Shakespeare in Theory and Practice

IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

T

CATHERINE BELSEY

heory is valuable to the degree that it enables us to read differently: a nuanced approach shows that the most obvious interpretation is never the whole story. In these essays, brought together here for the first time, world-renowned critic Catherine Belsey puts theory to work in order to register Shakespeare’s powers of seduction, together with his moment in history. Teasing out the meanings of the narrative poems, as well as some of the more familiar plays, Shakespeare in Theory and Practice demonstrates the possibilities of an attention to textuality that also draws on the archive. A reading of the Sonnets, written specially for this book, analyses their intricate and ambivalent inscription of desire. Belsey has been intimately involved with poststructuralism as it has emerged and developed in the English-speaking world. While the earliest essays published here are strongly influenced by Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser, both writers acknowledged a debt to the psychoanalytic account of representation as always unstable, designed at once to reveal and to repress, and Belsey’s later work has come to owe more to Lacanian psychoanalysis, in addition to Derridean deconstruction. Between them, these essays trace the progress of theory in the course of three decades, while a new introduction offers a narrative and analytical overview, from a participant’s perspective, of some of its key implications. Written with verve and conviction, this book shows how texts can be seen to offer access to the dissonances of the past when theory finds an outcome in practice. Catherine Belsey is currently Research Professor at the University of Wales Swansea and formerly Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University. Her most recent books are Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (2002), Culture and the Real (2005) and Why Shakespeare? (2007). ISBN 978 0 7486 3301 2 Cover image: Queen Mab’s Cave by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1775–1851. © Tate, London 2007. Cover design: Cathy Sprent Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.eup.ed.ac.uk

SHAKESPEARE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE CATHERINE BELSEY Edinburgh

SHAKESPEARE

SHAKESPEARE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE CATHERINE BELSEY

Shakespeare in Theory and Practice

Shakespeare in Theory and Practice 䉬 䉬 䉬

Catherine Belsey

Edinburgh University Press

© Catherine Belsey, 2008 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 10.25/12.5 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3301 2 (hardback) The right of Catherine Belsey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Preface

vi

11

Introduction: Practising with Theory

1

12

Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan with Augustine and Montaigne

15

Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis

34

Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece

54

15

Antinomies of Desire and the Sonnets

73

16

Peter Quince’s Ballad: Memory, Psychoanalysis, History and A Midsummer Night’s Dream

94

13 14

17

The Illusion of Empire: Elizabethan Expansionism and Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy

109

Making Histories Then and Now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V

119

19

The Case of Hamlet’s Conscience

139

10

Iago the Essayist

157

18

Notes Index

172 203

Preface

Shakespeare was my first love, not so much in the classroom as at the theatre. As a child in London, I saw most of the plays when the Old Vic put on the complete works over a period of five years. Three shillings and sixpence was a small fortune but a seat in the gallery was worth every penny. It took me a long time, however, to come by the kinds of critical skills that would let me say anything about Shakespeare that seemed worth putting into print. So much had been written already. Theory was an ally here: it offered unfamiliar ways to make sense of texts that would always exceed commentary. This book is a collection of essays in the etymological sense of that term: they represent successive try-outs, attempts not to betray the material they interpret. The chapters were written at different times and I have made no real effort to update them. Although I still subscribe to the views they put forward, I might not always start from the same place now. Instead, I have revised them only lightly, generally in the interests of clarification or to avoid undue repetition. Having commented elsewhere on ‘Anna O.’, for example, I have silently replaced her with ‘Irma’ in ‘Peter Quince’s Ballad’. On the rare occasions when I have been unable to resist an afterthought – or an afterreference – I have placed the new material in square brackets in the notes. ‘Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan with Augustine and Montaigne’ was first published in Center or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), pp. 257–78. ‘Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece’ were first published in Shakespeare Quarterly, the first in vol. 46 (1995), pp. 257–76, and the second in vol. 52 (2001), pp. 315–35. ‘Peter Quince’s Ballad: Memory, Psychoanalysis, vi

Preface

vii

History and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is revised from ShakespeareJahrbuch (1994), pp. 65–82. ‘The Illusion of Empire: Elizabethan Expansionism and Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy’ first appeared in Literature and History, Second Series, 1 (1990), pp. 13–21. ‘Making Histories Then and Now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V’ was first published in Uses of History: Marxism, Postmodernism and the Renaissance, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 24–46. ‘The Case of Hamlet’s Conscience’ appeared in Studies in Philology, 76 (1979), pp. 127–48, and ‘Iago the Essayist’ in Renaissance GoBetweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 262–78. Because these essays have been composed over a long period, I have relied on a great many people along the way – too many, indeed, to put on full record. Among the most decisive, George Hunter started me off. He was a wise and generous supervisor and my respect for him has not diminished with time. Alan Dessen has moved seamlessly over the years from distant role model to good friend, and John Astington is another, always ready to share his own exceptional scholarship. Alan Sinfield has long been a valued ally. I have consistently profited from discussions with Barbara Mowat and Gail Paster. Susan Zimmerman and Leeds Barroll have been the best of friends over the years, as have Alessandra Marzola and Coppélia Kahn. I am grateful to Terry Hawkes for the stimulus of our disagreements, as well as his excellent company. I should never have started on theory without the support of Andrew’s Belsey’s readiness to clarify philosophical terms, though he should not be held accountable for any failures to profit from his lucidity. My colleagues at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University kept me alert, as well as cheerful. Jean-Jacques Lecercle never fails to make me think, and I am grateful to Andreas Höfele for our discussions, as well as for opportunities to test my ideas before a discerning audience. Jackie Jones has been a joy to work with. The warmth of the staff at the Folger Shakespeare Library is unsurpassed, while Cambridge University Library remains a haven of courtesy and rationality. Catherine Belsey

chapter

1 Introduction: Practising with Theory

I Practice puts theory to the test. I have always been a practitioner first and foremost, valuing theory in so far as it delivers a different way of reading. Interpretation is only to a degree intuitive: we can learn to do it in new ways. Most children are able to paraphrase a story and say where their sympathies lie; critics do this too, but with recourse to a vocabulary that specifies how and why. In addition, however, just as in daily life we commonly signify more than we intend, give ourselves away, as the saying goes, so texts too may reveal more than their authors supposed. Theory has encouraged me to look more closely – to pay more attention. At the same time, ‘theory’ is anything but a monolith. These essays were written at intervals in the course of four distinct decades, and if the most recent of them belongs to the present, the earliest was composed in an intellectual and institutional setting we should barely recognise now. Few generations can have witnessed greater upheavals in the theory and practice of interpretation than mine. In 1974, when I was writing Chapter 9, ‘The Case of Hamlet’s Conscience’, English departments acknowledged no ‘theory’ in the current sense of the term. Courses on literary theory traced its development from Aristotle through Sidney and Dr Johnson to I. A. Richards; by way of current thinking, they respectfully reiterated the pronouncements of Keats, Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot. Northrop Frye was admired for his idiosyncratic structuralism but as something of a maverick. New Criticism, the ruling orthodoxy in the USA, had made far less impact in the UK, where the only serious debates were between the old historicism and a sanctimonious appeal to literature as the source of timeless moral 1

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truths. At its worst, the practice of reading incorporated both history and morality, dressing the prevailing pieties in a thin coat of scholarship, and authorising the entire discreditable package by reference to the writer’s intentions. Even at its best, where the old historicist critics were considerably better informed than some of their noisier successors, the first impulse of interpretation was to unify the work, to find the single thematic imperative of the text that would rationalise the relationship between its parts and the univocal whole. By the end of the 1970s the project had changed irrevocably. It was not just that new pieties came to upset the old order, when Marxism, feminism and the Civil Rights Movement prompted questions about the values canonical literature had been made to reaffirm. In addition, as certain Parisian concerns made their way across the English Channel, it became evident that we had neglected the problem of interpretation itself. Our critical exchanges included no vocabulary for defining the processes that made reading possible; the theory of meaning was still roughly where Locke had left it at the end of the seventeenth century. In a period of radical change, a generation of academics set out to arrive at a new definition of our discipline. We needed to escape the critical canon as badly as we wanted to overthrow the list of set books. If literature was too often what the older generation thought would do the young good, criticism was too commonly there to iron out pockets of dissension in the texts themselves – and exclude all those that were beyond reconstruction. In the course of a single hectic decade, a stream of translations redefined the options. Among the most influential, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things appeared in English in 1970, a paperback edition of Madness and Civilization in 1971; The Archaeology of Knowledge came next the following year, Discipline and Punish in 1977 and The History of Sexuality, volume 1 in 1979. Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, translated in 1972, spoke immediately to cultural critics, while his S/Z transformed my habits of reading fiction three years later; translations of The Pleasure of the Text were published in 1976 and A Lover’s Discourse in 1979. Meanwhile, Jacques Lacan’s Écrits and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis both appeared in English in 1977. These works were anything but lightweight and the unfamiliarity of the ideas they put forward, the range of reference they assumed and the intellectual developments they took for granted made them hard for us to grasp. Jacques Derrida seemed the toughest proposition of all: Of Grammatology was published in English in 1976, Writing and Difference in 1978, Spurs in 1979.1 Subtending the whole enterprise, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, reissued in paperback in 1974, recorded the discovery – and it was no less – that meaning depended on language, not the world.

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Without that recognition, the whole poststructuralist enterprise collapses on itself, and its adherents are revealed as no more than dedicated followers of fashion. When Saussure located the signified as integral to the sign, he challenged, perhaps inadvertently, the entire system of Western metaphysics, and with it both empiricism and idealism, those apparent opposites that turn out to be twins in positing either experience or ideas as the origin of meaning. Instead, meaning depends, Saussure showed – and the logic seems irrefutable – on difference, not reference, and in that sense there is, as Derrida was so controversially to put it, nothing outside the text: no extra-textual presence, that is, which can guarantee the truth of the signifier to an event, a state of being, a condition of affairs, or a concept understood as independent of its representation.2 II Of course, in the UK we were ten years or more behind Paris. Barthes’s Mythologies was first published there in 1957, addressed to a postwar France still engaged in acknowledging a history of collaboration with the Nazi occupation. Only a radical theory of culture would account for the numbers of perfectly decent citizens who had seemingly subscribed to values that decency ought surely to repudiate. And the theory would need to be subtle enough, or complex enough, to explain why, conversely, some people had risked their lives to overturn those values and the regime that imposed them. The issues were norms – and the resistance to norms, culture as the ensemble of signs – and the instability of meanings, and, uniting these concerns, the recruitment of recalcitrant subjects. Jacques Lacan’s first seminar goes back to 1953, and in those early days the emphasis was on the imaginary misrecognition that alienates us from ourselves, in addition to the symbolic order that continuously imposes obedient subjectivity from the outside on the real of the refractory human organism. Foucault, by contrast, had no time for psychoanalysis and yet his work came at some parallel issues from another angle. According to the story told in Madness and Civilization, composed later that same decade,3 while the treatment of insanity grew increasingly humane, in practice it also became correspondingly more intrusive; as psychiatry learned to control those alienated from society without the use of chains and manacles, its practitioners discovered how to inculcate self-restraint.4 Escape from such subjection grew rarer, Foucault argued, until unreason, motor of so much art, was perceptible only as a momentary flash in the work of a Nietzsche, an Artaud or a Van Gogh.5 Derrida’s critique of the book two years later does not call into question this history of subjects rendered docile without the use of force. Instead, it deepens awareness of reason’s precariousness: the possibility of madness,

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Derrida insists, constitutes the condition of meaning; as the trace of the other in the selfsame, unreason haunts all speech, just as it also haunts philosophy. Resistance, in other words, is inscribed in the very capacity to signify. If it took us longer in the UK, if our history was different and our motivation more local, the timing of our own interest in these developments was more than coincidental. Among the first titles from this extraordinary moment to appear in translation was Louis Althusser’s Lenin and Philosophy, published by New Left Books in 1971, and his essay on ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ gave academics a new status in the revolution to come. In America at this time theory followed a different path. There 1971 saw the publication of Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. As the title suggests, the emphasis was specifically literary and a good deal more formalist.6 To us, by contrast, the ISAs essay meant action. Education, Althusser urged, as if in recognition of the part played by students in the events of May 1968, was the dominant ideological apparatus, and teachers who put their knowledge to work against the system itself were no less than heroes.7 The Robbins Report on participation in higher education, adopted by the British Government in 1963, had led to a rapid expansion of the university sector. Staff and graduate students of the then ‘new’ universities were determined to break with the traditions of Oxbridge, which had produced so many of them. We looked to theory to transform our practice. In the light of Althusser’s analysis, our radical credentials no longer depended on our willingness to stand awkwardly on other people’s picket lines. Instead, the frustration we felt with the condition of higher education was justified and our efforts to transform it heroic. Feminism and the Civil Rights Movement had taught us to oppose injustice of all kinds. Now we would teach our students to do the same. While our utopian aspirations for our discipline ran way ahead of any possible reality, they were more constructive, even so, than the quality regimes and personal career development now offered by university managements in the UK to keep their staff in a state of self-induced conformity. (Foucault would turn in his grave.) If moralism was to give way to politics, we needed a new way of understanding the process of reading that was not confined to guessing the author’s intentions. Before delivering pronouncements on the meanings of texts, it was important to know what we meant by ‘meaning’. And that, prior to any political conviction, would in due course become my preoccupation. ‘Theory’, as I see it, is not in the first instance a matter of commitment, Marxist, feminist, postcolonial or queer: instead, theory investigates the nature of interpretation from whatever perspective; it considers the relationship between a text and any given point of view. In short, theory casts light on the activity of reading itself and, in the process, transforms the practice it illuminates.

Introduction: Practising with Theory

5

III So far, I have identified the protagonists of this brief history largely as ‘we’ with reference to a generation, and yet the confident plural commits me to speaking on behalf of others who had their own interests and concerns at the time. When it comes to the details of an intellectual trajectory, I am not sure whether the singular pronoun might not be more appropriate. And yet firstperson narrative brings its own problems. Doesn’t ‘I’ imply a fully-formed subject that preceded the rapid developments I underwent in that extraordinary decade and later? There was no such self, no prior cogito deliberating rationally on the choices that faced it, no ‘I’ exterior to the meanings and values in circulation at the time. The best I can say is that I needed to be convinced; I had to see the logic of the case for rethinking all my existing assumptions about the condition of meaning. But those assumptions I claim as mine were not a point of origin so much as effects in their turn, and the subject that progressively doubted them is best understood not as an identity, but rather as a succession of identifications, always in the process of change. To ‘my mind’, then, the first questions confronting criticism have increasingly come to seem not so much thematic as textual. They concern vocabulary, genre, register, mode of address. Since we cannot expect to make sense of a text without absorbing, as the condition of understanding it, these textual features and the intertextual relations they imply, the first task of criticism must surely be to isolate such formal properties for conscious inspection, and the imperative must be detailed attention to the textuality of the text. What expectations does it set up? Does it deliver or withhold the gratifications it seems to promise? What oppositions structure it? How does it offer to place a reader in relation to the events it describes? Only in the light of answers to these questions can we put forward a reading. Whether the project of interpretation is cultural history or cultural critique, the analysis will be more nuanced, more subtle, to the degree that it takes into account the complexity of signifying practice. In so far as our task is education, it is hard to see much point in requiring students to internalise the thematic content of selected texts. Instead, the most useful outcome of studying any form of cultural criticism must be an awareness of the capabilities and limits of representation, and the power of texts to persuade, for better or worse. My model for the analysis of fiction has been Roland Barthes’s S/Z, witty, dazzling and ironic by turns, and rich in unexpected insights into the nature of writing and reading. In a sense, that book condenses everything cultural critics had to learn from French theory. Attentive to history and the deprivation (literally) that creates wealth, Barthes’s reading of Balzac’s novella about a castrato also problematises gender, not to mention the process and the implications of storytelling. And the book does its work by monitoring every

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allusion, metaphor, pronoun, change of tense, shift of voice, each concealment and equivocation, as well as all the places where the text approaches the limits of possible representation. S/Z was not without progenitors, of course. Barthes had learned, the book indicates, from Derrida, himself in the first instance an attentive reader. What, after all, is Barthes’s interpretation of Sarrasine but an account of oppositions that cannot be held apart when the excision of masculinity makes way for an incursion of the feminine, while impropriety invades the proper, defined as ownership, wealth and social standing? And if Barthes led me to Derrida, he also led me back to Lacan: Balzac’s story does not only lead up to the disclosure of a crucial lack in the little old man whose identity constitutes its motivating enigma; it also implicitly acknowledges the narrative compulsion exercised by the objet a, lost object–cause of desire, that beckons and tantalises from beyond the reach of the signifier. Ending, as it does, with the Marquise ‘pensive’, Sarrasine, Barthes observes, ‘still seems to be keeping in reserve some ultimate meaning, one it does not express but whose place it keeps free and signifying’. Pensiveness in fiction, he notes, seems to propel the reader beyond what can be told. ‘At its discreet urging, we want to ask the classic text: What are you thinking about? but the text, wilier than all those who try to escape by answering: about nothing, does not reply, giving meaning its last closure: suspension’.8 While S/Z was my starting point, then, I could see no room for a purist adherence to a single thinker. ‘Eclecticism’ was held at that time to be a thoughtcrime, indicating shallowness, uncertain allegiance and the mind of a dilettante. But how to sort through the debates and disagreements that rapid translation brought home to us at the time? Did a flaw in the logic of an individual thinker entail the dismissal of the work in its entirety? There was much in Saussure, as Derrida gleefully pointed out, that remained unreconstructed, including the possibility that meaning might stand alone as pure concept or consciousness, the intelligible itself. At the same time, if Derrida repudiated Saussure’s residual logocentrism, his own account of differance ‘with an a’, the focal point of his devastating analysis of Western metaphysics, was in the first instance extrapolated from The Course in General Linguistics. Without the Saussurean signified as differential, there could have been no Derridean signified differed and deferred, distanced, relegated and supplanted, differantiated, by the signifier itself.9 Derrida’s account of The Course in Of Grammatology mocks the moralising phonocentrism of the ‘linguist from Geneva’,10 but his critique goes on to bring out more than Saussure himself knew of the possibilities inscribed in his text.11 At its best, deconstruction is at once critical and positive. In the fear of eclecticism I saw something of an insistence on keeping the faith. But faith was not my priority. The project had nothing to do with religion; it was not even to find a theory without blemish, and still less a

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fundamentalist allegiance to an unassailable master. Instead, theory would release new options for reflection on the language that purveyed to us accounts of events in the world, as well as the literature that was one influential location of meanings and values. In that respect, Foucault, too, had unexpectedly prepared me to read Derrida, though the debate between them obscured the parallels for too long. Madness and Civilization includes a brilliant chapter that deconstructs (avant la lettre) the opposition between reason and error in the unreason of a madness that follows its own logic. Blind to the daylight of rationality, belonging to the night, and yet populating its darkness with vivid images and hallucinations, classical unreason, Foucault maintains, is nothing other than ‘reason dazzled’.12 Unreason’s disturbance of the dividing line between day and night has implications for the history of drama. French classical tragedy, confined by the unities to a single period of twenty-four hours, depends, in Foucault’s analysis, on the incursion of dark imperatives into the daylight, while its nights are illuminated by lurid visions of the past. The tragic hero, he argues, brings to light the secrets of the night and yet is not permitted to be mad. But in a phrase Foucault concedes a contrast here with the preceding period, and a student of Shakespeare might find in his account of the grim loquacity of delirium a new way of thinking about the methodical madness depicted in Titus Andronicus, Hamlet and King Lear, where unreason produces a poetic excess, an explosion of sombre eloquence that at once misses and bears unerringly on the actual predicament of the speaker.13 And if, unlikely as it seemed, Foucault had helped me begin to make sense of deconstruction, the same Foucault, who deplored psychoanalysis, also made Lacan more accessible than I might have expected. There was, I have suggested, an unpredicted resemblance between Foucault’s disciplined bodies, brought grudgingly into line with the existing orthodoxy, and Lacan’s order of language and culture, apprehended as Law, which recruits the human organism for civilisation and its discontents. And what, in the end, was the Panopticon, if not a specific implementation in history of the all-seeing but unverifiable Lacanian gaze that subjects human beings to visibility as the condition of their seeing?14 I came later to Jean-François Lyotard, Lacanian among philosophers and himself driven by a radical discontent to pursue an absolute that is at once desired and unattainable. Lyotard celebrates art forms that refuse to reaffirm the reassuring totalities of the past and allude at the level of the signifier to what cannot be made present by the signifier itself.15 And if, alone among the work I have mentioned, Lyotard’s carries the trace of theology, or a residual allegiance to the ideal, it is a postmodern fidelity so tenuous, so incredulous towards the faith whose vocabulary it reproduces, that its edges overlap with Lacan’s own resolutely secular anti-idealism.16

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All roads led back to Lacan, then, though this recognition did not come in an instant. To be clear, my point is not that there is no difference between Barthes and Lacan, Foucault and Lacan or, indeed, Lyotard and Lacan. On the contrary, each of these names marks a very distinctive position. But that observation too easily masks a shared imperative to disqualify the humanist nomination of the cogito as origin of knowledge and meaning. Even when Derrida denounced what he identified (somewhat unjustly, in my view) as Lacan’s phallogocentrism, a metaphysics of truth inscribed in both speech and masculinity,17 he did not challenge the main contribution of Lacanian psychoanalysis to cultural criticism, namely, the destabilisation of meaning whenever the ‘alterity’ (Derrida’s own word) of the unconscious troubles the relation between the signifier and the signified to disrupt ‘naïve semanticism’.18 Only Lacan offered a theory of desire, that perennial matter of fiction. The great majority of stories and a substantial proportion of lyric poetry are about love and yet this remarkable fact is barely perceptible in traditional criticism. As Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin points out, the name that is written on the map in the largest characters may escape attention ‘by dint of being excessively obvious’.19 Preoccupied by sources, analogues, arcane historical allusions or life-affirming values, traditional criticism seemed to me to have neglected the subject matter of Shakespeare’s comedies. Concentrating on race, class and gender, my own contemporaries struck me as ignoring it too. It is perfectly possible to analyse sexual identifications without attending to love: for instance, the arch-exponent of queer theory, Judith Butler, has little to say about desire. Moreover, what is at stake is not simply thematic, the subject matter of the texts themselves. To the degree that people read for pleasure, fiction and poetry also elicit the desire of the reader, luring us in, teasing our curiosity, gratifying an appetite for the signifier. The evidence indicates that Shakespeare’s plays have repeatedly enlisted the desire of audiences worldwide, and when Derrida’s own exploration of desire in The Post Card appeared in translation in 1987, it reset my agenda for more than a decade. As far as Shakespeare was concerned, this led me back to the narrative poems and the Sonnets. In its own period, Venus and Adonis was intensely popular as an erotic narrative. If the narrative poems fail to excite us now, is that because we have moralised or politicised them out of pleasurable existence? In laying claim to Shakespeare for identity politics, have we paradoxically forgotten to read the Sonnets as love poems? IV I was never a new historicist. In a nutshell, new historicism seemed to me too bland, misled by its anthropological assumption that cultural moments were so

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homogeneous, so monologic, that any one component of the culture would be sure to confirm another. Stephen Greenblatt’s work has too much time for the sovereign self, in my view, and, paradoxically, too little space for resistance.20 And while I admired cultural materialism, I have never felt fully at home there. Its influence is detectable in some of these essays, but in the main the analysis of what is and has been made of the text has always seemed to me, in the end, less pressing than rereading it. But I share with both new historicism and cultural materialism a commitment to history. If we are not to live in a perpetual, undifferentiated present, or to reduce the past to the status of prelude to our own culminating moment, we need a sense of historical difference. Improbably enough, I believe psychoanalysis is our ally here, at least to the degree that it acknowledges the opacity of inscription, as well as the pressures exerted by a past that may never be recovered just as it was. Historiography confronts the difficulty that the past it records is lost irretrievably: the event is not available for contemplation. In consequence, the work of historians depends on interpretation – of documents, maps, portraits and tapestries – and this research is practised in the present on whatever fragments have happened to survive, in the light of knowledges not available to their makers. It follows that history is at best a new production: it makes sense, which is to say it produces a past that quite possibly never was. To positivist historians this state of affairs is inadmissible. It threatens their whole undertaking, which has always been to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The only alternative, it seemed to them, must be to license falsehood, and a school of empiricist historiographers took to denouncing the theory that exposed the limitations of their craft. For a more fashionable subjectivism, by contrast, that likes theory but prefers it lite, the disappearance of the event behind the evidence does indeed mean that history is indistinguishable from fiction and a generic difference is lost. Theory is taken to legitimate a historiography with no responsibility to what remains of the past. We needed, and still need, in my view, to deconstruct this opposition between history as pure fact and history as mere fiction. And it is here that psychoanalysis enters the picture, on the grounds that it too confronts the textuality of inscription. The dream the analysand recounts may never, Freud acknowledges, have taken place, or not in that way, in that order, in those terms. It is impossible to tell for certain what has been omitted, smoothed over, censored, forgotten. Only in the hesitations, lapses and silences can we be sure something has. And for this reason, he goes on, the material of psychoanalysis, the location of the forbidden desires that are its theme, is the narrative itself, the halting textuality of the record, not what lies behind it, differed and deferred beyond reach.21 In that respect, for its close, careful attention to the resistances of the text, the instability and uncertainty, in other

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words, of representation, psychoanalysis offers a model way of reading. A century ago, in the confidence of what he perceived as a new science, Freud chose to give a definitive account of the dreams he analysed. We should differ from him there but we can usefully reaffirm his recognition that interpretation relies on texts, not events. V Criticism has come a long way since we first turned to French theory to escape the prevailing banalities of the 1970s. Judgements of value are generally less self-assured now. Meanwhile, in thematic terms feminism, postcolonialism, queer studies have become orthodoxies: no one now complains when criticism is politically engaged. But there is more to be done at the interface between theory and practice. Too often, theory has been relegated to the status of another object of knowledge, divorced from the activity of reading that constituted the primary commitment of its progenitors. Barthes was first and foremost a reader, as was Derrida. Foucault reread the documents of cultural history and Lacan offered interpretations of Antigone, Hamlet and Poe’s story of ‘The Purloined Letter’. I have wanted to follow their example, reading texts from a range of periods and genres. But Shakespeare has always represented the ultimate challenge. Whether as playwright or poet, or both, he displays an extraordinary capacity to gather infinite meanings in a little room. In consequence, despite the accumulated commentary of the centuries, new interpretation remains possible. At times it also seems imperative. In our own era, the vitality of the texts is often almost submerged under the weight of character study, ideological appropriation or biographical speculation. Protean as he is, Shakespeare is not best seen, in my view, as a Victorian novelist in quest of psychological realism; he was not primarily a propagandist; and the ‘life’ that is invoked to account for the works is too often derived from them in the first place. I have tried to escape these approaches, while involving Shakespeare in issues that still matter: the past in its bearing on the present; the complexity of passion; the ways texts elicit desire. Topics that recur in this volume, then, include our access to history, psychoanalysis as a theory of both meaning and love, as well as the relationship between signification and desire as it illuminates the way texts address their readers or audiences. Chapter 2 sets out to justify in historical terms the invocation of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of early modern texts. Lacan, we know, offers an understanding of meaning as perpetually unstable, since unconscious desire struggles to make itself felt by disrupting or fading out the rational utterances of the cogito. His work thus vindicates a reading of texts as potentially inconsistent, and the culture inscribed in them as

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correspondingly precarious, the location of resistances to the Law they also inscribe. But historicists are inclined to cry anachronism whenever psychoanalysis is brought to bear on works that precede its own historical moment in the twentieth century. I suggest, however, that some of Lacan’s most important insights have their roots in St Augustine, whose influence on early modern culture cannot be exaggerated. A line of descent from Augustine’s account of our anarchic humanity, disobedient to itself, makes its way through Montaigne’s record of unruly behaviour, defined in texts as engagingly wayward as their theme, to Lacan’s understanding of the unconscious at odds with Law, expounded in seminars that refuse the linear clarity of rational discourse to mimic the ways of desire itself. In this light, while nothing in the early modern period quite coincides with the psychoanalytic unconscious itself, it need not be unhistorical to find disturbances of transparency as markers of resistance in the textuality of the period. Thereafter, I have ordered the chapters in accordance with Shakespeare’s trajectory, not mine. ‘Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis’ takes issue with the moralising interpretation of this early poem that blames an ageing Venus for improper advances to a boy. Instead, I suggest, Shakespeare’s Ovidian narrative can be read as a fable of origins, like Ovid’s own stories of metamorphosis, offering an aetiology of love itself as ultimately tragic. In addition, while the seductive beauty of Adonis tantalises the goddess of love with a longing that remains unsatisfied, the work itself tantalises the reader, arousing our desire for a generic and thematic closure that would reveal the single truth endorsed by the text. Withholding that conclusiveness, the poem marks a moment when the role of love was subject to radical historical reassessment. If Venus needed rescue from the moralists, so, it seemed, did the protagonist of Lucrece – first from a generation of male critics who found her guilty of collusion with her own rape, and then from a succession of feminists who blamed her for collaboration with patriarchy. In ‘Tarquin Dispossessed’ I argue that Lucrece does the best she can – and that Shakespeare’s second narrative poem attends closely to the complex implications of rape, as well as to the drawbacks of a sexual and state politics which ignores consent. ‘Antinomies of Desire and the Sonnets’, newly written for this volume, concerns the element of antagonism implicit in love. Aggression, so evident in the sonnets addressed to the dark woman, is also to be found in another key in the poems to the friend. But perhaps the poet’s real antagonism is directed to poetry itself, in so far as it ultimately resists the representation of an ambivalent desire? Furthermore, a repetition of this hostility, now a component of the desire they elicit, also impels critics to seek mastery of these fascinating and elusive texts, rewriting them in the image of their own preferred projects. We do the Sonnets a disservice, however, I suggest, whenever we seek

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to equip them with a final signified, whether this takes the form of a consistent narrative, a uniform sexual identity for the author or named historical addressees. Ambivalent as it is, desire necessarily generates a poetry of equivocation. These love poems perhaps come as close as any text can to the inscription of desire; they remain objects of desire for their readers, however, to the degree that in the last analysis they also decline to resolve their own enigmas. ‘Peter Quince’s Ballad’ shares the assumption that love cannot be made fully present in words. One possible recourse is citation: lovers define their own passion with reference to another already familiar, perhaps legendary, experience. And yet in the process they make something new. Bottom records his night of love with the Queen of the Fairies as a dream that evokes for him the biblical account of the kingdom of heaven – and creates a text that has only a tenuous connection with the encounter the audience has witnessed earlier in the play, while projecting forwards into a different future. On this basis, I reflect on the relationship between desire, memory, history and textuality. A later dreamer, Sigmund Freud, explicitly confronts the problem of the possible gap between the dream itself and its inscription in the memory. And yet the report of the dream that the analyst interprets may open the way to a reordering of the present and future of the analysand. By analogy, our postmodern histories cannot count on disclosing more than a trace of the past they record, and yet in the process of representation they too make something new, which has the capacity to change our own future. ‘The Illusion of Empire’ is the only essay in the book that was prompted by a specific occasion. On Sunday, 6 March 1988 three members of the Irish Republican Army were shot dead on sight by British special forces in Gibraltar. They were, it turned out, unarmed at the time; they carried no explosives and no detonators. This distressed me beyond expectation. It was not so much a matter of sympathy with the IRA as shame on behalf of my own government, which had opted for instant violence to eliminate political difference. The following Wednesday I was due to lecture on Henry V. Somewhat to my own surprise, as well as the students’, I abandoned my prepared theme in favour of a disquisition on Captain Macmorris and the inauguration of the stereotypical Irish soldier, irascible, incoherent and dangerous. Following up a train of thought initiated by Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore,22 I told the students what I knew about the Nine Years War the Elizabethan government conducted against the Irish, at its height in 1599 when the play was first performed. And I mentioned that this colonial assault was equally fiercely resisted by the Irish army of kerns and galloglasses, so ferocious and so welldisciplined that they terrified the English sent out to defeat them. In fact, the war ended only when the English imposed the policy of last resort, burning Irish crops and livestock to starve the people into surrender.

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The resulting essay, more scholarly but no less angry, demonstrates some of the strengths and weaknesses of conviction criticism. With ‘Making Histories’ I revert to a more reflective account of the second tetralogy, as well as to the problem of history in a postmodern world. Postmodernity calls into question the opposition between history and fiction, but without erasing the distinctiveness of the stories we construct about the past. These histories do not so much appeal to an extra-linguistic truth of a bygone era as single out for attention issues from the past that preoccupy their own moment. Shakespeare’s history plays dramatise a story of dissension and conflict, throwing into relief the precariousness of sovereignty; convictions are gradually dislodged and meaning progressively destabilised. In this respect, while the medieval history they dramatise is to a degree fictitious, the mounting uncertainty they stage implies an interrogation of power in the Tudor period. At the same time, the history plays also raise some of the same questions that drive our own stories of the past, leading to the possibility of a postmodern recognition of early modern concerns across the gap made by Enlightened modernity. ‘The Case of Hamlet’s Conscience’, the earliest of these essays, invokes the traditional role of conscience in the period to make sense of the dilemma confronting Hamlet. Contrary to the widespread account of a prince required to kill Claudius but impeded by his own psychological inadequacy, my view is that Hamlet confronts an ethical question: what ought he to do? In the course of the argument, a curious and inadvertent anticipation of deconstruction makes a fleeting appearance. The piece registers a dissatisfaction with the binary oppositions that structure not only Hamlet’s anxieties but the criticism of the time, which seemed to me to repeat them. As I saw it, the hero’s obligations were altogether less resolved, more equivocal, than commentators were ready to acknowledge. In 1974, when I wrote the article on Hamlet, I had barely heard of Derrida, and I knew virtually nothing of psychoanalysis. But I paid particular attention to a curious slippage in the fourth soliloquy, where the logic runs counter to the apparent sense: ‘Rightly to be great / Is not to stir without great argument’ (4.4.53–4). In isolation, this proposes that greatness is not easily moved to action without a powerful reason; in the context, however, Hamlet’s intention appears to be the exact opposite: ‘But greatly’, he goes on, ‘to find quarrel in a straw’. If this is what he means, consistency, though not, perhaps, aural felicity, requires a second ‘not’: ‘not not to stir’. No fully-fledged poststructuralist could have relished this more than I did. At the heart of one of his many self-reproaches for inaction, Hamlet betrays an antithetical imperative not to act without good cause. In this light, finding quarrel in a straw is absurd, not heroic, and the true hero would weigh the arguments for and against regicide before hastening to obey the Ghost’s

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command. The opposition demonstrates Hamlet’s dilemma in microcosm and the play’s ambivalence towards revenge, as the other invades the selfsame to problematise the moral duty of the protagonist. My essay, however, also demonstrates the difficulty of explaining that point without access to the vocabulary of poststructuralism. At that time I grasped the moment’s importance, but I called the reasoning ‘self-consuming’ in deference to the brilliant insights of Stanley Fish’s Self-Consuming Artifacts, published in 1972. The term throws into relief the potential parallels between Fish and Derrida, both closely attentive to the complexity of writing, until Fish turned resemblance into rivalry and went on to produce his much more knockabout work on interpretive communities in the 1980s and 90s. Whether because it took issue with the then orthodox account of the sensitive prince, too cerebral for action, or because it just didn’t cut it, the essay took several years to reach the printed page. All the Shakespeare journals turned it down. What obstinate commitment to its propositions impelled me to keep on sending it out, I cannot now imagine. It was Alan Dessen who, as a member of the editorial board of Studies in Philology, saw some merit in its argument and recommended publication in 1979. Three years later, my persistence was more than rewarded. A generous footnote in Harold Jenkins’s magisterial Arden edition of Hamlet commented, ‘This article, though it appeared too late for me to make use of, seems to me one of the very few to perceive the significance of revenge in Hamlet’.23 As a still junior lecturer, I was rapturous. That, as far as I know, was its first and last citation. Thirty years after that ‘pre-theoretical’ study, in ‘Iago the Essayist’ I approach Othello from a formal perspective, ascribing the tragedy in the first instance to a clash of genres as the inscription of antithetical values. Heroic love poetry meets a sceptical, laconic prose that reproduces the mode of Montaigne’s new essay genre, imported from France. What ultimately renders Iago so destructive, however, is not his disengaged manner but his betrayal of the genre he mimics: racial hatred is anything but dispassionate; instead, Iago’s style masks (psychoanalysis would say ‘censors’) a remorseless passion, as intense in its way as Othello’s own. At the same time, this deadly imperative meets a corresponding capacity for destruction in the hero’s love, the death drive that inhabits all desire. The common thread linking these essays, then, is an assumption that existing readings are never the whole story. Like Iago’s, all utterance, all writing, sets out at once to reveal and repress. Theory proposes that the trace of another meaning resides in even the most perspicuous of texts, and practice seeks out the equivocations of Shakespeare’s. Each age, we know, discovers its own reflection in his work. Perhaps, in addition, we can still sometimes find it surprising.

chapter

2 P s y c h o a n a ly s i s a n d E a r ly M o d e r n C u lt u r e : L a c a n w i t h A u g u s t i n e a n d M o n ta i g n e

I Is it legitimate to read early modern texts in the light of psychoanalysis? Can we, that is to say, appropriately bring to bear on work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a vocabulary, and the insights inscribed in it, that cannot be said to have existed before the late nineteenth century? Whether we date psychoanalysis from the Studies on Hysteria, initially published by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud between 1893 and 1895, or from Anna O.’s identification in 1881 of the ‘talking cure’ recorded there,1 the invocation of psychoanalytic theory in the interpretation of early modern texts seems to imply that what psychoanalysis uncovered was a universal, transhistorical truth of human nature, and this assumption sits very uneasily indeed with current historicist convictions that values, sympathies, emotions and behaviour change as culture changes. Do we, in other words, contradict ourselves if we use psychoanalytic theory to historicise the texts of a more distant epoch? To some degree, the answer must depend on what we use psychoanalysis for. It surely gave itself a bad name in the early days, when it was seen as a way of understanding the artist’s unconscious impulses or, worse, the pathology of the fictional character, in Freud’s account of Leonardo or Ernest Jones’s reading of Hamlet. As a thematic content of the psyche, able to be invoked as the explanation of the work of art, the Oedipus complex too easily takes on the role of a key to all mythologies. More recently, the Oedipal narrative, apparently understood as a timeless truth, has been brought to bear on early modern drama in order to account for the misogyny critics have found in the plays. Lacanian psychoanalysis, too, remains a sourcebook for universal 15

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themes, though of a different kind, in the work of Slavoj Žižek, who brilliantly but still ahistorically attributes to the death drive the final cause of the antagonism that characterises human nature. If psychoanalysis represents the inscription of eternal truths, it is radically incompatible with history. One of the effects of the centrality of new historicism since about 1980 has therefore been a tendency to marginalise psychoanalytic readings,2 on the grounds that, explaining everything, and in the same terms, they appear ultimately to explain very little. Besides, the relationship between children and their parents that Freud described was surely itself historically specific, and can be held to tell us more about turn-of-the-century Vienna than about any supposed universal human condition. The classic new historicist case is eloquently put by Stephen Greenblatt himself in ‘Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture’. Greenblatt argues that psychoanalysis cannot be adduced to interpret early modern culture, on the grounds that it represents the completion of the Renaissance project, not its explanation. Freud gives us a universalising account of the human condition and a totalising version of the self, on the basis of an understanding of subjectivity merely inaugurated four hundred years earlier. The early modern account of the subject is both developed and supplanted in the late nineteenth century, when psychoanalysis redoubles consciousness with an unconscious whose content is concealed. Psychoanalytic theory, itself a cultural construct, thus both completes and supersedes an early modern account of subjectivity: ‘The problem, I suggest, is that psychoanalysis is at once the fulfilment and effacement of specifically Renaissance insights: psychoanalysis is, in more than one sense, the end of the Renaissance’.3 It is hard to disagree. How, then, in an era dominated by historicist criticism could we possibly justify putting psychoanalysis at the centre of historical scholarship itself? Oddly enough, however, we owe new insights into the period to some of those who have done exactly that.4 Such critics commonly turn to Jacques Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud in the light of Saussure, and some defend their position on the grounds that the content of Lacan’s symbolic order, the order of language and culture, is itself historically specific, with the consequence that the unconscious is implicated in history.5 Lacan himself would have had reservations about this ‘culturalist’ view,6 but the textual specificity of readings by Lacanian critics prompts the paradoxical reflection that the crucial value of psychoanalysis for reading and interpretation might not be psychological at all. Instead, perhaps its use is textual, not thematic – illuminating, that is to say, not content, but a relation to language? What if, to be more precise, the Freudian account of the unconscious, modified and developed by Lacan’s recognition of Saussurean linguistics, were to offer us, rather than a version of the human condition, whether eternal or historically relative, an approach to the necessary condition of meaning? Then

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the advantage of psychoanalysis for historicists would lie not in its account of themes, or what is meant by early modern texts, but rather in its perception of the waywardness of textuality itself. Psychoanalysis would illuminate, in other words, not a signified, either constant or historical, but the instability of signifying practice. Its contribution would be methodological rather than explanatory, a way above all of paying attention to the workings of the texts. Emphasis on the Oedipal story or neurotic pathologies tends to dwell on what the unconscious hides from thought. But suppose we laid the stress on the prefix as pointing instead to what is simply missing from consciousness. If the unconscious, reread in relation to Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the sign, were seen as what Jacques Derrida calls a ‘radical alterity’, not a presence but instead a subtraction from what the text sets out to communicate, an element ‘definitively taken away from every process of presentation’,7 then psychoanalysis would impel us to read more attentively – more closely, in fact. This would not, however, be the close reading that outstayed its welcome as New Criticism, but the kind of attentiveness practised by the analyst, who listens for the slippages, lapses and incoherences in the speech of the analysand. Psychoanalysis dwells on the moments when the utterance fails to create consistency, evades its own inevitable thetic – or thesismaking – obligations, but instead both withholds and amplifies the information it promises, by fading from view. The result of such a mode of interpretation would be more history, not less, and more nuanced history, where it is inevitably so tempting to settle for updating or amplifying in the light of our current social and political concerns – sexual, say, or postcolonial – the old reassuring cognitive totalities of the Elizabethan world picture and the early modern mind. Is there still, even in the treatment of psychoanalysis as access to the condition of signification, rather than to the content of the unconscious, a trace of the universality historicism finds unpalatable? Possibly. It is at least arguable, on the other hand, that the psychoanalysis which emerged in the late nineteenth century, and has developed and refined itself ever since, shares a framework of ideas with an earlier model of human experience that goes back at least as far as St Augustine, whose shaping influence on both Catholic and Reformation Christianity can hardly be overestimated. If this case can be made, if such a framework was available in the Renaissance, the most rigorous historicist would surely be willing to concede that certain aspects, at least, of psychoanalysis might illuminate early modern culture. Greenblatt’s point is that psychoanalysis completes what was begun earlier, in history and in culture. If we take him at his word, is this not exactly why it can illuminate retrospectively texts that anticipate in practice some of the insights Freud and Lacan would go on to formulate as theory?

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The argument for a line of descent from Augustine through Freud to Lacan starts with sex, though it does not end there. This lineage passes through the essays of Michel de Montaigne, first published in French in the 1580s, and in John Florio’s English translation in 1603, but influential in early modern England even earlier. Montaigne was, as we know, an avid reader, whose library of a thousand volumes evidently included an edition of Augustine’s City of God, with a commentary by the Spanish humanist, Vives.8 If Montaigne occasionally took incidental issue with Augustine,9 he more commonly appears as an orthodox Augustinian, and most notably so when it comes to sex. Montaigne, who ignored nothing human, took a considerable interest, as did Augustine, in the behaviour – and its implications – of the anarchic male sexual organ. Montaigne’s essay, ‘Of the Force of Imagination’, for instance, records the remarkable capacity of fantasy to bring about physiological effects. Imagination, this essay maintains, is so powerful that it can transform us: people can die purely of fear; some attribute the stigmata of St Francis to imagination; Augustine himself, Montaigne claims, gave an example of a man who would faint in sympathy whenever others were unhappy. And among its other powers, imagination can radically affect masculine sexual prowess. Anxiety, or intensity of passion, or suspicion of sorcery can all deflate the most ardent lover; conversely, imagined magical remedies can reinstate potency when nothing else has changed. Indeed, Montaigne goes on, the penis commonly takes all too little account of external reality. On the contrary, it seems to lead a life of its own: Men have reason to checke the indocile libertie of this member, for so importunately insinuating himselfe when we have no need of him, and so importunately, or as I may say so impertinently failing, at what time we have most need of him; and so imperiously contesting by his authority with our will, refusing with such fiercenes and obstinacie our solicitations both mentall and manuall.10

This account of the unruly organ is close enough to Augustine’s to suggest that Montaigne may well have had the text open in front of him. In John Healey’s seventeenth-century English version, Augustine complains that the penis ‘will be sometimes importunate against the will, and sometimes immovable when it is desired, and being fervent in the mind, yet will be frozen in the body’.11 The word that describes this behaviour in Montaigne’s French and Augustine’s Latin, as in Florio’s English translation of Montaigne and Healey’s of Augustine, is consistently ‘importunate’.12 Augustine’s theological point is

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that, just as the Fall represented a refusal to obey the will of God, its consequence, appropriately enough, is that our own sexual organs refuse to obey us: ‘And in one word, what reward, what punishment, is laid upon disobedience but disobedience? What is man’s misery other than his own disobedience to himself: that seeing he would not what he might, now he cannot what he would?’13 Psychoanalysis too is crucially interested in the behaviour of the genitals. According to Freud, of course, the child’s sexual response to the mother is subject to punishment by the threat of castration. In consequence, children renounce incest early, and submit to the paternal law that represents civilised morality. From this moment on, culture depends on sublimation, the capacity to find legitimate outlets for sexual impulses. Like Augustinian theology, psychoanalysis allots a central place to the conflict between law and desire. As a historian of the penis puts it, For the Bishop of Hippo, original sin is passed from one generation to the next by semen, and the punishment for Adam’s insult against God is erections we cannot control. For Freud, the killing of the primal father and the sexual appropriation of the mother is passed on as the Oedipus complex, and the punishment is a civilization that controls our erections.14

Like Augustine, psychoanalysis treats the phallus as lawless, irrepressible, forever in conflict with propriety. While Augustine shows no special interest in female sexuality, his general assumption seems to be that women are subject to much the same sexual reflexes as men. In Freud, however, gender difference comes into being with the resolution of the Oedipus complex. As is well known, the phallic phase of infantile sexual pleasure is the same for little girls and little boys. But when the children discover the anatomical difference between them, the psychical consequences determine to a high degree their distinct sexual destinies. According to Freud, the little girl acknowledges that she is already castrated, and either succumbs to penis envy or settles down to wanting a baby as a substitute. The little boy, meanwhile, sees with horror that castration is a real possibility, and promptly submits to the values of civilisation, deferring his desire for his mother until such time as he is entitled to find a socially acceptable substitute in a marital partner outside the family. The sexual stereotyping in Freud’s account, and the misogyny of the differentiation he makes, have been variously pilloried as patriarchal or historicised as no more than can be expected of his cultural moment. In defence of psychoanalysis, however, it is worth pointing out that Freud goes on to treat the civilisation that endorses these ‘opposite’ sexes as a place, for both boys and girls, men and women, primarily of discontents. There is in Freud no

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divine comedy, no happiness as a reward for conformity, but instead a permanent tendency for both sexes to deviate from the appointed, monogamous, heterosexual path, and to face the perpetual likelihood of sexual disappointment. Civilised adults, torn between the impulsions of the drive and the imperatives of culture, Freud proposes, face ‘the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction’.15 Psychoanalytic castration re-enacts the Fall; thereafter, in each case, people are no longer at one with themselves. Both Augustine and Freud, in other words, locate human beings in a world of exile and loss; and both identify sex as the place where that loss is most evident. III Male and female genitals also play a part, of course, in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, where they are commonly represented symbolically, and understood to betray unconscious desire. It is no doubt the conjunction of these two sources, the role of the genitals in the Oedipus complex and their representation, oblique or otherwise, in dreams, that leads Lacan in his Saussurean reading of Freud to identify the phallus as the signifier of unconscious desire. How should we interpret the Lacanian phallus? Lacan’s prose is characteristically evasive, mimicking the speech of the analysand, who wants to tell – and at the same time wants to conceal – whatever it is that really (unconsciously) matters. In ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ Lacan insists that the phallus is not to be confused with the sexual organ it symbolises, whether male or female.16 At the same time, since at one point the lecture reveals that the woman may expect to find it in the body of her lover,17 the phallus is evidently not entirely remote from the organ that registers, as both Montaigne and Augustine attest, an impulse, or a failure of impulse, that is not amenable to conscious control. It would be a mistake, in my view, to reduce the Lacanian phallus to a biological organ; but it would equally be a mistake to understand it as purely figurative. The general effect of signification in Lacan is to bar access to the world outside representation, the ‘signifiable’,18 and to replace it with a signifier, derived from the order of language and culture, which exists outside us, and always betrays, in consequence of that Otherness, the organism on whose behalf it speaks. It follows that the signifier is as close as we get to the real thing, but we can never get back to organic being itself. The Lacanian phallus, as the signifier of unconscious desire, represents the sexual organ as it plays its part in culture. This part is at once ‘veiled’ (hidden from consciousness)19 and disruptive. What the phallus as the signifier of desire shares with the unruly member invoked by Freud, as well as by Montaigne and Augustine, is its anarchic

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character. Desire in Lacan always conflicts with Law, where Law is the discipline imposed by the tyrannical superego as representative of what Freud calls ‘civilisation’. Lacan differs from Freud, on the other hand, in his account of the role language plays in the constitution of the human subject. Let us go back to the (Lacanian) beginning. Desire comes into being for Lacan when the little human organism submits to the Otherness of the symbolic order, the discipline of language and culture. This order already exists outside us, and constitutes for the child the condition of being able to make its wishes known. But to the degree that these wishes are necessarily subjected to the pre-existing language, the Other, the very process of formulation means that our demands always alienate the wishes themselves; the name never quite matches what we want. Desire is the difference between the wish and the demand; it is what cannot be put into words; it is in consequence unconscious. Unconscious desire is not amenable, or indeed accessible, to reason; it lives a life of its own; it repudiates what Lacan dismissively calls ‘the goods’ (propriety, virtue, selfsacrifice, good deeds); and its signifier is the phallus. Human life may be understood, Lacan urges, as a ‘dialectic of demand and desire’.20 Demand, belonging to the symbolic order, consistently betrays desire, and desire equally consistently asserts itself, insists in dreams, jokes and lapses, or as psychosomatic symptoms, marks on the body. In hysteria the organism reasserts itself, puts on physical display the symptoms of the unsatisfied desire that springs from its subjection to the discipline of the symbolic. Even Aristotle knew that much, Lacan affirms, since he produced a theory of hysteria based on the fact that the uterus is a small animal which lives inside the woman’s body, and which moved about bloody violently when it wasn’t given something to tuck into. Obviously he used this example because he didn’t want to take a far more obvious one, the male sexual organ, for which you don’t need any sort of theoretician to remind you of its surgings.21

The project of psychoanalysis, the talking cure, is to elicit in dialogue and thus bring to consciousness the specific desires of the analysand. Analysis might be understood as a dialogue with unconscious desire. In a sense, then, the analyst’s interlocutor is the phallus, and Lacan exploits this remarkable possibility when he goes on to distinguish the Aristotelian theory of hysteria from psychoanalysis: Except Aristotle never thought matters would be helped by having conversations with the little animal inside the woman’s belly. In other words . . .. it [variously Aristotle’s hungry womb, Lacan’s phallus, unconscious desire] is not open to reason. If the experience of speech has an effect under these circumstances, it is because we are somewhere other than Aristotle.22

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‘We’, that is to say, analysts, are somewhere other than Aristotle thanks to Saussure, who detached meaning from reference, its anchorage in things in the world, or in pre-existing ideas in people’s heads, and thus made possible a recognition of the lack of fit between desire and demand, what we want and what we can say we want, as well as between the phallus as signifier and the penis or clitoris as organ. As the signifier of unconscious desire, the phallus is not open to reason; but the talking cure makes a difference, all the same, because it consists in a form of dialogue that escapes the constraints of rationality, interpreting what is said when reason fails and the subject fades into inconsequentiality, slips of the tongue, denial or silence. According to Lacan’s paradoxical thinking, while the phallus is and is not the organ, desire is and is not sexual. He makes very clear that sex is not in any sense desire’s origin. Instead, desire finds its source in the split between the real of the organism and the signifying subject constituted in the symbolic order. At the same time, the recurring theme of psychoanalysis is sexual, because sex so readily ‘occupies’ the field of desire created by the split. The sexual concentrates human energies at the level of both the organism and the signifier. This is the place where demand struggles most resolutely (and perhaps most ineffectually) to avoid misrepresenting desire. In naming the phallus as signifier, Lacan remodels – without abandoning it – Freud’s account of the castration complex, and the feminist proposal to substitute some other organ simply misses the point. But he also remodels without abandoning it an older tradition, embodied in Augustine and Montaigne, that dooms all mortal beings to the unhappiness of a desire and an organ that does not obey our conscious wishes, and evades our best efforts at rational or moral control. IV If this lawless desire, signified by the phallus, occupies a nodal point in Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, the anarchic member is also nodal for the Augustinian account of Christian theology, in so far as it concerns human life in this world.23 To Augustine the unruly sexual organ symbolises the human condition. In this, as in all things, he argues, we ourselves are not able to help ourselves. Try as we might, we cannot by an act of will achieve virtue, since even our own bodies do not obey us. According to Augustine, the original disobedience, the Fall, explains the existence of evil, as well as the need for divine Grace. While our models are those Old Testament figures like Abraham, who obeyed the will of God however hard it seemed, human beings are redeemed not by their own volition, which cannot ensure submission to the good, but by the ultimate obedience of Christ, the second Adam.24 Without this promise of redemption, Augustine tells God, people are restless, footloose creatures who have no hope of satisfaction, since ‘our heart cannot be quieted till it may

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find repose in thee’ [‘inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te’].25 Lacan, meanwhile, would have repudiated the metaphysical solution (and the address to the deity), but he would have recognised the anxiety, as well as the restlessness that precedes conversion in the discontented pagan protagonist of Augustine’s Confessions. He would also have shared Augustine’s perception of a double self, rational, deliberate, willing the good on the one hand, and arbitrary, unaccountable, incapable of obedience to the law on the other.26 While the Lacanian phallus and the Augustinian penis are nodal, Montaigne’s essays, laconic, relaxed, apparently moving easily from topic to topic by a kind of free association, are nowhere consecutive enough to display obvious nodes. Even so, the anarchic behaviour of the unruly member plays a critical part in his reflections too. Augustine concerns himself mainly with men; Lacan includes women, then disqualifies them again, and then backtracks on that too;27 only Montaigne credits women with the dubious advantage of a sexual appetite, and a corresponding unruliness, at least equal to men’s: The Gods (saith Plato) have furnished man with a disobedient, skittish, and tyrannicall member; which like an untamed furious-beast, attempteth by the violence of his appetite to bring all things under his becke. So have they allotted women another as insulting, wilde and fierce; in nature like a greedy, devouring, and rebellious creature, who if when he craveth it, hee bee refused nourishment, as impatient of delay, it enrageth.28

Like the Aristotelian womb in Lacan’s account, Montaigne’s sexual organ acts up if it’s not given something to tuck into. Law and desire are at odds. In view of the disobedience of this organ in both sexes, Montaigne argues, love is incompatible with marriage, since wedlock is a lasting institution designed to foster posterity, companionship, respect: A good marriage (if any there be) refuseth the company and conditions of love; it endeavoureth to present those of amity. It is a sweete society of life, full of constancy, of trust, and an infinite number of profitable and solid offices, and mutuall obligations.29

Marriage is lawful and law-abiding; desire is unpredictable and not amenable to discipline. Montaigne follows Augustine to the degree that he sees a perpetual conflict between sex and propriety. We do it in private, both insist, because the loss of control it entails is shameful.30 Moreover, Montaigne concedes that this disobedience of the body is evidence of our fallen nature: ‘Surely it is an

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argument not onely of our originall corruption, but a badge of our vanity and deformity’.31 Montaigne’s tone is different from Augustine’s, however. True, sex absorbs our attention in a way that no other physical activity does, he recognises, just as Augustine does,32 distracting the mind from intellectual pursuits and eclipsing thought, so that ‘it’s imperious authority makes brutish and dulleth all Platoes philosophy and divinity’. But Montaigne adds, as Augustine does not, ‘and yet he [Plato] complaines not of it’.33 Montaigne, in other words, also sees the other side of the story. His Cupid is comic, as well as dangerous, ‘a roguish God’, whose contest with devotion and justice is ‘sport’.34 Ancient societies deified the phallus, he notes;35 and if Nature had indeed invested it with any privilege, she would have done right, after all, in view of its role as ‘Author of the only immortall worke, of mortal men’.36 If he looks back to Augustine, then, Montaigne also looks forward in this ambivalence to Lacan, for whom, if desire conflicts with Law, it also constitutes the only genuine good. Lacan concedes that desire is arbitrary and absurd; it is dangerous, too, since in the end its imperatives cannot be disentangled from the death drive; but the alternative is the fierce and exorbitant tyranny of Law itself, the demanding and destructive superego, or conscience. For this reason, we should never struggle to suppress desire. On the contrary, from the point of view of the Last Judgement, if it were humanly possible to look back on our life from such a place, Lacan affirms, ‘the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire’.37 We should pursue desire wherever it leads. And in case this should be interpreted as a plea for the most callous hedonism, it is worth bearing in mind first that desire is unconscious, so that its object is not what we mistakenly suppose it to be. What we want is not that man, that woman or, indeed, that child, who is only a stand-in for the unnameable object itself. And second, we should remember that the sexual drive is ultimately inseparable from the death drive. In Lacan’s Seminar 7 the resolute and heroic pursuit of desire leads not to pleasure but to the living death of Antigone, walled up in her own tomb because she has done what she had to with respect to an unconscious imperative more powerful than Creon’s law. V Montaigne, then, can be seen as investing with a wry sympathy the Augustinian account of anarchic desire, symbolised by a sexual organ that ignores the imperatives of law and order. Meanwhile, there is direct evidence of Lacan’s familiarity with the works of both Augustine and Montaigne. Indeed, he refers more than once to each of them, and always with respect. Fully familiar with his cultural heritage, Lacan was aware of the parallels between psychoanalysis and Christian theology. Like redemption, culture is

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won at the price of a loss. The psychoanalytic experience, Lacan acknowledges, leads, ‘Freud in the van’, to original sin.38 But the child’s incestuous desire, he declares, is a ‘felix culpa’, a fortunate transgression, since its sublimation gives rise to civilisation.39 The theological paradox that good comes of evil enjoyed wide currency in Reformation Christianity, and the idea of the felix culpa (though not the phrase, which was liturgical) can be traced back to St Augustine.40 Moreover, Lacan knew the writings of Augustine directly, and mentions him several times. His essay on ‘Aggressivity’, presented as a paper in 1948, explicitly claims that Augustine ‘foreshadowed psychoanalysis’, commenting sardonically that, although his own moment resembled Lacan’s in its social upheaval (barbarians had just sacked the Roman Empire), at least Augustine was fortunate enough to have lived at a time when at least there wasn’t any trouble from the behaviourists. The instance of continuity Lacan gives here is the passage from the Confessions where Augustine describes a child pale with jealousy as it observes its foster-brother at the breast, and in properly Augustinian terms Lacan names the episode evidence of ‘original’ aggressivity.41 He returns to the implications of infant rivalry throughout his work, but most notably, perhaps, six years later in Seminar 1, where he mentions a case of his own, a little girl who was found, at an age when she could scarcely walk, absorbed ‘in the application of a good-sized stone to the skull of a little playmate from next door’. And he adds, invoking Augustine’s paradigm instance, ‘The deed of Cain does not require very great motor sophistication . . .’ This murderous, but perfectly normal, little girl made no attempt to conceal the truth of what she had done. Indeed, she had no sense of guilt, but laid claim to her deed ‘with assurance and peace of mind’.42 In Lacan’s account, guilt will come with the acquisition of Law, when in due course the child submits to the discipline of the symbolic order. Guilt belongs, in other words, to the signifying subject. So, in a manner of speaking, does truth; or at least, it is only the world of language that makes truth into an issue. Truth is what we tell – or deny. There is no question of truth until there is language. Lacan not only acknowledges the Augustinian anticipation of psychoanalysis; he also treats with equal deference Augustine’s account of the relation between truth and the signifier. One of the seminars of 1954 is virtually turned over to an exposition (by Father Beirnaert at Lacan’s invitation) of Augustine’s theory of language. If Augustine foreshadowed Freud, it seems he also anticipated Saussure, whose work Lacan explicitly brought together with Freud’s in order to reread the founding texts of psychoanalysis. Augustine’s De Magistro is, Lacan announces, ‘one of the most glorious’ texts one could read, and linguists ‘have taken fifteen centuries to rediscover, like a sun which has risen anew, like a dawn that is breaking, ideas which are already set out in St Augustine’s text’.43 The ideas in question include a non-referential theory

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of language, in which signs are not signs of things, and if for Augustine truth is ultimately extra-linguistic, metaphysical, as the Christian truth must in the end be, Augustine sees, even so, Lacan maintains, that it is the independence of the signifier, its detachment from things, that makes truth into a problem. Montaigne, too, elicits Lacan’s repeated attention and endorsement. ‘Psychoanalysis is a dialectic’, Lacan says; it is ‘what Montaigne in book III, chapter VIII, calls an art of conversation’.44 If psychoanalysis goes beyond Montaigne’s observations on human nature, it recognises their accuracy too. The subject is not a unity, Lacan says, ‘not only not free from contradiction, as we have known since Montaigne, but much more, since the Freudian experience designates it the place of negation’.45 Temperamentally, Lacan and Montaigne have much in common. For both, prohibition intensifies desire; and conscience in Montaigne, like Law in Lacan, is exorbitant, setting the self against the self.46 But above all, Montaigne anticipates Lacan’s interest in the fading of the subject. ‘I would show you’, Lacan asserts, ‘that Montaigne is truly the one who has centred himself, not around scepticism but around the living moment of the aphanisis of the subject. And it is in this that he is fruitful, that he is an eternal guide’, who goes beyond the historical turning-point that was his own time.47 Aphanisis (disappearance) was a term first used by Ernest Jones, who argued that the subject’s ultimate fear was that desire would disappear. Lacan appropriates the term to discuss the disappearance, or sometimes the ‘fading’, of the speaking subject itself, as it loses its purchase on meaning. I can disappear from what I am saying, and in the process make apparent the provisional character of subjectivity.48 Aphanisis resides at the heart of the analytic process, and at the heart, too, of the Lacanian account of the human condition. The historical turning-point where Montaigne stands as the eternal guide to aphanisis is the inaugural moment, Lacan says, of humanism in early modern culture, and its other representative is Descartes, whose philosophy excludes the unconscious. The object of desire for Descartes, Lacan points out, was certainty, but the certainty he longs for, and believes himself to have found, resides entirely at the level of the cogito. Descartes’s mistake, according to Lacan, is to claim possession of this certainty, to believe he has achieved it, and not to ‘make of the I think a mere point of fading’.49 Concealed in humanism, with its over-confidence in consciousness, there is always, in consequence, a ‘skeleton in the cupboard’, the threatened return of the disruptive and deadly drive.50 Montaigne, by contrast, reveals the ‘living’ moment when the subject fades, surpassing in his practice of writing whatever of humanism he may also share with his epoch. Lacan says no more here about Montaigne, leaving his audience to construe how this proposition is to be understood. My own best guess is that Lacan finds in Montaigne’s apparent inconsequentiality, the seeming free

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association characteristic of the essays, a contrast with the rigorously thetic, law-abiding self-discipline of an Enlightenment philosophy confident that nothing in principle exceeds its totalising grasp. Montaigne himself draws attention to the lawless quality of his writing, and laments that such unruliness also characterises his mind itself, which he describes as capricious. He is prone, he declares, to pick up verbal habits from others, and reproduce them out of context. He can be totally inconsistent, he goes on, affirming seriously one day what he said as a joke the day before. Moreover, All arguments are alike fertile to me. I take them upon any trifle. And I pray God this were not undertaken by the commandement of a minde as fleeting. Let me begin with that likes me best, for all matters are linked to one another. But my conceit displeaseth me, for somuch as it commonly produceth most foolish dotages from deepest studies; and such as content me on a suddaine, and when I least looke for them; which as fast fleete away, wanting at that instant some holde fast.

He goes on to describe how his train of thought is easily distracted by the most minor interruption. Ideas that come into his head unpremeditated slip out again as unaccountably, leaving him to ‘chafe, spight and fret in pursuite of them’.51 It is as if, then, the inconsequentiality of the essays dramatises in their own mode of address an involuntary disobedience to the discipline of rational composition, an importunate practice of writing where an anarchic self refuses accountability to the self that tries in vain to master it. Instead, he complains that his mind, left to its own devices, ‘begets’ in him ‘extravagant Chimeraes, and fantasticall monsters . . . orderlesse, and without any reason, one hudling upon an other’, full of ‘foolishenesse and monstrous strangenesse’.52 The essay genre itself, Montaigne’s invention, is precisely tentative, provisional, allusive and anecdotal. Its form runs counter to the totalising pretensions that would go on to characterise the philosophy of Descartes and his successors. Enlightenment prose sets out to follow a rational sequence and eschews digression. It was not until the early twentieth century, when modernism challenged Enlightenment ideals by introducing the stream of consciousness, that writing began once again to permit the deliberate representation of inconsequentiality. The project of this literary device was to do justice to the unruly way people actually think, and at the same time to enlist the full attention of the reader to the opacity of thought processes themselves. Lacan’s own writing and, indeed, the seminars, transcribed from recordings by Jacques-Alain Miller, take advantage, in high modernist manner, of this technique, with a view to mimicking the speech of the analysand in its apparent inconsequence, as well as the claim its opacity makes on the auditor’s attention.

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Montaigne’s scepticism represented a starting-point for Descartes: the one thing Descartes claimed he could be sure of was his own doubt. Equally, Cartesian over-confidence in the capabilities of consciousness represented a starting-point for Lacan, who early on declared himself opposed to ‘any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito’.53 No wonder, then, that Lacan returned to Montaigne as a guide to the moment when the subject ‘fades’. If Lacan is difficult, where Montaigne is relaxed and apparently casual, they share, none the less, a repudiation of the Enlightenment mode of address that condemns digression as a deviation from the rigorous linearity of the declarative text. VI Montaigne, then, takes Lacan beyond the Augustinian account of unruly desire. Offering an alternative to the law and order that drives Enlightenment rationalism, Montaigne’s mode of address also presents an instance of the ‘fading’ that characterises the Lacanian subject. Aphanisis represents more for psychoanalysis, however, than a ‘fading’ manner of writing or speech. Human beings constantly ‘choose’ between the world of meaning they inhabit as speaking subjects and the real of the organism that they also are. To choose meaning, culture, the symbolic order, is to invoke the mismatch between desire and Law, and thus to relegate an element of what we wish to say to the unconscious. Conversely, to opt for the real in an attempt to escape subjection by language as the inscription of culture is to lose all purchase on meaning and subjectivity itself. Lacan introduces the analogy of the highway robber or the mugger who demands, ‘Your money or your life!’, and the violent parallel is evidently not accidental. If you choose your life, you lose your money, he explains, but if you choose to hold on to your money, you lose both. Similarly, the subject that chooses meaning loses part of it to the unconscious, while to choose being is to lose access to meaning, and thus to everything that defines the signifying subject as fully human.54 There is in these circumstances no such thing as a subject in the full possession of meaning that the Cartesian cogito presupposes. Certainty is not an option, unless at the price of repressing the unconscious, that element of non-meaning that necessarily attends the process of signification. Something, not a presence, not a thematic content and certainly not sex, but a radical alterity, is definitively taken away from every process of presentation. The signifier always betrays us, as it must; language is incapable of transmitting a full thematic content, a complete, coherent world picture or a cognitive totality of any kind. This is not to say, of course, that something isn’t said, but it is necessarily both more and less than we consciously had in mind.

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Language permits the little human infant to name its wishes and make demands; it enables us to relate to one another in ways that are not simply bodily. But because language also betrays those wishes, the naming never achieves the perspicuity that is the goal of Enlightenment philosophy. As an analyst, Lacan speaks both of the analytic situation and of dialogue in general when he says, It follows that the place of the ‘inter-said’ (inter-dit [exchanged/censored]), which is ‘the intra-said’ (intra-dit) of a between-two-subjects, is the very place in which the transparency of the classical subject is divided and passes through the effects of ‘fading’ that specify the Freudian subject.55

This ‘fading’ is the basis of Lacan’s opposition to any philosophy directly issuing from the cogito. The scandal of psychoanalysis has been that it refuses the Enlightenment identification of the subject with consciousness, and the dualism of mind and body on which the Cartesian moment so explicitly depends. Freud and Breuer found that unconscious psychic disturbance manifested itself organically, in the coughs, disrupted vision and paralysed bodyparts of their hysterical patients. But then that same disturbance, in Freud’s account, depends in turn on the fact that the instinctual in civilised human beings is never fully surmounted, but survives in the drive as its represented form. According to Lacan’s rereading of Freud in the light of Saussure, unconscious desire marks the distance between the organism and the speaking being, as a reminder of that inextricable element of need which is lost in the demand that comes from the symbolic Other. For this reason, the subject is unable to be present to itself as pure thought. Instead, the Otherness of language and culture ensures that ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think’. These are, Lacan goes on, ‘words that render sensible to an ear properly attuned with what elusive ambiguity the ring of meaning flees from our grasp along the verbal thread’.56 As the fading of the subject into non-meaning, or into that alternative mode of meaning that characterises dreams, jokes and slips of the tongue, and that requires an active reading to make it signify, aphanisis demonstrates that the cogito depends on the repression of the organic remainder that makes itself felt in the psyche as unconscious desire. Descartes’s case depended on mind–body dualism, privileging thought as the place of identity: ‘I think, therefore I am’. But like Lacan, like Freud, his immediate predecessor, Montaigne, regards dualism, as he does asceticism, with suspicion. As his essay on ‘Imagination’ demonstrates, mental images have physical consequences. Conversely, mental processes depend on physical health. There is no energy in the products of his intellect, he says, if there is none in his body; they belong together and the one does not work without the

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other. The mind too easily follows the imperatives of the organism; indeed, ‘if hir companion have the chollicke, it seemes she also hath it’.57 Temperance, meanwhile, makes him stupid, he insists.58 Philosophers, Montaigne claims, believe that it is possible to satisfy the body without involving the mind. He finds their position ‘somewhat rigorous’, and adds, ‘May we not say, that there is nothing in us, during this earthly prison, simply corporall, or purely spirituall? and that injuriously we dismember a living man?’59 If the vocabulary here is reminiscent of Plato, and of philosophy’s founding antithesis between the sensible and the intelligible,60 Montaigne’s question challenges that opposition. His anti-dualist view might be seen, on the other hand, as compatible with Augustine’s account of the fallen human condition. Contrary to immediate appearances, Augustine is not a mind–body dualist either. Once again, Lacan, Montaigne and Augustine are aligned against the division between matter and spirit that informs the dominant tradition of Western philosophy. If the Fall has thrown mind and body out of kilter, destroying the God-given harmony between the mortal body and the immortal soul, that is our fault, Augustine affirms, and not part of the divine plan. The opposition that structures his thinking, however, is not between flesh and spirit, but between two cities, the earthly city we inhabit here and now, and the heavenly city to which all Christians ultimately belong. The first lives according to human, secular values, and the second in accordance with the will of God. Augustine’s prime opponents in this context are the Manichaeans, who imagine an eternal division between good and evil, and this is reproduced in the opposition they define between soul and body. By contrast, Augustine insists on valuing the body: procreation, he argues, was a glory, commanded by God, and sexual intercourse would have taken place in Eden, though in perfect obedience to the will and without the perturbation of mind that accompanies the act in the fallen world. At the Last Day we shall rise again as bodies, and not simply as disembodied souls, though our new forms will retain no vestige of corruptibility. Augustine has to reckon, of course, with St Paul, who consistently opposes flesh and spirit. But he interprets this first Christian theologian in the most resolutely anti-dualist manner. If the earthly city is defined as carnal, we should understand that term to refer to its values. In the earthly city, they live according to the flesh, but this is not to say that they seek bodily pleasures. Instead, they dedicate themselves to human, secular and worldly commitments. ‘Two loves therefore have given origin to these two cities, self-love in contempt of God unto the earthly, love of God in contempt of one’s self to the heavenly’.61 The flesh, Augustine maintains, is given by God and was good, at least until the Fall made it corruptible. Moreover, it would be a mistake to suppose that the flesh is the cause of sin. On the contrary, it was ‘the sinning soul’ that ‘made the flesh corruptible’. There are sins of the flesh,

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certainly, but the worst sins are envy, pride, wrath, deceit, all characteristic of the devil, who, after all, has no flesh.62 It was pride and the wickedness of the will, not the flesh, that caused the Fall.63 As Andrew Marvell’s debating Body would later put it, ‘What but a Soul could have the wit / To build me up for Sin so fit?’64 After the Fall, Augustine insists, Adam became carnal in mind and body, with the result that another imperative in both flesh and spirit came to undermine his once-unified longing to obey the law of God. In consequence of all this, Augustine takes issue with the Platonists, as well as the Manichaeans. The Platonists are not quite so wide of the mark, he allows, as the Manichaeans, since they make God the creator of the visible world, as well as the origin of the intelligible one. But they err in attributing sin to the desires of the flesh.65 The penalty for the Fall is made visible in the flesh as the lawless conduct of the unruly sexual organ, but the meaning of this punishment is the loss of control, the disobedience of the self to the self. In this sense, the penis for Augustine is the signifier, we might want in a postLacanian world to say, of lost mastery. Just as Augustine’s human being is divided against itself, asserting desire against the dictates of the will, the subject of psychoanalysis is other than it is, divided between conscious intents and unconscious desires. In neither case is the conflict reducible to a distinction between mind and body. Instead, in each instance an irrepressible imperative other than the law intrudes, insists and overturns the best efforts of consciousness to command behaviour. If their values are antithetical, Augustine’s metaphysical, identifying the law with the will of God and eternal life, and Lacan’s secular, defining the Law as both human and deadly, if one appeals to Grace to save him from desire, and the other insists that desire is the only genuine good, they share, nevertheless, a theoretical framework that the Enlightenment would repudiate, a conception of the self at odds with the self in a conflict where victory cannot be achieved by will-power. The early modern period represents the meeting-point of two incompatible knowledges, whose most representative figures we might now want to see as Descartes and Montaigne respectively. Descartes pointed forwards to the Enlightenment; but Montaigne, who looked back to Augustine in so many ways, also anticipates in some respects our own postmodern, postEnlightenment sensibilities. Of course, the historical differences are as great as the theoretical similarities. Psychoanalysis was radically new in its own modernist period: there is no conception of the specifically psychoanalytic unconscious in Augustine or Montaigne. But I have a sense that both Augustine and Montaigne might have found Lacan congenial, or at least intelligible, in a way that Descartes would not. And if so, we are not entirely anachronistic in allowing certain aspects of his work to illuminate the texts of the early modern period.

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Those aspects, I have suggested, are not so much thematic as textual. What psychoanalysis offers us, in my view, is a way of reading, an attention to the signifier that acknowledges the dialectic of Law and desire that informs all writing. This is apparent in the importunate irruption of unexpected meanings into the most thetic, the most disciplined of pronouncements, as well as the tendency of the writing subject to fade at the critical moment. Reading for aphanisis would withhold the promised mastery of world pictures and the illusory certainty of cognitive totalities, but would give us instead an early modern culture at least as divided, as complex and, indeed, as inventive as our own. VII In his brilliant, provocative and sometimes mischievous essay, ‘What is Postmodernism?’, Jean-François Lyotard, surely the most Lacanian of philosophers, claimed Montaigne for postmodernity.66 Fifteen years later, in 1997, the year before he died, Lyotard wrote the first half of a projected book on Augustine’s Confessions. The surviving text is elusive, subtle, lyrical, more prose-poem than commentary on Augustine’s text, the first-person figure who appears there as the writing subject ostensibly Augustine himself, but perhaps also interchangeable with Lyotard. The primary theorist of the postmodern finds in Augustine’s Christian theology a temporality that resembles at once the timelessness of the Freudian unconscious and the future anterior of the analytic experience. Lyotard also singles out for attention the unruliness of sexual desire, which conflicts with the most righteous resolutions of the will, and the other self that in Augustine’s text makes itself felt in dreams, a lecherous figure who wakes when the conscious, virtuous self is asleep. In Lyotard’s paraphrase, Sleep does not belong to I. Another principle, another prince exercises at its own pace on the stage of the dream the languorous and lascivious illusions. When the master’s lieutenant, controlling the passions and upright in chastity, is on leave, what can the master do? Has he not given the conjuror the reins?67

Intensely aware, as this quotation shows, of the resemblance between psychoanalysis and Augustinian thought, Lyotard additionally finds in the Confessions a story of reading. Trying to compensate for the originary loss, we read, interpreting both books and the Book of Nature, in order to possess the truth. For the postmodern philosopher, as for the Christian theologian, the longed-for object is the absolute, unattainable in the world we ourselves inhabit, but infinitely desirable in spite of that, or perhaps for that very reason. Lyotard mimics Augustine’s text, with its direct address to God:

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‘Chased out of the paradise of your intimacy, we are left for memory by you the collection of your works, the world, a text of which we form as much a part as its readers. Decipherable decipherers, in the library of shadows’.68 But the truth reaches us obscured: ‘We mumble our way through the traces left by the absolute that you are; we spell the letters’.69 The angels, Lyotard goes on, still paraphrasing The Confessions, read quite differently. They have no need of the intervention of language, the signifier that Augustine regarded with such suspicion. Instead, they encounter the Logos directly, ‘The very thought of the author’, ‘A presence of which we have no idea, an infinite ocean of light without shadow’.70 Augustine records his own conversion as a scene of reading. In despair in the garden, he hears a voice repeating, ‘Take up and read’. He at once read Romans 13, the chapter where the book fell open, and all doubt vanished.71 Thereafter, the daily struggle against sin is no less, but mysteriously, mystically, something is known, if only that the time of perfect knowledge is not yet.72 Is there envy or identification in Lyotard’s account of this recognition? The absolute, absolutely irrelative, outside space and time, so absolutely far – there [it] is for one moment lodged in the most intimate part of this man. . . . The soul has not penetrated into the angelic spheres, but a little of the absolute – is it thinkable? – has encrypted itself within it.73

Augustine (or Lyotard?) is thus more, as well as less, than he is: not only at the mercy of an anarchic desire, but aware of the Other, which is the source of meaning and truth, and yet does not exist as substance, but only as signification. ‘What I am not yet, I am . . . What is missing, the absolute, cuts its presence into the shallow furrow of its absence’.74 As cultural critics and historians of culture, we do not, it seems to me, aspire to the absolute as the object of our reading. On the contrary, our aim is not the truth beyond the signifier, but the contours of signification itself, while the absolute, with its supernatural resonances, can safely be left to philosophy. Instead, our task is to spell the letters that do no more than trace the anxieties as well as the ideals, the hopes, uncertainties and dissonances, that inform the writing of a past culture. In that project a postmodern and psychoanalytic acknowledgement of the incompleteness of every text, its silences and its potential incoherences, its propensity to ‘fade’, is a necessary ally, the material of a deeper historicism and a sharper awareness of historical difference. On those grounds, and because in its Lacanian form it is not inconsistent with certain critical early modern convictions, psychoanalysis surely deserves to be brought in from the cold.

chapter

3 L o v e a s T r o m p e - l ’ o e i l : Ta x o n o m i e s of Desire in Venus and Adonis

I The painter Zeuxis excelled in the art of trompe-l’oeil, a mode of painting that is capable of deceiving the eye by its simulation of nature. Zeuxis portrayed grapes with such success that birds flew towards his picture. His younger rival, Parrhasius, however, challenged Zeuxis to a competition to decide which painter’s work was more true to life. Parrhasius won – by depicting a curtain so convincing that Zeuxis begged him to draw it and reveal the picture behind.1 In his seminar ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a’ Jacques Lacan makes a distinction between the two pictures: only the curtain that Parrhasius painted is a true trompe-l’oeil, because its effect depends on what is missing, the possibility of a secret concealed behind the veil. For Lacan it is not deception alone that defines the trompe-l’oeil: on the contrary, its determining characteristic is the promise of a presence that it also withholds. Trompe-l’oeil tantalises.2 At a critical moment in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, when the goddess has succeeded in manoeuvring her reluctant suitor into a likely physical position, but without the consequence she seeks, the text compares Adonis to the painting by Zeuxis: Even so poor birds deceiv’d with painted grapes Do surfeit by the eye and pine the maw: Even so she languisheth in her mishaps, As those poor birds that helpless berries saw. The warm effects which she in him finds missing She seeks to kindle with continual kissing. (ll. 601–6)3

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But in Shakespeare’s poem the grapes also represent a trompe-l’oeil in accordance with Lacan’s definition. Deceptively promising oral gratification, the enticing picture of the grapes yields no pleasure for the stomach. In the same way, despite her best efforts, Venus finds that the provocative outward image of Adonis conceals nothing to her purpose: his beauty evokes a longing, which remains unsatisfied, for his desire – or for its phallic signifier. In painting deceit gives pleasure. ‘What is it’, Lacan asks, ‘that attracts and satisfies us in trompe-l’oeil? When is it that it captures our attention and delights us?’ In answer he proposes that the trompe-l’oeil pleases by presenting the appearance of a three-dimensional object which we go on to recognise as exactly that: no more than an appearance, painted in two dimensions. In order to enjoy the trompe-l’oeil, we have to be convinced by it in the first instance and then to shift our gaze so that, seeing the object resolve itself into lines on a canvas, we are no longer persuaded; we have to be deceived – and then to acknowledge our own deception. The gap between these two moments is the place, Lacan affirms, of the objet a, the lost object in the inextricable real, the cause of desire.4 What attracts in art, the civilising, sublimated product of the drive, is experienced in psychosexual life as a lack, the ⫺␾ (minus phi), a source of indestructible longing. The type of the desiring subject according to classical myth was Tantalus in the underworld, unable to reach the fruit that would allay his insatiable thirst. Shakespeare’s Venus outdoes Tantalus in frustration, however, when she holds Adonis in her arms but elicits no response: ‘That worse than Tantalus’ is her annoy, / To clip Elizium and to lack her joy’ (ll. 599–600). His desire evades her control: love cannot be commanded. The third dimension she wants is missing, and the absence she encounters serves only to intensify her longing. In the event, nothing very much happens in this narrative of desire. Tantalised as she is, Venus cajoles and entreats; Adonis, however, resists, rejects and finally escapes her; he is killed by the boar, and Venus laments. The poem, exceptionally popular in its own period,5 prompts in the reader a desire for action that it fails to gratify. Meanwhile, the critical tradition in its turn, just as tantalised by the poem’s lack of closure, has sought to make something happen, at least at the thematic level, by locating a moral centre which would furnish the work with a final meaning, a conclusion, a definitive statement. It is possible, however, to see the text itself as a kind of trompe-l’oeil, moving undecidably between modes of address, and sustaining the desire of the reader in the process. Perhaps it is precisely in its lack of closure that Shakespeare’s poem may be read as marking a specific moment in the cultural history of love. A literary trompe-l’oeil, a text of and about desire, Venus and Adonis promises a definitive account of love, but at the same time it withholds the finality that such a promise might lead us to expect. Instead, it tantalises and,

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in so doing, throws into relief the difference between its historical moment and our own. II Venus and Adonis records in poetry the originating moment of desire. Here the goddess of love, traditional object of all men’s admiration, unexpectedly appears as a desiring subject, herself at the mercy of an intractable passion. Led by experience to expect the devotion of others and accustomed to master, imprison and enslave her lovers (ll. 101–12), Venus is here reduced to the role of suitor (l. 6), overpowered by another’s beauty, and subject in her turn to indifference and disdain. The protagonist of the story thus comes to represent what the text identifies as a personification of desire itself, which is by definition unsatisfied: ‘She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d’ (l. 610). Lost, ironically, in the emotion she herself traditionally promotes, a subjection to passion which ‘makes young men thrall, and old men dote’ (l. 837), the queen of love has now become desire’s helpless victim, in her own law forlorn (l. 251). As goddess of love, she stoops – and fails to conquer. Because she cannot command the desire of Adonis, or even protect his life, Venus finally delivers over his mutilated body a curse on the emotion that subjects her, condemning love itself to perpetual dissatisfaction and despair: ‘Since thou art dead, lo here I prophesy, Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend: It shall be waited on with jealousy, Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end; Ne’er settled equally, but high or low, That all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe.’ (ll. 1135–40)

While Venus has not prevailed upon her unwilling lover, she has authority, nevertheless, as the personification of love, to define the condition she both represents and shares. The goddess’s words thus summarise her own story and at the same time ‘explain’ proleptically the tragic endings of those romances which constituted the classic love stories of Shakespeare’s period: Troilus and Cressida, Pyramus and Thisbe, Dido and Aeneas.6 As a result of Love’s distress, suffering and loss have become the destiny of lovers. All myth can be read as explanatory, an account of how things came to be the way they are: a sexual relation between the sky and the earth generates life; the Fall explains the presence of evil in the world. As another myth of origins, Venus and Adonis is true to its source. Ovid’s Metamorphoses also records the origins of things, and accounts in the process for their present

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character.7 The long narrative poem begins with the creation of the world, Jupiter’s disappointment in the human beings he has made, and the consequent flood, from which only Deucalion and Pyrrha are saved. Under divine instruction, the couple throw stones over their shoulders and thereby generate a new race of human beings. The ‘stoniness’ of their origins explains the hardy nature of the Romans and their capacity for work.8 More specific in its reference, the story of Daphne accounts for the sacred character of the laurel. There was a time when Apollo was happy to wreathe his forehead with the leaves of any tree but, when Daphne eludes him, he feels a special warmth for the laurel she becomes and declares that from now on it will be the source of garlands for him and, ironically, for Roman generals returning in triumph.9 Later in Book I, Argus asks how the reed pipe came to be invented, and Mercury responds with the story of Pan and Syrinx.10 An assembly of classical narratives, the Metamorphoses thus retains the mythic character of much of the material it so elegantly rewrites. The stories most widely reproduced, elaborated and imitated in the Renaissance from this familiar grammar school text11 concern the quest for a prohibited sexual pleasure either frustrated or compensated by metamorphosis: Daphne and Syrinx saved from rape in the nick of time; Narcissus unable to satisfy the erotic impulse his own image arouses, and transformed into a flower. If desire is a quest for presence, for the full (imaginary, impossible) presence of the beloved to the lover, and in so far as its perpetuation is an effect of presence deferred, these Ovidian narratives surely constitute perfect fables of desire. Daphne in flight, still out of reach, represents an emblem of the condition that subsists to the degree that possession eludes it; Daphne immobilised, meanwhile, putting down roots, fixed, remains the figure of unfulfilled desire, precisely because she is no longer Daphne. What Apollo now holds is not the nymph he wanted, though he loves the laurel and takes it for his tree. In the case of Ovid’s Venus and Adonis, presence is doubly deferred, gratification doubly displaced. The mythic story offers to explain the origin of the annual Adonia. This festival, the rite of Adonis, appears to have taken place in spring or summer all over the Mediterranean region.12 It seems that the reciprocal love of Venus and Adonis was celebrated on the first day of the Adonia, with ripe fruit and sweet cakes, in the presence of their images as lovers, while on the second, the body of the hero was ritually consigned to the waves with bitter lamentation.13 Love and death were thus brought into close conjunction, the intensity of desire affirmed by the emphasis on its transience. Ovid’s version of the story begins with the passing of time and the swift succession of the years; it ends with the short-lived anemone.14 The windflower that springs from the blood of Adonis is explicitly identified as a

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reminder of the goddess’s grief, her longing for lost presence, but the insistence on its ephemeral character renders the flower as tantalising as the love of the youth himself. Venus promises that the metamorphosis she brings about will constitute an everlasting memorial, but at once it is made clear that this is to be no more than an annually recurring image, and one that, moreover, is especially fleeting, since the winds from which it takes its name so easily destroy it. In this way Ovid’s lyrical narrative progressively withdraws the compensating presence it promises. The anemone – beautiful, fragile, mutable, and all that remains of a young man who became an object of desire for the goddess of love – thus figures in its elusiveness as the signifier of desire itself. Nor is it explicitly named: even the identity of the windflower is deferred for the reader, the unspecified answer to a kind of riddle constructed by the text.15 Shakespeare’s Venus, unlike Ovid’s we are to assume, never succeeds in eliciting the desire of Adonis. All she gets is the flower, but she does possess it, cradles it, indeed, in her breast, next to her throbbing heart, and kisses it (ll. 1173, 1185–6, 1188). And yet its destiny there, she recognises, is to wither, and in Shakespeare’s version there is no mention even of its annual reappearance. What the Renaissance in general and this text in particular adopt from Ovid is above all the notion of erotic metamorphosis itself: the object the lover finally gains is not the object of desire, but something else, a substitute, a stand-in. At the moment when the desiring subject takes possession of the object, something slips away, eludes the lover’s grasp and is lost. But if Ovid’s tale of Venus and Adonis offers presence withheld as the figure of desire, Shakespeare’s poem surpasses its source in audacity as well as length, by setting out to explain the origin of desire in its entirety. There was a time, we are invited to understand, when love was reciprocal, which is to say that its conquest was absolute: Mars, stern god of war, became a prisoner of Venus, and learned to be a lover (ll. 97–114). But the goddess’s new love is unrequited: now she is lovesick (l. 5) and Adonis ‘sullen’ (l. 75). When Adonis ignores her instruction and goes hunting, this disobedience leads to his death and her irretrievable loss. Henceforth, Venus insists, love will always be anarchic in character. ‘It shall suspect where is no cause of fear, It shall not fear where it should most mistrust; It shall be merciful, and too severe, And most deceiving when it seems most just; Perverse it shall be, where it shows most toward; Put fear to valour, courage to the coward.’ (ll. 1153–5)

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Her words are necessarily authoritative. As the personification of love, Venus does no more here than proclaim her own nature. Shakespeare’s myth of origins is also a definition of love. III A definition, however, ought surely to be definitive, a characteristic account of a representative state of affairs. And yet Venus and Adonis is hardly, in most respects, a typical love story. By conventional standards, the gender roles of the central figures are disconcertingly reversed; meanwhile, the genre of the narrative, now lyrical, now bordering on farce, seems oddly unresolved. As a result, love itself appears at one moment grossly material and at another delicately insubstantial, no more than airy nothing. Is there, then, a definition here or only a bravura display of a range of skills on the part of a young and ambitious poet, in a text as anarchic as the love its central figure both demonstrates and defines? First, gender. There can be little doubt that Elizabethan heroines, whether tragic or comic, whether Juliet or Rosalind, are permitted to be more outspoken in love than their Victorian counterparts. Even so, the voluble and unremitting pursuit of a coy young man by a relentless goddess wildly exceeds romantic convention. It is ‘Rose-cheek’d Adonis’ (l. 3), with his white hands (ll. 362–4) and his voice like a mermaid’s (l. 431), who blushes and pouts (l. 33), while Venus pulls him off his horse and tucks him under her arm (ll. 30– 2). The ‘tender boy’ (l. 32) remains inert, like a bird in a net (l. 67), while Venus, by contrast, resembles an eagle (l. 55). And in case the reader should forget how these things are traditionally done, the poem presents horses that behave in a much more predictable manner: Adonis’s courser neighs and bounds imperiously at the sight of the jennet, and majestically asserts a masculine control (ll. 265, 270). The text makes witty capital out of the scandal it thus creates when Venus draws attention to the reversal of roles. Adonis is, she tells him, ‘ “more lovely than a man” ’ (l. 9); if only, she sighs, things were the other way round: ‘ “Would thou wert as I am, and I a man” ’ (l. 369).16 But palpably she is not, and the result is a good deal of salacious comedy at the level of the poem’s action, or rather lack of action: ‘Backward she push’d him, as she would be thrust, / And govern’d him in strength, though not in lust’ (ll. 41–2). Venus pins Adonis to the ground as she kisses him goodnight, ‘And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth’ (l. 548). The exhausted Adonis eventually ceases to struggle, ‘While she takes all she can, not all she listeth’ [wants] (l. 564). A good joke is evidently worth repeating. Even when their physical positions are reversed, the text explains, the case of Venus remains hopeless: Now is she in the very lists of love, Her champion mounted for the hot encounter.

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Shakespeare in Theory and Practice All is imaginary she doth prove; He will not manage her, although he mount her. (ll. 595–8)

At the same time, however, Venus and Adonis is lyrical about the passion it also presents as absurd and, at the death of Adonis, unaffectedly elegiac in its lament for perfection destroyed: ‘Alas, poor world, what treasure hast thou lost! What face remains alive that’s worth the viewing? What tongue is music now? what canst thou boast Of things long since, or any thing ensuing? The flowers are sweet, their colours fresh and trim, But true sweet beauty liv’d and died with him.’ (ll. 1075–80)

Throughout the text one mode of address displaces another with remarkable agility. For an earlier generation of critics the resulting question of genre represented the central critical problem of Venus and Adonis. Was it primarily comic, or mainly tragic, or possibly satirical?17 Or was it simply so confused in its rapid shifts from high camp to low mimetic that there was no possibility of making any real sense of it at all?18 Despite clear stylistic and thematic debts to the Metamorphoses, the text is no mere imitation of Ovid’s disengaged and economical narrative; neither is it a generic copy of any existing Elizabethan text, regardless of parallels with Lodge’s Glaucus and Scilla. In terms of poetic decorum, this tragical–comical–pastoral(–mythical) love story defies the literary classifications of its period. Where, then, in all this undecidability, is any consistent definition of love to be found? Is passion no more than the crude appetite of an over-heated, love-sick queen (or quean) (l. 175)? Or is it, conversely, the effect of a delicate appeal to the finest senses? ‘Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear, Or like a fairy trip upon the green, Or like a nymph, with long dishevell’d hair Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen. Love is a spirit all compact of fire, Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.’ (ll. 145–50)

What exactly is the significance of the personification of love as a goddess who leaves no imprint on the sand, makes no dent in a bank of primroses

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(ll. 151–2) – and who has no impact on Adonis either? Is her reiterated lightness (ll. 155, 1192) an indication of lyric grace or vacuous triviality? What is the character of the desire that finds its inaugural moment in this myth of origins? IV In one instance the poem apparently makes a categorical statement and the text seems, indeed, definitive. Adonis is speaking. The desire of Venus is not, he insists, love at all, but instead its promiscuous, irrational, destructive simulacrum, lust (ll. 789–98). The goddess has misrepresented the true nature of her passion: ‘Call it not love, for love to heaven is fled, / Since sweating lust on earth usurp’d his name’ (ll. 793–4). And Adonis undertakes to disentangle the two, specifying each as the antithesis of the other: ‘Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, But lust’s effect is tempest after sun; Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain, Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done; Love surfeits not, lust like a glutton dies; Love is all truth, lust full of forged lies.’ (ll. 799–804)

A grateful critical tradition, eager to regulate the wayward textuality of the poem by locating within it a clear thematic statement, the expression of an authoritative design, has been all too ready to reproduce Adonis’s values as the key to the moral truth of the text. The tradition goes back at least to Coleridge, who was relaxed about the identification of Venus with lust, arguing that, although the poem was about concupiscence, it was not morally dangerous because Shakespeare had dispersed the reader’s attention beyond ‘the animal impulse itself’ to the images and circumstances in which it was presented.19 Just over a century later, however, Lu Emily Pearson demonstrated how much was now at stake in the antithesis Adonis had affirmed: Venus is shown as the destructive agent of sensual love; Adonis, as reason in love. The one sullies whatever it touches; the other honors and makes it beautiful. The one is false and evil; the other is all truth, all good. Reason in love, truth, beauty – these are the weapons with which lust must be met, or the ideals of man must go down in defeat before the appetites.20

If Pearson’s moral vehemence sounds archaic now, there is cause for surprise in the degree to which Adonis’s identification of Venus with lust has survived

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the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Heather Dubrow is much kinder, but the term reappears in her account, however softened by the attribution of motherliness: ‘Though lust is Venus’ primary motive, it is by no means her only one and by no means an adequate label for her behavior: tender maternal love is commingled with her lust . . .’21 Male critics, meanwhile, are relentless: Shakespeare ‘casts Venus as a frenzied older woman driven by comic lust for a very young man barely emerging from boyhood’.22 Although the poem has nothing to say about her age, except that her beauty is perfect, and annually revived (ll. 133–44), the goddess’s supposed decline has none the less proved explanatory for some male readers: ‘Her vulnerability is that of the older woman, desperate to renew her youth in the arms of a young lover’.23 Even a critic who allows that Venus represents ‘the drastically imperfect amalgam of lust and caring that is likely to be found in all lovers’, finds it necessary to point out that ‘The suffocating, devouring lust of Venus is too “vicious” (in both the antique and the modern senses) to escape censure’.24 In this way criticism provides itself with a definitive signified, a univocal thematic ‘message’ beyond the polyphony of the text, beyond, that is to say, the heterogeneity of its mode of address.25 V This critical reiteration of the taxonomy of desire that Adonis so confidently delivers probably tells us more about our own cultural moment than it does about Shakespeare’s poem. The binary opposition between innocent male youth and lascivious female old age is problematic, in the first instance, because it is compelled to attribute the central affirmation of the poem to a hero who is, as the text repeatedly reminds us and the plot of the story insists, so young that he knows nothing of love (ll. 127–8, 409, 806). It is not, of course, inconceivable that Adonis speaks with preternatural wisdom: Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream also talks of love with an insight that her role in the story might not lead us to expect (1.2.232–9).26 But if Helena speaks ‘out of character’ here, her observations are confirmed, in the absence of a controlling narrative voice, by the events of the play. The narrative voice in Venus and Adonis, by contrast, does not reproduce the neat antitheses the hero enunciates. On the contrary, while Adonis primly urges Venus not to call it love but lust, the text calls her desire either love or lust indifferently: The studded bridle on a ragged bough Nimbly she fastens – O how quick is love! – The steed is stalled up, and even now To tie the rider she begins to prove:

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Backward she push’d him, as she would be thrust, And govern’d him in strength, though not in lust. (ll. 37–42)

Meanwhile, the steed in question leaps, neighs and bounds (ll. 265) in response to a jennet identified as his ‘love’ throughout (ll. 259–324). The animal’s condition is variously ‘love’ (l. 311) and ‘desire’ (l. 276). As for Venus, ‘desire doth lend her force’ (l. 29); her language is ‘lustful’ (l. 47); but ‘she cannot choose but love’ (l. 79). In her case, ‘careless lust stirs up a desperate courage’ (l. 556), but ‘love’ too lacks moral scruples and picks locks to get at beauty (l. 576). Venus, of course, calls it love, but the text calls her ‘love’ the moment Adonis has completed his disquisition (l. 814). It is not obvious that one set of terms is used ironically: indeed, irony is precisely the quality that the polyphony of the text renders elusive. The poem seems to treat as interchangeable the terms Adonis so categorically distinguishes – and modern commentators have treated as opposites, without reference to linguistic change. In practice, the narrative voice is characteristic of its historical moment. At this time love and lust are not consistently used antithetically: on the contrary, since each can be understood as a name for desire, either may be innocent or reprobate according to the context, and they may also occur as synonyms without apparent irony. The emergence of a radical distinction between the two – a process inadvertently encouraged, as it turns out, by the voice of Adonis himself – marks a moment in the cultural history of desire which, as modern criticism unwittingly reveals, has proved formative for our own cultural norms and values. William Baldwin’s A treatise of Morall Phylosophie demonstrates the shifts in progress in the course of the early modern period. This collection of precepts derived from a range of classical authorities was exceptionally popular: twenty-four editions appeared between 1547 and about 1640. The earliest editions allow a certain overlap between love and lust: indeed, in 1550 the chapter heading ‘Of the worlde, the love, and pleasures therof’ reappears in ‘The Table’ as ‘Of the worlde, the lustes, and pleasures therof’. While this might, of course, be no more than a printer’s error,27 Baldwin places ‘Love, luste, and lecherye’ together in a single short chapter.28 Here the love in question is mainly caritas, with no sexual connotations, but in one exceptional instance ‘Repentaunce is the ende of fylthy love’,29 where the adjective has the effect of aligning love with the deadly sin of lechery. If on the one hand, ‘Luste is a lordlye and disobedient thynge’, on the other, ‘Dishonor, shame, evell ende and damnacion, wayte upon lecherie, and all other like vyces’.30 The implication seems to be that lust is a powerful impulse but in itself morally neutral, so that, like the will, it needs to be brought under control in the

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interests of virtue, while in contrast, lechery is unremittingly wicked. Later editions are modified, however, by the intervention of Thomas Paulfreyman, who repeatedly edited and enlarged Baldwin’s text. By 1564 ‘love’ has been removed from the chapter heading and from the table of contents. But if this simplifies the position with respect to love, lust remains as equivocal as before. Appropriately qualified, it evidently belongs with lechery: ‘Flie lecherous lustes . . .’; ‘the filthy luste of lecherie’.31 In a different context, however, it might equally well be entirely morally neutral: ‘Enforce thy self to refraine thine evill lustes and folow the good: For the good mortifieth and destroieth the evill’.32 Evidently at this moment lust is not necessarily to be condemned out of hand. In 1594, a year or more after the publication of Venus and Adonis, Thomas Bowes issued an English translation of Pierre de la Primaudaye’s Suite de l’Academie Francoise. There remains some uncertainty here about the moral implications of lust: ‘I will begin then with the affection of love, which is a motion whereby the heart lusteth [appete] after that which is good . . .’33 Almost immediately, however, a tentative moral distinction begins to appear. The will is drawn to what is good, and desires to embrace it, ‘and this love is called Cupiditie, Lusting, or Coveting’ [cupidité, ou concupiscence, ou convoitise]. But this differs from ‘true love’, which is the love of the good for itself and not for the sake of possession.34 Here lust is evidently not to be endorsed, since it is proprietary, but at the same time it has no specifically sexual connotations and, as in Paulfreyman’s Baldwin, it is possible to lust after the good. In the longer term, however, a change was taking place. During the sixteenth century, lust was gradually to lose its innocence, or at least its potential innocence, since a reprobate meaning was always available. Understood in the Middle Ages as delight, pleasure, desire, or sinful passion, according to context, the term had become primarily sexual and strongly pejorative by a point somewhere in the mid-seventeenth century. Coverdale’s version of Numbers 14: 8, ‘If the Lord have lust unto us’, was evidently acceptable in 1535; but the Authorised Version of 1611 rendered the phrase as ‘If the Lord delight in us’.35 Meanwhile, in 1533 the translator of the popular Enchiridion of Erasmus thought it appropriate to give libido as ‘bodyly luste’, ‘the luste of the body’, ‘lechery’, ‘fylthy lust’ or ‘unclenly luste’.36 Lust alone was evidently considered not specific enough to define a reprehensible desire:37 a qualifier of some sort was necessary to do justice to a condition which turns human beings, God’s handiwork, to ‘fylthy swyne / to gotes / to dogges / and of all brute beestes / unto ye most brute’,38 and which, in the humanist assessment of Erasmus, wastes time, destroys health, hastens old age and, perhaps worst of all, obliterates the use of reason.39 Just over 150 years later, a new translation of the Enchiridion was published as A Manual

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for a Christian Soldier. Here the qualifying words and phrases have disappeared, and libido is translated simply as ‘lust’. Without in any way softening the value judgements inscribed in the original text, the version of 1687 leaves it to ‘lust’ alone to do the work of defining a condition that reduces human beings to the level of beasts.40 (Twentieth-century translators also tend to render libido as lust.41) This handful of examples, most of them taken from repositories of popular morality, merely amplifies what the Oxford English Dictionary already indicates: in the course of the early modern period, with whatever advances and reversals, ‘lust’ as pleasure or delight was to become exclusively sexual and specifically sinful. But the dictionary, which defines individual words as if they were ‘full’, in isolation, of their own meanings, does not record the network of differences that constitutes a taxonomy. The shifting meaning of lust depends, at least in part, on the emergent difference between lust and love. Predictably, therefore, in this period of change the connotations of love are no less problematic. The name of a condition which may be divine, purely social, romantic or exclusively sexual, but which is in all these cases intense, leads to semantic uncertainties and gives rise to anxieties in the process. Sir Thomas More, for example, was deeply critical of William Tyndale because he translated the biblical ‘charity’ as ‘love’. The problem, from More’s Christian humanist point of view, is that ‘love’ carries the wrong connotations, unless it is appropriately qualified by an adjective which distinguishes between the divine and the sexual, since sexual love is not, of course, highly valued. Tyndale, however, to More’s disgust, consistently omits the requisite adjective: If he called charitie sometyme by the bare name of love: I wold not stick therat. But now wheras charitie signifieth in english mens eares, not every common love, but a good vertuous & wel ordred love, he wyl studiously flee fro ye name of good love, & alway speke of love, & alway leave out good.42

More blames Tyndale’s practice on the Lutheran project of elevating faith at the expense of charity. Since their theology makes salvation a question of faith and not good works, the Reformers deliberately conflate charity with the merely erotic love that exists between a man and his paramour: ‘and therfore he chaungeth ye name of holy vertuous affeccion, into ye bare name of love comen to the vertuous love that man beareth to god, and to the lewde love that is betwene flecke and his make.’43 While poetry and romance idealise love, humanist morality holds it in contempt. Erasmus has no greater patience than his friend, More, with sexual love (amor), and he includes it under the heading of libido in the Enchiridion. Love is just as absurd, and just as reductive as all erotic desire:

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Shakespeare in Theory and Practice Set before thyne eyen howe ungoodly it is / howe altogyder a mad thing to love / to waxe pale / to be made leane / to wepe / to flatter / and shamfully to submyt thy selfe unto a stynkyng harlot most fylthy and rotten / to gape & synge all nyght at her chambre wyndowe / to be made to the lure & be obedyent at a becke / nor dare do any thing except she nod or wagge her heed / to suffre a folysshe woman to reigne over the / to chyde the: to lay unkyndnesse one agaynst ye other to fall out / to be made at one agayne / to gyve thy selfe wyllynge unto a queene / that she myght mocke / k[n]ocke / mangle and spoyle the. Where is I beseche the amonge all these thynges the name of a man? Where is thy berde? Where is that noble mynde created unto moste beautyfull and noble thynges?44

In the light of our own taxonomies, it is tempting to speculate on the meaning of ‘love’ in this instance. The emotions described are romantic, even Petrarchan; the ‘stynkyng harlot’, however, comes from quite another part of the discursive forest, as does the violence, which evokes the fabliau genre rather than romance. But the point, presumably, is that Erasmus does not distinguish between kinds of love: all passion is degrading. The humiliating harlot reappears in the first part of The French Academie: evidently she had entered into the European popular consciousness, along with the corresponding value judgement on love. ‘True’ love, by contrast, is not sexual at all here, but belongs to friends: For we see some men so bewitched with a harlot, that if neede bee, and shee command it, they will hazard their honour and credit, and oftentimes make themselves an example to a whole countrey upon an open scaffold. And then they labour to cover their folly with this goodly name of Love, which is better tearmed of Euripides by the name of Fury and madnesse in men. For true and good love, which is the fountaine of friendship, is alwaies grounded upon vertue, and tendeth to that end: but this slipperie and loose love, is a desire founded upon the opinion of a Good, which indeede is a most pernitious evill.45

It is not clear that the moralists commonly recognise a radical difference between love and lust, or even between love and lechery. As late as 1616, in Thomas Gainsford’s commonplace book, there was still some uncertainty about whether these two categories were antithetical or synonymous. His Rich Cabinet initially sets up a contrast between the two, but this gradually gives way to similarity. Gainsford’s observations are divided under topics and listed alphabetically. ‘Love’ comes immediately after ‘Lechery’. If this is simply a trick of the alphabet, Gainsford nonetheless exploits its effect by setting up love as the contrary of lechery in the first instance. While lechery

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reduces human beings to the level of the beasts, and generally performs much as love does in Erasmus, love in Gainsford at first uplifts and ennobles. But the simple opposition does not hold for long. There is a gradual reversion to type, as it emerges that love is irrational, frivolous, a form of madness, like a monster, and then ‘libidinous and luxurious like a Goat’.46 Eventually, all the old commonplaces are reaffirmed, and the original distinction between love and lechery can no longer be detected with any confidence: ‘Love doth trouble wit, hinder Art, hurt nature, disgrace reason, lose time, spoile substance, crosse wisedome, serve folly, weaken strength, submit to beautie, and abase honour’.47 In the mean time, it is worth noting, lechery is both a kind of love and a form of lust, the differences once again specified only by the appropriate adjectives: ‘Lechery is in plaine tearmes extreame lust, unlawfull love, brutish desires, beastlie wantonnesse, and the itch or scab of old concupiscence’.48 VI Evidently, love and lust were changing in relation to one another: a new system of differences, which is to say a new taxonomy, was in the process of construction. But there is no single moment of transformation: the vocabulary of the period is marked by attempts at policing the language on the one hand and constant slippages on the other. While the sharp and unconditional antitheses of Adonis are evidently one option in the 1590s, the variation of the narrative voice in Shakespeare’s poem is another, and probably more familiar in the period. Critics with a strong sense of cultural history, who have nevertheless wanted to identify Adonis as the conscience of the text, have been driven to invoke Neoplatonism, somewhat incongruously, as the moral framework of Shakespeare’s racy, salacious Ovidian story.49 As for Venus herself, she was capable of embracing a whole range of meanings. While the Neoplatonists were anxious to distinguish the heavenly from the earthly Venus, others were content to acknowledge her heterogeneity. In an early instance of cultural history, derived from Vincenzo Cartari’s mid-sixteenth-century Italian book on the images of the gods of the ancients, Richard Linche explained to English readers in 1599 why there were so many classical statues and pictures of the goddess. The reason was that she represented ‘several natures and conditions’, from lechery to holy matrimony: According therfore to the opinion of the Poets, Venus was taken to be the goddesse of wantonnes & amorous delights, as that she inspired into the minds of men, libidinous desires and lustfull appetites, & with whose power & assistance they attained the effect of their lose concupiscence: wherupon also they entermed her the mother of love, because that without a certaine love and

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Shakespeare in Theory and Practice simpathie of affections, those desires are sildome acomplished. And unto hir they ascribe the care and charge of marriages and holie wedlockes.50

The text gives no indication that this range of responsibilities would have seemed anomalous in the sixteenth century. But history was on the side of Adonis. In 1615, more than twenty years after the poem was first printed and in the light of nine further editions, Alexander Niccholes cited Adonis, without naming him, as a proper authority on the contrast between love and lust. Niccholes quotes Shakespeare’s text anonymously, with two minor variations, both well within the range of likely errors in transmission. Love and lust are contraries, Niccholes declares, and in support of this position, he urges, ‘one thus writeth’: Love comforteth like sunne-shine after raine, But lusts effect is tempest after sunne. Loves golden spring doth ever fresh remaine, Lusts winter comes ere summer halfe be done.51

In the account Niccholes gives, lust is everything that love is not, so that love is defined by the exclusion of its differentiating opposite. Lust is what does not last, for example, and does not discriminate its objects. It is also impoverished, lacking. Niccholes turns Adonis’s ‘glutton’ (l. 803) into a beggar: ‘In Love there is no lacke, in Lust there is the greatest penury, for though it be cloyed with too much, it pines for want’. Moreover, lust destroys the domestic haven that love creates: ‘the one, most commonly, burnes downe the house that the other would build up’.52 The context of this sequence of antitheses is a treatise giving advice on how to achieve the great blessing of conjugal happiness, A Discourse, of Marriage and Wiving: and of The greatest Mystery therein contained: How to choose a good Wife from a bad. The book represents an argument, the title page assures its readers, ‘Of the dearest use, but the deepest cunning that a man may erre in: which is, to cut by a Thrid betweene the greatest Good or evill in the world’. As Niccholes’s text indicates, the realignment of love and lust is motivated by the newfound valorisation of marriage in the course of the century following the Reformation and the rejection of the celibate ideal. In this context, the radical distinction between love and lust becomes a critical issue. ‘Lust’, Niccholes affirms, is ‘the most potent match-maker in all Marriages under thirty, and the chief breaker of all from eighteene to eight[y]’.53 Lust makes unstable marriages. Love holds the family together: lust endangers it. In consequence, love is now endorsed by the moralists and lust repudiated. The difference between them has replaced the irrationality of both as the concern of a prescriptive morality.

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What philology records, it cannot be too strongly stressed, is not a fall from a merry Middle Ages, when sexual desire was innocent and the body and its pleasures beyond the range of moral judgement. On the contrary, in the earlier epoch lechery was a deadly sin, celibacy the way of perfection, and asceticism the privileged way of life for those capable of sustaining it. Love belonged in romances, which were held to be essentially trivial, mere entertainment. But the celebration of love as the foundation of a lifetime of concord and the inclusion of desire within the legality of marriage generated an imperative to distinguish true love, leading to conjugal happiness, by contrast with appetite, as the worst possible basis for a stable social institution. True love was sexual, but it was also companionable; lust, meanwhile, was precipitate, inconsistent, turbulent and dangerous. As markers of a cultural shift, the semantic changes may perhaps be indicated, however sketchily, by comparing two considerations of marriage, widely separated chronologically, both of which address the problems of love and lust. First, in 1411–12 Thomas Hoccleve discusses the question in his Regement of Princes, addressed to the Prince of Wales on the eve of his accession to the throne as Henry V. In Hoccleve’s account, celibacy is evidently preferable to marriage, but within marriage it is best to struggle against fleshly lusts. A man should take care to choose a wife on the basis of virtue: marrying for lust is bound to lead to disaster.54 This sounds familiar now, but the problems begin, predictably, with the respective meanings of the terms. Hoccleve confesses that he himself finally gave up waiting for a benefice and took a wife, whom he married for love (l. 1561). His interlocutor, the Beggar who has become his moral guide, is not satisfied with this account; he suspects, rightly as it turns out, that Hoccleve does not know the difference between love and lust, that he sees them as ‘convertible’ (interchangeable, l. 1563). This is a serious error: love, ‘goode love’, that is (l. 1628), is love of virtue, ‘love of the persone’ (l. 1633), and it lasts; lust, meanwhile, is sexual desire or pleasure, and though lawful lust is necessary for procreation, lust for lust’s sake is against God’s commandments. Nowadays people use aphrodisiacs, but this is contrary to the will of God. The Regement of Princes thus holds apart love and lust by identifying as lust everything that has to do with sex. Yet, no sooner has the text established this taxonomy than the precarious system of differences it has created with such difficulty collapses in a verse which treats love and lust as ‘convertible’ after all. Love’s heat is suddenly synonymous with lust, and both are sexual: ‘Also they that for luste chesen hir make Only, as other while it is usage, Wayte wel, that whan hir luste is overschake,

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Shakespeare in Theory and Practice And there-with wole hir loves hete asswage, Thanne is to hem an helle, hire mariage.’ (ll. 1653–7)55

The Beggar, a kind of Adonis avant la lettre, but invested by the text with a good deal more authority, cannot in the event hold apart the terms he sets out to define as antithetical. There is nothing here about marriage as companionship, no endorsement of nuptial love, no idealisation of married pleasure. In the circumstances, the only way to differentiate love from lust is to purge it of all sexual reference, and so rigorous a policing of its meaning cannot, it appears, be effectively sustained, since meaning is not at the disposal of the individual speaker. By contrast, we have reached a quite different and recognisably modern world when in 1638 in his handbook for married couples Robert Crofts provides a rhapsodic account of the romantic and companionable happiness of sexual love, as well as family life: It is said, there is no pleasure in the world like that of the sweet society of Lovers, in the way of marriage, and of a loving husband and wife. Hee is her head she commands his heart, he is her Love, her joy, she is his honey, his Dove, his delight. They may take sweet councell together, assist and comfort one another in all things, their joy is doubled and Redoubled. By this blessed union, the number of Parents, friends, and kindred is increased; It may be an occasion of sweet and lovely Children, who in after times may bee a great felicity and joy to them . . . A multitude of felicities, a million of joyfull and blessed effects, spring from true Love. And indeed this Nuptial Love and society sweetens, all our Actions, discourses, all other pleasures, felicities, and even in all Respects, Encreases true Joy and happinesse.56

Crofts sees no reason why married lovers should not have recourse to the arts of love to enhance their pleasure, and he advises husbands to talk to their wives about love and its value, or to tell them love stories, both happy and sad. He even includes a selection of sample poems and songs for the purpose. Some people, he continues, would think this sort of advice profane. But wee may know that it is good and commendable, for such as doe, or intend to live in that honourable and blessed estate of marriage, to bee possest with conjugall Love, and consequently such honest love discourses, devices, and pleasures, as encrease the same, are to bee esteemed good and commendable.57

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By now, Crofts can distinguish clearly between love and lust. He reaffirms the dichotomy between ‘true’, which is to say married, love and those extramarital desires for forbidden objects, which destroy the family and destabilise society: Let us also (while wee view the excellency of Lawfull and true Love) beware of unlawfull and Raging Lusts. There is wel nigh as much difference betweene true Love and unlawfull Lusts, as betweene heaven and hell.58

In this text, the antithesis between love and lust is sharp – and beginning to be familiar from a twentieth-century point of view. We could find something of the same taxonomy of desire in any mass-market romance, where the happy ending depends on the ability of the protagonists to distinguish between true love and an infatuation of the senses, which is no basis for marriage. Even so, it is worth noting first that Crofts still apparently feels it necessary to invoke an adjective: the repeated phrase in this chapter is ‘unlawfull lusts’.59 Second, the reference to law is not arbitrary: the text does not base the distinction between love and lust on a dualism of mind and body,60 but on a duality of lawful and unlawful, married and unmarried: unlawful lusts lead to fornication, adultery, incest, rape, breach of promise. The fully-fledged dualism of caring and sensuality in current popular romance is an effect of the Cartesian crystallisation of the cogito, identity as mind, which was evidently not yet part of Crofts’s culture. And third, ‘love’ too still benefits from a defining adjective: ‘true love’ has survived unchanged, of course, into the modern world. VII The power and the durability of the cultural change brought about by Adonis and Niccholes and Crofts, assisted by countless Puritan divines, is evident in the readings of Venus and Adonis I have already cited. A substantial proportion of current criticism, by endorsing the opposition Adonis formulates and finding in it the thematic truth of the poem, reproduces the taxonomy he helps to cement, and thereby enlists Shakespeare in support of family values, the naturalisation of the nuclear family as the only legitimate location of desire. Interpretation takes place within a framework, often unacknowledged, of conservative value judgements about what constitutes true and false love, ‘healthy’ sexual dispositions or the proper (which is to say, ‘natural’) relations between men and women. True love is identifiable in terms of a set of norms produced in the early modern period and now so familiar that they pass for nature. They represent the means by which a culture subjected an anarchic passion to the legality that is marriage, the terms on which unpredictable

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sexual desire was conscripted as the basis of a stable social institution.61 True love is, or ought to be, we are to understand, companionable and based on shared convictions; the rhetoric of lovers is thought to be properly transparent, their exchanges honest, not designed to persuade; and genuine love is permitted only between equals or near-equals, who treat each other with respect. From the point of view of conservatism, Shakespeare’s Venus fails on all these counts. The love she represents is by these standards palpably unhealthy and contrary to nature. She is seen as altogether too passionate, too persistent, too manipulative, too old. The phrase ‘Sick-thoughted Venus’, indicating lovesickness, as the Arden editor recognises, comes in the criticism to justify the diagnosis of a sexual pathology: ‘She is introduced as “Sickthoughted” (l. 5), the primary notion of amorous languishment being overlaid with that of sick excess’;62 ‘in the light of that epithet, her desire for the young Adonis can only be taken as unnatural and disorderly’.63 Leonard Barkan’s account of the poem finds the love it defines ‘passionate and excessive’;64 Jonathan Bate considers the desire of Venus ‘perverse’, while conceding that perversity is also a common element of love. The poem, he proposes, concerns transgression as a component of passion; it is thus ‘a celebration of sexuality even as it is a disturbing exposure of the dark underside of desire’.65 But what exactly is it that is transgressed in Venus and Adonis? Or what is the ‘wholesome’ arrangement that constitutes the criterion for the critical identification of psychosexual pathology here? Whatever Venus is offering Adonis, it is not marriage. In the first place, she is married already. The text does not mention Vulcan, but the invocation of Mars would surely remind most readers of the humiliating story of the adulterous couple caught in her husband’s net and exposed to view in the very act of love.66 And in the second place, it was not yet obvious in the early 1590s that the only proper destiny of lovers was to found a nuclear family. That belief, I have suggested, was still in the process of construction. The condition the poem records is not a failed attempt at true love as the basis of marital concord but instead the doomed passion of the classic love stories, and the narrative bears out the tragic characterisation of desire in the goddess’s final curse, a definition which applies prophetically for others and retrospectively for her. The invocation of family values as a framework for making sense of Venus and Adonis betrays, it seems to me, both the complexity of cultural history and the polyphony of Shakespeare’s text, which draws on Ovid and the poetic and romance traditions as well as on popular morality. If the poem is definitive for the period, it is so to the degree that it places an emergent taxonomy in conjunction – and conflict – with a residual ambivalence,67 an understanding of sexual desire as precisely sensual, irrational, anarchic, dangerous, but also, and at the same time, delicate, fragile and precious.

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Family values represent an effort to bring desire into line with Law, in the Lacanian sense of that term, with the taxonomies and the corresponding disciplines inscribed in the symbolic order. The family promises gratification in exchange for submission to the rules: true love is desire properly regulated; it is for an appropriate (heterosexual) object; and its story is told in Shakespearean comedy, and in due course in the nineteenth-century novel. True love obeys the rules of gender and genre, and its moment of closure is marriage, the metonym of a lifetime of happiness. Venus and Adonis tells a quite different story. It is at the moment when Venus is compelled to realise that gratification is not an option (‘All is imaginary she doth prove’, l. 597), that the text invokes the trompe-l’oeil of the painted grapes. Venus perceives that the fulfilment of her desire is ‘imaginary’ because her entreaties, arguments, threats or promises fail to arouse any response in Adonis. Passion does not obey reason or entreaty, regulation or Law. On the contrary, desire is anarchic, and is not brought about, in the end, by the persuasive powers of another person, not even a goddess, but by the missing objet a, the presence that the ordering mechanisms of the symbolic both promise and withhold. Irrational, irregular, incited by prohibition, and thus quite unable to take ‘no’ for an answer, desire is in every sense of the term an outlaw. It follows that desire repudiates the rules, the classifications and proprieties that historically take up their place in the symbolic order. The queen of love has her own law, the poem affirms (l. 251), but this topsy-turvy regime enslaves only the ruler. Venus and Adonis indicates that desire rejects the taxonomies of both gender and genre. Love’s object is a boy who looks like a girl, and who is in one sense too young for the difference to matter; its modes of address are at once absurd and lyrical and tragic. Passion is contrary, contradictory; ‘love is’, the text affirms, ‘wise in folly, foolish witty’ (l. 838). Shakespeare’s poem, which participates in the construction of family values, can also be read as pointing to the altogether utopian character of a social project that sets out to subject desire to discipline, regulation, legality. Itself a trompe-l’oeil, moving between genres, unclosed, unfurnished with a final signified, Venus and Adonis sustains the desire of the reader-critic to the degree that it refuses to yield the gratification of a final meaning, a commitment to moral piety concealed behind the folds of its heterogeneous textuality.

chapter

4 Ta r qu i n D i s p o s s e s s e d : E x p r op r i at ion and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece

I Lucrece1 tells a story about possession and dispossession. The woman at the centre of the narrative is treated as the proper possession of her husband – or perhaps her father: propriety evidently defines women as property in Shakespeare’s Rome. But possessions can be expropriated and property owners may be dispossessed. Tarquin takes improper possession of the faithful wife of his comrade-in-arms on the basis of an irresistible desire and, thus possessed, in the distinctive sense that he is impelled to act against his own judgement, Tarquin loses his self-possession and, as a result, his identity as friend, kinsman, prince, Roman lord. At the last, publicly exposed, shamed by Lucrece’s suicide, and driven in consequence from what was his proper place in Rome, along with the entire royal family that has taken possession of the city, Tarquin is doubly dispossessed by a woman’s constancy. Recent criticism is divided on the sexual politics of the poem. Reacting incisively against those male readers who had followed St Augustine to find Lucretia guilty of vainglory or, worse, colluding with her own rape, critics influenced by feminism have predominantly seen Shakespeare’s Lucrece as, instead, the victim of patriarchal values, whether the passive object of a struggle between men, or complicit in her suicide with masculine misogyny.2 A minority of other equally feminist arguments, however, powerfully defend her as an exemplum of female virtue, or hold her up as a model of resistance to patriarchy.3 Since each of these opposed but still broadly feminist cases can seem remarkably persuasive, is it possible that Shakespeare’s text is less univocal in its thematic project, or less stable in its signifying practices, than the existing arguments have been inclined to acknowledge? 54

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To a degree, the opposition between the two possible feminist readings is built into the term ‘rape’ itself. So apparently categorical, so decisive as condemnation of the perpetrator, in relation to the person injured the word equivocates. On the one hand, victims of rape are the helpless objects of outside violence; on the other hand they actively resist the rapist, demonstrating by their behaviour that the act is carried out against their will. Indeed, it is this contradictory combination of passivity and resistance that defines the event as rape,4 at least in modern Western usage, if less certainly in 1594, when the term included abduction, as well as sexual violation. To the extent that equivocation is a precipitating element in cultural change, as meanings shift, give way or narrow to specify alternative ways of interpreting the world, perhaps we can also read Lucrece in its historical difference as marking a moment of early modern cultural redefinition, which is registered in the story of possession and dispossession it recounts? The text does not appear to equivocate, however, in its endorsement of woman as property. Collatine, the proud husband, cannot contain his own conjugal happiness, but is evidently compelled to assure his fellow soldiers, ‘What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent, / In the possession of his beauteous mate’ (Lucrece, lines 17–18).5 And if the narrative voice reproaches him here, the reason is neither his proprietory attitude to his wife nor, indeed, his identification of her as a precious asset, but his public announcement of the value of the goods he possesses: why is Collatine the publisher Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown From thievish ears, because it is his own? (ll. 33–5)

Meanwhile, Lucrece herself does not challenge these mercantile comparisons either, though after the rape she understandably narrows their reference. Lucrece twice alludes to her body as her husband’s ‘interest’, figuring it as his investment or share in a company (ll. 1067, 1619); she also describes her chastity as stolen ‘treasure’ (l. 1056), a lost ‘jewel’ (l. 1191). And the narrative itself confirms her account, defining the betrayed Collatine as ‘the hopeless merchant of this loss’ (l. 1660). While these images do not necessarily imply any lack of tenderness between the couple – on the contrary, the marital relationship is depicted as warmly affectionate – they seem to take for granted that wives belong to their husbands.6 Tarquin himself perceives that, while she is not lawfully his to possess, she is also ‘not her own’ (l. 241). And at the end of the poem the desolate Lucretius and Collatine compete for the right to lament her death on the basis of ownership:

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Shakespeare in Theory and Practice The father says, ‘She’s mine.’ ‘O mine she is,’ Replies her husband, ‘do not take away My sorrow’s interest; let no mourner say He weeps for her, for she was only mine, And only must be wail’d by Collatine.’ ‘O’, quoth Lucretius, ‘I did give that life Which she too early and too late hath spill’d.’ ‘Woe, woe,’ quoth Collatine, ‘she was my wife; I ow’d [owned] her, and ’tis mine that she hath kill’d.’ The dispers’d air, who holding Lucrece’ life Answer’d their cries, ‘my daughter’ and ‘my wife’. (ll. 1795–1806)

But if the text nowhere overtly challenges the image of woman as the proper possession of her father or her husband, the tragedy it recounts depends precisely on the instability of this understanding of human relations. Her death – and, indeed, in a sense the rape itself – place Lucrece beyond the reach of them both: ‘The one doth call her his, the other his, / Yet neither may possess the claim they lay’ (ll. 1793–4). The story in its entirety might invite us to ask, moreover, whether either was ever justified in counting on the possession he had so confidently claimed. Property is always subject to theft and jewels can change hands. In the event, the ‘treasure’ that Collatine is fool enough to ‘unlock’ verbally in Tarquin’s tent (ll. 15–16) is explicitly plundered by Tarquin himself, who breaks locks to come at it, and who becomes in turn a burglar,7 a merchant-venturer (l. 336), and perhaps a pirate, for the purpose: ‘ “Desire my pilot is, beauty my prize; / Then who fears sinking where such treasure lies?” ’(ll. 279–80). If it is true, however, that Collatine’s boasting represents the immediate cause of Tarquin’s desire, it is equally evident from a long tradition of medieval narrative, which readily found its way into Renaissance drama, that keeping wives locked up is no guarantee of security either. The problem is neither the carelessness of husbands nor, indeed, the inconstancy of wives, but the expropriability of all property. Shakespeare’s narrative indicates as much from the beginning, insisting on the mutability of conjugal proprietorship: O happiness enjoy’d but of a few, And if possess’d, as soon decay’d and done As is the morning’s silver melting dew Against the golden splendour of the sun! An expir’d date cancell’d ere well begun!

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Honour and beauty in the owner’s arms, Are weakly fortress’d from a world of harms. (ll. 22–8)

This emphasis on the insecurity of ownership, reflecting back so immediately on Collatine’s boast, surely invites the reader to reconsider in an ironic light the text’s free indirect formulation of a joy in riches held, we might now notice, on loan: ‘What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent, / In the possession of his beauteous mate’ (ll. 17–18). All earthly goods are conventionally ‘lent’, of course, but perhaps some forms of temporal enjoyment are more transitory than others. Meaning, as Jacques Derrida’s early work consistently argued, depends on difference and, in consequence, on the trace of the other in the self-same.8 We cannot understand a term, or recognise a condition, without an implicit awareness of its differentiating other. Joy in ownership, the pleasure of possession, depends on the possibility of loss or dispossession. Collatine’s treasure is precious precisely to the degree that it can be stolen; his happiness, intensified by sharing it with his friends, is thereby put more thoroughly at risk. As medieval and Renaissance misers repeatedly reveal, to have is, paradoxically but by definition, to want – in one of a number of ways. Avarice is insatiable; usurers risk what they have to increase their wealth; the rich overspend and end in poverty. The text predicates this of Tarquin, but the observation might equally fit Collatine’s case. In this respect, at least, the two are oddly interchangeable: Those that much covet are with gain so fond That what they have not, that which they possess They scatter and unloose it from their bond; And so by hoping more they have but less, Or gaining more, the profit of excess Is but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain, That they prove bankrout in this poor rich gain. (ll. 134–40)

Both Heather Dubrow and Joel Fineman have independently (and brilliantly) noted that the poem’s recurring trope is synœciosis, or what Puttenham in his encyclopaedia of Renaissance poetics calls ‘the Crosse-couple’.9 Synœciosis brings contraries together to form oxymoronic or paradoxical truths: to hope more is to have less; to gain is to lose; excess of pleasure brings grief. Coincidentally, one of Puttenham’s examples of the cross-couple casts light on the puzzle of line 135 of Shakespeare’s poem: ‘what they have not, that which they possess’. In Puttenham’s instance, ‘The covetous miser, of all his

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goods ill got, / As well wants that he hath, as that he hath not’.10 Following an eighteenth-century reading, both F. T. Prince and John Roe attribute the poem’s observation to a Latin tag, ‘Tam avaro deest quod habet, quam quod non habet’ (‘what he has is as wanting to the miser as what he has not’),11 but Puttenham’s rhyme implies that the sentiment was proverbial in early modern English too. That Shakespeare invokes a condensed version of this commonplace is not, I think, accidental, since his line 135 (‘what they have not, that which they possess’) itself condenses the oxymoron on which his rendering of the story turns. Possession does not gratify desire for Collatine or Tarquin, since they do not in the event possess what they take into possession. Oppositions do not hold: impropriety invades the proper; violence intrudes into the supposed security of Collatine’s home; dispossession inheres in marriage perceived as ownership. At the same time, however, in expropriating Lucrece, Tarquin loses possession of his own faculties, and in consequence, he will go on to lose the kingdom he was to have possessed. II Tarquin, who takes violent and unlawful possession of what does not belong to him, is a thief, and if in this he betrays his friend and kinsman, he is at least faithful to etymology, since rape is theft (from the Latin rapio, rapere, raptus12). The Oxford English Dictionary gives three main meanings for ‘rape’: seizure of goods, abduction (especially of a woman) and sexual violation. All three senses were in circulation in 1594. But the story of the rapacious Tarquins goes further back. The synoptic Argument that prefaces the poem begins with an older narrative concerning the father of Shakespeare’s villain: Lucius Tarquinius (for his excessive pride surnamed Superbus) . . . caused his own father-in-law Servius Tullius to be cruelly murdered, and, contrary to the Roman laws and customs, not requiring or staying for the people’s suffrages . . . possessed himself of the kingdom.

Tarquin the Proud had taken violent and illicit possession of Rome. What is the relation between the prose Argument and the poem that follows it? The Argument gives more contextual detail; it is also more political. The poem reduces the action to the rape and its aftermath, and dwells on the emotions of the protagonists. While the poem focuses on the personal significance of their respective predicaments for Tarquin and Lucrece, the prose specifies the implications of the rape for Rome. Latinate in its sentence structure and relatively detached, the Argument concludes with Brutus’s bitter invective against the tyranny of Tarquin the Proud, the resulting exile

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of the entire Tarquin family, this time by popular consent, and the end of the Roman monarchy. It thus begins with usurpation and ends with the installation of the Republic. Shakespeare’s immediate sources for Lucrece were an extract from Livy’s annals of Rome and an episode from Ovid’s Fasti. The Argument and the poem, I suggest, represent different genres: prose, like Livy’s, as befits history; poetry, like Ovid’s, for interaction between individuals, dialogue, intensity of feeling.13 Though Lucrece expands on the material given in the Latin sources, in general the narrative follows closely the events they record. Yet the story of Tarquin senior, Tarquin the Proud and his violent seizure of the throne, is not given in the passages of Livy and Ovid that Shakespeare evidently had open in front of him. Instead, Tarquin’s refusal to consult the people, derived ultimately from Livy, comes from a Renaissance commentary on another book of the Fasti, in an annotation of Ovid’s own account of the violence itself.14 According to Ovid, Tarquin the Proud, incited by his wife, murdered the king, her father, and ascended his throne, where he held the dominion seized from his father-in-law. Ovid’s phrase is ‘sceptra . . . rapta Superbus habet’.15 This ‘rape’ as theft, introduced into Shakespeare’s Argument from another (not very esoteric) source, anticipates the rape of Lucrece. In the Argument’s words, Tarquin the Proud brutally ‘possessed himself of the kingdom’ that belonged to his father-in-law, just as the rapist, Sextus Tarquinius, took brutal possession of his kinsman’s wife, and ‘like a foul usurper went about, / From this fair throne to heave the owner out’ (ll. 412–13). The tyranny of Tarquin the Proud is recounted in Book 6 of the Fasti. The rape of Lucretia, meanwhile, occurs in Book 2. Ovid’s story of Lucretia is immediately preceded by an account of the prior treachery of the rapist, Sextus Tarquinius, who took possession of a neighbouring tribe, the Gabii (‘made them his own’16) by a trick. Pretending to be unarmed, Tarquin presented himself to the Gabii as their friend and offered to join with them against his father. Once he had secured their trust, however, he killed their leaders. This appalling betrayal was marked by an omen: from between the holy altars of the Gabii, a serpent came out and seized the sacrificial organs from the extinguished fires (‘exta rapit’17). The parallel between Tarquin the rapist and the rapacious snake might well have suggested the figurative ‘lurking serpent’ of Shakespeare’s poem (l. 362), who insinuates himself into the sanctity of another’s hearth and home on the basis of trust and stamps out his own torch as a prelude to taking possession of Collatine’s wife’s sexual organs in the most sacred domestic place, their marriage bed. If so, political history is repeated in the poetic narrative, just as it is in the recurring imagery of Lucrece as a city besieged, conquered and colonised by Tarquin.18 The state politics of the Argument, in other words, inform the sexual politics of the poem, and the personal is seen as continuous with the political.

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Rome expanded by colonising its neighbours, taking into possession many of their subjects as slaves. The ultimate instance of human beings as property, slavery was not, however, confined to ancient Rome: Shakespeare’s poem belongs to the period of the developing English slave trade. A slave appears in the margins of the story of Lucrece – as Tarquin’s redoubled threat to her reputation, her husband’s standing and the purity of the bloodline.19 ‘Lucrece’, quoth he, ‘this night I must enjoy thee. If thou deny, then force must work my way: For in thy bed I purpose to destroy thee; That done, some worthless slave of thine I’ll slay, To kill thine honour with thy life’s decay; And in thy dead arms do I mean to place him, Swearing I slew him, seeing thee embrace him. So thy surviving husband shall remain The scornful mark of every open eye; Thy kinsmen hang their heads at this disdain, Thy issue blurr’d with nameless bastardy. And thou, the author of their obloquy, Shalt have thy trespass cited up in rhymes And sung by children in succeeding times.’ (ll. 512–25)

Ironically, the would-be adulterer appeals to the chaste wife on the basis of dynastic family values but, in the process, the slave is identified as ‘worthless’ and seemingly dispensable. Adultery with a slave is evidently seen as more degrading than infidelity with a prince, and a bastard who inherits the slave’s namelessness would shame the family even more than the ‘ “slavish wipe” ’ that in line 537 of the poem brands slaves themselves. The threat is not carried out. In Shakespeare’s account Tarquin uses force instead, gagging Lucrece with her own nightgown to smother her outcry. In anguish after the rape, she curses Tarquin ‘ “to live a loathed slave” ’ (l. 984), and then affirms that he is one already (l. 1001). But figuratively both the poem and her own eloquence have anticipated her here. In accordance with a metaphoric commonplace of the period,20 passion enslaves the desiring Tarquin. His faculties, which should obey him absolutely, grow proud, ‘Paying more slavish tribute than they owe’ (l. 299). His mutinous veins, a disorderly rabble in place of a disciplined force, run out of control, ‘like straggling slaves for pillage fighting’ (l. 428). Pleading for release, Lucrece appeals

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to him to remember that he is to be a king; if he submits to ‘ “Black lust, dishonour, shame, misgoverning” ’ (l. 654), he loses all semblance of nobility: ‘ “So shall these slaves be king, and thou their slave” ’ (l. 659). This new instance of the cross-couple is too much for Tarquin and he at once enacts another: he surrenders to the revolt of the slaves, now specified in Lucrece’s miniature allegory as black,21 and overpowers his victim, protesting that he will hear no more (l. 667). Already the Roman lord is other than he is, dispossessed of his own identity: he himself forsakes himself (l. 157); ‘he himself himself confounds, betrays’ (l. 160, cf l. 341). Impropriety supplants the proper; the prince becomes a bondman, so that Lucrece exclaims, ‘ “In Tarquin’s likeness I did entertain thee: / Hast thou put on his shape to do him shame?” ’ (ll. 596–7). The poem’s image of Tarquin beside himself, slave to an insatiable desire beyond the reach of Law, is strangely Lacanian 350 years avant la lettre. In a manner that closely resembles Jacques Lacan’s doomed, desiring subject, in command of everything but its own desire (and thus, paradoxically, in true control of nothing whatever), the king’s son, dissatisfied with what he already possesses, wants precisely what, because it is forbidden, will destroy him and all he already has. In the same way, the poem observes, in vent’ring ill we leave to be The things we are, for that which we expect; And this ambitious foul infirmity, In having much, torments us with defect Of that we have: so then we do neglect The thing we have, and all for want of wit, Make something nothing by augmenting it. (ll. 148–54)

Tragically, Tarquin knows in advance the consequences of his crime. The ‘ “scandal” ’ (l. 204) in every sense of that term, as flagrant transgression, disgrace and discredit, will mark for ever his identity, his proper place in the symbolic order of language and culture. This position, inherited from the father and transmitted to his descendants, is held, in Lacanian theory, on condition of submission to the symbolic Law, and symbol-ised heraldically in the feudal imagery of Shakespeare’s Rome. Tarquin foresees his breach of familial property and propriety literally marked in the signifier of his own lineage, the emblem that declares his title, his proper entitlement to the name he passes on: ‘Yea, though I die the scandal will survive And be an eyesore in my golden coat; Some loathesome dash the herald will contrive,

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But the Lacanian Nom/Non-du-Père, the subject’s own Father’s Name-andProhibition, which is the guarantee of a place in the symbolic order, is powerless in this instance to banish desire: ‘My will is strong past reason’s weak removing: Who fears a sentence or an old man’s saw Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe.’ (ll. 243–5)

The maxim, the proverb and the moralising wall-hanging – all inscriptions of the Law that is the source of identity– prove ineffectual against the force of the will, which dispossesses the rational subject who respects property and propriety. I do not take the parallels between the sixteenth-century poem and twentieth-century psychoanalysis as evidence of the timeless truth of Lacan’s account, still less as proof of Shakespeare’s universal wisdom. On the contrary, the model of the psyche that links Lacan to Shakespeare seems to me to be Augustinian, and it is perhaps here, rather than in his reading of the story of Lucretia, that Augustine plays a significant part in the construction of Shakespeare’s poem. For Augustine the primal sin was disobedience, and its punishment since the Fall is the continuing disobedience of the human will. This is supremely evident in the instance of sexual desire, so the story goes, which is not only anarchic in itself but is intensified by prohibition. Desire is not purely a matter of the flesh but involves the soul: the shame of desire is that the soul cannot command either its own wishes or the body. Appropriately, both men and women now experience the penalty for disobedience to God in Eden as disobedience to themselves, and this, Augustine explains, is demonstrated by the unruly behaviour of the sexual organs, which no longer obey the commands of reason, but act – or refuse to act – in accordance with their own unaccountable reflexes.22 When Michel de Montaigne vividly records the willfulness of our ‘disobedient, skittish, and tyrannical member’, he reaffirms the Augustinian story in its strong form for the Renaissance, as well as for subsequent French culture, treating desire in consequence as incompatible with legality.23 Lacan in his turn inherits Montaigne’s scepticism, along with the image, in his nomination of the unruly phallus as the signifier of unconscious desire, which

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originates as the residue from submission to the symbolic Law, and forever conflicts with its prohibitions.24 In Shakespeare’s poem, Tarquin’s irresistible ‘will’, which both repudiates reason and distorts rational argument, is invested with all the ambiguity of the term in the period. At once psychological and physiological, the will is both appetite and penis.25 Tarquin’s struggle is a ‘disputation / ’Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will’ (ll. 246–7); when reproof and reason subdue his will, it is reanimated by Lucrece’s beauty (ll. 489–90); after the rape it is reduced by revulsion, ‘His taste delicious, in digestion souring, / Devours his will that liv’d by foul devouring’ (ll. 699–700). The insurrection of the flesh leaves the soul defaced and dispossessed, ‘thrall / To living death and pain perpetual’ (ll. 725–6), and Tarquin steals away ‘like a thievish dog’ (l. 736), no longer a prince and, indeed, figuratively no longer a human subject, but caught and held in a double instance of the cross-couple which brings together the military and economic metaphors that have all along defined his project: ‘A captive victor that hath lost in gain’ (l. 730). St Augustine’s point about the unruly member is that, since the Fall, only divine grace can ensure obedience to the divine will. By ourselves, we cannot help ourselves. In Lacan’s psychoanalytic secularisation of the story, rebellious desire will triumph in one way or another. The victory of Shakespeare’s metaphorical slaves, their assertion of sovereignty over the son of the king, results in the psychological condition that Lucrece calls ‘“exil’d majesty” ’ (l. 640), and although the immediate consequence of the slaves’ revolt is rape, the long-term effect will be the exile of the Tarquin dynasty and the installation of the Roman Republic. By pushing the familiar trope of the hero enslaved by his passions to the point of synœciosis, crowning the slaves who subjugate the prince in Lucrece’s ‘ “So shall these slaves be king” ’ (l. 659), Shakespeare’s text recapitulates by analogy the political narrative of the Argument in the story of the personal psychomachia that takes place at the heart of the poem. If the story is set in Rome, Lucrece itself belongs, of course, to an England that had been involved in the African slave trade, however surreptitiously, for something like forty years.26 It is hard to see the poem as sympathetic to any of the slaves it invokes, or ready to condemn the pernicious practices taking place with the consent, no doubt, of some of its early readers. On the contrary, Lucrece explicitly aligns the figurative slaves with evil; at the mercy of black slaves, Tarquin becomes a rapist. At the same time, possessions that they are, slaves can revolt, as Roman history so surely demonstrated, and in this way they too throw into relief the precariousness of ownership. Ironically, then, in one respect at least, the slaves are ultimately aligned in their oppression with the poem’s oppressed heroine, as they are with the avenging Brutus, who was obliged to lie low during the reign of Tarquin the

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Proud and wrongly supposed a fool. The resistance of all these victims of tyranny combines not only to exile the Tarquins but to change the form of government, and if the Republic did not succeed in doing away with either slavery or rape, this electoral political regime was at least precious enough to motivate a later Brutus to assassinate a friend in its defence. IV The assertion of Tarquin’s tyrannical will to possess the wife of his kinsman marks the low point of the story for both the central figures: ‘He thence departs, a heavy convertite, / She there remains, a hopeless castaway’ (ll. 743–4). Tarquin’s deliberations, which grow closer to psychological turmoil, have resulted in the rape of the poem’s central figure: Lucrece’s turmoil, by contrast, gradually issues in deliberation, which also leads to action. But is her suicide any more than a grim repetition of Tarquin’s violence, as Lucrece carries out the murder he threatened? Indeed, she herself points to the irony: ‘ “I feared by Tarquin’s falchion to be slain, / Yet for the self-same purpose seek a knife” ’ (ll. 1046–7). More specifically, at the moment of death, Lucrece insists on drawing the attention of the bystanders to the parallel: ‘ “fair lords, ’tis he, / That guides this hand to give this wound to me” ’ (ll. 1721–2). Coppélia Kahn reads the death of Lucrece as another misogynist act in a thoroughly patriarchal story of the brutal consequences of rivalry between men. In killing herself to preserve Collatine’s honour, Kahn argues, Lucrece stays within the structure of militaristic conquest and masculine conflict that motivated the rape in the first place. ‘The “Roman blade” that Tarquin flourishes over Lucrece is the same one that she turns against herself, and her death sanctions the continuation of the same force’.27 I see the persuasiveness of this, but I want to suggest an alternative emphasis. Every repetition necessarily differs from the action it repeats, if only by virtue of being a repetition and not the event itself. In this case, the differences are palpable. If Tarquin is driven to his act of violence by an uncontrolled desire that is deaf to his deliberations, Lucrece stages hers as a result of her deliberation, even in distress. Tarquin acts at night, by stealth, and in a darkness he himself creates. Lucrece acts before an audience – not only her family, but other members of the Roman community – and by daylight explains the significance of her deed, in order to enlist their intervention. She offers her death as a model for their treatment of the rapist: ‘ “How Tarquin must be us’d, read it in me” ’ (l. 1195). Brutus swears on Lucrece’s knife to drive the Tarquins from Rome; so if Tarquin’s blade is the same as hers, hers is the same as Rome’s against tyranny. Kahn’s argument concedes this last point but does not regard it as diminishing the misogyny of the text. The story of Lucretia was widely read as a

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myth of the founding of the Republic, and in this version of the narrative the rape is treated as virtually allegorical, or at best is seen as no more than the final instance of tyrannical rule, the last straw that broke the people’s back.28 In discussions of the political allegiances of Shakespeare’s text, Lucrece’s story easily becomes incidental. My own view, however, is that rape – and the horror of rape – is at the heart of the poem, but that sexual politics and state politics are interwoven, not that one is a stand-in for the other. If we read the text as a critique, what it criticises is a model of both marriage and government that works to no one’s advantage, not the husband’s and not, in the end, the tyrant’s. As Kahn herself pointed out, in an earlier essay that brilliantly inaugurated the feminist rescue of the text, the poem’s account of the rivalry between men over possession of a woman ‘questions the wisdom and humanity of making property the basis of human relationships’.29 The ‘hopeless castaway’ that Tarquin leaves behind after the rape is at first ‘frantic with grief’ (ll. 744, 762). She rails against time, night and Tarquin himself, and then, recognising that words solve nothing, determines to kill herself. She does not at any stage think of asking her husband what she ought to do. On the contrary, ‘ “I am the mistress of my fate” ’, she announces as confidently as grief permits (l. 1069). These are not the thought processes of a helpless victim of patriarchy or a mere pawn in a masculine power struggle. Finally, after the high Roman fashion, she performs before the assembled representatives of the community the act of violence that justifies their resistance: ‘ “fair lords, ’tis he, / That guides this hand to give this wound to me” ’ (ll. 1721–2). Familiar with titillating images of flesh as the solitary Lucretia commits suicide in the Renaissance tradition of high art,30 we might easily forget that in Shakespeare’s text she is dressed in mourning, and that she carries out the act in the presence of other soldiers besides the husband she has summoned for the purpose. And there was an alternative visual tradition that much more closely resembles Shakespeare’s account. A German illumination of the 1540s, in a work of history commissioned by the mayor of Augsburg as a gift for Henry VIII, shows the separate stages of the story occurring in different parts of the picture. The rape takes place in an upstairs room against the victim’s will: Tarquin holds a weapon and seizes her wrist; Lucretia turns her head away, and attempts to cover her naked body. Fully clothed, however, her eyes cast down, she kills herself, with evident deliberation, in the foreground below. And in between, as her body is borne out into the streets, Brutus stands on a platform exactly at the centre of the image, inciting the Roman citizens to rebellion.31 Here, too, the implications for the state are made clear, without diminishing either the violence of the crime or the dignity of the heroine. By her death Lucrece dissolves her shame, erases the threat of bastardy to Collatine’s lineage, and motivates political action. In the event, it is not her

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proprietary husband and father who exact the revenge she asks for: they are evidently too distraught with grief. But Brutus, as representative of the Roman community, throws off his protective mask of folly and rallies the citizens, with the result that, in the last two lines of the poem, ‘The Romans plausibly [with applause, by acclamation] did give consent / To Tarquin’s everlasting banishment’ (ll. 1854–5). V The position of ‘consent’ as the rhyme-word of the final couplet in a story about rape might prompt us to give it some weight. Brutus secures the consent of the Roman people to a change in the mode of government. Lucrece, by contrast, is not asked to consent to Collatine’s boasting. More important, the text goes to some lengths to clarify the fact that she does not consent to the rape. In Ovid and Livy she reluctantly yields in response to the threat of the slave; Augustine raises the question whether ‘(as she herself alone could know) she consented, betrayed by her own involuntary desire’, in another instance, presumably, of the unruly sexual reflex that for Augustine is the heritage of fallen humanity.32 But Shakespeare’s text – at this point, at least – is as unequivocal as language can make it. Tarquin interrupts her appeal, puts out the light, gags Lucrece with her own nightgown, and rapes her, ‘Cooling his hot face in the chastest tears / That ever modest eyes with sorrow shed’ (ll. 682–3). The appalling character of this action is represented as the forcible bodily violation that, at the same time, impugns the identity of a faithful wife and eradicates the personal sovereignty of a human subject. Collatine sees his wife as a possession. Lucrece does not challenge this subject position in words, but enacts another. Only once does she ask the male audience she has summoned for their views, and her question concerns the ethical implications of the loss of chastity under duress: ‘O speak’, quoth she: ‘How may this forced stain be wiped from me? What is the quality of my offence, Being constrained with dreadful circumstance? May my pure mind with the foul act dispense?’ (1700–4)

The justice of Lucretia’s suicide has been queried by St Augustine (‘if she was chaste, why was she killed?’ he asks33), and again in our own period by both the Augustinian critics and those who see her as complicit with patriarchal

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values. Lucrece concludes that her death is necessary, but her attempts to make sense of the issue bring the text once again to the cross-couple, synœciosis, the union of contraries at the outer edge of what it is possible to say.34 Lucrece never doubts that she has lost her innocence, but the problem that leaves is whether she is consequently guilty. In a culture that values lineage, the honour of the father involves the purity of the mother: the reproductive process cuts across any understanding of culpability as a purely individual matter: ‘If, Collatine, thine honour lay in me, From me by strong assault it is bereft: My honey lost, and I a drone-like bee, Have no perfection of my summer left, But robb’d and ransack’d by injurious theft; In thy weak hive a wand’ring wasp hath crept, And suck’d the honey which thy chaste bee kept. ‘Yet am I guilty of thy honour’s wrack; Yet for thy honour did I entertain him: Coming from thee I could not put him back, For it had been dishonour to disdain him.’ (ll. 834–44)

The paradoxes of propriety lead to an oxymoron: ‘ “O unseen shame, invisible disgrace! / O unfelt sore, crest-wounding private scar!” ’ (ll. 827–8). The worst reproach to Collatine is that the rape should be known; yet concealed, kept private, it still pollutes his dynasty, damaging the coat of arms that publicly registers the purity of the line of descent. Marriage is not just a state of mind, not just institutional partnership, but mating, parentage, genealogy. And yet it is not only Collatine’s honour that is at stake: the symbolic Law that confers identity constructs Lucrece as a loyal wife, and Tarquin has deprived her of that ‘true type’ (l. 1050). Propriety, she believes, demands atonement for this loss, and it is her proper place that only her death can restore: ‘ “Mine honour be the knife’s that makes my wound; / My shame be his that did my fame confound” ’ (ll. 1201–2).35 When Nancy Vickers assembles the images of heraldry in the poem to interpret their implications, she treats dynastic honour purely as a matter between men, ignoring Lucrece’s perception of her own place in the symbolic and cultural order. Paradoxically, Vickers thus effaces Lucrece’s resistance more fully than the text she denounces for its misogyny.36 Tarquin may repudiate the ethical instruction of a painted cloth, but Lucrece has a proper respect for the painting that tells

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the story of Troy and justly allocates praise and blame. Her own symbolic future is a deep concern: ‘The nurse to still her child will tell my story, And fright her crying babe with Tarquin’s name. The orator to deck his oratory Will couple my reproach to Tarquin’s shame.’ (ll. 813–16)

She dies to set the record straight,37 but it is the record of her own life that is at stake: ‘So of shame’s ashes shall my fame be bred, For in my death I murder shameful scorn: My shame so dead, mine honour is new born.’ (ll. 1188–90)

If the term rape equivocates, as I have suggested, defining the victim as at once passive object and resisting subject, Lucrece’s suicide, repeating the crime, also equivocates in its distinct but parallel way. Her final victim-isation, rendered by her own hand, is at the same time the ultimate act of self-determination; the object of violence is simultaneously the subject as agent of her own judicial execution. Part of our difficulty, I believe, in sympathising with the heroine’s reasoning here results from the dualism that would increasingly come to represent common sense from the moment when Descartes would in due course identify the person with consciousness. For Cartesians, and subsequently for a whole epoch, what we were was synonymous with what we thought, with the mind and its intentions. St Augustine, arguing that nuns who had been raped were not obliged to take their own lives, also located virtue in the mind, so that no blame attached to the victim.38 But elsewhere, as I have indicated, he assumes a more complex relation between reason and physiology. Both options were available in the early modern period, before the Enlightenment effectively reduced the person to the cogito. It is the men in Lucrece who opt for such a reduction, when they answer the heroine’s agonised question, ‘ “May my pure mind with the foul act dispense?” ’ (l. 1704) ‘With this they all at once began to say, / Her body’s stain her mind untainted clears’ (ll. 1709–10). But Lucrece herself knows better: with a joyless smile she turns away The face, that map which deep impression bears Of hard misfortune, carv’d in it with tears. (ll. 1711–13)

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Here sorrow marks the body in the form of a sad smile, dejection, weeping. And if grief is registered physiologically, calling in question the distinction so easily taken for granted by modern readers between mind and the organism of which it is a part, so, too, is rape, which violates flesh as well as self-respect, organic integrity at the same time as personal sovereignty. Rape, in other words, deconstructs the opposition between mind and body which an exclusively dualist culture came to see as obvious. Even in our own period, victims of rape commonly feel physically violated, tainted, changed irrevocably. As one modern rape victim commented, ‘The police have told me to consider myself still a virgin. They reckon what happened had nothing to do with my choice. That’s fine in theory, not quite so easy to put into practice when I am becoming increasingly uneasy that I could be pregnant’.39 Lucrece evinces the same fear (ll. 1062–4). Like her male interlocutors, the modern police conflate the person with intention, consciousness. But despite the chronological and cultural gap dividing them, both women know that chastity is lost in the real, not just in the psyche; pregnancy is a material condition; and rape constitutes a perpetual reminder that we are organic beings like any other. Lucrece’s culture, whether Roman or early modern, is not our own, and her struggle to arrive at a remedy for her loss is conducted in other terms than ours (which is to say, in terms of other meanings). And yet, in a post-Cartesian world, influenced by psychoanalytic accounts of the person as an organismin-culture, we can surely recognise the difficulty she too faces. If, she reasons, the body is a temple inhabited by the soul, its earthly housing, it follows that damage to one distresses both: ‘Her house is sack’d, her quiet interrupted, Her mansion batter’d by the enemy, Her sacred temple spotted, spoil’d, corrupted, Grossly engirt with daring infamy. That let it not be call’d impiety, If in this blemish’d fort I make some hole, Through which I may convey this troubled soul.’ (ll. 1170–76)

And yet, she reflects, in one sense death solves nothing, since it cannot restore the lost condition of the body, identity, or the freedom to choose. Moreover, if there is guilt, it surely belongs to the soul, not the battered body, which is only to be violated all over again by suicide. ‘ “Poor helpless help, the treasure stol’n away, / To burn the guiltless casket where it lay!” ’ (ll. 1057–7). ‘ “Helpless help” ’: synœciosis, the trope of deconstruction, insists on the incursion of the differentiating other into the self-same. The

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remedy is paradoxically a repetition of the cause; release from the consequences of Tarquin’s crime also re-enacts it. The limits of meaningful language have been reached. There is no logical solution. To live on casts doubt on her honour, her person, her symbolic place; death, on the other hand, punishes a crime she did not commit. Neither innocent nor guilty, Lucrece does the best she can. She publicly places the blame where it belongs; she erases the possible taint on the family name; and she reaffirms her own sovereignty in an action that is deliberately and independently chosen. The effect is a change of regime to one based on consent: propriety will no longer be synonymous with property. VI In 1594, when the poem appeared, the story of Lucrece was ancient history. And yet the change it records in the meaning of the proper was remarkably contemporary. Marriage, at least in fiction, in Protestant propaganda and in the conduct books, if not yet in social practice, was no longer arranged, dynastic and proprietary. Instead, it was beginning to be based on romantic love, shared values and more than formal consent.40 Even while Capulet, for instance, is busy arranging his daughter’s marriage in the old way, he urges on Paris the importance not only of Juliet’s agreement but also of her affection: But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart, My will to her consent is but a part, And she agreed, within her scope of choice Lies my consent and fair according voice. (Romeo and Juliet, 1.2.16–19)41

Rape, too, was changing its meaning. Previously a form of theft, an offence against the property of a husband or father, rape was separated from abduction in statutes of 1555 and 1597: for the first time the legal issue began to be seen, however tentatively, as one of consent.42 Meanwhile, in English state politics, although the monarchy would remain, becoming ever more absolutist in its pretensions for another fifty years, there were glimpses, at least, of an alternative based on consent, and republican Rome was often invoked as its model. In 1601 William Fulbecke published a history of Rome, abridged for popular consumption, which recounted with considerable narrative and stylistic verve the ‘factions, tumults and massacres’ of the last years of the Republic. Fulbecke’s story begins earlier, however, ‘When vainglorious Tarquine the last of the Romaine kings for the shamefull rape of Lucrece committed by one of his sonnes, was banished from Rome’.43 The new office of tribune of the people was created

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in due course, and Rome ‘was turned from an Aristocracie, from the rule of them that were manie and mightie, to a plaine and visible Democracie or estate popular, adminstred by the voyces of the multitude and magistrates, and by the united consent of the whole corporation’.44 Once this consensual government was established, Fulbecke records, Rome began to flourish morally and politically; but as soon as either the Senate or the people appropriated an unequal share of power, ‘dismal discord’ inevitably followed.45 It is Fulbecke’s word ‘consent’ that interests me here, rather than the question of his (or Shakespeare’s) republicanism, though it is worth noting that Richard Field, who published Lucrece, also issued Fulbecke’s Historicall Collection.46 ‘Consent’ occurs twice in Shakespeare’s prefatory Argument, and again in the final couplet of the poem. It indicates, in my view, that possession – whether legitimate, like Collatine’s, or usurped, like Tarquin’s – was no longer acceptable as a model of human relations. The rape of Lucrece, her suicide and the dispossession of the Tarquins all demonstrate its instability in practice. Consent does not eliminate problems, but it must be better. I suspect that even in the twenty-first century, we have yet to realise the full meaning of this word both in sexual politics and in the state. But if Lucrece’s story promotes consent, it does so literally over her dead body, which is paraded through the streets of Rome to put on display the iniquity of the Tarquins. Jane Newman has pointed out that Lucrece becomes an agent of change only when a man acts on her behalf. As she explains, the recurring references to Philomel in the poem draw attention to a different but familiar story, which Shakespeare’s poem does not tell but invokes at intervals in the course of its narrative. Women can act on their own behalf: in Ovid’s rendering Philomel and her sister Procne respond to Philomel’s rape by killing the son of the rapist and feeding him to his father, thus arresting the line of descent literally with a vengeance.47 A feminist Lucrece, Newman argues, would surely have killed Tarquin, not herself. Even Brutus thinks she might have done better: ‘ “Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so, / To slay herself, that should have slain her foe” ’ (ll. 1826–7). On the other hand, while the revenge of Philomel and Procne inventively reverses the implications of rape as a crime against the dynastic family, it stays within the problematic of assault as the appropriate response to assault. Though it is women who act in this case, they do so without challenging the existing agonistic and individualistic framework. But there are, as Lucrece demonstrates, two options. One is to repay crime with a fitting punishment. That is the mode of Philomel and Procne. The other is to challenge the cultural values that promoted the crime in the first place. This is what Lucrece does. Possession represents an inherently unstable model of human relations; it is Collatine’s boast of what he possesses that motivates Tarquin’s desire to take possession of another’s wife. Lucrece does not punish Tarquin: instead,

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she involves her audience is a process that goes beyond revenge. Indeed, what follows goes beyond Lucrece’s own instruction. To enlist the community, it appears, is to surrender the right to personal vengeance and submit to the will of the people. Tarquin is not killed, in the event, but banished from a new political order founded not on possession but on consent. The difference of Lucrece’s behaviour, we might therefore argue, is defined in Shakespeare’s references to Philomel by the trace in her story of this other option. Philomel appears in The Rape of Lucrece not as an avenger but after her metamorphosis into a nightingale, leaning her breast against a thorn to keep her woe alive for all to hear (ll. 1135–6). Rather than reproduce the external aggression of the perpetrator, Lucrece’s self-inflicted, public wound intercepts the sequence of personal attack and counter-attack and, in the process, brings the horror of the crime to the attention of the community. Lucrece thus calls into question the values of her culture (as all good feminists should). The installation of the Republic that is the consequence of her act affirms a model of state politics based on consent. Meanwhile, at the historical moment of the poem’s widespread appeal, free and unconstrained consent was in the process of becoming the only acceptable basis of marriage. Lucrece’s story demonstrates that the proper does not stay in place: the trace of the other destabilises the self-same. Perhaps the cross-couple, trope of deconstruction and thus of the instability of meaning, can be seen as the figure of cultural and political change. The story of Lucrece also indicates, however, that change for the better does not happen of its own accord. On the contrary, we need to take a hand. It would be encouraging to be able to believe that the hand in question will never again need to hold a knife.

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5 Antinomies of Desire and the Sonnets

I To desire in Shakespeare’s Sonnets is also to fight. Whatever we set out to find in these poems – the inscription of love, a historical narrative, or a sexual identity – antagonism clearly inhabits the passion they portray. Projected outwards, this hostility is variously directed at time, death, nature and a rival poet, but its objects also include the addressees, as well as poetry itself. Very little else about the Sonnets is as clear-cut. Individually, they are admired as if their meanings were self-evident: specific sonnets have been variously anthologised, read out at weddings, recited in Shakespeare in Love and quoted in Dr Who.1 Read consecutively, on the other hand, they withhold almost as much as they deliver. There is no way to be sure whether they form a sequence addressed to two people, a fair young man and a dark woman, or a collection, written at intervals to various people and not bound together until their publication in 1609.2 The order and numbering cannot confidently be ascribed to the author. Were they composed mainly in the 1590s, at the height of the sonnet vogue in England, or later, to rewrite with a difference the conventions that vogue might be thought to have exhausted? Are they fact, based on personal experience, or fiction, an exploration by a dramatist of new possibilities for an old genre? And does that distinction between fact and fiction hold when it comes to love? Doesn’t any sexual relationship exist as much in the distinct imaginations of each lover as in the exchanges of the couple? Critics have been eager to provide answers to many of these questions, supplying conjectural addressees, dates of composition and sexualities. But perhaps we do the Sonnets a disservice when we come up with solutions to 73

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the puzzles they present. Although he was presumably in a position to do so, there is no evidence that Shakespeare himself made any effort to issue corrections or clarifications, to confirm occasions, or name names. Without appealing to the author as the final authority, it can be argued that criticism strips the texts of their subtlety when it resolves what they leave inconclusive. Any univocal explanation of the Sonnets necessarily diminishes them – and reduces, in the end, our motive for reading them. Some of their thematic undecidability stems from ambivalence, as animosity repeatedly intrudes into the love they depict. Antagonism appears in a variety of contexts, but most obviously in the group concerning the socalled Dark Lady. The term is a Victorian misnomer: whoever she is, the addressee of these twenty-six sonnets is no lady. Even in isolating this apparently homogeneous group there are puzzles. Sonnets 127–52 seem to be about a woman, or perhaps more than one.3 But six of them dwell on the discrepancy between their addressee’s dark colouring and the ‘fair’ beauty that convention endorses, and two of these associate her ‘blackness’ directly with moral disgrace (sonnets 131, 147). Since the moral disgrace is affirmed elsewhere, and since this group seems consistently to concern a relentlessly physical passion and a corresponding self-reproach, I take the line of least resistance and follow convention in treating them as a sub-sequence. Seen, then, as a single figure, the dark woman is deceitful, promiscuous, treacherous, sexually voracious and probably diseased. For all their shared antipathy to these qualities, however, the register of this group of sonnets, is elusive. Are they best read with compassion, as the record of despair at love’s falsehood, or enjoyed as an exercise in wit at the expense of its waywardness? If we see these poems as telling a story, the tale is a bleak one; at the same time, the manner is intelligible as mischievous, caustic or outrageous. Many of them mock the Petrarchan conventions: ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’, sonnet 130 insists, while others seem to parody the whole idealising tradition by addressing sonnets to a whore.4 The dark woman may share her black eyes with Berowne’s Rosalind and Sidney’s Stella,5 but in other respects she represents the exact antithesis of the beauty, virtue and constancy valued by Petrarch and his successors. Even so, she remains desirable: ‘And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare’, sonnet 130 concludes, ‘As any she belied with false compare’. But what exactly is being affirmed here? That, equally exceptional in her own way, she deserves to be loved as well as any Petrarchan lady? That the poet, depicted ironically as blinded by passion, mistakenly thinks her equally worthy of devotion? Or that the conventional Petrarchan comparisons falsify both love itself and the nature of women? Perhaps all three. Under the influence of new historicism, much attention was devoted in the 1980s and beyond to the sonnet tradition as a place of self-fashioning.6 The

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self Shakespeare fashions as the first-person protagonist of the dark woman sonnets seems puzzled by love’s contradictions; at the same time, the writing self who puts this bewilderment on display appears shrewd, witty and selfdeprecating. Although in 1598 Francis Meres applauded ‘mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare’ for ‘his sugred Sonnets among his private friends’,7 it is not clear which, if any of those that survive, he might have had in mind. Sonnet 138, however, is one of two published in slightly different form in The Passionate Pilgrim a year after his comment appeared in print: ‘When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her, though I know she lies’. References here to the poet’s ‘vain’ desire to be thought young give this text enough specificity to send the biographers off in search of women under thirty-five in 1599, which does not narrow the field greatly, but the sonnet can also be read as a general observation on love’s propensity to deception and self-deception. Its account of the lovers’ reciprocal flatteries leads neatly to the couplet’s sexual pun, at once surprising and inevitable: ‘Therefore I lie with her, and she with me’.8 ‘Sugared’ seems hardly the word to describe such clever, worldly wisdom, and yet ‘the sweete wittie soule of Ovid’ that Meres also found in Shakespeare brings with it a knowing scepticism concerning the art of love. If the private friends who read Shakespeare’s sonnets included some of the young men about town who so enjoyed Venus and Adonis, they must have relished the cynicism and the sheer effrontery of his appropriation of a predominantly spiritualising convention for such a purpose, delighting in the carnival of sexual puns, including those on the poet’s own name (sonnets 135, 136). There were anti-Petrarchan precedents, of course, in which another’s object of desire was depicted as ill-natured or unchaste, and the blazon of conventional beauty was absurdly reordered to deplore eyes like pearls and sapphire lips.9 Such parodies throw into relief the element of excess and, indeed, repetition in the Petrarchan comparisons themselves. Shakespeare’s antiPetrarchan sonnets, witty as they are, distinguish themselves from these earlier instances by the close attention they pay to the paradoxes of love. Cupid is conventionally blind, but this is not mere blindness (sonnet 141): the poet judges truly, but then ignores his own judgement (sonnet 137). This love, unlike Petrarch’s, is indifferent to faults; indeed, delinquency excites desire. ‘Two loves I have, of comfort and despair’, sonnet 144 asserts. In the miniature moral play the poem records, ‘The better angel is a man right fair; / The worser spirit a woman coloured ill’. This contrast between male virtue and female evil can be ascribed to misogyny pure and simple,10 but misogyny, as Oscar Wilde might have agreed, is rarely pure and never simple. Instead, the texts themselves confront a puzzle. How is it that, when there seems nothing about her to admire or to like, when no aspect even of her body seems calculated to seduce (sonnets 137, 141), the dark woman’s very inadequacy

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remains so compelling? ‘O, from what power hast thou this powerful might / With insufficiency might heart to sway?’ (sonnet 150). Since Shakespeare’s time a moralising tradition has come to insist that love belongs with virtue. Thus domesticated, sexual desire joins the list of civic and social proprieties as the motive for the public, institutional and regulated partnership that grounds and reproduces family values. In the interests of this development, heroes and heroines who opt for unworthy objects of desire have progressively been seen as either deluded, mistaking charm for virtue, or at the mercy of counterfeit attachments, named infatuation or lust. There is plenty of moral condemnation in the dark woman sonnets of the ‘expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ that constitutes ‘lust in action’. Sonnet 129 could hardly state the case more sharply or more fervently: the condition is ‘Mad in pursuit, and in possession so, / Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme’.11 Puns here explicitly define lust in action as at once a moral problem and a sexual event. The expense of ‘spirit’ (mind and semen) takes place in a ‘waste’ (and waist) of shame. This leads to ‘hell’, which means vagina, as well as the wages of sin (sonnet 144). It is the receptacle implied by waist and hell that causes the poet’s flesh to ‘rise and fall’ (sonnet 151), while it also imperils his soul (sonnet 146). Successive sonnets dwell on the dark woman’s ‘will’, slang term for the sexual organs of both men and women and for desire itself. ‘Large and spacious’ as it is (sonnet 135), ‘the wide world’s common place’, ‘the bay’, indeed, ‘where all men ride’ (sonnet 137), her ‘will’ comes close to naming the emptiness constructed at the heart of all this witty excoriation. Ultimately, so much ado is about, in early modern English, ‘nothing’. This recognition ends not in reform, however, but in the paradox that truth does not dispel desire. Clear sight is no cure: ‘All this the world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell’ (sonnet 129). ‘Whence’, the poet continues to wonder, ‘hast thou this becoming of things ill?’ ‘Who taught thee how to make me love thee more, / The more I hear and see just cause of hate?’ (sonnet 150). Sigmund Freud noted a similar pattern among his analysands, and the imbrication of love and hate is well documented in psychoanalysis. Freud explains such ‘ambivalence’ as derived in part from unsurmounted impulses to introject the object of desire, to take possession of it or master it at all costs, and in part from a conflict between the interests of love and those of the ego.12 The implications of this conflict become clearer when Julia Kristeva expands on Freud in her essay on ‘love–hatred’ in Romeo and Juliet: the loving couple, she explains, allows each partner to refind the satisfaction of the infant in the arms of its mother, but at the risk of losing independence, as the couple threatens to swallow up the individuals who compose it.13 In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan rewrites Freud to treat love as an instance of sublimation, where what is sublimated to form culture is not

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sex itself, as in Freud, but the drive and its impossible object. Lacanian love is at least as ambivalent as Freud’s. Here the beloved, or successive objects of desire, are no more than stand-ins for the archaic, maternal target of the drive, the lost object, the inaccessible and dangerous Thing (das Ding), which simultaneously promises jouissance and threatens to engulf the subject. The Thing constitutes itself as filling the gap created by the loss of the real, when the little human animal accedes to the symbolic order of language and subjectivity. Access to the symbolic order separates the subject from the organic being it cannot discard and for the adult organism-in-culture there continues to reside beyond the immediate object of desire the magnetic, inhuman, terrifying Thing. Since it is outside the symbolic order, the Thing cannot be represented, except by emptiness. Sublimation takes place in the symbolic, at the level of the signifier, and it gives pleasure – the pleasure, for example, offered by a Petrarchan sonnet sequence. But sublimation does not erase the Thing. Instead, while pleasurable signifiers encircle it, fence it off and prevent it from devouring the subject, representation marks the place of the Thing by an absence, emptiness, vacancy, nothing.14 The sonnet, invented in thirteenth-century Italy,15 shares a line of descent with the troubadour poems of courtly love. Among the texts of this civilising, idealising tradition, addressed to arbitrary and unattainable mistresses so remote that they appear curiously depersonalised, Lacan finds a unique example of a scatological poem that seems to contradict every rule they otherwise observe. It concerns a lady who, to the poet’s disgust, insists that her knight must put his mouth to her ‘trumpet’, where he will find all kinds of noxious odours and repellent substances. There is no serious equivocation here: the image is explicitly anal and remarkably specific. Lacan comments, ‘This quite extraordinary document opens a strange perspective on the deep ambiguity of the sublimating imagination’. The lady, he goes on, suddenly finds herself ‘brutally positing, in a place knowingly constructed out of the most refined of signifiers, the emptiness of a thing in all its crudity’, a thing that reveals itself to be the Thing, the nothing that is all we know of the object of the drive.16 Allusion to the Thing is not reducible to physiology, but a bodily cavity may figure the void that is as close as we come to its representation. An orifice that gives onto vacancy is oddly interchangeable with the emptiness of the lady idealised out of substantial existence, and either image, for Lacan, alludes to the unrepresentable Thing. In the psychoanalytic account, the Thing is both life-giving and deadly. Lacan rolls Freud’s eros and thanatos into a single drive that impels the speaking being towards both life and death. It follows that the Thing, as the object-cause of desire, motivates both love and hate, adulation and antagonism, sometimes in equal proportions, sometimes in ways that make the two hard to distinguish from one another.

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If psychoanalysis is right about this ambivalence, the poet’s animosity towards the dark woman is no obstacle to desire; on the contrary, hostility is a likely component of love. This is neither a wholly new discovery nor one confined to an ex-centric work by a single troubadour. In one sense, Shakespeare’s Sonnets do no more than reverse the weight of the existing Petrarchan paradoxes. Tradition identifies the lady as the ‘cruel fair’ who ‘wounds’ with her disdain; this virtuous tyrant is conventionally the lover’s ‘sweet foe’. But beauty, virtue and sweetness are her prevailing characteristics: her cruelty consists above all in refusing to pity her lover. Shakespeare’s dark woman, by contrast, is more cruel than fair, more tyrannical than virtuous, and the poet’s complaint is that, when it comes to others, she is not disdainful enough. Even Thomas Wyatt’s love poetry, where a latent antagonism turns to full-blown hostility in threats of vengeance,17 does not depict a figure whose defects are themselves the cause of passion. Catullus, among Latin models for early modern lyric verse, recognised a relationship between love and hate;18 only Shakespeare, however, turns Petrarchism inside out to produce in the genre itself an ironic confrontation with the antinomies of desire. II ‘Two loves I have, of comfort and despair’. At first glance, sonnet 144 seems to set up an antithesis between the ‘man right fair’ and the ‘woman coloured ill’, the one offering contentment and repose, while the other turns love into torment. It is widely agreed, if only for want of counter-arguments, that the first 126 poems constitute a sub-sequence addressed to a fair young man. In practice, only about one-fifth of these poems make clear that their subject is male. That many of the others could equally concern a woman, however, may only go to confirm the ambiguity of the master–mistress and the passion he elicits. The last of them certainly marks a distinct break. Where sonnet 126 seems to bring to an inconclusive end the sub-sequence, if that is what it is, concerning the young man, the following sonnet explicitly introduces the new topic of the dark woman: In the old age black was not counted fair, Or if it were it bore not beauty’s name; But now is black beauty’s successive heir, And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.

Placed as it is, sonnet 127 seems to derive its contrast between past and present not only from comparison with a traditional world of blond beauty, but also with the epoch of the preceding poems. And indeed, it is as if this text rewrites the opening terms of sonnet 1:

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From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauty’s rose might never die, But as the riper should by time decease, His tender heir might bear his memory.

Where sonnet 1 confirms the association of beauty with fairness, sonnet 127 records a startling reversal of this convention. Where sonnet 1 proposes the preservation of such beauty by legitimate succession, sonnet 127 laments a fall from the proper processes of inheritance; and where the general proposition of sonnet 1 flows smoothly and lyrically from its apparently noncontroversial and timeless premise, sonnet 127 goes on to enlist the reader in a complex and difficult set of paradoxes concerning the decay that characterises the present moment. Similar pairings across the two groups initially seem to confirm the contrast between two kinds of love. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ sonnet 18 asks the young man. ‘Thou art more lovely and more temperate’. ‘I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright’, counters sonnet 147 to the dark woman, ‘Who art as black as hell, as dark as night’. Most obviously, the generalisations of sonnet 129 concerning ‘lust in action’ stand in direct opposition to those of sonnet 116 about ‘the marriage of true minds’. Nowhere in the first 126 poems, at least on the surface, is there explicit and contemptuous reference to sexual acts; there is no evidence of physiological disgust with the object of desire; nor is there anything comparable to the self-reproach and self-loathing that pervade the dark woman sonnets. Perhaps the ‘one thing’ that defines the young man sexually, because it is ‘nothing’ to the poet’s purpose (sonnet 20), bars allusion to that other and more dangerous nothing that evokes the enticing and forbidden Thing, the object-cause of hate, as well as love? But the picture is not so straightforward. In the first place, the poet’s ‘purpose’ as defined in sonnet 20 is as strongly disputed as any other aspect of the collection. And second, the psychomachia recorded in sonnet 144 does not go quite according to convention. In a move unprecedented in the morality tradition, the bad angel trains her seductive powers on the good angel himself, leaving the poet to suspect a sexual outcome: ‘I guess one angel in another’s hell’. This practical instance of deconstruction avant la lettre indicates that the other may literally and materially have been invaded by the selfsame. Binary oppositions, Jacques Derrida repeatedly points out, do not hold; as a theoretical necessity, the meaning of the term that defines another by antithesis penetrates in that very process the term it defines. Sonnet 144 registers an extreme case of linguistic theory put into bodily practice. Although sonnets 1–126 may not always assert the fact with the same intensity, in its own way the young man’s thing is also capable, evidently, of disturbing the poet’s peace of mind.

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It comes as no surprise, then, that antagonism inhabits the first group, as well as the second. Many of the vices attributed to the mistress are also ascribed in due course to the friend. In some instances, his ‘fault’ (sonnet 96) is a not very clearly specified ‘disgrace’ (sonnets 33, 34) or a ‘trespass’ (sonnet 35). Elsewhere, it is gregariousness (sonnet 61) or susceptibility to praise (sonnet 84). But sonnets 40–2 name promiscuity as treachery. Indeed, sonnet 41 might rank as a companion piece to sonnet 144, telling the same story from another point of view and in another key: the young man’s inconstancies are ‘pretty wrongs’; temptation is inevitable; his beauty will inevitably be assailed. But then the sestet marks a new turn: ‘Ay me, but yet thou might’st my seat forbear’. The friend’s infidelity to the poet with the poet’s mistress betrays ‘a two-fold truth’, his own and hers. With its imagery of temptation and falsehood, sonnet 41, like sonnet 144, also records a psychomachia. Indeed, this poem even includes its own miniature moral play: the young man is urged on by beauty and ‘thy straying youth, / Who lead thee in their riot’. These personifications evoke the popular Interlude of Youth, where the young hero, proud of his handsome and vigorous body, falls into the clutches of Riot, who introduces him to Lechery.19 The poet’s prevailing impulse is to make excuses for the friend’s faults. So lovely does the young man make his own shame that the poet ‘Cannot dispraise, but in a kind of praise’ (sonnet 95). Even so, the lover registers a puzzled ambivalence, represented in one near-oxymoron after another: the young man is a ‘gentle thief’, ‘Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows’ (sonnet 40), ‘Most worthy comfort, now my greatest grief’ (sonnet 48). The contradictions are explained by the antinomies of desire itself: ‘Such civil war is in my love and hate’ (sonnet 35). The manner of sonnet 41, at least at first, is resigned, not angry, but the vocabulary of the sonnets to the friend is not always so temperate. Sonnet 69 accuses its addressee of hypocrisy. There are those, it alleges, who, looking behind appearances, ‘To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds’. ‘But why thy odour matcheth not thy show’, the sonnet concludes, ‘The soil is this, that thou dost common grow’. ‘Soil’ is a conjectural emendation: the quarto text, the only one published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, gives ‘solye’, which makes no sense. If ‘soil’ is right, it not only indicates a ‘ground’ for the general opinion and fits in, however loosely, with the metaphor of growing things: it also brings with it associations of dirt, and perhaps especially sexual contamination.20 Here the young man’s fault is that he grows ‘common’. John Kerrigan glosses this as ‘vulgar, commonplace, cheap’, and adds, ‘With a quibble on “public pasture, unenclosed field” ’.21 This is not far, surely, from ‘the wide world’s common place’, or that other figurative account of the dark woman as ‘the bay where all men ride’ (sonnet 137). The contrast between flower and weed recurs in sonnet 94, and here the culminating moment of the poem, while not as sexually outspoken, seems to

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me as brutal and as bitter as any of the accusations addressed to the dark woman. The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet, Though to itself it only live and die, But if that flower with base infection meet, The basest weed outbraves his dignity: For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

The poem apparently concerns a generalised ‘They’, but this comparison gathers up all that has gone before of roses and summer’s days and, if we link it back to the procreation sonnets, now concedes the relative legitimacy of selfcontainment and self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, ‘infection’ points to parallel indications in the dark woman sonnets of sexually transmitted disease, while remaining intelligible here as a moral metaphor. ‘Lilies that fester’, however, is shocking. Festering is a function of bodies, not plants; the metaphor breaks the limits of lyric vocabulary as suppurating flesh abruptly intrudes into the conventional flower imagery. Lilies, we know, are white, pure, scented. That they were also thought in the period to smell bad when they decomposed does not diminish the incongruity of ‘fester’, which takes ‘infection’ to its literal and logical outcome in a world that knew nothing of antibiotics. Roland Barthes discusses a comparable moment in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. This quintessentially modernist text resembles Shakespeare’s Sonnets in unexpected ways. Now narrative, now reflective, each of its 80 sections stands more or less alone, and each can be read as an episode in a story or stories that are never consecutively assembled or connected. Overtly intertextual and at the same time original, A Lover’s Discourse, like the Sonnets, isolates the momentary triumphs and the disproportionate anxieties of passion. One fragment, ‘Alteration’, centres on the linguistic consequences of finding a flaw in the object of desire: In the other’s perfect and ‘embalmed’ figure (for this is the degree to which it fascinates me) I perceive suddenly a speck of corruption. This speck is a tiny one: a gesture, a word, an object, a garment, something unexpected which appears (which dawns) from a region I had never even suspected, and suddenly attaches the loved object to a commonplace world. Could the other be vulgar, whose elegance and originality I had so religiously hymned? Here is a gesture by which is revealed a being of another race. I am flabbergasted.

Stupefaction arises from the discrepancy between the ideal image of the other, sanctified by the lover’s overvaluation, and the new vision that

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overturns that ideal. The object of veneration is for a moment – unbearably – banal, ‘paltry’, and it hardly matters that the corruption in question is only a speck. This altered perception modifies the vocabulary that defines the beloved: The lover’s discourse is usually a smooth envelope which encases the Image, a very gentle glove around the loved being. It is a devout, orthodox discourse. When the Image alters, the envelope of devotion rips apart; a shock capsizes my own language.

Though Barthes cites a number of authorities here, including Goethe and Proust, he could have found no better instance than sonnet 94. ‘Lilies that fester’ rips apart the smooth envelope of Petrarchan verse and momentarily capsizes the genre, to reveal the unbridgeable gap between idealisation and an equally extreme revulsion. One way or the other, as we know from sonnet 129, desire is ‘perjured’, ‘extreme’ and ‘not to trust’. When the Sonnets leave unoccupied the gap between idolatry and disgust, making a no man’s land in the place of ordinary graduated reaction, they mask – or fail to mask – a void that incorporates into the desire they record an allusion to the creating, annihilating Thing. ‘Horrible ebb of the Image’, Barthes adds. And then he comments, ‘(The horror of spoiling is even stronger than the anxiety of losing)’.22 But in the Sonnets what spoils the friend is not always a speck of corruption: on the contrary, despoliation does not wait for a perceived modification of his image. Instead, ‘All in war with Time for love of you’ (sonnet 15), the poet imagines that alteration in advance: When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field, Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now Will be a tattered weed of small worth held. (sonnet 2)

Time is the youth’s enemy here, and yet from the perspective of an addressee, it is as if the poet writes on Time’s behalf – ‘in war with Time’ against the friend, as well as ‘for love of’ him. True, the poem appropriates the carpe diem tradition to urge the young man towards fathering a child while time allows, but the threat far outweighs the promise as the sonnet dwells on the ravages of age. Perhaps the carpe diem motif was always cruel, demanding love with menaces. Even in the first sonnet, where lyricism apparently predominates over threat, ‘beauty’s [quintessentially fragile] rose’ is no match for the

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vocabulary of mortality: ‘die’, ‘decease’, ‘famine’, ‘grave’. Indeed, the rose is the supreme traditional figure of mutability, along with the ‘spring’ and ‘bud’ that are related analogues for the friend in sonnet 1. Time, the opponent of loveliness, is integral to beauty’s representation in these early sonnets; perfection and its loss are coupled inseparably; antagonism inhabits adulation. Moreover, the proposed remedies are to a degree spurious, since what survives is always something else: children, perfume, poetry. Sonnet after sonnet relentlessly holds up to the young man a mirror showing his appearance in ruins (sonnets 5, 12, 63). ‘The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show’, sonnet 77 insists, ‘Of mouthed graves will give thee memory’. Sonnet 104 seems at first to take the opposite line: ‘To me, fair friend, you never can be old’. Three years have passed and no change in his appearance is detectable. But the sestet takes back most of what the octave seems to have given: beauty steals away so imperceptibly that ‘mine eye may be deceived’. The couplet ends the poem with a compliment that is nothing if not minatory: ‘For fear of which, hear this thou age unbred: / Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead’. There are not always compensations, even false ones, for decay and death. The final sonnet of this sub-sequence leaves the issue unresolved. Beginning with praise for the ‘lovely boy’, who stays young while his lovers age, it goes on to remind him that Nature cannot prevail over Time for ever. In the end, she must give up her ‘treasure’ to death: ‘Her audit (though delayed) answered must be, / And her quietus is to render thee’. Sonnet 126 has only 12 lines. These are followed, whether on the initiative of the author or the printer there is no way to tell, by a space for the missing couplet, indicated by two sets of empty brackets. What might have filled them? An epigrammatic reinforcement of the threat? Another promise of immortality in verse, or in the poet’s heart? But there is nothing there, only punctuation marks enclosing a void. Unlike the dark woman’s, the young man’s beauty is never in question, and yet it becomes a target for aggression of another kind. ‘Extreme’ in this respect too, the poems acknowledge no space between present perfection and inevitable perdition, as ‘never-resting Time leads summer on / To hideous winter, and confounds him there’ (sonnet 5). The negation of the gradual process that divides these opposites has the effect of foregrounding the contrary impulses that structure desire. Those sonnets that affirm the friend’s beauty also lay siege to it in the construction of the panegyric itself, as if the poet cannot praise but in a kind of dispraise, and the brutality is the more pronounced in that this beauty which is simultaneously endorsed and destroyed is the young man’s defining mark. We know almost nothing else about him. There are indications of high rank, but virtually no personal characteristics. ‘’Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity / Shall you pace forth’,

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asserts sonnet 55; ‘your praise shall still find room, / Even in the eyes of all posterity’. So far the claim has been borne out in its most literal sense: the praise survives; but of its subject we know, despite the best efforts of the biographers, nothing certain. ‘Your name from hence immortal life shall have’, sonnet 81 confidently affirms. A great deal of scholarly energy might have been saved if it had. Moreover, when it comes to representation, beauty itself, ironically, empties its bearer of substance. Roland Barthes, most Lacanian of literary critics, draws attention to this paradox in S/Z. ‘Beauty’, he notes, ‘(unlike ugliness) cannot really be explained’.23 ‘Like a god (and as empty) it can only say: I am what I am’. Beauty cannot be satisfactorily described, but only invoked by comparison with what is already known to be beautiful (flowers, summer, works of art). In that sense, beauty is always citational. ‘Lovely as Venus?’ Barthes suggests. ‘But Venus lovely as what?’24 Beauty’s material embodiment is rendered invisible by representation, disappearing into an infinite regress of citations. ‘What is your substance, whereof you are made’, wonders sonnet 53, ‘That millions of strange shadows on you tend?’ Adonis, Helen, the spring, all are ‘poorly imitated after you’. If Shakespeare here inverts the citational process, making the young man the ultimate standard to which all other beauties refer, he does not thereby succeed in making him present. On the contrary, whatever physical specificity he possesses only recedes behind his named copies, vanishing among these strange, unnumbered shadows. Never did the subject of a series of love poems so palpably stand in for the lost object of the drive. There is at the centre of the fair young man’s representation in these texts nothing that does not waver, shift, cancel itself out, except a beauty that is affirmed most powerfully in its own destruction. And yet the signifiers that encircle what is missing are among the most seductive in the English language, enticing, perhaps, not least on account of what they do not tell. III The dark woman and the fair young man are not the poet’s only antagonists in the Sonnets. Perhaps, indeed, they are not even the primary objects of his love and hate. It is at least arguable that the true topic of these poems is the poetry of their inscription. At intervals, this is invincible. If Time wins out over Nature, verse, the Sonnets repeatedly assert, will triumph over Time: thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

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Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (Sonnet 18, my emphasis)

Both Ovid and Horace assert their own immortality in their poetry. Following Petrarch, however, Shakespeare appropriates that claim for the theme of the Sonnets, the friend, his source and inspiration, a tenth muse (sonnet 38), who cannot die until Doomsday, which is to say while the poetry he occasions survives: ‘So, till the judgement that yourself arise, / You live in this, and dwell in lover’s eyes’ (sonnet 55). The Sonnets are oddly specific in their reference to the materials (frail, it might be thought) that will create works to outlast tombs and monuments: yellowing ‘papers’ (sonnet 17), ‘my pen’ (sonnet 81), ‘black lines’ (sonnet 63), ‘black ink’ (sonnet 65). But to transcend their own fragile materiality, the texts lavish on their subject every kind of figure and wordplay, demonstrating the poet’s mastery of the sonnet form. The discipline imposed by the genre is a severe one.25 Shakespeare’s rhyme scheme, though not the most difficult of the available possibilities, is unrelenting none the less. Meanwhile, the fourteenline limit, too long for a single aperçu but too short to develop a narrative, both encourages depth and demands precision.26 Often, a quatrain constitutes the inscription of a completed thought, while the sestet marks a turn in the argument. The concluding couplet, meanwhile, commonly epigrammatic, represents a witty summary or an unexpected twist. Though the sonnet could not compete with epic for esteem in its day, it is notable that many serious poets of the period opted to take up its challenge and struggle with and against its constraints. Conflict, in other words, is not confined to love. Jean-François Lyotard, most Lacanian of philosophers, points out that ‘to speak is to fight’, and ‘speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics’. His point in the context is that dialogue is a power game. He adds, however, that the opponent is not always another person and the project may not be to secure victory: This does not necessarily mean that one plays in order to win. A move can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention: what else is involved in that labor of language harassment undertaken by popular speech and by literature? Great joy is had in the endless invention of turns of phrase, of words and meanings . . . But undoubtedly even this pleasure depends on a feeling of success won at the expense of an adversary – at least one adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted language, or connotation.27

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The rhetorical mode of the Sonnets is agonistic. Whether in fact or fiction, they mostly set out to convince, and etymology defines conviction as conquest. The project is to coax the dark woman to yield, or the young man to have children, pay attention, behave better or simply to return the poet’s love, and the inventiveness of the poems is designed in the first place to overcome opposition. Elsewhere, the opponent may be time, or nature, or another poet. But the ultimate antagonist is the poetry itself, the exacting process of representation. In this contest, however, the poet does not always win. The ringing confidence of the affirmations of immortality alternates with doubt. In an incitement to procreate, sonnet 17 tells a different story: Who will believe my verse in time to come If it were filled with your most high deserts? Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say ‘This poet lies: Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’ So should my papers (yellowed with their age) Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue, And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage, And stretchèd metre of an antique song.

Here the poem, itself at time’s mercy, is no more than a monument concealing the beauty it commemorates, since the poet distrusts his own power to depict the friend’s qualities. And even if he could do justice to so high a theme, the future would surely treat his account like the stories told by of old men of their lost youth, more heroic than true. The problem here, as elsewhere, is that the object of desire exceeds any praise the poet can confer (sonnets 83, 103, 106). Metaphor only distances its theme, doubly deferring by a figure the thing itself. Moreover, the conventional similes for beauty are by definition ‘false compare’, too remote to tell the human truth (sonnet 130). Who can trust a poetry of inflated analogy, or a poet who ‘heaven itself for ornament doth use, / And every fair with his fair doth rehearse’ (sonnet 21)? To invoke Adonis and Helen, in other words, is to lose touch with the incomparable immediacy of this individual, to banish him among the millions of shadows that attend him. Instead, O let me, true in love, but truly write, And then, believe me, my love is as fair

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As any mother’s child, though not so bright As those gold candles fixed in heaven’s air. (Sonnet 21)

The proposition seems irresistible. ‘True in love’, which is to say truly in love, faithful in love and truthful in love, the poet has only to record what he knows, without reference to the stars, for the beloved’s brightness to be made plain. But how? Quite apart from the fact that it has already become a conventional poetic move to reject poetic convention (Astrophil deploys it to good effect in several of his sonnets to Stella28), how can the unvarnished truth be told? By what means, in other words, can the inevitable gap between things and their representation be bridged? Rivalry with another poet brings the matter to a head (sonnets 78–86) and sonnet 84 draws the logical conclusion: ‘he that writes of you, if he can tell / That you are you, so dignifies his story’. ‘You alone are you’ is the proposition here, and it is the only possible affirmation if the young man is to be represented ‘In true, plain words, by thy true-telling friend’ (sonnet 82). Barthes arrives at a similar paradox in A Lover’s Discourse: ‘what is characteristic of desire, proper to desire, can produce only an impropriety of the utterance’. Words are always other, beside the sameness of the selfsame: ‘From word to word, I struggle to put “into other words” the ipseity of my Image, to express improperly the propriety of my desire: a journey at whose end my final philosophy can only be to recognise – and to practice – tautology. The adorable is what is adorable . . . I love you because I love you’.29 But in the Sonnets this strategy does not meet the case, either: instead, it simply reiterates the familiar story in a poetry ‘barren of new pride’, ‘dressing old words new, / Spending again what is already spent’ (sonnet 76). The third option, however, is silence: My tongue-tied Muse in manners holds her still, While comments of your praise, richly compiled, Reserve their character with golden quill And precious phrase by all the Muses filed. I think good thoughts, whilst others write good words, And like unlettered clerk still cry ‘Amen’ To every hymn that able spirit affords, In polished form of well-refinèd pen. Hearing you praised, I say ‘’Tis so, ’tis true’, And to the most of praise add something more, But that is in my thought, whose love to you (Though words come hindmost) holds his rank before.

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This is more than a sulk occasioned by conflict with a rival poet. The concessions to the other writer’s skill may be ironic, but they confirm the problem implied by the unsatisfactory alternatives of ornament and tautology: neither does full justice to love since, while actions may speak, words come hindmost and thoughts are dumb. Like Cordelia, the poet is not able to heave his heart into his mouth, not out of perversity or peevishness in either case, but because it cannot be done. Love, which reaches for the signifier in poems and songs and stories, cannot in the end be made present in the signifier itself – not even by the most eloquent, the most inventive of poets. Truth, which is what we tell, remains itself an object of desire, forever lost between the symbolic and the real. The Sonnets mark by truth’s ultimate unattainability the unbridgeable gap that divides words from things (Lacan would say demand from desire). Do they win by this concession their struggle with and against their symbolic antagonist, the poetry of love’s inscription? No one finally conquers language, if conquest means bringing it into line with the world it only seems to name. Lyotard’s point, however, was not that the game had to issue in outright victory, but only that pleasure depended on a feeling of success acquired at the expense of the adversary. Shakespeare, I can’t help thinking, was entitled to some of that pleasure. Meanwhile, as bystanders, we are free to relish the contest without deliberating too precisely on the final score. IV But are we no more than bystanders? The history of criticism indicates that the Sonnets commonly enlist the desire of the reader – with all the ambivalence that entails. Interpretation, it seems, seeks mastery, which itself never entirely escapes aggression. The poems are admired, loved and celebrated; at the same time, frustrated by their textual difficulty, critics constitute themselves as rival poets, rewriting Shakespeare’s texts in a way that gratifies their own projects.30 In doing so, however, we implicitly find fault with the poems themselves, declare them inadequate, taking up a position of antagonism, just like lovers. To interpret, in that instance, is also to fight. Evidently, the Sonnets tempt commentators to supply what is missing, compose a narrative, replace textual undecidability with definitive choices, and delineate their own substitute for the object beyond representation. But if we succumb to that temptation we betray, I believe, a twofold truth – to the poems and to the desire they inscribe.

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Paradoxically, the Sonnets themselves invite such attention. Ostensibly so personal and yet so direct, they appear to confide in us, creating the illusion of an intimate relationship between reader and poet. Unlike drama, which addresses an audience in the first instance, the Sonnets seem designed to be read in solitude. The world they generate remains self-contained: we are never addressed directly. Instead, the poems position the reader in different ways. Sometimes it is as if we have access to a private journal, where the poet reflects on the situation, while the object of desire is identified in the third person: ‘Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, / That Time will come and take my love away’ (sonnet 64); ‘And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare’ (sonnet 130). More often, the reader stands in for the addressee, occupying the second-person place of the beloved, so that it is as if we take the full force of the text’s distinct pleas, complaints or accusations, though without ever mistaking ourselves for their object: ‘O learn to read what silent love hath writ’ (sonnet 23); ‘In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds’ (sonnet 131). At other times it is as if the poet begins by communing with himself, and then turns his attention to the beloved, placing the reader as privy to a written message to the addressee, which is the text itself: ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past, / I sigh . . . / But if the while I think on thee (dear friend) / All losses are restored, and sorrows end’ (sonnet 30). By this means, even while the details remain elusive, the Sonnets create the impression of figures so palpable that they must be real. Drawing especially on strategies developed in Astrophil and Stella, Shakespeare the dramatist constructs the illusion of dialogue, though he rarely reproduces it in his sonnets in the manner of Sidney. Instead, any number of the poems begin in the middle of the story, seeming to refer back to an incident or an utterance that poet and addressee can be expected to remember: ‘No more be grieved at that which thou hast done’ (sonnet 35); ‘Alas ’tis true, I have gone here and there’ (sonnet 110); ‘O call not me to justify the wrong / That thy unkindness lays upon my heart’ (sonnet 139). In this way the Sonnets gesture towards an apparently known and therefore seemingly knowable context, shared between the characters they depict. But the circumstances are very rarely specified,31 and this is part of the tease that enlists the reader’s desire in the production of a narrative that would hold together the individual lyrics. Sonnet 36 reluctantly concedes that the lovers must separate, lest the poet’s guilt should shame the beloved. What is this guilt and why would its disclosure entail dishonour? The situation the poem invokes is not made clear; nor is it intelligible by reference to the existing conventions.32 In consequence, the knowledge that the text does not provide seems to solicit the invention of a story to explain the allusion. In some versions this traces a consistent psychological development in the

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relationships; in others it means naming the historical protagonists. Either way, narrative comes to stand in for the missing content. A certain circularity emerges here, however: the conjectural stories interpretation invokes depend on interpretation in the first instance. When sonnet 58 begins, ‘That god forbid, that made me first your slave, / I should in thought control your times of pleasure’, is this an acknowledgement of total submission in the manner of the courtly lover, a due recognition of a difference in rank between the public playwright and his aristocratic friend, or a sarcastic retort in the course of a lovers’ quarrel?33 Different readers form different opinions, constructing distinct narratives on the basis of their readings. These stories in turn affect the interpretation of other poems. The next sonnet discusses whether former ages could have known an image to equal the friend’s. It concludes, ‘O, sure I am the wits of former days / To subjects worse have given admiring praise’ (sonnet 59). In isolation, this seems to say that ancient panegyrics never depicted the young man’s equal. Depending on how they interpret sonnet 58, however, some commentators prefer to reverse the meaning: ‘I am sure they praised (even) worse people’.34 The narrative critics produce influences their reading of each sonnet; at the same time, one sonnet bleeds into another, so that an assumption about its place in the sequence affects the understanding of its ambiguities. If, as I have suggested, the Sonnets defer the addressees they simultaneously do so much to make present, and at the same time withhold the immediate contexts they seem to take for granted, they also tantalise with their own linguistic opacity. Even discounting the problems of punctuation and the editorial questions prompted by the quarto text of 1609, the Sonnets are hard to read: densely argued, polysemous and unpredictable, at times they all but defeat the ingenuity of successive commentators. Any amount of analysis has been brought to bear on Sonnet 94 (‘They that have power to hurt’) but without, as far as I can see, resolving its difficulties.35 Sonnet 116, by contrast, appears transparent: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments’. But what exactly is the force of ‘admit’ here? Coming at the beginning of the second line, the word seems to attract attention, not least because it does not appear in the marriage service that is so clearly cited. Does the poem say, ‘Let me not concede that there are any obstacles’, or ‘Let me not acknowledge the obstacles that exist’? On the first reading, the rest of the sonnet celebrates love’s constancy; on the second, the affirmations of eternal fidelity are overtly utopian, pious hopes rather than convictions. Perhaps only a nuance separates the two versions, but the first interpretation picks out love’s triumph over change, while the second dwells on the impediments to constancy: ‘alteration’, removal, ‘tempests’, time’s ‘bending sickle’. Ironically, the following sonnet does admit to all the alterations sonnet 116 condemns and in precisely the terms the previous poem denies.36 Even sonnet 144, where

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the contrast between two loves, of comfort and despair, seems so straightforward, can be read in radically different ways.37 In these instances one reading may seem more plausible than another, but alternatives cannot be ruled out entirely. Meanwhile, in the wake of queer theory, the most disputed text has surely been sonnet 20, addressed to the ‘master mistress’. Nature, the conceit declares, intended the young man to be a woman but, falling (homoerotically) in love with her own creation, she cheated the poet of his ‘love’s use’: And by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

Does this mean what it seems to say, that the relationship with the young man is not a sexual one? Helen Vendler thinks so.38 Or should we follow Bruce Smith in speculating that the apparent denial of sexual interest might actually be an avowal of it? If the prick is not to the poet’s purpose, ‘Does he find other parts of the beloved’s anatomy more commodious?’, Smith wonders.39 Stephen Orgel ingeniously proposes that ‘women’s pleasure’ could mean an ‘ability to take pleasure as women do’, if the ‘But’ of the couplet is seen as reversing the previous argument.40 Katherine Duncan-Jones, meanwhile, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, proffers the possibility that, since ‘nothing’ means vagina, the one thing that Nature added is precisely ‘to my purpose’ as equivalent to female genitalia. She suggests that, while the sonnet can be read as renouncing sex, it might equally imply the exact opposite, on the grounds that ‘its naivety is too simple to be believed’.41 To all this several editors add that ‘use’ as usury is elsewhere associated specifically with breeding; it can mean the interest generated by capital.42 Love’s use, allotted to women, might then be read as the production of children, with no commitment either way as to the practice of the love the poet desires for his own. More elaborate queer readings of the first 126 sonnets depend heavily on the identification of double entendres.43 The majority of these were very thoroughly uncovered in the last days of New Criticism by Stephen Booth, whose edition finds sex whenever it looks closely – which is most of the time. Booth is inclined to see the sexual meanings as ‘latent’ and does not commit himself on the question of their implications for the nature of the relationship. Later commentators have been less reluctant to draw inferences. But puns are elusive quantities. When is a homonym an innuendo, and when does an innuendo reveal the unequivocal truth? ‘Prick’ in sonnet 20, for example, evidently has two meanings: to select from a list and to equip with a penis. But is ‘nothing’ really a pun, as Sedgwick suggests it might be? And is ‘use’

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another, as others conjecture it could be? More important, if we select an alternative meaning at the expense of the obvious one, are we not precisely denying the double entendre its doubleness? If we are right to find what Roman Jakobson called ‘the co-presence of a sublime and a crude meaning within the same words’, we are surely not at the same time right to opt for the crude meaning as the true one, to the exclusion of the first? Such a critical practice treats poems as cryptograms and criticism as code-breaking.44 In the case of ‘prick’ the two meanings converge: Nature, the word indicates, selected you for the addition of one thing, and that thing was a penis. Since ‘thing’ already carries this meaning in the period, interpretation does not require us to choose the sexual meaning at the cost of the other. But ‘nothing’, to revert to that example for the sake of argument, disperses meaning in opposite directions: either the additional thing is irrelevant to my purposes, or the additional thing, as equivalent to the vagina, is exactly what I want. To opt for one of these meanings is to exclude the other. My own view is that here too the issue is undecidable. In other words, sonnet 20 does not reveal what some of its readers most want to know. Instead, it wittily equivocates, and the answer to the question whether we are to understand that a homoerotic partnership is or would eventually be sexually consummated joins the list of deferred meanings that make of the Sonnets such an object of desire for their readers. In Figuring Sex between Men Paul Hammond gives a brilliant account of the way the texts invite sexual interpretations while at the same time placing them under erasure, so that ‘a term is written and then cancelled, but remains legible through the cancellation’.45 The Sonnets, he demonstrates, suggest, revise, modify, redescribe, and reverse what they seem to have proposed, often within the same fourteen-line space. Figures of desire and possession repeatedly run counter to the poem’s argument in ways that tease us into conclusions contradicted elsewhere. Although in the end Hammond’s case is that equivocation serves to ward off disapproval of a same-sex relationship, he also maintains that ‘Indirections and refusals to disclose are intrinsic to the mode of the Sonnets, and it would be a fundamental misreading to impose a clarity on the careful obscurities of Shakespeare’s text’.46 In the event, however, such fundamental misreading evidently remains all but irresistible. Again and again, critics have rewritten the Sonnets in the image of their own desire: for a love story, to identify the characters as historical figures, to unmask misogyny or vindicate homosexuality. And at every stage of this process, critical mastery entails an act of aggression in terms of a decision at the expense of the undecidability that prompted it. Out of love for the texts, readers long to resolve the uncertainties the Sonnets seductively offer, but we enter into competition with the poems themselves, betraying antagonism whenever we supply what they withhold, correct and complete

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them, filling their interstices with definitive meanings and writing in what they leave unwritten. In other words, we do violence to the texts when commentary banishes enigma to secure victory for the critic. In their reticence Shakespeare’s Sonnets inscribe yet another paradox. They need us as their guarantee of immortality: ‘Your monument shall be my gentle verse, / Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read’ (sonnet 81); ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ (sonnet 18). At the same time, they keep us at bay, fend off in the last instance the curiosity they do so much to enlist. Their equivocation is not wilful, nor, in my view, is it wholly attributable to a judicious self-censorship. On the contrary, love is not only personal, intimate, and private; its antinomies are also ultimately beyond the reach of the signifier. Moreover, at the heart of these texts there resides a necessary absence, an enigma that marks the place of the lost object beyond the individual beloved, and this mystery, as the cause of their textual desirability, brings readers back to the Sonnets again and again. Perhaps, indeed, this single feature is the best guarantee of immortality they could possibly offer.

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6 P e t e r Q u i n c e ’s B a l l a d : M e m o r y, P s y c h o a n a ly s i s , H i s t o r y a n d A

M i d s u m m e r N i g h t ’s D r e a m

I When in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Nick Bottom wakes from his night of passion with the Queen of the Fairies, he seeks a quotation that will do justice to what has happened, but the weaver has difficulty in remembering the passage accurately. His reinscription of the biblical original has its own value in the context, however. ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’ (4.1.211–14).1 Love is inevitably citational – but not necessarily less creative for that. In The Rose and the Ring, Thackeray’s fairytale of 1854, the sadly unprepossessing, plump Prince Bulbo falls in love with Betsinda, and in this romantic condition Bulbo also looks for appropriate literary references. ‘ “I never saw” ’, he says, ‘ “a young gazelle to glad me with its dark blue eye that had eyes like thine. Thou nymph of beauty, take, take this young heart. A truer never did itself sustain within a soldier’s waistcoat.” ’2 The amorous prince here misquotes not only Shakespeare’s Othello (5.2.260–1) but also the Irish poet Thomas Moore, whose gazelle had already provided considerable entertainment thirteen years earlier in The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens’s text in turn shows the verbose and villainous Dick Swiveller also misquoting Moore in the process of indicating his own unrequited passion for the perfidious Sophy Wackles: ‘It has always been the same with me,’ said Mr Swiveller, ‘always. . . . I never nursed a dear Gazelle, to glad me with its soft black eye, but when it came to know me well, and love me, it was sure to marry a market-gardener.’3

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Comic characters in love, we are invited to understand, are impelled, like so many lovers, to formulate their passion in poetry but, unpoetic in themselves, they have direct recourse to a textual memory, and declare their love, however inaccurately, in quotation marks. Bottom’s name, in conjunction with his transformation into an ass, invites the audience to associate him with the least poetic aspects of life. And yet even as a donkey, his misquotation indicates, the handicraft man has been touched by something special but mysterious, a power he finds unusually hard to name. In quest of a way of talking about a half-remembered sublimity, Bottom reaches for the language of the Bible at its most visionary, St Paul’s account of the future glory that God has prepared for human beings (1 Corinthians 2: 9). But it is not only comic characters who are given to citation. For all its familiarity, the experience of love cannot be made present in words, and the impulse to represent it often draws on a remembered fragment of culture that has once evoked a corresponding intensity and therefore serves to define and memorialise the moment. The quotation does not recover the experience, but it takes its place, even if in the process something slips away. What makes Bulbo, Dick Swiveller and Bottom comic here is not so much that they quote, but that they get it wrong. Shakespearean lovers we are invited to take much more seriously also communicate with each other and with the audience by reference to common memories, shared precisely because they are culturally produced and textually transmitted. Lorenzo and Jessica, newly married and alone by moonlight in the fairytale castle at Belmont, seek a mutual romantic idiom by reference to the classic love stories of the past: Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida, Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe, Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas (The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.1–12). It is as if love sets out to transform the quotidian and transfigure the banal by borrowing for the lovers the romance which belongs to their heroic counterparts. And what invests with grandeur those who are heroic already? The answer, of course, is their inscription in cultural artefacts, a process which commonly includes a similar regress of textual allusion. Even Cleopatra derives something of her cosmic desirability from ‘o’erpicturing’ the famous painting of Venus by Apelles (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.200), as well as from her own allusion to Virgil’s epic: Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand, And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze. Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops, And all the haunt be ours. (4.14.51–4)

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The reference to the Aeneid explicitly appropriates for Antony and Cleopatra in death the heroism of these illustrious predecessors, and confirms them as duly tragic in the process. Heroic stature, like love, is commonly citational. Bottom, meanwhile, perhaps at his most comic as he wakes from his night with Titania, is at the same time momentarily transfigured, paradoxically heroic too in his effort to name what cannot be made present. Bottom’s misquotation is not, after all, entirely absurd as an account of his personal midsummer night. The transformation of the biblical text acknowledges in the character of a mortal’s encounter with fairy love a certain confounding of the senses, hearing and sight, touch and taste, a blurring of the conventional boundaries between mind and body, and above all a radical unfamiliarity, a strange unearthliness which baffles both experience and description: ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’. What happened cannot be reported because it can’t be specified. Even its status as illusion or reality is unclear: was it a vision, or a waking dream? Bottom is not sure. ‘I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.204–6). The play, of course, delicately evades the question of what actually went on, since whatever it is takes place offstage, in Titania’s bower (3.1.197).4 The ass, preoccupied by oats and hay, as well as a desire to be scratched, apparently made very little of the event until afterwards when, lodged precariously in the memory, it is unable to be made fully present, accounted for, recorded, textualised. For Bottom now, waking up, it is not therefore so much a question of recovering lost presence as of producing something new which is nonetheless already recognisable, of making sense of an event. Bottom refuses to accept defeat (when did he ever?). The figure who organises the rehearsals of Pyramus and Thisbe, largely directs the production and longs to play most of the parts, certainly doesn’t give way when confronted by a mere problem of representation. Love in the Renaissance seeks textual inscription. When Berowne and his companions fall in love they write sonnets: that is how they betray themselves to one another. Orlando’s love poems deface trees in the forest of Arden. Bottom’s story presses to be written, and if the weaver cannot do it himself, Peter Quince, probably the author of the mechanicals’ play and certainly of the new prologue (3.1.17–24), is most obviously the person for the job. ‘I will get Peter Quince to write a [ballad]5 of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream,” because it hath no bottom’ (4.1.214–16).

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II The play here invokes an elusive dream of mortality intertwined with the fantastic, bottomless because ungrounded, and bottomless because at the same time unfathomably profound,6 at once trivial and significant; and in this dream of desire fulfilled a later critic might be forgiven for finding anticipations of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of dreams as wishfulfilment precisely releases the dream from any grounding in events, whether as re-enactment of the past or as prediction of the future, and at the same time invests it with profound importance because it speaks on behalf of a bottomless unconscious. For psychoanalysis, dreams recall a desire that is present in the memory, whether or not it was ever realised. ‘Let us not forget psychoanalysis’, urged Jacques Derrida, whose own relationship with psychoanalytic theory has been at best equivocal and, especially in relation to the work of Jacques Lacan, sometimes uncharacteristically vituperative.7 Derrida’s point in urging its importance is not that psychoanalysis can give us the truth of ourselves or our literature, but more simply – and more radically – that ‘the logic of the unconscious’ calls into question any smug reliance on ‘the authority of consciousness, of the ego, of the reflexive cogito, of an “I think” without pain or paradox’.8 Freudian psychoanalysis has its silly side: its narratives of infantile stages and arrested adults, its unconscious full of demons, its palpable anti-feminism. But at the same time it shows us to be other than we are. It brings to our attention those unexpected identities that intrude unpredictably on the rational, responsible, Enlightened subject, which always acts in accordance with common sense and its own best interests. Psychoanalysis invites us to remember what complacency proposes that we should forget. Bottom turns to the Bible in his quest for inscription. Freud too was not above citing the Bible when it came to explaining dreams. The book of Isaiah, he acknowledged, had momentarily anticipated his theory that in sleep imagination may gratify real desires; in his own dreams he identifies himself more than once as Joseph, who was ‘famous in the Bible as an interpreter of dreams’.9 Citations from Shakespeare are still more pervasive. The irrationality of dreams may not be without method, Freud argues, like the madness of ‘the Danish prince on whom this shrewd judgement was passed’.10 In one of his dreams he plays the part of Brutus in Julius Caesar; another reminds him of a scene from 3 Henry VI.11 Like the fictional lovers, the founder of psychoanalysis draws on a cultural memory when he comes to name what is elusive, here those other imperatives that consciousness prefers to conceal. While he traces most dreams to unconscious sexual desire, Freud’s own dreams repeatedly invest him with a more heroic identity, as his work

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disarmingly makes clear. An altogether less vulnerable psychoanalyst emerges in the dream of Irma’s injection, the very first example he recounts in The Interpretation of Dreams. Five years earlier, in 1895, Freud had published with Josef Breuer the first major work on psychoanalysis, Studies on Hysteria, effectively launching the new science. That year, he tells us, he was using his fledgling analytic technique to treat a young woman who was a friend of the family, a state of affairs which inevitably put increased pressure on the analyst to succeed. The treatment was only partially successful, however: while Irma’s condition had improved markedly, she had not lost all her symptoms, as a junior colleague did not scruple to indicate. Nettled, Freud determined to justify himself to a higher authority, Dr M. He wrote out the history of her case for the purpose and that night he dreamed of Irma. Her condition, it seemed in the dream, had an organic cause after all: Dr M. confirmed Freud’s diagnosis, though not without introducing some elementary errors of his own. Moreover, her illness had been brought on by an injection with a dirty syringe, administered by the younger doctor who had seemed to Freud so officious. Dissatisfied in reality with his failure to restore Irma to perfect health, in his dream Freud is absolved of all responsibility for his imperfect success – and is shown to be a good deal more committed and conscientious than either of his colleagues into the bargain. In other words, his dream shows the proponent of this new and controversial science as unassailable, immune to the human weaknesses that impose limitations on other medical practitioners.12 III This altered self-image becomes apparent to Freud as he brings his dream to light, narrativises it with a view to locating the experience in his own history, and subjects the experience to analysis. Though Freud might not be grateful for the comparison, Bottom, whose main preoccupations in Titania’s bower were confined to his own physical wellbeing, also glimpses an alternative identification, or perhaps more than one, when he attempts to put his midsummer night’s dream on record: ‘Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had – but man is but a patch’d fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.207–11). In most modern productions the actor here scratches his head and feels gingerly for the missing ears. Bottom’s metamorphosis cannot be named overtly, consciously, and yet of course it reappears in what sounds suspiciously like a sixteenth-century version of a Freudian slip: ‘Man is but an ass, if he go about [t’] expound this dream’ (4.1.206–7). But by nudging the audience towards the obvious and the absurd, perhaps modern productions miss another dimension of meaning here, a plurality which vindicates the visionary misquotation from St Paul. Bottom

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is presented from the very beginning as eager to appropriate and inhabit alternative identities. ‘What is Pyramus?’ he wants to know, when offered the part, ‘a lover, or a tyrant?’ A lover is fine: ‘That will ask some tears in the true performing of it. If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes. I will move storms’. And yet he is reluctant to let go of the tyrant: ‘I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in . . .’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.2.22–30). He also offers to play Thisbe ‘in a monstrous little voice’ and, of course, the lion as well: ‘I will roar, that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me. I will roar, that I will make the Duke say, “Let him roar again; let him roar again” ’ (1.2.52; 70–3). Bottom has, we might say, an appetite for identities. A reading in quest of character interprets this as bombastic selfimportance, swaggering complacency. But if we examine the impulse to play so many parts in textual rather than psychological terms, does it not also betray a self-dissatisfaction, a discontent with the limitations of any given identification? (What is an actor in Shakespeare but a walking shadow, a figure without substance, such stuff as dreams are made on?) Appropriately enough, Bottom does indeed take on a new identity when he becomes an ass, and finds he longs for a bottle of hay and a handful or two of dried peas. But Titania promises something quite different when she tells him: I am a spirit of no common rate; The summer still doth tend upon my state; And I do love thee; therefore go with me. I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee; And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep, And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep. And I will purge thy mortal grossness so, That thou shalt like an aery spirit go. (3.1.154–61)

Only the fairies, it must have seemed, could make it possible to escape the limits confronting a sixteenth-century weaver, a tradesman, and thus a member of a less than privileged class in Elizabethan England. Perhaps this is the possibility that Bottom encounters in what afterwards can only seem a dream: he glimpses a way of life that is both rich and romantic, and to experience it an identity that is more than mortal, purged of grossness, beyond the limitations of human life itself. No wonder a version of negative theology seems the most appropriate formula for a person who has for one night exceeded the human condition: ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.’

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In our own epoch Europe too has glimpsed a range of possible identifications, some more asinine than others, some rebellious, luxurious or sublime. And these visions or hallucinations have left their imprint on our history. Only a theory that holds us to be other than we are can hope to do justice to our repeated impulses in the course of the last century to swerve from a consensual progress towards the utopia of social democracy, consumer culture and the global market. There is an understandable desire to forget these deviations, to obliterate those aspects of our immediate past which constitute an embarrassment in the present. But my own view is that we should on the contrary remember them, even though we may not be able to do it accurately. For our own cultural health, we need, I think, to take account of the dreams, whether we see them as hallucinations or visions, which haunted Europe in 1917 and 1933, and of the discontents that motivated them, as well as the disasters that ensued. It is not a question of recovering the past, still less reenacting it, but rather of making sense of our own history from the perspective of the present, in the hope of making a difference in the future. What we remember of Europe’s past must not be a destiny, but it might constitute a critique. The philosophy of the Enlightenment, with its commitment to the unified subject, the authority of consciousness and universal reason, does not provide an appropriate framework for such a narrative, which would be a history of alterities. In the play it is Theseus who anticipates the Enlightenment’s readiness to exclude the irrational, the arbitrary and the paradoxical, everything, in fact which refuses to conform to the requirement for clear concepts transmitted in plain prose: I never may believe These antic fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. (5.1.2–8)

The play, of course, knows better: imagination signifies; love and poetry imagine identity transformed and a world other than it is. The fairies have meaning, though not necessarily substance; ‘magic’ has sense, if not reference.13 At the end of the play these supernatural creatures, inhabitants of the forest and the night, take over the sleeping palace of Theseus. It is midnight,

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And we fairies, that do run By the triple Hecat’s team From the presence of the sun, Following darkness like a dream, Now are frolic. (5.1.383–7)

The arbitrary and the irrational invade the city, the household, the seat of government. How could it be otherwise? This is, after all, a royal wedding night. The law of succession that underwrites the dynastic institution of monarchy paradoxically depends on the irrationality of desire, though the play is not so crude as to say so without immediately casting doubt on its own proposition: If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber’d here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream. (5.1.423–8)

Equivocal to the end about its own status as truth, the play constitutes the inscription of an alterity, a dream, as its title makes clear, no more – but also no less. Taken seriously, Bottom’s vision exceeds any account of what it is to be human that insists on ‘the authority of consciousness, of the ego, of the reflexive cogito’; Shakespeare’s fairy story indicates that human beings are both more and less than Descartes was shortly to – dream. V Bottom wants his story documented in Peter Quince’s ballad. What are the chances that Peter Quince will get it right, will tell the truth of this plural, over-determined dream? What, indeed, are the chances that Bottom can give him accurate material to work on? He seems, after all, to have only the haziest idea of what happened. Freud addresses the theoretical problem of the representation of dreams at the beginning of Chapter 7 of the Interpretation. The scientificity of his theory depends, after all, on precisely this problem of accuracy. ‘It has been objected on more than one occasion that we have in fact no knowledge of the dreams that we set out to interpret, or, speaking more correctly, that we have no guarantee that we know them as they actually occurred.’14 Are dreams really as indistinct and fragmentary as accounts of them imply? How do we know that the analysand tells the truth, remembers

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the dream correctly, does not inadvertently forget crucial elements, or does not improvise in the interests of consistency, where no coherence existed in the dream itself? We don’t. Freud concedes the argument at once: ‘It is true that we distort dreams in attempting to reproduce them.’15 This distortion is inevitable when unconscious wishes enter into consciousness. But the editorial modifications that take place in the process are far from arbitrary. Instead, ‘They are associatively linked to the material which they replace, and serve to show us the way to that material, which may in its turn be a substitute for something else’.16 The inevitable hesitations and transformations that appear in the representation of the dream are an effect of the censorship of wishes forbidden entry into conscious thought. We forget our dreams to the degree that they threaten the idea we have of ourselves. Contrary to popular belief, and contrary, indeed, to much that Freud himself says elsewhere, the material of psychoanalysis is precisely representation, the text or script of the analysand, though not, of course, what that script intends to say. Commenting on Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection, Jacques Lacan stresses the textuality of the material we have, urging his fellow-analysts to follow his direction in relation to their own patients: ‘please give more attention to the text than to the psychology of the author – the entire orientation of my teaching is that’.17 The edited text of the represented dream replaces the dream itself, which in turn replaces something else. There is no access to a prior and originating presence, only an infinite regress. ‘We thus gradually arrive at a notion of the unconscious as a movement of translation without an original, as a process of representation without a “represented,” something that “logically” speaking, is unthinkable – whether as a substratum or as a substance’.18 A dream memorialises a wish that refers to the past, but exists only in a current moment and, like love, cannot be made present in words. The unconscious is thus not a thing. It is not, as Derrida puts it, ‘a hidden, virtual, and potential self-presence. It is differed’, he goes on, – which no doubt means that it is woven out of differences, but also that it sends out, that it delegates, representatives or proxies; but there is no chance that the mandating subject ‘exists’ somewhere, that it is present or is ‘itself’, and still less chance that it will become conscious.

On the contrary, the unconscious is no more than what Derrida calls a ‘radical alterity’. With the alterity of the ‘unconscious,’ we have to deal not with the horizons of modified presents – past or future – but with a ‘past’ that has never been

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nor ever will be present, whose ‘future’ will never be produced or reproduced in the form of presence.19

This radical alterity, which is not a thing, nevertheless destabilises our control of the meanings we invoke, and in this respect psychoanalysis is only a sophisticated instance of all interpretation, just as dreaming is a common instance of all inscription. The dream is a new text, and its representation is another – a transformation that produces, not a recovery that reproduces. Bottom’s memory of his dream is indistinct and fragmentary: ‘Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had – but man is but a [patch’d] fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had.’ And in his account of it he misremembers the quotation. But he adapts the biblical text in a way that makes, I have suggested, a new sense, just as Cleopatra transforms Virgil, and Berowne transforms Petrarch. As representations, all stories, all histories, modify an obscure and fragmentary past. Recovery of the truth of the experience is not an option. We can, however, hope to make a new sense, which brings what is indistinct to light. VI The written record of Bottom’s dream will be a ballad. How else but in poetry could the vision of this lunatic-lover be recorded? Peter Quince’s ballad will have no pretensions to scientific accuracy. But if he can’t tell the truth, does it follow that it does not matter how he recounts the story, that he has no responsibilities as a historian? The text is not, of course, extant. As far as we know, it was never written. But undeterred by this difficulty, I want to speculate about the nature of Peter Quince’s ballad. While he will need to pay attention to the presentation of such an extraordinary event, Quince evidently cannot count on historical accuracy on the basis of Bottom’s oral narrative. Suppose, then, that in the absence of straightforward facts and clear explanations, he were to draw, whether deliberately or not, on an existing genre to make sense of Bottom’s experience. How else, after all, do we learn to narrate, to link heroes and villains with their appropriate modes of action, or names with values, unless by reference to the stories we remember, or half-remember? As generic models for his own text, Quince might turn to those ballads where a mortal man is spirited away by the queen of the fairies: ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, based on the fifteenth-century romance of Thomas of Erceldoune, or ‘Tam Lin’, first mentioned in 1549 and licensed in 1558. Citational in this sense, Peter Quince’s ballad might invest Bottom’s tale with a degree of mystery quite distinct from the ass’s own more mundane concerns at the time.

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And yet he might by that very means be more faithful, even so, to that element his source cannot name in his subsequent account. At any rate, Bottom’s story differs from theirs and, in consequence, Peter Quince’s ballad will not merely reproduce his models. On the contrary, he will modify the tradition by misquoting it. In telling a story, writing in a specific genre, he cannot help drawing on cultural memory, the existing repertoire of narrative and poetic strategies. But it is likely that he will adapt the material he invokes, transforming it in the process. We necessarily misquote when we appropriate other texts to do what justice we can to a new story. History, too, draws on existing fictional genres, as Hayden White has so cogently argued,20 but this does not inevitably falsify it. The fact that our histories cannot tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth does not mean that they are pure fiction or that we are entitled as historians to make things up. For us the non-presence of truth does not abrogate the notion of falsehood, or legitimise irresponsibility. It does not do away with the scholarly virtues of textual rigour or fidelity to the documents. VII Both the ballads I have mentioned were collected in the eighteenth century, though they are much older in origin. This originating moment, the ur-text, a prior presence is, appropriately enough, not available. But one of the features that characterises the ballads as archaic for a culture accustomed to the novel is their common oscillation of tenses between past and present. This invocation of a historic present deviates from the novelistic convention of narration in the past tense and invests the ballads with an oddly timeless quality, making them appear at once seductively ancient and insistently immediate. It transgresses the distinction we have come to take for granted between the past, over and complete, and a present, which is now. Moreover, Tam Lin still haunts Carterhaugh, the opening verse of his ballad records; the prophecies of Thomas the Rhymer continued to come true long after his death. The past subsists into the present and continues to resonate in the future. Psychoanalysis also disturbs the temporal relations that seem so clear to common sense. In Freud’s account, the past does not merely influence the current moment: on the contrary, it inhabits the present, in the compulsion to repeat long-buried feelings of love and hate which determines everyday relationships, as well as the analytic transference.21 Moreover, the past accounts for the future. This same persistently repeated past necessarily returns, and thus constitutes a prediction for the future, unless analysis makes sense of it, brings it into a new context and, in the course of the transference, alters its meaning, changing the future in the process. Analysis realigns the repressed

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feelings, integrates their traces into the symbolic order and makes a different future possible.22 At the same time, the analysand’s account of the past is not unmotivated: the narrative betrays unconscious wishes and expectations for the future. As desiring creatures, we cannot resist telling it like we want it to be. Bottom dreamed of wealth and immortality. Only slightly more realistically, in 1895 Freud dreamed of an authority and a standing he did not yet possess. Five years later he would write to his friend Wilhelm Fliess to say that he had revisited the house where he had the dream of Irma’s injection. ‘Do you suppose’, he asked his friend, that some day a marble tablet might be placed there to commemorate the occasion when ‘the Secret of Dreams was revealed to Dr Sigm. Freud’? There was an element of irony here: ‘At the moment’, he added, ‘there seems little prospect of it’.23 But who is to say that irony does not mask a genuine wish? Certainly not Freud. In the mean time, to help accomplish his ambition, there is work to be done. The wished-for future reorders the present as the desired outcome motivates action, whether or not that outcome is ever achieved in the terms that initially defined it. ‘The history of an impassioned individual life carries with it, from one watershed moment to the next, a history of the wished-for states by which that life was propelled’.24 In all these ways psychoanalysis rejects a linear notion of time which distinguishes rigidly between past, present and future. Peter Quince’s ballad will be a narrative of the trace of a past. It may make better sense than Bottom can of a moment of intensity, but it will also integrate this moment into a new context that will alter its meaning, and change the future into the bargain. ‘I will get Peter Quince to write a [ballad] of this dream . . . and I will sing it at the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.214–19). These lines are notoriously cryptic. What play? Pyramus and Thisbe? Whose death? Thisbe’s? And yet it hardly matters. In any case, Peter Quince’s ballad will represent an account of a past that it cannot fail to redefine and restructure. At the same time, this inscription of the past is to be motivated by a wish for the future, specifically the pleasure of an aristocratic audience and the greater glory of Bottom the actor. In the mean time, and to that same end, there is a play to be performed. The linear time that unscrambles past, present and future is affirmed by the Enlightenment and yet, paradoxically, the implied or repressed tense of Enlightenment history is not the past but the future. Its account (dream?) of the past is motivated by a wish. To the degree that this is a history of progress, development or emancipation, it moves towards a future to be accomplished, organises its material in the light of an Idea which must be realised.25 ‘To be concluded’ is the implicit promise of such a narrative. It is fundamentalist history, by contrast, that genuinely employs the perfect

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tense. Fundamentalism, which includes National Socialism, looks back to a completed founding moment and its project is the reinstatement of an original, ancestral purity. ‘Once upon a time’, it begins. But the tense of our postmodern history is, I want to propose, the future anterior. Its object is to ascertain what will have been the case, what will have been the meanings, the regularities, the possibilities for change. ‘To be continued’ is its modest undertaking, but its purpose is to intervene, to put the past to use in influencing what will turn out to have taken place. The future anterior is the tense of psychoanalysis. Analysis attends to what will have been the meaning of the trace of the forgotten past or the potential future that inhabits the present. Lacan considers the psychoanalytic dialogue as a process of production, not recovery – ‘For the function of language is not to inform but to evoke’. And he adds, What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.26

In an exposition of the implications of this pronouncement, Samuel Weber explains that, while psychoanalysis looks back, the analytic past can never be entirely remembered, since it will never have fully taken place. At the same time, psychoanalysis has a future goal, ‘a process of becoming’, even if this cannot be specified in advance.27 Thus, the future anterior entails a conjecture: what will have been the case ‘designates a surmise, a conditional prediction and hence, a proposition bearing upon an uncertain state of affairs’.28 The Enlightenment narrative of progress is ostensibly transparent, true to ‘the facts’. Meanwhile, it knows its own end; the privileged narrator stands outside the information itself, has mapped the field objectively, and predicts, without intervening, the direction of history, as the past moves irresistibly towards this conclusion. For fundamentalism, by contrast, the past is there to be recovered, re-enacted. By contrast with both, the postmodern narrative is hesitant, tentative, unclosed. Its past is indistinct and fragmentary, or incompletely realised. It predicts, but conditionally, since its function is to evoke what may become the case. It thus bears on uncertainty. Moreover, it alludes to the uncompleted past not as the missing contents of its story, but as the unpresentable, the conceivable which cannot be made present. Such presentation is not transparent but opaque, and postmodern history thus shares with art a determination to ‘misquote’ or parody the inherited rules and practices of good writing. As Jean-François Lyotard puts it in his essay, ‘What is Postmodernism?’ The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and text

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have the characters of an event . . . Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).29

Contemporary Europe, I have suggested, is haunted by memories of other identifications, which were in some instances never fully realised. To the degree that they were implemented, both communism and National Socialism cost millions of lives. But an account of the dissatisfactions of which each was a symptom can perhaps be formative for what we are in the process of becoming, and this history remains to be written: not accurately, perhaps, and certainly not completely, but not irresponsibly either, and in a way which is attentive to its own presentation. An identity which exceeds what Europe has been so far may depend on that inscription. VIII These reflections end with the play, and with Oberon’s recollection of the time he heard a mermaid singing. He recounts the event to Puck, who comments briefly, ‘I remember’. Oberon goes on: That very time I saw (but thou could’st not), Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all arm’d. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal throned by [the] west, And loos’d his love-shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts; But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft Quench’d in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon, And the imperial vot’ress passed on, In maiden meditation, fancy-free. Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell. It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound, And maidens call it love-in-idleness. Fetch me that flow’r; the herb I showed 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. (2.1.154–72)

This lyrical passage is a tissue of citations. It draws on a whole range of cultural memories – of Seneca, Golding, Chaucer, Sir Thomas Elyot and Lyly.30 The history of love-in-idleness adapts Ovidian metamorphosis and creates a

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new myth of Queen Elizabeth in the process. Oberon’s story of the past is also an instruction to Puck: it thus evokes what may become the case; and in consequence it constitutes an intervention, producing what by the end of the play will have been the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Its privileged narrator has access to a knowledge not available to Puck, which enables him to make predictions, but Oberon is more like a postmodern than an Enlightenment historian: things don’t go quite as he plans. His narrative thus bears on an uncertain state of affairs. What is more, the passage is self-consciously attentive to its own presentation. Shakespeare, I can’t help thinking, could have taught Peter Quince – and perhaps not only Peter Quince – a thing or two about how to write histories.

chapter

7 The Illusion of Empire: Eliz abethan E x p a n s i o n i s m a n d S h a k e s p e a r e ’s Second Tetralogy

The dying John of Gaunt celebrates England at the beginning of the second tetralogy in a poetic passage justly admired for its rhetoric by later generations, and particularly widely anthologised in the nineteenth century at the height of the British Empire. Gaunt’s patriotic affirmations of English military prowess were evidently taken to indicate the play’s support for the imperial venture. In their context, however, his exhortations, designed to register a contrast with Richard II’s neglect of the realm, sound more like reproach for failure to conquer other countries. Moreover, in other places the histories also call into question the reality – and perhaps the values – of contemporary colonial expansion. Henry V, in particular, casts doubt on the virtues of conquest and at the same time on England’s capacity to keep control of Ireland, its closest existing overseas possession. On this reading, the second tetralogy presents Gaunt’s imperial vision as an illusion, no more than the wistful imaginings of a dying man, and the plays register a certain ambivalence towards empire, alongside a marked anxiety about England’s command of the British Isles. Gaunt’s speech lyrically defines a nation that once was and now ought to be warlike considerably in excess of the requirements of the medieval chivalry characteristic of its fictional moment. ‘That England, that was wont to conquer others’ is not only, we are to understand a ‘seat of Mars’, but also a ‘scept’red isle’, ‘bound in with the triumphant sea’ and ‘Dear for her reputation through the world’ (my emphasis). Of course, the primary advantage of the sea in Gaunt’s account is defensive, like a moat: all just wars are always wars of self-defence. And yet the speech also alludes specifically to the most vigorous form of expansionism practised during its fictional epoch. In their heyday, Gaunt maintains, England’s kings gloriously extended the national 109

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sceptre ‘as far from home . . . / As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry’ (King Richard II, 2.1.40–66).1 The crusades were not exactly synonymous with imperialism, but they were in the sixteenth century its nearest historical analogue. In 1595, the probable date of Richard II, imperial dreams were widely evident. Six years before, Richard Hakluyt, whose Principall Navigations did so much to bring together the spirit of nationalism and an emergent imperialism,2 had boasted on behalf of the nation that in this most famous and peerlesse governement of her most excellent Majesty, her subjects through the speciall assistance, and blessing of God, in searching the most opposite corners and quarters of the world, and to speake plainly, in compassing the vaste globe of the earth more than once, have excelled all the nations and people of the earth.3

Having compassed the earth himself, Sir Francis Drake had already, and for quite understandable reasons, had his portrait painted with his hand lying in a proprietary way on a modest-sized globe.4 And in 1588 his sovereign, not to be outdone by one of her subjects, appeared in a series of ‘Armada’ portraits with her own more elegant fingers resting lightly on the section of the globe which showed America. The world first appeared in royal portraiture in 1579, two years after the publication of John Dee’s General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation. Dee’s book urged the monarch to set about the establishment of a British empire. He laid great stress on the Trojan origins and the Arthurian forebears of the Tudor dynasty, and he assured the queen that she was entitled to lay claim to much of America on the grounds that Florida had formerly been settled by Lord Madoc, who came from North Wales. In the first of the ‘Sieve’ portraits of Elizabeth, painted in 1579, part of a luminous globe is visible behind the queen, and a much more detailed reworking of this portrait in the following year includes a number of other signifiers of empire. This time the globe appears again to reveal a glowing Britain, set like a precious stone in a sea of ships.5 And finally, the ‘Ditchley’ portrait of 1592 shows the sovereign standing on an enlarged map of her realm, itself located on top of the world, to produce a picture that is altogether breathtaking in the audacity of its claim to power.6 In the context of the iconography of imperialism in general, John of Gaunt’s specific allusion to the crusades in Richard II may be understood as more than an invocation of fourteenth-century period flavour, and more even than an allegory in medieval dress of Elizabethan expansionism in general. It might also have been expected to evoke fairly specific oriental (and orientalist) associations in a London audience. From the 1580s onwards, trade with

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the Levant in particular was probably the most profitable of all the increasingly successful sixteenth-century overseas trading ventures. In the City of London the ‘Turkey merchants’ accumulated considerable wealth and influence. If the Levant Company did not take possession of overseas territory or found colonies, the capital and experience it acquired nevertheless became the means to empire, most notably by way of the East India Company. On the other hand, political and social relations with Turkey during this period were unremittingly hostile. The ambassadors, consuls and factors in the Levant all failed on the whole to establish any relationship of trust, or even mutual comprehension, with the Turks. Although they normally dealt with intermediaries, usually of European extraction, the life of an English merchant in the Levant tended to be a short and not a very happy one.7 John of Gaunt’s reference to past triumphs in this part of the world probably had, therefore, a certain resonance for some parts of the London audience of Richard II. So, perhaps, though the romance is of a quite different kind, did Henry V’s promise for the future. In a remarkably patriarchal wooing scene, Henry tells the Princess of France that she will make a good breeder of soldiers. ‘Shall not thou and I’, he continues, ‘compound a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard?’ (King Henry V, 5.2.204–7). But in the space between John of Gaunt’s account of a golden past and Henry’s proposal for a heroic future there is a utopian element, a sense of something unrealised in the present, at least as far as the history plays are concerned, about these dreams of conquest. This is particularly apparent when Henry IV, who has endlessly deferred his promised crusade, dies, ironically, as every student knows, in London at the Palace of Westminster in a chamber named Jerusalem. It is another commonplace of criticism that there is something unrealised about the heroics of Henry V in general. The Choruses, above all, prise open the gap between ‘imaginary puissance’ and the actual capabilities and imperfections of ‘this unworthy scaffold’: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars. (King Henry V, 1. Prologue, 1–6)

The Muse, as well as kingdom, princes and the conquering monarch himself, are here identified as no more than a fiction, a hope, devoutly to be wished.

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Of course, within this self-proclaimed illusion the imperial dream is brilliantly realised by the conquest of France, and on Henry’s triumphant return the citizens of London line the streets, just like the populace of ancient Rome welcoming their imperial Caesar. And in case this reference to empire is not enough to make the point, the Chorus goes on, As, by a lower but loving likelihood, Were now the General of our gracious Empress – As in good time he may – from Ireland coming. (5. Prologue, 29–31)

And yet, while the compliment invests the Earl of Essex with the combined glories of Julius Caesar and Henry V, at the same time the gap, the ‘lower . . . likelihood’, and the conditional form of the utterance (‘As in good time he may’), have the effect of calling the parallel in question. Analogy depends, after all, not only on similarity but also on difference. In consequence, the Chorus can be read as offering ‘our gracious Empress’ little more than a courtesy title and a pious hope for future success. And indeed, in the 1590s, though the resounding rhetoric of the times proclaimed England an imperial power, in practice the British empire was still barely more than a dream. The planned overseas conquests were consistently defeated by government policy, or the lack of it, and in particular by the absence of government funding. The majority of the overseas imperialist ventures of the period were private ones, and a substantial number of them failed sooner or later for lack of state support. Elizabeth was happy to approve and even appropriate successful initiatives after the event, but she rarely invested in anything that could not be guaranteed to produce an immediate cash return in the form of gold, silver or customs duties. In consequence, it was not until the seventeenth century that colonial initiatives in the Caribbean and North America were pursued with lasting effects. By the time Elizabeth died in 1603 her subjects had tried without success to intervene in the Guinea trade; they had tried and failed to break into the Caribbean slave trade; and the North American colony established briefly in Virginia had foundered.8 John of Gaunt’s complaint about Richard II was that he neglected the heroic tradition of foreign conquest in favour of a policy of miserable moneygrubbing. England, once held in with the triumphant sea, is now ‘bound in with shame, / With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds’; ‘That England that was wont to conquer others’ has lost all claim to international glory (King Richard II, 2.1.60–5). In 1601, after the Essex rebellion in London, Queen Elizabeth is reported to have told the antiquary William Lambarde, ‘I am Richard II. knowe ye not that?’9 The precise reference of this cryptic utterance remains conjectural. In the light of the fact that a play called Richard II

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was produced on the eve of Essex’s rebellion, it evokes a range of possible allusions. But lack of expansionist zeal is conceivably one of the parallels that Elizabeth recognised between herself and her hapless predecessor. In practice, the primary imperative of Elizabethan foreign policy was not imperialist at all in the obvious sense of that term. Elizabeth’s main interest was nearer home – in protecting the Channel against both France and Spain,10 and, more urgently still, in keeping a weather eye on Scotland, and retaining control of Ireland as a necessary buffer against invasion from the west. The long-standing Irish resistance, which had become chronic from 1560 onwards, seemed to subside in the 1580s, when a thousand English settlers effected the plantation of Munster. But the problem of suppressing a whole island population with a distinct culture and a separate religion flared up again when trouble broke out in the North, customarily the main area of revolt. Hugh O Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who had been brought over to England to be educated in the hope that he would duly internalise English values, returned to Ulster to civilise the natives and keep them in order. But in 1594 he himself rebelled against the Crown and inaugurated the Nine Years’ War. Munster came into the war in 1598, closely followed by Connacht. In 1599, when the Earl of Essex set out from London to crush rebellion, the fighting had spread to include most of Ireland.11 Act 3, scene 2, at the very heart of Henry V, concerns an Englishman, an Irishman, a Welshman and a Scotsman. The scene is so eccentric, so unmotivated, so apparently unrelated to anything else in the play, that it has prompted the view that it must be a later interpolation, a rather feeble substitute for a comic episode centring on Falstaff and cut out of the play at the last minute to placate the Brooke family, who believed Falstaff to be a caricature of one of their ancestors.12 But while this may be so, afterthoughts also signify, and a mode of criticism which takes psychoanalysis as a model, even if not as a metalanguage, has taught us to look for meanings in unlikely places. It has also taught us that texts are not necessarily monologic, that they betray uncertainties and indecisions even at their most apparently unequivocal moments. On these grounds, it seems worth looking more closely at the scene with the four captains and at its context in the play as a whole. The characterisation of the figures representing the nations which make up the British Isles is consistent, on the whole, with the national stereotypes who were to reappear in an almost endless succession of subsequent British jokes. Captain Jamy, the Scotsman, is as dour as Fluellen is verbose; Macmorris is an irascible Irishman; and Gower, the Englishman, and the only one who displays complete command of the English language, is (of course) calm, rational and authoritative. Figures whose power – or lack of it – is in direct proportion to their mastery of English constitute a recurrent source of comedy in the history plays. We might think of the French Princess Katherine,

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the malapropisms of Mistress Quickly, the Welsh Lady Mortimer, reduced to communicating in looks and kisses, or poor Francis the drawer who, in one of the least engaging scenes in the Henry IV plays, is not allowed to string two words together, apparently to enhance the pleasure of the audience by demonstrating the superior wit of Prince Hal. In comparison with these linguistically deprived figures, Captain Jamy speaks a Scottish dialect that has at least a certain autonomy; Fluellen has serious trouble with his English consonants; and the Irishman is barely coherent – though perfectly intelligible, to the extent that the audience is left in no doubt that he is perpetually on the verge of violence. Macmorris’s main profit from having learnt English seems to be that he knows how to curse. Fluellen in an ill-advised moment mentions his nation, and the Irishman rounds on him (or possibly Ireland: the syntax at this moment is especially unclear) as ‘a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal’ (King Henry V, 3.2.117–18). Macmorris’s only other declared interests are apparently in blowing up the town, slitting throats and cutting off Fluellen’s head. Here, as throughout the play, the Welsh Fluellen is presented as absurd but loyal. The Scots Jamy, meanwhile, is courteous, and slightly distant: Fluellen has a high respect for his valour and his military knowledge. But Macmorris, according at least to Fluellen, is an undisciplined soldier and an ass. Nothing that Macmorris himself says in the course of his brief appearance in the play does anything to contradict Fluellen’s view. And when in the next scene the King threatens the citizens of Harfleur that if his soldiers get out of control, they will rape and murder and spit babies on pikes, Captain Macmorris is the only figure we have seen who appears capable of such conduct. The stereotypes are presumably not accidental. Wales had been fully absorbed legally and administratively by 1547, and this institutional expropriation had taken place without fighting. Whatever their opinions of the English, the Welsh offered no open resistance. In return they were treated with a condescending benevolence. An English comment of 1601 is illuminating: We may daily perceive in our own country wherein our Northern and Welshmen, when they come to London, are very simple and unwary, but afterward by conversing a while and by the experience of other men’s behaviours, they become wonderful wise and judicious.13

Evidently, Fluellen simply needs a longer period of assimilation in London. In view of Elizabeth’s enthusiastic response to John Dee’s account of the part Wales had played in justifying the empire, it was probably tactful to lay stress on Fluellen’s loyalty. John Dee was a Welshman, of course, as indeed, were the Tudors themselves.

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Scotland, meanwhile, was an independent nation. At the same time English, or a dialect of English, was by this time the common language of all but the highlands. There was considerable trade with Scotland; a good many of the Scots were educated in England, especially at Oxford and Cambridge; other Scots moved into England and settled there. As the Scots alliance with France had become more of a burden, Scottish relations with England increasingly improved in consequence of the Reformation. If there was a marked English desire to take possession of Scotland, this was partly because the Scots were thought worthy of a certain grudging respect.14 But Ireland was a totally different case. From the 1520s on colonisation was widely seen as the most effective way of controlling the country, but a series of attempts at settlement had been defeated by local resistance. The Munster plantation of the 1580s was the most ambitious, but this was destroyed in the rebellion of 1598. The Irish were commonly regarded as savages. In the early seventeenth century the colonisers’ accounts of native North American Indian dress and customs frequently invoked the Irish as the most likely object of comparison.15 Irish soldiers constituted a special category. The galloglasses were fulltime professional infantrymen, fiercely armed with powerful swords and long-handled axes. They were supported by kerns, more lightly armed but equally ferocious. According to Spenser in 1596, the Irish soldiery were very valiant, and more able to endure cold, hunger and hardship than most; they were also ‘Cruell and bloddye full of revenge and delightinge in deadlye execucion licentious swearers and blasphemous Comon ravishers of weomen and murderers of Children’.16 Unlike the Welsh Fluellen and the Scots Jamy, Captain Macmorris is seen as a threat not only to the French but also to the stability of the English army. During the Nine Years’ War with Ireland there was some debate about the problem of the professional character of the Irish soldiers. The question was how to employ them in civil society once the rebellion had been crushed, since they were unable and unwilling to do anything but fight. In 1598 it was suggested that they might be employed on behalf of England in the Low Countries or France, but the Privy Council was less than enthusiastic. In 1601 Mountjoy came up with a better idea: perhaps they could be useful in the Indies, where with any luck substantial numbers of them would die. For some reason the proposal was not followed up.17 Perhaps it was thought that the Irish soldiers, for all their courage, were likely to be more trouble than they were worth. Henry V magnificently holds together his motley crew of captains, not to mention the unpromising contingent from Eastcheap, Pistol, Nym and Bardolph. Throughout his French campaign he sweeps all before him and, despite the superior French numbers, achieves a magnificent victory at

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Agincourt. The four nations that make up the British Isles are now shown to be in perfect accord, with England, of course, in control. This fantasy of harmony was to become more powerful after the accession of James I made the union between England and Scotland a serious possibility. King Lear, performed in 1606, emphasises the dangers of a division of Britain into three parts (in this case, Wales, Scotland and England), and to this extent it reads like support for James’s ideal vision of a single kingdom of Great Britain. Leah Marcus argues that Cymbeline, performed two or three years later, can also be understood as a plea for union. Posthumus Leonatus, she suggests, has much in common with the Post Nati, the Scotsmen born after James’s English accession. Like the Scots at the English court, he is poor, heroic and in exile at the court of Cymbeline. Meanwhile, Arviragus and Guiderius have made their home in Wales. When Posthumus, Arviragus and Guiderius are all reunited with Imogen, the ancient kingdom of Britain is unified at last. And then, as Jupiter affirms, ‘shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britain be fortunate and flourish in peace and plenty’ (Cymbeline, 5.4.143). Leah Marcus also argues that both these plays can at the same time be seen as undermining this utopian vision: the arbitrary, fractious Jupiter, whose utterance requires cumbrous translation, and the boisterous, autocratic Lear bear all too close a resemblance to James I, the monarch whose dream it was to command the glorious and imperial unified realm.18 In 1599, however, all this was in the future. Further still into the future, in 1944 Henry V was able in the hands of Laurence Olivier to become a brilliant propaganda film in support of the British war effort. It would not be surprising if for the audience in 1599, too, the play similarly constituted a patriotic fantasy, a recreation of John of Gaunt’s imagined ‘England that was wont to conquer others’, a dream of empire. And perhaps it would be equally unsurprising if, at the same time, the play called that fantasy into question in ways that point forward to the uneasy relationship that still obtains between the separate nations of Great Britain. A major concern of the state in 1599 was the Irish war. Ireland was the only plausible instance of an overseas English colony, and Ireland was in revolt. Irish rebellions were also a concern, marginal but recurrent, of the second tetralogy. It was Richard II’s absence in Ireland that was the occasion of Bolingbroke’s return to challenge his kingship; it was the need of money for the Irish wars that led Richard to seize Bolingbroke’s inheritance, and break the law of succession (King Richard II, I. iv. 61–2); and the final Chorus of Henry V more or less gratuitously hopes that the Earl of Essex will return from his Irish expedition, ‘Bringing rebellion broached on his sword’ (5. Prologue, 32). The image might evoke innumerable medieval representations of Herod’s soldiers with the innocents spitted on their broadswords, except that the connotations seem all wrong. Herod was conventionally the

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representative tyrant, murderer of babies, enemy of Christ, while Essex was apparently a national hero. In 1599 at the height of the Nine Years’ War, the British empire was an illusion everywhere, even, or perhaps especially, in Ireland. It is possible to read Shakespeare’s history plays as participating in this illusion, fostering it in the minds of the audience with racist stereotypes of the Irish and fantasies of conquest, which might be read specifically as displacements of the desire for imperial victory in Ireland.19 It is possible. There has been a tendency for critics on both the left and the right to read Shakespeare’s plays as profoundly conservative, as apologies for monarchy which simultaneously evoke a nostalgia for a vanished feudal way of life. But this analysis is beginning to give way to a new and ‘radical’ Shakespeare, whose texts are more critical of the regime that facilitated them.20 Without necessarily committing ourselves to a specific authorial position, what we can surely argue is that Henry V is notoriously deeply marked by disruptions and uncertainties, and most obviously uncertainties about the legitimacy of the fictional war it portrays. Before Harfleur Henry proudly calls himself a soldier – and then describes the characteristic activities of victorious soldiers, ‘With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass / Your fresh fair virgins and your flow’ring infants’ (3.3.13–14). How, then, is there anything to choose between the King and Macmorris, English soldiers and Irish ones? Henry’s army will behave like Herod’s, massacring French innocents: Your naked infants spitted upon pikes, Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confus’d Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen. (3.3.38–41).

Does Henry at war then resemble Herod, the type of all murdering tyrants? And is there after all an unconscious parallel between Herod and Essex? Meanwhile, Burgundy paints a moving picture from the point of view of the victim of the devastation which is an effect of war (5.2.38–62). But it is probably Williams, the common soldier, who most succinctly poses the moral problem of war, graphically depicting the moment when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp’d off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place’ – some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. (4.1.134–40)

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Henry repudiates all responsibility for the problem, of course. But his rebuttal of the case Williams makes is about whether the soldiers die with a clear conscience: it has nothing to say about the legs and arms and the widows and orphans.21 These ethical problems may be dissipated in the triumphal ending of the play, but they are by no means resolved.22 In order to present his film as a piece of unqualified heroics, Laurence Olivier had to make a number of cuts in the text. At this historical distance, is it perhaps possible to view the play that was performed in 1599 as betraying a certain unease, conceivably in spite of itself, about the specific war that was then in progress, the war to which it alludes, the expedition of the Earl of Essex to Ireland? Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, writing in Alternative Shakespeares, certainly think so: Ireland, they suggest, was the ‘bad conscience’ of both Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Elizabethan state.23 It was also at that historical moment the last illusion of (British) empire. And Ireland itself? Essex failed to subdue it, of course, but he was succeeded by Mountjoy, who eventually implemented the policy of last resort. He created famine all over Ireland by destroying produce and livestock: wherever his troops went they killed the cattle and uprooted the crops. As a result, in 1603 the rebels were at last starved into submission. It was not the first and it would certainly not be the last brutal colonial suppression of the Irish people.

chapter

8 Making Histories Then and Now : Shakespeare from Richard II to

Henry V

I Shakespeare’s history plays are not commonly taken seriously as history.1 Everyone knows that they are not accurate. Much of the material is pure invention, so the argument goes, and even when it is not, both story and characterisation are seen to have been significantly modified in the interests of vital and enduring drama, on the one hand, and the glorification of the Tudor dynasty on the other. Brilliant fictions, and perhaps equally brilliant propaganda, the history plays are understood to be precisely art, not life, imagination and not truth. Is it possible that this account reveals as much about the literary institution and the distinctions it takes for granted as it does about Shakespeare’s texts? History, it assumes, enables us to measure the accuracy of the plays and find them wanting – as truth. At the same time, and paradoxically, imagination throws into relief the dullness of mere empirical fact: art is regarded as dazzling where history is drab. In either case, the term ‘history play’ is something of an oxymoron. History, real history, conventionally stands outside literature as its binary opposite, fact as opposed to fiction. Or it did. Our postmodern condition has called into question that antithesis, and perhaps in the process identified ‘history plays’ as a more sympathetic category for us now. I want, not purely perversely, to read Shakespeare’s second tetralogy as history. II A generation ago, because it was understood to be outside literature, history constituted the final court of appeal for readers of Renaissance texts. 119

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The truth – which is to say, the authority – of an interpretation could be guaranteed by its historical accuracy in the light of our linguistic, cultural, social and political understanding of the period. Scholarship was the mark and criterion of correct reading, and scholarship was synonymous with a grasp of history. A good knowledge of the history of the language was a prerequisite: you had to know what the words of the text meant. And in quest of independent confirmation of the meaning, it was widely held, you also needed to know what the Elizabethans thought. That would ensure that you had accurately identified what they must have had in mind, and this in turn was understood to be the source of meaning. Thereafter, texts were fully intelligible only to those who could pick up the allusions within them to contemporary events, however obscure or allegorical. And the same allusions, duly deciphered, could then be used to date the texts in question. If a certain circularity is evident in this scholarly way with allusions, that is not surprising. It was, indeed, a common feature of scholarship that it was generally brought to bear on the very material that also generated it. Philology was derived, of course, from the study of the documents in the first place, and it was the scholar’s reading of the text that made possible the attribution of meaning to specific words and phrases. The meaning of these words and phrases, recurring elsewhere, then produced more readings of more texts. The possibility of an infinite regress was not raised: no one asked what guaranteed the original readings of the original texts. When it came to cultural history, political predisposition became more evidently part of the hermeneutic circle. F. R. Leavis scrutinised Renaissance poetry for the continuity of felt life in the expressive rhythms of English speech before the fall into writing – and repudiated counter-examples as outside the tradition. E. M. W. Tillyard, meanwhile, read a number of Renaissance plays to find a commitment to order, and discovered in consequence that most of the other plays of the period were also committed to order. And if Tillyard read Renaissance texts for intimations of hierarchy, C. S. Lewis saw the inaugural moment of the Anglican Church wherever he looked. As these examples indicate, the mood was frequently nostalgic. And even when Christopher Hill fluttered their right-wing reading practices by producing a scholarly, incisive and surely irresistible Marxist account of the Renaissance, including Renaissance literature, it was still with the effect of rediscovering for the admiration of the left a long-forgotten heroism, that of our revolutionary predecessors, recording their exemplary quests for change and the dangers they overcame. That the work was produced should not surprise us. But what needs accounting for is its dominance within the institution, at least in Britain, from the early 1950s onwards. In Renaissance studies even New Criticism never quite succeeded in dislodging the respect for history.2 This investment in

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the past was symptomatic of an anxiety about the present, the crisis of the postmodern, precipitated by the Second World War. In the world of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, what price the optimism of the Enlightenment? What purchase now had the conviction that reason and truth must finally prevail? Nostalgia was the quest for an authentic reference point in the past, a moment of plenitude from which to fend off an uncertain modernity,3 and history guaranteed the truth of that moment, its reality and its certainty. History, in each of its manifestations, was the single, unified, unproblematic, extra-textual, extra-discursive real that guaranteed our readings of the texts which constituted its cultural expression. If it was never fully mastered, never absolutely known, if the matter of history was never settled, that meant only that there was more work to be done. But meanwhile, the same postmodern anxiety also produced a contrary symptom, a counter-current in the literary institution, which called into theoretical question all realities, all certainties, and with them the certainty of history. The work of Ferdinand de Saussure, suddenly given a new prominence in the postwar period, put in doubt the possibility of mapping in language the extra-linguistic real. There was, Saussure’s work implied, no sure place beyond language to draw from. History was consequently dethroned: it too was linguistic, precisely a story, a narrative, a reading of the documents, and thus no longer able to constitute a guarantee of our readings of other documents. What, after all, could be invoked to guarantee the truth of history itself? It was Jean-François Lyotard who finally brought it out, who made explicit in The Postmodern Condition exactly what had changed. History itself, the grand narrative, the one story of the single extra-discursive truth, was no longer authoritative. Lyotard defined the postmodern condition as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’,4 and incredulity in consequence towards the knowledges and the competences the grand narratives had traditionally legitimated. The authority of the single historical story, with its heroes and voyages and goals, is, Lyotard argues, deeply political; the knowledge it transmits ‘determines in a single stroke what one must say in order to be heard, what one must listen to in order to speak, and what role one must play (on the scene of diegetic reality) to be the object of a narrative’.5 (Feminism and the Civil Rights Movement could, of course, have told him as much. The history of man, they were well aware, was the history of white men, and licensed their continued dominance.) History as progress, as the grand narrative of emancipation, legitimates the bourgeois state, in which the people have finally won the right to decide, to prescribe norms. This story of increasing freedom represses the role of the economy, not to mention the differences of access to the freedom it proclaims. In the liberal narrative ‘the name of the [single] hero is the people, the sign of legitimacy is the people’s consensus, and their mode of creating norms is deliberation’.6

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If in this respect, however, Lyotard was telling the left what it loved to hear, his analysis of the postmodern also threatened the authority of utopian Marxism, with its corresponding grand narrative of emancipation, the story of successive modes of production culminating in the socialist revolution. This story, Lyotard implied, was no more than the mirror image of liberal history, and no more credible as a guarantee of truth or political correctness. Almost at once Fredric Jameson, who had written the Foreword to the English translation of The Postmodern Condition (displaying in the process a certain unease about his role), published his magisterial denunciation of the postmodern in the New Left Review,7 and Terry Eagleton followed suit in a fluent and witty repudiation of the postmodern which was also, and explicitly, a denunciation of Lyotard himself.8 The source of their anxiety was the depthlessness of the postmodern, its commitment to surfaces, to the signifier, and its consequent ahistoricity, its lack of sense of a substantial past. The alternative to a grand narrative, complete with protagonists representing good and evil, was, they believed, an unfocused eclecticism, and the implications of that for our understanding of the political present were to reduce it, in Jameson’s words, to ‘sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable’.9 Were they right? Is there no alternative to the master-narrative of inexorable and teleological development, but only a (dis)continuous and fragmentary present, a world of infinite differences which are ultimately undifferentiated because they are all confined to the signifying surface of things, Lyotard’s notorious degree zero of the postmodern: ‘one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong’?10 Is there in practice only a leap of faith, a willed commitment to an increasingly implausible narrative on the one hand, or on the other contemporaneity endlessly deferred, the repeated encounter with nothing in particular which must ensue if the fullness of presence is recognised as a chimera? One of the classic locations of the poststructuralist interrogation of history is Jacques Derrida’s essay on Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. Foucault’s book appeared in Paris in 1961, and Derrida’s ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ was first given as a lecture in 1963. What worries Derrida in Foucault’s analysis is the risk of nostalgia, which invades not only the record of a fall from a merry and tolerant Middle Ages but, worse, the assumption of an undifferentiated Greek logos, reason without a contrary. In order to tell the story of the great incarceration of the insane in the seventeenth century, and the division between reason and madness that legitimates it, Foucault seems to posit a lost presence, a world that precedes division. In this sense Madness and Civilization repeats the pattern of other grand narratives, though in Foucault’s project a variant of the Christian story of paradise lost supplants

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the liberal account of progressive emancipation. (Later Foucault’s concept of history as genealogy would engage with the dangers of metanarrative and its quest for origins.11) There was, Derrida insists, no fall and, from the beginnings of Western philosophy, no undifferentiated logos, but only ‘reason divided against itself since the dawn of its Greek origin’.12 Derrida’s account of Western metaphysics might easily be read, therefore, as an affirmation of a single, continuous present, characterised ultimately by division, twenty-five undifferentiated centuries of beleaguered logocentrism. Derrida too tells a story, however, or perhaps a series of stories, and in this sense history reappears in his account of philosophy. But it returns, predictably, not as master-narrative but only as change, not as extra-discursive explanation and guarantee, but as textual difference. If madness has any continuous meaning, Derrida asserts, ‘it simply says the other of each determined form of the logos’. Each determined form is inevitably different, and in these differences it is apparent that philosophy too has a history.13 By establishing a continuity, Derrida argues, he is not defending a single and eternal condition of philosophy. ‘Indeed, it is exactly the contrary that I am proposing. In question is a way of accounting for the very historicity of philosophy’.14 This historicity is altogether more modest, more unassuming than the grand legitimating narratives, something closer, perhaps, to Lyotard’s petits récits, the little stories which are in his analysis ‘the quintessential form of imaginative invention’.15 Lyotard is not opposed to narrative: his own book tells the story of the emergence of the postmodern within modernism. Narration, after all, constructs objects of discourse, ‘objects to be known, decided on, evaluated, transformed . . .’16 How else but by telling new stories are we to challenge the limits of what one must say in order to be heard? But the petits récits lay no claim to extra-discursive authority, to mastery or to the absolutism of truth. They acknowledge the process that Derrida calls ‘differance’ (‘with an a’), by which signifying practice itself necessarily differentiates and distances all that is extra-linguistic.17 They explicitly make meanings, make histories. From the perspective of the literary institution it might be argued that the new historicism has replaced the old historicism of Tillyard and C. S. Lewis in something like the way Lyotard’s short stories supplant the grand narrative. Offering a generalisation which necessarily suppresses important differences, I suggest that at its most brilliant, its most elegant, new historicism is characteristically postmodern. It records no heroic quests, no voyages of discovery, no dangers triumphantly overcome. On the contrary, its expeditions are more commonly voyages of colonisation and ruthless conquest. It is anything but nostalgic in its account of a world dominated by power, which produces resistance only to justify its own extension. Sophisticated to the point of scepticism, the work of Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Goldberg, Steven

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Mullaney and others is self-consciously fragmentary, arbitrary. But its degree zero is the eclecticism of the anecdote, the single esoteric text, the improbable reading. Its theme is not change, since the history it recounts is rarely diachronic. The sleek surfaces of new historicist writing propose no programme; they offer the minimum of evaluations and transformations, except in so far as they transform into its opposite the grand narrative itself; and in consequence they legitimate no political intervention. In the analysis of Jameson and Eagleton the postmodern is a single, unitary, undifferentiated, non-contradictory phenomenon, the deadly cultural manifestation of late capitalism. (Marx would perhaps have been surprised by this unwillingness to acknowledge contradictions.) But in Lyotard’s account the postmodern is itself divided. If functionalism produces an analysis of society as a single whole, in which culture is non-contradictory, or power always succeeds in pre-empting challenges to its own increased mastery (produces them, indeed, for that purpose), there is another sociology, derived this time from the Marxist account of society as a site of struggle. It follows that there is also another postmodernism, this time of the left, which emphasises dissension,18 difference as opposition, and a possible consequent historicity which tells of the resistance that continues to challenge power from the position of its inevitable, differentiating other. Is it not this emphasis on struggle that is above all important for us in Marxism now? What distinguishes Marxism is not, in other words, its grand narrative, the inexorable succession of the modes of production, but its analysis of contest, the classes confronting each other locked in contradiction and conflict. Marx’s grand history is intelligible now as breathtakingly inventive, ingenious myth, the story of a struggle for power that repeats itself and differs from one historical moment to the next.19 Though it offers a brilliant framework, the attempt to work in detail with the Renaissance as the encounter between feudalism and capitalism runs, it seems to me, into endless problems of historical specificity. Marx’s account of the relations of production, however, so daring in the nineteenth century, and still politically indispensable now, has not been superseded by postmodernism or poststructuralism. Marx saw labour as the other of capital: not its binary opposite, but the condition, at once necessary and menacing, of its existence.20 And his dangerously radical gesture was to analyse capital from the position of the other. In this he was not naive. He was, indeed, more sophisticated in one way than the early Foucault of Madness and Civilization. In order not to repeat reason’s relegation of madness, Foucault set out to write its history from the place of the other, to make the madness that had been silenced by reason the subject, in every sense, of his narrative, to make it speak. Derrida’s case against him is that this reversal is impossible. To attempt to give madness a voice is simply to reiterate the conventional opposition between madness and

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reason, objectifying madness all over again.21 Derrida’s own practice, by contrast, speaks not of silent madness, but precisely of voluble reason. But deconstruction uncovers the differences within rationality, and thus writes of it otherwise. Marx also writes otherwise. He does not set out to speak for the working class, but instead he analyses the differences within capitalism, the contradictions which are precisely its undoing. To attempt to speak on behalf of subversion, to write a history of the working class, or to give women a voice, is in the end to reaffirm the oppositions that currently exist. Our more radical and more modest narratives set out to undo those oppositions themselves, to throw into relief the precariousness of power, of capital, of patriarchy and racism, showing them as beleaguered to the degree that the resistances they produce return to endanger their seamless mastery.22 This too is a postmodern project, but it is not satisfied with an elegant pessimism. Its mode is to activate the differences and promote political intervention. It tells short stories which are nevertheless narratives of change. There are many histories to be made, meanings to be differentiated, dissensions to be emphasised. And if the practice does not promise utopia, it has at least the advantage that it offers the possibility of making a difference. III In the light of the postmodern condition, it is not strictly true to say that Shakespeare’s history plays have not been taken seriously as history. Tillyard took them seriously. Not as historical fact, on the whole, but precisely as grand narrative. According to Tillyard’s account, the history plays tell the true story of their own moment, Elizabethan England, in the richness and multiplicity of its culture, its quintessential Englishness, and above all its universal commitment to hierarchy. ‘The picture we get from Shakespeare’s Histories is that of disorder’,23 he allows, but this is only on the surface of things. Behind the recurring rebellions which constitute the plots, in Shakespeare’s mind, is the great Elizabethan ideal, which the dramatist must have shared with his contemporaries, degree cosmically endorsed by the Author of the great chain of being. Tillyard’s nostalgic reading of the texts re-enacts, of course, his relation to his own historical moment. Shakespeare’s History Plays was published in 1944. All around was disorder. But beyond this there lay as the solution universal acceptance of the great ideal of hierarchy, not (and for an intellectual who had experienced the 1930s in Britain it was necessary to repeat) not socialism. Tillyard’s book also re-enacts his own relation to history itself. The Tudors, he insists, look to a story of the Middle Ages which legitimates their own legally precarious but deeply autocratic rule. Tillyard himself looks in

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turn to Tudor history for a narrative to legitimate autocracy now. Did it not, after all, produce the golden age of Elizabeth I and the golden works of Shakespeare? Oddly, however, Tillyard repeatedly identifies Tudor history as a construct, and emphasises its expediency.24 Obscuring the reality of the uncertain Tudor claim to the throne, he argues, there lies not truth but history-as-myth. Tillyard goes so far as to denounce Tudor historians who, worried about the empirical evidence, fail to reproduce the master-narrative. Only the select few could see the pattern. These include the brilliantly creative Hall, but not Holinshed, who displays an unintelligent anxiety about whether the details are accurate.25 Is Tillyard here compelled to repeat a certain unease about his own grand narrative, to betray an unconscious acknowledgement that it too represents history-as-myth, designed to keep disorder at bay? Does his proclaimed contempt for Holinshed imply (by denying it) a fear that an ordinary empiricist historian, lacking Tillyard’s creative flair, might fail to see into ‘the hearts of most Englishmen’ of the period,26 and might read the history of the sixteenth century, and particularly of the 1590s, rather differently? If so, Tillyard shows his reading to be postmodern in spite of itself, truly of its own historical moment, and not least in its inability to sustain the opposition between art and history, fiction and truth. It is possible to read Shakespeare’s history plays otherwise, in ways that have explicit resonances for us now. The second tetralogy tells a story of change which begins in nostalgia for a lost golden world and ends in undecidability. Early in Richard II John of Gaunt speaks wistfully of a time when kings were kings and went on crusades (2.1.51–6),27 but by the end of Henry V the legitimacy of kingship itself is in question. The issue is power. Similarly, the beginning of Richard II seems rooted in the simple unity of names and things, but the plays chart a fall into differance which generates a world of uncertainties. The issue is meaning. And the texts themselves bear witness to the difference within textuality. Read from a postmodern perspective, they reveal marks of the struggle to fix meaning, and simultaneously of the excess that necessarily renders meaning unstable. IV The vanishing world to which the opening of Richard II alludes is an imaginary realm of transparency, plenitude and truth, where the link between signifier, signified and referent has not been broken. In this unfallen state the signifier does not falsify. Instead, meaning is self-evident because it is guaranteed by the world outside language. Names, their meanings and the condition they name are apparently identical:

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What comfort, man? How is’t with aged Gaunt? O, how that name befits my composition! Old Gaunt, indeed; and gaunt in being old. Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast; And who abstains from meat that is not gaunt? For sleeping England long time have I watch’d; Watching breeds leanness, leanness is all gaunt. The pleasure that some fathers feed upon Is my strict fast – I mean my children’s looks; And therein fasting, hast thou made me gaunt. Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave, Whose hollow womb inherits nought but bones. (King Richard II, 2.1.72–83)

For Richard this reiteration of Gaunt’s name, specifying in a series of figures its meaning and its cause, is no more than an instance of the play of the signifier: ‘Can sick men play so nicely with their names?’ (2.1.84). But from the point of view of the audience, the sequence has the effect of producing a convergence on a single truth, identifying a unified state of being, gaunt by name and gaunt by nature. Ironically, this affirmation of plenitude, of the fullness of truth in the signifier, is also an assertion of absence, of leanness, fasting, the hollow womb of the grave. Its occasion is the absence Richard has made in the political and symbolic order. John of Gaunt is dying of grief for a land which has no heirs, a realm whose lineage is coming to an end as Richard fails to live the true and single meaning of sovereignty: ‘Landlord of England art thou now, not King’ (2.1.113). Richard divorces the name of king from the condition, leasing out the realm and banishing Bolingbroke. Gaunt’s grief is also for his own heir. The name of Duke of Lancaster has a material existence: it is a title, an entitlement, meaning land, a position, an army, power. By sending his son into exile, Gaunt protests, ‘thou dost seek to kill my name in me’ (2.1.86), to end the dynasty and expropriate the land.28 Thus Richard, already identified as the murderer of Gloucester, is now represented as causing the death of Lancaster. It is not, of course, to be done by fiat. Lancaster is not merely a name but a material presence. Since the title is precisely a legal entitlement – to property and to power in the realm – the inscription of power in the symbolic order cannot be created or destroyed by an act of individual will, not even the sovereign’s. In the opening scene of the play Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, nephew of the dead Gloucester, challenges the king in Mowbray. In Act 2 Bolingbroke, his identity transformed by his father’s death, returns to challenge the king again by reclaiming his title, in all its materiality:

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‘As I was banish’d, I was banished Hereford; / But as I come, I come for Lancaster’ (2.3.113–14); ‘I am come to seek that name in England’ (2.3.71, my emphasis). Yet, as in Gaunt’s sequence of figures, here too the names of England and Lancaster are linked as elements in a system of differences where meanings are interdependent. Names in the plays are authorised by inheritance, as fathers are authors of their children. The inscription of authority in a name is reciprocal and differential, not individual, and it is specified by blood. In consequence Bolingbroke is entitled to argue, ‘If that my cousin king be King in England, / It must be granted I am Duke of Lancaster’ (2.3.123–4). It is not granted, of course, in practice. The king’s repudiation of the symbolic order, which also guarantees his own succession, will go on to impel civil war to manure the ground with English blood – in another but, of course, related sense of the word ‘blood’. There is thus only a brief moment in Act 1 when the truth of things is perceived to reside in names, when the grand simplicities appear to be in place, or when the (royal) sentence seems absolute. By naming the banishment of Mowbray and Bolingbroke, the king is able to bring it about – or to repeal it. Richard sees Gaunt’s grief signified in his tears and reduces the term of Bolingbroke’s exile. Bolingbroke draws attention to the inscription of power in the signifier: How long a time lies in one little word! Four lagging winters and four wanton springs End in a word: such is the breath of Kings. (1.3.213–15)

But within the system of differences which gives meaning to kingship, and the law that inscribes the power in royal utterances, kings are only the location of authority, not its origin. In practice, Richard cannot give meaning to his sentences or deny meaning to the names of his subjects. His words are absolute only on condition that they remain within the existing system of differences. He, like his subjects, is subject to the symbolic order, the law inscribed in the language which allots meaning to the commands he issues. Richard transgresses this system of differences when he tries to remake the meaning of kingship in the image of his own desires. His predecessors lived the regality of their name, Gaunt complains. Their sovereignty was thus synonymous with England’s, and the realm was a ‘sceptr’d isle’, an ‘earth of majesty’ (2.1.40–1). But this world of unity and plenitude is already lost. Richard-as-England has consumed England’s material wealth in riot, misusing his sovereignty to mortgage the land, devouring in the name of his title his own entitlement. He has thus turned the sceptre against the

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isle, majesty against the earth itself, and in consequence fragmented the singleness of the realm, destroying in the process its singularity.29 The ‘teeming womb of royal kings’ (2.1.51) is now, according to the logic of Gaunt’s rhetoric, empty, and it is this absence of heirs which propels one of its few remaining denizens towards the grave, ‘Whose hollow womb inherits nought but bones’ (2.1.83). In setting himself up as the origin of meaning and law, Richard violates the symbolic order, and in consequence his words lose their sovereignty: Bolingbroke returns, repudiating the royal sentence of banishment. Richard makes a gap between names and things, between kingship and its referent, majesty, and Gaunt cannot live in the new world of lost plenitude that Richard makes. But Bolingbroke belongs there already, and thus proleptically identifies himself as Richard’s heir even more surely than he is his father’s. Gaunt offers consolation for exile in the supremacy of the signifier, as if the name could command the thing, or make the condition present: Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honour, And not the King exil’d thee; or suppose Devouring pestilence hangs in our air And thou art flying to a fresher clime. Look what thy soul holds dear, imagine it To lie that way thou goest. (1.3.282–7)

But his son was never fooled: he recognises the power to remake the world in accordance with the signifier as precisely imaginary: O, who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat? (1.3.294–9)

If, however, Bolingbroke recognises the gap between words and things that Richard has made, or has made evident, the difference and the distance between the signifier and what it promises to make present, Richard himself is tragically unable to do so. This is the dramatic irony of what follows, as Richard, deserted by 12,000 Welshmen, clings to the imaginary sovereignty of the signifier:

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Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names? Arm, arm, my name! a puny subject strikes At thy great glory. (3.2.85–7)

In practice, we are to understand, the unity of the king’s name and kingship itself have fallen apart. The realm has deserted him for Bolingbroke, and Richard is king in name only. Meanwhile, the new and silent sovereign says nothing, uses few words, or none (4.1.290). It is Richard himself who employs the breath of kings to strip away the signifier of his own monarchy: ‘What must the King do now? . . . Must he lose / The name of king? A God’s name, let it go’ (3.3.143–6). But like Gaunt, he cannot survive in the world where names do not bring entitlement. In this fallen state, if he is not king, it seems he has no identity at all: ‘I must nothing be’ (4.1.201). ‘What says King Bolingbroke? Will his Majesty / Give Richard leave to live till Richard die?’ (3.3.173–4). As Marjorie Garber points out, the king performs an act of erasure when he doubly deposes himself: I have no name, no title – No, not that name was given me at the font – But ‘tis usurp’d. Alack the heavy day, That I have worn so many winters out, And know not now what name to call myself! O that I were a mockery king of snow, Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke To melt myself away in water drops. (4.1.255–62)

He is already a mockery king, other than he is, figured here as insubstantial, a snowman visibly melting away, though it is worth remembering, of course, that his name, his entitlement, will return to haunt the remainder of the second tetralogy.30 V When Richard fails to find a means to guarantee his title and the sovereignty it names, or to sustain, in other words, the imaginary plenitude that calls the world into line with the signifier, the Bishop of Carlisle proffers the grandest of all grand narratives: ‘Fear not, my lord; that Power that made you king / Hath power to keep you king in spite of all’ (3.2.27–8). And Richard reiterates it (3.2.54–62). But the play at once subjects the master-narrative of divine protection for divine right to ironic scrutiny, as first Salisbury and then Scroop

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deliver their petits récits of desertions and defeats. If God has the capacity to keep Richard king, he signally fails in a fallen world to exercise it on behalf of his anointed deputy. The only power on earth that supports the materiality of titles is the law of succession, inscribed in the names that constitute entitlements, and Richard breaks this law by seizing the dukedom of Lancaster (2.1.195–208). Bolingbroke’s regime becomes in consequence one of bitter uncertainties, of conflicts for meaning which are simultaneously conflicts for power. These constitute the story of the reign of Henry IV, but the uncertainty begins in the deposition scene in Richard II, when it becomes apparent that the word is not anchored in the referent, and so no longer indicates a single, consensual object. The Bishop of Carlisle defends Richard’s sovereignty in the name of the transcendental signified that would hold all meanings and all reference in place: the king is ‘the figure of God’s majesty’ (4.1.125). In consequence, he argues, Bolingbroke is guilty of treason: ‘My Lord of Hereford here, whom you call king, / Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford’s king’ (4.1.134–5). As he concludes his argument, however, Northumberland steps forward on behalf of Hereford (now Lancaster; now England?) and turns the verbal and political tables on Carlisle: ‘Well have you argued, sir; and for your pains, / Of capital treason we arrest you here’ (4.1.150–51, my emphasis). Which is the traitor? who is the king? When in Act 1 Mowbray and Bolingbroke accuse each other of treason, the truth is available: in the following scene the exchanges between Gaunt and the Duchess of Gloucester make clear to the audience that Richard is responsible for Gloucester’s murder. But in the fallen world where the relation between signifier and referent is no longer transparent, who can be sure? If Richard is king, Bolingbroke is a traitor. But is he? If Bolingbroke is king, Carlisle is a traitor. But is he? Meaning is no more than differential. Richard’s breach of the law inscribed in titles has divorced the name of king from the power, laying bare a world of political struggle for possession of meaning, property and sovereignty. In this new world it is not a name but the allegiance of the Duke of York and of 12,000 Welshmen which proves decisive. The orders of the mockery king are now subject to confirmation by Bolingbroke: K. Rich. Bol. K. Rich.

For do we must what force will have us do. Set on towards London. Cousin, is it so? Yea, my good Lord. Then I must not say no. (3.3.207–9)

Bolingbroke comes back to claim his title in the name of law, but his victory, the play makes clear, is an effect of force, not legality. Nevertheless,

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the repressed law of succession returns to disrupt the reign of Henry IV. It is Mortimer’s legal title as Richard’s heir that cements the quarrel between Hotspur and the king (1 King Henry IV, 1.3.77 ff., 145–59), and if Mortimer is not the motive, he is none the less the legitimating occasion of the rebellion which constitutes the main plot of the Henry IV plays.31 Henry V is both nominally and legally king, and he manages to bring the law of succession into line with political strategy when his Archbishop of Canterbury adduces legal authority for the war with France. Part of Henry V’s claim to reunite the name of king with the power that belongs to it depends on his identity as a man of the people. He himself declares his ordinariness as he wanders in disguise among the common soldiers on the eve of Agincourt: ‘Though I speak it to you, I think the King is but a man as I am’. And if the utterance equivocates, exploiting the plurality of the signifier, the speech goes on to specify more clearly the unexceptional nature of the king: ‘all his senses have but human conditions; his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man’ (King Henry V, 4.1.100, 103). The scene presents the king as a popular hero and thus helps to legitimate his sovereignty. In Williams, therefore, who is also a man of the people, Henry encounters a figure who represents both his similitude and his differentiating other. At the moment of victory Williams, a man as he is, will apparently give back to Henry in his own person the king’s desired self-image, while still preserving his independence, his defining alterity (4.7.45–55). But on the eve of Agincourt, the climactic battle of the play, Williams challenges on behalf of the people the justice of the king’s war. The issue is ostensibly what it means to die well. The official position is apparently that if the king’s cause is good, and the soldiers’ consciences clear, death is no real threat to them. Williams sees it differently. From his point of view as an ordinary soldier, death is not simply a question of conscience, an affair of the soul, but a matter of ‘legs and arms and heads, chopp’d off in a battle’, of mutilated bodies on the battlefield, ‘some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard’, Williams continues thoughtfully, ‘there are few that die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?’ (4.1.133–43). If Williams’s role in the play identifies his as the voice of the people, his final sentence specifies the nature of the challenge he delivers: ‘Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection’ (4.1.143–5, my emphasis). Williams does not propose disobedience to the king: he accepts his subjection. But what he says locates the initiative for the war and the

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consequent responsibility for the legs and arms and heads, the widows and orphans, solely with the monarch. Uniquely in the history plays, the people are here presented without irony – without comedy and without the differentiating, distancing effect of an inadequate purchase on the language. We might think of other, contrasting figures in the second tetralogy, whose marginality is inscribed precisely in their precarious command of English. This includes most of the women: Mistress Quickly, a sort of Mrs Malaprop avant la lettre, Princess Katherine, whose foreignness is so engagingly comic in one of the most patriarchal wooing scenes in all of Shakespeare, and Lady Mortimer, a Welsh speaker confined to communicating in looks and kisses. It also includes the Gloucestershire rustics, as well as Fluellen, Jamy and Macmorris, the three captains representing Wales, Scotland and Ireland; and it includes poor Francis the drawer, who is not allowed to string two words together – for the greater glory of Prince Hal and Poins. Williams, on the other hand, speaks standard English, fluently and persuasively, on behalf of the people. And the people put a strong case that the king has no moral entitlement to risk their bodies, their lives and the security of their families in his war. Henry’s answer evades the issue, although he has the last word and to this extent Williams seems to concede his case. The whole question is apparently dissipated in the victory celebrations, as the king fills Williams’s glove with (ironically?) crowns (4.7.56). But it is not necessarily forgotten, and the audience is left to consider the problem implicitly raised in the debate. Has the sovereign the right to demand obedience to the point of death? What are the rights of the people? What are the limits of sovereignty? Who is entitled to define them, to impose them? What is the meaning – in theory and practice – of the king’s title? The encounter with Williams prompts Henry himself to ponder the last of these questions. Does anything differentiate the king who is a man of the people from the people themselves? The distinction, he maintains, is no more than an idol/idle ‘ceremony’, but this only prompts further questions. Is signifying ceremony material, substantial: ‘What are thy rents? What are thy comings-in?’(4.1.239)? Does ceremony entail power, or is it no more than an empty signifier, a form, an appearance: O, be sick, great greatness, And bid thy ceremony give thee cure! Thinks thou the fiery fever will go out With titles blown from adulation? Will it give place to flexure and low bending? Canst thou, when thou command’st the beggar’s knee, Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream. (4.1.247–53)

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What, then, does it mean in theory and in practice to say, as Henry does, ‘I am a king . . .’ (4.1.255)? This question runs all the way through the presentation of Henry V and his prodigal antecedent, Prince Hal, in the curious displacement and differentiation of his identity that recurs in all three plays. It is not duplicity of character that is in question: the plain style of his rhetoric marks Hal-Henry as precisely authoritative to the degree that he is seen to be straightforward. It is rather that the text consistently affirms what he is not: not a party to the crime of Gadshill, not governed by Falstaff, not given to displays of hysterical heroics like Hotspur. He is not a lover (King Henry V, 5.2.120ff), not a private man (4.1.233). And when he takes the audience into his confidence, it is to tell them that he is not what he seems, as he promises to ‘falsify men’s hopes’ (1 King Henry IV, 1.2.204). Even his eloquence itself has the effect of dispersing his identity. In the Archbishop’s account, Hear him but reason in divinity . . . You would desire the King were made a prelate; Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs, You would say it hath been all in all his study. (King Henry V, 1.1.38–42)

As Jonathan Goldberg puts it, ‘the very mastery of discourse that he displays leaves obscure who he is, where he is in his discourse’.32 At the moment of the critical encounter with Williams, Henry’s equivocation simultaneously conceals and seeks a truth: ‘I think the King is but a man as I am’. Even the opening Chorus of Henry V, which has no motive for equivocation, cannot locate him: ‘Then should the warlike Harry, like himself / Assume the port of Mars . . .’ (ll. 5–6). Always defined by analogy, like war, like himself, able to be portrayed (re-presented) like Mars, he is, he tells the Princess Katherine, only a plain soldier. He is one who so much exceeds his own self-definition, however, that he is also in the same scene a plain king (King Henry V, 5.2.142, 124, 165). It is as if the text cannot find a way to specify the thing itself, to make present the character of kingship.33 Since the play cannot settle on an answer to the problem of what it means to be a king, it throws into question the nature of both sovereignty and meaning. The play depicts a world of differance where meaning, as pure intelligibility, is always deferred, relegated, supplanted by the signifier itself. But if meaning cannot be made present, it is not an absence either, not a space to be vacated at will. Henry V’s ‘ceremony’ is not in that sense illusory: it is precisely an instance of the materiality of the signifier in so far as it brings about effects, ‘place, degree, and form / Creating awe and fear in other men’ (4.1.242–3). It elicits obedience, though it cannot ensure it, and in that sense

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it represents power, but a power which, without metaphysical guarantees, is always unstable. Ultimately, outside the fictional world of the history plays, the people were to repudiate, in the name of law, the law of succession, the power of ceremony – and the monarchy with them. In the 1590s the revolutionary struggle was half a century away. Are the questions posed by Shakespeare’s history plays among the conditions, nevertheless, of the possibility of that struggle? If so, we are entitled to read the plays not only as interrogating the absolutist claims of the Tudor present, but as raising a broader issue for the immediate future. This is the question that Brecht was to reformulate in another political crisis: ‘who does the world belong to?’ Who is entitled to property and power? Williams demonstrates that the royal meanings do not go uncontested. In the Henry IV plays it is Falstaff who consistently represents the refusal of monarchic order. His emblematic significance reaches its climax when he performs in play the role of king to Hal’s prince – and recommends the company of Falstaff (1 King Henry IV, II. iv. 408–16). But resistance is evident throughout in Falstaff’s repudiation of all orthodox values: heroism, military discipline, law, truth, honour and, inevitably, authorised meaning: Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty; let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal. (1 King Henry IV, I. ii. 22–28)

These squires of the night’s/knight’s body/bawdy/booty are revellers, lechers and cutpurses, as both plays make clear, and the proposition that Hal as king should redefine them by royal fiat as ‘men of good government’ is comic partly to the extent that it parodies the early scenes of Richard II. Such, Falstaff absurdly implies, is the breath of kings: it has the power to invert the system of differences that allots meaning. The concluding pun here (‘steal’) specifies the real nature of the anarchy Eastcheap represents: crime is a refusal of control, of legality, of the sovereign’s authority, just as the pun itself, an instance of the dispersal of meaning, insists on the refusal of the signifier in its wayward plurality to be confined to any single, authorised signified. Henry IV, we are invited to understand, deserves Falstaff. Eastcheap represents the inevitable return within his regime of the lawlessness by which he became king. Henry cannot exercise control – over the rebels or over Eastcheap – because he is not morally or legally entitled to the throne he holds. But Henry V changes all that. He does penance for his father’s crime,

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rejects Falstaff, brings treason remorselessly to justice, and displays at Agincourt that he has secured the popular obedience that he thus so richly deserves. Act V of Henry V duly celebrates the victory of the ideal Christian king. But at the end of the play, in a speech possibly written for Falstaff to perform, though attributed to Pistol in a version of the text from which Falstaff has been excised, it appears that resistance to the monarchic and symbolic order is about to begin all over again, and in exactly the same punning terms as before: Old do I wax; and from my weary limbs Honour is cudgell’d. Well, bawd I’ll turn, And something lean to cutpurse of quick hand. To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal. (King Henry V, 5.1.78–81)

VI It is worth remembering, whatever Tillyard may have argued about the unthinkable nature of rebellion in the sixteenth century, that it was the anarchic Falstaff whose reappearance Elizabethan audiences clamoured for. And for this reason too, when Stephen Greenblatt assures us that the audience of 2 Henry IV does not leave the theatre in a rebellious mood, or that the doubts raised about Henry V merely serve to heighten his charisma, I am compelled to wonder what can be the grounds of Greenblatt’s certainty.34 Not, I suspect, the text.35 And not what we know of Elizabethan history.36 What then? A politics which faces the present in the conviction that domination, however regrettable, is inevitable, a fact of life? I hope not. Shakespeare’s own practice of history-making is more complex and, ironically, more contemporary. When Greenblatt urges in the same essay that we need ‘a poetics of Elizabethan power’, and goes on to argue that this ‘will prove inseparable, in crucial respects, from a poetics of the theatre’, I find myself in wholehearted agreement with him.37 But a poetics of power would take account of the possibility of resistance, not simply as power’s legitimation, its justification or glorification, as the new historicists seem so often to argue, but as its defining, differentiating other, the condition of its existence precisely as power. And it would recognise the corresponding possibility that resistance is not tamed in the end. Meanwhile, a poetics of the theatre would take account of the ubiquity of resistance to power as a requirement of plot, and of the corresponding possibility that resistance is not always ‘contained’ by the reaffirmation of power. And finally, to do justice to the complexity both of power and of Shakespeare’s theatre, we need in addition a theory of

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textuality which understands meaning as differed and deferred, differentiated by and distanced from the signifier, so that it cannot be fixed by any reading, however supple, which treats texts as ultimately undifferentiated, homogeneous and univocal. Nostalgia for lost plenitude, for the unity of words and things, is a longing for the imaginary, a desire for the simplicity and certainty of a world that precedes the symbolic difference. This is a world without visible power, since power is a relation of difference. But because certainty implies metaphysical guarantees of the singularity of meaning and the truth of things, it is also a world which is in practice deeply authoritarian. The condition of differance, meanwhile, ensures only that nothing is certain. Presence is deferred, meanings no more than differential, not available for scrutiny independent of the signifier or as pure intelligibility. In consequence, differance precipitates doubt. The questions about power that differance prompts are not answered by reference to metaphysics. On the contrary, they concern a political relation, and one which, since it is an effect of difference, always inclines towards struggle. Shakespeare’s history plays know this. The world of plenitude was always already lost. It has no place outside the memory of an old man whose name is his condition and signifies an absence. Differance invades Richard II, and the plays go on to depict a succession of struggles which pose questions concerning the proper location of power in the present and in the future. The second tetralogy charts a descent from absolutism to the moment when the people confront the King, who cannot give them an adequate answer. It ends at this point. Unable to foresee the revolution of the 1640s, the history plays leave kingship in question. But do they not also indicate in the process that the world belongs, for better or worse, to those who are prepared to take it? Shakespeare’s histories refuse complicity with any grand narrative. They certainly do not recount Tillyard’s story of legitimate monarchy betrayed by monstrous rebellion, of hierarchy divinely endorsed. (But then in practice Tillyard was never sure they did.) Instead, these pre-Enlightenment texts propel their audience towards the as-yet unpresentable, the possibility of histories made by the people. Rejecting the transparency of names, they tell of political struggle and of the difference within the signifier. In that sense, they do indeed record the history of their own moment, though not quite as Tillyard perceived it. Of course, Shakespeare made free with his sources in a way that no serious member of the literary institution could now countenance. But ironically, does he not in other ways, in spite of the historical difference, display some of the concerns which impel our own postmodern and radical petits récits? Extraordinarily enough, the second tetralogy, read from the present, might perfectly well adopt as an epigraph Lyotard’s call to arms at the end of

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his essay, ‘What is Postmodernism?’: ‘Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name’.38 The difference between our histories and Shakespeare’s is decisive, an effect in part of the intervening Enlightenment. At the same time, however, the Enlightenment is no longer the condition that our postmodern culture aspires to. And to that extent it constitutes a space across which we are able to perceive Shakespeare’s questing, questioning stories otherwise, and perhaps also to accord them a new kind of recognition.

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9 T h e C a s e o f H a m l e t ’s C o n s c i e n c e

I What does Hamlet mean when he ascribes his own inaction to conscience? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. (Hamlet, 3.1.83–8)1

The variety of possible meanings of ‘conscience’ in the Elizabethan period has enabled its occurrence in Hamlet’s most familiar soliloquy to be widely interpreted – or, as I hope to suggest, misinterpreted – to mean ‘consciousness’ (OED, I) rather than ‘knowledge of right and wrong’ (OED, II). For instance, many editions of the play gloss ‘conscience’ here as ‘consciousness’, ‘selfconsciousness’ or ‘reflection’.2 Nothing in the lines themselves, however, implies this reading of the word. The apparent meaning of the text is fairly straightforward: the moral sense inhibits action by generating fear (of the consequences). ‘Conscience’ occurs several times in the rest of Hamlet where it seems to need no gloss, and it refers consistently to the faculty that distinguishes between good and evil.3 Six lines before the beginning of this soliloquy Claudius has given the audience the first indication of his guilt, when he says, ‘How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!’ (3.1.50). The word is common in the rest of Shakespeare and it tends generally to occur in 139

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the sense familiar from much Renaissance and later moral writing to mean the element in human beings that is ‘appointed of God to declare and put in execution his just judgement against sinners’, a moral arbiter, whose function is ‘to judge of the goodnes or badnes of thinges or actions’.4 Nor does the immediate context require any other reading of ‘conscience’ here. ‘To be or not to be’ is perhaps the most disputed of Hamlet’s soliloquies but it seems to me that the simplest interpretation offers the best starting point, at least, for analysis, unless there is good reason to reject the obvious. Clearly Hamlet is posing a problem. It is characteristic of the play that his reflections are interrupted before they reach a solution (‘soft you now . . .’, 3.1.88) but the question itself has been clearly stated: whether it is nobler to suffer or to take arms, to be passive or to act against the ‘sea of troubles’ Hamlet faces. The hopelessness of taking arms against the sea perhaps suggests something of the nature of his predicament. Opposition to Claudius is treason (3.3.1–23; 5.2.315) and in plotting against him Hamlet risks his own death, as the rest of the play makes clear. To kill the king may put an end to his troubles in every sense: ‘And by opposing end them? To die . . .’ (3.1.60). If death were no more than sleep, he continues, very reasonably (and it is the most ordered and rational, the least hysterical, of the soliloquies), it would surely be welcome, but people choose to go on living, however wretchedly, for fear of something after death, the unknown, which includes (we may construe) the possibility of eternal punishment, damnation. ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all . . .’, the same conscience which forbids wretches to kill themselves, however intolerable their lives, and which also forbids a murder that is simultaneously regicide. There is no need to suppose that Hamlet is himself contemplating suicide. In considering why people endure calamity so long, he is putting a case about the general reluctance to die, not grappling with a personal death wish. His own problem, as the soliloquy defines it, is the opposition between ‘suffering’, ‘conscience’, ‘thought’, on the one hand, and ‘opposing’, ‘resolution’, ‘enterprises of great pitch and moment’ on the other. The widespread reading of ‘conscience’ as ‘consciousness’ must, then, indicate an understanding of Hamlet’s meaning that is determined by a different interpretation of his problem. This is, I think, a vestige of the Romantic view of the play, which locates the central issue not in Hamlet’s situation but in his character: the tender, delicate, sensitive prince, unequal to the sacred duty of revenge, endlessly inventing excuses to escape from the harsh reality of action. This Hamlet toys in his melancholy with the notion of suicide but he is incapable even of that, and the ‘conscience’ said to make a coward of him is the speculative tendency that continually supplies him with pretexts for inaction. We can no longer accept that revenge is a sacred duty, however, and in rejecting this interpretation, we must also repudiate the escapist Hamlet

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inhibited by a Romantic ‘consciousness’. Once we do so, as Eleanor Prosser argues in Hamlet and Revenge, ‘the final lines of the soliloquy can mean only one thing: that the inner voice of judgement, by warning us that a proposed action is damnable, prevents us from undertaking great enterprises and thus makes us cowards’.5 We are then confronted by an altogether more vigorous Hamlet, struggling to determine the ‘nobler’ course, but caught up in the moral ambiguity that what seems a great enterprise is at the same time forbidden by conscience. Hamlet and Revenge makes a powerful historical case for patience as the proper Christian antidote to revenge, but in contesting the sacred duty theory on this basis, the book seems to me to obscure some of the complexity of Hamlet’s predicament. On the one hand, revenge is damnable; on the other, something is rotten in the state of Denmark. By Act 3 it is clear to the audience, at least, that Claudius is a villain; by Act 4 he is plotting to murder Hamlet; most of the court is spying on the rest of the court. The question of recourse to law does not arise:6 the monarch is the source of law and, significantly, Claudius twice insists that he will not bring the hero to ‘a public count’ (account) for the murder of Polonius (4.3.3–4; 4.7.16 ff.). His explanation makes an irony available to the audience: Hamlet’s popularity would ensure that the king’s arrows ‘Would have reverted to my bow again, / But not where I have aimed them’ (4.7.23–4). The fountainhead of justice is poisoned. In consequence, the time is out of joint, and Hamlet believes, as might any Renaissance prince, that he has a duty to set it right. It is difficult to imagine that an audience, however attentive to contemporary moralists, could admire a protagonist who simply washed his hands of the whole matter. On the contrary, he has two possible courses, both wrong – or perhaps both right. The question that confronts the audience, as well as the prince, is which is nobler. Fredson Bowers has also paid scholarly attention to the attitudes to revenge that prevailed both on and off the Elizabethan stage.7 My hypothesis is that we can gain further insight into the expectations and assumptions of Elizabethan audiences by examining their dramatic heritage of the analysis of inner conflict in the morality plays and, in particular, the recurrent opposition in the allegorical drama between personifications of Conscience and Wrath. Hamlet has to make a moral choice and in this he is the heir of Mankind and Everyman, heroes of the tradition that dominated the popular stage in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that consistently analysed, with varying degrees of subtlety, the processes of ethical conflict. It is no longer necessary to make out a case for the familiarity of Shakespeare and his contemporaries with this tradition. Scholarship recognises that elements of the morality pattern were successively transformed by Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson.8

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Clearly, the conflicts dramatised in the moralities were not confined to the stage. These plays have their roots in sermons, and the sermons in turn reiterate the prevailing concerns of the Christian tradition. But while in one sense it is a mistake to isolate drama, in another sense there is a special relationship between plays and other plays. The prevalence of particular theatrical conventions in given periods implies that the previous experience of the audience in the theatre itself has an influence on their expectations, their beliefs about what is plausible, and their willingness to accept certain relationships and connections without detailed exposition by the dramatist each time they recur.9 Parallels between Hamlet’s ethical doubts and the moral uncertainties of his allegorical predecessors make available to an Elizabethan audience certain conceptual patterns which are not so readily apparent in our own time. Hamlet’s ‘conscience’ might well evoke a personified abstraction with a long history on the stage: if so, the role of Conscience in the morality tradition would have become part of the connotative meaning of the word in a play about moral doubt. Parallels with Wrath, familiar not only as a sin condemned by the preachers but also as a ranting dramatic figure, might cast Hamlet’s vengeful soliloquies in an ironic light.10 In addition, however, the doubts and perplexities of Hamlet’s conscience might evoke the non-dramatic and altogether newer interest in the Protestant science of casuistry. William Perkins’s widely influential works were the first in what was to become a central field of interest for seventeenth-century divines.11 A Case of Conscience was first published in 1592 and A Discourse of Conscience in 1596. The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience was printed posthumously in 1606. Casuistry has since acquired a dishonest reputation but at this time it offered the faithful a way of resolving doubts about moral action, particularly in cases of conflicting ethical claims, by appealing to higher general principles. Perkins, of course, did not invent it. Casuistry had its roots in medieval Catholicism and was to become the special province of the Jesuits. Immediately after the Reformation there was a reaction against a practice so closely associated with the confessional and with the moral authority of the pope, but it rapidly became clear that the doctrine of salvation by faith alone only intensified the need for clear moral principles and ways of resolving practical ethical issues. The writings of Perkins were the first examples of Protestant casuistry to be available in print,12 and both A Case and A Discourse might have been familiar to some among the first audiences of Hamlet. I propose, therefore, to discuss the treatment of revenge in Hamlet in the light of these two traditions, the allegorical drama and the practice of casuistry, in order to extend the context for our understanding of the full complexity of the play. I shall first suggest that there are parallels between the casuistry of Perkins and the morality treatment of conscience, and then go on

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to consider the role of Conscience in the moral plays in discouraging mindless ‘resolution’, or Wrath. I shall then turn specifically to the problem of revenge in order to suggest that, while a linguistic analysis of Hamlet supports Prosser’s contention that private revenge is regarded as a sin, there remains the public problem of Claudius’s crimes, and here conscience confronts a new and more complex difficulty. In this respect, too, both the moral plays and Perkins seem to me to provide a context for Hamlet, but a context that points to a reading of the play as ultimately ambiguous, proposing not an unequivocal moral statement but a case of conscience for the consideration of the audience. II For Perkins (as, indeed, for Aquinas) conscience is aligned with the understanding, as opposed to the will. The understanding rules the whole person and controls the will, which is associated with the passions, ‘as joy, sorrow, love, hatred &c’.13 Corrupt passions blind the moral judgement, and one major impediment to a good conscience is ‘unstaied and unmortified affections, which if they have their swinge, as wilde horses overturne the chariot with men and all, so they overturne & over carrie the judgement & conscience of man’.14 Unimpeded, the conscience arrives at a position ‘by a kind of reasoning or disputing, called a practicall syllogisme’.15 Perkins demonstrates the method by applying it to a number of cases, proceeding by means of a series of arguments, followed by answers or objections to them, to establish the true conclusion. His discussion of revenge was not published until 1606, so there are no grounds for supposing that it had any influence on Hamlet, but the work of Perkins provides evidence of a contemporary interest in cases of conscience. Perkins writes clearly and simply and his works are addressed to the laity. Protestant casuistry was designed to be popular and useful, to provide a methodology of holiness that would equip people to solve moral problems in all spheres of life, economic and political, as well as theological. To this degree it has much in common with the morality plays, traditionally concerned to instil ethical values, presenting in dialogue between vices and virtues, or more often between vices and the central figure, a series of arguments and objections that set out to lead the audience towards the moral truth. The doubts and perplexities of human life are the central theme of the allegorical drama: vices consistently put forward false but plausible arguments which alert the audience to the kinds of sophistries employed by the devil. In W. Wager’s Enough is as Good as a Feast (c. 1559–70), for example, Covetous and his vice-lieutenants persuade Worldly Man to make money in order to be in a position to be charitable.16 Worldly Man succumbs to this argument and in his avarice

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at once forgets his motive. Here a case of conscience has been dramatised. Perkins deals with the same problem in The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience. Discussing how far individuals may with a good conscience seek wealth, he concludes that they are entitled only to make sure they have enough for their needs. He then lists the objections to this position that might be adduced by the covetous, including the obligation to ‘do good to the poore, to the Church, to the common wealth’. In response, Perkins in his own voice answers firmly, ‘We may not doe evill that good may come therof’.17 Perkins leaves his readers in no doubt about the proper solutions to his cases of conscience. The morality dramatists, too, label their vice figures clearly, so that the audience recognises the ironies of the hero’s fall. Irony alone, however, leaves open the possibility of misinterpretation, and usually the representatives of virtue make the moral position obvious beyond all possibility of confusion. Among these virtues, Conscience personified has a recurrent and fairly specific role in the moralities that illuminates, I believe, the case of conscience confronting Hamlet. III Hamlet’s conscience opposes resolution with thought, especially the thought of ‘something after death’ (3.1.84–5, 78). Conscience is not separately personified in The Castle of Perseverance, the first complete extant moral play. Instead, the virtuous impulses are represented by the Good Angel in alliance with the seven Virtues, who tell Mankind how to behave, arguing strenuously against the imperatives of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Good Angel’s single recurrent concern is the fate of the protagonist’s soul after death.18 This life, he warns Mankind, is a brief interlude where his choices will determine his eternal future. To deter the hero from sin he urges, ‘Man, thynke on thyn endinge day / Whanne thou schalt be closyd undyr clay’ (ll. 407–8), and this insistence on the thought of death and the possibility of damnation is the culminating moral message of the play as a whole: To save you from synnynge Evyr at the begynnynge Thinke on youre last endynge! (3646–8)

Conscience appears in person, however, in The World and the Child. This play of the early sixteenth century closely resembles The Castle of Perseverance in terms of plot and structure, but the cast is now reduced to four speaking parts. The hero recounts how the World has introduced him to the seven kings who represent the deadly sins, and this prompts Conscience

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to urge him to remember his salvation. After restoring the protagonist to virtue, Conscience leaves him with the advice, ‘In what occupation that ever ye be, / Always, or ye begin to think on the ending’ (ll. 482–3).19 The imperative, here as in Perseverance, is ‘think . . .’. Hamlet says he is deterred from action by ‘thinking too precisely on the event’ (4.4.41). If ‘event’ here means ‘outcome’ (OED, 3) or ‘ending’, he is following the advice of the morality Conscience exactly. Thought, particularly the thought of death and what follows it, inhibits resolution. A play that is much closer to Shakespeare’s own period, but still very clearly in the morality tradition, offers a further parallel. In Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience, printed in 1581, Philologus is persuaded by the vices to abandon his Protestant convictions and become a Catholic. As he is on the point of abjuring his faith, Spirit urges him not to betray his conscience (ll. 1462, 1484).20 Philologus acknowledges that his conscience pricks him, prompting the personification himself to appear on stage to remind him of damnation: ‘Alas, alas, thou woefull wight, what fury doth thee move / So willingly to cast thyself into consuming fire?’ (ll. 1502–3). He goes on to describe the pains of hell. Here, too, then, Conscience is urging the hero to think of the effect his action will have on the fate of his soul after death. Hamlet says the fear of something after death makes him a coward. Apius and Virginia, printed in 1575, resembles Hamlet more specifically, introducing an association between conscience, thought and ‘cowardice’, as the Vice names the fear of damnation. Encouraged by Haphazard, who personifies a spirit of recklessness or indifference to the consequences of action, Judge Apius gives way to lust for the innocent Virginia. Before he plunges into sin, however, Conscience and Justice ‘come out of him’, bearing a lamp and a sword (l. 500 S. D.).21 Apius hesitates: But out I am wounded, how am I devided? Two states of my life, from me are now glided, For Conscience he pricketh me contempned, And Justice saith, Judgement wold have me condemned: Conscience saith crueltye sure will detest me: And Justice saith, death in thende will molest me, And both in one sodden me thinkes they do crie, That fier eternall, my soule shall destroy. (501–8)

The Vice is contemptuous: ‘Why these are but thoughts man? Why fie for shame fie’ (510). He tempts the hero, like Hamlet, to scorn the pale cast of thought and urges, ‘Then care not for conscience, the worth of a pin’ (516).

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In this instance Apius accepts his advice, asserting that he is no coward: ‘Let Conscience grope, and judgement crave, I will not shrink one whit’ (524). Conscience, thought, cowardice and damnation are here aligned exactly as they are in Hamlet’s speech. The Vice’s argument that conscience urges cowardice is traditional. In George Wapull’s moral play, The Tide Tarrieth No Man, printed in 1576, the Vice is called Courage. One of his human victims is reproached by his conscience as the result of a sermon, but Courage mocks his cowardice: ‘Why, doltish patch, art thou so unwise / To quail for the saying of such a knave?’ (ll. 330–1).22 In the same way, the murderers hired to kill Clarence in Shakespeare’s Richard III are momentarily deterred by conscience.23 The second Murderer observes that Clarence will sleep until the Last Judgement, and then suddenly hesitates: 2 Murd. 1 Murd. 2 Murd. 1 Murd.

The urging of that word judgement hath bred a kind of remorse in me. What, art thou afraid? Not to kill him, having a warrant; but to be damn’d for killing him, from the which no warrant can defend me. I thought thou hadst been resolute. (1.4.107–13)

The fear of damnation inhibits resolution, just as it does in Hamlet.24 The second Murderer gradually recovers, and the last traces of conscience are dispelled by the thought of his reward. He is resolute again and conscience is finally dismissed: ‘I’ll not meddle with it – it makes a man a coward’ (133–4). The episode caricatures (in advance) Richard’s own terrors on the eve of Bosworth: ‘O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!’ (5.3.179). When Hamlet says, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’, his words evoke a tradition in which Mankind, who represents ‘us all’, fears to commit a sin because he thinks of the eternal consequences. Macbeth’s allusion to the imagery of the Last Judgement makes a similar connection: Duncan’s ‘virtues / Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against / The deep damnation of his taking off . . . I have no spur . . . We will proceed no further in this business’ (1.7.18–31).25 At once Lady Macbeth, deploying the technique of the morality vices, taunts the hero with cowardice and succeeds in inciting him to regicide. If Hamlet’s conscience urges him to hesitate before carrying out the Ghost’s ethically over-simplified command, the play’s other revengers are more resolute. Pyrrhus, avenging his father’s death by killing King Priam, pauses in the act only to arouse new vengeance, it appears (2.2.470–82). At the beginning of the play Fortinbras is advancing on Denmark to avenge his father with a band of ‘lawless resolutes’ (1.1.98) and, once deflected from this course, he finds a new outlet for his martial energies in endangering the lives

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of twenty thousand men ‘for an eggshell’, ‘a fantasy and trick of fame’ (4.4.54; 61). Laertes, believing that Claudius has killed his father, unhesitatingly rouses the rabble and bursts boldly into the palace, undeterred by thoughts of regicide, conscience or damnation: To hell, allegiance! Vows to the blackest devil! Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit! I dare damnation. To this point I stand, That both the worlds I give to negligence, Let come what comes; only I’ll be reveng’d Most throughly for my father. (4.5.129–33)

It is because Hamlet’s ethics are more subtle, because he sees the ambiguity of his position and is anxious to know which course is ‘nobler’ that he is the hero of the play. IV The temptation is to give way to an inhuman violence. If he is not a coward, Hamlet reflects, surely by now he should have ‘fatted all the region kites / With this slave’s offal’ (2.2.574–5). In this context, the recurrent morality figure of Wrath may also help to clarify the audience’s likely response to Hamlet. As a vice, Wrath consistently urges his victims to mindless and unhesitating belligerence. In The Castle of Perseverance he instructs Mankind, ‘Be also wroth as thou were wode’ (mad, line 1088); ‘Be redy to spylle mans blod’ (1092). He insists that Mankind should react without hesitation to any injury: ‘Whoso the wrethe, be fen or flode, / Loke thou be avengyd yerne’ (at once, 1090–91); ‘Anon take venjaunce, man, I rede’ (1097). While Claudius gives Laertes much the same advice: ‘What we would do, / We should do when we would’ (4.7.118–19), Hamlet’s delay is to his credit. Wrath masquerades as bravery. In The World and the Child, when Conscience tries to persuade him to forsake the seven kings, the hero proves particularly reluctant to abandon Wrath, ‘For he is in every deed doughty, / For him dare no man rout’ (ll. 393–4). He believes Wrath synonymous with courage, while any other mode of behaviour is cowardice.26 Conscience prevails, even so, but when he leaves the stage Folly takes his place to tempt the hero back to sin. Folly’s first action is to challenge him to a fight. Manhood resists on the grounds that Conscience forbids fighting; Folly accuses him of cowardice; enraged, the hero does battle to prove he is not afraid; this puts him in Folly’s power, and further sin follows. Fighting, in other words, is foolish, irrational, while Conscience prescribes patience, which the Vice calls

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cowardice. Hamlet, like Manhood, is at the mercy of antithetical impulses. Driven to rage by excitements of his reason and his blood, he is ready to call his hesitation a ‘craven scruple’ (4.4.40). The morality heritage would suggest that the noun, ‘scruple’, is at least as telling as the adjective.27 A similar network of associations reappears in Wager’s moral play of the 1560s The Longer Thou Livest, the More Fool Thou Art. Here Moros (fool) is associated from his childhood with Wrath who, conventionally enough, calls himself ‘Manhood’ to delude the hero into identifying him with masculine courage.28 Wrath blusters and rants, teaching Moros to do the same. He does not stop to think: ‘I am Wrath, soon kindled and set on fire. / Speak one word and I will break thy bones’ (ll. 1234–5).29 Moros cannot master the books of his virtuous counsellors, but he learns manliness readily from Wrath: Wrath

Moros

Like a man ever face out the matter, Stick not blood, heart, and wounds to swear; But suffer no man with thee to clatter, Anon let him have a blow on the ear. Behold, here I give thee a good sword And a dagger thyself to defend; Draw thy dagger at every word, And say that thy blood thou wilt spend. Bold, quoth he! I pray you keep my book, These weapons have set me on a fire Flourish with your sword. How say you? Like a man do I not look? To be fighting now is all my desire. (826–37)

In old age Moros becomes rich and exploits his tenants. One of these ventures to complain. As he goes out, Moros shows how well he has retained Wrath’s lesson: Enter furiously with a grey beard. Where is he? Blood, sides, heart and wounds! A man I am now, every inch of me. I shall teach the knave to keep his bounds. Fight alone. (1743–5)

He is still ranting and brandishing his sword when God’s Judgement comes on to put an end to his career. Moros, the recurrent figure of Wrath, as well as Sturdiness, aggressive companion to the reprobate hero in The Trial of

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Treasure (1567), all represent the bombast and violence of the passionate, unthinking impulse to avenge a wrong. The morality opposition between Wrath and Conscience foreshadows the conflict played out in Hamlet’s soliloquies. Part of him is committed, because he loved his father and because he is outraged by his mother’s incest and his uncle’s villainy, to passionate, unreflecting vengeance. That is the Hamlet who would outrant the Player, ‘Make mad the guilty and appal the free’ (2.2.557); who reproaches himself with his own inaction and calls it unmanly cowardice (2.2.565–83); who falls a-cursing, like Moros: ‘Bloody, bawdy villain’ (2.2.575); and who asserts, like Wrath, that ‘rightly to be great / Is . . . greatly to find quarrel in a straw’ (4.4.53–5). The vocabulary of these passionate, selfcastigating speeches is often crude and blustering, and the revenger they present falls little short of the remorseless Pyrrhus, drenched with blood, ‘roasted in wrath and fire’ (2.2.455), appalling Hecuba and the audience with his violence. Vengeful imagery is gross: ‘Now could I drink hot blood’ (3.2.380); ‘I should have fatted all the region kites / With this slave’s offal’ (2.2.574–5). The impulse belongs to the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. (3.2.378–80)

Vengeance entails the ‘lawless resolutes’ of Fortinbras, the poisoned sword of Laertes and, above all, Hamlet’s refusal to kill Claudius at prayer because this would be ‘hire and salary, not revenge’ (3.3.79). Revenge itself is crude, extravagant and wildly in excess of justice. Wrath always exceeds justice: that is its nature in the moral plays and, of course, in the Christian tradition which is their motive force. In The Longer Thou Livest it is clear that Moros’s tenant does not deserve the rage he provokes. But Claudius presents a more complex problem. If revenge is evil, so are the king’s crimes; and analysis of the play makes it hard to believe that the audience, however steeped in the morality tradition, or in non-dramatic moral and political pleas for patience or civil order, would relish the behaviour of a hero who simply put the episode of the Ghost behind him and returned to Wittenberg.30 Hamlet is subject not merely to temptation but to a moral dilemma, and this is central to our understanding of the play as a whole. V It is this ambiguity above all that has given rise to so much of the critical disagreement about Hamlet’s moral obligations, the meaning of the ‘To be or not

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to be’ speech, and the significance of ‘conscience’. If we examine the linguistic collocations of revenge and its cognate forms (including vengeance) in the play, it becomes clear that there is no need to go outside the text itself for evidence of this ambiguity: Hamlet is prompted to his revenge by both heaven and hell (2.2.580). While hell, sin and darkness seem the dominant collocations of revenge (3.1.122; 3.2.248; 4.5.128–33), Hamlet perceives himself to be impelled by heaven too. One possible source of his conviction is the association of revenge with honour, and this connection is confirmed in the text. The sight of Fortinbras’s army seems designed to spur him on (4.4.33), to incite Hamlet to emulate the behaviour of this ‘delicate and tender prince’ (48). And yet the reasoning of this speech, as is widely recognised, seems curiously selfconsuming: Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw, When honour’s at the stake. (53–6)

The missing negative of line 54 should give us pause: this line as it stands receives a good deal of oblique support from the rest of the speech, even though it runs counter to the ostensible pattern of reasoning. Fortinbras’s behaviour is as absurd as it is heroic and the language fails to persuade that the ‘eggshell’ (53), the ‘fantasy and trick of fame’ (61) can justify ‘the imminent death of twenty thousand men’ (60).31 Nor, I think, is such a response entirely anachronistic. Within the previous four or five years Elizabethan audiences had watched the comedy of Hotspur uncontrollably talking too much, largely about honour and revenge (1 Henry IV, 1.3.130–258) and had heard Falstaff more pithily put the opposite case at the end of the play (5.1.126–40). Hotspur here appears heroic but ridiculous, Falstaff a coward with common sense. Honour is as morally ambiguous as revenge itself: it certainly has little to do with heaven. Instead, the prevailing source of Hamlet’s conviction that heaven prompts him to action is filial love, endorsed by nature and by the commandments. This is the basis of the Ghost’s appeal: Ghost Hamlet Ghost

If thou didst ever thy dear father love – O God! Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. (1.5.23–5)

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The sequence dear father love – God – revenge connects this trio of ideas. The commonest of the collocations with revenge and its cognate forms is father, which occurs with nine of the sixteen instances of the term. In three of the nine cases father is qualified by dear and in two cases revenge is linked with love. Revenge thus appears as a manifestation of filial piety, not so much as a duty but as an act of love, and the contradiction between this and the damnable nature of the deed it entails is the cause of Hamlet’s dilemma: ‘I, the son of a dear father murder’d, / Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell. . .’. His reaction to the Ghost, it is commonly noted, is immediate, intuitive and passionate: that I, with wings as swift As meditation or the thoughts of love, May sweep to my revenge. (1.5.29–31)

‘Meditation’ is an unexpected word here. If it simply means ‘thought’ (OED, 1, b), it reinforces the breathless speed of the image (‘wings’, ‘swift’, ‘sweep’). If, on the other hand, it evokes a religious experience (OED, 2), it conveys a visionary intensity in Hamlet’s response. Perhaps both meanings are present. In either case, this parallel of the revenger with the lover suggests heroic passion. But passion, as Perkins says, may blind moral judgement, and the play’s counter-images of the passionate revenger confirm the revulsion engendered by the language of Hamlet’s vengeful speeches. The encounter between the ‘hellish’ Pyrrhus and the king who murdered his father leads to a relief that for Hamlet the native and bloody hue of resolution is moderated by the pale cast of thought. Exchanges between Laertes and Claudius in Act 4 show clearly and in sequence a process which in Hamlet is complex and interrupted by events, doubts, plans, and finally conscience. The italics are mine: King

Laertes King

Laertes, was your father dear to you? Or are you like the painting of a sorrow, A face without a heart? Why ask you this? Not that I think you did not love your father. (4.7.106–10)

There is no need to query the filial love of Laertes. Here and in their earlier conversation he has shown himself apt enough for revenge. But the response to this challenge is violent in excess of his previous feelings:

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Shakespeare in Theory and Practice what would you undertake To show yourself in deed your father’s son More than in words? To cut his throat i’th’church. (4.7.124–6)

Claudius’s reply points to one of the most important features of revenge as it is presented in Hamlet: ‘No place indeed should murder sanctuarise; / Revenge should have no bounds’ (127–8). Nor is this opinion confined to the corrupt king. The prayer scene, understood literally and not as a rationalisation of Hamlet’s inaction, provides a direct parallel. Claudius, if not in church, is at his devotions, and Hamlet rejects the opportunity to cut his throat, not out of respect for the situation but because revenge demands a deed of greater horror. Hamlet himself does not at any point explicitly analyse his inner conflict in terms of its ethical ambiguity, and John Lawlor, who recognises that ‘we see and reject the whole scale of values which bloody resolution entails’, suggests accordingly that the source of Hamlet’s tragedy is his failure to acknowledge his own aversion to revenge. But Lawlor argues that ‘the centre of interest in Shakespeare’s play is not in the ethic of revenge, but in the over-burdened human agent’.32 This judgement, only one step away from the concept of the ‘sensitive prince’, seems to me to propose a false dichotomy: our interest in the problems of Hamlet cannot so easily be separated from our interest in the ethics of Hamlet. Elizabethan audiences, accustomed to a drama that was thoroughly and overtly moral, would not necessarily need a more explicit statement from Hamlet himself, when the action and imagery of the play as a whole so emphasise the horror of revenge. VI But if the play finally rejects the ethic of private revenge, there remains the public and political problem of Claudius, whose crimes increase while Hamlet wrestles with his conscience. By Act 5, with more evidence of Claudius’s guilt before him, Hamlet is able to reorder his earlier question: Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon – He that hath kill’d my king and whor’d my mother; Pooped in between the election and my hopes; Thrown out his angle for my proper life, And with such coz’nage – is’t not perfect conscience To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damn’d

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To let this canker of our nature come In further evil? (5.2.63–70)

The problem remains a case of conscience but now the terms are reversed. Revenge is not mentioned: the issue is how to avert further villainy and in this new context conscience seems to demand action, an enterprise, perhaps, of great pitch and moment, while it is passivity that seems damnable. The speech is prompted by Horatio’s outraged response to Hamlet’s account of Claudius’s plot against his life: ‘Why, what a king is this!’ (62). And the audience’s view surely echoes Horatio’s: Claudius is not a fit ruler. It is now clear that the king has murdered Old Hamlet, attempted to murder his son and, Vice-like, corrupted Laertes. Horatio’s outrage is consistent with the orthodox Elizabethan political theory that the monarch is subject to the law.33 A similarly complex problem, unusual in the early drama, confronts the hero of John Pikeryng’s Horestes (1567), the first English revenge play.34 Horestes debates the question whether it is right for the hero to avenge his father’s death by killing his mother. At his first appearance Horestes (Orestes) reveals his own uncertainty about his moral duty (ll. 200–16).35 Pity for his mother contends with piety towards his father, and he concludes by appealing to the gods to resolve the problem: ‘shall I revenged be / Of good Kynge Agememnones death, ye godes declare to me / Or shall I let the, adulltres dame, styll wallow in her sin?’ (214–16). The question is whether to suffer Clytemnestra’s villainy or to take arms against it. Revenge, the Vice, appears at once, calling himself, perhaps predictably, Courage. Horestes is quick to respond to his persuasions: ‘My thinkes I fele corrage provokes, my wil for ward againe’ (249). He resists Dame Nature, who pleads against matricide (487–536), and executes Clytemnestra. So far, the moral position seems clear. It also anticipates the conventions of later revenge plays: Horestes is misled into believing that revenge is synonymous with bravery. But the ethical debate is not confined to the mind of the hero. Counsel, a figure of some gravity, shifts the ground when he urges that murderers should not escape punishment lest others be encouraged to imitate them (311–14). Later, he repeats this argument for revenge as a deterrent, adding that it is right for Horestes to execute his mother, since a corrupt ruler sets a bad example to the people and should be removed (617–38).36 After the event, however, Fame compares the cruel Horestes to Nero, while Menelaus condemns his ruthlessness (1072–6, 1134–51). Nestor, on the other hand, maintains that his action was just and in accordance with the will of the gods (1172–86). Menelaus now concludes, in a comment that seems to summarise the ambivalence of the whole play, that he too would have been avenged – but he would have spared his mother (1188–91). When Horestes

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marries the daughter of Menelaus, the new king reappears, accompanied by his Nobles, Commons, Truth and Duty, evidently a just and worthy ruler. Revenge is driven out, as the Vice always is when good triumphs, but here it is hard to escape the feeling that this is also because Revenge has accomplished his mission. Whether Horestes is prompted to act primarily by the gods or hell remains unclear. Evidently, the emerging distinction between private obligation and public duty changes the picture. Perkins seems to concur. He would certainly have viewed the problems faced by both Horestes and Hamlet as cases of conscience. As far as revenge itself is concerned, for Perkins the moral position is straightforward (and remains familiar): violence is permissible for immediate self-defence in the absence of the lawful authorities, but deliberate and delayed killing arising from ‘prepensed malice’ is forbidden in all circumstances, whatever disgrace patience may incur in the eyes of the world.37 There is one exception, however. When Moses slew the Egyptian in Exodus 2.11–12, he ‘took upon him publike revenge in this action, as a Magistrate, and not private, as a private man . . . Beeing then a publicke person, his example can proove nothing’ concerning private revenge.38 If by Act 5 to kill Claudius has become ‘perfect conscience’, this may be because it is now apparent that the king has wronged not only Hamlet but also the state. Perkins gives no further guidance on the distinction between public and private revenge. He does add, however, that wrath may be righteous anger when the offence is an injury to God as well as to an individual. And elsewhere a comment he makes indicates that Perkins would have recognised the full ambiguity of Hamlet’s position. He is discussing the sixth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, and after explaining that this is to be interpreted widely, he adds, ‘Againe, this law is as well transgressed by not killing, when the law chargeth to kill, and by pardoning the punishment due unto murther, as by killing when we should not’.39 Letting murderers go free, in other words, is also culpable. To uphold the law Hamlet has to break it, and Perkins offers no opinion that would further help to resolve his problem. Like most people (and certainly like the morality dramatists), Hamlet characteristically thinks in antitheses, organising his world in terms of good and evil, right and wrong: ‘Hyperion to a satyr’ (1.2.140); ‘Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed, / And batten on this moor?’ (3.4.66–7); ‘To be or not to be . . .?’ His address to the Ghost demonstrates this way of thinking: Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable . . . (1.4.40–2)

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The Ghost, he supposes, must be either honest or the devil, abusing him to damn him. Claudius, by contrast, violates oppositions. His first speech shows how each term enters into conflict or flat contradiction with another: Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state, Have we, as ‘twere with a defeated joy, With an auspicious and a dropping eye, With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole, Taken to wife. (1.2.8–14)

Claudius represents evidence ‘That one may smile and smile, and be a villain’ (1.5.108). He addresses the hero as ‘my cousin Hamlet, and my son’ (1.2.64), overriding the sharp distinction between the two relationships. Hamlet immediately – and sharply – disentangles them again: ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’ (65). But as the play goes on, it becomes clear that Claudius has plunged Hamlet into a situation he cannot so readily reorganise, because it cannot be reduced to the familiar antitheses of right and wrong: conscience violates oppositions; morality both demands and opposes action. It is generally agreed that Hamlet behaves differently in Act 5, after his voyage to England. If he now knows that ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends’ (5.2.10), he also knows beyond further question that Claudius has tried to murder him. It follows that, if to kill Claudius is perfect conscience, then heaven will be ordinant, and ‘the readiness is all’ (5.2.215–16). When the moment comes, the king has given adequate evidence of ‘further evil’: he is to blame for the deaths of Gertrude and Laertes, as well as Hamlet himself. The protagonist now acts without hesitation but also without the blustering wrath of the earlier soliloquies: ‘The point envenom’d too! Then, venom, to thy work’ (5.2.313–14).40 We can assume that he is not a coward, since the play accords him a soldier’s funeral; and that his conscience was right in the end we may suppose from Horatio’s elegy: ‘flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ (5.2.352). The pattern evokes the medieval moral plays, where Mankind struggles with his conscience and is finally, providentially, saved. At the end of The Castle of Perseverance, the soul of the central figure is conducted to the throne of God in full view of the audience; at the end of Everyman, Knowledge, who has behaved very like conscience, stands on the brink of the grave and hears the angels sing as the hero’s soul is received into heaven. It would be reassuring to think that this apparently straightforward conclusion resolved the ambiguities of Hamlet. On the contrary, however, I believe that we remain ambivalent to the last. The Ghost’s instructions cannot

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be obeyed. On the one hand, he commands Hamlet to punish the villain and purge the court: ‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’; ‘Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest’ (1.5.25; 82–3). But, on the other, he urges, ‘howsomever thou pursuest this act, / Taint not thy mind’ (84–5). The play as a whole suggests that Hamlet’s mind is tainted – not in the sense that he is mad, but that he is inevitably corrupted by his mission. Hamlet is as ethically scrupulous as it is possible to be but, symbolically, he finally kills Claudius with the poisoned rapier and the poisoned wine.41 The king’s to blame in both cases, and yet Hamlet acts with Claudius’s own weapons, the characteristic tools of the revenger. In the same way, while he is in no sense responsible for the situation in which he finds himself, he becomes tainted by it, killing Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and, indirectly, Ophelia. We can see why: as pawns of Claudius, they represent the enemy. Even so, their deaths are evidence that Hamlet has lost his innocence. It appears that to act morally, he must act murderously, but he cannot act murderously and retain moral integrity. If Hamlet were a morality play, it would present a simple antithesis between conscience and wrath, or between mindless revenge and thought. In Horestes Pikeryng confonted the moral and political ambiguities of revenge but was unable to weld them into a coherent whole. The evidence suggests that if Perkins had confronted Hamlet’s problem, he would have recognised the full extent of its complexity. The world of Hamlet ‘reverberates with questions’42 and, appropriately, it leaves its audience with a question – or perhaps with two: what ought Hamlet to have done? what else could he have done?

chapter

10 I ag o t h e E s s ay i s t

I Like it or not, the racist Iago has style. Succinct, laconic, dispassionate, Iago’s speech is blunt and to the purpose, prosaic even where it is lineated like verse. His manner is generally minimalist, understated, cool and ironic. When it comes to money, for example, he is casually aphoristic: ‘Who steals my purse steals trash’ (3.3.160);1 on the determinations of personal disposition, he is terse and iconoclastic: ‘Virtue? a fig! ’tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus’ (1.3.320–1); towards Cassio, he is wittily contemptuous: ‘Mere prattle without practice / Is all his soldiership’ (1.1.25–6); and on Othello, dismissive: he ‘will as tenderly be led by th’ nose / As asses are’ (1.3.400–1). The implications of Othello’s blackness have rightly formed the central theme of most commentary for the last forty years.2 Here, for the sake of variety, I approach the play experimentally from a formal perspective to assess the part played by Iago’s mode of address in this tragedy of racial hatred. Most evidently, his dry, low-key style stands in direct contrast to the passionate poetry that defines the hero. From Othello’s first entrance, with ‘Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them’ (1.2.59), to his first despair (‘Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars’ (3.3.352)), the protagonist’s speech is grand, intense, adjectival, frequently periodic, normally metrical and, in a word, heroic. Othello the soldier is also in love, and if this passion is ultimately simple because unqualified – as simple as Iago’s misanthropy and much more absolute – Othello’s idealising love is simultaneously immense: ‘when I love thee not / Chaos is come again’ (3.3.91–2). Its formulation, characteristically metaphoric, depends on large-scale comparisons, and commonly invokes the elements, cosmology, life and 157

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death. Reunited with Desdemona in Cyprus after the storm, for example, he exclaims: O my soul’s joy, If after every tempest come such calms May the winds blow till they have wakened death, And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas, Olympus-high, and duck again as low As hell’s from heaven. If it were now to die ’Twere now to be most happy. (2.1.182–8)

Coming immediately after a series of ruminations from Iago on spiders, flies, tricks, fingers and colonic irrigation (2.1.167–77), this grand protestation delivers a radical change of register which is all the more marked in consequence of the antithesis. Othello defines his passion in the poetry that characterises all Shakespeare’s tragic heroes and seems to invite the sympathy of the audience, whatever the measure of the protagonist’s failures of insight or of ethics. Like Cleopatra’s, Othello’s imagery becomes the more cosmic as his plight seems more disastrous: ‘Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse / Of sun and moon, and that th’affrighted globe / Should yawn at alteration’ (5.2.98–100). Even when, conversely, the mode of address is understated, domestic, colloquial, the imagined context remains, as it is for Macbeth, apocalyptic: ‘O ill-starr’d wench, / Pale as thy smock. When we shall meet at compt / This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven / And fiends will snatch at it’ (5.2.270–3). These high, astounding terms are not derived from the source story of Othello. On the contrary, the style of Giraldi Cinthio’s Italian novella is economical and racy; dialogue serves primarily to advance the plot. Instead, the immediate influence on Shakespeare’s tragic rhetoric was Christopher Marlowe, his predecessor on the early modern English stage. The prototype for Shakespeare’s Moorish soldier in love with the alabaster, pearlwhite Desdemona is Tamburlaine, the shepherd-warrior, and specifically Tamburlaine in love with Zenocrate, ‘lovelier than the love of Jove, / Brighter than is the silver Rhodope, / Fairer than whitest snow on Scythian hills . . .’ (1 Tamburlaine, 1.2.87–9). Tamburlaine’s promises to Zenocrate are nearly as spacious as Othello’s declarations: With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled Thou shalt be drawn amid the frozen pools And scale the icy mountains’ lofty tops. (1.2.98–100)3

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And since Zenocrate, who has to all intents and purposes been raped, finds this persuasive, as apparently she does, we should not be surprised that, ‘round’ and ‘unvarnished’ though he self-deprecatingly thinks his manner (1.3.91), Othello’s tales of adventure prove so stirring and seductive to Desdemona when he recounts his story. Iago, of course, calls this, ‘bragging and telling her fantastical lies’ (2.1.221). And as far as he is concerned, Othello’s military dispositions are equally nothing but bombast, ‘Horribly stuffed with epithets of war’ (1.1.13). The conflict between Othello’s credulity and Iago’s racist resentment, between passionate heroism and the scepticism that sets out to destroy it, is staged as a clash of styles. If Othello has learnt his grand manner from Tamburlaine in particular and from heroic love poetry in general, where has Iago acquired the ironic detachment that makes him not only plausible to the hero but potentially disarming to the audience, and in that respect a worthy antagonist for Othello? If all the world loves a lover, wit too is a precious asset on the stage. To some of us, at least, style is at least as seductive as ethics. Half a century ago, Bernard Spivack argued for the debt of Iago to the inventive Vice of the Elizabethan moral plays, who took the audience into his confidence to show how easy it was to entrap a succession of representative human beings in their own folly and thereby bring them to damnation. The Vice, too, was cynical, manipulative, earthy, comic and, in his own way, dashing. As an entertainer, this figure trod a fine line between putting on display the mechanics of temptation and ensnaring the audience itself in his own evil.4 But the Vice cannot be held accountable for Iago’s characteristic sentence structure and imagery, the inscription of the cool negligence that vindicates his identification as ‘honest Iago’, a plain man whose very bluntness is the deceptive index of his seeming transparency. Does Iago simply reproduce the native rhythms and comparisons of English speech? It might be tempting, in a nationalistic kind of way, to think so, though in view of Iago’s deadly racism, this would be a form of nationalism that would all too readily return to plague the inventor. Besides, since the English language originally grew from a Germanic base, with the later addition of a large French component, enriched in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance by Latin and Greek, subsequently modified by colonial expansion, and in the twenty-first century increasingly influenced by America, it is not obvious that English speech has ever had a native manner in quite the way F. R. Leavis and his generation longed to believe. Englishness alone does not account for Iago. On the contrary, in my view it was the English naturalisation of a new French genre, the essay, that provided the immediate impetus for Iago’s dispassionate mode of address, and the consequent contest of styles played out in the course of the tragedy.

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If almost any line of Othello can be counted on to demonstrate the multilingual lineage of the English language (‘Horribly stuffed with epithets of war’ would serve perfectly as an instance of Latin, German, Greek and French derivation respectively), almost any Shakespeare play will readily reveal itself as a composite text, an assembly of sources and influences, styles and genres. Tom Stoppard’s knowing, postmodern screenplay for Shakespeare in Love shows the playwright deliberately snapping up unconsidered trifles, which go on to find their places in the text of Romeo and Juliet. ‘A plague o’both their houses’, declares a street preacher, and the fictional Shakespeare is provided with the seeds of Mercutio’s dying speech (Romeo and Juliet, 3.1.108).5 A suggestion from Kit Marlowe initiates the plot; Ned Alleyn comes up with the title. Will sees Rosaline’s successor at a dance, where the camera lingers on the torches Juliet will soon teach to turn bright (1.5.43).6 In showing Romeo and Juliet as an assembly of borrowings, appropriations and transformations, the film exploits at the level of fantasy the comic possibilities of an actual mode of composition that Shakespeare’s editors have long taken for granted, and critical theorists have more recently dignified with the name of intertextuality. Romeo and Juliet itself draws variously on Roman comedy for its senex and nutrix, and on European medieval romance for its account of dangerous and destructive love, as well as on a fast-moving Italian novella, remodelled as a sentimental French poem, translated into English with further additions by Arthur Brooke. The play is indebted to Shakespeare’s own version of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition for the verse pattern of its Choruses, as well as the first exchanges between the protagonists (1.5.92–105). Nowhere is the value of a succession of cultural encounters more self-evidently on display. In a similar way, Othello, too, makes singularity out of a range of disparate materials. Roman comedy is there in the figure of Brabantio, just as medieval romance once again shapes the tragedy, in conjunction with the new-found conflation of romantic love with marriage, for better or worse. Besides the moral plays and Marlowe, Shakespeare’s drama draws on English domestic tragedy and travellers’ tales, as well as Ben Jonson’s comedies. E. A. J. Honigmann concludes his account of the sources with the observation that Shakespeare ‘packed into’ the play ‘much miscellaneous reading as well as something not far removed from research, his perusal of very recent books on the Mediterranean world, on north Africa and on Venice’.7 The list might also, in my view, include Montaigne’s essays, and give credit to their translator, John Florio, as go-between. Florio’s English rendering of Montaigne’s relaxed but economical prose, teaching his essays, as he puts it, ‘to talke our tongue’,8 either influenced or legitimated a range of writings and, perhaps more important, a

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mode of address, that would come to seem, in the work of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt two hundred years later, quintessentially English. And Florio knew all about intertextuality. To the degree that writers necessarily draw on their predecessors’ work, what is all writing but a form of translation, he asks. And even supposing Homer was truly original, ‘yet Homer by Virgil is often so translated . . . and Petrarch, if well tracked, would be found in their footesteps, whose verie garbage lesse Poets are noted to have gathered’.9 The date of Othello is uncertain. According to the traditional view, it was first performed in 1603 or 1604. Honigmann, as editor of Arden 3, dates it a year or two earlier, on the basis of verbal parallels with Hamlet and conjectural casting similarities with Twelfth Night.10 Michel Seigneur de Montaigne published his essays in French in the 1580s,11 and these appeared in Florio’s English translation in 1603. The manner of the Essayes is sceptical, wry and altogether un- or perhaps even anti-heroic. Montaigne is fascinated by human absurdity, not least his own, and is singularly unimpressed by what he sees as self-deception. Among the aids to this deluded condition, he lists poetry. For all Montaigne’s constant invocation of classical allusion in his support, his style represents the direct opposite of pedantry. On the contrary, he is commonly relaxed and conversational, but at the same time economical and pointed. And this plain manner inscribes a no-nonsense attitude. Here is Florio’s altogether dispassionate Montaigne deflating the poetic pretensions of love: ‘when all is done: I finde that love is nothing else but an insatiate thirst of enjoying a greedily desired subject. Nor Venus that good huswife, other, then a tickling delight of emptying ones seminary vessels’.12 And here, as prosaic, as sceptical, as dismissive, is Iago’s account of love: we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts; whereof I take this, that you call love, to be a sect or scion . . . It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. (1.3.330–6)

Where Iago’s design is malevolent, misanthropic, Montaigne is motivated by tolerance and resigned to folly, but the rhythms are similar. Iago tells Cassio, ‘Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving’ (2.3.264–6); and Florio’s Montaigne tells his reader, ‘It is chance that applieth glory unto us, according to her temeritie. I have often seene it to goe before desert; yea and many times to out-goe merit’.13 Other resemblances are not so much thematic as stylistic: the mode of address in each case is brisk, prosaic and unassuming, at the same time balancing antitheses with the effect of constructing an aphorism resembling a commonplace or proverb. And in each case the proposition seems correspondingly forthright, undeceived: candid Montaigne; ‘honest Iago’.

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Shakespeare’s general debt to Montaigne has long been known, though the source-hunters have looked mainly for parallels at the level of content. The traditional assumption has been that the influence of the Essayes pervaded the darkest of the plays written after they were printed in 1603, particularly King Lear in 1605 and the second quarto of Hamlet, printed a year earlier, but that while there were incidental echoes in Othello, Montaigne’s presence there was ‘scarcely discernible’.14 Surely, if we accept Honigmann’s earlier date, so that Othello preceded the publication of the English translation of the Essayes, any affinities are no more than coincidental? That is possible, though the dates alone are by no means conclusive. Florio’s translation was ready by 1599, and it is conceivable that Shakespeare had seen it, or parts of it. Sir William Cornwallis had, and he liked what he saw. By his own account, Cornwallis did not know French, but he admired the essays in translation for the economy of their style, ‘admitting as fewe Idle words as our language will endure’. Florio’s Montaigne, Cornwallis felt, had ‘put Pedanticall Schollerisme out of countenance’, speaking ‘nobly, honestly, and wisely, with little method but with much judgement’.15 In this tribute to Montaigne’s straightforwardness, Cornwallis also offers a sample of the stylistic debt he himself had incurred to his model’s blunt manner and antithetical phrasing. Cornwallis’s own Essayes were published in 1600, with a second collection hard on its heels in 1601, still before Florio had appeared in print. Also in 1601 Robert Johnson issued his anthology of Essais, or rather Imperfect Offers, exploiting in his title the French meaning of the term. There is little of Montaigne’s wit in these somewhat schoolmasterly admonitions, though they share his preference for reason over passion and a generally unpretentious prose style. But before Florio had completed his work, Francis Bacon’s initial collection of ten essays was printed in 1597. This conduct book for men of the world proved remarkably popular: it was reprinted a year later, and again in 1604 and 1606. The collection was to be expanded in 1612, and once more in 1625, to reach a total of fifty-eight essays. Though he probably read the Essais in French, and though he was the first writer to use Montaigne’s title for the new genre,16 Bacon’s stylistic debt to Montaigne was negligible in the intensely aphoristic compositions of 1597, where maxim follows succinct maxim with little in the way of transition between them. Though this would change in the later essays, there is nothing familiar, conversational or personal here. Moreover, Bacon’s cynicism in these early compositions goes way beyond Montaigne’s scepticism and, indeed, at times Iago’s,17 but his writing shared the prevailing economy of style, as well as the prevailing candour.18 Perhaps, then, both Florio and Shakespeare caught a moment when the Elizabethan public was already primed to welcome a new genre. Both Bacon and Montaigne owed a stylistic debt to Seneca. In 1951 George Williamson brilliantly told in The Senecan Amble the story of a

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struggle for the soul of early modern English prose between Cicero, on the one hand, whose rounded periods and subordinating conjunctions produced an elaborate sentence structure that organised the argument, while suspending the conclusion until it became inevitable, and, on the other, Seneca’s less theatrical, more dispassionate and predominantly paratactic sententiae, which offered a succession of conclusions that their seeming transparency made hard to resist. Part of Williamson’s point is that the more discontinuous and apparently casual Senecan style was nothing of the kind. On the contrary, it depended on the interaction of a repetition of sound and rhythm in successive phrases with wordplay and the inversion of word order to emphasise an antithesis or produce an aphorism.19 The competition between Cicero and Seneca was not between artifice and nature, but between two forms of art.20 Seneca’s epistles are, as Bacon himself pointed out, proto-essays, consisting of a succession of pointed observations on a given topic.21 Moreover, in so far as they assume an interlocutor and simulate speech, they address the reader with the same immediacy, though nothing like the same personal revelation or the same impression of free association, that is found in Montaigne. By the first decade of the seventeenth century, and with the support of Florio’s Montaigne, Senecan plainness was in the ascendant. In The Advancement of Learning in 1605 Bacon identified Ciceronianism as the first vanity in learning, for men began to hunt more after words than matter; more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention or depth of judgment.22

Montaigne, who deplores bombast,23 praises Seneca for his ‘plaine, unaffected’ manner; and while he admires Cicero’s morality, he confesses that he finds his ‘flourishes’ and ‘circumlocutions’ ‘tedious’, and more fit for sermons, where it is safe to take a nap.24 In his essay on Cicero, he exclaims, ‘Fie on that eloquence, which leaves us with a desire of it, and not of things’.25 ‘Mere prattle without practice’, as Iago might have said. The man of action prefers deeds to words, and therefore speaks plainly. As Cornwallis puts it, I like much better to doe well then to talke well, chusing to bee beloved rather then admired, aspiring to no more height then the comfort of a good conscience, and doing good to some, harme to none. If my Essayes speake thus, they speake as I would have them; for I thinke not of making moralitie full of imbrodery cutworkes, but to cloth her in trueth and plainenesse.26

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Committed to the plain truth, just as Iago seems to be, the essayists do not, of course, mince their words. Montaigne famously discusses intimate matters with great frankness. After Iago’s surprising sexual innuendoes in conversation with Desdemona, Cassio says he ‘speaks home, madam, you may relish him more in the soldier than the scholar’ (2.1.165–6). Everyday allusions and metaphors were another hall-mark of the essay tradition. On the importance of using judgement about what to read, Bacon says: ‘Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and Some Few to be Chewed and Digested’.27 Montaigne also acknowledges his debts to good authors in unassuming dietary images: each time he reads Plutarch, ‘I pull some legge or wing from him’, he admits.28 The comparisons are familiar, commonplace, quotidian. Iago doesn’t have much to say about books, but his ‘unbitted lusts’ are drawn from the ordinary world of horsebreaking. His imagery comes from the herbals (1.3.349–50) and concerns less-than-lyrical nettles and lettuce (1.3.322–3), unheroic cats and blind puppies (336–7), or unpoetic goats and monkeys (3.3.406). When he prophesies that Othello will be ‘led by th’ nose’, the metaphor echoes, whether consciously or not, Bacon’s warning that people who get into suits they don’t understand may be led by the nose.29 The plain style shrinks from grand comparisons as much as it distrusts elaborate and subordinating syntax. Montaigne disarmingly claims to put himself on display in his essays, just as he is, faults and all: ‘it is my selfe I pourtray’, he insists. ‘My imperfections shall therein be read to the life, and my naturall forme discerned’.30 Like Iago, the essayists confide in us. Montaigne is, he tells us, rather shorter than the average, and so lacking in authority; his face is not fat, but full; he is not good at physical exercise, with the exception of running, and he can’t sing or play an instrument. He is lazy and undisciplined, he says; he has a bad memory, especially for names; he forgets what he himself has written, let alone the sources of his quotations; he was brought up in the country, and yet he knows almost nothing of agricultural skills, and can hardly tell a lettuce from a cabbage.31 Although people urge him to improve his style, he refuses to change anything that is his custom: ‘Speake I not so every where? Doe I not lively display my selfe? . . . All the world may know me by my booke, and my booke by me’.32 Cornwallis is less copious in his revelations, but he can be equally personal, equally self-deprecating, even if the characteristics he reveals are less widely shared.33 Iago does not tell us about his physical appearance, for the obvious reason that we can see it, or his weaknesses, since these are not at issue, but he is remarkably forthcoming about his feelings and suspicions concerning the general, not to mention his designs on him: ‘I follow him to serve my turn upon him’ (1.1.41); ‘In following him I follow but myself’ (1.1.57). He is as frank with us about his relationship with Roderigo: ‘Thus

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do I ever make my fool my purse’ (1.3.382). The same transparency that takes the audience into his confidence disarms his interlocutors in the play, even when it is most dissembled: ‘Men should be what they seem’, he tells Othello, ‘Or those that be not, would they might seem none’ (3.3.129–30). Yes, indeed. It takes, of course, considerable rhetorical skill on the part of the essayists to present themselves as thus ingenuous, the same skill that is practised on his gulls by Iago, who seems at all times to show himself most openly as he is. To modern ears the essayists’ preference for the plain style carries conviction: we too distrust all forms of rhetoric and spin. But plainness may only be yet another kind of spin: what is made to sound obvious or proverbial may owe its persuasive power as much to the manner as to the substance. By 1623 Bacon acknowledged as much in an addition to the new, expanded Latin version of The Advancement of Learning: ‘it comes to passe by this Artifice that every passage seemes more witty and waighty than indeed it is’.34 (Ironically, Bacon’s seventeenth-century translator reintroduces a pointed Senecanism into the text at this moment: ‘more witty and waighty’ renders magis ingeniosa: cleverer.35) Iago could have learned from the essayists, then, if he needed to, that an aphorism or an everyday comparison can invest both a proposition and its author not only with wit and judgement, but also with an impression of transparency. ‘The wine she drinks is made of grapes’ (2.1.249–50); ‘We cannot all be masters, nor all masters / Cannot be truly followed’ (1.1.42–3). It is the syntax of Iago’s commonplaces that conspires to present the speaker as a shrewd man of the world, experienced and discerning precisely to the degree that he sees through the polite, conventional forms – and his interlocutors believe him. No wonder, then, that Othello does too: ‘This fellow’s of exceeding honesty / And knows all qualities, with a learned spirit, / Of human dealings’ (3.3.262–4). In consequence, when Iago practises the deepest hypocrisy in the transparent style of the essayists, he is at his most convincing: Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls: Who steals my purse steals trash –’tis something – nothing, ’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands – But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him And makes me poor indeed. (3.3.158–64)36

It is not only Othello who is fooled by this: Iago’s sentiment here has entered into the proverbial wisdom.

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What is at stake in my argument, then, is not exactly a matter of sources and influences, and not a question of direct thematic parallels, so much as an alignment. Iago aligns himself with the manner of the essayists: terse, prosaic, forthright. And this manner inscribes a world-view which is above all dispassionate. The essayists share the Stoic values of their stylistic model, Seneca, and their ethical model, Plutarch, believing that wisdom consists in scorning undue emotional investment in what we cannot control. They place a high premium on rationality, which can be relied on to show that passion is always extravagant, unjustified, an unsound basis for conduct: ‘If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality’, Iago insists, ‘the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions’ (1.3.327–30). From this point of view, Othello’s poetic idealisation of Desdemona, and his equally intense disillusionment at her supposed unfaithfulness, are indeed ‘preposterous’. The cosmic scale of Othello’s love poetry, as well as his passionate outcry, ‘the pity of it, Iago’ (4.1.192), represent exactly what Stoicism deplores, and the essayists call in doubt. Poetry, for Montaigne, is the ally of the passion he distrusts, ‘and who shall debarre Cupid the service and conversation of Poesie, shall weaken him of his best weapons’. Indeed, he goes further, proposing that poetic fiction is where love properly belongs: ‘But for so much as I know of it, the power and might of this God, are found more quick and lively in the shadowe of the Poesie, then in their owne essence’; ‘Venus is not so faire, nor so alluring all naked, quick and panting’, as she is in some verses of Virgil, he insists.37 In the 1625 edition of the Essayes, Bacon would go on to show that he shared Montaigne’s relegation of love to the world of fiction: ‘The Stage is more beholding to Love, then the Life of Man’, he affirms. Already in 1612 he had explained that the problem with love was extravagance, its propensity to overvalue and exaggerate: Extreame it may well bee, since the Speaking in a perpetuall Hyperbole, is comely in nothing, but Love. Neither is it meerely in the Phrase; For whereas it hath beene well said, that the Arch-flatterer, with whom all the petty Flatterers have Intelligence, is a Mans Selfe; Certainly, the Lover is more. For there was never Proud Man, thought so absurdly well of himselfe, as the Lover doth of the Person loved: And therefore, it was well said; That it is impossible to love, and to be wise.38

Or, in Montaigne’s more condensed aphorism, ‘wisedome and love cannot live together’.

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Montaigne is here quoting classical authority, he reveals. But his own view, more tolerant and more benign, turns out to be no less dispassionate, damning with faint praise: even love, he concedes, has its uses, keeping the dull and the elderly awake and alive. Thus modestly understood, ‘It is only hurtfull unto fooles’.39 Cornwallis, conversely, thinks it harmless enough as a way of socialising adolescents and teaching them, in fact, to write verses, but not really fit for grown-ups: It is a pretty soft thing this same Love, an excellent company keeper; full of gentlenesse and affabilitie; makes men fine and to go cleanly; teacheth them qualities, handsome protestations; and if the ground be not too barren, it bringeth forth Rimes and Songs full of passion, enough to procure crossed armes and the Hat pulled down. Yea, it is a very fine thing, the badge of eighteene and upward, not to be disallowed. Better spend thy time so then at Dice.40

Iago is harsher than any of the essayists, but he shares their general perspective: ‘It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will’. IV The play, it appears, thus presents a contest of mighty opposites, two antithetical figures, two opposed genres, in which prosaic scepticism confronts passionate poetry and prevails, taking possession of the hero to his own destruction. Iago convinces Othello that his idealising passion is not justified, and the hero begins to talk like his antagonist: ‘You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!’ (4.1.263). But even as Othello calls Desdemona whore, and rewrites his marriage, in the disparaging metaphors we might expect of Iago, as ‘a cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender in’ (4.2.62–3), a trace of the old heroic grandeur remains in the cosmic immensities that form the setting for the quotidian imagery defining the nihilism that constitutes his response to her supposed infidelity: Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks, The bawdy wind that kisses all it meets Is hushed within the hollow mine of earth And will not hear’t. (4.2.78–81)

The speech might almost be seen as a parody of the manner in which he greets Desdemona after the storm. But if heaven and hell are empty now and the mine of earth hollow, there is nothing of Stoicism here. The Stoics prescribed indifference, or at best

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resignation to the inevitable, not a murderous revenge. Indeed, Montaigne draws attention to a number of classical cuckolds who had the good sense to ignore the adultery of their wives. It is really much better, he says, to pay no attention: what can’t be cured must be endured.41 By contrast, the condition that supplants ‘fond love’ in Othello’s vocabulary, as in his actions, is not, of course, scepticism but ‘black vengeance’ and ‘tyrannous hate’ (3.3.448–52), a deadly destructiveness that leads with ‘icy current and compulsive course’ (457) to the tragedy’s appalling conclusion. These are ‘bloody thoughts’ (460), violent and hectic in their quest for ‘some swift means of death’ for Desdemona (480). Despite his later claim that ‘nought I did in hate, but all in honour’ (5.2.292), that is not how it sounds in the first passionate threats to ‘tear her all to pieces’ (3.3.434), or ‘chop her into messes’ (4.1.197). When Othello’s rounded periods give way, it is not the aphorisms and antitheses of the essayists that take their place, but the broken, fragmentary syntax of intense emotion: ‘Noses, ears and lips. Is’t possible? Confess! handkerchief! O devil!’ (4.1.42). Iago’s earlier gloating comment is evidently justified: ‘I see, sir, you are eaten up with passion’ (3.3.394). If the other of sceptical distrust invades the selfsame of love, it is not its own likeness it finds there, but instead a direct reversal of what the essayists would see as the initial overvaluation of the object of desire. In Act 5, confronted by the villain who has brought him to the brink of hell, Othello looks down at Iago’s feet to find the cloven hooves that should be visible there. ‘But that’s a fable’, he corrects himself (5.2.283–4). The audience, however, has glimpsed Iago’s devilish nature from the beginning, since we know, as Roderigo, Brabantio, Cassio, Desdemona herself and Othello do not, that the candid, negligent, dispassionate manner of the essayists has the effect of masking in Iago a feeling as deep and as powerful as Othello’s own. Racial hatred is a passion equal in its intensity to love.42 More so, perhaps, the play suggests, if hate is irreversible, while love can so easily be led by the nose. Four times in the first act Iago insists that he hates the Moor (1.1.5–7; 152; 1.3.366–7; 385), but only the audience is privy to the moment when this emotion momentarily reveals itself in imagery on the grand scale that resembles in a demonic key the cosmic idealisations of the hero in love: ‘I have’t, it is engendered! Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light’ (1.3.402–3). Iago’s hate is not, after all, only cold, calculating and rational; it is also, as he himself puts it, ‘hearted’ (1.3.367). At the end of the play, Iago stands revealed as an inhuman ‘Spartan dog’, a bloodhound, ‘More fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea’ (5.2.359–60). When love’s apparent antithesis takes over Othello, it is surely as another kind of passion that it does so. Iago’s conjuring transforms Othello in the likeness of the villain’s true self, fierce, relentless, irresistible, deadly. But is transformation, after all, the appropriate term? Doesn’t passion always encompass something akin to anguish, hunger or the sea, a drive,

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experienced as a force of nature, that incorporates at its limit a quest for death? Etymologically, in both the romance languages and German, passion and Leidenschaft mean suffering. Psychoanalytically, too, the death drive keeps returning to haunt the libido that seems to constitute its opposite, since the lost object of primordial desire cannot and, indeed, must not be refound. If so, heroic love, like heroism itself, is never as far from death, and its projection outwards in hate, as might at first appear. With that possibility in mind, I want to return to Othello’s inscription in passionate love poetry of perfect happiness at his reunion with Desdemona after the storm. O my soul’s joy, If after every tempest come such calms May the winds blow till they have wakened death, And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas, Olympus-high, and duck again as low As hell’s from heaven. If it were now to die ’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear My soul hath her content so absolute That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate. (2.1.182–91)

The logic of the speech turns on an initial opposition between storm and calm, death threatened by winds that make the seas touch hell and heaven on one side and, on the other, comfort that represents the absolute content of survival in restoration to dry land and to each other. But already these opposites are linked, on the grounds that the one promises the other precisely as its difference. The extreme joy of reunion is the direct consequence of separation and tempest, comfort the result of the experience of discomfort, content now of anxiety then. Absence, as the essayists might more sceptically have put it, makes the heart grow fonder, and depth of fear measures the scale of relief. The logic of the opposition does not turn out to hold, however. Just as the ship in the storm climbs hills of seas, levels with Olympus, glimpses heaven, only to be hurled down as low as hell, the instant of happiness now confronts the abyss of unknown fate in the future, which cannot be counted on, if the present contentment is truly absolute, to deliver such another comfort. And so, even in the moment of absolute content, ‘I fear’, Othello says. I fear My soul hath her content so absolute

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That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate.

The other invades the selfsame; anxiety concerning the future intrudes into the felicity of the present; and only death offers itself as the perpetuation of joy, both its ideal outcome and its guarantee: ‘If it were now to die / ’Twere now to be most happy’. Love and death are no longer opposites but allies, and their conjunction is the only form in which comfort can be made complete. When desire embraces death in this way, no wonder Othello’s ‘fond love’ so readily yields up its ‘hearted throne’ to destructiveness (3.3.448–52), projecting the death drive outwards in violence against the object of both, as the protagonist exchanges one passion for another that always already unconsciously inhabits it, his heroic love for villainous hate. What we witness is not scepticism prevailing over passion, but the death drive taking possession of desire, its own counterpart and double, at once antagonist and similitude. Passion supplants the antithetical passion it also entails. Moreover, just as absolute happiness cannot name itself without reference to the anxiety it represses, or cannot be sure to perpetuate itself except in death, pure passion, Othello’s declaration may be seen to demonstrate, cannot define its own ideal form, unconditional, transcendent, except in terms of its own possible future loss in unknown fate. There is no mode in which absolute, ideal love can simply proclaim its own presence. Indeed, the hero says as much: ‘I cannot speak enough of this content, / It stops me here, it is too much of joy’ (2.1.194–5). How can love formulate itself but by reference to its differentiating other (‘when I love thee not / Chaos is come again’)? Nor can this condition be sustained in some supposed realm of ultimate passion, untouched and uncluttered by rationality, calculation, action. It follows that the ideal, unutterable state that proclaims its own simple, unqualified presence cannot engage with the world beyond itself. Cyprus, the war, Cassio and Iago, marriage itself as an institution, are all other than the thing itself; they stand to a degree outside love and impel it, however marginally, in the direction of chaos. Othello creates the chaos he dreads, makes his own fearful prediction come true, not in the first instance, I believe, because of who or what he is, but out of a generic desire for the impossible absolute of heroic passion. That is why Iago the essayist is inevitably more powerful than the idealist Othello. An equally generic distrust of all ideals, all absolutes, is made the ally of a relentless hate that goes out of its way to embrace reason, calculation, action. Iago’s worldly hate invokes motives (his own envy, his suspicion of cuckoldry, Cassio’s innocence); it plots, invents stratagems, exploits Othello’s blackness, masquerades as its own other. Iago theorises his own passion, and to that

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degree can be seen to stand outside it. Impure in this sense, Iago’s hatred of Othello rationalises; sceptical towards all passion, including its own, it is ready to engage fully with every aspect of the world. The villain is dangerous because his racist passion, no less intense than Othello’s, is comprehensive, heterogeneous and dispersed, as the warrior-hero’s is not. Iago’s adoption of the dispassionate manner of the essayists is more, then, than a charade, a pose designed to fool the people he plans to destroy. His style both masks and proclaims him. As psychoanalysis repeatedly insists, the drive is known only in its inscription. Just as desire generates its own representation at the level of the signifier in love poetry, so malice is able to signify in a laconic imitation of the genre Montaigne inaugurated and Florio taught to talk our tongue. Iago’s stance is malign where Montaigne’s is benevolent, hostile where Montaigne’s is welcoming and inclusive, but the margin between the sceptic and the cynic offers scope for misanthropy and racism. Negligence may be born of tolerance, or contempt; a dispassionate stance can be either indulgent or callous. And where else can we locate drama but in style, at the level of the signifier, whether we conceive this as predominantly visual, gestural or verbal? Love and hate cannot be made visible in themselves; passion is never perceptible as such. The drive may motivate the action of tragedy; and the moment of anagnorisis may lay bare for an instant the ambivalent character of passion, as Othello’s remorseful rhetoric confronts the now silent Iago at the end of the play. But for the duration of the performance, after all, style is substance, and there is no other. Shakespeare’s tragedy of love and nihilism shows a contention of genres, as well as passions, in the poetic hero’s contest with an essayist who cloaks racial hatred in casual indifference.

Notes

1 Introduction: Practising with Theory 11. Where they differ, I have given the British publication dates. In some instances the translations appeared a year earlier in the USA. 12. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 158. 13. Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 437. 14. It was no doubt this active involvement of the subject in its own constitution as obedient that Stephen Greenblatt would in 1980 mistake for a (deliberate) selffashioning. 15. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock, 1971), pp. 278, 286–7. 16. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). 17. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (London: NLB, 1971), 121–73, pp. 144–9. 18. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Cape, 1975), pp. 216–17. 19. Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 129–60, pp. 139–41. 10. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 34. Geneva was the home of Calvinism, of course, as well as of Saussure. 11. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 27–73. 12. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 85–116, p. 108. 13. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 111. See also his earlier comments on Shakespeare (pp. 28–32).

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14. As early as 1962, Foucault had given a remarkable summary of the implications of Law in Lacan’s theory (see Foucault, ‘The Father’s “No” ’, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 5–20, pp. 15–16). For the Panopticon, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 200–3. For the gaze, see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (Seminar 11) [1964], trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 67–119; ‘From the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it’ (p. 83). 15. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 71–82. 16. Lyotard’s preoccupation with the sublime seems to me to bear traces of theology throughout, but see in particular Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, trans. Richard Beardsworth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000) and my discussion in this volume, pp. 32–3. 17. Derrida’s denunciation in ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’ depends primarily on Lacan’s early work (Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 411–96). The seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’ was first given in 1955 (Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–5 (Seminar 2), trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 191–205), though Lacan continued to add to it and included the expanded version as the opening essay of the Écrits in 1966. He discarded it, however, from the selection published in English in 1977. ‘The Rome Discourse’ was given in 1953, though that too was included in 1966 (Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 30–113). Derrida’s reading here of ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ [1958] (Écrits: A Selection, pp. 281–91) is less sympathetic than mine (see Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 54–71). 18. Derrida, ‘Le Facteur’, p. 420. For the ‘alterity’ of the unconscious, see Derrida, ‘Differance’, pp. 151–2. 19. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Purloined Letter’, Selected Writings, ed. David Galloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 330–49, p. 345. 20. See Catherine Belsey, ‘Historicizing New Historicism’, Presentist Shakespeares, ed. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), pp. 27–45. 21. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1976), pp. 656–60. 22. ‘History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V’, Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 206–27. 23. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 156–7n.

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Notes to pages 15–18

2 Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan with Augustine and Montaigne 11. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 83. 12. ‘As the new historicism attempts to strengthen its hold over reconfiguring the Renaissance (and in particular the Renaissance “subject”), psychoanalysis, implicitly or explicitly, finds itself marginalized’ (Elizabeth Bellamy, Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 4. 13. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Pyschoanalysis and Renaissance Culture’, Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 210–24, p. 210. 14. See for example Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995) and The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Christopher Pye, The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Philip Armstrong, Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2001). 15. Bellamy, Translations of Power, p. 14; Schiesari, Gendering of Melancholia, pp. 23–4. 16. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 284–5. 17. Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 129–60, pp. 151–2. 18. Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey, 2 vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), Vol. 1, pp. xli–xliii. 19. On the question, for example, of breaking wind (The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, 1.20, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1910), Vol. 1, p. 99). 10. Montaigne, Essayes, 1.20, Vol. 1, pp. 92–104 (p. 98). 11. Augustine, The City of God, 14.16, trans. John Healey [1610], 2 vols (London: Dent, 1945), Vol. 2, p. 47. The modern edition slightly corrects Healey’s orginal. 12. ‘On a raison de remarquer l’indocile liberté de ce membre, s’ingerant si importunement, lors que nous n’en avons que faire, et defaillant si importunement lors que nous en avons le plus affaire’ (Montaigne, Essais, Vol. 1, p. 102); ‘Sed aliquando importunus est ille motus poscente nullo, aliquando autem destituit inhiantem, et cum in animo concupiscentia ferveat, friget in corpore’ (St Augustine,

Notes to pages 19–23

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

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The City of God Against the Pagans, 14.16, Vol. 4, Books 12–15, trans. Philip Levine, The Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1966), p. 354). Augustine, City, 14.15 (trans. Healey), Vol. 2, pp. 45–6. David M. Friedman, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (New York: Free Press, 2001), p. 193. I am grateful to Cynthia Dessen for this book. Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 258. See also Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Jacqueline Rose, ‘Femininity and Its Discontents’, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 83–103. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 285. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 290. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, pp. 284, 288. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 288. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 290. Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–5 (Seminar 2), trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 225. Lacan, The Ego, pp. 225–6. Slavoj Žižek also notes the parallel between the Lacanian phallus and the Augustinian penis (The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 222–3). Augustine, City, 14.15 (trans. Healey), Vol. 2, p. 45. Augustine, Confessions, 1.1, trans. William Watts [1631], 2 vols, The Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1912), Vol. 1, pp. 3, 2. Michel Foucault also took an interest in Augustine’s account of the unruly member, seeing it as bringing into being a new form of self-subjection. Augustine refocuses attention, Foucault argues, from the relationship between the libido and other people to that between the self and the self. At this moment ‘sexuality, subjectivity, and truth were strongly linked together’ to bring the subject into line, or rather, to induce subjects to bring themselves into line (‘Sexuality and Solitude’, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 175–84, p. 183). Foucault repudiates psychoanalysis on much the same grounds: it insists on subjecting us to the ‘truth’ of our sexuality. Psychoanalysis ‘promises us at the same time our sex, our true sex, and that whole truth about ourselves that secretly keeps vigil in it’ (Herculine Barbin, trans. Richard McDougall (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), p. xi). In ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ the phallus symbolises the penis or clitoris indiscriminately; unlike men, women tolerate frigidity; men, by contrast, commonly seek out more than one woman; and yet ‘if one looks more closely, the same redoubling is to be found in the woman’ (Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 290). Montaigne, Essayes, 3.5, Vol. 3, p. 84. ‘In men the nature of the genital organs is disobedient and self-willed, like a creature that is deaf to reason, and it attempts

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

Notes to pages 23–30 to dominate all because of its frenzied lusts.’ The corresponding unruly organ in women is the womb, which longs to bear children, and causes all kinds of maladies if this gratification is deferred or denied (Plato, Timaeus 91 B and C, Timaeus, Critias, etc., trans. R. G. Bury, The Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1966), pp. 248–51). Montaigne, Essayes, 3.5, Vol. 3, p. 74. Montaigne, Essayes, 3.5, Vol. 3, pp. 106–7; Augustine, City, 14.19 (trans. Healey), Vol. 2, p. 50. Montaigne, Essayes, 3.5, Vol. 3, p. 106. Augustine, City, 14.16 (trans. Healey), Vol. 2, p. 47. Montaigne, Essayes, 3.5, Vol. 3, p. 106. Montaigne, Essayes, 3.5, Vol. 3, p. 98. Montaigne, Essayes, 3.5, Vol. 3, p. 82. Montaigne, Essayes, 1.20, Vol. 1, p. 100. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar 7), trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 319. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 317. Lacan, Ethics, p. 6. A. O. Lovejoy, ‘Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall’, ELH, 4 (1937), pp. 161–79. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 20; Augustine, Confessions, 1, pp. 19–22. Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–4 (Seminar 1), trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 171–2. Lacan, Freud’s Papers, 247–60, p. 249. Lacan, Freud’s Papers, p. 278. Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 179 (my translation). Montaigne, Essayes, 2.5, Vol. 2, pp. 45–6. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Seminar 11), trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 223–4. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 300. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 224. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 223. Montaigne, Essayes, 3.5, Vol. 3, pp. 104–5. Montaigne, Essayes, 1.8, Vol. 1, p. 44. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 1. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, pp. 211–12. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 299. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 166. Montaigne, Essayes, 3.5, Vol. 3, p. 66. Montaigne, Essayes, 3.5, Vol. 3, p. 62. Montaigne, Essayes, 3.5, Vol. 3, 123. Derrida, ‘Differance’, p. 133.

Notes to pages 30–37 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

177

Augustine, City, 14.28 (trans. Healey), Vol. 2, p. 58. Augustine, City, 14.3 (trans. Healey), Vol. 2, p. 29. Augustine, City, 14.13 (trans. Healey), Vol. 2, 43–4. ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 2 vols. Vol. 1. p. 23. Augustine, City, 14.5 (trans. Healey), Vol. 2, p. 31. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 81. Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, trans. Richard Beardsworth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 18–21, p. 20. Lyotard, The Confession, p. 41. Lyotard, The Confession, p. 40. Lyotard, The Confession, p. 42. Augustine, Confessions, 8.12, Vol. 1, pp. 464–5. Augustine, Confessions, 13.15, Vol. 2, pp. 406–7. Lyotard, The Confession, p. 53. Lyotard, The Confession, p. 57. Compare (and contrast!) Lacan: desire is affirmed as the absolute condition. Even less than the nothing that passes into the round of significations that act upon men, desire is the furrow inscribed in the course; it is, as it were, the mark of the iron of the signifier on the shoulder of the speaking subject. (Écrits: A Selection, p. 265) 3 Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis

11. Pliny, Natural History, 35.36, 65. 12. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 103, 111–12. 13. References to Venus and Adonis are to F. T. Prince, ed., The Poems (London: Methuen, 1960). 14. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 112. 15. There had been sixteen editions by 1640. 16. See The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.1–12, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1959). 17. Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 19, 27 and passim. 18. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.414–15. 19. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.450–567. 10. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.687–712.

178

Notes to pages 37–42

11. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 2 vols, Vol. 2, pp. 417–55. For an account of Ovid’s appeal in the Renaissance see William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1977), pp. 3–35; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 1–47. 12. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, p. 80. 13. See Theocritus, Idyll 15; Bion, ‘Lament for Adonis’; Plutarch, Alcibiades, 18. 14. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.519–739. 15. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.725–39. 16. Ironically, even the boar, she complains, inadvertently achieves a kind of consummation denied her as a woman: ‘’Tis true, ’tis true, thus was Adonis slain: He ran upon the boar with his sharp spear, Who did not whet his teeth at him again, But by a kiss thought to persuade him there; And nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine Sheath’d unaware the tusk in his soft groin.’ (ll. 1111–16) 17. For the range of answers to this question, see John Doebler, ‘The Many Faces of Love: Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis’, Shakespeare Studies, 16 (1983), pp. 33– 43; John Klause, ‘Venus and Adonis: Can We Forgive Them?’, Studies in Philology, 85 (1988), 353–77, pp. 353–5. Not everyone, however, has supposed that the question has a simple answer: New Criticism celebrated the ambiguity of the text. See, for instance, Kenneth Muir, ‘Venus and Adonis: Comedy or Tragedy?’, Shakespearean Essays, ed. Alwin Thaler and Norman Sanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1964), pp. 1–13; Norman Rabkin, ‘Venus and Adonis and the Myth of Love’, Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo F. McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene: University of Oregon Books, 1966), pp. 20–32. 18. Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1932), 139–49, p. 149; C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 498–9. 19. Biographia Literaria, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols, Vol. 7, Part 2, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (New Haven, CT: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 22. 20. Lu Emily Pearson, Elizabethan Love Conventions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1933), p. 285. 21. Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 46. Cf. ‘Venus lusts after Adonis,

Notes to pages 42–45

22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

179

but she is also maternally protective of him’ (Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, p. 77). John Doebler, ‘The Reluctant Adonis: Titian and Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982), 480–90, p. 484. This echoes Don Cameron Allen’s earlier judgement: Venus, he proposes, is ‘a forty-year-old countess with a taste for Chapel Royal altos’, and she reappears later in the poem ‘to discourse foolishly on love like a fluttery and apprehensive Doll Tearsheet of forty’ (Don Cameron Allen, Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), pp. 43, 57. Gordon Williams, ‘The Coming of Age of Shakespeare’s Adonis’, Modern Language Review, 78 (1983), 769–76, p. 776. Klause, ‘Venus and Adonis: Can We Forgive Them?’, pp. 371, 364. The most perceptive account I have found of the poem’s ‘tonal shifts’ is Nancy Lindheim, ‘The Shakespearean Venus and Adonis’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), pp. 190–203. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979). William Baldwin, A treatise of Morall Phylosophie (London, 1550), sigs I8r and R6r. I owe the comment to Peter Blayney. Baldwin, A treatise, sigs O2r–v. Baldwin, A treatise, sig. O2v. Baldwin, A treatise, sig. O2v. William Baldwin, A treatyce of moral philosophy (London, 1564), fols 185v, 186r. Baldwin, A treatyce, fol. 185r–v. Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academie (London, 1618), p. 479 and Pierre de la Primaudaye, Suite de l’Academie Francoise (Paris, 1580), fol. 166r. La Primaudaye, The French Academie, p. 480 (Suite, fol. 166v). OED, sv lust, sb., 1d. Erasmus, A booke called in latyn Enchiridion militis christiani and in englysshe the manuell of the christen knight (London, 1533), sigs Q5v, R3r, Q6r, N1r, R2v. There is one counter example: the next chapter heading (an epilogue of remedies against incentives to libido) is translated as ‘A shorte recapitulacyon of remedyes agaynst the flame of lust’, sig. R3v. Here the destructive ‘flame’ does some of the work of the other qualifying words or phrases. Erasmus, A booke called in latyn Enchiridion, sig. Q5v. Erasmus, A booke called in latyn Enchiridion, sigs Q6r–v. Erasmus, A Manual for a Christian Soldier (London, 1687), pp. 184–92. Erasmus, Handbook of the Militant Christian, trans. John P. Dolan (Notre Dame, IN: Fides, 1962), pp. 147–59; The Enchiridion of Erasmus, ed. and trans. Raymond Himelick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), pp. 177–84. A Dialogue concernynge heresyes & matters of religion in The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght (London, 1557), 103–288, p. 221.

180 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Notes to pages 45–52 More, A Dialogue concernynge heresyes, p. 222. A booke called in latyn Enchiridion, sigs Q7r–v. La Primaudaye, The French Academie, pp. 98–9. Thomas Gainsford, The Rich Cabinet Furnished with varietie of Excellent descriptions (London, 1616), 82v–87r, fol. 86r. Gainsford, The Rich Cabinet, fol. 87r. Gainsford, The Rich Cabinet, fol. 84r. T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakspere’s Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 73–93; Heather Asals, ‘Venus and Adonis: The Education of a Goddess’, Studies in English Literature 13 (1973), 31–51. Richard Linche, The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction (London, 1599), sig. Cc2r-v. Alexander Niccholes, A Discourse, of Marriage and Wiving (London, 1615), pp. 31–2. Niccholes, A Discourse, of Marriage and Wiving, p. 32. Niccholes, A Discourse, of Marriage and Wiving, p. 30. Thomas Hoccleve, Regement of Princes in Hoccleve’s Works, Vol. 3, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, ES 72 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1897), ll. 1555–764. Marrying for lust was still a possibility in 1585. In this instance, however, lust is a component of love, but the two are not interchangeable: ‘The wanton wyfe, whose love is all for luste . . .’ (Geoffrey Whitney, Ms. Harvard Typ. 14, fol. 48). I owe this reference to Steven W. May. Robert Crofts, The Lover: or, Nuptiall Love (London, 1638), sigs A7v–A8r. Crofts, The Lover: or, Nuptiall Love, sig. C6v. Crofts, The Lover: or, Nuptiall Love, sig. D6v. Crofts, The Lover: or, Nuptiall Love, sigs D6v–8r. There is dualism elsewhere, but ‘sensual’ love is not identified in this text as ‘lust’ (sigs B1v–2r). [I have since traced this process in detail in my Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (London: Macmillan and New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999).] Williams, ‘The Coming of Age of Shakespeare’s Adonis’, p. 770. See also Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, p. 66. David N. Beauregard, ‘Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare’s Representation of the Passions’, Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975), 83–98, p. 94. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, p. 271. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 48–65, p. 65. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4.171–89. For another symptom of this ambivalence, see Margaret Mikesell’s astute account of an unconscious regression to the praise of celibacy within the humanist defence of marriage in Vives’s influential conduct book for women (‘Marital and Divine

Notes to pages 54–54

181

Love in Juan Luis Vives’ Instruction of a Christen Woman’, Love and Death in the Renaissance, ed. Kenneth R. Bartlett, Konrad Eisenbichler and Janice Liedl (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1991), pp. 113–34). 4 Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece 11. The first quarto of 1594 gives the title as Lucrece on the title page, and as The Rape of Lucrece on the first page of the text and in the running heads. I want to exploit the ambiguity concerning the original title to emphasise that this is a story of rape on the one hand and, on the other, to make clear that Lucrece is the protagonist of her own story. In addition, I am grateful to Heather Dubrow for her generous comments on an earlier version of this essay. I have gladly adopted her extremely perceptive suggestions. 12. In an attack on the absurdity of pagan values, Augustine argued that admiration for Lucretia was irrational. Sin occurs in the mind. If, he urged (and who but she could be sure?), Lucretia did not consent to Tarquin’s desire, she did not deserve to die; her suicide, if she was innocent, must have been motivated by the desire for fame (The City of God Against the Pagans, 1.16–19). Among Augustinian critics, Don Cameron Allen proposed that we should condemn Lucrece’s suicide as a bid for pagan honour (‘Some Observations on The Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare Survey 15 (1962), pp. 89–98). Roy Battenhouse claimed that Lucrece’s ‘no’ was unconsciously designed to mean ‘yes’, and at the same time that she was preoccupied by thoughts of her own reputation, thus opting for both Augustine’s alternatives at once (Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), pp. 3–41). Ian Donaldson might be described as a weak Augustinian. He finds Lucrece incoherent because it fails to resolve the moral problems Augustine raises. Donaldson does, however, note the theme of possession (The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 40–56). As Sasha Roberts explains, there is evidence that an Augustinian reading was an available (if minority) option in the seventeenth century (‘Editing Sexuality, Narrative and Authorship: The Altered Texts of Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, ed. Cedric Brown and Arthur Marotti (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 124–52). See also Nancy Vickers, ‘ “The Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best”: Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 95–115; Joel Fineman, ‘Shakespeare’s Will: The Temporality of Rape’, Representations, 20 (1987), pp. 25–76; Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 97–127; Jane O. Newman, ‘ “And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness”: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), pp. 304–76; Coppélia Kahn, Roman

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13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

Notes to pages 54–59 Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 27–45. Lynn Enterline’s impressive analysis of the text is sympathetic to Lucrece, but is more concerned with the poem’s account of authorship than the rape (The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 152–97). Notable instances include A. Robin Bowers, ‘Iconography and Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981), pp. 1–21; Laura G. Bromley, ‘Lucrece’s Re-Creation’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), pp. 200– 11; Philippa Berry, ‘Woman, Language, and History in The Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare Survey 44 (1992), pp. 33–9. Ellen Rooney, ‘Criticism and the Subject of Sexual Violence’, Modern Language Notes, 98 (1983), 1269–78, p. 1272. All references to Lucrece are to William Shakespeare, The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (London: Methuen, 1960). Heather Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 55. For Tarquin as burglar see Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss, pp. 45–61. See in particular Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 27–73; and ‘Differance’, ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 129–60. Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 80–168; Fineman, ‘Shakespeare’s Will’. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), p. 172. Shakespeare, Lucrece, p. 74n; The Poems, ed. John Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 150n. All English translations from Latin are my own. Latin has no single word corresponding precisely to our modern rape. Rapio means ‘abduct’; stuprum is ‘disgrace’, illicit action including but not confined to rape (J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London: Duckworth, 1982), pp. 175, 200–1). It has even been proposed, on the basis of the differences, that the Argument was not written by Shakespeare (J. R. Tolbert, ‘The Argument of Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, Texas Studies in English, 29 (1950), pp. 77–90). There seems no good reason to go this far. ‘He, a private individual, sat on the high throne; before he was declared king by the people, he ascended the royal throne’ (Paulus Marsus on Fasti, 6.581 ff. Cf. Livy, History of Rome, 1.49.3. See T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakspere’s Poems & Sonnets (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 108–9).

Notes to pages 59–65 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

183

Ovid, Fasti, 6.600. Ovid, Fasti, 2.690. Ovid, Fasti, 2.712. See especially ll. 6, 221, 428–45, 463–83, 1170–3. The slave, now dark-skinned, is also present in one version of Titian’s painting, Tarquin and Lucretia, watching with trepidation from behind Tarquin (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). His presence might be mimetically motivated: William Painter’s translation identifies the slave as Tarquin’s; there is no indication of his provenance in Livy or Ovid. Shakespeare makes the threatened slave Lucrece’s. For other instances see Maurice Hunt, ‘Slavery, English Servitude, and The Comedy of Errors’, ELR, 27 (1997), 31–56, pp. 46–7. See also Augustine, City of God, 16.23. In the mid-seventeenth-century painting of Tarquin and Lucretia by Artemisia Gentileschi the slave is African, but by then the slave trade was well established (Neues Palais, Potsdam-Sans-Souci). Augustine, City of God, 13 and 16. I have cited in particular 13.3, 5, 13; 16.15– 17, 23. See also Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988). Michel de Montaigne, ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’, Montaigne’s Essays: John Florio’s Translation ed. J. I. M. Stewart (London: Nonesuch, 1931), 2 vols, Vol. 2, 233–98, p. 255. [For a detailed development of this argument, see my ‘Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan with Augustine and Montaigne’ in this volume.] Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 135. For other instances see Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London: Athlone, 1994), pp. 1536–7. Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 19–21. Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, p. 43. See Michael Platt, ‘The Rape of Lucrece and the Republic for Which It Stands’, Centennial Review, 19.2 (1975), 59–79. Stephanie H. Jed draws attention to this process in Renaissance Florence, where the installation of a humanism modelled on republican Rome involves retelling the story with Brutus as the protagonist (Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: 1989)). Annabel Patterson attributes the popular success of Lucrece to a covert republicanism (Reading Between the Lines (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 297–312). Coppélia Kahn, ‘The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976), 45–72, p. 56. Lucas Cranach’s engaging Lucretia of 1533 is naked against a black background; a filmy veil draws attention to her pelvis, rather than covering it; her eyes meet

184

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

Notes to pages 65–70 the spectator’s gaze (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin); there is an even more seductive Cranach version in the Sinebrychoff, Helsinki; Francesco Parmigianino highlights one breast, and shows a death-agony that could be mistaken for sexual ecstasy (Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte); for other instances see H. Diane Russell, Eva/Ave: Woman in Renaissance and Baroque Prints (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art with The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1990), cat. 4, 6, 7, 10, 11. See also Linda Hults, ‘Dürer’s Lucretia: Speaking the Silence of Women’, Signs, 16 (1991), pp. 205–37. Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The Heroic Tradition and its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Fig. 42. In Fig. 41 she dies clothed before a crowd of bystanders, central among them Brutus, vowing revenge. See also Sandro Botticelli, The Tragedy of Lucretia, c.1505 (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA). I owe this last reference to Heather Dubrow. Augustine, City of God, 1.19. I am grateful to Helen Cooper for discussion of this passage, and for the term ‘reflex’, which seems to me exact. Augustine, City of God, 1.19. Enterline’s rhetorical analysis also places Lucrece ‘at the limits of representation’, The Rhetoric of the Body, p. 174. Cf. ll. 1030–33. Vickers, ‘ “The Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best” ’. Cf. Gordon Williams, Shakespeare, Sex and the Print Revolution (London: Athlone, 1996), pp. 63–8. Augustine, City of God, 1.16. Jill Saward with Wendy Green, Rape: My Story (London: Pan, 1995), p. 76. Cf. Elaine Hilberman, The Rape Victim (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 33–40; William B. Sanders, Rape and Woman’s Identity, Sage Library of Social Research, 106 (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1980), p. 92. See Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (London: Macmillan, 1999). William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons (London: Methuen, 1980). Nazife Bashar, ‘Rape in England Between 1550 and 1700’, The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance, ed. London Feminist History Group (London: Pluto, 1983), pp. 28–42. Bashar points out that in practice convictions for rape were rare. See also Roy Porter, ‘Rape – Does It Have a Historical Meaning?’, Rape, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 216–36. Miranda Chaytor locates in mid-seventeenth-century legal practice a gradual cultural shift towards rape as a crime against consent in the accusations brought by poor women (‘Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century’, Gender and History, 7 (1995), pp. 378–407). William Fulbecke, An Historicall Collection of the Continuall Factions, Tumults and Massacres of the Romans and Italians (London, 1601), p. 1.

Notes to pages 71–75 44. 45. 46. 47.

185

Fulbecke, An Historicall Collection, p. 3. Fulbecke, An Historicall Collection, pp. 5–6. I owe this point to Martin Dzelzainis. Newman, ‘ “And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness” ’. 5 Antimonies of Desire and the Sonnets

11. Dir. John Madden, 1998; The Shakespeare Code, dir. Charles Palmer, BBC 1, 7 April 2007. 12. Christopher Warley points out that ‘sonnet sequence’ is a nineteenth-century category; in the sixteenth century the genre was not sharply defined or regulated and the relation between lyric and narrative not given (Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 2–3, 10, 19). 13. Sonnet 145 is so odd that commentators conventionally assign it to a much earlier epoch. Others are very generalised: sonnet 128 reproduces a familiar conceit; sonnet 143 comically develops a near-epic simile in which the beloved pursues a chicken round the farmyard, neglecting the poet, who features as her baby; sonnet 129 condemns all passion as shameful, while acknowledging its continuing power. 14. I have quoted from Colin Burrow’s edition of the text (William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), but I am also indebted to John Kerrigan, ed., The Sonnets and a Lover’s Complaint (London: Penguin, 1995); G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Sonnets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Thomson, 1997); as well as Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), which also includes a facsimile of the quarto text of 1609. 15. John Kerrigan speculates that tastes may have changed in the course of the 1590s: ‘Daniel’s Delia is fair in 1592, dark in the revised edition of 1601’ (The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, p. 59). 16. See, for example, Anne Ferry, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), especially pp. 170–214; Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 150–75. 17. G. Blakemore Evans, general editor, The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 1970. 18. ‘Therefore I’le lye with Love, and love with me’ in 1599. This may be an early version or imperfectly remembered (Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, pp. 477, 481).

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Notes to pages 75–78

19. See, for instance, Mopsa in The Old Arcadia (William A. Ringler, ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 12). Heather Dubrow discusses the tradition in Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 163–201. 10. See, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 28– 48; Valerie Traub, ‘Sex without Issue: Sodomy, Reproduction, and Signification in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York: Garland, 1999), pp. 431–53. 11. Sonnet 129 is the more subtle in that ‘lust’ is not yet fully synonymous with lechery. Instead, its primary association is pleasure (see my essay, ‘Love as Trompel’oeil, in this volume). The poem therefore begins as paradox, not moral rant. 12. Sigmund Freud, ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 105–38, p. 137. 13. Julia Kristeva, ‘Romeo and Juliet: Love–Hatred in the Couple’, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 209– 33. (If I am honest about this essay, I am more impressed by her account of ambivalence than by her reading of the play.) 14. Lacan’s most detailed discussion of sublimation and the Thing is to be found in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60 (Seminar 7), trans. Dennis Porter (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992). I discuss the theory and its implications in my Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (London: Routledge, 2005), especially pp. 44–9. 15. For an excellent history of the form see Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet. 16. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, pp. 161–3. Richard Halpern also discusses with great subtlety Lacan’s account of this poem in relation to the Sonnets, though his emphasis is different from mine (Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 86–101). 17. Michael McCanles, ‘Love and Power in the Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt’, Modern Language Quarterly, 29 (1968), pp. 145–60. 18. Carmen 85 confines itself to this topic: ‘Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. / nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior’ (‘I hate and love. Why do I do this, perhaps you ask. I don’t know, but I feel it and am tormented’. (My translation.)) In carmen 72 the injury she has done him lessens his friendly feelings toward Lesbia – but promotes his desire. Its closest Shakespearean analogue, sonnet 150, is in no sense a translation. As evidence of the widespread influence of Catullus, carmen 5, for instance, was translated by Thomas Campion, Ben Jonson and William Drummond of Hawthornden, among others (Eleanor Shipley Duckett, Catullus in English Poetry (Northampton, MA: Smith College Classical Studies, 1925), pp. 31–4.

Notes to pages 80–90

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19. Peter Happé, ed., Tudor Interludes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 113– 38, lines 39–58, 362–95. The Interlude of Youth belongs to the early years of the sixteenth century but it remained remarkably popular. Shakespeare also invokes it in Lucrece, where Tarquin rejects the virtues that counsel him against rape: ‘My part is youth and beats these from the stage’ (l. 278). The interlude also helps to structure Prince Hal’s story in 1 Henry IV (see especially 1.1.84–5). 20. Burrow compares Measure for Measure, 5.1.140–1 (Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 518). 21. The Sonnets and a Lover’s Complaint, p. 261. 22. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1979), pp. 25–8. 23. S’expliquer is stronger than the translation implies: it means something more like ‘make itself clear’, or even ‘give an account of itself’. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), p. 36; trans. Richard Miller (London: Cape, 1975), p. 33. 24. Barthes, S/Z, trans. Miller, pp. 33–4. 25. See Roman Jakobson and Lawrence G. Jones, Shakespeare’s Verbal Art in Th’expence of Spirit (The Hague: Mouton, 1970). 26. Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, pp. 4, 96, 125. 27. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 10. Cf. ‘The beyond of the couple is a beyond of the mother. Those who believe they have reached it do not cease violating her in the language: they are creators of style, of music . . .’ (Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 228). 28. See especially sonnets 1, 3, 15, 55, 74 (Ringler, ed., Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 163–237). 29. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, pp. 20–1. 30. Heather Dubrow, ‘ “Incertainties Now Crown themselves Assur’d”: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. Schiffer, 113–33, p. 129. 31. Spiller, Development of the Sonnet, pp. 153–4. 32. According to Anne Ferry, this construction of an undisclosed context is specific to Sidney and Shakespeare (The ‘Inward’ Language, pp. 26–7). She compares Shakespeare’s sonnets 86, 111 and 117–20. 33. ‘The poem clearly asks to be read as one party’s retort in a lovers’ tiff’ (David Schalkwyk, ‘Love and Service in Twelfth Night and the Sonnets’, Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005), 76–100, p. 84). 34. Booth reads the couplet as (faint) praise (Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 239); Duncan-Jones sees the first reading as ‘undercut’ by the second (Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 228); Burrow combines Booth’s account with a ‘hint’ of the second (Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 498). 35. See, most notably, William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 75–96; also J. H. Prynne, They that Have Powre to Hurt: A

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36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

Notes to pages 90–92 Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94 (Cambridge, 2001). (I owe this reference to Neil Reeve.) In sonnet 116 love is ‘the star to every wandering barque’; in sonnet 117 the poet has ‘hoisted sail to all the winds’. Sonnet 116 insists, ‘If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ’; sonnet 117 concedes ‘just proof’ of the poet’s ‘errors’ (and concludes that he was just testing). Paul Hammond points to the ambiguities concerning which love is which. ‘Does the boy provide affectionate comfort, while the woman makes the poet despair because of his sexual attraction to her? Or does the boy generate despair by refusing to sleep with the poet, while the woman comforts him by taking him into her bed? Or does the boy comfort the poet sexually? Or do both his lovers provide comfort and despair?’ Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 68. Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 129. Evans thinks so too (The Sonnets, p. 134). Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1991), p. 250. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 57. Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 34–5; Duncan-Jones, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets, pp. 150–1. Hammond follows her reading (Figuring Sex between Men, pp. 16, 83). Booth, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 165; Evans, ed., The Sonnets, p. 134. Burrow, ed., Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 421. See especially Joseph Pequigney, Such is my Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1985). Shakespeare’s Verbal Art, p. 14. We are invited ‘to decode puns and so make ourselves privy to secrets – secrets that are specifically sexual’ (Smith, Homosexual Desire, p. 254.) Although it is not one I finally share, Richard Halpern offers a sophisticated reading of the puns: The sublimating rhetoric of the sonnets separates out an impeccably refined and aestheticized form of desire from a sodomitical discourse that is then abjected as fecal remainder. This remainder is not, however, expelled to a space outside the poems, but is rather relegated to a nonspace within the poems. That is to say, it abides in the half-light of wordplay, implication, and insinuation. Sodomy subsists as the speaking of the unspeakable. (Shakespeare’s Perfume, p. 21)

45. Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men, p. 70. 46. Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men, p. 63. Booth notes ‘Shakespeare’s delight in words and phrases that support a particular response and simultaneously confound it’ (Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 209).

Notes to pages 94–101

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6 Peter Quince’s Ballad: Memory, Psychoanalysis, History and A Midsummer Night’s Dream 11. Shakespeare references, unless otherwise indicated, are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, general editor (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 12. William Makepeace Thackeray, The Rose and the Ring or, The History of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo, by Mr M. A. Titmarsh (London: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 82–3. 13. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, ed. Angus Easson (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 513. Dickens worked the gazelle hard: it reappears in Julia Mills’s diary in David Copperfield, ed. Trevor Blount (London: Penguin, 1966), p. 624. 14. The text does, however, propel the imagination of the audience in a fairly specific direction: lead him to my bower. The moon methinks looks with a wat’ry eye; And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, Lamenting some enforced chastity. (3.1.197–200) (‘Enforced’: violated.) See also: So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle Gently entwist; the female ivy so Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. (4.1.42–4) 15. ‘Ballet’ in Q1, Q2 and F. 16. William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979), p. cxvii. 17. Jacques Derrida, ‘Let Us Not Forget – Psychoanalysis’, Oxford Literary Review, 12 (1990), 3–7, p. 3. For Derrida’s most detailed exploration of psychoanalysis, including an attack on Lacan, see The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 18. Derrida, ‘Let Us Not Forget’, p. 4. 19. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 203, n. 1; p. 624, n. 2. 10. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 126 (cf. pp. 575–6). 11. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 552; 304. 12. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 180–99. 13. [I have explored this question in more detail since in my Why Shakespeare? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 85–107.] 14. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 656.

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Notes to pages 102–110

15. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 658. 16. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 659. 17. Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–5 (Seminar 2), trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 146–71, p. 153. Lacan’s own reading finds the key to the dream in the (meaningless) name, spoken by the unconscious, of the content of the syringe. The symbolic order, he argues, permits us to fend off the anxiety of the real. 18. Samuel Weber, Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, trans. Michael Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 4. 19. Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 129–60, p. 152. 20. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 21. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, On Metapsychology, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1984), 269–338, pp. 288–94. 22. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989, pp. 55–8. 23. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 199, n. 1. 24. Malcolm Bowie, Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 22. 25. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–1985 (London: Turnaround, 1992), p. 29. 26. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 86. 27. ‘Analysis can have for its goal only the advent of a true speech and the realisation by the subject of his history in his relation to a future’ (Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p. 88). 28. Weber, Return to Freud, p. 9. 29. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘What is Postmodernism?’, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 71–82, p. 81. 30. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Brooks, pp. 36–8n. 7 The Illusion of Empire: Elizabethan Expansionism and Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy 11. Shakespeare references, unless otherwise indicated, are to the one-volume edition of Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1951). 12. Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 35–6.

Notes to pages 110–117

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13. Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1589), sig. 2v. A second edition appeared in 1598– 1600. 14. Unknown Artist, National Portrait Gallery, London. 15. See Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), pp. 91–107, 130–3. 16. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, The ‘Ditchley’ Portrait, National Portrait Gallery, London. For a discussion of Elizabethan royal portraiture see Andrew Belsey and Catherine Belsey, ‘Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I’, Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540–1660, ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), pp. 11–35. 17. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, pp. 97–100. 18. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, p 2. 19. William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure (London: Methuen, 1961), pp. lvii–lix. 10. R. B. Wernham, ‘Elizabethan War Aims and Strategy’, Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale (London: Athlone Press, 1961), pp. 340–68. 11. David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966). 12. William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. John H. Walter (London: Methuen, 1954), pp. xxxvi–xl. 13. T. Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601), quoted in Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish, p. 13 14. Gordon Donaldson, ‘Foundations of Anglo-Scottish Union’, Elizabethan Government and Society, pp. 282–314. 15. Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish, pp. 23–7. 16. Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, Vol. 9, The Prose Works, ed. Rudolf Gottfried (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), p. 123. 17. Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish, pp 119–20. 18. Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 106–59. 19. There is a tradition of seeing Henry V as more centrally concerned with Ireland than the few references in the text might initially suggest. See Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 74–86. David Cairns and Shaun Richards treat the play as an unproblematic idealisation of English supremacy in Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 9–12. 20. See for example Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds, Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester

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Notes to pages 118–122

University Press, 1985); Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1989); Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 21. For a discussion of the ambiguity of the play see Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 33–62. 22. I am not convinced by the argument of Stephen Greenblatt, who finds that the doubts the play awakens only serve to intensify the audience’s impression of the monarch’s power. See ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion’, Political Shakespeare, 18–47, pp. 43–4. New historicism in general seems to me curiously reluctant to allow for the radical possibilities implicit in the notion of textual undecidability. 23. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ‘History and Ideology: the Instance of Henry V’, Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 206–27, pp. 224–7. 8 Making Histories Then and Now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V 11. One possible exception is Tillyard’s glowing account of the depiction of the middle ages in Richard II (E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 258–65). 12. The situation must have been different in the United States. Jean Howard claims that what new historicism supplanted was formalism, not old historicism (‘The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies’, ELR 16, (1986), 13–43, pp. 14–15), and David Simpson contrasts the ‘return to history’ with ‘deconstruction’ (‘Literary Criticism and the Return to “History” ’, Critical Inquiry 14 (1987–8), pp. 721–47). Paul de Man, whose scepticism about history features prominently in Simpson’s analysis, had relatively little influence in Britain in the 1970s, whereas Althusser, Macherey and Foucault were probably more influential in Britain at that time than they were in America. See also Don Wayne, ‘Power, Politics, and the Shakespearean Text: Recent Criticism in England and the United States’, Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 47–67, pp. 53–4. 13. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 8. 14. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xxiv. 15. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 21. 16. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 30. 17. Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (1984), pp. 53–92.

Notes to pages 122–124

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18. Terry Eagleton, ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism’, New Left Review, 152 (1985), pp. 60–73. 19. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’, p. 57. 10. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 76. Eagleton, who, in his haste to repudiate Lyotard, seems to miss the venom in this French irony at the expense of American culture, solemnly reminds us that there are millions of people who never jet-set at all, but go to work every day and educate their children (‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism’, p. 72). 11. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ was first published in 1971. See Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 139–64. 12. Jacques Derrida, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 31–63, p. 40. 13. Derrida finds an analogy – but only an analogy, he insists – between Descartes and St Anselm; and the Cartesian cogito is repeated – but only ‘up to a certain point’ – by the Husserlian cogito (‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, pp. 59– 60). 14. Derrida, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, p. 60. For a detailed and sophisticated discussion of this essay see Ann Wordsworth, ‘Derrida and Foucault: Writing the History of Historicity’, Post-structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 116–25. 15. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 60. 16. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 18. 17. Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 129–60, see especially p. 132. 18. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 61; Derrida, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, p. 39. 19. I refer here to the story of successive modes of production. Specific analyses, like The Eighteenth Brumaire, for example, are in quite a different category, and in many ways a model for us now. 20. Ironically it is Lyotard who draws attention to Marx’s insistence on the spuriousness of the unity of capital. Writing of the postmodern fission of the pretension to a single purpose, he adds, ‘since Marx, we have learned that what presents itself as unity . . . is the impostor-subject and blindly calculating rationality called Capital’ (Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sign of History’, Post-structuralism and the Question of History, 162–80, p. 180). Compare the Marxist Jameson: ‘anyone who believes that the profit motive and the logic of capital accumulation are not the fundamental laws of this world . . . is living in an alternative universe’ (Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan,

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21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

Notes to pages 125–138 1988), 347–60, p. 354). Like Jameson’s explicitly utopian Marxism itself, the reductiveness of this totalising proposition calls into question the value of his plea for totalisation. Derrida, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, p. 35. For a feminist instance see Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). The plea here is that we should take the opportunity to write woman differently. Shakespeare’s History Plays, p. 15. Shakespeare’s History Plays, pp. 36–76. Shakespeare’s History Plays, pp. 65, 55–8. Shakespeare’s History Plays, p. 73. Shakespeare references are to the one-volume edition of Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1951). Cf. Mowbray who, because he is accused of treason, stands to lose his name to Richard (1.1.167–9), and is therefore defending the rights of his ‘succeeding issue’ (1.3.20). The titles and thus the estates of traitors were forfeit to the Crown. This was pointed out to me by Gareth Edwards. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 20–1. And, of course, of the Wars of the Roses in Henry VI. Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power’, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 116–37, p. 132. I owe this point, or something like it, to Richard Burt. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V’, Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 18–47, pp. 41, 43. For a discussion of the ambiguity of the play see Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 33–62. Several of the speeches which, as Greenblatt acknowledges, generate the greatest scepticism concerning the legitimacy of the king’s authority, did not appear in the quartos of 1600 and 1602. These include the archbishop’s dubious motives for justifying the war (1.1), most of the speech before Harfleur (3.3.11–41) and the whole of Henry’s meditation on kingship (4.1.226–84) (Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets’, pp. 42–3). Annabel Patterson argues persuasively that the reason for the exclusions from the quartos was political: these speeches, like the epilogue, could be seen at the time as undermining the authority of the queen’s magnificent predecessor and prototype. But there is no reason to suppose that they were not included in the performance (Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 71–92).

Notes to pages 139–142

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37. Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets’, p. 44. 38. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 82. 9 The Case of Hamlet’s Conscience 11. Shakespeare references are to the one-volume edition of Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1951). 12. J. Dover Wilson, ed., Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934) gives ‘consciousness, reflection’. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill in their edition of The Complete Plays and Poems (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1942) offer ‘reflection’. Edward Hubler, ed., Hamlet (New York: New American Library, 1963) gives ‘self-consciousness, introspection’. Bernard Lott, ed., Hamlet (London: Longman, 1970) has ‘conscious thought, reflection’. The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans, general editor (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), gives ‘reflection, but with some of the modern sense, too’. [The question is still under discussion: see the note on the word in Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, eds, Hamlet (London: Thomson, 2006), which refers back to the Longer Note in Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1982).] 13. 2.2.601; 4.5.129; 4.7.1; 5.2.58; 67; 288. 14. William Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience (Cambridge, 1596), Epistle dedicatory; p. 2. 15. Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971), pp. 169–70. See also Nigel Alexander, Poison, Play and Duel: A Study in Hamlet (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). 16. Alexander, Poison, Play and Duel, pp. 179–80; Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare’s Tragic Sequence (London: Hutchinson, 1972), p. 59. 17. Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587–1642 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940). 18. See, for instance, J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943); Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); David M. Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); Alan C. Dessen, Jonson’s Moral Comedy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971); Robert Potter, The English Morality Play (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975); Edmund Creeth, Mankynde in Shakespeare (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976). [And since then, most prominently, Alan C. Dessen, Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). See also Jane K. Brown, The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), especially pp. 46–75, 88–104, though I have some reservations about her readings.]

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Notes to pages 142–146

19. Modern cinema offers a possible analogy. Genres like the western communicate at least partly by means of allusion to the tradition. We do not need to be told in detail in each western that there is no effective law at the frontier, or that crime is not merely a private matter but may threaten the precarious civilisation of a whole township. Deviations from the genre are fully comprehensible only by reference to the tradition. Hamlet is much more than a deviation from an established genre, of course, but its dramatic ancestry may be important to its interpretation. 10. For non-dramatic treatments of Wrath that bear some resemblance to the stage figure, see Spenser’s Furor and Occasion (The Faerie Queene, II.iv.3–15) and George Wither, ‘Of Choller’ (1613), Juvenilia (London: 1622), pp. 69–75. See also Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 79–115, esp. pp. 111–13. 11. Thomas F. Merrill, ed., William Perkins, 1558–1602, English Puritanist (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1966), p. xx; see also H. R. McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), pp. 64–97. 12. Thomas Wood, English Casuistical Divinity During the Seventeenth Century (London: S. P. C. K., 1952), p. 38. 13. Perkins, Discourse, p. 1. 14. Perkins, Discourse, pp. 86, 168. 15. Perkins, Discourse, p. 83. 16. W. Wager, Enough is as Good as a Feast, lines 821–8, in The Longer Thou Livest and Enough is as Good as a Feast, ed. R. Mark Benbow (London: Edward Arnold, 1968). 17. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge, 1606), p. 526. 18. Lines 1266–72, 2678–81. Mark Eccles, ed., The Macro Plays, EETS, O. S. 262 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). 19. Edgar T. Schell and J. D. Schuchter, eds, English Morality Plays and Moral Interludes (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969). 20. Schell and Schuchter, eds, English Morality Plays. 21. R. B., Apius and Virginia, ed. R. B. McKerrow (Oxford: Malone Society, 1911). 22. Schell and Schuchter, eds, English Morality Plays. 23. The parallel with Hamlet is noted by Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, p. 170. 24. ‘Resolution’ is not necessarily heroic in Shakespeare. The word often seems to convey the desperate courage of a criminal rather than the praiseworthy determination of a hero: see 1 Henry IV, 1.2.31; 58; King John, 4.1.35; Macbeth, 4.1.79; Measure for Measure, 2.1.12; Othello, 5.1.5. There may be an ironic parallel between Hamlet’s resolution that calls for an enterprise of great pitch and moment and Fortinbras’s ‘lawless resolutes’ who are ‘shark’d up’ for ‘some enterprise / That hath a stomach in’t’ (1.1.98–100). The vocabulary here (‘lawless’, ‘shark’d up’), does not invite unqualified admiration for the man of action.

Notes to pages 147–148

197

25. The association of conscience with the Last Judgement is common. See, for example, Henry Barrow, A Briefe Discovery of the False Church (1590) in Leland H. Carson, ed., The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1587–90 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), p. 410; Perkins, Discourse, Epistle Dedicatory and pp. 8, 10. Conscience frequently conducts a figurative ‘court’, in anticipation, perhaps, of the court of Doomsday: see Barrow, A Briefe Discovery, p. 401; Joseph Hall, quoted in Paul Elmer More and Frank Leslie Cross, eds, Anglicanism (London: S.P.C.K., 1935), p. 645. 26. Cf. Joseph Hall, who calls duelling a ‘conceit of false fortitude’ in Epistles, Vol. 2 (1608), Works (Oxford: Talboys, 1937–9), 12 vols, Vol. 6, p. 210; Wither, ‘Of Choller’: ‘there may be many doe suppose, / It is a signe of courage’ (p. 73); and Wither, ‘Of Man’, where revenge is ‘That cruel Ruffian, that in vaine doth strive, / His Off-spring from true Valour to derive’ (Juvenilia, p. 27). 27. George Wither’s satire, ‘Of Revenge’ (1613, Juvenilia, pp. 56–68) offers a later analogue for Hamlet. The poem is influenced by the stage tradition, as the opening makes clear: ‘Room for Revenge: hee’s no Commedian / That acts for pleasure; but a grim Tragedian’ (p. 56). Wither warns the revenger of the pangs of conscience he will suffer: For say thou scape the rigour of the Law, Thy wounded conscience will have many a flaw, Feares thou shalt passe by day, and then at night Dreames all of terrour thy scarred souls affright. (p. 57) If these lines evoke the ‘To be or not to be’ speech, a passage some lines later is even more reminiscent of Hamlet: But now (me thinks) I heare our Hacksters tell me, With thundring words, as if their breath would fell me, I am a Coward, if I will not fight. True, Cavalieros, you have spoken right: And, if upon good tearmes you urge me to it, I have both strength and heart enough to do it. (p. 58) Cf. Hamlet, 2.2.565–9; 4.4.39–46. Of course, some people think ‘bloody actions’ honourable (p. 58) but in truth revenge is ‘Brutish’ (p. 61), ranting (p. 67), the fruit of uncontrolled passion (p. 62). Only patient endurance of injury permits the conscience to rest in safety (pp. 64–5). In the following poem, (‘Of Choller’) it is made clear that revenge proceeds from unbridled wrath (p. 69). The parallels with Hamlet may be coincidental: if so, they provide further evidence of a conjunction of ideas common in the period. If, on the other hand, they spring from a recollection of the play, they show how Wither, at least, interpreted the relationship between wrath and conscience in Hamlet.

198

Notes to pages 149–157

28. For other instances of Wrath disguised as Manhood, see Spivack, The Allegory of Evil, pp. 155–60. 29. Benbow, ed., The Longer. 30. Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare the Professional (London: Heinemann, 1973), p. 67. 31. [Was this among the reasons why the speech had been dropped by the time the play reached the Folio text?] 32. John Lawlor, The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), pp. 66, 71. 33. See C. H. and K. George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation, 1570– 1640 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 221 ff. 34. Eleanor Prosser discusses Horestes (Hamlet and Revenge, pp. 41–4) but I think she underestimates its ambiguity, believing that revenge is presented unequivocally as ‘a shocking crime’ (p. 42). 35. John Pikeryng, Horestes (Oxford: Malone Society, 1962). 36. Counsel’s advice seems to accord with orthodox Elizabethan theory: a rightful ruler must not be resisted but a usurper ought to be removed from office by the true heir, especially if the power has been attained by murder. See W. A. Armstrong, ‘The Elizabethan Conception of the Tyrant’, Review of English Studies, 22 (1946), pp. 161–81. In the case of Hamlet it is not entirely clear, of course, whether Claudius is a usurper. Denmark’s elective monarchy intensifies the ambiguities of Hamlet’s position. See E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘The Politics in Hamlet and “The World of the Play” ’, Hamlet, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 5, ed., John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), pp. 129–47. 37. Perkins, The Whole Treatise, pp. 489–504. 38. Perkins, The Whole Treatise, p. 504. 39. William Perkins, A Golden Chaine (Cambridge, 1597), pp. 92–3. 40. G. K. Hunter, ‘The Heroism of Hamlet’, Hamlet, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 5, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), 90–109, p. 108. 41. Alan C. Dessen, ‘Hamlet’s Poisoned Sword: A Study in Dramatic Imagery’, Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), pp. 65–7. 42. Maynard Mack, ‘The World of Hamlet’, Yale Review, 41 (1951–2), 502–23, p. 504. 10 Iago the Essayist 11. William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997). All references are to this edition. 12. For some influential examples see G. K. Hunter, ‘Othello and Colour Prejudice’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 53 (1967), pp. 139–63; Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Improvisation of Power’, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 222–54; Karen Newman, ‘ “And Wash the Ethiop White”: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello’,

Notes to pages 158–162

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

199

Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 141–62; Patricia Parker, ‘Fantasies of “Race” and “Gender”: Africa, Othello, and Bringing to Light’, Women, ‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 84–100; Kim F. Hall, ‘Othello and the Problem of Blackness’, A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. 1, The Tragedies, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford; Blackwell, 2003), pp. 357–74; Michael Neill, ‘Introduction’, Othello, the Moor of Venice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 40–71, 113–30. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. J. S. Cunningham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981). Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to his Major Villains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons (London: Methuen, 1980). Subsequent references are to this edition. Dir. John Madden, 1998. The film itself is self-consciously just such an intertextual assembly, of course: part backstage musical, part Romeo and Juliet and part Shakespearean comedy, it festively mixes genres and celebrates anachronism. Shakespeare, Othello, p. 387. John Florio, trans., The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne (London: Dent, 1910), 3 vols, Vol. 1, p. 1. Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 1, p. 9. Shakespeare, Othello, pp. 344–50. Books 1 and 2 appeared in 1580. The fifth edition, published in 1588, included Book 3. ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 3, p. 105. ‘Of Glory’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 2, p. 344. The phrase is quoted from George Coffin Taylor, Shakespeare’s Debt to Montaigne (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), p. 32. See also J. M. Robertson, Montaigne and Shakespere (London: University Press, 1897) and Elizabeth Robbins Hooker, ‘The Relation of Shakespeare to Montaigne’, PMLA 17 (1902), pp. 312–66. William Cornwallis, Essayes, ed. Don Cameron Allen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1946), p. 42. Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. xlviii. For example, ‘Costly Followers are not to be liked; Lest while a Man maketh his Traine Longer, hee make his Wings Shorter’; ‘He that is only Reall, had need have Exceeding great Parts of vertue’ (Bacon, Essayes, pp. 147, 154).

200

Notes to pages 163–163

18. As Bacon’s editor points out, ‘Candid analysis of human nature and pragmatic assessment of political and social behaviour characterize the essays from the beginning’ (Bacon, Essayes, p. xix). 19. Seneca’s characteristic figures include isocolon (successive phrases of similar length), parison (successive phrases with repeated word order), and paromoion (successive phrases with repeated sound patterns), antimetabole (inversion of the order of words or ideas) and asyndeton (omission of co-ordinating conjunctions). For example, ‘Mors per omnes it: qui occidit, consequitur occisum’ (‘Death goes among all: he who deals death follows the dead’) (Epistle xciii, Lucius Annaeus Seneca Epistulae Morales, with an English translation by Richard M. Gummere (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962–7), 3 vols. Vol. 3, p. 10); ‘Remember that pain has this most excellent quality: if prolonged, it cannot be severe, and if severe it cannot be prolonged’ (Epistle xciv, Vol. 3, p. 17); ‘Boys fear trifles, children fear shadows, we fear both’ (‘On the Terrors of Death’, Epistle iv, Vol. 1, p. 15). 20. George Williamson, The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (London: Faber, 1951). The book makes very clear that the lines of descent are more complex than my simplified sketch would suggest, and much of the argument is concerned with the contradictory position of Euphuism, which was pointed in the Senecan way but by no means casual, since it paraded its own artfulness. Brian Vickers, who is a force to be reckoned with in this field, gives Williamson (and his predecessor, Morris W. Croll) very short shrift in his account of Bacon. He insists that a schematic division of Renaissance prose between these two camps is a distortion of a much more complex picture. At the same time, however, he does not deny that there was a controversy, or a broad difference. Much of his argument is concerned to rebut a Victorian hostility to Bacon on the basis of his ‘aphoristic’ style, a hostility that Williamson does not, of course, share, since his interest is not in judgements of value (Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)). 21. These compositions are ‘but Essaies, – That is dispersed Meditacions, thoughe conveyed in the forme of Epistles’ (Bacon, Essayes, pp. xlvii, xxxiii). Letterwriting was seen as a major instance of rhetorical skill in the Renaissance, and many letters were both written and polished with a view to publication. Informality was admissible in this context. Montaigne claimed to own more than a hundred volumes of printed Italian letter collections (Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 286–90). 22. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, IV. 2, ed. G. W. Kitchin (London: Dent, 1915), p. 24. 23. ‘When I heare our Architects mouth-out those big, and ratling words of Pilasters, Architraves, Cornixes, Frontispices, Corinthian, and Dorike works, and such like fustian-termes of theirs, I cannot let my wandering imagination from a sodaine apprehension of Apollidonius his pallace, and I find by effect, that they are but

Notes to pages 163–166

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

201

the seely and decayed peeces of my Kitchin-doore. Do but heare one pronounce Metonymia, Metaphore, Allegory, Etimologie, and other such trash-names of Grammer, would you not thinke, they meant some forme of a rare and strange language; They are titles and words that concerne your chamber-maids tittletattle. It is a fopperie and cheating tricke, cosin-Germane unto this, to call the offices of our estate by the proud titles of the ancient Romans, though they have no resemblance at all of charge, and lesse of authoritie and power.’ (‘Of the Vanitie of Words’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 1, p. 348.) ‘Of Bookes’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 2, pp. 99–100. ‘A Consideration upon Cicero’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 1, p. 266. Cornwallis is even more categorical in denouncing the eloquence of the Ciceronians: ‘How shall a man hope to come to an ende of their workes when hee cannot with two breathes saile through a Period and is sometimes gravelled in a Parenthesis?’ ‘The Vertue of thinges is not in their bignesse but qualitie, and so of reason which wrapped in a few wordes hath the best tang’ (Cornwallis, Essayes, pp. 175–6). Cornwallis, Essayes, p. 202. Bacon, Essays, p. 150. ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 3, p. 103. Bacon, Essays, p. 148. ‘The Author to the Reader’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 1, p. 15. ‘Of Presumption’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 2, pp. 355–90. He is also moody and capricious, as well as inconsistent (‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 2, p. 280). ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 3, p. 103. ‘Among my readings, Philosophy hath made me honest for two houres after . . .’ ‘History hath added to my naturall desire of loving fame . . . I like deeds well, but they were not within my reach, and so I sought to buy what my stock would reach to. Though I cannot clime so well as Caesar, yet I should thinke my selfe happy if I could but get up to his Stile’ (Cornwallis, Essayes, p. 75). He goes on, ‘Such a stile as this we finde more excessively in Seneca; more moderately in Tacitus and Plinius Secundus; and of late it hath bin very pleasing unto the eares of our time’. But it is now rightly despised, since [symmetrically with Ciceronianism itself] ‘it is nothing else but a hunting after words, and fine placing of them’ (Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning, trans. Gilbert Wats (London, [1639] 1640), p. 29). Vickers makes the point that the aphorism was appropriate to Bacon’s essays, since it was seen as a guarantee of profundity in books of advice to princes in particular (Francis Bacon, pp. 62–79). ‘quo fit ut omnia per huiusmodi Artificium, magis ingeniosa videantur, quam revera sint’ (Francis Bacon, De Dignitate & Augmentis Scientiarum, Opera, Tomus 1 (London, 1623), p. 27).

202

Notes to pages 166–168

36. The speech incorporates the ‘Senecan’ devices of aphorism, antithesis, asyndeton, alliteration and antimetabole. 37. ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 3, pp. 71–2. 38. Bacon, Essayes, p. 32. 39. ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 3, p. 121. 40. Cornwallis, Essayes, p. 20. 41. ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’, Florio, trans., Montaigne, Vol. 3, pp. 89, 96. 42. I owe this point to Andreas Höfele.

index

Althusser, Louis, 4 aphanisis (fading), 10, 17, 22, 26, 28, 29, 32, 33 Apius and Virginia, 145–6 Aquinas, Thomas, 143 Aristotle, 1, 21–2, 23 Arnold, Matthew, 1 Augustine, 11, 17, 18–33, 54, 62–3, 66, 68 Bacon, Francis, 162–3, 164, 165, 166 Baldwin, T. W., 178n.11 Baldwin, William, 43–4, 182n.14 Barkan, Leonard, 52, 177n.7 Barthes, Roland, 2, 3, 5–6, 8, 10, 81–2, 84, 87 Bashar, Nazife, 184n.42 Bate, Jonathan, 52 Bellamy, Elizabeth, 174n.2 Booth, Stephen, 91 Bowers, Fredson, 141 Bowes, Thomas, 44 Bowie, Malcolm, 190n.24 Brecht, Bertolt, 135 Butler, Judith, 8

Cartari, Vincenzo, 47 Castle of Perseverance, The, 144–5, 147, 155 casuistry, 142–4 Catullus, 78 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 95, 107 Cicero, 163 citationality, 12, 94–6, 104 Civil Rights Movement, 2, 4, 121 cogito, 5, 8, 10, 26, 28, 29, 51, 68, 97, 101 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 41 colonialism, 109–18, 123 Conflict of Conscience, The, 145 conscience, 13, 24, 25, 47, 132, 139–56 Cooper, Helen, 184n.32 Cornwallis, William, 162, 163, 164, 167 Coverdale, Miles, 44 Crofts, Robert, 50–1 cultural materialism, 9 de Man, Paul, 4 death drive, 14, 16, 24, 170 deconstruction, 6, 13, 69, 72, 79, 125 Dee, John, 110, 114 demand, 21–2, 29, 88

203

204

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Derrida, Jacques, 2, 6, 7, 10, 13, 14, 57, 79, 176n.60 critique of Foucault, 3–4, 122–3, 124–5 differance, 6, 123, 126, 134, 137 and psychoanalysis, 8, 17, 97, 102–3 see also deconstruction Descartes, René, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 51, 68–9, 101; see also cogito Dessen, Alan C., 14, 195n.8, 198n.41 Dickens, Charles, 94, 95 Dr Who, 73 Dollimore, Jonathan, 12, 118, 191n.20 Drake, Francis, 110 drive, 20, 24, 26, 29, 35, 77, 84, 168–70, 171; see also death drive dualism, 29–30, 51, 68–9 Dubrow, Heather, 42, 57, 181n.1, 186n.9, 187n.30 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 91 Dzelzainis, Martin, 185n.46 Eagleton, Terry, 122, 124, 193n.10 eclecticism, 6 Eliot, T. S., 1 Elizabeth I, 108, 110, 112–13, 126 Elyot, Thomas, 107 Enlightenment, 13, 27–9, 31, 68, 97, 100, 105, 106, 108, 121, 137, 138 Enough is as Good as a Feast, 143–4 Erasmus, 44–5, 45–6, 47 essay genre, 14, 27, 157–71 Essex, Earl of, 112–13, 116–17, 118 Everyman, 155 family values, 51, 52–3, 60, 76 felix culpa, 25 feminism, 2, 4, 10, 54–5, 65, 71–2, 121; see also gender; sexual politics Field, Richard, 71 Fineman, Joel, 57 Fish, Stanley, 14 Florio, John, 18, 160–1, 162, 163, 171 Foucault, Michel, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 122–3, 124, 175n.26

Freud, Sigmund, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25, 26, 29, 77, 104 ambivalence, 76–7 castration, 19–21 compulsion to repeat, 104–5 Interpretation of Dreams, The, 9–10, 12, 97–8, 101–2, 105 see also drive; psychoanalysis Friedman, David, 175n.14 Frye, Northrop, 1 Fulbecke, William, 70–1 functionalism, 124 future anterior, 32, 106–7 Gainsford, Thomas, 46–7 Garber, Marjorie, 130 gender, 5, 8, 19, 39, 53 genre, 5, 14, 39, 40, 53, 103–4, 157–71 Goldberg, Jonathan, 123–4, 134 Golding, Arthur, 107 Greenblatt, Stephen, 9, 16, 17, 123–4, 136, 172n.4, 192n.22 Hakluyt, Richard, 110 Hall, Edward, 126 Hall, Kim, 183n.26 Halpern, Richard, 188n.44 Hammond, Paul, 92, 188n.37 Hazlitt, William, 161 history, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15–17, 33, 100–8, 119–38 Hill, Christopher, 120 Hoccleve, Thomas, 49–50 Holinshed, Raphael, 126 Homer, 161 Honigmann, E. A. J., 160, 161 Horace, 85 Horestes, 153–4, 156 humanism, 26, 45 Interlude of Youth, The, 80 interpretation, 5, 10, 16, 17, 51, 88–93, 103, 120

Index intertextuality, 160, 161 Ireland, 12, 109, 112, 113–18 Jakobson, Roman, 92 James VI and I, 116 Jameson, Fredric, 122, 124 Jenkins, Harold, 14 Johnson, Robert, 162 Johnson, Samuel, 1 Jones, Ernest, 15, 26 Jonson, Ben, 141, 160 Kahn, Coppélia, 64–5 Keats, John, 1 Kerrigan, John, 80 Kristeva, Julia, 76, 187n.27 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10–11, 15– 33, 34–5, 61–3, 77, 97, 102, 106, 177n.74 imaginary, 137 Law, 7, 11, 21, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31, 32, 53, 61–3, 67 objet a, 6, 35, 53 Other, 20, 21, 29, 33 phallus, 20–4, 35, 62 real, 28, 77, 88, 121 symbolic order, 16, 21, 25, 28, 53, 61–2, 77, 88, 105, 128–9, 136 Thing, the, 77, 79, 82 see also drive; psychoanalysis; trompel’oeil Lamb, Charles, 161 Lambarde, William, 112 Lawlor, John, 152 Leavis, F. R., 120, 159 Lewis, C. S., 120, 123 Linche, Richard, 47–8 Livy, 59, 66 Locke, John, 2 Lodge, Thomas, 40 Longer Thou Livest, The, 148, 149 Lovejoy, A. O., 176n.40 Lyly, John, 107

205

Lyotard, Jean-François, 7, 8, 32–3, 85, 88, 106–7, 121–2, 123–4, 137–8, 190n.25 Mack, Maynard, 198n.42 Manichaeism, 30, 31 Marcus, Leah, 116 Marlowe, Christopher, 141, 158–9, 160 marriage, 23, 48–52, 55, 58, 65, 67, 70, 72, 160, 170 Marvell, Andrew, 31 Marxism, 2, 120, 122, 124–5 Meres, Francis, 75 Mikesell, Margaret, 180n.67 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 27 modernism, 27, 31, 123 Montaigne, Michel de, 11, 14, 18–32, 62, 160–71 Moore, Thomas, 94 More, Thomas, 45 Mullaney, Steven, 123–4 Neoplatonism, 47 New Criticism, 1, 17, 120 new historicism, 8–9, 16, 74, 123, 136 Newman, Jane, 71 Niccholes, Alexander, 48, 51 O Neill, Hugh, 113 Olivier, Laurence, 116, 117 Orgel, Stephen, 91 orientalism, 110 Ovid, 11, 36–8, 40, 47, 52, 59, 66, 71, 75, 85, 95, 107 Parrhasius, 34 Passionate Pilgrim, The, 75 Paulfreyman, Thomas, 44 Pearson, Lu Emily, 41 penis, 18–22, 24, 31, 63, 91–2 Perkins, William, 142–4, 151, 154, 156 Petrarch, 46, 74, 75, 77, 82, 103, 161 Plato, 23, 24, 30, 175n.28 Platonism, 31

206

Shakespeare in Theory and Practice

Plutarch, 164, 166 Poe, Edgar Allan, 8, 10 postcolonialism, 10, 12, 17 postmodernity, 7, 12, 13, 31, 32, 33, 106–7, 108, 119–38 Primaudaye, Pierre de la, 44, 46 Prince, F. T., 58 Prosser, Eleanor, 141, 143 psychoanalysis, 9, 10–11, 13, 15–33, 94–108, 113, 169, 171 Oedipus complex, 15, 17, 20 unconscious, 8, 10, 11, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 97, 102–3, 105 Puttenham, George, 57–8 queer studies, 8, 10, 91 rape, 55, 56, 58–9, 60, 65, 66–7, 68–9, 70 reader, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 27, 35, 38, 53, 89–93 reading, 2, 4, 5, 10–11, 14, 33, 120, 137 realism, 10 representation, 5, 6, 10, 11, 20 resistance, 4, 9, 11, 12, 54, 55, 65, 124, 125, 135, 136 Roe, John, 58 St Paul, 30, 95, 98 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 2–3, 6, 16, 17, 20, 22, 25, 29, 121 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 91 Seneca, 107, 162–3, 165, 166 sexual politics, 54, 59, 64–5; see also feminism; gender Shakespeare in Love, 73, 160 Shakespeare, William, 10, 126 Antony and Cleopatra, 95–6, 103 As You Like It, 96 Cymbeline, 116 Hamlet, 7, 13–14, 15, 97, 139–56, 161, 162

1 Henry IV, 114, 132, 133, 134, 135, 150 2 Henry IV, 111, 133, 136 Henry V, 12, 109, 111–12, 113–18, 126, 132–6 3 Henry VI, 97 Julius Caesar, 97 King Lear, 7, 88, 116, 162 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 74, 96, 103 Lucrece, 11, 54–72 Macbeth, 146 Merchant of Venice, The, 95, 177n.6 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 12, 94–108 narrative poems, 8, 11 Othello, 14, 94, 157–71 Richard II, 109–11, 112–13, 116, 126–31, 135, 137 Richard III, 146 Romeo and Juliet, 70, 76, 160 Sonnets, The, 8, 11–12, 73–93 Titus Andronicus, 7 Twelfth Night, 161 Venus and Adonis, 8, 11, 34–53, 75 Sidney, Philip, 1, 74, 87, 89, 186n.9 Sinfield, Alan, 12, 118, 191n.20 Slavery, 60–1, 63–4 Smith, Bruce, 91 sonnet, the, 77, 85 Spenser, Edmund, 115, 196n.10 Spivack, Bernard, 159 subject, 3, 5, 7, 16, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 35, 38, 62, 68, 77, 100, 124 subjectivism, 9 sublimation, 35, 76–7 ‘Tam Lin’, 103, 104 textuality, 9, 12, 17, 53, 102, 126, 137 Thackeray, W. M., 94, 95 ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, 103, 104 Tide Tarrieth No Man, The, 146 Tillyard, E. M. W., 120, 123, 125–6, 136, 137, 192n.1 Trial of Treasure, The, 148–9

Index trompe-l’oeil, 34–5, 53 truth, 25–6, 32–3, 88, 97, 103–4, 137 Tyndale, William, 45 Vendler, Helen, 91 Vickers, Brian, 200n.20 Vickers, Nancy, 67 Virgil, 95, 96, 103, 161, 166 Vives, 18

207

Weber, Samuel, 106 White, Hayden, 104 Wilde, Oscar, 75 Williamson, George, 162–3 Wither, George, 197n.27 World and the Child, The, 144–5, 147 Wyatt, Thomas, 78 Zeuxis, 34 Žižek, Slavoj, 16, 175n.23, 190n.22