seem to be place-bound, but about to fly or flow away. If we try to determine the kind of happiness this text seeks to describe in describing Appleton estate, things become even more complicated. For these autoreferential passages obviously present fantasies of topological bliss. But in terms of the poem’s macro-structure, we have only been building up to the culminating point. The former felicity is, once more and impossibly, transcended. We now turn to the true mistress, and indeed goddess and spirit of the place in the person of Mary Fairfax: “The young Maria walks tonight” (651). The praise her tutor lavishes on her is very different from that devoted to her father; some tropes, however, are similar, such as stress placed on the transformative powers of modesty, purity, and goodness37 or the conflation of Protestant with Catholic virtue, as the “Blest Nymph” (713) simultaneously appears as the Virgin Mary. But here, towards the end of the poem, the speaker goes beyond this by imagining his pupil not only as an incarnation of sophia, the divine Wisdom present with God at the creation of the world,38 but also as the creative spirit of the Lord,39 alone capable of bringing the world into being and of restoring it to its former paradisical state.40 Surprisingly, though, in this capacity Mary Fairfax is not only presented as the Lady in the Garden,41 but, in a breath-taking conceit, compared to the kingfisher:

37 Cf. in particular stanzas LXXXX, LXXXXI, and LXXXXIII. 38 Cf. Prov. 8.22 – 31. It is above all Maria’s superior linguistic proficiency which qualifies her for the role, for she not only knows all languages but appreciates them for the heavenly wisdom they contain: “She counts her beauty to converse j In all the languages as hers; j Nor yet in those herself employs j But for that wisdom, not the noise; j Nor yet that wisdom would affect, j But as ’tis heaven’s dialect.” (707 – 712). She is therefore polyglot also in a sense different from that of the speaker conversing with the birds and trees in the forest, for there, the inhabitants of the place seemed to talk primarily of themselves. 39 Another structural pattern underlying this text seems to be the praise of creation and Creator in Ps. 104 (which, fittingly, in verses 33 f. also ends on an auto-referential note). 40 Cf. stanzas LXXXXV and LXXXXVI. There are obvious apocalyptic connotations here, strengthened in the evokation of meteors and related phenomena as well as the ‘vitrification’ of the world (stanza LXXXVI). 41 In an emulation of the hortus-conclusus topos, which wildly surpasses its more conventional versions, as here the world is precisely not shut out but included.

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So when the shadows laid asleep From underneath these banks do creep, An on the river as it flows With ebon shuts begins to close; The modest halcyon comes in sight, Flying betwixt the day and night; (665 – 670)

Like the speaker, she appears as an intermediate being. She moves between light and darkness, in the crepuscular transition from day to night. But she is also miraculously capable of arresting this moment by irradiating42 the scene: The viscous air, wheres’e’er she fly, Follows and sucks her azure dye; The jellying stream compacts below, If it might fix her shadow so; The stupid fishes hang, as plain As flies in crystal overta’en; And men with silent scene assist, Charmed with the sapphire-wingd mist. (673 – 680)

The way this stilling and preserving of movement is described is remarkable. For not only does the halcyonic magic result in a momentary fixation which might appear as an anticipation of eternity. But as “Nature is wholly vitrified” (688), it is also rendered totally transparent. This is also a moment of neoplatonic epistrophÞ,43 as Nature “recollect[s]” itself (cf. 658). As the kingfisher is, emblematically speaking, a bringer of marine peace, Maria might herald at least a respite from civil war. Thus, the effect created by the kingfisher’s flight and described with extraordinary phenomenal accuracy and almost scientific visual acuteness remains deeply ambiguous: The process is one of congelation44 – it focusses on the point where aggregate states change. Things are neither liquid or mobile any more, nor are they solid yet. 42 The following stanza elaborates this idea of Maria / the kingfisher giving off her own light by comparing her to a “new-born comet” (683) and commenting on the purifying power of “her flames, in heaven tried” (687). 43 The concept of a return to the One; in the thinking of Plotinus and his successors, particularly of Proclus, the ‘conversion’, or turning back of the soul (or indeed, of everything there is), in a self-reflexive movement, to its transcendent origin (cf. Plotinus, Ennead V 1, 7, 4 ff.; for Proclus, see also Beierwaltes 1979. 44 Obviously a state which held particular fascination for Marvell; cf. the suggestive aggregate changes undergone both by the dew drop itself and by the Manna in “On a Drop of Dew” (see also the reading of the poem in Lobsien and Olk 2010).

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If they are fixed, they are fixed at the point of transformation. In the medium of kingfisher blue, things are shown for what they are, glazed over, yet not deadened but transfigured. For a fraction of time, their dynamic appears eternized and glorified. Maria seems to have reached the point the speaker could only adumbrate in his own experience of nature and his druidic role-playing: As they become part of her aura, all beings are turned into something else, yet remain wholly themselves. And, to add to the sense of a circularity, which manages at the same time to be self-sufficient, even tautological, and still to gesture towards transcendence, they return to her what they have received: “Therefore what first she on them spent, j They gratefully again present” (697 f.). The promise of happiness held forth by the poem, then, remains similarly unsettled and unsettling. Appleton House offers simultaneously variations on the theme of self-centred retreat into a garden world and of ascent to an otherworldly perfection. As sensual, epicurean versions of bliss are fused with spiritualized, neoplatonic types; as both appear steeped in irony; as incompatibles are finally once again conjoined in the classically Renaissance formula for the human as “rational amphibium” (cf. 774),45 earthly and heavenly places have become one – at least in the final address to the estate, its beauty perfected by Mary Fairfax, as “heaven’s centre, Nature’s lap, j And Paradise’s only map.” (767 f.). * * *

45 The topos of human nature as amphibious can be traced back to Plotinus, who refers to human souls as amphibians (amphibioi), hence capable of transition, transformation, and transcendence; cf. Ennead IV 8, 33: “Souls, then, become, one might say, amphibious, compelled to live by turns the life There, and the life here: those which are able to be more in the company of Intellect live the life There more, but those whose normal condition is, by nature or chance, the opposite, live more the life here below.” (Plotinus. 1984, 411). It seems to be no coincidence that Thomas Browne, too, in his Religio Medici conceives of man as “that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds” (Martin 1964, 33).

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In Marvell’s poem, my test case for a literary anthropology in terms of dwelling, nature, the poet’s place, and happiness, human space has become radically subjective space. The site of Appleton House is the poet’s mind. It is a utopian place in more than one sense: an imaginative Garden of Eden, but also a lost Arcadia, no-where. Despite its dense population with numerous creatures and beings not normally regarded as animated, this seems to be an a-social, solitary, perhaps in the end a-human paradise, inhospitable at least to the kind of humanity envisaged by the more traditional country-house poem. If places, like genres, need outlines which limit and define them; if Aristotelian concepts of space are conceived of in terms of enclosure and distinction, the space created by Marvell’s poem, despite its specific topographical reference, refuses to be confined. Instead, its dynamism and its incessant overstepping of bounds seem to point towards something else, perhaps a platonic ‘place’ “beyond the heavens”.46 Above all, the text celebrates the poetic imagination as a transforming force. As such, it moves beyond place, politics, confessions, and even gender, at home with Lord Fairfax, on familiar terms with his daughter, and involved in a polymorphous love affair with nature. It tries to balance on the impossible point of change. Its medium is transition. Happiness, then, is a kingfisher in flight.

46 See n. 14 above.

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Texts Cited Alpers, Paul (1979): The Singer of the Eclogues. A Study of Virgilian Pastoral. Berkeley / Los Angeles: University of Los Angeles Press. Alpers, Paul (1996): What is Pastoral? Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle (1926): The Art of Rhetoric. London: Heinemann. Beierwaltes, Werner (1979): Proklos. Grundzge seiner Metaphysik. Frankfurt / M.: Klostermann. Bredekamp, Horst (1991): Vicino Orsini und der Heilige Wald von Bomarzo. Ein Frst als Knstler und Anarchist. Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft. Cambers, Douglas (1993): The Planters of the English Landscape Garden. Botany, Trees, and the Georgics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Castiglione, Baldassare (1967): The Book of the Courtier. Trans. by Thomas Hoby. New York: Ams Press. Chalker, John (1969): The English Georgic. London: Routledge & Paul. Colie, Rosalie L. (1970): “My Ecchoing Song”. Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Cotterill, Anne (2002): “Marvell’s Watery Maze: Digression and Discovery at Nun Appleton”, in: English Literary History 69/1, 103 – 132. Denham, John (21969): The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham. Ed. by Theodore Howard Banks. New Haven: Archon Books. Donaldson, Ian (1986): “Jonson’s Magic Houses”, in: Essays and Studies 39, 39 – 61. Dubrow, Heather (1979): “The Country-House Poem: A Study in Generic Development”, in: Genre 12, 153 – 179. Empson, William (1959): Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Penguin Books. Evelyn, John (2001): Elysium Britannicum, or The Royal Gardens. Ed. by John E. Ingram. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Fowler, Alastair (1994): The Country-House Poem. A Cabinet of Seventeenth-Century Estate Poems and Related Items. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gillespie, Stuart (2007): “Lucretius in the English Renaissance”, in: Gillespie, Stuart / Hardie, Philip (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 242 – 253. Greer, Germaine (ed.) (1988): Kissing the Rod. An Anthology of 17th Century Women’s Verse. London: Virago. Grossman, Marshall (ed.) (1998): Aemilia Lanyer. Gender, Genre and the Canon. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Heidegger, Martin (1967): “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken”, in: Vortrge und Aufstze. Teil II. Pfullingen: Neske, 19 – 36. Hibbard, George R. (1956): “The Country-House Poem of the SeventeenthCentury”, in: Journal of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes 19, 159 – 174. Hinnant, Charles B. (1980): “A Philosophical Origin of the English Landscape Garden”, in: Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 83, 292 – 306. Hirst, Derek / Steven Zwicker (1993): “High Summer at Nun Appleton, 1651: Andrew Marvell and Lord Fairfax’s Occasions”, in: The Historical Journal 36/ 2, 247 – 269.

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Hirst, Derek / Steven Zwicker (1999): “Andrew Marvell and the Toils of Patriarchy: Fatherhood, Longing, and the Body Politic”, in: English Literary History 66/3, 629 – 654. Hobbes, Thomas (1994): The Elements of Law Natural and Politic. Part I: Human Nature. Part II: De Corpore Politico. With Three Lives. Ed. by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, David (2007): “The English Voices of Lucretius from Lucy Hutchinson to John Mason Good”, in: Gillespie, Stuart / Hardie, Philip (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 254 – 273. Horace (1926): Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry. London: Heinemann. Hunt, John Dixon (1986): Garden and Grove. The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination: 1600 – 1750. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Hunt, John Dixon / Peter Willis, (ed.) (1975): The Genius of the Place. The English Landscape Garden 1620 – 1820. London: Elek. Jonson, Ben (1970): Ben Jonson. The Poems, The Prose Works. Ed. by C. H. Herford / Percy Simpson and Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lanyer, Aemilia (1993): The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer. Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. Ed. by Susanne Woods. New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewalski, Barbara K. (1983): “Of God and Good Women: the Poems of Aemilia Lanyer”, in: Hannay, Margaret P. (ed.): Silent But for the Word. Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 203 – 224. Lewalski, Barbara K. (1991): “Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer”, in: The Yearbook of English Studies 21, 87 – 106. Lobsien, Eckhart (1978): Landschaft in Texten. Stuttgart: Metzler. Lobsien, Verena Olejniczak (2008): “‘Prove true, imagination!’ Proklamation und Dissimulation von Geschlecht in der Literatur der englischen Renaissance”, in: Zeitschrift fr Germanistik N.F. 18/2, 263 – 286. Lobsien, Verena Olejniczak (2010a): “Die Vollkommenheit des Unvollkommenen. Marvells neuplatonisch-biblisches Bild der Seele: ‘On a Drop of Dew’”, in: Lobsien, Verena Olejniczak / Olk, Claudia / Mnchberg, Katharina (ed.): Vollkommenheit. sthetische Perfektion in Antike, Mittelalter und Frher Neuzeit. Berlin: De Gruyter, 205 – 232. Lobsien, Verena Olejniczak (2010b): “Literarische sprezzatura. Unsichtbare Ordnung in Thomas Brownes The Garden of Cyrus (1658)”, in: Anglia [In print]. Lucretius (1924): De rerum natura. London: Heineman. Malins, Edward (1966): English Landscaping and Literature 1660 – 1840. London: Oxford University Press. Martin, Leonard C. (ed.) (1964): Sir Thomas Browne. Religio Medici and Other Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McClung, William Alexander (1977): The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press.

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McClung, William Alexander (1983): The Architecture of Paradise. Berkeley: University of California Press. Moore, Charles W. / Mitchell, William J. / Turnbull, William Jr. (1988): The Poetics of Gardens. Cambridge, Mass.: MJT, Press. Morford, Mark (1987): “The Stoic Garden”, in: Journal of Garden History 7/2, 151 – 175. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope (1997): Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Seattle / London: University of Washington Press. Patton, Brian (1996): “Upon Appleton House”, in: Renaissance Quarterly 49/4, 824 – 839. Plato (1973): The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Plotnius (1984): Plotinus. Trans. by A. H. Armstrong. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Poggioli, Renato (1975): The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Ritter, Joachim (1974): “Landschaft (1963). Zur Funktion des sthetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft”, in: Ritter, Joachim (ed.): Subjektivitt. Sechs Aufstze. Frankfurt / M.: Suhrkamp, 141 – 163. Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. (1969): The Green Cabinet. Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric. Berkeley: University of California Press. Røstvig, Maren-Sofie (1962): The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphosis of a Classical ideal 1600 – 1700. Rev. ed. Oslo: Norwegian University Press. Scoular, Kitty (1965): Natural Magic. Studies in the Presentation of Nature in English Poetry from Spenser to Marvell. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Seneca (1917): Moral Epistles. London: Heineman. Smith, Nigel (ed.) (2003): The Poems of Andrew Marvell. London / New York / Toronto: Pearson Education Limited. Temple, William (1814): The Works of Sir William Temple, Bart. Complete. London: Rivington. Thomas, Keith (2008): The Ends of Life. Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, James G. (1979): The Politics of Landscape. Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630 – 1660. Oxford: Blackwell. Virgil (1916a): Eclogue. London: Heinemann. Virgil (1916b): Georgica II. London: Heinemann. Wootton, David (2009): “Review of Keith Thomas The Ends of Life. Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England”, in: TLS 5526, February 27, 3.

Religious Beings

Among the Fairies: Religion and the Anthropology of Ritual in Shakespeare Brian Cummings What kind of animal is man? This essay considers what we might call the anthropological moment in Shakespeare: a moment in which the theatre compels the audience to reflect on its own humanity and what it means. This might seem to be Hamlet’s moment: What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel.1

This famous verse has a long history in aligning Shakespeare with an anthropocentric humanism. However, I am going to approach the topic more obliquely and perhaps more questioningly. My subject is a place where the human is placed in parenthesis rather than acts centre-stage, where the human indeed is made subordinate, at least temporarily, to non-human rules. There are several places in Shakespeare where this happens – Macbeth and The Tempest are other examples – but perhaps the most conspicuous is the kingdom of the fairies outside Athens. The fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are poised between two worlds: they are both among us and yet outside us. They appear similar to humankind yet also radically different. At one point they also interfere in the physical make-up of humankinds and metamorphose a human body into half-animal. Not only do they pose questions about the boundaries of the human, indeed, they also pose questions about the boundaries of the observable world, of what the world is really like. I will be using two models of anthropological perspective. The first is ethnographic, in investigating the distinctive world of the fairies and how it causes us to reflect on the distinctive world of the human. The second form of focus is methodological. This part of the essay is deliberately experimental: I want to consider what we think anthropology is, and how 1

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, 2.2.303; see also 4.4.33 – 5. All quotations from Shakespeare from The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, The Shakespeare Collection [Gale online edition, accessed 15 January 2010].

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we use it in interpreting Shakespeare. Alongside the physical and metaphysical questions embodied in Hamlet’s statement there is also a cultural and social dimension. To reflect on this I will examine how the idea of ritual has been constructed in cultural anthropology. Not only is ritual a frequent topos in anthropology, it is in some ways central to the way that the discipline has defined itself in the last thirty years. These methodological concerns themselves throw further light on the performative meaning of Shakespeare’s play. My topic is the nature of ritual in postReformation England, and in turn how this might manifest itself in Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not a play that involves obvious enactments of religious ritual, quite the reverse. Nonetheless, the play is constructed by means of a very conscious use of ritual of a highly imaginative and mimetic kind. The fairies create a ritual world, and then cast those rituals onto the world of humans, in ways which disrupt and transform the structure of human societies. By putting together these two very different kinds of material, then, I am hoping to uncover some kind of unexpected connection in order to enable us to see things we might not otherwise see. * * * Ritual is a concept with deep roots in the Anglo-American tradition of ‘cultural anthropology’. Indeed, ritual has become an anthropological perspective on what kind of a being human beings are. Recently this concept of ritual has taken a philosophical turn, following an almost throwaway phrase in Wittgenstein’s vast assemblage of posthumously published Nachlass. In one of his notebooks, which only turned up in 1967, he jotted down some notes on James George Frazer’s pioneer (if deeply flawed) classic of English anthropology, The Golden Bough. 2 Wittgenstein is almost entirely hostile to Frazer, offering some splendidly waspish jokes, especially Anglophobic ones: “Frazer cannot imagine a priest who is not basically a present-day English parson with the same stupidity and dullness [mit seiner ganzen Dummheit und Flauheit]”.3 In the midst of this attack, Wittgenstein comes up with a striking phrase, one that offers a distinctive perspective on the nature of anthropology as a philosophical discourse: 2 3

Wittgenstein 1993. Wittgenstein 1993, 125.

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For no phenomenon is in itself particularly mysterious, but any of them can become so to us, and the characteristic feature of the awakening mind of man is precisely the fact that a phenomenon comes to have meaning for him. One could almost say that man is a ceremonial animal [ein zeremonielles Tier]. That is, no doubt, partly wrong and partly nonsensical [unsinnig], but there is also something right about it.4

The phrase “a ceremonial animal” has recently been used by Wendy James in providing a new summation of the discipline of anthropology. In her words: Ritual, symbol and ceremony are not simply present or absent in the things we do; they are built in to human action. Examples of human action free of them are impossible to find, because all human action relates in some way to arenas of culturally specified significance we participate in with others.5

Man is, James asserts, the “ceremonial animal”. Ceremony is therefore fundamental to the study of humankinds. The study of rituals in widely variant societies has been a staple of anthropological field research for nearly a hundred years. In a more comprehensive fashion, the last work of the American anthropologist Roy Rappaport following his death in 1997, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999), explained ritual not only as an observable fact but as a social necessity. Rappaport attempted to give this a philosophical and even an evolutionary explanation. A fundamental predicate of the existence of language is the idea of falsehood: indeed the very freedom of sign from signified is a precondition for the possibility of falsehood. Yet this is not only a problem of language, as Rappaport asserts: What is at stake is not only the truthfulness or reliability of particular messages but credibility, credence and trust themselves, and thus the grounds of the trustworthiness requisite to systems of communication and of community generally.6

Lying is a fundamental breach in human society. Human “orderliness” depends on some “minimum standard of reliability”.7 This is where he brings in the idea of the ritual as a recuperative device for dealing with the credibility gap inherent in the recognition of falsehood in human communication; in his words: “aspects of religion, particularly as generated in ritual, ameliorate problems of falsehood intrinsic to language to a 4 5 6 7

Wittgenstein 1993, 129. James 2005, 7. Rappaport 1999, 15. Rappaport 1999, 15.

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degree sufficient to allow human sociability to have developed and be maintained”. 8 Rappaport’s thesis is that ritual is “the social act basic to humanity”.9 I am interested in this general statement here for two reasons. One is the way that it is used to identify a central feature of the methodology of anthropology. This can be used to shed light on the anthropological study of historical periods such as the early modern. However, there is also a way in which the historiography of ritual relates to the construction of ideas of ritual in modernity. There are obvious reasons why a controversy about ritual can be applied with interest to the historical period of the early modern. Indeed there has been a two-way dialogue, usually unacknowledged, between the historical formation of religion and the anthropology of ritual, for nearly forty years now. Perhaps the first major anthropologist to suggest a general thesis on the question of ritual was Mary Douglas in Natural Symbols, first published in 1970. The book was a lament combined with a polemic, which then flowered into an intellectual system. The lament was that “one of the gravest problems of our day is the lack of commitment to common symbols”.10 The polemic was a counter-blast in favour of ritualism, against what she identified – at the end of the 1960s in the midst of the social upheavals of those years – as “a wide-spread, explicit rejection of rituals as such”. “Ritual”, she said, “has become a bad word signifying empty conformity”.11 From the first page of her book, Douglas identified what she called “anti-ritualism” with a specific ideology of modernity, and a certain version of the origins of modernity in the early modern, specifically in the Reformation: Shades of Luther! Shades of the Reformation and its complaint against meaningless rituals, mechanical religion, Latin as the language of cult, mindless recitation of litanies. We find ourselves, here and now, reliving a worldwide revolt against ritualism.12

In modernity, she says, the ritualist is condemned as “one who performs external gestures without inner commitment to the ideas and values being expressed”.13 8 9 10 11 12 13

Rappaport 1999, 15. Rappaport 1999, 31. Douglas 1996, 1. Douglas 1996, 1. Douglas 1996, 1. Douglas 1996, 2.

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Douglas’s defence of ritual was both profound and passionate. It proclaimed a social manifesto for the centrality of the body to human experience, which it saw as urgent for our own times. It was also, perhaps coincidentally – although the reference to Luther makes it unlikely – a subtle commentary on the discipline of religious history as practised at the time. Douglas identified “three phases in the move away from ritualism”: First, there is the contempt of external ritual forms; second, there is the private internalizing of religious experience; third, there is the move to humanist philanthropy.14

This could as easily be applied to a bias in the historiographical narrative of religion as to the social scientists at whom it is primarily aimed. Reformation history in particular – even when written by Catholic historians – had long come to assume the primacy of doctrine over practice, the inevitability and even the moral good of the emergence of self-enlightenment as the primary focus of religion, and also to endorse a yardstick of social usefulness and improvement as indicators of the redevelopment of religion as a beneficial force in modernity. There is no doubt that Douglas’s book had a serious influence on the thinking of the historian who is now seen as having overthrown this dogmatic prioritizing of Reformation values in the apprehension of the early modern and pre-modern Christian past. Eamon Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars is a historical polemic and lament to put alongside Douglas.15 It is a stringent attack on the perceived values of Reformation historiography as well as a lament for the lost world of pre-Reformation religion.16 Its bÞte noire is Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, with the modernist prejudice of that work in favour of secular values of selfhood and enlightenment, and Thomas’s barely suppressed contempt for bodily mumbo-jumbo.17 Duffy cajoled historians and the general public into a new respect for the body and its experiences, including a fight against doctrinal history with its obsession with semantic exegesis of dogmatic theology at the expense of all other experience. Religion is a social experience of practice and performance as well as one of individual devotion. This is especially true of its pre-modern form: “the liturgy lay at the heart 14 Douglas 1996, 7. 15 Duffy 1992. 16 Duffy provides a methodological explanation of the origins of his book in a Preface to the Second Edition: Duffy 2005, xiii – xxxvii. 17 Thomas 1971.

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of medieval religion, and the Mass lay at the heart of the liturgy”.18 Duffy polemically defended medieval religion against modern values, arguing that “even the most apparently heterodox or bizarre magical practices” employ “ritual and symbolic strategies”.19 There is perhaps a special interest in the way that Douglas refers to anti-ritualism as motivated by social snobbishness, even within the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy, against what she calls “Bog Irishism”. A concentration on ritual, she implies, came to be regarded, in the years after Vatican 2, as retrograde and intellectually suspect. Duffy’s work has equally been a counter-revolution on behalf of his and Douglas’s common ancestors, the Bog Irish. There is more than incidental humour working here. Douglas and Duffy associate religion strongly with popular culture and local place. They do this in two senses: in valuing the local against the universal experience of religion, and in respecting the place of local community in religious practice. But they also proclaim the sacred value of place itself. Ritual, at its heart – in Douglas’s terms and in Duffy’s – is a practical theory of the embodiment of human value, and a recognition of the centrality of the experience of embodiment. Ritual is an embodied act and must take place in a specific place and at a specific time. Ritual involves, Duffy says, “benefits for body and soul”, in which the soul’s salvation cannot be separated from the experience of the body.20 This applies to the theology of the individual human body, in Christian terms clearly articulated by the concepts of incarnation and resurrection, but it also applies to the incorporation of humans in a collective body, in their self-recognition within the group, and their celebration of that group within collective bodily rituals. For both Douglas and Duffy the most generally conceptualized form of such a ritual is the Catholic mass, a sacrament which is collectively as well as individually experienced and which is bodily transmitted: The Host, then, was far more than the object of individual devotion, a means of forgiveness and sanctification: it was the source of human community.21

Sacraments move beyond the individual and come to embody a view of the whole external environment. In Douglas’s words: 18 19 20 21

Duffy Duffy Duffy Duffy

1992, 2005, 1992, 1992,

92. xx. 100. 93.

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Sacraments, as I understand, are signs especially instituted to be channels of grace. The whole material world is held to be sacramental in the sense that material signs and channels of grace are everywhere.22

We can see such an idea strongly present in Duffy’s later work, especially his hymn to the religion of place, The Voices of Morebath, a religious community in rural Devon, ritually observed in close detail over a whole century.23 * * * The movement to assimilate the work of Shakespeare within post-Reformation culture has been parodied as relying entirely on rather spuriously enhanced readings of the documentary life. It has become caught in the minutiae of the records of Shakespeare’s father John, and his confessional history. The evidence for this is difficult to read, as is the rather more tangential evidence around ‘Lancastrian Shakespeare’, and the tenuous existence of William Shakeshafte, who may or may not be the same person as William Shakespeare. Sometimes it seems as if the argument about Shakespeare’s confessional life has become lost in a blind alley. But at its best the ‘Catholic Shakespeare’ argument has involved something much broader, something openly influenced by Duffy. This is a restoration of the idea of religious value, especially a religion of the body and a religion of place. Arthur Marotti made a glancing reference, indeed, to Mary Douglas’s ideas in one of the essays in the Lancastrian Shakespeare volumes, which inaugurated the full version of the Catholic Shakespeare argument.24 It is in this context that we could begin to speculate on what the place of religion is in Shakespeare’s plays. Here I wish to ask this question in relation to the world of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is, of course, an imaginary place, ‘a wood near Athens’, but part of my argument here is that imaginative places are real, too; and real places are imaginative, equally. My interest is precisely in the imaginative matrix of place: how is place imagined as a site of religion, or of religious change? For that issue must be part of all our arguments about place,

22 Douglas 1996, 9. 23 Duffy 2001. 24 Marotti 2003, 227.

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however grounded in parish records or surveyors’ plans or antiquarians’ inventories. Act II of A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins with a fabulous stage direction: “Enter a fairy at one door, and Puck at another”. Puck asks the fairy where he is going, and he replies: Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough briar, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon’s sphere. (2.1.2 – 7)

A recent biographer, Ren Weis, tracks down Puck’s movements in order to have him “rambling among the woodlands and clearings of Warwickshire”.25 That is one way of locating the play within a sense of space. But this may miss the point, just as other readings have in putting the play so firmly in the months of a particular year in Shakespeare’s life. This manifestly gets the weather wrong: for in fact June and July in 1595 and 1596 were “very wet, and wonderful cold, like winter”, according to Simon Forman; “many did sit by the fire, it was so cold”. The wood outside Athens is not a real place, it is not like Duffy’s Morebath. But it can be assimilated to Duffy’s approach in a different way, when we see how the play’s landscape is constructed as a symbolic space, a space with symbolic values as part of an embodied world of ritual. Now we are ready to approach the anthropology of fairies. Who are the fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream? What kind of humankind are they? What questions about the human, or about human nature, do they pose? From the point of view of anthropology, the preliminary set of questions we might wish to isolate about the fairies is obvious enough. The fairies exhibit recognisable traits from the classical archetypes of anthropology. They behave, according to that deeply unfashionable jargon, like a ‘primitive’ society. They are an ethnographer’s dream. They perform complex dances; they have an elaborate herbal culture, including a homeopathic but also sometimes sinisterly applied popular medicine; above all, they participate in highly formal rituals which they believe to have a magical effect on their environment. Yet if the fairies conform to a stereotype of an ethnographic society, we could also stop to ask, what kind of society they are posited as being prim25 Weis 2007.

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itive to. Folklorists have been puzzling over A Midsummer Night’s Dream since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. One type of theory was obviously that the fairy world represented a residual form of a pagan ur-England, an older world of genuine social practices and beliefs, a preChristian survival. The idea of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a remnant element of folk culture, even, we might say, of folk religion, is both one of the oldest approaches to the play, and still among the most popular. In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, in 1755, a fairy is defined in recognisably Shakespearean terms: “a [f]abled being supposed to appear in a diminutive human form, and to dance in the meadows, and reward cleanliness”.26 Johnson thinks the four elf-children of the play, with their childish names of Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed, as representative of rural belief. Bottom addresses them with mock formality, as “your worship” or “honest gentleman”, as an adult might greet the children of friends, and in Johnson’s mind, perhaps, they appear to come from Shakespeare’s childhood Warwickshire memory. Johnson was a midlands boy himself. Yet are Shakespeare’s fairies a historical memory at all? A counter-tradition goes back at least as far as Walter Scott. In 1802, in an essay “On the Fairies of Popular Superstition”, Scott distinguished sharply between the literary fairies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries (including Warwickshire born Michael Drayton) and the harsher character of the dwarves, elves and goblins of older legend.27 Unlike the fairies of England, which had acquired poetic embellishments and (in Johnson’s notable definition) polite manners, their Scottish cousins had stayed truer to their roots and were still savage and dirty: While the fays of South Britain received such attractive and poetical embellishments, those of Scotland, who possessed no such advantage, retained more of their ancient and appropriate character.28

Scott did not think of the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a cultural memory, but as a literary invention. While fairies in Scotland were supposed to be diminutive in form, Scott believed that Shakespeare had further reduced them, tamed them, prettified them. His fairies are a falsification of historical memory. Scott even implies that they are part of a conscious rewriting of historical memory, a suppression of older, deeper, wilder sources in favour of a more comforting historical 26 Johnson 1755, “Fairy”. 27 Scott 1802. 28 Scott 1802, VI.

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past. He provides us with an ethnographic classification of the Fairies of the Highlands: They are, though not absolutely malevolent, believed to be a peevish, repining, and envious race, who enjoy, in the subterranean recesses, a kind of shadowy splendour.29

Scott informs us how the Scots fairies look: “the usual dress of the Fairies is green; though, on the moors, they have been sometimes observed in heathbrown, or in weeds dyed with the stoneraw, or lichen”.30 They ride in procession; they enjoy the pleasures of the chase; they drink wine; they abduct children. I am not going to try to prove or disprove Scott’s theory of the English softening of the wild roots of elven races. However, I think there are at least three types of fairy in Shakespeare’s play, with as many or more literary origins. There are the fairy king and queen, who have complex classical sources; Titania is taken from Ovid. Secondly, there are Peaseblossom and company, three of whose names in fact do come from ingredients in folk-medicine (and perhaps even Moth, since boiled moths were used in remedies).31 And then, most mysterious and dangerous of all, there is Puck, also called in the play Robin Goodfellow. We do not need to disentangle completely these different traditions: Shakespeare offers a synthesis. In response to Scott, though, we might wonder whether his own attachment to older, Scottish forms of folklore is not itself part of a highly literary romanticization. What is fascinating about Scott’s account, in fact, is the way that he so finely complicates the model of historical folklore that we are trying to apply. The original elements of folk culture turn out to be extremely difficult to unravel from our own investment in them as a form of historical nostalgia. This is already happening in Shakespeare, Scott says. The fairies already represent for Shakespeare some lost world of imaginary longing for the past. * * *

29 Scott 1802, VI. 30 Scott 1802, VI. 31 Brooks 1979, 3. 1. 155 note.

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Here, perhaps, we begin to see how the two halves of my argument can be made to coalesce. Duffy’s argument about the Reformation is structured around an idea of radical discontinuity. An old world of ritual embodiment is invested in a sense of sacred place and built around an idea of the incorporation of society in communal practices. This community extends beyond the immediate presence of its living members to embrace also the dead and the realm of the spirit. All of this is torn apart by an iconoclastic movement towards a disembodied religion brought about by the Protestant Reformation. In line with Douglas’s anthropological model, this new movement is anti-ritualist. Indeed in Duffy’s polemic it is consciously sacrilegious as well as demystificatory, it involves ‘the stripping of the altars’. At its heart is an attack on the central ritual act of embodiment, the mass. In Douglas’s words, we are witnessing a “historic shift in Europe from an emphasis on ritual efficacy before the Reformation to an emphasis on spontaneous, commemorative rites”.32 The immediately obvious parallel, one that has been drawn in a number of recent studies of the religion of Shakespeare’s time, is to think that allusions to popular folk memory and popular religion are part of the same polemic. Thus the nostalgia felt in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the lost or passing world of the fairies is analogous to the lost or passing world of the mass and of ritualized religion.33 I want partly to agree with this analysis and partly to argue for a significant realignment of it. First of all, as Richard Wilson has observed in an essay on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairies perform elaborate quasi-magical rituals which can readily be associated with sacramental actions.34 They apply potions which transform human action. Oberon sends Puck off in search of a herbal remedy for love: Fetch me that flower; the herb I show’d thee once. The juice of it, on sleeping eyelids laid, Will make or man or woman madly dote Upon the next live creature that it sees. (2.1.169 – 172)

Wilson has shown how the use of the herbs imitates a sacramental interpretation of the rite of marriage. But more deeply, these rituals operate at a general symbolic level. The fairies permanently change the social fabric of the human society they in32 Douglas 1996, 8. 33 Cf. for instance, Jensen 2009. 34 Wilson 2004, 144 – 155.

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teract with. The lovers are not the same at the end of the play, either in terms of their partners, or of their inner feelings. In the ending of the play this is given a consciously sacramental language: Now, until the break of day, Through this house each fairy stray. To the best bride – bed will we, Which by us shall blessed be; And the issue there create Ever shall be fortunate. (5.1.387 – 392)

The fairies successfully incorporate their human subjects in an act of ritualized sexual union but they also transform human society more widely. The court of the arrogant and overly worldly king Theseus is united with the world of the bombastic and idiotic rustic mechanicals. However, Duffy’s model of a one-way historical street here may be a little too convenient for his polemic. The danger of confessional stereotyping works in both directions. Just as Keith Thomas occasionally parodied medieval religion as superstition, so it is all too easy to parody all of the Protestant confessions as more or less the same, and as participating in Humpty-Dumpty style debunkings, a general process of linguistic deflation and deadening. There is some truth in this stereotype but there is also a general form of misunderstanding. The key point here is that Shakespeare’s fairies do not come to us unmediated. They are part of a dramatic argument, a representational system. It is an immediately obvious aspect of the structure of Shakespeare’s play that the fairies are set up as inhabiting an alternative form of world. They live in a different kind of space, following different physical laws. They even exist in a different time world, the world of the night as opposed to the day. This is an extremely simple theatrical device, yet by means of that simplicity it perhaps hides the complexity of the questions it raises about the world of ‘the real’, the ordinary human world with which the fairies so catastrophically interact. The fairies create an interpretative matrix just by being there at all. They make the audience watch the play in two different ways at once. As with any metatheatrical device, they therefore also make us ask questions about the nature of theatre, about mimesis itself. Here we may note that third and final strand in the anthropology of Shakespeare’s fairies, the one that goes by the name of Robin Goodfel-

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low.35 Puck, of course, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is granted that name as well; indeed in the early quarto texts he is given that name on first entrance and often in stage directions and speech cues. An ambiguity about naming him is part of his nature: he is a chimera, a will-o-the-wisp. Even the fairy who accompanies him onto the stage is not sure who he is: Either I mistake your shape and making quite, Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite Call’d Robin Goodfellow (2.1.32 – 34)

Robin is said to frighten young maids, play pranks, spike drinks, spoil the farmwife’s churn; he is called by some “Hobgoblin” and by others “sweet Puck”. The genealogy takes us to Reginald Scot’s The discoverie of witchcraft, the largest literary source for Shakespeare’s Puck. Scot’s Robin is a shape-shifter; in a paragraph of synonyms are listed both “hob gobblin” and “the puckle”.36 Like Shakespeare’s Puck he is known for sweeping the house clean; he grinds the malt or the mustard; he frequents churchyards at night; he curdles the milk; and above all like Puck, Scot’s Robin is one for the ladies, always flirting, chafing, messing and spanking. The most intriguing of these affinities between Scot’s text and Shakespeare’s are two references in quite different places, one in Book XIII to placing an ass’s head on a man’s shoulders; and the other in Book V to a man turned by a witch into an ass and then back again. Scot calls this “A strange metamorphosis, of body, but not of mind”.37 The man can hear himself called an ass, but cannot speak a word back. Probably Scot as well as Shakespeare was thinking of Apuleius’s famous story of The Golden Ass here. This shows the difficulty of unraveling popular from scholarly and literary sources, a problem all over the epistemology of fairies. Folklorists forever want their spirits to come at them clean from the countryside, unbesmirched by learning. But folklore is as much a species of lore as it is a product of the folk. The study of fairies in Shakespeare has been bedeviled by many things: not least a desire to identify a residue of real-life popular culture from which Shakespeare is drawing, a sometimes contradictory need to find precise textual sources, and a tendency to sentimentalize everything in sight. Scot was a debunker of fairies, just as Samuel Harsnett was, another favourite writer of Shakespeare, was responsible for all the goblins in King 35 Cf. Briggs 1959. 36 Scot 1651, 97 (originally published 1584). 37 Scot 1651, 73.

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Lear. 38 Scot and Harsnett both associate fairies and goblins with popish fakery and hocus-pocus, with spells and magic and charms. They uncover the fabrications of miracles, the exorcisms of priests, the lechery of monks, as forms of mumbo-jumbo designed to confuse the faithful. Puck is from the same progeny of cunning fraudulence and trickery: And sometimes lurk I in a gossip’s bowl In very likeness of a roasted crab, And when she drinks, against her lips I bob And on her withr’d dewlap pour the ale. (2.1.47 – 50)

The fact that this is comic has perhaps hidden the ways in which it is also burlesque and uncanny. The same belittling fate has overcome Puck when he casts his spell on Bottom the weaver and the other country mechanicals in Act III: I’ll follow you: I’ll lead you about a round! Through bog, through bush, through brake, through briar; Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound, A ho, a headless bear, sometime a fire; And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn, Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn. (3.1.101 – 106)

Puck’s gift is for a metamorphic magic which is transformative and also dangerous. This magic is based on a knowledge of a distinctively country practice of medicine cum religious ritual. Puritan preachers compared the actions of Robin Goodfellow with the Papal Mass: we learned Transubstantiation, & the sacrifice of the masse, prayer for the dead, going a pilgrimage, holie water, holie bread, oyle, candels: to be shorte, all and for euerie point of Poperie sundrie miracles done: yea the verie dregges of miracles, in milkepannes and greasie dishes, by Robin goodfellowe, and Hags, and Fayries, all wrought somewhat for their idle superstitions.39

The analogy also applied in reverse. In company with the Fairy King Oberon, Puck is an accomplished herbalist. He picks a bunch of lovein-idleness and mixes it into a tincture; he then applies the tincture in a semi-sacramental fashion. Oberon uses these charms to bewitch his wife and bring her back under his control; he also instructs Puck to employ them as a form of white magic in redeeming the marriages of the 38 Harsnett 1603. 39 Dering 1577, 125.

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Athenian youths who have gone astray in love. “Anoint his eyes” (2. 1. 261) Puck is told. To make the charm work, Puck uses a rhymed tetrameter which has something of the function of a liturgy: “Churl, upon thy eyes I throw / All the power this charm doth owe” (2.2.77 – 78). Shakespeare’s audience knew exactly what it was watching: a parody of a religious ceremony, a conjuring. Robin has roots that are both sinister and comic, which come from the religion of the countryside. Robin has a little of the demon about him, although it is a demon who comes to humiliate rather than torture, with laughter rather than tears. In Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie, the famous jester and actor comes back from the dead as a ghost, and tells his terrified interlocutor not to worry: “thinke that I am as pleasant a goblin as the rest, and will make the as merry before I part, as euer Robin Goodfellow made the country wenches at their Creame boules”.40 In a similar genre, in Barnabe Rich’s Greenes newes both from heauen and hell, the spirit of Robert Greene declares, “Sometimes I will bee Robin Goodfellowe, and will mete with a wanton wench in a darke corner, and let her blesse and crosse her selfe as well as she can”. His next phrase is very close to Shakespeare’s play: “Sometimes I will shew such dreames & vysins to women whilst they be sleeping, that they shall make theyr Husbands Cuds when they are waking”.41 Yet just because Protestant preachers said that fairies stank of Popery we should not believe them. Catholic theologians were as fierce in denouncing country magic as Calvinist ones; and many Protestant Englishmen retained their affection for country spirits and, just as much as residual Catholics, found in them some kind of bulwark against incipient Puritan literalism. We should beware of identifying the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a simple party line of religion. The play evokes a sympathy with the spirit of embodied religion but it also betrays a sharp comic humour about that religion. The fairies are a way of reflecting on ritual without looking directly at it. The play includes both a suspicion about magic and a yearning for social incorporation and renewal. In relation to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is worth remembering that the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer, while answering to the needs of Reformed suspicion about bodily ritual, was also frequently excoriated by Puritan divines who thought it was full of magical incantation. We tend now to think of that measure of incantation within the Re40 Tarlton 1590, 2. 41 Rich 1593, V3r.

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formed Church of England by the curious phrase ‘Catholic survival’. Whenever a post-Reformation Englishman is seen enjoying a ritual it is thought he must be a Catholic in disguise. The revisionist argument of Christopher Haigh has used this to show that most people in England were still ‘Catholic’ at the end of the century. Perhaps this view in turn needs revising in the light of the anthropological argument I have been examining. Rather than dividing the world between Catholics and Protestants we could divide them between ritualists and anti-ritualists. These terms do not team up in neatly confessional garb, although of course a fierce anti-ritualist is more likely to be a Calvinist than anything else. Yet I would like to go one step further and replace the merely negative term of ‘anti-ritualist’. Could we find a more neutral philosophical term? I propose here the word ‘heuristic’ to oppose to ‘ritualist’. There exists alongside a religious practice founded on efficacious acts another kind of religion predominantly concerned with ideas about discovery about the world and the individual’s place within it, if you like an epistemic rather a symbolic world. This is a religion which is trying to provide explanations, which favours verbal statements over efficacious acts, which justifies itself by means of prudential explanations (making the world a better place, enlightening the individual) and which identifies membership within the group by conformity to precisely articulated philosophical doctrines rather than assimilation within a set of recognisable social practices or ceremonial acts. The first thing to say here is that pre-Reformation religion is highly heuristic as well as ritualist. There is no shortage of discussion of significatory and semantic models of the eucharist in medieval theology. Secondly, Protestant Confessions vary enormously in their attitude to ritualism. And thirdly, in all forms of religion there is a huge variation between the official doctrinal explanations given within a theological hierarchy from what people actually do or think or believe. I am arguing, then, for a much more hybrid and fluid model of religious interaction in the post-Reformation world than is allowed for by confessional labels. There is a widespread anxiety over ritual forms in the sixteenth century, and this is associated with a widespread anxiety over religious language and its meaning. But a loss of confidence in a ritual religion and a dissentient strain in heuristic religion can happen in the same person, never mind across a whole confession. Rappaport’s idea of a crisis in credibility across a whole society around a concept of social truth is extremely powerful and suggestive in relation to the Reformation.

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Yet his evangelical fervour about the possibility of the redemptive value of ritual qua ritual is perhaps too monolithic in return. Here in conclusion we may remark some comparisons Rappaport makes, in his definition of ritual, with the parallel world of drama. Rappaport insists on a distinction between theatre and ritual as one of the ways in which we can observe what a ritual constitutes and what it does not. The defining relationship of ritual is ‘participation’, whereas, Rappaport says, in theatre audience and performers are always radically separated in function and often in space. Audiences, he says, “do not participate in the performance: they watch and they listen”. 42 Duffy, in his account of the medieval mass, uses a similar distinction: the laity experienced ritual as “participants”, not only as “spectators”.43 Rappaport proposes a radical distinction of ritual acts from “the open passivity or receptivity” that Western audiences experience within drama. Yet he also draws attention to “performances that, lying as they do between culturally recognized forms, derive their peculiar force from their very ambiguity”.44 Among these he groups passion plays and mystery plays. There is an intriguing methodological anxiety here in Rappaport. He finds it impossible to acknowledge the place of mimesis in ritual. Ritual for Rappaport must always be embodied in action. There is some truth in this. But is this mutually exclusive to the presence of mimesis in addition? Wittgenstein’s concept of the “ceremonial animal” similarly has been taken as the exclusion of a content-model of human discourse. Yet Wittgenstein, who at the time he coined this phrase was simultaneously developing the arguments of the Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations), was trying to enlarge the model of human language not newly enclose it. Shakespeare’s fairies are already mimetic. They are not a survival of an old world but a representation, a literary artefact. They provide a way of looking at the ritual world as well as a way of immersing in it. There is no reason why a heuristic and a ritual experience might not coincide in a human life, however important it may be from a methodological point of view to be able to recognise the difference. Shakespeare’s play is both heuristic and ritual, just as it is both mimetic and participatory.

42 Rappaport 1999, 40. 43 Duffy 1992, 109 – 116. 44 Rappaport 1999, 41.

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Texts cited Briggs, Katharine M. (1959): The Anatomy of Puck. An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Brooks, Harold F. (ed.) (1979): A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen. Dering, Edward (1577): XXVII. lectures, or readings, vpon part of the Epistle written to the Hebrues. Made by Maister Edward Deering, Bachelour of Diuinitie. London: H. Middleton. Douglas, Mary (21996): Natural Symbols. Explorations in Cosmology. London: Routledge. Duffy, Eamon (1992): The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England, c.1400 – c.1580. New Haven / London: Yale University Press. Duffy, Eamon (2001): The Voices of Morebath. Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. New Haven / London: Yale University Press. Duffy, Eamon (22005): The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England, c.1400 – c.1580. New Haven / London: Yale University Press. Harsnett, Samuel (1603): A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures. London: James Roberts. James, Wendy (2005): The Ceremonial Animal. A New Approach to Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jensen, Phebe (2009): Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Samuel (1755): A Dictionary of the English Language. London: W. Strahan. Marotti, Arthur F. (2003): “Shakespeare and Catholicism”, in: Dutton, Richard / Findlay, Alison / Wilson, Richard (ed.): Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 218 – 241. Rappaport, Roy A. (1999): Ritual And Religion In The Making Of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rich, Barnabe (1593): Greenes newes both from heauen and hell. Prohibited the first for writing of bookes, and banished out of the last for displaying of conny-catchers. London: Charlewood. Scot, Reginald (1651): Scot’s Discovery of vvitchcraft proving the common opinions of witches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars. London: R.C. Scott, Walter (ed.) (1802): Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Consisting of Historical and Romantic Ballads, Collected in the Southern Counties of Scotland. Edinburgh: James Ballantyne. Shakespeare, William: The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. The Shakespeare Collection [Gale online edition, accessed 15 January 2010]. Tarlton, Richard (1590): Tarltons newes out of purgatorie. Onely such a iest as his iigge, fit for gentlemen to laugh at an houre, &c. Published by an old companion of his, Robin Goodfellow. London: R. Robinson. Thomas, Keith (1971): Religion and the Decline of Magic. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Weis, Ren (2007): Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography. London: John Murray.

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Wilson, Richard (2004): Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1993): ‘Bemerkungen ber Frazers Golden Bough / Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’, in: Klagge, James / Nordmann, Alfred (ed.): Philosophical Occasions, 1912 – 1951. Indianapolis: Hacket, 115 – 155.

Golding’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Puritan Anthropology Enno Ruge I. The Opinion of Pythagoras In 1692 the religious writer Whitelocke Bulstrode published An Essay of Transmigration, in Defence of Pythagoras. Even though Whitelocke Bulstrode cannot be called a puritan like his father’s cousin, the well known godly politician and intellectual Bulstrode Whitelocke, after whom he was named, he had the reputation of being a “devout protestant”1 and a moralist. It needs some explaining, therefore, to show what allowed a man like Bulstrode to defend publically the notorious “opinion” of Pythagoras that “the Soul, after its departure from the Body, passes into some other Animal”,2 a theory which was considered incompatible with Christian doctrine. In 1699, for example, William Lloyd, bishop of Worcester, published a Life of Pythagoras, in which he condemned the ancient philosopher’s “impudent Diabolical fictions”. 3 Apparently, “[t]he Bishop was disgusted by the readiness to confuse Pythagoras’s theory of transmigration with the Christian belief in personal immortality”.4 For Lloyd, as for all orthodox Christians, the relationship between the soul and the body it inhabits was unique and the notion that the soul is perpetually reborn in a succession of physical forms, also known as metempsychosis, was therefore considered anathema. Bulstrode’s solution to the problem was that Pythagoras had been misinterpreted. When he talked about the possibility that a soul would enter into other kinds of living beings after death, the ancient teacher cannot have been speaking of the “Rational soul, but of the Sensitive and Vegetative Spirit; which Terms of Soul and Spirit, being often 1 2 3 4

Burns 2004. Bulstrode 1693, 4. Quoted in Sloman 1985, 183. Sloman 1985, 183.

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used as Synonima’s, have given occasion, especially to the Ignorant to mistake the meaning of Pythagoras”. 5 Whitelocke Bulstrode’s apology for Pythagoras’s theory of metempsychosis was not original. Another devout protestant, Arthur Golding, had used it in his dedicatory “Epistle” to the Earl of Leicester which precedes his complete translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1567): But as for the opinion which Pythagoras there brings Of souls removing out of beasts to men, and out of men To birds and beasts both wild and tame, both to and fro again, It is not to be understood of that same soul whereby We are endued with reason and discretion from on high, But of that soul or life the which brute beasts, as well as we, Enjoy. (“Epistle to Leicester”, 27 – 32)6

Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses was Shakespeare’s most important source for Ovid’s long poem about change and therefore probably also for his references to the “opinion” of Pythagoras in three of his plays. The best known of these references we find in Twelfth Night (1601) where another “kind of puritan”, the steward Malvolio, is asked what he thinks about “the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wildfowl” (4.2.50 f.).7 The relevance of the Metamorphoses in general and of the oration of Pythagoras to the interpretation of the festive comedy therein have been discussed by D. J. Palmer, William Carroll, Jonathan Bate and others.8 However, the odd reference to Pythagoras’s theory of transmigration has, to my knowledge, never been explored with regard to Malvolio’s supposed puritanism. In what follows, I am going to argue that the Pythagorean notion of a transmigration of the soul is evoked in Twelfth Night because of its relevance to 16th-century anthropological thinking which was pertinent to the puritan concept of human existence.9 I will

5 6 7 8 9

Bulstrode 1693, 4. All references to the Metamorphoses are to Ovidius Naso 2002. All references to Twelfth Nigh are to Shakespeare 1994c. Cf. Palmer 1967; Carroll 1980; Lamb 1980; Bate 1993, 144 – 151; Coffin 2004. I use the term “anthropological” in the sense of Otto Casmann’s Psychologia anthropologica sive animae humanae doctrina (1594 / 1596) as referring to that part of metaphysics focussing on the human soul, which was eventually to become a discipline of its own. A central problem of this new discipline was how to define the exact nature of the relationship between the body and the soul / mind at a time when the certainties of traditional metaphysics had become problematic.

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try to show that the “opinion of Pythagoras” is an integral part of the comedy’s sophisticated anti-puritan satire. II. The Gulling of Malvolio Notwithstanding his reservations about the idea that the same soul could successively inhabit different kinds of bodies, Arthur Golding claims in his “Epistle” of 1567 that the long “oration of Pythagoras” in the fifteenth book of the Metamorphoses “implies / A sum of all the former work” (288 f.). Indeed, in the long lecture – we are to imagine Pythagoras lecturing to his disciples, among whom is the philosopher king Numa10 – , which takes up almost half of the concluding book, Ovid has Pythagoras state: All things do change. But nothing, sure, doth perish. This same sprite Doth fleet, and fisking here and there, doth swiftly take his flight From one place to another place and entereth every wight, Removing out of man and into beasts and out of beast to man. But yet never perisheth nor never perish can. And even as supple wax with ease receiveth figures strange And keeps not aye one shape ne bides assurd aye from change And yet continueth always wax in substance, so I say, The soul is aye the selfsame thing it was, and yet astray It fleeteth into sundry shapes. Therefore, lest godliness Be vanquinshed by outrageous lusts of belly beastliness, Forbear (I speak by prophecy) your kinsfolk’s ghost to chase By slaughter; neither nourish blood with blood in any case. (Metamorphoses, Book 15, 183 – 195)

Whereas Golding hastens to neutralise the heretical potential of Pythagoras’s theory of transmigration, he seems not to be bothered by the philosopher’s “preaching abstinence from the flesh of living things” (25), even though the prohibition against eating meat can be seen as the logical consequence of the doctrine of metempsychosis11 and as such is emphasised repeatedly throughout the ancient teacher’s didactic lecture. Significantly, Pythagoras begins and ends his oration with extended warnings against the consumption of “wicked food” (84). Perhaps Golding would have agreed with Whitelocke Bulstrode, who flatly denied any connection between vegetarianism and “the gross Notion of Transmigra10 Cf. Heninger 1974, 51. 11 Cf. Riedweg 2005, 36.

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tion” and claimed that Pythagoras was simply practising a healthy lifestyle, “only eating such things as were light of Digestion; by which means he procured shortness of Sleep, Wakefulness, Purity of Mind, and constant Health of Body”.12 In marked contrast to that, Shakespeare, in his reference to Pythagoras in Twelfth Night, highlights the warning against killing and, implicitly, against eating animals in Twelfth Night – and he does so perhaps precisely for the same reason, Ovid’s protestant readers tried to downplay this central aspect of Pythagoras’s teachings. Evidently, the dramatist recognised the comic potential of advice like the following: “But give good ear and heed / To that that I shall warn you of, and trust it as your creed / That, whensoever you do eat your oxen, you devour / Your husbandman.” (Metamorphoses, Book 15, 54 – 57)13 Accordingly, Malvolio is not asked – as could have been expected – “What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning the soul?” but “What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wildfowl?”, thus shifting the emphasis from the soul to silly (and edible) birds. To this Malvolio answers: “That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.” (4.2.52 f.) Asked what he thinks of this opinion, Malvolio gives the expected academic reply: “I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of this opinion.” (4.2.55 f.) However, instead of confirming that this answer is in keeping with the orthodox Christian rejection of the theory of transmigration (and thus proof of Malvolio’s sanity), his examiner, the disguised fool Feste, perversely condemns the steward for his response: “Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness. Thou shalt hold th’opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow thy wits, and fear to kill a woodcock lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam. Fare thee well.” (4.2.57 – 60) We recall that Feste, with the drunkard Sir Toby and his cronies, locked Malvolio in a dark room, ostensibly to cure his “madness” with a kind of exorcism, but really to drive him mad in order to take revenge on the obnoxious spoilsport. The inverted, heretical comment made by Feste, whom Malvolio believes to be a reli12 Bulstrode 1693, 115 f. 13 In his “PoÞma Satyricon” Metempsychosis (1601) John Donne (1968, 309 f.) ridicules “the Pithagorian doctrine” which “doth not only carry one soule from man to man, nor man to beast, but indifferently to plants also; and therefore you must not grudge to finde the same soule in an Emperour, in a Posthorse, and in a mucheron [mushroom], since no unreadienesse in the soule, but an indisposition of the organs workes this. And therefore though tis soule could not move when it was a Melon, yet it may remember, and now tell mee, at what lascivious banquet it was serv’d.”

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gious authority, the curate Sir Topaz, is part of the popular subplot of Twelfth Night known as the gulling of Malvolio. Moreover, Malvolio’s denial of the existence of metempsychosis is pertinent to the meaning of the whole play. As William C. Carroll puts it, “in orthodox terms, Malvolio’s denial is right, but in the play’s terms he’s wrong”.14 To quote M. E. Lamb: Malvolio stands against more than Pythagoras’ theory of the transmigration of souls; he stands against change itself. Change is the essence of sanity in Twelfth Night, whether we view it as a play about transformations within the inward self or about actors performing roles. According to Pythagoras, all creatures change; change is our stay against annihilation; change is the essence of life itself. […] The constant change necessary to maintain order in the world is also necessary to maintain order within the self. In this sense Malvolio is mad in his refusal to change; and we must, with Feste, doubt his sanity until he holds the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wildfowl.15

In this sense, Malvolio indeed “defines the Ovidian character by contrast”.16 III. Pythagoras and Golding However, this reading still leaves open the question why it is a puritan, or at least a kind of puritan, who is confronted with the teachings of Pythagoras – a question, I believe, which is pertinent to a historical reading of Twelfth Night. (I shall return to the text of Shakespeare’s comedy presently.) One answer to the question as to why Pythagoras’s doctrine of metempsychosis is juxtaposed with English puritanism may be that the first English translator of the Metamorphoses was a puritan. According to his biographer, Arthur Golding “was of that considerable body of Protestants whose advocacy and practice of purity gave [the puritans] that name”.17 In the same year Golding completed his translation of the Metamorphoses he also published a translation of John Calvin’s moralist Treatise on Offences. 18 Among his translations of religious texts, which out14 15 16 17 18

Carroll 1980, 58. Lamb 1980, 74 f. Lamb 1980, 74. Golding 1937, 48. Golding 1937, 60.

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number by far those of poetical works, we find many pieces by Calvin, for example the reformer’s Sermons on the fifth book of Moses, called Deutoronomy, a key text for English puritans.19 “To such a man”, his biographer concludes, “the morals or the lack of morals, in the Metamorphoses, must have come as a shock.”20 Golding’s translation was part of a general tendency in the early modern period to moralise the Metamorphoses. Ovid became a “didactic teacher whose tales were really allegories about the human soul. […] The allegorizers posited a world that made sense in which the virtuous were rewarded and the evil punished”.21 Accordingly, “[t]he transformation of a man into a beast meant that his soul had become beastly”,22 or, conversely, a man’s evil intentions and ‘beastly’ conduct indicated that he must have inhabited a wild beast in a previous life. An example of this we find in The Merchant of Venice. Watching Shylock whetting his knife on the sole of his shoe in preparation of his revenge on Antonio, the merchant, his friend Graziano insinuates that Shylock is really whetting it on his “soul”23 and concludes – with explicit reference to the “opinion with Pythagoras”24 – that Shylock’s soul must once have inhabited a wolf, “for [his] desires / Are wolfish, bloody, starved and ravenous”.25 In Golding’s “Preface to the Reader” we read: But if we suffer fleshly lusts as lawless lords do reign, Then we are beasts; we are no men; we have our name in vain. And if we be so drowned in vice that feeling once be gone, Then may it well of us be said, we are a block or stone. This surely did the poets mean when in sundry wise The pleasant tales of turnd shapes they studied to devise. (Metamorphoses, “Preface to the Reader”, 111 – 116)

However, the odd phrasing of Golding’s denial of the possibility of reincarnation – remarkably odd even considering Golding’s notoriety for awk19 Golding 1937, 158. 20 Golding 1937, 48. 21 Lamb 1980, 63 and 65. On the moralizing of Ovid in early modern Europe see Seznec 1990, 72 – 75. On Renaissance humanists’ interest in Pythagoras in general see Joost-Gaugier 2009. 22 Lamb 1980, 64. 23 Shakespeare 1994b, 4.1.122. 24 Shakespeare 1994b, 4.1.130. 25 Shakespeare 1994b, 4. 1. 136 f. On the notion that the soul on each new reincarnation is either rewarded for virtue or punished for vice in its previous life, see Heninger 1974, 267.

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ward, sometimes comical, versifying – indicates that his sympathy for “tales of turnd shapes” may have had its limits: But for to deem or say Our noble soul (which is divine and permanent for aye) Is common to us with the beasts, I think it nothing less Than for to be a point of him that wisdom doth profess. Of this I am right well assured there is no Christian wight That can by fondness be so far seducd from the right. (Metamorphoses, “Epistle to Leicester”, 49 – 54)

It is almost as though we were listening to the prologue to Pyramus and Thisbe spoken by the amateur actor Peter Quince in a Midsummer Night’s Dream. One could say that in Twelfth Night Shakespeare lampoons the puritan translator’s moralising as well as his uneasiness about the theory of the transmigration of the soul. IV. Ancient and Early Modern Puritanism But what if Shakespeare was not only emphasising the obvious differences or contradictions between the idea of transmigration of the soul and puritan belief, but also the similarities? If Bishop Lloyd’s horror at the thought that the notion of metempsychosis could be confused with the Christian belief in the immortality of the soul is anything to go by, it indicates that there were people in the seventeenth century who saw similarities between the two concepts of the soul – and perhaps also between certain zealous protestants and the disciples of Pythagoras. In a much quoted chapter of his study The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) Eric Dodds points out that in fifth-century Greece a new concept of the “soul”, the psyche, emerged. Up to then The ‘soul’ [had been] no reluctant prisoner of the body; it was the life or spirit of the body, and perfectly at home there. It was here that the new religious pattern made its fateful contribution: by crediting man with an occult self of divine origin, and thus setting soul and body at odds, it introduced into European culture a new interpretation of human existence, the interpretation we call puritannical.26

Dodds’s use of the term “puritannical” for the new concept of the mortal body as an alien temporary container of an immortal rational soul and concomitantly of the world as a mere exile for the true divine self, asso26 Dodds 1951, 139.

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ciated with Pythagoras, Empedocles and the Orphic poets, may be provocative and anachronistic. Nevertheless, it highlights the common ground shared by ancient Greek ‘psychology’ and ‘puritan anthropology’. The concept of the body as a temporary dwelling of the soul was not embraced exclusively by English puritans, of course. All Christians in the early modern period would have agreed with St. Augustine’s concept of the soul as a bodiless, invisible, immortal substance endowed with reason, as the dominant power that uses the body merely as in instrument.27 However, the puritans were especially noted for their view of the body as a prison and their disdain for the senses. For an example we do not have to look very far. As we have heard before, for Arthur Golding the feature that distinguishes men from animals is their capability of not being ruled by their senses: For why, this lump of flesh and bones, this body, is not we’ We are a thing which earthly eyes denid are to see. Our soul is we, endued by God with reason from above; Our body is but our house, in which we work and move. T’one part is common to us all, with God of heaven himself, The t’other common with the beasts, a vile and stinking pelf. The t’one bedecked with heavenly gifts and endless; t’other gross, Frail, filthy, weak and born to die, as made of earthly dross. Now look how long this clod of clay to reason doth obey, So long for men by just desert account ourselves we may. (Metamorphoses, “Preface to the Reader”, 101 – 110)

For Golding, human nature was essentially corrupt as a consequence of original sin. Likewise, the horror of the body and the revulsion against the life of the senses felt by the followers of Pythagoras, Empedocles and others were – at least to a certain degree – a consequence of the idea of man’s inborn guilt. For the “Greek puritans” (Dodds’ phrase) “the world of bodily experience inevitably appeared as a place of darkness and penance”.28 According to an old Pythagorean catechism quoted in one of the earliest Lifes of Pythagoras, Iamblichus’ (c. 240 – 320 AD) De vita Pythagorica, “Pleasure […] is in all circumstances bad, for we came here to be punished and we ought to be punished”.29 As the self needed purging, purification, Pythagoras preached an ascetic lifestyle for which he set up a list of sometimes rather peculiar pre27 Cf. Kaplan 1996, 20. 28 Dodds 1951, 152. 29 Dodds 1951, 152. Cf. also Heninger 1974, 266. On the question for what wickedness man needed to be punished see Dodds 1952, 155.

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scriptions, known as symbola, of which abstinence from meat was probably one.30 At this point I should say that I am aware of the lack of historical evidence for the degree of vegetarianism among Pythagoreans. It is not at all clear whether Pythagoras or his disciples really strictly observed this dietary taboo or refrained only from eating certain parts of animals; nor is it clear how this prescription relates to other dietary rules, for example the somewhat contradictory ban on eating beans also associated with Pythagoras.31 What matters here is that the Pythagoreans were noted for their askesis, the practice of a special way of life.32 Their everyday life was strictly regulated by unconventional prescriptions such as an austere diet to subdue the flesh and liberate the soul, thus enabling it to aspire to higher things.33 According to Walter Burkert “[t]he peculiarities of this way of life require[d] continuous self-confirmation in a closed circle”, so that “the opposition between the despicable world and the special self-chosen life” had to become obvious.34 Their contemporaries perceived the Pythagoreans as “an exclusive group that markedly stood out in various respects from the surrounding society”, sometimes even as heretics, “false brothers” who split off from the congregation.35 The Pythagoreans saw themselves as a “a sort of spiritual lite”. 36 As is well known, early modern puritans regarded themselves as the elect. They defined themselves by their ostentatious piety, their discipline, the resistance to the temptations of an “unclean life”, in short, by what Max Weber calls the puritans’ “innerworldly asceticism” (which could involve a sober diet based on vegetables).37 The puritans’ practice of a special way of life, their strict distinction between the “godly” and the “ungodly” and their permanent campaign for moral reform and against all kinds of popular amusement like traditional holiday pastimes or the theatre frequently led to tensions with the surrounding society. There is a famous echo of this in Twelfth Night. After Malvolio tried in vain to call the nightly revellers to order, he is confronted by Sir Toby: “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” (2. 3. 107 f.) 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Cf. Heninger 1974, 271 – 275. Heninger quotes an exemplary list of symbola. Cf. Riedweg 2002, 67 – 71. Dodds 1951, 154. Cf. Dodds 1951, 152 – 156. Burkert 1985, 203. Riedweg 2002, 98. Dodds 1951, 144. Weber 1988, 84, 169 and 171.

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This jibe at the moral reformers is rather mild compared to other references to the ascetic lifestyle of the puritans in the satirical literature of the early 17th century. Anti-puritan satirical writings of that time abound with grotesque godly gluttons, puritan belly-gods, who while ostentatiously condemning the unclean life of the wicked, hypocritically pursue those fleshly lusts Arthur Golding abhors, who feast when they are supposed to be fasting. The best-known example is Zeal-of-the-land Busy in Ben Johnson’s city comedy Bartholomew Fair (performed 1614) who is seen stuffing his face with “unclean” (and therefore forbidden) meat.38 The fact that nonconformists regularly held their own collective private fasts whenever they wanted instead of observing the official fasting days of the liturgical calendar was considered socially disruptive and subversive to the established order. In anti-puritan satires like Bartholomew Fair these “obstinate, counter-cultural eating practices” of the godly were translated into metaphors of sexual transgression and political subversion.39 Similarly, Pythagorean communities were often eyed suspiciously by their neighbours and their ascetic lifestyle frequently became the object of satirical attacks. The disciples of Pythagoras were stock figures in old Greek comedy where Pythagoras’s theory of the transmigration of the soul and the concomitant prohibition against hurting animals were popular objects of ridicule. The title of an anonymous comedy, The Lady Devotee of Pythagoras, is reminiscent of anti-puritan satire which often ridicules female followers of puritan preachers.40 In a satirical sketch by Lukian, The Dream of the Cock, we encounter a cock who claims to be a reincarnation of Pythagoras.41 Xenophanes in one of his fragments records a humorous anecdote about Pythagoras, according to Merlin Peris “one of the earliest pieces of evidence on Pythagoras’ doctrine of transmigration”: For they say that he was passing by When a dog was being smitten. And he said ‘Stop: do not beat him; for in his cries I hear the voice of a man, a friend of mine’.42 38 Jonson 1977, 1.6.8. 39 Poole 2000, 48 – 54. Cf. Ruge 2008. 40 Cf. Spencer 1993, 67. Dame Purecraft in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair is an example of a female puritan devotee. Jonson 1977. 41 Cf. Peris 1989, 90. 42 Peris 1989, 88.

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That Shakespeare was aware of this ancient satirical tradition is indicated in As You Like It where Rosalind exclaims: “I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras’ time that I was an Irish rat”.43 Thus, for Twelfth Night Shakespeare may have drawn on another, much older satirical tradition besides anti-puritan satire: that of ancient Greece, fusing anti-puritan with antiPythagorean satire. V. A Kind of Puritan At this point, one might question the significance of this conclusion in view of the controversy over Malvolio’s puritanism. Based on the waiting woman Maria’s statement that Malvolio is only “a kind of Puritan”, and that even only “sometimes” (Twelfth Night, 2. 3. 130), critics have disputed Malvolio’s puritanism or at least called its relevance into question.44 If we believe Paul Siegel, however, a lot of Malvolio’s comic appearance will be missed if we fail to see him as a representative of the godly.45 I would argue instead that a lot of the comedy will be missed if we take Malvolio’s puritanism for granted. Critics like Siegel mistake the abundance of antipuritan jibes in Twelfth Night as evidence for the steward’s godliness. While I agree that the play’s anti-puritanism is pertinent to a historical reading of it I, contend that it only gains its full significance if we realise that Malvolio is not a stereotypical puritan or perhaps not a puritan at all. Here the reference to Pythagoras is relevant. In fact, Malvolio lacks almost all the features of the stage-puritan, most conspicuously his ostentatious piety and aspiration to holiness. When Maria taunts the steward that “he will not hear of godliness” (3. 4. 117) this is not “the ultimate insult to a puritan” as the editors of the Oxford edition of Twelfth Night 43 Shakespeare 1994a, 3. 2. 170 f. As Merlin Peris (1989, 95 f.) points out, Shakespeare may well have linked the old Celtic belief in reincarnation with the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of the soul. In his essay “On cruelty”, Montaigne perceives parallels between the religion of the “Ancient Gauls” and Pythagoras’ ideas, quoting from Pythagoras’ lecture in the Metamorphoses. Montaigne 2003, 486. I am grateful to Markus Wild for bringing this passage to my attention. On the connection between Pythagorean ideas and druid culture in Renaissance thought see Joost-Gaugier 2009, 52. 44 The issue was controversially discussed at least until the 1950s. Cf. Holden 1954, 123 f. Modern critics tend to take Malvolio’s puritanism for granted – too easily, I believe. 45 Cf. Siegel 1980, 218.

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claim,46 but simply a statement of fact, albeit one made with malicious intent. Likewise, Malvolio’s complaint about “disorders” and “uncivil rule” (2.3.91 and 115) in Olivia’s house is no proof that he speaks in the name of the godly campaign for a reformation of manners. As C. L. Barber pointed out long ago, Malvolio “is not hostile to holiday, because he is a Puritan; he is like a Puritan because he is hostile to holiday”.47 Moreover, Malvolio hardly hides his true intentions behind a pious faÅade. He is not a hypocrite. In fact we are told early in the play that his fault is his self-love and his rigidity. In a world where change and acting is so important, he is doomed precisely because he is incapable of dissembling – and therefore, according to the logic of anti-puritan polemics, no puritan. This is stressed by Feste’s jibe at puritan hypocrisy when he puts on the gown to play the part of Sir Topaz the curate in the examination of Malvolio: “I would I were the first that ever dissembled in such a gown.” (4.2.5 f.) The application of the epithet ‘puritan’ is part of the revellers’ revenge whose declared aim is to drive the killjoy mad, first by leading him to believe that his mistress is in love with him with the help of a forged letter and afterwards by locking him in the dark room. “[T]his letter will make a contemplative idiot of him” (2.5.16 f.), Maria promises when she explains her plan to her friends. In the gulling of Malvolio, the aim of driving him mad is equivalent to turning him into a puritan. In view of the similarities between puritanism and Pythagoraneanism Feste’s verdict on Malvolio, “Thou shalt hold th’opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits” (4.2.57 – 59), must be seen as an intensification of to the allegations of puritanism rather than a contradiction to them. Earlier, when Malvolio is in ecstasy over the forged love letter, Maria declares triumphantly: “Yon gull Malvolio is turned heathen, a very renegado, for there is no Christian that means to be saved by believing rightly can ever believe such impossible passages of grossness.” (3.2.64 – 67) The project of turning Malovolio into a heathen is then completed in the dark room, where he is once more ready to believe anything and become a disciple of Pythagoras – well, almost.

46 Shakespeare 1994c, 175, note to 3.4.117. 47 Barber 1959, 256.

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VI. Conclusion As a professional fool, Feste is the representative of the theatre. The beard and gown worn by him during the mock exorcism of Malvolio (which he will call an “interlude” in the final scene, 5.1.363) can be seen as an overdetermined signifier of the acting profession. As Maria wrily points out, he might have examined the steward without the costume, because Malvolio could not see him anyway (cf. 4.2.64 f.). As the leading actor in the gulling of Malvolio he demonstrates the power of the theatre to construct the image of a puritan, the less probable the better, an image that often stuck (if we believe Patrick Collinson).48 Here the fusion of anti-puritan and anti-Pythagorean satire makes perfect sense, because the puritans were bound to be scandalised by the suggestion of similarities between the ancient philosopher’s teachings and their own concept of human nature. Moreover, the interlude links the steward to the puritan opponents of the drama.49 Perhaps Malvolio’s final malediction, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” (5.1.368), indicates that Malvolio is beginning to accept the label “puritan” for himself. However, as Stephen Dickey has pointed out, the word “pack” in Malvolio’s curse may suggest that the steward and his enemies have undergone an Ovidian, or rather Pythagorean, transformation into wild beasts: Malvolio into a bear and his enemies into dogs, “dogg[ing]” (3.2.71) him in a bear garden that could be a theatre. The image of bear-baiting, however, is ambiguous. As Dickey reminds us, “it is not clearly preferable, metaphorically, to be either the bear or the dog”.50

Texts Cited Barber, Cesar L. (1959): Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bate, Jonathan (1993): Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bulstrode, Whitelocke (1693): An Essay of Transmigration in Defence of Pythagoras, or, A Discourse of Natural Philosophy. London. Burkert, Walter (1985): Greek Religion. Trans. by John Raffan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

48 Collinson 1995. 49 Cf. Dickey 1991, 270. 50 Dickey 1991, 265.

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Burns, Walter E. (2004): Art. “Bulstrode, Whitelocke (1652 – 1742)”, in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. URL: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3931 [accessed 2 July 2009]. Carroll, William C. (1980): “The Ending of Twelfth Night and the Tradition of Metamorphosis”, in: Charney, Maurice (ed.): Shakespearean Comedy. New York: New York Literary Forum, 49 – 61. Casmann, Otto (1594): Psychologia anthropologica. Hanau. Coffin, Charlotte (2004): “An Echo Chamber for Narcissus: Mythological Rewritings in Twelfth Night”, in: Cahiers lisabthains 66, 23 – 28. Collinson, Patrick (1995): “The Theatre Constructs Puritanism”, in: Smith, David / Strier, Richard / Bevington, David (ed.): The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London 1576 – 1649. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 157 – 169. Dickey, Stephen (1991): “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy”, in: Shakespeare Quarterly 42:3, 255 – 275. Dodds, Eric R. (1951): The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press (Sather Classical Lectures, 25). Donne, John (1968): The Complete Poetry of John Donne. Ed. by John T. Shawcross. New York: New York University Press. Golding, Louis Thorn (1937): An Elizabethan Puritan: Arthur Golding, the Translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and also of John Calvin’s Sermons. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press. Heninger, Simson K., Jr. (1974): Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics. San Marino: The Huntington Library. Jonson, Ben ([1631] 1977): Bartholomew Fair. Ed. by George R. Hibbard. London: Benn (= The New Mermaids). Joost-Gaugier, Christiane L. (2009): Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe: Finding Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaplan, Steven J. (1996): Concepts of Transmigration: Perspectives on Reincarnation. Lewiston, NY / Queenston, ON / Lampeter, UK: The Edwin Mellen Press (= Studies in Comparative Religion, 6). Lamb, Michael E. (1980): “Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”, in: Charney, Maurice (ed.): Shakespearean Comedy. New York: New York Literary Forum, 63 – 77. Lloyd, William (1699): A chronological account of the life of Pythagoras, and of other famous men his contemporaries. London. Montaigne, Michel de (2003): The Complete Essays. Ed. and trans. by M. A. Screech. London: Penguin. Ovidius Naso, Publius ([1567] 2002): Metamorphoses. Trans. by Arthur Golding. Ed. by Madeleine Forey. London: Penguin. Palmer, Derek J. (1967): “Art and Nature in Twelfth Night”, in: The Critical Quarterly 9, 201 – 212. Palmer, Derek J. (1979): “Twelfth Night and the Myth of Echo and Narcissus”, in: Shakespeare Survey 32, 73 – 78. Peris, Merlin (1989): “The Pythagorean Background to ‘Pythagoras’ Opinion’ in Shakespeare”, in: The Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 15, 83 – 98.

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Poole, Kristen (2000): Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riedweg, Christoph (2002): Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching, and Influence. Trans. by Steven Rendall. Ithaca, NY / London: Cornell University Press. Ruge, Enno (2008): “Mutton on Fridays: Food, Sex and Puritanism in Vienna”, in: Rupp, Susanne / Wald, Christina (ed.): Shakespearean Foodways: Feasting, Fasting, Playing and Digesting (= Wissenschaftliches Seminar Online, 6). URL: http://www.shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/en/publications/seminar/ issue2008/ruge.html [accessed 1 December 2009]. Seznec, Jean ([1940] 1990): Das Fortleben der antiken Gçtter: Die mythologische Tradition im Humanismus und in der Kunst der Renaissance. Trans. by Heinz Jatho. Mnchen: Fink. Shakespeare, William ([c. 1599] 1994a): As You Like It. Ed. by Alan Brissenden. Oxford: Oxford University Press (= The World’s Classics). Shakespeare, William ([c. 1596] 1994b): The Merchant of Venice. Ed. by Jay L. Halio. Oxford: Oxford University Press (= The World’s Classics). Shakespeare, William ([c. 1601] 1994c): Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Ed. by Roger, Warren / Stanley, Wells. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press (= The Oxford Shakespeare). Siegel, Paul N. (1980): “Malvolio: Comic Puritan Automaton”, in: Charney, Maurice (ed.): Shakespearean Comedy. New York: New York Literary Forum, 217 – 230. Sloman, Judith (1985): Dryden: The Poetics of Translation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Spencer, Colin (1993): The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. London: Fourth Estate. Weber, Max (91988): Gesammelte Aufstze zur Religionssoziologie I. Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck (= UTB fr Wissenschaft: Uni-Taschenbcher, 1488).

Negotiating the Foreign

When Golden times convents: Shakespeare’s Eastern Promise Richard Wilson I. Rapier, scabbard, and all At the British Museum, the grand exhibition entitled Shah ‘Abbas: The Remaking of Iran that opened beneath the mosque-like dome of the former Reading Room on February 19, 2009 was kept dark to protect the delicate parchments and textiles on display, but the incidental effect was to perpetuate the clich of a seductive oriental mystery. As The Times excitedly reported, “The spectator – like some traveller arriving along one of the East-West trade routes – is led into a strange, elaborate and literally shadowy land of men with drooping moustaches and shadowy designer stubble, of worshipping dervishes and Islamic-style dandies, of Indian ambassadors bringing exotic gifts, of prancing Arab stallions and hooded hunting hawks”. The result, gasped Rachel Campbell-Johnston, was that “Weaving your way through it can feel a bit like picking your way through the labyrinth of one of the carpets. This world is intricate, complex, luxurious, and rare. It can also be difficult”. But The Times reporter was in no doubt of the urgency of the challenge, now that Iran looks “stubbornly unapproachable, nurturing its hardline fundamentalism and nuclear programme”.1 The question this prompted, of course, is how this “shadowy” Islamic world would relate to the British “Reading Room” in Bloomsbury that was so close to sites of the July 7, 2005 terrorist bombings: Would it appear like a miracle or monster? The Shah ‘Abbas exhibition was praised by the press for reminding us of a time when envoys were sent to Iran “by Elizabeth I from a desire to build trading relations” and because of her “view that Iran was an equal on the international stage”.2 The museum’s director Neil MacGregor encouraged this response when he asserted that while he found the smiles of 1 2

Campbell-Johnston February 14, 2009. Mills February 24, 2009.

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the current Iranian leadership “delphic”, the aim of the show was “to make it easier for people to start thinking about that complexity”. MacGregor proposed that to understand Shah Abbas we need only recall the “key parallel” of his contemporary, “our own nation-shaping Elizabeth I”, who broke with Rome just as his Shi’ite state warred with the Sunni Ottomans: “In a strange way,” the director told newspapers, Elizabethan England became “the only other state to have such a close formal link between the state structure and the state church”.3 So to underline the elective affinity between Elizabeth’s England and the Shah’s Iran, and to guide us through the Shia maze, the organizers laid a trail of helpful literary clues: Repeated throughout the display quotations from The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night reassured visitors that the Safavid ruler he called “the Sophy” had been as familiar and impressive to Shakespeare as Gloriana herself: Sir Toby: Why, man, he’s the very devil, I have not seen such a virago. I had a pass with him, rapier, scabbard, and all, and he give me the stick-in with such a mortal motion that it is inevitable, and on the answer, he pays you as surely as your feet hits the ground they step on. They say he has been a fencer to the Sophy. (Twelfth Night, 3.4.243 – 248)

At the British Museum Shakespeare’s allusions to “the Sophy” served to underline the director’s philosophy that the “rapier, scabbard, and all” on display were artefacts to “provoke people from one part of the world to think about the world itself ”. MacGregor is an influential figure in the emotive debate over the global antiquities market that has been brought to a head by the sack of Iraq in America’s invasion. Thus the words of the Globe playwright authorised the universalism the director claims as the rationale for his “encyclopaedic museum”: The ideal that great metropolitan museums hold collections “in trust” for the whole world and “all time”, an ideal that he insists “has nothing to do with national ownership”, even if it has been “aided by a past of national wealth and imperial power”. Shakespeare’s supposedly universal genius was being mobilised, in fact, in a culture war about who owns the past that pits the museums’ cosmopolitan dream of “the world under one roof ”, as MacGregor extols it, against UNESCO-backed restrictions on traffic in cultural property, and the opposing view that an object ripped out of its historical or religious context is, as the Italian Culture Ministry asserts, a 3

Aspden February 7, 2009.

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mere “dead thing”.4 Shakespeareans like Stephen Greenblatt who began “with the desire to speak with the dead” might be surprised by the way the dramatist’s global status has become a trump card for universalism in this battle for possession of literal corpses.5 Yet as Professor Robert Foley of Cambridge University’s Duckworth Laboratory of Human Osteology asserts, repatriating the estimated 61,000 disintegrated Australian aborigine body parts currently hoarded in British museums to their desecrated burial grounds would be “like saying we no longer need the texts of Shakespeare”.6 In museum halls where it is as if New Historicism never existed Shakespeare remains the test of timeless truths about mankind, an imperial measure “Of all that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome / sent forth, or since did from their ashes come”, in Ben Jonson’s words, since he seems himself indisputably “not of an age, but for all time”.7 Thus, citing the Bard clinches the circular logic that, as the Anglo-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appia affirms in Whose Culture?, an internationalist manifesto organised by James Cuno, director of the Arts Institute of Chicago, the British Museum serves the interests “not of Britain but of the world”, because “the interests in question are the interests of all of humankind”.8 The cosmopolitanism Appiah and these curators therefore invoke is defiantly that of the Enlightenment, with a pre-theoretical faith in plays and poems as models for the encyclopaedic collection, since “Homer sang not for the Greeks alone but for all nations, and for all time”.9 That literary analogy looks irresistible as technology overrides traditional controls on movement of information, and “Just as the Enlightenment created the Universal Museum, the digital age is spawning the Universal Library”.10 And there is indeed an affinity between what Cuno calls “the promise of museums” and the universal appeal we now like to ascribe to a text like Shakespeare’s, which in Salman Ruhdie’s words about Satanic Verses Appiah quotes in his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, and that preface Whose Culture?, we have 4 MacGregor 2009, 39, 54. “Dead thing”: anonymous spokesperson, Italian Ministry of Culture, quoted Montebello 2009, 65. 5 Greenblatt 1988, 1. 6 Robert Foley, quoted in: Scobie June 28, 2009, 37. 7 Jonson 1997, 3351 f.; Robert Foley, quoted in: Scobie June 28, 2009, 37; Jonson 1997, 3352. 8 Kwame 2009, 82. 9 Montebello 2009, 55. 10 Brown 2009, 146.

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learned to read as an antidote to cultural nationalism, and as a celebration of “hybridity, impurity, intermingling”: the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mlange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it.11

When Barack Obama flew to Moscow on July 7, 2009 his speech on universal values was said to be “pressing the reset button” by quoting Pushkin, “the national icon and Russia’s favourite author”.12 In fact, the verses the President recited about the universality of geometry and poetry sent a less Slavophile signal about global interconnectedness. For as every Russian knows, Pushkin was great-grandson of the slave Hannibal brought by Peter the Great from the seraglio of Sultan Ahmed III, who was originally from Abyssinia, close to Obama’s father’s Kenya, and thus an eternal answer to Saul Bellow’s supremacist taunt: “No African Tolstoy”. So, with their famed hospitality to migrant meanings, Pushkin and Shakespeare may provide perfect primers for the Obama generation, who as Cuno says, look to cultural institutions for the tall order of helping them to understand “the world’s diversity and interrelatedness” and to “feel that they are a part of this world, they and everyone else with whom they are connected by virtue of their humanity”.13 Thus, the shock of the new and unexpected combination of Shakespeare and the Shah served a global need, according to this programme, reminding the visitors to the museum of its director’s paradox that only in such an imperial space is there the “possibility of allowing people – all of us – to think and imagine different histories from those with which we were raised […] And it is surely more important now than ever to insist that the world is one.”14 The mission of the “encyclopaedic museum”, MacGregor asserts, is the Enlightenment project envisioned by Diderot: “to shape the citizens of ‘that great city, the world”’, and the rationale of its “trusteeship” is that “objects from other cultures tell us not only about distant peoples but about ourselves”. So the achievement of his museum, he states, has been to reveal the “oneness of the world […] that all societies think 11 12 13 14

Rushdie 1991, 394, quoted in Appiah 2006, 112; and in Cuno 2009, 27. Walker July 8, 2009, 19. Cuno 2009, 17. MacGregor 2009, 39, 54.

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and behave […] the same way”.15 This quest for human sameness is the opposite of Levi-Strauss’s definition of anthropology as “the view from afar”.16 MacGregor is, of course, alert to the post-colonial critique that such collections are merely the spoils of victory carried away in triumph. But he responds with the realpolitik that these treasures were themselves the essential “butchering tools” that “let us conquer the world and build great cities like London, where visitors to the British Museum […] were able to see the truth that humanity is one”.17 The colonialism and slavery that created Bloomsbury’s colonnaded cultural temple turn out, in this “Enlightenment” re\valuation, to be preconditions of our cosmopolitan world order. In Bloomsbury Shakespeare underwrote the idea of “a universal museum aimed at a universal audience, for the use of the whole world”.18 But Shah ‘Abbas was, in fact, the third British Museum blockbuster unashamedly celebrating empire as the engine of globalisation, following Hadrian and Qin Shihuang of the terracotta army, with Montezuma in 2010. It was this last show that brought MacGregor’s cultural relativism to a dead-end, with much anguish in the press over the array of Aztec “butchering tools” used to flay human skin, daggers to rip out hearts, and boxes to collect the entrails of sacrificed children. As Philip Hensher wrote in The Independent, “It does no good to pretend that these objects are morally neutral; they are disgusting and barbaric. I hope we never come to the point where the instruments of genocide of the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge are offered in aesthetic mitigation”.19 For many, the curators had pushed Walter Benjamin’s truism that “There is no document of civilization which is not a document of barbarism”20 too far, with a display that seemed to regret the Aztecs had not been left to go on crafting such artefacts for their victims: 20,000 over four days in 1484, according to the records. Aztec “barbarism places them on the far side of a line that divides civilisation from its opposite”, as Hensher protested.21 So, though Benjamin had seen the world’s cultural treasures as a procession in which the victors marched over the vanquished, it was the Aztecs’ monstrous 15 MacGregor 2009, 47 f., 50. 16 “The view from afar”: Claude Levi-Strauss quoted and discussed in Tatlow 2001, 3, 230 f. 17 MacGregor 2009, 40, 44. 18 MacGregor 2009, 40. 19 Hensher September 28, 2009, 33. 20 Cf. Benjamin 1970, 258. 21 Hensher September 28, 2009, 33.

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jewel-encrusted skulls that finally made the museum’s parade seem not quite such a universal human triumph. II. Fencer to the Sophy If all human societies are “effectively, the same”, the British Museum reasons, the fact that the Elgin Marbles ended up in its halls is mere chance: It happened that London met the conditions for preserving the Parthenon frieze, MacGregor maintains, but it could as easily have been any other city.22 “The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics” of a lost world (Troilus, 5.2.159)23, identified with the dawn of Europe, yet at the intersection of so many later empires, the Parthenon marbles have become supreme prizes in the war between universalism and cultural nationalism. But as the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard reminds us, it is not an accident that these sculptures commemorating Greek defeat of Persia are today the pawns of the custody dispute between global culture and national patrimony, sameness and difference, for their successive histories within an Athenian temple, Byzantine church, Islamic mosque, Turkish munitions dump, and British museum are what constitute their universality, and “That can’t belong to one country”.24 It is as the overdetermined jigsaw of plural contexts, the fusion of competing histories, Beard proposes, that the universal comes to us, to make as much sense of as we can. To strive to make one from the many in the teeth of so much difference: Or as Shakespeare’s Fool shrugs at journey’s end in Twelfth Night, the play mentioning the Shah of Persia that is set where East meets West, in the very liminality of the Levant and Parthenon: ‘A great while ago the world begun, / With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, / But that’s all one, our play is done / And we’ll strive to please you every day’ (5.1.392 – 5). Shakespeare can easily be made to endorse the British Museum’s story that “that’s all one”. For it is true that the dramatist’s awareness of world trade does create a “global feel” that may well explain why his Globe was so named.25 And when this global poet had his Comedy of Errors turn on a voyage “bound / To Persia” (4.1.3 – 4) he started something more universalist or comedic than the Orientalism of rivals such as Marlowe, where 22 23 24 25

Cf. MacGregor 2009, 40, 44. Unless indicated otherwise, all Shakespearean quotes refer to Shakespeare 1997. Mary Beard, quoted in Moss June 16, 2009, 8. ‘Global feel’: Cohen 2001, 132.

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for all the fascination with “the stranger in a strange land” “your merchants of Persepolis” shrink to European stereotypes of the “slavish Persian” as Tamburlaine rides in “triumph through Persepolis”, and the Jew of Malta, whose profits from “the Persian ships” make him a wish-fulfilment of the acquisitive desire for “infinite riches in a little room”, is destroyed for all his “exceeding store of Persian silks”.26 Shakespeare shares Marlowe’s euphoria at Persia as a “gateway through which luxury goods arrive from the east” along the fabled Silk Road.27 But what makes his plays so ripe for the British Museum to co-opt is his universalist fantasy that, in the words of Twelfth Night, all these global journeys might yet converge to “end in lovers’ meeting”, in some Kantian “golden time” of “perpetual peace”, when as his Duke of Illyria vows, “A solemn combination shall be made / Of our dear souls” (2.3.39; 5.1.370 – 1).28 For in Shakespeare we indeed never cease to be tantalized that “The time of universal peace is near” (Antony, 4.6.4), and nor are we allowed to abandon that humanist dream of the world under one roof. But nor, either, are we permitted to forget the human cost. “This is the economy, stupid”, MacGregor reassured The Financial Times: Shakespeare knew about the Shah because Abbas opened Iran to English traders, and the multi-cultural and tolerant society he is said to have created in Isfahan arose from that “economic expediency”.29 All the exquisite images of this “enlightened despot” drinking with foreigners therefore have less to do with the “rapier, scabbard, and all”, they feature so prominently than with the “soft power” of porcelain diplomacy: the china plate’s the thing, in British Museum terms, to catch the conscience of the king. A cult of such worldly goods replaces historical analysis in much of the virtual shopping that passes for current Renaissance studies. But reviewers noticed how this consumerism minimised the Shah’s monstrosity. Indeed just two lines in the sumptuous exhibition catalogue touch on his “acts of extreme cruelty”, such as “having two of his sons blinded and another killed”, cutting out the tongues of liars, or garrotting 26 “Stranger in a strange land”: Greenblatt 1980, 194; Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great: Part One, 1,1,37; 2,5, 49 – 54; and 4,3,68; The Jew of Malta, 1,1,2 / 37 / 88, in: Marlowe 2003, 76, 100, 131, 250 f., 253. For Elizabethan dramatic representations of Persian luxury, see also Bartels 1993, 9 – 13, 65 – 69; and Kewes 2005, 163. 27 Vitkus 2003, 71. 28 Cf. Kant 1996, 328 – 331. For Shakespeare and Kant see Wilson 2007b; in particular 50 ff. 29 Aspden February 7, 2009.

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the dervishes who prophesied his death.30 There was no mention of how “One evening he went out dressed as a peasant and bought some bread and meat […] to find he had been sold short. He had the baker thrown into an oven and the meat-seller roasted alive”.31 Tactfully ignored too were his habits of boiling prisoners in oil, or castrating his eunuchs himself, albeit with such skill it was said “very few boys died under his hands”.32 And nowhere in this glittering showcase for “The Art of Museum Diplomacy”33 was any reference made to Abbas’s own brand of diplomacy when he received the first embassy from the Emperor Rudolf II in 1603, and the ambassador Georg Tectander “had an unnerving experience”: An Ottoman prisoner was brought in and Abbas called for two swords, which he then proceeded to examine. He chose one and sliced off the prisoner’s head. Tectander feared the Shah had heard the Emperor Rudolf was making peace with the Ottomans and would use the second sword on him. Instead Abbas turned to Tectander with a smile and said that was how the Christians should treat the Turks.34

European travellers to Iran were awed by the Shah’s spectacular New Year presents, but also recorded that the gifts he loved to receive were heads, “those of distinction enveloped in a silk turban, the others bare, and each thrust through with a lance”.35 So, when Sir Anthony Sherley, the first English emissary to Iran, met Abbas in 1598 he was saluted by a thousand lancers waving heads of Uzbeks impaled on spears, with “the ears on strings and hanged about their necks”. The Shah did not waste time, he reported, with talk of “apparel, building, beauty of our women, or such vanities”, but only wanted to hear “of our proceeding in our warres, of our usuall Armes, of the commodity of Fortresses […] of the use of Artillery”.36 Since Sherley’s father Sir Thomas was the Treasurer of War, what interested Abbas was how “his new model army could be equipped with up-to-date weaponry”.37 So the Englishman “presented 30 31 32 33 34

Canby 2009, 19. Blow 2009, 162. Blow 2009, 133, 173 f. Adams, February 19, 2009. Blow 2009, 77: quoting Georg Tectander, Eine Abenteuerliche Reise Durch Russland Nach Persien, 1602 – 1604 (Tulln: Herausgegeben von Dorothea MuellerOtt, 1978), 58. 35 Pietro Della Valle, quoted in Blow 2009, 167. 36 Anthony Sherley, letter to Anthony Bacon, 12 February 1600, quoted ibid, 54 ff. 37 Anthony Sherley, letter to Anthony Bacon, 12 February 1600, 37.

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to the King a number of girdles and pistols he brought from Aleppo”.38 His reward was a contract to retrain the Shah’s gunners.39 In view of the nuclear stand-off, this was not the kind of Anglo-Iranian exchange to feature in the exhibition. The problem with the Shakespeare quotations, however, was that if they were meant to help to rehabilitate a pariah state they were equally militaristic. Thus, the organisers posted without comment Sir Toby’s warning shortly before Sebastian impales his skull, that his assailant is rumoured to be Shah Abbas’s fencing-master; and referred without explanation to the Sunni Prince of Morocco’s bloodcurdling war-cry that the scimitar he sports is one with which he “slew the Sophy and a Persian prince / That won three fields of Sultan Suleiman” (Merchant, 2.1.25 – 26). As Ladan Niayesh observes in a recent essay on “Shakespeare’s Persians”, Morocco’s shining scimitar not only reveals the variety of oriental Others, but subverts the binarism “between the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest”’.40 So, perhaps Toby really does compare the chimerical “devil” from Abbas with the transvestite “virago” of Elizabeth. For suppressed in the museum’s narrative of the triumph of globalization were the violent contradictions not only of Shah’s Iran but of Shakespeare’s England itself.41 “They say he has been a fencer to the Sophy”: Sir Toby’s threat that “he pays you as Shahly as your feet hits the ground” may pun on reports from the Sherley mission of the war-game with which Abbas trained his troops, and with which a 1607 play, The Travels of the Three English Brothers would begin: “He ran in among them with his sword drawn and gave four of them their death’s wound […] cutting off the arms from divers of them. One gentleman which did but only smile […] the King gave him such a blow in the middle, that one half of his body fell from the other”.42 For as is well known, these terrifying warnings about the Sophy’s swordsman refer to Sir Anthony’s brother Robert Sherley, whose dazzling portrait beside that of his Iranian wife Teresia, the daughter of a Circassian chief Ishmael Khan, and a relative of the Shah, dominated the exhibition. Stylistically, these masque-like paintings resemble those mass-produced for the early Jacobean court, and must 38 39 40 41

Abel PinÅon, quoted, Davies 1967, 108. Cf. Savory 1967. Niayesh 2008, 128 f. These contradictions were also airbrushed from the highly sanitised book that originated at the same time as the exhibition from the Iranian exile lobby in Washington: Shakespeare, Persia and the East – cf. Ghani 2008. 42 George Manwaring, quoted in Blow 2009, 159.

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date from 1611, when as the catalogue records, “Teresia gave birth at the Sherley home in Sussex to a son, Henry, probably the first child born in England of Iranian descent”.43 Although she is shown wearing a type of veil, the most alienating feature of her portrait is the jewelled pistol she brandishes with a finger on the trigger. Misdating the picture, the museum connected this firearm with Teresia’s later rescue of Robert. But a loaded gun in Jacobean Sussex hints at a confrontation barely registered in Bloomsbury: “she eventually reached Rome, living out her days at […] the Carmelite convent of Santa Maria della Scala”, where she is buried alongside her husband.44 The Sherleys resided opulently in Rome on the rights to sell relics and rosaries granted by the Pope.45 This weapon was thus an assertion of a religious fundamentalism, and a disputed universalism, Europeans tend to forget whenever they judge Islam. But The Guardian suggested the parallels between Shakespeare’s world and the Shah’s were less comfortable than the British Museum, with its investment in “soft power”, was caring to admit: Iran has provoked fascination and fear in western Europe for more than two millennia. This fearful incomprehension has only increased since [the Iranian Revolution]. Shia rituals of self-flagellation, relics and martyrs can alienate in a Europe that is rapidly forgetting its own version of such rituals in the Catholic tradition.46

In its culturalist fixation on the shimmering surfaces of the silk fabrics that were Iran’s main exports to the West, the Shah show did not explore the ulterior purposes of the weapons offered in exchange. That might have been to avoid offending Istanbul. But this superficiality was also because the museum’s idea of Shakespeare’s England was too simplistic to explain what the Sherley brothers were doing on a mission that “ran completely counter to the foreign policy of Elizabeth I’s government, which was seeking friendship with the Ottomans on the principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’”.47 Thus, while the catalogue describes the silk robes, turban and sash Robert wears in his picture as the ceremonial suit in which he was dressed by his hosts when he and his brother were received by the Shah at Qazvin, there is no mention of the Catholic politics that brought these Englishmen to Persia, and explain the fact that contra43 44 45 46 47

Canby 2009, 57. Canby 2009, 57. Davies 1967, 228. Bunting January 31, 2009. Blow 2009, 53; cf. also Dimmock 2005, 137, 139, 141.

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ry to information at the museum, “The Sherley mission had no sanction whatever from the English government”.48 By coincidence, however, another exhibition opened at the same time in London also starring portraits of Robert and Tiresia Sherley, and this exposed the naivety of the message that these East-West encounters were all about trade. Van Dyck at Tate Britain centred on a pair of equally extravagant images of the silk-swathed couple, but in these the great painter portrayed them in their true colours, with Teresia in her Roman garden and Robert, again flaunting a turban he liked to top with a cross “to show he is a Catholic”, as the Shah’s ambassador to the Pope.49 Like a 1609 engraving of Islam’s English envoy kissing the papal foot, this was a picture that revealed competing universalisms, and the irony of the cry which echoes through Twelfth Night: “For the love o’God, peace” (2.3.77). III. Bloody as the hunter “I will not give my part of this sport for a pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy” (2.5.156 – 7): The aside is about Sir Anthony’s boast to the Earl of Essex of pocketing 30,000 crowns a year to upgrade Iran’s artillery. So, baiting Malvolio as “a kind of puritan” (2.3.125), it is ominous when Shakespeare’s Illyrians compare their violence with the Shah’s. The Oxford Shakespeare annotates Fabian’s aside by noting that “In 1599 Sir Robert Sherley returned from an embassy to the Shah and boasted of the rewards he had received”.50 In fact, Robert would not leave Iran until bound for Rome in 1608, when he was made a Papal count, not knight, and never boasted of anything. Given the wildness of contemporary reports about the Sherleys textual editors can be relied on to get the brother wrong. The confusion may even have provided a prompt for Shakespeare’s updating of the Plautine plot of identical twins. For the Sherleys’ activities in Iran were more significant, and this “pension from the Sophy” more pertinent to Twelfth Night, than any editor yet admits. In 48 Blow 2009, 53 f. 49 Giovanni Mocenigo, Venetian Ambassador in Rome, to the Doge and Senate, October 3,. 1609, Calendar of State Papers Venetian, 1607 – 1610, XI, 361. The cross in Van Dyck’s portrait has been painted over at a later date, but it appears in the engraving by Diego de Astor depicting Count Robert’s audience with the Pope: reprinted in Davies 2009, 227. Cf. Hearn 2009, 52 – 55; Riding 2005, 49; and Ribeiro 2005, 236. 50 Warren / Wells 1994, 151, n. 2.5.170.

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reality the brothers were sent east by the Earl of Essex as a manoeuvre against the Queen. Under cover of a decoy trip to Italy their errand was to induce Iran to attack the Ottomans, thereby releasing Spain to invade England or compel Elizabeth to purge her Malvolio, the lawyerly minister Robert Cecil, and name as her successor James VI of Scotland, then vowing to usher in the “golden time” of “convents” and religious toleration (5.1.369) the play’s Duke is still pledging at the end.51 Thus, far from diminishing Shakespeare’s universality, restoring Twelfth Night to its historical and religious contexts turns out to be one way in which Shakespeare’s continuing universalism can still be understood. The universalism of Twelfth Night can be appreciated without referring to its historic context in King James’s plan for “a general Christian union”; but without the play’s Epiphany theme that “Journeys end in lovers meeting” it is hard to appreciate what “Every wise man’s son” (2.3.39 – 40) knew in 1601 about hopes of the East.52 For because Essex’s rebellion ended in fiasco the Sherleys spent their lives covering their tracks, making it as difficult for historians as contemporaries to grasp why these two young Englishmen “should be working for the Shah to drum up an alliance against the Ottomans, when everyone knew Elizabeth was pursuing a pro-Ottoman policy”.53 But in Sussex the Sherley family were known to be recusants; and the brothers, who like John Donne were educated in Oxford at Hart Hall when the college was “a refuge for Catholics”, probably converted on arrival in Italy.54 They thus typified the Catholic gentry at the heart of the Essex plot: Premature Jacobeans activated by the Earl’s promise of a politique toleration like that of Henri IV’s recent Edict of Nantes.55 It was while arms-running for the French king that Sir Anthony was dubbed a knight of the holy Order of St Michael, for which he was gaoled in the Fleet. But if the ecumenical dream of “A solemn combina51 For the false hopes of Catholic toleration James raised before his succession, see McElwee 1958, 117 ff: “English Catholics were convinced […] that James had pledged himself […] to remit all fines for recusancy and tolerate their worshipping in private […]. In Ireland it was almost universally believed that the king was himself a Catholic” (118). 52 For James’s plan for “general Christian union” see Patterson 1997, 36. 53 Blow 2009, 62. 54 “Refuge for Catholics”: Caraman 1955, 187, n. 2: “Throughout Elizabeth’s reign Hart Hall was a refuge for Catholics […]. Perhaps for this reason it flourished as did no other College in this reign”; Cf. Davies 1967, 5, 135, 167, 257. 55 Cf. “Premature Jacobeans”: James 1986, 426. Essex was “wont to say that he did not like any man be troubled for his religion”: Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 649 – 9.

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tion” of “dear souls” (5.1.371 – 372) lay behind delusions about the universal love of God which the Sherleys projected on “the very devil” in Iran, the violence of the divisions within both Christianity and Islam also explain why as Twelfth Night seems to fear this fooling with religion might all end in blood: Sir Andrew: For the love of God, a surgeon – send one presently to Sir Toby. Olivia: What’s the matter? Sir Andrew: He’s broke my head across, and has given Sir Toby a bloody coxcomb too. For the love of God, your help! I had rather than forty pound I were at home. Olivia: Who has done this, Sir Andrew? Sir Andrew: The Count’s gentleman, one Cesario. We took him for a coward, but he’s the very devil incardinate. (5.1.168 – 176)

“[B]loody as the hunter”, the “intercepter” in Shakespeare’s comedy, who on “carpet consideration” is a mere “knight dubbed with unhatched rapier”, unexpectedly turns out to be “a devil incardinate” whose “incensement […] is so implacable that satisfaction can be none but by pangs of death and sepulchre” (3.4.198 – 213). This “incardinate” “incensement” hints at the papal backing for Essex’s coup. The traumatic volte-face on which Twelfth Night turns, when the harmless “eunuch” (1.2.52) Cesario (really Viola in disguise) is confused with ‘his’ twin, the mercenary Sebastian, does seem keyed to the shock of the plot.56 Jonathan Bate maintains that since Shakespeare was “over half-way an Essex man” his Richard II was indeed the play the rebels paid to be acted at the Globe on February 7, 1601 to rally their rising next day.57 The first recorded performance of Twelfth Night came one year later at Candlemas, the feast of the purification of the Virgin, February 2, 1602, in Middle Temple hall. But whatever Shakespeare once wished, his dark comedy with the title of the postChristmas reality check now looks set to count the cost of “What You Will”. Strung on a series of mock duels, until its brutal climax when Sebastian plays “havoc” (5.1.195) with the foolish knights, this Epiphany play pushes its warning to be careful what you wish so cruelly it suggests the author shared the astonishment when Essex led his mob of “angry young men in a hurry” in the stampede across London they planned to be “the bloodiest day that ever was”.58 For the “strange regard” Olivia 56 Cf. Wilson, 2007a. 57 Cf. Bate 2007, 272. 58 Cf. Stone 1965, 482 f.

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and the other characters give the warlike brother who appears to have “made division of [him]self ” (215) mirrors the consternation with which the onlookers greeted these “Rash, inconsiderate, fiery voluntaries, / With ladies’ faces and dragon’s spleens” (John, 2.1.67 – 68), when the “viragoes” turned out to be in earnest, and bringing not love but war: I am sorry, madam, I have hurt your kinsman, But had it been the brother of my blood I must have done no less with wit and safety You throw a strange regard upon me, and by that I do perceive it hath offended you. (5.1.201 – 205)

“[H]e will not now be pacified” (3.4.250): For a New Year celebration Twelfth Night is notoriously unsatisfying, its “dark house” (cf. 4.2.30) unenlightened and its “pestilence” (1.1.19) unpurged when Orsino declares that until Malvolio is pacified “We will not part from hence” (5.1.372).59 For though Fabian hopes its “sportful malice” will “rather pluck on laughter than revenge” (354 – 355), the unprecedented belligerence of Twelfth Night leaves the Duke’s project for a “solemn combination” stalled, hanging on an ambiguous legal “suit” (269) prosecuted by Malvolio against the master of the ship carrying the twins which was wrecked before the start. Orsino gives orders to “Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace”; but the steward’s implacable last words, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” (5.1.365), do not augur well when it is belatedly remembered “He hath not told us of the captain yet” (368). Since it seems that the “maid’s garments” Cesario dimly recalls wearing when “The captain did bring me first on shore” can never be recovered until the prisoner is freed from “durance” (267 – 269), the pageboy’s equivocal sexuality is therefore a screen for all the unfulfilled desires of this interrupted time of gifts. In fact it is difficult not to view Malvolio’s sudden court “action” (5,1,268) as symbolic of the trials after the coup, with many of the rebels, including Shakespeare’s own patron, the Earl of Southampton, stuck in legal limbo in the Tower pending a pardon from King James. Since the irreconcilable steward is to be “both the plaintiff and the judge” (343), it looks as “there shall be no more cakes and ale” (2.3.103 – 104). But in no other Shakespearean comedy is the promise of “the present hour” (5.1.346) suspended by quite such a paralysing sense that “What’s to come is still unsure” (2.3.45). 59 For the play’s ritual associations with the lights of Twelfth Night and purification of Candlemas, see Hassel 1979, 77 – 101.

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With Feste singing “There dwelt a man in Babylon” (71), or swearing by St Anne that “ginger shall be hot i’th’ mouth” (105), the revellers of Twelfth Night struggle to deliver the gifts of the day of kings, but they still expect them to come from the Orient: The jape to make Malvolio the king of beans has him smiling like “the new map with the augmentation of the Indies” (3.2.67 – 68). Yet the unfinished lawsuit with the sailor puts a question mark over the eastern journey that initiates this plot, reminding us how Sebastian had refused to disclose his destination when Antonio begged to “know of you whither you are bound”: “No, sooth, sir. My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy” (2.1.8 – 10). We never do learn where the twins were heading when their ship sank off the Illyrian coast, nor why its master is now liable to be accused and imprisoned by, of all people, Malvolio. But if the steward is in fact a standin for Cecil’s Protestant regime, the eastern Mediterranean setting acquires a risky topicality in light of the government’s pro-Turkish strategy, and the Sherley brothers’ operations to subvert this with their mission to the Shah. The stalemate of Twelfth Night then reads like Shakespeare’s suspended judgement on those presents promised from the East. Constance Relihan notes how he seems to repress the Orientalism of his main source, Barnaby Riche’s romance “Apollonius and Silla”, set in Constantinople and Cyprus.60 Yet the trial of the Captain actually makes his play contingent on a voyage as indeterminate as that of the brothers who had altered their tale so often about their business in Iran. Thus, when the Shah asked Sir Anthony to lead a return embassy to his purported patron Elizabeth, who wanted never to see him again, he persuaded Abbas to make him an emissary “to all Christian princes”; and it seems it is the “extravagancy” of this suit, ongoing as Shakespeare wrote, on which Twelfth Night attends: Feste: Now the melancholy god protect thee, and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal. I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might be everything, and their intent everywhere, for that’s it that always makes a good voyage of nothing. (2.4.72 – 76)

In Twelfth Night everything quibbles on a silk suit. Thus, at the start, “the suit from the Count” (1.5.93 – 94) is blocked because Olivia “will admit no kind of suit” (1.2.41); but after many “another suit” (3.1.100), with even Antonio arrested “at the suit of Count Orsino” (3.4.292 – 293), Se60 Cf. Relihan 1997, 80.

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bastian does not go “suited to his watery tomb” (5.1.227). By the time this was all put on for the suited silks in the Temple Sherley had altered the case for his suit to the Shah so suavely, due to the breaking news of Essex, his agent in Italy was saying “if we were to go for dinner I would end up paying the bill”; and the factor of the Levant Company that had sponsored him to open the silk road into Turkey wrote from Aleppo that he was “a warning to know how to trust such slippery gentlemen”.61 So it may not be chance that, as Keir Elam notes, in Twelfth Night “As in no other play, material – the textile, weave and colour of fabric – determines not only distinctions between characters but events themselves”.62 This fixation on transforming textiles – running from “flax on a distaff ” worked by “The spinsters, and knitters in the sun” (1.3.85; 2.4.43) to the cypress crepe of Olivia’s veil (3.1.113), damask silk of Viola’s fantasy sister (2.4.111), and the “velvet gown” (2.5.42 – 43) worn by Malvolio in his dreams – emphasises the suitability of silk clothing to self-fashioning.63 But as with Sir Andrew’s “divers-coloured stock” (1.3.114), or the crossgartered “yellow stockings” (2.5.173 – 174) which trip the steward up, such silken objects of desire prove treacherous, as if the strange body of exotic trade was now “inside England’s stately home”, along with the “changeable taffeta” and Persian rugs.64 Thus, “We have no great opinion of his wisdom”, the English ambassador moralised when Robert Sherley appeared in Spain in 1609, “for coming with a turban on his head”.65 If Twelfth Night does efface the “East” which is its referent that might then be because as Patricia Fumerton observes, silk suits like those of the Sherleys were truly disorienting, since they suggested the dangerous strangeness of the orient had now arrived and come inside: Something strange was happening to England’s wealth, and no one knew where exactly to point the finger […] to reify the trouble “out there”, to embody strangeness in particular foreign nations, peoples, or events that could be quarantined from the home trading body. For the paradox was that whenever the English actually fingered an embodied culprit responsible for trouble, it turned out that the English were involved. Strangeness “out there” was also “in here”.66 61 62 63 64 65

Quoted in Davies 2009, 113, 132. Elam 2008, 42 f. Cf. Jones / Stallybrass 2000, 18. Fumerton 1991, 194 f. Francis Cottington to William Trumbull, December 20, 1609, quoted in Davies 2009, 228. 66 Fumerton 1991, 174 f.

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IV. To the gates of Tartar Robert Sherley “much affected to appear in foreign Vests […] and accounted himself never ready till he had something of the Persian habit about him”, scoffed Thomas Fuller.67 Likewise, “My Lady’s a Cathayan” (2.3.68), Sir Toby explodes. Though he brags he will fight “To the gates of Tartar” (2.5.179) on the Shah’s frontier, any impaled head, however, will be his own, for in Twelfth Night the orient “resembles nothing more than England”.68 Thus, the very word “Cathayan” connotes not a “lying Chinese”, as editors gloss, but a European “going native” in the East.69 As Richard Marienstras emphasises, rather than projecting violence onto the alien Shakespeare persistently locates it within the familiar, and “in every case, the near is more dangerous than the far”.70 Nowhere is the play’s relativizing of oriental violence more pointed, therefore, than in the torment of Malvolio, a revenge for the treason trial of Edmund Campion, “the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink”, in the words of a celebrated Catholic poem, as despite Rackmaster Thomas Norton, author of Gorboduc, the Jesuit never signed a confession for that “niece of King Gorboduc” (4.2.11 – 14), the Queen.71 This sadistic mock trial leaves the steward “more puzzled than the Egyptians in their fog” (38 – 39). But Feste’s roles in it are “Sir Topaz” and “Master Parson” – the priests Henry Garnet and Robert Parsons – and it is these guises that tie the interrogation to Sherley’s scheme. References to “the old hermit of Prague”, “Sir Topaz” and “Master Parson” continue to bemuse editors, but they acquire significance from the religious politics of the Essex Plot. For Sir Anthony had arrived in Rome via Moscow and Prague in April 1601, and conferred at the Spanish embassy with Parsons, when the talk was all about “the attack on London”.72 Parsons guessed the reason the Shah’s envoy was plotting against England instead of Turkey was the “maltreatment” of a third brother – the “Notable pirate” and “salt-water thief ” (5.1.63) Thomas – by Cecil, “in taking his wife and keeping her openly” as a mistress: As Malvolio 67 68 69 70 71

Fuller 1811, 393. Elam 2008, 75. Cf. Billings 2003. Marienstras 1985, 6. For the background to this scene, which oddly defeats editors, see Graves 1994, 250 – 265. Like Malvolio, Norton has the tables turned when he was himself imprisoned in the Bloody Tower: 394 – 403. 72 The Duke of Sessa to Philip III, April 10, 1601, quoted in Davies 1967, 135.

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plans.73 So the cue for Feste’s charade may have come from the clown Will Kemp, with whom Anthony gossiped in Rome.74 But “it is common knowledge the City is extremely alienated from the Queen”, Sherley stated, “because of the death of the Count of Essex”. So, “Strike at London”, he reminded Parsons, “and you strike at England’s heart”.75 He was right. Londoners were horrified by the Earl’s execution, which happened as the Iranian delegation crossed the Alps. Such was the apparent “wreck past hope” (5.1.73) to which the fantasy of a “golden time” had been reduced by the real time of Twelfth Night. But that Shakespeare was able to welcome newness into this world was perhaps thanks to the Sophy after all: against his brother’s return Abbas was still holding the youngest of the Sherleys hostage in Iran. “He hath had wonderful great entertainment of the [Shah] with many exceeding rich gifts”, marvelled the English consul in Aleppo when Sir Anthony began his reverse embassy, before adding: “His brother remaineth in Persia until his return. God grant his voyage return good”.76 Robert was, in fact, now the Shah’s “slave”, according to Vatican informants, and the eighteen-year old boy went everywhere as “a favourite of the King, who generously gave him everything he needed”. He had “gained the goodwill of the King by whom he is liked”, ran the despatches, “because he renders services” according to local “habits and customs in things far from edifying”.77 Just what these services might have been is suggested by other memoirs. As a lover of Persian verse and a “composer of rhapsodies and part-songs”, the Shah frequented coffee-houses where “boys performed lascivious dances to the accompaniment of flutes”, one elderly Spaniard complained.78 Sir Thomas Herbert, who accompanied Robert on his final embassy in 1628, recalled how “youthful pages” played music as Abbas was served at table by other “Ganymede boys”.79 And 73 74 75 76

Robert Persons to Ralph Eure, April 30, 1601, quoted in Davies 1967, 72 f. See Wiles 1987, 36 f. The Duke of Sessa to Philip III, April 10, 1601, quoted in Davies 1967, 135. Richard Colthurst to John Sanderson, July 26, 1599, quoted in Davies 1967, 126. 77 A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia and the Papal Mission of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (1939). London, I, 143 f.; and Alfonso de la Cueva, Spanish ambassador I n Venice to Philip III, March 12 1608, quoted ibid. 168, 212. 78 Don Garcia Figueroa (1667): L’Ambassade de D. Garcia de Silva Figueroa en Perse. Paris.; and Antoine De Gouvea (1646): Relation des Grandes Guerres et Victoires par Le Roy Perse Chah Abbas. Rouen., quoted in Blow 2009, 120, 169. 79 Herbert 1928, quoted in Blow 2009, 166 f.

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John Thaddeus, a Carmelite, related that provincial governors would send beautiful youths as gifts, that he “kept more than two hundred boys” in his harem, and that he “was accompanied by forty naked boys when he went to the baths”.80 No wonder King James wrote so eagerly to the Shah asking after Robert.81 That this Persian court culture of pederasty and poetry was governed by eunuchs Abbas had personally castrated may have added urgency to the news circulating in 1600 with the True Report of Sir Anthony Shirley’s Journey that the younger of these English brothers had been left behind. To the evident discomfort of London’s Islamic clerics the British Museum highlighted a sexually suggestive portrait of the Shah “lounging next to a handsome page-boy who pours him wine” in its publicity however. The poem inscribed on the picture, we were told, compares “the lips of the beloved” to “the lips of the cup” and wine to love.82 And in the show itself other steamy lyrics about the “food of love” (1.1.1) illustrated the long and explicit Persian literary tradition of spiritualised pederasty. These poems were not translated. But if Shakespeare was similarly tickled by the Sherley legend it seems that these curators were not the first to slyly exploit the homoeroticism of the Sophy’s musical banquets to sublimate the violence of fraught religious extremes: Orsino: Give me some music. Now good morrow, friends. Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song, That old and antic song we heard last night; Methought it did relieve my passion much, […] Come hither, boy. If ever thou shalt love, In the sweet pangs of it remember me; For such as I am all true lovers are, Unstaid and skittish in all motions else Save in the constant image of the creature That is beloved. How dost thou like this tune? Viola: It gives a very echo to the seat Where love is throned. (2.4.1 – 21)

Viola’s plan to “serve this duke” by convincing the Captain “it may be worth thy pains” to “present me as an eunuch to him”, so as to sing “And speak to him in many sorts of music” (1.2.52 – 54), is often ex80 Chronicle of the Carmelites (n. 52), quoted in Blow 2009, 172. 81 Cf. Davies 1967, 139. 82 Cf. Canby 2009, 251; Neyeri February 17, 2009.

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plained as a dramatic false start.83 But Elam establishes that the figure of the eunuch continues to haunt this play; and Stephen Orgel proposes that when acted by a boy the part of Orsino’s “little Caesar” insinuated “a world of possibilities that were, to a Protestant society (perhaps temptingly) illicit”. These critics relate the little Roman’s musical offering to opera in a Vatican where boy-castrati excited fantasies that were “simultaneously heterosexual and homosexual”.84 But as Relihan points out, the play’s authorization of homosexual desire is also “linked to its delicate negotiation between eastern cultures and English values”.85 Bruce Smith indeed sees Twelfth Night as a rewriting of the Renaissance “Myth of the Shipwrecked Youth”, which ordinarily introduced same-sex desire in a Moslem setting in order to reinforce existing prejudice. Thus, when Shakespeare has Orsino cherish Cesario because the “Dear lad” has a “small pipe” like a “maiden’s organ […] And all is semblative a woman’s part” (1.4.28 – 33), he challenges the ways in which this hostage narrative operated to police “the dangerous fact of desire between a man and adolescent boy”, Smith deduces, and that disorientation is more than simply sexual, for “If we have undergone a rite of passage, it is a journey toward another country, not a return trip to the shores we left behind”. “Getting outside oneself, experiencing the world through somebody else’s eyes”, according to this evaluation, “is central to the comic vision” of Twelfth Night. 86 The escape from the seraglio would become the signature of a later Orientalism. But at this instant when relations between East and West were determined more by Christian schism than any anti-Islamic crusade, the perfumed garden of the harem offered Shakespeare a pluralizing cultural scenario, it seems, to turn the hostage crisis into hospitality, and western prejudice to eastern promise. If the imaginary ‘Persia’ of the ‘Sophy’ is a pretext for Shakespeare’s Illyria, this may reflect the actual Illyria as the pluralistic, multi-ethnic home of James VI’s favourite Catholic, Marco Antonio De Dominis Archbishop of Spalato. Improbably, it was this Adriatic divine, who later settled in London, whose books and letters offered “the most systematic treatment” of the project of Christian union which the king espoused.87 To Shakespeare, however, “the golden window of the east” 83 84 85 86 87

Cf. Craik 1975, 10. Cf. Elam 1996; Orgel 1996, 53 – 57. Relihan 1997, 91. Smith 1991, 151 – 156. Cf. Patterson 1997, 220.

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(Romeo, 1.1.112) was always the horizon of such possibilities. For of his 50 references to “the East”, 25 invoke sunrise at “the first op’ning of the gorgeous east” (Love’s, 4.3.219), a heliotropic turn towards the “grey-eyed morn […] Chequ’ring the eastern clouds with streaks of light” (Romeo, 2.2.1 – 2) which reverses the Virgilian translatio imperii, and seems to align what Robert Weimann calls “the commodious thresholds” of Shakespeare’s stage away from the West’s sunset world and towards renewal from the East.88 This sunrise theme, which recurs like a signature-tune in every genre, reminds us how often Shakespeare’s plays are located, as befits texts often acted at Christmas or Twelfth Night, during the liminal hours of New Year. As FranÅois Laroque observes, the daybreak celebrations of this “festival par excellence” enacted “a veritable myth, in which dreams of a Golden Age came true”, and a time of truce restored ‘universal fraternity’ fuelled by a “notion of hospitalitas which dictated houses should open their doors to all”. There was a structural affinity therefore between the hospitality of Shakespearean theatre and seasonal customs, like the Christmas Wassail Bowl or New Year gifts, which were intended to extend family conviviality to embrace the whole of humankind.89 Shakespeare’s eastern orientation was thereby keyed to the journey of the Magi, and its annual re-enactment in the advent of the Mummers, or in those virtual embassies from “The Prince of Purple” or the “Prince of Love” which taught the lawyers of the Inns of Court the silken suits of immunity – not of the hosts but of their guests.90 “Twelfth Day [January 6, 1663] […] we met with Major Thomson […] who doth talk very highly of Liberty of conscience […] he says that if the King thinks it good, the papists may have the same […]. After dinner to the Dukes house and there saw Twelfth Night acted well, though it be but a silly play and not relating at all to the name or day”:91 Samuel Pepys’ blithe contempt for Shakespeare’s comedy gains irony from his failure to connect it with his talk of toleration, but his diary entry provides historical perspective on its hope to “let no quarrel nor no brawl to come / Taint the condition of this present hour” (5.1.345 – 346). For “what’s to come” in Twelfth Night is taking centuries to arrive. But it cannot be chance that the other Sherley play, The Three Brothers, was acted in 1609 by a company of Catholic players 88 89 90 91

Cf. Weimann 2000, chap. 8. Cf. Laroque 1991, 148 ff. See Twycross / Carpenter 2002, 92 – 100. Pepys 1971, IV, 5 f.

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along with Pericles and King Lear. 92 “I do not like the fashion of your garments”, Lear cautions Edgar, “You will say they are Persian; but let them be changed” (3.6.73 – 74). Shakespeare grew wary of this “Persian” terrorist disguise. Yet The Three Brothers seems to share his hopes for “golden time”, because it ends with the Sherleys reunited as the Shah agrees to build a church “Wherein all Christians that do hither come / May peaceably hear their own religion”.93 This was a universalist vision even the Calvinist Thomas Middleton could endorse, when in another Sherley public relations exercise he declared how it was not Robert’s “garments embroidered thick with gold” which “dazzled”, but the “excellent music of his tongue” that sued so well it had converted the Shah himself into “confessing and worshipping” Christ.94 “[W]ould you undertake another suit”, Olivia likewise assures Cesario in Shakespeare’s comedy of silken embassies, “I had rather hear you to solicit that / Than music from the spheres” (3.1.100 – 102). In truth, the Sherley brothers would never be reunited, and Robert would soon be reporting “the hatred [Abbas] bears to Christians […] burning and pulling down all Churches”.95 Yet in Shakespeare’s Illyria hopes still centre on Cesario’s suit. Sir Anthony had left Iran with thirty-two chests of silks as gifts for European monarchs from the Shah. These were last seen at Archangel, where Sherley stowed them with the captain of a Dutch ship bound for England. He had perhaps cashed these frozen assets to finance Essex, before sailing “into the north of my lady’s opinion” to “hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard” (3.2.22 – 23). Someone who might have known the whereabouts of these presents was his uncle Sir Thomas Sherley, the Treasurer of the Middle Temple. But after the Essex catastrophe, Sir Thomas was in charge of the lawyers’ feasting for a difficult New Year. He had “a strong motive to stage a prestigious entertainment”, and so he commissioned the professional Lord Chamberlain’s Men with their expensive musicians to stage a play.96 The comedy they acted was Twelfth Night. So it would be satisfying to think that Shah ‘Abbas’s silk paid for Shakespeare’s comedy; and that contrary to Edward Said’s dualism of European production and Oriental seduction, this New Year gift from the East was a Persian musical offering to Londoners of “the food 92 93 94 95 96

Cf. Sisson 1942, 136 ff.; and Wilson 2004, 271 – 293. Anon. 1995, 131: xiii, 179 f. Middleton 2007, 674 f., ll. 89 f., 230 – 241. Robert Sherley to Sir Anthony Sherley, 1605, quoted in Davies 1967, 169. Arlidge 2000, 56 ff., 114 et passim.

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of love” (1.1.1).97 We learn, however, that the Shah’s ‘wise men’ pursued Sherley through the courts, because they claimed that their silk presents had been sold for “a great price”. The go-between, according to Father Parsons, had indeed been “his friend the captain”.98 And only the missing captain knew the truth about the “Sophy’s suit”.

97 Cf. Said 1985, 71. 98 Davies 1967, 123.

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Texts Cited Anon (1995): “The Travels of the Three English Brothers”, in: Parr, Anthony (ed.): Three Renaissance Travel Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 55 – 134. Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2006): Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton. Arlidge, Anthony (2000): Shakespeare and the Prince of Love: The Feast of Misrule in the Middle Temple. London: Giles de la Mare. Aspden, Peter (February 7, 2009): “Vaster Than Empires”, in: The Financial Times. Bartels, Emily (1993): Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bate, Jonathan (2007): Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind, and World of William Shakespeare. London: Penguin. Benjamin, Walter (1970): “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in: Illuminations. Trans. by Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 245 – 255. Billings, Timothy (2003): “Caterwauling Cataians: the genealogy of a gloss”, in: Shakespeare Quarterly. 54, 1 – 28. Blow, David (2009): Shah Abbas: The Ruthless King Who Became an Iranian Legend. London: Tauris. Brown, Michael (2009): “Exhibiting Indigenous Heritage in the Age of Cultural Property”, in: Cuno, James (ed.): Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over Antiquities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 143 – 164. Bunting, Madeleine (January 31, 2009): “Empire of the Mind”, in: The Guardian. Campbell-Johnston, Rachel (February 14, 2009): “Shah Abbas: The Remaking of Iran at the British Museum”, in: The Times. Canby, Sheila (2009): Shah ‘Abbas: The Remaking of Iran. London: British Museum Press. Caraman, Philip (1955): The Autobiography of an Elizabethan: William Weston. London: Longmans. Cohen, Walter (2001): “The Undiscovered Country: Shakespeare and Mercantile Geography”, in: Howard, Jean / Shershow, Scott (ed.): Marxist Shakespeares. London: Routledge, 128 – 158. Craik, Thomas W. (1975): “Introduction”, in: Lothian, John M. / Craik, Thomas W. (ed.): Twelfth Night. London: Methuen (= The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd Series), xvii – xxix. Cuno, James, (ed.) (2009): Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over Antiquities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davies, David W. (1967): Elizabethans Errant: The Strange Fortunes of Sir Thomas Sherley and His Three Sons, As Well in the Dutch Wars as in Muscovy, Morocco, Persia, Spain, and the Indies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dimmock, Matthew (2005): New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Elam, Keir (1996): “The Fertile Eunuch: Twelfth Night, Early Modern Intercourse, and the Fruits of Castration”, in: Shakespeare Quarterly 47, 1 – 36. Elam, Keir (2008): “Introduction”, in: Twelfth Night. London: Cengage Learning (= The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series), 1 – 153. Fuller, Thomas ([1662] 1811): The Worthies of England. Vol. 2. Ed. by John Nichols. London: Rivington. Fumerton, Patricia (1991): Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ghani, Cyrus (2008): Shakespeare, Persia and the East. Washington, DC: Mage. Graves, Michael (1994): Thomas Norton: The Parliament Man. Oxford: Blackwell. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980): Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (1988): Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hassel, Chris (1979): Renaissance Drama and the Church Year. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hearn, Karen (ed.) (2009): Van Dyck and Britain. Exh. cat. London: Tate. Hensher, Philip (September 28, 2009): “The Art of Death on a Mass Scale”, in: The Independent. Herbert, Thomas (1928): Travels in Persia 1627 – 1629. London: Routledge. James, Mervyn (1986): “At the Crossroads of the Political Culture: The Essex Revolt, 1601”, in: Mervyn, James (ed.): Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 417 – 432. Jones, Anne / Stallybrass, Peter (2000): Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jonson, Ben (1997): “To the memory of my beloved, the Author”. Repr. in: Greenblatt, Stephen et al. (ed.): The Norton Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 3351 – 3352. Kant, Immanuel (1996): “Towards Perpetual Peace”, in: Practical Philosophy. Trans. and ed. by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 328 – 331. Kewes, Paulina (2005): “Contemporary Europe in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama”, in: Hadfield, Andrew / Hammond, Paul (ed.): Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe. London: Thomson Learning (= The Arden Shakespeare; The Arden Critical Companions), 150 – 192. Laroque, FranÅois (1991): Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee Adams, William (February 19, 2009): “The Art of Museum Diplomacy”, in: Time. MacGregor, Neil (2009): “To Shape the Citizens of ‘That Great City, the World’”, in: Cuno, James (ed.): Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over Antiquities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 39 – 54. Marlowe, Christopher (2003): Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays. Ed. by Romany, Frank / Lindsey, Robert. London: Penguin.

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Marienstras, Richard (1985): New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McElwee, William (1958): The Wisest Fool in Christendom. London: Faber and Faber. Middleton, Thomas (2007): “Sir Robert Sherley His Entertainment in Cracovia”. Vol. 2. Ed. by Limon, Jerzy / Vitkus, Daniel J. In: Taylor, Gary / Lavagnino, John (ed.): Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 670 – 678. Mills, James (February 24, 2009): “Back to the Future with Iran Diplomacy”, in: The Tribune. Montebello, Philippe de (2009): “‘And What Do You Propose Should Be Done with Those Objects?’”, in: Cuno, James (ed.): Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over Antiquities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 55 – 70. Moss, Stephen (June 16, 2009): “Our Goal is to Have the Best Museum in the World”, in: The Guardian Arts, 6 – 9. Neyeri, Farah (February 17, 2009): “Iran’s Fidgety, Cruel Shah Abbas in British Museum Show”, in: Bloomberg News. Niayesh, Ladan (2008): “Shakespeare’s Persians”, in: Shakespeare, 4, 127 – 136. Orgel, Stephen (1996): Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patterson, W. B. (1997): King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 34 – 43. Pepys, Samuel (1971): The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Vol. 4: 1663. London: G. Bell. Relihan, Constance (1997): “Erasing the East from Twelfth Night”, in: Joyce Green MacDonald (ed.): Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 80 – 94. Ribeiro, Aileeen (2005): Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Riding, Christine (2008): “The Orientalist Portrait”, in: The Lure of the East. Exh. cat. London: Tate, 49. Rushdie, Salman (1991): Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981 – 1991. London: Granta. Said, Edward W. (1985): Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Savory, Roger M. (1967): “The Sherley Myth”, in: Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 5, 73 – 81. Scobie, Claire (28 June, 2009): “The Long Road Home”, in: The Observer Magazine, 32 – 37. Shakespeare, William (1997): The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton. Sisson, C. J. (1942): “Shakespeare Quartos as Prompt-Copies”, in: Review of English Studies 18, 136 – 138. Smith, Bruce R. (1991): Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stone, Lawrence (1965): The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558 – 1641. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Tatlow, Anthony (2001): Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Twycross, Meg / Carpenter, Susan (2002): Masks and Masking in Medieval and Tudor England. Aldershot: Ashgate. Vitkus, Daniel (2003): Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570 – 1630. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Walker, Shaun (July 8, 2009): “Obama Plays the Perfect Guest”, and “Pushkin: The Way to a Russian’s Heart”, in: The Independent 19. Warren, Roger / Wells, Stanley (ed.) (1994): Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press (= The Oxford Shakespeare). Weimann, Robert (2000): Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiles, David (1987): Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Richard (2004): Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wilson, Richard (2007a): “Bloody as the Hunter: Twelfth Night and the French Duel”, in: Wilson, Richard (ed.): Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows. London: Routledge, 202 – 226. Wilson, Richard (2007b): “Making Men of Monsters: Shakespeare in the Company of Strangers”, in: Wilson, Richard (ed.): Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows. London: Routledge, 242 – 260.

“Cony Caught by Walking Mort”: Indigenous Exoticism in the Literature of Roguery Bettina Boecker I. Foreign worlds: the literature of roguery “Bene lightmans to thy quarroms! In what libken hast thou libbed in this darkmans, whether in a libbege or in the strummel?”1This is the beginning of ‘a conversation between an upright man and a rogue’ as recorded in Thomas Harman’s Caveat for Common Cursitors, published in 1566, a seminal text in the literature of roguery that flourished in Britain roughly between 1530 and 1630. The upright man, a kind of senior criminal, wishes his subordinate a good morning (“Bene lightmans to thy quarroms”, “Good morning to thy body”), and asks him where he spent the night (“In what libken hast thou libbed in this darkmans”, “What house hast thou lain in all night”, “whether in a libbege or in the strummel”, “whether in a bed or in the straw”). The point of this conversation is that the ordinary reader does not understand it, and is not supposed to understand it – at least not without the extensive vocabulary lists provided by Harman and by those writing in his wake. Indeed if one were to look for a common denominator of all the texts usually subsumed under ‘the literature of roguery”, whether concerned with rural vagrants or with urban tricksters, it would have to be cant or canting, the supposedly secret language made available to the uninitiated by Harman and his followers. The term ‘literature of roguery’ – still in use despite its old-fashioned quaintness – refers to a body of writing concerned with criminal lifestyles and practices and published in the period already mentioned, between 1530 and 1630. These pamphlets, which can be rather long, usually profess a didactic aim: by exposing the wiles and ruses of various kinds of criminal fraudsters, writers intend to educate their readership into a heightened awareness of these tricks. That way, they intend to make an 1

Judges 1930, 115.

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active contribution to the actual curbing of crime; at least this is what they tell their readers. Apart from Thomas Harman, the two bestknown writers in the genre are Robert Greene and Thomas Dekker; other names include John Awdeley, Robert Copland, Samuel Rid and William Fennor. Given the critical importance of secrecy to the criminal underworld, it is not surprising to find that virtually every writer in the literature of roguery sees a necessity to explain how he knows what he knows. Here, individual strategies vary considerably. Harman, writing in 1566, reports how he interviewed vagrants passing by his manor, swapping promises of food, shelter or secrecy for privileged information only the rogues themselves could supply. Greene, writing in 1591, presents himself as a reformed offender divulging the tricks of his former partners in crime. Dekker cites both a veritable crimestopper, the ‘Bellman of London’, and an emissary of the devil, Palmersiel, as his informants. All of the authors just mentioned present their narratives as true. While the appearance of the devil’s footman would seem to render this claim rather absurd, the situation is much more ambiguous when it comes to Harman, for example, whose quasi-sociological methods are reminiscent of a modern field researcher. Indeed early students of the literature of roguery took the texts mostly at face value. Recent scholarship tends to consider them at least partly fictional, both because of their obvious indebtedness to medieval jest-books and because of the plagiarism2 rampant among the pamphleteers. Yet one will still find critics who regard the pamphlets as authentic documents of the Elizabethan underworld – as well as those who consider them an early form of realist fiction, and thus precursors of the novel.3 For the purposes of this paper, I want, at least for the moment, to sidestep the question of fictionality or non-fictionality. Instead, I am going to look at the literature of roguery as an anthropological or ethnological project avant la lettre, albeit an anthropological project of a specific kind. The criminal subculture described in the pamphlets is to be found right in the heart of the mother country; it is thus an indigenous Other rather than a truly ‘foreign’ tribe.

2 3

On plagiarism, see especially Gibbons 1968, 208 – 212. With the rogue pamphlets, Arthur Kinney states, “we are witnessing nothing less momentous than the birth of the [English] novel.” Kinney 2004, 378.

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Writing in 1610, the pseudonymous ‘Martin Markall’, who styles himself the “Beadle of Bridewell” describes the literature of roguery and its project in the following terms: There hath been of late days great pains taken on the part of the good old Bellman of London in discovering, as he thinks, a new-found nation and people. Let it be so for this time. Hereupon much ado was made in setting forth their lives, order of living, method of speech, and usual meetings, with divers other things thereunto appertaining. These volumes and papers are now spread everywhere, so that every jack-boy now can say as well as the proudest of that fraternity: “Will you wap for a win, or trine for a make?” [Will you [whore] for a penny, or hang for a halfpenny?]4

What Martin Markall’s predecessors have offered their readers, he claims, is the type of discovery usually linked with a voyage to unchartered territory: “a new-found nation and people”. The association with the exploration of the New World or, to use a more freighted term, with colonial expansion is obvious. It becomes even more explicit in the title of a still later contribution to the literature of roguery, written by William Fennor in 1617: The Counter’s Commonwealth, or, A Voyage made to an infernal island discovered by many captains, seafaring men, merchants and other tradesmen. But the conditions, natures and qualities of the people there inhabiting, and those that traffic with them, were never so truly expressed or lively set forth as by William Fennor, his majesty’s servant.5

The criminal underworld, by the second decade of the seventeenth century, could be and obviously was perceived as a world of its own, separate from the rest of the commonwealth and therefore to be described and interpreted using paradigms usually applied in the description and interpretation of genuinely “foreign”, i. e. geographically distant, peoples. This quasi-ethnological frame of reference is something that ‘Martin Markall’ and William Fennor are clearly aware of. But while they look back on a tradition that is firmly established and, above all, open for parody, any hint of the humorous is a conspicuous absence in Thomas Harman’s Caveat for Common Cursitors, the text that, arguably, every writer of roguery pamphlets from the 1560s onwards copied in one way or another. Har4

5

The most recent edition of the texts is Kinney 1990. Older anthologies include Furnivall 1880; Judges 1930 is still the most comprehensive collection of rogue pamphlets available, and, unless otherwise stated, it is from this edition that I quote. The “Martin Markall” quote can be found in: Judges 1930, 386. Fennor, The Counter’s Commonwealth, Judges 1930, 423.

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man is not the originator of the ethnological paradigm within the literature of roguery, but he is the one to elaborate it most fully. In that sense, the foreign world he depicts in the Caveat is the world of all subsequent pamphlets. II. Thomas Harman’s commonwealth of rogues Harman’s Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, published in 1566, presents itself as the result of empirical research on Harman’s part – field studies for which Harman, as it were, does not need to leave his house. He explains: […] I, having more occasion, through sickness, to tarry and remain at home than I have been accustomed, do, by my there abiding, talk and confer daily with many of these wily wanderers of both sorts, as well men and women, as boys and girls, by whom I have gathered and understand their deep dissimulation and detestable dealing, being marvellous subtle and crafty in their kind, for not one amongst twenty will discover, either declare their scelerous secrets. Yet with fair flattering words, money, and good cheer, I have attained to the type by such as the meanest of them hath wandered these thirteen years, and most sixteen and some twenty and upward, and not without faithful promise made unto them never to discover their names or anything they showed me. For they would all say, if the upright-men should understand thereof, they should not be only grievously beaten, but put in danger of their lives, by the said upright-men.6

Harman’s interviews, his willingness to penetrate into what he presents as a foreign and, at least initially, opaque culture have earned him a reputation as a proto-anthropologist.7 The tribe that he studies, the vagrants passing his house, are the people whom the historian A.L. Beier, in his seminal study, called Masterless Men. 8 One of the main points of Harman’s Caveat, and of the literature of roguery more generally, however, is that these men – and women – are not masterless after all, but part of a rigidly structured hierarchy of criminals. On top of the hierarchy are the upright-men, hardened criminals to whom other deviants are subservient. A similar hierarchy exists among female criminals, led by the autem-morts, the married women, and followed by lesser criminals such as the walking mort, an unmarried female vagrant, the doxies 6 7 8

Judges 1930, 62. Cf. e. g. Burke 1983; Beier 1995. Beier 1985.

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(who lose their virginity to the upright-men) and others. The criminals in Harman are not individual or isolated offenders, but part of an alternative society that mirrors the structures and principles of ‘official’ England. Not only does that society know a strict social hierarchy; there is also a high degree of professional specialization, and an individual’s profession can be glimpsed from the way they are dressed and from the tools that they carry. A hooker or angler, for example, is a criminal who uses “a staff five or six foot long” to steal items from within rooms where the windows are open. The staff has a little hole on top into which an iron hook can be put to facilitate the hooker’s job. With the hook detached, the staff doubles as an unconspicuous walking cane. Hookers, Harman informs us, “commonly go in frieze jerkins and gallyslops, pointed at the knee.”9 A prigger of prancers, a horse thief, can also be recognized by his outward apparel: he will usually wear jerkins of leather or of white frieze, and carry a little wand. Even where the crime to be perpetrated depends on verbal skills rather than an actual technique, Harman’s rogues stick to established routines which make them easily recognizable to their potential victims. Such is the case with the demanders for glimmer, who, Harman explains: […] be for the most part women; for glimmer, in their language, is fire. These go with feigned licences and counterfeited writings, having the hands and seals of such gentlemen as dwelleth near to the place where they feign themselves to have been burnt, and their goods consumed with fire.” (94)

The world of roguery is a world apart, a parallel society with – and this is important to Harman – no need of, and no right to, his readership’s charity. In order to make this point, Harman is careful to point out that this world is in fact a cosmos, or, to use his own phrase, a commonwealth. This is manifest not only from the social hierarchy among the rogues and from their division into different criminal guilds but also from the fact that theirs is a society structured by rules, rituals and ceremonies, such as rogue baptisms, rogue marriages or rules for the division of spoils. While these customs permit his readers to understand the alien culture of vagrant criminals because it is similar to their own, they are clearly marked as distortions or perversions of the customs of ‘official’ England. Ultimately, they establish the essential separateness of the underworld 9

Judges 1930, 73.

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rather than any shared cultural code between rogues and respectable citizens. The idea of a commonwealth of rogues is not something Harman invented. It is already present in such early texts as Robert Copland’s The Highway to the Spitalhouse (1535 – 1536), in Awdeley’s Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561), as well as in continental publications like Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools, 1494) or the Liber Vagatorum, printed in Pforzheim in 1510. Harman, however, makes this alternative commonwealth more ‘real’ than any of the writers who precede him. Descriptions of different types of rogues are usually accompanied by a story about an individual member of the respective ‘profession’ whom Harman claims to have interviewed personally. He provides extensive vocabulary lists as well as, critically, a list of the upright-men and rogues whom he knows – or pretends to know – by name. There is only one case, the case of Nicholas Jennings, where a criminal listed by Harman was actually prosecuted, but Harman certainly is or at least poses as an informant, playing into the hands of the Tudor authorities. Eighteen of the names that he lists resurface in judiciary documents from the period.10 Most recent scholarship has therefore placed him firmly on the side of suppression (containment) rather than subversion, notably Steven Greenblatt in “Invisible Bullets”.11 III. Othering as subjection Indeed there are many ways in which Harman, in the Caveat, would seem to amply substantiate a position which sees the primary and sometimes only purpose of othering in subjection and denigration. One of the most salient points is his constant comparison of criminals to animals, in a clear attempt to reduce vagrants to a level below the fully human. Of the rogues’ night-time abode in the woods he writes: […] [W]hile they thus lie hidden in covert, in the night they be not idle, neither, as the common saying is, well occupied. For then, as the wily fox, creeping out of his den, seeketh his prey for poultry, so do these for linen and anything else worth money that lieth about or near a house […]. 10 Cf. Woodbridge 2001, 59. 11 “The subversive voices are produced by and within the affirmations of order; they are powerfully registered, but they do not undermine the order.” (Greenblatt 1988, 52). Greenblatt’s interest in Harman and the literature of roguery in “Invisible Bullets” is of a rather passing nature; nevertheless, the essay is referred to in virtually every recent publication on the literature of roguery.

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When they have a greater booty than they may carry away quickly to their stalling kens, as is abovesaid, they will hide the same for three days in some thick covert, and in the night time carry the same, like good waterspaniels, to their foresaid houses.12

Animal imagery is rampant when it comes to describing the rogues’ sexual mores. Harman’s interest in the rogues’ sleeping arrangements borders on the obsessive, particularly when it comes to what he presents as the free availability of any woman to the upright men and other male criminals on top of the hierarchy. The offspring of such alliances Harman calls “wild rogues”, “beastly begotten in barn or bushes”13 during one of the mass orgies which Harman presents as the standard expression of rogue sexuality. The comparison of the rogues to wild beasts is reminiscent of another group that early modern Britain tended to other for purposes of subjection: the “wild Irish”. And indeed the rogue nation has a great number of Irish among its denizens. As Harman informs us, “There is above an hundred of Irish men and women that wander about to beg for their living that hath come over within these two years. They say they have been burned and spoiled by the Earl of Desmond, and report well of the Earl of Ormonde.”14 Some rogue professions are dominated by Irishmen, like that of the palliard or clapperdudgeon, a small-time pedlar with a fake marriage licence and fake wounds. Harman stresses the fact that they do not speak English, or pretend not to. This exclusion of the Irish rogues from the larger linguistic community is symptomatic, and to a certain extent concerns the rogue community as a whole, even if, in the case of the English vagrants, the exclusion is presented as voluntary. Cant, the criminals’ secret language, is the most important means by which the commonwealth of rogues constitutes itself as a nation apart from the commonwealth proper. Because of this, the documentation and translation of cant is a central part of Harman’s project. The lists of supposedly secret terms, the single most defining feature of the literature of roguery as a whole, have also contributed to a perception of the genre as embarked on a project of subjection and incorporation, a kind of internal colonialism. The literature of roguery presents vagrants as “internal barbarians, for they were nomadic like other barbarians 12 Judges 1930, 71. 13 Judges 1930, 78. 14 Judges 1930, 113.

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and spoke a barbarous tongue, cant.”15 Greenblatt compares Harman’s vocabulary lists to the list of Algonquian terms provided by Thomas Harriot in his Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Viriginia;16 more recently, they have been discussed as part of a “fantasy of linguistic and cultural incorporation” of which the act of translation forms an integral part.17 While the existence of a vagrancy problem in sixteenth-century England is well documented, the question whether cant was ever actually spoken is highly debated. One wonders what the practical use of such a “secret” language would have been given that its obvious strangeness was bound to attract attention to rather than deflect attention from the criminal projects of its supposed speakers. Its uses for Harman’s project, however, and for the literature of roguery more generally, cannot be dismissed out of hand. It is only through positing the necessity of an act of translation that the nation’s vagrants emerge as the nation of rogues, a counterculture and an (anti-)commonwealth in their own right. The ability to translate confirms Harman and those writing in his wake in their role as exposers or anatomizers, catering to what has been called “the period’s fascination with bringing hidden things to light.”18 For the reader of the roguery pamphlets, the act of translation turns the criminal counter-culture from a hidden into a foreign world, that is, from an inaccessible into an essentially accessible realm of experience: “every jack-boy”, the Beadle of Bridewell tells us in 1610 “now can say as well as the proudest of that fraternity: ‘Will you wap for a win, or trine for a make?’19 Generally speaking, the project of exposure presents itself as a disciplinary project; exposure is supposed to lead up to, or even equals, punishment. Harman writes: Now, methinketh, I see how these peevish, perverse, and pestilent people [thevagrants] begin to fret, fume, swear and stare at this my book, their 15 Woodbridge 2001, 160. That way, it seems to bear out the point made by the early modern Englishman quoted in Mullaney 1981, who claims: “We have Indians at home, Indians in Cornwall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland.” (71). Mullaney quotes Hill 1974, 20. 16 Greenblatt 1988, 49. 17 Stafford 2004, 312. Conversely, several scholars have pointed out that early modern English settlers tended to conceptualize the natives they encountered (and subdued) as a sort of New World lower class. See Woodbridge 2001, 57; Mullaney 1981, 71, Kupperman 1980, 121. 18 Woodbridge 2001, 63. 19 Judges 1930, 386.

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life being laid open and apparently painted out [my emphasis], that their confusion and end draweth on apace. […]For behold, their life being so manifest wicked and so apparently known, the honourable will abhor them, the worshipful will reject them, the yeomen will sharply taunt them, the husbandmen utterly defy them, the labouring men bluntly chide them, the women with a loud exclamation wonder at them, and all children with clapping hands cry out at them.20

Reader response to the Caveat as Harman envisages it is organized along strictly hierarchical principles. While those on top of the ladder display different degrees of the moral outrage expected of them, those on the bottom rungs – women and children – react in a less unambiguous manner. The childrens’ clapping of hands and crying out loud is reminiscent not so much of a boo or a catcall as of a form of applause, expressing a state of mind that Harman, with reference to the women, designates as ‘wonder’.21 Later on in the text, Harman expresses the hope that “when [the rogues] be once named hereafter, our children will much marvel what kind of people they were.”22 His exposure of the common cursitors at large in England’s counties and shires may seem, at a first glance, to appeal to nothing so much as to the sense of moral righteousness of the lawabiding citizens to whom he addresses his work. But as he seems to realize, these exposures can also elicit a reaction in which moral standards are temporarily suspended to permit what is perhaps best described as an aesthetic appreciation of strangeness – the state of “marvel” or “wonder” that has been discussed in relation with early modern exploration of the new world of its colonies. IV. Othering as exoticization On a closer look, wonder or marvel also seems to be at least one reaction that the literature of roguery attempts to elicit in its readers. Thomas Dekker’s 1608 Lantern and Candlelight makes the customary appeal to 20 Judges 1930, 63. 21 Mullaney 1981, 71 compares the period’s lists of vagrants to “the marvels of a wonder-cabinet, to await the disposition of a later age.” 22 Judges 1930, 65. Cf. Greenblatt 1992, 20 (paraphrasing Descartes): “When we wonder, we do not yet know if we love or hate the object at which we are marveling; we do not know if we should embrace it or flee from it. […] The object that arouses wonder is so new that for a moment at least it is alone, unsystematized, an utterly detached object of rapt attention.”

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the moral indignation of its audience, yet clearly also allows for other, less disparaging responses: Give me leave to lead you by the hand into a wilderness, where are none but monsters, whose cruelty you need not fear, because I teach the way to tame them. Ugly they are in shape, and devilish in conditions. Yet to behold them afar off may delight you, and to know their qualities, if ever you should come near them, may save you from much danger. Our country breeds no serpents or wolves, yet these engender here, and are either serpents or wolves, or worse than both.23

Although Dekker’s stance towards his subject matter – the ‘monsters’ are of course the vagrants and criminals whom he proceeds to describe to his readers – is emphatically judgemental, his moral condemnation of the underworld is framed by what is an essentially aesthetic approach towards villains and villainy. Due to the distancing effected by print, their ‘sight’ “delights” – what Dekker offers, in effect, is an aesthetics of monstrosity. And while, for Dekker, ‘monster’ is certainly a pejorative term, his use of it resonates with older, positive connotations like ‘miracle’ or ‘prodigy’. A monster is something to be abhorred, but also something to be marvelled at because it is exceptional, impossible to classify. In constructing vagrants and criminals as monstrous, the animal imagery found throughout the literature of roguery plays an important part. Criminals and vagrants are situated in a realm of in-betweenness which is neither fully human nor entirely animal. This point is borne out by the title pages to Robert Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets, which are concerned with urban tricksters out to defraud unwitting country visitors to London, the so-called conies or connies, rabbits or hares. Although, within the terminology of the cony-catching pamphlets, the victims rather than the perpetrators are presented as animals or animal-like, the title pages show creatures like the ones in figure one and two. Several explanations have been advanced to account for this curious reversal between text and image: some take them as presenting a case of metonymic substitution of the criminal for the victim24, some regard them as the pictorial equivalent of the essential similarity between cony and cony-catcher that is typical of Greene’s pamphlets:25 conies are usually defrauded when out to defraud someone else. It seems to me, however, that, in this case the simplest explanation is also the most convincing: the woodcuts testify to a deeply ingrained habit of presenting the criminal as animal-like and therefore as monstrous. 23 Judges 1930, 314.

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Fig. 1 Robert Greene, The second and last part of Conny-cachting. London: Printed by Iohn Wolfe for William Wright, 1592. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Mal. 575 (2)

The creatures on the title-pages to Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets present a case of indigenous monstrosity. In that respect, they form a sort of exception to the rule in that the classical locus for monstrosity or mon24 I am indebted to Greta Olson for this point. See her forthcoming ‘Criminal Beasts’ and the Rise of Positivist Criminology – From Shakespeare to Dickens (faculty dissertation, University of Freiburg, 2009). 25 This point was made by Nandini Das in a paper entitled “Who’s the cony? Woodcut representations of rogues and victims in Robert Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets” given at a conference at the University of Canterbury in August 2007 (“Truth Will Out: Crime, Criminals and Criminality, 1500 – 1700”).

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Fig. 2 Robert Greene, A Disputation Betweene a Hee Conny-catcher, and a Shee Connycatcher. London: A.J. for T.G., 1592. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, Call # 61114.

strosities, for early modern readers, would have been in travel narratives. The idea of the monstrous races, prominent in medieval texts like Man-

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deville’s Travels but actually going back to much earlier traditions, echoes through early modern maps and accounts of the New World.26 Greenblatt discusses Mandeville in relation to the state of marvel or wonder that Harman and his successors, if mostly covertly, also seem to aim at. I want to contextualize the pictorial, and more particularly the textual representation of roguery in a slightly different manner, drawing on a slightly anachronistic, but useful concept: exoticism, or, more precisely, indigenous exoticism. Its presence in the literature of roguery has not been ignored, though the term has mostly been used in its historically tainted, pejorative sense, which is to say that the texts’ exoticizing strategies have generally been read as part and parcel of a general strategy of containment or subjection. However, I am interested in exoticism not so much as a manifestation of othering for subjection, but as conveying “a stimulating or exciting difference, something with which the domestic [can] be (safely) spiced.”27 This is a view of the Other which the literature of roguery, though covertly, certainly permits: […] [V]agrants became associated with the freedom that ordinary citizens felt they lacked, […] romanticizing their free-wheeling life was a vicarious escape from a world of religious strictness, moral probity, humanistic moderation, civil manners, homekeeping domesticity – all of which a citizen could assent to in theory, but which in practice must often have felt confining.28

The criminal lower classes are everything that “official England” is not – but sometimes wishes it were. The otherness on offer may be a threat to English self-identity, but it is also pleasurable, thrilling, entertaining. The attractiveness of the Other, even if unavowed, turns it into a marketable good. That way, the literature of roguery qualifies as a manifestation of ‘the anthropological exotic’: […] a mode of both perception and consumption, [the anthropological exotic] invokes the familiar aura of other, incommensurably ‘foreign’ cultures while appearing to provide a modicum of information that gives the uninitiated reader access to the text and, by extension, the ‘foreign’ culture itself.29

As the print market expands and as we move towards the end of the vogue for rogue literature, the accessibility of the foreign world of roguery is a point that the pamphleteers emphasize more and more strongly. 26 27 28 29

Ramey 2008, 94 and passim. Ashcroft / Griffiths / Tiffin 1998, 94. Woodbridge 2001, 21. Huggan 2001, 37.

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Whereas Harman offers unsystematic lists of cant words and their English equivalents, Dekker provides a fully functional dictionary from which cant can, in effect, be learned as a foreign language – even though the words are exactly the ones to be found in Harman. In Lantern and Candlelight, he provides some “un-Englished” cant “to be construed by him that is desirous to try his skill in the language, which he may do by help of the following dictionary.”30 If every jack-boy, as the Beadle of Bridewell tells us, could ask “Will you wap for a win, or trine for a make?”, this is a development Dekker was more than complicit in. Increasing emphasis on the accessibility of the criminal underworld goes hand in hand with increasing elaborateness and multidimensionality in its depiction and – perhaps somewhat paradoxically – with an increasingly overt type of fictionality. Harman did or claims that he did his own interviews; Dekker’s informant in Lantern and Candlelight is Pamersiel, the devil’s envoy. The information itself is thus ‘framed’ as fictional, even though Dekker nowhere explicitly admits this. In O per se O he offers: To shut up this feast merrily, as sweet meats are best last, your last dish which I set before you to digest the hardness of the rest, is a canting song, not feigned or composed as those of the Bellman’s were, out of his own brain, but by the canters themselves, and sung at their meetings.31 (380)

The Bellman is of course Dekker’s own creation, and the comparison of the song to a sweetmeat, though it does not cancel out the pamphlet’s avowedly educational intentions, also hints towards other conceivable uses, among them pleasure and entertainment.32 Where Dekker foregrounds the fact / fiction problem only to launch yet another truth claim, a late pamphlet like the Beadle of Bridewell (1610) can use the unclear – to say the least – ontological status of the nation of rogues for humorous purposes. Martin Markall, Beadle of Bridewell: His Defence and Answers to the Bellman of London begins like a conventional roguery pamphlet, Discovering the long-concealed Original and Regimen of Rogues, when they first began to take head, and how they have succeeded one the other successively unto the six-and-twentieth year of King Henry the Eighth, 30 Stafford 2004, 325, quoting Dekker 1930, 192. 31 Judges 1930, 380. 32 Cf. Stafford 2004, 320 f.

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but then cites the following sources: Gathered out of the Chronicles of Crackropes and (as they term it) The Legend of Losels.33

The pamphlet goes on to describe the state and situation of Thievingen,34 ruled by one Don Purloiningo of Thievingen, scattered with villages like Foistham and Swearinghampton. It offers what, under the circumstances, must be described as a sham historiography and a sham geography of Thievingen. The Beadle of Bridewell, in short, satirizes what its anonymous author (possibly Samuel Rid) obviously perceives as the imaginary anthropology of his precursors in the literature of roguery, their investment in an essentially exoticist discourse. V. Fiction and exoticism The concept of exoticism brings me back to the fact / fiction problem touched upon in the beginning of this essay. To treat the literature of roguery as “exoticist” is to treat it as essentially fictional, for, as most theorists of exoticism have pointed out, the exotic doesn’t exist – it is a textual construct. Far from having its origin outside (the root meaning of the prefix exo-)[…] the exotic is produced inside discourse. It assumes the form of representation, but one whose relation to its referent is one of opacity or blankness. Far from being a transparent sign through which something else can be seen, the exotic functions as a sign that is itself dense and which detracts from its own referentiality.35

Exoticism translates the Other back into sameness, thereby obliterating the otherness which it sets out to document and explain in the first place. Because of the documentary, ‘factual’ pretensions of exoticist texts, the slipping, indeed obliteration of the signified produces a compensatory effect on the level of the signifier. To put it simply, what the exoticist text lacks in factual and conveyable information, i. e. in content, it makes up for in form. This process has been called straining: “[I]t is as if [the] extreme foreignness [of the Other] required a rhetorical and sty-

33 Judges 1930, 383. 34 Judges 1930, 396. 35 Clestin 1996, 163.

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listic surplus, a straining that simultaneously emphasized the workings of this particular mode of representation.”36 Rhetorical and stylistic surplus, ‘straining’, is observable everywhere in the literature of roguery, most obviously perhaps in the compulsive alliterations and the sheer copia of Thomas Harman: I thought it good, necessary, and my bounden duty, to acquaint your goodness with the abominable, wicked, and detestable behaviour of all these rowsey, ragged rabblement of rakehells, that – under the pretence of great misery, diseases, and other innumerable calamities which they feign – through great hypocrisy do win and gain great alms in all places where they wilily wander, to the utter deluding of the good givers […].37

Greene, in the cony-catching pamphlets, favours a similar style: […] [T]hese cony-catchers, these vultures, these harpies, that putrify with their infections this flourishing estate of England, as if they had their consciences sealed with a hot iron, and that as men delivered up into a reprobate sense, grace were utterly exiled from their hearts: so with the deaf adder they not only stop their ears against the voice of the charmer, but dissolutely, without any spark of remorse, stand upon their bravados, and openly in words and actions maintain their palpable and manifest cozenages, swearing […] that they will make a massacre of [my] bones, and cut off my right hand for penning down their abominable practices.38

‘Straining’ testifies not only to the difficulty of translating Other into same, but also to the conflicting desires of the subject torn between a desire for “Home, the Same, the familiar” on the one hand and a desire for otherness – “an outside” – on the other. This point is borne out by Harman and Greene in their contributions to the literature of roguery. Harman, though intensely intent on marking his moral and social distance from the vagrants he interviews, is not above various forms of blackmail and particularly of fraud, exactly the crime with which he charges the vagrants. His essential similarity to those he so loudly decries becomes even more obvious when issues of plagiarism are taken into account. The same goes for Greene. Whereas Harman presents himself as a righteous citizen with a spotless record, one of the major selling points of Greene’s pamphlets is his former involvement with the rogues he now sets out to expose. Greene is a kind of native informant – but though he makes much of his new-found rectitude and his loyalty with the authorities, in36 Clestin 1996, 4. 37 Judges 1930, 61. 38 Judges 1930, 150 f.

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dividual stories often invite readers to sympathize with the cony-catchers rather than with their victims. With both authors, ‘straining’ is arguably linked not only to an effort to translate otherness, but also to an effort to uphold otherness – a desire to maintain the essential separateness of the nation of rogues from the commonwealth, and of the author from his subject. Exoticism has been described as an episteme, “a cultural mechanism for comprehending remote and unknown phenomena without totally emptying them of their strangeness.”39 This definition would seem to presume that the Other exoticized within discourse really exists: it is a “phenomenon” to be “comprehended”, even though its essence may be distorted by the exoticizing strategies to which it is subjected. What I would like to suggest in conclusion to this essay, and with reference to the literature of roguery, is a less essentialist understanding of exoticism. The literature of roguery has all the central features of exoticist discourse. It is concerned with a culture that is both other and same, it is invested in a project of subjection but also attempts to elicit marvel and wonder, the style of some of its most central texts is characterized by a surplus, a “straining” that tries to bridge the conflicting impulses of a longing for sameness and a longing for the Other. Yet does that really turn early modern roguery into a ‘phenomenon’ to be comprehended? There are several factors that would seem to make this tenet difficult to uphold. Plagiarism is rampant among the pamphleteers; there are implicit as well as explicit parallels between the authors of roguery texts and the tricksters and fraudsters they describe, and we observe an increasing tendency towards overt fictionality as we move from the mid-sixteenth to the first third of the seventeenth century. It seems to me that the anthropological project undertaken by the literature of roguery effectively turns the exotic from an epistemological into an ontological category. It is because of their exoticism that the roguery pamphlets can be read as both fact and fiction. While the concept of exoticism provides a valuable heuristic tool for some of the most salient characteristics of the literature of roguery as a whole, it is deeply implicated in the problematic, indeed irresolvable ontological status of the genre. If exoticism can help explain the cultural functions of the literature of roguery, it seems that the literature of roguery, in turn, has some light to shed on the functions and uses of exoticism in the early modern age, and, by implication, on early modern anthropologies. 39 Ashley 2000, 83.

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Texts cited Ashcroft, Bill / Griffiths, Gareth / Tiffin, Helen (eds.) (1998): Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. New York / London: Routledge. Ashley, Kathleen (2000): “‘Strange and Exotic’: Representing the Other in Medieval and Renaissance Performance”, in: Sponsler, Claire / Chen, Xiaomei (ed.): East of West. Cross-Cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference. New York: Palgrave, 77 – 91. Beier, A. Lee (1995): “Anti-language or Jargon? Canting in the English Underworld in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”, in: Burke, Peter / Porter, Roy S. (ed.): The Social History of Language: Language and Jargon. Vol.3. London: Polity Press, 64 – 101. Beier, A. Lee (1985): Masterless Men. The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560 – 1640. London, New York: Methuen. Burke, Peter (1983): “Urban History and Urban Anthropology of Early Modern Europe”, in: Fraser, Derek / Sutcliffe, Anthony (ed.): The Pursuit of Urban History. London: Edward Arnold, 69 – 82. Clestin, Roger (1996): From Cannibals to Radicals: Figures and Limits of Exoticism. Minneapolis / London: University of Minneapolis Press. Das, Nandini (2007): “Who’s the cony? Woodcut representations of rogues and victims in Robert Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets”, conference paper given at the University of Canterbury in August 2007 (“Truth Will Out: Crime, Criminals and Criminality, 1500 – 1700”). Furnivall, Frederick J. (ed.) (1880): The Rogues and Vagabonds of Shakespeare’s Youth. London: New Shakespere Society Publications Series VI. Gibbons, Brian (1968): Jacobean City Comedy. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. Greenblatt, Stephen (1988): “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V”, in: Greenblatt, Stephen (ed.): Shakespearean Negotiations. Oxford: Clarendon, 21 – 65. Greenblatt, Stephen (1992): Marvelous Possessions, the Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hill, Christopher (1974): Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Huggan, Graham (2001): The Postcolonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Judges, Arthur V. (ed.) (1930): The Elizabethan Underworld. London: Routledge. Kinney, Arthur (2004): “Afterword: (Re)presenting the Early Modern Rogue”, in: Dionne, Craig / Mentz, Steve / Arbor, Ann (ed.): Rogues and Early Modern Culture. University of Michigan Press, 361 – 381. Kinney, Arthur (ed.) (1990): Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Kupperman, Karen (1980): Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580 – 1640. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield. Mullaney, Steven (1981): The Place of the Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Olson, Greta: ‘Criminal Beasts’ and the Rise of Positivist Criminology – From Shakespeare to Dickens. (faculty dissertation, University of Freiburg, 2009). Ramey, Lynn (2008): “Monstrous Alterity in Early Modern Travel Accounts: Lessons from the Ambiguous Medieval Discourse on Humanness”, in: Esprit Crateur 48, 81 – 95. Stafford, Brooke A. (2004): “Englishing the Rogue, ‘Translating the Irish’: Fantasies of Incorporation of Early Modern English National Identity”, in: Dionne, Craig / Mentz, Steve / Arbor, Ann (ed.): Rogues and early modern English culture. University of Michigan Press, 312 – 336. Woodbridge, Linda (2001): Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Renaissance Anthropologies of Security: Shipwreck, Barbary fear and the Meaning of ‘Insurance’ Cornel Zwierlein I. Introduction The sociology of time and risk, still much discussed by scholars like Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and the Foucault branch of governmentality studies, is framed by an encompassing historical narrative. Although in traditional societies multiple hazards to human and social well-being were clearly in evidence, they did not lend themselves to being described in any systematic way but were attributed instead to such external factors as divine provenance or cosmic fate. With the progression into modernity, the rise of the modern state and the emergence of an instrumentally rational relation to both nature and social organization, risks became the object of scientific measurement and assessment, subject to schemes of scientific causality and formal calculative rationality. The concept of ‘risk’ came into being with the advent of these technologies – and with ‘risk’ came also the concept of a modern ‘self ’ that attempted to capture reality by planning.1 A developmental trajectory thus becomes apparent – with the transition from medieval tradition to modernity, risk migrated from a domain defined by predestination, fatalistic resignation, incalculability and direct experience with catastrophe itself to one delimited by science, abstract knowledge and expertise, in which risk is contained within a relationship of extreme trust between individuals and collective institutions. This historical narrative of risk sociology also implies a statement on the development of a new anthropology:2 The management of risk entails the individualization of a personal view of the future, and the assumption of a unique mode of temporality inculcated by agents of gov1 2

“There were no risks in pre-industrial societies”. Reith 2004, 386. Cf. Binkley 2009.

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ernmental rationality: political consultants, legal advisors, brokers, forecasters, and insurance agents. Anthony Giddens takes Machiavelli’s famous analysis of fortune’s power in chapter XXV of the Prince as an example for the historical turning point in man’s attitude toward the future and toward planning: It is not surprising that the study of politics should provide the initial area within which notions of fate become transformed, for […] the practice of politics – in the modern context – presumes the art of conjecture. Thinking how things might turn out if a given course of action is followed, and balancing this against alternatives, is the essence of political judgement. Machiavelli […] foreshadows a world in which risk, and risk calculation, edge aside fortuna in virtually all domains of human activity.3

Although they frame his theory with just such an historical narrative of the central break between medieval and modern forms of envisioning the future, the following remarks of Anthony Giddens indicate how indeterminate their underlying historical narrative is. Giddens states “There seems to have been no generic word for risk in Machiavelli’s time, however; the notion appears in European thought about a century later”.4 This assertion that ‘risk’ emerged as a concept only in the 17 centuries sounds rather dubious if we consider the fact that the term ‘rischio’ appeared precisely in pre-Machiavellian Italy, specifically in the commercial language of 13th /14th century maritime insuring practices.5 The same historical imprecision can still be found in a recent article by the time sociologist Gerda Reith, who expressly takes up the task of defining different periods of changing temporal orientation. Reith also distinguishes between medieval conceptions of time and cosmology and those of the (early) modern age, characterized by an instrumentalizing temporal orientation for which the catchword ‘colonizing the future’ has been fittingly coined.6 Like Giddens, she explicitly claims: “From the Anglo-French risqu, the term [risk] was first used in the mid-seventeenth century, and 3 4 5

6

Giddens 1991, 111. Giddens 1991, 111. Giddens’ short reference to Machiavelli is nevertheless in accord with my own reading of Machiavelli as a methodizer of future planning, cf. Zwierlein 2006, 25 – 107. Curiously, there exists no well researched history of ‘risk’. Etymologies may point back to arab sources on mercenaries around 1000 A.D. (cf. Maso 2006, 29), but the real spread of the notion in its technical sense in Modern Europe followed the spread of insurance practices. The term was coined rather ‘en passant’ by Hgerstrand 1988, 40 f., but developed more systematically by Giddens 1991, 109 – 143.

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brought time and uncertainty into a quantifiable relation: Quite simply, the risk of an event occurring was the probability of it happening over a stated period of time.” Relying on famous concepts like the division between the church’s time and the merchant’s time by Jacques Le Goff,7 the research of Ian Hacking and Lorraine Daston about the discourse on probability,8 Max Weber’s characterization of the modern capitalist attitude toward time9 and FranÅois Ewald’s research on the insurance principle, she locates the shift toward a modern notion of risk in the middle of the seventeenth century – stating again falsely that only then would the term have emerged in European languages.10 The historical narrative in French sociological student text-books introducing risk sociology is exactly the same: telling a story of the medieval human as a “believer in the face of damnation” (citing Delumeau, Le Goff, Le Roy Ladurie, Weber), “the invention of the modern risk” takes place with FranÅois Ewald’s 19th-century accident insurance.11 Similar to the risk sociologists Dan Defert and FranÅois Ewald make the same simplistic distinction between traditional and modern forms of self-conduct.12 They point especially to the institution of insurances as an exemplary manifestation of the new attitude of ‘colonizing the future’. Ewald distinguishes between three aspects of ‘insurance’: first, there are economic and financial techniques; second, there are techniques of indemnity and compensation of damages; and third, there is “a moral technique”.13 He elaborates on the last point: To calculate a risk is to master time, to discipline the future. To conduct one’s life in the manner of an enterprise indeed begins in the eighteenth century to be a definition of a morality whose cardinal virtue is providence. To provide for the future does not just mean not living from day to day and arming oneself against ill fortune, but also mathematizing one’s commit7 8 9 10 11 12

Cf. Le Goff 1977a ; also cf. Le Goff 1977b. Cf. Krger, Lorenz et al. 1987; Hacking 1981; Hald 1990. Cf. Weber 2006. Reith 2004, 389. Peretti-Watel 2007, 31 – 62. Cf. Ewald 1991; Defert 1991. But Ewald is better informed about the etymology. Nevertheless, his focus on France, where insurances beyond the maritime field did not emerge prior to the 19th-century, leads to an underestimation of earlier developments on a European scale. Cf. his classic work: Ewald 1986. Ewald’s work on insurance as well as the contribution of Allo 1984, 33 – 40 were an outcome of the 1978/1979 seminar on Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, cf. Foucault 2004, 444. 13 Ewald 1986, 180.

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ments. Above all, it means no longer resigning oneself to the decrees of providence and the blows of fate, but instead transforming one’s relationships with nature, the world and God so that, even in misfortune, one retains responsibility for one’s affairs by possessing the means to repair its effects.14

Indeed, the moral technology of insurance has constituted an important element of daily behaviour since the earlier stages of social modernization. Mitchell Dean, following Pat O’Malley, has termed this everyday conduct of modern ‘selves’ the ‘new prudentialism’.15 This is not the proper place to criticize in detail the historical narrative framing time and risk sociology and governmentality studies. There is indeed a good reason to locate an important shift in insurance and risk history in the late 17th century, but it is not as if the term ‘risk’ itself had appeared only then. What becomes clear in the citations above is that one can study early insurance history also in an anthropological way, asking about the impact of that new institution on the relationship between the early modern self, time and space. In what follows, my short re-reading of early maritime insurance history serves to destabilize the clear-cut sociological distinction between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ and to make clear that the Renaissance is the very period in which all those ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ attitudes are in fact mingled together, that we find elements of pluralization and of antagonistic authorities at the same time and in the same contexts. Nevertheless, one important point will be that ‘insurance’ and ‘risk’ are completely different concepts in the 15th and in the 17th/18th centuries. What was the impact of the Mediterranean insurance business in Northern European countries? What kind of impact did the diffusion of the principle of insurance have on the individuals living there? – We have to place those inquiries in a broader framework that questions the historical modes of communicating and perceiving fear and danger, and of the modes of producing (a feeling of ) security. I will now take a closer look at how the practice of insurance business in 14 Ewald 1991, 207. 15 Dean 1996, 189 – 207. “The multiple responsibilization of individuals, families, households and communities for their own risks – of physical and mental illhealth, of unemployment, of poverty in old age, of poor educational performance, of becoming victims of crime. Competition between public (state) schools, private health insurance and superannuation schemes, community policing and ‘neighbourhood watch’ schemes, and so on, are all instances of contriving practices of liberty in which the responsibilities for risk minimization become a feature of the choices that are made by individuals, households and communities as consumers, clients and users of services.”

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Renaissance Italy and later in Northern Europe functioned (II); then I will treat the emergence of some new threats and dangers in the perception of northern European Renaissance citizens in Elizabethan and Jacobean times (III) and I will close with some reflections, in a critical dialogue with the existing literature about the patterns of insurance and insurance-like behaviour in regard to City comedies: did the diffusion of the insurance principle have some influence on the anthropology of Jacobean theatre (IV)? II. Early Insurances as an instrument for decoupling the realm of values from the environment What do we know about the early practices of prime insurance business in Europe? What are our sources? – The answer is quite clear up to the 17th century: from the 14th century onward there are only few direct sources of insurance practices in the form of late medieval merchants’ ledgers, in merchants’ letters and some original contracts and policies; nearly everything we know about those practices stems from juridical sources. Early insurance contracts of 14th/15th centuries in Genua, Barcelona and Naples were notarized in the registers of the notaries.16 Early insurance business in Venice and Florence, where there was no notarial custom, is known to us only from the records produced by legal disputes before the juridical authorities in the cities17 – with the rare exception of merchants’ family inheritances like the big Datini Archive in Pisa.18 But normally even those policies and contracts are only preserved as annexes of lawsuit records in the state and municipal archives. To my knowledge, we do not have any (meta-)reflections by a merchant about those new practices. Perhaps one could find such a passage on ‘insurances’ in one of the hundreds of unedited Italian manuscript ‘libri di famiglia’, which would be similar to the well-known passage in the ‘Libri della famiglia’ by Leon Battista Alberti, where the idea of ‘money is time’ is already expressed in 15th century Florence.19 But as it is, we find broader 16 Cf. Bensa 1884. 17 Cf. Nehlsen-Von Stryk 1986; Tenenti 1985; Tenenti / Tucci 1991, 663 – 686. 18 For a compilation of sources (not only from the Datini archive) concerning medieval insurance business cf. Melis 1975. 19 Werner Sombart mentions this passage in his dispute with Max Weber on the periodization of the capitalist spirit.

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reflections on the economic or state institutions of insurances, only since the early Enlightenment from the 1650/80 s onwards. For about 350 years of insurance history, the only learned discourse about insurances was produced by lawyers – legists and canonists – who had to deal with the until then unknown form of the insurance contract and who were sometimes involved as consultants in lawsuits.20 During the Enlightenment we find treatises not only on the problems of mortality tables and probability thinking – that is what is normally associated with the topic of ‘insurance’, thanks to the important work of Ian Hacking, Lorraine Daston or Geoffrey Wilson Clark.21 What we also find are more general reflections (for example by Defoe, Leibniz and some rather unknown German cameralists) about the function of insurances for men and society, linking even the practice of fire insurances to Rousseau’s social contract theory.22 Unfortunately, we do not possess similar texts for the Renaissance period, so we have no sources for studying how the Renaissance ‘self ’ expresses his or her relationship to the new mode of ‘colonizing the future’. Prime insurance found its way into European common knowledge on silent feet for a long time. But that does not prevent us from trying to deduce some hypotheses about the relationship between the individual and insurance practices from the sources we have. Let us first take a look at the question of how the merchants fitted insurances into their business practices. In 14th/15th century Italy and up until the 18th century in Northern Europe, there never existed a company exclusively dedicated to the insurance business. Insurances were signed by individual merchants as insurers 20 The first treatise on the subject is Santarm 1552, cf. Maffei 1985; before, we find handlings of the problem with the postglossators like Baldus and afterwards in scholastic legal theory like Summenhart 1500; the problem is touched on in De Soto 1556, lib. 6, qu. 7; Covarrubias y Leiva 1565 [et passim], lib. 3, cap. 2, n. 5; Straccha 1569; we have short mentions by Jacques Cujas, Rutger Ruland, Gouseppe Ludovisi, Alvaro Valsco, Johannes Borcholten, Hieronymus Pantzschmann, Hermann Vultejus, Juan Azor, Domenico Toschi, Leonardus Lessius, Anton Hering, Mario Antonini, Ferdinando Rebello, Garsia Mastrillo, Reiner Bachoff von Echt, a longer treatise in Scaccia 1619 and a famous short discussion in Grotius 1625, lib. II, cap. XII, n. 22. After Grotius, some 30 to 40 legal dissertations were published especially in the Empire by law students of the port cities, starting with Rutger Ruland: Ruland 1630; Schaffshausen 1638. Cf. Ceccarelli 2001, 607 – 658; van Stryk 1986; Vidari 1998, 113 – 137; van Niekerk 1998; La Torre 2000. 21 Cf. Clark 1999. 22 Cf. Zwierlein 2009, 231 – 255.

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for individual merchants as insured. Normally the total value of goods and ships which the client wanted to insure was divided into a handful of partial sums, each insured by one insurer; so, a ship with goods worth 1000 florins was insured by ten merchant-insurers each signing for the risk of 100 florins. Thus we do not find a real specialization of an insurance branch in medieval and Renaissance Europe; insurance was always one of many businesses undertaken by merchants. The only profession which specialized in insurances were the brokers who, for example in Venice, stood at their little portable desks (banchi) in the calle di sicurt at the Rialto; they established the relationship between insurers and insured against a provision and drafted the policies.23 The name of the street testifies to the fact that the business with ‘security’ became a special sector in late medieval public life. Insurance business spread from Florence, Genova, Venice to Southern France, Marseille, Lyon, on to Barcelona, on to the Atlantic coast of Spain and France. Even earlier it had spread to the Netherlands, with Bruges and Antwerp as the commercial centres of late medieval insurance practices in Northern Europe. In the 16th century it reached London and Hamburg, England and Germany.24 How did the insurances figure in the merchants’ minds? – we have to stick here to the still irreplaceable post-war research of Federigo Melis. In Melis’ account, the best representation of the merchant’s mind is the sum of his different forms of written material: his contracts, his letters with which he directed his agents and factors at remote places, and his different account books.25 Recently, Arlinghaus has advocated the idea that we should not think of the merchants’ ledgers as produced by the merchants’ mentality, but rather vice versa, we should imagine the merchants’ mentality constructed and formed by his day-to-day communication with and in his accounting books.26

23 Cf. Van Stryk 1986, 60 – 69. 24 Cf. Boiteux 1968; Fern ndez 1963; Bernal 1996/1997; Raynes 1964; van Gerwen / van Leeuwen 1998; van Gerwen / van Leeuwen 2000. 25 Cf. Melis 1975; Melis 1985. 26 Cf. Arlinghaus 2000, 400.

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The first entries of insurance and risk in an extant medieval merchant’s account book is to be found in the libro maggiore of Francesco Del Bene e Compagni of Florence (1318 – 1320):27 Messer Lapo e Dosso de‘ Bardi e Compagni deono avere d XVIIII d‘Aprile, anno mille trecento dicenove, per rischio de‘ panni iscritti in qu che ci fecero nella fiera di Proino Santaiuolo anno mille trecento diciotto condotti di Fiandra e di Brabante e di Champagnia e di Francia infino in Firenze a tutto loro rischio e nostre spese, e deb bono avere rischio del costo e delle spese che ci hanno fatte suso […] i quali panni costarono con tute ispese condotti in Pisa l. seimilla novecento quarantasette e s. diecinove d. tre a fiorini che montano a ragione di lire otto s. quindici centinaio di rischio, siccome ne fece patto e mercato, l. seicento sette s. dicienove a fiorino […]

Master Lapo e Dosso de‘ Bardi and compagnons must have from 19th April 1319 for the risk of cloth here registered which they have made for us at the fair of Provins and of Saint-Ayoul in the year 1318 transported from Flanders, Brabant, Champagne in France to Florence at their risk and our expenses; and they must have the risk of the costs of the expenses they have made/incurred for us […] The mentioned rolls of cloths have cost with all expenses transported to Pisa 6947 Lire 19 soldi 3 denari (making 8 Lire one ducat); 15 % risk, as we have agreed and treated, result in 607 Lire 19 soldi.

A bit later on we read still this more typical entry:28 Messer Lapo e Dosso de‘ Bardi deono avere d XXVIII Gennaio anno milletrecento dicenove, per le spese fatte d‘Avignone a Pisa e in Pisa sopra undici panni di Cielona iscritti in questa carta nella faccia di sotto […]: Per rimanente di vettura da Parigi a Avignone s. v tornesi, e per isciogliere in Avignone e Nizza e rilegare, e caricare a galea s. otto tornesi somma s. xiii tornesi di s. xv d. viii tornesi florini d‘oro, vagliono a fiorini ………… L. 1 s. iiii

27 Bensa 1884, 183 f. 28 Bensa 1884, 185.

Master Lapo and Dosso de‘ Bardi must have on the 28th january 1319 for the expenses made from Avignon to Pisa and in Pisa for 11 rolls of multicolored table-cloth which are registered on the page here below on the lower part […]: For the transport by carriage from Paris to Avignon 5 l. tournois and for unloading in Avignon and Nizza, rebonding and loading to the galley 8 l. tournois / gold ducats which make in ducats………….. L. 1 s. iiii

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Per la chiaveria d‘Aquamorta fior. 1 d‘oro vagliono a fiorini…………………… L. 1 s. viiii Per vettura d‘Avignone a Nizza fior. Tre d‘oro vagliono a fiorini …………. L. iiii s. vii Per navolo e rischio da Nizza a Pisa flor. Sedici d‘oro vagliono a fiorini .. L. xxiii s. iiii […]

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For the customs duty of Aquamorta 1 gold ducat which makes in ducats… L. 1 s. viiii For the transport from Avignon to Nizza 3 gold ducats which makes in ducats…L. iiii s. vii For the cargo and the risk from Nizza to Pisa 16 gold ducats which makes …….L. xxiii s. iiii

If we look at just these two entries, we see how the amount paid for the transport risk, something like a forerunner of the formal premium, is noted as an additional cost to the acquisition and transport costs of a given item, typically rolls of cloths. If we schematize this, there are two different places where we can find the notices of insurance costs and incomes in medieval account books. We have already seen the first possibility: the premium costs are noted on the left side, the debit side, as additional costs of a trading item. On the credit side, the insurance only figures in the case of wreckage and of destruction of the item. In that case, the total or partial insurance sum replaces the price of the item. From this, the function of the insurance contract becomes clear: it is a tool to maintain the debit/credit-balance in an equal state in a world of double-entry book-keeping, it is a tool which makes sense only in that mental world, it helps to keep business running in its regular order despite every casus fortuitus which may occur.29 The other place where we can find insurances in medieval and Renaissance merchants’ account books are the so-called books of securities themselves. Here, we observe insurances not as liabilities but as assets. The merchant who acts as insurer has to keep a special account book for the premium incomes and the losses to be paid. In those libri di sicurt we also find entries on the gambling business, wagers on the lives of popes and other things, which always attract curiosity and attention in literature but which constituted only a very limited part of the merchant’s activity. More important by far is the place of the insurance as an additional cost in normal transport trading. 29 The notion of ‘casus fortuitus’ stems from the Roman law of obligations, more precisely from the law of risk assumption in contracts of sale or purchase. In the italianized form “caso fortuito” the notion entered the language of insurance contracts and took there a new status as a main contract element. Cf. Zwierlein 2008.

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What are the implications of this use of insurances to the merchants’ new attitude toward time and space? First of all, the time aspect of the insurance contract does not differ from the time aspect of the other transactions noted in the account books of double-entry book-keeping. Every transaction noted in the books has a time index: the expenditures happen at one time – normally earlier – and the earnings happen at another time – normally later. It is true that the content of the insurance contract is special because it focuses on the possible occurrence or non-occurrence of a future event, while the content of a transport contract also aims at a future event, but at one to be effected. As a tool to balance values on both sides of the account book, the mental operation connected with insurances seems to have been part of a mood of general economization of the world, of transforming the world into values. In the end, insurances are nothing other than an accounting trick to avoid imbalances in the double-entry book-keeping system.30 We also have to see and understand the account books in the context of the rest of the merchants’ written communication. Taking our cue from the research done by Melis, we should imagine the late medieval Mediterranean merchant encapsulated in a dense web of incoming and outgoing letters carried by relay couriers. The hubs of the Mediterranean communication and trading network from about 1380 to 1500 were Florence, Pisa, Genova, Venice, Rome, Naples in Italy, the iles of Majorca and Ibiza, Valencia, Barcelona, in Spain, Perpignan, Avignon, Paris, Marseille, Montpelier in France and Bruges in the Netherlands; the latter figured as the only Mediterranean foothold in the northern maritime trading centers. Therefore, the 153000 letters in the Datini archive for a mere twenty years of communication of one single merchant family, the Datini, show that the merchants sent and received letters daily and hourly.31 As we can see from samples of some 2000 letters edited so far,32 the main content of these letters is not political, but exclusively commercial relating above all the movement of their own and others’ goods. Friends, agents, factors and other merchants wrote to Florence reporting the time and place when this or that merchandise had been seen in that city or on that ship in that port for the last time. The letters report the speed of the ships due to winds and weather and they tell about the 30 For a complex reconstruction of the different forms of late medieval merchants’ accounting systems cf. Arlinghaus 2000. 31 Cf. Melis 1973, 389 – 424/b. 32 Frangioni 1994.

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risks at sea, primarily about the danger of storms and of pirates.33 From this we can deduce a general attitude of prudence, fear and awareness of the risks of maritime transport.34 So the mental world of the late medieval and Renaissance merchant is, certainly, temporalized in the new LeGoffian sense of the merchant’s time, orientated towards the hours of the city clocks.35 But it is also a new orientation of a networked space. And it is the crossing of space that brings with it the rischio expressed in the insurance polices. Therefore, if we imagine the insurance practice not inscribed in a diachronic growth history of ‘colonizing the future’, but inscribe it in the Renaissance merchants’ communication network, insurances are part of a spatially organized mental representation of value flows. Space and the abstract mode of thinking in values are, more important than time. To be sure, the events that could destroy the goods would happen in the future, and the letters betray a certain general fear of those possible future events. But in the end, insurances serve to de-temporalize the flow of values: their function is to secure the maintenance of a value in the network of flows independent of the survival of its material substrate. The main function of insurances was thus to decouple the system of merchants’ communication from the imponderables of environment and to stabilize it. III. New fears of ‘Barbars’, hybridizations and the spreading of the insurance principle in late Elizabethan and Jacobean times If the main function of the Renaissance premium insurance business was to sever the system of the merchants’ value communication system from the environment, what can we learn from the insurance conflicts and the lawsuits which have produced the largest amount of sources about insurance practices up to the 18th century? I will treat here a special moment and problem in Hamburg, the most important German site of insurance business and practices, where the premium insurance appeared at about the same time as in London at the end of the 16th century, imported by Dutch merchants.36 In the 33 34 35 36

Cf. Melis 1962, 33. Cf. Delumeau 1978, chap. I.1. Cf. Dohrn-van Rossum 1992. “[D]anechst ohnuerhalten, was gestalt in dieser Stadt nun eine geraume Zeit als vor 50. 60. vndt mehr Jahren hero, vnter den Kauff- vndt Handelßleuthen ein zu

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16th and 17th centuries, Hamburg as a port city faced an important transition from a Hanseatic town oriented exclusively towards the North Sea into an important hub between Southern and Atlantic commerce and the Baltic system. The commerce directed towards the South formed 60 % of Hamburg’s whole trading economy at that time. In the 1620s and 1630s this expansion of Hamburg’s commerce was confronted with some severe problems – an extraordinary accumulation of storms causing ship-wrecks and of ships seized by the corsairs of the Barbary Coast. This led to what we can call the first crisis of insurance business in early modern Germany. Many insurers had obviously signed too many contracts and were now facing ruin. This led them to look for legal help to escape from the obligations whenever there was a chance. One problem was the common practice in insurance business of not paying the premium directly at the moment of the signing, but afterwards when the insured ship had come back safely into the port and when the insured merchant had received his earnings from the trading enterprise, hence having the necessary cash to also, at last, pay the insurance premium. But what if the ship did not come back and the premium had not yet been paid? Normally, the insurers did pay the insurance sum. This shows, once again, how the practice of insurance business did not primarily follow a future orientation: fixing the policy contract was enough, the payment in advance was not necessary. The legal dispute which followed the crisis now produced a great amount of discussion, which involved the whole existing juridical literature from Baldus to Benventuro Straccha about the classification of contracts within the Roman law. Hamburg lawyers (Rutger Ruland) used Roman law and the classification of the insurance as a contractus innominatus to argue for the necessity of paying the premi-

Recht zuelessiger Contract im schwang gewesen jn dehm ein Theil der Contrahenten der zur Sehe an entlegene Ohrter abgeschickter Schiffe vnd wahren risico vndt gefahr vff sich genommen, vndt ihm hingegen ein gewissen gewinn etwa 1. 2. oder mehr vons hundert (so man das praemium genandt) zuesagen oder verschreiben laßen, Jm maßen solcher Contract bey andern nationen, alß in Italia, Engelandt, Franckreich, Niederland, wie auch sonst passim gantz woll bekandt, vndt von den rechtsgelehrten Contractus assecurationis genennet wirdt.” (Rechtliche ausfhrung pro interesse Syndici der Stadt Hamburg in Sachen Hans Helbergs Wittib und Erben contra Jacques Budier, prod. Spirae 9. 10. 1634, in: Staatsarchiv (StA) Hamburg, Reichskammergericht (RKG) H 127 Teil 1, nr. 13); Cf. Kiesselbach 1901; Frentz 1985; Dreyer 1990; Ebert-Weidenfeller 1992.

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um in advance.37 They argued for the temporal future orientation of the insurance, while others defended the autonomy of the economic sphere of the merchants with their proper law, the lex mercatoria. 38 Merchants’ lawsuits about insurances, cambio and other special merchant contracts were made with a special degree of good faith and bona fide. If there was a litigation, it had do be decided quickly and definitively without the possibility of appeals to higher courts which could render the litigations “immortales”, an act which could destroy a whole business. In Genoa, Antwerp, and Amsterdam there already existed specialized chambers of insurance or chambers of commerce for questions which were only relevant in lawsuits.39 So, the controversy over whether the insurance contract was a contractus innominatus or would fit into some other category of the Roman law system of obligations was part of a larger conflict about the question of whether merchants’ contracts were subject to civil law or if they formed a proper juridical sphere unto themselves. But independently of how that conflict was resolved in each individual case, the discussion itself – raised in many lawsuits also after the 1620s/1630s – had the effect of infiltrating the merchants’ sphere with learned civil law on the one hand and to infiltrate learned discourse and the spheres of reflection and discussion outside the merchants’ sphere with the insurance principle on the other. With the first discrete legal treatises ‘de assecurationibus’, which were published in Italy from the 1550s onwards (the first German treatise by Rutger Ruland was published in 1630 in direct reaction to the conflicts of the 1620s mentioned above), we perceive the entry of that theme into some form of a restricted, learned ‘public sphere’. So, paradoxically, while the content of the lawsuits always expressed the will to cut off the special world of merchants’ communication 37 Cf. Ruland 1630: Being a contractus innominatus (and not a consensual contract) the contract would be closed only by handing over ‘a thing’ (the premium), not by simple consensus (signing the contract). Cf. only Zimmermann 1990. 38 Cf. Rçder 4.10.2006. 39 “Weiln aber solche vndt dergleichen Contracts mercatorij majorem et exuberantem fidem requiritur, vndt durchauß nicht kçnnen leiden, das die contrahenten deßwegen mit weitleufftigem Rechtsprocessen solten vermetet, vndt keinem, den andern seines gefallens herumbzuetreiben gestaltet werden: alß sein in andern außlendischen Kauff- vndt Handelsstedten, alß zue Genua, Antorff, Ambsterdam vndt andern Ohrten sonderbahre Rotae, Auditoria, Camerae oder gerichte gewidmet, an welchen von assecuranzen wexeln vndt dergleichen kauffmans Contracten de simplici et plano remota omni appellatione et tela judiciaria geschwind erkandt, vndt die Sachen zuer endschafft befordert werden” (StA Hamburg RKG H 127 1, nr. 13).

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from the rest of the world, the conflicts as such acted as mediators for the diffusion of the insurance principle beyond that closed realm. This effect of hybridization between the commercial and the institutional public sphere led to a certain broadening and a beginning of the universalization of the insurance principle in the northern port cities. At the same time, in the second half of the 16th century and around 1600, Hamburg as well as the Northern port cities of the Netherlands and England were confronted with an old danger which gained new virulence, the corsairs from the Barbary city states of Tunis, Algeria, Tripoli, Morocco. Muslim pirates had been making the Mediterranean insecure for centuries. But with the expulsion of the moors from the Iberian peninsula at the end of the reconquista in 1492 they had retreated to those city states under the loose dominion of the Ottoman Empire. The capture of Tunis by Charles V in 1535 did not last, that of Algeria in 1541 failed. At the turn of the century, the barbarians equipped themselves with new ships and better weapons, and systematized piracy and slavery as their main form of capital acquisition. High estimates count about 1 million Christians who were made slaves by the Barbarians between 1500 and 1830, and the biggest number falls into the first half of the early modern period, more specifically into the time from 1610 – 1650. There is a discussion about those high estimates, but nevertheless, the problem was more important than usually acknowledged.40 At the same time, about 1600, the Northern ports like Hamburg shifted their orientation from the Baltic region – where piracy was nearly unknown in the 15th/16th centuries due to the strong position of the neighboring states – to that of Southern commerce. From their point of view, they were quite suddenly confronted with the ’new’ danger of piracy and slavery in North Africa. In late medieval Mediterranean merchant letters from the 14th century we find regular mention of the movements of the corsairs; in Hamburg and probably also in London, that experience was quite new. We now find reactions in print, for example, by Jean-Baptiste Gramay, a prelate from Arnheim and something like a pan-European diplomat who solicited the emperor and the big northern port cities to form

40 Cf. Bennassar / Bennassar 1989; Bono 1964; Kaiser 2008; Panzac 2009, 129 – 140 has criticized the number (1 million) of Davis and suggests a figure of 180.000. Thorough research will probably show that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

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vividliy an alliance against the Barbary corsairs.41 Broadsheets like his evoked the torments and martyrdoms of Christian slaves in Africa: When the hereditary enemy is taking possession of a Christian ship, after having robbed all the goods of all the captives, they press them to convert to Islam: they beat them hard and they hang them upside-down with thick cords by their wrists; they flagellate them and split their soles to roast them on the fire or they spill seawater into their mouths till it bursts; they hammer nails in their fingers and fill their noses with sulfur fume and in the end they contract a barbed cord around the head until the brain and the eyes jump out of the head.42

This emotionally charged discourse was one element that induced fear and a greater demand for security. Kenneth Parker has underlined quite recently how that problem also involved the English seafarers, how captivity narratives triggered in Tudor and Stuart England the fear of the seafaring nation, and how that had been ignored by research.43 Besides that emotionalized discourse which became related to the broader anti-Turkish discourse of hundreds of pamphlets in early modern Europe,44 the 41 Magnus Ressel will soon publish new findings about the north-European diplomatic and propagandist work of Gramay. 42 “Dann wann sich der Erbfeind eines Christlichen Schiffs / es sey gleich der mit jhme confoederirten / oder andern Lndern bemchtiget / so ist nach außbeutung vnn beraubung aller Gter das erste / die armen Gefangnen ohne vnderschied / jung / oder alt / Weib oder Manspersonen / mit vnauffhçrlichen schlgen / zu vnmglicher verheissung allein darumben zu tringen / damit sie alßdann / wann jhnen der verheissung halber nit zugehalten wirt / zu mehrer Tiranney ein vrsach erfinden vnd frwenden kçnnen. Zu welchem end sie dann die gedachte arme Gefangen mit groben stricken hartiglich / vnd biß auff verletzung der Peiner vmbfangen / mit zusammen gebunden Hend vnd fß in die hçch hangen / bald fangen sie an dieselben zu Geißlen / bald die solen an fssen zuspalten vnnd bey dem Fewr zu braten / jetzt einem gesaltzenes Mehrwaser in den mund / biß dz Er zerspringen mçchte zu giessen / andern in die Negel vnd Finger nadel zutrucken / die Nasen mit schwffel rauch einzufllen / vnnd dann mit einem strick voller knçpff die Hirnschal mit gewalt so lang zusammen zuziehen / biß dz ihme das Hirn vnnd Augen auß dem kopff springen mçchten.” (Jean-Baptiste Gramay: Extract auß dem 29. Capittel deß 7. Buchs Africae Illustratae […], s.l. 1623, f. AijR; Id.: Diarium Rerum Argelae Gestaum ab anno 1619. In quo Argelae, descriptio vita, Religio, & mores Barbarorum, miseria captivorum, statusque Ecclesiae Africanae, describuntur, Cologne 1623). In: Gramay 1998. For the general fear of ‘the turk’ cf. Hçfert 2004; Barbarics-Hermanik 2009. This fear of ‘the turk’ is not identical with the barbary problem, but in the early modern public sphere, the two discourses were intermingled. 43 Cf. Parker 2004. 44 Cf. Gçllner 1961 – 1978.

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problems of capturing ships led to institutional reactions in northern Europe. In 1623 the so-called admiralty was founded in Hamburg, an institution which organized the convoy of trading ships by warships, copying Venetian and Dutch parallel institutions. In 1622/24 the first state insurance was founded in Hamburg into which every seaman had to pay when he sailed out of the port.45 The premium was proportional to the risk of his trip; the nearer to the Barbary Coast he had to sail, the more he had to pay. In the case of capture, if he managed to inform the city of his fate, the city, the slave chest to ransom him. For every sailor, a moral compulsion to care for himself in advance was exerted by that institution. We could say that state biased and private insurances like this triggered in the long run a shift from a belief in fatality and a trust in charity to strategies of precaution and provision against risks. Early English insurance history is well known from the works of Walpole, and Raynes, among others.46 The first insurance policies in the 1540 s are in the Italian language, and the first English policies date from the middle of the century. The centres of the insurance market were Lombard Street and the Royal Exchange. In 1576 a chamber of assurances was founded as before in Genoa and Antwerp. In 1601 we have the first Royal Act on Insurance business with approximately the same story as on the Continent, with the difference that we do not find institutions in England comparable to the Hamburg slavery chest. But the growing danger of the barbary pirates also increased in England the necessity for ‘security’. In 1620 the crown even sent a fleet under the command of Sir Robert Mansel to bombard Algiers and to free some 40 captives. But the normal way to create security was not with fleets and bombs, but by insuring the ships. In the northern countries like England, the Netherlands and Germany we can thus observe an important development and shift at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th – that is, precisely in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. While the maritime insurance business was practiced from the 14th century onwards in Italy, only at that later period did people in the northern port cities come into contact with it. From then on during the 17th century the insurance principle tended to be transformed, broadened and inscribed in other areas of society. The biggest step would be the emergence of fire insurances and the proliferation of life insurance from the 1680 s onward. From that moment 45 Cf. Bohn 2003; Baasch 1896; Baasch 1897; Frentz 1985. 46 Cf. Raynes 1964; Cockerell / Green 1994.

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on, the principle made its way into many parts of social life, it was no longer something closed off in the ‘laboratory’ of merchant communication. ‘Risk’ and ‘insurance’ are therefore by no means phenomena of the late 17th century, as sociological theory continues to assert. They are much older. But the meaning of ‘risk’ and ‘insurance’ had changed a lot. Roughly speaking, there was a shift from space to time. If one is looking for an effect of ‘colonizing of the future’, it is linked mostly with life and fire insurance, not with the maritime kind. The anthropology of ‘insuring’ prior to that date – in the Elizabethan and Jacobean age – is one linked with insecure space and with a new virtual realm of values that doubled the world of things. IV. Insurance and City Comedies One would expect this increasing diffusion of the knowledge, practice and principle of insurances into other areas of social life to be reflected in contemporary literature. With regard to Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, and especially the City comedies, this issue has already been treated to a certain extent by Theodore Leinwand in The City Staged, by Ceri Sullivan in The Rhetoric of Credit and by Anne-Julia Zwierlein in a comprehensive article entitled “Shipwrecks in the City”.47 Leinwand and Zwierlein suggest a close connection between the development of insurance practices in England and recurrences of themes and words in certain plays. For example, Leinwand proposes that the technical language of finance in The Merchant of Venice would imply a familiarity with insurance business when Bassanio says “Be assur’d you may” or Shylock “I will be assur’d”.48 But I would be rather skeptical in this regard. If Shakespeare had wanted to introduce the new technique of insurance, he could have done it easily by using the technical terms of ‘policy, risk, premium’. ‘To be assured’ is a normal phrase recurring in many Shakespeare plays, while there is no single use of ‘insurance’, ‘assurance’, ‘risk’, ‘policy’, ‘premium’ in the technical sense in Shakespeare. The often cited City Comedy Eastward Hoe by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston does indeed reflect many economic and merchant issues, but the figure called “Securitie” 47 Cf. Leinwand 1986, 21 – 80; see also Leinwand 1999; Sullivan 2002; Zwierlein 2004. 48 Leinwand 1999, 15; Zwierlein 2004, 93.

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has nothing to do with insurances in technical terms.49 “Securitie” is just a money lender; while the merchant is “euer repining against heauen, [praying] for a Westerlie wind to carry his ship forth, another for an Easterly, to bring his ship home, & at euery shaking of a leafe, he falls into an agony, to thinke what danger his Shippe is in on(e?) such a Coast, and so foorth”. So, while the merchant is in constant uncertainty, the figure of Securitie points out that “Where we that trade nothing but money, are free from all this, we are pleasd with all weathers: let it raine or hold vp, be calme or windy, let the season be whatsoeuer, let Trade go how it will, we take all in good part.”50 This confrontation of the uncertainty of trading and the calm securitie of money lending suggests the non-familiarity with insurance business rather than the opposite, because an insured merchant would perhaps not have feared weather and wind so much. Likewise, in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, had Antonio insured his ships, the whole story revolving around the pound of flesh for Shylock would not have worked. If elements of adventure, money-making and roguery in the Jacobean City Comedy are paralleled with the economic ‘plot of early modern insurance’ by critical literature, and if that is inspired mostly by life insurance and by Clark’s ‘Betting on lives’, it seems to have been stimulated in a somewhat anachronistic way by the same idea of an equivocation of ‘insurance’ and ‘colonizing of the future’ as in sociological theory.51 In contrast, not even maritime insurance is expressly a theme of the Comedies. The hybridization between the spheres of literary life in the London theatres and the commercial sphere of the streets behind the Royal Exchange does not seem to have been very strong – and in Hamburg, where a hybridization between commerce and the public sphere was stronger, there was no theatre. But the obvious and notorious recurrence of the motives of storm and shipwreck, of the maritime war between Christians and Moslems in the Mediterranean that appear in many late Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, with, for example, something like a reversed Christian renegade Othello at the head of the fleet, reflects the growing awareness of the problems of danger and the need of security in the years around 1600 when the Barbary problem became more and more crucial. Printed captivity narratives 49 Jonson / Chapman / Marston 1605. 50 Jonson / Chapman / Marston 1605, CiR. 51 Sullivan correctly does not mention insurance as an element in the comedies.

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of English sailors had proliferated in London since 1587,52 and stories about English renegades like the pirate Ward were quickly transformed into theatre plays.53 The techniques for the artificial production of security were not yet in the hands of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre figures. The plots of the plays exaggerate rather their tragical aspects, the vision of fear and of danger, than the ‘being-at-the-edge’ of perceiving the problems which were the object of spatial and value-orientated insurance thinking. V. Conclusion If insurance was not important for city comedies, perhaps I should have spoken more about “insurance-like behaviour” than about insurances themselves, about guilds and about functional equivalents for insurances to provide an insight into early modern anthropologies in the realm of economic action.54 But for my purpose it was central to show that, first, the early merchants’ practice of insuring is foremost a technique belonging to the great doubling of the world: that is, the material world of things and goods and the abstract world of values. The insurance principle belongs only to the latter world of value flows, of numbers and balances. Perhaps we would have to admit, that Enlightenment anthropology is already split to that degree into the world of things and the world of values. While Renaissance man is already confronted with the pluralizing element of insurance practices, his reflections on and desires about caring for himself, even in theatre and literature, seem to be still more integrative or more oscillating between unquestioned confidence and helpless uncertainty. An uncertainty linked quite exclusively with space and not with time. In the 1950s, Jean Halprin and Lucien Febvre postulated the necessity of a history of sentiment and the techniques of security.55 At least one of them had probably read Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic in which the theme of fear, anxiety for salvation, solitude in the face of the question of whether one were among the elected or not, had been expressed in 52 53 54 55

Cf. Cf. Cf. Cf.

Saunders 1587. Cf. Vitkus 2001. For other sources cf. Parker 2004. Daborne 1612. Epstein / Prak 2008. Halprnin 1946; Halprnin 1952; Febvre 1956.

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a proto-Freudian fin-de-sicle language.56 None of the two cited Weber, but the joint themes of early capitalism and religious discourse remained present at least in Febvres article about the ‘sentiment de scurit’. After Febvre, the theme was taken up only one-sidedly by Jean Delumeau in his books about La peur en Occident; the economic side of the story was forgotten.57 Perhaps it is time to look beyond the narrow boundaries of economic history and to revive the debate on the psychological shifts connected with the structures of early modern security production.

Texts Cited Allo, Eliane (1984): “Un nouvel art de gouverner. Leibniz et la gstion savante de la socit par les assurances”, in: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 55, 33 – 40. Arlinghaus, Franz Josef (2000): Zwischen Notiz und Bilanz: zur Eigendynamik des Schriftgebrauchs in der kaufmnnischen Buchfhrung am Beispiel der Datini56 Weber had already analysed the medieval situation regarding a “Versicherung gegen die Ungewißheiten des Zustandes nach dem Tode” (Weber 1979, 63): “Die Leistung der Reformation als solche war zunchst nur, daß, im Kontrast gegen die katholische Auffassung, der sittliche Akzent und die religiçse Prmie fr die innerweltliche, beruflich geordnete Arbeit mchtig schwoll.” (Weber 1979, 69 f.). He writes of “Heilsprmien”, “psychologische Prmien” (Weber 1979 88 f.), the “psychischen Prmien” of the “certitudo salutis” (Weber 1979, 96). For the psychological angle of Weber cf. also the following set of citations: “[…] Vor allem aber war der, wie sich immer wieder zeigen wird, fr unsere Betrachtungen fundamentale Bewhrungsgedanke als psychologischer Ausgangspunkt der methodischen Sittlichkeit gerade an der Gnadenwahllehre und ihrer Bedeutung fr das Alltagsleben so sehr in ‘Reinkultur’ zu studieren […]” (Weber 1979, 141), “[…] daß die Religiositt direkt hysterischen Charakter annahm und daß dann durch jene, aus zahllosen Beispielen bekannte, neuropathisch begrndete, Abwechslung von halbsinnlichen Zustnden religiçser Verzckung mit Perioden nervçser Erschlaffung, die als ‘Gottferne’ empfunden wurden […] gefhlsmßig – z. B. in der Form des sog. ‘Wurmgefhls’ […] konnte zum Fatalismus werden […] gefhlsmßiger Aneignung […], gefhlsmßiger Steigerung […], die Versçhnung und Gemeinschaft mit Gott jetzt (diesseitig) zu fhlen […], auf eine gegenwrtige innerliche Gefhlsaffektion. […]. Ein unter Umstnden bis zu den frcherterlichsten Ekstasen gesteigerter Bußkampf, in Amerika mit Vorliebe auf der ‘Angstbank’ vollzogen […], emotionelle Religiositt […].” (Weber 1979, 145, 151, 153 – my italics C.Z.). Cf. for the psychological vocabulary of the fin de si cle Steiner 1964; Schaps 1982. For Weber 1970; Lichtblau 1995; Sombart 1987; Radkau 2005. 57 Cf. Delumeau 1978; Delumeau 1983; Delumeau 1989.

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Angela / Zwierlein, Anne-Julia (ed.): Plotting Early Modern London. New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 75 – 94. Zwierlein, Cornel (2006): Discorso und Lex Dei. Die Entstehung neuer Denkrahmen im 16. Jahrhundert und die Wahrnehmung der franzçsischen Religionskriege in Italien und Deutschland. Gçttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Zwierlein, Cornel (2008): “Die Macht der Analogien: Rçmisches Recht, kaufmnnische Praktiken und staatliche Versicherung im Denken Leibniz”, in: Mitteilungen des SFB 573 ‘Pluralisierung & Autoritt’ 1, 8 – 18. Zwierlein, Cornel (2009): “Die Financial Revolution, die Feuerversicherung des 18. Jhs. und die Umweltgeschichte”, in: Sthring, Carsten / Kreye, Lars / Zwingelberg, Tanja (ed.): Natur als Grenzerfahrung: europa¨ ische Perspektiven der Mensch-Natur-Beziehung in Mittelalter und Neuzeit: Ressourcennutzung, Entdeckungen, Naturkatastrophen. Gçttingen: Universittsverlag Gçttingen, 231 – 255.

Human and Non-Human

Shakespeare’s Public Animals Paul Yachnin A number of Shakespeare’s characters – Katherine in Taming of the Shrew, Bottom, Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor, Shylock, Caliban, and others – can be best described as public animals. By ancient consensus, animals are neither public nor political. Aristotle draws a firm and formative line between human animals and all other animals on the strength of the human capacity for speech, moral judgment, and political, public-making action.1 Yet Shakespeare’s “animal-people” seek a public voice and public judgment, and they do so without casting off their beastliness.2 This element of Shakespearean characterization, which is especially prominent in Katherine, Shylock, and Caliban, was significant in his own time and over the long term because it elaborated and also challenged what is for us the strange notion that there is a hierarchy of kind within the category of the human itself. That the idea seems strange now is the outcome of a long process of social and ideological change in which Shakespeare’s public animals have had some part. Accordingly, my task in this essay is, first, to suggest something about how Shakespeare’s public animals have taken part in what might be called a reformation of kind. In order to begin to do that, I focus on Shylock as an exemplary public animal and make the case that Shakespeare built up the character of Shylock in terms of caninity, a claim that is likely to be controversial in theatrical as well as in political terms. Finally, I suggest that Shakespeare negotiated his own public animality by developing characters that could recruit a public audience on the strength of their ability to perform on both sides of the boundary between humanity and animality. On this account, while the anti-Semitism of Merchant is important in its own right, it is important also because it is an instance of how societies can deploy a discourse of animality in order to deny others, such as players, a legitimate public standing; the play is an instance also of how others such as play1 2

Aristotle 1946, 5 – 7. I use the admittedly ungainly term “animal-people” in order to insist on the oddness of these characters according to dominant ideas about the categorical difference between animals and humans.

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wrights and players can use dominant marginalizing discourses in innovative ways in order to stake a claim for their dignity, worth, and right to public recognition. By focusing on the “dogman” Shylock, I make sure that I do not shy away from what is most disturbing about the play – its deeply rooted anti-Semitism. Shylock is also a dog that talks, which complicates matters, but which does not alleviate what is objectionable about the character or the play (since even a talking dog can be a thorough-going dog). A further complication, as we’ll see, consists in the possibility that the other characters, the Christian ones, might have their fair share of animality too. That recognition of human animality is of great consequence, but it is not, in my view, decisive. I mean it is not quite enough to justify the play’s high standing and long life. The play comes into its own as a socially and ethically valuable work of art because Shylock is a talking dog that seeks a public audience. The dogman becomes human by going public. Not that he can, within the world of the play alone, achieve a public personhood up the high standards described by a philosopher like Hannah Arendt, a political thinker who makes what she calls public “appearance” foundational for the accomplishment of true human being (more about Arendt later). In order to go public and become human to an Arendtian degree, Shylock needs the theatre audience and the reading public, and he needs them over the longue dure. His trajectory thus parallels that of Shakespeare’s theatre and Shakespeare himself, an institution and a writer that share with Shylock his extreme social degradation, a certain scandal that he is even allowed to appear among respectable people, his always questionable public life, and his need for our attention in order to legitimate his publicity (“publicity” basically means “the quality or state of being public” but retains the element of scandal that attached to market-based publication and public performance in early modernity).3 It is important to bear in mind the differences between our thinking about the human and Shakespeare’s ideas about humanity. A unitary idea of personhood is automatic and obvious to us: all persons regardless of race, sex, class, ethnicity, or sexuality are entitled to the recognition of their human dignity and the social, legal, and political rights that flow naturally from such recognition. The boundary between human personhood and animal non-personhood is fundamental for us even as it comes 3

Kenneth Gross has written brilliantly about some of these parallels. Cf. Gross 2006.

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under increasing pressure from animal-rights activism and from new ideas about what Donna Haraway calls “natureculture.”4 The boundary, I suggest, was far more porous for Shakespeare. It was neither automatic nor obvious to Shakespeare and his contemporaries that women or nonChristians or people of lesser rank were human the way male members of the upper ranks were human. When Shakespeare received his coat of arms in 1596 and with it the confirmation of his gentle blood, did he not also thereby gain the formal recognition of his full humanity? I. Dog Words Can dogs talk? Montaigne seemed to think that they could. “[W]e can see,” he wrote in The Apology for Raymond Sebond, “they [i.e., the animals] have means of complaining, rejoicing, calling on each other for help or inviting each other to love; they do so by meaningful utterances: if that is not talking, what is it? How could they fail to talk among themselves, since they talk to us and we to them? How many ways we have of speaking to our dogs and they of replying to us!”5 In contrast, Shakespeare seems to have thought dogs could not speak. Brutus says that he would rather be “a dog, and bay the moon” (4.3.27) than a Roman who sells the mighty space of his large honours for the trash of bribes.6 Dogs, on this account, are noisy but dumb – brutes who clamour by moronic instinct in contrast to which we can recognize and value our own rational pursuit of the good. The dumbness of Shakespeare’s dogs poses a particular problem for me in light of the task that I have set for myself in this section of my essay, which has to do with the importance of rethinking Shakespeare’s conception of character in relation to the species threshold as well as rethinking the affective and philosophical dimension of his drama in light of an idea of a human-animal spectrum, where some characters are perfectly human and some substantially closer to beasts. How can this scaling of characters from full humanity to animality – this playing along the species threshold – be represented by means of the words that characters are given to speak when only humans, in Shakespeare’s apparent account, are 4 5 6

Haraway 2008. Montaigne 1991, 512. Except for the Merchant of Venice (Arden 2nd series), all Shakespeare quotes are from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed.

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given the gift of speech. I have tried to capture that problem in the section heading, “dog-words.” Strictly speaking, there are no such words. We remember the silent Rosalind’s answer when Celia encourages her to speak: Rosalind says that she has no words – “Not one to throw at a dog” (1.3.3). The assumption here is that, since dogs are incapable of meaningful utterance, a word suitable to throw at a dog would be hardly a real word – it would be a mere sound bearing only a semantic trace. What would Shakespeare’s dogs sound like if they could talk? I think that they might sound something like this: Shylock: Three thousand ducats; well. Bassanio: Ay, sir, for three months. Shylock: For three months; well. Bassanio: For the which, as I told you, Antonio shall be bound. Shylock: Antonio shall become bound; well. Bassanio: May you stead me? will you pleasure me? shall I know your answer? Shylock: Three thousand ducats for three months and Antonio bound. (1.3.1 – 09)

Shylock’s line, “Three thousand ducats; well,” begins the scene, but he is clearly echoing something that Bassanio has just said. It is a parroting of human speech: Shylock’s lines are comprised of sounds whose semantic content originates more or less from Bassanio. Or, more precisely, it is a dogging of human speech—repeating human utterances just as dogs follow human footsteps. Henry IV upbraids his son Hal in these terms. The Prince, he says, will show his “Base inclination and the start of spleen”: To fight against me under Percy’s pay, To dog his heels and curtsy at his frowns, To show how much thou art degenerate. (Henry IV, 1 3.2.126 – 128)

Dogs in Shakespeare seem to be natural bottom-feeders who make love to their employment. But importantly they are by turns fawning and vicious – self-serving, base, and not to trust. In the exchange between Bassanio and Shylock, dog-words are more aggressive than fawning, more a subtle threat to property and person than a mark of devotion, especially so in light of the shift in the balance of social power between the Christians Bassanio and his guarantor Antonio on the one side and the Jew Shylock on the other and also in light of Shylock’s word “well,” which serves to punctuate his echoing of Bassanio’s words and thereby to suggest a kind of deliberation on the money-lender’s part.

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The keen attentiveness and underlying sense of threat that are suggested by Shylock’s dog-words are reflected in the history of performance. Making his entrance (January, 26 1814), Edmund Kean graciously acknowledged the audience’s applause and then metamorphosed into something other. John Doran, who was present at the theatre that night, tells us that “the bow which he made in return to the welcoming applause was eminently graceful.” Only then, before the eyes of the audience, did Kean take on Shylock’s persona, as “he leant over his crutched stick with both hands.”7 This spectacular degeneration from upright bipedalism was surely an integral and important part of Kean’s performance. The display of a descent from uprightness is a particularly telling feature since Kean is, of course, the actor credited with changing radically the way Shylock was played. No longer the comic villain, which we suppose was the approach on the Elizabethan stage, and no longer the remorseless monster of Charles Macklin in the eighteenth century – Kean gave Shylock a human face. As Jay Halio points out, William Hazlitt’s understanding of Shylock was transformed by Kean’s performance. Kean showed Hazlitt that Shylock was far more human than he had thought. Hazlitt’s comment is important here, especially because it suggests how even in the enlightened nineteenth century, in the mind of a man of letters, and in the wake of a revolutionary humanizing performance, Shylock’s Jewishness remained stubbornly within the domain of animality: “Shakespeare,” Hazlitt wrote, “could not easily divest his characters of their entire humanity; his Jew is more than half a Christian.”8 On this account, Christian equals human, Jew equals non-human. I should note that early modern Christians had a wide variety of ways of thinking about Jews, including, along with the familiar ideas about infanticide, deicide, cannibalism, and effeminization, a small but robust tradition of philosemitism.9 Animality was by no means the sole conceptual model by which Christians made sense of Jews. I should also make clear that I am not arguing that Shylock is a dog, as if we could re-imagine the play as a Disney movie or an Art Spiegelman graphic novel. What I am suggesting is that Shakespeare’s conception of Shylock in terms of his verbal and gestural language and his place in the universe of creatures depends in large measure on the expressive and behavioral characteristics of dogs and on the relationship between the human and canine species, which for Shakespeare were 7 8 9

Edelman 2002, 109. Halio 1993, 66. Cf. Shapiro 1996, 43 – 88.

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a good deal less clearly separated than they are for us. If I were to offer advice to an actor preparing the role, I would suggest that he spend time at a dog shelter so that he could learn something about the conduct and look of dogs under stress. * * * Shakespeare’s conception of Shylock is essentially canine. He is, Salerio says, “A creature that did bear the shape of man” (3. 2. 273). Shylock’s canine Jewishness is in the language thrown at him (“the dog Jew” (2.8.14), “impenetrable cur” (3.3.18), “inexecrable dog” (4. 1. 127), “this currish Jew” (4. 1. 289 ), but it is also in his language. As we have seen, his first exchange with Bassanio suggests his dogged style of conversation, but his speech and vocabulary become increasingly aggressive and iterative. Since, moreover, his words enact a refusal to enter into a human, verbal exchange, they are more of the nature of a barking than a speaking: Antonio: Hear me yet, good Shylock. Shylock: I’ll have my bond. Speak not against my bond: I have sworn an oath that I will have my bond. Thou calld’st me dog before thou hadst a cause, But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs. The Duke shall grant me justice. I do wonder, Thou naughty gaoler, that thou art so fond To come abroad with him at his request. Antonio: I pray thee, hear me speak. Shylock: I’ll have my bond; I will not hear thee speak. I’ll have my bond; and therefore speak no more. I’ll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool, To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield To Christian intercessors. Follow not. I’ll have no speaking; I will have my bond. (3.3.3 – 17)

Shylock’s dog-words are of a piece here with the unaccountable and irresistible desire for human flesh that rises within him toward the end of his part in the story. It begins as the vaguely threatening “merry bond” that Shylock proposes in 1.3 and from the faintly cannibalistic remark to Antonio in the same scene: “Rest you fair, good signor, / Your worship was the last man in our mouths” (1.3.56 – 57). These seem at first merely curious violations of contractual and conversational decorum, but they are in fact indicators of a deeper division between the Jew and his Christian interlocutors. Shylock’s insistence on what he calls justice in the trial

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scene, but which is in the play’s terms the Jewish hunger for Christian flesh, sets Shylock definitively against what is experienced in the play as the human community and reveals Shylock’s essential nature as a “currish Jew” (4. 1. 288). How did Shylock become a dog and in particular a cur, “a worthless, low-bred, or snappish dog”10 in Shakespeare’s imagination? The association of Jews with usurers and usurers with wolves was common in the period. James Shapiro quotes the conclusion of a letter that Edmund Spenser wrote to Gabriel Harvey: “He that is fast bound unto thee in more obligations than any merchant in Italy to any Jew there” (98). Shylock’s predecessor, Marlowe’s villainous Barabas, was a hypocritical dog in his time and certainly influenced Shakespeare’s conception of Shylock: We Jews can fawn like spaniels when we please, And when we grin we bite; yet are our looks As innocent and harmless as a lamb’s. I learn’d in Florence how to kiss my hand, Heave up my shoulders when they call me dog […]. (2.3.20 – 24)11

As we have heard, moreover, “dog” and “cur” were ubiquitous terms of opprobrium in Shakespeare’s culture. All of this makes Shylock’s caninity seem more or less natural and to be expected, but Graziano helpfully provides a genealogy for Shylock, a metamorphosis from currish wolf to inexecrable dog that suggests why Shakespeare seized on and developed Marlowe’s caninization of the figure of the wolfish usurer: O, be thou damned, inexecrable dog, And for thy life let justice be accused! Thou almost mak’st me waver in my faith To hold opinion with Pythagoras, That souls of animals infuse themselves Into the trunks of men. Thy currish spirit Governed a wolf who, hanged for human slaughter, Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And whilst thou layest in thy unhallowed dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous. (4.1.127 – 137)

The wolf is in nature and in human imagination alien to humanity, a creature whose predation is an upsurge of unchecked appetitive wildness 10 This is the first definition of “cur” given by the OED (vol. II, p.1258). 11 Marlowe 1969.

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into human society, and a figure of unchecked appetite as an aspect of human society itself. But the wolf whose hanging yielded the currish spirit that transmigrated into Shylock’s dam was already somehow inside human society, since it suffered the legal penalty of hanging. Shylock is therefore even in his ancestry inside the human community yet not of it. Dogs have a place with us, they are bred, valued, and functional, but curs are low-bred, uncontrolled, and unwanted denizens in our communities. Shylock is a cur, according to this idea, because Jews are similarly animal strangers in our midst. According to Bruce Boehrer, it was traditional to represent Jews as feral interlopers, a characterization that contributed to the Continental practice of ritual hanging of Jews alongside dogs: This “particularly degrading mode of execution,” represents a “reversed Crucifixion.” Hanged upside-down from the gallows, two dogs stand in for the thieves executed with Jesus, while the condemned man, in conformity to a long-standing identification of Jews as “Antichristi typus,” occupies the central spot of dishonor, his baseness and bestiality apparently transcending even his comrades’.12

II. Going Public, Becoming Human The characterization of Jews as nonhuman belongs to the play as a whole. That is the case because Shakespeare’s culture is one for which not all creatures that bear the shape of a man are men. While is a fundamental principle of modern political culture that all persons are entitled to the recognition of their human dignity, it was not so to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Shakespearean characterization is based, in this view, not on an ideal of equality among human creatures but rather on an idea that humans are strung out along a hierarchy of capabilities and entitlements that coordinates to differences of sex, ethnicity, race, religion, and social rank (or breeding or blood). That means that some characters in Shakespeare are far closer to animality than are other characters. We can perhaps begin to see the cogency of this view of Shakespeare’s historically situated art of characterization by considering Shylock’s daughter Jessica’s response to sweet music and Lorenzo’s sweet and beautiful account of his newly Christian wife’s residual animality (here treated as attractive rather than repulsive but as nonhuman nonetheless): 12 Boehrer 1999, 165.

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Jessica: I am never merry when I hear sweet music. Lorenzo: The reason is, your spirits are attentive: For do but note a wild and wanton herd, Or race of youthful and unhandled colts, Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud, Which is the hot condition of their blood; If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound, Or any air of music touch their ears, You shall perceive them make a mutual stand, Their savage eyes turn’d to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music. (5.1.69 – 79)

If Jessica can be likened by someone who loves her to a kind of wild herd animal or an unbroken colt, then it should not surprise us to find that Shylock is a dogman. That conception of the Jew is embedded in the text, in the memory of performance that is implicit and active in the text, and in the performance and reception history of the play. But it is by no means the last word on Shylock. That is the case because the human/animal threshold is permeable and unstable. One of the causes of this instability consisted in the expanding resources of public expression and action that were becoming available to ordinary people, even to a dogman like Shylock, who uses the law of contract not only to seek his revenge on Antonio but also to get his day in court.13 In the trial scene, it becomes evident that if one creature that bears the shape of a man is not a man then it is possible that other creatures with the same features are also not men. When Peter O’Toole as Shylock suffered his final defeat, the assembly of Christians was transformed into something like a pack of carnivores, displacing the Jew from the realm of animality. The shifting of the weight of bestiality from Shylock to the Christians at this crucial moment in the play (Shylock’s last moments on stage) is a performance possibility built into the design of the scene and the unfolding of the dialogue. The overall design positions the bodies on stage and the rhythm of their interactions in ways that resonate with the practice of bear-baiting, an important competitor entertainment form whose complex disposition of spectator sympathies between bears and dogs Shakespeare adapted in this play as well as in plays with scenes of public humiliation such as Merry Wives and Twelfth Night and plays where heroic figures are brought down by packs of others like Troilus 13 For more about the expanding opportunities for public expression and action, cf. Wilson / Yachnin 2009.

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and Cressida and Coriolanus. In these plays, the ursine figure commands some if not all our allegiance and sympathy.14 The sympathy for Shylock, a figure alien, animal but not entirely other, which is such an important feature in performances since the nineteenth century, cannot have been completely absent from the original staging. The character of Shylock solicits our attention and sympathy to the same degree that the play calls on us to judge the judgment of the trial scene. In a scene of trial and officially condoned torture, even a bear can be worthy of our fellow feeling. Consider this passage from Thomas Dekker: No sooner was I entred [the bear garden] but the very noyse of the place put me in mind of Hel: the beare (dragd to the stake) shewed like a blank rugged soule, that was Damned, and newly committed to the internall Charle, the Dogges like so many Divels, inflicting torments upon it.15

There is no better indication of the persistent mixing of animality and publicity in the play than the fact that when Shylock enters onto the public stage on the Venetian court of law, he does so by traversing the space between caninity and ursinity. But the point is that he does go public. That dimension of Shylock’s character and story is strongly different from Marlowe’s Barabas, who would never have bothered to take his enemies to court so long as there was a dram of poison left in Malta. However marked is his appearance in court by obduracy, impertinency, and the threat of violence, Shylock is noteworthy because he seeks a public rather than a private revenge against his enemy Antonio. In effect, he uses the law to challenge the Christian practices of exclusion that keep him a public spectacle of a cur and prevent him from becoming what we could call a public person. III. William Shakespeare: Public Animal There are historical, social, and normative dimensions to Shylock’s going public. Jrgen Habermas has argued that early modern society is characterized by “representative publicity,” a state of affairs where public personhood belongs to the monarch and the social elite exclusively.16 This is likely overstating the case for early modern England, but Shakespeare himself registers 14 Cf. Scott-Warren 2003, 63 – 82, esp. 79 – 82. 15 Dekker 1609, B2. 16 Cf. Habermas 1991, 6 – 10.

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how deeply unequal is the access to publicity when, for example in Sonnet 9, he contrasts his addressee the aristocratic young man (the whole world is his life partner; if he dies without issue, “The world will wail [him] like a makeless wife”) with “every private widow,” a bereft nobody who is nevertheless able to take comfort in her late husband’s features as they are reflected in the faces of his children. “Private” is used here, as it is generally in Shakespeare, in the sense of privation, a meaning that is well described by Arendt as “a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacities.” In “ancient feeling,” Arendt says, “A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human.”17 Not surprisingly, Arendt tells us that we need publicity to become human: Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?” […] In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world […]. (178 f.)

Shakespeare himself was able to become something of a public person by way of his work as an actor and a writer in the common playhouse. This registers in his work as a distinctly questionable publicity, as in Sonnet 111’s petition to the young man: O for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide, Than public means which public manners breeds.

Shylock is also able to make his appearance in “the human world,” but only by appealing to views held outside the world of the play. No one in Antonio’s Venice would think to raise the question that would have been obvious for many in Shakespeare’s audience, especially those who had been required to embrace the state religion, which is that forced conversions, according to Christian thinking generally, are normally neither desirable nor praiseworthy. Shakespeare’s period was also alive to questions about the animal/human threshold. In the Apology, Montaigne discusses several cases of animals in mourning for the loss of their human masters. He also enumerates many instances of animal rationality and 17 Arendt 1998, 38.

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of their capacities for learning, introspection, and articulate expression. Shakespeare has Lear make a similar but different case for the near-identity of human and animal: “Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. […] Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal as thou art” (3.4.102 – 108). Importantly, Shakespeare is suggesting here that what connects all people as equals is not their common humanity, as something categorically different from animality, but rather their shared rootedness in nature and their shared and disguised animality. On this account, Shylock might indeed be a dogman but he would be no different in essential terms from all the other wild and wanton animals that bellow and neigh in the streets of Venice. Before I offer a brief, general conclusion, let me make one final observation about the play itself. Shylock’s dog-words mark him as less than human, but they can nonetheless be instruments of considerable emotional and critical force in performance, able to win an audience to reconsider the human/animal threshold in relation to the characters and thereby to see the dramatic action with new eyes. To return to King Lear for a moment, we remember the force of Lear’s cry when he enters carrying Cordelia’s dead body. Before he can find his human voice, he has not words but dog-words: “Howl, howl, howl!” When Laurence Olivier played Shylock in 1970, he reprised the terrifying off-stage scream that he had devised for his role as Oedipus twenty-five years earlier and he also must have remembered Lear’s animalistic howling. His Shylock was helped off the stage and then, wrote one reviewer, “[we heard] an anguished crescendo of a wail, as if Shylock’s wretched soul had died within him”.18 Olivier’s parting dog-word hung over the action that followed and determined its tone. At the end Shylock was not forgotten and his animal-like cry was transformed into an unearthly prayer as Jessica declined to join the others and stood reading her father’s deed of gift while an offstage voice recited Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead.19 In this performance, then, as to some degree in all performances of the play, Shylock is able to begin to become human by going public, which means by going out among the playgoers. I hope that my account of the dogman Shylock has begun to demonstrate that Shakespeare’s public animals have a bearing on our under18 Edelman 2002, 241. 19 Edelman 2002, 261.

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standing of the social and political dimensions of Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s theatre in his own time and over the long term, and also a bearing on what I have called the reformation of kind. That his public animals were involved in a “kindly” reformation – or indeed that there has been a reformation of kind at all – is a question that can be answered only by a massive, concerted effort of historical inquiry far beyond the scope of this preliminary essay. But that Shakespeare is a public animal like Shylock, Katherine, or Caliban seems, I suggest, abundantly clear on the evidence of social history as well as on his own account of the beastliness of theatrical publicity. This is, of course, one important way of understanding the roots of Shakespearean empathy, which is the affective dimension of his theatrical craft, by which he has been able to recruit a public over the long term for his menagerie of animal-people and for himself.

Texts Cited Arendt, Hannah (21998): The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle (1946): The Politics. Trans. by Ernest Barker. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Boehrer, Bruce (1999): “Shylock and the Rise of the Household Pet: Thinking Social Exclusion in The Merchant of Venice”, in: Shakespeare Quarterly 50, 152 – 170. Dekker, Thomas (1609): Worke for Armorours. London: Nicholas Okes. Edelman, Charles (2002): The Merchant of Venice: Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gross, Kenneth (2006): Shylock is Shakespeare. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press. Habermas, Jrgen (1991): The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Halio, Jay (1993): “Introduction”, in: Halio, Jay (ed.): The Merchant of Venice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haraway, Donna J. (2008): When Species Meet. Minneapolis / London: University of Minnesota Press. Marlowe, Christopher (1969): The Jew of Malta, in: Steane, John B. (ed.): The Complete Plays. London: Penguin. Montaigne, Michel de (1991): The Complete Essays. Ed. and trans. by M. A. Screech. London: Penguin. Scott-Warren, Jason (2003): “When Theaters were Bear-Gardens; or, What’s at Stake in the Comedy of Humors,” in: Shakespeare Quarterly, 63 – 82. Shakespeare, William (1955): The Merchant of Venice. Ed. by John Russell Brown. The Arden Edition 2nd series. London: Methuen.

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Shakespeare, William (21997): The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. by G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Shapiro, James (1996): Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, Bronwen / Yachnin, Paul (2009): Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge. London: Routledge.

“Fellow-brethren and compeers”: Montaigne’s Rapprochement Between Man and Animal Markus Wild With the words “confreres et compaignons” (“fellow-brethren and compeers”)1 Montaigne addresses the animals at the beginning of his famous defence of the reason of animals in his rambling essay “An Apologie of Raymond Sebond”, written in the 1570s. By addressing us as animals Montaigne is, in fact, much more polite than in his first address to us, where he addresses human beings in the following way: “The natural, original distemper of Man is presumption. Man is the most blighted and frail of all creatures and, moreover, the most given to pride.”2 An important proof of our presumption and vanity consists in the fact that we allocate capacities and abilities to the animals as we portion out pieces of food to our pets and livestock. As Montaigne puts it, vanity makes him equal himself to God; attribute to himself God’s mode of being; pick himself out and set himself apart from the mass of other creatures; and (although they are his fellows and his brothers) carve out for them such helpings of force or faculties as he thinks fit.3

For, by what kind of evidence do we deny language, reason, understanding, culture, or morals to animals?4 “How can he, from the power of his 1

2 3

4

The translation “fellow-brethren and compeers” is John Florio’s. For convenience, however, all references to Montaigne’s Essays are to the page numbers in the translation by Screech 1993, and to the page numbers in the French edition by Villey, revised by Saulnier 1965. The chronological layers of the texts are not indicated as they play no role in my argument. “La presomption est nostre maladie naturelle et originelle. La plus calamiteuse et fraile de toutes les creatures, c’est l’homme, et quant et quant la plus orgueilleuse.” (II, 12, 505/452). “C’est par la vanit de cette mesme imagination qu’il s’egale  Dieu, qu’il s’attribue les conditions divines, qu’il se trie soy mesme et separe de la presse des autres creatures, taille les parts aux animaux ses confreres et compaignons, et leur distribue telle portion de facultez et de forces que bon luy semble.” (II, 12, 505/ 452). For an excellent discussion cf. Serjeantson 2001, 425 – 444.

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own understanding, know the hidden, inward motions of animate creatures? What comparison between us and them leads him to conclude that they have the attributes of senseless brutes?”5 As an out and out Pyrrhonian sceptic, Montaigne questions the alleged evidence and tries to establish arguments in favour of the reason of animals. And he does so in order to counterbalance the arrogative human assumption of being among living creatures the only creature with a rational soul. This, of course, marks an important shift in the history of human self-understanding. One very important and essential feature (and I would claim: the most important and the most essential feature) of human self-understanding consists in the distinction between man and animal, in the anthropological difference. 6 And this very difference is commonly associated with having or not having a rational soul or mind. In this way, then, Montaigne approaches the animal to man. He does so by allowing the animal a stance, a perspective of its own on the world. This kind of rapprochement and this acknowledgment of a perspective are best captured in Montaigne’s famous saying: “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her? [ed. 1595] We entertain ourselves with mutual monkey-tricks. If I have times when I want to begin or to say no, so does she.”7 I have presented Montaigne’s arguments in support of animal reason in other places,8 and I have defended a Phyrronian interpretation of Montaigne elsewhere as well.9 In what follows, however, I want to take a look, 5 6 7

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“Comment cognoit il, par l’effort de son intelligence, les branles internes et secrets des animaux? par quelle comparaison d’eux  nous conclud il la bestise qu’il leur attribue?” (II, 12, 505/452). Cf. Wild 2006. For an excellent discussion of ancient philosophy cf. Sorabji 1993. For a more extended view cf. Steiner 2005. “Quand je me joue  ma chatte, qui sÅait si elle passe son temps de moy plus que je ne fay d’elle. [d. 1595] Nous nous entretenons des singeries reciproques. Si j’ay mon heur de commencer ou de refuser, aussi a elle la sienne.” (II, 12, 505/452) Cf. Wild 2006, 43 – 123; Wild 2009, 141 – 159. Cf. also Gontier 1998. Classical studies for the early modern period are Boas 1933; Hester 1936; Rosenfield 1940. They are, however, basically misleading, for they either do not take Montaigne into account and focus on the animal-machine-debate only or they treat Montaigne exclusively as a satirist. Cf. Wild 2000, 45 – 56; Wild 2009, 109 – 134. For different or opposing perspectives on Montaigne’s scepticism cf. Strowski 21931; Dumont 1972; Limbrick 1977, 67 – 80; Schiffman 1984, 499 – 516; Laursen 1992; Tournon 2000, 45 –

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so to speak, at the other side of the same coin, since not only does Montaigne approach (and thus liken) the animal to man, he also approaches human beings to animals. But before I begin with the main subject of my talk, let me emphasize that some of my more salient expressions so far are not meant to be unduly metaphorical or figurative. What I am hereby referring to are expressions like ‘addressing the animal’, ‘rapprochement between man and animal’, ‘acknowledging a perspective of its own’ or ‘approaching the animal to man’. To illustrate this I will briefly digress to an example closer to us in time than the early modern essayist’s assemblage of zoological lore taken from ancient literature. Nevertheless, I consider this example to be very Montaigneian in spirit. Moreover, I mean to indicate in this way that I consider Montaigne’s voice to be addressing us today.

I. Addressing the animal in a Montaigneian spirit The example is about gorillas. The first scientific description of the gorilla originated in 1847 and would set the pattern for a hundred years, when most of the encounters with gorillas took place. On the one hand there is a description of the animal that is very similar to us, on the other hand, gorillas are said to be exceedingly ferocious, and always offensive in their habits. The only scientist in the 19th century to produce a long-term study of the gorilla was Robert Garner in 1896. Intimidated by the supposedly ferocious nature of the gorilla, he built a portable cage he could see through on all sides. Thus protected, Garner spent 112 days in the African jungle, waiting for the gorilla. One day a young gorilla came close to the cage and took a peep. Garner writes: He stood for a time, almost erect, with one hand holding on to a bough; his lower lip was relaxed […], and the end of his tongue could be seen between his parted lips. He did not evince either fear or anger but rather appeared to be amazed.10

62; Brahami 2001; Hartle 2001; Levine 2001; and (of course) Popkin 2003. Historically, there is a close connexion between sceptical thinking and animal thought, cf. Floridi 1997, 27 – 57. 10 Garner 1896, 239.

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Who wouldn’t? In the first half of the 20th Century the hunters and collectors came.11 The hunter Carl Akeley is reported to have said: “The white man who will allow a gorilla to get within ten feet of him without shooting is a plain darn fool.”12 But then, something changed. In 1959 George Schaller went to Africa in order to study the Mountain Gorilla. Schaller had a very simple and very courageous idea, namely to advance, sit, and remain in full view. He increased his visibility and trustworthiness by moving slowly, by wearing the same clothes, by roaming alone, and by never chasing the animals.13 He was able to have a full view of the gorillas, because they could inspect the alien clearly, because they could watch and approach him, and because they could get acquainted with him. Unlike his predecessors, Schaller granted the gorilla a perspective of its own. And his better known successor, Dian Fossey, even started addressing the gorillas.14 One way to bring out the Montaigneian spirit of my gorilla example is a variation on the famous question I quoted a moment ago: When I watch the gorilla, how do I know that he is not watching me rather than I am watching him? Another way to characterize Schaller’s attempt of rapprochement is this: he wanted to counterbalance our tendency to consign animals to the mercy of our cultural imagination. Unfortunately, this attempt has led recent Cultural Animal Studies in a wrong direction. Here is an example of what I have in mind: “Animals do not mean anything; they are nothing more than that which the viewer sees; they do not, in themselves, symbolize or signify anything else.”15 Taken in one sense, this seems correct. Yet, in another sense it does not. Animals do mean something, and they are more than what the viewer sees. I know of no external thing that symbolizes or signifies anything else in itself. Signs, words, gestures, drawings, etc. signify something, yes, but they are made to mean 11 The four officially approved gorilla subspecies of today were named after their killers and collectors. The colonial types of the missionary (Thomas S. Savage), the man at arms (Robert von Beringe), the merchant (Herr Diehl), and the hunter (Rudolf Grauer); cf. Meder 1995. In 1929, a first surge of interest in the natural behaviour of the gorilla brought biologist Harold Bingham to the Congo. But his deficiency in training, his army of porters, trackers, and assistants, combined with the elusive nature of gorillas, resulted in complete failure and in poor photographs of shadowy, distant gorillas; cf. Bingham 1923, 1 – 66. 12 Quoted in Schaller 21964 , 10. For more on gorilla history cf. Dixson 1981, 1 – 10. 13 Cf. Schaller 1963. 14 Cf. Fossey, 1983. 15 Mullan / Marvin 1987, 124.

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something by something or (rather) by someone else. They do not signify in themselves, their meaning is derived. Their meaning is derived from our uses and from our thoughts, desires, purposes, intentions and so on. But now it seems that the way the animals themselves can mean something is at the mercy of our meanings. And this is just the line of thought Montaigne attacks when he says that man “carves out for the animals such helpings of force or faculties as he thinks fit.” In a Montaigneian spirit we should say the following instead: the meaning of thoughts, desires, purposes, intentions and so on is not derived from other meanings, it is original meaning. We mean something by using symbols, and we mean something by having thoughts. And clever and social animals mean something by producing signs, and they mean something by having thoughts, desires, purposes, intentions.16 Therefore, clever and social animals such as gorillas mean something. They have a view of the world. In this sense, they are not at the mercy of our meaning. (They are at our mercy in a different way.) What about ‘rapprochement’? Usually, the expression ‘attempt a rapprochement’ is used in political, belligerent, or war-like contexts. The context of the comparison in my example certainly was, and still is, war-like. Montaigne’s attempt at a rapprochement between man and animal took place in an extraordinarily belligerent context, too. From another point of view, in what sense does Montaigne approach and thus liken the human to the animal? I can approach this question by focussing on a contrast in the concept of ‘anthropology’. On the one hand there is the idea that anthropology is a project aimed at the exploration of universal human nature; on the other hand, there is the idea that anthropology is concerned with the investigation of cultural and ethnic differences. Anthropology in the first sense seems to emphasise constant, universal, defining features of human nature, whereas anthropology in the second sense seems to emphasise contingent, cultural, and self-defining features of different communities. How do these two ways of conceiving of human beings relate to each other?17 The way Montaigne would accom16 For a discussion of animal mentality and cognitive ethology cf. Allen / Bekoff 1997; Bekoff / Allen / Burghardt 2002; Bermudez 2003; Daston / Mitman 2005; Hurley / Nudds 2006; Wild 2008. 17 The difficulty with the question is intensified by taking up strong positions and by forcing the juxtaposition into outright policies of confrontation. Such was, for example, the case with Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002). Inspired by poor natural science, Pinker holds, for example, that the way children turn out is almost wholly unaffected by how their pa-

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modate both views is by invoking the concepts of a first nature and a second nature (mostly by implication, but literally in one important passage).

II. Experience, habit, and custom: the idea of a second nature The basic idea is simple and goes back to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. In his account of the acquisition of virtue of character Aristotle argues that it takes habituation for virtue to evolve, since virtue is not naturally given, but is based upon natural tendencies that are realized through habituation. He says: “Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us, rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.”18 Acquiring certain characteristics by education, learning, and habituation is surely natural for all human beings. Our capacities for imagination, action or thought are natural insofar as they depend on our biological endowment (on our first nature) and insofar as they are acquired during the normal human developmental process. They are part of second nature because we can acquire them only by being initiated into a specific cultural tradition. Second nature can be understood as an actualization of potentialities that belong to human animals. All human beings are endowed with the potentialities for the acquisition of habits of thought and action, and (if all goes well) they do acquire a second nature. That is our way of being an animal.19 However, there is a problem about different forms of a second nature. By what standards do we compare culturally different ways of life? The answer, in short, is: by our first nature; by the fact that we are, like the other animals, vulnerable, fragile, mortal bodily creatures. In the remainder of my paper, I will try to explain this idea. Let me start with Montaigne’s understanding of the Aristotelian idea of a second nature. rents bring them up. Human beings are viewed as Pleistocene-minded creatures wondering how they got lost in contemporary mega-cities. But surely, this is absurd. And it seems equally absurd to think, inspired by poor cultural studies, that the way children turn out is nothing but an effect of parental speech acts and the effects of biopolitics, phono-, logo-, ocular- or whatsoever-centrism. 18 EN II 1, 1103a23 – 26. 19 In contemporary philosophy it is John McDowell who has brought the notion of second nature to the fore again, cf. McDowell 1996, chap. 4; “Two Sorts of Naturalism”, in: McDowell 1998, 167 – 197.

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Interestingly, Montaigne develops the idea of the necessity of a second nature in the course of launching a critique against Aristotle. At the beginning of the essay “Of experience” Montaigne says: “No desire is more natural than the desire for knowledge. We assay all the means that can lead us to it. When reason fails us we make use of experience”20 This opening evidently refers to the beginning of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know.” The beginning of Aristotle’s work implies that man is the one who actively seeks for knowledge. More precisely, knowledge is the perfect actualization of human nature. Montaigne, however, seems to imply that the desire for knowledge is more akin to a driving force. Man is driven by his desire for knowledge. This way of putting the matter allows, first, for the question of whether the quest for knowledge is a good thing in itself (why should a fact about a natural tendency have normative force?), and it allows for the further question of whether it is possible for man to gain knowledge in the first place. I will not go into the first question here. Instead, I will take up the second question. More precisely, this question is concerned with whether it is possible for man to gain knowledge from experience. Of course, we do have experience and experiences in a very commonsense way. Montaigne is eager to describe his way of experiencing things, people, happenings, or events. But how could this mundane notion of experience provide a basis for knowledge in a more demanding way? Let us take a look at the beginning of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. According to Aristotle all our knowledge begins with sense-experience. The senses discern things and qualities, and this kind of information is stored in memory. The memories of certain things and qualities constitute man’s experience. This experience is the foundation of the practical arts and the sciences. The practical arts build on generalisations extracted from experienced similarities between things or qualities. The sciences, however, are more demanding, because they are searching for the true causes of the generalisations just mentioned. But Montaigne doubts the possibility of generalising from experience: The induction [consequence] which we wish to draw from the likeness between events is unsure since they all show unlikeness. When collating objects no quality is so universal as diversity and variety. As the most explicit example of likeness, the Greeks, the Latins and we ourselves allude to that of eggs, 20 “Il n’est desir plus naturel que le desir de connoissance. Nous essayons tous les moyens qui nous y peuvent mener. Quand la raison nous faut, nous y employons l’experience.” (III, 13, 1207/1065).

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yet there was a man of Delphi among others who recognized the signs of difference between eggs and never mistook one for another; when there were several hens he could tell which egg came from which. Of itself, unlikeness obtrudes into anything we make. No art can achieve likeness.21

In order to be able to generalize from experience we have to be able to compare the objects of experience. But how is this supposed to work if these objects are dissimilar, different, and always changing?22 If experiences are dissimilar, what entitles us to classify similarities and to extract generalisations from them? (In retrospect, it is easy to see that Montaigne articulates doubts similar to David Hume’s famous sceptical concerns about inductive reasoning.) And if experience, on a very plausible assumption, is the basis of practical arts, professions, and science, and given the fact that most cultures do actually contain forms of practical arts, professions, and science, how is it possible that experience in the relevant sense is not possible? In reply to this question, Montaigne attempts to show that we ought to have some sort of grids or schemes to establish order in, and to generalize from the unruly multitude of experiences. Generalisation is not the offspring of experience, rather, experience is the offspring of prior models or schemes for generalisation. Montaigne calls these models or schemes ‘customs’ or ‘habits’. He applies both these terms to the habits and customs of communities and of individuals. Let us focus on the communal application. According to Montaigne it is necessity that unites human beings, and it is necessary for human flourishing to live in com-

21 “La consequence que nous voulons tirer de la ressemblance des evenemens est mal seure, d’autant qu’ils sont toujours dissemblables: il n’est aucune qualit si universelle en cette image des choses que la diversit et la variet. Et les Grecs, et les Latins, et nous, pour le plus exprs exemple de similitude, nous servons de celuy des oeufs. Toutefois il s’est trouv des hommes, et notament un en Delphes, qui recognoissoit des marques de difference entre les oeufs , si qu’il n’en prenoit jamais l’un pour l’autre; et y ayant plusieurs poules, sÅavoit juger de laquelle estoit l’oeuf. La dissimilitude s’ingere d’elle mesme en nos ouvrages; nul art peut arriver  la similitude.” (III, 13, 1207 f./1065) 22 Montaigne expresses the same concern for human judgment when he says: “Never did two men ever judge identically about anything, and it is impossible to find two opinions which are exactly alike, not only in different men but in the same men at different times.” / “Jamais deux hommes ne jugeront pareillement de mesme chose, et est impossible de voir deux opinions semblables exactement, non seulement en divers hommes, mais en mesme hommes  divers heures.” (III, 13, 1210/1067).

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munities.23 Such communities are the origin of the habits and customs which furnish their members with certain ways of experiencing the world. In other words, they furnish them with a specific form of a second nature. Through the Essais Montaigne expresses this in several ways. He says that it “is for custom to give shape to our lives, such shape as it will – in such matters it can do anything.” Or he says that “we have to take men already fashioned and bound to particular customs”.24 The actualization of potentialities belonging to human animals is determined by communal customs and habits. This kind of (let us say) ‘habitalism’ or ‘usualism’ is aptly captured in the expression ‘second nature’. In the juridical usage of the Renaissance the expression is very wide in scope and “covers customary law, local mores, folk memory, popular consensus, even culture in general”.25 As Montaigne himself puts it: “Custom is a second nature and no less powerful.”26 Thus, Montaigne suggests that habits and customs lead to certain models of perception and schemes for experience, and these allow for similarities in and for generalisations from experiences. Human beings are brought up by being drilled, trained, and educated to notice some sa-

23 Cf. III, 9, 1083/956. 24 “C’est  la coustume de donner forme  nostre vie, telle qu’il luy plaist; elle peut tout en cela.” (III, 13, 1226/1080) and “nous prenons les hommes obligez desj et fromez  certaines coustumes.” (III, 9, 1083/957). 25 Maclean 1992, 173. 26 “L’accoustumance est une seconde nature, et non moins puissante. Ce qui manque  ma coustume je tiens qu’il me manque.” (III, 10, 1142/1010). There is a serious complication to all this. Montaigne doesn’t think that second nature is always beneficial: “But the principal activity of custom is so to seize us and to grip us in her claws that it is hardly in our power to struggle free and to come back into ourselves, where we can reason and argue about her ordinances. Since we suck them in with our mothers’ milk and since the face of the world is presented thus to our infant gaze, it seems to us that we were really born with the property of continuing to act that way.” / “Mais le principal effect de sa puissance, c’est de nous saisir et empieter de telle sorte, qu’ peine soit-il en nous de nous r’avoir de sa prinse et de r’entrer en nous, pour discourir et raisonner de ses ordonnances. De vray, parce que nous les [les coutumes] humons avec le laict de nostre naissance, et que le visage du monde se presente en cet estat  nostre premiere veu, il semble que nous soyons nais  la condition de suyvre ce train.” (I, 23, 130/115) Here I would have to explain, how reflective criticism it possible, and I would also have to explain how we arrive at an individual second nature. It is by travelling and reading. Literature and travel give a second nature a second chance, so to speak. But this is beyond the scope of my present concern.

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lient similarities that have been useful for a certain way of life. And there are, of course, different forms of life. This last idea is confirmed by the tales from the New World. And for this reason the discovery of the New World is so exciting for Montaigne. Here he finds a very different and rather strange form of life, showing that a second nature can take very different forms given different habits and customs. It is well known that Montaigne tends to praise the inhabitants of the New World. But the deeper reason for this noble-savage-kind of praise lies in the fact that, in Montaigne’s account of the New World, the imagination “turns not toward fantasies of ownership and rule”27 but toward comparison and shame. The “horreur barbaresque” of New World cannibalism serves as a means of articulating the horror at home.28 For Montaigne writes in his essay on the cannibals: It does not sadden me that we should note the horrible barbarity in a practice such as theirs; what does sadden me is that, while judging correctly of their wrong-doings we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; more barbarity in lacerating by rack and torture a body still fully able to feel things, in roasting him little by little and having him bruised and bitten by pigs and dogs (as we have not only read about but seen in recent memory, not among enemies in antiquity but among our fellow-citizens and neighbours – and, what is worse, in the name of duty and religion) than in roasting him and eating him after his death.29

This passage can help us to give an answer to a pressing question that arises when confronted with Montaigne’s view on second nature. This view seems to imply the consequence that different habits and customs lead to radically different forms of life. What, then, about the possibility of criticism? What about cultural relativism? As we can learn from the passage just quoted, the possibility of criticism is given by the possibility of comparing different life-forms. As already indicated, Montaigne not only 27 Greenblatt 1991, 150. 28 Nakam 1998. 29 “Je ne suis pas marry que nous remerquons l’horreur barbaresque qu’il y a en une telle action, mais ouy bien dequoy, jugeans bien de leurs fautes, nous soyons si aveuglez aux nostres. Je pense qu’il y a plus de barbarie  manger un homme vivant qu’ le manger mort,  deschirer, par tourmens et par genes, un corps encore plein de sentiment, le faire rostir par le menu, le faire mordre et meurtrir aux chiens et aux pourceaux (comme nous l’avons, non seulement leu, mais veu de fresche memoire, non entre des ennemis anciens, mais entre des voisins et concitoyens, et, qui pis est, sous pretexte de piet et de religion), que de le rostir et manger apres qu’il est trespass.” (I, 31, 235 f./209)

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evaluates the life-form of the inhabitants of the New World, rather he finds fault at home. He finds fault in the excessive violence and cruelty of the penal system and of the religious wars. But in analogy to the case of experience we might ask: by what standards do we compare different life-forms? The answer, in short, is: by our first nature; by the fact that we are, like the other animals, vulnerable, fragile, mortal bodily creatures. This is the force of Montaigne’s rapprochement of man and animal; or, if you like, of his ‘animalization’ of human beings. Let me note in passing, that the form of a solution for the relativityproblem in contemporary philosophy is centred not upon animality, but upon language. Something is a language, as Donald Davidson would say, only by the possibility of translation. There is, therefore, no radical incommensurability between languages, and, accordingly, no incommensurability between different ways of viewing the world and life. Or as Hans-Georg Gadamer would put it: Every language contains all other languages, there is, therefore, the possibility of a fusion of horizons. It seems to me that Montaigne’s solution should not be disregarded because of the contemporary interest in ourselves as linguistic creatures.

III. The first to put cruelty first: the idea of a first nature Let me explain the idea of the ‘animalization’ of human beings by looking at Montaigne’s central ethical essay “On cruelty”. Here we find Montaigne’s central moral insight: “Among the vices, both by nature and by judgment I have a cruel hatred of cruelty, as the ultimate vice of them all”30 Montaigne is (as Judith Shklar expresses it) putting cruelty first.31 Cruelty, in its most basic sense, is the activity of deliberately hurting sentient beings. The torture of humans and animals are paradigmatic cases of cruelty.32 It concerns animals and humans alike, it concerns us and them 30 “Je hay, entre autres vices, cruellement la cruaut, et par nature et par jugement, comme l’extreme de tous les vices.” (II, 11, 480 f./429) There is a question concerning Montaigne’s “cruel hatred of cruelty”. This is not a paradox. Montaigne is saying that the pitying of victims of cruelty might contain a quantum of cruelty itself. Cruelty is a cunning vice that will also be found in virtuous dispositions, such as pity. 31 Cf. Hallie 1977, 156 – 171; Shklar 1984, 1 – 44. For Montaigne’s role in modern moral philosophy cf. Schneewind 1988, 42 – 57; Schneewind 2005, 207 – 228. 32 Cf. Shklar 1984, 8: Cruelty is “the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear”.

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as frail complexes of vulnerable and perishable tissue. Montaigne insists that the first seeds of cruelty are spread in early childhood, and that they flourish by habit and by lack of counteraction.33 He explains that, not unlike anger, cruelty spreads and inspires imitation.34 To him the hatred of cruelty is an even greater motivation toward benevolence than any model of virtue could ever be.35 Cruelty is an ordinary and cunning vice that is also to be found in virtuous dispositions, such as pity.36 Before Montaigne, there had been no such strong and explicit reaction against cruelty in general. Why? As Daniel Baraz has pointed out cruelty is a marginal issue for early medieval thinkers and theologians.37 This changes to some extent in the late middle ages. But the concern with cruelty was mainly restricted to three topics: There is, first, Christian martyrdom. Cruelty is considered a trait in pagans, Jews, or heretics outside the Christian community. They may inflict harm on the martyr’s body, but they will not harm his soul. The pain of martyry is analogous to the pain of surgery because both kinds of pain are salutary. In the same way the martyr suffers a sancta crudelitas, the castigated heretic suffers cum crudelitate clementi. There is, second, the problem of excess or severitas in the lawful punishment by the prince. In this context, cruelty is seen as an exclusively penal topic. And there are, third, the cultural others. Cruelty in the medieval context is most often deemed an ‘achievement’ of foreign, heathen, belligerent peoples, such as Vikings, Mongols, or Turks, who topically excel in carnage, massacre, sexual violence, and cannibalism. It is crucial that cruelty is seen to come from outside. Even in accounts of the alleged cruelty of heretics, peasants, or Jews, cruelty is exclusively attributed to cultural others. Such ascriptions of cruelty authorize severe punishment. But severe punishment in these cases is not deemed to be cruel, since the punisher’s intention is not cruel, as torturing and killing cruel persons is not in itself cruel. Accordingly, tormenting the body in order to save the soul cannot be considered cruel. We are now in a position to understand why cruelty in this context can not be the worst thing we do. The first reason is simply: We are not cruel. The others are. The notion of cruelty simply does not apply 33 34 35 36 37

Cf. I, 23, 124/110. Cf. III, 13, 1205/1063. Cf. III, 8, 1045/922. Cf. III, 1, 892/791. Barraz 2003.

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to us. A second reason is that, in a strictly dualistic picture of the human being (having a body and a soul) the infliction of bodily torments is judged differently. Montaigne’s animalization of man accentuates our bodily nature, in strong contrast to this picture. There is, however, a third reason. You can judge an action morally with an eye on the intentions or with an eye on the consequences. The more you concentrate on the consequence of an action affecting another human being, the more you concentrate on the affected body. In this picture, the infliction of pain cannot be disregarded. In sum: once cruelty is not to be found in the cultural other alone but amongst us, once the separation of body and soul is questioned, and once you attend to the consequences of actions, cruelty can come to the fore. And it very much did so in the 16th Century. In the course of the religious wars in France the very notion of cruelty became a domestic one. It existed (in Montaigne’s words) “entre des voisins et concitoyens”.38 A parallel circumstance can be observed in an excessive concern with cruelty in print. Suffering Protestants invented what might be called a ‘propaganda of cruelty’. John Foxe, for example, writes: “For as the papists and Turks are alike in their religion; so are the papists like, or rather exceed them in all kinds of cruelty that can be devised.”39 Jean de Lry reports in his Histoire d’un voyage en terre de Brsil from 1578 on the cruelty of cannibals, which is widely outdone by the cruelty of the Spaniards, which he compares to the cruelty that French Catholics inflict on his fellow Protestants. Though Foxe and de Lry find cruelty in their culture, cruelty is still reserved for others, and certain forms of cruelty are deemed relatively excusable. In clear contrast, Montaigne reacts against cruelty in general. Cruelty is unconditionally vicious, and there is no excuse for cruelty by comparison. Because of their bodily nature cruelty concerns all human beings (and animals). There is no legitimate target for cruelty. Montaigne begins his essay on cruelty by considering virtue conceived of in a certain way, namely as a way of ruling the passions and the appetites. Virtuous persons control their passions and appetites by reason. Montaigne contrasts the virtue of Socrates and the virtue of Cato the Younger, both models of virtuous men. Nevertheless, he attributes to both men some sort of cruelty against themselves, because their attempt at ruling their passions is a form of internalised cruelty. But if cruelty is 38 Cf. Crouzet 1990; Zemon Davis 1973, 51 – 91. 39 Foxe 1583, VI, 7.

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the worst thing to exert, and if it is the most detestable vice, then these men should not serve as models at all.

IV. Taking pleasure in virtue The contrast between Socrates’ easy virtue and Cato’s austere virtue is interesting in our context. Take the rigorous, grim and unsparing exercise of virtue in the case of Cato. Cato lives up to the idea that virtue is its own reward. So, if virtue necessitates your losing your freedom, your possessions, your limbs, eyes, tongue, mental faculties or your life, this is no loss to the virtuous. This, of course, is the masculine and aristocratic yearning for control or the short life of glory Montaigne attacks in his essay. Take the contrast between a strong willed person and a virtuous person. The strong willed one does the right thing but does not want to, and struggles when doing what is right. The virtuous one does what is right and wants to do it, he faces no internal struggles here. The ease with which the latter performs right action and the pleasure he or she takes in virtuous action are part of what makes him or her good. One should note the important role of pleasure in living well. The idea here is to have us contrast the person who does what is right as a matter of self-interest with the person who does what is right out of a love of virtue. Someone who is moved to act rightly out of a love for virtue is more consistently going to take pleasure in right action. In contrast, the person who acts rightly out of self-interest may often view doing the right thing as the lesser of two evils. The virtuous person who sees virtuous action as good in itself and who takes pleasure in the performance of virtuous deeds is less likely to resent the demands of morality. Consequently, for him or for her a life of right action is more likely to be pleasant. And for us the lover of virtue is a more reliable companion. So, the virtuous and the strong willed, the virtuous and the vicious, the aristocrat and the peasant, the Protestant and the Catholic, the Frenchman and the inhabitant of the New World share the ever threatening possibility of death, suffering, disease, and loss. And this is, in general, something undesirable and harmful, and pleasure and enjoyment are, in general, desirable and a human good. Despite all the differences of second nature, there is an overlap between different forms of life insofar as there is an overlap in our first nature, the nature we share with animals. Montaigne stresses the fact that we are, like the other animals, vulnerable, fragile, and mortal bodily creatures. But there is still the other

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animal dimension of pleasure and enjoyment. In this way, Montaigne offers a doctrine of the human in the sign of crisis and civil war. He thereby seeks to establish sets of common values in situations when authority finds itself under pressure. How could he? I said that I see Montaigne as a Pyrrhonian sceptic. But the promotion of doctrines does not seem to fit a Pyrrhonian. Here we have to remember that Sextus Empiricus answers the famous accusation of apraxia against the sceptics by reference to four standards of action. Sextus explains these four practical standards in the following way: By nature’s guidance we are naturally capable of perceiving and thinking. By the necessitation of feelings, hunger conducts us to food and thirst to drink. By the handing down of customs and laws, we accept, from an every day point of view, that piety is good and impiety bad. By teaching of kinds of expertise we are not inactive in those we accept. And we say all this without holding any opinions.40

As one can see, Montaigne’s distinction between first and second nature and his attempt at rapprochement between man and animal in a time of war and crisis is in no way contrary to his Pyrrhonism. And we will be able to appreciate why Montaigne thinks that there is nothing in our intellectual inventory in which there is so much likelihood and profit as we can find in Pyrrhonism.

Texts Cited Allen, Colin / Bekoff, Marc (1997): Species of Mind. The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology. Cambridge: MIT Press. Barraz, Daniel (2003): Medieval Cruelty. Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. Ithaca / London: Cornell University Press. Bekoff, Marc / Allen, Colin / Burghardt, Gordon M. (eds.) (2002): The Cognitive Animal. Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bermudez, Jose-Luis (2003): Thinking Without Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bingham, Harold C. (1923): “Gorillas in a Native Habitat”, in: Carnegie Institute Washington Publication 426, 1 – 66. Boas, George (1933): The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Brahami, Frdric (2001): Le travail du scepticisme. Montaigne, Bayle, Hume. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 40 HP I, 11, 23 f.

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Crouzet, Denis (1990): Les guerriers de Dieu. La violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525 – vers 1610). Seyssel: Champ Vallon. Daston, Lorraine / Mitman, Gregg (eds.) (2005): Thinking With Animals. New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press. Dixson, Alan F. (1981): The Natural History of the Gorilla. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Dumont, Jean-Paul (1972): Le scepticisme et le phnom ne. Paris: Vrin. Floridi, Luciano (1997): “Scepticism and Animal Rationality. The Fortune of Chrysippus’ Dog in the History of Western Thought”, in: Archiv fr Geschichte der Philosophie 79, 27 – 57. Fossey, Dian (1983): Gorillas in the Mist. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Foxe, John (1583): Actes and Monuments[…]. London: Iohn Daye. Garner, Richard L. (1896): Gorillas and Chimpanzees. London: Odgood McIlvaine. Gontier, Thierry (1998): De l’homme  l’animal. Paradoxes sur la nature des animaux, Montaigne et Descartes. Paris: Vrin. Greenblatt, Stephen (1991): Marvelous Possessions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hallie, Philip (1977): “The Ethics of Montaigne’s De la curaut”, in: Oh un amy!. Ed. by Raymond La Charit. Lexington: French Forum, 156 – 171. Hartle, Ann (2001): Michel de Montaigne. Accidental Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hastings, Hester (1936): Man and Beast in French Thought of the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Hurley, Susan / Nudds, Matthew (eds.) (2006): Rational Animals? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laursen, John Christian (1992): The Politics of Skepticism in the Ancients, Montaigne, Hume, and Kant. Leiden: Brill. Levine, Alan (2001): Sensual Philosophy. Toleration, Skepticism, and Montaigne’s Politics of the Self. New York / Oxford: Lexington Books. Limbrick, Elaine (1977): “Was Montaigne Really a Pyrrhonian?”, in: Biblioth que de l’humanisme et de la Renaissance 39, 67 – 80. Maclean, Ian (1992): Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDowell, John (1996): Mind and World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McDowell, John (1998): Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Meder, Angela (1995): “Men Who Named the African Apes”, in: Gorilla-Journal 11; URL: http://www.berggorilla.de/english/gjournal/texte/11men.html. Montaigne, Michel de (1965): Les essais de Michel de Montainge. Ed. by Pierre Villey, rev. by V.-L. Saulnier. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Montaigne, Michel de (1993): The Complete Essays. Ed. and transl. by M. A. Screech. Harmondsworth / London: Penguin Books. Mullan, Bob / Marvin, Garry (1987): Zoo Culture. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Nakam, Grald (1993): Montaigne et son temps. Les vnements et les Essais. Paris: Gallimard.

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Pinker, Steven (2002): The Blank Slate. The Modern Denial of Human Nature. London: Penguin Books. Popkin, Richard H. (2003): The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle. Revised and Expanded Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quint, David (1998): Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rosenfield, Leonora (1940): From Beast-machine to Man-machine. The Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to la Mettrie. New York: Oxford University Press. Schaller, George B. (1963): The Mountain Gorilla. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Schaller, George B. (1964): The Year of the Gorilla. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Schiffman, Zachary S. (1984): “Montaigne and the Rise of Skepticism in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal”, in: Journal of the History of Ideas 45, 499 – 516. Schneewind, Jerome B. (1998): The Invention of Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneewind, Jerome B. (2005): “Montaigne on Moral Philosophy and the Good Life”, in: The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne. Ed. by Ullrich Langer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 207 – 228. Serjeantson, Richard (2001): “The Passions and Animal Language, 1540 – 1700”, in: Journal of the History of Ideas 62, 425 – 444. Shklar, Judith (1984): Ordinary Vices. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Sorabji, Richard (1993): Animal Minds and Human Morals. The Origins of the Western Debate. London: Duckworth. Steiner, Gary (2005): Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents. The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press. Strowski, Fortunat (1931): Montaigne. Paris: Felix Alcan. Tournon, Andr (2000): “Suspense philosophique et ironie: la zttique de l’essai”, in: Montaigne Studies 12, 45 – 62. Wild, Markus (2000): “Les deux pyrrhonismes de Montaigne”, in: Bulletin de la socit des amis de Montaigne 19 / 20, 45 – 56. Wild, Markus (2006): Die anthropologische Differenz. Der Geist der Tiere in der frhen Neuzeit bei Montaigne, Descartes und Hume. Berlin / New York: De Gruyter. Wild, Markus (2008): Tierphilosophie. Hamburg: Junius. Wild, Markus (2009): “Michel de Montaigne und die anthropologische Differenz”, in: Mensch und Tier in der Antike – Grenzziehung und Grenzberschreitung / Humans and Animals in Antiquity – Boundaries and Transgressions. Ed. by Alexandridis, Annetta / Winkler-Horacek, Lorenz / Wild, Markus. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 141 – 159. Wild, Markus (2009): “Montaigne als pyrrhonischer Skeptiker”, in: Unsicheres Wissen. Formen des Skeptizismus und Theorien der Wahrscheinlichkeit in der frhen Neuzeit. Ed. by Spoerhase, Carlos / Werle, Dirk / Wild, Markus. Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 109 – 134.

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Zemon Davis, Natalie (1973): “The Rites of Violence: Religous Riots in Seventeenth-Centruy France”, in: Past and Present 59, 51 – 91.

Animal Art / Human Art: Imagined Borderlines in the Renaissance Ulrich Pfisterer Only very rarely do apes do us the favour of adapting their behaviour to human cultural fantasies. This seemed to be the case in 1942 when a gorilla at the London Zoological Society traced the outline of his shadow with his finger not once but three times. It was as if he were re-enacting the classical myth of the origin of painting in which the daughter of the Greek potter Dibutades paints the silhouette of her departing lover on a wall as a remembrance. Even more astonishingly, the gorilla seemed to know the idiosyncratic alternative version of this myth on the fresco in Giorgio Vasari’s house in Florence (c. 1572) showing not the lovesick girl but the narcissistic King Gyges tracing his own shadow!1 The fact that the gorilla’s behaviour was remarked and reported at all bears witness to an abiding interest in the origin of art. Is art a genuinely human quality, a human universal, or are there suggestions of artistic behaviour in animals? What is, in fact, as one famous publication put it, the “picture-making behaviour of the great apes and its relationship to human art”?2 In 1913 the Russian scientist Nadjeta Koths, most probably the first, started to explore systematically, using comparisons with her own small child, the capabilities of non-human primates in the perception and production of images - capabilities which seemingly equalled only those of a two-year-old infant (fig. 1). A second peak in animal art research was reached in the United States in the early 1950s when Congo, a chimpanzee, produced the impressive œuvre of 384 paintings in several series of tests.3 1 2 3

On the gorilla see Huxley 1942, 637; cf. Lenain 1997, 176. For the mythical origin of drawing and painting see Rosenblum 1958, 329 ff.; cf. Stoichita 1997; Kenaan 2006, 17 – 28; cf. Brder 2006. Cf. Morris 1962. Earlier publications include Schiller 1951, 101 – 111; Goja 1959, 369 – 373; Rensch 1961, 347 – 364; Levy 1961, 83 ff. The results of this study were not published until decades later as Koths 1935. A detailed history of the scientific study of ape drawings and paintings is given by Lenain 1997.

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Fig. 1 Nadjeta Kohts and her chimpanzee Joni in Moscow (1913), (after Lenain 1997, fig. 12).

Animal art research must be seen against the backdrop and in the larger context of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selec-

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Fig. 2 Jean-Baptiste Deshays: The Monkey-Painter (c 1760), Rouen: Muse des Beaux-Arts.

tion, for which the criteria of beauty, the development of an aesthetic sense and (body-) decoration are of central importance.4 Darwin not only placed man firmly in the animal family (in particular in that of 4

For the reception and influence of Darwin’s ideas see Menninghaus 2003.

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the great apes) but also one of the most highly prized human abilities. The production and appreciation of art now seemed originally the biologically determined result of survival of the fittest and natural selection with at least nascent forms in animals as well.5 Opponents of this view placed all the more importance on defining ‘art’ as something beyond the basal “picture-making behaviour of the great apes” that was found only in humans. Such an art would serve nicely as the decisive distinction between man and animals. As opposed to language, which had long been discussed as a defining feature of the human, pictorial art had the major advantage that art objects are long-lasting.6 Ever more prehistoric art objects had been discovered in the latter part of the 19th century whose making went back to the very dawn of humanity, seemingly proof of the hypothesis that homo sapiens and art went together.7 Art, then, was the dividing line between man and animal. And so we are secure in the belief that – even if “[b]iologists have found evidence of an aesthetic sensitivity in several animal species, i. e., a capacity for appropriate response to formal structures, and behavioral patterns directly related to that capacity” – “[t]he creation and appreciation of art in its many forms are uniquely human activities.”8 Darwin’s theories clearly represent the most radical innovation in the scientific investigation of humankind and animal. But Darwin did not suspend the traditional antagonism between fäom and !mhqypos. Either the borderline between the human and animal worlds was to be seen as permeable, or there were categorical differences which defined what is specifically human. In particular, the question as to the intelligence and artfulness of animals was of central importance.9 5 6 7 8 9

To cite just three vintage publications that develop this thesis: Scott 1895 – 1896, 153 – 226; Schroeter 1914; Clay 1917, 172. See Cummings 2004, 164 – 185; Senior 1997, 61 – 84; and cf. Neis 2003; Kirchberger 1907. Cf. also Romanes 1882, esp. 328 – 338. For a more detailed discussion (with further bibliography) see Pfisterer 2006, 13 – 80; and Pfisterer 2009, 121 – 160. The first quotation is from Lenain 1999, 239 – 251, here 240; the second from Alland 1977, 21. Cf. recently Dissanayake 2000; cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt / Stterlin 2007. The central importance of reason and virtue in the conception of humans and animals in the early modern period has been stressed in recent studies, but ‘artifice’ and ‘fantasy’ neglected. See Sorabji 1993; Steiner 2005, 1 – 150; Fudge 2006. For an overview of Renaissance ideas on animals see Boehrer 2007.

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When in the 16th century European intellectuals went about deciding whether the indigenous peoples of the newly discovered Americas were human or not, the question of their artfulness was promptly deployed for and against. In 1550 Juan Gins Sepffllveda pointed out that: even though some of them show a talent for certain handicrafts, this is not an argument in favor of a more human skill, since we see that some small animals, both birds and spiders, make things which no human industry can imitate completely […]. [W]hat do these [capabilities] prove except that they are not bears or monkeys and that they are not completely devoid of reason?10

In his defence of the native Americans, Bartolom de Las Casas replied that “not all barbarians are irrational or natural slaves or unfit for government”. Some of his further arguments are not too different from what ethnologists and anthropologists were saying around 1900: Furthermore, they are so skilled in every mechanical art that with every right they should be set ahead of all the nations of the known world on this score, so very beautiful in their skill and artistry are the things this people produces in the grace of its architecture, its painting, and its needle-work. But Sepffllveda despises these mechanical arts as if these things do not reflect inventiveness, ingenuity, industry, and right reason.11

Art history has heretofore largely ignored these discussions about the borderlines between human art and animal art. The criteria of the still valid modern concept of art having been cemented in the Renaissance, the defining feature of human art became fantasy and genius. The best-researched area of animal art is that of apes as painters or as otherwise active in the arts – ultimately in the tradition of Aesop’s fables (fig. 2).12 In contrast, I am more interested in the question as to how the ‘real’ artistic abilities and artistic production of animals – the spiders’ webs, birds’ nests, image perception, etc. – are to be seen in relation to human artfulness and art appreciation. My first two sections below focus on the continuity theories put forward by numerous Renaissance authors, initially the idea that all human art is only a continuation and improvement of animal art, then the idea 10 Hanke 1974, 85. For a similar argumentation concerning other distinctive human characteristics see Cummings 1999, 26 – 50. 11 Hanke 1974, 74 ff. Cf. Koepping 2005. 12 The fundamental study Janson 1952, esp. 287 – 325. For more recent literature cf. Roscoe 1981, 96 – 103; Georgel / Lecoq 1987; Gerigk 1989; Lenain 1997; Marret 2001.

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that animals and animal sensory perception are only different in degree from the art appreciation of humans and that some may even be better suited. The third section summarizes finally the opposing, seemingly more plausible arguments of the proponents of a radical differentiation between man and animal. We will see that in the Renaissance subtle shifts in thinking which lead in the direction of the modern concept of art take place exactly in this context. Unhappily, I cannot elaborate here on the fact that the differentiation of human art and artistry from the animal sphere ‘below’ it has always been complemented by differentiation of human art and artistry from the art and artistry ‘above’ it, i. e., God and the art of the divine.13 1. A Zoology of Art “Behold! I have brought you a man,” the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope is supposed to have declared, showing a plucked chicken in mockery of Plato’s (and Socrates’) famous definition of man as a “featherless biped”. The episode, recorded by Diogenes Laertius, was well-known in the Renaissance; a drawing by Parmigianino was in wide circulation (fig. 3).14 The question of man-animal comparisons in Antiquity and the Renaissance is nicely illustrated by the episode. On the one hand, the story points up the uniqueness of man in creation while, on the other hand, opening our eyes to the many similarities between man and animal, such as in physiognomical analogies – the most famous being those of Giambattista della Porta and Charles Le Brun.15 Animals were granted not only inherent qualities of character, morality and feeling, but intelligence too. The same Diogenes of Sinope who made fun of Plato for his “featherless biped” remark is supposed to have said that the more an animal resembles man, the more intelligence it has. Aristotle, Galen, Plutarch and the Bible give us further observations on the intellect of animals.16 There were even those who said that animals had more intelligence and greater morality than human beings

13 14 15 16

Cf. for the Renaissance Emison 2004. Diogenes Laertius, VI, 40. Karpinski 2000, 121 ff. Cf. Kemp 2007. Cf. Newmyer 2008, 151 – 174.

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Fig. 3 Ugo da Carpi after Parmigianino: Diogenes (c 1526/30), Genve: Cabinet des Estampes.

and were happier to boot. In 1933 George Boas analysed this complex of ancient ideas and dubbed it “theriophily”.17 Two arguments are important in our connection, both of which go back to pre-Socratic philosophers. In a radical experiment in thought, Xenophanes exposed the dubiousness of anthropocentrism and the relativity of human beauty ideals: “[I]f cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that 17 Boas 1933; and Wiener 1973, 384 – 389; cf. also Harrison 1998, 463 – 484.

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men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.”18 Democritus claimed, according to Plutarch, that ultimately humans had learned all their arts and sciences from the animals or from the example of nature: “[W]e have been their pupils in matters of fundamental importance: of the spider in weaving and mending, of the swallow in home-building, of the sweet-voiced swan and nightingale in our imitation of their song.”19 Such ideas were actively discussed in the 15th century, for example in a disputation supposedly having taken place in Tunis in the year 1417 between the monk Antonio Turmeda and a donkey. Going back to a 10thcentury Arab animal fable, this originally Catalonian satire, the original version of which is lost, was published in 1544 in French translation as Disputation de l’Asne contre frere Anselme Turmeda, sur la nature & noblesse des Animaulx, faicte, & ordonne par lediczt frere Anselme, en la Cit de Tunicz, l’an 1417, Lyon 1544.20 In the eleventh argument the monk mentions the impressive buildings of human beings and that they can be erected in various styles as the builder pleases. The donkey points out that animals also build dwellings and, using the example of bees, refutes the suggestion that animals build by instinct and always in the same way: “comme elles font et difient joliment leurs maisons par compas, les une  six quarres, les aultres  huict, aultres  triangles, aultres quarres […]; et les difient d’une seule mati re comme est de cyre.”21 Such ideas recur in subsequent years. I shall mention only four examples from the 16th century. In the ten dialogues of Giovanni Battista Gelli’s very successful Circe, first published in 1549 in Florence and remaining in print for almost two centuries, translated into English, German and French, Odysseus questions his comrades, who have been transformed into animals, as to the advantages and disadvantages of being an animal. The first nine vehemently defend the advantages of animal existence – only the elephant concedes the superiority of the human intel18 Diels / Kranz 1960, 21. B15. See similar statements by Epicharm (Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum iii, 16) and Cicero, De natura deorum, i, 18 – 27; discussed by Montaigne, cf. Genetelli 2006, 139 f. 19 Plutarch 974 A; cf. Aelianus 2009, XII, 16. On Montaigne’s responses to this passage, see Maspoli Genetelli 2006, 115 – 123. 20 Turmeda 1984. There has also been a German translation: Des Esels Streitrede. Eine altkatalanische Satire, ed. Robert Beier, Berlin / Mnster 2009. 21 Turmeda 1984, 81. For the complexity of early modern discussions about certain animals, Woolfson 2009, 281 – 300.

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lect. The human arts are presented as the children of necessity, invented to compensate for human weakness, and the suggestion is pooh-poohed that there is a meaningful distinction to be made between the nest-building instinct of animals and the – likewise at least partly instinctual – human urge to build houses.22 Antonio Persio’s treatise on human genius (1576) and Ambroise Par’s Des animaux et de l’excellence de l’homme (1585) do not question human superiority for a moment but nevertheless agree that the example of nature (and competition among human beings) were the impetus for the invention and perfection of the arts. Notwithstanding silkworms, spiders, birds, dogs and other animals as creative examples in nature, especially Persio sees the origin of painting in shadows and of architecture in cave dwellings.23 Montaigne proves to be the perhaps most thoroughgoing early modern theriophilist. Montaigne undertakes a defence of animal art in several of his Essais, believing it superior to that of humankind: “Our utmost endeavours cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.”24 Of particular interest here is Montaigne’s reference to animals in his essay “Of Cannibals” in the New World. His argument is that God’s creation is so incomprehensibly abundant and diverse that we should refrain from judging any of it as barbarian. The cultural deformation and false artifice of Europe is contrasted with a natural state of joyful human activity close to that of the animal. In 1628, climaxing this debate, Giovanni Bonifacio published a summary of the arguments for and against the human arts being dependent on animal examples: The Liberal and Mechanic Arts: How they have been demonstrated by the irrational animals to man. 25 Bonifacio finds animal antecedents for a surprising number of intellectual and artistic endeavours: agriculture, arithmetic, astronomy / astrology, dialectics, economics, ethics, geometry, grammar, history, house-building, the hunt, medicine, metaphysics, music, navigation, rhetoric, physics, poetry, politics, textiles and warfare – only the pictorial arts seeming not to be attributable to animals. There is a theological assumption behind this panoply of arts and 22 Gelli 1549, 36 f. (2nd Dialogue), 162 and 165 – 172 (8th Dialogue); the basic model is Plutarch’s dialogue Gryllus, or: That Brute Beasts Have Use of Reason. 23 Persio 1999, 45; Par 1990. 24 Michel de Montaigne, Essais, IV; cf. Thierry Gontier (1998): De l’homme  l’animal. Montaigne et Descartes ou les paradoxes de la philosophie moderne sur la nature des animaux, Paris; Wild 2006; Maspoli Genetelli 2006. 25 Bonifacio 1628, 130 – 133.

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skills. Animals not having run awry of original sin, they possess all Godgiven abilities. Fallen man, on the other hand, must seek insight into the original arts and skills by observation and imitation of the animal world.26 The opposition of human and animal artistic productiveness made itself felt in the pictorial arts in particular, although less as a philosophical, theological or moral problem than as a metaphor for the mystery of artistic creativity. Ovid’s Metamorphoses connect several artes with animals. For example, Athena punishes the weaver Arachne (Met. 6, 1) for her superbia by transforming her into a spider, as seen on the title-page of the partial English translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s 1598 treatise on painting (fig. 4).27 Another striking example of this kind of metaphorical adaption is the personal device of Titian (fig. 5) published in Battista Pittoni’s Imprese di diversi prencipi (1568).28 The central image, flanked by personifications of Time and Fame, shows a mother bear licking her newborn cub into shape. The personal motto of the artist floating above in a scroll reads Natura potentior ars (More powerful than nature is art). The combination of image and inscription alludes to an ancient belief in the bear as an example of natural artistry. Ovid and Pliny both describe the procedure: “Bears when first born are shapeless masses of white flesh a little larger than mice […] Their mother then licks them gradually into proper shape.”29 Suetonius (Vita Vergili) and Donatus (Vita Donati) were probably the first to connect the mother bear’s practice with art, illuminating the writer’s work on a literary text with this simile. In 1537 Sperone Speroni compares the shaping of the cub more generally with the power of “the artifice of reason” as opposed to the formal forces of nature.30 This would identify Titian with the mother bear: The painter’s art, his rational ability to lick his own creation into shape, is uniquely more powerful than Nature’s. However, Mary D. Garrard points out that an alternative translation of the motto would be “Nature is a more powerful art”. This reading provides a better conceptual match with the she-bear simile: 26 Bonifacio 1628, 12 f. 27 A ‘Tracte’ Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Carvinge & Buildinge. Oxford 1598. The iconography of the title-page is analysed by Margery Corbett and Ronald W. Lightbown (1979): The Comely Frontispiece. The Emblematic Title-Page in England 1550 – 1660. London, 67 – 79. 28 Pardo 1993, 55 – 89; Suthor 2004, 15 – 20; Garrard 2004, 241 – 261. 29 Ovid, Metamorphoses, xv, v; Pliny, Nat. hist, viii, 126. 30 Speroni 1978, 538.

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Fig. 4 Titlepage of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo: A Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge […]. Englished by Richard Haydocke, Oxford 1598.

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an creature of nature whose own ‘art’ is more powerful than any human art.31 The accompanying poem under Titian’s impresa, by his friend Lodovico Dolce, documents a third understanding of the art of painting as transcending the longstanding competition of art with nature altogether, a reading which makes it all the more probable that the motto is intentionally ambiguous. Learned painters’ of diverse eras, Continuing into our own time, Designs and images have shown How art jousts with nature. Gathered at the glorious peak, They are deemed heavenly prodigies, But TITIAN, by the grace of divine fortune, Has bested art, genius and nature.32

Since Antiquity parallels have been drawn between the purely biological procreativity of animals and man’s intellectual production. In his preface to the Natural History, Pliny compares his work to the fetura, the litter of an animal, Pliny having given birth to 37 books at once, a number of offspring produced by few animals if any. The idea of the artist’s works as his children and the notion of giving birth to an artwork has been common since the mid-15th century. It is likely that Parmigianino’s exceptional drawing of a man holding a gestating dog is a reflection of his own artistic productivity (fig. 6). If the man depicted is indeed a self-portrait, as has been suggested, this conclusion would be inescapable.33 2. The Innocent Eye Test Mark Tansey, whose paintings almost exclusively play on the traditions of art and art history and test the sophisticated eye of the viewer, points to a similar conclusion in his 1981 Innocent Eye Test (fig. 7). Animals – a cow in this case – cannot perceive images, their realm being reality and not 31 Garrard 2004. 32 “Molti in diverse et dotti Pittori / Continuando infino ai tempi nostri / Han dimostro in disegni e bei colori / Quanto con la natura l’arte giostri / E giunti furno al sommo de gli honori / E tenuti fra noi celesti Mostri / Ma TITIAN merce d’alta ventura / Vinto ha l’arte, l’ingegno, e la Natura”; my translation. 33 Ruvoldt 2004 and Pfisterer 2005, 41 – 72.

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Fig. 5 Titian’s impresa from Battista Pittoni (1568): Imprese di diversi prencipi, Venice.

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Fig. 6 Parmigianino: Selfportrait (?) with bitch (c 1535/40); London: British Museum.

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Fig. 7 Mark Tansey: The Innocent Eye Test (1981), New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (after Danto 1992, p. 35).

representation.34 The subtlety and complexity of Tansey’s painting is a phenomenon that art historians like Georges Didi-Huberman and James Elkins have called “the object staring back”.35 Equally significant is the fact that Tansey’s painting is a grisaille, thereby alluding to black-and-white photography as the medium of supposedly ‘true’ documentation of nature. Tansey’s painting seizes upon a central art-historical theorem from Antiquity into at least the nineteenth century, that the perfection of a work of art can be measured by its mimetic realism and sensory deception – a deception that can be demonstrated particularly well in regard to animals. Thus Plinius, Seneca and Valerius Maximus reported of the grapes painted by the Greek painter Zeuxis that they had been depicted so beguilingly that birds flew to the image and picked at them. This anecdote 34 See Kellein 1990; Wolf 1990, 178 – 185; Danto 1992a, 16 ff. and 1992b, 15 – 31; Taylor 1999, 16. 35 Cf. Didi-Huberman 1990; Elkins 1996.

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has been repeated in many variants as an example of perfection in art.36 Konrad Celtis and Johannes Scheurl, for instance, relate that Drer’s dog mistook a self-portrait of his master for Drer himself, came running to it and prodded the image with its nose. The influence this anecdote had on art historians can be measured by the fact that Drer’s 1500 self-portrait, presumed to be the work in question, was examined for traces of the dog’s snout as late as the beginning of the 20th century.37 The power of deception and lifelikeness conveyed by art did not remain restricted to animals. Humans fell for it too. Pliny relates the erotic seductiveness radiating from the statues of Praxiteles.38 Perhaps not the production of art but rather the reaction to it, then, is the litmus test showing both the connections and the categorical differences between man and animal. Marsilio Ficino’s Theologia Platonica and Ludovico Ricchieri’s encyclopaedic Lectionum Antiquarum libri XXX, for example, both widely read 15th-century works, list examples of artistic approximation of reality: Zeuxis’ grapes, a dog painted by Apelles and the Knidian Venus of Praxiteles, a flying wooden pigeon constructed by Archytas crossing the borderline to animation and, the ultimate for Ficino and Ricchieri, the talking statues of the Egyptians.39 In the perfect imitation of nature through artistic deception, man shows himself as rivalling nature, even as being in competition with God: “Hominem esse dei aemulum.”40 To be sure, one could draw the opposite conclusion: The sensory organs of animals being more acute than man’s, animals respond more viscerally to representations. Thus the peak of artistic skill is reached when animals are fooled. This was the conclusion drawn by Jan Vos in his Zeege der Schilderkunst of 1654.41

36 Pliny, Nat. hist., 35, 65 and Seneca, Controversiae, 10, 34, 27. Cf. Bann 1989; also Kliemann 1996, 430 – 452. 37 Cf. Goldberg / Heimberg / Schawe 1998, 314 – 353. 38 Pliny, Nat. hist., xxxvi, 20; see Hinz 1989, 135 – 142; Hersey 2009. 39 Marsilio Ficino (1576): Opera Omnia, Basel, vol. 1, fol. 295 f. (Theologia Platonica XIII, 3); Ricchieri 1516, fol. 38 (II, 38). On automatons see Bredekamp 1993. 40 Ricchieri 1516, fol. 38. Cf. Alberti 1972, here De pictura, §25 and 27. Other authors stress the incommensurability of divine creation, see Dati 1503, fol. IIIr. 41 Weber 1991, 308, note 17. The superiority of animals’ senses is already discussed by Turmeda 1984. Cf. also Bonifacio 1628, 61.

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3. The Great Chain of Being or the Specificity of Human Fantasy and Genius and Art In the great chain of being, man could move both in the direction of animals and in the direction of the angels and God. Man consisted of two components, the animal body and the divine soul (homo exterior and homo interior), with animals generally understood to be inferior to man – the ‘animal-supremacist’ authors cited in the foregoing sections representing minority positions. At least the Bible leaves no doubt about the fact that man has been created in the image of God possessing an immortal soul and as master of the animal world. Ancient philosophers had debated whether animals possessed rudiments of reason and morality. Important Christian thinkers after Augustine agreed that animals occupied the two lowest levels of spiritual existence (anima vegetativa and sensitiva / spiriti vitali and animali), the third and highest being the sole mark of the human, namely reason and free will. In medieval German literature the perfection and elaboration of this highest spiritual existence was seen as coming about by immersion in the artes liberales. 42 St. Thomas Aquinas in particular was so forthright in expressing this Christian view of animal existence that he was cited by Catholic opponents of Darwinism as late as 1900.43 Thomas looked to the realm of art to demonstrate the rationality of the human intellect: Swallows’ nests and spiders’ webs, he declared, are all alike because animals follow the natural instinct implanted in them by God. Man alone rationally judges the differing forms of habitations and augments and varies the design as needed – a comparison that was frequently cited in later years.44 Antonio Turmeda, Giovannni Battista Gelli, Juan Gins Sepffllveda and Giovanni Bonifacio alluded to it. One could also mention Giannozzo Manetti’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (c. 1452), Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology (1482) and Benedetto Varchi’s lecture on the paragone of the arts (1547 / 1549) in which the human ars rationalis are contrasted with the instinctus or habitus naturalis of animals.45 Girolamo Cardano calls the elephant and the camal the most in42 Schumacher 1999, 376 – 390. For this view in the Renaissance, cf. Primaudye 1586, 170 – 179. 43 Sobol 1993, 109 – 128; Leemans / Klemm 2007, 153 – 177; cf. Wasmann 1897. 44 St. Thomas Aquinas, In Libros Physicorum, lb2 lc13 n5. 45 Manetti 1975, I, 37. Ficino 1576, Theologia Platonica, II, 223. Doel 2008. Varchi 1960, vol. 1, 10. Cf. Roggenkamp 1996, 844 – 860. See also the summary of

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telligent animals after man but accepts a categorical difference between man and animal.46 This would seem to lead directly to the dawn of modern animal psychology and the first book-length treatment of the subject, Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ Allgemeine Betrachtungen ber die Triebe der Thiere, hauptschlich ber ihre Kunsttriebe (Thoughts on the motives of animals, primarily their artistic motives), published in 1760, whereby the term “artistic motive” had no relation whatever to human art but rather designated the productive natural instincts of animals.47 Not until Darwin was the distinction between man and animal, between animal art and human art, seriously challenged. Early in the 15th century an alternative interpretation came to the fore which ultimately changed the concept of human art. Giovanni Gherardi’s Paradiso degli Alberti of 1410 / 1420 is a work in the mode of Boccaccio’s Decamerone but discusses primarily questions of philosophy and morality. At one point the fictive conversationalists turn to the question of whether some animals possess more “art and genius” than others. At first Gherardi mocks the idea that a firefly might be considered a better painter than Giotto because it is able to ‘paint’ in the dark. Then he cites the canonical truth that all creatures, like the swallow, follow the same natural instinct when building their nests. Not so mankind, all of whose individually built houses are different. This results from differing art and – this being Gherardi’s crucial new addition – from different inborn talent, i. e., “because there is different art and genius in each of them.”48

‘common knowledge’ in Primaudaye 1594, chap. 87 “Of those powers and properties, which the soule of man hath common with the soule of beast & of those powers and vertues which are proper and peculiar to it selfe […].” 46 Cardano 1560, 691, 717 (against the musical sense of a camal); cf. for the idea of ‘intelligent’ and ‘artistically talented’ animals Lubin 1998, 157 – 173 and Fudge 2006, 115 – 146. 47 Cf. Reimarus 1982. For the larger context of the discussion of instinct, mood and aesthetics in the 18th century see Frey 2008, 391 – 398. 48 Prato 1975, 236 – 243, lib. IV, §112 – 145, §143 paraphrasing Thomas: “Noi sapiamo quanta  la fama di Giotto nell’arte della pittura; diremo noi ch’una lumacal’avanzi nell’arte ch dipinge al buio, e Giotto non saprebbe menare pennello sanza lume? […] Raguardarsi le rondine, le quali sanza maestri fanno i loro nidi, e cos di molti uccelli, a una forma e a uno modo seguitando la natura loro sanza arte o ingegno. La qual cosa non si vede dove sia arte o ingegno, imper che, prendendo al presente mille uomini e facendo a cciascuno di quelli fare una casa, e che l’uno non sapesse dell’altro, fatte tutte le case, quelle si vedrebono

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Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture of 1460 at the latest cemented this view. Distinctions in human buildings result from differing imaginations and individually differing talents and styles alone. The stile di ciascheduno is recognisable in every work of art as well as in every written text and fundamentally distinguishes the creations of mankind from those of animals and God: You never see any building, or better: house or habitation, that is totally like another either in structure, form, or beauty. […] You may say, however, I have seen many habitations that are very much alike, even though they are not noble edifices, as the cottages of poor men, huts, and so forth. I reply to you that they are of such a nature that they will have some similarities, but if you consider carefully you will also understand the great differences. […] You know well that God could make things totally alike […] but if man wished to build a hundred houses all in the same mode, he could never make them all alike in every part, even if it were possible for them all to be built by one man alone. […] But the architect as well as the painter is known by the manner of their products, and in every discipline one is known by his distinct style.49

tutte isvariate l’una dell’altra; e questo averrebbe ch diversa arte e ingeno si vedrebbe in ciascuno di loro.” 49 Antonio Averlino, il Filerete (1972): Trattato di Architettura, ed. Anna M. Finoli and Liliana Grassi, Milan, vol. 1, 27 f.: “Tu potresti dire: l’uomo, se volesse, potrebbe fare molte case che si asomogliassero tutte in una forma e in una similitudine, in modo che saria proprio l’una come l’altra. Ben sai che Idio potrebbe fare che tutti gli uomini si somigliassero, pure non lo fa; ma l’uomo non potrebbe gi fare questo lui, se gi Idio non glie le concedesse; ma se […] uno uomo […] volesse fare cento o mille case a modo medesimo e ad una somiglianza, non mai farebbe che totalmente fusse l’una come l’altra in tutte le sue parti, se ben possibile fusse che uno tutte le fabbricasse. Qui ci sarebbe da dire alcune cose le quali lascer a li speculativi. Che se uno tutte le fabricasse, come colui che scrive o uno che dipinge, fa che le sue lettere si conoscono, e cos colui che dipinge, la sua maniera delle figure si cognosce, e cos d’ogni facult si cognosce lo stile di ciascheduno. Ma questa  altra pratica, nonostante: che ognuno pure divaria, o tanto o quanto, bench si conosca essere fatta per una mano. Ho veduto io dipintore e intagliatore ritrarre teste, e massime dell’antidetto illustrissimo Signore Duca Francesco Sforza, del quale varie teste furono ritratte, perch era degna e formosa pi d’una da ciascheduno, bene l’appropriarono alla sua e assomigliarono, e nientedimeno c’era differenza. E cos ho veduto scrittori, nelle loro lettere essere qualche differenza. Donde questa sottilit e propriet e similitudine si venga, lasceremo alli sopradetti speculativi dichiarare.” An English translation is Filarete 1965. See also Tigler 1963, 82 – 85.

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Human and especially artistic powers of fantasy came to be discussed increasingly often after the second third of the 15th century.50 Animals played a part here too – as hybrids or as monstra serving to prove the inexhaustible procreative power of nature as well as of artistic daring and inventiveness.51 In particular, comparisons of the creations of man and animals established individual imagination and fantasy as one of the prime distinguishing characteristics of humankind – equalling and even partially outstripping the significance of rational aspects. A further aspect was praise of the hand as endowing man with creative powers unmatched by any animal.52 It took another hundred years for these thoughts to gel into a thoroughgoing theory of human mental powers and gifts. Not until Giovanni Imperiali’s Musaeum Physicum of 1639 was the special importance of fantasy for the artistic ingenium clearly emphasized, along with various forms of talent and their dependence on the universalist intellect and the specialist fantasy.53 Thus it became clear for the first time why great painters 50 Cf. Kemp 1977, 347 – 398; Pfisterer 2002. Wels 2005, 199 – 226 sees the concept of fantasy as a product of the 18th century. 51 Gelli 1550, 206, grants animals a form of fantasy  la Horace: “se ben la fantasia vostra, pu ancora ella comporre, & dividere come sarebbe far d’un cavallo, & d’un huomo, un Centauro: & fingere l’huomo senza piedi, & senza mani, ella non pu dividere la materia, de la forma, ne gl’ accidenti da la sustanza; o comporgli insieme come fa l’intelletto nostro. […] Oltre di questo, non pu imaginare mai cosa alcuna: che ella non l’habbia veduta: & se non tutta insieme, almanco le sue parti.” Cf. for the broader context Daston / Park 1998, 1150 – 1750, Pfisterer 1996, 107 – 148. 52 See Kemp 2000, 22 – 27. 53 Imperiali 1639 – 1640, part II, 30 ff. and 38 (Cap. XI & XII): “Ex his tria colliguntur, quibus natura ingenij aptissime definitur. Primum est, ingenium non esse potentiam animae remotam, sed proximam. Secundum, ingenium esse potentiam animae intellectivae, ac sensitivae, nimirum phantasiae communem. Tertium, non esse potentiam solius animae intellectivae, nec solius phantasiae separatim, sed utriusque simul complicatae, ita tamen ut ex earum nexu resurgat cognitionis facilitas, in qua formalis ingenij ratio constituitur. […] concurrit ergo ad ingenium phantasia, ut eius materia, ratione huius organicae dispositionis, sed concurrit etiam ut agens, ac efficiens proprium & adaequatum ingenij, quia sicut in intellectus actionibus notatur excellentia quaedam, ob quam ingenij actiones vocantur; ita in actionibus phantasiae, puta in imaginando, talis adnotatur habilitas, ac perfectio, ut eas liceat appellare actiones ab ingenij vigore prodeuntes, quod optime in pictura, statuaria, & machinarum tum bellicarum, tum civilium artificio, alijsque mechanicis deprehendi potest operibus; fiunt enim haec singula a phantasiae virtute, quia sunt particularia, circa quae parum occupatur intellectus, qui sola universalia discursu, & ratione contempla-

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or sculptors or musicians are not at the same time necessarily great thinkers or scientists or inventors and vice versa. Discussion of melancholia from Ficino to Robert Burton included the human mind and psyche in the total equation and attributed a special measure of fantasy to the artist, but there does not seem to have been any theory of the artistic gift as subtle as Imperiali’s.54 It is in any case this idea about the connection of fantasy and genius with art which moved John Gregory, in his very successful 1766 Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World, to elevate genius and taste to crucial, genuinely human characteristics alongside reason, social principle and religion.55 And it is this idea on which Friedrich Schiller based his 1798 poem “Die Knstler” (Artists), art appearing as the criterion that separates man even from angels: Im Fleiß kann dich die Biene meistern In der Geschicklichkeit ein Wurm dein Lehrer seyn Dein Wissen theilest du mit vorgezognen Geistern Die Kunst, o Mensch, hast du allein. tur: […] Caeterum dubitet aliquis an phantasia tanquam efficiens in omni concurrat ingenio: nam multos quidem in intellectivis advertere licet ingeniosissimos, puta vel in Theologia, vel Philosophia, vel Theorica Medicinae, atque Astrologiae, quorum tamen nullam in activis, sive in phantasiae operibus, conspicimus excellentiam, quae cum in harmonia, figura, & proportione quadam consistant, ut Eloquentia, Musica, Geometria, ars Militaris, Politica, Pictura, Urbanitas, & huiusmodi aliae, nonnullos alioquin perdoctos in scientijs, eis penitus exutos animadvertimus, quos propterea velut abstractos a sensibus, ac eruditos quosdam asinos solemus nuncupare […] Porro phantasiae objectum est materiale, ac singulare, quo igitur ipsum perfectius cognoscet phantasia, eo magis conditionum materialium eiusdem obiecti species in eadem imprimentur. Sed sic erit difficilioris abstractionis penes intellectum, qui circa universale obiectum duntaxat occupatur. Experientia praeterea docet, pictores, qui ad vivum hominum imagines exprimunt, id una praestare phantasiae perfectione nullo fere, vel praecendente, vel subsequente intellectus discursu, quia eiusmodi excellentia solum consistit in unius particularis inspectione, quae intellectus functio non est. Datur ergo phantasiae bonitas absque bonitate intellectus. Hoc idem argumentum videtur militare de practica medicinae, in qua multi excellunt absque magna Theoricae notitita: Item de alijs artibus, ut statuaria, poetica, oratoria, mechanicis, in quibus excellens videtur vigere phantasia, absque excellentia intellectus.” – Imperiali goes even further than Juan Huartes in his Examen de ingenios para las ciencias of 1575. – Cf. Boenke 2005; and Fudge 2006. 54 Cf. Klibansky / Panofsky / Saxl 1964; Schleiner 1991; and – very focussed on Ficino – Brann 2001. 55 I quote the seventh edition, London 1777, esp. 84 ff., 130 – 135.

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Harder-working than bees you are not And worms can teach you what you ought Superior beings have knowledge too But art, o man, belongs to you!56

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Persio, Antonio (1999): Trattato dell’ingegno dell’huomo. Un appendice Del bever caldo. Ed. by Luciano Artese. Pisa / Rome: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali. Pfisterer, Ulrich (1996): “Knstlerische potestas audendi und licentia im Quattrocento – Benozzo Gozzoli, Andrea Mantegna, Bertoldo di Giovanni”, in: Rçmisches Jahrbuch fr Kunstgeschichte 31, 107 – 148. Pfisterer, Ulrich (2002): Donatello und die Entdeckung der Stile, 1430 – 1445. Munich: Hirmer. Pfisterer, Ulrich (2005): “Zeugung der Idee – Schwangerschaft des Geistes. Sexualisierte Metaphern und Theorien zur Werkgenese in der Renaissance”, in: Pfisterer, Ulrich / Zimmermann, Anja (eds.): Animationen / Transgressionen. Das Kunstwerk als Lebewesen. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 41 – 72. Pfisterer, Ulrich (2006):“Altamira – oder: Die Anfnge von Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft”, in: Vortrge aus dem Warburg Haus 10, 13 – 80. Pfisterer, Ulrich (2009): “Der Kampf um’s Weib’ – oder: Kupka, Darwin und die Evolution der Kunst(-Geschichte)”, in: Krass, Ute (ed.): Was macht die Kunst? Aus der Werkstatt der Kunstgeschichte. Munich: Utz, 121 – 160. Plutarch (1957): De sollertia animalium. Ed. by Harold Cherniss and William C. Helmbold. London / Cambridge, Mass.: The Loeb Classical Library. da Prato, Giovanni Gherardi (1975): Il Paradiso degli Alberti. Ed. by Antonio Lanza. Rome: Salerno Editrice. Primaudaye, Pierre de la (1586) [French original 1577]: The French Academy, London. Primaudaye, Pierre de la (1594): The Second Part of the French Academy. London. Reimarus, Hermann Samuel (1982): Allgemeine Betrachtungen ber die Triebe der Thiere, hauptschlich ber ihre Kunsttriebe. Ed. by Jrgen von Kempski. Gçttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Rensch, Bernhard (1961): “Malversuche mit Affen”, in: Zeitschrift fr Tierpsychologie 18, 347 – 364. Ricchieri, Lodovico Celio (1516): Lectionum antiquarum libri XXX. Venice. Roggenkamp, Bernd (1996): “Vom ‘Artifex’ zum ‘Artista’. Benedetto Varchis Auseinandersetzung mit dem aristotelisch-scholastischen Kunstverstndnis 1547”, in: Aertsen, Jan A. / Speer, Andreas (eds.): Individuum und Individualitt im Mittelalter. Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 844 – 860. Romanes, George J. (1882): Animal Intelligence. London: Kegan Paul. Roscoe, Ingrid (1981): “Mimic without Mind: Singerie in Northern Europe”, in: Apollo CXIV/234, 96 – 103. Rosenblum, Robert (1958): “The Origin of Painting. A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism”, in: The Art Bulletin 40, 329 – 331. Ruvoldt, Maria (2004): The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration. Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dreams. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Schiller, Paul A. (1951): “Figural Preferences in the Drawings of a Chimpanzee”, in: Journal of Comparative Psychology 44, 101 – 111. Schleiner, Winfried (1991): Melancholy, Genius and Utopia in the Renaissance. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

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Schroeter, Karl J. A. (1914): Anfnge der Kunst im Tierreich und bei den Zwergvçlkern: Unter besonderer Bercksichtigung der dramatischen Darstellung. Leipzig: Voigtlnder. Schumacher, Meinolf (1999): “ber die Notwendigkeit der kunst fr das Menschsein bei Thomas von Zerklaere und Heinrich dem Teichner”, in: Schaefer, Ursula (ed.): Artes im Mittelalter. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 376 – 390. Scott, Colin (1895 – 1869): “Sex and Art”, in: American Journal of Psychology 7, 153 – 226. Senior, Matthew (1997): “‘When the Beasts Spoke’: Animal Speech and Classical Reason in Descartes and La Fontaine”, in: Ham, Jennifer / Senior, Matthew (eds.): Animal Acts. London / New York: Routledge, 61 – 84. Sobol, Peter (1993): “The Shadow of Reason. Explanations of Intelligent Animal Behaviour in the Thirteenth Century”, in: Salisbury, Joyce E. (ed.): The Medieval World of Nature. New York: Garland, 109 – 128. Sorabji, Richard (1993): Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origin of the Western Debate. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Speroni, Sperone (1978): “Dialogo d’amore”, in: Pozzi, Mario (ed.): Trattatisti del Cinquecento. Milan, 538 – 538. Steiner, Gary (2005): Anthropocentrism and its Discontents. The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy. Pittsburgh: Universitiy of Pittsburgh Press. Stoichita, Victor I. (1997): A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion. Suthor, Nicola (2004): Augenlust bei Tizian. Zur Konzeption sensueller Malerei in der Frhen Neuzeit. Munich: Fink. Taylor, Mark C. (1999): The Picture in Question. Mark Tansey and the End of Representation. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press. Tigler, Peter (1963): Die Architekturtheorie des Filarete. Berlin: De Gruyter. Turmeda, Anselme (1984): Dispute de l’ne. Ed. by Armand Llinars. Paris: Vrin. Turmeda, Anselme (2009): Des Esels Streitrede. Eine altkatalanische Satire. Ed. by Robert Beier. Berlin / Mnster: LIT. Varchi, Benedetto (1960): “Lezzione nella quale si disputa della maggioranza delle arti e qual sia pi nobile, la scultura o la pittura”, in: Barocchi, Paola (ed.): Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento. Vol. 1. Bari, 10. Wasmann, Erich S. J. (1897): Instinkt und Intelligenz im Tierreich. Ein kritischer Beitrag zur modernen Tierpsychologie. Freiburg i.Br. Herder. Weber, Gregor J. M. (1991): Der Lobtopos des ‘lebenden’ Bildes. Jan Vos und sein “Zeege der Schilderkunst” von 1654. Hildesheim u. a.: Olms. Wels, Volkhard (2005): “Zur Vorgeschichte des Begriffs der ‘kreativen Phantasie’”, in: Zeitschrift fr sthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 50, 199 – 226. Wild, Markus (2006): Die anthropologische Differenz. Der Geist der Tiere in der frhen Neuzeit bei Montaigne, Descartes und Hume. Berlin: De Gruyter. Wolf, Bryan (1990): “What the Cow Saw, or, Nineteenth Century Art and the Innocent Eye”, in: Antiques Magazine January, 178 – 185. Woolfson, Jonathan (2009): “The Renaissance of Bees”, in: Renaissance Studies 24, 281 – 300.

Thinking the Human

“Now they’re substances and men”: The Masque of Lethe and the Recovery of Humankind Tobias Dçring It surely was a great extravagance, perhaps rather too much of it – even in the estimation of contemporary courtiers used to sumptuous entertainment, this occasion seems to have somewhat defied proportion. “The frenchmen are gon” John Chamberlain reported in a letter of March 1617, “gon after theyre great entertainment, wch was too great for such pettie companions.”1 The visitors referred to were the embassy of Henri, Baron de la Tour, afterwards Duc de Bouillon, who had come to England six weeks earlier as ambassador extraordinary for the Court of France, i. e. of King Henri IV. On Saturday, 22 February, he was lavishly entertained in the house of the right honourable the Lord Hay, who himself had earlier been ambassador to France, trying to negotiate a marriage for Prince Charles. In Chamberlain’s words, Baron de la Tour was “solemnly invited by the L. Hayes to the wardrobe to a supper and a masque, where the Countesse of Bedford is Lady and mistress of the Feast”2. The masque presented at this feast opened with the figure of Humanity, placed on the top of an arch triumphal, her lap “full of flowers, scattering them with her right hand”, an allegory based on Csare Ripa’s popular Iconologia. 3 In her left hand, however, Humanity held a golden chain symbolizing, as the printed text explains, “both the freedom and the bond of courtesy” (LMM 256).4 The show that opened in this way has been called “the first English opera”5, wholly sung “after the Italian manner” (LMM 257). It was staged by Nicholas Lanier, accomplished composer and designer, and based on a poetic script by Ben Jonson, then for a dozen years almost unrivalled as 1 2 3 4 5

Herford / Simpson 1950, vol. X, 566. Herford / Simpson 1950, vol. X, 566. Herford / Simpson 1950, vol. X, 567. All references to Lovers Made Men will be according to The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lovers Made Men will be abbreviated as LMM. Herford / Simpson 1950, vol. X, 567.

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the writer of such courtly entertainments, often produced by royal commission. Published the same year in a quarto edition under the title Lovers Made Men, the text was reprinted in the 1640 Folio and later renamed by Gifford (not knowing the quarto) as The Masque of Lethe. 6 It is this text, and the story it tells us, that concern me here, because I think they open interesting perspectives on the definition of the human. It is quite a short text – just over 140 lines of verse – and it seems to lie outside the main field of attention in what has been established as the canon of Jonsonian masques, so that critical engagements with it are rather few and far between. Yet to me and our purpose in this volume, it seems highly pertinent indeed. With Humanity presented as the opening figure, Lovers Made Men or The Masque of Lethe immediately highlights the question of the human as the framing issue of the whole performance. Like always in the genre of court masques, the particular meanings suggested by the social occasion of the original production converge on larger and more general meanings suggested by allegorical readings of this figure who, with her right hand, lavishly scatters gifts of flowers and, with her left hand, holds a catena aurea: largesse and bondage dialectically combined. In the same way, the sinister interpretation given to this golden chain, i. e. that courtesy is both a “freedom” and a “bond”, applies not just to the actual host Lord Hay but also implies the condition of the human, perpetually determined by opposing principles. To be sure, figurative oppositions in a dialectic field of forces form the basic pattern of most Jonsonian masques, with their structural counterpart of the so-called antimasque that soon became their hall- and trademark feature in performance. This antimasque, a special piece of entertainment, usually preceded and opposed the main action with a spectacle of boisterous, licentious comedy in a binary logic, which James Loxley has described as generating “a series of differing but structurally equivalent transgressors” – such as witches, sins, or Celts – all eventually transformed, “tamed or banished through their encounter with Stuart power”7. Such a transformation also forms the climax of The Masque of Lethe, as indicated by its printed title Lovers Made Men, a change from transgressive to normative, from somewhat deviant to fully human roles, achieved through the reconciliation of the two divine figures whose influences govern mankind in the action here presented: Mercury and Cupid. Yet interestingly, in this special case the conventional 6 7

Herford / Simpson 1950, vol. VII, 450. Loxley 2002, 119.

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change does not really operate in a binary logic of opposition and exclusion but rather in a mode of compromise and awkward combination. In structural terms, this compromise or symbolic continuum between the two sides is indicated by the fact that there are no separate antimasque characters who could be vanquished, tamed or banned. In fact, the antics of the antimasque are fully integrated in the main performance. As David Lindley observes, “in this work it is essential to the argument that masque and antimasque should not be opposed in dialectical fashion, but seen as a process of redefinition”8 – a highly precarious process, I would add, since it involves a redefinition also of the human. What is centrally at stake here, are the dynamics of memory and oblivion – in mythological terms, of Mnemosyne and Lethe – as rival powers over humankind. This, then, is my main concern with Jonson’s text: trying to explore how the lovers are “made men” again, I would like to discuss a recovery of humankind which, strikingly, is staged here in an act of healing as forgetting. Such an act, it seems to me, bears critical consideration as a performance of rival forces played out in an artistic arena which is itself made up of several and perhaps rival elements, forming the hybrid genre of the masque in an uneasy combination of verbal, visual and musical production. How to link these different parts together may therefore be another question raised with the image of the golden chain by which the spectacle is opened. Yet the crucial issue raised here concerns the concept of Humanity itself. If Renaissance anthropology asks the question “what a piece of work is man?”, The Masque of Lethe is a piece of entertainment urging us to rework the foundation of that question, aligning our concept of the human not principally, as might reasonably be expected, with the force of memory, but with the forces of forgetting: “Now they’re substances and men”: this triumphant climax is accomplished here when humankind has drunk from Lethe’s water – human substance thus recovered through oblivion. How can we account for this surprising turn? What does it suggest for our understanding of oblivion in the early modern culture of commemoration? And what may be its consequences for the larger context of Renaissance anthropology? I shall try to pursue these questions, along the lines suggested, in two ways: on the one hand, I would like to discuss the spectacular strategies of the masque, and Jonson’s use of them, in terms of the theatrical and metatheatrical issues they raise; on the other hand I would like to discuss Jonson’s poetics of 8

Lindley 1998, 285.

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physicality in the conspicuous consumption that this show represents and, simultaneously, performs. First of all, however, I should give a fuller account of what is actually going on and briefly reconstruct what the French ambassador and guest of honour at Lord Hay’s must have experienced. The scene discovered is the underworld: Charon has ferried across a group of ghosts, accompanied by Mercury on what he thinks is their last journey. As some of them seem to faint with exhaustion, he gives them new encouragement: Nay, faint not now, so near the fields of rest. Here no more furies, no more torments dwell Than each hath felt already in his breast; Who hath been once in love hath proved his hell. (LMM 257)

It turns out that these figures are the souls of desperate lovers. Tormented by desire or, as Mercury puts it, “drowned by love” (LMM 258), they have lapsed into a state of death-like ghostliness in which he leads them to their place of final rest. On this way, they now reach river Lethe, represented by “the person of an old man” (LMM 257), a curious reversal of the conventionalized gender of this figure. While Mercury and Lethe discuss how these humans perished through the destructive force of Love, the three Fates who sit at Lethe’s bank enter the conversation and point out that the ghostly figures, in fact, are not dead; they are shadows of their former selves, though not beyond recovery. At which point the central transformation in the Masque takes place; Jonson’s stage directions read: Here they all stoop to the water [i.e. of Lethe], and dance forth their antimasque in several gestures, as they lived in love; and retiring into the grove, before the last person be off the stage, the first couple appear in their posture between the trees, ready to come forth, changed. (LMM 259)

Mercury, Lethe and the Fates spell out what happens: Mercury: See! see! they are themselves again! 1st Fate: Yes, now they’re substances and men. 2nd Fate: Love at the name of Lethe flies. Lethe: For in oblivion drowned, he dies. (LMM 259 f.)

Whereas before, the human lovers were described as “drowned by love”, tossed on the sea of tempestuous desire, their humanity is now recovered while Love himself is drowned “in oblivion”. What the Chorus refers to as their “second birth” (LMM 260) is achieved through a wondrous effect

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of Lethe’s water, which thus appears like a baptismal font. Played out for the benefit of a Catholic embassy from France, following an unsuccessful marriage mission, the ritual purification of such a stage-conversion is interesting enough; yet what mainly interests me about this moment is why and how oblivion can emerge as a productive force, a beneficial, indeed healing power to define the human. For all we know, it was, just on the contrary, the faculty of memory that was central to Renaissance definitions of humanity – and had been so for times immemorial. In fact, the centrality of memory seems to have been a point where the various philosophical and physiological discourses of Renaissance anthropologies converge. According to Aristotelian tradition, which set a model that prevailed for nearly two thousand years, two organs “were involved in the production of memories”, as Mary Carruthers has shown: the heart as organ of reception, and the brain as place of storage.9 The central function of the heart for the work of recollection is also attested in linguistic evidence, as when the Latin term for heart, cor, is the central morphem of the verb ricordari (‘to recollect’) and when we today still speak of “knowing things by heart”. In the medieval context, Thomas Aquinas distinguished a particular type of memory which he calls “intellectual” and which, crucially, is distinctive just for humans;10 while animals do have certain memories too, these are confined to discrete experiences and cannot be conceptualized nor allow for generalization and prediction. In this way, the human faculty of memory was combined with, and requisite for, the eminent human faculty of reason – a bond which is canonical for most Renaissance writers11 and which we are familiar with from many canonical texts: What is a man If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast – no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability of godlike reason To fust in us unused. (Hamlet, 4.4. 32 – 38)

Hamlet’s rhetorical question, in this last soliloquy from the 1603 quarto, reiterates the bond of memory and reason which ennobles and empowers 9 Carruthers 1990, 48 f. 10 Carruthers 1990, 51. 11 Cf. Sullivan 2005, 45.

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humankind; “bestial oblivion” (Hamlet 4.4.39), by contrast, may well be so bestial precisely because it does not allow for any qualifying attributions and thus robs the human subject, as the speaking subject, of all rhetorical self-fashioning: “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”, to quote another canonical phrase (As You Like It, 2. 7. 167). Reduced to “mere oblivion”, the human is fully negated. How, then, can it be regained from Lethe’s water? Against the background briefly sketched, how can we understand Jonson’s reversal, redefinition or revaluation of long-standing memory canons in this masque? Such acts of reversing are, in fact, characteristic also for his use of the entire underworld scenario. For it must be said, that such a dire setting seems neither auspicious nor really appropriate for the festive entertainment of noble foreign guests. The mythological details of the geography of Hades evoked here are probably derived, as Wheeler points out, from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, but are familiar chiefly through the great tradition of infernal journeys from Vergil through Dante, which would eventually lead seventeenth-century English readers into Milton’s epic.12 Here, in the second book of Paradise Lost, the river of oblivion rolls Her watery labyrinth, whereof who drinks Forthwith his former state and being forgets – Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain. (II: 583 – 586)

That, in Jonson’s version, this horrid river functions like a fountain of youth, a source of joy and place where former human states and beings are regained rather than lost, can only be accounted for, I think, when we acknowledge that the figures of the desperate lovers we see at the outset are actually disfigured and have, through the working of desire, already given up their proper state and being. Under Cupid’s charms the desiring subjects lost themselves and turned into shades, so that they are restored to substance only when his charm is broken or removed. Lethe’s waters thus make manifest what has been latent in them as their essence but could, under the impact of desire as a foreignizing force, not come to the fore. Lethe’s waters therefore function in the logic of a homeopathic cure, treating like with likeness and thus healing self-forgetting with forgetfulness:

12 Wheeler 1970, 20.

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Your second birth Will fame old Lethe’s flood, And warn a world That now are hurled About in tempest, how they prove Shadows for Love. (LMM 260)

The lines of the chorus spell out the logic of this cure and set up the glorious outcome as a model to the world. Yet its true significance emerges only, I would like to argue, when we understand the curious formulation “Shadows for Love” also in another context that is crucially at stake here: the performative context of play-acting and masquing, where “shade” and “shadows” are conventional keywords for the theatre and player. The ghostly lovers, I suggest, are metatheatrical figures whose fate negotiates the working of contemporary stage-craft. Their rebirth through oblivion, therefore, should be reconsidered now in terms of Jonson’s ongoing engagement with the aesthetics of the masque, the medium he has made his own. The kind of misgivings and reservations which this author held against the dubious means of spectacle and staging – means commanded mainly by his co-worker and rival Jones – are too well known to need retelling here. However, what deserves note is the way in which Jonson articulates his disapproval of the fleeting arts of sensual staging in the very language of memory versus forgetting that pervades the Masque of Lethe. As he writes in his famous preface to Hymenai in 1606: It is a noble and iust aduantage, that the things subiected to vnderstanding haue of those which are obiected to sense, that the one sort are but momentarie, and meerely taking; the other impressing, and lasting: Else the glorie of all these solemnities had perish’d like a blaze, and gone out, in the beholders eyes. So short-liu’d are the bodies of all things, in comparison of the soules. And, though bodies oft-times haue the ill luck to be sensually preferr’d, they find afterwards, the good fortune (when soules liue) to be vtterly forgotten.13

That is to say, the mortal body of the spectacle – dance, design, and music – can, indeed should be “utterly forgotten” so that instead its everlasting soul will live: the “good fortune” of oblivion is here predicated on the even better fortune of literary memorialization by means of the poet’s art, made of an immortal substance and received through acts of intellec13 Herford / Simpson 1950, vol. VII, 209.

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tual understanding, rather than of sensual, momentary, utterly forgettable pleasures. The point recurs: “a lingering contempt for the ‘body’”,14 to quote Barbara Ravelhofer, i. e. a contempt for the theatrical entrapments of poetic soul, disfiguring its proper shape, is generally characteristic of this writer and his engagement with the medium of courtly entertainment. In this perspective we can read the figures of his “lovers made men” also as an allegory of this poet unmaking his mask, trying to purify the essence of his literary invention from its compromising physical realization. The lovers in this masque are rescued from disfiguring forces of desire through forgetting, just as the spectacle of this masque is to be salvaged from the sensual forces of shadowy stage-arts by consigning all its bodily aspects to oblivion and immortalizing it as noble poetry in living memory: a shining model to hold up to the world. As the Chorus concludes: Leap forth: your light it is the nobler made By being struck out of a shade. (LMM 260)

If we read “shade”, as I suggested, as a code word for the “theatre”, theatricality is here struck out from verbal art. So what I called the logic of homeopathic treatment in which the lovers are cured by the very thing that was their problem – this logic now turns back on Jonson’s art which also tries to cure itself from the same performative malady which, strictly speaking, constitutes its body. But – and here I need to make a crucial reservation – this is not the ending nor the final word. In fact, I have so far discussed only the first half of this masque, breaking off my reading at a decisive turning point. It turns out in the second half that such a project cannot really be successful. The shades of theatre and transformation are not so easily shaken off; they inhabit all poetic language, as a language of metaphorical and tropological desire, in fundamental ways that no-one can dismiss. Even Jonson himself, P.A. Skantze argues in an important study, “remains conflicted in his desire for the rewards of sensual spectacle and those of intellectual respect”15. And it is precisely such a conflict, I would add, that makes him integrate the antimasque into this masque. As noted earlier, Lovers Made Men does not operate in the binary logic of a contrastive 14 Ravelhofer 2006, 6. 15 Skantze 2003, 49.

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pattern; we observe here no expulsion or exclusion of transgressive figures, but a continuum of change, resulting in a narrative of reconversion and cohabitation. This leads us also to rethink the functional relations between memory and oblivion that form the framework of this piece and constitute my own interest in it. So we must ask once more: what exactly happens here and what does it suggest for the larger issues that concern us? Precisely at the point of triumph just now quoted – “struck out of a shade” – Cupid re-appears, i. e. the dangerous figure of desire whose charms have just been broken through the forces of forgetting, can no longer be excluded but returns with renewed force; as we might say in Freudian terms, clearly a return of the repressed: Why, now you take me! these are rites That grace Love’s days and crown his nights! These are the motions I would see And praise in them that follow me! (LMM 260)

As these lines from his revelatory speech make clear, Cupid is quite unimpressed by Lethe and continues his work of seduction by setting out to redefine the ongoing performance. What he refers to as “these rites” is the triumphant dance of the former lovers now celebrating their release from Cupid’s power and true recovery of human status. Cupid, however, in a classic act of re-containment, simply reinterprets what we see and declares the dancing to be part of his own rites. What is more, he goes on to remind the dancers that, up to this point, the true purpose of the masque has not yet been fulfilled: the entire spectacle has so far remained on the stage, confined within the diegetic framework of the fiction. As social entertainment, he argues however, the spectacle should yield to general merriment, embracing spectators as participants, thus moving from stageshow to all-embracing revels: Go, take the ladies forth, and talk, And touch, and taste too: ghosts can walk. ‘Twixt eyes, tongues, hands, the mutual strife Is bred that tries the truth of life. They do indeed like dead men move That think they live, and not in love! Here they take forth the ladies, and the revels follow; (LMM 261)

These revels indicated in the stage direction mark the moment which Stephen Orgel, in his seminal analysis of Jonsonian masques, has described

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as their strategy to incorporate their social audience, or rather, to transcend any distinction between performers and non-performers in a general act of feasting.16 In view of such incorporation, it seems highly significant that Cupid’s language emphasises physical action, physical organs and physical consumption: both his series of verbs – go, take, talk, touch, taste, live, love – and his series of nouns – eyes, tongues, hands – combine to establish a semantic field of concrete bodily acts and functions which, no doubt, is fully appropriate for the social occasion of feasting but which, on the other hand, is clearly at odds with Jonson’s alleged “contempt for the body” noted earlier and his critique of sensual spectacle. What, then, are we to make of such a curious contrast? In a final approach to my topic, I shall now try to reframe the issues noted in the text in a larger cultural context before venturing towards a tentative conclusion. Here I come back to contemporary reports of Lord Hay’s lavish entertainment, “the most sumptuous Feast at Essex house, that ever was seen before, never equalled since” in the judgement of Sir Anthony Weldon.17 According to John Chamberlain, the banquet involved “seuen score feasants, twelue partridges in a dish throughout, twelue whole samons, and whatever els that cost and curiositie could procure in like superfluitie; beside the workemanship and inuentions of thirtie master cooks for twelue dayes”.18 I quote these descriptions not only to illustrate what kind of physical extravagance we are talking about, but also to point out what kind of language is used throughout to describe the cultural work that made it. In particular, the thirty master cooks are relevant and, above all, what Chamberlain calls their “inuentions”. To be sure, invention is the precise rhetorical term used for all kinds of poetic production; the work of these cooks therefore prefigures, or possibly emulates, the work of the poet in his principle task of inventio. For this reason, I think, we should recall the long debate between a poet and a “master cook” which opens one of Jonson’s more famous masques, Neptunes Triumph for the Return of Albion, written seven years later for the occasion of another diplomatic marriage mission that failed, Prince Charles’ failed wedding to a Spanish bride (before, a year later, he finally got engaged with Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henri IV). What is so striking in this learned conversation between the representative of the arts of creating physical pleasure, i. e. the cook, and of creating intellectual 16 Orgel 1965, 19. 17 Herford / Simpson 1950, vol. X, 566. 18 Herford / Simpson 1950, vol. X, 566.

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pleasure, i. e. the poet, is precisely how all sense of such an opposition is being undermined and overwritten by a sense of shared concern. In fact it is the cook who leads the way and emphasises all the commonalities: “a good Poet differs nothing at all from a Master-Cooke. Eithers Art is the wisedome of the Mind”.19 When the Poet, somewhat slower on the uptake, does not get the point, the Cook spells it out for him (and us) to understand: For, there is a palate of the Vnderstanding, as well as of the Senses. The Taste is taken with good relishes, the Sight with faire obiects, the Hearing with delicate sounds, the Smelling with pure scents, the Feeling with soft and plump bodies, but the Vnderstanding with all these: for all which you must begin at the Kitchin. There, the Art of Poetry was learnd, and found out, or no where.20

The art of poetry learned in the kitchen: this is what I meant when I mentioned earlier Jonson’s poetics of physicality and when I suggested that the general account of setting up a hierarchy between the low and fleeting pleasure of the body and the high and lasting triumph of the mind does not tell the entire story. Clearly, though, this is a story often told by the poetic writer himself, as in his preface to Hymenai (quoted above) where he declares “things subiected to vnderstanding” superior to the things that “are obiected to sense”. 21 Yet in Neptunes Triumph, where he chooses the mask of the cook, he now tells us that understanding involves sensual experience just as well. How, then, can we square the two accounts? With this question, let me return to The Masque of Lethe and the issue of forgetting. With Cupid’s verbal emphasis on taste and physical consumption, which opens up the spectacle for courtly dance and general revelling, we now realize that Cupid’s return marks a return also of anthropology, i. e. the question of the human. What piece of work man is, is answered in this second half by emphasizing just the kind of physicality that the first half was trying to write off the record. Yet man is not all intellect and soul, the body must be reckoned with and it remains a necessary part of all things human, including food and love and lovemaking. The lovers are “made men”, not by ridding themselves of this beastly part, but by integrating, by transferring and transforming it into the texture of their reformed lives. This is a strategy, I would like 19 Herford / Simpson 1950, vol. VII, 683. 20 Herford / Simpson 1950, vol. VII, 684. 21 Herford / Simspon 1950, vol. VII, 209.

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to propose, which can precisely be learned in the kitchen: the art of cookery teaches how to integrate disparate elements, balance their qualities and make them all part of one composite whole, a transformation which the master cook in Neptunes Triumph refers to as “a metaphoricall dish” (689), indicating that essentially the same is happening with and in poetic language where metaphors and tropes are always at work in this way. In terms of the metatheatrical reading of The Masque of Lethe I suggested this means that the anxieties about legitimating such a wanton spectacle cannot be resolved by forgetting the spectacular or making us forget it by elimination – but only by embracing it, incorporating and digesting all the other elements into the literary invention. It seems to me therefore highly remarkable that the crucial moment of forgetting on which the entire action turns is also taking place through an act of physical consumption, namely drinking: drinking the water of Lethe. It is in this way that the ghostly lovers are cured from their pains and regain human substance, as if the dangerous river offers them the chance also of physical regeneration. Perhaps we should recall therefore, according to well-known Italian tradition, that the journey to the land of Cockaigne leads across the river of forgetting.22 At any rate, Jonson’s underworld scenario, which, when the revels start, extends its sphere throughout the festive hall, itself assumes the semblance of a sumptuous banquet – a great occasion of display and power where physical force can be regained and social bonds are made through common joy. In the words of the final chorus: All then take cause of joy, for who hath not? Old Lethe, that their follies are forgot; We, that their lives unto their fates they fit; They, that they still shall love, and love with wit. (LMM 262)

The emblematic figure of Humanity that frames Jonson’s show is characterized, as we saw, by a symbolic opposition (flowers versus chain) which the ensuing masque deflects into further oppositions – Lethe versus Love, Mercury versus Cupid, Soul versus Body, Forgetting versus Memory – none of which can be sustained, however, as a stable binary because all of them are rendered mutually compromised and mutually redefining: “love with wit”. Above all, for my interest here, the functional relation between Memory and Forgetting is being reconfigured when forgetting 22 Applebaum 2006, 133.

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figures as an active, shaping force, to be enlisted for pragmatic purposes such as personal regeneration – instead of thinking of it simply as the consequence of natural processes of decline, degeneration or decay. That memory stands to oblivion like culture stands to nature is a familiar view which structures major cultural projects such as the ars memorativa derived from classic rhetorics, a structure also underlying, as Frances Yates famously argued, the project of the early modern theatre as a memorial construction.23 My reading of The Masque of Lethe meant to question this familiar view. In the anthropological perspectives I tried to suggest the theatre may work on its spectators in rather the same way as Lethe’s waters, making them forget their current state. As Orgel says of masques in general, “what the spectator watched he ultimately became”.24 It certainly seems clear from our example that one crucial way in which oblivion operates in this sense as an actively transforming cultural force is banquetting and eating, i. e. the social acts of physical consumption. To conclude: Ben Jonson, as the masquerader, cook and poet of this feast, may well have entertained strong doubts about the viability of thus indulging into fleeting arts of utterly forgettable creations. His work, however, has remained for us as a memorial of such forgetfulness: consumed – to recall yet another canonical phrase – consumed with that which it was nourished by.

23 Yates 1966. 24 Orgel 1965, 7.

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Texts Cited Applebaum, Robert (2006): Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carruthers, Mary (1990): The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herford, Charles H. / Simpson, Percy / Simpson, Evelyn (ed.) (1950): Ben Jonson [Works]. Oxford: Clarendon. Jonson, Ben (1969): The Complete Masques. Ed. by Stephen Orgel. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Lovers Made Men quoted according to this edition, abbreviated LMM, 256 – 262] Lindley, David (1998): “The politics of music in the masque”, in: Bevington, David / Holbrook, Peter (ed.): The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 273 – 295. Loxley, James (2002): The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson. London / New York: Routledge. Milton, John (1992): The Complete English Poems. Ed. by Gordon Campbell. Everyman’s Library. London: Campbell. Orgel, Stephen (ed.) (1969): Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ravelhofer, Barbara (2006): The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, William (2006): As You Like It. Ed. by Juliet Dusinberre. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson Learning. Shakespeare, William (2006): Hamlet. Ed. by Thompson, Ann / Taylor, Neil. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson Learning. Skantze, P. A. (2003): Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre. London / New York: Routledge. Sullivan, Garrett A. (2005): Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheeler, Charles Francis (1970): Classical Mythology in the Plays, Masques and Poems of Ben Jonson [1938]. Port Washington / New York: Kennikat Press. Yates, Frances (1966): The Art of Memory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Shakespeare Ever After: Posthumanism and Shakespeare Stefan Herbrechter Shakespeare’s plays anticipate the impending displacement and disappearance of their world, and they solicit the reciprocal recognition that our world, likewise, conceals the evolving past of a prospective present. Their aim is to project us forward in time to a point where we can look back on Shakespeare’s age and our own as the prehistory of an epoch whose advent humanity still awaits.1 I. Shakespeare ‘After’ Shakespeare Shakespeare, like the sun, is a metaphor; he always means something other than he is.2

Edward Pechter’s What Was Shakespeare (1995) set out to evaluate Shakespeare Studies after the so-called “Theory Wars” and concluded that, at the turn of the millennium at least, there was no “end of Shakespeare Studies as We Know It” in sight, rather a “transformation”.3 This transformation – the result of ideological battles over the role of literature, history, politics and aesthetic value – seemed to have shattered a previous consensus, or, as Pechter calls it, a “unified discourse”4 in Shakespeare criticism. The unified discourse was that of “formalist humanism”5 which collapsed as a result of the combined attack of poststructuralist theory, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism, new historicism and cultural materialism. At the centre of this “alternative” and “political” Shakespeare were “questions about textuality and history, and about subjectivity, agency, and political effectiveness”.6 Where the self-stylised rad1 2 3 4 5 6

Ryan 2001, 199. Wilson 1996, 128. Pechter 1995, 14. Pechter 1995, 18. Pechter 1995, 30. Pechter 1995, 38.

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icalism of the new dissidents sees discontinuity, Pechter in his critique sees nothing but continuity, since dissidence and radical critique are the very backbone of the humanities and humanism itself. This is a tenet that has become quite strong in recent years, namely that the anti-humanism of theory has always relied in fact on a caricature of (“liberal”) humanism in order to detract from the fact that the humanities have always depended and thrived on dissensus rather than enforced consensus as their fundamental form of knowledge production – an argument most forcefully made in Edward Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism. 7 There is of course something utterly disarming about the idea of the humanities – the core of this venerable humanist institution called “University” – as thriving on dissensus rather than agreement. And it is true that some of the antihumanist stances of theory today, upon re-reading, appear somewhat “naff ” and, because of its use of politicised jargon, almost feels like agit-prop. But the idea that a return to some idealised “radical” humanist tradition might be possible sounds equally unconvincing, simply because its institutional support, the cherished humanist university, ceased to exist at the same time as theory, cultural studies and the new interdisciplinarity became all the rage. The university (and the humanities) have been “in ruins” ever since8 and merely survive in their neoliberal, managerialised, “posthistorical” and “postcultural” form. And with them ceased not only the consensus of a “unified discourse” (for example in Shakespeare criticism), but also, in a sense, a certain “Shakespeare” as such. As Scott Wilson wrote, in 1996, Shakespeare has become a mere icon, an empty metaphor, a commodity and an “object of an institutionally channelled desire”.9 Hence also Wilson’s conclusion that whatever remains of Shakespeare is subject to “heterology”. Shakespeare criticism “after Shakespeare” has been looking for what remains “other” and “utterly heterogeneous to his homogenized cultural body”.10 As Wilson rightly points out, this heterology can still be recuperated by a new form of humanism, which is of course one possible reading of the phrase “posthumanism and Shakespeare” in the title of this essay. Shakespeare may have become a “collapsing star” and a “black hole”, following Gary Tay7 8 9 10

Said 2004. Cf. Readings 1997. Wilson 1996, 129. Wilson 1996, 129.

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lor,11 or a “dense, retentive abyss reflecting nothing but the horror, the impotent plight of the would-be uniquely clever, honest and above all disciplined Shakespeare scholar faced with over 4,000 items lodged by the World Shakespeare Bibliography every year and the certain knowledge that any and every interpretation evaporates the instant it is written”,12 but the human and humanist urge of the Shakespeare scholar past, present and to come should never be underestimated. Shakespeare’s “solar unassailability” is unlikely to stop engulfing humanistic scholarly labour any time soon. So, what to do when humanism in its most antihumanist, political and theoretical form becomes a cynical “reflex”? If this sounds almost like an existentialist dilemma, it probably is, and thus the call for “authentic” action cannot be far off. We know, thanks to JeanPaul Sartre, that existentialism is also a humanism, a “dogged” and desperate humanism “malgr tout”. Wilson’s proposed authentic action, in fact, follows Bataille’s logic in “putting [Shakespeare] back into the use circuit as shit” and “putting all of Shakespeare’s shit, all that is remote, revolting, terrible, Other and so on back into play”.13 Shakespeare’s texts thus become the “resident evil”, that which cannot be recuperated by any humanism, simply because it is not (entirely) human. Investigations into the “inhuman” in Shakespeare have been proliferating ever since and while even these readings are not immune to a recuperation by humanism they can nevertheless no longer be called entirely human(ist). One might therefore suggest, they are, for want of a better word, “posthumanist”. However, posthumanist cannot imply a simple turning away, neither from humanism nor from theory, but rather a “working through” or a “deconstruction of humanism” for which something like theory is still very much needed. It also is no turning away from historicism and materialism, but it is a historicism and materialism adapted to the changed “posthuman condition”. One aspect of this condition “after” humanism is the lost consensus, the lost universalism, concerning history and culture. The relevance of Shakespeare after humanism it seems lies in the combination of presentism, strategic anachronism, even futurism, which are expressed in Linda Charnes’s well-known essay “We were never early modern”,14 in which she claims that Shakespeare in contem11 12 13 14

Cf. Taylor 1990. Wilson 1996, 130 f. Wilson 1996, 136. Charnes 2006, 43 – 52.

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porary culture stands for “historicity itself ”.15 It is not so much “calendar time” but the intensity of “subjective time” outside the dialectic between early and late modernity that resonates in Shakespearean characters like Hamlet. They are “always already postmodern, or rather, amodern – since […] one cannot ‘post’ something that has not yet happened”.16 This is not to say, however, that their value lies in a timeless aestheticist or moral human essence, or that they speak to the “heart of human feeling”, but that they highlight – in analogy with Bruno Latour’s argument in We Have Never Been Modern 17 – that modernity (and one might claim, humanism) remains a virtuality, an impossible task: If Latour is correct that we have never been modern, then Hamlet has never been early modern, we have never been postmodern, and we are all, along with the pesky Prince, stuck in the same boat with regard to what, exactly, ‘being historicist’ means […] Hamlet continues to speak to us because he continues to be ‘timeless’: not because he ‘transcends’ history but because we were never early modern. 18

II. Shakespeare ‘After’ Theory A conjunction between tradition and novelty in Shakespeare’s plays exercises an enchantment at once renewable and altogether singular.19

It seems thus that after several decades of heated ideological debates, theory, canon and culture wars, if not settled, have petered out in the general decline of the humanities. Hardened ideological positions on historicist and cultural relativism and the role of truth, politics, ethics and aesthetic value in literature and culture have probably mellowed somewhat as a result. However, the role of the early modern period, the Renaissance and Shakespeare, after having been hotly contested by new historicists, cultural materialists, traditionalists and humanists, remains as unclear and ambiguous as ever. As a result there is a new uncertainty in Shakespeare and early modern studies. The uncertainty this time however seems more profound – too pressing are the “future of the humanities” and the “role of literature” questions to allow for a simple return to “business as usual” in the post-theoretical English department. What returns 15 16 17 18 19

Charnes 2006, 42. Charnes 2006, 47. Latour 1993. Charnes 2006, 48, 52. Belsey 2007, 20.

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instead is a new kind of pluralism around the notion of “humanism”, and around the relationship between literature and life. Humanism, having been one of the main targets of theory, continues to be the main battleground, this time, however, in its pluralised form: i. e. humanisms. A new dissensus about the past, present and future of humanism and its subject – the human – emerges as a result of new perceived threats. The posthuman and posthumanism are starting to take shape, but just like the fragmentation of humanism into mainstream or liberal humanism, existentialist humanism, radical humanism etc., the uncertainty and pluralisation spills over into that which is supposed to supersede it. Posthumanisms promise and threaten in many familiar and sometimes less familiar forms. Posthumanisms revaluate, reject, extend, rewrite many aspects of real or invented humanisms. There is no surprise in this, because this is what the prefix “post-” does. This is its rhetorical essence: it “ambiguates”. It plays with supersedence, crisis, deconstruction, regression and progression at once. Its main virtue, if one chooses to take it seriously, is to defamiliarise, detach and surprise. The phrase “posthumanism and Shakespeare” does not merely highlight the resurfacing of the human and humanism in their fragilised forms. In fact, it is rather a form of care for the human, humanness, humanity that should motivate a posthumanist shift in Shakespeare criticism. It embraces the new plurality and the new questions that are put to humanism, by anti-humanism, posthumanism, even transhumanism alike: questions of human survival in late-modern, global, techno-scientific, hypercapitalist societies with their technocultures. Above all, it confronts humanism with its “spectres” – the inhuman, the superhuman, the nonhuman in all their invented, constructed or actual forms. It is a strategic move away from many anthropocentric premises, so that the human can no longer be taken for granted, humanity as a universal value is no longer self-legitimating, and humanism as a reflex or self-reflex cannot be trusted. To remain “critical”, nevertheless, in a humanistic, or “philological”20 sense in these times of plurality and risk, means to re-read, to read carefully but also differently. While there is of course no agreement about what exactly needs to be done and what role Shakespeare (and literature) can play in the face of this uncertainty, I have been promoting the label “critical posthumanism” as a compromise that shows the care, the scepticism and the openness towards Shakespeare after Shakespeare, or Shakespeare after humanism. Some of the guiding questions in this context are: is there life beyond 20 Cf. Said 2004.

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Shakespeare? What Shakespeare for the age of life sciences? What does Shakespeare tell us about our post-anthropocentric or maybe even postbiological times? Can we still make him our contemporary? It must be clear, however, that this kind of question cannot be answered without theory. But it is theory no longer entrenched in ideological dogmatism but a more relaxed and open-minded theoretical approach that values the lessons learned from the theory wars and subsequent wars, including the so-called science wars. Theory that puts its ear to the ground and listens to the new sounds, which, it is true, mostly come from the sciences these days – bio-, info-, cogno-, neuro- etc. sciences to be precise. It is no wonder that, in the face of these new sciences, the question of the human and the question of the relationship between literature and life come back to haunt the humanities. A phrase like “posthumanism and Shakespeare” therefore signals to everyone interested in literature, culture and the sciences that the current climate is posthumanist: not “dehumanising” but simply in transition or transformation. Humanism – the discourse explaining and legitimating what it means to be human – is in the process of transformation and hence the object of this discourse – the human (who is also its subject, but maybe no longer exclusively so) – is being rewritten. The anxieties and desires that this change and uncertainty cause reopen, for Shakespeare studies, the question of the bard’s, or to borrow Linda Charnes’s phrase, “CyberBard’s”21 role within the history of humanism. The argument as to what exactly Shakespeare’s humanism entails and what function it plays in his work is far from being settled, and remains to be pursued in all its complexity. It goes beyond critiques of the positioning of Shakespeare as a mainstay of a liberal education, or the temptation to read decadence or anarchy (as Matthew Arnold might have) in any of the related counter-positions. It is in any case not a question of polarisation between pro- and anti-humanists that is needed in order to continue to make Shakespeare and the early modern period relevant to our arguably posthumanist moment. What is at stake, instead, is a historically and textually informed clarification of the privileged relationship between the early modern on the one hand and the late, or postmodern, on the other, or between early humanism and a humanism that may be on its last legs, awaiting either its renewal, its working-through, its transformation, or, indeed, its end. This therefore opens onto what is meant by posthumanism. Posthumanism, as we understand it, is a critical stance 21 Charnes 1996, 142.

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that is at one and the same time aware of at least three choices for a contemporary literary criticism mindful of the interdisciplinary temper of our time. The first of these choices reacts to the fact that what is most canonical within the canon is becoming increasingly detached from any of the assumptions that consolidated a humanist paradigm. The second choice responds to outlooks that distance themselves even further from those assumptions, and recognizes that the implications of bio-, nano-, cogno- and info-technology on body, mind, culture, and epistemology have now become part of mainstream debate within the humanities and within interdisciplinary explorations of the integrity of the human. It should therefore be possible to read Shakespeare according to re-conceptualisations influenced by these outlooks – among them the possibility that Shakespeare may have “invented” the posthuman as well as the human. The third choice remains doggedly insistent that nothing much substantially has changed, that Shakespeare has survived far worse upheavals than these, and that it continues to be perfectly feasible to read him as if there were no hint of a brave new world that has such posthumanists in it. It is with all this in the background that one needs to revisit the humanist/anti-humanist debate in the light of current thinking, cultural practices, and re-orientations towards the posthuman. In practical terms, this involves recognizing that at present the question of what it means to be human is being asked in the context of dramatic technological change. Rereading Shakespeare within this present therefore takes on a new and exciting relevance. To discuss whether Shakespeare’s work coincides with the invention of the human is surely to question also his understanding of the inhuman, the non-human, the more-than-human, the less-than-human. Above all, it involves exploring whether the posthuman, too, is already there. Is it prefigured, represented, contested in Shakespeare? If so, is it possible to come up with a posthumanist approach to Shakespeare that would be able to respond to his work in the light of critical perspectives that retain the memory of humanism but which also seek to exemplify what posthumanist interpretation might entail?

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III. Shakespeare ‘After’ Humanism Life itself has become a naturalistic unreality, partly, because of Shakespeare’s prevalence […] To have invented our feelings is to have gone beyond psychologizing us: Shakespeare made us theatrical […].22

The question of Shakespeare’s humanism has created a vast amount of controversy and heated debate between self-proclaimed humanists and proponents of a politicised new historicist and cultural materialist Shakespeare. The argument has mostly been fought at an ideological level and has involved some strategic misrepresentations of the other camp. New Historicists and cultural materialists have been reduced to “postmodernists”, or “constructivist anti-essentialists”, while all too often defenders of Shakespeare’s “humanism” have themselves been caricatured as politically nave, reactionary, or idealist-cum-aestheticist. Those who seek a ready point of reference for this debate need go no further than reactions to Harold Bloom’s notorious equation of Shakespeare with the “invention of the human”, and his idea that we were “pragmatically invented” by Shakespeare. Indeed, Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare – The Invention of the Human insists on explaining Shakespeare’s pervasiveness through his “universalism”. It is of course a very Western universalism Bloom has in mind because he equates it with the invention of (modern) “personality”, which, in turn, is taken to be, as the subtitle professes, the “invention of the human”: More even than all the other Shakespearean prodigies – Rosalind, Shylock, Iago, Lear, Macbeth, Cleopatra – Falstaff and Hamlet are the invention of the human, the inauguration of personality as we have come to recognize it. The Idea of Western character, of the self as a moral agent, has many sources: Homer and Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles, the Bible and St. Augustine, Dante and Kant, and all you might care to add. Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness.23

For Bloom, Shakespeare is the Western and therefore the universal canon, and thus the only defense against the “anti-elitist swamp of Cultural Studies”24 which has presumably led to the current identity crisis within the humanities. Quite obviously, Bloom represents all that has been discredited in mainstream liberal humanism: an aestheticism that makes 22 Bloom 1999, 13. 23 Bloom 1999, 4. 24 Bloom 1999, 17.

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moral political (liberal) judgments on the basis of an apparent “empirical supremacy”.25 While Bloom defends the universalism and meliorism of the humanistic project against postmodern cultural relativism, others, like Robin Headlam Wells, in their defence of humanism and their attack on theory’s anti-essentialism and cultural constructivism or relativism turn to quite unlikely allies, like evolution, biology and genetics. Quite surprisingly, the idea that there may be a human “essence” after all, even if it is not cultural but genetic, is seen as somehow “liberating”. Humanity is not a construct but a “predisposition”, the self not an invention but a neuropsychologically explicable effect of hard-wired evolution-driven brain activity. As a result, literature (including criticism), strictly speaking, becomes a branch of cognitive – or neuroscience. It is certainly true that in the light of technoscientific change literary criticism cannot stand still, but it is precisely because of this change that a straight-forwardly humanist understanding of literature is no longer possible. Replacing theoretical anti-essentialism and constructivism with a new bioscientific essentialism cannot repair humanism, and using genetic notions of human “nature” to defend oneself against antihumanist theory only accelerates the proliferation of a rather uncritical form of posthumanism. Wells’s project in Shakespeare’s Humanism is to show “the centrality of human nature in Shakespeare’s universe”, “by listening to what other disciplines have to say about human nature”, in order for criticism to “move on from an outdated anti-humanism”.26 Ironically, however, this project might in the end turn out to be counter-productive. The anti-anti-essentialism directed against new historicism and theory is bought at the price of a new “naturalism” and techno-idealism. It might be preferable to imagine a different, namely critical posthumanist, materialism which does engage with technological challenges not by comparing concepts of “human nature” but, precisely, by denaturing the human. One simply does not need the mystification of a phrase like “human nature” to explain what constitutes our species’ biological and cultural characteristics once evolution is no longer confused with teleology. This does not invalidate the theory of evolution, it merely helps to “de-anthropocentralise” it. It is important not to confuse or freely slide between universalism and essentialism in terms of human “nature”. The fact that members of the species “homo sapiens (sapiens)” share genetic and cultural characteristics 25 Bloom 1999, 16. 26 Wells 2005, 5.

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which, at a basic non-normative level, are undoubtedly universal, does not automatically lead to moral aesthetic values about human nature since the concept of nature just like all the concepts used in science (from “life” to “gene”) are first and foremost linguistically and culturally mediated entities or metaphors. A critical posthumanism is neither turning its back on constructivism, nor on materialism and historicism, nor on the idea that universal meaning like truth is not given but made. A statement like Wells’s: “If there were no universal passions and humours, we would have no means of evaluating literature from another age or another culture: a text would have value only for the community in which it was produced”,27 is not an argument against a presumed theoretical presentism, because it neglects the fundamentally hermeneutic condition of all human and maybe also non-human knowledge, namely that meaning, including historical and scientific meaning, always needs to be appropriated and interpreted by a materially, historically, and radically contextualised subject. This is, in fact, precisely what Wells is doing in attempting to redress what he thinks is an imbalance. What else does it prove than showing that Shakespeare and his Renaissance or early modern context were already in many ways anti-essentialist, than to increase (and construct) Shakespeare’s continued, or indeed renewed, intensified, modulated etc. relevance to our own, equally constructed, stance regarding our present time? One should regard the opening up of literature and criticism after humanism (following on from and thus inheriting “postmodern” theory) towards what appear to be fundamental technoscientific challenges, and towards a constructed human nature, as probable but not as unproblematic – hence our appeal for a critical posthumanism. IV. Life ‘After’ Shakespeare Can Shakespeare help us with the question of how to live?28

For Andy Mousley, in Re-Humanising Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s “greatness” undoubtedly lies in his “humanity”. He tries to revive the idea of “Shaespeare as sage” or of the great writer’s “wisdom” as that part of Arnoldian criticism that looks upon literature as a “coherent criticism of life”. Mousley applauds a resurgence of “literary humanism” after anti27 Wells 2005, 192. 28 Mousley 2007, 1.

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humanist theory that reaffirms literature as an “antidote to dehumanisation, alienation and instrumentalism”.29 Shakespeare’s ethics and the “existential significance” of his writings for living an “authentically human” life should not, however, do away with anti-humanist theory’s “scepticism”.30 Mousley tackles this seemingly impossible task by differentiating between what he calls “mainstream humanism” (“individualism, […] sovereignty, unbridled freedom, autonomy and a magnified image of humanity”)31 – which was and continues to be the justified target of theoretical scepticism – and “other humanisms”, especially existentialist forms that do not presuppose a “transcendent” human “nature” but see the essence of humanness as an exploration of its limits – or, as Jean Paul Sartre famously explained, in defending existentialism against what he called “les naturalistes”, that is, existentialism, is a humanism, because it starts from a radicalised idea of freedom (namely, as responsibility and task) and from the lack of determination in anything human, captured in the phrase: “l’existence prc de l’essence”. Reading mainstream humanism back into the Renaissance results, according to Mousley, in seeing Shakespeare as “a bridge between Renaissance humanism and modern literary humanism”, who “broadens and deepens the Renaissance humanist preoccupation with ‘how to live’”, and “who intensifies the existential significance of otherwise abstract ideas and precepts by converting them into vividly realised forms of life”.32 In short, Shakespeare was both a sceptic and a sage, a kind of ironic humanist, and Mousley, as a result, puts his trust in Shakespeare to achieve a “better humanism”,33 one that constitutes an attempt “to answer the question of what remains of the human, when ‘the human’ like all else is liable to evaporate”.34 Shakespeare, it is hoped, may help us to “become human”35 after all. Mousley, in what one might call his “yearning for the human” – paraphrasing Akeel Bilgrami’s introduction to Edward Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism 36 – is following in the footsteps of eminent and critical humanists like Said, for whom humanism is first of all, literally speaking, self-criticism. And this means, of course, that the task of 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Mousley 2007, Mousley 2007, Mousley 2007, Mousley 2007, Mousley 2007, Mousley 2007, Mousley 2007, Said 2004.

8. 12. 16 f. 21. 23. 25. 30.

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every humanist scholar or “philologist” is to be critical of humanism itself. As admirable and noble as this existential, almost desperately hopeful, yearning for our promised humanity might seem, the implied radical openness of the human and the idea of thinking the human “at the limits”, remains a high-risk strategy. Humanism has never been able to guarantee anything, and even Shakespeare as “life coach” cannot perform miracles. There have always been humans who yearned for something entirely other than (being) human – and currently their number seems to be on the rise again. One can yearn for God, or spiritual community, but also for the machine, artificial intelligence, or a transhuman successor species, in short, (self )transcendence in any form. This is why merely radicalising the critical potential that undoubtedly lies in some forms of humanism37 is probably not enough and one should instead insist on using the admittedly awkward posthumanist label, at the risk of being mistaken for a techno-enthusiast. But the historical-material imperative compels one to take the newness of the posthuman challenge seriously and, to a certain extent, literally. Shakespeare after humanism is still humanist – that may be true, but the challenge to the humanist tradition does not just stem from anti-humanist theory, it also lies in post-, de-, super-, trans- etc. humanising tendencies within modernity and thus at the heart of technoscience and late capitalist humanity. In this sense, Shakespeare might not be merely after humanism, but he might also be after technology and, ultimately, after the human as such. V. Shakespeare ‘After’ Technology […] a close study of Shakespeare’s plays indicates that the metaphorical or symbolic transformation of the human being into a technological implement [“turning tech”] was well under way in the early modern period.38

In many ways, the posthuman gestures towards technology and cultural change, which, if not driven by, are at least inseparable from, technological and scientific development. However, it is equally clear that this is no one-way street. One could take one’s cue from the inspiring and provocative work by Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday in The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print 39 or from Arthur 37 Cf. Halliwell / Mousley 2003. 38 Cohen 2006, 18. 39 Rhodes / Sawday 2000.

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F. Kinney’s Shakespeare’s Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama,40 or from Adam Max Cohen’s Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions. 41 Shakespeare’s own awareness of technological change in early modern culture takes place at a time when modern knowledge partitioning was not yet in place and thus interdisciplinarity or rather transdisciplinarity made a dialogue between early scientific investigation and humanistic study relatively simple. There was also no modern sense of technology but merely mechanical practices, tools, new instruments, machines and artefacts or “techniques”. That technical and machinic metaphors are present in Shakespeare’s work is obvious, but their ambiguity is also a reflection of a developing general cultural ambiguity towards the machinic human other. Especially in such a mechanical environment as the theatre, the mixing of human and machine, and thus early modern forms of “cyborgisation”, are never far away – a process that Cohen names “turning tech”, by which he means the “description of the individual as a machine”.42 If the early modern age is the beginning of the homo mechanicus, and if early modern literature gives rise to something like the literary cyborg, as Sawday claims, there is also ambiguity about the distinction between nature and culture, the boundaries of the body, biology and spirituality, materialism and idealism, emotion and cognition.43 No wonder that cognitive and neurosciences are increasingly called upon to explain the cognitive cultural “map” of the early modern mind and “Shakespeare’s brain”.44 All these are attempts to demonstrate the continued if not increasing relevance of Shakespeare and the privileged relationship between early and late modern culture. One useful analogy here might be the image of “retrofitting”, in the sense of creating an adaptability between old and new (technologies, and by analogy cultures and their readings), which thus represents a kind of reinforcing and bridging continuity. One further meaning of “Shakespeare and posthumanism” could be: retrofitting the early modern in this sense – combining technological change with continuity and cultural ecology. Links are forged between the first age of print and that which presents itself as maybe the last age of print with

40 41 42 43 44

Kinney 2004. Cohen 2006. Cohen 2006, 17. Cf. Sawday 1999, 171 – 195. Cf. Crane 2000.

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its transition to digital and digitalised culture and the major conceptual reorientations this might bring. As Rhodes and Sawday put it: The computer, through its possibilities for interactivity, ‘play’ and the creativity of hypertext, is now rapidly undoing that idealization of stability [underpinning the age of print], and returning us to a kind of textuality which may have more in common with the pre-print era.45

Even though the Shakespearean text will undoubtedly survive and even thrive in the digital age, the idea and the available technologies relating to text and textuality46 – text, Graham Holderness reminds us, is itself, in its irreducible multiplicity, a piece of technology47 – will change, have already changed the practice of textual editing and literary criticism. It is thus becoming increasingly difficult to disentangle “pastism” (historicism), “presentism” and “futurism” in Shakespeare studies after technology. VI. Shakespeare ‘After’ the Human […] what we are living through now is not some (post)modern collapse of Western subjectivity but another mutation in its enduring dynamic.48

Ultimately, the effect of the collapsing of the humanist tradition and the radical opening-up of the human and its meaning, is prompted by certain ethical questions, which explains the major focus on non-human others, the inhuman, the subhuman but also the superhuman. On the one hand, there is the “greening” of Shakespeare through various forms of ecocriticism; on the other, there is the post-anthropocentric thrust of posthumanist theory that concerns itself with all kinds of nonhuman others, especially animals. Gabriel Egan explains his motives in writing Green Shakespeare by claiming to “show that our understanding of Shakespeare and our understanding of Green politics have overlapping concerns”.49 The increasingly urgent and concrete threat of environmental disaster, questions of sustainability and the contemporary critique of “speciesism” actually go hand in hand. What can early modern forms of “ecology” and 45 Rhodes / Sawday 2000, 11 f. 46 Cf. the wonderful French phrase for “word processing”, traitement de texte, or the more functionalist German Textverarbeitung. 47 Holderness 2003. 48 Dollimore 1998, 271. 49 Egan 2006, 1.

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attitudes towards nature and animals teach late modern Green politics and animal rights movements? There is a new organicism, vitalism and ideas of interconnectedness between nature and culture, humans and their environment, networks and nodes, that promise new forms of interdisciplinarity between the sciences and the humanities outside or “after” the humanist tradition, producing new, posthuman(ist) forms of subjectivity. To what extent can the beginning of modernity and humanism be helpful in making choices for us who find ourselves at the other end of five hundred years of modernity and humanism? Again, the notion of retrofitting seems appropriate here: Shakespeare’s plays show an abiding interest in what we now identify as positive-negative-feedback loops, cellular structures, the uses and abuses of analogies between natural and social order, and in the available models for community. Characters in Shakespeare display an interest in aspects of this natural world that are relevant for us, and if we take that interest seriously we find that there is nothing childlike or nave about their concerns.50

In analogy with the indeterminacy of nature and culture in early modern times, there is also a “space of ontological indeterminacy”51 between humans and animals, according to Bruce Boehrer. It is worth studying the “distinctions between human and animal nature”, which are “central to western cultural organization […], help to license particular forms of material and economic relations to the natural world; […] help to suggest and reinforce parallel social distinctions on the levels of gender, ethnicity, race, and so on historically”,52 but it is also necessary to draw parallels with contemporary forms of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, speciesism and humanism. In Perceiving Animals, Erica Fudge argues for this kind of continuity, this retrofitting of early modern and late modern speciesism. The “degradation of humanity in the face of the beast in early modern thought is a recurring theme”,53 she explains, but anthropomorphism allows both for, the sentimental humanisation of animals and the animalisation of humans. If this mutual dependence of the violent and speciesist process of “becoming human” and “becoming animal” is a major concern in early modern culture and in early modern humanism, then it increasingly comes back to haunt a late modern and posthumanist culture in which the boundaries between human and animal (like all 50 51 52 53

Egan 2006, 50. Boehrer 2002, 1. Boehrer 2002, 3. Fudge 2000, 10.

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those boundaries between humans and their significant others which have played and continue to play a role in the process of shoring up and guaranteeing the humanity of the human, e. g. the monster, the machine etc.) once again, this time through bio- and other technologies, have become porous. “Thinking with animals” becomes thus a major task, since “ignoring the presence of animals in the past [as in the present or the future one might add] is ignoring a significant feature of human life”.54 Nonhuman animals can be “agents” in human culture, they can also be “subjects”: “humans cannot think about themselves – their cultures, societies, and political structures – without recognizing the importance of nonhumans to themselves, their cultures, societies, and political structures”.55 The phrase “posthumanism and Shakespeare” therefore also speaks to this “dislocation of the human” brought about by the return of its nonhuman others and the possible parallel between the challenges to early modern and late modern humanism, where, as Donna Haraway puts it, the distinctions between human and animal, and human and machine have become “leaky”.56 VII. Conclusion, or We Have Never Been Human Even a presumably postmodernist – if not post-humanist – vision […] harbors a deeply humanistic yearning insofar as it underscores the necessity of narrative memory in the creation and maintenance of subjectivity.57

“Posthumanism and Shakespeare” – the phrase thus opens up several lines of questioning: what would it mean to read Shakespeare no longer as humanist – neither as a humanist author nor from a humanist’s standpoint? Who, in fact, is the real posthumanist, Shakespeare or us? Two humanisms are here in doubt – Shakespeare’s and ours. Doubting, after a period of prolonged theoretical anti-humanism, can also mean several things: on the one hand, it can simply be a rather stubborn confirmation of humanism, a return to common sense in post-theoretical times.58 It can also lead to a revaluation of humanism, in the form of a critical return to and an 54 55 56 57 58

Fudge 2004, 3. Fudge 2004, 4. Haraway 2004, 10. Charnes 2000, 202 f. Cf. Bloom 1999; Wells 2005.

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affirmation of the radical potential within humanism itself.59 But it may also be understood as an attempt to read Shakespeare through all sorts of figurations of the “inhuman” (either in its late modern, technological forms, like cyborgs, machines, computers etc., or in its more ancient, premodern or rather “amodern” appearances, like ghosts, monsters, animals, etc.). Finally, critical posthumanism can also work its way back to Shakespeare and construct genealogies between his work and a perceived or real current shift away from a humanist knowledge paradigm, the possible advent of a new episteme in which the human again becomes a radically open category for the promise of a post-anthropocentric and posthumanist, but hopefully not posthuman, future.

Texts Cited Belsey, Catherine (2007): Why Shakespeare? Houndmills: Palgrave. Bloom, Harold (1999): Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. London: Fourth Estate. Boehrer, Bruce (2002): Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England. Houndmills: Palgrave. Bruster, Douglas (2003): Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn. Houndmills: Palgrave. Chambers, Iain (2001): Culture After Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity. London: Routledge. Charnes, Linda (1996): “Styles That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Ideology Critique”, in: Shakespeare Studies 24, 118 – 147. Charnes, Linda (2000): “The Hamlet formerly known as Prince”, in: Grady, Hugh (ed.): Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium. London: Routledge, 189 – 210. Charnes, Linda (2006): Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Adam Max (2006): Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions. Houndmills: Palgrave. Cook, Amy (2006): “Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science”, in: SubStance 35.2, 83 – 99. Crane, Mary Thomas (2000): Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading With Cognitive Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dollimore, Jonathan (1998): “Shakespeare and Theory”, in: Loomba, Ania / Orkin, Martin (ed.): Post-Colonial Shakespeares. London: Routledge, 259 – 276. Dollimore, Jonathan (2004): Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Houndmills: Palgrave. 59 Cf. Said 2004; Mousley 2007.

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Egan, Gabriel (2006): Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Fudge, Erica / Gilbert, Ruth / Wiseman, Susan (ed.) (1999): At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period. Houndmills: Palgrave. Fudge, Erica (2000): Perceiving Animals: Humans and beasts in early Modern English Culture. Houndmills: Macmillan. Fudge, Erica (ed.) (2004): Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Halliwell, Martin / Mousley, Andy (2003): Critical Humanisms: Humanist/AntiHumanist Dialogues. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Haraway, Donna ([1985] 2004): “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, The Haraway Reader. London: Routledge, 7 – 45. Holderness, Graham (2003): Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. Joughin, John J. (ed.) (2000): Philosophical Shakespeare. London: Routledge. Kinney, Arthur F. (2004): Shakespeare’s Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama. New York: Routledge. Latour, Bruno (1993): We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mousley, Andy (2007): Re-Humanising Shakespeare: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pechter, Edward (1995): What Was Shakespeare? Renaissance Plays and Changing Critical Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Readings, Bill (1997): The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rhodes, Neil / Sawday, Jonathan (ed.) (2000): The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print. London: Routledge. Ryan, Kiernan (2001): “Shakespeare and the Future”, in: Cartmell, Deborah / Scott, Michael (ed.): Talking Shakespeare: Shakespeare into the Millennium. Houndmills: Palgrave, 187 – 200. Said, Edward W. (2004): Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Houndmills: Palgrave. Sawday, Johnathan (1999): “‘Forms Such as Never Were in Nature’: the Renaissance Cyborg”, in: Fudge, Erica / Gilbert, Ruth / Wiseman, Susan (ed.): At the Borders of the Human. Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philsosphy in the Early Modern Period. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 171 – 195 Taylor, Gary (1990): Reinventing Shakespeare. London: Hogarth Press. Wells, Robin Headlam (2005): Shakespeare’s Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Scott (1996): “Heterology”, in: Nigel Wood (ed.): The Merchant of Venice. Buckingham: Open University Press, 124 – 163.

Index Abbas, Shah 14, 109f., 113, 115–117, 123, 126f., 130 Agamben, Giorgio 8, 23, 37f. Alberti, Leon Battista 161, 232, 234 Amin, Samir 38 Antelme, Robert 34, 36f. Appia, Kwame Anthony 111 Apuleius 83 Aquinas, Thomas (St) 5, 233, 251 Arendt, Hannah 15, 186, 195 Aristotle 5f., 54, 185, 204f., 222, 268 Arnold, Matthew 266 Ashcroft, Bill 149 Augustine, Aurelius (St) 5, 98, 233, 268 Awdeley, John 138, 142 Baldus 162, 168 Bataille, George 263 Beck, Ulrich 157 Beier, A.L. 140 Bellow, Saul 112 Benjamin, Walter 113 Bingham, Harold 202 Bloom, Harold 11, 268f., 276 Boas, George 200, 223 Bonifacio, Giovanni 225f., 232f. Brant, Sebastian 142 Bredekamp, Horst 46, 58, 232 Browne, Thomas 42, 64 Bruno, Giordano 1f. Bulstrode, Whitelocke 91–94 Burckhardt, Jacob 8 Burke, Peter 140 Burkert, Walter 99 Calvin, John 95f. Capella, Galeazzo 9 Carroll, William C. 92, 95

Casas, Bartolom de Las 221 Cassirer, Ernst 5, 10 Cato 211f. Cavendish, William 47 Cecil, Robert 120, 123, 125 Chamberlain, John 130, 247, 256 Chapman, George 173f. Charles I, (Prince Charles) 247, 256 Charnes, Linda 263f., 266, 276 Clifford, Margaret 49, 51f. Copland, Robert 138, 142 Cotton, Charles 44, 47, 57 Dante, Alighieri 252, 268 Darwin, Charles 18, 218f., 233f. Daston, Lorraine 159, 162, 203 Davenant, William 58 De Dominis, Marco Antonio 128 Defoe, Daniel 162 Dekker, Thomas 138, 145f., 150, 194 Del Bene, Francesco 164 Della Porta, Giambattista 222 Denham, John 44f. Diderot, Denis 112 Didi-Huberman, Georges 231 Diogenes 222f. Dodds, Eric 97–99 Donne, John 94, 120 Doran, John 189 Douglas, Mary 74–77, 81 Drayton, Michael 79 Duc de Bouillon 247 Duffy, Eamon 75–78, 81f., 87 Elizabeth I (Queen of England) 109f., 117f., 120, 123 Elkins, James 231 Ewald, FranÅois 159f.

280

Index

Fairfax, Mary 53–56, 59, 62, 64 Fairfax, Thomas 42, 53f., 65 Fairfax, William 53–55 Febvre, Lucien 175f. Fennor, William 138f. Ficino, Marsilio 232f., 237 Filarete, Antonio Averlino 235 Florio, John 199 Forster, Edward Morgan 35f. Fossey, Dian 202 Foucault, Michel 157, 159 Foxe, John 211 Frazer, James George 72 Freud, Sigmund 176, 255 Fudge, Erica 234, 237, 275f. Fuller, Thomas 125

Horace 236, 46 Huggan, Graham 149 Hume, David 206 Hundt, Magnus 7, 9

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 209 Galen 222 Garner, Robert 201 Gehlen, Arnold 10 Gelli, Giovanni Battista 224f., 233, 236 Giddens, Anthony 157f. Gifford, William 248 Golding, Arthur 13, 91–93, 95f., 98, 100 Gramay, Jean-Baptiste 170f. Greenblatt, Stephen 111, 115, 142, 144f., 149, 208 Greene, Robert 85, 138, 146–148, 152 Gregory, John 237 Gyges 217

Kant, Immanuel 9, 115, 268 Kean, Edmund 189 Koths, Nadjeta 217

Habermas, Jrgen 194 Haraway, Donna 187, 276 Harman, Thomas 137–145, 149f., 152 Harriot, Thomas 144 Harvey, Gabriel 191 Hay, James 247f., 250, 256 Hazlitt, William 189 Heidegger, Martin 3–5, 22, 42 Henri IV (King of England) 120, 247, 256 Hermes Trismegistus 60 Hobbes, Thomas 47f.

Innocent III (Pope)

7

James I (King of England) 120, 122, 127 James VI 120, 128 James, Wendy 73 Jennings, Nicholas 142 Johnson, Samuel 79 Jonson, Ben 16f., 41–43, 49, 54, 100, 111, 173f., 247–250, 252–259

Lamb, Michael E. 13, 92, 95f. Lanier, Nicholas 247 Lanyer, Aemilia 13, 49–52 Laroque, FranÅois 129 Latour, Bruno 264 Le Brun, Charles 5f., 222 Le Goff, Jacques 159 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 162 Lely, Peter 58 Lry, Jean de 211 Levi, Primo 36f. Lvi-Strauss, Claude 113 Lloyd, William 91, 97 Lucretius 46 Lukian 100 Luther, Martin 74f. MacGregor, Neil 109–115 Machiavelli, Niccol 9, 35, 158 Macklin, Charles 189 Mandeville, Bernard 149 Manetti, Giannozzo 5, 7, 9, 21, 233 Maria, Henrietta (Daughter of Henri IV) 53, 62–64, 101–103, 256 Markall, Martin 139, 150 Marlowe, Christopher 27, 30, 114f., 191, 194

281

Index

Marston, John 173f. Marvell, Andrew 13, 42f., 45f., 48, 52f., 55, 57f., 63, 65 Maximus, Valerius 231 Melis, Federigo 161, 163, 166f. Milton, John 5, 252 Montaigne, Michel de 15f., 58, 101, 187, 195, 199–213, 224f. More, Thomas 9 Mnkler, Herfried 30, 38 Norton, Thomas

26, 125

Obama, Barack 112 Olivier, Laurence 196 Orgel, Stephen 128, 247, 255f., 259 O’Toole, Peter 193 Ovid 5, 80, 92–94, 96, 226 Pepys, Samuel 129 Pico de la Mirandola, Giovanni 36 Plato 48, 54, 222, 268 Plessner, Helmuth 10 Plinius 231 Plotinus 63f. Plutarch 222, 224f. Proclus 48, 63 Pushkin, Alexander S. 112 Pythagoras 14, 91–102, 191 Rappaport, Roy 73f., 86f. Reimarus, Hermann Samuel 234 Rich, Barnabe 85, 123 Rid, Samuel 138, 151 Ripa, Csare 247 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 162 Rudolf II 116 Ruland, Rutger 162, 168f. Rushdie, Salman 112 Said, Edward 130f., 262, 271 Sartre, Jean-Paul 263, 271 Schadewaldt, Wolfgang 21f. Schaller, George 202 Scheler, Max 10 Schiller, Friedrich 217, 237

7–9,

Scot, Reginald 80, 83f. Scott, Walter 79f. Seneca 46, 231f. Sepffllveda, Juan Gins 221, 233 Sextus Empiricus 213 Shakespeare, John 77 Shakespeare, William 11, 13–15, 21, 24, 26f., 30f., 35f., 38, 72, 77–83, 85, 87, 91f., 95, 109–111, 114, 117–123, 128–130, 174, 185–192, 194–197, 261, 263f., 266–273, 275f. Shapiro, James 189, 191 Sherley, Anthony 116–121, 123–127, 129–131 Sherley, Robert 14, 117, 119, 124f., 130 Shklar, Judith 209 Sidney, Robert 43, 49, 54 Skantze, P. A. 254 Socrates 211f., 222 Spenser, Edmund 191 Straccha, Benventuro 162, 168 Tansey, Mark 2288, 231 Thomas, Keith 75, 82 Thwaites, Isabel 53, 55 Tiffin, Hellen 149 Titian 226, 228f. Trinkaus, Charles 7f. Vere, Anne 53 Vergil 252, 226 Vos, Jan 232 Weber, Max 99, 159, 161, 175f. Weimann, Robert 129 Weldon, Sir Anthony 256 Wheeler, Charles F. 252 White, Hayden 21 Whitelocke, Bulstrode 91–93 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 72f., 87 Woolf , Virginia 2f., 11 Xenophanes 100, 223 Yates, Frances

259