Shakespeare Without Boundaries: Essays in Honor of Dieter Mehl

Shakespeare without Boundaries

Dieter Mehl

Shakespeare without Boundaries Essays in Honor of Dieter Mehl

Edited by

Christa Jansohn, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Stanley Wells

University of Delaware Press Newark

Published by University of Delaware Press Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rlpgbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data on file under LC#2010002598 ISBN: 978-1-61149-026-8 (cl. : alk. paper) eISBN: 978-1-61149-027-5 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents List of Illustrations

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Foreword: Shakespeare without Boundaries CHRISTA JANSOHN

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Dieter Mehl: The Boundary Crosser ANN JENNALIE COOK

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Part I: Early Modern Playwriting and Editing: Boundaries and Thoroughfares The Limitations of the First Folio PAUL EDMONDSON and STANLEY WELLS

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Anonymous Was a Woman PHYLLIS RACKIN

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Thomas Heywood, Script-Doctor GRACE IOPPOLO

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Part II: Beyond the Bounds of Medium: From Page to Stage to World Wide Web Performance and the Play-Text R. A. FOAKES

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“He shifteth his speech”: Accents and Dialects in Plays by Shakespeare and His Contemporaries BRIAN GIBBONS Shakespeare and Dance: Dissolving Boundaries ALAN BRISSENDEN Passing Through: Shakespeare, Theater Companies, and the Internet PETER HOLLAND 5

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CONTENTS

Part III: Crossing Intratextual Boundaries Making Mistakes: Shakespeare, Metonymy, and Hamlet ANN THOMPSON and JOHN O. THOMPSON

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Dot Dot or Dash: A Strange SOS from Prospero’s Island BRUCE R. SMITH

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The Problematization of Generic Boundaries: Lyrical Inroads into Shakespeare’s Dramatic Dialogue ALEXANDER SHURBANOV

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Part IV: Crossing Intertextual Boundaries William and Geoffrey CATHERINE BELSEY “It will have blood they say; blood will have blood”— Proverb Usage and the Vague and Undetermined Places of Macbeth MARTIN ORKIN The Fall of a Sparrow: Shakespearean Tragedy and the Bible PIERO BOITANI

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189 203

Part V: Dissolving National Boundaries Foundational Myth in Cymbeline DAVID BEVINGTON

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Shakespeare and Velázquez HUGH MACRAE RICHMOND

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Crossing the Dotted Line: Shakespeare and Geography CHEE-SENG LIM

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Part VI: Boundary Crossings: Translation and National Discourses “there’s the rub”: Translating Hamlet’s Thought Process WERNER HABICHT “Bottom, thou art translated”: Translation as a Boundary and a Bridge MARTA GIBINSKA

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CONTENTS

Hamlet across Boundaries of Language and Genre in Jacinto Benavente’s Comedy Hamlet’s Jester JESÚS TRONCH

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Part VII: Boundary Crossings: “Afterlives”; or, Shakespeare without Boundaries Hamlet’s Furniture: Shakespeare Sat Here CATHERINE M. S. ALEXANDER

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Dickens and Shakespeare’s Ghost(s) ADRIAN POOLE

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Madame Odier Illustrates Shakespeare GEORGIANNA ZIEGLER

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Shakespeare in the Edwardian Nursery: Simple Stories as the Passport to Plays VELMA BOURGEOIS RICHMOND

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Contributors

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Index

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Illustrations The Tempest, 5.1.161-78 from Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blunt, 1623), sig. B3.

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Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Erasmus (1523), oil and egg tempera on panel.

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John Payne (engraver), title page to William Alabaster, Roxana Tragaedia (London: William Jones, 1632), detail.

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Map detail from George Sandys, A Relation of a Iourney Begun An. Dom. 1610 (London: Richard Field for W. Barrett, 1615).

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The “plane of thought” (A) and the “plane of sound” (B) from Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (1916). 151 Johannes Stradanus (engraver), “America,” PAF70094 from the print collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

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Johannes Stradanus (engraver), “America,” reversed.

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Mathilde Odier, “Viola speaking with the Duke.” Twelfth Night, act 2, scene 4. Watercolor, c. 1853.

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Mathilde Odier, “Cordelia meeting King Lear.” King Lear, act 4, scene 7. Watercolor, c. 1854.

346

Gordon Browne’s illustration for Sir Sidney Lee’s Introduction to Mary Macleod’s The Shakespeare Story-Book.

355

Sketch of Shakespeare’s Birthplace for F. J. Furnivall’s “When Shakespeare was a boy,” in E. Nesbit’s Children’s Stories from Shakespeare.

357

Title page of Mary Macleod’s The Shakespeare Story-Book.

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Picture from William J. Rolfe’s Shakespeare the Boy: With Sketches of the Home and School Life, The Games and Sports, The Manners, Customs, and Folk-Lore of the Time, 1896.

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Foreword: Shakespeare without Boundaries Christa Jansohn

THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS IS A TRIBUTE TO DIETER MEHL, PROFESSOR of English at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University, Bonn (1968– 98), and now emeritus. He was Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 1971–72 and is Associate Fellow of the college. He has lectured at various universities and at conferences in America, Canada, and Europe. His career as a distinguished and internationally well-known Renaissance and medieval scholar is marked by numerous publications and positions. Dieter Mehl was the first president of the reunited German Shakespeare Society (1993–2002) after its fateful division from 1964 until 1993, and he is a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature (Mainz). He has been a member of the International Shakespeare Association since 1981 and of the executive committee (1996–2006) and he is now honorary vice president. His principal publications in English are The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (1965), which has become an international classic study, still referred to in the new Arden 3 Hamlet (2006), as well as the frequently reprinted book Shakespeare’s Tragedies. An Introduction published by Cambridge University Press (1986). He also contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies as well as its revised reissue as The Cambridge Shakespeare Companion and coedited Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century together with Jonathan Bate and Jill L. Levenson for Delaware Press (1998). In 2007 a concise introduction to Shakespeare’s Hamlet was published by the prestigious firm C. H. Beck (Munich). In a characteristic vote of thanks at the end he declares his indebtedness to some half dozen of the many Hamlets he had seen on stage, from Paul Scofield and Alan Badel in 1956 to Sam West half a century later. It is a mark of his unflagging enthusiasm that in 2007 he also joined the team of the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Outside Shakespeare he has published Geoffrey Chaucer: An Introduction to His Narrative Poetry (Cambridge, 1986) and contributed to the Cambridge Chaucer Companion (1986). The range of his scholarly 11

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activities and achievements is also documented by the fact that he was invited to join the team of editors of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence. He has edited or coedited three volumes, among them the two early versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1999) and, for Continuum, The European Reception of D. H. Lawrence (2007). For more than twenty-five years he has edited the English section of Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen (1982–), the oldest literary journal on the continent (founded in 1846). At the World Shakespeare Conference in Brisbane (2006) he organized a seminar entitled “Local and Global Hamlets,” and at the SAA meeting in San Diego (2007) a seminar entitled “Shakespeare and Chaucer,” to cross boundaries between “medieval” and “Renaissance” literature and criticism. No wonder he was particularly impressed by the quotation, chosen by James T. Boulton in 1986, for the D. H. Lawrence memorial in Westminster Abbey: “Homo sum, the adventurer.” It seemed to fit so well with his own idea of scholarly activity and the rewards of sociable human intercourse and inquisitive curiosity. Several volumes would be needed to celebrate adequately Dieter Mehl’s achievements in the various “literary territories” in which he has done research, lecturing, and teaching. The focus of our festschrift on “Shakespeare without boundaries” tries to reflect only one field of Dieter Mehl’s outstanding contribution to the study of Shakespeare and the various ways of boundary crossings, such as the boundaries of place, time, genre, language, national discourse, and medium. We think of a boundary whenever we think of an entity clearly demarcated from its surroundings. Whether sharp or blurry, natural or artificial, for every object there appears to be a boundary that marks it off from the rest of the object world. Events also have boundaries— at least temporal boundaries. Even abstract entities, such as concepts, have boundaries of their own. A boundary seems always to separate two sites through which differences may communicate. But what is the relation to the entities it separates? Where and which is the demarcation line? And why does it seem that there is no demarcation line separating Shakespeare and his work from other literary phenomena? Can we speak of Shakespeare without boundaries? Or is it that there seem to be two boundaries, one belonging to Shakespeare, the other belonging to the nation/reader/audience of his work? These questions will be further articulated in this essay collection by a particularly wide-ranging and impressively international team of contributors that in itself is proof of the intellectual curiosity and inquisitive crossing of conventional boundaries within present-day Shakespeare studies.

FOREWORD: SHAKESPEARE WITHOUT BOUNDARIES

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The term “boundaries,” which can be associated with various metaphors (e.g., spatial, time, language, genre etc.), evokes images of divisions and the possibility to change the lines between “territories.” Many of the essays therefore question traditional demarcations (i.e., genre, canon formation) and look at the importance of shifting boundaries. The essays exemplify that boundaries “are not absolute, that in various epochs they have been drawn in various ways; and we have not taken into account that the most intense and productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries of its individual areas and not in places where these areas have become enclosed in their own specificity.”1 Our volume does not want to perpetuate a “boundary mentality” or a “Shakespeare-without-boundaries mentality,” but wants to reveal and recognize these boundaries, their artificiality and constraining power as well as their possible capacity to separate and unify at the same time. All the contributors share with Dieter Mehl an interest in extending the boundaries of Shakespeare criticism. The festschrift will reflect various perspectives of current Shakespeare criticism and a curiosity about new questions to be asked. It is aimed at the scholarly Shakespeare community worldwide as well as at scholars and students interested in theoretical issues of a variety of topics. Instead of breaking boundaries and inventing a “global,” a “universal,” or a “world” Shakespeare, the editors and authors think that it is more important to be aware of boundaries in Shakespeare’s work and Shakespeare criticism. “We have frequently forgotten,” argues Bakhtin rightly, “that the boundaries . . . are not absolute, that in various epochs they have been drawn in various ways; and we have not taken into account that the most intense and productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries. . . .”2

 The editors are deeply grateful for the enthusiastic and uncomplicated cooperation of the contributors and for their spontaneous response to our suggestion for this volume. We hope that this collection of essays will form a colorful border appropriate for Dieter Mehl’s own endeavors to extend the boundaries of scholarly curiosity and investigation.

NOTES 1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 2. 2. Ibid.

Dieter Mehl: The Boundary Crosser Ann Jennalie Cook

HIS SMILE MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE. WHEN DIETER MEHL FIRST APproaches, he looks every inch the serious scholar with an international reputation. Then the smile of recognition breaks out, creasing his eyes behind their glasses into merry slits and exuding warm friendship. I have seen that smile work its magic all over the world, from England to America to Australia. Wherever he goes, Dieter finds people to like and occasions to prompt his unique little chuckle. For instance, in Tokyo, the Shakespeare Society of Japan had dedicated the 1991 World Congress to the memory of their late president Jiro Ozu, a major figure in the realm of international scholarship. Besides participating in several public tributes, his widow, a sophisticated traveler who lived in Paris, hosted an elegant luncheon at a restaurant known only to Japanese connoisseurs. She invited just three guests. One of them was Dieter Mehl, whose kindness to her and her husband she had never forgotten. That sort of memorable, unassuming charm makes Dieter Mehl cross boundaries with ease, whether they be cultural, national, academic, intellectual, or organizational. He deserves special praise for his role in negotiating an end to the division of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft that arose during the Cold War.1 In 1953, 1958, 1960 (when Dieter Mehl completed his dissertation at the University of Munich), and again in 1963 the organization’s annual general meeting, set for Weimar, was canceled, as too few members in West Germany could attend, thereby making it impossible to assemble a quorum. After leaders at Weimar hastily recruited their own quorum and took legal control of the association in 1963, the Bochum-based Gesellschaft West was formed. As Mehl himself has written, the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth in the following year, together with the centennial observation of the original group’s founding in 1864, took place in both cities with a “venomous spirit of mutual vituperation.”2 Global politics dictated that Dieter Mehl’s first major publication, Die Pantomime im Drama der Shakespearezeit, appeared in 1964 under the auspices of the Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West (followed the next 15

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year by his own English translation under the title The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention).3 Nevertheless, artificial boundaries, no matter how powerful, did not prevent him from crossing to the other side. He was among the first enthusiastic reviewers of Robert Weimann’s seminal Shakespeare und die Tradition des Volkstheaters and introduced the East German’s work to international colleagues in Review of English Studies and Arcadia.4 As early as 1980, Dieter had begun to attend the Weimar conferences and in 1988 was invited as part of an official “foreign” delegation from the Gesellschaft West. Because he already knew many on the other side of the border, he helped to facilitate their attendance at the International Shakespeare Congress of 1986 in what was then West Berlin, as well as the visits by delegates to East Berlin museums and theaters— despite the checkpoints and the wall. When the wall came down, the two Gesellschafts were caught in an awkward tangle of ideology, history, and commitment. Wisely, they took no immediate action but instead negotiated a future relationship over a period of two years. Dieter Mehl was among those who strongly pleaded for Weimar as the official headquarters, with Bochum as the site for publishing a unified Jahrbuch. Then, when Werner Habicht and Robert Weimann graciously stepped down as presidents of their respective groups, the person chosen to head the newly united Deutsche-Shakespeare Gesellschaft was someone who had already won the trust of its membership, Dieter Mehl. Fittingly, the vice presidency went to his friend from across the dissolved border, Maik Hamburger, dramatist and translator for the famed Deutsches Theater in Berlin. As chair of the International Shakespeare Association, I enjoyed the privilege of extending official congratulations to them and to their organization on behalf of colleagues throughout the world. We stood in awe of what they had so peacefully achieved. Most boundaries do not disappear with such good will. Indeed, increased good will across many boundaries marked Dieter’s term as president of the Gesellschaft from 1993 to 2002. As he modestly put it, “One might almost presume that, occasionally, the study of Shakespeare can make us better colleagues and less dogmatic human beings.”5 Under his leadership, scholars and theater professionals from many other countries made appearances at the annual meetings that broadened the experience of Gesellschaft members—Martin Orkin from South Africa and Hanna Scolnikov from Israel, Ania Loomba from India and Martin Hilsky from the Czech Republic, David Bevington from the United States and Terence Hawkes from the United Kingdom, as well as Peter Shaffer and Fiona Shaw from the realms of stage and screen. In what had always

DIETER MEHL: THE BOUNDARY CROSSER

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been a male-dominated culture, the new president used his influence to promote greater opportunities for women scholars, an evenhandedness as well as a universality amply demonstrated by the contributors selected for this volume. I have had many an occasion to observe Dieter Mehl’s ability to reach out across international lines. He has served on committees to plan the ISA’s World Congresses, held at five-year intervals, where a delicate balance of nationality, status, gender, theme, and practicality must be achieved. He cheerfully undertook the task of coediting the proceedings of the 1996 congress in Los Angeles,6 where a similar but even more difficult problem of balance in choosing papers prevails. He has offered wise advice in the deliberations of the ISA Executive Committee, not simply representing the interests of the Deutsche ShakespeareGesellschaft but also seeking the best policies for colleagues everywhere. In recognition of his contributions to our global organization, he was named an honorary vice president of the International Shakespeare Association in 2006, a position he will hold for life. Thus far, I have focused on Dieter Mehl’s personal awareness that artificial barriers need not divide the scholarly world. However, even if he had not made signal contributions to organizations in his field, thereby winning him a host of friends and admirers, his scholarship would clearly demonstrate his refusal to remain in a narrowly defined area. His twenty or more major publications certainly include important Shakespearean work, ranging from the early assessment of the Elizabethan dumb show to the tragedies. Yet he is also an authority on Chaucer, on Middle English romances, and on D. H. Lawrence, and his research is a staple of both German and English presses. He began editing even before completing his doctorate. Besides individual volumes, since 1982 he has been editor of the English sections of Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, his country’s oldest journal on Germanic literature (founded in 1846). More than twenty issues of Studien zur englischen Literatur (founded in 1990) have appeared under his aegis. In addition to his editorial work, Dieter’s translations include Dickens and Swift, alongside Chaucer and English poetry. These publications alone would establish him as a major scholar whose expertise crosses many sorts of boundaries. However, not until one looks at the massive number of articles and the far larger number of reviews does Dieter Mehl’s extraordinary contribution to the life of the mind emerge. He has been continuously reading, writing, and publishing since 1961, when his first article and first review appeared. There are now almost ninety of the former and some three hundred of the latter. The articles appear in

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such prestigious publications as The Cambridge Chaucer Companion and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies. Their range is truly daunting, from Renaissance dramatic emblems to Milton, from Oliver Goldsmith to Tom Stoppard, from Thomas Malory to C. P. Snow, from King Lear and opera to Shelley and Mont Blanc. Mehl’s reviews display an equally dazzling range; not only solid assessments of books on Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Lawrence but also forays into John Lydgate, Henry James, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Anne and Charlotte Brontë, Erich Maria Remarque, Jane Austen, Scottish poems, Victorian visual imagination, and Tudor-Stuart royal doctors. Intellectual boundaries? Hardly. Instead, we find an active, inquiring mind with sufficient discipline to critique tirelessly and consistently. After a distinguished career at the University of Bonn, Dieter Mehl remains a truly global presence, lecturing widely and regularly attending the biennial International Shakespeare Conferences at Stratford-upon-Avon as well as the annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America. He turns up in San Diego, Valencia, Brisbane, and Prague, where he never seems to have anything more pressing to do than ask after a friend’s health or laugh at a bon mot or enjoy a play. He fondly remembers an Armenian Coriolanus and a Georgian Othello from the early Weimar years but takes equal pleasure in the latest production at London’s Globe. And wherever he travels, his smile brightens the place, and his chuckle evokes an answering, affectionate grin. As Dieter titled a recent article, “ ‘Never was such a man for crossing frontiers.’ ”7 We are all the richer for his crossings.

NOTES 1. For more comprehensive accounts of these events, see Christa Jansohn, “The German Shakespeare-Gesellschaft during the Cold War,” and Dieter Mehl, “The German Shakespeare-Gesellschaft and ‘Die Wende,’ ” both in German Shakespeare Studies at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, ed. Christa Jansohn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 272–90 and 292–304, respectively. 2. Mehl, “German Shakespeare-Gesellschaft,” 295. 3. Dieter Mehl, Die Pantomime im Drama der Shakespearezeit, Schriftenreihe der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West, Neue Folge, vol. 10 (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1964); Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention. London: Methuen, 1965). 4. RES 20 (1969): 220–22; Arcadia 4 (1969): 311–14. 5. Mehl, “German Shakespeare-Gesellschaft,” 300. 6. Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress Los Angeles, 1996, ed. Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson, and Dieter Mehl (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998). 7. “ ‘Never was such a man for crossing frontiers’: A Gap in the Border-Line,” Etudes Lawrenciennes 32 (2005): 21–36.

Shakespeare without Boundaries

I Early Modern Playwriting and Editing: Boundaries and Thoroughfares

The Limitations of the First Folio Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells

OUR ESSAY IN CELEBRATION OF DIETER RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT WHAT the First Folio text itself represents and then considers how it is currently being used by actors. Always an important volume, its reputation has never stood as high as it does now. Over a century ago it became the only book to be memorialized with a monument, in Love Lane, London.1 The charred remains of a copy that was accidentally incinerated are preserved in a glass case in Philadelphia.2 About eighty copies, in various states of preservation, have found their resting place in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington.3 In 1964 the copy belonging to the Royal Shakespeare Company was taken to the Vatican to be blessed by the pope. He mistook it for a gift, and it had to be tactfully retrieved.4 It has repeatedly been published in both type and photographic facsimile. The processes by which it was printed have been minutely analyzed.5 Scholarly monographs have been devoted to study of its publishing history, of the whereabouts of surviving copies—around 230 of them—of annotations scribbled in them by generations of owners, and of the prices they have raised when put on sale. A copy that came on the market in 2006 was treated to a world tour before coming under the hammer, and the sale was reported internationally. In recent years editors have preferred its texts of certain plays—Hamlet and King Lear among them—to previously printed, longer versions that more closely represent Shakespeare’s original manuscripts. And now it has (more or less) been edited in its own right, with doctrinaire disregard of manifestly superior quarto readings and with shamefaced addition of non-Folio texts, including the poems by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen under the auspices of the Royal Shakespeare Company.6 Is all this attention justified? Publication of the volume seems to have been the prime responsibility of John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s lifelong colleagues in the King’s Men. They, along with Richard Burbage, are the only former colleagues to whom he left bequests in his will of 1616. Possibly the four men had discussed memorializing him in this way, spurred on perhaps by the 23

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knowledge that Ben Jonson was already big with a folio. And Germaine Greer suggests that Shakespeare’s wife, too, may have been instrumental in having the book published.7 Burbage had died in 1619, before the Shakespeare volume was ready for the press, but its preliminaries are signed by the other two legatees. They were actors, not professional scholars, and they seem to have been motivated rather by love for their friend and by pride in their company’s achievements than by the desire for monetary gain. They are often referred to as the book’s editors, but we do not know how much they undertook personally of the very considerable amount of detailed work that went into its preparation for the press. This work was little less demanding of scholarly dedication than that undertaken by academic editors at the present time. Someone had to deal with the publishers; to commission the Droeshout engraving and the prefatory poems written by Ben Jonson, Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges, and James Mabbe; to assemble the texts, making decisions about what to include and what to omit; to decide on the order in which the plays should be printed; to make decisions about their titles; to determine which should be printed from manuscript and which from previously printed texts, to negotiate problems of copyright; and to commission and pay for transcripts of plays of which previously printed texts or manuscripts were not available. And someone decided that it was not enough simply to hand existing quartos of the plays over to the printers, but that some person or persons should to some degree— sometimes to a very considerable degree—collate and annotate certain printed texts in order to make them conform, with varying degrees of exactitude, to manuscripts that had been amended for the theater. Some plays, such as Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Merchant of Venice, were only lightly annotated, with the result that evident errors remain. For other plays the task was more substantial, though not all-pervasive. Titus Andronicus was printed from a copy of the third quarto, of 1611, but with the addition of a scene (the “fly” scene, act 3, scene 2) that had not appeared in any of the quartos and with other changes, some of which reflect theatrical practice after the introduction of act intervals around 1608. And for a few plays the process of annotation was remarkably thorough and must have required many hours of taxing, detailed work resulting in a copy that the printers would have found difficult to read. For Troilus and Cressida a copy of the 1609 quarto was marked up with some five hundred variants, an average of between seventeen and eighteen changes on each page—one every two to three lines—made after comparison with a scribal transcript of a theater copy on which revisions for pro-

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duction at the Globe or elsewhere had been made. Most pains were taken over King Lear, for which a copy of the second, 1619 quarto was marked up with the addition from a theater manuscript of around one hundred full lines that are not in the quarto, with the marking for omission of close on 300 lines, including an entire scene, that are in the quarto, and with over eight hundred and fifty verbal variants, including changes and additions to stage directions and reassignment of several speeches to different speakers. The result, with deletions, additions, interlineations, and interleaved sheets, must have been a compositor’s nightmare. There is no wonder that the book did not appear until seven years after Shakespeare died. If Heminges and Condell did all the work themselves, they must have had skills far different from those normally required of actors. If they did not, who did? Ben Jonson, the most scholarly of the popular playwrights of the period, was associated with the enterprise, at least to the extent of providing verses to accompany the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare that prefaces the volume and of writing for it the noble and deeply thoughtful, if not entirely translucent lines in Shakespeare’s memory that represent the most serious criticism that his work had thus far received. Maybe Jonson helped in other ways, too. And it has been pretty conclusively established that Ralph Crane was commissioned to make transcripts of several plays; Trevor Howard-Hill has suggested that Crane may also have undertaken other editorial functions.8 No doubt he would have had to be paid. The result of all the work that went into preparing the volume is that for a number of Shakespeare’s plays we have far better evidence of the form and manner in which they were performed than if only the quartos had survived, or if those who put the Folio together had taken the easier way out and simply reprinted quartos. The Folio is a tribute to Shakespeare the dramatist, an affirmation by his colleagues of the belief that his plays reached full fruition only in the theater. Above all the volume preserved texts of eighteen plays, including some of Shakespeare’s greatest, that had not appeared in print and that otherwise might have been lost forever. The world would have been a very different place without, for instance, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Also, if the Folio had not omitted The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy, both of which had been published as Shakespeare’s, it would have been very difficult to deny the claims of their title pages that he had written them. The work undertaken in preparing the Folio has, then, unquestionably exerted a paramount influence upon our perception of Shakespeare; but, important though it is, that influence has not al-

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ways been to the good. The volume is a highly eclectic collection of variously derived texts, all plays. The decision to exclude any nondramatic writings seems particularly perverse in that these are the only works that Shakespeare clearly intended to be read. There may have been problems about copyright. The Sonnets, published in 1609, had not been much of a success, judging by both the number of surviving copies and by the absence of reprints before Benson’s garbled version of 1640, so the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, presumably still had unsold copies. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, on the other hand, had been reprinted regularly since they first appeared in 1593 and 1594, respectively, so their publishers too would not have wished to part with their rights. The decision not to include the poems in a volume that otherwise aimed at inclusiveness had the effect for centuries of reducing the impression of Shakespeare’s range by drawing attention away from his achievement as a nondramatic poet. The poems were excluded from reprints of the Folio throughout the seventeenth century, and the content of eighteenth-century editions continued to reflect that of the Folio, with the poems issued at best as supplementary volumes until Malone’s edition of 1790. Partly for this reason the Sonnets were little known until the romantic period, and there is no serious discussion of the narrative poems before Coleridge, in the Biographia Literaria of 1817. The Folio editors also omitted four plays—Edward III, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost Cardenio—in which it is now believed that Shakespeare had a hand, while including All Is True under the title of Henry VIII (maybe in order to complete the English histories) and the collaborative Timon of Athens. Perhaps they could also have printed Love’s Labour’s Won. It is significant that the Folio editors represented many of the plays in the state in which they were acted in the theaters of their own time—the later Jacobean period—rather than of the time at which they were first written and performed. This is why they offer, for example, adapted texts of Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Macbeth rather than the plays as Shakespeare first wrote them. An important effect of changes in theater practice is the presence in the Folio of act and scene divisions in a number of plays. None of the plays printed in Shakespeare’s lifetime is divided into either acts or scenes (though it is clear that in some of them, such as Henry V, he had the classically derived five-act structure in mind). There is every reason to believe that until about 1608 plays in the public theaters, even the longest, were acted without interruption.9 The editors of the Folio, however, clearly set out with the intention of dividing all the plays into acts, though they abandoned this practice in

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the later plays of the volume. Some of the subdivisions in the Folio undoubtedly represent the ways the plays were acted during the later part of Shakespeare’s career, but others are no less clearly editorial, and some are grotesquely inappropriate, as will be testified by readers who have had the experience of coming, perhaps with relief, to what is marked as the end of act 4 of Love’s Labour’s Lost only to find that more than half of the play still lies ahead. Although the Folio editors’ intention to divide all the plays was not carried through, what they did encouraged later editors to complete the process, bringing the representation of the plays closer to that of classical drama and resulting in printed texts that misrepresent the manner in which most of the plays were originally given by breaking the flow of the action. This must be regarded as a limitation of the Folio. Without it the plays would have gone on being printed continuously, as in the quartos, a policy that might well have had far-reaching effects on theatrical practice, and indeed on theatrical economics (which is affected by bar visits during intervals). The other decision made by the Folio editors that has had farreaching consequences is their arrangement of the volume’s contents. They might have arranged the plays according to the order of composition. Presumably they might even have told their readers when the plays were written, thus saving scholars of later generations an enormous amount of trouble. Instead, and regrettably, they decided to group the plays according to the categories named in the title of their volume: Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. This was not a straightforward task, and the manner in which it was carried out has had far-reaching, and not entirely beneficial, consequences. On original publication only six of the plays had been assigned more or less precisely to the categories in which they are placed in the Folio: Titus Andronicus was “A Roman tragedy”; Romeo and Juliet first an “excellent conceited tragedy,” then a “most lamentable tragedy”; Love’s Labour’s Lost a “pleasant conceited comedy”; The Merry Wives of Windsor a comedy, Hamlet a tragical history on the title pages of the first and second quartos and a straightforward tragedy on the head title of the second quarto; and Othello a tragedy. Another five plays were assigned to no category.10 Two of the plays—1 Henry IV and Henry V (a chronicle history)—were classed as histories in both the Folio and in quarto, but three of the Folio histories (3 Henry VI, Richard II, and Richard III)—were tragedies on first publication. One of the Folio comedies, The Merchant of Venice, was a history on its title page and a comical history according to its head title, and two of the

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Folio tragedies started off as histories: King Lear was a chronicle history on its title page and a history on its head title, and Troilus and Cressida was a “famous history.” The most conspicuous anomalies in the Folio’s classification relate to the plays there classified as histories. The word had a broad signification; it could be used of any narrative, not just one based on actual events. The Folio editors chose to use it only in the historical sense, and restricted it to plays based on medieval and Tudor English history. In doing so they obscured the tragic nature of Shakespeare’s treatment of the final part of the reign of Henry VI and the reigns of Richard II and Richard III and ignored the historical aspects of the reign of King Lear and also of the plays based on Roman history that had not appeared in quarto. They were clearly intent on emphasizing the biographical aspects of the history plays—only one, Richard III, is described as a tragedy, and even that is “The Life and Death of Richard III” in the running titles. To this extent their procedure takes the plays away from the theater in the direction of narrative history. This is probably also why the compilers pretty certainly altered the titles under which some of the plays had been performed: the second and third parts of Henry VI seem to have been known in the theaters of the 1590s as the “First and Second parts of the Contention betwixt the two famous houses of York and Lancaster” (or some equally unwieldy variant of this), and accounts of the burning of the Globe three times allude to the play printed as Henry VIII in the Folio as “All is True,” never unequivocally as Henry VIII; indeed, the ballad commemorating this occasion has as its refrain the words “and yet all this is true.”11 Editorial decisions about genre affect other plays than those that had already appeared in print: the Roman tragedies and Macbeth are historical narratives no less than the plays centered on the lives of English kings, and Cymbeline is a historical as well as a comical play. Shakespeare’s work is essentially eclectic, often drawing on a wide range of literary and dramatic traditions and conventions within a single play. In attempting to confine it within the straitjacket of three straightforward categories Heminges and Condell were less true to his memory than they would have wished. In particular, their imposition on many of the plays of act and scene divisions and their grouping of the plays according to generic categories along with their alteration of original titles to fit these categories have shaped the ways in which succeeding generations have thought and written about their author. The pagination of the volume is nonsequential, starting afresh for the printing of each new generic section. This, we suggest, may reflect an original intention to publish the work in three volumes, or at least to allow purchasers of unbound sheets to make three

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volumes out of them. Such breaks in the reading make plays difficult to locate by page number and suggest a devolved Shakespeare in three separate parts, in a similar way to the imposition of the five-act structure. So much for textual scholarship. What about the theater? More and more actors are falling in love with the First Folio. Over many years, Dieter has brought hundreds of Shakespeareans on short courses to Stratford-upon-Avon, initially to the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and then to the Shakespeare Centre, headquarters of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. A highlight of those programs has long been the question-and-answer sessions with members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Dieter has sat through, and contributed to, scores of them, possibly even more than a hundred over the years. Increasingly actors have wheeled into their discussion of the plays reference to the First Folio. Why do they do this, and what is meant by it? The critical assumption that the First Folio as printed is somehow both useful to actors and represents an existing through-line to Shakespeare’s own intentions goes back at least as far as 1948. Richard Flatter, an Austrian who translated Shakespeare into German, produced Shakespeare’s Producing Hand: A Study of His Marks of Expression to Be Found in the First Folio.12 The literary scholar and theatrical practitioner Nevill Coghill wrote the introduction. Responses to the work acknowledged its usefulness for thinking about Shakespeare theatrically, but criticized its venturing into the territory of textual bibliography. Charlton Hinman’s 1950 review recognized it as “something of a landmark in Shakespeare studies generally” while commenting that Flatter’s “evidence of Shakespeare’s own ‘hand’ . . . can scarcely be thought sound.”13 The tensions then present between textual scholarship and theatrical experience are every bit as keen today, if not more so. What is at stake when actors turn to the First Folio for guidance? First and foremost is a sense of Shakespearean authority. The title of Flatter’s book suggests a real sense of presence, a presence that persists whenever an actor finds the Folio (at best) “helpful” and (at worst) “authentic.” At stake, too, is an approach to the Folio text that is apparently unmediated by scholarly endeavor: reader and actor meet text and by so doing gain privileged access to Shakespeare’s intentions for his own acting company. In ecclesiastical terms it represents the difference between Bible-based Protestantism and churchbased Catholicism. Moreover, the approach that finds Shakespeare’s presence actually within the text as printed on the Folio’s pages should raise suspicions

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by proclaiming itself to be straightforward and simple. Herein lies the ongoing tension between the academy and the theater. Donald Weingust, an apologist who argues for the preeminent position of the Folio in both the study and onstage, betrays these critical assumptions in the following terms: “The Folio orthography becomes a simple alternative means of textual study, one well suited to the temporal demands of theatrical production. Folio-based techniques provide actors not only technical assistance, but also a less tangible, though no less important, moral authority bound up with the supposed intentionality of the playwright.”14 Here Weingust betrays an approach that stems not from scholarly discipline, but from rehearsal room desirability, an approach which has nothing to do with historical truth and everything to do with a vague (“less tangible”) morality. The desirability of “a simple alternative means of textual study” betrays another item on the agenda of what is beginning to look like First Folio fundamentalism, an attack not only on New Bibliography but also on textual scholarship more generally, which is perceived as difficult. Experientially, the approach has everything to do with empowering actors, and nothing to do with empowering critical thought. “Unediting” Renaissance texts might inspire a greater openness of interpretative framework—let us enjoy both the first and second quartos’ “base Indean” and the Folio’s “Judean” just moments before the end of Othello—but in Weingust’s construction what might be a healthy and self-conscious pluralism becomes a case of lazy and overly simplistic indecision. Guidance for actors using the Folio comes in many other guises, including: realizing asides through shifts in speeches, noticing that the Folio entrances might make theatrical sense in themselves, finding dramatic pauses in metrical gaps, understanding metrical irregularity to be a place where gestures can be inserted, obeying the Folio’s lineation even when irregular (since this might be revealing about characterization), and finding markings akin to music notation within the rhetorical punctuation of the Folio: the colons indicate a pause, commas a shorter one, or breaks in the argument, similar to the modern dash; there is no need for the semicolon. Weingust refers us to Flatter’s remarks about Macbeth: “Flatter perceives Macbeth as perhaps the most perfectly transmitted of Shakespeare’s texts. He finds the play relatively free of what might be called protoeditorial interference. The proof of its integrity, for Flatter, is the great deal of irregularity preserved in the text, much of which is represented in line division and irregular verse.”15 But it is increasingly accepted that the Folio text of the play represents Middleton’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s original. A more valid interpretation in the

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light of current scholarship would be that the irregularity of the text as printed in the Folio probably has more to do with Middleton’s habit of writing irregular verse lines than with Shakespeare’s provision of implicit directions to the actors. The First Folio-centered approach has found fullest expression in the work of Patrick Tucker’s Original Shakespeare Company. Tucker’s theatrical practice is based on trying to reproduce the kinds of dramatic energies experienced by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men. Cue scripts rather than full texts are used—indeed, actors are dissuaded from reading the full text lest it gets in the way of the immediacy of experience. (As Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell says: “I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”)16 But the Folio sits enshrined in Tucker’s overall approach. His is a directorial method that ironically eschews direction: “If an actor asks to what use he should put such opportunities [“the acting potential of Folio incidentals . . .”] Tucker is quick to reply, “I don’t know, you’re the actor, you decide.” Proponents of using the Folio as an acting text make it clear that these opportunities are notes to the actor, rather than dicta for inflexibly specific interpretation.”17 Actually, Tucker’s “dicta” are carefully laid down in his 2002 book, Secrets of Acting Shakespeare: The Original Approach. His recommendation on the importance of capital letters in the Folio provides an illuminating example: “In the final analysis, no one knows if the capitalization was what the actors’ script would have had, but my work with actors reveals that it always gives useful and valuable acting notes to the performer. Even if the capitalization was a whim of the compositor—and the more work I do with the original script the more I find this difficult to believe—then at least it is an Elizabethan’s [sic] choice of which word to highlight with the use of the capital, and therefore someone closer to the original performance.”18 The capital letters may or may not be “Shakespearean,” but they are still “Elizabethan,” which, Tucker supposes, gives them special authority. In another example Tucker gives to illustrate the integrity of the Folio’s use of a question mark, Malvolio’s “Ile be reueng’d on the whole packe of you?”—“where Malvolio starts his exit with a threat, realizes that he is outnumbered, and leaves us laughing at the deflation of his pomposity”19—Tucker’s dictum is not quite good enough. In fact, the Folio gives Malvolio no exit at this point. Here is a strange case of Tucker’s “dicta” not being used properly to his own advantage. Presumably, Tucker would not want his actors even to look into the corrupting influence of a Penguin, Oxford, Cambridge, or Arden

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text, and yet his own dissemination of the First Folio is not quite accurate enough, and certainly not unfiltered (though he gives the illusion that it is) by his own editorial and dramatic preferences. The theater’s ever-growing fascination with the Folio text is compounded in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s edition: William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (2007). The editors claim, “[A]stonishingly, the Shakespeare First Folio—unquestionably the most important single book in the history of world drama—has not been edited in its own right for about three hundred years. By ‘edited’ we mean reproduced with the correction of presumed printer’s errors and the modernization of spelling and punctuation. There have been facsimile reproductions and diplomatic transcriptions of the Folio: these, however, are not corrected and modernized editions.”20 First Folio readings have been preserved, where these can be made sense of, stage directions and speech prefixes are Folio-based, or Folio-pointed, so that the 1623 text is everywhere apparent as an implied presence, whether this brings with it a Shakespearean authority or not. But quarto texts have been used for inevitable emendations, as have other historical editions. The editors have also felt the need to print “substantial Quarto-only passages” at the end of relevant plays. What the edition represents “aims to be simultaneously authentic and modern.”21 Ironically, this apparently most theatrical of all current complete editions does not serve up the Folio quite as well as the actors who might wish to use it would like. Here is a Folio whimsically filtered and far removed from the fundamentals necessary to Tucker’s influential theatrical approach. Actors who wish to use the Folio would find it much more beneficial to use a facsimile. The level of editorial intervention in the RSC edition itself clearly illustrates the limitations of the 1623 volume. This is and is not an edition of the Folio. Having illustrated the tensions between the theatrical and scholarly approaches to the Folio, and having found a scholarly attempt to edit the Folio strangely compromised by its own terms, what are we left with? The First Folio is also the site where Lukas Erne’s exaggerated case for Shakespeare as a purely literary author is being contested.22 The 1623 publication is the primary touchstone for the ongoing tension over who can claim most Shakespearean authority: the reader or the actor, the academy or the theater. The epigraph to this festschrift is of help here: Edmund Burke’s “There is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.” The boundary of the feelings in Burke’s formulation is the vanguard of any approach for which the First Folio is in any way a sentimental starting point, that is

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any theory based on a feeling, or a quest for Shakespeare’s presence. It requires imagination to instigate a new kind of dialogue between the academy and the theater. In this new dialogue, neither side would be intimidated by the other, and at the heart of it would be an openness to the mutual pursuit of truth and a new appetite for an exactness of interpretation. The dialogue would recognize the best that is to be found in Patrick Tucker’s exploration of “authentic” stagings and would inform this by a scholarship that could see beyond the limitations of the First Folio, rather than being hidebound by them. The publication of the Folio represents one of the earliest critical acts in Shakespearean literary and theatrical scholarship. Its Shakespeare is every bit as constructed as the Shakespeare of successive centuries, and both actors and scholars need to take heed not to let sentiment rule when it comes properly to assessing what the Folio represents. The Folio is where “the war of authority”23 between the theater and the academy begins, and where it is still going on. We owe an enormous debt to Heminges and Condell, but some of their work needs to be undone, not blindly followed, if we are to enhance our understanding of what Shakespeare wrote. Shakespeare’s First Folio is of an age, not for all time.

NOTES 1. It is reproduced in Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, vol. 1: An Account of the First Folio Based on Its Sales and Prices, 1623–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), xxii. 2. Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, vol. 2: A New Worldwide Census of First Folios (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 316. 3. Ibid., 58–61. 4. Stanley Wells, Shakespeare: For All Time (London: Macmillan, 2002), 371. 5. Especially by Charlton J. Hinman, The Printing and Proof Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). 6. The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 7. Germaine Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), chap. 21. 8. T. H. Howard-Hill, “Shakespeare’s Earliest Editor, Ralph Crane,” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1992): 113–29. 9. Gary Taylor, “The Structure of Performance: Act-Intervals in the London Theatres, 1576–1642,” in Gary Taylor and John Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606–1623 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 3–50. 10. Pericles, omitted by the Folio editors, was just a “play” in the 1609 Quarto. 11. The relevant documents are reproduced in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 28–30. 12. Richard Flatter, Shakespeare’s Producing Hand: A Study of His Marks of Expression to Be Found in the First Folio (London: William Heinemann, 1948).

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13. Cited in Don Weingust, Acting from Shakespeare’s First Folio: Theory, Text and Performance (London: Routledge, 2006), 40, 41. 14. Ibid., 7. 15. Ibid., 30. 16. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Russell Jackson, New Mermaids (London: A. C. Black, 1980), 1.495–97. 17. Weingust, Acting from Shakespeare’s First Folio, 15. 18. Patrick Tucker, Secrets of Acting Shakespeare: The Original Approach (London: Routledge, 2002), 236. 19. Ibid., 244. 20. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (New York: Modern Library, 2007), liv. 21. Ibid., lvii. 22. The case is put forward in Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 23. Weingust, Acting from Shakespeare’s First Folio, 38.

Anonymous Was a Woman Phyllis Rackin

ALTHOUGH I TAKE MY TITLE FROM VIRGINIA WOOLF’S A ROOM OF ONE’S Own, my subject is a group of texts that Woolf believed were most likely written by men—the playscripts designed for performance in the commercial theaters of Shakespeare’s London. For although Woolf shrewdly guessed “that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,” she believed that if Shakespeare had had a sister who shared his genius and his desire to write for the stage, she, unlike her brother, would have faced insurmountable obstacles. The “Judith Shakespeare” Woolf imagined might have been forced into an unwelcome marriage; she would surely have been denied an education and discouraged from reading or writing; if she did manage to write, the best she could have managed would have been something “scribbled up in an apple loft on the sly” and quickly hidden or buried. And she could never have found work in the theater. Woolf imagines what might have happened if she had tried: Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man–guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last. . . . Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so . . . killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads. . . .

“[A]ny woman,” Woolf concludes, “born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.” She “would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.”1 35

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We now know that Woolf’s estimate of the boundaries that confined sixteenth-century Englishwomen was unduly pessimistic—that some of the women born with great gifts did very well indeed, that there were women who received good educations and women who wrote,2 that many women chose their own husbands,3 that there were women who worked as actors,4 and that some women even wrote plays that were performed and admired.5 Nonetheless, we still assume, as Woolf did, that no women could have written for the first English commercial theaters. In the spirit of crossing the boundaries that have circumscribed our own thinking, I would like to propose that it may finally be time to reconsider that assumption—to cross, at last, the gendered boundary that has long marked off Shakespeare’s theater as a masculine enclave in which women could appear only as audiences and consumers for the products of an all-male theatrical business. My argument is purely speculative, but it is designed to provide a first step in identifying those women and the plays they wrote by challenging the bases for the belief that they did not exist. Perhaps the most powerful argument against the possibility that women wrote for the stage is the long-standing belief that the playhouses were exclusively male enterprises. However, recent studies by such scholars as Natasha Korda, Susan Cerasano, Marion WynneDavies, Pamela Allen Brown, and Peter Parolin have now clearly established that women were actively and visibly engaged in the business of the early modern English professional theater companies.6 Of course, it has long been known that, beginning with Queen Elizabeth, aristocratic and royal women had been patrons of the playing companies, but we now know that women lower on the social scale were deeply involved in their day-to-day business. Women supplied costumes for theatrical productions, they lent money to the players, and they owned shares in the companies. In addition, women were an active and visible presence in the playhouses. As “gatherers” or “box-holders,” they stood at the entrances to collect entrance fees. They constituted a sizable portion of the playgoers—perhaps more than half—and on some occasions, they even appeared onstage. This increasing recognition of women’s activities as providers and consumers of theatrical entertainment invites a new—and more skeptical—look at the long-standing belief that women had no part in the writing of the plays those companies produced. We know that medieval and Renaissance Englishwomen did write the scripts for a variety of plays, which ranged from liturgical drama to aristocratic and royal entertainments. Examples range from Katherine of Sutton, the fourteenth-century abbess of Barking nunnery, who wrote a number of liturgical plays,7 to Elizabeth Cary, the

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Renaissance lady who wrote the tragedy of Mariam the Fair Queen of Jewry. Plays written by Renaissance Englishwomen were appreciated by their own contemporaries, but it is only recently that scholars have begun to produce the modern editions and critical commentary that are giving this work its well-deserved place in the history of Renaissance drama. Cary’s play was written in 1602 and first published in 1613, but it had to wait over three centuries—until 1914—for its first modern edition. Another Renaissance Englishwoman whose importance as a playwright has often been underestimated is Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke and the sister of Sir Philip Sidney. Students of Renaissance drama have long been taught about the tradition of neo-Senecan tragedy and the role of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy in popularizing it, but Mary Sidney’s play The Tragedy of Antonie may have been equally influential. That play, an English translation of the French Senecan tragedy Marc Antoine, was published in 1592, exactly the same year that Kyd’s play was first registered; and it was much admired in its own time. Subsequent editions appeared in 1595, 1600, 1606, and 1607,8 and Samuel Daniel claimed that he wrote his own closet drama, The Tragedy of Cleopatra, as a companion piece to it.9 Examples like these demonstrate that Renaissance Englishwomen were fully capable of writing successful plays. Although none of the plays I have mentioned was designed for commercial performance on the public stage, such an achievement was not entirely unprecedented: the celebrated Italian actress Isabella Andreini was equally— and internationally—famous as a professional playwright.10 The absence of women from the list of known, commercial playwrights in England does not necessarily mean that no English women had a hand in writing for the public stage—only that their names may be difficult or impossible to retrieve. We have legal documents to tell us the names of other women who were involved with the English acting companies—to tell us, for instance, that Susan Baskerville was a shareholder in two companies, that Mary Bryan and Margaret Gray were shareholders in the second Fortune, and that Elizabeth Wheaton was a gatherer who collected admission fees at both the Blackfriars and the Globe. But the majority of the plays that we have from those first commercial theaters have come down to us without the names of their authors. The assumption that every one of those unnamed authors was a man is simply that—an assumption. During the 1580s, for instance, 80 percent of the plays printed lacked authorial attribution, and although the percentage of named playwrights increased significantly in subsequent years, it never rose above 50 percent until after the beginning of the seventeenth cen-

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tury.11 Of course, as we now know, and as these percentages clearly demonstrate, Shakespeare’s contemporaries did not share our interest in the identification of authors. As Marcy L. North points out, “More than 800 known authors were published anonymously between 1475 and 1640, and to this figure one must add pseudonymous authors, those authors who are still unidentified, and those who penned the many anonymous poems and smaller items that appear in anthologies and miscellanies of the period. . . . Few early modern authors avoided anonymity entirely.”12 Nonetheless, although I believe our own interest in questions of authorship is often anachronistic, I do not mean to imply that it is illegitimate. For at least three centuries, readers have been passionately interested in questions of authorship, and there are many good reasons for that interest. My point is simply that the recorded evidence we look for concerning the authorship of these early commercial plays may very well not exist, because these were records that it never occurred to anyone to keep. If the question of authorship had not yet acquired either the significance or the urgency it was later to assume, this was especially so in the case of plays written for the new commercial theaters. Designed in the first instance for oral delivery rather than printed publication, these texts naturally featured their performers much more than their writers.13 And even when one of these early plays was printed, it was often identified as “offered for acting” and included doubling charts and the information that a specified number of performers could “play it at ease.”14 As all these features clearly demonstrate, the playscripts were originally conceived not as literary works but as theatrical resources, purchased and owned and modified by the acting companies that regarded them as items in their stock-in-trade—the raw material that, along with the costumes and cauldrons and gunpowder and other goods, the players used to put on their shows. Accordingly, it is not surprising that most plays were never published and that when they were published they were more likely to be identified as the property of the companies that owned and staged them than as the work of the writers who had originally produced the scripts.15 Even in the case of a playwright as successful as Shakespeare, it was not until relatively late in his career that his name was sufficiently valued as a selling point to appear on the title pages of his published plays. The first two editions of Romeo and Juliet, for instance, were published in 1597 and 1599 without authorial attribution.16 Buyers purchased copies of printed plays, just as they went to the playhouses—to see the work of popular companies of players or to see a play that dealt with a topic that interested them, not to see the work of a particular writer. A good example is Arden of Faversham

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(1592), the play that probably initiated the new dramatic genre of domestic tragedy. Although the play was popular enough to be printed in three separate quarto editions, the identity of its writer or writers is still unknown. What attracted playgoers and readers was the notorious story it told. The title page identified that story as “The lamentable and true tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham in Kent who was most wickedly murdered, by the means of his disloyal and wanton wife, who, for the love she bare to one Mosbie, hired two desperate ruffians, Blackwill and Shakebag, to kill him.” The actual names of Alice Arden’s lover and the two ruffians are carefully specified, but the name of the playwright does not appear.17 Here, as in the many other cases when the name of the writer (or writers) was not regarded as a commercial asset, it would not have been advertised by the players or printers who marketed the plays. In such a market, the gender of the writer who composed the script could easily have remained as unknown and unrecorded as his—or her—name. In considering the likelihood that women had a part in writing commercial plays, it is also important to remember that the scripts were typically the results of authorial collaboration rather than the work of individual writers working in isolation.18 This is a mode of writing in which women were especially likely to be involved. Sixteenth-century English households were not simply domiciles: they were also places of production in which every resident—husband, wife, hired men and women, and children—would have a part. As K. D. M. Snell points out, this was a period in which “women were massively involved in familial artisan production.”19 The household of a playwright is likely to have been organized on similar principles. The household of a baker produced bread; the household of a glover produced gloves. Plays, like other manufactured goods sold as the property of a householder, could just as easily have been the product of his wife’s or daughter’s work as well as—or perhaps even instead of—his own. We already know that the theatrical business, like the others I have named, was often a family affair. Agnes Henslowe, the wife of Philip, who owned the Rose Theatre, was involved in his pawnbroking business and lent money to actors. Susan Baskerville inherited her share in the Red Bull company from her son, the player William Browne, and her share in Queen Anne’s company from her husband, Thomas Greene, who was also a player. Another actor, Robert Browne, wrote to Philip Henslowe to request that the wife of still another player be given the position of gatherer at the first Fortune.20 These are only a few of the many examples that have been brought to light in recent years as the result of the work of such scholars as Natasha Korda, Susan Cerasano, and Marion Wynne-Davies,

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and the publication by E. A. J. Honigmann and Susan Brock of the wills left by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the London theater.21 As Brock and Honigmann explain, women were “strongly represented” in those wills both as testators and as executors; and, given the many offstage roles that women performed in the companies, “we can be confident that a female point of view would make itself heard within the profession, as it does from the audience in, for example, The Knight of the Burning Pestle.”22 In that play, Nell, a grocer’s wife, repeatedly interrupts and disrupts the players’ intended performance of a play called “The London Merchant” with demands that they perform instead a chivalric romance featuring the exploits of her apprentice, Rafe. No one has written more perceptively about the households of English Renaissance playwrights or the economics, sociology, and erotics of the collaborative work they performed than Jeffrey Masten, both in his pathbreaking 1997 book, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama, and in subsequent essays. Masten situates the practice of collaborative authorship in the context of “domestic relations” between “men living, working, and sleeping together” and sometimes even buried in a single grave. His descriptions of these domestic relations offer a suggestive model for imagining similar household collaborations between men and women. To be sure, Masten himself dismisses that possibility. He acknowledges that women did write “sometimes prolifically, in other genres,” and that a few women, such as Elizabeth Cary and Mary Wroth, are known to have written plays; but he argues that “the malemale languages and practices associated with collaboration in and around the theaters,” along with the masculine rhetoric of authorship, which emphasized terms like “father” and “begetter,” produced a genre that excluded writing by women.23 Masten also argues that when Margaret Cavendish published her plays in the second half of the seventeenth century, she resorted to “the sexualized language of male-male collaboration” to describe her husband’s contributions to her work. The prefatory material in the 1647 collected edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays had already appropriated “female generative power for male purposes” in John Berkenhead’s declaration that the collaborative work of Beaumont and Fletcher was “Got by Two Fathers, without Female aide.”24 As a result, Masten argues, Cavendish’s claim in her own first folio, published in 1662, that her and her husband’s “Wits join as in Matrimony, my Lords the Masculine, mine the Feminine Wit, which is no small glory to me, that we are Married, Souls, Bodies, and Brains, which is a treble marriage, united in one Love . . .” demonstrates “the emergence of male-female collaboration out of

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the prior discourse of homoerotic friendship that informs the Beaumont and Fletcher volume.”25 Although the issue of priority might be debated, Masten’s analysis of the ways the Renaissance rhetoric of authorship excluded women is subtle and convincing. The mere act of taking pen in hand was often verbally coded as masculine: puns on “pen” and “penis,” comparisons of pens to weapons, repeated declarations that women’s hands were better suited to needles, all helped to erect a gendered boundary between women and writing. Nonetheless, many women crossed that boundary, and there are several reasons for believing that the assumptions embedded in such language would not have entirely prevented women from writing for the sixteenth-century companies of English players. In the first place—and this is a point that Masten clearly recognizes—the concept of authorship did not necessarily apply to the writers of scripts for performance during the early years of the English commercial stage. Moreover, even during the years when playwriting did come to be conceived as a kind of authorship, this masculinist rhetoric and the assumptions it expressed were much more likely to have militated against the acknowledgment of a woman’s authorship than to have prevented her from working as a playwright. In such a case, her work would have been published anonymously or identified as that of a male collaborator. In other words, the ideological constraints that Masten describes make it more, rather than less, likely that some of the many plays whose authorship is anonymous were actually written by women and also that women collaborated in writing plays whose authorship was attributed only to men. There would have been numerous reasons, ranging from social propriety to commercial marketability, for concealing the fact that a woman had a hand in writing a play. As the well-known examples of the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and George Sand remind us, women continued to publish their work under the names of men as late as the nineteenth century. Moreover, even if a woman did not decide to conceal her authorship, it may have been concealed by those who appropriated, transcribed, or printed her work. A relatively recent example is D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, which included unacknowledged transcriptions, nearly verbatim, of written recollections produced at his request by Jessie Chambers, the prototype of the character he called Miriam.26 Closer to Shakespeare’s time is the example of the unfinished History of . . . King Edward II, now generally attributed to Elizabeth Cary, which was published in 1680 as the work of her husband—an attribution that was not challenged until 1935.27 Still earlier—and more striking—is the case of Christine de Pizan

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(1450–1526), a woman who openly proclaimed her status as author. Of the twenty-four extant manuscript copies of Christine’s fais d’armes et de chevalerie, for instance, fifteen present the text as if a man had written it, omitting or rewriting in masculine terms all the sections in which Christine names herself.28 In fact, as Jennifer Summit points out, although Christine was the most widely read woman writer in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England, the numerous English translations of her work that were produced “almost universally reassign[ed] authorship of her works to men.”29 Perhaps the most important evidence to consider in evaluating the likelihood that women wrote for the early modern English commercial stage is the fact that those plays were not, in the first instance, written for self-expression or personal recognition. They were written, just as they were performed and printed, for profit. The conceptual limitation of the playwright to a figure who could be imagined as the father of a family and the begetter of children would certainly have been discouraging to women, but with money to be made and a marketable skill, it is much less likely to have prevented women from writing plays that were performed and produced either without authorial attribution or as the work of a male partner and collaborator. Virginia Woolf argued that there was no way a woman in Shakespeare’s time who wanted to write plays could have acquired training in her desired craft. There is no doubt that the lack of opportunities to perform with the London professional companies would have constituted a formidable obstacle. But Woolf did not know about the many ways in which women were associated with the companies, both financially and physically: what, for instance, might she have made of the presence of women gatherers who collected entrance fees to the theaters? What about the women who were the wives and daughters of practicing playwrights? In many cases, and perhaps with their husbands’ and fathers’ encouragement, these women would have had numerous opportunities to observe the tricks of the trade that supported or helped to support their own households. And of course, even women who were not members of a playwriting household might have learned how to write for the players simply by attending their performances. As mentioned, in early modern London, women constituted a sizable proportion of the audiences in the playhouses. Antitheatrical polemics emphasized the presence of prostitutes, but contemporary records of playgoing actually contain far more references to citizens’ wives and ladies than to whores.30 The “Prologue” to Ben Jonson’s Epicoene (1609–10) declared the players’ intention to provide a dramatic feast fit for a wide variety of female playgoers, ranging from “ladies” to “waiting wench[es]” and from respectable

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citizens to what he called “daughters of Whitefriars,” a district notorious for crime and vice. In 1604 the French ambassador reported that Queen Anna liked to attend plays in which the comedians of the city brought her husband on the stage for the purpose of ridicule.31 As these examples indicate, the women who attended the playhouses were drawn from every rank of the social hierarchy, ranging from royalty to common criminals. Perhaps the greatest number, however, were the women of the city’s middling class. Some of those sophisticated London women might easily have developed from savvy consumers to equally savvy writers of play-scripts—perhaps especially skillful at producing material that would appeal to other women. I have not come up with a specific reference to any woman or women who wrote for the first English commercial companies, either under a veil of anonymity or disguised with the name of a male collaborator. One place to look for such women would be in the families of named actors and playwrights. It is tempting to speculate, for instance, that Thomas Heywood, who declared that he had “either an entire hand or at the least a main finger” in the writing of 220 plays,32 many of which featured female characters sympathetically portrayed, may have been assisted on occasion by the hand or at least the finger of his wife. One of those occasions may have been the writing of Swetnam the Woman-hater Arraigned by Women. The play’s authorship is unknown: it was published anonymously, but it is listed by the Brown University Women Writer’s Project. Of course, the fact that a text expresses a pro-feminine point of view does not mean that it is necessarily the product of a woman’s writing,33 but we do know that women did write some of the texts in the seventeenth-century “woman debate” to which Swetnam clearly belongs. In the case of Swetnam the Woman-hater Arraigned by Women, there is some evidence that points to Heywood’s involvement (and, through him, perhaps to that of a woman in his household). The play was probably first performed in 1618 or 1619 by Queen Anne’s players at the Red Bull, a theater with which Heywood was associated at that time. In addition, as the play’s editor, Coryl Crandall, notes, “the condition of the quarto and the projected condition of the ms. from which it was set” are consistent with “Heywood’s reputation as a fast and competent . . . writer.”34 Finally, as Louis B. Wright observed, the defense of women the play contained “is precisely the sort of thing [Heywood] might have written.”35 This is an elaborate chain of speculation. I have no evidence that Heywood’s wife—or even Heywood himself—had a hand in the writing of this play. Moreover, I have been unable to discover anything at all about Heywood’s wife. Earlier scholars believed that she may have been Anne Buttler, who married

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a man named Thomas Heywood in 1603, but nothing else was known about Anne. However, even her name may be a dead end: the entry for Thomas Heywood in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography declares unequivocally that the Thomas Heywood Anne Buttler married was not the playwright.36 It is entirely possible that neither the names of the women who took part in the writing of Heywood’s (or any other) commercial plays nor references to their existence may ever be found. Even without this evidence, however, I remain convinced that some women must have had a hand in the writing of scripts for the first English public theaters. Up to now, three powerful obstacles made that possibility unthinkable. The first is the long-standing assumption that no women were involved in theatrical production, but that assumption has now been fully discredited. The second obstacle is the undeniable fact that powerful cultural pressures militated against women claiming the status of authors. But since writing for the commercial stage was not initially regarded as authorship and was so often done anonymously, women could have written for that stage or assisted men in that writing without claiming authorship or even regarding themselves as authors. The third obstacle is still in place. We still do not have any direct evidence of Renaissance Englishwomen writing for the public stage. Perhaps it is now time to look harder to find it. It is certainly time to discard the assumption that no such women existed.

NOTES 1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 2nd ed. (1929; New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1957), 49–51. 2. As Margaret W. Ferguson observes, “Modern feminist scholarship has unearthed many sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century women [writers] Woolf did not know of.” See Ferguson’s “Renaissance Concepts of the ‘Woman Writer,’ ” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 162–63. 3. Vivien Brodsky Elliott, “Single Women in the London Marriage Market: Age, Status and Mobility, 1598–1619,” in Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. R. B. Outhwaite, Social History of Human Experience (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 89, 97. 4. Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, eds., Women Players in England, 1500– 1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). 5. Susan Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds., Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (London: Routledge, 1996); and Susan Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds., Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance, 1594–1998 (London: Routledge, 1998). 6. In addition to the work cited in notes 4 and 5, see especially Natasha Korda, “Household Property / Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker,” Theatre Journal 48,

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no. 2 (May 1996): 185–95; Korda, “Labours Lost: Women’s Work and Early Modern Theatrical Commerce,” in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, Redefining British Theatre History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 195–230; and Ann Thompson, “Women/‘women’ and the Stage,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 100–116. 7. Nancy Cotton, “Women Playwrights in England: Renaissance Noblewomen,” in Cerasano and Wynne-Davies, Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama, 32. 8. Ibid., 33. 9. Susan Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, introduction to Cerasano and Wynne-Davies, in Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama, 11. 10. Brown and Parolin, Women Players in England, 13–14. 11. James P. Saeger and Christopher J. Fassler, “The London Professional Theater, 1576–1642: A Catalogue and Analysis of Extant Printed Plays,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 24 (1995): 63–109. 12. Marcy L. North, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in TudorStuart England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 3. 13. Ibid., 45. See also John W. Velz, “From Authorization to Authorship, Orality to Literature: The Case of Medieval and Renaissance Drama,” Text 6 (1994): 197–211. 14. Velz, “From Authorization to Authorship,” 202–3. 15. Scott McMillin, “Professional Playwrighting,” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 228. 16. Ibid., 236. 17. For Holinshed’s account of the murder, see Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (reprint, London: J. Johnson, 1808), 3:1024–31. For a more reliable modern account, see Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 15–84. 18. McMillin argues that although Shakespeare, as a sharer in the company for whom he wrote all his plays after 1594, “probably wrote his own plays more often than most writers did, and collaborated less. . . . there is no reason to think that [he] turned his back on occasional opportunities,” and he may have “engaged in more teamwork than we are aware of” (McMillin, “Professional Playwriting,” 235). 19. Keith D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1600–1900, Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 277. 20. Cerasano and Wynne-Davies, ed., Renaissance Drama by Women, 159, 173–75. 21. E. A. J. Honigmann and Susan Brock, eds., Playhouse Wills, 1558–1642: An Edition of Wills by Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in the London Theatre, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). For the work of Korda, Cerasano and WynneDavies, see notes 5 and 6 above. 22. Ibid., 4. 23. Jeffrey Masten, “Playwrighting: Authorship and Collaboration,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 370; and Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 8. 24. Masten, Textual Intercourse, 137. Lena Cowen Orlin has suggested that Berkenhead’s witticism might indicate that “female aid” in the writing of plays was so generally assumed that it required denial in this case. 25. Margaret Cavendish, “To the Readers,” in Playes Written by the . . . Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London, 1662), Wing N868, sig. A6. Masten, Textual Intercourse, 158.

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26. It is instructive to read Harry T. Moore’s account of Jessie Chambers’s contributions, which he examines in detail in “Appendix B: The Genesis of Sons and Lovers as revealed in the Miriam Papers,” in his D. H. Lawrence: His Life and Works, rev. ed. (New York: Twayne, 1964), 285–305. While acknowledging the extent of Chambers’s contributions, Moore repeatedly denigrates their literary quality in order to insist that the “value” of “her material” was only “ancillary” and that “Lawrence’s gift was the primary one” (294). For a better analysis of Lawrence’s use of Chambers’s and other women’s writings in both Sons and Lovers and other works, see Hilary Croxford Simpson, “A Literary Trespasser: D. H. Lawrence’s Use of Women’s Writing,” Women’s Studies International Quarterly 2 (1979): 155–69. 27. Donald Stauffer, “A Deep and Sad Passion,” in Essays in Dramatic Literature: The Parrott Presentation Volume, ed. Hardin Craig (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1935), 289–314. For convincing arguments in favor of Elizabeth Cary’s authorship, see Gwynne Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 112–14; and Tina Krontiris, “Style and Gender in Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II,” in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 137–53. 28. Frances Teague, “Christine de Pizan’s Book of War,” in The Reception of Christine de Pizan from the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Centuries: Visitors to the City, ed. Glenda K. McLeod (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 32. 29. Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 62–63. 30. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 62. 31. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 1:325. 32. “Letter to the Reader,” prefixed to The English Traveller, in Thomas Heywood: Three Marriage Plays, ed. Paul Merchant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 108. 33. Valerie Wayne, “The Dearth of the Author: Anonymity’s Allies and Swetnam the Woman-hater,” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Anderson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 221–40. See also North, Anonymous Renaissance, chap. 7. 34. Coryl Crandall, ed. Swetnam the Woman-hater: The Controversy and the Play: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Notes, (Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Studies, 1969), 28–30. 35. Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), 490n. 36. David Kathman, “Heywood, Thomas,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 13190.

Thomas Heywood, Script-Doctor Grace Ioppolo

THOMAS HEYWOOD (C. 1574–1641), WHO CLAIMED TO HAVE HAD “EITHER an entire hand, or at least a maine finger” in 220 plays, was one of the most prolific and influential dramatists of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and early Caroline theater. Heywood was also recognized in his own time as a master essayist, producing numerous prose tracts, treatises, pamphlets, and broadsides, and in them, to use his own terms, he “dissected” and “anatomised” the religious and political dilemmas of contemporary monarchs and their courts. As principal writer of pageants for the Lord Mayor’s Day from 1631 to 1639, Heywood was in a unique position to celebrate civic governance and local policy. He also produced and circulated translations of ancient Greek and Latin texts, as well as writing his own poetry, and, uniquely, editing the plays and poems of his collaborators and contemporaries, often describing in detail in prefaces and epistles how these texts were transmitted from author to audience.1 From at least as early as 1596, Heywood began writing plays for the Lord Admiral’s Men, one of the two most prominent acting companies of the period, and by 1598 the writer Francis Meres could praise Heywood’s plays as among “the best for Comedy.”2 Heywood also worked from the 1590s to the 1630s as an actor and dramatist for the Earl of Derby’s Men, the Earl of Worcester’s (later Queen Anne’s) Men, the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, Queen Henrietta’s Men, and the King’s Men. His plays were performed at the Rose, Curtain, Red Bull, and Phoenix playhouses, among others, as well as at court. Heywood collaborated or worked with the major dramatists, actors, company managers, and theater owners of the period, including Edward Alleyn, William Shakespeare, Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, John Webster, William Rowley, Christopher Beeston, Richard Brome, and Philip Henslowe. As a sharer and company manager at least for Worcester’s and the Queen’s Men, Heywood not only responded to current artistic and economic practices but helped to establish them. 47

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As Dieter Mehl has argued, Heywood demonstrated both “dramatic expertise and versatility” as a dramatist.3 No other early modern dramatist moved so seamlessly, consistently, and successfully between acting companies and playhouses, and in many ways, Heywood is the true representative of the multitalented man of the theater. In addition to numerous printed texts wholly or partly attributed to him, two of his play manuscripts, The Captives and The Escapes of Jupiter, and a portion of another, Sir Thomas More, which survive in his own handwriting are testimony to his methods of composing and revising plays. To borrow from the hierarchical list of dramatists’ ranks as outlined by Jonson in Volpone (1606), Heywood served at various times in his career either as “Co-adiutor/Nouice, Iorney-man or Tutor.”4 He must have learned to integrate his own composition methods and practices into those of others while learning to adapt their methods and practices, especially as he frequently revised, or to use a modern word, “doctored,” the play-scripts of many of the most prominent dramatists of the period, most likely with their assistance. In essence, then, Heywood was the ultimate collaborator. On occasion, Heywood even concerned himself with the costuming of his characters, as he sought reimbursement from Philip Henslowe on February 5, 1602/3, for paying a tailor the grand sum of £6 13s. for “A womones gowne of black velluett” (i.e., velvet) that was to be used in A Woman Killed with Kindness, to be acted by Worcester’s Men.5 However Henslowe does not record Heywood’s reaction at paying a costumer £1 13s. more for one gown than a dramatist usually received for writing an entire play. Such authorial and authoritative concern with even minor facets of production, such as commissioning, and perhaps designing, the perfect costume for his heroine, is evident in Heywood’s masterly treatise An Apology for Actors (1612). This text provides one of the most illuminating and comprehensive examinations of the social, political, and cultural effects of early modern acting and playwriting. In it, Heywood defends the careers and reputations of men of the theater, no matter the rank of their roles or duties, but particularly enshrines dramatists as true poets, for which Webster, for one, pledges his eternal thanks in a dedicatory poem. However, Webster’s gratitude to Heywood is tinged with sarcasm and bitterness toward those who, unlike Heywood, have failed to accord writers the respect and prestige, if not the renown, they deserve. Heywood’s Apology demonstrates the skills of diplomacy and mediation that either encouraged or developed from the kind of collaborative work he did so successfully. Contemporary comments by Heywood’s collaborators and colleagues throughout his career attest

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to the affection in which his peers as well as his employers held him. This is especially true in the tributes paid to him as a true comrade (on and off the stage) in An Apology for Actors by actors and entrepreneurs such as Christopher Beeston, Richard Perkins, Robert Tallant, and John Taylor. Such camaraderie and loyalty were obviously mutual, given the two-year contract between Henslowe and Heywood from 1598 in which Heywood agreed, as Henslowe stated, “not to playe any wher publicke a bowt london not while the ij yeares be exspired but in my howsse.”6 Heywood’s dedication and fidelity to Henslowe in this period included not only acting but the composition of numerous plays, either alone or in collaboration with other dramatists with whom Henslowe was already working. But Henslowe may not have been Heywood’s first appreciative theatrical employer and patron, for Heywood implies in his 1625 Funeral Elegy for James I that he had “once” been a member of the Earl of Southampton’s Men, a company for which we have no contemporary records. This relationship between Heywood and Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, appears to have been genuinely affectionate, judging from Heywood’s long digression from praising James and which includes this tribute: Henry, Southamptons Earle, a Souldier proued; Dreaded in warre, and in milde peace beloued. Oh giue me leaue a little to resound His memory, as most in dutie bound, Because his seruant once.

In fact, Heywood claims that Southampton was such, in all things striuing To gain a Name, by Arts, and Armes suruiuing Beyond all Marble.7

Southampton’s support of the arts, and specifically as patron to an acting company, may have begun in the mid or late 1590s, and certainly before February 1601 when his implication in the rebellion of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, against Queen Elizabeth I landed him in prison, where he remained until James’s accession to the throne in 1603.8 If Heywood began his career with Southampton’s Men, he may have worked as an actor or dramatist with the company on October 14, 1596, when he sold a play to the Lord Admiral’s Men, and prior to March 25, 1598, when he signed his exclusive acting contract with Henslowe.

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From the Lord Admiral’s, Heywood moved to Derby’s Men and then back to the Lord Admiral’s and on to Worcester’s and several others, most likely bringing with him the entrepreneurial and artistic skills he had acquired and developed along the way. Heywood’s apparently effortless moving from one company to another does not suggest that he was a hack, incapable of serving as a contracted or long-term playwright, for he was clearly moving to companies formed or re-formed by those with whom he had previously worked, including Edward Alleyn and Christopher Beeston. Heywood’s progression through so many companies marks him as typical of dramatists in the Jacobean age, by which time the theatrical industry had become nearly standardized in its financial practices, especially as acting companies consolidated and reconsolidated on a frequent basis, resulting in a highly networked set of personnel. This network was more supportive than it was competitive. In sum, the theatrical industry was small enough and confined by such tight geographical boundaries in London that most members of it knew each other personally and professionally, with complex or overlapping working and living spaces and histories. Heywood’s praise of Southampton, contained in a long elegy full of generous praise for James I, seems sincere and evinces once again his willingness to marginalize his own achievements, as much as is possible in the literary form of the elegy, in order to lavish praise on those who have supported him. But Heywood may not have been as modest about his own accomplishments as dramatist, poet, translator, historian, and biographer as he suggests here and in the epistles and prefaces to so many of his works. That Heywood repeatedly claimed from the first decade of the 1600s that he did not care if his works went into print does not mean that, in fact, he did not care. That he made the same claim so often through the years suggests that he was dedicated to claiming authority as an author. Thus, for a dramatist apparently so unconcerned with his own fame in print, Heywood spent a lot of time explaining exactly how he got into print. He may not have adopted Webster’s bitter tone, but he certainly used a firm hand in repeatedly collaborating with, and apparently overseeing, the printers who produced his literary and theatrical works. Contrary to Arthur Clark’s pronouncement that Heywood was “modest” because he had “few delusions about his own plays,”9 Heywood did not see himself as a second-rate dramatist but as an integral part of a successful and circular collaboration among dramatists, actors, and entrepreneurs. The first of Heywood’s claims in a play to abhor print apparently comes in 1608, approximately twelve years into his career of drama-

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tist, but he professes to stake his claim in his own work only in order to rebuke those who are poor collaborators in the process of putting a play into production.10 At this time, Heywood solemnly notes in The Rape of Lucrece: “It hath beene no custome in mee of all other men (curteous Readers) to commit my plaies to the presse, the reason, though some may attribute to my own insufficiencie, I had rather subscribe in that to their seueare censure then by seeming to auoide the imputation of weakenes, to incurre a greater suspition of honestie.”11 Heywood claims here, probably with some truth, that others censoriously believe that his failure to shepherd his plays into print is due to the “insufficiency” of his talent and achievement. But at the risk of being honest, he rejects any imputation of weakness on his part. This uncharacteristic defense of himself and the attack on some malicious colleagues springs not from Heywood’s arrogance but from a very painful economic betrayal of himself, especially as a company sharer and/or manager, and his theatrical colleagues. Heywood explains: “[T]hough some haue vsed a double sale of their labours, first to the Stage, and after to the presse, For my owne part I heere proclaime my selfe euer faithfull in the first, and neuer guiltie of the last.”12 This reproach of those dishonest dramatists, in an age without copyright, who have doubly sold their labors, first to acting companies, which then owned the texts in whole, and then to printers, without the acting companies’ permission, establishes Heywood’s reputation both as an honest merchant in selling his products and a loyal colleague of actors and theater personnel. As Heywood knew, all theater personnel depended on each other for the commercial and artistic success of the plays in their repertory. Heywood’s anger at his loss of authority and reputation, as well as the acting companies’ loss of income when they find their unique plays in print without remuneration, is not aimed solely at fellow dramatists but at any who help to create or experience the theatrical process and then try to take it home with them through dictation: “[S]ome of my plaies haue (vnknown to me, and without any of my direction) accidentally come into the Printers handes, and therfore so corrupt and mangled, (coppied onely by the eare) that I haue beene as vnable to know them, as ashamde to challenge them.”13 For this reason, his paternal interest in The Rape of Lucrece forces him to “furnish” it in its “natiue habit,” and allows him to rail that his previously printed plays “haue beene so wronged in beeing publisht in such sauadge and ragged ornaments.”14 However, Heywood’s apparently reluctant admonition in The Rape of Lucrece in 1608 to those dramatists who betray acting companies’ authority and jeopardize their economic and artistic control and integrity did not appear to

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have much effect, judging from his epistle three years later in The Golden Age. He once again warns his courteous readers that the play came “accidentally to the Presse” and then notes that he was “loath (finding it mine owne) to see it thrust naked into the world, to abide the fury of all weathers, without either Title for acknowledgement, or the formality of an Epistle for ornament.”15 In the following year, 1612, Heywood appears to admit that the “weaknesses” of which his more malicious colleagues have accused him earlier in his career have indeed kept him from publishing his own plays. In the epistle to An Apology for Actors, he pleads: “My pen hath seldome appeared in Presse till now, I haue beene euer too iealous of mine owne weaknesse, willingly to thrust into the Presse: nor had I at this time, but that a kinde of necessity enioyned me to so sudden a businesse.”16 The only immediate necessity in An Apology is apparently to defend the theatrical profession against abuse. This time the abuse comes not from those inside but outside: Puritan fundamentalist writers. Two decades later, in 1631, Heywood once again pleads: “Cvrteous Reader, my Plaies have not beene exposed to the publike view of the world in numerous sheets, and a large volume; but singly (as thou seest), with great modesty, and small noise.”17 In professing such reluctance and making such “small noise,” in defending his authorial processes and products, Heywood appears to stress their theatrical value above their literary value. Heywood was extraordinarily proud of the success his plays had enjoyed on the stage among audiences over four decades. Thus, he could expound in 1632 on the ways in which his works had united both audiences and acting companies. In discussing the first part of The Iron Age, he reminisces about the astounding success of this play and The Golden Age, The Silver Age, and The Brazen Age (written between 1611 and 1632) by noting that “these were the Playes often (and not with the least applause,) Publickely Acted by two Companies, vppon one Stage at once, and haue at sundry times thronged three seuerall Theaters, with numerous and mighty Auditories.” However, he appears to link the elegance of his dramas on the stage with their appeal on the page, so that “the grace they had then in the Actings, take not away the expected luster, hoped for in the Reading.”18 This widespread migration of his plays across London’s theatrical district and acting companies, consolidating them for a time, marks Heywood as remarkable in his depth and breadth of involvement in the theatrical industry, whether it be writing or acting in a play, managing companies, or even buying costumes for his female protagonists. Heywood’s uniqueness of experience in moving so successfully among acting companies and playhouses, coupled with his inherent

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abilities to act as negotiator and mediator among reputable and “honest” dramatists, may explain why he came to work as a reviser and, in modern terms, a “script-doctor” on so many other dramatists’ play-texts. In 1633, after so many attempts to define and establish his career and reputation as a dramatist, while in the process of defending the careers and reputations of his more silent, or bitter, colleagues and collaborators, Heywood finally takes credit for all the works known as his and for the works unknown as his. In the process of explaining his lack of concern for his legacy as a printed author of The English Traveller, he declares the range of his theatrical achievements by stating that the play is “one reserued amongst two hundred and twenty, in which I haue had either an entire hand, or at the least a maine finger.”19 Once again, this admission comes in the process of explaining that the play came “accidentally to the Presse,” and once again the play needs to be acknowledged as a legitimate child: “I hauing Intelligence thereof, thought it not fit that it should passe as filius populi, a Bastard without a Father to acknowledge it.” After nearly forty years as dramatist, actor, and entrepreneur, Heywood seems to need to sum up, and put into perspective, his enduring and illustrious career: “True it is, that my Playes are not exposed vnto the world in Volumes, to beare the title of Workes, (as others) one reason is, That many of them by shifting and change of Companies, haue beene negligently lost, Others of them are still retained in the hands of some Actors, who thinke it against their peculiar profit to haue them come in Print, and a third, That it neuer was any great ambition in me, to bee in this kind Volumniously read.”20 After stressing that his plays have not come out in “volumes,” and hence, as a pun, are not “Volumniously” read, Heywood seems to be crying out here for a folio edition of his collected works to match those of his former colleagues Jonson and Shakespeare, who apparently did have the “great ambition” to be read in one large edition. Fourteen years later, the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, two more of his former colleagues, would also be released in a folio volume, with Heywood’s collected works still languishing unpublished. As much as Heywood seems to deride Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s enshrinement in folio editions, he certainly seems to need the public authorization and recognition that a collected edition endows. This typically Heywoodian explanation that his plays moved among shifting and changing companies, comprising actors who feared that print would destroy their monopoly on the text (as Heywood himself argued in The Rape of Lucrece) offers some insight into the last years of the pre-Restoration theater industry. But more important is the way in which Heywood, nearing the end of his career, understands

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that he is one of the few remaining veterans, and historians, of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and early Caroline theater. His long experience as dramatist, actor, advisor, and, simply, observer in the production of a play from composition by the author to submission to the censor to rehearsal and performance by the actors and finally to reception by the audience gives him a senior status in the 1630s that no other theatrical figure can match. Ironically, it is his role as witness to others that now gathers critical interest. Although his canon of singly or collaboratively written plays includes over twenty printed with his name on the title page, three surviving in manuscript, at least eleven lost, and several others that may be attributable to him in some form,21 Heywood is sometimes more famous among modern textual scholars for script-doctoring his colleagues’ plays than for writing his own. Heywood was not embarrassed to admit that he worked as a reviser of others’ plays. In 1633, he specified the kind of script-doctoring that he did, at least to The Jew of Malta. Once again, he has no desire to take credit either for Marlowe’s achievement on the page or Edward Alleyn’s on the stage: “This Play, composed by so worthy an Authour as Mr. Marlo; and the part of the Jew presented by so vnimitable an Actor as Mr. Allin, being in this later Age commended to the Stage: As I vsher’d it unto the Court, and presented it to the Cock-pit, with these Prologues and Epilogues here inserted, so now being newly brought to the Presse, I was loath it should be published without the ornament of an Epistle.”22 Heywood shows here a shrewd understanding of the ways in which print permanently enshrines reputations and accomplishments, and he is “loath” to assume credit for anything in The Jew of Malta except the new prologues and epilogues. However, his admission to “ushering” the play into performances at court and at the Cockpit Theatre implies that he has attempted to reshape an Elizabethan play for a Caroline audience. In essence, Heywood wants his courteous readers to acknowledge that he is not a rehandler but a reinventor of other men’s works, and, especially, that these works are part of a rich legacy passed down through two generations. Marlowe, who died in 1593, and Alleyn, who died in 1626, are those “tutors,” to use Jonson’s term in Volpone, who passed on their skills to the “novice” Heywood in the 1590s. Forty years later, he passes on his skills to younger colleagues as senior tutor. Revising plays for later performances was a routine business and artistic endeavor in all three periods in which Heywood worked. As Henslowe’s Diary makes clear, he usually contracted the author(s) of the original text of a play when it came time to revise or alter it, and the most cost-effective way to revise was with the addition of new pro-

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logues or epilogues that could easily be detached, updated, or replaced in the future. It was only when the original authors had died or moved to another company (or had cheated Henslowe with the “double sale of their labours,” to use Heywood’s term) that Henslowe had dramatists revise others’ plays. In addition, Henslowe’s records establish that from the mid-1590s Heywood had a very busy career almost simultaneously as covenanted actor (1598–1600) and as dramatist. Between 1598 and 1602, Heywood was contracted to write or cowrite War without Blows and Love without Suit, The London Florentine, Joan as Good as my Lady, A Woman Killed with Kindness, Shore’s Wife (possibly but not certainly later printed as Edward IV), Marshal Osric, Lady Jane (part 1), The Blind Eats Many a Fly, Christmas Comes but Once a Year, and possibly two other plays (listed without titles in the Diary). Only one of these plays, A Woman Killed with Kindness, survives in print under those titles. He also made additions to the play Cutting Dick.23 Henslowe’s Diary demonstrates that dramatic collaboration could be a shifting and not a permanent occupation. Although we now have come to assume, particularly from the canon of Beaumont and Fletcher, that collaborators worked together long-term and exclusively, Henslowe’s records more frequently show collaborators working in short-term and more fluid alliances, at least from the late 1590s to the early 1600s. Collaborators on any given play could change during the writing of a play and could work together at a dizzying pace. Chettle, Dekker, Heywood, Webster, and Wentworth Smith were contracted to write the first part of Lady Jane on October 15, 1602, and received payment in full (most likely for submitting the finished playtext to Henslowe) less than one week later on October 21.24 Even if each dramatist wrote one act, the five men produced a play four times faster than usual, although it is possible that they began work on the play at an earlier point or had taken over an old text. Although dramatists apparently set their own time limits for the completion of a play, the average time in the Diary from the contraction of a play to its completion is four to five weeks, as was the case with the composition of Christmas Comes but Once a Year. By November 2, Heywood and Webster are contracted to write it, yet the interim payment for the play on November 23 is to Chettle and Dekker, with Heywood and Chettle receiving final payment on November 26.25 Whether Dekker was already a collaborator from November 2 or joined the team on the twenty-third (and dropped out before the twenty-sixth) is not clear, but this pattern of collaborators moving in and out of a play’s composition is not unusual in the Diary. Henslowe was sufficiently confident that Christmas Comes but Once a Year would be finished quickly that he began to pay for its costumes on behalf of

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the company on November 9, one week after contracting it. Also typical is Heywood’s interim payment for writing The Blind Eats Many a Fly on November 24 (he finished it on January 7, 1602/3) before he had finished Christmas Comes but Once a Year,26 for collaborators as well as single writers are often contracted to write two or more plays simultaneously, as well as to provide additions or make alterations to other plays.27 In terms of Heywood’s own writing methods and strategies when writing alone, two of his autograph play manuscripts survive at the British Library: The Captives and The Escapes of Jupiter, both in Egerton Manuscript 1994. While The Captives is entirely foul papers, with some later minor additions by a company scribe or bookkeeper working closely with Heywood, The Escapes of Jupiter is a mix of foul and fair copies, as Heywood composed the play by revising portions of The Golden Age and The Silver Age while copying them out from their printed editions. Yet it is the portions of the manuscript, or “book” (i.e., promptbook, in modern terms) of Sir Thomas More, in which Heywood collaborated, which tell us the most about Heywood’s practices as script-doctor and collaborator. Chettle, Dekker, Shakespeare, and others, including a company scribe or bookkeeper, made revisions to the manuscript, originally written by Anthony Munday, in an effort to revive or revise, at some point, a play-text that had either not satisfied the censor or the acting company or both. While the circumstances of the composition and revision of the play are fraught with irresolvable problems,28 Heywood has been acknowledged as being a kind of “overseer” of the alteration and revision of the original text, “in charge of the general revision of Munday’s manuscript before [Hand] C took over as bookkeeper.”29 In other words, Heywood was the master of the script-doctors. This may have been due to any or all of the following reasons. First, by the date of the revisions, either the late 1590s or early 1600s, Heywood had already established himself as an apparently successful collaborator, so he would perhaps have had the best temperament or mediation skills, or leadership qualities, to work with the other revisers, and to placate Munday if he was consulted or involved in the revision. Second, Heywood appeared to have worked fast and efficiently, particularly in adjusting text for the insertion of new material. What is clear from his surviving manuscripts is that he did not see a need to revise or recopy foul papers (even in making small additions) but let them stand as composed. Third, for a more practical reason, Heywood’s notoriously bad handwriting may have been too difficult for another dramatist to read. An errata sheet at the end of the 1640 edition of Heywood’s The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Wor-

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thy Women in the World begged readers to excuse the compositor for any errors, for he had “received this Coppy in a difficult and unacquainted hand.”30 Heywood’s problems here were not due to his advanced age in 1640, for judging from his portions of Sir Thomas More (c. late 1590s / early 1600s) and the entire manuscripts of The Captives and The Escapes of Jupiter (c. 1610s) his hand was always a sloppy mix of secretary and italic letters with many unformed letters, with the result that many words are nearly illegible. His handwriting is the most difficult to decipher of all the hands in The Book of Sir Thomas More, as the play manuscript is entitled. He may simply have served as “overseer” of the revisions because he could read everyone else’s hands, but no one, except the company scribes with whom he must have worked closely, could read his own hand. Such a scribe may indeed have been employed on this manuscript. The revisions of Chettle, Dekker, and Shakespeare of Munday’s original text largely consist of additions written out on sheets separate from the main manuscript. Heywood also offers such separate additions but systematically integrates, interlinearly or marginally, large and small additions of the other revisers into Munday’s manuscript, such as adding the new character of the Clown and working his dialogue into the text. As Melchiori has pointed out, Heywood, as Hand B, “intervenes” in and corrects the text, with Heywood at one point offering two passages that were “last-minute additions.”31 Heywood particularly deals with passages marked for omission, either due to demands of Sir Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, or of the company, by replacing them with his own material. If Heywood was indeed serving as chief reviser, he may not simply have corrected and integrated the new passages but have been responsible for assigning them to one or more of the dramatists working as revisers. In Sir Thomas More, Heywood may have fulfilled the role that Dieter Mehl shrewdly and persuasively offers him between 1604 and 1606 in If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Parts I and II. That is, Heywood “was the sort of craftsman who could provide such theatrical fare at short notice, combining historical anecdote and textual snippets from historical accounts with some lively ideas of his own.”32 Heywood’s liveliness and versatility signal that he was highly skilled at a number of roles in early modern theater: writer, rewriter, actor, entrepreneur, advisor, and even audience. His texts in print and manuscript show him to be practical, as well as talented and accomplished. These qualities mark that part of his career in which he worked as script-doctor not as marginal or insignificant but as integral to the success of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama. Plays were

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produced and performed, from author to bookkeeper to censor to actor to audience, collaboratively, and Heywood was the master collaborator.

NOTES 1. For discussions of Heywood’s career, see Arthur Melville Clark, Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist (New York: Russell and Russell, 1931), and Kathleen McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 2. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Common Wealth (London: Printed by P. Short for Cuthbert Burbie, 1598), 284. 3. Dieter Mehl, “The Late Queen on the Public Stage: Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Parts I and II,” in Queen Elizabeth I: Past and Present, ed. Christa Jansohn, Studien zur englischen Literatur 19 (Münster: LIT, 2004), 157. 4. Ben Jonson, Volpone or The Foxe (London: Printed [by George Eld] for Thomas Thorpe, 1607), sig. A4v. 5. Dulwich College MS 7:119v; R. A. Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 223. 6. Dulwich College MS 7:23r, 231r; Foakes, Henslowe’s Diary, 50, 241. 7. Thomas Heywood, A Funeral Elegie, Vpon the Much Lamented Death of the Trespuissant and Vnmatchable King, King Iames, King of Great Brittaine, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith (London: Thomas Harper, 1625), sigs. B4v, C1r. 8. Charles A. Rouse’s suggestion in “Was Heywood a Servant of the Earl of Southampton?” Publications of the Modern Language Association 45, no. 3 (1930): 790, that Heywood may have belonged to the Earl of Southampton’s Men between his departure from the Lord Admiral’s Men in 1600 and his joining the Earl of Worcester’s Men in 1602 can easily be dismissed, given that Southampton was imprisoned in the Tower from February 8, 1601, to April 10, 1603, for his part in Essex’s rebellion. A more likely period would have been early 1598 to early 1599, given that Essex’s unlawful return from Ireland in late 1599 cast such allies as Southampton in disgrace for several months. 9. Clark, Thomas Heywood, 208. 10. For an overview of authors’ circular collaboration in the production and performance of their plays, see Grace Ioppolo, Dramatists and Their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse (London: Routledge, 2006). 11. Thomas Heywood, The Rape of Lucrece: A True Roman Tragedie (London: Printed [by E. Allde] for I. B[usby], 1608), sig. A2r. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Thomas Heywood, The Golden Age (London: William Barrenger, 1611), sig. A2r. 16. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors: Containing Three Briefe Treatises (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612), sig. A4r. 17. Thomas Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West (London: Richard Royston, 1631), sig. A4r. 18. Thomas Heywood, The Iron Age (London, Nicholas Okes, 1632), sig. A4v.

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19. Thomas Heywood, The English Traueller (London: Robert Raworth, 1633), sig. A3r. 20. Ibid. 21. For an excellent discussion of modern methods of attribution, see Macdonald P. Jackson, “Late Webster and His Collaborators: How Many Playwrights Wrote A Cure for a Cuckold?” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 95 (2001): 295–313. 22. Thomas Heywood, The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Ievv of Malta (London: Printed by I[ohn] B[eale] for Nicholas Vavasour, 1633), sig. A3r. For further discussion by Heywood of detachable elements of literary works, see Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s, Selected Out of Lucian, Erasmus, Textor, Ovid, &c. (London: Printed by R. O[ulton] for R. H[earne], 1637). 23. For numerous entries on Heywood’s dealings with Henslowe, see Foakes, Henslowe’s Diary, 50ff. 24. Dulwich College MS 7:116r; Foakes, Henslowe’s Diary, 218. 25. Dulwich College MS 7:116v; Foakes, Henslowe’s Diary, 219. 26. Dulwich College MS 7:118v; Foakes, Henslowe’s Diary, 220–21. 27. Although Neil Carson argues in “Collaborative Playwriting: The Chettle, Dekker, Heywood Syndicate,” Theatre Research International 14, no. 1 (1989): 13–23 that allegiances in collaborators were often casual and did not cross company lines, numerous documents among the Henslowe-Alleyn archive at Dulwich College, London, including Manuscripts 1: Theatrical Papers, suggest otherwise. This archive is available in digital form as part of the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitization Project. (www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk) 28. For discussions of the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, see, for example, W. W. Greg, ed., The Book of Sir Thomas More, (1911; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Booke of Sir Thomas More Re-Examined,” Studies in Philology 69 (1972): 167–91; Giorgio Melchiori, “The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore: A Chronology of Revision,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 291–308; and T. H. Howard-Hill, ed. Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and Its Shakespearean Interest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For a dissenting, but not entirely convincing, view that Hand D should not be attributed to Shakespeare, see Carol A. Chillington, “Playwrights at Work: Henslowe’s, Not Shakespeare’s, Book of Sir Thomas More,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 439–79. 29. See Melchiori, “The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore,” esp. 304–5. 30. Thomas Heywood, The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women in the World (London: Thomas Cotes for Richard Royston, 1640), sig. FF4v. 31. Melchiori, “The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore,” esp. 295–97; also see W. W. Greg’s 1911 introduction (updated by Harold Jenkins in 1961) to Greg, Book of Sir Thomas More. 32. Mehl, “The Late Queen on the Public Stage,” 157.

II Beyond the Bounds of Medium: From Page to Stage to World Wide Web

Performance and the Play-Text R. A. Foakes

WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT PERFORMANCE criticism? Is it possible to establish any parameters? I was moved to ask these questions when reading two discussions of Hamlet in the same journal. One concerned the production of Hamlet by Michael Boyd at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 2004, which featured a notable performance by Greg Hicks, the actor who played three roles: the Ghost of old Hamlet, the First Player, and the Gravedigger. His appearance as the Ghost in particular struck many as sensational and drew particular attention for its novelty as the figure slowly entered through the audience: “[P]icture a withered, whitened figure, naked save for the tattered remains of cereclothes dangling kilt-like from its waist, dragging from its immobile claw-like right hand a huge broadsword which makes an echoing, scraping sound as it trails along the ground, a sharp and silvery counterpoint to the lowing oriental drum which punctuates each of its appearances.”1 This Ghost seemed deathlike, a “tormented, zombie-like remnant of a self,” but managed to speak to Hamlet in what sounded like a “recorded message” from a very remote world, before swinging the sword round as he cried “Revenge,” and making his exit by leaping into a grave that opened for him. In his enthusiasm Michael Dobson goes on to say, “This was an astounding piece of acting, and a real feat of dramatic imagination on Boyd’s part, the other-worldliness of the ghost brilliantly rendered as an irruption from some other theatrical genre altogether.”2 The same issue of Shakespeare Survey contained an essay by the present writer on the Ghost in Hamlet offering an explanation of the text’s insistence, in quarto and folio, on the Ghost being costumed in armor, or what looked like armor.3 The Ghost is seen by Barnardo as a “portentous” figure (1.1.113)4 in relation to imminent conflict between Norway and Denmark, and wears the “very armor” (1.1.64) old Hamlet wore when he did battle. In the following scene Horatio reports that the Ghost appeared “Armed at point exactly, cap-à-pie” (1.2.201), or head to foot, and Hamlet wants to make sure: 63

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Hamlet. Horatio, Marcellus, Barnardo. Hamlet. Horatio, Marcellus, Barnardo.

Armed, say you? Armed, my lord. From top to toe? My lord, from head to foot. (Hamlet, 1.2.227–30)

Then when Hamlet eventually confronts the Ghost, he addresses him as “dead corpse, again in complete steel” (1.4.52). The text of the first scenes of the play repeatedly insists that the Ghost is clad in full body armor and helmet. I sought to explain this insistence by arguing that the Ghost in effect combines the image of a father who was murdered a very short time ago with a representation of Hamlet’s father as an idealized warrior from ages long past, “as belonging to a different world from his own, not only in his heroic or godlike stature, but in also in religious terms.”5 Hamlet associates his father with ancient gods and heroes like Mars and Hercules, and the Ghost appears like a medieval warrior-king from a Catholic past. The apparition in armor corresponds both to the way Hamlet seems to imagine the past and to what he wishes he could be; but, as a Globe audience would have known, body armor such as the text indicates was obsolete except for ceremonial purposes or tilting by the end of the sixteenth century. Claudius operates by diplomacy, not by heroics, and the new age is Protestant, not Catholic. Superficially there might seem to be no connection between these two considerations of the Ghost, one reporting on a production from which many references in the text of the play to the Ghost in armor had to be excised, the other focusing on precisely those passages that had to be cut in presenting an almost naked figure. One may be thought of as representing performance criticism, the other as textbased criticism. The gap in this instance is perhaps inevitable, since audiences now do not have the belief in and fear of ghosts and spirits that was common in Shakespeare’s age, and a talking ghost may be hard to accept. The Ghost would probably have startled a Globe audience as innovatory, since he is unique among the many ghosts in the plays of the period in being costumed in armor. Once he begins to speak to Hamlet he turns into a father figure, lecturing his son at some length. In modern productions the Ghost may have something about him to suggest a military connection, a glint of a buckle or helmet, but is often cloaked, so that his materiality is emphasized, the Ghost as Hamlet’s father rather than some spirit from the supernatural world. It might seem that Shakespeare could expect his audience to accept with fear and wonder a Ghost that is at once of both the spiritual and material worlds.

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That is one possible conception of the Ghost. Michael Boyd’s production was startling in part because he chose to stress the “otherworldliness” of the Ghost in a performance that, as Dobson put it, was “fit to haunt the audience’s nightmares for years to come.”6 Beliefs and attitudes have changed so much since Hamlet was first staged around 1600 that in relation to the Ghost it may be no longer possible to achieve the effect the text calls for, and actors and directors have to solve the problem as best they can. Michael Boyd’s solution was, in its way, brilliant. In this play some aspects of the text arguably have to be disregarded or cut, since spectators might see a ghost in armor as clumsy and comic. However, evidence of the stage tradition stemming from Thomas Betterton in the seventeenth century through to David Garrick in the eighteenth and beyond shows that audiences were terrified not by the Ghost but by the actor playing Hamlet, who made them share his terror. In the late nineteenth century it seems that when Edwin Booth played Hamlet, “the weird and awful atmosphere of the ghost-scenes was preserved by the actor’s transfiguration into tremulous suspense and horror.”7 Boyd’s treatment of the Ghost ignored this tradition and the reasons for claiming, as Dieter Mehl does, that “in any reasonably successful production the question of the Ghost’s real nature hardly arises for the audience because it is Hamlet’s reaction that demands our full attention and the Ghost speaks so directly to him that we immediately believe in the reality of this decisive experience.”8 I remember the distinctive ghost in Boyd’s production, but have no recollection of Hamlet’s response to it. Should the Ghost be made more prominent than Hamlet in these scenes? Often in modern productions of Shakespeare’s plays changes of a different order are made, ones that are not made in order to solve a problem, but for novelty and in order to be different. Plays may be staged in costumes from any period, and in any kind of setting, and these productions often can be very effective, but directors may make some very odd choices. In 2006, for instance, The Tempest was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, with Patrick Stewart as a strong Prospero. As a spectator, what struck me at once was the stage setting: this was designer Shakespeare, with Prospero accommodated in a wooden hut on the shores of Greenland or some such Arctic area. A barren waste was the impression conveyed by the chilly shoreline, broken only by a low hillock that could have been ice. It was hard to imagine how this character, who looked more like Robinson Crusoe than a duke, could have reached there from Italy. There were other eccentricities in the production, as when the goddesses in the masque appeared looking more like dancers

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from a remote Indian tribe in Canada than classical figures, and substituted Mongolian songs (according to the program) for the text of the masque. I wanted to ask why anyone would set The Tempest in the far north, a play about Italian aristocrats shipwrecked while returning home from Tunis and now anxious to get back to Naples or Milan from a subtropical island where Caliban can catch monkeys or “snare the nimble marmoset” (2.2.168). Ariel appeared to have strayed from a Beckett play, being white-faced, black-cloaked, and moving painfully slowly, like a zombie, not at all Prospero’s speedy spirit, and clearly unable to fulfil his promise to fly, To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride On the curled clouds (The Tempest, 1.2.188–90)

at Prospero’s bidding. In this same season Much Ado About Nothing was staged at the Swan Theater with a bar in the background bearing the sign “Cuba Bar,” with sounds of Spanish-style music, setting the play in Havana with a Spanish ambience when the text puts us firmly in Messina, an Italian context. So, do these things matter? The proponents of performance theory have been vigorous in insisting that performance frees criticism from dependence on the text, and in fact fashions text into something else that is different. Performance, says W. B. Worthen, is “the incarnation of texts as behavior.”9 Behavior, however, does not require a text at all, and the playwright’s words cease to matter, so why focus on Shakespeare? The aim of innovation in the theater is no longer to seek what is in the text, but “what is in the text’s expressive structure.”10 In efforts to explain and justify a theatrical practice that would liberate the plays “from the deadening clutches of a high cultural tradition,”11 performance is claimed as a “relatively autonomous field of cultural production.”12 So performance is freed to work against the text by what Alan Dessen calls “rewrighting” or “rescripting”—gearing a play to a concept or a new period or culture.13 A polemical aim has been to validate a major shift away from the “tenacious web of nostalgia and tradition that has Shakespeare as performance in its grip.”14 In so arguing Susan Bennett dismissed twelve productions of King Lear in Britain in the 1980s as “traditional,” and claimed aggressively: “If authenticity and/or originality are impossible with the recognized theatrical script, those fetishized traces of the initial collaboration and improvisation now known as King Lear, it might be more productive to turn critical attention to some contemporary improvisation with and around those same textual traces.”15

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Worthen puts the matter more carefully in arguing for freeing the stage from a dependence on literature, “from the obligation (even from the ability) to reproduce the text, or the ways we may understand it as mere readers.”16 In effect, though, each critic is proposing that performance should do what it pleases without respecting the text, because it is transforming texts into something else, called “behavior” by Worthen. Again, let me ask, does it matter? Well, the issue is not a simple one. To start with, even the most “traditional” productions of Shakespeare’s plays modify the texts in various ways. They are tailored to the needs of a modern audience, usually keeping the running time to three hours or less, including intervals, which seem to have been introduced about 1610, or after most of Shakespeare’s plays were written. In order to keep the running time short, long plays in performance may be heavily cut (as probably they always were), and in order to arrange an appropriately timed interval or intervals, the sequence of scenes may be rearranged. The plays are usually performed indoors, with women playing the female roles that were assigned to boys at the original Globe, and with sophisticated lighting, costumes, and scenery. Peter Holland reports attending a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre where the director stated in the program notes that he had cut 564 lines from the text.17 Holland did not identify the cuts once he was caught up in the action onstage, and I doubt if any Shakespeareans would have been able to do so. The director’s note was interesting in drawing attention to the practice—but directors almost always cut and paste. My point is that even so-called traditional productions do not “reproduce” the text, but adjust it to fit current audience expectations. Another expectation now is that any cast in a professional theater may include actors from differing racial backgrounds. Holland reviewed a 1994 production of As You Like It (Cheek by Jowl; Declan Donellan directing) as “[t]he finest production of comedy in the year,” observing that the all-male cast offered a vision of a “refreshingly new green world.”18 He did not feel a need to prepare the reader for the photograph he reproduces of the final scene when we realize that in this green world Rosalind was played by a black actor, while Orlando was white. The modern stage has become color-blind, something Shakespeare could not have foreseen. In addition to such local conditions of the age there are larger pressures on the theater in any age. Even if primary decisions about productions and interpretations at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre are aesthetic, and the politics are submerged,19 productions are affected by the larger social and political circumstances of the age. So Susan Bennett was able to comment on as many as twelve mainstream productions of King

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Lear that were presented during the 1980s decade, when it displaced Hamlet as the most performed of the major tragedies. Hamlet seemed to have lost its relevance, and Sheridan Morley, reviewing a 1980 production of the play in Punch, could see little point “in doing this Hamlet here and now.”20 King Lear, by contrast, usually less often played than Hamlet, became the flavor of the decade in the 1970s and 1980s, when its relevance was enhanced by analogies with a political world run by old and usually despotic rulers in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Other concerns, too, such as the problem of coping with the ever-increasing elderly proportion of populations in Western countries, as well as anxieties about providing for the homeless and the poor, and dealing with dysfunctional families, helped to make King Lear the tragedy of choice. In our experience of plays in the theater all of us, I suspect, remain largely unaware of the extent to which productions are inevitably affected by this larger world picture and current social and political conditions, and it is something we only notice in retrospect, as when we realize, for example, that there was only one production of Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford during the 1970s, and that was in the tiny “Other Place” theater. Such larger pressures influence productions in various ways. In King Lear, for instance, the old monarch, encountering Poor Tom in a storm, cries, “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here” (3.4.107–8). In recent times productions have made Lear strip half-naked, or completely naked, at this point, though a long stage tradition is to be seen in illustrations of earlier performances that show Kent and the Fool preventing Lear, still in regal robes edged with ermine, from disrobing, so that he remains visibly the king. In democratic societies kings have little or no power and do not much matter, so it is not surprising that perhaps the most highly praised staging in England in recent times was that at the National Theatre featuring Ian Holm as a Lear who stripped naked when he met Poor Tom and was presented as the head of a very dysfunctional middle-class family. The larger historical and political mutations thus may affect the ways in which plays are produced without the directors, actors, or audience being conscious of any special influence. The 2007 Royal Shakespeare Company production with Ian McKellen as Lear also showed him stripping naked in this scene. I think it is important to distinguish between these larger perspectives and more immediate considerations that have an impact on what producers choose to do. In relation to the larger world picture,

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directors and actors work within horizons they have not chosen and may not realize are there. In relation to the particular conditions of their own age they make conscious choices that reflect changing local circumstances and fashions. In Worthen’s terms, “acting responds more directly to changing social behavior than to changing ways of reading classical texts.”21 So, for example, minimalism at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in production values gave way in the 1980s to lavishness, as in staging Two Gentlemen of Verona as a 1930s musical (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1991), under the influence of the fashion for musicals on the London stage. A few years later Baz Luhrmann’s film Romeo + Juliet (1996) transferred the action of the play into the “commodity culture of random violence and alienated street gangs” that was associated with Los Angeles.22 I think Michael Bristol’s claim that every “staging of a Shakespeare play results from a dialogue between the historical moment of its creation and the contemporaneity of the mise-en-scène”23 needs to be qualified: the dialogue is between the larger pressures of the accumulated past that establish parameters we take for granted, and local pressures that consciously affect the choices made in the theater. We take for granted the comforts of modern theaters, intervals, the availability of toilets and bars, stage lighting, and a dimmed auditorium, but sit up and notice a representation of the Ghost in Hamlet as an emaciated figure dragging a huge sword behind him. In performance criticism local choices such as this one are the primary focus of attention. Take, for example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream as staged by Robert Lepage at London’s National Theatre in 1992– 93. This radical rejection of the clinical whiteness of Peter Brook’s famous 1970 staging was extensively reviewed. The mise-en-scène was “a stage covered with grey mud, a watery pool at its center,” shielded by black screens upstage, and lit by a single light bulb overhead. The lovers quarreled in the mud, and eventually washed off their filth in showers at the rear of the stage. Theseus was played as blind, Puck by a leather-clad female with one breast exposed, and Bottom was raped by Titania. Many reviewers, like Michael Billington, found the production “lugubriously eccentric,” but a leading academic performance critic, Barbara Hodgdon, defended it as “postcolonial and postmodern,” with a black Oberon and an Asian Titania, gamelan music, and “traces of interracial and intercultural tensions.”24 The reviewers had in mind the loss of “authentic magic, comic joy, and rigorous attention to the verse,”25 and were commenting on the production in the light of their expectations in seeing Shakespeare’s play and hearing his words, based on some notion of authenticity. Hodg-

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don rejected as nostalgia a concern for such matters, and viewed the production as “an attempt to incorporate the global array that forms the imaginative landscape of contemporary cultural life.”26 I saw this production and disliked it, but I think she is right to defend it as she does, in terms of “contemporary cultural life.” It is a defense, however, that concedes another very important point—namely, that she is concerned with production values, not with Shakespeare’s play as such. Performance critics, like Caliban, rejoice in their sense of freedom—at last they can dispense with the text and with the authority of Shakespeare. The Lepage production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream did indeed free the play from its text and transform it into “behavior” so that, as Hodgdon noted, reviewers complained “of the actors’ carelessness with words, of an inability to hear, and of physical activity distracting attention from the dialogue.”27 The very idea of a “text” has, of course, been challenged by the argument that Shakespeare’s texts are unstable, and that the plays may exist as multiple texts, so that Shakespeare’s original words and intentions cannot be recovered. Add to this Worthen’s claim for the “relative independence of performance behavior from the meanings taken as intrinsic to the script”28 and it might seem that performance of Shakespeare’s plays has most “force” (to use Worthen’s term) when it is altogether freed from dependence on the text. Is it then the case that Shakespeare’s name is needed to give one kind of authority to performance criticism, by associating it with the most famous of dramatists, but his words may be changed or ignored in the treatment of his texts in the theater? Is performance criticism always about performance or “behavior,” not about plays as conceived by their authors? It is important to keep in mind that performance is ephemeral and can only be reconstituted in memory, as embodied in recollections of individual observers or choices made by photographers, or in some cases intentions as recorded in promptbooks. What we think we know about performances is always questionable: as Alexander Leggatt says in a book on King Lear for a series on Shakespeare in performance, “Memory cheats: . . . in researching this book I have been astonished by how often my memory is at odds with the evidence—much of which depends on other people’s memories.”29 Archives too may mislead: “[I]n the case of unrecorded changes to a production made during previews, after press night, or over the course of a long run, the official documents can lend authority to moments and memories shared by few, if any, audience members.”30 Add to this that performances in the run of any play vary from day to day, while memories of any performance are bound to be selective for each individual witness, as a comparison of newspaper reviews of the opening night

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of any play staged at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre will show. Performance criticism nevertheless is valuable in various ways—for instance, in showing how theater practice changes with the times, how great actors have advanced our understanding of scenes, and how stage productions have been and are affected by fashions, and by social and political considerations in any age. It can also show how visual elements in performance, such as costumes and properties, can be used in unexpected ways to produce new emphases in productions.31 All this helps to explain the paradox of the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London. On the one hand, the reconstruction was as faithful to the original as scholarship, construction, and craftsmanship could make it, so that audiences might “see how his [Shakespeare’s] plays were originally intended to work.”32 But this notion of authenticity was inevitably compromised by the needs of modern audiences for comfort, seating, toilets, safety, lighting, intervals, and so on, those larger considerations that we take for granted. Then it turned out that the company at the Globe did not as a rule seek to put on plays with “authentic” staging, apart from Henry V in 1997, when even the underwear worn by the actors was said to be made of leather. At first the audiences were hesitant about participating, but increasingly they have learned to hiss, applaud, or make other noises during the action, which may relate to how audiences behaved at the original Globe. What they see on the stage, however, has on the whole been of our time: Worthen traces “the force of Shakespearean performativity not to the text, but to the regimes that shape performance on the stage of the new Globe.” He relates the new Globe to theme parks, noting that it is a tourist destination in London, selling “a mediated experience of the past in the present.”33 The audiences love the experience of a show there, but in contemporary terms, as related to tourism and recreation. The younger-than-average audiences go there to get a Shakespeare “fix” and, in productions I have seen, always applaud vigorously at the end of a show. They watch not only actors working in the same daylight but also the rest of the audience —but they are in tourist garb, while the actors, as it turns out, may be in costumes of any period. Any attempt at a Shakespearean “authenticity” to match the so-called authenticity of the theater has long been abandoned, as, for example, in recent productions courtiers in The Winter’s Tale moved around on roller skates (invented in 1863), and Much Ado About Nothing was staged somewhat bizarrely with an allfemale cast. No matter how adequate or poor the performance, the audience enjoys an unusual experience, which has to do with the ambience, with the unfamiliar nature of the reconstructed outdoor theater with the audience in daylight almost encircling the stage as part

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of the show, and with the Globe’s prestige as a tourist site. The staged play is “only one element in the entertainment.”34 So at the Globe, too, production values are more important than the texts of the play. Performance critics dismiss the authority of Shakespeare in claiming freedom from the control of the texts, and at the same time reclaim his authority as validating their approaches. They need Shakespeare because he is the most famous dramatist in the world, and guarantees that readers (academic ones anyway) will pay attention to what they say. The logic of their concept of performance, however, would lead to the relegation of the text to the margins, if not to simply rewriting it. In 1996 Dennis Kennedy published an essay called provocatively, “Shakespeare without His Language,” noting that he is the “most performed playwright in the world at large,” and that in foreign countries his works “require not only linguistic translation but also cultural adaptation.”35 Freed from a dependence on Shakespeare’s words, productions in countries such as Germany and Italy have been adventurous in visual and physical aspects of production. Kennedy goes on to argue that we do not speak the same language that Shakespeare spoke: “at best we speak a remote dialect of it,”36 so that year by year our “ability to reach the plays directly in their original language lessens.”37 Since he wrote this we have all come to accept globalization as a fact of life, and to recognize an increasing reliance on forms of English as adapted in the many countries that use it as a lingua franca, so his claims do not seem so revolutionary. So I return to the question whether it mattered that the Royal Shakespeare Theatre set The Tempest in the arctic regions. The answer in the light of wider considerations is no, or not much. The setting was odd, but the text, or most of it, was well spoken to a listening audience. Such productions may seem boringly conventional to radical performance critics, but I think are vitally important as refreshing our engagement with Shakespeare’s dialogue. Most of his language remains current, and much has been absorbed into common usage, so that Kennedy is wrong to say our dialect is remote from it. However unstable because of variant texts and printing-house errors, the texts remain substantially the same whenever they are reedited. Performances, however, are never quite the same evening by evening in the run of a production, and productions almost always aim to be different from one another. In 2007 The RSC Shakespeare Complete Works was published, copyright by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It is based on the texts of the plays as printed in the First Folio of 1623, because these, it is claimed by the editors, are derived from the theater: “No edition until ours has begun from an attempt to reconstruct

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and then modernize what Hemings and Condell authorized: the texts that went into Jaggard’s shop in the form of transcripts of promptbooks for some plays and Quartos marked up with reference to the theater for others.”38 In spite of this announcement in the general introduction, the more than two thousand pages of edited texts make little or no reference to performance, and the imprimatur of the Royal Shakespeare Company seems to be there to attract potential buyers rather than to establish any connection between this edition and the stage. It would seem then that there is a sort of loose boundary line between performance criticism and textual study. The play exceeds the text in representing an action that is realized in performance. Performance criticism on the whole is concerned with representation, with what actors do rather than with what they say, and with the ways in which plays are accommodated to the contemporary world. The printed texts remain substantially the same, but performance on the stage is ephemeral, and inevitably changes as cultural horizons shift. It is important that experiment should thrive in adaptations and staging of the plays, including those on film or video, and engage with contemporary world cultures. In this way the plays take on new meanings and relevance for the age. Performance criticism establishes a record of such experiments and adaptations. At the same time I think we should value a theater in which Shakespeare’s words are respected, while recognizing that there is no way we can recover “authentic” Shakespeare on the stage. For directors and actors may also discover new meanings in the texts, which then expand possible ways of understanding a character or a play. In 1984, for instance, Derek Jacobi played Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and found a way of enhancing the humor of the soliloquy in which he decides to love Beatrice. He has overheard the dialogue in which Don Pedro, Leonato, and Claudio have led him to believe she loves him, and considers whether to believe them: “They seem to pity the lady. It seems her affections have their full bent. Love me? Why, it must be requited” (2.3.220–21). So the text runs in the quarto and folio, but Jacobi delivered it as “Love me? Why?—It must be requited.” His pause on “Why?” was very effective in raising a laugh in the audience, as he registered for a moment surprise that he could not think of any reason why she should, then went on, as if pushing that thought aside, “It must be requited.” The comma in Q and F could have been introduced by a printer, so his reading opens up a possible variant interpretation. It is interesting that Jacobi’s ingenious stage interpretation of a phrase is mentioned in the notes to the scholarly Arden edition of Much Ado About

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Nothing,39 but not in the Royal Shakespeare complete works. This edition also merely reprints, in the typeface assigned to editorial stage directions added in modern editions “Tears off his clothes,” against Lear’s “Off, off, you lendings.”40 This in effect reprints Nicholas Rowe’s direction, “Tearing off his clothes” added in his edition of 1709, and ignores the long stage tradition in performing this scene.41 The RSC Shakespeare runs almost to twenty-five hundred pages, and no one-volume edition could possibly include commentary on staging and stage traditions. So here it seems a line is inevitably drawn between text and performance. But if performance exceeds the text, the text also exceeds performance, which works not to “revivify” Shakespeare’s text but rather “to substitute for it, even displace it,”42 as in the representation of the Ghost in Hamlet by Greg Hicks.

NOTES 1. Michael Dobson, “Shakespeare Performances in England, 2004,” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 296. 2. Ibid. 3. Cf. R. A. Foakes, “ ‘Armed at point exactly’: The Ghost in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 34–47. 4. Line references to quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 4th ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). 5. Foakes, “ ‘Armed at point exactly,’ ” 45. 6. Dobson, “Shakespeare Performances in England, 2004,” 296. See also the account by Greg Hicks of his aims and intentions in playing the Ghost in Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today, ed. Michael Dobson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 17–24. 7. See William Winter, Life and Art of Edwin Booth (New York: Macmillan, 1893), 172. 8. Dieter Mehl, Shakespeare’s Tragedies: An Introduction, (reprint; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37. 9. W. B. Worthen, “Shakespearean Performativity,” in Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity, ed. Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie, with Christopher Holmes, Accents on Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2001), 129. 10. Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie, introduction to Shakespeare and Modern Theatre, ed. Bristol and McLuskie, with Christopher Holmes, Accents on Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2001), 6. 11. Robert Shaughnessy, The Shakespeare Effect: A History of Twentieth-Century Performance (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 4. 12. Paul Yachnin, “ ‘To kill a king’: The Modern Politics of Bardicide,” in Shakespeare and Modern Theatre, ed. Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie with Christopher Holmes, Accents on Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2001), 37. 13. Alan C. Dessen, Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. 14. Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 40.

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15. Ibid., 47. 16. W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37. 17. Cf. Peter Holland, English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 17. 18. Ibid., 91–92. 19. Ibid., 9. 20. R. A. Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 39. 21. W. B. Worthen, “Shakespearean Performativity,” 133. 22. Hugh Grady, “Modernity, Modernism and Postmodernism in the TwentiethCentury’s Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare and Modern Theatre, ed. Michael Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie, with Christopher Holmes, Accents on Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2001), 30. 23. Michael Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), 13. 24. See Barbara Hodgdon “Looking for Mr. Shakespeare after ‘The Revolution’: Robert Lepage’s Intercultural Dream Machine,” in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (London: Routledge, 1996), 73, 80. 25. Ibid., 73. 26. Ibid., 86. 27. Ibid., 76. 28. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, 61. 29. Cited by Bruce R. Smith, “Speaking What We Feel About King Lear,” in Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 36. 30. Margaret Jane Kidnie, “Citing Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, ed. Peter Holland, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 122. 31. See, for instance, Carol Chillington Rutter’s brilliant account of ways in which the handkerchief that figures so importantly in Othello has been exploited: Rutter, “ ‘Her first remembrance from the Moor’: Actors and the Materials of Memory,” in Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, ed. Peter Holland, (Cambridge: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 2006), 168–206. 32. Andrew Gurr, “Shakespeare’s Globe: A History of Reconstructions and Some Reasons for Trying,” in Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in association with Mulryne and Shewring, 1997), 34. 33. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, 84, 96. 34. Ibid., 114. 35. Dennis Kennedy, “Shakespeare without His Language,” in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (London: Routledge, 1996), 134. 36. Ibid., 136. 37. Ibid., 146. 38. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, eds. William Shakespeare: Complete Works, RSC Shakespeare (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 2007), lvii. 39. William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, ed. Claire McEachern, Arden edition, Series 3 (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 217. 40. Bate and Rasmussen, Royal Shakespeare, lx. 41. See page 68 above. 42. See Shaughnessy, Shakespeare Effect, 8.

“He shifteth his speech”: Accents and Dialects in Plays by Shakespeare and His Contemporaries Brian Gibbons

IN THIS ESSAY MY CHIEF CONCERN IS WITH THE DRAMATIC RATHER THAN the linguistic significance of accents and dialects in plays of Shakespeare’s time. I also refer to modern stage performance, though for brevity’s sake I confine my discussion to Britain. The borders between the different accents and dialects of English, in Britain, have always involved tension: they are easily, indeed instantly, recognizable by the inhabitants, but their implications are complex, for they are borders marking historical and cultural as well as merely geographical difference; and then there are also class differences, quite separate from regional differences and also marked differently. While the establishment of English as the lingua franca in Britain was virtually secured by Shakespeare’s time, the national languages of the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish are still alive today and are still obviously influential in the regional English they speak. A certain ambivalence is inseparable from this issue: sharing an accent or dialect contributes to solidarity, it is a bond; hearing someone use a different accent, too, may give pleasure, may be a source of attraction; on the other hand, difference in accents may be divisive, may mark, and provoke, rivalry and mutual hostility. Humor is perhaps the most sensitive barometer for registering this ambivalence, and shows that the issue of separatism is certainly serious in today’s Britain, where the last prime minister may use every opportunity to refer to “Britain” and “British” but in an accent that reminds everyone that his own nation is Scotland, lying “north of the border” where an assertive nationalist party has recently come to power. The issue of accent and dialect exposes another kind of border, that between the written/printed word of a play-text and the spoken word of stage performance. In English the border between the written word and the spoken word is of course only intermittently 76

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bridged by orthography; I therefore intend to focus on some specific instances in Elizabethan plays where a particular accent or pronunciation is actually indicated, or is to be inferred, but I shall also consider cases where it is not marked but is strongly to be suspected. As a support to this inquiry, I shall consider a further border, that between Shakespeare’s time and our time. To consider where modern actors of these plays use different accents and dialects may throw light on what was done in the original performances, especially of plays by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

WRITING AND SPEECH A play-text is not yet theater, but it is a kind of written score originally designed for performance. Words, as abstract signs, encode meaning, and also have a material dimension. In Finnegans Wake James Joyce defamiliarizes the material act of writing, granting it a riotous physical presence of its own, deferring any abstract code of meaning: “[I]t is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks as like it as damn it.”1 His phrase “vocable scriptsigns” points to the fact that words are also to be voiced; and as a speech system, too, involving sound and movement when performed, language is markedly physical: anatomical and neurophysiological; thus, Gerard Manley Hopkins declared in a letter to Robert Bridges: “above all remember what applies to all my verse, that it is, as living art should be, made for performance and that its performance is not reading with the eye but loud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation, with long rests, long dwells on the rhyme and other marked syllables.”2 Theater, as living art made for performance, preserves the link between the human body and language. The fixed play-text includes unobtrusive stage directions for performance: but more specifically, its punctuation can guide the actor in rhetorical delivery, and its orthography can guide pronunciation. Early modern educators such as John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius: Or, The Grammar Schoole (1612),3 took Cicero and Quintilian at their word. Brinsley advises schoolmasters to have their pupils sound words aloud as they write them down in just the same way as they would sound words aloud as they read them from an already written text. Scholastic practice had used punctuation as logical marking to clarify the elements of a text, but the humanists introduced

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a new function for punctuation, as rhetorical marking, to indicate its real or imagined oral delivery. They added a third function for punctuation, to guide interpretation, indicating relationships and nuances in a text. They invented new marks: the semicolon, the exclamation mark, the question mark, parentheses. As Sara van den Berg summarizes Ben Jonson’s practice of punctuation: “If, in the body of a text, logical punctuation marks its skeletal structure, rhetorical punctuation marks its breath.”4 Jonson carefully explains the humanist functions of punctuation in his English Grammar (1640), noting that semicolons, commas, and full stops indicate shorter or longer pauses for breath, the semicolon requiring “a mean breathing” whereas the comma requires “somewhat a longer breath.”5 The issue of punctuation in Jonson’s Volpone has been given particular attention by Robert N. Watson in his New Mermaid edition:6 he observes that “in Jonson a comma often represents the space, the lightly emphatic pause (between a predicate and its objective or subjective clause) in which a modern reader would insert ‘that’ as when . . . Mosca describes Celia’s ‘soft lip, / Would tempt you to eternity of kissing’ (Q 1.5.112).” Modern writers, indeed most modern editors, would remove commas from Mosca’s almost pornographic description of Celia as “a beauty, ripe, as harvest” (Q 1.5.109) but Jonson’s commas suggest the provocative pauses of a cumulative developing series of thoughts: “ripe” works by itself before becoming subsumed into the conventional comparison. The same effect explains the even more insistent commas when Mosca evokes, for the greedy client Voltore, the wealth awaiting him: “When you do come to swim, in golden lard, / Up to the armes, in honey” (Q 1.3.70). Watson shows how the punctuation serves as a kind of musical notation, as a guide to speaking the lines, something that editorial modernization would (and usually does) partly efface. Shakespeare makes excellent comedy from inept actors misreading punctuation in the prologue to Pyramus & Thisbe (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 5, scene 1). Our ubiquitous critical modernizing editions usually impose modern punctuation, so it is instructive to contrast the very light punctuation style of the original manuscript of Hand D in Sir Thomas More.7 In his analysis of an eighteen-line passage of Hand D, Bruce Smith notes that there are only three commas, and these indicate not just pauses for breath but shifts in pitch and volume.  Smith supposes one line, “nay this a ound fellowe I tell you lets mark him,” is to be uttered as a single breath: hence there is no comma after “tell you.”8

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THE SCARCITY OF ORTHOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF ACCENTS AND DIALECTS Yet if rhetorical punctuation was understood as a means of guiding actors in speaking their lines, orthographic indications of regional and foreign accents and dialects appear in play-texts much less often than actors were apparently expected to use them. They are found usually in prose dialogue and rarely involve persons of middle and higher rank (an obvious exception is in Henry V, with MacMorris, Gower, and Llewellyn). Among Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights there is the representative case of Dekker, who habitually works with stereotypes anyway, but even at his comic best, in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,9 he willingly restricts himself to catchphrases, such as “Prince am I none, yet am I nobly born” (7.46) and “but let that pass” (7.122), and a small range of repeated idiolectic markers per major character, and of course stage-Dutch: though there is little to choose between Dekker’s Dutch Skipper, with his supposedly genuine utterance “Yaw, yaw, ik heb veale gedrunck” (7.139) and Hans the disguised Englishman’s effort “be neit vorveard. Ik hab al de dingen voour mack skoes groot end klene. . . . Ik weet niet wat you seg; ik verstaw you niet” (4.83–84, 89). Ben Jonson is remarkable and exceptional for having assembled, in Bartholomew Fair, not just city comedy Londoners but acoustic representatives of the whole nation, presumably in rivalry to Shakespeare’s Henry IV: Whit, the bawd, is Irish; members of the Watch are Scots and Welsh; Busy is an ex-baker from Banbury and Cokes from the country, Harrow; in addition to the Northern clothier and Western man and the diverse tradespeople of London—all with their colloquial voices.

ACCENTS AND DIALECTS AND THE DECLINE OF RP ON THE MODERN BRITISH STAGE Let us now cross the border from Elizabethan to modern Britain, where accents and dialects that vary from Received Pronunciation still remain mainly regional, but have become codified and identified as much more complicated social and cultural markers—auditory images of the times, so to speak, if all too insular. This is evident on BBC radio (from the 1940s children’s serial Toytown to the enduring rural soap opera The Archers to the voice-mimic comedy sketches of today’s Dead Ringers) or in British public life, from Sir Harold Macmillan to Ian Paisley, from Brian Sewell to Ali G, from the Kumars to Billy Con-

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nolly to Terry Wogan, from Penelope Keith to Kenneth Williams (he who loved to mimic Dame Edith Evans’s high-pitched reaction to the news that she would have to work with him: “Really? But is not he that a-a-actor with the extra-o-o-o-ordinary vo-i-ce?”). In the 1950s it was unquestioned that for major Shakespeare roles British actors should use Received Pronunciation with an Oxford accent, as did Sir Laurence and Sir John and Sir Ralph (though none of them sounded as cut-glass as Noel), but what makes this truly significant is its effect on an audience’s perception of the class and power structures in Shakespeare, for evidently, if the principal persons tend to share the same Oxford accent, they will implicitly be felt to reflect and to share the corresponding modern class and cultural values. Had George Bernard Shaw seen productions of Much Ado in which Benedick did not sound so much like a gentleman, but more like a self-made Yorkshireman, say, would Shaw have perhaps reacted less strongly to the coarser elements of the part? In my own case, school visits to the Old Vic in the mid-1950s meant that I naturally thought not only of Romeo but of all star roles as spoken in Oxford Received Pronunciation. Coriolanus at the time was Olivier, using the accent of English patrician privilege. Accent and pronunciation affirmed a centralized cultural authority. Received Pronunciation then had such prestige that one felt it to be simply the norm for spoken English—that went without saying. Autumn 1958 was first term at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, for the young Tom—now Sir Tom—Courtenay. In his recent memoir he remembers it: Clifford Turner, a crucial RADA figure . . . taught voice production. . . . Definitely of the old school, his voice was beautifully produced, supported by an enormous diaphragm, which sometimes he cradled like a baby. It was said he could recite an entire Shakespeare sonnet on one breath. . . . Mr Turner gave us . . . Rupert Brooke . . . to work on for tone—“Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through, / Beside the river, make for you / A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep / Deeply above . . .” Not one of us, throughout our two years at RADA, could ever manage the “ees” and “oos” like he could. He loved to correct us when we mispronounced things. He had a great time with Terry Rigby’s Midlands accent. “Oi’d loike to do a piece from Rowmeo and Juli-ette, sir.” “Rowmeao! Rowmeao! who’s he? And we say Juliut, Juliut, with the accent on the first syllable. There’s no “ette.” And he would wince with distaste as he said “ette.”10

Courtenay adds that Turner’s voice production was stronger than his acting—a promising distinction for a student in those days to have made. It was still the Age of Reith (the magisterial head of the BBC)

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as far as the authority of Received Pronunciation was concerned, and it would have taken a brave student indeed to point out that Shakespeare himself, coming from Warwickshire, might have had a Midland accent, albeit an Elizabethan one: and indeed, one might ask, would Terry Rigby’s “Rowmeao” actually have sounded so outlandish to Elizabethan ears? It was around 1960 in Britain that everyone was struck by a particular aspect of the New Wave in the theater and cinema. This was the unapologetic and emphatic use of authentic regional (especially Northern) accents—there was Donald Pleasance in The Caretaker, or Tom Courtenay, Wilfred Pickles, Mona Washbourne in the film Billy Liar, and the flat North-Midland of Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. It was the direct impression of authenticity that seemed new and distinct here, in contrast to what had passed for regional and lower-class speech before, with stereotyped cheery Cockney, or apolitical, blurred Mummerset, or pastiche Welsh (contrast the straight Western accent of Hugh Griffiths as Squire Western in the movie of Fielding’s Tom Jones). The use of authentic regional and nonstandard accents is now firmly established in British acting, to the disadvantage of what was not so long ago the indispensable attribute of the English gentleman, the Oxford accent.11 An early harbinger of this change, in the 1970s, was a TV show, Rising Damp, with Leonard Rossiter as a seedy landlord constantly betrayed by his flat Northern vowels, and always hopelessly outclassed by the perfect Oxford accent and manner of his tenant, a student who also happened to be black (played by the effortlessly superior Don Warrington). Peter Hall’s sequence of Shakespeare’s history plays at Stratford in 1964 established a truly defamiliarized, grim representation of civil war, Falstaff notwithstanding. There is a moment in act 3, scene 1 of 1 Henry IV when Glendower boasts that at my birth The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes, The goats ran from the mountains (3.1.34–36)

and Hotspur responds “I think there’s no man speaks better Welsh. / I’ll to dinner” (lines 47–48).12 Sometimes this encounter is played for laughs, but it is a different matter if Glendower sounds like a real, not a stage, Welshman, really angry, and powerful—and the more so if Hotspur for his part is possessed of a strong and for once authentic Northeastern accent used in earnest. Michael Bogdanov and

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Michael Pennington published their account The English Shakespeare Company in 1990, in which Pennington remarks: “Nothing is more deadly than to hear someone struggling for a received accent because it’s Shakespeare and posh; and since the plays echo and re-echo with the sounds of Bangor, Northumberland and Southwark, those actors should if possible come from there or close by.”13 Another stage performer who made his professional debut around 1960 is Alan Bennett, whose Leeds accent was exploited in the influential satiric revue Beyond the Fringe, which contains a devastating parody of the mindless-but-well-spoken style of Shakespeare then in decline. Bennett recently had this to say on the subject of accent: “I tried to lose my Northern accent at one period, the 1950’s I suppose, when the provincial voice was still looked down on. Then it came back and now I don’t know where I am, sometimes saying my ‘a’s long, sometimes short, though it’s the ‘u’s that are a continuing threat— words like butcher, study, sugar, and names like Cutbush always lying in ambush. . . . The truth is anyone from the North who ventures south of the Trent contracts an incurable disease of the vowels.”14

EVIDENCE OF ACCENTS AND DIALECTS ON THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE To return to the Elizabethans, it is interesting to note what Puttenham has to say about this very matter of accents north of the Trent. Notice that he warns gentlemen against the use of regional accents and pronunciation altogether, as well as warning them of the danger of language lacking in the decorum required of important persons and occasions. Puttenham enlivens his teaching with a vivid anecdote concerning “language nothing well spoken”: I remember in the first yeare of Queenes [sic] Maries raigne a Knight of Yorkshire was chosen speaker of the Parliament, a good gentleman and wise in the affaires of his shire and not vnlearned in the lawes of the Realme, but as well for some lack of his teeth as for want of language nothing well spoken, which at that time and businesse was most behooffull for him to haue bene; this man after he had made his Oration to the Queene, which ye know is of course to be done at the first assembly of both houses, a bencher of the Temple both well learned and very eloquent, returning from the Parliament house, asked another gentleman, his frend, how he liked M. Speakers Oration: “mary,” quoth th’other, “me thinks I heard not a better alehouse tale told this seuen yeares.”15

Incidentally this would seem, mutatis mutandis, to be a classic anecdote. I myself have heard a version of it, concerning a former mayor

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of Zurich (which has its own proud dialect) delivering a speech in his best Hochdeutsch to the upper crust of Berlin and getting a similar reception. In short, snobbery about accent and dialect is not a Victorian invention. But Puttenham has more to say on the subject of accent and pronunciation, revealing significantly a high sensitivity to both as markers of social and educational status. This I think might be relevant to Elizabethan stage practice. Puttenham warns against following the speech of the “inferiour sort” even “in the best towne and Citie in this Realme, for such persons doe abuse good speaches by strange accents or ill shapen soundes and false ortographie.” A gentleman and a poet should rather model his speech on “the better brought vp sort” and thus avoid “the termes of Northern-men, such as they vse in dayly talke, whether they be noble men or gentlemen or of their best clarkes, all is a matter; nor in effect any speach vsed beyond the riuer of Trent . . . it is not so Courtly nor so currant as our Southerne English is; no more is the far Westerne mans speach.” Puttenham advises one to take the speech of the court “and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx. myles, and not much aboue.”16 As to this disparaging of the speech of “Northern-men” and “Westerne man,” it may not be entirely coincidental that Ben Jonson (whose Discoveries shows a deep affinity with Puttenham’s discussion of style) in Bartholomew Fair should stage a dialogue between, precisely, a Northern man and a Western man: it is presented as self-evidently, inherently, funny: Why, where are you, zurs? Do you vlinch, and leave us i’the zuds, now? Northern. I’ll ne mare, I is e’en as vull as a paiper’s bag, by my troth, I. Puppy. Do my northern cloth zhrink i’ the wetting, ha? (Bartholomew Fair, 4.4.10–12) Puppy.

Jonson also takes pains to render the Irish accent (possibly an intoxicated one), which he requires of the actor who plays a bawd, Whit: Whit. Nay, ’tish all gone now! Dish ’tish phen tou vilt not be phitin call, Master Offisher! Phat ish a man te better to lishen out noishes for tee an tou art in anoder ’orld—being very shuffishient noishes and gallantsh too? One o’ their brabblesh would have fed ush all dish fortnight; but tou are so bushy about beggersh still, tou hast no leishure to intend shentlemen, an’t be. (3.1.1–7)17

This is almost moving toward such recent humorous but acoustically correct pronunciation handbooks as Let Stalk Strine (for Australians),

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The High Spotty Book (for upper-class twits), or John Pepper, Ulster-English Dictionary (sample entry, Ballet, abbrev. for “William”: e.g., “Are Ballet’s a bittava geg”; “Ballet futted it the whole way without a murmur”). Puttenham, then, seems to be pretty clear that accent was of growing importance as a marker of social class, and that any Elizabethan aspiring to be recognized as a gentleman would do well to cultivate a Southern accent. The warning about north of the Trent, and the advice to speak in the accent of the educated classes in the Home Counties, has held from that day onward. But let this not disguise the fact that Puttenham does also assert—and this should be stressed, I think—that out in the Elizabethan regions even nobles and gentlemen were in fact still using their regional pronunciation and dialectal elements (“the termes of Northern-men, such as they vse in dayly talke, whether they be noble men or gentlemen or of their best clarkes”). I believe this may well be materially relevant to my present purposes. If we are to accept what Puttenham says, then we must assume that some regional gentry and nobility did in reality habitually use a regional accent, quite irrespective of whatever was fashionable at court (remember that Aubrey says Ralegh spoke broad Devonshire to his dying day—though one wonders whether he used it by choice or really from necessity). If so, then perhaps the playwrights, Shakespeare among them, would on occasion have expected the players to attempt imitation of this feature, which even then had its cultural, and no less its political, implications. Certainly in Elizabethan play-scripts the orthography of noncomic roles normally does not indicate regional or foreign accents—in Henry V the French Princess is a partly comic role, and so her French-accented broken English prose is orthographically represented, but the verse of the masculine French courtiers, including the Dauphin, is not orthographically differentiated from that of the English, though it seems difficult to believe that the Elizabethan players did not adopt for these French roles throughout a light French accent to go with the evident Gallic temperament, manners, and the style of dress and insignia. James Siemon notes that in Merry Wives Falstaff recognizes the accent of the disguised Evans—“that Welsh fairy” —even though Evans’s lines are orthographically plain English.18 This could indicate that Shakespeare expected the actor of Evans to use a Welsh accent, although the text does not indicate it.

PROBABLE AND POSSIBLE USE OF ACCENTS ON THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE The most cautious—dull—speculation might be that the actors as a rule spoke a uniform version of Puttenham’s Southern Educated. It

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is possible to remain skeptical. While the orthography of serious roles does not indicate special accent, that does not rule it out, either— as we see from stage performance of Shakespeare today. For instance in Deborah Warner’s 1989 RSC production of King John at The Other Place, it was striking that the King himself (played by Nicholas Woodeson) should have looked and sounded so self-made and small-scale, a very modern sort of cross between a Bosnian warlord and an Essex scrap dealer or long-distance trucker. This was a refreshing reminder that to look at England from Rome, in the Middle Ages, might have been quite like looking at, say, Bosnia, from NATO headquarters now. Such a professional stage representation of King John himself was surely not practicable—indeed, I doubt if it was thinkable—in Britain in the Age of Reith, before 1960, before cultural prestige had begun to desert Oxford Received Pronunciation. The question of accent is associated with other questions about the playwright’s arts of characterization and the actor’s style. Today in England’s professional theater, experience seems to indicate that the use of regional or class-inflected accents for Shakespeare plays constitutes a telling code, and one that can either enhance or reduce the impression of specificity, whether personal or social. In a recent English instance, the Northern Broadside Company (I hope this is still the case—I have yet to see them at work) performs Shakespeare in exclusively Yorkshire accents. Whereas this can be expected to be welcomed in Halifax or Hull, where an audience can cope with it—as presumably today still in Wakefield you do not need to be a trained medievalist to follow an unmodernized performance of the Wakefield Secunda Pastorum—the case is altered for spectators from farther afield. In this connection the actor Robert Stephens recalled his experience in about 1960 at the Royal Court Theatre, when the aim was a naturalistic way of speaking onstage: “You have to appear to be naturalistic but you can’t be naturalistic because you won’t be heard beyond the third row of the stalls. . . . [W]hatever you are playing you must be clear to the audience.”19 When one calls to mind the touring routes of the players in Elizabethan England, now revealed by the REED editors as an integral part of company life, this imperative was a tall order: for instance the Queen’s Men in 1592–93 visited Aldeburgh, Ipswich, Maidstone, Faversham, Canterbury, Fordwich, New Romney, Reading, Oxford, Lyme Regis, Plymouth, Exeter, Barnstaple, Bridgwater, Leicester, Chatsworth, Kendal, Newcastle, and York.20 Throughout the period London acting companies kept up their tours, even to the remote dialect strongholds—the West and North, still today the very designations (or warnings to the unwary) that you see on motorway signs. In short the London players were in repeated contact with provincial speech-communities, identified by

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the Elizabethan grammarian Alexander Gill in his Logonomia Anglica (1619) as six in number: the general, the northern, the southern, the eastern, the western, and—the poetic! In many serious plays as well as popular histories like George a Greene The Pinder of Wakefield (1599), the plots feature regional dissent from, or conflict with, the city or court in London: magnificently so in Shakespeare’s history plays. For this very reason it is assumed that Elizabethan players habitually spoke serious roles in Puttenham’s Southern Educated, as a kind of lingua franca. It might be, but evidence is lacking. On the other hand, the indications are that in Elizabethan London, as in the London of 1960, a variety of regional accents and pronunciation was a familiar—indeed, an inevitable—feature of daily life in the streets and alehouses and the law courts; so much so, in fact, as the evidence from orthography for comic roles shows, that a number of regional and foreign accents were fully accepted to the point of being stage-conventionalized. The dramatic significance of this, as anyone can see in Henry V, can be rich in comedy. In at least one case, Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605), accent is used to serve not only comic and farcical purposes, but also powerfully serious dramatic ones. In such serious major roles as Marlowe’s Barabas, Shakespeare’s Shylock, and above all Othello, the playwright suggests a distinct exotic idiolect through vocabulary, syntax, and other features. Modern performances have shown how seamlessly a foreign accent fits such parts.

DOUBLING AND SHIFTING OF SPEECH Furthermore, in Elizabethan stage performance, except for the two or three players who took the longest roles, it was customary for actors to play several parts. Did this routine practice of doubling encourage players to include a quick change of accent whenever they switched dress and wig? Take Webster’s “induction” to Marston’s play The Malcontent (1604). Here you have a Stoppard-style opening, with several of the company’s well-known leading actors—Sinklo, Condell, Lowin, Burbage —coming on as themselves and being asked by a spectator (played by the actor Will Sly) whether the actor Will Sly is about. After some chat Burbage (the company’s star actor who created tragic hero roles, including Hamlet), leaves to get ready for the play. It is intriguing to wonder whether these actors used their own real-life voices when performing themselves here, especially as during the play itself Burbage has the role of Duke Altofront, who spends half his time disguised as a bitter-mouthed malcontent Malevole. At one point he is surprised

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by the entry of a character and, says the stage direction, “he shifteth his speech.”21 What is the nature of the voice change here? The simplest explanation is “switch to a different accent.” In Measure for Measure Shakespeare’s Duke spends much time disguised as a friar. At one point he is forced to reveal his true identity to the Provost. I do not think a change of accent is indicated. But in King Lear Edgar disguises himself not only as the deranged beggar Poor Tom but also, when with his blinded father, Gloucester, as a peasant of Kent, and there Shakespeare makes explicit in orthography his requirement of rustic speech and accent. In The Revenger’s Tragedy the hero Vindice takes on his second additional role using a rustic accent, which the playwright indicates orthographically. I have seen two productions of the play, and I am sure this accent makes the action clearer for an audience as well as more enjoyable.

CONCLUSIONS AND SPECULATIONS We do need to distinguish trivial from serious significance in the dramatic use of accent and pronunciation, especially because the colloquial speech of the poor and illiterate is often intended mainly to get laughs, whether mocking or sentimental. Yet Ben Jonson, one of the three playwrights involved in Eastward Ho!, habitually displays in his comic drama such sharp alertness to the dramatic possibilities of accent that I suspect—given how carefully he devises social gradations and specified locations and language for the persons of his comic worlds, from 1598 with Every Man In to 1616 with The Devil Is an Ass— that in performance he wanted much more widespread use of differing accents than is indicated in the orthography. Thus, in Jonson’s The Alchemist Face and Subtle and Dol are all low-born and use a low register of language among themselves, so presumably are intended to switch to a different accent every time a customer enters the house. This accent is presumably posher—or attempted posher, since Dol’s father, so we are told in 4.1.57, was an Irish costermonger, which might imply that we hear a hint or two of Irish brogue in her cockney and even in her posh accent, and this could enhance the comedy of her telling Mammon she is “a poor baron’s daughter.” I find it tantalizing, this idea that Jonson, and Shakespeare too, and the others, may have used, as a matter of convenience, a uniform orthography for the major parts of their play-scripts, but that they did not necessarily expect the players uniformly to use Southern Educated accents. Puttenham’s emphasis on the unmistakability of court speech suggests that there was indeed a general public Elizabethan capacity to

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recognize different accents and pronunciation as signals, as sociocultural indicators. At the turn of the century, circa 1600, some eight thousand to ten thousand people per year were migrating to London from the regions. An inevitable feature of daily life must have been hearing a variety of regional accents and dialects in the streets and alehouses and law courts. No wonder some were stage-conventionalized. All in all, the orthographic indication of dialect and accent in Elizabethan play-scripts is carefully specific and detailed, so much so that it would evidently be a time-consuming and demanding exercise for the playwright to write dialogue at length in this form (even Bernard Shaw in Pygmalion reverts to normal orthography for Eliza, after the first few pages registering her Cockney with orthographic exactitude). For this reason alone it need be no surprise that the bulk of the text in an Elizabethan play does not give orthographic indication of accent and pronunciation, especially when one considers the pressure of time under which many playwrights wrote. They had, after all, other methods to indicate the dramatic significance of the regional and national origins of the persons in their plays. I imagine there was a further practical reason for using a uniform orthography: the playwrights’ awareness of the impracticability of trying to tie interpretation down in such a way, given the inherent variability of theater, of live performance art, in which different actors may successively play a given role without all possessing the same skills in vocal mimicry. Again, differing theatrical occasions require different styles of performance: the Globe, Blackfriars, court, touring, each could have involved changes going further than mere adjustments of nuance. A somewhat different case is represented by the line from Eastward Ho: “I ken the man weel; he’s one of my thirty-pound knights” (4.1.167–68). It was written, as we see from its orthography, to be spoken in a Scots accent. But this was to be delivered not just in a common-or-garden Scots accent, it was intended to be recognizably the accent of a specific person, and one well known in London in 1605, King James I. The imitation was evidently notable—indeed, it was promptly noted even at court, and the playwrights wound up in jail. There would be nothing in itself remarkable for an Elizabethan audience about this representation of a regional or foreign accent and pronunciation; on the contrary, in comedy it was familiar and conventionalized (the most popular varieties—French, Scots, Irish, and Welsh accents—are deliberately brought together in Henry V). What is unusual about the case of Eastward Ho! is the attempt at mimicry of a well-known living person. There are other instances of mocking impersonation of recognizable real persons—of the playwrights

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Dekker, Marston, and Jonson themselves (and these I imagine probably involved vocal mimicry also)—in the plays collectively representing the War of the Theatres. Elsewhere, as we have seen, in Webster’s induction to The Malcontent, the company’s leading actors —Sly, Sinklo, Burbage, Condell, and Lowin—are required to perform themselves before taking their fictional roles. Few things seem more certain about Elizabethan stage practice than that the audience took delight in low colloquial speech with its colorful pronunciations and mistaking of words, and Shakespeare goes further than his fellow dramatists in developing this rich field, giving his actors wonderful opportunities with the speech of uneducated lower-class characters, often writing in dialectal features and signaling orthographically the required accent and pronunciation. There might be a point, therefore, in turning to the Cade rebellion in 2 Henry VI. There it is repeatedly stressed that the rebels hail from Kent (whereas Holinshed asserts they came from several counties). For Shakespeare’s London audiences Kent was close enough to be specifically identifiable—anyone might hear Kentish accents any day of the week where the Dover road ran through Southwark. Shakespeare gives Jack Cade himself a certain oratorical power, and on several occasions, confronting men of rank, he speaks in verse. Cade makes his first appearance at the head of a body of his men, flanked by his mates Dick and Smith. They are artisans, not mere rogues or “base drudges” as Stafford calls them. Their behavior is structured, only its aim is the exact inverse of the gravity characterizing their highborn opponents. Cade’s first scene (4.2.31ff.) shows him confirmed in his authority precisely because his mates persistently interrupt him—their freedom to make mock of him is in part an expression of their male bonding, and it also serves to confirm and display the attitude of defiance that they have in common (as Cade himself says at the conclusion of the scene, “then are we in order when we are most out of order”). For these artisans, calling a spade a spade is the proper discourse for their politics, and it seems unthinkable that they would not speak in their native Kent accent. Yet this Kentish accent is not represented in the text orthographically. Why not? I suggest that the sheer length of the Cade scenes is reason enough, but the Cade scenes do offer other signs that Shakespeare required the accent. His dramaturgy reveals through various other, nonorthographic signs his very clear requirement that regional accent and pronunciation are to be used. The scenes are the stronger when the accent of the rebels sounds authentic, and Cade should be seen to represent a real political energy and enterprise. Whatever view one

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takes of him, he is certainly no laughing matter. This is an instance where regional accent would serve serious dramatic purposes. Thanks to modern scholars and actors, many of the borders separating us from the Elizabethans’ theater and their stage practice have been crossed; it is generally agreed that in their theater the word was king; but if there is less certainty about how it may have sounded, there is a case for assembling evidence, whether direct or indirect, and testing a hypothesis or two.

NOTES 1. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 118. 2. Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleen Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 245–46. 3. Cited by Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 119. 4. Sara van den Berg, “Marking his Place: Ben Jonson’s Punctuation,” Early Modern Literary Studies 1, no. 3 (1995): 1–8. 5. Ben Jonson, The Works, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), 8:551. 6. Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Robert N. Watson (London: A. and C. Black, 2003), xxxii–xxxiii. 7. See The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1690. 8. Smith, Acoustic World, 241. 9. Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Anthony Parr, 2nd ed. (London: A. and C. Black, 1990). 10. Tom Courtenay, Dear Tom: Letters from Home (London: Doubleday, 2000), 112– 14. 11. An article in The Daily Telegraph (March 24, 2001, Weekend Feature) about the National Theatre’s production of My Fair Lady was chiefly concerned with the feat of an actress, “East End soap star” Martine McCutcheon, who learned Received Pronunciation for the part. The secretary of the Society of Teachers of Speech and Drama is quoted as saying it must not be called “elocution” because the society “dropped the word years ago, things have changed so much. . . . We’re much like the drama schools and teach RP as just another accent.” 12. William Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, ed. Herbert Weil and Judith Weil, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 13. Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington, The English Shakespeare Company: The Story of “The War of the Roses,” 1986–1989 (London: Nick Hern Books, 1990), 18. 14. Alan Bennett, “Diary,” London Review of Books, November 2, 2000. 15. George Puttenham, “The Arte of English Poesie,” in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. G. Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), 2:144. 16. Ibid., 150–51. 17. Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. G. R. Hibbard, new ed. (London: A. and C. Black, 2007). 18. James R. Siemon, “All right Englishe alike? Social Accents and Shakespearean Drama” (unpublished seminar paper, World Shakespeare Congress, Valencia, 2001);

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see also his Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). 19. Robert Stephens, RSC Magazine, Spring 1992. 20. Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth McLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 183. 21. See John Marston, The Malcontent, ed. Bernard Harris (London: A. and C. Black, 1967), 1.3.42.

Shakespeare and Dance: Dissolving Boundaries Alan Brissenden

DIETER MEHL BEGINS HIS DETAILED STUDY OF THE ELIZABETHAN DUMB show with some typically perceptive remarks. “Speech and action have been the two basic elements of drama in every age; their mutual interplay” he writes, “is one of the most complex and interesting problems in the history of drama. Thus in tracing the development of early Elizabethan drama we shall see how various attempts were made to strike a balance between the two extremes, . . . until with the emergence of Shakespeare’s major plays a perfect, if temporary, fusion of the two seems to have been achieved.”1 It was in the late eighteenth century that speech was done away with altogether, and action alone, in the form of dance, was first used to interpret Shakespeare’s plays on the stage. This essay considers the use of Shakespeare’s plays as material for dance works, from the invention of narrative ballet some two hundred and fifty years ago to the technological opportunities of the present. Most space is given to versions of Romeo and Juliet, appropriately, as that tragedy has been choreographed far more often than any of the other plays, but there are also discussions of ballets based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Richard III, and an anthology piece, The Shakespeare Dances. Dance had been associated with the plays from the beginning. Only eight contain no mention of dance in some form and at least twelve, and probably fifteen, contain actual dancing. Directors often add them to others, sometimes incongruously. During the late seventeenth century dance was an important part of musicalized versions, the most famous of them The Fairy Queen, an adaptation, probably by Thomas Betterton, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with “Singers and Dancers, Scenes, Machines, and Decorations, all most profusely set off,”2 first performed at Dorset Garden Theatre in 1692. Henry Purcell’s music continues to delight audiences, and in 1946 the Sadler’s Wells opera and ballet companies joined forces to pro92

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duce a version that concentrated on the quarrel between Oberon and Titania over the changeling boy, kept spoken text to a minimum, but used more of Shakespeare’s than the seventeenth-century adaptation’s, and choreography by Frederick Ashton. A revival in 1951 had choreography by John Cranko. Both men would later create important full-length Shakespearian ballets. But it was the tragedies that first attracted dance makers. During the later eighteenth century the great dancer, choreographer, and theorist Jean-Georges Noverre and others developed the idea of ballet d’action—narrative ballet—and mythological and literary themes became the basis for many of their works. Noverre was impressed by the realism of English actors, especially Garrick, who invited him to Drury Lane in 1755. Although in London only until 1757 on that occasion, Noverre aimed to join narrative and the prevailing French style of ballet, urging the greater importance of mime over divertissement—dances (and songs) inserted into stage spectacles, including operas and plays, or performed at the beginning or end. “I have dared to fathom the art of devising ballets with action” he wrote, “to re-unite action with dancing; to accord it some expression and purpose. I have dared to tread new paths.”3 Noverre produced an Antony and Cleopatra when he was at Stuttgart’s Hoftheater, probably in 1760, but there is nothing to indicate that this was derived from Shakespeare’s play, and the amorous Roman and his Egyptian queen had long been a subject for French dramatists. One of Noverre’s leading dancers at Stuttgart, Charles LePicq, appeared at the King’s Theatre in London during the 1780s. Comments in the Public Advertiser for May 3, 1784, give some notion of his performance: “LePicq is the most graceful dancer in Europe, and excells every Competitor in the Narrative and Pathos of Gesticulation.” In 1785 he created the title role in his own Macbeth, his only Shakespearian ballet, and the Public Advertiser remarked of the performers, perhaps a little patronizingly: “[C]onsidering the narrow boundaries of their art, which is tonguetied, they discoursed ‘with most miraculous organs.’ ”4 The tongue-tied nature of the dancers’ art did nothing to discourage the development of the ballet d’action, or the choice of Shakespearian tragedies as choreographic material. In the same year that LePicq produced Macbeth in London, in Venice Eusebio Luzzi created his Romeo and Juliet, the first recorded version of the most frequently choreographed of all the plays. Filippo Beretti produced his in 1788 for La Scala, Milan; Ivan Valberkh’s version took the stage in St. Petersburg in 1809, and in 1811 the father of Danish ballet (though an Italian), Vincenzo Galleotti, produced his Romeo and Juliet in Copenhagen, appearing himself when seventy-seven as Friar

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Laurence, and in 1816, the last year of his life, he devised a Macbeth, his final major work. In Venice Galleotti had studied the theories and works of Gaspero Angiolini, along with Noverre one of the pioneers of ballet d’action, who believed in the collaborative unity of a strong narrative line, costumes, stage design, and the expressiveness of the dancer’s body. While we can only imagine what such early ballets were like, constructing our thoughts from letters, journals, press reports, books, and graphic representations, it has been possible to tap the memory of Zora Semberová,5 the first dancer of Juliet to a score by Sergey Prokofiev. Born in 1913, she studied with the great classical teachers Olga Preobrajenska and Tatjana Gvovsky, and Rosalia Chladek, a leader in modern dance. When, as principal dancer at the Brno State Theatre for Opera and Ballet, Semberová was cast as Juliet in Ivo Psota’s ballet, which premiered on December 30, 1938, to his initial dismay she insisted on dancing in soft shoes, not the stiffened pointe shoes of classical ballet, which she felt would inhibit the kind of dramatic expression the role demanded. She did not study the play beforehand, but had a copy with her during rehearsals. Psota, who also took the role of Romeo, concentrated on the story of the lovers, and she as a dancer “followed the music, not only the story, [wanting] to express the feeling. . . . You as a dancer select what you think [the characters] feel,” she has said. “I didn’t want to imitate feeling, I wanted to be truthful. Very often dancers pretend; I was against this.” She listened to the music, rather than reading the play, as “the music is nearer to dance.” The concentration was not simply on the story, but in the story, as Psota did not use the full Prokofiev score, composed 1935–36, but one of the two suites drawn from it in 1936, either no. 1, op. 64a or no. 2, op. 64b, each between thirty and forty minutes long. The ballet made up the first half of a program completed by Vilém Blodek’s opera In the Well (1867). According to Semberová, Psota’s shorter ballet was much better than later full-length versions because the content was really about the lovers, and did not contain the many extraneous dances of those using the full score, which in a danced performance can run for nearly four hours.6 In certain ways, this first version was closer to the play. When they meet at the Capulets’ ball, Shakespeare’s young lovers do not dance, contrary to many productions and most ballets. At the end of the ball, after their sudden conflagration of love, Juliet asks the Nurse the identity of the young man “that would not dance” (1.5.132).7 In Brno in 1938, Romeo and Juliet saw each other from opposite sides of the stage, gazed at each other for a time from a distance, but did not

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dance. Unlike in the text, they also did not kiss—not until the balcony scene, that is. And here, Romeo climbed up to Juliet, and the scene opened up into her bedroom, where their rapturous duet took place. There were few lifts—the choreography was not acrobatic, “it was not fashionable.”8 When she resisted being married to Paris, Juliet’s father was very strict, but not cruel, not rough, though when he appeared, Semberová says, she “got shocked.” At the end, the two families were reconciled over the dead bodies of their children, as in Shakespeare, where many later versions end with the death of Juliet. The brevity of Psota’s Romeo and Juliet must have injected something of the play’s rushing urgency into the ballet. The first choreographer to use the full score, Leonid Lavrovsky, composed with Prokofiev and Sergei Radlov an elaborate libretto with three acts comprising thirteen scenes, a prologue, and an epilogue. The ballet premiered at the Kirov Theater, Leningrad, on January 11, 1940, with Konstantin Sergeyev and Galina Ulanova in the leading roles. In December 1946 it entered the repertoire of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater Ballet, and it was this company that the New York Herald Tribune critic Edwin Denby saw at the Metropolitan Opera House in April 1959. The ballet stays close to Shakespeare’s plot, and the principles of the early ballets d’action are followed in that the story is related through a considerable amount of mime. In notes he published on his ideas for the ballet, Lavrovsky had written, “In ballet, words are absent and the effect of every phrase of mime must correspond with the spoken language of the stage characters. . . . Ballet is a choreographic play in which the dancing must arise naturally from the mimed action, or the mimed action be the logical sequence of the dancing.”9 Less than delighted by some aspects of this approach, Denby lamented: The pantomime points of the crowd scenes are made obvious and then made obvious again. Succinctness, surprise, leaps in logic—the fun of pantomime—are avoided. . . . The pace is that of an army’s indoctrination lecture. When the crowd dances, the dancing is more stage business. Briefly the love scenes—the balcony, bedroom, and tomb duets—hint at a kind of dance that isn’t stage business: on the balcony, a few classic steps; in the bedroom, a few lifts; in the tomb, a single lift, a very fine one. But even alone together the lovers keep pantomiming: the ballet doesn’t venture into the other world of metaphor a dance can develop.10

He had little but praise for Ulanova, however: for him her “vividness saved the first night.”11

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By 1963 the production appears to have changed, or else the Sunday Times critic Richard Buckle was completely at odds with Denby— probably a little of both. After seeing the Bolshoi at Covent Garden in July of that year, Buckle wrote enthusiastically, “It is extraordinary how the whole big company lives the drama and makes it live for us,” even saying that the ballet had something of the meteoric quality of the play. He does complain at “the inclusion of five jesters,” but adds mollifyingly that they “capered admirably.”12 He does not mention mime at all, but colorfully describes the scene of the carrying off of the dead Tybalt as “epic, monumental,” and Lady Capulet, borne aloft on the bier as “a fury—Siddons and Bernhardt.” Reviewing the 1956 film of the ballet, Denby had groaned, “[T]he heavy mime style bores you. So when Lady Capulet, with an awesome gesture, rends her bodice in grief over Tybalt, you find yourself peeking at her underwear to see if that too is in period.”13 The boundaries of the text are stretched and pulled in all sorts of directions by the demands of the music and the libretto. For a start, the prologue is a tableau showing Friar Laurence blessing the marriage of Romeo and Juliet. The first scene of act 2, set in Verona’s main square, includes several dances for members of the crowd and waitresses from the inn, a procession carrying an image of the Madonna, and Benvolio and Mercutio flirting with girls. A large crowd attends Juliet’s funeral, and Paris is left praying by the tomb; he leaves before Romeo arrives, thus escaping death. Friar Laurence is absent, and the reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets takes place in the epilogue. This is all very different from Prokofiev’s original intention. In 1935 the composer and the radical dramatist Sergei Radlov saw the young lovers as struggling against feudal attitudes toward love and marriage, and they let them live. Friar Laurence was on hand to prevent Romeo killing himself, Juliet awoke, and the ballet ended in happiness. They called the ballet Romeo and Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare. The Soviet cultural authorities, scandalized, banned the work, and Prokofiev, realizing his score would not be performed, succumbed and composed a tragic ending, completing it in 1938. Lavrovsky became interested, and after a good deal of wrangling, with rewritings and unwillingly composed additions, the Lavrovsky version had its premiere—and even then with some musical alterations by the choreographer. The original libretto and score were unearthed in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow by the Princeton musicologist Simon Morrison, to whom I am indebted for this exciting information. The first performance of the ballet with the original libretto

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and music, choreographed by Mark Morris and danced by his company, was given on July 4, 2008, at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College in New York State. Antony Tudor’s one-act ballet for American Ballet Theatre, which had its premiere on April 6, 1943, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, ended with the deaths of the lovers. The score was arranged by Antal Dorati from works by Frederick Delius—not an obvious choice, and Denby, who thought the piece “a personal version of the story, a reverie on the subject, with muted and oppressed images,” considered the score “background music, as soundtrack . . . [but] of high quality.”14 The nine scenes flowed into one another, aided by a unit set with a colonnade at the back, and the use of enclosing drapes for scenes such as Friar Laurence’s cell. Tudor produces Capulet’s niece Rosaline for Romeo, and gives the lovers a dance at the ball, but he follows Shakespeare in keeping them apart in the balcony scene, as Ivo Psota did. Deborah Jowitt wrote in the Village Voice: “There is no grand pas de deux for the balcony scene: alone on the stage floor, Romeo bursts into an exulting stammer of leaps and postures and wide-flung gestures, while Juliet on the balcony above returns his passion with slow and happy stretchings and curvings of her body and arms.”15 This is hugely different from the scene in Kenneth MacMillan’s version for the Royal Ballet, in which Juliet descends and their ecstasy is expressed through her swift runs and rapturous arm movements, Romeo’s whipping turns and high leaps and a series of spectacular and varied lifts, catching her from a turning jump, swinging her up, and running with her on his shoulder, for instance. MacMillan, whose Romeo and Juliet premiered at Covent Garden on February 9, 1965, followed Tudor in including the unkind Rosaline in the cast, and increased her importance by giving her Tybalt as a partner, reinforcing the animosity between the two families. As in Tudor, she rejects Romeo at the beginning of the ballet, but she also provides a sophisticated contrast to the three whores who figure largely in the marketplace scenes, flirting, kissing, and dancing with Romeo, Benvolio, and Mercutio (in fact, there is rather too much of them). The brawl develops as in Shakespeare, only much further, with a pile of bodies dragged center stage before the Duke as he restores order. In MacMillan’s act 1, scene 3, Rosaline teases Romeo at the entrance to the Capulets’ ball. Tybalt presents her with a rose, which she drops; the masked Romeo returns it to her. Recognizing him, she accepts it, but enters the ball with Tybalt. Inside, she continues to reject Romeo, and it is when he sees Juliet dancing with Paris that he is so suddenly smitten, as she is when the dance brings her in front of him.

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MacMillan then creates a splendid opportunity for the expression of their impetuous passion. Juliet sits center stage, playing a lute to accompany her six friends in a dance, but Romeo takes over with a joyous series of turning leaps and virtuosic steps, which concludes with a spinning line of pirouettes and a finish on one knee in front of her. Juliet follows this with a solo echoing his, and directed at him; he joins her, and, in a daze, she raises her arms above and in front of her as he lifts her—a movement seen again in the balcony scene. They are separated by Old Capulet, Paris, and a furious Tybalt, but Mercutio and Benvolio have cheeky, taunting solos, and after Mercutio mimes drawing a sword he runs off, pursued by Tybalt. Later, left alone the lovers have a passionate duet, with deep arabesques and soaring lifts. Discovering them, Tybalt orders Romeo to leave, but Old Capulet intervenes and makes them shake hands. In the next dance Rosaline partners Romeo and Tybalt Juliet, but the lovers manage to come together again, and Romeo runs off, happy. Paris, the Nurse, Capulet, and Tybalt are concerned as the scene ends. In the following apron scene, outside the Capulet house, the guests leaving, Tybalt starts to go after Mercutio and Benvolio with his sword, but is held back by Lady Capulet. MacMillan took various narrative elements from act 1, scene 5, developed its emotions and ideas, changed the order of events, and expressed the drama’s essential underlying tensions as well as the personalities of the characters and the birth of love. When Rudolf Nureyev choreographed the play for London Festival Ballet in 1977, he pared down the narrative, added new material, and emphasized family conflict, sex, and morbidity. The ballet begins and ends with four black-cloaked figures running low across the apron, stopping at times to throw dice. As they depart a cart piled with dead bodies is drawn across the stage. Romeo enters, dances a romantic solo, then leaves, and as sunset colors the sky the stage slowly fills with Montagues and Capulets. Tension rises as the two sides begin to stamp and sneer at each other until a brawl develops. Romeo returns and tries to stop the fighting, but Tybalt enters with drawn sword, Mercutio takes him on, and although the Duke arrives to end the melée, the two sides withdraw, still threatening each other. The ball of the next scene begins with little narrative drive, but the antagonism toward the Montagues is intensified by a ritual in which a large Montague flag is held out flat and the men point their long swords into the center. Tybalt and Lady Capulet, who have been seen earlier in a secret sensual embrace, lead a dance, and Juliet and her friends are joined by Paris. When Romeo and his friends enter, the lovers see each other, are instantly attracted, and dance together, and

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Mercutio and Paris part them. When the other guests retire to the back of the stage for a banquet, Romeo and Juliet dance and kiss, and in their mounting rapture are seen by Tybalt, who accuses Romeo to Capulet. As in the play, Capulet prevents him attacking the lovestruck Romeo, who is standing center stage, dazed. Mercutio enters, dancing in and out of the guests to distract them, and a game of blindman’s buff follows, ritualized by the dancers’ forming a wheel of fortune, moving in concentric circles with Rosaline (yes, she is a guest at the ball) held aloft in the center. When Tybalt bumps into Romeo, they tear off their blindfolds and Romeo runs off, Tybalt in pursuit. In this scene, Nureyev gives dramatic visual expression to Shakespeare’s themes of fate and conflict. He also develops the relationship between Lady Capulet and Tybalt far beyond the play’s five lines she speaks when he is found dead (3.1.145–50), but that is in keeping with the extravagant gestures of grief given her by Lavrovsky and others such as John Cranko (1958), who have her casting herself on his body as it is carried out. Yuri Grigorovich, who revised Lavrovsky in 1979, brings Juliet on as well, and a corps de ballet of weeping, swaying women. Nureyev also brings both Capulet women onstage but, typically, pushes the emotion even further. After pouring out her anguished grief over Tybalt’s corpse, Juliet rises, turns, and sees the stunned Romeo standing immobile. She storms at him, slaps his face, then recoils in horror at what she has done before running off. This is a prelude to the following scene in her bedroom, which gives danced expression to Juliet’s thought that her “grave is like to be my wedding-bed” (1.5.135). Here Nuyerev invents a dream in which Death becomes a tall, black-cloaked figure with a skull head. Juliet, trancelike, dances with him. At the end, he lifts her, revealing he is naked but for a dance belt, then lays her on the bed, lies on top of her, and draws his cloak over both of them. The reaction when her body is discovered contrasts with the weeping and wailing of the play. There are no histrionics; instead, there is a quiet discovery by Lady Capulet, a tableau of the parents, the Nurse and Paris, and a slow procession as Juliet’s body is carried out. There is nothing like Shakespeare’s comedy for Peter and the musicians to lighten the melancholy (4.5.100–138). The next two scenes show Friar Laurence’s messenger being killed by thugs, who tear up his letter to Romeo, and then a dream of Romeo in which Juliet comes to him with six of her friends. The final scene in the crypt brings the death of Paris, after which Romeo lifts Juliet’s limp body from the tomb and dances with it, echoing movements from their love duet. He dies, she wakes, at first not seeing him. When she does, she thinks him alive, discovering the truth when she kisses him; she draws his

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dagger, kills herself and drags herself to kiss him again as she dies. The two families slowly enter, become reconciled and kneel before the tomb. The gamblers who opened the ballet run low again across the apron, pausing to cast their dice. Nureyev’s version is sometimes choreographically messy, but it provides a good example of a conventional retelling of the narrative, illuminating themes by introducing such elements as dreams, inventing characters and relationships, and giving a frame to the whole work. While Lavrovsky, MacMillan, Cranko, Nureyev, and others like them dissolve the boundaries between the play and dance by such techniques, there are some who reinterpret the text far more radically. For the Lyon Opera Ballet in 1990, for example, Angelin Precolcaj set the story in a modern police state; Tybalt does not die, but is a dictator in a regimented society in which Romeo and Juliet are the only free spirits. When Paul Grinwis created The Eternal Lovers for the Borovansky Ballet in 1951, using Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, he invented a narrative depicting the struggle between Love and Death for the lovers’ souls after death. The setting was a surreal Renaissance landscape, somewhat Dalí-esque. This was the first Shakespearian ballet made for an Australian company, and of the twenty-five more created to 2007, nine were derived from this play. The West Australian Ballet produced no less than five of these, including two pas de deux, two full-length narrative works, and in 1999, Natalie Weir’s Dry Sorrow (cf. Romeo and Juliet, 3.5.59), a one-act interpretative response to the final scene, set to Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead and using the lovers with a chorus of eight dancers. The tomb on which Juliet lay also served for the lovers’ bed, as it may well have done on the Elizabethan stage: when Shakespeare’s desperate Juliet is being coerced into marriage with Paris, she begs her mother to postpone the wedding, or if not to “make the bridal bed / In that dim monument where Tybalt lies” (3.5.200–201), and Elizabethan fourposters strongly resemble many monumental tombs of the period. I have given so much attention to Romeo and Juliet because there have been at least 130 danced versions, and several pas de deux, since Luzzi’s in 1785—far more than have been made from any other of the plays. Among the comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has attracted choreographers the most, and Marius Petipa’s version, created in 1876 for the St. Petersburg Hermitage Theatre with Mendelssohn’s overture as the music, was the first significant work created from one of them. Mikhail Fokine revised it in 1906 for performance at the St. Petersburg Imperial Theater School, where he

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was teaching—apprentice work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest choreographers. More notably, another of the era’s great choreographers, George Balanchine, chose the play for his first full-length ballet, which premiered on January 17, 1962, with the New York City Ballet at the City Center, New York. Balanchine had long had an affection for the play, having appeared when about eight years old as an elf in a production at the Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg. He arranged dances for a 1950 production in Stratford, Connecticut, but became really interested in Mendelssohn’s music, and has written, “I think it can be said that the ballet was inspired by the score.”16 Mendelssohn’s incidental music not being sufficient for a full-length work, Balanchine added the Symphony no. 9 for Strings and the Son and Stranger overture, but raises the curtain on the action before the end of the overture, the stage filling with small fairies (danced by children), adult elves, and Puck. A tearful Helena wanders through the forest; Oberon and Titania meet, and quarrel over the changeling boy; the mechanicals are seen in the background. They all leave, and Theseus and Hippolyta and the lovers have their moment before the stage is left to Helena, then finally the fairies as the overture ends. The essentials of the plot have been expressed rapidly with brief but clear mime, and the narrative can get under way. Not that the story progresses much in the next scene, which centers on a glamorous duet for Titania, in flowing, diaphanous pink, and a partner in tights and short tunic. However, when Puck makes an attempt to steal the boy, he is beaten off by Titania’s attendants. Similarly, the next scene, danced to the scherzo, is filled with brilliant virtuosic dancing for Oberon—with swift airborne beats and high turning jumps, he seems to be more above the ground than touching it. He sends Puck off to get the magical flower, and when the lovers arrive confusion follows as in the play, but again, with brief, rapid mime, and dance to express the emotional action. There is almost too much anguish and anger at times for the situation to be humorous, Hermia particularly being given movements that quell laughter. Later, alone, she expresses fear and dismay through a series of traveling pirouettes. Puck disrupts the mechanicals’ rehearsal, assifies Bottom, and leads him to the sleeping Titania; she awakes and dances with him to the nocturne. Limp and uninterested, he has to be shown how to partner her. As she leads him off, he turns back to pick up the grass she has given him. It is curiously asexual, and when Oberon wakes her with the antidote, her reaction is similarly low key. As mist envelops the forest, the court hunting dogs run through the trees, Puck

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guides the lovers to their proper places to be discovered by Theseus and Hippolyta, and the first act ends. The rapid crosscutting of the choreography in the forest, expressive of the discords of the plot, is gloriously contrasted by the ordered formality of that for act 2. The women are in tutus, the men in adaptations of short classical Greek tunics, and the whole act is given over to celebration through dance, much of it in symmetrical ensemble. The mechanicals do not appear to present their play, but a duet for two dancers, the long centerpiece of a dance for seven couples, has a gentleness and elegance that is the diametric opposite of the sad/funny combination of the bewitched Titania and bemused Bottom—“the fulfilled dream of love foretold in the first act,” as the New Yorker critic Arlene Croce put it.17 The three marriage couples lead some of the dances, including the last—it has to be said that eventually the plethora of steps grows tedious—and the ballet ends in the forest, where Titania and Oberon meet and are reconciled beneath a glowing moon; but, unlike Shakespeare’s fairy monarchs, they depart in opposite directions, because, Balanchine curiously explained, “[t]hey are married but they are not lovers . . . they are not human.”18 So Balanchine compresses the story in the first act and puts a gloss on it in the second, which he makes a showcase for his choreography. Frederick Ashton’s The Dream was part of the Royal Ballet’s triple bill for the Shakespeare quatercentenary, together with Helpmann’s Hamlet (1948) and MacMillan’s new Images of Love, based on themes from the sonnets. With conductor John Lanchbery, who arranged Mendelssohn’s incidental music, Ashton composed a libretto omitting the court characters so that the ballet becomes an essay on love and human nature. The argument and reconciliation of Oberon and Titania is the main plot, supported by the entanglements of the four lovers. The imbroglio resulting from Puck’s mistake with the flower juice is genuinely funny—indeed, in his important study of Ashton, David Vaughan claims: “There is no funnier passage in ballet than the pas de quatre in which people keep getting picked up and put down again out of the way.”19 With piquant humor, Ashton puts Bottom into pointe shoes when he is transformed by Puck (an idea borrowed by Peter Brook in his 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production), but while this may elevate him some little way toward the fairy lightness of Titania, her descent to earthiness is characterized by her gleeful riding on his back and amorous entwinings. Where the scherzo is the music for brilliant virtuosic dancing for Oberon, as in Balanchine, and Puck, the nocturne provides the climax of the Dream, with the reconciliation of Titania and Oberon, though this comes through her loving submission to him, imaged in

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a bending from the waist as she turns toward him from a supported arabesque. There can be no doubt that in their tender sensuality, and in their dancing not just with each other but for each other, this royal fairy couple have been lovers, and, “new in amity” (Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.87), will be again. Where Ashton and his costume designer, David Walker, turned to Victorian lithographs of fashion and the romantic ballet for inspiration, in 2006 Chrissie Parrott, while using Mendelssohn’s music, made innovative use of modern technology for her version for the West Australian Ballet. She encapsulated the early Athens scenes in projections onto a screen, and created a troop of digital fairies that flittered and skittered among the human cast of sixteen. While making Puck the main protagonist, Parrott concentrated on the lovers and Titania and Oberon. At the conclusion, Titania, Oberon, and the changeling boy went off together as a family. A very different kind of entertainment emerged from a 1991 Sydney Dance Company workshop when it became a fully mounted and unique production. In this anthology, The Shakespeare Dances, a series of “Bard Bits,” choreographed by artistic director Graeme Murphy to John Dankworth’s settings of Shakespeare songs and sonnets sung by Cleo Laine, linked five longer works: “Sleep No More” (Gideon Obarzanek), inspired by Macbeth; “Before the Word” (Kim Walker), presenting Juliet, Ophelia, Cleopatra, and Lady Macbeth; “Hamlet” (Adrian Batchelor), which sought to compress the essence of the play into fifteen minutes; “Lucrece” (Alfred Williams [Taahi]), danced to excerpts from Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia; and “Mooggrah” (Stephen Page), a postcolonial reading of The Tempest, with a score by the choreographer’s brother David—the Page brothers are Aboriginal. An actor spoke the words of two of the sonnets, at times moving with the dancer, and also some of the verse of “Lucrece,” again participating in the action, which was a powerful, if straightforward, interpretation of the story. But “Mooggrah,” an Aboriginal word meaning the “smell of a storm,” was the most interesting of the works. In the first part, Caliban, originally danced by the choreographer, overcomes Prospero, quite good-naturedly; meanwhile Ariel has been standing upstage left with a thin stream of sand falling from cupped hands. In the second part, Prospero is nurtured in the desert by two spirits and dances with Ariel. The sand stream is now dropping down steadily from the sky, and as he follows Ariel out, he stops and allows it to fall on his head and forehead, accepting the land instead of trying to dominate it. In a program note Page wrote, “I was inspired by the spirituality of the story. I have taken the fantasy forward so that

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. . . Prospero, as Shakespeare created him, remains a powerful figure, yet the spirit characters, particularly Ariel, are now more dominant.”20 Some of Shakespeare’s lines were also used in Maggi Sietsma’s Virtually Richard3 choreographed in 2000 for Expressions Dance Company of Brisbane. Sietsma focuses on the women of the play, the death of Clarence, and the last battle. The eight dancers, in jeans and simple tops, are given an eclectic and athletic vocabulary that draws on classical and modern movement, jazz ballet, breakdancing, and other contemporary dance forms. Richard and Margaret speak some of the words; Elizabeth, the mother of the young murdered princes, wails a lament, in unison with the other women; and Abel Valls’s electronic score rumbles, screeches, moans, and startles. A scaffold cube containing a skeletal throne is moved about the performance space, mounted from time to time by Richard and other characters, and black-and-white video and still projections are projected on the back wall. Describing the genesis of the work, Sietsma has said: “The incredible power of Richard’s character is what fascinates me most about the play. I feel almost manipulated or compelled by Shakespeare to admire Richard, even when objectively I know that he is not at all admirable.”21 She succeeded in transferring this essential quality of diabolical attractiveness to the stage, charging the part, with the right actor dancer, with bisexual allure, as John Maxim, the dance critic of the Mexico edition of El Universal / Herald realized: “Licking his thumb or fingers or those of his victims, before, during and after sexually charged dance combinations, slithering about on the floor on his back or belly like a snake, gyrating like a slow-dancer while lightly grasping his crotch. . . . R3 seduces practically everybody in sight, including the audience.”22 The effect of the piece is well caught by Steve Urkowitz of the City College of New York’s Theater Department, who saw a performance during the Eighth International Shakespeare Association Congress in Brisbane in 2006, when he wrote in an e-mail to Sietsma, “The choreographer’s vision was concentrated on relationships between men and women and sometimes children. . . . That classic seduction scene where Richard gets Ann to agree to marry him made more sense with almost no words but with moves of seduction and repulsion and politically-grim understanding—all cooking or exploding out of different body-parts of both dancer/actors at the same instant that stretched for five minutes of beauty and ghastliness.” Virtually Richard3 has a strong spine of narrative, a highly selective but cogent focus, and a mode of expression that unites modern technology, speech, song, and electronic sound with a vibrant combina-

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tion of movement techniques. As an interpretation, it throws new light on Shakespeare’s play, especially in relation to the women characters. It certainly loosens the boundaries between text and mode of performance. When asked where he started from when working with a Shakespearian text, the choreographer Graeme Murphy thoughtfully replied, “It’s great to have a good knowledge of that text, but once you have absorbed it, it’s best to let it go, because when it comes to movements—what you need to deliver the poetry and the essence— words just simply get in the way. If you’re trying to translate words into movement, you’re in the wrong industry. . . . Pavlova said, ‘If I could say it, I wouldn’t have to dance it.’ ” Then he added, impishly, “Wouldn’t that be a great relief!”23 Not all choreographers, Lavrovsky for one, would agree that “words just simply get in the way,” but it is instructive to notice how many of even those discussed above have been inspired by the music—the rhythms of music are different from the rhythms of words and, as Semberová remarked, closer to the rhythms of dance. In the best Shakespearian ballets, codified movement— dance—derived from and interpreting the dramatist’s words, becomes a third element of expression, to be placed alongside the speech and action that Dieter Mehl, in the quotation that began this essay, identified as the two basic elements of drama, and that in Shakespeare’s major plays achieved “a perfect, if temporary, fusion.” Today, modern technology adds yet another element, and gives further dimension to the Shakespearian experience.

NOTES 1. Dieter Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (London: Methuen, 1965), 3. 2. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (1708), cited in The Works of Henry Purcell, ed. Anthony Lewis (London: Novello, 1968), 10:vii. 3. Jean Georges Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets, trans. Cyril W. Beaumont (London: C. W. Beaumont, 1930), 10. 4. Cited in Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Lepicq (also Le Picq, Lepic), Charles,” in International Dictionary of Ballet, ed. Martha Bremser, 2 vols. (Detroit: St. James Press, 1993), 2:846–48, 848. 5. Conversation with the author, Adelaide, November 7, 2007. 6. Edwin Denby, Dance Writings, ed. Robert Cornfield and William MacKay (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 394. 7. See Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (London: Macmillan, 1981), 64–65. All Shakespeare line and scene references are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 8. Conversation with the author, Adelaide, November 7, 2007.

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9. Cited in George Balanchine and Francis Mason, Balanchine’s Festival of Ballet (London: W. H. Allen, 1978), 493. 10. Denby, Dance Writings, 394. 11. Ibid. 12. Richard Buckle, Buckle at the Ballet (New York: Atheneum, 1980), 100–101. 13. Denby, Dance Writings, 392. 14. Ibid., 108. 15. Balanchine and Mason, Balanchine’s Festival of Ballet, 498. 16. Ibid., 360. 17. Arlene Croce, Going to the Dance (New York: Knopf, 1982), 24. 18. Cited in Joseph H. Mazo, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in International Dictionary of Ballet, ed. Bremser, 2:954–55. 19. David Vaughan, Frederick Ashton and His Ballets (London: A. and C. Black, 1977), 342. 20. Stephen Page, The Shakespeare Dances (Pymble: Playbill, [1991]), 5. Theater program. 21. Maggi Sietsma, “Choreographer’s Notes” on Virtually Richard3, http://www .expressions.org.au/vr3touring.php. 22. John Maxim, “Virtually Richard3,” El Universal / The Herald, April 4, 2004. 23. Conversation with the author, Adelaide, November 8, 2007.

Passing Through: Shakespeare, Theater Companies, and the Internet Peter Holland

EVER SINCE DAVID GARRICK SUCCESSFULLY ENFORCED A PROHIBITION ON spectators going behind the scenes during a performance, playgoers’ access to backstage has been severely limited. There were usually three ways in which individual members of an audience could engage with the performers and their spaces, onstage and backstage: the first is, obviously, by watching the performance itself, the purpose for which they have chosen to attend the theater, even if there may be many other kinds of reasons also present (social, familial, amatory); the second is by leaving the theater building and trying, as a friend or fan, to gain access through the stage door a door guarded by the stage-door keeper, a figure as fierce in reality as so often in fictions of the theater; the third, at least in nineteenth-century theaters, is through the pass-door, a door dividing the performers’ space from the audience’s, usually placed close to the plane of the proscenium at the end of a corridor alongside the stalls. The desire to pass through the door that marks the boundary of the performing space, to be allowed into the world behind, the space of creation and of machinery, of transformation and practicalities, is fundamental to the emotional and appetitive experience of theater. Passing, that desire which in the social territories of race and gender is a wish to convincingly appear to be other than oneself, a wish to perform the other, becomes in the wish to go through the pass-door a yearning to watch, to understand, to participate in, and even perhaps to be accepted within the domain of those who are making performance. But it is a wish that, until very recently, was denied almost all theatergoers. Clustering outside the stage door (at least in conventional images of Edwardian “stage-door johnnies”) is the best that might be managed. “Going round,” that right of entry to visit the performer in her/his dressing room, is a favor bestowed on few. And, if the performance itself and its aftermath block off the spectator’s direct access to the performer, rehearsal does so even more completely. 107

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Rehearsals are closed spaces of exploration, weeks of work that leave the participating creators vulnerable and open. Hence, in most theater traditions, few if any people outside the creative team have access. There may occasionally be an observer in the rehearsal room, either as dramaturge or as permitted outsider, and the outsider may silently watch, record and, eventually, write up what happened. The rehearsal log, whether recorded by a performer or an observer, is a fascinating but distinctly infrequent document. We cherish and return to, say, David Selbourne on the rehearsals for Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Kristina Bedford on Peter Hall’s 1984 Coriolanus, or the twinning of William Redfield and Richard Sterne on Gielgud directing Burton in Hamlet, two actors working in the same production but with diametrically opposed views of the worth of the experience.1 They give us a glimpse beyond the pass-door, enable us to pass through and pass back to the time leading up to the moment of performance. Like most such documentation, the rehearsal log has normally appeared long after the production has closed. For most productions, the playgoers’ access to the processes of creation has been restricted to materials in the program or the press, and usually, even then, no more than a statement by or interview with the director. Even program notes rarely have anything much to do with the processes of rehearsal and creation, with the note’s author so often a scholar who has never been near the production’s rehearsal room or even talked with the director; the note simply supplies something that the program’s editor has determined as necessary. Where visual witness of rehearsal is available—for example, in the rehearsal photographs in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s programs—they are usually no more than bland images of actors in rehearsal clothes doing something in the rehearsal room, but exactly what they are doing and what it might signify form no part of the image and its text; they exist only as identifiers of the actors, not of the work of the creation of the performance, and are often replaced by production photographs in later iterations of the programs after the initial print run has been exhausted and production photographs become available. My opening may appear to be nothing more than a conventional lament for the ephemerality of performance, the temporal boundaries of liveness that are the defining lack that performance manifests. If that were all, then the boundaries are too familiar to have been worth identifying. But there has been a remarkable fracture in those boundaries, and the cause is precisely that form of the materialization of information that seems in many respects most inimical to

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the precise nature of live theater. Turn to the Web sites of many theater companies, whether their work is primarily Shakespeare or not, and you are likely to be deluged by a quantity of information about the production that has no earlier parallel. The boundaries between creation and reception have been fractured, and this collapse of border security in the territoriality of theater alters, fundamentally and probably irrevocably, the spectators’ access to the event. Normally the publicity about a production in theater company season brochures is restricted to a hundred words or so about the play together with a conceptual image and the principal cast; in some cases theater companies distribute a magazine that contains materials analogous to—indeed, often identical with—the notes and photos to be found in the program. But if you wanted to know more about, say, the production of Coriolanus at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario in 2006 before buying tickets, you could have clicked on links that would have given you the following: • a complete cast list, together with understudies • a series of “Top Reasons to See this Show” ‘(including the fact that it stars Colm Feore whom “you might have seen in” a series of major movies and TV miniseries, that “you might not get another chance” because it is rarely performed, that the “story is shockingly relevant today,’ ” finding “eerie parallels in our post-911 [sic] world”) • a large pdf file that is the season’s “Background Book” with synopsis, themes, and other such standard educational outreach materials2

If the first of these is standard program data and the third belongs squarely in the realm of the theater company’s education department (a source of sponsorship, the development of future audiences, and the development of alternative means of sales through school parties), the second, at least, might have parallels with almost any marketing campaign trying to engage interest in a play from which, notoriously, audiences have always tended to shy away. But if you had world enough and time, you could also have watched the following: • • • •

an interview with Santo Loquasto, the production’s designer another with Colm Feore yet another that paired Feore with the director, Antoni Cimolino a fourth with the music composer Steven Page and the sound designer Todd Charlton • some very brief extracts from the performance • most remarkably of all, hours of vlogs and blogs about the production during rehearsals, including a video diary in many segments by the director, made at a series of junctures during the weeks of preproduction, and re-

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hearsals and previews that analyzed how well the process was going, described progress and anxiety, documented hopes and fears, joys and sadness—indeed, very nearly all the predictable clichés of the emotional rollercoaster of creating theater

My conditional and the verb forms in the sentence that preceded these lengthy lists (“if you wanted to know more . . . before buying tickets, you could have clicked”) were carefully chosen: the materials are designed as encouragements to buy tickets and, once the production had closed, nearly all the material (with the exception of the “Background Book” and the “Top Reasons”) were taken down from the Web site and would eventually be transferred to the theater company’s archive. Whatever archiving may be undertaken by the Stratford Shakespeare Festival did not necessitate the video and audio records’ preservation as openly accessible materials that had initially placed them firmly into the sphere of the commercial transaction of marketing and ticket purchases. While the availability of such documentation, accumulated through the process of rehearsal, media coverage (for some of the interview material is derived from television), and marketing, seems to move from print materials in the earliest stages of its timeline to post-opening visuals, in other circumstances the filmed footage exists surprisingly early. While writing this essay in November 2007, I could already watch a taped interview with Laird Williamson, the director of Coriolanus at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a production that is not even in rehearsal and will not open until well into 2008.3 Of course, design is already in process and had begun in July 2007 with text and meetings with the costume and scene designers (Deborah M. Dryden and Richard L. Hay), so that the “prologue” mailshot (also available on the Web site),4 aimed at the company’s mailing list, could speak of how the production, “still in embryo,” was accumulating images of “anti–World Trade Organization demonstrations and the Iraq War to haute couture ads and Isamu Noguchi creations” that “resonated with Williamson’s vision.” If this sounds like a collection of banal clichés, then that may be less a function of a limited imagination among the design team than of the kinds of thinking that frequently characterize such early stages of design. Whatever the function of the comments, readers of the information will watch the eventuating production with such features in mind; the visual sources can be checked off by the audience, seeking to understand the interpretative line the production is exploring. It is, of course, often the case that onstage events are not understood by audiences, that an aspect of design or costume, action or

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event, cannot be “read” by the audience, either individually or collectively. In Rebecca Bayla Taichman’s production of The Taming of the Shrew for the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, DC, in 2007, Petruchio made his first entrance seated on a retro motorcycle with sidecar, pushed onto the stage by Grumio. The sidecar was occupied by an enormous painting, magnificently framed but covered almost entirely by a piece of fabric. The painting was never moved, never shown to the audience, never explained. It existed as a signifier of something, but I, for one, could not work out what. Indeed, the only meaning its presence suggested was that Grumio must have pushed Petruchio the whole way to Padua. The Shakespeare Theater Company’s Web site includes a section called “Digital Shakespeare” that contains, for each production current, future, or in the recent past, a series of audio and video links.5 One recurrent feature of the site is a set of extracts from the director’s talk, available as video or audio podcast, at what the company refers to as “First Rehearsal,” with emphatic capitalization. Standing at a lectern, speaking to a substantial audience, the director describes his/her approach to the production. Asides, the stylish twenty-fourpage magazine that the company produces and mails out for each production, often includes extracts from the talk, with the invitation to “listen to a podcast of the full commentary” on the company’s Web site.6 Taichman’s talk on Shrew refers to the first read-through that morning, but First Rehearsal is not the first rehearsal, not an event restricted to the cast, crew, and design team for the production. It is not closed but very much opened out. First Rehearsal’s audience appears to be the public—hence the repeated hope that the listeners in the audience for the talk, rather than those listening/watching to the Web-delivered version, will see the eventual show. As well as the director’s speech—powerful and purposive in the case of Taichman’s on Shrew, blander in most of the other cases I have watched—the conventions of First Rehearsal include a viewing of the set model and costume designs, features that are also usually a part of a company’s first rehearsal experience. In effect, First Rehearsal performs a replication, an imaging of the stereotype of the acting company’s first day of rehearsals. It is not a peep backstage, even if the unseen audience may include those who were also present in the rehearsal room for that first read-through, the table-work start of the company’s collaborative creative process. Rather, it offers a formalized simulacrum of that event, including its external features while, in its public visibility, denying the social and group-defining aspects of that remarkably tense opening. It is both the event and its representation, for there is no suggestion that, as it were, Taichman is repeating to a wider pub-

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lic what has already been said to the ensemble of the Shrew company; it turns the closed purpose into one with multiple, more public purposes, ones bound up with the communication of the excitement of a future event that marketing needs. In effect, the aspects of First Rehearsal that are Web-available are a stage in the production’s hyping of itself, while also fulfilling the purposes of explaining concept and direction. Here the director’s speech functions as being for the actors. It is vital as the accompaniment to the frightening negotiations of role that begin with the read-through. Hence, for instance, there is the requirement by some directors that an actor never read her/his own role at this read-through. Instead, the transfer of the role allows the text to emerge without the beginnings of the possession of role that an actor’s speaking of a role in which she/he is cast would manifest. In the talks, also available on Digital Shakespeare, by the set and costume designers, Narelle Sissons and Miranda Hoffman, narrating aspects of the set models and costume sketches, there came, by chance, the explanation of the painting in the sidecar. Grumio had, apparently, not pushed Petruchio all the way, but they had run out of gasoline and Petruchio had completely run out of money to pay for more. The painting, taken from the walls of Petruchio’s decaying mansion, was to be understood as being brought to Padua to be sold to raise some much-needed cash—although the mansion, when seen in the production, seemed neither to be decaying particularly rapidly nor to have a space where the painting had once hung. My failure to read the detail was rectified, and I was reminded again how difficult the act of theatrical communication can be. Viewed after the performance, the video clarified the communicative obscurity in this minor detail. More significantly, I had failed, too, to read the meaning of the massive banner displayed above the set for the wedding feast of Katherina and Petruchio, “Congratulazioni Baptista,” a sign that it was the father, not the bride, let alone the groom, who was to be congratulated on the wedding, not only in having married off the difficult elder daughter but also because paternal authority was what counted in the world of Padua. As Taichman commented in her speech, “It’s a man’s world and one with a bottomless appetite. There is never enough sex, money, distraction. It’s a motherless culture. The word ‘father’ is mentioned more than 50 times and ‘mother’ only twice. Wealth passes from father to son, with the woman as an accessory.”7 Yet, while reading silences and absences is almost a banal critical cliché, the silence at First Rehearsal and indeed anywhere else in the production’s Web or print paratexts on the topic of the production’s

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most strikingly visible aspect of its meaning enforces attention. Taichman had cast Nicholas Hormann as Petruchio and Charlayne Woodard as Katherina. A white Petruchio tamed an African American Katherina. The production’s publicity image drew attention to the female actor’s ethnicity, showing Katherina’s back, wearing a wedding dress and veil and bright red boxing gloves, her arm, shoulders, and profile telling us, through the sharp color contrast with the whiteness of the costume, to see her race, to observe what elsewhere the culture of theater might tell us not to “see” at all. It was quite simply impossible to watch Petruchio’s subjection of Katherina and her abject delivery of the final speech without reading over it the discourse of slavery, the visual language of race and gender mapping onto each other, this double subordination in the power structures of American society speaking more loudly than the conventions of color-blind casting. The account in Asides, for instance, of the casting of Woodard talked of her casting here as a step up: “Although Charlayne Woodard has played roles in Shakespeare’s plays before (most notably Maria in a production of Twelfth Night in Central Park with Gregory Hines, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jeff Goldblum), The Taming of the Shrew represents a new challenge: her first Shakespearean lead.”8 Maria has, quite commonly in the last thirty years, become a role for a black actor, the character’s servant status marked by the actor’s ethnicity (here, then, not a matter of color-blind casting at all), and so the choice to mention this production as Woodard’s Shakespeare experience not only identifies her as working with famous stars but also pulls us back to an awareness of a potentially raced moment, even though nothing whatsoever elsewhere in the lengthy article speaks of her race other than the photo that accompanies it.9 Whether deliberate or not, this suppression of the raced nature of the casting was eloquent, especially given the production’s visual emphasis on Bianca (Lisa Birnbaum) as white pinup. A headless Vargasgirl poster image dominating the stage was shown to be identified as Bianca when she appeared wearing the same 1950s swimsuit and made her entry in a bathtub wearing a costume of bubbles at the time that Gremio and the disguised Tranio proposed her dowry. Woodard’s muscularity was beautiful but in ways incompatible with the aesthetics of this Padua, a beauty that said nothing in the 1950s costuming (read now as retro chic) of the production but spoke beyond the dated enclosures of the historical setting toward our differing evaluations of strength and passivity, of Katherina as black and Bianca as doubly white, in name and race. In defining many of the production’s parameters for its thinking, for its creation, for our perception and reception of its meanings that

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were to be more fully developed across the period from first rehearsal (or “First Rehearsal”) to opening and run, the absence on the “Digital Shakespeare” materials of what, for me at least, will remain as the production’s greatest accomplishment and defining memory may speak of a cultural ambivalence about commenting on the discourse of raced action and desire, about the ways in which the production brilliantly refused, over and over again, to allow Woodard and/or Katherina to pass as white. The production’s final image, in which Petruchio knelt before Katherina and handed her the wager money, which she tossed into the air to be swirled by blowing fans into a storm of bills as they laughingly embraced, could not erase nor really be reconciled with the slave’s hand beneath the foot of her doubled master, doubled because slave owner and husband. “First Rehearsal” is both a performance and its fake. The director’s opening speech can now be given live or as a filmed webcast for whoever engages with it whenever he or she happens to wish to.10 It turns, that is, the event into performance, both feigning and being its creative function by appropriating it, most effectively, to the purposes of marketing and sales, through the processes of Web-delivered education. On the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Web site, there are two buttons next to the name of each show in the season: “Buy Now” and “Explore,” the latter a means of encouraging us to do click on the former. By following “Explore” we can quickly reach the webcasts, pursuing the invitation to pass through to a process that will make us eager to see the product. There are few versions of such transitions that I have encountered within the performance space itself. Though the late twentiethcentury innovation of a sequence of “preview” performances was, in a sense, the public presentation of a run of dress rehearsals for which tickets are sold, events that precede the “first night,” there is nothing other than their sequential precedence that indicates what is occurring for the ensemble, and seeing the preview is, for virtually all the audience, the only performance of the production they will choose to see. Unusually, the Wooster Group in New York runs public shows during the exceptionally long process of development and rehearsal that characterizes their work. But buying a ticket is no guarantee as to what one might see, since on a given night the company will run whatever the process of rehearsal suggests ought to be run, be it a few scenes, an act, or the entire show, in costume or out of it, with set or without, lit properly or only with “workers.” This movement from the rehearsal room to a sustained and sustaining interaction with the audience, finding what works with an audience redefining what ap-

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peared to have worked in the closed space of rehearsal, is exceptional in its giving audiences access to moments of process (even though not presented as processual interaction) and giving the actors access to audiences to test out the discoveries, keeping or rejecting them as the show moves on. The company’s exploration of the staging of the film of Hamlet, directed by Gielgud and starring Burton, in production in November 2007 is a radically different performance event from that one could have seen in March 2007 when at an entirely different stage of finished presentation. The performance, in such a mode of theater, is in a sense always in process, never an end product, never not being rehearsed. In the last few years, the National Theatre in London has developed a practice of documenting rehearsal in the form of a diary account that, unlike the substantial, often scholarly versions that take some time to produce,11 can be on sale in the theater very soon after the show has opened.12 Hence, it becomes possible for the audience members to buy as a souvenir a slim book that recounts the process that generated the production that they are about to see, have just seen, or are in the middle of seeing (for I suspect that interval sales are strong). Even these rapid transitions from journal to print pale beside the Web’s versions. The National Theatre, supported by government funding, has committed itself to developing an array of materials about a number of its productions on the Stagework Web site13 and other companies have joined the project.14 As I write this article in November 2007, I can read week by week the accumulating rehearsal diary for Hytner’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, with Simon Russell Beale and Zoë Wanamaker as Benedick and Beatrice, that opens next month. I can see how, at least in the eyes of the diarist, Annette Vieusseux, Hytner explores possibilities, tries ideas, allows the actors to find character and meaning, from the director’s speech at the first rehearsal, the first readthrough, and the designers’ showing of set models and costume designs (i.e., the facets of first rehearsal that became the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s First Rehearsal) onward. Observed but not directly visible, mediated both by the author’s perception (and the limits of her perceptiveness) and by what is appropriate to be made public—for I take it that, say, major and disturbing creative tensions and shouting matches would not make it into the Web-diary—the account is now up to the end of week 5 and I can enjoy seeing (by reading this controlled account) how the opening exchanges are turning into testing out of character and relationship, and how familial and social structures that Hytner has described early in rehearsal are now

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becoming blocking and business, enabling the play to be uncovered, mined, or whatever other metaphor is appropriate to the journey of rehearsal and creation. The rehearsal diaries for Much Ado About Nothing are purely verbal, but they are likely eventually to be accompanied on the Web site by the kinds of other documentation that Stagework often provides. For the production of Richard III, directed by Barrie Rutter for Northern Broadsides with the West Yorkshire Playhouse, for instance, I can watch (and have enjoyed watching) interviews with the designer and director, numerous interviews with many of the members of the cast, footage of the materials of construction sites out of which the set design concept emerged, or a description of how clogging, the rhythmic dancing in heavy industrial clogs that have been a part of Northern Broadsides’ work since its inception (and which derive from Rutter’s experience of working with Tony Harrison on his Trackers of Oxyrhynchus), functions both as a way of making battles work on stage and as a means of unifying the company in physical activity in the early stages of the rehearsal weeks. For the play’s opening speech I can watch Conrad Nelson speaking it in rehearsal and in performance and giving his own glossed commentary of what he thinks it means. The list of video and audio extracts and the complex and structured interrelationships between them would take pages to describe. The Web site Stagework is designed for school students and schoolteachers, for the general public and for scholars, and it is a remarkably successful achievement. The theater companies have clearly committed themselves fully to the enterprise, and the willingness of the cast and production team to work so hard to create materials specifically for the site is exceptional. Not attached to a theater company’s marketing department—nor really to their education/outreach department, either—the Stagework documentation achieves, in its series of fragments and glimpses, a kind of perception of creation. But it is only a kind of perception. A clip offers a rehearsal glimpse of Richard’s opening speech: it is certainly filmed in the rehearsal room with director and assistant at a desk watching Nelson. Suspicious though I am, I do not see this as staged for the camera. But all the clip contains is Nelson running the speech through; there is no comment from director or actor about what has been achieved in that run nor how it might develop. I can, of course, compare it with the same speech “in performance”: here is Nelson in costume standing on the set, but it is not a live performance (for his speaking out of the frame straight to camera is not the same as looking at the theater audience, and there is no hint of a live audience presence). The

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performance is staged for the camera, moved from its liveness to a mediated presentation that implicitly gestures toward the actuality of theater while actually simultaneously denying itself as theater at all (not least since the camera angle is not one that represents the point of view of any member of the audience). The POV (point of view) is an artifice, and the performance is, in volume, scale, gestural range, and focus, designed for watching on the computer screen through the Stagework site, rather than being the end product of the rehearsal process, which can be (implicitly) seen within the other clip of the speech. At such times what is available goes beyond anything that theater performance makes possible through its need to find a mode of recording that mediates and hence transforms that which it ostensibly documents. The viewer has both passed through to the rehearsal room and yet is ironically denied access both to what happens in rehearsal (since we do not see anything other than an early stage of performance, none of the interaction that is the primary activity of rehearsal) and to what happens / will happen in performance itself. Of course, there are numerous other pieces whose relationship to performance is much more exact. Unsurprisingly, it is Hytner’s National Theatre production of Henry V that is most fully available (that is, the production is less subject to the transformations through its recording and Web casting)—unsurprising, since the production made extensive use of video materials, turning the play’s public visibility into analogies to the forms of television representation of the movement to war and the actuality (as it were, implicitly the French word actualité) of the Iraq invasion. Watching on a computer screen Adrian Lester as Henry in smart suit speaking directly to the camera as he gives the rationale for the invasion both is the performance itself (for the video is exactly what was used at the National) and, through its being displaced onto my computer, becomes a representation of that performance, the object, and its mediatization. The “home video” quality of the filmed sequence of Prince Henry with Falstaff and his crew functioned in the theater as the memory of the past, watched by Pistol and the others as the mourners at the wake after Falstaff’s funeral watch before switching off the video player and switching on the snooker channel. On the computer screen, the same video becomes a fully achieved YouTube clip, complete with time-coding, moved now from the pub TV screen of the stage-set to the domestic space of consumption of such clips that are our online experience. If such data of performance change in their transition to the Web site, redefining their place and their parameters, the boundaries and contexts of our assimilation and consumption of them as part of per-

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formance, the Stagework presentation of Richard agreeing to accept the crown in the production by Northern Broadsides shows a different redefining of the limits of theater.15 Part of the scene is available in a complex hierarchy of clips with the possibility of stopping the scene to view interview segments with actors commenting on their character’s perception of the scene’s principal action. But it can also be watched from four different perspectives (i.e., from four camera angles taken from more than one performance) representing the POVs of Buckingham, Richard, and the Mayor of London as well as the audience. This is a kind of Web-delivered version of the spectrographic technique for workshopping, in which the scene is redirected by a sequence of different characters to represent their view of the action: imagine, say, the division of the kingdom in King Lear act 1, scene 1, from the perspective of, in turn, Lear, Kent, Cordelia, and Regan. Since the Richard III material was all taped for the purpose of placing on the Web site, even the perspective of the audience is a manufactured construction rather than an access to live consumption of the object. Fascinating as is this exploration of positioning and viewpoint, especially given the vertical layering that the blocking of the scene necessitates with Richard and the “two right reverend fathers” (3.7.60) above the rest of the actors looking vertiginously down on the others, the digitized experience is a form of representation of performance that also denies the singleness of our perspective from the bounded constriction of our view that marks our theater seat (except, say, in promenade performance or moving around the yard at the Globe). But for all the quantity of the segments of the site, for all the imaginative and successful ways in which the data has been accumulated and presented, for all the perspectives it makes available, Stagework still offers only fragments and reformulations, inadequate glimmerings of process and consequence, of preparation and performance. Stagework is a remarkable site, a space in which inventively the designers have achieved conjunctions of different materials, only rarely tricky for their own sake (like the distinctly camp “interactive” exploration of a speech created with Ian McKellen, stopping to ask us questions that we must answer before he continues). Informative for the theatrically naive (what exactly does a director do?), rich in its documentation of the thoughts of those involved in a production, engaging in its Web designs, Stagework teases us with having passed through to the space in which productions are created; yet it always redefines the boundaries of that creativity, allowing us access only through the eyes of our guides (the camera, the writer of the rehearsal log, the webmaster), never the kind of unmediated access to

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the event of theatrical creativity and the preservation of performance for which we yearn. Exciting and frustrating in equal measure, it stands both as an enticing advance on anything previously widely available and as the limit of what the Web has achieved—at least at the moment of my writing this and no doubt superseded by the time this reaches print. It marks again the desire to go beyond Shakespearean boundaries, to pass through the pass-door and finally and frequently to access process, a desire destined never to be satisfied.

NOTES 1. See, among other examples, David Selbourne, The Making of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (London: Methuen, 1982); Kristina Bedford, “Coriolanus” at the National: “Th’ Interpretation of the Time” (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1992); William Redfield, Letters from an Actor (New York: Viking, 1967); Richard L. Sterne, John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in “Hamlet” (New York: Random House, 1967). 2. See http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/plays/coriolanus.cfm?Jump=Reasons# reasons. 3. See links from http://www.osfashland.org/browse/production.aspx?prod=93. 4. “Close Quarters” in prologue at http://www.osfashland.org/_dwn/plays/ CloseQuarters.pdf. 5. Shakespeare Theatre Company: http://www.ShakespeareTheatre.org. 6. See “Director Rebecca Bayle Taichman’s Comments at First Rehearsal,” Asides 1 (Season 2007/8): 8. See http://www.shakespearetheatre.org/plays/articles.aspc? &id=574. 7. Ibid. 8. “Sparring Partners,” Asides 1 (Season 2007/8): 9. See http://www.shakespeare theatre.org/plays/articles.aspc?&id=575. 9. On this topic in general, see Ayanna Thompson, ed., Colourblind Shakespeare, (London: Routledge, 2006). 10. See, for an example of the trope of the director’s speech as published text, Peter Hall, “Hamlet,” in Theatre at Work, ed. Charles Marowitz and Simon Trussler (London: Methuen, 1967), 160–63. 11. See above, n. 1. 12. See, for example, Jonathan Croall, Hamlet Observed: The National Theatre at Work (London: NT Publications, 2001); Bella Merlin, With the Rogue’s Company: “Henry IV” at the National Theatre (London: Oberon Books, 2005); see also Robert Butler, The Alchemist Exposed (London: Oberon Books, 2006) for Hytner’s production of Jonson’s The Alchemist and the numerous others published in the “National Theatre at Work” series as a collaboration between NT Publications and Oberon Books. 13. Stagework: http://www.stagework.org.uk. 14. Rather than referencing the URL for each segment from the Stagework site that I comment on, I indicate here that all were accessed via www.stagework.org.uk. 15. Richard III, act 3, scene 7.

III Crossing Intratextual Boundaries

Making Mistakes: Shakespeare, Metonymy, and Hamlet Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson

PERHAPS PARADOXICALLY, GIVEN THE TITLE OF THIS VOLUME, WE WOULD like to address the question of boundaries that do exist within Shakespeare’s texts. This arises from a new project of ours, one that follows on from our earlier collaboration, Shakespeare, Meaning and Metaphor.1 In that book, we applied recent studies of metaphor within the fields of linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy to Shakespeare. This time, we aim to do something similar with metonymy: to expound recent thinking about this more difficult and less familiar figure (or set of figures) and to develop an approach to literary texts through it, focusing primarily on Shakespeare. In recent times it was Roman Jakobson, working broadly within the tradition of Saussurean linguistics, who labeled metonymy as one of the two “axes of language.”2 Subsequently, scholars have developed his approach, both within structuralism and within cognitive linguistics in the productive tradition inaugurated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By.3 David Lodge has applied this mode of analysis to modern literature,4 while scholars such as Jane Hedley, Jutka Dévényi, and Judith Anderson have applied it to early modern texts.5 Metonymy can be defined in a broad sense as the figure of contiguity or “next-to-ness,” as opposed to metaphor as the figure of similarity. The notion of an entity that is demarcated from its surroundings is necessarily one of contiguity. It should be said that, puzzling though metaphor as the figure of resemblance is, metonymy as the figure of contiguity is a great deal more puzzling. It is not currently clear to us that the excellent and thought-provoking work done in the past and being undertaken in the present under the name of metonymy can in fact be “unified.” Certainly, to do so would be an ambitious aim. Here we wish to be eclectic and exploratory, since metonymy is not our topic, only a tool with which to address the matter of boundaries. 123

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Boundaries exist to keep us from making mistakes about relationships and lines of demarcation. This chapter, when we move on to Hamlet, will explore a number of boundaries and a number of mistakes, amongst other things the boundary between the living and the dead, the contiguity inherent in kinship (“next of kin,” “a little more than kin and less than kind”), and some issues of recognition and misrecognition. We will eventually focus on the metonymics of the dumb show, with reference of course to Dieter Mehl’s important book on The Elizabethan Dumb Show (first published in German in 1964 and translated into English in 1965),6 and we will show how his work has resonance for what we are trying to do with metonymy today. But we will begin with a more broad discussion of the significance of mistakes, using metonymy as an exploratory concept, and, in a related way, the idea of boundaries. Boundaries exist, inter alia, to save us from the bad consequences of mistakes, whether to help us to avoid them or to help us to rectify them. Metonymy, in its very broad definition going back to classical rhetoric, is the figure of boundaries. Its formulae—contiguity, part for whole and vice versa, container-contained and genus-species relationships—have in common a concern with boundaries and frames. We believe that Shakespeare was very interested in boundaries, and that his “unboundedness,” in the various senses our fellow contributors to this volume discuss, is in good part a function of how he exploits boundaries dramatically and poetically. The reason for Shakespeare’s continuing strength across temporal, nation-state, and linguistic borders is that metonymy’s boundary-related relationships, even more than metaphor’s similarity relationships, are cognitively fundamental to human culture, hence remarkably stable cross-culturally and hence transmissible across space, time, and language. The mistake, or mistakenness, is a key powering force in narrative generally, well suited to provide material for the “middle” of the beginning-middle-end structure of stories. Something has to go wrong, either so that it can come right (comedy), or go decisively wrong (tragedy), or be there to be accounted for (history). Shakespeare was aware of this from the beginning of his career, when after all he produced early on The Comedy of Errors. Mistakes come in many varieties, of course, but boundary issues and their metonymic aspects provide a unifying framework for discussing them, a framework of which, we suggest, Shakespeare had a startlingly intuitive grasp. This helps to explain the cross-narrative resemblances that hold the canon together. Here is a preliminary (and selective) typology of mistakes found in plays regardless of genre (comedy, tragedy, history):

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• mistakes of identity • mistakes based on contiguity (“being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” mistakes of misfortune) • mistakes of miscategorization (genus-species)

We will discuss briefly some examples of each of these from across the canon before concentrating on how they come together in the fabric of Hamlet.

MISTAKES OF IDENTITY The boundary between an individual and all other individuals is humanly crucial, and its loss is one of the great potential fears. The Comedy of Errors is a tour de force in its setting up space-time noncontiguity relationships that, with some help from strong resemblance relationships (the double twins), allow the errors to occur. At the same time, the contiguity of succession of scenes and of shared stage-space gives the audience its privileged and pleasurable grasp of who exactly is who. (A production of the play in which the audience got lost as to character identities would be judged to be a failure.) No one in The Comedy of Errors is actually in disguise (one might say that from the point of view of the plot it is sheer good luck that the two pairs of identical twins happen to be wearing identical clothes), but of course a common cause of mistaken identity in Shakespeare is when female characters dress “up” as men, crossing gender boundaries (Rosalind becoming Ganymede in As You Like It, Viola becoming Cesario in Twelfth Night), or when male characters dress “down,” crossing class boundaries (the King becoming Harry le Roy in Henry V, Kent becoming Caius and Edgar becoming Poor Tom in King Lear); occasionally, male characters dress “up” in class terms, as when in 1 Henry IV Sir Walter Blunt and other men fight on the battlefield at Shrewsbury “[s]emblably furnish’d like the King himself” (5.3.21). “The King hath many marching in his coats,” as Hotspur puts it (5.3.25).7 Imogen in Cymbeline does both: she dresses “up” across the gender boundary to be a man but “down” across the class boundary to be a commoner, Fidele. Cymbeline also contains the extraordinary scene of the mistaken corpse, mistaken partly because of its stolen or usurped clothing and partly because it lacks the important part-forwhole piece that would confirm its identity, the face. The face for the person is one of the “metonymies we live by,” as Lakoff and Johnson put it. Digressing from their discussion of everyday, inescapable metaphoricity, whereby one kind of thing gets regularly, even auto-

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matically, understood in terms of another (“time is money,” “argument is war,” etc.), they note that metonymy can serve some of the same purposes that metaphor does and specifically that “the face for the person” is not just a poetic or rhetorical device but part of the way we think and act as well as the way we talk and write: “If you ask me to show you a picture of my son and I show you a picture of his face, you will be satisfied. You will consider yourself to have seen a picture of him. But if I show you a picture of his body without his face, you will consider it strange and will not be satisfied. You might even ask, ‘But what does he look like?’ ”8 Cymbeline pushes this everyday metonymy to the limit by suggesting that even a wife might not recognize her husband when presented with not just “a picture of his body” but an actual corpse without a face. Other cases of mistaken identity occur without the need for either identical twins or disguise: “I am not what I am,” says Iago in Othello (1.1.64), meaning that he is not the blunt honest captain that he pretends to be (a stereotype that Kent employs for a more admirable purpose in King Lear). Iago’s whole strategy is to lead Othello toward his terrible mistake by manipulating stereotypical identities: Desdemona is set up as the typical Venetian woman who would deceive her husband, Cassio as the typical seducer “framed to make women false” (1.3.396), and Othello himself as the typical passionate black man who will act violently on a jealous impulse. In a completely different kind of plot, one reading of The Taming of the Shrew is that Petruchio’s strategy is to persuade the characters surrounding Kate that her classification or identity as a shrew has been a mistake; arguably he persuades Kate herself of this in the scene on the road back to Padua in which she joins in his game of mistaking the sun for the moon and an old man for a young woman.

MISTAKES OF CONTIGUITY Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a fatal mistake in a number of plays. The “Clown” who carries a letter from Titus Andronicus to Saturninus expects to be rewarded, not hanged; Polonius, eavesdropping in the Queen’s closet in Hamlet, expects to learn Hamlet’s secrets, not to be killed. In this context, Romeo and Juliet might be retitled The Tragedy of Errors: Romeo is very much in the wrong place (or the wrong company) when he encounters Tybalt immediately after his secret wedding and gets drawn into a fight. “O, I am fortune’s fool,” he cries (3.1.137), but it is Mercutio who has paid for this mis-

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take with his life. Further mistakes—the failure of Friar Lawrence’s letter to reach Romeo and the mistiming of Juliet’s return to consciousness—climax in Romeo mistaking Juliet’s live body for a corpse and thereupon killing himself. Similarly fatal mistakes occur in the English and classical historical plays: Cassius in Julius Caesar kills himself thinking that Octavius’s army has defeated Brutus’s army whereas in fact it is the other way around. Messala comments: Mistrust of good success hath done this deed. O hateful Error, Melancholy’s child, Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men The things that are not? O Error, soon conceived, Thou never com’st unto a happy birth But kill’st the mother that engendered thee. ( Julius Caesar, 5.3.64–69)

These are difficult lines, and they are powerful in a way that we had not noticed before reading them in this context. We take it that error is seen as melancholy’s child because nonexistent evils (in this case the perception of defeat rather than victory) are the product or offspring of depressed or suicidal minds. Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, like Romeo, kills himself thinking his lover is already dead—in this case a piece of deliberate manipulation on her part that causes his fatal mistake. Deliberate manipulation of place and time is used to bring about happier conclusions in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure when the so-called bed-trick is used to avoid two women (Diana and Isabella) being in the wrong place at the wrong time (the bed of the would-be rapist) from their point of view, and to substitute two other women (Helena and Mariana) for whom this is the right place (the bed of the husband or the betrothed). Helena reflects uncomfortably on the consequences of this supposedly happy mistake: But, O strange men! That can such sweet use make of what they hate, When saucy trusting of the cozen’d thoughts Defiles the pitchy night; so lust doth play With what it loathes for that which is away. (All’s Well That Ends Well, 4.4.21–25)

and later remarks to Bertram, “when I was like this maid / I found you wondrous kind” (5.3.308–9).

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MISTAKES OF MISCATEGORIZATION One could say that this type of mistake occurs when one species of object or person is mistaken for another of the same genus. The most obvious—indeed, obsessive—example in Shakespeare is where a member of the genus “woman” is mistaken for a member of the species “unfaithful woman.” This could be seen to overlap with, but is distinct from, mistaken identity: there is no doubt about the identity of Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, Desdemona in Othello, Imogen in Cymbeline, or Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, but each is mistaken by her husband (or in Hero’s case her fiancé) for a different kind of woman. For Desdemona and Imogen there is an additional contiguity mistake whereby a significant object (the handkerchief, the bracelet) is seen as part of the woman in such a way that it can be taken to stand in for her and represent her, with disastrous (or nearly disastrous) consequences. This kind of mistake does not seem to occur in the same way with male characters (Adriana in The Comedy of Errors thinks her husband has been unfaithful to her, but she happens not to be mistaken), but a comparable set of errors flow from the perception of a member of the genus “man” as a member of the species “brave man.” As Hero, Desdemona, Imogen, and Hermione appear to their husbands to be what they are not (unchaste or unfaithful), so characters like Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well and Pistol (and even Falstaff) in the Henry IV plays appear to some of those around them to be more heroic and less cowardly than the audience knows they really are.

ELSINORE MISTAKENNESS From this point on, we will concentrate on Hamlet. The play is a veritable treasury of mistakes, of accusations or fears of mistakenness, of boundaries not observed or wrongly crossed. Just before “The Murder of Gonzago” is interrupted, the Player Queen piously wishes “never come mischance between us twain” (3.2.222), but by the end Horatio is ready to speak of . . . accidental judgements, casual slaughters . . . purposes mistook Fallen on th’inventors’ heads. (5.2.366–69)

and Horatio is anxious to get the situation under control “lest more mischance / On plots and errors happen” (5.2.378–79). We can explore only a few of the numerous examples.

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WHAT KIND OF A MISTAKE MIGHT THE GHOST BE? Obviously the Ghost is not, literally, Hamlet’s father, because Hamlet’s father is dead, though the modern colloquial phrase “a ghost of his former self” makes sense in terms of a process of negative change over time: Ophelia’s response to Hamlet‘s transformation from his former self (“O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” etc.) is relevant here, as indeed is the King’s comment on his stepson that “nor th’exterior nor the inward man / Resembles that it was” (2.2.6–7). To be a ghost must be to have, or represent, some part of an actually vanished whole, and, alarmingly, to have crossed the boundary (or “bourn” as Hamlet calls it at 3.1.78) between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Horatio accuses the Ghost of “usurping” . . . that fair and warlike form In which the majesty of buried Denmark Did sometimes march. (1.1.45–48)

The Ghost is wearing Hamlet’s father’s clothes—“Such was the very armour he had on” (1.1.59) and “My father in his habit as he lived” (3.4.133) and could easily be mistaken for him, as Sir Walter Blunt is for Henry IV. The physical resemblance is stressed: “Is it not like the King?” asks Marcellus, to which Horatio replies “As thou art to thyself” (1.1.57–58), later assuring Hamlet “[t]hese hands are not more like” (1.2.211). But Hamlet is still cautious: this may be a case of disguise where the Ghost has put on not only the clothes but the very body (or bodily appearance) of his father: “If it assume my noble father’s person” (1.2.242). A categorization of such a being is called for, given the seriousness of what the Ghost is calling upon Hamlet to do—namely, to revenge him. The Ghost may be a “true ghost,” or it may be a deceptive ghost, a fiend. The “look” of the Ghost is one sign of its truth. But the appearance of devils may be dissembling. So a part, the appearance, does not necessarily stand for a whole. (“[S]mile and smile and be a villain” [1.5.108] is only one of many remarks in the play to this effect.) Independent corroboration of the Ghost’s legitimacy as the true ghost of his father is felt by Hamlet to be required. Hence the performance of “The Murder of Gonzago” (or, as Hamlet calls it, “The Mousetrap”), of which we will have more to say below. A fiction is set up to “stand in for” the reality of the fratricide. This is a matter of resemblance (“something like the murder of my father” [2.2.530]): the dumb show and the spoken lines (a problematic part inserted into what the Play-

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ers would have known as a whole play) resemble what actually happened sufficiently for the King to call “Give me some light, away” (3.2.261). But resemblance consists, precisely, in the likenesses of the contiguity of the means of murder, the poison applied to the ear. The Ghost’s likeness to the dead King is one question; the dead King’s unlikeness to the usurping, fratricidal king is equally dwelt upon. And the focus here, from Hamlet’s point of view, is on the accusation of incest—a crossing of one of the boundaries set out in the Book of Common Prayer “Table of Kindred and Affinity” whereby a man may not marry his (dead) brother’s wife. The play is notoriously unclear on this issue: the King himself draws attention to it by describing Gertrude as “our sometime sister, now our Queen” (1.2.8), but he does not list incest among his sins in his attempt to pray in act 3, scene 3; the Queen sees her remarriage as merely “hasty” (2.2.57), and the councillors have apparently gone along with it (1.2.15–16). It is only Hamlet and the Ghost who use words like “incest” and “incestuous” (1.2.157; 1.5.42 and 83). Early audiences would have been aware that Henry VIII had gained papal permission to marry Katherine of Aragon, widow of his dead brother Arthur, though he subsequently claimed this was a sin when he wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, thereby precipitating the English Reformation.9 Interestingly, the Queen in Der bestrafte Brudermord or Fratricide Punished, an eighteenth- or possibly seventeenth-century German play derived from Hamlet, mentions having had a papal dispensation for her second marriage in the equivalent of the closet scene. In the very scene in which he is shortly to be informed about the “figure like your father” (1.2.198), Hamlet has already remarked on “My father’s brother (but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules)” (1.2.152–53), and his insistence upon the unlikeness culminates in the contiguous presentation of the “counterfeit presentment[s]” of the two brothers in the closet scene (3.4.51–86), where he dwells at length on the physical and moral differences between the two men—a discourse that becomes even more striking if, as in Kenneth Branagh’s film, the actor playing Hamlet’s uncle is, at least to some members of the audience, more attractive than the actor playing his father, or if, as has happened frequently onstage since John Gielgud’s production in 1939, the same actor plays both parts.

DO YOU KNOW ME, MY LORD? Hamlet’s pretended misrecognition of Polonius (“Excellent well, you are a fishmonger,” [2.2.171]) is a deliberate and comic mistake, crossing a class boundary and signaling to the audience that he is feigning

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madness at this point. Earlier in the scene, it has become conventional to make a comic moment of the first appearance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: when the King dismisses them with “Thanks, Rosencrantz, and gentle Guildenstern,” the Queen follows him with “Thanks, Guildenstern, and gentle Rosencrantz” (2.2.33–34)—perhaps just a piece of courtesy, giving the two courtiers equal priority, but more often interpreted as a correction of the King who does not know which is which. In Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), it is Rosencrantz himself who first confuses the names, and the confusion continues throughout the play, raising the specter of losing one’s own identity, as in The Comedy of Errors.10 Without ever having recourse to literal disguise (apart from Hamlet’s own plot to “put an antic disposition on,” a plot that is usually underplayed on the modern stage), the play keeps raising issues of uncertain or mistaken identity. From Hamlet’s banal castigation of women to Ophelia in which he resorts to a conventional criticism of makeup (“God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another” [3.1.142–43]) to his response to discovering that he has murdered her father (“Is it the King? / . . . / I took thee for thy better” [3.4.24–30]), the question of what it is to know someone or be known oneself reverberates. Hamlet himself refuses to be known (“Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?” [3.2.361–62]) and asks, more than once, “What / . . . is a man?” (2.2.269, 4.4.32). Despite his contempt for the conventional trappings of mourning (“I know not ‘seems’. / . . . These / . . . are actions that a man might play” [1.2.76, 83–84]) he encourages his mother to practice hypocrisy (“Assume a virtue if you have it not” [3.4.158]) and has no hesitation about substituting his own message to the king of England and using the royal seal to cover the deception. Insisting on the differences between his father and his stepfather, he nevertheless plays on the idea of his “uncle-father” (2.2.313) and even addresses his stepfather as “mother” (4.3.48–49). The comedy of the conversation with the Gravedigger in act 5, scene 1 depends on Hamlet himself not being recognized, although the Gravedigger claims to recognize Yorick’s skull. Horatio either does not know or does not recognize Laertes in this scene (Hamlet has to tell him who he is), but in the next scene, in one of the play’s most extravagant comic exchanges, Hamlet and Osric enumerate Laertes’ “parts” or qualities with a rhetoric from mathematics: Hamlet. Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you, though I know to divide him inventorially would dazzle th’arithmetic of memory. . . . [T]o make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror, and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more. (5.2.98–105)

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This gets us back to expressions like “as thou art to thyself” and “these hands are not more like”: the only person “like” Laertes is his mirror image or his shadow.

AND IN PART HIM Polonius carefully instructs Reynaldo to say to the Danes he seeks out in Paris that he knows Laertes’ “father and his friends / And in part him” (2.1.14–15), concealing his own knowledge in order to draw information out of his interlocutors. Persons and their bodies seem to fragment in this play, taking on iconic significance at times—the dead King’s ear, Yorick’s skull, the “drop of blood that’s calm [that] proclaims [Laertes] bastard” (4.5.117). One of the most difficult passages in the play—indeed, in the entire canon—concerns a part-for-whole issue. This is Hamlet’s speech at 1.4.17–38 (found only in the 1604/5 Second Quarto text) on how Danish drunkenness destroys the nation’s reputation; it is often referred to as the “dram of eale” crux (“eale” being an otherwise unknown word, much emended by editors, usually to “evil”). The gist of the speech is obvious, even proverbial: “One ill condition mars all the good,”11 but Hamlet’s elaboration on the idea that a single flaw (“some vicious mole of nature” [1.4.24], “the stamp of one defect” [1.4.31], “that particular fault” [1.4.36], or finally “the dram of eale” [1.4.36]) can damage a good person or nation by bringing him or them into disrepute is convoluted and syntactically obscure. A puzzling part-for-whole moment occurs very early on, only eighteen lines into the first scene. “Say, what, is Horatio there?” asks Barnardo and gets the reply “A piece of him” (1.1.18). The “piece” of Horatio may be only his hand, offered in greeting, or “a shrunken fragment of his real self,” on account of the cold. “Peace, break thee off” (1.1.39), Marcellus says once the Ghost appears: speech is thought of as an extended body that in being broken off, curtailed, brings about peace (quiet)—unlike, one might say, “The Murder of Gonzago” which, in being broken off, brings us closer to the violent climax of the play. Already, “Stand and unfold yourself,” Francisco has said to Barnardo (1.1.2): in the darkness there is a folding up of identity. In the actual full light of a Globe Theatre performance by daylight, worries about who is who and what can be seen of each are being created purely in language. The Ghost is a “dreaded sight” (1.1.24), in which Horatio does not initially believe. It has a “figure,” which is to say that what it looks like, its figure, stands for itself as a putative identity: “the same figure like the King that’s dead” (1.1.40).

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This is a form, “fair and warlike” (1.1.46); a form of Denmark (the dead king being a metonymy for his kingdom), now buried; a form that once marched. Any identity is a relationship between a visible or more broadly “sensible” part—calling upon the apparition to speak is all-important—and the whole it “expresses.” It is clear that part-for-whole issues pervade the play at various levels of importance and poetic heightening. For example, Horatio’s reference to “[a] piece of him” may pass by scarcely noticed, while the line “If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away” (5.2.212) is more of a key moment in the drama. The boundaries crossed in Shakespearean tragedies—that is to say, the mistakes and the crimes—tend to have stage embodiments: Desdemona’s handkerchief is succeeded by Othello’s pillow. Swords do their worst and neither ears (Hamlet) nor eyes (King Lear) are spared. If “next-to-ness” ought to be the most tender of experiences, the point of tragedy is to show its terrible potential for violence. It is still the case that, in real life, most murderers are known (and often intimately known) to their victims.

DUMB-SHOW METONYMICS In conclusion, we would like to return to “The Murder of Gonzago” or, more specifically, to the dumb show that precedes it, and to explore the ways in which the dumb show stands in for the play-withinthe-play, which in turn stands in for the murder of Hamlet’s father. In dumb shows, where the early modern theater invents the silent cinema before its time, sheer “next-to-ness” (a part or summarized version standing in for a larger whole) bears the weight of expressing the matter of the drama, wordlessly.12 And in this context it is worth returning to the fact that Hamlet’s father died through a poison administered, unusually enough, to the ear. Modern medicine tells us that such a method of poisoning would not actually be effective, but editors of Hamlet follow Geoffrey Bullough in suggesting that Shakespeare took the idea from accounts of the murder of the Duke of Urbino in 1538, allegedly done in this way.13 Another possible source might be Marlowe’s villain Lightborn in Edward II (1592) who describes a method of killing he claims to have learnt in Naples: “whilst one is asleep, to take a quill / And blow a little powder in his ears” (5.4.34–35).14 A point that has been made about the ears’ difference from the eyes is that eyes may be closed but ears cannot be in the same way. To close an ear is, in Hamlet, murderous. In enacting that, in silence, the Players replicate the very nature of the crime Hamlet is having them enact.

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By the time Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Dieter Mehl tells us, dumb shows had “almost completely disappeared from more refined plays and were mainly to be found in the type of popular drama that is ridiculed by Hamlet” in his famous “advice to the Players” speeches, especially when he expresses contempt for the groundlings “who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise” (3.2.11–12).15 But Hamlet seems to have given them a new lease on life, and they subsequently appear in plays by Marston, Webster, and Middleton. A crucial feature of the dumb show in Hamlet is the immediate contiguity of the Players and the Danish court: “The play scene derives its particular effect and tension from the fact that here the moral purpose of drama is deliberately exploited and that actors and spectators are on the stage simultaneously.”16 Unlike our experience of the Ghost’s oral/aural account of the crime in act 1, scene 5, the audience now can see it enacted in front of them. Who is next to whom during this enactment? This scene, the one in all three early texts of Hamlet that requires the largest number of speaking parts, is notoriously difficult to stage. As Mehl says, “The audience in the theatre alone can recognize the true meaning of the dumb show and therefore keeps an eye not only on the play, but also on the King and Hamlet.”17 But how can this be organized? For directors, it is an important decision whether to have the onstage audience “downstage” (i.e., between the offstage audience and the Players) or “upstage” (behind the Players). Sightlines are complicated either way. Moreover, Hamlet’s own location is doubtful: the Queen invites him to “sit by me,” but he refuses on the grounds that in Ophelia he sees “metal more attractive” (3.2.105–6). Given that he wishes to watch the King’s reactions to the dumb show and the play, it is arguable that he does not want to sit too close to him; since Edmund Kean’s performance in 1814 to at least Asta Nielsen’s screen performance in 1920,18 actors of Hamlet began watching the show stretched out at Ophelia’s feet but then crawled menacingly toward the King during the performance. Proximity is crucial here, not just the proximity of the Players to their audience, but indeed that of the Players to their text, the wordless “embodiment” of the crime that they unknowingly perform. The dumbness of the show fools the King into complacency, Mehl argues, and this is not surprising: “Ophelia’s puzzled reaction to the pantomime indicates that its significance was not immediately obvious to an Elizabethan audience.”19 Seeing a show of the actual murder is not enough on its own to alert the King. But a boundary, for the offstage audience, is crossed: this is our first sight of the murder: “It is therefore important that what at first was only reported by the

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ghost should now be visibly presented in some detail in the pantomime.”20 The dumb show works, for the offstage audience, as a kind of flashback to the murder of Hamlet’s father, even though it is ostensibly a kind of prologue to a different murder, that of Gonzago. It is followed by another prologue, or “posy of a ring” as Hamlet calls it (3.2.145), which as Mehl points out is not only “meaningless” but “almost more unusual and astonishing than the actual pantomime and is undoubtedly intended to provide an even better reason for the bewilderment of the spectators.”21 The dumb show stands in for (“figures”) the crime, by resemblance, but enacts it by contiguity, in its performance within the diegesis, but also in the shape of the urcrime itself. A “striving for powerful effects . . . [and] the visualization and intensification of moral ideas and concepts” operates metonymically as well as metaphorically.22 And moral ideas are matters of boundaries. Unlike many dumb shows in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, “The Murder of Gonzago” does not lead immediately into the violent catastrophe of Hamlet itself. Hamlet’s description of the murderer as “nephew to the king” (3.2.237) may, however, give the King some anxiety. Neither of the murderers is a nephew in the source given by Bullough, but the poisoner in Fratricide Punished is identified as “the King’s brother”: brother-as-poisoner would of course reinforce the flashback to the original crime, while nephew-as-murderer would seem to look forward to Hamlet’s own intended revenge. This may be one reason why the play is broken off at this point. The dumb show is of course needed to show both the murder and its consequences and, even if the King and Queen do not seem to react to it immediately, it is felt, at least by the offstage audience, as an important factor in the dramatic changes they both undergo in the next two scenes: the King, in soliloquy, expresses his guilt and his failure to repent at some length for the first time in act 3, scene 3 (he has prefaced this with a brief aside in act 3, scene 1), and the Queen acknowledges her fault and asks for Hamlet’s advice in act 3, scene 4. What boundary does the Queen imagine herself to have crossed, or is made by Hamlet to realize she has wrongly crossed? The question of murder in Hamlet is rather straightforward, the question of incest more puzzling (for the characters as much as for ourselves). Then there is the boundary between sanity and madness, and that other boundary between truth and deceit, and the ultimate boundary, that between life and death. We hesitate to raise, on the basis of the scant evidence available, the question of the life/death boundary involved in the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet/Hamlet as a background to his revision of the Ur-Hamlet. The earlier play (whose own very existence is certainly ghostly) would have preceded Ham-

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net’s death, while the Hamlets we know succeed it. Yet, in conclusion, working with the Hamlet texts themselves, their thoughts about boundaries are themselves boundless. And we have found that this approach has enabled us to have thoughts about Hamlet that we might not otherwise have had. It has been a privilege to be part of a community with Dieter Mehl and so many others—scholars, writers, “players”—the vast community of the living and the dead within which these thoughts have been experienced.

NOTES 1. Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson, Shakespeare, Meaning and Metaphor (Brighton, England: Harvester, 1987). 2. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Fundamentals of Language, by Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Janua Linguarum 1 (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 53–82. 3. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Lakoff has more to say on metonymy in his subsequent Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Useful introductions to the burgeoning cognitive linguistics tradition include Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002) and Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Recently more attention is being paid to metonymy within this tradition, e.g., in Antonio Barcelona, ed., Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000). 4. David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977). 5. Jane Hedley, Power in Verse: Metaphor and Metonymy in the Renaissance Lyric (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988); Jutka Dévényi, Metonymy and Drama: Essays on Language and Dramatic Strategy (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1996); Judith H. Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stewart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 6. Dieter Mehl, Die Pantomime im Drama der Shakespearezeit: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der “Dumb Show” (Heidelberg: Quelle and Meyer, 1964); and Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (London: Methuen, 1965). 7. All Shakespeare references and quotations, apart from those from Hamlet, are from The Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan, rev. ed. (London: Thomson Learning, 2001). All Hamlet references and quotations are from the more recent Arden Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006). 8. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 37. 9. See Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England: Literature, Culture, Kinship, and Kingship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Richard A. McCabe, Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law: 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jason P. Rosenblatt, “Aspects of the Incest Problem in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978): 349–64. 10. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber and Faber, 1967).

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11. R. W. Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), C585. 12. See, however, the essay by Bruce R. Smith in this volume, in which he argues that dumb shows were not always, strictly speaking, silent. 13. Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7: Major Tragedies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 29–33. 14. Quoted from Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (London: Penguin, 1986). 15. Mehl, Elizabethan Dumb Show, 114. 16. Ibid., 114–15. 17. Ibid., 118. 18. Hamlet, directed by Sven Gade and Heinz Schell, Germany, 1920. 19. Mehl, Elizabethan Dumb Show, 117. 20. Ibid., 115. 21. Ibid., 118. 22. Ibid., 171.

Dot Dot or Dash: A Strange SOS from Prospero’s Island Bruce R. Smith

THE PAGEANTLIKE MOMENTS THAT DIETER MEHL ISOLATES IN THE ELIZabethan Dumb Show serve a variety of functions. Pantomime, the word for such scenes in Mehl’s German text, is more accurate than “dumb show” in admitting the variety of ways in which speech can intrude on visual images in these scenes. Sometimes an onstage speaker provides commentary; sometimes dialogue erupts amid the mimed action. With or without speech, however, Pantomimen present themselves to spectators as something separate from the rest of the play. They come with boundaries. For sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playwrights and actors such scenes were handy not only for fast-forwarding the plot but for representing orders of experience different from the main action. One of those distinct orders of experience involved the supernatural: gods, fiends, thunder, strange music, miraculous happenings. The boundary in these cases separates a “below” from an “above”: the supernatural is presented, figuratively if not physically, as being higher than the main action. Dumb shows, Mehl observes, were “a favourite means of bringing such supernatural elements on to the stage, at the same time separating them clearly from the rest of the play.”1 As instances Mehl cites two scenes from The Tempest: the phantom banquet in act 3, scene 3, and the wedding masque in act 4, scene 1. A sense of separateness from the main action, a palpable shift to another order of experience, also attends Prospero’s revelation to Alonso in act 5, scene 1, that his son Ferdinand has not drowned but is alive and well—and, better still, is affianced to Prospero’s daughter Miranda. Shakespeare might have directed Prospero to summon Ferdinand and Miranda through one of the two stage doors, but, no, he directs Prospero suddenly to reveal the pair, almost certainly by pulling aside a curtain that hung before a recessed space at the back of the stage. The first image shows how this moment is scripted in the 1623 folio printing. “Here Prospero discouers Ferdinand and Miranda, 138

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The Tempest, 5.1.161-78 from Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blunt, 1623), sig. B3.

playing at Chesse”:2 the word “discover,” as Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson conclude from their survey of 200 such stage directions, carries two precise meanings, both having to do with revelation. What is revealed can be either “true identity by removing a disguise” or “a hidden scene.”3 Both meanings seem present in Prospero’s discovery. When the spectators saw Ferdinand in act 3, scene 1, he appeared in the guise of a drudge, carrying logs. Better that than the guise in which Alonso imagines his lost son: a waterlogged corpse. Just before Prospero whisks aside the curtain, Alonso wishes that he himself “were mudded in that oo-zie bed / Where my sonne lies” (5.1.153– 54). In Prospero’s discovery Ferdinand seems to appear in his royal clothes that, like the sea-drenched garments of Gonzalo and the others, “hold notwithstanding their freshnesse and glosses, being rather new dy’de then stain’d with salte water” (2.1.67–69). That curious hyphen in “oo-zie” and those apostrophes in “dy’de” and “stain’d” demonstrate that boundary marking and boundary erasing are also going on at a micro level. For whatever reason, the hyphen insists on the separateness of the two syllables in “oozy,” while the apostrophes

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elide syllables that in other metrical circumstances could be pronounced as separate: “dyèd” and “stainèd.” Revelation of true identity may be implied by Prospero’s discovery of Ferdinand and Miranda, but more viscerally present is the bounded space they inhabit. In more than 90 of the 200 instances in Dessen and Thomson’s survey, “discover signals the opening of a curtain or door to reveal scenes ranging from the simple to the complex.”4 In dramatic fictions as well as in stage directions the space behind the curtain is usually referenced as “within.”5 Within what? In terms of the physical stage, within the tiring house. Dessen and Thomson’s dictionary cites 800 examples of voices, music, knocking, laughing, thunder, and other noises “within,”6 making “within” a space that can be heard but not seen. Characters’ speeches can make “within” any number of fictional places—a bedroom, a banqueting hall, or, as here, a study—and through discovery those fictional places can be made visible.7 In these cases sight takes precedence over sound, even though music may be heard and language may frame the scene or emerge within it. “This Cell’s my Court,” Prospero tells Alonso: “heere haue I few attendants, / And Subiects none abroad: pray you looke in” (5.1.168–69). Although the implicit contrast between “abroad” and “here” might invite spectators to consider the stage platform as Prospero’s court, his “this” most likely accompanies a gesture toward the curtained alcove—defined in nine earlier references as a “cell” (1.2.20, 1.2.39, 1.2.349, 4.1.161, 4.1.182, 4.1.195, 4.1.216, 5.1.10, 5.1.84)—within which Ferdinand and Miranda are discovered moments later to the astonished gazes of Alonso and his courtiers. Caliban’s reference to “the mouth o’th Cell” (4.1.216) suggests that the space presents itself—to Caliban, at least—as a cave. No less emotionally powerful is the moment when the figures within the “within” turn their gazes “without.” That shift in viewpoint occasions one of the play’s most famous lines: “O braue new world / That has such people in’t” (5.1.186–87). (Again an apostrophe erases the boundary between two verbal entities.) Just when Ferdinand and Miranda bound out of the space “within” and join the brave new world before them is unclear in the Folio text (the second Oxford edition, like most modern editions, marks it as happening just after Sebastian’s exclamation “A most high miracle” [5.1.180]), but the crossing over from “within” to “without,” the figurative descent from Sebastian’s “high miracle” to the normal plane of human affairs, functions in The Tempest as the equivalent of the moment in The Winter’s Tale when Hermione’s statue comes to life and descends to join the marveling onlookers. In that case, too, the miracle happens when a curtain is pulled aside.8 The word “apparition” perhaps comes clos-

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est to catching the quality of these scenes as both theatrical shows and otherworldly revelations. They are also trans-actions, “actings across” boundaries that are physically as well as figuratively present. Let us take stock of the boundaries that confront us in act 5 of The Tempest and consider the challenges those boundaries pose to readers who aspire to inhabit more than one critical cell at a time. The most obvious boundary is provided by the curtain that Prospero pulls aside to reveal the high miracle he has in store. The boundary between art and nature may puzzle Perdita in The Winter’s Tale,9 but Shakespeare and his contemporaries expected such a boundary in the display of paintings. Numerous sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury engravings of collectors’ galleries and artists’ studios in the Low Countries confirm that Olivia in Twelfth Night follows custom when, offering to pull aside her mourning veil and show Cesario her face, she says, “we will draw the Curtain, and shew you the picture. Looke you sir, such a one I was this present: Ist not well done?” (1.5.223–25). Paulina in her “Gallerie” (5.3.10) or “Chappell” (5.3.86) does the same with the curtain that shrouds Hermione’s freshly painted statue. The heightened drama that the curtain provides on such occasions is suggested by a story Edward Herbert tells in his autobiography. In 1610, about the very time Shakespeare was writing The Winter’s Tale, the Earl of Dorset was showing Herbert around his London house, “where bringing mee into his Gallery and shewing mee many Pictures hee at last brought mee to a Frame covered with greene Taffita and asked mee who I thought was there and therewithall presently drawing the Courtaine shewed mee my owne Picture.”10 The location of Hermione’s statue in a chapel perhaps recalls the custom in Catholic England of shrouding crucifixes during Lent and uncovering them at Easter.11 The “miracle” in Sebastian’s exclamation may carry the same religious charge as the condition that Paulina sets: “It is requir’d / You doe awake your Faith” (5.3.94–95). “Requir’d,” not “requirèd.” Not only in hanging arrangements but in painted pictures themselves a curtain was a standard prop when the artist wanted to represent a studio or study. Hans Holbein’s 1523 portrait of Erasmus, probably painted for William Warham, archbishop of Canterbury, and almost certainly owned during Shakespeare’s lifetime by the Earl of Arundel and displayed in Arundel’s famous gallery in Somerset House, features just such a prop.12 A green curtain hung on rings from a rod serves to demarcate a space “within” that displays the accouterments of a scholar’s study, including books (one of them stuck with notes) and a chemist’s vial. The book on which Erasmus rests his hands bears an inscription, “HRAKLEI[OI] RONOI,” “The Labors of

Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Erasmus (1523), oil and egg tempera on panel. On loan to the National Gallery, London. Reproduced by permission of the Bridgeman Art Library.

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Hercules,” that invites the viewer to consider the fifty-seven-year-old sitter’s life as one of heroic intellectual labor, scant personal gain, and political idealism. At least that is how Erasmus himself reads the life of Hercules in Adagia, cento 3, book 1, number 1. The Greek hero’s labors can of course mean feats of physical strength and endurance, Erasmus concedes, but they also betoken “tasks of the kind that bring very great blessings to other people, but almost no return to the man who undertakes them, except a little reputation and a great deal of ill-will.” The green curtain in figure 2 may be the same physical prop that is used to suggest withdrawal and scholarliness in Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More, now in the Frick Collection, New York.13 The curtain in The Tempest marks, then, a complex boundary that traverses art and nature, sacred and secular, private and public. One boundary of the fiction in The Tempest is defined by the theater’s tiring house wall. The two doors that punctuate this wall provide the main (perhaps the only) means of entrance into the fiction. “Enter Alonso, Sebastian, Anthonio, Ferdinando, Gonzalo, and others” (1.1.SD before 8): it is through those two doors that the Italians voyaging from Tunis come onto the platform and bring into presence the sea that surrounds the three hours’ traffic of the stage. “Enter Prospero and Miranda” (1.2.SD before 1): moments later the same doors establish the platform, not as the sea, but as an island. (It is possible, of course, that Prospero and Miranda have physically observed the sea wreck from “above,” as they do in many modern productions, and they could make their entrance through the curtain that later defines Prospero’s cell, but such entrances from “within” are extremely rare and tend to be limited to special effects, like the moment Ferdinand and Miranda emerge from the chess-playing pantomime and join the other characters on the main platform.)14 The platform becomes an island in scene 2 of The Tempest, and so it remains as Ferdinand at 1.2.377 and Alonso, Antonio, and their retinue at 2.1.1 make their reentries. If anyone, Caliban is the likeliest character to make his first entrance through the curtain rather than one of the doors. “What hoa: slaue: Caliban: / Thou Earth, thou: speake” (1.2.315–16): Prospero summons Caliban onto the stage and into the fiction from a location elsewhere, a location that Caliban’s first speech prefix specifies as “within” (1.2.316). Like most other denizens of “within” in early modern plays, Caliban is heard before he is seen. Fictionally if not physically, Ariel seems less confined by the play’s boundaries. It may be through one of the doors that Ariel first bounds onto the platform, but he answers Prospero’s summons with a sweeping verbal gesture toward all the places he can move:

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I come To answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly, To swim, to diue into the fire: to ride On the curld clowds (The Tempest, 1.2.190–93)

Compared to all the other characters, their feet firmly planted on the platform’s wooden planks, their movements restricted to the platform’s 1,182.5 square feet, Ariel comes across as being remarkably unbounded.15 Three other boundaries to the fiction are provided by the edges of the platform on which the players move and speak. The next figure shows a vignette from the title page to William Alabaster’s Latin tragedy Roxana, acted at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1592, but not printed until 1632. As R. A. Foakes points out, thirty-six years had passed since Alabaster’s play had been acted, and nothing connects the engraved image with any particular theater, but configuration of the stage as a half octagon does gesture toward a design that, by 1632, was familiar from the Phoenix Theatre in Drury Lane (converted from a cockpit in 1617) and the Cockpit-in-Court (adapted into a theater by Inigo Jones in 1629–30).16 The railings shown in the Roxana image accentuate the three forward edges of the platform as boundaries, even as the spectators in the space “above” lean over in such a way as to challenge the fixity of the boundary on the fourth side—the only one of the four boundaries that has apertures and admits comings and goings. In the Roxana image no doors are shown along this fourth boundary, only a curtained opening to “within.” Thomas Platter, who managed two theatrical outings, one to the Globe and one to the Curtain, during his visit to London from Basle in 1599, trains a keen eye on these arrangements of physical space. His description of the Theatre in Shoreditch seems to apply also to the Globe, since he speaks of London’s theater buildings in the plural: “Die örter sindt dergestalt erbauwen, daß sie auf einer erhöchten brüge spilen, unndt jederman alles woll sehen kan” [The playhouses are so constructed that they play on a raised platform, so that everyone has a good view].17 The word that Platter chooses for the stage, Brüge (modern German Brücke), actually means “bridge” or perhaps “bridgework,” suggesting that the platform functioned in Platter’s view as a connection between two spaces (perhaps tiring house and yard) as well as a defined space in its own right. Platter goes on to set in place other boundary markers in the form of doors (thür) that separate different galleries (gäng) and standing-places (ständt) from each

John Payne (engraver), title page to William Alabaster, Roxana Tragaedia (London: William Jones, 1632), detail. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.

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other—and different sorts of customers from each other, according to their ability to pay: Dann welcher unden gleich stehn beleibt, bezahlt nur 1 englischen pfenning, so er aber sitzen will, laßet man ihn noch zu einer thür hinein, da gibt er noch 1 Pf., begeret er aber am lustigesten ort auf Kissen zesitzen, da er nicht allein alles woll sihet, sondern auch gesehen kan werden, so gibt er bey einer anderen thüren noch 1 englischen pfenning. [For whoever cares to stand below only pays one English penny, but if he wishes to sit he enters by another door, and pays another penny, while if he desires to sit in the most comfortable seats which are cushioned, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen, then he pays yet another English penny at another door.]18

The boundaries that Platter sets in place here are not just physical but social—and not just social but psychological. The dynamic of not only seeing but being seen from the highest gallery suggests that people with three pennies to spend could breach the multiple boundaries–physical, social, and psychological—that the Globe erected between spectator and spectacle. We can witness that licensed movement in the extended hands and tilted heads of the gallery sitters in figure 3. The physical boundaries presented by the tiring house wall, by the edges of the platform, by the railings, and by the doorways leading to higher galleries have their counterparts within the fiction of The Tempest. A boundary between “within” and “without” is set in place in the play’s first seconds. “A tempestuous noise of Thunder and Lightning heard: Enter a Ship-master, and a Boteswaine” (1.1.SD before 1): heard from where? From where thunder comes from in the early modern theater, from “within.” Another stage direction when the ship is breaking up —“A confused noyse within” (1.1.SD at 57)—leaves no doubt about the sinister qualities of this heard but unseen space beyond the platform’s boundary. Meanwhile “without”—to judge from the exclamations, shouted commands, and disjointed prose—is seen as no less chaotic, no less unbounded. Solid earth is encountered only in the next scene, with the entrances of Prospero and Miranda and the shift to verse. The contrasted qualities of the scene on the sea and the scene on land can be witnessed in early modern maps. This detail from the map of the Mediterranean that accompanies George Sandys’ A Relation of a Iourney Begun An. Dom. 1610 shows the very route traversed by Alonso, Antonio, and their cohorts as they sailed from the north coast of Africa, where they attended the marriage of Alonso’s daughter to the King of Tunis, toward Sicily and the Italian peninsula. Terra firma appears in white, the Mediterranean Sea in dots

Map detail from George Sandys, A Relation of a Iourney Begun An. Dom. 1610 (London: Richard Field for W. Barrett, 1615). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

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made by the engraver’s burin, and the coastlines of Africa, Sicily, and the other islands in horizontal hatchings that firmly demarcate the solidities of the land and separate them from the formlessness of the sea. Prospero’s island must be just such a bounded space as Lampedola, Limossa, Malta, Goza, and Pantallaria appear to be in Sandys’s map. Along the map’s left-hand side, sharply printed lead rules establish degrees and minutes of latitude. Tripolis lies at 30 degrees north, the southern tip of Sicily at 35 degrees north. A similar effect of boundary marking can be witnessed in the printing of The Tempest in the 1623 folio. The text of the play is bounded by vertical rules. Horizontal rules set off the beginnings of acts and of most scenes in The Tempest. Thus the portion of text shown in figure 1 takes its place within an elongated box that extends from sig. B2 verso to sig. B4 recto—a box that begins at “Actus quintus: Scæna Prima” (title before 5.1.1) and ends at “Exeunt omnes” (5.1.SD after 322). Another box contains “EPILOGVE spoken by Prospero,” another box still “The Scene, an vn-inhabited Island” and “Names of the Actors.” Again, punctuation marks a boundary that might not otherwise be noticed by the reader: Prospero’s island is “vn-inhabited.” The hyphen serves to emphasize the “un-.” Even without rules, books typically insist on bounded texts and images by setting them within the blank space of margins. So common, so unquestioned is this practice that modern printing technology has had to invent special terms for the rare situations in which images extend right to the edges. Such printing is known in English as a “bleed,” in French as à fond perdu (“to the lost bottom” or perhaps “to the lost background”), in Italian as al’vivo (to the life), in German as angeschnitten (cut in).19 Each term reveals a certain skittishness about boundaries. Texts and images need edges; otherwise the relationships between space and body (“bleed”), background and foreground (à fond perdu), art and life (al’vivo), and this piece and that piece (angeschnitten) become confused. The final box in the 1623 printing of The Tempest, with its setting in place of scene and “persons,” represents in print what the spectators at the Globe in 1610–11 saw and heard on the quadrilateral of the platform: a bounded space that situates the reader/spectator here and the text/action there. The particular fiction being enacted in The Tempest replicates this situation by locating the persons of the play within the confines of an island, bounded by a teeming sea. At the Globe the audience with their craning necks and bobbing heads occupied the place of the sea. It is curious that Prospero promises to “drowne my booke,” not burn it (5.1.57). Drown? Usually books, like witches, were burned.

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Book burning was the means that John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Bancroft, bishop of London, used to rid the land of satires in their ban of June 4, 1599.20 Haig Bosmajian explains why: “Since fire was the power that could cleanse the farms and communities of their witches, moles, vermin, disease, and pestilence, and since heretical, blasphemous infections, plagues, and poisons could be destroyed through book burnings, the cleansing, purifying, dreadful, magical fire was also ignited to rid the land of seditious and impure obscene works.”21 There was some precedent for drowning books, however, in the legend of St. James the Greater, who converted the magician Hermogenes and ordered him to throw his books into a stream. Drowning one’s book, not burning it, may be appropriate to a play that begins with a shipwreck and ends with a promise of “calme Seas, auspicious gales, / And saile, so expeditious, that shall catch / Your Royall Fleete farre off” (5.1.318–20), but it also calls attention to the water that threatens the boundaries of Prospero’s domain, to the latitude of movement that Ariel enjoys, to the wandering attention of Miranda as Prospero narrates his story in act 1, scene 2. Drowning the book is, I would argue, just the kind of reading, looking, and hearing that The Tempest, like other early modern scripts, demands and deserves. The boundary marking, the rule setting, that governs the printed book extends, as we have seen, to its punctuation—in early modern terms, to its “pointing” or “distinction.”22 For the compositor who was working on The Tempest this meant the frequent use of colons, two dots (“pricks” was the preferred term in Early Modern English) placed over one another, to separate one breath-unit from one another. A colon to Shakespeare and his contemporaries was not primarily the two pricks but the unit of speech those two pricks served to bound. For John Hart, setting the rules in An Orthographie (1569), a colon is an “artus membrorum or internodium, which is the space, or the bone, fleshe and skinne betwixt two ioyntes.”23 For a speaker a colon marks a major (but not complete) pause for breath, just as a comma marks a shorter pause. “Pause” is, indeed, the name Ben Jonson in The English Grammar gives to a colon: he defines it as “a Distinction of a Sentence, though perfect in it selfe, yet joyned to another, being marked with two pricks. (:).”24 The colons or double pricks in figure 1 set internal boundaries to Prospero’s speech. Peculiar to the habits of the man who set the type for The Tempest is the use of dashes to demarcate syllables within single words. For such marks of the pen “dash” was the general term in early modern English— “a horizontal stroke of varying length (-, –, —),” according to the Oxford English Dictionary—whereas “hyphen” was the more precise term

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for a dash that occurs within a single word.25 Ferdinand’s “oo-zie bed” (5.1.153) has been cited already. Figure 1 contains the curious dash in “Not a relation for a break-fast” (5.1.166). Not to attend to the dots and the dashes, as Peter Quince fails to do in the prologue to “Pyramus and Thisbe” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is to miss the point, in more ways than one. “It is not enough to speake,” as Lysander observes to Theseus and Hippolyta, “but to speake true” (5.1.120–21). True to what? Lysander has in mind truth to grammar. I have in mind truth to experience. Dots and dashes: long before Morse Code became the language of telegraphy these two sorts of distinctions were at work in early modern communication. As things that a human body might do, as marks that a hand might make, they imply different degrees of force. In its etymology and earliest uses, a dash is a violent act. Daschen entered Middle English about 1300 from Norse to indicate a drubbing or a slapping with an open hand. The earliest definition recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1297: “To strike with violence so as to break into fragments; to break in pieces by a violent stroke or collision; to smash” (“dash, v.1,” etymology, 1.a). A dot, by contrast, is much less forceful. After a single instance in Old English as the word for the head of a boil, the term entered early modern English only in the later sixteenth century and became a term for punctuation only in the eighteenth (OED, “dot, n.1,” etymology, †1, 3.a, 5). Before then the preferred term, as we have noted, was “prick,” a small hole or puncture (OED, “prick, n.,” etymology), hence “a point or other mark made with, or as with, a pen, pencil, etc.; a spot, a dot” (OED, “prick, n.,” 2.a). When it comes to boundary marking, a dot or prick is reticent. It defers where a dash insists. The hand that guided the burin in figure 4 had to put much more effort into the lines than into the dots. Dots and dashes operate in linear space and in linear time. In figure 1 they take their places in lines of type. As for the units of speech that they separate, Hart thinks of them in spatial terms as bone, flesh, and skin between two joints—one of the two internodes in a thumb, say, or the three in a finger. Jonson thinks of them in terms of time, of how long a person can speak without pausing for breath: “For, whereas our breath is by nature so short, that we cannot continue without a stay to speake long together; it was thought necessarie, as well for the speakers ease, as for the plainer deliverance of the things spoken, to invent this meanes, whereby men pausing a pretty while, the whole speech might never the worse be understood.”26 Saussure, lecturing three hundred years later, recognizes this diachronic di-

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mension of language—“articulation,” he says, “may refer to the division of the chain of speech into syllables, or to the division of the chain of meanings into meaningful units”—but he in effect turns the diachronic dash (—) ninety degrees to form a bar ( | ) when he turns his attention to the synchronic structuring that goes on in every speech-act.27 That synchronic structure shapes up as marks made on water, as shown here: “[W]e can envisage the linguistic phenomenon in its entirety—the language, that is—as a series of adjoining subdivisions simultaneously imprinted both on the plane of vague, amorphous thought (A), and on the equally featureless plane of sound (B).”28 The vertical lines that create synchronicity between thought and sound, Saussure goes on to observe, work like wind on water: “[T]he changes in atmospheric pressure break up the surface of the water into series of divisions, i.e. waves.”29 In the act of taking the horizontal dash and making it vertical, Saussure delivers us to the state of academic criticism since the 1970s. In structuralism and deconstruction the kinds of meanings that count as important are taken to be the meanings found between arbitrary marks—Derrida’s “archewriting”—on the plane of thought.30 Criticism in this mode is all about the vertical lines that mark those boundaries. Our survey of the boundaries that impinge on Prospero’s discovery of Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess suggests, however, that a better marker would be two dots (:) turned ninety degrees and extended to form an ellipsis (. . .). “[P]ray you looke in:” (5.1.169): the colon that marks a pause in Prospero’s invitation to Alonso is full of anticipation, full of passion. So is the colon that marks a pause in Alonso’s first speech to Ferdinand:

The “plane of thought” (A) and the “plane of sound” (B) from Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (1916).

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Now all the blessings Of a glad father, compasse thee about: Arise, and say how thou cam’st here. (5.1.182–84)

In these words two bodily gestures are cued. The first is an embrace, an opening outward; the second, a rising up and a moving toward. Those two actions breach the multiple boundaries that we have set in place: Pantomime from main action, discovery-space from platform, cell from island, “withinness” from “withoutness,” passions from words, and—most crucially—actors from spectators. The feelings implied in Alonso’s ellipsis move out in waves toward the spectators. If Joseph R. Roach is right about the “science” of early modern acting, those waves were felt to be physical forces that radiated from the actor’s eye beams and touched off changes in the audience’s body chemistry through hearing the actor’s spoken words in their hearts as well as their ears.31 The passion that the spectator-listeners are invited to feel is specified in a word that sounds in The Tempest from the start but reaches a crescendo in Alonso’s exchanges with Prospero in act 5, scene 1. “[T]his must craue / (And if this be at all) a most strange story” (5.1.118–19), Alonso exclaims when Prospero first discovers himself to his sometime political enemy. Prospero takes over that word when he tells Alonso how he himself “most strangely / Vpon this shore (where you were wrackt) was landed” (5.1.162–63), but “strange” remains Alonso’s word throughout act 5, scene 1. He returns to it more and more frequently as the scene draws to a close: “These are not naturall euents, they strengthen / From strange, to stranger” (5.1.230– 31), “This is as strange a Maze, as ere men trod” (5.1.245), “This is a strange thing as ere I look’d on” (5.1.292, the last of many responses to Caliban as “strange”), “I long / To heare the story of your life; which must / Take the eare strangely” (5.1.315–17). Alonso’s association of “strange” with “a Maze” catches the qualities of “strange” as “[u]nfamiliar, abnormal, or exceptional to a degree that excites wonder or astonishment” (OED, “strange, a.,” 10.a). Etymologically, “strange” is defined by boundaries: it derives from the Latin extraneus (foreign, external, from the other side of the border). The extra in that formulation locates “strange” as being “without” vis-à-vis the speaker’s “within,” but it connects the speaker and the thing-spoken-about through an unspoken—indeed, perhaps unspeakable—ellipsis of feeling. Dumb shows indeed. In this respect Platter’s perception seems right: the stage functions for spectator-listeners as a Brüge or bridge that crosses boundaries.

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Not every reader and watcher of Shakespeare’s plays may feel the need to be rescued from the regime of poststructuralism, but if they do, act 5 of The Tempest sounds the SOS.

NOTES 1. Dieter Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (London: Methuen, 1965), 25. 2. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Isaac Iaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), sig. B3. In William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), this stage direction occurs before 5.1.174 (The Tempest). Further quotations from Shakespeare’s scripts are taken from the 1623 folio printing but are cited in the text with act, line, and scene numbers from the 2nd Oxford edition. 3. Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 69, cross-referenced boldface and italics regularized. 4. Ibid., 70. 5. Surveying the thirty surviving scripts known to have been acted at the Globe between 1599 and 1609, Richard Hosley, “The Discovery-Space in Shakespeare’s Globe,” Shakespeare Survey 12 (1959): 35–46, concludes three things about discovery scenes: (1) they are few and infrequent (only nine of thirty scripts include one); (2) they function as “ ‘shows,’ or disclosures, of a player or object invested with some special interest or significance” (44–45); and (3) they do not involve any appreciable movement within the space. (The Tempest falls outside Hosley’s chronological limits.) Andrew Gurr’s summation of the evidence in The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 151, seems just: “There was certainly some sort of enclosed space at the back of the stage, which could be pressed into use for the Globe plays. Its use seems to have been essentially for static tableaux, in accordance with long-established theatrical tradition.” 6. Dessen and Thomson, Dictionary of Stage Directions, 253. 7. My own investigation of the 115 stage directions in Dessen and Thomson’s dictionary having to do with arras, curtains, hangings, tapestries, or traverse indicates that fictional spaces within are most usually suggested to be bedchambers (23 percent), followed by studies (14 percent), and banqueting halls (5 percent). See Bruce R. Smith, “The Curtain between The Theatre and The Globe,” in The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 208–47. 8. “[B]ehold, and say ’tis well,” Paulina invites Leontes, Polixenes, and Perdita (The Winter’s Tale, 5.3.20). That she pulls aside a curtain at this moment is suggested by Leontes’ entreaty “Doe not draw the Curtaine” (5.1.59) and Paulina’s threat “Ile draw the Curtaine” (5.1.68). In physical terms a pedestal is implied, in ontological terms the supernatural is implied when Paulina says, “ ’Tis time: descend: be Stone no more: approach: / Strike all that looke vpon with meruaile: Come” (5.1.99–100). 9. Declaring to Polixenes that she will not plant hybrid gillyvors (“Natures bastards”) in her garden, Perdita explains, “For I haue heard it said, / There is an Art, which in their pidenesse shares / With great creating-Nature.” Not so, replies Polix-

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enes. “[S]o ouer that Art, / (Which you say addes to Nature) is an Art / That Nature makes” (The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.83, 86–88, 90–92). 10. The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury written by himself, ed. J. M. Shuttleworth (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 60. On the display of paintings behind curtains see Christopher Rowell, “A Seventeenth-Century ‘Cabinet’ Restored: The Green Closet at Ham House,” Apollo 143 (April 1996): 18–23. 11. John North, The Ambassadors’ Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance (London: Hambledon and London, 2002), 247–48, 318. 12. John Rowlands, Holbein: The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger (Boston, MA: D. R. Godine, 1985), 128. 13. Among many other places, the portrait of More is reproduced as plate 90 in Susan Foister, Ashok Roy, and Martin Wyld, Holbein’s “Ambassadors,” Making and Meaning (London: National Gallery, 1997). 14. Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6–7, 111–12. 15. My calculation of the platform’s square footage at the Globe is based on the dimensions specified in the Fortune contract, which takes the Globe as its model: “wch Stadge shall conteine in length ffortie and Three foote of lawfull assize and in breadth to extende to the middle of the yarde,” where the yard is specified to be “fiftie fiue foote . . . everye waie wthin,” implying a stage 43 feet wide by 27.5 feet deep, or 1,182.5 square feet. My quotations from the Fortune contract are taken from the transcription in Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 308, 307. 16. R. A. Foakes, Illustrations of the English Stage, 1580–1642 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), 72. Connections between the Roxana image and a similar image on the title page to Nathaniel Richards’ Messalina (1640) are examined by John H. Astington, “The Origins of the Roxana and Messalina Illustrations,” Shakespeare Studies 43 (1991): 149–69. 17. Thomas Platter, Englandfahrt im Jahre 1599: Nach der Handschrift der öffentlichen Bibliothek der Universität Basel, ed. Hans Hecht (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1929), 37; trans. as Travels in England, 1599, trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 167. 18. Ibid., 37, 167. 19. For the French equivalent of “bleed” I am indebted to Jean-Pierre Marson, for the Italian to Monica Bonechi, for the German to Christa Jansohn. 20. On the so-called bishops’ ban (an official prohibition on the printing of satires and an exemplary burning of books of satires outside Stationers’ Hall) see Janet Clare, “Marston: Censure, Censorship, and Free Speech,” in The Drama of John Marston: Critical Re-Visions, ed. T. F. Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 194–211; Lynda E. Boose, “The 1599 Bishops’ Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualization of the Jacobean Stage,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 185–200; and Richard A. McCabe, “Elizabethan Satires and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599,” Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981): 188–94. 21. Haig Bosmajian, Burning Books (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 31. 22. My understanding of early modern punctuation is derived largely from M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), esp. 41–61. The vagaries of punctuation in the 1623 folio are considered by Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). I have attempted a foray

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into the signifying power of orthography once before, in Bruce R. Smith, “Prickly Characters,” in Reading and Writing in Shakespeare, ed. David M. Bergeron (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 25–44. 23. John Hart, An Orthographie, in John Hart’s Works on English Orthography and Pronunciation, ed. Bror Danielsson (Stockholm: Alquist and Wiksell, 1955), 1:200. 24. Ben Jonson, The English Grammar, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 8:552. 25. Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), “dash, n.1,” 7.c: “A horizontal stroke of varying length (-, –, —) used in writing or printing to mark a pause or break in a sentence, a parenthetic clause, an omission of words or letters or of the intermediate terms of a series, to separate distinct portions of matter, or for other purposes.” Further citations from the OED are given in the text. Compare “hyphen, n.,” 1: “A short dash or line (-) used to connect two words together as a compound; also, to join the separated syllables of a word, as at the end of a line; or to divide a word into parts for etymological or other purposes,” with distinctly philological citations from 1603, 1620, and 1636. Not until a citation from 1678 does the word seem to have become truly naturalized. 26. Jonson, English Grammar, 8:551. 27. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (Chicago: Open Court, 1986), 10. 28. Ibid., 110. 29. Ibid., 111. 30. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), passim. 31. Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 27. According to Galenic physiology, Aristotelian physics, and Ciceronian rhetoric, the actor’s motions “could transform the air through which he moved, animating it in waves of force ripping outward from a center in his soul. His passions, irradiating the bodies of spectators through their eyes and ears, could literally transfer the contents of his heart to theirs, altering their moral natures.”

The Problematization of Generic Boundaries: Lyrical Inroads into Shakespeare’s Dramatic Dialogue Alexander Shurbanov

A MOST OBVIOUS POINT AT WHICH THE LYRICAL MODE INVADES SHAKEspeare’s dramatic texts is their monologic component: soliloquies, inserted poems, songs, and so on. Its penetration, however, is much subtler and more interesting when it affects the basic medium of drama: the dialogue, the azione parlata.1 Here the lyric’s static, intrapersonal essence flows right into the dynamic, interpersonal midst of the dramatic and merges with it to achieve new, complex effects. This essay will examine variants of such generic modulation in two plays from the turn of the century, when Shakespeare’s career was entering upon its climactic phase: As You Like It and Hamlet.

I Early on in the Arden comedy, the pastoral innamorato Silvius attempts to define to old Corin what it is like to be in love: If thou remember’st not the slightest folly That ever love did make thee run into, Thou hast not lov’d. Or if thou hast not sat as I do now, Wearying thy hearer in thy mistress’ praise, Thou hast not lov’d. Or if thou hast not broke from company Abruptly as my passion now makes me, Thou hast not lov’d. O Phebe, Phebe, Phebe! (As You Like It, 2.4.31–40)2

This monologue consisting of blank-verse tercets with its experiential view of love, its simple yet imposing diction, its powerful refrain 156

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“Thou hast not lov’d,” and the closing triple apostrophe amounts to an effective lyrical outburst. The usually ironic Rosalind is the first to appreciate its compelling drive: Alas, poor shepherd, searching of thy wound, I have by hard adventure found mine own. (2.4.41–42)

Her emotional comment illuminates the empathetic effect that lyric poetry is apt to obtain, the exciting discovery of a profound identity of all individual experiences. A little later, the pastoral bard in russet produces yet another, similarly structured and no less enthusiastic dissertation on the same topic: It is to be all made of sighs and tears, And so am I for Phebe. . . . . . . . . . It is to be all made of faith and service, And so am I for Phebe. . . . . . . . . . It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion and all made of wishes, All adoration, duty and observance, All humbleness, all patience and impatience, All purity, all trial, all observance; And so am I for Phebe. (5.2.83–98)

At this point, however, the utterance departs from the monologic format. All lovers present on the scene join in by simply substituting the names of their respective counterparts for Phebe’s name at the close of each stanza, thus turning the solo recital into a litany of voices, or something that could be called a collective lyric happening. These incantatory triple repetitions grow into the concentric pattern of an extended refrain, which reasserts the underlying kinship of all individual love stories. Silvius becomes the spokesman for all, the shaman of the amorous condition as such. In his monograph Roots of Lyric, Andrew Welsh outlines some aspects of traditional charm rituals that seem to underlie the Arden collective lyric: “Communal participation also creates the regular refrain: the main verses are sung by a leader, but all the dancers sing the refrain. . . . Speech rhythm gives way to chant rhythm, yielding a special chant language characterized by strong patterns of repetition in sound, word, and verse-line. . . .”3 The leader’s role is chiefly con-

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cerned with the setting of the theme and the tone of the communal event. This is precisely what Silvius does. As he eventually steps down from his central position in the magic exercise, it seems to be carried on by its own momentum: Phebe. [To Ros.] If this be so, why blame you me to love you? Sil. [To Phebe.] If this be so, why blame you me to love you? Orl. If this be so, why blame you me to love you? (5.2.102–6)

At this point the common identity of the individual contributions becomes complete and thoughtlessly automatic. The words are reiterated without discernible reference to the reality of the situation. Such is certainly the case of Orlando, whose mistress is supposedly absent. Rosalind is puzzled: “Who do you speak to ‘Why blame you me to love you?’?” though in this very act she is herself drawn into the incantatory repetition of the question. Orlando, as if still dazed by the ritual, responds in the same five-foot iambic measure, with an internal homophone rhyme to boot: “To her that is not here, nor doth not hear.” This is getting out of hand and becoming eerie in its separation from dramatic action. Rosalind must put an end to it, and she switches promptly to her trustworthy prose: “Pray you no more of this, ’tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon” (lines 110–11). Now she takes over the shaman’s role herself to structure the denouement in the same way as the “dialogue” has been structured by making use of its centripetal inertia. For, as she has already told Orlando, she is a trained sorceress. Her ensuing speech, radiating toward each of the participants in the ritual, is the first step toward the transformation of the whirling azione parlata into action proper. Mark the recurrent pattern of the concentric form with its respective personal variations evolving through three consecutive stages from declaration to command: 1. [To Sil.] I will help you if I can. [To Phebe] I would love you if I could. . . . 2. [To Phebe] I will marry you, if ever I marry woman, and I’ll be married tomorrow. [To Orl.] I will satisfy you, if ever I satisfied man, and you shall be married tomorrow. [To Sil.] I will content you, if what pleases you contents you, and you shall be married tomorrow. 3. [To Orl.] As you love Rosalind meet. [To Sil.] As you love Phebe meet. And as I love no woman, I’ll meet. (5.2.111–21)

Of course, the participants respond in an identical manner, following Silvius’s lead, as usual:

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Sil. Phebe. Orl.

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I’ll not fail, if I live. Nor I. Nor I. (5.2.123–25)

The next step will include Duke Senior and engage everybody in the common scheme by a formal oath. Verse is the appropriate medium for this solemn act: Patience once more, whiles our compact is urg’d. You say, if I bring in your Rosalind, You will bestow her on Orlando here? Duke Sen. That would I, had I kingdoms to give with her. Ros. And you say you will have her, when I bring her? Orl. That would I, were I of all kingdoms king. Ros. You say you’ll marry me, if I be willing? Phebe. That will I, should I die the hour after. Ros. But if you do refuse to marry me, You’ll give yourself to this most faithful shepherd? Phebe. So is the bargain. Ros. You say that you’ll have Phebe if she will? Sil. Though to have her and death were both one thing. (5.4.5–17) Ros.

The heroine adheres consistently to the formulaic iteration of “magic” phrases, and yet she never lapses into thoughtless automatism but weaves with great care the web of concrete dramatic action that she has designed by means of lyrical locution. The parallel answers are similarly formulaic. Rosalind completes the oath-taking ritual by another monologue of radial addresses sustained in the same shamanic iterative language: I have promis’d to make all this matter even. Keep you your word, O Duke, to give your daughter, You yours, Orlando, to receive his daughter; Keep you your word Phebe, that you’ll marry me, Or else refusing me to wed this shepherd. Keep your word Silvius, that you’ll marry her If she refuse me; and from hence I go To makes these doubts all even. (5.4.18–25)

In the anagnorisis scene, when Hymen appears and her true personality is finally revealed, she initiates one last whirl of the amorous litany with everybody else’s willing cooperation:

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Ros. [To The Duke.] To you I give myself, for I am yours. [To Orl.] To you I give myself, for I am yours. Duke Sen. If there be truth in sight, you are my daughter. Orl. If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind. Phebe. If sight and shape be true, Why then my love adieu. Ros. I’ll have no father, if you be not he. I’ll have no husband, if you be not he. Nor ne’er wed woman, if you be not she. (5.4.115–23)

This incantatory dialogue sounds so cryptic by making a number of different references with its minimalist use of nearly identical chunks of language that Hymen, as the new leader of the game, feels obliged to step in and unravel the mystery. Then, without delay, the god of marriage takes care to solemnize the weddings of all four couples in their own linguistic mode (lines 130–35). One final whirl of this concentric-language rite remains to be completed by Jaques’s benison (lines 185–92). The Duke has already announced the dances for the “brides and bridegrooms all” (line 177) and the rounds of words quite naturally transform into similarly patterned physical movements. Susanne Langer is right in principle when, in her discussion of folk poetry, she states: “No one has ever known a crowd to invent a song, although successive members may elaborate one, adding stanzas or proposing parodies, once its poetic theme, rhyme scheme, and tune have been proposed (the meter is usually dictated by the tune). The idea comes from one person; and a serious song, such as a “spiritual,” is usually presented in a complete form, however simple.”4 Yet the lyrical locution in the latter scenes of As You Like It takes shape as a simultaneous collective effort—very similar to the ritualism described by Andrew Welsh. Here Rosalind, leaning on Silvius’s example and help, manages to fuse the separate individualities of several dramatis personae into a single lyrical persona, a unitary voice expressing the essential oneness of all love experience. For, lyric always tends to rise from the midst of its apparent subjectivism to generalized impersonality. And by transforming this poetic unification into a unified dramatic action, the heroine succeeds in summarily bringing the romantic comedy to its necessary conclusion with the collective ceremony of multiple marriages. The centrality of an individual consciousness is nonetheless undeniable. In Agnes Latham’s phrase, “Rosalind’s high spirits jet like a fountain.”5 It is this lively temperament, perked up by the still unaccommodated passion of love, that pours itself forward into delightfully fresh imagery, witty wordplay, adages, jokes, parables, and

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fantasies, but above all, into the excited tripping rhythms of syntactical parallelisms, enumerations, and climaxes of all kinds, affecting the other denizens of the forest to the point of molding their speech in a similar springy pattern. The heroine’s lyrical presence is thus diffused throughout the play to adapt its general atmosphere to her own nature. The Forest of Arden is, in the final analysis, an inner territory of her mind, of her poetic imagination, and she has the prerogative to shape it the way she wishes. Even its theatrical reality in the Elizabethan age was a thing of the imagination created by the lyrical power of language, not by stage props or sets. As Arden is, then, not a truly dramatic but a personally lyrical space, Rosalind meets with little resistance from the other characters when she places them in the roles she has allotted each of them. Shakespeare’s youthful heroine, who is too reticent to put her feelings into a clearly articulated thematic utterance, generously shares the impulse of her heart with all humanity in the midst of azione parlata and becomes the inspired lyrical demiurge, the harbinger of universal happiness. Her poetic presence is seldom expressed in isolated generic inclusions, but its modal spread throughout the comedy is so pervasive that it transforms the drama from within by hybridizing it with the lyric and giving it the effervescent symmetrical form characteristic of the latter. The resulting overflow of centripetal energy is gradually streamlined into a vector.

II Hamlet, perhaps even more than As You Like It, is dominated throughout by one single person and one single consciousness. As Dieter Mehl points out, “The Danish Prince is . . . a most powerful presence in every scene of the play, even when he is actually absent from the stage. There is no part of the action without him and no dramatic suspense that is not directly related to his character.”6 This tragedy abounds in poetic insets—soliloquies, monologues, and rhymes, mainly associated with the hero—yet what mostly foregrounds the Prince as the bearer of the lyrical mode is, once again, his distinctive manner of participating in dialogue. The tone is set with the first words he utters on the stage. The King has just made his long formal speech from the throne, and both Laertes and Polonius have replied in the same predictable court language designed not so much to offer information or express predisposition as to confirm the established social hierarchy. However, as soon as Claudius begins his new display of oratorical skills with the words “But now, my cousin

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Hamlet, and my son—,” his addressee interrupts him with an objection signaling refusal to enter the political game: “A little more than kin, and less than kind” (Hamlet, 1.2.64–65).7 The speeches uttered so far are entirely actional,8 for their chief purpose is to formulate or negotiate future events. This cue is different: unconcerned with any concrete action, it focuses the attention on the relationship between the two parties in the act of communication. The issue now becomes debatable, not axiomatic, as everything coming from the King is a priori deemed to be. Moreover, Hamlet’s reaction is enigmatic, since the differentiation of meaning between the two almost synonymous words “kin” and “kind” is not self-evident. Thus, his interlocutor is deprived of immediate response. Some commentators assume that this is an aside rather than a disrespectful interruption. I prefer to view it as the latter, for it represents the hero’s idiosyncratic way of participating in conversation, of which there are many later examples. But it seems nevertheless to be self-addressed, nondiscursive. M. M. Mahood observes: “After so much ceremonious speechmaking, Hamlet’s first words have outrageous force, for he begins as he is to continue, a man talking to himself.”9 Such a person has to be either a lunatic or a poet. Hamlet appears to be both. But while the authenticity of his madness is uncertain, his lyrical way of using language to mainly clarify things to himself rather than to persuade others is beyond doubt. This is the quintessentially lyrical stance. Claudius’s next cue is tritely metaphorical: “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” (line 66). Since dead metaphors are tropes reduced to monosigns, this question presupposes a straightforward literal answer. Hamlet, however, chooses to resuscitate the figurative core of the phrase. And his attitude is once again that of disagreement: “Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun” (line 67). The metaphorical logic prompted by Claudius’s cliché has been extended. This choice shows Hamlet’s keen sensitivity to the suggestive potential of words, which characterizes poetic locution. His cue is indeed amply lyrical, for it is tantalizingly suggestive rather than informative. The Prince’s language is, from the very beginning, so fully liberated from discursive constraints10 that every word “sparkles with infinite freedom”11 and activates all its denotative and connotative meanings. This necessarily generates ambiguity, paronomasia, antidiscourse. Mahood notes that “he wraps inside a compliment about the King’s favour the statement that he is insulted to be called Claudius’ son; whereas Claudius takes the reply to mean that Hamlet considers himself dispossessed, out of house and home.”12 Given that he offers no verbal reaction, it is difficult to know how Claudius takes

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the reply, but the last-mentioned sense is probably part of the speaker’s cryptic message, for it voices a central preoccupation of his.13 What the critic takes as Hamlet’s intended meaning is itself richly ambiguous and can be paraphrased in a variety of ways: “I am too much in the King’s presence—far more than I’d like to be,” “I am too much of a son—for I have had a father and I don’t need another one,” “I am too loyal and loving a son to accept a new father,” and so forth. The ambiguity springs from a play on the homophones sun and son, common in Elizabethan and Shakespearean texts. The spelling “sonne” in Q2 is indicative.14 According to Mahood’s count, Hamlet “has more quibbles than any other of Shakespeare’s tragedies.”15 And, as Northrop Frye observes, “[A] pun introduced into a conversation turns its back on the sense of the conversation and sets up a self-contained verbal sound-sense pattern in its place.”16 Thus its close relation to lyric is revealed. The lyric quality of Hamlet’s first cues is due not only to the wordplay they indulge in but also to their incisive brevity, especially as they emerge in the midst of a fairly vacuous formal verbosity. We are riveted to these utterances because we sense their condensed meaningfulness and its importance, an importance that transcends the concrete exigencies of dramatic action. When next Gertrude tries to persuade her son that he should not be unnecessarily depressed by his father’s death, saying it is common that “all that lives must die,” and Hamlet picks up the attribute chosen by her to reply: “Ay, madam, it is common,” we hear in this an ironic bifurcation of sense again: ordinary, as the Queen has obviously meant it, but also coarse, vulgar, as a hinted comment on her attitude (1.2.72–74). From the very beginning we learn to listen attentively to what the Prince has to say, expecting every bit of his language to “radiate towards a thousand uncertain and possible relations.”17 Punning, of course, is not an automatic generator of lyric, and Shakespeare hastens to make this qualification in the ensuing scene by introducing a very different use of verbal wit. Now the speaker is Polonius. Somewhat like Hamlet, he snatches a word from somebody else’s cue in order to try out its semantic potential. The interlocutor in this case is Ophelia, who confides to her father that the Prince has “of late made many tenders / Of his affection to me” (1.3.99–100). The father is infuriated and proceeds directly to admonish his dangerously naive daughter: Marry, I will teach you. Think yourself a baby That you have ta’en these tenders for true pay Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more dearly

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Or—not to crack the wind of the poor phrase, Running it thus—you’ll tender me a fool. (1.3.105–9)

In fact, Polonius has already cracked the wind of the poor phrase by first playing on the two meanings of tender—the one used by Ophelia, “offer of love,” and the one he considers more appropriate in the case, “formal presentation of money in payment”—and then elaborating on this second sense to reduce his daughter to a mere commodity. Such exhaustive exploitation of the word deprives the pun of intriguing suggestiveness and renders it pedantically tedious, a mere phraseological exercise. Now that Polonius has got into the punning mood, he finds it difficult to extricate himself from it and continues to quibble until the end of the conversation. This kind of mechanical paronomasia is the opposite of Hamlet’s: it is not self-addressed, probing, lyrical, but outward-bound, oratorical. Unsurprisingly, Polonius becomes the permanent butt of the Prince’s gibes. Hamlet withdraws abruptly from actual communication when he meets his rhetorical antipode a little later, in act 2, scene 2. To Polonius’s question “Do you know me, my lord?” he offers a seemingly distracted answer: “You are a fishmonger” (lines 173–74). Commentators, however, have learned—as Polonius himself will soon do—to discover an underlying logic beneath Hamlet’s apparently wild talk. Here is an editorial footnote: “174. a fishmonger] In its ordinary sense ridiculously inappropriate for Polonius. But in another aspect a fishmonger is seen as one whose daughter had a more than ordinary propensity to breed, which leads on to ll. 181–4.”18 Disjunctive though it might sound, Hamlet’s part in the dialogue is far from unfocused. Its first thematic section opens with the identification of his interlocutor as the proverbial fishmonger and closes with the injunction that he should take care that his daughter does not get pregnant, a possibility that Polonius, as we have already heard, dreads. Within this framework Hamlet has managed to refer to “kissing carrion” and to philosophize about conception. His associative, figurative manner allows him to shift quickly from one image to another, totally different and therefore seemingly unrelated, while his attention to a central topic remains steady. This is a good illustration of the typical lyric combination of rhetorical discontinuity with thematic fixedness. The second section of the dialogue switches to a new topic, introduced by Polonius’s question: “What do you read, my lord?” (line 191). Hamlet’s answer—“Words, words, words” (line 192)—is starkly uncooperative within the particular discursive frame, since the inter-

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locutor’s interest is obviously in what the words signify, though it seems to suggest the speaker’s dissatisfaction with trite uses of language. The question is then reformulated: “What is the matter, my lord?” (line 193), but the Prince pretends to misunderstand again: “Between who?” (line 194). Thus the word matter is liberated from all discursive constraints and allowed to wander. Polonius continues persistently to drive the conversation back into the narrow channel of ordinary communication: “I mean the matter that you read, my lord” (line 195). At this point Hamlet can plunge into an ironical-satirical disquisition on old age and decay that is seemingly an answer to the query but, in fact, an oblique sarcastic comment on the courtier’s person. While Polonius’s wont—exhibited in his earlier conversations—was to cursorily catalogue the meanings of a word or a phrase in a lexicographical fashion, Hamlet’s is to probe into their referential potential and to bridge yawning semantic gaps, thus opening up unexpected visions latent in language. This type of wordplay lies at the roots of lyric. It constitutes the antidiscourse that puts the interlocutor in the position of overhearing a basically self-addressed utterance19 and attempting—not always successfully—to intuit its underlying logic and reconstruct the implied message. If Hamlet appears for the most part of this exchange to be mocking the old man under the guise of a madman’s wild talk—that is, to be not inwardly lyrical but evasively satirical, resembling sardonic villains like Richard III, Iago, and Edmund—in its closing third section, sustained in much the same paronomastic style, he fully withdraws into his own overwhelming concern: Pol. Will you walk out of the air, my lord? Ham. Into my grave? (2.2.206–7)

Polonius recognizes the unexpected relevance of this shift of the phrase’s meaning: “How pregnant sometimes his replies are—a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of” (lines 208–11). As usual, he has a theory about what he sees and, burying his head in its narrowness, misses the broader dimension of the truth, though he is ever so close to it. The lyric mode, he could have said, is so pregnant of revelation—a happiness that often poetry hits upon, that the reason of everyday “actional” existence cannot so effectively produce. The closure of this uneasy dialogue is sustained in the same vein, as Hamlet continues harping on his obsessive theme (“not to be”), using every new occasion to return to it by transcending the literal

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sense and opening up the wider figurative perspective of words and phrases: Pol. My lord, I will take my leave of you. Ham. You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will not more willingly part withal—except my life, except my life, except my life. (2.2.213–17)

The ironist disguising his contempt as court etiquette has imperceptibly turned lyricist in order to speak thoughtfully and feelingly of himself to himself. When, next, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enter the stage, they at first seem almost antipodal to Polonius. Hamlet greets them excitedly as “My excellent good friends” (2.2.224), and the dialogue trips along merrily. But it does not take the Prince long to size up his interlocutors’ new position and, having sniffed out their mission, to switch back to the double-edged language employed in his dealings with Claudius and Polonius. Guildenstern is the first to unwarily set the new tone of the conversation when he answers the question “Good lads, how do you both” (line 225) in a paradoxically figurative manner: “Happy in that we are not over-happy: on Fortune’s cap we are not the very button” (lines 228–29). The Prince’s attention is at once fixed onto this emergent image and its wider possibilities to dig into the truth of the situation. He follows faithfully the logic of the metaphor by asking: “Nor the soles of her shoe?” (line 230) to surmise: “Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?” (lines 232–33), and when Guildenstern makes an awkward attempt to extricate himself from the backfiring anatomical figure by switching to another, military one (“Faith, her privates we” [line 234]), Hamlet pulls him back to it by a paronomastic association to conclude triumphantly: “In the secret parts of Fortune? O most true, she is a strumpet. What news?” (lines 235–36). Aggressive sarcasm flows imperceptibly into personal grievance, dramatic exchange becomes lyrical self-expression. When, somewhat later, the Prince’s allusion to his bad dreams is ascribed by the other two to ambition, that “shadow of a dream” (line 259), he plays briefly with the trope to expose its shallowness but also to once again remind himself of his being deprived of his birthright (lines 263–65), thus continuing an undercurrent of associative thought. A couple of cues later his mind still dwells on the idea, as he returns to the image of the beggars with reference to himself. And right after that we hear him question his old pals’ loyalty in

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an ambiguously figurative way that is at once followed by an unexpectedly literal challenge: “Were you not sent for?” (line 274). From this point on the conversation is absolutely straightforward, unbefuddled by tropes, puns, and other forms of withdrawal from cooperative communication. Doubt has been resolved into prosaic clarity, which cancels the lyric. The ensuing appearance of Polonius as the futile bearer of stale news provides Hamlet with a new opportunity to make a fool of the old busybody. He comes close to calling him an ass (line 391) and then discomfits him with the enigmatic allusion to Jephthah and his daughter (lines 399–408), which sounds like an extension of the earlier fishmonger trope. A metaphorical logic already applied to the topic is faithfully, though unobtrusively, sustained. During the Mousetrap episode (act 3, scene 2), Hamlet indulges in the wide variety of oblique talk that he has by now customized to suit each of his spurned interlocutors. The King comes in for chastisement first. His question “How fares our cousin Hamlet?” (line 92) elicits an answer very much like the ones offered at their first stage encounter in act 1, scene 2: “Excellent, i’faith, of the chameleon’s dish. I eat the air, promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so” (lines 93–94). Once again a keyword from Claudius’s cue (fare) is wrenched from its discursive frame to send the conversation off on another trajectory, the figurative way of speaking being substituted for the literal one, so that language can be liberated and made suggestive in an elusive, disconcertingly indefinite fashion. The general drift of this utterance is fairly obvious in spite of its indirection: the Prince alludes again to his annoyance at being left out in the cold by his uncle’s seizure of power. The “capon” element contains an oblique reference to the royal designs on his life. When Claudius pleads innocent of what he seems to be accused of (“I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine” [lines 95–96]), his nephew responds in an equivocal way: “No, nor mine now” (line 97). What does the Prince imply? Does he regret having let out the truth of a grievance that had better be kept secret?20 Or does he perhaps, half-apologetically, suggest that what has been said does not convey his real feelings? Such language leaves its referential frame uncertain, fluid, and draws the hearers’ attention back to the speaker’s state of mind, which can only be surmised. After a few jokes, cracked at the expense of Polonius and then of Ophelia in similarly cryptic language, Hamlet runs again into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose double-dealing is now an open book for him. He puns disrespectfully about the King’s distemper, drowning the actional dialogue in figurative equivocation. Finally, Guilden-

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stern feels obliged to expostulate: “Good my lord, put your discourse into some frame, and start not so wildly from my affair” (lines 300– 301). Hamlet tries to explain his willful uncooperativeness by referring to his insanity, an excuse that he will later use again after the altercation with Laertes. Yet the audience cannot help sensing that his linguistic tactic is that of ambiguity laden with sarcasm. Primarily leveled at Claudius, it ricochets toward his emissaries too. The hero’s keen sensitivity to lexical connotations makes him focus on Guildenstern’s choice of the words “affair” and “business” in reference to the task they have been enjoined on by the King and define their relation as “trade,” resorting for the first time to pluralis majestatis to preclude any further possibility of informal intercourse (lines 324–25). Now Hamlet can ask Guildenstern a point-blank albeit metaphorically phrased question: “[W]hy do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil?” (lines 337–38). The addressee is so confused that he seeks refuge in the meaningless euphuistic language of court etiquette: “O my lord, if my duty be too bold, my love is too unmannerly” (lines 339–40). The contrast between these two ways of speaking could not have been sharper. It is Hamlet’s turn now to express bewilderment: “I do not well understand that” (line 341). And with the words “Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me . . .” he flies into one of his most lyrical short monologues (lines 354–63) revolving around the musical instrument in his hand and exploring its figurative potential. When Polonius enters as a superfluous messenger again, Hamlet responds to his “news” in a manner so unrelated to it as to suggest raving: “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?” (lines 367–68). One wonders if at a deeper level this is not a gibe at the old man’s slowness, both physical and mental. We remember that on other occasions the Prince has already compared him to an ass and a calf. Why he replaces so quickly the camel with a weasel and then with a whale—making him accept each shift uncritically—and whether there is an encrypted caricature of the meddler in this series of imagined shapes may be anybody’s guess. Hamlet retains the central meaning of his utterance to himself, thus magnifying its semantic and emotive impact. In the final analysis, he always ends up conversing with himself, often puzzling people who seem to be closer to him and putting the others on their guard. Commentators have noticed that in the latter half of the tragedy its protagonist undergoes a radical change. After the discovery in the Mousetrap scene he turns abruptly from contemplation to action, transforming from “poet” into “hero.”21 His way of speaking becomes more interpersonally dramatic, less centripetal, though not deprived

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of poetic imagery. Now that the rapier has been forced into his hand, only occasionally do we catch a glimpse of the earlier probing questioner, but the stamp he has left on our minds with his disturbing riddles, throwing dialogue again and again out of its rut into a realm of higher meaning, is indelible.

III The protagonists of both As You Like It and Hamlet impose the lyrical mode on the very stronghold of the dramatic, the azione parlata. And yet, there is a marked difference between the two, for the Prince of Denmark, unlike Rosalind, is anything but collectivistic in the realization of his lyrical impulses. While she projects her inner self on her surroundings, he, conversely, draws the whole of the outer world into the throbbing center of his own being. While she is concerned with the creation of magic linguistic formulae that can fuse the inimitably personal into the universal and mold the entire human world in a poetic way, his profound interest in language and its knack of concealing the truths of existence coupled with his determination to rend this veil of deception makes almost every utterance of his a poetic revelation. In a dishonest, scheming world that he deeply distrusts, he picks up every suspicious word from the flow of conversation and subjects it to the test of its own polysemous potential. Thus, he performs the essential function of poetry, consisting according to Jan Mukarˇovský in “confront[ing] the vocabulary of the given language with the world of things which this vocabulary is supposed to reflect and to whose changes it is continuously adapting itself.”22 With the instruments of lyric he endeavors uncompromisingly to cleanse the very substance of the world, freeing it of the dross of mechanical routine. In the final analysis, the Prince is not the creator of formulae but their deconstructor. Like Rosalind (perhaps like Juliet too), Hamlet would never think of himself as a poet, and he would never brood on the problem “how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world.”23 The pedantic inventories of allegory are alien to his nature. He would rather hit on an unexpected association and probe to its utmost depth instead of spreading out to its periphery. It is true that, unlike Rosalind, Hamlet is given to soliloquizing. But his soliloquies do not offer us a better insight into his inner world than does his laconic participation in dialogue. Both characters are extremely reticent, even secretive. But again and again they betray their true feelings inadvertently and infec-

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tiously. Rosalind does that by being overly excited and vividly imaginative as the center of communal interaction, and Hamlet does it by every now and then retiring into an inner space to make a mental note about life in the course of conversation, leaving his interlocutors in the lurch. His mental notes carry a degree of seriousness much higher than that of the shallow conversation from which they depart. We are made to feel that the actual center of reality is inside the protagonists rather than without. Both Rosalind and Hamlet establish a pervasive atmospheric presence without which their plays are unthinkable. This presence is lyrical rather than dramatic, but its lyricism is generated as much by the way they interact with the others as by what they say to themselves. Consequently, the dramatic and the lyric become inseparably interlocked. The boundary between the two is obliterated. Drama turns poetry without ceasing to be drama. The familiar compound phrase poetic drama acquires generic relevance.

NOTES 1. Azione parlata (It.)—spoken action (Luigi Pirandello’s phrase referring to dialogue in drama, coined in an essay titled “L’azione parlata” of 1899, http://www .pirandelloweb.com/scritti/scritti_l’azione_parlata.htm). 2. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1975). All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. 3. Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 165, 172. 4. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 275. 5. Agnes Latham, introduction to As You Like It, ix–xcv, xx. 6. Dieter Mehl, Shakespeare’s Tragedies: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 32. 7. Hamlet, 1.2.65. All subsequent quotations are taken from William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1981). 8. I borrow this term from Manfred Pfister’s classification of monologues in drama (The Theory and Analysis of Drama [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988]), but I extend its reference to other areas of dramatic texts too. 9. M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay (London: Methuen and Co., 1968), 113. 10. In a chapter entitled “Poetics of the Lyric” Jonathan Culler notes that structuralists “tend to think of poetry as a way of liberating the word from the constraints which discursive order imposes on it.” Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 183. 11. In his discussion of the way in which words function in poetry, Barthes says: “. . . “[L]e Mot poétique . . . brille d’une liberté infinie et s’apprête à rayonner vers mille rapports incertains et possibles” (Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1953], 69–70. [The poetic word . . . sparkles with infinite freedom and is ready to radiate towards a thousand uncertain and possible relations.”]). 12. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay, 114.

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13. Compare the similar ironic allusions of Coriolanus and Timon to their exposure to the weather: Third Serv. Where dwell’st thou? Cor. Under the canopy. Third Serv. Under the canopy? Cor. Ay. Third Serv. Where’s that? Cor. I’th’city of kites and crows. (William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank, Arden Shakespeare [London: Methuen, 1976], 4.5.38–43) Apem. Tim.

Where ly’st o’nights, Timon? Under that’s above me. (William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, ed. Harold J. Oliver, Arden Shakespeare [London: Methuen, 1959], 4.3.294)

14. See Dover Wilson in The Works of Shakespeare: “Hamlet,” ed. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), 150 n. 67, quoted in Harold Jenkins’s edition of Hamlet (see n. 7), line 435. 15. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay, 112. 16. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 276. 17. See note 11 above. 18. Hamlet, ed. Jenkins, 246. 19. “Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling: but, if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling conferring itself to itself, in moments of solitude.” John Stuart Mill, Essays on Poetry, ed. F. Parvin Sharpless (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 12. “[P]art of our enjoyment of great poetry is the enjoyment of overhearing words which are not addressed to us.” T. S. Eliot, “Poetry and Drama,” in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), 109. 20. Harold Jenkins refers us to the proverb: “A man’s words are his own no longer than he keep them unspoken” (Hamlet, ed. Jenkins, 293n). 21. The distinction between these two types of characters, the active “heroes” and the contemplative “poets” is made by Tzvetan Todorov on the basis of ideas offered by Novalis in his Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Todorov, Genres in Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 51. 22. Jan Mukarˇovský, The Word and Verbal Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 72. 23. From the opening lines of King Richard’s soliloquy in Richard II, 5.5.1–2.

IV Crossing Intertextual Boundaries

William and Geoffrey Catherine Belsey I

ACT 5 OF AS YOU LIKE IT UNEXPECTEDLY INTRODUCES A NEW CHARACter: her local suitor, it seems, lays claim to Audrey. This amiable country bumpkin does not stand a chance, however, against the mocking wit of the court clown, Touchstone. Their exchanges begin well enough: the newcomer calls Touchstone “sir” and removes his hat in deference to a man of superior status; his interlocutor replies with the courtesy title of “gentle” friend and urges him to cover his head again (5.1.15–17).1 Touchstone’s interrogation of the stranger, however, shows clearly who is in control of events. The young man was born in the Forest of Arden, his replies reveal; he is moderately well off (“so so”); he has in his own estimation “a pretty wit,” though he is not “learned”; and his name is William. “A fair name,” Touchstone concedes (lines 20–38). While the court fool’s syntax grows increasingly complex as the dialogue progresses, the countryman’s remains resolutely paratactic and virtually monosyllabic: “I do sir”; “No sir”; “Which he sir?” (lines 36, 38, 44). Touchstone’s verbal dexterity includes a wide range of synonyms and a mastery of elementary Latin; William’s tongue-tied simplicity confines him to a dialect of the vernacular. And where Touchstone threatens, William eventually retreats, relinquishing Audrey with a cheerful “God rest you merry, sir” (line 59). William has no part in the source text, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde. Nor does the episode make any detectable contribution to the plot of the play, though it offers a comic interlude between Rosalind’s faint and her reunion with Orlando. An emerging scholarly consensus identifies William as the dramatist’s own surrogate, an ironic persona adopted as a theatrical joke in 1599 for the new Globe Theatre. It was in 1596 that Shakespeare had acquired a coat of arms for his father; a year later he bought the impressive New Place in Stratford, confirming his prosperity, as well as the bid for “gentle” status. Katherine Duncan-Jones sees the dialogue between Touchstone and 175

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the twenty-five-year-old William as conducted between Shakespeare’s older and younger selves, “an exchange between the wealthy and quick-witted playwright and the provincial youth he has left behind him in the Forest of Arden.”2 James P. Bednarz, meanwhile, interprets the scene as constituting one round in the “Poets’ War,” where Shakespeare gleefully adopts the caricature of himself already sketched by Ben Jonson as artless and unschooled, a social climber but at heart a good-natured country clown.3 Shakespeare’s sources for William, Bednarz proposes, are not the pastoral romance that supplies the story but a succession of self-portraits by authors in the classical tradition of pastoral poetry, from Virgil’s Tityrus to Spenser’s Colin Clout. These are sad shepherds whose unrequited love is the occasion of their own melancholy songs. In an ironic reversal of the convention for this bucolic comedy, Shakespeare’s rejected lover not only lacks a properly pastoral name: he is also hopelessly inarticulate, as well as self-effacing—more like the authorial surrogates of the English medieval tradition, and Chaucer’s in particular.4 The Sonnets confirm that Shakespeare was not above including a version of himself in his poetry, and his own role there is anything but heroic. In the first place, the name required to make the succession of puns on impulse, desire, and the sexual organs of both men and woman that compose Sonnets 135 and 136 is the diminutive form, Will. And in the second, this homely appellation stands in direct contrast to the punning classical pseudonyms adopted by other sonneteers, such as Parthenophil, lover of a virgin (Parthenophe), or Astrophil, in love with a star (Stella). But then Shakespeare’s poems concerning the so-called Dark Lady seem to mock the whole idealizing Petrarchan tradition by addressing sonnets to a woman who is portrayed in the texts themselves as less than beautiful, as well as inconstant, deceitful, voracious, and perhaps diseased. Her lover, it follows, is a loser. Since you make your favors so readily available to others, urges Sonnet 135, surely your “will” could admit mine and barely notice the difference? The author (fictional or not) of the following sonnet sinks still lower. Since “one” is not properly a number at all, “Then in the number let me pass untold” (uncounted, unrecorded); “For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold” (lines 9–10). And finally, the couplet of Sonnet 136 triumphantly reduces the poet to his own nickname—or desire, or penis: “Make but my name thy love, and love that still; / And then thou lov’st me, for my name is Will” (lines 13–14). But the inclusion of a dramatist’s fictional surrogate as a fool in his own play is unprecedented in the English theatrical tradition.5 In my view, the William of As You Like It primarily pays tribute to Chaucer,

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whose status as exemplary vernacular poet of a preceding age was exceptionally high at that time. Chaucer is among the most theatrical of poets, and his many stand-ins are depicted with varying degrees of irony. Whether or not in individual cases medieval English verse was actually read aloud by the author, poetry of the period conceived of itself as spoken: “[T]he conditions of public performance are enacted in the poem.”6 Recitation, in other words, was understood to be a component of the event, so that the teller might readily feature in his own tale, as do Langland’s Will or Skelton’s Parrot and Colin Clout. At once inside and outside the text he performs, a diffident narrator is thus acknowledged to exist but without becoming intrusive. Chaucer’s poetry makes exceptionally sophisticated capital out of this convention. Dieter Mehl has written with great subtlety about his “playful treatment of the autobiographical possibilities of first-person narrative.”7 The narrating self, who is and is not Chaucer, is perpetually bemused, disarmingly uncomprehending, in constant need of further explanation from his fictional interlocutors. In The Book of the Duchess, published in the sixteenth century as The Dreame of Chaucer, with the effect of confirming the identification of the first-person narrator with the poet, this figure has been sleepless and unhappy so long that he is “as it were a mased thing” (fol. 244r).8 When a good book (Ovid’s Metamorphoses) finally procures him a night’s sleep, the textual Chaucer seems quite mystified by the plight of the Knight in Black, and his attempts at consolation are inadequate and misplaced, as the Knight does not scruple to remind him: “Thou wotest ful litel what thou menest / I have lost more than thou wenest,” he reiterates (fol. 241v; cf. 243r, 244r).9 When the Knight finally declares his bereavement in words that can no longer be misunderstood, the narrator’s response is simplicity itself: “She is dedde: Naie, Yes by my t[r]outhe / Is that your losse, by God it is routhe” (fol. 244r). The device of the naive dreamer has the dual effect of sustaining the story while ascribing the poetry—and the suffering it represents—to the sorrowing aristocratic lover (who might or might not be a fictional representation of John of Gaunt). It was a strategy Chaucer would continue to exploit with varying effects in a succession of dream poems. The Parliament of Fowls shows the dreamer all but overwhelmed by the complexity of the passion he has read about in books. Even though he is “dull,” as Africanus tells him, and knows nothing from experience, he may be capable of learning something, once this guide has unceremoniously “shove[d]” his reluctant protégé into the garden of love (fol. 245r). The wide-eyed observer, we are left to construe, misses no feature of the garden it-

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self, from the temple of Venus to the mating of the birds, while his innocence flatters the audience into supposing that they themselves are responsible for making sense of the events he records. By the time of The Canterbury Tales, self-deprecation has reached a pitch of high comedy. Though the sixteenth-century edition differs in certain respects from our own scholarly version, it leaves no doubt that the general narrator is to be identified with Chaucer himself. In the case of the “Prologue to Sir Thopas,” it notes: “here foloweth the wordes of the Hoste to Chaucer,” and later, “here beginneth Chaucers Tale of Melibeus” (fols. 69v, 71r). But where the narrator of the Parliament of Fowls proclaimed himself a dedicated reader, the pilgrimChaucer, ironically, knows only one tale, and that an old rhyme. Moreover, he demonstrates that he is no storyteller. In practice, his parody of romance in “The Tale of Sir Thopas” proves so excruciating that the Host feels compelled to interrupt this “Dogrell,” lambasting the narrator’s “leudnesse” (ignorance) in the process: “By God (qd he) plainly at o worde / Thy drastie riming is not worth a torde” (fol. 70v). The poet’s pilgrim-surrogate takes this in good part, however. After a mild protest, in which he points out that the Host has not stopped anyone else, and this is, after all, the best verse he knows, the narrator equably agrees to try something in prose, adding serenely that the Host ought to like this next story, unless he is exceptionally hard to please. Like the easygoing William, the fictional Chaucer is stripped of his author’s own skills but eminently accommodating. It is in The House of Fame, however, that Chaucer’s stand-in is addressed by his first name. Here the narrator’s position is particularly absurd. In his dream he is scooped up by an enormous golden eagle and carried into the air as lightly as if he were a lark. The terrified dreamer begins to come to his senses only when the eagle speaks in a human voice to assure him of his friendship, even though he finds his unnecessary burden trying. But what, the dreamer wonders, does this flight mean? He is not a hero, like others who were carried up to heaven. Does Jove mean to “stellifie” him (fol. 277r)? Not yet, the eagle replies: instead, he is to observe the ways of lovers in the House of Fame, where every sound made in the world is audible. And the schoolmasterly eagle, always ready to instruct the figure he carries between his claws, embarks on a solemn and prolonged exposition of the science of sound, with “Geffray, thou wottest well this . . .” (fol. 278r). Like William, Geoffrey is quite out of his depth; like William’s, his brief interventions are mainly monosyllabic, as well as consistently courteous toward his condescending interlocutor. In one instance the eagle complacently asks Geoffrey for confirmation that he

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has proved his altogether improbable point in appropriately simple words: For hard language, and hard matere Is incombrous for to here At ones, wost thou not wel this And I answered and said yes A ha (qd. he) lo so I can Leudly to a leud man Speke, and shew him soch skilles That he may shake hem by the billes So palpable they shoulden be But tel me this now pray I the How thinketh the my conclusioun A good persuasioun (Qd. I) it is and like to be Right so as thou hast proved me. (The House of Fame, fol. 278v)

Geoffrey’s readiness to agree leaves the audience to draw their own conclusions about whether an allegorical fantasy benefits from scientific justification. Meanwhile, in As You Like It has Audrey done well to opt for Touchstone? If Shakespeare borrows from his illustrious predecessor in this play, he transforms William’s predicament. At the same time, however, he maintains the comedy of innocence abroad— and the corresponding invitation to form an opinion on the events depicted.

II The prevailing New Historicism deflects attention from Shakespeare’s intertextual heritage. Finding unexpected analogies between texts of the same epoch but radically different genres, it tends to ignore lines of chronological descent within literature itself. In the work of Stephen Greenblatt and his colleagues, resolutely synchronic as it is, the parallel anecdote supplants history as narrative. Perhaps reacting against what had come to seem an increasingly pointless quest for sources and influences, the cultural anthropology of New Historicism has had the effect of imposing boundaries on the kind of scholarship that is held to illuminate the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.10 The turn to anthropology has had its virtues, of course: arguably, the institution needed a shift of perspective. But, perhaps inadvertently, this framework of the New Historicist “cultural poetics”

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discourages formal analysis in favor of ideology. What links the fiction of the time with the letters, essays, merchants’ records, and gynecological treatises that concern New Historicism is in the first instance thematic. Close attention to the actual poetics of the texts would be pointless, since there would be so little common ground. Vocabulary, syntax, genre itself, the formal properties of the work of fiction, are relegated accordingly to the margins of scholarship. I have no quarrel with ideological analysis: most discussions of race and gender have shown themselves to be a good deal sharper and more instructive than some of the woolly moralizing that so often passed for literary criticism a generation ago. But our politicized accounts of the fictional texts that constitute the objects of literary criticism will be subtler and more nuanced to the degree that they take account of their formal and intertextual properties. Does William’s debt to Geoffrey, always supposing it exists, contribute anything to our understanding of As You Like It? The scene is sometimes cut in performance; its antecedents are surely no more than a curiosity? Perhaps. On the other hand, Chaucer’s uncomprehending narrators, I have suggested, invite the audience to supply the judgment a more reflective commentator might have spelled out on our behalf. William’s intervention might lead us to conclude that Audrey has made a poor choice. As the most cynical of lovers, Touchstone shows every promise of confirming Ganymede’s observation that “men are April when they woo, December when they wed” (4.1.140–41). The contrasting innocence of the rejected William paradoxically confirms the fact that Shakespeare’s romantic comedy is not altogether naive about the prospects for the marriages it celebrates. If Shakespeare found in Chaucer the technique of standing back to make way for the audience to judge, he was evidently a close and attentive reader. It happens that a new edition of Chaucer was produced in 1598, at the time when Shakespeare was probably in the process of composing As You Like It.11 (Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, explicitly quoted by Phoebe [3.5.82–83], was also published that year, as was a new edition of Rosalynde.) The Workes of our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer appeared in a handsome folio volume, with a picture of Chaucer himself, his eyes cast down on the ground, just as he appears to the Host in “The Prologue to Sir Thopas.” Thomas Speght’s edition of The Workes includes an essay by Francis Beaumont Sr. in praise of the author, here “both alive again and yong again,” as well as testimonies cited from Roger Ascham, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip Sidney. Based on William Thynne’s edition of 1532, revised and reissued in 1542, 1550(?), and 1561, Speght’s version, as my quotations indicate, provides a text that is perfectly rec-

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ognizable in current terms, though slightly modernized. And whether coincidentally or not, a range of plays dramatizing Chaucerian narratives appeared in its wake.12 We know that Shakespeare was already familiar with Chaucer’s work. Ann Thompson concludes that in the course of the 1590s he draws on The Legend of Good Women in Lucrece; on the Legend, “The Merchant’s Tale,” and possibly The Parliament of Fowls, as well as “The Knight’s Tale,” for A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and on Troilus and Criseyde in Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice. There are possible allusions to The House of Fame in Titus Andronicus (1.1.627–28) and in 2 Henry IV, where Rumour is “painted full of tongues” (Induction, SD), like Chaucer’s Fame, who has as many tongues as beasts have hairs (fol. 281r).13 But if the playwright had glanced through the new edition to refresh his memory, he might have found much to interest him. Thompson judges that Rosalind alludes to “The Merchant’s Tale” when she insists that woman is never without an answer (4.1.163–65), and to Troilus as one of the lying love stories she invokes (4.1.92–95).14 In The House of Fame alone, Shakespeare would have found many friends, old and new. The story of Troy, beginning with Sinon’s treachery, is recorded as ecphrasis, just as it is in Lucrece (lines 1366–1568) (and, indeed, in Virgil himself).15 Theseus features in The House of Fame, though as Ariadne’s faithless lover, not Hippolyta’s husband; Ganymede is there too, though as the gods’ butler, not Lodge’s heroine in disguise. But above all, book 1 is a catalogue of familiar Virgilian and Ovidian love stories designed to locate Chaucer’s work in a line of descent that we now think Shakespeare was also in the process of claiming, as the writer who would both reconcile and surpass the Ovidian Marlowe and the Virgilian Spenser.16 Chaucer’s place remains, The House of Fame indicates, unrecognized, however. He has long served Venus and Cupid in books and poems as best he can but, so far, “Without guerdon” (fol. 277v). Would this complaint have appealed to the writer of Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Love’s Labour’s Won, not to mention the Sonnets, some of which, at least, were in circulation by the time Francis Meres praised Shakespeare’s output, perhaps surprisingly, in 1598?17 Whether or not Sonnets 25, 29, and 111 had yet registered in verse the good fortune and honors that seemed to elude the common player, their author might well have felt a sense of kinship with the neglected love poet of The House of Fame. Moreover, his life, Geoffrey complains, is all work and no play: after laboring at “reckenings,” the contoller of customs goes home and sits dumbly over yet another book, living like a hermit (fol. 277v). Geoffrey’s isolation here confirms the Host’s observation on

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the figure of Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales that “unto no wight doth he daliaunce” (fol. 69v). Coincidentally, John Aubrey would in due course be led to believe that Shakespeare was “not a company keeper” in London,18 and James Shapiro notes that the story rings true, since it draws attention to the limited time available to the dramatist at this stage for writing: “As a resident playwright as well as actor in the Chamberlain’s Men, a playing company that performed nearly yearround, most of Shakespeare’s mornings were taken up with rehearsals, his afternoons with performances, and many of his evenings with company business. . . . He had precious few hours late at night and early in the morning free to read and write.”19 Certainly, the poet of Sonnets 27 and 28 is “[w]eary with toil” (though he had no need to turn to The Book of the Duchess for the Petrarchan commonplace of the sleepless lover).

III The House of Fame, in other words, offered much that Shakespeare might have found sympathetic in 1598. Above all, it gave him Geoffrey as the pupil of a voluble pedagogue, a diminutive figure in the clutches of the giant eagle. Another little pupil is instructed for the entertainment of the audience in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. This scene, too, plays no significant part in the plot of the play and was not, indeed, printed in the quarto of 1602. Even though it is a holiday, young William Page reluctantly displays his small Latin, as he is put through his paces by the garrulous Welsh priest who (not unusually) doubles as a schoolmaster. Like Touchstone, Sir Hugh Evans also makes much of his interlocutor’s name: indeed, in a scene of seventy-eight lines he calls him “William” eleven times. “Was the name chosen because Shakespeare . . . had a similar experience as a schoolboy?” wonders the editor of Arden 3.20 Possibly. Shakespeare was almost certainly taught most of his Latin by another Welshman, Thomas Jenkins.21 William Page, who would be about seven or eight years old at this stage of his grammar school education, stolidly reproduces the material he has learned by rote from his first Latin textbook, A Shorte Introduction of Grammar (“for the bryngynge up of all those that entende to atteyne the knowlege of the Latine tongue”) by William Lilly and John Colet. The exchanges in this scene, which come very close to the obscurity of the book itself, are rendered virtually nonsensical by the uncertain purchase on English of the instructor. “William, how many numbers is in nouns?” “Two” (4.1.18–19). The answer is cor-

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rect, but the question is virtually unintelligible to anyone who has not been taught from the same primer. “What is he, William, that does lend articles?” A lender, perhaps? No. “Articles are borrowed of the pronoun” (lines 33–35). That William innocently reproduces what is in effect gobbledygook offers an adverse comment not only on the competence of this schoolmaster-parson,22 but also on the practices of early modern education. The object of the grammar school was to teach boys to write Latin, but the activity was commonly based on memorizing the rules.23 Shakespeare evidently sympathized with the children sacrificed to the rigors of this process: his depiction of the pedant Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost tends to vindicate As You Like It’s “whining school-boy,” “creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school” (2.7.145–47). Giorgio Melchiori sees the Latin test as pivotal in a play about the use and abuse of language.24 Certainly, much of the wit in The Merry Wives of Windsor concerns bombast, malapropisms, and the errors of non-native speakers. In the Latin scene, the comedy is compounded for the audience by Mistress Quickly’s bawdy misinterpretations of the foreign words. William remains, however, entirely focused on his task and impervious to her frequent interventions. In this near Babel, where a woman who has no knowledge of Latin constantly interrupts the interrogation conducted by a schoolmaster with an imperfect command of English, the little boy appears resolutely sane by comparison, and naively unaware of any possible double meanings: Evans. William. Evans. William. Evans.

What is lapis, William? A stone. And what is “a stone”, William? A pebble. No, it is lapis; I pray you remember in your prain. (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4.1.27–31)

It is also, as the audience would well know, a testicle. The scene depends on a succession of schoolboy jokes, of which the schoolboy himself remains sublimely oblivious.

IV While the circumstances are different, the mode of the comedy resembles Chaucer’s to the degree that it exposes pomposity by showing its victim calmly doing what he can, to the best of his limited ability, to accommodate the unaccountable ways of the world. Did Shakespeare need to learn the technique from Chaucer? Arguably

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not, since Charlie Chaplin, who wrought it to a fine art, probably did so without reference to either of them. But coincidentally, a date in 1599 has come to seem more probable for The Merry Wives of Windsor than the previous 1597, placing the play in the same year as As You Like It and directly after Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer. Since Leslie Hotson, tradition had assigned the play’s first performance at court to the occasion when Lord Hunsdon, patron of the Shakespeare Company, was installed as a knight of the Garter on April 23, 1597. But as the editor of Arden 3 points out, while there is no documentary evidence for this hypothesis, Falstaff’s Windsor story makes much more sense if it is understood to take place after his banishment with a Crown allowance at the end of 2 Henry IV. Windsor was one place of resort for retired soldiers, where they were required to attend church services in exchange for a small pension. Falstaff’s efforts to secure the wives as “exchequers” (1.3.68) would be more readily intelligible to an audience that already knew his previous history.25 The William of As You Like It can more plausibly be associated with William Page if both plays belong to roughly the same period. My final candidate for descent from Chaucer’s Geoffrey also appeared in 1599. This case is much harder to make. Although I am by no means the first to link Michael Williams in Henry V with the dramatist and with Shakespeare’s other Williams, not excluding Shallow’s absent cousin, William Silence,26 the argument for a line of descent from Geoffrey seems at first glance no more than tenuous. Williams is neither uncomprehending nor bemused; nor is he inarticulate. The link with the author, if there is one, lies in the last name, not the first. And the name itself is not foregrounded. Unlike William and William Page, Michael Williams remains nameless in the dialogue; in the quarto text he is simply one of three soldiers; only in the Folio does he appear as Michael Williams, and then only in a single stage direction. Thereafter he is Williams. The speech prefixes in the Folio identify him as Williams for one leaf, and subsequently as “Will.” In this, however, he resembles William and William Page, who are both “Will.” in the speech prefixes. And like both of them, he doggedly, resolutely delivers the innocent point of view with the effect of throwing into question the legitimacy of power. The key difference, perhaps, is that this time what is at stake is a matter of life and death —and Judgment. On the eve of Agincourt, the soldiers are afraid and with good reason, in view of the overwhelming French numbers. The King in disguise does nothing to reassure them (Henry V, 4.1.97–98). Dramatic irony aligns a knowing audience, and the corresponding power, with the monarch: “the King is but a man, as I am”; “I think he would not wish himself anywhere but where he is” (lines 101, 117–

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18). Henry successfully counters the soldiers’ objections to finding themselves where they are—with, indeed, their ready consent: these are by no means republicans (lines 128–31, 143–44, 184–87, 218–20). And yet, amid the comedy of home truths told about the King in his unsuspected presence, Williams introduces a quite different register, suddenly placing severed bodies and bereavement under the shadow of Doomsday, when the scattered limbs of the dead will reassemble, still charging the King with their losses in support of his claim: “But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopped 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” (Henry V, 4.1.132–39). The double time scheme, which erases the interim between death and the Last Judgment, intensifies this curiously modernist visualization of haphazard mutilation and anguish (Shakespeare’s anticipation of Picasso’s Guernica?) and isolates it from the knockabout comedy of the subsequent exchange of gloves. Going way beyond the discussion in the opening scenes about the legalities of Henry’s rights in France, Williams poses a question that concerns all wars fought on dubious grounds, or, perhaps, all wars that are not in the first instance defensive. Has any leader the right to require as a matter of obedience the dismemberment and death of the governed? Like William and William Page, Williams speaks in the most prosaic of prose. “Chaucer,” we remember, could not cope with verse in The Canterbury Tales; the Man of Law prefaces a list of “Chaucer’s” works with a concession to his modest competence in meter and rhyme. (This might well have seemed true to sixteenth-century readers unfamiliar with the medieval final “e.”) There are in what Williams says no high, astounding terms and no rhetorical techniques of debate. The unvarnished view of war from the perspective of the ordinary soldier is appalling precisely in its artlessness. And though Henry in a much longer speech evades responsibility for the soldiers’ own moral state, he has no reply to give on the critical issue of the legs and arms and heads, or the impoverished widows and orphans. Indeed, the confrontation with the soldiers leads directly to his meditation on what differentiates a king, a man as they are, from the people he commands. And the answer, it seems, is no more than “[idle/]idol ceremony,” “place, degree and form, / Creating awe and fear in other men” (lines 236, 242–43). These ruminations are not given in the quarto text. Current opinion varies on the reason for the differences between Q and F. Lukas

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Erne believes that Q comes close to a performance version, while F, with its substantial choruses and reflective speeches, and a corresponding ambivalence toward its titular hero, was designed for the close attention of readers.27 Annabel Patterson has argued that Q, which presents an almost unproblematic view of Elizabeth’s heroic royal predecessor, is the result of self-censorship for the purposes of print in the context of the Essex affair.28 James Shapiro sees the quarto text as stripped of the play’s controversial elements in order to avoid giving offense concerning the Irish war.29 Certainly, very nearly every component of the play that could possibly be seen as polemical is confined to F. Every component, that is, except the encounter with the three soldiers. The substance of Williams’s case against the King’s war is there in Q, albeit lineated in oddly nonmetrical verse.30 Was this speech, so unassuming and yet so telling, an outcome of Shakespeare’s many years spent dramatizing the chronicles of English history? At the end of eight plays about warfare, does this intervention bear the dramatist’s own signature, however covertly? Williams is no revolutionary: he remains throughout a loyal and obedient subject. Moreover, all anxieties are ostensibly dispelled by the victory at Agincourt. And a benign monarch shows his right to rule when he rewards his former opponent with gold crowns. But a question about the price paid by ordinary people in a war of conquest has been put before the audience, however naively. And who better to raise it than a stand-in for the loyal and obedient dramatist who has the power to dissolve its potential bitterness in general rejoicing? If so, Shakespeare had evidently understood the diplomatic advantages conferred by the introduction of an innocent and inoffensive authorial substitute.

V Is it true? Did Shakespeare derive his various Williams(es) from Geoffrey? Did he read, or reread, The House of Fame in Speght’s edition of Chaucer’s works to produce a range of fictional surrogates in the following year or so? I have no way of knowing. Unlike the increasing numbers of biographers who have confidently undertaken to tell his story, I have no access to what Shakespeare had in mind. He certainly knew Chaucer’s work and read it attentively. I have pursued the possibility that he borrowed one of its most engaging strategies not as the study of an intention but as an exercise in intertextual analysis. Existing conventions form the condition of the possibility of writing:

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there are at any given time rules of meaning, syntax, genre, and these make utterance intelligible as utterance, or a narrative recognizable as a story. Thus, the writing process can never be bounded in an ideological nutshell; nor can its constituent parts be restricted to either an individual point of origin or an anthropologically deciphered moment. As Roland Barthes points out in “The Death of the Author”: “[T]he writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.” But this does not mean that an author can produce nothing new. On the contrary, rules are made to be broken as they collide with other rules. “His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.”31 On the one hand, Shakespeare’s capacity for inventive imitation is exceptional; on the other hand, his technical and generic restlessness remains one source of his continuing vitality. Of his own time and culture, inevitably, Shakespeare is not always best seen as confined to it. Arguably, his works break whatever boundaries critical fashions do their best to impose.

NOTES 1. Except where otherwise indicated, Shakespeare references are to the Arden Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (London: Thomson, 2001). 2. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life (London: Thomson, 2001), 25–26. 3. James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare & the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 105–31. 4. Ibid., 117, 124. 5. Ben Jonson was given, of course, to including living people, barely disguised, but his own fictional surrogates are not naive. 6. David Lawton, Chaucer’s Narrators, Chaucer Studies 13 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), 1. 7. Dieter Mehl, Geoffrey Chaucer: An Introduction to His Narrative Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 14. See also Dieter Mehl, English Literature in the Age of Chaucer (London: Longman, 2001), 14–15. 8. The Workes of our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer (London, 1598). All references are to this edition. 9. The pagination here is erratic. 10. Dieter Mehl, who has published over a wide range, most notably on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and D. H. Lawrence, has consistently ignored any such restrictions. He led a seminar on Chaucer and Shakespeare at the meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in San Diego in 2007, and also edited with Jonathan Bate and Jill L. Levenson an anthology entitled Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Los Angeles 1996 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998). 11. The play is conventionally assigned to 1598–99. The editor of Arden 3 suggests that it was first performed at court on February 20, 1599, prior to public perfor-

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mance in the autumn. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Thomson, 2006), 36–46. 12. Thomas Dekker et al., Troilus and Cressida (1599); Dekker, Patient Grissil (1600); Dekker, Fair Constance of Rome (16000; The Return from Parnassus (1600); George Chapman, Sir Giles Goosecap (1602); and Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (1602[?]). See Ann Thompson, Shakespeare’s Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), 17–27, 30–44. 13. See Thompson, Shakespeare’s Chaucer, 85–87, 88–94, 94–110, 65–66; 74. These attributions are not secure: The Titus reference could be to Ovid’s Metamorphoses 12.39–63, itself Chaucer’s source; by 1597–98 Rumour was conventionally shown with tongues. 14. Ibid., 63, 65. 15. For a more detailed assessment of the intertextual relations of the Troy story in Lucrece, see Catherine Belsey, “The Rape of Lucrece,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 90–107, 100–103. 16. See Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 17. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1970. 18. Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 205. 19. James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), xxiii. 20. William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (London: Thomson, 2000), 4.1.15n. 21. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 1:479–80. 22. There is also some question about his competence in Latin itself, unless his version of the masculine accusative is a printer’s error (1.41). 23. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine, 1:560. 24. Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Melchiori, 6. 25. Ibid., 20–21. 26. See, for example, Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); she also lists the unseen Wills and Williams mentioned in 2 Henry IV (244–45). 27. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 194–95, 230–33. 28. Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 81. 29. Shapiro, 1599, 103. 30. William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (London: Routledge, 1995), 388. 31. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 146.

“It will have blood they say; blood will have blood”—Proverb Usage and the Vague and Undetermined Places of Macbeth Martin Orkin

THE “FOREIGNER,” SAYS DERRIDA, IS THE ONE WHO, “PUTTING THE FIRST

question, puts me in question.”1 It may be suggested that when Macbeth meets the witches, they, “putting the first question,” put Macbeth “in question.” And while they appear to be foreign to Macbeth and Banquo, they bring into question all that an ordered (familiar) world based on particular, dominant, constructions of underlying patterns or moral “order”—in this case, the world of Duncan—would seek to deny.2 Although positioned as foreign to the world of the court they are, insistently, inside the natural world of Macbeth, by implication, that of its audiences. If “foreigners” remind us that the world we may be comfortable in has (culturally constructed) borders, to encounter them is to find ourselves in a place where “foreign” alternatives or equivalents to our familiar (“natural”) boundaries emerge as, insistently, also there, in the very space we might otherwise conceptualize as “our” (“natural”) world. The presence of the “foreigner” proposes the artificiality of (familiar) boundaries—Gloria Anzaldúa describes the borderland as “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.”3 Encounter with “foreigners,” or inevitable “foreignness” in experience, or the real foreignness of the world we inhabit does not eradicate the patterns of order assumed conventionally to exist, upon which people mostly depend. But they sometimes, as these remarks by Derrida and Anzaldúa suggest, bring some of these assumed or expressed patterns or formulations into question, giving us a glimpse into the more complex reality we actually inhabit. I want in this essay to consider examples of the multiple ways in which the prolific earlymodern and nowadays relatively foreign predilection for proverbs— specifically here, proverb allusion in Macbeth,—operates. Proverbs, we may remember, present, as B. J. Whiting long since defined them, “or189

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dered combinations of words . . . which survived for a time because of brevity and cleverness.”4 They offer, again, as Andrew Griffin very recently has it, “truisms” that infer articulation of a “trans-historical universality.”5 They aim to impose on or set to expectation or experience putative boundaries of one or other kind. While there are too many proverb allusions in Macbeth for any exhaustive treatment of them in a brief essay, I want to identify instances where proverbs reaffirm conventional boundaries as well as ones where they bring those articulated boundaries into question. What, too, might the very (early-modern) predilection for proverb usage as we encounter it in Macbeth itself suggest?

I If proverbs are partly markers and bearers of communal, inherited literary or folk wisdom—according to Henry Peacham, they are “most profitable, and most pleasant, & may well be called the Summaries of maners, or, the Images of human life: for in them there is contained a generall doctrine of direction, and particular rules for all duties in all persons”6—the evidence of profuse proverb allusion in the play (as in most of Shakespeare’s plays) might be expected, in turn, to promise, detect, or reaffirm detailed instances of such predicated patterns of order, or articulated boundaries to, or discoverable within, experience. Such allusions might be defined, as J. L. Austin might have it, as constative, utterances “transmitting truth, that is, an instrument of knowledge, a means of knowing reality.”7 A group of proverb allusions in the play promotes and assumes for its speakers just such boundaries, inferring a predictable working of the world, one that, for instance as Kenneth Muir once upon a time told it, entails the “disruption of order through evil, and its final restoration. [The play] begins with what the witches call a hurly-burly and ends with the restoration of order by Malcolm. Order is represented throughout by the bonds of loyalty; and chaos is represented by the powers of darkness with their upsetting of moral values.”8 In such allusions, speakers rely on the proverb formulations they allude to as reliable points of reference. When, after the discovery of Duncan’s murder, Donalbain tells Malcolm, Where we are There’s daggers in men’s smiles. The nea’er in blood, The nearer bloody (Macbeth, 2.3.135–37)9

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he makes a relatively straightforward allusion to what is taken as received truth in alluding to The nearer in kin the less in kindness (1565 Tilley, K38),10 a recognition of the proverbial recurrence of treachery among kinsmen. The proverbial wisdom alluded to by Donalbain appears to be reiterated in the situation providing an appropriate justification for his departure from Dunsinane. Again, Macbeth says, after the appearance of Banquo’s ghost, and the withdrawal of his guests, “It will have blood, they say. Blood will have blood” (3.4.121), alluding to Blood will have blood c. 1395 (Tilley, B458), drawing on the proverb as, once more, a kind of truth-evidence. It is possible, though, to construe from Macbeth’s allusion, as well, certain subjectivity effects: a brooding repetition, that musters authority of a formulation asserting the inescapability of the violent consequences that must follow acts of violence, as reassurance that the ghost, evidence of his own crime, is itself to be expected, and as possible means of steeling himself, too, for further action. Resolving to return to the “weird sisters” (3.4.132) he observes a moment later: I am in blood Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er (Macbeth, 3.4.135–37)

alluding to Go forward and fall, go backward and mar all 1580 (Tilley, G152) as further authoritative evidence of underlying patterns of dilemma, against which (once more to construe subjectivity) he must be resolute. At the same time, implicit ironies in both of Macbeth’s allusions appear to reaffirm that view of the world which Muir identifies as informing the play. Blood will have blood proposes retribution, Go forward and fall, go backward and mar all the possibility of moral as well as physical paralysis or entrapment.11

II However, another group of proverb allusions in the play emerges as less attached to assumptions of a moral pattern to the universe and more transgressive of the boundaries set by early modern concepts of rhetoric, language, and value. As evident in Macbeth’s allusions just mentioned, many proverb allusions involve proverb rewordings, manipulations, or reapplications—that is, individual versions of or responses to generalized assertions of attachment to a putative ordered structuration of the world. Elsewhere, these too invite comment on

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particular subjectivity effects. They sometimes provoke, as well, interrogative or destabilizing inferences. When Ross consoles Lady Macduff, with the asseveration that “Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward / To what they were before” (4.2.24–25), he alludes to the proverb When things are at the worst they will mend 1582 (Tilley, T216). But Ross’s allusion occurs just before the murder of Lady Macduff and her children, and the event thus brings into question the validity of the proverb signification. After the murder of Lady Macduff and her children, Malcolm draws on proverbs in an attempt to console Macduff when he learns of the bloody crime, in “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak / Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break” (4.3.210– 11) alluding to Grief pent up will break the heart (1589 Tilley, G449). Again, in Be comforted. Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge To cure this deadly grief (Macbeth, 4.3.214–16)

he alludes to A desperate disease must have a desperate cure (1539 Tilley, D357). Malcolm’s attempt to use proverb wisdom in these ways to console Macduff emerges simultaneously as partly manipulative, opportunist, part of a rhetorical project to redirect the intense pain of Macduff’s grief into vengeful support for his cause. Other proverb allusions manifest even more overt manipulation of or engagement with the proverb formulation in ways that bring more directly into question the (constative) credibility of the proverb.12 In this they suggest an interrogative or, again in Austin’s terms, performative reapplication of proverb idiom that in one or another way detaches it from hypothesis of identifiable pattern inferring an order to experience. Indeed, certain proverb allusions in the play appear actively to promote instead presentation of that morally enigmatic or equivocal world that the play, it is well known, more generally contemplates. In such allusions, proverbial “boundaries” are resituated —by the individual variation—within what appears to be a “vague and undetermined place,” one bringing into question the very boundaries such proverbs seek to demarcate. As example here I choose a cluster of proverb allusions early in Macbeth. One of the most significant and obvious of these occurs at the very beginning when the witches asseverate “Fair is foul, and foul is fair, / Hover through the fog and filthy air” (1.1.10–11). They allude to the proverb Fair without but foul within c. 1200 (Tilley, F29). This enunciates a problem of

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moral perception in language in which the moral poles that duplicity seeks to hide still remain evident (what is fair is without; what is foul is, duplicitously, within).13 But the wording of the witches generalizes that potential, only implicit in the proverb, for enigma or moral obfuscation. Macbeth’s later echo of this allusion, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (1.3.36) maintains this intensification of enigma, only implicit in the proverb formulation. Again, a few moments before this, the witches agree to meet “When the hurly-burly’s done, / When the battle’s lost and won” (1.1.3–4) in an allusion to No man loses (wins) but another wins (loses) (c. 1526 Tilley, M337), which also foregrounds the aspect of obfuscation in the proverbial signification. When Duncan says, moments later, “What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won” (1.2.67), what he means about the traitor Cawdor and his loyal Macbeth is of course clear, but the echo—as well as the latent dramatic irony of the situation—points simultaneously to the text’s interest in a (morally) equivocal place. But another early proverb allusion, entailing, as extensive scholarship has had it, apparently unambiguous reference to early modern concepts of education, appears in many respects to contest such a destabilizing tendency. At the beginning of act 1, scene 4, Duncan observes, of treachery: “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face” (1.4.11–12). The proverb The face is the index of the heart (mind) 1575 (Tilley, F1) is applied in both positive and negative form in Elizabethan idiom. Whereas Withals’s Dictionary lists “Your face doth testifie what you be inwardly” (1586 Withals, L7),14 a line from Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy maintains, “Ther’s no credit in the countenance” ([c. 1589] 1592 Kyd, Span. Trag. 3.1). Duncan’s use of the word “art” suggests specific attachment to principles of rhetoric. Among the meanings of the word “art” in NED is to be found: “1. Skill in doing anything as the result of knowledge and practice.” In some contexts the meaning relates more directly to the learning of the schools. For example NED notes as another meaning for the word “art”: “3. the trivium, or one of its subjects, grammar, logic, rhetoric; dialectics,” and cites the following from Gabriel Harvey: “It makith no matter howe a man wrytith untoe his friends. . . . Praeceptes of arte and stile and decorum . . . ar to be reservid for an other place (1573 G. Harvey Common-pl. Bk. [1884] 76).” Again, the Variorum edition quotes Heath’s suggestion that Duncan’s word “construction” is a metaphor taken from grammatical construction.15 And T. W. Baldwin shows that Latin versions of the proverb were encountered in texts studied in Elizabethan schools.16 This may explain why older proverbs on a similar theme such as Deem not after the face (c. 1395 Whiting, F1) appear to have been absorbed

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into, or replaced by the idiom to which Duncan turns. Baldwin, indeed, agrees with Malone’s comment that the school term “construe” is intended by the word “construction,” and he argues that Duncan’s remark relates specifically to the practice of rhetoric: “Erasmus gives it as a principle of art that the face is the index of the mind, and that consequently by watching the face the orator can read the mind.” He speculates that Shakespeare might have encountered the well-known saying in Erasmus rather than in any classical source. He argues, “At least, it must be evident that this rule of art and its negative were hard to escape in grammar school circles.”17 If rhetoric is important for the humanists as among other things a potential tool of government, the ruler Duncan’s language, then, reiterates a clear and significant negative version of a well-known formulation important in humanist schemes of education. At the same time, as in the case of Duncan’s echo of the language of the witches that I noted above, the text equivocates on this presentation of what may be argued to be a proverbial norm by allowing Duncan to transfer the title of one traitor to another apparently loyal supporter, whose own potential for treachery is glimpsed in the previous scene, and who enters immediately after Duncan utters these words. This irony undoes the morally prophylactic aspiration informing early-modern humanist rhetoric and memory work. And juxtaposition of such a proverb allusion so soon after allusion to a contrary enunciation Fair without foul within has a further obviously morally obfuscatory effect. One last, different kind of example of an allusion that resonates, on the one hand, attachment to an (assumed) order in the matter of perception and evil, but that on the other simultaneously suggests, in the detail of its application, a paradoxical universe that itself provides no prophylactic against the ambiguity experience entails occurs when Lady Macbeth tells her husband Your face, my thane, is as a book where men May read strange matters. To beguile the time, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under’t. (Macbeth, 1.5.60–64)

She alludes here to Fair face foul heart (1584 Tilley, F3; recorded by Whiting in an earlier form F4, He that makes the fairest face shall soonest deceive, c. 1495), exploiting the very duplicity the proverb warns against for her own purpose, in a way that situates her as beyond the moral boundaries demarcated in the proverb formulation. Her performative emphasis upon physiognomy and her easy enumeration of

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“eye,” “hand,” and “tongue” as instruments for deception presents the potential for calculated dislocation or deliberate obfuscation of any constative claims that might be made for rhetoric, the speaking/writing “technologies” of early modern communication.18 Such allusions, it can be argued, point to the transgressive potential informing human action and the articulated (“artificial”) boundaries of the culture within which it must occur.19 In this, it might be suggested too, they will, despite their (early-modern) “foreignness,” inevitably speak, in turn, to audiences, themselves similarly located within (paradoxical) dominant formulations of order and value, similarly concerned in their own actions to resolve paradox. In their unsettling of the boundaries of an assumed underlying moral order, such proverb rewordings detach themselves from and obviously challenge the conventional moral boundaries of their world. They suggest a borderland space of transgressive proverb allusion that glimpses the “foreign,” that speaks as well more accessibly to present-day concerns about the unreliability or indeterminacy of value or about those present-day (destabilizing) boundaries proposed for language set by writers such as, say, Derrida or Lacan.

III Nonetheless, in contrast to the more provocative allusions I have just noted, a web of other allusions in the play, although, once more strongly foreign to present-day taste in language usage appears again to asseverate the authority of certain articulated boundaries, forming a cumulative ratification of conventional assumptions about action and its consequences. Macbeth’s famous enunciation of the possibility of action free of (moral) consequence, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” (1.7.1–2), alludes to The thing done has an end (is not to do) (c. 1380 Tilley, T149), for which Dent gives the first citation as But that is don, is not to done (c. 1380, Chaucer HF 361, recorded in Whiting, D287). The proverb signification asserts the finality of action, which, it is true, Macbeth in his rewording chooses to construe as glimpsing (free) action without consequence.20 The allusion inaugurates a conflict throughout the soliloquy as Macbeth proposes, as agonized counters to contest the idea of free action that obsesses him, a series of reasons drawn from convention as to why he should not commit the deed. But later when considering the murder of Macduff’s family he manifests famously less difficulty in contemplating such a (proverbial) notion of action, asseverating,

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From this moment The very firstlings of my heart shall be The firstlings of my hand. And even now, To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done. (Macbeth, 4.1.162–65)

Here he puts the signification of the proverb No sooner said than done (So said so done) 1566 (Tilley, S117) to deliberate instrumental use. The proverb is usually used to advocate consistency in word and deed, the avoidance of hypocrisy, the loyal and efficient enactment of promises.21 Macbeth, however, perverts its didactic content; proverbial authority is drawn on as a recommendation for quick implementation of the most brutal decision in the play. He indulges in none of the conflicting reflections prompted by his earlier allusion at the beginning of his earlier soliloquy (1.7).22 The contrast in his treatment of the two allusions invites recognition of further subjectivity effects: we may discern in the juxtaposition Macbeth’s attempt to separate (violent) human action from conscience, an attempt that, as has been well observed,23 in the course of the play seems to reduce his actions to simple, brutal automatism.24 Another related proverb allusion occurs in the sleepwalking scene when Lady Macbeth mutters, “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed” (5.1.57–58), alluding to Things done cannot be undone c. 1460 (Tilley, T200; Whiting gives an earlier version of this proverb D287 What is done may not be undone a1300) which emphasizes that actions have consequences that cannot be evaded and so contrasts too with the aspiration in Macbeth’s earlier allusions to enunciate an action that might be free of consequence. Lady Macbeth’s allusion may also be said to be constative: she acknowledges the truth value of the proverb. Again, such evidence of guilt—albeit in her sleep—that she has in earlier scenes consciously tried to eliminate, or at least ignore, contrasts with Macbeth’s intermittent brutality in acts 4 and 5, one indication of the distance that now lies between herself and her husband. Implicitly, too, the allusion directs the applicability of the proverbial truth to Macbeth as well, despite his attempt until the end of the play to evade the signification communicated in the proverb. Indeed, Lady Macbeth herself anticipates the allusion when she articulates the pain both she and her husband are experiencing in act 3, suggesting there to him that obsession with the murder of Duncan ought to be expunged, when she says “Things without all remedy / Should be without regard. What’s done is done” (3.2.13–14). Here, the proverb Past cure, past care (1567 Tilley, C921) may be in the back-

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ground of Lady Macbeth’s remark as well.25 The proverb signification partly points to the difficulty she and Macbeth have in making its prescription apply, and her rewording foregrounds this. The words “should be” can mean “are said to be” and, as NED indicates, they may be used, “15. . . . in the oblique report of another’s statement in order to imply that the speaker does not commit himself to the truth of the alleged fact.” In view of this, Lady Macbeth seems even more likely to be citing a saying in which she has been accustomed to believe but which now appears less effective. Moreover, the word “remedie” strengthens the impression that she not only encourages her husband to forget the past but speaks with language tinged with remorse. One sense of “remedie” is the removal of evil; NED gives the more literal meaning as “1. a cure for a disease or other disorder of body or mind . . . medicine or treatment which alleviates pain and promotes restoration to health.” The associations in the word thus point to a yearning for release from disease. In asseverating in turn that “what’s done is done” Lady Macbeth also seeks to console Macbeth by trying to use the irrevocability of completed action to argue that enacted violence should be ignored or forgotten. But the resonances in these lines point also to a realization of another aspect of the proverb signification: that actions have inescapable consequences. This realization separates her from a husband who tries increasingly to tighten his grip on the capacity to enact violence without concern for consequence. Such particular networks of proverb allusion, as compared with some of the more transgressively manipulated or enunciated allusions I have noted earlier, reiterate in an authoritative way conventionally assumed patterns in or boundaries to experience. In their very confirmation by way of language and dramatic action of the validity of these articulated boundaries to action, this particular group of allusions runs notably counter to present-day concerns as to, say, the instability or relativity of knowledge. Andrew Griffin’s contention that proverb allusions (I would suggest, of particularly this kind) infer a particular nonmodernist understanding of history seems here, also, particularly appropriate.26 He argues that even as humanist historiographers might detect for the early-modern period a waning of the “mythopoetic Providentialist vision of human history,” and claim emergence of a notion of “human agency (characterized by choice, wilfulness, the capacity for decision),” the “grating and terrifying universality of truisms,” perpetuates an “abyss of inevitable human nature” (my emphasis). Their implied logic, instead of any “diachronic axis of historical change,” is to assert a “deeper” and recurring (synchronic) “historical pattern-

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ing” to which detailed event or the notion of individual agency becomes secondary.27

IV Proverb allusions articulate boundaries, for the play’s world, then, in fluctuating ways, sometimes reaffirming conventional, established patterns,28 sometimes interrogating or dissolving them. In this they suggest a fluctuating sense of that need, which I noted at the outset, to assume a certain ordered universe and that “foreignness” of a world that does not conform to the patterns we might wish to assert for it. Furthermore, all of these allusions confirm a speaking tradition that itself, in the very predilection for pithy enunciation of one or other kind of boundary, seems now, as I also remarked at the outset, relatively foreign to us. This early modern habit of language usage occurs, moreover, in a play that from its beginnings in battle and the terrible descriptions of that battle, to the decapitated head on a stake that closes it, is steeped in often unspeakable violence. What might the ongoing patronage of audiences, then and now, of such a theater of violence, despite its verbally expressed moral touchstones (whether indeed they are used to reiterate traditional boundaries or more provocatively to detect disruption of them), also signify? For, even if it is true that some proverb usage in the play appears to contribute to a (verbal) reassertion of moral order, to present a constative or “deep historical” / universalist patterning (on which an account such as Muir’s also insists) that might be claimed to be recuperative, the simultaneous violent substance of the play puts that very speaking of an ordered patterning to experience into question—as do certain of the more transgressive proverb allusions I have listed. Such a disjunctive coexistence of the verbal and the violent arguably, too, brings partly into question the theatrical enjoyment we receive from viewing Macbeth. When, during the fourth series of the television series The Sopranos, Tony Soprano tells Johnny Sack that he has decided not to kill the mobster Carmine Lupertazzi, Johnny Sack, disappointed at the thought of having to continue to work with Carmine and his “idiot son,” reiterates, for himself, Macbeth’s anticipation of the petty creeping within time that, in his view, awaits him. The gangster’s allusion to Macbeth’s lines, like so much else in the television series, is shocking partly because he uses what in Shakespeare’s hero is language that identifies (as it happens with the help of proverb allusion)29 the tedium of moral bankruptcy, revealing the last vestiges of

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an inner conscience. But, instead, for Johnny Sack, such tedium, results from his failure to commit murder. This violent inversion of one of Macbeth’s last links with a moral touchstone is paralleled by the extent to which numerous other gestures at a moral patterning recognizable for the audience—their “knowledge” that they are watching mobsters, the criminally deviant, Tony Soprano’s sporadic “heart of gold,” his sometimes acute grasp of psychoanalytic understanding, concerns with service, loyalty, the Catholic Church, to name but a few—are embedded at the same time in ongoing processes of unceasing incidents of violence. Beyond the obvious irony of this is the violence itself, practiced by these, to us, “foreign” mobsters, their “foreign” grotesqueries and aura of Grand Guignol notwithstanding. This is something with which we as audiences, TV season after TV season, by way, perhaps, of just such verbal or nonliteral gestures at a moral patterning, manage to remain nonetheless engrossed, demonstrably continue to connect. Beyond what boundaries, then, might the Shakespeare text itself, in turn—and the violence it presents to us, together with the sometimes apparent inefficacy or irrelevancy it proposes to its audiences, of proverbial articulation—still in the present day be placing us?

NOTES 1. See Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3. 2. Terry Eagleton made this point in 1986; his statement was reprinted in “The witches are the heroines of the piece . . .,” in Macbeth, New Casebooks, ed. Alan Sinfield (London: Macmillan, 1992), 46–52. 3. Cited by Mae G. Henderson, “Introduction: Borders, Boundaries, and Frame(work)s,” in Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies, ed. Mae G. Henderson (London: Routledge, 1995), 1. 4. Bartlett Jere Whiting, ed., Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly before 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), xi. 5. Andrew Griffin, “The Banality of History in Troilus and Cressida,” Early Modern Literary Studies 12, no. 2 (September 2006): 2, 4. 6. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1577), ed. W. G. Crane (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1954), 30, quoted in T. K. Mauch, “The Role of the Proverb in Early Tudor Literature” (PhD thesis, University of California, 1963), 88–89. Use of proverbs—not only “popular” but “learned” ones, culled from biblical, classical, or other literary sources—and proverbial phrases, or sententiae, was also of course evidence of erudition and wisdom. 7. Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 13. 8. Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare the Professional and Related Studies (London: Heinemann, 1973), 150.

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9. All citations from Macbeth are taken from The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997). 10. Head proverbs are quoted from Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Collection of the Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), hereafter referred to as Tilley. Following the proverb, the date of the earliest citation either in Tilley, or in The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, ed. F. P. Wilson, 3rd rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), hereafter referred to as ODEP, or in Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases, ed. Bartlett Jere Whiting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), hereafter referred to as Whiting, or in Robert William Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), hereafter referred to as Dent, is given together with the number for the proverb in Tilley, where there is one. 11. See also allusions to The best is behind c. 1369 (Tilley, B318), Come (Hap) what come (Hap) may c. 1475 (Tilley, C529), The longest day has an end c. 1390 (Tilley, D90), The croaking raven bodes misfortune (death) 1578 (Tilley, R33), Snake in the grass c. 1290 (Tilley, S585), The Cat would eat fish but she will not wet her feet c. 1225 (Tilley, C144), As odious as an owl c. 1507 (Whiting, O68), As naked as they were born a1300 (Tilley, B137). 12. Decades ago, Katherine Lever, “Proverbs and Sententiae in the Plays of Shakspere,” Shakespeare Association Bulletin 13 (1938): 173–83, 224–39, offered another cautionary observation about aspects of the truth value of proverbs, which I will not pursue here: “It has been thought in the past that a moral system of ethics could be constructed from the wise sayings of Shakspere. This, however, would be possible only if example were joined to precept or if only those statements were selected which were spoken by the virtuous characters. When the generalizations are completely isolated and classified by content, it becomes apparent at once that many different and mutually exclusive opinions are held about the same subject” (236). 13. Biblical associations that confirm a straightforward presentation of the dangers of appearance and the negative reality it may hide are clear in “Mony appel is bryht with-vte. / And bitter with-inne” (c. 1275 Provs. Of Alfred [Skeat] 30, cited in Wilson, OEDP, 240). The significance of the witches’ allusion to this proverb is emphasized by its position in a rhyming couplet at the end of the scene. Presentation of the proverbial formulation as a paradox, in the present tense, also promotes the sense of continuing ever present ambiguity. Moreover, H. G. Moore, “The Dramatic and Rhetorical Functions of Proverbial Materials in Representative Plays of Shakespeare” (PhD thesis, Texas Technological College, 1955), 359, detects in the lines antimetabole (turning things around) and syncresis (comparing contrary things in contrasting clauses), which promote, too, the effect of enigma, registering a disturbing sense of the “simultaneity of opposites” (Horst Weinstock, Die Funktion elisabethanischer Sprichwörter und Pseudosprichwörter bei Shakespeare, [Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1966], 202–3). 14. John Withals, A shorte Dictionarie in Latine and English verie profitable for yong beginners (London: Thomas Purfoot, 1586). 15. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, ed. Horace Howard Furness, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1873), 51n. 16. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greek, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 1:650–51. 17. Ibid., 1:589 and 1:651. 18. Tilley lists three echoes of this proverb elsewhere in Macbeth. When he decides to proceed with the “terrible feat” (1.7.80), Macbeth alludes to it directly in “Away,

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and mock the time with fairest show. / False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (lines 81–82). Macbeth cites the proverbial authority—and what is in the play a repetitive and evocatively ritualistic but in particular contexts an unnerving use of the rhymed couplet—as seal for behavior that, as in the case of Lady Macbeth, aims to achieve that against which the proverb warns. Before the murder of Banquo, Macbeth again alludes to the proverb when he tells his wife: Let your remembrance Apply to Banquo. Present him eminence Both with eye and tongue; unsafe the while that we Must lave our honours in these flattering streams And make our faces visors to our hearts, Disguising what they are (Macbeth, 3.2.31–36)

This time, however, there is a noticeable shift in Macbeth’s allusion, for his earlier recognition of the “terrible” nature of what he contemplates and the “false heart” it requires is still moored to a sense of conscience, whereas in these lines, there is not only a much simpler concern to implement, as his wife earlier argued to him, the technologies of communication in a self-interested way, but as well a resentment at the use of those technologies, registered as “flattery” and read simply as a sign of their own lack of “safety.” In his final lines there is implicit regret that his intentions cannot be made more blatant, and disguising what they are reflects ambiguously on the words “face” and “heart.” Such usages of the proverb contrast with the more straightforward allusion to the proverb’s moral teaching when Malcolm tells Donalbain in 2.3.131–33: Let’s not consort with them. To show an unfelt sorrow is an office Which the false man does easy.

19. See also allusions to From Top (head) to toe (heel) c. 1200 (Tilley, T436), Sleep is the image of death 1534 (Tilley, S527), To know the worst is good c. 1558 (Tilley, W915), A quiet conscience sleeps in thunder 1584 (Tilley, C609), Virtue is its own reward 1509 (Tilley, V81), What we do willingly is easy (1596 Tilley, D407), Men are but men (1576 Tilley, M541), Either mend or end 1578 (Tilley, M874). 20. Coincidentally, Macbeth’s use of this proverb connects with aspects of twentieth-century existentialist discourse, but the proverb signification itself, as I indicate, does not argue this potential. 21. See, for example, So sayd, and so done, is a thread well spone (1577, J. Fit John A Diamond most Precious, H2v). 22. Earlier, after having made plans to murder Banquo, Macbeth tells his unknowing wife in a rhyming couplet that ends the scene, “Thou marvell’st at my words; but hold thee still. / Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill” (3.2.55–56), alluding to Crimes (Mischiefs) are made secure by greater crimes (mischiefs) 1566 (Tilley, C826). Barely hinting at his intentions, Macbeth relies upon the authority of the proverb to reassure Lady Macbeth. Again he turns to it without introspection, but the coarsening of conscience he undergoes after the murder of Duncan is predicted in part by the proverb signification. Macbeth’s need for justification indicates that the process of hardening within him is not yet complete. Ironically, what is, to him, wisdom to justify another murder for the sake of the continuance of his line is also language that emphasizes the irreversible nature of his own actions.

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23. In another context it would be interesting to observe too, how Macbeth’s intention to murder in these lines is stated twice, the second time by means of the proverb allusion. His resort to the proverb suggests an undying need for authority, support, and justification even at this stage in the process of his hardening. 24. See allusions to As true as you stand there (c. 1497 Tilley, S818) 3.4.72, By boasting men may know fools c. 1450 (Whiting, B420) 4.1.169, A white-livered fellow (1546 Tilley, F180), To be bound to a stake c. 1500 (ODEP) 5.7.1, You lose your labor c. 1515 (Tilley, L9) 5.10.8, To lick (kiss) the dust (ground) (1535 Tilley, D651). 25. See also the allusions to What we do willingly is easy (1596 Tilley, D407), To look to one’s water 1377 (Tilley, W109), Take counsel of your pillow 1530 (Tilley, C696), and A desperate disease must have a desperate cure (1539 Tilley, D357), Salt seasons all things c. 1567–68 (Tilley, S80). 26. See Griffin, “Banality of History,” esp. his arguments on 1–4. 27. Ibid., 7, 12, 7. 28. See in this connection too, the following examples of the semiliteral reapplication of proverb idiom in allusions to The devil sometimes speaks the truth 1592–93 (Tilley, D266), Lay thy fingers on thy lips 1509 (Tilley, F239), All the water in the sea cannot wash out this stain 1598–99 (Tilley, W85), You will not believe he is bald (dead) till you see his brain (1580 Tilley, B597), Take counsel of your pillow 1530 (Tilley, C696). 29. See allusions to His candle burns within the socket (1589 Tilley, C41), This world is a stage and every man plays his part c. 1530 (Tilley, W882), Life is a shadow (smoke) 1549 (listed in ODEP).

The Fall of a Sparrow: Shakespearean Tragedy and the Bible Piero Boitani

PERHAPS EVEN GOD WOULD BALK AT THE IDEA OF CONTEMPLATING THE Bible and Shakespeare, two entire universes, in the same breath, as it were: for humanity it is almost certainly a constitutional impossibility. We struggle to come to grips with the one universe we inhabit. As a mere man, then, I may be pardoned if I simply sketch in a few ideas. By one of those pleasing serendipities history sometimes patterns itself into producing, the staging of Shakespeare’s greatest plays coincided with the conception and publication of the King James translation of the Bible, the Authorized Version, the two discourses representing in many ways the basis of English language, culture, and literature. The translation of the books of the Bible began in January 1604 and ended with the publication of the whole in 1611:1 precisely the span that scholars assign to Measure for Measure and Othello, in the early years, and The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest at the end; in the middle, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, the Sonnets, Timon, Pericles, and Cymbeline: as if Shakespeare were producing a textfor-text response to the appearance of Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Kings, the Prophets, Job, Psalms, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, the Gospels, the Letters, and Revelation. My brief sketch begins some years before the beginning of the King James Version of the Bible, with the tragedy that was to become the paradigm of modernity, Hamlet. After the celebrated exchange between Shylock and Antonio in The Merchant of Venice 2—which could be read as a debate between Hebrew and Christian interpretations of the Bible, and which concludes with Antonio’s line, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose”—it is in Hamlet that Shakespeare brings our attention back to the Bible, delicately but urgently.3 When, in act 5, scene 1, the two gravediggers are doing precisely that, digging the grave of the drowned Ophelia, the first one states roundly that “There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers—they hold up Adam’s profession” (5.1.29–31). When 203

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the other questions Adam’s gentlemanly credentials, his affirmation is in the words “A was the first that ever bore arms,” in the sense of both limbs and coats of arms (5.1.33). Unaware of the pun, the second grave digger replies “Why, he had none,” to which the first quips back: “What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the Scripture? The Scripture says Adam digged. Could he dig without arms?” (5.1.34–37). The complete and paradoxical logic, as the spectator is to learn in the space of the scene, of the First Clown—his pseudoScholastic argal—forces us into the imaginary universe of the Scriptures, which in a few lines we scan from beginning to end, from Adam to the Day of Judgment. “What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?” (5.1.41–42) is his second conundrum, and the other’s answer, “The gallows-maker,” is adequate—“I like thy wit well” (5.1.43, 45)—but not eschatologically thorough enough for the First Clown, who, after thirteen more lines of “brain-cudgel[ing],” gives him the right answer, “a grave-maker,” since “The houses he makes last till doomsday” (5.1.58–59). Some moments later, when Hamlet and Horatio appear on the scene, Hamlet observes that the grave digger handles human skulls as if they were totally depersonalized objects, and muses, “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to th’ ground, as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder” (5.1.74–76). Hamlet is even more consequential in his syllogisms than the First Clown. He too starts from the Scriptures, from the Book of Genesis. Both spectator and reader will remember that Cain has a not-inconsiderable walk-on part in the play. In act 1 the ghost of Hamlet’s father informs his son that he was “by a brother’s hand / Of life . . . dispatch’d” (1.5.74–75), and Claudius himself very openly recognizes that his “offence is rank, it smells to heaven” and bears the brand of the Ur-crime, “It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t— / A brother’s murder” (3.3.36–38, my emphasis). The primordial world of the Bible thus envelops Elsinore from the beginning, and perhaps one of the many tragedies of Hamlet the character is his needing material proof of Claudius-Cain’s guilt, as if his father’s “revelation” were not enough, with his “commandment” to “remember [him]” and act accordingly.4 Unlike the Old Testament God, Hamlet cannot simply rain down curses on Cain and condemn him to a life of eternal wandering: he has to take revenge, following a logic that belongs less to the Christian world than to that of the Oresteia. All the more surprising, then, that toward the end of the play Hamlet—having survived the efforts of Claudius to kill him at the hands of the English, having returned from England and taken part in Ophelia’s funeral—moves from the Old to the New Testa-

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ment. This is the passage from which I have taken my title (5.2.215– 16). When Horatio attempts to convince him to obey his heart, and desist from, or delay, the show down with Laertes, Hamlet strangely, oracularly replies: “Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be” (Hamlet, 5.2.215–20). There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.5 Commentators rightly quote Matthew’s Gospel: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matthew 10:29–30). But perhaps Shakespeare is thinking of a parallel passage in Luke where the sparrows are five in number (Luke 12:6), and which ends with Christ’s urging the readiness Hamlet speaks of: “Let your loins be girded about, and your lights burning. . . . Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not.”6 Trust to Providence, and wait in readiness for death, which can come at any moment: this, in a word, is the Gospel message. But how can the logic-chopping Hamlet make himself the bearer of such a humble and unequivocal message, and maintain, as he did some few lines earlier, that “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will—“ (5.2.10–11, my emphasis)? Who is this Christianteleological Hamlet? For the whole of the play’s first part, Hamlet could find no sense in the world, considering it “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed,” overgrown with “things rank and gross in nature,” a “sterile promontory,” a “foul and pestilent congregation of vapours” (1.2.135– 36 and 2.2.299–303). No trace here of any providence taking care of the poor sparrows and numbering the hairs on our heads. Here Hamlet is deliberating outright whether to live or not; whether it is worth tolerating the many ills “that flesh is heir to” when he could simply remove himself from the scene, making “his quietus . . . / With a bare bodkin” (3.1.63 and 75–76). To be or not to be. Whereas now he urges Horatio to Let it be—to leave things as they are: amen; and he is to repeat it at the point of death: “But let it be” (5.2.343, my emphasis). We might, perhaps, explain it by saying Hamlet has simply shaken off his melancholy: yet a second before producing his evangelical sparrows for Horatio, he had confessed that he was sick beyond any hypochondria: “all’s ill here about my heart”: a radical, inexpressible mal de vie. Yet, having survived Claudius’s plot against his life seems to open up a space of consolation, a room for some kind of “providence.” In recounting all this to Horatio, he remembers sealing the

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letter to the English king, which turned his death sentence on his own proposed assassins, with his father’s seal: “Why, even in that was heaven ordinant” (5.2.48). The voyage to England and concomitant events, we realize, have been in some way crucial for him. No explanation is given us, though, of the ascent from the initial darkness to the final, wavering glimmer. The rest is silence. We, and he, have to be content with the sparrow’s fall. Hamlet goes no further, without himself using his considerable negative capability to become the bird, as the psalmist does in Psalm 102:4–8: “For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth. My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread. By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin. . . . I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.”7 The psalmist, however, adds: “But thou, O Lord, shalt endure for ever; and thy remembrance unto all generations. Thou shalt arise, and have mercy upon Zion: for the time to favour her, yea, the set time, is come.”8 Hamlet observes the fate of the sparrows, and his fellow humans, and his own, as if from the threshold of the Scriptures, as it were: before a glass, darkly, and not yet through it. It is Horatio who prays and wishes (“blesses” would be the appropriate word) that “flights of angels” might “sing [his friend] to [his] rest” (5.2.365).9 The last scenes of the play contain no blinding flash of the light of faith, but the glimpse of a distant gleam, as the fall of the sparrow is a dim mystery understood, perhaps, by the protagonist, but never revealed to the spectator, unless he chooses to interpret this as Hamlet’s own fall—that is, the protagonist’s death. This seems to be Shakespeare’s own theatrical itinerary: between rewriting and deconstructing the Scriptures—re-Scripture and antiScripture, tragedy and transfiguration. Let me try to explain. Shakespeare’s ample use of biblical imagery and allusions is unquestioned. In my opinion, however (and I am not alone in this), in a number of works the Bible constitutes the subtext, or antitext, the light of which gives a new reading of the plays. We have quite enough to deal with here without looking at the poetry too, but we should at least consider whether it is purely accidental that the Sonnets open with an echo from Isaiah and Matthew, and close with an image that makes no sense whatsoever unless read with the Song of Songs in mind.10 Might we read this as an oblique attempt on Shakespeare’s part to construct his own—among other things—parabiblical Canzoniere, a sort of secular Psalter, or a Song of Songs? My answer will be directed through the plays. Othello, we know, is the tragedy of jealousy. Agostino Lombardo, however, has demonstrated how it encloses a larger, appalling tragedy

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of the word,11 inextricably, postlapsarianly split between object and meaning, which begins with a “temptation” scene—the famous scene 3 of act 3—the archetype for which is, of course, Eve’s temptation by the Serpent. Othello’s, then, is not the fall of a sparrow, but the Fall of Man, desired and superbly plotted by Satan, the power of Evil. Iago, Harold Bloom energetically reminds us, incarnates the Spirit of Negation,12 and, commenting on Iago’s famous “I am not what I am” (Othello, 1.1.65), evokes God’s proclamation to Moses in Exodus 3:14, Eheye Asher Eheye, “I AM THAT I AM” (also translatable as “shall be”) and the apostolic version that in King James’s Paul becomes the lower-case “I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:10). Iago is the diabolic despiser of Being, and the second, and greater, nihilist in English (and Western) literature, after Chaucer’s Pardoner. Fewer readers will remember, however, that much later, when Iago’s plot is (to “cite Scripture to our purpose”) “cleaving” to Othello’s “bones and skin,” and he has already called Desdemona a “devil” and ordered her “out of [his] sight,” it is Iago who gives Lodovico an apparently innocuous (if syntactically tortured), but actually singular definition of Othello: He’s that he is; I may not breathe my censure, What he might be; if, as he might, he is not, I would to heaven he were. (Othello, 4.1.266–68)

He’s that he is, Iago deliberates: and in one second the Moor of Venice is transfigured, on the impious lips of the Enemy, into the supreme essence of the Sinai Yahweh. The particular perfidy of Iago’s pronouncement cannot be overstressed, because while attributing divinity to Othello, he is (rather more naturally) denying it. Humanity simply cannot say of God: “I may not breathe my censure” and “what he might be, he is not.” According to the Bible, God is, tout court, and to say of him that if he is not as he might or should be, then “I would to heaven [!] he were,” is the blasphemy of blasphemies. And then, what precisely did Shakespeare have in mind when he wrote the last scene of the play? Desdemona begs Othello to grant her one last night, or one last half hour—the space of a prayer—but Othello replies that “It is too late” (5.2.84). As he begins to smother her, Desdemona cries out three times: “O Lord, Lord, Lord!” (5.2.85). On the point of death, Desdemona calls on her Lord: the only prayer she has time for. Simultaneously, however, Emilia, from without, calls out “My lord, my lord! what, ho, my lord, my lord!” (5.2.86). Desde-

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mona calls on God, and Emilia calls to Othello. Othello and Yahweh are here in dangerous propinquity: Lord and my lord. A second later Othello realizes that Desdemona is still alive. “Not dead? not yet quite dead?” (5.2.87) he asks, and, dealing a final blow, pronounces the words: “I that am cruel, am yet merciful” (5.2.88). Merciful and magnanimous indeed: and a verbal identity card for the Old Testament God! “I,” Yahweh informs Moses on giving him the Ten Commandments, “am the Lord thy God. . . . Thou shalt have no other gods before me . . . for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (Exodus 20:2–5). A jealous God: a jealous, punishing Othello. I rest half my case. Yet this is not only great tragic irony, but a sinister gleam from the darkness, directed at heaven. Immediately afterward Emilia calls Othello “the blacker devil,” in comparison with the angel Desdemona was; soon after this, subverting Exodus and the traditional biblical response to the divine call (hinne-ni—“Here I am”), Othello presents himself as “That’s he that was Othello; here I am“ (5.2.285, my emphasis). Othello, of course, can hardly be God: having once believed it, he now kills himself and what he recognizes as his total nonunderstanding: “one not easily jealous, but being wrought, / Perplex’d in the extreme” (5.2.346–47). Shakespeare’s spectators grasp at a glance the orthodoxy of the catastrophe, and experience infinite, pain-filled pathos, although “perplex’d” and disturbed in their turn: was Iago perhaps right when he pronounced He’s that he is? And how far does this glimmer reach? Far enough to touch on the jealous, and now black, God of the Bible? Is this, then, the tragedy of the highest word, the Word? In sum, then, what Shakespeare seems to me to be doing is obliquely interweaving the tragedy of the Fall of Man with the shadow of the greatest tragedy the West has experienced, the death of God. Before reaching such a dramatic conclusion it would be advisable to check this against another text. King Lear is, of course, generally recognized as the most biblical of Shakespeare’s plays. It reads, in acts 2– 4 especially, as a reworking of the book of Job. Of all the sections of the Hebrew Bible—in Christian terms, the Old Testament—it is Job’s story that has most shocked the Western soul. There is nothing comparable even in Greek drama, with the exception, perhaps, of Euripides’ Bacchae. Nothing questions the wisdom and justice of God like this Sapiential book in which God, hell-bent, one is tempted to say, on a showdown with Satan, allows him to strip his servant, the just, faithful, and innocent Job, of everything—family, wealth, health— except his life. Nowhere in Scripture, or indeed anywhere in classical

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culture, is there such a scorched-earth exploration of the total gratuity of human suffering and the existence of sheer evil in the world. The four friends who offer Job their comfort have their work cut out for them to find some explanation that might satisfy human reason and decency. No concept of sin, justice, or providence will do, even though Job testily maintains (Job 19:25), “I know that my Avenger [traditional translations, including King James, have “redeemer”] liveth.” Yet God’s thunderous replies to his servant’s protests out of the ‘whirlwind’ of the final chapters give their oblique answer. Yahweh meets Job’s accusations by upping the ante, and shifting to the level of another mystery. When Job asks “Why me?”—why is the good man punished and the bad exalted; why, in general, does man suffer and die? why does the sparrow fall?—the Lord answers: “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding” (Job 38:1–4). God “explains” the tragedy of evil and suffering, in the here and now and in the always and everywhere, with the mystery of Creation, the unfathomable enigma at the basis of being and existing, and with the life of the universe: wondrous, appalling, good, ill, stars, and Leviathan. When, four whole chapters later, Yahweh finally ceases his thundering, Job retracts his accusations and repents “in dust and ashes,” in full recognition that God is allmighty: “thou canst do every thing,“ he says to his Lord. “Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not. . . . I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee” (Job 42:3–5). Yahweh immediately showers riches on him, thereafter sending him sons and daughters, grandchildren, “even four generations,” blesses “the latter end of Job more than his beginning,” and allows him to live to 140 years, at the end of which Job dies, “old and full of days” (cf. Job 42:10–17). Lear’s tragedy is less radical but, paradoxically, more extreme. It is less radical because Lear is guilty, albeit simply of being vain and foolhardy: of dividing up his kingdom and quantifying his daughters’ love, the verbal variety of Goneril and Regan, and the real love of Cordelia and Kent. Its consequences are more extreme, however: restitution is only offered for an instant, and then forever denied. No blessing, human or divine, can save him from the death of his newly restored Cordelia, or that of Gloucester, or of Kent, or, mercifully, as Kent points out, his own death. Lear is perhaps Job as witnessed in the Western imaginary,13 the desolate, destitute wreck to whom his wife recommends suicide (2:9): “Curse God, and die.” Lear is an exclusively tragic Job, over whom—

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in counterpoint, as it were—the shadow of Christ’s passion and crucifixion also loom (Christ, of course, being the Christian “fulfillment” of Job). When, in act 2, scene 4, Lear orders Regan, who intends to dismiss all his attendants, to “reason not the need” since “our basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous” (2.4.266–67), there very clearly emerges in his words what is known as the “Joban paradigm,” the King’s self-identification with his biblical predecessor, the victim of God:14 You Heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!— You see me here, you Gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age; wretched in both! (King Lear, 2.4.273–75)

Yet at the very same moment Lear departs from his model, hurling curses with a fury that sets aside all “patience” and, jumping from “Gods” to daughters, pronounces: If it be you [Gods] that stirs these daughters’ hearts Against their father, fool me not so much To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall—I will do such things,— What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be The terrors of the earth. (King Lear, 2.4.276–84)

Here too, as shortly before (2.4.106, 159ff., 162ff., 228), Lear alternates the passio and the patientia of Job and Christ, on the one hand, and the full bent of Yahweh’s anger against his enemies on the other. From this point onward, Lear’s trajectory is to be a constant counterpoint/counterpart as he writes and rewrites the book of Job. It is no accident that the lines quoted above are followed by the two dominant themes of act 3, the storm, and madness, two facets of the one, universal upheaval: “You think I’ll weep,” Lear says to his daughters; “No, I’ll not weep: / I have full cause of weeping” (2.4.284–86), he goes on, while the stage directions inform us of a “storm heard at a distance,” but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool! I shall go mad. (King Lear, 2.4.281–83)

Passion and patientia are about to become hysterica passio.

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Here, then, is Lear, in the middle of the storm, promising to be “the pattern of all patience” (3.2.37), invoking, convoking, and bonding with the storm. This is Lear the victim, Lear-Job: “here I stand, your slave, / A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man” (3.2.19–20), the slave of the elements which, however, he “tax[es] not . . . with unkindness” (3.2.16). But he is also an uncanny and perverse shadow of Yahweh, the storm-raiser, the voice that speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, the se’ara: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world! Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once That makes ingrateful man! (King Lear, 3.2.1–9)

The difference from Job’s God hardly needs underlining. Pronouncing from the whirlpool of the storm, God evokes his own Creation. Lear wants from his storm a destruction extending perhaps even to Christian civilization itself, its topmost-steeples (weathercocks) and dawn-announcing creatures (the farmyard cockerels). What Lear wants is a Second Flood, and the return of being and the natural world to nothing: to the nothing of which, he thunders in the first act, nothing will come. Here Lear is to the God of Job as Othello in the last scene is to the God of Exodus. Yet Shakespeare’s approach to the Bible is always oblique. When, later, Lear asks the “noble philosopher” and “learned Theban” Edgar, in the guise of Poor Tom, what the cause of the thunder is (3.4.146), he is repeating Yahweh’s questions to Job, but as a man who wishes to know, not as the God who has himself created the thunder. Lear enacts the trial of his daughters, as Job calls God to justice, with the difference that we know his daughters are guilty. It is even possible, I think, to consider the exchanges between Lear and the Fool as crazed versions of the dialogues between Job and his friends. What we are witnessing, though, is the swift, ineluctable slide of Lear’s intellect into madness. The “contentious storm” in the elements, as the protagonist himself seems to realize, becomes the objective correlative of the “tempest in [his] mind” (3.4.6. and 12). This, of course, changes the perspective offered by the Job paradigm, moving it, slightly but explicitly, from the Sapiential, Hebrew sphere to the Christian. To “see into the heart of things,” Lear has to lose all reason, following the model prescribed by St Paul: “Let no man deceive himself. If any

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man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness“ (1 Corinthians 3:18). It is no accident that the quotation in this Pauline passage is actually from the book of Job (Job 5:13), from Eliphaz’s first reply to Job when he curses the day he was born. Shakespeare is rewriting the Old Testament through the New, then, and above all through himself, superimposing Christ on Job, and, with awful dramatic presumption, Lear on both. I refrain from tracing Gloucester’s parallel trajectory, whom I shall return to in a second, because it has already been splendidly done by Harold Fisch.15 Then, Lear is more than enough, as we move from his descent into madness to what amounts to no less than a resurrection, when he regains his senses and recognizes Cordelia in the camp near Dover (4.7). Shakespeare has already, of course, identified Cordelia indirectly but unequivocally three scenes before, at the point when she is urging her followers to find her father. “O dear father!” she exclaims, “It is thy business that I go about” (4.4.23–24): the sentence is an astonishing copy of Christ’s words to Joseph and Mary in the ‘Authorized Version,’ when his parents search for him desperately and find him disputing with the doctors. “How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49). Cordelia is a Daughter in the same way that Jesus of Nazareth of the Gospels is a Son. Yet here it is the father who rises again, and, at the moment in which they “take [him] out o’ th’ grave” (4.7.45) as he himself puts it, he perceives himself as the Christ of the Passion: “Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire” (4.7.46–47). Divinity is shared and merged in both father and daughter: here Cordelia is Christ in heaven, as “bliss” quite openly connotes, and Lear is Christ on the cross. And when her father finally recognizes her in recognizing his own humanity—“For, as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia” (4.7.69–70)—she replies by recognizing her total essence as daughter, and, like Christ, declares her own, absolute being: “And so I am, I am“ (4.7.70, my emphasis). This is a singular rescripting of Scripture, indeed: an old man, in the guise of God the Father, rises from the dead before his own child! Nor does the process end here, but only in act 5, scene 3, when the French army is defeated and Lear and Cordelia are led off to prison together. It is here that Lear imagines a future of bliss, redemption, and sublimation that, while entirely human, goes far beyond the resurrection prefigured above. In prison he and Cordelia will sing like birds i’ th’ cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,

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And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies. (King Lear, 5.3.9–13)

Above all, in this familiar paradise, they will fulfill their mission of human beings separate from but in harmony with God: “And take upon’s the mystery of things / As if we were God’s spies” (5.3.16– 17).16 It reads, if I may so put it, like the Gospel according to William Shakespeare, as close and as far from the canonical Gospels as Lear and Cordelia resemble Christ taking upon himself the sins of the world, and yet differ from him in positing themselves not as God’s children but as his spies. We also know, of course, that such a consummation devoutly to be wished is not to be theirs: in this tragedy, death follows resurrection, and the end of King Lear could not be further from the end of the book of Job and the Gospels. But then, Shakespeare’s re-Scriptures are always complex. The subplot in which Gloucester is protagonist has a subtly different ending. Gloucester believes, and states, that men are for the gods “[a]s flies to wanton boys . . . / They kill us for their sport” (4.1.36–37). The ideal answer to this, after his attempted suicide from the “cliff,” comes from the poor beggar who is rebecoming his son Edgar: thou happy father, Think that the clearest Gods, who make them honours Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee. (King Lear, 4.6.72–74)

Edgar, like Hamlet in the final scenes, begins to glimpse a further design: in the fake fall of Gloucester lies, as in the sparrow’s true one, a special providence. To Hamlet’s the readiness is all he later replies with a specular, completer phrase: “Ripeness is all” (5.2.11, my emphasis). Men, Edgar says to his father, again tempted by suicide, “must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither” (5.2.9–10): they must be ready for death, but also for birth, rebirth—in a word, life. They must endure, as Job learns to endure. This is the message Edgar carries through to the end of the play, and his maxim that “the weight of this sad time we must obey” (5.3.323) might seem crushingly inadequate before the devastating, unbearable, cumulative catastrophe of the last scenes of King Lear. It is, however, no more or less than that of Qoheleth, the preacher who observes the “vanity of vanities” yet maintains that there is a time to laugh, and a time to weep. It is from here, and from Lear’s and Cordelia’s recognition and resurrection, that Shakespeare departs,

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after Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra,17 moving toward “old tales” and the romances in which Cymbeline and Imogen, Pericles and Marina and Thaisa, Leontes and Perdita and Hermione, Prospero and Miranda—fathers and daughters, husbands and wives—are all variously lost, fallen, found, and ultimately arise.18 Different tales, different tellers, in which, for example, another storm (yet another: as from Twelfth Night on) will wreck a ship to save lives, and an omnipotent father will use all his creative force for the good of mankind. The fall of a sparrow will be countered by the flight of angels. Earthly and immanent, this will also carry the shadow of the metaphysical, the divine: the New Will and Testament of William Shakespeare.

NOTES 1. See the introduction and bibliography by Robert P. Carroll and Stephen Prickett in their edition of The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and David Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1:139–311. The Authorized Version was of course not the first English translation of the Bible in the Renaissance, being preceded by Tyndale, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible (used by Shakespeare), and the Bishops’ Bible. 2. Merchant of Venice, 1.3.64–98. All Shakespearean texts are quoted from the “Arden Shakespeare,” in particular The Merchant of Venice from the text edited by John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1955), Hamlet by Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), Othello by M. R. Ridley (London: Methuen, 1958), King Lear by Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1963), and Macbeth by Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1959). On this exchange between Antonio and Shylock, see Gabriel Josipovici, On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 55–58. 3. In all that follows my debt to Harold Fisch’s splendid book, The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton and Blake: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), in particular 66–149, will be evident. 4. For this, I refer readers to my The Genius to Improve an Invention: Literary Transitions (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), chap. 1. 5. Jenkins, Hamlet ad loc., underlines in his commentary that the Elizabethans believed both in a general providence, which manifests itself in the system of creation, and, within it, in a singular or special providence, which manifests itself in a particular event. Calvin insisted on the latter. 6. Luke 12:35–40, and Matt. 24:44, as Harold Fisch suggests in Biblical Presence, 113. 7. “Sparrow alone” in the Authorized Version and “passer solitarius” in the Vulgate, but not in the Hebrew original. This is the ancestor of all solitary sparrows in Western literature, including those of Petrarch and Leopardi (and Keats). See Giovanni Pozzi, Alternatim (Milan: Adelphi, 1996), 45–71, 169–72. 8. Pozzi, Alternatim, 13–14. 9. After reading Stephen Greenblatt’s very important Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), and several reviews of it, I wondered if the author and the reviewers might not have missed what seems the most pertinent ques-

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tion in the context of Greenblatt’s own book, and one that inevitably rises from the imaginaire itself evoked by the book: where (if anywhere) beyond death will Hamlet’s soul end up? Heaven, one is irresistibly tempted to answer with Horatio’s “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” (5.2.365; Harold Jenkins’s commentary ad loc. would support this). That may well be Horatio’s pious wish, and as such it cannot of course be questioned. But Hamlet is, in a radically Christian perspective, undoubtedly guilty of Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s elimination (for which, as we have seen, he even says heaven was ultimately “ordinant”), and of trying and finally succeeding, though on the spur of the moment, to kill Claudius. And although he and Laertes repent and forgive each other, Hamlet never explicitly repents of these other “sins” (which Horatio knows), let alone forgiving his uncle. Not even purgatory would, then, be his final destination. Does Horatio the scholar not know elementary theology, be it Protestant or Catholic? Or does he simply wish to “bless” Hamlet—as traditional Christians would their dying relatives and friends? And what could Hamlet, seconds before dying, “tell” those “That are but mutes or audience to this act” (5.2.340) if he had that time which “this fell sergeant, Death,” being “strict in his arrest” (5.2.341– 42), does not allow him? A silent “lagrimetta,” a small tear in point of death, is enough to save Dante’s Buonconte da Montefeltro in Purgatorio 5, and, conducted by “God’s angel,” he ends up in purgatory (whereas his father Guido, precisely because he has not repented and even though he has obtained the previous absolution of the pope, ends up in hell in Inferno 27). Is Hamlet’s silence here a kind of confession? Will he, like his father, end up in purgatory? These are not idle, but basic and inevitable questions. If we read or watch the play not as twenty-first-century critics, but as seventeenthcentury human beings—or Christians in general—these are precisely the questions we, having heard the ghost of Hamlet’s father say he comes from purgatory at the beginning, would ask ourselves at the end. Shakespeare, of course, is not Dante, and in Hamlet, act 5, scene 2, a strange mixture of ethical and metaphysi-cal perspectives is evident. When Hamlet kills Claudius, Laertes pronounces the latter “justly serv’d” (an eye for an eye) (5.2.332), but then asks Hamlet to “[e]xchange forgiveness” with him (a Christian gesture) (5.2.334). Hamlet replies as a Christian, “Heaven make thee free of it” (5.2.337). After “Had I but time . . . O, I could tell you—,” Hamlet begs Horatio to “[r]eport [him] and [his] cause aright” (5.2.341–44)—that is, to inform and justify his actions—and insists on this, speaking of the “wounded name” (5.2.349) he will leave behind him, and he urges his friend to tell his story. Hamlet, in sum, seems worried about his reputation (and the political future of Denmark) rather than about his eternal life, or death. His final word is neither heaven, nor hell, nor purgatory, but significantly, and perhaps more faithfully to the Hebrew Bible, “silence” (5.2.363). 10. William Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1986), 1.12: Isa. 32:5, and Matt. 25:14–30; 154:14; Song of S. 8:7. Kerrigan does not miss the “I am that I am” of 121.9 from Exod. 3:14, for which see below on Othello. 11. See his introduction to Otello (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1995), vff. 12. Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths (Cambridge, MA: and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), 64–69. 13. For this tradition, see Gianfranco Ravasi, Giobbe, 2nd ed. (Rome: Borla, 1984), 108–270. 14. King Lear, 2.4.269; and see Fisch, Biblical Presence, 123–32, and references therein; and Fisch, New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1998), 100–115. 15. Fisch, Biblical Presence, 132–42.

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16. Lear continues (5.3.20–21, my emphasis): “Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, / The Gods themselves throw incense.” 17. For Antony and Cleopatra see Fisch, Biblical Presence, 35–65. An analysis of Macbeth would be complex. The opening scene with the witches certainly recalls, and is perhaps inspired by, the scene in which Saul, through a witch, consults the spirit of Samuel, receiving from him an oracle on his future loss of the kingdom (1 Sam. 28). See Robert Alter, The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (New York: Norton, 1999), 139 n. 19. The parallels between Macbeth’s and Saul’s story are oblique, but significant (for an example of textual echo, see Macbeth 2.3.68–69 and 1 Sam. 24:10), as are the allusions in Macbeth to the Gospels and Genesis. It might not be out of place to observe that Macbeth’s last great speech, “To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow” (5.5.19–28, my emphasis) is full of Sapiential echoes: Ps. 22:15 for “dusty death”; Ps. 39:7 and Job 8:9 for “walking shadow”; Job 18:6, Ps. 18:28, Prov. 20:27 for “brief candle.” It looks as if Macbeth’s itinerary—but how long and tormented!—were going from a decaying Saul to a Job reduced to nothing: truly a “tale . . . signifying nothing” (5.5.28–30, my emphasis). 18. I have explored this theme in The Bible and Its Rewritings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 159–72, in Prima lezione sulla letteratura (Rome: Laterza, 2007), and Il Vangelo secondo Shakespeare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009).

V Dissolving National Boundaries

Foundational Myth in Cymbeline David Bevington

C YMBELINE IS, IN ONE IMPORTANT SENSE, A PLAY ABOUT THE MYTHIC foundations of Britain in a line of descent going back to Rome and, at a still further remove, to Troy. At the same time, Shakespeare explores the sense in which Britain is quintessentially native and indigenous, claiming thereby to be the author of her own greatness. These ideas coexist in uneasy yet productive tension, resulting in a definition of a national character and history that is at once multiple and unified. The theme of Britain’s roots in Roman and pre-Roman history was of course not new to the Renaissance.1 Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (1136–37) had laid forth a narrative of national origins going back to the Trojan War. That great conflict led ultimately (according to Virgil) to Aeneas’s departure from the burning city at the behest of Venus, with his father Anchises on his back and his son Iulus (Ascanius) by the hand, his wife Creusa (a daughter of Priam) following but soon lost to the story. Subsequent to Aeneas’s founding of Rome, in an extension of that narrative told by Geoffrey without any authority in the Aeneid itself, Aeneas’s great-grandson Brut sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar and around the western coast of Europe to Britain; the name “Britain” purportedly is an eponymous commemoration of that event. This fabricated legend was patently a fanciful and imitative elaboration of Virgil’s Aeneid, aimed at giving Britain an honorable and ancient pedigree on the Roman and Trojan side. The Greek heritage was repudiated. As Chaucer said in his House of Fame, “Oon sayde that Omer made lyes, / Feygnynge in hys poetryes” (1477–78).2 This legend became the substance of “the matter of Britain,” to be further explored in Layamon’s Brut (1205), Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (c. 1160), Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Troiana (completed 1287), Raoul Lefevre’s redaction of Guido, John Lydgate’s Troy Book (first printed 1513), and William Caxton’s The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy (printed 1474), the first book printed in English. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601) tends to side with the Trojan warriors, especially 219

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Aeneas and Hector, while taking a more critical view of Agamemnon, Nestor, Achilles, Ajax, and even Ulysses. King Cymbeline appears in Geoffrey’s largely mythical accounts of the early British kings, along with Lear, Locrine, Gorboduc, Ferrex, Porrex, Lud, Cassibelan, Tenantius, Guiderius, and Arviragus. Some of these have a shadowy claim to historical reality; the others, by and large, do not. What interests me here are the larger dimensions of foundational myth in Cymbeline, as found for example in the Aeneid (30–19 BC) and in Plutarch’s Life of Romulus in his Parallel Lives (Bioi paralleloi, c. AD 70–120). Other examples could be explored, such as Livy’s History of Rome (Ab Urbe Condita, 27–BC.), Tacitus’s history of how the Germans became a nation (published AD 104–117), and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, but Virgil and Plutarch should be enough to establish some patterns. Viewed in this context, and without meaning to imply that Shakespeare intended any direct connection (though he refers at times to the Aeneid, as in the account of the death of Priam in Hamlet [2.2.452–518],3 and certainly knew Plutarch’s lives of Mark Antony, Julius Caesar, Brutus, and Coriolanus), we can perceive certain features of Cymbeline that bear a striking resemblance to foundational myths as a collective genre. An aging widower king, faced with a dynastic problem (like that of King Lear) owing to the seeming lack of a male heir, must decide what to do about his handing on of royal authority to the next generation. His apparent solution is to marry a second wife and to insist that his sole daughter, Imogen, marry his newly acquired stepson, Cloten. Marital arrangements like this often turn up in foundational myths and indeed in history as well, as a means of forming alliances through exogamous marriage.4 (One can imagine Shakespeare’s personal interest in this matter as well, since, after the death of his son Hamnet in 1596, his hope of inheritance necessarily lay with his two daughters and the husbands they acquired: Susanna marrying John Hall in 1607, Judith marrying Thomas Quiney in 1616, the latter after the writing of Cymbeline c. 1608–10.) Cymbeline’s plan of inheritance quickly falls apart, and for reasons that again resonate with broader implications. Cymbeline’s new queen is a fearsome creature, so relentlessly ambitious for her son and evil in her nature that she might step out of a folk tale or fairy story. She is the wicked stepmother of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or the Wicked Witches of the East and the West in The Wizard of Oz. Stepmothers in folk literature, folklorists tell us, are ameliorating masks for feelings of anger at the real mother; in the original story of Hansel and Gretel, as recorded by the brothers Grimm, the hateful parent was the biological mother. The wicked stepmother is often conflated with or confused with a witch; Medea is a witch who de-

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stroys her own children. These hateful women are usually paired and contrasted with their virtuous opposites, underscoring the psychological impulse to bifurcate the mother figure into saint and demon. What is of particular concern here is that Cymbeline’s Queen becomes the apostle of divisiveness and civil conflict. She embodies the irrational in a way that sets up female emotionality and destructive passion against rational control as embodied, theoretically at least, in the male. She urges resistance to Rome; and, although that idea might seem to endorse the spirit of national patriotism and selfdetermination, her espousal of it is through appeals to hatred and discord.5 When her plan fails of placing her son on the British throne and of chasing the Roman army from Britain’s shores, Cymbeline’s Queen plots to murder her husband (having earlier intended to take the life of Imogen “by poison”) and then takes her own life. The court physician, Cornelius, reveals to the King the appalling confession that the dying queen has made to Cornelius in the presence of her women: First, she confessed she never loved you, only Affected greatness got by you, not you; Married your royalty, was wife to your place, Abhorred your person.

More is to come: More, sir, and worse. She did confess she had For you a mortal mineral which, being took, Should by the minute feed on life and, ling’ring, By inches waste you. In which time she purposed, By watching, weeping, tendance, kissing, to O’ercome you with her show and, in fine, When she had fitted you with her craft, to work Her son into th’ adoption of the crown; But, failing of her end by his strange absence, Grew shameless desperate; opened, in despite Of heaven and men, her purposes; repented The evils she hatched were not effected; so Despairing died. (Cymbeline, 5.5.37–61)

Small wonder that Cymbeline is heard to cry out, “O most delicate fiend! / Who is’t can read a woman?” (5.5.47–48). She is, like Lady Macbeth, “a fiendlike queen” (Macbeth, 5.8.70). Cymbeline generalizes her condition to that of womankind. Feminine irrationality stands

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as an almost unceasing threat to dynastic stability until at last it is thrown down by the seemingly providential forces that guide Britain uncertainly toward mature selfhood. Cloten is the embodiment of the Queen’s illicit ambitions. As with Lady Macbeth or Volumnia in Coriolanus, the Queen’s unhallowed ambitions are projected onto a male through whom she can hope to attain power; the male world of presumed rational control is thus subverted by the irrational and the demonic.6 Cloten is a ludicrous figure, vain, arrogant, cowardly, vengeful, jealous, laughed at by his own servants, and grotesquely incapable as a wooer, yet dangerous in his plot to dress himself up in Posthumus Leonatus’s garments, kill Posthumus right in front of Imogen’s eyes, and then ravish her (3.5.138–39). His dressing himself in Posthumus’s clothes accentuates the way in which these two men are paired and contrasted, thereby bifurcating the male into opposite types just as mothers are also bifurcated. Both Cloten and Posthumus are wooers of Imogen; they are approximately of an age; and for much of the play they seem to represent the rival possibilities of dynastic settlement in Britain. When Cloten is beheaded by Guiderius, the clothed body of the dead man resembles that of Posthumus to such an extent that the distraught Imogen is unable to detect the difference. Outwardly they are alike. As rivals for the hand in marriage of the King’s daughter, Cloten and Posthumus are polarized opposites, one representing irrational hatred, the other representing trust and reason (though Posthumus does of course waver in his faith, goaded by Iachimo’s temptations). Then, too, the fact that Imogen and Cloten are not related at all by blood, since she is Cymbeline’s daughter by his first marriage and Cloten is the Queen’s son by her previous marriage, accentuates the contrast between virtue and villainy. Dynastically, a lot depends on who will finally prevail. Before going on to explore further the dynastic issues in Cymbeline, let us step back in time to examine the dimensions of foundational myth as it recurringly manifests itself in the work of Virgil and Plutarch.7 The Aeneid is a foundational myth about the founding of Rome, much as Cymbeline embodies a foundational myth about the founding of Britain. Aeneas can seem at times ruthless about women and implacable to his foes, but he does represent the values that Romans prize most in their heroic men: all that he does is in obedience to the will of the gods, chiefly his mother, Venus. He personifies Roman steadfastness, self-control, attentiveness to duty, and pietas, both in his devotion to the gods’ will and in his honored respect for his father and ancestors. His leaving Dido for Italy is presented by Virgil both

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as obedience to the gods’ will and as a return home. Aeneas’s lineage, through his father, Anchises, and then further back through Tros and Erichthonius, enables him to claim an ultimate connection both to Troy and to Italy, since Erichthonius’s father, born in Etruria, was reputedly descended via his mother, the Pleiad Electra (in one of Zeus’s many amorous liaisons), from Atlas, king of Italy, whereas Tros was the father of Ilus, the founder of Troy. Tros in turn sired Laomedon, builder of the walls of Troy; Laomedon sired Priam. Aeneas is a member of the royal family of Troy by virtue of his marriage to Priam’s daughter Creusa and also by Aeneas’s direct descent in a collateral line from Tros. His claim of autochthonous and inalienable heritage in Italy is a story seemingly invented by Virgil for the purpose of legitimizing the founding of Rome even while insisting too on Aeneas’s Trojan ancestry. Women are important in Aeneas’s establishing his claim to rule in Italy. His wife, Creusa, is soon left behind at Troy, and then Dido at Carthage. Aeneas’s nurse, Caieta, stays with him until she dies at the time of the landing on Italian soil (book 7). Here a funeral mound is raised and solemn rites performed in her memory. The land is named after her, as a means of laying claim to the territory in which she is buried. Such lands of burial become sacred. The previous inhabitants have of course their own history and their own naming of the land, but that history is supplanted now by a process of synthesis between old inhabitants and new arrivals bringing their own autochthonous claims. The process is not unlike that through which various peoples newly arriving in Britain would establish themselves and legitimate their claims, both before and after the Roman invasions. Having left behind the women of his Trojan and Carthaginian past and thus severing his connection with the female in order to present himself as an autochthonous male deriving his sustenance from the land he newly claims by birthright, Aeneas is now in a position to strengthen immeasurably his claim through the winning of Lavinia. She stands at the center of the second half of the Aeneid. She is the daughter of King Latinus, “long ruler over a country / Blessed with the calm of peace.”8 He was, Virgil tells us, the son of Faunus, who in turn was son of Picus (i.e., Woodpecker), the son of Saturn, founder of the line. Lavinia is Latinus’s only daughter, and he has no son. She is engaged to Turnus, king of the Rutuli, whose candidacy is strongly favored by Queen Amata. Turnus is the queen’s choice partly because of his Greek heritage, being descended from Danae. The choice of husband for Lavinia is thus highly symbolic. Turnus is a native king with Greek heritage, intent on repelling Aeneas’s Trojan invasion. Turnus is backed by a vengeful and furious woman, and is aided as

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well by Turnus’s sister Juteria and by the Fury Electo. Together these women represent the dark furor of raging emotion, loss of control, violence, enchantment, and irrationality that is destructive and yet also essential as a kind of generative power associated with the land, like the female Eumenides or Furies in the third play of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy. On the other side, Aeneas represents masculine reason, self-control, and piety. The interrelation of these mighty opposites is complex; Aeneas is capable of a fury of his own. Yet he is a Roman in spirit, and is identified as such by his father, Anchises, in the visit to the lower world in book 6. He is the embodiment of Romanitas. And of course he wins. His victory is dictated by imperial and divine mandate. Through exogamous marriage he brings to the royal line of Italy the reinvigorating strength of a new patrilineal dynasty, one that King Latinus has needed to form a marriage alliance through his single daughter and thereby produce an heir (Silvius) who will explicitly unify the claims of Troy and of Italy. Turnus could have similarly supplied a family dynasty from his kingship of the Rutuleans, but Virgil makes clear that his candidacy is fatally tainted by his close association with cruelty, uncontrolled rage, and impiety. Aeneas’s successful overcoming of Turnus has dynastic consequences that are not unlike those of the defeating of the dynastic hopes, in Cymbeline, of Cloten and his madly ambitious mother. And of course Aeneas’s victory is seen by Virgil as anticipating Octavius Caesar’s triumph over Antony at the sea battle of Actium in 31 BC, shortly after which Virgil began writing the Aeneid. Plutarch’s Life of Romulus looks forward to Cymbeline in another way. Like Guiderius and Arviragus, Romulus and Remus are raised in a rural and sylvan world, with shepherds and wolves as their companions. Their story recalls that of Cyrus, the great ruler of Persia, who, as Herodotus tells it, was ordered by his grandfather Astyages to be slain, lest the prophetic dream come true that a vine would grow from the private parts of Astyages’s daughter Mandane and spread over all Asia—that is, usurp the Persian throne. Accordingly, the infant Cyrus was brought up by a herdsman and his wife in a mountainous and thickly wooded land near the Black Sea (1.106ff.). A similar upbringing gives to Romulus and Remus the aggressive strength and hardiness of the natural world. At the same time, their parentage ambivalently reveals two traditions, one shameful, the other heroic. The first is that Amulius, descendant of Aeneas and Lavinia, slept with his niece Ilea (also identified as Rhea Silvia), the daughter of Amulius’s brother Numitor, after first making her a vestal virgin to insure that she would not marry, and thereby sired Romulus and Remus through an incestuous affair. The other, more respectable tradition is that

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Rhea Silvia slept with Mars, thereby giving her sons the status of quasideity. In either event, Amulius is supposed to have done away with Rhea Silvia and to have thrown the twins in the Tiber River, whence they were rescued and brought up by the royal herdsman Faustulus and his wife, Acca Larentia. Even here the tradition is sharply ambivalent: Acca Larentia, the stepmother, is the lupa, the wolf, with connotations of whoredom. Accordingly, Romulus and Remus are at once swiftly violent and rash but also Roman in their gravitas of judgment and reason. As with Cyrus, and with Guiderius and Arviragus, or Moses, for that matter, the ultimate goal of the story is to restore the young men to their rightful heritage. The story is one of contested claims for power. When Amulius dies, in order to avoid bloodshed the twins agree to leave his grandfather Numitor on the throne of Alba Longa, while Romulus and Remus found a new city among the seven hills of Rome. A potentially peaceful resolution of the contest of primacy between Romulus and Remus by means of ornithomancy turns bitter when Romulus is accused by his brother of fraud, and the result is civil conflict and fratricide; the invading brother, Remus, is cut down. Romulus, when finally it is his turn to die, proves once again to be an unstable figure: one legend describes the death as a godlike apotheosis, while another describes how Romulus is killed by the senators of Rome and cut into pieces, as though in vindication of republican values over tyrannical monarchy, and in anticipation of the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. (Julius Caesar was to identify himself with Romulus; Octavian, renamed Augustus Caesar, chose the more elevated course of tracing his lineage to Aeneas.) Rome is thus founded on a rivalrous brotherhood in which the potential for loyal and cooperative mutuality yields to sibling rivalry and violence. Hence the very essence of the Roman character can be seen as ambivalent, being on the one hand rapaciously violent and cunning and on the other dutifully pious. In matters of gender as well, the Romans assert their ascendancy over women through violence, obtaining wives for Romulus’s soldiers in the episode known as the Rape of the Sabine Women. Women are necessary in the formation of alliances, as in the story of Aeneas; they are a scarce and contested commodity, needed for continuation of the dynastic line. At the same time, they are viewed as unstable and irrational. Shakespeare’s Cymbeline follows a similar path, of restoring lost sons who have been raised in the wilderness to monarchical authority at the expense of a demonized female impulse toward wild fury. A tradition of native origins is thus reconciled with a proud assertion of Trojan heritage, in the name of a newly synthesized Romanitas.

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Let us return to Shakespeare’s play. What perspective can we gain by studying it as a foundational play about Britain, in the vein, though without explicit borrowing, of the foundational myths of Virgil and Plutarch? That the similarities are generic rather than direct reinforces the point that foundational stories run to type. They are myths, while at the same time they are refashioning historical materials in such a way as to tell the story that the particular culture and its political leadership wish to hear. A case in point is Imogen in her role as the heroine and princess of the realm whose choice in marriage must necessarily have consequences in a dynastic struggle to determine who will gain the upper hand at court. Posthumus and Cloten are presented as opposite in every way: Posthumus is virtuous, “a poor but worthy gentleman,” while Cloten is, in the opinion of an unnamed gentleman in the opening scene, “a thing / Too bad for bad report” (Cymbeline, 1.1.16–17). The play’s opening conversation, among courtiers whose anonymity bestows on them a choric function, operates to make clear the stark contrasts between the two contenders for Imogen. Posthumus, though of lower rank than the princess he has married, claims an honorable and even heroic heritage. “His father / Was called Sicilius,” one of the gentlemen informs us, who did join his honor Against the Romans with Cassibelan, But had his titles by Tenantius, whom He served with glory and admired success, So gained the sur-addition Leonatus. (1.1.29–33)

Cassibelan is Cymbeline’s uncle in this play (3.1.5), though great-uncle according to Holinshed, a younger brother to and successor of King Lud; Tenantius is Cassibelan’s nephew. The account of Sicilius here is important in establishing him as a brave and loyal fighter against the Romans; the sur-addition bestowed upon him, “Leonatus” or “Lion-born,” is a mark of great honor. Posthumus Leonatus, his son, is worthy of his father in every way. Even his birth is an event of wonderment: his two older brothers having died in the wars, and their father, Sicilius, then having “quit being” out of inconsolable sorrow at the loss, Posthumus was thereupon born to a mother who died in childbed (hence the name “Posthumus”), leaving the babe to be taken into the King’s protection. In Cymbeline’s court, Posthumus has been made one of the King’s bedchamber—that is, intimate retinue —and has received the benefits of “all the learnings that his time /

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Could make him the receiver of,” with the result that he has become that rarest of creatures, a courtier who is universally admired for his integrity. He is, as one of the gentlemen informs us, most praised, most loved, A sample to the youngest, to th’ more mature A glass that feated them, and to the graver A child that guided dotards. (1.1.47–50)

That is, he has provided a model of behavior for younger courtiers and a mirror to the older courtiers reflecting their best selves, as though a child should be instructing old men. Posthumus must undergo a tortured odyssey in the course of the play, losing faith for a time in the virtue of his radiantly virtuous wife, but we need to recognize that he is established from the start as the perfect gentleman and a fit choice for Imogen. As one of the gentlemen puts it, Posthumus is a creature such As, to seek through the regions of the earth For one his like, there would be something failing In him that should compare. I do not think So fair an outward and such stuff within Endows a man but he. (1.1.19–24).

Posthumus is a nonpareil. Cloten, contrastingly, is the embodiment of everything a courtier should not be. We first see him with two unnamed lords, whose anonymity again underscores their role as choric commentators. They utter satirical asides for virtually every speech of Cloten in scene 2, a short scene clearly designed as an antithesis to the beginning of scene 1 devoted to singing Posthumus’s praises. The choric asides of the two lords emphasize Cloten’s lack of personal hygiene, his odiferous perspiration, his brainless misuse of the English language, his posturing as an intrepid fighter, and his cowardice in backing away from a duel. Cloten is indeed something of a miles gloriosus, in the vein of Plautus’s Prygopolynices. “His steel was in debt; it went o’ th’ backside the town,” jests one of the lords sotto voce: Cloten avoids fighting in pusillanimous fashion, much as a debtor hides in back streets. The phraseology “backside the town” may hint at buggery. When Cloten sputters that “The villain [his opposite in this duel] would not stand me,” one of the lords privately reinterprets to Cloten’s disadvantage: “No, but he fled forward still, toward your face” (1.2.15–

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16). Act 2, scene 1, repeats this scenario with two anonymous lords still accompanying Cloten as he frets at having lost a bet in the game of bowls. Most of all, the lords sneer among themselves at Cloten’s preposterous wooing of Imogen. She is already married, of course, to Posthumus; whether Cloten and his mother hope for a divorce now that Posthumus is banished, or whether Cloten ever stops to reflect on such niceties in his urge to possess Imogen sexually, is not clear, but assuredly he is intent on wooing her. His language as a wooer is bawdy, and all the funnier for being unintentionally so. Of the music he provides for her morning serenade, he observes, “they say it will penetrate,” and then manages to make the image even more obscene: “Come on, tune,” he bids the musicians. “If you can penetrate her with your fingering, so; we’ll try with tongue too” (2.3.12–15). His view of music itself is no less coarse. “If this penetrate,” he tells the musicians, evidently pleased with the verb he has chosen, “I will consider your music the better; if it do not, it is a vice in her ears, which horsehairs and calves’ guts, nor the voice of unpaved eunuch to boot, can never amend” (2.3.29–32). Truly, Imogen’s plight is an unenviable one. As she puts it, “A father cruel and a stepdame false, / A foolish suitor to a wedded lady / That hath her husband banished” (1.6.1–3). Cloten’s fatuous repulsiveness might be no more than a dismal annoyance to Imogen, were it not for Cloten’s close relationship to his mother. He is a fool, an “ass,” but a menacing one because his mother is evil. As one of the lords puts it in a soliloquy bearing all the marks of a choric statement: That such a crafty devil as is his mother Should yield the world this ass! A woman that Bears all down with her brain, and this her son Cannot take two from twenty, for his heart, And leave eighteen. Alas, poor Princess, Thou divine Imogen, what thou endur’st, Betwixt a father by thy stepdame governed, A mother hourly coining plots, a wooer More hateful than the foul expulsion is Of thy dear husband, than that horrid act Of the divorce he’d make! The heavens hold firm The walls of thy dear honor, keep unshaked That temple, thy fair mind, that thou mayst stand T’ enjoy thy banished lord and this great land! (2.1.52–65)

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The “horrid act / Of the divorce he’d make” refers to Cloten’s attempts to take Imogen away from Posthumus, whether by actual divorce or simply by force of possession. Importantly, this choric speech ends on a note of identifying Imogen’s marriage with the enjoying of “this great land”; the hope of wellmeaning objective observers is that Imogen may become queen in recognition of her right as the seemingly sole child of the King, with Posthumus as her consort. The King is adamantly opposed to this idea; it is a compelling reason for his anger at her marriage to Posthumus, not simply that she has married below her station, but that she has left Britain, in Cymbeline’s view, with an unacceptable choice for royal rule. Cymbeline is quite explicit about this in his denunciation of Imogen’s choice: “Thou took’st a beggar, wouldst have made my throne / A seat for baseness” (1.1.143–44), he tells her. In Cymbeline’s view, Imogen has thrown away a precious opportunity, in that she might “have had the sole son of my queen!” (1.1.140). The King’s frustrated strategy now seems clear: lacking, as he supposes, a male heir, he has married a widow with a son of her own who could then inherit the throne by virtue of his marriage to the King’s sole daughter. This proposed strategy is similar to the dynastic strategies through marriage that we find throughout Virgil, Plutarch, and other writers of foundational history. And, as in those accounts, the choice in Cymbeline is one that represents a struggle between maternal power and male dominance, and also one that poses a native heritage against a foreign one. The ending of Cymbeline, as we shall see, offers an elaborate synthesis of these seemingly antagonistic opposites. The association of the Queen with cunning duplicity and the use of poisons helps accentuate the remarkably vivid contrast in Cymbeline between virtue and its baleful opposite. The Queen is, as Imogen readily perceives, a consummate practitioner of deception. With the unwilling assistance of Doctor Cornelius, the Queen has become an expert in poisons, especially those that “are the movers of a languishing death, / But, though slow, deadly” (1.5.9–10). She has long been a pupil of Cornelius in how to make perfumes, distill, and preserve, to such an extent that she has won the King’s confidence in the health-giving effects of her “confections” (lines 12–15). She has taken to performing experiments with her compounds on “such creatures as / We count not worth the hanging,” though none human, testing the “vigor” of her drugs and how to apply “Allayments” or antidotes to their action, in order to determine “Their several virtues and effects” (lines 19–23). She spurns Cornelius’s worry that such practices will harden her heart. Fortunately for the tragicomic plotting of the

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play, Cornelius suspects her intents and provides her with substances that “Will stupefy and dull the sense awhile” rather than the “Strange ling’ring poisons” that she thinks she now possesses; he will not trust “one of her malice with / A drug of such damned nature” (lines 33– 37). Her original intent is to leave the poison, in the guise of a potent cordial able to redeem the patient from death, with Pisanio, servant of Posthumus and go-between in his communications with Imogen, in the hopes that Pisanio will unwittingly give the poison to both husband and wife and perhaps take some himself (1.5.80–84). Ultimately the Queen is foiled in her baleful intent by Cornelius’s precautions, in such a way that the drug actually contributes by indirect means to the final reconciliations of the play: Imogen takes the drug, falls into a comatose sleep, is found lying upon the body of the seeming Posthumus (actually the headless Cloten), and thus is directed toward the final scene of reconciliation with her father, husband, and brothers. The Queen’s last poison plot is foiled simply because the onward rush of events overwhelms her evil intent. Poison is thus integral to the plot of the play; it is also symbolic of the demonic feminine quest for dominion that must do battle with the forces of reconciliation that ultimately prevail. Moreover, the duplicitous practicing of poison is associated explicitly with Italy and southern Europe, as it was in many a Renaissance play, including Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“The Mousetrap” or “The Murder of Gonzago” is written, Hamlet tells us, “in very choice Italian,” 3.2.260–61), Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and Women Beware Women, and Webster’s The White Devil. The operative phrase in Cymbeline is “That drug-damned Italy” (3.4.15).9 Imogen thus expresses her worry—a worry borne out in fact—that her husband, Posthumus, has been “outcraftied” during his visit to a country that is so noted for its trafficking in drugs and poisons. The figure most closely associated with Italy in Cymbeline is Iachimo. His name, “Giacomo” in modern spelling, is the most overtly Italian name in the play. The word “Italy” appears more often in Cymbeline than in any other Shakespearean play, and is associated on most occasions with Iachimo. He is referred to by the apparition of Posthumus’s father, Sicilius Leonatus, as “Slight thing of Italy” for his perfidy in tainting the “nobler heart and brain” of Posthumus “with needless jealousy.” “Slight” here means “worthless.” Iachimo is identified as the leader of a band of “gentlemen of Italy” who are on their way to England to fight in Caius Lucius’s army (4.2.341). Most of all, Italy is closely identified with the macho view of women that prompts Iachimo to provoke Posthumus into a disastrous wager on the virtues of their respective women by insisting, “You must not so far prefer her

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[your mistress] ’fore ours of Italy” (1.4.65–66). Imogen has feared Italy’s reputation for feminine allure: she has wanted to make Posthumus “swear / The shes of Italy should not betray / Mine interest and his honor” (1.3.28–30). Later, when she learns from Posthumus’s letter reluctantly delivered to her by Pisanio that Pisanio is under orders to kill her for her purported adultery, Imogen suspects that “Some jay of Italy, / Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him” (3.4.49–50). Some flashy whore, who owes her beauty entirely to cosmetics, is to blame. Actually, of course, it is Iachimo, but Imogen is right to suspect that a diseased male imagination about sexuality is at the heart of the problem. The word “Italian” also turns up more often in Cymbeline than in any other Shakespearean play, and is usually coupled with Iachimo’s name. Cloten is curious to go see “this Italian” who has turned up at the British court (2.1.38, 49). Pisanio wonders what “false Italian” has poisoned Posthumus’s mind against his virtuous wife (3.2.4–5). In the final scene, Iachimo confesses how “mine Italian brain / ’Gan in your duller Britain operate / Most vilely” (5.5.198–200), prompting Posthumus to cry out against him, “Italian fiend!” Italy, then, is set in polar opposition to Britain at her best in the person of Imogen. The scene of Iachimo’s nighttime intrusion into her bedchamber is reminiscent of the rape of Lucrece, especially when Iachimo removes her bracelet and gazes upon “her left breast” with its “mole cinque-spotted”—a reminiscence made explicit by Iachimo himself as he notes how “Our Tarquin thus / Did softly press the rushes ere he wakened / The chastity he wounded” (2.2.12–14). Rape does not physically occur, but Iachimo’s insult upon Imogen’s honor is nonetheless profound. The phrase “Our Tarquin” associates this outrage not only with Italy but also with the infamous moment in the early history of Rome when the tyrant Tarquins were expelled.10 The tale of Tereus and Philomel, which Imogen has been reading as she fell asleep, is of course from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and from classical legend: Philomela and Procne were daughters of Pandion, legendary king of Athens, while Procne was married to Tereus, king of Thrace. Imogen’s lady in attendance is named Helen, perhaps another classical reminiscence. Iachimo is also explicitly from Rome, not just Italy: he is introduced to Imogen as “a noble gentleman of Rome” (1.6.10; see also 5.5.113), and evidently he is the brother of the duke of Siena (4.2.344), so that he is a person of considerable rank. Posthumus meets Iachimo in Rome, at the residence of Philario (1.1.98), so that the temptation takes place there. For the most part, though, the name of Rome is associated with the general of the Roman forces in Britain, Caius Lu-

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cius, and with Posthumus when he is disguised as a Roman soldier. Cymbeline ranks ahead even of Julius Caesar in its deployment of the word “Roman.” Caius Lucius is characteristically referred to as “this Roman” (2.3.65), “Lucius the Roman” (3.4.143), “the Roman” (3.5.31). At times, one cannot tell whether the phrase refers to Caius Lucius alone or to his army, as when Posthumus reports during the climactic battle that “Great the slaughter is / Here made by th’ Roman” (5.3.78–79); Caius Lucius is his army, and they are he. “Rome” and “Roman” thus stand apart from “Italy” and “Italian.” Italy is associated with duplicity, poison, jealousy, and sexual depredation; Rome at its best embodies the virtues found in Caius Lucius. He is, like the young Marcus Antonius whom Plutarch so greatly admires, a brave soldier, a charismatic military leader, a devotee of honor and a practitioner of duty. Even his British enemies regard Caius Lucius as incorruptible and an impressive opponent. As the representative of Augustus Caesar, he recalls to Cymbeline how Julius Caesar, “whose remembrance yet / Lives in men’s eyes, and will to ears and tongues / Be theme and hearing ever,” conquered Britain in the time of Cymbeline’s uncle, Cassibelan, and won from Cassibelan the assurance of a tribute to be paid by him “And his succession” to Rome in the yearly amount of three thousand pounds (3.1.1–9). That tribute has now been allowed to lapse. Cloten and his mother defiantly and insolently declare that the payment of tribute is at an end. Their justification for breaching the treaty is that Britain is now stronger than it was and thus able to resist; even Julius Caesar suffered grievous reversals off the British coast, and Britain’s “saltwater girdle” remains intact. Cymbeline provides a more principled answer when he reminds Caius Lucius that “Till the injurious Romans did extort / This tribute from us, we were free” (lines 47–48) and that the British people reckon themselves to be “a warlike people” ready to “shake off” the “yoke upon ’s” (lines 51–52). Yet even the King resorts ultimately to arguments of force and expediency by noting that “the Pannonians and Dalmatians for / Their liberties are now in arms” (lines 73–74), offering both a precedent for Britain to rebel and a geopolitical calculation that the Romans now face rebellion on several fronts and will be less able than before to meet the British challenge (3.1.10–80). Caius Lucius conducts his part of these negotiations with dignity and restraint. He refuses to be drawn into a shouting match, and is so commanding a presence that he is offered a hearty if temporary welcome during the negotiations; even Cloten bids Caius Lucius to “Make pastime with us a day or two, or longer” (lines 77–78). After all, as Cymbeline concedes in welcoming his honored guest, “Thy Caesar knighted me; my youth I spent / Much un-

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der him” (lines 69–70). “Thy Caesar” is no less than the mighty Augustus Caesar. Cymbeline and Caius Lucius appear to be the best of enemies. Rome thus offers a model to Britain of her own foundational story, one that is far more attractive than the brash allurements of “drugdamned Italy.” Rome responds to the emergency in Britain, exacerbated by the rebellions of the Pannonians and Dalmatians, by appealing to “The gentry” of Rome (3.7.7) to volunteer their assistance; this is the circumstance under which Iachimo comes to lead a force of gentlemen to Britain, with Posthumus in their wake. This is a responsibility from which the Roman gentry do not flinch; as a tribune puts it, “We will discharge our duty” (line 16). Cymbeline receives a report that “The Roman legions, all from Gallia drawn, / Are landed on your coast with a supply / Of Roman gentlemen by the Senate sent” (4.3.24–26). When Caius Lucius and his forces undergo reversals in the fighting, leading to the capture of Caius Lucius himself, he faces the apparent certainty that he will be executed with Roman stoical calm: “Sufficeth / A Roman with a Roman’s heart can suffer” (5.5.81–82). He asks nothing for himself, but only that the person he takes to be his boy, a Briton born (i.e., Imogen in male disguise), be ransomed. Caius Lucius knows that his soothsayer has predicted, from signs of divination, “Success to th’ Roman host” (4.2.351–55), but he does not repine at his loss; he accepts his destiny because “the gods / Will have it thus” (5.5.79–80). Caius Lucius is a noble Roman, whose sterling virtues are needed to counter the wild intemperance of Cloten and the Queen. These contrasts will be incorporated in the play’s resolution. Before we get to that resolution, though, we need to consider the saga of Cymbeline’s lost two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus. They are reported to have been stolen from their nursery at court some twenty years ago, one at the age of three, the other still in swaddling clothes. The circumstances are a matter of wonderment, “worth your hearing,” as one gentleman tells another in the expository first scene (1.1.57–66). It is indeed a “strange” story, even inexplicable, so much so that we as audience are immediately attuned in a tragicomic play to expect that the two “lost” sons will turn up by the end of the play. Thereafter they disappear from view until Imogen, in male disguise and hoping to meet her husband at Milford-Haven in Cambria, or Wales (where she has been directed to go by her jealous husband’s letter in order that the loyal servant Pisanio might have opportunity to kill her), comes across the mountainous cave where the two boys dwell with old Belarius. Once beloved of Cymbeline as a brave and loyal soldier in battle against the Romans, this man was banished two

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decades ago by Cymbeline because of the false oaths of two “villains” at court who accused him of confederacy with the Romans (3.3.58– 69). He abducted the two boys to go along with him and their nurse Euriphile (who became Belarius’s wife and then subsequently died), doing so partly out of revenge (namely, to deny Cymbeline succession even as Cymbeline has bereft Belarius of his lands [lines 101–3]), partly too no doubt out of desire to have sons of his own, and partly to save them from “the art o’ th’ court, / As hard to leave as keep, whose top to climb / Is certain falling, or so slipp’ry that / The fear’s as bad as falling” (3.3.46–49). The young men clearly have benefited from being raised in a world where they have become “subtle as the fox for prey, / Like warlike as the wolf for what we eat” (lines 40–41). They are strong, superb at hunting, and uncorrupted. When Guiderius fearlessly slays Cloten, answering that man’s insolent challenge of Guiderius as a “robber, / A lawbreaker, a villain,” a “thief,” a “traitor,” a rustic “mountaineer” (4.2.75–122), the contrast of country versus court could not be more instructive. Guiderius and his brother are indeed “runagates” and “outlaws” (lines 63–68), as Belarius knows only too well, and as a result Guiderius especially must face the prospect of severe penalty for having killed the King’s stepson as one last complication before the final resolution of their story, but these lads are fearlessly honest. They represent the natural world of primitive Britain at its best. At the same time, these are princes of the royal blood, and blood will tell. They chafe openly at their “cell of ignorance,” their “pinching cave,” where they “discourse / The freezing hours away” (3.3.33– 39). Their life is “beastly” to them in the sense of giving them animal strength and cunning but at the expense of what they imagine the court can offer. They respond to Belarius’s tales of court life and “the tricks in war,” and to his insistence that “this life / Is nobler than attending for a check, / Richer than doing nothing for a bauble, / Prouder than rustling in unpaid-for silk” (3.3.15, 21–24), by yearning to be allowed to try a life of courtly fame and honor for themselves. “How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature!” Belarius asks in wonderment. These boys know little they are sons to th’ King, Nor Cymbeline dreams that they are alive. They think they are mine; and though trained up thus meanly I’th’ cave wherein they bow, their thoughts do hit The roofs of palaces, and nature prompts them In simple and low things to prince it much Beyond the trick of others. (3.3.80–86)

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Even the slaying of Cloten by Guiderius, frightening as it is from a legal standpoint, impresses Belarius as one more irrefutable proof of the lads’ innately royal nature: O thou goddess, Thou divine Nature, how thyself thou blazon’st In these two princely boys! They are as gentle As zephyrs blowing below the violet, Not wagging his sweet head; and yet as rough, Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud’st wind That by the top doth take the mountain pine And make him stoop to th’ vale. ’Tis wonder That an invisible instinct should frame them To royalty unlearned, honor untaught, Civility not seen from other, valor That wildly grows in them but yields a crop As if it had been sowed. (4.2.171–83)

What this all suggests for a foundational myth is that the King’s two sons are ideally equipped to provide a new generation of royal leadership in Britain, one that is invigorated by having been nurtured in the natural surroundings of mountainous, borderland Britain—in Cambria, a name embedded twice in the text (3.2.43 and 5.5.17; the name “Wales” appears once, at 3.2.60) as a reminder that their youth takes its strength from Celtic Britain, far away from the court. Guiderius is the Prince of Wales in the truest, most native, sense. No life at court has sapped their extraordinary energies. Yet the resolution of the play will eventually bring them to the center of power. As with Romulus and Remus, a sylvan and rural upbringing gives to Guiderius and Arviragus the vigor and hardiness of the natural world, along with a canniness and deep suspicion of courtly mores that will presumably enable them to rule far more wisely and successfully than their too-easily-misled father. Imogen’s role becomes crucial in the resolution of dynastic conflict. For much of the play, she is, like Lavinia in the Aeneid, the object of rival claims that are schematically opposite to one another. Cloten is to an extent like Turnus in being a native claimant; Posthumus, like Aeneas, represents the opportunity to provide an infusion of new blood and leadership. We have seen that well-wishing observers do indeed hope that Posthumus will prevail as by far the better choice. Yet Posthumus does not become the once and future king, and Imogen does not become his queen. Her role, in Shakespeare’s anglicized and romanticized version of this foundational story, is to

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step aside in favor of her brothers, especially Guiderius as the older, once they are identified as such in the play’s final scene. By the familiar mechanisms of romantic plotting, including those hoary devices of “a most curious mantle, wrought by th’ hand / Of his queen mother” in which the baby Guiderius was “lapped,” and “a mole, a sanguine star” on Guiderius’s neck, the royal family line is shown to be intact. Guiderius’s having slain Cloten is one last difficulty, prompting the King to make one last attempt to undo his own happiness by condemning Guiderius (still known as Polydore) to death for having killed a prince, but that difficulty is soon gotten over once Belarius proves to the courtly assembly that Polydore is in fact Guiderius and thus crown prince of Britain. Imogen is thus like earlier Shakespearean heroines, such as Rosalind and Viola, in patiently seeking very little power for herself; she is content to be the enabler of the fortunes of her husband and her brothers. Her role is that of marriageable women in a dynastic conflict. In keeping with the healing impulses of romantic tragicomedy, she makes possible a solution that is harmonious. Posthumus too is integral to the resolution of the play’s dynastic conflicts.11 He too steps aside, if one can even ascribe any such action to him, since he never entertains a desire for the political authority that some charitable observers wish he could have. He and Imogen care only about their marriage. Both are anxious not to offend the King’s wishes, however misguided he may be, and once again the happy ending offers them a means to do just that. Imogen’s marriage does not, as Cymbeline had feared, make his throne “A seat for baseness” (1.1.143–44). Instead of aspiring to be king under circumstances that would inevitably be divisive, Posthumus Leonatus becomes, at the play’s end, an apt emblem of the uneasy but productive coexistence that must unite Britain and Rome henceforth. Posthumus is both British and Roman. His name and surname are both Latinate. He visits Rome, and there becomes infected with the irrational sexual jealousy that brings him to the verge of destroying his own happiness. His dual national identity takes the theatrical form of repeated changes of costume and the adoption of disguise. He comes to Britain at the beginning of act 5 dressed as an Italian, having volunteered to join those Romans who have answered the call of Rome for more fighters on the British front. No sooner has he arrived, however, than he bitterly repents his decision to be “brought hither / Among th’Italian gentry, and to fight / Against my lady’s kingdom” (5.1.17–19). He has great reason to be sorry for what he has done in ordering the death of Imogen; even were she guilty of the adultery he has suspected, the

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penalty he thinks he has exacted is heinously extreme. “You married ones,” he apostrophizes, “If each of you should take this course, how many / Must murder wives much better than themselves / For wrying but a little!” (5.1.2–5). Contrite, close perhaps to despair, Posthumus resolves to end the charade of his adopted Italian identity: ’Tis enough That, Britain, I have killed thy mistress; peace, I’ll give no wound to thee. Therefore, good heavens, Hear patiently my purpose: I’ll disrobe me Of these Italian weeds and suit myself As does a Briton peasant; so I’ll fight Against the part I come with; so I’ll die For thee, O Imogen, even for whom my life Is every breath a death; and thus, unknown, Pitied nor hated, to the face of peril Myself I’ll dedicate. (5.1.19–29)

Posthumus thus longs for oblivion and death in battle that will be an inadequate but deeply felt expiatory gesture of sorrowful self-accusation, since, in his own view, he has been a murderer of his wife and a traitor toward the country of which she is princess. Posthumus’s change of costume thus betokens a crucial shift from an adoptive and false Italian identity to a true and honest British one. The shift is also from showy arrogance to plain humility. Posthumus wishes to do away with pretense and bluster in favor of innate virtue. “Let me make men know / More valor in me than my habits show,” he insists. “I will begin / The fashion: less without and more within” (5.1.29–33). This contrast is immediately demonstrated in the stage direction that opens scene 2: “Enter Lucius, Iachimo, and the Roman army at one door, and the Briton army at another, Leonatus Posthumus following like a poor soldier.” The contrast is especially vivid between Iachimo, here seen at the height of his reputation as a leading officer in the Roman army, and Posthumus as not simply a Briton but an anonymous peasant. He has resumed his British identity in one sense, but is still in disguise. It is as a British peasant that Posthumus first vanquishes and disarms Iachimo, and then seconds Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus in rescuing Cymbeline in the midst of the battle. Posthumus relates how Belarius and the two young men, absurdly out of costume for a battle and “more like to run / The country base than to commit such slaughter” (5.3.19–20), have made a stand against the Roman army in a narrow lane and have inspired their British countrymen to resist the Romans instead of fleeing in panic. Posthumus

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thus has joined the three irregular Britons in becoming a heroic architect of the British victory. Yet he then doffs his British garb and identifies himself to a British captain as “A Roman” (5.3.89) in order that he can be imprisoned and executed by the victorious British army, thus dying the expiatory death he thinks he deserves. The providential intervention of the god Jupiter, to whom Posthumus’s family all appeal, means of course that all will eventually be well, and that the strange prophecy about a “lion’s whelp,” a “piece of tender air,” and a “stately cedar” (5.4.138–40, 5.5.439–56) will at last be fulfilled. The Italian journey of Posthumus’s nightmare yields to his recovered British identity. Yet the Italian experience is integrally a part of him, and yields a meaningful perspective on the way in which the play’s ending is both Italian, or Roman, and British. The part of the Italian experience that prevails finally in cooperation with a reunited and reconstituted Britain is identifiably Roman. The Italian aspect, associated throughout with the poison-wielding queen and Iachimo’s macho cunning, is resoundingly defeated on the one hand by the Queen’s suicide and on the other by Iachimo’s confession of guilt. Burdened by a “heavy conscience” (5.5.417), he kneels and asks that he be executed for his crimes. From this he is saved by the charitable intervention of the man he has most grievously wronged; as Posthumus says to him, “The power that I have on you is to spare you” (line 422). King Cymbeline, inspired by this generosity of spirit, declares that “Pardon’s the word to all” (line 426). Pardon extends itself even to Caius Lucius and to the Roman Empire, to which Britain will henceforth pay “our wonted tribute” (line 466). The resistance to paying tribute in this play has been exclusively the program of Cloten and his mother the Queen, and then, briefly, of Cymbeline when he is under their spell. However much those sentiments appeal to British patriotism, they seem misplaced in the present circumstances. Cymbeline submits to Caesar as to one who is an enlightened emperor, ably represented in the person of his general and chief ambassador, Caius Lucius. Cymbeline’s action is surprisingly generous, in that the British have won the battle they sought to win in the name of British freedom, but it is also ennobled by being generous. The action shows the error of the mean-spiritedness of the Queen, whom Cymbeline now fully perceives to be “wicked” in dissuading him from continuing his arrangement with Rome. The “heavens in justice both on her and hers / Have laid most heavy hand,” he concludes (lines 467–69). This is not to say that British patriotism is dead or of no value; it is instead to suggest that patriotism needs to take all circumstances into account and help a country to ar-

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rive at a sane balancing point between xenophobia and the realities of power.12 The harmonizing theme in the play’s last moments is one of union. The Soothsayer’s prophecy, which earlier had promised to Caius Lucius “Success to th’ Roman host” (4.2.355), now has come true in a way that no one could have foretold, given the British victory in the battle, but is now clearly at hand through accommodation. The Roman eagle described by the Soothsayer, winging its way from “the spongy south to this part of the west” (4.2.352), and then vanishing in the beams of the sun, can now be seen to signify that our princely eagle, Th’imperial Caesar, should again unite His favor with the radiant Cymbeline, Which shines here in the west. (5.5.477–80)

Cymbeline is still the sun in this image; the vanishing eagle is Octavius Caesar, retiring gracefully from the scene once order has been reestablished. Tragicomedy works its wonders. The major characters, aware at last that “Some falls are means the happier to arise” (4.2.406) and that “Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered” (4.3.46), perceive that the seeming accidents of human misfortune in this play are ultimately directed at fulfilling the benign will of the heavens.13 The foundational myth of Cymbeline, then, is of a Britain proudly acknowledging its roots in Roman culture and tradition while still insisting on its quality of being uniquely British. And of course, since this is all about ancient history, the fable leaves open the question of how rulers in times yet to come may well build on Britain’s Roman heritage in such a way as to be able to declare independence from the Rome of a corrupted Catholic Church while still sustaining the true and ancient Christian faith. This implicit promise of a peacefully triumphant future is one that King James, studious in ancient learning and intent on becoming Europe’s peaceful matchmaker, might well be able to fashion to his own liking.14

NOTES 1. See Robert S. Miola, “Cymbeline: Beyond Rome,” in Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 206–35. 2. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

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3. Quotations are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 6th ed. (New York: Longman, 2009). 4. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, translated from the French by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Stürmer, and Rodney Needham, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1969). 5. See Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997). 6. See Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992). 7. I am much indebted for some of this material to my colleague at the University of Chicago, Bruce Lincoln, a superb sociologist and historian of religion in the Divinity School. See, for example, his Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 8. The Aeneid of Virgil: A Verse Translation, by Rolfe Humphries (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 7.178. 9. See Thomas G. Olsen, “Iachimo’s ‘drug-damn’d Italy’ and the Problem of National Character in Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Yearbook 10 (1999): 269–96. 10. See Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 11. See Meredith Skura, “Interpreting Posthumus’ Dream from Above and Below: Families, Psychoanalysis, and Literary Critics,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 203–16. 12. See J. Philip Brockbank, “History and Histrionics in Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Survey 11 (1958): 42–49; Michael J. Redmond, “Rome, Italy, and the (Re)Construction of British National Identity,” Shakespeare Yearbook 10 (1999): 297–316; and Patricia Parker, “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline,” in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. Gordon Teskey and George M. Logan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 189–207. 13. See David Scott Kastan, “Cymbeline: ‘A Strain of Rareness,’ ” in Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, by David Scott Kastan (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), 145–61; and Robert Grams Hunter, “Cymbeline,” Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). 14. See Emrys Jones, “Stuart Cymbeline,” Essays in Criticism 11 (1961): 84–99; Ros King, “Cymbeline”: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005); and Leah Marcus, “Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality,” in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 134–68.

Shakespeare and Velázquez Hugh Macrae Richmond

IN SHAKESPEARE’S TIME THE BOUNDARIES OF ENGLISH AND SPANISH IDENtities seem almost mutually impermeable, as defined by the adversarial behavior of English privateers like Drake and by military campaigns such as those of Essex, leading to Spanish responses such as the Armada. However, culturally these countries had much in common, as seen in their open-air theaters at Almagro and Southwark: Lope de Vega not only shared with William Shakespeare similarly structured theatrical venues and such plots as Romeo and Juliet, but he fully defined Shakespearean tragicomedy in his El arte nuevo di hacer comedias in esto tiempo.1 The affinities of Shakespeare and Velázquez display the possibility of yet a further crossing of conventional boundaries beyond nationality, between the arts,2 resulting from a shared social ambition among prominent Renaissance artists, confirmed by the royal focus of their art and careers. Both artists aspired to genteel status, far beyond that of mere craftsmen, as illustrated in John Shakespeare’s successful reapplication for a coat of arms in 1596, surely fostered by his son William’s access in London to the College of Heralds. In 1604, under King James I, Shakespeare, now himself termed a “Gentleman,” became a Groom of the King’s Bedchamber, with access to the Great Wardrobe in recognition of the King’s Men’s services to the court. In 1636, as a result of his role as a court painter, Velázquez was given the analogous position of Assistant to the Royal Wardrobe, and later progressed to Supreme Court Marshall and even admission to the knightly Order of Santiago. These socially ambitious artists illustrate the initiation of a new aristocracy of the talents confirmed by the court rank of the dramatist and theater manager Sir William Davenant, Shakespeare’s godson. More artistically significant than these social aspirations may be the relative freedom both men shared from sophisticated academic conditioning. This lack of scholarly constraints hardly needs demonstration in Shakespeare’s case, as a notorious nongraduate of Oxbridge (reflected in Robert Greene’s diatribes against nongraduates to his fellow University Wits), and with his disregard of many concessions 241

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to the neoclassical aesthetic favored by his protégé Ben Jonson. Precisely the same freedom from constricting artistic convention has also been noted in Velázquez, who “benefited from another, if perverse, advantage—the possibility of working outside the classical tradition”3 as a result of his initial distance from the great centers of artistic tradition in Italy. The indifference of Velázquez to academic theory may have resulted from the relative provinciality of his environment, for “the art of painting in Spain remained in what might be called the pre-humanist phase.”4 Harry Eyres observes that “Velázquez, from the beginning, turned his back on the conventional idea of beauty. He painted very few religious pictures and treated mythological pictures with a relentlessly de-mythologizing, at times frankly embarrassingly down-to-earth way, as in his notorious painting of Vulcan’s discovery of his wife Venus’ adultery with Mars.”5 The same reductive tendencies appear in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, in which a Rubenesque Venus becomes the obsessional lover of a supercilious Adonis. The guiding principle in such treatments reflects Velázquez’s rejection of idealism—whether that of religion, mythology, or secular ideology. In Eyres’s view, he saw such aspiration to Platonic perfection as (in Ortega y Gasset’s words), “a lack of respect towards things. . . . To be an idealist is to deform reality in accordance with our desire.”6 Brown feels that Velázquez “had come to understand that paintings executed by following the classical rules produced a view different from what the eye sees.”7 One of the results of this rejection of absolutes is a casualness about the high finish characteristic of much classic art. Many of Velázquez’s paintings seem impressionistic, and their texture reveals the character of the underlying surface material because of the thinness of his paint: “Thinner, or leaner, pigments permit Velázquez to move his brush more freely over the surface, thus producing sketchy effects and capturing the fugitive movement of light. They also permit the weave of the canvas to be seen, which softens the colors and shadows.”8 This almost improvisational quality helps to explain the enthusiasm for his work of such impressionists as Edouard Manet, who considered the picture of a comedian, Il buffone Cristóbal de Casteñeda, to be “the greatest painting he had ever seen” and one that illustrated “the essence of existential drama, man alone on a bare stage.”9 The suspicion of absolutes in thought and of labored artistic practice is notoriously characteristic of Shakespeare, as compared to Ben Jonson, who censured his mentor in a famous passage in Timber: “I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer

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hath been, ‘would he had blotted a thousand’ ”10—meaning, “he should have taken more pains to correct and polish his work,” as the neoclassicist Jonson required of himself. Eyres argues from this trait that there is a deeper identity between these two great artists: “More profoundly, these men share an essential dramatic vision of the human being as actor, and that rare quality of certain great artists—the ability to absent themselves from the scene of their creation, what the contemporary painter Antonio Lopez Garcia has called ‘the absolutely available mind, the totally clear gaze.’ ”11 There are exceptions to this generalization in both cases, as seen in the self-portrait of Velázquez in Las meniñas, and in the Poet’s role which introduces the impression of an autobiographical element in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, seemingly written in propria persona (see Sonnet 136), not to mention several somewhat personalized choruses, prologues, and epilogues. However, both Shakespeare and Velázquez regularly present characters without personal commentary, allowing them to speak for themselves; neither attempts or pretends to “pluck out the heart of [their] mystery” (Hamlet, 3.2.365).12 And neither draws a constrictingly overt “moral” from his art in the spirit of Ben Jonson’s more didactic works. Velázquez’s portraits of royalty were not flattering but scrupulously accurate, as his subjects often ruefully acknowledged, while his attention to the humblest members of the court, the clowns and dwarfs, was equally perceptive, as Eyres confirms: “It was in his paintings of the dwarfs and fools that Velázquez revealed the ethical as well as aesthetic greatness of his art of portraiture. Everyone is equal before the brush of Velázquez. The dwarf El Primo—an intellectual or poète maudit before his time, a sensibility and intelligence of refinement imprisoned in the body of a twisted child—is in no way less human than the splendid monarch or the exquisite Infanta.”13 One thinks immediately of the profound insights of Shakespeare’s Fool in King Lear, a role in which the unimposing Robert Armin holds his own with the great tragic actor Richard Burbage as King Lear. And certainly Shakespeare does not hesitate to display the defects of historical English monarchs such as Henry VI or Richard II (the latter having a contemporary relevance that Queen Elizabeth I found provocative during the Essex conspiracy against her, when it was used to exploit a precedent for deposition). His satirical presentation of the contemporary King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost was also risky, as shown by such revisions of the original text found in the first quarto as the renaming as “Ferdinand” of the monarch who later became King Henri IV of France.14 Chapman’s more overt mistreatment of the same historical characters in his Biron plays suffered ruinous censorship.

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Another way in which Velázquez achieved artistic detachment from his subjects lay in his systematic signposting of the artifice of the medium in which he was working. Sometimes this recognition is as explicit as the visible introduction of his own act of painting into Las meniñas, but more typically, the fact of self-conscious mimesis is established by explicit examples of the distinction between image and reality, such as the paintings on the wall of the room in which Las meniñas is set. He makes similar use of mirrors whose images are distinguished from the unseen reality they reflect, such as the reflection of the king and queen detectable on that painting’s rear wall (and confirmed in the attention devoted to these external figures implicitly presiding in front of the pictured social group). Similar mirrors appear in Venere allo specchio, and less obviously in Tre musici. There is some doubt in the Interno di cucina (con Cristo in casa di Marta e Maria) whether the scene with Christ in the top right-hand corner is a mirror or, more probably, a glimpse through a serving hatch, but whichever it may be, the “quadro nel quadro”15 offers a commentary on the foreground. Velázquez’s inset of Christ’s exposition to women in the background of this kitchen painting causes us to identify the cause and nature of the laboring woman’s expression of resentment in the painting’s foreground, when we understand the New Testament allusion to Mary’s attentiveness to Jesus and to Martha’s distracted industry (Luke 38–42). Indeed, the implication carries over to the famous painting in the Scottish National Gallery in which the consoling old woman in the kitchen painting’s foreground reappears in another one while frying an egg, implying her stoic commitment to Martha’s ethos. This parallelism of artificial and “real” images is a feature of several other paintings. These include the inset of the naval battle in the Don Juan portrait, which alludes to the Battle of Lepanto, and thus provides an ironic background to the clown who now bears the name of Don Juan of Austria, who led the Christian fleet that conquered the Turks. The inset reminds the spectator that this caricatured admiral once led the Christian fleet to a famous victory over the Turks, but now his epic character has been reduced to grotesquerie. These pictures within pictures are the painterly equivalent of characteristic Shakespeare insets of “plays within plays” such as Hamlet’s own “The Mousetrap” (or “The Murder of Gonzago”) in Hamlet, the “Pageant of the Worthies” of Love’s Labour’s Lost, “The Masque of Ceres” in The Tempest, or the interlude of “Pyramus and Thisbe” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. An even more absolute awareness of the artifice of the play’s main action is achieved by the frame established round the Petruchio-Katherina courtship through the Sly prelude to

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The Taming of the Shrew. The play within the play is used by Shakespeare not only to confirm the artificiality of the main performance itself, but also to offer an abstraction of the issues and implications of the main plotline. Similarly, the clownish absurdities of Bottom as he interprets the archetypal classical lover Pyramus may encourage us to apply his interlude’s implications to evaluation of the erratic behavior of the young lovers earlier. Because of such complex perspectives or contexts, it is never safe to assume the adequacy of a surface reading of either Shakespeare or Velázquez, whether in realistic or mythological subjects. Like Shakespeare, Velázquez was deeply attracted to the more picturesque (not to say provocative) aspects of classical culture, rather than to the sublimities more often favored in the Renaissance neoclassical vein. Both artists were thus understandably devoted to Ovid as a source for vivid and significant characters and situations. Shakespeare’s delight in Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is reflected throughout plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the death of Velázquez, the list of the contents of his library included two copies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The significance of this documentation appears strongly in the painting now usually called Las hilanderas. Ostensibly, the painting might be constricted to a realistic genre study of a craft shop, but when this Ovidian context is added to the appreciation of the painting, its structure and meaning can be enriched. For the painting’s actual subject may not be the seemingly realistic genre study of the weaving workshop that dominates the foreground, but the Ovidian theme of the background scene. The more traditional and relevant title in earlier records suggests to modern scholars that the painting’s topic might be truly Ovidian: La favola di Arachne.16 Ovid’s story of the ambition of the weaver Arachne to rival the gods complicates any appreciation of the significance of the foreground by stressing the significance of the painting’s other details. In Las hilanderas, the seemingly staged confrontation of Minerva and Arachne in the rear has led commentators to believe that the old woman at the spinning wheel is intended to be Athena in her first manifestation when, in the disguise of a crone, she counsels Arachne against pride at surpassing the gods, as described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (6.5–145).17 For in Ovid, Minerva hears of Arachne’s boast of surpassing her skills as the divine patron of the art of weaving, and Minerva meets this challenge by staging a competition. In this the goddess appears disguised as an old woman, analogous to the old woman in the left foreground of the painting, to which role the goddess might have descended via the seemingly allegorical ladder

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placed directly behind the head of the old woman. This divine identity may be confirmed by the performance of the crone’s spinning wheel, which is rotating with such speed that its spokes have blurred into invisibility. Critics have also noted the accidental display of a shapely leg from beneath the goddess’s disguise. The youthful woman on the right, with her bold gesture with the yarn, would therefore be Arachne. Whatever these allusions may suggest, the complexity of the painting is enriched by the events stressed by its rear perspective’s focus on a possible more explicit confrontation. This scene suggests the now revealed and helmeted goddess is confronting the still assertive Arachne, who wears the same costume as the woman in the foreground, now carrying a red swathe. The Ovidian allusions are strengthened by the tapestry behind this confrontation, which duplicates Titian’s study of another Ovidian story: Jove’s rape of Europa. The rest of the audience in the background scene has been realistically explained as three admiring young women who are Lydian supporters of Arachne in Ovid, but they might be interpreted as Muses concerned with artistic matters, as hinted by the unexpected musical instrument included in the scene, whose lack of use may allegorize the loss of celestial harmony that is illustrated. Behind these complexities lies a further level of possible personal allusion: the implication that Arachne’s ambition matches Velázquez’s own ambition to rival the highest of ranks on the basis of his professional skill. Originally Arachne had chosen as her subjects for her weaving several other Ovidian episodes of mortals transcending the achievements of the gods. The whole issue of the status of the artist is latent in the painting’s thematic spread from the labors of the artisans to a heavenly ideal of artistic perfection. It is notable that there is no hint of the final ungracious punishment leveled at Arachne by the resentful goddess in reducing her rival to the condition of a spider. The Shakespearean play that comparably reflects the influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for which Las hilanderas provides a structural analogue, as confirmed by its susceptibility to the same interpretative methods. The climax of the play involves a similar foregrounding of artisans’ artistic ambitions, in Bottom—another weaver—and his craftsmen associates. They plan to stage one of Ovid’s most admired stories in the Metamorphoses (4.55–166), the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe. Bottom aspires to the highest of roles, as tyrant or lover, and consequently also suffers, temporarily at least, the humiliation of a bestial translation analogous to that of the fabled Arachne, albeit at the hand of the more modern spirit of mischief, Puck. The ambitious Arachne encounters the god-

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dess Minerva, while the aspiring actor Bottom (as an ass) becomes the paramour of the Queen of the Fairies. Her name, Titania, derives from the Titans in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (6.185, 346), who also once challenged the Gods. Moreover, with his troupe, Bottom also proves successful in dominating figures of higher rank at the ducal wedding celebrations. Shakespeare deftly makes the workmen’s interlude comment sardonically on the amatory vagaries of the newly married couples, so that the workmen’s artistic ambitions provide the unifying climax of the play’s skeptical view of upper-class society. Shakespeare’s play also has several other detailed allusions to Ovid’s poem, such as Helena’s reference to his story of Daphne and Apollo (2.1.231). Both works also overtly reflect on the conventions of art, which the workmen in Dream explore quite creatively during their rehearsal preparations (act 1, scene 2, and act 3, scene 1) and during Bottom’s exposition to Theseus of their interlude’s procedures (5.1.184–87). In both works there is a comparable ricochet of meanings and analogies between the various characters, social groups, and levels of reality, including the artists themselves. In her earliest manifestation, Minerva first warns Arachne against the hubris apparently shared by most weavers throughout the ages. Zevedei Barbu18 has alerted us to this tendency in his study of their craft, including as it does such aggressive figures as the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales19 as well as Shakespeare’s Bottom. Moreover, modern scholarship has confirmed Ovid’s relevance to this painting of Velázquez by discoveries about the exact historical configurations of space and decoration in the Spanish royal palace at that time. In Las meniñas the paintings hung on the chamber wall by Velázquez are also allusions to the Metamorphoses: specifically, copies of Rubens’s version of the same Arachne story, and also of his study of the musical contest between Marsyas, the flute player, and Apollo.20 These parallel allusions demonstrate that the two greatest paintings of Velázquez are subtly allusive to the issue of mortal artists’ aspirations to a higher status. Both paintings involve a complex interaction of social levels, initially implicit but ultimately compelling. Much the same ambition appears in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in which the poet’s art seems competitively measured against the status of the young aristocratic friend of the speaker. Perhaps this assertiveness of Shakespeare reaches its height in Sonnet 55, when the poet outbids other artists as the preserver of human excellence: Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powr’ful rhyme;

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But you shall live more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time. (lines 1–4)

The interaction of artistic and historical images is also a feature of several other paintings by Velázquez. These include a painting in the Prado of a comic villain called Il buffone don Juan de Austria, which commemorates one of the clowns in the seventeenth-century Spanish court who mockingly usurped the role of his sixteenth-century namesake, the obsessive and militant Don Juan of Austria. This painting’s sardonic reevocation of the victor over the Turks at Lepanto (1571) surprisingly parallels the character of the notorious Bastard Don John who figures in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Behind both grotesque figures seems to lie the original, historical Don Juan, who was indeed the bastard son of the emperor Charles V, and thus the resentful half brother of King Philip II of Spain, husband of Queen Mary Tudor.21 Don Juan sought compensatory military glory for his humiliating illegitimacy, which he most conspicuously achieved in 1571 as the commander of the Christian fleet at Lepanto, which defeated Turkish designs to conquer Europe for Islam. Even then Don Juan’s heroic role was counterbalanced by his morbid sensitivity as an illegitimate half brother of Philip II without territorial pretensions. His compensatory ambitions to find a kingdom included the concept of an armada that would secure him the English throne “usurped” by Elizabeth I, following upon his forced marriage with the already captive Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I’s Catholic rival for the throne of England. It is not surprising that the English saw him as a grotesque monster, but it is quite unexpected to find the identical reversal of heroic interpretation current among the artists and performers of the Spanish court. Both artists present us with a caricature of Don John resited in a sophisticated social context in which his militaristic character seems alien and adversary. Warrior values are seen to be incompatible with courtly urbanity. Such calculated differentiations of levels of reality are an instinctive pattern in these two artists, whether in the recurrent Shakespearean insets of plays within plays or the equally frequent stress in Velázquez on paintings and mirror images within the frame of a broader subject. However, these effects are not simply decorative and incidental but thematic: they affect our understanding of the principal subject. Both literally and metaphorically, Velázquez displays the painterly equivalent of Hamlet’s concept of drama as holding a mirror up to nature (3.2.22). For example, the famous Venere allo specchio

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daringly presents us with the back of Venus and shows us only the reflection of her face in a mirror held by Cupid. At first one might assume that the theme is the narcissism of a beautiful woman, but we soon realize that if we can see the face of Venus in the mirror, then what she is looking at is not herself but a prospective lover, in whose shoes we are seemingly standing. The goddess’s ulterior motive of stimulating desire is the real subject of the painting, not the simple sensual attraction of a naked woman. The critic Maurizio Marini has made a similarly wry point about the Velázquez figure of Mars.22 This matches the profoundly ironic treatment of the subject by Botticelli, Veronese, and other Italian paintings, in which Mars does not appear in his bellicose role, but in the opposite mood. Velázquez shows us a disarmed, pensive warrior, again staring beyond the picture frame, at what one suddenly realizes is a scene akin to the Venere allo specchio. In the latter we were set in the place of a prospective lover; now we can more directly identify with the role of the goddess’s amatory prey. The effect of the Mars picture is not one of confidence or admiration: the scattered armor suggests rather the loss of drive and assurance. We are made more aware of the inadequacy of military might than its authority, in a vision analogous to the ruinous fate of Antony (not to mention the shattered career of Othello, and of most other Shakespearean generals). This awareness of the futility of military honor links the painting closely with the painter’s other study of the warlike temperament: the strange painting of Il buffone don Juan de Austria just mentioned. Velázquez’s two martial figures appear as strangely out of military context as that of the Bastard Don John in Shakespeare’s Much Ado. For such a leading Spanish general of markedly Anglophobic temperament to appear in the middle of an Elizabethan social comedy is roughly equivalent to Field Marshal Hermann Göring showing up for the midnight party of George and Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Yet both artists use such a bizarre figure to similar ends. The Spanish court was obsessed by grotesques for reasons explained by Marini: “In the time of absolutism by divine right the powerful have need of confidence which could only come to them by confronting with a negative alter ego. . . . The negative, anyway, exalts the positive.”23 There is a suggestion that the clown’s choice of the Don Juan role was dictated by King Philip III, and that decision indicates an accurate sense that the tortured life of the illegitimate Don Juan provides a reassuring foil for more orthodox royalty. In real life Don Juan illustrated the pathological kind of personality Shakespeare evoked in

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another frustrated member of a royal family: Richard of Gloucester, later Richard III, not to mention other bellicose illegitimate sons such as Edmund—all in desperate pursuit of a kingdom and a crown. What we have seen in such Anglo/Hispanic juxtapositions, across the borders of nationality and ignoring the limits of art forms, is a mutual enlightenment in the use of historical characters and methods of composition. In Shakespeare’s case it usually pays to look beyond familiar limits for comparisons with his challenging psychological creations. The range of his characterization beyond conventional stereotypes certainly becomes clearer by linkage with the analogous, harshly realistic treatment of kings and clowns by Velázquez. We can also see how both artists use insets or duplications to illuminate such themes, Shakespeare with his plays within plays, and Velázquez with his reflections in mirrors or other forms of pictures within pictures. However, perhaps the most salutary illumination comes from the multifarious perspectives favored in the greatest paintings of Velázquez, which help us to descry the same richness, complexity, and distancing in Shakespeare’s multiplicity of angles of vision in his stage blocking. The broad stage and pillars of the restored Globe Theatre in Southwark have shown us the incompleteness of the limited interpretative options for blocking of upstage and downstage detected in Elizabethan stage space by Robert Weimann in Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater.24 On the restored Globe stage there are not just two major positions: the elite upstage and the populist downstage. We can now detect a dozen distinct spaces for independent groups to coexist during a scene, allowing exactly the intersecting perspectives intrinsic to the art of Velázquez in his greatest paintings. There are few major scenes in Shakespeare without some such contrasting viewpoints being established by the verbal clues to blocking of such groups, often as diverse as anything seen in Las meniñas or Las hilanderas.25 For example, in Troilus and Cressida act 5, scene 2, Diomedes’ dialogue with Cressida is overseen by Troilus, who in turn is observed by Odysseus, and all four are watched and judged by Thersites. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, act 4, scene 3, Dumaine’s breaking of his oath of celibacy is seen by Longaville, who is similarly observed by the King, and all three are in turn exposed to the overview and censure of Berowne. Perhaps the most obvious case of such multiple perspectives occurs during the performance of “The Murder of Gonzago” in Hamlet, act 3, scene 2, where we have endless visual interactions between the play as a whole and the play within the play, including the divergent concerns and observations of every member of the stage audience, from Hamlet and Horatio to the King, Queen, Polonius, and Ophelia. In many

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ways this is the kind of artistic court event recorded in Las meniñas. The multiplicity of perspectives undercut the authority of any individual point of view, which provides the means of achieving Shakespeare’s characteristic detachment of his audiences from the excessive feelings of any single central figure. Thus, the artistic consequences of the recurring use of inset scenes in Velázquez teach us to understand the multivalent implications of meaning resulting from such perspectives within key scenes in Shakespeare. There are innumerable similar opportunities for mutual illumination in the further juxtaposition of the careers and artifacts of these two great Renaissance artists, because their shared artistic and social perspectives transcend the national boundaries of literary and artistic criticism. It appears that to the unmistakable claims of German culture to add to our understanding of Shakespeare, we might plausibly add those of Spanish art.

NOTES 1. Don W. Cruikshank notes that England was usually at war with Spain under Queen Elizabeth. However, if Lope de Vega had only “a fairy-tale view of England,” the English saw Spain as a major, if hostile, power: “[W]orks of Spanish literature were major sources of inspiration for English dramatists. . . . Spanish plots, characters, references, and words were almost too numerous to count.” Don W. Cruikshank, “The Great Divide,” in Parallel Lives: Spanish and English National Drama, 1580–1680, ed. Louise Fothergill-Payne and Peter Fothergill-Payne (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Presses, 1991), 203. John J. Allen also sees “a possible relationship” between the open-air theaters of Lope de Vega and Shakespeare. John J. Allen, “The Spanish Corrales de Comedias and the London Playhouses and Stages,” in New Issues in the Reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Franklin J. Hildy (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 207–35. See also Hugh Macrae Richmond, “Dramatists against Theory: The Affective Dramaturgy of Cinthio, Lope de Vega, and William Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Bulletin 22, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 43–53. 2. Precedents for this bridging of the arts include Jacob Burkhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Classics, 1990); Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque (New York: Dover, 1932); Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955); Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper Collins, 1972); Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). 3. Jonathan Brown, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 104. 4. Ibid., 105. 5. Harry Eyres, “Discovering Velázquez,” Daily Telegraph, November 6, 1999. 6. Ibid. 7. Brown, Velázquez, 104. 8. Ibid., 78.

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9. Eyres, “Discovering Velázquez,” 25. 10. Ben Jonson, Timber or Discoveries, Being the Observation of Men and Manners (London: J. M. Dent, 1898), 35. 11. Eyres, “Discovering Velázquez,” 25. 12. Shakespeare references are keyed to: William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 13. Eyres, “Discovering Velázquez,” 25. 14. Hugh M. Richmond, “Shakespeare’s Navarre,” Huntington Library Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1979): 193–215. 15. Maurizio Marini, Velázquez (Milano: Electa, 1977), 33. 16. Brown, Velázquez, 252–53; José López-Rey, Velázquez: The Complete Works (Köln: Benedikt Taschen, 1997), 160–68. 17. References to Ovid are cued to: Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Frank J. Miller, Loeb Series (London: Heinemann, 1927). 18. Zevedei Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology (New York: Grove, 1960), 45– 49. 19. Chaucer references are cued to: Geoffrey Chaucer, General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 23–36. 20. Marini, Velázquez, 36. 21. Hugh M. Richmond, “Much Ado About Notables,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 49–63. 22. Marini, Velázquez, 24. 23. Ibid., 100. 24. For example, compare the theories in Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), with the firsthand experience of the stage of the rebuilt Globe Theatre described in Hugh M. Richmond, “Angles of Vision: Recording Much Ado at the Restored Globe Theatre,” Shakespeare Bulletin 15, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 31–33. 25. See the opening chapter of Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), 3–16.

Crossing the Dotted Line: Shakespeare and Geography Chee-Seng Lim

EARLY MODERN EUROPEANS KNEW MORE ABOUT THE GEOGRAPHY OF the globe they were about to overwhelm than is sometimes imagined. The Universalis Cosmographia Secundum Ptholomaei Traditionem et Americi Vespucii Alioru[m]que Lustrationes drafted at the monastery in Saint Die in 1507, over a hundred years before Shakespeare’s The Tempest drew on the theme of imperialism, has such astounding accuracy that scholars are still mystified about how it was achieved. The map, which is the oldest known document to name “America,” was compiled by the German cartographer and monk Martin Waldseemüller (c. 1470– c. 1521/22).1 In June 2007 the German chancellor Angela Merkel officially transferred the document from the German government to the American people in a ceremony at the Library of Congress, where it is now on permanent display.2 The map continues to pose questions that scholars cannot answer. It seems unlikely that it was the jottings of the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci (although his name is adopted to christen the newly discovered territory) that provided the breathtaking accuracy of the cartographic project initiated by the Duke of Lorraine.3 How was the Pacific mapped in when it is thought that Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first European to reach the Pacific Ocean in 1513? How did the cartographers at the monastery accurately outline the western coastline of South America? John Hébert of the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division pointed out that the South American continent was at certain key points accurate to “within 70 miles” and speculates that Waldseemüller might have christened the Western Hemisphere after Vespucci because it was Vespucci who seemed to have understood that Columbus had discovered a vast expanse of land that was new.4 The cartographic efforts of Johannes Schöner and Peter Apian in 1515 and 1520 respectively confirmed the name “America,” although Waldseemüller himself in 1520 reverted to “Terra Incognita” and, for “North America,” curiously 253

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“Cuba.” The 1507 map is, according to John Hébert, “essentially the beginning or first map of the modern age, and it’s one that everything builds on from that point forward. . . . It becomes a keystone map.”5 One of the most important uses of this mapmaking was in the service of the emergent imperial project in Europe. At the beginning of this era in the early modern period the roles of Portugal and Spain preceded other European countries. That era has only just come to a close in Asia at the very end of the twentieth century in Macao with the symbolic handover of the territory back to China by Portugal. As it began, so it ended with Portugal. In effect, it was the great European project with the involvement of many nations and essentially, the movement was from West to East. Christopher Columbus, of course, set out in the fifteenth century to look for Asia by sailing west. He was convinced that he had landed on the islands off the continent of Asia when he discovered the Caribbean in 1492. One can get an idea of the Western view of colonial possessions including Asia by looking at an engraving of a later explorer than Columbus who gave his name to America, Amerigo Vespucci. America (c. 1575–80) is a famous print by the Belgian engraver Johannes Stradanus (Jan van der Straet, 1523–1605). It opens a series of twenty prints called Nova Reperta (New Discoveries, c. 1580). The Latin motto of America reads, “Americen Americus retexit, & Semel vocauit inde semper excitam.” [Americus rediscovers America. He called her but once and thenceforth she was always awake.]6 Europe, represented by Vespucci, stands fully clothed, civilized, and energetic, forward thrusting across the page from left to right—the direction of our reading of the Western languages has conditioned our gaze to scan from Vespucci on the left to the female representation of the New World on the right. The “New World,” and the field of reference can be extended to include the colonies that subsequently follow in Asia and elsewhere, is represented by a supine woman, in a state of undress and reclining, fully inviting to the thrusting forward of Europe and the West. Masculine Europe takes possession of a feminized New World, which can be notionally referred to as the tropics on the analogy of notions of the West or the North of the North-South Divide. If we turn the engraving the other way round, we see that the energy levels I have been talking about would be somewhat reversed: The engraving as it stands illustrates the engagement of the West with the New World and beyond (which will be termed the Tropics). The

Johannes Stradanus (engraver), “America,” PAF70094 from the print collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

Johannes Stradanus (engraver), “America,” reversed.

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engagement is cast in terms of erotic desire so evident in the lascivious gaze of Vespucci. The colonial territory is represented as a willing object of Western desire. Most schoolboys of a generation ago know of Rudyard Kipling’s statement on the distinctiveness of the East and the West in his “Ballad of East and West”: Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat.7

This view of things hopes for a meeting and reconciliation at the end of human history before God’s great judgment seat. We are more interested in the possibility of East and West meeting in the early modern period and in the here and now. The works of Shakespeare can be seen as furthering this possibility of porously crossing and recrossing the dotted lines that conventionally separate nations and territories on maps. We can respond to Kipling’s conception of East and West by problematizing it in citing a passage from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks in which Gramsci talks about the ideas of East and West in our discourse: To understand exactly what might be meant by the problem of the reality of the external world it might be worth taking up the example of the notions of “East” and “West” which do not cease to be “objectively real” even though analysis shows them to be no more than a conventional, that is “historico-cultural” construction. . . . Obviously East and West are arbitrary and conventional, that is historical, constructions, since outside of real history every point on the earth is East and West at the same time. This can be seen more clearly from the fact that these terms have crystallised . . . from the point of view of the European cultured classes who, as a result of their world-wide hegemony, have caused them to be accepted everywhere. Japan is the Far East not only for Europe but also perhaps for the American from California and even for the Japanese himself, who, through English political culture, may then call Egypt the Near East. So because of the historical content that has become attached to the geographical terms, the expressions East and West have finished up indicating specific relations between different cultural complexes. Thus Italians often, when speaking of Morocco, call it an “Eastern” country, to refer to its Moslem and Arab civilisation.8

A cursory look at the atlas of course shows us that Morocco sits more to the geographical west than Italy. In this regard, one is put in mind of how many Australians refer to themselves as Westerners and to Aus-

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tralia as part of the West. Many find this amusing and have taken this as proof positive of the theory of continental drift! We can develop the discussion of the colonial encounter as a stereotypical rape of a female as a discourse that turns around, so that Europe in the person of a female representative is then depicted in later modern literature as suffering rape or at least an attempt at it. We see this as much in The Tempest of Shakespeare as in Forster’s A Passage to India. Salman Rushdie asked a pertinent question when he wondered, “Who raped whom?” We could begin to find an answer in Stradanus’s depiction of Vespucci. When in The Tempest Caliban charges Prospero with annexation and usurpation, his evasive retort to Caliban’s charge of injustice is essentially simple, “You tried to rape my daughter” and we might extrapolate his reply, “And so I can rape your island.” In the wake of the geographical spread set off by the imperial era, Stradanus and his colleagues saw themselves working in a new era of “Geographiae” (from 1475 on) against the ancient and medieval “Cosmographiae” of Ptolemy. It was a modern cartographic era pieced together from accounts of actual travelers, crossing boundaries and returning from those bournes to enlighten their fellow countrymen. In a parallel movement, Shakespeare sees his own cultural spread. There was no need to wait for ages hence and for “states unborn and accents yet unknown” (Julius Caesar, 3.1.114) before that started to happen. Just as the whole of the Western Hemisphere came to honor a person still living (Vespucci did not die till 1512, Waldseemüller’s map is 1507), so Shakespeare’s fame was carried abroad to other continents by a trade delegation—his work was physically being transmitted to one of the most propitious lands for its furtherance to this day, India. My location in Malaya, now Malaysia, would get its Shakespeare through an artistic transmission from the subcontinent, as we find described in Geoffrey Kendal’s The Shakespeare Wallah.9 The uncertain geography of The Tempest and other romances such as Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale does not matter as much as we might think in an age of increasing geographical accuracy. Shakespeare is of the here and everywhere like Othello. When Roderigo calls Othello an “extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere” (Othello, 1.1.138–39), or when Othello himself recounts his travels to strange lands,10 fictionally he does travel and traverse those spaces, geographical and fantastical—to Aleppo and the ends of the earth with its wonders. Shakespeare’s travels were in his imagination, more akin to Ariel’s in the play or the audience in the stalls, than to Florentine Vespucci’s or the Neapolitan Stephano’s. The butler goes abroad from Italy and lands on Caliban’s island because he is stranded with his masters as part of an entourage. Although Shakespeare him-

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self, as far as we know, did not travel abroad, in his own era the plays were beginning to travel, and we hear of the first performance outside Europe, and possibly England, off the unlikely coast of Sierra Leone. We pause for a brief reading of The Tempest from the perspective of the postcolonial. The Tempest is an important play in this context. But yet we can go back further than the condescending orientalism highlighted by Edward Said to a very early orientalism, which seemed to be motivated more by admiration for the literature and wisdom of the East than the much discussed, later condescension of Macaulay.11 A. J. Arberry, a very important orientalist (in the primary and original sense of the word), the translator of the Qur’an, pays tribute to Sir William Jones as “The Founder” of Orientalism. In Oriental Essays, Arberry recounts how Sir William was brought up on Shakespeare by his mother and how Sir William transcribed the whole of The Tempest from memory.12 One suspects that something in the thematic concerns of the play must have prompted this friend of Samuel Johnson, this fellow of the Royal Society and this future founder and foundation president of the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta, established along the lines of the Royal Society, to attempt such a feat. Sir William would have felt for Caliban, dispossessed and enslaved. On September 9, 1780, Jones spoke to a meeting of freeholders, and his published remarks ring as strong as those of William Wilberforce, who came after him in the push to abolish slavery: “I pass with haste by the coast of Africa, whence my mind turns with indignation at the abominable traffic in the human species. Sugar, it has been said, would be dear if it were not worked by Blacks in the Western islands; but let sugar be as dear as it may be, it is better to eat none, better to eat aloes or coloquintada than violate a primary law of nature, impressed on every heart not imbruted by avarice, than rob one human creature of those eternal rights, of which no law upon earth can justly deprive him.”13 Sir William Jones’s passing by the coast of Africa puts us in mind of another such passing much earlier, when Shakespeare was still alive and even before the Sonnets had appeared in print. As already mentioned, the first recorded performance of Hamlet outside England was off the coast of Sierra Leone on September 5, 1607. In fact “Who’s there?”—the first words of the play—appear to be also the first words of Shakespeare spoken outside Europe; and they are spoken in the tropics. The performance must have been given in hot weather under the tropical sky in becalmed waters within sight of the shore, with long-tailed monkeys scampering on the rocks. Here the delayed Keeling Expedition enacted Hamlet even before

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Shakespeare reached continental Europe. Shakespeare was in the tropics before he was in Dresden, when a touring troupe of English actors played Hamlet again in 1626. Gary Taylor retells the fascinating story in his “Hamlet in Africa, 1607.”14 Four black Africans were among the audience onboard, and we even know the name of one of them—Lucas Fernandez. Harold Bloom claimed in 1998 in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human: “There are many signs that global self-consciousness increasingly identifies with Hamlet, Asia and Africa included.”15 The estuary where this 1607 performance of Hamlet took place is now the port of Freetown, the capital of a state recently menaced by an ex-president of Liberia who will be tried for war crimes there. The state is still called Sierra Leone. Shakespeare would have made something of the irony in the names. Sierra Leone is one of the world’s poorest countries, but early in the seventeenth century four inhabitants had the good fortune to witness one of the greatest plays by the great Shakespeare performed under its skies while the Keeling Expedition was waiting for a favorable wind to waft it onwards. It is the first British diplomatic mission to India. These Africans heard the first words of Hamlet, “Who’s there?” “Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself,” and some lines later, when Horatio enters, “Who is there?” with his answer, “Friends to this ground.”16 The first lines of Shakespeare spoken outside the borders of England are lines that challenge an intruder crossing a notional dotted line but resolve themselves into a hospitable welcome and an expression of benevolent good will—the dotted line allows the entry of that which is on the other side or the outside. And these four Africans spent a long afternoon taking in one of the best plays in the world before it premiered in either Europe or the New World—Shakespeare, to echo the words of Harold Bloom, was already making himself prominent in the self-consciousness of Africa, of the tropics. But if Africa and other tropical locations can be said to identify with Hamlet, Hamlet also has to identify with Africa and these other tropical locations. Laura Bohannan’s “Shakespeare in the Bush” recounts the encounter of Tiv tribesmen with Hamlet in Nigeria.17 The clash of cultures is instructive, with the Tiv elders convinced that this earnest anthropologist from Oxford University must have got the story wrong, as detail after awkward detail conflicted with the Tiv worldview of what uncles must do in the absence of fathers for their nephews (they care for and nurture their nephews), what the surviving brother should do with the departed brother’s wife (he marries her), and so on. Translations and performances of Hamlet in my part of the tropical world in the early years of the twentieth century also demonstrated

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that in crossing the dotted line to other geographical regions the freight of Shakespeare’s plays was not without danger of perishing.18 The Chinese audiences in Southeast Asia did not take kindly to the culturally inauspicious acts of jumping into graves and handling dead men’s bones. These two tropical examples should teach us that there can be no easy assumptions of the universality of Shakespeare, and yet Shakespeare continues to travel across cultural and geographical boundaries. We have been speaking of perspectives turned upside down and inside out with the distorting cultural spectacles of foreign cultures. We recall the episode in Dickens’s Great Expectations when the world for little Pip is turned upside down by someone who will have the experience of being transported to Australia in the Antipodes, where apparently till recent years children used to be upended like Pip so that “they can see London.”19 Turning the world upside down from locations in the tropics can invert the terms of The Tempest by presenting Caliban as king of his island and Prospero as the interloper, intruder, and usurper. The island is apparently somewhere in the tropical Caribbean, although it is by the cavalier geography of Shakespeare in the romances also in the Mediterranean. This uncertain geography figures also in Cymbeline, where the ambassador, Lucius the Roman, is announced as intending to land at Milford Haven, on the wrong coast, and in The Winter’s Tale, where a country without a coastline can suddenly acquire one. The point, as in Columbus’s “discovery” of Asia, is not precise geography but what one does with what is then immediately under one’s nose.20 Ben Jonson is missing the point in sneering at the misconceived geography that gives Bohemia a coastline as well as a desert. The geography is that of the imagination, and the outward topography is merely the setting for the unfolding of the plot.21 Shakespeare may be merely “flout[ing] geographical realism . . . to underline the unreality of place in the play.”22 But Prospero committed the sin of usurpation against Caliban after he himself had suffered that sin against his own dukedom in Milan: “For I am all the subjects that you have, / Which first was mine own king,” Caliban insists.23 But of course this claim is not backed by maps with well-demarcated dotted lines to establish sovereignty or even ownership. This claim to kingship by Caliban and charge of usurpation nevertheless prompts Prospero to accuse Caliban of an attempt on the virtue of Miranda, his beautiful daughter. We are returned to the early iconography of discovery, and colonialism is cast in the metaphors of sexual conquest and penetration, as we see suggested in the depiction

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of Vespucci by Stradanus or by Donne in his own poem (“Oh my America, my newfound land, / My kingdome, safelyest when with one man man’d”).24 Prospero, stung with a reference to his own sin of usurpation and who has suffered usurpation at the hands of his own brother Antonio, shifts the argument to accuse Caliban of trying to violate Miranda’s virginity. In so doing he makes an accusation grounded in an obvious lie—“lodged thee / In mine own cell” (The Tempest, 1.2.348–49)—his cell or palace is in Milan—not on Caliban’s island. Caliban has been dispossessed and imprisoned in a hard rock structure. In the end, whether we read The Tempest as a postcolonial subject or a Eurocentric Bloom, Shakespeare invites us to consider the message of act 5—the rarer action is in virtue (and reconciliation) than in vengeance. The only reservation for such a reading is that it does not go far enough. As has been urged, there ought to be an act 6 (breaking the paradigm of the five-act play) in order for Caliban to enact his own necessary reconciliation and forgiveness of Prospero— for the tropics to forgive the temperate Europe its intemperate excesses of colonialism and imperialism. Europe had been often intemperate in its imperialism in our tropical zone, and having departed as imperialist is now often indifferent to the mess left behind. This suggested act 6 will return us to a consideration of Lamming’s mention of the Haitian Ceremony of the Dead where, as in act 5 of The Tempest, the truth is told and then reconciliation reached and forgiveness pronounced. This Haitian ceremony crosses the dotted line between the living and the dead; the traveler is invoked to return to complete the rarer action. A negative aspect of the incomplete dialogue can be dubbed the Caliban Complex, in which the postcolonial societies not only cringe and grovel before the imposing civilization of the West but also remain patent failures after the departure of Prospero. The Calibans have not built on the model left by the Prosperos nor reverted with great success to their traditional, customary models. The world has changed, and the old formulae no longer work, and yet the new is in a process of becoming and fashioning. Sometimes the dotted lines drawn on the map are forcibly redrawn or violently redemarcated. In this complicated context, it becomes important to disseminate the nuance and complexity that Shakespeare’s work routinely fosters in these cultural spaces. Ultimately, we need the hospitable spirit to regard Shakespeare’s work as “friend to this ground” in helping us, as new and emergent societies, to fashion, taking a cue from Gonzalo, new commonwealths after our own imagining.

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NOTES 1. “The map is the earliest multisheet printed wall map, made up of 12 sheets, each measuring 161/2 inches by 231/4 inches, resulting in an overall map that measures 41/2 feet by 8 feet, or a total of 36 square feet. The map is in mint condition and is an exceptionally fine example of printing technology at the onset of the Renaissance.” See “Library of Congress Acquires Only Known Copy of 1507 World Map Compiled by Martin Waldseemüller” at http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2001/01– 093.html. 2. Helen Dalrymple. “America’s ‘Birth Certificate’: Waldseemüller Map Transferred to American People,” http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0706/map.html. See also John R. Hébert, “The Map that Named America: Library Acquires 1507 Waldseemüller Map of the World,” http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0309/maps.html, with images of the map. 3. Fernández-Armesto thinks Vespucci’s description “curiously occluded” and probably heavily influenced by the literary topos of the locus amoenus, “the undifferentiatedly agreeable place.” Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006), 136. 4. David Alexander, “Map that Named America Is a Puzzle for Researchers,” Reuters, December 3, 2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN03322 39320071203. 5. Ibid. 6. For a detailed discussion see José Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). 7. Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West,” in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Inclusive Edition, 1885–1932, 4th ed. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934), 235. 8. Antonio Gramsci, “Problems of Marxism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, by Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 447. 9. Geoffrey Kendal and Clare Colvin, The Shakespeare Wallah, introduced by Felicity Kendal (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1986). 10. Othello, 1.1.136–37, 1.3.131–44. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 2nd ed. Oxford Shakespeare, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). 11. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). See Thomas Macaulay, “Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education,” in Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, selected by G. M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 721–24, 729: “I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit [sic] works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” 12. A. J. Arberry, Oriental Essays: Portraits of Seven Scholars (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 48. 13. Quoted in Arberry, “The Founder: William Jones,” in Oriental Essays, 56. 14. Gary Taylor, “Hamlet in Africa, 1607,” in Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period, ed. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 223–48.

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15. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 420. 16. Hamlet, 1.1.1–2, 1.1.11. 17. Laura Bohannan, “Shakespeare in the Bush,” Natural History 75 (August/September 1966): 28–33. 18. Kendal and Colvin, Shakespeare Wallah. 19. I owe this to Helen Page, my former literature teacher in school and a granddaughter of Sir Earle Page, briefly prime minister of Australia. 20. Greenblatt speaks of Columbus at one point imagining himself the king of all he surveys: “For a moment at least—a moment at once of perfect wonder and of possessive madness—Columbus has become king of the Promised Land.” Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 85. 21. “Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden,” in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, vol. 1: The Man and His Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 139. 22. Andrew Gurr, “The Bear, the Statue, and Hysteria in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 422. 23. The Tempest, 1.2.343–44. 24. John Donne, “Elegy 8: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” in The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, ed. Gary A. Stringer, vol. 2: The Elegies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 163–64, lines 27–28.

VI Boundary Crossings: Translation and National Discourses

“there’s the rub”: Translating Hamlet’s Thought Process Werner Habicht To be, or not to be, that is the Question: Whether ’tis Nobler in the minde to suffer The Slings and Arrowes of outragious Fortune, Or to take Armes against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to dye, to sleepe No more; and by a sleepe, to say we end The Heart-ake, and the thousand Naturall shockes That Flesh is heyre too? ’Tis a consummation Deuoutly to be wish’d. To dye to sleepe, To sleepe, perchance to Dreame; I, there’s the rub, For in that sleepe of death, what dreames may come, When we haue shuffle’d off this mortall coile, Must giue vs pawse. (F1; italics added)

WHAT SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET MEANS WHEN IN THE “TO BE” SOLILOQUY he says “Ay, there’s the rub” appears to be fairly obvious, even if not everyone will know what exactly a rub is, at least in such a context. One can, after all, sense Hamlet’s irritation as an upsurging new thought disturbs and redirects his meditation, especially since he immediately goes on to elaborate his sudden interjection, concluding that it “must give us pause.” A “pause” (last word of the elaborating phrase, stressed metrically) is what he is making, and his thinking is pushed in another direction. When, however, it comes to translating the interjection itself, the word rub and the meaning it contributes to it will nevertheless have to be considered. Paying comparative attention to the crossing of linguistic and cultural boundaries as performed in any translation could be one way of revealing some of the problems involved. What follows is a partial attempt to do so, based on a selection of 120 or so translated texts old and new in an admittedly limited number of languages, mainly Germanic and Romance.1 267

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Although the general drift of Hamlet’s meditation up to that point is comprehensible enough, the reflection tentatively initiated by the basic “question” (“to be, or not to be”) generates complications and consequent interpretation cruces. It leads Hamlet to consider the “not to be” option and thus to resume a suicidal inclination already manifest in his very first monologue. But unlike in 1.2.129 the death wish is not checked by a (however reluctant) respect for the divine “canon ’gainst self-slaughter”; rather, it is first subverted by the curiously mixed metaphors invoked for its exploration (“Slings and Arrowes of outragious Fortune”; “Armes against a Sea of troubles”), then reinforced by referring to the traditional notion of death as sleep and hence hailed as “a consummation / Deuoutly to be wish’d,” and then again subverted by the association of sleeping and dreaming: “To sleepe, perchance to Dreame; I, there’s the rub.” These latter words, then, are the point where the self-induced deconstruction of Hamlet’s death wish is complete and where he is forced to “pause” and redirect his thought. If this is so, then one may legitimately ask what significance is attached to the expression “there’s the rub,” which marks the reversal. English speakers of today are likely to respond to the expression as a whole, since it is familiar, almost proverbial, perhaps a mere verbal gesture recognizing some difficulty, or perhaps an intensified variant of “that is the question” at the beginning of the soliloquy. This is how in dictionaries of current English usage the pertinent sense of the noun rub (apart from the more usual meaning “the act of rubbing”) is explained, mostly with reference to the idiomatic there’s the rub itself; for example: There’s / here’s the rub] used when saying that a particular problem is the reason why a situation is so difficult.2 The rub [sing.] (dated or rhet.) a problem or difficulty: . . . there’s / there lies the rub.3

But then the familiarity of the phrase may well be due to its occurrence in the most famous monologue of the most famous play of the most famous national dramatist. Shakespeare may, indeed, have coined it—the OED, at any rate, has no earlier attestations of the phrase. If so, he would have made use of a meaning of rub common in his own time but obsolete today. In early modern English, rub was a bowling term, denoting “an obstacle or impediment by which a bowl is hindered in, or diverted from, its proper course” (OED, s.v. rub, n[oun]1 sb. 2a). It also had a more general meaning, no doubt

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transferred from the bowling context, signifying any kind of “impediment or difficulty” of either a physical or a mental nature (as the OED quotations 2b and 3 confirm). In the Shakespeare canon itself, rub in these senses occurs about ten times, though it is not always easy to determine whether, and to what extent, the bowling association is present or whether a more general meaning predominates—in other words, whether rub is a fresh or a faded metaphor. It will be noticed, however, that in Shakespeare a rub is usually something that either obstructs a path, in which case the bowling association seems natural —as in Henry V (“We doubt not now / But every rub is smoothed on our way” [2.2.188–89]), or in King John (“the breath of what I mean to speak / Shall blow each dust, each straw, each little rub” [3.4.128– 29]). Or else it may obstruct, in a more abstract sense, the course of fortune, as in Henry VIII, 2.1.129. Surely Shakespeare is aware of both meanings—the concrete one applied to bowling and the transferred one, since he plays with them in the garden scene of Richard II; when the lady-in-waiting, attempting to cheer up the melancholy queen, suggests: “Madam, we’ll play at bowls,” the answer is: “ ’Twill make me think the world is full of rubs / and that my fortune runs against the bias” (3.4.3–5).4 Hamlet’s “Ay, there’s the rub,” then, especially if one assumes that it once had the freshness of a newly coined phrase, may well have been an active metaphor suggesting that the prince’s thinking, like a bowling ball that hits an unevenness in its path, is being stopped and diverted. Thus the rub suggests that his thinking, initiated by simple infinitives, has now become metaphorical, even if the strength of the image can hardly be determined unambiguously. Hamlet is, after all, encountering a less explicitly definable mental obstacle. Or he may be referring to “the fact of a bowl meeting with such impediment” (OED). Or modern readers familiar with his by now fossilized idiomatic expression but unaware of the technical meaning of rub may see him as simply making an irritated gesture. In Hamlet translations, at least in those examined here, one accordingly finds solutions of four general types—albeit with nuances and transitions both within and between different target languages. Some translators concentrate on the metaphorical effect, even if the metaphor itself has to be replaced. Some render the abstract meaning transported by the metaphor. Others transform the objective image into a subjective reaction released by it. Others again strive to render the gestic quality of the interjection. This is not simply a matter of deciding between historical accuracy and present response. For each of these types is a justifiable, if partial rendering of the source text and its latent ambivalence. And each corresponds to one of four

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ways of assessing the process of Hamlet’s thinking—which thus appears to be imaginative in one case, rational in the second, subjective in the third, and impulsive in the fourth. At any rate translators are confronted with the extra problem that target languages are not likely to have an equivalent for the pregnant rub-image derived from bowling. And, of course, current English usage itself does not have one either—which is why modern editors feel the necessity of explaining the old technical meaning of rub in a note, more or less paraphrasing the OED. Pertinent notes may run like this: rub] obstacle . . . metaphor from bowls, the rub being anything which impedes or deflects the bowl from its course.5 rub] impediment (from the game of bowls).6 rub] obstacle in the game of bowls, an impediment to the ball’s intended path.7

Such succinct information, however, can still be misleading if it tempts a reader to think of one of those well-polished modern bowling alleys, where rubs will hardly be expected, even if the idea that the diverted bowling ball was aimed at a “king” protected by eight other pieces might have its Hamletian attraction. More elaborate comments would in fact be needed to explain the nature of Elizabethan lawn-bowling, where rubs could have been as critical as their equivalents are on a golf green today, and where the ball was aimed at another ball, not at a king and pins. To convey all this by way of translation is hardly feasible, especially if in a target language no similarly concise and monosyllabic bowling term is available, let alone one that has yielded a proverbial expression. (1.) One common practice is to change vehicles for the given tenor—that is, to replace the Shakespearean metaphor by a different one, particularly if the target language permits it to be shaped into a pointed idiomatic expression similar to the one that the source text has yielded. This, however, almost inevitably involves a slightly changed perception of what happens in Hamlet’s mind. In German, for instance, the most frequent substitution of this kind was introduced by the very first Hamlet translator (Wieland, 1766) as “Da steckt der Haken” [there sticks the catch]. This has often been repeated, not only as “Da ist der Haken” (H. Müller, 1977; Greiner, 2005), but also with stylistic, prosodic, and syntactic variations, including replacements of the visually imagined obstructing object (“hook, catch”) by the verbally expressed act of obstruction (see below, no. 3). This image occurs in other Germanic languages as well, as in Icelandic

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“Her kemur hængur” (Jochumsson, 1878) or Swedish “ja där är haken” (Zillacus, 1983). It is even preferred in “translations” of Shakespeare into current English, in which the rub metaphor is avoided and replaced by “yes, that’s the hitch”8 or “Ah, but there’s the catch.”9 A “hook” or “catch” would seem to affect Hamlet’s thinking in a peculiar way: it is not being diverted like a bowling ball by a “rub,” but arrested like a thread by a hook. A solution more widespread internationally is the replacement of the rub metaphor by a “knot” metaphor, which suggests that Hamlet’s thinking is confronted with or entangled in a confusing complication. This in turn is rare in German—“Ach, hier liegt der Knoten!” (Mendelssohn, 1771) is an entirely isolated example—but it often occurs in other languages both Germanic and Romance, particularly as Danish “det er knuden” (Foersom, 1811; Lembcke, 1873) or “der er knuden” (Østerberg, 1887; Blom, 1911), Swedish “Se, däri ligger knuten” (Hagberg, 1847), Dutch “Daar zit de knoop” (Voeten, 1958; also Jonk, 1998), Italian “ah, qui è il nodo” (Orlandi, 1920; similarly Meo, 1974), “Ah quest’è il groppo” (Carcano, 1875), or “L’intrice stà lì” (Matteucci, 1875). Perhaps not surprisingly it also occurs in Modern Greek as “edwv eivnei o kovmpo~” (Polylas, 1889; Rotas, 1938). One Greek prose translation even goes as far as invoking the “Gordian knot”: “A! idouv o Govrdio~ desmov~” (Damirale, 1900), although Hamlet is surely far from resolving the knotty complication as resolutely as did Alexander the Great. Yet another way of compensating for the bowling image both metaphorically and idiomatically is the substitution of some sort of “stumbling block,” which would seem to imply a moment of helplessness in Hamlet’s thinking. It used to be favored by some early German translators; for instance: “Ja, dieß ist der Anstoß!” (Benda, 1826; similarly Mannhart, 1830; Jencken, 1834; Simrock, 1837). It is true that none of this has been repeated after the mid-nineteenth century, probably because the word “Anstoß” (in the sense of “stumbling block”) has since become obsolete. But in other languages that image has endured, attracting a remarkable range of expressions, for instance as Swedish “ja, det är stötestenen!” (Hallqvist, 1986), French “oui, voilà l’achoppement” (Bing/Copeau, 1939), Italian “Sì, lì è l’intoppo” (Piccoli, 1927; similarly Pavolino, 1951), perhaps also “Oh, qui è l’inciampo!” (de Sanctis, 1939; similarly Obertello, 1958; Monti, 1959), or “e qui è l’incaglio” (Montale, 1949; Melchiori, 1977), and Spanish “si, he ahí el tropiezo” (Martínez Sierra, 1918; Izquierdo, 1952). However, the metaphorical obstacle may well be conceived as being more dramatic, more challenging. It may be some abyss—as in French “Ah voilá le gouffre qui m’arrête!” (Ménard, 1886) and Dutch

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“ah, zie de valkuil” (Komrij, 1986)—or, more likely, a cliff, as in French “Ah! là est l’écueil” (Guizot, 1821; similarly, Brousse, 1964; Déprats, 1983), or Italian “e qui è lo scoglio” (Lodovici, 1956), or Spanish “¡Ahí surge el escollo!” (Custodio, 1968). Occasionally there are more extraordinary metaphorical substitutions, which can be as unpleasant as a disease invoked in Italian, “Ah, ecco la rogna” [scabies] (Valletta, 1839), or as homely as in the colloquial Dutch “Dáár wringt de schoen” [there hurts the shoe] (Van Suchtelen, 1947). In short, all these metaphorical renderings of “ay, there’s the rub” are to some degree inventive in that they contribute to presenting a Hamlet who reflects his own thought process imaginatively. (2.) By contrast, translations of the second type tend to be reductive in that they eliminate the metaphorical dimension altogether, along with the bowling association in particular. This may help to transform the sensuousness of Hamlet’s thinking into a more rational argumentation. The transferred meaning of rub common in early modern English could offer some justification. As a result, the rub that Hamlet’s thinking encounters is then an “obstacle” pure and simple. Many translations into Romance languages would seem to favor this kind of solution; for instance in French: “Oui! Voilà l’obstacle!” (Morand/Schwob, 1900; also Rosny, 1909; de Pourtalès, 1923), or “Ah, c’est l’obstacle!” (Bonnefoy, 1952; Malaplate, 1991); or, in Italian, “Ecco l’ostacol tutto” (Leoni, 1814), or, in Spanish, “¡Sí, ahí está el obstaculo!” (Astrana Marín, 1922), “¡He ahí el obstáculo!” (Méndez Herrera, 1956). Sometimes the abstract noun is reinforced by an epithet: “oui, voilà le grand obstacle” (Le Tourneur, 1779), or “Si, y ved aquí el grande obstáculo” (Moratín, 1798). Or it can, of course, be some similarly abstract synonym and provide concomitant nuances of Hamlet’s predicament; for example, in French, “Fatale incertitude . . .” (LaPlace, 1746); “Oui, là est l’embarras” (Hugo, 1856– 67); “oui, voilà le point embarrassant” (Laroche, 1839); “Ah, voilà le problème” (Reinach, 1880); “Ah, voilà la difficulté” (Berbrugger, 1845). The latter option also has Italian and Spanish equivalents: “Sì, questa è la difficoltà” (Fandot, 1915); “Ahí, ahí está la dificultad” (Roviralta Borrell, 1905). Italian and Spanish offer additional, more or less intense variants, such as Italian “ecco l’idea terribile!” (Rusconi, 1826) or “L’impedimento è qui” (Errante, 1946), Spanish “Ahì está el daño” (Blanco-White, 1824), “Ah! ese es el enigma” (MacPherson, 1873), “En eso está el sarcasmo” (Bergua, 1944), “He ahí el inconveniente” (Molina Foix, 1989), or “Sí, ese es el estorbo” (Pujante, 1994). The same principle has resulted in Dutch “Daar ligt de zorg’lijkheid” (van Dam, 1924), Swedish “ja, detta är vårt stora

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trångmål” (Rosén, 1952), or Modern Greek “Idouv, idouv to provskomma” (Vikelas, 1882). (3.) Another way of dealing with the “obstacle,” whether metaphorical or abstract, is to replace it by the effect it creates, which is usually rendered by a verb or verbal expression rather than by a noun. In several translations what is thus highlighted is not the rub or any substituted impediment in the way of Hamlet’s thinking, but his subjective response as he recognizes the challenge. Thus, instead of invoking a “stumbling block,” the experience of hitting it or being alarmed by it is foregrounded. Instead of German “der Anstoß” what we get is “Ja, dran stößt sich’s” (Eschenburg, 1777), or “da stößt’s an” (Rapp, 1843), or even “Da stutzt man doch” [there one does stop short] (Zeynek, 1952), and also, following the same pattern, French “oui, voilà où l’on achoppe” (Maguin, 1995). The “hook, catch” metaphor is in more recent German translations converted into something like “Ah, da hakt sichs!” (Fried, 1970) or “ja, da hakt es” (Klein, 1984; Steckel, 1995). Or else a similarly idiomatic verb suggests a more painful awareness, such as “Ja. Da steckt’s!” (Flatter, 1952; Hamburger/ Dresen, 1973) or “Ja, da klemmt’s” (Günther, 1988), implying that Hamlet’s thinking is getting “stuck” or “trapped.” Comparable verbs are available in Dutch: “ja, dit stremt” (Burgersdijk, 1882), “ai, daar ’t strubbelt” (Van Looy, 1907) or “Ja, daar wringt het” (Courteaux, 1958). Sometimes Hamlet’s reaction is given additional paraphrastic weight, for example in French as “ah! c’est ce mot qui glace, épouvanté” (Ducis, 1769), “Et c’est là qu’un doute affreux vient naître” (Cayrou, 1876), and “Ouais: c’est ici que le doute nous blesse” (Vercors, 1965), or in Italian as “Già, ma qui si dismaga l’intelletto” (Raponi, 1995, derived from Arrigo Boito’s libretto of Amleto). Both this and a somewhat colloquialized German translation, which has “hier reißt der Faden!” [here breaks the thread] (Rothe, 1963), could imply that even in the soliloquy Hamlet is losing his mind. (4.) Instead of pointing to, or transmitting the effect of, an “obstacle,” a fourth way of translating the phrase tends to obliterate the semantic content of rub altogether, which leaves us with the sheer gestic quality of a more or less emotionalized interjection. In this case Hamlet is simply saying something like “that’s it!” “there it is!” or at most “this is the point!” This could be supported by the Q1 text (1603), whatever its origin (early version or memorial reconstruction), which has no rub at all, but simply “I mary there it goes.” Such abruptness is preferred by many German translators, especially since this is the version introduced by Herder 1774 as “Ah! da liegt’s!” and perpetuated by Schlegel 1798 as “Ja, da liegt’s.” Since Schlegel’s trans-

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lation came to acquire a privileged status, his expression has often been taken over unaltered (Schütz, 1806; Voss, 1827; Meyer, 1829; Köhler, 1856; Moltke, 1868; Bodenstedt, 1870; Schaller, 1956), or, slightly modified and even further reduced, as “ja, das ist’s” (von Himmelstiern, 1837; Fontane, 1844; Josten, 1930). In principle the gestic option is available in other languages as well—Dutch “Ja, daar zit het” (Kok, 1860), Danish “men dèr står vi!” (Sarvig, 1965), French “ah! tout est là!” (Dumas/Meurice, 1848), “c’est là le dur!” (Lermina, 1900), “Aie! ça ne va plus!” (Pagnol, 1947), or Spanish “¡Qué difícil!” (Conejero, 1989). The French expression “c’est là le hic” (Gide, 1944; similarly, Chatelain, 1864; Derocquigny, 1924) may sound slightly more sophisticated, and equivalents of “this is the point” slightly more controlled, such as German “Ja, das ist der Punkt” (Ortlepp, 1838; Hagen, 1847) and Italian “Questo è il punto” (Angeli, 1931) or “Ecco il punto” (Squarzina, 1990). The variants are likely to affect the intensity of the gesture. Further gestic effects can be added to this as well as to the other translation types. The very “ay” that introduces Hamlet’s phrase, although easily translatable as “ja” or “oui” or “sì,” can have a metrical stress that in the source text it has not, or it can be transformed into an inarticulate “Ah” (either a desperate sigh or a noise of recognition), or else into a deictic word such as French “voilà,” Italian “ecco,” or Greek “idouv.” Or words can be emphatically redoubled or otherwise emotionalized, German examples being “Da, da liegt’s” (Schröder, 1777) or “Da ist’s! da liegt’s!” (Marbach, 1874). Or else the phrase “ay, there’s the rub” is translated into some kind of silence—a telling one, to be sure, generated by a reshaped sentence structure, as in Vittoz’s translation for Mesguich’s production (1986/1997), which has Hamlet merely stammer “oui, non,” or in Himonas’s Greek version (1988), where a silence emerges from two juxtaposed unanswered questions. Each of these types of rendering the rub-phrase crucial to Hamlet’s soliloquizing in the “To be” monologue—replacement, abstraction, conversion, or gesture—is, as we have seen, represented in translations of most of the target languages examined here. But certain national traditions of Shakespeare translation and Hamlet interpretation, too, would seem to have wielded their influence. Thus within the entire history of Hamlet translation in Germany one will notice the competitive presence of the “hook/catch” metaphor on the one hand and the gestic type on the other. They were both used by the very first translators of note: the former by Wieland, 1766, the latter by Schröder, 1777 (who adapted Heufeld’s adaptation of Wieland’s version), for the stage, and by A. W. Schlegel for the page. The ma-

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jority of German Hamlets have, despite translators’ otherwise diverging approaches, favored either the one or the other of these two options, albeit with variations of style and emphasis and with changing predilections in the course of history. While in the nineteenth century the gestic version was generally preferred (doubtless under the influence of Schlegel), the metaphorical “hook/catch” version came back into favor in the second half of the twentieth century, especially once Erich Fried had propagated its verbal (instead of nominal) formulation stressing the subjective experience of Hamlet’s being “caught” rather than the objective “catch.” The picture offered by the historical sequence of, say, French or Italian translations is an entirely different one: here all four general types of translating the rub are represented, but the abstract one predominates, and altogether there is a considerably larger spectrum of experimental variation. Any translation of the rub-interjection may provide a clue to an assessment of Hamlet’s way of thinking, which, at least at this particular stage in the soliloquy, could be pondering or irritated, rational or emotional. The way the interjection is embedded in its immediate context adds further color. After all, it interrupts a train of thought initiated by a tentative sequence of monosyllabic infinitives and leads up to a dilemma that requires reconsideration. Translations not only pay attention to the semantic substance of the words that are uttered under such pressure, but also strive to convey a sense of the tone and the effect of the utterance. An actor’s delivery may be introspective or outgoing (perhaps even spoken with an awareness of the presence of eavesdroppers), hesitant or straightforward, cautious or impatient, questioning or exclamatory. Ultimately it is, of course, an actor’s or director’s business to make the decision required by the open resources of Shakespeare’s text, in line with a character concept derived from the play as a whole. Guidance, however, can be offered by the translation an actor may be using—for whatever it may be worth; besides, some translations are more performance-conscious than others, and a translator himself may behave as a sort of imaginary director. To some degree the tone of Hamlet’s delivery of the text is indicated by its punctuation.10 This begins in editions of the English text itself, since the usual modern-spelling editions are accustomed to “translate” the predominantly rhetorical punctuation (indicating breath pauses of various length) of the original Q2 and F texts into a different, syntactically determined system—a procedure that implies interpretation and may affect the meaning, especially since Q2 and F, for whose punctuation the compositors are likely to be no less responsible than the author, differ considerably and even substantially

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near the passage in question. In Q2 the resumed infinitives “to die to sleep” belong to the preceding speech unit: “ ’tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wisht to die to sleepe,”—which looks logically coherent, until an anadiplosis repeats the word “to sleepe,” which is thus foregrounded and questioned. In F, on the other hand, the preceding unit ends with a full stop after “devoutly to be wish’d.” Hence, what follows may be a more or less asyndetic and thus tentative string of infinitives, whose coordination is being undermined in the utterance and provokes Hamlet’s “Ay, there’s the rub.” Modernizing the original punctuation, unstable as it is in the first place—that is, “translating” it into a consistently syntax-based one, requires adjustments, which at this point have to supply links or pauses between the infinitives, between these and the interjection that checks their sequence (and thus the course of Hamlet’s thought imagined as that of a bowling ball), and between the interjection and the new thought triggered by it (“For in that sleepe of death what dreames may come . . .”). The results of editorial repunctuation are, indeed, remarkably diverse, especially since they are aided by a copious import of extra marks. There are hardly any two major English editions in which the punctuation of this particular line and a half is absolutely identical. Not only does each individual distribution of commas, semicolons, colons, periods, dashes (including extra-long dashes common in eighteenth-century usage), and also various combinations of these, suggest more or less heavy silences, but these silences can also, with the help of added question marks or exclamation points (or both), be identified as either interrogatory or exclamatory, or as changing from the one to the other. There is, indeed, an enormous gamut of possibilities, which at the same time can function as performative compensations for the faded rub-metaphor, and which range from, say, the emphatically pause-riddled thoughtfulness of Malone’s (1790) “To die;—to sleep;— / To sleep! Perchance to dream;—ay, there’s the rub;” down to the short-sentenced, straightforward matter-of-factness of the Oxford Shakespeare (Wells/ Taylor, 1988): “To die, to sleep. / To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub.” To what extent foreign translators adopt the punctuation of an English edition they happen to use is, of course, difficult to determine. But on the whole their interpretative notation with punctuation marks, further affected by national conventions, tends to be, if anything, even more opulent. In German and Germanic versions, dashes are sometimes overabundant—not surprisingly, perhaps, since the German word for “dash” is Gedankenstrich [“thought stroke”]. French versions are also addicted to dots (. . .), which can give Ham-

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let’s speech something of a Pinteresque touch. And Spanish ones are particularly fond of exclamation points; for example, “¡Morir . . ., dormir! ¡Dormir! . . . ¡Tal vez soñar! ¡Sí, ahì está el obstaculo!” (Astrana Marín, 1922). Besides, expletive insertions can be added to reinforce the punctuation effect both rhythmically and syntactically. For it is not only a faded, but also a substituted rub-metaphor that translators have to cope with. In one French prose translation the bowling metaphor is, indeed, replaced by a punctuation metaphor: “Mourir,— dormir;— dormir, peut-être rêver:— oui, voilà le point d’interrogation” (Montégut, 1867). And in the Greek translation of Himonas, 1988, already referred to, two weighty interrogation points (in Greek marked as “;”) are substituted for the omitted rub. The nuances with which translators respond to the single sentence considered here (if a sentence it is) are at best a marginal indication of how Hamlet’s thought process is interpreted. Something depends on whether and how they fit in with larger patterns of corresponding nuances. In the original “To be” speech one will notice an alternation of simple, perhaps tentative, but increasingly urgent beginnings marked by the juxtaposed infinitives (“To be, or not to be”; “to die, to sleep”), on the one hand, and complicating imaginative amplifications, on the other. Later on, even Hamlet’s generalized conclusion (“Thus conscience doth make cowards [of us all]”) again turns into a metaphorically complicated amplification (“the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought . . .”). There is both repetitiveness and advancement, both circularity and progression—which results in a kind of spiral-like movement. Translations may well interfere with or modify the pattern, if only because of seductive characteristics a target language has in store. For example, the “to die to sleep . . .” passages may be a formal echo of the initial “to be, or not to be.” But the adversative beginning changes into the complexity of an unstable coordination, the neutral question into a graphic and emotionally irritating rub. In German, the relation can easily be reversed. Schlegel, 1798, translated the first line of the soliloquy as “Sein oder Nichtsein, das ist hier die Frage.” These infinitives can thus be read as ponderous nouns—a reading further encouraged by their capitalization—which turns them into big concepts, something like the “être” and “néant” of Voltaire’s first (poetic) sample translation (c. 1730), now also evoking Sartre. This is how the line has become proverbial, often quoted in a variety of contexts, despite attempts by more recent Hamlet translators to reduce its pomposity. Schlegel’s “to die to sleep” passages, however, do retain the infinitives as such and are noncapitalized, and then replace the rub by a mere gestic expression; this alters the urgency of Hamlet’s in-

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creasing dilemma. The very opposite can happen in Modern Greek. Since the spoken language does not have an infinitive, one way of translating the “to be, or not to be” line sounds even more informal than in English: “Na Δnai kaneiv~ hv na mun eivnai,—autov eivnΔ to zhvthma” (if someone is or isn’t,—that’s the problem), whereas in the “to die to sleep” passages it seems to have been more convenient to replace the infinitives by nouns: “Qavnato~,—uvpno~,—uvpno~, ivso~ ovneira!” [Death,—sleep,—sleep, perhaps dreams] (Rotas, 1938). Shifted correspondences of this kind are a frequent symptom of Shakespeare translations. They offer clues to identifications, interpretations, and modifications of thought processes, and also of linguistic and cultural factors behind them—particularly if a sufficient corpus of multilanguage material is taken into consideration.

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF HAMLET TRANSLATORS REFERRED TO Translations of Hamlet are here identified by name of translator(s) and, as far as possible, year of first publication, whether separately or as part of Shakespeare’s complete or selected plays or works. No attempt has been made to record subsequent editions (revised or not) and reprints, which in many cases are numerous. Target texts not in blank verse are designated accordingly. Danish Blom, August. 1911 Foersom, Peter Thun. 1811 Lembcke, Edvard. 1873

Østerberg, Valdemar J. 1887 Sarvig, Ole. 1965

Dutch Burgersdijk, Leendert A. J. 1882 Courteaux, Willy. 1958 Jonk, Jan. 1998 Kok, Abraham. 1860 Komrij, Gerrit. 1986

Van Dam, Bastiaan Adriaan Pieter. 1924 Van Looy, Jacobus. 1907 Van Suchtelen, Nico. 1947 Voeten, Bert. 1958

French Berbrugger, Adrien (prose). 1845 Bing, Suzanne / Copeau, Jacques (prose). 1939

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Bonnefoy, Yves. 1952 Brousse, Georges (prose). 1964 Cayrou, Alcide (alexandrines). 1876 Chatelain, Chevalier de (alexandrines). 1864 Déprats, Jean-Michel. 1983 Derocquigny, Jules. 1924 Ducis, Jean-François (alexandrines). 1769 Dumas, Alexandre / Meurice, Paul (alexandrines). 1848 Gide, André (prose). 1944 Guizot, François Pierre Guillaume (prose). 1821 Hugo, François-Victor (prose). 1856–67 LaPlace, Pierre Antoine (prose). 1746 Laroche, Benjamin (prose). 1839 Le Tourneur, Pierre Félicien (prose). 1779 Lermina, Jules (prose). 1900 Maguin, François. 1995 Malaplate, Jean. 1991 Ménard, Louis (alexandrines). 1886 Messiaen, Pierre (prose). 1941 Montégut, Émile (prose). 1867 Morand, Eugène / Schwob, Marcel (prose). 1900 Pagnol, Marcel (prose). 1947 Pourtalès, Guy de (prose). 1923 Reinach, Théodore (alexandrines). 1880 Rosny, J.-H. (prose). 1909 Vercors. 1965 Vittoz, Michel. 1986 Voltaire (sample translation). 1730 German Benda, Johann Wilhelm Otto. 1826 Bodenstedt, Friedrich. 1870 Eschenburg, Johann Joachim (prose). 1777 Flatter, Richard. 1952 Fontane, Theodor (MS; published 1966). 1844 Fried, Erich. 1970 Greiner, Norbert (prose). 2005 Günther, Frank. 1988 Hagen, W. 1847 Hamburger, Maik / Dresen, Adolf. 1973 Herder, Johann Gottfried (excerpts). 1774 Heufeld, Franz (prose; stage adaptation). 1772

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Himmelstiern, R. Samson von. 1837 Jencken, F. 1834 Josten, Walter. 1930 Klein, Holger (prose). 1984 Köhler, Friedrich. 1856 Mannhart, J. B. 1830 Marbach, Oswald (adaptation). 1874 Mendelssohn, Moses (excerpts). 1771 Meyer, Joseph. 1829 Moltke, Max (based on Meyer). 1868 Müller, Heiner. 1977 Ortlepp, Ernst. 1838 Plehwe, Hermann von. 1862 Rapp, Moriz. 1843 Rothe, Hans (definitive version). 1963 Schaller, Rudolf. 1956 Schlegel, August Wilhelm. 1798 Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig (prose; stage adaptation). 1777 Schütz, Karl Julius. 1806 Seeger, Ludwig. 1867 Simrock, Karl. 1837 Steckel, Frank-Patrick. 1995 Voss, Johann Heinrich. 1827 Wieland, Christoph Martin (prose). 1766 Zeynek, Theodor von. 1952 Greek Damirale, Michael (prose). 1900 Himonas, Giorgos. 1988 Polylas, Iakovos. 1889

Rotas, Vassilis. 1938 Vikelas, Demetrios. 1882

Icelandic Jochumsson, Matthias. 1878 Italian Angeli, Diego. 1931 Carcano, Giuglio. 1875 De Sanctis, Alfredo. 1939 Errante, Vincenzo. 1946

Fandot, Raul (prose). 1915 Leoni, Michele. 1814 Lodovici, Cesare Vico (prose). 1956

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Matteucci, Luigi. 1875 Melchiori, Giorgo (based on Montale). 1977 Meo, Antonio (prose). 1974 Montale, Emilio. 1949 Monti, Giancarlo (prose). 1959 Obertello, Alfredo (prose). 1958

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Orlandi, Giuseppe (prose). 1920 Pavolini, Corrado (prose). 1951 Piccoli, Raffaello. 1927 Raponi, Goffredo. c. 1995 Rusconi, Carlo. 1826 Squarzina, Luigi (prose). 1990 Valletta, Ignazio (prose). 1839

Spanish Astrana Marín, Luis (prose). 1922 Bergua, José (prose). 1944 Blanco-White, José María (fragment). 1824 Conejero, Manuel Angel / Talens, Genaró. 1989 Custodio, Alvaro. 1968 Izquierdo, José. 1952 MacPherson, Guillermo. 1873 Martínez Sierra, Gregorio (prose). 1918 Méndez Herrera, José. 1956 Molina Foix, Vicente. 1989 Moratín, Leandro Fernández de (prose). 1798 Pujante, Angel Luis. 1994 Roviralta Borrell, José (prose). 1905 Swedish Hagberg, Carl August. 1847 Hallqvist, Britt G. 1986

Rosén, Sven. 1952 Zillacus, Clas. 1983

NOTES 1. The selection has unavoidably been codetermined by practical accessibility of the target texts. Substantial, but by no means exhaustive, multilanguage collections of Shakespeare translations are available for ready consultation in only a few specialized libraries, such as the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, or the Shakespeare Libraries in Birmingham (Public Library), Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare Centre), and Weimar (Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek). Up-to-date bibliographical guidance, however, has improved in recent years, at least as far as single-language corpora are concerned (though completeness still remains to be achieved); see, for instance, Hansjürgen Blinn and Wolf Gerhard Schmidt, Shakespeare—deutsch (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 2003); Panos Karagiorgos, “A Bibliography of Greek Translations of Shakespeare’s Plays,” in Shakespeare Studies (Thessaloniki: Kyriakidis, 1995); or the useful list of Spanish Shakespeare translations appended to

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Laura Campillo Arnaiz’s dissertation “Estudio de los elementes culturales en las obras de Shakespeare y sus traducciones al Español . . .” (Universidad de Murcia, 2005). The promising online project of a pan-European compilation initiated at the University of Basle (http://pages.unibas.ch/shine/translators.htm) is at the moment of this writing still “under construction.” Even so, comparative (i.e., multilingual) studies are a rarity. A seminal example is Dirk Delabastita’s There’s a Double Tongue: An Investigation into the Translation of Shakespeare’s Wordplay with Special Reference to “Hamlet” (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), which covers Dutch, French, and German translations and includes (347–492) an analytical anthology of Hamlet passages (the one discussed here not among them). Meanwhile it is hoped that the material accumulated here to illuminate a single detail is sufficiently representative to permit certain generalizations. 2. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englisch (Harlow, England: LangenscheidtLongman, 1995), s.v. “rub2.” 3. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), s.v. “rub noun 2.” 4. All quotations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 5. Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982), 278. 6. Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, ed. Philip Edwards, New Cambridge Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 158. 7. William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), 1705. 8. Jenny Mueller, Barron’s Simply Shakespeare (Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s, 2002). 9. John Crowther, No Fear Shakespeare (New York: Spark Publishing, 2003). 10. For a fuller account of editorial punctuation in this context, see Werner Habicht, “ ‘Schlafen! Schlafen?’: Eine Anmerkung zur Interpunktion in Shakespeare-Ausgaben und Shakespeare-Übersetzungen,” in Zur Überlieferung, Kritik und Edition alter und neuerer Texte, ed. Kurt Gärtner and Hans-Henrik Krummacher, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, 2000, no. 2 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000), 243–60. Cf. also Charles Edelman, “What Is Asking and What Is Wondering: Dramatic Punctuation in Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare: Readers, Audiences, Players, ed. R. S. White, Charles Edelman, and Christopher Wortham (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1998), 106–20.

“Bottom, thou art translated”: Translation as a Boundary and a Bridge Marta Gibinska

BEN JONSON’S VOLUBLE PRAISE OF SHAKESPEARE’S ART CONTAINS A prophetic couplet: I see thee in the Hemisphere Advanc’d, and made a Constellation there!1

Thus, Ben Jonson places Shakespeare in space without boundaries and makes his fellow playwright’s and rival’s art an object visible to all, a property of all who care to lift their eyes to see (to see is to understand). Earlier in the poem Jonson foresees Shakespeare’s triumph on “all Scenes of Europe,” where Shakespeare would come “forth to warme Our ears” (to hear is to comprehend). Ben Jonson’s enthusiasm has been shared by an increasing number of readers and spectators over the whole world who form together the enchanted Globe, this wooden O—a figure representing an all-inclusive yet boundless space for Shakespeare to enchant. However, on inspection this arduous image begs questions and raises many doubts. Indeed, “Shakespeare” seems to be the object of general and ubiquitous veneration, but what is “Shakespeare”? His work in English or in my own language? Shakespeare‘s language poses serious problems to native speakers after four hundred years, so the editors of “the Book” must explain and paraphrase—indeed, translate Shakespeare’s language. Foreigners read and see Shakespeare’s plays in translations, often unaware that the phrase “our Shakespeare” is not identical with Ben Jonson’s or Frank Kermode’s “Shakespeare”; more, that it signals division, boundaries, behind which Shakespeare is no more ours. The diachronic perspective on language (also on culture) makes us aware of differences that often form boundaries that are difficult to cross. Translation complicates the issue by divisions that may be both diachronic and synchronic. 283

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Ben Jonson’s Constellation appears, then, to many different eyes in many different shapes. The act of translation is magic and confusion. Its ostensible aim is to give us, among others, one Shakespeare, to make his art available to all, to enable his triumph on all “Scenes of Europe”—of the Earth. However, as translation studies and theories make us aware, nobody ever believes that the translated text is identical with the source text. Quince’s anguished exclamation hits the nail on the head: Bottom is Bottom, though not Bottom at all. Quince recognizes his fellow Athenian and yet knows that he is changed. This inherent difficulty is encapsulated in the word “translate”: “1a: to bear, remove, or change from one place, state, form, or appearance to another . . . 2a: to turn into one’s own or another language b: to transfer or turn from one set of symbols into another . . . c(1): to express in different terms.”2 All these definitions assume the existence of a dividing line where things, when carried across, undergo changes. What is on one side of the boundary does not equal what is on the other. Yet, things are carried across the divide to place them on the other side, to make them available there. So, translating is like building bridges in the belief that the passage to the other side makes sense. If we treat languages as space, then translating Shakespeare’s text means doing two things at the same time: to change the text and to place that text in the territory of another language. The magic and confusion of translation is the crux of all translation theories and translation studies, particularly daunting when the subject of reflection is literary translation—that is, when the act of moving things across deals with art. Translation theories and translation studies developing steadily throughout the last century have proposed to look at translation from the source text’s perspective, or to focus on the target text; they have taken for their foundation linguistic or literary theories, divided the matter to be translated into form and contents, or insisted on their indivisibility, but always worked on the assumption of some core, essence, or heart of meaning that would have to be transmitted from source text to target text; and here all, though in various ways, had to deal with the difficulty of change, transformation, otherness, as the stumbling block for the transmission of that core. Pound’s logopoeia—“the dance of the intellect among words” that “does not translate . . . but having determined the original author’s state of mind, you may or may not be able to find a derivative or an equivalent”3—draws our attention to meaning as a unique quality of the source text (I pass by his intentional fallacy) in relation to which the target text may only offer a secondhand article. To cross the

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bridge between two languages means to abandon the original logopoeia and strive to create its possible other in the target language. Equivalent or equivalence had become key terms for describing the translator’s ideal for years to come. Especially influential in this respect was the work of Eugene Nida with his distinctions of functional, formal, and dynamic equivalence.4 Although Nida used equivalence and built his theory far away from Pound, and was convinced of the translatability of the message (contents, meaning), he still suggested the inevitable difference of the target text. Equivalence, after all, presupposes difference rather than identity. Translation studies developing in the last quarter of the twentieth century articulated translation as interpretation and creation, putting stress on the target product within the target culture;5 correspondence of one-to-many in the translated text was postulated as the measure of inevitable difference if the text was to be successfully adopted in the target culture.6 Lawrence Venuti emphasizes the difference between source text and target text by destroying the myth of the translator’s invisibility and by pointing to the necessity of adopting the strategy of foreignization or defamiliarization rather than familiarization (domestication) in the target language and culture.7 After Venuti it is actually impossible to talk of fidelity of translation—a phantomlike notion, the wishful thinking of many who have busied themselves with the problem of translation. Whatever is carried across the bridge must be changed. Even-Zohar questions the idea of functional equivalence in translation,8 but Gideon Toury, his disciple, returns to it, changing it from a term denoting a hypothetical ideal to an empirical fact of the translated text. Both (though in different ways) point to the essential problem of producing the target text, understood as a cultural artifact, in a version acceptable in the receiving culture. Translation, according to Toury, is never completely acceptable in the target culture, because it always introduces elements of defamiliarization. Neither can it be entirely adequate to the source text.9 Bottom must be translated into an ass that will be accepted and understood in a language and culture other than English, so that the amazement and sense of fun expressed by the translated Quince offers meaningful action in the episode. Gentzler sums up his discussion of translation theories by stating that all of them “have made rigid distinctions between original texts and their translations, distinctions that determine subsequent claims about the nature of translation.”10 Such rigid distinctions set an interesting boundary between “original Shakespeare” and numerous “translated Shakespeares.” The language-cum-culture boundary of Englishness is like an impenetrable medieval wall except where a gate may open up onto

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a bridge let down over a moat. Mowbray understood it well: crossing the border of England as an exile he saw himself a dumb prisoner of the Other: And now my tongue’s use is to me no more Than an unstringèd viol or a harp, Or like a cunning instrument cased up, Or, being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony. Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue, Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips (Richard II, 1.3.155–61)

Fortunately, translation is not an exile, and the fate of Shakespeare’s translated text should not really be compared to poor Mowbray’s. Translators over the ages have proved to what extent foreign languages and cultures are hospitable to Shakespeare. However, before I shall attempt to discuss that hospitality (necessarily with a deconstructing slant), I would like to concentrate on the division, the boundary, that is responsible for the difference of translated Shakespeare. A good illustration is the fate of Bottom in Polish translations. Bottom as a telling name is rich in possible referents: it may denote the notoriously abused part of the body on which we sit—an excellent starting point for puns on “arse”/“ass”; it may denote “lack of understanding”—the bottom of intelligence, again leading us straight to the notion of an ass, but also, ironically, to Bottom’s great monologue in act 4, scene 1. Bottom the Weaver—the name connected with the profession—leads us to numerous explanations concerning weaver’s workshop equipment (the skein or the reel to wind the thread on). One of the best contemporary Polish translators of Shakespeare, Stanisław Baran´czak, looks critically at the Polish translation series of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in order to justify his own choice of the name.11 The earliest name that has become a very popular element of Polish Shakespeare ever since the mid-nineteenth century, Spodek, keeps the idea of a bottom part, but not of the human body. The word exists in Polish meaning “saucer”—a small plate placed under (at the bottom of) a cup. This choice is immensely restrictive and eliminates all the possible ways in which the original name functions in the text and characterizes its bearer. Nevertheless, the name became so tightly connected with the character in Polish culture (presumably on the strength of keeping an idea of “bottomness”) that a hundred years later an original and very funny translation by a very good and popular poet retains the name.12 Maciej Słomczyn´ski chose a new name, Dupek,13 which has a straightforward connection with

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the anatomical detail of the human body, suggests slight vulgarity and colloquial register (dupa in Polish is equivalent to “arse”), and is in itself a contemptuous term for a foolish and insignificant person. Theoretically the choice suggests a much better presence of Bottom in the Polish language and culture. Yet, in the general reception either in reading or in the theater, the proposition was not welcome: this version of Bottom seems badly received in the target culture, perhaps because of too heavy-handed and crude a sense of humor. Baran´czak has chosen yet another name, suggesting he has saved at least two connotations, that of “underness” and that of profession (of a tailor rather than a weaver, though), namely Podszewka—the word for lining fabric.14 Whether this name will be a successful Polish Bottom it is too early to say: many Poles would still refer to Spodek as a matter of course, while the new names have the effect of “Spodek translated.” Telling names are notorious for the problems they set in translation and are an obvious instance of the great divide between languages and cultures, both diachronically and synchronically. I propose now to look for more subtle instances of the otherness of translation. Hamlet’s outburst in reaction to Gertrud’s seemingly innocent question, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” (1.2.75), is a highly structured rhetorical piece in which rhetoric is a sure guide to interpretation and acting. Hamlet performs a complicated gesture by delivering the speech, and its significance relies on our reading of the web of repetitions and contrasts. For example (I cannot hope to go into every single detail here), it is important to see the difference between “my inky clothes” and the ensuing sequence of grief manifestations, because the latter do not bear the possessive description; along with this contrast the speech contains signals of Hamlet’s histrionic talents (which will also be amply manifested in the “antic disposition” speech at the end of act 1, scene 5). The string of lines, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief That can denote me truly. (Hamlet, 1.2.78–83)

gives the reader, but also the actor, firm guidelines: the ironic reversal of syntax from a series of negative examples to a positive assertion, and the emphatic position of the repeated “nor—no” initial syllables, followed by the examples of mourning behavior, form together iconic

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lines that in themselves contain an ironic reversal that questions the negation, and so are an invitation to act, to actually perform each line. In short, the speech by virtue of its verbal structure possesses an interesting instability whereby we observe Hamlet protesting against seeming by performing the seeming with such a gusto (notice inventio: the examples are multiplied with ease) that one may wonder whether he himself does not delight in it. One stops to think whether he has not just denoted truly himself as acting (i.e., seeming) grief. How much can a translation retain? Paszkowski, the nineteenth-century translator,15 gives up the initial repetition of “nor . . . no” and decides to translate “I know not ‘seems’ ” (Hamlet, 1.2.76) as a full line with three forms of negation in order to rely on this very strong negative verse to govern the following list of grief manifestations. In an attempt to find an equivalent for the string of negations, he places before the first instance and after the last one a ghost of repetition. In retranslation the lines are “Nothing this is—,” “—this is nothing.” He foregoes the repetition/ contrast of “my inky cloak” and “customary suits of solemn black,” retaining only the latter (Hamlet, 1.2.77–78). As a result his Hamlet is much less subtly ironic, certainly not histrionic; he gives the assembled court a serious lecture on grief. On the surface the speech might be described as “faithful” translation, but the surface is thin: underneath we see a different Hamlet performing a different act. Maciej Słomczyn´ski makes an effort to retain the initial repetition of negative words, juggling quite interestingly between ani (nor) and nie (no), but is unable to keep the original relation of syntax to verse and uses enjambement that dictates solemn cadences of rhythm to the whole speech: it is more a lament than a wry and deeply ironic monologue.16 Słomczyn´ski gives up the distinction between “my inky cloak” (emphasis addded) and “the customary suits of solemn black”: “a coat black as ink” and “gloomy and dark clothes venerated by custom” (in retranslation) do not convey the irony of ranting against mourning appearance by one who makes every attempt (judging by Gertrude’s words) to give the impression of the gloomiest looks. Stanisław Baran´czak chooses the dramatic gesture as the dominating element of Hamlet’s words.17 His version of the repetitive syntax is introduced by the verse-initial reiteration of the demonstrative pronouns Ten, Ta, Te (This, These), while negation is changed to affirmation: all “these” demonstrations of grief are appearances, are seeming; one can pretend them, play like an actor (in loose retranslation). In effect Hamlet, in Baran´czak’s words, is a deadly serious man who demonstrates by his own clothes, sighs, face, and so on, how one can play, and as a result points to his own true mourning—to

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what “passeth show.” The dramatic irony of the source text is wiped out: this Hamlet stages an unambiguous performance. In all three instances the divide between English and Polish is additionally strengthened by the translators’ individual interpretations of the character and of the action. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is split into three very different Hamlets; the relation between son and mother structured by Gertrude’s inopportune question and Hamlet’s answer is different every time. Yet, there is such a thing as boundless Shakespeare. Translation does not change everything. When laughing at Bottom’s translated looks or watching Hamlet’s protestations, we can still understand enough to be able to discuss, agree with, or disagree on the issues that the original and the translated texts offer. Part of the answer to the problem of otherness and sameness is the bridge of translation, which means access to both kinds of texts. In this perspective those who read Shakespeare in their native language only are locked within the boundaries of that language and culture: once abroad, they are lost like Mowbray. The otherness for them comprises various readings of the same text: their Hamlets and Bottoms are monolingual. Those who can follow the source text and the translated text find the boundless space stretching its horizons on both sides and offering an endless perspective. This is not to be understood as a plea to learn languages and read Shakespeare in more than one language. I would like to offer here a deconstructive view on translation that allows one to see it as the endless practice of trace playing, as the hub of revealing and concealing, and therefore constituting the boundlessness of a text.18 It is true that from the deconstructionist point of view any reading is translation, which means the difference between intra- and intertranslation is negated. But in the latter—that is, the translation into another language—the violation of the text will have to be more pronounced; the boundaries are stronger, and therefore the chance to reveal the suppressed, to increase the play of traces, is incomparably more promising. Discarding the hegemony of the source text over the target text and denying any fixed identity of the text (and we all know how many questions are posed by what we refer to as “Shakespeare’s text”), we can make every act of translation (whether intralingual or interlingual) equally valid. Every act of translation will then invite a new experience of Derridean différance, of that reflection on what is actually happening in the very act of rewriting. This, in turn, leads to constant reflection on meaning; every gesture of “naming” requires a footnote, an explanation, to retrieve what might be lost in translation either way. The notion of “sameness” (and therefore of “otherness”) has to undergo significant reformulation. What in traditional trans-

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lation theory is defined as “original” and “translation,” or “source” and “target” texts, becomes a web of chains of significations that bind the two kinds of texts into a mutually supplementing, symbiotic relationship in which nothing is fixed or understood: the continual flux of signification prevents any definitive and final meanings to be frozen in any text. I read Derrida’s “play of forms” and the “practice of this play”—that is, “a retention and protention of differences, a spacing and temporization, a play of traces”—as the position which allows us to understand the boundlessness of Shakespearean texts, or, more precisely, the boundlessness of their existence in the flux of translations.19 It allows us to understand the elusive “core” or “essence” (the “thing in itself”) as part and parcel of the inevitable process of change: only in the act of translation, by differing and deferring, it reveals itself and by revealing erases itself. Bottom in the endless process of translation will be forever the play of traces, the glittering différance. By “not being” he is the boundless presence. And the present paper is nothing else but a continuing chase to capture Bottom and Hamlet, an act of translation of English and Polish figures who, at the moment when they seem to emerge from the text, disappear, to reappear again somewhere else, in other translations. They both, in the Derridean sense, desire translation that any language can most hospitably offer them as a means to survive, to live on.20 There are no boundaries.

NOTES 1. Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of MY Beloued, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare and What He hath left us,” in The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. William Allan Nelson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1942). Introductory material from the First Folio edition (1623), unpaginated. All subsequent quotations from Shakespeare’s works are taken from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 2nd ed. Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). 2. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. “translate.” 3. Ezra Pound, “How to Read,” in Polite Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 170–71. 4. Eugene A. Nida, Towards a Science of Translating (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1964). 5. James S. Holmes, Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies; Approaches to Translation Studies 7 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988). 6. Raymond van den Broeck, “The Concept of Equivalence in Translation Theory: Some Critical Reflection,” in Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies. With a Basic Bibliography of Books on Translation Studies, ed. James S. Holmes, José Lambert, and Raymond van den Broeck (Leuven: Acco, 1978), 29–47. 7. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (London: Routledge, 1995); Venuti, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1998).

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8. Itamar Even-Zohar, “Translation Theory Today: A Call for a Transfer Theory,” Theory & Analysis of Literature & Communication, Poetics Today 2 (1981): 1–8. See also his introduction to this article. 9. Gideon Toury, In Search of a Theory of Translation (Tel Aviv: Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1980). 10. Edwin Gentzler, Contemporary Translation Theories, rev. 2nd ed, Topics in Translation 21, (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2001), 145. 11. Stanisław Baran´czak, “Trzy postscripta szekspirowskie. 2. Spodek nie z˙ yje! Niech z˙ yje Podszewka,” in Ocalone w tłumaczeniu, ed. Stanisław Baran´czak (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2004), 223–27. 12. William Shakespeare, Sen nocy letniej, trans. Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyn´ski (Warsaw: PIW, 1954). 13. William Shakespeare, Sen nocy letniej, trans. Maciej Słomczyn´ski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1982). 14. Baran´czak, “Trzy postscripta szekspirowskie,” 227. His translation of the play is William Shakespeare: Sen nocy letniej (Poznan´: “W drodze” 1992). 15. Hamlet, trans. Józef Paszkowski, in William Shakespeare: Dzieła Dramatyczne, ed. S. Helsztyn´ski, R. Jabłkowska, and A. Staniewska, 2nd ed. (Warsaw: PIW, 1964), 18. 16. William Shakespeare, Tragiczna historia Hamleta Ksie˛cia Danii, trans. Maciej Słomczyn´ski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1978), 27–29. 17. William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Ksia˛z˙ e˛ Danii, trans. Stanisław Baran´czak (Poznan´: “W drodze,” 1990), 22. 18. In my discussion I follow mainly Jacques Derrida and in particular his Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Derrida, “Sending: On Representation,” Social Research 49, no. 2 (1982): 294–326; Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference and Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165–248. 19. Derrida, Margins, 15. 20. Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” 175–89. Derrida here himself “translates” Walter Benjamin’s ideas on translation.

Hamlet across Boundaries of Language and Genre in Jacinto Benavente’s Comedy Hamlet’s Jester Jesús Tronch

MY CONTRIBUTION TO A VOLUME DISCUSSING SHAKESPEARE WITHOUT boundaries stems from my research on the presence of Hamlet in Spain, focusing on productions, translations, criticism, and literary and cultural appropriations.1 Certainly the reception and the use of a canonical dramatist in a foreign-language country entails the crossing of boundaries not only of language, as in the case of translations and more or less straight stage versions, but also of genres, as in the case of the influence or the intertextual relations in different kinds of creative writing: other dramatic genres, poems, prose narratives, critical appraisals, films, televised adaptations, or advertisements. I will focus on one specific use of Hamlet by a Spanish dramatist that crosses the boundaries of genre and language: Jacinto Benavente’s posthumous El bufón de Hamlet: Comedia en tres actos y un epílogo (Hamlet’s Jester: A Play in Three Acts and an Epilogue),2 first performed four years after the author’s death, at the opening of the Teatro Goya in Madrid on January 30, 1958.3 Jacinto Benavente (1866–1954) is one of the most significant, influential, and prolific Spanish playwrights in the twentieth century. Noted for his comedies that subtly and mildly satirize bourgeois mores with witty and realistic dialogue, Benavente was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922. He was also a theater director, cinema producer, and screenwriter. As Benavente himself acknowledged, his long dramatic career was strongly influenced by Shakespeare.4 Cuento de amor (1899) is a rewriting of Twelfth Night; his one-act comedy Los favoritos (1903) is based on an episode from Much Ado About Nothing; and the one-act La historia de Otelo (1907) has several references to the Shakespearean tragedy.5 His masterpiece and most often-staged play, Los intereses creados (1907), which has been translated as The Bonds of Interest,6 contains thematic coincidences and parallelisms with The Merchant of Venice.7 In 1911, Benavente translated King Lear. His com292

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edy La noche iluminada (1927) combines real, contemporary characters with the fantastical figures from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,8 and one of its characters, Mr. Plum, “recalls Horatio’s dictum in Hamlet.”9 Sánchez Estevan has observed that Freud and Hamlet are among the many contemporary topics at play in Literatura (1931).10 A Midsummer Night’s Dream was used again in the three-act Titania, first performed in 1945. In Cualquiera lo sabe (1935) and in La infanzona (1945), Schwartz has observed some quotations from Hamlet.11 Benavente left unfinished a translation of this tragedy,12 which inspired El bufón de Hamlet, his last play.13 As Schwartz states, “Shakespeare’s most penetrating influence [on Benavente] occurs in El bufón de Hamlet.”14 This play is a prequel to Shakespeare’s tragedy that enacts how fourteen-year-old Hamlet disrupts his uncle’s plot to seize the throne and how the latter retaliates by murdering Hamlet’s assistant, his jester Yorik. Benavente blurs the boundaries between genres, turning a tragedy into a benevolent drama with tragicomic tones. Reusing many Shakespearean ingredients, as detailed below, Benavente anticipates the antagonism between Hamlet and his uncle in a temperate struggle for power only shown at the level of personal relations among members of the Danish royal family. The ending keeps the initial status quo and leaves the situation ready for the unfolding of the familiar Shakespearean story. Generally, through the protagonist’s recurrent concerns, the play discusses the role of kingship, or rather government, denouncing the rulers’ insensitivity to the harsh reality of social inequalities; the resort to war to solve political conflicts that could be avoided if given more reflection; and moral issues such as the adults’ failure to serve as models of what they teach, especially when they lie, a topic related to the theme of deception and appearances to which El bufón de Hamlet pays continued attention, as Shakespeare did. In Benavente’s dramas, traditional morals prevail and social order is preserved,15 and the dialogue is interspersed with “advertencias y máximas educadoras” [pieces of advice and educational maxims], as he puts it himself.16 These general features are also present in his last play. In his penchant for sermonizing, Benavente makes wellintended remarks reinforcing stereotyped views of men and women in a patriarchal society and moderate rebukes at general vices.17 In one of his pieces of moralization, Benavente inserts a censure of abortion—not asked for by the situation—when Polonio states that “When one is born is not really when one comes into life” [Ni es cuando se viene al mundo cuando en realidad se nace a la vida] (721). Some of the spokesmen of Benavente’s moralizing remarks are children, thus allowing him to justify and enhance his customary

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mild critique in the guise of infantile candor. For instance, at the beginning of the play, Ofelia states that “A king can do everything. He can be very kind, make justice, punish the bad and reward the good” (711). This conventional, conservative view of authority, so bluntly voiced, is best digested and perceived as accepted truth because it comes from an innocent and trusting ten-year-old girl. Similarly, the ingenuous aura of the teenaged Hamlet makes some of his criticisms more acute. Benavente’s political conservatism is evident in the fact that the play preserves the social and political order despite the turmoil, the only victim of which is the low-class outsider: the beggarturned-court-jester Yorik, whom Hamlet has adopted out of compassion. Similarly, his conservative stance can be seen in Gertrudis and Hamlet’s discussion of poverty in which nonconflicting solutions are related to good feelings and intentions (762); and in the way in which the play focuses on the conflict between two views and attitudes toward power and kingship: Hamlet’s antibellicism and sensitivity to poverty is well intended but in fact ineffective, while Claudio’s covetousness of power and defense of war will win, if not in Benavente’s play, in the story’s continuation in Shakespeare’s tragedy. With respect to the play’s criticism of war, it is significant that El bufón de Hamlet does not voice Benavente’s earlier denunciation in 1915 that the cause of wars lies with politicians and businessmen who, behind the scenes, make money through speculation.18 Benavente’s treatment of familiar characters reveals his endorsement of conventional morality. Ofelia is the submissive, innocent girl, who has readily assumed—and also talks openly about—the role patriarchal society allots to women. A clear example is her remark that “We are women, we will be what adults want us to be” [Somos mujeres, seremos lo que quieran los mayores que seamos] (710). Polonio is the wise old counselor whose only fault is his verbosity, which Benavente reuses for comical episodes. As old age seems intrinsic to the character’s comic effect, he appears as old as Shakespeare’s Polonius, and Benavente justifies the chronological disparity through Polonio’s explanation that Laertes and Ofelia are offspring of a second wife. He adds unnecessarily that the latter is absent because she died at the birth of his daughter (737). Laertes prefigures his impetuous character and combativeness, and so does Fortimbrás, hostage at the Danish court, who appears as a young bellicose, would-be warrior who thinks highly of war and verbally anticipates his future revenging role. Claudio is the ambitious usurper who proves himself villainous not only by lying to his own brother but also by murdering the weak counterpart of his enemy: as he cannot eliminate Prince Hamlet, he kills

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his spy-jester. But Benavente tones down his villainy by depicting him as an efficient ruler (not unlike Shakespeare’s Claudius) and as a respectful, silent lover of his brother’s wife, who admirably suffers his unrequited and undeclared love. Gertrudis is shown as a faithful, loving wife and mother, piously praying for the safe return of her husband from war (719), and approving the silent attitude of an unrequited lover, since it was duty that came between him and his beloved (747). Two relatively new characters are the King and Yorik. Developing the character of the ghost in Shakespeare’s play, Benavente creates a caring husband for Gertrudis, a loving father for fourteenyear-old Hamlet, and a monarch who, despite his victory in the Norwegian wars, shares with his son a hesitating character (especially over political decisions) but contrastingly appears as a too-credulous and well-meaning personality (especially when his treacherous brother easily convinces him of his loyalty). Yorik is portrayed as a hunchbacked beggar who proves to be both loyal to Hamlet and his father, and clever: he pretends that his adaptation to court life has led him to drunkenness and gluttony while in fact it is a strategy to wheedle information about political dissension. Finally, the character of Hamlet contains both expected features and added traits. He is the melancholy, doubting, skeptical, eagerto-know, witty, and nonconforming prince who idolizes his father (“He is my God!” Hamlet exclaims [764]), and who, according to his uncle Claudio, “thinks too much without restraint and does not always keep back what he thinks” (719). He has theatrical aspirations (he states that to make people laugh is the best job in the world [716]), confesses that his own thoughts do not allow him to be happy (755), and pokes fun at Polonio (775). Yet Benavente’s Hamlet shows a sensitivity to poverty and social inequalities and some awareness of the origin of poverty that are unparalleled in Shakespeare (712, 713). The fourteen-year-old prince’s loathing of war anticipates the antimilitarist disposition of Hamlet’s “How all occasions” soliloquy (act 4, scene 4; only in the second quarto).19 Unlike the Shakespearean Hamlet’s deep indignation and bitterness toward Gertrude, Benavente’s prince simply shows a halfhearted love for his mother (759– 60); and unlike the former’s political ambition, the fourteen-year-old prince insists on his not wanting to become king (even if he is elected [736]): only the assassination of Yorik makes him want to be king in order to find out who the murderer is, to punish him and to impart justice (779). From that moment, the epilogue shows a Hamlet closer to the familiar figure: his mood has changed, his mother fears for his sanity, and he challenges his parents with obstinate mourning. Thus, Benavente ends his play with a state of affairs that perfectly matches

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the beginning of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Other additions appear with the King’s remark that his son is “so loving, there is so much sweetness and kindness in him” (739), in contrast to Claudio’s censure that he is effeminate, fainthearted, and whimsical (748). But while the father’s comments are reinforced by the play showing Hamlet as fond of his father and asking him to send Fortimbrás, who has been taken hostage, back to his country and family (733), Claudio’s complaints are merely verbal. Probably written simultaneously with his unfinished translation of Hamlet, Benavente’s play contains a good number of incidents and phrases that anticipate Shakespeare’s tragedy, and displays such a meticulous reorganization that it seems to be looking for the approving smile of the Shakespeare connoisseur who, in spite of the different language and genre, will recognize each reconstituted element. In the first scene, while the children are talking about the role of women, Hamlet suggests that a nunnery is a future possibility for Ofelia (710). In the second scene, Claudio greets Polonio’s entrance by exclaiming “You are always welcome in our presence” [Siempre eres bien llegado a nuestra presencia) (719), and Polonio in fact brings the good news of the Danish victory over Norway, which recalls Claudius’s “Thou still hast been the father of good news” (TLN 1066/ 2.2.42). The third scene has a conversation between Gertrudis and Hamlet that recalls the closet scene in act 3, scene 4, as it begins with the queen reproaching her son with the words “You have upset your uncle very much” [Muy disgustado tienes a tu tío] (724), rehashing Gertrude’s “Thou has thy father much offended” (TLN 2386/3.4.9); and “I do not want you to speak with such malice and subtlety” [No quiero que hables así, con esas malicias y sutilezas], reworking “you answer with an idle tongue.” Yet Benavente’s scene does not enact Shakespeare’s deep and intense mother-son conflict with its oedipal undertones. Gertrudis’s fear of her son, made explicit in her “You fill me with fear, Hamlet” [Me das miedo, Hamlet, me das miedo] (725), is only a response to Hamlet’s strange complaint about his ill-fated ability to see through people’s lying words. She is also scared after listening to a long speech by Hamlet that reuses phrases from the famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. After reflecting on life as compared to a theatrical performance, with the difference that players take off their costumes when they finish whereas real people only undress when going to bed, Hamlet takes on the idea of dreaming in our sleep until death induces us to “shuffle off [our] mortal coil,” and defines death as eternal sleep. But then he introduces the fear of what dreams will come, and ends up realizing that dreams are also lies and appearances (727). Benavente reshapes the Shakespearean soliloquy

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to tap into his recurrent theme of reality versus appearance. The motif of dreaming after death recurs in a conversation between Yorik and Hamlet in act 2, scene 9, when Yorik replies to Hamlet’s somber equation of silence with death (recalling the prince’s last words “The rest is silence”): Yorik disagrees by stating that death is neither rest nor silence, because we have a soul that also dreams after death (753– 54). Here Benavente responds to Shakespeare by reworking Hamlet’s meditations into a statement of Christian faith. Although his skeptical Hamlet continues the debate by saying that to die is not to sleep, and that whether we have a soul that survives after death is an enigma worth killing oneself to solve, Yorik advises him not to precipitate his journey to that “undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (TLN 1733–34/3.1.78–79), and to “rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of” (TLN 1735–36/ 3.1.80–81); to which Hamlet replies by agreeing that if to die is to sleep, “in that sleep of death what dreams may come[?]” (TLN 1720/ 3.1.65). Both Hamlet’s dislike of makeup and the famous skull motif are brought together in Gertrudis’s narrative of her son’s strange behavior when he shows a donkey’s skull to the courtiers in order to remind them of what they will become after death (749). Hamlet’s words after he has definitely decided to become a king—“I did not wish to be a ruler in order to revenge and to punish” [No quisiera yo haber mandado para vengar ni para castigar] (779)—recall Hamlet’s lament for the imposed duty “That ever I was born to set it right” (TLN 886/ 1.5.189). Precisely at this moment, Benavente introduces what may be judged as translations (as opposed to reconstitutions) of Shakespeare’s phrases: “¡Mi pobre Yorik!” [Alas, poor Yorick] [TLN 3372/ 5.1.184]) and “Algo hay podrido en Dinamarca” [Something is rotten in the state of Denmark] (TLN 678/1.4.90), spoken by Hamlet and not by Marcellus (778–79). As noted above, the play’s epilogue shows a Hamlet closer to the Shakespearean prince in his obstinacy to keep mourning. Polonio appropriates Claudius’s reminder that one’s father also lost a father and “That father lost, lost his” (TLN 271–72/1.2.89–90), and suggests that a venomous reptile may have killed Yorik (785), thus justifying the Shakespearean Ghost’s account of the “forged process” of his death as caused by a serpent (TLN 723– 24/1.5.36–37). And when Hamlet appears wearing black (785), prefiguring Shakespeare’s “inky cloak” (TLN 258/1.2.77), and the King rebukes him for seeming to show excessive grief for a jester, Hamlet retaliates with the familiar challenging “ ‘Seems?’ ” (TLN 257/ 1.2.76). But again Benavente takes the dialogue back to the theme of deceptive appearance when Hamlet says “You are right and I will

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gladly obey. What does this external mourning matter?” [Dices bien y te obedeceré gustoso. ¿Qué importa este luto exterior?], and concludes by equating appearance with “mascarada del dolor” (786), an equivalent of “the trappings and the suits of woe” (TLN 267/1.2.86). Gertrudis’s gentler approach in “yo te ruego que moderes la expresión de tu pena” [I pray you abate the expression of your grief] (786) is in tune with Gertrude’s “Good Hamlet, cast thy nightly colour off” (TLN 248/1.2.68). More anticipations are seen in motifs and incidents related to Ofelia. The monarchs comment on a future love relationship between Hamlet and Ofelia (727); and Polonio reminds her that “Kings and princes are not always lords of their heart” [Los reyes y los príncipes no son siempre dueños de su corazón] (766), synthesizing Laertes’ reminder in TLN 480–87/1.3.17–24. The queen has a special preference for Polonio’s daughter (787). Ofelia’s fondness for gathering flowers and her near-drowning accident when she tries to reach some flowers by the lake shore from the boat (752) are premonitions of Ophelia’s distribution of flowers (act 4, scene 5) and her death after clambering to hang her coronet weeds on the willow bough (act 4, scene 7). Although Horatio is absent from Benavente’s play, Hamlet anticipates his comment that Horatio is in his “heart’s core” (TLN 1924/3.2.73) when the prince is told that he will be sent to Wattemberg [sic] where Horatio is (787). His remark that there are more things than we can see, though addressed to Laertes instead of to Horatio, recalls “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in our philosophy” (TLN 863–64/1.5.166–67). Laertes expresses his wish to go traveling, especially to France; at the beginning of act 3 we learn that the new king of Norway is Fortimbrás’s uncle, who is expected to discourage Fortimbrás from attempting to wage war against Denmark when he becomes king (759); Benavente’s Danes also have a reputation for heavy drinking (761); and Hamlet and Laertes receive fencing lessons (766). Benavente does not miss the opportunity to nod at the spectator’s knowledge of the Shakespearean tragedy by relying on the dramatic irony of a number of incidents, as when Hamlet states: “I know that no tragedy will be written about me” [Yo sé que de mí nunca se escribirá una tragedia] (787). Hamlet also says “Not even my father, if dead, would come back to tell me the truth about the afterlife” [Ni el mismo padre mío si muriera volvería para decirme la verdad de la otra vida] (763). And at the end of the play, Claudio, addressing his sleeping brother, promises that “You will always have someone to watch over your life” [Siempre tendrás quien vele por tu vida] (792).

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In comparison with other Hamlet-related works in Spanish drama (listed in the appendix), Benavente’s use of the plot, list of roles, and characterization, and the borrowing, reformulation, and repurposing of incidents, motifs, and phrases make El bufón de Hamlet the closest Spanish derivative of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Taking into account that El bufón was probably written in 1954, when the eighty-seven-year-old Benavente died, and that it was his last play, one could imagine that the dramatist envisioned a “farewell to art” centered on his own identification with the role of the jester. As the dialogue specifies several times in the play, the jester has the privilege of saying whatever he likes for the merriment of the audience, even if he voices unpalatable truths. Although later critics find Benavente’s moral and social criticism rather mild, the prolific dramatist would see himself as an entertainer telling truths through mockery with his comedies. As he has Hamlet say, making people laugh is the best job in the world (716). Although Benavente silenced Yorik in El bufón by means of a violent death and had the King announce the prohibition of jesters at court in the play’s epilogue, it is Hamlet who takes up the role of jester so that truth will continue to have a speaker in society. One can imagine Benavente seeing himself as “Poor Yorik” and appropriating and re-creating Hamlet’s jester as a final declaration of his own outspokenness. That Nobel Laureate Benavente, for whom Shakespeare was a constant master, turned to Hamlet at the end of his career in his captivating identification with the jester in Yorik, and with his young prince, is an engaging instance of the power of Shakespeare’s tragedy to transcend boundaries of language and genre.

APPENDIX Here is a list of Hamlet-related works in Spanish drama other than stage versions and adaptations: Bello, José, and Luis Buñuel. Hamlet. 1927. In Teatro español de vanguardia, ed. Agustín Muñoz and Alonso Lopez, 256–71. Madrid: Castalia, 2003. Benavente, Jacinto. El bufón de Hamlet: Comedia en tres actos y un epílogo. In Jacinto Benavente: Obras Completas, 10:705–92. Madrid: Aguilar, 1958. Bergamín, José. Hamlet, solista. Dir. Ricardo Salvat. Perf. Jaime Blanch. Dido, pequeño teatro. Madrid, 1963. Camón Aznar, José María. Los fuertes. In Tragedias: El héroe; El pozo

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amarillo; El rey David; Los fuertes, 151–203. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, S.A., 1952. Conejero Dionís-Bayer, Manuel Ángel. Hamlet en el espejo. Biblioteca para el actor. Valencia: Fundación Shakespeare, 1996. English translation as: Manuel Dionís-Bayer, Hamlet in the Mirror, trans. Stephen Jennings and Manuel Ángel Conejero (Valencia: Shakespeare Foundation of Spain, 1998). Gómez de la Serna, Ramón. La bailarina. Prometeo 24 (1910): 981– 1004. Grau, Gemma. El vestido rojo: Texto dramático para seis actrices; El diario de Ofelia: Monólogo inspirado en el personaje de la obra “Hamlet” de William Shakespeare. Madrid: La Avispa, [2002]. León, Celia. Palabras para Ofelia. Perf. Perico Almagro and Alicia Grau. Casa de la Juventud, San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid). December 17, 2005. Murillo, Miguel. Sólo Hamlet solo. Mérida: De la Luna Libros, 2006. Ordóñez de Villamar, Pablo Antonio. Un nuevo Hamlet o Joven rubio, hijo de madre infectuosa. MS VC/15737/6. Biblioteca Nacional. 1979. Quiles, Eduardo. Una Ofelia sin Hamlet. Perf. Escena-1. Teatre de la Beneficiencia, Valencia. July 5, 1997. Reglero, Nina. El juego de Hamlet [The Game of Hamlet]. Valladolid, 1997. Rigola, Àlex, dir. European House (pròleg d’un Hamlet sense paraules) [European House (Preface for a “Hamlet” without Words)]. Girona, 2005. Barcelona, 2006. Saavedra, Ángel de. Desengaño de un sueño. Madrid: José Repullés, 1844. Sánchez de Castro, Francisco. Theudis, drama original, en tres actos y en verso. Madrid: Imprenta de D. Antonio Pérez Dubrull, 1878. Sassone, Felipe. El intérprete de Hamlet: Tragicomedia en cuatro actos. Madrid: R. Velasco, 1915. Tamayo y Baus, Manuel. Un drama nuevo: Drama en tres actos. 1867. This is a list of plays that I have gathered so far through searches in library catalogues, in the Spanish ISBN database, in specialized books on Spanish literature, in my reading and theatergoing experience, and in haphazard “discoveries,” and therefore does not claim to be exhaustive. Difficult as it is to distinguish categories, the list excludes stage versions, and stage adaptations advertised as Hamlet or as an imitation, adaptation, or free version of it. I am concentrating on texts that claim some literary independence from (though inspired by) Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The latter is the case with the four early versions derived from J. F. Ducis’s neoclassical adaptation (the 1772

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Hamleto attributed to Ramón de la Cruz, the undated and anonymous manuscript at the Biblioteca Menéndez Pelayo in Santander, the undated manuscripts by Antonio de Saviñón, and the 1825 Hamlet by J. M. Carnerero), Pablo Avecilla’s Hamlet, drama en cinco actos, imitación de Shakespeare (Madrid: C. González, 1856), Carlos Coello’s El príncipe Hamlet, drama trágico-fantástico en tres actos y en verso, inspirado por el “Hamlet” de Shakespeare (Madrid: Imprenta de José Rodríguez, T. Fortanet, 1872), Luis López Ballesteros and Félix González Llana’s Hamlet, príncipe de Dinamarca, refundido y adaptado a la escena española (Madrid: Imprenta de Regino Velasco, 1903), Fernando de la Milla’s El príncipe de Dinamarca, versión libérrima de Hamlet (Madrid: Prensa Moderna, 1928), and more recently Ignacio García May’s 1988 ¡Hamlet! (unpublished). The attentive reader may have noticed that in the list of Hamlet-related but independent plays I have included J. Bello and L. Buñuel’s play bearing the title Hamlet: it is a surrealist comedy, parodying artistic conceptions in tune with the authors’ avant-gardist and demystifying spirit; its only relation to Shakespeare is the name of the protagonist, the presence of a character that is the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and a few echoes.

NOTES 1. This essay is part of the Research Project FFI2009-01969 financed by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. I wish to express my gratitude to the editors of this volume for inviting me to pay homage to Professor Dieter Mehl with this contribution. 2. The text, hereafter quoted as El bufón de Hamlet, was printed in the complete works edition Jacinto Benavente, Obras Completas, 11 vols. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1950– 58). I have used the reprint in volume 10, published in 1969, 705–92. 3. Julio Mathias, Benavente (Madrid: EPESA, 1969), 135, 153. 4. Jacinto Benavente, “Recuerdos y lecturas,” in Obras Completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1969), 11:566–67. 5. Ismael Sánchez Estevan, Jacinto Benavente y su teatro: Estudio biográfico crítico (Barcelona: Ariel, 1954), 73, 130; and Kessel Schwartz, “Shakespeare’s Influence on Benavente’s Plays,” South Central Bulletin 20, no. 4 (1960): 36–37. 6. Jacinto Benavente, The Bonds of Interest, in Jacinto Benavente, Plays, trans. John Garrett Underhill (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1917); and Benavente, The Bonds of Interest / Los intereses creados, trans. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004). 7. José Manuel González, Shakespeare y la generación del 98 (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1998), 141–46. 8. Alfonso Par, Shakespeare en la literatura española, 2 vols. (Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Balmes; Barcelona: Biblioteca Balmes, 1935), 2:243. 9. Schwartz, “Shakespeare’s Influence on Benavente’s Plays,” 35. 10. Sánchez Estevan, Jacinto Benavente y su teatro, 213.

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11. Schwartz, “Shakespeare’s Influence on Benavente’s Plays,” 36. 12. Hamlet: Tragedia de Shakespeare (traducción), in Jacinto Benavente, Obras Completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1969), 10:835–917. 13. Mathias, Benavente, 135. 14. Schwartz, “Shakespeare’s Influence on Benavente’s Plays,” 37. 15. Santos Sanz Villanueva, Historia de la literatura española: El siglo XX (Literatura actual) (Barcelona: Ariel, 1984), 6.2:212. 16. Quoted from Javier Huerta Calvo, Historia del teatro español (Madrid: Gredos, 2003), 2:2272. 17. Benavente, El bufón de Hamlet, 710, 766. Subsequent page references are inserted within parentheses or square brackets in the main body of the text. 18. In his Sobremesa, quoted in Sánchez Estevan, Jacinto Benavente y su teatro, 146– 47. 19. References to Shakespeare’s Hamlet are from A Synoptic “Hamlet”: A CriticalSynoptic Edition of the Second Quarto and First Folio Texts of “Hamlet,” ed. J. Tronch-Pérez (Valencia: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Valencia; Zaragoza: SEDERI, 2002), which uses both the Through Line Number (TLN) established by Charlton Hinman in his The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile (New York: Norton and Company, 1968) and the act, scene, line references in G. B. Evans’s widely used The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

VII Boundary Crossings: “Afterlives”; or, Shakespeare without Boundaries

Hamlet’s Furniture: Shakespeare Sat Here Catherine M. S. Alexander

THIS PAPER SUGGESTS A PATHWAY, LARGELY THROUGH EIGHTEENTHcentury collections and illustrations, for the proliferation of Shakespeare that has a specific destination: a seated Shakespeare. Whether occupied (or just vacated) by Hamlet, the playwright’s best known character in the period; or by Garrick, the actor, manager, adapter, and entrepreneur synonymous with Shakespeare; or by the figure of Shakespeare himself, the chair contains the body for presentation while at the same time taking it beyond the immediate boundaries of page and stage. A couple of minutes into MGM’s 1953 film of Kiss Me Kate (dir. George Sidney) “Fred Graham” (Howard Keel), wishing to establish his credentials as a serious classical actor, points to a large portrait on the wall that clearly shows him performing Hamlet: he is dressed in black, wears tights, and occupies an x-framed coffer-maker’s chair that film buffs will recognize from Olivier’s film of Hamlet and theater historians may associate with Hamlets from Edwin Booth and Henry Irving to Donald Wolfit in 1937. Art specialists might spot that this chair design features in the portrait of the 1604 Somerset House Conference, and furniture historians will note the Gothic influence triggered by Pugin’s designs from the 1830s and, particularly, for the Palace of Westminster in 1847. In this specific circumstance—the film adaptation of Shrew, the role(s), the pose, and the chair (with or without its scholarly accretions)—the seated figure in the portrait communicates, in popular and elite cultures, Shakespeare. Hamlet may be sitting here but so, in this context of striving for cultural status, is William. In the early nineteenth century Mary Hornby, the custodian of the Birthplace, displayed Shakespeare’s chair among other relics including his tobacco box; Anne Hathaway’s Cottage claimed Shakespeare’s courting chair (and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford repurchased it at Christies a few years ago); and a Bidford inn boasted 305

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the chair in which Shakespeare drank, apparently excessively. In 2001 the trust also purchased a portrait of Shakespeare by Richard Westall, dated 1825, in which Shakespeare is seated, fairly conventionally, between Thalia and Melpomene, the Muses of comedy and tragedy. The unexpected feature, to the modern eye, is the dominance of a decidedly domestic upholstered armchair in which a youthful Shakespeare lounges, one leg casually pressed against an arm. One of the oddest references to Shakespeare’s chair is in John Williams’s late eighteenth-century verse, “The Old Arm-Chair: An Ode” that contains the following stanza, which a note informs the reader is “Alluding to Shakespeare’s arm-chair shewn at Stratford upon Avon”: Inclos’d by thee, the Drama’s sire, Vast Shakespeare smote the silver lyre, As Nature triumph’d round; E’en angels left their bright abodes. And downward cleav’d thro’ liquid roads To listen to the sound.1

So this is an armchair that is elevated because it once contained Shakespeare, yet it also breaks out of the enclosure (in part because of its strange punctuation) to become the playwright’s parent: a fanciful speculation that is the corporeal equivalent of the common, metaphorical “nature” as the source of his genius. Equally fanciful is the composition of Thomas Banks’s 1789 sculpture (now in New Place Gardens in Stratford) that seats Shakespeare precariously on a rock (copying the pose of the figure of Dawn in Michelangelo’s tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici) between the standing figures of the Dramatic Muse and the bare-breasted Genius of Painting who is gesturing to him “as the proper Subject for her pencil.” As subsequently engraved by Benjamin Smith and published in 1796 the illustration became well known as the image at the front of the collected prints of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. This paper will argue that a seated Shakespeare, in legend, painting, stone, film, or print, is less an odd byway or aberration of bardolatry or biography and more the end product of processing and proliferation, that I outline below, that determined the dominant features of English cultural life and took the playwright beyond the boundaries of page and stage.

I Specifically I am referring to the relentless categorizing and the application or imposition of systems and patterns on the past and pres-

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ent that was undertaken by practitioners, commentators, critics, and entrepreneurs throughout the long eighteenth century to construct, in Ashfield and de Bolla’s term, “the topography of modernity.”2 The urge to classify made the period the age of the literary collection, compilation or history, the biography and bibliography, the aesthetic philosophy, the lexicon, the guidebook, the catalogue, and the manual. Painting and handwriting, painters and poets, acting and elocution, architecture and antiquities, landscape, gardening, playwrights and plays, language and rhetoric, letters, jokes, poetry and, to a lesser extent, music (all that area of activity that was once and for many years subsequently called “culture”) were subject to assembly, scrutiny, and analysis as they were read for meaning and had meanings and associations imposed upon them. The desire to control rapidly expanding spheres of knowledge and experience by defining realms of meaning (creating an eighteenth-century search engine) required a quantifiable context of time and space—a geography or history— that could be charted and provide opportunities for demonstrating comparison and progression. Such an approach offered reassurance of the present as well as offering a reading of the past and became a tool to explain, to educate, and to influence. Or, as Thomas Warton put it, in the preface to his History of English Poetry: “In an age advanced to the highest degree of refinement, that species of curiosity commences, which is busied in contemplating the progress of social life, in displaying the gradations of science, and in tracing the transitions from barbarism to civility.”3 Many of the great accretions of antiquities, manuscripts, curios, art, and artifacts that subsequently formed the basis of great national collections (such as those of Edward Harley, the second Earl of Oxford, which preserved the manuscript of The Play of Sir Thomas More; Sir Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham, who created the physical, politicized taxonomy of Stowe Gardens; Sir Hans Sloane; and the library of George III, which included Charles II’s copy of the third folio) were sustained and supported by significant personal wealth. Others were acquired through prestige and prominence (David Garrick’s collection of 1300 early English plays, for example, that has been so valuable to subsequent bibliographers and editors), and printed catalogues and commentaries (by Samuel Johnson, William Oldys, and Horace Walpole, for example) made them available to a broader audience and, through implicit interpretation and contextualizing, extended their reach and significance. It was an extension into the cultural domain of the work of Linnaeus in botany that itself had generated the fashion for concrete collections of the natural world such as fossils and minerals. His system of codification, with a

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standardized language, which determined the placement of every known animal and plant within an assigned species, genus, order, and class, clearly influenced the form of some literary schemas. Warburton’s division of Shakespeare’s plays into eight classes and his indices of characters, sentiments, speeches, and images (volumes 1 and 8 of his 1747 edition of The Works of Shakespear), for example, reflect the Linnaean method. Indeed, the two traditional taxonomies of science had distinct parallels in the arts, particularly after 1759 when the Miscellaneous Tracts of Benjamin Stillingfleet (best known now for his commentary on Milton, his work on harmony in music, and his membership of the Blue-Stocking circle) gave wider prominence to the Linnaean system. Firstly, the traditional, classical form is concerned with description, naming, and classification on the basis of morphology; and secondly, the experimental form analyzes patterns to determine evolution, interrelationships, and the role of environmental influences in their formation. These two models equate with the dominant impulses of the cultural taxonomies. The first impulse was to define and quantify the product and its producer as is seen in works as diverse as Horace Walpole’s Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England (1759) and his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762–80). The latter was the first systematic account of British art based on the late George Vertue’s notebooks, which also contained a chapter on modern gardening and which was subsequently extended by Edward Edwards’s Anecdotes of Painters, and his Catalogue of Engravers in England (1765). It is evident, too, in Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1777), the expanding introductory material of the collected works of Shakespeare, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s Descriptions of the Antiquities in the Province of Attica (1761), Sheridan’s Discourse . . . on Elocution and the English Language (1759), and the mundane collection of jokes in Joe Miller’s Jests (1739). It was much of this area of activity that led to the commodification of culture through the creation of categories. The second impulse, to determine the source or origin, is evident in descriptive evolutions, theories, and histories of the stage, music, and poetry, the introductory material to Dodsley’s A Select Collection of Old Plays (1744), George Steevens’s 1766 collection Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare, Being the whole number printed in quarto during his lifetime, or the ballad collections of Thomas Evans, Allan Ramsay, David Herd, or Thomas Percy (who printed the origins of the songs in Othello, for example), purporting to illustrate the origins of English and Scottish verse and popular tales from the late 1720s. The nature of the material being explored added two important strands to the methods adopted from science, and were themselves

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subjected to a scientific, quantifiable approach: the attempt to explain and measure the response to the “thing” or “object” (I am resisting the use of the word “art form” here), and the endeavor to establish a rationale of taste and determine a basis for its gradations. This quest took a range of forms. Walpole’s practical approach was the creation of a short-lived Committee of Taste, comprising himself, John Chute, and Richard Bentley, to determine standards of architecture and decoration in the Gothic style. In addition to the more enduring and influential works by Hogarth (The Analysis of Beauty Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste, 1753), Burke (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757), and Hume’s Treatises (1739–40), such ideas were frequently the subject of minor verse histories, explored, for example, by Mark Akenside in “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” Hugh Downman in “On Genius,” Samuel Whyte’s “The Theatre,” or John Cunningham’s “Ode to Taste.” Charles Churchill’s The Rosciad of 1761 is, in effect, a verse taxonomy of actors and acting. In this extended satire, concerned with definition, description, and measurement, Shakespeare and Johnson judge the candidates for Roscius’ vacant chair. Each actor is assessed and Shakespeare declares Garrick the winner. A few years later Hugh Downman, in The Drama (published 1775), extends Churchill’s idea but begins with Garrick, considers his contemporaries, and also employs the same critical processes with actresses. This is evidence, of course, that areas of knowledge had not yet acquired discrete vocabularies, and there is an elision of method and material that is most obvious, perhaps, in Erasmus Darwin’s long narrative poem “The Botanic Garden,” which sought to integrate contemporary science and a classical worldview by incorporating Linnaeus’s botanical system into a natural history instigated and dominated by ancient figures. Thus, sections of the first part, “The Economy of Vegetation,” deal with the descent of the Goddess of Botany, her reception by Spring and the Elements, and her address to the Nymphs of Fire, before moving to the application of steam engines and Franklin’s early work with electricity. This incongruous and anachronistic schema is delivered in Pope-like heroic couplets. The humor that we may see in such an endeavor is a reminder not to assume that classification or analysis was always a high-minded or serious activity (although Darwin’s was) concerned with the pursuit of truth or the definition of beauty: there are streaks of knowing playfulness and intellectual gamesmanship, clapperclawing, and plenty of evidence of authorial rivalries pursued with varying degrees of good will. There is evidence too of commercial motivation, with the consideration of product placement, promotion, and sales determining the form and content

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of classifications. Plagiarism and sharp practice exist in cultural taxonomies as diverse as collections of Shakespeare—spurious editions of poems and false volumes of the major editions—and guidebooks such as that for Stowe Gardens (where Shakespeare is categorized and placed in the landscape feature created by busts of “British Worthies”), which appropriated narrative and illustrations from earlier works. So I am suggesting that out of the taxonomic impulses and the methods employed (which I have briefly sketched here) evolved four broad aims or activities: to describe and name, to establish an evolutionary process, to define beauty, and to determine taste. And within these aims different emphases determined the contents, function, and style—the characteristics—of cultural taxonomies. Thus, the aesthetic analyses of Hogarth, Burke, and Hume used subjective observation to examine effect while the critical systematizing of poetry by Kames and Newbery (both of 1762) was underpinned by the application of moral principles. Anthropological curiosity informed Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry, and he clearly intended it to instruct others. The search for a measurable verisimilitude and mimetic repetition pervades acting manuals and architectural commentaries, while competitive presentational devices influenced the production of some collections and guides. While criteria, form, and method coexisted with varying degrees of compatibility, comfort, and intellectual credibility, the analyses nonetheless share some characteristics and generated a number of discernible constants: a strong sense of audience awareness pervades much of the literature, with knowledge and systems prepared or packaged specifically for the young, the aspiring, the novice, and the specialist. Thus, John Newbery’s The Art of Poetry on a New Plan of 1762 was intended for “young Gentlemen and Ladies,” and he addresses the “young Pupil” directly;4 and Stockdale’s one-volume Edition of Shakspeare of 1784 was prepared for “[m]any of the middling and lower ranks of the inhabitants of this country [who] are either not acquainted with him at all, excepting by name, or have only seen a few of his plays, which have accidentally fallen in their way.”5 The intended audience dictated the written style, and a noticeable feature of taxonomies is their accessibility. In part this is also the product of the reductive simplicity that is integral to the form: opportunities for discursiveness or complexity are restricted. The absence of sophisticated or exclusive vocabularies reinforces the availability of these texts, and examples, allusions, and comparisons used for explication are drawn from well-known literary passages—plays and poems—or borrowed from another art form. Such linguistic crossover is obvious

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in Darwin’s “Botanic Garden” but is evident to a lesser extent in a host of other material. Thus, William Gilpin, in his attempt to explain the picturesque effect of castles and ruins in his Tour of the Lakes concluded his description of the abandoned Scaleby Castle with a well-known allusion to a Shakespeare play that added color and atmosphere: “Shakespeare’s castle of Macbeth could not have been more the haunt of swallows and martins than this.”6 A better-known example would be Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711), which conforms to the four taxonomical aims in its attempts to define and establish the rules of criticism, and draws its language, precepts, and illustrations particularly widely, from music, sculpture, poetry, literature, painting, and architecture in addition to allusions to religion, nature, and classical culture. The concern with measurement required the use of yardsticks, and while some cultural discourses, like Pope’s, made use of the old rules and the classical models for their judgments (the unities in drama, Palladio or Vitruvius in architecture, Longinus in aesthetics, Greek proportion in representational art, and the epic in poetry, for example), others were engaged in the creation of new rubrics, often defined in opposition to the classics or continental practice, that would accommodate English style. Thomas Whately’s unfinished Remarks on Some of the Characters in Shakespeare (1785), for example, one of the earliest works devoted solely to character criticism (although his ideas were foreshadowed by Lewis Theobald in The Censor in 1717), takes as its starting point the need to define new rules for drama that will accommodate and judge, in a way that the classical precepts of fable and plot will not, “the truth and force of the imitation” of character and will thus admit Shakespeare, who “however faulty in some respects, is in this, the most essential part of the drama, considered as a representation, excellent beyond comparison.”7 Written shortly after Whately’s Remarks, although preceding its publication, Thomas Hawkins’s The Origins of the English Drama (1773) attempted a similar accommodation with classical rules in order to elevate Shakespeare. Dismissing the need to debate the origin of modern drama in Europe, ostensibly because the arguments were well rehearsed elsewhere but in practice sidestepping the need to credit France or Italy, he asserted: [I]t will be sufficient for our purpose to contend that it was a Distinct Species of itself and not a Revival of the ANCIENT DRAMA, with which it cannot be compared and must never be confounded. If this point is clearly proved we shall place our admirable SHAKESPEARE beyond the reach of Criticism, by considering him as the poet who brought the drama of the Moderns to its highest perfection, and by dispensing with his obedience

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to the RULES of the ANCIENTS, which probably he did not know, but certainly did not mean to follow.8

Similarly Hogarth, searching for the cause as well as the effect of aesthetic truth, defined his six quantifiable principles of grace and beauty and promoted his serpentine line—the key to his Analysis of Beauty— through overt condemnation of the French school and the continental masters. Thus, Rubens is criticized for his “swellings,” Dürer for his “impracticable rules of proportion,” and Raphael for his “ridiculous excess.”9 It is evident from those disparate examples of the creation of new canons that classification acquired a strongly nationalistic stance regardless of whether or not the product was of domestic origin. In addition to British history and geography, other features and qualities such as national climate, religion, diet, sexual behavior, dress, character, government, and politics functioned as a causal explanation and as a form of definition of culture providing both a framework and a principle for determining worth. The variables of environment or context are used to account for and award value rather than the rigidities of alien precepts, which often precluded such commendations. “English taste” wrote Oliver Goldsmith in 1759, “like English liberty, should be restrained only by laws of its own promoting,” and criticism must “understand the nature of the climate and country &c., before it gives rules to direct Taste. In other words, every country should have a national system of criticism.”10 That is a telling analogy with English liberty and one of the strongest impulses of the eighteenth-century taxonomic form: to make culture part of a political discourse that defends and affirms the structures of an evolving and expanding nation-state and that makes engagement with domestic culture an imperative as important as national defense. And a prominent constant of this pervading chauvinism, this insistently domestic aesthetic, is the fabrication of a national heritage achieved through a manipulation of history that provides an appropriate pedigree—that taxonomic urge to locate the source or origin—and becomes an important mechanism not only to validate and authenticate what was old or traditional in English arts but also to give greater credence to the new or, at least, an aspiring, sophisticated present. The demonstration of progression from an earlier domestic model, however tortuously achieved, was a tool to incorporate the novel and relied on readings of the past as ignorant, savage, or unenlightened. This is an ambivalent, even paradoxical, relationship with the past because it enables two positions—the elevation of the old and new—to be celebrated and sustained. And it was not the only ambivalence, as is demonstrated in Samuel Foote’s Taste, his two-act comedy of 1752,

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which attacked the pretensions of aspiring, ignorant art connoisseurs and exploited the growth of collecting and the tensions between English and European art (and artists) and appreciation of the past and present. Lady Pentweazle sits for a portrait by Carmine, whose main business is faking old masters to be sold by his friend, the antique dealer Puff. In the second act Lord Dupe and Novice are conned into purchasing such works, and the imposters, disguised as art critics, are discovered and exposed by Lady Pentweazle. Carmine and Puff survive, however, because Dupe and Novice would rather part with their cash than with their reputation as judges of art. David Garrick wrote and delivered the prologue, in character as Peter Puff, and stressed the growing cultural tensions: Before this court, I PETER PUFF appear, A Briton born, and bred an Auctioneer; Who for myself, and eke a hundred others, My useful, honest, learned bawling Brothers, With much Humility and Fear implore ye, To lay our present desp’rate Case before ye.— . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why laugh at TASTE? It is a harmless Fashion, And quite subdues each detrimental Passion; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . All Artists are encourage’d—but our own. Be not deceiv’d, I here declare an Oath, I never yet sold Goods of foreign growth: Ne’er sent Commissions out to Greece or Rome; My best Antiquities are made at Home. I’ve Romans, Greeks, Italians near at hand, True Britons all—and living in the Strand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . But hush— Should it be known that English are employ’d, Our Manufacture is at once destroy’d; No matter what our Countrymen deserve, They’ll thrive as Ancients, but as Moderns starve If we should fall—to you it will be owing; Farewell to Arts—they’re going, going, going; The fatal Hammer’s in your Hand, oh Town! Then let Us up—and knock the POET down.11

II What I have been discussing so far are the characteristics of the eighteenth-century taxonomic urge that through repetition, reinforce-

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ment, and proliferation become the determinants of approved elements of national life. I am suggesting that they evolve into cultural values that in turn define those things to which are accorded cultural value or worth. And it is out of this process and its subsequent nineteenth-century affirmations drawing on the established values and value that “Shakespeare” (whatever we may mean by that word) achieves or acquires significance. The process creates the product. His work itself is clearly the subject of processing: as early as 1714 the second edition of Rowe catalogued and quantified Shakespeare’s text by including a table of “the most Sublime Passages,” and I have already alluded to Warburton’s edition (1747), which quantified and qualified the canon of “our Author’s Dramatick Works, by dividing them into four Classes, and so giving an estimate of each Play reduced to its proper Class.”12 Perhaps the most important Shakespeare taxonomy of the period (and one that has received far less critical attention than the editions) is William Dodd’s The Beauties of Shakespear: Regularly Selected from each Play with a General Index Digesting them under Proper Heads (1752 and expanded in the second edition of 1757). It is a remarkable work, in the Longinian tradition, like Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry and other taxonomies that are concerned with the sublime, as is evident from the explanatory “Preface” that discusses editorial method and draws the reader’s attention to experience, asserting that “the most infallible test of the true Sublime is the impression a performance makes upon our minds, when read or recited.”13 And Dodd proceeds, play by play and scene by scene, to identify “Beauties,” making comparisons between the plays and with classic and modern authors and striving, as he put it, to keep himself “clear as possible from the dangerous shelves of prejudice” and “to the utmost to maintain an exact and becoming candor all thro’ the work.”14 Identifying the “beauties” in this way was a remarkable taxonomic achievement that did much to propagate and make familiar portions of Shakespeare’s text and facilitate their use in other taxonomies. As “Shakespeare” acquires status or validation and familiarity through taxonomic processing, so he/it becomes a reference point, a descriptor for other domains, and, through use as a taxonomic tool, is reaffirmed and reinforced. “Shakespeare” is not the subject of the three major taxonomic works of the midcentury but is prominently employed for explication, example, and allusion. Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 is the best known and makes extensive use of Shakespeare, more than any other quoted author, for lexicographical identification and definition. The subject matter of Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty of 1753 extends beyond painting to other visual domains, and his de-

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scriptors or categories—fitness, variety (quoting Cleopatra’s “infinite variety”), line, composition, coloring, and so on—is developed in the final chapter, “Of Action,” to other forms including bowing and curtseying. The latter is illustrated, once again, with an Antony and Cleopatra reference: Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra’s waiting women —“And made their bends adornings.”15 He writes of dance, too, where the rise and fall of a minuet is glossed with Florizel’s lines to Perdita from Winter’s Tale: What you do, Still betters what is done,— —When you do dance, I wish you A wave o’th’ sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, And own no other function.16

He concludes with observations on acting, reinforcing his argument about variety with a nod to Hamlet: “[A]s plain space makes a considerable part of beauty in form, so cessation of movement in acting is as absolutely necessary; and in my opinion much wanted on most stages, to relieve the eye from what Shakespear calls, continually sawing the air.”17 Hogarth was writing “with a view of fixing the fluctuating Ideas of Taste” (four years before Foote’s comic take on the matter) and there is a similar endeavor in Joshua Reynolds’s seventh Discourse, “Delivered to the Students of The Royal Academy, on the Distribution of the Prizes, December 10, 1776.” He insists that the artist must be literate and learned, and he encourages reading and conversation, whose “desired and legitimate offspring is a power of distinguishing right from wrong; which power applied to works of art, is denominated Taste.”18 His subsequent exploration of taste and its constituents uses, like Hogarth, the language of Hamlet to the players encouraging temperance and holding the “mirror up to nature” to warn against perplexing or distracting the eye through confusion or an unharmonious use of color.19 While Reynolds is critical of Hogarth’s art and ignores the Analysis entirely, the third important midcentury work, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1757, acknowledges its debt to Hogarth (in section 15 on “Gradual Variation”) and, like the Analysis, employs Shakespeare as an exemplar. Burke quotes eleven lines from 1 Henry IV, for example, to illustrate the “richness and profusion of images, in which the mind is so dazzled as to make it impossible to attend to that exact coherence and agreement of the allusions, which we should require on other occasion” that he believed char-

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acterizes “Magnificence” as a source of the sublime, and elsewhere he makes use of Merchant and Winter’s Tale.20

III As Shakespeare is being subjected to pervasive cultural processing and employed as an illustrative tool in literary and aesthetic text taxonomies that take him beyond the common boundaries of a dramatist, a parallel visual development takes place. Part of the taxonomic process—and frequently its product—was illustration, and the visual and the textual informed each other. The same impulses that created the categories, catalogues, and collections propelled both printed and visual records of cultural values and worth, and jointly recorded, reinforced, replicated, and celebrated English achievements: engravings, and the growth of their enabling technologies, were the obvious means to record and inform. The illustrative focus, particularly in taxonomies of literature and history that defined the past, was on the heads of heroes (note the head of Shakespeare that, copying the Folio format if not the Droeshout prototype, accompanied eighteenth-century editions), but other aspects of the figure, the posture, and gesture of actors, say, or the emblematic portrait of the practitioner came to characterize the celebrity, the English subject (whether the taxonomer or the taxonomee)—who was given a physical reality and a permanent record in a distinctive new style of portraiture. In a shift from the grand manner that was typical of portraits of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, where the rich and powerful stood commandingly, often in a classical landscape, these new national heroes are presented in a more intimate setting. There are clearly two indicators of intellectual, homegrown achievement: seating the subject in a determinedly English domestic setting; and the use of properties (books, manuscripts, plans) to draw attention to the nature of the activity that is being celebrated. Such style is evident, for example, in the portraits of Jacob Tonson (Kneller, 1717), Hans Sloane (Slaughter, 1736), Horace Walpole (Eccardt, 1754), Samuel Johnson (Reynolds, 1756), and Benjamin Stillingfleet (Zoffany, 1761), and in each case the seated subject holds a palpable sign of his achievement—botanical drawings, books, or papers. The chair functions as a reverse of these synecdochal signifiers: in enclosing the figure it becomes the container of the brilliant mind, and so it is partly through the developing conventions of domestic/English art, particularly portraiture, that the

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significance of a seated Shakespeare, as in Westall’s picture, acquires its potency and cultural value. In one sense, of course, such use of a chair may be analogous to a throne or a judgment seat and this was certainly the case with the seated figure of Shakespeare as both an adjudicator and a monarch in Churchill’s Rosciad: In the first seat, in robe of various dyes, A noble wildness flashing from his eyes, Sat Shakespeare.—In one hand a wand he bore, For mighty wonders famed in days of yore; The other held a globe, which to his will Obedient turn’d, and own’d the master’s skill.21

And at the end of the competition to find the greatest actor, “great Shakespeare thus decreed”: “Garrick! take the chair, / Nor quit it— till thou place an equal there.”22 The “taking” took visual form in Hogarth’s double portrait of David Garrick and his wife, the dancer Eva-Maria Veigel, of 1757. If one of the many anecdotes that accrued to his life can be believed, Garrick was firmly associated with chairs in the public, theatergoing mind because of the mechanical device he employed in the Hamlet closet scene that enabled a chair to fall, as if of its own volition, when he started at the sudden appearance of his father’s ghost,23 replicating the Rowe illustration. In Hogarth’s portrait Garrick is occupying an English chair, designed by Hogarth and with the additional cultural capital of being crafted from wood supposedly of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, and his emblems associate him further with the interest in cultural value: he has a quill in his right hand and is captured in mid-composition. The manuscript on the desk in front of him shows the first lines for his prologue to Samuel Foote’s Taste. Garrick is also a stand-in (sit-in?) here for his mentor Shakespeare and acts as the amanuensis for the missing author, a role that in illustration is filled, increasingly, by Hamlet. Hamlet becomes the understudy, and it is the Hamlet chair, occupied or vacant, that is the reminder of the creator. The specific chair/throne/Shakespeare association, initiated by Churchill’s verse, was later exploited by George Cruikshank, playing again with a Hamlet link, in his cartoon “Reflection: To be or not to be.” Published on February 11, 1820, three days before George III’s funeral, it shows the Prince Regent’s joy at becoming George IV at last tempered when he looks in the mirror and realizes that his estranged wife, Caroline, will become Queen Consort. He is trying on

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the crown, and a rejected coronet with Prince of Wales feathers lies on the floor. The chair in this case is decorated with the motto of the Order of the Garter: “Honi soit qui mal y pense.” The use of text in the cartoon title is a reminder that the strong association between character and author was established not simply through performance and editions but through the proliferation of portions of text. Hamlet was the most popular source for parody with “To be or not to be” providing the rhetorical impetus not only for Cruikshank but for Samuel Badcock’s “Presbyterian Parson’s Soliloquy” of 1744 (“To conform or not conform”); “To wed or not to wed” (the anonymous “Batchelor’s Soliloquy,” in the Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1744); Thomas Cooke’s similar “To marry or live single” of 1756; Garrick’s prologue to Eugenia (1752), promoting the adaptation of the French play (“To dam, or not—that is the question now”); and Richard Jago’s debate about the wisdom of publishing his work, “To print or not to print.” But it was the use of the phrase “He was a man. Take him for all in all. / I shall not look upon his like again” (Hamlet, 1.2.87–88) that established the strongest link between dead author and Hamlet. The phrase was often employed on the death of actors (the anonymous “Elegy on the Death of Mr Powell,” for example) and most frequently used at the death of David Garrick. Samuel Pratt’s “The Shadows of Shakespeare: A Monody, in Irregular Verse, Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Garrick” has the shade of Hamlet visit Garrick’s grave to deliver nine lines that conclude “We may not look upon his like again,”24 and William Combe’s “A Tour in Search of the Picturesque” commemorates Garrick in its twenty-third canto: Of Garrick’s self e’en nought remains; His art and him one grave contains: In others’ minds to make him live Is all remembrance now can give. All we can say—alas! how vain “We ne’er shall see his like again.”25

It was Garrick who had applied the phrase to Shakespeare himself at the conclusion of his great “Ode to Shakespeare” at the Jubilee in 1769 and subsequently as the inscription on the pedestal of the statue of Shakespeare that he presented to Stratford and that is now in a niche on the Town Hall wall. While the association between author and character was developed textually, the association between character and chair was visual. The first systematic illustration of Shakespeare’s work occurred in a taxonomic work, Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of the Collected Works,

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and the Hamlet picture was by far the most influential. The much reproduced image of the so-called Closet Scene (an alarmed, seated Gertrude, a wigged and rather portly standing Hamlet—often identified, but with no evidence, as Betterton—and an armored ghost appearing through the wall to the right) includes two English chairs, perhaps a pair, probably of walnut, and showing the significant Restoration style change (the height of the chair back from the ground is about three times the height of the seat). Usually such chairs were for decoration only—a pair might stand either side of a door—but here they are clearly for sitting on and, in the context of this moment of Hamlet, a way of indicating surprise and, in this setting, status. They are probably covered in silk, and the legs, which are plain when a cabriole style might have been expected, have the typical large pads or front feet that were common from the 1690s onward. The overturned chair in Rowe is significant, because it identifies in frozen form a moment of action. Other illustrations in Rowe include furniture and some contain chairs, but none have the endurance or become so firmly associated with character—and subsequently author —as the Hamlet chair. Hogarth exploits the “freeze frame” potential of the overturned chair in a Hamlet-like way in After the Marriage, the second picture in his 1743 sequence Marriage à la Mode, in the same period that he was innovating, along with Francis Hayman, stage pictures and portraits. That he was using the conventions of a play in these series paintings is apparent in a comment in his Autobiographical Notes: “[O]ccular demo[n]stration will convince man and [word illegible] sooner than ten thousand Vols. . . . [L]et figure be consider as Actors dresed for the sublime genteel comedy or same in high or low life.”26 Hayman himself employed the chair in his painting of the Hamlet Play Scene of 1745, shortly after working on the illustrations of Hanmer’s edition of Shakespeare and decorating the supper boxes in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens with Shakespearean scenes and completing his commission for the Prince of Wales Pavilion in Vauxhall (including a lost play scene in Hamlet). In the surviving picture, which may be a preliminary work for Vauxhall but which is also similar to the Hanmer Hamlet, the chair has clearly just been vacated by Claudius, rising in consternation at the representation of the poisoning of old Hamlet that is being enacted by the Players in the left of the composition. Once again the chair is significant in a freezeframe moment of alarm. About ten years later Hayman also painted the Closet Scene (possibly showing Garrick’s rival Spranger Barry as Hamlet and Mary Elman as Gertrude) replicating the Rowe moment and using two chairs to indicate the shock and surprise of both characters: one chair is hastily vacated by Gertrude, the other is over-

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turned. The same conventions were employed in the mid-1770s in James Roberts’s painting of the same scene, possibly showing the performances of William Smith, who took over the role as Hamlet on Garrick’s retirement, and Elizabeth Hopkins as Gertrude. In 1777 John Henderson replaced Smith at Drury Lane and is credited with ending the use of the mechanical device to overturn the chair.27 While stage practice may have changed, the visual association between Hamlet and chairs endured, with a style change from Baroque to mock Gothic that accommodated Edwin Booth, Olivier, and even “Fred Graham,” and the association between Hamlet and author was reinforced textually. What I have been sketching here is an outline of a cultural process that contributed to the proliferation of Shakespeare, creating a product beyond the boundaries of page and stage, in which a chair—occupied, vacant, or even overturned—signifies the author. Shakespeare sat here.

NOTES 1. John Williams, Poems by Anthony Pasquin, 2 vols. (London: J. Strahan, 1789), 1:66. 2. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader in British EighteenthCentury Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1. 3. Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, 3 vols. (London: J. Dodsley, 1775– 81), 1:n.p. 4. John Newbery, The Art of Poetry on a New Plan: Illustrated with a Great Variety of Examples from the Best Authors, 2 vols. (London: J. Newbery, 1762), 1:vii. 5. William Shakespeare, Stockdale’s Edition of Shakspeare: Including, in One Volume, the Whole of His Dramatic Works . . ., ed. John Stockdale (London: John Stockdale, 1784), A2. 6. Paul Carl Barbier, William Gilpin: His Drawings, Teaching and Theory of the Picturesque (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 161. 7. Thomas Whately, Remarks on Some of the Characters in Shakespeare (Oxford: Parker, 1808), 7–8. 8. Thomas Hawkins, The Origin of the English Drama (Oxford, 1773), in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers, 6 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 552. 9. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste (London: J. Reeves, 1753), ix. 10. Oliver Goldsmith, An Enquiry Into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (London: n.p., 1759), 90, 95. 11. David Garrick, “Prologue,” in Samuel Foote, The Dramatic Works of Samuel Foote, vol. 1 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1809), x–xi. 12. William Shakespeare, The Works of Shakespear . . . , ed. William Warburton, 8 vols. (London: J. and P. Knapton and others, 1747), 1:n.p.

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13. William Dodd, The Beauties of Shakespear, 2 vols. (London: T. Waller, 1757), 1:xvi. 14. Ibid., 1:x–xiv. 15. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, 146. 16. Ibid., 147. 17. Ibid., 152. 18. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 118. 19. Ibid., 126. 20. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 72, 112, 20. 21. Charles Churchill, “The Rosciad,” in Poems of Charles Churchill, ed. James Laver, 2 vols. (London: King’s Printers, 1933), 1:13. 22. Ibid., 47. 23. John William Cole, The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, F. S. A. (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), 282. 24. Samuel Pratt, Miscellanies, 4 vols. (London: T. Becket, 1785), 2:11–25. 25. William Combe, The Three Tours of Dr. Syntax (London: Alex Murray, 1869), 101–15. 26. William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty with the Rejected Passages from the Manuscript Drafts and Autobiographical Notes, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 215. 27. Cole, Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, 282.

Dickens and Shakespeare’s Ghost(s) Adrian Poole

CONQUISTADORS, TRADERS, MIGRANTS, EXILES: ALL KINDS OF MOTIVES drive beings across boundaries, and all kinds of consequences ensue. Ghosts are a special case, and especially appealing as figures for traffic between the living and the dead. Ghosts are not exclusively fearful, in themselves or in their effect on others. They can be absurd, provoking, treacherous, chastening, cheering, reliable. Shakespeare haunts English literature. Never more so than in the nineteenth century, when his ghost stalks through the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, and Browning and the novels of Scott, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. But no major writer in English has been as obsessed by Shakespeare as Dickens.1 As a child he was terrified by Richard III and Macbeth at the Theatre Royal, Rochester; from the age of eighteen to twenty-one he read Shakespeare avidly at the British Museum; a few years later he produced, for family and friends, O’Thello (the Irish version, with tunes), one of those Shakespearean burlesques in which the Victorians took so much delight; in 1837 he became close friends with the great Shakespearean actor of the age, William Charles Macready; ten years later he produced a famous amateur production of The Merry Wives of Windsor in which he made a memorable Justice Shallow; and in 1856 he fulfilled his childhood dream of buying the house at Gad’s Hill with all its Falstaffian associations (it was the only house he ever owned).2 In the telling, old-fashioned phrase, Dickens knew Shakespeare by heart. Quotations and allusions flowed naturally from his lips and pen, and found their way into the mouths of his fictional characters. Describing his state of nervous excitement on starting a new novel, he declared himself “as infirm of purpose as Macbeth, as errant as Mad Tom, and as rugged as Timon.”3 On June 8, 1870, he wrote jestingly or half-jestingly to a friend, possibly referring to his torrid relations with his young mistress, Ellen Ternan: “These violent delights have violent ends.”4 These ominous words are spoken by Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet (2.5.9). A few hours later Dickens suffered the stroke from which he died the next day. 322

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By the time he had published Pickwick Papers (1837), Oliver Twist (1839), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Dickens was being hailed as “the Living Shakespeare.” Readers were quick to see Shakespearean models behind some of his characters. Little Nell made readers think of Cordelia, and if Mr. Pickwick reminded them of Falstaff, so too did Sam Weller. In 1850 an anonymous contributor to Fraser’s Magazine enthusiastically wrote, “Sam Weller, we suppose, made old England more ‘merrie’ than it had ever been since Falstaff drank, and roared, and punned, at the Globe Theatre.”5 After Dickens’s death, his fellow novelist Anthony Trollope spoke for many when he claimed that “no other writer of English language except Shakespeare has left so many types of character as Dickens has done.”6 So in one sense the “Shakespeare’s Ghost” of my title is a figure of speech for the way Dickens’s imagination is filled with memories of Shakespearean characters, stories, and sayings. “Remember me,” says the Ghost to young Hamlet (1.5.91). No need for Shakespeare’s Ghost to say this to young Dickens. But recollection of the Ghost in Hamlet glides me into the more specific sense in which I want to consider “Shakespeare’s Ghost,” or more accurately “ghosts,” and more generally “the supernatural.” The ghosts in Shakespeare’s own plays include those of all the victims of Richard III who appear on the eve of the battle of Bosworth (5.3.119–77)—no less than eleven, though modern productions rarely rise to this challenge. Dickens was fascinated by Richard of Gloucester himself but he was not really scared by him, except as a child. In “Dullborough Town” he recalls his childhood visits to the theater, and the terror he felt at the final stage-fight between Richard and Richmond. He remembers “how that wicked King slept in war-time on a sofa much too short for him, and how fearfully his conscience troubled his boots.”7 The wicked king undoubtedly contributed to the grotesquely criminal Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop. In Martin Chuzzlewit we meet a very different kind of villain, but Pecksniff too is associated with the murderous world of Richard III when he tells Mrs. Todgers: “My feelings, Mrs. Todgers, will not consent to be entirely smothered, like the young children in the Tower. They are grown up, and the more I press the bolster on them, the more they look round the corner of it” (chap. 9). This sounds harmless enough. But a kind of nervous laughter plays round a lot of Dickensian villains, and Richard III, that lethal joker, is an influential prototype. Lady Macbeth says scornfully to her husband: “’tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil” (2.2.53–54). Dickens retained “the eye of childhood” throughout his life and it is an essential element in his great-

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ness. But Richard III is too much of a painted devil to be as dangerous as some other Shakespearean models. Julius Caesar is another play with a memorable ghost, this time just one. The murdered Caesar himself appears on the eve of another fatal battle, this time at Philippi, to the man who struck the blow that elicited the famous exclamation: “Et tu, Brute?” (3.1.77). Richard of Gloucester sleeps through all the ghosts, but Brutus here is awake and speaks to the ghost of the man he has murdered. They have a short exchange in which Caesar’s Ghost says Brutus will see him at Philippi. The exchange proceeds thus: Brutus. Well: then I shall see thee again? Ghost. Ay, at Philippi. Brutus. Why, I will see thee at Philippi then. ( Julius Caesar, 4.3.283–85)

This is terse enough to have been written by Harold Pinter, almost comically brief by comparison with the long conversation young Hamlet will have with his ghost. Caesar’s ghost made no impression on Dickens, but the play did. Julius Caesar is the play that the young David Copperfield is enthralled to see at Covent Garden. That night, he tells us, he “dreamed of ancient Rome, and Steerforth, and friendship, until the early morning coaches, rumbling out of the archway underneath, made me dream of thunder and the gods” (chap. 19). David’s dream makes an unexpected connection between his friendship with Steerforth and the central event of the play, the act of betrayal in which Caesar is killed by his friends. This is not the only prophetic dream in Dickens that is colored by a Shakespearean association. In the other great novel written in the first person, Pip similarly has an ominous dream after seeing a Shakespearean tragedy at the theater (Great Expectations, chap. 31). But how seriously should we take such dreams and fantastical imaginings? In The Old Curiosity Shop two young office-clerks arrive for work and break into this little routine: “ ’Tis now the witching—” “Hour of night!” “When churchyards yawn,” “And graves give up their dead.” At the end of this quotation in dialogue, each gentleman struck an attitude, and immediately subsiding into prose walked into the office. (The Old Curiosity Shop, chap. 56)

The lines they are quoting are mainly Hamlet’s, from the end of the Mousetrap scene:

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’Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. (Hamlet, 3.2.390–92)

But their last line has been adapted from Julius Caesar. This is Calphurnia recounting the unusual events portending Caesar’s death: “A lioness hath whelped in the streets, / And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead” (2.2.17–18). Shakespeare is an endless source for such playful banter. Dickens loved it when speaking and writing in his own person, and through his fictional creations. And although we do not have the same evidence for Shakespeare the person, we can still say the same for what he does through his characters. Parody, travesty, burlesque, caricature, cartoon: these depend on readers or audiences recognizing who or what is being mockingly impersonated, and this recognition creates a certain sociability, the warm feeling we get from being in the know, part of the circle, a member of the community. All art aspires to such cohesive, cohering effects. But art can also divide and exclude those-in-the-know from these-who-are-not. Most comedy divides people—those who do not get the joke from those who do, let alone those who provide its scapegoats and butts. In its mild way there is something like this going on, even in Dick Swiveller and Mr. Chuckster’s harmless jesting. They have fun, and so do we, and it is hard to believe that Shakespeare’s Ghost would have been offended by their high-spirited parody. After all, Shakespeare himself enjoys mimicking other playwrights like Marlowe and Kyd and Lyly, social types like Osric and Oswald, and so on. Even more to the point, Shakespeare creates all sorts of characters who love to mimic and parody. They are often underdogs (like Dick Swiveller), servants, clowns, and fools. But they can also be wellborn, like Richard III, Mercutio, and Hamlet. Indeed, one could say that Prince Hamlet is the supreme mimic. He loves to imitate other people and mock their language and put on performances. So it is conceivable that when Hamlet drops into this lurid style of speaking at the end of the Mousetrap scene—“’Tis now the very witching time of night”—he knows he is going over the top, that he is speaking in quotation marks, that he is playing at being the bloody avenger. For a moment he sounds more like Laertes or Othello or Richard III or Shylock or the extravagant protagonists of Shakespeare’s great rival, Christopher Marlowe, like Tamburlaine or Barrabas in The Jew of Malta. And yet it is hard to believe that he is only putting it on here. Listen to the whole speech, and it is impossible to miss the way its tone changes abruptly halfway through:

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’Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on. Soft, now to my mother. O heart, lose not thy nature. Let not ever The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom; Let me be cruel, not unnatural. (Hamlet, 3.2.390–97)

There may be different kinds of sincerity, conviction, and candor at work in Hamlet here. The fact that Hamlet is the most fluctuating, elusive, and iridescent character that Shakespeare ever created is exactly what makes him such an inspiration to novelists.8 But my point here is more simply this: within the world of the play Hamlet is faced by a real and urgent predicament. Now that he knows the Ghost is honest and Claudius is guilty of his father’s murder (perhaps also his mother, of complicity at least), then what is he to do? The very witching time of night when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to the world: this melodramatic language may be a way of avoiding, if just for a moment, the all too real confrontation he is about to endure with his mother. Dick Swiveller and Mr. Chuckster seize on the extravagant part of the speech, and we can see why they do so. Out of context it does sound absurd, whereas in context it raises questions about Hamlet’s grasp on his own feelings, intentions, fears, desires—and language. I say there may be something melodramatic about the beginning of Hamlet’s speech here. “Melodrama” has acquired a tawdry reputation, but for Dickens and his age it was a vigorous and honorable genre. There is a significant passage in Oliver Twist where Dickens pauses to defend melodrama. Melodrama, he claims, joins together tragedy and comedy; it is a means of moving between them. He writes: It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. . . . Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling, only there we are busy actors instead of passive lookers-on, which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes

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of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous. (Oliver Twist, chap. 17)

There is a deliberate vulgarity in that reference to the side of bacon: noone is going to accuse him of being “elitist.” But the point Dickens is making is serious, and insofar as the Victorians made less distinction between “Shakespeare” and “melodrama” than we might now, the kind of scenic and tonal juxtapositions in Shakespeare that caused Sidney and the neoclassicists such chagrin provide one of the models from which Dickens takes heart. Busy actors and passive lookers-on, mere spectators: this is a boundary that Dickens was eager to cross, to challenge, to erase. This is the way his art works. While sharp shifts of focus may look absurd to mere spectators when seen from the outside, they are not absurd to the busy actors absorbed in the scene. Both these perspectives are true, but it is a proper motive for art to compel its spectators and readers to move between them, in and out of the alternating scene. I have mentioned ghosts and the supernatural in Richard III and Julius Caesar. We find plenty of the supernatural to all sorts of complex effect in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the late plays, including of course The Tempest. However, it is the ghosts and the supernatural in the tragedies that made their greatest impression on Dickens, above all in the two to which I now turn: Hamlet and Macbeth. Hamlet often rouses Dickens to mirth and to foolery, especially where the Ghost is concerned. David Copperfield is especially rich in allusions to it. There is the Doctor, Mr. Chillip, who “walked as softly as the Ghost in Hamlet, and more slowly” (chap. 1). There is Tommy Traddles’s hair: “You have no idea what obstinate hair mine is, Copperfield. I am quite a fretful porcupine” (chap. 41). This alludes to the Ghost’s words, when he says that if he were to tell the secrets of his prisonhouse, the tale would harrow up young Hamlet’s soul, freeze his young blood, and make “each particular hair to stand an end / Like quills upon the fretful porpentine” (or “porcupine”: 1.5.19–20). Like Dick Swiveller, Tommy Traddles is a figure of genial comic resilience, and this is wonderfully epitomized by his hair, which “under the combined effects of exercise and excitement stood on end as if he saw a cheerful ghost” (chap. 49). When Mr. Micawber wants to praise his father-in-law, he invokes the Hamlet who says of his dead father: “ ‘A was a man, take him for all in all: / I shall not look upon his like again” (1.2.187–88). In Micawber’s brilliantly pedestrian travesty this comes out as: “Take him for all in all, we ne’er shall—in short, make the acquaintance, probably, of anybody else possessing, at his time of life, the same legs for gaiters” (chap. 12).

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Dickens has his most explicit and extended fun with Hamlet in Great Expectations when Pip and Herbert Pocket go to see Wopsle’s impersonation of the melancholy Dane. This hilariously shambolic production includes a royal phantom who carries “a ghostly manuscript round its truncheon, to which it had the appearance of occasionally referring, and that, too, with an air of anxiety and a tendency to lose the place of reference which were suggestive of a state of mortality. It was this, I conceive, which led to the Shade’s being advised by the gallery to ‘turn over!’ a recommendation which it took extremely ill” (Great Expectations, chap. 31). And so on. Pip and Herbert Pocket try to escape at the end, but they are forced to go backstage. When Wopsle asks them what they thought of his performance, they reply—and anyone who has found themselves stumped for words in similar circumstances will admire their ingenuity and even be tempted to borrow this formula—“Massive and concrete.”9 As with David Copperfield, who dreams of Julius Caesar, so with Pip, whose troubled sleep is infiltrated by Hamlet: “Miserably I went to bed after all, and miserably thought of Estella, and miserably dreamed that my expectations were all cancelled, and that I had to give my hand in marriage to Herbert’s Clara, or play Hamlet to Miss Havisham’s Ghost, before twenty thousand people, without knowing twenty words of it” (chap. 31). It is a crucial moment. Miss Havisham is not the only ghost who threatens to make Pip play Hamlet. At this stage he still thinks she is his benefactor, his patron, like the Ghost in Hamlet—save that Miss Havisham is really more like a jilted Ophelia who has nursed her grievance and desire for revenge rather than drowned herself. Pip is pursued by ghosts. A few chapters on, the news of his sister Mrs. Joe’s death opens “a grave . . . in my road of life. . . . The figure of my sister in her chair by the kitchen fire, haunted me night and day. . . . I had now the strangest ideas that she was coming towards me in the street, or that she would presently knock at the door” (Great Expectations, chap. 35). Pip even thinks of himself as a kind of ghost, hopelessly haunting Estella and the house where she lives. A few further chapters, and another ghost does indeed knock at his door for real: his true patron, Magwitch, back from the purgatory of Australia, with all the implied terrible echoes of the Ghost in Hamlet and his demands for love, for the proof of love: “If thou didst ever thy dear father love—” (1.5.23). Macbeth provides Dickens with even more resonant images of ghostly guilt. Again it inspires a fair amount of mockery. To revert again to those childhood memories of the Theatre Royal, Rochester: “Many wondrous secrets of Nature had I come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary: of which not the least terrific were, that the witches

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in Macbeth bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good King Duncan couldn’t rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it, and calling himself somebody else.”10 It is not surprising that Dickens was particularly drawn to the banquet scene, and that he was notably fond of Macbeth’s words, after the Ghost of Banquo’s second exit: “Why, so;—being gone, / I am a man again” (3.4.106–7). After a dinner in his honor he wrote to his friend John Forster: “The great event is over; and being gone, I am a man again.”11 He gives Steerforth a lighthearted allusion to Macbeth’s line (David Copperfield, chap. 22), and Ralph Nickleby a more serious one: “Night after night comes and goes, and I have no rest. . . . One night’s unbroken rest, and I should be a man again” (Nicholas Nickleby, chap. 59). All these are entirely explicit references. The allusion seems conscious and purposive, deliberately invoked by the writer and designed to be recognized by the reader/audience. No less interesting, however, are those occasions when it is harder to know whether we are supposed to recognize the allusion or not— or even whether Dickens himself does. Consider the death of old Mr. Dolls, Jenny Wren’s father, in Our Mutual Friend: “And there, in the midst of the dolls with no speculation in their eyes, lay Mr Dolls with no speculation in his” (chap. 4). This makes reference to the line in which Macbeth addresses Banquo’s Ghost directly: “Thou hast no speculation in those eyes, / Which thou dost glare with” (3.4.93–94). Why has Dickens thought of Macbeth here? Because of his feelings of hatred toward the hopelessly alcoholic Mr. Dolls, one of Dickens’s many bad fathers? Has he identified with Jenny Wren’s wish to kill her father? Or further, has he thought of Macbeth because he also imagines the sense of guilt attendant on that violent impulse—both of which are present in that memory from Macbeth? Would this sense of violence and guilt help to explain the even more oblique reference in the opening chapter of Dombey and Son to the surely not very toxic Miss Tox? “Miss Tox wore round her neck the barrenest of lockets, representing a fishy old eye, with no approach to speculation in it.” It is easy to suppose that Dickens knew that he was alluding to Macbeth here, without quite knowing why he was doing so. It seems a much more impulsive reference than the ones just previously mentioned about “being a man again,” by Steerforth and in his own person. Echoes and allusions like this seem to rise unbidden in Dickens’s writing, as if they well up from his unconscious. But then Shakespeare’s is the great ghost in the English literary unconscious at large, always liable to burst or creep through the boundaries separating one text from another, or to hover around them. Consider this: “For now,

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a vision came before him, as constant and more terrible than that from which he had escaped. Those widely staring eyes, so lustreless and so glassy, that he had better borne to see them than think upon them, appeared in the midst of darkness; light in themselves, but giving light to nothing” (Oliver Twist, chap. 48). This is Bill Sikes, pursued by the vision of the woman he has murdered. Was Dickens consciously thinking of Macbeth? We cannot tell. What we can say is that the play is such a live presence in Dickens’s imagination that when it is seized by thoughts of violence and guilt, Macbeth is always likely to surface. Certainly the most famous Macbeth of his day recognized a connection. In 1869 Dickens went to visit the ailing William Charles Macready and gave him a reading of Nancy’s murder. Dickens records the old actor’s stuttering but eventually stentorian responses: “ ‘In my—er—best times—er—you remember—them my dear boy—er—gone, gone!—no, I’ll be damned’—with great emphasis again —‘it comes to this—er—Two Macbeths! ’ ”12 Macbeth has two great speeches in which he laments all the goods he knows he has foregone, that he will now never enjoy, from which he is entirely excluded. One is near the end of the play (“my way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf” [5.3.22–23]); the other occurs just after the murder of Duncan: Methought, I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murther Sleep,”—the innocent Sleep; Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great Nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast;— (Macbeth, 2.2.34–39)

Dickens knew all about insomnia. He has a fine essay entitled “Lying Awake” where he remembers Macready delivering these great lines of Macbeth’s.13 When Dickens discovered how disappointing were the initial profits from A Christmas Carol, he confessed: “I never was so knocked over in my life. . . . I have slept as badly as Macbeth ever since.”14 But his greatest concerted writing about insomnia is in the essay entitled “Night Walks” (published July 21, 1860, in All the Year Round, shortly before he started on Great Expectations).15 It draws on a number of images and ideas from Shakespearean tragedy, notably the image of “Houselessness” from the passage on the heath in King Lear, where Kent repeatedly urges the King to take shelter, just before the appearance of Poor Tom. Lear says:

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In boy, go first. You houseless poverty— Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep. Exit [Fool]. Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this.16 (King Lear, 3.4.26–33)

“Houseless poverty” is a condition and a threat that recurs throughout Dickens’s writing. When young David Copperfield reaches the safe haven at Dover provided by Betsey Trotwood, he tells us: “I prayed that I never might be houseless any more, and never might forget the houseless” (chap. 13). “The houseless” represent the dark side of Dickens’s vision of collective good cheer, what it means to be excluded from the warm domestic circle round the Christmas tree. Like the two children Scrooge discovers lurking under the robes of the Spirit of Christmas Present, one of those moments in Dickens endowed with a rhythmic intensity that chisels it into the reader’s memory: “Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish”: a boy called Ignorance, a girl called Want (stave 3). In “Night Walks” Shakespeare fuels this dark vision with memories of King Lear and Poor Tom on the heath, of Hamlet in the graveyard, of Macbeth alone in the middle of the night. As he prowls the almost deserted streets, close to the ominous river, past Newgate Prison, the Law Courts, the Bank of England, the Houses of Parliament, Dickens’s imagination is arrested by two kinds of building: the theater and the madhouse. He gropes his way into an empty theater and tells us: “One would think that nothing in them knew itself at such a time but Yorick’s skull.”17 Looking out from the stage across the orchestra pit, it seems to him “like a great grave dug for a time of pestilence.”18 And beyond it, the void: “A dismal cavern of an immense aspect, with the chandelier gone dead like everything else, and nothing visible through mist and fog and space, but tiers of winding-sheets.”19 He moves on to the madhouse, Bethlehem Hospital (or “Bedlam,” as in “Tom o’ Bedlam”). He finds himself thinking: “Are not the sane and insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives? Are we not nightly persuaded, as they daily are, that we associate preposterously with kings and queens, emperors and empresses, and notabilities of all sorts? . . . I wonder that the great master who knew everything, when he called Sleep the

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death of each day’s life, did not call Dreams the insanity of each day’s sanity.”20 In “Lying Awake” he also meditates on the leveling power of sleep and dreams. He thinks of Queen Victoria in her palace and “Winking Charley, a sturdy vagrant, in one of Her Majesty’s jails”: a version of King Lear and Poor Tom.21 In “Night Walks” Dickens courts the ghost of Macbeth, as if insomnia could assist him in passing the boundary between waking and dreaming, between the sane and the insane, between the world of the living and the world of the dead. “And indeed in those houseless night walks . . . it was a solemn consideration what enormous hosts of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were raised while the living slept, there would not be the space of a pin’s point in all the streets and ways for the living to come out into. Not only that, but the vast armies of dead would overflow the hills and valleys beyond the city, and would stretch away all round it, God knows how far: seemingly to the confines of the earth.”22 To which the reader may well feel like responding, as Horatio does to Hamlet: “ ’Twere to consider too curiously to consider so” (5.1.203–4). In conclusion let me hazard in summary terms what Hamlet and King Lear and Macbeth meant to Dickens as models for different kinds of stories. First, a contrast between Hamlet and King Lear. Hamlet’s is the model story of the son who strives to grow up, to deal with his fathers and mothers. It is the archetypal narrative for many nineteenthcentury novels—indeed, for novels from Goethe to Joyce23—and it is the major model behind the two first-person novels that shadow some of Dickens’s own experiences, David Copperfield and Great Expectations, notably the latter. The model provided by King Lear is quite different. It seems to revolve around fathers and daughters. It seems to be concerned with unhousing, exiling, and humbling the father so that he can be redeemed by the “daughter-wife,” a story we find in The Old Curiosity Shop, and perhaps most prominently in Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit. Another way of looking at this contrast is in terms of space. Hamlet is about being in confinement; Elsinore the space is crucially influential on Gothic romance and its images of internal derangement. The nineteenth-century novel turns its Hamlets out on the road to find their fortune. It puts Hamlet on a romance quest with great expectations, expectations shadowed by the anxiety that perhaps Elsinore can never be truly escaped, because we carry it inside us. King Lear by contrast is the play about being turned out of doors into the wind and rain: not into a landscape of promise, the world lying all before us, but into a landscape of menace, real wilderness, poverty, and cold—houselessness. The central figure in King Lear is not the son

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who is yet to be, but the father who has been, who is a “has-been,” who is (about to be) unmanned. This would help to explain Mr. Dombey, Mr. Dorrit, old Manette (in A Tale of Two Cities), the aged P. (in Great Expectations), all the needy fathers. I think this is partly true. There are plenty of needy fathers in Dickens, and plenty of hopeless ones too, beyond redemption, too bad to be true, whether comically so like Micawber or villainously so like Murdstone or abjectly so like Mr. Dolls. But there are also plenty of needy young men and women. And it is not at all clear that King Lear is the figure in the play that interests Dickens most. Dickens is no less interested in what it might mean to be the young, hopeful children, Cordelia and Edgar. Of course we cannot think of them independently of the fathers and father figures on whom they attend. But their predicaments—and in the case of Edgar the extraordinary alter ego of Poor Tom that he has to invent—do invite Dickens’s imagination to dwell on them, and explore what it takes to be a Good Child. More important than Lear to Dickens’s imagination was another and more flagrantly guilty king. Macbeth provided Dickens with the vision of more active criminality and guilt than Lear’s. And, crucially, a guilt from which there is no redemption. Macbeth lies beyond Lear, as it were, because Macbeth is a Lear with no Cordelia. Macbeth is the man who forgoes fatherhood and dedicates himself to murdering children. By the end of the play Macbeth is a man who knows he is damned without hope of salvation. So if we compare Hamlet and Macbeth for what Dickens made of them, we might conclude something like this. Hamlet tells the story of a son who inherits a complex, onerous legacy from his father and mother and has to work out a self and a story to claim as his own: it is, if you like, the story of a child trying to free himself from his family. Macbeth is the story of a man who tries to destroy the family, the very basis of sociable living, to reduce the whole world around him to chaos and savagery. Macbeth kills the fathers, Duncan and Banquo; he kills the mother, Lady Macduff, and her children. King Herod only tried to kill the firstborn; Macbeth wants to kill all the children. It is the ghost of Macbeth who haunts Dickens’s deepest nightmares, not only the nightmare of personal guilt but beyond that a larger collective nightmare about the destruction of love. What do I mean by this? Let me close with some reflections on the way Shakespeare’s Macbeth wells up in Dickens’s imagination at the center of Bleak House. The moment I have in mind is the burial of the law-writer Nemo at the end of chapter 11. We shall in due course discover that this is the corpse of Lady Dedlock’s lover and Esther Summerson’s father, Captain Hawdon. As his body is laid to rest in

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the “hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene,” Dickens predicts the literal physical disease, like a plague, that will emanate from this poisonous source. The dead man will not be raised up to new life as the New Testament promises. He will be raised up, Dickens prophesies, as “an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside: a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilisation and barbarism walked this boastful island together.” And then Dickens launches into one of those invocations where it is impossible to know who exactly is speaking (or writing): “Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon, or stay too long, by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the windows of the ugly houses. . . . Come, flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should call to every passer-by, ‘Look here!’ ” Phrases and images from Macbeth and Hamlet have been running in Dickens’s head throughout this chapter and the one before. There are references to “a shrill ghost unquiet in its grave,” to cocks crowing and crows flying, to the Snagsbys’ housemaid Guster “murdering sleep.” As we reach the burial ground we might recall that speech of Hamlet’s: ’Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. (Hamlet, 3.2.390–92)

But in fact the voice that looms behind this climactic paragraph is not Hamlet’s but Lady Macbeth’s, as she summons all the powers of darkness: Come, you Spirits That tend on mortal thoughts. . . . . . . Come to my woman’s breasts, . . . . . . . . . . . . Come, thick Night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell. (Macbeth, 1.5.39–50)

The black heart of Bleak House is the poisoned graveyard where Esther Summerson’s nameless father is buried, and where she will find the corpse of her mother, Lady Dedlock. Father, mother, and child, united not in love and life but in shame, guilt, corruption, and death. “Look here!” cries Dickens, at the devastation our society can wreak

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on what should be the source of its new life: the love that should unite father and mother and child. This is the dark side to all the good dreams of which Dickens’s novels are of course full, whether they are the cozy sentimental visions of families round the Christmas tree, or more solemn imaginings of spiritual rebirth and renewal. This is what it means to be shut out from paradise and pursued by avenging ghosts. To the nightmares of loneliness, guilt, and despair that give Dickens’s fiction its enduring credibility, I cheerfully submit, Shakespeare’s ghost made a royal contribution.

NOTES 1. All references to Shakespeare are to William Shakespeare, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (Walton-on-Thames, England: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998). References to Dickens’s fiction are to the text of the Penguin English Library editions unless otherwise stated, but given the variety of readily available editions, they indicate chapter only. 2. I owe debts both general and particular to Valerie A. Gager, Shakespeare and Dickens: The Dynamics of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3. Charles Dickens to Leigh Hunt, May 4, 1855, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 7: 1853–1855, ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Angus Easson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 608. 4. Charles Dickens to Charles Kent, June 8, 1870, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 12: 1868–1870, ed. Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 547. 5. Anon., “Charles Dickens and David Copperfield,” repr. in Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Collins (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 245. 6. Anthony Trollope, in St. Paul’s Magazine (1870), repr. in Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Collins (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 324. 7. Charles Dickens, “Dullborough Town,” in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4: The Uncommercial Traveller and Other Papers, ed. Michael Slater and John Drew, Dent Uniform Edition (London: J. M. Dent, 2000), 143. 8. “Iridescent” is the word George Eliot chooses to describe Gwendolen Harlet’s character, and to “the play of various, nay, contrary tendencies.” George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 36. Though Eliot is thinking of Shakespeare here, it is in fact not Hamlet but Macbeth to whom she refers in the following sentence. 9. Alexander Welsh writes illuminatingly on Wopsle as one of Pip’s several “doubles,” along with Orlick and Drummle: “The killer and the wifebeater have parts to play that are too reprehensible to countenance except melodramatically, and so far from being recognized as kindred spirits, they are loathed by Pip. . . . Wopsle’s ambitions, however, are open for anyone to see; he has to be mocked and differentiated from the hero as too self-important and absurd. Yet Wopsle is the other man from the provinces in the novel, who is setting his sights on London and a wholly new sphere of life. . . .” Alexander Welsh, Hamlet in His Modern Guises (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 119. 10. Dickens, “Dullborough Town,” 143.

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11. Charles Dickens to John Forster, June 26, 1841, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 2, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 310. 12. Charles Dickens to Mr. and Mrs. J. T. Fields, February 15, 1869, in Letters of Charles Dickens, 12: 291. 13. Charles Dickens, “Lying Awake,” in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 3, “Gone Astray” and Other Papers from Household Words, ed. Michael Slater, Dent Uniform Edition (London: J. M. Dent, 1998), 90. 14. Charles Dickens to Thomas Mitton, February 12, 1844, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 4, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 42–43. 15. Charles Dickens, “Night Walks,” in Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 4, “The Uncommercial Traveller” and Other Papers, ed. Michael Slater and John Drew, Dent Uniform Edition (London: J. M. Dent, 2000), 148–57. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition. I have explored the Shakespearean provenance of Dickens’s image of “houselessness” in “The Shadow of Lear’s ‘Houseless’ in Dickens,” in Shakespeare Survey vol. 53, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 103–13. 16. Macready records the young Queen Victoria coming to see his production at Covent Garden, February 18, 1839: “Acted King Lear well. The Queen was present, and I pointed at her the beautiful lines, ‘Poor naked wretches!’ ” The Journal of William Charles Macready, ed. J. C. Trewin (London: Longmans, 1967), 132. 17. Dickens, “Night Walks,” 151. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 151–52. 20. Ibid., 153–54. 21. Dickens, “Lying Awake,” 90. 22. Dickens, “Night Walks,” 154. 23. See Jonathan Arac, “Hamlet, Little Dorrit, and the History of Character,” South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (1988): 311–28.

Madame Odier Illustrates Shakespeare Georgianna Ziegler

DURING THE 1850S, A CULTURED FRENCHWOMAN EMBARKED ON A PROJect to illustrate a selection of Shakespeare’s plays, in a volume that recently came to light at the Folger Library in Washington. How it entered the collection is not clear, but the quality of the unsigned watercolors carefully bound into the volume invites further investigation and provokes questions regarding authority, context, and the transmission of Shakespeare across the boundaries of language, culture, and media. The one-volume edition of Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems in English was published in Leipzig in 1833 by Ernest Fleischer for the European market. Fleischer “took over his father’s bookshop” in 1829 and began to offer “foreign literature on very fine paper and with elegant binding,” apparently the first in Germany to do so.1 This particular copy, however, made its way into the French market. A bookplate in the front shows the intertwined initials of the former owner as “M O,” explained further by an old bookseller’s note in French saying that the paintings were by Mme Odier. There were two Madame Odiers who were sisters-in-law, both with a first initial “M” and both artists, and they have been confused in as authoritative a reference work as Bénézit’s Dictionary of Artists. Marguerite de Rouville, Mme Auguste Odier, was a watercolorist who exhibited four landscapes at the Paris Salon in 1866 and 1867. In contrast, Mathilde de Laborde, Mme. Edouard Odier, painted portraits. Three of these came to light around 1930 in a family album. One, dating to circa 1836, is a watercolor sketch of George Sand and Mme d’Agoult in a loge at the theater; the second is a crayon sketch for a portrait of Franz Liszt; and the third, a watercolor portrait of the writer Prosper Mérimée.2 In addition, I have seen reproductions of two graphite and watercolor family portraits done by her. Because of her interest in depicting people and her involvement with the Parisian circles of writers and artists, Mme Edouard Odier must be the one responsible for the Shakespeare illustrations. This identification is substantiated in the recent biography of Jean-Joseph de Laborde, Louis XV’s banker and grand337

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father of Mathilde Odier. Writing about the descendants of the family Laborde, the authors note that Mathilde was “l’illustratrice des œuvres de Shakeaspeare [sic], de Musset et de Victor Hugo” [illustrator of the works of Shakespeare, of {Alfred de} Musset and of Victor Hugo].3 Born in 1815, Mathilde de Laborde studied art with Ary Scheffer,4 and in 1838 she married Edouard Odier, an artist who had studied with Ingres and was also from a banking family. The couple were childless, but they enjoyed traveling to Spain and England and moved in political circles that included the exiled French royal family as well as Mme de Montijo and her daughter Eugénie, who became the wife of Napoleon III. Their cultural connections were also impressive. Mathilde’s older sister Valentine, Mme Gabriel Delessert, was the mistress of Prosper Mérimée and hosted one of the Parisian salons frequented by the intellectual glitterati, including Chateaubriand, Delacroix, Musset, and Marie d’Agoult.5 Perhaps at such a gathering Mathilde made her little portrait of Mérimée. In any case, the writer was fond of Mathilde, gave her at least one of his short stories, and taught her Latin.6 Writing to Mme Delessert’s son from Madrid in 1853 he says he met an amiable church canon in Toledo who was quite taken with Mme Mathilde Odier and her drawing: “ ‘qui prennait un petit crayon; tris, tris et voilà un dessin achevé’ ” [who took a small crayon, tris, tris and, voilà, a drawing!].7 It is not surprising that Mathilde Odier should have read Shakespeare in English. She was growing up just when the new generation of French romantics developed an appreciation of the great English poet, casting aside, however gradually, the aspersions cast upon him by Voltaire. The modern French poet Yves Bonnefoy, who has translated Shakespeare’s plays and poems for fifty years, has surmised that only if Shakespeare had been translated during his own time into Garnier’s verse could his essence “have seeped into our poetry . . . But the taste for classicism soon barred any genuine understanding of Shakespeare.”8 It was this taste for classicism—the alexandrine couplet and unity of time and place—that had to be bridged by a new generation of romantic writers in the early nineteenth century in their attempt to appropriate Shakespeare to their own culture. While Mme de Staël in her work On Literature (1800) and her widely influential novel Corinne (1807) had been more favorable to Shakespeare than Voltaire, writers such as Stendhal and Victor Hugo in the 1820s showed open appreciation for the English bard, while the women poets Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Amable Tastu wrote verses influenced by Shakespeare.9 Victor Hugo, one of the early defenders of Shake-

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speare, in the preface to his play Cromwell (1827) saw the French Revolution as the great transitional moment, clearing the way for the poets and writers who followed to be “les organes d’un recommencement” [“agents of a new beginning”].10 But even for writers willing to appreciate and attempt a translation of Shakespeare into French, the obstacle of the differences between the languages remained. Hugo describes the process of translation as an assault, an act of violence of one language and set of ideas upon another, which the second does its best to resist: “Quelle idée a-t-on de venir lui mêler dans le sang cette substance des autres peuples?” [What would lead someone to mix this substance of other people in their own blood?]. It is, he says, a violation of boundaries (“violation des frontières”).11 Even the French word itself, “traduire,” coming from the Latin “traducere” with its sense of allowing to pass, hints at the possibility of resistance, which Hugo picks up in his metaphor. The new generation of French writers persisted, however, attempting translations of groups of plays or single ones: Guizot and Pichot (the Works, 1821), Alfred de Vigny (Othello, 1829), Alexandre Dumas (Hamlet, 1847), Benjamin Laroche (the Works, 1851), George Sand (As You Like It, 1856), and others, some in verse, some in prose, such as the laudable translation of the Works by Hugo’s son, François (1850–67).12 But the differences between the languages made translating Shakespeare into French continually difficult. Yves Bonnefoy has tried to capture the essential rupture between the two languages. “English poetry is a mirror,” he writes, “French poetry a crystal sphere . . . in English the word is an opening, it is all surface; and in French it is a closing, it is all depth.” What he means is that English explodes into a large variety of words to express “the phenomenal world,” while French with its more reduced vocabulary turns inward to the Idea, “dying to the world.”13 Thus, the cultured French wanted to read Shakespeare in his own language. The writer Marie d’Agoult, whom Mathilde Odier depicted at the theater with George Sand, studied English as a young woman in order to read Shakespeare in the original, then later in life read him aloud with her lover, Franz Liszt, during a summer in Switzerland, and discussed Shakespeare with George Sand on a visit to the older writer.14 Mathilde Odier read her English edition of Shakespeare in 1853 and 1854. In penciled notes in the table of contents she marks five plays with an X and indicates the date, April 1853. These are: The Tempest, Two Gentlemen; Merry Wives; Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure. There are lines next to Much Ado and Midsummer, then Love’s Labour’s is marked “July,” and As You Like It and All’s Well, “August.” We know that she spent part of the summer of 1853 at her father-in-

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law’s country home—probably at Plessis-Piquet just outside Paris— which presumably would have been a relaxing place to read.15 A line after Winter’s Tale indicates a break for a new date in the right margin, “1854.” She read Anthony and Cleopatra in February, Coriolanus in March, I Henry IV in May, 1 Henry VI in July, and 2 Henry VI in August along with King John, Titus, and Pericles. She finished Henry VI in September, then read Timon in October. No dates are given for Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello, but faint lines are drawn next to them, and these are plays that she illustrated. The passages she marks in her reading fall into several groups. Some fit into the popular nineteenth-century category of “gems from Shakespeare,” such as Benedick’s “Happy are they that hear their detractions, and can put them to mending” (Much Ado, 2.3.231–33); or Lear’s “Take physic, pomp; / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel” (3.4.38–39). Others may appeal to her sensibility as an artist, such as Imogen’s imagining how she would have continued to look for Posthumus as he sailed away: I would have broke mine eye-strings; crack’d them, but To look upon him; till the diminution Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle: Nay, follow’d him, till he had melted from The smallness of a gnat, to air; and then Have turn’d mine eye, and wept. (Cymbeline, 1.3.22–28)16

This passage is a wonderful verbal evocation of artistic perspective. Still other marked passages suggest that they may carry a deeper personal meaning for Odier. Two such occur in Richard II and Othello. Bushy tells Richard’s queen that she should not imagine sorrows, but she replies: “It may be so; but yet my inward soul / Persuades me, it is otherwise: Howe’er it be, / I cannot but be sad . . .” (2.2.29–31). In Othello, Desdemona says to Iago, “Comfort forswear me! Unkindness may do much; / And his unkindness may defeat my life, / But never taint my love” (4.2.187–190). Odier’s rare use of underlining in this passage (as well as the more usual marginal mark) suggests that it is especially meaningful. We do not know exactly why Mathilde Odier was reading Shakespeare at this time, but a cryptic comment by Mérimée in a letter to the comtesse de Montijo, dated November 1854, says “M. me semble bien triste depuis quelque temps” [M{athilde} has seemed very sad to me for some time].17 Perhaps in this, her thirty-ninth year, she was feeling the passage of time in her childless marriage, and a distancing from her husband.18 Whatever the cause, her obvious interest in

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Shakespeare led to another kind of creative output in the fourteen carefully crafted and jewel-like watercolors. The nameless book dealer who later handled the volume suggested that the designs were similar to the work of Tony Johannot, a popular French illustrator of the time. This is certainly true of some of Johannot’s work, but others of his illustrations are lighter and more decorative than Odier’s finished pieces. In spite of studying with Ary Scheffer, Odier demonstrates a poor sense of anatomy, characteristic of the work of many amateur women artists who did not have access to live models, especially male ones.19 However, her layered painting with watercolor and gouache, with its scenic placement of characters and often dramatic use of light and dark, is strikingly effective and owes something to the stage and to the lithographs and paintings of Eugène Delacroix. It is highly likely that she would at least have known his lithographs for Hamlet, which were published in 1843, and that she would have seen some of his paintings, since he was an intimate at her sister’s salon. Delacroix knew Paul Delaroche, a fellow artist who had once roomed with Edouard Odier in Rome, and Delacroix was also a friend of George Sand who admired his talent greatly and owned at least eight of his paintings.20 In addition, Delacroix, Delaroche, and Ary Scheffer were part of a group of young artists who had broken with the traditions of the academy in the 1820s and started their own form of “romantic” art, just as the writers of the period broke with the classical unities.21 Writing at the end of the century, Marius Vachon actually compares the painting of Delacroix and of Millet to the style and characterization of Shakespeare.22 It was artists such as these and the musicians Hector Berlioz, Ambroise Thomas, and Charles Gounod who could circumvent the difficult boundary of the French language by using the media of art and music to record their responses to Shakespeare. By the 1850s when Mathilde Odier set out to illustrate Shakespeare, his plays were also an attractive subject for women artists in France. In a detailed study of their work, Charlotte Yeldham shows that “1830 to 1850 was a peak period in the exhibition of” paintings at the salons based on literary works. Shakespeare—especially scenes from Othello and Hamlet—is right up there with Racine and Molière.23 And although literary subjects declined in popularity “from 1850 until the end of the century,” Shakespeare was still important; “24 [sic] works exhibited by women between 1850 and 1900 were based on scenes and characters from his plays.”24 There was an iconography in place for Shakespeare illustration similar to that which had developed over the years for biblical subjects. Certain plays were illustrated more than others, and within those, certain scenes tended to dominate pic-

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torial representation, often pretty much repeating settings and characters from one artist to another. What interests me are the ways in which Odier sometimes works within this set iconography, but also sometimes breaks out of it to provide her own meditation on a scene. Her illustrations for Hamlet, King John, and Macbeth are closest to traditional iconography, but even here there are interesting variations. Her choice of the mad Ophelia standing by a willow tree on the brink of drowning is perhaps the most redundant of her illustrations, since it was a moment chosen by many other artists.25 In particular, Odier follows an iconography begun by Richard Westall in his 1802 painting for the Boydell Gallery, an iconography that was reproduced many times through engravings and copies by others.26 Little details, however, individualize Odier’s depiction of the scene. Her Ophelia faces left instead of right, and holds flowers in her left hand, probably the remains of what she has woven into a crown. While Westall and others suggest a tormented madness in the expression on Ophelia’s face and the way she reaches out to the willow branch, clutching her tangled hair, Odier’s Ophelia appears more tranquil.27 There is a quiet beauty in her face, as though she is already looking into another realm invisible to us, perhaps remembering her love for Hamlet. Instead of clutching the willow tree, she appears to be holding up lavender flowers, which may be pansies for remembrance. Such control over passion may owe something to the long theatrical tradition in France, influenced by classical decorum, where passion found its voice in language harnessed by alexandrine verse, rather than in the acting itself. The appearance of an English acting company in Paris in 1827 was a revelation, leading to a gradual cultural revolution. The audience was shocked and moved by Harriet Smithson’s emotional depiction of Ophelia’s madness in a manner never before seen on the French stage. Intellectuals such as Dumas and Sainte-Beuve commented on this “shock of the new”—a theatrical representation that broke with everything in their past and opened exciting possibilities for their understanding of Shakespeare and the theater. Looking back on this moment, Dumas wrote, “From this hour alone I understood theater. . . . It was the first time that I saw real passions in the theater, animating men and women in flesh and bone.”28 Scenes of the performance were distributed through lithographs in Souvenirs du théâtre anglais à Paris (Paris, 1827) and other places.29 Delacroix’s 1843 lithograph with its sensual and tortured Ophelia owes much to this tradition of theatrical emotionalism. Given the impact of this watershed moment on the writers and artists in the generation of her youth, it is even more notable that

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Mathilde Odier reverts back to earlier French taste and depicts scenes of deep emotion with a surface calm. This restraint in showing madness is further evident in her watercolors of the distraught Constance in King John and the somnambulant Lady Macbeth. King John is the only history play that Odier illustrates. She shows Constance in act 3, scene 4, with Pandulf, King Philip, and probably Lewis, who stands with his back to us on the far right. The scene appears staged; Pandulf in his bright cardinal’s robes stands between Philip and Constance, he and the king showing by their gestures that they pray for or plead with her. The figure of the king in dark blue is balanced by the black-dressed Constance on the left, not kneeling and frantically pulling her hair as she is frequently shown, but standing and pulling slowly on one lock of her dark hair. Odier thus places Constance on the same level as the men, but instead of looking directly to them for help, her face turns toward heaven. The tension of the moment is revealed quietly in the way she holds her left arm with clenched fist tightly across her stomach. Constance is the only one of Odier’s heroines whom she depicts in a dark rather than a light or white dress, but she is a widow and a queen, and her ermine-trimmed gown nicely balances Philip’s kingly presence, suggesting their equality. Like the scene with Ophelia by the brook, the sleepwalking scene in Macbeth, where Lady Macbeth is observed by a gentlewoman and doctor, was one of the most frequently illustrated. In many versions she holds a lamp or candle, but here the oil lamp rests on the table, illuminating Lady Macbeth in her white gown. Rather than rubbing her hands together, or looking frantically around, she gazes down in sorrow at her left hand, while her right is raised. As with Ophelia and Constance, Odier shows her not frenzied but sad, and this sadness grips the other figures also, as the gentlewoman lays her hand on the arm of the bearded doctor for comfort during this grim and terrible moment. Such intimacy through gesture or glance characterizes some of Odier’s other illustrations as well, endowing them with her unique perception. Act 3, scene 1 of Much Ado was popular with artists, depicting Beatrice overhearing Hero and Ursula talking about her in the garden. Most views show the two women conversing while standing or walking, with Beatrice lurking behind a bush or trellace, sometimes sitting. Odier sets her figures in the wild rather than in a formal garden, and they are more tranquil than is usual. Dark-haired Beatrice kneels and listens from behind a tree, her hands clasped attentively in front of her. On the other side of the tree, Hero and Ursula

Mathilde Odier, “Viola speaking with the Duke.” Twelfth Night, act 2, scene 4. Watercolor, c. 1853. From Folger Shakespeare Library: PR2752 1833b copy 2 Sh. Coll.

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do not pace, but sit in quiet conversation, the one resting her hand on the other’s arm in a gesture of female intimacy. A similar moment of intimacy, this time between a man and woman, occurs in Twelfth Night, act 2, scene 4, rarely depicted by other artists. The meeting between the disguised Viola and the countess Olivia is most commonly illustrated, but Odier has chosen a moment full of tense, restrained emotion, when Viola as Cesario speaks with the Duke. He lounges in a chair, his back to us, so that he and we the viewers focus our attention on Viola in a page’s costume, standing in front of a table with her hands clasped. But though we and the Duke view her together, we understand the dreamy sadness in her face in a way that he does not yet comprehend, as she says, “My father had a daughter loved a man.” Odier’s choices of scene and composition often show her taking “the woman’s part.” In three of her scenes, she depicts a woman alone, and I will come back to those, but on other occasions when a group of people is shown, her choices subtly place the woman in a position of power, as with the standing rather than kneeling Constance, and her focus on Viola from the front, while we see the Duke only from the back. Two similar instances occur in her illustrations for Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear. Rather than choosing the death of Cleopatra, like many artists, Odier shows Antony confronting Cleopatra in a moment of subservience, which could be their first meeting where “the triple pillar of the world [is] transformed / Into a strumpet’s fool” (1.1.13–14), or later where he says, “O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt? See / How I convey my shame out of thine eyes” (3.11.53–54). It is unusual to see Antony bowing to the queen, with his hands open in supplication, while she regards him regally beneath her dark brows from her throne, surrounded by her handmaids. Though the figure of Cleopatra is stiffly drawn, there is no doubt that she holds the power in this composition. Odier is also careful to use Egyptian design on the steps and throne and in Cleopatra’s costume. In addition to French interest in orientalism at the time, Mathilde Odier and her husband had themselves traveled to Tangiers in 1851 where they were received into a Moorish household, and where her artist husband noted details of female dress that no doubt left their impression on Mathilde as well: veils, collars, bracelets, gold hair ornaments.30 When illustrating King Lear, Odier does not choose the mad Lear on the heath, but instead the quieter moment near the end of the play when Lear recovers his reason and is reconciled with Cordelia. A number of other painters, among them George Romney, Benjamin West, and Ford Madox Brown, had chosen this scene as well, but

Mathilde Odier, “Cordelia meeting King Lear.” King Lear, act 4 scene 7. Watercolor, c. 1854. From Folger Shakespeare Library: PR2752 1833b copy 2 Sh. Coll.

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Odier’s version is unusual in not depicting Lear lying in bed or sitting in a chair with Cordelia kneeling to him.31 Instead, Odier shows Lear awake and kneeling to Cordelia, who stands with her arms raised in a kind of benediction. Looking more like the young Victoria, Cordelia’s own queenliness is revealed in her bearing and the small gold crown she wears. Cordelia appears only a short while in the play, and Odier chooses to make the most of this brief moment when we see her as queen and rescuer of her father. As I mentioned earlier, Odier focuses on the heroine alone in three of her illustrations—namely, those depicting Ophelia, Imogen, and Desdemona. All three of these women are victimized in some way, but Odier chooses to give each her moment of solitary reflection before violence descends. With Ophelia, as we saw, it is the moment before drowning. For Imogen and Desdemona she chooses the intimacy of the bedchamber before it is violated by Iachimo and Othello, respectively. Imogen’s chamber was one of the scenes from Cymbeline most attractive to artists, but rather than showing all the details of tapestry and carving, with Iachimo hiding in the chest, Odier focuses on a golden-haired Imogen reading in bed, leaning on her elbow, while her thoughts wander from the book in front of her. The bed is richly appointed, but the focus is on the white bedclothes and fairness of Imogen glowing against the darkness of the room and thus emphasizing her purity. For Desdemona, Odier selects a more uncharacteristic moment to portray—her sad reflection over the willow song in act 4, scene 3. Rather than choosing the commonly depicted scene of Othello in Desdemona’s chamber, Odier focuses on Desdemona herself, sitting on the edge of her bed, leaning on a harp; like Imogen she is caught in a moment of contemplation rather than action.32 Imogen is no longer reading, nor is Desdemona playing; rather, both are engaged in reflection. Odier stresses the privacy of this moment by excluding the character of Emilia, who is present in the play. A prie-dieu is just visible to the right, anticipating Othello’s query, “Have you prayed tonight, Desdemona?” (5.2.28), while the crimson of the bed curtains suggests the violence to come. Each of these women is thus given a moment in a room that is still her own, before it is violated by male aggression built of distrust. The ultimate violation, of course, is death, and like many other artists, Odier chooses the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliet. But rather than showing Juliet awakening to see the Friar and her dead lover, Odier depicts Romeo and Juliet after death, in a stunning arrangement of black and white within a Gothic tomb setting, the two lovers alone and joined in their final sleep. Achille Devéria, in his watercolor sketch and lithograph taken from the Kemble/Smithson production

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for the Théâtre Anglais, shows the half-naked body of Juliet, still in her death torment, sprawled in Romeo’s lap.33 By contrast, Odier’s version depicts Juliet in deep repose, her clasped hands and long whiteshrouded form suggesting a medieval funerary monument. Romeo in black wilts on the floor by her side, resting his arm and head against hers. It is a dramatic moment, no doubt owing much to later stage productions, but also one that reveals peace after long strife. In several of these paintings—notably those from Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline, and Othello—Odier achieves much of her effect by dramatic lighting, as though she were throwing a spotlight on the two lovers or the women in their chambers to highlight them as characters from the real and metaphorical darkness that surrounds them. The figure of Lady Macbeth is highlighted similarly, though here her lady-in-waiting shares a reflected light, bringing her forth from her near anonymity. Most of Odier’s illustrations for the comedies are brighter, as might be expected, but the scene from Two Gentlemen of Verona where Proteus speaks to Sylvia at the window of an inn again uses effects of light and darkness to dramatize the action (act 4, scene 2). The light in the window of the inn makes Sylvia the focal point and highlights Proteus’s face, while his body remains in shadows. Meanwhile, the outdoor evening light faintly illuminates the pensive figure of the disguised Julia off to the side, while the innkeeper is barely visible as he lies on the ground behind. Again, Odier has chosen a moment in the play that was rarely illustrated; the more popular scenes were of Lance and his dog, or especially, the assault on Silvia in act 5. Although Angelica Kauffmann had depicted that scene of attempted rape in her 1788 painting for the Boydell Gallery, Odier may not have felt comfortable as a woman in mid-nineteenthcentury France illustrating such violence. As we saw, she also eliminated Iachimo and Othello in their respective plays, choosing instead scenes that focused on the women before the intrusion of violence. In her treatment of the comedies in general, Odier turns more to group scenes, as would be characteristic of these plays, rather than focusing on the individual. In addition to Two Gentlemen and Much Ado, she shows the four lovers in Athenian dress meeting in the woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the three masked French ladies leading the lords disguised as Russians in Love’s Labour’s Lost. There the women’s ball gowns reflect contemporary French fashion. The two exceptions among the comedies are Twelfth Night, which, as we have already seen, captures an intimate moment between the disguised Viola and Duke Orsino, and As You Like It, which inspires her only scene without a woman. Instead of depicting the feisty, cross-

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dressed Rosalind, as so many artists did, she shows instead the moment of tenderness where Orlando helps old Adam. Indeed, she does not depict two of the strong comic heroines who are popular with critics today—Rosalind and Kate—and though it appears from her marks in the table of contents that she read The Tempest, All’s Well, Merchant of Venice, Taming of the Shrew, and Winter’s Tale in April, July, and August of 1853, she includes no illustrations for any of them nor for Comedy of Errors, which is also marked. We can only conclude that the plays she did choose interested or moved her the most, or perhaps she made other watercolors but selected these as the best to include in a volume that would have been especially rebound. Many of her chosen scenes reveal a contemporary sensitivity to pathos, and especially to moments when a woman reflects upon or engages with others during emotional crisis. Odier as an artist was influenced by the culture of romanticism in which she grew up, which used the example of Shakespeare to look for emotion in all subjects and forms, as George Sand wrote.34 Or as her fellow artist Delacroix noted in his journal around the same time that Odier made these little paintings, Shakespeare is “a particularly gifted genius [who] has thrown the light of his torch into the secret corners of our soul.”35 But Odier’s approach is not to show emotion outwardly in contorted features, but to create a quiet tension by reflecting upon it inwardly, distilling it into scenes of miniature beauty.

NOTES 1. Christa Jansohn, e-mail message to author, April 20, 2007. See also William Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint: Deutsche Übersetzungen von 1787 bis 1894, ed. Christa Jansohn (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1993), 49–51.The edition is based on Johnson, Steevens, Reed, and Malone: Folger shelfmark PR2752 1833b c.2 Sh.Col. 2. See A. de Rothmaler, “Deux portraits inédits de George Sand,” Gazette des Beaux Arts 5 (April 1931): 256–59. 3. François d’Ormesson and Jean-Pierre Thomas, Jean-Joseph de Laborde: Banquier de Louis XV, mécène des Lumières (Paris: Perrin, 2002), 295. The authors do not give a specific source for their attribution of Mathilde Odier as an illustrator, but presumably it comes from one of their major sources about the family, a ten-volume typescript by Alexandre de Laborde, “Mémorial Laborde” (1933–43). This appears to be part of the family papers at the Archives de la Maison de Noailles. 4. Scheffer was a Dutch painter who settled in Paris and was a friend of Mathilde’s father, whose portrait he painted (d’Ormesson and Thomas, Jean-Joseph de Laborde, 289). Alexandre Dumas, père, admired Scheffer as a “translator” of Goethe and Dante, and referred to the literary subjects of some of his paintings. See Alexandre Dumas, Mes mémoires, originally published 1852–56, electronic version made avail-

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able by Société des Amis d’Alexandre Dumas; chapter 97: http://www.dumaspere .com/pages/biblio/chapitre.php?lid=m3&cid=97. 5. D’Ormesson and Thomas, Jean-Joseph de Laborde, 291. Natalie de Laborde, the aunt of Valentine and Mathilde, had been the mistress of Chateaubriand, and studied art with David (D’Ormesson and Thomas, Jean-Joseph de Laborde, 277–78). 6. Prosper Mérimée, letter to Madame G. Delessert, 24 June 1853, in Prosper Mérimée, Correspondence générale, ed. Maurice Parturier, 2nd ser., 1 (Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1953), 79; and Mérimée, letter to Madame Alexis de Valon, Paris, 30 October 1849, in Correspondence générale, 2nd ser., 5 (Paris: Le Divan, 1946), 529. JulieThérèse-Cécile Delessert, Mme Valon, was Mathilde’s niece. 7. Prosper Mérimée, letter to Edouard Delessert, Madrid, 30 Septembre 1853. In Mérimée, Correspondance Général, 2nd ser., 1:174. 8. Yves Bonnefoy, Shakespeare & the French Poet, ed. John Naughton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 214. 9. Aimée Boutin, “Shakespeare, Women, and French Romanticism,” MLQ 65 (2004): 505–29. Tastu and later Louise Colet along with five other women contributed essays to the Galerie des femmes de Shakespeare that was distributed in the 1840s by several different publishers (see 521 n. 33). 10. Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, ed. Bernard Leuilliot (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), 305. 11. Victor Hugo, preface (1864) to the translation by François-Victor Hugo, in ibid., 339. 12. For a summary of Shakespeare translations in nineteenth-century France, see Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 622–23. John Pemble in Shakespeare Goes to Paris (London: Hambledon and London, 2005) gives a useful introduction to the problems of translating Shakespeare for page and stage in France (chapter 4). For a history of Shakespeare in France through the eighteenth century, see J. J. Jusserand, Shakespeare in France under the Ancien Regime (New York: Putnam’s, 1899). 13. Bonnefoy, Shakespeare, 220. 14. Richard Bolster, Marie d’Agoult, The Rebel Countess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 65, 164; Curtis Cate, George Sand: a Biography (New York: Avon Books, 1976), 416. Mme d’Agoult’s second novel, Valentia (1847) is partially autobiographical and finds the heroine “alone in the mountains” reading Homer and Shakespeare (Bolster, Marie d’Agoult, 202). 15. Prosper Mérimée, letter to Mme de Boigne, Paris, 20 July 1853. In Mérimée, Correspondance Générale, 2nd ser., 1:111. 16. There are no line numbers in the edition used by Odier; therefore, all references to act, scene, and line numbers in Shakespeare are to the New Folger Library edition, ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992–). 17. Mérimée, Correspondance Générale, 2nd ser., 1:390. 18. She apparently enjoyed a long relationship with John Hobart Caradoc, second Baron Howden, British minister in Madrid. See D’Ormesson and Thomas, JeanJoseph de Laborde, 295. 19. On women’s art education in France see Gen Doy, Women and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century France: 1800–1852 (London: Leicester University Press, 1998). One of Scheffer’s other students was “Princesse Marie d’Orléans, the daughter of King Louis-Philippe.” Scheffer encouraged her interest in sculpture, though “her elevated social position also meant that study of the male or female nude would be unthinkable” (110).

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20. Lucien Boissonnais, “Edouard Odier, Mémorialiste et Peintre,” in Edouard Odier, Mémoires familiers (Geneva: Slatkine, 2006), 11. George Sand, letter to Théophile Silvestre, Nohant, 5 January 1853, in George Sand, Correspondance, ed. Georges Lubin, tome 11, April 1852–June 1853 (Paris: Editions Garnier, 1964), 535–37. 21. On the development of the “young innovators” in art, see Henri Loyrette, Sebastien Allard, and Laurence des Cars, Nineteenth Century French Art (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), 56. 22. Marius Vachon, La femme dans l’art (Paris: J. Rouam, 1893). He says that Delacroix’s colors “ont l’harmonie délicate et cadencée des chants d’amour de Shakespeare ou des rimes passionnées de Dante” (565) [have the delicate and cadenced harmonie of Shakespeare’s love songs or the passionate rhymes of Dante], and that Millet “idéalisait à la Shakespeare la paysanne de France” (574) [idealized à la Shakespeare the women peasants of France]. 23. Charlotte Yeldham, Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France and England (New York: Garland, 1984), 1:206, 207. 24. Ibid., 1:208. 25. Among women artists exhibiting in the French salons from 1850–1900, “as in England, Ophelia was by far the favourite figure, 15 out of the 24 being devoted to her” (ibid., 1:209). Richard Altick writes that “pictures of Ophelia constituted the most popular single subject of English literary painting.” Richard Altick, Paintings from Books (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 299. 26. Altick, Paintings from Books, 299. 27. The degree of madness depicted in this scene varies. Altick insists that “the element of overt madness was nearly always played down” in nineteenth-century paintings of Ophelia (ibid., 299). My own investigation shows that representations of the drowning scene from Mary Hoare (1781), Henry Tresham (1794), and Richard Westall (1798) through Thomas Uwins (1805), Robert Smirke (1806), and Eugene Delacroix (1838) all depict Ophelia in more tormented positions as she hangs onto the tree. Closer to Odier’s peaceful Ophelia are the watercolor by Richard Redgrave (1842) and the oil painting by Arthur Hughes (Royal Academy, 1852). 28. Dumas, Mémoires, chapter 109, http://www.dumaspere.com/pages/biblio/ chapitre.php?lid=m3&cid=109: “A partir de cette heure, seulement, j’avais une idée du théâtre. [. . .] C’était la première fois que je voyais au théâtre des passions réelles, animant des hommes et des femmes en chair et en os.” 29. Details on this production and the comments of Dumas and Sainte-Beuve may be found in Peter Raby, Fair Ophelia: A Life of Harriet Smithson Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 58ff. 30. Edouard Odier, Mémoires familiers, 167: “des voiles, des manches en mousseline brochées d’argent, des colliers, des bracelets, des ornemens de tête en or d’un travail charmant. [. . .]” 31. On the depictions of this scene, see Altick, Paintings, 311–12. 32. In the 1824 Salon, Eugénie Marguerite Honorée Charen (Mme Servières) exhibited a painting of the “willow song” scene from Othello (Yeldham, Women Artists, 1:205). 33. Reproduced in Raby, Fair Ophelia, 78, 87. 34. George Sand, introduction to Comme il vous plaira (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1856), 7. “Le vrai progrès de notre siècle en ce genre a été le romantisme, qui, à l’exemple de Shakspeare, s’étant affranchi de toute règle absolue, a cherché l’émotion dans tous les sujets et sous toutes les formes.” 35. Eugène Delacroix, The Journal, trans. Walter Pach (New York: Crown, 1948), 509. Delacroix’s journal is full of references to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare in the Edwardian Nursery: Simple Stories as the Passport to Plays Velma Bourgeois Richmond

THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN LITERATURES FOR CHILDREN AND FOR ADULTS is typically a sharp one, albeit some texts are appropriated by both. Edwardians recognized that while Shakespeare’s plays were too exacting for young readers, stories that retell them both delight and prepare children for adult reading.1 Although the topic is neglected, the establishment of English studies as a university discipline is closely tied to Edwardian enthusiasm for children’s versions of classics / traditional literature. Shakespeare is the “greatest writer” and a basis for “our inheritance”—in the United States and the Empire as well as Britain. Tales and Stories from Shakespeare—a composite—is number one in a list of fifty most popular titles used by London primary schools according to The Teaching of English in England, the Newbolt Report, completed in 1921, signed appropriately on April 23.2 This government document records Edwardian attitudes; it is both a summation and a pedagogical guide for schools, universities, evening schools, and continuation schools, such as ongoing adult education. The Edwardian attitudes included expectations for a “children’s century” that many cite as the golden age of children’s literature, a corollary of increasingly expanded schooling and library resources.3 The Newbolt Report affirms that literature is “the most direct and lasting communication of experience of man to men”4 and challenges the current use of Greek and Latin. It claims that English and English literature are “so inextricably connected as to form the only basis possible for a national education.”5 Of the fourteen members of the committee many wrote about Shakespeare at least incidentally, and several were distinguished scholars/critics of Tudor drama and Shakespeare: Caroline F. E. Spurgeon (1869–1941), Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935); Frederick S. Boas (1862–1957), Shakespeare and His Predecessors (1896), Shakespeare and the Universities (1923), editor of The Year’s Work in English Studies; Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944), Shake352

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speare’s Workmanship (1918), editor of the King’s Treasuries of Literature Series (251 volumes, 1920–38), and coeditor of New Cambridge Shakespeare; and J. Dover Wilson (1881–1969), editor of Life in Shakespeare’s England (1911), coeditor of New Cambridge Shakespeare (1921– 66), The Essential Shakespeare (1932), and critical studies. QuillerCouch combined extensive contributions to children’s literature with work to establish the English tripos at Cambridge. In a first lecture, October 25, 1916, he described the modern languages tripos, section A (English) in 1917: “First of all (and rightly) it is demanded of us that we show acquaintance, and something more than a bowing acquaintance with Shakespeare.”6 Nevertheless, English fervor had limitations. This was recognized in the Newbolt Report’s consideration of “the drama in education,” which acknowledged greater German enthusiasm for Shakespeare, a result of reading in a current language: “English-Shakespeare is written in a language that every Englishman does not understand. . . . [It is] not only difficult, but archaic as well; and thus he seems doubly unsuitable for young readers. Fortunately he is saved for the schools by his wonderful power of re-telling a story in dramatic form, and his equally wonderful power of characterization, and we may add, his incomparable mastery of word-music. Indeed, it is Shakespeare the poet as much as Shakespeare the dramatist to whom we must introduce our pupils.”7 Expectations are completely consistent: reading of the actual plays is not for the young child, but early knowledge and delight in Shakespeare’s stories are highly desirable. There were countless editions of retold plays—from cheap Books for the Bairns paper pamphlets, published by W. T. Stead, to Reward/Prize volumes that displayed the best of Edwardian extravagance in printing, to well-presented schoolbooks. These provided stories/tales, usually with modest interlacing of quotations; schoolbooks typically also introduced some of Shakespeare’s songs. Distinguished Shakespeareans crossed the usual boundaries between school and university to define and advocate lifelong study of Shakespeare. Not all were on Newbolt’s committee. Sir Israel Gollancz (1863–1930) was professor of English language and literature at King’s College, London; editor of the Temple Shakespeare, forty volumes (1894–96), The Book of Homage to Shakespeare (1916), and founder of the Shakespeare Association in 1916. Gollancz also advocated that children enjoy schoolwork; to foster this ideal he worked to establish an annual “Shakespeare Day,” a celebration of April 23 to bring together children in the United Kingdom, the Dominions, and the United States. Schools in France also recognized it.8 While Shake-

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speare is undeniably part of English nationalism, honoring him could appeal more widely than Empire Day, officially recognized the same year, although first celebrated in 1902. Both were part of public pageantry, like the great historical festivals held at various places. The Warwick Pageant of 1906 includes a sequence in which the boy Shakespeare meets Queen Elizabeth I during her visit to Kenilworth in 1575, a variation on the revels famously re-created in Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821). Although the date of 1916 signals nationalism and patriotism, Shakespeare consistently goes beyond boundaries. Just as in the sixteenth century players brought plays to the continent, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century retold stories were widely disseminated. Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807) was translated into German, French, Danish, and Polish, while English editions were published in America and India. The finest Victorian retelling, Mary Seamer Seymour’s Shakespeare’s Stories Simply Told (1880), was used by Heinrich Saure in a German edition of 1885 designed to teach English and introduce Shakespeare.9 One explanation of Shakespeare’s eminence is the place of English as a world language. The Newbolt Report cites a Northern Peace Conference held in 1919 in Stockholm, where the question which language is best suited for universal use received fiftyfour replies: one was for German, eight for French, one for Latin or Spanish, five for Ido or Esperanto, and twenty-nine for English.10 Sir Sidney Lee (1859–1926), author of the acclaimed A Life of William Shakespeare (1898), contributed a simplified biographical introduction to Mary Macleod’s The Shakespeare Story-Book (1902). The publisher F. J. Harvey Darton recruited F. J. Furnivall for his own Tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims Retold from Chaucer and Others (1904), an analogous crossing between adult and child.11 Few rival Harvey Darton, a publisher, scholar, and writer, in the recognition of children’s literature. Having contributed a chapter to the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (11.xvi), he published his seminal Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (1932); Darton also retold additional classics for children (The Seven Champions of Christendom [1901], A Wonder Book of Old Romance [1907], A Wonder Book of Beasts [1909]).12 The flexibility of mind, enthusiasm, and energy needed for such multiple endeavors was typical of many Victorians. Frederick James Furnivall (1825–1910), a crucial figure in promoting the study of English, was founder, director, and often editor of books published by the Early English Text Society; a promoter and editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, editor of a Six-Text Print of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” for the Chaucer Society (1868); and he supervised the pro-

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Gordon Browne’s illustration for Sir Sidney Lee’s Introduction to Mary Macleod’s The Shakespeare Story-Book (London: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., 1902), p.vii.

duction of forty-three facsimiles of Shakespeare quartos. He was cofounder, with Walter W. Skeat (1835–1912) of the London Working Men’s College. Furnivall founded the New Shakespeare Society, devoted to the study of “the growth, the oneness of Shakespeare”; he also established societies to promote Chaucer, the ballad, Wycliffe, Browning, and Shelley. His introduction to F. J. Harvey Darton’s retold Chaucer stories is significant, but Furnivall’s major contribution to children’s literature is a much expanded edition of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1901), the “grandest” made of this seminal work to introduce traditional adult literature to children, not least because it inspired Tales from Chaucer in Prose: Designed Chiefly for the Use of Young Persons (1833), the work of Lamb’s friend Charles Cowden Clarke (1787–1877), an influential lecturer, poet, and writer.13 Clarke, with his wife Mary Victoria Cowden Clarke (1809–98), who produced a monumental The Complete Concordance of Shakespeare (1845), wrote The Shakespeare Key: Unlocking the Treasures of His Style . . . (1879). A collection of their editions of works, biography, chronology, and glossary was published as Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare (1864). Mary Cowden Clarke created The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850–52), three

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volumes of imaginative stories, intended largely for children, that present circumstances in each childhood that explain the character of Shakespeare’s heroines—and allow Clarke to develop and express ideas about gender. She read Lamb’s Tales as a little girl and was a friend of the brother and sister. Mary Lamb taught her Latin and recitation and influenced her love of literature; Charles Lamb’s letters often refer to “Victoria,” and his “Serenata, for two voices” celebrates her marriage. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, the favored text, illustrated by the finest artists, enhanced and expanded, was well established before Furnivall’s sumptuous two volumes appeared, published by Raphael Tuck in 1901, almost a century after the first edition. Prices for “the grandest and most costly” Lamb’s Tales ranged from 30s. for cloth, to £5 5s. for the Edition de Luxe in white buckram and £6 6s. for white leather, signed and numbered. Thus, a modest effort to amuse Mary Lamb, provide children (especially girls) with an introduction to Shakespeare, and gain some income has become a scholarly exposition and sumptuous collector’s item. Earlier Harrison S. Morris noted in his Tales from Shakespeare (1893) that “during the eighty-six years between the issue of the first edition in 1807 and the present time there have been put forth more than fifty editions.”14 Morris declared his “veneration felt for the well-loved brother and sister,” not least because they prudently chose the twenty plays most readily turned into “intelligible prose versions”; those omitted—especially history plays—posed great difficulty. Morris retold sixteen plays not included by the Lambs; historical paintings greatly enhance this book. In contrast, Furnivall did not add English history plays, but sent readers to the original in the belief that patriotism warrants closer contact. At the end of volume 2 he added “Furnivall’s Sketches”: Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and four (Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus) of the tragedies not told by Charles Lamb. This decision is one expression of his adherence to Lamb’s Tales— he gives a detailed account of the work of Charles and Mary Lamb and publication history—while making significant efforts to modify their limitations. Thus Furnivall, whose deepest concern is the mixedup order of Lamb’s Tales—The Tempest is first—includes results of the Shakespeare Society’s verse tests to establish the order of the plays. Anxious to make clear “the growth of Shakespeare’s mind,” he divides the plays into a dating sequence of comedies and tragedies, by which he arranges the two volumes.15 Of similar importance are corrections to Lamb’s texts with substantial introductions that include sources, occasion for composition, and interpretations by others

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Sketch of Shakespeare’s Birthplace for F. J. Furnivall’s “When Shakespeare was a boy,” in E. Nesbit’s Children’s Stories from Shakespeare (London: Raphael Tuck and Sons, 1912), p. 9.

(Tennyson, Gollancz). Furnivall locates each play geographically, and emotionally or intellectually, to support a trajectory of growth in Shakespeare’s mind; and he tries to remedy egregious omissions. The Lambs favored the comedies—written by Mary—but simplifications and reductions left out most of the “fun.” Furnivall finds it “an odd thing” that “two such humourful folk . . . who enjoyed Shakespeare’s fun, made up their minds to keep all that (or almost all) out of his plays when they told the stories to boys and girls who so like fun too.”16 He robustly restores details of drunken comedy in Twelfth Night and The Tempest, and brazen con men, Parolles in All’s Well that Ends Well and Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale. In short, where Lamb’s Tales reflect assumptions about what is suitable for girls who were identified as the primary audience since boys could read Shakespeare in their fathers’ libraries or at school, Furnivall fleshes out the stories with details that would attract and amuse boys.17 He also makes much of Shakespeare’s use of boy actors—one tall and one short appear as girls in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Much Ado About Nothing; Portia and Imogen—a cogent way of explaining practices in

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Shakespeare’s theater. The second volume’s introduction describes the theater and Elizabethan printing practices, gives some biographical information, and a boy’s life in Shakespeare’s days. Furnivall’s eminence, and the pragmatic economy of publishers, led Tuck to reprint portions as “When Shakespeare Was a Boy” in The Children’s Shakespeare (1912), the nearest rival to Lamb’s Tales, written by E(dith) Nesbit (1858–1924).18 Thus, Furnivall’s influence was extended and supported an early effort by a woman who became one of the most revered Edwardian writers of fiction for children. Many beautiful Edwardian editions relied upon illustrations and quality production to attract readers/buyers to Lamb’s Tales. Furnivall’s edition seeks to be the best in these terms. But he also rectifies faults and provides a way to accurate and deeper understanding through scholarly and hearty treatment of Shakespeare stories, including his own six “Sketches” (Love’s Labour’s Lost, Merry Wives of Windsor, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus), written with the completeness deemed suitable for children. To honor the achievement of the Lambs is a stance repeated continuously, but a concurrent view was to recognize the need for a better retelling. A year after Furnivall’s edition came Mary Macleod’s The Shakespeare Story-Book (1902), supported by an introduction written by Sir Sidney Lee (1859–1926), whose edition of the Oxford facsimile of the First Folio was published in the same year. A Life of William Shakespeare (1898) marked Lee’s role as an authority, and three major works—an edition of the Complete Works, Shakespeare and the Modern Stage, and Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century (more than eight hundred articles), all published in 1906—express the magnitude of his work, which also included helping to create and being chief editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Lee’s dedication to strenuous scholarly work and literary criticism extended to children’s literature, a salient reminder of Edwardian attitudes that English studies were essential to society and not elitist. It is worth noting that the publisher of The Shakespeare Story-Book was Wells Gardner, Darton. This further illustrates the seriousness of F. J. Harvey Darton’s commitment to great English literature retold authentically for children and vetted by scholars, assisted by high production values, including illustrations by Gordon F. Browne (1858–1932). Sir Sidney Lee is rather harsh in his criticism of Mary Lamb—he says she lacked her brother’s style, humor, and fancy. Moreover, omissions in the Tales are so serious as to leave “a very fragmentary knowledge of the scope of Shakespeare’s plots.”19 Acknowledging the ancient debate between relative merits of character and plot, Lee finds them equally interesting in the best Shakespeare plays. But, in

Title page of Mary Macleod’s The Shakespeare Story-Book (London: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., 1902).

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a typically Victorian way, he expects character to become more absorbing as the child studies more. This leads to an argument that emphasizes plot, and the corollary inadequacy of Lamb’s Tales. Nevertheless, Lee briefly introduces something more to pique interest. He explains that Shakespeare’s plots are not original and cites sources (Bandello and Cinthio), but then observes that it is not necessary to note this to read “the present narration of the stories of his plays. . . . It is essential that young readers should find delight and recreation in the tales as he finally presented them in his plays. Such delight and recreation I believe the contents of this volume is fitted to afford them.”20 Lee’s conclusion is a clear statement of the purpose of retold literature for children: “that the knowledge here conveyed to young readers of Shakespeare’s plots may lead them to become in future years loving students of the text of his plays.”21 This pedagogical principle embodies the recognition that stories, which naturally delight children, provide both incentive and assistance (they know the plots) for youthful and adult reading at more sophisticated levels. The corollary is that the absence of such early knowledge/familiarity makes later reading more strenuous and less appealing; sad indeed is the childhood deprived of such knowledge and friends. Macleod’s title “story-book” acknowledges that storytelling defines early engagement with literature, whether through ancient and medieval oral tradition or in children’s literature. A reminder of children’s tastes is Edward Salmon’s Juvenile Literature As It Is (1888), which begins with Charles Welsh’s 1884 poll (790 boys aged eleven to nineteen) of popular authors: Shakespeare is eighth with 44 nominations. Charles Dickens is first (223 nominations), followed by W. H. G. Kingston (179), Walter Scott (128), Jules Verne (114), Captain Marryat (102), R. M. Ballantyne (67), and Harrison Ainsworth (61). A similar survey of girls (1000) put Shakespeare fifth, after Dickens, Scott, Charles Kingsley, and Charlotte Yonge; John Bunyan is eighth.22 Novels, especially adventure and historical ones, dominate. A corollary delight in narrative characterizes stories from Shakespeare; indeed, some retellings, especially of history plays, read like juvenile novels. Educators and librarians in the early twentieth century decried the creation of “namby-pamby,” “wishy-washy,” cheap fiction and argued that stories retold from great literature were much more compelling and rewarding. Lee’s judgment of Mary Macleod’s accomplishment was shared in the United States. Standard Catalog for High School Libraries (1929), while acknowledging a plentitude of editions of the plays, recommends two children’s versions: a wellillustrated, cheaper edition of Lamb’s Tales and The Shakespeare StoryBook, listed at $3 and described in a review by the American Library

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Association as “Charming stories of 16 plays with dialogue in words of the original.”23 Most books of Shakespeare stories for children follow Lamb’s Tales in favoring the comedies (including The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale as well as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice) and the great tragedies. Even Furnivall chose not to introduce history plays in his grand, expanded edition. But Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch explicitly ranges beyond the boundary of “pleasant and profitable stories” that the Lambs set, and countless others followed. His objective in Historical Tales from Shakespeare (1910) is both to increase the number of plays and to change current inherent lack of interest in history and assure that children do not “miss so much which might quicken their interest in history and early patriotism.”24 QuillerCouch’s career exemplifies more than any other scholar’s a crossing of boundaries: as journalist, novelist, writer of fairy tales, editor, and lecturer. The Liberal prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith appointed him King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge University, where he—as Basil Willey and E. M. W. Tillyard affirm— succeeded in establishing an independent honors school of English literature that included “the English moralists.”25 It has been argued that “Q” was driven by a desire to sustain the Liberal principles that were going out of favor.26 Totally committed to a belief that Shakespeare’s histories are the “truest” English history, “a story of men’s motives and feelings, as well as of the actual events they gave rise to or were derived from,” he does not correct inaccuracies of chronology or details, “so long as he [Shakespeare] tells his story with fairness and justice.” With “a single exception” of vilifying Joan of Arc “these plays might almost serve as a handbook to patriotism, did that sacred passion need one.”27 Historical Tales from Shakespeare begins with two stories from Roman plays (Coriolanus and Julius Caesar), studies of order and tyranny, to establish classical precedents and origins, backgrounds to European civilization. There are six English histories, one for each medieval king, since Quiller-Couch combines tetralogies to stress history rather than individual plays. He supplies a genealogy of York and Lancaster and quotes the Yorkist claim from 2 Henry VI (2.2); a table explains Henry V’s claim to the crown of France. The dying Gaunt’s speech in Richard II, an “incomparable lament,” is quoted with an exhortation: “[N]o English boy, who is old enough to love his country, is too young to get it by heart, forgetting the sorrow in it.”28 Henry V is presented as the supreme exemplar of chivalry, and even weak (Richard II) or villainous (Richard III) kings fight valiantly. QuillerCouch’s account of Agincourt reads like a battle in a juvenile novel

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by G. A. Henty (1832–1902). These stories are both Shakespeare and Quiller-Couch, whose high sentiment is overtly stated: “[T]o-day, if ever, it is necessary to insist that no patriotism can be true which gives to a boy no knightliness or to a girl no gentleness of heart.”29 These sentiments match those of the Newbolt Report, which assumed that “the love of goodness, the love of truth, and the love of beauty” were the motives of the human spirit.30 The inclusion of girls is ancillary to the book’s chief emphasis. If Lamb’s Tales are a “feminization” of Shakespeare, Quiller-Couch’s Historical Tales are a “masculinization,” an appeal to make boys admirers of Shakespeare stories, most of which were written by women. Girls ranked Shakespeare higher as a favorite author, and women, in whose education English literature was more prominent, outnumbered men in English studies at British universities. Two-thirds of the Modern Languages School that became English Studies at Cambridge were women, while at Oxford sixty-nine women and eighteen men were candidates for the new exams.31 Shakespeare was the key text for entrance examinations for Oxbridge and the Indian civil service and essential in adult education.32 A. Syms-Wood’s Oxford and Cambridge edition of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1904) is supplemented by extracts from the plays, comparison of tale with play, sources, explanatory material, and questions; it makes clear how exacting were the requirements and how thorough was preparation needed for preliminary candidates. Some material—for example, comparative study of Othello and The Winter’s Tale—would challenge many of today’s undergraduates. Stories read when young could provide early basic knowledge and inspire more advanced study. An Indian edition of Lamb’s Tales was a textbook for entrance examinations at Calcutta University.33 Alternatively, those who lacked rich early instruction could learn about Shakespeare through workers’ education. A notable example in the United States is E. Nesbit’s Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare: A Home Study Course, edited by E. T. Roe (1907). More complex than English editions for children, this one begins with a panegyric and declaration of worldwide influence. Although the stories were written for children (to simplify Lamb) and Roe keeps the original illustrations that show all characters (except Lear) as small children, there is a unique addition: “Shakespeare Quotations,” not to illuminate the stories but as a compendium of passages (three to six lines) to encourage moral virtue through Shakespeare’s observations on a wide range of subjects—adversity, deception, drunkenness, life, love, opportunity, worldly honors.34 Prior to World War II American literature was essentially English literature with a few recent additions, so that it is not surprising to

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find a parallel enthusiasm for Shakespeare in the United States. Eva March Tappan (1854–1930) was a distinguished educator, writer of children’s stories from literature and history, and editor of a home library, The Children’s Hour (1909), in ten volumes, that reprints three of Lamb’s Tales. Shakespeare has a prominent place in her A Brief History of English Literature (1905/14), which concludes with two chapters on American authors. The later, revised edition eliminates American writers, since there was A Short History of American Literature, added to by Rose Adelaide Witham (1932). The section “American Scholars” observes: “In fact, the Shakespeare plays seemed to hold the attention of American scholars.”35 Those identified are Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury (1838–1915) of Yale University, as an authority on Chaucer and Shakespeare, and Felix Emanuel Schelling (1858– 1945), as greatest for Elizabethan literature. Three are named for “excellent editions”—Henry Norman Hudson (1814–86), Richard Grant White (1821–85), and William J. Rolfe (1827–1910). And the Variorum Edition, the work of Horace Howard Furness (1833–1912), continued by his son, is recognized as the most valuable contribution, “printing all the variants of the lines and adding full notes and much aesthetic criticism.”36 With one exception, these scholars did not write books for children; this may reflect reliance upon books of English origin or local emphasis upon American writers in schoolbooks. William J. Rolfe is unusual, having written a very scholarly book for children. His Shakespeare the Boy (1896) set a high standard for biography as cultural history. Although originally articles written for a periodical, Youth’s Companion, they were intended to be expanded as a book. Rolfe, who quotes very extensively from other scholars and contemporary sources, goes far to realize his goal to “help young folk . . . to a better understanding of many allusions in his [Shakespeare’s] works.”37 An amusing example is his way of presenting various ball games, including “ ‘rounders,’ out of which our Yankee base-ball has developed.”38 This is more reassuring than the “barbarous amusements” of bearbaiting and cockfighting. Like Furnivall, Rolfe seeks boy readers. Furnivall and Lee are among authorities cited, along with Halliwell-Phillipps and Knight, for biographical information and local history. The first parts—“I. His Native Town and Neighborhood,” “II. His Home Life,” and “III. At School”—are predictable. The last two parts—“IV. Games and Sports” and “V. Holidays, Festivals, Fairs, etc.”—use research in folklore and are more obviously popular. Rolfe’s sources are Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes, Brand’s Popular Antiquities, and Dyer’s Folk-lore of Shakespeare. Perhaps most cogent is a section on storytelling: “[T]here was no lack of oral tales, legends, and folk-lore for the entertainment of the family of a winter evening.

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Picture from William J. Rolfe’s Shakespeare the Boy: With Sketches of the Home and School Life, The Games and Sports, The Manners, Customs, and Folk-Lore of the Time (1896), new ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1900), facing p. 178.

The store of this unwritten history and fiction was inexhaustible.”39 This corresponds to Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour.” American scholars, most of whom attended German universities, followed their scientific style to make contributions to the study of history and etymology of language. Thus, “American research began to take its place with European scholarship.”40 In the early twentieth century William Allan Neilson (1869–1946), professor of English at Harvard and president of Smith College, was editor of The Complete Dramatic and Poetic Works of William Shakespeare (1906) and The Chief Elizabethan Dramatists excluding Shakespeare, and author of The Facts about Shakespeare (1913). Neilson, like other Shakespeareans with wide interests, also contributed to children’s knowledge of traditional literature; he wrote a reading guide for The Junior Classics (1912), another popular home library, in ten volumes, edited by William Patten.41 A supportive introduction was contributed by Charles W. Eliot (1834–1926), president emeritus of Harvard University, a distinguished educator widely known as editor in chief of

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the Harvard Classics, “Dr. Eliot’s Five-foot Shelf of Books,” which offered the “wisdom of the world” in primary texts and was the model for home libraries. Indeed, volumes of The Junior Classics bear a secondary title, The Young Folks’ Shelf of Books. In the United States as in England, then, Shakespeare scholars, albeit they relied heavily upon Nesbit and Lamb, believed Shakespeare stories were an effective introduction for children. A return to ready crossing of boundaries between child and adult literature by distinguished scholars might enhance Shakespeare’s role—and the place of English studies.42

NOTES 1. Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Shakespeare as Children’s Literature: Stories in Words and Pictures for Edwardian Children (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2008). 2. Henry Newbolt, The Teaching of English in England: Being the Report of the Department Committee Appointed by the President of the Board of Education to Inquire into the Position of English in the Educational System of England (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1921). 3. Most histories of children and of children’s literature trace developments; especially useful is Alec Ellis, A History of Children’s Reading and Literature, The Commonwealth and International Library (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1968), a detailed account from the eighteenth century through most of the twentieth century. Two librarians in the United States give parallel insight to Edwardian attitudes: Montrose J. Moses, Children’s Books and Reading (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1907) and Frances Jenkins Olcott, The Children’s Reading (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.; Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1912). 4. Newbolt, Teaching of English, 8–9. 5. Ibid., 14. 6. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Reading, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), 4. 7. Newbolt, Teaching of English, 312. 8. Ibid., 319. 9. Mary Seamer [Seymour], Shakespeare’s Stories Simply Told (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1880). Subsequently Seymour added stories to include all of Shakespeare’s plays. It was published in two volumes: Shakespeare’s Stories Simply Told: Comedies (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1883) and Shakespeare’s Stories Simply Told: Tragedies (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1899). The German edition is M. Seamer, Shakespeare’s Stories: Für Schulen bearbeitet und mit Anmerkungen versehen, ed. Heinrich Saure (Berlin: F. A. Herbig, 1890). 10. Newbolt, Teaching of English, 67–68. 11. F. J. Furnivall, Tales from Shakespeare by Mary and Charles Lamb: With Introductions and Additions (London: Raphael Tuck and Co., 1901), 1:xi–xii. 12. F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life, ed. Brian Alderson, rev. 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 13. Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2004), 24–35. 14. Harrison S. Morris, Tales from Shakespeare (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co; London: William Heinemann, 1893), 1:v.

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15. F. J. Furnivall, Tales from Shakespeare by Mary and Charles Lamb: With Introductions and Additions (London: Raphael Tuck and Co., 1901), 1:xi–xii. 16. Ibid., 1:xi. 17. Jean I. Marsden, “Shakespeare for Girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare,“ Children’s Literature 17 (1989): 47–63, argues the “feminization” of Shakespeare. But the popular ten-volume The Family Shakespeare (1818), ed. Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825), who promoted the Society for the Suppression of Vice, has similarities that perhaps belie censure associated with “bowdlerizing,” a term better known than his texts. David Daiches, “Presenting Shakespeare,” in Essays in the History of Publishing in Celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the House of Longman, 1724–1974, ed. Asa Briggs (London: Longman, 1974), 61–112. 18. E(dith) Nesbit, The Children’s Shakespeare, ed. Edric Vredenburg, Raphael House of Gift Books for Boys and Girls (London: Raphael Tuck and Sons, 1912). This edition, part of a Reward/Prize series, uses some of Harold Copping’s illustrations, made for Furnivall’s edition of Lamb’s Tales, and adds color plates from paintings by John H. Bacon and others. Raphael Tuck is thus publisher of the two most frequently reprinted collections of Shakespeare’s stories. 19. Mary Macleod, The Shakespeare Story-Book (London: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., 1902), ix–x. 20. Ibid., xii. 21. Ibid. 22. Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard, The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 285; Ellis, History of Children’s Reading and Literature, 72. 23. Standard Catalog for High School Libraries, ed. Zaidee Brown (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1929), 137. 24. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Historical Tales from Shakespeare (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), iii. 25. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of Reading is a series of twelve lectures, delivered from October 25, 1916, through November 6, 1918, that put the case for English studies. Lectures 3 and 4 are “Children’s Reading (I and II),” and 11 is “On the Use of Masterpieces.” The lectures were published as a book, On the Art of Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920). 26. Terence Hawkes, “Entry on Q,” in Shakespeare and Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (London: Routledge, 1999), 33–36, 37, 42. Analysis of As You Like It, jointly edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch and J. Dover Wilson, in New Cambridge Shakespeare (1926), supports argument for Quiller-Couch’s Liberalism; see Hawkes, “Entry,” 39–40. 27. Quiller-Couch, Historical Tales from Shakespeare, iv-vi. 28. Ibid., 99–100. 29. Ibid., v. 30. Ibid., 9. 31. Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 67–69. 32. Ibid., 61, argues that these three principal factors ensured English literature a permanent place in higher education. 33. Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare: Being the Textbook in English Appointed by the Senate of the Calcutta University for the Entrance Examination (Calcutta: Roy Press, 1879). 34. Edith Nesbit, Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare: A Home Study Course, ed. E. T. Roe (Chicago: A. Hertel and Co., 1907), 288–317.

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35. Eva March Tappan, A Short History of American Literature, added to by Rose Adelaide Witham (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 131. 36. Ibid. 37. William James Rolfe, Shakespeare the Boy: With Sketches of the Home and School Life, the Games and Sports, the Manners, Customs, and Folk-Lore of the Time, new ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1900). 38. Ibid., 123. 39. Ibid., 73. 40. Tappan, Short History of American Literature, 132. 41. William Patten, The Junior Classics, 10 vols. (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1912). 42. Julie Henry and Chris Hastings, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare: For a Pass You Need to Know . . . Nothing,” London Sunday Telegraph, April 23, 2006.

Contributors CATHERINE M.S. ALEXANDER is a Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and researches and writes on eighteenth-century Shakespeare. For Cambridge University Press she has edited Shakespeare and Politics and Shakespeare and Language and, with Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Race and Shakespeare and Sexuality. She has recently completed Henry VIII for Penguin, the illustrated and documented Shakespeare: The Life, The Works, The Treasures for André Deutsch and the RSC, and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays (CUP). She is a Trustee of the English Association and directs the International Shakespeare Summer School for the University of Cambridge. CATHERINE BELSEY is Research Professor in English at Swansea University. She is author of Critical Practice (1980, 2002), Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (2002), and Culture and the Real (2005). Her books also include The Subject of Tragedy (1985), Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (1999), Why Shakespeare? (2007), and Shakespeare in Theory and Practice (2008). DAVID BEVINGTON is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His studies include From “Mankind” to Marlowe (1962), Tudor Drama and Politics (1968), and Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (1985). He is also the editor of Medieval Drama (Houghton Mifflin, 1975); The Bantam Shakespeare, in 29 paperback volumes (1988), currently being reedited; and The Complete Works of Shakespeare, sixth edition (Longman, 2009), as well as the Oxford 1 Henry IV (1987), the Cambridge Antony and Cleopatra (1990), and the Arden 3 Troilus and Cressida (1998). He is the senior editor of the Revels Student Editions, and is a senior editor of the Revels Plays and of the forthcoming Cambridge edition of the works of Ben Jonson. He is senior editor of The Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama (2002). His latest books include Shakespeare (2002, 2nd edition, 2005); How to Read a Shakespeare Play (2006); This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now (2007); and Shakespeare’s Ideas (2008). Forthcoming from Oxford University Press: Murder Most Foul: The History of Hamlet. PIERO BOITANI, FBA, is Professor of Comparative Literature at “Sapienza,” Rome. His books include The Shadow of Ulysses: Figures of a Myth (Oxford, 1994), The Bible and its Rewritings (Oxford, 1999), Winged Words. Flights in Poetry and History (Chicago, 2007), La prima lezione sulla letteratura (Rome, 2007), Letteratura europea e Medioevo volgare (Bologna, 2007), Il Vangelo secondo Shakespeare (Bologna, 2009). ALAN BRISSENDEN, a graduate of Sydney and London universities, is an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. His publications include the New Mermaids edition of Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1968),

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Rolf Boldrewood (1972), Shakespeare and Some Others (ed., 1976), Shakespeare and the Dance (1981) and the Oxford Shakespeare edition of As You Like It (1993); Australia Dances is forthcoming. Reference books he has contributed to include The Spenser Encyclopedia (1991), The International Encyclopedia of Dance (1998), The Oxford Shakespeare Companion (2001), The Australian Dictionary of Biography and The Greenwood Shakespeare Encyclopedia (forthcoming). He has published on dance since 1950 and in 1996 was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to the arts. Founding Vice-President and later President of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association, in 1998 he was elected its first Honorary Life Member. ANN JENNALIE COOK is the author of The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576–1642, and Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society, both published by Princeton University Press. She has served as an officer of the International Shakespeare Association, on the Board of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and— from 1975 until 1987—as Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America. Her work has been supported by fellowships from both the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. She was named a Life Trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the only American to hold this honor. She taught for more than twenty years at Vanderbilt University. PAUL EDMONDSON is Head of Learning and Research at The Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon, a trustee of The Rose Theatre Trust, co-series editor for Palgrave Macmillan’s Shakespeare Handbooks, and co-supervisory editor of the Penguin Shakespeare (for which he has contributed to several introductions). His publications include: Twelfth Night: A Guide to the Text and Its Theatrical Life (Palgrave, 2005), and (co-authored with Stanley Wells) Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford, 2004) and Coffee with Shakespeare (2008). He has published on Shakespeare’s influence on the Brontës (Brontë Studies and Shakespeare Survey). He contributed an essay on the poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare to The Cambridge History of English Poetry. He wrote the script for The Shakespeare Centre’s ‘Life, Love, and Legacy’ exhibition and cocurated ‘Shakespeare Found: A Life Portrait.’ R. A. FOAKES is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many publications are editions of a number of Shakespeare’s plays, including the Arden 2 editions of King Henry VIII (1958) and The Comedy of Errors (1962), the Cambridge edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1985), and the Arden 3 edition of King Lear (1993). He has also edited a facsimile edition of Henslowe’s Diary (1977), as well as a transcript (with R. T. Rickert, 1961; reprinted with new prefatory material, 2003). His critical writings on Shakespeare include Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays (1971), Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art (1993), and Shakespeare and Violence (2003). He has also published Coleridge on Shakespeare. The text of the lectures of 1811–12 (1971) and an edition of Lectures 1808– 1819 On Literature for the Bollingen Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2 vols., 1987). BRIAN GIBBONS is the General Editor of “The New Cambridge Shakespeare” and a General Editor of “The New Mermaids”; he is a corresponding member of the Academy of Science and Literature (Mainz). After Cambridge he taught at the University of York, subsequently holding a Chair of English at the University of Leeds, then Zürich, and Münster, and visiting professorships at Montpellier and UCLA. He lives in York. His principal publications are Jacobean City Comedy (1968, rev. ed. 1980),

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Shakespeare and Multiplicity (1993, 2006), editions of Romeo & Juliet for the Arden Shakespeare (1980), and of Measure for Measure for the New Cambridge Shakespeare (1993). For the New Mermaids he has edited The Revenger’s Tragedy (1968, new ed. 2009), The Way of the World (1971, new ed. 1994) and The Duchess of Malfi (2001). MARTA GIBINSKA was educated at and received her degrees from the Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland, where she currently holds a position as full professor in English literature. She teaches poetry and drama from the Middle Ages through Romanticism. Her academic interests are centered on Shakespeare; her publications include two monograph studies, The Functioning of Language in Shakespeare Plays (1989) and Polish Poets Read Shakespeare. A Refashioning of the Tradition (1999). Apart from the language and literary reception of Shakespeare’s works, she has published many articles on the problems of the theatrical potential of the dramatic text, on Shakespeare’s sonnets, and on the problems of Shakespeare translation. In the years 1992–2002 she was President of the Polish Shakespeare Society. She is currently member of the Board of the European Shakespeare Research Association. WERNER HABICHT is Professor Emeritus of English, University of Würzburg, Germany. He obtained his degrees at the University of Munich and held previous positions at the Universities of Heidelberg and Bonn as well as visiting professorships at the Universities of Texas (Austin), of Colorado (Boulder), Ohio State (Columbus) and of Cyprus (Nicosia). He was President of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (West) (1976–87). He is elected member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Author of studies on medieval poetry and on Renaissance and modern drama, including Shakespeare’s reception in 19th and 20th-century Germany. Former editor of Shakespeare Jahrbuch (West) (1980–1995); co-editor of several volumes of criticism and of a literary encyclopedia (Literatur Brockhaus, 2nd edn. 1995). PETER HOLLAND is McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Theater and Associate Dean for the Arts at the University of Notre Dame. From 1997 to 2002 he was Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham. He was President of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2007–8. He is editor of Shakespeare Survey, general editor of the series Redefining British Theatre History, co-general editor (with Stanley Wells) of Oxford Shakespeare Topics and (with Adrian Poole) of Great Shakespeareans. He has edited many Shakespeare plays, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Oxford Shakespeare. Among his publications are English Shakespeares (1997), William Shakespeare (from his entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) and Shakespeare, Memory and Performance (2006). GRACE IOPPOLO is Professor of Shakespearean and Early Modern Drama in the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. Her publications include Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse (2006) as well as Revising Shakespeare (1991) and Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes (2000). She has produced critical editions of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Measure for Measure and has published numerous articles on early modern textual transmission and manuscript culture. With Peter Beal she has co-edited Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (2007), a collection of essays on manuscripts written by, to, or for Queen Elizabeth. She is the General Editor of The Complete Works of Thomas Heywood (forthcom-

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ing from Oxford University Press) and with S. P. Cerasano is preparing a critical edition for OUP of Edward Alleyn’s Diary. She is the founder and director of the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project (www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk). CHRISTA JANSOHN is Professor of British Culture and Director of the Centre for British Studies at the University of Bamberg, Germany. She is a member of the Academy of Science and Literature (Mainz). She is author of books on the use of quotation and allusion in the early work of D. H. Lawrence (1990) and on the Shakespeare-Apocrypha and their German reception (2000). She has edited Dorothea Tieck’s translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets (1992) and Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint. German Translations from 1787 to 1894 (1993). With Dieter Mehl she edited The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (1995), and the two early versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1999) for Cambridge University Press. For Delaware Press she edited German Shakespeare Studies at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (2006), and Shakespeare’s World: World Shakespeare. The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Brisbane 2006 (together with Richard Fortheringham and Robert White, 2008). She is co-editor of Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen (2001–), and Editionen in der Kritik (2006–). She is currently completing a book, Aufbruch und Bruch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft: 1945– 1963 and a critical edition of Gundolf’s and Wenghöfer’s (hitherto unpublished) translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets and narrative poems. CHEE-SENG LIM retired as Professor of English at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in July 2009 after almost twelve years as Head of Department. He is a Past International Chairman of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS, 1997–99) and is currently a Member of the Executive Committee of the International Shakespeare Association. He is co-editor of Shakespeare Without English (New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2006) with Sukanta Chaudhuri and English Studies in Asia (Kuala Lumpur: Silverfish, 2007) with M. Araki, R. Minami & Y. Yoshihara. His scholarly articles and book chapters have appeared in journals and books published in France, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. MARTIN ORKIN is Professor in the Department of English and the Department of Theatre at the University of Haifa, Israel. His most recent book is Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power (London: Routledge, 2005). He is author of Drama and the South African State (1991) and Shakespeare Against Apartheid ( Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1987), editor of At the Junction: Four plays by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company (1995) and co-editor of Post-Colonial Shakespeares (1998). In recent years the multicultural theater workshop groups he has led have devised a number of performance scripts including Everywoman (a contemporary women’s adaptation of Everyman), The War Show (an exploration of aspects of the Second War between Lebanon and Israel) and Shakespeare in Haifa (an examination of The Merchant of Venice in the context of present day Israel and Palestine). He is currently exploring the phenomenon of hatred in early modern drama. LENA COWEN ORLIN, Professor of English at Georgetown University and Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America, serves on the Executive Committee of the International Shakespeare Association with Dieter Mehl. Between 1982 and 1996 she was Executive Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of Locating Privacy in Tudor London (2007) and Private Mat-

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ters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (1994). The collections of essays she has edited include Staging Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Alan C. Dessen (with Miranda Johnson-Haddad, 2007), Center or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll (2006), New Casebooks Othello: Contemporary Critical Essays (2003), and Material London, ca. 1600 (2000). She has also edited A Sourcebook for English Studies: The Renaissance (2009), Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide (with Stanley Wells, 2003), and Elizabethan Households: An Anthology (1995). ADRIAN POOLE is Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He works on the theory and practice of tragedy, on the after-lives of the classics in English literature, on Shakespeare, and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British fiction. His monographs include Gissing in Context (1975), Henry James (1989), Shakespeare and the Victorians (2003), and Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (2005); together with Jeremy Maule he edited the Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation (1995). He has written extensively on nineteenth-century fiction, on Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, James, and Stevenson, and he has edited the Cambridge Companion to English Novelists (2009). He is one of the general editors of the Complete Fiction of Henry James to be published by Cambridge University Press in thirty volumes, and will himself edit The Princess Casamassima. PHYLLIS RACKIN, former President of the Shakespeare Association of America, (PhD, University of Illinois) is Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published extensively on Shakespeare and related subjects. Her books include Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (1990, 1993); Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (1997), which she wrote in collaboration with Jean E. Howard; and Shakespeare and Women (2005). Her current research interests include the political implications of changing fashions in recent feminist Shakespeare criticism and the variety of uses served by cross-dressed disguise in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Her most recent article is “Dated and Outdated: The Present Tense of Feminist Shakespeare Criticism,” which appeared in Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (2009). HUGH MACRAE RICHMOND, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, holds a BA from Cambridge and a D Phil. from Oxford, with diplomas from the Universities of Florence and Munich. He heads the Shakespeare Program at U.C.B., staging Shakespeare plays. He was an advisor for the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. His books include Shakespeare’s Political Plays, Shakespeare’s Sexual Comedy; performance histories of Richard III and Henry VIII; a bibliography on Shakespeare and the Renaissance Stage; Shakespeare’s Theatre; and books on European poetry: John Milton, The School of Love, Renaissance Landscapes, and Puritans and Libertines. His educational documentaries are: Shakespeare and the Globe, Milton By Himself, and A Prologue to Chaucer (distributor: Films for the Humanities); Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Restored and Shakespeare & the Spanish Connection (via TMW Media). His Web site at “Shakespeare’s Staging: Berkeley” is currently approaching one million visits. VELMA BOURGEOIS RICHMOND is Professor of English Emerita, Holy Names University, Oakland, California. She joined the faculty in 1958, was Chairperson of the English Department, and Dean of Academic Affairs. She holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Louisiana State University; Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel

CONTRIBUTORS

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Hill; B.Litt. from Oxford University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar; Doctor of Humane Letters from the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Berkeley. Her principal published works are: Laments for the Dead in Medieval Narrative (1966), The Popularity of Middle English Romance (1975), Muriel Spark (1984), A Prologue to Chaucer (video, 1986), Geoffrey Chaucer (1992), The Legend of Guy of Warwick (1996), Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance (2000, Book Award Conference on Christianity and Literature), Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (2004), Shakespeare as Children’s Literature: Edwardian Retellings in Words and Pictures (2008). ALEXANDER SHURBANOV is Professor of English Literature at Sofia University, Bulgaria. His books include Renaissance Humanism and Shakespeare’s Lyrical Poetry, Between Pathos and Irony: Christopher Marlowe and the Genesis of Renaissance Drama, Poetics of the English Renaissance, Shakespeare’s Lyricized Drama, and the collaborative studies Painting Shakespeare Red: An East-European Appropriation and The Reception of English Literature in Bulgaria through Translation. He has translated into Bulgarian verse Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and a number of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. BRUCE R. SMITH is the author of six books that explore the shaping power of theatrical performance on social identity (Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500–1700), sexuality (Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England), gender (Shakespeare and Masculinity), and modes of perception (The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, The Key of Green, Phenomenal Shakespeare). A former president of the Shakespeare Association of America, he is Dean’s Professor of English at the University of Southern California. ANN THOMPSON is Professor of English at King’s College London; she has previously taught at the University of Liverpool and at Roehampton University. She is a General Editor of the Arden Shakespeare series and has (with Neil Taylor) edited all three texts of Hamlet for Arden (2006). Other publications include an edition of The Taming of the Shrew (1984), Shakespeare’s Chaucer (1978), Shakespeare, Meaning and Metaphor (with John O. Thompson, 1987), Teaching Women: Feminism and English Studies (with Helen Wilcox, 1989), Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660–1900 (with Sasha Roberts, 1996) and In Arden: Editing Shakespeare (with Gordon McMullan, 2003). JOHN O. THOMPSON is now retired. He has taught Communication Studies, Media Studies and Film at the University of Liverpool, the British Film Institute, the University of Wales (Cardiff) and Thames Valley University. In addition to collaborating with Ann Thompson on Shakespeare projects, he has co-edited (with Manuel Alvarado) The Media Reader (1990), and (with Antony Easthope) Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory (1991). His books of poetry include Echo and Montana (1980) and The Gates of Even (2002). JESÚS TRONCH holds a PhD from the University of Valencia (Spain) where he teaches English literature and audiovisual translation. His main interests are textual criticism (specifically on early modern drama) and the presence of Shakespeare in Spain. He has published A Synoptic ‘Hamlet’: A Critical-Synoptic Edition of the Second Quarto and First Folio Texts of ‘Hamlet’ (2002), and Un primer ‘Hamlet’ (1994). He is co-editing a critical edition of The Spanish Tragedy for the Arden Early Modern Drama series. Forthcoming is an on-line monograph on Hamlet in Spain.

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CONTRIBUTORS

STANLEY WELLS, CBE, is Chairman of the Trustees of Shakespeare’s Birthplace, Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies of the University of Birmingham, and Honorary Emeritus Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. His books include Literature and Drama; Royal Shakespeare: Studies of Four Major Productions at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre; Modernizing Shakespeare’s spelling; Re-editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader; and Shakespeare: the Poet and his Plays. He edited A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, and The Comedy of Errors for the New Penguin Shakespeare and King Lear for the Oxford Shakespeare. He was for nearly twenty years the editor of the annual Shakespeare Survey, and writes for the New York Review of Books and many other publications. He has edited The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies and is General Editor (with Gary Taylor) of The Complete Oxford Shakespeare and co-author of William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. His most recent books are Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism; The Oxford Dictionary of Shakespeare; The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (edited with Michael Dobson); Shakespeare For All Time; Looking for Sex in Shakespeare; Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Coffee with Shakespeare, both co-authored with Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare & Co., and Is It True What they Say About Shakespeare?, and Shakespeare, Sex, and Love. GEORGIANNA ZIEGLER is Louis B. Thalheimer Head of Reference at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. She has a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania, and taught on the college level for a while before becoming a librarian. At the Folger she has curated several exhibitions, including “Shakespeare’s Unruly Women” (1997), and “Elizabeth I: Then and Now” (2003) for which she also wrote and edited the catalogs. She has published a number of articles on early modern women and women and Shakespeare, including pieces on Elizabeth of Bohemia, Esther Inglis, the nineteenth-century reception of Lady Macbeth and Catherine of Aragon, and on Shakespeare for children. She is currently completing a book, Domesticating the Bard: Englishwomen and Shakespeare 1790–1890.

Index Abbott, Claude Colleen, 90n. 2 Actium, 224 Adelman, Janet, 240n. 6 Aeschylus: Oresteia, 204, 224 Africa, 146, 148, 258–59 Agincourt, 184, 186, 361 Ainsworth, Harrison, 360 Akenside, Mark: “The Pleasures of the Imagination, 309 Alabaster, William: Roxana, 144, 154n. 16 Albee, Edward: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 249 Aldeburgh, 85 Alexander the Great, 271 Alexander, Catherine M. S., 305, 368 Alexander, David, 262n. 4 Ali G, 79 Allard, Sebastien, 351n. 21 Allen, John J., 251n. 1 Alleyn, Edward, 47, 50, 54 Almagro, 241 Almagro, Perico, 300 Alter, Robert, 216n. 17 Altick, Richard, 351nn. 25, 26, 27, and 31 America, 11, 15, 253, 254, 354 Anderson, Judith, 123, 136n. 5 Anderson, Karen, 46n. 33 Andreini, Isabella, 37 Angeli, Diego, 274, 280 Angiolini, Gaspero, 94 Anna, Queen, 39, 43 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 189 Apian, Peter, 253 Appelbaum, Stanley, 301n. 6 Arabia, 262n. 11 Arac, Jonathan, 336n. 23 Arberry, A. J., 258, 262n. 12; Oriental Essays, 258 Archer, John Michael, 154n. 20 Arden of Faversham, 38–39

Armin, Robert, 243 Arnaiz, Laura Campillo, 282n. 1 Arthur (King Henry VIII’s brother), 130 Ascham, Roger, 180 Ashfield, Andrew, 307, 320n. 2 Ashton, Frederick, 93, 102–3; The Dream, 102 Asia, 224, 254, 259–60 Asquith, Herbert Henry, 361 Astington, John H., 154n. 16 Astrana Marín, Luis, 272, 277, 281 Aubrey, John, 84, 182 Austen, Jane, 18 Austin, J. L., 190, 192 Australia, 15, 256–57, 260, 263n. 19, 328 Austria, 244, 248 Avecilla, Pablo, 301 Bacon, John H., 366n. 18 Badcock, Samuel: “A Presbyterian Parson’s Soliloquy,” 318 Badel, Alan, 11 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 13, 13n. 1 Balanchine, George, 101–2, 106nn. 9, 15, and 16 Baldick, Chris, 366n. 31 Baldwin, T. W., 188nn. 21 and 23, 193–94, 200n. 16 Ballantyne, R. M., 360 Ballesteros, Luis López, 301 Bally, Charles, 155n. 27 Bancroft, Richard, Bishop of London, 149 Bandello, Matteo, 360 Bangor, 82 Banks, Thomas, 306 Baran´czak, Stanisław, 286–88, 291nn. 11, 14, and 17 Barbier, Paul Carl, 320n. 6 Barbu, Zevedei, 247, 252n. 18

375

376

INDEX

Barcelona, Antonio, 136n. 3 Barking Nunnery, 36 Barnstaple, 85 Barry, Spranger, 319 Barthes, Roland, 170n. 11, 187, 188n. 31; Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, 170n. 11, “The Death of the Author,” 187 Basel (Basle), 144, 282n. 1 Baskerville, Susan, 37, 39 Bass, Alan, 291n. 18 Batchelor, Adrian, 103 Bate, Jonathan, 11, 18n. 6, 23, 32, 33n. 6, 34n. 20, 75nn. 38 and 40, 187n. 10 Baum, Frank L.: The Wonderful] Wizard of Oz, 220 Beale, Simon Russell, 115 Beaumont, Cyril W. 105n. 3 Beaumont, Francis, 40–41, 53, 55, 180; The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 40 Beckett, Samuel, 66 Bedford, Kristina, 108, 119n. 1 Bednarz, James P., 176, 187n. 3 Beeston, Christopher, 47, 49–50 Bello, José, 299, 301 Belsey, Catherine, 175, 188n. 15, 368 Benavente, Jacinto, 292–99, 301nn. 2, 4, and 6, 302nn. 12 and 17; Cualquiera lo sabe, 293; Cuento de amor, 292; El bufón de Hamlet: Comedia en tres actos y un epílogo, 292–99; La infanzona, 293; La historia de Otelo, 292; La noche iluminada, 293; Literatura, 293; Los intereses creados, 292; Los favoritos, 292; Titania, 293 Benda, Johann Wilhelm Otto, 271, 279 Benjamin, Walter, 291n. 20 Bennett, Alan, 82, 90n. 14 Bennett, Susan, 66–67, 74n. 14 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, 219 Benson, Larry D., 239n. 2, 252n. 19 Bentley, Richard, 309 Beowulf, 220 Berbrugger, Adrien, 272, 278 Beretti, Filippo, 93 Bergamín, José, 299 Bergeron, David M., 155n. 22 Bergua, José, 272, 281 Berkenhead, John, 40, 45n. 24 Berlin, 16, 83 Berlioz, Hector, 341

Betterton, Thomas, 65, 92, 319; The Fairy Queen, 92 Bevington, David, 16, 74n. 4, 219, 240n. 3, 368 Bidford, 305 Billington, Michael, 69 Bing, Suzanne, 271, 278 Birmingham, U.K., 29, 281n. 1 Birnbaum, Lisa, 113 Blanch, Jaime, 299 Blanco-White, José María, 272, 281 Blayney, Peter W. M., 59n. 28 Blinn, Hansjürgen, 281n. 1 Blodek, Vilém: In the Well, 94 Blom, August, 271, 278 Bloom, Harold, 207, 215n. 12, 259, 261, 263n. 15 Boas, Frederick S., 352 Bochum, 15–16 Bodenstedt, Friedrich, 274, 279 Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, 136n. 9 Bogdanov, Michael, 81, 90n. 13 Bohannan, Laura, 259, 263n. 17 Boigne, Madame de, 350n. 15 Boissonnais, Lucien, 351n. 20 Boitani, Piero, 203, 214n. 4, 216n. 18, 368 Boito, Arrigo, 273 Boleyn, Anne, 130 Bolster, Richard, 350n. 14 Bolla, Peter de, 307, 320n. 2 Bonechi, Monica, 154n. 19 Bonn, 11, 18 Bonnefoy, Yves, 272, 279, 338–39, 350nn. 8 and 13 Boose, Lynda E., 154n. 20 Booth, Edwin, 65, 305, 320 Bosmajian, Haig, 149, 154n. 21 Bosnia, 85 Botticelli, Sandro, 249 Boulton, James T., 12 Boutin, Aimée, 350n. 9 Bowdler, Thomas, 366n. 17 Bowlby, Rachel, 199n. 1 Boyd, Michael, 63, 65 Brand, John: Popular Antiquities, 363 Bremser, Martha, 105n. 4, 106n. 18 Bridges, Robert, 77 Bridgwater, 85 Briggs, Asa, 366n. 17

INDEX

Brinsley, John: Ludus Literarius: Or, The Grammar Schoole, 77 Brisbane, 12, 18, 104 Brissenden, Alan, 92, 105n. 7, 368–69. Bristol, Michael, 69, 74nn. 9, 10, and 12, 75nn. 22 and 23 Britain (Great), 66, 76, 79, 81, 85, 219, 221–23, 226, 229, 231–39, 352 Britten, Benjamin: The Rape of Lucretia, 103 Brno, 94 Brock, Susan, 40, 45n. 21 Brockbank, J. Philip, 240n. 12 Brome, Richard, 47 Brontë, Anne, 18, 41, 322 Brontë, Charlotte, 18, 41, 322 Brontë, Emily Jane, 41, 322 Brook, Peter, 69, 102, 108 Brooke, Rupert, 80 Brousse, Georges, 272, 279 Brown, Ford Madox, 345 Brown, John Russell, 214n. 2 Brown, Jonathan, 242, 251nn. 3 and 7, 252n. 16 Brown, Pamela Allen, 36, 44n. 4, 45n. 10 Brown, Zaidee, 366n. 23 Browne, Gordon F., 358 Browne, Robert, 39 Browne, William, 39 Browning, Robert, 322, 355 Bryan, Mary, 37 Buckle, Richard, 96, 106n. 12 Bullough, Geoffrey, 133, 135, 137n. 13 Bulman, James C., 75nn. 24 and 35 Buñuel, Luis, 299, 301 Bunyan, John, 360 Buonconte da Montefeltro, 215n. 9 Burbage, Richard, 23–24, 86, 89, 243 Burgersdijk, Leendert A. J., 273, 278 Burke, Edmund, 32, 309–10, 314–15, 321n. 20; A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 309, 314–15 Burke, Joseph, 321n. 26 Burkhardt, Jacob, 251n. 2 Burt, Richard, 154n. 20 Burton, Richard, 108, 115 Butler, Robert, 119n. 12 Buttler, Anne, 43–44

377

Caesar, Augustus (Octavius), 224, 225, 232, 233 Caesar, Gaius Julius, 220, 225, 232 Calcutta, 258, 362 California, 256 Calvin, Jean, 214n. 5 Calvo, Javier Huerta, 302n. 16 Cambria. See Wales Cambridge, U.K., 11, 144, 353, 361– 62 Camón Aznar, José María, 299 Canada, 11, 66 Canterbury, 85, 141, 149 Caradoc, John Hobart (2nd Baron Howden), 350n. 18 Carcano, Giuglio, 271, 280 Carnerero, J. M., 301 Caroline, Queen Consort, 317 Carpenter, Humphrey, 366n. 22 Carroll, Robert P., 214n. 1 Carson, Neil, 59n. 27 Cary, Elizabeth, 36–37, 40, 46n. 27; History of . . . King Edward II, 41; Mariam the Fair Queen of Jewry, 37 Cate, Curtis, 350n. 14 Cavendish, Margaret, 40, 45n. 25 Caxton, William: The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, 219 Cayrou, Alcide, 273, 279 Cerasano, Susan, 36, 39, 44n. 5, 45nn. 7, 9, 20, and 21 Chambers, E. K., 46n. 31 Chambers, Jessie, 41, 46n. 26 Chaplin, Charlie, 184 Chapman, George, 188n. 12, 243 Charen, Eugénie Marguerite Honorée (Mme Servières), 351n. 32 Charles II, King, 307 Charles V, Emperor, 248 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 338, 350n. 5 Charlton, Todd, 109 Chatelain, Chevalier de, 274, 279 Chatsworth, 85 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 17, 18, 176–78, 180–84, 186, 187n. 10, 188n. 13, 195, 207, 219, 239n. 2, 247, 252n. 19, 355, 363 —Works: The Book of the Duchess (The Dreame of Chaucer), 177, 182; The

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Chaucer, Geoffrey —Works (continued) Canterbury Tales, 178, 182, 185–86, 247; The House of Fame, 178–79, 181–82, 186, 219; “The Knight’s Tale,” 181; The Legend of Good Women, 181; “The Merchant’s Tale,” 181; The Parliament of Fowls, 177–78, 181; “The Prologue to Sir Thopas,” 180; The Troilus and Criseyde, 181 Cheney, Patrick, 188nn. 15 and 16 Chettle, Henry, 47, 55–57 Chicago, 240n. 7 Chillington, Carol A., 59n. 28 China, 254 Chladek, Rosalia, 94 Churchill, Charles, 309, 317; The Rosciad, 309, 317, 321n. 21 Chute, John, 309 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 77 Cimolino, Antoni, 109 Cinthio (Giovanni Battista Giraldi), 360 Clare, Janet, 154n. 20 Clark, Arthur Melville, 50, 58nn. 1 and 9 Clarke, Charles Cowdon: Tales from Chaucer in Prose, 355 Clarke, Mary Victoria Cowden: Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare, 355, 356; The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 355 Cleopatra, 315 Coello, Carlos, 301 Coghill, Nevill, 29 Cole, John William, 321nn. 23 and 27 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Biographia Literaria, 26 Colet, John, 182 Colet, Louise, 350n. 9 Collins, Philip, 335nn. 5 and 6 Colonne, Guido delle: Historia Troiana, 219 Columbus, Christopher, 253–54, 260, 263n. 20 Colvin, Clare, 262n. 9, 263n. 18 Combe, William: “A Tour in Search of the Picturesque,” 318; The Three Tours of Dr. Syntax, 321n. 25 Condell, Henry, 23, 25, 28, 33, 73, 86, 89 Conejero Dionís-Bayer, Manuel Ángel, 274, 281, 300

Connolly, Billy, 79–80 Cook, Ann Jennalie, 15, 369 Cooke, Thomas: “To marry or live single,” 318 Copeau, Jacques, 271, 278 Copenhagen, 93 Copping, Harold, 366n. 18 Coriolanus, King, 220 Cornfield, Robert, 105n. 6 Cotton, Nancy, 45n. 7 Courteaux, Willy, 273, 278 Courtenay, Sir Tom, 80–81, 90n. 10 Cox, John D., 45n. 23 Craig, Hardin, 46n. 27 Craik, T. W., 188n. 30 Crandall, Coryl, 43, 46n. 34 Crane, Ralph, 25 Crane, W. G., 199n. 6 Cranko, John, 93, 99, 100 Croall, Jonathan, 119n. 12 Croce, Arlene, 102, 106n. 17 Crowther, John, 282n. 9 Cruikshank, Don W., 251n. 1 Cruikshank, George, 317–18 Cuba, 66, 254 Culler, Jonathan, 170n. 10 Cunningham, John: “Ode to Taste,” 309 Custodio, Alvaro, 272, 281 Cyrus, 224, 225 Czech Republic, 16 d’Agoult, Marie, 337–39; Valentia, 350n. 14 Daiches, David, 366n. 17 Dalí, Salvador, 100 Dalrymple, Helen, 262n. 2 Damirale, Michael, 271, 280 Daniel, Samuel: The Tragedy of Cleopatra, 37 Danielsson, Bror, 155n. 23 Dankworth, John, 103 Dante, Alighieri, 215n. 9, 349n. 4, 351n. 22 Darton, F. J. Harvey, 354–55, 358, 365n. 12 Darwin, Erasmus: “The Botanic Garden,” 309, 311 Davenant, Sir William, 241 David, Jacques-Louis, 350n. 5 De la Cruz, Ramón, 301 De la Milla, Fernando, 301

INDEX

Dekker, Thomas, 47, 55–57, 79, 89, 90n. 9, 188n. 12; The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 79, 90n. 9 Delabastita, Dirk, 282n. 1 Delacroix, Eugène, 338, 341–42, 349, 351nn. 22, 27, and 35 Delaroche, Paul, 341 Delessert, Edouard, 350n. 7 Delessert, Gabriel, 338, 350n. 6 Delessert, Julie-Thérèse-Cécile (Madame Valon), 350n. 6 Delius, Frederick, 97 Denby, Edwin, 95–97, 105n. 6, 106nn. 10 and 13 Dent, Robert William, 137n. 11, 195, 200n. 10 Déprats, Jean-Michel, 272, 279 Der Bestrafte Brudermord (Fratricide Punished), 130, 135 Derocquigny, Jules, 274, 279 Derrida, Jacques, 151, 155n. 30, 189, 195, 289–90, 291nn. 18, 19, and 20 Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline, 338 Des Cars, Laurence, 351n. 21 Desmet, Christy, 366n. 26 Dessen, Alan C., 66, 74n. 13, 139–40, 153nn. 3, 4, 6, and 7 Dévényi, Jutka, 123, 136n. 5 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex, 49, 58n. 8, 241, 243 Devéria, Achille, 347 Dickens, Charles, 17, 322–35, 335nn. 1, 3–7, and 10, 336nn. 11–15 and 17–22, 360 —Works: All the Year Round, 330; Bleak House, 333–34; A Christmas Carol, 330–31; David Copperfield, 324, 327–29, 331–32; Dombey and Son, 329, 332; Great Expectations, 260, 324, 328, 330, 332–33, 335n. 9; Little Dorrit, 332; “Lying Awake,” 330, 332, 336nn. 13 and 21; Martin Chuzzlewit, 323; Nicholas Nickleby, 323, 329; “Night Walks,” 330–32, 336nn. 15, 17–20, and 22; The Old Curiosity Shop, 323–26, 332; Oliver Twist, 323, 326–27, 330; “O’Thello,” 322; Our Mutual Friend, 329, 333; Pickwick Papers, 323; A Tale of Two Cities, 333 Digges, Leonard, 24 Dobson, Michael, 63, 65, 74nn. 1 and 6

379

Dodd, William, 314; The Beauties of Shakespear, 314, 321n. 13 Dodsley, Robert: A Select Collection of Old Plays, 308 Dominions, 353 Don Juan of Austria, 244, 248, 249 Donellan, Declan, 67 Donne, John, 261, 263n. 24 Dorati, Antal, 97 d’Orléans, Princesse Marie, 350n. 19 d’Ormesson, François, 349nn. 3 and 4, 350nn. 5 and 18 Dorset, 92 Dover, 89, 212, 331 Downes, John, 105n. 2 Downman, Hugh: The Drama, 309 Doy, Gen, 350n. 19 Drake, Sir Francis, 241 Dresden, 259 Dresen, Adolf, 273, 279 Drew, John, 335n. 7, 336n. 15 Droeshout, Martin, 24–25, 316 Dryden, Deborah M., 110 Dubrow, Heather, 240n. 14 Ducis, Jean-François, 273, 279, 300 Duke of Lorraine. See René I Dumas, Alexandre, 274, 279, 339, 342, 349n. 4, 351nn. 28 and 29; Mes mémoires, 349n. 4 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 175, 187n. 2 Dürer, Albrecht, 312 Dusinberre, Juliet, 188n. 11 Dyer, T. F. Thiselton: Folk-lore of Shakespeare, 363 Eagleton, Terry, 199n. 2 Earl of Arundel. See Howard, Thomas Earl of Dorset. See Sackville, Richard Earl of Essex. See Devereux, Robert Easson, Angus, 335n. 3 Eccardt, John Giles, 316 Edelman, Charles, 282n. 10 Edmondson, Paul, 23, 369 Edwards, Edward: Anecdotes of Painters, Catalogue of Engravers in England, 308 Edwards, Philip, 282n. 6 Egypt, 256 “Elegy on the Death of Mr Powell,” 318 Eliot, Charles W., 364–65 Eliot, George, 18, 41, 322, 335n. 8; Daniel Deronda, 335n. 8

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INDEX

Eliot, T. S.: On Poetry and Poets, 171n. 19 Elizabeth I, Queen, 36, 49, 186, 243, 248, 251n. 1, 354 Elliott, Vivien Brodsky, 44n. 3 Ellis, Alec, 365n. 3, 366n. 22 Elman, Mary, 319 Emerson, Caryl, 13n. 1 England, 15, 37, 42, 68, 85, 141, 204, 206, 230, 248, 251n. 1, 258–59, 286, 338, 351n. 25, 365 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 141, 143, 194; Adagia, 143 Erne, Lukas, 32, 34n. 22, 185–86, 188n. 27 Errante, Vincenzo, 272, 280 Eschenburg, Johann Joachim, 273, 279 Euripides: Bacchae, 208 Europe, 11, 93, 219, 230, 239, 248, 253–59, 261, 283, 311 Evans, G. Blakemore, 90n. 7, 105n. 7, 188n. 17, 252n. 12, 282n. 4, 302n. 19 Evans, Dame Edith, 80 Evans, Thomas, 308 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 285, 291n. 8 Exeter, 85 Eyres, Harry, 242, 243, 251nn. 5 and 6, 252nn. 9, 11, and 13 Fandot, Raul, 272, 280 Fassler, Christopher J., 45n. 11 Faversham, 85 Felman, Shoshana, 199n. 7 Feore, Colm, 109 Ferguson, Margaret W., 44n. 2 Fernandez, Lucas, 259 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, 262n. 3 Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones, 81 Fields, J. T., 336n. 12 Finney, Albert, 81 Fisch, Harold, 212, 214n. 3 and 6, 215nn. 14 and 15, 216n. 17 Flatter, Richard, 29, 30, 33n. 12, 273, 279 Fleischer, Ernest, 337 Fletcher, John, 40–41, 47, 53, 55 Foakes, R. A., 58nn. 5 and 6, 59n. 23, 59nn. 24, 25, and 26, 63, 74nn. 3 and 5, 75n. 20, 144, 154nn. 15 and 16, 369 Foersom, Peter Thun, 271, 278

Foister, Susan, 154n. 13 Fokine, Mikhail, 100 Fontane, Theodor, 274, 279 Foote, Samuel: On Taste, 312–13, 315, 317, 320n. 11 Fordwich, 85 Forster, E. M.: Passage to India, 257 Forster, John, 329, 336n. 11 Fothergill-Payne, Louise and Peter, 251n. 1 Foucault, Michel, 252n. 25 France, 298, 311, 341–42, 348, 350nn. 12 and 19, 353, 361 Franklin, Benjamin, 309 Freetown, 259 Freud, Sigmund, 293 Fried, Erich, 273, 275, 279 Frye, Northrop, 163, 171n. 16 Frye, Susan, 46n. 33 Furness, Horace Howard, 363 Furnivall, Frederick James, 354–58, 361, 363, 365n. 11, 366nn. 15 and 18; Tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims Retold from Chaucer and Others, 354 Gade, Sven, 137n. 18 Gager, Valerie A., 335n. 2 Gałczyn´ski, Konstanty Ildefons, 291n. 12 Galleotti, Vincenzo, 93–94 Garcia, Antonio Lopez, 243 Garnier, Charles-Marie, 338 Garnier, Robert: Marc Antoine, 37 Garrick, David, 65, 93, 107, 305, 307, 309, 313, 317–18, 320, 320n. 11 Gärtner, Kurt, 282n. 10 Gentzler, Edwin, 285, 291n. 10 Geoffrey of Monmouth: Historia Regum Britanniae, 219 George III, King, 307, 317 George IV, King (Prince Regent), 317 Germany, 72, 337; East, 16; West, 15 Gibbons, Brian, 76, 369–70 Gibinska, Marta, 283, 370 Gide, André, 274, 279 Gielgud, Sir John, 80, 108, 115, 130 Gill, Alexander: Logonomia Anglica, 86 Gilpin, William: Tour of the Lakes, 311 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang v., 332, 349n. 4

INDEX

Goldblum, Jeff, 113 Golding, Arthur, 245 Goldsmith, Oliver, 18, 312, 320n. 10 Gollancz, Israel, 353, 357 Gombrich, Ernst H., 251n. 2 Gómez de la Serna, Ramón, 300 González, José Manuel, 301n. 7 Gounod, Charles, 341 Goza, 148 Grady, Hugh, 75n. 22 Graham, Joseph F., 291n. 18 Gramsci, Antonio, 256, 262n. 8; Prison Notebooks, 256 Grau, Alicia, 300 Grau, Gemma, 300 Gray, Margaret, 37 Greenblatt, Stephen, 179, 200n. 9, 214n. 9, 215n. 9, 263n. 20, 282n. 7 Greene, Robert, 241 Greene, Thomas, 39 Greenland, 65 Greer, Germaine, 24, 33n. 7 Greg, W. W., 59nn. 28 and 31 Greiner, Norbert, 270, 279 Griffin, Andrew, 190, 197, 199n. 5, 202n. 26 Griffiths, Hugh, 81 Grigorovich, Yuri, 99 Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm, 220 Grinwis, Paul: The Eternal Lovers, 100 Guizot, François Pierre Guillaume, 272, 279, 339 Günther, Frank, 273, 279 Gurr, Andrew, 46n. 30, 75n. 32, 153n. 5, 154n. 14, 263n. 22 Gvovsky, Tatjana, 94 Habicht, Werner, 16, 267, 282n. 10, 370 Hagberg, Carl August, 271, 281 Hagen, W., 274, 279 Halifax, 85 Hall, John, 220 Hall, Peter, 81, 108, 119n. 10 Hall, Susanna (Shakespeare’s daughter), 220 Halle, Morris, 136n. 2 Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard, 363 Hallqvist, Britt G., 271, 281 Hamburger, Maik, 16, 273, 279 Handley, Graham, 335n. 8

381

Hanmer, Thomas, 319 Hardenberg, Friedrich v. (Novalis): Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 171n. 21 Hardy, Thomas, 18, 322 Harley, Edward, Earl of Oxford, 307 Harris, Bernard, 91n. 21 Harris, Roy, 155n. 27 Harrison, Tony: Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, 116 Hart, John, 149–50, 155n. 23; An Orthographie, 149, 155n. 23 Harvard, 364 Harvey, Gabriel, 193 Haselkorn, Anne M., 46n. 27 Hastings, Chris, 367n. 42 Hathaway, Anne (Shakespeare’s wife), 24, 305 Havana, 66 Hawkes, Terence, 16, 366n. 26 Hawkins, Thomas, 311, 320n. 8; The Origin of the English Drama, 311 Hay, Richard L., 110 Hayman, Francis, 319 Heath, Stephen, 188n. 31, 193 Hébert, John, 253–54, 262n. 2 Hecht, Hans, 154n. 17 Hedley, Jane, 123, 136n. 5 Helpmann, Robert, 102 Helsztyn´ski, S., 291n. 15 Heminges / Hemings, John, 23, 25, 28, 33, 73 Henderson, John, 320 Henderson, Mae G., 199n. 3 Henri IV, King of France, 243 Henry VI, King, 28, 243 Henry VIII, King, 130 Henry, Julie, 367n. 42 Henslowe, Agnes, 39 Henslowe, Philip, 39, 47–49, 54–55, 59nn. 23 and 27; Diary, 54–55, 154n. 15 Henty, G. A., 362 Herbert, Edward, 141 Herbert, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: The Tragedy of Antonie, 37 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 273, 279 Herford, C. H., 90n. 5, 155n. 24, 263n. 21 Herodotus, 224 Heufeld, Franz, 274, 279

382

INDEX

Heywood, Thomas, 43–44, 47–58, 58nn. 1, 7, 8, and 11–18, 59nn. 19, 22, 23, and 30 —Works: An Apology for Actors, 48–49, 52, 58n. 16; The Blind Eats Many a Fly, 55–56; The Brazen Age, 52; The Captives, 48, 56–57; Christmas Comes but Once a Year, 55–56; Cutting Dick, 55; The English Traveller, 46n. 32, 53, 59n. 19; The Escapes of Jupiter, 48, 56–57; The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women in the World, 56, 59n. 30; Funeral Elegy for James I, 49; The Golden Age, 52, 56, 58n. 15; If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Parts I and II, 57; The Iron Age, 52, 58n. 18; Joan as Good as my Lady, 55; Lady Jane, 55; The London Florentine, 55; Marshal Osric, 55; The Rape of Lucrece, 51, 53, 58n. 11; Shore’s Wife/Edward VI, 55; The Silver Age, 52, 56; Sir Thomas More (The Book of), 48, 56–57, 59nn. 28 and 31, 78; War With-out Blows and Love Without Suit, 55; A Woman Killed With Kindness, 48, 55 Hibbard, G. R., 90n. 17 Hicks, Greg, 63, 74, 74n. 6 Hildy, Franklin J., 251n. 1 Hill, Charles Jarvis, 290n. 1 Hilsky, Martin, 16 Himmelstiern, R. Samson von, 274, 280 Himonas, Giorgos, 274, 277, 280 Hines, Gregory, 113 Hinman, Charlton J., 29, 33n. 5, 154n. 22, 302n. 19 Hoare, Mary, 351n. 27 Hoare, Quintin, 262n. 8 Hodgdon, Barbara, 69, 70, 75n. 24 Hoffman, Miranda, 112 Hogarth, William, 309–10, 312, 314–15, 317, 319, 320n. 9, 321nn. 15 and 26; The Analysis of Beauty, 309, 312, 314–15, 320n. 9, 321nn. 15 and 26; Autobiographical Notes, 319 Holbein, Hans, 141, 143 Holinshed, Raphael, 45n. 17, 89, 226 Holland, Hugh, 24 Holland, Peter, 45n. 6, 67, 75nn. 17, 29, 30, and 31, 107, 336n. 15, 370 Holm, Ian, 68

Holmes, Christopher, 74nn. 9, 10, and 12, 75n. 22 Holmes, James S., 290nn. 5 and 6 Homer, 350n. 14 Honigmann, E. A. J., 40, 45n. 21 Hopkins, Elizabeth, 320 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 77 Hormann, Nicholas, 113 Hornby, Mary, 305 Hosley, Richard, 153n. 5 Hotson, Leslie, 184 House, Madeline, 336n. 11 Howard, Thomas, Earl of Arundel, 141 Howard-Hill, Trevor, 25, 33n. 8, 59n. 28 Hudson, Henry Norman, 363 Hughes, Arthur, 351n. 27 Hugo, François-Victor, 272, 279, 339, 350n. 11 Hugo, Victor, 338–39, 350nn. 10 and 11; Cromwell, 339 Hull, 85 Hume, David, 309–10; A Treatise on Human Nature, 309 Humphries, Rolfe, 240n. 8 Hunsdon, Lord, 184 Hunt, Leigh, 335n. 3 Hunter, Robert Grams, 240n. 13 Hytner, Nicholas, 115, 117, 119n. 12 Ichikawa, Mariko, 154n. 14 India, 16, 257, 259, 262n. 11, 354 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 338 Ioppolo, Grace, 47, 58n. 10, 370–71 Ipswich, 85 Iraq, 117 Ireland, 58n. 8 Irving, Henry, 305 Israel, 16 Italy, 65, 72, 222–24, 230–32, 242, 256, 257, 311 Izquierdo, José, 271, 281 Jabłkowska, R., 291n. 15 Jackson, Macdonald P., 59n. 21 Jackson, Russell, 34n. 16 Jacobi, Derek, 73 Jaggard, William, 73 Jago, Richard, 318 Jakobson, Roman, 123, 136n. 2 James I., King, 49–50, 88, 241

INDEX

James, Henry, 18 Jansohn, Christa, 11, 18n. 1, 58n. 3, 154n. 19, 349n. 1, 371 Japan, 15, 256 Jencken, F., 271, 280 Jenkins, Harold, 59n. 31, 170n. 7, 171nn. 14, 18, and 20, 214nn. 2 and 5, 215n. 9, 282n. 5 Jenkins, Thomas, 182 Jennings, Stephen, 300 Joan of Arc, 361 Jochumsson, Matthias, 271, 280 Johannot, Tony, 341 John, J. Fit, 201n. 21 John, King, 85 John of Gaunt, 177 Johnson, Mark, 123, 125, 136 nn. 3 and 8 Johnson, Samuel, 258, 307–9, 314, 316, 349n. 1; Dictionary of the English Language, 314; Lives of the English Poets, 308 Jones, Emrys, 240n. 14 Jones, Inigo, 144 Jones, Sir William, 258 Jonk, Jan, 271, 278 Jonson, Ben, 24, 25, 42, 47, 48, 53–54, 58n. 4, 77–79, 83, 87, 89, 90nn. 5, 6, and 17, 119n. 12, 149–50, 155nn. 24 and 26, 176, 187n. 5, 242–43, 252n. 10, 260, 263n. 21, 283–84, 290n. 1 —Works: TheAlchemist, 87, 119n. 12; Bartholomew Fair, 79, 83, 90n. 17; The Devil is an Ass, 87; Discoveries, 83; Eastward Ho!, 87–88; An English Grammar, 78, 149, 155nn. 24 and 26; Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, 42; Every Man In His Humour, 87; Volpone, 48, 54, 58n. 4, 78, 90n. 6 Josipovici, Gabriel, 214n. 2 Josten, Walter, 274, 280 Jowett, John, 33nn. 9 and 11 Jowitt, Deborah, 97 Joyce, James, 77, 90n. 1, 332; Finnegans Wake, 77 Jusserand, J. J., 350n. 12 Kahn, Coppélia, 240nn. 5, 10, and 11 Kames, Henry Home, 310 Kamps, Ivo, 262n. 14 Karagiorgos, Panos, 281n. 1

383

Kastan, David Scott, 45 nn. 15, 16, and 23, 136 n. 7, 187 n. 1, 240 n. 13, 335 n. 1 Katherine of Aragon, 130 Katherine of Sutton, 36 Kathman, David, 46n. 36 Kauffmann, Angelica, 348 Keats, John, 214n. 7, 322 Keel, Howard, 305 Keeling, Captain William, 258–59 Keith, Penelope, 80 Kemble, John William, 347 Kendal, 85 Kendal, Felicity, 262n. 9 Kendal, Geoffrey, 257, 262n. 9, 263n. 18; The Shakespeare Wallah, 257 Kenilworth, 354 Kennedy, Dennis, 72, 75n. 35 Kennedy, Gwynne, 46n. 27 Kent, 39, 87, 89 Kent, Charles, 335n. 4 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, 105n. 4 Kermode, Frank, 283 Kerrigan, John, 215n. 10 Kidnie, Margaret Jane, 75n. 30 King of Navarre, 243 King, Ros, 240n. 14 Kingsley, Charles, 360 Kingston, W. H. G., 360 Kipling, Rudyard, 256, 262n. 7 Klein, Holger, 273, 280 Kneller, Godfrey, 316 Knight, Charles, 363 Köhler, Friedrich, 274, 280 Kok, Abraham, 274, 278 Komrij, Gerrit, 272, 278 Korda, Natasha, 36, 39, 44–45n. 6, 45n. 21 Kövecses, Zoltán, 136n. 3 Krontiris, Tina, 46n. 27 Krummacher, Hans-Henrik, 282n. 10 Kyd, Thomas, 325; The Spanish Tragedy, 37, 193 Laborde, Alexandre de, 349n. 3 Laborde, Jean-Joseph de, 337 Laborde, Mathilde de. See Odier, Mathilde Laborde, Natalie de, 350n. 5 Lacan, Jacques, 195 Laine, Cleo, 103

384

INDEX

Lakoff, George, 123, 125, 136nn. 3 and 8 Lamb, Charles and Mary, 354–58, 360–63, 365, 366nn. 18 and 33; Tales from Shakespeare, 354–56, 358, 360–63 Lambert, Jóse, 290n. 6 Lamming, George, 261 Lampedola, 148 Lanchbery, John, 102 Langer, Susanne, 160, 170n. 4 Langland, William, 177 LaPlace, Pierre Antoine, 272, 279 Laroche, Benjamin, 272, 279, 339 Latham, Agnes, 160, 170nn. 2 and 5 Laver, James, 321n. 21 Lavrovsky, Leonid, 95–96, 99, 100, 105 Lawrence, D. H., 12, 17–18, 41, 46n. 26, 187n. 10; Sons and Lovers, 41, 46n. 26 Lawton, David, 187n. 6 Layamon: Brut, 219 Le Tourneur, Pierre Félicien, 272, 279 Lear, King, 28, 220 Lee, Sir Sidney, 350n. 12, 354, 358, 360, 363; A Life of William Shakespeare, 354, 358, 350n. 12 Lefevre, Raoul, 219 Leggatt, Alexander, 70 Leicester, 85 Leipzig, 337 Lembcke, Edvard, 271, 278 León, Celia, 300 Leoni, Michele, 272, 280 Lepage, Robert, 69, 70 Lepanto, 244, 248 LePicq, Charles, 93 Lermina, Jules, 274, 279 Lester, Adrian, 117 Leuilliot, Bernard, 350n. 10 Levenson, Jill L., 11, 18n. 6, 187n. 10 Lever, Katherine, 200n. 12 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 240n. 4 Lewis, Anthony, 105n. 2 Liberia, 259 Lilly, William, and John Colet: A Shorte Introduction of Grammar, 182 Lim, Chee-Seng, 253, 371 Limossa, 148 Lincoln, Bruce, 240n. 7 Linnaeus, Carl, 307, 309

Liszt, Franz, 337, 339 Livius, Titus (Livy): History of Rome [Ab Urbe Condita], 220 Llana, Félix González, 301 Lodge, David, 123, 136n. 4 Lodge, Thomas: Rosalynde, 175 Lodovici, Cesare Vico, 272, 280 Logan, George M., 240n. 12 Lombardo, Agostino, 206 London, 18, 23, 35, 42–43, 49, 50, 52, 59n. 27, 69, 71, 79–80, 83, 85–86, 88–89, 93, 98, 115, 141, 144, 149, 182, 241, 331, 352–53, 355 London Prodigal, The, 25 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 364 Longinus, 311 Loomba, Ania, 16 Lopez, Alonso, 299 López-Rey, José, 252n. 16 Loquasto, Santo, 109 Los Angeles, 17, 69 Louis Philippe, King, 350n. 19 Louis XV, King of France, 337 Low Countries. See Netherlands Lowin, John, 86, 89 Loyrette, Henri, 351n. 21 Lubin, Georges, 351n. 20 Luhrmann, Baz, 69 Luzzi, Eusebio, 93, 100 Lydgate, John, 18; The Book of Troy, 219 Lyly, John, 325 Lyme Regis, 85 Lyon, 100 Mabbe, James, 24 Macaulay, Thomas, 258, 262n. 11 Macao, 254 MacKay, William, 105n. 6 Macleod, Mary: The Shakespeare StoryBook, 354–55, 358, 360, 366n. 19 MacMillan, Kenneth, 97–98, 100, 102; Images of Love, 102 Macmillan, Sir Harold, 79 MacPherson, Guillermo, 272, 281 Macready, William Charles, 322, 330, 336n. 16 Madrid, 292, 338, 350n. 18 Maguin, François, 273, 279 Mahood, M. M., 162–63, 170nn. 9 and 12, 171n. 15 Maidstone, 85

INDEX

Mainz (Mayence), 11 Malaplate, Jean, 272, 279 Malaysia (formerly Malaya), 257 Malone, Edmond, 26, 194, 276, 349n. 1 Malory, Thomas, 18 Malta, 148 Manet, Edouard, 242 Mannhart, J. B., 271, 280 Marbach, Oswald, 274, 280 Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), 220, 232 Marcus, Leah, 240n. 14 Marini, Maurizio, 249, 252nn. 15, 20, 22, and 23 Marlowe, Christopher, 54, 86, 133, 137n. 14, 180–81, 230, 325; Edward II, 133; Hero and Leander, 180; The Jew of Malta, 54, 86, 230, 325 Marowitz, Charles, 119n. 10 Marryat, Captain, 360 Marsden, Jean I., 366n. 17 Marson, Jean-Pierre, 154n. 19 Marston, John, 86, 89, 134; The Dutch Courtesan, 86; The Malcontent, 86, 89, 91n. 21 Martínez Sierra, Gregorio, 271, 281 Mary Tudor, Queen of England, 82 Mary, Queen of Scots, 248 Mason, Francis, 106nn. 9, 15, and 16 Masten, Jeffrey, 40–41, 45nn. 23, 24, and 25 Mathias, Julio, 301n. 3, 302n. 13 Matteucci, Luigi, 271, 281 Mauch, T. K., 199n. 6 Maxim, John, 104, 106n. 22 May, Ignacio García, 301 Mazo, Joseph H., 106n. 18 McCabe, Richard A., 136n. 9, 154n. 20 McCutcheon, Martine, 90n. 11 McEachern, Claire, 75n. 39 McKellen, Ian, 68, 118 McLean, Sally-Beth, 91n. 20 McLeod, Glenda K., 46n. 28 McLuskie, Kathleen, 58n. 1, 74nn. 9, 10, and 12, 75n. 22 McMillin, Scott, 45n. 15, 91n. 20 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 306 Mehl, Dieter, 11–13, 15–18, 18nn. 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, 48, 57, 58n. 3, 59n. 32, 65, 74n. 8, 92, 105, 105n. 1, 124, 134–36, 136n. 6, 137nn. 15 and 19,

385

138, 153n. 1, 161, 170n. 6, 177, 187nn. 7 and 10, 301n. 1 Melchiori, Giorgo, 57, 59nn. 28, 29, and 31, 183, 188nn. 20 and 24, 271, 281 Ménard, Louis, 271, 279 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix, 100–103 Mendelssohn, Moses, 271, 280 Méndez Herrera, José, 272, 281 Meo, Antonio, 271, 281 Merchant, Paul, 46n. 32 Meres, Francis, 47, 58n. 2, 181 Mérimée, Prosper, 337–38, 340, 350nn. 6, 7, 15, and 17 Merkel, Angela, 253 Merlin, Bella, 119n. 12 Mesguich, Daniel, 274 Messiaen, Pierre, 279 Meurice, Paul, 274, 279 Mexico, 104 Meyer, Joseph, 274, 280 Michelangelo (Buonarroti), 306 Middleton, Thomas, 30, 31, 47, 134; The Revenger’s Tragedy, 87, 230; Women Beware Women, 230 Milan, 66, 93 Milford Haven, 233, 260 Mill, John Stuart: Essays on Poetry, 171n. 19 Miller, Frank J., 252n. 17 Millet, Jean-François, 341 Milton, John, 18, 308 Miola, Robert S., 239n. 1 Mitton, Thomas, 336n. 14 Molière, Jean-Baptiste, 341 Molina Foix, Vicente, 272, 281 Moltke, Max, 274, 280 Mont Blanc, 18 Montale, Emilio, 271, 281 Montégut, Émile, 277, 279 Montgomery, William, 33n. 11 Monti, Giancarlo, 271, 281 Montijo, Eugénie de, 338 Montijo, Madame/Comtesse de, 340 Moore, H. G., 200n. 13 Moore, Harry T., 46n. 26 Morand, Eugène, 272, 279 Moratín, Leandro Fernández de, 272, 281 More, Sir Thomas, 143, 154n. 13 Morley, Sheridan, 68

386

INDEX

Morocco, 256 Morris, Harrison S., 356, 365n. 14; Tales from Shakespeare, 356, 365n. 14 Morris, Mark, 97 Morrison, Simon, 96 Moscow, 95–96 Moses, Montrose J., 365n. 3 Mottley, John: Joe Miller’s Jests, 308 Mowat, Barbara, 350n. 16 Mueller, Jenny, 282n. 8 Muir, Kenneth, 190, 198, 199n. 8, 214n. 2 Mukarˇovský, Jan, 169, 171n. 22 Müller, Heiner, 270, 280 Mulryne, J. R., 75n. 32 Munday, Anthony, 47, 56–57 Munich (München), 11, 15 Muñoz, Augustín, 299 Murillo, Miguel, 300 Murphy, Graeme, 103, 105 Musset, Alfred de, 338 Naples, 66 Napoleon III, King of France, 338 Naughton, John, 350n. 8 Nelson, Conrad, 116 Nelson, William Allan, 290n. 1, 364 Nesbit, Edith, 357–58, 362, 365, 366nn. 18 and 34; Children’s Stories from Shakespeare, 357–58; Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare, 362 Netherlands (Low Countries), 141 New Romney, 85 New York, 97, 101, 104, 113–14, 143 Newbery, John, 310; The Art of Poetry on a New Plan, 310, 320n. 4 Newbolt, Henry, 352–54, 362, 365nn. 2, 4, 7, and 10 Newcastle, 85 Nida, Eugene, 285, 290n. 4 Nigeria, 259 Noguchi, Isamu, 110 North, John, 154n. 11 North, Marcy L., 38, 45nn. 12 and 13, 46n. 33 Northumberland, 82 Norton, David, 214n. 1 Novalis. See Hardenberg, Friedrich v. Noverre, Jean-Georges, 93–94, 105n. 3 Núñez de Balboa, Vasco, 253 Nureyev, Rudolf, 98–100

Obarzanek, Gideon, 103 Obertello, Alfredo, 271, 281 Olcott, Frances Jenkins, 365n. 3 Odier, Edouard, 337–38, 341, 351nn. 20 and 30 Odier, Mathilde (Mme Edouard Odier), 337–43, 345, 347–49, 349n. 3, 350n. 16, 351n. 27 Odier, Valentine (Mme Gabriel Delessert), 338, 350n. 5 Oldys, William, 307 Olivier, Sir Laurence, 80, 305, 320 Olsen, Thomas G., 240n. 9 Ontario, 109 Ordóñez de Villamar, Pablo Antonio, 300 Oregon, 110 Orgel, Stephen, 45n. 6 Orkin, Martin, 16, 189, 371 Orlandi, Giuseppe, 271, 281 Orlin, Lena Cowen, 45nn. 17 and 24, 371–72 Ortega y Gasset, José, 242 Ortlepp, Ernst, 274, 280 Østerberg, J. Valdemar, 271, 278 Outhwaite, R. B., 44n. 3 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 181, 231, 245–47, 252n. 17; Metamorphoses, 177, 188n. 13, 231, 245–47 Oxford, 31, 81, 85, 259, 358, 362 Ozu, Jiro (President of Shakespeare Society of Japan), 15 Pach, Walter, 351n. 35 Padua, 111–13, 126 Page, Helen, 263n. 19 Page, Sir Earle, 263n. 19 Page, Stephen, 103, 106n. 20 Page, Steven, 109 Page, William, 182, 184, 185 Pagnol, Marcel, 274, 279 Paisley, Ian, 79 Palladio, Andrea, 311 Panofsky, Erwin, 251n. 2 Pantallaria, 148 Par, Alfonso, 301n. 8 Paris, 15, 337, 340, 342 Parker, Patricia, 240n. 12 Parkes, M. B., 154n. 22 Parolin, Peter, 36, 44n. 4, 45n. 10 Parr, Anthony, 90n. 9

INDEX

Parrott, Chrissie, 103 Parturier, Maurice, 350n. 6 Paszkowski, Józef, 288, 291n. 15 Patten, William, 364, 367n. 41 Patterson, Annabel, 186, 188n. 28 Pavlova, Anna, 105 Pavolino, Corrado, 271 Peacham, Henry, 190, 199n. 6 Pemble, John, 350n. 12 Pennington, Michael, 82, 90n. 13 Pepper, John, 84 Percy, Thomas, 308 Perkins, Richard, 49 Petipa, Marius, 100 Petrarca, Francesco: Canzoniere, 206 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 113 Pfister, Manfred, 170n. 8 Philadelphia, 23 Philip II, King of Spain, 248 Philip III, King, 249 Phillips, Adam, 321n. 20 Picasso, Pablo, 185 Piccoli, Raffaello, 271, 281 Pickles, Wilfred, 81 Pinter, Harold, 277, 324; The Caretaker, 81 Pirandello, Luigi, 170n. 1 Pizan, Christine de: Fais d’armes et de chevalerie, 41–42 Platter, Thomas, 144, 146, 152, 154n. 17 Plautus, 227 Pleasance, Donald, 81 Plehwe, Hermann von, 280 Plessis-Piquet, 340 Plutarch, 220, 222, 224, 226, 232; Life of Romulus, 220, 224; Parallel Lives [Bioi paralleloi], 220 Plymouth, 85 Polylas, Iakovos, 271, 280 Poole, Adrian, 322, 372 Pope, Alexander, 309, 311; An Essay on Criticism, 311 Portugal, 254 Pound, Ezra, 284–85 Pourtalès, Guy de, 272, 279 Pozzi, Giovanni, 214nn. 7 and 8 Prague, 18 Pratt, Samuel, 318, 321n. 24; “The Shadows of Shakespeare,” 318 Precolcaj, Angelin, 100

387

Preobrajenska, Olga, 94 Prichard, Mari, 366n. 22 Prickett, Stephen, 214 Prince Regent. See George IV Prokofiev, Sergey, 94, 95, 96 Proudfoot, Richard, 136n. 7, 187n. 1, 335n. 1 Psota, Ivo, 94–95, 97 Ptolemy, 257 Pugin, Edward Welby, 305 Pujante, Angel Luis, 272, 281 Purcell, Henry, 92 Puttenham, George, 82–84, 86–87, 90n. 15 Quiles, Eduardo, 300 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 352–53, 361–62, 365n. 6, 366nn. 24–27; Historical Tales from Shakespeare, 361–62 Quiney, Judith (daughter of Shakespeare), 220 Quiney, Thomas, 220 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, 77 Rabasa, José, 262n. 6 Raby, Peter, 351nn. 29 and 33 Rachmaninov, Sergei: Isle of the Dead, 100 Racine, Jean, 341 Rackin, Phyllis, 35, 188n. 26, 372 Radlov, Sergei, 95, 96 Ralegh, Walter, 84 Ramsay, Allan, 308 Raphael (painter), 312 Raponi, Goffredo, 273, 281 Rapp, Moriz, 273, 280 Rasmussen, Eric, 23, 32, 33n. 6, 34n. 20, 75nn. 38 and 40 Ravasi, Gianfranco, 215n. 13 Reading, 85 Redfield, William, 108, 119n. 1 Redgrave, Richard, 351n. 27 Redmond, Michael J., 240n. 12 Reed, Isaac, 349n. 1 Reglero, Nina, 300 Reinach, Théodore, 272, 279 Reith, John (1st Baron Reid), 80, 85 Remarque, Erich Maria, 18 René I, Duke of Lorraine, 253 Revett, Nicholas, 308

388

INDEX

Reynolds, Joshua, 315–16, 321n. 18; Seven Discourses on Art, 315 Richard II, King, 28, 243, 361 Richard III, King (Richard of Gloucester), 28, 250, 323, 361 Richards, Nathaniel: Messalina, 154n. 16 Richmond, Hugh Macrae, 241, 251 n. 1, 252 nn. 14, 21, and 24, 372 Richmond, Velma Bourgeois, 352, 365nn. 1 and 13, 372–73 Ridley, M. R., 214n. 2 Rigby, Terence, 80, 81 Rigola, Àlex, 300 Roach, Joseph R., 152, 155n. 31 Roberts, James, 320 Rochester, 322, 328 Roe, E. T., 362, 366n. 34 Rolfe, William J.: Shakespeare the Boy, 363–64, 367n. 37 Rome, 85, 219, 221–23, 225, 231–33, 236, 238, 239, 341 Romney, George, 345 Rosén, Sven, 273, 281 Rosenblatt, Jason P., 136n. 9 Rosny, J.-H., 272, 279 Rossiter, Leonard, 81 Rotas, Vassilis, 271, 278, 280 Rothe, Hans, 273, 280 Rothmaler, A. de, 349n. 2 Rouse, Charles A., 58n. 8 Rouville, Marguerite de (Mme Auguste Odier), 337 Roviralta Borrell, José, 272, 281 Rowe, Nicholas, 74, 314, 317–19 Rowell, Christopher, 154n. 10 Rowlands, John, 154n. 12 Rowley, William, 47 Roy, Ashok, 154n. 13 Rubens, Peter Paul, 247, 312 Rusconi, Carlo, 272, 281 Rushdie, Salman, 257 Rutter, Barrie, 116 Rutter, Carol Chillington, 75n. 31 Saavedra, Ángel de, 300 Sackville, Richard, Earl of Dorset, 141 Saeger, James P., 45n. 11 Saïd, Edward, 258, 262n. 11 Saint Die, 253

Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 342, 351n. 29 Salmon, Edward: Juvenile Literature As It Is, 360 San Diego, 12, 18, 187n. 10 Sánchez de Castro, Francisco, 300 Sánchez Estevan, Ismael, 293, 301nn. 5 and 10, 302n. 18 Sanctis, Alfredo de, 271, 280 Sand, George, 41, 337, 339, 341, 351nn. 20 and 34 Sandys, George: A Relation of a Iourney Begun An. Dom. 1610, 146–48 Santander, 301 Santiago, 241 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 277 Sarvig, Ole, 274, 278 Sassone, Felipe, 300 Saure, Heinrich, 354, 365n. 9 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 150, 151, 155n. 27 Saviñón, Antonio de, 301 Sawyer, Robert, 366n. 26 Scaleby Castle, 311 Schaller, Rudolf, 274, 280 Scheffer, Ary, 341, 349n. 4, 350n. 19 Schell, Heinz, 137n. 18 Schelling, Felix Emanuel, 363 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 273–74, 277, 280 Schmidt, Wolf Gerhard, 281n. 1 Schoenbaum, Samuel, 188n. 18 Schöner, Johannes, 253 Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig, 274, 280 Schütz, Karl Julius, 274, 280 Schwartz, Kessel, 293, 301nn. 5, 9, and 11, 302n. 14 Schwartz, Murray M., 240n. 11 Schwob, Marcel, 272, 279 Scofield, Paul, 11 Scolnikov, Hanna, 16 Scotland, 76 Scott, Walter, 322, 354, 360; Kenilworth, 354 Seamer [Seymour], Mary: Shakespeare’s Stories Simply Told, 354, 365n. 9 Sechehaye, Albert, 155n. 27 Seeger, Ludwig, 280 Selbourne, David, 108, 119n. 1 Semberová, Zora, 94–95, 105 Sergeyev, Konstantin, 95

INDEX

Sewell, Brian, 79 Shaffer, Peter, 16 Shakespeare, Hamnet, 135, 220 Shakespeare, John, 241 Shakespeare, William, 11–13, 15–16, 18, 23–33, 35–36, 38, 40–42, 45n. 18, 47, 53, 56–57, 59n. 28, 64–67, 69–73, 76–89, 90n. 12, 92–95, 97–100, 102, 104–5, 109, 113, 115, 123–24, 128, 133–35, 139, 141, 149, 153, 156, 161, 163, 170n. 2, 175–76, 178–88, 187n. 10, 188nn. 11, 12, 20, 24, and 30, 194, 198, 200nn. 12 and 15, 203, 205–8, 211–13, 214n. 1, 215n. 9, 219–20, 225–26, 231, 235–36, 241–45, 249–51, 251n. 1, 253, 256–61, 262n. 10, 267–70, 274–75, 278, 281n. 1, 282nn. 4–10, 283–86, 289, 290n. 1, 291nn. 12, 13, 15, 16, and 17, 292–300, 302n. 19, 305–6, 308–11, 314–20, 322–23, 325–27, 329, 333, 335, 335n. 8, 337–42, 349, 350nn. 12 and 14, 351n. 22, 352–63, 365, 366nn. 17 and 18 —Works:1 Henry IV, 27, 79, 81, 125, 128, 315, 340; 2 Henry IV, 79, 128, 181, 184; 1 Henry VI, 340; 2 Henry VI, 28, 89, 340, 361; 3 Henry VI, 27, 28; All’s Well That Ends Well, 127–28, 339, 349, 357; Antony and Cleopatra, 25, 93, 127, 203, 214, 216n. 17, 315, 340, 345, 356, 358; As You Like It, 25, 67, 125, 156–61, 169, 170, 172n. 2, 175–76, 179–80, 183–84, 188n. 11, 339, 348–49, 357; Cardenio (lost), 26; The Comedy of Errors, 124–25, 128, 131, 349; Coriolanus, 18, 108, 109–10, 171n. 13, 203, 222, 340, 356, 358, 361; Cymbeline, 28, 125–26, 128, 203, 214, 219–22, 224–39, 240nn. 12, 13, and 14, 257, 260, 340, 345, 347–48; Edward III, 26; Hamlet, 11, 23, 26–28, 63–65, 68–69, 74, 108, 115, 123–26, 128–36, 136n. 7, 137n. 18, 156, 161–70, 170n. 7, 171n. 20, 203–6, 214nn. 2 and 5, 215n. 9, 220, 230, 243–44, 248, 250, 258–59, 263n. 16, 267–78, 282nn. 1, 5, and 6, 287–89, 291n. 17, 292–93, 296, 299–301, 302n. 19, 305, 315, 317–19, 323, 325–28, 332–34, 335nn. 8 and 9, 339,

389 340–42; Henry V, 26–27, 71, 79, 84, 86, 88, 117, 125, 184–85, 188n. 25, 269; Henry VIII (“All is True”), 26, 28, 269; Julius Caesar, 25, 127, 232, 257, 324–25, 327, 356, 358, 361; King John, 85, 269, 340, 342–43; King Lear, 18, 23, 25–26, 28, 66–68, 70, 87, 118, 125–26, 133, 165, 203, 208–13, 214n. 2, 215n. 14, 216n. 16, 243, 292, 330–33, 340, 345, 347; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 24, 27, 181, 183, 243–44, 250, 339, 348, 356, 358; Love’s Labour’s Won, 26, 181; Macbeth, 25–26, 28, 30, 93–94, 103, 189–99, 200nn. 9, 15, and 18, 201nn. 18, 20, and 22, 202n. 23, 203, 214, 214n. 2, 216n. 17, 221, 322, 327–30, 332–34, 335n. 8, 342–43; Measure for Measure, 26, 87, 127, 203, 339; The Merchant of Venice, 24, 27, 86, 181, 203, 214n. 2, 292, 316, 325, 349, 361; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 27, 84, 182–84, 188nn. 20 and 24, 322, 339, 356, 358; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 69–70, 78, 92, 100–103, 108, 150, 181, 244–47, 286, 293, 327, 339, 348, 357, 361; Much Ado About Nothing, 24, 66, 71, 73f., 75n. 39, 80, 115–16, 128, 248–49, 292, 339, 340, 343, 348, 357; Othello, 18, 27, 30, 75n. 31, 86, 126, 128, 133, 165, 203, 206–8, 214n. 2, 215n. 10, 257, 262n. 10, 292, 308, 325, 339–41, 347, 348, 351n. 32, 362; Pericles, 26, 33n. 10, 203, 214, 340; The Rape of Lucrece, 26, 181, 188n. 15; Richard II, 27, 171n. 23, 269, 286, 340, 361; Richard III, 27–28, 92, 116, 118, 119n. 15, 165, 322–23, 325, 327; Romeo and Juliet, 27, 38, 67, 69, 92–100, 126, 127, 181, 241, 322, 325, 340, 347, 348; The Sonnets, 26, 176, 181, 182, 203, 206, 215n. 10, 243, 247, 258; The Taming of the Shrew, 111–13, 126, 245, 305, 349; The Tempest, 25, 65–66, 72, 92, 103, 138–41, 143, 144, 146, 148–49, 151–53, 153nn. 2 and 5, 203, 214, 244, 253, 257–58, 260–61, 263n. 23, 327, 339, 349, 356–57, 361; Timon of Athens, 26, 171n. 13, 203, 340; Titus Andronicus, 24, 27, 126, 181, 188n.

390

INDEX

Shakespeare, William —Works (continued) 13, 340; Troilus and Cressida, 24, 26, 28, 188n. 12, 219, 250, 356, 358; Twelfth Night, 25, 113, 125, 141, 214, 292, 339, 345, 348, 357; The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 69, 339, 348; The Two Noble Kinsmen, 26; Venus and Adonis, 26, 181, 242; The Winter’s Tale, 25, 71, 128, 140–41, 153n. 8, 154n. 9, 203, 214, 257, 260, 315–16, 340, 349, 357, 361–62 Shapiro, James, 182, 186, 188nn. 19 and 29 Sharpless, F. Parvin, 171n. 19 Shaughnessy, Robert, 74n. 11, 75n. 42 Shaw, Fiona, 16 Shaw, George Bernard, 80, 88; Pygmalion, 88 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 18, 355 Sheridan, Thomas: Discourse . . . on Elocution and the English Language, 308 Shewring, Margaret, 75n. 32 Shoreditch, 144 Shurbanov, Alexander, 156, 373 Shuttleworth, J. M., 154n. 10 Sicily, 148 Sidney, George, 305 Sidney, Sir Philip, 37, 180, 327 Siemon, James, 84, 90n. 18 Sierra Leone, 258–59 Sietsma, Maggi, 104, 106n. 21; Virtually Richard3, 104 Silvestre, Théophile, 351n. 20 Simpson, Hilary Croxford, 46n. 26 Simpson, Percy, 263n. 21; and Evelyn, 90n. 5, 155n. 24 Simrock, Karl, 271, 280 Sinfield, Alan, 199n. 2 Singh, Jyotsna, 262n. 14 Sinklo, John, 86, 89 Sissons, Narelle, 112 Skeat, Walter W., 355 Skelton, John, 177 Skura, Meredith, 240n. 11 Slater, Michael, 335n. 7, 336nn. 13 and 15 Slaughter, Stephen, 316 Sloane, Sir Hans, 307, 316 Słomczyn´ski, Maciej, 286, 288, 291nn. 13 and 16

Sly, Will, 86, 89 Smirke, Robert, 351n. 27 Smith, Benjamin, 306 Smith, Bruce R., 75n. 29, 78, 90nn. 3 and 8, 137n. 12, 138, 153n. 7, 155n. 22, 373 Smith, G. G., 90n. 15 Smith, Geoffrey Nowell, 262n. 8 Smith, Wentworth, 55 Smith, William, 320 Smithson, Harriet, 342, 347 Snell, K. D. M., 39, 45n. 19 Snow, C. P., 18 South Africa, 16 South America, 253 Southwark, 82, 89, 241, 250 Spain, 248, 251n. 1, 254, 292, 338 Speght, Thomas, 180, 184, 186 Spenser, Edmund, 176, 180, 181 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 155n. 30 Spurgeon, Caroline F. E., 352 Squarzina, Luigi, 274, 281 St. Petersburg, 93, 100, 101; Leningrad, 95, 100 Staël, Madame de: Corinne, 338; On Literature, 338 Staniewska, A., 291n. 15 Stauffer, Donald, 46n. 27 Stead, W. T., 353 Steckel, Frank-Patrick, 273, 280 Steevens, George, 308, 349n. 1 Stendhal (Henri Marie Beyle), 338 Stephens, Robert, 85, 91n. 19 Sterne, Richard, 108, 119n. 1 Stewart, Patrick, 65 Stillingfleet, Benjamin, 308, 316; Miscellaneous Tracts, 308 Stockdale, John, 310, 320n. 5 Stockholm, 354 Stockwell, Peter, 136n. 3 Stoppard, Tom, 18, 86, 131, 136n. 10; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 131 Storey, Graham, 335nn. 3 and 4, 336n. 11 Stowe Gardens, 307, 310 Stradanus, Johannes. See van der Straat, Johan Stratford, Connecticut, 101 Stratford-upon-Avon, 18, 29, 65, 68, 81, 175, 281n. 1, 305–6, 318

INDEX

Strier, Richard, 240n. 14 Stringer, Gary A., 263n. 24 Strutt, Joseph: Sports and Pastimes, 363 Stuart, James, 308 Stuttgart, 93 Summit, Jennifer, 42, 46n. 29 Swetnam the Woman-hater Arraigned by Women (anon.), 43 Swift, Jonathan, 17 Switzerland, 339 Sydney, 103 Syms-Wood, A., 362 Sypher, Wylie, 251n. 2 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 220 Taichman, Rebecca Bayla, 111–13 Talens, Genaró, 281 Tallant, Robert, 49 Tamayo y Baus, Manuel, 300 Tangiers, 345 Tappan, Eva March, 363, 367nn. 35 and 40 Tastu, Amable, 338, 350n. 9 Taylor, Gary, 33nn. 9 and 11, 153n. 2, 259, 262nn. 10 and 14, 276, 290n. 1 Taylor, John, 49 Taylor, Neil, 136n. 7 Tchaikowsky, Peter Ilyich: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, 100 Teague, Frances, 46n. 28 Temple, Sir Richard, Viscount Cobham, 307 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 322, 357 Ternan, Ellen, 322 Teskey, Gordon, 240n. 12 Theobald, Lewis: The Censor, 311 Thomas, Ambroise, 341 Thomas, Jean-Pierre, 349nn. 3 and 4, 350nn. 5 and 18 Thompson, Ann, 45n. 6, 123, 136nn. 1 and 7, 181, 187n. 1, 188nn. 12 and 13, 335n. 1, 373 Thompson, Ayanna, 119n. 9 Thompson, John O., 123, 136n. 1, 373 Thomson, Leslie, 139–40, 153nn. 3, 6, and 7 Thorpe, Thomas, 26 Thynne, William, 180 Tilley, Morris Palmer, 191–96, 200nn. 10, 11, and 18, 201nn. 19 and 22, 202nn. 24, 25, 28, and 29

391

Tillotson, Kathleen, 335n. 3, 336n. 14 Tillyard, E. M. W., 361 Tilney, Sir Edmund, 57 Todorov, Tzvetan, 171n. 21 Toledo, 338 Tonson, Jacob, 316 Toury, Gideon, 285, 291n. 9 Travitsky, Betty S., 46n. 27 Tresham, Henry, 351n. 27 Trewin, J. C., 336n. 16 Tripolis, 148 Trollope, Anthony, 323, 335n. 6 Tronch(-Pérez), Jesus, 292, 302n. 19, 373 Troy, 181, 188n. 15, 219, 223, 224 Trussler, Simon, 119n. 10 Tuck, Raphael, 356, 358, 366n. 18 Tucker, Patrick, 31–33, 34n. 18 Tudor, Antony, 97 Tunis, 66, 143, 146 Turner, Clifford, 80 Tyndale, William, 214n. 1 Ulanova, Galina, 95 United Kingdom, 16, 353 United States (U.S.), 16, 352–53, 360, 362–63, 365, 365n. 3 Urkowitz, Steve, 104 Uwins, Thomas, 351n. 27 Vachon, Marius, 341, 351n. 22 Valberkh, Ivan, 93 Valencia, 18 Valletta, Ignazio, 272, 281 Valls, Abel, 104 Valon, Alexis de, Madame, 350n. 6 Van Dam, Bastiaan Adriaan Pieter, 272, 278 Van den Berg, Sara, 78, 90n. 4 Van den Broeck, Raymond, 290n. 6 Van der Straet, Jan (Johannes Stradanus), 254–55, 257, 261 Van Looy, Jacobus, 273, 278 Van Suchtelen, Nico, 272, 278 Vatican, 23 Vaughan, David, 102, 106n. 19 Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, 319 Vega, Lope de, 241, 251n. 1; El arte Nuevo di hacer comedias in esto tiempo, 241 Veigel, Eva-Maria, 317

392

INDEX

Velázquez, Diego Rodruigez de Silva y, 241–51 Velz, John W., 45nn. 13 and 14 Venice, 93, 94, 207 Venuti, Lawrence, 285, 290n. 7 Vercors (Jean Marcel Bruller), 273, 279 Verne, Jules, 360 Vertue, George, 308 Vespucci, Amerigo, 253–54, 256–57, 261, 262n. 3 Vickers, Sir Brian, 320n. 8 Victoria, Queen of England, 332, 336n. 16, 347 Vietnam, 68 Vieusseux, Annette, 115 Vigny, Alfred de, 339 Vikelas, Demetrios, 273, 280 Villanueva, Santos Sanz, 302n. 15 Virgil, 176, 181, 219–20, 222–24, 226, 229; Aeneid, 219–20, 222–24, 235, 240n. 8 Vitruvius, Marcus, 311 Vittoz, Michel, 274, 279 Voeten, Bert, 271, 278 Voltaire, 277, 279, 338 Voss, Johann Heinrich, 274, 280 Vredenburg, Edric, 366n. 18 Wakefield, 85 Waldseemüller, Martin, 253, 257, 262n. 1 Wales, 233, 235 Walker, David, 103 Walker, Kim, 103 Walpole, Horace, 307–9, 316; Anecdotes of Painting in England, 308; Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, 308 Wanamaker, Zoë, 115 Warburton, William, 308, 314, 320n. 12 Warham, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 141 Warner, Deborah, 85 Warrington, Don, 81 Warton, Thomas, 307, 310, 320n. 3; The History of English Poetry, 310 Warwick, 354 Warwickshire, 81 Washbourne, Mona, 81 Washington, D.C., 23, 111, 281n. 1, 337 Watson, Robert N., 78, 90n. 6

Wayne, Valerie, 46n. 33 Webster, John, 47–48, 50, 55, 86, 89, 134; The White Devil, 230 Weil, Herbert and Judith, 90n. 12 Weimann, Robert, 16, 250, 252n. 24 Weimar, 15–16, 18, 281n. 1 Weingust, Donald, 30, 34nn. 13, 17, and 23 Weinstock, Horst, 200n. 13 Weir, Natalie: Dry Sorrow, 100 Wells, Stanley, 23, 33nn. 4 and 11, 153n. 2, 262n. 10, 276, 290n. 1, 374 Welsh, Alexander, 335n. 9 Welsh, Andrew, 157, 160, 170n. 3 Welsh, Charles, 360 Werstine, Paul, 350n. 16 West, Anthony James, 33nn. 1 and 2 West, Benjamin, 345 West, Sam, 11 Westall, Richard, 306, 317, 342, 351n. 27 Westminster, 12, 305 Wharton, T. F., 154n. 20 Whately, Thomas, 311, 320n. 7; Remarks on Some of the Characters in Shakespeare, 311 Wheaton, Elizabeth, 37 White, R. S., 282n. 10 White, Richard Grant, 363 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Canterbury, 149 Whiting, Bartlett Jere, 189, 193–96, 199n. 4, 200nn. 10 and 11, 202n. 24 Whyte, Samuel, “The Theatre,” 309 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 270, 274, 280 Wilberforce, William, 258 Wilcox, Helen, 44n. 2, 45n. 6 Wilde, Oscar, 31, 34n. 16; The Importance of Being Earnest, 31 Willey, Basil, 361 Williams, Alfred, 103 Williams, Clare, 154n. 17 Williams, John, “The Old Arm-Chair: An Ode,” 306, 320n. 1 Williams, Kenneth, 80 Williamson, Laird, 110 Wilson, F. P., 200nn. 10 and 13 Wilson, John Dover, 171n. 14, 353, 366n. 26 Winter, William, 74n. 7 Withals, John, 193, 200n. 14

INDEX

Witham, Rose Adelaide, 363, 367n. 35 Wogan, Terry, 80 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 251n. 2 Wolfit, Donald, 305 Woodard, Charlayne, 113–14 Woodeson, Nicholas, 85 Woolf, Virginia, 35–36, 42, 44nn. 1 and 2; A Room of One’s Own, 35 Workes of our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, The, 180 Wordsworth, William, 322 Wortham, Christopher, 282n. 10 Worthen, W. B., 66–67, 69–71, 74n. 9, 75nn. 16, 21, 28, and 33 Wright, Louis B., 43, 46n. 35 Wriothesley, Henry, Earl of Southampton, 49–50, 58n. 8 Wroth, Mary, 40 Wycliffe, John, 355

393

Wyld, Martin, 154n. 13 Wynne-Davies, Marion, 36, 39, 44n. 5, 45nn. 7, 9, 20, and 21 Yachnin, Paul, 74n. 12 Yale, 363 Yeldham, Charlotte, 341, 351nn. 23 and 32 Yonge, Charlotte, 360 York, 85 Yorkshire, 85 Yorkshire Tragedy, A, 25 Young, G. M., 262n. 11 Zeynek, Theodor von, 273, 280 Ziegler, Georgianna, 337, 374 Zillacus, Clas, 271, 281 Zoffany, Johann, 316 Zurich, 83